King Arthur: Warrior of the West: Book Two

by M. K. Hume

  Artor stepped forward and the crowd was suddenly still. With his back to the pyre, Artor surveyed the crowd with his head lifted in pride at the honour he was about to bestow on his friend.

  ‘Targo, my friend, had only one name. There was no family nomen by which we might know his ancestors. All that we know of him was that he was of common stock, and was born under the hot sun of the Roman hills.

  ‘He was already well past his youth when I first met him. It was an unwilling meeting, for I was a feckless boy and he was a hard taskmaster. I can still remember how he would sit beneath a linden tree and set me tasks that made no earthly sense to the boy I was. If I made an error in judgement during my weapons training, he would say, “You’re dead, boy!” He guided me towards making sound decisions based on thought and logic. He helped to turn an unwilling child into a man. That I can stand before you as High King of the Britons today, undefeated by the Saxons, can only be attributed to the lessons taught to me by Targo. These lessons were Targo’s laws.

  ‘Targo followed me through weariness and pain. He gave me laughter, hope and courage, and the strength to face the task that still lies ahead of us. And he never ceased to challenge me to think, and to rule, and to be a warrior, even as he lay dying.

  ‘I honour Targo, my oldest friend and my staunchest servant. He was a stranger who came to a new land, and spent the rest of his life keeping the west free for all Britons.

  ‘Ave, Targo! Sword Master and Man! Honour him, free men of the west!’

  Artor stepped back, to be replaced by other men of renown, Myrddion among them, who spoke of Targo’s courage and his manliness. Gruffydd, too, bearing Artor’s great sword, spoke of his drinking friend while he wept unashamedly.

  Then the swell of speakers was done.

  Nimue bit her lip. These men had touched on those aspects of Targo’s character that warriors prize, but so much was left unsaid, so much that she had seen since she had first come to Cadbury.

  Gathering her courage, she smashed custom and stepped forward, her heart in her mouth in fear and trepidation.

  The crowd howled in protest, joined exultantly by Wenhaver, for all women were precluded from speaking praises of the dead, least of all a maid who was largely unknown and of peasant heritage.

  Nimue stood before the angry mob, a tall, slender woman of silver and grey, and waited until Artor raised his hand.

  The crowd stilled.

  ‘I know that I speak against custom,’ Nimue spoke in a loud, clear voice, ‘but I break with tradition because Targo was my friend, and he would have known that I loved and respected him for the true man that he was. I wish to speak for Targo and I will not be silent!’

  The crowd exploded with shouted insults once again, but Artor strode to Nimue’s side and silence slowly fell.

  ‘Have you gone witless, girl?’ he asked in a whisper. ‘You could easily be killed if you affront this assembly. I might not be able to dissuade them from violence if they feel insulted.’

  Nimue stared directly into Artor’s stormy eyes. ‘My lord, all men obey you. I was there with Targo at his deathbed, and I know what manner of man Targo really was, deep in his hidden heart where neither weapons nor killing ever owned him. Someone must speak for the Targo who lived beyond his trade in death. I am an alien, as he was, but we understood each other, my lord, and I know his history from his own lips, and wrote it down as he requested in the nights and days before his death. I claim the right to speak for Targo himself. ’

  Slowly and deliberately, Artor faced the crowd. His eyes were shadowed with the recognition that there were facets of Targo’s life that he had never cared to discover.

  ‘When Targo was struck with illness, this woman physicked him at great risk to herself. She was prepared to remain with Targo to face the whim of the contagion. Nimue nursed our friend through his last illness, and obtained a history of his life from the man as he lay dying. She knows and understands Targo’s mind and spirit.

  ‘It’s unseemly to shout and threaten while Targo waits above us in his golden shroud that has been sewn by the hands of this extraordinary woman. I propose that we break with tradition and permit her to speak, although she is a woman and our customs do not generally permit such licence to a female.

  ‘The famed Boedicca, a great Briton, who almost drove the Romans out of our lands, was also a woman, and she suffered a man’s fate from the justice of Rome. Our enemies made no distinction. How can we?’

  The affronted muttering of the crowd indicated that many men were still enraged by Nimue’s request, but others agreed that the disturbance made by protest was more unseemly than the trivial words of a mere woman.

  Silently, Nimue waited, a silver light in her grey dress, until the crowd lapsed into attentive regard, or an insulted silence.

  ‘As you can see, I am a woman. And my hair, my eyes and my tattoo mark me as a barbarian woman at that. No doubt I was born to ignorant, savage parents who worshiped pagan gods from the frozen north. Therefore, I wish to speak for Targo, a man who came from the pagan south, where the winds stir softly through the green olive groves, and the grape vines shiver in the summer breezes; where the air is heavy with the smells of aromatic wood smoke and the racks of drying fish. So he told me in the days before his death, for I’ve never seen such a land, and can only imagine it.’

  The crowd remained silent but stone-faced.

  ‘Targo was robbed of children of his own, a loss that he regretted throughout his long life. What stole this basic right from him? Women know these things and we understand. When the land was threatened, the young men and boys were taken from their simple homes and forced into the Roman legions. How well we also know of the need that robs us of our husbands, our fathers, our sons and our brothers. But Targo never lost his love of the quiet land with its fertile fields, its village life and the deep springs of water from the earth that is the first love of all, the memory of home.’

  Now the crowd stirred.

  Nimue felt their sudden change of mood, but she still waited, a girl of moonlight under a brazen summer sun.

  ‘Here, in this land that is so different from his birthplace, he forged a new life and a new home. Yes, he missed the sun when his old bones ached in the winter, but he made his place among us and learned to love the quiet patterns of the earth once more as he became attuned to the rhythms of all green and growing things. He was happy at Aquae Sulis, far more content than he had ever been. He took a widow to his bed, and raised her young sons, but fate did not choose to give Targo the peaceful old age he had earned.

  ‘A boy called out to him, a man-child unsuited to the burdens of his birth, and so Targo put away his contentment and took up the sword once again. Many were the men he killed, too many to remember their faces, but in dreams they came back to him as shadows, and they reminded him that life is precious and hard won.

  ‘For love, he put aside his contentment. For love, he bore the constant weight of his dead. For love, he grew old in service after he was, so briefly, a free man. For love, he put aside the comfort of a woman’s constancy. And for love, he permitted himself to forsake the greening fields for the red earth of the battle lines.

  ‘Is there a greater love than that which is given freely and without regret, but which plunges the giver into the world that he rejected years before? No, my friends! We should honour him as the warrior who served his master beyond his arm’s strength or his heart’s desire.

  ‘So, I speak for this selfless man. He was a soldier and had great courage, but he was also a soul of gentleness who was trapped in a body that had been fitted for war. He harboured no regrets at his choice. Simply, and with sadness, he regretted that his new home called him forth from the peace and obscurity that he craved. A king, a great scholar, a serving man, a barbarian, and a mere girl attended his dying and, as always, his thoughts were for those others who would live after him, and not for the travesty of his own life.’

  And then Nimue stood even taller, and raise
d one clenched fist in an unconscious mimicry of the salute used by soldiers and gladiators for hundreds of years before she took her first breath.

  ‘Ave, Targo! You gave us your old age and doomed yourself to loneliness for a dream of glory in which you wanted no part. Today, we stand and honour you, for what you fought for were the gentle fires of home, ours and yours!’

  As she finished her oration, the crowd roared their approval, and even Artor was amazed that such a delicate creature could touch that deepest part in every man and woman which dumbly accepts suffering and loss of life so that the hearth remains alive and full of warmth. He bowed to Nimue, who blushed deeply as she stepped back behind the shadow of her master.

  Only Wenhaver narrowed her eyes, and her hatred was a tangible thing.

  Artor stood forth once more.

  ‘And so, let us consign this ordinary man to the flames,’ he roared over the noise from the assembled crowd. ‘And we shall pray that when we have Targo’s choice to make, we will give as he gave, with fortitude, grace and laughter, so that the west will live forever.’

  Artor took up the torch held by a waiting warrior and plunged it deeply into a corner of the pyre, and then another, and another, until logs, flowers, perfume and oils began to burn fiercely. As the flames rose into the sky, the white smoke plumed about Targo’s gold-shrouded corpse and it seemed that his body stirred as if to rise again.

  Few eyes were dry as the pyre consumed itself and the body waiting at its zenith. Priests muttered prayers, echoed by the ordinary citizens, who felt themselves committed to some greater cause embodied in the death of the old man. Many of the warriors examined their own souls, and each wondered if he would be found wanting if he faced the choices made by Targo, so far from all he had once loved.

  And so Targo entered legend, and ultimately myth, as the human symbol of a great leader who pursued the beast of war to slay it, but never defeated his quarry, although he expended his life in the quest. What humans know in their hearts, they will ever glorify in the symbolism of any single person who embodies what they wish to become.

  As for Nimue, now renowned as the Maid of Wind and Water for her silver hair and dress, and for the way the vortex of the flames lifted her shining tresses into a flag of light, she was feared, for great beauty is always oddly inhuman, and the common folk called her a queen come out of the otherworld to be the conscience of Cadbury. Even Targo’s dented, ancient short sword, mounted on her wall with all its age and hard use freely open to scrutiny, became a symbol of protection, conferred by its grey blade and her slim white hands. She could hide no longer.

  At last, she would achieve the position that Gallwyn had dreamed her foster-daughter would assume, within a mantle of superstitious love. Whenever she walked in the fields that surrounded Cadbury, collecting herbs and roots for Myrddion’s potions, men swore she left a track of silver water, as if a lake had been her mother and her father was the moon. The truth, that she walked early when the grass was thick with dew, meant nothing, for she was the Maid of Wind and Water and beyond the ken of mortal men.

  How Wenhaver raged as the stories grew. How she bit her scented pillows late at night when Artor avoided her, and swore that Nimue would suffer for every reverential bow the upstart received as she passed through the corridors, the streets and the fields of Cadbury. Deep in the Stygian darkness of her spirit, Wenhaver yearned to tear down all that her husband had built about Nimue’s ears so that the mob would know her for the witch she was.

  So Wenhaver cast away the bearing of a queen, and chose the whore’s way as her revenge, trusting that her husband would be ignorant or, worse, compliant for the sake of peace, and that Gawayne would cleave to her alone, putting her body before the safety of the kingdom. In her golden net of hair, hell beckoned, as seductive as the sweetest wine, and her milkless breasts were poisoned with avarice. Yet, in the streets of Cadbury, she smiled as she spread coin and bread to ease the cares of the people, and gloried as they slowly came to love her.

  ‘I will be a true queen, and I will watch the white witch perish,’ Wenhaver swore silently as she lay in the arms of her lover, careful that no prying eyes should winkle out her secret. ‘And Artor shall lose everything he now has, and will know at the death that it was I who destroyed him.’

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THE NAKED EYE

  Perhaps Wenhaver’s spite and malice would have become nothing but a whore’s dirty little secret. The realms of the High King were peaceful in the main, for the Saxons rarely left their footholds in the east, and Artor’s warriors patrolled the mountain chains, reacting with speed and deadly force against any rash incursions into the territory of the Britons.

  Perhaps.

  But the soul is a curious arbiter. The best of men deceive themselves if they believe that base desires are more than a fingernail’s breadth below the surface of personal will. The worst of men, those who know their weaknesses better, soon learn to hide, and to deceive.

  So discord, and worse, came to Cadbury.

  The first sign of the Terror that was to come occurred when a crucified sheep was discovered. It had been nailed to an old oak in a copse of trees beyond the rich fields. Human hands had slit the ewe from belly to breast and torn the pink entrails from its body while its heart was still beating. A shepherd discovered it, just before morning light, and vomited away his early meal of porridge as he cut the carcass down and retrieved the skin and the meat.

  Shortly afterwards, one of Artor’s great hounds was found with its paws cut off, and its teeth torn out so that the bloodied muzzle was an affront to the decency of the men who discovered the atrocity. Out of mercy, Artor was forced to cut the dog’s throat himself to put the poor creature out of its suffering. Warrior looked at warrior, and women kept their children close indoors at a time of year when the long dusks beckoned the young boys to play at soldier’s games in the woods, and encouraged the young girls to collect garlands of flowers. The scent of dried blood seemed to hover in the air, and Artor watched his foster-brother with eyes that had never learned to wholly trust the man.

  Anticipating the High King’s concerns, Caius sought Artor out.

  The king’s lands had profited from the careful stewardship of Artor’s foster-brother. Caius had also grown wealthy, probably from the manipulation of his position at court, but few men cared, for all servants took their profits from well-managed estates.

  Caius, now Sir Caius in the people’s regard, knew all too well that only three people still lived who remembered a blood-soaked night, an underground temple where children had died cruelly before being dumped, unshriven, in unsanctified graves, and how Artor had saved his young foster-brother from his own foolishness.

  Artor was studying field reports when Caius entered his private rooms unannounced. The steward saw the flash of irritation in Artor’s eyes at his unwelcome intrusion, and the speculative look the king gave him before it was quickly quashed. A surge of resentment filled Caius.

  ‘I regret my interruption, my brother, but such doubts as I see in your eyes deserve plain speaking.’

  Artor pushed the scrolls to one side of his rough table, and turned to face Caius. Courteous as always, he offered his foster-brother a stool and some good wine, and waited to hear what urgent matters had prompted this meeting.

  Over time, Caius had grown older and heavier in the jowls and in the upper body, but his legs, incongruously, were as slender as in his boyhood. Indulgence had blurred his delicate features, and the passing decades had marooned his once dark, carefully groomed hair in a mere fringe of grey around his ears. His mother, Livinia, would have believed that the years had lent him gravitas, that old Roman word for dignity, but Artor saw a soft man who had been spoiled by luxury and the sweetness of life at court.

  ‘What are you talking about, Caius? Why should I doubt you? Few men have served me as well, or as honourably, as you’ve done,’ Artor replied, succeeding in pushing away his impatience.

  ‘I am concerned
about these atrocities. I cannot help but remember those days of long ago when the Severinii ran amok, and I wonder if you still believe me capable of such vile behaviour. I sometimes think of Severinus and how charming he could be, and how filthy his soul became.’ Caius kept his open, guileless eyes fixed on those of his king.

  ‘The Severinii are long dead, and the earth where their villa once stood was sown with salt over twenty years ago,’ Artor said softly. ‘There may be some form of man-beast who walks among us, but I could never believe that you would have cast aside your oaths or the memory of your blessed mother so easily. Why would you risk all that you have won for the blood of a sheep or a dog? No, Caius. In truth, you have done nothing that causes me to doubt you.’

  Artor spoke levelly, with eyes that were grave and unswerving, and Caius was relieved. But Artor was now the High King of the Britons, and not the honest Artorex of their youth. He, too, had learned to dissemble.

  ‘Thank you, brother,’ Caius said, his hands playing unconsciously with the curled fringes of his hair. ‘This matter has caused me concern for some time. I thought that my involvement with Severinus all those years ago could mean that I might be suspected of involvement in these abominations that have taken place. I thank you for your trust.’

  ‘Of course, Caius. Now, may I help you further?’ Artor’s civility did not waver, nor did the kindly interest in his stern face.

  ‘No . . . no . . . my apologies for the interruption, my lord. You are busy with your duties towards the realm, and heaven knows I need to inventory the grain reserves before the harvest begins . . .’ The nervous voice of Caius trailed off, and he bowed deeply to his brother and left the apartments.

  Artor stared at the wall of his room, more like a priest’s cell in its lack of comfort and its practical simplicity than the apartments of a supreme ruler.

  ‘Why did you bring up the name of the Severinii, brother?’ Artor murmured aloud. ‘And why should some random acts of cruelty to animals bring those perverted bastards to your mind? Guilt never quite goes away, does it?’