Barbara Erskine - Child of the Phoenix

© 1992

The full moon sailed high and cold above the streaming clouds, aloof from the rising tide and the white-whipped waves. At the door of the hall a woman stared out across the water towards the glittering snows which mantled the peaks of Yr Wyddfa. Near her a man stood waiting in the shadows, silent, still, his hands clasped on his staff. Einion Gweledydd was tall, white-haired, austere in his patience. Soon the child would be born; the child whose destiny he had foretold; the child whose hands would hold three crowns; the child he would claim for the ancient gods of Albion. He smiled. The English wife had been in labour for three long days and soon she would die.

Behind the woman, in the hall, the fire had been banked up against the cold. A dozen anxious attendants crowded around the bed with its heaps of fur covers where their princess lay, too tired now even to cry out as the pains tore again and again at her frail body.

The men of the Illys had gone, sent out to allow women’s work to be done.

Rhonwen turned from the door at last and went to stand before the fire. She watched it hiss and spit, contained in its pit in the centre of the hall, the smoke spiralling up towards the hole in the smoky roof beams which led it out and up towards the wind-blown clouds. Dawn was near.

Behind her Princess Joan screamed. Rhonwen stooped and picking up a handful of oak twigs she threw them into the flames where they flared blue and green, salted by the wind off the sea which tortured and twisted every tree on the island’s edge. She watched them for a while, then she turned and went towards the bed.

Behind her a spark flew outward and lodged amongst the dampened rushes which carpeted the floor. It hissed a moment as if undecided whether to die or burn, then caught a frond of greenery and ran crackling along it to the next.

By the bed the women tended their exhausted princess and the tiny girl her body had spewed on to the sheets. In the hall already wreathed with smoke they did not smell the extra bitterness.

The fire ran on across the floor away from them and leaped towards the wooden walls with their embroidered hangings. The rustle of flame turned to a hiss and then a roar. When the women heard it and turned, it had already taken hold, devouring the wall, leaping towards the roof beams, racing back across the floor towards them.

One of them ran to ring a tocsin to summon the men, but they would be too late to save the hall. The others bundled the unconscious princess into her bedding and carried her as fast as they could towards the door. Outside Einion frowned: it seemed the princess would live; yet it was foretold that she would die.

Rhonwen was to be the child’s nurse. She stood for a moment looking down at the baby crying on its sheepskin blanket. So little a mite, the last daughter of the Prince of Aberffraw; the granddaughter of John Plantagenet, King of England.

A burning beam crashed across the floor near the bed. Rhonwen smiled. The fire was a sign. Bride, lady of the moon, was a goddess of fire. This child was thrice blessed and touched by destiny. She would inherit Bride’s special care. Stooping, she gathered the baby into her arms, then she turned and ran amongst a shower of falling timbers for the door.

As the wind sucked the flames higher Einion Gweledydd raised his face to the east and his eyes widened in shock. The heavens too were aflame. The racing clouds flared orange and crimson and gold; where the wind had whipped the waves into towering castles they were purple and scarlet and gilded with sparks. The howl of the wind and water mingled with the greedy roar of the fire and the crash of thunder overhead. Before his awed gaze the clouds ran together and coalesced, their borders streaming flame as they reared up overhead. He saw the form of a great bird slowly spreading across the sky, its wings outstretched from the fire-tipped peaks of Eryri to the gold of the western sea.

The sun eagle. Eryr euraid . No! Not an eagle, a phoenix! His lips framed the word soundlessly. The bird of fire on its pyre as the sun was born in the east; as the last child of Llywelyn Fawr was carried from the burning hall; the child of Bride; the child of the fire; the child of the phoenix.

‘Don’t look down!’ Balanced precariously on the wooden walkway at the top of the scaffolding which nestled against the high wall, the child turned and peered into the darkness. ‘Tuck your skirts up in your girdle,’ she called imperiously. ‘No one’s going to see your bottom in the dark!’ Her giggle was lost in the wail of the wind. ‘We’re nearly there. Come on!’

Far below the dangerous perch the courtyard of Hay Castle lay in darkness. A fine mist of rain had driven in across the Black Mountains and slicked the wooden scaffold poles and the newly dressed stone. Beneath their leather slippers the planks grew slippery.

Isabella de Braose let out a whimper of fear. ‘I want to go back.’

‘No, look! Three more paces and we’re there.’ Eleyne, the youngest daughter of Llywelyn, Prince of Aberffraw, and his wife, the Princess Joan, was ten, a year her friend’s junior. By a strange quirk of marriage and remarriage she was also Isabella’s step-great-aunt, a fact which caused the girls renewed giggles whenever they thought about it.

Eleyne gripped Isabella firmly by the wrist and coaxed her forward step by step. They were aiming for the gaping window of the gutted tower to which the new wall abutted. In another week or so the masons would be starting work on renovating it so that it could once again become the focal point of the castle, but as yet it was a deserted, mysterious place, the doors at the bottom boarded up to stop anyone going in amongst the tumbled masonry and charred beams.

‘Why do you want to see it?’ Isabella wailed. She was clinging to the flimsy handrail, her fingers cold and slippery with rain.

‘Because they don’t want us to see what is in there,’ Eleyne replied. ‘Besides, I think there’s a raven’s nest inside the walls.’ Letting go of the other girl’s wrist, she ran along the last few feet of planking and reached the wall of the old tower. Exhilarated by the wind and by the sting of the cold rain on her face, she could hardly contain her excitement. She felt no fear of heights. It had not crossed her mind that she might fall.

‘Come on, it’s easy.’ Peering over her shoulder she narrowed her eyes against the rain. Below, the roofs of Hay huddled around the castle, with here and there a wisp of rain-flattened blue smoke swirling in the darkness. She was very conscious suddenly of the brooding silence beyond the town where the great mass of black mountains stretched on either side of the broad Wye Valley into the heartland of Wales.