We fought fast, we cheered each other and we killed without mercy.
Cadoc himself came early to the fight. He came swinging the huge rusty sword so vigorously that it whistled in the air. He knew his business well enough and he tried to batter down one of the kneeling men, for he knew that once that outer ring was broken then the rest of us would die quickly enough. I parried the great blow on Hywel-bane, back-cut him with a quick swing that wasted itself in his filthy thatch of hair, then Eachern, the tough little Irish spearman who still served me despite Mordred’s threats, rammed his spear-shaft at the Bishop’s face. Eachern’s spearhead had vanished, torn off by a sword blow, but he cracked the iron tip of the staff’s butt onto Cadoc’s forehead. The Bishop looked cross-eyed for a heartbeat, his mouth gaped rotten teeth, then he just sank to the mud. The last attacker to try and breach the shield-ring was a straggle-haired woman who climbed over the ring of dead and shrieked a curse at me as she tried to jump over the kneeling men of the front rank. I seized her hair, let her reaping knife blunt itself on my mail coat, then dragged her inside the ring where Issa stamped hard on her head. It was just then that Arthur struck.
Thirty horsemen with long spears slashed into the Christian rabble. We, I suppose, had been defending ourselves for all of three minutes, but once Arthur arrived the fight was over in an eyeblink. His horsemen came with couched spears, galloping hard, and I saw a terrible misting spray of blood as one of the spears slammed home, and then our attackers were fleeing in panic and Arthur, his spear discarded and with Excalibur shining in his hand, was shouting at his men to stop the killing. ‘Just drive them away!’ he shouted. ‘Drive them away!’ His horsemen split into small groups that scattered the terrified survivors and chased them back up the road towards the guardian cross.
My men relaxed. Issa was still sitting on the straggle-haired woman and Eachern was searching for his lost spearhead. Two men in the shield-ring had taken nasty wounds, and one man of the second rank had a broken and bloodied jaw, but otherwise we were unhurt, while around us were twenty-three corpses and at least as many badly wounded men. Cadoc, groggy from Eachern’s blow, still lived and we tied his hands and feet, and then, despite Arthur’s instructions to show our enemy respect, we cut off his hair and beard to shame him. He spat and cursed at us, but we stuffed his mouth with cut hanks of his greasy beard, then walked him back to the village.
And it was there I discovered Ligessac. He had not fled after all, but had simply waited beside the little altar in the church. He was an old man now, thin and grey-haired, and he yielded himself meekly, even when we cut off his beard and wove a crude rope from its hair that we leashed around his neck to show that he was a condemned traitor. He even seemed quite pleased to meet me again after all the years. ‘I told them they wouldn’t beat you,’ he said, ‘not Derfel Cadarn.’
‘They knew we were coming?’ I asked him.
‘We’ve known for a week now,’ he said, quietly holding out his hands so that Issa could lash his wrists with rope. ‘We even wanted you to come. We thought this was our chance to rid Britain of Arthur.’
‘Why would you want to do that?’ I asked him.
‘Because Arthur’s an enemy of the Christians, that’s why,’ Ligessac said.
‘He is not,’ I said scornfully.
‘And what do you know, Derfel?’ Ligessac asked me. ‘We’re readying Britain for Christ’s return and we have to scour the heathen from the land!’ He made that proclamation in a loud, defiant voice, then he shrugged and grinned. ‘But I told them this was no way to kill Arthur and Derfel. I told Cadoc you were too good.’ He stood and followed Issa out of the church, but then turned back to me in the doorway. ‘I suppose I’m to die now?’ he asked.
‘In Dumnonia,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘I shall see God face to face,’ he said, ‘so what is there to fear?’
I followed him out of the church. Arthur had unplugged the Bishop’s mouth and Cadoc was now cursing us with a stream of filthy language. I tickled the Bishop’s newly shaved chin with Hywelbane. ‘He knew we were coming,’ I told Arthur, ‘and they planned to kill us here.’
‘He failed,’ Arthur said, jerking his head aside to avoid a gob of the Bishop’s spittle. ‘Put the sword away,’ he ordered me.
‘You don’t want him dead?’ I asked.
‘His punishment is to live here,’ Arthur decreed, ‘instead of in heaven.’
We took Ligessac and walked away, and none of us really reflected on what Ligessac had revealed in the church. He had said they had known we were coming for a whole week, but a week before we had been in Dumnonia, not in Powys, and that meant someone in Dumnonia had sent the warning of our approach. But we never thought to connect anyone in Dumnonia with that muddy massacre in the squalid hills; we ascribed the slaughter to Christian fanaticism, not to treachery, but that ambush was plotted. To this day, of course, there are Christians who tell a different story. They say that Arthur surprised Cadoc’s refuge, raped the women, killed the men and stole all Cadoc’s treasures, but I saw no rape, we killed only those who tried to kill us, and I found no treasure to steal — but even if there had been, Arthur would not have touched it. A time would come, and not far off either, when I did see Arthur kill wantonly, but those dead were all to be pagans; yet the Christians still insisted he was their enemy and the story of Cadoc’s defeat only increased their hatred for him. Cadoc was elevated into a living saint and it was about that time that the Christians began to taunt Arthur as the Enemy of God. That angry title stuck to him for the rest of his days.
His crime, of course, was not the breaking of a few Christian heads in Cadoc’s valley, but rather his toleration of paganism during the time he governed Dumnonia. It never occurred to the more rabid Christians that Arthur was himself a pagan and tolerated Christianity, they just condemned him because he had the power to obliterate heathenism and did not do it, and that sin made him the Enemy of God. They also remembered, of course, how he had rescinded Uther’s exemption of the church from forced loans.
Not all Christians hated him. At least a score of the spearmen who fought alongside us in Cadoc’s valley were themselves Christians. Galahad loved him, and there were many others, like Bishop Emrys, who were his quiet supporters, but the church, in those unquiet days at the end of the first five hundred years of Christ’s rule on earth, was not listening to the quiet, decent men, it was listening to the fanatics who said that the world must be cleansed of pagans if Christ were to come again. I know now, of course, that the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ is the only true faith, and that no other faith can exist in the glorious light of its truth, but it still seemed strange to me, and does to this day, that Arthur, the most just and lawful of rulers, was called the Enemy of God.
Whatever. We gave Cadoc a headache, tied Ligessac’s throat with a leash made from his beard, and walked away.
Arthur and I parted company beside the stone cross at the head of Cadoc’s valley. He would take Ligessac north and then go east to find the good roads that led back to Dumnonia, while I had decided to travel deeper into Siluria to find my mother. I took Issa and four other spearmen and let the rest march home with Arthur.
We six men circled Cadoc’s valley where a woeful band of bruised and bloody Christians had gathered to chant prayers for their dead, and then we walked across the high bare hills and down into the steep green valleys that led to the Severn Sea. I did not know where Erce lived, but I suspected she would not be hard to find for Tanaburs, the Druid I had killed at Lugg Vale, had sought her out to work a dreadful spell on her and surely the Saxon slave woman so wickedly cursed by the Druid would be well enough known. And she was.
I found her living by the sea in a tiny village where the women made salt and the men caught fish. The villagers shrank away from my men’s unfamiliar shields, but I ducked into one of the hovels where a child fearfully pointed me towards the Saxon woman’s house that proved to be a cottage high up on a ragged bluff above the beach. It wa
s not even a cottage, but rather a crude shelter made of driftwood and roofed with a ragged thatch of seaweed and straw. A fire burned on the small space outside the shelter and a dozen fish were smoking above its flames, while still more choking smoke drifted up from the coal fires that simmered the salt pans at the base of the low cliff. I left my spear and shield at the foot of the bluff and climbed the steep path. A cat bared its teeth and hissed at me as I crouched to look into the dark hut. ‘Erce?’ I called. ‘Erce?’
Something heaved in the shadows. It was a monstrous dark shape that shed layers of skins and ragged cloth to peer back at me. ‘Erce?’ I said. ‘Are you Erce?’
What did I expect that day? I had not seen my mother in over twenty-five years, not since the day I was torn from her arms by Gundleus’s spearmen and given to Tanaburs for the sacrifice in the death-pit. Erce had screamed as I was snatched away from her, and then she had been taken away to her new slavery in Siluria and she must have supposed me dead until Tanaburs had revealed to her that I still lived. In my nervous mind, as I had walked south through Siluria’s steep valleys, I had foreseen an embrace, tears, forgiveness and happiness.
But instead a huge woman, her blonde hair turned into a dirty grey, crawled out from the jumble of skins and blankets to blink at me suspiciously. She was a vast creature, a great heap of decaying flesh with a face as round as a shield and blotched by disease and scars, and with eyes that were small and hard and bloodshot. ‘I was called Erce once,’ she said in a hoarse voice. I backed out of the hut, repelled by its stench of urine and rot. She followed me, crawling heavily on all fours to blink in the morning sunlight. She was dressed in rags. ‘You are Erce?’ I asked her.
‘Once,’ she said, and yawned to show a ravaged, toothless mouth. ‘Long ago. Now they call me Enna.’ She paused. ‘Mad Enna,’ she added sadly, then peered at my fine clothes and rich sword belt and tall boots. ‘Who are you, Lord?’
‘My name is Derfel Cadarn,’ I said, ‘a Lord of Dumnonia.’ The name meant nothing to her. ‘I am your son,’ I added.
She showed no reaction to that, but just settled back against the driftwood wall of her hut that sagged dangerously under her weight. She thrust a hand deep inside the rags and scratched at her breast. ‘All my sons are dead,’ she said.
‘Tanaburs took me,’ I reminded her, ‘and threw me into the death-pit.’
The story seemed to mean nothing to her. She lay slumped against the wall, her huge body heaving with the effort of each laboured breath. She toyed with the cat and stared out across the Severn Sea to where, dim in the distance, the Dumnonian coast was a dark line under a row of rainclouds. ‘I did have a son once,’ she said at last, ‘who was given to the Gods in the death-pit. Wygga, his name was. Wygga. A fine boy.’
Wygga? Wygga! That name, so raw and ugly, stilled me for a few heartbeats. ‘I am Wygga,’ I finally said, hating the name. ‘I was given a new name after I was rescued from the pit,’ I explained to her. We spoke in Saxon, a language in which I was now more fluent than my mother, for it had been many years since she had spoken it.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, frowning. I could see a louse crawling along the edge of her hair. ‘No,’ she insisted again. ‘Wygga was just a little boy. Just a little boy. My firstborn, he was, and they took him away.’
‘I lived, mother,’ I said. I was revolted by her, fascinated by her and regretting that I had ever come to find her. ‘I survived the pit,’ I told her, ‘and I remember you.’ And so I did, but in my memory she was as slim and lithe as Ceinwyn.
‘Just a little boy,’ Erce said dreamily. She closed her eyes and I thought she was sleeping, but it seemed she was passing urine for a trickle appeared at the edge of her clothes and dripped down the rock towards the struggling fire.
‘Tell me about Wygga,’ I said.
‘I was heavy with him,’ she said, ‘when Uther captured me. A big man, Uther, with a great dragon on his shield.’ She scratched at the louse, which disappeared into her hair. ‘He gave me to Madog,’ she went on, ‘and it was at Madog’s holding that Wygga was born. We were happy with Madog,’ she said.
‘He was a good Lord, kind to his slaves, but Gundleus came and they killed Wygga.’
‘They didn’t,’ I insisted. ‘Didn’t Tanaburs tell you?’
At the mention of the Druid’s name she shuddered and pulled her tattered shawl tighter about her mountainous shoulders. She said nothing, but after a while tears showed at the corners of her eyes. A woman climbed the path towards us. She came slowly and suspiciously, glancing warily towards me as she sidled onto the rock platform. When at last she felt safe she scuttled past me and crouched beside Erce. ‘My name,’ I told the newcomer, ‘is Derfel Cadarn, but I was once called Wygga.’
‘My name is Linna,’ the woman said in the British tongue. She was younger than me, but the hard life of this shore had put deep lines on her face, bowed her shoulders and stiffened her joints, while the hard business of tending the salt-pan fires had left her skin blackened by coal.
‘You’re Erce’s daughter?’ I guessed.
‘Enna’s daughter,’ she corrected me.
‘Then I am your half-brother,’ I said.
I do not think she believed me, and why should she? No one came from a death-pit alive, yet I had, and thereby I had been touched by the Gods and given to Merlin, but what could that tale mean to these two tired and ragged women?
‘Tanaburs!’ Erce suddenly said, and raised both hands to ward oft evil. ‘He took away Wygga’s father!’ She wailed and rocked to and fro. ‘He went inside me and took away Wygga’s father. He cursed me and he cursed Wygga and he cursed my womb.’ She was weeping now and Linna cradled her mother’s head in her arms and looked at me reproachfully.
‘Tanaburs,’ I said, ‘had no power over Wygga. Wygga killed him, because he had power over Tanaburs. Tanaburs could not take away Wygga’s father.’
Maybe my mother heard me, but she did not believe me. She rocked in her daughter’s arms and the tears ran down her pockmarked, dirty cheeks as she half remembered the half-understood scraps of Tanaburs’s curse. ‘Wygga would kill his father,’ she told me, ‘that’s what the curse said, that the son will kill the father.’
‘So Wygga does live,’ I insisted.
She stopped her rocking motion suddenly and peered at me. She shook her head. ‘The dead come back to kill. Dead children! I see them, Lord, out there,’ she spoke earnestly and pointed at the sea, ‘all the little dead going to their revenge.’ She rocked in her daughter’s arms again. ‘And Wygga will kill his father.’ She was crying heavily now. ‘And Wygga’s father was such a fine man! Such a hero. So big and strong. And Tanaburs has cursed him.’ She sniffed, then sighed a lullaby for a moment before talking more about my father, saying how his people had sailed across the sea to Britain and how he had used his sword to make himself a fine house. Erce, I gathered, had been a servant in that house and the Saxon Lord had taken her to his bed and so given me life, the same life that Tanaburs had failed to take at the death-pit. ‘He was a lovely man,’ Erce said of my father, ‘such a lovely, handsome man. Everyone feared him, but he was good to me. We used to laugh together.’
‘What was his name?’ I asked, and I think I knew the answer even before she gave it.
‘Aelle,’ she said in a whisper, ‘lovely, handsome Aelle.’
Aelle. The smoke whirled about my head, and my brains, for a moment, were as addled as my mother’s wits. Aelle? I was Aelle’s son?
‘Aelle,’ Erce said dreamily, ‘lovely, handsome Aelle.’
I had no other questions and so I forced myself to kneel before my mother and give her an embrace. I kissed her on both cheeks, then held her tight as if I could give back to her some of the life she had given to me, and though she succumbed to the embrace, she still would not acknowledge that I was her son. I took lice from her.
I drew Linna down the steps and discovered she was married to one of the village fishermen and had six children living. I gave
her gold, more gold, I think, than she had ever expected to see, and more gold, probably, than she even suspected existed. She stared at the little bars in disbelief.
‘Is our mother still a slave?’ I asked her.
‘We all are,’ she said, gesturing at the whole miserable village.
‘That will buy your freedom,’ I said, pointing to the gold, ‘if you want it.’
She shrugged and I doubted that being free would make any difference to their lives. I could have found their Lord and bought their freedom myself, but doubtless he lived far away and the gold, if it was wisely spent, would ease their hard life whether they were slave or free. One day, I promised myself, I would come back and try to do more.
‘Look after our mother,’ I told Linna.
‘I will, Lord,’ she said dutifully, but I still did not think she believed me.
‘You don’t call your own brother Lord,’ I told her, but she would not be persuaded. I left her and walked down to the shore where my men waited with the baggage. ‘We’re going home,’
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