In Winter's Shadow

by Gillian Bradshaw

  They were not. We did not hear from Bedwyr from December until April, because of the harsh winter and the unwillingness of the traders to risk their ships on the rough seas. We had received one letter from him late in September, written in the first week of that month upon his arrival at Macsen’s fortress; and another early in December, which had reported that some of Macsen’s claims were settled, but that others had been raised. When the spring brought calm seas we had another letter, which had in fact been written shortly after the second one we had received, but which had spent the winter with one of our agents in a Breton port, awaiting a ship. This contained bad news: Macsen remained obdurate on all the points under discussion, and had insistently pressed Bedwyr to forswear his allegiance to Arthur and remain instead in Less Britain as Macsen’s warleader.

  ***

  “When I refused the place he offered,” Bedwyr wrote, “the king grew angry, and called me a traitor to my homeland. He would hear no arguments for the unity of the Empire; he said that the Empire was dead and ought to remain so. And he has grown very insistent on this, until I thought it better to leave him and spend the winter on my family’s estates in the southeast, whither I will go tomorrow. I will return to Britain in the spring, as soon as the roads and the winds permit—unless you wish otherwise, my lord. But I see no point to remaining, for I cannot negotiate with Macsen.”

  ***

  Arthur agreed that it would be best if Bedwyr did not encounter Macsen again, and wrote commanding his return. So Bedwyr came back to Camlann in May, and as soon as he arrived I realized that what had happened in that gray afternoon in August was not over, as I had believed.

  It was a lovely spring afternoon; I came into the Hall on some other errand to find a knot of men standing about and welcoming our warleader in loud voices, and Arthur among them, clasping Bedwyr’s hand. Bedwyr stood among them looking travel-worn, plain, and unhappy. I had missed him sometimes in the months he had been away, but I thought that the ruinous love had died, and I missed him only as one misses a sympathetic friend. But somehow he sensed my presence beyond the others, and looked up, searching for me with his eyes. He did not smile when he saw me, but something leapt between us, an idle string on a harp suddenly drawn tight, plucked and drowning out other tones in its sound. I realized from the leap my heart gave that I was still bound to him, and I knew with sudden horror that it was worse for him, that he had not forgotten me for an instant of his absence; knew it without any need for more communication than a look. So I began again to avoid him.

  In early June we sent Gwalchmai and Gwyn to Less Britain in Bedwyr’s place. We were forced to, for the unresolved claims were beginning to cause problems. Macsen had imposed a tariff on the wine his people exported which was high, the rate traditionally charged on trade with barbarian nations, not even that charged for another province of the Empire. This had drawn loud complaints from the various traders, as well as from the noblemen they supplied, and had encouraged smugglers. Some of these smugglers had been caught and executed by Macsen, and now their clans were besieging us with petitions for vengeance, justice, and the blood-price. Several fugitives from justice in Britain had settled comfortably in Less Britain, in defiance of all previous treaties. This outraged the clans they had injured, who joined the smugglers’ clans in their petitioning. So Gwalchmai and Gwyn departed with announcements of harsh counter-measures: a trade embargo and an offer of asylum to any and all Breton fugitives.

  Gwalchmai’s servant, Rhys, went as well, reluctantly parting from his wife and children. “After all,” he told me as we arranged supplies for the journey, “Gwalchmai doesn’t need me now. He won’t overwork himself this time, not with his son along.”

  “You think not?” I asked dubiously. “He might work twice as hard, to make Gwyn proud of him.”

  Rhys snorted. “He might—but he would never let Gwyn work so, and I don’t see Gwyn leaving his father to work alone. And he will see to it that he is well treated, so that Gwyn will be as well. An excellent thing, fatherhood, for making a man take notice of what he does.” Rhys grinned, and added wistfully, “I wish I had seen his face when he found out”—for Rhys, strangely, had known about Gwyn for years. He had learned of the boy from the lady Elidan herself, but had been sworn by her to silence on the matter. “Though I would have spoken out,” he told me, on the occasion that he informed me of his foreknowledge and asked for an account of what had happened, “if I had thought that those two wouldn’t find out on their own.”

  “I think you will find that you are still needed,” I told Rhys. “Macsen will not make things any easier for Gwalchmai than he did for Bedwyr, and he will need a servant he can trust.”

  Rhys sighed, ran a hand through his hair. “True enough. And it’s not that I grudge going—only that Eivlin is due to have the baby in October, and I would like to be on hand. My lord would be certain to send me back before then, if the negotiations drag on as they did last time, but I would rather be here all the while. We’ve been lucky in two healthy children, and Eivlin is fine now, but still, there might be danger. Still, I always knew I would have to do a lot of traveling if I served Gwalchmai, and it’s late to complain of it now—and maybe the matter will be settled soon.”

  It was not. Faced with the trade embargo, Macsen rescinded the tariff, but would not agree on a blood-price for the smugglers he had had executed, and denied that the fugitives existed. Letters flowed back and forth across the ocean; our emissaries returned late in July to confer, then sailed back again, and still the negotiations dragged on, with Macsen giving way on one point and suddenly discovering five others to stick on. In September a rough and unsatisfactory settlement was achieved, and the party returned. We might well have sent them out again, but by then we had other things to think of.

  That same spring Medraut wrote and postponed his proposed visit to Camlann, explaining that he had some domestic difficulties which could not endure his absence. At about the same time we learned from the disaffected members of his clan that Medraut suspected some of their number, and that they were afraid. They asked if Arthur would grant them asylum, and judge between themselves and their cousin Medraut. Arthur wrote to say that he was willing to judge their cause, but could not promise unconditional asylum. But before they could have received this letter, we had news that five members of the royal clan and some twenty others of different, noble clans of the Islands were accused of plotting against their king. The five were kin-wrecked and exiled, the twenty executed. The five exiles, with their servants, set off from the Orcades in a twenty-oar curragh laden with goods, but were scarcely out of sight of land when a violent storm arose, and the ship was wrecked on the cliffs of northern Pictland, and all but one of the passengers drowned. This man was one of the five. His name was Diuran Mac Brenainn, and he had been warleader for King Lot. Gwalchmai remembered him as a sensible and a just man, passionately loyal to the clan’s welfare. He managed to cling to the keel of the ship and was eventually washed ashore. He made his way to the shipyard of Eoghan, where previously he had sent messages to be relayed to Arthur. Here he stayed with the clerk at the yard, and sent a message to Arthur: a miserable, semi-literate letter obviously dictated in haste. It accused Medraut of murdering Agravain and of killing the others in the ship, by sorcery, and it begged Arthur, “by the faeth of the God yow worshippest,” to send him aid, and to lend support to an army of Islanders who would “redeem the Ercendy Islands from the son of lffernus.”

  Arthur dispatched a courier northward with some gold to support the man in his destitution, and with it a cautiously worded letter, inviting Diuran to Camlann, and asking him to represent his cause to the other kings of Britain. But the courier returned with the gold, surprisingly untouched, and with it our letter, enclosed in a letter from the clerk of the shipyard. He was evidently the scribe of the first letter, for his style of bad Latin was the same, and he announced in it that Diuran had died of a fever the week before our letter arrived.

  “I of
fered him the gold,” our messenger said, “for he was a poor man, and had paid for the other’s burial out of his own money. But he refused it. He was a strange little man.”

  Despite this, Medraut’s “domestic difficulties” apparently continued, for he again postponed his visit, and put another group of noblemen to death. He then declared war on some of the Western Islands which had been part of King Lot’s domain, but which had seceded under Agravain and claimed the protection of the king of Dalriada. Medraut sailed to them with a great army, fought several short, sharp encounters, and defeated them. Their ally, Aengus of Dalriada, made no move to help them. Medraut was allied to Arthur and related also to Aengus’s foremost enemy, Urien of Rheged, and no doubt Aengus thought the Western Islands not worth the risk of a war with the greatest powers of Britain. At any rate, Medraut had a free hand with the Islanders, and showed no mercy. He deposed their ruling clans, executing the men and giving most of the women to the new clans he raised in their place. The old ruling clans were, he said, guilty of treason to himself and to Agravain.

  This successful campaign won Medraut more support within the Orcades, for his people admired his military prowess, and were pleased to have reclaimed the Western Islands and the fear of their neighbors. In August he wrote to us again, saying that he was now free to make his deferred visit, and that he would set out in September, after he had returned to his fortress of Dun Fionn and set it in order. But he sent this letter from the shipyard of Eoghan in northern Pictland, and added a note which disturbed us.

  “The troubles engendered by the laxity of poor Agravain’s reign are widely spread,” he wrote, “in this very shipyard I found a clerk, one Padraig Mac Febail, probably the only lettered man in Pictland, who had used this very skill in aid of treachery. I had the man brought to me and, on questioning him, found that besides aiding my enemies he had left his monastery in Erin, doubtless for some crime. I therefore had him put to death, seeing that his viciousness was of long standing. Why do I recount this to your grace? Merely as an example of how I am placed: I am certain that you will understand my position, and forgive my long delay in coming to swear my oath to you.”

  It troubled me to think of this clerk, who had carefully copied out the messages which the noblemen of the Orcades must have sent him by word of mouth, and put them into his clumsy Latin. He himself was an exile, yet had somehow managed to support Diuran after the shipwreck, and had sent back the gold without even using any to pay for the burial. I could imagine him discovered, dragged before Medraut by the king’s warriors, questioned under that cool contemptuous smile, and finally put to death with a casual command intended not so much to punish him as to display to Arthur the extent of Medraut’s knowledge.

  “My mother ruled in this fashion,” Gwalchmai said, when he returned from Gaul and Arthur gave him this letter to read. “The Islands were afraid when my father went away on campaigns, for her rule was heavy on them then. But she was more skilled. She had a sense of what could and could not be done, and the people were more afraid of her than they will ever be of Medraut.” He looked again at the letter from his brother, and lifted his eyes to us, frowning. “This will not be the end of Medraut’s troubles.”

  Nor, I thought, of ours.

  SIX

  At the beginning of October Medraut sailed into Caer Gwent with two ships and fifty men. Because he came peacefully and in the emperor’s name, he was offered hospitality by Cynyr, Lord of Caer Gwent, while he sent Arthur notice that he had arrived and requested an escort so as not to alarm the countryside by the size of his bodyguard. Arthur himself rode west to meet him and escort him to Camlann, also taking fifty men. He left me and Bedwyr together to keep the fortress.

  It had grown difficult for me to avoid Bedwyr even before Arthur left. When the warleader first returned from Gaul he had tried as hard to avoid me as I him, but this effort had lapsed. By September he was actually looking for opportunities to see me. I reproached him for it, once; he looked away from me and whispered, “I do not mean to,” then, slowly his eyes moved back to meet mine and he added, “I cannot help it.” It made me ashamed. Bedwyr was serious by nature, not easily moved to love but faithful and constant after he had committed himself, and because of this he was suffering. Men suffer so in the songs all the time, but in reality most of them forget love more easily. But Bedwyr was really almost sick from it. He had returned from Less Britain looking thin and exhausted, and thin and exhausted he remained. He no longer spoke freely with Arthur, which puzzled my husband. “I do not know what is the matter with Bedwyr,” he confided to me one night. “Ever since he returned from Gaul he has been as grim and silent as a memorial column. Does he think I am angry because he failed, or because Macsen tried to persuade him to desert me? He ought to know better.”

  I said nothing. I knew well enough that Bedwyr was tortured with guilt before Arthur, and perhaps by jealousy as well. But I could say nothing, even when Arthur grew angry. Every time I saw Bedwyr I remembered that sweet and terrible afternoon, and sometimes I lay awake at night, listening to Arthur’s quiet breath beside me, aching and ashamed. Sometimes at a feast my eyes would meet Bedwyr’s, and we would understand without a word spoken where our thoughts had turned, and I would feel my face grow hot, and would turn and pretend to talk to someone else, but feel his presence like a bright light which cast shadows all about me. So I tried to meet the warleader only in public. I was afraid when Arthur announced that he would meet Medraut at Caer Gwent, and urged him to send Bedwyr instead.

  “You rush off to meet him as though you were champions out to fight single combat,” I said. “But you are emperor, and he is only ruler of a few islands on the edge of the world. Moreover, he is officially your subject ally. You have the position of greater strength. Let him feel that, and the rest of the world see it; let him come to you.”

  But Arthur only stood in the doorway of the conference room, keeping his back to me, gazing into the west and fingering the hilt of his sword. “Why should I allow Medraut to act the part of subject and ally when we both know that he is my competitor in Empire?” he demanded bitterly. “Let him, and let the Family and all the rest of Britain, see that I am matching myself against him, and let them realize that it is a question of choosing. Besides, I wish to see for myself how he conducts himself with my subject lords. Perhaps he has told his tale to Cynyr of Caer Gwent now. I can see what Cynyr makes of it, and of me.”

  “My dear lord, if he has told Cynyr we will know soon enough from our other sources. In seeing for yourself you will only hurt yourself.”

  “I wish to know! In God’s name, am I to remain here like a statue in a niche, smiling at all comers while they whisper, “Ah, he looks fine, but really is a bastard, a begetter of bastards on his own sister, and a usurper? No!”

  “But Arthur…”

  He whirled about and looked at me. “I am leaving tomorrow for Caer Gwent, and that is the end of it.”

  I looked away from the cold eyes and nodded.

  I could feel the hardness leave the stare, and looked up again when I thought it was gone. He flinched, seemed to begin an apology, then stopped, awkwardly. He shrugged. “I must arrange it, then. In a few hours…” he turned, looked again out over the walls westward, then started down the hill, his purple cloak flapping and his hand on his sword.

  He was, in fact, impatient. All the summer he had been bracing himself for Medraut’s arrival, for the gradual onset of the rumors that would disgrace and discredit him, and reveal his most painfully held secret to the scorn and hatred of the world. He could bear it, just, and hope to hold onto power long enough to find a suitable successor. But Medraut’s constant deferral of his arrival, the postponing from week to week of the anticipated struggle, were wearing him out with expectation and fear. He gave little public sign of it; he could not afford to. But he grew increasingly hard to reach and irritable. Sometimes he even uncharacteristically lost his temper, usually with me. I was the one who knew him best, the one he co
uld afford to be honest with. But after he had broken and shouted at me, it was always harder still to draw near to him. Ashamed, he recoiled from me. And I wanted him more and more as the autumn continued. The harvest is always exhausting, always demands more than it seems possible to give. I would wake in the morning, feeling that I could scarcely muster enough energy to rise, and my husband would look at me wearily, not daring to apologize for some scene the night before and not touching me. And most of the day would be utter madness, dashing wildly about the fortress checking and making inventories of goods stored for the winter, arranging payments, receiving tribute, hearing petitions, organizing, ordering accounts, paying attention—and feeling Bedwyr’s gaze now and then like a searing fire.