Lion Rampant

by Bernard Knight

Genres: Historical Fiction; Medieval; War & Military

Synopsis

A historical epic by Bernard Knight, Lion Rampant is set in medieval Wales and features the tale of Nest, a princess known as 'the Welsh Helen of Troy'. Nest was a lover of King Henry I of England, married the steward of a Pembrokeshire castle (giving rise to the FitzStephen and FitzGerald families, including Gerald of Wales), and was later abducted by a marauding Welsh noble. This is the story of the adventure, intrigue, and warfare in the various kingdoms of Wales during the twelfth century.

Release date: March 25, 2016

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 269

Sample

PROLOGUE

Within a few years of 1066, all England had been conquered by the Norman invaders. However, the Celtic princedoms of Scotland, Ireland and Wales retained their independence to varying degrees for centuries longer.

The Princes of Wales, in spite of their constant in-fighting, owed their freedom to the mountains which had also protected them from the Romans and Saxons. These same mountains posed too difficult a problem for William the Conqueror to deal with himself – he and his successors were too interested in England and Normandy. He delegated the problem to a few of his favourite henchmen, who became Lords of the Marches along the Welsh border. In effect, these became subsidiary kingdoms under the overall sovereignty of the monarch. The Marcher Lords had absolute power in their realms and were free to enlarge their territory westwards at the expense of the Welsh princes.

The Marcher Lords, in turn, delegated a lesser power to their own knights, adventurers who were willing to cut out estates for themselves by force of arms. Both they and the lords themselves drove into Wales, their success varying greatly at different periods and in different areas.

From the first, the coastal plains at the extreme north and south fell easy prey, but the central mountain mass continued to give it age-old protection, both to the peaks of Gwynedd and part of Powys in the north and to the remote coastal area in the west, especially Ceredigion (the modern Cardiganshire).

Dyfed (the modern Pembrokeshire), being contiguous with the South Wales coastal strip, was more vulnerable. William the Conqueror made a sabre-rattling procession there in 1081, under the pretext of a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. David. Whilst there, he came to an arrangement with Rhys ap Tewdwr1, supreme prince of South Wales, by which, on payment of tribute to the Conqueror, Rhys’ lands would be safe from invasion by the hovering Marcher Lords. Though William was able to control these rapacious lords during his lifetime, their ambition tore loose on several occasions during the reigns of his sons, William Rufus and Henry I, leading to the open revolt of the great Montgomery family against the Crown at the turn of the century.

William’s pact with Rhys was honoured for his lifetime but, within weeks of Rhys’ assassination in 1093 – by an over-ambitious Norman occupier of Brecon – both Normans and opportunist Welsh princes tore into Dyfed and Ceredigion to begin a wrestling match for territory that was to last for another two hundred years.

Prince Rhys had a daughter, Nest, whose reputed beauty has caused her to be called ‘Helen of Wales’. Her name is woven into Welsh history – and into that of Ireland and England – more deeply than any other Welsh woman before or since. Her beauty plunged West Wales into battle, fire and vendetta that was to flare up again and again for years to come.

This is the story of the seven most eventful of those years.

1Rhys, son of Tudor

CHAPTER ONE

CHRISTMAS DAY 1109

The frosty moonlight gave the scene an ethereal brilliance. To the Porter at the outer gate, the royal compound seemed carved from silver, suspended against the blackness of the woods across the river.

There was not a breath of wind to disturb the hazy smoke which filtered through the wattled eaves of the great hall. It climbed slowly into the diamond-studded sky, as if undecided whether to drift over the sea to Ireland, or back up the Teifi valley to lose itself in the hills of West Wales.

The Porter had eaten his Christmas meal some hours before, snug in his own hut with his buxom wife and three children. Now he was resigned to spending the rest of the night at the opening in the stockade, unlikely to be disturbed by anyone save latecomers to the prince’s feast. His spear could lie idle and his dagger could rust in its scabbard: although there were Normans across the river in Dyfed, the gate would not need defending against them this night. Prince Cadwgan2 ruled all Ceredigion and most of Powys. There had been peace these last few years – albeit an uneasy one.

The Porter scratched himself and pulled his sheep’s fleece closer against the frost. His woman would bring him a bowl of soup at midnight but, until then, all he had to do was imagine the rich food and drink that was being poured down the throats of the revellers inside the hall. This was the first Christmas for the new building and Cadwgan was celebrating with an extravagant feast. The old hall had burned down last spring and the prince had it rebuilt in the fancy new style, with dry stone walls up to a man’s height, pierced with openings to let in the light. Many thought it mere aping of the new fortresses of the French and suspected that Cadwgan’s Norman wife had nagged him into it. The Porter scowled at the thought. She would be in there now, glutting her fat body on good food, the old cow! He hoped that she choked on it.

Looking up at the full moon, he calculated that there were little more than three hours before midnight and his dish of cawl. Getting late, he mused. Owain and his hotheads had better be quick or they’ll miss the best of the food. Everyone else that Prince Cadwgan had invited had arrived long ago, so where was his eldest son and heir? There had been a lot of speculation in the armoury that morning as to whether Owain would get an invitation at all, after that business in Powys last week. Cadwgan had just about despaired of his eldest son, they said – and that old French bitch did all she could to twist the knife in the wound.

The Porter looked around again at the wooden palisade of the Welsh castle, enclosing its two acres of ground. The other guard should be patrolling there somewhere, unless he’d slipped back into his dwelling for a quick fumble with his new wife! His eye fell on the Hall again, with its steeply pitched roof of rush thatch and turf. A faint buzz of voices and the clatter of dishes came tantalizingly across the compound, but a moment later his keen ears picked up another sound.

From the north, where the coast track ran down the length of Ceredigion to this fortress of Din-geraint3, the rumble of hooves came faintly through the night air, as they hammered across the open moorland beyond the woods.

The Porter smiled to himself in the brittle cold. Owain ap Cadwgan was coming! Owain, favourite of the men, idol of the little boys – and devastator of the maidens!

Owain was coming – now the Christmas feast should really come to life!

Inside the hall of Din-geraint, enough drink had flowed to get the party well under way. This was one of the three feasts of the year when the womenfolk were allowed to share the Hall with the men and their presence added spice to the revels. Both young men and old fools showed off before them, their eager tongues wagging from too much mead, bragget and new beer. In the centre of the earthen floor, between the middle pair of the six huge tree trunks that supported the roof, was a great fire, piled with peat and topped with a massive yule log.

Through the blue haze of smoke which hung amongst the rough rafters, a hubbub of gossip, laughter and the clatter of wooden dishes confirmed the good spirits of the hundred or so people in the Hall. Cadwgan himself was already half drunk and full of the expansive good nature that a dozen horns of spiced mead had induced. Even his snobbish, patronizing wife, her fat buttocks drooped over the chair next to him, permitted herself a few strained smiles from time to time.

‘Well, lady, what do you think of our new hall?’

The prince waved an unsteady hand at the low stone walls, hung with Christmas garlands of laurel and holly.

Her once-handsome face, thickened by two dropsical pregnancies, cracked into a supercilious sneer.

‘It would make a good cottage for a serf in England,’ she rasped, ‘or a fair pigsty in Normandy … why can’t you build all in stone, like civilized people?’

Cadwgan scowled and turned his head away. His good humour drained away as if the woman had pulled a plug from the bottom of his soul. Pigsty, be damned! Old pig herself! He’d had six sons by different women and daughters by too many others to remember, but had managed to avoid marrying any of them, until he got saddled with a wife like this – and a Norman into the bargain. No wonder a man took to drink! The thought brought him back to the present and he banged furiously on the table with his gold-banded drinking horn. His cupbearer, hovering nervously nearby, leapt to refill the vessel and spilt some mead on the scrubbed table alongside the prince’s silver plate.

‘You clumsy fool!’ snarled Cadwgan, giving the man a vicious backward blow in the stomach with his elbow.

As the man slunk away, Cadwgan felt instant remorse. He knew that he was getting old and losing his grip. Ten years ago, a clumsy servant would have had a cheerful clout on the ear, followed by a hearty slap on the back – and gone away grinning with pride. Now his serfs hated him, his freemen pitied him and his gentlemen despised him. When they went to battle – which, thank God, was now rarely enough – instead of clamouring to die for him, they found every excuse to slink away and only recovered their old vigour when Owain appeared on the scene.

Tears of drunken self-pity began to well up in Cadwgan’s red-rimmed eyes as he gulped the strong mead. He stared mistily out across the raised upper hall at his guests and his officers, then sniffed noisily, rubbing at his eyes with the linen sleeve of his tunic. No one took much notice of him – he was respected there not for himself, but for his princely rank in the strict hierarchy of Welsh royal protocol. He was the son of Bleddyn – and Bleddyn was long dead. By this token, Cadwgan was Prince of Powys and Ceredigion – at least, for as long as the French condescended to respect their pact leaving him in authority there.

But there was little love for Cadwgan himself. He knew that when his sons looked at him, they were mentally calculating how long he might live, so that their chance would come. And the way he felt some days, with these attacks of the yellow skin and vomiting of blood, they would not have very long to wait.

His eyes pricked again, but with a sudden flare of his old spirit he jumped to his feet and slammed a horny hand on to the table. Immediately, the Silentiary – one of the ten officers of the Court entitled to a chair in the privileged upper hall – sprang to his feet, struck the nearest roof pillar with his staff and bellowed in a resounding voice:

‘Silence! Yr Arglwydd4 speaks!’

The tumult melted away like snow in a flame and one young woman in the lower hall who giggled in the silence got an ear-warming buffet from the matron next to her.

Prince Cadwgan ap Bleddyn ap Cynfyn leaned heavily with his fists on the table, to steady himself. He raised one arm in the tired gesture of an old man, though he was hardly turned fifty.

‘My guests … my kindred … my people! I give you welcome on this day of Jesus Christ.’

The arm drooped and Cadwgan swayed slightly and fell silent. The Chief Guest, sitting two chairs away on the prince’s right hand, looked decidedly embarrassed. Rhydderch ap Tewdwr had married Cadwgan’s sister Hunydd, but had no particular wish to be present when the Prince of Powys fell flat on his face in the dishes at his own Christmas feast.

But his brother-in-law pulled himself together and gazed blearily down into the main hall, where crowded tables lined the walls.

‘Seven years of peace have I given you … seven years since we last fought for our land against King Henry!’

His voice was strong again, but his tongue sounded too big for his mouth.

You bloody old liar, thought Rhydderch cynically. You joined your brothers in helping Norman against Norman – and when you found that you had backed the loser, you changed sides within the hour.

Even Cadwgan seemed to realize in his fuddled mind that he was on the wrong tack. He switched his platitudes to less delicate matters.

‘Tonight we sit in the greatest hall in Ceredigion.’ He swept his hand uncertainly up to the dark recesses of the roof. ‘Eat your fill and drink well! When the tables are cleared, we will have a night of entertainment before us. I have called bards from the ten commotes5 and beyond, to compete before us.’

He swayed slightly again and his Chancellor half-rose to grab him. But the prince gripped the table edge with one hand and threw up his drinking horn with the other.

‘The day of Jesus Christ!’ he yelled hoarsely.

‘The day of Jesus Christ!’ echoed another roar from the Chief of the Household of Din-geraint, jumping from his chair at the far end of the lower hall. Reluctantly, the whole assembly lumbered to its feet and raggedly repeated the Holy toast.

Then, as their voices died and the gulping of mead and beer subsided, there was the sudden sound of hooves rattling on the frozen ground outside. The tinkle of harness and the sound of voices came through the woollen drapes that hung over the entrance.

The Doorward rushed forward, but he was too late. Though a big man himself, he was brushed aside by the solid mass of youthful humanity that erupted through the curtains.

All eyes were on the doorway as the leader, a redhead with shoulders like an ox, stopped on the threshold and stood grinning at the standing crowd.

‘God be with you all!’ he cried. ‘But there’s no need for you to rise to your feet for me … I’m not prince yet!’

It was a perfect entrance and, with the typical Welsh sense of drama, the assembly took full advantage. The drinking cups went up again, with about twenty times as much enthusiasm as for Cadwgan’s toast.

‘Owain … Owain … Owain!’ they chanted exuberantly, ‘Owain the Valiant, Lion of Powys!’

Smiling hugely, the auburn-haired princeling strode forward, closely followed by eight other young men. The Penteulu – the Chief of the Household – came forward to clasp Owain’s arm in an affectionate greeting. The young man threw back his great riding cloak of green wool and unbuckled his sword belt.

‘Take this, friend … there are no French to do battle with in here tonight … at least, no Frenchmen,’ he added wickedly, with a pointed glance up the Hall towards Marie de Sai, his stepmother.

As surreptitious giggles and guffaws rippled round the Hall, the other men were throwing off their cloaks and removing their arms, as courtesy demanded.

Immediately behind Owain was his closest brother, Morgan. They began striding up towards the fire to greet their father.

Cadwgan watched them approach with mixed feelings. Pride at fathering such men battled with anxiety, and not a little jealousy. The eternal strife between the generations was far stronger here than usual and most of it was directed at his eldest boy.

Morgan, son of a different mother – as all his sons were, except the two recent brats of the Frenchwoman – was Owain’s satellite. Though strong, brave and clever in his own right, Morgan stood in the shadow of his elder brother’s vibrant personality. The heir was self-assured to the point of arrogance – Morgan watched his flank and his rear and made up in calculating coolness for what he lacked in his brother’s fire and impulsiveness.

The two young men stepped up between the low screen that separated the lower from the upper Hall and stopped before the prince.

They bent their heads dutifully to him.

‘Arglwydd, we wish you well,’ said Owain simply.

‘Greetings, our father, on this day of Christ,’ added Morgan.

Cadwgan looked suspiciously at Owain, who was smiling innocently. He saw that his son was strikingly dressed in a mottled wolfskin hung over a fine green tunic. Around his neck was a slim torc of twisted gold.

The father glared from Owain across to the dark face of the swarthy Morgan, then back to his eldest son.

‘I greet both my sons and welcome them to this house, which is as much theirs as mine,’ he muttered formally. His watery gaze remained fixed on Owain. ‘I trust that you have been acting with some restraint since we last met?’ he growled thickly, thinking of the journey he must make the very next day, to smooth over some feathers that Owain had recently ruffled in Powys.

The auburn-haired young man gave a little bow.

‘I only try to keep your lord’s domain free from traitors and to slit a few filthy French throats.’

As he said the last words, he looked pointedly at where the obese Marie de Sai sat champing a boiled fowl. She reddened and only a mouthful of meat gave Morgan time to grab Owain’s tunic and pull him across to a vacant space at a table against the opposite wall. While the woman spat insults into Cadwgan’s ear, Owain and his brother squeezed themselves behind the tables and slid their legs over a long bench. Though the heir was entitled to one of the coveted chairs allotted to persons of distinction, he had long ago refused to take one while his other brothers had to do without. The battle with his father over this breach of tradition had long ago been fought and no one raised their eyebrows when the Edling6 slid onto a common bench.

He now found himself next to the pretty young daughter of the Chief Judge, who sat on his privileged chair on the other side of the girl.

As he sat down, two beaming servants hurried up with wooden bowls of steaming broth. There were hunks of bara canryg to steep in it – bread made from wheat and rye – as well as plain wheaten loaves and rye cakes. The table groaned with food, though it was restricted in variety at this time of year. Almost all the cattle were slaughtered in November, as only breeding animals could be fed through the winter, but there was plenty of salted beef, and pork and poultry in plenty. Fish, eggs, apples, honey, curds and hot oatcakes lay on wooden platters, the rare metal dishes being reserved for the highest folk and their chief guests.

A servant jogged up with a great joint of boar’s flesh sizzling on a skewer, the fat still burning at one end. Owain courteously sliced off a few pieces for the girl and laid them on the scrubbed boards before her, where she expertly barricaded them with bread crusts to keep the gravy and molten fat from running on to the white linen of her best robe.

After hacking off some great chunks for himself with his dagger, Owain settled down to eat with one hand and drink with the other. When his first thirst had been quenched, he used the free arm to better purpose by slipping it around the slim waist of the giggling girl next to him, her mantle shielding it from the judicial stare of her stately father.

Gwenllian was sixteen, a mature age for a spinster in days when girls became marriageable at twelve. She was spoken for by the son of the Penteulu in Gwynionydd, another commote of Ceredigion, but he was miles away tonight and a last-chance flirt with Owain the Valiant was one to be grasped eagerly. She slid closer along the bench and gently used her elbow to coax his hand nearer her breast.

Though he responded readily, she noticed petulantly that there was not a second’s hesitation in the rhythm of his jaws. The young bloods had arrived late from Powys and had to catch up on the food before the tables were taken away for the entertainments. Gwenllian had already eaten her fill and was merely playing with the food that Owain had cut for her. She slipped pieces down to the sleek hunting dogs and corgis that crouched wide-eyed beneath the tables.

As Owain crunched his way through pig, game and beef, he watched his profile against the glow of the fire and the flicker of the rush lights. There was strength in every line of his face, from the rather heavy brows to the clean-shaven chin, aggressive and pugnacious. Though most Welshmen shaved their heads up to a circular rim, Owain kept his hair longer and an unruly russet lock bobbed over his forehead. As he tore pieces from the boar’s shin bone, Gwenllian noticed his gleaming teeth. Even in a land where cleaning them with hazel twig was a ritual, his were unusually white and strong – most other men of twenty-five had lost a few from either fighting or disease.

She wriggled contentedly and felt his hand slide up her cloak to cup her breast.

‘And how is my Gwenllian these days?’

Owain swallowed his meat and bent his face to her ear. He had known her about the court since she was a baby, but that did not prevent him from fully appreciating her lately developed attractions.

‘All the better for seeing you, my Owain – it’s half a year now, I feared to hear of you being married!’

He laughed and squeezed her playfully. ‘Married! Why should I ever marry when there are lively girls like you about? Or do you want me to end up like my father, driven to the mead horn by that haughty French cow!’

He picked up a pheasant drumstick and pointed it across at Cadwgan’s Norman wife, spitting out the words with a virulence that surprised even the resilient Gwenllian. She decided to change the subject, in case Owain’s volatile moods swung again and made him stop massaging her under her mantle.

‘What do you think of our prince’s choice of Chief Guest tonight, Owain? He never had much love of Rhydderch before, even if he was wed to his sister.’

Owain shrugged, not taking his eyes off Marie de Sai nor his lips from the food.

The girl spoke again, with the worrying persistence of her sex. ‘Do you think your father has designs on Cantref Mawr7, that he’s playing up so to his brother-in-law?’

The eldest son switched his gaze to the Chief Guest, who sat immediately opposite, a few seats from the prince. In the courts of Welsh princes, the lord sat on the right hand, not at the top of the hall as with the Saxons and Normans.

Owain saw a handsome man, with a black beard and moustache. Rhydderch wore unusually fine garments and had a magnificent golden torc around his neck.

‘Rhydderch ap Tewdwr, brother of the great Rhys,’ he mused aloud. ‘My dear uncle-in-law, who I wouldn’t trust with half a groat when my back was turned.’

Gwenllian giggled again. ‘He doesn’t look short of half a groat, nor even a hundred pounds. Look at that satin robe on his wife – and his own neck plate!’ Owain stopped eating and glared across the upper hall with a fixity that made his uncle stare back in annoyance.

‘That torc belonged to his brother, Rhys ap Tewdwr, the last true Prince of Deheubarth,’ declared Owain in a loud, carrying voice. ‘And he wore it by strength of arms, not as a lickspittle of the damned French!’

The powerful voice happened to hit a lull in the babble of voices and Gwenllian suddenly felt like sinking under the table with the dogs.

Alongside Owain, Morgan sighed and automatically felt for the absent hilt of his sword.

The Judge turned to glare at the heir, who blithely ignored him but, on the opposite table, Rhydderch turned red above his beard, twisting to see if Cadwgan was taking any notice.

The prince, however, had chosen not to hear, though Marie de Sai began hissing a commentary into his unwelcoming ear.

Owain calmly tore a wheaten loaf in half and began to pour honey along its length. Though Gwenllian’s ear was no more than a foot away, he carried on in a conversational tone that could be heard halfway down the Hall.

‘Rhys ap Tewdwr was a great man – he gave his life at Brecon Gaer in trying to keep de Neufmarché’s vultures out of these lands. He would turn in his grave to see a Welsh vassal of the French playing at being prince in his old palace of Dinefwr!’8

He intended his words to be insulting and he succeeded. Rhydderch sprang to his feet, his heavy chair going over backwards with a crash. The black brows hung like thunderclouds over his furious face. He turned and shouted, not at Owain, but at Cadwgan, the host.

‘Prince and brother – I have watched this son of yours grow bigger and more insolent as the years went by. But did you invite me to your feast only to be a sport for your unruly offspring?’

His neck veins stood out like purple worms as he pointed a quivering finger in Owain’s direction. He was no coward and the heir’s brash insults were unfair, even if it was true that he held his lands in Cantref Mawr by condescension of the Normans. When his brother Rhys had been killed sixteen years earlier, the Kingdom of Deheubarth had been fragmented by Welsh and Norman alike. Rhydderch, like Cadwgan, was at least managing to keep a Welsh hold on some of the land, not like the utter subjection of Penbroch and Morgannwg9 by the Normans and their Flemish underlings.

Owain ate on with insolent unconcern, but this time Cadwgan could not continue his pretence of sudden deafness. He lumbered to his feet, groaning inwardly at his fate in having such a wayward son. Morgan watched anxiously, his deeper sensitivity feeling a great foreboding for his brother.

‘Owain, come here!’

The prince’s voice grated through the ominous quiet in the Hall.

Though dissipated and tired, the enormity of having his Chief Guest so grossly insulted by his own son brought an edge to his voice that rang subconscious echoes of childhood chastisements to Owain.

His grin vanished and he climbed sullenly off his bench to walk across to face his father once more.

The whole hall fell deadly quiet. Family quarrels, even those of the Chief of the Kindred, were not things to be hidden beneath a polite veneer of manners. A squabble was public property, something to be talked over across the hut fires in the long winter evenings. Everyone watched, their eyes flicking from father to son. . .