by M. K. Hume
‘How ironic,’ Llanwith whispered in Myrddion’s ear. ‘We celebrate rebirth but Uther is childless and like to remain so. When he eventually dies, whether in battle, by accident or even of old age, all this will be swept away in a tide of Saxon migration.’ His widespread arm encompassed the whole of the west, and Myrddion could feel the mourning in the Ordovice prince’s bear-like stance.
The healer raised one hand to rest it lightly on Llanwith’s forearm. ‘I will do everything I can to save our land, Llanwith. We will negotiate these dangerous roads safely if you can keep faith with me. Uther is not immortal, nor is he infallible. Anything but!’
‘Silence, Myrddion!’ Luka hissed from behind Myrddion’s back. ‘You speak treason, and the High King has taken the torch to light the fire.’
The healer felt oddly comforted by the closeness of good friends.
As Luka whispered his warning, Uther turned to face the assembled dignitaries. ‘Kings of the west, the old year dies and a new one struggles to be born. Although our enemies assail us, the gods are with us, for they carved these isles from the wild oceans in a time before time, and they will not leave our land to the mercy of harsh foreign deities. As you are aware, I have no wife to share my bed, bear my sons or light the solstice fire with me. As a soldier and the guardian of our borders, I have lacked the time or the leisure to court a woman. Yet the gods may relent and send me a wife. As I light this fire, I pray that they will stand beside us in the battles to come, and that they will take pity on us poor, suffering and lonely mortals. Let the old year burn, and may the new year rise in glory from the ashes.’
Although he is rough and uncouth in most encounters, Uther has a gilded tongue when he wants to use it, Myrddion thought. But what does he mean by those words? Let the gods provide? Uther’s never looked to the gods for anything, and trusts only cold iron to speak for him.
Uther thrust his torch into each corner of the pyre as, all over Venta Belgarum, smaller fires were lit to welcome the maven, the god of the new year. The night sprang awake with a ruddy face, and the streets became alive with running citizens, wild dancing and the mad joy of celebration. Many children would be conceived on this night and no husband would argue the parentage, for the darkness was the prelude to a new dawn and a change that even the simplest citizen acknowledged as the Samhain fires roared, collapsed and sank into embers of russet, blood and gold.
Although he tried to bury himself in sensation; although he struggled to find some release in the soft breasts and warm thighs of Ruadh; although he tortured his mind with memories of Flavia and her hot, sweet mouth, Myrddion found his body was cold and unresponsive. With muttered apologies, he rolled away from Ruadh’s body as cold as a smooth block of stone. Yet fire burned in his belly as he felt the Mother run her fingers through his ribcage, along the twisted veins and arteries through which his blood pumped, until she lodged herself within the convoluted caverns of his brain.
‘She has come!’ he screamed aloud on the edge of sleep. Ruadh curled herself into a fetal ball and prayed for the first light of dawning.
CHAPTER XVIII
LOSS
Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.
Proverbs, 31:10
‘I must have her – the witch has ensorcelled me and I can think of nothing else. I see her eyes whenever I sleep. Every woman I touch palls in my arms because she is not Ygerne. I must have Gorlois’s woman, whatever the cost – or I’ll go mad!’
Uther paced his bedchamber like a wild stag in rut, shaking his heavy head of hair as if carrying a crown of antlers that hungered to bury themselves in Gorlois’s broad chest. His hands clenched and unclenched, his eyes were frenzied and his appetite was gone, so that even the calm and reasonable Botha shivered at his master’s growing desperation.
‘He’s like to act in some crazed fashion to gain the woman, alienating all his allies in the process,’ Botha had whispered to Myrddion as they talked outside the king’s apartment. ‘He’ll not be deflected, Myrddion, for you know how our master thinks. He’ll not be satisfied until he possesses what he lusts after.’
‘And Gorlois will not sacrifice his wife for safety’s sake,’ Myrddion told the worried captain. ‘Ygerne would kill herself before she’d allow Uther to touch her. Does Uther want her because she belongs to a man he envies or is it that she is an exceptionally beautiful woman? What a coil. I’ve tried to puzzle a way out of this mess, but there’s none that I can see.’
‘All you can do is your best, Healer. Uther has tried to approach Ygerne in the ladies’ bower, but she eludes him like a ghost. Her daughter inflames the situation further by sniping at him in her patronising fashion at every opportunity, but today the kings will meet and our master is on the brink of an explosion of rage. You know the symptoms as well as I do.’
‘Intimately!’ Myrddion snapped. He squared his shoulders and pushed the door open.
‘You’ve finally seen fit to join your king,’ Uther sneered, and paused in his rabid pacing as Myrddion entered his apartment. ‘How kind of you to find time to see me.’
Ignoring his sarcasm, Myrddion bowed deeply. ‘Are you unwell, my lord? Can I be of assistance?’
With a burst of dangerous energy, Uther rounded on the healer and prodded Myrddion on the chest with one forefinger to punctuate each sentence. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Myrddion refrained from backing away or, worse still, striking Uther’s hand away.
‘The meeting of the tribal kings is to be held within the hour. But at the moment I have no intelligence concerning their expected response to my instructions. Nor do I know what the Saxons are about. And Gorlois defies me by hiding his wife away from me. What do you propose to do about that? You’re supposed to be my adviser, so advise me.’
‘The latest news arrived during the early hours of this morning, at some risk to the messenger, master. The Saxons have landed at Anderida and they have surrounded the fortress. Unexpectedly, their warriors have begun to dig beneath the walls while your loyal subjects rain burning oil and arrows down upon them. Still, the Saxons have not been deterred from their siege and the fortress is dangerously low on fresh food. The advice I have received is that our warriors are reduced to eating their horses even as we speak.’
‘So? Let them wait! I will execute the whole garrison if they surrender – those few that the Saxons leave alive. More important, what have you discovered concerning Gorlois’s plans? He plots treason, doesn’t he?’
Myrddion shook his head. ‘No, my lord, that’s untrue. I have been through the reports of every spy embedded in the Dumnonii retinue and I have no doubt that Gorlois remains true to the west and to the High King. He desires only to return to Tintagel with his wife and daughter.’
Uther grinned like a wolf and something starving gleamed in his blue eyes. ‘He’ll not go to Tintagel – on my oath. Not alive and breathing!’
‘Master . . .’ Myrddion felt the air drain out of the room. ‘Gorlois is your strongest ally and your powerful left hand. Do not remove one arm, like the Roman emperor Valentinian who killed Flavius Aetius, his last great general. Rome suffers now because of that foolish execution and the emperor eventually perished in a welter of his own blood. You are needed in this land, my lord, and the west will fail without you. To sweep Gorlois away to the shades, for the sake of a pretty face, is sheer madness.’
Uther struck Myrddion across the face with his clenched fist. If the king had expected Myrddion to fall, however, he was mistaken, for although the healer was driven backwards for several stumbling steps he somehow managed to keep his balance. Myrddion’s eyes were black wounds in his white face, except for where a red mark was imprinted on his brow and a thin snake of blood escaped from a split in his dark eyebrow.
‘You shouldn’t strike at friends, lord, for you have too few to antagonise those who support you. I am oath-bound and cannot retaliate.’
‘You?’ Uther snarled and shook his stinging knuckles, where the
skin had been split by the hard bones of Myrddion’s brow. ‘The day I fear a healer is the day I consign myself to death.’
Botha would have spoken and moved forward to intervene, but Myrddion raised his left hand and motioned him to hold his position. ‘Do not interfere, Botha. Your trial of faith is years in the coming, so leave me to mine.’
Uther howled and struck Myrddion once again, this time dropping the healer to his knees. Shaking his head slowly, and with his face leaking blood from the mouth, Myrddion rose to his feet, but his hands were still not curled into fists. A part of his brain knew that Uther was baiting him out of a frustrated hunger to shed blood, but the king also hoped to be given the justification to sweep his adviser into oblivion and free himself from his oath to his brother.
Myrddion’s split lips opened as he raised his head. He spat a gobbet of blood to the floor and stared the High King down with eyes that were changing . . . changing . . . and growing colder than the ice packs of the north, more pitiless than anything Uther had ever seen. Myrddion felt the goddess coming and the old fitting began to rise in his mind like the slow uncoiling of her serpents. Yet this time, the shivering creature that was Myrddion was permitted to hear and remember every word that he was forced to utter.
‘Woe to you, Uther Pendragon. You have been given a crown, but it will never be enough for you.’ Myrddion’s voice continued as Uther cocked his fist to strike him once again. ‘Strike me if you wish, but you have set the wheels in motion and Fortuna will now oversee the attainment of all your desires. The wheel turns, and you cannot – will not – stop it.’
‘What are you raving about?’ Uther’s voice seemed to come from far away, while Myrddion’s voice grew louder and stronger, to fill the whole apartment with a reverberating sound that was hardly human.
‘You will have your woman and may you take much pleasure in her, for she will bring a dowry with her that sows the seeds of your impotence. Although you will fight the Saxons to a stand-still, you will waste your strength in years of war for no honour and little glory. But you will take pleasure in the terror you bring into being, out of spite and in raddled old age, and you will kill the only creature on this earth who loves you . . . all to create a failed myth of power.’
‘I am the High King. I am Pendragon, so I am no myth, you drivelling fool,’ Uther hissed, but his fists loosened and he took a half-step backward away from Myrddion’s accusatory eyes.
‘You will keep the throne warmed for a man who is far better than you . . . one who will eclipse you without effort or fear. Everything you are will be written on your face by the time of your death and men will rejoice when you take your last breath. You will die alone and unmourned, and a witch will seal your spirit away into eternal darkness.’
The room was so still that Myrddion’s ragged breathing was shockingly loud.
‘So what of you? I’ll see you worm food before that fate comes to me.’
Myrddion laughed and the sound was rusty, like the complaint of hinges on a ruined door to a tomb, or the lid of a sarcophagus being dragged open by impious hands. ‘I will outlive you by decades to see all that you hate most come into being. Fear not, Uther Pendragon, for you’ll not be forgotten, but men will whisper your name in tandem with the hated Vortigern’s as those kings who paved the way for something better. Your crown and your sword will belong to another man whom you’ll bring into being out of the blood and tempests in your soul.’
Incensed, Uther struck Myrddion again, and this time the healer’s head snapped backward, so that Botha feared that his neck had been broken by the violence of the blow. Slowly, like a young tree struck by lightning, Myrddion fell until he was only a black puddle of cloth on Uther’s floor. ‘Shovel this mess away,’ Uther ordered with hunted, shamefaced eyes. ‘I have a meeting to attend.’
‘I’m sorry, Master Myrddion,’ a voice whispered from far away. Across a vast divide of blackness, the healer heard the voice and wondered vaguely why the phlegmatic captain of the king’s guard would need to beg his pardon in such an ashamed voice. But the effort of thinking was too difficult. Myrddion slipped back into womb-like darkness.
When he awoke the second time, Myrddion tried to open eyes that felt as if they had been stitched shut. Painfully, he struggled to pull apart his gummed lashes while a soft, soothing voice hushed him and placed a cool damp cloth over his face. When the hand lifted away the moist compress, Myrddion discovered that his eyes opened easily and Ruadh’s concerned, frowning features swam into focus.
‘Why are you here, Ruadh? Where am I? I don’t understand what’s happening.’
‘You’re in a small room in King Uther’s hall and I was called to tend to you by Captain Botha over half a day ago. It’s the evening of the third day of the New Year – the tribal kings are meeting and it seems we are going to war. And you, my beloved, must lie still because you have been very ill. I feared that you’d never wake again.’
Disoriented and alarmed, Myrddion’s expert fingers explored the left side of his face, which ached with painful insistence. He found a knot at his temple on the hard skull bone that protected the softer, weaker temple below it. ‘I was very lucky,’ he whispered. ‘An inch lower and I could have been killed. I feel like I’ve been kicked by a horse.’
Then, because his eyes hurt so much, he closed them for the welcome dark, while his exploratory fingers continued to rove over the swollen contours of his face. He needed no eyes to see what the king had done to him when enraged beyond cool reason. His trained fingers found the split in his eyebrow, the contusion on his cheekbone that bruised his eye and the deep cut across his jawline. Because he understood the value of strong teeth, he checked each one and sighed with relief when he was sure that none was damaged, broken or loosened in its socket.
‘He was trying to provoke me,’ he whispered as he hungered for the luxury of healing sleep. His common sense told him that matters between the High King and himself were finally at breaking point.
‘I understand, master, for Botha told us that he was certain Uther wanted you to strike him in turn, so that he would be at liberty to order your execution. Do you remember what you said to him? Brangaine has told me of your fits, but she also explained that you never remember what you have said.’
Myrddion stirred on the pallet, which was filled with straw that scratched him through the coarse homespun fabric. ‘I remember every word I spoke on this occasion.’
The healer felt, rather than saw, Ruadh’s raised eyebrows and he wearily opened his eyes again to explain. ‘I don’t know if what I said was prophetic or not – or if I was just repeating whatever entered my head during a fit of temper. I do know that I said terrible things to the High King, so I’m surprised that I’m still alive and breathing.’
Ruadh laughed shakily, and Myrddion sensed the tears that lay below her amusement. ‘He must place a high value on you, for you are ordered to take the healers to Anderida to care for his troops. We have waited for you to come back to us.’
‘I’ll not go. Let Uther and his damned war go to the shades unmourned. I don’t care any more for oaths, honour or threats, so I’m going home, regardless of what the High King tries to extort from me. I’ve had enough of him.’
‘Oh, master!’ Ruadh’s face changed, and now Myrddion could see the tears that spilled unchecked over her eyelids and ran down her face. ‘You can’t refuse, my lord, for Uther will not permit you to challenge his sovereignty.’
‘Help me to my feet, woman, and you’ll see Myrddion the healer walk away from Venta Belgarum and everyone in it.’ Without waiting for assistance, he dragged himself to his feet and stood swaying, his blackened and swollen face contorted with purpose. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he said unnecessarily.
Leaning on Ruadh’s shoulder, he staggered to the doorway of the mean, dusty room, which was clearly used to store broken furniture, bales of rotten fabric and other rubbish. No evidence could have been clearer of Myrddion’s fall from grace and favour. He had been d
umped unceremoniously on a filthy pallet in a disused storeroom. No guards barred his path as he made his painful, weaving way through the echoing corridors until they reached the dark silence of the cobbled forecourt. Under a sallow moon, the citadel seemed empty, and Venta Belgarum stilled with a frightened hush that waited on its master’s next order. Painfully, but with determination, Myrddion forced his trembling legs to carry him down the winding streets that led to the House of the Healers.
The few people who were abroad in the night to see Myrddion’s damaged face chose to avoid his eyes, as if even a shared glance could contaminate them. The fear generated by an autocratic ruler extended down into the meanest streets, forced its law-abiding citizens indoors and caused them to huddle around their fires holding their children close to their breasts. Myrddion could sense a dangerous rift in the maintenance of order within Venta Belgarum, and the miasma of fear and tension only firmed his determination to flee with all his staff at the earliest opportunity.
The house of the healers was dark, although wagons had been loaded and the familiar, welcoming buildings still offered an aura of safety and comfort. The door gaped inward and Myrddion leaned on the frame for a moment, his senses swimming from his efforts to propel himself forward.
‘Come, master, you must sleep if we are to embark on any journey,’ Ruadh murmured. ‘Regardless of our destination.’
Her face reflected her despair and she looked much older than usual, so Myrddion wondered if she had told him everything she knew or suspected. Then Praxiteles came and took his right arm and Cadoc moved to his left, and both men carefully and tenderly helped him to his room where he could surrender to the sweet anodyne of unconsciousness.
Before the dawn stole into his bedchamber, Myrddion was roused from a deep sleep by eerie, heart-rending screams that tore apart the silence of early morning. With a jerk, he surged out of his warm covers and staggered to his feet. Shouts, curses and the terrified crying of children followed the initial disturbance, so that the cacophony chased the last dregs of sleep out of his brain.