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  Iwan, his face tight with pain, said nothing. Brother Ffreol accepted Bran’s assurances, and they rode on.

  “Do you think we should have seen the Ffreinc by now?” asked the monk after a while. “If they had been in a hurry to reach Elfael, we would certainly have met them. They probably stopped to make camp for the night. God be praised.”

  “You praise God for that?”

  “I do,” admitted the monk. “It means the Cymry have at least one night to hide their valuables and get to safety.”

  “One night,” mocked Bran. “As much as all that!”

  “Wars have turned on less,” the priest pointed out. “If the Conqueror’s arrow had flown but a finger’s breadth to the right of Harold’s eye, the Ffreinc would not be here now.”

  “Yes, well, it seems to me that if God really wanted praising, he’d have prevented the filthy Ffreinc and their foul mar-chogi from coming here in the first place.”

  “Do you have the mind of God now that you know all things good and ill for each and every one of his creatures?”

  “It does not take the mind of God,” replied Bran carelessly, “to know that anytime a Norman stands at your gate it is for ill and never good. That is a doctrine more worthy than any Bishop Asaph ever professed.”

  “Jesu forgive you,” sighed the priest. “Such irreverence.”

  “Irreverent or not, it is true.”

  They fell silent and rode on. As the sun sank lower, the shadows on the trail gathered, deepening beneath the trees and brushwood; the sounds became hushed and furtive as the forest drew in upon itself for the night.

  The road began to rise more steeply toward the spine of the ridge, and Bran slowed the pace. In a little while the gloom had spread so that the gap between trees was as dark as the black boles themselves, and the road shone as a ghost-pale ribbon stretching dimly away into the deepening night.

  “I think we should stop,” suggested Brother Ffreol. “It will soon be too dark to see. We could rest and eat something. Also, I want to tend Iwan’s wound.”

  Bran was of a mind to ride all night, but one look at the wounded warrior argued otherwise, so he gave in and allowed the monk to have his way. They picketed the horses and made camp at the base of an oak just out of sight of the road, ate a few mouthfuls of bread and a little hard cheese, and then settled down to sleep beneath the tree’s protecting limbs. Wrapped in his cloak, Bran slept uneasily, rising again as it became light enough to tell tree from shadow.

  He roused Ffreol and then went to Iwan, who came awake at his touch. “How do you feel?” he asked, kneeling beside the champion.

  “Never better,” Iwan said as he tried to sit up. The pain hit him hard and slammed him back once more. He grimaced and blew air through his mouth, panting like a winded hound. “Perhaps I will try that again,” he said through clenched teeth, “more slowly this time.”

  “Wait a moment,” said Ffreol, putting out his hand. “Let me see your binding.” He pulled open the big man’s shirt and looked at the bandage wrapped around his upper chest. “It is clean still. There is little blood,” he announced, greatly reassured.

  “Then it is time we made a start.”

  “When we have prayed,” said the monk.

  “Oh, very well,” sighed Bran. “Just get on with it.”

  The priest gathered his robe around him, and folding his hands, he closed his eyes and began to pray for the speedy and sure success of their mission. Bran followed the sound of his voice more than the words and imagined that he heard a low, rhythmic drumming marking out the cadence. He listened for a while before realising that he was not imagining the sound. “Quiet!” he hissed. “Someone’s coming.”

  Ffreol helped Iwan to his feet, and the two disappeared into the underbrush; Bran darted to the horses and threw his cloak over their heads to keep them quiet, then stood and held the cloak in place so the animals would not shake it off. Brother Ffreol, flat on the ground, watched the narrow slice of road that he could see from beneath his bush. “Ffreinc!” he whispered a few moments later. “Scores of them.” He paused, then added, “Hundreds.”

  Bran, holding the horses’ heads, heard the creak and rattle of wagon wheels, followed by the dull, hollow clop of hundreds of hooves and the tramp of leather-shod feet—a pulsing beat that seemed to go on and on and on.

  At long last, the sound gradually faded and the bird-fretted silence of the forest returned. “I believe they have gone,” said Ffreol softly. He rose and brushed off his robe. Bran stood listening for a moment longer, and when no one else appeared on the road, he uncovered the horses’ heads.Working quickly and quietly, he saddled the horses and then led the animals through the forest, within sight of the road. When, after walking a fair distance, no more marchogi appeared, he allowed them to leave the forest path and return to the road. The three travellers took to the saddle once more and bolted for Lundein.

  CHAPTER 6

  By midmorning Bran, Iwan, and Brother Ffreol had begun the long, sloping ascent of the ridge overlooking the Vale of Wye. Upon reaching the top, they paused and looked down into the broad valley and the glittering sweep of the lazy green river. In the distance they could see the dark flecks of birds circling and swooping in the cloudless sky. Bran saw them, and his stomach tightened with apprehension.

  As the men approached the river ford, the strident calls of carrion feeders filled the air—ravens, rooks, and crows for the most part, but there were others. Hawks, buzzards, and even an owl or two wheeled in tight circles above the trees.

  Bran stopped at the water’s edge. The soft ground of the riverbank was raggedly churned and chewed, as if a herd of giant boar had undertaken to plough the water marge with their tusks. There were no corpses to be seen, but here and there flies buzzed in thick black clouds over congealing puddles where blood had collected in a horse’s hoofprint. The air was heavy and rank with the sickly sweet stench of death.

  Bran dismounted and walked back toward the road, where most of the fighting had taken place. He looked down and saw that in the place where he stood the earth took on a deeper, ruddy hue where a warrior’s lifeblood had stained the ground on which he died.

  “This is where it happened,” mused Brother Ffreol with quiet reverence. “This is where the warriors of Elfael were overthrown.”

  “Aye,” confirmed Iwan, his face grim and grey with fatigue and pain. “This is where we were ambushed and massacred.” He lifted his hand and pointed to the wide bend of the river. “Rhi Brychan fell there,” he said. “By the time I reached him, his body had been washed away.”

  Bran, mouth pressed into a thin white line, stared at the water and said nothing. Once he might have felt a twinge of regret at his father’s passing, but not now. Years of accumulated grievances had long ago removed his father from his affections. Sorrow alone could not surmount the rancour and bitterness, nor span the aching distance between them. He whispered a cold farewell and turned once more to the battleground.

  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 agai
n 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 way—as 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 war-band.” 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 king,” 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.”