It must have been good indeed—I could not recall afterwards what I had played, or how well—for all at once I seemed to awaken to a storm of approval and applause, and looking up I saw Owein himself smiling at me: under the circumstances, perhaps not the most reassuring of sights. But he was clapping heartily with the rest, and tossed me a gold ring as guerdon, and again I bowed, though less deeply than before.
Pyrs seemed to feel the need to assert himself; and any road, he, not Owein, was master in this hall.
"Such artistry should receive greater reward than a gaud," he said, in a surprisingly high, light voice. "What would you ask, master?"
I had my answer ready. "Lord," I said, "a place at your table."
That woke them all up again: I could hear the gasps run round the room, and they sat up as if jerked by a single string. Pyrs looked discomfited—doubtless he was wishing he had given me another gold gaud after all—but Owein merely smiled a sleepy smile, and spoke lazily; but he was heard.
"The Lord Pyrs already has a bard in his service. And is it not said that two harps in the same hall will never play in tunefulness together?"
Once more I bowed before I replied. "It is so said, Lord Owein; therefore do I challenge the bard of the house for his place, according to ancient custom."
The instant the words left my lips I was sorry: The custom I had just invoked was indeed a true and an ancient one, but I did not know if any save a true bard would be aware of it in these degenerate days, and I was in terror lest I had in my traha revealed myself. This had not been part of my original plan… But it seemed that I had not, or at least I had not yet.
"We know of course of this old and worthy custom—Owein was watching me now with genuine interest in his eyes, though I could detect not the smallest suspicion that he thought me anything but the wandering bard I posed as, just another threadbare anruth hoping to win a place. But Owein was still speaking.
"It is written that any bard seeking his petty place may challenge any incumbent placeholder. Let us settle the matter then—with a bardic duel."
Owein waved his hand, and the space between the tables was magically cleared. Another stool was brought and set five paces from my own, and then the house bard, one Anlaudd by name, came down from the seat in a corner of the dais where he had been listening to me play. His harp was already in his hands—a nice little instrument, but not fit to share the same shelf with Frame of Harmony—and he wore an air of mingled annoyance, apprehension and superiority. I could tell by his bearing that he was but one of the half-bards; still, who knew but that he might not prove my master all the same. As he came to the little carved seat placed over against my own, I rose, and as one we bowed to Owein and to Pyrs, and to the rapt onlookers, and to each other. We seated ourselves in a ringing silence, and began.
As challenger I had the right to sing first: Frame of Harmony leaped under my fingers, and I sang a song of the Arvon mountains; intricate and pretty, but by no means a major music. It was well received, but I could hear in the quality of the applause the faintest tinge of disappointment, that under the circumstances they had hoped for something altogether more spectacularly fine—and that was just as I had planned it.
Then Anlaudd took his turn—a Vanx melody, I think—and then I played again, and so it would go on, until one of us conceded defeat or until Owein—Pyrs having been overruled, seemingly, in his own hall—declared one of us the victor.
After a while I had suddenly had enough: I had been chaunting most inspired for over an hour, but so, surprisingly, had Anlaudd, his skill rising to the need of the moment as art so often did—commendable for one who was after all no real bard. But I had need to win this contest, for motives far beyond my own personal glory, or even the wish for a place that I had claimed as the contest's cause. I had thought I was playing the best I knew; but clearly more was needed, so in the uncertain silence that followed Anlaudd's last effort—and even I must admit that he harped superbly—I closed my eyes and opened myself to whatever power there was, to the power Elphin had long ago said was my own. After a moment I felt something stirring, somewhere far away, as if it had just then been awakened from stasis or sleep, and then as I called again it came in like a rush of waters.
Oh, I had felt the bardic force stir in me before, as it had been moving just now in Anlaudd; but this that now possessed me was a thing altogether different. The Holy Awen came down upon me like a singing flame: Suddenly I was vast, I towered above the castle, above all Gwynedd; if I lifted a finger, oceans boiled; if I shook my hair, storms arose; I touched the strings of my harp, and mountains walked…
I do not remember singing, but I shall never forget what it was I sang:
"Owein, learn thou what may be
That mightiest creature from before the flood.
Without flesh, without foot, without bone, without blood,
Neither older nor younger than it was at the first.
When the Three Shouts were given,
It was on the hill, it was in the wood,
It was upon the fields, it was above the waters.
A cry in the dawning, a whisper in the darkness,
It was not born, neither was it made.
Consternation does it cause, and lamentation,
Wherever the Highest shall will it.
It is the blast that blows against Owein Rheged,
And the name of that wind is The Bear."
When the Awen left me—and it left between one heartbeat and the next, going like a thunderclap, with the unheard boom of mighty wings—the hall came roaring back around my ears. I stood sweating and shaking, cold and hot at once, blinking in the sudden noise and light, noticing particularly Owein's guards as they fingered their weapons, prepared at their master's lightest nod to drag me out and give my insolence the reward they clearly thought it merited. But for his part Owein only looked at me, his fingers to his chin, and under that measuring, weighing stare I grew cold and quiet.
"Death to lay hands upon a bard," said Pyrs doubtfully. "Even so brazen a one as this—let him go as he has come, and no more."
"Nay," said Owein, rising from his seat. "Let his insolence have more fitting reward: I shall take him as bard in my own hall. Many other bards do I maintain at Caer Dathyl, but in thirty years this is the first who has sung me aught but flattery to win a place." To me then: "What is your name, master?"
I looked him straight in the eyes. "Lord, in my craft I am called Mabon Dialedd."
'Son of Vengeance'… overdramatic perhaps, and dangerously near the truth; but a name to hide my own that I had vowed to use long ago, should this moment ever come; as now it had. Just for an instant I saw Owein's pale eyes flicker; then the mask was back in place.
"Well," he said lightly enough, "it seems I have acquired more here tonight than a bard only. But however you may be called, you will ride with my company in the morning for Caer Dathyl. One of my men will come for you, so be ready betimes."
As he left the hall with Pyrs and the others of his tail, I sank back upon my little stool, quietly shaking, oblivious to the tendered—and clearly heartfelt—congratulations of Anlaudd. Dazed and delighted and daunted all together I may have been; but I had won my petty place, won it in the afanc's lair itself, even as I had jested to Arthur that I might; and still I could not decide if Arthur would be pleased or wrathful.
But one thing I did know, and reflected on most soberly: Once again the gods, or whoever it might be that manages such matters, had ordained that a casual word, spoken in what amounted to rashness and jest, should become cold reality. And if that does not instruct us yet again that we must be ever vigilant as to what we wish for in our heedlessness, I do not know what might.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-seven
I was five years in Owein's court and service; five years in Caer Dathyl, that place of strength and stone. By and large it was a pleasant enough servitude, once I had accustomed myself to the terrifying reality that, through dan or traha,
I was in the employ of the Marbh-draoi's sword-arm, the master of Gwynedd, my enemy and my brother's enemy. Certainly my tasks were not what I should call burdensome: As Owein had said, he maintained a goodly number of other bards to suit his state, and I, however hand-chosen, was the most junior of the lot.
So it fell to me to harp for guests and visitors, mostly—though never, thank gods, Edeyrn; he came not again to Caer Dathyl—and, perhaps once or twice a fortnight, to entertain in hall after the nightmeal. Now and again Owein himself would call for me to soothe with my harp a troubled mood or sleepless night, and on those occasions I took advantage to learn of him what might be learned—though, as ever, I took care to keep the quality of my harping to a level that any half-bard might with art and diligence achieve.
My master was a complex man, which I had not thought to find him; I had ever imagined him as merely the Marbh-draoi's creature, a hired sword and a hired soul as well. But I soon came to learn that he was vastly more than Edeyrn's obedient servant: He was quick of mind and quick to act; yet he never acted save from strength and from reasons that were to him if to none else, good and sound ones. And by no means was he the unstable despot common wisdom held him to be: There was cold brutality, certainly, and amply displayed; but it was equally cold necessity that lay beneath it, not simple savagery. Owein was not one to let reluctance come between him and his duty; if after so many years of it his resolve had grown to look like ruthlessness, so be it, and perhaps in the end it was.
But it was not unremitting grimness either: He took a perverse fondness for me from the first—perhaps as he had said, for that he knew I was no glozer, no speaker of honeyed words to princes, and he saw and relished the mockery beneath my chaunts as much as did I. We were never friends—too much blood of too many I loved lay between us, though he was not to know that until the end—but there was ease and even laughter, and in a strange, wholly unexpected way, I soon learned I could serve him without dishonor; even, sometimes, without dislike.
But never did I forget my chief purpose for being in Owein's service, and almost from the hour of my arrival at Caer Dathyl I contrived to send messages—by way of the Hanes, now coming into the fullness of its usefulness—back to Arthur and the Companions, and even to Uthyr in Coldgates.
Of the one I had dreaded above all others to see—Gwenwynbar—there was no sign. I had half-expected to find her waiting for me at Caer Dathyl, poised to pounce, and what I should have done in such case I have no idea even now—had none then, save some vague, and no doubt vain, thought of fith-fath.
But again luck—or dan—held: My cautious questions eventually elicited the information that upon the birth of her son a year since—Malgan, she had called him; a name traditional to Owein's family, and already the boy had been proclaimed Owein's heir—Gwenwynbar had decided that Caer Dathyl was not the healthiest place for an infant; and she had gone with the child and a court, indeed, of her own to a seacoast maenor of Owein's in the province of Sarre. Having established herself there in the queenly splendor she had long craved—and had never had with Arthur—she did not return to the capital but instead waited, by all accounts scarcely impatiently, for Owein to visit her.
This was interesting knowledge, and after I had passed it on in the usual manner—allowing for the swiftness of the Hanes, it should reach Arthur in a sevennight or so—I gave thanks for Gwenwynbar's absence, and wondered a little on it myself.
Though I doubted Gwenwynbar had ever informed her new lord of her past status as wife to his chief adversary—and, grudgingly, still bore thankfulness to her for our deliverance that time under Edeyrn's very nose—I had long given up speculating as to whether her child had been sired by Arthur or by Owein. Only Gwenwynbar herself knew that, and it appeared that for the moment, at least, and the foreseeable future, she had chosen that Owein should be credited with Malgan's paternity. Since Owein had until now not troubled himself to get any heir at all, I wondered also if perhaps he had not found it as much to his purpose as Gwenwynbar had to hers, that the boy should be acknowledged as his.
What that purpose might be was made abundantly clear some three years later, when it was proclaimed across Keltia that Edeyrn had adopted Owein to be his own heir; the unspoken intent clearly being that as Owein should succeed Edeyrn when at last the unthinkable should occur and the Marbh-draoi no longer walked among us, so then should Malgan come to succeed Owein. Just as clearly, this had been a thing long determined, and the timing of the announcement contingent upon the birth of a suitable heir of Owein's body: Presumably, now the child was four years of age, he might safely be expected to live and thrive; and so did Edeyrn at last declare his grand design.
Though there had been some curiosity in Keltia as to what, indeed, should befall when Edeyrn was no more, so long had the Marbh-draoi ruled that I think folk thought in their despair that he should rule forever. I, who knew the truth of his long-living, found my own speculation running on a different track: Edeyrn was by Merlynn's own accounting at least four hundred years of age—twice a Kelt's natural outside lifespan. Granted that he came by this thoroughly unnatural span for that his mother had been of the Shining Folk—could it mean, even so, that his years ran short at last; hence this new concern for the usurper-succession? And if he who was half-Sidhe could live undiminished to twice the double-century, what did that say of the spans of those who were full-blooded of that mystic race?
Intriguing questions: But though I dutifully passed on my reflections to Arthur, I received none back again; and as for the common folk of Keltia, once the first stir of Owein's adopting was past, they sank back into the same seething of apathy and unrest in which they had been caught for the past two hundred years, and little changed.
Even Arthur's activities seemed shaded down into half-strength: Though he kept up the same raids and reivings he had been making for years, he had grown more wary of late, pulling back into his beloved Arvon fastnesses, emerging from time to time only to remind folk, forcefully enough when he did so, that Owein did not have all things his own way.
Gwenwynbar I never saw, save at a safe anonymous distance on a few occasions of state when she deigned to return to Caer Dathyl. Though it seemed that Owein was as besotted with her as he had ever been, she herself seemed to have cooled somewhat in her passion; if passion there had ever been on her part, and knowing her as I did I rather doubted it. No, she had set out to snare Owein as coolly and calculatedly as earlier she had set herself to trap Arthur.
Yet by all accounts she was devoted to her son: Malgan ap Owein was a well-grown five-year-old now, old enough to come to court on his own—attended of course like the princeling he was. He was a careful child, well-behaved, tall and lithe like his mother, already receiving instruction in sword-play from his father's lieutenants, and a more accomplished rider than I had been at his age, or was even now. Though I made it my custom to go to ground outside the city whenever Malgan came to visit his father—in fear that some word or thought of me should through him reach Gwenwynbar, and my masquerade and mission be exploded—I contrived to observe him from afar, to see what might be seen.
From such limited scrutinizings it was hardly possible, of course, for me to deduce the child's paternity: I saw traits in him that I had known in Arthur these forty years past, and traits that I had discerned in Owein over the past five, so clearly there was no answer for me there.
But then one day, full five years after Owein had beckoned me from the hall at Ruabon, I had an answer to a question I had long forgotten I had ever framed in words, and all my Sight gave me no warning.
It was a nightmeal during one of the days of the Midsummer festivities. Owein had gone as was his custom to spend the feast days with Gwenwynbar and Malgan at his castle of Saltcoats, south of Caer Dathyl on the shores of a great shallow bay, where Gwenwynbar had made her abode since the birth of her son. Again as was his custom, the lord of Gwynedd had taken a sizable tail with him, as well as off-world guests, and so the benches of Caer Dathyl's
Great Hall were less full than usual for the evening meals.
As I have said, I was not Owein's only bard or even his chief bard, and so had managed to avoid being included in the party for Saltcoats—which of course suited me very well. If my presence had been commanded, I should have feigned illness or found some other excuse, but I had never been asked on such jauntings and was fervently glad of it.
But the thinness of the bard-roster for the feast days meant my playing in hall rather more often than was my usual duty, and this was the third straight night I had been chief chaunter. Ordinarily such prolonged bard's service would have been a strain—and indeed my voice this third night was more ragged than it should have been—but my audiences were undemanding, and the mood with Owein away was one of relaxment, and the summerwine for the festival was an excellent pressing this year. Altogether an easy and pleasant time…
So I invite you to imagine my utter staggerment when, looking out idly over the hall as was my habit when I played, I saw Arthur Penarvon on the lower benches, among the rough-clad servitors and galloglasses and grooms.
He stood out among them like a Beltain fire on a rocky tor at middlenight, so that I marvelled that I had not noticed him before that instant. But when my heart had stopped pounding I realized that his invisibility had been his own doing; he had blended in perfectly with that rough company, and only my stupidity could now betray him. He made no sign of recognition, of course, as I made none, only watched me and listened with the same polite and appreciative attention that the others gave me. But even so I could sense by his bearing—the alertness that was impossible to disguise—and the total shielding of his mind from the one swift probe I ventured that he had come for no small purpose or senseless exploit, and that he had been waiting for this moment for some time.
I played on—at least I think I must have, for none, not even Owein's lieutenant Daigh, who was master in our master's absence, reproached me with fumbled harping, though I have not the slightest recollection of how I played or what or until when. I was conscious only of the overriding need to keep my gaze from Arthur's face—both of our lives, and more beside, without question depended on it—yet all I could see was that face, shining in the corner of my sidesight.
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