Dear Stranger

by Elendil, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Glewlwyd Mighty-Grasp came to the kitchen door with snow on his shoulders and said there was a man at the gate who talked like a goose with a cold.

Gwrhyr put down his bread. Since Martinmas he had been fetched to the gate four times. One visitor had been an Irishman, one a Breton with a cart of salt, and one a heron, which had stood on the gatepost all morning saying something urgent. In the end the heron's complaint had been about the fish weir and nothing to do with Arthur. The fourth had been Glewlwyd's own nephew, very drunk, and Gwrhyr had been needed only to agree that he was speaking Welsh.

"A goose," Gwrhyr said.

"A goose that's walked a long way." Glewlwyd held out a hand the size of a shovel blade and pulled him off the bench. "It's the Calends. The knife is in the meat and the drink is in the horn. I'm not opening that gate for a man I can't understand."

They called Gwrhyr the Interpreter of Tongues, and he did not argue with the title, though it promised more than any one man could do. He had no gift. What he had was patience. He listened to a language until the noise came apart into words, and then he listened to the words until they came apart into the things people meant by them. The second part took longer, and it was the part nobody thanked him for.

The gate of Celli Wig faced east, down a long slope of white field to the trees. The man stood just outside it in the trodden snow with a horse behind him, and he held up a branch of holly. It was the only green thing in sight, and he held it high, the way a man does when he wants to be sure it is seen before anything else about him. He was perhaps thirty. He had fair hair cut straight across the forehead and a cloak of brown wool with a brooch at the shoulder. The brooch had garnets set in gold, a dear thing to wear on the road. His boots had split at the toe and been bound with cord. His horse was shaking.

He spoke as soon as Gwrhyr came to the bars. It was the speech of the people from over the eastern sea, the speech the men of the island called Saxon. It was all in the throat and the front teeth, with words that ended like a door being shut.

Ic eom Leofwealh. Ic sece minne wealh.

Gwrhyr had his answer ready, and then he held it back.

Leof was easy. It meant dear, beloved, a thing that is held in the hand and not let go. Wealh was easy too, taken by itself. It was the word Gwrhyr had been waiting to meet in a man's mouth, because he had heard it before only from prisoners and from the edges of other men's quarrels. Now here it was twice in one breath, once as the end of a name and once as the thing the man was looking for.

"Well?" said Glewlwyd.

"His name is Leofwealh. He says he's lost something and he thinks it's here."

"A horse?"

"No." Gwrhyr asked the Saxon what he had lost. The man told him, at length, and Gwrhyr listened to all of it before he turned round. "A woman. She ran from his house before the harvest was in. He's followed her for twenty days. He heard she'd gone to Arthur."

Glewlwyd looked at the holly, then at the split boots. "There's a woman came a week ago," he said slowly. "She went to the queen."

---

Arthur let him in, because it was the Calends and there was a custom about the Calends, and because a man under a green branch had walked into a hall of the Island's warriors alone, and Arthur wanted to see what kind of man did that.

The hall was hot after the yard. There were two fires, and the smoke hung under the roof in a flat grey ceiling. It smelled of pork fat, wet wool and the sweet burnt smell of mead spilled on hot stones. Arthur sat at the high table. The white mantle he called Gwen was over his shoulders, though the room was too warm for it, and beside his cup lay the short knife called Carnwennan. Gwenhwyfar sat at his right. Cei sat at his left with his feet on the bench, because Cei always took up as much room as there was, and next to Cei sat Bedwyr. Bedwyr was eating with the one hand he had, and quickly, as he did everything.

Gwrhyr stood beside the Saxon in the open space before the table, where suppliants stood. The man had not let go of the holly. Water from his boots spread on the flagstones.

"Ask him what he wants of me," said Arthur.

Gwrhyr asked. Leofwealh answered, and Gwrhyr gave it to the hall plainly. The man had a farm in the valley of a river whose name meant nothing in Welsh. He had a woman in his household who had run away. He had followed her west, asking at every ford. He wanted her back.

"What is she to him?" Gwenhwyfar asked. "His wife?"

Gwrhyr put the question. The Saxon looked surprised that anyone needed to ask.

Heo is min wealh.

Here was the trouble, and Gwrhyr had known since the gate that it was coming. He could have given the hall a single word. Any of three words would have been true, and each of them would have been a lie.

"He says she's his wealh," he said. "Lord, there's no one word of ours I can give you for it. In his tongue it means a stranger, someone from outside, someone who doesn't speak as his people speak. It also means one of us, a man or a woman of this island; when they talk about us, that's what they call us. And it means a slave. It's the same word. He doesn't hear three things in it. He hears one."

The hall had been talking while the Saxon talked. Now it stopped, from the high table downwards.

Cei took his feet off the bench. "Ask him," he said, "what he calls me."

"Cei."

"Ask him."

Gwrhyr asked. Leofwealh looked at Cei for some time: at the height of him, the scarred hands, the gold at his throat, the sword across his knees. Then he gave the only answer his language had.

Wealh.

Cei began to stand. Bedwyr did not look up from his meat. He put out his one hand, laid it flat on Cei's forearm and left it there, and after a moment Cei sat down again. He was breathing through his nose.

"He's under a branch," said Arthur, mildly, to nobody in particular, "on the Calends, in my hall." Then, to Gwrhyr: "Where is the woman?"

---

She came from the kitchens with Gwenhwyfar's woman at her elbow. She had been scouring pots, and her forearms were grey to the elbow with wet ash and sand. She was older than Gwrhyr had expected, near forty, small and square, with a burn scar along the back of one hand, the kind cooks get from a pot handle. She did not look at the Saxon. She walked straight up the hall to the high table and stood in front of the queen.

"I'm under your protection, lady," she said in Welsh. It was the Welsh of Dyfnaint, broad and slow. "You gave it to me at the kitchen door. I'm asking you to remember it."

"I remember it," said Gwenhwyfar.

Then Leofwealh spoke to the woman, not loudly, in the tone a man uses to a dog that has gone too far into a field. Wealh. Cum her.

She turned round. She answered him in his own speech, fluently. She must have had years to learn it. Gwrhyr understood all of it, and he did not put any of it into Welsh, because she had not said it to the hall. She had said it to the man. When she had finished, the Saxon's face had gone a dull red from the neck up.

"What did she say?" Cei asked.

"Something about his mother," said Gwrhyr. Cei laughed out loud, the only laugh in the hall, and the woman glanced at Gwrhyr. It was a quick look, and not grateful. She had been translated too, and she knew it.

Arthur leaned back in his chair. Gwrhyr had seen him do that before, and he did not like it, because it meant that Arthur was going to be generous. When Arthur was generous he was sometimes less careful than when he was angry.

"Tell him," said Arthur, "that on the first day of the year no guest leaves my hall without a gift. Tell him he shall have whatever his head and his tongue can name, as far as the wind dries and the rain wets, and the sun runs and the sea goes round, and the earth reaches. Except my ship. And my mantle. And Caledfwlch, my sword, and Rhongomyniad, my spear, and Wynebgwrthucher, my shield, and Carnwennan, my knife. And Gwenhwyfar, my wife." He reached for his cup. "Tell him all of it. Leave none of it out."

Gwrhyr told him all of it. He found Saxon words for the wind and the rain, which were easy, and for the sea going round, which was not. He gave the names of the ship, the mantle and the weapons as they were, since a name does not cross into another tongue, and Arthur's things were known by their names. The Saxon listened with great attention and his lips moved a little, as if he were counting the seven things off.

Gwrhyr saw what would happen a heartbeat before it did. So, he thought later, did Gwenhwyfar.

Leofwealh lifted the holly a little higher and named his gift.

Þone wealh.

The wealh.

---

Nobody in the hall but Gwrhyr knew what had been asked. Nobody but Gwrhyr and the woman, who had gone very still beside the queen's chair, with her grey hands at her sides.

"Well?" said Arthur. "What does he ask for?"

Gwrhyr knew, then, exactly how much an interpreter holds. The whole matter turned on one word, and the word was in his mouth and nowhere else. If he said the woman, Arthur's honour was bound and Gwenhwyfar's protection broken, and in front of the whole Island one of them would have to break their word. If he said the slave, Arthur would say he kept no slave of this man's, and the Saxon would go out of the gate with the custom honoured and everyone feeling clever, and he would be back in the spring with friends. Either word would have been true, and either would have been a choice made by Gwrhyr and passed off as the Saxon's.

"Lord," he said. "Give me leave to ask him one thing first. The word won't cross as it is."

Arthur looked at him a long moment, then lifted a hand: go on.

Gwrhyr turned to the Saxon and spoke to him quietly in his own tongue, as one man asks another the way.

"Which wealh do you mean? The stranger, the Briton, or the slave?"

Leofwealh frowned, as a man frowns when he is asked which of his two hands is his hand. "There is one word," he said. "She is a wealh."

"So is your name," said Gwrhyr.

He had not meant to say it so baldly. But the name had been sitting in the front of his mind since the gate, a little crooked, like a stone in a shoe. The Saxon heard it. For a moment he did not answer at all. The holly sank an inch.

"My father named me," he said at last.

Gwrhyr waited.

"My mother was bought at a fair on the river, before I was born," said Leofwealh. "From the west. She was" (and his mouth hesitated over the word for the first time, Gwrhyr saw, as if he had found something in it he had not put there) "a wealh. My father was fond of her. He said so. He gave me the name."

"Dear wealh," said Gwrhyr.

"Dear stranger," said the Saxon. "That is how it was meant." Then, after a while: "Is it?"

Gwrhyr did not answer that. He turned to the high table and told them all of it, word for word, the bought mother, the fair, the father who was fond of her, and the name that meant three things.

When he had finished, Arthur said, "And what do we call ourselves? Tell him that, as well."

"Cymry," Gwrhyr said to the Saxon, and then gave it to him in his own speech, the long way round, because his speech had no short way. "Those who share a border. People of the same country. It means: the ones beside you."

Leofwealh looked down the hall: at the two fires, at the benches of the Island's warriors, at Cei, who was still red about the ears, and at Bedwyr. Bedwyr had finished his meat and was watching him over the rim of a horn with polite interest, as he might have watched a dog walking on a frozen pond.

"Tell him," said Cei, "that if he wants a wealh I'll go home with him. I'd like to see his farm. I'd like to see his river with the stupid name."

Gwrhyr did not translate that either. But the hall had heard it, and somebody at the low tables began to laugh, and then the next bench, and the laughter went up the hall like fire through dry bracken. Under cover of it the Saxon said something to Gwrhyr so quietly that Gwrhyr had to bend his head.

Hu hatte heo?

What is she called?

Twenty days on the road, Gwrhyr thought, and years before that, and he had never asked. He turned to the woman. He did not put the question into Welsh. He only looked at her, and she understood it in the Saxon well enough.

"Lleucu," she said. She said it to the hall, not to the man.

Leofwealh tried it. He made a noise like a log spitting in a fire, Thleck, and stopped. He tried again. Leh-kee. The double l was not in his mouth at all. His people had no such sound, and he had come to the age of thirty without ever needing one.

"What does he ask?" said Arthur, over the dying laughter. "I've given my word. He's had time enough to name it."

The Saxon spoke. Gwrhyr listened to the whole of it before he turned.

"He asks for bread for the road, lord," he said, "and a feed for his horse, and the way to the Tamar ford."

There was a pause at the high table.

"That's a small gift for the Calends," said Arthur.

"It's what he named."

Gwenhwyfar was looking at Gwrhyr. Gwrhyr kept his eyes on Arthur. Lleucu was looking at neither of them. She looked at the Saxon, for the first time since she had come up the hall, and went on looking at him until Cei came back with the boots.

"Then he shall have it," said Arthur, "and a cloak that isn't wet, and a pair of boots, because I won't have it said that a man left Celli Wig on the Calends with his toes in the snow." He drank. "Cei. Find him boots."

---

Gwrhyr walked him to the gate. It was after noon, and the snow had stopped. The sky over the eastern trees was the colour of a pewter plate, and the cold had settled hard. Leofwealh's horse had been fed and rubbed down, and was in a better temper than anyone. The Saxon wore Cei's second-best boots. They were too big for him, and he walked in them like a man wading.

At the gate he stopped.

"Again," he said, in his own tongue. "Her name."

"Put your tongue where you'd put it for an l," said Gwrhyr. "Against the top of your mouth, behind the teeth. Now leave it there and don't make a sound with your throat. Blow past it. On one side."

Leofwealh blew. What came out was a hiss and a wet click and not much else. Glewlwyd, who had come down to open the gate, watched with his arms folded and said nothing, at great cost to himself.

"Again," said Gwrhyr. "Softer. You're not putting out a candle."

The Saxon shut his eyes and tried a third time, and for a single breath it was there. It was not right, but it was nearer than anyone of his people had come: a soft rushing at the side of the tongue, and then the rest of the name after it. Lleucu.

He opened his eyes. He did not say anything. He looked back once at the hall, at the smoke going straight up from the roof into the still air. Then he took the reins and led the horse out through the gate and down the long white slope towards the trees, walking carefully in the borrowed boots.

The holly branch was left behind, pushed upright into the snow against the gatepost. Glewlwyd looked at it for a while and then, since it was green and the Calends and nobody had told him otherwise, he let it stay.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Elendile per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Elendil, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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