Prince of Time (27 page)

Llywelyn’s eyes were bright as he gazed at his son. “I have not forgotten,” he said.

“Brecon must take precedence,” said Goronwy, getting back to business. “It is Hereford’s seat.”

“That and Painscastle,” Tudur added. “It guards the main road into central Wales.”

Carew nodded. “I will ride south with my men and reconnect with Rhys ap Maredudd and the other Debeuharth princes who seem to have won Pembroke for us. We will turn east, then, and sweep the English before us.”

“I’m for Montgomery,” Gruffydd said. “Now that that the Mortimers are dead, I can take it.”

“Give the castellan a chance to switch sides,” Dafydd said. “My father has good memories of that place. We don’t want it destroyed if it doesn’t have to be.”

Gruffydd snorted. “Yes, my lord.”

“And you, son?” Llywelyn said. “What will you do?”

“I have a couple of errands to run.” Dafydd looked at me. “And after that, I hope to win the war before it truly starts.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Bronwen

D
avid and Lili settled themselves across the table from Ieuan and me the next morning at breakfast. Lili was looking polished, her male clothes forsaken for a green dress and wimple.

“The Prince says we’re going on a little trip to get your vehicle,” Lili said.

“I for one, would be delighted to stretch my legs,” David said.

“With broken ribs?” I glanced at Ieuan. He was moving well, but wasn’t completely better either.

“What kind of prince would I be if I couldn’t ride a horse with a couple of broken bones?” David said. “Besides, it’s Taranis I’ll be riding. I missed him while I was in England.”

“Don’t give me that stoic knight crap,” I said. “You’ve not healed yet.”

David laughed. “I’m much better; and besides, Lili thinks the ribs are just cracked, not broken.”

“Why do you want the car?” Ieuan said. “You’re not thinking of driving it, are you?”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, yes he is!”

“Not me, you,” David said. “The van too, if Mom is willing once she gets here. Can you imagine what it will look like to the English if they see it coming toward them in the middle of the night, headlights in the front, shooting fire arrows at anything that moves?”

“He’s gone mad, Bronwen,” Ieuan moaned. “Wales is doomed.”

“No, no, Ieuan,” David said. “It could really work, and it would save Welsh lives in the process.”

“You mean to cross the border into England before Bohun sends his forces against us here?” Lili said.

“Absolutely.” David nodded.

“I don’t know how Prince Llywelyn will feel about your mother putting herself in danger,” Ieuan said. “I don’t want Bronwen in danger.”

“I can—”

Ieuan interrupted me. “Yes, I know. You and Lili can take care of yourselves. Well,
I
don’t care if that is true. The battlefield is no place for women.
My
women.”

“That’s all well and good for you,” I said, my temper rising. “I don’t want to have to sit safe inside the castle, worrying about
you
!”

“You tell him, Bronwen,” Lili said. She popped a doughnut into her mouth. The cook had scattered several trays of them among the tables. Overnight it had become a popular breakfast food.

“We’re going to lose this argument, Ieuan,” David said, “if we don’t come up with some new ammunition soon.”

Ieuan ate a bite of egg. “More immediately, my lord,” he said, “how do you mean,
get the car
? It’s in England.”

“I know,” David said. “That’s a problem. However, this time we’re going to bring fifty armed men with us. We were, what, thirty feet from a track where we hid it? Less than a mile from the Dyke? We’re going to go get it and bring it to the Welsh side of the border. I need you girls back in your breeches, though, if that’s okay,” David said. It seemed like he should have been asking me, but he was looking at Ieuan.

“Don’t look at me,” Ieuan said. “I’m going to pick my battles very carefully. Bronwen may wear breeches if she likes. My sister embarrasses me in such manner on a daily basis, why not my wife?”

“Your soon-to-be wife,” I said, smacking him in the belly with the back of my hand. “Don’t jump the gun on me.”

“What’s this word, ‘gun’?” said Lili. I’d used the word
gwn
, obviously a modern construction, borrowed from English.

I pursed my lips. “Um...a weapon that fires a ball a great distance.”

“You mean like a trebuchet?” said Lili.

“Smaller,” I said. “You can hold it in your hand.”

“That would be very useful,” said Lili.

A thoughtful look crossed David’s face.

“Oh no,” I said. “You can’t be serious.”

“Not guns,” said David, “but black powder certainly. I printed directions on how to make it off the internet while I was at Aunt Elisa’s house. All we need is saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal.”

“Better yet, we could make Greek fire,” I said.

“Nobody knows the real ingredients of Greek fire,” David said. “There’s a lot of speculation, but—”

“I do,” I said.

“What do you mean,
you do
?” he said. “How come you do and nobody else does?”

“Well, a lot of people do, really. Anyone who studies ancient Rome like I have plays around with the idea of what it could be made of.” I stopped. David raised his eyebrows.

 “Okay, truth,” I said. “Last spring, the administration at Penn State was all gung-ho about interdepartmental cooperation. They promoted the idea of each department sponsoring interdepartmental potlucks, talks, and little seminars that a bunch of diverse people might be interested in. So, taking the idea to its appropriate extreme, the medieval studies department had this idea that they would sponsor a contest to see who could re-invent Greek Fire using technology from the Middle Ages, circa 1000 AD. Each team had to be interdepartmental, so the teams included chemists, historians, archaeologists, and medievalists.”

“Oh, wow! My mom would have loved that,” David said. “Did someone make it?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “The administration even approved the contest, since the application for the event only mentioned a ‘medieval weapons demonstration’. They thought it was going to be jousting and some harmless sword fighting.”

“Harmless sword fighting?” Ieuan said, offended.

“When you grow up with guns, swords look tame,” David said. “Go on, Bronwen. Tell us.”

“It was pretty spectacular. In all there were two solutions that worked best. As you mentioned, charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter. It’s best to use the crystallized remains of bat guano from caves as saltpeter to provide the potassium nitrate.”

“Saltpeter’s a little more complicated than that . . .” David’s voice trailed off as I glared at him.

“Am I telling the story, or are you?”

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, putting up his hands. “Just trying to be accurate.”

“I bet your sister would say you were one of those annoying little brothers who contradicted her all the time, wouldn’t she?”

Ieuan cleared his throat. David smiled. “Go on,” he said.

“As I said, these three ingredients are the basis of black powder, which you must then grind really fine, like talcum. Once you have the right consistency, you can mix that with oil—making a sort of pitch. It catches fire easily, and when you throw water on it, it spreads.”

“We could do that,” Ieuan said.

“Well the best recipe belonged to the team that combined lime, bones, and charcoal in the proper combination to make calcium phosphide. They designed a pot with a division down the middle and a stopper in the top. You pour the concoction into one half, water into the other, and throw it. When the pot breaks, the ingredients combine. When combined with water, calcium phosphide releases phosphine which spontaneously combusts on contact with the air.”

“My God,” David said. “You sound like you did it.”

“Well, my team won. That’s
how
we won, before the fire department came and shut us down.”

 “Oh, wow,” David said again. “Okay, okay, black powder and Greek fire are going to really make this all work better than I thought.”

“Better?” I said. “There’s nothing better than Greek Fire in this day.”

“Bronwen,” David said, the annoying sound of patience in his voice, “we have at least forty gallons of gasoline within a twenty mile radius of us right now. That’s partly why I want to get your car.”

“Gasoline! You can’t be serious? What are you planning to make? Molotov cocktails?”

“Something like that,” he said.

“They’re trickier than you might think,” I said. “You have to use the right amount of gasoline, the right kind of bottle, the right stopper.” I stared at him, horrified. “Think of the people you could kill, David. You can’t—”

David leaned forward and grabbed my arm. “Can’t I? You know what the English will do to Wales if they defeat us? It’s called genocide. You may have heard of it? They’ll destroy us if they can, and they’d do it today if my father and I didn’t stand between them and our people. Don’t tell me what I can’t do, Bronwen, because I can do it. We need to win this war; right here, right now, and I have the means to do it.”

I pulled away from him and turned my head, but not before tears pricked my eyes. It was Lili who spoke next, leaning in as David had, but her touch and voice were gentle. “Don’t believe him, Bronwen. He never kills except when he has to. Do you, my lord?” she asked David. “You’re offended that she thinks you would.”

I lifted my head. He sat, his arms folded across his chest, his chin out.

“My lord.” Lili implored him.

“We’re going to kill some people, Bronwen,” he admitted. “There’s no denying that, but mostly—” He paused and then grinned, stretching his arms above his head, fists clenched, “—we are going to scare the bejesus out of the English!”

“Your plan is to scare them?” I was now completely confused.

“So they’ll sue for peace,” Ieuan said. “That’s what you want, really—that they come begging for peace on your terms. The population of Wales is too small to defeat England. What you want to do is make it too costly for them to continue the fight.”

“Got it in one,” David said. “How did the Americans defeat the English in the American Revolution? By force of arms? Hardly. They won just enough battles to make the English count the cost and figure it too high.” He pushed up from the table. “We’re going to get my pack from wherever Lili hid it and then we’re going to go get the car.”

* * * * *

David, in his arrogance, had already alerted his men what he was planning before he asked us, so midday found us mounted and riding through the countryside. Thirty of the men-at-arms and knights really were
his
men. He had fifty with whom he trained, but twenty of them were still in the north, hopefully coming this way with his mother.

I rode pillion with my arms wrapped around Ieuan, who was in full armor. He’d complained when he appeared in it that it was someone else’s and didn’t fit right. Sitting in front of me, every so often his shoulders twitched as he tried to adjust it.

Lili rode behind David. She’d explained that she was going to ride in the car with me, so they didn’t want to have an extra horse on the way back, which made
sense
, but I knew the truth, for I’d been present for the argument about it beforehand.

“You are
not
a soldier,” Ieuan had hissed.

“I can shoot as well or better than half your men,” Lili had replied, her voice rising. “I am not as big as you, but—”

“You’re not as big as I am,” Ieuan had answered, “nor any man here. Bronwen tells me that in her world, some women become soldiers, but in
this
one, they don’t, nor ever will, and especially
not
my sister!”

David had interrupted then. “
I
would really appreciate it, Lili if you would accompany Bronwen in the car.”

Lili had hesitated and then capitulated. For a girl who’d claimed just five days ago that she had no interest in men, she was spending an awful lot of time in David’s company—and listening to what he had to say, though this time, I thought he was right.

“You have to understand, Lili,” David had explained, after Ieuan had stomped out of the room, having got what he wanted but not his way, “that Ieuan’s objections have nothing to do with
you
or the fact that you’re a woman, despite what he says. It has everything to do with
him
.
He
doesn’t want to have to worry about you fighting, but that isn’t something he wants to put into words.”

“Why do you say that?” Lili had said.

“Because I feel the same way,” David said.

Oh now, isn’t that sweet?

Not that I was one to talk. I was more than a little annoyed with myself for falling for Ieuan so easily. It was just so
pat,
so
typical
. Already it was
Ieuan and Bronwen
this and
Ieuan and Bronwen
that.
Do I really love him or am I so lost in this crazy place that this is the only thing that makes sense?

We’d recovered the backpack without difficulty. I’d asked David, as he helped me mount behind Ieuan, if he was worried about accusations of witchcraft.

“History is written by the victors, Bronwen,” he’d said. “Either we’re going to lose, and Hereford will have my head, in which case I will no longer care—or we’re going to win. I don’t intend to flaunt my peculiarities in front of my men. However, they already know about Aunt Elisa’s van, and we’re about to pick up another vehicle, which
you
are going to drive. The more they know of it, see it, touch it, the less dangerous the knowledge becomes to us, and the less we have to live in secret.”

We’d taken the road to Aberedw in order to find the pack, and now cut cross-country on a track, skirting the castle of Painscastle to the north. In all, we had only fifteen miles to travel—fifteen minutes in my car—but it was nearing suppertime when we spied the Dyke in the distance. The countryside on both sides of the wall was farmland, nearly as flat as land ever got in Wales, punctuated by stands of trees. The day had started clear, but clouds had rolled in from the west, and as we dismounted in a small wood about a half a mile from the Dyke, it started to rain.