Here Be Dragons Read online

  Praise for Here Be Dragons

  “By far the best novel I’ve read this year, Here Be Dragons is historical fiction in the grand tradition.”

  —Nashville Banner

  “This lush historical saga draws readers into the legendary world of thirteenth-century Europe.”

  —Booklist

  “Penman’s book neatly untangles a portion of the crisscross politics of the time. A weighty but accessible royal portrait, an agreeable love story, and a painstaking reconstruction of some virtuoso medieval wheeling and dealing.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Penman has written something wonderful here…in clear, concise style that’s filled with rich historical splendor. She’s brought the distant past into sharp focus for the modern reader. It’s exciting to look forward to Penman’s future works.”

  —The Arizona Daily Star

  “Penman has brought her considerable talent to the task of making her characters, almost all of them true to history, live across the chasm of more than seven centuries. She has more than succeeded, bringing alive an age that is almost lost in elusive record and at the same time creating a love story and a novel that are commanding, suspenseful, and beautifully written.”

  —The Knoxville News-Sentinel

  “Penman’s Here Be Dragons is lavish with romance and has an authenticity that should delight the most discerning buff of historical novels.”

  —Grand Rapids Press

  “Sharon Kay Penman has a gift for making her characters come alive, and her tale of people, laws, customs, privileges, responsibilities, hatreds, and loves is gripping.”

  —South Bend Tribune

  “Once you pick it up, you’ll be wrapped up in the travails of the heroine, the lovely but strong-willed Joanna, and her husband, the wildly romantic Welsh prince, Llewelyn.”

  —Providence Journal

  To my parents

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people for their support and encouragement and understanding: My parents. Julie McCaskey Wolff. My agent, Molly Friedrich of the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency. My dear friend Cris Arnott, who helped me to track down the elusive Richard Fitz Roy. Betty Rowles and Jean and Basil Hill, who showed me so many kindnesses during my research trips to Wales. Olwen Caradoc Evans and Helen Ramage, who shared with me their knowledge and love of Welsh history. Above all, my editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Marian Wood. And lastly, the staffs of the National Library of Wales, the British Library, the Caernarfon Archives, the University College of North Wales Library, the research libraries of Cardiff, Llangefni, and Shrewsbury, the Brecknock Borough Library, the County Archives Office in Mold, and in the United States, the University of Pennsylvania Library.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Book One

  1: Shropshire, England

  2: Shropshire, England

  3: Chinon Castle, Province of Touraine

  4: Southampton, England

  5: Gwynedd, Wales

  6: Lisieux, Normandy

  7: Yorkshire, England

  8: Poitiers, Province Of Poitou

  9: Powys, Wales

  10: Fontevrault Abbey, Province of Anjou

  11: Gwynedd, Wales

  12: Rouen, Normandy

  13: Southampton, England

  14: Winchester, England

  15: Chester, England

  16: Aber, North Wales

  17: Aber, North Wales

  18: Rhosyr, North Wales

  19: Portsmouth, England

  20: Aber, North Wales

  21: Tewkesbury, England

  22: Aber, North Wales

  23: Hereford, England

  24: Shrewsbury, England

  25: Woodstock, England

  26: Cricieth Castle, North Wales

  27: Aber, North Wales

  28: Aberconwy, North Wales

  29: Cambridge, England

  30: Nottingham, England

  31: Dolwyddelan, North Wales

  32: Grantham, England

  33: Dover Castle, England

  34: Porchester, England

  35: Aber, North Wales

  36: Rhosyr, North Wales

  37: Dolwyddelan, North Wales

  38: Aber, North Wales

  39: Tywyn, North Wales

  40: Corfe Castle, England

  41: Cirencester, England

  Book Two

  1: Windsor, England

  2: Dolbadarn, North Wales

  3: Dolwyddelan, North Wales

  4: Aber, North Wales

  5: Llanfaes, North Wales

  6: Ludlow Castle, England

  7: Shrewsbury, England

  8: Cricieth, North Wales

  9: Tregarnedd, North Wales

  10: Deganwy, North Wales

  11: Aber, North Wales

  12: Aber, North Wales

  13: Dolwyddelan, North Wales

  14: Llanfaes, North Wales

  15: Cricieth, North Wales

  16: Llanfaes, North Wales

  17: Aber, North Wales

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Theirs was a land of awesome grandeur, a land of mountains and moorlands and cherished myths. They called it Cymru and believed themselves to be the descendants of Brutus and the citizens of ancient Troy. They were a passionate, generous, and turbulent people, with but one fatal flaw. They proclaimed themselves to be Cymry—“fellow countrymen”—but they fought one another as fiercely as they did their English neighbors, and had carved three separate kingdoms out of their native soil. To the north was the alpine citadel of Gwynedd, bordered by Powys, and to the south lay the realm of Deheubarth. To the English kings, this constant discord was a blessing and they did what they could to sow seeds of dissension and strife amongst the Welsh.

  During the reigns of the Norman Conqueror, William the Bastard, and his sons, the English crown continued to gain influence in Wales; Norman castles rose up on Welsh soil, and Norman towns began to take root in the valleys of South Wales. As the Normans had subdued the native-born Saxons, so, too, it began to seem that they would subdue the Welsh.

  Henry Plantagenet, King of England, Lord of Ireland and Wales, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, ordered a wall fresco to be painted in his chamber at Winchester Castle. It depicted a fierce, proud eagle being attacked by four eaglets; as the great bird struggled, the eaglets tore at its flesh with talons and beaks. When asked what this portended, Henry said that he was the eagle and the eaglets were his sons.

  And as the King’s sons grew to manhood, it came to pass just as Henry had foretold. Four sons had he. Young Henry, his namesake and heir, was crowned with his sire in his sixteenth year. Richard, the second son, was invested with the duchy of Aquitaine, ruling jointly with Eleanor, his lady mother. Geoffrey became Duke of Brittany. The youngest son was John; men called him John Lackland for he was the last-born and the Angevin empire had already been divided amongst his elder brothers.

  But John alone held with his father. The other sons turned upon Henry, seeking to rend him as the eaglets had raked and clawed at the bleeding eagle on the wall of Winchester Castle. In the year of Christ 1183, the House of Plantagenet was at war against itself.

  Book One

  1

  Shropshire, England

  July 1183

  He was ten years old and an alien in an unfriendly land, made an unwilling exile by his mother’s marriage to a Marcher border lord. His new stepfather seemed a kindly man, but he was not of Llewelyn’s blood, not one of the Cymry, and each dawning day in Shropshire only intensified Llewelyn’s heartsick longing for his homeland.

  For his mother’s sak
e, he did his best to adapt to the strangeness of English ways. He even tried to forget the atrocity stories that were so much a part of his heritage, tales of English conquest and cruelties. His was a secret sorrow he shared with no one, for he was too young to know that misery repressed is misery all the more likely to fester.

  It was on a Saturday morning a fortnight after his arrival at Caus Castle that Llewelyn mounted his gelding and rode north, toward the little village of Westbury. He had not intended to go any farther, but he was bored and lonely and the road beckoned him on. Ten miles to the east lay the town of Shrewsbury, and Llewelyn had never seen a town. He hesitated, but not for long. His stepfather had told him there were five villages between Westbury and Shrewsbury, and he recited them under his breath as he rode: Whitton, Stony Stretton, Yokethul, Newnham, and Cruckton. If he kept careful count as he passed through each one, there’d be no chance of getting lost, and with luck, he’d be back before his mother even realized he was gone.

  Accustomed to forest trails and deer tracks, he found it strange to be traveling along a road wide enough for several horsemen to ride abreast. Stranger still to him were the villages, each with its green and market cross, its surprisingly substantial stone church surrounded by a cluster of thatched cottages and an occasional fishpond. They were in truth little more than hamlets, these Shropshire villages that so intrigued Llewelyn, small islands scattered about in a sea of plough-furrowed fields. But Llewelyn’s people were pastoral, tribal, hunters and herdsmen rather than farmers, and these commonplace scenes of domestic English life were to him as exotic as they were unfamiliar.

  It was midday before he was within sight of the walls of Shrewsbury Castle. He drew rein, awed. Castle keep and soaring church spires, a fortified arched bridge spanning the River Severn, and the roofs of more houses than he could begin to count. He kept his distance, suddenly shy, and after a time he wheeled the gelding, without a backward glance for the town he’d come so far to see.

  He did not go far, detouring from the road to water his horse at Yokethul Brook, and it was there that he found the other boy. He looked to be about nine, as fair as Llewelyn was dark, with a thatch of bright hair the color of sun-dried straw, and grass-green eyes that now focused admiringly upon Llewelyn’s mount.

  Llewelyn slid to the ground, led the gelding foward with a grin that encouraged the other boy to say, in the offhand manner that Llewelyn was coming to recognize as the English equivalent of a compliment, “Is that horse yours?”

  “Yes,” Llewelyn said, with pardonable pride. “He was foaled on a Sunday, so I call him Dydd Sul.”

  The other boy hesitated. “You sound…different,” he said at last, and Llewelyn laughed. He’d been studying French for three years, but he had no illusions about his linguistic skills.

  “That is what Morgan, my tutor, says too,” he said cheerfully. “I expect it is because French is not my native tongue.”

  “You are not…English, are you?”

  Llewelyn was momentarily puzzled, but then he remembered. The people he thought of as English thought of themselves as Norman-French, even though it was more than a hundred years since the Duke of Normandy had invaded and conquered England. The native-born English, the Saxons, had been totally subdued. Unlike us, Llewelyn thought proudly. But he knew the Normans had for the Saxons all the traditional scorn of the victors for the vanquished, and he hastened to say, “No, I am not Saxon. I was born in Gwynedd, Cymru…what you know as Wales.”

  The green eyes widened. “I’ve never met a Welshman before,” he said slowly, and it occurred to Llewelyn that, just as he’d been raised on accounts of English treachery and tyranny, this boy was likely to have been put to bed at night with bloody tales of Welsh border raids.

  “I’ll show you my cloven hoof if you’ll show me yours,” he offered, and the other boy looked startled and then laughed.

  “I am Llewelyn ab Iorwerth…” He was unable to resist adding, “Ab Owain Fawr,” for Llewelyn was immensely proud that he was a grandson of Owain the Great, proud enough to disregard Morgan’s oft-repeated admonition against such bragging.

  But the younger boy did not react, and Llewelyn realized with a distinct shock that the name meant nothing to him. He seemed to want to respond to Llewelyn’s friendliness, but there was a certain wariness still in his eyes. “I am Stephen de Hodnet.” He hesitated again. “You do not live in Shropshire, do you? I mean, if you are Welsh…”

  The implication seemed clear: if he was Welsh, why was he not in Wales where he belonged? Llewelyn was more regretful than resentful, for this past fortnight had been the loneliest of his life. “I’m staying at Caus Castle,” he said coolly, and reached for Sul’s reins.

  “Caus Castle!” The sudden animation in Stephen’s voice took Llewelyn by surprise. “Lord Robert Corbet’s castle? You’re living there?”

  Llewelyn nodded, bemused. “For now I am. My lady mother was wed a fortnight ago to Sir Hugh Corbet, Robert’s brother. You know them?”

  Stephen laughed. “Who in Shropshire does not know the Corbets? They are great lords. My papa says they have more manors than a dog has fleas. In fact, he hopes to do homage to Lord Robert for the Corbet manor at Westbury.” And he then proceeded, unasked, to inform Llewelyn that he was the youngest son of Sir Odo de Hodnet, that the de Hodnets were vassals of Lord Fulk Fitz Warin, holding manors of Fitz Warin at Moston and Welbatch, that he was a page in Fitz Warin’s household at Alberbury Castle.

  Llewelyn was a little hazy about the intricacies of English landholding, but he did know that a vassal was a tenant of sorts, holding land in return for rendering his overlord forty days of military service each year, and he was thus able to make some sense of this outpouring of names, places, and foreign phrases. What he could not at first understand was Stephen’s sudden thawing, until he realized that the name Corbet was his entry into Stephen’s world. It was, he thought, rather like that story Morgan had once told him, a tale brought back by the crusaders from the Holy Land, of a man who’d been able to gain access to a cave full of riches merely by saying the words “Open Sesame!”

  This realization gave Llewelyn no pleasure; it only reinforced his conviction that English values were beyond understanding. How else explain that he should win acceptance not for what truly mattered, his blood-ties to Owain Fawr, the greatest of all Welsh princes, but for a marriage that he felt should never have been? All at once he was caught up in a surge of homesickness, a yearning for Wales so overwhelming that he found himself blinking back tears.

  Stephen did not notice, had not yet paused for breath. “…and my papa says Caus is the strongest of all the border castles, that it could withstand a siege verily until Judgment Day. Tell me—is it true that Lord Robert has a woven cloth on the floor of his bedchamber?”

  Llewelyn nodded. “It is called a…a carpet, was brought back from the Holy Land.” He could see that Stephen was on the verge of interrogating him at tiresome length about a subject that interested him not at all, and he said quickly, “But I know naught of castles, Stephen. Nor do I much like living in one. We do not have them in my land, you see.”

  Stephen looked incredulous. “None at all?”

  “Just those that were built by the Normans. Our people live in houses of timber, but they’re scattered throughout the mountains, not all clustered together like your English villages.”

  It was obviously a novel thought to Stephen, that not all cultures and societies were modeled after his own. They were both sitting on the bank by the stream and he rolled over in the grass, propped his chin in his hands, and said, “Tell me more about the Welsh.”

  Llewelyn no longer had any reservations about boasting of his bloodlines. Stephen was so woefully ignorant that it was truly a charitable act to enlighten him, he decided, and proceeded to acquaint Stephen with some of the more legendary exploits of his celebrated grandfather, giving his imagination free rein.

  “And so,” he concluded, having at last run out of inspiration, “wh
en my grandfather died, his sons fought to see who would succeed him. My father was deprived of his rightful inheritance, and Gwynedd is now ruled by my uncles, Rhodri and Davydd.”

  Welsh names were falling fast and free—to Stephen’s unfamiliar ears, much like the musical murmurings of Yokethul Brook. But one fact he’d grasped quite clearly. A prince was a prince, be he Welsh or Norman, and he looked at Llewelyn with greatly increased respect. “Wait,” he begged. “Let me be sure I do follow you. Your grandfather was a Prince of…Gwynedd, and your lady mother is the daughter of a Prince of…?”

  “Powys. Marared, daughter of Prince Madog ap Meredydd. My father was killed when I was a babe, and ere my mother wed Hugh Corbet, we lived with her kin in Powys…”

  Llewelyn had not begun talking until he was nearly two, and since then, his mother often teased, he seemed bound and determined to make up for all that lost time. Now, with so satisfactory an audience as Stephen and a subject that was so close to his heart, he outdid himself, and Stephen learned that among the Welsh there was no greater sin than to deny hospitality to a traveler, that Welshmen scorned the chain-mail armor of the English knight, that Llewelyn’s closest friends were boys named Rhys and Ednyved, and the ancient Welsh name for Shrewsbury was Pengwern.