The Brothers of Gwynedd Read online

  Six years I spent thus in the purest peace and serenity, and all this while the world without went on its way, and the news of it came in to us like the distant sound of the waves on the shore, ominous to others, but no threat to our haven. The things that were told to me seemed like stories read in one of Ciaran's books, vivid and alarming, but not real, so that even alarm was pleasure. For the stories of the saints are full of terror and delight, no less than the legends of heroes that the bards recite to the harp.

  So I heard that after the return of her lord the Lady Senena, in her joy at the reunion, again conceived, and her third son was born in the spring of the following year. A fourth followed a year later, David, the last of her five children. But whether she named him after his uncle, with that same hope of softening her lord's fortune which had prompted her to give her second son the name Llewelyn, I do not know. There was peace then between them, the prince had enlarged the Lord Griffith's lands greatly, adding to the whole cantref of Lleyn a large portion of the lands of Powys, designing, I think, to leave him with an appanage which should recompense him for the surrender of his wider rights by Welsh law, and reconcile him to becoming a loyal vassal of his brother. But it was not in his nature to see beyond his own wrong to a larger right, and he knew only the title of Gwynedd, and could not envisage Wales, for all he quoted Welsh law. A man is as he is. The Lord Griffith was a fine man, tall and splendid to look upon, fully as tall as his father, and he was of great stature, though gaunt, where Griffith was full of flesh. He was openhanded to a fault where men pleased him, and too quick to lash out where they displeased. He was hasty in suspicion of affront, and merciless in retaliation. He was readily moved by generosity, and lavish in returning it. He never forgot benefit or injury. But he could not see beyond what helped or hurt him and his, and that is a small circle in a vast world, too narrow for greatness.

  Doubtless he loved, but never did he understand, his father, that Llewelyn who is rightly named the Great.

  This last child of theirs, the boy David, touched my own fortunes nearly. For my mother had at last conceived by her husband, and brought forth a still-born girl three days before her lady bore her boy. And since the Lady Senena was low with a dangerous fever for two weeks after the delivery, and my mother was heavy with milk and yearning, she naturally became wet-nurse to the royal child. I had lost my sister, but I had a breast-brother, a prince of the blood-royal of Gwynedd, seven years and more my junior. This came early in my peace, and moved me deeply. I thought much of this helpless thing drawing its life from my mother, who had given me life also, and of whatever this mysterious thing might be that we two shared. And the bright, resolute, fearless creature who shared the stars of my birth with me, and who had been my fellow before I knew what royalty was, had fallen away from me then, and was almost forgotten.

  I had been four years at Aberdaron, and was approaching my tenth birthday, when first we heard from a pilgrim bard that the great prince had been taken with a falling seizure. It was as if the earth had shaken under us. True, the attack was not severe, and had done no more than weaken him in the use of one arm, and draw his mouth a little awry, but we had never thought of him as being subject to age, like lesser men, even though he was now in his sixty-fifth year, for his vigour seemed to reach like a potent essence into the furthest corners of the land, and inspire even those, like me, who had never seen him in the flesh. Truly that flesh was now seen to be mortal. And the shudder of foreboding that shook most of Wales became a tremor of anticipation and hope to those who had sided with Griffith and were biding their time with him. And not only these, for beyond the march in England they surely licked their lips and tasted already the pickings the dogs find after the lion is dead. Him they had let alone now for four years, and would let alone while he lived, with all his conquests rich and fat about him, for they dared not tempt again the force they had ventured too often already to their cost. But with the great prince gone, and an unknown, or untried at least, in his place, then they would close in on all sides to snatch back, if they could, the many lands they had lost to him.

  It was the first time that I had ever considered how those who felt as England felt towards us could hardly be anything but enemies to Wales; and it caused me some uneasiness even then, but being so young, I did not apply it too closely to those I had known and served all my life. And soon I forgot the qualm it had cost me, in thinking of other things. For towards the end of this same year—I think it was on the 19th of October, and the place I know was the abbey of Strata Florida, a foundation beloved of the prince and always faithful to his house—there was called a great assembly of all the princes of Wales, and there every man among them took the oath of fealty to David as the next heir. Then indeed we felt that death had moved a gentle step nearer to our lord, and none knew it better than he, or felt less fear of it for himself, or more for Wales. Doubtless he knew better than any how the marcher lords were sharpening their knives, and what a load his son would have to bear.

  Now I cannot say whether this ceremony at Strata Florida so inflamed the mind of the Lord Griffith that he took some rash action to assert his rights, or whether the Lord David, armed with so formidable a support, moved against him in expectation of just such a defiance, but certain it is that at the end of this year Griffith was stripped of his lands in Powys, and left with only his cantref of Lleyn, and that by order of his younger brother. By which it was made clear to all that the Lord David had already assumed a part of his royal privilege before his father's death, and that undoubtedly with his father's knowledge and sanction, for no son in his right wits would have reached to take any morsel of power out of those great hands but by their goodwill and grace. And surely the lords along the march, who had lost so much to Gwynedd these last twenty years, were counting days and mustering men already. Prince David had King Henry's word to accept and acknowledge him, and none other, and doubtful though King Henry's troth might be, if it held for any it would hold for his nephew, his sister's son. She, that great lady, her husband's right hand and envoy and counsellor all her days, was dead then more than two years, and buried with all honour and great grief at Llanfaes in Anglesey. She had but one son, though her daughters were married into all the great houses of the march, for better assurance. Yet there remained the Lord Griffith, and he was irreconcilable. And the year following there was sudden bitter blaze between those two brothers, the confiscated lands held hostage being insufficient to keep the elder in check, rather goading him to worse hostility. And before the year was out we heard that David had taken his brother prisoner, and his eldest son Owen with him, and lodged them in the castle of Criccieth under lock and key.

  This Owen Goch—"the Red" by reason of his flaming hair—was the Lady Senena's first child, and being nearly three years older than I, was then approaching thirteen, only a year away from his majority. And I suppose that it seemed a folly to shut up the father and leave in his place a son on the edge of manhood, round whom the same discontents could gather. The girl Gladys came next, a year before Llewelyn. She would not present the same danger, and the younger boys were but children as yet, and could be left with their mother at liberty. Thus for the second time that household was broken apart, and the lady was left to protect her own and manage her family's affairs alone. But she was not molested in her home at Nevin, and the boy Llewelyn, they said, was welcome always at his grandsire's court, and spent more than half of his time there, very gladly, for there was life there, and hunting, and riding, and all the exercise and company a lively boy loves. Nor did his mother hinder, even when she knew that he was much in favour with his uncle David, who was childless by his wife Isabella. The boy was too young, said his mother, to understand, and could not be guilty of disloyalty to his house, and surely it was well to have one child covered by the protection of royal favour, a warranty against the loss of all, if the greatest must be lost. But I think, knowing or unknowing, she was using this boy to go back and forth in innocence and keep her informed of
what went forward at Aber, while she waited for the prince to die. For she knew, none better, that there was a well of sympathy for Griffith's case, and that its time for gushing would not come while the lion yet lived. And she had learned how to wait with dignity, and in silence.

  Yet I am not sure, even then, how right she was to trust in the innocence of her son Llewelyn. For even without art, news can flow two ways. And at what age art and wisdom begin is a mystery, and at what age those who will some day be men achieve the courage and the clarity to judge and choose and resolve, that is a greater mystery. And this was no ordinary child, with no ordinary grandsire. And they namesakes. There is magic in names.

  Howbeit, on the tenth day of April of the year twelve hundred and forty the great Prince Llewelyn, feeling the heavy darkness draw in on him again, and this time believing it an end, had himself conveyed into the abbey of Aberconway, which he loved and had shielded so long, and there took the monastic habit, after the manner of great kings going to their judgment. And wrapped in this blessed cloth he died on the day following, and there his great body lies buried. And doubtless his greater soul has room enough now, even beyond that reach he had in this world. For he was the true friend and patron of the religious, wherever they preserved the purity and austerity of the faith, and whatsoever he did was done with grandeur and largeness of mind, and for Wales, which he loved beyond all things.

  So David ap Llewelyn was Prince of Aberffraw and Lord of Snowdon in his father's room. And in May of that same year he attended King Henry's council at Gloucester, became a knight at the king's hands, after the English fashion, put on the talaith, the gold circlet of his state, and did homage for Gwynedd, pledging himself liegeman of the king of England as overlord, saving only his sovereign right within his own principality. All which had been many times done before, and was no surrender of any part of his due, but his own side of a covenant, of which the reverse was King Henry's sworn acknowledgement of his firm status as prince of North Wales. And the other great magnates of Wales did homage in their turn on the like understanding.

  What did not appear was how wide a gulf yawned between the two conceptions of what that status meant. It was not long before all those lords marchers who had lost land to Llewelyn, however long ago, and all those border Welsh who held themselves aggrieved at surrendering to him commotes and castles forfeited for disloyalty, or taken in open battle, began to resort to law and to force, demanding from David the return of losses they would not have dared reclaim from his father. Thus the earl of Pembroke went with an army, in the teeth of the lord of that cantref, to rebuild his lost castle of Cardigan and plant a garrison there, while lawsuits came thick and fast over Mold, and Powys, and the lordship of Builth, which came legally to David as his wife's dower, but not without all possible resistance from her de Breos kin. Any and every disaffected lord, English or Welsh, who could bring a legal plea for the possession of land lost to the father, fairly or unfairly, turned now to rend the son. And King Henry, always maintaining his good faith in recognising his nephew's status, connived at all the activities of those who were bent on plucking his principality to pieces.

  Nor was he so rich in solid friends on the borders as his father had been, for the line of Earl Ranulf, Llewelyn's lifelong ally and sympathiser, was extinct in Chester, and that earldom had gone back to the crown, laying bare all the northeast of Gwynedd to the assaults of the enemy.

  David in this storm, perhaps not all unexpected but breaking upon him too soon, did his best to delay, after the English fashion, those lawsuits the English brought against him, and as a better instrument to his hand, chose rather than law to submit the impleaded lands to a council of arbitrators nominated from both sides, with the Pope's legate in England at their head. But this measure also he found to be acting against him, and fell back once more upon delay, sending excuses for failure to attend the meetings of a commission he now saw to be no more than a dagger in King Henry's hand. For this whole issue had now been channelled through the king and his council, making a quarrel between two countries rather than between mere men at odds over land. Thus he held off the pack for a year, his envoys, his father's old, able men, going backwards and forwards many times and using every art of persuasion and disruption, but in the end to no purpose. For King Henry saw that he had many allies, so many Welsh princes being either disaffected over land, or aggrieved by Griffith's captivity and disinheritance, and that all that was obstinately being withheld from him by legal means he could acquire by force at little cost, something he dared not attempt beforetime. Having summoned David to appear before the commission at Montford on the Severn in June, and well knowing that he would not come, he made preparations for an attack in arms. And David, though he had word of the martial movements behind the summons, had no way left open to him but to absent himself, and let what must follow, follow.

  I tell all this not as I saw it then, being little more than a child, and without understanding of many of the tidings I heard, but as I understood it later, when I had seen more of the world than the clas at Aberdaron. But I was not so young or so ignorant that I could not feel the threat as touching even me, when they spoke of the king of England moving into the marches at the end of July with a great force of men in arms, and setting up his court in Shrewsbury. For what could he be doing there in the borders but preparing the undoing of Gwynedd? Shrewsbury was a great way off, further than I could then imagine, but not so far that the English could not reach even this last corner of Lleyn with fire and sword if war once flared.

  Yet I had no notion that events outside our enclosure and our fields and coast could ever touch me as a person, or draw me out of this haven I had grown to love and think of as my lifelong home.

  They came for me on the last day of July, two grooms of the Lady Senena's household, bringing a third pony for me.

  I was raking the early hay in the field above the shore, about noon, when Ciaran sent one of the brothers to call me in, for I had visitors with the abbot. A clear, bright day I remember it was, with a fresh breeze bringing inland the strong, warm scent of kelp from the beach below me, and the southward sea innocently restless, sparkling with the sun and its own motion. So beautiful a day that I went unwillingly, even believing it would be only for an hour, I who have never seen Aberdaron again.

  Abbot Cadfael was waiting for me in the antechamber of the guesthouse within the enclosing walls and with him two men in the Lady Senena's livery. I saw their horses in the stable as I passed, not blown nor sweated, for it was no long ride from Neigwl, where the lady then had her household. The younger of the two riders I did not know. The elder it took me some minutes to know for my step-father. I had not seen him for six years, half my lifetime, and he was changed by double as many summers and winters, for men age by curious lurches and recoveries, now standing still in defiance of time for a dozen years, then sliding downhill by a decade in one season. These years with my mother had been his breaking time, for I think she had won, without fighting, that long battle between them. It was not that she could not love, but that he could not make her love. There was grey in his shaggy dark hair, and his face was hollow and hungry, with deep-sunken eyes. He had been a very comely man. Yet in one thing he was unchanged. I saw by the way his eyes hung upon me in silence that he hated me as of old. But it is one thing I can never forget to him, that as long as he lived he could not cease from loving her. And when I was old enough to understand that purgatory aright, and had myself some knowledge of the pain of love, then I forgave him all, for he was paid over and over for any injury he ever did me.

  "Son," said Abbot Cadfael very gravely, "there is here a call for you to go out from among us, to another duty."

  At that I was clean knocked out of words and breath, as if one had attempted my life, for Aberdaron was my life, and I had thought it should be so always. I knew by rote already the vows I was to take, and waited for the time without impatience only because I was sure of it. And in one sentence all was taken away from m
e. I went on my knees to him, and when I could speak I said: "Father, my heart is to this life and none other. My home is here, and all that I am is yours. How can I go hence, and keep any truth in me?"

  He looked at me closely and thoughtfully for a long time, for I think I had not spoken as he had expected of a boy twelve years old. But he said only: "Truth is everywhere, and your truth will go with you. Child, you were but lent to us a season, and she who lent you requires you of us again. It is not for you to choose, but to accept with humility. I have no right to deny you, nor you to refuse."

  I would have wept, but not with those deep eyes of my mother's husband watching me, for I still hated him then as he hated me. And I knew that the abbot spoke truth, for the Lady Senena had been my provider and protectress all these years, and by rights I belonged to her, and not only could not, but must not refuse her commands. She could cut off my endowment and have me put out of this refuge when she would, but that I knew she would not do. For though she was austere and hard of nature, she was also faithful to whatever she undertook, and would not avenge herself upon an underling. Therefore my debt to her was all the greater, and whatever she asked of me I must do. But to discover, if I might, the magnitude and the duration of my loss—for even losses can be regained after