I scanned my eye in the other direction, across the purpling mountaintops until I perceived, in the distance, a cloud of dust far off on the valley road. ‘They are coming,’ I whispered and Rhonwen began to cry, her head in Gwarw’s chest, the old woman patting her shoulder, crooning comfort as she so often had to me. I turned away from them, into the wind. I could offer them no consolation, would make them no false promises. In the next few hours anything could happen.
And then, quite suddenly, as if from nowhere, an eagle flew down, the wind from his wings lifting my hair, his mournful cry penetrating something buried deep within my mind, bringing the memory of heartbreak and defeat. And pain and dread lurched in my stomach as I recollected a childhood dream.
I looked up at the wheeling eagles, real this time and, certain what was to come, I fell to my knees, begging Ffreur’s God with all my heart, not to let it happen.
The night was long, and cold. I crouched with my women, cradling my son in my arms. We were hungry, thirsty and afraid. I did not sleep but sat a little apart from the others, watching as the sun clambered over the horizon to herald the dismal day.
It was not long after dawn that we heard the far-off clash of swords, and distant cries of anguish. I untangled myself from Hedyn’s clinging hands to look down to the llys, dreading that which I knew I would see.
I could not discern faces but could clearly see tiny figures on horseback striking down those who fought on foot, the cries of the injured, like the mews of a new-born kitten, drifting, helpless toward us.
I remembered Cadafael saying that Oswiu would take no prisoners.
Soon a Judas wind bore the acrid stench of smoke, fanning the flames, hastening the destruction of Cynddylan’s Hall. Gwarw and Hild blubbered like children behind me while Hedyn sat quiet in Rhonwen’s lap, his head laid upon her breast, passive, accepting … flaccid, but I had no time to worry for him.
Poor Gwarw, who had driven mercilessly uphill the evening before, was suffering badly. Her feet were still bleeding and muddy from the climb and her hair hung in grey knots about her face, making her seem suddenly much older. If I did not take care of her, I would lose her next.
‘Here, let me see.’ I crouched to examine her wounds, wishing we had thought to bring water and, tearing a strip from my petticoat, I began to bind them, promising a salve when the crisis was passed.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She had looked after me since the day I was born yet here she was, clinging to my hand, her old woman’s tears falling, reversing our roles, and for once dependent upon me. I patted her hand and stood up, screwing up my face as I wondered what on earth we were to do.
I was too afraid to go down until the summons came and so we waited there all day and through the next night, never knowing how the battle went. ‘The horn will sound soon,’ I assured them. ‘Don’t worry.’
But it was long in coming, and the longer we waited the greater our fear became until each rustling goat in the undergrowth became a potential enemy, each swift bird a deadly missile.
It was noon the following day when, my lips parched, my belly growling, I peered down to the llys again. I could see no movement at all but it was plain the royal palace was a ruin. Smoke billowed from the remains of the feasting hall and the charred timbers of the ladies bower stretched in a lament to the leaden sky. The buildings smouldered, the blackened roof joists rearing like a huge skeleton to the smoke choked clouds. Nothing stirred, only the flap of rags and the shifting shadows of the passing day.
I knew that death awaited us there and at last, disobeying Cynddylan’s last request, I faced the fact that I must go down to face yet more sorrow and bear witness to my penance.
‘Come,’ I said, turning to the women. ‘I think it is safe now.’
The hall had been high and proud, a place of feasting, symbolic of Pengwern’s invincible power, a place that tales were told of. A place to which men travelled from afar. Now, it lay in ruins and my women and I walked among ashes and blackened timbers.
I stood in the great hall and looked up through the place where the roof had been to the empty heavens above. Beneath my feet the debris of my life lay crushed and broken, to be blown by the wind and extinguished by squalling rain until Pengwern and the people who lived there were forgotten.
Just one bower, less damaged than the others, remained standing, the charred door swinging, drunkenly on its great hinge. I tried to push it open but something lay against it, hindering my progress. With much pushing and heaving I managed to make a small gap and, leaving Gwarw and the others poking dismally in the ashes, I slid through and into void beyond.
I can barely speak of what I found there. It was too pitiful for tears. I stood, dry-eyed, looking down upon what was left of our people. At their head lay Emyr, still clutching his sword, his lips drawn back, his teeth bared, his eye sockets plundered by carrion. His corpse was sprawled across the smouldering bodies of my aunts and uncles, those whom I had sent him to liberate and who he had protected till his last breath. That small brave boy had given up his life to save their souls.
The sparrow-thin limbs of our elders were twisted and broken, their arms naked of rings, plundered by the victors. My uncle Borian, recognisable only by the sword he still held aloft had striven to protect his women. This was no proper end for an old warrior, and although I could not tear my eyes away, it was hard to look upon the rage that death had frozen onto his features. I removed my shawl and laid it across him with a whispered prayer.
All around me, as I waded on through the corpses of my kin, the eagles feasted like devils on their flesh. I had to stop them. I called the others for help and they came at once, my depleted retinue, pushing through the gap in the door, crying out aloud at the pitiful sight that waited on the other side. We were nothing now but a pathetic huddle of stricken women and one small boy, and every one of them was looking to me for guidance.
Me. Heledd the adulterer, who had no answers.
Our burdened hearts aching, we pulled our loved ones from the embers and piled their blackened, brittle bones into a shallow grave. Our faces became daubed with their funeral dust and so hot was the ground beneath us that the skin was melted from our feet. Our task was beyond sorrow and we worked on in deathly silence, a prayer on every lip to a God that none of us were sure was listening.
Rhonwen found Cynddylan first. I heard her cry out, saw her fall to her knees in the ashes and knew without being told what she had discovered. I stood beside her and looked down at my brother, the battle standard she has stitched for him had become his funeral shroud. He was burned black by the fires of war and just one arm remained untouched by the raging flames, the arm of the hand that bore the royal ring of Pengwern.
Keeping my eyes averted from the thing that had been my dearest brother, my honoured King, I went on my knees and drew the ring from his finger. Then I called my son to me. Hedyn was the last remaining link to Pengwern and as far as the world was concerned he was Cynddylan’s heir. As I pushed the ring of Pengwern over the knuckles of a minstrel’s child and made him swear to seek vengeance, my throat closed in misery.
‘You are Pengwern’s King now, my son,’ I said. He made no reply, so I gave him a little shake, ‘You must take vengeance for this when you are a man.’ He nodded uncomprehendingly, and looked at me, his face white beneath the grime, his eyes awash with the sort of fear that no child should ever know.
The sort of fear that is never erased.
I stood up, keeping hold of Hedyn’s hand and looked about me for the last time upon the ruin of my dynastic home. Nothing was left. No people, no treasures, no land, no authority, all was laid waste. Pengwern would never rise again.
Ffreur’s laughter was silenced, and the throne stood empty, the army obliterated and, knowing myself to be solely to blame, I looked upon my slaughtered kin and our derelict hall and thanked God that Ffreur had not lived to see it.
Part six
Heledd’s Hymn
The Hall of Cynddylan pie
rces me
Every hour, after the great gathering din at the fire
Which I saw at thy fire-hearth!
The hall of Cynddylan is dark tonight. Those words are like a wasp in my head, stinging and cruel and I cannot lose the memory. I do not sleep, only doze and pray, and doze again, no difference between day and night. I remember a poem that Osian once sang.
For a while the leaves are green,
then they turn yellow,
fall to earth and die,
crumbling to dust.
The leaves of my father’s tree have withered in their prime, and it was I who wielded the axe and struck the first blow. I will never forgive myself for the consequences of my girlish infatuation, and of all the passions that raged through my young body, the love, the anger, and even the grief, now there is only shame remaining … and the guilt.
God will never forgive me. I have tried hard to make recompense but my crimes eats away at me like a great stinking canker for which there is no cure.
I regret so much.
My women and I travelled for many months, our bellies empty, and our feet sore. As I had feared, it was all too much for Gwarw, her poor old feet could no longer carry her and she perished at the roadside early one morning, clinging to my hand, begging my forgiveness, but for what, I do not know. Throughout my entire life she nagged, slapped, cosseted, and bullied me into being a good person but it seems I didn’t have it in me. I am to blame for it all. As we lay her in her shallow, makeshift grave, my already shattered heart fragmented a little more, and the only comfort I could find was the knowledge that she was better off dead. I hoped she was with Ffreur now, somewhere where sorrow is a stranger and tears are never shed.
After that, my companions left me one by one. When Hild grew too sick and weak to continue I gave her into the care of a small group of nuns but I could not stay, although they would have welcomed me. I was driven to travel onward, compelled to keep walking and I would not stop for, at each stop on our journey, every time I began to feel better, the faces of Pengwern’s murdered people came back to haunt me. They would not let me rest and so I kept walking although I had no direction. And one day there was just Hedyn and I, a ragamuffin princess and the son of singer of songs.
What a sorry pair.
Hedyn was not the boy he had once been. Cynddylan’s ring hung heavy on his skinny finger. He clutched at it, looking anxiously about him as if he feared King Oswiu were hidden behind every bush. His fearful eyes came to disturb me as surely as the dead ones of his father and uncles. He clung to my skirts, trudging alongside me, rarely speaking and never complaining but I knew that all his joys had perished. All our hopes burned up in the fires that had raged through Cynddylan’s hall.
In the end Osian’s son fell sick of the fever when he was but twelve years old, and although I nursed him as best I could, he too was taken from me. His short life had been a sorry one and I was solely to blame for that too. I would have done better to make sure he was never born at all than to damn him to the life he had.
Alone, I laid him beneath the soft sod and added his memory to my other sorrows, and thereafter whispered his name in my many prayers.
Since then, I have spent a lifetime alone at this small stark church at the head of the valley. It is a pretty place that looks down across the land to the place where the setting sun sparkles on the surging sea. The local people call it Heledd’s church, although in truth, it is God’s church, not mine.
I am old now. I did not deserve the release that death would have brought but it cannot be long away. These days my hands tremble, the skin on them is spotted with age and those same breasts that once so enchanted Osian and Cadafael knock like empty pouches against my ancient ribs.
I have been a bad person and although I have prayed for many years I still cannot believe that God forgives me, and until that time I will find no peace. Thirty years of prayer is not enough to expiate my sins and so deep is my guilt that I if lived until the World’s end it would not be long enough to expunge my crimes with prayer.
I am not afraid of death. The only fear I have is that even when I am laid within my oaken coffin I will not rest easy but will continue to walk this sorry world, cut off from heaven and all that I love. I am the last survivor, and when I am gone there will be no one left to pray for the poor perished people of Pengwern. That is why I inscribe these parchments now, in the hope that whosoever finds them will continue to pray for Ffreur, and for Cynddylan and perhaps just a little, for me.
Often of a night, when ague shakes my old bones and my knees are stiff from the kneeling, I let my mind remember Ffreur and how joyful things once were. I am shamed by my youthful sorrows that seem so trite and shallow in the face of true grief. It makes me cringe to remember the self-righteous young girl I was. It is almost funny that, with each new trial God sent me, I thought it was the worst that could ever be. I had to lose everything to learn that lesson.
I was a fool. My marriage, that should have been a blessing, I saw only as a curse. My first born, that should have been an answered prayer, was merely a burden, and my wifely duties that should have brought me joy, brought only revulsion.
And my lies, my egocentric deceptions, which I had regarded as cunning, all ended in ruin …not just for me … but for everyone. What a silly, vain, headstrong thing I was, and how unfit I was to be a princess, let alone a queen.
If only I could change the past.
My story began and ended with Ffreur. She was the better, purer half of me, and I wish I had listened to her inborn wisdom. Sometimes, as I sit here in the dark, I feel her loving arms slip around me, her breath tickling my ear, her laughter the only warm thing in my frigid world.
‘Sing to me, Heledd,’ she says and her presence cheers me a little and I sing her my refrain once more, knowing that it makes her smile to hear it.
My name is Heledd and this has been my song. Please sing it.
Author’s Note
This novel, The Song of Heledd is a work of fiction inspired by fragments of Welsh poetry known as Canu Heledd and Marwnad Cynddylan. The poem, and others relating to Heledd and Pengwern, can be found in the Red Book of Hergest which is housed in the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The Red Book of Hergest dates from the 14-15th centuries but the poems themselves are believed to have been written in the 9th century, although set in the 7th. Canu Heledd seems to be part of an older oral tradition, recorded and transcribed in the medieval period.
Canu Heledd is a cycle of saga englynion in which Heledd is the narrator. Apart from this poem, there are very few female dialogues in the saga tradition and Jenny Rowlands in her book Early Welsh Saga Poetry extends this, saying, ‘women do not speak or appear, and even allusions to their existence is rare. ’
Sole survivors of disaster are not uncommon in saga poetry but female survivors are. This dispensing with tradition suggests to me that Heledd’s story is perhaps a true one, a historical event that has passed down through the oral tradition to become legend.
Heledd is the sole surviving member of the royal house of Pengwern. Her dynasty and family have been destroyed and, in the poem, her brother, King Cynddylan’s, hall is in ruins. Her lament for him and the destruction of the royal seat remains powerfully emotive, but the thing that struck me the most is her sense of blame.
It seems that her actions have brought about the downfall of the dynasty and she is unprepared to forgive herself. The poem itself is historically inaccurate, written for entertainment not to enter the historical record but the combined documents make fascinating reading, each complementing the other.
Historically we know nothing about Heledd herself but her brother, Cynddylan is believed to have united with Cadafael of Gwynedd and Penda of Mercia against Northumbrian forces in the battles of Maes Cogwy, Chester, Lichfield and Winwaed, where Penda was slain.
Shortly after Winwaed in 655AD Oswiu invaded Mercia and Powys, launching an attack upon the royal llys at Pengwern and practically obliter
ating the dynasty in one night.
It has been suggested that, in order to cement the alliance between Powys and Gwynedd, Heledd acted as a peaceweaver and was married to Cadafael, then King of Gwynedd.
For reasons we will never know, on the eve of the battle at Winwaed, Cadafael suddenly withdrew his troops and rode back to Gwynedd, abandoning Powys and Mercia to their fate. This act earned him the title of Cadafael Cadomedd, which translates as ‘battleshirker.’ There is no record as to his motivation but it did his reputation little good and shortly afterward, although the circumstances remain sketchy, the rule of Gwynedd passed back to Cadwaladr.
In a small hamlet of Llanhilleth in the hills above Blaneau Gwent is a small church dedicated to St Illtyd. Mary of Monmouth, who writes a splendid blog, says of the church. ‘Although currently dedicated to St Illtyd, the original dedication of the church was to St. Heledd or Hyledd, as evidenced by parish lists of the 16th and 17th centuries (Baring-Gould 1911, 254). This gave the place-name Llanhyledd of which Llanhilleth is an anglicised form. ’
The historical detail of 7th century Powys and Gwynedd is very sparse. We can never know what really became of Heledd and her family but there are enough references to know they existed. The poems tell us that the family bond was strong, that Heledd was a woman whose actions impacted upon the world around her. The poem provides rich descriptions of the llys and the people who lived there, Cynddylan in his purple cloak, the richly carved mead halls, the merging tradition of Celtic and Christian religion. And the mention of Ffreur, a sister she once mourned but mourned no longer. Canu Heledd raises many questions but this one is the greatest. Heledd no longer mourns her sister? Why?
The Song of Heledd Page 18