Crown in Candlelight (17 page)

‘Some air for you, boy.’ He carried the dog up the spiral, feeling the bones, the sadness. I should kill him! he thought, and Cafall laid his head lovingly upon the Lord’s upper arm. Your way, not mine, said the touch. Your wisdom is my contentment.

No, he thought. Who am I to quench the spirit of a god? Cafall lay on cool stone, breathing the night under the dewed dimmed moon. While Glyn Dwr thought once more of the dead, the loved, of the past arrogances, his Parliaments at Machynlleth and Harlech, of his own rising fame and his slow decline. Of Margaret again, as blithe and temperate as the summer of his years; of his brave sons, of Megan, asleep below, who loved him, and of lovely Hywelis; born of the faery-woman and his last anchor and guide. He rested his brow against the embrasure above a declivity built for the discharge of weapons, and heard a shuffling on the stair. For a moment he hoped it was Hywelis, aware of his distress and come from bed to talk away the night. But Hywelis never shuffled, her step was silk. He turned to see Gruffydd Llwyd, holding his sycamore harp like a limb without which he could not function.

‘So you’re wakeful too,’ said Glyn Dwr. ‘Mind the dog.’ The bard stepped carefully over Cafall, and leaned beside the Lord.

‘It’s late, I mean early,’ said Gruffydd Llwyd, and the Lord knew a harsh desire for the voice of Iolo Goch, who had never spoken unless it was sense, and never for speech’s sake. Iolo lay at Valle Crucis, under the protection of Eliseg. Yet Gruffydd was a good fellow and doubtless would go down in the annals with talents enhanced once his time was done.

‘Lord, are you well?’

‘I dreamed,’ said Glyn Dwr. ‘The dream misliked me.’

‘Did you conquer?’ asked the bard, with insight.

The Lord shook his head.

‘Only a dream,’ said Gruffydd Llwyd. ‘Remember your triumphs! Eagles have devoured the corpses of your slain.’

‘My loved and hated, both.’

The bard teased the harp. Its plaint squeezed through the stone machicolations and down into the valley which now looked palely flattened, as if the moon had wearied it.

‘Those who have hurt you,’ said the bard, ‘writhe in the flames, howling that death never slays.’

Glyn Dwr grimaced. ‘I wish them no hell-flames. My own are before me.’

‘No, Lord. You are all goodness.’

‘Sing,’ he demanded. The bard struck strings again, and called, in his nasal reed:

No ’scathe ’twill be, occasion thus to take,

And May did well, houses of leaves to make,

Long ages there beneath the trees we’ll be,

From all secure, I and my sweet with me …

The Lord raised his hand.

‘What’s this? We are men together. Sell me no lickerish tales of love.’

The bard crashed out a discord.

‘There are doings tonight,’ he said.

‘Ay,’ Glyn Dwr looked out across the valley. ‘Of flesh and fowl, of ghoul and memory.’

‘And’ (rancour drove out discretion) ‘of man and maid!’

The Lord was silent for at least a minute. Drwyndwn Flatnose paid a visit to the battlements, cried eerily and soared away. The moon pearled from the shadows of dawn and hung full of the night’s history.

‘Do you speak of my girl?’ said the Lord at last.

‘She and Owen ap Meredyth. It was best that I gave it you in verse. It was written by a kinsman of his …’ Suddenly anguished and afraid, the bard took his harp and went quickly away.

Glyn Dwr looked down at the very moment. He saw the gate and the little movements around it. Rhys the postern guard, full of an agitation plain even at a distance. Then a straight figure whose triumph all but sang. Lastly, his lily of the sea.

She was no longer the white Olwen, daughter of Ysbaddaden the Terrible. She sat locked in the topmost tower of Glyndyfrdwy and contemplated the stone wall with its reflection of raindrops under sunlight. She pictured the valley, starred with cinquefoil and rapt with dragonflies, the stream running down, the bent bruised grass where she had lain with Owen. But now that she was revealed, taken, divided, her mind was bound to earth. It could no longer slide from her flesh and roam, projected as easily as the breeze. Four solid walls surrounded her, an appallingly alien sensation. The inner sight was gone, leaving its meagre proxy, imagination.

The Lord knew everything, without a word of confession: the dissolution of her will, the hurt, the final sharp pleasure. As if he had experienced it through his own senses, he knew how Owen, wildly amorous, had dealt with her a little savagely, clumsily, had made her cry, then kissed her tears. And how afterwards the clarity of the moon and night had assailed her in a bleak, foreign way; the shapes and sounds of predators and prey, the pattern of the clouds, had assaulted her so that for the first time in her life she felt vulnerable and on the edge of fear.

The Lord knew everything, not because she had told him but because their blood bound them by brain and spirit and intent, as if they walked with the same shadow.

For a day and a night, since the Lord had given her over to Megan’s charge, she had sat in this tower, dress and hands still stained with grass. Far below in the courtyard she heard sounds: hooves, a snatch of singing (quickly hushed as news of the Lord’s mood spread abroad), the chink of the anvil from the forge, a dog whining. She sat enthralled by loss. Old songs raged within her; the song of mourning for Angharad: ‘ill work for the eyes is long weeping, the bondage of sorrow’, and the sadness of old lovers became a comprehension of the sorrows of the world. Owen was not dead, but she was kept from him and already time passed, bringing him nearer to departure. Outside the day clouded, and wept, the rain that she had forecast teeming down in the courtyard, pooling in a mosaic of green and brown upon the mossy cobbles. The wall on which her eyes were fixed rippled and dulled. Set into it were niches filled with the effigies of saints: Dewi, Beuno, Collen, Curig, Winifred and Gwen, mother of Cybi; they lost their edge before her gaze and seemed also to shimmer and weep.

Owen would soon be gone and with him the last remains of her knowledge and power. She was blinded by loss. No longer could she probe the destinies of Owen or any other, or point the Lord to a new comet and share his visionary hopes and regrets. She could not even track down the essence of Madog; he ran somewhere outside the gates of her vision. White Olwen was dead, the pure vessel shattered, and her giant father clutched an edgeless sword.

Her fingers fluttered to her neck, the target for the Lord’s first look, in that terrible moment when she and Owen stood before him in the breaking dawn, and Rhys had gone to be flogged. Glyn Dwr’s voice had been calm with rage, almost dispassionate.

‘So you have cast away the torque of Maelor. Our bond was broken easily.’

Until that moment she had not noticed its loss, and cried out in fear. The rest was nightmare, Glyn Dwr’s voice rising and falling, the smoke from the eternal hearth writhing in concord with his words of shame and heartbreak and rejection. In one corner of the hall the bard sat trembling, and through the dream of despair she noticed Cafall, lying limply, seeming very ill.

The rain harped outside the walls and the wind blew drifts of it in through the slit dampening her hair. Birds, disturbed by the sudden change in the weather, flew past the embrasure in haste. She was startled by a clap of heavy wings and claws scratching on the sill. For an instant a great white seabird rested there, fixing her with its sidelong yellow stare. A terrible hunger assailed her, as if the seabird’s look had implanted it. Then the bird launched itself on its upriver flight, dislodging a tiny hail of stones. The rain continued, bringing the night.

Megan aroused her in the early dawn, bearing a cup of ale, bread and cheese. She entered and locked the door behind her. Hywelis smiled woefully.

‘Then I am not to be starved to death.’

‘You ate yesterday,’ said Megan, her face like those of the stone figures.

‘Did I?’ She thought: Owen has taken away my mind, with all else. She held out her hand for the food.

Savagely frowning, Megan said: ‘First, this.’ She uncorked a small vial. A bitter smell filled the room, flowers distilled in pain, to kill whatever tiny hope might be growing. Hywelis knew all Megan’s skills.

Obediently she drank. The liquid poured vilely in every corner of her stomach. It makes no difference, she thought. I was never meant to bear his child, I have no part in his greatness … greatness. A gleam of remembrance came, like the half-forgotten face of a friend.
Always mine, but not mine alone
…

She retched. ‘Was this your doing?’

‘No. The Lord’s will, but I endorse it with my heart. I would not see any living token of your shame.’

‘Shame? I have only done what others do!’

‘But you were not others,’ said Megan heavily.

Hywelis ate a little, and drank the ale to erase the bitterness in her mouth.

‘What of Owen?’ It had to be asked. Megan’s face grew fiercer. ‘Is he to be punished? He cannot be gainsaid now. He has a duty.’

‘Why do you not ask after the Lord your father?’

‘May I see him?’

‘In half an hour.’

Why half an hour? The Lord did nothing without reason, and he had had Rhys made a whipping-boy for the sins of the night. What of Owen?

‘You must abase yourself.’ Megan put the key in the lock. ‘And you must be cleansed, made proper.
Duw
! Had I been born in your skin, I would not have used our sweet Lord thus.’

The bath was filled in Megan’s chamber, and Megan, as efficient as ever, scrubbed and towelled, her face growing blacker as she saw the dried blood on Hywelis’s thighs and the marks on her breasts. Hywelis thought of the other bath, the night of Owen’s singing. Megan took the dead Cathryn’s dress from the closet. Another reminder.

‘Not that one,’ said Hywelis, and was given a long robe of dusty black, in which, pale and thin and nunly, she descended to the hall. The hearth smoked erratically over its red heart. Cafall, much weaker, lay with his head on Glyn Dwr’s foot. The bard was reading sombrely aloud from a great book bound in hairy hide. The Lord had his head in his hands; she saw the rings and the raised violet veins.

‘… so Adam, dying, sent Seth to Paradise to fetch the oil of mercy. There the angel gave him three seeds which he put under his dead father’s tongue. And from these sprang the Tree from which the Cross was made …’

The bard saw Hywelis and closed the book. ‘She comes,’ he said nervously, and Glyn Dwr raised his head. His eyes had lost their anger, they were weary and red-rimmed. She longed to fling herself into his arms, to be small again and sit on his shoulder to look for omens over the battlements of ruined Sycharth. But she crept to him on her knees and laid her mouth upon his hands. They were cold, their pulses slow.

‘Go,’ said Glyn Dwr to the bard, and with an anguished look at Hywelis, he obeyed. She continued to press her lips on the Lord’s skin, her tears running, moving her mouth in the word
Forgive
, so that only his flesh heard it. He said:

‘I have a mind that you shall become an anchorite at Valle Crucis. The discipline is rigid and they mortify the flesh.’

She looked at him desperately.

‘No, my lord, my place is with you.’

He grimaced, turning his sad tempestuous face away. ‘You say me no? What are you to me now? You are blunted and blinded and null …’

Cafall, in his dying sleep, whimpered and sighed.

‘I can still love you,’ said Hywellis.

But you were more to me than love.’ He looked at her again. ‘You were my strength, my counsellor. Now I am a small boy wandering in the night. I cannot read you any more. You cannot read me. We are divided.’

His voice was mild, sad now. Courage came to her. ‘May I ask?’

‘Ask.’

‘What has become of him?’

Still not angry, he looked almost satisfied that she had asked. ‘He has gone, within the last half hour. With my blessing; I would not send a man into battle with curses. He will make a fair soldier. But he shall do no more hurt to me and mine.’

There was to be no farewell, and she had lost them both. She crept closer, and laid her head down by Cafall’s weeping muzzle.

‘Do not grovel, Hywelis,’ said the Lord. ‘It is unfitting for my daughter.’

‘Then let me serve you,’ she said, against his foot.

He laughed, loss and contempt within the laugh, and said as if he hoped against hope:

‘Very well. Come sit by me. Sit, and look in the fire!’

She followed his instruction eagerly. She blinked, dashed a hand across her eyes as if to strengthen them. The Lord folded his hand about her own.

‘Look in the fire, girl. Look in the smoke, and tell me what you see!’

The strong vapour snaked upwards, forming puffs, blowing this way and that, almost purple at the core, diffused into white as its edge thinned. The heart of the fire seemed to diminish as if an invisible hood dampened it. She had never seen it so low, yet while he watched her, he tipped the dregs of a drink into the embers, fostering thicker smoke, a screen upon which she must write her will. She crouched, bent like a harridan, staring through stinging, moistening eyes. Greyness swirled and streamed, the moving dust wherein, countless times before, she had seen the face of Gruffydd Glyn Dwr, of Margaret and Cathryn, of Rhys ap Gethin, of Iolo Goch and the Nightingale of Dyfed, of Glyn Dwr himself, horsed and snarling, riding to an unknown war, an unfought battle, every colour and vein of him limned on this insubstantial canvas. Every mood, every sickness, every celebration; his soul and ambition, written in smoke, clearer than truth.

Cafall’s stertorous breathing went on and on. Hywelis stared until her eyes were scarlet with smoke and pain. There was only greyness, a suffocating cloud of nothing. She turned and shook her head.

‘I had hoped,’ he said. ‘I was foolish. The fire is dying, Cafall is dying, and my
Lili’r môr
has failed me. Once, by your light, I could tread the black road of tomorrow. By Him who died on Tree! that was sorry work that Owen did!’

His hand left hers, his face closed to her.

‘Go from me,’ he said.