by Philip Reeve
And he takes out a great axe, its haft green with moss, its blade shining that silver-green of a spring lake reflecting new birch leaves. He lays it on the flagstones by the fire. Chink. He gazes round at the guests with his green eyes. “Any one of you,” he says, “may strike my head off. Here, I’ll make it easy for you…” And he goes down on one knee and bows his head, and pulls his green hair aside to bare his green neck.
Up jumps Medrawt, ever eager to show his strength and courage. “I’ll meet that challenge!” he shouts. “I’ll cut off your old green head with such a blow it will fly out of that door you’ve so rudely left open and all the way back across the sea to Ireland!” And he takes his stance beside the kneeling green man, and lifts up the axe, all sharp and shiny in the firelight.
“Just one condition,” says our green friend, before the blade comes down. “If you cut off my head today, you’ll have to let me cut off yours tomorrow. That’s fair.”
Medrawt hesitates. (The listeners chuckle, imagining the look on the young man’s face.) He senses a trick. In tales like this there’s always a trick, and nothing is ever what it seems. The gold you bring back from the otherworld turns overnight into dry leaves. The pretty lady is an old hag in disguise. Medrawt lowers his sword. His face is almost as green as the stranger’s. (Listening to the tale, he laughs uncomfortably, and accepts the friendly blows and laughter of his comrades. He’s pleased he has a part in the story, but he wishes it had been a braver one.)
Now up steps Arthur, and the listeners go quiet again. They know the real business of the story is beginning. “I won’t let my men face dangers I won’t meet myself,” says the Arthur in the story. And he takes the axe from Medrawt and, quick as lightning, strikes off the green man’s head. Thump. It rolls across the floor. A spatter of green blood comes out of the severed neck, sticky as sap.
Then the headless body stirs. It stretches, and rises to its feet. The guests gasp and stare in horror. (And Myrddin’s listeners gasp and stare along with them.) The body walks to where the head lies and picks it up. The head’s green eyes look about it. The green mouth grins. “I’ll be back tomorrow night to take my turn,” says the head. The body takes up the axe in its other hand, and the green man strides out of the hall and vanishes into the snowy, midwinter dark.
A long day of worry passes. Next night, the gates and doors are barred, and a guard is set all around the fort. But sharp at midnight the green man appears in Arthur’s hall, as whole and sound as when we first saw him. Arthur’s men rage and his women wail and weep, but Arthur stands up, brave to the end, and says, “I’ve made my bargain, and I’ll keep it” (or something such – Myrddin put it better, and included a lot of stuff about how much Arthur cares for his men, and how he’ll miss them). Then he kneels down, and bares his neck, and the green man raises his axe.
Crash! The blade smashes a flagstone in half. (That one there, between your feet, Sagranus.) Arthur is unharmed. He springs up, whole. The green man kneels to him. “Artorius Magnus,” he says, “you’re as brave as they say. I’ll go back to my own country and tell them of your courage, champion of Britain.”
In the silence as the story ends, I look about. I see their faces, and I feel the same look on my own. An enchanted look. It’s not that we believe the story. We all know no green man really came here, or walked around with his head held in his hand. But we feel we’ve heard a kind of truth. Even Arthur feels it, lounging in his big chair with Cunaide at his side and his hound Cabal at his feet. For a moment, the real Arthur and the story Arthur are one and the same, and we know that we are all part of the story, all of us.
XII
A year has passed. It’s my second summer as a boy. I’ve almost forgotten that I ever was a girl. The oak-tops in the cleaves below the fort are a green sea, stirring and shushing in the wind, and the hills beyond them reach away in hazy veils of green and blue to the real sea, which is a distant silvering along the joining place of world and sky. I’ve never seen that real sea close, but I’m about to. Arthur is taking a band of men south to gather taxes from fat farmers. And Myrddin is to go with him, and so am I.
I remember making the horses ready, the work of loading the pack-ponies, hanging their saddles with bags which we hoped would be full of gold when we came home again. I remember stopping nights at thick-walled halls where sulky headmen glowered at us as they grudgingly handed Arthur his tribute. The sky was blue, and the sun was golden, and the roadsides bloomed with meadowsweet and foxgloves. People in the farmsteads said Arthur had brought the summer with him, and that pleased him, though they’d have said the same to any great man who rode by with a gang of warriors behind him.
And I remember a villa in the hills, a Roman-ish place, with slaves to run it still, and plump red cattle grazing the pastureland. Gorse popping in the sunshine as we rode to it along a white track, dust clouding from our horses’ hooves like smoke, and a hawk pinned on the sky high up. The owner of the place looked even sulkier than the rest when Myrddin told him that great Arthur was guarding this land against the Saxons. He said this was the territory of Maelwas, King of Dumnonia, and he had already paid his tribute.
“If this is Maelwas’s land, where is he?” asked Arthur, smiling, looking puzzled. The men behind him laughed. Maelwas was a joke to them, the old king of a land too big for him. Arthur rode on their laugher, laughing himself as he went on, “I don’t see Maelwas hereabout. We crossed into his country days since, and never a welcome have we had. I think Maelwas’s lands are shrinking like the last patch of hair on an old man’s head. I reckon you need someone else to guard you against those Saxons.”
The landowner looked grim, and said he had already paid tribute.
“Then you’ll pay it again,” said Arthur, and he jumped down off his horse and walked past Myrddin and knocked the man down. He didn’t draw his sword, just kept kicking and stamping until the man’s face was one soft mask of blood and his teeth were scattered all about in the dry grass, yellow as gorse-flowers.
The man’s servants and family looked on without speaking or trying to help. Children snuggled into their mothers’ skirts. When Arthur was finished some slaves came forward to drag their master away. “You see what can happen?” Arthur asked the rest, wiping blood-spatter off his face with a corner of his cloak. “You never know when a war-band might ride up here to burn your huts and take your cattle and your women and your gold. You need a strong friend to keep trouble at bay.”
And Bedwyr and me going round with the bags while he spoke, and the servants running indoors to fetch gold coins and pewter dishes and a set of silver spoons with the symbols of Christ on the handles, and that hawk still circling high up.
After that Arthur pointed us east towards a rich church he planned to plunder. But at a ford along the road we met a band of men sent out by Maelwas, who had heard of our coming at last. Insults and arrows went to and fro across the water all through a sweltering day, but it was too hot to fight, and come the sundown we drew back into the woods on our side of the river, and the Dumnonii drew back into theirs. “Arthur doesn’t need a fight with Maelwas,” Myrddin said. “He has made the old man notice him. That’s a start.”
So we turned downriver to the sea, where there was a place that had been held by one of Arthur’s old shield-companions once, a man called Peredur Long-Knife. He was ten years dead, this Long-Knife, and all his sons with him, but his widow was supposed to hold his lands still, and Myrddin reckoned she’d pay well for Arthur’s protection.
We came at evening down a long combe, following aimless sheep-tracks through bracken and bilberries and the scratchy, purple ling, and there was the sea, all shiny pewter and as wide as the world. I’d thought it would be smooth and clear, like a great pond, but it was dark and rough and hummocked, heaving up in white-topped hills. I had to hide my surprise, for Bedwyr and the other boys thought I’d been across it in a boat when I came from Armorica to be my master’s servant. I couldn’t see how anybody could venture out on t
hat restless greyness in a boat. I couldn’t stop glancing at it, for fear it would rise up when I wasn’t looking and drown the land. I didn’t trust that sea one bit.
We rode down to the beach, and our horses snorted and jerked up their heads at the salt air. The sky was a wet slate, scratched all across by the hard voices of the gulls. There was a smell of rot from the tideline, and a village of round huts straggling up to a stronghold on a cliff-top. Door-curtains flapped in the damp air, and a few fishermen’s children ran to hide among the drying nets as we rode by.
“Looks poor,” said Arthur grumpily, as we came up the track to the stone-walled hall. “This was a wasted ride.”
“Maybe they’ll spare men, at least,” Myrddin replied.
“Looking for more men from this place will be like groping for coins in an empty purse.”
Around the rampart of the hall ran a gap-toothed palisade, with dead gulls strung up on it, perhaps in an effort to scare off their friends, who kept screaming overhead, daubing the place with white dazzles of shit. Inside the fence a rash of huts had sprouted. A chapel hunched low in the hall’s lee with its back to the weather. A pack of men with half-shaved heads and flapping, crow-black robes spilled out of it to stare as our horses came through the unguarded gate, clipclopping on the warped boards that made a roadway there. The tallest barred our way. Thistledown hair, he had, and fierce eyes. His robes stuttered round his skinny limbs, cloth so thin you could see his white flesh through the weave. His nose was red, though, and his words ran together, like a man who liked his wine. He held up his shaky hands in front of Arthur’s horse.
“Turn back!” he shouted. “You are men of the sword, and the sword will devour you! Your hands are red with blood! I, Saint Porroc, command you in the name of the Lord of the Seven Heavens, turn back and leave this place!”
The sea-wind took his words and whisked them over the wall and away through the dry dunes and the shivering sea-cabbage. But not before we’d had time to hear them. All down the line of horsemen, riders reached for their swords. No man told Arthur to turn back. Not if he wanted to keep his head on his shoulders.
“But he’s a saint!” I said, nervous.
“A self-appointed saint.” Myrddin gave a soft, scornful laugh. “Britain teems with them.”
Arthur, up at the head of the column, leaned on his horse’s neck and grinned. “And does the lady of the place hire you and these other beggars to be her guards?”
(I looked at the hall. In the doorway, like a ghost, a woman stood watching us.)
“God guards this place!” the old man in the roadway bellowed. “And I am God’s servant. You’ll find no warriors here. No swords, no weapons. Nothing but the love of God.”
I winced, expecting any moment to see Caliburn flash from its sheath and cut the thin, straining stalk of his neck. But Arthur’s moods were always hard to guess. He just laughed.
“Out of my way, old man,” he said.
A kind of mumbling howl went up from the black huddle of monks. Saint Porroc shouted shrilly, “If you kill me, God will whisk me up to Paradise, but you will whirl and scorch for ever in the fires of Hell!” But he didn’t look happy at the prospect of martyrdom. He let slip a strangled shriek when Arthur urged his horse forward, and let it push him awkwardly aside. He stumbled and sat down hard in the gritty sand, where he held up his arms and started shouting Latin. His followers all copied him and their psalms and spittle blew past us on the salt gale as we went on our way up to the hall and dismounted outside.
Peredur Long-Knife’s widow was a small woman with frightened eyes. A big driftwood cross hung round her neck on a rough cord which had made red weals in her flesh. Everything else about her was a shade of grey, as if the tears she’d shed for her lord and all his sons had washed the colour out of her. But she knelt before Arthur, and kissed the hem of his cloak, which I think pleased him after the welcome we’d had in the hills.
“I have no gold to offer you, and no warriors,” she whispered. “This is a place of women. All the men went to the wars, and God did not see fit to send any of them home again. I have no sons now, only my daughter. Saint Porroc guards us. He has been kind enough to build his hermitage here upon my land. It is his prayers that protect us from sea-raiders and horse-thieves.”
Arthur cast his eye over the daughter, who stood further back, staring at us from behind a fence of waiting-women. She was pretty enough, but only a child, no older than me. His gaze slid off her like water off metal and went roving among her older, prettier companions.
“We’ll take no gold from you,” he said, talking to the lady of the place, but with his eyes on one of the serving women. “A bed for the night, and straw for our horses, and a day’s hunting. That’s all we ask of Peredur Long-Knife’s widow.”
Peredur Long-Knife’s widow looked past him to her saint, as if expecting help. None came. She seemed to gather herself, leaning for a moment against the doorpost while she struggled to recollect the right words and ways for greeting war-lords. With a watery effort at a smile she said, “You are welcome, my lord Arthur.”
That night she served a feast for us. Killed and roasted a pig she probably couldn’t spare (though I noticed that Saint Porroc’s monks had pigs a-plenty in pens behind the little chapel). She was so frightened of Arthur that just looking at him seemed to hurt her. Arthur could have helped himself to her place without a thought, and everybody in the hall knew it; you could see it in the wary, watchful looks they gave him through the smoke. The monks outside knew too. When I slipped out to piss I saw a dozen of them standing outside their humpbacked huts, eyes on the hall. They knew they and their angry saint would be booted out if Arthur took the place.
But Arthur had no use for this drab, sandy holding, so far from his other lands. Anyway, he was in a giving mood. He ate the stringy pig and called it good, and drank Peredur Long-Knife’s memory in gritty, vinegarish wine. He nodded approval when the widow’s blushing daughter picked out a tentative, tuneless air upon her harp. He grabbed the serving girl who’d snagged his fancy and sat her on his lap and shouted to my master for a story.
So Myrddin, who’d seen the hunting-spears being sharpened ready for tomorrow’s sport, told us the tale of another hunt that Arthur had ridden out on, and somehow the real hunt merged into a magical hunt where Arthur and his companions took the places of the old heroes, and the boar they were hunting became Twrch Trwyth, the great boar of the island of Britain, and they chased him deeper and deeper into dark old thickets of story until Arthur speared him and snatched from between his two ears the magic comb.
And we slept by the fire that night, wrapped in our cloaks, dreaming of riding through ancient woods, with the white tail of Twrch Trwyth flashing ahead of us and the spears in our right hands so sharp we heard the air sing as the blades sliced it.
I woke to a booming, sunlit morning. The doors of the hall were open, and a sea-wind was whisking up the ashes in the fireplace. The light kept dimming suddenly as a cloud masked the sun and bursting out again, golden, world-filling. Even the gulls sounded happier.
The men and boys of Arthur’s band were waking up around me, scrambling to their feet and shaking the wine-fog from their heads. Bedwyr, all tousle-haired, tugged me away to ready our masters’ horses for the hunt. He was itchy with excitement at the day ahead. “A hunt’s not like war,” he said earnestly. “In a hunt we’re the equal of the grown men. Speed and wits may take the quarry, where weight and strength mean nothing. I hunted often in my father’s lands when I was younger.”
I nodded, trying not to show how I really felt about the idea of riding our wiry little ponies fast across those hummocky, tussocked cliff-tops. I tried to look as if I had hunted before, too; as if I’d spent my summers chasing the boar Twrch Trwyth instead of dipping for minnows in the withy-ponds. And when I thought about the tales Myrddin had spun for us in the firelight I found it wasn’t so hard, after all, to imagine myself a great hunter. You could see the same thing in Bedwyr�
�s face, and in the faces of the other men as they got ready, shouting for spears and calling dogs to heel. The spell of the story was still at work in us, and we were all eager to prove what heroes we were.
My master, stepping out blinking into the sunlight, tipped cold water on my imaginings. “You’ll stay here with me, Gwyn.”
“But your horse is ready, master,” I said.
“Unready her, then,” snapped Myrddin. “Do you really think I would risk my neck galloping through those tangle-woods? I leave hunting to the horsemen. Besides, they say that dragon’s teeth and giant’s bones may be found along this shore, and I mean to look for some. Fetch a bag, and come with me.”
I blushed hotly, half relieved and half ashamed at being kept from the hunt. Other boys laughed as I tramped back to the hall. One of the men – Owain, maybe – called out, “Let the boy come, Myrddin,” but of course my master would not relent. I knew what he was frightened of. Injuries are common on the hunting field. What if I fell, and someone tried to tend me, and discovered what I really was?
I could hear the horns sounding as I climbed the stairs to the chamber where Myrddin had been quartered (no blanket by the hearth for Arthur’s enchanter). As I rummaged through his things for the old sack he wanted I could hear the clatter of the departing horses. I felt as if they were taking something of mine away with them as they rode along the cliff-road, through the gorse.
