Free The Wind From Hastings by Morgan Llywelyn Page A

one person that I still breathe with your breath, your heart beats in my breast!

RHUDDLAN

    M Y NEW LIFE was truly begun. In one day (and a night) I had moved in rank from student to First Lady in Wales. And chatelaine of Rhuddlan, too: keeper of the keys to the private chambers, the stillroom, the strongroom, and the solar. My domain included the kitchens, a chapel, barn and stables, a kilnhouse for drying grain, a cow byre, a small house for Griffith’s falcons, the porch where we dined on starry summer nights, and the privy.
    Also within Rhuddlan’s walls were the watch towers and sleeping huts for the men-at-arms and the servants’ chamber and hall, but these were none of my affair. Emma did love to bring me tales from the servants’ chambers and I did love to give ear to them, though I pretended for the sake of my dignity that I was impatient with such tittle-tattle.
    But the part of my new kingdom I loved most was not within stout timbered walls; it was best seen from the back of my gray pony. The rich and rolling valley of the Clwyd, its colors always changing beneath the
racing clouds—that was dear to me. The distant purpled hush of mountains. The songs of the thrush as we lay on our pallet of furs in the early morning, when pearly light came streaming in through the solar’s wind door, open to air and sky. The funny manmade mountain they called “Toothill” upon which Rhuddlan stood.
    The valley of the Clwyd was rich land, so fertile that many of the Cymry had given up their traditional occupations of hunting, hawking and fishing and taken to tilling the soil. Landowners plowed with a heavy wooden plow and a team of eight oxen; a whole community went in together in this endeavor, sharing the oats, barley or wheat they raised. I loved to ride along the edges of the fields, listening to the cries of the callers who walked backward leading the oxen, singing their commands like bards.
    â€œIt seems the whole world is here!” I said to Griffith once. “Everything we need is grown hereabouts or provided to us as the court’s share from the tribes. It is not like East Anglia, where we purchased from traders so much of our goods.”
    â€œIt is wrong to be dependent on others,” Griffith replied. “Each tribe of the Cymry cares for itself; no man can cut off its food supply or take away its clothing and fuel. We do without some of the luxuries of the great towns, perhaps, but we are free.” His face grew very serious. “Remember that, Aldith. It is a great thing to be independent, to have no foot on your neck.” There was a real sadness in his eyes that surprised me.
    â€œSurely no man is so free as you!”
    My Griffith gave a bitter laugh. “Few men are so enslaved as I.”
    â€œBut you are Ruler of All Wales!”
    â€œMmmmmm,” said Griffith, stroking his neatly trimmed auburn beard.
    I waited. I had learned that those “Mmmmmms” of his meant he was about to deliver himself of an important
thought and wanted all of my rapt attention.
    â€œSo I am, Ruler of All Wales. That is a title I went after like a hungry bear, sweeping aside everything that got in my path. And would do so again, just as fiercely! Make no mistake about that, Aldith; my ambition is not quenched, nor will it ever be. Unfortunately.
    â€œFor I can tell you this, little one. At sundown the landowner puts away his plow and oxen, the fisherman leaves his nets and weir and goes home to a good supper and an easy sleep. But for a Prince sundown means only that the torches must be lit, so that he can see better the problems he must grapple with. There are always friends to be made, enemies to be staved off, decisions and choices and dealings until the mind scurries like a trapped rat.
    â€œWe live well here at Rhuddlan, Aldith, but I pay for each cow and oat and piece of gold as surely as if I wrested them from the land myself. No plowman works as hard as