‘It’s spreading,’ Culhwch warned him darkly. One of the women was beating her naked back with a length of rusty chain and her frenzied wailing echoed in the big stone chamber as her blood spattered thick on the tiled floor. ‘They’ll go on like this all night,’ Culhwch said. The worshippers had gradually edged forward to surround the ecstatic dancers, leaving the three of us isolated in our shadowed niche. A priest saw us there and darted towards us. ‘Have you eaten the body of Christ?’ he demanded.
‘We ate roast goose,’ Arthur said politely, standing up.
The priest stared at the three of us and recognized Culhwch. He spat into Culhwch’s face. ‘Pagan!’ he shrieked. ‘Idolater! You dare defile God’s temple!’ He struck at Culhwch - a mistake, for Culhwch gave him a blow that span the priest hard back across the floor, but the altercation had attracted attention and a howl went up from the men who had been watching the flagellating dancers.
‘Time to go,’ Arthur said, and the three of us retreated smartly across the forum to where Culhwch’s spearmen guarded the palace’s arcade. The Christians spilt out of their church in pursuit, but the spearmen stolidly closed into a shield-wall and lowered their blades, and the Christians made no attempt to storm the palace.
‘They might not attack tonight,’ Culhwch said, ‘but they get braver by the day.’
Arthur watched the howling Christians from a palace window. ‘What do they want?’ he asked in puzzlement. He liked his religion to be decorous. When he came to Lindinis he would always join Ceinwyn and me at our morning prayers when we knelt quietly before our household Gods, offering them a piece of bread and then praying that our daily duties would be done properly, and that was the kind of worship Arthur liked. He was simply bemused by the things he had seen in Isca’s church.
‘They believe,’ Culhwch began to explain the fanaticism we had witnessed, ‘that their God is coming back to earth in five years, and they believe they have a duty to prepare the earth for his coming. Their priests tell them that the pagans have to be wiped out before their God will come back and they preach that Dumnonia must have a Christian king.’
‘They’ll have Mordred,’ Arthur said grimly.
‘Then you’d better change his dragon shield into a fish,’ Culhwch said, ‘for I tell you, their fervour is getting worse. There’s going to be trouble.’
‘We’ll placate them,’ Arthur said. ‘We’ll let them know Mordred’s a Christian and perhaps that’ll calm them down. Maybe we’d better build that church Sansum wants,’ he added to me.
‘If it stops them rioting,’ I said, ‘why not?’
We left Isca next morning, escorted now by Culhwch and a dozen of his men, and we crossed the Exe by the Roman bridge and then turned south into the deep sea-lands that lay on Dumnonia’s furthest coasts. Arthur said nothing more about the Christian frenzy he had witnessed, but he was oddly silent that day and I guessed the rites had upset him deeply. He hated any kind of frenzy for it stripped men and women of their sense, and he must have feared what such a madness might do to his careful peace. But for now our problem was not Dumnonia’s Christians, but Tristan. Culhwch had sent word to the Prince, warning him of our approach, and Tristan came to greet us. He rode alone, his horse’s hoofs leaving spurts of dust as he galloped towards us. He greeted us happily, but recoiled from Arthur’s chill reserve. That reserve was not caused by any innate dislike Arthur had for Tristan - indeed he liked the Prince - but rather sprang out of Arthur’s recognition that he had not just come to mediate this dispute, but to sit in judgment on an old friend. ‘He has worries,’ I explained vaguely, trying to reassure Tristan that Arthur’s coldness held no foreboding.
I was leading my own horse, for I was always happier on foot, and Tristan, having greeted Culhwch, slid out of his saddle and walked beside me. I described the wild Christian ecstasies and attributed Arthur’s coldness to his worries about their meaning, but Tristan did not want to hear any of it. He was in love and, like all lovers, he could talk of nothing but his beloved. ‘A jewel, Derfel,’ he said, ‘that’s what she is, an Irish jewel!’ He paced long-legged beside me, one arm round my shoulder and with his long black hair chinking from the warrior rings he had woven into its plaits. His beard was more heavily streaked with white now, but he was still a handsome man with a bony nose and dark, quick eyes that were bright with passion. ‘Her name,’ he said dreamily, ‘is Iseult.’
‘We heard,’ I said drily.
‘A child from Demetia,’ he said, ‘a daughter of Oengus Mac Airem. A Princess, my friend, of the Ui Liathain.’ He spoke the name of Oengus Mac Airem’s tribe as though its syllables were forged in purest gold. ‘Iseult,’ he said, ‘of the Ui Liathain. Fifteen summers old and as beautiful as the night.’
I thought of Arthur’s ungovernable passion for Guinevere and of my own soul’s longings for Ceinwyn and my heart hurt for my friend. He had been blinded by love, swept by it, made mad by it. Tristan was ever a passionate man, given to black deeps of despair or to soaring heights of happiness, but this was the first time I had ever seen him assaulted by the storm winds of love. ‘Your father,’ I warned him carefully, ‘wants Iseult back.’
‘My father’s old,’ he said, dismissing every obstacle, ‘and when he dies I shall sail my Princess of the Ui Liathain to Tintagel’s iron gates and build her a castle of silver towers that shall scrape the stars.’ He laughed at his own extravagance. ‘You’ll adore her, Derfel!’
I said nothing more, but just let him talk and talk. He had no appetite for our news, cared not a bit that I had three daughters or that the Saxons were on the defensive, he had room in his universe for nothing but Iseult. ‘Wait till you see her, Derfel!’ he said again and again, and the nearer we drew to their refuge the more excited he became until at last, unable to be apart from his Iseult for a moment longer, he leapt onto his horse and galloped away ahead of us. Arthur looked quizzically at me and I grimaced. ‘He’s in love,’ I said, as if I needed to explain.
‘With his father’s taste for young girls,’ Arthur added grimly.
‘You and I know love, Lord,’ I said, ‘be kind to them.’
The refuge of Tristan and Iseult was a beautiful place, maybe the loveliest I ever saw. It was a place where small hills were cut by streams and heavy woods, where rich rivers ran fast to the sea and where great cliffs were loud with screaming birds. It was a wild place, but beautiful, a place fit for love’s raw madness.
And there, in the small dark hall among the deep green woods, I met Iseult. Small and dark and fey and fragile is how I remember Iseult. Little more than a child, really, though she had been forced to woman’s state by her marriage to Mark, yet to me she appeared as a shy, small, thin girl, nothing but a delicate wisp of near-womanhood who kept her huge dark eyes fixed on Tristan until he insisted that she greeted us. She bowed to Arthur. ‘You don’t bow to me,’ Arthur said, lifting her up,
‘for you are a Queen,’ and he dropped to one knee and kissed her small hand. Her voice was whispery like a shadow’s voice. Her hair was black and she had tried to make herself look older by binding it in a great coil on the crown of her head and by hanging herself with jewels, though she wore the jewels awkwardly, reminding me of Morwenna dressing up in her mother’s clothes. She gazed at us fearfully. Iseult realized, I think, even before Tristan did, that this incursion of armed spearmen was not the coming of friends, but the arrival of her judges. Culhwch had provided the lovers with their refuge. It was a hall of timber and rye thatch, not big, but well built, and it had belonged to a chieftain who had supported Cadwy’s rebellion and thereby lost his head. The hall, with three huts and a storehouse, stood circled by a palisade in a wooded hollow of land where the sea winds could not chafe its thatch, and there, with six loyal spearmen and a mound of stolen treasure, Tristan and Iseult had thought to make their love into a great song. Arthur tore their music into shreds. ‘The treasure.’ he told Tristan that night, ‘must be returned to your father’
‘He can have it!’ Tristan declared. ‘I only brought it so I would not have to call on your charity. Lord.’
‘So long as you are in this land, Lord Prince,’ Arthur said heavily, ‘you will be our guests.’
‘And how long will that be, Lord?’ Tristan asked.
Arthur frowned and looked up into the hall’s dark rafters. ‘Is that rain? It seems so long since it rained.’
Tristan asked the question again, and again Arthur refused to answer. Iseult reached for her Prince’s hand and held it as Tristan reminded Arthur of Lugg Vale. ‘When no one else would come to your help, Lord, I came,’ Tristan said.
‘You did, Lord Prince,’ Arthur admitted.
‘And when you fought Owain, Lord, I stood beside you.’
‘You did,’ Arthur said.
‘And I brought my hawks’ shields to London.’
‘You did, Lord Prince, and they fought well there.’
‘And I took your Round Table oath,’ Tristan said. No one ever called it the Brotherhood of Britain any more.
‘So you did, Lord,’ Arthur said heavily.
‘So, Lord,’ Tristan begged, ‘have I not deserved your help?’
‘You have deserved much, Lord Prince,’ Arthur said, ‘and I am mindful of it.’ It was an evasive answer, but the only one Tristan received that night.
We left the lovers in the hall and made our own straw beds in the small storehouses. The rain passed in the night and the next morning dawned warm and beautiful. I woke late to discover Tristan and Iseult had already left the hall. ‘If they have a peck of sense,’ Culhwch growled to me, ‘they’ll have run as far away as they can.’
‘Will they?’
‘They don’t have sense, Derfel, they’re lovers. They think the world exists for their convenience.’
Culhwch walked with a slight limp now, the legacy of the wound he had taken in the battle against Aelle’s army. ‘They’ve gone to the sea,’ he told me, ‘to pray to Manawydan.’
Culhwch and I followed the lovers, climbing out of the wooded hollow to a windswept hill that ended in a great cliff where the seabirds wheeled and against which the vast ocean broke white in tattered bursts of spray. Culhwch and I stood on the clifftop and stared down into a small cove where Tristan and Iseult walked on the sand. The previous night, watching the timid Queen, I had not really understood what had driven Tristan into love’s madness, but that winch morning I did understand. I watched as she suddenly broke away from Tristan and ran ahead, skipping, turning and laughing at her lover who walked slowly behind. She wore a loose white dress and her black hair, no longer bound in a coil, streamed free in the salt wind. She looked like a spirit, like one of the water nymphs who had danced in Britain before the Romans came. And then, perhaps to tease Tristan, or else to take her pleas closer to Manawydan, the sea God, she ran headlong into the great tumbling surf. She plunged into the waves so that she disappeared altogether and Tristan could only stand distraught on the sand and watch the churning white mass of breaking seas. And then, sleek as an otter in a stream, her head appeared. She waved, swam a little, then waded back to the beach with her white wet dress clinging to her pathetic thin body. I could not help but see that she had small high breasts and long slender legs, and then Tristan hid her from our view by wrapping her in the wings of his great black cloak and there, beside the sea, he held her tight and leaned his cheek against her salt-wet hair. Culhwch and I stepped out of view, leaving the lovers alone in the long sea wind that blew from fabled Lyonesse.
‘He can’t send them back,’ Culhwch growled.
‘He mustn’t,’ I agreed. We stared across the endlessly moving sea.
‘Then why won’t Arthur reassure them?’ Culhwch demanded angrily.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I should have sent them to Broceliande,’ Culhwch said. The wind lifted his cloak as we walked west around the hills above the cove. Our path led to a high place from where we could see down into a great natural harbour where the ocean had flooded a river valley and formed a chain of wide, well-sheltered sea lakes. ‘Halcwm,’ Culhwch named the harbour, ‘and the smoke is from the salt works.’ He pointed to a shimmer of grey on the far side of the lakes.
‘There must be seamen here who could take them to Broceliande,’ I said, for the harbour had at least a dozen ships anchored in its shelter.
‘Tristan wouldn’t go,’ Culhwch told me bleakly. ‘I suggested it to him, but he believes Arthur is his friend. He trusts Arthur. He can’t wait to be King for he says that then all Kernow’s spears will be at Arthur’s service.’
‘Why didn’t he just kill his father?’ I asked bitterly.
‘For the same reason that none of us kills that little bastard, Mordred,’ Culhwch said. ‘It’s no small thing to kill a king.’
That night we dined in the hall again, and again Tristan pressed Arthur to say how long he and Iseult could stay in Dumnonia, and again Arthur avoided giving an answer. ‘Tomorrow, Lord Prince,’ he promised Tristan, ‘tomorrow we shall decide all.’
But next morning two dark ships with tall masts hung with ragged sails and with high rearing prows carved into the shapes of hawks’ heads sailed into Halcwm’s sea lakes. The two ships’ thwarts were crowded with men who, as the loom of the land cheated their sails of wind, unshipped their oars and drove the long dark ships towards the beach. Spear bundles were propped at the sterns where steersmen heaved on their great steering oars. Green branches were tied to each hawk’s head prow, signifying that the ships came in peace.
I did not know who had come in the two ships, but I could guess. King Mark had come from Kernow.
King Mark was a huge man, reminding me of Uther in his dotage. He was so fat he could not climb Halcwm’s hills unaided and so four spearmen carried him in a chair that was equipped with two stout poles. Forty other spearmen accompanied their King who was preceded by Cyllan, his champion. The clumsy chair swayed up the hill, then down into the wooded hollow where Tristan and Iseult believed they had found refuge.
Iseult screamed when she saw them, then, in a panic, she ran desperately to escape her husband, but the palisade had only one entrance and Mark’s huge chair filled it, so she ran back into the hall where her lover was trapped. The hall doors were guarded by Culhwch’s men and they refused to allow Cyllan or any of Mark’s spearmen into the building. We could hear Iseult crying, Tristan shouting and Arthur pleading. King Mark ordered his chair set down opposite the hall’s door and there he waited until Arthur, his face pale and tight, emerged and knelt before him.