White Ravens

by Owen Sheers

  It was the sound of that second shot that dragged Matthew back to consciousness. The bullet Evan had fired at him had penetrated his waistcoat and hit the casement of the silver pocket watch Ben had given him the morning they’d left the farm. Piercing the casement the bullet had shattered the inner workings but hadn’t gone any further, spreading and flattening into a splash of lead instantly welded to the delicate cogs, springs and pins of the watch’s mechanism.

  The force of the impact had still been considerable, knocking Matthew out, breaking one of his ribs and sending a crushing shockwave through his chest and lungs. The sound of the second shot reached him like a distant echo, a vague hand, shaking him awake. As the light seeped back into his eyes, as he became aware of where he was once more, Matthew tried to speak. When he did, he found he couldn’t. Hearing the commotion in the room, but unable to see it; hearing the hysterical cries of his wife and the cries of his son, Matthew tried to bring words to his lips, but none would come. He tried to move, but again found he could not. His eyes were open and despite the sound of the shot still ringing in his ears, he could hear. He could even smell the tang of cordite from the fired pistol, and the charring of his waistcoat where the bullet had entered. But his body and his voice were paralysed, silenced by the bullet cooling in the distorted workings of his watch.

  Lying there, on the floor, his vision limited to the ceiling above him, Matthew listened as Ben, speaking urgently in rushed Welsh, hurried Branwen and their son out of the house. He heard him gathering together clothes for them and then the sound of him physically carrying them both from the room and on, out of the front door.

  Just as Branwen’s voice had been the first thing Matthew had known of his wife, her singing rising through the floorboards beneath his bed, so her voice would be the last he’d know of her too. As his sight began to fade again, Matthew could still make out Branwen’s pitiful repeated moan as her brother carried her into the night. ‘Matthew, Matthew, Matthew,’ was all she said. His name, diminishing into the distance before echoing again in his mind, ‘Matthew, Matthew, Matthew,’ as his eyes dimmed and the light within them extinguished to darkness.

  When it was clear the old man wasn’t going to continue, Rhian spoke. ‘But,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t dead was he?’

  She’d asked a question, but said it as a statement. The old man turned to look at her. Her forehead was creased in thought, and he saw that she knew. ‘No,’ he said, ‘he didn’t die. But then, he’s never really been alive since either.’

  ‘How d’yer mean?’

  ‘Well,’ the old man said with a sigh. ‘Matthew’s father heard those shots and arrived at the cottage soon after Ben and Branwen had left. He called the police straight away, of course, finding his son lying there, and Evan too; the back of his head blown away. The police took Matthew to hospital where they fixed up his rib as best they could. An inspector came back the next day to question him. Matthew’s voice and some of his movement had come back by then. Propped up in his bed he told the inspector everything, but said he didn’t want to press any charges for abduction or for anything else. The only people to have committed any crimes, he told the inspector, had been himself and Evan, he saw that now. He against Branwen’s love, Evan against them all. Evan had taken care of his own punishment and so would Matthew. That’s what he promised himself as he lay there in that hospital bed. A week later he was discharged, first to his parents’ house and then, a week later again, to his own silent cottage where he walked through its front door still carrying a bruise the size of a tennis ball over his heart.

  When he opened that door Matthew found a letter waiting for him on the mat. It had arrived that same morning and although he didn’t recognise the handwriting he knew exactly who and where it was from. Sitting down beside the fireplace, the ash from that fateful night still piled beneath the grate, he opened the letter and read. It was from Ben. He’d heard about Matthew’s survival when he’d read a newspaper article about Evan’s suicide. But the paper had run the story too late. Ben had bought the copy when he was in town, having just left the hospital where he’d listened to the coroner read his report in a room off the mortuary where Branwen’s body was laid out. The best diagnosis the coroner had been able to give, Ben wrote, was that Branwen had died of a broken heart.

  Later that night, after Matthew had cried himself dry, he went to the bookshelf and pulled out the copy of the Mabinogion Ben had told him to read. Sitting on the bed he’d shared with his wife, surrounded by her clothes, by what he could still salvage of her scent, Matthew read the Second Branch, the myth of Branwen, Daughter of Llyr. When he’d finished the story he understood. He wrote back to Ben that night, telling him he would follow this letter he was sending to Wales. He wanted to lay flowers on Branwen’s grave and to retrieve their son. But when Matthew did journey back to that little town in the hills there was already a reply from Ben waiting for him with the stationmaster. The note told Matthew where to find Branwen’s grave within the grounds of the mountain chapel where they’d married. But then it also asked him not to visit the farm, not to come for his son, but to leave them, Ben and his nephew, alone. ‘The boy is happy here,’ it read. ‘Let him be so now.’

  Matthew respected Ben’s wishes and, against his strongest desires, stayed away from that mountain farmhouse to which he’d brought so much tragedy. He did, though, climb up into the hills to the old chapel where he laid white lilies on Bran’s grave, propping them carefully under the inscription on her headstone – ‘Llawn yw’r coed o ddail a blode, / Llawn iawn o gariad ydwyf inne.’ ‘The woods are full of leaves and flowers / And I am full of love.’ Kneeling beside her there, Matthew vowed he would never return home until he’d found a way to make amends to her family, even if that meant never seeing Ireland again.’

  This time the old man made it clear he’d come to the end of his story. Sitting back on the bench he sighed, apparently transported by his own words far away from London and the traffic rushing past on the road behind them.

  Somehow, the day was already turning. The sun seemed to have quickened through the sky so when Rhian looked at the old man’s profile his face was lit in the honeyed light of evening. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said at last. ‘How would reading the myth have helped him?’

  ‘Well,’ the old man said, leaning forward again and placing his hands on his stick and his chin on his hands. ‘Maybe it wouldn’t. But those old stories, they’re all lessons and warnings aren’t they? It’s up to us which. For Matthew this one was both. He didn’t listen to its warning, so he learnt its lesson instead.’

  ‘Which was?’ Rhian asked quietly.

  ‘To be a bridge, not a barrier.’ He turned to meet her eye. ‘Matthew should have reached out to Evan, even after what he’d done. And, God knows, he should have reached out to Branwen too.’

  Rhian looked out at the river, its eddies picking up scraps of the evening light, swirling glimmers of gold in its dark waters. ‘Their son,’ she said, still looking away, remembering the cool touch of her father’s scar running the length of his arm. ‘His name was Gwern wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ the old man said softly. ‘Yes it was.’

  ‘My father’s name,’ she said, turning back to face him. ‘How did you know? To find me here?’

  ‘Oh,’ the old man said through a sad smile. ‘A little bird told me.’

  Shifting his weight on the bench he leaned in towards Rhian until his head was level with hers. She saw his hand shaking with strain on the handle of his stick and heard the waver of age in his voice again as he whispered, soft and low into her ear, the sea wind of an Irish accent rising from nowhere through his words. ‘Be more of a man than either your grandfather or your father ever were Rhian,’ he said. ‘Go back to your brothers now. Help them. Be a bridge.’

  Ar Lan Y Môr

  Ar lan y môr mae rhosys cochion

  Ar lan y môr mae lilis gwynion

  Ar lan y môr mae ’nghariad inne

&nbs
p; Yn cysgu’r nos a chodi’r bore.

  Ar lan y môr mae carreg wastad

  Lle bûm yn siarad gair â’m cariad

  O amgylch hon fe dyf y lili

  Ac ambell sbrigyn o rosmari.

  Llawn iawn yw’r môr o swnd a chregyn

  Llawn yw’r wy o wyn a melyn

  Llawn yw’r coed o ddail a blode

  Llawn iawn o gariad ydwyf inne.

  Ar lan y môr mae cerrig gleision

  Ar lan y môr mae blodau’r meibion

  Ar lan y môr mae pob rhinwedde

  Ar lan y môr mae ’nghariad inne.

  Down by the Sea

  By the seaside there are red roses

  By the seaside there are white lilies

  By the seaside is my sweetheart

  Sleeping at night and rising in the morning.

  By the seaside is a level stone

  Where I spoke a word with my love

  Around it grows the lily

  And an occasional sprig of rosemary.

  The sea is full of sand and shells

  The egg is full of white and yellow

  The wood is full of leaves and flowers

  And I am full of love

  By the seaside are blue stones

  By the seaside are the sons’ flowers

  By the seaside is every virtue

  By the seaside is my sweetheart.

  The Second Branch of the Mabinogion

  Branwen, Daughter of Llyr

  Bendigeidfran, son of Llyr, is the king of the island of Britain, invested with the crown of London. One day, while sitting at one of his courts in Harlech he sees several beautiful ships approaching from southern Ireland. The ships bear Matholwch, king of Ireland who asks to marry Bendigeidfran’s sister, Branwen, daughter of Llyr. Bendigeidfran agrees to the union, but during the celebrations, Bendigeidfran’s half-brother, Efnysien, objects and viciously maims Matholwch’s horses.

  Bendigeidfran offers Matholwch compensation in the form of a magic cauldron that can bring men back to life but without the power of speech.

  Matholwch and Branwen go back to Ireland where they are at first welcomed and Branwen has a son, Gwern. But after a year rumours spread about Efnysien’s insult and Matholwch has to reject Branwen to stop the uproar. Set to cook for the court, she rears a starling that, after three years, she sends to her brother with a message about her treatment.

  Bendigeidfran raises an army that sails to Ireland while he wades, because no ship is big enough for him. The Irish see him coming and retreat over the Liffey, destroying the bridge. But Bendigeidfran makes himself a bridge for his army to cross, and to appease him the Irish build a house, because no house has ever been big enough for him before. But they hide a hundred warriors inside. Efnysien secretly kills the warriors, and when the two sides meet openly peace is restored and Branwen’s child Gwern is made king.

  Calling Gwern to him, Efnysien throws the child into the fire; fighting immediately breaks out, with the Irish replenishing their ranks by throwing their dead warriors into the cauldron. Seeing this Efnysien repents and throws himself into the cauldron, stretching out to break it and his heart at the same time.

  Bendigeidfran, who is wounded with a poison spear in the foot, escapes, as do Branwen and seven men. Branwen dies of a broken heart. Bendigeidfran orders his men to cut off his head and carry it to the Gwynfryn in London to be buried with its face towards France. It was said no oppression could come to the island while the head was in its hiding place.

  A brief synopsis: for the full story of the Second Branch see The Mabinogion, A new translation by Sioned Davies

  (Oxford World’s Classics, 2007)

  Afterword

  ‘Then he went for the horses, and cut their lips to the teeth, and their ears down to their heads, and their tails to their backs; and where he could get a grip on their eyelids, he cut them to the bone. And in that way he maimed the horses, so that they were no good for anything.’

  Ever since first reading the Mabinogion whenever I’ve heard the myths mentioned this is the passage that comes to mind. Not a tree half in flame, nor the image of a beautiful woman woven from flowers, nor even the giant Bendigeidfran wading with his army across the Irish sea. But this, Efnysien’s mutilation of Matholwch’s horses; a brother’s disproportionate, displaced revenge for his sister’s marriage to their owner.

  Why should this passage, more than any other, have made such an indelible mark? I’m sure it’s partly because of the quality of the writing – the mythic prose that describes the action so coolly while also hitting all the right triggers. When Efnysien cuts ‘their lips to the teeth’, the horses’ sudden macabre grins are slashed across our vision. We see and feel the panicked struggle in that almost casual aside, ‘where he could get a grip on their eyelids’. And then there’s that terrible repeated reduction – ‘to the teeth... down to their heads... to their backs... to the bone’.

  For me, though, this already powerful description was made even more penetrative by a strong personal association with horses. I’d been lucky enough to grow up among them, on visits to my grandfather’s smallholding, and at home in the fields and lanes around my parents’ house in South Wales. From an early age I’d been well acquainted with the calmness of their assured weight, the beauty of their movement and the mystery of their ancientness. So when I first read of Efnysien’s rageful assault against Matholwch’s stable I felt the injustice of his attack keenly, as if his blade had cut into the horses grazing in the fields outside my window, as much as those of the Irish king’s.

  Adding further voltage to this general association was the charge of a specific memory. One summer when I was nine or ten years old some horses around our village were abused and maimed in their fields. The idea of what happened to those horses, so inexplicable to a young mind, cast a shadow over those fields that took many months to fade. Several years later, when I read the description of Efnysien’s crime that shadow darkened again, not just because the description reminded me of the maimed horses in my village, but also because it evoked so vividly the sense of senselessness I’d felt as a child; the inexplicability of violence meted out upon innocent animals.

  In the years since, Matholwch’s disfigured horses became something of a mythic touchstone for me, occupying a similar territory as the maids hung by Odysseus on his return to Ithaca. Just like Penelope’s maids the horses were the ‘collateral damage’ of the myth’s main protagonists, victims of the quarrels and loves of their masters, their innocence reflecting upon their assailants to further amplify the already gratuitous nature of their crimes.

  I suppose it’s no surprise, given this history, that I should have turned to the Second Branch of the Mabinogion when asked to choose a story for this project. When I did, though, I discovered a very different story from the one I’d remembered. I read it again and again. With each rereading the purpose and core of the myth seemed to shift under my gaze. What, after all, beyond that violent act at its genesis, was Branwen’s story about? Was this a Welsh-Irish Romeo and Juliet? Star-crossed lovers at the mercy of tribal prejudice? Or was this a tale of a beautfiul woman suffering at the hands of the very men who should have been protecting her? Or was this story not about Branwen at all, but actually a cautionary tale about the cyclical nature of atrocity? A lesson in how violence will beget violence in an ever more terrible spiral of destruction?

  Branwen’s myth is, of course, all of these; a surprisingly subtle and layered tale, the focus of which is defined as much by its contemporary reader as the fourteenth-century storytellers who first shaped and mapped its narrative. It is a myth – a story both of its time and yet timeless, part of its colour being leant by the temporal lens through which it’s read. For me, a lens of 2009 brought me zooming in once again upon Efnysien’s act of violence and also upon Matholwch’s ‘reply’ to that insult – his own excessive and displaced punishment of Branwen upon the couple’s return to Ireland. These beats of the myth struck a strong contemporary
note with me, although at first I couldn’t work out exactly what that note was. It was something to do with the unreasonableness of these men’s actions, the excessive nature of their physical and emotional violence and the nihilistic resonance it left in its wake.

  And then I remembered. A friend’s cousin who, having come of age with a Croatian militia in the Bosnian conflict, began stabbing his pregnant wife with his penknife while travelling home one night in a taxi. Then there was the brother of another friend, recently returned from Iraq, whose wife had banished him from the house after the sight of his own children, in their comfortable home, with their toys, food and security, had driven him into fits of rage. And then there was the man I’d recently met in a Bridgend prison who, back home after two tours in Afghanistan, responded to a minor insult in the pub with extreme and brutal violence. This was the note I’d heard in the actions of Efnysien and Matholwch: the irrational violence of men suddenly returned from a world of conflict into a world of peace. Men whose internal scales had been imbalanced by sanctioned violence and who, shaped by that experience, had returned home to perpetrate more violence, both physical and emotional, themselves.

  In responding to the Branwen myth I knew I didn’t want to faithfully hit every beat of the original. I wasn’t interested in holding up a mirror, translating every aspect of plot, character and incident into a contemporary setting. At the same time, however, I was interested in somehow using the myth’s architecture, especially the broader arc of its narrative, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a certain ludic pleasure in finding ways for other elements of the original text also to exert pressure upon my tale. The sources of this pressure were sometimes from the myth itself – the cauldron that restores dead warriors to life without their speech, the starling that carries Branwen’s message home to Wales. Other influences, however, were drawn from the myth’s wider orbit, such as the tradition of oral storytelling that lies at the genesis of the Mabinogion, or the interpretation of Bendigeidfran as an early prototype for the Fisher King. The greatest influence upon my own story, though, would grow from a seed sown at the very end of the original myth.