‘The other side of the pigs.’ The boy pointed beyond the pen, where a group of men and women were arguing or making merry – it was hard to tell. And so Merlin and Parcefal would have to wait until morning.
Yvain thanked the boy and we set off across the slippery timber walkway which led to warmth, hot food, spiced ale and mead, and sore heads.
The noise inside the ale house was the roar of the ocean hurling itself in white fury upon the rocks. It was the seething din in the heart of a great fire. Or the storm wind in the trees. Too much for me, who had lived a hermit’s life in the forest and, after that, the quiet existence of a monk of the Thorn on a fog-veiled island in the marshes.
‘I can’t stay in here,’ I told Father Yvain, who just grinned and put a cup of something in my hand. Iselle was already drinking. Though only a quarter of the size of King Uther’s old hall, the ale house was choked with folk and hazed with smoke from a central hearth and myriad greasy-flamed oil lamps. I had never seen so many people in one place and the stink of sweat and damp wool, ale breath, foul wind and burning fish oil was enough to bring bile into my throat and tears to my eyes.
‘You get used to it,’ Gawain told me, smiling at how I sat with my knuckles pressed to my nose.
‘The more you drink, the better the stink.’ Gediens banged his cup against Father Yvain’s. The two of them downed a great wash of ale and slammed their cups onto the table in unison, grinning like a pair of mischievous boys.
To our surprise, there had been no slaves or grooms positioned outside to look after men’s blades and war gear while they drank – as was customary to lessen the occasions of blood and ale flowing together when wits drowned and anger surfaced – so the place heaved with armed men, warriors with swords at their hips or on their backs. Men with knives in their belts, their spears leaning against the walls. Some even wore mail shirts; visitors to Tintagel perhaps, who were reluctant to take their eyes off their war gear in a place of strangers. None, though, wore scale armour, which made Gawain and Gediens more conspicuous than they would have liked, though the arrival of two hoary lords of war did persuade revellers to move along the benches and make room for us, which they might not have done otherwise.
‘Look at them,’ Iselle hissed, lips curling behind her cup as she ran her eyes across those thronging the room. Men bellowed and women cackled, and all were away on a sea of strong drink, slurring their speech, stumbling when they stood, voices fighting against the clamour and by doing so only raising it. ‘Do they know what’s happening out there?’ Iselle asked me. ‘The Saxons rape and burn and kill. Britain tears itself apart.’ With her cup she gestured at a man and woman across the table who were entwined in each other like the roots of some tree.
‘They are free, and the Saxons are far away,’ I said, my face flushing as I shifted on the bench, trying to turn my shoulder so that the amorous couple would no longer be in my line of sight.
‘Well, they are fools if they think they’re safe,’ Iselle spat. ‘Just as the monks on Ynys Wydryn were fools believing that the Saxons would leave them alone.’ She scowled, and I mused, not for the first time, on what a fierce creature she was. Quite unlike any woman I had ever known. Not that I had known many women, other than the nuns who now and again had visited our monastery. Iselle traced a finger over a dark knot in the cup’s grain. ‘Just as I was a fool to think the marsh and the mists would protect us,’ she said.
Gawain, Gediens and Father Yvain were talking amongst themselves, mired in shared memories, but I saw the anger in Iselle, could almost hear it simmering beneath her skin despite the drone of all those voices.
‘There was nothing you could have done to save Alana,’ I told her.
She shook her head. ‘I should have been there, instead of being on Ynys Wydryn. I would have killed those men and Alana would be alive.’
Perhaps that was true. But it was more likely that Iselle would have been dead too, and that, I realized, was an unbearable thought. I felt my face flush hot and so I turned to watch a man who was sharing his food with the greying dog sitting patiently beside him. The old dog was so careful in taking the meat scraps from the man’s hand.
‘So, I am a coward because I fled Ynys Wydryn and left my brothers to die,’ I said, ‘and you are a fool because you helped me in the marsh. Because you came to the island when you should have been with your foster mother on the day the Saxons burned your home.’
I looked at her again. She thought about what I had said and did not gainsay any of it. And then I said something which would have had Father Brice tearing at his burial shroud, had he been afforded one.
‘Perhaps the gods of this land have not given up and turned their backs on us completely,’ I suggested. The words had seemed to come from someone else. Guilt twisted like a blade inside me and I tried not to think of what the brothers would say, as I leant forward so that my next words would not be overheard. ‘If Gawain, you and Gediens take Merlin back, and if Arthur rises again, then maybe there is a chance for Britain.’
I could see that Iselle was as surprised as I was to hear those words from me. ‘You’re saying the gods have a hand in all this?’ she asked.
I shrugged. ‘We cannot say that they don’t.’
She thought about that. ‘Then you are as much a part of it as I, else you would be dead in the marsh. Or dead on that hillside below the tor.’ She drank and dragged the back of her hand across her lips, and I just stared because I had never seen anyone like her.
‘I’m beginning to think that you would not have made a good monk of the Christ god.’
The barb in that stung me, but I said nothing. In truth I did not know what I believed. I doubted now that the Christian god, the god of Joseph of Arimathea, cared about the fate of Britain or the lives of those who prayed in His name. The seed of that doubt had been watered by the blood of my brothers. Nor did I carry in my heart the same embers of hope that glowed in Iselle’s heart, that the old gods of Britain would awaken to our need and inspire great armies of spearmen and victories the likes of which the people had not known since Arthur led the fight.
What I believed was that I had abandoned my brothers on Ynys Wydryn, just as my father had abandoned me. And I had failed to carry the Thorn to safety. And maybe Alana would still be alive if Iselle had not helped me to carry the corpse of Eudaf the cobbler back to the monastery.
The ale was strong. I could already feel it warming my insides and blunting my wits. And I was glad of it because I did not want to think any more.
‘Take it steady, Galahad,’ Father Yvain warned me even as he filled my cup. ‘This stuff has a kick like a donkey, and I don’t want to be carrying you to your bed.’
Iselle lifted an eyebrow at me. A challenge.
Gediens grinned. ‘Galahad’s not in some monastery of the White Christ now, Yvain.’ He palmed ale from his beard and gestured at the revellers around us. ‘He’s at Tintagel. Let him enjoy himself.’
Father Yvain grunted, not disagreeing, his attention turning to a woman with long, golden hair and hips as broad as the ship I had seen in Tintagel bay. And I drank long and deeply to show the monk and Iselle too that I did not need looking after.
‘Dumnonia needs a king,’ Gawain said into his cup.
‘Constantine calls himself king,’ Gediens said.
Gawain snorted. ‘Constantine can call himself the Emperor of Rome as his grandfather did. Doesn’t make it true.’
I remembered a day not long after I had come to Ynys Wydryn, when Father Yvain had returned from one of his trips across the lake with news that Lord Constantine had proclaimed himself king in Dumnonia. I knew that Constantine’s father, Ambrosius Aurelius, had been High King of Britain for ten years before he was assassinated and Uther assumed the throne in his brother’s place. On his deathbed, Uther had named his own son, Arthur, as heir, and Arthur had fought long and hard, though he had never been king.
‘Arthur bought us peace. A peace of sorts, anyway. Your father too,’
Yvain had told me, when I had sought him out in his workshop that night to ask him more. ‘It was his final act as protector of Britain.’ Yvain’s brows had gathered. ‘Well, you know that better than most, lad.’
I’d nodded, remembering that red day when I had seen things which a boy should never see. The Saxons, being too weak to press on, retreated east to lick their wounds and raise more spears and, in that respite, the noble blood in Lord Constantine’s veins had whispered to him of his old ambitions. As the lady’s smock rose on that field the next spring, their stems strengthened with the blood of the slain, Constantine rose with them, proclaiming his right to sit on Uther’s old high seat here at Tintagel.
These days, King Constantine’s high seat was a tree stump in some forest in Caer Lerion, so said Gawain, though he admitted that Constantine yet harried the Saxons with the last of his loyal spearmen.
‘We need a king here,’ Gawain said now, looking from Father Yvain to me. ‘There is no stronger fortress in all Britain. Men and supplies can come by boat and a thousand Saxons could do nothing about it.’ He shook his head, drank again and put his cup down on the stained table. ‘This is where we should start. When we’re ready.’
‘What about Camelot?’ Father Yvain asked.
Gawain nodded at Gediens, inviting him to answer Yvain’s question. ‘Too close to King Cerdic’s army,’ Gediens replied, ‘and anyway, we cannot be sure that the Lady Morgana will help us.’ He leant forward and lowered his voice. ‘Not when she learns about Arthur,’ he said. ‘The lady is like a spider at the centre of Dumnonia, guarding her web. I don’t think she would welcome us.’
‘I hear she has never let King Constantine through the gates,’ Gawain said, a measure of scorn in the word king. ‘No, this is where we should raise the banner.’ He pressed his finger down onto the table. ‘Here. At Tintagel.’
Maybe it was the drink in him talking, but it seemed to me that in that moment Gawain allowed himself to do more than hope. His eyes had sharpened as though fixed on some sight which only he could see. A vision of Arthur’s bear banner flapping in the gusts atop that cliff-walled peninsular fortress. Perhaps, rather than the revellers in that stinking, din-filled place, Gawain saw a glimpse of spearmen carrying bear-shields beneath summer skies. Warriors marching to the shrill call of the war horn. Brave sons of Dumnonia and Cornubia, Caer Celemion and Caer Gloui, making a slaughter’s dew with Saxon blood. Gawain believed in it. Truly believed, and he sat back on his stool to indulge the vision in peace, as Gediens and Father Yvain argued about whether to stick with the ale or buy a jug of Greek wine.
When I looked around that room, I saw drunks and fat merchants and fugitives who cared only about the skin on their backs and the wine skin in their hands. I saw folk huddled over gaming boards, winning and losing the rings on their fingers and the brooches on their cloaks. I saw couples writhing in the dark corners, needful as beasts. Men and women living for whatever pleasures they could find on this wind-whipped and sea-fretted rock on the south-west edge of the Dark Isles.
A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi were the words I had read, painted in faded Roman script above the door of Uther’s old hall. A precipice in front, wolves behind. It seemed to me that those words were no less true now than they were in Uther’s day, when my father had walked beneath that sign into the king’s hall. Only, back then we had Arthur.
And yet, perhaps Gawain had caught a glimpse of the future, I thought later, as the room began to spin around me and Father Yvain bought two trenchers of roast pork and fresh bread, telling me I needed to eat well to soak up the ale in my stomach. Perhaps Arthur would take up his sword and shield and become the Lord of Battles once again.
But there could be no Arthur without Merlin, and so in the morning we would find the druid and take him back.
A precipice in front, wolves behind.
I woke with a sour stomach and a head like the anvil beneath the smith’s hammer. Iselle didn’t fare much better by the looks of her. She sat scowling in the straw of the stables where Gawain had bought us a place to sleep, her face ashen and her mouth set as tight as a drum skin, as if she were clenching down on all the ale and wine to keep it from rising back up and out. In the corner of the stall, the old mare with whom we had passed the night emptied her bowels, the manure balls followed by a stream of stinking urine.
I sat up, a wave of dizziness flooding me, and through bleary eyes I saw Gediens standing with both arms stretched above his head as he let his scale armour coat fall over him, then shrugged and jumped to help the weight of it settle. I had slept on a bed of fresh straw in just my under-tunic, my cloak laid over me like a blanket, and now I felt awkward in front of Iselle. Not that she seemed in the least interested in my state of undress.
‘I thought monks were good drinkers,’ Gediens said, a grin on the face that appeared through the neck hole. ‘I was mistaken.’
Father Yvain took my habit from the nail on which it hung. ‘Galahad is a slow learner.’ He threw it at me. I fumbled with the gown, which stank of ale and smoke from the previous night. The smell of it put a lump in my throat but I swallowed it down. ‘You wouldn’t believe how long it took him to learn how to turn a simple bowl on my lathe,’ the monk went on, shaking his head at the memory. ‘And even then, it wasn’t fit for pissing in.’ He chuckled, at which the old mare nickered as though sharing the joke. ‘He tried, though. I can’t deny that.’
I stood and threw the gown on, as Gediens had done with his armour, and swallowed again. ‘Maybe if I’d had a better teacher,’ I said, at which the monk dipped his head and raised his hand in acknowledgement of a good counter-stroke.
I drew the belt tight at my waist, the rough wool of the habit chafing my neck and wrists, reminding me of long nights kneeling in prayer with my brothers. Had I truly just spent the night carousing while they lay dead and unburied on Ynys Wydryn? I saw Father Brice’s face as he yelled at me to leave, to go or be damned. Remember us, Galahad, he had called after me, those words now a dull echo in my head, pulsing with the blood in my ears.
‘If you’re going to spew, best you do it outside, lad,’ Gediens said.
Dizziness welled inside me and I glanced around for a jug of weak beer. Or better still, clean water, my mouth being dry and my tongue feeling like a sliver of old leather. Worse than that, worse even than the dawn sunlight spearing through a stall window into my eyes, were the grins on Gediens and Father Yvain’s faces.
Gediens turned to Iselle, who was gathering her hair to braid it behind her head. ‘Where are my manners? Good morning, my lady.’ He gave an elaborate bow. ‘I trust you are feeling better than Galahad this morning?’
The look Iselle gave him was as sharp as claws, but before she could unfasten her lips, Gawain appeared at the door.
‘A caravan of slave traders from Caer Gloui has crossed the land bridge,’ he told us, taking up his spear and shield. His cheeks and nose were red with the cold that he brought with him into the stable. ‘Seems half of Tintagel is swarming to get an eyeful, and the other half is sleeping off last night’s ale, which means now is a good time to get down to the cove.’
Iselle and I caught each other’s eye, Gawain’s words clearing our drink-addled heads like an icy breeze through a smoky hall. We both felt the weight of what we were about to do. For Merlin, the last of the druids, was here at Tintagel, hiding in the sea cave below the cliffs. The man who had advised Uther and Arthur, who communed with the gods of Britain and who heard the whispers of the dead, had been found after ten years of Arthur’s loyal men searching for him. And now we would come face to face with him and take him east, to Arthur.
‘You found the hunchback Lidas?’ Gediens asked Gawain.
Gawain nodded, a steam-like fog rising from his mailed shoulders. ‘The price was steep, but the man knows horses. He’ll have them saddled and waiting at the gates at noon.’
Gediens nodded. ‘Good.’
Gawain looked at Father Yvain, who was testing the edge of h
is spear blade against his thumbnail. Their eyes met and the monk nodded, his previous good humour gone now. In its place was an air of quiet resolve, a determination to do what must be done, and though he wore a habit like my own, and a bear skin over it rather than the scale armour coats which Gawain and Gediens boasted, Yvain looked no less a warrior than they. In a handful of late winter days, ten years on Ynys Wydryn seemed to have fallen away from him like snow stamped off a boot.
‘Are you ready, Galahad?’ he asked, his breath clouding in the chill dawn air by the stable’s open door.
I nodded. Still I did not see what my part was in any of this, and yet I cannot deny that I felt a thrill of anticipation, a shiver of nerves at the thought of meeting Merlin. So too did Iselle, I knew, though she said nothing of it as she quietly strung her bow, her face showing no strain as she bent the yew stave against her foot. Whispers of Merlin had fluttered across the Dark Isles on the breeze since we were both children, and Iselle was as taut as that bow string at the prospect of rumour made flesh.
We walked out into the dawn and I filled my lungs with fresh sea air only a little sullied by hearth smoke. A gust blew across Tintagel’s heights, cutting through my robes and making me shudder as I watched a cormorant skimming beneath a swathe of sullen cloud. Silent and black as a shadow it beat westward, like night itself retreating before the dawn.
‘A warning.’ Gawain stopped midstride and turned to face us as he slung his shield over his back. ‘Merlin was ever a disagreeable shit. I never much liked him, and that was then, when Arthur believed in him.’ His lip curled. ‘Before he slunk off like a weasel to … the gods alone know where. But he should’ve been there with us that day Mordred betrayed Arthur. Betrayed Britain.’ He pulled the shield’s carrying strap and shrugged his broad shoulders until it was comfortable. ‘He’ll be old now. Old and bitter, likely as not. But he’s still a druid and in my experience only a fool trusts a druid.’ He raised an eyebrow at Father Yvain. ‘I’ll wager by now Parcefal is wishing he’d sewn the old goat’s lips together.’
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