See How They Run

1. Title Page
   
2. Dedication
   
3. Introduction
   
4. See How They Run
   
5. I
   
6. II
   
7. III
   
8. IV
   
9. V
   
10. VI
    
11. VII
    
12. Third Branch of the Mabinogion:
    
13. Afterword
    
14. Acknowledgements
    
15. Advertisements
    
16. Copyright
    

Er cof am Iona Evans (1965-1989)

New Stories from the Mabinogion

Introduction

Some stories, it seems, just keep on going. Whatever you do to them, the words are still whispered abroad, a whistle in the reeds, a bird’s song in your ear.

Every culture has its myths; many share ingredients
with each other. Stir the pot, retell the tale and you draw out something new, a new flavour, a new mean
ing maybe.
There’s no one right version. Perhaps it’s because myths were a way of describing our
place in the world, of putting people and their search for meaning in a bigger picture that they linger in our imagination.

The eleven stories of the
Mabinogion
(‘story of
youth’) are diverse native Welsh tales taken from
two medieval manuscripts. But their roots go back hundreds of years, through written fragments and the
unwritten, storytelling tradition. They were first
collected under this title, and translated into English, in the nineteenth century.

The
Mabinogion
brings us Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and a history of the Island of Britain seen through the eyes of medieval Wales – but tells tales that stretch way beyond the boundaries of contemporary
Wales, just as the ‘Welsh’ part of this island once did:
Welsh was once spoken as far north as Edinburgh. In one tale, the gigantic Bendigeidfran
wears the crown of
London, and his severed head is buried there, facing France, to protect the land
from invaders.

There is enchantment and shape-shifting, conflict, peacemaking, love, betrayal. A wife conjured out of flowers is punished for unfaithfulness by being turned into an owl, Arthur and his knights chase a magical wild boar and its piglets from Ireland across south Wales to Cornwall, a prince changes places with the king of the underworld for a year...

Many of these myths are familiar in Wales, and
some have filtered through into the wider British
tradition, but others are little known beyond the Welsh border. In this series of New Stories from the Mabinogion the old tales are at the heart of the new, to be enjoyed wherever they are read.

Each author has chosen a story to reinvent and retell for their own reasons and in their own way:
creating fresh, contemporary tales that speak to us as much of the world we know now as of times
long gone.

Penny Thomas, series editor

See How They Run

I

He sat at his desk and felt really great. For the first time in ages: on top of his game. A strong surge of happiness had swept through him all morning; he felt clean, alert, and completely in control.

Good news had arrived in a steady trickle, as it does sometimes in life, and he felt really up for it. He enjoyed fresh starts, physically as well as mentally.
They happened so seldom – they were rare and
special. Anything was possible.

Today, on a Monday morning in spring, in his room overlooking the town, he studied his computer screen. He’d already changed the background to a shot he’d taken himself – a sheaf of young daffodils in the college grounds. Fresh start, fresh picture. Crisp and clear. It was almost religious the way he went about it; he could have been a hermit sweeping his cell on Christmas Eve, with a sprig of holly above the holy rood, his stone floor sprinkled with a dusting of fresh, windblown snow.

He fetched a hard drive from a low drawer to his
right, and after connecting it he filed away every
single document and folder on the desktop, clearing the screen. Next he rearranged all the icons in a neat triple line on the left; then he played about with his recycle bin, before deciding to leave it in the bottom left hand corner. The space to the right of the daffs was completely clear; when he leaned back in his
chair to study the effect he felt a fresh surge of
pleasure. A bright yellow light of optimism cheered the room. And outside, a neon sky. He’d studied it through his classical ogee window – a vast vault of blue, seemingly higher and broader than he’d ever seen it before. Looking out over the landscape he’d seen no movement at all, as if every single human had been transported somewhere else, leaving a virgin landscape. He tried to imagine the scene before modern history: a wide open country full of silence and measureless, limitless time. It was easier to imagine the deep past with a sad wind moaning outside. Using his imagination he could erase all the buildings below and travel swiftly backwards. That’s why history had attracted him as a boy: as the wind saddened in the eaves of their rural cottage he had wondered about those lost, mysterious people toiling in their raw landscapes; he had been intrigued by their forgotten tombs and their uncontrollable myths.
Back in the present he toyed with the idea of
binning the games folder, but he liked a quick bout of Solitaire or Mahjong Titans before he started, to limber up, so he stayed his hand.

There! He had a pristine desktop, and he went a step further, clearing his large pine desk of everything except for his fruit bowl and his regulation family photo, plus a new notebook and a new biro. He played about with their appearance on the desk, nudging each item in different directions until everything looked just right. Minimalistic and tidy. It was like being a god, rearranging the world. He was Zeus with a half-eaten apple in one hand and a mouse in the other, stooped over his computer, viewing the world within the screen, quietly planning, conniving, pushing his little playthings this way or that. He liked the image; he’d just finished a paper on the old Celtic gods, whose names no one knew, and his head was still full of them.

After storing the hard drive he rubbed his hand dry of apple juice and right-clicked a new folder into
existence. It was neat the way he could do that.
Sublime, creative. He labelled it
Notes
and filed away his first document, a memo from his head of department:

From: Professor M. Williams

To: all deans, faculty heads, everyone in the history department

Dr Llwyd McNamara has received a bursary to help him prepare a biography of the great rugby player Big M, and as a consequence he will take a term’s sabbatical to research his project. Dr Fflur Ceiriog will take his lectures pro tem and I will take his seminars. I’m sure we all wish him well, and I look forward to reading more about this Welsh icon. An overview of the Irish tragedy is long overdue.

For years, Llwyd had used his unusual Christian name as a chat-up device during the seduction process, but since it was unpronounceable to most of the students, especially the large Chinese contingent who clogged his local Morrisons every term, he’d been secretly glad when the departmental secretary mutated it, though he felt she might have consulted him first.

So he became Lou to all except the small Welsh community at the college. Even his wife mocked him with it, gently and ironically. The Tibetans, she said, gave each child a new name if it survived a major illness. Was she implying something?

He’d never known why he had a Welsh forename. It was the only hint he’d been given regarding his paternity; his ma had refused steadfastly to tell him any more. He’d been born at a time when the only
special relationship
had been the bond between all the Celtic countries, and not between a bunch of bent Americo-British politicians and their business cronies.

Llwyd meant
pale
and suggested a pasty, nerdy type. Even worse, it hinted at a furtive, malicious plotter, an Iago figure.

Lou positioned his new folder in the top right-hand corner and wondered if it looked right there, a small yellow bird in a big blue sky. Maybe he could customise it, and he toyed with the idea of phoning
IT, but realised he wasn’t sure what he wanted. A
different colour maybe? He’d leave it for now.
Perhaps one day there would be a whole department at the uni studying nothing else but computer icono­graphy – a branch of semiotics, presumably. He’d like that, he was intrigued by symbols.

Next, he created another folder and labelled it
Ireland
. After moving it about with his mouse he
finally positioned it directly below
Notes
. It was so agreeable, the way a folder glided into place when it was released by the mouse.

Finally, before starting on his fresh, daffodil-smelling project, he phoned Catrin to check up on her – because they’d both clicked another folder into being about three months previously; his partner was pregnant, and she was preparing that very day to set off to her parents’ home in the hills to inform them. It was going to be an exciting year, he could feel it in his marrow.

He celebrated with three straight clearances among the Mahjong Titans.

And yet something wasn’t quite right. After winning his games he sat for a while, looking at the flatish bank of cumulus clouds he’d caught with his camera, above the daffodils, now frozen on his screen. He got up and went back to the window, finding another bank of clouds, lighter and longer, rumpled pillows
drifting eastwards across the real horizon. In the doll-within-doll world of his computer the clouds
had no emotional density; yet over there in the sky, moving very slowly in the far distance, they imparted a sensuous, supernatural otherness, a stratospheric mysticism; high in the blue above him they seemed to drift on the invisible winds of time, a fantastical convoy. He imagined the old deities sitting on their thrones of ether, drifting towards the edge of the world and the fringes of human comprehension. The clouds could also be seen as huge ships, Leviathan trawlers crawling with their engines merely ticking over, dredging the land; their cumulus shadows were long dark nets thrown out to gather the homesteads, animals, spinneys and churches below.

Lou considered the worlds within worlds around him: he himself had been hatched inside his grandmother, as an egg within his embryonic mother; now his genetic future was growing silently within Catrin, as a tiny cloud might form and gather at dawn below the sea’s far horizon.

On his desktop lay a document within a folder within a computer within a room within a college within a nation, and so on ad infinitum – but almost
everything he’d created so far had lain within the confines of academia.
Confines.
If he wanted to research
this book properly he would have to leave the safety of his academic atoll, relinquish the beautiful digital shimmer inside the coral depths of his computer. He would have to step out into the real universe. The one with rain and death, not pretty icons and cursory games. Farewell to FreeCell and Mahjong Titans. Most of all he’d miss the pattern of books – a blow-up of scholarship’s dusty butterfly wings – covering the entire wall to his right. Like the cloud-shadows dredging the landscape outside, his books had trapped him between the webbing of their printed lines and hauled him along the scholastic seabed. He’d been caught, hook, line and sinker.