‘Yes.’
‘But how will you find the Cauldron without me?’
He shrugged, but offered no answer.
‘How will you find it with her?’ I asked, for I still did not understand why a virgin must find the Cauldron, or why that virgin should have to be Ceinwyn.
Merlin shrugged again. ‘The Cauldron,’ he said, ‘was ever under the guard of a virgin. One guards it now, if my dreams tell me correctly, and only another virgin can reveal its hiding-place. You will dream it,’ he said to Ceinwyn, ‘if you are willing to come.’
‘I shall come, Lord,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘as I promised you.’
Merlin pushed the grass knot back into the pocket before rubbing his face again with his long hands.
‘We leave in two days,’ he announced flatly. ‘You must bake bread, pack dried meat and fish, sharpen your weapons, and make sure you have furs against the cold.’ He looked at Nimue. ‘We shall sleep at Caer Sws. Come.’
‘You can stay here,’ I offered.
‘I must speak to Iorweth.’ He stood, his head level with the rafters. ‘I release you both from your oaths,’ he said very formally, ‘but pray you will come anyway. But it will be harder than you know and harder than you fear in your worst dreams, for I have pledged my life on the Cauldron.’ He looked down at us and his face was immensely sad. ‘The day we step on the Dark Road,’ he told us, ‘I shall begin to die, for that is my oath, and I have no certainty that the oath will bring me success, and if the search fails then I shall be dead and you will be alone in Lleyn.’
‘We shall have Nimue,’ Ceinwyn said.
‘And she is all you will have,’ Merlin said darkly, then ducked out of the door. Nimue followed him. We sat in silence. I put another log on the fire. It was green, for all our firewood was fresh-cut unseasoned timber which was why it smoked so badly. I watched the smoke thicken and swirl about the rafters, then took Ceinwyn’s hand. ‘Do you want to die in Lleyn?’ I chided her.
‘No,’ she said, ‘but I want to see the Cauldron.’
I stared into the fire. ‘He will fill it with blood,’ I said softly. Ceinwyn’s fingers caressed mine. ‘When I was a child,’ she said, ‘I heard all the tales of old Britain, how the Gods lived among us and everyone was happy. There was no famine then, and no plagues, just us and the Gods and peace. I want that Britain back, Derfel.’
‘Arthur says it can never return. We are what we are, not what we once were.’
‘So who do you believe?’ she asked. ‘Arthur or Merlin?’
I thought a long time. ‘Merlin,’ I finally said, and perhaps that was because I wanted to believe in his Britain where all our sorrows would be magically taken away. I loved the idea of Arthur’s Britain too, but that would take war and hard work and a trust that men would behave well if they were treated well. Merlin’s dream demanded less and promised more.
‘They we’ll go with Merlin,’ Ceinwyn said. She hesitated, watching me. ‘Are you worried by Morgan’s prophecy?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘She has power,’ I said, ‘but not like his. And not like Nimue, either.’ Nimue and Merlin had both suffered the Three Wounds of Wisdom, and Morgan had only endured the wound to the body, never the wound to the mind or the wound to pride; but Morgan’s prophecy was a shrewd tale, for in some ways Merlin was defying the Gods. He wanted to tame their caprices and in return give them a whole land dedicated to their worship, but why would the Gods want to be tamed? Maybe they had chosen Morgan’s lesser power to be their instrument against Merlin’s meddling, for what else could explain Morgan’s hostility? Or maybe Morgan, like Arthur, believed that Merlin’s quest was a nonsense, an old man’s hopeless search for a Britain that had vanished with the coming of the Legions. For Arthur there was only one fight, and that was to hurl the Saxon Kings from Britain, and Arthur would have supported his sister’s whispering tale if that meant no British spears were to be wasted against Diwrnach’s blood-painted shields. So perhaps Arthur was using his sister to make certain that no precious Dumnonian lives were to be thrown away in Lleyn. Except for my life, and my men’s lives, and my beloved Ceinwyn’s life. For we were oath-sworn.
But Merlin had released us from our oaths and so I tried one last time to persuade Ceinwyn to stay in Powys. I told her how Arthur believed that the Cauldron no longer existed, how it must have been stolen by the Romans and taken to that great sink of treasure, Rome, and melted down to make hair-combs or cloak-pins or coins or brooches. All that I told her, and when I was done she smiled and asked me once again who I believed, Merlin or Arthur.
‘Merlin,’ I said again.
‘And so do I,’ Ceinwyn said. ‘And I’m going.’
We baked bread, packed food and sharpened our weapons. And the next night, the eve of our going on Merlin’s quest, the first snow fell.
Cuneglas gave us two ponies that we loaded with food and furs, then we slung our star-painted shields on our backs and took the northern road. Iorweth gave us a blessing and Cuneglas’s spearmen accompanied us for the first few miles, but once we had passed the great ice wastes of the Dugh bog that lay beyond the hills north of Caer Sws those spearmen stepped aside and we were alone. I had promised Cuneglas that I would protect his sister’s life with my own and he had embraced me, then whispered in my ear. ‘Kill her, Derfel,’ he said, ‘rather than let Diwrnach have her.’
There were tears in his eyes and they almost made me change my mind. ‘If you order her not to go, Lord King,’ I said, ‘she might obey.’
‘Never,’ he said, ‘but she is happier now than she has ever been. Besides, Iorweth tells me you will return. Go, my friend.’ He had stepped back. His parting gift had been a bag of gold ingots that we stowed on one of the ponies.
The snowy road led north into Gwynedd. I had never been to that kingdom before and found it a crude, hard place. The Romans had come here, but only to dig lead and gold. They had left few marks on the land and given it no law. The folk lived in squat, dark huts that huddled together inside circling stone walls from which dogs snarled at us and on which the skulls of wolves and bears were mounted to deter the spirits. Cairns marked the summits of hills and every few miles we would find a pole struck into the road’s verge and hung with dead men’s bones and ribbons of tattered cloth. There were few trees, the streams were frozen and snow blocked some of the passes. At night we sheltered in the huddled houses where we paid for our warmth with slivers of gold chopped from Cuneglas’s ingots. We dressed in furs. Ceinwyn and I, like my men, were swathed in lice-ridden wolf-pelts and deerskins, but Merlin wore a suit made from the coat of a great black bear. Nimue had grey otter skins that were much lighter than our furs, but even so she seemed not to feel the cold as the rest of us did. Nimue alone carried no weapons. Merlin had his black staff, a fearsome thing in battle, while my men had spears and swords and even Ceinwyn carried a light spear and had her long-bladed hunting knife scabbarded at her waist. She wore no gold and the folk who gave us shelter had no conception of her rank. They did notice her bright hair and assumed that she, like Nimue, was one of Merlin’s adepts. Merlin they loved, for they all knew of him and they brought their crippled children to be touched by his hand.
It took us six days to reach Caer Gei where Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, was spending the winter. The caer itself was a hilltop fort, but under the fort’s shoulder there was a deep valley with tall trees growing from its steep sides and in the valley a wooden palisade circling a timber hall, some store-rooms and a score of sleeping huts, all of them ghosted white with snow and with long icicles hanging from their eaves. Cadwallon proved to be a sour old man while his hall was merely one third the size of Cuneglas’s hall and the press of warriors meant that its earth floor was already packed tight with beds. A space was grudgingly made for us and a corner screened for Nimue and Ceinwyn. That night Cadwallon gave us a feast, a poor thing of salted mutton and stewed carrots, but the best his stores could provide. He did generously offer to take Ceinwyn off our hands by making
her his eighth wife, but he seemed neither offended nor disappointed when she refused. His seven existing wives were dark, sullen women who shared a round hut where they squabbled and persecuted each other’s children. It was a wretched place, Caer Gei, though a royal one, and it was hard to believe that Cadwallon’s father, Cunedda, had been the High King before Uther of Dumnonia. Gwynedd’s spears had fallen on lean times since those great days. It was hard to believe, too, that it was here, beneath the high peaks that were now brilliant with ice and snow, that Arthur had been raised. I went to see the house where his mother had been given shelter after Uther had rejected her and found it to be an earth-walled hall about the same size as our house in Cwm Isaf. It stood among fir trees whose boughs were bent low by snow, and it looked north towards the Dark Road. The house was now home to three spearmen, their families and livestock. Arthur’s mother had been half sister to King Cadwallon who was thus Arthur’s uncle, though Arthur’s birth had been illegitimate and the relationship could hardly be expected to yield many spears for Arthur’s spring campaign against the Saxons. Cadwallon, indeed, had sent men to fight against Arthur at Lugg Vale, but that gift of men had been a precaution to keep Powys’s friendship rather than because the King of Gwynedd hated Dumnonia. Most of the time Cadwallon’s spears faced north towards Lleyn.
The King summoned Byrthig, his Edling, to the feast so that he could tell us of Lleyn. Prince Byrthig was a short, squat man with a scar running from his left temple across his broken nose and down into his thick beard. He had only three teeth, which made his efforts to chew meat lengthy and messy. He would use his fingers to chafe the meat against his one front tooth, thus abrading the food into shreds that he washed down with mead, and the laborious work had left his bristling black beard filthy with meat juices and half chewed scraps. Cadwallon, in his gloomy manner, offered him as a husband to Ceinwyn and again seemed unmoved by her gentle refusal.
Diwrnach, Prince Byrthig told us, had his home at Boduan, a fort that lay far to the west in the peninsula of Lleyn. The King was one of the Irish Lords Across the Sea, but his war-band, unlike that of Oengus of Demetia, was not composed of men from a single Irish tribe but was a collection of fugitives from every tribe. ‘He welcomes whatever comes across the water, and the more murderous they are, the better,’ Byrthig told us. ‘The Irish use him to rid themselves of their outlaws and there have been many of those of late.’
‘The Christians,’ Cadwallon grumbled in curt explanation, then spat.
‘Lleyn is Christian?’ I asked in surprise.
‘No,’ Cadwallon snapped as though I should have known better. ‘But Ireland is bowing to the Christian God. Bowing in droves, and those who can’t stand that God flee to Lleyn.’ He pulled a scrap of bone from his mouth and inspected it gloomily. ‘We’ll have to fight them soon,’ he added.
‘Diwrnach’s numbers increase?’ Merlin asked.
‘So we hear, though we hear little enough,’ Cadwallon replied. He looked up as the heat in the hall melted a swathe of snow from the sloping roof. There was a scraping rumble, then a soft crash as the mass slid off the thatch.
‘Diwrnach,’ Byrthig explained, his voice made sibilant by his ravaged teeth, ‘asks only to be left alone. If we do not disturb him, he will only occasionally disturb us. His men come to take slaves, but we have few people left in the north now, and his men will not travel far, but if his war-band grows too large for Lleyn’s crops then he will seek new land somewhere.’
‘Ynys Mon is famous for its crops,’ Merlin said. Ynys Mon was the big island that lay off Lleyn’s northern coast.
‘Ynys Mon could feed a thousand,’ Cadwallon agreed, ‘but only if its people are spared to plough and reap, and its people are not spared. No one is. Any Briton with sense left Lleyn years ago, and the ones who are left crouch in terror. So would you if Diwrnach came visiting to search for what he wants.’
‘Which is?’ I asked.
Cadwallon looked at me, paused, then shrugged. ‘Slaves,’ he said.
‘In which,’ Merlin asked silkily, ‘you pay him tribute?’
‘A small price for peace,’ Cadwallon dismissed the accusation.
‘How much?’ Merlin demanded.
‘Forty a year,’ Cadwallon finally admitted. ‘Mostly orphaned children and maybe some prisoners. He’s happiest, though, with girls.’ He looked broodingly at Ceinwyn. ‘He has an appetite for girls.’
‘Many men do, Lord King,’ Ceinwyn answered drily.
‘But not like Diwrnach’s appetite,’ Cadwallon warned her. ‘His wizards have told him that a man armed with a shield covered with the tanned skin of a virgin girl will be invincible in battle.’ He shrugged.
‘Can’t say I’ve ever tried it myself.’
‘So you send him children?’ Ceinwyn said accusingly.
‘Do you know any other kind of virgin?’ Cadwallon retorted.
‘We think he’s touched by the Gods,’ Byrthig said, as though that explained Diwrnach’s appetite for virgin slaves, ‘for he seems mad. One of his eyes is red.’ He paused to grind a piece of grey mutton on his front tooth. ‘He covers his shields in skin,’ he went on when the meat had been reduced to a tissue,
‘then paints them with blood and that’s why his men call themselves the Bloodshields.’ Cadwallon made the sign against evil. ‘And some men say he eats the girls’ flesh,’ Byrthig went on, ‘but we don’t know that; who knows what the mad do?’
‘The mad are close to the Gods,’ Cadwallon growled. He was plainly terrified of his northern neighbour, and no wonder, I thought.
‘Some of the mad are close to the Gods,’ Merlin said. ‘Not all.’
‘Diwrnach is,’ Cadwallon warned him. ‘He does what he wants, to whom he wants, how he wants and the Gods keep him safe while he does it.’ Again I made the sign against evil, and suddenly wished I was back in far Dumnonia where there were lawcourts and palaces and long Roman roads.
‘With two hundred spears,’ Merlin said, ‘you could scour Diwrnach from Lleyn. You could wash him into the sea.’
‘We tried once,’ Cadwallon said, ‘and fifty of our men died of the flux in one week, and another fifty were shivering in their own excrement, and always his howling warriors circled us on ponies and their long spears showered out of the night. When we reached Boduan there was only a great wall hung with dying things that bled and screamed and twisted on their hooks and none of my men would scale that horror. Nor would I,’ he admitted. ‘And if I had, what then? He would have tied to Ynys Mon and it would have taken me days and weeks to find the ships to follow him over the water. I have neither the time, the spearmen, nor the gold to scour Diwrnach into the sea, so I give him children instead. It’s cheaper.’ He shouted for a slave to bring him more mead, then gave Ceinwyn a sour glance. ‘Give her to him,’ he said to Merlin, ‘and he might give you the Cauldron.’
‘I will give him nothing for the Cauldron,’ Merlin snapped. ‘Besides, he does not even know the Cauldron exists.’
‘He does now,’ Byrthig put in. ‘All Britain knows why you go north. And do you think his wizards don’t want to find the Cauldron?’
Merlin smiled. ‘Send your spearmen with me, Lord King, and we shall take both the Cauldron and Lleyn.’
Cadwallon snorted at that proposal. ‘Diwrnach, Merlin, teaches a man to be a good neighbour. I will let you travel my land, for I fear your curse if I don’t, but not one man of mine will go with you, and when your bones are buried in Lleyn’s sands I shall tell Diwrnach that your trespass was none of my doing.’
‘Will you tell him by which road we travel?’ Merlin asked, for we faced two roads now. One led around the coast and was the usual winter road north, while the other was the Dark Road that most men reckoned was impassable in winter. Merlin hoped that by using the Dark Road we could surprise Diwrnach and be gone from Ynys Mon almost before he knew we had even come. Cadwallon smiled for the only time that night. ‘He knows already,’ the King said, then glanced at Ceinwyn, the brighte
st figure in that smoke-dark hall. ‘And doubtless he looks forward to your coming.’
Did Diwrnach know we planned to use the Dark Road? Or was Cadwallon guessing? I spat anyway, to protect us all from evil. The solstice was due, the long night of the year when life ebbs, hope is bleak and the demons have dominion of the air, and that was when we would be on the Dark Road. Cadwallon thought us fools, Diwrnach waited for us, and we wrapped ourselves in fur and slept. The sun shone next morning, making the surrounding peaks into dazzling spikes of whiteness that hurt our eyes. The sky was almost clear and a strong wind blew snow from the ground to make clouds of glittering specks that wafted across the white land. We loaded the ponies, accepted the grudging gift of a sheepskin from Cadwallon, then marched towards the Dark Road that began just north of Caer Gei. It was a road without settlements, without farms, without a soul to offer us shelter; nothing but a rugged path through the wild mountain barrier that protected Cadwallon’s heartland from Diwrnach’s Bloodshields. Two poles marked the beginning of the road and both were topped by rag-draped human skulls from which long icicles clinked in the wind. The skulls faced north towards Diwrnach, two talismans to keep his evil beyond the mountains. I saw Merlin touch an iron amulet that hung around his neck as we passed between the twin skulls and remembered his dreadful promise that he would begin to die the moment we reached the Dark Road. Now, as our boots squeaked and crunched through the road’s undisturbed layer of snow, I knew that oath of death had begun its work. I watched him, but saw no signs of distress as, all that day, we climbed into the hills, sliding on snow and trudging in a cloud of our own misting breath. We slept that night in an abandoned shepherd’s hut that still blessedly had a ragged roof of old timbers and decaying straw with which we built a fire that flickered feebly in the snowy darkness.
Next morning we had gone no more than a quarter mile when a horn sounded above and behind us. We stopped, turned, and shaded our eyes to see a dark line of men cresting a hill down which we had slithered the previous evening. There were fifteen of them, all with shields, swords and spears, and when they saw they had gained our attention they half ran and half slid down the treacherous slope of snow. Their progress made great cloudy plumes that drifted westwards on the wind. My men, without orders from me, formed a line, unstrapped their shields and lowered their spears so that they formed a shield-wall across the road. I had given Cavan’s responsibilities to Issa and he growled at them to stand firm, but no sooner had he spoken than I recognized the curious device painted on one of the approaching shields. It was a cross, and that Christian symbol was carried by only one man I knew. Galahad.
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