Crown in Candlelight

by Rosemary Hawley Jarman

  Taken all round, it was a good exhortation, and by English standards greatly flamboyant, although a bard would by now have drawn tears and cries of assent from his listeners, and there was still quietness. Yet Hywelis saw Owen affected; he rose with the others, his face pale and attenuated; he trembled and his golden eyes were feverish. The assembly lined up to kneel again and raise their hands to those of the King’s proxy. The oath was administered, repeated, never louder than a breath. The night-breeze crept through the tent-flap.

  Ardently watched by Hywelis, Owen’s turn came. She saw his shape lucent as steel, his arrowed hands following the line of his straight back. In that same moment she saw the quintessence of his greatness. To all the others he was merely another youth, arrogant, restive and suggestible. To her he was the embryo of something immeasurable, greater than the highest martyrdom or the keenest fame, stronger and more obsessive even than love, though love was there in bounty. She could not yet gauge its form, yet the unseen grandeur of his destiny lit him like a torch and diminished all else about it.

  Abruptly the ceremony ended. The youths milled at the table, merry with nervous relief; Welsh and laboured English mingled. Someone was asking naively about the commanders—would they, the recruits, be riding with the King himself? No, there would be hundreds of captains; if one were fortunate one might march a mile behind the King’s brothers or the King’s friend, Richard Courtenay, Bishop of Norwich, for the Church was also to join this sacred war. The impressive names were drawn out like jewels from a bag; the Earl of Dorset, Lord Fitzhugh, Sir Thomas Erpingham, Sir Gilbert Umfraville, the Duke of York, the Earl of Oxford

  There were to be months of preparation. Every man must have a harness always ready; a jack, the quilted steel-lined coat, a helmet, gloves, sword, dagger and poleaxe, and the matchless longbow and arrows. Every man at muster was to wear the cross of Christ and St George. There was to be no whoring, no camp-followers. Churches were not to be looted on pain of death, and monks and nuns left unmolested.

  Those insufficiently trained in arms were to go at once to London where schooling awaited them, and Owen was one of these selected. Hywelis, with a sinking heart, heard him ask: ‘Am I to leave tonight?’ and the answer: ‘No, you will collect what gear you have and say farewell to your mentors. We shall be here another four days.’ She knew he would have gone on the moment, but now she had a reprieve, four whole days of him. The Lord would be angry with him but there was nothing he could do. Owen’s allegiance was chosen, his oath must be honoured.

  When he came from the tent he was subdued and serious. He spoke to the sentries courteously. ‘Until our next meeting,’ and they nodded, but Fletcher, still plainly uneasy, stepped back as Hywelis went by. He offered Owen a lantern which he refused, for although the moon was declining, its light still washed the valley. Fletcher watched them go, and to him Owen went handclasped with the powers of darkness. It would need many a pot of ale before he could begin to laugh and damn Hywelis’s words of that night.

  She pressed lightly against Owen as they made the mossy descent, searching with feet and eyes and instinct for the track down into the valley. The heather scents mingled with the bitter-sweetness of campion and meadowsweet, peat and ferns. Somewhere towards the mountain ridge, a vixen cried of love. Hywelis searched the night for Madog’s essence, and knew him far away.

  ‘Did you see that sentry’s hands shaking?’ said Owen.

  ‘It was my fault, I told his fortune. Now I wish I hadn’t.’ She forgot that her vision had saved her from an unknown brutality.

  Owen stopped and faced her eagerly.

  ‘Tell me mine, Hywelis. If you have the power to, it would be wonderful to know … I’d know what hazards to dare, and when to hold still. Tell me, Hywelis.’

  She pulled him on, saying that the night was fading and they must be back before early Mass. Rhys would be watching for them, and Gruffydd Llwyd was a poor sleeper, often rising to play his harp to himself. As for Glyn Dwr, God send him an unbroken night! Tomorrow would be bad enough. Tomorrow, today, for already the moon’s pallor looked weary and clouded by dew. Ahead of them they heard the stream’s lonely, small-hours voice. Drwyndwn Flatnose, glutted with prey, floated beside them from crag to crag, riding the air on his great lemon wings.

  ‘There’s the water. Are you ready for the leap?’

  ‘I could do it in one stride. Now I am the King’s man, a soldier. I am strong.’

  ‘Come then.’ She poised on the lip of the stream. Her voice trembled.

  ‘Hywelis,’ he said uncertainly, ‘are you weeping?’ He peered into her face, at the wet glitter of her eyes. She did not answer, but thought: yes, I weep, because I am moved by the regard you have for yourself, a good thing in truth when there are so many who cringe and doubt and draw back; because of what I saw in you as you took the oath, that destiny that you, all unknowing, wear like cloth of gold. And because you are my other self, and in four days I shall be split, and bleed.

  ‘Girl.’ He came close and they stood, their ankles deep in meadowsweet, the noise of the water in their ears. ‘Be happy. I have not thanked you for tonight. I’ve no right to ask more. Let my fortune remain unknown. I’ll remember your kindness, not your prophecies.’

  She said: ‘Remember me. Yes. Remember me, and that I said this: you will be safe, and loved as few have ever been loved.’

  ‘I know. You will always love me.’

  ‘Not I alone,’ she said heavily. ‘Those of more noble fame, Owen.’

  Instantly excited, he said: ‘What do you mean? Shall I rise to a height in some great lord’s favour? You must tell me now, I didn’t press you! For if this is so, I’ll fight like ten thousand, and one day I’ll meet Glyn Dwr as an equal, not an orphan nurtured of his charity. Tell me, tell me …’ He held her shoulders, searching her face. She gave a long sigh, and said:

  ‘I can tell you this. You will be truly great. Your name will live for ever.’

  ‘How? Through my skill in arms? Through my leadership in the field? Through my music?’ The moon cast off cloud and gleamed in his eyes. He was breathing rapidly. Hywelis sighed again, almost a groan. Waveringly she let her hand fall to his loins. There she touched him, feeling the springs of his excitement made flesh, the tall hardness that beat like a second hidden heart.

  ‘Through your seed,’ she said, and withdrew her hand. As if exhausted, she sank to sit on the ground, and instantly he knelt beside her. Unsure of which had aroused him more, her words or her touch, he took her to him passionately, kissing her mouth, fondling the long wild hair, kissing the sad wild eyes. From a nearby tree came a crystal spill of song, a rapturous torrent wasted on the night.

  ‘The nightingale …’ he said, muffled and trembling.

  ‘No, a whitethroat,’ whispered Hywelis. ‘We have awakened him.’

  ‘Cariad, let me … let me now …’

  Revealed, her body answered the moon’s whiteness. She was a pale pearl, glowing so that the grass where she lay seemed illuminated by her, and for a moment he recoiled from her mystery. Then she drew him to her brilliant arms, enfolding him, the moon, and the clamouring night.

  At the zenith of their embrace, the torque became loosened from her neck. A careless upthrown hand nudged it away. It hung for an instant on the edge of the bank then slid without sound into the racing stream.

  The Lord stood on the battlements of Glyndyfrdwy. Soon after midnight he had been glad to wake from a dream of terror. He had been poised on the crest of Dyna Mont Owain, the hill named after him where he had often stood to watch his enemies coming from Chester in the east. Yet he had seemed to be shadowed by the tomb of Eliseg, saint and king and inspiration of the Welsh. He had watched a ring of flambeaux coming closer to surround him. Turning to yell a command to his troops, he had found himself deserted. A bluff wind wavered the grass, and the bog-bean flowers swayed, dyed pink by the encroaching flames. Behind him a ring of burial stones rose starkly from the turf. He had rushed down the slope, roa
ring his challenge, striking out at nothing; the forces evaded him though he lashed and grappled and swore. Then he fancied that Rhys ap Gethin fought beside him with grinning skull-face, and that Margaret of Maelor, made fragile by the wind, wrung her dead hands and whispered: ‘Fight, my Owain!’ then, sadly: ‘Fly my Owain!’ He had heard his own guttural breath, felt the pain of effort in his lungs. Woke streaming with sweat, his wolfskin coverlet tossed aside. The harsh breathing went on; it was Cafall’s. The great dog lay by the bed. He had lost flesh in the past two days, his ribs stood out like a mammoth’s skeleton. Glyn Dwr swung his legs from the couch and bent to him. A burning tongue feebly lapped his hand.

  ‘Some air for you, boy.’ He carried the dog up the spiral, feeling the bones, the sadness. I should kill him! he thought, and Cafall laid his head lovingly upon the Lord’s upper arm. Your way, not mine, said the touch. Your wisdom is my contentment.

  No, he thought. Who am I to quench the spirit of a god? Cafall lay on cool stone, breathing the night under the dewed dimmed moon. While Glyn Dwr thought once more of the dead, the loved, of the past arrogances, his Parliaments at Machynlleth and Harlech, of his own rising fame and his slow decline. Of Margaret again, as blithe and temperate as the summer of his years; of his brave sons, of Megan, asleep below, who loved him, and of lovely Hywelis; born of the faery-woman and his last anchor and guide. He rested his brow against the embrasure above a declivity built for the discharge of weapons, and heard a shuffling on the stair. For a moment he hoped it was Hywelis, aware of his distress and come from bed to talk away the night. But Hywelis never shuffled, her step was silk. He turned to see Gruffydd Llwyd, holding his sycamore harp like a limb without which he could not function.

  ‘So you’re wakeful too,’ said Glyn Dwr. ‘Mind the dog.’ The bard stepped carefully over Cafall, and leaned beside the Lord.

  ‘It’s late, I mean early,’ said Gruffydd Llwyd, and the Lord knew a harsh desire for the voice of Iolo Goch, who had never spoken unless it was sense, and never for speech’s sake. Iolo lay at Valle Crucis, under the protection of Eliseg. Yet Gruffydd was a good fellow and doubtless would go down in the annals with talents enhanced once his time was done.

  ‘Lord, are you well?’

  ‘I dreamed,’ said Glyn Dwr. ‘The dream misliked me.’

  ‘Did you conquer?’ asked the bard, with insight.

  The Lord shook his head.

  ‘Only a dream,’ said Gruffydd Llwyd. ‘Remember your triumphs! Eagles have devoured the corpses of your slain.’

  ‘My loved and hated, both.’

  The bard teased the harp. Its plaint squeezed through the stone machicolations and down into the valley which now looked palely flattened, as if the moon had wearied it.

  ‘Those who have hurt you,’ said the bard, ‘writhe in the flames, howling that death never slays.’

  Glyn Dwr grimaced. ‘I wish them no hell-flames. My own are before me.’

  ‘No, Lord. You are all goodness.’

  ‘Sing,’ he demanded. The bard struck strings again, and called, in his nasal reed:

  No ’scathe ’twill be, occasion thus to take,

  And May did well, houses of leaves to make,

  Long ages there beneath the trees we’ll be,

  From all secure, I and my sweet with me …

  The Lord raised his hand.

  ‘What’s this? We are men together. Sell me no lickerish tales of love.’

  The bard crashed out a discord.

  ‘There are doings tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Ay,’ Glyn Dwr looked out across the valley. ‘Of flesh and fowl, of ghoul and memory.’

  ‘And’ (rancour drove out discretion) ‘of man and maid!’

  The Lord was silent for at least a minute. Drwyndwn Flatnose paid a visit to the battlements, cried eerily and soared away. The moon pearled from the shadows of dawn and hung full of the night’s history.

  ‘Do you speak of my girl?’ said the Lord at last.

  ‘She and Owen ap Meredyth. It was best that I gave it you in verse. It was written by a kinsman of his …’ Suddenly anguished and afraid, the bard took his harp and went quickly away.

  Glyn Dwr looked down at the very moment. He saw the gate and the little movements around it. Rhys the postern guard, full of an agitation plain even at a distance. Then a straight figure whose triumph all but sang. Lastly, his lily of the sea.

  She was no longer the white Olwen, daughter of Ysbaddaden the Terrible. She sat locked in the topmost tower of Glyndyfrdwy and contemplated the stone wall with its reflection of raindrops under sunlight. She pictured the valley, starred with cinquefoil and rapt with dragonflies, the stream running down, the bent bruised grass where she had lain with Owen. But now that she was revealed, taken, divided, her mind was bound to earth. It could no longer slide from her flesh and roam, projected as easily as the breeze. Four solid walls surrounded her, an appallingly alien sensation. The inner sight was gone, leaving its meagre proxy, imagination.

  The Lord knew everything, without a word of confession: the dissolution of her will, the hurt, the final sharp pleasure. As if he had experienced it through his own senses, he knew how Owen, wildly amorous, had dealt with her a little savagely, clumsily, had made her cry, then kissed her tears. And how afterwards the clarity of the moon and night had assailed her in a bleak, foreign way; the shapes and sounds of predators and prey, the pattern of the clouds, had assaulted her so that for the first time in her life she felt vulnerable and on the edge of fear.

  The Lord knew everything, not because she had told him but because their blood bound them by brain and spirit and intent, as if they walked with the same shadow.

  For a day and a night, since the Lord had given her over to Megan’s charge, she had sat in this tower, dress and hands still stained with grass. Far below in the courtyard she heard sounds: hooves, a snatch of singing (quickly hushed as news of the Lord’s mood spread abroad), the chink of the anvil from the forge, a dog whining. She sat enthralled by loss. Old songs raged within her; the song of mourning for Angharad: ‘ill work for the eyes is long weeping, the bondage of sorrow’, and the sadness of old lovers became a comprehension of the sorrows of the world. Owen was not dead, but she was kept from him and already time passed, bringing him nearer to departure. Outside the day clouded, and wept, the rain that she had forecast teeming down in the courtyard, pooling in a mosaic of green and brown upon the mossy cobbles. The wall on which her eyes were fixed rippled and dulled. Set into it were niches filled with the effigies of saints: Dewi, Beuno, Collen, Curig, Winifred and Gwen, mother of Cybi; they lost their edge before her gaze and seemed also to shimmer and weep.

  Owen would soon be gone and with him the last remains of her knowledge and power. She was blinded by loss. No longer could she probe the destinies of Owen or any other, or point the Lord to a new comet and share his visionary hopes and regrets. She could not even track down the essence of Madog; he ran somewhere outside the gates of her vision. White Olwen was dead, the pure vessel shattered, and her giant father clutched an edgeless sword.

  Her fingers fluttered to her neck, the target for the Lord’s first look, in that terrible moment when she and Owen stood before him in the breaking dawn, and Rhys had gone to be flogged. Glyn Dwr’s voice had been calm with rage, almost dispassionate.

  ‘So you have cast away the torque of Maelor. Our bond was broken easily.’

  Until that moment she had not noticed its loss, and cried out in fear. The rest was nightmare, Glyn Dwr’s voice rising and falling, the smoke from the eternal hearth writhing in concord with his words of shame and heartbreak and rejection. In one corner of the hall the bard sat trembling, and through the dream of despair she noticed Cafall, lying limply, seeming very ill.

  The rain harped outside the walls and the wind blew drifts of it in through the slit dampening her hair. Birds, disturbed by the sudden change in the weather, flew past the embrasure in haste. She was startled by a clap of heavy wings and claws scratching on t
he sill. For an instant a great white seabird rested there, fixing her with its sidelong yellow stare. A terrible hunger assailed her, as if the seabird’s look had implanted it. Then the bird launched itself on its upriver flight, dislodging a tiny hail of stones. The rain continued, bringing the night.

  Megan aroused her in the early dawn, bearing a cup of ale, bread and cheese. She entered and locked the door behind her. Hywelis smiled woefully.

  ‘Then I am not to be starved to death.’

  ‘You ate yesterday,’ said Megan, her face like those of the stone figures.

  ‘Did I?’ She thought: Owen has taken away my mind, with all else. She held out her hand for the food.

  Savagely frowning, Megan said: ‘First, this.’ She uncorked a small vial. A bitter smell filled the room, flowers distilled in pain, to kill whatever tiny hope might be growing. Hywelis knew all Megan’s skills.

  Obediently she drank. The liquid poured vilely in every corner of her stomach. It makes no difference, she thought. I was never meant to bear his child, I have no part in his greatness … greatness. A gleam of remembrance came, like the half-forgotten face of a friend. Always mine, but not mine alone …

  She retched. ‘Was this your doing?’

  ‘No. The Lord’s will, but I endorse it with my heart. I would not see any living token of your shame.’

  ‘Shame? I have only done what others do!’

  ‘But you were not others,’ said Megan heavily.

  Hywelis ate a little, and drank the ale to erase the bitterness in her mouth.

  ‘What of Owen?’ It had to be asked. Megan’s face grew fiercer. ‘Is he to be punished? He cannot be gainsaid now. He has a duty.’

  ‘Why do you not ask after the Lord your father?’

  ‘May I see him?’

  ‘In half an hour.’

  Why half an hour? The Lord did nothing without reason, and he had had Rhys made a whipping-boy for the sins of the night. What of Owen?