Musing on this, I walked straight into a motionless Eluned. As I apologised, she pointed ahead. Between us and the wall which had grown as we approached it, there stood a figure, facing in our direction. My first reaction, as always, was panic. The vagabondi had found us. The one I thought I had killed was alive. They knew they were looking for at least one young woman.
“Is it them?” I blurted.
Eluned turned to me and smiled. “No, my lady. It is our final guide. It is Gwenllian, last high servant of the lady. She who dwells in Uricon.”
The figure drew nearer. Just like Ceridwen, the Keeper of the Dyke, she was very tall and clothed all in red. While still some distance away, she spoke.
“Welcome, Eluned Llyn Y Gadair. Welcome Expected One. Long has been our waiting. Uricon welcomes and awaits you.”
Her voice was deep and magical, her words resonating through the air.
We had at last arrived in Uricon.
PART TWO
Uricon
Chapter 15
“The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.”
I stared at him. “You sound just like Eluned.” I was about to laugh, but the look on his face stopped me.
“That I take as a compliment. Eluned is of the old people. They know much that we have forgotten. You would do well to remember that.”
These many weeks after we had arrived at Uricon, there was still much I had to learn about this young man. We were sitting, uncomfortably, each on one of the small pillars of bricks that lay around. Before us loomed the vast, broken wall built, so it was said, by the old Romans. Each time I saw it I wondered at the mind that encompassed such an undertaking.
Unusually, the sun was shining and the air was warm. I had pulled the skirt of my shift up over my knees. The slight breeze cooled my calves. I knew Nefyn did not like to be up here in daylight, especially a day as bright as this, but I missed the warmth of the sun.
“Your legs are well-shaped,” he said. “You should discard this dress. Wear trousers. They would be better.”
I smiled at him. “Better for what?”
He looked at me, then looked away.
I knew he would not answer my question. “Besides, who would give me trousers? You?”
Even though I was considered to be tall for a woman, Nefyn stood head and shoulders above me. His legs seemed to reach up to my arm pits when I stood next to him.
“You should ask your tailor.”
“My who?”
“Your tailor. Ignoramus. The one who makes these shapeless garments you wear. They do not grow on trees.”
“She wouldn’t know how to make trousers. It’s easy to make one of these.” I stood up, dropped my skirts and twirled about.
“You could try asking her.”
I left him and wandered over to the enormous ruined wall. It soared upwards and off in both directions. Straight in front of where I stood now, there was an equally massive gap in the wall, as if someone had designed a doorway, but never found doors large enough to fill it.
“‘Through conquest of kingdoms, unconquered this wall endured.’”
Nefyn’s voice startled me. He was right behind me. “Who said that?”
“It is from the writing of the old people of England. They came after our old people. Took many of their lands. When they saw the works of the old Romans, they were astonished.”
“And so are we. And so are we. Look at it. Over two thousand years old. No one would think of building like this any more.” I looked around at what appeared to be nothing but desolation. “This was once a city?”
“One of the greatest. Filled with people. Laughing. Singing. Buying. Selling. Fighting. Drinking. Men. Women. Children.”
“Now they are gone. What is left of their city belongs to us. You. Me. Eluned. Perhaps Gwenllian.”
“The travelling women. Sometimes. And the ghosts.”
“The ghosts? What are they?” I assumed he meant the vagabondi when he said ‘travelling women’.
“Those who could not leave. Those who left their spirits here. Of the many generations, most left when the old Romans left. Some remained. Now they are gone. But they did not leave willingly.”
When Nefyn started to talk in this manner I tended to switch off. He became increasingly negative. Speaking of the past as if it was only yesterday. As if he could have changed the past, given the chance. I knew that was not possible, so his words simply irritated me. The future was all that concerned me. What was I – what were we going to do?
“Come on,” I said, turning to him. “Let’s go back inside. What we see out here always makes you sad.”
I put out my hand, but he did not take it. Arms by his side, his fists clenched, he turned away and headed back to the hidden room.
Chapter 16
“What do these words say?” I asked as we crouched down to crawl along the corridor leading to the Room. Along one side of the corridor there were words, carved into the rock face. No one answered. I had asked that the first time I had entered the room. I had been terrified, even with Nefyn crawling along in front of me, and Eluned behind me, constantly touching my foot to reassure me. With only the faint light from Nefyn’s candle, the tunnel had seemed to go on for ever, deeper and deeper into the cold, damp earth.
Since that time I had learned not to fear the darkness of the tunnel, even once crawling along it on my own without a candle, not something I wished to repeat. Each time I entered the tunnel I forced myself to memorise one or two of the carved words, then as soon as we arrived in the Room, I picked up my notebook and wrote them down, as near as I could. None of the letters were particularly clear, so some words I just made up, writing in the same jagged way, hoping that it would become clear once I had it all.
As I wrote down the final pair, Nefyn came up behind me and snatched the book away from me.
“The words in the tunnel,” he said.
“Yes. So what?”
“You can read them?”
“I don’t know yet. Those are the last two words. It’s complete now. Do you know what they say?”
“Of course not. They’re not English, are they?” He threw the book back to me. “You waste too much time.”
I crawled off into my corner, taking one of the small candles from the table. Eluned came to sit next to me.
“You must not fear him, my lady.”
“Fear him? I don’t fear him. He’s an idiot.”
“No, my lady. Not so. What did he wish to see in your book?”
I showed her the page in my book where I had written the words.
“You know these words?”
“What? Oh, they seem familiar. Somehow. I think they may be in Welsh. Like The Gododdin.”
“Yes, it seems so to me. But I think they are not written as they should be.”
“What do you mean? I wrote them down two words at a time, as they were written on the wall. At least, I think that’s how they were written. It’s difficult to be sure when I only get one chance, by the light of a flickering candle.”
Eluned sat down on the floor with the book on her lap. She turned to the back of it and tore out a blank page. “You have a pencil, my lady?”
I reached into the little niche where I kept my scant belongings and handed her a small pencil.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I will write your letters another time. Bigger. Perhaps clearer. Please be patient, my lady.”
I watched, reluctantly interested, as she folded the loose sheet, placed it beneath the words I had written and slowly started to copy them, enlarging each letter by about a half as she did so. It took her a while. Occasionally she held up the book, her finger pointing out a particular letter, with a quizzical look on her face. Each time I shrugged. I knew some of the letters were wrong. Some were mere guesswork. Eventually, she reached the end. Closing my book, she held up the page with her writing for
me to see.
This is what I read:
yg koet ymas ?ym ?bro ym bryn canhwyll yn tywyll a ?gerd genhyn ?kynan yn racwan ym ?pop discyn.
Where a letter or a word had been doubtful in my version, she had written a question mark. At first I could make nothing of it. Until Eluned pointed at the phrase almost in the centre – ‘canhwyll yn tywyll’. I read the words aloud. I repeated them.
“It is Welsh,” I said, at last. “‘Canhwyll yn tywyll’. Those words are Welsh. Wait. I think I know what they mean.”
I grabbed Taid’s notebook and my copy of The Gododdin from the niche. Flicking back and forth between both, I eventually wrote down ‘candle’ and ‘darkness’ beneath the first and third word. The second word I knew was ‘in’ – ‘candle in darkness’.
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s it. A candle in the darkness. That’s why these words are written on the wall of the tunnel. We use a candle to see in the darkness of the tunnel, just as whoever carved these words must have done. There has to be a meaning to the rest of the words.”
Eluned nodded, taking Taid’s notebook and The Gododdin from me, gently.
“Stop. Sleep, my lady. Tomorrow we see.”
I unrolled my blanket and promptly fell asleep.
Chapter 17
As usual, the cold awoke me the next morning. The thin light that came into the Room was just enough to show what little it contained. Eluned was sleeping beside the now extinguished fire, ready to set it as soon as she was up. Nefyn slept on the far side on a ramshackle old truckle bed. Between us was the low table with its two chairs, and I could just make out Nefyn’s pile of old books beside the tunnel entrance.
There was never any more natural light than this, no matter what time of the day it was, which was why I ventured outside as often as I could, despite Nefyn’s and Eluned’s misgivings. She had not ventured out of the Room since we first entered it, now nearly three weeks ago. A thin curtain across one corner of the room hid another smaller room that contained what Nefyn called ‘the latrine’ which was where we had to wash. And do the other things. I hated it, and tried to hold myself until I was outside, but it was difficult and I frequently had to submit. It did at least have running water, in the form of a stream that came out of the wall, ran through a small wooden trough and poured into an earth cess pit.
The Room, the latrine, and the tunnel had all been constructed by the old Romans, according to Nefyn, and were originally a basement beneath a massive building he called a ‘bath house’. He claimed that one of his books described one of these, suggesting that it had a complicated system in which the heat from several fires was directed beneath the floor and through the walls of the building. The tunnel we entered the Room through was the remains of one part of this system, which was why the walls were blackened. The whole thing sounded far-fetched to me. If those old Romans had managed to build such a thing, why were there only ruins left now?
I shall never forget the first time we had to crawl through the tunnel into the Room.
I suppose that I had somehow come to expect that Uricon would be a kind of paradise. After everything we had endured to reach this place, I was shattered to discover nothing but some old ruins. When Gwenllian had greeted us, she had swept her arm across the view as if she was revealing something magnificent. Every night of our journey, huddled in whatever hovel or hole we found ourselves, I had dreamed of ‘Uricon’ – my ‘Uricon’, a place of comfort and warmth, generously provided with everything I could need. Water to take a bath. Fresh clothes. Fresh fruit and vegetables. A bed with a soft, comfortable mattress. When I awoke, cold, damp and miserable, the thought that this was where we were headed kept me going.
How wrong I was. Uricon was all that remained of a great Roman city, according to Nefyn. We had been introduced to him shortly after Gwenllian left us. She had taken Eluned aside and they spent nearly an hour talking in whispers, while I sat on what remained of a wall, shivering and hungry. Eventually, they had returned. Gwenllian said nothing to me, smiled enigmatically, turned and walked away. Before she had gone a few yards, she had disappeared.
“She will return, my lady,” Eluned had said, also smiling. “We are to await her. Her servant will assist us in the meantime.”
I didn’t care to ask where she had gone, or why we were supposed to wait for her. I was too cold, too hungry, too, too disappointed that the paradise I had been expecting had evaporated into thin air.
Moments later, Nefyn materialised. I don’t remember seeing him coming. One minute he was not there. The next minute he was. A tall, thin, scrawny looking individual, the thought that this was the servant of the last high servant of the lady only served to extinguish any residual hope I may have had left. He introduced himself to Eluned, but seemed to ignore me.
“Eluned Llyn Y Gadair, it is indeed an honour and my privilege to welcome you to my humble dwelling. My name is Nefyn fab Cunedda, last of the Votadini. Long have we expected you.”
He bowed deeply to her. She bowed back. “Your welcome is music to our ears Nefyn fab Cunedda. My people, the Ordovices, send you greetings from afar. Soon, alas, we also shall be gone into the past.”
She turned to me. “This lady, you know, is the Expected One.”
He did not look at me, but said, “Long have we awaited her, Eluned Llyn Y Gadair. It is my fortune to join with you in serving her.”
These formalities quickly became tedious. “Does he have any food, Eluned?” I asked angrily. “Anywhere decent to sleep, perhaps? Or to have a wash? Never mind the long names and ancient people. This is now, and I am dirty, hungry and tired.”
Nefyn still spoke to Eluned. “When my lady Gwenllian returns there will be plenty. Until then I can only offer you what little I have. Please ask her to follow me.”
“I can hear you, you know,” I exploded. “You can talk to me.”
Eluned touched my arm. “He cannot, my lady. He belongs to the High Servant. He is only allowed to speak to her and others such as myself, also servants of the Lady.”
“Come. Bring her,” he said and turned away.
So it was that we arrived in the Room. I was not at all willing to get down on my hands and knees and crawl through the tunnel at first, but it was made clear that there was no choice if I wanted to eat and sleep. What I found, of course, was even greater disappointment. The room, which now lay around me, scarcely visible through the damp murk of early morning, was almost bare. A low truckle bed, a table and two chairs and a pile of books. There was a fire place but it was filled with long dead ashes. Once Eluned had encouraged me to sit on a chair, she whispered something to Nefyn who promptly disappeared back down the tunnel.
Eluned looked about, eventually discovering two ancient blankets heaped in a corner. She shook them out, filling the room with dust and dead insects, then folded them into a rough bed shape on the floor.
Nefyn eventually returned, dragging a sack behind him. Out of this he took what looked like a block of wood and a strip of leather which he placed on the table before me. Then he tipped the sack near the fireplace and out fell a small pile of twigs and broken branches.
High The Vanes (The Change Book 2) Page 6