Hood Page 23

  They took what they wanted and behaved as they pleased, never giving a thought to the Cymry now languishing under their reign.

  It could not continue. The scant rations left from the previous winter were dwindling rapidly, and in some places in the valley the Cymry were beginning to run out of food.

  Something must be done, and with both lord and heir dead, it fell to Bishop Asaph to do it.

  Joining Brother Clyro in the chapel, he announced, “I have decided to speak to Count de Braose. I want you to remain in the chapel and uphold me before the Throne of Mercy.”

  “How would you have me pray, father?” asked old Brother Clyro. “That God would remove this oppression, or that God would turn the hearts of the oppressors toward peace?” A pedantic, unimaginative man, a scribe and a scholar, he could be counted on to carry out the bishop’s instructions to the letter but, as ever, insisted on knowing the precise nature of those instructions.

  “Pray for a softening of Count de Braose’s heart,” the bishop sighed, humouring him, “a turning from his ways, and for food to sustain the people through this ordeal.”

  “It will be done,” replied Clyro with a nod.

  Leaving the elderly cleric in the chapel, Bishop Asaph walked through the building site that had once been the monastery yard and struck off along the dirt road to the caer.

  The day had grown warm, and he was thirsty by the time he reached the fortress. The place was all but deserted, save for a crippled stable hand who, in the absence of the others who were aiding construction of the town, had been pressed into duty as a porter.

  “Bishop Asaph to see Count de Braose,” the cleric declared, presenting himself before the servant, who smelled of the stable. “It is a matter of highest importance. I demand audience with the count at once.”

  The porter’s laugh as he limped across the yard was all the reply he received, and in the end, the bishop was made to wait in the yard until the count consented to receive him.

  While he was waiting, however, another visitor arrived: a Norman lord, by the look of him. Astride a fine big horse and splendidly arrayed, with an escort of two retainers and three soldiers, he was, Asaph decided, most likely a count, or perhaps even a baron. Clearly a man of some importance.

  Thus, it was with some surprise that the bishop heard himself hailed by the noble visitor. “You there!” the stranger called in a tone well suited to command. “Come here. I would speak to you.”

  The bishop dutifully obeyed. “Your servant, my lord.”

  “You are Welsh, yes?” asked the stranger in good, if slightly accented, Latin.

  “I am of the Cymry, my lord,” answered the bishop.

  “That is correct.”

  “And a priest?”

  “I am Father Asaph, bishop of what is left of the monastery of Llanelli,” replied the churchman. “Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

  “I am Bernard de Neufmarché, Baron of Gloucester and Hereford.” Indicating that the bishop was to follow, the baron led the churchman aside, out of the hearing of his own men and the count’s overcurious porter. “Tell me, how do the people hereabouts fare?”

  The question was so unexpected that the bishop could only ask, “Which people?”

  “Your people—the Welsh. How do they fare under the count’s rule?”

  “Poorly,” answered the bishop without hesitation. “They fare poorly indeed, sire. They are forced to work for the count, building his strongholds, yet he does not feed them— nor do they have any food of their own.” Asaph went on to explain about the meagre harvest of the previous year and how the count’s ambitious building scheme had interfered with this year’s planting. He concluded, saying, “That is why I have come—to make entreaty with the count to release grain from his stores to feed the people.”

  Baron Neufmarché listened to all the churchman had to say, nodding solemnly to himself. “Word of this has reached me,” he confided. “With your permission, bishop, I will see what I can do.”

  “Truly?” wondered Asaph, greatly impressed. “But why should you do anything for us?”

  Neufmarché merely leaned close and, in a lowered voice, said, “Because it pleases me. But see that it remains a secret between ourselves, understood?”

  The bishop considered the baron’s words for a moment, then agreed. “As you say,” he replied. “I praise God for your kind intervention.”

  The baron rejoined his men, and they were conducted directly to the hall, leaving a bewildered bishop to stand in the yard. “Father of Light,” he prayed, “something has just happened which passes all understanding—at least, I cannot make any sense of it. Yet, Strong Redeemer, I pray that the meaning will be for good, and not ill, for all of us who wait on the Lord’s deliverance in this time of testing.”

  The bishop remained in a corner of the yard, lifting his voice in prayer. He was still praying when, a little later, Count Falkes’s seneschal came looking for him. “My lord will deal with you now,” Orval told him and started away again. “At once.”

  The bishop followed the seneschal to the door of the hall and was conducted inside, where the count was seated in his customary chair beside the hearth. Baron Neufmarché was also in attendance, standing a little to one side; the visiting baron appeared to pay no heed to the bishop as he continued talking quietly to his own men. “Pax vobiscum,” said the bishop, raising his hand palm outward and making the sign of the cross.

  “Yes? Yes?” said the count, as if irritated by his visitor’s display of piety. “Get on with it. As you can see, I am busy.

  I have important guests.”

  “I will be brief,” replied the bishop. “Simply put, the people are hungry. You cannot make them work all day without food, and if they have none of their own, then you must feed them.”

  Count de Braose stared at the cleric for a moment, his lip curling with displeasure. “My dear confused bishop,” began the count after a moment, “your complaint is unfounded.”

  “I think not,” objected the bishop. “It is the very truth.”

  The count lifted a long, languid hand and raised a finger.

  “In the first place,” he said, “if your people have no food, it is their own fault—merely the natural consequence of abandoning their land and leaving good crops in the field. This was entirely without cause, as we have already established.”

  Another finger joined the first. “Secondly, it is not—”

  “I do beg your pardon,” interrupted Neufmarché, stepping forward. Turning away from his knights, he addressed the count directly. “I could not help overhearing—but am I to understand that you make your subjects work for you, yet refuse to feed them?”

  “It is a fact,” declared the bishop. “He has enslaved the entire valley and provides nothing for the people.”

  “Enslaved,” snorted the count. “You dare use that word? It is an unfortunate circumstance,” corrected the count. Turning his attention to the baron, he said, “Do you undertake to feed all your subjects, baron?”

  “No,” replied the baron, “not all of them—only those who render me good service. The ox or horse that pulls plough or wagon is fed—it is the same for any man who labours on my behalf.”

  The count twitched with growing discomfort. “Well and good,” he allowed, “but this is a predicament of their own making. A hard lesson it may be, but they will learn it all the same. I rule here now,” the count said, facing the bishop once more, “and the sooner they accept this, the better.”

  “And who will you rule,” asked the baron, “when your subjects have starved to death?” Advancing a few paces toward the bishop, the baron made a small bow of deference and said, “I am Baron Neufmarché, and I stand ready to supply grain, meat, and other provisions if it would aid you in this present difficulty.”

  “I thank you, and my people thank you, sire,” said the bishop, careful not to let on that they had already spoken of the matter in private. “Our prayers for deliverance are answer
ed.”

  “What?” objected the count. “Am I to have nothing to say about this?”

  “Of course,” allowed Neufmarché, “I would never intrude in the affairs of another lord in his realm. I merely make the offer as a gesture of goodwill. If you prefer to give them the grain out of your own stores, that is entirely your decision.”

  The bishop, hands folded as if in prayer, turned hopeful eyes to the count, awaiting his answer.

  Falkes hesitated, tapping the arms of his chair with his long fingers. “It is true that the storehouses are nearly empty and that we shall have to bring in supplies very soon.

  Therefore,” he said, making up his mind, “I accept your offer of goodwill, Neufmarché.”

  “Splendid!” cried the baron. “Let us consider this the first step along the road toward a peaceful and harmonious alliance. We are neighbours, after all, and we should look toward the satisfaction of our mutual interests. I will dispatch the supplies immediately upon my return to Hereford.”

  Seeing in Baron Neufmarché a resourceful new ally, and emboldened by his presence, the bishop plucked up his courage and announced, “There is yet one more matter I would bring before you, lord count.”

  Knowing himself the subject of the baron’s scrutiny, Falkes sighed. “Go on, then.”

  “The two farms you burned—special provision must be made for the farmers and their families. They have lost everything. I want tools and supplies to be replaced at once so they can rebuild.”

  Hearing this, the baron swung toward the count. “You burned their farms?”

  The count, aghast to find himself trapped between two accusers, rose abruptly from his chair as if it had suddenly become too hot. “I burned some barns, nothing more,” blustered the count nervously. “The threat was merely an enticement to obedience. It would not have happened if they had complied with my request.”

  “Those families had little enough already, and that little has been taken from them. I demand redress,” said Asaph, far more forcefully than he would have dared had it not been for the baron looking on.

  “Oh, very well,” said Count Falkes, a sickly smile spreading on his lips. He turned to the baron, who returned his gaze with stern disapproval. “They will be given tools and other supplies so they can rebuild.”

  Regarding the bishop, the baron said, “Are you satisfied?”

  “When the tools and supplies have been delivered to the church,” said the bishop, “I will consider the matter concluded.”

  “Well then,” said Baron Neufmarché. He turned to an extremely agitated Count Falkes and offered a sop. “I think we can put this unfortunate incident behind us and welcome a more salutary future.” He spoke as a parent coaxing a wayward child back into the warm bosom of family fellowship.

  The count was not slow to snatch a chance to regain a measure of dignity. “Nothing would please me more, baron.”

  To the bishop, he said, “If there is nothing else, you are dismissed. Neufmarché and I have business to discuss.”

  Asaph made a stiff bow and withdrew quietly, leaving the noblemen to their talk. Once outside, he departed Caer Cadarn in a rush to bring the good news of the baron’s kindness to the people.

  CHAPTER 27

  By the end of his second day in the forest, Bran was footsore, weary, and voraciously hungry. Twice he had sighted deer, twice loosed an arrow and missed; his shoulder still pained him, and it would take many more days of practise before he recovered his easy mastery of the weapon. He had retrieved one arrow, but the other had been lost—along with any hope of a meal. And though the berries on the brambles and raspberry canes were still green and bitter, he was proud enough to refuse the growing impulse to return to the cave and beg Angharad’s help. The notion smelled of weakness and surrender, and he rejected it outright.

  So as the twilight shadows deepened in the leaf-bound glades, he drank his fill from a clear-running stream and prepared to spend another night in the forest. He found the disused den of a roe deer in a hollow beneath the roots of an ancient oak and crawled in. He lay back in the dry leaves and observed a spider enshroud a trapped cricket in a cocoon of silk and leave it dangling, suspended by a single strand above his head.

  As Bran watched, he listened to the sounds of the woodland transforming itself for night as the birds flocked to roost and night’s children began to awaken: mice and voles, badgers, foxes, bats—all with their particular voices—and it seemed to him then, as never before, that a forest was more than a place to hunt and gather timber, or else better avoided. More than a stand of moss-heavy trees; more than a sweet-water spring bubbling up from the roots of a distant mountain; more than a smooth-pebbled pool, gleaming, radiant as a jewel in a green hidden dell, or a flower-strewn meadow surrounded by a slender host of white swaying birches, or a badger delving in the dark earth beneath a rough-barked elm, or a fox kit eluding a diving hawk; more than a proud stag standing watch over his clan . . . More than these, the forest was itself a living thing, its life made up of all the smaller lives contained within its borders.

  This realization proved so strong that it startled him, and he marvelled at its potency. It was, perhaps, the first time a thought like this had ever taken hold in Bran, and after the initial jolt passed, he found himself enjoying the unique freshness of the raw idea—divining the spirit of the Greene Wood, he called it. He turned it over and over in his mind, exploring its dimensions, delighting in its imaginative potential. It occurred to him that Angharad was largely responsible for this new way of thinking: that with her songs and stories and her old-fashioned, earthy ways, she had awakened in him a new kind of sight or understanding. Surely, Angharad had bewitched him, charmed him with some strange arboreal enchantment that made the forest seem a realm over which he might gain some small dominion. Angharad the Hudolion, the Enchantress of the Wood, had worked her wiles on him, and he was in her thrall. Rather than fear or dread, the conviction produced a sudden exultation. He felt, inexplicably, that he had passed some trial, gained some mastery, achieved some virtue. And although he could not yet put a name to the thing he had accomplished, he gloried in it all the same.

  He lay back in the hollow of the great oak’s roots as if embraced by strong encircling arms. It seemed to him that he was no longer a stranger in the forest, an intruder in a foreign realm . . . He belonged here. He could be at home here. In this place, he could move as freely as a king in his caer, a lord of a leaf and branch and living things—like the hero of the story: Rhi Bran.

  He fell asleep with that thought still turning in his mind.

  Deep in the night, he dreamed that he stood on the high crest of a craggy hill rising in the centre of the forest, the wind swirling around him. Suddenly, he felt the urge to fly, and stretching out his arms, he lifted them high. To his amazement, his arms sprouted long black feathers; the wind gusted, and he was lifted up and borne aloft, rising up and up into the clear blue Cymraic sky. Out over the forest he sailed; looking down, he saw the massed treetops far below— a thick, green, rough and rumpled skin, with the threads of streams seamed through it like veins. He saw the silvery glint of a lake and the bare domes of rock peaks. Away in the misty distance he saw the wide green sweep of the Vale of Elfael with its handful of farms and settlements scattered over a rolling, rumpled land that glowed like a gemstone beneath the light of an untroubled sun. Higher and still higher he soared, revelling in his flight, sailing over the vast extent of the greenwood.

  From somewhere far below, there arose a cry—a wild, ragged wail, like that of a terrorised child who will not be comforted or consoled. The sound grew until it assaulted heaven with its insistence. Unable to ignore it, he sailed out over the valley to see what could cause such anguish. Scanning the ground far below, a movement on the margin of the forest caught his eye. He circled lower for a closer look: hunters. They had dogs with them and were armed with lances and swords. That they should violate the sanctity of his realm angered Bran, and he determined to drive them away.
He swooped down, ready to defend his woodland kingdom, only to realise, too late, that it was himself they were hunting.

  He plummeted instantly to earth, landing on the path some little way ahead of the invading men. The sharp-sighted dogs saw him and howled to be released. As Bran gathered himself to flee, the hunters loosed the hounds.

  Bran ran into the forest, found a dark nook beneath a rock, and crawled in to hide. But the dogs had got his scent, and they came running, baying for his blood . . .

  Bran awakened with the sound of barking still echoing through the trees. A soft mist curled amongst the roots of the trees, and dew glistened on the lower leaves and on the grassy path.

  The long rising note came again and, close behind, the very beast itself: a lean, long-legged grey hunting hound with clipped ears and a shaggy pelt, bounding with great, galloping strides through the morning fog.

  Seizing his bow, Bran nocked an arrow and drew back the string. He was on the point of loosing the missile when a small boy appeared, racing after the dog. Barefoot, dirty-faced, with long, tangled dark hair, the lad appeared to be no more than six or seven years old. He saw Bran the same instant Bran saw him; the boy glimpsed the weapon in Bran’s hands and halted just as Bran’s fingers released the string.

  In the same instant a voice cried, “Pull up!”

  Distracted by the shout, Bran’s aim faltered, and the arrow went wide; the hound leapt, colliding with Bran and carrying him to the ground. Bran crossed his arms over his neck to protect his throat . . . as the dog licked his face. It took a moment for Bran to understand that he was not being attacked. Taking hold of the dog’s iron-studded collar, he tried to free himself from the beast’s eager attentions, but it stood on his chest, holding him to the ground. “Off!” cried Bran. “Get off!”

  “Look at you now,” said Angharad as she came to stand over him. “And is this not how I first found you?”

  “I surrender,” Bran told her. “Get him off.”

  The old woman gestured to the boy, who came running and pulled the dog away.