“All that Cuhelyn tells you is truth,” said Owain.
Gwion opened stiff lips to say hollowly: “I do believe it. Nevertheless, he is still your brother and my lord. I know him rash and impulsive. He acts without thought. I cannot therefore abjure my fealty, if you can renounce your blood.”
“That,” said Owain with princely patience, “I have not done. Let him keep his word to those he brought in to recover his right for him, and deliver my Welsh soil from an unwanted invader, and he is my brother as before. But I would have him clean of malice and false dealing, and I will not put my seal to those things he has done which dishonour him.”
“I can make no such stipulation,” said Gwion with a wry and painful smile, “nor set any such limit to my allegiance. I am forsworn myself, even in this his fellow. I go with him wherever he goes, even into hell.”
“You are in my mercy,” said Owain, “and I have not hell in mind for you or him.”
“Yet you will not help him now! Oh, my lord,” pleaded Gwion hotly, “consider what men will say of you, if you leave a brother in the hands of his enemies.”
“Barely a week ago,” said Owain with arduous patience, “these Danes were his friends and comrades in arms. If he had not mistaken me and cheated them out of their price they would be so still. If I pass over his treachery to them, I will not pass over his gross and foolish misreading of me. I do not like being taken for a man who will look kindly on oath-breakers, and men who go back shamefully on bargains freely made.”
“You condemn me no less than him,” said Gwion, writhing.
“You at least I understand. Your treason comes of too immovable a loyalty. It does you no credit,” said Owain, wearying of forbearance, “but it will not turn away your friends from you.”
“I am in your mercy, then. What will you do with me?”
“Nothing,” said the prince. “Stay or go, as you please. We will feed and house you as we did at Aber, if you want to stay, and wait out his fortune. If not, go when and where you please. You are his man, not mine. No one will hinder you.”
“And you no longer ask for my submission?”
“I no longer value it,” said Owain, and rose with a motion of his hand to dismiss them both from his presence.
They went out together, as they had entered, but once out of the farmstead Cuhelyn turned away, and would have departed brusquely and without a word, if Gwion had not caught him by the arm.
“He damns me with his mercy! He could have had my life, or loaded me with the chains I have earned. Do you, too, avert your eyes from me? Had it been otherwise, had it been Owain himself, or Hywel, beleaguered among enemies, would not you have set your fealty to him above even your word, and gone to him forsworn if need were?”
Cuhelyn had pulled up as abruptly as he had turned away. His face was set. “No. I have never given my fealty but to lords absolute in honour themselves, and demanding as much of those who serve them. Had I done as you have done, and brought the dishonour as a gift to Hywel, he would have struck me down and cast me out. Cadwaladr, I make no doubt, welcomed and was glad of you.”
“It was a hard thing to do,” said Gwion with the solemnity of despair. “Harder than dying.”
But Cuhelyn had already plucked himself free, with fastidious care, and was striding away through the camp just stirring into life with the morning light.
Among Owain’s men Gwion felt himself an exile and an outcast, even though they accepted his presence in their midst without demur, and took no pains to avoid or exclude him. Here he had no function. His hands and skills did not belong to this lord, and to his own lord he could not come. He passed through the lines withdrawn and mute, and from a hillock within the northern perimeter of the encampment he stood for a long time peering towards the distant dunes where Cadwaladr was a prisoner, a hostage for two thousand marks’ worth in stock and money and goods, the hire of a Danish fleet.
Within his vision the fields in the distance gave way to the first undulations of sand, and the scattered trees dwindled into clusters of bushes and scrub. Somewhere beyond, perhaps even in chains after his recapture, Cadwaladr brooded and waited for help which his brother coldly withheld. No matter what the offence, not the breaking of his pledged word, not even the murder of Anarawd, if indeed such guilt touched him, nothing could justify for Gwion Owain’s abandonment of his brother. His own breach of faith in leaving Aber Gwion saw as unforgivable, and had no blame for those who condemned it, but there was nothing Cadwaladr had done or could do that would have turned his devout vassal from revering and following him. Once given and accepted, fealty was for life.
And he could do nothing! True, he had leave to depart if he so wished, and also true, he had a company of a hundred good fighting men bivouacked not many miles away, but what was that against the numbers the Danes must have, and the defences they had secured? An ill-considered attempt to storm their camp and free Cadwaladr might only cost him his life, or, more likely, cause the Danes to up anchor and put to sea, where they could not be matched, and take their prisoner away with them, back to Ireland, out of reach of any rescue.
The distant prospect afforded him no enlightenment, and no glimmer of a way forward towards the liberation of his lord. It grieved him that Cadwaladr, who had already lost so much, should be forced to pay out what remained to him in treasury and stock to buy his liberty, without even the certainty that he might recover his lost lands, for which the sum demanded of him had been promised in the first place. Even if Owain was right, and the Danes intended him no harm provided the debt was paid, the humiliation of captivity and submission would gnaw like an ulcer in that proud spirit. Gwion grudged Otir and his men every mark of their fee. It might be said that Cadwaladr should never have invoked alien aid against a brother, but such impetuous and flawed impulses had always threatened Cadwaladr’s wisdom, and men who loved him had borne with them as with the perilous cantrips of a valiant and foolhardy child, and made the best of the resultant chaos. It was not kind or just to withdraw now, when most it was needed, the indulgence which had never before failed him.
Gwion moved on along the ridge, still straining his eyes towards the north. A fringe of trees crowned the crest, squat and warped by the salt air, and leaning inland from the prevailing wind. And there beyond their uneven line, still and sturdy and himself rooted as a tree, a man stood and stared towards the unseen Danish force as Gwion was staring. A man perhaps in his middle thirties, square-built and muscular, the first fine salting of grey in his brown hair, his eyes, over-shadowed beneath thick black brows, fixed darkly upon the sand-moulded curves of the naked horizon. He went unarmed, and bare of breast and arms in the sunlight of the morning, a powerful body formidably still in his concentration on distance. Though he heard Gwion’s step in the dry grass beneath the trees, and it was plain that he must have heard it, he did not turn his head or stir from his fixed surveillance for some moments, until Gwion stood within touch of him. Even then he stirred and turned about only slowly and indifferently.
“I know,” he said, as though they had been aware of each other for a long time. “Gazing will bring it no nearer.”
It was Gwion’s own thought, worded very aptly, and it took the breath out of him for a moment. Warily he asked: “You, too? What stake have you over there among the Danes?”
“A wife,” said the other man, with a brief, dry force that needed no more words to express the enormity of his deprivation.
“A wife!” echoed Gwion uncomprehendingly. “By what strange chance…’ What was it Cuhelyn had said, of three hostages left in peril after Cadwaladr’s defection and defiance, two monks and a girl taken by the Danes? Two monks and a girl had set out from Aber in Owain’s retinue. To fall victim in the first place to Cadwaladr’s mercenaries, and then to be left to pay the price of Cadwaladr’s betrayal, if the minds of the Danes ran to vengeance? Oh, the account was growing long, and Owain’s obduracy became ever easier to understand. But Cadwaladr had not thought, he never thought before, he acted first and regretted afterwards, as by now he must be regretting everything he had done since he made the first fatal mistake of fleeing to the kingdom of Dublin for redress.