He went on one knee. ‘Say it, Lord.’
‘If I die, Issa, and Ceinwyn still lives, then you must kill her with one sword stroke before Diwrnach’s men can take her.’
He kissed the sword’s tip. ‘I swear it, Lord.’
At high tide the swirling currents died away so that the sea lay still except for the wind-fretted waves that had floated the two boats up from the shingle. We lifted the ponies on board, then took our places. The boats were long and narrow and, as soon as we had settled amidst the sticky fishing nets, the boatmen gestured that we were to bail out the water that seeped between the tarred planks. We used our helmets to scoop the cold sea back to its place and I prayed to Manawydan, the sea God, that he would preserve us as the boatmen put their long oars between the tholes. Merlin shivered. His face was whiter that I had ever seen it, but touched by a nauseous yellow and smeared by flecks of foam that dribbled from the corners of his lips. He was not conscious, but muttered odd things in his delirium. The boatmen chanted a strange song as they pulled on their oars, but fell silent when they reached the middle of the straits. They paused there and one man in each boat gestured back towards the mainland. We turned. At first I could only see the dark strip of the shore beneath the snow-white and slate-black loom of the mountains beyond, but then I saw a ragged black thing moving just beyond the stony beach. It was a banner, mere fluttering strips of rags tied to a pole, but an instant after it appeared a line of warriors showed themselves above the strait’s bank. They laughed at us, their cackling coming clear through the cold wind above the sound of the lapping sea. They were all mounted on shaggy ponies and all were dressed in what appeared to be torn strips of ragged black cloth that caught the breeze and fluttered like pennants. They carried shields and the hugely long war spears that the Irish favoured, and neither the shields nor the spears frightened me, but there was something about their tattered, long-haired wildness that struck a sudden chill through me. Or perhaps that chill came from the sleet that had begun to spit on the west wind to dimple the sea’s grey surface.
The ragged, dark riders watched as our boats grounded on Ynys Mon. The boatmen helped us lift Merlin and the ponies safe ashore, then they ran their boats back into the sea.
‘Shouldn’t we have kept the boats here?’ Galahad asked me.
‘How?’ I asked. ‘We’d have to divide the men, some to guard the boats and some to go with Ceinwyn and Nimue.’
‘So how do we get off the island?’ Galahad asked.
‘With the Cauldron,’ I adopted Nimue’s confidence, ‘all things will be possible.’ I had no other answer to give him and dared not tell him the truth. That truth was that I felt doomed. I felt as though the curses of those ancient Druids were even now congealing around our souls. We struck north from the beach. Gulls screamed at us, whirling around us in the flying sleet as we climbed up from the rocks into a bleak moorland broken only by outcrops of stone. In the old days, before the Romans came to destroy Ynys Mon, the land had been thick with sacred oaks amongst which the greatest mysteries of Britain were performed. The news of those rituals governed the seasons in Britain, Ireland, and even Gaul, for here the Gods had come to earth, and here the link between man and the Gods had been strongest before it had been sundered by the short Roman stabbing swords. This was holy ground, but it was also difficult ground, for after just an hour’s walking we came to a vast bog that seemed to bar our path into the island’s interior. We ranged along the bog’s edge, seeking a path, but there was none; so, as the light began to fade, we used our spear-shafts to discover the firmest passage through the spiky tussocks of grass and the sucking, treacherous patches of marsh. Our legs were soaked in freezing mud and the sleet found its way inside our furs. One of the ponies became stuck and the other began to panic, so we unloaded both beasts, distributed their remaining burdens amongst ourselves, then abandoned them.
We struggled on, sometimes resting on our circular shields that served like shallow coracles to support our weight until, inevitably, the brackish water seeped over their edges and forced us to stand again. The sleet became harder and thicker, whipped by a rising wind that flattened the marsh grass and drove the cold deep into our bones. Merlin was shouting strange words and thrashing his head from side to side, while some of my men were weakening, sapped by the cold as well as by the malevolence of whatever Gods now ruled this ruined land.
Nimue was the first to reach the bog’s far side. She leapt from tussock to tussock, showing us a path, and finally reached firm ground where she jumped up and down to show us that safety was close. Then, for a few seconds, she froze before pointing Merlin’s staff back the way we had come. We turned to see that the dark riders were with us, only now there were more of them; a whole horde of tattered Bloodshields was watching us from the bog’s far side. Three ragged banners were hoisted above them, and one of those banners was lifted in ironic salute before the riders turned their ponies eastwards. ‘I should never have brought you here,’ I said to Ceinwyn.
‘You didn’t bring me, Derfel,’ she said. ‘I came of my own will.’ She touched a gloved finger to my face. ‘And we shall leave the same way, my love.’
We climbed up from the bog to find, beyond a low crest, a landscape of small fields that lay between lumpish moors and sudden rock outcrops. We needed a refuge for the night and found it in a settlement of eight stone huts that were circled by a wall the height of a spear. The place was deserted, though people clearly lived there for the small stone huts were swept clean and the ashes in the hearth were still just warm to the touch. We stripped the turf roof off one hut and cut the roof timbers into shreds with which we made a fire for Merlin, who was now shivering and raving. We set a guard, then stripped off our furs and tried to dry our sopping boots and wet leggings.
Then, as the very last of the light seeped from the grey sky, I went to stand on the wall and searched all about the landscape. I saw nothing.
Four of us stood guard for the first part of the night, then Galahad and another three spearmen watched through the rest of that rainy darkness and not one of us heard anything other than the wind and the crackle of the fire in the hut. We heard nothing, we saw nothing, yet in the morning’s first wan light there was a newly severed head of a sheep dripping blood on one part of the wall. Nimue angrily pushed the sheep’s head oft the wall’s coping, then screamed a challenge towards the sky. She took a pouch of grey powder and scattered it on the fresh blood, and afterwards she rapped the wall with Merlin’s staff and told us the malevolence had been countered. We believed her because we wanted to believe her, just as we wanted to believe that Merlin was not dying. But he was deathly pale, breathing shallowly and making no sound. We tried to feed him with the last of our bread, but he clumsily spat the crumbs out. ‘We must find the Cauldron today,’ Nimue said calmly, ‘before he dies.’
We gathered our burdens, hoisted our shields onto our backs, picked up our spears and followed her northwards.
Nimue led us. Merlin had told her all he knew of the sacred isle and that knowledge took us northwards all morning long. The Blood-shields appeared soon after we had left our shelter and, now that we neared our goal, they became bolder so that at any one time there were always a score in sight and sometimes three times that number. They formed a loose ring about us, but took care to stay well outside the range of our spears. The sleet had stopped with the dawn, leaving just a cold, damp wind that bent the grass on the moors and lifted the black tatters of the dark riders’ cloaks. It was just after midday that we came to the place Nimue called Llyn Cerrig Bach. The name means the ‘lake of little stones’ and it was a dark sheet of shallow water, surrounded by bogs. Here, Nimue said, the old Britons had held their most sacred ceremonies, and here too, she told us, our search would begin; but it seemed a bleak place in which to seek the greatest Treasure of Britain. To the west was a small, shallow neck of the sea beyond which lay another island, to the south and north were just farmlands and rocks, and to the east there rose a very
small steep hill that was crowned with a group of grey rocks like a score of other such outcrops we had passed that morning. Merlin lay as if dead. I had to kneel beside him and put my ear close to his face to hear the tiny scratching of each laboured breath. I laid my hand on his forehead and found it was cold. I kissed his cheek. ‘Live, Lord,’ I whispered to him,
‘live.’
Nimue told one of my men to plant a spear in the ground. He forced the point into the hard soil, then Nimue took a half dozen cloaks and, by hanging them from the spear’s butt and weighting their hems with stones, she formed a kind of tent. The dark riders made a ring about us, but stayed far enough away so that they could not interfere with us, nor we with them.
Nimue groped under her otter skins and brought out the silver cup from which I had drunk on Dolforwyn and a small clay bottle stoppered with wax. She ducked under the tent and beckoned Ceinwyn to follow.
I waited and watched as the wind chased black ripples across the lake, then suddenly Ceinwyn screamed. She screamed again, terribly, and I started towards the tent, only to be stopped by Issa’s spear. Galahad, who as a Christian was not supposed to believe in any of this, stood beside Issa and shrugged at me. ‘We’ve come this far,’ he said. ‘We should see it to the end.’
Ceinwyn screamed again, and this time Merlin echoed the noise by uttering a faint and pathetic moan. I knelt beside him and stroked his forehead and tried not to think what horrors Ceinwyn dreamed inside the black tent.
‘Lord?’ Issa called to me.
I twisted round to see that he was looking southwards to where a new group of riders had joined the Bloodshields’ ring. Most of the newcomers were on ponies, but one man was mounted on a gaunt black horse. That man, I knew, had to be Diwrnach. His banner flew behind him; a pole on which was mounted a crosspiece and from the crosspiece there hung two skulls and a clutch of black ribbons. The King was cloaked in black and his black horse was hung with a black saddle cloth, and in his hand was a great black spear that he raised vertically into the air before riding slowly forward. He came alone and when he was fifty paces from us he unslung his round shield and ostentatiously turned it about to show that he did not come looking for a fight.
I walked to meet him. Behind me Ceinwyn gasped and moaned inside the tent about which my men made a protective ring.
The King was dressed in black leather armour beneath his cloak and wore no helmet. His shield looked flaky with rust and I supposed the flakes had to be the layers of dried blood, just as its leather covering had to be the flayed skin of a slave girl. He let the grim shield hang beside his long black sword scabbard as he curbed his horse and rested the great spear’s butt on the ground. ‘I am Diwrnach,’ he said.
I bowed my head to him. ‘I am Derfel, Lord King.’
He smiled. ‘Welcome to Ynys Mon, Lord Derfel Cadarn,’ he said, and doubtless he wanted to surprise me by knowing my full name and title, but he astonished me more by being a good-looking man. I had expected a hook-nosed ghoul, a thing from nightmare, but Diwrnach was in early middle age and had a broad forehead, a wide mouth and a short clipped black beard that accentuated his strong jawline. There was nothing mad about his appearance, but he did have one red eye and that was enough to make him fearsome. He leaned his spear against his horse’s flank and took an oatcake from a pouch. ‘You look hungry, Lord Derfel,’ he said.
‘Winter is a time for hunger, Lord King.’
‘But you will not refuse my gift, surely?’ He broke the oatcake into halves and tossed one half to me.
‘Eat.’
I caught the oatcake, then hesitated. ‘I am sworn not to eat, Lord King, till my purpose is finished.’
‘Your purpose!’ he teased me, then slowly put his half of the oatcake into his mouth. ‘It wasn’t poisoned, Lord Derfel,’ he said when it was eaten.
‘Why should it be, Lord King?’
‘Because I am Diwrnach and I kill my enemies in so many ways.’ He smiled again. ‘Tell me about your purpose, Lord Derfel.’
‘I come to pray, Lord King.’
‘Ah!’ he said, drawing the sound out as if to suggest that I had cleared up all the mystery. ‘Are prayers said in Dumnonia so very ineffective?’
‘This is holy ground, Lord King,’ I said.
‘It is also my ground, Lord Derfel Cadarn,’ he said, ‘and I believe strangers should seek my permission before they dung its soil or piss on its walls.’
‘If we have offended you, Lord King,’ I said, ‘then we apologize.’
‘Too late for that,’ he said mildly. ‘You are here now, Lord Derfel, and I can smell your dung. Too late. So what shall I do with you?’ His voice was low, almost gentle, suggesting that here was a man who would see reason very easily. ‘What shall I do with you?’ he asked again, and I said nothing. The ring of dark riders was unmoving, the sky was leaden with cloud and Ceinwyn’s moans had subsided to small whimpers. The King lifted his shield, not in threat but because its weight rested uncomfortably on his hip, and I saw with horror that the skin of a human arm and hand hung from its lower edge. The wind stirred the fat fingers of the hand. Diwrnach saw my horror and smiled. ‘She was my niece,’ he said, then he stared past me and another slow smile showed on his face. ‘The vixen is out of the covert. Lord Derfel,’ he said.
I turned to see that Ceinwyn had come out from under the tent.
She had discarded her wolfskins and was dressed in the bone-white dress she had worn to her betrothal feast, its hems still soiled by the mud she had kicked onto the linen when she had run away from Caer Sws. She was barefoot, her golden hair had been unloosed and to me it seemed she was in a trance. ‘The Princess Ceinwyn, I believe,’ Diwrnach said.
‘Indeed, Lord King.’
‘And still a maid, I hear?’ the King asked. I said nothing in answer. Diwrnach leaned forward to ruffle his horse’s ears fondly. ‘It would have been courteous of her, do you not think, to have greeted me when she arrived in my country?’
‘She too has prayers to say, Lord King.’
‘Then let us hope they work.’ He laughed. ‘Give her to me, Lord Derfel, or else you will die the slowest of deaths. I have men who can take the skin from a man inch by inch until he is nothing but a thing of raw flesh and blood and yet still he can stand. He can even walk!’ He patted his horse’s neck with a black-gloved hand, then smiled on me again. ‘I have choked men on their own dung, Lord Derfel, I have pressed them beneath the stones, I have burned them, I have buried them alive, I have bedded them down with vipers, I have drowned them, I have starved them and I have even frightened them to death. So many interesting ways, but just give the Princess Ceinwyn to me, Lord Derfel, and I will promise you a death as swift as a bright star’s fall.’
Ceinwyn had started to walk westwards and my men had snatched up Merlin’s litter, their cloaks, weapons and bundles, and were now going with her. I looked up at Diwrnach. ‘One day, Lord King,’ I said, ‘I will put your head in a pit and bury it in slave dung.’ I walked away from him. He laughed. ‘Blood, Lord Derfel!’ he shouted after me. ‘Blood! It’s what the Gods feed on, and yours will make a rich brew! I’ll make your woman drink it in my bed!’ And with that he kicked back his spurred boots and wheeled his horse towards his men.
‘Seventy-four of them,’ Galahad told me as I caught up with him. ‘Seventy-four men and spears. And we are thirty-six spears, one thing man and two women.’
‘They won’t attack yet,’ I reassured him. ‘They’ll wait till we’ve discovered the Cauldron.’
Ceinwyn must have been freezing in her thin dress and without any boots, but she was sweating as if it was a summer’s day as she staggered across the grass. She was finding it difficult to stand, let alone walk, and she was twitching just as I had twitched on Dolforwyn’s summit after drinking from the silver cup; but Nimue was beside her, talking to her and supporting her, but also, oddly, tugging her away from the direction she wanted to take. Diwrnach’s dark riders were keeping pace with us, a moving ring o
f Bloodshields that moved across the island in a loose, wide circle that was centred on our small party. Ceinwyn, despite her dizziness, was almost running now. She seemed barely conscious and was mouthing words I could not catch. Her eyes looked empty. Nimue constantly dragged her to one side, making her follow a sheep path that twisted north about the knoll that was crowned with grey stones, but the closer we came to those high and lichen-covered rocks the more Ceinwyn resisted until Nimue was forced to use all her wiry strength to keep her on the narrow path. The front edge of the ring of dark riders had already gone past the steep knoll so that it, like us, lay within their circle. Ceinwyn was whimpering and protesting, then she began to hit at Nimue’s hands, but Nimue held her hard and dragged her on, and all the while Diwrnach’s men moved with us.
Nimue waited until the path was at its closest point to the steep crest of rocks, then at last she let Ceinwyn run free. ‘To the rocks!’ she shrieked. ‘All of you! To the rocks! Run!’
We ran. I saw then what Nimue had done. Diwrnach dared not touch us until he knew where we were going and if he had seen Ceinwyn heading for the rocky knoll he would surely have sent a dozen spearmen to garrison its summit, then sent the rest of his men to capture us. But now, thanks to Nimue’s cleverness, we would have the steep jumble of huge boulders to protect us, the same boulders, if Ceinwyn was right, that had protected the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn through more than four and a half centuries of gathering darkness. ‘Run!’ Nimue screamed, and all about us the ponies were being whipped inwards as the ring of dark riders closed to cut us off.
‘Run!’ Nimue shrieked again. I was helping to carry Merlin, Ceinwyn was already clambering up the rocks and Galahad was shouting at men to find themselves places where they could stand amidst the stones and use their spears. Issa stayed with me, his spear ready to cut down any dark rider who came close. Gwilym and three others snatched Merlin from us and carried him to the foot of the rocks just as the two leading Bloodshields reached us. They shrieked a challenge as they kicked their ponies up the hill, but I knocked the first man’s long spear aside with my shield then swung my own spear so that its steel blade cracked like a club across the pony’s skull. The beast screamed and fell sideways and Issa slid his spear into the rider’s belly while I slashed my spear back at the second rider. His spear-shaft clattered on mine, then he was past me, but I managed to seize a handful of his long tattered ribbons and so dragged him backwards off the small beast. He flailed at me as he fell. I put a boot on his throat, raised the spear and rammed it hard down at his heart. There was a leather breastplate beneath his ragged tunic, but the spear cut through both and suddenly his black beard was frothing with a bloody foam.
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