She had led us to a door that stood at the bottom of some brick steps and which, when she pushed it open, led into a great cellar that lay under the palace floor and was supported by huge arches of Roman brick. ‘They keep wine here,’ Gwenhwyvach said, explaining the jars and skins that stood racked on the shelves. She had left the door open so that some glimmers of daylight would penetrate the dark, dusty tangle of arches. ‘This way,’ she said, and disappeared between some pillars to our right. We followed more slowly, groping our way ever more carefully as we went further and further from the daylight at the cellar door. We heard Gwenhwyvach lifting a door-bar, then a breath of cold air wafted by us as she pulled a huge door open. ‘Is this a temple of Isis?’ I asked her.
‘You’ve heard about it?’ Gwenhwyvach seemed disappointed.
‘Guinevere showed me her temple in Durnovaria,’ I said, ‘years ago.’
‘She wouldn’t show you this one,’ Gwenhwyvach said, and then she pulled aside the thick black curtains that hung a few feet inside the temple doors so that Ceinwyn and I could stare into Guinevere’s private shrine. Gwenhwyvach, for fear of her sister’s wrath, would not let me tread beyond the small lobby that lay between the door and the thick curtains, but she led Ceinwyn down two steps into the long room that had a floor made of polished black stone, walls and an arched ceiling painted with pitch, a black stone dais with a black stone throne, and behind the throne another black curtain. In front of the low dais was a shallow pit which, I knew, was tilled with water during Isis’s ceremonies. The temple, in truth, was almost exactly the same as the one Guinevere had shown me so many years before, and very like the deserted shrine we had discovered in Lindinis’s palace. The only difference - other than that this cellar was larger and lower than both those previous temples - was that here daylight had been allowed to penetrate, for there was a wide hole in the arched ceiling directly above the shallow pit. ‘There’s a wall up there,’ Gwenhwyvach whispered, pointing up the hole, ‘higher than a man. That’s so the moonlight can come down the shaft, but no one can see down it. Clever, isn’t it?’
The existence of the moon-shaft suggested that the cellar had to run out under the side garden of the palace and Gwenhwyvach confirmed that. ‘There used to be an entrance here,’ she said, pointing to a jagged line in the pitch-covered brickwork halfway down the temple’s length, ‘so that supplies could be brought directly into the cellar, but Guinevere extended the arch, see? And covered it over with turf.’
There seemed nothing unduly sinister about the temple, other than its malevolent blackness, for there was no idol, no sacrificial fire and no altar. If anything, it was disappointing, for the arched cellar possessed none of the grandeur of the upstairs rooms. It seemed tawdry, even slightly soiled. The Romans, I thought, would have known how to make this room fit for the Goddess, but Guinevere’s best efforts had simply turned a brick cellar into a black cave, though the low throne, which was made from a single block of black stone and was, I presumed, the same throne that I had seen in Durnovaria, was impressive enough. Gwenhwyvach walked past the throne and plucked aside the black curtain so that Ceinwyn could go beyond. They spent a long time behind the curtain, but when we left the cellars Ceinwyn told me there was not much to see there. ‘It was just a small black room,’ she told me, ‘with a big bed and a lot of mouse droppings.’
‘A bed?’ I asked suspiciously.
‘A dream-bed,’ Ceinwyn said firmly, ‘just like the one that used to be halfway up Merlin’s tower.’
‘Is that all it is?’ I asked, still suspicious.
Ceinwyn shrugged. ‘Gwenhwyvach tried to suggest it was used for other purposes,’ she said disapprovingly, ‘but she had no proof, and she did finally admit that her sister slept there to receive dreams.’ She smiled sadly. ‘I think poor Gwenhwyvach is touched in the head. She believes Lancelot will come for her one day’
‘She believes what?’ I asked in astonishment.
‘She’s in love with him, poor woman,’ Ceinwyn said. We had tried to persuade Gwenhwyvach to join us at the celebrations in the front garden, but she had refused. She would not, she had confided to us, be welcome and so she had hurried away, darting suspicious glances left and right. ‘Poor Gwenhwyvach.’
Ceinwyn said, then laughed. ‘It’s so typical of Guinevere, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
‘To adopt such an exotic religion! Why can’t she worship the Gods of Britain like the rest of us? But no, she has to find something strange and difficult.’ She sighed, then put an arm through mine. ‘Do we really have to stay for the feast?’
She was feeling weak for she had still not fully recovered from the last birth. ‘Arthur will understand if we don’t go,’ I said.
‘But Guinevere won’t,’ she sighed, ‘so I had better survive.’
We had been walking around the long western flank of the palace, past the high timber palisade of the temple’s moon-shaft, and had now reached the end of the long arcade. I stopped her before we turned the corner and I put my hands on her shoulders. ‘Ceinwyn of Powys,’ I said, looking into her astonishing and lovely face, ‘I do love you.’
‘I know,’ she said with a smile, then stood on tiptoe to kiss me before leading me a few paces on so that we could gaze up the length of the Sea Palace’s pleasure garden. ‘There,’ Ceinwyn said with amusement, ‘is Arthur’s Brotherhood of Britain.’
The garden was reeling with drunken men. They had been kept too long from the feast so now they were offering each other elaborate embraces and flowery promises of eternal friendship. Some of the embraces had turned into wrestling matches that rolled fiercely over Guinevere’s flower beds. The choirs had long abandoned their attempts to sing solemn music and some of the choirs’ women were now drinking with the warriors. Not all the men were drunk, of course, but the sober guests had retreated to the terrace to protect the women, many of whom were Guinevere’s attendants and among whom was Lunete, my first and long-ago love. Guinevere was also on the terrace, from where she was staring in horror at the wreckage being made of her garden, though it was her own fault for she had served mead brewed especially strong and now at least fifty men were roistering in the gardens; some had plucked flower stakes to use in mock sword fights and at least one man had a bloody face, while another was working free a loosened tooth and foully cursins the oath-sworn Brother of Britain who had struck him. Someone else had vomited onto the round table.
I helped Ceinwyn up to the safety of the arcade while beneath us the Brotherhood of Britain cursed and fought and drank itself insensible.
And that, although Igraine will never believe me, was how Arthur’s Brotherhood of Britain, that the ignorant still call the Round Table, all began.
I would like to say that the new spirit of peace engendered by Arthur’s Round Table oath spread happiness throughout the kingdom, but most common folk were quite unaware that the oath had even been taken. Most people neither knew nor cared what their lords did so long as their fields and families were left unmolested. Arthur, of course, set great store by the oath. As Ceinwyn often said, for a man who claimed to hate oaths he was uncommonly fond of making them.
But at least the oath was kept in those years and Britain prospered in that period of peace. Aelle and Cerdic fought each other for the mastery of Lloegyr, and their bitter conflict spared the rest of Britain from their Saxon spears. The Irish Kings in western Britain were forever testing their weapons against British shields, but those conflicts were small and scattered, and most of us enjoyed a long period of peace. Mordred’s Council, of which I was now a member, could concern itself with laws, taxes and land disputes instead of worrying about enemies.
Arthur headed the Council, though he never took the chair at the table’s head because that was the throne reserved for the King and it waited empty until Mordred came of age. Merlin was officially the King’s chief councillor, but he never travelled to Durnovaria and said little on the few occasions that the Council met in Lindinis. Half a dozen of the councillors were warriors, though most of those never came. Agravain said the business bored him, while Sagramor preferred to keep the Saxon frontier peaceful. The other councillors were two bards who knew the laws and genealogies of Britain, two magistrates, a merchant, and two Christian bishops. One of the bishops was a grave, elderly man called Emrys, who had succeeded Bedwin as bishop in Durnovaria, and the other was Sansum. Sansum had once conspired against Arthur and few men doubted that he should have lost his head when that conspiracy was revealed, but Sansum had somehow slithered free. He never learned to read or write, but he was a clever man and endlessly ambitious. He came from Gwent, where his father had been a tanner, and Sansum had risen to become one of Tewdric’s priests, but he came to real prominence by marrying Arthur and Guinevere when they fled like fugitives from Caer Sws. He was rewarded for that service by being made a Dumnonian Bishop and Mordred’s chaplain, though he lost the latter honour after he conspired with Nabur and Melwas. He was supposed to rot in obscurity after that as the guardian of the shrine of the Holy Thorn, but Sansum could not abide obscurity. He had saved Lancelot from the humiliation of Mithras’s rejection, and in so doing he had earned Guinevere’s wary gratitude, but neither his friendship with Lancelot nor his truce with Guinevere would have been sufficient to lift him onto Dumnonia’s Council.
He had achieved that eminence by marriage, and the woman he married was Arthur’s older sister, Morgan - Morgan, the priestess of Merlin, the adept of the mysteries, the pagan Morgan. With that marriage Sansum had sloughed off all traces of his old disgrace and had risen to the topmost heights of Dumnonian power. He had been placed on the Council, made Bishop of Lindinis and was reappointed as Mordred’s chaplain, though luckily his distaste for the young King kept him away from Lindinis’s palace. He assumed authority over all the churches in northern Dumnonia, just as Emrys held sway over all the southern churches. For Sansum it was a glittering marriage, and to the rest of us it was an astonishment. The wedding itself took place in the church of the Holy Thorn at Ynys Wydryn. Arthur and Guinevere stayed at Lindinis, and we all rode to the shrine together on the great day. The ceremonies began with Morgan’s baptism in the reed-edged waters of Issa’s Mere. She had abandoned her old gold mask with its image of the horned God Cernunnos and had instead adopted a new mask that was decorated with a Christian cross and, to mark the day’s joyousness, she had abandoned her usual black robe for a white gown. Arthur had cried with joy to see his sister limp into the mere where Sansum, with evident tenderness, supported her back as he lowered her into the water. A choir sang hallelujahs. We waited while Morgan dried herself and changed into a new white robe, then we watched as she limped to the altar where Bishop Emrys joined them as man and wife.
I think I could not have been more astonished had Merlin himself abandoned the old Gods to take up the cross. For Sansum, of course, it was a double triumph, for by marrying Arthur’s sister he not only vaulted into the kingdom’s royal Council, but by converting her to Christianity he struck a famous blow against the pagans. Some men sourly accused him of opportunism, but in all fairness I think he did love Morgan in his own calculating way and she undoubtedly adored him. They were two clever people united by resentments. Sansum ever believed that he should be higher than he was, while Morgan, who had once been beautiful, resented the fire that had twisted her body and turned her face into a horror. She resented Nimue too, for Morgan had once been Merlin’s most trusted priestess and the younger Nimue had usurped that place and now, in revenge, Morgan became the most ardent of Christians. She was as strident in her protestations of Christ as she had ever been in her service of the older Gods and after her marriage all her formidable will was poured into Sansum’s missionary campaign. Merlin did not attend the marriage, but he did derive amusement from it. ‘She’s lonely,’ he told me when he heard the news, ‘and the mouse-lord is at least company. You don’t think they rut together, do you? Dear Gods, Derfel, if poor Morgan undressed in front of Sansum he’d throw up! Besides, he doesn’t know how to rut. Not with women, anyway.’
Marriage did not soften Morgan. In Sansum she found a man willing to be guided by her shrewd advice and whose ambitions she could support with all her fierce energy, but to the rest of the world she was still the shrewish, bitter woman behind the forbidding golden mask. She still lived in Ynys Wydryn, though instead of living on Merlin’s Tor she now inhabited the Bishop’s house in the shrine from where she could see the fire-scarred Tor where her enemy, Nimue, lived.
Nimue, bereft of Merlin now, was convinced that Morgan had stolen the Treasures of Britain. As far as I could see, that conviction was based solely on Nimue’s hatred for Morgan whom Nimue considered the greatest traitor of Britain. Morgan, after all, was the pagan priestess who had abandoned the Gods to turn Christian, and Nimue, whenever she saw Morgan, spat and hurled curses that Morgan energetically flung back at her; pagan threat battling Christian doom. They would never be civil with each other, though once, at Nimue’s urging, I did confront Morgan about the lost Cauldron. That was a year after the marriage and, though I was now a Lord and one of the wealthiest men in Dumnonia, I still felt nervous of Morgan. When I had been a child she had been a figure of awesome authority and terrifying appearance who had ruled the Tor with a brusque bad temper and an ever-ready staff with which we all were disciplined. Now, so many years later, I found her just as alarming. I met her in one of Sansum’s new buildings in Ynys Wydryn. The largest was the size of a royal feasting hall and was the school where dozens of priests were trained as missionaries. Those priests began their lessons at six years old, were proclaimed holy at sixteen and then sent on Britain’s roads to gain converts. I often met those fervent men on my travels. They walked in pairs, carrying only a small bag and a staff, though sometimes they were accompanied by groups of women who seemed curiously drawn to the missionaries. They had no fear. Whenever I encountered them they would always challenge me and dare me to deny their God, and I would always courteously admit his existence then insist that my own Gods lived too, and at that they would hurl curses at me and their women would wail and howl insults. Once, when two such fanatics frightened my daughters, I used the butt of a spear on them and I admit I used it too hard, for at the end of the argument there was a broken skull and a shattered wrist, neither of them mine. Arthur insisted I stand trial as a demonstration that even the most privileged Dumnonians were not above the law, and thus I went to the Lindinis courthouse where a Christian magistrate charged me the bone-price of half my own weight in silver.