‘I do like this place,’ he said, ignoring my question as he turned around to give the whole arena another long inspection. ‘I do like it.’
‘I thought you hated the Romans.’
‘Me? Hate the Romans?’ he asked in pretended outrage. ‘How I do pray, Derfel, that my teachings will not be passed to posterity through the mangled sieve you choose to call a brain. I love all mankind!’
he declared magniloquently, ‘and even the Romans are perfectly acceptable if they stay in Rome. I told you I was in Rome once, didn’t I? Full of priests and catamites. Sansum would feel quite at home there. No, Derfel, the fault of the Romans was coming to Britain and spoiling everything, but not everything they did here was bad.’
‘They did give us this,’ I said, gesturing at the twelve tiers of seats and the lofted balcony where the Roman lords had watched the arena.
‘Oh, do spare me Arthur’s tedious lecture about roads and law-courts and bridges and structure.’ He spat the last word out. ‘Structure! What is the structure of law and roads and forts but a harness? The Romans tamed us, Derfel. They made us into taxpayers and they were so clever at it that we actually believe they did us a favour! We once walked with the Gods, we were a free people, and then we put our stupid heads into the Roman yoke and became taxpayers.’
‘So what,’ I asked patiently, ‘did the Romans do that was so good?’
He smiled wolfishly. ‘They once crammed this arena full of Christians, Derfel, then set the dogs on them. In Rome, mind you, they did it properly; they used lions. But in the long term, alas, the lions lost.’
‘I saw a picture of a lion,’ I said proudly.
‘Oh, I am fascinated,’ Merlin said, not bothering to hide a yawn. ‘Why don’t you tell me all about it?’
Having silenced me thus, he smiled. ‘I saw a real lion once. It was a very unimpressive threadbare sort of thing. I suspected it was receiving the wrong diet. Maybe they were feeding it Mithraists instead of Christians? That was in Rome, of course. I gave it a poke with my staff and it just yawned and scratched at a flea. I saw a crocodile there too, only it was dead.’
‘What’s a crocodile?’
‘A thing like Lancelot.’
‘King of the Belgae,’ I added acidly.
Merlin laughed. ‘He has been clever, hasn’t he? He hated Siluria, and who can blame him? All those drab people in their dull valleys, not Lancelot’s sort of place at all, but he’ll like the Belgic land. The sun shines there, it’s full of Roman estates and, best of all, it’s not far from his dear friend Guinevere.’
‘Is that important?’
‘Don’t be so disingenuous, Derfel.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘It means, my ignorant warrior, that Lancelot behaves as he likes with Arthur. He takes what he wants and does what he wants, and he can do it because Arthur has that ridiculous quality called guilt. He’s very Christian in that. Can you understand a religion that makes you feel guilty? What an absurd idea, but Arthur would make a very good Christian. He believes he was oath-sworn to save Benoic, and when he failed he felt he had let Lancelot down, and so long as that guilt rankles Arthur, so long will Lancelot behave as he wishes.’
‘With Guinevere too?’ I asked, curious at his earlier mention of Lancelot and Guinevere’s friendship, a mention that had possessed more than a hint of salacious rumour.
‘I never explain what I cannot know,’ Merlin said loftily. ‘But I surmise Guinevere is bored by Arthur, and why not? She’s a clever creature and she enjoys other clever people, and Arthur, much as we love him, is not complicated. The things he desires are so pathetically simple; law, justice, order, cleanliness. He really wants everyone to be happy, and that’s quite impossible. Guinevere isn’t nearly so simple. You are, of course.’
I ignored the insult. ‘So what does Guinevere want?’
‘For Arthur to be King of Dumnonia, of course, and for herself to be the real ruler of Britain by ruling him, but till that happens, Derfel, she will amuse herself as best she can.’ He looked mischievous as an idea occurred to him. ‘If Lancelot becomes the Belgic King,’ he said happily, ‘then just you watch Guinevere decide that she doesn’t want her new palace in Lindinis after all. She’ll find somewhere much closer to Venta. You see if I’m not right.’ He chuckled at that thought. ‘They were both so very clever,’
he added admiringly.
‘Guinevere and Lancelot?’
‘Don’t be so obtuse, Derfel! Who on earth was talking about Guinevere? Really, your appetite for gossip is quite indecent. I mean Cerdic and Lancelot, of course. That was a very subtle piece of diplomacy. Arthur does all the fighting, Aelle gives up most of the land, Lancelot snatches himself a much more suitable kingdom, and Cerdic doubles his own power and gets Lancelot instead of Arthur as his neighbour on the coast. Very neatly done. How the wicked do prosper! I like to see that.’ He smiled, then turned as Nimue appeared from one of the two tunnels that led under the seats into the arena. She hurried over the weed-strewn turf with a look of excitement on her face. Her gold eye, that so frightened the Saxons, gleamed in the morning sun.
‘Derfel!’ she exclaimed. ‘What do you do with the bull’s blood?’
‘Don’t confuse him,’ Merlin said, ‘he’s being more than usually stupid this morning.’
‘In Mithras,’ she said excitedly. ‘What do you do with the blood?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘They mix it with oats and fat,’ Merlin said, ‘and make puddings.’
‘Tell me!’ Nimue insisted.
‘It’s secret,’ I said, embarrassed.
Merlin hooted at that. ‘Secret? Secret! “Oh, great Mithras!”‘ he boomed in a voice that echoed from the tiered seats, ‘ “whose sword is sharpened on the mountain peaks and whose spearhead was forged in the ocean deeps and whose shield doth shadow the brightest stars, hear us.” Shall I go on, dear boy?’
he asked me. He had been reciting the invocation with which we began our meetings, and which was supposed to be a part of our secret rituals. He turned from me in scorn. ‘They have a pit, dear Nimue,’
he explained, ‘covered with an iron grille, and the poor beast gushes its life away into the pit and then they all dip their spears into the blood, get drunk and think they’ve done something significant.’
‘I thought so,’ Nimue said, then smiled. ‘There’s no pit.’
‘Oh, dear girl!’ Merlin said admiringly. ‘Dear girl! To work.’ He hurried away.
‘Where are you going?’ I called after him, but he just waved and walked on, beckoning to my lounging spearmen. I followed anyway and he made no attempt to stop me. We went through the tunnel and so out into one of the strange streets of tall buildings, then west towards the great fortress that formed the north-west bastion of the city’s walls, and just beside the fort, built against the city wall, was a temple. I followed Merlin inside.
It was a lovely building; long, dark, narrow and tall with a high painted ceiling supported by twin rows of seven pillars. The shrine was evidently used as a storehouse now, for bales of wool and stacks of leather hides were piled high in one side aisle, yet some folk must still have worshipped in the building for a statue of Mithras wearing his odd floppy hat stood at one end and smaller statues were arrayed in front of the fluted pillars. I supposed that those who worshipped here were the descendants of the Roman settlers who had chosen to stay in Britain when the Legions left, and it seemed they had abandoned most of their ancestors’ deities, including Mithras, because the small offerings of flowers, food and guttered rush lights were clustered in front of just three images. Two of the three were elegantly carved Roman Gods, but the third idol was British: a smooth phallic stump of stone with a brutal, wide-eyed face carved into its tip and that statue alone was drenched in old dried blood, while the only offering beside Mithras’s statue was the Saxon sword that Sagramor had left in thanks for Malla’s return. It was a sunny day, but the only light inside the temple
came through a patch of broken roof where the tiles had vanished. The temple was supposed to be dark, for Mithras had been born in a cave and we worshipped him in a cave’s darkness.
Merlin rapped the floor’s flagstones with his staff, finally settling on a spot at the end of the nave just beneath Mithras’s statue. ‘Is this where you’d dip your spears, Derfel?’ he asked me. I stepped into the side aisle where the hides and wool bales were stacked. ‘Here,’ I said, pointing to a shallow pit half hidden by one of the piles.
‘Don’t be absurd!’ Merlin snapped. ‘Someone made that later! You really think you’re hiding the secrets of your pathetic religion?’ He tapped the floor beside the statue again, then tried another spot a few feet away and evidently decided that the two places yielded different sounds, so tapped a third time at the statue’s feet. ‘Dig here,’ he ordered my spearmen.
I shuddered for the sacrilege. ‘She shouldn’t be here, Lord,’ I said, gesturing at Nimue.
‘One more word from you, Derfel, and I’ll turn you into a spavined hedgehog. Lift the stones!’ he snapped at my men. ‘Use your spears as levers, idiots. Come on! Work!’
I sat beside the British idol, closed my eyes, and prayed to Mithras that he would forgive me the sacrilege. Then I prayed that Ceinwyn was safe and that the babe in her belly was still alive, and I was still praying for my unborn child when the temple door scraped open and boots sounded loud on the stones. I opened my eyes, turned my head, and saw that Cerdic had come to the temple. He had come with twenty spearmen, his interpreter, and, more surprisingly, with Dinas and Lavaine. I scrambled to my feet and touched the bones in Hywelbane’s handle for luck as the Saxon King walked slowly up the nave. ‘This is my city,’ Cerdic announced softly, ‘and everything within its walls is mine.’ He stared for a moment at Merlin and Nimue, then looked at me. ‘Tell them to explain themselves,’ he ordered.
‘Tell the fool to go and douse his head in a bucket,’ Merlin snapped at me. He spoke Saxon well enough, but it suited him to pretend otherwise.
‘That is his interpreter. Lord,’ I warned Merlin, gesturing to the man beside Cerdic.
‘Then he can tell his King to douse his head,’ said Merlin.
The interpreter duly did, and Cerdic’s face flickered in a dangerous smile.
‘Lord King,’ I said, trying to undo Merlin’s damage, ‘my Lord Merlin seeks to restore the temple to its old condition.’
Cerdic considered that answer as he inspected what was being done. My four spearmen had levered up the flagstones to reveal a compact mass of sand and gravel, and they were now scooping out that heavy mass that lay above a lower platform of pitch-soaked timbers. The King stared into the pit, then gestured for my four spearmen to go on with their work. ‘But if you find gold,’ he said to me, ‘it is mine.’
I began to translate to Merlin, but Cerdic interrupted me with a wave of his hand. ‘He speaks our tongue,’ he said, looking at Merlin. ‘They told me,’ he jerked his head toward Dinas and Lavaine. I looked at the baleful twins, then back to Cerdic. ‘You keep strange company, Lord King,’ I said.
‘No stranger than you,’ he answered, glancing at Nimue’s gold eye. She levered it out with a finger and gave him the full horrid effect of the shrivelled bare socket, but Cerdic seemed quite unmoved by the threat, asking me instead to tell him what I knew about the temple’s different Gods. I answered him as best I could, but it was plain he was not really interested. He interrupted me to look at Merlin again.
‘Where’s your Cauldron, Merlin?’ he asked.
Merlin gave the Silurian twins a murderous look, then spat on the floor. ‘Hidden,’ he snapped. Cerdic seemed unsurprised by that answer. He strolled past the deepening pit and picked up the Saxon sword Sagramor had donated to Mithras. He gave the blade a speculative cut in the air and seemed to approve of its balance. ‘This Cauldron,’ he asked Merlin, ‘has great powers?’
Merlin refused to answer, so I spoke for him. ‘So it is said, Lord King.’
‘Powers,’ Cerdic stared at me with his pale eyes, ‘that will rid Britain of us Saxons?’
‘That is what we pray for, Lord King,’ I answered.
He smiled at that, then turned back to Merlin. ‘What is your price for the Cauldron, old man?’
Merlin glared at him. ‘Your liver, Cerdic.’
Cerdic stepped close to Merlin and stared up into the wizard’s eyes. I saw no fear in Cerdic, none. Merlin’s Gods were not his. Aelle might have feared Merlin, but Cerdic had never suffered from the Druid’s magic and, so far as Cerdic was concerned, Merlin was merely an old British priest with an inflated reputation. He suddenly reached out and took hold of one of the black-wrapped plaits of Merlin’s beard. ‘I offer you a price of much gold, old man,’ he said.
‘I have named my price,’ Merlin answered. He tried to step away from Cerdic, but the King tightened his grip on the plait of the Druid’s beard.
‘I will pay you your own weight in gold,’ Cerdic offered.
‘Your liver,’ Merlin countered the offer.
Cerdic raised the Saxon blade and sawed fast with its edge and so severed the beard plait. He stepped away. ‘Play with your Cauldron, Merlin of Avalon,’ he said, tossing the sword aside, ‘but one day I will cook your liver in it and serve it to my dogs.’
Nimue stared white-faced at the King. Merlin was too shocked to move, let alone speak, while my four spearmen simply gaped. ‘Get on with it, fools,’ I snarled at them. ‘Work!’ I was mortified. I had never seen Merlin humiliated and never wanted to either. I had not thought it was even possible. Merlin rubbed his violated beard. ‘One day, Lord King,’ he said quietly, ‘I shall have my revenge.’
Cerdic shrugged away that feeble threat and walked back to his men. He gave the severed beard plait to Dinas, who bowed his thanks. I spat, for I knew the Silurian pair could now work a great evil. Few things are so powerful in the making of spells as the discarded hair or nail-clippings of an enemy, which is why, to prevent such things falling into malevolent hands, we all take such good care to burn them. Even a child can make mischief with a hank of hair. ‘You want me to take the plait back, Lord?’ I asked Merlin.
‘Don’t be absurd, Derfel,’ he said wearily, gesturing at Cerdic’s twenty spearmen. ‘You think you could kill them all?’ He shook his head, then smiled at Nimue. ‘You see how far we are here from our Gods?’ he said, trying to explain his helplessness.
‘Dig,’ Nimue snarled to my men, though now the digging was over and they were trying to lever up the first of the great baulks of timber. Cerdic, who had plainly come to the temple because Dinas and Lavaine had told him that Merlin was looking for treasure, ordered three of his own spearmen to help. The three leapt into the pit and rammed their spears under the timber’s lip and slowly, slowly forced it up until my men could seize it and drag it free.
The pit was the blood pit, the place where the dying bull’s life drained into mother earth, but at some time the pit had been cunningly disguised with the timbers, sand, gravel and stone. ‘It was done,’ Merlin told me out of earshot of all Cerdic’s people, ‘when the Romans left.’ He rubbed his beard again.
‘Lord,’ I said awkwardly, saddened by his humiliation.
‘Don’t worry, Derfel.’ He touched my shoulder in reassurance. ‘You think I should command fire from the Gods? Make the earth gape and swallow him? Summon a serpent from the spirit world?’
‘Yes, Lord,’ I answered miserably.
He lowered his voice even more. ‘You don’t command magic, Derfel, you use it, and there’s none here to use. That’s why we need the Treasures. At Samain, Derfel, I shall collect the Treasures and unveil the Cauldron. We shall light fires and then work a spell that will make the sky shriek and the earth groan. That I promise you. I have lived my whole life for that moment and it will bring the magic back to Britain.’ He leaned against the pillar and stroked the place where his beard had been cut. ‘Our friends from Siluria,’ he said, staring at the black-bearded twins, �
�think to challenge me, but one lost strand of an old man’s beard is nothing to the Cauldron’s power. One strand of beard will hurt no one but me, but the Cauldron, Derfel, the Cauldron will make all Britain shudder and bring those two pretenders crawling on their knees for my mercy. But till then, Derfel, till then you must see our enemies prosper. The Gods go further and further away. They grow weak and we who love them grow weak too, but it will not last. We shall summon them back, and the magic that is now so weak in Britain will become as thick as that fog on Ynys Mon.’ He touched my wounded shoulder again. ‘I promise you that.’
Cerdic watched us. He could not hear us, but there was amusement on his wedge-shaped face. ‘He will keep what’s in the pit, Lord,’ I murmured.
‘I pray he will not know its value,’ Merlin said softly.
‘They will, Lord,’ I said, looking at the two white-robed Druids.
‘They are traitors and serpents,’ Merlin hissed softly, staring at Dinas and Lavaine who had moved closer to the pit, ‘but even if they keep what we find now, I will still possess eleven of the thirteen Treasures, Derfel, and I know where the twelfth is to be found, and no other man has gathered so much power in Britain in a thousand years.’ He leaned on his staff. ‘This King will suffer, I promise you.’
The last timber was brought out of the hole and thrown with a thump onto the flagstones. The sweating spearmen backed away as Cerdic and the Silurian Druids walked slowly forward and stared down into the pit. Cerdic gazed for a long time, then he began to laugh. His laughter echoed from the tall painted ceiling and it drew his spearmen to the pit’s edge where they too began to laugh. ‘I like an enemy,’
Cerdic said, ‘who puts such faith in rubbish.’ He pushed his spearmen aside and beckoned to us. ‘Come and see what you have discovered, Merlin of Avalon.’
I went with Merlin to the pit’s edge and saw a tangle of old, dark and damp-ruined wood. It looked like nothing more than a heap of firewood, just scraps of timber; some of them rotted by the damp that had seeped into a corner of the brick-lined pit and the rest so old and fragile that they would have flared up and burned to ash in an instant. ‘What is it?’ I asked Merlin.
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