‘Would you have killed Culhwch?’ Igraine asks me.
‘Of course not!’
‘I hate Mordred,’ she said.
‘You are not alone in that, Lady.’
She stared at the fire for a few moments. ‘Did he really have to become King?’
‘So long as it was in Arthur’s hands, yes. If it had been me? No, I would have killed him with Hywelbane, even if it did mean breaking my oath. He was a sad boy.’
‘It all seems so sad,’ Igraine said.
‘There was plenty of happiness in those years,’ I answered, ‘and even afterwards, sometimes. We were happy enough back then.’ I still remember the girls’ shouts echoing in Lindinis, the rush of feet and their excitement at some new game or some strange discovery. Ceinwyn was always happy she had a gift for it — and those around her caught the happiness and passed it on. And Dumnonia, I suppose, was happy. It prospered, certainly, and the hard workers made themselves wealthy. The Christians seethed with discontent, but even so those were the glory years, the time of peace, the time of Arthur. Igraine shuffled the new sheets of parchment to find one particular passage. ‘About the Round Table,’
she began.
‘Please,’ I said, holding up my one hand to still what I knew would be a protest.
‘Derfel!’ she said sternly. ‘Everyone knows that it was a serious thing! An important thing! All the best warriors of Britain, all sworn to Arthur, and all of them friends. Everyone knows it!’
‘It was a cracked stone table that by the day’s end was cracked even more and smeared with vomit. They all got very drunk.’
She sighed. ‘I expect you’ve just forgotten the truth,’ she said, dismissing the subject much too easily, which makes me think that Dafydd, the clerk who translates my words into the British tongue, will come up with something altogether more to Igraine’s liking. I even heard one tale not so long ago which claimed that the table was a vast wooden circle around which the whole Brotherhood of Britain sat and looked solemn, but there never was such a table, nor could there have been unless we had cut down half the woods of Dumnonia to build it.
‘The Brotherhood of Britain,’ I said patiently, ‘was an idea of Arthur’s that never really worked. It couldn’t! Men’s royal oaths took preference over the Round Table oath, and besides, no one except Arthur and Galahad ever really believed in it. By the end, believe me, even he was embarrassed if anyone even mentioned it.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she said, meaning that she was utterly sure I was wrong. ‘And I want to know,’ she went on, ‘what happened to Merlin.’
‘I will tell you. I promise.’
‘Now!’ she insisted. ‘Tell me now. Did he just fade away?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘His time did come. Nimue was right, you see. At Lindinis he was just waiting. He always liked to pretend, remember, and in those years he pretended to be an old, dying man, but underneath, where none of us saw it, the power was always there. But he was old, and he did have to hoard his power. He was waiting, you see, for the time when the Cauldron would be unveiled. He knew he would need his power then, but till it was needed he was happy to let Nimue guard the flame.’
‘So what happened?’ Igraine demanded excitedly.
I wrapped the sleeve of my cowl about the stump of my wrist. ‘If God lets me live, my Lady, I will tell you,’ I said, and I would not tell her more then. I was close to tears, remembering that last savage instance of Merlin’s power in Britain, but that moment lies a long, long way ahead in this story, long past the time when Nimue’s prophecy about the Kings coming to Cadarn came true.
‘If you won’t tell me,’ Igraine said, ‘then I won’t tell you my news.’
‘You’re pregnant,’ I said, ‘and I am so very happy for you.’
‘You beast, Derfel,’ she protested. ‘I wanted to surprise you!’
‘You have prayed for this, Lady, and I have prayed for you, and how could God not answer our prayers?’
She grimaced. ‘God sent Nwylle the pox, that’s what God did. She was all spots and sores and weeping pus, so the King sent her away’
‘I’m very glad.’
She touched her belly. ‘I just hope he lives to rule, Derfel.’
‘He?’ I asked.
‘He,’ she said firmly.
‘Then I will pray for that too,’ I said piously, though whether I will pray to Sansum’s God or to the wilder Gods of Britain I do not know. So many prayers have been said in my lifetime, so very many, and where did they bring me? To this damp refuge in the hills while our old enemies sing in our ancient halls. But that ending is also far ahead, and Arthur’s story is far from done. It is hardly begun in some ways, for now, as he discarded his glory and gave his power to Mordred, the times of testing came, and they were to prove the trials of Arthur, my Lord of oaths, my hard Lord, but my friend till death. At first, nothing happened. We held our breath, expected the worst, and nothing happened. We made hay, then cut the flax and laid the fibrous stems in the retting ponds so that our villages stank for weeks. We reaped the fields of rye, barley and wheat, then listened to the slaves singing their songs around the threshing floor or the endlessly turning millstones. The harvest straw was used to repair the thatch so that, for a time, patches of roof-gold shone in the late summer sun. We picked the orchards clean, cut the winter firewood and harvested willow rods for the basket-makers. We ate blackberries and nuts, smoked the bees out of their hives and pressed their honey in sacks that we hung in front of the kitchen fires where we left food for the dead on Samain Eve.
The Saxons stayed in Lloegyr, justice was done in our courts, maids were given in marriage, children were born and children died. The waning year brought mists and frost. The cattle were slaughtered and the stink of the retting ponds gave way to the nauseous smell of the tanning pits. The newly woven linen was bucked in vats filled with wood-ash, rainwater and the urine we had collected all year, the winter taxes were paid, and at the solstice we Mithraists killed a bull at our annual festival that honoured the sun while on the same day the Christians celebrated their God’s birth. At Imbolc, the great feast of the cold season, we fed two hundred souls in our hall, made sure three knives were laid on the table for the use of the invisible Gods and offered sacrifices for the new year’s crops. Newborn lambs were the first sign of that awakening year, then came the time for ploughing and sowing and of new green shoots on old bare trees. It was the first new year of Mordred’s rule.
That rule had brought some changes. Mordred demanded to be given his grandfather’s Winter Palace, and that surprised no one, but I was surprised when Sansum demanded Lindinis’s palace for himself. He made the demand in Council, saying he needed the palace’s space for his school and for Morgan’s community of holy women, and because he wanted to be close to the church he was building on Caer Cadarn’s summit. Mordred waved his assent, and so Ceinwyn and I were summarily evicted, but Ermid’s Hall was empty and we moved to its mist-haunted compound beside the mere. Arthur argued against letting Sansum into Lindinis, just as he opposed San-sum’s demand that the royal treasury pay for the repair of the damage done to the palace by, Sansum claimed, too many ill-disciplined children, but Mordred overruled Arthur. Those were Mordred’s only decisions, for he was usually content to let Arthur manage the kingdom’s affairs. Arthur, though he was no longer Mordred’s protector, was now the senior councillor and the King rarely came to Council, preferring to hunt. It was not always deer or wolves that he hunted and Arthur and I became accustomed to taking gold to some peasant’s hut to recompense the man for his daughter’s virginity or his wife’s shame. It was not a pleasant duty, but it was a rare and lucky kingdom where it was not necessary.
Dian, our youngest daughter, fell ill that summer. It was a fever that would not go away, or rather it came and went, but with such ferocity that three times we thought she was dead, and three times Merlin’s concoctions revived her, though nothing the old man did seemed able to shake the affliction clean a
way. Dian promised to be the liveliest of our three daughters. Morwenna, the oldest, was a sensible child who loved to mother her younger sisters and was fascinated by the workings of the household; ever curious about the kitchens, or the retting ponds or the linen vats. Seren, the star, was our beauty, a child who had inherited all her mother’s delicate looks, but had added to them a wistful and enchanting nature. She spent hours with the bards learning their songs and playing their harps, but Dian, Ceinwyn always said, was my daughter. Dian had no fear. She could shoot with a bow and arrow, loved to ride horses, and even at six years old could handle a coracle as well as any of the mere’s fishermen. She was in her sixth year when the fever gripped her, and if it had not been for that fever we would probably all have travelled to Powys together, for it was a month short of the first anniversary of Mordred’s acclamation when the King suddenly demanded that Arthur and I travel to Cuneglas’s realm. Mordred made the demand at one of his rare appearances at the royal Council. The suddenness of the demand surprised us, as did the need for the errand he proposed, but the King was determined. There was, of course, an ulterior motive, though neither Arthur nor I saw it at the time and nor did anyone else on the Council except Sansum who had proposed the idea, and it took us all a long time to smoke out the mouse-lord’s reasons for the suggestion. Nor was there any obvious reason why we should be suspicious of the King’s proposal for it seemed reasonable enough, though neither Arthur nor I understood why we should both be dispatched to Powys.
The matter sprang from an old, old story. Norwenna, Mordred’s mother, had been murdered by Gundleus, the King of Siluria, and though Gundleus had received his punishment, the man who had betrayed Norwenna still lived. His name was Ligessac, and he had been the chief of Mordred’s guard when the King was just a baby. But Ligessac had taken Gundleus’s bribes and opened the gates of Merlin’s Tor to the Silurian King’s murderous intent. Mordred had been snatched to safety by Morgan, but his mother had died. Ligessac, whose treachery had caused Norwenna’s death, had survived the war that followed the murder, just as he had survived the battle at Lugg Yale. Mordred had heard the tale, of course, and it was only natural that he should take an interest in Ligessac’s fate, but it was Bishop Sansum who fanned that interest into an obsession. Sansum somehow discovered that Ligessac had taken refuge with a band of Christian hermits in a remote and mountainous area of northern Siluria that was now under Cuneglas’s rule. ‘It hurts me to betray a fellow Christian,’ the mouse-lord announced sanctimoniously in the Council meeting, ‘but it hurts just as much that a Christian should have been guilty of so foul a treachery. Ligessac still lives, Lord King,’ he said to Mordred, ‘and should be brought to your justice.’
Arthur suggested that Cuneglas be asked to arrest the fugitive and send him back to Dumnonia, but Sansum shook his head at that proposal and said it was surely discourteous to ask another King to initiate a vengeance that touched so closely on Mordred’s honour. ‘This is Dumnonian business,’ Sansum insisted, ‘and Dumnonians, Lord King, should be the agents of its success.’
Mordred nodded agreement and then insisted that both Arthur and I go to capture the traitor. Arthur, surprised as always when Mordred asserted himself at Council, demurred. Why, he wanted to know, should two lords go on an errand that could be safely left to a dozen spearmen? Mordred smirked at that question. ‘You think, Lord Arthur, that Dumnonia will fall if you and Derfel are absent?’
‘No, Lord King,’ Arthur said, ‘but Ligessac must be an old man now and it won’t need two war-bands to capture him.’
The King thumped the table with his fist. ‘After my mother’s murder,’ he accused Arthur, ‘you let Ligessac escape. At Lugg Vale, Lord Arthur, you again let Ligessac escape. You owe me Ligessac’s life.’
Arthur stiffened momentarily at this accusation, but then inclined his head to acknowledge the obligation. ‘But Derfel,’ he pointed out, ‘was not responsible.’
Mordred glanced at me. He still disliked me for all the beatings he had taken as a child, but I hoped that the blows he had given me at his acclamation and his petty triumph in evicting us from Lindinis had slaked his thirst for revenge. ‘Lord Derfel,’ he said, as ever making the title sound mocking, ‘knows the traitor. Who else would recognize him? I insist you both go. And you don’t need to take two whole war-bands either,’ he reverted to Arthur’s earlier objection. ‘Just a few men will do.’ He must have been embarrassed at giving Arthur such military advice for his voice tailed weakly away and he looked shiftily at the other councillors before recovering what little poise he did possess. ‘I want Ligessac here before Samain,’ he insisted, ‘and I want him here alive.’
When a King insists, men obey, so Arthur and I both rode north with thirty men apiece. Neither of us believed we would need so many, but it was an opportunity to give some underemployed men the exercise of a long march. My remaining thirty spearmen stayed behind to guard Ceinwyn, while Arthur’s other men either stayed in Durnovaria or else went to reinforce Sagramor who still guarded the northern Saxon frontier. The usual Saxon war-bands were active on that frontier, not trying to invade us, but rather attempting to snatch cattle and slaves as they had through all the years of peace. We made similar raids, but both sides were careful not to let the raids turn into full-scale war. The makeshift peace we had forged at London had lasted remarkably well, though there had been little peace between Aelle and Cerdic. Those two had fought each other to a standstill and their squabbles had largely left us unmolested. We had, indeed, grown accustomed to peace.
My men walked north while Arthur’s rode, or at least led their horses, on the good Roman roads that took us first to Meurig’s kingdom of Gwent. The King gave us a grudging feast at which our men were outnumbered by priests, and after that we made a detour to the Wye Valley to see old Tewdric, whom we found living in a humble thatched hut that was half the size of the building where he kept his collection of Christian parchments. His wife, Queen Enid, grumbled at the fate that had driven her from Gwent’s palaces to this mice-ridden life in the woods, but the old King was happy. He had taken Christian orders and blithely ignored Enid’s scoldings. He gave us a meal of beans, bread and water and rejoiced at the news of Christianity’s spread in Dumnonia. We asked him about the prophecies which foretold the return of Christ in four years’ time and Tewdric said he prayed they were true, but suspected it was much more likely that Christ would wait a full thousand years before returning in glory. ‘But who knows?’ he asked.
‘It’s possible He will come in four years’ time. What a glorious thought!’
‘I just wish your fellow Christians would be content to wait in peace,’ Arthur said.
‘They have a duty to prepare the earth for His coming,’ Tewdric said sternly. ‘They must make converts. Lord Arthur, and cleanse the land of sin.’
‘They’ll make a war between themselves and the rest of us if they aren’t careful,’ Arthur grumbled. He told Tewdric how there had been riots in every Dumnonian town as Christians tried to pull down or defile pagan temples. The things we had seen in Isca had just been the beginnings of those troubles and the unrest was spreading fast, and one of the symptoms of that burgeoning trouble was the sign of the fish, a simple scrawl of two curving lines, that the Christians painted on pagan walls or carved into the trees of Druidic groves. Culhwch had been right: the fish was a Christian symbol.
‘It’s because the Greek word for fish is ichthus Tewdric told us, ‘and the Greek letters spell Christ’s name. Iesous Christos, Theou Uios, Soter. Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. Very neat, very neat indeed.’ He chuckled with pleasure at his explanation, and it was easy to see from where Meurig had inherited his annoying pedantry. ‘Of course,’ Tewdric went on, ‘if I were still a ruler then I’d be concerned by all this turmoil, but as a Christian I must welcome it. The holy fathers tell us there will be many signs and portents of the last days, Lord Arthur, and civil disturbances are merely one of those signs. So maybe the end is near?’
&
nbsp; Arthur crumbled a piece of bread into his dish. ‘You truly welcome these riots?’ he asked. ‘You approve of attacks on pagans? Of shrines burned and defaced?’
Tewdric stared out of the open door at the green woods that pressed hard about his small monastery.
‘I suppose they must be hard for others to understand,’ he said, evading a direct answer to Arthur’s question. ‘You must see the riots as symptoms of excitement, Lord Arthur, not signs of our Lord’s grace.’ He made the sign of the cross and smiled at us. ‘Our faith,’ he said earnestly, ‘is a faith of love. The Son of God humbled Himself to save us from our sins, and we are enjoined to imitate Him in all we do or think. We are encouraged to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us, but those are hard commandments, too hard for most folk. And you must remember what it is that we pray for most fervently, and that is for the return to this earth of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ He made the sign of the cross again. ‘Folk pray and long for His second coming, and they fear that if the world is still ruled by pagans then He might not come and so they feel impelled to destroy heathenism.’
‘Destroying paganism,’ Arthur observed tartly, ‘hardly seems proper to a religion that preaches love.’
‘Destroying paganism is an act full of love,’ Tewdric insisted. ‘If you pagans refuse to accept Christ then you will surely go to hell. It will not matter that you have lived a virtuous life, for you will still burn for all eternity. We Christians have a duty to save you from that fate, and is that duty not an act of love?’
‘Not if I don’t want to be saved,’ Arthur said.
‘Then you must endure the enmity of those that love you,’ Tewdric said, ‘or at least you must endure it until the excitement dies down. And it will. These enthusiasms never last long, and if our Lord Jesus Christ does not return in four years then the excitement will surely wane until the millennium comes.’ He stared again at the deep woods. ‘How glorious it would be,’ he said in a voice full of wonder, ‘if I could live to see my Saviour’s face in Britain.’ He turned back to Arthur. ‘And the portents of His return will be disturbing, I fear. Doubtless the Saxons will be a nuisance. Are they much trouble these days?’
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