Clash of Kings (3 page)

Melvig ate in a petulant, reflective manner and scorned to use the old Roman divans, choosing instead to experience the solid serviceability of an adze-formed oak bench and table. His daughter served him mead with her own hands, although she wished privately that the Deceangli and Ordovice tribes were still at war so that her father would be forced to stay in his fortress at Canovium to the north. Still, she smiled in that distant fashion that always aggravated her father’s temper. Even as he accepted her excellent wine, he fought a desire to box her ears or to slap her pale cheeks until she cast off her impassiveness to weep and curse him. Anything but that empty face, the old man thought impotently, but managed to save his irritation for the belated appearance of his granddaughter.

Conscious of the gulf between them, Olwyn tried to bridge that yawning space without touching him, which she knew would not be acceptable to the irascible old king.

‘How go your borders, Father? I know your friendship with King Bryn ap Synnel is as strong as ever, but the Picts still raid our lands in the spring.’ She was conscious that she was gabbling, but that gulf . . . She bridged it in the only way she could, with hurried words, hoping to deflect criticism from her wayward daughter. ‘I know you are in alliance with the Cornovii king, but the Brigante aren’t very friendly, are they? I do wish you had time for more peaceful pursuits.’

Melvig frowned. He was uncomfortable with
woman’s chatter
, as he called it, and was unwilling to discuss political matters with anyone, including his son, Melvyn.

He ran his hand through his beard and scratched his chin to cover his awkwardness. As an affectionate but distant father, he had never known how to discuss anything of importance with his daughters, faring better when he was issuing peremptory instructions in a gruff voice. He patted his daughter’s head clumsily, and tried to deflect any personal revelations.

‘You don’t need to worry your head about the Picts, or those Brigante bastards. They’ve got a new king who’s more amenable to reason than his predecessor. It’s the south where the true dangers lie, but there’ll always be someone to keep you safe, girl. You don’t need to be afraid.’

‘I’m not afraid, Father. Whatever will happen, will happen. We all stand in the hollow of the Mother’s hand.’

Melvig cleared his throat, and Olwyn knew he was embarrassed by any reference to the Mother, whom all sensible men feared to their very bones. Regretfully, Olwyn patted her father’s shoulder in passing and went to wait for her daughter.

When she finally arrived, the girl came at a run, with scant regard for her wind-torn hair and grass-stained skirts. Melvig noticed that Branwyn’s feet were bare and dirty, and that one sunburned hand clutched her sandals behind her back.

As if he wouldn’t notice!

‘So, my young barbarian, you’ve decided to honour us with your presence at last. What do you have to say for yourself, eh? Don’t you realise how foolhardy you are to run across the path of galloping horses? The gods must have protected us both, for you weren’t trampled to death and I didn’t fall from my horse.’

Branwyn stood resolutely before him with her dirty feet slightly apart. Her eyes were cast down modestly, but Melvig wasn’t deceived.

‘Are you half-witted, girl? Give me a fair answer, or by my oath I’ll have you locked in your room. And there you will stay for six months, even if I have to leave a guard to enforce my wishes.’

‘You’re frightening her, Father!’

‘Her?’ Melvig snorted derisively, and waved a chicken leg in his granddaughter’s direction. ‘She’s afraid of too little for her own good.’

The object of his disapproval was a tall, slender girl just approaching womanhood but still possessing all the awkwardness of a young animal. Her skin was startlingly pale, for Olwyn and Melvig both tanned easily, and were always a warm, golden hue. Her eyes were inherited from Godric, and were brown and lustrous, but they were harder and more wilful than those of her noble father. Her mouth was generous and naturally red, but her nose was too long and narrow for feminine beauty, and her lips always appeared to be smiling at something vaguely unpleasant. Her mahogany-brown hair with its highlights of bronze was an odd frame for her pale flesh and dark eyes, and with that imperious nose coupled with brows that rose upward at the outer corners the child possessed an alien, disconcerting sexuality. Melvig felt his palms itch with the desire to slap her pale face. Even Olwyn, a doting mother, was a little repelled by her daughter’s indifference to the opinions of her elders.

‘I beg your pardon if I frightened you, Grandfather,’ she replied meekly. ‘But I like the sand and the gulls, and I don’t really notice anything other than where I’m going when I’m freed from my lessons.’

‘You’ll discover just how frightened I am, young lady, if you run under the hooves of my stallion again,’ Melvig spluttered, but his mouth curled in grudging appreciation. She was a spirited vixen, although she irritated him mightily. ‘You’ll feel the flat of my hand!’

‘Father!’ Olwyn protested, her eyes finally registering concern.

‘Go to your bed, girl – without your supper,’ the king ordered, gazing off into the distance to indicate that he had made an irrevocable decision. ‘Perhaps a time of fasting will remind you to take more care in future.’

‘There’s a storm coming, so all sensible folk will be seeking shelter for the night,’ Olwyn added. ‘You could easily have been caught in the elements of the gods through your foolishness, Branwyn. The storm clouds come from over Mona, where the druids tended the sacred groves. They tell us that the spirits are angry when the winds blow fiercely from the island, so any sensible person knows to pray to their household gods and keep their heads down.’

The girl bowed low to her grandfather with a gravity that was totally false. Olwyn saw the girl’s lips quivering with scorn, and felt a frisson of fear at her daughter’s arrogance. Then the girl was gone, leaving behind the smell of sunshine and seaweed, as well as a small scattering of sand granules.

‘Mark my words, Olwyn, that little vixen will bring trouble to your house. Your Godric was a good, decent man, and apart from your failure to remarry for the sake of your family you’ve always been a dutiful daughter. But what can be made of Branwyn? She’s wilful, disobedient and completely unprepared for marriage. That’s your fault, daughter! She’s not even particularly beautiful,’ the old man added, combing his beard with irritable fingers. For the first time, he had felt the child’s blatant, unconscious sexuality and he was disturbed by its wild strength ‘What is to become of this plain, fractious and peculiar child?’

Having voiced his opinion, he considered that the discussion was closed. Oblivious of the offended expression of his daughter, he stamped off to his quarters in a much-improved humour, while behind his receding back, Olwyn seethed. She regretted her gender and the intense, inward-looking nature that robbed her of the ability to voice any argument or complaint. Whenever her father invaded her quiet world, she felt impotent, frail and alone. Olwyn accepted that her daughter was reckless and even heedless of others, but Branwyn was so like her grandfather that the child sometimes overwhelmed her mother.

A distant rumble of thunder intruded into Olwyn’s turbulent thoughts and she moved to the heavy wooden door of the villa. Her manservant was waiting to bolt the doors for the night, and Olwyn felt a surge of guilt that she should keep this good man from his bed. Uncharacteristically, she remained at the entrance to her house after ordering him to retire, because, like her mother before her, Olwyn couldn’t resist the lure of the approaching storm. Wild weather fascinated her and made her believe that real blood raced through her quiet veins.

The storm gradually blotted out the last, numinous light of the long evening. Black clouds marched across the sky in the vanguard of the tempest and were laced with bruised purples and livid greens as if the gods had struck heaven’s face in a jealous rage. Behind the leading edge of the boiling storm clouds came an ominous denseness that seemed more palpable than air. Periodically, lightning lanced out of the darkness and struck the sea or the island like a crooked staff of incandescent energy. The air smelled of ozone, salt and the breathless sweat of a dead afternoon.

Olwyn clutched herself and shivered. Something was angry: not the gods, precisely, but something older and more primal that barely deigned to notice, for the most part, the small irritants of humanity. Now, that indefinable ‘it’ had been stirred and, in its sudden temper, was tearing the sea to shreds of foam and eliminating the stars that had filled the sky.

Superstitiously, Olwyn backed through the wooden doors and slammed them shut behind her. As she lowered the heavy bar into place, she heaved a sigh of relief that the villa was locked against whatever sought to smash it into fragments of brick, wood and tile.

‘When Poseidon pounds his trident and Zeus throws his thunderbolts, all sensible people cover their heads and pray that they will see morning,’ the steward, Plautenes, told the cook, a fellow transplanted Greek who was shivering with fear in their narrow bed. ‘Don’t fret, Crusus. The gods have no use for men like us. As the old saying goes, they’ve got other fish to fry.’

Perhaps Plautenes was right, for the villa was shaken to its strong foundations by peal after peal of rolling thunder. Tiles were dislodged by the wild, gusting winds and several trees in the orchard were ripped out of the ground.

Throughout the terrifying evening, only two people in the villa were completely at peace. Melvig slept soundly, for he was a hardheaded realist who refused to fear the demons of the air that existed only in the imaginations of the foolish. Under the fine linen covers of his pallet, he slept dreamlessly, to wake at dawn without any memory of the storm or the dangers it had presented.

After prayers to the Mother and an invocation to Grannie Ceridwen to save her household, Olwyn fell into the dreamless, untroubled sleep of the truly innocent, trusting that her mistresses would save her from the terror of the darkness.

In her small room, before a narrow, shuttered window, Branwyn gloried in the havoc that played out before her wondering eyes. In the face of such elemental power, she found herself unable to be frightened when the pyrotechnics of sheet and forked lightning limned her narrow and limited view of Mona with lurid colour.

‘It’s wonderful!’ she whispered to the storm with a childlike glee. ‘Tomorrow anything might happen, for the gods have wrought the sea and the air anew. How exciting it is!’

When she finally fell asleep in a wild tangle of long limbs and unbrushed hair, the stillness that descended over the villa held no fears for her. Branwyn, daughter of Olwyn and grandchild of Melvig ap Melwy, had yet to learn the smell and taste of terror.

CHAPTER II

UPON THE TIDE

Before the kitchen fires were lit, before Olwyn stirred from her narrow pallet and even before her grandfather opened one eye to enjoy the rise of a newly minted sun, Branwyn was awake, dressed and abroad. Wise to the fury of storms, she knew that the tide would have delivered up a rich treasure in broken and whole shells, sea-polished stones, seeds, and the skeletal, grey wood that the waves deposited along the high-water line. With the ghoulishness of a child, she revelled in examining dead fish that had been cast up from unimaginable depths and were stranger than any fisherman’s catch. Iridescent jellies quivered on the white rime of deposited sand that softened the piles of uprooted weed, black silt and shiny grey stones.

Nothing could keep Branwyn away from such marvels.

The sky was barely lit with the first flush of dawn when the girl cast off her rough leather sandals on the tough grass foreshore, tied her skirts into makeshift trousers between her legs and picked her way down to the tide line.

Her headscarf was soon employed to serve as a collection bag. Shells, complete and beautiful, were popped into the cloth. Spiral horns, like the fierce weapon of a centaur, were placed into the folds of linen. A strange, translucent cone, shaped like a whimsical hat, followed her other treasures, and this booty was soon joined by stag horns of tide-wood, two pebbles the colour of ripe apricots and a fragment of weed that was firm yet pliant, entrancing Branwyn’s imagination with its strange beauty.

Soon, she had rounded the point and was picking her way through a tangle of dark grey rocks, peering through the early morning light into marooned rock pools where small balls of spines tried to hide in crevices. Tiny fingerlings danced away from her questing fingers as she stirred the salty, crystalline water into miniature whirlpools.

Then an alien sound, a groan, stopped her movement and evaporated her inner peace. Wrenched from salt-burned lungs and a seared throat, the sound was as harsh as a crow’s cry against the perfection of an idyllic dawn. Like the wild thing that she was, Branwyn crouched low and scanned the wet rocks that surrounded her at the water’s edge.

There!

Above the suck of the waters, a huddled shape was wedged between two fangs of greyish stone. Whatever it was, the contorted form was large, black and menacing.

Branwyn almost left it to die. So close! Like any startled animal, she was poised to run back the way she had come. So easily are kingdoms made, and lost, then made again, on the courage of a girl not wise enough to understand the texture of fear.

Branwyn crept cautiously towards the huddled shape. When she was a spear-length from the body, she saw the outflung, open hand that was as white as new bone against the coarse grey rock. The fingers were long, with nails so clean and well tended that Branwyn wondered if a woman lay supine where the sea had thrown her body.

Carefully and warily, Branwyn knelt beside the huddled shape, which appeared to be tangled in heavy, wet wool. Every sense was alert as the girl pulled an edge of the still-sodden cloth away from the head. She gasped in shock.

The body was male and the face was beautiful. The man’s nose was long, narrow and straight with sensitive nostrils that flared, even now, as he struggled to breathe. His eyebrows were perfect, black semicircles above closed eyes that were fringed with long, curling lashes. The eyelids appeared bruised and tender, so that Branwyn’s heart gave a sudden little skip as if something pressed down hard on her chest.