The Brothers of Gwynedd (189 page)

  I knew then what I had to do. But first I had to find Cristin, and satisfy myself that no harm had come to her, that she would wait here for me and trust me. For I was still confused, and had not yet realised the meaning of her action in full. I understood only after I had hunted through Aber and failed to find her. She came of a long line of bards and warriors, the honour of Wales was her honour. And when I came to belt on sword and dagger, I found I had no dagger, it had been unclasped from the straps sheath and all, and no one but Cristin could have taken it. She had taken upon herself the vengeance of Wales. I had not mistaken that shattering union of ours in the night, it was indeed to be the first, last and only time.

  Godred had a good grey horse, and it had been returned to him for the journey home. In trivial matters Edward was honest. There was but one of that colour among us, and it was gone from the stables. The sleepy boy who was just rolling out of the hay of the loft said that he had not heard anyone come or go in the night, but there had been someone saddling up below about an hour before I came. He had not come down to see, but he had looked out at the loft door, and seen a young fellow canter away towards the postern gate, no more than a boy by the cut of him, and his voice below when he gentled the horse was light and young. Then I knew that I was right.

  I took the best horse I found, and saddled and rode, inland from the postern gate like Cristin before me, like Godred before Cristin. She had left him sleeping, and come to me to give and receive but once what was her due and mine, and before first light had risen softly from beside me, and taken my dagger, to awake him and do justice upon him face to face, and if need be die in doing it. I knew her. She would never have struck a sleeping man. But he had already fled, and like me, Cristin knew where he would go. She was his wife, a traitor's wife, and there was no way of cleansing herself of his shame but in his blood.

  That was no very long ride, but a hard one, by the upland way that she had taken, and it was Cristin I had to overtake, rather than Godred. For I reasoned as I rode that if he reached the cave before full daylight, as he well might, he would lie up there in hiding until the darkness came down again, rather than risk being hunted by day, as he surely would be once the word went out that he was Judas. One more night ride, and he could be safe in Carnarvon, which was strongly garrisoned by the English. They might not countenance Welsh traitors as approvingly as Edward did, but they would not let Edward's lap-dog be handed over to Welsh vengeance. There was time, therefore, for Godred, but little time to forestall Cristin, since she had an hour's start of me. I pressed hard, but saw no horseman ahead. Cristin had been in no less haste.

  If she had crossed the bog that protected the hermitage as often as I had, while Elizabeth kept her wild court there, I should never have overtaken her in time. But when I came to the broken tangled copse where our look-outs had been slain, there was a brown horse on a long tether grazing the thinning turf. Godred had crossed mounted. She was wary of attempting that, and had left her mount here and chosen to feel her way along the bog path on foot, to be a lighter burden on the quaking ground, and have a surer sense of the security of her footholds as she went. For a different reason I left my horse beside hers, for a man afoot could go partially screened half the way, but a man on horseback would be seen. I did not want her to hurry, but to go slowly. I knew my way here very well, and hoped to gain on her if she had not already reached firm ground.

  I saw her when I was close to the halfway mark, slight and dark among the waisthigh rushes and the tufted reeds, and blessedly she was so intent on picking her way with care that she never looked back. She had not given a thought to pursuit. I was able to overtake her unheard until I was close, and the rustle of the reeds alarmed her, and she turned and knew me, and was alarmed no more. I laid my arms round her, and she let her head rest against my shoulder, and neither of us said a word. When I held out my hand for the dagger she turned it and offered me the hilt, surrendering into my hands her quarrel and the quarrel of Wales. And I led her in my arms the rest of the way to safe ground, and we came to the door of the cliff-hut together. There I kissed her and went in, and closed the door after me.

  The sun, even on a brighter day, would not have shed much light under these rocks until afternoon, and it was dim and cold in the hut, but the entrance of the cave beyond was shaped in fitful, flickering light. He was there. He had kindled a fire, and lit two torches and wedged them among the rocks to give him light. The brychans that had served David's children for beds were still there, and a stone table, and some other desolate reminders. At the back of the cavern Godred was on his knees, raking with careful hands through the deep sand-pocket where David's valuables were buried, and bringing up coins, one by one, to lay in a pile beside the trinkets he had already raised. Some leathern pouch that held them had rotted or parted at the neck and spilled the money into the gravel.

  I made no sound in the doorway, and the light was before me, I had a long moment to look upon him before he knew I was there. He had lost that curious, furtive look with which he had come home, there was no mask to hide his greed, and rage, and resolution. All his life his first charge had been to take good care of Godred. If he had lost his best piece of gold, he was determined to have all he could get of what was left, and above all his life. And this was my half-brother, my father's son. Gwynedd was beset with brothers, they were the cords of the rack that broke her joint from joint.

  I took one step forward into the cave, and he leaped about and stood crouching and staring, the stone table between us. He knew me, and slowly he straightened up, wary and alert, and gradually a small, malicious smile curled his lips.

  "You," he said softly. "I might have known! Where else would she go but to you? Have you come to make sure of your share even of this, now you've got the other? Oh, but I know my dear brother, my father's bastard, well enough to know he'll have always a noble motive for all he does! You're here to execute the justice of Wales?
You,
the by-blow of a passing guest and a witless maidservant?"

  He was trying to provoke me into some rash onset, but it was strange, I felt no need to speak word to him, and never did so again. I drew my sword, and went in towards him, and he circled and kept the table of stone between us, and still taunted and sweated, watching for a false move.

  "You really believe you've followed me here to avenge David? Fool, all you've done is seize on the first, best pretext you ever were offered to be rid of me! What you want is to possess your brother's wife—in purity, oh, in
purity,
naturally! Saint Samson, too chaste to stoop to adultery! Half-man, do you still not know what you are? A whole man would have taken her long ago!"

  I was not moved, I came on still, and took care not to veer from between him and the doorway. I levelled the sword before me, and then he raised and showed his empty hands, and I saw by the firelight the sweat glistening on his forehead. Well I knew he must have a sword somewhere in that place, but it was not on him, and he did not offer to get it. And I, without a word, flung sword and scabbard from me into the corner where his little hoard lay, sending the coins rolling, and after the sword the dagger. I came on with my bare hands.

  I should have known he would always have one more trick in him. He stood up straight and ceased to circle, coming slowly into the open rock floor facing me, his hands at shoulder-level and a little spread, as if to reach for a wrestling hold. But as I flung myself upon him his right hand flashed to the back of his neck where the hood of his capuchon hung in folds, and the blade of a long hunting-knife caught the torch-light and slashed down my sleeve and into my left thigh in a glancing wound. If I had not flinched away from the flash of light, that stroke would have come close to my heart. I had gone for his throat, and forced his head back with my right hand, but I had to use the left to grapple his wrist and hold the knife off from me as best I could. We fell together, the fine sand flying, and hearing the long blade clash flatly on rock I rolled sidewise over it to pin his arm down. He was taller than I, and with a longer reach. It did not matter. It did not matter that he had a weapon and I had none. He never heaved free from my weight to use his knife again, for I got both hands round his throat and clung, he flapping and threshing and choking under me, with his free hand clawing at my wrists. When I felt even the hand on which I lay loose its grip of the knife's haft, forgetting everything but the struggle for breath, I rolled over to the right, dragging him with me, and rolled him beneath me again in the scattered faggots and ashes of his fire. Even with two hands he was past doing more than claw the skin from my wrists and forearms, and when in his throes he again thought of the knife, and groped desperately about the floor for it, it was out of his reach. I think I kept my grip on his throat long after he died. I think I said to him over and over: "Remember David! In hell remember David!" But by then he may already have been dead.

  I got up from him slowly at last, with bloody, aching hands, and stood and looked at what I had done. I do not remember any remorse or any exultation. There could have been no other ending. I left him there, sprawled like a trampled spider by his fire, and left the coins and bits of gold finery beside him. Of what value were they now to any man? Wales was avenged on Godred, yes, but not on Edward. Never on Edward! Never until judgment day!

  I went out, and Cristin was sitting on the doorstep with her hood drawn over her hair, and her arms round her knees. When she heard me come she rose and lifted her head, and her sad face became glorious. She came and held me in her arms, breast to breast, and I felt great breaths of thankfulness and ease drawn down deep, deep into her body. I came to her red-handed, stepping over her husband's corpse, and she did not turn from me. David had foretold it, long before.

  She asked nothing, and I told her nothing then. There would be a time for that. I did not kiss her. The bitterness of rage and hatred was too rank on my mouth. But I led her back over the marsh in my arm, and there we sat by the horses and rested a while, and she bound up the gash in my thigh, and washed the blood from my wrists with water from one of the pools. Only then did I remember Godred's horse, that must be somewhere there about the hermitage. We sent to fetch him later. I could not go back then. I was so full of the deaths of princes and the imperative of vengeance, there was no more action left in me.

  After a while a kind of peace came back to us, so strange at such a time that I could not at first account for it, grateful as I was, but then it came to me that it was the removal of Godred that made the world at its darkest endurable. Not only because there was no longer a malignant shadow barring Cristin from me, but because the air we breathed, however chill and sad, was cleansed of the venom that had sought to poison even honour itself, even chastity. In the great darkness there remained this small, clear light, and having lost the land that had been ours, we were given seisin of a free country once again, narrow and profound, the love we bore each other, love justified, married love. We grew aware of it at the same moment. She turned to me, and I to her, and we lay down in the turf together, in that bleak place that so well represented such future as was left to us and to Wales, and loved a second time for affirmation, not wildly as in the night, but with solemn tenderness and tears.

  Together, afterwards, we rode home to Aber.

  It is not less dark in Wales because we have a private light, a little marsh-light that leads faithfully and does not betray. In the night of Edward's shadow, it is still the gift of God that two may go hand in hand, and not be utterly desolate. If there is another hope, it is that no night, no winter, can last for ever. And when there is promise of another daybreak, there will still be Welshmen to awaken and arise. For I will not believe that my lord has lived and died to no purpose.

ap:
son of

brychan:
plaid or blanket of homespun, and by extension the truckle beds so
furnished
cantref:
hundred: regional division of land, literally "hundred hamlets"
castellan:
custodian of the castle

clas:
monastic community of lay canons under an abbot, and including at least one other priest

commote:
division of land, smaller than the cantref, on which the courts of justice are
based
crwth:
small stringed instrument, played with a bow
distain:
steward, the chief official of a principality
edling:
the official heir, nominated by a prince in his own lifetime and accepted by
his people
fawr, mawr:
great
fychan:
lesser: attached to a name often distinguishes son from father
goch, cock:
red
llyn:
lake
llys:
court: the royal seat in each region of a principality
maenol:
manor; in particular the fortified dwelling of a chief
penteulu:
the captain of the prince's permanent household army
saesneg:
English: thus Maelor Saesneg is the commote of Maelor which thrusts into
English territory
talaith:
the gold diadem of royal office
teulu:
the prince's household army
tref:
homestead or hamlet
ynys:
island
ystrad:
valley: Ystrad Tywi is the Vale of Towy