Keeper of the Dream

by Penelope Williamson

  Owain stood up suddenly and bellowed down the length of the hall. “Cristyn, my love! Rhuddlan and I are going raiding! Merfyn ap Hywel has a herd of sheep that I’ve had my eye on all this summer. Plump sheep they are, and with fleece white and thick as clotted cream.”

  The two battle-hardened warriors helped each other step down from the dais as if it were the sheer face of Yr Wyddfa Fawr itself that they were descending. They walked very slowly and carefully toward the hearth, but stools and benches took a malevolent pleasure in leaping up into their path, so that there was a lot of banging and swearing before they finally arrived, safe but breathless, at the hearth.

  Owain laughed and the fumes of his meady breath nearly made Arianna swoon. “A rogue like Merfyn doesn’t deserve such a nice herd of sheep. ’Tis against the laws of nature, is it not, Rhuddlan?”

  He gave Raine such a hearty slap on his back that the younger man swayed on his feet. Raine was smiling lazily at Arianna, undressing her with hot, and slightly unfocused, eyes.

  “The Norman and I,” Owain proclaimed loudly, “have decided that it is our duty as Christian knights to restore order to the natural … uh … order of things.”

  They didn’t wait for permission to leave, but began to pick their way through the sleeping servants and warriors who had bedded down in the aisles of the hall.

  “Do not forget your sword and buckler, husband,” Cristyn called out after him.

  Arianna turned on her mother. “How can you encourage him in this foolishness? They are so drunk they will never be able to sit a horse, let alone ride all the way into Llyn and do battle with Merfyn ap Hywel.”

  “If I forbid him to go, he will turn stubborn. His manly pride will demand that he prove to your Norman husband that the Prince of Gwynedd wears the braies in this hall.’ She lifted her slim shoulders in a shrug. “Besides, they won’t get far.”

  Arianna scowled after them. “They are behaving like children.”

  “That is the way of men. Girls grow up, you see. We become wives and then mothers. But men remain forever at heart little boys. A wise wife learns when to humor her man’s childish whims. And when not to.”

  There was a firm set to her mother’s small pointed chin that Arianna had never noticed before. Arianna couldn’t remember many arguments between her parents, but on the few occasions when her mother had gone nose to nose with her father, it was Owain, the mighty Prince of Gwynedd, who had backed down. Arianna made a resolution that before she left Dinas Emrys with Raine, she would speak with her mother and learn all she could about how to tame a black dragon.

  Suddenly a loud splash disturbed the quiet of the hall, followed by a string of bloodcurdling curses.

  “God’s death …” Arianna stifled a giggle with her hand. “They’ve fallen into the moat!”

  Mother and daughter carefully laid aside their skeins of yarn and went to the rescue of their men. They went slowly, as if taking a stroll on their way to Mass. By the time they arrived at the gatehouse, some of Owain’s teulu had already fetched a rope and were preparing to haul the men out of the slimy water. Putting a finger to her lips, Cristyn relieved them of the rope and waved them inside.

  It was a dark night, deep and still, with only a few fading stars and a sliver of a moon to cast any light. Cristyn, looking small and slender as a girl, danced over to the thick chain that raised and lowered the drawbridge. She slung the coil of rope over the chain, but she didn’t lower it.

  “What in God’s wounds is happening up there?” Owain bellowed. “Where did everybody go? We’re freezing down here, man. And it stinks!”

  Grasping the chain with one hand and raising her skirts with the other, Cristyn lowered herself so that she was sitting on the edge of the bridge, her legs swinging free. Smiling to herself, Arianna did the same. The moat stank of stagnant water and rot. Fortunately for the two warriors now floating down there in the sludge, the castle’s sewage did not drain into the moat, but was carried away instead by an underground stream within the bailey.

  Cristyn put her weight on her outstretched arms and leaned down to peer into the darkness. “Owain, my love. Why have you decided to go swimming this time of night? I thought ‘twas your intention to steal Merfyn’s sheep.”

  “Cristyn, sweetling, is that you? Do not natter at me, woman. Fetch a rope and be quick about it. And for the Virgin’s sake, cover up your legs!”

  Cristyn pulled her skirts up higher, revealing the tops of her stockings. The pale skin of her knees were like two silver oranges in the dim moonlight. “It seems these big, brave knights need our help, daughter. Shall we give it to them?”

  Arianna looked down into the moat, but, although she could hear a lot of splashing going on, she could see nothing. “Nay, why should we? If they are such big, brave knights, they ought to be able to help themselves.”

  Raine’s voice drifted up to her from out of the black hole beneath her feet. “Arianna, my sweet vassal. Remember this afternoon and the oath you gave me.”

  Arianna remembered the afternoon, all of the afternoon. In truth, she felt hot and weak and slightly dizzy whenever she thought of that afternoon. “ Tis my thought,” she said to her mother, though she spoke loud enough to be heard above all the splashing and cursing, “that a night in the moat will go far in teaching them both that to go a-raiding with a belly and a head full of mead is a dangerous undertaking.”

  “Arianna!” Raine roared, abandoning all pretense of the gentle lover.

  Her father spoke in a wheedling tone that she’d never heard before. “Cristyn, wife of my heart, love of my life … surely you do not mean to leave me to drown?” When this elicited no response, he changed tactics. “Woman, if you don’t help us out this instant, when I do get out I will make you very, very sorry.”

  Cristyn began to hum a lilting little song. From below there came a lot of loud whispering, like the rustle of crows in a corn field. The men were no doubt plotting their next strategy. Arianna wondered whether it would take the form of promises or threats.

  “Arianna, are you listening?” Raine demanded.

  Arianna swung her legs. “Very well, I’m listening. Since I’ve nothing better to do.”

  “Your father informs me that a wife’s willful disobedience of her lord and husband—a disobedience that results in an endangerment of his life and health—is on the list. On the list, Arianna. If you continue in this defiance, it will be my veriest duty to punish you, and you must grant your permission for this punishment. For such is the law and you cannot deny it.”

  “What list does he speak of?” asked Cristyn. “What law?”

  Arianna was grateful that the dark hid the sudden color that flooded her face. “It must be the mead talking,” she said to her mother. She pretended to study her nails, though it was so dark she could barely see her hand. “Your threats are like needles pricking the hide of a water buffalo, husband. I feel not a thing. In truth, I believe I will return to the hall now and resume my skeining.”

  Mother and daughter stood up and made a great show of leaving, rattling the suspension chain and clomping on the hewn-log decking of the bridge. More bellows and threats echoed up from below. At the gate they paused and pretended to reconsider.

  “I suppose,” Cristyn said, “much though they deserve it, it would be unnecessarily cruel to leave them floating in the moat for the entire night.”

  “Mayhap you’re right,” Arianna said. “A guard could mistake Raine for a Norman rogue and put an arrow in his arse.”

  Raine’s voice came at her out of the dark. It sounded as if he were speaking through his teeth. “That is not at all amusing, little wife.”

  Arianna smothered a laugh with her hand and met her mother’s brimming eyes. “Shall I fetch the rope?”

  “I suppose …” Cristyn heaved a sigh of defeat, like a woman moved by pity in spite of her better judgment. “Else they will likely become waterlogged and drown afore morning.”

  They tied one end of the rope to
the chain and lowered the other into the moat. After a brief argument about who was to go first—during which Raine pointed out that age went before youth and Owain insisted that youth must go before beauty—the rope suddenly pulled taut as it took a man’s weight. Arianna felt a quiver of fear in her stomach as it occurred to her that she and her mother might have gone a little too far with their jest.

  Owain’s head came over the edge of the bridge, followed by the rest of him. He looked like some slimy creature that had crawled out of a bog. Rearing up, he made a grab for his wife. “Come here, woman, and give me a kiss.”

  Mother and daughter both ran off, shrieking and laughing, for the safety of the hall.

  Owain turned his head aside and spat moat water out of his mouth. “Women!”

  “Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.” Raine hauled himself onto the bridge. He shook his head like a wet dog and wiped the reeking slime off his face. “The first man to say that was probably Adam.”

  Owain snorted a laugh. “Aye, no doubt. No doubt.” He bent over to wring out the skirt of his tunic, looking up through slanted eyes at the Norman, his enemy. The knight’s pale eyes were focused on the gate through which Arianna had disappeared. Owain straightened and laid a heavy hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “You will cherish her, you will cherish my Arianna?”

  Raine stiffened, but he did not shrug off his father-in-law’s hand. “She will come to no harm as my wife,” he said.

  It was not precisely the promise that Owain had wanted, but it would do.

  For he had seen the way the Norman looked at his daughter. Love did not make a man look at a woman like that. But hunger did. He had felt that sort of hunger for Cristyn the first time he laid eyes on her, felt it still after nearly twenty-five years. How well he knew that out of such a hunger, love could grow.

  Sunlight glinted behind Arianna’s closed lids, and she opened them slowly onto the gilt-spangled canopy of her marriage bed. She stretched out her hand, but the place beside her was empty. She turned over, pressing her face into the sheet, breathing deeply of his smell.

  Their marriage wasn’t perfect—far from it. But in the week that had passed since they’d left her father’s llys and come home to Rhuddlan, they had reached an accommodation. Aye, accommodation was the word for it. They had laughed and made love and spoken truths in the quiet of the night that neither one of them quite yet believed in the light of day. They were like two feuding enemies, she thought, enemies who had somehow grown fond of each other and weary of the fight. So they had buried their swords and sat down together to drink a cup of mead and tell tales and laugh together. And perhaps … perhaps become friends.

  He brought her with him now when he toured his commotes. The land ruled by the Lord of Rhuddlan encompassed thick forests and bleak moorlands, all rock and coarse grass, and wild salt marshes where wading birds bred among empty tidal sands. But there were also rich open fields of oats and barley and rye, all patched together haphazardly like a ragpicker’s scraps, and lumpish, cross-cropped hills dotted with flocks of wool-bearing sheep.

  “It must please you to know that all of this is yours,” she had said one day as they stood on the crest of a hill admiring the view of the wide, rich green valley that bordered the band of blue water that was the river Clwyd.

  “And yours,” had been his response, and she realized with a warm jolt of surprise that his were not empty words. He saw the Honor of Rhuddlan as hers to share—both in the bounty and the responsibility that came from ruling.

  She stretched now, curling her toes. She really should be getting up, before Raine came to get her, calling her a slug-a-bed. They were to spend the day together supervising the harvest. Already the breeze coming through the open window smelled sweet from the freshly mown grain.

  She had just swung her feet over the side of the bed, when a horrible nausea gripped her. She knelt in the rushes beside the bed, and was violently sick into the chamber pot. Breathing deeply, afraid for the moment to move, she sat hunched over and tried to will the nausea to pass.

  A pair of lanky legs appeared before her. Her blurred gaze moved up the long length of them until it rested on a white face surrounded by locks of fiery red hair and an impish grin.

  “What are you doing on the floor, my lady?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing, you fool?” Embarrassed at having that wretched squire catch her in so undignified a position, Arianna stumbled to her feet. “And what are you doing up and about? You’ll rupture your wound.”

  One moment, it seemed, she was talking and taking a step toward the squire, and the next thing she knew she was lying on the bed and Taliesin sat beside her with a bowl, her golden mazer, in his lap. He leaned over to wipe off her face with a dampened cloth and a soothing heat seemed to flow into her, over her, as if she were sliding into a tub of warm, oily water. She looked deep into black eyes, eyes that glowed, moonlit from within.

  He is no squire, she thought. No human boy could have survived such a wound she saw Kilydd give him, survive and then be up and about causing mischief in so short a time. And those eyes, something in his eyes …

  “You fainted, milady. Nothing to worry about.” The voice was Taliesin’s, clear, melodic, the trained voice of a bard. But the eyes, the eyes belonged to someone else, somewhere else….

  She squeezed her own eyes shut. Her stomach felt so queasy. She swallowed around the sour taste in her mouth and tried to ignore her pounding head.

  “Do you need the chamber pot again, my lady?” Taliesin said.

  Arianna’s lids slowly opened. “I fear that some Norman has tried to poison me.”

  His mobile lips curled into a smile, his black eyes glittered, brightening. “Some Norman has certainly made you ill, milady. You are with child.”

  “I can’t be.”

  His eyes flashed brighter. “Don’t be foolish, girl. Of course you can be.” The light in his eyes faded. He looked himself again, all mischievous boy. His face bore a smug look. “My lord will be pleased,” he said.

  With child. Arianna pressed her hand against her womb. She was going to have a baby. Raine’s baby.

  Emotions crowded in on her, so many and so fast that she couldn’t settle on any one—joy, fear, excitement. Baby. I’m going to have a baby.

  She became aware of Taliesin’s cheerful chatter as he danced around the room. “ ’Tis morning sickness you’ve got. You won’t die from it, you only think you will. It’s a good sign actually. It means the babe is taking.”

  He appeared before her again, a blackjack mug in his hand. He helped her to sit, tilting the leather mug to her lips. “This should help—it’s rhubarb, licorice, and wood-bane. The woodbane tastes awful, I fear. The licorice helps to disguise it some, but not a lot.”

  Arianna swallowed the draught, grimacing at its bitter, oily taste. He started to pull the mug away, but she grabbed his hand. “Taliesin, you will leave me to tell my lord husband of this.”

  “Of course, my lady. That pleasure should be yours alone.”

  He flashed a ravishing smile, patting her cheek as if he were soothing a child. She couldn’t help smiling back at him. “You look mighty pleased with yourself, boy. You’d think this was all your doing.”

  A mischievous, secretive look came into his eyes, and they shimmered, like twin stars in the blackest of nights. “Goddess be with you,” he whispered.

  He sauntered from the room, humming a lilting tune. At the door he turned and, grinning broadly, put words to the music. It wasn’t a lullaby, as she had thought, but a love song.

  “Lady, take me, body and heart,

  And keep me for your one true love … ”

  The door swung shut on Taliesin’s sweet, liquid voice. You are with child. Raine would be pleased when she told him. Oh, more than pleased. It was what he wanted most, the culmination of all his ambitions.

  She rubbed her stomach. How strange it seemed to think that at this very moment a babe was growing within
her. How strange and how wondrous. She tipped her head, looking down at her flat abdomen, and she tried to picture it swollen with child. She saw a fat, waddling Arianna with a belly shaped like an ale barrel, and she giggled. She pictured herself with a babe in her arms, suckling at her breasts, and her smile softened.

  With slow, careful movements, Arianna tried sitting up. She felt weak and heavy, but she was no longer nauseated. The golden mazer sat beside her on the bed where Taliesin had left it. She pulled it into her lap, cradling it in her palms. She looked down, but saw only her own face reflected back to her from the clear flat surface of the water.

  She dipped her finger in the water. The reflection shattered and disappeared. She didn’t care if the magic bowl had suddenly decided to guard its secrets. She was living her future.

  She had bred the Norman a son and all she could feel was joy.

  17

  Raine leaned on one outstretched arm, trying to hold a piece of curling parchment flat on the table, while at the same time adding a sum by pushing beads up the wires of an abacus. One corner of his mouth turned down in a frown and his hair looked mussed, as if just moments ago he had raked it with impatient fingers.

  Arianna stood in the door of the antechamber. The sight of him caused the oddest sensation in the pit of her stomach, a sort of vibration, like a loud hum in a hollow cave, and a compulsion to touch him. She wanted to smooth the hair back out of his eyes and kiss his mouth into softness. But he had a visitor.

  She started to turn away, but she must have made some sound, for Raine looked up. “Arianna … Come here. Have you met Simon?”

  A fat, bandy-legged man waddled forward to greet her. He was richly dressed and sported a fancy beard that had been waxed and tufted and then interwoven with gold threads. The pointed yellow hat he wore, along with the big circle of saffron-colored cloth sewn on his breast, marked him as a Jew.