Crown in Candlelight (10 page)

Yet she thought on, staring unseeingly now at the playing fox-cubs. From the night she had seen the corpse-candles, Iolo Goch had begun to decline in the gentle fading of a life well spent in song and story and comfort of his Lord. How fair Sycharth had been! When poets from all Wales had come on
clera
, the bardic circuit which by guild law they were bound to travel, they had been enthralled. The eulogies rang out in praise of the Lord and his ancestors, the legendary Cadwallader, synonymous with Owain himself, who was deemed the reincarnation of the earlier, mystical Owain, blood-kin to Arthur. They hymned Sycharth as none other had done; not Iolo, or Llewellyn Goch, or Gruffydd Llwyd of Powys, or Sion Cent, with his terse-metred verses. Or even the sublime, revolutionary Dafydd ap Gwilym, the Nightingale of Dyfed, the merry one who in his rhymes equated God with human love.

They had praised the Lord Glyn Dwr, not only in their own tropes and similes but in the songs of Taliesin, who, two hundred years earlier had made paeans to three kings: Rhydderch the Old, Nudd, and Mordaf, who fought against Hussa. In turn Taliesin had likened these three to their own mighty ancestors; to Urien of Rheged and his son Owain ap Urien, who vanquished Deodric the Flame-Bearer. Urien the land’s anchor, whose son’s javelin drew blood from the wind. Those who came to Sycharth all those years ago were the Gogynfeirdd, the poets of the princes, speaking through genius loosed by Iolo Goch, and the Lord and his lieutenants had listened to them. Not as past princes had listened, inattentive, for the long eulogies were as familiar as the Mass, but sternly, with a growing tremor of excitement and eyes always aloft for the coming of the comet.

There will be weeping and widows, and tearing of raiment,

There will be blood in the stream and bowels on the thorns,

Owain the seed of wain has said farewell to mercy.

Riding on clouds with the fire in his fist,

He will whirl the bones of the Saeson about his head,

He will rise in starshine and raise a new mountain,

A mountain of piled red corpses.

Hywelis’s early childhood rang with these fierce hymns. Glyn Dwr had many wards, children of friends and kinsmen, but from the night of Iolo Goch’s return he favoured Hywelis, and kept her by him. She remembered the nights, drowsing at his side, half-listening to the poets, and the lieutenants drunk with forecasts of indisputable victory. Perhaps even then her sense warned her that the hubris all about her was bad. But what she felt was formless; she could have spoken of it to none, even Owain’s own children: Cathryn, who later married the hostage Mortimer, or Alice, later the wife of John Scudamore, who, though English, loved the Welsh better; or Meredyth, now the last survivor, or Gruffydd, or Owain’s lady, Margaret of Maelor—beautiful, kind and now, like nearly all the Lord’s immediate family, dead.

Even his grandchildren dead before him, and Sycharth a ruin, its timbers corroded by fire, its great tower fallen.

There was an ancient song, the lament of Queen Heledd, surveying the waste of Eglwysau Basa; Heledd, who knew that to rejoice too soon is death.

The Hall of Cynddylan, it is dark tonight,

Without flame, without bed,

All from the serpent of my tongue’s boast.

I live; my lord is dead,

I will weep awhile, and then be silent.

Hywelis closed her eyes, and dreamed that when she looked again she would see other mountains in southerly Tanat Vale, and there the golden manor, ringed with bright water, its tiled roofs glowing between stout battlements. The door, which by tradition was never locked. Merfyn grooming the horses, whistling. And the lady Margaret of Maelor coming to welcome guests down the three bowed stone steps, and scolding Hywelis sweetly: where were you, girl? Wandering again? Come, bring the best Shrewsbury ale for our company! The white bread, the wine, the roast meat. Strike the harp! Help me! Bad one, pretty one!
Lili’r mor!
Lily of the sea—it was the Lord’s name for her, it honoured the peculiar whiteness of her skin, made whiter by her red hair. The guests streamed in, singing the eternal theme that Sycharth was blessed, without shame, without famine, dearth or thirst, a haven. Now, within its fire-darkened walls, the forest celebrated its own subtle victory; ivy and lichen and moss filled the wounds. Squirrels ran among the bones of Sycharth, and at night the owls lamented or mocked its ruin.

All through the Lord’s impatience. The comet had set his mind on fire. Had he only waited a mere two years longer! Then the comet would have honoured him and not the Saeson. Owain Glyn Dwr and not Prince Henry would have been true Prince of Wales. Henry, a sixteen-year-old boy, had burned Sycharth, had outmatched the great Welsh lord. Men had argued, over the years, that matters might have gone differently if Owain had done this or that, had favoured one marcher lord or ambushed another; had employed trustier lieutenants. If only his French allies had not proved cowards and traitors. Wise and foolish men had talked: of the victories given to him—at Plinlymmon on the slopes of Mynydd Hedgant, at Bryn Glas, at Craig-y-Dorth, on the border of Shropshire; of the frustration, near Worcester, when his hard-won French allies withdrew their support; and of the defeats, at Welshpool, at Carmarthen, at Pwll Melyn of Usk, at Grosmont, from which Glyn Dwr’s spirit never recovered. And throughout, Prince Henry had been at the forefront of the harrying, young and bold, already a legend as the Lord once had been.

Glyn Dwr had waited only two years after Iolo’s prophecy. He had descended, blood-mad, with troops, upon Ruthyn Fair in the manor of Lord Grey. He had spared none that September day in 1400; killing the English merchants as they tried to protect their fair-booths, he had sought vengeance on Grey’s tenants as if Grey were the Chained Serpent himself. The annexation by Grey of Glyn Dwr’s manor at Dyffryn Clwyd had unleashed the war, and it was not so much the loss of property that had enraged the Lord; it was the instinct that Grey had treated him, a great Welsh prince, as inferior, And now the Lord kept himself bitterly at Glyndyfrdwy, wronged and brooding and defeated.

Yet he had once been part of the English, had been educated in the London Inns of Court, spending many months at the court of Richard the Second, and he had married a daughter of the English holding of Saeson Maelor. King Richard he had loved; Henry Bolingbroke he hated. As for Prince Henry, now King of England, had it not been for his styling of Prince of Wales, the Lord would have honoured his valour. But Glyn Dwr had taken his stance as a pure Welshman the son of Gruffydd Vychan of Powys Fadog and Helen of the royal House of Deheubarth. And now Hywelis, his natural daughter, thought of him with love and sadness.

The foxes had run into a mossy clearing white with stars of campion and patched blue with speedwells. Down to it a rough track led from the distant mountains, a trail veined with a thousand tiny streams from the great white fall above. Flies sang over wet stones. A toad sat waiting to feed, its claret eyes rimmed with gold, one hand furled and knuckled, the fingers of the other splayed and transparent. Hywelis watched its cunning beauty avidly. She did not see the rider on the ridge above her, or the great bird circling overhead.

The golden eagle, gliding high on a cushion of light wind, had been watching the cubs for some time. Its talons were like shears, its look regal and terrible. Earlier it had chased a feral goat over a cliff edge, but the prey had fallen into a stream and been swept away into a mountain crevasse. The eagle dropped suddenly and Bronwen, the vixen, looked up as the shadow fell on her and her family. She gave a shrill gibber of fright and rage. The talons closed on Madog’s back. The other cubs fled, but Bronwen stayed bravely crouching in menace at the great bird that clutched the cub and made to rise from the ground. It stood half as high as a man and its wingspread measured a man’s length and more. Deep in its throat it growled, the growl echoed by Bronwen and by Hywelis’s cry as she leaped up and ran towards the bird. She knew an eagle would attack a human; yet Madog was her cub as much as Bronwen’s. He struggled in the talons, his downy white waistcoat catching the sun. Hywelis, seizing a fallen branch, ran at the eagle, half-tripping on her ragged dress.

The rider spurred his pony down the hill and drew rein. He was young, just on manhood, with a strong wild face and thick tawny-gold hair. He had extraordinary eyes, flecked and ringed with gold but essentially a brilliant blue, flawless and penetrating. Strong light or certain moods could turn his eyes from blue to gold, and now the sun coloured them an amber honey. He carried a small springald loaded with an arrow, and, steadying his mount with his knees, he stood in his stirrups and fired. The arrow sped; he bit his lip, there was not as much time as he would have wished, and even with this beautiful springald which he had made himself, there was the chance of error. The barb curved as intended and pierced the eagle’s throat. A white membrane veiled the bird’s eyes, the talons unclenched and Madog rolled crying away, his back cut to the bone, his forehead bleeding. The eagle died, wings shuddering, flexed open. Hywelis bent over Madog; he was too badly injured to run. Bronwen was watching, frantic, from some close hide. Hywelis gathered the cub into her skirt, while the rider dismounted and came near. She looked up, and knew him.

He said: ‘Is it badly hurt?’

She shook her head.

‘I shall nurse him. Look, he trusts me.’ The cub, shivering with fright and pain, had turned blindly to Hywelis, pressing its mask against her, bloodying her dress.

‘I shot well,’ he said, though not boastfully.

‘You did indeed. Owen ap Meredyth ap Tydier, my thanks.’

‘A brave weapon, this,’ he said, and patted the
baga
at his saddle-horn. It was filled with dead rabbit and pheasant and grouse. He surveyed Hywelis. He had known her always; they had been brought up together at Sycharth and Glyndyfrdwy. To him she was merely one of the wilder elements of the courts, along with the poets and doom-bringers. Always fey, always solitary Never elegant. Today, he saw her ankles scratched bloody by thorns, her neck splashed with mud from a peat-hag, her hair uncombed. He himself was fastidious to a degree, and his own jerkin, although patched, was good wool and deerskin and carefully preserved. Yet he realized that Hywelis here in the valley was perfect. Her torn green gown merged with the bracken, her white skin was like the clouds over Eglwyseg and her hair was as rich as the fox’s pelt. She was smiling at him.

She was almost three years his senior. He had a vague memory of her being put in charge of him when he was small and dreaming off while he got into mischief, leaning down the well-shaft to see his reflection, opening the stable-door and nearly being trampled by the Lord’s big stallion … long ago. He, Owen ap Meredyth ap Tydier, was now a man, nearly the age of Prince Henry when he burned Sycharth. Owen was related to Glyn Dwr through a cousin of the Vychan line; he was also his godson. His father, Meredyth ap Tydier, outside the law for killing a man while in service to the Bishop of Bangor, had left his infant son with the Lord for safety, and had departed for ever.

Hywelis continued to look at him, gratefully, at the strange iridescent eyes, the bright hair and tanned face, and something moved without warning in her mind, a mystery. Without form but carrying sure consequence, it was the same feeling of significance as on the night of Iolo Goch’s return. Feelings of climax yet of expectancy, maddeningly obscure; the end or the beginning of something unknown. It flowed within her head, it faded to stillness; she was changed by it. Rising, she folded her sleeves tenderly over the wounded cub. She looked at the great sprawled body of the eagle. Its glory was gone.

‘Something must always die.’

She looked up, startled, for he had voiced her thought.

‘Yes. A sacrifice.’

‘But to what?’ he asked, and they looked at one another inconclusively. Then he said: ‘What shall you do with the fox?’

‘I told you. I’ll nurse him and he will love me for ever.’

Owen laughed. He had a firm mouth that curled as if always on the edge of laughter. Somehow his mouth looked wise and self-mocking, as if it were older than the rest of him.

‘When he’s strong again, he’ll leave you, Hywelis. A fox isn’t a dog; he will be bondman to none.’

She said: ‘Will you take me back with you, Owen?’ He nodded. ‘Yes. The Lord is asking for you.’ He held the springald out, admiring it. ‘I have made a lovely weapon here. With this I could pick out the eyes of the French.’

Hywelis was on her knees again, searching among the grass by a stream. She came up with a handful of rough hairy leaves and a few purple and cream flowers. The cream ones she discarded.

‘Comfrey plant,’ she said. ‘The Saeson call it Yalluc, or Asses-Ear!’

‘Never let the Lord hear you name it so then. I slipped an English oath yesterday and he hurled his cup at me.’

‘The purple flowers for Madog, he is a male.’ She wasn’t listening. ‘I’ll boil them in milk and his back will heal soon. And his poor head!’ She touched the cub gently between its ears. She got up. ‘Are we ready?’

He stretched a foot out from the stirrup and she put her own on it. The pony started up the heathery hill, putting its neck down for the climb. Hywelis said, as her hair blew back and tickled Owen’s face, ‘Why did you talk about shooting at the French, when it’s the English who are our enemy?’

He chuckled. That was part of a glorious secret, so far a daydream.

‘I don’t know,’ he lied. ‘Is your fox easy? We must be home soon, the Lord is restless today.’

‘I haven’t seen him since last night; I was away before dawn.’

‘With the dew on the grass?’ He clipped the pony’s sides with his strong slim legs. ‘You are strange, Hywelis.’

She slewed to look at him and she was indeed strange, with her milk-white face and her tilted eyes in which the lingering mysticism of her thoughts still moved. He held her tighter and they rode on over the rise of the hill, where the bracken yielded to sparse sunstroked grass and hawthorn bushes cast round shadows, each like a crouching spider. Below the hillside grew mile on mile of great trees, oak and ash and elm, a city of birds, roaring with song, the lark taking the highest stave over the croak of the starling and the jay’s erratic scream, while thrush and blackbird cried alarm and sweetness. Riding, they passed through a droning mist of insects, and a dragonfly settled for an eyeblink on Hywelis’s hair.