by Mary Lide
“Jesu,” it said, “stay still. He’ll find me else.”
It was a girl child, that at least I recognized, although in the half-light it was hard to tell. Her skirts were rucked up and knotted between her long legs, which were scratched with thorns. She was barefoot, her toes black with mud. Her hair hung in great snarls, and her breath came heavy, as if she had been running hard. After a while she leaned back, sighed, rubbed a dirty hand across her face.
“God’s wounds,” she said, still gasping for breath, “who would have thought the fool would leap his horse through a patch of gorse. Trip him! He almost rode me down. And ruined the best snare I have ever set. Praise God, he never saw me, too busy getting on his feet. But I have never run back so fast. And I’ll be whipped in any case for going there.”
Now I had not seen her before, though that was not so strange as it may sound. Cambray is small, but I avoided the castlefolk when I could, and castle children most of all. I had little liking for the castle maids, who take madmen for their own sport. If I thought anything at all, it would have been first that it served her right, more intent on my own misery than hers. Until the realization of what she had said came to me. It made me sit up again.
“You set the trap?” I said. “You took his bow?”
“Aye,” she said briskly, trying to smooth her hair. “I found it propped behind a chest. I thought he had tired of it.”
That, too, was Lord Hue’s way, they said; done with a thing, he threw it aside carelessly, its value only what he found in it, its worth returned only when he wanted it again. But I had never known a girl to be so rash.
“You set the trap?” I emphasized the word.
She looked at me from beneath her mass of hair and crossed herself.
“Jesu,” she swore, sounding almost alarmed, “the crazed boy, who croons to himself along the shore. What are you doing here?’’
I was not offended by her, although her bluntness could have made me flinch. She had no worse phrased it than the other things said of me.
“The wood you used was mine,’’ I told her, misery returning when I spoke of it aloud. “I thought to carve it into a lute stem someday.’’ Once more I buried my face in my knees.
She observed me for a moment, head on one side, as I came to know she often did.
“That makes sense’’ was all she said. “I thought they said you had lost your wits. I’d hide, too, if I were you.’’
She crawled across me to the gap and peered out. She was about my height, my age, as thin as a rake and streaked with dirt, but there was a wildness about her, a freedom, that my poor pinched soul leapt toward. I had never seen her before, I repeat, had no idea who she might be, yet sensed the purpose in her spirit like a flame. For the first time a spark of hope lit up in me.
Lord Hue was on foot himself now, had seized a fork, the one I had dropped, had looped the bowstring about his knuckles
in a double thong. He prodded with the fork, swinging the lash to make men jump aside. “Someone ran ahead of me,” he cried. “Now will I find him out, the Celtic cur, to unhorse me and run.” He began to advance toward the open stable door.
“Quick,” the girl said. As she spoke, she had scrambled out between the bales, nimble as a cat. I saw her plan, to escape behind the lines of men more intent on watching before them than aware what went on behind their backs; but fear kept me rooted to the spot, although she knotted her fist in my hair and tried to drag me along. She was gone in a flash; too slow behind her, I lumbered to my feet, despair and guilt upon my face.
Lord Hue saw me at once. Head lowered like a bull, he charged through the men, shouldering even larger ones aside, and caught me by the tunic. I came limply enough, that little spark of hope already dead, anticipation already having made that guilt seem real. With a mighty effort he slung me on my knees across the broad steps that led to the granary above and stood, hands on hips, looking at me. I dragged myself upright, backed to the wall. “So, cur,” he snarled, “where’s my bow?” and he whistled the thong about my ears.
On foot like that, set on a step, I came almost to his height. His eyes, close to mine, were dark, flecked with gold, and in them I saw the specks of anger. When Lord Hue was wroth, they said, run for your life. But there was no place left to run; the girl had already disappeared, and I was left alone to take her blame.
I mouthed at him, words tumbling out without sense, but at least I had the sense not to mention her.
‘His wood,’ ” he mocked me. “ ‘Found it,’ ” he said. “ ‘My wood,’ ” he said, each word a sneer, “as if a serf can claim anything, as if a serf has any rights, even to life. Shall you use my bowstring to kill me?” He brought it down across my arms.
There was a gasp. Now, looking back from my old age, I suppose all there sensed a truth. A serf owns nothing in this world, has nothing, except a master whose slave he is to do with as he likes. That is the first law a serf's child learns. And he who threatens a master looks for death. Yet I cannot truthfully say that if faced with death, I feared it as much as I would now, being either too young to know what was meant or, more like, too numbed with fear of what the next moment held. Or, as may be, already knowing that existence could promise little for me, so much at odds with it, so unfitted for this border world, I was already resigned to fate. Survival in a border castle is hard, and that is the second law a serf s child learns.
I stood huddled against the rough stone wall; beneath me a sea of faces, some with mouths agape, some all grins, a bear-baiting, a cockfight, no better pleasure than this. I heard a clatter of the castle guard, my father’s straw hair marking him as he found excuses for his embarrassment; I heard my mother’s scream, saw my sisters hiding in her skirts, the other castle brats wriggling to the front to watch the sport. As much against those sights as the blows I closed my eyes.
Before the third one fell, Lord Robert’s voice made me open them. “There has been enough talk of rights,” he said, “of things ‘thine’ and ‘mine.’ It is a poor, mazed thing at best.”
In the pause that followed, I saw how the brothers faced each other, as if a current, red-hot, ran between them, fiercer than Lord Hue’s wrath, such a wave of mixed love and hate, I almost closed my eyes once more against it.
“He is a singer.” The girl’s voice came out, clear and high, emphasizing the word. I knew her tone at once, although now when I thought of it, I realized, too, she spoke Norman French, as Lord Robert did. She stood beside him, carefully keeping him between her and Lord Hue. “This is Urien the Bard,” she repeated, “the Welsh singer.”
The tension broke. Men put their hands on hips and guffawed. Even Lord Robert smiled, the same sweet smile that she had. She had smoothed down her crumpled dress, pulled her hair back. I suddenly saw how the morning sun had brought out its color, bronze, like a new-minted coin, and her eyes were dark as Hue’s own. She, too, smiled at me, the Lady Olwen whom I had not recognized. That smile gave me heart. “Head up,” it said. And for the second time in my life came that flash of hope.
At the foot of the stairs, caught between his brother and sister, caught between his own conflicting thoughts, Hue bit his lip. I sensed the struggle in him, rage and reason, and thanked God that this time reason would win.
He threw down the cord.
“If bard,” he said, his voice cracking, a boy’s voice that slid from man’s to child’s, “if bard as you claim, then let him sing.” He snapped his fingers—sent his page flying to fetch a lute. Now I had never held such a thing before, had seldom seen one, though in truth had saved that wretched piece of oak with the thought of one day turning its strange curved shape into the neckpiece of such an instrument.
Had I known the lute they finally brought (the men by now all squatted down to hear the rest of the joke played out, the children screaming and pointing underfoot), would that have silenced me, had I known it as belonging to the great earl, one he sometimes played himself? All I can tell you, when it was put into my hands,
I felt it quiver with a life of its own. And when I struck a note, a chord, I felt the power running through my fingers to the shoulder blades, the way one feels on striking an iron bar too hard, a ripple, a shock. It was a sense of power I had never had before, although I have known it often since. And that, too, I cannot explain, save to tell you now that in that sorry world where I had found myself, the only things that ever gave me joy were sounds, words, noises, natural happenings, until, hearing them, I had to re-create them for myself.
In any case, then, ignorant of what a singer is, ignorant of my own ignorance, I sang. Since that day men have praised my voice, which in old age has not lost its tone, although I can no longer summon up the force that once I had. It has deepened, of course, and I have trained it to my advantage so that I can achieve by craft what then I did from the promptings of my heart. And the songs I sing are of my own making, that like a craftsman I put my mark on them. But I think I have never sung so well, or so fittingly, as then, untrained, for the first time.
And what did I sing? Somewhere out of memory, beyond thought (or did some god put it in my mind?), I heard my voice ring out, as if it were not my own, as if it belonged to someone else, above the noise of that castle with its watchroom, stable, and keep, as a lark sings exultant at noon.
And we shall rise, a mighty host,
War bands, warriors, long-haired,
Hardened by battle, one folk once,
Out of exile and death returned,
Ready in war to strike for our own.
A Celtic war song, then, a defiant song to sing to a Norman lord to his face, a song of defiance, yes, and perhaps of prophecy. And when I was done, no one moved or laughed.
In the silence that followed, only Lord Robert spoke. “By the Mass,’’ he said, as if drawing breath, “Urien the Bard, you speak the truth.” He smiled at me. That smile made me his for life.
The little maid, Olwen the Fair, Olwen of the White Way, the white flower, she nodded at me as if to say, “See, I knew it would be so.”
And beside them Hue stood, with bent head, and I could not tell if he wept.
That was our first meeting, then, how first I got my name.
I have told you it for memory’s sake. And for one other thing, that it will show you who we were, how we lived, how we came to be bound. Nor do I mean to suggest that afterward all things changed. Not so, not yet. I still was serfs brat, they still great lords. Nor did they stay long at Cambray that year. With the winter frosts they were gone again, they, their retinue, their busy lives. We sank back to our own small ways, small cares.
My mother perhaps had her moment of triumph, poor soul, to redden her wan cheeks with the youthfulness that once had made her beautiful to men. My father, that straw-haired soldier with the hard mouth and fist, he ceased his daily beatings; more from amazement than pride, I think, realizing that he could never whip me into a pikeman like himself. The other castlefolk ceased their jibes or left me alone; their children gave up their torments. Such respite at least was gift beyond price. And if sometimes in the night, when we had scrabbled for a place before the fire, I and those sisters, half sisters, clutching and whining by my mother’s side (and whose get were they, darkhaired and fat? Not my Norman father’s, I think), I lay upon my side, head buried beneath the sacking we used for warmth, and dreamed dreams of my own, why, that, too, was a comfort.
Time passed. The winter dragged its wet, weary days, and in the following spring the lords of Cambray returned again. And so they now did for several years. Why that was I could not have told you then, nor what had caused such a change in their lives, although in time that, too, would be made clear. But for a while it came about that in the spring we should expect them, that at the autumn’s end they left.
Six months, then, of the year we had something to look forward to. I cannot say how much they remembered me, the boys of that noble house, fast growing into men. Hue certainly paid me no heed, although I often watched him, a bond between us, of thought and understanding, almost as if I could sense out his mind. And thinking back to those days, I suspect now he knew it, too, knew perhaps and feared, resented it. How else should he have known when to wheel his horse so that it almost crushed me against a wall, how to stalk past so that the point of his hunting spear struck the place where a moment before I had stood, how known in which direction to hurl his boots when his pages drew them off? I saw less of Lord Robert at that time; he rode with his father and the other men about those border affairs, as shall be told.
As for the Lady Olwen, she alone looked for me to give excitement, meaning, to each day when she was at Cambray. Our meetings were not often. I can number them upon a hand. She had spoken truth that she would have a whipping for having wandered on the moors. Among the castlefolk it was said she was forbidden to go there alone, although what danger, I would have scoffed at such a thought, not knowing then the care of noble maids, or the nature of that border watch. But the whisperers also said that when the mood took her, she would slip away despite that rule. And sometimes, I think now, knowing her, so unlike other maidens of her age and rank, her folk must have let her go, when her spirit could not be denied. She showed me how she set her traps. Not yet old enough to hunt with her brothers, she was quick with line and net; her hands with their broad fingertips were as steady as a boy’s. She could find her way through the thickets, brambles, and furze as stealthily as a mountain cat. I had never known a maid who cared so little for how she looked; and once when I showed her where the wild fox denned, she lay for hours watching them with a stillness, a silence, that I had never known in womankind.
I showed her where the birds made their nests, the speckled thrush, the robin, and how the lapwing ran ahead with pretense of broken wing to lead us away from its egg clutch upon the ground. I showed her where the hare made its form. Once when we came upon it, the soft gray down from its breast with which it lined the shape was still warm. I took her among the rock pools and showed her where the fishermen set their nets, and in time I taught her the names and magic properties of flowers and plants that we Celts know: primroses and wild roses and the other sacred five-petaled flowers, and most potent of all, the creeping white trefoil, from which some said her own name was culled.
But best of all, I told her what I hoped and thought, words coming slowly to me who now make my way by words, drawn from me almost painfully. There was a place that I had found that first summer I spent upon the hills, a kind of cave hollowed out among the granite rocks, and there sometimes when a black mood fell on her, I would sing to her to soothe her. For she shared this quality with her brother, Hue; for all that she could be so fair, as just and kind as Robert was, sometimes the dark side of her Celtic self would make her change, run wild. Then she could be fickle, inconstant, thoughtless, although never cruel as he could be.
So the years passed, three, four; we settled to a custom that gave something to hope for, to expect. Until the year when all was changed. I know its date well enough, the year 1172, a year to be branded in my memories. In that year many things occurred that were to change all our lives. Bear with me. I shall tell you each in turn. It is not a question of forgetting, of not knowing what first to say, but rather how not to say too much. In telling you I must tell all, all, as I still remember all: how Lord Robert came to be a man and took up man’s cares, how Hue knew himself at last, how the outside world came to bear down upon us at Cambray. And how the Lady Olwen grew to womanhood to torment me. Each of these things then so interwoven that each in turn must be unwound. As a stone thrown into a lake, so the ripples spread. Bear with me, I say, now shall we come to them, with their joys, their pains. I told you how little happiness there was for me. Yet pleasure there was that, in the end, I should be the eyes and voice of these great ones.
Chapter 2
That year, 1172 of Christendom, was to be a special year for us all. It began like any other one, except Lord Raoul returned earlier than usual to Cambray in an April full of storms, after a winter r
emembered for its severity. Snow had covered the hills for months that year, unusual for us, and there had been wolves sighted on the high moors—omens these, if I had understood them. And when the thaw came, it flooded the coastal fields until sometimes it seemed Cambray sat like a stone outcrop, an island in a brown and muddy waste. On hearing, then, of this early arrival of Earl Raoul’s household (for he had sent messengers ahead to stir us all into our usual fret at news of them), I had watched for the family for days, going each morning to the moors to look for them; and when at last they arrived, with their noise, their bustle, their joyful cavalcade, the Lady Olwen greeted me in her usual easy way, as if we had parted just an hour before. But after that first meeting I seldom spoke with her, not even to pass the time of day and never alone as we used. In vain I waited for her—more than that, expected her—in all our usual haunts: behind the hayricks and cattle byres, and on the moors when I thought the mixture of April sun and rain would drive her, restless, out. She never came. For as I soon discovered, she had a new playmate this year, or rather, a new plaything, which they said her father had brought for her to await her arrival here at Cambray. It was a horse, a little moorland horse, creamy white, with long cream tail and mane, spirited, with a small, well-set head and long, springy legs, and most of the Lady Olwen’s waking hours were spent in taking care of it. So although I saw her often enough, it was from a distance, with one of her father’s men mounted as escort riding behind; and although she came up on the moors, it was to let her hound run (she had a new kind of hound, too, thin and gray, which could almost outdistance a hare) so she could race after it. She doted on that horse, I say, an interest I found hard to understand, for I must confess having little liking for horses, considering them unintelligent and dangerous. But Lady Olwen spent hours grooming this little horse, if she was not on its back; and when she could not coax the grooms into cleaning its red harness with the silver bells, she sat on the tack room floor herself, her skirts spread around her, while she polished and rubbed until the red leather and silver shone like new. Well, that was her way. Like Hue she could show an intensity, a purpose, and a will that could not be diverted from their path or changed. So now her full attention was settled upon her horse, and she had no time for anything else. Until that April day when someone else rode into her life. But I go too fast ahead. For first she had to turn to me for help. When she had need of me, she came to me again. And I did not fail her, not then, nor ever, as in time that, too, shall be told. But now she asked my help in a childlike, womanlike way, and boylike, manlike, I gave it unstintingly.
