The Brothers of Gwynedd (11 page)

  This Owen the Red was then seventeen years old, and with every day more like his father in appearance, very well-grown and already more than six feet tall. He was not ill-looking, but less striking than the Lord Griffith by reason of a certain too-emphatic sharpness in his features, where his sire's for all their impetuosity and pride had been good-humoured. Owen had all his father's rashness and arrogance, but lacked the warmth and generosity with which he could turn back and make amends. His body bade fair to grow as wide, but his mind and nature never would, they closed against other men in suspicion and ready for jealousy.

  It may be that his imprisonment, first in Criccieth and then in London, had done something to narrow him, but I think it did not change, but only aggravate, his tendencies. Certainly it had not been arduous here in England, however he had chafed at it, and it had done nothing to teach him patience or humility. The first offer of sovereignty in Gwynedd had him reaching for it greedily. I think King Henry did not have to exert much persuasion to get him to promise homage for it. And if the fulfilment of his hopes and the wearing of the talaith were delayed, he got something by way of earnest at once, for he was very richly fitted out with clothes at the crown's expense, and provided with a horse and a small retinue to go with him, suitable to a native prince coming home.

  The place chosen for his bid was Chester, the nearest strong base to Eryri. And since he must set out squired and escorted almost wholly by English retainers, and with an officer of the king to supervise and direct his efforts, he had need of someone who could write well both in Welsh and English, and Latin, too, if need arose. And there was no one but me. So I became clerk and squire to Owen the Red.

  My mother had lost her childlike look since Meilyr fled from London, I know not how it was, but she had grown more comfortable and ordinary, and as though in some way nearer. Much as I had loved her, and she me, being embraced by her, touching her, walking with her had been like touching a picture or a carving, but now she was flesh. And very hard it was for me to leave her, but she willed it so, for she was wholly devoted to the Lady Senena's household, having lived for this family all her days. So I said submissively that I would go.

  "And think," she said, sitting with me that last night, after the children were asleep, "how close this town of Chester is to the commote of Ial. He was born there, west of the Alun, he may well have gone back there. Surely if he hears that the Lord Owen is in Chester and calling up his men, he will come to him there."

  Hearing her was like another echo in my mind. For she had but one "he" who needed no naming.

  I said: "He may well." But did we know whether he was alive or dead?

  "It may be," she said, "that you will meet him there."

  "And if I should," I said, "have you any message to him?"

  She sighed, saying: "It is too late. I shall never see him again." And I think she was a little sad, but with her it was not easy to know, for there was always a withdrawn sadness about her, and where its roots lay, even now that her feet trod the same earth with the rest of us, I never could fathom.

  On that last evening before we rode from London she took out, from the box where she kept her few ornaments, a plain silver ring with an oval seal, a deep-cut pattern of a hand severed at the wrist, holding a rose. I had never seen it before, nor, I think, had any other person among us, except, perhaps, her husband. She put it on my finger, and bade me take it with me, for it was my father's, and who knew?—it might yet bring me in contact with him. And that was the first and last time that she spoke of him to me, at least in all the time I had been of an age to understand and remember. It was long since I had even given a thought to that unknown man-atarms who had fathered me, and when first she said "your father" I own I took her to be referring to Meilyr, even though she had never before called him so. But then I knew that of him she would only have felt it needful to say: "It was
his!
Yet the first man who took her I do believe she loved, however briefly, and the second, the one to whom she was lawfully given, I doubt she never did, not even then, when his absence was ever-present with her as his presence had never been. For indeed she was always a strange woman.

So I promised her I would wear it, and did so, I confess, with some pride, as

It was no easy matter being clerk and personal servant to Owen Goch, for he had grown accustomed to the English ways after his recent heady novitiate at King Henry's court, and required that servants should be servile, while I had still the Welsh habit of speaking my mind freely even to my masters. Familiarity he would not stomach now, but cut it off short, with lashing reproof, or if his mood was ill, with a ready blow, so that I learned to keep my distance in word as well as fact. But once this was accepted, we got on well enough on such terms as he dictated and I endured with an equal mind. It was less wise of him to use somewhat the same tone and manner with the English fighting men who surrounded him, or at least the lower ranks among them, for he knew well enough how to moderate his pride with the knights and their Commander. But Owen, ever over-sanguine, felt himself within grasp of the talaith that should have been his father's, and he would be a prince in every part.

  To John de Rohan, who was in fact his guard and keeper rather than the captain of his escort, I am sure he ranked rather as a kind of engine of war on two legs, an expensive but hopefully valuable weapon, somewhat irritating and cumbersome to manipulate about the country, but effective once brought to the proper spot.

  I was of an age then to get more profit from adventuring about the world, and in that summer weather I used my eyes and ears to good effect, and found great pleasure in the pageant of man and season and countryside. And often for days, and ever longer as time passed, I forgot my mother and the Lady Senena, and the life we had left behind, and so, I am sure, did Owen Goch. I knew well enough, if he did not, that we were no more free than we had been in the Tower, but it was hard to believe it while we rode in the sunshine thus, and fed well and lay comfortably at every day's end.

  We got a ceremonial welcome in Chester, all that Owen could have wished, for they hoped much from him. John Lestrange, the warden of the northern march, received us and saw us installed in a fine lodging, and there was set up the office that was to busy itself about drafting proclamations and appeals to the Welsh, and circulating them throughout the Middle Country as far as Conway, and by means of various agents, even deeper into Eryri. I came into my own there as Owen's best scrivener in the Welsh language, for though he had a fine flow of eloquence like most of his house, he was not lettered beyond the signing of his name. Very fine proclamations we drew up between us, and I was kept busy copying the long pedigree of my young lord, and setting forth his claims and his injuries, King Henry's tender care for him and concern for his just cause, and the peace and benefit that might accrue to Wales if they did right to him, and rallied to his standard against the uncle who shut him out from his inheritance. Throughout all those pans of Wales which were held under the crown these were read and distributed and cried publicly. And where the crown had no sway they were insinuated by whatever agency de Rohan could discover and use.

  So the last of the autumn passed, with only one drawback, that we got no result for all our labour. And for myself, I did not see these efforts of mine go out with a single mind or a whole heart, seeing at whose expense and for whose profit this matter was really undertaken. For here was Wales contending against England, and a Welsh prince was seeking to win away as much as he might of Wales to a side which, Owen or no Owen, could only be called England's. And surely there was a part of me that drew relieved breath as every day passed, and still barely a man, and none of substance, took the bait we put out and came to declare himself.

  Then Owen, unhappy with this state of affairs, for he had counted on making a strong appeal to all those chiefs who had taken his father's part, at least did something for those few Welsh who were brought in prisoner, for he suggested that they should be offered grace and aid if they would either convert to his banner, or better, go back into Wales as agents for him. But such as accepted this surely took to their heels gladly when they were released to their own country, and did no recruiting for us, and such as elected to join the king's forces did so to save life and limb, and were of little worth, their hearts being elsewhere.

  Most of that winter we passed in Chester, but when the hardest of the weather was over we moved out nearer to the salt marshes and sands of the Dee, to the king's manor of Shotwick. I think by then King Henry had given up the idea that Owen could be of much use to him at this stage, but still he required him as a puppet to be produced and give his proceedings a cover of justice when he put an army into the field in earnest, as now he had determined to do. For the Welsh revolt continued vigorous and successful. In February a certain Fitz-Mathew, who was in command of a force of knights controlling the southern march, was ambushed and killed in a hill pass near Margam, and most of his company shattered. And if King Henry could rejoice over one bloody engagement near Montgomery, where, as we heard, three hundred Welshmen were drawn into a net from which they could not escape, and there slaughtered, he was soon grieving again for the loss of Mold, for David stormed and took it at the end of March. That could not pass. With Mold in David's hands again there was no safety for the royal castle at Diserth, it might be cut off from its base of Chester at any time. The king knew then that there was nothing for him to do but call up the whole muster of his knighthood service, and launch a full campaign with the summer, and he began at once to send out orders to his justiciars to collect provisions for his army.

  We spent most of that year at Shotwick, for the king would not risk using Owen in the field, though he did entertain and display him at Chester when he came there in August, and halted his army for a week. Then they moved on to the banks of the Conway, and the king began the building of a great new castle on the rock of Degannwy on the east bank, to provide protection from a distance both for Diserth and Chester. They remained in camp there, busy with this building, until the end of October.

  Now it chanced that that year the winter came down early and like iron, before autumn was half over, fighting at last for Wales. The whole month of October was bitter and bleak, full of frosts and gales and snow, and in that camp by the Conway they froze and starved, killed and died, with no mercy on either side. The king's army was far too strong to be attacked in pitched battle, which in any case we Welsh never favoured, and it managed to keep open a supply line back to Chester, as well as bringing in supplies by sea from Ireland. But ships are flimsy against such storms as came down that year, and some foundered, and one at least was run aground by a clumsy steersman in the sands on the Aberconway side, and fought over bitterly by both armies, but the Welsh got away with most of its cargo. Their need was at least as great, for the king had landed troops from Ireland in Anglesey and captured or despoiled the late crops there. But King Henry went on doggedly with the building of his new castle, and the work grew rapidly.

  One of the few Welsh soldiers who had embraced Owen's cause was our courier back and forth to this camp at Degannwy, and brought us grim accounts of what went forward there, how the English had raided the abbey of Aberconway, across the river, stripped the great church of all its treasures, and fired the barns, how they had given up taking prisoners, and slaughtered even the noblemen who fell into their hands, until David took to repaying the murders upon the English knights he captured. Nightly the Welsh made lightning raids in the darkness, killed and withdrew. And daily the English, after every skirmish, brought back into camp Welsh heads as horrid trophies.

  These things he told us, and I could not forbear from watching Owen's face as he listened, for these were the heads of his kinsmen, over whom he desired to rule, and whose support he was wooing. But he was not of such subtlety as to question deeply what he did, and saw no further than the right that had been denied his father and was still denied him.

  "And I'll tell you," said the messenger, steaming beside our comfortable fire, "one they have killed, though he was brought in prisoner after an honest fight, and that's the youngest of Ednyfed Fychan's sons." This was the great steward who had served Llewelyn Fawr and now David, in all some forty years of noble, wise dealing, without greed for himself, and with the respect of all. And he was now an old man. "Hanged him," said our courier, "on a bare tree, high for the Welsh to see. And that David will never forgive."