The Brothers of Gwynedd (37 page)

So we kept our Christmas feast with great reverence and gratitude for victories won, hearing service daily in the royal chapel of the llys, and at night we drank deep and heard noble singing to the honour and praise of Llewelyn and David and their allies. And on the last day of the old year came a rider from Meredith ap Rhys Gryg, bringing word that Rhys Fychan was known to be alive and well, and reunited with his wife. The messenger brought also a list of those of his chief tenants, officers and knights to be with him under English protection. But the name of Godred ap Ivor was not among them. Of him nothing was known.

  So the hope I would not recognise, since it was the death of her hope, thrust up its head again as often as I ground it underfoot, and grew like a weed.

We marched again, one week into the new year of twelve hundred and fifty-seven, and I left her behind at Aber with Goronwy's wife. I say "I left her" as though she had given me some right to hold myself responsible for her safety and well-being, but indeed she was her own mistress, and I had no more rights in her than any other among us. The only thing I had that was mine alone concerning her was the memory of the journey north together. Not even she could have taken that from me, even had she wished. But she was always my sweet friend, and cherished, I think, those same memories for kindness' sake, if she had no love left to give. So it was well for me, however deep the hurt, that I should leave her for a while.

  We mustered at Bala, for this time Llewelyn was bent on settling accounts with Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys, who in every dissension was unswervingly on the side of England. After the winning of the two Maelors from that other Griffith, Madoc's son, at the beginning of our winter campaign, those mishandled neighbouring lands of Powys Gwenwynwyn stuck sharply into our eastern flank, at once a knife ready to disembowel us and a barrier against our free movement southwards. Moreover, this was the most obstinate and renegade of all our chieftains, a Welsh hater of the Welsh, and his example was a danger to Llewelyn's cause as long as he remained immune.

  We struck, therefore, by way of the Tanat valley to the Severn, that great river, and then swept southward, upstream, along the valleys of Severn and Vrnwy both, seizing and settling as we came, until late in the month we reached Griffith's town and castle of Pool. The castle lay between town and river, and escape over the water into England was never difficult for him and his family. We burned the town, but by the time we fought our way into the bailey Griffith was away with his wife and children to the protection of the lady's father, John Lestrange, and appealing also for help to John FitzAlan, who was lord of lands at Clun, and held Montgomery for the king. Though it did him little good, for we pushed on still to the south on our own side the water, and though we did not take the castle of Montgomery itself, for it stands upon a great rock on the English side, in so strong a position that men might waste hours scaling the mound, and attack with mangons and trebuchets is impossible, there being no comparable height convenient to mount them, yet we did sack and lay waste the town below, for a memorial to our visit. All that Lestrange and FitzAlan and Griffith could do between them was to hold the castle itself, for the force they sent out against us we shattered in the fields between Severn and Berriew, and sent them scurrying back up the hill to the shelter of their stone walls.

  After this Llewelyn thought it high time to be seen and felt in the south again, for he well knew it would be harder for a prince of Gwynedd to hold together that fragmented region, so strong in marcher castles and so parcelled out among many sons, than to keep a firm hand upon the north, where the sun of his countenance and the shadow of his justice were always close at hand. Before the English had recovered from the shock of Montgomery we were joining forces with Meredith ap Rhys Gryg in Cantref Bychan, and sweeping on towards the sea between Towy and Tawe. Before the end of February we were in Gower, where many of the Welsh tenants of the de Breos lands rose to join us in great joy, and we not only ate away the borders of this Norman barony, but did as much for the power of the king's seneschal in that region, Patrick of Chaworth, the lord of Kidwelly. Not for many years had those two great men been penned within their own fortresses, as they were then, or seen so many of their possessions lopped like branches from the trunk, and been powerless to prevent.

  In the month of March we had proof positive of the alarm we had caused in King Henry's court, for a letter came from the king's brother, Earl Richard of Cornwall, requesting Llewelyn to receive a deputation of Dominican friars who would present to him the earl's protestations and proposals for an end to this warfare, and offering him a safe-conduct to meet with them.

  "I see," said Llewelyn, amused but thoughtful, "that Henry thinks his brother's influence may carry more weight than his own, now Richard has one foot on the steps of the imperial throne." For this Earl Richard, whose general good sense and steadiness were by no means to be despised even for themselves, was come into a greater title this year, having been elected king of the Romans—that is to say in plainer terms, king of Germany—and emperor-elect, though for all I could see, very little practical gain ever came of it.

  "Will you go?" asked David doubtfully. "Better Richard's good faith than Henry's, I grant you, but I would not stake my life on either."

  But Llewelyn said without hesitation that he would go, and replied courteously to the invitation, accepting the place appointed, and the date. "For if they are come to the point of being willing to talk," said he, "there's a chance at least, if no more, that we may secure everything we have gained. If they'll offer peace on present terms, so much the better. Even a truce would give us time to consolidate."

  David was in some doubt still, for he felt we had not yet gone far enough, and that we should gain more by continuing this impetuous invasion than by halting to strengthen our hold on what we already had. Nevertheless, Llewelyn went to the meeting, for I rode to the earl of Gloucester's castle of Chepstow in his train, as his clerk and secretary, while David, with Meredith ap Rhys Gryg, maintained our proper presence in arms in Gower.

  Now on this ride we passed through the whole wide land of Glamorgan, and used our eyes along the way, too, to good effect later in the year. For nothing well learned is ever wasted. But very little else came of the meeting, if nothing was lost.

  Earl Richard had sent a long and reasoned letter, very persuasively worded, but its effect was but to appeal to Llewelyn, in the name of the treaty of Woodstock and of right relations between our two countries, to restore the four cantrefs of the Middle Country to Prince Edward's control. And though it was suggested that such a conciliatory move would produce a worthy return, nothing was precisely stated of its substance. Nor did it seem that the Dominican brothers who came as envoys had any authority to bargain beyond what Earl Richard had set out in his own hand, which did not carry us far.

  Llewelyn sent by them a long and courtly reply, which we took pleasure in composing, rejecting the argument that he was acting against the interests of his fellow-princes in Wales, for on the contrary, what he had done and was doing had the backing of all of them, with a very few exceptions, and represented the true will of the Welsh people. He said he could not surrender any part of his conquests, for all were Welsh land, though he was prepared to agree that the commotes of Creuddyn and Prestatyn should remain as yet under English control. Which was a mild irony that may have tasted sour to the court, for though these commotes were indeed theoretically dominated by the castles of Diserth and Degannwy, still garrisoned by the English, the garrisons hardly dared put their heads out of door now that they were isolated among free and vengeful Welshmen. And to sum up, Llewelyn would be very willing to discuss a permanent peace on the basis of his present position, but short of that would agree only to a long truce on the same basis. For neither of these courses, it seemed, were the English yet ready. So nothing more came of this visit, and we returned to rejoin David at Carreg Cennen, and went home to Gwynedd for the Easter feast.

There were daffodils in the grass when we came home to Bala, and by the lake the catkins danced in the hazel bushes, for it was a most lovely spring, the renewal of all life. And Cristin was there, for she had ridden down from Aber with Goronwy's wife and children to meet us, and the llys was prepared for the festival with young branches and green reeds and the yellow and blue field flowers, kingcup and violet, and the chapel decked with fresh embroideries.

  I had thought on the way, those last miles, that I would avoid her company, for the sweet of that season was so sharp that I could not well bear it. But she was coming down the meadows as we rode in at the gate, with her skirts kilted out of the dewy grass, and her hair down in two loose braids over her shoulders, and her stride was long and lithe, like a boy's, and in her arms, very lightly and easily balanced against her shoulder, she had a new, speckled lamb, still damp and curly from its dam, one of the laggard comers of that spring. One of Tudor's little boys, the youngest, ran and dawdled and ran again behind her, with a wand of willow tufted with yellow catkins in his hand.

  Thus at every return she came back into my life, and I was stricken afresh with that extreme quality she had, whether it should be called beauty or by some other name, so that the breath stopped in my throat for pure wonder. So lovely did she seem to me that I knew at last how my mother had appeared to dead Meilyr, and his image rose within me and filled me with that same unendurable pain he had suffered, the chiefest sorrow of the human heart, to love and not be loved in return, to love and know oneself unloved.

  I understood then those things he had known, how the sweet and bitter of the beloved's presence are so finely balanced one against the other that the lover can neither live with his darling nor without her, and is forever torn in two by the impossibility of decision, going back again and again to suffer the same anguish, again and again withdrawing only to find the void outside the range of her looks and words a living death. So Meilyr had his full revenge on me at last.

  "Bala has a new shepherdess," said Llewelyn with admiration, reining in beside her. She greeted him only with an inclination of her head, to avoid shining the weight of the lamb, and said simply: "The ewe has a second one still coming. Morgan will bring her down with the twin when she's safe delivered. There are hawks hovering. I thought well to get this one into the fold and leave him free. She was very late, he had some trouble with her."

  "You have unexpected skills," he said, smiling.

  "I learned more than needlework," said Cristin composedly, "in my father's house. We had sheep, too." Her eyes were fixed and urgent upon his face, but she would not ask. "I give you joy, my lord," she said earnestly, "of your triumphs won, and wish you all the blessings of this feast."

  "I would I could have brought you joy," said Llewelyn. "But of your husband there is still nothing known. I am sorry!"

  I saw for a moment that sharp whiteness and tightness of fear in her face until he spoke, and then the softening that was rather of resignation than relief or despair. "I am grateful for your care of me," she said steadily. "I can wait." And she turned her head a little, and looked at me.

  So it was always. Her love I could not have, but her dear trust and companionship I could not forswear, for that would have been a great and undeserved injury to her. And in those bright spring days I learned to keep fast hold of the hope I still had in her friendship, to savour the joy it was to be with her, and to contain the sorrow. For there was promise in her words, and I could wait, too, half a lifetime if need be, to have her mine at last. If she preferred my company, if she confided in me, if she put her trust in me, surely that was immeasurable blessing, even if in the end I gained no more.