by M. K. Hume
With wide, astounded eyes, Blaise fell silent and remained so all the way to Glastonbury. She sulked in silence, but left Arthur in no doubt that she was plotting her revenge.
When Glastonbury appeared before them Arthur felt the peace of the holy place descend into his soul. He had been raised to venerate this valley, where so much of his family history had been forged. Bishop Lucius of Glastonbury had arranged for the infant Artor to be taken to the Villa Poppinidii and then paid Ector Major to foster his new charge. At the end of Artor’s life another bishop had buried him in secret and prayed for his soul. Desperate to find some connection with his birth father which did not involve pain and disappointment, Arthur had come to see the resting place of the last High King of the Britons.
For the sake of the brothers of Glastonbury, Arthur left the party on the outskirts of the village that had grown around the religious enclosure, itself centred on a small, dilapidated wooden structure that had been bound together in places with straps of iron and sheets of lead to keep it upright.
Here, according to the legends, Joseph of Arimathea had built a church and planted the holy thorn from either the Cross of Calvary or the Crown of Thorns. When he died, the Cup of Lucius, rumoured to be the Bowl of Ceridwen or even the Sangreal, or Holy Grail, had been stolen from his grave. True or not, legends filled the sweet air of Glastonbury that weaved its way around the tor and all who lived below it.
Arthur and Gareth trotted their horses up to the rudimentary gatehouse and Arthur asked if he could speak to the bishop, apologising that he was unfamiliar with the name of the current incumbent of this important position. He gave his own name and that of Gareth before explaining their pedigree to a priest, who folded his hands inside his long sleeves as he memorised their message.
‘Brother Peter will take you and your companion to the quarters we keep here for pilgrims who visit. I must ask now that you put away all weapons in this holy place, for they are not permitted. Then, depending on the decision of our bishop, you and the rest of your party may be permitted to remain in the quarters for the night. We see many pilgrims who come to Glastonbury for the sake of their souls, but in these uncertain days even God’s house is not free of threat from the pagans. They would burn Joseph’s House without a qualm, so I will take your message to the bishop myself.’
The two men followed Brother Peter to a simple two-storeyed structure of wood some little way from the church, the priests’ quarters, the fish ponds and the gardens in which men were labouring despite the light, drizzling rain. The building for pilgrims was close to the smithy and the snug stables, and Arthur’s experienced eye saw that these rooms had been set up like a plain and serviceable inn for travellers. He quickly realised that the clean pallets were filled with sweet grass and the wooden floors had been scrubbed until the planks were almost white.
The sun was lowering in the west when three robed men arrived at the pilgrims’ quarters nearly an hour later. The priest who had met them at the gate was one of them, while another was a huge old man, white haired around his tonsure but obviously powerful. Arthur and Gareth assumed that he was a bodyguard of sorts to the frail, slender man who accompanied him. All three were dressed in heavily cowled robes of unbleached wool, tied at the waist with simple cords. Each carried a crucifix and beads at their waist for their prayers, and each had obviously been hardened by toil because the hands they offered were callused from years of labour in the fields. The smallest man stepped forward and both young warriors inclined their heads in gestures of respect.
‘I am Father Philip, the treasurer of the Glastonbury community,’ he said in a mild, scratchy voice that was ragged from lack of use, and Arthur wondered if this inoffensive man had taken a vow of silence in the past. ‘You have already met Father Septimus, who cares for the needs of all our pilgrims. This is Bishop Mark,’ he added, indicating the elderly, burly priest whom they had taken for some kind of protector.
Arthur and Gareth knelt and asked for a blessing, which Bishop Mark gave with gnarled, age-spotted hands that still retained traces of beauty. When they rose to their feet Mark looked up at Arthur, and the warrior could see recognition in the clear brown eyes that were still young and burning in the old man’s face.
‘So rumour does not lie. The Dragon King has left a hatchling behind him,’ he said. Arthur blushed scarlet, and assured the priest that whoever his sire might have been he was the foster-son of Bedwyr, the Arden Knife, and had no wish to be addressed in any other way.
‘I knew Lord Bedwyr well, although he couldn’t bring himself to return to the Church. I remember him and Mistress Nimue with fondness. He must be very old now, is he not?’
‘Aye, master, he is quite frail. He wearies of life, except for my mother, and waits with anticipation for the day when he will re-join his beloved king.’
‘You may tell Bedwyr that I will pray for him. The days when he could use the roads to travel to Glastonbury died with the High King, I fear! Now, what can I do for you, son of the forest?’
Arthur blushed again. ‘I wish to see the grave of the High King, Bishop Mark. Nimue has told me of her journey here, and she is certain that he will come again at a time of great need. She told me that the body lies near the church, and I am hoping that it is in your power to show me the place so that I can offer a prayer for his spirit.’
Without a word, Mark turned and led the way to the church and its small graveyard, while Gareth waited for Brother Peter to return with the rest of their party. One grave mound was a little separate from the others, situated to the right of the church wall. The sod had been disturbed during the past few years, and although the grass had grown back over the slight concavity in the earth, the cross looked a little askew, as if it had been hastily replaced in the ground. Mark saw Arthur gazing at the grave and divined his thoughts.
‘Near to four years ago, an ancient man rode up to the church, surrounded by a heavily armed band of warriors who were strange to us. A pack beast bore a small wrapped bundle and I believed at first that they wished to bury a beloved child in our graveyard. The old man was King Gawayne, whom I had not seen for decades. He was very frail and desperately ill, but his will shone through his eyes as strongly as ever. I heard later that he died shortly after he returned to his home, and I said many prayers for a man who displayed such loyalty.’
‘Whose was the corpse?’ Arthur asked despite himself.
‘When we opened the wrappings, we found the body of Abbess Mary Martha, whose name in your world was Wenhaver, High Queen of the Britons.’
Arthur felt his chest constrict. He had heard much of her fabled beauty, her faithlessness with Gawayne and her ultimate courage as the last High Queen of the British people.
‘What did Gawayne want, Bishop Mark? This is not idle curiosity. As you know, Gawayne was my kinsman, and I would dearly wish to know how his story ended.’
‘I understand your desire, my son. Gawayne believed that the last High Queen of the Britons should lie with her husband, as she had wished, and we abided by his request. We opened the grave, removed the stone that covered the High King’s remains and placed the queen’s body on top. They are now together in death, deep in the ground where we had first interred him after he was brought to this holy place.’
The bishop stared into Arthur’s eyes.
‘Before returning home, Gawayne asked us to carve a final message on the reverse of Artor’s gravestone. One of our artisans did so, and the stone was replaced in the grave before it was refilled. The prayers for the dead were private and short, but all was done as Mother Mary Martha would have wished. Artor and Wenhaver will rest for ever in peace within this holy place.’
‘Can you tell me the message ordered by Gawayne?’
‘The words came straight from the heart of the great warrior: Here lies Artor, King of the Britons, and Wenhaver, his second wife.’
‘Thank you for your kindness, my lord. I would like to pray now, if you will excuse me.’
Bishop
Mark moved some little distance from the grave and watched as the beautiful, extraordinarily tall young man knelt in the grass and abased himself at the foot of the grave. Then Arthur sat on his heels with a bent head.
Mark smiled sadly to himself. Somewhere in his devout heart some trace of the old Roman ways that had coloured his youth was retained, so he imagined a great wheel being turned by God rather than Fortuna, and the figures of mighty men rising and falling as judgement was meted out to those powerful manipulators of human life who had reigned supreme until their deaths.
‘I hope the king sleeps well,’ he murmured. ‘In the aftermath of his death, his sins have been forgiven, for he gave everything for his people and the Church. He was not a true believer, but his son is cut from finer cloth and seems to be noble to the bone. However, his eyes are still innocent, and he has yet to experience the cruelty of life, so I pray the Lord to have mercy on him, if only for the sake of his father.’
The last rays of the sun caught Arthur’s amber curls and turned them into a halo, or a crown. Mark shivered. There lay the past, and there knelt the future. ‘Ah, Lord, what you have decided will come to pass. We foolish souls cannot understand your divine purpose.’ He looked up, and saw that Arthur was gazing at him with eyes that were everything and nothing.
‘Thank you for your courtesy, Bishop Mark. I believe I shall not pass this way again, but I pray that Glastonbury remains safe from the Saxons.’
As they walked back to the pilgrims’ lodgings, where even Blaise had been silenced by the atmosphere of this sacred place, Mark realised that he was weeping, but in the days and years that followed he could never explain the reasons for his tears.
CHAPTER XIX
THE LAST OF ARDEN
Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest
And passage through these looms
God orders motion, but ordained no rest.
Henry Vaughan, Silex Scintillans, ‘Man’
After weeks of travel, Arthur felt as though he had been on the road for ever with the bitch-child, Blaise, who more than lived up to her name with its echoes of fire. Nothing was ever right in Blaise’s world, and everyone suffered because of her misery. Arthur was prepared to concede that being torn away from everything that was familiar and comforting at such a young age would have caused him to experience fear, feelings of rejection and displeasure, but he hoped that he would have acted with more grace than this girl displayed. She had never left Tintagel except for brief visits to Isca Dumnoniorum, so she should have enjoyed new places and people as a relief from the tedium of her childhood. But the journey from Tintagel to Glastonbury, and then by easy stages to Lindinis before joining the old Roman road to the north, had been agony for everyone involved.
At first, Arthur had sought to amuse the girl with the strange sights and the local legends. She remained sullen and, if she spoke, was devastatingly rude. Whenever he tried to show any empathy for her situation Blaise cut him off, until he despaired of finding any common ground where they could meet. Blaise was only a child, a difficult little girl, and she had no concept of what it meant to her family to have her safely married and domiciled in the relative security of the north.
Then, at a no-name, unimportant village in the hills above Corinium which they detoured towards after noticing a pall of smoke rising into the clear spring air, Arthur and Blaise came to their first fragile, tentative understanding.
The village had been attacked and destroyed on the previous day, and the remnants of its stone cottages were still smouldering, criss-crossed by fallen timbers that had been burned almost through by the heat of the conflagration.
‘Keep the girl back,’ Arthur ordered brusquely. He could still recall the remains of Crookback Farm all those years earlier, so he had some understanding of what they would find when they entered the village. He and Eamonn rode ahead into the small settlement, which had been so poor that most of the cottages were built of wood and thatch, obviously scavenged: materials that allowed the structures to burn like dry leaves. All that was left was stamped earth, ashes and a few broken pots. And the bodies.
Behind the cottages, empty pens showed that these villagers had scrabbled to earn a living with black-faced sheep and goats, because the soil was clearly a mixture of shale, flint and clay that was far too heavy for most crops. Water was plentiful, but life must have been hard for the inhabitants before the Saxon raiding party took everything of value, including their lives.
Unseen by the two warriors, Blaise had disobeyed their instructions and ventured into the shell of the first cottage on the edge of the circle of ruins. Her piercing cry drew their immediate attention, and with swords drawn they turned to face what they thought was an imminent threat to their safety.
‘They’re dead!’ the child wailed, her eyes staring and very dark in her chalk-white face. ‘The little children – even the boys! They’ve been . . . hacked to pieces. Who could do that to five-year-old children?’
Arthur stepped towards the ashen-faced, shaking girl. ‘I told you to stay with the guards. When will you learn to obey?’
‘But they’re all dead!’ she protested, two tears escaping unnoticed from her eyes. ‘What was the point of killing children, Eamonn? They couldn’t fight back. They were no threat to anyone. They were no older than little Nudd. Who would kill someone as young as little Nudd?’
Arthur gripped the girl’s shaking shoulders and noticed that she was tall for her age and gangly with her growth spurt. She seemed on the verge of hysterics, so he put one arm round her shoulders and gently steered her back to the guards and her pony.
‘These Saxons weren’t necessarily warriors. Their fighting men aren’t always monsters, just different from us in too many ways for us to live together peacefully. But every race has its outlaws, creatures who prey on weaker victims. This band lacked the courage to mount an attack on any group stronger than unarmed villagers who only had spades and hoes to protect themselves. Such men grow fat on the chaos of war and nothing is too vile for them to do. Do you see?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, gulping and beginning to cry again in the shelter of her hill pony’s mane. Arthur returned to the circle of buildings, ordering the five Dumnonii warriors to accompany him.
‘Seek out all the bodies and bring them to this hut. We’ll use the stones from the wall to surround them and then cover them over with whatever timber we can find,’ he ordered crisply. ‘We’ll burn their remains.’
The men fanned out immediately, each entering one of the pathetic ruins.
Eamonn stepped over the threshold of the cottage Arthur had selected and looked at the partially burned bodies within it. A number of children had been driven inside before the doors had been shut and the thatched roof set on fire with a flung torch. The doors and walls had sagged under the assault of five small bodies as the children had tried to escape the flames that were devouring them. Fortunately, they appeared to have died from inhaling the black, oily smoke which still stained their mouths and nostrils in the minutes before the fire engulfed their tender bodies. Eamonn turned away, sickened by the mental image of their last moments. As the bodies of ten adults and several more infants were gathered and placed in the hut with the children, he conferred with Arthur.
‘Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Arthur murmured. ‘We don’t have the time to bury these corpses, or even cover them, so we must burn them right here in their village. The outlaws could still be close, and we don’t have the luxury of time to hunt them down. Besides, we’d be risking the safety of the girls, which King Bors wouldn’t tolerate – or forgive. No, we have to allow these animals to remain free.’
‘How do you know these murders weren’t inflicted by a war band? I’ve always been told that the Saxons will commit almost any sin,’ Eamonn said softly. He was piling wood from a shattered animal pen on top of the pitiful tangle of dead flesh, and his face was twisted with suppressed, impotent fury.
‘Bedwyr has often told me that the northerners of bygone days acted in this way, but he swears that many of the current Saxon lords were born here in Britain, just as we were. Today’s Saxons don’t seem to be quite so senselessly cruel; they only attack settlements to further their land holdings and their power. Of what use is this village to the Saxon warrior class? Was there really so much wealth here that a war band would be tempted to attack it? Besides, what group of settlers would want holdings as poor as these? No, logic indicates that this is the work of a rebel group, men who have been cast out of their own villages as outlaws and so prey on small, unprotected places like this for food and what few precious objects are owned by the farmers. Think, Eamonn! We live in lawless times, and we are far from Mercia or the kingdoms of the east. The one good thing to result from this senseless ruin might be that Blaise will give us an easier journey. She’s badly shaken by what she has seen here.’
Eamonn nodded, but his dark eyes were bemused. ‘Sometimes you can be so matter-of-fact and so cold that I can hardly recognise you, my friend.’
‘Put it down to my parentage, Eamonn. No one in my family is particularly soft hearted,’ Arthur replied wistfully. Under the layer of practical analysis, he felt the deaths of these children acutely, but time was passing too quickly for the party to spend too much time here. Spring would soon be over and summer would be upon them. He had no intention of being caught in the north during the autumn, and the prospect of winter’s grasp was totally unacceptable. If they were delayed here, they would all suffer.
So Arthur used his flint to strike up a fresh spark and consigned the poor farmers to a cleaner burial than their murderers had intended. In the sudden leap of flames, the bodies seemed to move as if they were intent on rising out of their winding sheets of fire and coming forth from the funeral pyre. Arthur turned and left the victims, carefully closing the door and latching it to conceal the sad corpses, although the hut was open to the sky and any attempt to protect the bodies from airborne predators would be futile.
