‘That spring, Bishop,’ Guinevere intervened, ‘would it be in the hills north of Dunum?’
‘Why yes, Lady!’ Emrys said, pleased to have an audience other than the unresponsive Mordred.
‘You have heard of the miracle?’
‘Long before your priest arrived there,’ Guinevere said. ‘That spring comes and goes, Bishop, depending on the rainfall. And this year, you will remember, the late winter rains were unusually heavy.’
She smiled triumphantly. Her opposition to the church still existed, but it was muted now.
‘This is a new spring,’ Emrys insisted. ‘The countryfolk assure us it never existed before!’ He turned back to Mordred. ‘You should visit the spring, Lord King. It is truly a miracle.’
Mordred yawned and stared blankly at the pigeons on the far roof. His coat was stained with mead and his new curly beard filled with crumbs. ‘Are we done with business?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Far from it, Lord King,’ Emrys said enthusiastically. ‘We have yet to receive a decision on the building of the church, and there are three names proposed as magistrates. I assume the men are here to be questioned?’ he asked Arthur.
‘They are, Bishop,’ Arthur confirmed.
‘A full day’s work for us!’ Emrys said, pleased.
‘Not for me,’ Mordred said. ‘I’m going hunting.’
‘But, Lord King . . .’ Emrys protested mildly.
‘Hunting,’ Mordred interrupted the Bishop. He pushed his couch away from the low table and limped across the courtyard.
There was silence round the table. We all knew what the others were thinking, but none spoke aloud until I tried to be optimistic. ‘He pays attention,’ I said, ‘to his weapons.’
‘Because he likes to kill,’ Guinevere said icily.
‘I only wish the boy would talk sometimes!’ Emrys complained. ‘He just sits there, sullen! Picking at his nails.’
‘At least it isn’t his nose,’ Guinevere said acidly, then looked up as a stranger was escorted into the courtyard. Hygwydd, Arthur’s servant, announced the stranger as Cyllan, champion of Kernow, and he looked like a King’s champion for he was a huge black-haired and rough-bearded brute who carried the blue tattoo of an axe on his forehead. He bowed to Guinevere, then drew a barbaric-looking long-sword that he laid on the flagstones with its blade pointing at Arthur. That gesture was a sign that trouble existed between our countries.
‘Sit, Lord Cyllan.’ Arthur waved to Mordred’s vacated couch. ‘There’s cheese, some wine. The bread is new baked.’
Cyllan tugged off his iron helmet that was crested with the snarling mask of a wildcat. ‘Lord,’ he said in a rumbling voice, ‘I come with a complaint . . .’
‘You come with an empty belly too, I’ve no doubt,’ Arthur interrupted him. ‘Sit, man! Your escort will be fed in the kitchens. And do pick up the sword.’
Cyllan surrendered to Arthur’s informality. He broke a loaf in half and sliced off a big wedge of cheese. ‘Tristan,’ he explained curtly when Arthur asked the nature of the complaint. Cyllan spoke with his mouth half full of food, making Guinevere shudder with horror. ‘The Edling has fled to this land, Lord,’ Kernow’s champion went on, ‘and brought the Queen with him.’ He reached for the wine and drank a hornful. ‘King Mark wants them back.’
Arthur said nothing, but just drummed on the table’s edge with his fingers. Cyllan swallowed more bread and cheese, then poured himself more wine. ‘It’s bad enough,’ he went on after a prodigious belch, ‘that the Edling is,’ he paused, glanced at Guinevere, then amended his sentence, ‘is with his stepmother.’
Guinevere interrupted to provide the word that Cyllan had not dared pronounce in her presence. He nodded, blushed and went on. ‘Not right. Lady. Not to couple with his own stepmother. But he’s also stolen half his father’s treasury. He’s broken two oaths, Lord. The oath to his royal father and the oath to his Queen, and now we hear he has been granted refuge near Isca.’
‘I heard that the Prince is in Dumnonia,’ Arthur said blandly.
‘And my King wants him back. Wants both of them back.’ Cyllan, his message delivered, attacked the cheese again.
The Council reassembled, leaving Cyllan to kick his heels in the sunlight. The three candidates for magistrate were told to wait and the vexed problem of Sansum’s great church was set aside while we debated Arthur’s answer to King Mark.
‘Tristan,’ I said, ‘has ever been a friend to this country. When no one else would fight for us, he did. He brought men to Lugg Vale. He was with us in London. He deserves our help.’
‘He has broken oaths made to a King,’ Arthur said worriedly.
‘Pagan oaths,’ Sansum put in, as if that lessened Tristan’s offence.
‘But he has stolen money,’ Bishop Emrys pointed out.
‘Which he hopes will soon be his by right,’ I answered, trying to defend my old battle comrade.
‘And that is precisely what worries King Mark,’ Arthur said. ‘Put yourself in his place, Derfel, and what do you fear most?’
‘A dearth of princesses?’ I ventured.
Arthur scowled at my levity. ‘He fears that Tristan will lead spearmen back to Kernow. He fears civil war. He fears that his son is tired of waiting for his death and he’s right to fear it.’
I shook my head. ‘Tristan was never calculating, Lord,’ I said. ‘He acts on impulse. He’s stupidly fallen in love with his father’s bride. He’s not thinking of a throne.’
‘Not yet,’ Arthur said ominously, ‘but he will.’
‘If we give Tristan refuge, what will King Mark do?’ Sansum asked shrewdly.
‘Raids,’ Arthur said. ‘Some farms burned, cattle stolen. Or else he’ll send his spears to take Tristan alive. His boatmen could manage that.’ Alone among the British kingdoms the men of Kernow were confident sailors and the Saxons, in their early raids, had learned to fear the longboats of Mark’s spearmen. ‘It will mean constant, niggling trouble,’ Arthur conceded. ‘A dozen dead farmers and their wives every month. We’ll have to keep a hundred spearmen on the border till it’s all settled.’
‘Expensive,’ Sansum commented.
‘Too expensive,’ Arthur said grimly.
‘King Mark’s money must certainly be returned,’ Emrys insisted.
‘And the Queen, probably,’ Cythryn, one of the magistrates who sat on the Council, put in. ‘I cannot imagine that King Mark’s pride will allow him to leave that insult unavenged.’
‘What happens to the girl if she’s returned?’ Emrys asked.
‘That,’ Arthur said firmly, ‘is a matter for King Mark to decide. Not us.’ He rubbed his long bony face with his two hands. ‘I suppose,’ he said wearily, ‘that we had better mediate the affair.’ He smiled. ‘It’s been a long time since I was in that part of the world. Maybe it’s time to go there again. Will you come, Derfel? You’re a friend of Tristan. Maybe he’ll listen to you.’
‘With pleasure, Lord,’ I agreed.
The Council agreed to let Arthur mediate the matter, sent Cyllan back to Kernow with a message describing what Arthur was doing and then, with a dozen of my spearmen in attendance, we rode south and west to find the errant lovers.
It began as a happy enough journey, despite the awkward problem that lay at its end. Nine years of peace had swollen the land’s goodness and if the summer’s warm weather lasted, and despite Culhwch’s gloomy predictions, it looked set to be a fine harvest that year. Arthur took a real joy from seeing the well-tended fields and new granaries. He was greeted in every town and village and the greeting was always warm. Children’s choirs sang for him and gifts were laid at his feet: corn dollies, baskets of fruit or a fox pelt. He returned gold for the gifts, discussed whatever problems afflicted the village, talked with the local magistrate and then we would ride on. The only sour note was struck by Christian hostility, for in nearly every village there was a small group of Christians who would shriek curses at Arthur until their neighbours hushed them up or pushed them away. New churches stood everywhere, usually built where pagans had once worshipped at a sacred well or spring. The churches were the products of Bishop Sansum’s busy missionaries and I wondered why we pagans did not employ similar men to travel the roads and preach to the peasants. The Christians’ new churches were, admittedly, small things, mere huts of wattle and thatch with a cross nailed to one gable, but they multiplied and the more rancorous of their priests cursed Arthur for being a pagan and detested Guinevere for her adherence to Isis. Guinevere never cared that she was hated, but Arthur disliked all religious rancour. On that journey to Isca he often stopped to talk to the Christians who spat at him, but his words had no effect. The Christians did not care that he had given the land peace, nor that they had become prosperous, only that Arthur was a pagan. ‘They’re like the Saxons,’ he told me gloomily as we left another hostile group behind, ‘they won’t be happy till they own everything.’
‘Then we should do to them what we did to the Saxons, Lord,’ I said. ‘Set them against each other.’
‘They already fight amongst themselves,’ Arthur said. ‘Do you understand this argument about Pelagianism?’
‘I wouldn’t even want to understand it,’ I answered flippantly, though in truth the argument was growing ever more vicious with one set of Christians accusing the other of heresy, and both sides inflicting deaths on their opponents. ‘Do you understand it?’
‘I think so. Pelagius refused to believe mankind is inherently evil, while men like Sansum and Emrys say we are all born evil.’ He paused. ‘I suspect,’ Arthur went on, ‘that if I were a Christian, I’d be a Pelagian.’ I thought of Mordred and decided that mankind might well be inherently evil, but I said nothing. ‘I believe in mankind,’ Arthur said, ‘rather more than in any God.’
I spat at the road’s verge to avert the evil his words might bring. ‘I often wonder,’ I said, ‘how things would have changed if Merlin had kept his Cauldron.’
‘That old pot?’ Arthur laughed. ‘I haven’t thought of that for years!’ He smiled at the memory of those old days. ‘Nothing would have changed, Derfel,’ he went on. ‘I sometimes think Merlin’s whole life lay in collecting the Treasures, and once he had them there was nothing left for him to do! He didn’t dare try to work their magic, because he suspected nothing would happen.’
I glanced at the sword hanging at his hip, one of the thirteen Treasures, but I said nothing for I was keeping my promise to Merlin not to reveal Excalibur’s true power to Arthur. ‘You think Merlin burned down his own tower?’ I asked instead.
‘I’ve wondered,’ he admitted.
‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘he believed. And sometimes, I think, he dares to believe he’ll live to find the Treasures again.’
‘Then he’d better hurry,’ Arthur said tartly, ‘because he can’t have much time left.’
We spent that night in the old Roman governor’s palace in Isca where Culhwch now lived. He was in a gloomy mood, not because of Tristan, but because the city was a hotbed of Christian fanatics. Just a week before a band of Christian youths had invaded the city’s pagan temples and pulled down the statues of the Gods and splashed excrement on the walls. Culhwch’s spearmen had caught some of the desecrators and filled the jail with them, but Culhwch was worried about the future, if we don’t break the bastards now,’ he said, ‘they’ll go to war for their God.’
‘Nonsense,’ Arthur said dismissively.
Culhwch shook his head. ‘They want a Christian King, Arthur.’
‘They’ll have Mordred next year,’ Arthur said.
‘Is he a Christian?’ Culhwch asked.
‘If he’s anything,’ I said.
‘But he’s not who they want,’ Culhwch said darkly.
‘Then who is?’ Arthur asked, intrigued at last by his cousin’s warnings. Culhwch hesitated, then shrugged. ‘Lancelot.’
‘Lancelot!’ Arthur sounded amused. ‘Don’t they know he keeps his pagan temples open?’
‘They don’t know anything about him,’ Culhwch said, ‘but they don’t need to. They think of him in the same way that people thought about you in the last years of Uther’s life. They think of him as their deliverer.’
‘Deliverer from what?’ I asked scornfully.
‘Us pagans, of course,’ Culhwch said. ‘They insist Lancelot is the Christian King who’ll lead them all to heaven. And do you know why? Because of that sea eagle on his shield. It’s got a fish in its claws, remember? And the fish is a Christian symbol.’ He spat his disgust. ‘They don’t know anything about him,’ he said again, ‘but they see that fish and think it’s a sign from their God.’
‘A fish?’ Arthur plainly did not believe Culhwch.
‘A fish,’ Culhwch insisted. ‘Maybe they pray to a trout? How would I know? They already worship a holy ghost, a virgin and a carpenter, so why not a fish as well? They’re all mad.’
‘They’re not mad,’ Arthur insisted, ‘excited, maybe.’
‘Excited! Have you been to one of their rites lately?’ Culhwch challenged his cousin.
‘Not since Morgan’s wedding.’
‘Then come and look for yourself,’ Culhwch said. It was night-time and we had finished supper, but Culhwch insisted we don dark cloaks and follow him out through one of the palace’s side doors. We went up a dark alley to the forum where the Christians had their shrine in an old Roman temple that had once been dedicated to Apollo, but which had now been scoured of paganism, limewashed and dedicated to Christianity. We went in through the west door and found a shadowed niche where, in imitation of the big throng of worshippers, we knelt.
Culhwch had told us that the Christians worshipped here every evening, and every evening, he said, the same frenzy followed the gifts of bread and wine that the priest distributed to the faithful. The bread and wine were magical, supposed to be their God’s blood and flesh, and we watched as the worshippers thronged about the altar to receive their scraps. At least half of the worshippers were women and those women, once they had taken the bread from the priests, began to fall into ecstasy. I had often seen such strange fervour, for Merlin’s old pagan rites had frequently ended with screaming women dancing about the Tor’s fires, and these women behaved in much the same way. They danced with closed eyes and with their waving hands held up to the white roof where the smoke from the torches and from the bowls of burning incense made a thick mist. Some wailed strange words, others were in a trance and just gazed at a statue of their God’s mother, a few writhed on the floor, but most of the women danced in step to the rhythmic chanting of three priests. The men in the church mostly watched, but some joined the dancers and it was they who first stripped themselves to their waists and snatched up knotted thongs with which they began to lash their own backs. That astonished me, for I had never seen anything like it before, but my astonishment turned to horror when some of the women joined the men and began to scream with ecstatic joy as the lashes drew blood from their bare breasts and backs. Arthur hated it. ‘It’s madness,’ he whispered, ‘pure madness!’