The sun touched the heaped hills northward, and the green glowed into emerald, while the blue-gray of the bare trees shone with highlights of silver from the damp. Rhuawn shook his head thoughtfully.
“That is a strange song. What is it?”
Gwalchmai smiled, and a little of the glow went from his eyes. “It is a song about a man who sailed to the Land of Youth, which is one of our names in the Orcades for the Kingdom of Summer. They say that if you sail far enough west, you will reach it. The song is called ‘The Voyage of Bran mac Febal.’”
“I remember. You sang some of it once before.”
“That is so. This part comes later. When Bran had set sail, he met the son of Lir—whom they call a god, in Erin—riding across the sea in a chariot, and the son of Lir sang that song, to show that the sea was not a barren plain but a fertile kingdom, if one has the eyes to see it…We should turn right here, and we can follow the Aesce up to the hills.”
We forded the Aesce and started our horses to a trot again. The willows were yellow and green, and the air was almost warm. Almost. I thought about sailing the bitter salt plain of the sea, and finding then a fertile wood in the beauty of spring, and seeing the whole sensible world as another world. I shivered. A world as shining as a dream, more real than waking, which men might slip into in a moment’s insight. Had Gwalchmai been there? I had heard some songs that said so, and which said that his horse and his sword had been brought from the Kingdom of Summer, the Island of Apples, the Land of Youth, or any of the other names of the Otherworld. A world which lay somehow beneath and behind our world, and which broke through upon us unexpectedly, yet was always there to those who had eyes for it.
I shivered again, but from cold, and thought to wonder if it could be warmer in the Otherworld. I snuggled my raw hands into my cloak, and checked the packhorse’s lead-rein.
The Aesce enters the plain by a great gorge, flanked by jagged, sky-tearing cliffs. We had to dismount and walk the horses part of the way, for the river, swollen with its spring waters, had overflowed a section of the path. We were all drenched up to the knees by the freezing stream, and Rhuawn slipped and was soaked to his waist. We stopped at the head of the gorge to put our boots back on and to wring out our clothes, but then remounted and headed off at a fast trot, and soon reached our Roman road. We were some fifteen miles, as the crow flies, from Camlann.
We ate our lunch in the saddle, about as far north as the Ciw river, which joins the Afen west of Baddon. It was then beginning to cloud over, and in the afternoon it began to rain, while a fierce March wind battered the drops against our faces. We didn’t really mind. Rhuawn told an exceedingly long and complicated tale about a man who caught the north wind in a fishing net, and what came of it, and had us all laughing.
We had to make the horses swim a few paces when we crossed the Afen, which was high with the spring floods, and this made us even wetter than the rain had. We trotted fast to keep the horses warm, and their sides steamed. We had lost our Roman road some time before, and the way was winding and muddy, but for all that we made good time, and reached the main west road from Baddon, not far beyond the Afen. This we followed direct to the inlet where one can take a ferry across Mor Hafren to the shore of Powys and to Caer Gwent.
We arrived at the ferry at evening, and dragged a boatman from his supper to take us across. The water was rough, and gleamed with white in the darkness, smelling strongly of salt. Our horses, except for Ceincaled, stood with drooping heads, too tired to be nervous. I felt quite seasick by the time we put in on the west bank in Powys, and made no argument when Gwalchmai gave the boatman the excessive payment of a gold armlet. Then it was remount, and drive our horses on another mile to Caer Gwent. But there were fires there, and hot baths and hot food, warm beds and a warm and courteous welcome.
The next morning we presented Cynyr, lord of Caer Gwent, with Arthur’s gift, and he thanked us very prettily, and asked us to stay for a few days. Gwalchmai declined the invitation for us, and so we were provided with fresh horses—except for Gwalchmai, who wanted and needed none—and set out on the main west Roman road to Gwar Uisc. My fresh horse was inclined to be skittish. I had parted from Llwyd with only a twinge of regret. I knew that Cynyr would have him treated well, and he was welcome to any work he could wring from the lazy beast. I would pick the horse back up on the way home.
We did not go quite so far that day, since we would not change horses again until we reached Caer Legion in the north. We crossed the Uisc river on the bridge at Gwar Uisc, said then rode north through Powys. We spent that night at a farm near the river Dyweleis, and set out again early the next morning. Three days after leaving Caer Gwent, we reached Caer Guricon, just over the border of Gwynedd. Both Caer Gwent and Caer Guricon are old Roman towns, but the differences between them are astonishing. There were fewer people in Caer Guricon than in any Roman town I had seen, and those that did live there huddled close to the building which the local lord used as his feast hall. But the great difference was not this, but the hostility. The local lord gave us the hospitality we demanded, since it was our right as the Emperor’s warriors; but he gave it glaring and grudgingly. No one in the town, from the lord’s warriors to the Hall servants, would speak to us, and they had all a silent, vicious stare that set one’s teeth to grinding. The lord wanted us to stay and sleep with his warband in the feast hall, but Gwalchmai insisted on a separate house. We were eventually given a small, narrow townhouse, with broken roof tiles, which had not been swept or cleaned for a long time.
Gwalchmai looked around it and laughed. “Well, cousin,” he said to Rhuawn—members of Arthur’s Family call each other cousin, when they aren’t calling each other “brother”—“we are back in Gwynedd.”
“And a grief it is, too,” Rhuawn replied. “Shall we keep watch?”
In the end we did not keep watch, but settled in the middle room of the house. Gwalchmai dragged his sleeping mat in front of one door, and Rhuawn pulled his over by the other, and no one slept in the middle of the room, in case anyone tried to drop things on us. If I had not been so tired from the journey I do not think I could have slept at all, and, as it was, it took me an hour to drift off, all the time expecting to hear stealthy footfalls creeping into the house. But nothing happened. Nothing was really expected to: it was simply wise to take precautions in Gwynedd.
We left as early as we could the next morning, and did a hard day’s riding, reaching Caer Legion after nightfall. The town was a little more hospitable than Caer Guricon, and we changed horses there—again, except for Gwalchmai, who kept Ceincaled—and the next morning, our sixth day from Camlann, we rode westward into Arfon. The heights of the mountains were still white with the winter snow, while their flanks were green and gray. The sun struck their peaks, flashing from ice, glowing on mists, glittering on streams and cataracts. I could not keep my eyes from them. They tell the same kind of stories about Arfon as they do about Gwlad yr Haf, and it is easy to see why.
In the late afternoon we turned off our Roman road, pushing our horses hard, and followed a mountain track southward. It was the last step in our journey, the road to Degannwy itself. The sun began to set, turning the mountains rose and lavender. I was tired enough from the journey to be wide awake, but I felt like a rope that is drawn too tight, and quivers at a touch. At every bend in the road I half expected to ride clear out of the world, and find that the snows in Arfon were turning into apple blossom, and the trees to silver. Then, finally, we rounded a bend in the road and saw Degannwy far in the distance. There was nothing Roman about that fortress. It was built before Claudius came to conquer the east of Britain, before Julius Caesar ever invaded. The legions of Rome had never really conquered Arfon, for all their centuries and legions in Britain, for all their roads and towns and discipline. Looking at the green, twilit dark slopes around me, I could not think that anyone, even Arthur, could come into Arfon in war and bring his w
arband out intact and alive. No doubt the same thought had occurred to Maelgwn Gwynedd, and caused him to move his royal fortress from the Roman port town of Caer Segeint up to this small stronghold in the mountains.
It was fully dark when we reached Degannwy and demanded entrance at the gates. The guards kept us waiting, watching us with that vicious stare I was coming to expect in Gwynedd, while one of their number sauntered back to their feast hall to tell the king Maelgwn that some emissaries of the Pendragon had come. The stars were bright by the time the guard strolled back and told the others to open the gates and let us in, and we could ride our stumbling horses up the hill towards the Hall, with its lights and sound of music. The stables were a low-lying mass a short distance down the hill from the Hall.
Gwalchmai swung down from Ceincaled in front of these stables, and caught the stallion’s bridle while he began to talk to one of Maelgwn’s grooms. Rhuawn and I also dismounted, stiffly, and I began to check the packs on the pony we had brought from Caer Legion. A group came down from the feast hall with torches, and I was glad of it, since I had light to see that everything was still in its place, strapped firmly down on the little beast’s back. I looked back to Gwalchmai, awaiting directions.
He finished his interrogation of the groom, and turned to the party with the torches, ready to question and explain in his quiet, eloquent fashion. But he froze halfway through that turn, and stood moveless as a wild animal that has seen some predator. The torchlight glowed on his crimson cloak and gold jewelry, but the uncanniness suddenly filled his face so that he looked scarcely human. His eyes were very wide, lips half parted. One hand still held his mount’s bridle, the other was raised, held forward in an arrested gesture.
I felt cold and shaken to see him so abstracted from himself, but I didn’t want to look at what he was looking at. I glanced to Rhuawn, who looked puzzled, then over to the party with the torches, and finally at what Gwalchmai was staring at.
My first thought, looking at the woman who stood with the torch-glow red on her, was that she really did look very like Gwalchmai, as much as a woman can look like a man. The resemblance must have been even closer when he was younger. She had the same fine bones, the same high-bridged straight nose and thin, expressive mouth. Her hair, fastened behind her head and bound with gold, was the same deep black, and her eyes…but when I saw her eyes, I felt that she did not look much like him after all. Like his, they were black, but black in such a way that they seemed to drink all the light around them, and quench the color in everything that surrounded her. Black enough to drink your life like a thirsty man gulping down a cup of water, and she would do it, and smile as she did it. She stood very straight, wearing a low-cut crimson gown which left her pale arms bare. She was extraordinarily beautiful, ageless, and she was smiling, but she looked at no one but Gwalchmai. Slowly, very slowly, she walked forward, and her shadow fluttered in the torchlight, and still my lord did not stir.
“So, my falcon,” she said in a low, soft voice. “Are you then displeased to see your mother?”
He lowered his raised hand and straightened slowly, as though struggling to do so; and then he bowed, very gracefully. “Lady, I had not expected to find you here.”
She gave a low laugh. “Indeed not. But now we are a pleasant family party: you and your brother and your father and I.”
“My father? And my brother? Agravain is at Camlann.”
She laughed again. “Agravain! Have you forgotten that you have two brothers? Your other brother has greatly wanted to see you again.”
“Medraut.” Gwalchmai’s face was expressionless. “So.” He raised his head a little and spoke in a different voice, proud and cold, “I have come to Maelgwn ap Docmail, king of Gwynedd, as the emissary of Artorus Augustus Caesar, Imperator Britanniae, Insulae Draco.”
“Well, indeed. Maelgwn is in his Hall, feasting with your father. Do you wish to come and greet him now?” She took another step nearer, her eyes never leaving his face. “Your father, for all that you have done, will still no doubt be glad to see you. I myself am glad to see you, my spring-tide falcon; very glad…” her voice grew lower. I could not think, nor move, and the torchlight seemed dim and colorless. She took one more step nearer, her eyes fixed as a cat’s.
Then, suddenly, Ceincaled reared, screaming, and tore his bridle from his master’s hand. The horse towered a moment, wild and white and shining, and descended, flinging himself towards the lady, ears back and teeth bared. She hurled herself to the side, and some of the men who had come with her drew their swords. Gwalchmai cried out and ran to catch his horse’s bridle.
The lady picked herself up from the ground and turned and walked back towards the Hall without saying another word and without looking at her son once. Gwalchmai held Ceincaled’s head, stroking the stallion’s neck and speaking to him quietly in Irish. Both horse and man were trembling.
Rhuawn, after another moment’s immobility, jerked his own mount’s bridle and started into the stable. I took my horse and the pack-pony, and Gwalchmai followed us with Ceincaled, still whispering to the horse.
We found stalls for the animals, rubbed them down and gave them some grain. Our horses fell to at once, but Ceincaled stirred uneasily. He nickered when Gwalchmai left him, and neighed loudly when we left the stable, so that Gwalchmai turned and called something in Irish which must have meant “Be still.” We looked at the feast hall.
“I do not understand,” said Rhuawn at last, speaking in Latin so that Maelgwn’s men would not understand. “That woman is your mother, the Queen of the Orcades, the daughter of the Emperor Uther?”
“Illa’st,” Gwalchmai replied, tiredly, “She is. And the King of Gwynedd is not plotting with Aengus of the Dalriada, or with any from Hibernia, but with Lot mac Cormac of Orcade, my father. Or rather, he plots something with my mother, for, when I left Dun Fionn, she governed most of the plotting, and I imagine that she is doing all of it now. My father is a strong man, but she is a subtle designer, and will outlast him.”
“I have heard, and now believe it,” Rhuawn said, very slowly. “I have heard—but be gentle to me, and forgive me that I speak of it to you—that the Queen of Orcade is a great witch.”
Gwalchmai nodded. “She is. By her skill in sorcery she has made herself a Queen of Darkness. And she hates my lord Arthur most bitterly, more bitterly than Maelgwn Gwynedd does.”
Rhuawn gave Gwalchmai a steady look. “Although she is the Pendragon’s sister?”
“Rather, I think, because she is the Pendragon’s half sister than in despite of it, and because her mother was the wife of the Pendragon Uther, while Arthur’s was some country girl. But it is no matter. We must find what it is that she and Maelgwn plot together, and tell Arthur, and stop them. They are more dangerous than Cerdic and the Saxons.”
Rhuawn nodded, very thoughtfully, and we began walking up the hill, accompanied by some of Maelgwn’s servants, who had been waiting.
If the Hall had been friendly, it would have been a joy to enter. It was filled with music and light and warmth, and with a rich smell of roasting meat and strong, warm mead, triply welcome after the cold, wild air of the mountain twilight. It was a small Hall, and would seat no more than four hundred men, and he rarely had many guests. But it seemed both large and unfriendly when we walked up the length of it with all eyes fixed on us. The music stopped when we came in, and the only sound was the wind in the thatch, the crackling of the fires, and our own footfalls. Gwalchmai walked very straight and proud, his head held high, cloak thrown back from his left shoulder to show the hilt of his sword, and the shield with the enameled boss gleaming over his other shoulder. He ignored the stares completely. Rhuawn also looked calm, but I was near enough to see how tightly his hand was clenched on his sword-hilt. I had no sword to clutch, and had no wish for these barbarian nobles to see how nervous I was, so I spent the walk up the Hall looking at the faces of th
e men at the high table.
Maelgwn held the center of the table, of course, looking down the Hall at all his warband. He was a slight man, with gingery red hair and a thin beard. He wore a purple cloak, more than his status permitted him, and a gold circlet around his hair. The purple did not suit him. He pretended to talk to the man on his left, but something about the angle of his head told me that he was all the while looking at us. He seemed the sort for that, the kind of man I would not trust in a market place, or leave to guard my flock. But he looked lower than his reputation as a great enemy, a petty miserable little schemer who only chanced to be a king.
The man on his right was of another sort altogether. Though still not above average height, he had plainly been taller than Maelgwn, and something told me that once his hair had been like hot gold. It was gray now, and his face was lined and haggard, his eyes sunken. But those eyes were still a fierce, hot blue. They were like Agravain’s eyes. I did not think that Agravain resembled his father quite so strongly as Gwalchmai did their mother, but there could be no doubt as to his paternity. I could just remember the days, more than twelve years before, when every movement of Lot mac Cormac, king of the Ynysoedd Erch, had been a source of gossip and debate in every kingdom in Britain; when many British kings would do nothing which had not been commanded by Lot at Dun Fionn. Those days had ended when Arthur seized the imperium in Britain, and compelled a Lot defeated in battle to swear peace and give hostages. It could still be seen that Lot had once been a great man. As we approached the high table, however, I thought how worn he looked now, and how much older than his wife.
We stopped before the high table, the main fire pit warm at our backs, and Gwalchmai saluted Maelgwn, drawing his sword and lifting it, hilt first. Maelgwn finally turned from his feigned conversation. As he did so, the man on his left also turned. This was a young warrior, a man about my age. His blond hair was lighter than Lot’s, his first beard soft, shining down on his cheeks, eyes a clear gray. He was very handsome, and smiled in welcome. It was a pleasant smile. I wondered who he was and what he was doing there, but only briefly. Gwalchmai was saying to Maelgwn, “To Maelgwn ap Docmail of Gwynedd, greetings, in the name of the Pendragon Arthur ab Uther, High King of Britain and your king.”
Kingdom of Summer Page 13
