Morgan, his pagan friend, had been Merlin’s most trusted priestess until the younger Nimue usurped that position, but Merlin and Nimue were both far away and that left Morgan as virtual ruler of Merlin’s lands in Avalon. Morgan, with her gold mask hiding her fire-ravaged face and her black robe shrouding her flame-twisted body, assumed Merlin’s power and it was she who finished the rebuilding of Merlin’s hall on the Tor, and she who organized the tax-collectors in the northern part of Arthur’s land. Morgan became one of Arthur’s most trusted advisers; indeed, after Bishop Bedwin died of a fever that autumn, Arthur even suggested, against all precedence, that Morgan be named as a full councillor. No woman had ever sat on a King’s Council in Britain and Morgan might well have been the first, but Guinevere made sure she was not. Guinevere would let no woman be a councillor if she could not be one herself, and besides, Guinevere hated anything that was ugly and, the Gods know, poor Morgan was grotesque even with her gold mask in place. So Morgan stayed in Ynys Wydryn, while Guinevere supervised the building of the new palace at Lindinis.
It was a gorgeous palace. The old Roman villa that Gundlcus had burned was rebuilt and extended so that its cloistered wings enclosed two great courtyards where water flowed in marble channels. Lindinis, close to the royal hill of Caer Cadarn, was to be Dumnonia’s new capital, though Guinevere took good care that Mordred, with his twisted left foot, was allowed nowhere near the place. Only the beautiful were allowed in Lindinis, and in its arcaded courtyards Guinevere assembled statues from villas and shrines throughout Dumnonia. There was no Christian shrine there, but Guinevere made a great dark hall for the women’s Goddess Isis, and she provided a lavish suite of rooms where Lancelot could stay when he visited from his new kingdom in Siluria. Elaine, Lancelot’s mother, lived in those rooms and she, who had once made Ynys Trebes so beautiful, now helped Guinevere make Lindinis’s palace into a shrine of beauty.
Arthur, I know, was rarely at Lindinis. He was too busy preparing for the great war against the Saxons, to which end he began re-fortifying the ancient earth citadels in southern Dumnonia. Even Caer Cadarn, deep in our heartland, had its wall strengthened and new timber fighting platforms poised on its ramparts, but his greatest work was at Caer Ambra, just a half hour’s walk east of the Stones, which was to be his new base against the Sais. The old people had made a fort there, but all that autumn and winter the slaves toiled to steepen the ancient earth walls and to make new palisades and fighting platforms on their summits. More forts were strengthened south of Caer Ambra to defend the lower parts of Dumnonia against the southern Saxons led by Cerdic, who were sure to attack us while Arthur assaulted Aelle in the north. Not since the Romans, I dare say, had so much British earth been dug or timber split, and Arthur’s honest taxes could never pay for half that labour. He therefore made a levy on the Christian churches that were plentiful and powerful in southern Britain, the same churches that had supported Nabur and Sansum’s effort to topple him. That levy was eventually repaid, and it protected the Christians from the ghastly attentions of the Saxon heathens, but the Christians never forgave Arthur, nor did they notice that the same levy was taken from the handful of pagan shrines that still possessed wealth.
Not all the Christians were Arthur’s enemies. At least a third of his spearmen were Christians and those men were as loyal as any pagan. Many other Christians approved of his rule, but most of the leaders of the church let their greed dictate their loyalty and they were the ones who opposed him. They believed that their God would one day return to this earth and walk among us like a mortal man, but He would not come again until all pagans had been converted to His faith. The preachers, knowing that Arthur was a pagan, hissed curses at him, but Arthur ignored their words as he made his ceaseless tours of southern Britain. One day he would be with Sagramor on Aelle’s border, the next he would be fighting one of Cerdic’s war-bands as it probed deep into the river valleys of the south, and then he would ride north through Dumnonia and across Gwent to Isca where he would argue with local chieftains about the number of spearmen who could be raised from western Gwent or eastern Siluria. Thanks to Lugg Vale Arthur was now far more than Dumnonia’s chief lord and Mordred’s protector; he was Britain’s warlord, the undisputed leader of all our armies, and no King dared refuse him, nor, in those days, wanted to.
But all this I missed, for I was in Caer Sws and I was with Ceinwyn and I was in love. And waiting for Merlin.
Merlin and Nimue came to Cwm Isaf just days before the winter solstice. Dark clouds were pressing close above the bare oak tops on the ridges, and the morning frost had lingered well into the afternoon. The stream was a patchwork of ice ledges and trickling water, the fallen leaves were crisp and the valley’s soil as hard as stone. We had a fire in the central chamber so our house was warm enough, though it was choking with the smoke that billowed about the un-trimmed beams before finding the small hole in the roof’s ridge. Other fires smoked from the shelters that my spearmen had made across the valley; stout little huts with walls of earth and stone supporting roofs of timber and bracken. We had made a beast shed behind the house where a bull, two cows, three sows, a boar, a dozen sheep and a score of chickens were penned at night to protect them from the wolves. We had plenty of wolves in our woods and their howling echoed at every dusk, and at night we would sometimes hear them scrabbling beyond the beast shed. The sheep would bleat piteously, the hens would set up a cackling panic, and then Issa, or whoever else stood guard, would shout and hurl a firebrand into the wood’s edge and the wolves would skitter away. One morning, going early to fetch water from the stream, I came face to face with a big old dog wolf. He had been drinking, but as I stepped out of the bushes he raised a grey muzzle, stared at me, then waited for my salute before he loped silently upstream. It was, I decided, a good omen and, in those days as we waited for Merlin, we counted the omens. We also hunted the wolves. Cuneglas gave us three brace of longhaired wolfhounds that were bigger and shaggier than the famous Powysian deerhounds like those Guinevere kept in Dumnonia. The sport kept my spearmen active and even Ceinwyn liked those long cold days in the high woods. She wore leather breeches, high boots and a leather jerkin, and hung a hunter’s long knife at her waist. She would braid her fair hair into a knot at the back of her head, then scramble up rocks and down gullies and over dead trees behind her brace of hounds who were leashed on long horsehair ropes. The simplest way to hunt wolves was with a bow and arrow, but as few of us possessed that skill we used the dogs, war spears and knives, and by the time Merlin returned we had a pile of pelts stacked in Cuneglas’s store hall. The King had wanted us to move back to Caer Sws, but Ceinwyn and I were as happy as our anticipation of Merlin’s ordeal allowed us and so we stayed in our small valley and counted the days. And we were happy in Cwm Isaf. Ceinwyn took a ridiculous pleasure in doing all the things that till now had been done for her by servants, though strangely she was never able to wring a chicken’s neck and I always used to laugh when she killed a hen. She had no need to do it, for any one of the servants could have killed the fowl and my spearmen would do anything for Ceinwyn, but she insisted on sharing the work, though when it came to killing hens, ducks or geese she could not make herself do it properly. The only method she ever devised was to lay the poor creature down on the earth, put a small foot on its neck and then, with her eyes tight closed, give the head one quick decisive tug. She was more successful with the distaff. Every woman in Britain, save for the very richest, was forever with a distaff and spindle, for spinning wool into thread was one of those endless jobs that will presumably last until the sun has made its last turn about the earth. As soon as one year’s fleeces had been turned into yarn, so the next year’s fleeces came to the storehouses and the women would collect their apronfuls, wash and comb the wool, then start spinning the thread again. They spun when they walked, they spun as they talked, they spun whenever there was no other task needing their hands. It was monotonous, mindless work, but not unskilled; at first Ceinwyn could only prod
uce pathetic little tatters of wool, but she became better, though never as quick as those women who had spun the wool since the very first day their hands were big enough to hold the distaff. She would sit of an evening, telling me about her day, and her left hand would turn the staff and her right would flick the weighted spindle that hung from the distaff to elongate and twist the emerging thread. When the spindle reached the floor she would wind the thread around it, fix the spooled yarn with the bone clip on the spindle’s top and then start spinning again. The wool she made that winter was often lumpy, or else fragile, but I loyally wore one of the shirts she made from that thread until it fell apart.
Cuneglas visited us often, though his wife, Helledd, never came. Queen Helledd was truly conventional and she disapproved deeply of what Ceinwyn had done. ‘She thinks it brings disgrace on the family,’
Cuneglas told us cheerfully. He became, like Arthur and Galahad, one of my dearest friends. He was, I think, lonely in Caer Sws, for other than Iorweth and some of the younger Druids he had few men with whom he could talk of anything but hunting and war, and so I replaced the brothers he had lost. His older brother, who should have become King, had been killed in a fall from a horse, the next son had died of a fever and the youngest had been killed fighting the Saxons. Cuneglas, like me, deeply disapproved of Ceinwyn’s going on the Dark Road, but he told me that nothing short of a sword blow would ever stop her. ‘Everyone always thinks she’s so sweet and kind,’ he told me, ‘but there’s a will of iron there. Stubborn.’
‘Can’t kill chickens.’
‘I can’t even imagine her trying!’ he laughed. ‘But she is happy, Derfel, and for that I thank you.’
It was a happy time, one of the happiest of all our happy times, but always shadowed by the knowledge that Merlin would come and demand the fulfilment of our oaths. He came on a frosty afternoon. I was outside the house, using a Saxon war axe to split newly chopped logs that would fill our house with smoke, and Ceinwyn was inside, hushing a squabble that had risen between her maidservants and the fiery Scarach, when a horn sounded across the valley. The horn was a signal from my spearmen that a stranger approached Cwm Isaf and I lowered the axe in time to see Merlin’s tall figure striding among the trees. Nimue was with him. She had stayed a week with us after the night of Lancelot’s betrothal and then, without a word of explanation, had slipped away one night, but now, dressed in black beside her lord in his long white robe, she returned. Ceinwyn came from the house. Her face was smudged with soot and her hands bloodied from a hare she had been jointing. ‘I thought he was bringing a war-band,’ she said, her blue eyes fixed on Merlin. That was what Nimue had told us before she left; that Merlin was raising the army that would protect him on the Dark Road.
‘Maybe he’s left them at the river?’ I suggested.
She pushed a lock of hair away from her face, adding a smudge of blood to the soot. ‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asked, for I had been stripped to the waist as I chopped the wood.
‘Not yet,’ I said, though I pulled on a wool shirt as Merlin leapt long legged over the stream. My spearmen, anticipating news, trailed from their huts to follow him, but they stayed outside the house when he ducked his tall figure under our low lintel.
He offered us no greeting, but just went past us into the house. Nimue followed him, and by the time Ceinwyn and I entered they were already squatting beside the fire. Merlin held his thin hands to the blaze, then seemed to give a long sigh. He said nothing, and neither of us wanted to ask his news. I, like him, sat at the fire’s edge while Ceinwyn put the half jointed hare into a bowl then wiped her hands free of blood. She waved Scarach and the servants out of the house, then sat beside me. Merlin shivered, then seemed to relax. His long back was bowed as he hunched forward with his eyes closed. He stayed thus for a long time. His brown face was deeply lined and his beard a startling white. Like all Druids he shaved the front part of his skull, but now that tonsure was smothered with a fine layer of short white hair, evidence that he had been a long time on the road without a razor or a bronze mirror. He looked so old that day, and hunched by the fire he even looked feeble. Nimue sat opposite him, saying nothing. She did rise once to take Hywelbane from its nail hooks in the main beam and I saw her smile as she recognized the two strips of bone set into the handle. She unsheathed the blade, then held it into the smokiest part of the fire, and once the steel was covered in soot she carefully scratched an inscription into the soot with a piece of straw. The letters were not like these I write now, that both we and the Saxons employ, but were older magical letters, mere strokes slashed by bars, that only the Druids and sorcerers used. She propped the scabbard against the wall and hung the sword back on its nails, but did not explain the significance of what she had written. Merlin ignored her.
He opened his eyes suddenly, and the appearance of feebleness was replaced by a terrible savagery.
‘I put a curse,’ he said slowly, ‘on the creatures of Siluria.’ He flicked his fingers towards the fire and a puff of brighter flame hissed in the wood. ‘May their crops be blighted,’ he growled, ‘their cattle barren, their children crippled, their swords blunted and their enemies triumphant.’ It was, for him, a mild enough curse, but there was a hissing malevolence in his voice. ‘And on Gwent,’ he went on, ‘I give a murrain, and frosts in summer and wombs shrivelled to dry husks.’ He spat into the flames. ‘In Elmet,’ he said,
‘the tears will make lakes, plagues will fill graves, and rats shall rule their houses.’ He spat again. ‘How many men will you bring, Derfel?’
‘All I have, Lord.’ I hesitated to admit how few that was, but I finally gave him the answer, ‘Twenty shields.’
‘And those of your men who are still with Galahad?’ He gave me a quick glance from beneath his bushy white eyebrows. ‘How many of those?’
‘I have heard nothing from them, Lord.’
He sneered. ‘They form a palace guard for Lancelot. He insists on it. He makes his brother into a doorkeeper.’ Galahad was Lancelot’s half-brother and as unlike him as any man could be. ‘It is a good thing, Lady,’ Merlin looked at Ceinwyn, ‘that you did not marry Lancelot.’
She smiled at me. ‘I think so, Lord.’
‘He finds Siluria tedious. I can’t blame him for that, but he’ll seek Dumnonia’s comforts and be a snake in Arthur’s belly.’ He smiled. ‘You, my Lady, were supposed to be his plaything.’
‘I had rather be here,’ Ceinwyn said, gesturing at our rough stone walls and smoke-stained roof beams.
‘But he’ll try to strike at you,’ Merlin warned her. ‘His pride climbs higher than Lleullaw’s eagle, Lady, and Guinevere is cursing you. She killed a dog in her temple of Isis and draped its pelt on a crippled bitch that she gave your name.’
Ceinwyn looked pale, made the sign against evil and spat into the fire. Merlin shrugged. ‘I have countered the curse. Lady,’ he said, then stretched his long arms and bent his head back so that his ribboned plaits almost touched the rush-covered floor behind him. ‘Isis is a foreign Goddess,’ he said, ‘and her power is feeble in this land.’ He brought his head forward again, then rubbed his eyes with his long hands, I have come empty-handed,’ he said bleakly. ‘No man in Elmet would step forward, and none elsewhere. Their spears, they say, are dedicated to Saxon bellies. I offered them no gold, I offered no silver, only a fight on behalf of the Gods, and they offered me their prayers, then let their womenfolk talk to them of children and hearths and cattle and land and so they slunk away. Eighty men! That’s all I wanted. Diwrnach can field two hundred, maybe a handful more, but eighty would have sufficed, yet there were not even eight men who would come. Their Lords are sworn to Arthur now. The Cauldron, they tell me, can wait till Lloegyr is ours again. They want Saxon land and Saxon gold and all I offered them was blood and cold on the Dark Road.’
There was a silence. A log collapsed in the fire to spring a constellation of sparks toward the blackened roof. ‘Not one man offered a spear?’ I asked, shocked at the new
s.
‘A few,’ he said dismissively, ‘but none I would trust. None worthy of the Cauldron.’ He paused, then looked tired again. ‘I am struggling against the lure of Saxon gold and against Morgan. She opposes me.’
‘Morgan!’ I could not hide my astonishment. Morgan, Arthur’s eldest sister, had been Merlin’s closest companion until Nimue usurped her place, and though Morgan hated Nimue I did not think that hatred extended to Merlin.
‘Morgan,’ he said flatly. ‘She has spread a tale through Britain. The tale says that the Gods oppose my quest and that I am to be defeated, and that my death will embrace all my companions. She dreamed the tale and folk believe her dreams. I am old, she says, and feeble, and loose-witted.’
‘She says,’ Nimue spoke softly, ‘that a woman will kill you, not Diwrnach.’
Merlin shrugged. ‘Morgan plays her own game and I don’t yet understand it.’ He rooted about in a pocket of his gown and brought out a handful of dried knotted grasses. Each knotted stem looked alike to me, but he sorted through them and selected one that he held towards Ceinwyn. ‘I release you from your oath, Lady.’
Ceinwyn glanced at me, then looked back to the knot of grass. ‘Will you still take the Dark Road, Lord?’ she asked Merlin.
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