The Brothers of Gwynedd (162 page)

  "Lestrange has newly garrisoned Dinas Bran," said David.

  "So much the better, he'll be over-confident."

  It proved as he said. The forces of both brothers, with the best-mounted levies of the Middle Country, swept south-east up the line of the Clwyd and while David surrounded Ruthin, the prince rushed onward to Dinas Bran, overhanging the valley of the Dee. A wild and rainy ride we had of it over the hills, with a gale blowing, but in such weather, even if he had yet heard of the rising, and considered his own situation, doubtless Lestrange thought us still far away, and unlikely to trouble him, so far south. We had scouts ahead, despatched before we set out, who brought us back word that the Welsh of Maelor to the east of us, and Edeyrnion and Cynllaith to the south, had risen joyfully to the prince's call, turning their backs even on the plunder of Oswestry, twice raided, to join in the assault, for Lestrange, who held the castle for the crown, was kin by marriage to Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn, and very well hated.

  We closed in from three sides upon Dinas Bran, high on its great grassy ridge above the river valley. We from the north, approaching over the hills, had the best ground for attack, and came as the greatest shock to a garrison that thought us still busy with Rhuddlan and Flint. Moreover, I would not say the watch they kept was very competent, or we should not have got within striking distance of the main gatehouse before they gave the alarm. Speed, which had been our greatest asset in reaching them so soon, was also our strongest weapon in attack. They never had time to get the bars into their sockets before we stove in the doors, and were among them, and put our first parties up on to the walls to dispose of their archers, not only to have a commanding ring round the mêlée in the castle ward, but also to prevent them from shooting down upon our friends from Cynllaith as they stormed up the hill to join us. After that it was no great feat of arms, and cost us but a few men wounded, to get possession of the whole castle with most of the garrison, though Lestrange himself with a small, well-mounted party got out by a postern gate when he saw the castle was lost, and made clean away before we knew he was loose. But Dinas Bran was ours to garrison afresh for Wales, and the Welsh of those parts were eager and ready to man it in the prince's name.

  Thus we held, within a few days, a strong line of castles running south-east from the sea almost to Oswestry, and guarding the whole of the northern march fronting Chester: from the north Denbigh, Ruthin and Dinas Bran, with Rhuddlan itself still in English hands but isolated at the northern extreme of the line, and Hope a somewhat vulnerable but as yet useful outpost, much nearer to Chester.

  "They've tried hard enough to wrest it from me by law," said David grimly, when we conferred with him again in captured Ruthin. "Now let them come and try what they can do in arms." He foresaw already that the time might come when he would be forced to abandon a position so exposed to the danger of being outflanked from Chester. "As yet it's safe enough," he said, eyeing the chances the future held, "it takes time for Edward to get his lumbering muster into motion. But once he's launched, I may well have to relinquish Hope." He grimaced at the double sound of that, and laughed. "But it shall cost them dear and do them little service if I must abandon it."

  "This time," warned Llewelyn, "we should be fools to think Edward will hold his hand until the feudal host is ready. He knows as well as we how cumbersome the old way can be. He prefers paid men."

  At that time we had not and could not yet hope for any news from the court, and did not even know where Edward was at that moment, and whether he had yet heard of the sudden blaze of rebellion that was flaring through the west. For it was still no more than five days since David had stormed Hawarden, when we returned to Denbigh to prepare for the coming of the princes and the holding of the solemn parliament of Wales.

  Denbigh was teeming with activity, armourers and fletchers hard at work, the first visitors riding in, and their grooms and men-at-arms loud and busy about stables and hall. The prince's couriers had reached every part of Wales that was open to us, and all the chiefs of the north came in person to the gathering, that it might have all possible authority. This time there was no question of dissent. There was barely a man who was not heart and soul committed to the struggle, for there was none whose own rights were not threatened.

  From Cardigan, Griffith and Cynan, the sons and heirs of Meredith ap Owen, who had been a loyal ally of the prince lifelong, sent their seneschal, for they were still busy about securing the town of Llanbadarn and the country round, though their attempt upon the castle had been only partially and briefly successful. They could, nonetheless, prevent it from being relieved or receiving fresh supplies except by sea, and to send ships round to that western coast was by no means so quick and simple as to despatch food from Chester to Flint or Rhuddlan. Given a few weeks, they could starve out the royal garrison without cost to themselves.

  From the vale of Towey came Griffith, the second of the prince's three nephews, together with envoys from his two brothers, to report that the combined forces of all three had risen in an onslaught on the castles of Llandovery and Carreg Cennen, both of which had formerly belonged to their house, and had been retained by the crown after the last war. With an old and strong royal enclave at Carmarthen, and Pembroke almost more English than Welsh, Edward had hopes of extending his hold by founding such another centre of administration at Dynevor and had also garrisoned the other castles along the Towey by way of outposts of this new royal region. Now, said Griffith, he stood to lose them, for though Carreg Cennen had not yet fallen, its fall was as good as certain, and Llandovery was already breached, and John Giffard, who held it from the king, had been forced to abandon it and withdraw into England.

  Strange indeed were the shifting alliances and enmities of the border families of England and Wales, after so long of inter-marrying for land and policy. This same John Giffard, once an ardent follower of Earl Simon de Montfort, and later one of those young men who turned most violently against him, was married to Maud Clifford as her second husband, and that lady was cousin to Llewelyn and David, her mother being Margaret, daughter of Llewelyn Fawr. Giffard had been installed by Edward in Llandovery to the deprivation of his wife's young kinsmen, and now they in their turn had driven him out and regained their own by force of arms.

  One more piece of news we gained at that conclave, and that was brought by the lord of lal. "Did you know, my lord," he said, "that your brother, the Lord Owen, came to spend Easter on the lands King Edward gave him, near the Cheshire borders? We made no approaches to his tenants, for fear it should get to his ears, and be betrayed." Llewelyn looked at David, then, for that must have been by his orders. "But when we rose, and they heard of it, they were up after us in a moment, and had hoped to carry him with them. It was a vain hope. Last night they brought word he's fled into Chester, to join de Grey."

  "It's no surprise," said David indifferently, "and he can do us no harm there now, Grey already knows only too well what we're up to, and by this time either he from Chester or Gilbert de Clare from Gloucester will surely have got word to Edward, wherever he may be. All Owen can offer them is his own single sword, and we have nothing to fear from that."

  It was a true but a cruel word, from the youngest to the eldest of those four brothers. For Owen Goch, who for some years in their youth had shared the rule in Gwynedd equally with Llewelyn, until he made war against him in the hope of gaining all, and so lost all, was certainly of little consequence by that time in the affairs of either England or Wales. Edward had made his freedom and establishment in lands a condition of the treaty of Aberconway, and Llewelyn had given him the peninsula of Lleyn, and Edward added to his portion some manors bordering Cheshire, but I doubt if either of them had given a thought to him since that time, and all Owen had wanted, after so long of confinement, was to live comfortably and quietly on his own lands, and trouble no one. Now he was again cast, much against his will, into the turmoil of war, and found himself again landless, his eastern tenants having declared for Wales, and his western lands being just as surely lost to him, now that he had chosen to take refuge with his English protectors in Chester.

  "I must send to his bailiff in Lleyn. At least his going solves one problem for us," said the prince with compunction. "I am glad he's safe out of our hands, for he never would have come in with us against the king, and as you say, he is no threat. He has taken no forces with him, and he can tell them nothing more than they already know."

  There was never to be a time when all those four brothers of Gwynedd stood side by side as one. Their fragmented fortunes contained within them all the history of Wales. But for the rest, there was no one missing from the muster but Rhys ap Meredith of Dryslwyn, always enemy to Llewelyn like his father before him, and the renegades of Pool, when the prince rose and put to the assembled parliament of Wales the issue that had brought them together, and with one voice, and a loud and passionate voice at that, they declared that the treaty of Aberconway had been breached time after time by England, until it had no further validity, but was null and void, and left to Wales no remedy but in arms. And formally they denounced the treaty, and gave their assent to the solemn acceptance of war.

  Then it remained only to plan the next moves. And young Griffith begged, and the envoys from Cardigan supported his plea, that either Llewelyn or David would come south with them, and use his authority to direct their campaigns there.

  "I will go," said David, "if the prince wills it."

  "It would be best," said Llewelyn. "While I complete the raising of Gwynedd. Take with you whatever part of your own forces you need, and I'll supply their place here as my levies come in."

  A hundred lances David took south with him, and a score of mounted archers, and among the lances was Godred. I was in the bailey that morning to watch them go, along with all the rest of the household, maidservants, menservants, grooms, falconers, pages, shepherds, armourers, cooks and scullions, every soul who could drop his burden and down his tools for a few minutes to see a gallant show and wish a great venture well. And I saw then, and heard, and felt, in all the tremor of movement and quiver of voices about me, how we had not so much taken a brave leap forward into an enlarged future, but harked back into a noble, turbulent, fruitless past, the heroic past of a Wales torn and self-tearing. It was like the old days, they said! But I would have had it like new days, days never before known, the beginning of an unbreakable unity and a new grandeur. And how many of us were ready for it, even then? Yet there was ardour enough in the courtyards of Denbigh to make a nation, had a few more of us had any clear vision what a nation was.

  Against my judgment I had hopes then. The trembling of the air with so many farewells and godspeeds set my heart shaking with it, and caused me to catch my breath like the rest. Both hope and despair were so native to Wales, they grew like weeds, and died like flowers in frost. And who could be sure that David had not judged his moment rightly, after all, and dealt his strokes wisely, and won a kingdom for us? It could have been so!

  The troops massed and mounted, and I saw Godred among them, but if he saw me he said no word and made no sign. By his face I think he was glad to be turning his back upon Denbigh and his barren wife, and his face towards the loose skirmishes and casual plunder of war, in which he moved like a houseless vagabond, free of kin and kind, his bed and his food where he found it, and no questions asked. When I first met him, before ever I knew he was my father's son and my love's lost husband, in this fashion he was living, travelling light through a world in which there always had been and always would be room for him somewhere, a bed, a woman, food and a fire, and a lord to hire his agile body and ready sword. He owned nothing but the clothes he stood in, and his arms, and a horse, and to say truth even the horse was stolen from the earl of Gloucester's stables at Llangynwyd when it became clear that the castle must fall, and Godred deemed it wise to remove himself elsewhere. Other assets he had then, a comely face, a light, winning voice, and a heart givable and reclaimable as gaily as tossing a ball. All soiled and faded now, but still living, and keeping yet their colour and sap, like flowers pinched but not killed by frost. And often I thought that if I had not found him then, and restored him to princely service in Wales, and to the wife he had thought dead, and perhaps even mourned for a day or two with the surface of his shallow and sunlit mind, all we three might have gone through the world happy.

  David came out from the great doorway of the hall with his wife on his arm, and Cristin walking behind with his two sons, one by either hand. David kissed them, kissed Elizabeth, and mounted, and wheeled away at the head of his column without a glance behind. There was no time for long farewells when he was already in arms, even his face bright and tempered for battle.

  Elizabeth watched the cavalcade form and follow, until the gates closed after them, and the echo of their hooves had died away down the long, steep slope into the town. The little boys were bounding and shouting beside her, but she was still, narrowing her brown eyes to watch until the last glimpse of David's erect head was lost to her. He did not turn, and she had known he would not.

  She had watched him go from her thus once before, after he had bestowed her and his children safely in England, and set his household troopers to prowl the middle march and harry the border cantrefs from Shrewsbury. But then it had been with all the might of England on his side, and now he rode against the same power, and his act was bitter and particular offence to the king who had maintained and protected him then. And she was born English, daughter to the earl of Derby and kinswoman to Edward himself through her mother, and though she would have followed David without question wherever he chose to lead her, yet all her mind and heart stood in solemn awe of this terrible undertaking in which he now dared to engage, and it was with open eyes and conscious daring that she took her stand beside him, and blessed what he did. Married to him at eleven years old, she had borne her first child at fourteen, and motherhood had not put an end to her own childhood, but only prolonged and glorified it, so that she seemed but the gayest and most loving of older sisters to her own brood. But when David rode from Denbigh that morning to unite the Welsh of the south, in defiance of King Edward and all the power of England, I watched her face, the merry, good-natured face ever ready to kindle into laughter, and now so grave and so aware, and I saw her grow up before my eyes.