The blood had crowded dark and blue into Owen's face. "You know, none so well," he said thickly, "that your mother and mine pledged that for our father, and for me after him, while we were still prisoners in Criccieth. What say did I ever have in it? I was no sooner out of one dungeon than into another."
"And was it she who repeated the pledge, and signed your name to it, two years ago in Westminster? Oh, we have our intelligencers, too, even in King Henry's court. Who threatened you with rack and rope then? You jumped at it willingly. To get your few commotes of Wales you were ready to help him set fire and sword to the whole."
"I wanted no such warfare! Was one side to blame for that bitter fighting more than the other? I did nothing but promise natural gratitude and loyalty for the restoration of my right…"
"Your right! Your right!" said Llewelyn through his teeth. "Can you see nothing on earth but your right? Has no other man any right, except you? The right to be Welsh, tenant to a Welsh lord, judged by Welsh law, living by Welsh custom? You would have given over your own people to the king's officers to tax and plague and call to war service like the wretched English. Do you expect a welcome for that?"
"Yet it is my right," said Owen, setting his jaw, "and the council cannot but uphold it. I am the eldest son of our father, and the next direct heir to Gwynedd, and I stand on that right. And if you have complaints against me, so have I against you, and against him that's dead, for he deprived our father of his birthright and his liberty, and you—you turned traitor to your own family and sided with their enemies."
"I sided with Wales," said Llewelyn. "Your grandsire and mine had a vision of Wales that I learned from him. Wales united under one prince and able to stand up to all comers. There's no other way of fending off England for long. I went with my uncle not against our father, but against England, and sorry I was and am that we could not all stand together. Now you come running with the same old ruinous devotion to a right that will dismember Gwynedd, let alone Wales, and feed it to your king, whether you mean it or no, gobbet by gobbet until he has gorged all. And if I can prevent you, I will."
As Owen had grown redder and angrier, and fallen to plucking at his sleeves with shaking hands, so Llewelyn had grown ever more steady and quiet, as though he took the measure of an enemy who was seen now to be no great threat to him, and in time might even come to lose the complexion of an enemy. He had a way of standing with his feet planted a little apart, very solid and very still, like one set to withstand all winds and pressures from every quarter and remain unmoved. A moment he looked into Owen's congested face, then: "And I can!" he said with certainty, and turned on his heel to walk back towards the door from which he had come.
To Owen, I think, it seemed that he had said his last word, and that with undisguised contempt, and meant to go away from us without another glance. But I think his intent, having found out all he needed to know in order to determine his future course, was merely to call in his chamberlain, and commit his brother to the care of the servants for board and bed, for even between rivals and enemies hospitality could not be denied or grudged. However it was, he turned his back squarely, without a qualm, as he had turned his face towards us without compromise or evasion. And as he took the first long steps, Owen made a curious small noise in his throat, a moan too venomous for words, and plucking out the dagger he wore at his belt, lunged with all his force after his brother's withdrawing back, aiming under the left shoulder.
I had been standing a little behind him, unwilling to move or make sound or in any way be noticed during this scene, indeed I would gladly have been away from there if I could, for there was no room for a third in that exchange. But now I had good reason to be grateful that there had been no escape for me, for surely, if only for those few moments, Owen meant murder. And even so I was slow to catch the meaning of the sudden rapid motion he made, and snatched at his sleeve only just in time to hold back his arm from delivering the blow with full force. The point of the dagger slid down in a long line, dragged to the right by my retarding weight, cut a shallow slash in the stuff of Llewelyn's tunic, and clashed against the metal links of his belt. Then I got a better hold of Owen's arm and dragged him round towards me, and in the same moment, feeling the rush of our movements behind him even before he felt the shallow prick of the dagger—for there was almost no sound—Llewelyn sprang at once round and away from us, whirling to confront the next blow.
But the next blow was not aimed at him. The opportunity was already lost, Owen turned on me, who had robbed him of it, or saved him from it, I doubt then if he knew which for pure rage. His left hand took me around the throat and flung me backwards, and my hold on his arm was broken, and I went down on my back, winded and shaken, with Owen on top of me.
I saw the blade flash, and tried to roll aside, but the tip tore a ragged gash through my sleeve and down the upper part of my arm, between arm and body. His knee was in my groin, and I could not shake him off. I saw the dagger raised again, and in the convulsion of my dread one of the tall silver candle-holders went over, crashing against a chair, and spattered us with hot wax. I closed my eyes against that scalding shower and the glitter of the steel, and heaved unavailingly at the burden that was crushing me.
The weight was hoisted back from me unexpectedly, and I dragged in breath and looked up to see what had delivered me. Owen was down on one hip, a yard and more aside from me, glaring upwards under the tangle of his hair, and panting as he nursed his right wrist in his left hand. And Llewelyn, with the dagger in his grasp, was stamping out a little trickle of flame that had spurted along the hair of one of the skin rugs, and righting the fallen candlestick.
He was the first to hear the buzz of voices outside the room, and the latch of a door lifting. He flung the dagger behind him into the cushions of one of the chairs, and reached a peremptory hand to Owen's arm.
"Get up! Do you want witnesses? Quickly!"
I had just wit enough to grasp what he wanted, and shift for myself, though lamely, at least quickly enough to be on my feet and well back in the shadows, my arm clamped tight against my side, when they came surging in from two doors. The inner one by which Llewelyn had entered admitted an old, bearded man, once very tall but now bent in the shoulders and moving painfully, and a younger man, perhaps himself as much as fifty, who propped his elder carefully with a hand under his arm. At the outer door the guards looked in from the hall, coming but a pace or so over the threshold, and I saw the maids peering over their shoulders in curiosity and alarm.
Llewelyn stood settling the tall candelabrum carefully on its feet and straightening the leaning candles. He looked round at them all with a penitent smile, and said, looking last and longest at the old man, whom I knew now for that Ednyfed Fychan whose fame almost matched his lord's: "I am sorry to have roused the house with such a clatter. A mishap. I knocked over the candles. There's no harm done but a smell of burning."
Whether they entirely believed I could not tell, but they accepted what he wished them to accept, and asked nothing. He kept his face turned steadily towards them, and only I could see the slit in the back of his cotte, and the one bright blossom of blood where the point had pricked him.
"Goronwy," he said courteously to the old man's son, "will you take the Lord Owen in charge, and have food and a lodging prepared for him? He has had a long ride, and is weary. And, Meurig, make sure his horses are well cared for."
The guard drew back obediently into the hall and closed the door. Owen, moving like a man indeed very weary, half-stunned by what he had done and the resolute way it was being buried and denied before his eyes, stepped forward unprotesting, and went where Goronwy ap Ednyfed led him. The old man, standing straighter now that he stood alone, but so frail that I seemed to see death, a good death, looking peaceably over his shoulder, looked at Llewelyn, and briefly at me, and back, without wonder or doubt, at Llewelyn.
"All is well?" he said, in the clear, leaf-thin voice of age.
"All is very well. There is
nothing to trouble you here." He smiled. "Leave us. You can, with a quiet mind."
When they were all gone but we two, he made me sit down close to the warmth of the brazier, and himself slipped away for some minutes, very softly, and came back with another cotte on him, and warm water in an ewer, and linen, and helped me to peel the torn sleeve back to the shoulder from my bleeding arm. The gash was shallow but sliced, and had bled down into my waist as I hugged it against me to keep it from being seen. Ashamed to be so waited on by a prince of Gwynedd, I said I could very well bind it myself, and he told me simply and brusquely that I lied, and foolishly. Which I found to be no more than the truth when I obstinately made the assay, and he took back the task from me, tolerantly enough, and made very neat and expert work of it.
When it was done, and I would have risen and withdrawn from him, conceiving in my weariness and confusion of mind that he was done with me now, and wondering sickly what was to become of me, and whether I had not put myself clean beyond the limits of mercy in Owen's household, I who had no kinsmen here in any group to take me in, he bade me sit down again, and himself sat long with his chin in his fists, gazing at me intently. And after a while he said abruptly:
"You could have made your master the master of Gwynedd. Why did you interfere? You came here with him to serve his interests, did you not?"
"Not that way," I said, and he looked at me sharply, and a little smiled.
"Well, plainly you cannot now return to him. He would either make an end of his unfinished work, and kill you, or else discard you and leave you to fend for yourself." He leaned a little closer, and moved the torch to cast its light more directly on my face. "I know you!" he said. "You are the boy at Neigwl—the boy with the sheep!"
It was the best part of five years gone, and he had not forgotten. I owned it, remembering how he had looked at me then, and found himself content.
"And you never told?" he said.
"No."
"Neither did I," he said. "I knew then you would not. Afterwards, when it came out that my mother had taken the children and fled, my uncle asked me outright if I had known of it beforehand, and I told him the truth. And he said to me that if I could make as solitary a choice as that, well calculated to bring down on me the anger of both sides, then I was a good man for either side to welcome and value, if they had the wit. That is what he was like, at least to me. And he's gone! Fretted away to skin and bone in his bed in seven short days of fever! And my brother comes galloping to pick the bones!"
He got up from his chair suddenly, and turned to walk restlessly between the brocaded wall and the shrouded doorway, to hide the grief and anger of his face, for even if he remembered me with warmth, this was a private passion. To do justice, all the more because it might bring him some shade of comfort, I said what was true: "He did come of his own will. The king and his officers had no part in it, we took the moment when they were shaken and distracted, and we ran. I don't say it could not have been done earlier. I do say the way offered then, and suddenly, and he jumped at it."
"I take your words," said Llewelyn, still pacing. "I would not take his! Brother or no, it sticks fast in my gullet that he comes running now, when God knows we have troubles enough, even united, and with King Henry ready to prise his sword-point into every chink of disunity we shall crumble away like a clod after frost. But that's none of your doing," he said, shaking himself clear of the greatest shadow that hung upon him, and turning again to face me and consider me sombrely. "It seems," he said, "that you made a kind of choice of your own, a while ago. Are you willing to abide by it?"
I caught his meaning, and my heart rose in me for pure pleasure. I said: "My lord, more than willing!"
"If you enter my service there is none here will challenge or offend you, not even Owen. He will learn that he dare not."
"But, my lord," I said, much afraid that this unlooked-for offer might yet be snatched away from me, "he has my pledged fealty."
"I will ensure that he shall release you. If he values you no more than shows in him, he will not care over-much, and his grudge against you—as I remember him, he bore grudges!—can be bought off. What were you to him? In what service?"
I told him then what I could do, for I think he had taken me simply for manservant and groom; and when he heard that I could read and write in Latin, English and Welsh, was now a fair horseman, and even had some mild practice in arms, though never otherwise than in play and exercise, he was astonished and pleased, and in pleasure he lit up into a child's unshadowed brightness.
"You are what I need," he said gladly, "for I do well enough in Welsh, and have some Latin, but in English I go very haltingly. You shall teach me better. And you can also reckon, and have copied documents at law? English law I must learn to know, if I am to understand my enemies."
"My lord," I said, still a little afraid of such good fortune, "I know very well that you must have clerks about you who have served your uncle well and will do as much for you, and I do fear that what you are now offering me is offered out of too much generosity for a very slight service I could not choose but do you. I would not wish to take advantage of a moment when gratitude may seem due, but only to take and hold a post in your service if I deserve and am fit for it. Take me on probation, and discard me if I am not worth my place."
And at that he laughed at me, frankly and without offence. "You also make very lofty speeches," he said, "and I may yet make good use of your eloquence, but I am not obliged to take your advice. There is the small matter of a life I owe you." The laughter vanished very suddenly. He said seriously: "He meant killing."
"I have good reason to know as much," I said, shaken by the recollection. "And to remember that that debt is already paid, and with somewhat over."
"So much the better, then," he said, "that you and I should remain close together, close enough to go on bandying the same small favour about between us the rest of our lives. Yet if you do refuse me, I can but offer you my hospitality here as long as you choose, and a horse to carry you wherever you will thereafter. But I had rather you would not refuse me."
It was ever his most disarming gift that he had a special humility, the very opposite of his youngest brother, and never took for granted that he should be liked, much less loved. Confident he was of his judgments and decisions, but never of the effect he had on those about him, and I swear he did not know that by then there was nothing within my giving or granting that I could have refused him. So there was eternally renewed pleasure in making him glad. And I said to him: "With all my heart, if it were for that reason only, I will come to you, and be your man as long as I live. But it is not only for that reason, for there is nowhere in this world I would rather take my stand than here in Aber, and no one under whom I would more gladly serve than you."
So it was sealed between us. And he put away ceremony, and began to speak of finding me food, and a bed, and fresh clothes to make away with the blood-stained cotte I wore, for we wanted no rumours and curiosity about the llys concerning an ill encounter between the brothers, to add to the load of uncertainty and disquiet the court already bore. And last, as we were about to leave that room, he asked me: "One thing I have forgotten—I never asked your name."
I said it was Samson.
At that he gave me one quick, bright look, and began to say: "I once knew another Samson…" And there he halted abruptly, and looked again at me, very closely and in some wonder, and for a while was not sure of what he thought he saw.
"Not another," I said. "The same."
"You? Was it you? My mother had a tirewoman was left with a child…You are Elen's son?" He did not wait for an answer, for how he was all but certain without any word for me. "Yes, you could well be! But then, if you are my Samson, I saw you here at Neigwl that day, bringing down the sheep, and did not know you again!"
"You had not seen me," I said, "for more than six years, and you saw me then but a moment."
"Yes, but there's more to it! I never thought of you
then, nor dreamed it could be you. They sent you to Aberdaron long before."
"When your mother fled to England," I told him, "my mother would not go without me. They sent to fetch me back that very day that you saw me."
"And I had thought they would make a canon or a priest of you, and now I get you back thus strangely and simply. I have not forgotten," he said, the deep brown of his eyes glowing reddish-bright, "the years we were children together. We had the same birthday, the same stars. We were surely meant to come together again. I missed you when they sent you away. And now you come back with an omen—the dagger that strikes at one of us strikes at both. We are linked, Samson, you and I, we may as well own it and make the best of it."
To which I said a very fervent amen, for the best of it seemed to me then, and seems to me now and always, the best that ever life did for me, whatever darkness came with the bright.
Thus I became confidential clerk and secretary to the Lord Llewelyn ap Griffith, prince of Gwynedd.
The Brothers of Gwynedd Page 10
