The Prince's Pen

by Horatio Clare

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  New Stories from the Mabinogion

  The Prince’s Pen

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Lludd and Llevelys

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Advertisements

  Copyright

  Aux Étrangers

  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 meaning 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

  The Prince’s Pen

  Part One

  So now you want to know how we won the war, and the peace – and what happened to the money? Not that you’d have cared for a word of mine if you’d been there at the beginning! Not that I said much to anyone but him. Oh, they had names for me. His Nun, his Freak; they hated me... and I never drank so when he stopped they hated me, and they hated me because they knew there was something and I would never let on.

  I never let on that Ludo the Warlord, the Prince of the West, the Master of the Severn Sea, the Codfather himself, could neither read nor write. There, I’ve said it: Ludo had the literacy of a lamb. And thanks to me he needed no letters, for as he used to say, he had his Clip, the Prince’s Pen! Everything he needed to remember and hold to him he kept stored in that red-curled head. Anything he must read or write fell to me. No one else was ever close to me, after he took me on.

  They thought it was my looks, my curled and tortured face, poor Cut-lip Clip, which kept my bed so cold. But it never was just that. There were soft girls and hard girls who might have reached for me, and perhaps not just for my access to him; women who might have nailed their palms in the darkness and steered their tongues aside my scar-split face – but I could not have them. The spiters were right: I was his Nun, a bride of our battles. (The only one I loved, beside him, I could never have.) And now that he is gone, and his little empire in the care of the daughter of his brother, the great Levello, the Mountain King, and because I have time before I go...

  Here is the story of Ludo and Levello. Here is the true history of how, by cunning and valour, they defeated the Invaders. Here is how Ludo – through his brother’s counsel and Uzma’s power – mastered the dread beast of Faith. And here also is a curious chapter in Ludo’s last coup, the restoration of the people’s land. From Clip the Prince’s Pen, last survivor of the court of Ludo the Warlord, the Peace Father, to you, unknown reader of the future, Greetings!

  Now, to begin: have your historians told you why the Invaders came? They said we harboured their enemies. (That was barely half true: they were small sprats, those Dissenters.) They said we were backward, out of the times, savage obstacles in the path of progress and peace, an offence to the United Nations and World Majority Government.(That was a little more true – what were their distant councils to us? What were their rabbles of waggling jaws, their assemblies of unimaginable bureaucrats? They were nothing.) But no, no. The prize was not a few chanting ascetics, nor the conversion of a bunch of farmers and fishers and smugglers to their one-party faith and their God, ICU. The prize was elemental. Our air, our west winds and our rain-making hills: water! We were near drowned in it half the time, though not so nearly as our poor neighbours, the English.

  By the time the Invaders arrived our land was already a groaning ship and England a dense archipelago, a shattering of islands written thick with silver runes. Cities drawn up like anchored ships: sea towers, flood walls, residential rigs, quays and miles of bridges. They called it New Venice. It sounds romantic but in old Wales we knew we were lucky to have our feet on steep stone, green slopes and earth.

  Shipping was the business you wanted then. Young men with hopes to catch headed for the docks like gulls. Ludo and Levello were born within sniff of the sea, as I was. They came from a farming family, four brothers up on the rise above Druidstone. Ninnian and Caswallawn stayed on the farm. Levello, at thirteen, went north to the new harbour at Aberystwyth. Ludo, two years older and ever a man for the most direct move, came south to Pembroke Dock. He found work on the flying-boat fleet, with the Longshore Union, and that is how we met.

  I was born in Castle Terrace, Pembroke. We knew Ludo before he knew us, a red barrel of a boy, never silent, with a prodigious memory for a face and a cargo and jokes. My father was a doctor with the Port Inspectorate. Every foreign boat that landed, every duck with a load and crew had to be inspected. It was remorseless work, my father’s share enough for five. (Almost all the doctors, engineers and brains went East, of course, to the money and the good living.) At fifteen I was two years his assistant. ‘Jellyfish’ they called me in those days, and ‘Porto’, after the Portuguese Man O’War.

  ‘Looks like a jelly that sucked a propeller!’

  My father’s operation, his one and only attempt at cosmetic surgery, did not help much. I was marked an easy target, and would have stayed one if only the Piranhas, the little quayside knife boys, had not tried to rob me, under that old blue moon.

  My father had taken delivery of a box of vaccines from India and I was hill-hauling them back to our store when the Piranhas struck. All around me in a moment.

  ‘Give it up!’

  ‘Get away. It’s no good to you.’

  ‘Give it up or you’re gutted!’

  Out came the knives.

  ‘It’s vaccine!’ I cried, ‘You can’t use it! Let me by, I’ll give you money.’

  ‘We’ll have the money as well.’

  From utter darkness in the wing of shadow behind the Flying Pilot there came a rush of splatter like a horse pissing, and a voice.

  ‘I know you, Skinny Jakes,’ it said, ‘You know I
know you.’

  The Piranhas stopped. One squealed: ‘Who’s that? Get out of there!’

  The pissing continued prodigious. A black snake wound down the road.

  ‘Who’s this!’ There was a laugh and the voice had form now, a shape more man than boy. ‘This is the King of Old Pembroke Town and he’s telling you to scat!’

  The pissing stopped, there was a shuffle-pause and a slow zii-p.

  ‘Now,’ said Ludo, stepping out of the shadow with his fists up like monkeyheads, ‘who’s got the liver to wash my hands? Does it have to be you, Skinny Jakes?’

  The Piranhas shoaled at him and there was a crack as he flattened one, a blurred thud and another was limp, his weedy body Ludo’s shield, preventing the rest from using their knives.

  ‘You’ll drop it or your Jakes is cut and I’ll take his blade to the rest of you,’ said Ludo, terribly calmly. He did not sound breathless or even the merest bit excited, that was the frightening thing.

  ‘Aww, Ludo! Let him go!’

  ‘Fair’s fair boys, and goodnight to you!’ boomed Ludo, jetting the woozy body at them. In a scrabble there were only the two of us, and the body he’d hit lying still. I was standing there, holding the box.

  ‘Cut-lip Clip? Dad’s the doctor?’ Ludo enquired, peering at me under his curls.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d say that’s one you owe me, well?’

  ‘Oh – yes! Thank you, Ludo...’

  ‘No thanks. Can you read?’

  ‘Read?’

  ‘And write?’

  ‘...Yes?’

  ‘I don’t like to read, myself.’

  ‘No. Don’t you...’ (I couldn’t think.) ‘It can be...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Time-consuming?’

  ‘That’s right exactly!’ he laughed. ‘It can be time-consuming. And I’ve got none to consume if I’m to make up that boast just now, well?’

  ‘Boast?’

  ‘King of Old Pembroke Town,’ he said, solemnly, and now he came close. ‘I mean to do it in five.’

  ‘Five?’

  ‘Years.’

  It barely took him two.

  ‘Best get that box safe away, isn’t it? Here. I’ll carry, you show the way.’

  The box was plucked from my arms.

  ‘Vaccine you said, Clip?’

  ‘Yes, Ludo.’

  ‘Useful stuff...’

  Swansea was tough, they’re wild there. Afterwards London and Newcastle and even Liverpool were easy, because who controlled the approaches control­led all, and we had the west. But Swansea was tough. Ludo outflanked them, taking the unions and the gangs and through them the ports and through them all the power in Newport first, then Cardiff. ‘Honest wages for honest work!’ was our slogan, with a wink, for less than half of the work, strictly speaking, was honest.

  Yes, yes, we were smugglers, bootleggers, brigands, black marketeers, profiteers, buccaneers, pirates. We were gangsters. We were a tough bunch, a bad lot, but we had heart, you know. No women, no kids – we kept the old law. And we weren’t dishonest, except where the law was concerned. We had a kind of conscience. We weren’t the first underground to offer services in return for service. You couldn’t count the money we put into schools, clinics, soup kitchens: things the impoverished and corrupted government would not offer or could not maintain. We regulated the petty criminals and adjudicated disputes judiciously. Sign up with us and we looked after you. Fight us and you would get more fight than you could handle. We never killed except when we were forced to – but the Swansea gang, the Gweilch, wouldn’t have any of it. They promised us blood.

  ‘They’re frightened,’ Ludo said, sadly. ‘They don’t mean it.’

  They had reason to be frightened, after what we did to Birmingham (dosed their drinking water, dear me – the effects wore off after a week but it was no fun while it lasted) and they did surely mean it.

  ‘A chance to climb down with honour is all they need,’ he said, but we couldn’t see the chance until we heard about the wedding. One of their sea runners, Hook, a thin-faced man and cunning, was to be married. Hook had a thing going with the Bretons in Saint Malo; his boats weaved between the patrols. He paid off the Excise men and more importantly someone who told him where gaps would appear between drones. Hook’s wedding would float on French champagne. All the best families in the Gweilch would be there. Some of us thought we should just blow them up.

  ‘Never,’ said Ludo, ‘That would mean nine generations of war. But we ought to send some sort of present.’

  We got the munition from the base at Brawdy – Ludo ran the labour there as he did the ranges at Castlemartin, the barracks at Brecon and the base at Sennybridge. Even after the Invaders came, we never lost our grip on them, which made a difference to the struggle.

  The timing was exquisite, had to be. We bought one of their bouncers and had him plant the tracker. Jenks the Donkey Drop, Ludo’s maths man, did the calculations. A flying-boat at such and such a height, at such a speed, dropping a package of such a weight, into a thirty-second window... Hitting the spot wasn’t the problem, the laser would do that for you: it was all about the angle. Don’t ask me to explain it. Jenks had a feeling for angles that would have dumbed a computer.

  Anyway, the feast was done, the space was cleared, and Hooky and his bride about to take their turn – the band raised their bows and gathered their blowing breaths – when Ludo’s present arrived, smashing through the roof and the ceiling, burying itself nose-first in the centre of the floor. Picture the poor Gweilch as the dust cleared and they saw the tail fins and the prop still turning on the end of that silver cigar! There’s a foot of it moled into the concrete and five more gleaming above. But instead of blowing out the building, the block and everyone, the cigar splits open and spills the dance floor with a rattling spray of hardened light. Wonder enough – but then the room fills with a recording of Ludo’s boom.

  ‘This is a love bomb for you boys – we apologise for alarming the ladies. Congratulations, Mr Hook and Charlotte! We wish you health and happiness and hope we will always stand together. Now, please, forgive our intrusion – and dance, if we be friends...’

  After a few moments Hooky laughed, then they all laughed, the band struck up and Hook and Charlotte took the floor, diamonds scattering around their feet. A whole bucketful, a bombful of diamonds – that is how Ludo bought the loyalty of the Gweilch. Well, that and the face of death. It was a grand party, we heard.

  It was not the last time Ludo used combinations of terror, relief and awe to master an audience and realise his will.

  ‘Those Jacobeans had the stuff!’ he exclaimed, after becoming acquainted with Webster and his Duchess. He became quite a student of the classics. I made recordings for him, readings of books I felt might interest him, as well as others I thought he ought to know. In the time of our ascendancy (when we took over the Gweilch we were living in the great house at Dinefwr) as in our time underground he would often retire to his quarters – be it the King’s postered bedroom or his portion of a cave – with my voice and the words of the immortals. I started with the obvious: Macchiavelli’s Prince, Sun Tzu’s Arts of War, Foot’s biography of Aneurin Bevan – and then we went through Shakespeare. There was never any suggestion, of course, that he could not read. It was understood that he needed to use the time working and could listen to me with one ear.

  Why didn’t I teach him to read? Bless you for asking! I guess you never sinned so low as to sit at the right hand of a bandit baron as he made his play for the regency. ‘A’ as in ‘ace’, ‘aa’ as in ‘apple’. ‘B’, ‘bu’, as in bullet through the back of the neck... Revealing anything short of infallibility would not have done at all.

  ‘You do a fair Porter, Clip,’ he laughed once, ‘but your Macbeth isn’t black enough and Henry doesn’t convince like your Fluellen!’

  He came to love a good bout of literary criticism. In the first year of the war we were lying in a thicket somewhere
near Bwlch one gut-wet night – it was more of a thinnet, actually, as I recall – in ambush, passing the wait for a convoy of Invaders in debate over Hamlet.

  ‘He was a damn weak boy,’ Ludo insisted, wiping the rain off his nose. ‘The ghost tells him all he needs to know. There’s no arguing with your father’s blood – I’d have been straight down off those battlements, spit Claudius and take the crown. Polonius and his whelp would have jumped into line – grateful if I didn’t do them too!’

  I was trying to keep the rain out of the mortar tubes. ‘But suppose the ghost is lying,’ I retorted. ‘A damned spirit, a devil. You wouldn’t act without proof and damn yourself.’

  ‘You don’t need proof when you hear truth,’ Ludo said, taking a swig from the flask and passing it over my head. (They used to nip a bit of warm on ambush, not enough to spoil the aim, just sufficient to counter the riddles of rain down the neck.) ‘Look at old Othello. He gets his proof, much good does it do him.’

  ‘You’re talking about instinct. It’s not a strawberry hanky he chokes her with, it’s perverted instinct. We can’t act on that – we need reason.’

  ‘Reason!’ Ludo roared, prompting a chorus of shushing from the bushes where his fighters lay. He ignored them. ‘Is it reason brings you out on a no-moon night in bloody February under dogbelly cloud to throw bombs at a bunch of conscripts from Guangzhou or wherever?’

  ‘Yes,’ I stubborned. ‘Well, it’s no bloody ghost, anyroad.’

  ‘Isn’t it, Clip?’ And he smiled that smile, the same I saw the night of the Piranhas, the smile that said he had won and the earth was on its rightful axis. ‘For a reader your history is thin. See down there? The Gaer? That was a Roman fort. Don’t you think your ancestors lay just here, waiting to scrag a legionary or two, on a brother night to this bitch? Does history proceed by instinct or reason, Clip? The ghosts are with us tonight, mun. Be sure of it – and shoot straighter!’

  Pretty well everyone heard that. If half the Liberation Army had come up the road then we would have bayonet-charged them. This was Ludo’s genius. Not conviction – or not conviction alone, for that will undo you in the end, whatever Ludo thought – but a coupling certainty of the depth of the moment, a feel for its roots in time, time forward and time back.