The Brothers of Gwynedd (34 page)

  Her lips moved, but upon so slight a motion of breath that I could not be sure she said: "And I you!" But thus I think she spoke.

  "And now," I said, "frost or no, it remains for us to bury him, and that we shall do here, where he died. But your part is done, and nobly, and I would have you safe with your own people. I will give you a reliable escort to bring you into Brecon to join your lady."

  She looked at me steadily, and jutted lip and chin for a long moment, considering. Then with a resolution as final as it was quiet, she said: "No!"

  I was at loss here, not understanding what she meant or what she wanted of me. And I began to say patiently that I could not abandon her here in the forest, or leave her to the mercy of possible unwounded and desperate fugitives from Cwm-du. Leave alone the cold and hunger of winter, her horse being in as great need as herself. And mistaking her reserve, I told her earnestly that she need have no fear of riding with my men, for I would take whatever oath she required that she should be respected in every way among us, by the last and least of our party as surely as by myself. But the dead man I must see decently into the grave here, however temporary his stay, for though he was not blood kin to me, yet in a manner he was closer than blood kin, and I would not move from this place until I had said the office over him for his rest.

  She said to me, with the same still and starry face, her eyes never loosing their fixed bold of mine: "I take your word, for all as for yourself, and I do and will trust myself with you gladly. But will you not extend to me the same choice your lord offered to my lady?"

  "You do not wish," I said, bewildered, "to go to Brecon?"

  She said: "No!" as forcibly as before. And she said that she would have gone, with all her doubts, but for this chance that had opened for her another way. Duty she owed to her lady, and would have paid, however reluctantly. But God had brought her here to this place, and turned the world and her life about, and by that she would abide, very gladly. For she was Welsh, and of a line from which bards and warriors had sprung, and it was against her grain to flee from the Welsh and take shelter, as if by nature though against her nature, with the English, whose one aim, however they fostered one chieftain against another, was to devour Wales wholemeal.

  "Then is it your wish," I said, "that we should see you safe back to Carreg Cennan, into the household of Meredith ap Rhys Gryg?"

  "Not that, either," she said. "I have no father or brother left there to make me welcome, and I think it no wise move to put myself into the protection of a lord like Meredith, with grown sons around him. If I am to beg shelter and refuge, I'll beg it from the highest. If you will take me, I will go with you to your Prince Llewelyn, and if there is a place for me about his court, in service among his womenfolk, I will fill it as well as I may."

  I was taken full aback at this resolution in her, and yet I did not question or advise, hardly knowing then why. It was not long before I knew. For on the face of it this was folly, for her to venture afield into Gwynedd, the one woman among ten men, and for us to burden ourselves with her when our passage might not be without troubles. And this folly I accepted and embraced, never asking a reason of myself or her. I asked her only: "Do you mean this in earnest? And is there none left here at all who deserves and waits for news of you? Not one person to be in distress for you?"

  "To the best of my knowing," she said steadily, "not one."

  So then I knew, by reason of the great flood of hope and joy that filled me, why I had no desire to examine or consider all the difficulties that might face us on her account, or the need we had of haste to overtake my lord. And I said to her only: "Come, then, if that is your wish." For God he knows it was mine.

We buried Meilyr, my mother's husband, in a deep hollow of the ground among the trees, where the mast and mould of years from the branches had made a loose, crumbling soil that would not harden like the open ground, even in the frost. We broke the soil with our daggers and hands to get deeper, and since we could make no very profound grave without better tools, we prised up rocks from the bed of the brook to pile over him, for fear wolves or foxes should dig him up again. Later we sent word to the canons of Talley, to bring him away and give him better burial. That day there was none but myself to speak the words over him. Yet I think he has not slept less well for that. Could I have laid him with my mother, I would have done it. As it was, I took her ring, when we moved and composed his body, for his hands had loosed their hold of it, and threaded it upon his little finger, that he might not lose it in the earth.

  The woman stood with us by that graveside, not heeding the cold or the wind. And when I rose from kneeling beside him, I looked at her, and her eyes were wide and fixed, staring upon the silver band on his finger, where the little engraved hand held the rose. In her face there was nothing to be read, except the rapt solemnity of death's presence, for to be brought face to face with another man's death is to meet one's own death in the way, and this touched her nearly, for she had been the instrument of God in blessing his departure, and I think she grieved and marvelled, as at the loss of something she had not known until then for hers. And that was my case also.

  Nor had dead Meilyr yet ended his work with me. But that I did not know when we piled the icy rocks over him, and left him to his rest.

We rode back into Dynevor as the light was beginning to fail, and made a stay overnight for her sake. And in the morning we took fresh horses and set out for the north.

  Refreshed and resolute, she rode beside me out of the gatehouse and down the track from the mound. With kilted skirts she rode, astride like a man, and booted, for I think she was determined that she would not be a drag upon our speed, but keep mile for mile with us, untiring. All she had with her was a thin saddle-roll with a few clothes in it, and whatever else women will not leave behind when they leave most of what they possess. And since for the first few miles we faced the east and the dawn, there was a lustre upon her face and a brightness in her eyes, for the sun came up red and splendid across the wasting snow.

  It came upon me suddenly that I did not even know her name, for though she must have gathered many of ours from our utterances, there had been no one to speak hers before us, and so positive was her presence that until then I had felt no need to find a talisman for her, as though such a woman could be shut into a charm and held in the hand. But now, realising, I spoke my astonishment aloud, and she looked round at me, and deep into me, as was her way, without a smile.

  "Yours I know," she said. "They call you Samson. You are the private clerk and close friend of Llewelyn ap Griffith. And well I know I should have told you more of myself than I have, though God knows I have told you true. My name is Cristin, Llywarch's daughter, who was Rhys Mechyll's bard until his death."

  "I have heard him spoken of," I said, "many a time."

  She gazed straight before her into the rising sun, and said: "There is more. Among the men who went out from Dynevor to meet Llewelyn at Cwm-du there was one Godred, a younger son of one of Rhys Mechyll's knights, in Rhys Fychan's service now. Like many another, he has not come back. They have no word of him here at Dynevor, except that one who did come in safely from that fight saw him unhorsed and fallen in the forest, and doubts if he got away with his life. Yet some will make their way alive into Carmarthen, surely, and some into Brecon, and only God knows the names of the spared."

  She turned her head again to look at me, and her eyes in the low, radiant light were burnished silver-grey, and large as moons, but her face was quite calm and still.

  "I am Cristin, Godred's wife," she said. "Or his widow."

In the cantref of Gwerthrynion we found the traces of Llewelyn's passage clear, for he had possessed himself of most of that goodly land, ripping away all the western borders of Roger Mortimer's lordship on the march. And only this cantref, out of all he had taken into his power that winter, had he retained for himself, using all the others to bind various of his allies to him, that it might be seen that the deliverance of Wales would be also the enlargement of all those who took part in it. So we passed in peace, with remounts where we needed them, and lodging at request, and came to the Cistercian house at Cwm Hir, always dear to Llewelyn Fawr, and always loyal to his line.

  They were gone from there before we came, but only by one day. So we took a night's rest, and went on after them. It was then some five days before the Christmas feast.

  Cristin, Godred's wife, rode with us grimly, without complaint or nagging, though often I know she was very weary. At every halt I took care to make provision for her privacy and rest, and at every uprising she came forth fresh and neat, with her youth like armour between her body and any failure or faintheartedness. For she was a very strong-willed lady. And though there was much about her I did not understand, I understood only too well that it might be my irredeemable loss if I questioned her concerning what she had seen fit to tell me, and afterwards had told me no more. And whether she had loved this Godred, and been happy with him, I could not know, for on that subject she had closed both her lips and her heart. But chiefly I told myself that she had cause to believe the word of the soldier who had reported him fallen and wounded, and was sure in her own mind that he was dead, and that being so, she wished to escape from the scene of her loss, being now utterly alone, into some new expectation of life in another country. But whether I believed this because it was the most probable truth, or because I greatly desired it to be so, that I do not know. I do know that daily I prayed earnestly without words that I might be delivered from the sin of praying for his death.

  And yet in those days we rode together in such precious comradeship as I had never known with any woman, or ever thought to know. And being forbidden by her silence to speak of her secrets, I found no such prohibition upon my own. In the hospice at Cwm Hir, before I left her to her rest, we sat some while together, and were at peace, and suddenly I desired above all things to tell her all that she must, in her heart, desire to know about the man she had helped to die in blessedness in the foothill forests of the Black Mountains. And I told her all the story of my mother and my mother's husband, and my mother's brief and nameless love, out of which I was born.

  "I knew," said Cristin, "that it was no simple matter of an errand undertaken, or you would have given him the ring at once, as soon as you knew him, and so discharged it. Then you have sacrificed to his peace of mind all those hopes you had of finding a place for yourself among your father's kin."

  "I sacrificed nothing," I said. "I gave him, with good-will, what he valued and needed more than I. As for the hope that I may some day find someone who is kin to me, what have I lost by the gift? I shall not forget the hand and the rose. If I see it again, I shall know it."

  "But you have buried," she said, "the only proof you had to give you rights among them, even if you find them. Have you thought of that?"

  I had not, for the truth was that long ago I had let go any ambitious idea I had had of establishing myself with my father's house. For now that I had a place in Llewelyn's confidence and an ambition all the dearer and more consuming because it was his, and mine only in reflection from him, I had no need in this world of any other kin.

  "Well for you," she said, watching me with deep gravity, "if you bury with the ring everything that it signified, and rest content with the present and the future, forgetting the past. What need have you of any man's hand to raise you, when you have a prince as lord and friend? And what of brothers when he uses you as a brother? You have made for yourself a valuable and enduring place which you owe to no man's patronage, and no man's merits but your own. And you tell me you would not change, and have no regrets. Cut off the father you never knew, for he will only eat away a part of your mind that you cannot spare. Better to think rather of sons."