by Wayne Grant
Forty miles to the east of Deganwy, Griff Connah jerked awake in the saddle. He had nodded off after two days of hard riding with no sleep. Just an hour before, he’d halted at a stream to let the big grey gelding have a drink and to splash icy water on his face, but that had only banished the heaviness in his eyes for a while. The horse had such a smooth gait it had lulled him to sleep, but the animal was so sure-footed, he hadn’t been pitched from the saddle as he dozed. He shook himself and patted The Grey’s neck.
“You’re a steady one,” he said.
He wondered if Roland Inness might sell the beast to him, but doubted he could afford the price. He’d seen the Englishman do a horse trade with Llywelyn for the Prince’s prized warhorse. Inness had got the loan of eighty men for a month—himself among them—for that single horse, and an ill- tempered one at that! No, he would not horse trade with Roland Inness.
He looked around him. He was in a clearing and had a good view of the night sky. He looked for the bright star over the northern horizon and found it. He had been headed northeast the last time he’d checked, before falling asleep in the saddle, and saw that the track still pointed in that direction. If he had not missed a fork during the night, he should be very near one of Llywelyn’s winter camps soon.
He was about to give the grey gelding a gentle nudge in the flanks when two men stepped out onto the road ahead. They had longbows.
Our lads—or I’m about to be robbed, he thought.
He looked over his shoulder and was not surprised to see two more men emerge from the gloom behind him.
“What brings ye out in the middle of the night?” one of the men to his front called to him. The tone was not threatening, but it was a challenge nevertheless. Griff strained to see the man’s face, but could not in the darkness. There seemed no point in concealment.
“It’s Griff Connah, come on Llywelyn’s orders to gather his men. If you be they, then lead me into camp. If yer brigands, I’ve little to rob.”
The man who had hailed him laughed.
“The horse looks to be of good enough stock to steal—but we’d not make the great Griff Connah walk!”
Griff let out an involuntary sigh of relief, as longbows were lowered and men hurried up to greet him. The first to reach him was Gareth Hager. Hager had joined them two years ago, after his father had been dispossessed of his farmstead by one of Daffyd’s henchmen.
“What news, Griff?” he asked eagerly. “Last we heard, the Prince had got away into the mountains and a pack of bloody Danes were watchin’ the passes.”
Llywelyn had sent out messengers to his other camps during his retreat into the mountains, warning them that Roderic and Daffyd had joined forces and were on the attack. The men in the camps had heard nothing more for almost a fortnight.
Griff dismounted and one of the men took the reins of The Grey.
“Aye, the Danes sit at the foot of the mountains, but the Prince has gone out the other side. He’s been joined by his cousins, Maredudd and Gruffydd. By now, they will have landed on Anglesey and taken Aberffraw.” He said this with more certainty than he felt.
This set off a buzz among the four sentries who had stopped him.
“Aberffraw! Now that is news.”
Griff slapped Gareth on the shoulder.
“There’s more. We’ve been joined by five score men, sent by the Earl of Chester. Some of you were with me when we took that city for the Earl and know these men.”
“I was at Chester,” called out one of the bowman standing in the shadows. “Have they sent us the Invalid Company?”
“Aye, the Invalids are with us and so is Sir Roland Inness. And by the end of this day, they will have the castle at Deganwy in their possession.”
An excited growl rose from the sentries at this news.
“What of us, Griff?” asked Gareth.
“How many men have we left here?” Griff asked and braced himself for the answer.
Their rebel army had been growing rapidly over the past year as the people of Gwynedd sensed Llywelyn gaining the upper hand, but a rebel army is a fragile thing in some ways. Suffer a setback and those who flocked to the Prince’s banner would start to slink back to their homes to wait to see how the wind blew. For a fortnight, all the men out here on the border knew was that Llywelyn had been routed from his winter camp and pursued into the mountains. Griff feared that many would have lost hope in the face of these blows.
“Two hundred eighty-two at the morning muster,” Gareth said, matter-of-factly, “and maybe half that at the camp over near Ruthin—as of two days ago.”
Griff wanted to kiss the man. It seems they had lost no more than a handful of their fighters.
“So, where are we headed, Griff?”
He looked up to see that all four of the sentries were waiting to hear where and when they would strike back at the enemy.
“We ride for Deganwy at first light.”
***
An hour before dawn, a man banged on the door of a small farmhouse. It was the finest house in a miserable little village that clustered between the surrounding hills, but it was hardly more than a hovel. Haakon the Black had taken it for his own quarters, its owners having fled at the first sight of the approaching Danes. The men Haakon brought with him had found what cramped lodging they could in the lesser dwellings scattered along the river.
Here they had sat for a fortnight, watching the pass that led up into the mountains to the south. A league up that pass was a fortress where they’d been told the rebel Llywelyn had gone to ground. After they had surprised and routed him in his winter quarters they’d chased him into this cleft in the hills, but had been turned back by the steep terrain and the blasted longbows the Welsh were so fond of.
Haakon saw no profit in losing half of his men trying to force his way into the mountains and had pulled back. Their paymaster, Lord Roderic, had been displeased, but after a fierce winter storm blanketed the pass in deep snow even he had conceded that his nephew was, for the time, out of reach. So, they had settled in to watch the pass.
He’d sent sixty of his men to keep watch over another break in the hills further south where one of his scouts had reported seeing a large number of mounted men ride into the hills just ahead of the storm. He’d left twenty more to guard the precious longships they’d beached on a gravel bar downstream. Haakon did not like having his men strung out so in unfamiliar country. Still, the pay was good and these rebels seemed to not have much fight in them.
The pounding on the door had roused him in an instant. His men never disturbed him in the night without very good cause. He leapt from his bed and yanked open the door. Arn, one of his lieutenants who had commanded the night watch stood there.
“What?” Haakon snarled.
“A fire—a big one,” the commander of the guard said simply. “Big glow in the sky—some miles north of here.”
For a moment, Haakon was confused. Why would he be rousted from his bed for a fire miles away? He looked off to the north and could easily see the yellow glow there. Then it struck him with an icy dread.
“The boats…”
“Could be a patch of woods caught,” Arn said hastily, but there was little conviction in his voice. If he had thought it a patch of woods, he would never have awakened his leader. Haakon shook his head.
“Pick six men to ride with me,” he commanded. “Leave twenty men here to watch the pass and start the rest on foot north along the river road.” He reached for his long mail coat that hung from a peg on the wall, as Arn rushed off to issue his orders. For not the first time, he cursed Lord Roderic’s decision to take back the horses he’d provided for their raid on Llywelyn’s camp.
“You’ll not need mounts to guard these passes,” he’d said. That might be true enough, but using his men thus was a pure waste of money. His Dub Gaill were hand-picked warriors, skilled in fighting from horseback or the deck of a ship. If Lord Roderic had left the horses, they could have raided the length and breadth of Gwynedd, until none
were left to oppose them. Farm boys with spears could have watched the mountain passes.
But it was Roderic’s money and they were his horses, so they had sat and watched. Now, the passes could be damned. They needed to move and, for all but a handful of his men, it would have to be on foot.
He had no lingering effects from being roused from a deep sleep as the dancing yellow glow in the sky to the north held his attention. He felt a burning rage at the thought that his beautiful longships might be the source of that hellish light. Those boats were his most prized possessions and it would take a fortune to replace them. They were also his means of escape, should things go ill on some foreign shore.
The thought that he and his men might not have a ready way to quit this country troubled him. The Welsh had thus far proven no match for his men, but he had no desire to be stranded here. As he strapped on his broadsword and stepped into the night, the anger still coursed through him, but as he looked at the glow to the north he felt something else. For the first time in years, he felt a twinge of worry.
Down the Conwy
By the growing light of dawn and the dying light of burning boats, the men of the Invalid Company shoved their longships into the river and started downstream. Friar Cyril was at the helm of the lead boat, followed by Roland in the second and Sergeant Billy at the helm of the last longship.
While at Dolwyddelan, the Invalids and the Welsh archers had been divided into three crews and spent their last afternoon at Llywelyn’s fortress sitting in rows of four on the ground being schooled by Friar Cyril on the handling of oars. The pretend oars they grasped and the pretend boats they rowed had been remarkably easy to manage.
The first hour on the river proved that a day pretending to row a boat had ill-prepared landsmen for navigating the Conwy. The three longships made it round four bends in the river, when a shouted warning from Jamie Finch came too late and the lead boat ploughed into a sand bar on the fifth. The impact nearly tossed the small Londoner from his perch in the bow as Friar Cyril frantically swung the steering oar and shouted commands to the cursing men at the oars.
“Starboard side—lift your oars!” he screamed and some of the men managed to comply. Whether by their actions, or by luck, the current caught the stern and swung it around, dragging the boat free. Now it drifted downstream backwards.
“Port side—pull!” the churchman begged and most of the men on that side did pull, spinning the boat around so that its bow once more faced downstream. Over the next quarter-hour, each of the three longships ran aground at least once in the narrow river channel, as the men struggled to find a rhythm at the oars.
In the second boat, Roland held his tongue as they blundered downstream. In truth, his ship and crew had fared no better than the rest. It was now fully daylight and, even with their clumsy handling of the boats, it would not take long for the current alone to fetch them up at Deganwy. If they could not row together or steer a straight course by then, no one would mistake them for Danes, the greatest sailors in the world.
As they rounded the next bend, the river broadened a bit and Roland ordered Fancy Jack, who had been calling the stroke, to up the tempo. As they closed on Friar Cyril’s boat, he signalled the church man to beach at the next gravel bar. Sergeant Billy followed them toward the shore and, surprisingly, all three boats managed to run up on the bar without further disaster. Roland scrambled forward and vaulted over the bow to the gravel. His two helmsmen scrambled to join him.
“This won’t do,” he said simply. Sergeant Billy and Friar Cyril nodded in sad agreement.
“Not a seafaring man among them,” Sergeant Billy said in frustration, gesturing toward his crew.
“Or among us,” Roland said, flatly. “The men camped at Deganwy will not be fooled.”
“They just need practice,” Friar Cyril said, defensively. “Sitting on the ground and playacting at rowing is a far cry from the real thing!”
“Aye, you’re right, but now we have the real thing,” Roland said pointing at the boats drawn up on the bar. “Get back to your stations and drill the men here on the bank, but with real oars in their hands.”
Friar Cyril and Sergeant Billy clambered back aboard their boats and gathered their crews. Roland did the same and stood in the bow. He looked at the ten rows of men at the oars. Many hung their heads. He turned to Fancy Jack who had been calling the strokes.
“Sir John, let’s have one stroke, on your command.”
The one-armed knight nodded and turned to the men.
“Make ready!” he roared. It was not, perhaps, a proper command, but men knew what was intended and drew their oar handles to within a few inches of their stomachs and held the blades more or less level, a foot above where they would meet the water.
“One stroke, on my command!” he called. Men tensed on the rowing benches.
“Pull!”
Men thrust their handles forward, rotated them up a foot then dragged them back to the start position. It wasn’t together, but most of the rowers executed a serviceable pull on their oars. Two men who had been slow to respond to the command almost tangled their blades with the men on the bench behind them. One of those men rose with a curse on his lips, but Fancy Jack leapt forward.
“Sit yourself down!” he ordered coldly. The man muttered, but sat. Sir John turned to the two offenders in the row ahead and snarled.
“This is no game, damn you! We go clumsy with the oars in sight of these Welsh bastards downriver and we’ll not even make it to the bank! Now—make ready!”
For the next hour, in each boat, men called the stroke and oarsman repeated the drill, over and over. It was ragged to begin with, but after considerable cursing and finger-pointing, all of the crews began to find a rhythm.
High above the bar, two small boys watched the strange exercise from a grassy hillside, while their sheep pawed the ground looking for anything green.
“What ye suppose they’re about?” said one, as they watched the men cursing in a strange language and rowing away on dry land.
“Don’t know,” said the other, “but I doubt they’ll get far that way.”
***
Out along the wilderness that separated Powys from Gwynedd, men were rousted from their rough shelters at dawn to begin the long march to the west. They rode out behind Griff Connah and under the red and gold banner of the House of Aberffraw. Two hours later, they reached a second camp in the valley of the Clwyd. Griff had sent a man ahead to alert the rebels there of his coming and they were armed and mounted when he arrived. The column barely paused as seven score men fell in behind.
Griff pushed the pace hard, for by his reckoning, Roland Inness should be headed down the Conwy River by now in Danish longships to seize Deganwy Castle. As fanciful as that plan still seemed to him, he thought Roland and the Invalids would find a way to make it work. The young English knight’s plan to take back Chester had seemed just as fanciful, but in the end, Chester had fallen to them.
Still, if he failed to arrive with his four hundred men in two days, the plan would unravel and Inness and his men would be dead. Speed was required, but as the day warmed, the backcountry roads thawed, turning them into black muck that sucked at the hooves of their horses and bogged down the ration wagons that tried to keep up.
By mid-morning, he ordered bread handed out to the men and abandoned the wagons. But progress was painfully slow and he could not risk ruining their mounts before they reached Deganwy. As he wiped a clot of black mud from his cheek, he saw a horse in the passing column slide back down a hill into the rider behind and knew one thing with a cold certainty.
They were going to be late.
***
On the banks of the Conwy, a stream of curses echoed in the morning stillness as Haakon the Black surveyed the smouldering ruins of his longships. Most were blackened shells, half-collapsed onto the gravel of the bar. A few still fed flames that were completing their work of destruction. He whirled around and faced the men he’d left to guard hi
s precious fleet. He’d found them bound by the huts and had left them that way. They trembled at the fury of his gaze.
“Who did this!” he roared.
No one dared to speak.
“I’ll have an answer or, by God, I’ll kill every man here!” the tall Dub Gaill screamed.
Finally, a man spoke up.
“It was Englishmen, lord, I swear. Hundreds of ‘em! A few Welsh too, but mostly English.”
Haakon stepped forward and drove a massive fist into the side of the man’s head, toppling him over like he’d been poleaxed.
“Englishmen? Hundreds of Englishmen?” he snarled, as he stepped in front of the next man. “They took but three boats! Can’t get hundreds of men into three boats!”
The man before him cringed, but dared not hesitate to speak.
“Wasn’t hundred’s, lord, not near that. A little over one hundred is all, plus a score of Welsh archers. But they was English, I swear, lord. All save the archers and the leader—he spoke Danish.”
“Danish?” This piece of news momentarily cooled the big Dane’s fire. “He spoke Danish?”
The man nodded vigorously.
“Aye, lord, but with a strange accent. Never heard the like.”
“Did this Dane have a name?”
The bound man screwed up his face as he tried to recall, then brightened.
“Oh, aye, sir. They called him Sir Roland.”
Haakon turned the name over on his tongue. Roland was a common enough name among the Danes, but Danish warriors didn’t style themselves as knights, as was the custom of the English.
A Danish knight leading Englishmen and Welshmen?
It was a puzzle, but hardly mattered at the moment. Haakon turned away from the bound men and looked back upon the ruins of his fleet. He saw his old companion, Ulf Haroldson, and his helmsman, Snorri, lying face down on the cold stones of the gravel bar. He grunted and turned to his second in command.
“Pick out three of these bastards to kill as a lesson to the others. When the rest of the men come up, we march downriver. I have three boats to retrieve and a Dane to kill.”
