The Brothers of Gwynedd (108 page)

  So he said, and in the circle of his arm David stood stiff and still, like a man of ice, for his face had blanched into a blue, burning whiteness, and his eyes, as I have seen them do at other times, had closed their shutters against the world and were staring within, in fascination and grief and horror, as though he saw every evil thought or act of his life graven into his own mirrored face. So he was for an instant only, and then his ice melted, and the dark, smiling grace came back to his countenance, that was turned, large-eyed, upon Llewelyn. Something brief and graceful he said, and escaped out of the embrace, and Llewelyn let him go without another thought. And all that light-hearted company stayed, all through January and into February, though now I cannot think that one heart among them was very light.

  At the new year it was fine and cold, but towards the end of January the sun removed, heavy cloud came down and swallowed the mountains, mist closed in and devoured the sea. Aber was an island in blank greyness, and the sky drooped ever lower and heavier upon us. Then the snows began, great, drifting snows that blocked all roads. Deprived of riding, the court settled down equably to pass the time at home in the maenol, and sit out this bad weather. Stores were ample; we had no need to worry. Only David, restless and uneasy, prowled the wards like a caged beast, and eyed the sky a hundred times a day for a break that did not come.

  I say, only David, yet there was a manner of echo from his disquiet that ran also through the men of his retinue, and had them edging along the walls from stable to hall, and hall to armoury, as though waiting for something of which they were half afraid.

  "Would not you tread warily," said Godred, grinning and holding me affectionately by the elbow, as we watched David lunge through the outer ward, "if you were groom or page of his? But there's nothing ails him that a quick thaw won't cure. He hates to be cramped." All which was true, and there was no need to say it to me, nor could I imagine what there was in his words to keep him quietly giggling to himself, though he was given to such secret communings meant to be heard but not understood, and in the course of them he laughed a great deal. "Hates to be cramped in his acts or in his ambitions," signed Godred, "and if you shut him in he'll break out. A nice, quick thaw, say in the next week or so, would suit him royally."

  But the thaw, when it came, suited no man, for at the month's end the snow turned to torrential rain, that went on day and night, with gales that ripped the mists away and drove the black clouds headlong across our sky, but never tore a chink between us and the sun. The little river that ambles down to the salt flats through Aber became a rushing flood, all the lower meadows stood under shivering water, and all the streams burst their banks throughout the whole of north Wales. From the hills the snow dislodged in half-melted floes, swelling the floods. There had never been such a season. Cramped we were indeed, for there was no sense in stirring out of the gates. And David's fever burned clear white like the hottest of flames, but the fiercer he burned, the more silent he became.

  All that second day of February he walked apart when he could, and his eyes looked within, as though he had shut himself into an even narrower prison than the maenol of Aber. That was the day that the clouds first thinned and broke, and the rain ceased, when first we saw the mountains again, and the shore, and even the distant silver line of the island of saints across the sands of Lavan. So far from releasing David into his former buoyancy, this change turned him mute, distant and still, with an air of listening to something, or for something, that we could not hear. He watched the sky, and looked out over the subsiding waters as the brook sank slowly towards its proper bed, and his face was as still and inexpressive as stone. In the evening, when the meal was over, and the hall smoky and red with torches, Elizabeth missed him from her side, and when he did not return in a little while, sent me to find him. She was anxious about him by then, for though he showed to her a face more like his own, and for her could smile and speak reassurance, yet she knew there was something amiss with him, and feared he was ill.

  In the wards the snow was melting raggedly, drawing crooked white edges under every wall. There was someone standing just within the shadow of the great doorway, and as I drew close I saw that it was Cristin. She laid a hand upon my arm, and that was a rare thing, for us to touch each other.

  "He is in the chapel," she said, knowing my errand without need of telling. "He has been there alone all this while."

  "She has missed him," I said, "and is uneasy. He will not want that."

  "No," she said, "not at any cost." And she took her hand slowly from my arm, and I crossed the wet, dark ward and went in to him.

  He was not kneeling, but standing close to the altar, and the only light within being the altar lamp, its red glow shone upward into his face, and I say it for a moment fixed and drawn in fire, like the mask of a man in hell. Or like the face of a man wrestling with terrible and blasphemous prayers. But when he heard me enter, and swung round to face me, then the half-lit face I saw was quite calm and resolute, and the blue eyes mildly veiled.

  "Samson?" he said. "Is it you?" I was in darkness, but he knew. "Always my careful shepherd! Am I not free to take my thirst to the spring like any other man?" His voice was light and mocking, but a tone higher than I knew it.

  Being in no mind to try to take from him what he was plainly unwilling to share, I told him flatly that I was sent by his lady to find him, for she was afraid he sickened. And at that he uttered something neither sigh nor laugh.

  "So I do sicken," he said. "I sicken God, man and myself, but it is not a sickness of the body that makes me loathsome." And the next moment he said lightly: "Say a prayer for a fine night, before you follow me in, for if the roads are passable I'll be on my way to my own tomorrow." And he went past me with a large, easy step, and made his way back to the hall and his wife, and kept his countenance and his tranquillity the rest of the evening.

  But in the night I could not rest, I hardly know why. It was not simply the recollection of words and actions so strange and yet so small, it was rather something in the air after that long isolation of the floods and the rains, a fearful stillness that hung on the night now that the endless streaming, whispering, rippling noises of the waters were hushed. When the whole maenol was asleep, the silence was as tall and wide as the night, and charged with uneasiness. I lay listening for any sound to make the void again populated, and how many imaginary footsteps I heard I do not know, but one I heard that was not imaginary. It passed by my tower chamber towards the stair, and halted for a brief moment outside Llewelyn's own sleeping apartment, which was close, for I had always a corner very near him, and if ever he needed anything in the night, it was me he called to him. When those quiet feet paused, I rose up silently from my brychan and girded my gown about me, for who would thus stand motionless in the dark outside my lord's door? But in a moment the footsteps resumed, slipping away until they ceased, the stairway swallowing them up.

  I needed no light to find my way anywhere I pleased about Aber, and it seemed that this restless one after midnight needed none, either. He knew this place as I knew it. I let myself out and went to open Llewelyn's door, very softly. In the darkness within his long, peaceful breathing measured the depth and tranquillity of his sleep. Whoever had ill dreams in Aber that night, the prince had none. I closed the door again upon his rest, and eased the latch silently into place, and for a while I stood guard outside his room, waiting and listening. But there was no more movement, and after a time I went back to my bed, and there lay waiting in vague disquiet without understandable cause, until I fell asleep.

  It was but a shallow and wary sleep, for what awoke me next was the first faint change in the darkness, hardly a lightening, rather a softening in the texture of the night. Dawn was still more than an hour away, but for early February it was a clear night and with stars, and by our northern reckoning rather warm, a heavy, moist air. I had lain no more than ten minutes drowsing and wondering, when of a sudden my door was opened and someone came in. There was almost no sound in her coming, all in a moment she was there, barefoot in her nightgown with a shawl round her shoulders, and over the shawl the spilled marvel of her black, silken hair, stirring round her like living darkness, and curtained within that marvel her pale, bright face, with huge eyes limpid and iris-coloured like the first promise of morning that came in with her, and its first freshness that breathed in her breath. Thus for the first time came Cristin to my bed, and departed again as virgin as she came. For what had Godred's occasional marital demands to do with her virginity?

  I started up naked in the skins of the brychan, and could not arise before her because of that nakedness. And for want of better words—for of such there are none—I said her name: "Cristin!"

  In a whisper she said: "David is gone! He never went in to her. His pillow is impressed. Samson, I dread for her. She was asleep too soon to wait for him. She does not yet know. But if she awakes and misses him, God knows what may befall her. There is nothing else can cause his son to burst her womb untimely, but if she fears for David she may miscarry. Samson, find him!"

  I clutched the furs about me, and watched the vision that was my Cristin, a light that dazzled my eyes, though but half-seen in darkness. I said: "Go back and stay with her, and tell her, if she wakes, that all's well, he rose for sheer wakefulness, and I am with him. She knows he has his moods, she may believe it. And I'll find him."

  She said, in that clear thread of a voice, under her breath and barely audible, as she herself was a phantom faintly shining in the absence of light: "God bless you, my dear love!" Not a word more. And she was gone as she had come, and I was alone.

  I rose up hastily and did on my clothes, and went out, down the stair and through the silent passages and rooms, through the hall where all the sleepers stirred and snored. Everywhere I passed like a shadow, stretching my ears after any sound or movement to betray another wakeful presence, but there was none. Nor did I believe he would be anywhere there among other men. The place for which I made with the most confidence was the chapel, where once already to my knowledge he had taken some struggle or distress of his own, only to be called away without an answer. But he was not there, either. And the first pre-dawn light was beginning to soften the black of the east into dove-grey, and I dreaded that Elizabeth would awake and come forth herself to search for him, before I could make good what I had promised her, that I should be with him.

  There was no possibility that he would be in any of the guest lodgings in the wards, only those public places remained, the stables and mews and store-houses, and what should he want with them? The watch on the main gate was awake and aware, and had had an undisturbed night, and seen no one stirring.

  It was almost by chance I found him, as I stood in the inner ward, turning about to look if anything moved anywhere around me, or any shape broke the merloned line of the wall. And he was there, he or someone, a tall blackness swathed in a cloak, motionless against the sky above the postern gate. He neither saw nor heard me. His back was turned, for he gazed steadily out over the wall to the south-east.

  I mounted the wooden staircase to the guard-walk, in the corner close to where he stood, and went to him without any great care to conceal my approach, but without any deliberate utterance, either, for it was so strange to see him standing like a carven man, black and still and cold in the February dawn. I knew by the infinitely faint bracing of his shoulders the moment when he knew he was no longer alone, and by the want of any larger movement that he knew very well who it was who came. His face was tight and pinched with the cold, as if he had stood out the night there, but it was quite still and calm, a dead calm, as if something had ended, something the passing of which was not yet recognisable as either to be mourned or welcomed. His eyes never shifted their gaze from the hills, but it was a drained, exhausted gaze, no longer urgent. He said not a word, but when I touched him he turned and went with me, and at the head of the stairway he withdrew out of my hand, and went before me down into the ward. And there was Elizabeth coming out from the tower door in a flutter of blue, dressed and cloaked and anxious, with Cristin at her shoulder.

  There was light enough then to recognise us by manner and gait and stature across the ward, and we came as a relief to them, walking towards them as we did in the most commonplace way in the world. They could not see the frozen blankness of his face. Elizabeth cried out his name, at once glad and reproachful, and flew to take him by the shoulders, and suddenly he heaved himself out of his torpor with a shudder and a moan, and recoiled from her, evading the innocent embrace.

  "Don't touch me!" he said in a soft, wild cry. "You'll soil your hands!"

  The look of astonished hurt and disbelief on her face, in that first moment of doubt and uncertainty she had ever suffered from him, struck him clean out of the trance that had held him bound, and he realised what he had done. He flung up both hands and shut his palms hard on his cheeks, and shook out of him, like gouts of blood: "A bad dream—I have had a bad dream!" And before she had time to question or to weep, he leaned and caught her up passionately and tenderly into his arms. "Lisbet, it's over now! It's gone! All's well now—all's very well!"