The cart, high-sided, is close to the front of the procession. Hands and feet in rusting manacles, he’s sprawled lazily in the straw at the back, as though it’s a royal coach.
With his grey-black hair back over his ears. His one eye cold and steady; only taut skin and a ridged scar where the other one used to be.
Dudley, for a moment, admires his nerve. The way, he tells me, he once admired a one-eyed stag, cornered by the hunt, returning his gaze with an old warrior’s arrogance that Dudley recognised at once, and let him escape. With a kind of joy that surprised him.
Prys Gethin’s one eye has a rare brilliance and intensity, as if it no longer ever blinks. He looks at Dudley as though they’re old friends.
Dudley is aware of the smell of hot pies and gravy. He can hear whoops and cheers and halloos from the people assembled for the arrival of the prisoner. The crowd is swelled by those here for the market, many from out of town. But the whoops and cheers and halloos seemed muted compared with yesterday, when there was no prisoner to hear them.
Two men colourfully dressed as jesters, wearing masks, arrive out of the throng, carrying ropes woven into hangman’s nooses which, hopping like frogs, they dangle in front of the occupant of the cart.
One of them is so encouraged by the mild, uncertain laughter that he leans into the cart, tightening and loosening his noose and then tightening it again and cackling.
Until Prys Gethin inclines his head and smiles gently.
‘You’ll die within the week, friend,’ he says drily, in the perfectly rounded English of a priest making a pronouncement from his pulpit.
But he hasn’t even looked at the sneering clowns.
His gaze has not shifted from Dudley.
XXVII
Likely a Sin
‘THERE’S A STORY mabbe you’ll’ve heard? How the Welshie women who followed Rhys Gethin’s army, they come down from the hill when it was all over? With knives. Come with knives. All gleeful and laughing. Set about the remains of the English.’
Stephen Price gazed over the humps in the field bordering the church where the risen dead had been laid to rest. Below us was the cluster of houses I’d seen from Nant-y-groes, with pens for chickens and pigs, and a handful of people about their tasks and all the distant sheep, like maggots on decaying meat.
‘Normal enough to cut the apparel from the slain,’ Price said. ‘Take the weaponry and the leather.’
Maybe I knew what was coming. Maybe I
‘The privy parts.’ He looked away, down the hill. ‘Stuffed them into their mouths, so they’re hanging down, kind o’ thing. A mockery. If there’s any worse humiliation for a man, then I en’t yeard of it.’
I winced.
‘Hatred of the Norman Marcher lords, see. Taught, from birth, to hate. And the hatred hangs in the air, yet. Close your eyes by yere and stare into the full sun and all you see is black. That’s what they say. Never tried it myself.’
I kept my eyes full open. Not that there was sun this day.
‘When did the church catch fire?’
‘Before the battle. Glyndwr would burn any church as paid tithes to England. And the English seen the smoke and flames from the house of God, like a sign before the battle. Rebuilt now, but it’s a sad place.’
I’d marked how, the more he spoke, the more his accent deepened, as if he was retreating not so much into his own past, but Pilleth’s. He looked into his hands, as if the geometry of the land was etched there.
‘Used to be a place of pilgrimage. Shrine of the Virgin behind the tower, next to the well – the holy well. A healing place. For the eyes, mainly. For clear sight.’
‘No one comes now?’
‘No one gets near the well. The rector don’t hold with it. Papism.’
I sighed. Thinking there should be a middle way. Hearing Bishop Scory in Hereford talking of how old beliefs yet held sway on the border.
‘Isn’t this yet Bishop Scory’s diocese?’ I said to Price. ‘Scory’s a man of moderation. Why would he appoint a Puritan?’
Stephen Price’s laugh was arid.
‘Mabbe he didn’t. Belief can change in a blinking. Mabbe the rector had a moment of revelation. Educated man, used to be a canon in Hereford. The ole boy who was yere before him, Father Walter, he used to have to hop over the big words in the Bible but, by God, he was the man for this parish. He’d do a Sunday worship with hands still wet from pulling a new lamb in your barn.’
‘A practical man.’
‘Aye. New rector talks of a calling. First sign of the way things were going was when an ole boy – widower, living alone – goes to him real scared by… what he seen. Asks for the ghosts to be sent away from his door. Rector shows him a face like stone and tells him the devil makes them see things as don’t exist and to fall down on his knees and pray for the forgiveness of his sins.’
‘He must be an inspiration to you all,’ I said.
Price sat down on the little promontory, the hills around him like rough blankets, the horizon broken by the distant castle mound, with its forked fingers of stone.
‘See, this… this en’t a bad place, that’s the thing. Good light, good shelter and you can see the weather coming. And all the families yere owns their own land. Village as should be five times the size it is, but folks don’t come and the folks that’s yere… there’s no good fortune.’
Price looked up the slope of Brynglas towards the little church tower.
‘Take the Thomas boy. Fine boy, good farmer, and then he’s telling his mother he can’t see no future yere. Hangs himself in the oak wood. Rector denies him burial in the churchyard for his sin. Now he lies with the ole warriors and no cross. Well, that en’t right. That makes nobody happy.’
‘Except the rector.’
‘He don’t know what happiness is. Likely a sin.’ Price raised his eyes to mine. ‘I’m the squire. What should I do?’
I’d seldom felt more useless. A student of the Hidden who observed and took notes for all the books he’d one day write. A collector of manuscripts, an aspirant to alchemical transformation and a maker of owls that flapped their wings and went
‘Look,’ I said. ‘It’s a battle site. When men die in fear and torment, embittered by treachery, and then their bodies are abused and left to rot where they fell… then spirits may linger and there’s an air of unhappiness which might last many years.’
‘It’s come back,’ he said.
‘What has?’
‘We… buried another. Few days ago.’ He’d dropped his gaze to the ground and his voice to a murmur. ‘Buried him at night. Me and Morgan, the shepherd. Well… I had to do most of it. Pedr Morgan, he wouldn’t touch it, but he done the digging. Never told the vicar. I said a few prayers, for what that was worth.’
I came down from the mound. Stephen Price kept on talking softly to the grass.
‘I was thinking at first as we’d do what we sometimes does when it’s more’n a few bones. When it’s a man. Put him on an ole bier and take him into the church. We leave ’em there overnight covered in sacking and then take ’em out for burial. Well… clear soon enough we couldn’t do that with this ’un.’
‘Why?’
‘Normal thing’s to alert the coroner. And the sheriff.’
‘About old bones?’
‘And mabbe the sheriff’d raise the hue and cry, kind o’ thing, and it’d be all over the county and beyond. And
