Children of Clun

by Robert Nicholls

  “Remarkable to say, Gwenith; that’s a wish I’ve been carryin’ meself, inside me doublet,” he tapped his chest, “for many a month! Exactly the same!”

  It was at that moment that voices flared up outside and the door burst open, admitting the dripping forms of Gwilym, Eustace and Rhodri – all tumultuous with relief at regaining the comforts of home and hearth.

  “There’s an ‘orse under my eaves!” Gwilym was bellowing as he entered. “Has someone brought news o’ my girls, then?”

  Tom turned his smile in their direction. “No, mister. More’s the pity. Just a poor pedlar, grateful for the kindest hospitality south of Shrewsbury.”

  “You took so long!” cried Gwenith, tugging fretfully at her husband’s cloak. “Why’d you take so long? I feared you were lost, as well!”

  “Lost?” Rhodri began immediately to bluster as he and Eustace shouldered forward to sit by Tom at the table. “What? In that tiny forest? Why, I could have tied Eustace to an arrow and shot ‘im out of there at any moment. Never a fear!”

  Gwenith looked up into Gwilym’s eyes. He closed them and shook his head lightly. “We found the ash of a fire. An’ the bones of a fresh cooked coney. But the rain had finished any chance o’ tracks.”

  Gwenith turned and busied herself, stern-jawed and purposeful, swallowing back her anguish and tears. “So they’ve ‘ad a meal then!” she said with forced certainty. “Smart girls! They’ll be alright, I know they will!”

  “Oh, aye, yes! An’ we’ll be out again tomorrow, Annie’s mum!” declared Rhodri, inadvertently giving away his secret infatuation. “An’ this time, we’ll find ‘em! I know it in me heart, we will!”

  For a while, then, the men’s conversation drifted over the day’s events. Gwilym, Rhodri and Eustace spoke of the walking, the cold, the damp, the strange sounds and eerie silences of the forest. By way of encouragement, Tom volunteered his story of finding the bewildered, wandering knights.

  Gwilym, Rhodri and Eustace, fresh from the terror of the woods, turned their astonishment on him immediately. What ungodly purpose, they wanted to know, had taken Tom into the forest himself? Didn’t he know that a man could stray from Clun all the way into the mountains of Wales and never see another human being in a year’s walking?

  Sightseeing, Tom murmured. A foolish sightseer! He’d heard tales of Offa’s Dyke, the ancient earthworks built in centuries past, to separate the Welsh from the English, and had wanted to walk where the ancient Celts had walked.

  “Ahh,” Gwilym grunted. “Life must’ve been simpler, six ‘undred year ago, eh? When all it took was a ditch to keep the enemy away!”

  Tom spoke thoughtfully. “Have you no faith in such barriers, reeve?”

  Gwilym leaned forward on his elbows.

  “Barriers is only good for the willin’, says I! Say I build a fine fence between me an’ me neighbour. If ‘e doesn’ respect its purpose an’ knocks it down or climbs over it, well . . . I’ve wasted me time, ‘aven’t I? Jus’ one more challenge, see? No! Way I see it, ye can’t ever fence off the real enemies. Where’s the barrier ‘gainst the Black Death, Tom? Or the pangs of ‘unger! Or the thievin’ tax collectors! Or child stealin’ scoundrels in the forest? Eh? Ye won’t ever find such a barrier, Tom! ‘Cause there’s no such thing on God’s earth. An’ ye can take the reeve’s word for that!”

  Gwilym’s weariness was finally giving way to despair, for children lost, and he allowed his head to fall. He would allow no one to see the tears welling in his eyes.

  “It’s a wise man you are, reeve,” said Tom softly. He raised his glass in salute and drank. Then, into the silence that followed, he said, “And yet . . . if a man was in need of another point o’ view . . . I guess he could ask, where’s the fence that could keep true friends apart? . . . Or the one that could separate folks who love and want to protect each other. Where’s the fence that can keep us, great or small, from followin’ the path the good Lord’s marked out for us?”

  Gwilym lifted his head to stare at Tom. In his heart, he felt that death was just such a fence and that it had probably come shouldering in, between himself and his daughters. But he could not voice that thought. There was silence, with only Gwenith sniffling softly over the fire. In discomfort, Rhodri attempted to change the subject.

  “But what of them rogues who waylaid the good knights in the forest, Tom?” he asked. “Tell us more o’ them!”

  Tom waved dismissively. “A travelling band, no doubt. Gwenith tells me that Clun is bothered little by such rascals. So they likely aren’t out for mischief. They had no captives – no children with them – or the knights would surely have said.” Then he thought he’d test the reactions of the group. “Something odd, though! It seems they told the knights they were remnants of the ‘Plant Owain’! It didn’t mean anything to the knights. Does it to any of you?”

  Both Gwenith and Gwilym, far the oldest in the house, sucked in their breaths, and cast alarmed glances at one another.

  “Never!” Gwilym murmured. “Plant Owain? The Children of Owain?”

  To the questioning looks of Eustace and Rhodri, he explained, “Owain Glyndwr! Dependin’ on your point o’ view – either a terrible mischievous man or the rightful Prince o’ Wales and heir to the Kingdom o’ Powys! ‘Plant Owain’ was the name taken by loyal mates who stuck by ‘im – even, they say, to the point o’ disappearin’ wi’ ‘im when the end come into view.” He looked wistfully at Tom. “Someone’s been ‘avin’ a lend o’ your fine knights, my friend! The Plant Owain – they’re all dead! Dead ‘n’ gone! Years past! Surely! Nothin’s been heard of ‘em in so long! They’d be all old men, by this, at any rate! No! Whoever it was, it wunt them!”

  Tom shook his head in mock astonishment, all the while smiling inwardly.

  “Ay, surely so. Some old fellows havin’ a joke, then, I expect. Or the knights were deceived . . . by forest sprites, perhaps.”

  Soon after, he paid for his refreshments and swung his cloak about him. Outside, he walked Dobbin through the darkness, up the hill to the castle. The rain fell coldly down but, in both his and Dobbin’s hearts, private suns were rising.

  Chapter 16 – Sir Cyril’s Gaff

  At that same moment, in the Great Hall, Sirs Angus and Cyril wallowed, pig-like, in a much more public form of happiness. Their return had produced an outpouring of wine and meat and hilarity in which their exhaustion, at least temporarily, had evaporated. And, like young men everywhere, when made the centre of attention, their senses of self-importance sat on their backs like apes with spurs, transforming relatively mundane adventures into magnificent encounters. In the re-telling, they became twin St Georges, returned with dragon scales still snagged in their teeth.

  All the castle’s company, from Sir Roland and Lady Margaret to their exalted guests to the lowest kitchen hands (these last lurking quietly in the shadows, pretending service) had gathered to hear the tale. The clash of swords, echoing through the woods; the whinnying of horses, the thud of arrows into shields, the cries of the wounded and dying before the final onslaught that had barely managed to overwhelm them. The unchivalrous theft of swords and horses – the only way the few surviving brigands could be sure of saving their miserable skins. It was all enormously thrilling.

  It was Sir Roland himself, too familiar by far with fantastic stories, who finally asked, “And what of this . . . quest . . . you say drew you away? The two children from the village! Have you rescued them?”

  “Alas!” cried Sir Cyril expansively, waving a substantial bone in the air. “We did not! Though I’m certain they were there, amongst those low-born, cowardly sons of sheep! I tried – we both tried – to fight through to them – to rescue them. But alas!” A rumble of despair went through the crowd, sprinkled with the barely stifled cries of women. “Who knows,” Cyril added, with imagination-fueled outrage, “what cruelties such scoundrels might visit on young girls?” (In fact, virtually every knight in the land knew, first hand, what cruelties men
might inflict on young girls. And that was despite their claims to chivalry.)

  It was at this stage that the outrage in Sir Cyril’s fearsome warrior’s heart swept him to his feet. He slashed the half-gnawed bone through the air and thrust it, along with his voice and his eyes, toward the distant ceiling.

  “By this sword and this hearth,” he bellowed, undeterred by the fact that his ‘sword’ was, in fact, the drumstick of a goose, “I will not rest until that filth is swept from the earth! It shall be death to them, one and all! Death to the Plant Owain!”

  His cry circled once through the hall and fell into a resounding sea of silence. The failure of the gathering to take up the cry, as he’d fully expected them to do, made the very walls shiver with apprehension. Sir Roland’s wine cup stopped, half way on its journey to his lips and hovered there, like a hawk that’s suddenly lost sight of its quarry. Sir Cyril froze, the bone still held aloft; only the drift of his eyes from side to side, falling the way a feather might fall, betrayed his surprise and uncertainty.

  “What did you say, Sir Knight?” queried Sir Roland.

  He asked it softly, the way a schoolmaster might hope to trap a truant boy into confessing himself. Sir Cyril swallowed hard and noticed Sir Angus looking up at him, as though the two had never met. In fact, there was a sudden sense that, though every eye in the hall was focussed on him, no person amongst them would have admitted to knowing him at that moment. Sometimes, being brave can be a very lonely experience.

  “Ummm,” he said.

  “`Death’, you were saying,” Sir Roland offered helpfully. “Death to the . . . ?”

  “Ummm. The filth?”

  “`The Plant Owain’, I thought you said. Is that what you said?”

  Sir Cyril nodded unhappily and began to bring the bone down from its aggressive thrust at the air. He felt like a boy about to be taught by his mother that the word he’d been innocently singing warranted a washing out of the mouth.

  “I see!” Sir Roland continued in that suspiciously solicitous voice. “And do you know, Sir Cyril, who the Plant Owain are? Or rather, who they were?”

  Sir Cyril shook his head. “One of the old men just said it. ‘We are the Plant Owain’, he said!”

  All eyes turned to stare at Sir Roland, whose own eyes wandered off into a distant focus. The wine cup, still hovering below his lip, began to move in a small circle, teasing its contents into a lazy, blood-like whirlpool. An aberrant breeze raced amongst the torches and the light flickered nervously. Eyes became reluctant to blink, mouths forgot to close. Then Sir Roland’s eyes burned back into focus and the cup settled decisively onto the table. He gestured to the air and Samuel Rowe, the castle steward, never far from Sir Roland’s shoulder, leaned an ear in close.

  “See to it the gates are secured this night, Master Rowe,” Roland said softly. “And place what guards you can muster ‘round the walls. I’m sure you’ll know the appropriate places.”

  Samuel bobbed once and disappeared into the silent crowd, barely causing a ripple as he slid through. Then Sir Roland raised his cup high, somewhat in the fashion that Sir Cyril’s bitter bone had been raised only moments earlier.

  “Drink up, gentlemen!” he said. Then he added, so softly that a moth would have had to flutter close to hear, “It may be that we’re in for an interesting autumn!”

  Chapter 17 – Owain Glyndwr

  “What is this place?” Madeleine asked. If buildings had been able to wander away into the forest, get lost and, after long years, give up on finding their way home, then those buildings would have looked like these. Except that light twinkled from one. And a faint smell of wood smoke, with a hint of roasting meat, was definitely tickling her nostrils. They’d just watched Roger race off down the faint path, quickly lost to view in the shadowless night.

  “Used to be a priory,” ancient Jeremy explained as he led the little train of souls out from under the trees, into the full pelt of rain. “One o’ God’s little pockets, this valley! A pocket full o’ monks cleared it an’ planted it, nobody knows how long ago. Now a pocket full o’ greybeard boyos live in it.”

  “But there’s not even a village!” Madeleine exclaimed. “Why live way off here in the forest, by ye’selves?” She was aware of throaty chuckles, leaping like frogs from the throats of the men around her.

  “Now, who better than ourselves to live with, Maddie? I ask ye!”

  She looked at him with incomprehension. For Madeleine, village life was already as small a life as it was conceivable to live. Anything less would denote an emptiness of heart, a bleakness, a nothing. What sort of dark and bitter and dangerous people would need such isolation?

  “Truth is, we’re all of us jus’ too awkwardly shaped to fit anywhere else,” Jeremy explained, as though he’d been listening to her thoughts. “Ask young Jack, there! Jack, tell the girl why ye’re off here in the wild wood ‘stead o’ bein’ an upstandin’ village lad.”

  Jack was being lowered from the horse, wincing and groaning. He made a rasping sound in his throat, like a chain being hauled through a pulley, and spat over his shoulder onto the ground. Obviously, he was more robust than she’d taken him for!

  “Me ‘n’ Rog’, we do what we like out ‘ere. Law says, a year ‘n’ a day on our own ‘n’ we’re free men. Maybe then we’ll go . . . go wherever we want.”

  “Tell ‘er what job ye were doin’ before ye run off, Jack. Tell ‘er ‘bout yer ‘markable career in the precincts o’ the castle.”

  Jack’s face twisted with revulsion. “Gong fermer.” He spat again and several others spat as well, as though to ward off evil spirits. The rest of the men were moving off, taking the newly acquired horses to stabling areas and seeking out their own dry clothes. Jack was left leaning against – crumpling against – Jeremy.

  “Gong fermer!” Jeremy repeated. “Carryin’ off the shite o’ the high ‘n’ mighty! Might suit the shape o’ some people, but not our Jack! Nor Roger neither! No sir!”

  Jeremy then lifted the slight figure of Jack onto his back and held him with surprising tenderness. “An’ that’s why I’m ‘ere too, Maddie. I’ll carry a man I respect. Carry him from ‘ere to Doomsday, if need be. But I’ll carry no man’s shite.”

  In her mind’s eye, Madeleine pictured a frail, pale little boy, dredging out the castle’s sewerage – covered, perhaps, in sores from the filth. Hence his name, she supposed – Jack Sorespot. And she pictured the same boy, still scrawny and weedy but now grown wild and defiant, throwing himself, for no reason that she could easily understand, between herself and a ravening wolf. She glanced behind and saw, in the shadow of the rain, Brenton Le Gros, who had come back ‘strange’ from the war in France. His knees were trembling with exhaustion; the little blond head of Anwen visible on his shoulder. Though the two had spoken softly to one another for what seemed like miles, Anwen was now asleep. People, Madeleine thought, are very complicated creatures!

  “Well come on! Open the door, girl!”

  It was Jeremy, barking at her, jarring her from her reverie.

  “There’s weary men ‘n’ children needs admittin’!”

  Madeleine thrust open the door and stepped into the presence of legend.

  * * * *

  One of the most extraordinary things about extraordinary people and places is their apparent ordinariness. One day, the person you’ve been telling your troubles to reaches into the air and pulls a rose from behind the wing of a passing butterfly. And you think, surely, there should have been a clash of cymbals before that! This was the moment – the stepping through the door moment – that Madeleine would later remember with incredulity – the moment when the cymbals failed to sound.

  The building was the remnant of a dormitory in which the monks of the original priory had gathered at the end of a day’s toil. It was low ceilinged, with a wooden plank floor and, at the far end, a large stone hearth, vented to the outside by a stone chimney. There were tables and benches and chairs. There was a middle-age
d fire crackling in the huge fireplace, with iron pots arranged around it and meat, venison perhaps, on spits hovering at the edges of it. To Madeleine, it seemed a grand, inviting place – better even than Clun castle, with its forbiddingly cold stone and vast windy spaces. This was warm and dry – as comforting as a hymn in a church.

  Tending to the hearth was yet another old man, grey haired, with a twin pointed grey beard, like the one worn by Silent Richard of Wrexham. Dressed in loose fitting woollen pants and a light leather jerkin, he was arranging coals in the fire with an iron poker and nodding at Roger, who was a picture of animated story telling. When Madeleine stepped through the door, the man rose immediately and put a hand on Roger’s shoulder, causing the boy to subside, the way a feverish person does when a cool cloth is placed on their brow. As he turned toward her, Madeleine could see that, while not terribly large – not as big as her father or Brenton, for example – he had been, in his time, a solid, well made man. Now, though, there was an impression of shrinkage. Like an over ripe pumpkin, when the flesh begins to turn to water.

  Their eye contact was brief, lasting only until Jeremy and Brenton, with their twin burdens, nudged her out of the doorway.

  “For a man who can control the wind an’ the weather, Owain, ye’ve done a piss poor job this evenin’!” grunted Jeremy. “That’s the first an’ the last I’ll say about that!”

  And that was Madeleine’s introduction to the legendary Owain Glyndwr! The Welsh answer to both Merlin the magician and Richard the Lionheart – one of the greatest stories of his age. It was a story that had petered out years ago when he disappeared – unable to fight on, unwilling to surrender. Even so, by firelight in the villages, he was remembered.

  He was remembered as a soldier and a saviour; a terrorist and a sorcerer; iron and water; a mystery explained, but never understood. He was, in short, a man whose story had been commandeered by the makers of myths and dreams. And here he was, caught listening attentively to the tales of an idiot boy; caught straining to lift an exhausted fifteen year old girl from the back of a trembling giant. Madeleine saw Anwen wrap her arms about Owain Glyndwr’s neck and drop her head onto his shoulder, without waking. She saw him lower her gently onto a pallet before wrapping an arm about the waist of Brenton LeGross, to brace him against collapse.