by Philip Reeve
“One day Arthur will set up his standard, and the kings of Britain will flock to him like starlings,” Myrddin said. “King Maelwas of the Dumnonii has as good as promised that Arthur will command his warband come the fighting season. With all those warriors behind him, he’ll be the new Ambrosius. He’ll win the lost lands back, and the Saxons will throw themselves into the sea to escape him.”
He was so sure that it would happen that I didn’t think to doubt him. But it frightened me, the thought of all that war to come. Why did Myrddin want it so bad? Why did he seem so fierce, when he spoke about the Saxons? Sometimes I thought, why not let Arthur hold his territory and all the other kings hold theirs and leave the Saxons quiet in the lands they’d settled? But I didn’t speak that thought, in case it sounded womanish.
At Din Tagyll, from the heights above the sea, I watched the ships go out on the evening tide. In winter Din Tagyll is too storm-threshed for any but a few mad monks to live there, but in summer King Cunomorus makes it his capital, and the steep headland’s sides bloom bright with flags and awnings, and in the cove below the ships drop anchor. I watched their sails fill with the wind as they slipped clear of the cliff’s lee, and they went out like swans over the wide ocean. Some of the men who sailed them had skin as black as coal. They were bound for shores I couldn’t even imagine; lands of leopards and unicorns; harbours whose names burst sweetly in my mouth like ripe grapes. Alexandria. Antioch. Constantinople.
After midsummer we turned back. I’d hoped we’d go along the south coast, and maybe to Peredur Long-Knife’s place. I would have liked to see what had become of Peri. But we stayed north, keeping to the shore of the Severn-sea, then striking inland towards the country I’d been born in; to Ban’s hall, which was held for Arthur by the Irishman.
It was around then that I started to realize my master had plans to work a fresh enchantment on me. After so long on the road, my hair hung almost to my shoulders. One morning, as we were saddling the horses in a dell where we’d spent the night, I spoke of finding some shears to cut it.
He shook his head. “You’ll not pass as a lad much longer,” he said. “That old fox Maelwas was right.”
I got frightened. I thought maybe he meant to leave me behind in those same soggy hills he’d got me from. I thought he meant to marry me to some shepherd, or one of the rough chieftains whose halls we’d been passing nights in. I went down on the earth and hugged his knees and said, “Please, master, let me come back to Sulis with you. I’ve been a good servant, haven’t I?”
Myrddin smoothed my too-long hair. I wasn’t looking at his face, so I don’t know if he was smiling, but I like to think there was a smile about him as he said, “You’ve been a good boy, Gwyn. But you’ll be a better girl. It’ll be Gwyna who rides back with me at fall-of-leaf.”
His words kicked the breath out of me. I suppose I’d always known it would have to come, but not yet, surely? “I don’t want to be a girl!” I cried. “I’ll never be able to go home. People will recognize me!”
“Of course they won’t,” said Myrddin. “Half a year will have gone by. Do you think they have statues of your head standing around Aquae Sulis as if you were some old emperor? You will go back in a woman’s dress, with your long hair loose. You will walk like a girl and talk like a girl, and they will think, ‘That maiden looks a little like Gwyn,’ if they think anything at all. And I shall tell them you are Gwyn’s kin, and they will think of you no more.”
“But I don’t know how to be a girl!” I told him. “I’ll have to do the things that women do…” I gaped like a fish, groping about for examples. I barely knew the things that women did. “Sewing and stitching and spinning and brewing barley-beer… What will they think when I don’t know how to do those things?”
“Then you must learn.”
“I’ll be no good at them. Slow and clumsy.”
“Gwyna,” he said. (His firmest voice, the one that brooked no replies.) “You will be a young woman soon. You’ll look more out of place in Arthur’s war-band then than you will fumbling your weaving-work in his wife’s house.”
“His wife?”
“Of course. Do you think I want a woman servant? You’ll join Gwenhwyfar’s household. Be one of her waiting-women.”
I thought of Gwenhwyfar’s house, which was a little small building, half hidden behind Arthur’s big hall. I thought of the graceful, perfect girls she kept about her there, slender as withies. “She’ll not take me.”
“She will. To please Arthur.”
“But I don’t want to,” I said, like a little child. I could feel the tears tickling my cheeks and creeping in salty at the corners of my mouth. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“Since when did it begin to matter what you want?” said Myrddin angrily, and turned away from me, stalked off with his shoulders hunched up like an old hoodie crow. Hid his face with one brown, bony hand like he was trying to rub the image of me off his eyeballs. Then turned and came back, kinder. “I have another purpose in this, Gwyna. When you are part of Gwenhwyfar’s household you will keep your eyes open, and whatever you see you will bring to me.”
“You want me to spy on her?”
“It would be wise for me to know what goes on in her mind. She is the wife of the Dux Bellorum after all. I should know what goes on in her heart, and who could tell me that better than one of her own waiting-women?”
I wiped my tears, and hiccuped, feeling glad that he did not want to cast me off entirely.
“Now come,” he said, “I want to sleep at your old lord’s home on the hill tonight. We have miles to go yet.”
He kicked his horse’s flanks and it trotted ahead, leaving me to follow. I didn’t try telling him the other thing I disliked about becoming a girl again – that it would mean the end of my friendship with Bedwyr.
But riding on, I started to see that my friendship with Bedwyr was almost ended anyway. Those last few months in Sulis there’d seemed a barrier between us, like the horn pane of a lantern. He was almost a man, with a scruffy stubble of beard that he was vastly proud of, and a host of boastful tales about his skill at hunting. He’d ride as a warrior with the war-band when the next fight came. I remembered the way that he and the other boys talked about girls. They hadn’t the courage yet to talk to girls, but they talked about them endlessly. They watched them at the marketplace. Their heads turned like the heads of watchful birds when Gwenhwyfar’s handmaidens passed them in the street. They laughed, and scoffed, and compared one with another, and I couldn’t join in that talk. It uneased me to hear the way they spoke. How hard they thought of girls’ bodies, and how little of their feelings. Like women were just creatures to be used and traded. They respected horses better.
I was sure Bedwyr never guessed the truth about me, but I knew I unsettled him. My smooth cheeks, and my voice that had never cracked and deepened as his had. Perhaps he thought my master had put me under an enchantment, so that I would never grow.
We skirted the borders of the Irishman’s country, and turned towards my old home up the river-road. In the afternoon, when the flies hung in lazy clouds above the water, we came to the pool with the waterfall where it had all begun for me.
My skull was filled up with a moil of thoughts. While the horses drank from the shallows I knelt down and stared at my reflection in the water, and tried to see something girlish in my sunburned face. “Gwyna,” I tried saying. And it was like I was calling her back from the dead.
XXIV
The old farmstead where I’d grown up had been rebuilt, and roofed with thick, fresh thatch. There were red cattle lowing in a pound, and children playing in the river when we came riding past at set of sun. They followed us a little way, naked and shrieking with laughter, calling out to Myrddin to tell them a story, for they’d seen the harp among his saddlebags and guessed his trade. They didn’t look at me, and if any of them were my friends from the old times, I didn’t recognize them. A lot of water had flowed downstream since then.
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br /> The Irishman was summering at Ban’s old holding. It was better than his own damp hall in the hills, I dare say. He had got an Irish wife from Demetia with red cheeks and a quick smile, and their children squabbled like puppies beside his hearth. He seemed a happy Irishman, though when Myrddin raised the matter of the yearly tribute he owed Arthur he was quick to say how hard his life was; how half his cows had died last winter, and Cunomorus of Kernyw kept sending raiding-bands to rob his tinners on the moors.
In return, Myrddin told him news from the east; Arthur’s latest victories; the battle at Badon and the wedding to Gwenhwyfar. And when he had done he drew me forward out of the shadows where I’d been standing, and said, “This is Gwyna.”
It was strange to hear my name made whole again after so long being Gwyn. “Yes,” said my master, “I know she looks boyish, but she is a girl. Look closely. You see?”
They looked closely. They saw. My smooth face and slender fingers and the beginnings of my small breasts under my tunic. The Irishman gave a grunt of surprise.
“I brought her with me out of the mountains beyond Bannawg,” Myrddin explained. “There is a dragon in those parts, and the people of the place make a sacrifice to it every year of three maidens.”
The Irishman and his wife leaned forward, hooked. The cup bearers and the guards at the door pricked up their ears to listen, and even the children on the floor stopped pinching each other. I wondered what life my master was inventing for me, and did my best to look like I came from dragon-country.
“Well,” Myrddin went on, “Gwyna’s father swore he’d not let his little girl be breakfast for some worm. So when she was born he let it be known that his wife had given birth to a boy, and he dressed the child as a boy, and let her run with the boys of his place, and it is as a boy that she has lived ever since. But now that she is almost a woman, the ruse is wearing thin, and so I agreed to take her back to Aquae Sulis with me, there to enter the service of the lady Gwenhwyfar.”
The Irishman nodded, as if this was the only reasonable thing to do, where dragons were involved.
“Trouble is,” Myrddin went on, looking into the guest cup and finding it empty, holding it out for a slave to refill, “the trouble is, she knows nothing of the ways of women. She knows about horses, and the hunt. She has fought against the heathen Scots who plague her country whenever the dragon rests. But of being a maiden among other maidens she knows nothing at all.”
The Irishman frowned slowly, realizing that something was being asked of him. “Then let her stay here a while!” he said suddenly. It was Myrddin who had put the idea in his mind, of course, but he thought it was his own, and seized on it, and flourished it proudly as a sign of his loyalty to Arthur and to Arthur’s friend. “Yes! Let her stay here with Nonnita! Nonnita will teach her everything! Weaving and … and … the rest of it. Yes! Anything to help Myrddin!”
And so I stayed there through the summer’s golden end, with Nonnita and her ladies, while Myrddin went travelling off alone, carrying new tales of Arthur down into Kernyw.
At first I lived in fear of running into someone I’d known when the hall was Lord Ban’s place, but all Ban’s followers were dead, or fled, or scattered off as slaves across the world, and I was never challenged. I doubt they would have known me anyway, for I’d been an urchin then, and now I was a maiden, with a dress of wool dyed kingfisher blue and a russet cloak that did up at the shoulder with a tin brooch. The clothes were faded, and had belonged to a girl who’d died of fever in the spring, but they fitted me. I was still enough of a boy not to care much about clothes.
The girls and women of the household didn’t like me. They thought I was strange and clumsy and spoke too loud. But slowly I learned from them the things women do. They don’t speak to the menfolk unless they’re spoke to first, that’s one. They don’t tuck up their skirts and run. They sit for hours stitching and mending, which is slow torture, and embroidering, which is worse. They spin wool and linen. They weave cloth, singing in time to the clack of the clay weights which swing against the loom’s frame. They steep meat in brine-barrels, and grind flour. They knead soft dough into loaves, getting flour on their arms and their cheeks and the tips of their noses. They make cheese, and butter, and cream, and buttermilk. They brew beer. They giggle. They whisper. They gossip.
It wasn’t for me, that life. I missed Dewi and I missed my master. I promised myself I’d talk to him when he came back; plead with him, beg him, make him understand. “I tried being girlish,” I’d tell him, “and it didn’t work. I’ve been too long a boy. My voice isn’t right. I don’t move like the rest of them. My stitches don’t hold. My yarn gets tangled. My loaves are soft as wet wool, or hard like river stones.” And I told myself that Myrddin would see. He’d see his mistake. He’d find some other way, and I’d be a boy again.
“What was that dragon like?” they asked, every day or so, until I cursed Myrddin for thinking up such a story. “Did you see it at all? Did you ever hear it roar?”
“I heard it once,” I told them. “I couldn’t not. It was loud enough to shiver rocks down off the mountainside. And I saw it fly over. Big as three horses it was, with bat’s wings and bear’s claws and a snake’s tail.”
“Was it red or green?”
I thought quick. “It was every colour. Red, green, all the colours of the rainbow. It rippled with colours. And in its jaws it carried a poor maiden from the village, as big as Rhiannedd.” And I pointed at the plumpest of the lady Nonnita’s girls, who turned pastry-coloured and began to twitter. The rest stared wide-eyed at me, like girls who would have nightmares later.
That night, like punishment for my lies, I woke with griping in my belly, and a sudden marshiness about the mattress under me. When I touched that damp and lifted up my hand into the moon-glow from the window my fingers were wet and dark with blood.
I thought I was dying. I’d not seen that much blood since Badon, and then it had been other people’s, not spilling out of my own secret insides. My cries woke up the other girls, and they thought I was as big a joke as I’d thought them when I was scaring them with dragonstories. It was only my monthlies, said Nonnita. It was the same for every woman in the world. We had tides, like the sea. The moon called forth our blood. Did I not know that?
Well, I’d heard something of it. But I’d thought myself too boyish to suffer it. I lay and snivelled while the others settled back into sleep. It seemed to me my own body had betrayed me, and sided with Myrddin. There’d be no way back into boyhood for me now. What would the warband make of me washing bloody rags once monthly?
But later, when I’d learned to cope with it, as we have to cope with all things we have no hope of changing, later I thought, Myrddin must have known. The same craft that let him know when rain was coming, or a mist would rise, had warned him what would soon be happening inside me. If we’d turned east instead of west after Ynys Wydryn, if we’d gone back to Sulis in the normal way, it might have been Bedwyr and the other boys I’d woken in my panic when it started.
Halfway through apple-harvest Myrddin returned, and said it had come time to leave. I was surprised by how sorry I felt, to be saying farewell to Nonnita and fat Rhiannedd and the rest. But I packed up my few belongings, and the things I had learned, and set off behind him again, riding eastward through the first of the autumn’s rain. Now I was a girl I rode sideways on Dewi, which felt awkward and unnatural. The colour seeped out of my blue dress and sprinkled off my toes in sky-blue drips. My shoes shrank and pinched my feet, and my newly long hair hung down in rain-dark rat’s tails round my face. The west wind blew up my skirts and chilled my damp legs through. I hunched inside my cloak and consoled myself with daydreams where I was a boy again, and running after my brother Bedwyr towards adventures. There were no adventures in my future now, I thought, glaring bitterly at Myrddin’s back. Women don’t have them. They just suffer when their men’s adventures go wrong.
We went slower and slower as we drew near Sulis. Myrddin ke
pt thinking of reasons why we should turn off the road and call in at scruffy settlements where he could exchange his songs and stories for a meal and a place to sleep and a few cups of watered wine. I think he was afraid of learning what Arthur had been up to in his absence. Like a father who leaves his children alone for the first time. But when we reached the crown of the hills that stand behind the town, and looked down, it all seemed much as I remembered. It was a day of sunlight and sudden, shining showers, and the red roofs of the old Roman buildings were as bright as the autumn woods.
A few miles from the walls stood a place that must have been a rich man’s house in the olden times, with outbuildings and slaves’ quarters and a smithy of its own. It was all fallen into ruins, but a part of the main house was still roofed over and Myrddin turned in at the gateway. A man and woman were waiting there, country people from a nearby steading. They fell down bowing at the sight of us. “Welcome, Lord Myrddin,” the man called out. “It has all been made as your messenger commanded.”
“This is my new home,” he told me, leaving them to quarter our horses and taking me inside, into a long room smelling of fresh lime-wash. He’d sent word from the Irishman’s place, and hired the man and woman to make the house ready, and bring his few possessions there from his old place in Aquae Sulis. He said, “If Arthur is to lead the armies of Britain he must be seen to be a Christian lord, and keep magic and wizards at arm’s length. The old ways still speak to his soldiers and the common people, and they will know I am close. But when he talks to Maelwas’s envoys he must be able to deny me. He must be able to say, ‘Myrddin? That old trickster? No, he has no place in my town…’”
