The Forgotten Kingdom

by Signe Pike

  1st of July, AD 580

  I sat alone on a pinewood bench, eyes closed and hands clasped. My body was wrung out. I could not push the hand of fate. I could only sit and let the images of those I loved fill the blackness behind my eyes, trying not to jump at each new blast of the battle horn.

  And then, just when I dreaded the worst of my own fears, I tilted my head, suddenly listening.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked sharply.

  The monks across the room looked up from their prayers. Cywyllog blinked. “I hear nothing.”

  “Precisely.” I stood, hurrying to the door.

  “Do not open it!” Cywyllog commanded.

  I lifted the bolt, throwing the door open wide, and the room was flooded with the echoes of cheers.

  I raced outside and climbed the platform of the inner rampart, unprepared for the sight that met me below.

  So many dead.

  “Oh no. Oh no, please…” I whispered, scurrying down, pounding upon the door of the inner rampart, shouting, “Let me out! Let me out!”

  The men did as I said, and the look I gave them was one of wonderment and trepidation. We had won. We had done it.

  Yet who had survived?

  I ran down the hill, slipping, my dress caking with mud, tears choking my voice, as I gestured for Meldred’s men to cast open the outer gates.

  The warriors were coming now, so many wounded. Blood, mud, and gore obscuring their faces.

  “Rhydderch? Rhydderch?” I cried, my voice sounding panicked as a child’s. Gripping the arm of the first man I could reach. “Have you seen my husband? My brother? Have you seen the king?” The men shook their heads, and as they poured past, up into the safety and dry warmth of the fortress, I reached the battlefield and stopped, struck by the horrors that lay at my feet. “Rhydderch! Lailoken!”

  Maelgwn, my heart yet longed to scream. And then, in the distance, a most curious sight caught my eye. A retinue of strange warriors, walking slowly across the field. They wore gray hoods. Their hair was plaited, the look upon their faces grim. Mud darkened their bodies in the places they were exposed, but I could see beneath the smears of earth that animals had been pricked into the surface of their skin.

  “Picts,” I said aloud. At the front of their clann strode a man with black hair and two fish upon his face. And beside him, three women. Rain bedraggled all, save the one who was tall. She wore a cloak that fluttered in a thousand fingers as she moved. A cloak made of feathers. She stopped at the sight of me, standing stock-still, and I squinted to better see her face beneath her hood.

  Who was this mysterious woman? Had it been she who had summoned the Picts?

  A pale arm emerged from her cloak as the retinue she walked before stopped, and I saw a trail of birds upon her wrist as she reached to push back the hood of her cloak. Her mass of tawny hair was bound back in coiled plaits, some of which had come loose, falling about her freckled face. Her gray eyes regarded me. Then her voice came, carrying across the field of the lost, the field of the dead.

  “Mother.”

  It could not be.

  It could not be after all these years.

  “Angharad? Angharad,” I cried as I burst into tears, hands covering my mouth as I ran, stumbling, not fast enough, over dead bodies, nearly slipping and falling as I fought just to reach her, yet the beautiful young woman stood motionless. Why did she not come to me?

  “Angharad!” My voice was a wail, as if she were some apparition who might just as easily disappear. I stumbled over the lifeless leg of a fallen man into the space before her, and we stood, eyes searching.

  “Oh, my love. Oh, my sweet.” I closed the distance between us, clutching her to my breast as if she were yet a child, the relief of the solidness of her body in my arms overwhelming my senses. “Oh, my love.” I rocked her, my hands moving in disbelief to her hair, the curve of her back, her face as I drew back to look at her. “You are alive,” I said. My voice was weighted with as much heartbreak as wonder. “How have you come here?”

  Speak. I wanted to shake her.

  She had only called out my name.

  Speak so I will know you are real and not some trick of the Gods.

  But who was I to demand of her, I who had given her up? I who had forsaken her? The eyes that looked back into mine were those of the child I once knew, but they held the look of a stranger. My heart fractured to shards in the cavity of my chest.

  She thought a moment, her acorn-colored brows drawing together in a frown. “I suppose it all began with a dream.”

  “Will you tell me? Please. I want to know all. But you have been in battle. Oh, my love. Come back to the fortress.”

  I gripped her hands, unable to release her. But I had been so shocked at the sight of my daughter, so suddenly returned, and in the midst of such a place, that I had forgotten her company. “I am sorry; forgive me. I am entirely overcome. Please. You are most welcome. Follow me back to the hall.” I looked to them now, my face full of gratitude, and my eyes caught on those of the dark-haired woman who had been standing beside my daughter all the while, unnoticed.

  “Languoreth,” the woman said, with a slight bow of her head. She had never been one to paint her emotions upon her face. Her face, that same delicate complexion like the underbelly of a leaf, her unflinching blue eyes, not a gray hair upon her head and hardly a wrinkle upon her skin.

  “It cannot be.” I stepped back, looking between the two of them. “Ariane?”

  She smiled then, a thing I remembered was once quite a rare sight, and a flood of emotions threatened to drown me. Disbelief. Joy. Sadness.

  Anger.

  I sucked in a breath. There was too much here. Too much. I needed time for us all to speak. And Rhydderch. Lailoken. I could not bear the thought they might not have lived to see Angharad returned.

  “Come.” I nodded to them all. “We are still sorting through the living and the dead. There will be plenty of time for speaking once we have found those who remain.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Angharad

  Dùn Meldred

  Southern Kingdom of Gododdin

  1st of July, AD 580

  The hall of Meldred was full to bursting, though Muirenn and Talorcan kept clear of the far end of the great room, where the priests dined.

  Angharad could not keep her eyes from trailing to the faces whose memory she had battled so long to keep. The graceful sweep of her mother’s brow. Her father’s eyes, a wintry reflection of her own, tracking each movement she made as if she might slip from the room. He had wept when he held her, but she had difficulty summoning tears.

  It had been so long.

  She could not offer her parents the child they had lost, the little girl she knew they yet wished her to be. And as her mother met her eyes across the room with a hint of a smile, she saw its edges were touched with sorrow.

  Angharad felt out of place here. With Ariane, among the Picts, was where Angharad felt most at home.

  Wind and weather. The waterfall had told her Eachna was made of water. Wind and weather push water about. Now Angharad had begun to understand something of herself. But she was only at the beginning. She knew she could not stay.

  Artùr had not returned—he and his men, along with the Dragons, had finished the Angles in the wood, and Artùr had begun his long journey back to Mannau. She realized, though it did not matter, that while she had seen him, Artùr had not even known Angharad was there.

  But there was Eira. And Lailoken sat beside Angharad, his strong hand pressing hers in reassurance as he adjusted the poultice Ariane had bound to his thigh. And there were many yet in need of healing. Angharad and Ariane and Languoreth had tended the wounded, side by side.

  Angharad’s knowledge already surpassed that of the woman who had borne her. “A priestess.” Her mother had looked at her in wonder. “Angharad, you astonish me.”

  But this overwarm room of warriors and queens, petty kings and chieftains, was deafening with its thousands o
f unspoken voices. Angharad’s senses felt burned by wind and by lightning, and now the inner voices of the Britons cried out far too loud. That one was thinking of his wife. That one was envious of her father, the king. Maelgwn Pendragon, sitting by the hearth, may have had his thoughtful green eyes trained on the fire, but they strayed in stolen moments, lighting upon her mother.

  Her uncle turned as if she had spoken her discomfort aloud. “It is only for a short time,” he assured her. “On the morrow, most shall ride away.” He bent his sandy head in a bid for her gaze. Angharad looked at him. “Do you know what I would say?” he asked.

  It calmed her to search him. Like slipping into her cloak.

  “Yes,” she answered after a moment.

  He nodded then, more to himself than to Angharad. “Well, then,” he said. “We have spoken it all.”

  CHAPTER 53

  Lailoken

  Grey Mare’s Tail Waterfall

  Kingdom of the Selgovae

  September, AD 580

  I had woken that morning at the foot of Black Mountain, unable to recapture my dream. There had been a woman there. A stranger. A girl to whom I’d been speaking. There had been a longing vast as a range of mountains.

  The dream echoed its importance, tugging at my memory. Somehow I knew it might return if only I visited the falls.

  I stood long, gazing up at the snowy cataract, thinking of the Keeper of the Falls. And then I sensed him, as if I had the ability to summon him, though I had discovered, of course, it had been the Keeper of the Falls who had truly summoned me.

  He is more than a shade, I thought. He is a god of place.

  I had thought it a myth that in the days of Rome, Wisdom Keepers had given their lives in an effort to become gods. Perhaps it was because the way of accomplishing such a feat had been lost. But now I understood that the Mad Keeper had not been driven to his death by any loss of his senses. He had given his life in an effort to protect his people from the coming of the Ninth Legion and, in so doing, had become a God of the Falls. He had returned to warn me of the Angles, and so it would seem he had given his life not only to protect the Selgovae but to protect us all. Perhaps he had not returned; rather, he had never departed. His tale was one of patterns, of beasts that die back or are slaughtered but never truly fall away.

  Now I sensed his footsteps, measured, trailing after as I followed the goat path back downhill, settling to sit in the little gray cell built for dreaming within the old wall of stone.

  Close your eyes, I thought I heard him say.

  I took a breath and did as he bade, feeling myself dropping deep, then deeper again.

  I pushed aside thoughts of how I must soon return to Partick.

  How we had won a battle, but now surely faced many more to come. The Angles had failed to take Din Eidyn, but returned now to Bernicia and to Deira to regather their strength.

  Soon war would come again.

  Deeper, the Keeper said. Close your eyes, and I will tell you a tale.

  There were temples once. They dotted the land like pinpricks into veins, tapping into the power that thrummed beneath the land of the living; the land of the dead. There, within the temple walls, you would sleep in a cell and dream in darkness, and when you woke and spoke of owls whose eyes burned yellow in the black, of plunging beneath the deep gray waters of a loch, the Keeper would ponder and tell you its meaning.

  There were star trackers once, who lifted their eyes to winter skies within circles of stone. They sang songs of summoning, and through the long, hollow halls the ancestors came, forgetting their earthly ends of ash or decay. They came to bear witness, to bind our treaties. On Samhain, when the days stretched thin, they came to sit at the table and dine with the children they’d borne. They came to be remembered.

  There were temples once, you were telling the girl who had come, for she was trying to remember. But the girl sat beside us as if we were not there. She walked a land vacant as a desert, a land of shades and blowing grasses. She walked and sought the places where temples once stood, but for too long they had lain altered, neglected.

  For too long, the ancestors of the girl had been sleeping.

  You were weeping for them, then. All the lost children. Rocking beneath the wave of their sorrow.

  A thousand times, and a thousand times again, they will come searching, calling your name. In distant times, they will summon you.

  And because of your sacrifice, you will hear them.

  You will hear them and return.

  And they will remember.

  Myrddin, they will cry out.

  Myrddin.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In her day, Languoreth of Cadzow was one of the most powerful women in Scotland. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a native who has heard of her.

  How could a woman of such influence be wiped so effectively from the collective memory of her own people?

  The answer to this question lies in the nature of the warrior-king society of early historic Scotland, in the enemies Languoreth made in her lifetime—men of a new patriarchal religion that sought to subvert the matriarchy that had held sway in the British Isles for well over a millennium—and in the explosion of her brother Lailoken’s reputation, which would transform him, over time, from flesh and blood into a fictional icon: the wizard we know today as Merlin.

  Languoreth’s husband, Rhydderch Hael, was a Briton who ruled the kingdom of Strathclyde from approximately AD 580 to AD 614. Scholars acknowledge Rhydderch’s history, along with the figures he encountered, men like Aedan mac Gabrahn, Columba of Iona, Urien of Rheged, and Mungo, also known as Saint Kentigern. They know the children descended from Rhydderch and Languoreth’s union, who surface in medieval Welsh Triads, saints’ lives, and king lists.I Languoreth is named as the wife of Rhydderch in the twelfth-century Life of St. Kentigern, and her memory is preserved in the fourteenth-century Red Book of Hergest. She’s remembered as Rhydderch’s adulterous queen in a piece of Glasgow folklore called “The Fish and the Ring.”

  These mentions amount to more early medieval “press” than can be claimed by any one of Languoreth’s female contemporaries, yet scholars still declare Rhydderch a historical figure even as they relegate his wife to the realm of fiction—if they mention her name at all.

  Of course, I am not unbiased. I’ve devoted a decade of research to Languoreth and Lailoken’s history with the sole intention of resurrecting the people I believe inspired an ancient yet enduring legend.

  The Forgotten Kingdom, the second book in the Lost Queen Trilogy, brought unique challenges, including the study of three additional cultures: the Scots of Dalriada, the Picts, and the Anglo-Saxons. Characters were roaming the length and breadth of Scotland, which meant the introduction of new flora and fauna. I also had to piece together two very different historical battles, the records of which are scant: the Battle of Arderydd and the Battle of the Caledonian Wood. Throughout the process, I noted things I wanted to share with readers so they, too, could explore the truth behind the fiction.

  The Battles

  The Battle of Arderydd, one of the most violent and least remembered civil conflicts in Scottish history, took place in the year AD 573, according to the Annales Cambriae. Pitting Languoreth’s husband against her brother and Lailoken against his young nephew, it tore her family apart. The ramifications are discussed in a “Dialogue between Myrddin and His Sister,” in which Myrddin’s sister states that she lost both a son and a daughter. It was difficult enough to write the death of Rhys, so I allowed Angharad to survive and embark upon a journey of her own.

  Both William Forbes Skene and my colleague Adam Ardrey believe Arthur and Aedan mac Gabrahn played a role at this battle on the side of the victors. But this is something that has given me pause.

  There is no mention of Aedan mac Gabrahn’s involvement at Arderydd in any surviving text that deals with the battle. Skene argued the nearby “Arthuret” Hills carry a memory of Arthur, which might prove his victory at Arderyd
d. And while Adam Ardrey suggests that Aedan might have sided with Rhydderch to gain support for his claim to the kingship of Dalriada, I’ve come to a different conclusion.

  First, I don’t believe Aedan mac Gabrahn needed Strathclyde’s support to take the throne of Dalriada, a situation that came down to its own civil war between Aedan and his half brother, Eoganan. Aedan won, and chased Eoganan into “retirement.” There is no record of Strathclyde’s involvement.

  Second, as a Scot embroiled in his own battles in Dalriada, why would Aedan offer men for a battle between Brythonic kings down by Hadrian’s Wall?II

  Third, while there is no textual evidence that supports Aedan’s or Arthur’s involvement at Arderydd, two often-ignored texts provide some compelling clues about the nature of Aedan’s relationship with Lailoken: the medieval poem “Peiryan Vaban” (“Commanding Youth”) and a Welsh Triad that remembers the “Three Unrestrained Ravagings of the Island of Britain.”

  “Peiryan Vaban” is a rare poem attributed to Myrddin. In it, Myrddin is portrayed as a warrior, speaking to an unknown but powerful youth of the violent revenge “Aeddan” will take upon Rhydderch for the death of Gwenddolau in a battle, presumably at Arderydd.

  Then, in the Triads, a memory is preserved of a violent raid upon the court of Rhydderch by Aedan: “When Aedan the Wily came to the court of Rhydderch the Generous at Alclud, he left neither food nor drink nor beast alive.” The date of any such raid is unknown, and Lailoken may or may not have been present, but this is the reason I’ve included Aedan’s raid on Clyde Rock in this book.

  Other evidence also leads me to believe it unlikely that Aedan formed an alliance with British kings against Gwenddolau. In Adomnan’s Life of Saint Columba, Rhydderch asks the saint whether he should fear death by Aedan mac Gabrahn’s hand. Later, Myrddin is brought from exile to become one of Rhydderch’s counsellors, or so the story goes. Myrddin was effectively an enemy of the state, languishing in exile for nearly seven years. It seemed unlikely that sheer nepotism could win him back a place at court, especially given the religious tensions in Strathclyde at the time, which are detailed in Mungo’s hagiography. It makes much more sense if Lailoken was able to offer something that Rhydderch could not attain on his own: an alliance with Aedan mac Gabrahn. It was only after 580, when Lailoken emerged from exile, that Aedan mac Gabrahn joined a confederation of Brythonic kings to help fight the Angles of Bernicia.