Cymru - Chapter 10

GWILYM

The State Carriage took a grand total of two minutes to get to Caerleuad, which always made Gwilym feel bizarrely guilty, as though he should have just walked and saved everyone the bother. It certainly seemed unworthy of the ever-present fanfare, which he thought he’d actually managed to escape until the carriage began to lift and suddenly everyone was marginally deafer from the strident trumpeting despite being no nearer to knowing where the damned sound was coming from. Gwilym made a mental note to wring the information out of Watkins at his earliest convenience.

As they landed, Caerleuad’s exotic fanfare of melodic metal drums soothed his aching eardrums. There was a lot to be said for Marged’s eccentricity.

Footmen leapt to the doors of the carriage, and Gwilym assumed his best Regal Manner as he climbed out, head held appropriately high to display the torque at his throat. Watkins was always so particular on it that Gwilym found his spine doing so even when the man wasn’t around to cough his whistling cough as a subtle reminder; which was strange, since he was in Caerleuad. Lady Marged didn’t give two hoots about traditions.

She came towards him now out of the semi-circle of dignitaries waiting to welcome him, all fly-away hair and colourful patchwork dress and outstretched arms. She was wearing a pair of orange fingerless gloves that stood out garishly, the palms covered in various ink stains. Closer inspection of her torque, just before Gwilym found himself enveloped in her rather expansive bosom, showed that she had wrapped a tendril of flowering ivy around it. He grinned.

“Lord Gwilym!” Marged trilled, hugging him tightly for several seconds before letting go. “Oh, I’m so glad you came! It’s been months, it has. Come on! You simply must come and try on a pair of these gloves, they’re to die for if you’re working in the winter.”

“Thank you, my lady,” Gwilym said cheerfully. He knew her response before it came, but appearances were important.

“Oh Gwilym, when will you learn?” Marged giggled, both chins wobbling. Most of her hair had been tied back, he realised. With a knitting needle. “It’s Marged to you, my lovely. Now come along in! It’s windy, you’ll catch your death out here…”

Unfortunate phrasing, since Awen had rather literally caught his death the day before. Gwilym was still feeling twitchy.

They went in, passing along the Top Level corridor-streets of Caerleuad. Its basic architecture was largely same as all other Archipelagan cities, but Marged had been in power for almost fifty years, which was plenty of time to redecorate. Her mother before her hadn’t been wildly austere either. The results were walls covered in shell mosaics of shells, living flower arches to pass through and one particularly sappy mural of a group of people, one representing each societal class, standing together and smiling inanely while bird flew over their heads. Every now and again, they passed a wall that had been dedicated to the children of Caerleuad: pictures of Riders and flowers adorned them, and poems about peace and kittens and lovely things. Marged was probably crazy, Gwilym reflected; but at least it was a happy insanity. Her people loved her.

They reached the Sovereign’s Residence, far smaller than most because Marged had given most of it up to become affordable housing years before. The assembled courtiers and dignitaries wandered away as formally as Marged would allow, and after closing the massive doors behind them, the servants did the same. Marged waved Gwilym to a chair, and he obediently took one of the massive and overstuffed armchairs by the merrily burning fire.

“So!” Marged said brightly as she starting digging through her enormous basket of knitting. As one of the top balls of wool fell it was caught in mid-air by the most psychotic-looking alley cat Gwilym had ever seen, who proceeded to tear the wool into tiny fibres. “Your first Archwiliad coming up! How exciting! Are you enjoying it all so far?”

“It’s been an experience,” Gwilym admitted. “Some of the Wings are a bit intimidating. Er, should he be doing that?”

Marged glanced down. As she saw the scarred and mental animal on the rug her face lit up, and before Gwilym could protest she bent down and scooped it up. The cat froze, apparently in shock.

“Oh, isn’t oo a sweetie?” Marged cooed. “He’s so beautiful! Who’s beautiful? You are!”

The cat turned evil yellow eyes on Gwilym. It felt distinctly like a never-mention-this-again threat. Gwilym stared at the ex-ball of wool and swallowed.

“Yes, he’s fine,” said Marged affectionately as she placed the cat back on the floor and turned back to her knitting basket. It fled under the nearest sofa and vanished. “Anyway, dear, you were saying about the Wings. I find they vary, too: the one Tregwylan sends is usually dreadful.”

“I’ve not met them yet,” Gwilym admitted. He mentally marked them as “No Fun.”

“Hardly an experience to look forward to,” Marged sniffed disdainfully. “They’re all so… stiff, you know? They don’t smile, they don’t sit down, they don’t wear their scarves. Llangefni are usually a riot, though!”

“Yes,” Gwilym said, with feeling. “I think three of our taverns had to be redecorated the next day. They sang lots of songs about mead.”

“Those are the ones!” Marged chuckled. She pulled a single green glove out of the mass of wool and regarded it sadly before searching for its mate. “I do like Llangefni. They taught me a fascinating new way to drink mead, actually, in these tiny little glasses. At the end of the evening, though, it turned out they’d been giving me brandy! What scamps, eh?”

What scamps. It truly disturbed Gwilym that they were Llangefni’s premiere defence in the instance of war; they seemed like the reject Wing, where all the Riders who’d failed at the intelligence tests had been sent on the grounds that no one cared about Llangefni.

“What do you think of Casnewydd?” he asked cautiously. Marged straightened for a moment, looking thoughtful. The cat’s yellow eyes reappeared under the sofa like some kind of goblin.

“Casnewydd,” Marged repeated. “They’re a bit of a mixed bunch, actually. Or is that fair? Most of them are jolly nice. I like the girl with the bird; she showed me how to fly it and all sorts! It sat on my shoulder! I didn’t sleep for a week, Gwilym, magical it was.”

The cat leaped forwards and reclaimed the remains of the wool, dragging it back under the sofa before Marged saw.

“Their Wing Leader is lovely, too,” Marged went on. She was now carefully pulling apart several other pairs of gloves. “A bard, as I recall, and quite happy to tell jokes with me. Odd expression, mind you, but lovely hair. It’s a shame Riders aren’t allowed to wear more colours. Oh! Here we are!”

She spun around, holding up two green fingerless gloves triumphantly. Gwilym grinned, and took them from her.

“Thank you,” he said pulling one on. “You didn’t have to.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Marged beamed, waving a hand dismissively. “You’ll be needing them this winter.”

She sank into the armchair across from Gwilym’s and leaned forward, her manner theatrically conspiratorial suddenly.

“Tell you what, though,” she said, her voice attempting to be low, “I never thought much of one or two of them. That funny boy with the fringe… We had a big dinner while they were here, and they were all dressed up formally and looking lovely except him. I mean, he’d made the effort, but he’d managed to get hold of that terrible hair jelly the fishermen use, and his fringe looked like two slugs. Disgusted, I was.”

Gwilym laughed out loud. He could just imagine Marged’s reaction. The cat, startled, fled from under the sofa towards the door, pausing half-way and looking angrily at them.

“I told him he might not want to bother next time,” Marged continued. “Got all sullen, he did, face like he’d been slapped. He spent the rest of the meal telling the others what to do. I think he’s their Deputy. I didn’t like him.”

“I’ve got them at the moment,” Gwilym said. He wondered how to broach the subject of Marged’s dissenters when she’d just given him such lovely gloves, and his nerve failed him. “Someone tried to kill me yesterday.”

Marged gave a little shriek that sent the cat rebounding off the closed door. Gwilym wondered if that was why it was scarred.

“Someone tried to kill you? Oh, Gwilym, that’s terrible! What happened?”

He reached into the long pocket sewn into the lining of his revoltingly ornamental yet sadly traditional cloak and pulled out the arrow. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of it yet. He showed it to Marged, who swept a tiny pair of eye-glasses off the table beside her and perched them on her nose before examining it, wide-eyed.

“A fake bard got in and tried to shoot me,” Gwilym said glumly. “We’re interrogating today to find out how and why.”

“But… It didn’t hit,” Marged said, apparently shocked to the core. She was staring at the stained arrow-shaft.

“No,” Gwilym said. “The Casnewydd Wing Leader was sitting next to me. She caught it about an inch out.”

Marged stared at him. “Good gods,” she said quietly, and then seemed to consider that. “I always said she had nice hair.”

He wasn’t entirely sure what the connection was there, but he had to admit Marged was right. Gwilym loved Awen’s hair. Mentally, he shook himself, and steeled himself for the conversation coming.

“Marged,” he said hesitantly, “do you mind if I ask you something?”

Marged looked up at him from the arrow, the glasses making her eyes huge.

“Of course! Ask away.”

“I’ve been hearing rumours about you,” Gwilym began, kicking the cowardly part of his brain that really liked the gloves firmly in the brain-teeth. “Which, basically, accuse you of trying to murder the good nation of Cymru as it sleeps while you get rich off of its warring carcass.” He looked at the children’s pictures of Maypole dancing and Marged covering one wall as he said it. It was all so ludicrous.

“Oh,” Marged said. She sounded utterly crest-fallen. “Really? That wasn’t the point at all.”

Gwilym manfully resisted the urge to slap his own forehead. Of course. Of course she’d done something, assuming everyone would accept and automatically understand her motives and of course it was eccentrically innocent. He sighed.

“They say you’ve been sending dissenters?” Gwilym asked gently. “Talking about de-powering the Sovereigns?” Marged waved a hand, apparently struggling for words.

“This will be difficult to explain I’m afraid, Gwilym,” she said at last. She looked at him sadly. “Your father was always so much better at explaining things than me.”

Gwilym stared at her. She didn’t notice, her gaze somewhere three feet over his shoulder.

“It was his idea,” Marged said finally. She pulled a ball of wool out of the basket beside her, and the knitting needles out of her hair. Knitting helped Marged think. “He first explained it to me years ago, but it was more of a pipe dream then. Don’t get me wrong, now: he was appropriately indebted to the Senedd for pulling us out of all that silliness with the wars and such, but he thought the system could be better.”

Gwilym blinked. Only Marged could dismiss centuries of warring despotism as ‘silliness’. The woman was deranged.

Out loud, he said, “Better?”

“Oh, yes. Fairer. And think about it, Gwilym,” Marged said, waggling a finger in a manner that was suddenly, painfully, reminiscent of Gwilym’s father. “The people who really make up this country, the ordinary people; they have peace with the Sovereigns and the Senedd. But what were they fighting for before? They made the armies, but they were almost never conscripted. So why did they do it?”

She left the question hanging for Gwilym to answer, and sat back to knit. Gwilym thought about it.

“Because they wanted each leader they put on the throne,” he said slowly. Marged beamed.

“Exactly! Each one promised them something better, that they’d lower taxes or increase border patrols or raise the exchange rate with Erinn. Messy, but still politics, see.”

“Well, yes,” Gwilym said uncomfortably. “But as soon as another leader made a better offer they’d start the next war. Hence the Senedd and the Archwiliadau.”

“Which is better,” Marged agreed, “and I’m not denying it. Nor did your father for that matter. But the Archwiliadau are a chance to alter country-wide politics to keep everyone happy, not the way individual Sovereigns run their individual city states. So if you have a Sovereign who’s doing a terrible job in their own city, nothing can be done about it, you see? The poor people who live there simply have to wait for their Sovereign to die or abdicate.”

And what if their heir was no good? Gwilym wondered painfully. That was a good point.

“And particularly when you consider that many Sovereigns now undergo the Gwales Ritual,” Marged continued, apparently oblivious of Gwilym’s silent guilt. “They live longer than most of the people they govern. Do you see.”

He did see. “I still think it’s better to have them, though,” Gwilym said morosely, but Marged waved a hand and he fell silent on pain of being skewered on a knitting needle.

“But that’s just it, Gwilym!” she said enthusiastically. “What your father worked out was a system of government that kept the Sovereigns but gave the people back their right to choose! The Sovereigns still exist and perform all the same duties, but they’re only in power for twenty-year stretches at a time. At the end of those, they hold… oh, what did your father call it?... an Etholiad in the city. About five potential new Sovereigns tell people what they would do if they got into power, and the people choose the one they want for the next twenty years. You see? So if it all goes badly, at the end of twenty years the people can simply choose someone else!”

Marged’s eyes were shining. Gwilym could only gape at her.

“But…” he said at last, his head swimming. “But what if the new Sovereign passes a law saying that only they can be Sovereign from this point on? No more Etholiadau? Surely it would start a war!”

“Ah, no!” Marged waved her knitting again happily. Gwilym sat back. “Because, you see, the Archwiliadau would still exist. The Union would still exist. Like now, they’d enforce the ground rules.” She flipped her knitting over merrily. “It would really be the same system as now, just with choice over Sovereigns. It would be lovely.”

It was staggering. All the more so because his father was apparently its architect.

“So,” Gwilym said, his head swimming, “how long ago exactly did my father tell you this?”

“Thirty years, or thereabouts,” Marged mused. Gwilym choked.

“Thirty years?”

“Well, give or take,” Marged shrugged. “The problem was that although I could see the merits of it, we both knew that others wouldn’t. It was too close to the wars still, you see. Look at you! You never saw the wars, and yet you’re struggling to accept it. We knew we’d have to sit on it for a while.”

They sat in silence for a while, shock reverberating through Gwilym as Marged contentedly knitted a pair of fluffy socks in yellow. Thirty years his father had been planning this. Since before he was born. Why had he never mentioned it? It made sense that he wouldn’t have while Gwilym had been a child, perhaps, but for all twenty-six years of his life? Had he told Gwilym’s mother? His brother? His sister?

Probably not his sister. She’d been an Angry Person.

“Who else knew about this?” Gwilym asked finally. “Did my brother know?”

“Of course!” Marged said. “He was next in line to be Sovereign, after all. I think he may have told others in your family too, but not until he was ready to move on it.”

“So when did you start putting this into practice, then?” Gwilym asked. “While he was still alive?”

“Oh, heavens, yes!” Marged said cheerfully. “It was always your father’s baby, not mine, although I loved it. I told him that I’d wait until he wanted to move, and then I’d back him up all the way. It was about a year ago, two months before-” An uncharacteristic shadow crossed Marged’s face. “Before your family were killed.”

“Then thank you,” Gwilym said quietly. “For carrying on for him.”

Marged waved her knitting, slightly flushed. “Oh, hush,” she said, obviously pleased. “I did think it was a good idea anyway. But it was what he wanted, and the time was right. Cymru is in a very strong position at the moment; relations with Erinn have never been better, and Saxonia is divided; too much so to invade us. It’s the best time to suggest a change of structure, while no one can take advantage. And, of course, sufficiently far from the wars as to keep our heads on our necks.”

“Why did no one tell me any of this?” Gwilym sighed. It seemed remarkably unfair, just because he’d been the reckless one of the family who sneaked out at night to run underground clinics and potentially he’d just answered his own question, hadn’t he?

Marged leaned forward and patted his knee.

“Because you came to your throne knowing nothing about politics, dear. I didn’t know what you were going to be like; all I knew of you was that you were a bit of a liability to your father. Politically speaking. I must say, though, I’ve been jolly impressed!”

Well, that was something, anyway. Impressing Marged gave one a lovely glow inside, although that said the Llangefni Wing had managed it, and they had the combined intelligence of seaweed.

Marged looked slightly guiltily at him for a moment, and then looked down.

“I also knew you’d been left alive because you were deemed ‘safe’,” she said, apparently fascinated by her perfect stocking stitch. “So I wasn’t sure at first if I could trust you.”

The silence oozed thickly between them, uncomfortably loud. The cat mewled pathetically, and slunk under a dresser in the corner of the room.

“Left alive,” Gwilym repeated steadily. Marged sighed.

“I have no proof, Gwilym,” she said gently. “This is only supposition on my part. But I’m certain your family were assassinated. The few Sovereigns we began speaking to weren’t happy.”

“Who?” Gwilym asked. He sounded amazingly calm, he thought. He was rather impressed with himself.

“As I say, I’ve no proof,” Marged said. “But my money would go on Flyn or Gwenda.”

“Flyn,” Gwilym repeated. Casnewydd. The people who claimed Marged needed stopping at all costs, or at least all costs that involved Flyn’s new world order with him at the top.

He turned the arrow over in his hands.