Kingdom of Summer

by Gillian Bradshaw

  I could see that, when a letter was sent for such a distance, there would have to be some sign that it had reached its destination, but it still seemed a complicated system. I said so.

  “It has to be,” said Gwalchmai. “Any message passes through several hands on its journey, and any one of the men could be bought by Maelgwn or some other ruler, or be killed, and the message lost. As it is, those who bear the message do not know what it is they carry. The man who put the pine cone there was told only to do so much. There are a few other signs; Arthur and I agreed on them before we left.”

  I suddenly realized that Gwalchmai was trusting me with a great deal. If I told Maelgwn, he could set watchers on the oak and capture the messenger, and perhaps through him find the rest of Arthur’s supporters in Gwynedd. And even if I did not do that, it would be a simple matter for me to substitute any message I wanted. If Medraut told me to leave something there, I could drop his letter in that hollow, leave a sprig of holly by the track, and Gwalchmai could think that Arthur commanded him to be more charitable towards his brother.

  But I could not. Gwalchmai must have known that, to trust me so far. While I thought it would be a fine thing if my lord were a little gentler with Medraut, I could not use trickery and deception to make him so. That would be the same as no gentleness at all. And then, even as I thought of it, I suddenly noticed that I did not quite trust Medraut. I would have to see about him. Truly, I would.

  NINE

  When I returned to Degannwy an hour or so later, I went to look for Rhuawn. It took some looking, but I eventually found him. He was with Medraut, and the two sat together in a quiet corner of the feast hall, near a fire, playing the harp in turns. Both looked up when I walked over to them, and Medraut smiled and indicated a place to sit. I sat, leaning against one of the benches. Rhuawn was singing a long song in praise of the spring, “when warbands are splendid before a bold lord,” and, while it was not exactly what I had been enjoying the season for, it was still a fine song.

  When Rhuawn finished, Medraut took the harp. He began to pluck it idly, as men do before they’ve decided what to sing, bringing out light ripples of sound like the wind on a pool.

  “We have songs such as that in Irish,” he told Rhuawn. There is one which is supposed to have been made by the greater warleader, Fionn mac Cumhail. It is the longest and dullest of the lot, so, of course, everyone has to memorize it.” He played a little more, the runs of music sliding into each other with a rush under his fingers, while he gazed dreamily into the fire. “My brother was born in the spring,” he said, after a little. “He will be twenty-seven this May.” A kind of tune began to grow out of the music, then faded again, “I wonder if I could give him a present.”

  Rhuawn snorted. “I don’t think you should; and I think, if you did, he would not receive it from you.”

  “I might show him my care by it.”

  “I don’t think he’d pay any attention. He does not listen to me when I try to speak with him on your behalf. He keeps very much to himself.”

  Medraut smiled warmly at Rhuawn. “I thank you deeply for your efforts. It is good to have a friend in this…but truly, I think he only misunderstands me. If I remain patient and generous, he will see that I at least am not his enemy.”

  Rhuawn shrugged. “Hawks may swim and salmon may fly.”

  “My brother can swim, and his name means hawk. I wonder…”

  Rhuawn straightened and leaned forward, putting out his hand for emphasis. “Your brother will remain obstinate. He’s already made that plain to me, abundantly plain. I don’t know why, but he’s set against you and will never change his mind.”

  I opened my mouth to say something in Gwalchmai’s defense, but Medraut was already speaking. “I can’t simply give up his friendship. He is my brother.”

  “He has abandoned you. He has sworn the Threefold Oath to Arthur, and he holds that above his own blood. He tells people that you and your mother are sorcerers, and he tramples your kinship. In your place, I’d have no qualms about letting him discover his own condemnation.”

  I stared at Rhuawn, astonished. But Medraut was shaking his head. “It isn’t Gwalchmai’s fault.” He stopped his harping for a moment, then began again with a different rhythm, and went on, “Listen, Rhuawn. I will tell you a thing I have thought of.”

  Rhuawn listened attentively. I shut my mouth tight and chewed on my lip, to remind myself to keep quiet.

  “It is about this battle-madness of his which you have told me of.” Medraut’s harp thrummed steadily. “When my brother was young, and as I remember him, he had no such thing. He used to have fights with Agravain, and Agravain always beat him, and there was no sign of madness. The first time I heard of it was in songs, and in reports from Britain.

  “Now, when Gwalchmai left Dun Fionn, he left suddenly. He took his horse from the fortress on a stormy night and rode off at a gallop across to the cliffs westward. He says—I have heard it, Rhuawn—that our mother tried to kill him that night. He has even said that I…” he hesitated, fighting with it, “that I was with her, and assenting. But I know that no such thing happened. The idea is madness—me, to kill my brother? For a long time this confused me. I could not see why my brother, who had always been so close, should say such things. And yet, I think he truly believes them; and moreover, I have heard that he says he journeyed to the Otherworld after he departed Dun Fionn, and tells of many other impossibilities. What I think is that he had a fit of this madness you tell me of, for the first time, perhaps, and that he rode off in it, raving and seeing visions, and that his mind has been warped by this demon ever since. So you see, it is not Gwalchmai’s fault that he thinks of me as his enemy. It is only this disease.”

  I had been searching for some way in which both brothers might be seen to be speaking the truth. Here, now, was a way. Madness and delusion, and it was undeniable that Gwalchmai did go mad in battle. It made sense, excellent sense, and neatly accounted for the situation.

  And yet I was certain it was a lie.

  But Medraut plainly believed his theory. He bowed his head over the harp, and the music went on.

  Rhuawn rubbed his sword-hilt with one hand. “Do you think so, truly?” he asked Medraut. “If it is thus, this is a dreadful ill for him to suffer.”

  “What other explanation is there?” asked Medraut.

  “That something did happen that night,” I said. Both the warriors looked at me, and I looked back at Medraut. His harp-playing faltered a minute, almost became a tune, then resumed in a different, wilder key. It was an infernal distraction, that plunking. “You wouldn’t have had to know anything about it,” I admitted. “Or, even, remember it.”

  “But I would know,” Medraut said simply. His gray eyes were wide and grave.

  “Of course he would,” snapped Rhuawn. “Rhys, this makes a great deal of sense. I’ve never liked battle-madness, because it doesn’t always happen in battle. Sometimes those Saxon berserkers go mad in the feast hall and murder half a dozen of their comrades. And if someone has the berserker-gang, I have heard that it gets worse with time.”

  “My lord Gwalchmai is not mad,” I snapped back. “You must have seen him fight. You know he’s not a berserker.”

  Rhuawn looked uncertain a moment. Medraut kept on playing the harp. “I have seen Gwalchmai in battle,” Rhuawn spoke slowly. “He is a very great warrior, but he is uncontrollable. And he collapses afterwards, just as the Saxon berserkers do.”

  “I didn’t say that Gwalchmai was mad,” Medraut added hurriedly. “Only…touched, at times. Ill.”

  “If you’d seen his face when it is on him, you couldn’t believe that,” I insisted.

  “Well, I have never seen his face at such a time, it is true…” began Medraut.

  “I have watched him fight, and this is the only explanation for his treatment of Medraut. And when
did you ever see his face when the madness was on him, Rhys? No one dares to meet his eyes then.”

  “When we were coming down to Camlann we met some bandits on the road and he killed them. And even in the madness, he is still himself, only…only…ach, I can’t say it. But your own servant, Aegmund, has told me tales of Saxon berserkers, how they foam at the mouth and howl like wolves. Gwalchmai is not like that at all.”

  “But it must be the same kind of thing,” returned Rhuawn. “We can’t say what he sees in the madness.”

  I couldn’t answer this, and simply glared.

  “It is a hard thing to believe of one’s lord,” said Medraut, still hesitant. “And, God knows, a hard thing to believe of one’s brother. But I have no other explanation. I know that Gwalchmai desires glory and honor—as what warrior worth his mead does not?—but he would not, for that, spread lies about my mother and me. No, he has believed a thing proceeding from madness, and, having believed it, sought glory among foreigners instead of with his own kin. While one must honor the Pendragon,” Medraut nodded to Rhuawn, “still, my brother forsook his own blood for Arthur’s service, a thing no right-thinking man would do. And once he had given his oath to Arthur, whom political necessity had made our enemy, he could not but keep to the delusion. And now he thinks that my mother and I—and my father, too, I imagine—are fighting for some great darkness, while he and the Pendragon fight for some kind of light. But, in fact, all my father wanted and wants, is to have power in Britain, which is just what the Pendragon wanted, and has. And my father’s rights are as good as the Pendragon’s. He married the legitimate daughter of a Pendragon, and he is the legitimately born king of a royal clan, although he is Irish, while the Pendragon—and I say this not to disparage him, for, indeed, I greatly admire him for overcoming it—Arthur is only one of the Pendragon Uther’s bastards, and legally clanless and unable to succeed to the High Kingship. Arthur is High King, as we know, and a great one: and that is a fact in the real world. It is not as though he stood for some pure light, while my father and my mother, who once with an equally good claim opposed him, must perforce stand for darkness. Such notions are fine in a song, and lend elegance, but what have they to do with the world in which we live? My poor brother confounds Britain with the Land of Youth, the Kingdom of Summer. Och, by the sun, I have missed him, these years, and wondered, again and again, when I would see him: I see him, and find that he is still mad, and hates me. If only he were free of it, and could come home!”

  Unable to command himself, Medraut turned his whole mind to the harp, and finally began playing some kind of tune, a weird thing in a minor key. I sat, bewildered, wondering where the bottom of my world had dropped to. It was true enough: Arthur had scant legal right to the imperium of Britain. Could the struggle I had seen so clearly, the struggle of Light and Darkness, be merely the clashings of dishonest kings? The idea was solid, easy to consider, without any vague indefinites and worlds within worlds depending upon it. And if it was true, then Medraut, and Morgawse, were quite innocent, and Gwalchmai was quite deluded, and I with him. Medraut’s harp kept on steadily, and I thrashed about in his words, trying to find some way out.

  “My friend,” said Rhuawn, “you are right. This is a sickness which has come upon him. I wish to God that he were healed of it, for it is a dreadful thing for a man to be separated from his own clan and his own blood. I thought so at the first, and now that I am sure you are innocent…but what can be done? Are there treatments for madness?”

  Medraut drew a deep breath, his eyes very bright. “Yes. There are some treatments for madness.” His voice was soft. “One can read of them in books, works written by learned Roman doctors. But I could not mention it to him. He would never trust me to help, though I have ached to try them.”

  “These methods,” said Rhuawn slowly. “Could I help?”

  “Would you be willing?” asked Medraut in a surprised tone.

  I struggled silently with Medraut’s argument, trying to find the flaw in it. But my thoughts were confused, and all I could do was stare at the whole and think what sense, what excellent sense, it all made.

  “Anything,” said Rhuawn. “Gwalchmai saved my life in battle, once, and all my loyalty is due to him, together with the friendship I bear for him and for you, and, in honor, I will help him to a cure in any way which you show me.”

  “He would not accept our aid,” said Medraut. “We could never convince him that he is wrong, and probably he would think I devised some sorcery against his life. If we even suggested anything, he will write to his lord, and Arthur would listen to him.”

  “Arthur trusts Gwalchmai above his own right hand,” said Rhuawn, “and he does not understand the situation.”

  “If I should give Gwalchmai some medicine, then, would you keep it secret from the High King?” Medraut asked, almost pleadingly. “It would only take a little while.”

  Rhuawn held out his hand. “I will help you in any treatment you plan, and I will set Arthur’s mind at rest that all is well with us.”

  Medraut took his hand and clasped it gladly, then looked at me. “Will you also, join us?” he asked.

  I licked my lips, trying to find a way out, and looked at Medraut. He seemed humble and earnest and excited: no help. He must be wrong. He must be, but where?

  “Perhaps Gwalchmai has spoken to you about me, or about this struggle he believes is going on. I know that he can be very convincing. But think carefully, and see if this does not seem more likely than those fantasies he spun for you.”

  “Come, Rhys,” put in Rhuawn. “We don’t call him Gwalchmai the Golden-tongued for nothing. But Medraut is talking about real things.”

  “Will you help us?” Medraut asked again.

  I again licked my lips. Where, where, where?

  Suddenly, there flashed before my mind the image of Gwalchmai kneeling to offer his sword to my father. There was no one to impress there, no advantage to be gained. The gesture was a pure gift, as Gwalchmai had given to Arthur and as Arthur gave to Britain: and it was real. The image was quickly followed by others: my lord laughing with admiration and telling me to keep the brooch; unthinkingly helping with a task unbefitting to his rank; talking earnestly with Arthur; singing that unearthly song in the marshes before Gwlad yr Haf. I dropped my half-lifted hand. There was really no question. Medraut was lying, and he had lied all along. While Gwalchmai’s eloquence and courtesy were real things, expressions of his whole life, Medraut’s came from words alone, fine paint over rotten timbers. Even without asking Lot’s warriors, I realized that I had never actually seen him do anything courteous, noble or gentle unless he stood to benefit from it. I could weigh the two men together, and their two visions of the world, and there was no question whom I should believe.

  “No,” I said. “I will not.” And I stood abruptly and faced them both. “I will not because my lord is not mad, nor deluded, and you, Rhuawn, you know that he is not, but you find it more likely and comfortable to believe Medraut. I will not have any part in certain un-named things done to ‘cure’ him, things suggested by a reputed sorcerer who has made you swear not to tell his enemy and your lord, the Emperor Arthur, about any of this.”

  Rhuawn leapt up in a rage. “Do you accuse me of disloyalty to my lord Arthur?”

  “That’s as may be. You are disloyal to your friend Gwalchmai. A month ago he’s cousin and brother to you, and now you’re ready to forget this, and forget that he saved your life even as you speak of it, because of a few words from a man recently met, a man who openly admits that ‘political necessity’ makes him your lord’s enemy, whose father we came here to hinder in a plot, and whose mother is a famous witch. Tell me I lie!”

  Rhuawn hit me across the face hard enough to make me stagger back. I stumbled into a bench, fell over it, and cracked my head against the floor. The world went black for a second, and then I scrambled around until
I managed to stagger up into a crouching position, clasping my skull.

  “You forget your place,” said Rhuawn. “I should kill you for daring to speak so to a warrior. You need a thrashing to remind you that you are a servant, and that servants do what they are told, without back-talk. You have been honored very much above your desserts as it is, and it has made you proud.” He took a step forward, drawing his sword so as to beat me with the flat of it. Medraut, who by now was also on his feet, caught his arm. “Indeed, you must not thrash him, Rhuawn. He is Gwalchmai’s servant, not yours.”

  “Gwalchmai will not thrash him.” But Rhuawn halted. I rose to my feet, the feast hall wobbling about my ears. I was vaguely aware of some others down the other side of the room staring, but I was too angry to care. I wished that Rhuawn would come, even with his sword, so that I could hit him, just once.

  “If Rhys chooses not to believe the truth, it comes from no evil nature, but only from a misplaced loyalty,” said Medraut, “and it need not hinder us. If we can cure my brother, Rhys will be glad enough, I am sure. Come. Leave him be.”

  I realized then that Medraut was making certain of Rhuawn for some scheme. He had hoped that I would have a part in it as well, but I was not essential. Rhuawn was…to reassure Arthur? I looked at Rhuawn. He was still fuming. I could not talk to him now. I glanced around the Hall, then turned and walked off, still holding the back of my head where I had hit the floor. Medraut and Rhuawn sat down again behind me, and I heard Medraut’s voice begin again, softly.

  One of Maelgwn’s warriors jeered as I left the Hall: “Oh, had enough of your betters’ company?” and the rest laughed. I wanted to hit him, too, but I wanted more to find Gwalchmai, to find and warn him.

  He was not at the house. Rather than run about looking for him I sat down and fingered the back of my head. A lovely lump I would have there. I had cut my mouth against my teeth, too, and I rinsed the blood with some stale, once-boiled water, then sat on the bed and waited for Gwalchmai.