‘They might not attack tonight,’ Culhwch said, ‘but they get braver by the day.’
Arthur watched the howling Christians from a palace window. ‘What do they want?’ he asked in puzzlement. He liked his religion to be decorous. When he came to Lindinis he would always join Ceinwyn and me at our morning prayers when we knelt quietly before our household Gods, offering them a piece of bread and then praying that our daily duties would be done properly, and that was the kind of worship Arthur liked. He was simply bemused by the things he had seen in Isca’s church.
‘They believe,’ Culhwch began to explain the fanaticism we had witnessed, ‘that their God is coming back to earth in five years, and they believe they have a duty to prepare the earth for his coming. Their priests tell them that the pagans have to be wiped out before their God will come back and they preach that Dumnonia must have a Christian king.’
‘They’ll have Mordred,’ Arthur said grimly.
‘Then you’d better change his dragon shield into a fish,’ Culhwch said, ‘for I tell you, their fervour is getting worse. There’s going to be trouble.’
‘We’ll placate them,’ Arthur said. ‘We’ll let them know Mordred’s a Christian and perhaps that’ll calm them down. Maybe we’d better build that church Sansum wants,’ he added to me.
‘If it stops them rioting,’ I said, ‘why not?’
We left Isca next morning, escorted now by Culhwch and a dozen of his men, and we crossed the Exe by the Roman bridge and then turned south into the deep sea-lands that lay on Dumnonia’s furthest coasts. Arthur said nothing more about the Christian frenzy he had witnessed, but he was oddly silent that day and I guessed the rites had upset him deeply. He hated any kind of frenzy for it stripped men and women of their sense, and he must have feared what such a madness might do to his careful peace. But for now our problem was not Dumnonia’s Christians, but Tristan. Culhwch had sent word to the Prince, warning him of our approach, and Tristan came to greet us. He rode alone, his horse’s hoofs leaving spurts of dust as he galloped towards us. He greeted us happily, but recoiled from Arthur’s chill reserve. That reserve was not caused by any innate dislike Arthur had for Tristan — indeed he liked the Prince — but rather sprang out of Arthur’s recognition that he had not just come to mediate this dispute, but to sit in judgment on an old friend. ‘He has worries,’ I explained vaguely, trying to reassure Tristan that Arthur’s coldness held no foreboding.
I was leading my own horse, for I was always happier on foot, and Tristan, having greeted Culhwch, slid out of his saddle and walked beside me. I described the wild Christian ecstasies and attributed Arthur’s coldness to his worries about their meaning, but Tristan did not want to hear any of it. He was in love and, like all lovers, he could talk of nothing but his beloved. ‘A jewel, Derfel,’ he said, ‘that’s what she is, an Irish jewel!’ He paced long-legged beside me, one arm round my shoulder and with his long black hair chinking from the warrior rings he had woven into its plaits. His beard was more heavily streaked with white now, but he was still a handsome man with a bony nose and dark, quick eyes that were bright with passion. ‘Her name,’ he said dreamily, ‘is Iseult.’
‘We heard,’ I said drily.
‘A child from Demetia,’ he said, ‘a daughter of Oengus Mac Airem. A Princess, my friend, of the Ui Liathain.’ He spoke the name of Oengus Mac Airem’s tribe as though its syllables were forged in purest gold. ‘Iseult,’ he said, ‘of the Ui Liathain. Fifteen summers old and as beautiful as the night.’
I thought of Arthur’s ungovernable passion for Guinevere and of my own soul’s longings for Ceinwyn and my heart hurt for my friend. He had been blinded by love, swept by it, made mad by it. Tristan was ever a passionate man, given to black deeps of despair or to soaring heights of happiness, but this was the first time I had ever seen him assaulted by the storm winds of love. ‘Your father,’ I warned him carefully, ‘wants Iseult back.’
‘My father’s old,’ he said, dismissing every obstacle, ‘and when he dies I shall sail my Princess of the Ui Liathain to Tintagel’s iron gates and build her a castle of silver towers that shall scrape the stars.’ He laughed at his own extravagance. ‘You’ll adore her, Derfel!’
I said nothing more, but just let him talk and talk. He had no appetite for our news, cared not a bit that I had three daughters or that the Saxons were on the defensive, he had room in his universe for nothing but Iseult. ‘Wait till you see her, Derfel!’ he said again and again, and the nearer we drew to their refuge the more excited he became until at last, unable to be apart from his Iseult for a moment longer, he leapt onto his horse and galloped away ahead of us. Arthur looked quizzically at me and I grimaced. ‘He’s in love,’ I said, as if I needed to explain.
‘With his father’s taste for young girls,’ Arthur added grimly.
‘You and I know love, Lord,’ I said, ‘be kind to them.’
The refuge of Tristan and Iseult was a beautiful place, maybe the loveliest I ever saw. It was a place where small hills were cut by streams and heavy woods, where rich rivers ran fast to the sea and where great cliffs were loud with screaming birds. It was a wild place, but beautiful, a place fit for love’s raw madness.
And there, in the small dark hall among the deep green woods, I met Iseult. Small and dark and fey and fragile is how I remember Iseult. Little more than a child, really, though she had been forced to woman’s state by her marriage to Mark, yet to me she appeared as a shy, small, thin girl, nothing but a delicate wisp of near-womanhood who kept her huge dark eyes fixed on Tristan until he insisted that she greeted us. She bowed to Arthur. ‘You don’t bow to me,’ Arthur said, lifting her up,
‘for you are a Queen,’ and he dropped to one knee and kissed her small hand. Her voice was whispery like a shadow’s voice. Her hair was black and she had tried to make herself look older by binding it in a great coil on the crown of her head and by hanging herself with jewels, though she wore the jewels awkwardly, reminding me of Morwenna dressing up in her mother’s clothes. She gazed at us fearfully. Iseult realized, I think, even before Tristan did, that this incursion of armed spearmen was not the coming of friends, but the arrival of her judges. Culhwch had provided the lovers with their refuge. It was a hall of timber and rye thatch, not big, but well built, and it had belonged to a chieftain who had supported Cadwy’s rebellion and thereby lost his head. The hall, with three huts and a storehouse, stood circled by a palisade in a wooded hollow of land where the sea winds could not chafe its thatch, and there, with six loyal spearmen and a mound of stolen treasure, Tristan and Iseult had thought to make their love into a great song. Arthur tore their music into shreds. ‘The treasure.’ he told Tristan that night, ‘must be returned to your father’
‘He can have it!’ Tristan declared. ‘I only brought it so I would not have to call on your charity. Lord.’
‘So long as you are in this land, Lord Prince,’ Arthur said heavily, ‘you will be our guests.’
‘And how long will that be, Lord?’ Tristan asked.
Arthur frowned and looked up into the hall’s dark rafters. ‘Is that rain? It seems so long since it rained.’
Tristan asked the question again, and again Arthur refused to answer. Iseult reached for her Prince’s hand and held it as Tristan reminded Arthur of Lugg Vale. ‘When no one else would come to your help, Lord, I came,’ Tristan said.
‘You did, Lord Prince,’ Arthur admitted.
‘And when you fought Owain, Lord, I stood beside you.’
‘You did,’ Arthur said.
‘And I brought my hawks’ shields to London.’
‘You did, Lord Prince, and they fought well there.’
‘And I took your Round Table oath,’ Tristan said. No one ever called it the Brotherhood of Britain any more.
‘So you did, Lord,’ Arthur said heavily.
‘So, Lord,’ Tristan begged, ‘have I not deserved your help?’
‘You have deserved much, Lord Prince,’ Arthur said, ‘an
d I am mindful of it.’ It was an evasive answer, but the only one Tristan received that night.
We left the lovers in the hall and made our own straw beds in the small storehouses. The rain passed in the night and the next morning dawned warm and beautiful. I woke late to discover Tristan and Iseult had already left the hall. ‘If they have a peck of sense,’ Culhwch growled to me, ‘they’ll have run as far away as they can.’
‘Will they?’
‘They don’t have sense, Derfel, they’re lovers. They think the world exists for their convenience.’
Culhwch walked with a slight limp now, the legacy of the wound he had taken in the battle against Aelle’s army. ‘They’ve gone to the sea,’ he told me, ‘to pray to Manawydan.’
Culhwch and I followed the lovers, climbing out of the wooded hollow to a windswept hill that ended in a great cliff where the seabirds wheeled and against which the vast ocean broke white in tattered bursts of spray. Culhwch and I stood on the clifftop and stared down into a small cove where Tristan and Iseult walked on the sand. The previous night, watching the timid Queen, I had not really understood what had driven Tristan into love’s madness, but that winch morning I did understand. I watched as she suddenly broke away from Tristan and ran ahead, skipping, turning and laughing at her lover who walked slowly behind. She wore a loose white dress and her black hair, no longer bound in a coil, streamed free in the salt wind. She looked like a spirit, like one of the water nymphs who had danced in Britain before the Romans came. And then, perhaps to tease Tristan, or else to take her pleas closer to Manawydan, the sea God, she ran headlong into the great tumbling surf. She plunged into the waves so that she disappeared altogether and Tristan could only stand distraught on the sand and watch the churning white mass of breaking seas. And then, sleek as an otter in a stream, her head appeared. She waved, swam a little, then waded back to the beach with her white wet dress clinging to her pathetic thin body. I could not help but see that she had small high breasts and long slender legs, and then Tristan hid her from our view by wrapping her in the wings of his great black cloak and there, beside the sea, he held her tight and leaned his cheek against her salt-wet hair. Culhwch and I stepped out of view, leaving the lovers alone in the long sea wind that blew from fabled Lyonesse.
‘He can’t send them back,’ Culhwch growled.
‘He mustn’t,’ I agreed. We stared across the endlessly moving sea.
‘Then why won’t Arthur reassure them?’ Culhwch demanded angrily.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I should have sent them to Broceliande,’ Culhwch said. The wind lifted his cloak as we walked west around the hills above the cove. Our path led to a high place from where we could see down into a great natural harbour where the ocean had flooded a river valley and formed a chain of wide, well-sheltered sea lakes. ‘Halcwm,’ Culhwch named the harbour, ‘and the smoke is from the salt works.’ He pointed to a shimmer of grey on the far side of the lakes.
‘There must be seamen here who could take them to Broceliande,’ I said, for the harbour had at least a dozen ships anchored in its shelter.
‘Tristan wouldn’t go,’ Culhwch told me bleakly. ‘I suggested it to him, but he believes Arthur is his friend. He trusts Arthur. He can’t wait to be King for he says that then all Kernow’s spears will be at Arthur’s service.’
‘Why didn’t he just kill his father?’ I asked bitterly.
‘For the same reason that none of us kills that little bastard, Mordred,’ Culhwch said. ‘It’s no small thing to kill a king.’
That night we dined in the hall again, and again Tristan pressed Arthur to say how long he and Iseult could stay in Dumnonia, and again Arthur avoided giving an answer. ‘Tomorrow, Lord Prince,’ he promised Tristan, ‘tomorrow we shall decide all.’
But next morning two dark ships with tall masts hung with ragged sails and with high rearing prows carved into the shapes of hawks’ heads sailed into Halcwm’s sea lakes. The two ships’ thwarts were crowded with men who, as the loom of the land cheated their sails of wind, unshipped their oars and drove the long dark ships towards the beach. Spear bundles were propped at the sterns where steersmen heaved on their great steering oars. Green branches were tied to each hawk’s head prow, signifying that the ships came in peace.
I did not know who had come in the two ships, but I could guess. King Mark had come from Kernow.
King Mark was a huge man, reminding me of Uther in his dotage. He was so fat he could not climb Halcwm’s hills unaided and so four spearmen carried him in a chair that was equipped with two stout poles. Forty other spearmen accompanied their King who was preceded by Cyllan, his champion. The clumsy chair swayed up the hill, then down into the wooded hollow where Tristan and Iseult believed they had found refuge.
Iseult screamed when she saw them, then, in a panic, she ran desperately to escape her husband, but the palisade had only one entrance and Mark’s huge chair filled it, so she ran back into the hall where her lover was trapped. The hall doors were guarded by Culhwch’s men and they refused to allow Cyllan or any of Mark’s spearmen into the building. We could hear Iseult crying, Tristan shouting and Arthur pleading. King Mark ordered his chair set down opposite the hall’s door and there he waited until Arthur, his face pale and tight, emerged and knelt before him.
The King of Kernow had a jowly face blotched by broken veins. His beard was thin and white, his shallow breath rasped in his fat throat and his small eyes seeped rheum. He waved Arthur to his feet, then struggled out of his chair and on thick, unsteady legs followed Arthur to the largest of the huts. It was a warm day, but Mark’s thick body was still draped in a sealskin cloak as though he found it cold. He put a hand on Arthur’s arm to help him walk into the hut where two chairs had been placed. Culhwch, disgusted, planted his bulk in the hall’s doorway and stood there with a drawn sword. I stood beside him while, behind us, black-haired Iseult wept.
Arthur stayed a full hour in the hut, then emerged and looked at Culhwch and me. He seemed to sigh, then walked past us into the hall. We did not hear what he said, but we heard Iseult scream. Culhwch glared at Kernow’s spearmen, begging just one of them to challenge him, but none moved. Cyllan, the champion, stood motionless beside the gate with a great war spear and his huge long-sword. Iseult screamed again, then Arthur suddenly emerged into the sunlight and plucked my arm. ‘Come, Derfel.’
‘What of me?’ Culhwch asked defiantly.
‘Guard them, Culhwch,’ Arthur said. ‘No one is to enter the hall.’ He walked away and I walked with him.
He said nothing as we climbed the hill from the hall and nothing as we walked along the hill path, and still said nothing as we walked out onto the cliff’s high peak. The headland’s stone jutted into the sea beneath us where the water broke high and ragged to shatter its spume eastwards on the undying wind. The sun shone on us, but out to sea there was a great cloud and Arthur stared at the dark rain falling on the empty waves. The wind rippled his white cloak. ‘Do you know the legend of Excalibur?’ he suddenly asked me.
Better than he did, I thought, but I said nothing of the blade being one of the Treasures of Britain. ‘I know, Lord,’ I said, wondering why he had asked me such a question at such a moment, ‘that Merlin won it in a dream contest in Ireland and that he gave it to you at the Stones.’
‘And he told me that if I was ever in great need then all I had to do was draw the sword, plunge it into the earth and Gofannon would come from the Otherworld to aid me. Isn’t that right?’
‘Yes, Lord.’
‘Then, Gofannon!’ he shouted into the sea wind as he drew the great blade. ‘Come!’ And with that injunction he rammed the sword hard into the turf.
A gull cried in the wind, the sea sucked at the rocks as it slid back to the deeps and the salt wind gusted our cloaks, but no God came. ‘The Gods help me,’ Arthur said at last, staring at the swaying blade, ‘but how I wanted to kill that fat monster.’
‘So why didn’t you?’ I asked harshly
.
He said nothing for a while and I saw there were tears running down his long hollow cheeks. ‘I offered them death, Derfel,’ he said. ‘Swift and painless.’ He cuffed at his cheeks, and then, in a sudden rage, he kicked the sword. ‘Gods!’ He spat at the quivering blade. ‘What Gods?’
I pulled Excalibur from the turf and wiped the earth from its tip. He refused to take the sword back, so I laid it reverently on a grey boulder. ‘What will happen to them, Lord?’ I asked. He sat on another stone. For a time he did not answer me, but just stared at the rain on the far sea while the tears trickled down his cheeks. ‘I have lived my life, Derfel,’ he said at last, ‘according to oaths. I know no other way. I resent oaths, and so should all men, for oaths bind us, they hobble our freedom, and who among us doesn’t want to be free? But if we abandon oaths then we abandon guidance. We fall into chaos. We just fall. We become no better than beasts.’ He suddenly could not continue, but just wept.
I stared at the grey heave of the sea. Where, I wondered, do those great waves begin and where do they end? ‘Suppose,’ I asked, ‘that the oath is a mistake?’
‘A mistake?’ He glanced at me, then looked back to the ocean. ‘Sometimes,’ he said bleakly, ‘an oath cannot be kept. I could not save Ban’s kingdom, though God knows I tried, but it could not be done. And so I broke that oath and I will pay for it, but I did not break it willingly. I have yet to kill Aelle, and that is an oath that must be kept, but I have not yet broken the oath, merely delayed it. I have promised to take Henis Wyren back from Diwrnach, and I will. And maybe that oath was a mistake, but I am sworn to it. So there is your answer. If an oath is a mistake then you are still obligated because you are sworn to it.’ He wiped his cheek. ‘So yes, one day I must take my spears against Diwrnach.’
‘You have no oath to Mark,’ I said bitterly.
‘None,’ he agreed, ‘but Tristan does, and Iseult does.’
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