Uneasy Lies the Crown

by N. Gemini Sasson

  Catching eyes in the half-dark with Owain, Tudur nodded once then fused himself to a tree next to Gruffydd. They did not have to wait long for their ruse to be discovered.

  As Grey and his men came crashing through the woods, the trees came to life. Naked branches transformed into spears and axe hafts. A sea of Welsh blades flashed and engulfed the English on three sides.

  In frantic chaos, some of Grey’s party spun about, seeking retreat to the rear, their horses crashing into one another. But even as they put spurs to flanks and turned back toward Ruthin, Gethin and his marauders surged from behind and blocked their way.

  “Fight, men! Cut through!” Grey screamed.

  The first Englishman was skewered at the tip of a spear.

  Tighter and tighter, the English huddle drew as their men were picked off one by one, dropping in pools of bloody snow upon the frozen ground. Grey slashed out, his weapon swinging wildly, striking no one. The lopsided fray was as fleeting as it was fierce. The end came when the butt end of a pike smacked into Grey’s neck and toppled him from his horse.

  He lay face up on the cold earth, eyes wide in shock. His sword lay just beyond his grasp. With a jerk of his arm, he freed his dagger, but as he did so a circle of spears and swords hovered above him.

  Owain kept his voice level as he stepped between two of the spearmen. “I believe this is when you beg for mercy, my goodly lord.”

  His knuckles whitening as he gripped the dagger, Grey swallowed hard. “You heathens bear no mercy toward any.”

  Only a handful of Grey’s soldiers had been spared, enough to carry back the shameful tale of their defeat.

  “No mercy?” Owain unsheathed his sword. “What a grand idea. I will remember that.”

  But it was Gruffydd who pressed the flat of his blade, gleaming with blood, firmly across Grey’s naked throat. His arm quivered with a barely contained rage.

  “You may have kept Elise from me,” Gruffydd said, drawing a piece of well-worn parchment from beneath his tunic just enough to reveal its constant proximity to his heart, “but I know the truth.”

  Jaw taut, Grey drawled, “Truth? You are late in your tidings, pup. My niece left the abbey long ago after bearing your bastard. It was a blessing the whelp was born dead. The Church would not have her, whore that she was, so I convinced a Flemish merchant to take her as his wife... She carries his child now.” He licked away the trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. “It is cruel to envision, is it not, her lying there trembling in pleasure beneath the loins of some other man?”

  “I never lay with her. I have more honor than that. The child was yours.” Gruffydd’s boot smashed down on Grey’s bare wrist. With a shriek, the lord’s dagger fell from his fingers. “Rape and incest. Murder and thievery. Is there a crime left you have not committed?”

  Then Gruffydd extended his other hand toward Tudur, who gave him a smoking rush light. Slowly, he lowered the flame until Grey’s naked cheek reddened from the heat. “I will introduce you to hell long before your actual death.” Grinning smugly, he stepped away.

  In seconds, Welsh soldiers had shoved Grey’s bruised face into the snow and were binding his hands behind his back. Then gruffly, they yanked off his battered helmet and hoisted him up to stand before Owain.

  Swinging his sword back and forth at his side, Owain approached Grey. “Much as I want to make a sacrifice of you, heathen that I am, and see you bleed to death here and now for all the wrongs you have caused, I won’t grant you such mercy. That would be too kind.”

  Eyes red from smoke, Grey glared at him. He took two faltering steps, the rope that bound his hands cutting deeply into his wrists. Fast behind him, Rhys kicked at the back of his legs. Grey stumbled forward, landing on his knees an arm’s reach from Owain.

  Lord Grey knelt before his archenemy on a carpet of blood-splattered snow, the bodies of his garrison strewn about him like squashed flies. Beads of melted snow dripped from the end of his nose. He spat at Owain’s boots. “Raise your God damn, bloody sword and take my head. Do it! Get on with it, you fucking bastard! You’ve killed so many, what is one more? Put my head in a basket and deliver it to London. I care not. You will get yours... one day.”

  “I will get...”—Owain lifted his weapon up, then back—“what was mine to begin with.” He thrust the long blade forward. Iron sliced the air.

  Grey’s eyes shut instinctively. Cold metal kissed his neck. When he looked again, Owain held the sword level, a teasing inch from his jugular.

  “So easy,” Owain said, his lips tight. “It would be so very easy to kill you. But it would bring me a great deal more satisfaction to see you suffer and live with what you have done... and the knowledge that I have beaten you. I hope you live long.”

  In slow cruelty, Owain withdrew the blade and then motioned to one of his men. Grey’s horse was brought up and they shoved him onto the saddle as roughly as a miller handles a sack of flour. Gethin slung a noose around Grey’s neck and pulled the knot tight until he gagged.

  Grey glared at Gethin. “Going to hang me from my own walls, then? Fitting justice from the hands of a criminal.”

  The invitation was a temptation to Owain, but he muffled his amusement. “A sweet sight it would be. But that’s not your noose.”

  “It is a leash, Lord Grey,” Gruffydd announced, smiling great and broad. “We wish to keep you close at hand. There’s value on your head, ugly as it is.”

  “Gruffydd,” Owain wagged his sword, “I grant you a prisoner.”

  By the look on his face, nothing could have satisfied Gruffydd more.

  The six remaining English soldiers were stripped of their weapons, armor and shirts and tied together to the trunk of a large tree.

  It was midmorning before Owain and his men rode out from the woods of Coed-Marchon. Grey, who had left without a cloak that morning, shivered convulsively. As they passed the thicket which the English had so prudently avoided, Tudur went and plucked up the last fizzling rushlight. He set fire to the helmeted figures, which were nothing more than cloaks and tunics stuffed with dry straw and set on poles.

  The building containing the ruthless Marcher Lord was a single room, wide enough for two men to lie abreast and one and a half times the length of a man, but not nearly tall enough to stand in. Once, it had served as a sheep cote; now it was a prison. The floor was a mixture of dirt and manure, his bed a pile of moldy straw. It was comprised of aged oak beams and a loosely planked roof that acted as a sieve whenever it rained. Between some of the beams of the walls was enough space to slide a man’s arm halfway to his elbow. It was through these slats that his meals came and dirty dishes went. The wind funneled and whipped through the cracks like knives flung at his skull. He tried to burrow his way out with his fingernails, but his captors had already thought that possibility through and hammered iron rods deep into the surrounding ground. When they threw Grey in this ignominious cell, they nailed the door shut. He was forced to bury his own feces and endure the stench of his own urine.

  As if living in his own stench was not enough, his Welsh tormentors would dance and sing outside his tinderbox prison, juggling torches and sprinkling the walls with boiling pitch nightly. Glyndwr’s oldest son Gruffydd seemed to take the greatest delight in it, circling with the satisfaction of a hawk above a wounded hare. Occasionally, Gruffydd would cease his pacing, glare with judgmental eyeballs at Grey, and chant, “Rapist, murderer, thief, traitor, rapist, murderer...”

  Sleep became Grey’s only desire. He teetered on the brink of madness, fantasies of revenge filling his waking moments and nightmares of fiery death consuming his dreams.

  Iolo Goch:

  Before spring’s end, Lord Reginald de Grey of Ruthin was escorted by Gruffydd ap Owain under the dark of night to Dolbadarn Castle. The view from his single, barred window was unchanging: wild, rough mountains that pierced the sky’s lid, their image mirrored in the sullen black waters of Llyn Peris.

  Each evening as the sun retreated, a blazing
star trailed its fiery tail across the Stygian darkness. To Lord Grey, it was an omen of ill portent. To the bards who sang of Owain Glyndwr, it was the resurrection of Myrddin Emrys’s prophecies—that Arthur had come again.

  In order to raise the astronomical sixteen thousand pounds in gold that were demanded by Glyndwr for ransom, Grey’s manor in Kent was sold off. The drain on Grey’s finances would leave him forever penniless.

  28

  Harlech Castle, Wales — May, 1402

  Between the deep blue waters of Tremadoc Bay and mountains couched in lavender mist, Harlech Castle thrust majestically skyward, washed in the yellow-pink of morning’s first light. Owain stood at the head of his army on the ragged shoreline. He coveted every stone.

  “How many?” he asked, as his kinsman Gwilym ap Tudur rode up beside him.

  Dropping to the ground, Gwilym dashed a coating of sand from the front of his tunic. “Roughly a hundred men-at-arms, give or take a dozen... and over four hundred of those nasty Cheshire archers.”

  “Five hundred then? Are you certain?” Owain asked skeptically.

  Gwilym’s thin lips twisted in a sneer. “I am. Seems they were expecting us.”

  A warm breeze tossed Owain’s hair across his eyes. He turned and peered at his men through a veil of graying strands. “What now?”

  “Into the mountains,” Gethin answered.

  “Mountains?For what?” Tudur’s weariness was evident in the slump of his shoulders. “To hide again?”

  Gethin shook his head. “No. To Maelienydd: Mortimer lands. There’s much bounty yet to be had between the Severn and the Lugg.”

  “Maelienydd? Maelienydd...” Owain shaded his eyes with a hand and gazed at Harlech’s titanic walls. “They wouldn’t expect us to provoke a Mortimer, would they?”

  Rhys Ddu spat. “Ach, only thing Henry expects of you, Owain, is sheer madness.”

  “Madness, genius, are they not the same?”

  Rhys nodded toward the mountains. “Come on then. Maelienydd awaits.”

  The Welsh army withdrew eastward—back into the wilderness from which they had crawled. Harlech’s garrison hadn’t even been afforded the satisfaction of sending a caveat of arrows. The castle was safe in English hands. For now.

  Pilleth, Wales — June 22nd, 1402

  When news of the burning of Bleddfa Church in Maelienydd by Welsh raiders reached Ludlow Castle, Sir Edmund Mortimer did not hesitate. Although he was the uncle of the young Earl of March, he had sworn his loyalty to King Henry and leapt at this opportunity to prove himself, for he did not wish to give the king any cause to suspect that he wished his kinsman on the throne instead. Thus far, his sister Elizabeth’s husband, Harry Hotspur, had proven steadfast as well, although Hotspur had quarreled with the king repeatedly over the delay of payments due to him.

  Lured at first toward Knighton by the latest attack, Mortimer found nothing but smoking ashes. He then led his army southward into the throat of the Lugg Valley, threading along the trails that were once Roman roads. A steady week of rain had left the valleys flooded and so Mortimer kept his army clinging to the slick hillsides. Through crowds of oak leaning into the mired valleys, the English trudged, their eyes alternating between the treacherous path and the rumbling sky.

  Slowed by a growing mountain of plunder, it appeared the Welsh were being chased down like fading hares. On the 21st of June, the English bedded down at Whitton. Mortimer’s scouts had reported that the Welsh were camped on the emerald skirt of Bryn Glas, a hill less than a mile away from the village of Pilleth. The presence of the dragon standard had been confirmed.

  At last. He would bring to battle and destroy the rebel Glyndwr.

  Late into the night, Owain knelt in fervent prayer before the effigy of the Virgin Mary in Pilleth Church. Sleep, when it finally came, was broken and fraught with worry. When St. Alban’s Day dawned, the air was already steaming. He rose, donned his armor, and prayed again before mounting his warhorse. His helmet, polished but with many dents, rested on his saddle before him. Sweat trickled over his temples.

  Rhys Ddu pulled up beside him on his horse. “Fifteen hundred. And they look very sober about the whole matter.”

  “Gethin?” Owain began. “As always, should I fall, you will take command.”

  Gethin nodded only once. His countenance was as rigid as his brass-edged breastplate.

  As they watched the English columns advance, tall standards bobbing in rhythm and lance tips pointing heavenward, Owain pulled on his helmet. A page scuttled forth and handed up his dragon-adorned shield and newly whetted great sword. “Did you mark the point, Rhys?”

  “I did. We’ll be within almost bowshot when they come abreast of that row of hawthorns,” Rhys noted, pointing.

  “Good. When they get there, but not before, we turn back and go up Bryn Glas.”

  “And give them our backs as targets?” Tudur said.

  “If our timing is right, we’ll be just beyond their reach. Archers must stand still to shoot.”

  “What if Mortimer doesn’t follow us?”

  “Oh, he will. He will. ’Tis a sure thing in his eyes. They outnumber us two to one. Mortimer needs to prove his loyalty and we’re going to let him try.”

  Tudur scoffed. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph. We should’ve burnt the damn church and left.”

  Owain gave him a sideways glance, and then turned his sights back on the nearing English. “Did you find the monk you were looking for at Mynachdy last night, Gethin?”

  Gethin weighed his favorite axe in both hands. “I did.” His eyes narrowed as he looked east into the low morning sun. “Be mindful of the first flight.”

  “Positions,” Owain commanded. He glanced toward the lines, searching. The smell of mud and sweat rising from his soldiers mingled into one heavy stench. His sons, Gruffydd and Maredydd, were there... somewhere. But each face looked like the one next to it—gazing on at the enemy in macabre state as the throb of battle drums shook the earth beneath their feet.

  Pushing forward, Mortimer’s archers, mostly men from the Welsh brink of Maelienydd itself, packed into their menacing wedge shapes. Clutching the shafts, the bowmen pushed their points into the soggy ground before them, so that they might easily snatch them up for ensuing volleys.

  “Retreat!” came Owain’s order. The word echoed down the lines as the Welsh turned like a tidal wave breaking against the shore. Hooves and feet pounded toward the hill. Urging his horse along behind the lines, Owain shouted at them to move faster, faster, faster. By all appearances, the maneuver was an inch short of bedlam and a mile short of genius.

  The first pluck of arrows nestled against their bow staves. Waxed strings stretched taut.

  “Pull!” Death’s chorus sang out.

  Owain glanced toward the hissing hail. The sky was black and moving.

  The first arrow pierced the skull of a Welsh soldier. His body flew forward with the force; then his face slammed onto the trampled ground. No one paused to check if he was still alive, or even to claim his body. They were all running for their lives.

  Owain’s horse stumbled and then regained himself. They were almost clear of arrow range. Almost.

  It was in that moment when Owain thought safety was at hand—the flight of arrows having largely fallen short—that he felt the white heat of a broadhead pierce through his mail and into his flesh. Just below his right calf, a tendon snapped, sending a knife of pain through his entire body. His horse reared as the arrow punctured the animal’s ribcage. Owain gripped the reins and pulled them in to his chest, hanging on. The ground whirled. Bodies lay scattered around him in a moaning, writhing sea.

  “Owain!” Tudur called as he rode up and grabbed the reins from his brother. “Take my horse!” He abandoned his shield and dismounted as a roar arose from the English ranks.

  Swooning, Owain looked down. “I can’t.” His breathing was shallow and ragged as he fought the white blazing fire that consumed him. His horse staggered. His weapon fell from his
grasp. His fingers fumbled at the straps of his shield, but he couldn’t loosen it. “You’ll have to... break off the shaft.”

  Tudur snapped the shaft as close to Owain’s leg as he could. Then in one brusque jerk Owain wrenched his leg free. Blood gushed down his leg and streamed onto the ground. Pulling his horse close, Tudur yanked the shield from Owain’s arm and helped him onto his saddle. Then, he gathered the trailing reins and sprinted on foot toward Bryn Glas.

  Another rain of arrows pursued them as Tudur guided his horse with haste over the litter of bodies. It was a long, arduous run. His breath heaved and his pace began to slow. When at last he reached the Welsh lines, he collapsed.

  Faceless soldiers surrounded Owain. Relieved, he kicked his good leg free of the stirrup and tried to swing it over the saddle, but instead his body pitched backward. Arms enclosed him, safely lowering him to the ground.

  Strangely, he no longer felt pain. Nor could he discern the words being spoken to him. Or see...

  Convinced the Welsh were in retreat, Mortimer ordered the advance. Mounted knights pressed through the line of archers and the charge began. Fury-bent, the English knights were focused on nothing but the breathless Welsh soldiers cleaving to the slick, grassy slope. So intent they were as they thundered across the plain that they did not sense the torrent of arrows closing in on their backs.

  Edmund Mortimer gazed on in horror from behind his lines. His jaw hung frozen. English knights and horses dropped like flies on the open field.

  Beside him, Sir Walter Devereux mumbled in disgust, “Your trusted Welsh archers...”