I left her, left the shrine and climbed to the Tor where I pushed back the half-broken water gate that hung crazily off one rope hinge. The blackened ashes of the hall and tower were being swallowed by the earth, and around them were the dozen dirty huts where Nimue and her people lived. Those people were the unwanted of our world; its cripples and beggars, its homeless folk and half-crazed creatures who all survived on the food Ceinwyn and I sent weekly from Lindinis. Nimue claimed her people spoke with the Gods, but all I ever heard from them was mad cackling or sad moaning. ‘She denies everything,’ I said to Nimue.
‘Of course she does.’
‘She says her God burned it to nothing.’
‘Her God couldn’t soft boil an egg,’ Nimue said vengefully. She had decayed foully in the years since the Cauldron had disappeared and as Merlin had subsided into his gentle old age. Nimue was filthy these days, filthy and thin and almost as crazed as when I had rescued her from the Isle of the Dead. She shivered at times, or else her face grimaced in uncontrollable twitches. She had long ago sold or thrown away the golden eye, and now wore a leather patch over the empty socket instead. Whatever intriguing beauty she had once possessed was now hidden under dirt and sores, and lost beneath her matted mass of black hair that was so greasy with filth that even the countryfolk who came to her for divination or healing would often recoil from her stench. Even I, who was oath-sworn to her and who had once loved her, could hardly bear to be near her.
‘The Cauldron still lives,’ Nimue told me that day.
‘So Merlin says.’
‘And Merlin lives too, Derfel.’ She put a nail-bitten hand on my arm. ‘He’s waiting, that’s all, saving his strength.’
Waiting for his balefire, I thought, but said nothing.
Nimue turned sunwise to stare all about the horizon. ‘Somewhere out there, Derfel,’ she said, ‘the Cauldron is hidden. And someone is trying to work out how to use it.’ She laughed softly. ‘And when they do, Derfel, you will see the land turn red with blood.’ She turned her one eye on me. ‘Blood!’ she hissed. ‘The world will vomit blood that day, Derfel, and Merlin will ride again.’
Maybe, I thought; but it was a sunny day and Dumnonia was at peace. It was Arthur’s peace, given by his sword and maintained by his lawcourts and enriched by his roads and sealed by his Brotherhood. It all seemed so distant from the world of the Cauldron and the missing Treasures, but Nimue still believed in their magic and for her sake I would not express disbelief, though on that bright day in Arthur’s Dumnonia it seemed to me that Britain was forging its way from darkness into light, from chaos into order and from savagery into law. That was Arthur’s achievement. That was his Camelot. But Nimue was right. The Cauldron was not lost and she, like Merlin, was just waiting for its horror.
* * *
Our chief business in those years was to prepare Mordred for the throne. He was already our King for he had been acclaimed as a baby on Caer Cadarn’s summit, but Arthur had decided to repeat the acclamation when Mordred came of age. I think Arthur hoped that some mystical power might invest Mordred with responsibility and wisdom at that second acclamation, for nothing else seemed capable of improving the boy. We tried, the Gods know we tried, but Mordred stayed the same sullen, resentful and loutish youth. Arthur disliked him but stayed wilfully blind to Mordred’s grosser faults, for if Arthur held any religion truly sacred it was his belief in the divinity of kings. The time would come when Arthur would be forced to face the truth of Mordred, but in those years, whenever the subject of Mordred’s suitability was raised in the royal Council, Arthur would always say the same thing. Mordred, he agreed, was an unattractive child, but we had all known such boys grow into proper men and the solemnity of acclamation and the responsibilities of kingship would surely temper the boy. ‘I was hardly a model child myself,’ he liked to say, ‘but I don’t think I’ve turned out ill. Have faith in the boy.’ Besides, he would always add with a smile, Mordred would be guided by a wise and experienced Council. ‘He’ll appoint his own Council,’ one of us would always object, but Arthur waved the matter aside. All, he blithely assured us, would turn out well.
* * *
Guinevere had no such illusions. Indeed, in the years following the Round Table oath she became obsessed with Mordred’s fate. She did not attend the royal Council, for no woman could, but when she was in Durnovaria I suspect she listened from behind a curtained archway that opened into the council chamber. Much of what we discussed must have bored her; we spent hours discussing whether to place new stones in a ford or to spend money on a bridge, or whether a magistrate was taking bribes or to whom we should grant the guardianship of an orphaned heir or heiress. Those matters were the common coin of council meetings and I am sure she found them tedious, but how avidly she must have listened when we discussed Mordred.
Guinevere hardly knew Mordred, but she hated him. She hated him because he was King and Arthur was not, and one by one she tried to convert the royal councillors to her own view. She was even pleasant to me, for I suspect she saw into my soul and knew that I secretly agreed with her. After the first council meeting that followed the Round Table oath she took my arm and walked with me about Durnovaria’s cloister which was misted from the smoke of herbs that were being burned in braziers to avert a return of the plague. Maybe it was the heady smoke that dizzied me, but more likely it was Guinevere’s proximity. She wore a strong perfume, her red hair was full and wild, her body straight and slender, and her face so very finely ¦ boned and full of spirit. I told her I was sorry her father had died.
‘Poor father,’ she said. ‘All he ever dreamed of was returning to Henis Wyren.’ She paused, and I wondered whether she had reproved Arthur for not making more effort to dislodge Diwrnach. I doubt Guinevere ever wanted to see Henis Wyren’s wild coast again, but her father had always wanted to return to his ancestors’ lands. ‘You never told me about your visit to Henis Wyren,’ Guinevere said reproachfully. ‘I hear you met Diwrnach?’
‘And hope never to meet him again, Lady.’
She shrugged. ‘Sometimes, in a king, a reputation for savagery can be useful.’ She questioned me about Henis Wyren’s condition, but I sensed she was not truly interested in my answers, any more than when she asked me how Ceinwyn was.
‘Well, Lady,’ I answered her, ‘thank you.’
‘Pregnant again?’ she asked in mild amusement.
‘We think so, Lady.’
‘How busy the two of you do keep, Derfel,’ she said in gentle mockery. Her annoyance at Ceinwyn had faded over the years, though they never did become friends. Guinevere snapped a leaf from a bay tree that grew in a Roman urn decorated with naked nymphs and rubbed the leaf between her fingers.
‘And how is our Lord King?’ she asked sourly.
‘Troublesome, Lady.’
‘Is he fit to be King?’ That was typical of Guinevere; a straight question, brutal and honest.
‘He was born to it. Lady,’ I said defensively, ‘and we are oath-sworn to it.’
She gave a derisive laugh. Her gold-laced sandals slapped the flagstones and a gold chain hung with pearls clinked about her neck. ‘Many years ago, Derfel,’ she said, ‘you and I talked of this and you told me that of all the men in Dumnonia Arthur was fittest to be King.’
‘I did,’ I admitted.
‘And you think Mordred is fitter?’
‘No, Lady.’
‘So?’ She turned to look at me. Few women could look me straight in the eye, but Guinevere could.
‘So?’ she asked again.
‘So I have sworn an oath, Lady, as has your husband.’
‘Oaths!’ she snarled, letting go of my arm. ‘Arthur swore an oath to kill Aelle, and Aelle yet lives. He swore an oath to take back Henis Wyren, yet Diwrnach still rules there. Oaths! You men hide behind oaths like servants hide behind stupidity, but the moment an oath becomes inconvenient you forget it soon enough. You think your oath to Uther cannot be forgotten?’
‘My oath
is to the Prince Arthur,’ I said, taking care, as ever, to call Arthur a Prince in front of Guinevere. ‘You wish me to forget that oath?’ I asked her.
‘I want you, Derfel, to talk sense into him,’ she said. ‘He listens to you.’
‘He listens to you, Lady.’
‘Not on the subject of Mordred,’ she said. ‘On everything else, maybe, but not that.’ She shuddered, perhaps remembering the embrace she had been forced to give Mordred at the Sea Palace, then she angrily crumpled the bay leaf and threw it onto the flagstones. Within minutes, I knew, a servant would silently sweep it away. Durnovaria’s Winter Palace was always so tidy, while our palace at Lindinis was too littered with children ever to be neat and Mordred’s wing was a midden. ‘Arthur,’ Guinevere now insisted tiredly, ‘is the eldest living son of Uther. He should be King.’
And so he should, I thought, but we had all taken oaths to put Mordred on the throne and men had died at Lugg Vale to defend that oath. At times, the Gods forgive me, I just wished Mordred would die and so solve the problem for us, but despite his clubbed foot and the ill-omens of his birth, he seemed blessed with a rugged health. I looked into Guinevere’s green eyes. ‘I remember, Lady,’ I said to her carefully, ‘how years ago you took me through that doorway,’ I pointed to a low archway that led oft the cloister, ‘and you showed me your temple of Isis.’
‘I did. So?’ She was defensive, maybe regretting that moment of intimacy. On that distant day she had been trying to make me an ally in the same cause that had prompted her to take my arm and bring me to this cloister. She wanted Mordred destroyed so that Arthur could rule.
‘You showed me Isis’s throne,’ I said, careful not to reveal that I had seen that same black chair again at the Sea Palace, ‘and you told me that Isis was the Goddess who determined which man should sit on a kingdom’s throne. Am I right?’
‘It’s one of her powers, yes,’ Guinevere said carelessly.
‘Then you must pray to the Goddess, Lady,’ I said.
‘You think I don’t, Derfel?’ she demanded. ‘You think I haven’t worn out her ears with my prayers? I want Arthur as King, and Gwydre as King after him, but you can’t force a man onto a throne. Arthur must want it before Isis will grant it.’
That seemed a feeble defence to me. If Isis could not alter Arthur’s mind, how were we mere mortals expected to change it? We had tried often enough, but Arthur refused to discuss the matter, just as Guinevere gave up our conversation in the courtyard when she realized I could not be persuaded to join her campaign to replace Mordred with Arthur.
I wanted Arthur as King, but only once in all those years did I ever break through his bland assurances and talk seriously with him about his own claim to the kingship, and that conversation did not occur until five whole years after the Round Table oath. It was during the summer before the year in which Mordred was to be acclaimed King, and by then the whispers of hostility had become a deafening shout. Only the Christians supported Mordred’s claim, and even they did it reluctantly, but it was known that his mother had been a Christian and that the child himself had been baptized and that was sufficient to persuade the Christians that Mordred might be sympathetic to their ambitions. Everyone else in Dumnonia looked to Arthur to save them from the boy, but Arthur serenely ignored them. That summer, as we have now learned to count the sun’s turning, was four hundred and ninety-five years after the birth of Christ and it was a beautiful, sun-soaked season. Arthur was at the height of his powers. Merlin sunned himself in our garden with my three small daughters clamouring for stories, Ceinwyn was happy, Guinevere basked in her lovely new Sea Palace with its arcades and galleries and dark hidden temple, Lancelot seemed content in his kingdom by the sea, the Saxons fought each other, and Dumnonia was at peace. It was also, as I remember, a summer of utter misery.
For it was the summer of Tristan and Iseult.
Kernow is the wild kingdom that lies like a claw at Dumnonia’s western tip. The Romans went there, but few settled in its wilderness and when the Romans left Britain the folk of Kernow went on with their lives as though the invaders had never existed. They ploughed small fields, fished hard seas and mined precious tin. To travel in Kernow, I was told, was to see Britain as it had been before the Romans came, though I never went there, and nor did Arthur.
For as long as I could remember Kernow had been ruled by King Mark. He rarely troubled us, though once in a while — usually when Dumnonia was embroiled with some larger enemy to the east — he would decide that some of our western lands should belong to him and there would be a brief border war and savage raids on our coast by Kernow’s fighting boats. We always won those wars, how could we not? Dumnonia was large and Kernow small, and when the wars were done Mark would send an envoy to say it had all been an accident. For a short time at the beginning of Arthur’s rule, when Cadwy of Isca had rebelled against the rest of Dumnonia, Mark did capture some large portions of our land beyond his frontier, but Culhwch had ended that rebellion and when Arthur sent Cadwy’s head as a gift to Mark, the spearmen of Kernow had quietly gone back to their old strongholds.
Such troubles were rare, for King Mark’s most famous campaigns were fought in his bed. He was famous for the number of his wives, but where other such men might have kept several wives at one time, Mark married them in sequence. They died with appalling regularity, almost always, it seemed, just four years after the marriage ceremony was performed by Kernow’s Druids, and though Mark always had an explanation for the deaths — a fever maybe, or an accident, or perhaps a difficult birth — most of us suspected it was the King’s boredom that lay behind the balefires that burned the queenly corpses on Caer Dore, the King’s stronghold. The seventh wife to die had been Arthur’s niece, Ialle, and Mark had sent an envoy with a sad tale of mushrooms, toadstools and Ialle’s ungovernable appetites. He had also sent a pack mule loaded with tin ingots and rare whalebones to avert any possibility of Arthur’s wrath. The deaths of the wives never seemed to prevent other princesses from daring the sea crossing to share Mark’s bed. It was better, perhaps, to be a Queen in Kernow, even for a short time, than to wait in the women’s hall for a suitor who might never come, and besides, the explanations for the deaths were always plausible. They were just accidents.
After Ialle’s death there was no new marriage for a long time. Mark was getting old and men assumed he had abandoned the marriage game, but then, in that lovely summer of the year before Mordred assumed power in Dumnonia, the ageing King Mark did take a new wife. She was the daughter of our old ally, Oengus Mac Airem, the Irish King of Demetia who had delivered us victory at Lugg Vale, and for that deliverance Arthur forgave Oengus his myriad of trespasses that still harassed Cuneglas’s land. Oengus’s feared Blackshield warriors were forever raiding Powys and what had been Siluria, and through all those years Cuneglas was forced to keep expensive war-bands on his western frontier. Oengus always denied responsibility for the raids, saying that his chiefs were ungovernable and promising he would lop some heads, but the heads remained unlopped and at every harvest time the hungry Blackshields would return to Powys. Arthur sent some of our young spearmen to gain battle experience in those harvest wars that provided us with a chance to train unblooded warriors and keep the older men’s instincts sharp. Cuneglas wanted to finish Demetia off once and for all, but Arthur liked Oengus and argued that his depredations were worth the experience he gave our spearmen and so the Blackshields survived.
The marriage of the ageing King Mark to his child-bride of Demetia was an alliance of two small kingdoms that troubled no one, and besides, no one believed Mark had married the Princess for any political advantage. He married her solely because he had an insatiable appetite for young royal flesh. He was then near sixty years old, his son Tristan was almost forty and Iseult, the new Queen, was just fifteen.
The misery began when Culhwch sent us a message saying that Tristan had arrived in Isca with his father’s child-bride. Culhwch, after Mehvas had died of his surfeit of oysters,
had been appointed the governor of Dumnonia’s western province and his message reported that Tristan and Iseult were fugitives from King Mark. Culhwch himself was amused rather than troubled by their arrival for he, like me, had fought beside Tristan at Lugg Yale and outside London and he liked the Prince. ‘At least this bride will live,’ Culhwch’s scribe had written to the Council, ‘and deserves to. I have given them an old hall and a guard of spearmen.’ The message went on to describe a raid by Irish pirates from across the sea and ended with Culhwch’s usual request for a tax reduction and a warning, also quite usual, that the harvest looked thin. It was, in brief, a commonplace dispatch with nothing to alert the Council’s apprehensions, for we all knew that the harvest looked fat and that Culhwch was positioning himself for his customary wrangle over taxes. As for Tristan and Iseult, their story was merely an amusement and none of us saw any danger there. Arthur’s clerks filed the message away and the Council moved on to discuss Sansum’s request that the Council should build a great church that would celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Christ’s birth. I argued against the proposal, Bishop Sansum snapped and barked and spat that the church was necessary if the world was not to be destroyed by the devil, and that happy wrangle kept the Council engaged till the midday meal was served in the palace courtyard. That meeting was held in Durnovaria and, as usual, Guinevere had come from her Sea Palace to be in the town when the Council met and she joined us at the midday meal. She sat beside Arthur and, as ever, her proximity gave him a glowing happiness. He was so proud of her. The marriage might have yielded him disappointments, especially in the number of its children, but it was plain that he was still in love with her. Every look he gave her was a proclamation of his astonishment that such a woman would marry him, and it never occurred to Arthur that he was the prize, that he was the capable ruler and good man. He adored her, and that day, as we ate fruit, bread and cheese under a warm sunlight, it was easy to see why. She could be witty and cutting, amusing and wise, and her looks still commanded attention. The years did not seem to touch Guinevere. Her skin was as clear as skimmed milk and her eyes had none of the fine wrinkles that Ceinwyn’s showed; it seemed, indeed, that she had not aged one moment since that far-off day when Arthur had first spied her across Gorfyddyd’s crowded hall. And still, I think, every time Arthur returned home from some long dutiful journey across Mordred’s realm he received the same shock of happiness at seeing Guinevere that he had received on that very first day he saw her. And Guinevere knew how to keep him fascinated by always staying one mysterious pace ahead of him and so drawing Arthur ever deeper into his passion. It was, I suppose, a recipe for love. Mordred was with us that day. Arthur had insisted that the King begin to attend the Council before he was acclaimed with his full powers, and he always encouraged Mordred to take part in our discussions, but Mordred’s only contribution was to sit scraping at the dirt under his fingernails or else yawning as the tedious business droned on. Arthur hoped he would learn responsibility by attending the Council, but I feared the King was merely learning to avoid the details of government. That day he sat, as was proper, at the centre of the meal table and made no pretence whatever to be interested in Bishop Emrys’s story of a spring that had miraculously appeared when a priest blessed a hillside.
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