Our own shields were slung on our backs and so their white stars were invisible, and though we all wore the grey wolf-tail, the spearmen must have thought we were friends for they made no challenge as we approached. Instead, thinking that we wanted to enter the shrine, they moved aside, and it was only when I was halfway through the gate, drawn there by my curiosity about Lancelot’s part in this night’s strange events, that the two men realized we were not their comrades. One tried to bar my way with a spear. ‘Who are you?’ he challenged me.
I pushed his spear aside and then, before he could shout a warning, I shoved him backwards out of the gate while Issa dragged his comrade away. A huge crowd was gathered inside the shrine, but they all had their backs to us and none saw the scuffle at the main gate. Nor could they hear anything, for the crowd was chanting and singing and their confused babble drowned the small noise we made. I dragged my captive into the shadows by the road where I knelt beside him. I had dropped my spear when I had pushed him out of the gateway, so now I pulled out the short knife I wore at my belt. ‘You’re Lancelot’s man?’ I asked him.
‘Yes,’ he hissed.
‘Then what are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘This is Mordred’s country.’
‘King Mordred is dead,’ he said, frightened of the knife blade that I was holding against his throat. I said nothing, for I was so astonished by his answer that I could find nothing to say. The man must have thought my silence presaged his death for he became desperate. ‘They’re all dead!’ he exclaimed.
‘Who?’
‘Mordred, Arthur, all of them.’
For a few heartbeats it seemed as if my world lurched in its foundations. The man struggled briefly, but the pressure of my knife quietened him. ‘How?’ I hissed at him.
‘I don’t know.’
‘How?’ I demanded more loudly.
‘We don’t know!’ he insisted. ‘Mordred was killed before we came and they say Arthur died in Powys.’
I rocked back, gesturing at one of my men to keep the two captives quiet with his spear-blade. Then I counted the hours since I had seen Arthur. It was only days since we had parted at Cadoc’s cross, and Arthur’s route home was much longer than mine; if he had died, I thought, then the news of his death would surely not have reached Ynys Wydryn before me. ‘Is your King here?’ I asked the man.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
His answer was scarcely above a whisper. ‘To take the kingdom, Lord.’
We cut strips of woollen cloth from the two men’s cloaks, bound their arms and legs and rammed handfuls of wool into their mouths to keep them silent. We pushed them into a ditch, warned them to stay still and then I led my five men back to the gate of the shrine. I wanted to look inside for a few moments, learn what I could, and only then would I hurry home. ‘Cloaks over your helmets,’ I ordered my men, ‘and shields reversed.’
We hoisted the cloaks up over our helmet crests so that their wolf-tails were hidden, then we held our shields with their faces low against our legs so that their stars would be obscured, and so disguised we filed quietly into the now unguarded shrine. We moved in the shadows, circling around the back of the excited crowd until we reached the stone foundations of the shrine Mordred had started to build for his dead mother. We climbed onto the unfinished sepulchre’s highest course of stones and from there we could watch over the heads of the crowd and see what strange thing happened between the twin rows of fire that lit Ynys Wydryn’s night.
At first I thought it was another Christian rite like the one I had witnessed in Isca, because the space between the rows of fire was filled with dancing women, swaying men and chanting priests. The noise they made was a cacophony of shrieks and screams and wails. Monks with leather flails were wandering among the ecstatics and lashing their naked backs, and each hard stroke only provoked more screams of joy. One woman was kneeling by the Holy Thorn. ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’ she shrieked. ‘Come!’ A monk beat her in a frenzy, beat her so hard that her naked back was a lurid sheet of blood, but every new blow only increased the fervour of her desperate prayer.
I was about to jump down from the sepulchre and go back to the gate when spearmen appeared from the shrine’s buildings and pushed the worshippers roughly aside to clear a space between the fires that lit the Holy Thorn. They dragged the screaming woman away. More spearmen followed, two of them carrying a litter, and behind that litter Bishop Sansum led a group of brightly clothed priests. Lancelot and his attendants walked with the priests. Bors, Lancelot’s champion, was there, and Amhar and Loholt were with the Belgic King, but I could not see the dread twins Lavaine and Dinas.
The crowd shrieked even louder when they saw Lancelot. They stretched their hands towards him and some even knelt as he passed. He was arrayed in his white-enamelled scale armour that he swore had been the war gear of the ancient hero Agamemnon, and he was wearing his black helmet with its crest of spread swan’s wings. His long black hair that he oiled so it shone fell down his back beneath the helmet to lie smooth against a red cloak that hung from his shoulders. The Christ-blade was at his side and his legs were clad in tall red leather war-boots. His Saxon Guard came behind, all of them huge men in silver mail coats and carrying broad-bladed war axes that reflected the leaping flames. I could not see Morgan, but a choir of her white-clad holy women were vainly trying to make their song heard above the wails and shouts of the excited crowd.
One of the spearmen carried a stake that he placed in a hole that had been prepared beside the Holy Thorn. For a moment I feared we were about to see some poor pagan burned at that stake and I spat to avert evil. The victim was being carried on the litter, for the men carrying it brought their burden to the Holy Thorn and then busied themselves tying their prisoner to the stake, but when they stepped away and we could at last see properly, I realized that it was no prisoner, and no burning. Indeed, it was no pagan tied to that stake, but a Christian, and it was no death we were watching, but a marriage.
And I thought of Nimue’s strange prophecy. The dead would be taken in marriage.
Lancelot was the groom and he now stood beside his bride who was roped to the stake. She was a Queen, the one-time Princess of Powys who had become a Princess of Dumnonia and then the Queen of Siluria. She was Norwenna, daughter-in-law of High King Uther, the mother of Mordred, and she had been dead these fourteen years. She had lain in her grave for all those years, but now she had been disinterred and her remains were lashed to the post beside the votive-hung Holy Thorn.
I stared in horror, then made the sign against evil and stroked the iron mail of my armour. Issa touched my arm as though to reassure himself that he was not in the throes of some unimaginable nightmare.
The dead Queen was little more than a skeleton. A white shawl had been draped on her shoulders, but the shawl could not hide the ghastly strips of yellowing skin and thick hanks of white fatty flesh that still clung to her bones. Her skull, that canted from one of the ropes pinioning her to the stake, was half covered with stretched skin, her jawbone had fallen away at one side and dangled from her skull, while her eyes were nothing but black shadows in the firelit death mask of her face. One of the guards had placed a wreath of poppies on the dome of her skull from which dank strands of hair fell ragged to the shawl.
‘What’s happening?’ Issa asked me in a soft voice.
‘Lancelot is claiming Dumnonia,’ I whispered back, ‘and by marrying Norwenna he marries into Dumnonia’s royal family.’ There could be no other explanation. Lancelot was stealing Dumnonia’s throne, and this grisly ceremony among the great fires would give him a thin legal excuse. He was marrying the dead to make himself Uther’s heir.
Sansum signalled for silence and the monks who carried the flails shouted at the excited crowd that slowly calmed down from their frenzy. Every now and then a woman would scream and the crowd would give a nervous shudder, but at last there was silence. The choir’s voices tailed away and Sansum raised his arms and prayed that Almighty God
would bless this union of a man and a woman, this King and his Queen, and then he instructed Lancelot to take the bride’s hand. Lancelot reached down with his gloved right hand and lifted the yellow bones. The cheek pieces of his helmet were open and I could see he was grinning. The crowd shouted for joy and I remembered Tewdric’s words about signs and portents, and I guessed that in this unholy marriage the Christians were seeing proof that their God’s return was imminent.
‘By the power invested in me by the Holy Father and by the grace given to me by the Holy Ghost,’ Sansum shouted, ‘I pronounce you man and wife!’
‘Where’s our King?’ Issa asked me.
‘Who knows?’ I whispered back. ‘Dead probably.’ Then I watched as Lancelot lifted the yellow bones of Norwenna’s hand and pretended to give her fingers a kiss. One of the fingers dropped away as he let the hand go.
Sansum, never able to resist a chance to preach, began to harangue the crowd and it was then that Morgan accosted me. I had not seen her approach and the first I knew of her presence was when I felt a hand tugging at my cloak and I turned in alarm to see her gold mask glinting in the firelight. ‘When they find the guards missing from the gate,’ she hissed, ‘they’ll search this compound and you’ll be dead men. Follow me, fools.’
We jumped guiltily down and followed her humped black figure as it scuttled behind the crowd into the shadows of the shrine’s big church. She stopped there and stared up into my face. ‘They said you were dead,’ she told me. ‘Killed with Arthur at Cadoc’s shrine.’
‘I live, Lady.’
‘And Arthur?’
‘He lived three days ago, Lady,’ I answered. ‘None of us died at Cadoc’s shrine.’
‘Thank God,’ she breathed, ‘thank God.’ Then she gripped my cloak and hauled my face down close to her mask. ‘Listen,’ she said urgently, ‘my husband had no choice in this thing.’
‘If you say so, Lady,’ I said, not believing her for one moment, but understanding that Morgan was doing her best to straddle both sides of this crisis that had come so suddenly to Dumnonia. Lancelot was taking the throne, and someone had conspired to make sure Arthur was out of the country when he did it. Worse, I thought, someone had sent Arthur and me to Cadoc’s high valley and arranged for men to ambush us there. Someone wanted us dead, and it had been Sansum who had first revealed Ligessac’s refuge to us and Sansum who had argued against allowing Cuneglas’s men to make the arrest, and Sansum who now stood before Lancelot and a corpse in the light of this night’s fires. I smelt the mouse-lord’s paws all over this wicked business, though I doubted Morgan knew half of what her husband had done or planned. She was too old and wise to be infected by religious frenzy, and she at least was trying to pick a safe path through the cascading horrors.
‘Promise me Arthur lives!’ she appealed to me.
‘He did not die in Cadoc’s valley,’ I said. ‘That much I can promise you.’
She was silent for a while and I think she was crying beneath the mask. ‘Tell Arthur we had no choice,’ she said.
‘I will,’ I promised her. ‘What can you tell me of Mordred?’
‘He’s dead,’ she hissed. ‘Killed while he was hunting.’
‘But if they lied about Arthur,’ I said, ‘then why not about Mordred?’
‘Who knows?’ she crossed herself and plucked at my cloak. ‘Come,’ she said abruptly, and led us down the side of the church towards a small wooden hut. Someone was trapped inside the hut for I could hear fists beating on its door that was secured by the knotted loops of a leather leash. ‘You should go to your woman, Derfel,’ Morgan told me as she fumbled at the knot with her one good hand. ‘Dinas and Lavaine rode south to your hall after nightfall. They took spearmen.’
Panic whipped inside me, making me use my spear-point to slash at the leather leash. The moment the binding was cut the door flew open and Nimue leapt out, hands hooked like claws, but then she recognized me and stumbled against my body for support. She spat at Morgan.
‘Go, you fool,’ Morgan snarled at her, ‘and remember it was I who saved you from death today.’
I took Morgan’s two hands, the burned and the good, and put them to my lips. ‘For this night’s deeds, Lady,’ I said, ‘I am in your debt.’
‘Go, you fool,’ she said, ‘and hurry!’ and we ran through the back parts of the shrine, past storehouses and slave huts and granaries, then out through a wicket gate to where the fishermen kept their reed punts. We took two of the small craft and used our long spear-shafts as quant poles, and I remembered that far-off day of Norwenna’s death when Nimue and I had escaped from Ynys Wydryn in just this fashion. Then, as now, we had headed for Ermid’s Hall and then, as now, we had been hunted fugitives in a land overrun by enemies.
Nimue knew little of what had happened to Dumnonia. Lancelot, she said, had come and declared himself King, but of Mordred she could only repeat what Morgan had said, that the King had been killed while hunting. She told us how spearmen had come to the Tor and taken her captive to the shrine where Morgan had imprisoned her. Afterwards, she heard, a mob of Christians had climbed the Tor, slaughtered whoever they found there, pulled down the huts and begun to build a church out of the salvaged timbers.
‘So Morgan did save your life,’ I said.
‘She wants my knowledge,’ Nimue said. ‘How else will they know what to do with the Cauldron? That’s why Dinas and Lavaine have gone to your hall, Derfel. To find Merlin.’ She spat into the mere. ‘It’s as I told you,’ she finished, ‘they’ve unleashed the Cauldron and they don’t know how to control its power. Two Kings have come to Cadarn. Mordred was one and Lancelot was the second. He went there this afternoon and stood upon the stone. And tonight the dead are being taken in marriage.’
‘And you also said,’ I reminded her bitterly, ‘that a sword would be laid at a child’s throat,’ and I thrust my spear down into the shallow mere in my desperate hurry to reach Ermid’s Hall. Where my children lay. Where Ceinwyn lay. And where the Silurian Druids and their spearmen had ridden not three hours before.
Flames lit our homeward path. Not the flames that illuminated Lancelot’s marriage to the dead, but new flames that sprang red and high from Ermid’s Hall. We were halfway across the mere when that fire flared up to shiver its long reflections on the black water.
I was praying to Gofannon, to Lleullaw, to Bel, to Cernunnos, to Taranis, to all the Gods, wherever they were, that just one of them would stoop from the realm of stars and save my family. The flames leapt higher, spewing sparks of burning thatch into the smoke that blew east across poor Dumnonia.
We travelled in silence once Nimue had finished her tale. Issa had tears in his eyes. He was worrying about Scarach, the Irish girl he had married, and he was wondering, as I was, what had happened to the spearmen we had left to guard the hall. There had been enough men, surely, to hold up Dinas and Lavaine’s raiders? Yet the flames told another tale and we thrust the spear-shafts down to make the punts go even faster.
We heard the screams as we came closer. There were just six of us spearmen, but I did not hesitate, or try to make a circuitous approach, but simply drove the punts hard into the tree-shadowed creek that lay alongside the hall’s palisade. There, next to Dian’s little coracle that Gwlyddyn, Merlin’s servant, had made for her, we leapt ashore.
Later I put together the tale of that night. Gwilym, the man who commanded the spearmen who had stayed behind while I marched north with Arthur, had seen the distant smoke to the east and surmised there was trouble brewing. He had placed all his men on guard, then debated with Ceinwyn whether they should take to the boats and hide in the marshes that lay beyond the mere. Ceinwyn said no. Malaine, her brother’s Druid, had given Dian a concoction of leaves that had lifted the fever, but the child was still weak, and besides, no one knew what the smoke meant, nor had any messengers come with a warning; so instead Ceinwyn sent two of the spearmen east to find news and then waited behind the wooden palisade.
Nightfall br
ought no news, but it did bring a measure of relief for few spearmen marched at night and Ceinwyn felt safer than she had in daylight. From inside the palisade they saw the flames across the mere at Ynys Wydryn and wondered what they meant, but no one heard Dinas and Lavaine’s horsemen come into the nearby woods. The horsemen dismounted a long way from the hall, tied their beasts’ reins to trees and then, under the pale, cloud-misted moon, they had crept towards the palisade. It was not till Dinas and Lavaine’s men attacked the gate that Gwilym even realized the hall was under attack. His two scouts had not returned, there were no guards in the woods and the enemy was already within feet of the palisade’s gate when the alarm was first raised. It was not a formidable gate, no more than the height of a man, and the first rank of the enemy rushed it without armour, spears or shields and succeeded in climbing over before Gwilym’s men could assemble. The gate guards fought and killed, but enough of those first attackers survived to lift the bar of the gate and so open it to the charge of Dinas and Lavaine’s heavily armoured spearmen. Ten of those spearmen were Lancelot’s Saxon Guards, while the rest were Belgic warriors sworn to their King’s service.
Gwilym’s men rallied as best they could, and the fiercest fight took place at the hall’s door. It was there that Gwilym himself lay dead with another six of my men. Six more were lying in the courtyard where a storehouse had been set on fire and those were the flames that had lit our path across the lake and which now, as we reached the open gate, showed us the horror inside.
The battle was not over. Dinas and Lavaine had planned their treachery well, but their men had failed to get through the hall door and my surviving spearmen were still holding the big building. I could see their shields and spears blocking the door’s arch, and I could see another spear showing from one of the high windows that let the smoke out from the gable end. Two of my huntsmen were in that window, and their arrows were preventing Dinas and Lavaine’s men carrying the fire from the burning store house to the hall thatch. Ceinwyn, Morwenna and Seren were all inside the hall, together with Merlin, Malaine and most of the other women and children who lived inside the compound, but they were surrounded and outnumbered; and the enemy Druids had found Dian.
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