“I am also Dumnonian by birth,” he explained. “And we have wheat from near Mor Hafren every harvest.”
I knew that, because my father took the cart up to Camlann every harvest, with some other holders from our area, and sold the wheat, but I had not expected the Emperor to know. “My father, Sion ap Rhys, grows some of that wheat, Great Lord, and he is glad to sell it to the Pendragon, as I am glad to be here.”
Arthur grinned suddenly. “Prettily said, man. You’ll have no trouble when your lord takes you on an embassy.” He sat at the table, took a glass of wine, and nodded for the rest to sit as well. “And, as regards embassies, I must see you,” he said, addressing Gwalchmai again, “regarding that journey to Caledon, for there are a few things I wish you to explain further. Dear God, you need have no fear; I won’t send you back there yet.”
“I thank you for that, for once. My horse needs a rest.”
“Less than you need one. Rejoice: till the spring comes I will give you nothing to do but write letters, confer with ambassadors, translate Irish into good Latin and vice versa, and look after your horse. My friend, you were a fool to swear your oath to me.”
“I consider it otherwise. Am I not to do accounts, copy your books, or give advice on the new building plans, then? How are the plans going?”
“If you wish, I will let you do all of those, except the accounts. Gwynhwyfar has taken to saying that everyone else makes chaos of them, and does them all herself. But the plans—well, we will begin the new store house after the thaw; I decided not to put it next to the old one, but down the hill…”
“Near Gereint’s house?”
“No, eastwards…” After a few minutes of this, Arthur tired of trying to sketch the planned building on the table in wine lees, and leapt up offering to show what he meant. The idea of tramping about the fortress gave me no great pleasure just then, however, for my legs were sore from all the riding. I offered instead to carry our gear to wherever Gwalchmai wanted it carried. Agravain, rather surprisingly, offered to show me the house he and his brother shared with another prestigious warrior. So while Arthur, Gwalchmai and Bedwyr swept off to inspect the building site, I picked up the two sets of saddle-bags and began to collect spears.
Agravain watched me impatiently and finally exclaimed, “My brother’s servant, and you don’t know how to carry a spear! Here.” He picked the spears up in a way that I could not see differed from my way in the slightest, and walked off briskly. I fumbled around to find the shield and ran after him, nearly dropping one of the saddle-bags as I hurried to catch up.
The house was a pleasant one, soundly built of mud and wattle, neatly whitewashed, and with a thick thatch. It stood to the east of the Hall, and from the doorway one could look out at the tor of Ynys Witrin standing like a watch tower against the marshy plain that leads to the Saxon kingdoms. Inside, however, it was a mess, with bedding and clothing and weapons strewn over everything. I later found out that Agravain had had a servant till the year before, when the man died of a fever, and no one had cleaned the place since. I set the saddle-bags down and wondered where to put things. Agravain leaned the spears against the wall with satisfaction.
“There,” he said. “And now, Rhys, or whatever your name is…”
“It is Rhys.”
“Whatever it is, you are my brother’s servant, and there are one or two things I will tell you.”
I wondered what. He looked at me, rubbing the knuckles of one hand.
“I gather you persuaded my brother into taking you on. Well and good, for he needs a servant; he is always doing things a warrior ought not do, and takes no care for himself But what he needs is a servant, one who will do as he is told and not give himself airs. You came into Camlann as though you thought yourself some kind of guest, and sat at the same table as the noblest warriors and the High King himself. My brother will not stop such behavior. He will be inclined, if I know him, to treat you as he treats his horse—better than he treats himself—merely because you are dependent on him. It is a privilege to serve him, servant, remember that.”
I swallowed the anger that was rising in my throat and nodded, trying to look as though the privilege impressed me.
“And listen, servant.” Agravain stepped over and seized the front of my cloak, twisting it so that it choked me and forcing me against the wall. “My brother will do nothing to punish you for insolence, but if you serve him badly, and let him do without while you live in luxury, and take advantage of his courtesy—I will see to it that you are beaten as much as you deserve. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” I croaked. I longed to tell him that I was a free-born clansman, a servant by choice only, and that I could throw his privileges in his face and leave; but the thought that I could stopped me, and made me hold my tongue. I had chosen, and I had had no expectation that all warriors would be like Gwalchmai or Bedwyr.
“Good,” said Agravain, and hit me across the face, just to show me what he meant. I had my fist up, ready to hit him back, before I remembered that if I did hit him, he might do anything, and he was a trained warrior. And also, I had chosen…I forced my hand to relax. Fortunately, Agravain had not noticed it. He hit me once more, with the flat of his hand this time, and let me go. I began to straighten my cloak.
“Where did you get that brooch?” Agravain demanded suddenly.
My hands froze. “My lord gave it to me,” I said, trying to keep my voice deferential. “He gave it to a townsman as payment for a night’s lodgings, and I got it back by bargaining. Your brother told me to keep it.”
“That’s no brooch for a servant. Give it here.”
I had not thought it a brooch for a servant, either, but I would not be told so by Agravain ap Lot. “Lord, my lord told me to keep it. If I gave it away, I would be disobeying him.”
“You can give it to me. I’m his brother.”
“I will then—if he tells me to.”
Agravain grabbed one of the spears and held it upside down, by the neck like a cudgel. “By the Sun! You will do as you’re told.”
“I am, Lord. I was told to keep it.”
“Greedy fool.” Agravain glared at me a moment longer, and I braced myself for a thrashing with the spear. But he lowered the weapon. “I will speak to my brother about this. He should not give such things away.” He tossed the spear aside. “Get this place in order,” he flung at me, and strode from the house.
I sat down on one of the low beds, shaking with anger, and beat my fist against the mattress from sheer frustration.
“You should have expected this,” I told myself, out loud. But it did no good. I hadn’t expected to feel like this. I had always been able to stand up for myself; for that matter, I usually won any fight I stood up in. But now any noble dog could treat me as he pleased, and I would have to smile and say “Yes, Lord.” Gwalchmai and, it seemed, Bedwyr and the Emperor were pleased to treat me honorably, but I had a strong feeling that Agravains were more common. I slammed the bed once more, and hit my hand against the wooden frame.
I sucked my knuckles and looked at the frame, and then the pounded mattress, and had to laugh. Still laughing, I straightened the dented bedding, and got up and tried to set some order to the mess that filled the room.
By the time Gwalchmai arrived, at twilight, I had managed to put everything in a place. The wrong place, undoubtedly, but it was improbable that anything really had a right place. It was hard work, because I was no more used to it than the warriors were, but I was beginning to feel that I was winning the fight.
Gwalchmai opened the door quietly, looked around at the place in surprise, then shot me a questioning look.
“Your brother told me to put it in order,” I explained.
“Ah.” Gwalchmai closed the door, went over to the fire, caught up a taper and lit a hanging lamp. A warm glow fell over the small room, and Gwalchmai blew out
the taper. With the glowing end still raised, he turned and looked at me. His look was a little sad, his eyes attentive on my face.
“How many times did my brother hit you?” he asked quietly.
I stared.
“Oh come, you will not tell me you got that bruise across your face by running into a door, will you?”
I shrugged. “Only once, hard.”
Gwalchmai sighed and sat down, twirling the taper with his fingers. The end made a little circle of red as it spun. “Agravain came and told me I should not give servants valuable brooches, and warned me against insolence. I am sorry if I have got you into trouble.”
I looked at Gwalchmai as he stared at the end of his taper, his fine, thin face looking worn and worried, and suddenly, without thinking about his name and his troubles, I liked him very much.
“He only noticed the brooch after he hit me,” I said. “My lord, some men talk with their fists, and I expected it when I asked to come with you.”
Gwalchmai shook his head. “Agravain is a good man. He merely feels that he must…maintain a position. And he doesn’t know how to talk to people.”
I thought to myself that Agravain might be a good man to those he considered to be “people,” but I felt that that included only a small segment of humanity. However I nodded in reply to Gwalchmai’s statement. “My lord, it is nothing to worry about. I’ve had worse fights with my cousins.”
“But Agravain hits hard, and you couldn’t hit him back.”
“He doesn’t hit that hard.”
“Yes he does. I remember his thrashings. Vividly.”
At my look of surprise, Gwalchmai added, “I wasn’t always a good warrior, you know, and Agravain is more than three years older than me. And he knows how to humiliate. I hadn’t thought of that when I agreed to let you come.”
“My lord,” I said, exasperated, “the fact that one man feels that he must maintain his position at the expense of mine is no reason for me not to stay here.”
“But there are others who might feel the same way. There is Cei. I’ve known him to bully servants on principle. And he lives here, in this house.”
I’d heard of Cei. If Gwalchmai was famed as the finest warrior in Arthur’s cavalry, Cei ap Cynyr was the finest in the infantry. There were nearly as many songs about him as there were about Gwalchmai, and most of them mentioned that he had a heavy hand and a hot temper. If I stayed with Gwalchmai at Camlann, to live in the same house as Cei and Agravain might be a bit tiresome. But then… “My lord, if I won’t be living here, what does it matter where Cei lives, or Agravain either for that matter?”
Gwalchmai looked up sharply from the taper, which had finally gone out. “What? You’re not going back home?”
“No. But you said you would find me another lord at Camlann.” Gwalchmai was silent. “You told me you didn’t want a servant.”
“Oh. So I did.” He tossed the taper in the fire, stood and leaned against the wall, watching it burn. “I’d forgotten that.” His eyes lifted from the fire and met mine. “Would you be willing not to go to another lord? To stay with me instead?”
I sucked in my breath and fidgeted with the cloak-pin. I knew my own wants well enough. For all that I had only known this man for a week or so, I knew I could trust him with my life and honor. I knew that, serving him, I would be required to do nothing demeaning or dishonorable, and that I would most certainly be able to work hard for the Light. And it would be hard, too, with more long journeys, and sleeping in stables—and probably in the open as well—and no food and long hours and plenty of enemies. But I wanted it, God knows. And besides the rest, I liked the man.
“My lord,” I said, “I would be very willing to do that thing. But only if you want me to. I do not wish to do what your brother threatened to thrash me for, and take advantage of your courtesy. You are not responsible for me, just because you agreed to bring me here.”
“My courtesy! Man, this is scarcely courtesy. I am calling you to a hard life. If you served some other master, you would have an easier time of it. No, it is because you are a good servant and a good man to have at one’s back.”
I wondered what, other than outbargaining the townsman, I had done to deserve that description. But I grinned. “It is your courtesy, my lord, as far as I’m concerned. Is it settled, then? I stay with you?”
“It is settled.” He stepped quickly from the fireplace and put out his hand, and I clasped it. He smiled, and I grinned back. Agravain or no Agravain, I had a place for myself.
SEVEN
We stayed in Camlann about a month and a half before we set out again. I think it was probably the longest single period Gwalchmai had stayed there. The war and Arthur’s embassies had kept him busy before. And, as Arthur had promised, he had work to do in that month and a half. Unlike most of the other warriors, Gwalchmai could read and write, his Latin was excellent, and he knew Saxon and Irish as well as British and was familiar enough with the web of British affairs that he could work a way into any tangle of alliances and enmities without offending the allied or hostile parties. All this was very useful to Arthur, who, I discovered, spared nothing that was useful to his ends, himself least of all. But he never asked more than his followers were willing to give. He was a man obsessed with a dream, a vision of the Empire arising again in Britain, and taking into itself all the barbarians, to create a new order, working with justice in peace; and to create it he worked with his whole life and the lives of those around him. He had the gift of making other men see what he meant, and the whole fortress assumed nothing else than that we were about restoring a Christian civilization to a world that was growing dark, though most of the people there would not have put it that way. It was an exhilarating assumption.
Not all the warriors were worked as hard as Gwalchmai, however. Most of them knew only how to fight and, when not fighting, played knucklebones, hunted, or were bored. Agravain and Cei were in this group, and, once I got to know them, I found them sometimes humiliating, frequently infuriating, but on the whole tolerable. Indeed, I quite liked Cei, though his temper was worse than Agravain’s, and his tongue sharper. He was a very tall, heavy-muscled red-head with a thick red beard, and he wore more jewelry than any other man in the Family. His treatment of servants was all I had heard it would be, but he was not by nature a bully. He enjoyed being talked back to, though he might offer, and occasionally provide, a thrashing for it if one went too far. He liked arguing, and was a fine bargainer, and we had some grand disagreements about how I arranged matters in the house. He had an acid wit and a fine sense of sarcasm, but he knew how to laugh.
Agravain was completely different. He was indeed trying to “maintain a position,” and, seemingly, felt that he had to defend it at any cost. I wondered whether it might have something to do with his having come to Camlann originally as a hostage for his father’s oath of peace. While there was little he would not do for his friends—and, more especially, for his brother—he would not lift a finger for anyone else, or stir by a quarter of a step from the lofty and glorious standing of warrior and first-born son of a king. On some days he was moody, and would fall into a rage at the imagined implications of a look—this with his inferiors, of course, not other warriors. The only way for us to handle him was to give him what he wanted, and that immediately. Still, after the first day he left me alone. I gather that Gwalchmai had had a serious talk with him, although neither Gwalchmai nor Agravain ever said so.
I was glad to be left to work, because I had more than enough work to keep me busy. The house had to be looked after: the fire kept burning, the place kept clean and orderly, the thatch repaired. Then, Agravain and Cei assumed that, since I was living there, I would naturally do all their personal work as well as Gwalchmai’s. I had to see that their clothing was taken to a washerwoman, their small wants for this and that were satisfied, and that their weapons and armor were i
n good condition. (Another servant, Amren, showed me how to do this last.) The horses were looked after by grooms, which was a mercy, but I still had to exercise Llwyd, and sometimes Cei and Agravain’s horses as well. Gwalchmai very rarely let anyone else near his Ceincaled, and, to tell the truth, was in other ways the least work of the three.
When I had finished looking after my lot of warriors, there was still much else to do in the fortress. Because the Family had for so long wandered over all of Britain, few of the warriors had personal servants, and the servants who worked at Camlann were adequate for a smaller community only. There were only about a hundred and fifty men and a hundred women for the whole fortress, and all of us were busy. The public places like the Hall and the guard tower and store-rooms had to be kept clean and ordered; the cattle had to be butchered, and the hides cured for leather; the kitchens had to be supplied, mead to be fermented, and so on and on. But I did not dislike the work, as I had thought I might. The pleasant thing about service is that, unlike farming work, it can be done in company and while talking. I found the other servants at Camlann good company. Perhaps two-thirds of them were either former townsfolk or descended from a long line of servants. But there were also a fair number of clansmen like myself, farmers who had lost their land to the Saxons, and had been unable or unwilling to find land and settle elsewhere. There were even a few Saxons, men who had been captured on a raid and had sworn to serve some lord or other in exchange for their lives. The others came from every part of Britain, and even from across the sea in Less Britain, and to hear their tales was as good as listening to a song.
The management of the household of Camlann was under the supervision of the Queen Gwynhwyfar. She was a thin, brown-eyed lady like a candle-flame, warm and shining, topped by masses of red hair. She never seemed to sit still, and always seemed to know where every man and woman in the household was and what they were doing. She never seemed to walk anywhere: she ran; some said she danced. She determined how much wool we had and how much we needed to buy and how much each person could take; she saw to it that the cattle were slaughtered in the right numbers and that we had enough grain; she ordered major repairs, like thatching, and kept all the accounts. Her instructions were administered by Gweir ap Cacwmri, who ran practically everything, and his wife, Tangwen, who ran everything, including Gweir.
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