A Novel

by Sean Pidgeon

  There is a prickling of anxiety now, a sense of natural forces arrayed against her. She counts the hours since she left Oxford, imagines Donald still waiting for her, hopes fading, as twilight falls across the valley. The sun breaks through at last, still well up above the horizon as she drives on past Abergavenny into the eastern fringe of the Black Mountains. She pushes up to seventy on the empty road that leads to Crickhowell and Brecon and finally to the narrower lanes that will take her up into the wilderness.

  DONALD FINDS HIMSELF pacing upstream towards the lower waterfall, back downstream to the ruins of the old bridge, ideas crowding in on him from the empty sky. The Song of Lailoken describes how the one called Belak-neskato in her death-throes laid a bitter curse on her adversary, the poet who calls himself the crab.

  I did not heed her last-breath’s screeching

  Threefold life she promised me, and threefold death

  My doom the venom on her tongue.

  Margaret Rackham hinted at a connection to these lines in the poem when she spoke of Bowen’s intense dreams of a kind of threefold death, his visions of being crushed by falling stones in the forest, assaulted on a bridge by an enemy wielding sharpened sticks, drowned in a raging flood. Thus Bowen’s own death was also in a sense foretold: with his strange premonitory note sent to the Bodleian on the eve of the accident, he seems to have guessed that his time was near. Perhaps there is, after all, a thread that connects these three elusive characters, Lailoken and Siôn Cent and Caradoc Bowen. They were the successive inheritors of an ancient poem, and each in his own time became obsessed with these strange and troubling verses. Did each of them in the end also come to suffer his apportioned part of the threefold death? The prophecy of Belak-neskato was fulfilled at last when Caradoc Bowen, the final victim of her curse, fell into the torrent at Three Devil Falls.

  Donald sits down once more at the river’s edge, tries to halt the irrational galloping of his thoughts. There is no place in his scientific world-view for avatars of an earlier age. Margaret Rackham described Bowen as suffering from a kind of psychosis: she thought his death was self-inflicted, an act of prophetic self-fulfilment. If he suffered from dark dreams of his own death, this was the unhappy result of his fixation on a poem that he came to believe had a personal, oracular meaning for him. If he lost his footing as he made a dangerous climb up the waterfall, this happened only because, in some final act of acceptance or resignation, he placed himself deliberately in harm’s way.

  THERE ARE LONG shadows now from the line of hills to the west, making a strange light that begins to play tricks on Julia’s senses. Turning a sharp bend, she brakes suddenly at a fork in the road, certain that she saw the silhouette of a woman in a dark cloak standing there, a hand outstretched; but it is only the blackened fragment of a dead tree leaning across the verge. She stops the car, takes out Donald’s map, tries to find her bearings. It is clear enough: a turn to the right will bring her on to the track that leads alongside the river to Three Devil Falls.

  Now she is so close, something makes her hesitate. She gets out of the car and walks over to the tree. There is a strange sound in the air, something whispering from the rim of the valley, glancing off the folds and ridges, mingling with the wind and the rushing stream. It is a woman’s voice, a simple phrase endlessly repeated, Julia’s mother speaking to her along some magical southerly path through the Welsh bedrock from Dyffryn Farm. Do what you must do, my love, do what you must do. But now the words are changing, losing their benign intentions, and she is not so sure.

  Leaning back against the trunk of the tree, she sinks her head in her hands, tries to shut out the insidious whispering, this malicious trick her mind has chosen to play on her. When all is quiet once more, what comes to her first is a memory of her father cursing at the kitchen stove, trying to light it with damp wood on a cold April morning: angry at her for the news he has heard from the treacherous Gareth Williams, that she has been seen in the company of Robert Mortimer’s son. She remembers the look on his face, half-joking and half-serious in the intense way he had sometimes. He told her she should always try to take the right path, even if another way seems easier. Her mother was there in the room, turning her back on him. You were never quite so wise yourself, Dai Llewellyn, she said.

  She plays through scenes from her past, imagines going the other way at every turn, where that would have left her now. Instead of leaving Donald standing outside the Randolph Hotel after he kissed her clumsily on the cheek, she takes him by the hand, walks on with him down Broad Street to a future without Hugh Mortimer. Instead of leaving him alone with Lucy Trevelyan at Jesus College, she walks boldly in through the gate. Instead of abandoning Hugh at the side of the road, she finds a way to go back to him, to repair the shattered fragments of their married life. Instead of getting back in her car and taking the right-hand turn, she goes to the left, keeps on driving until she comes to some new crossroads where she might hope to choose a path that leads to a simpler life.

  DONALD CAN HEAR a noise in the far distance, the humming of an engine. The more closely he listens, the more it seems to fade away. By now, he is almost sure that Julia will not come. He imagines her still at home in Oxford, ashamed, confused, remorseful perhaps, his letter disregarded: Hugh Mortimer there at her side, coolly avowing his undying love for his wife. Still, he will wait for her until the last moment, just in case.

  It is Julia, in the end, who had the right instincts about the Song of Lailoken. When they met at the Randolph Hotel, she suggested to him that there might be some connection between the poem and Paul Healey’s archaeological finds. At the time it seemed an impossible leap, to imagine that the remains unearthed at Devil’s Barrow, the woman with her arms wrapped around a ritual chalice decorated with the symbols of stag, boar, and raven, the three-headed serpent, were somehow what the Song of Lailoken was about.

  And yet there is now some real evidence that can be brought to bear. The dating analysis from King’s College suggests the late second or early first millennium BC for the human remains in the barrow, and Margaret Rackham’s team at the Bodleian has shown that the Song of Lailoken is at least as old as the sixth century AD. If the poem recited to St. Cyndeyrn was derived from a long-standing Celtic oral tradition, it could be far older than this, as Lucy with her Homeric insights has shown him. Is it possible that the poem was learned by the bard Lailoken as a young apprentice, that it was a story passed on to him from some earlier generation: then captured for the first time in writing by St. Cyndeyrn, who heard it from Lailoken in the forest?

  Once the new linguistic evidence is added to the mix, the convergence that Julia originally proposed becomes harder to resist. Otto Zeiss’s plausible theory suggests that the alien words in the poem, Belak-neskato and Araket and Madarakt, are the names of animal totems taken from a language that was spoken in Britain when the first Celtic peoples, contemporaries of the heroes of the Iliad, were exploring the coastal Atlantic routes to the north. The Song of Lailoken carries an echo of the forgotten time when they came into contact with the descendants of the original post-glacial settlers, the indigenous Britons whose ancestors were the builders of Stonehenge.

  There is a story here that badly wants to be told, a tale of the terrifying raven-priestess dispensing death to her own people, thirteen male warriors chosen with special care to satisfy the gruesome demands of the white-winged, three-headed sky god:

  Belak-neskato she was named, the death-wielder

  Draining blood of men three-times slain

  To slake the white serpent, three-times thirsting

  Sky-devil who bore the giants’ ring from farthest west

  To make this hallowed killing-place.

  The remains of Belak-neskato were discovered at Devil’s Barrow, still clutching the magical chalice on which her raven totem was depicted with those of her twin protectors, the stag and the boar, Araket and Madarakt.

  Painted petty-gods on earth, their strength availed them nothing

&nbs
p; The first meeting Arthur’s blade, the second flew the field

  Then our champion leaping high struck down the black enchantress

  Tore her from her gruesome perch.

  The warrior Araket fell at the sky-temple to the sword of the hero Arthur, and was laid to rest alongside Belak-neskato whom he had tried to save. Buried with him were the antlers of the great Irish elk, which he had worn as a symbol of his unearthly power. Beneath them in this mass grave were the bodies of the thirteen victims of the threefold death. Madarakt escaped that day, but would return to challenge Arthur in a final battle at the crooked vale.

  DONALD OPENS HIS eyes, sees Julia standing there looking down at him with her beautiful, ironical smile. ‘I hope I’m not too late,’ she says.

  He climbs to his feet, disorientated, takes half a step towards her. ‘No, I’m glad you’re here,’ he says, reaching to take her hand. ‘There’s something I need to show you.’

  The crossing is challenging but not perilous, a series of jumps between the broken-down footings of the bridge. The path on the other side is steep and tumbled with boulders, but they are able to find a way up, scrambling through thickets of stunted ash and birch. Soon they break out of the trees to a narrow ridge that climbs steadily up the eastern side of the valley. The slope becomes gradually more sheer, but there is a firm footing underneath and a narrow but well-defined path carved through heather now shading towards the dark brown of winter. This track can be seen curving up far ahead of them, summoning them to the higher ground.

  By now they are walking in single file, distracted by the difficulty of the final pitch across the top of the valley wall. They come around a broad shoulder of the hillside to a place where the track splits in two. Above and to their left, a short, steep climb will take them to the very top of the cliff. Ahead of them, the full sweep of the valley at last comes into view, the river cutting and weaving its way past smooth-faced rocks the colour of blood, its jagged course making the shape of a wolf’s-head smile as it finds its way down from the rim of the valley to the top of the uppermost waterfall, where Caradoc Bowen fell. The path in front of them opens up to a rocky ledge, a broad, tapering space shaped like an axe’s blade beneath tall cliffs rising to great rounded sandstone crags glowing bright red in the light of the setting sun.

  ‘Does it look familiar to you?’ Donald says.

  Julia comes to stand next to him, takes hold of his arm. ‘It’s like a scene from a fairy tale.’

  He would not have thought to say it this way, but she has captured it perfectly. This is a view that has remained unchanged across the centuries, the same rugged landscape that was once described in a heroic tale of the red dragon pitted against the white, crossing stone circles and rivers and mountainsides to a last battle beneath the blood-tinged cliff where Arthur felled the giant Madarakt even as he was himself struck down.

  ‘I think that’s exactly what it is,’ Donald says. ‘But there’s something missing from the story.’ He points to the narrow path that branches away from the main track, leading sharply up the hillside. ‘We need to climb up to the top.’

  DONALD STEPS UP at last to a broad slab laid by human hand at the edge of the cliff. In front of him now are the three great stones, a tall upright on either side with a huge curved capstone raised on top. Together they form the entrance to a grass-covered burial mound, a doorway to a dimly lit tunnel disappearing into blackness. On another day, in another place, he would be studying this tomb as a scientific archaeologist, examining the details of its construction, wondering at the possibilities of excavation. But he finds himself in a far different frame of mind as he stands there staring into the portal, shivering with a chill that has nothing to do with the coolness of the mountain air, the fast-approaching sunset. It is not a sense of fear, but a disorientating awareness of the scale of human time, the centuries that have gone by since anyone passed this way, into the darkness.

  He takes out his father’s map, to settle himself, to be sure he is not mistaken. The name of this place is clearly written there, Drws-Arthur, Arthur’s Door, a throwback to a far-distant event described in the closing lines of the Song of Lailoken.

  We bore him up to the highest cliff-top, gate of the otherworld

  Laid him beneath a linden tree, the shield-wood powerless now

  The words unspoken on his lips, the life we saw still behind his eyes

  No more than the trick of light and shadow on the rock.

  Donald conjures up the scene, allows himself to believe that it might be true: that this remote and rugged place, unchanged across the centuries, is where the warrior Arto-uiros, the bear-man, fought his last fight and was carried off to the otherworld where his wounds might be healed. There is an entry in the Annales Cambriae, the fragmentary tale of Arthur’s final battle written there by Welsh monks whose grandparents’ grandparents had heard the story whispered to them as children.

  Gueith Camlann, in qua Arthur et Medraut corruere.

  The strife of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell.

  As he stands at the windswept edge, looking along the valley to the tall sandstone crags raised like bloodied fists in the declining sun, the real Arthur feels almost within reach.

  Julia comes up beside him now, stands there quietly with a charming curious expression on her face. He takes her by the hand, and together they walk past the staring entrance to the tomb, then on around the burial mound. On the northern side, a small grove of trees has somehow found enough shelter to survive on the exposed cliff-top. The trunks are stunted and twisted, scarred with deep entwining furrows, and amongst them stand the hollowed remains of some earlier generation. Donald pulls Julia close to him, feels the physical presence of her, the warmth of her body against his, the rightness of being here with her. He looks up at the knotted black branches against the orange sky with the buds of next year’s leaves almost ready for life. Though he cannot quite be sure, he thinks they might be linden trees.

  Chronology

  2400 BC Completion of main stone circle at Stonehenge

  1000* First contacts between Celtic-speaking peoples and indigenous Britons

  750* Homer: the Iliad

  43 AD Claudius begins Roman conquest of Britain

  407 Withdrawal of Roman legions from Britain

  500* Siege of Mount Badon

  540* Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain): earliest reference to Mount Badon

  555* St. Cyndeyrn (Kentigern) establishes a monastery at Llanelwy

  573* According to Welsh mythology, the prophet Lailoken flees to the forest

  600* Aneirin, Y Gododdin: earliest poetic reference to Arthur

  731 The Venerable Bede of Jarrow, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum: widely regarded as the first true work of English historical scholarship

  828* Nennius, Historia Brittonum: lists twelve Arthurian battles, including Badon but not Camlann

  970* Annales Cambriae (Annals of Wales): lists two Arthurian battles, Badon and Camlann

  1138 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) including the Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin): introduces Arthur, King of the Britons, and the prophet Merlin to a wide audience

  1152 Geoffrey of Monmouth consecrated Bishop of St. Asaph

  1154* Death of Geoffrey of Monmouth

  1190* Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, le Conte du Graal: progenitor of the medieval ‘romance’ tradition of Arthurian literature

  1400–1415 The Welsh rebellion of Owain Glyn Dŵr

  1416* Death of Owain Glyn Dŵr

  *approximate or tentative date

  Guide to Welsh Pronunciation

  Despite its formidable appearance, the Welsh language follows generally simple rules of spelling and pronunciation. The principal Welsh names and placenames in the novel are pronounced roughly as follows.

  Camlann = kam-lan (with two short vowels)

  Cwmhir = koom-heere

 
; Cyndeyrn = kin-dayrn

  Dyffryn = duh-frin

  Owain Glyn Dŵr = Ohwain glin doowr

  Plaid Cymru = plide kumree

  Rhayader = ray-uh-der (with the ‘uh’ barely sounded)

  Siôn Cent = shon kent

  Tân y Ddraig = tahn uh thraig (‘th’ as in ‘the’, ‘ai’ as in ‘eye’)

  Ty Faenor = tee vynor

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2013 by Sean Pidgeon

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

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  write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

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  Manufacturing by RR Donnelley, Harrisonburg, VA

  Book design by JAM Design

  Map by David Cain

  Production manager: Anna Oler

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pidgeon, Sean.

  Finding Camlann : a novel / Sean Pidgeon.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-393-24015-3 (hardcover)