That got everyone’s attention. The strap in Gawain’s hands went still. Gediens and Parcefal frowned at one another, and I glanced at Iselle but she was transfixed by Merlin, her eyes no less fierce than his own.
‘You have heard of the thirteen treasures of the island of Britain?’ the druid asked. ‘Of Dyrnwyn, or White-Hilt, the Sword of Rhydderch Hael? And the Whetstone of Tudwal Tudglyd, upon which if a brave man sharpened his sword, that sword would kill any man whose blood it drew, yet if a coward sharpened his blade on it, that blade would never draw blood?’
Gawain and Parcefal shared a look which said that even if they had heard some old stories long ago, such things were for children and fools. I shrugged at Iselle and it seemed that she knew nothing much of Tudwal Tudglyd’s whetstone either.
Merlin blinked and threw out his arms. ‘What about the Horn of Brân Galed?’
Parcefal grinned. ‘Whatever drink might be wished for was found in it,’ he said, pleased with himself.
Merlin raised an eyebrow at the old warrior. ‘I would have wagered the horn itself that of all the treasures, that one you would know.’
Parcefal shrugged. ‘No man can remember them all. No man who isn’t a druid.’
‘Once, I had thought I might seek out the thirteen treasures,’ Merlin said. ‘Gather them together in one place, Tintagel perhaps, or Camelot. And that being all together, they would draw the eyes of the gods. More than that, their combined power would bring the gods back to Britannia to stand beside our spearmen and cast the Saxons back into the sea from whence they came.’ He scratched his iron-grey beard. ‘Did you know I have played a game on the Chessboard of Gwenddoleu ap Ceidio?’ he asked. ‘I won a slave from King Culhwch of Ebrauc, though he ran away and so I cursed his soul,’ he added, for Oswine’s benefit. The Saxon, who was busy rubbing grease into Merlin’s cloak, half smiled. ‘But I realized it would be impossible,’ Merlin went on, ‘to gather them all. Oh, easy enough to recognize the Chariot of Morgan Mwynfawr, if you can find it, mind,’ he pointed a finger, ‘but not so easy to tell the Crock and Dish of Rhygenydd the Cleric from any other crock and dish.’ He grimaced. ‘How many whetstones do you suppose you would have to try before you found Tudwal’s?’ He waved the whole idea away with a hand. ‘I would need three lifetimes to do it.’ He held up a bony finger to Arthur. ‘But, one of the thirteen treasures is not so far away from here.’ He put a thumb to his mouth and chewed the nail. ‘Well, it is not beyond the walls, anyway, as Excalibur was.’
‘My arse still aches from that journey,’ Gawain put in, but Arthur was in no mood to reminisce.
‘The Cauldron of Annwn is on the Isle of the Dead,’ Merlin said.
‘Then it might as well be bubbling over Arawn’s own hearth fire.’ Gediens shot Parcefal a knowing look.
‘What about it?’ Arthur said.
Merlin nodded. ‘The cauldron is one of the most powerful of all the ancient treasures. It can restore life itself.’
Merlin hardly needed to say more. We all looked at each other in the gloom. Surely a cauldron which could revive the dead had the power to cure someone who was not dead, only afflicted?
‘Who owns the cauldron? The dead?’ Gawain asked, the flavour of mockery in his tone, but he was already on the hook and Merlin knew it.
‘Worse,’ Merlin admitted.
Arthur and Gawain shared a look which spoke of old fights and poor odds. And yet here they both were. Alive, still. Friends, still.
‘If we get our hands on this cauldron and bring it back here, you’ll be able to use it to bring the lady back?’ Gawain asked Merlin.
Before Merlin could answer, Arthur spoke. ‘I thought you told us your power is gone.’ His grey eyes were searching the druid’s. ‘That the gods have abandoned you.’
Merlin pursed his lips as he considered this. ‘And yet perhaps not entirely abandoned,’ he suggested, ‘for, as I told you, I dreamt of the cauldron, and where do dreams come from if not the gods?’ He looked at Gawain. ‘I will do what I can.’ He raised a hand. ‘If I have the cauldron.’
Ever since Oswine had fetched us and I had seen the change in Merlin, I had felt a tightening in my belly. Now, my heart was racing.
‘So, we’ll go to the Isle of the Dead and find it,’ I told Gawain.
‘And you think whoever has it will simply give it to us?’ Parcefal asked. No doubt his ageing bones were creaking with complaint at the very idea of another long journey, after the years he had already spent looking for Merlin.
‘They will give it to us, or else we will take it,’ I said, as if there would be no more to it than that.
‘It is as though he is here with us again,’ Arthur said to me, and I knew he meant my father.
‘It is, Arthur,’ Gawain agreed, a grin on his face which I had not seen before, but which suited him like a favourite cloak, lost but found again a long time after.
‘Well, count me out of it,’ Parcefal announced, ‘for I’ll not go to the Isle of the Dead.’
I grinned at Iselle and she grinned at me, and Parcefal rolled his eyes and growled something foul.
16
The Fisher King
FIRST, WE WOULD GO to Ynys Môn off the north-west coast of Gwynedd. From there it would be less than a day’s sail north across the Irish Sea to the Isle of the Dead. But there was another reason for going to Ynys Môn, besides its northern coast being the best place from which to take ship. We would need warriors in order to retrieve the Cauldron of Annwn. Lord Constantine had none to spare, and nor did we have the time to seek volunteers amongst Dumnonia’s cantrefs and rounds. But the lord of Ynys Môn, whom men called the Fisher King, was rich in silver, spears and horse, so it was said, and Merlin believed he could be persuaded to help us.
‘It will be good to see old Pelles again,’ Merlin had said.
‘This is no journey for you, old man,’ Gawain had replied.
Merlin had let out a bark at that. ‘You do remember the last quest we went on together, Gawain? And how you and Lancelot and the others were on your knees by that pool, waiting for your turn to be drowned by a pair of painted Picts and a naked priestess?’
Gawain’s lip curled in his beard. ‘As I said, my arse still aches from the ride. Wish I could forget it.’
‘Then you will also recall that I saved your lives,’ Merlin said, then turned to me. ‘Your father’s, too.’
‘You were a younger man then,’ Gawain grunted. ‘And could still catch birds to hide up your sleeves.’
Merlin’s grin was sour. ‘I am not dead yet. You will need King Pelles and so you will need me.’
‘Let him come,’ Parcefal said, ‘or we may end up dragging the wrong pot all the way back.’
So Merlin had come with us, and in truth from the moment we set off, leaving Arthur and Guinevere beneath the old apple tree, the druid seemed ten years younger. His back straightened so that he was taller now than before. He had waxed his long beard and moustaches, making them into stiff iron-grey blades which accentuated his rawboned face. He had even combed and oiled what little hair yet clung to his head, tying it at the nape of his neck with a thong, into which he had knotted two raven feathers, much to Iselle’s delight. He did not wear his old robes, these being threadbare and ragged, but over trews and a tunic which Oswine had washed, he draped a cloak of green wool trimmed with wolf’s fur. The cloak was a gift from Arthur, who said that Merlin could not look like a beggar or a wandering priest of the Christ and expect men to respect him or aid his cause. But to me it seemed that the cloak was Arthur’s acknowledgement of a friendship rekindled by the druid’s willingness to take to the road once more in service to him. Whatever the reason, the cloak suited Merlin well and with his ash staff, which Iselle had fashioned and into which Merlin had carved strange symbols whilst whispering secret words, he looked like the druid of our imaginations.
‘The Cauldron of Annwn was forged by the druids long before the Romans came to the Dark Isles,’ Merlin told us as we rode n
orth, following the Hafren which sprang from the peat bogs high in the Cambrian mountains, sometimes flowing so full and fierce that it carried away roundhouses which folk had built too near its banks. ‘My forebears kept the cauldron on Ynys Môn, in their stronghold there.’
Iselle had nodded, an ardent look in her eyes, as there always was when Merlin spoke of the old times and of druids and their secret rites. She saw me looking at her, then looked away, a smile touching her lips, and I felt the heat rise in my cheeks. I may have been half listening to the druid, but I had been thinking about that night with Iselle in Arthur’s stable and I was sure that Iselle knew it.
‘Of course,’ Merlin had gone on, ‘even those who saw the future in their dreams could not prevent it coming to pass, and the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus came with his legions to extinguish the flame of knowledge in Britain.’ At this, the druid’s face fell so that you would have thought he had witnessed the slaughter himself, even swung a sword to defend his kind. And yet it had been a catastrophe, the times as dark as those we faced now. The way I had learnt it, the druids had made a desperate last stand before their sacred groves, but in the end the Romans prevailed, as they so often had, and the slaughter had been complete, no druid living to see another sunrise over Ynys Môn.
Not so, according to Merlin.
‘Three druids escaped the butchery,’ he said now, swaying in the saddle and holding up a leaf so that the setting sun shone through it. ‘These carried the cauldron by boat to the Isle, where it remains to this day.’ He lifted his hand and the leaf fluttered away and I saw that it was a butterfly, the first I had seen since the previous summer. Iselle watched it until it disappeared from sight. ‘Of course, we are not the first to seek Annwn’s cauldron,’ Merlin said, idly taking up the reins again.
‘It’s not called the Isle of the Dead for nothing,’ Gawain said in his gruff, unpolished way.
Corncrakes rasped amongst the tall grass. A gentle gust blew into a stand of hazel and alder thickly hung with catkins, sending a billow of yellow smoke into the hogweed and tall grass thronging the brackish margins of the river.
‘But perhaps the cauldron wants us to find it,’ Iselle said, at which the druid’s eyes widened in surprise.
‘Perhaps,’ he nodded.
And we all hoped Iselle was right as we rode on along the coast of Caer Gloui towards Powys, and warblers plucked flying insects from the air above the river bank, and somewhere amid a far-off thicket a nightingale sang a ballad to the coming dark.
Being accoutred as warlords, Gawain, Parcefal, Gediens and I were not expecting to travel unnoticed. Our armour and helmets gleamed, so that these brighter days with the sun higher in the sky announced us like warriors from fireside tales. We had combed and washed our helmet plumes so they streamed like blood or, in the case of my father’s, like snow spilling from a high bough. Even our spear blades must have glinted like stars which linger into the dawn, and one reason we saw so few folk was because they saw us long before we saw them. Several times, though, we saw the backs of men or women running off to hide or to warn their lords of us, and now and then Iselle or I – having the best eyes – alerted the others to children darting from tree to gorse in our wake.
Whenever we came near some round, which we sometimes could not avoid doing, the folk in the fields beyond the enclosure, be they sowing, weeding or ploughing, unbent their backs and stared, and one or two called out to ask who we were, for they could see we were not cut-throats or raiders and so did not fear that we would do them harm. We called back that we were escorting Lord Merlin to Ynys Môn, and I for one enjoyed the bulge of their eyes when they realized who the green-cloaked, grey-bearded man amongst us was. It was the truth after all, and Merlin being a druid and thus respected by all the countries and peoples of Britain, but for Lady Morgana and her Saxon allies, we thought we should be safe enough this far to the west of our enemies.
One night, we were invited into a round to share drink and what news we’d gathered on our travels with a chieftain called Cyledyr, who claimed that Merlin had once cured him of a terrible toothache when he was but a boy. Merlin had the sense to pretend that he remembered the incident and the boy, which had Cyledyr lifting his chin in the company of his friends and retainers and filling our cups again and again until we all fell asleep at the benches and woke to the second cock with aching heads.
On another occasion we were met on the road by spearmen mounted on tough, wild-looking ponies, who said they were King Gwion’s men and insisted that we pay our respects to their king and beg his permission to cross his land. They were shaggy-haired, scarred, belligerent men dressed in battered leather armour and animal skins, and it seemed to me that they hoped we would refuse their demands. That they hungered to show us that fine war gear did not prove the warrior’s worth, though I’m sure they would have had the scale coats off our backs and onto their own whether by combat or theft given the chance. It was not yet noon when these twelve men accosted us, and we were loath to go with them and lose a day’s ride. Parcefal growled that we should kill one or two of them and the rest would scatter like chaff on the breeze, but that is not what I saw in their eyes. Neither did Gawain, and so we went with them to their cantref, whose deep ditch, high bank and palisade, many of the stakes scorched and blackened, confirmed that these were a warlike people and we had done the right thing by accepting their invitation.
King Gwion himself was a bear of a man, who took enormous pleasure in showing us no less than fifty heads which his warriors had taken in recent fights, despite the campaigning season being only just upon us.
‘Lord Arthur would see you well paid if you brought spearmen east to fight the Seax,’ Gawain told the king over horns of ale, for such men as these, who rode well and took pride in reaping their enemies’ heads, would be useful come the summer. But King Gwion only laughed at Gawain’s suggestion, like a man trying to prove he cannot be taken for a fool.
‘Arthur is long dead, as everyone knows,’ he told us, still grinning, ‘and the Seax are far away from here. They are not my problem, Gawain of Lyonesse.’ He threw up an arm which was thick and gnarled with muscle and scar. ‘I have my own enemies to kill and do not need more.’ He lifted his ale horn to his warriors, who sat huddled by the hearth though it was not cold, so steeped were they in the habit of it after the long winter. ‘Perhaps, when all the ghosts in Powys are headless,’ he turned to Merlin, ‘and you bring Lord Arthur back from Annwn, druid, I will come and kill the Seax with you.’
There was little point in arguing Arthur’s existence, and so Gawain indulged the man, as did we all, lifting our horns and thanking him for his hospitality. And in the morning, King Gwion made a gift to Gawain of a skull, which he claimed he’d taken himself from a famed giant called Berth, who had led a cattle raid against Gwion’s people. We all agreed it was almost half the size again of a normal skull, so that this Berth must have been a huge man. Gawain thanked King Gwion for the gift and took the time to dig a sizeable hole to bury it in when we had ridden out of sight of Gwion’s warriors, who had followed us for a while on their small, hardy horses.
And that night we saw the glow of Beltane fires in the darkness and against the black sky, and we knew that in Camelot and by some sacred rites, whether Saxon or those observed by the people of Britain, Lady Morgana had joined herself in marriage to our hated enemy. Yet we barely spoke of it.
We continued north past desolate, wind-flayed hill forts, across meadows thronged with sheep amongst the yellow cankerworts and buttercups, and along river valleys ruled by hare and hawk. Once, Iselle said that she saw the glint of steel up on the crest of a wooded hill behind us, so that we wondered if King Gwion’s men yet followed us, perhaps making sure we left their land. But we saw no further signs and when we came to the rugged, cloud-darkened kingdom of Gwynedd, King Cadwallon received us with a feast of mutton, swine, and dark mead which tasted of smoke and heather. Cadwallon, whom men called Longhand, was as Roman as Lord Constantine, a
nd the grim little fort which served as his base was clearly intended to tie his rule with the old Imperial Roman order, to keep alive the idea of stability and martial power, as a child who shouts into a vast gloomy cave takes comfort from the voice which echoes back.
A short, clean-shaven man with knowing eyes beneath a thatch of hair the same copper hue as Iselle’s, Cadwallon’s cleverness tempered the warlike nature which his people were born with, and Merlin and Gawain trusted him enough to tell him of our quest for the Cauldron of Annwn.
He and his people were Christians, so we did not fear him wanting the cauldron for himself. Besides which, he said we were mad to be going willingly to the Isle of the Dead. He spoke of other parties who had gone in search of the cauldron, not in his time but in his father’s and his grandfather’s. None of those men had ever returned. Yet, King Cadwallon had enough respect for Merlin, whom he knew from former times, and for Arthur, whose bear he had recognized on our shields, to say that he would pray for our success and for Lady Guinevere’s recovery.
‘Lord Arthur and I are brothers of the sword,’ he told us that evening as we ate, and after Merlin had regaled his hall with stories of the thirteen treasures. ‘We both have given our lives to the protection of our people against ravenous devils. He against the Seax, I against the Irish.’ He turned his gaze towards his high seat so as to draw our eyes to the red cloak of a Roman officer draped upon it. It had belonged to his grandfather. Too old and too venerated to be worn, yet too obviously Roman to be hung behind a door where no one would see it, or folded in a chest in the dark. ‘We have both burned,’ he said, ‘like torches flaming in the night, holding back the darkness.’
‘Arthur will burn brightly again, lord king,’ Gawain assured him.
The king nodded, his lips pressed together into a fine line. I doubted he believed Gawain that Arthur would rise again to lead the kings of Britain, but I think he wanted to. For he had helped King Pelles rid Ynys Môn of the Irish, who had been a persistent threat since the legions abandoned their forts overlooking the Irish Sea. Perhaps this was how Cadwallon had earned his nickname, Longhand, for his power which stretched from sea strand to eagles’ nest, from mountains to marsh, though I had also heard it was because he could reach a stone from the ground to kill a raven without bending his back. Not that his arms looked specially long to me, but, either way, King Cadwallon was sure of his place in this world, and of the task which his god had given him, and he employed bards to compose songs in order that everyone else would know it too.
Camelot Page 31