Chapter 5

Athair

The mornings always began the same. And I can see him now. Up before the tumult of the hens. Before the sky blues up from the east. Before the morning chaos of rooks, like endless dark darts, flocking across the farmyard, wheeling to a hundred conflicting impulses. Mo athair—Father rises from the damp boards of the mill-house, leaving me slumbering, and passes down for the mess of willows standing in the long pools of silvery water spreading out from the river which has over-reached its course, heaving its bulk smoothly, without violence, like a sow onto the bank, spilling over the low grazing in this saturated land where the air itself is like a hanging gauze. The brown earth engorged beneath the deep sheen of the grass accepts the shape of his foot as he pads along the narrow, sharp cutting of the mill-race which is full to the very brim with a body of water sliding along at speed.

In the fields beyond, he rises with the ground, long, loping steps upwards towards the outer pastures, where he goes to mend a hedge or find a stray goat, or some other excuse to get him beyond sight so that he may make his way into the wood to a mossy stone where he stops and kneels and says his prayer in a tongue not of that land. A language that intrudes into the cadence of the morning. He speaks to Mother through the spongy black earth of leaf rot and fruit fall. He speaks of me I am sure, and of the news he has heard of his countrymen—of the Engleis away south. Every single morning, he maps out his own solitary way.

His name was Johan. A man who maintained a firm countenance, yet a tender engagement with the physical world around him and the problems encountered in its organisation. In the absence of a mother he would not discuss, he sheltered me, taught me and claimed me.

He had been the reeve of the manor of a place called Frodsham in the shire of Chester, which meant that he ran the farmstead and oversaw the villeins and collected taxes for the Earl. He had a wife and children, two oxgangs of his own and two servants in a fine wooden house with low, sweeping thatch. That was before raiders had happened upon him alone on the banks of the Merswy.

It had not taken the Tiarna long to recognise his worth. Father had an aptitude for every craft and action required on the farmstead, and while his counsel was often sought in matters of sowing and grazing and managing the mill-races and fishing weirs, this did not free him from menial work. We broke our backs with the rest, bending with the sickle, the rhythm of the rip and tear of the barley stalk, the building of the rick and the twist of the harvest knot. We worked the kiln also, stoking the fire to dry out the grain after the harvest had been winnowed. We fed coppiced branches of a certain size into the flame, the fire kept even, making certain not to set the roof ablaze nor to scorch the grain. His value to the master gave me some measure of protection, and I was, at times, happy, having not known any other life.

The Tiarna entrusted the running of the big mill to my father, grinding the kiln-dried grain between two heavy millstones powered by the waterwheel—an ingenious arrangement of paddles and flues that Father had helped to improve upon.

A lifetime it seemed that we spent within both kiln and mill telling tales we had heard, singing rhymes, mostly in Father’s tongue. It was within that space that I demanded the story of his abduction again and again, watching his face go sombre and grave, until it became as real to me as if I had been there myself, accosted in the shallows of that wide estuary.

Later, as Father and I worked our way along the millstream clearing clotting wads of dead leaves and windfall, I asked him of these Engleis—if they would bring us freedom. Father quelled my excitement.

‘They are only mercenaries. Just another war between cowherds who would be kings’.

I recited the names as I remembered them—Pembroke, FitzGerald, FitzStephen.

‘Striplings’, he said. ‘Hungry youths is all. Half-Welsh brigands’.

I asked then about de Lacy and what his coming meant, and a change came over Father, his eyes growing cold upon the sounding of those words.

‘There will be no freedom under a yoke of that name’, he said.

It was the reckoning then. The vengeance I had poured so much of my soul into praying for, willing, clenching with every fibre of self, pledging with broken-toothed conviction in the fevered hours before dawn as I slept in the byre, or among the Tiarna’s hounds, or sat watch by night over herds on the verge of some rough mountain­side. I prayed to a God I did not fully understand. On behalf of Father. For freedom. For justice. Justice for a life stolen.

We sat together that night and ate our oats. Something was different. Something had changed. I felt more substantial. I felt, heady with the fever of youth’s vanity, that I had earned a place at the high table, leaving my father behind. That I had acquired a new sight. A power of perception recognised by the Tiarna.

‘Tell me again’, I said.

‘Tell you what?’ he said, churlish.

‘Tell me of how you came to this land’. And in the telling, as always, my ear trained to the inflection, to the tremor, to the missed rhythm, to any word that could, by its shape, or the shadow of its shape, tell me even the most miniscule thing about my mother.

I do not recall a particular realisation but rather a slow dawning. Over time, noticing slight changes in his story. An accumulation of evidence. Marking small contradictions over the seasons as my probing, my hunger for a glimpse of a different world, of a far-off life, grubbed up inconsistencies. I came to know, as my mind matured, the ways of deceit, and after being in the presence of the Tiarna, after studying with Milesius, I was more alive than ever to how language could be used. To say one thing and conceal another. I listened for the jarring word, the shading of the eyes, the discord of a phrase. It became clear by slow revelations that he had not been, as he maintained, at the riverbank on that fate-filled day inspecting fish traps for his lord. He was there in some way profiting from an exchange. Inveigling gullible peasants onto a waiting galley? A shameful commerce he no doubt had a decade to rue. To consider the workings of God’s justice, which had steered the hand of the pirate to take him on-board also and keep the fee promised him. I felt some small victory that night, accepting this truth, and it gave me a secret power over him. A power which emboldened me to say what I had wanted to say for so long.

‘And where was Mother in all of this?’

He looked up from the rough, wooden bowl, and his hollow eyes shone dark with a lustre of anger. The intensity of that stare stripped me of any illusion of power.

‘She was already on the boat’, he said. His eyes filling along the brim as he stared at me, his face betrayed and furious. It had been so long since I had seen him react with passion to anything that a tremor ran across my shoulders. But those slim words, illuminating in their scarce brevity a hundred things I had yearned to know, brought warmth also. She had been there all along. In that scene I had visited a hundred times. Her face shaded, sitting on the boat. She was not a Gael, then, but a Saxon, or Norman—Engleis. She had crossed the sea with him. And this revelation forced me onwards, recklessly pushing for more.

‘She was a stranger to you then?’ I pressed, and I saw everything move slowly, unreal in its ferocity. The bowl flew from his hand, spilling porridge, before clattering against a roof post, his eyes and face growing suddenly bigger as his unfurling legs propelled him towards me. His fist closed on my temple, and the first blow sent my head backwards to crack against the boards. He was on me then, with two more punches falling before a blackness descended.

When I came to, the sharp iron scale taste of blood in my throat, the small space vibrating with his cries. He howled and howled with his face shoved deep into a mound of straw bedding so that the sound came out like the fury of a storm invading the thatch above us as his fist landed shuddering blows onto the damp plank floor.

I sat up with ringing in my head and a sick feeling in my stomach. I crawled over to his bowl and saved what oats I could. Lifting his small wooden spoon from the floor, I set this across the bowl and placed them both on the edge of the millstone. I curled into my own bedding to think about Mother, knowing that the worst was over.