The Prince's Pen

by Horatio Clare

  In this way Lludd rid Britain of the three plagues. Afterwards he ruled in peace and prosperity for as long as he lived. This tale is called the Adventure of Lludd and Llevelys, and here it ends.

  Synopsis:

  for the full story see The Mabinogion, A New Translation

  by Sioned Davies (Oxford World’s Classics, 2007).

  Afterword

  On the wall of one of the classrooms of my childhood was a timeline of Welsh literature, beginning in the corner of the room with the Mabinogion. It seemed an appropriately dense and twisting root: the small print described branches and boars, Romans, cauldrons, Arthur, Irish links, Celts. Among the books set by my teachers the Mabinogion never featured. I bought a dull-jacketed edition, without introduction or notes – which I soon missed. It was like reading a spell book, half in runes, without a key. One imagined listeners in some age of dark, nodding at symbolisms and references only rare scholars might now understand. It was this series of Seren’s which took me back to the stories. And then came the email from Penny Thomas, editor of this series. Bless my luck, ‘Lludd and Llevelys’ had not been taken by another writer. It was instantly the one I wanted.

  Their story barely runs to five pages and its very brevity makes the brothers more monumental. Lludd, with all his heroic qualities, adds a dimension not much seen in heroes, except when its absence is a tragic flaw – he listens. And he has a wise counsellor in his brother. One of the great pleasures of my life is my relationship with a wise brother. The human crack in the smooth old shell of the tale, their argument – when the brothers try to speak through a horn, and all comes out contrary until Llevelys washes it clean with wine – was the first aperture through which I saw characters I recognised, and therefore a story. Although the judgement of leaders as great or not great is history’s prerogative, I have consciously seen only one sure star, in Nelson Mandela – though a case could be made for Mikhail Gorbachev. Lludd – Ludo, as he became – could not be a Mandela, but I tried to give him some of the playfulness, the humour and the sense of historic purpose that one of Mandela’s fellow prisoners once described to me, recalling his time on Robben Island with the liberator of South Africa. I addressed that challenge, the description of a great man, with the sense of needing someone like that fellow prisoner, who could recall him first-hand.

  The myth presents its plot as a gift to any re-teller. You cannot help but feel that the five pages we have left are a worn-down nub of a gripping epic. Invasion, civil strife and crisis – and all beaten by a leader’s technology, cunning and strength: how those old bards must have had them craning forward in the firelight while they told it! The key line, the fulcrum about which the whole thing turns, sounds as though it has struck all its listeners with equal force and so survived every telling: the description of the power of the Corannyeid. ‘There was no conversation anywhere in the island, however hushed, that they did not hear, provided the wind caught it; consequently no harm could be done to them.’ To today’s reader that can only mean surveillance, certainly to a citizen of the same island, which has become the most snooped-on in the world. I did not have to look far for examples of people who have become the prey of our most terrible technologies.

  The two dragons seemed to me to be two faiths but they might just as easily have been two tribes – one is described as ‘foreign’; the other is ‘your dragon’, as Llevelys tells Lludd. The way they are disposed of together, buried in an eternal embrace, seemed rather touching and appropriate: how has this island ever prospered except by an embrace (sometimes exploitative, but sometimes also noble) of the world? The solution to the dragons’ conflict is a mingling, an inter-marriage: time, above all. Their reduction, in the tale, from vast monsters to two little pigs is a wonderfully incisive – and somehow very Welsh – take-down: what are the great trumpeting screams of competing faiths, at root, but the amplified grunting of the little pigs of ego inside mortal demagogues? Similarly, the giant who empties the kingdom’s cellars is these days a familiar force: nebulous, working invisibly, casting sleep and ignorance over its victims.

  Although The Prince’s Pen is necessarily an extra­polation, it intentionally departs from the spirit and the letter of the original only once, in the brothers’ solution to the Corannyeid. This story puns on ‘bug’, rather than depicting the full horror of the myth, in which biological (and presumably gene-based) warfare is used, in a monstrously casual and effective way. Perhaps consequently it misses an opportunity to explore a potential nightmare of the near-future. I don’t regret it: some things are too hideous to contemplate. The solution works in the myth only because the Corannyeid descend – as original audiences would have understood – from the fairy folk of Breton legend. Fortunately, we no longer have the luxury of quite being able to believe in the dehumanisation of our foes.

  Acknowledgements

  The ‘Mitchell’ referred to is David Mitchell; the book is his The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. All my love and thanks to John and Sally Clare. Many thanks to the editorial and production staff at Seren, particularly Penny Thomas. Thank you, Zoe Waldie and Mohsen Shah, and thank you, Manu at the Oberdan Cafe. And thank you, Merlin Hughes, Roger Couhig, Alexander Clare and Rebecca Shooter. This is for you, with love.

  Seren is the book imprint of

  Poetry Wales Press Ltd

  57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

  www.seren-books.com

  © Horatio Clare 2011

  ISBN 978-1-85411-563-8

  The right of Horatio Clare to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Mathew Bevan

  The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.