The Brothers of Gwynedd

  So we trimmed the name of the rushlight low and clear, and sat with him all night long, his body and bed the sheathed sword between us. Twice he roused a little, not quite awake, and made the wry movements of dry lips that signified his thirst, and then I raised him, and she put honeyed water to his lips, and a fresh, cool cloth to his forehead, and he swallowed and slept again. Such words as we spoke to each other were not of ourselves, but of him, and they were wonderfully few. All night long I never touched her hand. And all night long we were in peace. To be in her presence, unassailed and sinless, was more of bliss than I had believed possible.

  In the dead of night the silence was so profound within the llys that every murmur of wind in leaves from without came to us clearly, and towards morning, but long before light, bird-song began in a sudden outburst of confidence and joy, so loud and brave that I marvelled how such fragile instruments could produce such notes without shattering. Then the first pre-dawn pallor appeared in the east, and the first footsteps were heard in the bailey, the creakings and murmurings of men arising unwillingly from rest. And Llewelyn opened his eyes, sunken but clear, and asked for wine.

  I went to fetch it. If I had not leaped so gladly to answer his wish I should not have seen the curtain of the outer door of the anteroom still quivering from the hand that had just let it fall hurriedly into place, or heard the light, furtive footsteps fleeing, tip-toe, along the stone passage without.

  The brychan was drawn close against the open door of the bedchamber, its head shielded by the tapestry hanging. I stooped and felt at the blanket draped upon it, and in the centre it was warm to the touch.

  I did not linger then, but did my errand, neither seeing nor expecting to see on my way that person who had kept us company unseen and unheard during the night. For there were many ways out into the bailey and the wards from that passage, and outside in kitchens and stables and byres the household was already stirring. But afterwards, when I came again, and when the Lady Senena had bustled in to take charge, the first ray of sunlight piercing clean through the bedchamber and the open door showed me two more evidences of what I already knew. A tiny mote of sun danced upon the blanket, where all else was still in shadow, for there was a small hole in the tapestry, low towards the head of the brychan. And in passing through that chink, the light irradiated a single shining thread among the dark colours still further darkened by smoke, and I drew out in my fingers a long, curling hair, pale as ripe barley-silk.

  I said no word to Cristin or any other. Nor to him, when I met him in the armoury, and he greeted me gaily after his usual fashion, and asked me how the prince did, and if we had had quiet watch. I answered him simply, as though I took him and all his words and acts for honest. Better he should never be sure that I knew anything more of him than the sunlit outer part. Nor could I discern anything in him changed towards me, in voice or face, until I left him there and, leaving him, for some reason looked back. Still he stood smiling after me, all innocent goodwill, with no more of parody in his manner than was usual with him. Only his eyes, so wide and round and brown, and full of speckled golden lights like the shallows of the river where I had first encountered him, were become blind brown stones in his comely face.

  After that day the prince mended and this time he paid better heed to advice, and waited for his strength to come back before he tested it too far. By the time September came in, and we were busy with the harvest, he was himself again, a little leaner but as hard and vigorous as ever. And the Lady Senena, satisfied with his progress and his promises, returned to Neigwl and took Cristin with her, and shortly was followed by David and all his retinue. So I was rid of Godred, whom I was farther than ever from understanding, and robbed of Cristin, whom day by day, in presence or in absence, it seemed to me that I knew better, understood more profoundly, and loved more irrevocably.

  During the prince's illness, of which rumour had spread far and wide as it always does, the state of lawlessness in the marches had grown worse, and the breaches of truce were many. And still, by Llewelyn's order, his officers held them in check as best they might, and refrained from turning the frequent incidents into major battles. True, the Welshmen along the border were not saints, either, and from stoutly defending themselves may well have passed, where a tempting opportunity offered, to local revenges, and even to raids of their own. But by now the retinues of the marcher barons had very little to restrain them, and the prince's patience, no more inexhaustible than that of any high-mettled man, soon wore perilously thin.

  I think what held him back, where it might well have urged on another man, was the news that came through to us from France of the disaster that had fallen upon King Henry's court there. For in Paris there was a great epidemic of plague, which someone had unhappily carried in among the king's officers. Many died there, and King Henry himself and young Edmund, his son, were also stricken, and lay dangerously ill for some weeks. Rumours that the king was dead, or likely to die, did nothing to restore order in the marches. But late in October we heard that he was out of danger, and allowed to get out of his bed and walk a little.

  "Poor wretch!" said Llewelyn. "I have been in the same case myself. Why should I add to his troubles? As long as he forbears with me, so will I with him."

  But that was before Meurig rode into Aber from Shrewsbury in the early days of November, making for his winter nest earlier than usual because he carried urgent letters that concerned Wales very closely and bitterly.

  He did not know what it was he carried, for the roll was sealed; he knew only that it had been brought to him secretly by a Welsh friar, the last of a chain of messengers conveying it not from Westminster, but from King Henry's own court in Paris. Thence it had travelled by the same ship that brought reassurances and orders to the justiciar in London, but in the care of a Welsh seaman. The covering letter was from Cynan, greeting us fresh from a sick-bed which had barely missed being his death-bed, for he was among the royal clerks in attendance on the court, and had been brought down with plague like almost all the rest, though by the grace of God he was mending well when he wrote. There were two enclosures, both copies in Cynan's own hand, though shaky still from his illness, so that Llewelyn frowned over the cramped Latin, and followed a slow finger along the lines.

  "He says only his sickness has kept him from sending these earlier, for he could not trust them to any other, or let any other know he possessed copies. The first is not dated. The second, he says, follows it and will date it for us."

  The first letter enclosed was short, and for want of its original seal Cynan had written the name of the sender at the foot, and the name was Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys. Llewelyn read it through with a frown that changed as he went into a grin of somewhat sour amusement.

  "Listen," he said, "what Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn writes to his patron King Henry. He greets his lord, and informs him that he has been making enquiries about Llewelyn's health, and it is bad. The prince rallied enough to take exercise, but then twice relapsed into the same sickness, and is said to be very weak, and unlikely to recover. Griffith will send further reports if he should grow worse." He laughed, disdainfully rather than angrily, for there was nothing unexpected in this. We knew from long since that Griffith was the royal spy on our borders, just as we had Cynan and others in England. Yet there was all the width of the world between a Welsh-born prince slavishly reporting to England on the health of the prince of Wales, and a Welsh clerk in London risking livelihood and life itself in the service of his own country.

  "Poor Griffith," said Llewelyn, "he has no luck, for all his industry. Here am I alive and dangerous, and the king laid low in his turn. Griffith must be biting his nails now which way to go."

  He unrolled the second scroll, which was longer, and raised his brows at sight of the superscription.

  "It is from King Henry himself to his justiciar. The date is the twenty-second of July."

  It was the day he first walked out into the sun again after his relapse. I remembered it
, and so did he. He leaned on my arm that day, looking out over the salt flats to the sea.

  He read with a darkening face, that struggled with its own betraying thoughts, but mirrored most of them. A long, dour reading it was, and at the end of it he suddenly cursed aloud, and then as abruptly laughed even more loudly, though there was outrage and anger in his laughter.

  "His Grace has heard the news of Llewelyn's death! He writes in great haste—he was whole and well himself, then, his turn was still to come!—to make plain his plans for the succession in Wales. Llewelyn is unwived, and without issue, but with a vigorous brother named David ready to pick up the burden he let fall, and that must never be permitted, no, at all costs not David, who would be as single and vehement as his elder. His Grace has an answer to David. Owen Goch is to be freed from his prison and set up in half of what the king proposes to leave of Wales. But he'll gain very little, for Henry means to recover for himself the homages of all the other Welsh princes, leaving Gwynedd at its narrowest to be divided between Owen and David. And how is he to contrive all this? By force of arms! This, while he writes to me piously of peace! The barons of the march are to assemble their arms at Shrewsbury to conquer Wales. He looks for help from certain impressionable princes, not forgetting Meredith ap Rhys Gryg. Well? Those are King Henry's plans for Wales, when he thinks me on my death-bed, or dead already. It is not my word, it is his. Here in plain script. Under his own seal."

  It was as he had said, in every particular. How Cynan ever contrived to get a copy of the letter I could not guess; it may well be that he memorised it complete from another clerk's account, for he was not so close to the crown as to be dealing with such correspondence himself.

  "To be fair to him," said Goronwy, always the most temperate of us, "this is no proof he was in bad faith in talking of peace with you, or thanking you for your forbearance in his troubles at home. True, he may well have been pursuing that path because he saw no alternative while you lived. It's when he thinks you dead that he feels it a possibility to conquer Wales. After his fashion he is paying you a compliment."

  "A compliment I could well do without," said Llewelyn, between laughter and rage still. "How long is it since I heard much the same rumours of him, and held my hand from taking any advantage? When did King Henry ever make the least gesture of generosity towards me and mine? When we were hard-pressed, then he bore harder still on us and took whatever he could. Now I doubt not he would like this letter buried deep, knowing I am well alive. He shall know it even better yet. I tire of my own restraint, seeing he observes none. It is time to show King Henry how exceedingly alive I am!"

  What plans the prince would have made, and where his deliberate blow would have fallen, had not others provided occasion, was never made plain. He summoned his host and his allies at leisure, calling David from Neigwl, while he considered the courses open to him, and weighed their advantages. This was the first time that ever he set out of intent not merely to breach the truce but to destroy it.

  Occasion, amounting in itself almost to prior breach, was not far to seek, though we did not then know what was toward. The many and increasingly grave raids on the borders had alarmed and enraged others besides the officers of Gwynedd. In particular the Welshmen of Maelienydd, in the central march, uneasy neighbours to Roger Mortimer, were angry and unhappy when they saw that he was thrusting his border forward into their territory and building himself a new castle on the hill of Cefnllys, and thinking it politic not to speak first, but to act, for fear Llewelyn should continue to counsel moderation, raised a force of their own and took the castle by a trick. They had no wish to occupy the site themselves, only to prevent it being used as a base against them, and accordingly they razed the walls and the keep, and so left it. As soon as he heard the fate of his fortress, Roger raised a strong force, helped by his neighbour Humphrey de Bohun, and rushed to Cefnllys to rebuild it. Too weak to attack so powerful a company, the men of Maelienydd did what perhaps they should have done earlier, and hurriedly sent a courier to appeal for aid to Llewelyn.

  By a happy irony the messenger arrived on the first day of December, a single day after the arrival of a letter from King Henry himself, still weak and ailing in France, but stirring himself to deal, even from that distance, with the many disorders that plagued his realm, and should, if he had been wise, have kept his mind off meddling with any other prince's territory. Among the many complaints to assail him was one from Mortimer, it seemed, bitterly accusing the Welsh of the assault on his castle, and indicting Llewelyn by name. Which accusation King Henry duly passed on to the prince, requesting explanation for the breach of truce.

  "Having got over his disappointment at finding me still alive," said Llewelyn, "he's forced back on the old approaches. How gratifying, to be able to write with a clear conscience and deny the impeachment. I have not laid a finger on the truce—yet."

  And he dictated a mild, noncommittal reply, acknowledging the letter, stating that as far as his knowledge went he had not in any way broken his truce with the king, and offering amends for any proven infringements to date, provided the same justice was done to him.

  Next day came the man of Maelienydd, in his turn complaining to his prince, defending the action of the Welsh with many and voluble legal arguments, some of them sound, and appealing for help to prevent the reinstatement of Cefnllys.

  "We have our occasion," said Llewelyn, and laughed. "We even have a case, should we need one. He had no more right to build contrary to the truce than I have to raze what he has built. Maelienydd is a very fair country, and we are courteouslyinvited in; it would be unmannerly to refuse."

  That was the first time that we had meddled so far east, except in our own northern lands, and it says much concerning the situation in those parts, and the fears and hopes of those who lived there, that we were indeed invited, not only by the men of Maelienydd, but after them by those of Brecknock, and welcomed like deliverers when we came.

  We made our usual vehement descent, outrunning our own report, with a force greater, as we found, than that Mortimer and de Bohun had furnished for their rebuilding. They were encamped within the broken walls of the castle, and we came so suddenly and unexpectedly that though Cefnllys stands on one end of a lofty ridge, we were able to occupy positions all round it without hindrance, and settled down to hold them under close siege.

  It was plain that they had only limited supplies, and that they were advanced so far from Mortimer's base at Wigmore as to be very badly placed for breaking out of our trap, all those miles of hostile Maelienydd separating them from reinforcements. We could starve them into submission in a week or two. But Llewelyn had a better use for those seven days.

  "Now let's see," he said, "how practical a man Roger can be. For he knows his situation as well as we do, and I think has the good sense to recognise and admit it. I have no great ambition to fight with him, and I would as lief have him out of here and out of my way while I secure Maelienydd."

  He told us what he proposed, and David laughed, and begged to be the ambassador to the besieged. He rode into the enclosure attended by a single squire, and laid before Roger Mortimer, no doubt with a demure and dignified face, the prince's offer. Since it was clear that surrender was only a matter of time, and relief exceedingly improbable, why expend men and resources in postponing the inevitable? Llewelyn had no wish to fight with his cousin. If Mortimer would accept it, he and his army were offered free and unimpeded passage through Llewelyn's lines and across the border, intact to a man, with all their gear.

  That was no easy decision to make, but Mortimer was a big enough man, and honest enough with himself, to shrug off what many a younger and rasher captain would have seen as disgrace and dishonour. Indeed, later he was plagued with suggestions in many quarters that he had been in league with the Welsh in this matter, which I can testify was quite false. He could have stayed and fought, and seen many of his men wounded and killed, only to surrender in the end. Instead, he chose to take his whole
force home in good order when he was given the chance. For my part, I respected his common-sense, and so, I think, must the wives of his soldiers have done when their men came home unmarked.

  We opened our ranks to let them out, and saluted them as they marched by, for we had nothing against them, and the message they were taking back to King Henry was more galling than a bloody defeat would have been.

  "I call that good housekeeping," said Llewelyn, watching their ranks recede towards Knighton. "We've spent little to gain much, and he's preserved what could be preserved. No fool squandering of men for spite or stubbornness, as your thickheaded heroes would have done. I approve him."