It may not have mattered much to the false bards and their masters, but it mattered more than anything else to me and to my true fellows, and to other artists as well. For each art partakes in the end of each other art, and each artist shares in the crafts of his coequals. The bard must be musician and lymner, not merely a storyteller: The words must be painted, they must be portrait and landscape and sculpture all together. There must be music in it too, the words must sing; and dance, they must move to a palpable rhythm. Likewise the lymner or carver, for their part, must tell a story in their works, make statue or painting move, put frozen music in pictures. And the musician must be poet and painter together, his chaunts must be a thing one can put hands upon, as upon another person in a dance, or move through as tangible as a landscape, or read as clear and plain as an ancient text.
But now it became my duty, just as clear and plain, to put all this aside for a while, so that I might serve it in secret; and, perhaps, to serve it so better than I had ever done before…
One of the controls Edeyrn had over bards at that time—which was to say, since bards did nearly all the general teaching in Keltia, over the minds of Kelts as well—was the requirement that they be tested, and granted leave to practice only by means of such licensing. Some of us, it was true, had actually passed through his bastard bard-schools, and so qualified. Yet this ploy presented the rest of us somewhat of a problem: Though there were not all so many of us around, still there were enough of us to give the dimmest enumerator pause, should it ever come to counting of our numbers. After even the most cursory census, it would be plain to all that there were far more bards about than the false schools could have possibly produced, and the whole secret structure, so laboriously constructed upon a foundation of so many lives and deaths, would be laid bare before the Marbh-draoi's wrathful eye.
So to forestall such disaster, we had contrived over the years to get some of our own into places of influence within the Theocracy edifice, so that they would be among the ones doing the testing and granting the licenses to practice, or altering the records to allow for an extra few bards each year out of each of the approved schools.
Therefore was I so confident of my triumph, when I went for my testing before a panel of a Druid, a senior Raven, and the bard who had tested Elphin before me—the bard who had granted impeccable credentials to many others like us, sworn to destroy the system that required such deceptions of its folk.
The test itself was almost anticlimactical: first a bored Druid of Edeyrn's faction, dull and untalented; then an equally bored Raven with an ear of lead. Then came my final inquisitioner, a merry-faced woman of an age to be my grandmother, with the hearing of a lynx and the tongue of a serpent. We went through the thing under the noses of the other two as if it were some dance to which we knew secret steps; she granted me my license as if it were an afterthought, a foregone thing—which in truth it was—and the other examiners left, clearly relieved to be done with a tedious duty. Upon which we spent the rest of the afternoon chatting about Tinnavardan, in dichtal of course; for my part I had to explain the Hanes, of which she had heard much but in which she had not been instructed—the which I was pleased to remedy.
It was done, then; I had not expected to have such a feeling of exhilaration, but there it was. Tracing the feeling to its source, as I went to rejoin Elphin, I realized that I had achieved more than mere ratification here today: I had achieved empowerment. Now I could begin in earnest, as Arthur already had, to put my gifts to work for my country—or what would once again be my country, after all our gifts and arts and swords had worked together to make it so.
To that end, then, with the blessing of Uthyr and Ygrawn and Merlynn and Elphin, I left Coldgates to set out on my journeying years. I was an anruth, and so did I begin as bard.
And continued so for seven years together, wandering round Gwynedd from hall to hall, sleeping rough, sleeping fine—not unlike the journeys I had made with Elphin years before. Little of note befell me; it was for me a time of learning, of looking with all senses open, not just eyes alone.
I have mentioned now and again in these pages how Keltia was a sad, poor kingdom just at that time: Held down by Edeyrn and the rule of Ravens, we had no technology or trade to speak of, nothing to offer in commerce beyond our borders; we had all but forgotten that we were born a starfaring people—few folk these days save those favored of the Theocracy had ever seen their own home world from space.
And the more I went round Gwynedd the more I saw: folk worn down before their time, poor souls; folk embittered by lost opportunity and soured by thwarted dreams; folk clever enough to know they had been cheated of their birthright, but too angry to be able to do aught about it save only to rant impotently. Sad and sorry did it make me; more than that, it all but broke my heart, and sore did it tax my vow of secrecy. It was all that I could do to keep from crying out to them, 'Do not despair so! Do not grieve! Do not lose that angry edge!,' to keep from telling them that all would be restored to them, and more, and sooner than they might well believe.
So I sang them what comfort I could; and, seeing it, singing it, I began to believe it myself. I had been privileged, as few others had, to see the process of our salvation beginning, and yet I had not been able truly to believe in it even so. I had seen in my own foster-brother the shining heart of the power that was beginning to rise, as power will clothe the one who works the magic in the circle's center, though that power is raised not by him but by the others who spiral round to raise it.
But still I had not been able to accept it, not completely, not until now, now that I saw the ragged minds and poor bare souls and scarred hopes that two hundred years of Edeyrn's rule had left to call Keltia. And all the time as I travelled, I heard rumor of some upstart rebel in the western mountains, who, striking swift and hard and seemingly out of nowhere, had begun in the past few years to make the lives of the Raven garrisons true and warranted hell.
None of those who reported of him knew his name or parentage—it was said he had come out of the far north, but there were as many tales that held him for a southerner, or for a man of the remote eastern isles, or even that he had come down from Arianwen, Gwynedd's small white moon, where wild savage folk were rumored yet to dwell.
No need to tell you how much this talk interested me: Not only did I most shamelessly use every trick I knew, bard's trick and Druid's trick alike, to coax every word known of this mysterious ravager from the lips of my informants; but I then passed on the tales, suitably enhanced and enforced, to the next little gathering for which I chaunted, in the next little townland.
I was not entirely alone on these rounds: Elphin and I encountered each other often, and exchanged, besides those embraces of greeting of friends unsure if each might be the last, all such news as had come our ways since our latest encounter. And from time to time I travelled with a companion—another bard, perhaps, on an errand like to mine, or a Fian spying out the land and the forces upon it, but always one of our own; and if from time to time these companions should chance to be lasses, and companionship took on a warmer hue, that too was as it should be. Neither I nor they could risk romance with any who did not share our cause and secrets; one more reason for us to share as we could.
And sometimes even there were friends: Daronwy, met one summer afternoon at a market square in a town called Talgarth; Betwyr and Tryffin, most convincing-looking layabouts, feigning drunk in a roadside bruidean near Caer Dathyl; one time even Tarian—her tall blond elegance impossible to alter, she had not troubled to try, and was putting on a very creditable performance as a high-ranking, arrogant Theocracy lady.
And once even Arthur himself, though it was folly beyond belief that he should dare to show his face in public without a sword in his hand and his Companions at his back.
"Good enough reason for it, Talyn," he said, setting down his ale-mether. "Though perhaps like all the others you may not think so—"
"That shall be when I have heard," I said, u
nable to suppress a stab of alarm. We had met, by arrangement, at a horse-fair in a country town in the far southwest of Arvon, and after the ritual examination of some very fine beasts offered for purchase, had repaired to the tap-room of the local inn, ostensibly to discuss business. Yet even in so remote a place we could not avoid the occasional Raven, and two already had taken cursory note of our presence—though with the town full of strangers for the fair we were most likely safe enough.
But for once Arthur, as a rule the most straightforward and plainspoken of individuals, seemed to find it hard to come to his point, and after an unbearable minute or two of watching him struggle for words, I sought to find some for him.
"Is it to do with your uncle?" I asked—the first rule of the Counterinsurgency's operatives was that the name of Uthyr Pendreic, and the names of his kin, should never be spoken outside the shielings save in a known safe place, which, gods knew, a tap-room in a back-country village was not like to be.
He shook his head. "Nay, nor with my mother or sisters or cousin—I fear this time it is I who cause the problem."
"What have you done this time?"
Arthur looked up at me at last with a strange smile upon his face. "I have fallen in love, braud. I am on my way to wed, and to take her home with me to Llwynarth."
Out of all the thoughts that crowded my mind, out of all the words I might have said, thought and word came out the same. "Whyfor?"
"Oh, for a few, any road, of the customary reasons… Her name is Gwenwynbar; she is the daughter of the lord of Plymon. And before you ask, aye, my uncle and my mother have been told."
"And they approve?"
"They think it—ill-timed."
And they are not alone to think it so… "Then if I may ask again, whyfor? Do you love her so greatly?"
"Whatever 'love' means," he said with an impatient flick of his fingers. "At least I am not at war with her as I have been with—Well, there is peacefulness between us, and I have been fighting alone these many years now; have I not earned the chance of a little happiness for myself?"
I nodded, but my eyes were on the table in front of me, for I knew the lady somewhat from my travels. Her father, Gerwin, was one of Uthyr's staunchest supporters, who had more than once saved the lives of Counterinsurgency spies fleeing Ravens, and who was regarded by Keils Rathen, Uthyr's warlord, and the Taoiseach Marigh Aberdaron as one of the surest and safest sources of information we had on all the planet.
But the daughter—whom I had met once, briefly, in her father's hall while I was there on bard's business—was cut from inferior cloth; or so at least I had thought. She had seemed pretty enough, but brainless, a sly-eyed baggage, where what Arthur wanted was a mate of character and courage. He wanted Gweniver, though he did not yet know it, and no more did she know she wanted him; they would, I knew, but it appeared that in the meantime we were doomed to suffer Gwenwynbar queening it over us all. Not a happy thought—but Arthur was speaking again.
"—when you meet her, Talyn. Come with me now to Rhosyran, to stand with me before the brehon, and then come back with us to Llwynarth."
Sunk in gloom as I was by then, I caught the only word he had said that seemed to cheer.
'Brehon'! It is a brehon union, then?"
Arthur looked surprised. "Did I not say so? Aye, for the space of a year of Beli; my uncle thought it best."
I did not say how very fervently I agreed with the wisdom of Uthyr the King; at least, not then. But that night, lying awake next the quartz-fire, Arthur a shadowy sleeping shape just beyond the circle of light, I stared unseeing at the summer stars, full of a dread I could neither shake nor share, nor even clearly define.
That day for the first time I had looked on my fostern as another might, to see him as another—as a woman—might see him. Tall by now as a young rowan—and even in Keltia his height did mark him out, yet another reason why he should not be showing himself—hair red-brown like dark copper in sunlight, skin ale-brown where that sun had touched it, pale as a true Kelt's where clothes covered: Arthur was thirty-three this Wolf-moon past, still not grown to full strength and wisdom, but full of youth and fire and grace. Most attractive to any maid, and I assumed that in spite of his growing burdens of war there had been a few he had found attractive in his turn. Still, I saw no need for him to wed one of them…
I should not have been as surprised as I was, indeed, surprised to find myself: Though it seemed to me a thing irresponsible in the extreme, to choose this time—and this woman—to wed, a brehon union was by far not the worst fate that might have befallen, and perhaps all would yet be well. And too, as he himself had said, surely he deserved some joy, and if he had found the possibility with this daughter of an old and loyal house, may he be welcome to it.
Yet as I lay there, one word echoed and re-echoed in my mind, until it seemed that not my soul alone but all the sleeping darkness round must ring with it: Gwenwynbar. A pretty name, as Arthur thought it. But to me it had another aspect altogether: In the bardic usage, the ancient meaning of that name was 'Poisoned Spear.'
Travelling openly, it took us only three days to come to Rhosyran, a fortified manor on the sea-coast below Caerllyon. There we were received by Gerwin and Tamise, his lady, and entertained most royally by the household. How royally was made apparent when on the morrow of our arrival, Ygrawn herself arrived.
"Did you think I should stay away?" she asked with some heat, when, alone with her in her chamber, I asked cautiously as to whether she should have dared to come. "Tell me, Talyn, what do you think of this one who is to be my daughter?"
"Have you not met her yet, methryn?" I asked, surprised.
Ygrawn shook her head. "I have not, and little am I looking forward to it… But I asked what you did think."
"She is no Gweniver," I said flatly, and was grimly pleased to see Ygrawn smile.
"Nor, for all her patent hopes, will she rule at my son's side."
In spite of myself, I laughed. "That, I think, she has already learned: that queenship is reserved to another—now, and in time to come."
"Has she indeed?" said Ygrawn, still smiling. "Then perhaps she will be as quick to learn the rest of it."
That night in hall was the first time I had seen Arthur's lady at close hand; indeed, I had seen her only twice before, that one time many years ago, and briefly when she had welcomed us on our arrival. I watched her now, trying to see her as Arthur saw her. She was very fair, even beautiful in a showy way: thick curling hair of red-bronze-gold, huge brown eyes, a tall and slender form. She was magnificently clad but much overpainted, and wore too many jewels at neck and ears and wrists and fingers. Lovely indeed; and yet there was something not lovely at all behind her fairness, something as subtle and deathly as blight on a rose—the faintest taint of unwholesomeness, as something that has been permitted to ripen past perfection, into rot.
Gwenwynbar came forward with the guest-mether, to offer to Ygrawn as we sat at table, a fine show of deference on her that I knew Ygrawn saw through as easily as I did. The great mystery for both of us was why Arthur did not…
"And this is—?" Ygrawn knew perfectly well the girl's name and her descent for the past two thousand years; this hesitation was calculated and two-edged: to disconcert the young woman, and to hear her speak for herself.
"Gwenwynbar, Lady," she said in a soft, childlike voice. "But I am called Gwenar, if it please you."
I could tell without looking exactly how much it pleased Ygrawn—not one smallest bit—but she was Queen, and she was Arthur's mother, and she owed Gwenwynbar at least the outward seeming of civility and welcome. So she took the guest-cup, and drank, and pledged the household her friendship and Uthyr's together, and bade the ceremony begin.
Next day Ygrawn prepared to return to Coldgates—she had come herself as much to spare Uthyr the journey as to see what manner of woman would now call her mathra-cheile, and she had seen. As for myself, I would be accompanying Arthur and Gwenwynbar—I alone refused to call her a
s she preferred, and gave her her full and fateful name on all occasions; which did little to endear me to her, and which of course was not meant to.
It was a strange and strained journey, to say the least. Though I was scrupulous in giving them all the privacy they could have wished, still it seemed that to Gwenwynbar my mere presence on the same planet with her new lord was threat and annoyance aimed at her personally. Well, good luck to her: I had been with Arthur rather longer than she, and gods willing, I would be with him still long after she had gone. This too she knew, and much did it chafe her.
But though I detested Gwenwynbar every bit as much as she loathed me, even so I found cause for delight in this seemingly interminable slog: We were going to Llwynarth, and it would be the first time I had ever been permitted to come there. Though the circumstances of my coming were not perhaps as I would have had them had I been master of the arranging, still at the end of this march I would be at the Bear's Grove at last, and I would have endured far more, and far worse, than Gwenwynbar's cross, jealous presence to get there.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-three
The news of Arthur's marriage had travelled before us to Llwynarth, so that by the time we arrived there the first astonished speculation had long since died down, and those who dwelled in that sanctuary were able to greet their leader's lady with what passed, at least, for civil welcome.
In truth it spoke more strongly for their powers of control than for their obedience to hospitality's laws: Tarian and Grehan met us, as commanders in Arthur's absence, with most of the Companions ranked at attention behind them. Now these two were after all members of princely families, kindreds that had been royal since Keltia's first beginnings; there was little they did not know about putting on a mask for public occasions, and the masks they had that day donned would not have cracked under blastfire. Oh, there was naught outward any might have called them on—stiff expressions of welcome, smiles of seeming warmth that all the same did not reach the eyes—in short, the sort of polite condescension for which the perpetrator cannot be accused without insult and under which the recipient can do naught but writhe in impotence.
The Hawk's Gray Feather Page 25