Shadow of the King (82 page)

moving through the grass, the jingle of harness, the creak of leather. Then the

arrows ceased and Arthur lifted his sword, raised it high. The signalmen took

up the order.

Trotting, steady jogging. Riders firm, deep in the saddle; one hand on the

reins, held behind the shield. Spears raised, the lightweight javelins. Thrown.

The second spear coming easily into hand, heavier, more destructive. The

horses. Held in, reins tight, checked. Necks bent, heads in, jaws taut, wanting

to go; manes tossing, eyes white, nostrils red, flaring, snorting; mouths open,

pulling against the hold of the bit, cutting, curbing. Blood-flecked foam.

Arrows in shield, in flesh. Spears crippling, disabling. Death. Wounding. Pain.

The shield wall, standing firm. Holding. Where one fell, another stepped forward.

Cantering. Strides lengthened and stretching. Hooves galloping, the ground

vibrating, thundering, drumming. Breath hot. The men, mouths open, voices

indistinct in the single, shouted war-cry.

Both sides—British and Saxon—released that terrible howl, defying death.

The last few strides. Faces near enough to be seen. Clear beneath the protec-

tion of helmets. Eye, blue, brown. Bright, excited, fearing. Breath gasping,

quickened. Fingers gripping, palms sweating. Bodies taut. Legs, feet, braced,

balanced. The reins slackened, let loose. Horses’ necks low, stretched, hooves

pounding. Legs, manes, tails blurred by speed and wind. The shield-wall standing

firm. Met. Hooves, teeth. Plunging, screaming. Sword, dagger, axe. Crashing

through, destroying. Man against man. Blood and terror. Men who did not

flinch, slay or be slain. Bloody heads, limbs maimed, amputated, mutilated. Kill

or be killed.

The shriek of pain. The agony of bloody destruction.

Battle.

Dusk and the ending of a day that was long, sorrowful, and bloody in its

passing. Only the few were unwounded, with so many dead, British and Saxon.

For neither side the victory; for both, the grieving of death. The horror of such

terrible killing.

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The Saxons would write, later, in their chronicles:
Port came with his two sons,

Maegla and Bieda, in two ships, and killed a Briton of high rank
. Geraint.

The British? For him, for Geraint, they wrote:
After the war cry. Bitter the grave.

Twenty-One

June 486

I admit I know the Pendragon not well, but he seems quiet, withdrawn.

As if some great trouble sits heavy on his heart?” Owain spoke carefully, for

he had no wish to offend his father’s sister, his aunt Gwenhwyfar.

She was a wonder to him, twenty years his senior, at eight and forty she was

a woman who had retained her strident looks. Was it her laugh that kept the

youthfulness dancing around her? Or her wit, her understanding? She was slim,

agile. He had seen her, only this morning, practising with his own three sons

parrying with a blunted sword, casting a spear. God’s truth, even he, at eight

and twenty, found an ache in his back and shoulders after strenuous exercise!

And if Gwenhwyfar carried her age, what of the Pendragon? One and fifty, a

man of wise years! To younger men, was not any age approaching two score seen

as elderly? Arthur was young in years, however, when compared to two men of the

past for whom Owain had much interest—he enjoyed the histories, especial y those

early years of the Empire. In particular, the careers both political and military, of

Augustus Octavian and Vespasian. Grand, impressive men who had died at the ages

of six and seventy and nine and sixty. Old? Hah! Arthur had a way to travel yet!

They were walking, he and his aunt, along the firm, wet sand of the bay below

Caer Arfon. The tide was ebbing, a sharp wind blowing across the strait from the

island of Mon. Behind, to the horizon, rose the mountains, snow-topped Yr Wyddfa

caressing the summer blue of a cloud-scudding sky. Gul s wheeled overhead, and

away down the shore the waders were scurrying for the exposing mussel beds.

Gwenhwyfar bent, lifted a stick washed in by the tide, tossed it for the dogs

to chase. The two of them raced off, paws scattering wet sand, tongues lolling,

ears flapping, barking joyously. Arthur was ahead, walking alone, head down,

hands thrust deep through the leather of his baldric, his long stride taking him

further away from the slower pace of his wife and her nephew.

How could she answer Owain’s question? Four years it had been. Four years

since that dreadful, bloody day at Llongborth when so many, so many had

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died. So many, yet nothing had come of it for either side. No one the victor,

a stalemate, an equal withdrawal. Save Llongborth was lost them, now. That

had come about later, more than one year and two seasons after that day, after

the terrible deaths of that battle. None of the British cared to return there for

any reason, and the place had become abandoned, left to the crows and the

waterfowl and the Saex. For the British, too many ghosts walked with too

much pain at Llongborth.

So many gone, that day. Of them all, the most painful, the most missed, Geraint.

How long had he been friend to Arthur? He had been there fighting beside

the Pendragon at the beginning, when Vortigern ruled, when Hengest’s shadow

had darkened the land. Been there, seeming always, at Arthur’s shoulder.

Without Geraint, what was left? More, without Geraint, who would be there

with Arthur?

“It was on this day we fought at Llongborth.” Need she say that? Ought he

not know? But then, why would they remember a battle fought so long ago,

so far away? Why ought they remember, here, in Gwynedd, for they had their

own many deaths to remember. Cunedda, her own father, killed so long, long

ago, by Hibernian sea-raiders. Catwalaun, Owain’s eldest brother, slain last year

by the kindred of those same men, but killed over there, on Mon. Mon, the

Gwynedd island, where once the powerful druids, the Myrddin, the wise men,

had lived and worshipped—and died under the brutal hand of Rome. After

Cunedda’s passing, Mon had become Hibernian. Again and again, Gwynedd

had attempted to send those unwanted and unwelcome settlers back across the

sea or to their pagan gods. Enniaun, Cunedda’s son, Gwenhwyfar’s brother,

had tried. Failed. But not his son, Catwalaun; Owain’s brother had the doing of

it—but they, both of them, lay cold, buried beside the Lion Lord, Cunedda.

Aye, Gwynedd had her own dead to remember.

Now there was Owain, the second son of Enniaun, left to rule. It ought

be Maelgwyn, for he was Catwalaun’s son, but Maelgwyn was a boy of three

and ten, too young to keep the sand-shore of Gwynedd empty of pirates. Too

unsuitable. Maelgwyn would never make a good king for Gwynedd, they all

knew that, save for Maelgwyn. Illtud was trying to teach the boy sense and

morality, trying to thrash into him that greed and lust and cruelty were not

traits to bring respect and pride. His was at good school, Llan Illtud Fawr. The

pity so many students were not as good.

And Arthur? Was it any wonder these last months he had seemed morose

and ill-humoured?

4 9 6 H e l e n H o l l i c k

“We have trailed through a bad winter—did the snows come early here in

Gwynedd?” Gwenhwyfar looked, as she spoke, to the crown of Yr Wyddfa,

the Snow Mountain. Even in early summer there was a thin shawl of white

around its height.

“The Strait between here and Mon froze. For the one night when the tide

was at lowest ebb; I have never known a winter so cold as this last.”

Gwenhwyfar nodded. Nor she.

The dogs were back, growling and barking over the delight of the stick. Gwyn

and Mel—one named for the white in his coat, the other for the honey-gold of

her eyes, descended from Blaidd, the dog of Gwenhwyfar’s son, Llacheu. They

were good dogs, though young and foolish. Mel especially seemed to have little

sense in her brain. She was Archfedd’s, but Archfedd had gone hawking with

Owain’s wife and sons. Mel was not a dog to take hunting, fool animal would

try to catch the hawk, like as not.

Arthur was half a mile or so ahead, too far to call out to him, attempt to

catch up. Gwenhwyfar threaded her arm through her nephew’s, swung him

around to return to the Caer. “Had there been a noted victory for either

side—at Llongborth, I think we would rest the easier. A battle with no

outcome leaves a wound that is open and raw, one that weeps pus and stinks

of rotting flesh.”

There would be more fighting, but when it came it would be all the more

bitter, all the more necessary, for fighting without settlement made each side

the more determined to prove their worth. And Cerdic was not a man to

shrug and let a thing pass. He had Llongborth, but had it by default. It was

said—and aye, not by the British alone, there were Saxons who whispered

around the hearth also —that Cerdic was not a man of worth and valour. He

had been carried, bleeding and whimpering, from the field at Llongborth.

Wounded, but not deeply, he had left his men, commanded to be taken to a

place of safety. Had he stayed, then happen the outcome at Llongborth might

have ended different. For until Cerdic quit the field, the Saex were making

the better of the day.

That, Arthur dwelt on, these long months as time wheeled through the slow

passing of the seasons. Cerdic, when he had replaced the dead and wounded,

would come again. That and the other thing; that many of the weapons hastily

collected had been of British crafting.

Geraint had been slain by a Saxon using a British spear.

Arthur had it, kept it in place of honour above his king’s chair at Caer Cadan.

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Kept it as a reminder to all who saw it; a reminder that one day he would

discover who it was who sold the Saex superior British weaponry.

And whoever it was would pay dearly for the death of Geraint.

Twenty-Two

The lake was calm, as if embroidered on a tapestry. The only

movement the ripples that spread from a busy pair of grebe. In those

places where the mountains cast their shadow, the water lay deep and black,

almost menacing. In contrast, the rest of the lake sparkled bright and blue.

White puffs of cumulus wandered somnolent across the greens and browns

reflected from Yr Wyddfa’s lower slopes. A breathtaking view; the lake, and the

mountain horseshoe; sun-bright colour, shadowed darkness.

Gwenhwyfar lay on her back, her arm behind her head watching the cloud

shapes lazily change, imagining faces, animals. A dog, a tree, a wine amphora. As

a young girl this had been one of her most special places. Always, she and her

youngest brother had looked forward to coming to the stronghold down along

the valley. Dinas Emrys they called it now, although they had known it in child-

hood as Dinas Mynydd. Vortigern, the tyrant king, of all people, had ordered it

built. He had been a young man then, the royal torque still new and chafing at his

neck. That had been at the time when he had ordered Cunedda into Gwynedd

from the north, from beyond the Wall, expecting him and his people to sink into

the morass of oblivion. Hah! Vortigern had not known Cunedda! It was Enniaun

who had, later, given it with its land and prestigious citing, to Emrys—in the days

before he had adopted his Roman name, Ambrosius. Strange how the stories

about the place had grown out of virtually nothing regarding the two names,

Vortigern and Emrys, the one reviled for his evil and alliance with Hengest the

Saxon, the other revered for his goodness and service to God. But that was the

way of stories, one small thing exaggerated into a mountain of untruths.

The horses, hobbled, grazed nearby, the chink of harness and the steady tear

and chomp of their eating accentuating the drowsing heat of the day. The dog,

Gwyn, lay stretched out, panting, legs twitching as he dreamed of chasing hares.

Mel was away with Archfedd, the girl too young and full of energy to waste a

sun-hot day by lazing, sleeping, on the warm grass.

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“That is a good sign,” Gwenhwyfar said. “Look, a dragon cloud in the sky.”

Dragons! They were the foundation of the story surrounding Dinas Emrys. The

red dragon, the white. The British, the Saex. Good, evil. God, the heathen.

Arthur lay on his stomach sprawled next to her, one arm flung carelessly

across her, his hand cupping her breast. He had been drifting into sleep.

“White or red?” He mumbled.

“White, of course.”

Stretching, shifting his cramped leg, Arthur twisted around, sensuously

caressing her as he moved. “Saxon then. Bad omen.”

“Oh nonsense! It’s a cloud!”

Carried on the silence, amplified by the wide stretch of water, came young

laughter. Gwenhwyfar craned her neck. She could see the horses, grazing as

hers and Arthur’s were, taking advantage of the lush grass on the far side of the