Dahut

by Poul Anderson

  Gratillonius trod forth. The amphitheater loomed at his back. Its arena was a mire, but storage chambers and the like lent shelter to such people as he had found, riding about after he won ashore. They could not linger, of course, without fire or food or even fresh water. Salt made the canal undrinkable as far as he had searched, and would be slow to rinse away. He must take them to where there was help. Surviving houses along the valley, whether abandoned or not, ought to hold some stores; and farther on were the Osismii.

  First he required air, solitude, motion to work the rust from his bones, the sand from his head, so that he would be fit to lead his flock. The time seemed infinitely distant when he might acknowledge to himself that he was spent. Ys was gone; but he remained the tribune of Rome, a centurion of the Second.

  The path brought him to Aquilonian Way. There he turned west.

  The chill around him never stirred. Above reached a blank silver-gray. The world seemed likewise bled of color; bared soil, grass and shrubs hammered flat, murky puddles, trees felled or stripped, lichenous rocks, darkling cliffs, charred snags where the Wood had been. Ocean rolled and tossed, the hue of the sky. Horizons were lost in haze. Sound was his footfalls on paving stones, surf which farness softened, and mewing of gulls, whose wings made a snowstorm ahead.

  He began to pass over that which the tide had left. For each step he took, thicker grew heaps of kelp, chunks of driftwood, marooned fish, broken shells. Among them he saw more and more work of hands: potsherds, glass, pieces of furnishings, forlornly bright rags, here a carpenter’s adze, there a worshipper’s idol, yonder a doll. Heavier objects lay closer to the water. What the gulls were after was those corpses that had come aground.

  Gratillonius guessed the number as two or three hundred. More would doubtless wash in during the next several days; however, the sea kept most of its dead. He didn’t go down to look. He belonged to the living. Maybe later he could give the bones decent burial.

  He paused and gazed before him.

  How empty it was between the headlands. Blocks lay everywhere disarrayed on the arc of the beach. Fragments of wall stood above the waves beyond. Reefs and holms were barnacled with ruins. He could not bring himself to guess what this thing might have been, or that. Everything was merely empty. He supposed that in time the currents would eat away what he saw, and only the skerries outside the bay abide.

  It did not matter. Ys was gone.

  Had Ys ever been?

  Alone in the gray, Gratillonius wondered. It felt like a dream that glimmered from him as he woke—rampart, gate, ships, the towers tall above little shadow-blue alleys, watchfires and hearthfires, temples and taverns, philosophers and fools, witchcraft and wisdom, horror and hope, songs and stories that the world would hear no more, friends, foes, the Gods he denied and the God Who in the end denied him, and always the women, the women. How could this clay ever have kissed them or listened to the laughter of their daughters? Let Dahut be unreal!

  Gratillonius shook his head. He would not hide from himself. Nor would he weep. Not yet, anyhow. He had work to do. Be it enough that Dahut was at peace.

  Soon he must force his people to their feet and start the trek up the valley. But let them rest a bit longer. Gratillonius went on to the junction of Redonian Way and bore north. He would go out on Point Vanis, look down from above, then across the sea, and remember.

  AFTERWORD

  The Breton folk tell many different tales about the sunken city of Ys, its king, and his daughter. Bearing in mind that these often disagree, let us give a synopsis of the basic medieval story.

  Grallon (sometimes rendered “Gradlon”) was ruler of Cornouaille, along the southwestern shore of Brittany, with his seat at Quimper, which some say he helped found. Once he took a great fleet overseas and made war on Malgven, Queen of the North. In conquering her country he also won her heart, as she did his. They started off together for his home, but terrible weather kept them at sea for a year. During this time Malgven bore a girl child, and died in so doing. When the heartbroken Grallon finally returned, he could deny nothing to his daughter Dahut (in some versions, Ahes). She grew up beautiful and evil.

  While hunting, Grallon met a hermit, Corentin, who lived in the forest. This man was miraculously nourished; each day he drew a fish from the water, ate half, and threw the other half back, whereupon it became whole and alive again. However, it was his wisdom that most impressed the king. Grallon persuaded Corentin to join him in Quimper, and there the holy man won the people over to righteous ways. Other legends maintain that he was the actual founder or cofounder of the city, and its first bishop.

  Dahut felt oppressed by the piety all around her, and begged her father to give her a place of her own. He built Ys on the shore—Ys of the hundred towers, walled against the waters that forever threatened its splendor. Hung upon his breast, Grallon kept the silver key that alone could unlock the sea gate. Otherwise he gave Dahut free rein and turned a blind eye to her wickedness.

  Led by her, Ys became altogether iniquitous. The rich ground down the poor, gave themselves to licentious pleasures, forgot their duty to God, and even blasphemed Him. Dahut herself took a different lover every night, and in the morning had him cast to his death in the sea.

  Another holy man, St. Guénolé, was stirred to enter the city and plead with the people to mend their ways. For a while he did succeed in frightening many into reform; but the baneful influence of Dahut was too strong, and they drifted back into sin.

  At last God determined to destroy Ys, and gave the Devil leave to carry out the mission. Taking the guise of a handsome young man, he sought Dahut in her palace and was soon welcomed into her bed. Him she did not have killed. Rather, she fell wildly in love. He demanded, as a sign of her affection, that she bring him the key Grallon bore. Dahut stole it while the king was asleep and gave it to her lover. The night was wild with storm. He slipped out and unlocked the gate. The sea raged in and overwhelmed Ys.

  It had no power over St. Guénolé, who awakened innocent Grallon and warned him to flee. Barely did the king’s great charger carry him through the waters as they surged in between the city walls. Dahut screamed in terror. Her father saw, and tried to save her. The saint told him he must not, for the weight of her sins would drag him down too; and she was swept away from his grasp. None but Grallon and Guénolé escaped, as Ys went under the waves.

  Guénolé laid the doom on the city that it would remain sunken until a Mass was said in it upon a Good Friday. Dahut became a siren, haunting the coast, luring sailors to shipwreck among the many rocks thereabouts. Grallon gave up his crown and ended his days in the abbey of Landevennec which Guénolé had founded.

  A later story relates how one mariner was borne benath the water by certain strange swimmers. Somehow he did not drown, and they led him to the sunken city and into a church where a service was going on. He was afraid to give the responses, when no one else did. Afterward his guides brought him ashore and let him go; but first they asked sadly, “Why did you not say what you should have at the Mass? Then we would all have been released.”

  Ys is still there under the sea.

  Thus far the tradition. As for its origin, the prosaic fact is that stories about submerged towns are common along the Welsh and Cornish coasts. Folk from those parts could well have carried the idea with them during their massive emigration to Armorica in the fifth and sixth centuries. In the course of time it came to be associated with Grallon and with several of the host of Breton saints. On the other hand, the tale could conceivably have been a native one which the Bretons found when they arrived, and this we have assumed for our purposes.

  Among the disagreements between versions of the legend, conspicuous is that concerning the site. Some accounts put Ys on the Baie de Douarnenez, others on the Baie d’Audierne, still others on the Baie des Trépassés. We have chosen the last of these.

  Obviously we have made a good many more choices! First and foremost, we have imagined that there really was an Ys.<
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  If so, when did it perish? Saints Corentin and Guénolé are assigned to the fifth and sixth centuries respectively; therefore they could not both have been involved. We picked the earlier era. (If nothing else, the farther back in time, the more plausible it is that no record would survive of the city and its destruction. At that, we have had to offer some explanation of why the Romans left none.) Therefore Corentin must needs assume the role that folklore gives to Guénolé. Besides, legend associates him with the founding of Quimper and makes St. Martin consecrate him its bishop.

  Since no kingdom of Cornouaille existed at this time, our Grallon would have had to begin as the ruler of Ys, which must thus have been flourishing long before his birth. He in turn would have had no reason to start a settlement at what was to become Quimper until after the loss of his realm. The need for a new stronghold, in the chaos that was spreading through Gaul, would be clear to him if he was himself a Roman, as we have supposed.

  From the first-century geographer Pomponius Mela we have adopted and adapted the Gallicenae. True, he describes them as vestal virgins, but with his own sources all being indirect, he was not necessarily right about this. The sixth-century historian Procopius gives an account of the Ferriers of the Dead; he says they took their unseen passengers from Gaul to Britain, but we depict men so engaged between Ys and the Île de Sein. The king who must win and defend his crown in mortal combat is best known from Lake Nemi, as described by Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough. However, the practice has occurred elsewhere too, in various guises, around the world, so we could reasonably attribute it to Ys.

  Aside from such modifications, logically required, we have stayed as close as possible to the legends. After all, this is a fantasy. Yet we have at the same time tried to keep it within the framework of facts that are well established.

  For us it all began one day in 1979, when we were staying on a farm near Médréac in Brittany and Karen, on impulse, wrote the poem with which our story ends. Earlier in the same trip we had visited a number of Roman remains in England and stood on Hadrian’s Wall. Now somehow this came together with Ys, of which our surroundings reminded us, and the first dim outlines of the tale appeared. At home we thought and talked about it more and more often, until by 1982 our ideas were clear enough that we returned to Brittany for a look at sites we had not examined before. There followed about a year’s worth of book research, and then the actual writing—occasionally interrupted to meet other commitments—lasted into the spring of 1987. The whole business has been a strange and rewarding experience. We hope readers will enjoy what has come out of it.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the King of Ys series

  I

  1

  There was his hand, her father’s strong hand, closing on the arm she raised toward him. The waters roared and rushed. Wind flung a haze of scud off their tops. Barely through salt blindness could she know it was he and sense the bulk of the horse he rode. Memory passed like a lightning flash: she had sworn she would never mount that horse again while her father lived. But he was hauling her up out of the sea that would have her.

  There was then a shadow behind him in the murk and spume, a tall man who touched a staff to her father’s head. His grip clamped the tighter, but he did not now draw her onward. Waves dashed her to and fro. Tide went in flows and bursts of force. The noise filled heaven and her skull.

  It was as if she sensed the sudden anguish, like a current out of his body into hers. The fingers slackened. A surge tore her from them. She screamed. The flood flung a mouthful to choke her. She had a glimpse of him, saw him lean forth, reach after what he had lost. A torrent swept her away.

  Terror vanished. Abruptly she was altogether calm and alert. No help remained but in herself. She must hoard her strength, breathe during those instants when the tumult cast her high and hold the breath while it dragged her back under, watch for something to cling to and try to reach it, slowly, carefully. Else she was going to drown.

  The sea tumbled her about, an ice-cold ravisher. She whirled through depths that were yellow, green, gray, night-blue. Up in the spindrift she gasped its bitterness and glimpsed walls crumbling. The violence scraped her against them, over and over, but bore her off before she could seize fast. Waves thundered and burst. Wind shouted hollowly.

  The snag of a tower passed by and was lost. She understood that the deluge had snatched her from high ground and undertow was bearing her to the deeps. Surf brawled white across the city rampart. Already it had battered stone from stone off the upper courses, made the work into reefs; and still it hammered them, and they slid asunder beneath those blows. Right and left the headlands loomed above the wreckage, darknesses in wildness. Beyond them ramped Ocean.

  A shape heaved into view, timbers afloat, fragment of a ship. It lifted on crests, poised jagged against clouds and the first dim daylight, skidded down troughs, rose anew. The gap closed between it and her. She gauged how she must swim to meet it. For this chance she could spend what might was left her. With the skill of a seal, she struck out, joined herself to the waters, made them help her onward. Her fingertips touched the raft. A roller cloven by a rock sent it from her.

  She was among the skerries. Fury swirled around them, fountained above them. Never could she reach one, unless as a broken corpse. Billows crashed over her head.

  Dazed, the animal warmth sucked from her, she did not know the last of them for what it was. She was simply in the dark, the time went on and on, her lips parted and she breathed sea. The pain was far off and brief. She spun down endlessly through a whiteness that keened.

  At the bottom of that throat was not nullity. She came forth into somewhere outside all bounds. Someone waited. Transfiguration began.

  2

  Fear knocked in the breast of Gratillonius as he approached the Nymphaeum.

  Around him dwelt peace. The stream that fed the sacred canal descended in a music of little waterfalls. Morning sunlight rang off it. This early in the year, the surrounding forest stood mostly bare to the blue overhead. The willows had unsheathed their blades, a green pale and clear if set beside the intensity of the pasture-lands below, but oak and chestnut were still opening buds. Squirrels darted along boughs. Certain birds started to sing. A breeze drifted cool, full of damp odors.

  What damage he saw was slight, broken branches, a tree half uprooted. The storm had wrought havoc in the valley; the hills sheltered their halidom.

  Nothing whatsoever seemed to have touched the space into which he emerged Swans floated on the pond, peacocks walked the lawn. The image of Belisama Mother stood on its pile of boulders, beneath the huge old linden, above the flowing spring. Earth of flowerbeds, gravel of paths, hedgerows and bowers led his gaze as ever before, to the colonnaded white building. The glass in its windows flashed him a welcome.

  You did not let hoofs mar those grounds. A trail went around their edge to join one behind the Nymphaeum, which led on into the woods and so to the guardhouse and its stable. For the moment, he simply dismounted and tethered Favonius. The stallion snorted and stood quiet, head low. Despite having rested overnight at the last house they reached yesterday, man and beast remained exhausted. Recovery from what had happened would be slow, and then—Gratillonius thought—only in the body, not the spirit. Meanwhile he must plow onward without pause, lest he fell apart.

  Corentinus joined him. The craggy gray man had refused the loan of a mount for himself and strode behind, tireless as the tides. He leaned on his staff and looked. Finally he sighed into silence: “Everything that was beautiful about Ys is gathered here.”

  Gratillonius remembered too much else to agree, but he also recalled that his companion had never before beheld this place, in all the years of his ministry. It must have smitten him doubly with wonder after the horrors of the whelming. Usually Corentinus was plain-spoken, like the sailor he once had been. With faint surprise, Gratillonius realized that the other man had used Ysan.

  He could not bring himself to
reply, except for “Come” in Latin. Leading the way, his feet felt heavy. His head and eyelids were full of sand, his aches bone-deep. Doubtless that was a mercy. It kept the grief stunned.

  But the fear was awake in him.

  Female forms in blue and white appeared in the doorway and spread out onto the portico. Well might they stare. The men who neared them were unkempt, garments stained and wrinkled and in need of mending. Soon they were recognizable. Murmurs arose, and a single cry that sent doves aloft in alarm off the roof. The King, dressed like any gangrel. The Christian preacher!

  They trudged up the stairs and jerked to a halt. Gratillonius stared beyond the minor priestess to the vestals whom she had in charge. His heart wavered at sight of his daughters.

  Nemeta, child of Forsquilis; Julia, child of Lanarvilis. Them he had left to him Una, Semuramat, Estar—no, he would not mourn the ten who were lost, not yet, he dared not.

  He found himself counting. The number of persons on station varied. It happened now to be seven, or eight if he added the priestess. Besides his own pair there were four maidens ripening toward the eighteenth birthdays that would free them from service. He knew them, though not closely. All were grandchildren of King Hoel. One stemmed through Morvanalis, by an older sister of that Sasai who later became Gratillonius’s Queen Guilvilis. One descended from Fennalis’s daughter Amair, one each from Lanarvillis’s Miraine and Boia. (Well, Lanarvilis had been dutifully fruitful in three different reigns; she deserved that her blood should live on.) Then there was a little girl of nine, too young for initiation but spending a while here as custom was, that she might become familiar with the sanctuary and serene in it. With her Gratillonius was better acquainted, for she was often in the house of Queen Bodilis, whose oldest daughter Talavair had married Arban Cartagi; the third child of that couple was this Korai.