“We leave in joy, good people, so do not weep. For the exile takes but his body to the sister land, leaving his heart in Wales. Last verse of Sanctus again, and sing it to the sky! Sing!”
The tide had got us proper, swinging us to the stern ropes. The wind was rising, the pennant standing as stiff as a bar. Impatient, the Cestria bucked to the swell. Screamed goodbyes now, people weeping aloud, ropes splashing silver as they were hooked from bollards. Halyards stiffening, sails billowing, the ship heeled and rolled in the wind, thumping in the waves. I looked again at the Irish Morfydd, and saw through her breast the winding road that led to Amroth where Mari might be coming, and far beyond it to Llangain and Carmarthen, Llandeilo and Senny, and I laboured up the Clydach Valley road to home. Cae White I saw, ruined, deserted, the golden sweeps of its rejected corn; the empty kitchen, the cold, dead hob. And then came a vision of Mari, sitting in Tomos’s trap with Richard and Jonathon either side, dominated by the black mass of Tomos, trotting east towards Nanty, and Mari was weeping. Aye, weeping – but for me, or her Iestyn? Strange and cruel are the laws of God, that a woman cannot marry her dead husband’s brother. And this, I knew, was why she had not come. Stranger, too, are the laws of women. The road to Amroth danced in my eyes, and the road was empty. The crowd was as solid as a heading of coal now, arms raised as a forest as the gap between us widened, and I smiled again at the Irish Morfydd; she who had risen, it seemed, from the smashed props of Number Six and walked the galleries through a thousand tons of rock, sent by my Welsh Morfydd, to say goodbye.
Matthew Luke John at my elbow now, hooking me to face him.
“For God’s sake, man,” said he, “you are weeping.”
“Go to hell,” I said.
“For the petticoat woman? For that one there? O, aye!” and he narrowed his eyes. “Well, there’s a waste, but never you mind, for we’ll tar and feather a few in the town of Pittsburgh. Eh, dry it up, Jethro. They come better in silk than rags.”
He spoke again, but I did not hear him, for in turning I had seen the crimson sky. The sun was setting, blazing and red as a Dutch cheese with him, one half steaming the sea and the other half in Hades, flaring at the clouds with his furnace glow, taking my mind back to childhood and the flashes of Blaenafon. It was as if the ovens of Pittsburgh had crashed back on hinges, striking at the world with their incinerating glare, and Mari’s face grew dim in that light as the sea divided us. Creaking, clanking, shuddering, the Cestria was lumbering before the wind, and in the magnificence of her bedlam I heard the call of the iron as men had heard it for a thousand years before me. O, brilliant was this sky! Brilliant is the flaring when the cauldron is turned and the molten streams run wild, hissing and firing in the moulds! I put out my arm and thrust Matthew behind me, hearing again the clang of the loading bays, the thump of hammers, the whine of the mills. Bedlam in the rigging now as the Cestria got going, with the wind singing as a puddler’s hammer and the spray hissing as water in the steaming-pit. This, the cold kiss of the firing-iron, the scald of the ladle, the heat and stink and sweat and call of it in all its hobnail stamping, this the iron that no woman understands. With Tara held against me I shouldered my way through the exiles huddled in their tears, staring at home; lace-trimmed gentry, half naked beggars, half starved Welsh and starving Irish. Reaching the prow I stared at the western sky where the iron was pouring, turning but once to wave.
Standing erect, she was, and alone, her shawl held high.
Morfydd no longer now, but Mari standing there.
“Mari,” I said. “Goodbye.”
Also by Alexander Cordell
The Mortymer Saga
THIS PROUD AND SAVAGE LAND
THE RAPE OF THE FAIR COUNTRY
HOSTS OF REBECCA
SONG OF THE EARTH
BELOVED EXILE
LAND OF HEART’S DESIRE
THE LOVE THAT GOD FORGOT
A THOUGHT OF HONOUR
RACE OF THE TIGER
THE SINEWS OF LOVE
THE DEADLY EURASIAN
THE WHITE COCKADE
WITCHES’ SABBATH
THE HEALING BLADE
TRAITOR WITHIN
THE FIRE PEOPLE
IF YOU BELIEVE THE SOLDIERS
THE DREAM AND THE DESTINY
THIS SWEET AND BITTER EARTH
SEA URCHIN
TO SLAY THE DREAMER
ROGUE’S MARCH
LAND OF MY FATHERS
PEERLESS JIM
TUNNEL TIGERS
TALES FROM TIGER BAY
REQUIEM FOR A PATRIOT
MOLL
THE DREAMS OF FAIR WOMEN
SWEET AND BITTER EARTH
SEND HER VICTORIOUS
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