The Brothers of Gwynedd

by Edith Pargeter

  It began in the hall that night, before all the household, and I think it was David who began it, though the voice that set the note was that of Rhydderch Hen, the oldest of the bards, who played and sang the lady's commemorative hymn. I may be wrong, the spark may well have come from Rhydderch himself. But David sat so tense and strung that night, and himself spoke so little, that I cannot but wonder. For he knew how to put thoughts in men's minds and actions into their hands that they never fully intended. Moreover, these three days spent again in the company of his eldest brother, brought from prison inevitably to return to prison, had pierced David deep in the conscience softened and rent by his mother's passing, and the words with which she left this world.

  Rhydderch began with the praise of the Lady Senena, and the recital of her troubled fortunes in her marriage and her chosen exile with her children, all that old story made gentle and acceptable now even to those who had been torn by contention then. He sang her faithfulness to her sons and her lord, her great strength of mind and will. Then he turned to the subject of filial duty and family loyalty, of the sacredness of a mother's last wish and prayer, and the obligation of a son, prince though he might be, and the greatest of princes, to reverence and observe it. For he sang that even where wrong had been done, brother should forgive brother, as he hoped for forgiveness.

  It was not the first time the bards had made known their desire for Owen's release and reinstatement, and that was no great wonder, for they were old men and wedded to the old ways. But this was the first time it had been pressed with such force. Owen Goch himself, who was sitting beside Llewelyn in the centre of the high table—though he knew and we knew his guards were never very far away—began to flush and glow with gratification, and to give forth sparks of hopefulness, but I do not believe he had known beforehand what Rhydderch meant to do. And David burned like a slow and secret fire, and watched Llewelyn's face every moment. But the prince sat unmoved to anything more than a smile of slightly grim tolerance, and thanked and rewarded Rhydderch for his singing.

  Soon afterwards Llewelyn, of intent, signalled to the silentiary that he would leave the hall, and withdrew into the high chamber with his brothers, and would have me attend him there. Since Goronwy was still absent in the south, there was no other with us at that meeting, for he foresaw that one or other of them had things to say better said only between themselves. Me he never shut out, since first I came in curious circumstances into his service. I was the silent witness, yet informed enough to make balanced judgments, and I was the recorder if such were needed. So he would say, but I think truly he wanted me because there were moments when he felt himself alone, and I was a brother at one remove, a brother without claims on him, and all the more indissolubly bound to him because there was nothing but my own will to bind me.

  The door was barely closed between us and the hall when David said, not aggressively as I had feared, but with a white and quiet passion: "You have heard our mother's voice, and the voice of the bards echoing it. I know you cannot be indifferent. It was her last wish, her last warning. All of us heard it. Llewelyn, you cannot send Owen back into captivity. You said you would do right to him. Keep your word! Set him free!"

  Owen Goch stood gathered up tightly into himself, in that big, lusty body running to fat with such long inaction, and his eyes strayed from brother to brother in uncertainty and watchfulness, reading every tone, every quiver of a face. Doubtless there was a great hope in him, but also a great and obdurate sullenness, at least as far from reconciliation at heart as ever Llewelyn was.

  "By what right," said Llewelyn mildly, and looking only at David, "do you make yourself our brother's champion, and ask clemency for him? He has made no such claim on his own account."

  "By right of the clemency you showed to me," said David, and his face was so drawn and shrunken with passion that he looked as one starved. "Why to me, and not to him? Did not I offend as grossly as he? And yet I am free and indulged, and he is still in ward and landless and solitary, after seven years. You cannot justify it! What has he done that I have not?"

  Llewelyn said: "You have done somewhat that he has not. You offered me, voluntarily, your homage and fealty, and have kept them ever since."

  "You never gave to him," said David, burning like a tall and bitter flame, "the chance to offer the like. Me you took and him you left. How will you answer for that in the judgment?"

  "I will answer for it now," said Llewelyn. And he turned and faced Owen Goch, who glowered upon him uneasily through the red of his bush of hair and bush of beard, "I offer it now," he said. "The same you chose of your own will to pledge me, David." But he did not look at David, or speak directly to Owen. At the one he looked, to the other he spoke. "I say to him," said Llewelyn, "that I revere my mother's memory and intent, and I stand in her sight, by God's grace. If Owen will do homage and swear fealty to me as David did, acknowledging me as prince of Wales, if he will quitclaim to me, in return for what lands I assign him, all his claim to sovereignty in Gwynedd or in Wales, then he may go free from this moment, and be established in a fair portion. Fair," said Llewelyn hardly, "considering all that has been, and the council shall be the judge." For the first time he addressed Owen Goch pointblank." Will you do so?" he said.

  There was a long moment of silence and struggle, as though all those there present held their breath, and fought for air and life. Then Owen Goch heaved himself clear of the hush like a salmon leaping, and said through his teeth: "No! I have my rights! I keep my rights! You are my younger, and you rob me. I appeal to Welsh law. This land of Gwynedd is partible, every yard of it. I demand my own!"

  "You had your own," said Llewelyn, "portioned to you by the council of Gwynedd, and fully equal to mine. You were not content with it, you struck for more and lost all. And even if I grant your claim in this land of Gwynedd, where do you stand in this land of Wales? That I have won, that I have made, that I have created with my bare hands? What part have you in that, and what right? None! You are seven years out of date, Wales has outrun you. You may do homage to me and hold lands to the full extent of your claim as my vassal, or you may go back to Dolbadarn and nurse your ancient right in prison. It has no reality anywhere else."

  So he said, forcibly but without any anger or venom, hammering to make all plain, though I think he had little hope that Owen Goch would accept the undoubted grace he was offered. For grace it was. He might then have come to the prince's peace, as many a better and greater had come, and been confirmed in all his holding, and protected under the prince's shadow from all encroachment. But he could not get over the fixed notion that he was the elder, and held equal right, no matter what he had done to imperil it, no matter what Llewelyn had done all this time to assert his better right, by virtue of the efficacy of his rule and the preeminence of his arms. For there is no question but Wales, to give it that glorious name, was his creation out of chaos.

  "I will see you damned and in hell," said Owen Goch, through a throat so crammed with hate he could hardly speak, "before I will do homage to you or pledge you fealty."

  After a moment of bleak silence Llewelyn said evenly: "I will not hold you to a decision made in heat, that may be regretted when the blood is cooler. Sleep on it overnight, and think what you do." And he struck his hands together, and called, and the guards came softly in. There was not another word said between them. Owen Goch had enough sense of his own dignity to fend off the affront of being held or enforced. He stalked through the doorway without a look aside, and they closed gently after him and herded him, away to his guarded sleep.

  "If either of you has anything to say to me," said Llewelyn then, with arduous calm, for I knew he was more distressed than he was willing to show, "say it. I am listening."

  David was silent, but so taut and black of brow that I knew he had much more boiling within him. But Rhodri spoke up with all the loud, indignant righteousness of those who move upon the surface of events, and understand little of what goes on beneath. Nothing of wh
at tormented David was known to him. He had neither betrayed Llewelyn in his warfare for Wales, nor helped him after, as David had. All he saw and felt was the narrow current that moved his own boat. But in the elucidation of that current he had read and brooded over all the law books of the old men, centuries gone.

  He went into the assault with such desperate courage that Llewelyn was astonished, and at another time would have been amused, for he never took Rhodri very gravely.

  "Owen does right," Rhodri said vehemently "to hold strictly to law, and you do wrong to flout it, and have been doing wrong all these years, as you well know. Nor is it any answer to hark back to what is gone, and say that Gwynedd was fairly divided, and Owen sacrificed his rights by acting against you. He did what he did in defence of David's rights and mine, which had never been fairly met, and never have since. It would be honourable to write off what was done then, and begin afresh to do justice to us all. You have the true occasion now to do what should have been done long ago. No one will point the finger at you, or see any weakness in such an act. The bards will approve. It would be fitting, as a memorial to our mother, who made her own will plain before she died."

  He was very pale with passion, so that his reddish freckles stood out darkly over his cheekbones and nose, and his hair, that was a bleached red like ripe wheat-stalks, shook down over his high forehead. Surely he had been brooding for years and preparing what he had to say, and had wanted the courage to begin until the Lady Senena's dying words braced him to the deed. And now that he was launched, he poured out his arguments with such frenzied fluency that it was plain all his reading had been directed to one end, the urging of his own case. For though he was careful to bring in always the matter of Owen's freedom, with much more ferocity did he press the point that all the sons, from eldest to youngest, had equal rights to land, all of which was by law partible.

  "Which land?" said Llewelyn with ominous mildness. "The land of Gwynedd or all the land of Wales? What came to us by inheritance was the shrunken domain of Gwynedd west of Conway. Am I to divide that equally in four and share it with you?"

  "The lands of Gwynedd east of Conway have also been recovered," said Rhodri, well primed with his studies in law, "and are also partible."

  "Recovered by my hand," said Llewelyn flatly, "though I grant to David, with hearty goodwill, that he did his share gallantly there. But where were you? And for the rest of Wales—barring the marcher lordships, and those are matter for action hereafter—there are princes with claims of their own, claims I have been the means of satisfying and guaranteeing, and though they may have done homage and fealty to me, never think they have waived any of their rights in their own commotes, or are likely to look kindly on any claim you may advance on them. No, confine your pleas to Gwynedd west of Conway, where they might—I say might!—have some validity."

  Rhodri was thrown somewhat out of his stride, but having begun he could not leave off, for he might never have the force to open the matter again. So he drew furious breath, and went at it with stammering passion, shooting legal quotations like arrows, and so voluble that it seemed he had learned most of the code off by heart. And the longer he went on, the less did he mention Owen's rights, and the more his own, though still he cried out absolutely for Owen's freedom. He needed Owen, if he was to achieve anything, for he was always uneasy at standing alone, and David, though he had begun this, stood by with a dark face and a bitter eye, and said no word now in his support. So Rhodri pressed hard on the theme of his mother's dying wish, and reviled the impiety of rejecting it. And when he was out of breath and words, Llewelyn said:

  "Owen still has a choice, if he cares to use it. Don't prejudge what he will do. But I tell you this, if he goes free he goes free as my vassal, owing me homage and fealty, and with the law and the council ready to deal with him if he betrays me. It has been too late to plead the old law of inheritance in Gwynedd ever since our grandfather's day, when by consent it was put aside. You cannot turn time back. I will not give you or any man licence to dismember what I have made into one."

  "You are spurning justice," flamed Rhodri, made bold by despair, "and flouting our mother's prayer!"

  "In your judgment," said Llewelyn, "doubtless I am. Certainly my answer to you is no! No, I will not release Owen as an act of mindless piety, without his submission. No, I will not give you a full fourth share in even the western part of Gwynedd. The lands you hold were apportioned to you by the council, and held to be a fair endowment. You will get no more from me."

  Then Rhodri cried out against him for an unjust tyrant, a spoiler of his brothers, and flung away out of the room in a fury. I thought, then, he was half afraid of what he had already done and said, and wishing to be elsewhere when Llewelyn's patience broke. But now I think he had another idea and another reason, and made use of his rage as cover for his withdrawal. "I will not stay in your court," he cried from the doorway, "I take my people home tonight." And so he was gone, and when we heard great hustle and bustle and clatter of hooves in the wards somewhat later, no one wondered at it.

  When the door had closed on his going, with a slam that shook a faint drift of dust out of the tapestry curtain, Llewelyn stood somewhat wearily looking after him for a moment, and then said, more to himself than to us: "God grant that may be the end of it. Who would have thought he had it in him, though! If he could bring half the vigour to the interests of Wales he brings to his own we should have a paladin at our service." And he poured wine, and drank gratefully, and looked across at David, who remained where he had stood throughout, his eyes burningly intent on his brother's face. "In the name of God," he said, "even if you have more to say, need it be said bolt upright? Or are we still at the bar of a law-court? You, or I?"

  "Both, it may be," said David, darkly smiling, though it was more like a grimace of pain. "I am sorry, but you have not finished with me. All that I said to you I say again. And neither you nor Owen have answered it."

  "My offer to Owen," said Llewelyn, "is still open. Even if he is of the same mind tomorrow, and still rejects it, it will remain open. He has only to submit, and he can have his freedom and his lands again."

  "You know he will not," said David, and his face was riven suddenly, as though its composure fell apart from some terrible convulsion of pain, until he forcibly reimposed upon it its normal severe and haughty beauty. Only then did I begin to perceive how deeply he was torn by his mother's passing, and the manner of it, and how it had set him at odds with his own heart and mind and conscience. Not often in his life did he turn to do battle with the creature he was, though always he knew its lineaments perfectly, without shame or self-deceit. "I am not asking you for bargains, or bleating, of justice," he said, "I am asking you for a gesture of princeliness at your own risk. If you are not afraid to deny what my mother prayed for, I am. I am, because I am the instrument of his misfortune, and I feel the load upon me like a curse. You can deliver me, as well as Owen, if you will."

  "Fool!" said Llewelyn with affection. "You wring your own heart for no reason. You have paid off your indebtedness time and time again, you owe nothing to me, and nothing to Owen. Unless he accepts his position as vassal to me, how can I control him, how protect the union I have made? His voluntary submission is vital, not for me, but for Wales, which he could otherwise destroy. Do you think I will imperil that?"

  "He will not submit," said David, with the certainty of despair.

  "He will. Though it take him years yet, he will come to his senses. If I can wait, why not you?"

  "While I go free," said David, marvelling, "and in your trust, and in your bosom!"

  "Why should you not? You, whom he enticed into his revolt against me, barely nineteen years old, torn two ways between brothers, and knowing him better than you then knew me? He should have been ashamed," said Llewelyn hotly, for it was something he had held against Owen from that day, "so to have seduced you."

  "Sweet Christ!" said David, so low I think Llewelyn did not hear, but I did, for I w
as closer to him, and much wrung between them, being friends to both. Then he raised his voice, and said harshly: "You do us both wrong, we were not as you supposed, Owen and I. It was for my right he struck, whatever he believed he stood to gain, and it was I who put it into his head, and provided him all that argument he broached with you. He was the seduced, and I the seducer! Me you should have loaded with chains, him you should have loosed. What could Owen do against you, with no wits but his own?"

  All this he said with such weighted and laborious force that I knew how much it cost him, but to Llewelyn it had, I can well understand how, the sound of argument composed in obstinacy, word by word as he devised it. He looked upon his brother hard and long, between sternness and affection, and said bluntly:

  "Those are bold and generous lies, but still lies, and unbecoming between you and me."

  "No lies," said David, quivering, "but truth."

  "I do not believe you. If it had been true, you would have spoken up long ago, even if you lacked the courage after Bryn Derwin. It is no way to help Owen by slandering yourself."

  David saw then that he was caught in his own skills as in a net, and could not break through them, but would still have to carry this load of guilt upon his heart. For once before, but then of deliberate intent, he had spoken the truth in such a way that it could not be believed, and now the same fate, unsought, was visited upon him as a requital. He tried, but even for him now words were hard to find, and his persistence in a confession that was taken to be simply a mistaken act of chivalry, a weapon for enforcing his will even at his own sorry cost, at last pricked Llewelyn, who was tired and wrung, into flashing anger at such obstinacy.