Lleu said at last, “He’s all right.”
“Hold the lantern up there: can you see any sign of the rest?”
“There’s nothing, sir,” Lleu whispered.
“Help me.” I could not sit up, trapped as I was; propped awkwardly on an elbow, almost flat on my back, I struggled to shift the beam that held me prisoner. But even when Lleu pulled with me we could not move it. “Take the lantern,” I said quietly, “and go for help. Don’t run; we may not have much air. If there is another tremor, don’t come back. Did you mark the way out?”
He nodded. “But sir—,” he began. “Are you hurt?”
I shook my head. “But Tegfan must be. And the rest of us, Cado—” I bit the words off, scarcely able to speak aloud what I was thinking. “Six men!” I gasped, incredulous. “Six men, and I responsible!”
Lleu bent, impulsively, to drop a quick kiss on my forehead before he took the lantern and started up the tunnel. I watched him go, the light with him growing more distant. When he turned the corner there was only a faint bloom of yellow warmth against the far wall: and after that nothing but blackness, and I alone.
I can hardly bear to tell of this.
I thought I must go mad waiting there for very long. But soon, soon, four men from the upper shafts came down with lanterns and shovels. Tegfan—he was senseless through all our cautious work to free him, and I started to splint his legs as best I could before we carried him out. But the roof began to tremble again. We abandoned the tools, for it took all four men from the upper shafts to carry Tegfan. The tunnel shuddered and rattled as we half ran, half crawled upward, dodging showers of clay and dust. It was agony to put weight on the foot that had been trapped; I dragged myself behind the others, frantic lest I should cause their destruction as well.
The ground and ceiling beyond the cut doorway to the main tunnel were steady, and a little crowd stood waiting for us there. They had not dared to venture beyond the stone lintels and oak beams that supported the entrance, and sent up a sober cheer of thanks as we burst gasping into their midst. I stood just beyond the tremorous shaft, shaking so that I could not hold kuld upthe horn of ale someone offered me. One said, “My lord, can you see to Tegfan’s legs?” Another asked, “Will we be able to search for the others that were with you?”
For answer—it was an answer—came a low rumble and clatter from deep in the tunnel, and the lower shaft collapsed. It sealed itself from the roots outward, as though some starved inner core hungered to consume the entire hillside. I have killed another friend, I thought, buried alive six men; and so imagined the abyss closing around me, and plunged into the devouring darkness.
Light mist on my face, then, and wind. I opened my eyes to a gray sky that seemed blindingly bright. I lay on the flat ground just beyond the quarry, with Caius and Cadarn kneeling by me. “Lleu,” I gasped, and sat up too fast. The red stone tilted about me. “Where is Lleu?”
“Home,” Caius said. “Unhurt, not so much as a scratch. Gently, lad.” He helped me to sit up. “Gods, what a day for you. Can you walk?”
I hesitated to answer. Cadarn said, frowning, “Let me see your foot.”
It was already so swollen that I could not get my boot off. “We’re shutting down for the day,” Cadarn said. “The king has sent Caius to see you home. You can borrow one of the ponies if you can’t walk.”
I could not even take the reins, for my wrist was also badly bruised. When we reached the villa Caius helped me to my room and sent for Aquila; they had to cut away my boot before Aquila could bind my ankle. Lleu brought me supper, and with it the message that Artos wanted to speak to me when I had finished. I could not eat. I said that I would go at once to Artos, and Lleu soberly offered me his shoulder for support. Outside his father’s study he said to me, with apology and pity in his voice, “I am to be present at this interview.”
Artos was pacing, waiting for us. “Get Medraut a chair,” he said curtly for greeting. Now he stood still, to lean against his desk and face me. “Do you know what angers me most in this miserable day’s work?” he demanded.
I shook my head. I could not look at him. “Tell me.”
“That Lleu was there when it happened. That you knew the chance you took with the explosives: you even thought to get Cadarn’s permission before you used them. That you knew the shaft might not hold up, and yet you had Lleu down there with you not so much as an hour after you had broken through the wall. Trust! My God, Medraut, what would you have me think of you? What kind of an idiot would take his sovereign’s heir down a forced mining tunnel before the earth even had a chance to settle?”
“He is not hurt,” I whispered.
“And for that you’d do well to offer up a fervent prayer of thanks,” Artos snapped. “And meantime pray as well for those men under your command, who also trusted you, Iaen and Gwyn, Cynedyr, Cado—”
“I know their names!”
Artos hit me, hard, in cold fury.
“Father!” Lleu cried out softly.
Artos turned on him. “Not a word from you, my Bright One. You’ve been little wiser than your brother, today.” He faced me again, and spoke more gently. “Only I expect more of you, Medraut.”
“I spoke without thinking,” I said in a low voice. “But Cado k01Cou, Medrawas my friend. Forgive me, sir.”
“And forgive me also, Medraut.” Artos sighed. He shook his head and leaned against the desk again, folding his arms and regarding me with sorrow and anger. “I have never lost so many lives at once unless it was in a battle.”
I shook with pent despair. “An accident—I could not stop it happening—”
“I know.” He spoke evenly now, in control of his anger. “But the fact remains that Lleu was with you when it happened.” Lleu sighed this time, but held silent. Artos continued, “Your transgression is in a lack of responsibility, Medraut, and as punishment I can only see fit to deny you that responsibility in the future. You are stripped of your foremanship. You may not return to work in the copper mines until Tegfan’s legs are healed. You will remain within the villa for the rest of the week, and for a month after that you will not leave the grounds of the estate unescorted.”
I bowed my head. Behind me, I heard Lleu say, “And I?”
Artos answered gently, “I think such an experience has been punishment enough for you.”
I looked up sharply at my father, and challenged: “Is Lleu not old enough to choose where he will or will not go? Is he never to be given any responsibility, not even for himself? Can you ensure that he never kills anyone by accident, any more than you can protect him from being struck by lightning?” I stopped for breath, my heart racing. Words came to me out of the dark, out of memory: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Artos did not move. He said in deadly quiet: “You will return to your room.”
The following week was the blackest period of my life. I could not walk for several days, and I had sufficient leisure to imagine a half dozen ways I might have avoided so great a disaster; I sat at my desk for hours with my face in my hands and could think of nothing else. Artos allowed me to join the sad and bleak little funeral service held at the mines. But most of the week I was confined to my room, alone.
As I began to accept that for all its horror the ordeal was over, and irreversible, I tried to think of other things. I distilled oils for Ginevra, exotic but harmless essences such as cinnamon and vanilla; and I read. I read over again almost all the books I own, and some others I found in my father’s study, abandoning myself especially to those that are not true: Irish legends, Roman poetry, the few Greek plays that I have in Latin translation. One evening in November Artos discovered me over one of these, weeping in still and stricken silence. At first I did not even notice he was there, standing behind me, until he laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. Startled, I could only stare at him in inarticulate shame that he should find me in tears over a fiction.
But he read aloud over my shoulder, “‘I weep for you as well, though
I can’t see you, imagining your bitter life to come.’”
I turned the pages over and wiped my eyes. “I beg your pardon, sir.”
“I also have shed tears for the king of Thebes,” Artos said. “My marksman: I have a task for you that I think you will enjoy.”
I could feel my hands tensing with relief. I was wretched with the enforced idleness of the last month.
Artos said, “I want you to teach Lleu to hunt.”
We took five hounds and rode south. The Mercian plain was at this time o kt tu tof year gray and brown, with clouds resting and tearing on the distant peaks that rimmed the horizon. There had been one or two light, insignificant snowfalls, and patches of snow lay unmelted here and there beneath the trees. The lake where the fisheries are was covered with a thin scale of ice, and our horses’ hooves sent a few pebbles skidding across the barely solid sheet as we rode by. The gravel made a surprisingly loud noise as it hit the ice, echoing and squealing like metal on stone. Lleu, who had scarcely spoken to me since our session with Artos, started at the unearthly sound like a nervous cat.
“You’ve nothing to fear, Bright One,” I said lightly. “I’m not going to touch my bow today.”
“You’re not shooting at all?”
“No. You are.”
I thought: You are going to kill, my brother; you are going to take the life of another living being, and forever you will be accountable for that life. As I am for many lives lost, animal and man.
I added aloud, “For after all, it’s no little thing to feed yourself, my lord Prince.”
Lleu threw me a resentful look and did not answer. He knew the purpose of our hunting together.
Before long we came upon a stag, full-grown but young. We could not get close to it at first, and soon we had lost both deer and hounds. We slowed our pace and halted. I sounded a long horn call and we heard the far-off yell of the dogs in answer, but Lleu made no move to follow. “Do you come?” I said impatiently. “Give chase!”
I reached out and pulled at his reins, then tore after him as his horse started suddenly away. We rode through a tangle of dripping trees, then burst into a cloudy brown clearing, silvered over with mist, to see the rusty deer bright bounding through the winter bracken. “Your bow!” I cried. “Now!”
Lleu obediently sent an arrow streaking just between the graceful antlers, harmless.
I pulled alongside him and reached out to snatch his reins again, bringing him abruptly to a halt. “You do it on purpose,” I hissed. “That is the trouble, is it not? In practice you can hit a moving target at twice that distance. I told your father I would teach you to hunt, and if we must spend the rest of the night riding you are not returning to be petted and praised by the high king till you have killed. You have the skill.” Lleu’s face was ashen. I added with cool menace, “I swear by the Wild Hunt if you do not bring down that stag at the next opportunity, I will make you eat its entrails when you do.” The deer and dogs had already disappeared into the trees at the opposite side of the clearing. I struck Lleu lightly across the face with his own reins. “Now, follow!”
He tore away from me, riding blindly and furiously. I caught up with him among the trees, and we rode together in silence except for the horses’ hooves thundering hollow on damp turf. Ahead of us, the young buck was tiring visibly. “Now, Bright One,” I said. “Strike.”
Lleu bent his bow with reluctant hands. Despite his hesitation he took the creature with an arrow in its throat.
“Ha!” I drew my horse to a halt. “Beautiful!”
But he had not killed it. The lean, quick hounds leaped for it like gray flames. “No!” Lleu cried. He slid from his horse and threw himself among the dogs, snatching at the collar of his own. “Here, sir! Back!” Clinging to his strain kto . He sing hound, he shouted wrathfully, “Call off your horrible dogs!”
I called the dogs and dismounted. “Better that you finish than that they do,” I said, and gave Lleu my hunting knife.
“Oh, I can’t!” he gasped. He knelt next to the fallen deer with one hand lightly resting on a short, proud antler, and his hound and Goewin’s whining at his shoulders.
“Would you have it die slowly, then?” I said.
He held on to the antler and moved the heavy head to stretch out the animal’s throat; its steaming breath was strangled and uneven. I began to say, “If you don’t—”
But he drove the blade to cut deep across the stag’s throat. And just as he looked up at me, another deer came through the trees toward us: not chased and so not running, a dark doe, almost black. Goewin’s hound darted after it.
“Take her, Prince!”
Lleu stood up and shot, elegantly and miserably. I laughed. “It’s true; you could have hit every animal you’ve ever aimed at. What a strange little idiot you are.” I glanced at his gray, bleak face and said in a gentler voice, “Give me the knife, I’ll help you. If you are to be high king you will have to kill more than deer, eventually.”
“I know,” he said.
“There is some balance to all things, Lleu. The stag’s death gives us winter me
at; and the power to kill, or to heal or to judge, carries with it a great weight of responsibility.”
“I know.” Lleu pushed his hair back from his forehead wearily. “I know. You are teaching me. Only don’t expect me to thank you for this lesson.”
“You never do,” I said, thinking of another beautiful stag, and the huntsmen buried beneath the hill.
X
Revelation
TEGFAN’S LEGS HEALED SLOWLY. At the end of the year he still could not walk. Though by now I was no longer confined to the estate and could come and go as I pleased, I was still idle; I was desperate to be given even the smallest of tasks. Close to Christmas, Caius sent me to the smithy with a mare that was to be shod. While Gofan worked over the new shoes, Marcus said to me casually, “Will you be rhyming with us this year, lord?”
“How do you know I ever did?” I asked. It had been eight years since my last rhymers’ pageant, the ritual Midwinter’s mumming at Elder Field. There had been no revelry the year of the famine, and that sobriety had also tainted the following Christmas.
“Caius tells me that when you were a boy you took the part of the Old Year’s son, the Winter Prince.” Marcus grinned at me. “I, of course, have taken on that role in your absence, but you may try to wrest it from me if you like.”
“No fear of that,” I returned. “I think I am no longer suited to act the young hero. And I thought you’d stopped the play.”
“We haven’t done it since you’ve been back,” Gofan said. “But this year… for the most part this has been a golden year. It bears celebrating.”
“There is a conspiracy abroad to cast you as the Magician,” Marcus a nto . ars cdded.
Magician—I? The rhymers’ play is a pageant for midwinter, celebrating the return of the sun at the dark time of the year’s closing. The Magician is the bringer of light, the figure whose task it is to recall the murdered harvest lord to life. I thought it bitter irony they should see me fit for such a role. But Marcus tossed my objections aside, and even Gofan laughed. They said I was the most skilled healer the villagers had ever known, and that I was missed in the mines and the fields. I warmed to their friendship and flattery. So I came to join the informal and haphazard rehearsals for the play; I was once again made welcome by the high king’s friends and servants, at a time when I had a great need of laughter and companionship.
Christmas brought cold. The year’s end was marked by clear, bitter nights on fire with white starlight. There was no snow, only the biting, bone-deep chill that froze the little rivers solid and kept the African cats curled together on the warm tiles of the atrium floor. But the granaries were full, and the storehouses crowded with dried fruit and salted meat. The people of Camlan and Elder Field wrapped themselves well with wool and fur and laughed at the hard frost, for they were busy with the preparation of a joyous Midwinter’s feast. I was torn betwe
en full enjoyment of the celebration and my nagging, lingering burden of guilt for the tragedy I had caused in the early autumn. A Christmas of glitter and sweetness, which I thought myself unworthy to share in. And yet I could not help but share in it.
On Midwinter’s Eve I returned to the villa after a long day spent on the threshing floor in one of the village barns, where we had been making rhymers’ costumes out of straw and evergreen. All the family were at leisure in the atrium. Gareth sat in the window seat with one of the cats, while Gwalchmei played idly upon a small harp; Agravain, in an uncharacteristic fit of patience, was teaching Gaheris and Lleu an obscure dicing game. Goewin and her mother were arguing agreeably over a parchment spread on the table. I scooped up one of the cats and nuzzled it beneath my chin; its fur was the color of the dry savanna country of Aksum before the rains, warm. The cat shrank away from the chill of my skin, and I thought suddenly of Lleu when he was no more than five years old: allowed outside in winter for the first time in his life, laughing as he winced away from a handful of snow that I held against his cheek.
“It’s still so cold out?” Artos inquired from his couch.
“Cruel,” I said.
“Did you see Tegfan today?”
“I did. He says the pain has stopped. I don’t want him walking yet, though.”
“Wise, my marksman,” Artos said. He stood before me to tease my cat beneath its chin. “I have said nothing, but I know what a trial this healing is for you. Your patience is to be admired.”
His praise, only his simplest kind word, could kindle warmth in me. I said quietly, “Thank you, sir.”
I put down the cat and began to take off my gloves. I had scarcely set them on the table before Caius came in and said to Artos, “There are pilgrims at the gate.”
“Beggars?” Artos asked. “Who would be out on such a night?”
The Winter Prince Page 10