Chapter 25

 

29 August 1288

Near Caldicot Castle

 

Llywelyn

 

Rain dripped down the back of Llywelyn’s neck. In his haste to prepare for battle, he hadn’t gotten the leather collar of his helmet and his mail to overlap properly. He could have worn his mail coif, but he hated how it restricted his vision and movement, so instead he wore a mail shirt with supplemental plate on his chest and a tin cup helmet (as Meg called it).

The moment he thought of her, he brutally forced aside the image of her face that rose before his eyes. It was battle that he had to think on. The English had wavered, as Math had hoped, caught between the storm and the beach. In the end, they’d split in two. Those in the tail of the fleet had fled back to the English shore, and the rest had decided take their chances on the beach.

Llywelyn had overheard two of his soldiers discussing which water passage was more dangerous: the Menai Strait or the Severn Estuary. Llywelyn knew the truth (the Menai Strait, of course, his home ground), but the argument had been heated, and Llywelyn had to admit that the southern man had some good points, particularly in regards to storms.

The Menai Strait was a narrow passage between Anglesey and the Gwynedd mainland. When crossed in front of Aber Castle, the Strait stretched two miles to the Anglesey shore. At Bangor, however, the distance was only three hundred yards and was proportionately more perilous. The water could shift direction without warning at the change in the tide. At least on the Menai, however, a boat had a chance of reaching shore. Out here … Llywelyn shook his head to see the bulk of the English fleet still half a mile from the Welsh beach, facing Llywelyn’s army if they went forward, and only more storm between them and safety to the rear.

When he’d come out of the blind, Math had been in his element. Given the way he’d rallied the troops into action, he must have gotten some Berserker blood from a hither-to-unknown Viking ancestor. Math had flung himself onto his horse and put himself in front of the Welsh cavalry before their charge. Llywelyn could see him now, fifty yards ahead, heading down the beach towards the English soldiers who’d managed to land their craft before the storm hit.

By their position in the fleet, these men had been eager to be the first to assault the Welsh position, but now with the menace of the storm, had been unlucky enough to find themselves first onto the beach. One of the young men from Llywelyn’s teulu reined his horse and shot Llywelyn a grin as he fell in beside him. “God is with us, my lord!”

It seemed just so much hubris to agree, but an exhilaration rose over Llywelyn. By God, He is!

Llywelyn hung back with two dozen of his men. Their job was to form a defensive wall to the southwest of the main Welsh force, to prevent the English from fleeing down the beach in their direction. One of Llywelyn’s men glanced over his shoulder to make a comment to his neighbor, and his jaw dropped.

Llywelyn looked too. It had been raining hard for half an hour now, but it was nothing in comparison to what was coming. A wall of rain was driving up the Severn Sea towards their beach.

“They have a hundred heartbeats. No more.” Awe resonated in the man’s voice. He, too, had grown up in the north, in Gwynedd, where the mountains dominated the landscape as much as the sea. For Llywelyn’s part, he’d never been on the sea during a storm. Hearing about the one that had shipwrecked Meg was bad enough.

Llywelyn tightened his grip on his sword. His horse’s legs were splayed, bracing against the wind that threatened to blow Llywelyn right off of him. Further up the beach, Math’s men drove into the English soldiers who’d left their boats.

And then the storm hit.

It was only then that Llywelyn saw the real danger—not to the boats out at sea, though that was certainly bad for the English—but to his own men. The storm and the tide were almost perfectly synchronized, with the tide turning at the same moment that the storm was hitting. From what the southern soldier had boasted, the sandy beach on which they stood could go from dry, to two inches deep in water, to waist height two waves after that. And it was already happening.

“Retreat!” Llywelyn grabbed the horn his banner bearer carried and sounded it himself. “By God! Retreat!”

The men ahead of him didn’t stop. Either they were too caught up in the blood lust of battle to think of anything else, they refused to accept a retreat when victory was right before them, or they honestly didn’t hear the horn call over the storm.

Llywelyn shoved the horn back into the man’s hands. “Make it sing!” Llywelyn had barely been able to hear it himself over the sound of the rain pounding rat-a-tat-tat on his helmet.

Without waiting for the standard bearer to obey, Llywelyn spurred his horse towards Math. His guards followed as a matter of course, rather than because they had any idea what the king was doing. Llywelyn circled around the fighting to the north. Math’s men were actively engaged with the former occupants of at least twenty boats that had reached the shore, though a handful had attempted to escape back into the Estuary once they saw the size of the force that greeted them. Perhaps that was the safest place to be right now, but Llywelyn didn’t see how anyone could think that, even if they were English.

Men seethed near the shore, but further back, the Welsh cavalry danced on the margins of the fight, their horses skittering and everyone nearly blinded by the rain. Llywelyn thrust through a gap to where Math had pulled up, watching the storm come in and the English boats fall back in disarray. Already, bodies floated in the shallows, some with open wounds, the blood mixing with the salt water. More were caught up with every wave that drove onto the shore. Some of the English boats must have capsized further out.

Llywelyn grabbed Math’s arm. “We must get off the beach!”

“What?” Math turned to him. His color was high, but at the sight of his father-in-law’s grim face, some of the light in his eyes faded. “What’s wrong?”

“With the storm breaking and the turning of the tide, we’ll drown where we stand.”

Llywelyn didn’t need to say more. Math may have been a child of the mountains, but with that upbringing came a healthy fear of the sea.

“Back! Back! Back!” Math stood in his stirrups and sounded the retreat, first with his voice, and then with a high, piercing whistle. That caught his men’s attention when the horn hadn’t. At last the men began to obey, turning their horses’ heads and making for the dunes that lined the beach to the north.

Llywelyn glanced to the southwest. The waves surged ever higher. A moment ago, his horse had been standing twenty yards from the water. Now he was five. The men who’d been engaging the English noticed the change too and broke off the fight. Some of the men who’d been unhorsed or come to battle on foot had lost their footing and fallen into the water, while their horsed companions struggled to save them.

Llywelyn risked a delay to collar a man-at-arms—a boy really, he couldn’t have been older than Dafydd was when he came to Wales—and haul him upright.

“Thank you, my lord.” The boy coughed and sputtered. “I thought I was a goner.”

Llywelyn removed his foot from the stirrup so the boy could boost himself onto the horse and sit behind him. “We’re not out of this yet,” Llywelyn said.

Helping the boy meant that Llywelyn had fallen behind many of his men. He put his head against his horse’s neck and spurred him towards the dunes that ran along the rim of the beach, while the boy clutched at his waist and held on for dear life.

Llywelyn checked behind him again. Bile rose in his throat at what he saw, along with real honest-to-God fear that he hadn’t felt since that day at Cilmeri when he knew he was going to die. He wasn’t ready to die, even if Dafydd was ready to be king.

The wind blew the rain into him. His horse struggled to find purchase in the water-logged sand. The men still on the dunes waved and shouted, desperate to help and yet aghast at what was happening to their compatriots.

Llywelyn looked up and saw that the first of his men had reached the grass-covered dune that fronted the fields behind it, Math among them. Math turned, his eyes seeking. Llywelyn knew Math looked for him and opened his mouth to shout—but a wave overtook him before he could.

It lifted the hooves of Llywelyn’s horse off the ground and swept Llywelyn and the boy right out of the saddle. Llywelyn tried to hang onto his horse’s bridle but the strong current pulled him away and under the churning tide. Jumbled now, unsure which way was up, Llywelyn struggled for air. He knew how to swim, but his clothing had gone from rain-soaked to waterlogged, and he couldn’t get his limbs to move.

“Jesus Christ, Dad! Don’t do this to me!”

Llywelyn’s last thought before he lost consciousness was that the voice sounded an awful lot like Dafydd’s, though of course it couldn’t be, and that when he saw him next, he would speak to him about taking the Lord’s name in vain.