Longbow Girl (2 page)

J
ames got up from the bench and walked slowly down the hillside. He watched from a distance as Merry rode Jacintha, her Welsh Mountain pony, through the stream at the bottom of the valley. It was swollen after weeks of winter rain and she lifted her boots high. He heard her laugh as the pony shook herself vigorously on the other side.

Merry didn't use a saddle or bridle unless riding in a show. Bareback felt more real, she said, and she had trained Jacintha – and all the farm's Welsh Mountain ponies, which had been the Owens' livelihood for centuries – to respond only to gentle pressure on the halter. She didn't call herself a horse whisperer, said it was just kindness, patience, understanding and a good-hearted pony. But to James it always seemed like magic.

With Merry, Jacintha had become a major prize-winning
show pony in the jumping and hunter classes. With her fine conformation, her jet-black coat, the white sock on her rear off leg and the white star on her dished head, she was like a fairy-tale image of a pony. She was fast and high-spirited. Merry loved her fiercely. At least it wasn't that horse who'd died, James thought now.

Jacintha cantered across the valley, picking up pace now. Merry was lining up her pony, aiming at the boundary wall. Too high, surely, to jump . . . But Merry gathered in her pony, let her measure the distance, then threw herself flat over Jacintha's neck so it seemed there was just one animal galloping away from him. The black pony leapt into the air. It looked for a second as if girl and animal were flying; then Jacintha cleared the wall and landed safely on the other side.

James rolled his eyes. Typical Merry: having fun, pushing it and making a point. He knew it was an act of defiance, her trespass. Not that he would ever see it as such. When his parents and sister were off the estate, Merry would often come round. But the de Courcys were all in residence. And this was Merry's not-so-subtle message to them.

With her straight-backed poise and waist-length blonde hair streaming behind her, he thought that Merry looked more than ever like a marauding warrior princess.

The Owens had been given Nanteos Farm in the fourteenth century, so long as each heir swore to protect the Crown by the skill of the longbow. For seven hundred years, the Owen family had stood ready to do just that, and Merry was the first female heir. Now it had become an honorary concept – James
couldn't imagine how the current queen would need a bodyguard archer – but without the longbow, Merry didn't know who she was. Maybe that was why she understood what football was to him – so much more than a sport or a game. But unlike Merry, he did not have the support of his parents. A career as a professional footballer was simply not an acceptable occupation for the lord of the Black Castle. On one side was talent, yearning and ambition. On the other was snobbery, convention and the weight of history. He sometimes wondered if he'd ever break free.

Just before the boundary wall, James found the stallion's grave, marked by a simple headstone. He felt a slow burn of fury and shame as he tried to imagine the scene, if only to punish himself. Merry had witnessed the wolfhounds' attack, had been the only one at home. She'd then had to shoot her own stallion, put a bullet in his head to end his agony. He couldn't begin to imagine how she'd felt, wondered if their families would always hate each other.

He jumped over the wall and accelerated up the hill at a sprint, trying to burn off his feelings. His father's Welsh Black sheep, grazing decoratively, took fright at his approach and trotted away. The de Courcy flock had to be black to match the castle, his mother often joked, but they were in fact an ancient breed. The castle records that his father obsessed over showed that the de Courcys had kept these sheep for over five hundred years.

Above him loomed the Black Castle, Castell Du, built by his ancestors back in the 1200s. It looked like the fortress it was:
dark, forbidding, a statement of power, money and intent. But it was also a home,
his
home. He loved it, always had. He'd be sad to leave it.

He glanced across the elegant parkland to check on Merry, hoping she'd jumped back on to the safety of her own lands. But she was still cantering along on the wrong side of the wall, putting on her show of defiance. Picking a fight, looking for trouble, almost as if she were summoning it from the cold spring air.

He slowed down as he saw the slight but ferocious figure of his mother appear on the drawbridge that spanned the castle moat. She was scowling.

‘Can you believe it, that feral Owen girl trespassing on our land?' she said.

‘Seeing is believing and all that, Ma.'

‘I honestly don't know why you bother with her,' the countess continued. ‘Why don't you bring home some of your friends from school instead?'

‘There's a lot you don't know,' James answered, refusing to engage in the fight his mother so clearly wanted.

He walked under the portcullis, across the cobbled courtyard, up to the pair of phoenixes, the de Courcy emblem that guarded the great front door. He hauled open the oak, slammed it shut behind him. The boom echoed through the castle and down to the dungeons like a roll of thunder.

M
erry crossed the de Courcy land. She knew she was barred, could almost feel the Black Castle glowering down at her from its hilltop perch, and imagined the Earl de Courcy, binoculars pinned to his disapproving eyes, spying. Maybe he'd set the wolfhounds on them both.

‘He'd love that, wouldn't he?' she said into Jacintha's ear, and cantered on for another few hundred yards, making her point. She could see James crossing over the moat, disappearing under the teeth of the portcullis. And his mother.

‘Better go back, girl,' she said to Jacintha at last. ‘Don't want you killed too.'

Safely over the wall and back on her own land, Merry hacked on towards the Black Wood. It was an ancient forest, said to be thousands of years old. She wasn't sure if it had
taken its name from the thickness of the trees, which on all but the sunniest of days seemed to turn day into night, or because of its proximity to the Black Castle. The forest spread across both the Owens' land and the de Courcy estate. The trees respected no boundaries and there was no dividing wall within the forest itself.

Merry spotted a narrow break and entered the trees, following a natural pathway, perhaps made by deer and her own ponies seeking shelter. The sun was warm on her face and she could smell the sweet, earthy scent of her pony's sweat.

Birdsong rang out: thrushes, robins, finches. Merry was sure she heard a nightingale, after which the valley of Nanteos was named, but the notes of its song grew fainter, as if the bird were moving away, leading them deeper into the forest. With a light squeeze of her legs, Merry guided Jacintha to follow it. Jacintha was nervous. Ponies were prey animals, and the forest was anything but silent. The trees spoke to one another in surprisingly high-pitched squeaks as wood rubbed against wood in the gentle breeze.

Pony and rider meandered off the path, on to a smaller track. Merry ducked under low-hanging branches, gazing around her. She knew almost all her family's lands intimately, but this part she had never explored closely. Legend had it that the forest was haunted. Looking around, Merry could almost believe it. Moss climbed up the tree trunks, shrouded the branches, fell in tendrils towards the earth, velvet green, pervasive, almost prehistoric.

The nightingale fell silent. Jacintha stopped abruptly.

‘What is it?' asked Merry, looking around. Not the wolfhounds, she prayed, fear flickering through her. She slid off Jacintha's back, grabbed a solid branch and, heaving on it, broke it off the tree with a loud crack that echoed round the forest.

But Jacintha was still standing to attention, so Merry felt sure the wolfhounds were not there. She would have heard them by now, and Jacintha would be more frightened. So what was it? She led her pony forward, under an especially low-hanging branch.

‘Ah! So that's it.'

Ahead of them was a huge, uprooted oak tree, its roots tilted skyward. Merry felt a pang. The oak was a healthy one, probably at least four hundred years old.

‘What have you seen, old tree?' she asked softly. ‘Did the spring gales bring you down?'

She hooked Jacintha's reins over a branch and went closer. The tree had fallen at a strange angle, over an oddly symmetrical mound of earth over twenty feet long and about ten feet high. It looked man-made. Like the burial mounds she'd studied in her history lessons. The tree must have grown over the top of it.

She skirted back to the roots. There was a huge, gaping hole where the roots had been. Merry paused, tilted her head. Something was down there, a rectangular shape. Intrigued, she scrambled down, muddying her hands as she slipped. Then she reached down, worked on the earth, and pulled the object free.

It was a small chest, the size of a large shoebox. She brushed off more dirt, revealing ornately worked metal. It looked very old. She felt a sudden wariness. Was this how Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon felt when they stood on the threshold of Tutankhamen's tomb, when they first caught the gleam of gold within? Before the supposed curse of Tutankhamen took Carnarvon's life six weeks later?

Don't be ridiculous
, she chided herself.
It's just an old chest. In Wales
.

Yes
, said a competing voice,
but it might be from a tomb just the same
.

There was a clasp, rusty, rough-edged. Merry tried to prise it open it but it wouldn't yield. She fiddled, pulled, pried, cut herself, swore.

Then with something between a hiss and a sigh, the chest opened. Inside was an oblong bundle covered in tatty cloth the colour of old leaves. Biting her lip, Merry unwound the cloth. It spooled at her feet like the wrappings of a mummy.

Inside was a book.

It was ancient-looking, written in an elaborate, cursive script on pale parchment. She thought it looked like old Welsh. Some pages were illustrated with beautiful and detailed coloured drawings.

‘Wow! What have we got here?' Merry whispered, shivering slightly. Whatever it was, it must have been a treasured possession of whichever Welsh chieftain had been buried in the mound. She quickly wrapped up the book again and replaced it in the metal chest, then stood still, thinking. After a
few minutes she carried it back to Jacintha. The pony snorted and tossed her head.

‘Hey, it's all right Jac,' murmured Merry. ‘Nothing in here to hurt you. ‘

She stroked Jacintha's warm muscled neck, soothing her, then, unusually awkward as she clasped the chest under her arm, she stood on a branch of the fallen tree, mounted her pony and rode from the forest.

Jacintha was skittish all the way, shied at every sound. Bareback, encumbered by the chest, Merry nearly tumbled a few times.

‘Calm down, Jac,' she crooned. ‘Everything's fine.'

Except that it wasn't.

M
erry was a storyteller. Since she'd been a little girl she'd come home from her adventures on the farm or in the hills and woods with ever more outlandish tales to tell her parents.

‘I met a knight walking through the forest. In armour he was, polished silver, sword and all.'

Or:
‘Guess what, Jacintha jumped so high today she soared through the air. A gust of wind took us, half a mile we went, right up the Beacons.'

This story would be used to justify her being home half an hour late. The better it was, the more her parents excused her.

Merry didn't know where she got it from. Certainly not her father. He believed in what he could see, nothing more. Longbowman. But her mother, a talented artist, liked to tell stories in her paintings – vivid oils of dragons and harps and knights.

Both her parents were sitting at the kitchen table going over the farm accounts when she walked in. Her baby brother, Gawain, lay in his playpen gurgling away under a baby gym.

She hid the chest behind her back. ‘Guess what I found today?'

Her father looked up. His face was sombre but when he locked eyes with her, it broke into a smile. He closed the file in front of him, pushed it away. ‘Now, let me see.' He leant back in his chair, hands behind his head. ‘You fell down a well and before you managed to haul yourself out you discovered a hoard of Roman coins?'

Merry shook her head, grinning. ‘Not this time, Da.'

Her mother tucked her long dark hair behind her ears and studied her quizzically. ‘A stranger wandering in the hills. You could have sworn you saw the outline of wings beneath his coat. You spoke to him for a while, then turned away for just a second and when you looked back he'd gone. Disappeared into thin air. You spent hours hunting for him and that's why you missed lunch, isn't it, Spinner?'

Merry laughed.
Spinner
was her mother's nickname for her: spinner of tales. ‘Nice one, Mam. But no.'

She brought the chest from behind her back, set it on the table.

‘I found this,' she said, opening the chest and unwrapping the book with a flourish.

Her parents eyed the book. Her father leant forward as her mother slowly turned the pages, her long white fingers delicate on the ancient parchment.

They looked up, silenced by a real story this time.

‘Where on earth did you find this,
cariad
?' asked her father.
Cariad
meant ‘sweetheart' in Welsh. Merry loved her parents' various names for her, made her feel that she was lots of different things.

‘Get your boots on,' said Merry. ‘I'll show you.'

Her father carried Gawain in a sling across his chest. Six foot four, he always walked at military-yomp pace, eating up the ground. Merry and her mother were used to it, reckoned a walk with him equalled a workout.

When they got to the burial mound they were glowing with a sheen of sweat. They paused. Around them the forest was silent now. No birds sang. Probably frightened away, thought Merry.

‘Down there,' she said, pointing to the hole in the ground. ‘You can see the shape behind it, now the tree's blown over. It's got to be a burial mound.'

Her father cast his eyes over it. ‘I think you're right,
cariad
,' he said. ‘You know, in all the years I've never noticed it.'

‘It's as if the tree was guarding it,' said Elinor. ‘Or hiding it.' She paused and murmured, ‘Maybe this is why they say the forest is haunted.'

Caradoc Owen gave her a brisk look. ‘Who's buried here? That's what I'd like to know.'

‘Someone important,' said Merry. ‘Some chieftain or prince. Must be to have had a book like that.'

‘We need to find out,' Elinor said. ‘And we need to decide
what to do with the book. We can't keep it hidden away in a cupboard.'

‘Something like that belongs in a museum,' said Caradoc.

Merry looked down at the burial mound, wondered if whoever lay there minded that she had taken their book. She shivered with a sudden sense that they did. Maybe digging around in tombs was not such a good idea. She thought again of the Valley of the Kings and the curse of Tutankhamen.

‘Maybe we should just forget about it and put it back,' she said hurriedly.

Her parents gave her a strange look. ‘
Why?
' they asked in unison.

‘Well, it belongs to whoever's down there.'

‘He or she is long gone,' said Caradoc. ‘They shouldn't trouble you.'

But they did. ‘Come on, let's go home,' Merry said. She didn't want to be near their skeletal remains any longer.

Back at the farmhouse, her mother took her aside.

‘You found the book. What do you think we should do with it?' she asked.

Merry shook her head. ‘I'm not sure. Half of me really does want to bury it again but the other half is curious. I want to know more.'

‘Look,' Elinor said, putting her hand on her daughter's arm. ‘It's Saturday. No need to do anything for a few days. Just sleep on it.'

Merry did just that. When she went to bed that night she
pushed the chest containing the book deep under her bed. But she kept thinking back to the hole under the tree. When had the chest been buried? And who had owned the land then – the de Courcys, or the Owens?

She stood in her cosy yellow-painted room with its two windows, one looking up the hill towards Seren's cottage, the other across the valley to the Black Castle, reliving the events of the day. So much had happened. James arriving home in turmoil, the buyer coming to look at their mare, her discovery in the Black Wood. It has started off like any other day and turned into something different.
Life has a way of surprising us, cariad
, her father was fond of saying.
Best be ready
.

But what did that mean? All she was ready for was a war she'd never have to fight. A war of longbows and knights in armour.

She opened the window facing the Black Castle for some fresh air. For a while she just stood there, breathing in the night, gazing across the black void to the castle, where distant lights glimmered. What was James doing, she wondered? More arguments with his parents, or was he holed up in his room, avoiding them?

She heaved out a sigh, closed her primrose-sprigged curtains, changed into her nightdress, and walked barefoot across the white-painted floorboards. There was a small rug in the middle of her room, but she liked the feel of the wood beneath her feet. She removed her eye patch, slipped into bed and pulled the duvet and quilt up to her chin.

Half asleep, half transported by her own imagination and by
memories of the tale her father had told and retold many times, her mind went back to the fateful battle nearly seven hundred years ago when the ownership of land changed, when her family's fortunes were made and the Owens' longbow tradition began.

A battlefield in Northern France, Crécy 1346: the muscled archers hauling back their massive bows, sending up a hail of arrows that blackened the sky and brought death to the French and victory to the English. Against all odds. And sixteen-year-old Edward, the Black Prince, heir to the English throne, embroiled in close-quarter combat and fighting for his life, saved not by the noblemen who were his close guard, nor the fourth Earl de Courcy, who commanded that guard, but by Merry's own ancestor – a longbowman who, with a well-aimed arrow, felled the man who was swinging an axe to the prince's head . . .

And on that one arrow, the fortunes of the Owen family turned. The Black Prince rewarded Longbowman Owen with five hundred acres of land and enough gold to build a modest cottage. Five hundred acres taken from the ancestral estates of the Earl de Courcy, a royal punishment that cut deep.

The enmity between the two families started that day. Everyone knew the de Courcys still wanted back what they would always regard as
their land
. Its loss was an open wound, picked over by the generations so that it would never heal.

In her dreams, Merry saw the chieftain rising from the burial mound, saw the flesh recladding his skeletal frame, saw the rich robes of his rank once again swathing his body as he
marched from the dark forest across the open fields, to reclaim his book. But more than that, to take back the Owens' land, their home, and return it to the de Courcys.