Rhuddlan (30 page)

Delamere entered his friend’s chamber and was
horrified. The windows had been shuttered and the atmosphere was
dark and putrid. Scant light was given off by fire in the brazier
which Gladys had pulled close to the bed and which made the room
stifling. Bowls and cups littered the floor. Longsword lay on the
bed, the linens, soiled with his own waste and sweat, pushed down
and twisted around his legs. Gladys herself was in no fine state.
Her hair was loose and uncombed, her gown unbelted and she walked
about barefoot. Dark circles under her eyes attested to a lack of
sleep.

“God Almighty, girl!” he exclaimed. “What’s
going on?”

“No one will come in anymore,” she said
dully. “They’re afraid.”

“Of what?”

“God’s revenge. They say the fever is God’s
revenge for Lord William’s attack on Llanlleyn.”

Delamere crossed the room and threw back the
shutters covering the windows. Cool air and light came through.

“Sir Richard, no!” Gladys said, suddenly
agitated. “The air will kill him! He must be made to sweat!”

“It stinks to high heaven in here! If you
can’t get anyone to come in and clean, you’ll have to do it
yourself!” He leaned over Longsword who was, for the moment, lying
still but breathing shallowly, his chest rising and falling
rapidly. The wound at the base of his neck was swollen and dark
red. A noxious whitish pus oozed from it.

“I’ve tried to keep a bandage over it, Sir
Richard, but he keeps pulling it off,” Gladys said, coming up
behind him. “I’ve really been trying—” She suddenly burst into
tears.

Delamere ignored her. He touched Longsword’s
brow and felt it scorch his hand. He straightened up. There was
only one thing to do.

“Listen, girl,” he said quietly, turning to
Gladys, “I’m going out to fetch someone who can cure him and I’ll
be back at nightfall. In the meantime, I want that bed stripped and
changed, I want him bathed and made comfortable, I want the rubbish
cleared out of this room and I want you to make yourself
presentable. Understand? I don’t give a damn about you or your
baby, only that man. If you haven’t done as I’ve told you by the
time I return, I’ll personally take you down to the ward and flog
you to death. Do you understand?”

She was too frightened to do anything more
than nod.

Rhirid stood in a corner of
the makeshift council room, listening with growing anger as his
father’s advisers cautioned against further incitement of Norman
wrath. Was it old age or just years of complacent living that made
men of the warrior caste so soft and tentative? And what had
they
done to infuriate the
Normans, anyway?

“Perhaps we ought to send a delegation to
Rhuddlan—” someone started to suggest, but Rhirid rudely
interrupted.

“What for?” he demanded. “To apologize for
being in their way? To give them all our cattle and hope they leave
us alone?”

“Rhirid, that was no idle attack on our
fort,” Maelgwn said. “You do know that, don’t you?”

He didn’t like the way his father was eyeing
him. “What do you mean?” he hedged.

“We’ve recently learned that you and some of
your friends almost killed Lord William.”

“That was pure luck,” Rhirid
said, not a little smugly. “We thought to avenge the murder of the
shepherd since the
galanas
was obviously not forthcoming. We had no idea who
it was we shot. By rights that wound should have
festered.”

“But it didn’t and now he’s looking for
revenge.”

“He’s already destroyed Llanlleyn. What else
can he do? They have no subtlety, these Normans; you can hear them
coming a mile off. We can easily keep a step ahead of them.”

“For how long?” Maelgwn demanded. “Until
we’re sitting in the lap of the earl of Chester? Rhirid, stop
reacting and start thinking. We can’t hope to win against the
Normans; we don’t have the manpower. We have to put an end to this
war or Llanlleyn will cease to exist.”

“No!” Rhirid exploded.
“We
can
win against
them! It’s solely a matter of—”

“Rhirid,” Maelgwn said impatiently, “why
don’t you go outside?”

He wanted to say more, to shame them into
action, but the faces of the old men were staring at him with
annoyance and he knew they were too preoccupied with their own
plans for conciliation to take him seriously. He whirled around
angrily and plowed into a servant bearing cups of sweet mead on a
platter. The tray was upset and the cups went crashing to the
ground but Rhirid stormed through the doorway and outside without a
backwards glance.

A voice stopped him. “What are we going to
do?”

He glared into the afternoon sun, shielding
his eyes with a hand. Half a dozen men stood before him—young men
like himself; his father’s warriors. They waited expectantly.

“Give in,” he blurted out before he thought
the better of it. He was furious with the council meeting but also
embarrassed that his father planned no retributive action. It was
behavior, he believed, unworthy of a chief. “Placate the
Normans.”

The men were surprised. They’d spent the days
since the attack on Llanlleyn sharpening swords and flexing their
muscles. They’d been looking forward to an all-out assault on
Rhuddlan.

“They burned our fortress and we’re going to
thank them for it?” one man, Dylan ab Owain, boomed in
astonishment.

“Something like that,” Rhirid said
bitterly.

Dylan ab Owain was a large man with black,
shoulder-length hair and thick mustaches which he had grown long so
that it framed his mouth and gave him an impressively rough look.
He was one of Rhirid’s closest companions, although Rhirid was
never certain whether it was mere friendship or a fear of his wife
that prompted Dylan to spend so much time with him instead of with
her.

“I say we attack Rhuddlan!” he declared. The
others with him agreed.

“We don’t stand a chance against those stone
walls,” Rhirid said. “It would be suicide to attack Rhuddlan
Castle.”

“Then you’re just like your father!” Dylan
said angrily. “We need someone who’ll lead us against the
foreigners, not sit and wait for them to overrun Gwynedd.”

“And I’m your man,” Rhirid told him. He’d had
an idea; he was excited about it but kept himself calm. “Rhuddlan
is out of the question. It doesn’t suit our style of warfare.
Strike hard and pull back; that’s what we do best. It worked nearly
perfectly when we met the foreigners on the road last month, didn’t
it?”

“What are you proposing instead?” someone
else demanded.

“The Normans didn’t heal William fitz Henry,
right? At least, not the Norman warriors. Where did they take him
after we shot him?”

“To the abbey. But, Rhirid, we can’t attack a
holy place!” Dylan protested.

“It isn’t
our
holy place. It’s
Norman just like that fortress.” He shrugged. “We don’t have to
inflict much harm, only enough to draw the Normans away from
Rhuddlan. I’m thinking we find the person responsible for healing
William fitz Henry and take our revenge.” He looked at the still
doubtful circle of faces before him and jerked his head backwards.
“Or we can lay our weapons down at their feet like those old men in
there want us to do.”

The mid-afternoon sun illuminated the quiet
abbey enclave below Delamere and his companions. They’d ridden
hard; Delamere felt an excruciating urgency to get to St. Mary’s
and back to Rhuddlan because he feared Longsword wouldn’t survive
the night. Now he paused to collect his thoughts. He decided to
abandon social niceties and not stop to greet the abbess but to
detour directly to the storehouse where he remembered leaving the
Welsh chit almost three weeks earlier.

“Sir Richard,” one of the men said in a low
voice. “There’s something to our right.”

Delamere tensed and listened. The last thing
he needed was to run into Rhirid ap Maelgwn’s warriors. He heard
rustling in the undergrowth and relaxed. “After two years in Wales,
can’t you tell the difference between a squirrel and a
Welshman?”

The men laughed and Delamere picked up his
reins and pressed his knees into his mount’s flanks. Suddenly a
bolt of scraggly grey came hurtling out of the bushes and into
their midst, spooking his horse. The frightened animal whinnied in
alarm and reared up. The intruder was a dog. It didn’t run from the
group before it but started snarling with hackles raised and teeth
bared. With difficulty Delamere brought his horse under control. A
knight lifted his arm and aimed his javelin at the angry cur. “No!”
Delamere shouted at him.

He’d seen a small girl standing a few yards
away behind the dog, dressed in a plain blue gown, looking utterly
composed and even a little amused. She noticed he was watching her
and gave him a wave.

“Hello, Sir Richard!”

It was Gwalaes’ child; what was her name?
He’d only met her that one time he’d gone to look for Gwalaes
before he had taken Longsword back to Rhuddlan. She was too young
to be wandering in the forest, he thought. Perhaps she was
lost.

With calm assurance she walked up to the
barking, snarling dog, put her baby arms around its neck and
scolded it into silence. The mangy thing licked her face and she
actually laughed.

“Bronwen, is it?” he asked. “What are you
doing so far from home?”

“I’m not far from home. It’s
right there,” she said, pointing towards the abbey. She eyed him
shrewdly. “But
you’re
far from your home.”

He nodded. “We’ve come to see your mother.” A
sudden thought struck him. He remembered how awed she’d been by the
horses. “How would you like to ride with us back to the abbey?”

Her serious expression melted instantly. “On
one of them?” she breathed in excitement.

He smiled and, swinging his leg over his
mount’s rump, jumped to the ground. The dog growled again but
Bronwen hushed it impatiently. Delamere knelt on one knee before
her so that his face was on a level with hers. “You can ride with
Sir Ralph, all right? You see him, the knight on the pretty white
and brown horse? Do you think you’ll be frightened?”

“No,” she answered. “But what about Kigva?
Who’ll she ride with?”

“Who? Oh—your little dog. Don’t worry about
her, Bronwen; she’ll run alongside you.” He stood up and gestured
for de Vire to move closer. “The girl is coming with us,” he said
in French. “Hold fast to her. Whatever happens at the abbey, don’t
release her unless I tell you so, understand?”

The knight looked frantic. “But, Sir Richard,
I don’t know anything about children! What if she cries? I don’t
even speak Welsh!”

“Just do as I say!” Delamere snapped. “And
remember—don’t let her go or I’ll have your head!”

They found Gwalaes inspecting her laundry
down by the stream behind the storehouse. Bronwen’s dog barked and
rushed towards her. Delamere heard her laugh and scold the animal
for coming precariously close to her clean bedsheet. And then she
looked in his direction, expecting to see only her daughter chasing
after Kigva and instead seeing four Normans in full battle gear on
their massive horses—one of whom had an arm around Bronwen’s
waist.

Delamere wasted no time. He leaped to the
ground before his horse had even stopped. “I need you,” he said
flatly.

“What are you doing with my daughter?” she
demanded in a low voice that wouldn’t reach Bronwen.

He ignored the question. “Lord William is
close to death. The wound didn’t heal and he has fever. You must
come with us to Rhuddlan.”

“No! I told you to leave him here for a few
days—”

“I don’t think you understand,” Delamere
said, so intensely that her attention was momentarily diverted from
her daughter and her eyes flicked to his. “If you don’t come, he’ll
die.”

Something in his haggard face and burning
expression must have touched her because she reluctantly relented.
“Very well. Bring him here—”

“That’s impossible!” Delamere cut in
viciously. “He can’t be moved! You can. If you don’t agree to come
voluntarily, I have no qualms about picking you up and carrying you
off—”

She gasped. “How dare you! How dare you
threaten me!”

“—but I don’t think you’ll refuse. Because
I’ve got your daughter and I’ll take her to Rhuddlan if it’s the
only way to get you there.”

For a moment she was stunned into silence.
She stared at him, frightened, her heart pounding furiously. He
stared back, implacable.

“Mama!” Bronwen called. “Did you see me
riding the horse?”

She swallowed and looked over Delamere’s
shoulder. One of Bronwen’s hands clung to the saddle pommel and the
other one waved at her. “Yes, I saw you,” she said as brightly as
she could manage it. “You ride very well!” She was suddenly more
angry than afraid. “How can you do this to a little girl?” she
hissed at Delamere. “What kind of man are you?”

“A desperate man! I’ll do anything to save
Lord William!”

Her mind spun rapidly. “Very well,” she said
finally. “I’ll come. But Bronwen must stay here.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“I’ve said I’ll come! There’s no reason—”

“There’s a very good reason—I don’t trust you
Welsh. Your daughter is my hostage. My possession of her will
ensure your best efforts.”

“I swear I’ll do whatever you want, Sir
Richard, but please leave Bronwen here! She’s only a little
girl!”

He clicked his tongue impatiently. “I have no
time to argue with you, Gwalaes. Fetch what you need and be quick
about it. We must get back to Rhuddlan today and every minute we
waste discussing your daughter is another minute of sunlight
squandered.” He returned to his horse and hoisted himself up. He
picked up the reins and looked down at her with a stony face.