‘It seems,’ Merlin said in Saxon, ‘that we have looked in the wrong place. Come,’ he spoke British again as he touched my shoulder, ‘I’ve wasted our time.’
‘But not ours,’ Dinas said harshly.
‘I see a wheel,’ Lavaine said.
Merlin turned slowly back, his face looking ravaged. He had tried to deceive Cerdic and the Silurian twins and the deception had failed utterly.
‘Two wheels,’ Dinas said.
‘And a shaft,’ Lavaine added, ‘cut into three pieces.’
I stared again at the squalid tangle and again I saw nothing but wooden scraps, but then I saw that some of the pieces were curved and that if the curved fragments were joined together and braced with the many short rods, they would indeed make a pair of wheels. Mixed with the scraps of the wheels were some thin panels and one long shaft that was as thick as my wrist, but so long that it had been broken into three pieces so it would fit into the hole. There was also an axle boss visible, with a slit in its centre where a long knife blade could be fitted. The heap of wood was the remains of a small ancient chariot like those that had once carried the warriors of Britain into battle.
‘The Chariot of Modron.’ Dinas said reverently.
‘Modron,’ Lavaine said, ‘the mother of the Gods.’
‘Whose chariot,’ Dinas said, ‘connects earth to the heavens.’
‘And Merlin doesn’t want it,’ Dinas said scornfully.
‘So we shall take the chariot instead,’ Lavaine announced.
Cerdic’s interpreter had done his best to translate all this to the King, but it was plain that Cerdic remained unimpressed by the sorry collection of broken and decayed timber. He nevertheless ordered his spearmen to collect the fragments and lay them in a cloak that Lavaine picked up. Nimue hissed a curse at them, and Lavaine just laughed at her. ‘Do you want to fight us for the chariot?’ he demanded, gesturing at Cerdic’s spearmen.
‘You can’t shelter behind Saxons for ever,’ I said, ‘and the time will come when you’ll have to fight.’
Dinas spat into the empty pit. ‘We are Druids, Derfel, and you cannot take our lives, not without consigning your soul, and every soul you love, to horror evermore.’
‘I can kill you,’ Nimue spat at them.
Dinas stared at her, then extended a fist towards her. Nimue spat at the fist to avert its evil, but Dinas just turned it over, opened his palm and showed her a thrush’s egg. He tossed it to her. ‘Something to fill your eye-socket, woman,’ he said dismissively, then turned and followed his brother and Cerdic out of the temple.
‘I’m sorry, Lord,’ I said to Merlin when we had been left alone.
‘For what, Derfel? You think you could have beaten twenty spearmen?’ He sighed and rubbed at his violated beard. ‘You see how the powers of the new Gods fight back? But so long as we possess the Cauldron we possess the greater power. Come.’ He extended his arm to Nimue, not for comfort, but because he wanted her support. He suddenly looked old and tired as he walked slowly down the nave.
‘What do we do, Lord?’ one of my spearmen asked me.
‘Make ready to go,’ I answered. I was watching Merlin’s stooped back. The cutting of his beard, I thought, was a greater tragedy than he dared admit, but I consoled myself that he still possessed the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn. His power was still great, but there was something about that bent back and slow shuffle that was infinitely saddening. ‘We make ready to go,’ I said again. We left next day. We were hungry still, but we were going home. And we did, after a fashion, have peace.
Just north of ruined Calleva, on land that had been Aelle’s and was now ours again, we found the tribute waiting. Aelle had kept faith with us.
There were no guards there, just great piles of gold waiting unattended on the road. There were cups, crosses, chains, ingots, brooches and torques. We had no means of weighing the gold, and both Arthur and Cuneglas suspected that not all the agreed tribute had been paid, but it was enough. It was a hoard. We bundled the gold in cloaks, hung the heavy bundles over the backs of the war horses, and went on. Arthur walked with us, his spirits brightening as we drew nearer and nearer to home, though regrets still lingered. ‘You remember the oath I took near here?’ he asked me shortly after we had collected Aelle’s gold.
‘I remember it, Lord.’ The oath had been taken on the night after we had delivered much of this same gold to Aelle the previous year. The gold had been our bribe to turn Aelle away from our frontier and onto Ratae, the fortress of Powys, and Arthur had sworn that night that he would kill Aelle. ‘Now I preserve him instead,’ he commented ruefully.
‘Cuneglas has Ratae back,’ I said.
‘But the oath is unfulfilled, Derfel. So many broken oaths.’ He peered up at a sparrowhawk that slid in front of a great white heap of cloud. ‘I suggested to Cuneglas and Meurig that they split Siluria in two, and Cuneglas suggested you might like to be the King of his portion. Would you?’
I was so astonished that I could hardly respond. ‘If you wish it, Lord,’ I finally said.
‘Well, I don’t. I want you as Mordred’s guardian.’
I walked with that disappointment for a few paces. ‘Siluria may not like being divided,’ I said.
‘Siluria will do as it’s told,’ Arthur said firmly, ‘and you and Ceinwyn will live in Mordred’s palace in Dumnonia.’
‘If you say so, Lord.’ I was suddenly reluctant to abandon Cwm Isal’s humbler pleasures.
‘Cheer up, Derfel!’ Arthur said. ‘I’m not a King, why should you be one?’
‘It was not the loss of a kingdom I regret. Lord, but the addition of a King to my household.’
‘You’ll manage him, Derfel, you manage everything.’
Next day we divided the army. Sagramor had already left the ranks, leading his spearmen to guard the new frontier with Cerdic’s kingdom, and now the rest of us took two separate roads. Arthur, Merlin, Tristan and Lancelot went south, while Cuneglas and Meurig went west towards their lands. I embraced Arthur and Tristan, then knelt for Merlin’s blessing, which he gave benignly. He had regained some of his old energy during our march from London, but he could not hide the fact that his humiliation in the temple of Mithras had hit him hard. He might still possess the Cauldron, but his enemies possessed a strand of his beard and he would need all his magic to ward off their spells. He embraced me, I kissed Nimue, then I watched them walk away before I followed Cuneglas westward. I was going to Powys to find my Ceinwyn and I was travelling with a share of Aelle’s gold, but even so it did not seem like a triumph. We had beaten Aelle and secured peace, but Cerdic and Lancelot had been the real winners of the campaign, not us.
That night we all rested in Corinium, but at midnight a storm woke me. The tempest was far away to the south, but such was the violence of the distant thunder and so vivid were the flashes of lightning that flickered on the walls of the courtyard where I slept that it woke me. Ailleann, Arthur’s old mistress and the mother of his twins, had offered me shelter and she now came from her bed-chamber with a worried face. I wrapped my cloak around me and went with her to the town walls, where I found half my men already watching the distant turmoil. Cuneglas and Agricola were also standing on the ramparts, but not Meurig, for he refused to find any portents in the weather.
We all knew better. Storms are messages from the Gods, and this storm was a tumultuous outburst. No rain fell on Corinium and no gale blew our cloaks, but far off to the south, somewhere in Dumnonia, the Gods flayed the land. Lightning tore the dark clean out of the sky and stabbed its crooked daggers at the earth. Thunder rolled incessantly, outburst after outburst, and with every echoing clap the lightning flickered and dazzled and split its ragged fire through the shuddering night. Issa stood close beside me, his honest face lit by those distant spits of fire. ‘Is someone dead?’
‘We can’t tell, Issa.’
‘Are we cursed. Lord?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I replied with a confidence I did not entirely fe
el.
‘But I heard that Merlin had his beard cut. ‘
‘A few hairs,’ I said dismissively, ‘nothing more. What of it?’
‘If Merlin has no power, Lord, who does?’
‘Merlin has power,’ I tried to reassure him. And I had power, too, for soon I would be Mordred’s champion and would live on a great estate. I would mould the child and Arthur would make the child’s kingdom.
Yet still I worried about the thunder. And I would have worried more had I known what it meant. For disaster did come that night. We did not hear of it for three more days, but then at last we learned why the thunder had spoken and the lightning struck.
It had struck on the Tor, on Merlin’s hall where the winds made moan about his hollow dream-tower. And there, in our hour of victory, the lightning had set the wooden tower alight and its flames had seared and leapt and howled into the night and in the morning, when the embers were being spattered and extinguished by the dying storm’s rain, there were no Treasures left at Ynys Wydryn. There was no Cauldron in the ashes, only an emptiness at Dumnonia’s fire-scarred heart. The new Gods, it seemed, were fighting back. Or else the Silurian twins had worked a mighty charm on the cut braid of Merlin’s beard, for the Cauldron was gone and the Treasures had vanished. And I went north to Ceinwyn.
PART THREE
Camelot
‘All the treasures burned?’ Igraine asked me.
‘Everything,’ I said, ‘disappeared.’
‘Poor Merlin,’ Igraine said. She has taken her usual place on my window-sill, though she is well wrapped against this day’s cold by a thick cloak of beaver fur. And she needs it, for it is bitterly cold today. There were flurries of snow this morning, and the sky to the west is ominous with leaden clouds. ‘I cannot stay long,’ she had announced when she arrived and settled down to skim through the finished parchments, ‘in case it snows.’
‘It will snow. The berries are thick in the hedgerows and that always means a hard winter.’
‘Old men say that every year,’ Igraine observed tartly.
‘When you’re old,’ I said, ‘every winter is hard.’
‘How old was Merlin?’
‘At the time he lost the Cauldron? Very close to eighty years. But he lived for a long while after that.’
‘But he never rebuilt his dream-tower?’ Igraine asked.
‘No.’
She sighed and pulled the rich cloak about her. ‘I should like a dream-tower. I would so like to have a dream-tower.’
‘Then have one built,’ I said. ‘You’re a Queen. Give orders, make a fuss. It’s quite simple; nothing but a four-sided tower with no roof and a platform halfway up. Once it’s built no one but you can go inside, and the trick of it is to sleep on the platform and wait for the Gods to send you messages. Merlin always said it was a horribly cold place to sleep in winter.’
‘And the Cauldron,’ Igraine guessed, ‘had been hidden on the platform?’
‘Yes.’
‘But it wasn’t burned, was it. Brother Derfel?’ she insisted.
‘The Cauldron’s story goes on,’ I admitted, ‘but I won’t tell it now.’
She stuck her tongue out at me. She is looking startlingly beautiful today. Perhaps it is the cold that has put the colour into her cheeks and the spark into her dark eyes, or maybe the beaver pelts suit her, but I suspect she is pregnant. I could always tell when Ceinwyn was with child, and Igraine shows that same surge of life. But Igraine has said nothing, so I will not ask her. She has prayed hard enough, God knows, for a child, and maybe our Christian God does hear prayers. We have nothing else to give us hope, for our own Gods are dead, or fled, or careless of us.
‘The bards,’ Igraine said, and I knew from her tone that another of my shortcomings as a storyteller was about to be aired, ‘say that the battle near London was terrible. They say Arthur fought all day.’
‘Ten minutes,’ I said dismissively.
‘And they all declare that Lancelot saved him, arriving at the last moment with a hundred spearmen.’
‘They all say that,’ I said, ‘because Lancelot’s poets wrote the songs.’
She shook her head sadly. ‘If this,’ she said, slapping the big leather bag in which she carries the finished parchments back to the Caer, ‘is the only record of Lancelot, Derfel, then what will people think? That the poets lie?’
‘Who cares what people think?’ I answered testily. ‘And poets always lie. It’s what they’re paid to do. But you asked me for the truth, I tell it, and then you complain.’
‘ “Lancelot’s warriors,”‘ she quoted, ‘ “spearmen so bold, Makers of widows and givers of gold. Slayers of Saxons, feared by the Sais…”‘
‘Do stop,’ I interrupted her, ‘please? I heard the song a week after it was written!’
‘But if the songs lied,’ she pleaded, ‘why didn’t Arthur protest?’
‘Because he never cared about songs. Why should he? He was a warrior, not a bard, and so long as his men sang before battle he didn’t care. And besides, he could never sing himself. He thought he had a voice, but Ceinwyn always said he sounded like a cow with wind.’
Igraine frowned. ‘I still don’t understand why Lancelot’s making peace was so very bad.’
‘It isn’t difficult to understand,’ I said. I slid off the stool and crossed to the hearth where I used a stick to pull some glowing embers from the small fire. I arranged six embers in a line on the floor, then split the row into two and four. ‘The four embers,’ I said, ‘represent Aelle’s forces. The two are Cerdic’s. Now understand we could never have beaten the Saxons if all the embers had been together. We could not have defeated six, but we could beat four. Arthur planned to beat those four, then turn on the two, and that way we could have scoured Britain of the Sais. But by making peace, Lancelot increased Cerdic’s power.’ I added another ember to the two, so that four now faced a group of three, then shook the flame off the burning stick. ‘We had weakened Aelle,’ I explained, ‘but we’d weakened ourselves too for we no longer had Lancelot’s three hundred spearmen. They were pledged to peace. That increased Cerdic’s power even more.’ I pushed two of Aelle’s embers into Cerdic’s camp, dividing the line into five and two. ‘So all we had done,’ I said, ‘was weaken Aelle and strengthen Cerdic. And that’s what Lancelot’s peacemaking achieved.’
‘You are giving our Lady lessons in counting?’ Sansum sidled into the room with a suspicious look on his face. ‘And I thought you were composing a gospel,’ he added slyly.
‘The five loaves and two fishes,’ Igraine said swiftly. ‘Brother Derfel thought it might be five fishes and two loaves, but I’m sure I’m right, am I not, Lord Bishop?’
‘My Lady is quite right,’ Sansum said. ‘And Brother Derfel is a poor Christian. How can such an ignorant man write a gospel for the Saxons?’
‘Only with your loving support, Lord Bishop,’ Igraine answered, ‘and, of course, with my husband’s support. Or shall I tell the King that you oppose him in this small thing?’
‘You would be guilty of the grossest falsehood if you did,’ Sansum lied to her, outmanoeuvred again by my clever Queen. ‘I came to tell you, Lady, that your spearmen believe you should leave. The sky threatens more snow.’
She picked up the bag of parchments and gave me a smile. ‘I shall see you when the snow has stopped, Brother Derfel.’
‘I shall pray for that moment. Lady.’
She smiled again, then walked past the saint who half bowed as she went through the door, but once she had gone he straightened and stared at me. The tufts above his ears that made us call him the mouse-lord are white now, but age has not softened the saint. He can still bristle with vituperation and the pain that still afflicts him when he passes urine only serves to make his temper worse. ‘There is a special place in hell, Brother Derfel,’ he hissed at me, ‘for the tellers of lies.’
‘I shall pray for those poor souls, Lord,’ I said, then turned from him and dipped this quill in ink
to go on with my tale of Arthur, my warlord, my peace-maker and friend.
What followed were the glorious years. Igraine, who listens to the poets too much, calls them Camelot. We did not. They were the years of Arthur’s best rule, the years when he shaped a country to his wishes and the years in which Dumnonia most closely matched his ideal of a nation at peace with itself and with its neighbours; but it is only by looking back that those years seem so much better than they were, and that is because the years that followed were so much worse. To hear the tales told at night-time hearths you would think we had made a whole new country in Britain, named it Camelot and peopled it with shining heroes, but the truth is that we simply ruled Dumnonia as best we could, we ruled it justly and we never called it Camelot. I did not even hear that name till two years ago. Camelot exists only in the poets’
dreams, while in our Dumnonia, even in those good years, the harvests still failed, the plagues still ravaged us and wars were still fought.
Ceinwyn came to Dumnonia and it was in Lindinis that our first child was born. It was a girl and we called her Morwenna after Ceinwyn’s mother. She was born with black hair, but after a while it turned pale gold like her mother’s. Lovely Morwenna.
Merlin was proved right about Guinevere, for as soon as Lancelot had established his new government in Venta, she declared herself tired of the brand-new palace at Lindinis. It was too damp, she said, and much too exposed to the wet winds coming off the swamps about Ynys Wydryn, and too cold in winter, and suddenly nothing would do except to move back to Uther’s old Winter Palace at Durnovaria. But Durnovaria was almost as far from Venta as Lindinis, so Guinevere then persuaded Arthur that they needed to prepare a house for the distant day when Mordred became King and, by a King’s right, demanded the Winter Palace’s return, so Arthur let Guinevere make the choice. Arthur himself dreamed of a stout hall with a palisade, beast house and granaries, but Guinevere found a Roman villa just south of the fort of Yindocladia that lay, just as Merlin had foretold, on the frontier between Dumnonia and Lancelot’s new Belgic kingdom. The villa was built on a hill above a creek of the sea and Guinevere called it her Sea Palace. She had a swarm of builders renovate the villa and fill it with all the statues that had once graced Lindinis. She even commandeered the mosaic floor from Lindinis’s entrance hall. For a time Arthur worried that the Sea Palace was dangerously close to Cerdic’s land, but Guinevere insisted the peace negotiated at London would last and Arthur, realizing how she loved the place, relented. He never cared what place he called home, for he rarely was at home. He liked to be on the move, always visiting some corner of Mordred’s kingdom.
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