The Killing Way

by Tony Hays

  “Here.” I shoved the platter at him. “I’ll see about some water.”

  He leaped to his feet and reached for the jug. “No, Malgwyn, do not bother yourself. Cicero!”

  But I spun the jug from his reach. “I’ve only lost one arm, Kay. I still have another and two legs to walk on. Besides, Cicero is old and does not need four mouths to see to. I’ll get the water.” I hated when people tried to do things for me, and I hated even more that it was sometimes necessary.

  “No, let me get the water!” Owain’s voice broke across the room, and I had to laugh as the little urchin rushed into the room and snatched the jug from under my arm.

  “Go then! And don’t break the jug, you little thief!”

  “Your voice holds not half the ill will that your words do, Malgwyn,” Kay observed. “Do I detect a hint of kindness in your black and hardened old heart?”

  “Choke on your bread, and worry not about the condition of my heart,” I cautioned him, but a smile found its way to my lips. “He’s a good-hearted lad; his mother is a . . .”

  “I know of his mother. She does not keep herself only for Accolon.”

  “Aye, and a shame it is. She was a fine woman, once. But hunger has brought her low.”

  Once a beautiful lass, hunger, drink, and use had coarsened her features and lined her face. Times were hard for a woman and her child with no man to provide for them. I did not judge her harshly for the path she had chosen.

  Owain returned then, holding the jug by the rope tied to its neck as it banged heavily against his leg.

  “Are you hungry, boy?”

  He looked away and nodded. I broke half the bread off and went to a pit in the corner of the room. I lifted the wooden lid and reached into the coolness where I knew Kay kept cheese, wine, and what vegetables he might have. Pulling a chunk of cheese out, I handed it and the bread to him. “Go, share that with your mother.”

  Owain took it but did not move to the door. “I will try and find her in a bit.”

  “Oh,” I said gruffly, not wanting to increase his discomfort. Besides, Nyfain was a grown woman; she could fend for herself. “Very well. You are a growing lad, and you could use some meat on your bones. We’ll help you find her later. Hurry up and eat. I have work for you.”

  The lad nodded and began to eat energetically.

  “You are in danger of becoming a good man, Malgwyn,” Kay chuckled.

  I snatched up the jug and threw it at his head. Laughing, he caught it deftly. “Cease your prattle,” I snapped. “We too have work to do. Where is Bedevere?”

  “He arose early and went to rouse the soldiers at the barracks.”

  While Kay ate, I instructed the boy on his duties, that of sharpening my quills and making my ink. I learned a simple process from the monks at Ynys-witrin in which the wood and bark of thorn trees, cut before they have leafed or bloomed when the sap is still high, is boiled and rendered unto a powder, then revived with good wine and vitriol. The task was easy enough for Owain to commit to memory. I required only that he keep a pot heated to boil the wood and bark. Using vitriol was too touchy a task to leave to a boy.

  In moments, we were ready for the day. I cuffed the boy on the shoulder as we started out the door. “Come, bring your food. We’ll get you started at my hut. You must earn that bread, lad. Don’t even think of leaving until your work is done.”

  “Yes, Malgwyn,” he said, so little-boy soberly that I wanted to laugh out loud.

  “Well, I’ll see if your mother is about.” My ears burned, as I knew without turning that Kay was grinning at me. I moved to change the subject.

  “Owain? Are you sure it was Eleonore, the serving girl at Lord Arthur’s hall, who came seeking me?”

  “I am positive, Master Malgwyn. I’ve seen her many times in the castle, and she often watched me when my mother and Father Accolon were busy.”

  “And she told you naught of what she wanted?”

  “No, only that it was important that she see you.”

  I frowned. Eleonore had never come to see me before. And yet she came on the night she was killed. This was worthy of note. I was drunk, as usual, watching the procession, watching more carefully the serving women for the other lords. But if it were as Nyfain said, if it were about conspiracy and assassination, why come to me? Why not Kay, or directly to Arthur? That question would never be answered.

  With a sigh, I gestured to Kay and we left.

  After we took Owain to my hut, we looked about to see if anyone had been there overnight, but nothing seemed out of place. With the boy engrossed in his work, we turned back to the castle. The cobbled road made a slight turn as it headed up the hill toward Arthur’s headquarters, just after it passed through the southwest gate, a sturdy wood and stone structure built into the first of three mighty palisades encircling the fort. Castellum Arturius, as Arthur liked to call it in his precious Latin, was a large fortress, the largest in the region for a day’s ride in any direction. A rock wall, of dressed stone, was surmounted by a solid wooden wall. Guard chambers were cut into the stone on either side of the gate. Above the gate was a kind of towered rampart with a walkway for guards. In front of the gate, at staggered intervals, were wooden barricades, mounted on swivels to be swung into place in case of attack.

  Guard posts stood every thirty yards or so, requiring thirty guards per watch, sixty when trouble threatened. Not that Arthur lacked for men. Arthur’s castle held a complement of three hundred foot soldiers and seven hundred cavalry. Two long, low wooden barracks and a row of stables at the opposite end of the plateau from Arthur’s hall held the common soldiers and perhaps a hundred of the cavalry. The primary cavalry encampment lay outside the fortress to the south.

  The cool spring day reminded me that this path was called the Via Caedes, “the Killing Way.” Old bards sang older tales of a massacre that happened along this path into the fort in Roman times. Nobody remembered why, just that men, women, and children had died in droves along this path. One of the workmen that laid the cobblestones told me once of finding bones buried in the road. The Killing Way. An appropriate path for the day’s activities, I mused, pulling my fur cloak around my shoulders to block out the chill. I chanced to touch the fibula that held the cloak up. It was a big, heavy, cast-bronze piece in the shape of a crossbow. Arthur had given it to me after one of our battles with the Saxons. He said that it came from one of his ancestors, a Roman officer, and would bring me luck. The memory warmed me and steeled me to my task.

  As we passed the guard chambers, a thought struck me. “Kay, do not the vigils report for duty at the southwest gate?”

  “Aye. What of it?”

  “Accolon told us last night that he saw Eleonore on the Via Caedes as he reported for the midnight watch.”

  Kay shrugged. “Then he misspoke, a harmless error. Hardly of note.”

  “Everything is of note, Kay. A favor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Go and find Accolon’s partner on watch last eve; bring him to me at Cuneglas’s house.”

  “Why there?”

  “I must track her movements, and starting at her home seems logical.”

  With a nod of understanding, Kay split away from me at the fort’s well just inside the gate and took a simple footpath, one used by the guard patrols, that led more directly to the barracks.

  Not as many used the Via Caedes as used the main gate which entered the town from the southwest, near unto Arthur’s great hall. Sober and in the daylight, I approved of what Arthur had wrought when he refortified the town. The main streets running at either side of the hall all the way to the barracks were evenly cobbled with clean stone. Ditches, lined with flat rocks, ingeniously carried the filth and garbage of the houses out of the fort. I had seen similar construction in old Roman villages, and it surprised me not that Arthur had adopted it for his fort. It kept the foul odors low and the lanes cleaner.

  An open area of hard-packed earth lay in front of the great, timbered hall. I
remembered hearing that Arthur wanted to cobble it as well but had not yet done so. On the outer edges were wooden stalls for merchants to sell their wares. Brightly colored pennants—red, green, blue—flew from the roofs announcing their wares. Wine, pottery, brooches to fasten a tunic, furs, leather, linen for the wealthier class. I could hear the unmistakable rhythm of the hammers beating their singular cadence at the forge.

  Arthur, I knew, had the wealth to import pottery from distant lands, fine expensive amphorae and platters. I myself had no interest in such things. Food did not change its taste based on the cost of the plate. I noted a handful of servi, slaves, scurrying through the lanes. For the most part, they belonged to merchants traveling through. Arthur did not believe in slavery, but it was still accepted. Many of them were Gauls, some were Picts and Scots, captured in battle and impressed into forced labor.

  A breath of foul wind blew through the lane and my nose crinkled at its approach. Fermenting woad. I knew the smell well, as the dye-makers worked in a hut not far from mine in the old village. Arthur hated the odor so much that he banned woad-making within the walls of the castle.

  I suddenly noted that others trudging along the lane were staring at me. Some, walking in pairs, whispered to each other as they passed. The attention disturbed me, though I could not tell if they were disapproving or merely curious. Usually people paid me no attention. A few had tried to put a coin in my hand, but I had dropped the coins as if they were diseased. I tucked my head down and walked faster into town.

  Cuneglas’s house, a stout, timbered affair with a thatched roof, was located on the southwestern side of the town, along one of the back lanes. Those houses on the lane leading from the square to the barracks were timbered as well, but of two stories, aye, and some with balconies too. Those were owned by merchants and some of Arthur’s nobles. Gawain kept such a house here and elsewhere. When not in residence, he had a pair of servants, an old couple whose best working days were behind them, to keep the place safe and clean. Others belonged to soldiers’ families and what civites, civil authorities, as there were. Arthur did not like to share his authority.

  Though Cuneglas’s home was not such a palace, it was a respectable home for a thatcher and gave proof that he had prospered at his trade. Some children played in the lane, toying with three or four kittens, just old enough to be fearless. A yellow-haired lass of six, her eyes laughing, rose from the kittens and tripped back toward my brother’s house. At the sight of her my heart seemed to pound loud enough for the monks at Ynys-witrin to hear.

  Mariam. My daughter.

  The smile faded from her lips and the laughter fled from her eyes as she hid behind the woman with her. She hung her head and stepped warily for the door, just as it opened and a short, handsome woman came out. Ygerne, a redheaded woman of thirty winters, was a mystery to me. My family had opposed their wedding because Ygerne was of the Pictish tribes, whence sprang her red hair. But somehow she had convinced them to accept her.

  She was not a beautiful woman, but strangely attractive. No chalk whitened her face, as did most women of her class, for her natural skin was pale enough. Though her lips were too full, she did not paint them with red ochre. Nor did she use antimony or ashes to darken her eyelids. Her breasts were almost too large for her size, and though she had borne three children, her waist had not thickened as most women’s did. Like all the women of our land, her hair—a bright, shining mass—flowed down her shoulders and touched her hips. Although I did not know her well, she had a bluntness that I had always appreciated, and no man could have asked for a better mother to his children.

  My child buried her face in Ygerne’s skirt. “Mother!”

  “Go inside, child.”

  Mariam fled through the door.

  I hung my head. It hurt to see her run from me. Once she had known me as her uncle, and she would gleefully leap into my arms and tug at my beard. We had been close, as uncle and niece, close enough to play games together, to joke and tease each other. Then, just a few moons before, Cuneglas, in a drunken slip, let it be known that I was her father.

  She did not understand why her own father would lie to her, why, if it were true, she did not share my hut. Since that day she would not speak to me, aye, she would not even let me touch her, try to explain our deception. No, she would have none of it. And I had come up with no way to right a serious wrong. To convince her of the truth was difficult enough; all she had known as mother and father were Ygerne and Cuneglas. To explain why I had left her with them took more words than I had at my command.

  Now she was lost to me completely, and I could find no way to heal the wound.

  “It would not be like this if you had let me tell her the truth some time ago,” Ygerne scolded me.

  I excused my neglect with my behavior, a tried-and-true answer. “Better that she have a mother and father, than half a man who spends half his life in a wine jug.”

  “That much is true. Look at you, Malgwyn. You look like you sleep with the pigs and cows. What have you eaten today?” Before I could speak, she pointed inside her house, silently commanding me to enter. I frowned, but somehow it seemed wrong to disobey.

  My brother’s home was clean and neat. The hearth, like mine, sat in the middle of the floor. A hole in the roof drew the smoke and expelled it. I saw that Ygerne was fortunate enough to have an iron spit on which to roast meat. In one corner, a large wooden pallet covered a sizable storage hole. Against one wall were stacked the furs they used to sleep on. A fur curtain partitioned off the back of the house, and I guessed that that was where Ygerne and Cuneglas slept. In cold weather, I knew, the whole family would share one space.

  Sometimes, when I campaigned with Arthur, we would find the remains of a Roman villa, fallen into disrepair. I would walk through and marvel at the ingenuity of Roman engineers, how they provided running water in the houses, their methods of heating homes in the often brutal winters of Britannia. The floors were often mosaics of colorful stone.

  We had none of that any longer. In some ways, independence from Rome had taken us several steps back, and I feared it would take us many more years to recapture what we had lost. Even the furniture in our common homes was less polished, less fine.

  A wooden table, newer and better built than mine, took up a space near the storage hole, but though it surpassed mine, it still was a handmade affair. Cuneglas was seated at it, frowning, shoveling some porridge from a bowl into his mouth. A second stool sat empty, and Ygerne pointed me toward it as Mariam huddled in a corner, playing with some carved wooden figures. Instead of sitting down, I went over to her.

  “May I join you?” Though it sounds odd, before Cuneglas’s besotted declaration, I had often found much pleasure in playing with Mariam. Together we had named some of the figurines. But now, as she had done for the fortnight past, she refused to answer me and turned her back. My heart sank, but I forced a smile onto my face and returned to the table.

  “Why the unhappy look, brother?”

  I would have thought him sad at the girl’s death, but this was a different kind of look. One that did not fit with sadness.

  He shrugged, grunted, and looked to Ygerne bending over a pot on the fire. “Must my brother sit here hungry?”

  Ygerne straightened and brought me a platter of boiled cabbage and beef. Her hand lingered on my back as she served me. I smiled at her, grateful for the tenderness. Cuneglas frowned at the gesture. She looked at her husband, sadly I thought, and took Mariam by the hand and led her back outside.

  “So, how are you today, Cuneglas?”

  “Tired,” he admitted with a half-smile, “and off my desire for food. I am not used to those same sights that you have seen, Malgwyn. To see that poor girl split open like a deer, and her heart laid out on the table . . .” He shuddered.

  “When did you last see her?”

  He pushed back his bowl and thought for a moment. “She came home after the evening meal at the hall and changed her wrap. Near unto the midnight
, she left again. I asked her where she was going, but she was a willful child and laughed at me.”

  “So no mention of who she was going to see?”

  Cuneglas shook his head. “No, nothing. Why?”

  “Remember what Accolon told us. He saw her near the gate on the Via Caedes about midnight as he headed to report for watch. She was with someone, but the person was hooded, and he could not tell who it was.”

  My brother frowned. “My belly was unsettled. I did not listen closely.” His frown grew deeper. “I thought as much. But how came she to Merlin’s house from the gate?”

  “That is the question that must be answered.”

  “And you think, perhaps, that whoever she was with at the gate may have had a hand in this?”

  I shrugged. “It is possible. We know of no one else that was with her. But, all things are possible.”

  He pushed back his platter and rose. “I must get to work. I have repairs to make on Arthur’s hall before tonight’s feast.”

  “Will you be at the gathering?”

  Cuneglas smiled. “I am only the thatcher. I do not receive invitations to feasts at Arthur’s table.”

  “And I’m only ‘Mad Malgwyn,’ ” I pointed out.

  “Enough remember you as ‘Smiling Malgwyn’ not to quetion your seat at the table. Good fortune, my brother, as you search out the culprit in this affair. She was a wonderful lass, and I shall miss her greatly.”

  “You take an odd interest in the girl.” Could my own brother have some part in this affair? The idea seemed inconceivable, but I knew that he strayed from Ygerne often, and Eleonore was a beautiful girl of some eighteen seasons.

  He laughed. “It harms me not to say that I was in love with Gwyneth as all little boys fall in love with their older brother’s wives. Eleonore had just enough of Gwyneth in her to give her a special place in my esteem.” At that, he stopped laughing and clutched my arm at the wrist. “Find the doer of this deed, Malgwyn.”