The Heart Remembers

by Margaret Redfern

  ‘But how are you come so soon?’ Twm asked later, after the greeting and hugging and exclaiming, and Matje had rushed away to the kitchen to prepare tasty food for these weary travellers. ‘We know Edgar sent messages begging you to join him but they must only just have arrived. Did you come on wings?’

  ‘Not wings but watter, and ower much of it. We know nowt of messages. We missed you all so we caäme looking. And here we are, saäfe and sound at last, though we’ve had our share of adventures. What’s this about our altar boy? Why’s he so keen to have us there? Nowt amiss, is there?’

  ‘Nothing except Agathi with child and needing her Hatice – and Edgar needing your hefty shoulders at that manor of his.’

  ‘Nay, do yer say so? Agathi bearing a bairn?’

  It wasn’t Blue who spoke: it was Hatice. Dai and Twm stared at her in amazement then burst out in loud laughter. Blue grinned and nodded and hugged his Hatice to him.

  ‘A’ve made a Fen woman of her,’ he said proudly. ‘Niko and Mehmi an’ all. Don’t yer take no heed of these two frim foölk, my lass. Yer’ll do well enough with Edgar’s people. They’ll not be proper Fen foölk but near enough.’

  ‘Frim folk?’

  ‘Foreigners,’ Blue grinned. ‘What do yer think on that, Welshman?’

  ‘A marvel, Blue.’

  The big man’s face changed as he looked at the frail brown man sitting in front of him. ‘Eh lad, but yer scathed. A nivver thought as A should see it. Sior Francesco said as it had been gravementemale fer yer, but there’s been time enough for yer to shape and yer looks as if yer’d dwine away.’

  ‘We had an encounter with an avalanche in the High Mountains,’ Twm said.

  ‘Eh, is that it, then? So did we but it passed us by. Our marronier said as there were two English – were that you, then? One as near dead?’

  ‘Dead certainly if it had not been for Thomas here,’ Heinrijc Mertens said.

  After that, an evening spent in news from Venezia: Elisabeta da Ginstinianis was married after all to Jacopo Trevior. There had been pressure on Francisco and his father to heal the wounds between the two families. The great sea-city mattered more than any one family. ‘May’appen,’ Blue said, ‘Francisco realised as there were nobbut Trevior to take the wench on. Brrr.’ He shivered and rubbed his hands together. ‘She’s as cold as a fish’s tail, that one. He’s well rid. His part of the bargains was as they’d not live in Venezia. They’ll go to the Veneto. Maybe as far as the Great Lake. It’s the father A’m that sorried fer.’

  There was tale-telling, adventures and near-escapes, wondrous encounters, admiration for Mehmi’s oud and Niko’s daf, and for their playing.

  ‘Foölk at Edgar’s plaäce, they’ll nivver have heard the like,’ Blue said proudly. ‘Who’d ha thought as our two giovane would make sich a joyful sound together.’

  ‘Dafydd has plans to travel to Edgar’s “place”,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Aye well, that’s right,’ Blue said. ‘So he should.’

  ‘As soon as he can arrange a sailing.’

  Blue cast a look at Thomas, saw he was at his most austere; at Dai, expressionless; at Heinrijc Mertens, anxious, imploring. ‘Ay well, A reckon as Dai will have his way. Always does, Tom lad. No need fer fretting. It’s doable. We’ll be there – keep him safe like. He’ll be better for being in England with our little lass. Though they do say as it’s hard to get a boat across that pond these days.’

  ‘Dafydd has a way, if Rémi has news.’ Thomas’ voice was resigned.

  Rémi looked at him anxiously then at Dafydd, who nodded. ‘Seems they know all, Rémi – except what news you have today.’

  A sailing on Friday night, moonless.

  ‘If any man can steer by the stars and keep us safe from the French, it’s Jan Cloet.’ Dai said.

  ‘Room fer us all?’ Blue asked.

  ‘May’appen,’ Dai said, at his most imperturbable.

  28

  July 1337

  The Manor of Lord Roger de Langton

  Girat, regirat garcifer;

  Me rogus urit fortifer;

  Propinat me tunc dapifer

  (The kitchen-lad turns and turns the spit again;

  The pyre burns me fiercely; Now the steward serves me up)

  (Carmina Burana, 12th/13thC)

  ‘Swan for Lord Roger’s dinner? Don’t talk daft, boy. When does he ever have swan on his platter? Any more than your own master’s kitchens.’

  ‘If he does…when he does…’

  ‘Oh aye? Pigs flying, boy. Have done wi’ yer chelp.’

  ‘What’s this then?’

  The old man had crept up on them, quiet despite his bulk. He liked to tour his kitchens, ask Peter Cook what was broiling or baking or roasting, taste a little, savour titbits. If he had little life left to him, how better to use it than in pleasure?

  ‘Sir. Lord Roger. It’s this nuzzling lad from Lord Edgar’s manor wanting to know if you’d be supping on swan.’

  ‘Swan? You seem very eager for swan meat, child.’

  ‘Not the meat. I want a swan bone. A swan’s wing.’ Oluf stood his ground. He stared the old man in the face. ‘There’s none to be had at ours.’

  ‘A swan’s wing bone is it? And what use do you have for a swan’s wing bone?’

  ‘A pipe,’ Oluf said, his eyes bright, eager. ‘They say you can make a pipe from the swan wing and when you play it, it sounds like the angel it once was.’

  ‘And when – if – you have the wing, how will you make the pipe?’

  Oluf’s face was stubborn. ‘I don’t know but I’ll find out how.’

  ‘And when you have made it, do you know how to play it?’

  ‘Not me. It’s not for me. It’s for Joan. She played Mistress Kazan’s pipe that belonged to her grandfather’s brother, the music man, and she loved it so, though he was an enemy of King Edward. I want to make a swan pipe for her.’ He chucked up his chin, belligerent. ‘She deserves it.’

  Sir Roger chuckled, working his way through the confused explanation. ‘So young. So chivalrous. Of course you must, young sir. Maybe my own minstrel can help you.’

  Guillaume was a little rat-faced man, ancient now, a Gascon who had been with Sir Roger for many years. Minstrel he was called but truth be told too old now, and his fingers stiffened and bent. He was a lute player – used to be a lute player – but he knew how to play a pipe. ‘I am called Guillaume after mon père, etson père before him.’ Even after all these years of living in England, his speech was throaty, difficult to follow.

  ‘My father, he give me a pipe of elder when first he come back from the Welsh war. The first Welsh war. A tale so strange. The pipe, it is made by a halfwit. A simple pipe of elder but the sound is true.’ The old man’s face creased into a grin, and suddenly Oluf could see the boy he had been. ‘At first, it sound like – how do you say? Lâcher un pet?’ He blew out noisily and Oluf giggled.

  ‘Like a fart,’ he smirked.

  ‘D’accord. Like a fart. It make me laugh. But then, me, I practise and mon père, he know I am good. But never so good as the halfwit, he say.’ He shrugged, the shrug of a man of Gascony. ‘Not a halfwit, say mon père, that one, but he had not the use of his tongue.’

  He was one of the parti being taken to Wales, this halfwit who was not a halfwit, to build the first of Edward’s great castles in Wales, his Ring of Iron. They were brave boys, the one who made the pipe and the young brother who looked after him. ‘Never am I forgetting what he tell me, mon père. Pauvre petits. Taken to war like that, and the younger a boy about my own age. I wonder what happen to them. So long ago. Mort, I suppose, and me, I am well on the way to my grave. Dieu soit béni. Ah well. Lord Roger, he has the need of a new minstrel but still he keeps me here. A difference, having a good master. You wish for a swan pipe? Le bon Dieu knows you do not ask for much, do you, petit coquin!’

  There was a swan, of course; Roger de Langton made sure of that. He was beguiled by the boy’s unswerving pur
pose. A villein’s son a chevalier? When Edgar came visiting, he found Lord Roger determined to hold a feast with the mutilated swan at its glorious centre. The old man was absorbed in discussing its roasting with his cook. The largest iron spit, the square one, that would be best; easier to turn, better for carrying the heavy weight of the swan; and iron made for quicker roasting than wooden spits. ‘That’s my advice, my Lord Roger,’ Peter Cook said. ‘Well larded and basted to keep it moist.’ He’d always thought that strange; a waterfowl’s nature was moist and wet yet a swan was dry and tough unless it was well larded.

  ‘And with Chaudron sauce?’

  ‘Of course, my Lord.’ Peter Cook’s face spoke what his tongue did not: what else but that sauce made with the swan’s entrails ground with bread and powdered ginger and galingale, coloured with blood, well boiled and strained and seasoned with a little vinegar.

  Edgar listened to the two men, both in the autumn of their lives, and just like Kara Kemal. He wondered if the thoughts of all old men were set on food, then remembered Dafydd, and Thomas’ joking ‘mind always on your stomach?’ Perhaps it was those who had lived through the Great Famine years who never forgot starvation.

  ‘Edgar my boy, we haven’t had such a treat in this manor for too long now. Blessings on the head of that young rogue of yours.’

  ‘My young rogue?’

  ‘That boy of Bernt’s. What’s his name? Oluf? Came begging a swan’s wing to make into a pipe for that little maid he’s so fond of.’

  Edgar started to laugh. ‘Oluf did that? For Joan?’

  ‘Don’t mock the boy, Edgar. He’s a fine young man.’ He shot a sharp glance at Edgar. ‘Says young Joan finds kitchen and dairy work hard going. Too heavy for a young lass like that – not much meat on her.’

  Edgar nodded. ‘He’s probably right.’ He hadn’t even thought of it, he who so prided himself on caring for the people of his manor. Joan was small and slight. He remembered now how he’d seen her slumped sometimes in the yard, her copper hair screwed back from her face, bracing herself when she was shouted for from the dairy or the kitchen. A young girl, not more than – what – eight summers? And still she’d found time to teach Kazan to play the swan pipe. ‘So Oluf has his swan wing?’

  ‘And busy with it now.’ Edgar raised his eyebrows. ‘With Guillaume, who was the best of minstrels until age had him by the tail, just as it has me.’

  The two of them worked together, an old man irritated by his own useless hands, and the young peasant boy used only to manual work. Together, they cleaned the hollow bone, inside and out, until it gleamed like moonshine; then the careful measuring and drilling of the seven holes. ‘This must be true, petit. There must be not one mistake.’ Four low and three high. Then the mouthpiece, bevelled securely to the distal end of the gleaming bone. At last it was done. Guillaume and Oluf stared at each other. ‘Now it is the pretty Jeanne who must blow esprit into this wing of the dead swan.’

  Roger de Langton held his marvellous feast. He made sure the girl was there, though she was red-faced-sweating in the kitchens. Oluf served at the tables, subduing his excitement so that he would be worthy of the honour shown him by this kind old gentleman. Such kindness. Such unlooked for kindness. His da and ma were somewhere in the hall because Sir Roger had invited all of the manor of Bradwell, sokemen and villeins and cottars alike. ‘In the fashion of the old days,’ Guillaume had told him. Oluf knew his ma and da were watching him walk with the other waiters behind the Marshal and Sewer to the top table. He bowed, keeping time with the rest, and turned to kneel by the Carver. All the same, it was a struggle to contain himself until the moment when Lord Roger called for silence. And then for music. He demanded that the girl Joan come forward. ‘She is responsible for our mutilated swan,’ he announced. ‘Yes, call her from the kitchen,’ he said impatiently.

  She came, her red hair frowzled by the heat and steam, her shoulders sagging from the heavy labour, small and shy amongst this grand company.

  ‘You can play the swan pipe, they tell me,’ said Lord Roger.

  ‘Only what I’ve played for Mistress Kazan,’ the girl murmured. She glanced nervously around all the great company there at the tables, and her own kind sitting at the lower tables. There was Hilda, and there Oluf’s ma and da. She was red-faced with it all, hating being the centre of attention.

  ‘Then you can play this one.’ Lord Roger beckoned to Oluf and he stepped forward, proud and smiling, holding the swan pipe before him. Guillaume was behind him, his thin rat’s face proud and anxious.

  Joan gasped. ‘This pipe? My Lord?’

  ‘This pipe, my girl, made especially for you by this young man of yours and my old friend Guillaume. Ah, what it is to be young.’

  The girl took the pipe in her hands. She was no longer sagging-shouldered. She stood upright, as if at a command. Her eyes were glinting green-yellow like catkins in the spring sunshine. Her hair gleamed coppery-red in the torchlight. Just once she looked at Oluf and her small, tired face lifted in a glimmering smile. She raised the pipe to her lips. She breathed life into the dead bone and a thread of wavering notes spilled out into the hall until the pipe sang like the angel it had once been.

  29

  The Marches

  August 1337

  I love the sea coast of Meirionnydd

  Where a white arm was my pillow

  I love the nightingale in the green wood

  In the sweet vale where two waters meet.

  (Hywel Ab Owain Gwynedd: d.1170, trans. Tony Conran)

  They were not high mountains, not like those in the Great Plateau of Anatolia, nor the High Mountains they had crossed in late autumn, but there was a sense of space and of being very high. The roof of Wales, she thought. I am on the roof of Dafydd’s country. That morning it seemed the sun had not risen so black were the clouds, great towers of them, swirling above and about them, and the edge of the mountains even darker against them. A brooding, alien world, this country of Dafydd’s. Later, much later, as they neared the highest point of the pass, the darkness thinned to greys with lighter grey and in places a white sky. Oerddrws. Bwlch Gwynt. Windy Gap. It lived up to its name. The dark mountains were green now, with dark splotches that were the peat bogs they had been warned of. Keep to the paths they had been told. There’s peat bogs as will suck you in if you strays. And so they kept to the route, well-trodden because this was the way the pilgrims came on their way to Saint David’s. You should be travelling in a pilgrim party. It’s not safe elsewise. There’s bandits between Oerddrws and Mawddwy. In the end, they were joined by a solitary pilgrim. ‘You must call me Huw,’ he told them the first morning. ‘This is my second journey to St David’s in the far west of this country.’Two journeys to Saint David’s were equal to one to Rome. That was what he said; what they had said, those pilgrims they had travelled with in England. But there was range on range of high hills between them and the comfort of an inn. Suddenly sharp sun shone through a cleft in the clouds and there was a flash of rainbow. They stopped to look, gazing back the way they had come. Dark clouds, and the rainbow an underbelly turning the underside of the clouds into rainbow colours.

  ‘That is surely a good omen!’ Esyllt breathed. Esyllt was a good girl, Kazan acknowledged. It had been all holiday at first, travelling from manor to manor of Giles’ brothers and brothers-in-law, and then they had left Giles’s wren-like Aunt Ceridwen and her placid husband Eifion in their manor near Tegid. ‘All these brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles,’ Kazan said. ‘This is like Amir, and his cousins of cousins of cousins.’

  ‘Not so bad as that,’ Giles said, and they laughed, and told Esyllt the story of the guide Amir, and how he had cousins of cousins of cousins in every part of Anatolia. They told her of the journey to Attaleia, and Esyllt’s dark blue eyes opened wide and wider. It was after that Kazan found her saddened.

  ‘How can he love me, Kazan? I have done nothing. I have been nowhere. How can he love me?’

  ‘He loves you. You
are his wife. And you have been on a journey as great as his. Do not mistake that. A different journey but difficult for all that. Now your journeys are ended and you meet and your meeting is sweet. This is good, Esyllt. Your souls and your hearts meet, and your bodies make an even sweeter meeting.’

  The girl blushed fiery crimson. ‘That is not for maids to talk of,’ she said.

  ‘But it is the truth.’

  They started the journey along the banks of the great lake, following the track that would lead over the mountain pass. At first horrified by their solitary travelling and often rough lodging, Esyllt had become accustomed to it, had enjoyed new-found freedom. Everything was astonishing to her. But Giles, she reminded herself, had been in stranger places, had met stranger people. Kazan was glad to see the girl’s better understanding of her new husband.

  Now here they were, riding the pilgrim route across the roof of the Welsh world and it was summer, she told herself, a Welsh summer. This is Dafydd’s country, and it is beautiful, but so cold and so wet.

  The track levelled out across the summit of BwlchOerddrwsthen began its downward journey, past the great cross that had marked the parting of the tracks for long time past. Here and there were stone huts, hafotai, the summer dwellings, built alongside fast-running streams and with small sheep folds close by. They were hailed at one, and welcomed, and asked the questions all travellers were asked. Where have you come from? Where are you going? Best not tell too much, Giles had warned the two girls, but the lie that they were pilgrims travelling to St David’s, that stuck in Kazan’s throat. ‘To Cymer Abbey,’ she said.

  ‘Then you’ve not far to go,’ the shepherd said. He shared sheep’s cheese with them, and bright, clear water. ‘There’s a spring higher up,’ he said. ‘It never dries up.’

  Not surprising, Giles thought, with so much rain. Did God have rain clouds especially for this country of Dai’s? He shook the blasphemy from his thoughts and muttered a prayer for forgiveness. The shepherd was grinning at him, weather-beaten face creasing. ‘It’s not always like this, young sir. Some days there’s blue sky and white cloud and God smiles on this land of ours.’