The Summer of the Danes by Ellis Peters Page A

audience been sought in
private, Cuhelyn would have found it deeply offensive. To precipitate it thus
publicly, in hall before the entire household, was a breach of courtesy only
possible to an insensitive Norman set up in authority among a people of whom he
had no understanding. But if the liberty was as displeasing to Owain as it was
to Cuhelyn, he did not allow it to appear. He let the silence lie just long
enough to leave the issue in doubt, and perhaps shake Gilbert’s valiant
self-assurance, and then he said clearly:
    “At
your wish, my lord bishop, I will certainly hear Bledri ap Rhys. Every man has
the right to ask and to be heard. Without prejudice to the outcome!” It was
plain, as soon as the bishop’s steward brought the petitioner into the hall,
that he had not come straight from travel to ask for this audience. Somewhere
about the bishop’s enclave he had been waiting at ease for his entry here, and
had prepared himself carefully, very fine and impressive in his dress and in
his person, every grain of dust from the roads polished away. A tall,
broad-shouldered, powerful man, black-haired and black-moustached, with an
arrogant beak of a nose, and a bearing truculent rather than conciliatory. He
swept with long strides into the centre of the open space fronting the dais,
and made an elaborate obeisance in the general direction of prince and bishop.
The gesture seemed to Cadfael to tend rather to the performer’s own
aggrandisement than to any particular reverence for those saluted. He had
everyone’s attention, and meant to retain it.
    “My
lord prince—my lord bishop, your devout servant! I come as a petitioner here
before you.” He did not look the part, nor was his full, confident voice
expressive of any such role.
    “So
I have heard,” said Owain. “You have something to ask of us. Ask it freely.”
    “My
lord, I was and am in fealty to your brother Cadwaladr, and I dare venture to
speak for his right, in that he goes deprived of his lands, and made a stranger
and disinherited in his own country. Whatever you may hold him guilty of, I
dare to plead that such a penalty is more than he has deserved, and such as
brother should not visit upon brother. And I ask of you that measure of
generosity and forgiveness that should restore him his own again. He has
endured this despoiling a year already, let that be enough, and set him up
again in his lands of Ceredigion. The lord bishop will add his voice to mine
for reconciliation.”
    “The
lord bishop has been before you,” said Owain drily, “and equally eloquent. I am
not, and never have been, adamant against my brother, whatever follies he has
committed, but murder is worse than folly, and requires a measure of penitence
before forgiveness is due. The two, separated, are of no value, and where the
one is not, I will not waste the other. Did Cadwaladr send you on this errand?”
    “No,
my lord, and knows nothing of my coming. It is he who suffers deprivation, and
I who appeal for his right to be restored. If he has done ill in the past, is
that good reason for shutting him out from the possibility of doing well in the
future? And what has been done to him is extreme, for he has been made an exile
in his own country, without a toehold on his own soil. Is that fair dealing?”
    “It
is less extreme,” said Owain coldly, “than what was done to Anarawd. Lands can
be restored, if restoration is deserved. Life once lost is past restoration.”
    “True,
my lord, but even homicide may be compounded for a blood-price. To be stripped
of all, and for life, is another kind of death.”
    “We
are not concerned with mere homicide, but with murder,” said Owain, “as well
you know.” At Cadfael’s left hand Cuhelyn sat stiff and motionless in his
place, his eyes fixed upon Bledri, their glance lengthened to pierce through
him and beyond. His face was white, and his single hand clenched tightly upon
the