People of the Black Mountains Vol.II: The Eggs of the Eagle Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Raymond Williams

  Map

  Title Page

  Approximate Dates of the Stories

  First

  Glyn to Elis: Eight Stages

  Berin Returns to Banavint

  Gwydir and Gwenliana

  Bibra in Magnis

  Glyn to Elis: 9

  The Eggs of the Eagle

  In the Shadow of Artorius

  The Samain of the Yellow Death

  Glyn to Elis: 10

  The Death of Clydawg

  The Gift of Acha

  Dragon and Gentile

  Glyn to Elis: 11

  The Smithy of Elchon

  Signs of a Vengeance

  The Abergavenny Murders

  Glyn to Elis: 12

  The Monk’s History

  Widows of the Welshry

  Glyn to Elis: 13

  The Abergavenny Rising

  The Comet

  Oldcastle in Olchon

  Last

  Postscript

  Place Names

  Book List

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Raymond Williams’ last novel is an imaginary history of Wales from Roman times to the Middle Ages. It is an expansive, profound and insightful panorama of ordinary human life, played out in the foothills of the Black Mountains.

  About the Author

  Raymond Williams was born in 1921 in the Welsh border village of Pandy, and was educated at the village school, at Abergavenny Grammar School, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. After serving in the war as an anti-tank captain, he became an adult education tutor in the Oxford University Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies. In 1947 he was an editor of Politics and Letters, and in the 1960s was general editor of the New Thinker’s Library. He was elected Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1961 and was later appointed University Professor of Drama.

  His books include Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961) and its sequel Towards 2000 (1983); Communications (1962) and Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974); Drama in Performance (1954), Modern Tragedy (1966) and Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968); The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970), Orwell (1971) and The Country and the City (1973); Politics and Letters (interviews) (1979) and Problems in Materialism and Culture (selected essays) (1980); and four novels – the Welsh trilogy of Border Country (1960), Second Generation (1964) and The Fight for Manod (1979), and The Volunteers (1978).

  Raymond Williams was married in 1942, had three children, and divided his time between Saffron Walden, near Cambridge, and Wales. He died in 1988.

  Also by Raymond Williams

  Criticism

  Culture and Society

  Towards 2000

  Communications

  Television: Technology and Cultural Form

  Drama in Performance

  Modern Tragedy

  Drama from Ibsen to Brecht

  The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence

  Orwell

  The Long Revolution

  Politics and Letters (interviews)

  Problems in Materialism and Culture

  (selected essays)

  Fiction

  Border Country

  Second Generation

  The Fight for Manod

  The Volunteers

  Loyalties

  People of the Black Mountains I The Beginning

  People of the Black Mountains Vol.II

  The Eggs of the Eagle

  Raymond Williams

  Approximate Dates of the Stories

  Berin Returns to Banavint 82 AD

  Gwydir and Gwenliana 196 AD

  Bibra in Magnis 300 AD

  The Eggs of the Eagle 420 AD

  In the Shadow of Artorius c. 490 AD

  The Samain of the Yellow Death 550 AD

  The Death of Clydawg 740 AD

  The Gift of Acha 760 AD

  Dragon and Gentile 896 AD

  The Smithy of Elchon 1055 AD

  Signs of Vengeance 1136 AD

  The Abergavenny Murders 1175 AD

  The Monk’s History 1265 AD

  The Widows of the Welshry 1356 AD

  The Abergavenny Rising 1401 AD

  The Comet 1402 AD

  Oldcastle in Olchon 1415 AD

  First

  SEE THIS LAYERED sandstone in the short mountain grass. Place your right hand on it, palm downward. See where the summer sun rises and where it stands at noon. Direct your index finger midway between them. Spread your fingers, not widely. You now hold this place in your hand.

  The six rivers rise in the plateau towards your wrist. The first river, now called Mynwy, flows at the outside edge of your thumb. The second river, now called Olchon, flows between your thumb and the first finger, to join the Mynwy at the top of your thumb. The third river, now called Honddu, flows between your first and second fingers and then curves to join the Mynwy. The fourth river, now called Grwyne Fawr, flows between your second and third fingers and then curves the other way, south, to join the fifth river, now called Grwyne Fechan, that has been flowing between your third and your outside finger. The sixth river, now called Rhiangoll, flows at the edge of your outside finger.

  This is the hand of the Black Mountains, the shape first learned. Your thumb is Crib y Gath. Your first finger is Curum and Hateral. Your second finger is Ffawyddog, with Tal y Cefn and Bal Mawr at its knuckles. Your third finger is Cadair Fawr. Your outside finger is Allt Mawr, from Llysiau to Cerrig Calch, and its nail is Crug Hywel. On the high plateau of the back of your hand are Twyn y Llech and Twympa, Rhos Dirion, Waun Fach and Y Das. You hold their shapes and their names.

  Yet the fingers are long and skeletal, curving on themselves, and at their edges and in the plateau there are glaciated cwms and cross valleys, red rockfalls and steeply gouged watercourses. Beyond the hand are other heights: Troed and Llangynidr to the west, between Rhiangoll and Lake Syfaddon; Brynarw and Sugar Loaf to the south, and then the isolated Skirrid, the Holy Mountain; east, each ridge running lower, Cefn and Arthur’s Seat and Merbach, before the dip to the meadows of Wye.

  Beyond these outliers are two rivers to the sea. Mynwy carrying Olchon and Honddu flows to the circling Wye. Grwyne and Rhiangoll flow into the Usk. Wye and Usk, divided by Wentwood, the old Forest of Gwent, flow to the ancient seariver, the Severn Sea, where Wales now looks towards England.

  The hand of the Black Mountains. From a distance, in good light, the long whaleback ridges are blue. Under cloud they are grey cloudbanks. But from within they are many colours: olive green under sunlight; darker green with the patches of summer bracken; green with a pink tinge when there are young leaves on the whinberries; dark with the heather out of flower, purple briefly in late summer; russet with autumn bracken, when at dawn after rain the eastern slopes can be red; pale gold in dead winter bracken, against the white of snow. Yet black, a cellular black, under storm cloud: a pitted honeycomb of darkness within darkness.

  The valleys are always green, for the grass is bright there. Yet from the ridges they seem woodlands, with farms and fields in clearings. At midsummer, on the closely trimmed hedges, there are stands of honeysuckle and of pink and white wild roses, and on the banks beneath innumerable foxgloves. It is close looking up from the flowers to the steep bare ridges, but the contrast is sharp: above the bleak open tops, with their heather and sedge and cottongrass and peat pools, their paths which dissolve into endless sheep tracks, their sudden danger with few landmarks in low cloud and mist; and below the settled green valleys, with their network of banked lanes, their patchwork of fields, the few ploughlands above the sandstone a wet dark red or dried pink; their scattered stone houses, rough layered or ashlar, from brown or grey towards pink and green under rain. This settled and that open wild country are still within the shape of the hand.

  Press your fingers close on this lichened sandstone. With this stone and this grass, with this red earth, this place was received and made and remade. Its generations are distinct but all suddenly present.

  GLYN TO ELIS: EIGHT STAGES

  BEFORE THE TIME of The Eggs of the Eagle long ages of history had passed for the people of the Black Mountains, and many tracks had been followed in the journey of the young man, Glyn, into whose mind these stories of the past arise.

  One day in the recent past, Glyn had driven his mother from London to the mountains, to stay with her father, Elis, while she recovered from an operation. Their journey was long, and as they reached the cottage at Llwyn Derw high on the hillside in the falling dusk, they could see that the windows were dark. No one was within but a note lay on the kitchen table outlining the walk which Elis had taken that day. He had planned to walk from Twyn y Gaer, in the next valley to the west, climbing past the Stone of Vengeance and the ancient stone circle of Garn Wen, across the ridges to Blaen Olchon and then along the Cat’s Back to his home: fourteen miles across the mountains.

  Elis had spent his life here – he knew every inch of his route, every contour and stream, every ancient place – he could not be lost, but he might be lying injured somewhere on the hillside. When he did not return Glyn set out to search for him. But as he reached the heights, moving now through patches of moonlight and blocks of shadow, thinking of the past and present of the land around
him, suddenly a strange word came, distant, distinct, but not his own, ‘Marod . . .’ , ‘Marod at once awoke . . .’. A story opened, of men and their womenfolk sheltering in the caves, hunting horses before the last ice-age. And as he walked on, past the old stone graves, the circles and dolmens, scanning the ridges and gazing into the valleys below, more stories of the past related to each place arose in turn: stories of settlements and herders, of trading and marriage, of the coming of the Measurer and the mysteries of the Druids, of plague and peace and invasion through many centuries. He saw how the ways of the mountains had changed as different peoples came and lived among them, keeping their separate ways and speech, but banding together against invaders, in uneasy alliance.

  All this Glyn saw and pondered as he crossed the heights, reaching at last the high ground of Tal y Cefn. To the north, above the scarp, lay the earthworks of an old British camp, perhaps the court of a lord. And he thought how, as well as the traces in the land – the arrowheads, the circles, the earthbanks – from the time of the Romans, for the first time, after ten thousand generations, came written traces, accounts which, by convention, would be called ‘the beginning of history: the true, because recorded, story of the land’. In fact such records, applying the generalisations and false simplifications of a foreign empire and a different, centralised culture, had distorted the true, more complex history.

  Glyn thought of the British resistance in these mountains to the Roman invaders: of the league of the Fisher Kings and the Roman victory at the Battle of Claerion, of the Roman leader Clutacos and the British slave Derco, who had disappeared from the battle, deep into the woods with his bow and spear, to remain an enduring symbol of resistance. The men of the valley spoke in deference to Clutacos when they said this dangerous slave could not be found – but Clutacos was not deceived, ‘He kicked his pony angrily. He led his warriors out of the valley towards the high plateau and the long ridges to Banavint. Derco, hiding in an old oak above the track, watched them riding across the skyline.’

  Berin Returns to Banavint

  BERIN SON OF Clutacos walked slowly up the stony track to Banavint. The old defence banks and ramparts of the stronghold had been slighted. There was now a broad open way into the settlement.

  Berin stopped and looked around. Sheep grazed across the slopes. The old zigzag track from the valley to the spur was as he remembered it. In the valley the scattered huts of Masona were occupied and busy. Men were working on timber, and children playing by the river. In the broad fenced clearings were cattle and pigs. He had avoided Masona on his way back, crossing the river Hodeni farther south and climbing through the oak wood. He did not know how he might be received in Masona. His old woollen tunic was torn and stained. His sandals were broken after his long rough walk. For two days he had followed the river Uisc and then climbed to Isgirit, the Broken Mountain, to look down at the fort of Gobanio. At first he had moved at night, under the half moon, but in his own thickly wooded country he had risked moving by day.

  There were no guards or dogs at the entrance to Banavint. There were no sounds of life. He forced himself up the last and steepest part of the track, and walked into the old stronghold. His father’s house, on the far side of the enclosure, with its high conical thatched roof, was as he remembered it. But the guard hut at the entrance was ruinous, and many of the other huts, across the enclosure, were neglected or deserted. Berin walked slowly along the old path to the gateway of the inner rampart. It too was open, its timbers roughly thrown down.

  He waited, breathing the good air. It was the clear sweet air of his childhood, which began only at this height. He ran his fingers back through his long matted hair. It had not been dressed as it should have been since that morning of the battle above Iupania, eight long years ago. He approached his father’s house, walking quietly. There was no sound from inside, but he could smell the sharp smoke of a peat fire. At the entrance he stopped and looked into the shadows.

  There was a movement inside. Clutacos, now in his fifty-fourth year, had been sitting on bracken close to the smoky fire, but now he jumped up, drawing his dagger.

  ‘Father, it is Berin.’

  Clutacos stopped, peering out.

  ‘What name? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I am Berin, father.’

  Still holding the dagger, Clutacos came forward. Berin stepped so that his face could be seen in the light. He saw astonishment, even fear, in his father’s lined face, which was heavily grimed from the fire.

  ‘You cannot be Berin. He is in the other world.’

  ‘Not the other world, father. Though it has often seemed that I died to myself.’

  ‘Berin was killed a brave warrior, at the battle of Iupania.’

  ‘Not killed, father. I was taken that day by the Romani.’

  ‘I do not believe you. My Berin would not have been taken.’

  ‘Many thousands were taken, and I among them. The Romani made us their slaves.’

  Clutacos looked around, bewildered. Then he came out of the house, still pointing the dagger. When Berin did not move, Clutacos reached out his hand and touched Berin’s cheek. He put away his dagger and touched Berin’s right arm. He closed his eyes for some moments and then squared his shoulders. His long hair was now grey but he still spiked it roughly with lime. His big grey moustache was stained yellow from his nose. There was a faded blue bar on his forehead.

  ‘Is it the truth, this shame?’ he asked harshly.

  ‘It is the shame of us all,’ Berin answered.

  ‘Not all. Not all. It is the shame of Vindon and Cadi, the King Fools of the battle. And now the shame of Sisill, who has ridden down to submit.’

  Berin reached out his hand and gripped his father’s shoulder.

  ‘There is much to tell. We will sit by the fire. I must rest.’

  ‘There is no honourable rest in submission.’

  ‘Father, I have not submitted. I have escaped and come home to you.’

  Clutacos stared into his face. He began to turn away but then suddenly threw out his arms and clasped Berin close to him. They stood holding each other tightly. Berin closed his eyes.

  Later, when they had eaten and drunk by the fire, Berin began the long story of all that had happened to him.

  He had been born four years after the defeat of the Roman army at Claerion. In those four years, and in his own first two years of life, the Siluri and their close allies had won many victories. Ostorius Scapula, who had threatened to destroy their very name, had died during the fighting. Their only disappointment was that they had killed him by pressure instead of in battle. All over the Silurian lands, in repeated summer campaigns, the Romans had fought to establish camps and forts, and held some of them, but at Gobanio they had again been heavily defeated. In a new kind of war, the Silurian peoples used the shapes of their country to make sudden attacks in forests, in mountain passes and in swamps. They now fought, the Romans said, like bandits, with spears and bows. Under constant pressure, the Romans tried to draw them out into pitched battle, remembering their victory over Caradoc. Yet when at last this happened, a full legion under the command of Manlius Valens was defeated east of the Hsabren. The Silurian warriors rode, as in early days, through the submissive lands of the Dobuni, showing their new power. The long war began slowly to turn. The Roman forts were reinforced and held. The roads between them were improved. The Siluri, driven back west of the Hsabren, returned to harassment and sudden attacks. But now every year the forts were stronger and many warriors were lost trying to take them by storm.

  Thus through the years of Berin’s childhood the war settled into stalemate. The Romans had strong forts at Burro and Cicucio and had recaptured and rebuilt Gobanio. They had also, after a fierce battle in which Clutacos was wounded, retaken Claerion and built a large, heavily defended camp. Yet the land between these forts they did not control. When they moved through it, from fort to fort, in large numbers and heavily armed, they were still often ambushed and there were many running fights. Nor could they yet bring new forces, for there was other heavy fighting in the east and north of the island, and the garrisons had to rely on themselves.