‘Any day now, Lady.’
‘And brings Lancelot?’ she asked.
‘I would think so.’
She grimaced. ‘The last time we met, Lord Derfel, I was to marry Gundleus. Now it is to be Lancelot. One King after another.’
‘Yes, Lady,’ I said. It was an inadequate, even a stupid answer, but I had been struck by the exquisite nervousness that ties a lover’s tongue. All I ever wanted was to be with Ceinwyn, but when I found myself at her side I could not say what was in my soul.
‘And I am to be Queen of Siluria,’ Ceinwyn said, without any relish at the prospect. She stopped and gestured back down the Severn’s wide valley. ‘Just past Dolforwyn,’ she told me, ‘there’s a little hidden valley with a house and some apple trees. And when I was a little girl I always used to think the Otherworld was like that valley; a small, safe place where I could live, be happy and have children.’ She laughed at herself and began walking again. ‘All across Britain there are girls who dream of marrying Lancelot and being a Queen in a palace, and all I want is a small valley with its apple trees.’
‘Lady,’ I said, nerving myself to say what I really wanted to say, but she immediately guessed what was on my mind and touched my arm to hush me.
‘I must do my duty. Lord Derfel,’ she said, warning me to guard my tongue.
‘You have my oath,’ I blurted out. It was as near to a confession of love as I was capable of at that moment.
‘I know,’ she said gravely, ‘and you are my friend, are you not?’
I wanted to be more than a friend, but I nodded. ‘I am your friend, Lady.’
‘Then I will tell you,’ she said, ‘what I told my brother.’ She looked up at me, her blue eyes very serious. ‘I don’t know that I want to marry Lancelot, but I have promised Cuneglas that I will meet him before I make up my mind. I must do that, but whether I shall marry him, I don’t know.’ She walked in silence for a few paces and I sensed she was debating whether to tell me something. Finally she decided to trust me. ‘After I saw you last,’ she went on, ‘I visited the priestess at Maesmwyr and she took me to the dream cave and made me sleep on the bed of skulls. I wanted to discover my fate, you see, but I don’t remember having any dreams at all. But when I woke the priestess said that the next man who wanted to marry me would marry the dead instead.’ She gazed up at me. ‘Does that make sense?’
‘None, Lady,’ I said and touched the iron on Hywelbane’s hilt. Was she warning me? We had never spoken of love, but she must have sensed my yearning.
‘It makes no sense to me either,’ she confessed, ‘so I asked Iorweth what the prophecy meant and he told me I should stop worrying. He said the priestess talks in riddles because she’s incapable of talking sense. What I think it means is that I should not marry at all, but I don’t know. I only know one thing, Lord Derfel. I will not marry lightly.’
‘You know two things, Lady,’ I said. ‘You know my oath holds.’
‘I know that too’ she said, then smiled at me again. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Lord Derfel.’ And with those words she ran on ahead and scrambled back into the ox-cart, leaving me to puzzle over her riddle and to find no answer that could give my soul peace.
Arthur came to Caer Sws three days later. He came with twenty horsemen and a hundred spearmen. He brought bards and harpists. He brought Merlin, Nimue and gifts of the gold taken from the dead in Lugg Vale, and he also brought Guinevere and Lancelot.
I groaned when I saw Guinevere. We had won a victory and made peace, yet even so I thought it cruel of Arthur to bring the woman for whom he had spurned Ceinwyn. But Guinevere had insisted on accompanying her husband and so she arrived in Caer Sws in an ox-drawn wagon that was furnished with furs, hung with dyed linens and draped with green branches to signify peace. Queen Klaine, Lancelot’s mother, rode in the cart with Guinevere, but it was Guinevere, not the Queen, who commanded attention. She stood as the cart pulled slowly through Caer Sws’s gate and she remained standing as the oxen drew her to the door of Cuneglas’s great hall, where once she had been an unwanted exile and to which she now came like a conqueror. She wore a robe of linen dyed gold, she wore gold about her neck and on her wrists, while her springing red hair was trapped by a circle of gold. She was pregnant, but the pregnancy did not show beneath the precious gold linen. She looked like a Goddess.
Yet if Guinevere looked a Goddess, Lancelot rode into Caer Sws like a God. Many folk assumed he must be Arthur for he looked magnificent on a white horse draped with a pale linen cloth that was studded with small golden stars. He wore his white-enamelled scale armour, his sword was scabbarded in white and a long white cloak, lined with red, hung from his shoulders. His dark, handsome face was framed by the gilded edges of his helmet that was now crested with a pair of spread swan’s wings instead of the sea-eagle wings he had worn in Ynys Trebes. People gasped when they saw him and I heard the whispers hurry through the crowd that this was not Arthur after all, but King Lancelot, the tragic hero of the lost kingdom of Benoic and the man who would marry their own Princess Ceinwyn. My heart sank at the sight of him, for I feared his magnificence would dazzle Ceinwyn. The crowd hardly noticed Arthur, who wore a leather jerkin and a white cloak and seemed embarrassed to be in Caer Sws at all. That night there was a feast. I doubt Cuneglas could have felt much welcome for Guinevere, but he was a patient, sensible man who, unlike his father, did not choose to take offence at every imagined slight, and so he treated Guinevere like a Queen. He poured her wine, served her food and bent his head to talk with her. Arthur, seated on Guinevere’s other side, beamed with pleasure. He always looked happy when he was with his Guinevere, and there must have been a keen pleasure for him to see her treated with such ceremony in the very same hall where he had first glimpsed her standing among the lesser folk at the back of the crowd.
Arthur paid most of his attentions to Ceinwyn. Everyone in the hall knew how he had spurned her once and how he had broken their betrothal to marry the penniless Guinevere, and many men of Powys had sworn they could never forgive Arthur that slight, yet Ceinwyn forgave him and made her forgiveness obvious. She smiled on him, laid a hand on his arm and leaned close to him, and later in the feast, when mead had melted away all the old hostilities, king Cuneglas took Arthur’s hand, then his sister’s, and clasped them together in his and the hall cheered to see that sign of peace. An old insult was laid to rest. A moment later, in another symbolic gesture, Arthur took Ceinwyn’s hand and led her to a seat that had been left empty beside Lancelot. There were more cheers. I watched stony-faced as Lancelot stood to receive Ceinwyn, then as he sat beside her and poured her wine. He took a heavy golden bracelet from his wrist and presented it to her, and though Ceinwyn made a show of refusing the generous gift, she at last slipped it onto her arm where the gold gleamed in the rush light. The warriors on the hall floor demanded to see the bracelet and Ceinwyn coyly lifted her arm to show the heavy band of gold. I alone did not cheer. I sat as the sound thundered about me and as a heavy rain beat on the thatch. She had been dazzled, I thought, she had been dazzled. The star of Powys had fallen before Lancelot’s dark and elegant beauty.
I would have left the hall there and then to carry my misery into the rainswept night, but Merlin had been stalking the floor of the hall. At the beginning of the feast he had been seated at the high table but he had left it to move among the warriors, stopping here and there to listen to a conversation or to whisper in a man’s ear. His white hair was drawn back from his tonsure into a long plait that he had bound in a black ribbon, while his long beard was similarly plaited and bound. His face, dark as the Roman chestnuts that were such a delicacy in Dumnonia, was long, deeply lined and amused. He was up to mischief, I thought, and I had shrunk down in my place so that he would not work that mischief on me. I loved Merlin like a father, but I was in no mood for more riddles. I just wanted to be as far from Ceinwyn and Lancelot as the Gods would let me go.
I waited until I thought Merlin was on the far side of the hall an
d that it was safe for me to leave without him spotting me, but it was just at that moment that his voice whispered in my ear. ‘Were you hiding from me, Derfel?’ he asked, then he gave an elaborate groan as he settled on the floor beside me. He liked pretending that his great age had made him feeble, and he made a great play of massaging his knees and groaning at the pain in his joints. Then he took the horn of mead out of my hand and drained it.
‘Behold the virgin Princess,’ he said, gesturing with the empty horn towards Ceinwyn, ‘going to her grisly fate. Let’s see now.’ He scratched between the plaits of his beard as he thought about his next words. ‘A half month till the betrothal? Marriage a week or so later, then a handful of months till the child kills her. No chance of a baby coming out of those little hips without splitting her in two.’ He laughed. ‘It will be like a pussy cat giving birth to a bullock. Very nasty, Derfel.’ He peered at me, enjoying my discomfort.
‘I thought,’ I responded sourly, ‘that you had made Ceinwyn a charm of happiness?’
‘So I did,’ he said blandly, ‘but what of it? Women like having babies and if Ceinwyn’s happiness consists of being ripped into two bloody halves by her firstborn then my charm will have worked, will it not?’ He smiled at me.
‘ “She will never be high,”‘ I said, quoting Merlin’s prophecy that he had uttered in this very hall not a month before, ‘ “and she will never be low, but she will be happy.”‘
‘What a memory for trivia you do have! Isn’t the mutton awful? Under-cooked, you see. And it’s not even hot! I can’t abide cold food.’ Which did not stop him stealing a portion from my dish. ‘Do you think that being Queen of Siluria is high?’
‘Isn’t it?’ I asked sourly.
‘Oh, dear me, no. What an absurd idea! Siluria’s the most wretched place on earth, Derfel. Nothing but grubby valleys, stony beaches and ugly people.’ He shuddered. ‘They burn coal instead of wood and most of the folk are black as Sagramor as a result. I don’t suppose they know what washing is.’ He pulled a piece of gristle from his teeth and tossed it to one of the hounds that scavenged among the feasters. ‘Lancelot will soon be bored by Siluria! I can’t see our gallant Lancelot enduring those ugly, coal-blackened slugs for very long, so, if she survives childbirth, which I doubt, poor little Ceinwyn will be left all alone with a heap of coal and a squalling baby. That’ll be the end of her!’ He seemed pleased at the prospect. ‘Have you ever noticed, Derfel, how you find a young woman in the height of her beauty, with a face to snatch the very stars out of their heavens, and a year later you discover her stinking of milk and infant shit and you wonder how you could ever have found her beautiful? Babies do that to women, so look on her now, Derfel, look on her now, for she will never again be so lovely.’
She was lovely, and worse, she seemed happy. She was robed in white this night and about her neck was hung a silver star looped on a silver chain. Her golden hair was bound by a fillet of silver, and silver raindrops hung from her ears. And Lancelot, that night, looked as striking as Ceinwyn. He was said to be the handsomest man in Britain, and so he was if you liked his dark, thin, long, almost reptilian face. He was dressed in a black coat striped with white, wore a gold torque at his throat and had a circle of gold binding his long black hair that was oiled smooth against his scalp before cascading down his back. His beard, trimmed to a sharp point, was also oiled.
‘She told me,’ I said to Merlin, and knowing as I spoke that I revealed too much of my heart to that wicked old man, ‘that she isn’t certain about marrying Lancelot.’
‘Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?’ Merlin answered carelessly, beckoning to a slave who was carrying a dish of pork towards the high table. He scooped a handful of ribs into the lap of his grubby white robe and sucked greedily on one of them. ‘Ceinwyn,’ he went on when he had sucked most of the rib bare, ‘is a romantic fool. She somehow convinced herself she could marry where she liked, though the Gods alone know why any girl should think that! Now, of course,’ he said with his mouth full of pork,
‘everything changes. She’s met Lancelot! She’ll be dizzy with him by now. Maybe she won’t even wait for the marriage? Who knows? Maybe, this very night, in the secrecy of her chamber, she’ll tup the bastard dry. But probably not. She’s a very conventional girl.’ He said the last three words disparagingly.
‘Have a rib,’ he offered. ‘It’s time you were married.’
‘There is no one I want to marry,’ I said sulkily. Except Ceinwyn, of course, but what hope did I have against Lancelot?
‘Marriage has nothing to do with wanting,’ Merlin said scornfully. ‘Arthur thought it was, and what a fool for women Arthur is! What you want, Derfel, is a pretty girl in your bed, but only a fool thinks the girl and the wife have to be the same creature. Arthur thinks you should marry Gwenhwyvach.’ He said the name carelessly.
‘Gwenhwyvach!’ I said too loudly. She was Guinevere’s younger sister and was a heavy, dull, pale-skinned girl whom Guinevere could not abide. I had no particular reason to dislike Gwenhwyvach, but nor could I imagine marrying such a drab, soulless and unhappy girl.
‘And why ever not?’ Merlin asked in pretended outrage. ‘A good match, Derfel. What are you, after all, but the son of a Saxon slave? And Gwenhwyvach is a genuine Princess. No money, of course, and uglier than the wild sow of Llyffan, but think how grateful she’ll be!’ He leered at me. ‘And consider Gwenhwyvach’s hips, Derfel! No danger there of a baby getting stuck. She’ll spit the little horrors out like greased pips!’
I wondered if Arthur had really proposed such a marriage, or whether it was Guinevere’s idea? More likely it was Guinevere. I watched her as she sat arrayed in gold beside Cuneglas and the triumph on her face was unmistakable. She looked uncommonly beautiful that night. She was ever the most striking-looking woman in Britain, but on that rainy feast night in Caer Sws she seemed to glow. Maybe that was because of her pregnancy, but the likelier explanation was that she was revelling in her ascendancy over these people who had once dismissed her as a penniless exile. Now, thanks to Arthur’s sword, she could dispose of these people just as her husband disposed of their kingdoms. It was Guinevere, I knew, who was Lancelot’s chief supporter in Dumnonia, and Guinevere who had made Arthur promise Lancelot Siluria’s throne, and Guinevere who had decided that Ceinwyn should be Lancelot’s bride. Now, I suspected, she wanted to punish me for my hostility to Lancelot by making her inconvenient sister into my lumpen bride.
‘You look unhappy, Derfel,’ Merlin provoked me.
I did not rise to the provocation. ‘And you, Lord?’ I asked. ‘Are you happy?’
‘Do you care?’ he asked airily.
‘I love you, Lord, like a father,’ I said.
He hooted at that, then half choked on a sliver of pork, but was still laughing when he recovered. ‘Like a father! Oh, Derfel, what an absurdly emotional beast you are. The only reason I raised you was because I thought you were special to the Gods, and maybe you are. The Gods do sometimes choose the strangest creatures to love. So tell me, loving would-be son, does your filial love extend to service?’
‘What service, Lord?’ I asked, though I knew well enough what he wanted. He wanted spearmen to go and seek the Cauldron.
He lowered his voice and leaned closer to me, though I doubt anyone could have heard our conversation in the loud, drunken hall. ‘Britain,’ he said, ‘suffers from two sicknesses, but Arthur and Cuneglas recognize only one.’
‘The Saxons.’
He nodded. ‘But Britain without the Saxons will still be diseased, Derfel, for we risk losing the Gods. Christianity spreads taster than the Saxons, and Christians are a bigger offence to our Gods than any Saxon. If we don’t restrain the Christians then the Gods will desert us utterly, and what is Britain without her Gods? But if we harness the Gods and restore them to Britain, then the Saxons and the Christians will both vanish. We attack the wrong disease, Derfel.’
I glanced at Arthur who was listening intently to somethin
g Cuneglas was saying. Arthur was not an irreligious man, but he carried his beliefs lightly and bore no hatred in his soul for men and women who believed in other Gods, yet Arthur, I knew, would hate to hear Merlin talk of fighting against the Christians. ‘And no one listens to you, Lord?’ I asked Merlin.
‘Some,’ he said grudgingly, ‘a few, one or two. Arthur doesn’t. He thinks I’m an old fool on the edge of senility. But what about you, Derfel? Do you think I’m an old fool?’
‘No, Lord.’
‘And do you believe in magic, Derfel?’
‘Yes, Lord,’ I said. I had seen magic work, but I had seen it fail too. Magic was difficult, but I believed in it.
Merlin leaned even closer to my ear. ‘Then be at Dolforwyn’s summit this night, Derfel,’ he whispered,
‘and I will grant you your soul’s desire.’
A harpist struck the chord that would summon the bards for the singing. The warriors’ voices died away as a chill wind gusted rain through the open door and flickered the small flames of the tallow candles and the grease-soaked rush lights. ‘Your soul’s desire,’ Merlin whispered again, but when I looked to my left he had somehow vanished.
And in the night the thunder growled. The Gods were abroad and I was summoned to Dolforwyn. I left the feast before the giving of gifts, before the bards sang and before the drunken warriors’ voices swelled in the haunting Song of Nwyfre. I heard the song far behind me as I walked alone down the river valley where Ceinwyn had told me of her visit to the bed of skulls and of the strange prophecy that made no sense.
I wore my armour, but carried no shield. My sword, Hywelbane, was at my side and my green cloak was about my shoulders. No man walked the night lightly, for night belonged to ghouls and spirits, but I had been summoned by Merlin so I knew I would be safe.
My path was made easy for there was a road that led east from the ramparts towards the southern edge of the range of hills where Dolforwyn lay. It was a long walk, four hours in the wet dark, and the road was black as pitch, but the Gods must have wanted me to arrive for I neither lost the road, nor met any dangers in the night.
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