The Brothers of Gwynedd Read Free

books, vivid and alarming, but not real, so that even alarm was pleasure. For the stories of the saints are full of terror and delight, no less than the legends of heroes that the bards recite to the harp.
      So I heard that after the return of her lord the Lady Senena, in her joy at the reunion, again conceived, and her third son was born in the spring of the following year. A fourth followed a year later, David, the last of her five children. But whether she named him after his uncle, with that same hope of softening her lord's fortune which had prompted her to give her second son the name Llewelyn, I do not know. There was peace then between them, the prince had enlarged the Lord Griffith's lands greatly, adding to the whole cantref of Lleyn a large portion of the lands of Powys, designing, I think, to leave him with an appanage which should recompense him for the surrender of his wider rights by Welsh law, and reconcile him to becoming a loyal vassal of his brother. But it was not in his nature to see beyond his own wrong to a larger right, and he knew only the title of Gwynedd, and could not envisage Wales, for all he quoted Welsh law. A man is as he is. The Lord Griffith was a fine man, tall and splendid to look upon, fully as tall as his father, and he was of great stature, though gaunt, where Griffith was full of flesh. He was openhanded to a fault where men pleased him, and too quick to lash out where they displeased. He was hasty in suspicion of affront, and merciless in retaliation. He was readily moved by generosity, and lavish in returning it. He never forgot benefit or injury. But he could not see beyond what helped or hurt him and his, and that is a small circle in a vast world, too narrow for greatness.
      Doubtless he loved, but never did he understand, his father, that Llewelyn who is rightly named the Great.
      This last child of theirs, the boy David, touched my own fortunes nearly. For my mother had at last conceived by her husband, and brought forth a still-born girl three days before her lady bore her boy. And since the Lady Senena was low with a dangerous fever for two weeks after the delivery, and my mother was heavy with milk and yearning, she naturally became wet-nurse to the royal child. I had lost my sister, but I had a breast-brother, a prince of the blood-royal of Gwynedd, seven years and more my junior. This came early in my peace, and moved me deeply. I thought much of this helpless thing drawing its life from my mother, who had given me life also, and of whatever this mysterious thing might be that we two shared. And the bright, resolute, fearless creature who shared the stars of my birth with me, and who had been my fellow before I knew what royalty was, had fallen away from me then, and was almost forgotten.
      I had been four years at Aberdaron, and was approaching my tenth birthday, when first we heard from a pilgrim bard that the great prince had been taken with a falling seizure. It was as if the earth had shaken under us. True, the attack was not severe, and had done no more than weaken him in the use of one arm, and draw his mouth a little awry, but we had never thought of him as being subject to age, like lesser men, even though he was now in his sixty-fifth year, for his vigour seemed to reach like a potent essence into the furthest corners of the land, and inspire even those, like me, who had never seen him in the flesh. Truly that flesh was now seen to be mortal. And the shudder of foreboding that shook most of Wales became a tremor of anticipation and hope to those who had sided with Griffith and were biding their time with him. And not only these, for beyond the march in England they surely licked their lips and tasted already the pickings the dogs find after the lion is dead. Him they had let alone now for four years, and would let alone while he lived, with all his conquests rich and fat about him, for they dared not tempt again the force they had ventured too often