A Novel

by Signe Pike

  Drowsiness soon overtook me. I succumbed to sleep and woke, my chest damp with sweat. Yes, the room was a tomb. Or was I dreaming? The fire had gone out and my body shivered, yet I did not feel cold. My eyes were closed and around me was only darkness, and yet I could see each fleck on the floor’s planking with such clarity. My body was parchment, skin like vellum, and I peeled it away, left it sleeping on the bed.

  And then, it seemed, I was dreaming of the forest.

  This time no rustle of wind, no call of birds, no sliver of sunlight, could penetrate the thick boughs overhead. I did not know these woods, but I could smell them. I could smell that dawn was coming though the woods were yet dim as twilight. I could smell men in their battle armor, hiding in the bushes, the sour scent of violence clinging to their skin.

  A shuffle sounded. My ears pricked. I whipped my head round to see a soldier standing only paces from me in the underbrush, his spear raised and a hungry glint in his eye. My muscles tensed and coiled, ready to spring. But just as he thrust his arm back to let his weapon fly, another man came and swiped at his shoulder.

  “Leave it,” he barked. “Now’s no time for hunting. Later there’ll be plenty of venison to eat.”

  But I had already fled: up over fallen trees, up the hill, away from the gloom and the weight of the silence rushing in, stifling, thundering in my ears like a band of warhorses. Higher I raced with the grace of a deer, ’til I came to the top of a hill and could go no farther. Here a timber lookout was posted, surrounded by stakes. But it was empty now, abandoned, save for the remnants of a signal fire, forgotten woodsmoke.

  Across the valley rose the ramparts of a fortress, surrounded by mountains of brush piled up, ready to be lit. The smoke of battle would soon be upon them. The banner of the Dragon flapped in the dawn from the peaked roof of Gwenddolau’s hall, and below, between the ditch and the rampart, an army of Dragon Warriors the size of ants, their bodies facing the forest. I tried to make them out: my brothers, my love, searching with keen sight for any sign of my daughter. But the eyes I was looking through were scanning the woods, and the heart that was beating was not my own. It did not register anything beyond the terror of the battle cry that rose up, the harsh blare of the carynx, the roar of the men, discordant in their chaos, as they swept through the forest, their boots snapping twigs like slender bones lying in the underbrush.

  Two armies standing, two armies racing, horses charging through the water of the river, swords drawn to slash and spears poised to tear, shield walls digging down into the dirt, bracing for the blows that would come, and I woke, vomiting, my stomach seized with cramps.

  I was bent over the floor, feet tucked beneath me, my body obeying the expulsion of the toxin that coursed through my blood.

  “No,” I begged, swiping at my mouth. “Take me back, please. Take me back! I was too soon. I was too soon!”

  But there was more, I could feel it; all was not done. A spark caught my eye and I looked to the hearth. Where the fire had gone dark, a new fire blazed, seeping past the weariness and into my bones, until where I had been shaking, I was suddenly warm.

  I saw then, too, not just what was taking place but also what was yet to come. The fortress was burning, and yet there were men escaping through flame. I saw a mountain capped in snow, Dragon Warriors retreating into the forest. I saw my Angharad standing before me, so beautiful, beautiful but grown. I saw Cyan as a man, on the heights of Clyde Rock.

  And then I saw further, further than I had ever imagined one could see.

  I saw army upon army, foreign men with black banners pouring from the sea, a greater danger than any civil war of Britons. There was the clashing of steel and the spilling of blood ’til it ran through the grass like a red rushing river. I saw a hut on a hill and recognized my brother. His wild hair was white, his back hunched in age, traveling over cobblestones as children jeered and threw stones, calling him names. Disgraced. Forgotten. All his wisdom and kindness, the great deeds of his life—they had all been for naught.

  Myrddin, they jeered.

  Myrddin.

  In the end I slept, my body worn out. When I woke it was daylight. Aela had come and sat at my bed. The battle was raging even as I stood.

  “Fetch me some food, Aela. I wish to eat.”

  Her eyes widened but she raced to do my bidding, returning in moments with butter and bread. I bathed, took food, and drank, all the while lost in my thoughts. There would be no word for some time yet, I knew. But I would not lie there like a husk, waiting to be buried.

  I had seen it: what would come. Not all, but enough that I knew. And there was something important that I must do.

  On my table beside the window I found parchment and quill.

  I sat and dipped the feather in ink, bending my head over the blank skin of parchment, and began to write.

  There are those who will argue such things should not be written.

  The songs are for the Keepers. Have I, of all people, forgotten the written word is sacred?

  But who am I, if not a keeper of the Old Way? My name is Languoreth, daughter of Morken. I write because I have seen the darkness that will come. When we will no longer gather to share the sagas of our heroes, our gods. When our people flee into forests in the blackness of night and our histories burn along with the bodies of our Keepers. We will scatter their ashes back to the earth. And when the last of them are gone, who among us will remember our stories?

  The shifting of the sun, the medicine of the plants, the lines of lilt and language; without our tales, our lives will be forgotten.

  Already there are those who seek to tell a new history.

  They will taunt and jeer, until my brother’s true name is lost, and he is called only “Myrddin.”

  Madman.

  But my brother is no madman.

  He is cunning and brave. Kind and fierce. My brother is far-famed: he whispered his wisdom at the shoulder of Uther Pendragon. He fought to salvage the bones of a kingdom.

  I write these words now on parchment because we live in such times that must be remembered.

  My brother’s name is Lailoken.

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  * * *

  Many of us grew up on tales of the wizard Merlin, the gnarled, white-haired mage who stood beside King Arthur of legend. As a child, one of my favorite movies was Walt Disney’s The Sword in the Stone. But it wouldn’t be until I was an adult that the mythos of the Arthurian saga would truly consume me.

  Having written a travel memoir that required research into the Celts, I’d been studying Celtic history intensively for nearly three years by the time I wandered into a tiny bookshop in Glastonbury, England. Browsing the shelves, I came across a copy of Adam Ardrey’s nonfiction book Finding Merlin and bought it on a whim. In it, Ardrey, a lawyer from Glasgow, presents compelling evidence that the legend of Merlin is based on a man named Lailoken who lived in sixth-century Scotland.

  Finding Merlin contains several revelations. For me, perhaps the most intriguing was the fact this man Lailoken had a twin sister. Her name was Languoreth. She would go on to become a powerful queen, likely one of the most influential women in early medieval Scotland—but, tragically, she’s been largely forgotten. The Lost Queen.

  Though Languoreth may be lost to modern consciousness, her memory is preserved in several places: a Welsh poem copied down in the fourteenth-century Red Book of Hergest entitled “The Dialogue Between Myrddin and His Sister Gwenddydd” (her family name) and a piece of Glasgow folklore known as “The Fish and the Ring.”

  We find Languoreth recorded in ancient king lists as the wife of a ruler named Rhydderch Hael, who scholars believe ruled from Clyde Rock in the late sixth to early seventh centuries. There are children descended from the union of Rhydderch and Languoreth; their names are recorded in ancient Welsh triads as well as historic genealogies. But who Languoreth truly was—and what she experienced in her lifetime as one of the most powerful women in her era—has been buried under the w
eight of passing centuries.

  The Battle of Arderydd, one of the most violent and least remembered civil wars in Scottish history, took place in the year AD 573, according to the Annales Cambriae. It pitted Languoreth’s husband against her own brother. It pitted Lailoken against his own young nephew. I couldn’t stop thinking about Languoreth and the epic times she lived through: the battle that tore her family apart, the Anglo-Saxon migrations, and the first ever politico-religious acts of violence that the Britons of Strathclyde would have likely experienced. Moreover, in today’s world, powerful female role models must be brought forth and honored now more than ever. I thought it a travesty that Languoreth had been written out of history, her powerful story never told.

  When I first began researching Languoreth, there was a passion that ignited me, but mostly my work was driven by a visceral sense of sadness over the difficult times in which she lived and a great sense of injustice that her life had been forgotten. I don’t believe writers find stories. I believe stories find us. And the way in which this story found me left me with little choice as to whether or not I was going to write it. I believed it was time Languoreth stepped from the mists of history to take her place in our hearts, our minds, and our memories.

  • • •

  To the Celtic people, names were sacred. As a culture that lived and remembered via oral tradition, the Britons occupied a world where the spoken word held tremendous power. The son of a petty king or chieftain, Lailoken was (as Tolkien’s Gandalf would say) “no conjurer of cheap tricks.” He was a warrior, a druid, a scholar, and a powerful politician. As such, Lailoken made powerful enemies in his lifetime, especially in the burgeoning Christian church—enemies who, toward the end of his life, sought to obliterate his influence by doing the thing any honorable Celt feared most: erasing his name from the public record.

  Lailoken’s adversaries in the church began, in an effort to discredit him, to refer to him as Myrddin, which means “Madman” in Old Welsh—pronounced “Meer-thin.” (Old Welsh is a language directly descended from Brythonic, the language of Lailoken and his people.)

  As Adam Ardrey discovered, Lailoken means Chief of Song: it is in actuality a title, not a name. Just as Morken means, loosely translated, Great Chief. “Song” as the Celts referred to it, is a figurative word for a vital component of their culture lost to us now. We can only make educated guesses as to its true meaning. Song was not only singing, or oral history, or genealogies, or stories, or entertainment. It was also religion, power, mystery, and preservation of ancient knowledge regarding the natural world, healing, philosophy, and the very nature of human existence. I disagree with academics who assert that the idea of Song refers strictly to a role or tradition upheld by Celtic “poets,” as well as that the term “poet” (as it is understood today) is even a word that can accurately describe the power, influence, and position that those involved in Song possessed in Celtic society. Chief of Song. Lailoken’s sister or father would have called him by a family name, rather than by this title, but whatever Lailoken’s real name was, it’s been lost. Nonetheless, the title tells us that whoever Lailoken was, he was a leader of the Old Way, and someone of great importance to the political world of his time.

  There is reason to believe the process of obscuring Lailoken’s name began in his own lifetime. But certainly by the time Lailoken became known as Myrddin in lore and literature, the slander begun by his adversaries was complete. However, in what is perhaps one of history’s sweetest ironies, only in the hagiography of Lailoken’s greatest enemy (Glasgow’s patron saint, Mungo), written nearly six hundred years later by Jocelyn of Furness, do we learn this insane fellow called Myrddin had another name by which he was known: Lailoken. And so “Lailoken” became the best name to use in trying to resurrect a more accurate memory of an epic ghost.

  For hundreds of years, scholars and writers have obsessed over the Arthurian legends, seeking to unearth a kernel of truth about the magnificent men and women that color the pages of the epics. But surprisingly few have sought to overlay human migratory patterns in search of answers. When you examine what was happening historically during the times these stories were first taking root, it’s easy to see how the tales of Myrddin could have migrated from their place of origin in southern Scotland down into Cornwall, Wales, and Brittany. In fact, there is much evidence for it.

  Within the Celtic language, there is a linguistic split that occurred well over one thousand years ago. The Britons, including our people of Strathclyde, spoke a dialect called “P-Celtic.” Their Celtic brethren the Scotti (or Westmen, as I also call them), spoke a variant called “Q-Celtic.” We tend to think of history as static, and are quick to enclose events within parameters that give us an understanding of a beginning and an end. In reality, conquerings are seldom truly infinite, and history is fluid. The Anglo-Saxon “invasion” was—rather than a single event that can be set to a specific date in history—a series of migrations, battles, raids, and power grabs that went on for many decades in many different parts of Scotland and England. (These events also happened much later in Scotland than in England, where Romanized towns were taken over much earlier and seemingly with more ease.) In fact, there is evidence that Clyde Rock (today called Dumbarton Rock) was still a stronghold of the Britons well into the ninth century, a date which does not hold with Anglo-Saxon occupation as it is claimed to have occurred in the rest of the country.

  When the Angles made Strathclyde and the other Brythonic territories uncomfortable enough to live in, migration took place. Britons from Scotland fled into what is now Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, where other Brythonic populations still possessed the land and military prowess to offer them a better way of life. The Arthurian stories belonged to the Britons, and they took their stories with them.

  This is how the Arthurian tales became geographically misplaced.

  Ardrey is not the first author to place Merlin and Arthur in Scotland (although he is unquestionably my favorite). There are a few other books that present very good arguments, Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Quest for Merlin being one. I agree with these writers that it is no surprise that scholars trying to place a historical Arthur and Merlin in the south of England or in Brittany come up with so little evidence. It’s only when you return Lailoken and his contemporaries to their natural geographical home that the place names, family names, battle locations, and legends all fall perfectly into place.

  I spent nearly six years immersed in the research and writing of this novel in an effort to present as accurate a portrayal of sixth-century Strathclyde and the world of the Britons as possible. When I have taken leaps, it has been with the archaeological and anthropological evidence in mind, but I don’t doubt there will be argument as to some of my choices, and I’ve likely made some mistakes. In places I’ve taken the fiction writer’s liberty of condensing the historical time line for the sake of story flow or infusing romance. For a more accurate time line pertaining to the events in the book, as well as a much more detailed account on the truth behind the legend, I encourage you to read Ardrey’s works.

  The post-Roman and Early Medieval time periods are among the least archaeologically represented periods in all of the United Kingdom. In southern Scotland, houses were almost exclusively built from timber, which is easily burned during times of war and rots away, leaving little more than postholes. Many lived in huts of wattle and daub that had changed little since the Iron Age and left few traces. Things were built on top of these sites by conquering peoples and subsequent generations, further obscuring any archaeological record. We don’t know if Early Medieval noble houses had second stories, or stairs, or windows at all. (Many think likely not.) But we do know that, several hundred years earlier, Roman houses built in what is now the UK were multistory and had indoor plumbing and an early form of centralized heating, as well as paned glass, and so I have allowed for some Roman influence where there might have been none.

  Much of what we know from this time period comes from the work
of a monk called Gildas, who recorded maddeningly little in relation to dates. There is argument as to where Gildas was writing as well as when. Many scholars place Vortigern’s betrayal much earlier historically than I have placed it in this book, and think him a man of England.

  Given the dust and grime of the Early Medieval period, it’s not likely druids (I call them Wisdom Keepers) wore the white robes first mentioned by Greek chroniclers daily; they were more likely reserved for ceremony and special occasions. To give them an immediately distinguishable feature, I’ve taken some liberties here. The brown hoods worn by monks were woven, tasseled pieces that slipped over the head, not full cloaks. A magnificent example can be seen today at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

  The sites in this book are characters that deserve unearthing themselves.

  Bright Hill is my name, but in Mungo/St. Kentigern’s hagiography it states that the hill in Glasgow where the saint buried the body of Fergus was indeed a hill sacred to the druids. It is Mungo’s biographer, Jocelyn of Furness, who relates that any who tried to remove the “offending body” were punished with severe beatings and even death. Today Mungo’s Glasgow Cathedral sits near the spot, and the hill of the druids has become Glasgow’s Necropolis. Old Glasgow city records recall a natural spring near the bottom of that hill, and on a visit to Glasgow, author Adam Ardrey was kind enough to point out the road to me that now runs between the cathedral and the hill that used to be the Molendinar Burn, a freshwater stream that would have flowed from the base of the hill down to the river Clyde. There was an ancient spring there that would very likely have been sacred to the Britons, especially given its location so near their druid hill. I’ve called it the White Spring. “White Isle,” near Partick, was most recently known as Whiteinch, and was demolished when the river Clyde was dredged to enable the passage of larger ships. Any archaeological remains of Cadzow Fortress are very likely buried beneath (and beside) the ruins of a much later medieval castle. You can tour the grounds, which have been blessedly preserved by the wonderful people at Chatelherault Country Park in Hamilton, Scotland. There you can walk the same woods that Lailoken and Languoreth walked, and you can visit the mysterious “Roman” earthworks nestled among an ancient stand of oaks. A special place.