The Storyteller's Granddaughter

by Margaret Redfern

‘But not Asperto. I could not keep him safe.’

  ‘His choice, little lass. Would ’ave been my choice an’ all.’

  ‘She’s well enough to travel, Blue, if you’ll carry her.’

  ‘A’ll tent the little lass, Dai.’

  ‘Best let the rest see she’s well enough.’ He was at his most non-committal.

  Dai was right; she was a hero. No matter that she had failed to save Asperto. ‘He was truly the hero,’ she said sadly. ‘Asperto. Is it not so, Niko?’

  ‘Asperto,’ he agreed, ‘and Yıldız the star. She was very brave. But you also Kazan. Do I still call you Kazan now you are a girl?’

  They were outside in the fresh morning, breathing in the scent of crushed mint and pine. There was mist on the river mingling with fine spray from the rushing water. Droplets clung to leaves and grass. Their faces were beaded with moisture and the animals’ coats gleamed slickly. Pale pink sky edged over the rim of the gorge; pale rays of sunlight struck the opposite rim but below in the gorge they were in shadow and, further back, the way they had come, clouds darkened the sky, stopping abruptly as if a quill had drawn a straight line under them. Her arm was re-bound and supported in a triangle of cotton tied securely behind her neck. The empty sleeve of her tunic was pinned out of the way. An empty sleeve like Rehan, she remembered, though Rehan had lost his arm. It seemed a very long time ago that she had rested in Maria’s house that first morning of her journey. Not even a full moon since she had left the camp.

  ‘A can’t not call yer Fustilugs no more,’ Blue said. He shook his head in wonderment. ‘You ’aven’t ’alf taken it to do, ent yer lass, and yer done it all by yersen.’

  ‘Not by myself, blue man. I have had all of you to help me.’

  ‘Well,’ said Giles, ‘I can’t think of him – her – as anything other than Kazan.’

  ‘Truly Kazan the Great,’ said Edgar. Everything to him was full of wonder: the beautiful pale girl at his side, the boy-girl who had tried so valiantly to save the slave Asperto; the nomad tribe who had risked so much to save them. All was cause for wonder and gratitude even while he mourned the dead man.

  ‘“Shame it is for a warrior to hide his name from another,”’ Kazan said. ‘Your song was truer than you thought, Mehmi.’

  ‘Indeed it was,’’ he agreed, and sang softly, ‘I am the hero Kazan who rides a bright star… I think my father knew you for who you were, Kazan.’ His father, who had sent the girl and the bride-gift of his favourite mare to his friend Dafydd-the-Welshman. A flash of understanding and he knew now why the Welshman had kept the girl so securely with him, was so protective of her. But she…she was unaware of his love, of that Mehmi was sure, and as sure that Dai had made no sign of it, for honour’s sake. ‘You did well, Kazan,’ he said. ‘And if you were other than you said – well – we all have our secrets.’

  She nodded and should have been content but she was not. She had cheated them with her secrets and now this. If she had been truly a man, young and strong, then she could have saved Asperto. She was desolate.

  Dai turned to Niko, saw he had the same shadowed eyes and wan face. ‘You ride with Hatice today and both of you must eat before we travel. You must not go hungry, now, with all the way we have to go. Come.’

  Eat? Any mouthful would stick in her throat. From Niko’s face, she guessed he felt the same. Figs and white goat cheese and flat bread. Dai watched them nibble without appetite and choke and nibble again. He sighed and sat down beside them. ‘You know you must eat if you are to travel.’ His voice was kind. He saw her shudder, and the boy’s face twist in grief. He was not needed to make ready for the journey; his companions would see to all that was necessary. Better to sit with these two sad souls and try what he could to heal their hurt. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘This death of Asperto, piti gythgam it is – a terrible pity – but it was his gift to you, wasn’t it now?’

  ‘It was a gift I did not want.’

  ‘Even so, it was his gift to you and you must accept it as such.’ He looked down at the ground, his hands resting on his knees, fingers interlocked. ‘It is a gift that weighs heavy, I know, but it is a gift.’ He stopped, searching for the words to explain how he knew this to be true. I couldn’t save him. He knew the despair, the hopelessness. Who better than he? I couldn’t save them. And living because of the gift of another’s life. That was a heavy burden. ‘Listen,’ he said again. The words came awkwardly. ‘My taid – my grandfather – was a good man. You have heard me say this before.’

  Kazan raised her head. ‘The grandfather who rescued mine from drowning?’

  ‘Yes.’ He stopped, head still bent, hands knotted together. ‘You should know also that he gave his life to save mine.’ He glanced briefly at Niko. ‘I was about your age.’ He stopped again. He had never told a single soul of that time.

  ‘What happened?’

  He sighed. They needed to know, and now, while they were secure in this yürük camp high above the teeming river.

  23

  Dai’s Story

  ‘This was in the time of the Great Hunger. It started one summer.’’

  The summer before simmering discontent became open revolt, he remembered.

  ‘The early summer of 1315,’ he said. ‘It rained. Rained heavy, it did, all summer long. Still falling in autumn, it was. There were rivers where there should have been roads. Fields were flooded and crops and pasture were under water. The seed beds were sodden. Grain stood rotting under water. The harvest was late, where there was any harvest. No hay – meadows too wet to cut hay, see – so the animals were starving. Land too wet to plough in autumn or the next spring and there was still the rain.

  Blue halted by them. He’d been tethering the animals but he stopped now. Time enough before they started down the mountain track. ‘Knew yer’d remember that time, Dai. Evil, it were. Foälk were warned of it, like. That comet that was in the sky that year. Remember that? Blood red. A warning, that was. Famine and death. And the moon blotted out in the autumn. Another warning.’

  Giles abandoned his checking of the baggage. ‘There were earthquakes in France those years. My brother told me so.’

  ‘See? Warnings, innit? Wickedness about. Should have knoöwn it weren’t going to be just that one summer. No. That summer were only the first of it. Nowt to yetten fer year on year. Round our way, fish traäps were wrecked and dykes were washed awaäy. Couldn’t not make much salt, neither – too cold and wet and not fuel enough. Any theer was, prices were aboon what poor foälks could paäy. Besides, no food to keep with salt, was theer? Sheep diseased. Beasts dying with murain. God saäve us, they stank to heaven. Stuff cooming out of their eyes and mouths and noses. Remember that, Dai? Made yer boäk to see ’em.

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘The shits, poor beästs, brusting out of ’em. Or they’d be trying to when theer weren’t not nowt left for them to shit. Died where they stood.’

  ‘The winters were long and cold. Bitter cold. No let up then. One year the land was frozen from the Feast of St Andrew right till Easter.’

  He stopped again. Around him, the men were packing the animals ready to move on. Sakoura was keeping a careful eye. No need to him to be watchful. Giles came up to them, glanced down at the two wide-eyed young ones. He had heard Dai’s words. ‘End of November is St Andrew’s Feast.’

  Twm as well; Dai hadn’t expected an audience.

  ‘The northern seas were frozen over as well – Heinrijc Mertens said so, didn’t he Dafydd?’ Twm dropped down beside them. ‘The Great Famine, that’s what you’re talking about? So no ships sailed. Snow everywhere. It wouldn’t melt. Heinrijc Mertens remembers that well. Remember he said so? The north lands were as bad as our poor country. And France. And all this when it seemed the whole world was at war. England against Scotland; England against itself, when the second Edward and his she-wolf Queen fought for right to rule.’ His face closed up, remembering, remembering. ‘Why this talk about a hellish time?’

  ‘Dai�
��s story about his grandfather.’

  Twm raised an eyebrow. Dai telling a tale? First time for everything, but even so…

  ‘It started the year Llewelyn Bren and the Welsh fought against the harshness of English rule,’ said Dai. ‘My father was with him. Heinrijc Mertens told me the Flanders’ fight against the French was as desperate.’

  Armies must be fed, he thought. King Louis of France diverted grain to his own troops, away from Flanders and England. In wars and famine, the rich got richer and armies had their bellies filled, especially armies on the winning side. It was the little people who suffered. How they suffered.

  ‘My father was a fighting man. He said the roads were quagmires and even the court horses were trapped up to their knees. Getting supplies was almost impossible.’ Twm snorted impatiently, picking up Dai’s thought, had he but known. ‘But there were supplies to be had. Famine in the land and still armies were fed,’ he said, bitterness colouring his words.

  ‘It was the grain that was the worst,’ said Dai. ‘Where there was any to be had, it was mildewed and mouldy.’

  ‘That bread,’ said Giles. ‘My brother told of bakers who sold bread filled with disgusting things – dregs of wine, pig droppings, stuff like that. He said in Paris they were punished – set on wheels with their hands raised and holding their own tainted loaves.’

  ‘Eating it drove men mad. Taid – grandfather – made us swear never to eat rotten grain. He said how it would kill us. We promised, of course, but he knew sharp hunger and how a child’s empty belly forgets promises made. He showed us what happened to those poor souls desperate enough to stuff their craws with rotten grain.’ He was silent, remembering. Kazan edged closer to him, put her hand over his – tight-knotted on his knees.

  ‘What happened to them?’ she asked.

  ‘Hm?’ He had all but forgotten where he was, remembering, seeing, telling what he saw and remembered. ‘What happened to them? Great swollen blisters over all their bodies. Screaming out they were, on fire, they were burning. Retching and heaving, poor devils, and writhing with the agony of it all. Some ran mad in the streets. And their fingers and toes and hands and feet…’ He stopped, his gaze fixed still on his hands, seeing again the horror of it all. ‘They dropped off their bodies. Just dropped off. And then they died. A terrible death.’ He breathed in deeply. ‘After I’d seen that, I took care never to eat mouldy grain. But it was hard when there was nothing to eat but grass in the meadows and we grazed that like cattle. Or plants, bark, leather, cloth, dirt, grubs…’ He was silent again. ‘My youngest brother couldn’t help himself. Only a dwt, see, and crying with hunger.’

  ‘Did he die that death?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A heärd as theer were some as et their own bairns.’

  Blue, unheard, settling in beside them.

  ‘I heard it said there were those who ate dead men’s flesh. They said prisoners – Scots men – were killed and eaten by their captors. In Ulster, that was, in the Carrickfergus siege.’

  ‘Maybe so, Giles.’ There was some rumour of that years later, when Dai was in Hereford. Could be true. Desperate times and who could say what men would do when they were starving. ‘I know there were some who gnawed raw-dead bodies of cattle, just like dogs.’ Dai sighed. ‘We try to look out for each other in my country. Villagers and monks alike. Our abbey of Cymer has always been a poor House but the monks did their best, even though they were pressed to give money to the King’s bridge building plans. Stone bridges every ten miles. A worthy cause, at any other time, but not in times of famine.’

  ‘But do you not have stone bridges in your country?’

  Dai laughed at her innocent question. ‘Not like here, Kazan, where you have bridges built by the old people, and bridges of great beauty and strength built by the last rulers, and good roads, and pure water carried in pipes and over bridges for mile after mile.’

  ‘But how do you travel in your country without good roads and bridges?’

  ‘With difficulty. There are the old ways, if you know of them, and the monks have built roads and that helps but often the ways are potholed or flooded or thick with mud.’ Not like here, he thought, not for the first time, with staging posts with free accommodation and baths and food and physicians and those who care for animals and everything a traveller needs for comfort. And yet, he thought, I long to see my own wretched, poverty-stricken little country. The Mawddach and Cadair Idris and all the lands in between the mountains and the rolling sea.’

  ‘But your taid. How did he give you his life?’

  ‘What food there was, Taid gave me his share. Said he wasn’t hungry. He made me eat and, God forgive me, I was hungry enough to believe what he said. Said it would give me strength to forage for the rest – my brothers and sisters and mother and others of our family. So I did.’ Too young to be a provider for so many, to know such hopelessness when there was nothing – nothing – nothing to be found, and only pebbles to suck to fool empty stomachs into believing there was food to fill them. Taro’r gwaelod, the pit of despair. Have courage, have faith, boy bach. Cwyd dy galon. There is always a way. Ask, and it shall be given? Knock, and it shall be opened? Where were the five loaves and two fishes to fill this groaning, suffering multitude?

  ‘What did you find to eat, Welshman?’

  ‘Pigeons. Doves. Starlings. Anything I could get. The doves I hated. They came to eat what corn we had and it was forbidden by law to kill them. They were the Lord’s fowls. But I killed them anyway. And we ate them. Sometimes a pig. Not affected by the times, pigs weren’t, and even a scrawny pig can feed many people for a good long time. Not ours to kill so we had to steal them away and that was a risky business. One time even a lap dog of the Mistress, plump enough though her people were not. She wept more for the loss of her pet than she ever did for the poor families who died. But there was never enough. Seabirds’ eggs. Needed a head for heights to get those. Rich men’s pantries.’ A quick smile. ‘Needed a head for danger to get pickings from those.’ He sighed. ‘I watched my family die, slowly. Not a quick death, starvation. Taid was the first. Didn’t eat, see. Wasted away to skin and bone.’ Dim ond croen ac asgwyrn. Just skin and bones. The night when he knew death would come.

  I’ve had my life, boy bach. It’s been a good life but your turn now. Stay alive. Keep them alive. Do what you must but stay alive. No one should go hungry. Remember that, bachgen.

  ‘Where was your father?’

  ‘Away fighting with Llewelyn Bren. Then news came they were defeated and my father was one of the dead. My mother was with child but the child died inside her, and she died with it.’ I couldn’t keep them alive, he thought. I couldn’t keep my promise to Taid. He remembered his mother’s sweet, high voice singing an old song: Peis Dinogat. The song a mother sings to her son about the father, the fallen hero.

  Pan elei dy dad ty e helya,

  llath ar ei ysgwyd llory en y law,

  ef gelwi gwn gogyhwc,

  Giff, Gaff, dhaly, dhaly, dhwc, dhwc…

  When your father used to go to hunt

  with his shaft on his shoulder and his club in his hand,

  he would call his speedy dogs,

  Giff, Gaff, catch, catch, fetch, fetch…

  ‘What happened then?’

  Dai shrugged. ‘I was caught red-handed robbing the manor kitchens. No Heinrijc Mertens to bail me out – this was years before I met him. One of the men-at-arms owed Taid a past favour. So many owed Taid favours.’

  ‘Like my grandfather?’

  ‘Like your grandfather. This man, this Gascon guard, turned a blind eye so I could escape. They were cutting off the hands of those they caught stealing, see.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘There’s wild land in the Welsh mountains. Wet land, see, that strangers can’t travel. Deserters and desperate men had made a home for themselves in one of the valleys of Mawddwy. Ar herw. The outlawed.’ He looked up at their shocked faces. ‘I joined them. I was a dwt
but desperate enough after all, wasn’t I now? And there you go… Like I say, my grandfather, your Asperto, they made a gift of their lives. That’s not a gift you can refuse but one you must honour by living as well as you can.’

  ‘A choice made, like my brother’s,’ said Giles. ‘Death and eternal salvation.’’

  ‘There you go.’ Dai nodded to where streaks of sunlight were lighting up the gorge. ‘Day’s getting on. Best make tracks if we’re to reach the han before night. One good thing, better weather down the mountain.’

  She didn’t move immediately. ‘What happened to your family?’

  ‘Most died. There was a younger brother and sister – twins, they were – the White Brothers took them and promised to care for them.’ Once he was gone there was no going back. He had to trust to the White Brothers to take care of the two who were left alive.

  And he was going back to find out, Tom thought. You and your conscience, Dafydd. No wonder you feel you have to save the world and those who suffer in it. No wonder your mind is so often on your stomach, and the stomachs of those you take into your care. No one should go hungry. For the first time he felt a great pity for the quiet brown man who owed his life to a starving, dying man. A promise is a promise. ‘You knew Kazan to be a girl?’ Tom had demanded angrily. He felt cheated, somehow; not trustworthy after all. ‘How long have you known? Since she arrived? You recognised her from the camp but you said nothing?’ A promise is a promise. How many promises? To his grandfather, to Heinrijc Mertens, to Rémi, to this boy-girl. How many others? The man was shackled by promises, by duty and honour that he would never shirk. Tom had no anger or resentment left in him.

  Brother Jerome had quietly joined them to listen. ‘You save souls, Brother,’ Dai said. ‘Me now, I reckon if you save a body God will help the soul find its own salvation. No body, no soul, is there now?’

  ‘Perhaps that is so.’ The little gray-and-pink man didn’t commit himself.

  24

  Mi lemman me haues bihot of louue trewe