The Broken Sword

by Molly Cochran

  Beatrice laughed, and the flame from the candle between them cast its light on her face, making her skin look like velvet.

  "Shall I make another?" she asked.

  "Maybe we should play checkers." Arthur made a fist and squashed his rook into a flat disk.

  "What a smashing idea!"

  Arthur groaned.

  "Shh." She pointed to Taliesin, who was snoring in a makeshift hammock some ten feet away. "The poor dear must be awfully tired. This is the first I've seen him sleep since we left…" Her eyes registered the memory of that terrible day. "... Marrakesh..." Suddenly all the fun that had bubbled out of her during their game seemed to dry up. "Well, then," she said, trying to ignore the pain she felt. "Would you rather be red or black?"

  "I know how you feel," he said. "I do."

  "Yes, I know you do," she whispered. "Hal was all you had, just like my Grams."

  He looked away.

  "The difference is, Hal's going to come back."

  "No, he isn't," Arthur hissed. "You don't have to say things like that to make me feel better. I'm not a little kid." He rolled over in his bedding.

  "Oh, Arthur, I wasn't patronizing you. Please believe me.”

  "Then why'd you say it?" Through his anger, a glimmer of hope appeared in his eyes. "Did Taliesin tell you?" If the old man said Hal was alive, then he was. Taliesin knew everything.

  "No."

  "Oh," Arthur said, disappointed.

  "But I know it."

  "Okay," he said, trying to smile.

  "I know you don't believe me. I'm not putting it into words very well." She searched his face. "It's just that sometimes I get a feeling of... of watching something happen, although I can't see it with my eyes. It's as though a puzzle is coming together. Hal is a piece of the puzzle, and so is Mr. Taliesin. But you're the most important piece of all, Arthur. Everything that's coming is because of you."

  Arthur swallowed. He knew what Beatrice was talking about, even if she herself did not. He knew who he was, what he was. He knew why Hal and the old man had come into his life.

  What he didn't know was what he was supposed to do about it.

  "What's coming?" he asked, desperately wanting to hear the answer.

  "A beginning," she said. She touched her fingers to his cheek. "You're going to do something wonderful."

  "Like what?"

  She shrugged. "You'll have to decide that, I imagine." Beatrice got gracefully to her feet. "I want to give you something." She went over to her bedroll, then came back carrying an object in her two hands. It was the cup. "This was meant for you. I'm sure of that."

  He held it. "You wouldn't be giving me this if you knew what it can do."

  "Oh, I know. It will keep you alive forever."

  Arthur shook his head, then offered it back to her. "I don't think I want that."

  "Keep it anyway, Arthur. It's part of the puzzle."

  The candle guttered. "Oh, man," he said. "Where'd we put the matches?"

  "I'll get them for you if you want, but I'm going to bed."

  "Oh. Never mind, then."

  He heard Beatrice walking confidently through the darkness, using the senses she had depended on long before she gained her sight. Arthur curled up in his blanket, picturing her face in the firelight, then went to sleep.

  When Taliesin awakened in the middle of the night, she was squatting near his hammock, her face on a level with his.

  "Good heavens, child, you startled me!" he said, swinging his legs to the floor. He stood up and lit a candle which he had placed on one of the wooden crates in the hold. Beatrice didn't move. "Is something on your mind?"

  "Mona," she whispered. "I've been thinking of Mona."

  The old man felt a shiver. "How do you know about that?"

  "Do you remember?" The girl stared straight ahead, her eyes open but focused far away, past Taliesin's face, to a place deep within his private memories. Those memories were from more than a thousand years ago, but they still burned in his mind, intense and immediate.

  "Yes, I remember," he said quietly. "It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. Perhaps the most beautiful place on earth."

  "You were little more than a boy when you came, a joker and a balladeer."

  Taliesin stiffened. "You could not know that!"

  She smiled, an impish grin that make the old man's heart skip.

  "Who are you?" he demanded.

  The girl did not answer. Her eyes, the old man thought. If he had not known that Beatrice was sighted, he would have believed she was still blind.

  He had been a bard.

  That was the only way he could think of to make a living away from the court after King Ambrosius died. Out of love for his youngest and brightest child, the king had given young Taliesin the title of Prince and a place in the castle—a gift which had proven to be a curse rather than a blessing.

  As a bastard, Taliesin Was viewed as a threat by Ambrosius' eldest son, Uther, even though three other legitimate heirs stood between Taliesin and the rulership of Ambrosius' chiefdom. Perhaps it was the open affection the king had always shown this child of his old age, whose mother had brought him a happiness unlike any he had known with his queen while she was alive; or it might have been Taliesin's particular gifts—his gentleness, his prescient sensitivity, his stunning capacity for learning—that singled him out as a target for Uther's hatred. For whatever reason, Uther had always made it clear that his much younger half-brother would not be welcome in the court after Ambrosius was gone. As the old King's strength began to fail, Taliesin began to notice Uther watching him through narrowed eyes, as if he half expected his father to name the unwanted child, rather than Uther himself, as his successor.

  Not that Taliesin ever harbored pretensions toward the throne. He was a scholar by nature, not at all inclined toward leading men into battle or engaging in the niggling demands of statecraft. His position in his father's court had allowed him the opportunity to explore the world of the mind through the voluminous scrolls left by the Romans and the rarer and subtler texts of the mystical Irish writers. Too, he studied the properties of herbs and spirit-healing from the wise women who lived in the countryside, the anatomy of the human body from the surgeons who accompanied soldiers into battle, and music from the traveling entertainers who stopped by King Ambrosius' stronghold during times of peace.

  This was what he loved most. During the evenings when the bards came to bring news of neighboring chiefdoms or sing the ancient histories of Wales, Taliesin would sit motionless for hours, his eyes smarting from the smoke of the torch fires, as he committed each line to memory.

  He taught himself to write in his native language, using the simple Roman alphabet to sound out the complex Welsh words in order to remember the hundreds of songs extolling the heroic exploits of brave Welsh warriors and wicked kings (they were all wicked, except for Ambrosius, he noted, assuming the bards changed the names of the villains and heroes with each castle they visited). And he taught himself to play instruments—a harp he constructed from a piece of pine and strings of squirrel gut, several flutes and drums, and a long, shallow basin in which strings resonated against hammered bells.

  These were all he took with him when he left the castle after Uther tried to kill him.

  The attempt on his life had not been unexpected; when Uther took time out from his new duties to go for a morning ride in the mountains with a fifteen-year-old boy whose company he had never sought before, Taliesin knew that he would end up either running for his life or losing it.

  As it turned out, Uther's lack of interest in his imagined rival was what saved Taliesin. Believing the thin, unathletic boy to be frail and unaccustomed to the outdoors, he led his young bastard half-brother to the wilds of Gwynedd, in the western part of the kingdom, where the hills were rugged and the snow fell early, and the howling of wolves pierced the silence of the long nights. There, in the evening fog that confused the most experienced huntsmen, Uther sent Taliesin into a va
lley to investigate what he said might be a wild boar in a thicket. When the boy returned to the rise where he had left Uther, the crown prince was gone.

  With a sigh of relief, Taliesin dismounted and led his horse to a nearby stream to drink. So this was all it was to be, he thought, making a sign of gratitude to Mithras, the god whose stream this was. Disdainful of actually murdering him, Uther had simply left Taliesin to die of exposure or wolves.

  Neither was a real possibility. Taliesin knew the west intimately. He had traveled often to these parts to consult with the wise ones—the mid wives and herb-healers who journeyed here for the rare flowers and grasses that made up their apothecaries, the hermits who chose to live in the west because of its loneliness and harsh beauty, and the druids who passed through one by one, always solitary, on their way from the island of Mona which was the beating heart of their community.

  For the druids, the few inhabitants of the area came two or three times a week to set food beneath the worn stone shrines to Mithras at the sources of the mountain streams. The druids were always being called by some king or other to cast spells for victory in battle or for a queen's delivery of a strong boy-child. Sometimes those calls were heeded, sometimes not. No one except the Innocent, the druids' term for the first among their number, told these magicians where to practice their art, and not even the Innocent could order the results.

  Consequently, the local herders and fishermen felt a strong combination of fear and divine protection from the wizards of Mona who passed through their bleak land on the way to castles or religious enclaves in more hospitable climates to the south and east. To ensure their goodwill, the precious and scarce food was set out even in the foulest weather to feed the magicians or their gods or, more often, the wolves which, according to the druids, were also a part of All That Is.

  Armed with this knowledge, Taliesin spent the night in a cave near the Mithras shrine, well fed and protected from predators by a fire created with tinder and flint left conveniently nearby, and considered the urgency of his departure from his father's court.

  During that night, he heard music from the druids' island of Mona. It was a chant of sorts, the ancient and wild music of the earth itself. He had heard people speak of it before, this office that took place at the quietest hour of the night, but he had not come close to imagining the music. Sometimes it was harsh, as forbidding as the countryside from which it originated; then, later, the sound grew serene as angels' wings, with the lilting high voices of women encasing the low baritone cry of the druid men.

  He heard it again the next morning, at dawn, when the fog settled thickly into the valleys like pools of milk. The Salutation to the Sun, sung in ancient syllables no longer recognizable as Welsh, drifting in patches like puffs of wind across the water and the cold mountain air.

  Mona, he thought, staring out into the fog toward the source of the song. Every word spoken or sung there was magic. The island was the great repository of truth, of all the knowledge in the world worth keeping. It was not stored in books, as were the histories and poetry of the Irish. The barbarian Vikings had plundered Ireland's sacred places and used those precious parchment tomes to start their cooking fires. No, the wisdom of Mona was not trusted to written symbols that might be destroyed in a moment or misinterpreted through centuries. It was kept, intact and perfect, in the minds of all its druids. Each gray-hooded disciple, young or old, male or female, devoted his life to absorbing Mona's knowledge until he was himself that knowledge, a living embodiment of the power of All That Is.

  Taliesin closed his eyes to better hear the music. The druids were not of the world. Their discipline took them out of the sphere of men to become part of a greater whole, their wizardry the magic of the universe. Mona was where he belonged, where he wished to be more than any place else on earth.

  With an inrush of air, he ran to untie his horse. He would go there now, straightaway, and ask to be admitted as a student or a menial. Mentally he went over his qualifications: He could read and write; that would be an asset to the community. He was already self-trained in the use of herbs and medicines. His knowledge would be laughable compared with that of the disciples at Mona, but at least he was not completely ignorant. And he was stronger than he looked. Yes, he would…

  Just before the crest of the hill where his horse waited, Taliesin stopped with a gasp. A wolf had walked unseen out of the fog and now stood directly in front of him, its long shape barring his way, its head turned to face him.

  The animal was old, he could see that from its grizzled white muzzle, but it was not lame or ill. Oddly, it exhibited no sign of fear at seeing him. Its fangs were not bared, and its ears were not slanted back; nor had its body assumed the crouched position of attack. Then, with a sudden ray of sunlight that shot over the horizon, Taliesin noticed something else about the wolf.

  It was blind.

  A creamy blue film completely covered its eyes. The wolf seemed to be looking at Taliesin through two shafts of moonlight.

  Maybe he doesn't know I'm here, he thought wildly. If I'm still, if I'm very quiet…

  Go to your father, a voice said.

  Involuntarily, Taliesin snapped his head around. There was no one besides himself and the wolf in the still valley. Yet the voice had been so clear!

  The animal was still facing him calmly, those blank, unseeing eyes seeming to peer at him from the depths of the universe.

  He is dying. Make your farewells. Go. Mona will wait.

  A thin cry of fear and confusion escaped from the boy's throat. The wolf blinked its slitted eyes slowly. Then, with a graceful swoop of its long tail, it walked back into the fog.

  Taliesin stumbled toward his horse and untied it with wildly shaking hands. Of course the wolf had not spoken, he told himself. No one had. The voice, as he remembered it, had been neither young nor old, male nor female. Not a real voice at all, but some trick of the imagination borne of the cold and the mystery of this deserted place. It would be foolish to go home now, to give Uther another chance to kill him.

  As he mounted, he heard again the weird, compelling music from the island, and it broke his heart.

  "Mona will wait," he whispered.

  He turned his horse toward the east and, with the rising sun stinging his eyes, headed at a canter back toward Ambrosius' castle.

  He remained at court only long enough to say good-bye to Ambrosius, who had raised his bastard son like a prince. Uther, who had scowled in suppressed rage when the boy rode into the castle gates, was finally appeased when Taliesin rode back out with nothing more than his instruments and a few books. He was, in fact, so pleased with his half-brother's voluntary banishment that years later, when Taliesin's name was known throughout Wales and his songs were remembered and sung in places as far away as Cornwall and Scotland, Uther invited the famous bard to sing at the castle where the two of them had once shared a father.

  And Taliesin had accepted, as he had accepted the invitations of all the petty chiefs who called themselves kings, though they all knew that, since the Romans, there had been no real king to rule Britain.

  The Romans had come some four hundred years before. They had built roads, established cities, introduced bathing, brought books, even officially recognized some of the local kings as honorary citizens of Rome. An ancestor of Ambrosius himself had been granted this honor generations before, which was why his chiefdom had been permitted to stand. The machine-like invaders from their warm land to the south had deemed this family "civilized"—meaning that the clans so honored were less likely to attack the Romans as they went about the business of Romanizing Britain.

  Or tried to. They had been trying for centuries to instill the Pax Romana on the wild tribes of this northern land. Beginning with Vercingetorix of Gaul, the Romans had systematically eliminated every leader capable of uniting the disparate chiefdoms. They had burned the villages of the rebellious, starved the uncertain, murdered by the thousands the women and children who wandered as refugees, preferr
ing to live off the meager fruits of the uncultivated earth rather than look to their conquerors for succor.

  But their efforts had been for nothing. The wide Roman-built roads went unused by the proud Britons. Their magnificent baths were smeared with dung. And the populace, from farmers armed with wooden pitchforks to the educated honorary Romans and their genteel wives, had never, not in four hundred years, ceased to fight.

  By the time Taliesin was born, the Romans had all but vanished from Britain, maintaining only a small number of garrisons in England to protect their towns populated almost exclusively by Romans and their mixed-blood descendants. In Wales, the soldiers were almost never seen.

  "It is because of Mona," the Welsh whispered among themselves. "The druids keep them away with their magic."

  Any Roman worth his salt wages would have laughed at such an idea. The druids were of no consequence, the useless relics of an ancient folk religion whose tenets were so lost in time that the people no longer knew what they were. Oh, the warrior chieftains occasionally prevailed on the gray-robed holy men to cast some sort of spell or other (which, more often than not, didn't work), and the farmers in the barbaric countryside still coupled with their women in the fields, believing that the act of procreation would bring about a good harvest, but there were no services in this dying religion, nothing to connect the druids with any sort of reality. No, despite the fierce patriotism of its inhabitants, the real reason the Romans had abandoned Wales was that there was nothing in that desolate land worth taking.

  Still, the stature of the druids grew during the Empire's slow retreat from Britain. When Rome itself began to suffer from constant attack by nomadic barbarians and the far-flung legions were recalled home one by one to defend their besieged city, even the conquered Britons in places as Romanized as Londinium began to believe that this had been the work of the druids who manipulated the stars of destiny from their mysterious island.

  "If only the holy men could give us a king to unify the chiefdoms," mused the people from one shore of Britain to the other.