The Brothers of Gwynedd (13 page)

  So we were brought into another room, smaller and withdrawn behind hide curtains, where a brazier burned. The walls were hung with tapestries, and skins of bear and wolf were laid on the beaten earth of the floor. The lost imprint of the hand of King John's daughter lay softly on all in that chamber. The torches burned in tall holders of silver, but they were few and dim, only enough to light the way for those passing through, for who had leisure to sit down over wine or warm his feet at a fire in Aber at this time? The young men of the bodyguard, having conveyed their lord with grief and solemnity to Aberconway, might lie down and sleep until they received other orders, but all the solid men of the council must be in almost constant debate over the desert he had left behind, the legal rights of his young widow, the state of readiness of the land for King Henry's next move against Gwynedd, now that its buckler and sword was laid low, with no son to take up the fight after him, not even a daughter to bear princes hereafter.

  There was one great chair, higher than the rest on the dais by two tall steps, and carved and gilded. And I had half-expected that Llewelyn would be braced and ready for us there as on a throne already claimed. But the room was empty and silent. We waited some minutes, Owen with mounting impatience and rising gorge, before the curtains swung behind the dais, brusquely and suddenly, and a young man came shouldering through and let the hangings swing to behind him. I have said it was dim within the room, dulling even the red of Owen Goch's hair. The boy came forward a few quick steps before he halted to peer at us, standing there a foot or so lower than he stood. The light of the torches was on him, we saw him better than he could distinguish us.

  I knew him to be but two months past seventeen then, for so was I. He had shot up by a head since last I had seen him, and stood a hand's-breadth taller than I, but well short of his brother, and his shoulders were wide and his limbs long, but he carried little flesh upon him. His face was as I remembered it, all bright, gleaming lines of bone starting in the yellow light of torches and candles, with those fathomless peat-pool eyes reflecting light from the surface of their darkness. And the longer I gazed, the younger did he seem, this boy burned brown with living out of doors in all weathers, so that even in winter, in the long evenings shut within walls, his russet only fined and paled into gold. But what I most remember, beyond the careless plainness of his dress, which was homespun and dun, is the healed scar slashed down the inner side of his left forearm, and its fellow, a small, puckered star under the angle of his jaw on the right side, mementoes of Degannwy in the frost six months ago; and with that, the slight reddening and swelling of his eyelids, that might have marred him if I had not known it for the stigma of private weeping, some two days old.

  He said clearly: "They tell me there is one here claims to be brother to me. Which of you is he?"

  I own I thought at first that this was policy, a move to affront and repulse the returned heir, but then I recalled that it was seven years since these two had stood face to face, and those perhaps the most vital seven years of Llewelyn's life, all the time of his enforced growing-up, under angry pressures in which Owen Goch had had no part. I do believe that he was honest. For never have I known him go roundabout of intent, but always straight for his goal. And before Owen could blaze, as he was willing to do, Llewelyn came closer, voluntarily surrendering whatever advantage he had in the height of the dais, and swinging down to look at us intently. I saw his eyes dilate and glow.

  "It
is
you!" he said. "I had thought it was some trick. Well, what's your business with me?" And after a pause, very brief and chill, he said: "—
brother!"
as though he tried the savour of the word on his tongue, and found it very little to his taste.

  "My business is hardly with you," said Owen, stung and smarting, "but with the council of Gwynedd. You know me. I
am
your brother, and since you will have me say it, your elder. The prince of Gwynedd is dead, and there is no heir to succeed him. And mine is the next claim."

  "You must forgive my being slow to recognise you," said Llewelyn. "I have been so long brotherless here, when I could well have done with a brother. Yes, the prince of Gwynedd is dead. No doubt you came to mourn him, you should have halted at Aberconway for that. As for an heir to succeed him, the council are in some dream that they have one ready to hand." He drew back a short step, and looked Owen Goch over from head to foot and back again, and his face was bleak, like a man wrung but unwilling to weep. "Who gnawed through your leash," he said bitterly, "you or King Henry?"

  At that Owen began to smoulder and to threaten a blaze, and but that he found himself somewhat at a disadvantage, here, there would have been an outburst on the spot. "What are you daring to charge against me?" he cried. "If the king's men could have got their hands on me this day, do you think I should not have been dead by now, or on my way back to the Tower? He had no part in my coming."

  "So you say. But you have been his lapdog too long to be easily credited, and it makes good sense that he should toss you in here at this pass to break Gwynedd apart for him, so that he can devour piecemeal what he found too big to swallow whole. Strange chance," said Llewelyn hardly, "that offered you a way of escape now, after keeping the doors fast shut on you so long."

  "Well for you," flamed Owen then, "who have never been a prisoner! Can you not understand that I have been dogged at every step, never gone from room to room without a shadow on my heels, or ridden out without archers at my back? I broke loose as soon as I could, and I am here, and it is
my
doing—none other's!"

  "A year too late," said Llewelyn. "Where were you when your masters sacked the church at Aberconway? Where were you when they hanged Edynfed's boy, the child of his old age, high on a tree by the shore of Conway, and stood Welsh heads in a row to freeze along the edge of the tide? Do you think," he said, "that we have not your fine proclamations by heart, every word? We know where you were, what you were doing, how you were living princely while we sweated and drowned and died. And we know who paid for it all, the very clothes on your back! And we know what you pledged for it, the future of Gwynedd and of Wales! To hold direct from the king whatever he could get for you!"

  The blood had crowded dark and blue into Owen's face. "You know, none so well," he said thickly, "that your mother and mine pledged that for our father, and for me after him, while we were still prisoners in Criccieth. What say did I ever have in it? I was no sooner out of one dungeon than into another."

  "And was it she who repeated the pledge, and signed your name to it, two years ago in Westminster? Oh, we have our intelligencers, too, even in King Henry's court. Who threatened you with rack and rope then? You jumped at it willingly. To get your few commotes of Wales you were ready to help him set fire and sword to the whole."

  "I wanted no such warfare! Was one side to blame for that bitter fighting more than the other? I did nothing but promise natural gratitude and loyalty for the restoration of my right…"

  "Your right! Your
right!"
said Llewelyn through his teeth. "Can you see nothing on earth but your right? Has no other man any right, except you? The right to be Welsh, tenant to a Welsh lord, judged by Welsh law, living by Welsh custom? You would have given over your own people to the king's officers to tax and plague and call to war service like the wretched English. Do you expect a welcome for that?"

  "Yet it
is my right," said Owen, setting his jaw, "and the council cannot but uphol
d it. I am the eldest son of our father, and the next direct heir to Gwynedd, and I stand on that right. And if you have complaints against me, so have I against you, and against him that's dead, for he deprived our father of his birthright and his liberty, and you—you turned traitor to your own family and sided with their enemies."

  "I sided with Wales," said Llewelyn. "Your grandsire and mine had a vision of Wales that I learned from him. Wales united under one prince and able to stand up to all comers. There's no other way of fending off England for long. I went with my uncle not against our father, but against England, and sorry I was and am that we could not all stand together. Now you come running with the same old ruinous devotion to a right that will dismember Gwynedd, let alone Wales, and feed it to your king, whether you mean it or no, gobbet by gobbet until he has gorged all. And if I can prevent you, I will."

  As Owen had grown redder and angrier, and fallen to plucking at his sleeves with shaking hands, so Llewelyn had grown ever more steady and quiet, as though he took the measure of an enemy who was seen now to be no great threat to him, and in time might even come to lose the complexion of an enemy. He had a way of standing with his feet planted a little apart, very solid and very still, like one set to withstand all winds and pressures from every quarter and remain unmoved. A moment he looked into Owen's congested face, then: "And I can!" he said with certainty, and turned on his heel to walk back towards the door from which he had come.

  To Owen, I think, it seemed that he had said his last word, and that with undisguised contempt, and meant to go away from us without another glance. But I think his intent, having found out all he needed to know in order to determine his future course, was merely to call in his chamberlain, and commit his brother to the care of the servants for board and bed, for even between rivals and enemies hospitality could not be denied or grudged. However it was, he turned his back squarely, without a qualm, as he had turned his face towards us without compromise or evasion. And as he took the first long steps, Owen made a curious small noise in his throat, a moan too venomous for words, and plucking out the dagger he wore at his belt, lunged with all his force after his brother's withdrawing back, aiming under the left shoulder.

  I had been standing a little behind him, unwilling to move or make sound or in any way be noticed during this scene, indeed I would gladly have been away from there if I could, for there was no room for a third in that exchange. But now I had good reason to be grateful that there had been no escape for me, for surely, if only for those few moments, Owen meant murder. And even so I was slow to catch the meaning of the sudden rapid motion he made, and snatched at his sleeve only just in time to hold back his arm from delivering the blow with full force. The point of the dagger slid down in a long line, dragged to the right by my retarding weight, cut a shallow slash in the stuff of Llewelyn's tunic, and clashed against the metal links of his belt. Then I got a better hold of Owen's arm and dragged him round towards me, and in the same moment, feeling the rush of our movements behind him even before he felt the shallow prick of the dagger—for there was almost no sound—Llewelyn sprang at once round and away from us, whirling to confront the next blow.

  But the next blow was not aimed at him. The opportunity was already lost, Owen turned on me, who had robbed him of it, or saved him from it, I doubt then if he knew which for pure rage. His left hand took me around the throat and flung me backwards, and my hold on his arm was broken, and I went down on my back, winded and shaken, with Owen on top of me.

  I saw the blade flash, and tried to roll aside, but the tip tore a ragged gash through my sleeve and down the upper part of my arm, between arm and body. His knee was in my groin, and I could not shake him off. I saw the dagger raised again, and in the convulsion of my dread one of the tall silver candle-holders went over, crashing against a chair, and spattered us with hot wax. I closed my eyes against that scalding shower and the glitter of the steel, and heaved unavailingly at the burden that was crushing me.

  The weight was hoisted back from me unexpectedly, and I dragged in breath and looked up to see what had delivered me. Owen was down on one hip, a yard and more aside from me, glaring upwards under the tangle of his hair, and panting as he nursed his right wrist in his left hand. And Llewelyn, with the dagger in his grasp, was stamping out a little trickle of flame that had spurted along the hair of one of the skin rugs, and righting the fallen candlestick.

  He was the first to hear the buzz of voices outside the room, and the latch of a door lifting. He flung the dagger behind him into the cushions of one of the chairs, and reached a peremptory hand to Owen's arm.

  "Get up! Do you want witnesses? Quickly!"

  I had just wit enough to grasp what he wanted, and shift for myself, though lamely, at least quickly enough to be on my feet and well back in the shadows, my arm clamped tight against my side, when they came surging in from two doors. The inner one by which Llewelyn had entered admitted an old, bearded man, once very tall but now bent in the shoulders and moving painfully, and a younger man, perhaps himself as much as fifty, who propped his elder carefully with a hand under his arm. At the outer door the guards looked in from the hall, coming but a pace or so over the threshold, and I saw the maids peering over their shoulders in curiosity and alarm.

  Llewelyn stood settling the tall candelabrum carefully on its feet and straightening the leaning candles. He looked round at them all with a penitent smile, and said, looking last and longest at the old man, whom I knew now for that Ednyfed Fychan whose fame almost matched his lord's: "I am sorry to have roused the house with such a clatter. A mishap. I knocked over the candles. There's no harm done but a smell of burning."

  Whether they entirely believed I could not tell, but they accepted what he wished them to accept, and asked nothing. He kept his face turned steadily towards them, and only I could see the slit in the back of his cotte, and the one bright blossom of blood where the point had pricked him.