Here Be Dragons - 1

HERE BE DRAGONS

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ALSO BY SHARON KAY PENMAN
The Sunne in Splendour
Falls the Shadow
The Reckoning

HERE BE
SHARON KAY PENMAN
Ballantine Books New York

Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold or destroyed"
and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it
Copyright © 1985 by Sharon Kay Penman
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New
York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.
This edition published by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company.
Maps by Anita Karl and Jim Kemp
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-90026
ISBN: 0-345-38284-6
Cover design by Georgia Morrissey
Cover art by Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Effects of Good Government, fragment.
Fresco, 1337-1340/The Granger Collection
Manufactured in the United States of America First Ballantine Books Edition:
June 1993
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

To my parents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
1. WOULD like to thank the following people for their support and encouragement and understanding: My parents. Julie McCaskey Wolff. My agent, Molly Friedrich of the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency. My dear friend Cris
Arnott, who helped me to track down the elusive Richard Fitz Roy. Betty Rowles and Jean and Basil Hill, who showed me so many kindnesses during my research trips to Wales. Olwen Caradoc Evans and Helen Ramage, who shared with me their knowledge and love of Welsh history. Above all, my editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Marian Wood. And lastly, the staffs of the National Library of
Wales, the British Library, the Caernarfon Archives, the University College of
North Wales Library, the research libraries of Cardiff, Llangefni, and
Shrewsbury, the Brecknock Borough Library, the County Archives Office in Mold, and in the United States, the University of Pennsylvania Library.

PROLOGUE
THEIRS was a land of awesome grandeur, a land of mountains and moorlands and cherished myths. They called it Cymru and believed themselves to be the descendants of Brutus and the citizens of ancient Troy. They were a passionate, generous, and turbulent people, with but one fatal flaw. They proclaimed themselves to be Cymry"fellow countrymen"but they fought one another as fiercely as they did their English neighbors, and had carved three separate kingdoms out of their native soil. To the north was the alpine citadel of Gwynedd, bordered by Powys, and to the south lay the realm of Deheubarth. To the English kings, this constant discord was a blessing and they did what they could to sow seeds of dissension and strife amongst the Welsh.
During the reigns of the Norman Conqueror, William the Bastard, and his sons, the English crown continued to gain influence in Wales; Norman castles rose up on Welsh soil, and Norman towns began to take root in the valleys of South
Wales. As the Normans had subdued the native-born Saxons, so, too, it began to seem that they would subdue the Welsh.
HENRY Plantagenet, King of England, Lord of Ireland and Wales, Duke of
Normandy, Count of Anjou, ordered a wall fresco to be painted in his chamber at Winchester Castle. It depicted a fierce, proud eagle being attacked by four eaglets; as the great bird struggled, the eaglets tore at its flesh with talons and beaks. When asked what this portended, Henry said that he was the eagle and the eaglets were his sons.
And as the King's sons grew to manhood, it came to pass just as er|ry had foretold. Four sons had he. Young Henry, his namesake and

Xll heir, was crowned with his sire in his sixteenth year. Richard, the second son, was invested with the duchy of Aquitaine, ruling jointly with Eleanor, his lady mother. Geoffrey became Duke of Brittany. The youngest son was John;
men called him John Lackland for he was the last-born and the Angevin empire had already been divided amongst his elder brothers.
But John alone held with his father. The other sons turned upon Henry, seeking to rend him as the eaglets had raked and clawed at the bleeding eagle on the wall of Winchester Castle. In the year of Christ
1183, the House of Plantagenet was at war against itself.

BOOK ONE

SHROPSHIRE, ENGLAND
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JL J.E was ten years old and an alien in an unfriendly land, made an unwilling exile by his mother's marriage to a Marcher border lord. His new stepfather seemed a kindly man, but he was not of Llewelyn's blood, not one of the Cymry, and each dawning day in Shropshire only intensified Llewelyn's heartsick longing for his homeland.
For his mother's sake, he did his best to adapt to the strangeness of English ways. He even tried to forget the atrocity stories that were so much a part of his heritage, tales of English conquest and cruelties. His was a secret sorrow he shared with no one, for he was too young to know that misery repressed is misery all the more likely to fester.
IT was on a Saturday morning a fortnight after his arrival at Caus Castle that
Llewelyn mounted his gelding and rode north, toward the little village of
Westbury. He had not intended to go any farther, but he was bored and lonely and the road beckoned him on. Ten miles to the east lay the town of
Shrewsbury, and Llewelyn had never seen a town. He hesitated, but not for long. His stepfather had told him there were five villages between Westbury and Shrewsbury, and he recited them under his breath as he rode: Whitton, Stony Stretton, Yokethul, Newnham, and Cruckton. If he kept careful count as he passed through each one, there'd be no chance of getting lost, and with luck, he'd be back before his mother even realized he was gone.
Accustomed to forest trails and deer tracks, he found it strange to be traveling along a road wide enough for several horsemen to ride abreast.
tranger still to him were the villages, each with its green and market
°ss, its surprisingly substantial stone church surrounded by a cluster

of thatched cottages and an occasional fishpond. They were in truth little more than hamlets, these Shropshire villages that so intrigued Llewelyn, small islands scattered about in a sea of plough-furrowed fields. But Llewelyn's people were pastoral, tribal, hunters and herdsmen rather than farmers, and these commonplace scenes of domestic English life were to him as exotic as they were unfamiliar.
It was midday before he was within sight of the walls of Shrewsbury Castle. He drew rein, awed. Castle keep and soaring church spires, a fortified arched bridge spanning the River Severn, and the roofs of more houses than he could begin to count. He kept his distance, suddenly shy, and after a time he wheeled the gelding, without a backward glance for the town he'd come so far to see.
He did not go far, detouring from the road to water his horse at Yokethul
Brook, and it was there that he found the other boy. He looked to be about nine, as fair as Llewelyn was dark, with a thatch of bright hair the color of sun-dried straw, and grass-green eyes that now focused admiringly upon
Llewelyn's mount.
Llewelyn slid to the ground, led the gelding foward with a grin that encouraged the other boy to say, in the offhand manner that Llewelyn was coming to recognize as the English equivalent of a compliment, "Is that horse yours?"
"Yes," Llewelyn said, with pardonable pride. "He was foaled on a Sunday, so I
call him Dydd Sul."
The other boy hesitated. "You sound . . . different," he said at last, and
Llewelyn laughed. He'd been studying French for three years, but he had no illusions about his linguistic skills.
"That is what Morgan, my tutor, says too," he said cheerfully. "I expect it is because French is not my native tongue."
"You are not. . . English, are you?"
Llewelyn was momentarily puzzled, but then he remembered. The people he thought of as English thought of themselves as NormanFrench, even though it was more than a hundred years since the Duke of Normandy had invaded and conquered England. The native-born English, the Saxons, had been totally subdued. Unlike us, Llewelyn thought proudly. But he knew the Normans had for the Saxons all the traditional scorn of the victors for the vanquished, and he hastened to say, "No, I am not Saxon. I was born in Gwynedd, Cymru . . . what you know as Wales."
The green eyes widened. "I've never met a Welshman before," he said slowly, and it occurred to Llewelyn that, just as he'd been raised on accounts of
English treachery and tyranny, this boy was likely to have been put to bed at night with bloody tales of Welsh border raids.

"I'll show you my cloven hoof if you'll show me yours," he offered, H the other boy looked startled and then laughed.
"I am Llewelyn ab lorwerth ..." He was unable to resist adding, "Ab Owain
Fawr," for Llewelyn was immensely proud that he was a randson of Owain the
Great, proud enough to disregard Morgan's oftfepeated admonition against such bragging.
But the younger boy did not react, and Llewelyn realized with a distinct shock that the name meant nothing to him. He seemed to want to respond to Llewelyn's friendliness, but there was a certain wariness still in his eyes. "I am
Stephen de Hodnet." He hesitated again. "You do not live in Shropshire, do you? I mean, if you are Welsh ..."
The implication seemed clear: if he was Welsh, why was he not in Wales where he belonged? Llewelyn was more regretful than resentful, for this past fortnight had been the loneliest of his life. "I'm staying at Caus Castle," he said coolly, and reached for Sul's reins.
"Caus Castle!" The sudden animation in Stephen's voice took Llewelyn by surprise. "Lord Robert Corbet's castle? You're living there?"
Llewelyn nodded, bemused. "For now I am. My lady mother was wed a fortnight ago to Sir Hugh Corbet, Robert's brother. You know them?"
Stephen laughed. "Who in Shropshire does not know the Corbets? They are great lords. My papa says they have more manors than a dog has fleas. In fact, he hopes to do homage to Lord Robert for the Corbet manor at Westbury." And he then proceeded, unasked, to inform Llewelyn that he was the youngest son of
Sir Odo de Hodnet, that the de Hodnets were vassals of Lord Fulk Fitz Warin, holding manors of Fitz Warm at Moston and Welbatch, that he was a page in Fitz
Warm's household at Alberbury Castle.
Llewelyn was a little hazy about the intricacies of English landholding, but he did know that a vassal was a tenant of sorts, holding land in return for rendering his overlord forty days of military service each year, and he was thus able to make some sense of this outpouring of names, places, and foreign phrases. What he could not at first understand was Stephen's sudden thawing, until he realized that the name Corbet was his entry into Stephen's world. It was, he thought, rather like that story Morgan had once told him, a tale brought back by the crusaders from the Holy Land, of a man who'd been able to gain access to a cave full of riches merely by saying the words "Open Sesame!"
This realization gave Llewelyn no pleasure; it only reinforced his conviction that English values were beyond understanding. How else explain that he should win acceptance not for what truly mattered, his

r blood-ties to Owain Fawr, the greatest of all Welsh princes, but for a marriage that he felt should never have been? All at once he was caught up in a surge of homesickness, a yearning for Wales so overwhelming that he found himself blinking back tears.
Stephen did not notice, had not yet paused for breath. ". . . and my papa says
Caus is the strongest of all the border castles, that it could withstand a siege verily until Judgment Day. Tell meis it true that Lord Robert has a woven cloth on the floor of his bedchamber?"
Llewelyn nodded. "It is called a ... a carpet, was brought back from the Holy
Land." He could see that Stephen was on the verge of interrogating him at tiresome length about a subject that interested him not at all, and he said quickly, "But I know naught of castles, Stephen. Nor do I much like living in one. We do not have them in my land, you see."
Stephen looked incredulous. "None at all?"
"Just those that were built by the Normans. Our people live in houses of timber, but they're scattered throughout the mountains, not all clustered together like your English villages."
It was obviously a novel thought to Stephen, that not all cultures and societies were modeled after his own. They were both sitting on the bank by the stream and he rolled over in the grass, propped his chin in his hands, and said, "Tell me more about the Welsh."
Llewelyn no longer had any reservations about boasting of his bloodlines.
Stephen was so woefully ignorant that it was truly a charitable act to enlighten him, he decided, and proceeded to acquaint Stephen with some of the more legendary exploits of his celebrated grandfather, giving his imagination free rein.
"And so," he concluded, having at last run out of inspiration, "when my grandfather died, his sons fought to see who would succeed him. My father was deprived of his rightful inheritance, and Gwynedd is now ruled by my uncles, Rhodri and Davydd."
Welsh names were falling fast and freeto Stephen's unfamiliar ears, much like the musical murmurings of Yokethul Brook. But one fact he'd grasped quite clearly. A prince was a prince, be he Welsh or Norman, and he looked at
Llewelyn with greatly increased respect. "Wait," he begged. "Let me be sure I
do follow you. Your grandfather was a Prince of ... Gwynedd, and your lady mother is the daughter of a Prince of . . . ?"
"Powys. Marared, daughter of Prince Madog ap Meredydd. My fa* ther was killed when I was a babe, and ere my mother wed Hugh Corbet, we lived with her kin in
Powys ..."
Llewelyn had not begun talking until he was nearly two, and since then, his mother often teased, he seemed bound and determined to