Summer of the Danes bc-18

by Ellis Peters

  “Danes, five at least, They came up from the bay. There was a boy could be Welsh showed them the way…”

  “Danes!” Cuhelyn echoed, between wonder and enlightenment. He had expected devilment of some kind from Cadwaladr, was it now possible that this meant devilment aimed against Cadwaladr, instead? The thought gave him some sour amusement, but he did not yet quite believe in it. This could still be mischief of another kind, Dane and Welshman regretting their severance and compounding their differences secretly to act together in Owain’s despite.

  He set off in haste to Cadwaladr’s tent, and walked in without ceremony. A rising breeze blew in his face, flapping the severed skins behind the brychan. The swaddled figure on the bed heaved and strained, uttering small animal sounds. This second bound victim confounded all possible notions that might account for the first. Why should a party of Danes, having made its way clandestinely here to Cadwaladr, next proceed to bind and silence him, and then leave him here to be found and set free as inevitably as the sun rises? If they came to enter into renewed conspiracy with him, if they came to secure him hostage for what he owed them, either way it made no sense. So Cuhelyn was reflecting bewilderedly as he untied the ropes that pinioned arms and legs, plucking the knots loose with grim patience with his single hand, and unwound the twisted rugs from about the heaving body. A hand scored by the rope came up gropingly as it was freed, and plucked back the last folds from a shock head of disordered dark hair, and a face Cuhelyn knew well.

  Not Cadwaladr’s imperious countenance, but the younger, thinner, more intense and sensitive face of Cuhelyn’s mirror twin, Gwion, the last hostage from Ceredigion.

  They came to Owain’s headquarters together, the one not so much shepherding the other as deigning to walk behind him, the other stalking ahead to make it plain to all viewers that he was not being driven, but going in vehement earnest where he wished to go. The air between them vibrated with the animosity that had never existed between them until this moment, and by its very intensity and pain could not endure long. Owain saw it in the stiff set of their bodies and the arduous blankness of their faces when they entered his presence and stood side by side before him, awaiting his judgement.

  Two dark, stern, passionate young men, the one a shade taller and leaner, the other a shade sturdier and with colouring of a less vivid darkness, but seen thus shoulder to shoulder, quivering with tension, they might indeed have been twin brothers. The glaring difference was that one of them was lopped of half a limb, and that by an act of blazing treachery on the part of the lord the other served and worshipped. But that was not what held them counterpoised in this intensity of anger and hostility, so strange to both of them, and causing them both such indignant pain.

  Owain looked from the one grim face to the other, and asked neutrally of both: “What does this mean?”

  “It means,” said Cuhelyn, unlocking his set teeth, “that this man’s word is worth no more than his master’s. I found him trussed up and gagged in Cadwaladr’s tent. The why and how he must tell you, for I know nothing more. But Cadwaladr is gone, and this man left, and the guard who kept the lines there says that Danes came up from the bay in the night, and left him, too, bound among the bushes to open a way within. If all this to-do has a meaning, he must deliver it, not I. But I know, and so do you, my lord, better than any, that he gave his oath not to attempt flight from Aber, and he has broken his oath and befouled his bond.”

  “Scarcely to his own gain,” said Owain, and forbore to smile, eyeing Gwion’s face marked by the harsh folds of the brychan, his black hair tangled and erected, and the swollen lips bruised by the gag. And to the young man so grimly silent and defiantly braced he said mildly: “And how do you say, Gwion? Are you forsworn? Dishonoured, with your oath in the mire?”

  The misshapen lips parted, and shook for a moment with the recoil from tension. So low as to be barely audible, Gwion said remorselessly: “Yes.”

  It was Cuhelyn who twisted a little aside, and averted his eyes. Gwion fixed his black gaze on Owain’s face, and drew deeper breath, having freely owned to the worst.

  “And why did you so, Gwion? I have known you some while now. Read me your riddle. Truly I left you work to do in Aber, in the matter of Bledri ap Rhys dead. Truly I had your parole. So much we all know. Now tell me how it came that you so belied yourself as to abandon your troth.”

  “Let it lie!” said Gwion, quivering. “I did it! Let me pay for it.”

  “Nevertheless, tell it!” said Owain with formidable quietness. “For I will know!”

  “You think I will use excuses in my own defence,” said Gwion. His voice had steadied and firmed into a calm of utter detachment, indifferent to whatever might happen to him. He began gropingly, as if he himself had never until now probed the complexities of his own behaviour, and was afraid of what he might find. “No, what I have done I have done, I do not excuse it, it is shameful. But I saw shame every way, and no choice but to accept and bear the lesser shame. No, wait. This is not for me to say. Let me tell it as I did it. You left it to me to send back Bledri’s body to his wife for burial, and to convey to her the news of how he died. I thought I might without offence do her the grace of facing her, and bringing him to her myself, intending a return to my captivity, if I can so call that easy condition I had with you, my lord. So I went to her in Ceredigion, and there we buried Bledri. And there we talked of what Cadwaladr your brother had done, bringing a Danish fleet to enforce his right, and I came to see that both for you and for him, and for all Gwynedd and Wales, the best that could be was that you two should be brought together, and together send the Danes empty-handed back to Dublin. The thought did not come from me,” he said meticulously. “It came from the old, wise men who have outlived wars and come to reason. I was, I am, Cadwaladr’s man, I can be no other. But when they had shown me that for his very sake there must be peace made between you two brothers, then I saw as they saw. And I made cause with such of his old captains as I could in such haste, and gathered a force loyal to him, but intent on the reconciliation I also desired to see. And I broke my oath,” said Gwion with brutal vehemence. “Whether our fine plans had succeeded or failed, I tell you openly, I would have fought for him. Against the Danes, joyfully. What business had they making such a bargain?

  Against you, my lord Owain, with a very heavy heart, but if it came to it, I would have done it. For he is my lord, and I serve no other. So I did not go back to Aber. I brought a hundred good fighting men of my own mind to deliver to Cadwaladr, whatever use it might be his intent to make of them.”

  “And you found him in my camp,” said Owain, and smiled. “And half of your design seemed to be already done for you, and our peace made.”

  “So I thought and hoped.”

  “And did you find it so? For you have talked with him, have you not, Gwion? Before the Danes came up from the bay, and took him with them a prisoner, and left you behind? Was he of your mind?

  A brief contortion shook Gwion’s dark face. “They came, and they have taken him. I know no more than that. Now I have told you, and I am in your hands. He is my lord, and if you will have me to fight under you I will yet be of service to him, but if you deny me that, you have the right. I thought on him beleaguered, and my heart could not stand it. Nevertheless, as I have given him my fealty, so now I have given for him even my honour, and I know all too well I am utterly the worse by its loss. Do as you see fit.”

  “Do you tell me,” said Owain, studying him narrowly, “that he had no time to tell you how things stand between us two? If I will have you to fight under me, you say! Why, so I might, and not the worst man ever I had under my banner, if I had fighting in mind, but while I can get what I aim at without fighting, I have no such matter in mind. What makes you think I may be about to sound the onset?”

  “The Danes have taken your brother!” protested Gwion, stammering and suddenly at a loss. “Surely you mean to rescue him?”

  “I have no such intent,” said O
wain bluntly. “I will not lift a finger to pluck him out of their hands.”

  “What, when they have snatched him hostage because he has made his peace with you?”

  “They have snatched him hostage,” said Owain, “for the two thousand marks he promised them if they would come and hammer me into giving him back the lands he forfeited.”

  “No matter, no matter what it is they hold against him, though that cannot be the whole! He is your brother, and in enemy hands, he is in peril of his life! You cannot leave him so!”

  “He is in no peril at all of the least harm,” said Owain, “if he pays what he owes. As he will. They will keep him as tenderly as their own babes, and turn him loose without a scratch on him when they have loaded his cattle and goods and gear to the worth he promised them. They do not want outright war any more than I do, provided they get their dues. And they know that if they maim or kill my brother, then they will have to deal with me. We understand each other, the Danes and I. But put my men into the field to pull him out of the mire he chose for himself? No! Not a man, not a blade, not a bow!”

  “This I cannot believe!” said Gwion, staring wide-eyed.

  “Tell him, Cuhelyn, how this contention stands,” said Owain, leaning back with a sigh from such irreconcilable and innocent loyalty.

  “My lord Owain offered his brother parley, without prejudice,” said Cuhelyn shortly, “and told him he must get rid of his Danes before there could be any question of his lands being given back to him. And there was but one way to send them home, and that was to pay what he had promised. The quarrel was his, and he must resolve it. But Cadwaladr believed he knew better, and if he forced my lord’s hand, my lord would have to join with him, to drive the Danes out by battle. And he would have to pay nothing! So he delivered defiance to Otir, and bade him be off back to Dublin, for that Owain and Cadwaladr had made their peace, and would drive them into the sea if they did not up anchor and go. In which,” said Cuhelyn through his teeth, and with his eyes fierce and steady and defiant upon Owain, who after all was brother to this devious man, and might recoil from too plain speaking, “he lied. There was no such peace, and no such alliance. He lied, and he broke a solemn compact, and looked to be praised and approved for it! Worse, by such a cheat he left in peril three hostages, two monks and a girl taken by the Danes. Over them my lord has spread his hand, offering a fair price for their ransom. But for Cadwaladr he will not lift a finger. And now you know,” he said fiercely, “why the Danes have sent by night to fetch him away, and why they have dealt fairly by you, who have committed no offence against them. They have shed no blood, harmed no man of my lord’s following. From Cadwaladr they have a debt to collect. For even to Danes a prince of the Welsh people should keep his word.”

  All this he delivered in a steady, deliberate voice, and yet at a white heat of outrage that kept Gwion silent to the end.

  “All that Cuhelyn tells you is truth,” said Owain.

  Gwion opened stiff lips to say hollowly: “I do believe it. Nevertheless, he is still your brother and my lord. I know him rash and impulsive. He acts without thought. I cannot therefore abjure my fealty, if you can renounce your blood.”

  “That,” said Owain with princely patience, “I have not done. Let him keep his word to those he brought in to recover his right for him, and deliver my Welsh soil from an unwanted invader, and he is my brother as before. But I would have him clean of malice and false dealing, and I will not put my seal to those things he has done which dishonour him.”

  “I can make no such stipulation,” said Gwion with a wry and painful smile, “nor set any such limit to my allegiance. I am forsworn myself, even in this his fellow. I go with him wherever he goes, even into hell.”

  “You are in my mercy,” said Owain, “and I have not hell in mind for you or him.”

  “Yet you will not help him now! Oh, my lord,” pleaded Gwion hotly, “consider what men will say of you, if you leave a brother in the hands of his enemies.”

  “Barely a week ago,” said Owain with arduous patience, “these Danes were his friends and comrades in arms. If he had not mistaken me and cheated them out of their price they would be so still. If I pass over his treachery to them, I will not pass over his gross and foolish misreading of me. I do not like being taken for a man who will look kindly on oath-breakers, and men who go back shamefully on bargains freely made.”

  “You condemn me no less than him,” said Gwion, writhing.

  “You at least I understand. Your treason comes of too immovable a loyalty. It does you no credit,” said Owain, wearying of forbearance, “but it will not turn away your friends from you.”

  “I am in your mercy, then. What will you do with me?”

  “Nothing,” said the prince. “Stay or go, as you please. We will feed and house you as we did at Aber, if you want to stay, and wait out his fortune. If not, go when and where you please. You are his man, not mine. No one will hinder you.”

  “And you no longer ask for my submission?”

  “I no longer value it,” said Owain, and rose with a motion of his hand to dismiss them both from his presence.

  They went out together, as they had entered, but once out of the farmstead Cuhelyn turned away, and would have departed brusquely and without a word, if Gwion had not caught him by the arm.

  “He damns me with his mercy! He could have had my life, or loaded me with the chains I have earned. Do you, too, avert your eyes from me? Had it been otherwise, had it been Owain himself, or Hywel, beleaguered among enemies, would not you have set your fealty to him above even your word, and gone to him forsworn if need were?”

  Cuhelyn had pulled up as abruptly as he had turned away. His face was set. “No. I have never given my fealty but to lords absolute in honour themselves, and demanding as much of those who serve them. Had I done as you have done, and brought the dishonour as a gift to Hywel, he would have struck me down and cast me out. Cadwaladr, I make no doubt, welcomed and was glad of you.”

  “It was a hard thing to do,” said Gwion with the solemnity of despair. “Harder than dying.”

  But Cuhelyn had already plucked himself free, with fastidious care, and was striding away through the camp just stirring into life with the morning light.

  Among Owain’s men Gwion felt himself an exile and an outcast, even though they accepted his presence in their midst without demur, and took no pains to avoid or exclude him. Here he had no function. His hands and skills did not belong to this lord, and to his own lord he could not come. He passed through the lines withdrawn and mute, and from a hillock within the northern perimeter of the encampment he stood for a long time peering towards the distant dunes where Cadwaladr was a prisoner, a hostage for two thousand marks’ worth in stock and money and goods, the hire of a Danish fleet.

  Within his vision the fields in the distance gave way to the first undulations of sand, and the scattered trees dwindled into clusters of bushes and scrub. Somewhere beyond, perhaps even in chains after his recapture, Cadwaladr brooded and waited for help which his brother coldly withheld. No matter what the offence, not the breaking of his pledged word, not even the murder of Anarawd, if indeed such guilt touched him, nothing could justify for Gwion Owain’s abandonment of his brother. His own breach of faith in leaving Aber Gwion saw as unforgivable, and had no blame for those who condemned it, but there was nothing Cadwaladr had done or could do that would have turned his devout vassal from revering and following him. Once given and accepted, fealty was for life.

  And he could do nothing! True, he had leave to depart if he so wished, and also true, he had a company of a hundred good fighting men bivouacked not many miles away, but what was that against the numbers the Danes must have, and the defences they had secured? An ill-considered attempt to storm their camp and free Cadwaladr might only cost him his life, or, more likely, cause the Danes to up anchor and put to sea, where they could not be matched, and take their prisoner away with them, back to Ireland, out of reach of any rescue. />
  The distant prospect afforded him no enlightenment, and no glimmer of a way forward towards the liberation of his lord. It grieved him that Cadwaladr, who had already lost so much, should be forced to pay out what remained to him in treasury and stock to buy his liberty, without even the certainty that he might recover his lost lands, for which the sum demanded of him had been promised in the first place. Even if Owain was right, and the Danes intended him no harm provided the debt was paid, the humiliation of captivity and submission would gnaw like an ulcer in that proud spirit. Gwion grudged Otir and his men every mark of their fee. It might be said that Cadwaladr should never have invoked alien aid against a brother, but such impetuous and flawed impulses had always threatened Cadwaladr’s wisdom, and men who loved him had borne with them as with the perilous cantrips of a valiant and foolhardy child, and made the best of the resultant chaos. It was not kind or just to withdraw now, when most it was needed, the indulgence which had never before failed him.

  Gwion moved on along the ridge, still straining his eyes towards the north. A fringe of trees crowned the crest, squat and warped by the salt air, and leaning inland from the prevailing wind. And there beyond their uneven line, still and sturdy and himself rooted as a tree, a man stood and stared towards the unseen Danish force as Gwion was staring. A man perhaps in his middle thirties, square-built and muscular, the first fine salting of grey in his brown hair, his eyes, over-shadowed beneath thick black brows, fixed darkly upon the sand-moulded curves of the naked horizon. He went unarmed, and bare of breast and arms in the sunlight of the morning, a powerful body formidably still in his concentration on distance. Though he heard Gwion’s step in the dry grass beneath the trees, and it was plain that he must have heard it, he did not turn his head or stir from his fixed surveillance for some moments, until Gwion stood within touch of him. Even then he stirred and turned about only slowly and indifferently.