Brother Cadfael 18: The Summer of the Danes

and the gradients gentle enough for pleasant riding.
    "An old, old road," said Cadfael. "It starts from Chester, and makes straight for the head of Conwy's tidal water, where once, they say, there was a fort the like of Chester. At low tide, if you know the sands, you can ford the river there, but with the tide boats can ply some way beyond."
    "And after the river crossing?" asked Mark, attentive and glowing.
    "Then we climb. To look westward from there, you'd think no track could possibly pass, but pass it does, up and over the mountains, and down at last to the sea. Have you ever seen the sea?"
    "No. How could I? Until I joined the bishop's household I had never been out of the shire, not even ten miles from where I was born." He was straining his eyes ahead as he rode now, with longing and delight, thirsty for all that he had never seen. "The sea must be a great wonder," he said on a hushed breath.
    "A good friend and a bad enemy," said Cadfael, beckoned back into old memories. "Respect it, and it will do well by you, but never take liberties."
    The prince had set a steady, easy pace that could be maintained mile by mile in this undulating countryside, green and lush, patterned with hamlets in the valleys, cottages and church snugly huddled together, the fringe of cultivable fields a woven tapestry round them, and here and there solitary, scattered throughout the tref, the households of the free landowners, and no less solitary, somewhere among them, their parish church.
    "These men live lonely," said Mark, taking in the distinction with some wonder.
    "These are the freeborn men of the tribe. They own their land, but not to do as they please with it, it descends by strict law of inheritance within the family. The villein villages till the soil among them, and pay their communal dues together, though every man has his dwelling and his cattle and his fair share of the land. We make sure of that by overseeing the distribution every so often. As soon as sons grow to be men they have their portion at the next accounting."
    "So no one there can inherit," Mark deduced reasonably.
    "None but the youngest son, the last to grow into a portion of his own. He inherits his father's portion and dwelling. His elder brothers by then will have taken wives and built houses of their own." It seemed to Cadfael, and apparently to Mark also, a fair, if rough and ready, means of assuring every man a living and a place in which to live, a fair share of the work and a fair share of the profit of the land.
    "And you?" asked Mark. "Was this where you belonged?"
    "Belonged and could not belong," Cadfael acknowledged, looking back with some surprise at his own origins. "Yes, I was born in just such a villein tref, and coming up to my fourteenth birthday and a slip of land of my own. And would you believe it now?, I did not want it! Good Welsh earth, and I felt nothing for it. When the wool merchant from Shrewsbury took a liking to me, and offered me work that would give me licence to see at least a few more miles of the world, I jumped at that open door as I've jumped at most others that ever came my way. I had a younger brother, better content to sit on one strip of earth lifelong. I was for off, as far as the road would take me, and it took me half across the world before I understood. Life goes not in a straight line, lad, but in a circle. The first half we spend venturing as far as the world's end from home and kin and stillness, and the latter half brings us back by roundabout ways but surely, to that state from which we set out. So I end bound by vow to one narrow place, but for the rare chance of going forth on the business of my house, and labouring at a small patch of earth, and in the company of my closest kin. And content," said Cadfael, drawing satisfied breath.
    They came over the crest of a high ridge before noon, and there below them the valley of the Conwy opened, and beyond, the ground rose at first gently and suavely, but above these green levels there towered in the distance the enormous bastions of Eryri, soaring to polished steel peaks against the pale blue of the sky. The river was a winding silver thread, twining a tortuous course through and over shoals of tidal mud and sand on its way northward to the sea, its waters at this hour so spread and diminished that it could be forded without difficulty. And after the crossing, as Cadfael had warned, they climbed.
    The first few green and sunny miles gave way to a rising