The Brothers of Gwynedd (67 page)

  "Fool!" said Llewelyn with affection. "You wring your own heart for no reason. You have paid off your indebtedness time and time again, you owe nothing to me, and nothing to Owen. Unless he accepts his position as vassal to me, how can I control him, how protect the union I have made? His voluntary submission is vital, not for me, but for Wales, which he could otherwise destroy. Do you think I will imperil that?"

  "He will not submit," said David, with the certainty of despair.

  "He will. Though it take him years yet, he will come to his senses. If I can wait, why not you?"

  "While I go free," said David, marvelling, "and in your trust, and in your bosom!"

  "Why should you not? You, whom he enticed into his revolt against me, barely nineteen years old, torn two ways between brothers, and knowing him better than you then knew me? He should have been ashamed," said Llewelyn hotly, for it was something he had held against Owen from that day, "so to have seduced you."

  "Sweet Christ!" said David, so low I think Llewelyn did not hear, but I did, for I was closer to him, and much wrung between them, being friends to both. Then he raised his voice, and said harshly: "You do us both wrong, we were not as you supposed, Owen and I. It was for
my
right he struck, whatever he believed he stood to gain, and it was I who put it into his head, and provided him all that argument he broached with you. He was the seduced, and I the seducer! Me you should have loaded with chains, him you should have loosed. What could Owen do against you, with no wits but his own?"

  All this he said with such weighted and laborious force that I knew how much it cost him, but to Llewelyn it had, I can well understand how, the sound of argument composed in obstinacy, word by word as he devised it. He looked upon his brother hard and long, between sternness and affection, and said bluntly:

  "Those are bold and generous lies, but still lies, and unbecoming between you and me."

  "No lies," said David, quivering, "but truth."

  "I do not believe you. If it had been true, you would have spoken up long ago, even if you lacked the courage after Bryn Derwin. It is no way to help Owen by slandering yourself."

  David saw then that he was caught in his own skills as in a net, and could not break through them, but would still have to carry this load of guilt upon his heart. For once before, but then of deliberate intent, he had spoken the truth in such a way that it could not be believed, and now the same fate, unsought, was visited upon him as a requital. He tried, but even for him now words were hard to find, and his persistence in a confession that was taken to be simply a mistaken act of chivalry, a weapon for enforcing his will even at his own sorry cost, at last pricked Llewelyn, who was tired and wrung, into flashing anger at such obstinacy.

  "Stop this!" he cried. "It is unworthy, and I will not witness it. I have said on what conditions Owen goes free, and the reason you know as well as I, and it is not a mere matter of land. There is one cause I care about, and it is Wales, and not for Owen, nor for you, nor for any other will I put Wales in peril after the old fashion. Only a few months since you saw yourself what King Henry intended, if I had been wiped out of the world—to divide and devour, to split up the land and consume it piecemeal, to play brother against brother in the name of Welsh law, which he despises but can still quote for his own purposes! He could not ask for better advocates than I have heard tonight! What does he need with armies if he can get his work done for him by Welshmen without ever unsheathing a sword? And for no pay but promises he need never fulfil!"

  "Are you saying," asked David, whiter than his shirt and stiff as a lance, "that England has bought me?"

  "Not so! There was no need. But if you had been bought, and at a high price, too, you would still be very good value to England. Half your heart," said Llewelyn unwisely, "was always in doubt where it belonged, between King Henry and me. I thought that severance had healed. Now I wonder! In the matter of Wales, he who is not for us is against us. It is time to ask where
you
stand!"

  If he had not been driven so hard he would not have said it, and it was done to put an end to a colloquy he could no longer bear, but it went in like a sword, all the more because there was, then as always, a degree of truth in it. David stood staring at him for a long, aching time of silence, while he gathered a voice so thick and heavy with outrage and grief that it stuck fast in his throat, and he had to heave the words out of him like gouts of blood. His face was ice, but within he burned, and his eyes were pale blue flames, both fire and ice.

  "I stand in the presence of my liege lord," he said, "and above the grave of my mother, and confronting the prison that holds my brother, whom I misled and cozened and abandoned. And you expect me to be whole? You understand nothing, you care for nothing, but Wales. Very well, keep your Wales, hold it together with your hands, bind it with your blood, marry Wales, beget Wales, have Wales for brother and mother and all, and cease to be troubled with us mortals. I have done!"

  He turned on that word, and flung away out of the room, so violently yet so silently that neither of us had time to say a word more or reach out a hand to him. I heard his footsteps in the stone passage outside the door, and they were swift and hard and steady, as though he knew what he had done, and where he was going, and did not repent of it, however mortal his pain.

  "Dear God!" sighed Llewelyn wearily, and passed a hand over his face. "Was it I did that, or he?"

  "Shall I go after him?" I said.

  "No. To what end? I am of the same mind still, and so is he, what can we have to say to each other yet? Nor have I any right to call him back. He is a free man. He is gone of his own will, and in time he'll come back of his own will. Have we not seen him stalk away in the same fashion many a time before?" And he looked at me very searchingly, and asked me: "
Was
he lying?"

  I said: "No." What else was there to say, and what to add?

  "The more reason," said Llewelyn heavily, "for letting him alone until he pleases to come to. I have been remiss. Too much a prince and too little a brother. Now there's nothing to be done but hope that Owen will think better of his refusal by tomorrow, and save David's countenance and mine."

  For whatever regret he felt, it was not for his decision, and whatever he might take back, it was not the sentence of continued imprisonment. David was right, he was married first to Wales.

David slept at Aber that night, if indeed he did sleep, but in the morning early he collected all his household and rode, himself with a handful of knights going ahead while the rest followed later. The vanguard made no farewells. The rest were ready to march by midday. Rhodri had taken himself off with all his retinue overnight, and Owen, still obdurate, rode with a tight escort for Dolbadarn soon after Prime. For he utterly refused to abate any of his full claims under Welsh law. Aber was emptying fast, and for all it would have happened so even without the quarrel, still that disintegration seemed to me a sad, symbolic thing.

  Godred being with David's knights, I was able to speak with Cristin before she left with the main party, and I told her all that had passed. For she was as secret and stout as any man, and had always a steady fondness for David, alone of all women being able to meet him as equals and friends, without illusions and without reservations.

  "There are times," she said, "when he speaks with me almost as he does with you." And she flushed, as though by that notice he acknowledged, and she recognised, the bond there was between us. "If by any means I can help him," she said, "I will. For your sake and his."

  Other than that, we said never a word of ourselves. Or of Godred. Above all, never of Godred.

  "My lord, first I make it plain, the errand you gave us is successfully done. But not without hindrance. When we came down towards the lakeside, where there is cover close about the track, archers in hiding among the trees loosed at us, and then mounted men rode out on us from either side the way. They were more than we, and had the vantage of surprise. Who looks for an ambush about the prince's business in Gwynedd itself? We lost one man killed, and three were wounded, before ever they closed. But we beat them off, none the less. My lord, this was an attempt to take away the Lord Owen Goch out of captivity. No question! They tried to cut him out from among us, but vainly. He is safe in Dolbadarn." And he said, to be just and make all clear: "He was not a party to it. Surely he would have gone with them if he could, but I saw his face when it began, and I know he was as much at a loss as we. There was no foreknowledge. It was the other who planned it."

  "The other?" said Llewelyn, as tight as a bow-string, and his voice unnaturally gentle that it might not be unnaturally harsh.

  "My lord, pardon the bringer of unwelcome news! We took captive four of the attackers, before the rest broke and fled. Three are lancers of Lleyn. The fourth is the Lord Rhodri, your brother."

  I was by Llewelyn's side then, I saw all the lines of his face and body ease, warming slowly into life. He had expected another answer.

  "Rhodri!" he said. "These were Rhodri's folk, then?" And he drew cautious breath, and his hands upon the arms of his chair slackened, and flushed with blood over the stark bone.

  "Yes, my lord, no question. We have taken them into Dolbadarn with the Lord Owen, and there they are in safe hold. Also our wounded we left there to be tended. But for a few scratches the Lord Rhodri is not hurt. And your castellan holds him safe until he receives your orders."

  "He shall have them," said Llewelyn, "tomorrow. You did well, and shall not be forgotten. For the man you lost, I am sorry. Bring me his name and estate, and if he has a family, they shall be my charge. It was too much to spend," he said, more to himself than to us, "for my failure." And he dismissed Cadwallon kindly, and sat a long time brooding after he was gone.

  "Well," he said at last, "I must work with what I am and what I have. Rhodri shall have fair trial, and the law that he so loves, not I, shall say what is to be done with him. And till he has a day appointed him we'll keep him safe, but not in Dolbadarn. Two so like-minded in the one hold might be all too well able to buy a messenger and means. In Dolwyddelan he should be safe enough."

  He got up from his chair and paced a little between tapestried wall and wall, restless and troubled, and looking round at me suddenly he said: "Here I stand, to all appearances at the zenith, not a Welsh prince against me but one, all the reality mine, nothing remaining but to get England's recognition, and that no longer quite out of reach. Yet it seems, Samson, I have stripped myself of all my kin, mother, brothers and all, in one day. As though a cloud had come over the sun. You remember Rhydderch's red-gold dragon in the noonday? It may be this is God's reminder to me that after the zenith there is no way for the sun to go but down."

  I said stoutly that he made too much of it, for to say the blunt truth, there was but one of his brothers had ever been of much value to him, and he was not at fault here. "You heard Cadwallon," I said. "David was not there."

  "Not in the flesh," said Llewelyn drily. "By his own admission and yours he knows how to get others to do his work, even in his absence. Why should he not use Rhodri, if he did not scruple to use Owen?"

  Then I understood the heart of his loss, and how it reached out beyond David to touch me in my turn, since I had known all these years, or possessed a conviction so strong as to be almost knowledge, of David's greater guilt at the time of Bryn Derwin, and had never said word to him about it, either in extenuation of Owen's crime or in warning against David. But neither could I speak a word now for myself, while he said none against me. Nor was there any blame or reproach in his face or manner.