That night we all rested in Corinium, but at midnight a storm woke me. The tempest was far away to the south, but such was the violence of the distant thunder and so vivid were the flashes of lightning that flickered on the walls of the courtyard where I slept that it woke me. Ailleann, Arthur’s old mistress and the mother of his twins, had offered me shelter and she now came from her bed-chamber with a worried face. I wrapped my cloak around me and went with her to the town walls, where I found half my men already watching the distant turmoil. Cuneglas and Agricola were also standing on the ramparts, but not Meurig, for he refused to find any portents in the weather.
We all knew better. Storms are messages from the Gods, and this storm was a tumultuous outburst. No rain fell on Corinium and no gale blew our cloaks, but far off to the south, somewhere in Dumnonia, the Gods flayed the land. Lightning tore the dark clean out of the sky and stabbed its crooked daggers at the earth. Thunder rolled incessantly, outburst after outburst, and with every echoing clap the lightning flickered and dazzled and split its ragged fire through the shuddering night.
Issa stood close beside me, his honest face lit by those distant spits of fire. ‘Is someone dead?’
‘We can’t tell, Issa.’
‘Are we cursed, Lord?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I replied with a confidence I did not entirely feel.
‘But I heard that Merlin had his beard cut?’
‘A few hairs,’ I said dismissively, ‘nothing more. What of it?’
‘If Merlin has no power, Lord, who does?’
‘Merlin has power,’ I tried to reassure him. And I had power, too, for soon I would be Mordred’s champion and would live on a great estate. I would mould the child and Arthur would make the child’s kingdom.
Yet still I worried about the thunder. And I would have worried more had I known what it meant. For disaster did come that night. We did not hear of it for three more days, but then at last we learned why the thunder had spoken and the lightning struck.
It had struck on the Tor, on Merlin’s hall where the winds made moan about his hollow dream-tower. And there, in our hour of victory, the lightning had set the wooden tower alight and its flames had seared and leapt and howled into the night and in the morning, when the embers were being spattered and extinguished by the dying storm’s rain, there were no Treasures left at Ynys Wydryn. There was no Cauldron in the ashes, only an emptiness at Dumnonia’s fire-scarred heart.
The new Gods, it seemed, were fighting back. Or else the Silurian twins had worked a mighty charm on the cut braid of Merlin’s beard, for the Cauldron was gone and the Treasures had vanished.
And I went north to Ceinwyn.
PART THREE
Camelot
‘ALL THE TREASURES BURNED?’ Igraine asked me.
‘Everything,’ I said, ‘disappeared.’
‘Poor Merlin,’ Igraine said. She has taken her usual place on my window-sill, though she is well wrapped against this day’s cold by a thick cloak of beaver fur. And she needs it, for it is bitterly cold today. There were flurries of snow this morning, and the sky to the west is ominous with leaden clouds. ‘I cannot stay long,’ she had announced when she arrived and settled down to skim through the finished parchments, ‘in case it snows.’
‘It will snow. The berries are thick in the hedgerows and that always means a hard winter.’
‘Old men say that every year,’ Igraine observed tartly.
‘When you’re old,’ I said, ‘every winter is hard.’
‘How old was Merlin?’
‘At the time he lost the Cauldron? Very close to eighty years. But he lived for a long while after that.’
‘But he never rebuilt his dream-tower?’ Igraine asked.
‘No.’
She sighed and pulled the rich cloak about her. ‘I should like a dream-tower. I would so like to have a dream-tower.’
‘Then have one built,’ I said. ‘You’re a Queen. Give orders, make a fuss. It’s quite simple; nothing but a four-sided tower with no roof and a platform halfway up. Once it’s built no one but you can go inside, and the trick of it is to sleep on the platform and wait for the Gods to send you messages. Merlin always said it was a horribly cold place-to sleep in winter.’
‘And the Cauldron,’ Igraine guessed, ‘had been hidden on the platform?’
‘Yes.’
‘But it wasn’t burned, was it, Brother Derfel?’ she insisted.
‘The Cauldron’s story goes on,’ I admitted, ‘but I won’t tell it now.’
She stuck her tongue out at me. She is looking startlingly beautiful today. Perhaps it is the cold that has put the colour into her cheeks and the spark into her dark eyes, or maybe the beaver pelts suit her, but I suspect she is pregnant. I could always tell when Ceinwyn was with child, and Igraine shows that same surge of life. But Igraine has said nothing, so I will not ask her. She has prayed hard enough, God knows, for a child, and maybe our Christian God does hear prayers. We have nothing else to give us hope, for our own Gods are dead or fled, or careless of us.
‘The bards,’ Igraine said, and I knew from her tone that another of my shortcomings as a storyteller was about to be aired, ‘say that the battle near London was terrible. They say Arthur fought all day.’
‘Ten minutes,’ I said dismissively.
‘And they all declare that Lancelot saved him, arriving at the last moment with a hundred spearmen.’
‘They all say that,’ I said, ‘because Lancelot’s poets wrote the songs.’
She shook her head sadly. ‘If this,’ she said, slapping the big leather bag in which she carries the finished parchments back to the Caer, ‘is the only record of Lancelot, Derfel, then what will people think? That the poets lie?’
‘Who cares what people think?’ I answered testily. ‘And poets always lie. It’s what they’re paid to do. But you asked me for the truth, I tell it, and then you complain.’
‘ “Lancelot’s warriors,” ’ she quoted, ‘ “spearmen so bold, Makers of widows and givers of gold. Slayers of Saxons, feared by the Sais…” ’
‘Do stop,’ I interrupted her, ‘please? I heard the song a week after it was written!’
‘But if the songs lied,’ she pleaded, ‘why didn’t Arthur protest?’
‘Because he never cared about songs. Why should he? He was a warrior, not a bard, and so long as his men sang before battle he didn’t care. And besides, he could never sing himself. He thought he had a voice, but Ceinwyn always said he sounded like a cow with wind.’
Igraine frowned. ‘I still don’t understand why Lancelot’s making peace was so very bad.’
‘It isn’t difficult to understand,’ I said. I slid off the stool and crossed to the hearth where I used a stick to pull some glowing embers from the small fire. I arranged six embers in a line on the floor, then split the row into two and four. ‘The four embers,’ I said, ‘represent Aelle’s forces. The two are Cerdic’s. Now understand we could never have beaten the Saxons if all the embers had been together. We could not have defeated six, but we could beat four. Arthur planned to beat those four, then turn on the two, and that way we could have scoured Britain of the Sais. But by making peace, Lancelot increased Cerdic’s power.’ I added another ember to the two, so that four now faced a group of three, then shook the flame off the burning stick. ‘We had weakened Aelle,’ I explained, ‘but we’d weakened ourselves too for we no longer had Lancelot’s three hundred spearmen. They were pledged to peace. That increased Cerdic’s power even more.’ I pushed two of Aelle’s embers into Cerdic’s camp, dividing the line into five and two. ‘So all we had done,’ I said, ‘was weaken Aelle and strengthen Cerdic. And that’s what Lancelot’s peacemaking achieved.’
‘You are giving our Lady lessons in counting?’ Sansum sidled into the room with a suspicious look on his face. ‘And I thought you were composing a gospel,’ he added slyly.
‘The five loaves and two fishes,’ Igraine said swiftly. ‘Brother Derfel thought it might be five fishes and
two loaves, but I’m sure I’m right, am I not, Lord Bishop?’
‘My Lady is quite right,’ Sansum said. ‘And Brother Derfel is a poor Christian. How can such an ignorant man write a gospel for the Saxons?’
‘Only with your loving support, Lord Bishop,’ Igraine answered, ‘and, of course, with my husband’s support. Or shall I tell the King that you oppose him in this small thing?’
‘You would be guilty of the grossest falsehood if you did,’ Sansum lied to her, outmanoeuvred again by my clever Queen. ‘I came to tell you, Lady, that your spearmen believe you should leave. The sky threatens more snow.’
She picked up the bag of parchments and gave me a smile. ‘I shall see you when the snow has stopped, Brother Derfel.’
‘I shall pray for that moment, Lady.’
She smiled again, then walked past the saint who half bowed as she went through the door, but once she had gone he straightened and stared at me. The tufts above his ears that made us call him the mouse-lord are white now, but age has not softened the saint. He can still bristle with vituperation and the pain that still afflicts him when he passes urine only serves to make his temper worse. ‘There is a special place in hell, Brother Derfel,’ he hissed at me, ‘for the tellers of lies.’
‘I shall pray for those poor souls, Lord,’ I said, then turned from him and dipped this quill in ink to go on with my tale of Arthur, my warlord, my peace-maker and friend.
What followed were the glorious years. Igraine, who listens to the poets too much, calls them Camelot. We did not. They were the years of Arthur’s best rule, the years when he shaped a country to his wishes and the years in which Dumnonia most closely matched his ideal of a nation at peace with itself and with its neighbours; but it is only by looking back that those years seem so much better than they were, and that is because the years that followed were so much worse. To hear the tales told at night-time hearths you would think we had made a whole new country in Britain, named it Camelot and peopled it with shining heroes, but the truth is that we simply ruled Dumnonia as best we could, we ruled it justly and we never called it Camelot. I did not even hear that name till two years ago. Camelot exists only in the poets’ dreams, while in our Dumnonia, even in those good years, the harvests still failed, the plagues still ravaged us and wars were still fought.
Ceinwyn came to Dumnonia and it was in Lindinis that our first child was born. It was a girl and we called her Morwenna after Ceinwyn’s mother. She was born with black hair, but after a while it turned pale gold like her mother’s. Lovely Morwenna.
Merlin was proved right about Guinevere, for as soon as Lancelot had established his new government in Venta, she declared herself tired of the brand-new palace at Lindinis. It was too damp, she said, and much too exposed to the wet winds coming off the swamps about Ynys Wydryn, and too cold in winter, and suddenly nothing would do except to move back to Uther’s old Winter Palace at Durnovaria. But Durnovaria was almost as far from Venta as Lindinis, so Guinevere then persuaded Arthur that they needed to prepare a house for the distant day when Mordred became King and, by a King’s right, demanded the Winter Palace’s return, so Arthur let Guinevere make the choice. Arthur himself dreamed of a stout hall with a palisade, beast house and granaries, but Guinevere found a Roman villa just south of the fort of Vindocladia that lay, just as Merlin had foretold, on the frontier between Dumnonia and Lancelot’s new Belgic kingdom. The villa was built on a hill above a creek of the sea and Guinevere called it her Sea Palace. She had a swarm of builders renovate the villa and fill it with all the statues that had once graced Lindinis. She even commandeered the mosaic floor from Lindinis’s entrance hall. For a time Arthur worried that the Sea Palace was dangerously close to Cerdic’s land, but Guinevere insisted the peace negotiated at London would last and Arthur, realizing how she loved the place, relented. He never cared what place he called home, for he rarely was at home. He liked to be on the move, always visiting some corner of Mordred’s kingdom.
Mordred himself moved into the ransacked palace at Lindinis, and Ceinwyn and I had his guardianship and so lived there too, and with us were sixty spearmen, ten horsemen to carry messages, sixteen kitchen girls and twenty-eight house slaves. We had a steward, a chamberlain, a bard, two huntsmen, a mead-brewer, a falconer, a physician, a doorkeeper, a candle-man and six cooks, and they all had slaves, and besides those house slaves there was a small army of other slaves who worked the land and pollarded the trees and kept the ditches drained. A small town grew around the palace, inhabited by potters and shoemakers and blacksmiths; the tradespeople who became rich off our business.
It all seemed a long way from Cwm Isaf. Now we slept in a tiled chamber with plaster-smooth walls and pillared doorways. Our meals were taken in a feasting hall that could have seated a hundred, though as often as not we left it empty and ate in a small chamber that led directly from the kitchens for I never could abide food served cold when it was supposed to be hot. If it rained we could walk the covered arcade of the outer courtyard and thus stay dry, and in summer, when the sun beat hot on the tiles, there was a spring-fed pool in the inner courtyard where we could swim. None of it was ours, of course; this palace and its spacious lands were the honours due to a king and all of them belonged to the six-year-old Mordred.
Ceinwyn was accustomed to luxury, if not on this lavish scale, but the constant presence of slaves and servants never embarrassed her as it did me, and she discharged her duties with an efficient lack of fuss that kept the palace calm and happy. It was Ceinwyn who commanded the servants and supervised the kitchens and tallied the accounts, but I know she missed Cwm Isaf and still, of an evening, she would sometimes sit with her distaff and spin wool while we talked.
As often as not we talked of Mordred. Both of us had hoped that the tales of his mischief were exaggerations, but they were not, for if any child was wicked, it was Mordred. From the very first day when he came by ox-wagon from Culhwch’s hall near Durnovaria and was lifted down into our courtyard, he misbehaved. I came to hate him, God help me. He was only a child and I hated him.
The King was always small for his age, but, apart from his clubbed left foot, he was solidly built with hard muscles and little fat. His face was very round, but was disfigured by a strangely bulbous nose that made the poor child ugly, while his dark-brown hair was naturally curly and grew in two great clumps that jutted out on either side of a centre parting and made the other children in Lindinis call him Brush-head, though never to his face. He had strangely old eyes, for even at six years old they were guarded and suspicious, and they became no kinder as his face hardened into manhood. He was a clever boy, though he obstinately refused to learn his letters. The bard of our household, an earnest young man named Pyrlig, was responsible for teaching Mordred to read, to count, to sing, to play the harp, to name the Gods and to learn the genealogy of his royal descent, but Mordred soon had Pyrlig’s measure. ‘He will do nothing, Lord!’ Pyrlig complained to me. ‘I give him parchment, he tears it, I give him a quill and he breaks it. I beat him and he bites me, look!’ He held out a thin, flea-bitten wrist on which the marks of the royal teeth were red and sore.
I put Eachern, a tough little Irish spearman, into the schoolroom with orders to keep the King in order, and that worked well enough. One beating from Eachern persuaded the child he had met his match and so he sullenly submitted to the discipline, but still learned nothing. You could keep a child still, it seemed, but you could not make him learn. Mordred did try to frighten Eachern by telling him that when he became King he would take his revenge on the warrior for the frequent beatings, but Eachern just gave him another thrashing and promised that he would be back in Ireland by the time Mordred came of age. ‘So if you want revenge, Lord King,’ Eachern said, giving the boy another sharp blow, ‘then bring your army to Ireland and we’ll give you a proper grown-up whipping.’
Mordred was not simply a naughty boy – we could have coped with that – but positively wicked. His acts were designed to hurt, even to
kill. Once, when he was ten, we found five adders in the dark cellar where we kept the vats of mead. No one but Mordred would have placed them there, and doubtless he did it in the hope that a slave or servant would be bitten. The cellar’s cold had made the snakes sleepy and we killed them easily enough, but a month later a maidservant did die after eating mushrooms that we afterwards discovered were toadstools. No one knew who had made the substitution, but everyone believed it was Mordred. It was as if, Ceinwyn said, there was a calculating adult mind inside that pugnacious little body. She, I think, disliked him as much as I did, but she tried hard to be kind to the boy and she hated the beatings we all gave him. ‘They just make him worse,’ she admonished me.
‘I fear so,’ I admitted.
‘Then why do it?’
I shrugged. ‘Because if you try kindness he just takes advantage of it.’ At the beginning, when Mordred had first come to Lindinis, I had promised myself that I would never hit the boy, but that high ambition had faded within days and by the end of the first year I only had to see his ugly, sullen, bulbous-nosed, brush-headed face and I wanted to put him over my knee and beat him bloody.
And even Ceinwyn eventually struck him. She had not wanted to, but one day I heard her scream. Mordred had found a needle and was idly pushing it at Morwenna’s scalp. He had just decided to see what would happen if he pushed the needle into one of the baby’s eyes when Ceinwyn came running to see why her daughter cried. She plucked Mordred into the air and gave him such a blow that he went spinning halfway across the room. After that our children were never left to sleep alone, a servant was always at their side and Mordred had added Ceinwyn’s name to the list of his enemies.
‘He’s simply evil,’ Merlin explained to me. ‘Surely you remember the night he was born?’
‘Distinctly,’ I said, for I, unlike Merlin, had been there.
‘They let the Christians tend the birth bed, didn’t they?’ he asked me. ‘And only summoned Morgan when everything was going wrong. What precautions did the Christians take?’
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