The Brothers of Gwynedd (46 page)

  There my lord made known his mind concerning the future of Wales and its union under his leadership, and in council there was no dissenting voice. With one accord they accepted him as overlord, on royal terms of protection and justice upon his side, and fealty and service upon theirs, consenting also to the despatch of an envoy, in the name of this new Wales, to compound an alliance with Scotland, for the better guarding of both lands from the encroachments of English power. And Gwion of Bangor was chosen and approved as envoy to the Scottish patriots.

  To this day I remember, above all, the burning whiteness of my lord's face when the hands of the last of his vassals were withdrawn from between his hands, and there was a silence, every eye hanging upon him. For he was so pale and bright with desire and resolution and the pride of great humility that he seemed to be as a lamp lit from within. And I remembered that we were born within the same night, perhaps the same hour, and his stars were my stars, and I thought how therefore there might be indeed a logic in this, that whatever I paid in sacrifice might justly weigh to his gain, and it followed that there was nothing for grieving even in my grief.

  I will not say that it ever seemed to me that Cristin's coin could justifiably be spent like mine, but Cristin I could neither help nor save. God would surely some day fill up for her the void where she had poured out her love to no avail. As for myself, I thought I was well spent and well lost if I bought one more gleam of lustre for this my prince, who thus spoke to us:

  "My grandsire Llewelyn ap Iorwerth took to himself the style and title of prince of Aberffraw and lord of Snowdon, and did great honour to that name. But both these are names of the north, and Gwynedd is but one member in this land, and though I was born there, and of that same line, yet you have laid on me now the right and duty of speaking for north and south alike, for east and west, and of maintaining the rights of all. I think it only fitting that this all should be one. And with your consent I choose to be known henceforth as Llewelyn ap Griffith ap Llewelyn, prince of Wales."

  Every man there, to the last and least of us, caught up the breath from his lips and cried his title back to him with acclaim:

  "Llewelyn ap Griffith ap Llewelyn, prince of Wales!"
When we rode from Strata Florida it was a winter dawn, but of sparkling beauty, for there was a clear sky and light frost that silvered the bushes over and rang the branches like bells. For the first mile of this journey of the first true prince of Wales we rode due east, and the sun came up before us into its low zenith vast and glorious, the colour of red gold, as it might have been an orb presented at a coronation.

Still I remember that homecoming we had, when we rode back to Aber from the assembly of all the chieftains of Wales, in the spring of the year of grace, one thousand, two hundred and fifty-eight. We came at the season of the rising of Christ from the dead, when all things rose gloriously with him, the meadow flowers in the grass, the larks soaring from under our horses' feet, the fortunes of Gwynedd, and the star of our prince Llewelyn, no longer prince only of the north, and hemmed in by English power on all sides, but the overlord of many vassals and the entire hope of Wales.

  For at that assembly every chieftain of the land but one only had sworn the oath of fealty to my lord and friend, and done homage to him as suzerain, and for this while at least our long-dismembered land was one. Indeed, I think that was the first time in all our history that Wales had been one, no small glory to him who kneaded all those several fragments into a single rock within his hands.

  So we came home at that Easter with great elation and lightness of heart, to match the season and the wonder. When we rode between the mountains and the sea into the royal maenol of Aber, the women came out with flowers and singing to meet us. Not the woman I would most gladly have seen, for she was a long ride south out of my ken, and wife to another man. But, even wanting her, I will not deny that I, too, was carried aloft on the wings of that exultation, and the inward grief I had, pierced through and through by her absence, I lifted up in my heart to the glory of God, and as an entreaty for the safe-keeping and blessing of Llewelyn's lordship, and the crowning of his endeavours for my land. For I, Samson, his clerk, the least and the closest of those who loved him, desired most of all things then left in my life his triumph and happiness.

  We celebrated the feast as never before, having so much reason for thankfulness. As I remember it, the weather was kind and fair upon the Good Friday, when all we of the prince's company kept the long vigil of grief that the season and our own hearts belied. And after, when the day of the resurrection was come, we were very merry in hall those nights, and very drunken, at least some of us below the fire. For Llewelyn himself never drank deeply, his intoxication coming rather with the draughts of strong mead the bards provided him. They had fuel enough to their fires that spring, and sang his whole life's achievement before him, and all their hopes of him for the future.

"He took up the fallen sword of his royal uncle,
David, to whom he was faithful from his childhood,
And made it more glorious far, a lightning against the invader,
A terror to kings, a rod of justice against treachery.
Who is like him in the field of battle,
And in the council of princes who can match him for wisdom?
In the council of princes the first and greatest,
He took diverse and warring clans into his palms
And fused their fragmented metals into steel with the fire of his longing,
A sword of swords to defend Wales, from Montgomery to the sea,
And from Ynys Mon to the farthest reaches of Kidwelly,
No longer many but one, this Wales of his making.
More glorious than his glorious grandsire, whose name he bears,
He has thrust back the English from our borders,
Given us ships and engines of war, taught us the uses of unity,
Held up before us the vision of freedom, never henceforth to be forgotten,
And we bereft of it never again content, so bright is its beauty.
He is the lion of Eryri, the bright falcon of Snowdon,
The red-gold dragon in the noonday,
So radiant, the eyes dazzle…"

  So sang Rhydderch Hen, the chief of the bards, and Llewelyn listened with a sceptical smile, though for all his suspicion of flattery it was heady wine to him.

  David, his youngest brother, left his place and came and sat down beside me, leaning with an arm about my shoulders. And stooping to my ear he said, in his voice that was tuned clearer than Rhydderch's harp, and never so sweet as when its matter was bitter: "As I believe in hot ice and cold fire, so I believe in Welsh unity."

  "You have seen it," I said, taking him, as I always took him, warily but not too gravely. "New-made and puny, but alive. God forbid we should ask too much of it at birth, but at least we have seen it born."

  "Into a kindred of litigants and fratricides," said David no less sweetly, "where its chances of surviving infancy are slender indeed."

  "God knows," I said, "they have seldom brought such a miraculous child to birth before, what wonder if they make inexpert nurses? Yet you are newly come from a prodigy, do not turn your back on it yet. They have all taken the oath of fealty, have they not?"

  "All but Griffith de la Pole," owned David, mocking himself with the name, for so the English called Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys, who alone held out from the Welsh confederacy, and in using the same style for him David acknowledged that this Welshman born was so drawn into the Englishry of the marches as to be no longer a true Welshman at all.

  "For Griffith we are not accountable yet. His time will come. Did you ever know the rest of them at one until now, bound in one oath to one man?"

  I looked along the high table then to see that one man at the height of his achievement. The smoke of the torches and the candles made a soft blue mist within the hall, and in that mist the light shot rings of colour and sparks of fire, as sometimes the sun will strike these wonders out of rain. So I saw Llewelyn sit mute and upright within a halo of tinted darts that sparkled like stars, and his face was bright and sharp as crystal, and his eyes looked far. He was not accustomed to waste much thought upon being splendid without, all his intent fixing upon an inward splendour, but this day he had made himself unwontedly fine in honour of the feast, and very fittingly he shone. Not as David, who wore jewels as his right and meed, being so beautiful, but with a strong, brown, warming splendour, full of hope and force and fire. He was twenty-nine years old, at the full of his growth and strength, more than average tall, and broad of bone, but lean and lissome of flesh. Brow and visage, he was brown always, the winter and indoor living doing no more than pale him into gold, a ruddy gold fitting for the dragon of which Rhydderch sang. His hair, too, was but the same brown darkened, and the close-trimmed beard that outlined his bones and left his mouth bare was like a goldsmith's modelling for a coin, such as the English strike of their kings. And that night in hall he wore the golden circlet of his rank, the talaith of Gwynedd that had become the talaith of Wales.

  "He would need," whispered David in my ear, "to be more than man, to hold those oaths together. We shall see, we shall see, who will be the first to fall away."

  At that I turned sharply, drawing back my head to have him the more clearly in my sight, for he hung upon my shoulder with that half-mocking and half-rueful affection he commonly used towards me. There were always galls to be found somewhere sharpening the sweet of David's converse, and I could not fail to catch an echo here, for it was but three years since he himself had fallen away from his fealty to Llewelyn, and risen against him in arms, in company with Owen Goch, their oldest brother, then partner with Llewelyn in the rule of Gwynedd. For which unjustified assault Owen still lay in close confinement in the castle of Dolbadarn, though David, whom Llewelyn conceived as the victim of his elder's influence and eloquence, was restored to grace and favour, and indeed had earned both in action since. Yet often in this time of his restoration I had known him make allusion of his own wayward will to his default, like one probing with the point of a dagger in idle malice, towards whose heart it was hard to guess, though always he exposed his own. Some such prick, and aimed surely at me, I looked for here. For David knew how to hurt as he knew how to please, and his real and hot affection was a rose with many and long thorns.

  "Oh, no, my sweet Samson," he said in the softest of breaths, "not I! Not this time! Never again in that fashion, whatever else may follow. Set your loyal, loving, clerkly mind at rest, I stay my brother's man. I do but reason from what we have. A great handful of irreconcilable princes, hungry for land, accustomed to contention, so suddenly assaulted by my brother's vision of a Wales as whole as England, able to stand against England and match as equals. All this they feel and desire, like some epic of the bards. But nothing of it do they understand, and nothing of it can they will, with any charged purpose. Oh, while Llewelyn is there among them to lend them his vision it goes well enough, but as soon as his eye is off them they'll look again at their neighbours and kin, and see them as before, not allies, but rivals, and the manor allotted unfairly to a brother, or the boundary-mark moved by a neighbour, will loom larger to them than the sovereign power of a Wales they've never known."

  He looked up then and caught my eye, no doubt studying him very warily. I would rather he had not, but there was never any way of hiding from him what I was thinking. He laughed, a little hollowly, but without any bitterness or blame. "You are right," he said. "Who should know the way of it better than I, who first began it?"