The Wicked and the Just

by J. Anderson Coats

  Get out, he said. Ere a handful of whooping devils put a rope round his neck and pushed him out his chamber window.

  I heave myself up. The screaming is muffled here, but somehow that’s worse. If I go through the streets, they’ll see me. I’ll have to follow the walls through rearyards till I get to the gate.

  I check my rearyard. Empty. So I make myself walk. Running draws their attention and they’re in the houses, tipping coffers and seizing garments by the handful. They’ll see me through shutterless windows and sweep down.

  Near the fence, I step on something furry. It’s Salvo, lying peacefully on his side as if he’s asleep on his gorse bed. But he’s not. His throat has been cut. A collar of shiny red from ear to ear. Bleeding a scarlet fan into the mud.

  I cross myself and keep walking.

  Next door’s rearyard is torn up like a byre. My shoe sucks into the mud. Then the other. So I leave them. The mud squishes cold and gritty around my ankles.

  At the corner, I peer down High Street. What’s left of the Michaelmas fair is strewn and thrashed. Broken carts and dead sheep and ragged scraps of bunting still clinging to smoldering buildings. And Welshmen bearing plunder, sacks and crates and bundles. Welshmen with torches, setting townhouses afire. Welshmen everywhere, armed and wroth as demons loosed from Hell.

  It’s about a stone’s throw across High Street to Church. And I must cross High in plain view of these butchers.

  I’ll never make it. They’ll descend on me like a pack of dogs.

  I take a deep breath and step into the road. Chin up, eyes forward. The walk that earned me penance from the lady de Coucy.

  Over my shoulder is the castle’s gray profile. The cross of Saint George does not fly above the Eagle Tower, nor the arms of the constable. There’s another banner, one I don’t recognize. A red and gold banner, quartered.

  The Welsh have taken the castle.

  All dead. The castle garrison. The porters at the city gate. No one’s left. They’ll spare none of us.

  Cannot stop. Welshmen everywhere. One foot before the other, slipping in blood.

  An apron drifts across the Sandyses’ greenway. A shift, too. Three adjoining townhouses are ablaze, smoke pouring from the windows. A baby cries somewhere in a pathetic, straggling wail.

  If I survive this I will confess my sins like an anchoress, for if Hell is anything like the fall of Caernarvon, I want to be perfectly certain of my soul.

  ***

  Follow the wall. Drag my hand against it. Don’t look too closely at limp shapes in corners or furtive movement behind sheds. Stand still as a hare when Welshmen pour out of townhouses, smearing sooty handprints on doorframes. Count towers till I reach the Penny Tower, then the city gate.

  At the gate, Welshmen stream in and out weighed down with plunder, making a great din with their shouting, singing, roaring. Somehow I must get through that gate. It’s the only way out of Caernarvon.

  I lean against a shed. Suck in trembling breaths. My feet are raw. My legs are like cooked parsnips and I cannot go on. Not another step. Not through that gate.

  Get out, he said to his only living child, the light of his otherwise meaningless life.

  Grip my muddy gown. Let out a shuddery breath. Then I plunge around the shed corner and plow through the alley toward the city gates.

  One gate has been torn from the hinges and trampled to splinters. I fix my eyes on the bridge that spans the river beyond the dark arch. Welshmen stagger and storm through the gate-hole. I look through them as I pass. They do not exist.

  There are scrape marks on the ground where the toll trestle stood. Not even a splinter remains.

  Outside the gate, I choke on acrid smoke. The wharves are burning. Every last boat sends diagonal flames to the heavens and the canals are crammed with charred flotsam.

  Chin up, stride even. Running draws their attention. I pray to every saint who’s listening to surround me with angels bearing swords.

  Something snares my plait.

  The saints are elsewhere today.

  I reel backward and twist, but whatever has me jerks my hair downward and slings me hard against the bridgehouse. The whole world is naught but purple stars and agony from scalp to backside.

  Then a Welshman appears before me and pins me by the neck to the bridgehouse with one big hand. His other hand pushes my gown up in scrabbly grips and grabs. He’s grinning. He’s missing teeth.

  The sky behind him is glowing blue while all the world burns.

  No one is coming to help me. They’re all dead.

  The Welshman gets my gown over my knee and I kick. I kick as hard as I can between his legs and he roars as if I’ve killed him. I hope I have. He falls away bellowing like a poorly stuck pig and that’s all I see because I run for the bridge, attention be damned.

  There’s a clamor of harsh noise behind me but I don’t look back. I fly across the bridge through a crowd of Welshmen fighting over plunder and getting drunk off tuns of wine that must have come from those burning ships.

  Mayhap they chase me. Mayhap they don’t. They don’t catch me. I stop running only when I’m deep in the greenwood gasping for breath and there’s not a soul around save birds and insects and quiet, ancient trees.

  No more screaming. No more smoke. Only riversong and the chirring of birds, the wet, woody smell of earth.

  My legs give way. I collapse in the brush. Take breath after breath. My skin burns. My neck. My legs, where his damp eager hands dragged upward.

  Caernarvon stands on its plain while a curtain of black smoke rises as if the Adversary himself has come to claim it.

  I’m out.

  I’m alone.

  It’ll be dark soon. Were there any bells left, they’d be ringing Nones.

  My gown crackles, a stiff sheet of blood and muck and vomit. It reeks like a midden in August. My feet are laced with cuts and blistered from sun-baked ground, stinging as if full of pins.

  Water murmurs somewhere nearby. As on the outing with Emmaline and her kin all those months ago. When angry Welshmen pelted William with rubbish because he was a taxator.

  And I was wroth because of my ruined gown.

  We’d regret it, the poor wretch swore, sweltering at borough court as serjeants hauled him away. Every last act of it.

  I crawl beneath a tree. Curl up. And tremble.

  They murdered my father. They hold Caernarvon, seat of his Grace the king’s government in the Principality of North Wales. My house will soon be char and timber if it isn’t already. I am without the walls with naught in the world but the clothes on my back.

  And it’ll be dark soon.

  Someone’s coming. There’s no time to hide, so I huddle as small as I can, a cat in January. No tromp of boots, so it’s a Welshman.

  Go past. You don’t see me.

  But he does. And his face darkens.

  It’s Griffith.

  He’s smudgy with soot and his tunic is torn. He squares up like a boar and looks me up and down, as if I’m something to scrape off a shoe.

  Tremble and whimper and my breath comes in tiny gasps as if I’m pulling air through a reed.

  Griffith snorts, shakes his head, and starts toward the ford, disappearing in margins over the hill.

  Swipe at my wet cheeks again and again.

  Then he stops. For a long moment he does naught, and I will him on his way with every bit of will I have.

  But Griffith comes back up the rise, piece by piece, face, shoulders, torn tunic, till he’s standing over me like an idol.

  Get out, he said, ere they killed him in cold blood. He did not mean like this.

  “No. It won’t do.” Griffith sounds weary, as if he is a thousand years old. “The worst is coming. Here.”

  He holds out a hand.

  If whatever’s coming is worse than the sack of Caernarvon, Hell must be opening its great maw.

  “Go away.” I try to stand. If he knows I cannot fight back, I’m done for. But I cannot even climb to
my knees.

  Without fanfare, Griffith hauls me up like a wet pallet, looses me roughly, and leaves me swaying like a sapling on legs that won’t make it ten steps.

  “Wh-where are we going?” I whisper.

  He makes no reply, merely fixes me with a look that shuts my gob very quickly and jerks his chin at the greenwood. So I make myself stumble behind him on colt-legs and feet burning like sulfur.

  Mayhap it’ll be quick. Please, God, let it be quick.

  We walk. The sun sinks. One foot before the other. Days and se’ennights and years we walk.

  Just when I cannot go another step, we come to the bottom of a wooded hill.

  And I collapse.

  So Griffith drags me step after staggering step toward a sagging hovel decaying amid thick brush. He shoulders the curtain aside and lowers me before a ring of embers. Next to me is a pile of moth-eaten blankets outlined faintly in orange light. He hangs the quartermeasure sack from a hook in the rafters, then approaches me.

  Flinch. And flinch. Dear God, this is it.

  But Griffith only kneels to build up the struggling fire. He’s close enough that I can smell him, smoke and sweat and soot, but he does not so much as look at me. The coals glow like stars. At length, flame licks up the tinder and begins to crackle.

  I can see better now. There are wattled walls, patched and repatched. Dirt floor, damp at the edges. The whole place smells of mold and rot with the faint whiff of goat.

  When the fire is busy, Griffith goes to the sack hanging from the rafters. He withdraws a hand-sized wedge of cheese and a loaf of bread. The bread is bloody on one heel, but he cuts a slab from the other end and sets it in a shallow vessel.

  He has not cut my throat, raised a hand, pushed me down. He does not seem to even want to.

  Behind me, someone screams as if cornered by a haunt.

  Gwinny’s in the doorway. She’s wearing three cloaks dangling with silver cloak-pins and brooches and armorbuckles. About her waist is a man’s belt stuffed with two daggers and a length of silk, and she clutches quartermeasure sacks in her fist like a wilting bouquet.

  And she looks like the Adversary’s Hellspawn daughter as she storms across the room, raving in Welsh.

  THE brat is in my house. The brat is in my house!

  I storm across the room to serve her with the back of my hand what I served the other English of Caernarvon, but Gruffydd catches me in a tight embrace. “Gwenhwyfar, thank Christ! You weren’t . . . I didn’t . . .”

  My little brother is hugging me as he hasn’t since we were small. I hold him close for more long moments than I can count, and I’m the one who pulls away first.

  “Jesu, lass, you look . . .” By the look of him, Gruffydd is casting about for the word vengeful, but seems unwilling to say it aloud. “Were you trapped there? Did any man hurt you?”

  I take off the cloaks one at a time and they jingle to the floor. Then I toss down my quartermeasure sacks and slide out of the belt. I take off the too-big felt shoes and dump coin from both. I look at him in triumph.

  “I’ll be damned,” he murmurs, and he cannot keep the admiration from his voice.

  “I’m perfectly sound. I was not trapped anywhere. Not today.” I prime a mighty slap and turn toward the brat, but Gruffydd catches my hand and holds it fast.

  “Leave her be.”

  “I’ll not suffer her in my house.” With my free hand, I fling a shoe at the brat. It bounces off her back and she squawks like a wrung-neck chicken. “English at their best are still bloody well English. But now I’m rid of them all. I’m free.”

  Gruffydd tightens his grip. “We’re not rid of them, and we’re certes not free.”

  I hiss and wrench toward the brat, ready to pummel, but my little brother pulls me up cold.

  “I said leave her be.”

  I snort. “If you’re not man enough to give her the justice she deserves, be assured that I will.”

  “Vengeance,” Gruffydd says in a low, dangerous voice, “is not justice.”

  The brat looks up. She knows we’re speaking of her, though she cannot understand a word of Welsh. It is Justice Court, then, and I am justiciar, bailiff, and hangman. I am handing down a sentence in a foreign tongue and carrying it out with the rope.

  I narrow my eyes. “You of all men can say such a thing?”

  “No. Yes.” Gruffydd runs a hand through his hair. “I cannot, but I must. She . . . tried to make it right.”

  “By taking the boot off your neck? How charitable.”

  “How do you think the likes of me got on that timber gang?” Gruffydd jabs a finger at the brat.

  I flinch. “It was never! You’re mad!”

  “Her father has the ear of the honesti now. She leaned on him, and the castle provisioner passed over all the lackeys who bribed him for months and what do you know? Gruffydd ap Peredur with his tainted malcontent blood has a place on the most sought-after work gang in the Principality.”

  I press my lips together. Study the brat crumpled before the fire, tattery and pale and small.

  “I know not why she did it,” Gruffydd says. “I only know that she did it knowingly, with intent.”

  “You’re as much a fool as Dafydd.” I fold my arms. “We must get rid of them. Every man, woman, and child. Every brat and dog.”

  I say it in English so she’ll tremble and cower.

  “Is that what you think this rising is about?” Gruffydd shakes his head as if I’m a child. “Destroying the English? Pushing them out of Gwynedd?”

  “We took the seat of royal government. I watched Madog ap Llywelyn wipe his arse with the town charter while the whole Exchequer burned.”

  Gruffydd smiles faintly. “Gwen, the English king will come with a massive army and put the rebels down. But then he will want to know why he had to. Have you any idea how much it cost to raise that monstrosity in stone and mortar? Do you really think he’ll just let Caernarvon go?”

  I toe my pile of goods. There’s blood beneath my fingernails.

  “When the rising is all over,” Gruffydd says, “the rebels crushed and Madog ap Llywelyn hanged from Caernarvon’s walls, the burgesses will come back. They’ll rebuild Caernarvon, but they’ll remember what happened here. As will the English king. The burgesses have learned what happens when Welshmen are pushed to the wall, and they will not push so hard again.”

  Da went out, but Caernarvon happened anyway. Ten years he’s been dust, and English have learned naught.

  Gruffydd nods at the brat. “This girl has learned it better than most. And now she’s the sole holder of her father’s burgage. She’ll bring her husband into the privileges of Caernarvon and tell him exactly what to think of us. That’s who we’ll live under. Those who remember the aftermath.”

  Not if she doesn’t survive the aftermath. Not if I turn her out, let the men with blackened faces take care of her.

  Sharp pain shoots up my arm and Gruffydd’s breath rushes past my ear. “I see it in your face, Gwenhwyfar. And believe me, I’m sorely tempted to let you, but by God, we are not animals, no matter how many times they say as much.”

  I pull free, glare down at her.

  “She stays,” Gruffydd says in a ragged voice. “Come what may, we will not harm her or allow harm to come to her.”

  The brat is trembling now. Hard. Ripping at a loose thread on her cuff as if it’s biting her.

  Like as not she thinks she’s escaped a terrible fate, but she’ll come to envy those who fell in Caernarvon.

  She is without the walls now.

  ***

  For the first time in as long as I can remember, I don’t get up at bare dawn. I lie abed till the whole sky is pink, stretch like a hearthcat, and smile up at the thatch.

  Then I rise and spend a long, delicious moment deciding what I’m going to do next.

  Sometime in the night, the brat moved. She’s huddled near the door even though it’s the coldest place in the house. She’s staring hard at the floor, and the
re are stark lines down her cheeks where tears have carved runnels through the grime.

  I ignore the brat, stir the fire to life, tend to Mam. Gruffydd comes in with a bucket of water and she flinches hard, even though he thumps right past her without a look.

  Gruffydd and I are eating bread and cheese when we hear a shuffle, and there she is before us. She’s trembling so badly she can barely keep her footing, but she stands chin up, shoulders back, as if she’s priming for hemp about her neck.

  The brat swallows several times, then chokes out, what will become of me?

  Gruffydd glances my way, but I fold my arms and shrug. “She’s here because of you,” I tell him in Welsh. “You deal with her.”

  He glares at me, then fixes the brat with a cool stare. That depends, he says in English. Have you anyone that will come for you?

  Yes! She jumps on it, clings to it. My cousin. Nicholas of Coventry. He’s a squire for Sir Reginald de Tibetot. You’ll find him at Wallingford. He’ll come. I know he will.

  Gruffydd nods and tells her, we’ll ask the priest’s boy to fetch him here. Should you value your life, you’ll not stir from this house till your cousin arrives. Those men out there are not to be trifled with.

  “And until then,” I say in Welsh, “you work.” I pick up the empty bucket and shove it into her arms. “Go fetch water.”

  What did you say, she asks, and I grab her wrist and rough her toward the door.

  “Water! Go. Fetch. Water.”

  The brat frowns at me in utter bewilderment as she clutches the bucket. Her clawed-up fingers stand out white and stark.

  “Best hope you’re a fast learner.” I smirk and narrow my eyes. “Some of us learned English beneath the rod.”

  She blinks rapidly, then squares up like a cornered beast.

  You’re savages, cries the brat, the lot of you are savages who killed my father!