The Brothers of Gwynedd

  "Also Welsh, like you?" he said.

  "Every man."

  He jutted a thoughtful lip at me, and said with certainty: "But you were not at Llangynwyd, that I know!"

  "Then your knowledge is at fault, for I was, and so were we all. But of the other party. And be easy, we mean no harm to any man who ran from there, not if he be Welsh. We have a message to you. Where were you meaning to head now? For one of Gloucester's manors?"

  He did not answer that at first, but laughed to himself, and slid down into the river again. "Come in," he said, making strokes just strong enough to hold him motionless against the current, "since I take it that's what you came for. There's water enough for two, and on my part no haste." And he rolled over and plunged out of sight, to reappear on my side of the deeper passage.

  So I leaped in and joined him, and we swam a while, and lay in the shallows together after, letting the cool of the flow stream over our shoulders and down our loins. He lowered his head back into it until only the oval of his face broke the surface, and his hair stood wavering out from his temples like yellow weed or pale fern.

  "To tell truth," he said then, "I was wondering myself what the next move was to be. For I was never much enamoured of Earl Richard's service, and in any manor of his I might find my welcome altogether too warm. For I reckon I was the first out at the postern at Llangynwyd, and with horse and harness that were not mine until yesterday. And though I have a brother who is lord of a manor in Brecknock, I fear I made that sanctuary too hot to hold me some years ago, his wife being young and pretty. And I can hardly go back to my old service at Dynevor, since Rhys Fychan was thrown out of it, for his uncle Meredith is no friend of mine."

  "Then you've not heard the news," I said. "For Rhys Fychan is back in Dynevor, and in pledged allegiance to Prince Llewelyn and his confederacy of Wales, and the very message I had for you is that the door's open to any who care to go that road with him. You may ride back when you will, and the gift of one of Gloucester's horses won't come amiss there, either. Or you may go partway with us, for we go back to Llangynwyd, and then northwards for Gwynedd."

  "No!" he cried between delight and disbelief, and rose in a fountain of sparkling drops to stare at me. "Is that true? Rhys has changed sides, and been well received? How did this come about? I thought that was an irreconcilable enmity on both sides."

  I told him briefly the way of it, and he sank into the water again with a crow of joy. "I am glad of it!" he said, lying still and straight there like a drowned man. "I was Rhys's man until Llewelyn broke him, and I'd as lief be his man again, all the more if he's quit his English allegiance. Right joyfully I'll ride with you. You said truly, no serpent but an angelic voice! May I know who it is comes to point me my way? Surely no two friends ever saw more of each other at first meeting!" And he laughed. His was a face very well acquainted with laughter, by the lines of it.

  I told him I was Samson, Llewelyn's clerk, and asked his name in return. In utter innocence I asked it, so pleasant and strange was this encounter, with some quality in it of dreaming. Until then, when I awoke.

  He said, easy and content, with his eyes closed: "My name is Godred ap Ivor."

  The bright, bracing chill of the water was suddenly harsh as ice flowing down breast and belly and thigh, the blood so stayed in me at the name. And he lay soothed and smiling and blind beside me, his head tilted back, the large, lace-veined eyelids bland and still.

  I rose with infinite care upon my elbow and looked down at him, thus oblivious, never knowing what he had done to me, feeling nothing of the immense loss and grief that weighed upon my heart, filling me slowly like pain poured from a vessel. I looked about us, and there was no man to see and no man to hear, no man to know that I had ever met him in this place. And all I had to do was fill one hand with that floating hair, drag his head down under the water, and roll over upon him to hold him under until he drowned. And no one would know. What would he be but a fugitive knight who had left horse and harness lying, and gone to bathe in a river whose currents he did not know? For months we had written him down as dead. So brief and easy a gesture now to make it true, and Cristin would be free.

  That was so terrible a moment of temptation, and came upon me so like a lightning-flash out of a clear sky, that I cannot bear even now to remember it. I do believe with all my heart that there is no man who cannot kill, given the overwhelming need and the occasion. And if I did not, it was not out of any honourable resistance on my part, it was because of Cristin, who did not want him dead, but wanted him living.

  And he lay by me in his comely nakedness, the worst offence of all, arrogantly sure of his safety, feeling nothing, fearing nothing.

  "Get up, then, Godred ap Ivor," I said, when I could speak without suffocating or cursing, "and set about getting dry, while I tell you something that concerns you nearly, and only you. For that name I have known now for many months. I have been looking for you all this time."

  At that he opened his eyes wide, in surprise and interest but without disquiet, and leaping up in a great wave of water, waded ashore to where the risen sun gilded the grass, and for want of cloth or kerchief to dry himself, began to dance and turn about in the sunshine. I followed him ashore more slowly. Even the night had been warm and gentle, and the morning came in quivering heat. lit was no labour to dry off in that radiant air.

  "I feel," said Godred, clapping his arms about his shoulders, "the honour of having had your attention. But how or why is mystery to me. What is it you have to tell?

  "You had a wife," I said, the words coming thick and slow upon my tongue, "who was in the Lady Gladys's services and fled with her from Dynevor last December."

  "I had," he said, suddenly still, and looking at me with a reserved face and narrowed eyes.

  "Did you never seek to find her, after that flight? It is a long time now, seven months."

  He must have felt some censure in my tone, for his voice was defensive as he said: "At first I had no chance, for I was two months sick of my wounds after Cwm-du, and knew very little of where I was myself, or what was being done with me. Afterwards, yes, I sent out everywhere message of mine could go. They told me in Brecon she was dead."

  "So they believed in Brecon," I said.

  "You mean she is not?" he said slowly, staring.

  "She is alive and well. She is in Gwynedd, living at Llewelyn's court and under Llewelyn's protection."

  He hesitated, frowning, watching me very intently. "You mean this?" he said. "She is truly alive? But why should you lie to me!"

  "I would not. She lives, and no harm has come to her but the harm of not knowing whether you lived or died."

  "But how?" he cried. "How did this come about?"

  I told him, as barely as it could be told. "Mercy of God!" he said, like a man rapt in wonder. "How strangely providence does its work. She mourning me, and I mourning her, and suddenly this return to life! Take me with you to Gwynedd! One more in Llewelyn's army will not be amiss, with the host called out in two weeks' time, and the cause of Wales is the same now north or south. Let me ride with you to fetch Cristin home!"

  I said that was our intent, and that he was welcome, I, who had crooked my fingers so short a while before, to drag him under water by the hair and there drown him. That sin was past, and could be confessed and repented. As for the awful sin of wishing I had done so, that would remain with me and be repeated endlessly for many years, if his youth was not cut off by some accident of war to spare me murder.

  "And we had better be moving," I said, to make an end, "or we shall miss the best of the day."

  He took that for acceptance enough, and went to put on his clothes, and so did I. In a little while he came leading his horse through the trees to me. Clothed, he looked slighter and frailer than I had seen him to be, and younger, for his was a face that would always keep its boyish look. As lightly as he had sung, before ever I set eyes on him, so now he came whistling. He fell in beside me, the horse pacing between us, and
began to speak of Cristin, as though her miraculous recovery were the only source of his exultant lightness of heart. Yet constantly I felt that he was ever so by nature. Howbeit, he spoke of her very winningly, having a feeling for words that would have done credit to a bard. His voice, too, was one of his chiefest graces, that pure, high voice for which the men of music love to make songs.

  Being still full of a personal and bitter curiosity concerning him, for he had taken away all my present hope and all my peace of mind, and shown me to myself as a murderer by intent, I was observing whatever I could see of him as we walked, and since the led horse was between us I had but glimpses over the swaying neck of his yellow hair crisping into curls as it dried, and paling to the colour of wheat stalks just before ripening, of his face in profile now and then, eager and open, and under his horse's round belly of the lithe, easy stride of his long legs. And after these, I looked upon the left hand that was visible to me, holding his bridle. Brown and strong it was, with broad knuckles and a powerful, flat wrist, good enough for a bowman. And upon the little finger he wore a ring. A plain silver ring with an oval bezel for a seal. This I could see clearly, for it rode close beneath my eyes, so that there could be no mistaking the deeply incised pattern of the seal, a little hand severed at the wrist, holding a rose.

  Then I knew what Cristin had known, when she looked upon the ring I gave to Meilyr, and when afterwards, on the ride north together, I told her how I got that ring, and what it meant to me. And I understood at last why she had urged me to put away all thought of the father I had never known, and think no more of the hand and the rose. "Well for you," she had said, "if you bury with the ring everything it signified, and rest content with the present and the future, forgetting the past."

  And I knew at last, too late, hearing her voice in my memory so urgent and passionate, how I had fooled myself and failed her, so grossly mistaking what she meant when she told me I need have no fear of her armour against David, for she was bespoken, heart and all. And yet, she was a wife, and what could she or I do but remember it? Whether we would or no!

  But no part of all this coil and tangle of sorrow was his fault, and he, too, had rights, this young man who walked stride for stride beside me, so closely matched, in whom I could not doubt I beheld at last my stranger-father's youngest son. It was not only the ring that told me so, though the ring was the key that unlocked my knowledge. No, for I knew, now, what had been so disturbing to me about that meeting of two naked bathers, facing each other across the river, about that face and its shaping, those eyes, and their arched brows. For though he was fair, and I dark, he well-favoured and I homely, he too light of mind, and I too grave, we were sealed and signed as from the same mintage, mirror-images one of the other, my brother Godred and I.

  I told him nothing of my birth, I asked him nothing of his. I brought him back to Llewelyn at Llangynwyd, and presented him as a miraculous mercy, a bountiful act of God. My lord's pleasure in this return of the lost was all the pleasure I expected to get from it. For to him it was indeed not only an unlooked-for grace, but a favourable omen.

  "Now I will believe," he said, greeting Godred, "that the blessing of God is with our arms, now that this one hopeful aim has been happily achieved, that was not desired for our own glory. Small right we had, after so long, to expect to find you, and you are here. A living encouragement to hope for everything, even the impossible."

  So he saw it, and for him I was glad, for we were going back to Gwynedd, whither David was already gone before us with the vanguard, to face an assault by forces greater in numbers and equipment by far than our own, and it was well that we should go in high heart. And that we did. And I must own that Godred had all the graces and attractions a young man should have, all his bearing, his eagerness now to reach his wife, his gratitude for her restoration, all were right and proper, and moving to behold. All through that journey to the north he spent much time with me, and I could not well forsake or avoid him, to make known to others the contention I felt within myself.

  Thus we came again into Gwynedd by the twenty- seventh day of July, and at the fords of the rivers we began to meet with custodians who sprang up out of hiding at our approach to show the safe way across, for the principal fords had already been pitted, and some of the more vulnerable bridges broken. Many of the lowland trefs had been abandoned, the inhabitants with all their gear removing into the mountains. It seemed that Goronwy had done his work thoroughly, and there was little for Llewelyn to do but place his forces where most he wanted them, and have them ready for action.

  "They'll come by the north route," he said, "near the coast, for he'll want above all to relieve and re-provision Diserth and Degannwy. And that, seeing he cannot stay camped there for ever, or leave his south coast fleet there, either, we'll let him do. It would not be worth good men's lives to stand too stubbornly in his way. Once he's gone we can break again any supply chain he can leave behind him."

  I had expected and dreaded that Cristin would be still at Bala, but all the women of the court had been withdrawn into the castle of Dolwyddelan, high in the mountains of Snowdonia. When we came into those parts Llewelyn, having determined on making his base and headquarters at Aber, whence he could hold the north coast, gave Godred his leave and blessing to ride direct to Dolwyddelan to be reunited with his wife, and either bide with us or take her home to the south with him, according as they chose together. The prince gave him a guide to bring him there the more readily, since he did not know our tracks in the north, and that duty, naturally enough, he assigned to me. In pure goodwill he said that I alone had deserved it. And in my own heart I confessed to God that it was true, and only fitting punishment that I should restore to my dear love the unloved husband of whose death my will was guilty, but not yet my hand.

  Then we rode together and alone, and Godred was assiduous in his civil attention to me, and I, in my private bitterness, attributed to him all manner of motives which perhaps never were his: as, that he courted me because he had ambitions in this new service, and had seen that I was close in Llewelyn's confidence, and might advance him; or, that I might, if he did not win my favour, do him harm there; or, that he felt I had some reservations about him, and desired to allay them. But never, which may well have been the truth, that he felt real friendship and gratitude to me, and showed it like any other man.

  For I knew that I was unjust to him. I knew I had no grounds for holding against him my resentment or my pain, and yet my ingenuity kept finding me just such grounds. I remembered things about our meeting which had then meant nothing, and in all likelihood meant nothing now, and found them meanings. I recalled the lightness of his mood, as though he had no care in the world, he who had lost Cristin, the treasure I had never possessed, and never now should possess. But he was by nature of a light mind, which is no sin, and had accepted the fact of his loss many months before, was he to weep all day and every day? There was also that thing he had said concerning a brother—my world was now populated with brothers!—who had a manor in Brecknock to which Godred could not go because of some small matter of his brother's young and pretty wife. But whatever that harked back to might have happened before Godred's own marriage to a wife who had more than youth and better than beauty, indeed, it might never have happened at all, it was such a loose vaunt as gay young men may well use before a stranger, not desiring to give away too much of their true and perhaps anxious selves. It could not seriously be counted against him.

  It did not dawn upon me until we were nearing Dolwyddelan that there was some other particular troubling me, with better reason. Something was amiss in his account of his own proceedings since Cwm-du. For he had said in his own defence, when I questioned him about the efforts he had made to find her, that for two months he had lain very sick of his wounds, scarcely alive enough to think of such a quest.

  But I had sat naked beside his nakedness in the water, had watched him turn and leap as he swam, and stretch out his arms to the sun as he dried himself
. And nowhere on all that fine, athletic body was there mark or scar or pucker of even the smallest wound. Not one blemish in his smooth whiteness.

  At the outer ward of Dolwyddelan we were challenged and passed within, over the ditch defences, and up the rocky mound to the inner ward and the hall. The place was seething with activity, and well garrisoned, since so many of the noble women were there for safety in this perilous month. And now that we were there, Godred fell silent and almost abashed, as near as he could get to that state, and left it to me to go first and order all that passed. Llewelyn's castellan came out to us as we dismounted, recognising me, and I told him our errand was to Cristin, Llywarch's daughter, but not what it was, for I desired with an intolerable, burning desire to know the best and the worst, and that I could learn only from her face, when she came in innocence to see who called for her. And if this was a cruelty I pray it may be excused by the cruel need out of which it sprang.

  And by reason of this same desperate need I would not go within, but waited