‘Send them to kill Padraig?’ I suggested.
‘He’s dead already, Derfel, but his followers are all too much alive.’ Oengus had drawn me into a corner of the courtyard where he stopped and looked up into my face. ‘I hear you tried to protect my daughter.’
‘I did, Lord,’ I said. I saw that Ceinwyn had come from the palace and was embracing Arthur. They held each other as they talked and as Ceinwyn glanced reprovingly towards me. I turned back to Oengus. ‘I drew a sword for her, Lord King.’
‘Good of you, Derfel,’ he said carelessly, ‘good of you, but it isn’t important. I’ve several daughters. Not even sure I can remember which one Iseult was. Skinny little thing, yes?’
‘A beautiful girl, Lord King.’
He laughed. ‘Anything young with tits is beautiful when you’re old. I do have one beauty in the brood. Argante, she’s called, and she’ll break a few hearts before her life’s done. Your new King will be looking for a bride, won’t he?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Argante would do for him,’ Oengus said. He was not being kind to Mordred by suggesting his beautiful daughter as Dumnonia’s Queen, but rather making sure that Dumnonia would go on protecting Demetia from the men of Powys. ‘Maybe I’ll bring Argante on a visit here,’ he said. Then he abandoned the subject of that possible marriage and shoved a scarred fist hard into my chest. ‘Listen, my friend,’ he said forcefully, ‘it isn’t worth falling out with Arthur over Iseult.’
‘Is that why he brought you here, Lord?’ I asked suspiciously.
‘Of course it is, you fool!’ Oengus said happily. ‘And because I can’t stand all those Christians on the Caer. Make your peace, Derfel. Britain isn’t so big that decent men can start spitting at each other. I hear Merlin lives here?’
‘You’ll find him through there,’ I said, pointing towards an arch that led to a garden where Ceinwyn’s roses blossomed, ‘what’s left of him.’
‘I’ll go and kick some life into the bastard. Maybe he can tell me what’s so special about a clover leaf. And I need a charm to help me make new daughters.’ He laughed and walked away. ‘Getting old, Derfel, getting old!’
Arthur gave my three daughters into the keeping of Ceinwyn and their Uncle Cuneglas, then walked towards me. I hesitated, then gestured through the outer gate and walked ahead of him into the meadows where I waited and stared at Caer Cadarn’s banner-hung ramparts above the intervening trees. He stopped behind me. ‘It was at Mordred’s first acclamation,’ he said softly, ‘that you and I first met Tristan. Do you remember?’
I did not turn round. ‘Yes. Lord.’
‘I am no longer your lord, Derfel,’ he said. ‘Our oath to Uther is done, it’s finished. I am not your lord, but I would be your friend.’ He hesitated. ‘And for what happened,’ he went on, ‘I am sorry.’
I still did not turn round. Not out of pride, but because there were tears in my eyes. ‘I am sorry too,’ I said.
‘Will you forgive me?’ he asked humbly. ‘Will we be friends?’
I stared at the Caer and thought of all the things I had done that needed forgiveness. I thought of the bodies on the moor. I had been a young spearman then, but youth was no excuse for slaughter. It was not up to me, I thought, to forgive Arthur for what he had done. He had to do that for himself. ‘We shall be friends,’ I said, ‘till death.’ And then I turned.
And we embraced. Our oath to Uther was done. And Mordred was King.
PART FOUR
The Mysteries of Isis
Was Iseult beautiful?’ Igraine asks me.
I thought about the question for a few heartbeats. ‘She was young,’ I said at last, ‘and as her father said . . .’
‘I read what her father said,’ Igraine interrupted me curtly. When she comes to Dinnewrac Igraine always sits and reads through the finished skins before sitting on the window-sill and talking to me. Today that window is hung with a leather curtain to try and keep the cold out of the room, which is badly lit with rush lights on my writing-desk and filled with smoke because the wind is in the north and the smoke from the fire cannot find its way out of the roof-hole.
‘It was a long time ago,’ I said wearily, ‘and I only saw her for a day and two nights. I remember her as beautiful, but I suppose we always make the dead beautiful if they are young.’
‘The songs all say she was beautiful,’ Igraine said wistfully.
‘I paid the bards for those songs,’ I said. Just as I had paid men to carry Tristan’s ashes back to Kernow. It was right, I had thought, that Tristan should go to his own land in death, and I had mixed his bones and Iseult’s bones, and his ashes and her ashes, and no doubt a fair amount of ordinary wood ash too, and sealed them all in a jar we found in the hall where they had shared their impossible dream of love. I had been wealthy then, a great lord, master of slaves and servants and spearmen, wealthy enough to buy a dozen songs about Tristan and Iseult that are sung to this day in all the feasting halls. I made sure, too, that the songs put the blame for their deaths on Arthur.
‘But why did Arthur do it?’ Igraine said.
I rubbed my face with my one hand. ‘Arthur worshipped order,’ I explained. ‘I don’t think he ever really believed in the Gods. Oh, he believed they existed, he was no fool, but he didn’t think they cared about us any more. I remember he once laughed and said it was so arrogant of us to think that the Gods had nothing better to do than to worry about us. Do we lose sleep over the mice in the thatch? He asked me. So why would the Gods care about us? So all that was left to him, if you took away the Gods, was order, and the only thing that kept order was the law, and the only thing that made the powerful obey the law was their oaths. It was really quite simple.’ I shrugged. ‘He was right, of course; he almost always was.’
‘He should have let them live,’ Igraine insisted.
‘He obeyed the law,’ I said bleakly. I have often regretted allowing the bards to blame Arthur, but he forgave me.
‘And Iseult was burned alive?’ Igraine shuddered. ‘And Arthur just let it happen?’
‘He could be very hard,’ I said, ‘and he had to be, for the rest of us, God knows, could be soft.’
‘He should have spared them,’ Igraine insisted.
‘And there would have been no songs or stories if he had,’ I answered. ‘They would have grown old and fat and squabbled and died. Or else Tristan would have gone home to Kernow when his father died and taken other wives. Who knows?’
‘How long did Mark live?’ Igraine asked me.
‘Just another year,’ I said. ‘He died of the strangury.’
‘The what?’
I smiled. ‘A foul disease, Lady. Women, I think, are not subject to it. A nephew became King then, and I can’t even remember his name.’
Igraine grimaced. ‘But you can remember Iseult running from the sea,’ she said accusingly, ‘because her dress was wet.’
I smiled. ‘Like it was yesterday, Lady.’
‘The Sea of Galilee,’ Igraine said brightly, for St Tudwal had suddenly come into our room. Tudwal is now ten or eleven years old, a thin boy with black hair and a face that reminds me of Cerdic. A rat face. He shares both Sansum’s cell and his authority. How lucky we are to have two saints in our small community.
‘The saint wishes you to decipher these parchments,’ Tudwal demanded, putting them on my table. He ignored Igraine. Saints, it seems, can be rude to queens.
‘What are they?’ I asked him.
‘A merchant wants to sell them to us,’ Tudwal said. ‘He claims they’re psalms, but the saint’s eyes are too dim to read them.’
‘Of course,’ I said. The truth, of course, is that Sansum cannot read at all and Tudwal is much too lazy to learn, though we have all tried to teach him and we all now pretend that he can. I carefully uncurled the parchment that was old, cracking and feeble. The language was Latin, a tongue I can barely understand, but I did see the word Christus. ‘They aren’t psalms,’ I said, ‘but they are Christian. I suspect they’re gospel fragments.’
‘The merchant wants four pieces of gold.’
‘Two pieces,’ I said, though I did not really care whether we bought them or not. I let the parchments curl up. ‘Did the man say where he got them?’ I asked.
Tudwal shrugged. ‘The Saxons.’
‘We should certainly preserve them,’ I said dutifully, handing them back. ‘They should be in the treasure store.’ Where, I thought, Hywelbane rested with all the other small treasures I had brought from my old life. All but for Ceinwyn’s little golden brooch that I keep hidden from the older saint. I humbly thanked the younger saint for consulting me, and bowed my head as he left.
‘Spotty little toad,’ Igraine said when Tudwal had gone. She spat towards the fire. ‘Are you a Christian, Derfel?’
‘Of course I am, Lady!’ I protested. ‘What a question!’
She frowned quizzically at me. ‘I ask it,’ she said, ‘because it seems to me that you are less of a Christian today than you were when you began writing this tale.’
That, I thought, was a clever observation. And a true one too, but I dared not confess it openly for Sansum would love to have an excuse to accuse me of heresy and burn me to death. He wouldn’t stint on that firewood, I thought, even if he did ration what we could burn in our hearths. I smiled. ‘You make me remember the old things, Lady,’ I said, ‘that is all.’ It was not all. The more I recall of the old years the more some of those old things come back to me. I touched an iron nail in my wooden writing-desk to avert the evil of Sansum’s hatred. ‘I long ago abandoned paganism,’ I said.
‘I wish I was a pagan,’ Igraine said wistfully, drawing the beaver-pelt cloak tight about her shoulders. Her eyes are still bright and her face is so full of life that I am sure that she must be pregnant. ‘Don’t tell the saints I said that,’ she added swiftly. ‘And Mordred,’ she asked, ‘was he a Christian?’
‘No. But he knew that was where his support in Dumnonia was, so he did enough to keep them happy. He let Sansum build his great church.’
‘Where?’
‘On Caer Cadarn.’ I smiled, remembering it. ‘It was never finished, but it was supposed to be a great big church in the form of a cross. He claimed the church would welcome the second coming of Christ in the year 500, and he pulled down most of the feasting hall and used its timbers to build the wall and the stone circle to make the church’s foundations. He left the royal stone, of course. Then he took half the lands that belonged to Lindinis’s palace and used their wealth to pay for the monks on Caer Cadarn.’
‘Your land?’
I shook my head. ‘It was never my land, always Mordred’s. And, of course, Mordred wanted us evicted from Lindinis.’
‘So he could live in the palace?’
‘So Sansum could. Mordred moved into Uther’s Winter Palace. He liked it there.’
‘So where did you go?’
‘We found a home,’ I said. It was Ermid’s old hall, south of Issa’s Mere. The mere was not named for my Issa, of course, but for an old chieftain and Ermid had been another chief who had lived on its southern bank. When he died I had bought his lands, and after Sansum and Morgan took over Lindinis I moved there. The girls missed Lindinis’s open corridors and echoing rooms, but I liked Ermid’s Hall. It was old, thatched, shadowed by trees and full of spiders that made Morwenna scream and, for my oldest daughter’s sake, I became Lord Derfel Cadarn, the slayer of spiders.
‘Would you have killed Culhwch?’ Igraine asks me.
‘Of course not!’
‘I hate Mordred,’ she said.
‘You are not alone in that, Lady.’
She stared at the fire for a few moments. ‘Did he really have to become King?’
‘So long as it was in Arthur’s hands, yes. If it had been me? No, I would have killed him with Hywelbane, even if it did mean breaking my oath. He was a sad boy.’
‘It all seems so sad,’ Igraine said.
‘There was plenty of happiness in those years,’ I answered, ‘and even afterwards, sometimes. We were happy enough back then.’ I still remember the girls’ shouts echoing in Lindinis, the rush of feet and their excitement at some new game or some strange discovery. Ceinwyn was always happy she had a gift for it - and those around her caught the happiness and passed it on. And Dumnonia, I suppose, was happy. It prospered, certainly, and the hard workers made themselves wealthy. The Christians seethed with discontent, but even so those were the glory years, the time of peace, the time of Arthur. Igraine shuffled the new sheets of parchment to find one particular passage. ‘About the Round Table,’
she began.
‘Please,’ I said, holding up my one hand to still what I knew would be a protest.
‘Derfel!’ she said sternly. ‘Everyone knows that it was a serious thing! An important thing! All the best warriors of Britain, all sworn to Arthur, and all of them friends. Everyone knows it!’
‘It was a cracked stone table that by the day’s end was cracked even more and smeared with vomit. They all got very drunk.’
She sighed. ‘I expect you’ve just forgotten the truth,’ she said, dismissing the subject much too easily, which makes me think that Dafydd, the clerk who translates my words into the British tongue, will come up with something altogether more to Igraine’s liking. I even heard one tale not so long ago which claimed that the table was a vast wooden circle around which the whole Brotherhood of Britain sat and looked solemn, but there never was such a table, nor could there have been unless we had cut down half the woods of Dumnonia to build it.
‘The Brotherhood of Britain,’ I said patiently, ‘was an idea of Arthur’s that never really worked. It couldn’t! Men’s royal oaths took preference over the Round Table oath, and besides, no one except Arthur and Galahad ever really believed in it. By the end, believe me, even he was embarrassed if anyone even mentioned it.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she said, meaning that she was utterly sure I was wrong. ‘And I want to know,’ she went on, ‘what happened to Merlin.’
‘I will tell you. I promise.’
‘Now!’ she insisted. ‘Tell me now. Did he just fade away?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘His time did come. Nimue was right, you see. At Lindinis he was just waiting. He always liked to pretend, remember, and in those years he pretended to be an old, dying man, but underneath, where none of us saw it, the power was always there. But he was old, and he did have to hoard his power. He was waiting, you see, for the time when the Cauldron would be unveiled. He knew he would need his power then, but till it was needed he was happy to let Nimue guard the flame.’
‘So what happened?’ Igraine demanded excitedly.
I wrapped the sleeve of my cowl about the stump of my wrist. ‘If God lets me live, my Lady, I will tell you,’ I said, and I would not tell her more then. I was close to tears, remembering that last savage instance of Merlin’s power in Britain, but that moment lies a long, long way ahead in this story, long past the time when Nimue’s prophecy about the Kings coming to Cadarn came true.
‘If you won’t tell me,’ Igraine said, ‘then I won’t tell you my news.’
‘You’re pregnant,’ I said, ‘and I am so very happy for you.’
‘You beast, Derfel,’ she protested. ‘I wanted to surprise you!’
‘You have prayed for this, Lady, and I have prayed for you, and how could God not answer our prayers?’
She grimaced. ‘God sent Nwylle the pox, that’s what God did. She was all spots and sores and weeping pus, so the King sent her away’
‘I’m very glad.’
She touched her belly. ‘I just hope he lives to rule, Derfel.’
‘He?’ I asked.
‘He,’ she said firmly.
‘Then I will pray for that too,’ I said piously, though whether I will pray to Sansum’s God or to the wilder Gods of Britain I do not know. So many prayers have been said in my lifetime, so very many, and where did they bring me? To this damp refuge in the hills while our old enemies sing in our ancient halls. But that ending is also far ahead, and Arthur’s story is far from done. It is hardly begun in some ways, for now, as he discarded his glory and gave his power to Mordred, the times of testing came, and they were to prove the trials of Arthur, my Lord of oaths, my hard Lord, but my friend till death. At first, nothing happened. We held our breath, expected the worst, and nothing happened. We made hay, then cut the flax and laid the fibrous stems in the retting ponds so that our villages stank for weeks. We reaped the fields of rye, barley and wheat, then listened to the slaves singing their songs around the threshing floor or the endlessly turning millstones. The harvest straw was used to repair the thatch so that, for a time, patches of roof-gold shone in the late summer sun. We picked the orchards clean, cut the winter firewood and harvested willow rods for the basket-makers. We ate blackberries and nuts, smoked the bees out of their hives and pressed their honey in sacks that we hung in front of the kitchen fires where we left food for the dead on Samain Eve.
The Saxons stayed in Lloegyr, justice was done in our courts, maids were given in marriage, children were born and children died. The waning year brought mists and frost. The cattle were slaughtered and the stink of the retting ponds gave way to the nauseous smell of the tanning pits. The newly woven linen was bucked in vats filled with wood-ash, rainwater and the urine we had collected all year, the winter taxes were paid, and at the solstice we Mithraists killed a bull at our annual festival that honoured the sun while on the same day the Christians celebrated their God’s birth. At Imbolc, the great feast of the cold season, we fed two hundred souls in our hall, made sure three knives were laid on the table for the use of the invisible Gods and offered sacrifices for the new year’s crops. Newborn lambs were the first sign of that awakening year, then came the time for ploughing and sowing and of new green shoots on old bare trees. It was the first new year of Mordred’s rule.