Clash of Kings (4 page)

‘It’s the face of a demon!’ her rational mind argued, for Branwyn was aware of the legends that spoke of fair seals in human form that sometimes came out of the night to steal away the souls of unwary girls.

‘He’s a gift to me from Poseidon!’ she said aloud. ‘The storm has given me a present, for no one so beautiful could possibly wish me any harm.’

She was suddenly determined to save the injured man, and immediately set about putting her desire into action. With much tugging and grunting effort, she stripped the clinging, heavy cloak from the inert body, dragging the man out of the crevice in the process. A long cut on his side was revealed through his torn tunic and an equally livid wound marred the perfection of his white forehead. The movement caused his injuries to bleed sluggishly, and Branwyn felt a twinge of alarm that she might cause him to suffer further harm.

‘If I leave him here, the sea will have him again,’ she told herself loudly to invest her words with confidence. ‘This time, he’ll surely drown!’ Branwyn spoke to herself often, having grown without other children to provide her with company. ‘And anyway, he’s mine, to do with as I wish,’ she murmured childishly.

The stranger began to mumble in a strange language. His eyes slowly opened and she discovered that they were black and quite insensible. He flinched away from her touch and would have struck her, had she not drawn back as she would from any wounded animal.

Branwyn was wilful, but she was no fool. This stranger was delirious, injured, and he could easily die if she didn’t find shelter for him. But where could she take him? And how?

Just above the shoreline, she could see a ruined cottage that, for the large part, gaped open to the elements. Except for one corner, most of its thatched roof was gone, and two shale walls had tumbled in under the dual ravages of wind and icy winters. But part of the structure was still protected from the elements if she could find a way to bring her prize to its doubtful shelter.

Branwyn realised that the stranger was watching her intently, although she couldn’t guess at what he saw. Schooling her voice into the tones of the cook when he was being most autocratic, she began to issue orders.

‘You’re hurt, sir. Come, no argument or foolishness. You must rise so I can help you to safety.’ The man’s unfocused eyes looked up at her blankly, while his marble forehead furrowed in an attempt at concentration.

‘Get on your feet,’ she ordered, although she willed her mouth to smile sweetly. ‘I’ll help you, if only you can stand for me.’

As a child will obey the voice of an adult, even when he is fretful and ill, the young man stirred and slowly attempted to climb to his knees. Branwyn lent him her meagre strength to support him as he struggled to stand upright.

‘Very good, Triton,’ she muttered, when at last he leaned heavily on her thin shoulders with one shaking arm. ‘Now we’ll try to get you to walk.’

With indrawn hisses of pain, her gift from the sea obeyed her commands. Together, they struggled into the sharp, wiry sea-grass, where his knees crumbled like broken kindling, taking Branwyn to the ground with him. A sharp elbow caught her in the stomach and winded her, leaving both man and girl lying prone under the rising sun until Branwyn managed to struggle to her feet and continue the arduous task of bullying her charge. Slowly but inexorably, they climbed the slope that led to the ruined croft.

Over an hour had passed by the time she released her charge at last and permitted him to collapse in the shade of the rock walls. Above him, sufficient thatch remained on the roof to protect his supine body from rain. Carefully, Branwyn spread out his cloak to dry and weighted it down with stones lest it should flap in the wind and draw attention from some passing peasant. The girl wanted no witnesses to her adventure. This man was hers.

Gently, she stroked his forehead and found that his skin burned with the beginnings of a fever. His lips were cracked with thirst and she regretted that she had neglected to bring a water skin.

‘Never mind. I’ll go home, I think, and beg some food from Plautenes. He always gives me what I want.’

Her dark, cat’s eyes gleamed impishly. Plautenes might profess to love his plump Greek cook, Crusus, but Branwyn knew that the steward wasn’t impervious to the female sex. He had never laid so much as a finger on Branwyn, but she understood from his hot brown eyes that he nurtured illicit thoughts about her. Branwyn wasn’t entirely sure what these thoughts entailed for, unwisely, Olwyn had neglected this part of her daughter’s education. Little did her mother understand how curiously her daughter’s imagination dwelt on the mysteries of sex.

Yes, Plautenes would filch bread, cheese and goat’s milk for her from the kitchens, she decided as she returned to the villa, where her unexpected return was greeted with incredulous pleasure by her mother.

‘You’re back, Branwyn? Good girl! Your grandfather would never leave if he thought you were wandering off again after his complaints. He’s already broken his fast and is in an expansive mood, so be nice to him and we may return to our normal routines once he’s gone.’

Olwyn pinched her daughter’s cheeks to induce a little colour into their pallor, then tamed the girl’s wild, mahogany curls with her own bone comb and straightened her crushed robe.

‘Off with you, sweetheart! Your grandfather loves you, but he’s used to having his own way and has no patience with the interests of his womenfolk.’ Olwyn had no appreciation of the irony in her words. She failed to recognise that both Branwyn and herself were much like her arrogant father in their separate, eccentric fashions.

Branwyn endured several homilies and lectures from her grandfather, sat on his knee and kissed his cheek with charming, youthful giggles. She made a great many promises that she had no intention of keeping. Although she smiled winningly and assured Melvig that he was the best man in the whole world, her mind remained fixed on the ruined hut and the plight of its injured occupant. Her last sight of her trophy as he had lain, feverish, coughing and curled into the cool sandy sod, added a sense of urgency to the brilliance of her laughter.

Once she was released and had plundered the kitchen for food and clean rags, she headed for the stables. Branwyn knew her mother would ask questions if she requested salve for the stranger’s wounds, and she had no intention of sparking Olwyn’s curiosity. Fortunately, she knew that the stables would provide her with a vile-smelling ointment used to treat swellings on delicate hocks or to cure cuts and abrasions on horses’ legs. Her grandfather’s stable lad was too stupid to question his master’s granddaughter, so she took a thick compress of moss and some mysterious, pungent oil wrapped in a grimy length of oilskin. Melvig would be long gone before he discovered she had been helping herself to his horse salves – if he ever did.

Despite her best efforts, noon had come and gone by the time Branwyn returned to the ruined cottage. The sky was miraculously clear and seemed newly washed by the storms of the night. A few clouds scudded in from the sea and gulls squabbled on the foreshore as they hunted for dead fish and shellfish torn from the safety of their rocks. With the feel of sandy grass beneath her bare feet, Branwyn sensed her quiet life was trembling on the brink of change.

Within the purple shadows of the hut, the stranger continued to sleep fitfully. He stirred irritably when Branwyn forced milk between his lips and when she inadvertently knelt on his right arm as she applied the horse salve to his temple and ribs. The ointment stained his delicate skin an unhealthy sanguine, but the girl knew that the smelly mess would cause him no lasting harm. Then, with strips of rag, she bound the stolen compress to the wound on his side and fastened it securely in place.

His hairless, defined torso made her stomach feel strange. Unused to the manners of epicureans, Branwyn couldn’t know that his body had been plucked clean of body hair. Caught in the throes of her first experience of lust, she was mesmerised by a male beauty that was so different from the greasy complexions of the villa servants or her grandfather’s ancient, rough masculinity.

She sat beside him throughout the long afternoon, watching as he twisted and turned in his fever, and tried to understand the odd words that exploded from his well-shaped mouth in spasms of delirium.

For her, it was enough simply to watch him as he breathed.

As dusk fell, Branwyn left the water skin close to his hand, along with the food she had brought, wrapped in a piece of rag. His woollen cloak, now dry, did double duty as a blanket that she tucked around his slim form, flushing when she inadvertently touched his thigh. Then, regretfully, she returned to her mother’s house.

The night dragged as Branwyn longed for morning. Had Poseidon sent him to her only yesterday? Would he love her as the gods had decided he should? Every foolish love story told by the maidservants flitted through her dreams until her twelve-year-old imagination had turned her stranger into a hero, cast into the storm by the jealousy of the queen of heaven, whom he had rejected. Seamlessly, Branwyn included herself in her wondrous fantasy, the true love of his heart for whose sake he would defy the gods and carry her away to his gold and ivory palace.

Only an indulged, protected child would have been so foolish. Branwyn had always been the centre of her small world and she couldn’t imagine why anyone would choose to cause her harm.

At first light, excitement lent speed to her feet as she ran the mile or so to the ruined cottage. Anticipation flushed her cheeks with handsome colour and caused her eyes to sparkle with a luminous joy. Had the stranger opened his eyes, he would have seen the woman in the child clearly revealed through all of her tremulous vulnerability. But he continued to sleep.

In his fever, the stranger had cast off the cloak and his hair had broken free of the leather thong that had kept it from his eyes. His hair was not particularly long, but it was glossy black and exceptionally fine, with the first strands of white appearing on the right side of his forehead.

Branwyn shivered.

His pallor had warmed during the night so that his skin appeared rosy where his cheek rested against his hands. Carefully, so as not to waken him, Branwyn eased herself down onto the sod until she lay against his long, bare spine.

He didn’t move. His shoulders rose and fell gently with his steady breathing, while Branwyn yearned to rest her hand on his breast and feel the long, slow beat of his heart. Her romantic imagination fuelled by her innocent desires, she watched the clouds scud overhead through the smashed roof. In her content, she must have fallen asleep, for she was awakened, suddenly and shockingly, by a heavy weight across her thighs and a rough hand clamping off her throat.

Branwyn mewed with surprise and looked up into the flat black eyes of the stranger, who was examining her with all the casual disinterest of a king – or a god.

‘Where am I? And who are you?’ he demanded in a very bad approximation of the common speech. ‘I’ll break your pretty neck if you scream, so nod if you understand what I’m saying.’

Branwyn nodded, all dreams of love, heroism and romance swept away by a flash of something atavistic and cruel in his glacial stare. Then the pressure on her bruised throat was eased.

‘I am Branwyn, daughter of Godric of Segontium and granddaughter of Melvig ap Melwy, king of the Deceangli people.’ She attempted to capture some of her usual arrogance, but her voice broke with emerging fear.

‘Another jumped-up savage crowing over his petty dung heap.’ The stranger rolled his eyes derisively. ‘So I’m at Segontium, I suppose?’

Branwyn nodded.

‘And you’re responsible for this thing?’ He indicated the poultice with a twitch of his nostrils. ‘If I’m not mistaken, your remedy smells of horse liniment.’

Branwyn spat at him, her temper outweighing her fear as he sneered at her and her family.

‘Quite the little savage, aren’t you?’ He smiled down at her. ‘Still, you saved me from the sea, so I suppose I owe you something.’

The weight on her hips was released as the stranger raised himself until he was kneeling and began to pull off his boots. ‘Gods, but they’re ruined,’ he muttered to himself in disgust as he upended each boot carefully onto his cloak. Two soft leather pouches fell free and Branwyn heard the unmistakable, gentle clink of gold coins.

‘So even a little savage knows what gold is. It’s handy that you didn’t think to rob me when you had your chance.’

‘You’re a horse’s arse!’ Branwyn swore crudely, conjuring up the worst insult she could imagine. ‘I’m not a thief!’

He backhanded her negligently with one graceful hand, but the force of the blow belied its casualness. For a moment, Branwyn’s senses darkened.

‘What delights are you hiding under those rags?’ the stranger murmured reflectively as he began to strip and search her. He stroked her immature breasts appreciatively before bending to lick a line of sweat from her cheek with his tongue. She flinched away from the ugliness of the action as he lifted her birth talisman with an elegant finger.

‘You’ve nothing of value, my dear, except this amulet. It’s pretty, but hardly worth confiscating. Perhaps I might allow you to keep your pretty toy as a reward for keeping me safe when I wasn’t quite . . . myself?’

His fingers played with the golden chain on which hung her father’s only gift to her, a small gold and ivory figure of the goddess Ceridwen, lying beside the iron arrowhead between her breasts.

‘I wish I’d let you die!’ Branwyn hissed, then shrieked when he cruelly twisted one of her nipples.

‘You will be nice to me, little one. I’d hate to be forced to cut off your breasts.’

The stranger showed her a thin, deadly knife that he drew from a sheath inside his boot. As he watched her eyes flare with fear, he twisted her nipple again, even harder this time, until tears filled her eyes.

‘Please?’ He smiled down at her gently while tapping his forehead with one finger. ‘I must have scrambled my brains on the rocks, my pretty. Will anyone come looking for you if we stay here till I’m ready to resume my journey?’