‘But I’ll beat this bearded toad quicker than you, you Saxon bag of guts,’ Culhwch said fondly. Tristan stepped between us and protested that he would tight Cyllan alone, that this was his battle and no one else’s, but Culhwch growled at him to get back into the hall. ‘I’ve beaten men twice as big as that bearded lout,’ he told Tristan.
Cyllan drew his longsword and gave it a slash through the empty air. ‘One of you,’ he said carelessly,
‘I don’t care which.’
‘No!’ Mark suddenly shouted. He summoned Cyllan and two others of his spearmen and the three men knelt beside Mark’s chair and listened to their King’s instructions. Culhwch and I both presumed that Mark was ordering his three men to fight the three of us. ‘I’ll take the bastard with the big beard and the dirty forehead,’ Culhwch decided, ‘you take that red-haired piece of dogshit, Derfel, and my Lord Prince can skewer the bald one. Two minutes’ work?’
Iseult crept from the hall. She seemed terrified to be in Mark’s sight, but she came to embrace Culhwch and me. Culhwch swamped her in his arms, while I knelt and kissed her thin pale hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said in her little shadow voice. Her eyes were red with tears. She stood on tiptoe to kiss Tristan, and then, with one scared backward look at her husband, she fled back into the hall’s shadows. Mark raised his heavy head from the collar of his sealskin fur. ‘The court of swords,’ he said in a voice thick with phlegm, ‘demands one man on one man. It has always been thus.’
‘Then send your virgins one at a time, Lord King,’ Culhwch shouted, ‘and I’ll kill them one at a time.’
Mark shook his head. ‘One man, one sword,’ he insisted, ‘and my son asked for the privilege, so he will fight.’
‘Lord King,’ I said, ‘custom decrees that a man can fight for his friend in the court of swords. I, Derfel Cadarn, insist on the privilege.’
‘I know of no such custom,’ Mark lied.
‘Arthur does,’ I said harshly. ‘He fought for your son in a court of swords and I will fight for him today.’
Mark turned his bleary eyes towards Arthur, but Arthur shook his head as if to suggest he wanted nothing to do with the argument. Mark looked back at me. ‘My son’s offence is filthy,’ he said, ‘and no one but he should defend it.’
‘I will defend it!’ I said, then Culhwch stepped beside me and insisted that he would fight for Tristan. The King just looked at us, raised his right hand and gave a weary gesture. The spearmen of Kernow, instructed by the red-haired man and the bald warrior, formed a shield-wall at the King’s signal. It was a wall two men deep and the front rank held their shields in a locked row while the second rank held their shields to protect the heads of the front rank. Then, on a word of command, they tossed their spears to the ground.
‘Bastards,’ Culhwch said, for he understood what was about to happen. ‘Shall we break them, Lord Derfel?’ he asked me.
‘Let us break them, Lord Culhwch,’ I said vengefully.
There were forty men of Kernow, and three of us. The forty shuffled slowly forward in their locked shield-wall with their eyes watching us warily from beneath the rims of their helmets. They carried no spears and had drawn no swords. They did not come to kill us, but to immobilize us. And Culhwch and I charged them. I had not needed to break a shield-wall in years, but the old madness whirled in me as I screamed Bel’s name, then I shouted Ceinwyn’s name as I rammed Hywelbane’s point at a man’s eyes and as he ducked aside I threw my shoulder at the junction of his and his neighbour’s shields.
The wall broke and I screamed in triumph as I thumped Hywelbane’s hilt on the back of one man’s head, then stabbed it forward to widen the gap. In battle, by now, my men would be thrusting behind me, opening the gap and soaking the ground with enemy blood, but I had no men behind me, and no weapons opposing me, just shields and more shields, and though I whirled in a circle, making Hywelbane’s blade hiss as she slashed around, those shields closed inexorably on me. I dared not kill any of the spearmen, for that would have been dishonourable after they had so deliberately cast aside their own weapons, and bereft of that opportunity I could only try and frighten them. But they knew I would not kill and so a ring of shields circled me, closed on me, and Hywelbane was at last stopped dead by an iron shield-boss and suddenly the shields of Kernow were pressing hard about me. I heard Arthur shout a harsh command, and I guessed that some of Culhwch’s and my spearmen had wanted to help their lords, but Arthur held them back. He did not want a bloody fight, Kernow against Dumnonia. He just wanted this grim business done and finished.
Culhwch had been trapped like me. He raged at his captors, called them infants, dogs and worms, but the men of Kernow had their orders. We were neither of us to be hurt, but just held tight by a press of men and by the clamp of their shields, and so, like Iseult, we could only watch as the champion of Kernow walked forward, his sword held low, and gave his Prince a bow. Tristan knew he would die. He had taken the ribbon from his hair and tied it about his sword’s blade, and now he kissed the linen strip. Then he held his sword out, touched the champion’s blade, and sprang forward in a lunge.
Cyllan parried. The sound of the two swords echoed back from the palisade, then echoed again as Tristan attacked a second time, this time swinging the sword in a fast downward slash, but once again Cyllan parried. He did it easily, almost wearily. Twice more Tristan attacked, and then he kept his blows going, swinging and lunging as fast as he could, trying desperately to wear Cyllan’s defence down, but he only wearied his own arm, and the moment he paused for breath and took a step back, the champion lunged.
That lunge was so well done. It was even beautifully done if you cared to see a sword used properly. It was even mercifully done for Cyllan took Tristan’s soul in an eyeblink. The Prince did not even have the time to look back at his lover in the hall’s shadowed door. He just stared at his killer, and the blood gushed from his cut throat to turn his white shirt red, then his sword dropped as he made the dying, bubbling, choking sound, and as his soul fled, he just dropped.
‘Justice is done, Lord King,’ Cyllan said bleakly as he pulled his blade free from Tristan’s neck and walked away. The spearmen who surrounded me, none of whom had dared meet my eyes, drew back. I raised Hywelbane and the sight of its grey blade was misted by my tears. I heard Iseult scream as her husband’s men killed the six spearmen who had accompanied Tristan and who now took hold of their Queen. I closed my eyes.
I would not look at Arthur. I would not speak with Arthur. I walked to the headland and there I prayed to my Gods and I begged them to come back to Britain, and while I prayed the men of Kernow took Queen Iseult down to the sea-lake where the two dark ships waited. But they did not carry her home to Kernow. Instead the Princess of the Ui Liathain, that child of fifteen summers who had skipped barefoot into the waves and whose voice had been a shadowy wisp like the seamen’s ghosts who ride the long sea winds, was tied to a post and heaped around with the driftwood that lay so thick on Halcwm’s shore, and there, before her husband’s unforgiving eyes, she was burned alive. Her lover’s corpse was burned on the same pyre.
I would not leave with Arthur. I would not talk to him. I let him go, and I slept that night in the dark old hall where the lovers had slept. Then I travelled home to Lindinis and that was when I confessed to Ceinwyn about the old massacre on the moor when I had killed the innocent to keep an oath. I told her about Iseult burning. Burning and screaming while her husband watched. Ceinwyn held me. ‘Did you not know that hardness in Arthur?’ she asked me softly.
‘No.’
‘He is all that stands between us and horror,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘how could he be anything but hard?’
Even now, with my eyes closed, I sometimes see that child coming from the sea, her face smiling, her thin body outlined against the white clinging dress and her hands reaching for her lover. I cannot hear a gull’s cry without seeing her for she will haunt me till the day I die, and after death, wherever it is my soul goes, she will be there; a child killed for a King, by law, in Camelot.
I did not see Lancelot for many years after the Round Table oath, nor did I see any of his henchmen. Amhar and Loholt, Arthur’s twins, lived in Lancelot’s capital of Venta where they led bands of spearmen, but the only fighting they seemed to do was in its taverns. Dinas and Lavaine were also in Venta where they presided over a temple dedicated to Mercury, a Roman God, and their ceremonies rivalled the ones held in Lancelot’s palace church that had been consecrated by Bishop Sansum. Sansum was a frequent visitor to Venta and he reported that the Belgic people seemed happy enough with Lancelot, which we took to mean that they were not openly rebellious. Lancelot and his companions also visited Dumnonia, most often going across their border to the Sea Palace, but sometimes travelling as far as Durnovaria to attend some high feast, but I simply stayed away from such festivals if I knew they were coming, and neither Arthur nor Guinevere ever demanded that I attend. Nor was I invited to the great funeral that followed the death of Lancelot’s mother, Elaine. Lancelot, in truth, was not a bad ruler. He was no Arthur, he cared nothing for the quality of justice or the fairness of taxes or the state of the roads, he simply ignored those things, but as they had been ignored before his rule no one noticed any great difference. Lancelot, like Guinevere, cared only for his comfort and, like her, he built a lavish palace that was filled with statues, bright with painted walls and hung, of course, with the extravagant collection of mirrors in which he could admire his own endless reflection. The money for these luxuries was exacted in taxes, and if those taxes were heavy then the compensation was the freedom of the Belgic lands from Saxon raids. Cerdic, astonishingly, had kept his faith with Lancelot and the dreaded Sais spearmen never raided Lancelot’s rich farmlands. But nor did they need to raid, for Lancelot had invited them to come and live in his kingdom. The land had been depopulated by the long years of war and huge stretches of fine fields were growing back to woodland, and so Lancelot invited settlers from Cerdic’s people to till the fields. The Saxons swore oaths of loyalty to Lancelot, they cleared the land, they built new villages, they paid their taxes, and their spearmen even marched in his war-band. His palace guard, we heard, were all Saxons now. The Saxon Guard, he called them, and he chose them for their height and for the colour of their hair. I did not see them in those years, though eventually I met them, and they were all tall blond men who carried axes polished to a mirror brightness. Rumour had it that Lancelot paid tribute to Cerdic, but Arthur angrily denied it when our Council asked him if it was true. Arthur disapproved of Saxon settlers being invited onto British land, but the matter, he said, was Lancelot’s to decide, not ours, and at least the land was at peace. Peace, it seemed, excused all.
Lancelot even boasted that he had converted his Saxon Guard to Christianity, for his baptism, it seems, had not just been for show, but was real enough, or so Galahad told me on one of his frequent visits to Lindinis. He described the church Sansum had built in the Venta palace and told me that every day a choir sang and a bevy of priests celebrated the Christian mysteries. ‘It’s all very beautiful,’ Galahad said wistfully. That was before I had seen the ecstasies in Isca and I had no idea such frenzies took place, so did not ask him whether they happened in Venta, or whether his brother encouraged Dumnonia’s Christians to see him as a deliverer.
‘Has Christianity changed your brother?’ Ceinwyn asked.
Galahad watched the flicker of her hands as she teased a thread from the distaff onto the spindle.
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘He thinks it’s enough to say prayers once a day and then he behaves as he likes thereafter. But many Christians are like that, alas.’
‘And how does he behave?’ Ceinwyn asked.
‘Badly.’
‘Do you want me to leave the room,’ Ceinwyn asked sweetly, ‘so you can tell Derfel without embarrassing me? And then he can tell me when we go to bed.’
Galahad laughed. ‘He’s bored, Lady, and he alleviates his boredom in the usual way. He hunts.’
‘So does Derfel, so do I. Hunting’s not bad.’
‘He hunts girls,’ Galahad said bleakly. ‘He doesn’t treat them badly, but they don’t really have much choice. Some of them like it and they all become rich enough, but they also become his whores.’
‘He sounds like most kings,’ Ceinwyn said drily. ‘Is that all he does?’
‘He spends hours with those two wretched Druids,’ Galahad said, ‘and no one knows why a Christian King would do that, but he claims it’s just friendship. He encourages his poets, he collects mirrors and he visits Guinevere’s Sea Palace.’
‘To do what?’ I asked.
‘To talk, he says.’ Galahad shrugged. ‘He says they talk about religion. Or rather they argue about it. She’s become very devout.’
‘To Isis,’ Ceinwyn said disapprovingly. In the years after the Round Table oath we had all heard how Guinevere was retreating more and more into the practice of her religion so that now the Sea Palace was said to be one huge shrine to Isis, and Guinevere’s attendants, who were all women chosen for their grace and looks, were the priestesses of Isis.
‘The Supreme Goddess,’ Galahad said disparagingly, then carefully crossed himself to keep the pagan evil at bay. ‘Guinevere evidently believes the Goddess has enormous power that can be channelled into human affairs. I can’t imagine Arthur likes it.’
‘He’s bored by it all,’ Ceinwyn said, spinning the last of the thread off the distaff and laying it down.
‘All he ever does now,’ she went on, ‘is complain that Guinevere won’t talk to him about anything except her religion. It must be horribly tedious for him.’ This conversation took place long before Tristan fled to Dumnonia with Iseult, and when Arthur was still a welcome guest at our house.
‘My brother claims to be fascinated by her ideas,’ Galahad said, ‘and maybe he is. He claims she’s the most intelligent woman in Britain and says he won’t marry till he finds another just like her.’
Ceinwyn laughed. ‘A good job he lost me, then. How old is he now?’
‘Thirty-three, I think.’
‘So ancient!’ Ceinwyn said, smiling at me, for I was only a year younger. ‘What happened to Ade?’
‘She gave him a son, and died doing it.’
‘No!’ Ceinwyn said, upset as always at hearing of a death in childbirth. ‘And you say he has a son?’
‘A bastard,’ Galahad said disapprovingly. ‘Peredur, he’s called. Four years old now, and not a bad little boy. In truth I rather like him.’
‘Has there ever been a child you didn’t like?’ I asked him drily.
‘Brush-head,’ he said, and we all smiled at that old nickname.
‘Imagine Lancelot having a son!’ Ceinwyn said with that intonation of surprised import with which women greet such news. To me the existence of another royal bastard seemed entirely unremarkable, but men and women, I notice, respond to these things quite differently.
Galahad, like his brother, had never married. Nor did he have land, but he was happy and was kept busy serving as an envoy for Arthur. He tried to keep the Brotherhood of Britain alive, though I noticed how quickly those duties fell away, and he travelled through all the British kingdoms, carrying messages, settling disputes and using his royal rank to ease whatever problems Dumnonia might have with other states. It was usually Galahad who travelled to Demetia to curb Oengus Mac Airem’s raids on Powys and it was Galahad who, after Tristan’s death, carried the news of Iseult’s fate to her father. I did not see him after that, not for many months.
I tried not to see Arthur either. I was too angry with him, and I would neither answer his letters nor go to the Council. He came to Lindinis twice in the months after Tristan’s death and both times I was coldly polite and both times I left him as soon as I could. He did talk for a long time with Ceinwyn and she tried to reconcile us, but I could not shake the thought of that burning child from my head. But nor could I ignore Arthur altogether. Mordred’s second acclamation was now just months away and the preparations had to be made. The ceremony would be held at Caer Cadarn, just a short walk east of Lindinis, and inevitably Ceinwyn and I were drawn into the planning. Mordred himself even took an interest, perhaps because he realized that the ceremony would at last free him of all discipline. ‘You have to decide,’ I told him one day, ‘who will acclaim you.’
‘Arthur will, won’t he?’ he asked sullenly.
‘It’s usually done by a Druid,’ I said, ‘but if you want a Christian ceremony then you must choose between Emrys or Sansum.’
He shrugged. ‘Sansum, I suppose.’
‘Then we should go and see him,’ I said.
We went on a hard midwinter day. I had other business in Ynys Wydryn, but first went with Mordred to the Christian shrine where a priest told us that Bishop Sansum was busy saying mass and that we must wait. ‘Does he know his King is here?’ I demanded.
‘I shall tell him, Lord,’ the priest said, and scuttled away across the frozen ground. Mordred had wandered off to stand beside his mother’s grave where, even on that cold day, a dozen pilgrims knelt in worship. It was a very simple grave, nothing but a low mound of earth with a stone cross that was dwarfed by the lead urn Sansum had placed to receive the pilgrims’ offerings. ‘The Bishop will be with us soon,’ I said. ‘Shall we wait inside?’
He shook his head and frowned at the low grassy mound. ‘She should have a better grave,’ he said.
‘I think that’s true,’ I said, surprised he had spoken at all. ‘You can build it.’
‘It would have been better,’ he said snidely, ‘if others had paid her that respect.’
‘Lord King,’ I said, ‘we were so busy defending the life of her child that we had small time to worry about her bones. But you are right, and we were remiss.’
He kicked moodily at the urn, then peered inside to see the small treasures that had been left by the pilgrims. Those who were praying at the grave edged away, not for fear of Mordred whom I doubt they even recognized, but because the iron amulet I wore about my neck betrayed that I was a pagan. ‘Why was she buried?’ Mordred suddenly asked me. ‘Why wasn’t she burned?’
‘Because she was a Christian,’ I said, hiding my horror at his ignorance. I explained that Christians believed their bodies would be used again at the final coming of Christ, while we pagans took new shadowbodies in the Otherworld and thus had no need of our corpses which, if we could, we burned to prevent our spirits wandering the earth. If we could not afford a funeral pyre then we burned the dead person’s hair and cut off one foot.
‘I shall make her a vault,’ he said when I had finished my theological explanation. He asked me how his mother had died and I told him the whole story of how Gundleus of Siluria had treacherously married Norwenna, then murdered her as she knelt to him. And I told him how Nimue had taken her revenge on Gundleus.
‘That witch,’ Mordred said. He feared Nimue, and no wonder, for she was becoming ever fiercer, ever gaunter and ever dirtier. She was a recluse now, grubbing a life in the remnants of Merlin’s compound where she chanted her spells, lit fires to her Gods and received few visitors, though once in a while, unannounced, she would stride into Lindinis to consult with Merlin. I would try to feed her on those rare visits, the children would run from her, and she would walk away, muttering to herself with her one eye wild, her robe caked with mud and ashes, and her matted black hair tangled with filth. Beneath her refuge on the Tor she was forced to watch the Christian shrine grow larger, stronger and ever more organized. The old Gods, I thought, were losing Britain fast. Sansum, of course, was desperate for Merlin to die so he could take the Tor for himself and build a church on its fire-scarred summit, but what Sansum did not know was that all Merlin’s land was willed to me.
Mordred, standing beside his mother’s grave, wondered at the similarity of names between my eldest daughter and his dead mother and I told him that Ceinwyn was Norwenna’s cousin. ‘Morwenna and Norwenna are old names in Powys,’ I explained.
‘Did she love me?’ Mordred asked, and the incongruity of that word in his mouth gave me pause. Maybe, I thought, Arthur was right. Maybe Mordred would grow into his responsibilities. Certainly, in all the years I had known him, I had never held such a courteous discussion before.
‘She loved you very much,’ I answered truthfully. ‘The happiest I ever saw your mother,’ I went on,
‘was when you were with her. It was up there.’ I pointed to the black scar where Merlin’s hall and his dream-tower had stood on the Tor. It was there that Norwenna had been murdered and Mordred had been snatched away from her. He had been a baby then, even younger than I had been when I was snatched from my mother, Erce. Did Erce still live? I still had not travelled to Siluria to find her, and that omission made me feel guilty. I touched the iron amulet.
‘When I die,’ Mordred said, ‘I want to be in the same grave as my mother. And I’ll make the grave myself. A vault of stone,’ he declared, ‘with our bodies lifted on a pedestal.’
‘You must talk to the Bishop,’ I said, ‘and I’m sure he’ll be pleased to do whatever he can to help.’
So long, I thought cynically, as he did not have to pay for the vaulted sepulchre. I turned as Sansum hurried across the grass. He bowed to Mordred, then welcomed me to the shrine.
‘You come, I hope, in search of truth, Lord Derfel?’
‘I come to visit that shrine,’ I said, pointing to the Tor, ‘but my Lord King has business of his own with you.’ I left them there alone and led my horse up to the Tor, passing by the group of Christians who, day and night, prayed at the Tor’s foot that its pagan inhabitants would be driven away. I endured their insults, then climbed the steep hill to discover that the water-gate had fallen from its last hinge. I tied my horse to a stake in what remained of the palisade, then carried the bundle of clothes and furs that Ceinwyn had packed so that the poor folk who shared Nimue’s refuge would not freeze in the bitter weather. I gave Nimue the clothes and she dropped them carelessly in the snow, then plucked at my sleeve and drew me into her new hut that she had built exactly where Merlin’s dream-tower had once stood. The hut stank so foully that I almost gagged, but she was oblivious to its mephitic stench. It was a freezing day and an icy sleet was whipping out of the east on a damp wind, yet even so I would rather have stood in the freezing downpour than endure that reeking hut. ‘Look,’ she said proudly, and showed me a cauldron, not the Cauldron, but just a common, patched iron cauldron that hung from a roof beam and was filled with some dark liquid. Sprigs of mistletoe, a pair of bat wings, the sloughed skin of snakes, a broken antler and bunches of herbs also hung from the rafters that were so low that I had to bend double to get inside the hut, which was eye-stingingly full of smoke. A naked man lay on a pallet in the far shadows and complained about my presence.