The Brothers of Gwynedd (171 page)

  I said: "You ask foolishly. I will ride with you wherever you care to call me, whether it is towards my own weal or my own woe. And no one knows it so well as you."

  "God knows," said Llewelyn, "towards which of the two I am calling you in the end. But at least the woe should not have reached Dolwyddelan yet. Let's take the good where we find it."

  So we took horse gladly and rode together over the upland track to Penmachno, across the little river, and through the forested hills until we could see in the dusk the great angular tower rising on its ridge above us, and began the winding climb to the narrow inner ward, walled round every way. They kept a good guard, we were challenged before ever we got near the foot of the rock, and twice again on the way aloft. One of the men ran ahead as soon as the prince was known, and they came with flares to light us in, for the nights were drawing in fast then, though so far the clear weather held, and prolonged the daylight somewhat. Within the week the sky was to change, and autumn threaten with cloud and gales, but that night it was still and calm. Half the household came pouring out to greet us, the castellan leading them, and Elizabeth met us in the hall. She was within a month of her time then with her ninth child, and the balanced gait and careful step could not but remind him. David's heir, Owen, turned eight years old, stood close at her side, and was already as tall as her shoulder. The two eldest girls also came out after their mother, dark, glowing and beautiful, foreshadowing glorious women. The prince saw before him the blossoming shoots of his brother's tree, so lavish and so fair, while he was left barren but for one solitary bud, and never would love woman or get child again. And as I watched them, for all I could not question the will of God, I found his dispositions hard to understand and harder to bear, and it was all the more strange to me that what I saw in Llewelyn's face was a brooding, regretful tenderness that had no envy in it at all, but came terribly close to pity. It was made clear to me then, very sharply, that the more richly gifted she and David were in these radiant children, the more they had to lose, and the more to be feared were the weapons sharpened against them. And though David had the fire and challenge of his warfare to beguile and compensate him, she had no such distraction, but lived every day with the plain possibility of disaster.

  She did not look afraid. Her face had lost its childish roundness of cheek and chin, and gained a clean-drawn firmness of line in the change. But though fear may be put away for oneself, she was surrounded by others at least as dear to her as her own life, and fear for such is infinitely more terrible, and with that fear, I think, she lived in close companionship night and day. Not that she doubted David's gallantry and skill. But now that childhood delightfully prolonged was at last put behind her, she knew that the gallant and the skilled can also die, can also fail.

  She asked warmly how Llewelyn did, and only afterwards asked after David, with no show of haste or anxiety, and no protest at being sent away from him. Llewelyn told her that we had left him well, and Denbigh not so far threatened, and that he had orders not to take any risk of being cut off there. And he asked if she and the children had everything they needed, and if they were well, and whether there was any wish he could fulfil for them now that he was here. Thus with mutual courtesy, each grieved for the other, they went in to the high chamber together, and took the children with them. And in a moment Cristin came out to me.

  "I knew you were here," she said, "before ever I saw it was the prince she was going out to meet. I felt you in the air of the evening, when you were drawing near." She gave me her hand, and we stood close, hungrily gazing. I had not tasted to the full, until then, the three-months' fast without sight or sound of her, all that golden summer a desert, nor been pierced with so sharp an understanding of his loss, who could never again recover the presence and the radiance of his beloved in this world, nor clasp the hand she held out to him.

  She had on a plain blue gown, and her black, silken hair was braided and coiled on her neck. Not even that summer, day after hot day out of doors with the children, had been able to burn the pure whiteness of her skin, that mates so seldom but so perfectly with pure black hair.

  "There was not a day I did not miss you," she said.

  "And never a day," I said, "when I have not thought of you."

  "Was there fighting?" she asked, and her fingers closed and held me fast for a moment.

  "Nothing heroic," I said truthfully. "As little fighting as we could contrive with the most mischief possible. The real battle will be here in the north."

  We went out from the noise and warmth of the hall into the night, and climbed to the wall, and looked out together over the rolling waste of heath and hill and furze and dimpling bog, bleached into black and white of crests and hollows under a half moon. The sky was immense and full of stars.

  "He sent us here to be safe," said Cristin, leaning her chin in her cupped hands on the parapet of the wall. "But where is safety to be found? Now I hear we are to move again, further into the mountains, to Dolbadarn. What is safety? In time of peace women die in childbirth, cruelly, like the princess, and men stray into quaking ground in these uplands, and go under by inches with their feet held fast, until their mouths fill with peat-water and slime. And in war many survive, even many who never looked for survival. I think there is nothing to be done but go forward through each day as it comes, as straightly and honourably as a man may, and take a reasonable man's care, and after that not trouble overmuch. I see a kind of safety in that, live or die, soon or late. That cannot be the difference, since it comes to all. What matters is something else. Perhaps to live whole, and die whole. Whole?—erect?—I do not know the perfect word."

  I said that she had found two that were good enough for me. She might have been pondering how to describe Llewelyn.

  "Tell me truly what we have to face," she said, "in the north and in the south. We see too close here, and see out of shape."

  I told her all that we had done in the south, and how we had left matters there, frozen into a wary deadlock, though that could not hold for long when the reinforcements came in sufficient numbers. And I told her how we had found things in the east, and what was to be expected there within the next one or two weeks, for I reckoned it could not be staved off much longer than that. She listened with grave attention. In the moonlight her tall, blanched forehead and huge dark lakes of eyes were more than half her face. And by that bone-white light, for all her forty-six years, there was never a line nor a furrow to mar her marble smoothness.

  "In the end," she said, "it will be as it was the last time. I was not here then, but I do know. And if it all comes to grief, some of those who come after will blame him in their wisdom, and ask why he fell a second time into the same trap, hemmed about here in the mountains like a forsaken garrison in a castle without a moat. And he has no choice. No choice at all! He sees the danger as clearly as man may, and he cannot forestall it. In the end, Eryri is not large enough. God should have given us a coast three times as long, ripped apart with difficult inlets of the sea, wasting months either by water or land to reach us. Or blessed us with a harvest that ripens in May, and can be in the barns before Edward can get his muster into motion. One year is much like another in the same land, and what the king has learned in one he can use in any other, and there is nothing we can do to change it. Only ships, perhaps, as you say, ships might have altered the balance. But he thought himself at peace!"

  I said: "No neighbour of Edward's will ever be at peace."

  "No neighbour of Edward's," she said, "and no brother of David's."

  I said then what I strongly felt, and urgently desired to be true, and yet could not

be quite sure I believed, that this time David would be true to his pledges, and stand by his brother to the end. And this was the one thing changed from the previous conflict, that those two were at one, and would remain one. That unity might well be worth an army to us.

  "It is October already," I said, "the wind has changed and the weather will change, and still the king is held fast on the Clwyd, and dare not move on towards Degannwy. Even with Ruthin lost, even if David must let Denbigh go, still it will take some time to move on to the Conway. We may have cost him enough already to make him think hard about continuing into the winter, even with our corn to feed his thousands. It may be he'll think better of it, and be open to terms again."

  "But even so," said Cristin shrewdly, "will it not be all to do again very soon? I do not believe he can keep his hands and his hounds off Wales for long."

  I was of her mind, and could not but say so, for to offer her false comfort was impossible. So we knew and acknowledged together what it was we faced, and with us all those creatures we loved, and the land to which our blood belonged. We stood together on the wall under the moon as long as there was any stir about the wards, very loth to part. But at last she said that she must go, for there was only Nest with the younger children, and if any of them awoke it would be Cristin who was cried for. And since my lord and I were to leave at dawn to join the army on the Conway, I must also get my rest. So we said our goodnights, as always, without great to-do or many words, and yet, as she went from me towards the low, dark doorway in the tower wall, I felt the strings of my heart being drawn out to breaking with every step she took away from me.

  She also felt it, for every step was slower than the last, and in the doorway she turned and came back no less slowly, and stood close, looking up into my face. Here were none but we, and tomorrow all the many hundreds of garrison and household would be seething about us.

  "Kiss me!" she said. "This once, kiss me. After the morning, who knows when I shall see you again?"

  I took her by the shoulders, God knows as fearfully as if I had been handling windflowers that bruise and wither at a touch, though they are brave enough and strong enough to thrust their way through the snow into blossom. She made no move to touch me with her hands, but only raised her face to mine, and under my mouth her lips were cold and fresh and smooth, stirring only for an instant into frantic life before she withdrew hurriedly and went from me without looking back. I said after her, softly: "I love you!" and her step checked once, and she said: "I love you!" like a distant echo, never turning her head, and then the darkness of the doorway swallowed her up, and she was gone.

  Only then did I begin to shake like a fevered man, as though I had been racked with a great storm of weeping that left all my body one bitter ache. For that was the first time that ever I kissed my love on the lips, in all those years we had known and sustained each other, and I could not but know that it might well also be the last.

  All along the river the prince strung his guard-posts against any crossing, with outposts on the eastern side to give due warning. We visited Aberconway and saw it well-manned, and thence, instead of the coastal road, which was always guarded, took to the uplands, the great rock highlands inland of Penmaenmawr, from the seaward crest of which we could scan all the expanse of the bay of Conway, from the peninsula of Creuddyn to the east to the distant point of Ynys Lanog and the shore of Anglesey on the west. Stormy we saw it then, all the miles of watery floor bright in a lurid sunlight but swept by strong winds, and the sky above heavy and bloated with cloud that drove before north-easterly gales in the upper air, and piled like toppling rocks on the western horizon.

  "Autumn has remembered us," said Llewelyn, "I hope in time."

  We rode the whole circuit of the northern hills, and everywhere made our defences secure, concentrating strong companies the length of the coast fronting Anglesey, and especially above Bangor, where Edward's boatbridge was to touch land. We went down to the shore there, close in cover, and saw the bridge itself, a long snake of boats braced together, riding the water easily, though there was a strong swell there as the wind drove into the narrows. They had not brought the serpent fully to land, but anchored a separate long-boat ready on the more sheltered side, with a raised portion like a draw-bridge, having the whole thus ready for use but out of reach of attack from the mainland. Two coastal ships, teeming with men, most of them apparently archers, lay off on either side, and others along the Anglesey shore, and a small wooden turret on the end of the bridge itself was likewise manned by archers.