Here Lies Arthur

by Philip Reeve

  Winter set in soon after. The air grew cold. We lit fires to warm our quarters. Mist hung over the ruined temples at the heart of town. From the hill-tops, I thought, Aquae Sulis must look like a steaming stock-pot.

  One morning we woke to find those hills all hoary with first snow. Parties of men went to and fro between the town and Arthur’s western strongholds before the roads were buried. They brought back treasures to deck Arthur’s new capital, and the women and hangers-on of some of his followers. Cei’s wife and daughter rode in, but I noticed Arthur did not send for Cunaide. I felt sad for her, abandoned in that cold fortress, her place taken by Gwenhwyfar.

  Arthur had wanted a quick marriage, but Gwenhwyfar made him wait till Easter, when her time of mourning for her husband would be done. Arthur asked the bishop to cut short her mourning-period, but the bishop refused. Arthur thought about killing the bishop, but Cei and my master reminded him it might be bad for his reputation.

  To take his mind off killing bishops, Myrddin advised that a new hall be built for the wedding. “What is the difference between us and our forefathers?” he asked one night when the men were lounging around the big fire in Arthur’s hall. “They built great palaces, while we are content to live among the ruins! Arthur should build here, to show that in him the spirit and the pride of old Britannia are come again! We’ll build a round hall, with tiles upon its floor and painted garlands on its walls. And at the heart of the hall, a round banqueting chamber, where we who have fought at Arthur’s side may meet as equals…”

  “I’ve never seen you at my side in a fight, Myrddin,” shouted Arthur. “You skulk safe out of danger’s way with the women and the baggage-train.” But you could see the idea at work on him, even as he raised his cup to acknowledge the gusts of laughter from his men. He’d never dreamed of building halls before, but now he was starting to see himself as a man who built; a ruler who left his mark upon the world in the form of splendid halls.

  For the next week or so, my master pored over drawings in the smoke-fug of his quarters and took me out in the wincing cold to mark where the post-holes should be dug. “Here. And here. And here!” he ordered, walking a circle in the forum with instruments made out of willow-staffs and twine. The bishop and his priests and their wives looked on and muttered about witchcraft and conjurings.

  But Myrddin’s efforts conjured up nothing, and the snow kept falling to blot out the marks I made. It quilted the roofs and streets. It froze the water in the horse-troughs so that we had to smash it with stones and spear-butts of a morning before the animals could drink. In the after-Christmas dark Arthur lost interest in hall-building, and Myrddin’s schemes withered like a flower in the frost. “It was only the seed of a hall,” he said, rolling up the skins he’d drawn his sketches on. “We’ll let it lie hidden till spring, then see what grows.”

  Arthur was tired of waiting for his wedding, and for fighting-season to come round again. He left Cei in charge and took his favourite companions off into the hills, hunting deer and wild pig down the same combes they’d hunted Saxons through that autumn. They took Bedwyr with them – he was almost one of them, since Badon-fight.

  Myrddin whiled away the time by teaching me to write. So if you are following my story, you have Myrddin to thank for it, and if it bores you, you have him to blame, for these crabbed black inky words that you’re reading are built from letters that he showed me how to make, scratching them with a stick in the ash before a winter fire in Aquae Sulis.

  One day, while the hunters were still away, I went down by myself to the waters, where I’d gone with Bedwyr when we first came to the town. The weather was warming, and the snow was gone from the streets, though the hill-tops were still speckled white. I was itchy and flea-bitten inside my clothes. I’d not had a chance to wash since Christmas, and even then I’d only splashed my face, too scared to even take my tunic off in front of the other boys. In the silent town the warm waters of Minerva seemed to call to me.

  A couple of serving-girls from Gwenhwyfar’s household were lingering near the pillared front entrance to the baths, the entrance the bishop had boarded up. I ducked along the building’s side before they saw me. Bedwyr and the other boys were forever seeking out those girls, swapping stories about them and wrangling over which one was prettiest or friendliest, but they scared me. I thought they might not be as blind as Bedwyr and his friends to my smooth chin.

  I crept into the baths through the same hole in the wall I’d found with Bedwyr, pushing my way through the twigs and the dangling charms. The big pool lay shadowed by its mossy, sagging roof, like a pool in a cave. I reached my hand down through the wreaths of mist and touched the water and it felt hot. It still smelled bad, but not as bad as me. I pulled off my leggings, unwrapped my breech-cloth, bared my whole white body to the shivery air. The water clopped gently against the old steps, and I walked down into it, grateful for its warmth.

  Have you bathed in warm water ever? I never had. It was like a miracle, to be warm again after those months of cold. Not warmed by a fire that roasts one side of you and leaves the other cold, but wrapped and coddled in warmness. My skin tingled with pleasure as I ducked under, smoothing my fingers through the greasy louse-nest of my hair, imagining the winter dirt coming off me in a cloud. Old coins and tin charms slithered beneath my toes, and drowned holly leaves pricked my soles. Opening my eyes in the soft green dark I saw something glimmer on the mulchy floor, and reached for it. My fingertips closed on a moon-shaped slip of metal that some old Roman had thrown there as an offering to the sacred waters.

  When I surfaced again, someone was watching me.

  How had I not seen her before? It was dark in there, I suppose, and my eyes were not used to it. Gwenhwyfar was in the shadows, just her head and shoulders showing above the lapping water, watching me with her grey eyes. I didn’t even recognize her at first. Her hair hung straight and wet around her face. I took her for the goddess of the place, and went under in a panic, snorting and gurgling.

  She came through the water to me and pulled me up, looking intently at my face as I choked and spat. “I know you,” she said. “The magician’s boy.”

  She smiled. I’d not seen her smile before. Had she seen me naked on the pool-side? Or had she only turned at the splashings I’d made? I shrank down in the water till it hid everything except my hedge-pig hair and flat brown face. Wavelets lapped at my nose and made me sneeze.

  Gwenhwyfar said, “Bishop Bedwin would be filled with righteous anger if he knew I came here. He says it is a wicked place, and full of pagan spirits. But I would rather risk meeting a spirit or two than smell as bad as Bedwin does.”

  I hugged myself under the water. My fists were clenched so tight that the moon-shaped charm I’d dredged up dug its points into my palm. “I won’t tell,” I promised.

  Gwenhwyfar backed away from me in a swirl of water. “Turn your back, magician’s boy.”

  So she still thought I was a boy! Or did she? I thought I saw an odd light in her eyes. Maybe I imagined it. I turned and bowed my head and shut my eyes, and heard the water shift and slosh as she waded to the far side of the pool to climb out. I stole one glance, and had a glimpse of her long body before she wrapped a square of woollen-stuff around her. White, she was, like a stripped twig.

  XXII

  She hadn’t always lived in a town. When she was a girl Gwenhwyfar lived in a villa on a green hill beside a steep green cleave. The cleave was tangled with trees, feathery with ferns, a secret stream slinking black and gold through the oak-shadows. Gwenhwyfar went riding there on her pony, or hunted along the wood-shores with a little bow one of the servants made her. She was as wild as a fawn.

  At least, that’s how I see her, when I make pictures in my head of the life she led before.

  But fate had laid a snare for Gwenhwyfar; set to trap her when she reached the age of marriage. Her father was a half-brother of Ambrosius Aurelianus. The old general’s blood ran well diluted in her, but still it ran. You could s
ee it beneath the skin at her temples, and on the long, pale column of her throat. Those winding veins, bluish under her white flesh, with maybe a hint of imperial purple. She was a bridge between our time and the happier times of Ambrosius, and the man who married her would link himself and his sons with the great name of the Aureliani.

  Valerius’s brother was the first. He’d been chosen for her by her family and by her father’s allies among the ordo of Aquae Sulis. Gwenhwyfar didn’t mind. Marcus was handsome, light-hearted, kind; everything a girl could want. He brought her gifts. The seed of his son was already growing in her when the word came of his death in a cattle-raid.

  After that, it was Valerius’s turn. It’s not uncommon for a dead man’s brother to marry the girl he’d been promised to. Why spoil a neat arrangement just because the bridegroom had run himself upon some rustler’s pike? But Valerius was a poor substitute. He was cold and stern. He’d grown used to being overlooked in favour of his older brother, and it had soured him. Now Marcus was gone, Valerius took the things that had been his with a sort of bitter triumph. It didn’t please him to find that the baby in his new bride’s belly was one of them.

  It was a hard birth. The child was sickly, and soon dead. But in the few short days he lived, Gwenhwyfar loved him. Holding him made her happy. His little blue hands clutched fistfuls of her hair. She sang to him. When he died, the happiness went out of her for good. The cold old town they made her live in felt like a tomb. She dreamed her son was crying out for her, down under the cold ground, and she could not go to him. Her husband hated her. There were no more babies.

  And now a new husband had come for her. However hard she tried to slow the approach of her wedding to Arthur, the days kept slipping through her fingers. Her women made jokes about him. His strength. His manliness. All she could think of was the name his men gave him. The Bear. Sometimes it seemed to her that he really was a bear, poorly disguised as a man. His short, black bristling hair, his watchful eyes. The way he tore at his meat in the feast-hall. His snarls and roars when things displeased him. In the growing warmth of spring she shivered as she stitched her marriage-gown and imagined her wedding night.

  I felt sorry for her. Poor old heron.

  XXIII

  We went travelling that springtime, my master and me, with Arthur and Gwenhwyfar’s wedding-hymns still ringing around inside our skulls. “We’ll let the Bear have some time alone with his new bride,” said Myrddin. “He’s a Christian lord now, with a Christian wife, and he doesn’t need an old heathen like me about him.” So we went south and west, into the Summer Country, and I found out why they called it that. There would be good grazing there in summer, the people said, pastures of lush green grass where their red cows grew fat and sweet. But when I was there with Myrddin it was barely land at all. Water covered acre after acre, leaving nothing dry except the hedge-banks and the causeways.

  We’d come there with a purpose. King Maelwas of Dumnonia spent his year on a long round of travels from one of his holdings to the next. He was feasting that spring at Ynys Wydryn, the apple-isle which rises steep and green out of those wet levels, with a monastery balanced on its top. Maelwas was a Christian king. The monastery on Ynys Wydryn was his doing, and there was a fine hall there beside the wooden church where he and his sons and servants and his shield-companions could stay when he came to pray.

  The monks who kept the place were wary of Myrddin, even though he took care to hide away his old charms and amulets before we crossed the causeway to their gate. They knew his reputation as a magic worker, and I think they would have turned him away, but someone went to tell Maelwas who it was who had come seeking him, and Maelwas sent a messenger to the abbot and told him to let us in.

  Maelwas surprised me. I thought the king of so much country would be a man like Arthur, hard and scarred, forever sniffing the wind for fresh fights. But Maelwas was old, and spoke soft, and seemed gentle-mannered. I suppose he had been wilder in his youth, when he rode with Ambrosius. He greeted Myrddin, and asked after Gwenhwyfar, who was a kinswoman of his – his half-sister’s daughter’s daughter. “I remember her as a girl,” he said. “A pretty thing. Your Arthur is a lucky man. I trust he’ll treat her well.”

  That night in his hall Myrddin told his tales of Arthur. No enchanted swords or green men there. Just Arthur the soldier of Christ; how he’d driven back the Saxon army that tried to seize Aquae Sulis, and beaten the Devil in a rock-throwing contest out in the west somewhere.

  Maelwas listened with a little smile about him always, as if to show us that he knew these tales weren’t true, however pleasant it might be to hear them by the hearth.

  We stayed a few days at Ynys Wydryn. On the morning we left, when a booming wind was combing the grass flat and making cats’-paws on the flooded fens, Maelwas spoke alone to Myrddin. I heard them as I brought the horses close.

  “I’ve had no tribute this year from your master in Aquae Sulis. Perhaps his wedding to my pretty kinswoman drove it from his mind.”

  “Arthur would like to pay you all he owes,” Myrddin promised. “But he has an army of cavalry to feed. His warriors aren’t untrained levies who can go home to their farms between fights and grow their own food. They are soldiers, who live for war. He must put their needs first if he is to keep them together, and strong enough to defeat the Saxon threat.”

  “But the Saxons have not troubled us since Ambrosius’s time,” Maelwas pointed out. “A few raids. More of a nuisance than a threat.”

  “They will come again,” said Myrddin fiercely. “All the time we British fight among ourselves, the Saxons in the east grow stronger. They will drive west again one day, unless we smash them utterly.”

  “And is Arthur truly strong enough to do that?” Maelwas asked. “To drive them back across the sea? Can he really finish the work Ambrosius began? End the dismal partition of Britain and win back the lost east for Christ?”

  “Not alone,” my master said. “But if you would make him leader of your war-band in battle, and command all the lesser kings who pay you tribute to do likewise, he could be the new Ambrosius.”

  “Except that Ambrosius fought for Britain and the Christian faith,” said Maelwas mildly, “and I do not think Arthur fights for anything but Arthur. More robber than soldier, I’ve heard. A wild, roving man, like Uthr before him. A looter of churches. A cattle-thief. Only last summer he came plundering our westward lands, making men pay him tribute that was not his to take.”

  Myrddin shrugged. “A mistake. When a man is as strong as Arthur, he over-reaches himself sometimes. But your kinswoman Gwenhwyfar has tamed that wildness out of him. Her love of Christ has set him a good example. Arthur is God’s strong man. Henceforward, he’ll fight only Saxons. He would lead your war-band with honour and victory.”

  Maelwas was silent a moment, his eyes on Myrddin’s, considering. The watching monks and warriors shuffled and stirred. Cloaks flapped in the breeze and a man coughed. I don’t think they liked to see their master dealing so friendly-like with mine. There were men there who hoped to lead Maelwas’s war-band themselves one day.

  Suddenly Maelwas chuckled, and slapped Myrddin’s shoulder. “Thank you for your stories,” he said. “I shall consider what you say, and if it seems to me that Arthur is really all you claim, you will hear from me.” Then, walking with Myrddin towards the place where I was waiting with the horses, he nodded at me, and said, “Why do you dress her as a boy?”

  Myrddin must have been taken by surprise. Knowing him, I could see that he was startled. But he plucked a story from the air as calmly as another man might swat a fly. “She is my daughter,” he said gravely. “But this travelling life leads us often among wild places and fighting men. For her own protection I dress her as a boy.”

  Maelwas smiled, looking me up and down. “It is a good disguise,” he said. “But I don’t think it will work much longer.”

  My master did not speak to me as we rode back across the causeway. I could feel anger coming off hi
m like warmth off a fire. It had been bad for him, being found out in a trick at the last moment like that. I felt ashamed of myself for letting old Maelwas see the truth. Had it been my fault? Had I not been boyish enough? I’d let my hair get longer, following the same fashion as Bedwyr and the other boys. It hung below my ears, and maybe it showed up something girlish in my face.

  I felt in the pouch on my belt and gripped the old moon-charm I’d taken from the baths that day Gwenhwyfar saw me there. When I found it I’d been thinking to give it to my master, so he could string it round his neck with all the rest, or hang it up outside his door to keep thieves out. But he would have wanted to know where I had found it, and I knew if I’d told him he’d have made me spill out the whole story, somehow: how I’d met Gwenhwyfar, and how she’d nearly found my secret out. Rather than face his anger, I had kept it hid. And now he was going to be angry anyway.

  He didn’t speak until we reached the old troop road. Then he said, “He’s a cunning old fox, that Maelwas. He sees things other men don’t.” He looked at me a long while. Nodded, as if something had been decided. “The weather is set fair. We won’t go back to Aquae Sulis yet.”

  “But you must tell Arthur what King Maelwas said…”

  “I’ll send him word. Arthur can cope without me for a season, I think.”

  And he turned his horse west instead of east, and what was there for me to do but follow him? He’d not been angry with me, but I couldn’t help thinking, as I urged Dewi after him, that this was some sort of punishment.

  Summer rolled us along like stones in a stream. Moridunum to Isca, Isca to Tamaris, and in between them all the little places, Caer this and Din that, which the Romans had never given names to, and had left with their old names and their old ways. And after Tamaris-ford there were barely any Roman names at all, just the long land of Kernyw under its wide sky. But wherever we went, people had heard of Arthur, and were glad to hear more. Myrddin scattered stories like sparks, and the brush-fire of Arthur’s fame spread.