I pondered that for a long moment, draining my cup while I gave my thoughts time to settle. I did not believe King Pelles about that. As we had stood on that hill overlooking the battle, my father and I had both seen the slaughter being done. We had watched the shieldwalls clash and we had heard the thunder of it. I had smelled death on the air, as had my father’s war stallion Tormaigh. Still, my father had held out his hand for his long spear, which I had given him. No man, least of all one with my father’s reputation, could have hoped to ride into that bloody maelstrom and ride out again.
King Pelles leant close to me and placed his hand upon mine on the table. I smelled the sourness of his old breath. ‘I am heart glad to meet you again, grandson,’ he said, squeezing my hand in his.
‘And I you, grandfather,’ I said.
Then he leant closer still, so that Iselle could not hear him. ‘She has the proud look of a queen,’ he said, a mischievous glimmer in his eye, his white brows gathered close, like a pair of conspirators.
I returned his smile, watching Iselle, who was watching the room. Pelles’s bard was playing the lyre and singing the ballad of King Ban and Queen Elaine in my honour.
‘She does, grandfather,’ I said.
And she did.
The night we feasted in the Fisher King’s hall was the night of the full moon. Silver-white light threw shadows over the land. It lit oak and ash and hares fighting in the long grass. It revealed glimpses of owls swooping from high boughs and it brought wolves out of their dens, so that we heard them howling in Gwynedd’s high forests. It was a night of shrieks and squeals, of things killing and being killed, so that while none of us spoke of it, we were all in mind of the ultimatum given us by King Cerdic.
And yet, instead of being at Camelot, swearing ourselves to the rule of the Saxon king and his new queen Morgana, we were feasting on Ynys Môn. We were draining cups with men who had turned their backs on the past, and we were preparing to cross the Irish Sea in search of an ancient cauldron that, it was said, would never boil the food of a coward. A cauldron which could bring the dead back to life. Instead of sending his spearmen back to their homes and their farms and bringing Arthur’s bear standard to Lady Morgana, who would set it alight and watch it burn and scatter the ashes along with the last hopes of Britain, Lord Constantine was preparing for war.
The king, my grandfather, had shed twenty years in a night, so Merlin said, such was his joy at meeting me, and such the bittersweet draught of familiarity which tugs at the memory of old pain. For in me he saw his daughter, who had been lost to him some years even before the fever took her. It showed in his rheumy eyes which, while they silently enquired of me what sort of man I was, looked inwards too, to other times and places. To the shades of shared moments between a father and his daughter which only now, in the too late, shed their patina and revealed their incalculable value.
He told me stories of my mother when she was a girl, tears in his eyes as he remembered, and Iselle and I listened, not as the young will condescend to the old, but as folk will listen to a bard who can spin a golden tale from old, worn threads. I wanted to know what my mother liked to eat, and how she had once shut herself inside a chest so that the king and queen had not found her for a day and had sent spearmen out across the island in search of her. I wanted to know what was her favourite colour of linen, for I remembered her in blue, and what birds she had favoured. Little things, really, but things which I had been denied, being so young when death stole her from me.
As for Iselle, I think she listened because she felt that knowing my mother was somehow knowing me, and if the old king did not truly remember all of which he spoke, he made a convincing show of it, as around us men and women made merry with a din like the sea thrashing against the shore. The once-famed horse lords of Armorica and Britain feasted on flesh and drank deeply of the past. As though they could share again good wine which had all been drunk years ago. Or ride a full day without suffering the aches in the flesh. As though they could raise Arthur’s name to the sky and he would hear it and come galloping on his white mare, Llamrei, his armour glittering under the sun and his red plume streaming in the wind.
Then, when songs had been sung and wine skins emptied, Merlin asked King Pelles if he would help us retrieve the Cauldron of Annwn. Of course, he already knew our reason for being there. King Cadwallon’s emissaries had leaked that news as a basket leaks salt, but hearing it from Merlin himself, and so late in the night too, brought a weight upon the old king, as if he had forgotten about it or else hoped that we had. His eyes lost some of their blueness and I saw the thumb of his right hand worrying at a gold ring, turning it round and round a bony finger.
‘The isle is death,’ he said, stilling every tongue but those of flame which whispered their secrets in the hearth. ‘As is the cauldron itself. The craving of it.’ He scuttled a hand across the table to touch the iron blade of an eating knife. ‘Ever since the day the sacred groves were burned and the streams ran with the blood of the druids, and those who survived the slaughter carried the cauldron across the sea to safety, men have coveted it.’ He locked eyes with Merlin then. ‘As you well know, my old friend. But none have ever found it.’ Just then a candle guttered and went out, and I saw some dark looks around the room for the omen in that. ‘None,’ he repeated.
It was Merlin who broke the ominous silence. ‘We cannot know that, lord king,’ he countered, ‘that none ever found the cauldron, I mean.’ He fluttered a hand towards the rafters. ‘Just because a swallow is taken by a kestrel outside your barn in the spring, it does not mean that the swallow did not winter in far-off Africa.’ The druid had been drinking steadily but his words just about made sense, for all the frowning faces around me. ‘The cauldron is there,’ he said. ‘I dreamt of it years ago.’
The king’s brow furrowed like the sea before the wind. ‘There are worse things than kestrels on the isle, Merlin,’ he said, stopping short of naming those things.
‘So they say,’ Merlin admitted with a nod, extending a hand across the table towards Gawain. ‘But nothing has managed to kill us yet.’
‘Not for want of trying.’ Gawain’s lips showed his closed teeth as a dog’s do. Some of King Pelles’s horse warriors thumped their fists against the table’s oak planks. Lord Cai nodded at his old friend in a way that told me Gawain had already done his work and convinced Cai to help us, if the king allowed it.
It was my turn now. Despite all the wine, my mouth was suddenly dry. My stomach felt hollow. I cleared my throat and sat straighter. ‘We cannot turn back now, grandfather,’ I said. ‘To beat the Saxons, we need Lord Arthur. But there can be no Arthur without Guinevere.’ I looked at Iselle and realized that I did not mind if every man or woman in the hall read what was in my face, so long as the king read it. ‘We will go to the Isle of the Dead,’ I said. ‘We will find the cauldron and take it back to Dumnonia so that Merlin may use its power to cure Lady Guinevere.’ I turned back to my grandfather. ‘Lord king.’ I squared my shoulders and lifted my chin. ‘Since leaving Ynys Wydryn I have seen the ruin of the land with my own eyes. I have seen farmsteads burning, their livestock driven east to feed Saxon warriors. I have stumbled upon corpses left to rot in the grass. Seen children wandering the woods, as aimless as smoke.’ I felt the skin prickle on the back of my neck. ‘Britain itself will become an isle of the dead if we cannot face our enemies and turn them back.’
King Pelles stared at me, pulling his short white beard between finger and thumb. Shaking his head slowly from side to side. ‘She is here before my eyes,’ he said in a distant-sounding voice. Then he blinked slowly, correcting his thoughts. ‘You are both here.’ He nodded. ‘My daughter and my grandson. Gods, but I was a stubborn fool to let any of it come between us.’ He winced at the pain in memories. ‘My Helaine.’ The name sounded like a man’s last breath in this world, and I thought he would shed tears again, but he breathed deeply and held firm. ‘What sort of king would I be … indeed, what sort of man, were I
to turn my back on you, Galahad, my own flesh? My bone and blood?’ He looked at Iselle. ‘Should I deny you my help because I am old and will not be here to drink to your victory or share in the sorrow of your loss? No,’ he shook his head. ‘He is a fool who plants no trees because he knows he will never sit in their shade.’
With that he gripped the arms of his chair and pushed himself up onto his feet, shrugging off the courtier who tried to steady him. ‘You shall have half my loyal company, Lord Gawain, and my ship to take you across the sea.’ He grabbed at his wine cup and held it aloft, though his arm trembled and some of the red liquid sloshed over the lip onto the table. ‘And when you return with the treasure, we shall celebrate with such a feast as will put this night to shame,’ he announced, keeping the cup raised towards the roof beams, as fists pounded oak and thunder rolled through the hall.
Then he turned and looked down at me, for I was still sitting, and the thunder died because he had something more to say. ‘And I will get to know my grandson better,’ he said in a quieter voice. A man’s voice, not a king’s, and tainted with regret. Even so, men cheered again. Gawain and Cai banged their cups together, spilling ale across the king’s board.
King Pelles took Iselle’s hand in his and led her off to show her the great tapestry which hung behind his high seat, embroidered with a scene of the ancient hero and king Brân the Blessed being killed by a poisoned Irish spear thrust through his foot during the Great War. Beside the giant Brân, rendered in fine needlework, stood three warriors with swords ready to cut off his head, as the dying hero instructed. But my eye was drawn elsewhere, to Merlin, who was watching me, smirking like a man who has won a wager but knows it would not be wise to boast of it.
17
The Isle of the Dead
WE SAILED NORTH ON a grey sea beneath a grey sky, the westerly breeze spitting rain into my face as I watched the low skerries slide past our port side. Enough wind across the sail to shrug the rain off it and keep us moving at a decent pace, water breaking into white spume across our bows.
‘We’ll reach the isle well before dusk,’ Cai said, stroking the chest and withers of his gelding, a grey Andalusian of sixteen hands. ‘So long as Karadas stays wise of drift and tide,’ he added, loud enough for the captain on his quarterdeck to hear. Karadas licked a finger and held it up to the thin gusts, calling back that it was not unusual for the wind to squall out of nothing off this northern coast.
‘And if that happens,’ he said, ‘coupled with this westward ebb, it’ll be all I can do to prevent her hull being ripped on the skerries and you land men sinking with all your pretty gear.’ He gave a gap-toothed grin and Cai grinned back, the two men enjoying the nervous glances which some of the other warriors shared as they comforted their horses, for the animals hated being at sea even more than the men did.
Iselle, who had already given up her breakfast to the fishes, hung over the sheer strake, hiding her pallor from the rest of us, much to Gawain’s amusement, while I looked after her horse as well as my own. It was her first time at sea, as it was mine, yet I revelled in the experience, of the sea’s breath in my face and hair, the rise and dip of the Calistra’s hull up crest and down furrow, and the sense of the unknown, which I found thrilling, perhaps because of my years of confinement at the monastery on Ynys Wydryn, where the days brought few surprises. And though I had heard of men drowning at sea, their ships ripped upon teeth-like rocks so that lives spilled like guts from a wounded beast, I guessed we were safe enough that day. Seamen being more superstitious than most men, if Karadas was joking with Cai, teasing him about sinking into Manannán mac Lir’s cold clutches, it must be because there was almost no chance of it happening. Or so I hoped.
What I feared was not the Irish Sea, not on that spring day, nor that terrible sea god, but rather whatever awaited us on the isle. We were fewer than we would have liked. Not that King Pelles hadn’t been generous, giving us Lord Cai and nine of his horse warriors, so that we were seventeen in all who would be going ashore. But seventeen did not sound like many given that we were bound for a place from which men did not return. And yet we could not expect the king to lend us more of his warriors for our quest, for all the portents of it being led by the last of the druids, those priests of Britain who had once made this very same journey to save the cauldron. All those long years ago.
Nor could the Calistra have taken more men and horses. As it was, the shallow hold, as well as all available deck space, was crammed with men, war gear and skittish horseflesh; a bilious cargo from which fear and unease rose along with the stink of tarred lines, brackish bilge water and wool smeared with tallow, and the beasts’ manure, making me stretch my neck to breathe in the clean sea air.
‘Arthur used to get seasick something terrible,’ Gawain grinned, watching Iselle lean over the side, clutching her copper hair in a knotted fist to keep it from getting spewed on. ‘He was green as grass the first time we sailed the Dividing Sea over to Armorica. Said it was the stringy hare he’d eaten the night before, but I ate the same meal and I was bright-eyed and hale.’ The big man shook his head. ‘Never liked the sea, did Arthur.’
But I liked the sea. Still, it was a strange feeling when I could no longer see Ynys Môn off our stern, but only the grey gloom of sea, sky and cloud, and the occasional sea bird living its life far beyond the troubles and cares of man. A herring gull shrieking as the wind carried it like a leaf on a river. Or, sometimes, a black and white bird with a bill as bright as fire, flying just above the waves, its stocky wings beating impossibly hard. Now and then, I would see these strange birds fall like stones and vanish beneath the surface as though passing between worlds. And it made me think of our journey out here on the Western Sea, beyond which lay Annwn, the world beyond this life. Or so those in Britain believed who had not turned to Christ.
As for myself, I no longer knew what I believed, but as we sailed on that seemingly endless, shifting sea, through veils of rain and sometimes alongside sleek creatures that arrowed beneath the racing furrows or leapt and cavorted as though to see what we were, I felt closer to Merlin’s faith than to that of my former brothers, who were now no more in the world than my memories of them.
A tall, striking warrior with a head of black curls called Medyr was the first to call out that he could see low cliffs through the rain and mist. Either the horses understood Medyr, or else they smelled the land, for they began to nicker and stamp and toss their heads so that their manes flew in the wind.
‘You’ll soon be rid of us,’ Cai called to Karadas, who had just been growling curses under his breath at the sight of all the filth which the nervous horses had dropped on his well-scrubbed deck.
‘Could be you’ll wish I had wrecked us and sent you to the crabs,’ the captain replied, stepping up to the bow rail to peer into the mizzle haze. ‘I wouldn’t go traipsing around that island for a year’s supply of mead and a raven-haired beauty to drink it with.’
‘We have spears and horses, and we have a druid,’ said Sadoc, a warrior with a narrow face and bulging eyes. He stroked the flank of his chestnut gelding but watched the land towards which, even on the ebb tide, the Calistra was gliding like a crane to its roost.
‘I mean no offence to Lord Merlin,’ Karadas said, showing Merlin a callused, tar-stained palm, ‘but the hateful creatures on that island care nothing for the laws and proprieties that govern normal men. Druid, king, knight or slave. No one should set foot on there and expect to come back to the world of the living.’ He lifted a hand again. ‘Well, I’ve said my piece and no man can say otherwise. And I hope by all the gods that you’re all on the beach two mornings from now, because I won’t be coming looking.’
‘Be here,’ Cai told him.
‘And bring grain for the horses,’ Gawain added.
‘And ale for us.’ Parcefal’s request got a nod of agreement from Gediens and several of the others, though how they could be thinking of ale at such a time, I could not imagine.
And th
en we were all holding reins and tack, speaking soothing words to our horses whilst the Calistra’s crew reefed some sail to slow us, and Karadas turned her bows towards a cove which he knew to be sandy enough for him to run her up the beach.
‘Whatever we find here, I’d rather that than staying aboard this boat,’ Iselle said, still pale, her lips still warped by the sourness of bile.
‘I have decided I like sailing,’ I smiled. I said it to keep the fear from my face, though surely I was not the only man aboard the Calistra who was afraid of what we might find on the island.
Karadas grimaced at the sound of the Calistra’s hull grinding up the strand, which we heard even with the horses shrieking and neighing and men cursing as they struggled to steady themselves and their animals against the sudden loss of forward momentum. Six sailors leapt over the side with gangplanks and poles, which they thrust into the sand, leaning them against the Calistra’s barnacled hull to steady the ship as best they could while we disembarked the horses.
‘Who’s got that damned horn?’ Karadas called, at which a sailor lifted the horn which hung across his shoulder. For, having beached the vessel on the ebb tide, Karadas and his crew would now have to wait for the flood tide to lift her again, and though the sailors had spears, and some had talked of a recent fight against Irish pirates, the Isle of the Dead was something else.
‘If we hear the horn, we’ll come as fast as we can,’ Cai had assured the captain.
‘Aye, you’d better,’ Karadas had said, but I knew the Calistra’s crew would be watching the dunes and long grass and praying to Manannán to bring the sea up onto the strand.
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