Hood kr-1 Page 5

  Images of chaos sprang into his mind-a desperate battle between woefully outnumbered and lightly armed Britons and heavy, hulking, mail-clad Ffreinc knights. He saw the blood haze hang like a mist in the air above the slaughter and heard the echoed clash of steel on steel, of blade on wood and bone, the fast-fading shouts and screams of men and horses as they died.

  Looking toward the wood to the north, he saw the birds flocking to their feeding frenzy. Squawking, shrieking, they fought and fluttered, battering wings against one another in their greed. Grabbing up stones from the riverbank, he ran to the place, throwing rocks into the midst of the feathered scavengers as he ran.

  Reluctant to leave the mound on which they fed, the scolding birds fluttered up and settled again as the angry stones sailed past. Stooping once more, he took up another handful of rocks and, screaming at the top of his lungs, let fly. One of the missiles struck a greedy red-beaked crow and snapped its neck. The wounded bird flopped, beating its wings in a last frantic effort to rise; Bran threw again and the bird lay still.

  The hillock was covered with brush and branches cut from the thickets and trees along the riverbank. Pulling a stick from the pile, Bran began beating at the flesh eaters; they hopped and dodged, reluctant to give ground. Bran, screaming like a demon, lashed with the branch, driving the scavengers away. They fled with angry reluctance, crying their outrage to the sky as Bran pulled brushwood from the stack to lay bare a massed heap of corpses.

  The stick in his hand fell away, and Bran staggered backward, overwhelmed by the calamity that had taken the lives of his kinsmen and friends. The birds had feasted well. There were gaping hollows where eyes had been; flesh had been stripped from faces; ragged holes had been wrested in rib cages to expose the soft viscera. Human no longer, they were merely so much rotting meat.

  No! These were men he knew. They were friends, riding companions, fellow hunters, drinking mates-some of them from times before he could remember. They had taught him trail craft, had given him his first lessons with blunted wooden weapons made for him with their own hands. They had picked him up when he fell from his horse, corrected his aim when he practised with the bow, and along the way, taught him much of what he knew of life. To see them now with their empty eyes and livid, blackening faces, their ruined bodies beginning to bloat, was more than he could bear.

  As he gazed in mute horror at the confused tangle of slashed and bloodied limbs and torsos, something deep inside himself gave wayas if a ligament or sinew suddenly snapped under the strain of a load too heavy to bear. His soul spun into a void of bloodred rage. His vision narrowed, and it seemed as if his surroundings had taken on a keener, harder edge but were now viewed from a long way off. It seemed to Bran that he gazed at the world through a red-tinged tunnel.

  There was another hill nearby-also crudely covered with brush and lopped-off tree branches. Bran ran to it, uncovered it, and without realising what he was doing, climbed up onto the tangled jumble of bodies. He sank to his knees and grasped the arms of the corpses with his hands, tugging on them as if urging their sleeping owners to wake again and rise. "Get up!" he shouted. "Open your eyes!" He saw a face he recognised; seizing the corpse's arm, he jerked on it, crying, "Evan, wake up!" He saw another: "Geronwy! The Ffreinc are here!" He began calling the names of those he remembered, "Bryn! Ifan! Oryg! Gerallt! Idris! Madog! Get up, all of you!"

  "Bran!" Brother Ffreol, shocked and alarmed, ran to pull him away. "Bran! For the love of God, come down from there!"

  Stumbling up over the dead, the monk reached out and snagged Bran by the sleeve and hauled him down, dragging the prince back to solid ground and back to himself once more.

  Bran heard Ffreol's voice and felt the monk's hands on him, and awareness came flooding back. The blood-tinged veil through which he viewed the world dimmed and faded, and he was himself once more. He felt weak and hollow, like a man who has slaved all night in his sleep and awakened exhausted.

  "What were you doing up there?" demanded Brother Ffreol.

  Bran shook his head. "I thought… I-" Suddenly, his stomach heaved; he pitched forward on hands and knees and retched.

  Ffreol stood with him until he finished. When Bran could stand again, the priest turned to the death mound and sank to his knees in the soft earth. Bran knelt beside him, and Iwan painfully dismounted and knelt beside his horse as Brother Ffreol spread his arms, palms upward in abject supplication.

  Closing his eyes and turning his face to heaven, the priest said, "Merciful Father, our hearts are pierced with the sharp arrow of grief. Our words fail; our souls quail; our spirits recoil before the injustice of this hateful iniquity. We are undone.

  "God and Creator, gather the souls of our kinsmen to your Great Hall, forgive their sins and remember only their virtues, and bind them to yourself with the strong bands of fellowship.

  "For ourselves, Mighty Father, I pray you keep us from the sin of hatred, keep us from the sin of vengeance, keep us from the sin of despair, but protect us from the wicked schemes of our enemies. Walk with us now on this uncertain road. Send angels to go before us, angels to go behind, angels on either side, angels above and below-guarding, shielding, encompassing." He paused for a moment and then added, "May the Holy One give us the courage of righteousness and grant us strength for this day and through all things whatsoever shall befall us. Amen."

  Bran, kneeling beside him, stared at the ground and tried to add his "Amen," but the word clotted and died in his throat. After a moment, he raised his head and gazed for the last time on the heap of corpses before turning his face away.

  Then, while Bran bathed in the river to wash the stink of death and gore from his hands and clothes, Ffreol and Iwan covered the bodies once more with fresh-cut branches of hazel and holly, the better to keep the birds away. Bran finished, and the three grief-sick men remounted and rode on as the cacophony of carrion feeders renewed behind them. Just after midday they crossed the border into England and a short while later approached the English town of Hereford. The town was full of Ffreinc now, so they moved on quickly without stopping. From Hereford, the road was wide and well used, if deeply rutted. They encountered few people and spoke to none, pretending to be deep in conversation with one another whenever they saw anyone approaching, all the while remaining watchful and wary.

  Beyond Hereford, the land sloped gently down toward the lowlands and the wide Lundein estuary still some way beyond the distant horizon of rumpled, cultivated hills. As daylight began to fail, they took refuge in a beech grove beside the road near the next ford; while Bran watered the horses, Ffreol prepared a meal from the provisions in their tuck bags. They ate in silence, and Bran listened to the rooks flocking to the woods for the night. The sound of their coarse calls renewed the horror of the day. He saw the broken bodies of his friends once more. With an effort, he concentrated on the fire, holding the hateful images at bay.

  "It will take time," Ffreol said, the sound of his voice a distant buzz in Bran's ears, "but the memory will fade, believe me," At the sound of his voice, Bran struggled back from the brink. "The memory of this black day will fade," Ffreol was saying as he broke twigs and fed them to the fire. "It will vanish like a bad taste in your mouth. One day it will be gone, and you will be left with only the sweetness."

  "There was little sweetness," sniffed Bran. "My father, the king, was not an easy man.

  "I was talking about the others-your friends in the warband."

  Bran acknowledged the remark with a grunt.

  "But you are right," Ffreol continued; he snapped another twig. "Brychan was not an easy man. God be praised, you have the chance to do something about that. You can be a better king than your father."

  "No." Bran picked up the dried husk of a beechnut and tossed it into the fire as if consigning his own fragile future to the flames. He cared little enough for the throne and all its attendant difficulties. What difference did it make who was king anyway? "That's over now. Finished."

  "You will be kin
g," declared Iwan, stirring himself from his bleak reverie. "The kingdom will be restored. Never doubt it."

  But Bran did doubt it. For most of his life he had maintained a keen disinterest in all things having to do with kingship. He had never imagined himself occupying his father's throne at Caer Cadarn or leading a host of men into battle. Those things, like the other chores of nobility, were the sole occupation of his father. Bran always had other pursuits. So far as Bran could tell, to reign was merely to invite a perpetual round of frustration and aggravation that lasted from the moment one took the crown until it was laid aside. Only a power-crazed thug like his father would solicit such travail. Any way he looked at it, sovreignty exacted a heavy price, which Bran had seen firsthand and which, now that it came to it, he found himself unwilling to pay.

  "You will be king," Iwan asserted again. "On my life, you will."

  Bran, reluctant to disappoint the injured champion with a facile denial, held his tongue. The three were silent again for a time, watching the flames and listening to the sounds of the wood around them as its various denizens prepared for night. Finally, Bran asked, "What if they will not see us in Lundein?"

  "Oh, William the Red will see us, make no mistake." Iwan raised his head and regarded Bran over the fluttering fire. "You are a subject lord come to swear fealty. He will see you and be glad of it. He will welcome you as one king welcomes another."

  "I am not the king," Bran pointed out.

  "You are heir to the throne," replied the champion. "It is the same thing."

  Ffreol said, "When we return to Elfael, we will observe the proper rites and ceremonies. But this will be the first duty of your reign-to place Elfael under the protection of the English throne and-"

  "And all of us become boot-licking slaves of the stinking Ffreinc," Bran said, his tone bitter and biting. "What is the stupid bloody point?"

  "We keep our land!" Iwan retorted. "We keep our lives."

  "If God and King William allow!" sneered Bran.

  "Nay, Bran," said Ffreol. "We will pay tribute, yes, and count it a price worth paying to live our lives as we choose."

  "Pay tribute to the very brutes that would plunder us if we didn't," growled Bran. "That stinks to high heaven."

  "Does it stink worse than death?" asked Iwan. Bran, shamed by the taunt, merely glared.

  "It is unjust," granted Ffreol, trying to soothe, "but that is ever the way of things."

  "Did you think it would be different?" asked Iwan angrily. "Saints and angels, Bran, it was never going to be easy."

  "It could at least be fair," muttered Bran.

  "Fair or not, you must do all you can to protect our lands and the lives of our people," Ffreol told him. "To protect those least able to protect themselves. That much, at least, has not changed. That was ever the sole purpose and duty of kingship. Since the beginning of time it has not changed."

  Bran accepted this observation without further comment. He stared gloomily into the fire, wishing he had followed his first impulse to leave Elfael and all its troubles as far behind as possible.

  After a time, Iwan asked about Lundein. Ffreol had been to the city several times on church business in years past, and he described for Bran and Iwan what they might expect to find when they arrived. As he talked, night deepened around them, and they continued to feed the fire until they grew too tired to keep their eyes open. They then wrapped themselves in their cloaks and fell asleep in the quiet grove.

  Rising again at dawn, the travellers shook the leaves and dew from their cloaks, watered the horses, and continued on. The day passed much like the one before, except that the settlements became more numerous and the English presence in the land became more marked, until Bran was convinced that they had left Britain far behind and entered an alien country, where the houses were small and dark and crabbed, where grim-faced people dressed in curious garb made up of coarse dun-coloured cloth stood and stared at passing travellers with suspicion in their dull peasant eyes. Despite the sunlight streaming down from a clear blue sky, the land seemed dismal and unhappy. Even the animals, in their woven willow enclosures, appeared bedraggled and morose.

  Nor was the aspect to improve. The farther south they went, the more abject the countryside appeared. Settlements of all kinds became more numerous-how the English loved their villages-but these were not wholesome places. Clustered together in what Bran considered suffocating proximity anywhere the earth offered a flat space and a little running water, the close-set hovels sprouted like noxious mushrooms on earth stripped of all trees and greenery-which the muddwellers used to make humpbacked houses, barns, and byres for their livestock, which they kept in muck-filled pens beside their low, smoky dwellings.

  Thus, a traveller could always smell an English town long before he reached it, and Bran could only shake his head in wonder at the thought of abiding in perpetual fug and stench. In his opinion, the people lived no better than the pigs they slopped, slaughtered, and fed upon.

  As the sun began to lower, the three riders crested the top of a broad hill and looked down into the Vale of Hafren and the gleaming arc of the Hafren River. A smudgy brown haze in the valley betrayed their destination for the night: the town of Gleawancaester, which began life in ancient times as a simple outpost of the Roman Legio Augusta XX. Owing to its pride of place by the river and the proximity of iron mines, the town begun by legionary veterans had grown slowly over the centuries until the arrival of the English, who transformed it into a market centre for the region.

  The road into the vale widened as it neared the city, which to Bran's eyes was worse than any he had seen so far-if only because it was larger than any other they had yet passed. Squatting hard by the river, with twisting, narrow streets of crowded hovels clustered around a huge central market square of beaten earth, Gleawancaester-Caer Gloiu of the Britons-had long ago outgrown the stout stone walls of the Roman garrison, which could still be seen in the lower courses of the city's recently refurbished fortress.

  Like the town's other defences-a wall and gate, still unfinisheda new bridge of timber and stone bore testimony to Ffreinc occupation. Norman bridges were wide and strong, built to withstand heavy traffic and ensure that the steady stream of horses, cattle, and merchant wagons flowed unimpeded into and out of the markets.

  Bran noticed the increase in activity as they approached the bridge. Here and there, tall, clean-shaven Ffreinc moved amongst the shorter, swarthier English residents. The sight of these horse-faced foreigners with their long, straight-cut hair and pale, sun-starved flesh walking about with such toplofty arrogance made the gorge rise in his throat. He forcibly turned his face away to keep from being sick.

  Before crossing the bridge, they dismounted to stretch their legs and water the horses at a wooden trough set up next to a riverside well. As they were waiting, Bran noticed two barefoot, ragged little girls walking together, carrying a basket of eggs between them-no doubt bound for the market. They fell in with the traffic moving across the bridge. Two men in short cloaks and tunics loitered at the rail, and as the girls passed by, one of the men, grinning at his companion, stuck out his foot, tripping the nearest girl. She fell sprawling onto the bridge planks; the basket overturned, spilling the eggs.

  Bran, watching this confrontation develop, immediately started toward the child. When, as the second girl bent to retrieve the basket, the man kicked it from her grasp, scattering eggs every which way, Bran was already on the bridge.

  Iwan, glancing up from the trough, took in the girls, Bran, and the two thugs and shouted for Bran to come back.

  "Where is he going?" wondered Ffreol, looking around.

  "To make trouble," muttered Iwan.

  The two little girls, tearful now, tried in vain to gather up the few unbroken eggs, only to have them kicked from their hands or trodden on by passersby-much to the delight of the louts on the bridge. The toughs were so intent on their merriment that they failed to notice the slender Welshman bearing down on them until Bran, lur
ching forward as if slipping on a broken egg, stumbled up to the man who had tripped the girl. The fellow made to shove Bran away, whereupon Bran seized his arm, spun him around, and pushed him over the rail. His surprised yelp was cut short as the dun-coloured water closed over his head. "Oops!" said Bran. "How clumsy of me,"

  "Mon Dieu!" objected the other, backing away.

  Bran turned on him and drew him close. "What is that you say?" he asked. "You wish to join him?"

  "Bran! Leave him alone!" shouted Ffreol as he pulled Bran off the man. "He can't understand you. Let him go!"

  The oaf spared a quick glance at his friend, sputtering and floundering in the river below, then fled down the street. "I think he understood well enough," observed Bran.

  "Come away," said Ffreol.

  "Not yet," said Bran. Taking the purse at his belt, he untied it and withdrew two silver pennies. Turning to the older of the two girls, he wiped the remains of an eggshell from her cheek. "Give those to your mother," he said, pressing the coins into the girl's grubby fist. Closing her hand upon the coins, he repeated, "For your mother."

  Brother Ffreol picked up the empty basket and handed it to the younger girl; he spoke a quick word in English, and the two scampered away. "Now unless you have any other battles you wish to fight in front of God and everybody," he said, taking Bran by the arm, "let us get out of here before you draw a crowd."

  "Well done," said Iwan, his grin wide and sunny as Bran and Ffreol returned to the trough.

  "We are strangers here," Ffreol remonstrated. "What, in the holy name of Peter, were you thinking?"

  "Only that heads can be as easily broken as eggs," Bran replied, "and that justice ought sometimes to protect those least able to protect themselves." He glowered dark defiance at the priest. "Or has that changed?"

  Ffreol drew breath to object but thought better of it. Turning away abruptly, he announced, "We have ridden far enough for one day. We will spend the night here."