Shadow of the King

by Helen Hollick

  “It was not this quiet even when my father was away in Gaul with the men, when Mam thought him to be dead,” Archfedd said.

  Medraut shifted uncomfortable in the saddle. When Arthur had been with him and Morgaine. Archfedd did not notice his discomfort, that was all a long time ago, she had been a child then, all she remembered was her Mam’s unhappiness and her own enjoyment when she had been with the children of Geraint’s stronghold. Distant days of childhood summers. She had swum in the sea, played on the sand and ridden Briallen in the undulating, sunbaked hills. A child’s order of priority. She had been well cared for and loved by Enid, Geraint’s wife. Of course she missed Gwenhwyfar when she had gone over the sea, but she would have missed the pony more!

  They dismounted, put the horses in stables, dismissed the escort, Archfedd sending a slave to fetch water and feed for the animals. The few servants around – and the gatekeeper as they had entered – had nodded polite greeting to her, but it was not extended to Medraut. Archfedd assumed they did not know him for who he was, took him as another of her escort. It was possible, for he was dressed soberly in plain riding gear, bearing no shield or elaborate sword, having no identifying badge. He had been away a long time. Twelve years. There would be those who did not recognise him.

  They shied away from the Hall, wandered instead through the low archway, along the side of the granary and into the maze of narrow alleyways between the huddle of dwelling-places; a village in itself, where the married Artoriani who chose to, lived with wife and family. Here there were more people, women Archfedd knew.

  The wife to one of the senior Decurions invited them into her house-place, a building eight man-strides by ten, reed-thatched, wattle-walled, one third two-storied, made as a slatted loft, hay scattered, several blankets. Here, the children would sleep. The central hearth-fire with the inevitable cooking pot, lazy smoke rising to linger between the roof-beams before meandering out through the smoke-hole. Simple furniture, a bed, stools, a wooden clothes-chest. In one corner, a loom. Cooking pots, wooden and pottery bowls. Herbs hanging from the beams among the salted and smoked meats.

  Bechan her name, with a brood of youngsters from babe to one almost man-grown. “There are a few folk up at the Hall,” she explained to Archfedd, “but with so many away it seems so large and empty. Come, sit, eat.” She ladled broth into wooden bowls, handed them to her unexpected guests. A few of the children were grouped, owl-eyed, squatting close for self-protection at the far side of the hearth. Mostly girl-children, a few boys.

  “Why so many gone, Bechan?” Archfedd asked, spooning the delicious venison broth. The ride had been long, she was hungry.

  Medraut added, “My father, to my knowledge, has never before drained so many Artoriani from the Caer. Always, he left a minimum of three turmae.” One hundred men, plus those who could not, for various reasons, report for duty. Caer Cadan was a place of great importance, the symbol of a king, its defence as strategic as any border. Only when Arthur had been thought dead had it fallen this silent, this unused.

  “More broth?” Bechan asked Archfedd.

  “I understand from the gatekeeper the senior command here is placed with a man named Marcus Alexios.” Medraut persisted with his questioning, aware she was reluctant to speak with him. “I do not know him.”

  “I believe I do,” Archfedd interjected. “A big man, with hair as red as a fox’s brush?”

  “A competent man,” Bechan confirmed, offering her wine. “Decurion of Blue Turma. He is out with a hunting party.”

  Archfedd nodded. Aye, Marcus Alexios, as Bechan said, a competent man. But not one of her father’s best, certainly not the one she would have expected her father to leave in command here. Bechan poured wine for Medraut, her lips pressed closed; busied herself with her youngest a while, seeing to soiled clothing, his feeding. Medraut exchanged a glance with his half-sister. There was something here Bechan was not willing to speak of. It shouted at them with the clarion of the war horns.

  “My father,” Medraut began, trying again, “has been warring with Cerdic the Saxon since the day of his son’s birthing.”

  “You would know much of that matter.” It was not quite spoken with hostility, but there was a sharpness there, a distinct rebuttal.

  “They have met in battle before.” He forced Bechan to meet his eyes, momentarily only, for the woman looked away, concentrated on suckling her babe. “In the name of God, Bechan,” Medraut insisted, “what is happening? What is different about this confrontation?”

  “You need ask?” she responded with a quick hiss of anger. “You, who served with Cerdic? Accepted shelter within his Hall.” Annoyed, Medraut was about to snap an answer, Archfedd set her hand on his arm, a brief shake of her head.

  “That was in the past, Bechan. We heard our father was ill. That is why we have come here. Surely,” she paused, regarded the woman with a look that showed all too plain whose daughter she was, her head dipped to one side, one eyebrow raised, the other eye slight closed. “Surely,” she repeated, “he is now well?”

  Bechan had started to rock her child backwards and forwards, the slow, rhythmical movement of a mother with her babe, a comfort from grief. She lifted the child to beneath her chin, held him, close, protective. She was silently weeping, her face buried in the bundle that was the child. Her eldest boy climbed to his feet, went behind her, placed his hands on her shoulders.

  “Na,” she said, through her tears. “Na, he is well enough, but… ” She lifted her head, wiped at her face, “but would you expect a man of his years, who is still weakened by the fever, to go into battle? That,” she said with sudden venom lashing at Medraut, “ought be for a loyal son to do!”

  Medraut was shocked. Her hatred so virulent.

  “My father says you are a traitor,” the lad behind Bechan sniped. “He says, if you were a son worthy of his father you would not have turned against him, would not have taken up with the Saxons.”

  Startled at the attack, Archfedd defended her brother, who sat stunned, mute. “My brother is no traitor, else I would not be with him! What happened in the past has been misconstrued – and he was with Cerdic to spy for us, the British. His life was daily at risk.”

  The boy spat saliva into the fire, sending sparks hissing, showing he did not believe her. The woman had not attempted to reprimand her son, to silence him.

  “Is this how others think?” Archfedd snapped, jumping to her feet, her fists resting on her hips. “Is this why we have been greeted by hostility and lack of manners? I remind you of who I am. Of who my brother is!”

  Medraut groaned inwardly. Would the mistakes of the past never leave? Had they all, then, assumed the worst of him this while? The letters he had sent these years to his father and Gwenhwyfar, the gifts. Had they not been recognised for what they were, a willingness to apologise, to ask forgiveness? Gwenhwyfar had answered him – once or twice only, admittedly – but surely with Arthur’s approval? Now he was not so sure. Had he left it too long to come back? Twelve years too long?

  “Aye,” Bechan said to Archfedd, her nose wrinkling as if there were some foul smell in the place. “We know who your brother is. A Saex-loving cur, who deserted his father. Who tore Lord Arthur’s heart, and cared not he had done so.” She said no more, but the words in her eyes were as plain as any spoken. Desertion, the worst crime a soldier could commit, worse even than murder or rape.

  Again, Archfedd hotly spoke up. “My brother is no deserter. He is here – we are here – to join our father. We ride again within the hour.”

  Medraut lifted his head from his hands, caught at her arm. “You must stay here, I will go.”

  “Aye,” Bechan sneered her contempt. “You will go. To the Pendragon? Or are you to run to Cerdic, tell him what you now know? That no lord cared to answer your father’s summons. That after Cerdic had threatened the King here at his own hearth, the lords melted back to their own lands like mist on a summer’s morn. Is that why you are here? To confirm to the Saex th
e British lords are like you, cowards and unwhelped pups who will not fight with their King because they know he cannot win?”

  “My father does not need the help of the lords,” Archfedd boasted. “He has fought often enough with Artoriani alone. He does not make use of mercenary force unless it is necessary.” She spun on her heel, flounced for the open door, calling Medraut to follow.

  Slowly, he stood. He brought a dagger into his hand, a slim-bladed, beautifully crafted thing. The battered, misshapen gold ring on his hand glinted. How, as a child, he had wanted that dagger as his own! How heavy it had been to carry since the day his father had given it.

  With a steady gaze he regarded the woman who was also standing, the babe, full-fed, draped over her shoulder, her son, arms folded in attitude of defiance, beside her.

  “I am no traitor,” he said. “I left my father because I knew how it pained him to see, daily, that I was, as you rightly say, a cowardly, unwhelped pup. I have never fought, I have never seen battle.” Medraut swallowed. “In all my miserable life, I have never held the courage to harm another man.” He could hear Archfedd outside, making her way up towards the stables, bellowing orders to have fresh horses immediately saddled. He turned to go, but at the door-place retraced his steps, back again to the hearth-fire.

  “To take all the Artoriani with him and leave so few here, I am thinking it must be, this time then, necessary?”

  The woman nodded. A single, jerked movement of confirmation.

  V

  Cerdicesford, the English called it later, when the mess of battle was cleared away, when the ravens had glutted their bellies on the carnage and the bones had began to bleach as the sun rode with blazing heat for most of that summer, across the sky.

  Where the sloping hills came down to the marsh river Cerdic waited for his father, and there took stand against the Artoriani. Ready, this time, with a thousand men behind his banner, ready to withstand the fear of the horses, ready to fight until an end should take one of them.

  They rode, as ever, the Artoriani; wearing red cloaks and white tunics, their hearts high, large with courage. They rode with pride behind the Pendragon’s Banner, knowing they faced an opponent who, this time, would not run.

  The officers, the Decurions, one of them husband to Bechan, a woman who had a brood of children to care for at Caer Cadan, who would be, within the first hour of fighting, a widow. The turmae, Red, Blue, Green, all the others, thirty men to each; bold, fearless men who loved their lord above all else. Even life itself.

  Many, too many, almost all, put that love to the ultimate test that day at Cerdicesford.

  Beside the Pendragon, his kindred, those he loved. To his left, his wife, Gwenhwyfar, her hair tied in a single braid for battle; in her hand her sword, the one he had given her, oh, so long, long, ago. Next to her, Archfedd. She had never fought before in battle and Arthur had ordered her away, but she had too much of him and her mother bred within her. Too damned stubborn. Bedwyr would have preferred to have ridden with them, to have been beside Gwenhwyfar, for to die with her would be better than dying without her, but he had the left to command, his task it was to stop the Saex crossing the river, from coming behind. He failed. There were not enough of the British. Too many of the English.

  To Arthur’s right, his son, pale-faced and fearful. Not of the Saxons, even though there were so many. So many! Na, he was afraid he might again fail his father.

  Take heart, Arthur had said to him as they waited, the horses fretful, wanting to be released, to run, to charge that shield-wall of Saxons that prickled death over there, beside the rush of the river. Dying is not so bad. It can only happen to you the once.

  He had smiled at his son. And Medraut knew, then, that he was forgiven and that whatever else might happen, he would do his best for his father, the Pendragon.

  The land stretched quiet in sleep, with only the creatures of the night scuttling between the pockets of shadow. The stars. Uncountable, scattered as if some great, godly hand had recklessly tossed them there against the beauty of that vast, unending expanse of darkness. The air smelt deliciously warm and damp, a heady, pleasant, earthy scent of summer. The streams chattered as they rushed; the wider, slower rivers bumbling along, while the night-calm water of the lake beneath Yns Witrin shimmered gracefully under the caress of a light, teasing, night breeze. A few waves lapped dreamily against the rushes. A frog plopped below the surface; a nesting water bird rustled, agitated.

  Gwenhwyfar, the protective height of the Tor at her back, knelt beside her Lord, the fold of her bloodied and torn cloak draping over him. The night was mild, but he was cold, his hands, his face, without warmth. Her head was up, her green eyes gazing, unseeing, over the spread of the star-silvered Summer Land. An immense feeling of unbearable loneliness was tightening about her shoulders, heavy, weighted, like an ill-made cloak.

  They had brought him here – she, Archfedd and Bedwyr – a difficult journey, knowing what they left behind and what they faced. But it was best to travel quickly and in secret, to seem no more than any landowner with a horse-drawn cart travelling away from the great victory of the Saxons, and the revenge that would be Cerdic’s. Although that word would not, yet, have spread. It would. Very soon, it would.

  Archfedd was sleeping, curled beneath her cloak, the tears dried on her cheeks streaked against the smatter of blood. She would return to Llawfrodedd, raise her sons into manhood, but for Archfedd, for all the years she was still to live, she would never laugh again, nor flinch at the cruelties one man could inflict upon another. For Camlann, as the British named it – the battle that finally ended Roman Britain and made Cerdic into the first King of the dynasty of Wessex – Camlann would never be superseded by anything, anything at all.

  Bedwyr was nearby, somewhere beside the lake, cleaning the wound to his arm, Gwenhwyfar thought. They would put Arthur’s sword there soon, give it into the waters so none might find it and use it for their own. So Cerdic would never, even by chance, have it.

  At least Cynric had not been there among the Saxons. He had kept his word of truce, for he had honour within him. He had refused to fight against his grandsire – his father? Once, Gwenhwyfar had heard it said that Cynric was thought to have been Arthur’s son. Had heard it from that Saxon of Mathild’s, Eadric, was it? It was nonsense of course… and yet…maybe it was not. Ah, it would have been well to know that Arthur’s seed would one day rule the English with honour and respect, but rumour was not proof. Although she had never forgotten that time outside the gates of Caer Morfa when the boy, Cynric, had looked into her eyes and let her and her grandson pass. He had not had a shadow of Cerdic or Winifred behind those eyes, for he had stared at her with the look of Arthur. A look she knew so well, so very well.

  A sigh, falling as quiet as an autumn-curled leaf, escaped Arthur’s breath. Gwenhwyfar smiled down at him, her fingers tightening, with such love, around his.

  “I am for the Otherworld, Cymraes.” He announced it as a fact, a statement. Nothing hysterical or dramatic. It was so.

  Gwenhwyfar squeezed his hand. His skin was slightly damp, she could feel his trembling. He was afraid. As was she.

  “It seems,” he added, “I have been long enough in this.”

  Simply she answered, “Aye, it would seem so.”

  The stars. The souls of the dead. A thousand, thousand eyes watching, unblinking. Waiting. One fell, blazing a trail of a last triumph, burning brightly and briefly before it faded, was gone. Was that one for Medraut, Gwenhwyfar wondered? He deserved a star to fall for him, to mark his passing. There would be no grave for him, no burials for the Artoriani who had died, for so few remained to tidy away the dead. He had died, as had they all, with courage in his heart. Had died knowing the Pendragon would not be far behind.

  Again, she squeezed Arthur’s hand as he said, “From the humblest creature to the wondrous thing that is a star, everything must die when it comes to its time of ending.”

  With her other hand she touched th
e flop of hair across his forehead that had, since first she had ever known him, been so irritatingly untidy. Not to him, but to the night darkness, to the stillness of the silent Tor and the starlit ripples on the Lake, she answered; “As long as there is someone willing to tell the story and another eager to listen, a man such as you will be forever remembered. Though they may forget what you did and why, and they may mistake the minor parts played by others in the tale.”

  The wind hushed across the Tor, dancing through the grass, teasing the reeds beside the lake, and whispered to itself as it twirled away up the valley towards the distant hills marking the place that had been Caer Cadan.

  “But none shall forget your name,” Gwenhwyfar said on a tear-caught breath. “None shall forget the man who was once the Pendragon. Arthur. My King.”

  Author’s Note

  Few historians are prepared to accept the dates and events listed in sources such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bede and Gildas as entirely accurate. Rather, these records represent a broad – and biased – sweep of events. It is so frustrating there are so few undeniable facts for this muddled era of British history. We know what happened, occasionally where, but not precisely when. Even these early written records rarely agree with each other in the matter of dates. The timing of Easter, which was in disagreement for many years, stirred the whole confusion of dating into a further, fogged mess. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for instance, lists some events – notably the “history” of Wessex – twice, with a difference of nineteen years for the same event. So, if even in the tenth century, when it was written, they were not certain of the dates, what chance do we have one thousand years later? In the end, I gave up trying to make sense of it all and decided to leave the nit-picking to the professionals. I therefore freely admit my dates are manipulated – within the realms of plausibility – to fit my tale; for after all, the three books of the Pendragon’s Banner Trilogy are novels, loosely woven around the few definite things that happened. In this, the third book, I have on the whole, used the earlier version of the nineteen-year discrepancy. For instance, Cerdic landed at Cerdicesora with his five ships in 476 or 495, and could have fought his battle at Cerdicesford in 500 or 519.