Men called it the Isle of the Dead, but the place was thronging with life. The horseshoe-shaped bay was noisy with plovers, terns and oystercatchers, and the seals which lay on the offshore skerries, singing their strange lament, so that Gawain said they reminded him of the brothers of the Thorn. The rocky ledges above the shore echoed with the clamour of guillemots, kittiwakes, shags and all types of gull, and I realized I had been a fool to imagine that the island would be as quiet as the grave.
We mounted and formed a column two abreast, taking our time riding up the wet sand to the high tide line, letting our horses find their land legs before we asked more of them. But my own gelding seemed so pleased to be off that ship that he would have gladly galloped if I’d spurred him. His nostrils were soft and round, whereas on the ship they had been tight, thin and drawn. And his lower jaw was so loose that spittle was dribbling from it, which reminded me of Tormaigh, my father’s stallion, for he had used to drool when he was content. Perhaps only Iselle was more relieved to be on dry land.
The gelding had not come with a name and so I had called him Seren, for the white star which blazed above his eyes amid the crow-black coat. He had accepted the name so readily that Iselle said I had probably given him the name which he already owned. She was likely right, for you could not look at that mark on his head without thinking of a star.
We rode up among the dune slacks and coarse grass, above which gnats hung in brown clouds, making us cover our mouths and noses. Some of us turned in the saddle and saw Karadas and his men staring after us. The young sailor lifted his horn again, as if to remind us what we must do if we heard its note before the tide was in. I made the sign of the Thorn, from habit perhaps, and I hoped we would see the Calistra on the second morning and that the sailors would cheer as they caught sight of an ancient treasure of Britain in our possession.
‘Just think what we could do with another hundred like these,’ Gediens said. He and Parcefal were riding behind Iselle and me, while Gawain rode at the head of the column with Lord Cai and Merlin.
‘It doesn’t take much thinking,’ Parcefal said. ‘We’d drive the Saxons back into the Morimaru and watch them drown.’
But we all knew this would never be any more than a dream. These men, along with their companions who had stayed on Ynys Môn, were the last of Arthur’s cataphracts, the feared horse warriors who had fought with him in Gaul and in Britannia. No king in the land was bringing the same quality of horse stock across the Narrow Sea these days. They spent their silver on slaves to dig their ditches and raise their palisades, and on feeding and paying the spearmen who peered over those sharpened stakes into the fretted land.
Who was I to be amongst these few? I felt like an imposter, like a man taking credit for another’s deeds, who knows that his transgression will be uncovered sooner or later. And yet even so, I could not help but feel honoured too, being amongst them, these warriors who made a sight to stir the blood and fire the heart. Ring mail or bronze scales burnished so that they held even the dying light of the day. Silver-chased helmets with their cheek irons down and their long plumes washed and combed straight, and the round shields slung across their backs painted with Arthur’s bear, because though these men had pledged themselves to King Pelles, they had refused to paint any other sigil on them. Some of the men were as old as Gawain, a couple even as old as Parcefal, but others had been young men of Dumnonia, trained and brought into the company during Arthur’s Saxon wars. And all of them were killers. All shared a bond which only death could sever, though such a bond may endure even beyond, so long as the living remember. And all of them had known my father, which I knew made them curious about me.
You are not him. You are not your father. So Father Yvain’s words whispered, like the sea breeze on the back of my neck. Words he had spoken just before Lord Geldrin’s spearmen threw him over the cliff edge at Tintagel. I was not my father. And yet, I hoped I would have some of his courage when the time came.
‘What is it?’ Gediens called to Merlin from behind me, breaking the spell of my thoughts. The druid had walked his mount a little way from the column and now sat with his back to us as we passed, watching a distant belt of elder trees that stood on the verge of a steep bank. Oswine sat his horse beside him, patient as a hound who knows that any sound or movement might put up the birds before its master is ready.
‘See something?’ Gediens called out again. Merlin did not reply, just sat there watching the trees, holding his staff across his saddle in the way other men gripped their spears.
‘I’d be surprised if his old eyes can see much past his nose,’ Parcefal behind me murmured, not loud enough for Merlin to hear.
‘He doesn’t need eyes to see.’ That from Iselle put a shiver in my flesh.
‘Old goat knows something he’s not telling us,’ Gediens muttered. ‘Mark my words.’
And that night, we learnt what that was.
By the light of the waning moon we came down into a wooded glen, through which a stream wound amongst ghostly birch and coppiced ash, shining in the night like a ribbon of black silk. Nestled beside the stream were two buildings, watched over by an ancient wych elm whose far-flung branches, bare of leaves but red with tasselled flowers, must have given shelter and shade to whoever had lived here.
But the place was long abandoned, and before Lord Cai ordered his men to dismount, Gawain sent me in first, to see if it would make a good spot to overnight. And so I walked across the clearing, resisting the urge to draw Boar’s Tusk and hold it before me, though I kept my hand on the grip, the blood gushing in my ears as I approached the main roundhouse.
The thatch was all moss and ferns, and some of the roof poles had fallen in, spilling rotten straw into the interior, which smelled damp and had become home to rats or mice. The creatures scurried away from me as I explored the place, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. The wattle walls, once limewashed, were now mouldering and stank, and a table, four stools and three beds stood in the gloom, scattered with droppings and cloaked in spider silk which shivered from the open door, stirring as if waking from a long sleep. But between that roundhouse and the small, weather-beaten barn, we would have shelter for the night and I told Lord Cai, who nodded and shared a look of relief with Gawain. For, even armed as we were, they preferred not to ride deeper into an unknown land in the dark.
‘No fires,’ Gawain said. The smoke would carry far on that wind. His armour glowed dully by the single rushlight which someone had put in the middle of the hearth, the first tiny warmth those blackened stones had felt since the fires which had blazed there long ago. ‘Get your heads down. We ride at dawn.’
The men went about preparing their beds upon the hard floor with the practical efficiency of soldiers long used to each other’s company, each eager to get some sleep before it was his turn to guard the horses or stand watch at the edge of the stream or up on the ridge overlooking the valley. We had all brought spare cloaks, skins or furs, and no one really minded not having a fire for warmth, though some of the men grumbled as they chewed cold meat and bread, and it struck me that while they had surely endured hardships in the past, they had grown used to living well in the service of my grandfather the king.
Taking off the helmet and heavy scale coat, I felt a lifting of a burden greater than just the weight of that war gear. It was a shedding of expectation – my own and that of others, too – as I placed the armour carefully with my saddle. But with that unburdening came the fear that the others would see me as I truly was, as a man who had never been part of a brotherhood of warriors nor faced trials of arms nor shared the spilling of blood, as they had.
I could do nothing about that, though, and so I spread my blanket on the earthen floor beside an old loom which stood beyond the hearth. A wide piece of patterned wool cloth lay on the frame still, days in the making but unfinished. Stone weights hung from the warp threads, barely stirring in the breaths of night air questing through the ruined roof, and I wondered how those slender woolle
n strings had not snapped years ago. I thought of the infant born at the monastery who had lived no longer than the time it took a candle to burn to the nub. I thought of the brothers themselves, bones on the hillside now, and of the corpses I had seen twisting on ropes in the marsh, one of them a child, a boy no older than nine summers. I thought of my mother, too, her shade stirring like the cobwebs in this old place. Close again. Closer than she had been for many years, her presence felt like a tightening in my chest. As though, unable to resist the lure of her father and her son being together for one night, my mother’s spirit had wandered to the edge of the veil separating her world and ours and lingered there now in sad and jealous torment.
So many lives cut short, severed by gods or fate or men, while the weighted threads hanging from the bones of that old loom somehow endured.
I watched an ox-shouldered, scarred-faced man called Cadwy sit down on the edge of a bed to examine something which looked in the gloom like a shoe, and I knew I was not the only one wondering what had happened to the folk who had lived in this place. But none of us wanted to give words to our thoughts, knowing as we did that speaking something aloud can sometimes make it true.
I was also wondering where Iselle was and trying not to feel offended that she had not thrown her blanket down next to mine, when the door creaked open and her face appeared, her hair bright copper under the moonlight, mocking the timid rushlight in the hearth. Her eyes bid me go with her, so I left my gear and stood, taking only Boar’s Tusk and wrapping my cloak around me against a night which was damp enough to get into the flesh and stubbornly remain there. I asked where we were going, but Iselle did not answer. I looked past her to the ancient wych elm looming in shadow now as cloud sailed across the moon. A gnarled and twisted tree, its burls like great warts, its boughs contorted like human limbs tortured by fire. And beneath those branches, standing amongst the tree’s partly exposed roots, I could make out a knot of five people, one of whom I could see was Oswine because of his fair hair.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked, but Iselle shushed me as we joined the small gathering and Gawain nodded at me in a way which made me think he had sent Iselle to fetch me. Lord Cai acknowledged me with a raised eyebrow, but Gediens and Parcefal did not look up, so intently were they watching the figure who knelt amongst those roots, his hands upon them as if they were mighty snakes and he was commanding them to thrust themselves down into the earth.
The hooded and bowed figure was Merlin. Gone was the green cloak trimmed with wolf fur, which Arthur had given him. His old dark robes covered him again, like a death shroud, without whose long embrace the corpse’s bones would fall in a scatter. I had not realized he had brought his old vestments with him. And now the druid was intoning, or rather singing, under his breath. To my surprise his voice was pleasant, younger sounding than Merlin himself and as melodious as water running over a brook’s pebble bed. Many of the words were unknown to me, yet I knew it was a sad song, of things lost and of things all but forgotten. It struck me that Merlin was singing to the tree itself and to the tree’s memory, for surely the wych elm had sent its great roots into the earth long before the legions came to Britain. It had stood sentinel in this little valley nearly a thousand years and perhaps it had witnessed the coming of the cauldron less than a man’s lifetime after Joseph of Arimathea came from a land of sun to these Dark Isles and thrust his staff into the ground at Ynys Wydryn, giving life to the Holy Thorn.
We stood in the dark. We watched and waited, and even Gawain, whose patience for Merlin ran thin as new ice, did not interrupt whatever rites the druid was performing in the moon shadow of that old tree. Iselle, I noticed, was swaying in time with the melody, her eyes closed, so that I believed that she somehow understood what was going on, for she was of the land and the sky, as strong as the wych elm, her roots as deep. And though I was not, like her, bound within the magic of Merlin’s song as threads are woven together on a loom to make patterned cloth, I felt the power in it, stronger than the devotions which we had lifted to heaven from our island sanctuary, even with all our voices.
And then, when I was only vaguely aware that I had wandered into the deepest reaches of Merlin’s strange liturgy, the song cut off, suddenly, without warning. He pulled his hands off the thick roots as a man does from an iron pot which he had not known was still hot from the fire. And went completely still.
Gawain and I looked around us, thinking Merlin had heard something that we had not. But the night in the valley beyond the farmstead was quiet but for the soft hiss of a breeze amongst the wych elm’s flowers and in the gorse and nettles which had risen like a tide against the old animal pens and the ruins of a grain store.
Parcefal and Cai looked at each other, and Gediens lifted his chin to Oswine, seeking his explanation, though no one dared be the first to speak in case they somehow ruined the rites. No one except Gawain.
‘What is it, Merlin?’ he asked, his scarred face terrifying to look at in the shaft of moonlight spearing between the branches.
Oswine helped Merlin to his feet and the druid turned to us. Inside his hood, his eyes were dark and sharp as flints.
‘I am not the last,’ he whispered. His voice was not the chime of gentle running water now, but the rasp of a whetstone on a blade. He mumbled something unintelligible, turned his head and spat, perhaps meaning to hit the elm’s roots. Perhaps not. We glanced at one another, seeking his meaning, then looked back at Merlin.
‘You’re not the last what?’ Gawain asked him, but Merlin was deep in thought. ‘Answer me, druid,’ Gawain growled, unwilling to indulge Merlin any longer.
Merlin’s eyes widened. I saw their whites in the shadow of his hood. ‘There is a druid here,’ he said, ‘on this island.’
Some of the others touched sword pommels or other iron. I made the sign of the Thorn, annoyed at myself for the habit even as I did so.
‘With the cauldron?’ Iselle asked. Of us all, she seemed the least astonished by Merlin’s revelation. Or else, she had the strongest faith in the old man’s ability to divine such a thing from the roots of a tree, or through song, or however he had done it.
Merlin considered her question.
‘I don’t know,’ he told her. But there was something different about Merlin. He stood a little taller, less rounded in the shoulder. He took his staff from Oswine and pushed back his hood, and there was a light in his eyes which I had never seen before, as though a candle flame lit his face from the inside. There was something almost like a smile playing at the corners of his lips, but it was clear to us that he would say no more about this other druid for now. So, Gawain said we should all get some rest and with that he turned and made his way back to the barn, where he had made his own bed.
I had turned to go after him when Merlin flung an arm over my shoulder. It was not raining, but the wool of his black gown smelled damp and foetid. ‘I am alive, Galahad,’ he said, squeezing the flesh of my upper arm with his claw-like hand. But for Oswine, who hung back several paces behind us, the others walked on, leaving us beneath the elm’s branches, which everyone knows is a dangerous place to be. ‘For the first time in years, I am alive. I was wrong, Galahad, to think that the gods had abandoned me.’ As we walked on, he threw his other arm out towards the sloping ground where yellow cowslips, sheep’s sorrel and dove’s foot cranesbill shivered in the moonwash. Up on the hill, I saw a glint of steel. Just a wink of light. The spear blade of one of Lord Cai’s men who was on first watch.
‘Or perhaps we are closer to the gods here, in this place. What do you think, boy?’ he asked.
I did not really mind him calling me boy. To a man who had helped Uther onto Dumnonia’s high seat, everyone must seem young. ‘I think you should tell Iselle what she has a right to know,’ I said, watching her now as she stood waiting by an ancient, moss-draped log pile under the roundhouse eaves. Merlin stopped and turned me around to face him, and I was surprised by his strength.
‘You think all that is important now?
’
I nodded. ‘I think I would want to know if it were me.’ And I felt I was betraying Iselle’s trust by not telling her, though I did not say that to Merlin.
‘Then tell her.’ He threw those words away. And yet, the way he was eyeing me implied a challenge to which he was keen to see if I would rise. ‘Tell her this night. Why not?’ He leant forward and hissed in a quieter voice, ‘It’s not as though you weren’t planning to sneak off in search of some dry ground. When the rest of them are snoring away like hogs.’
His talk of there being another druid on the island had been unnerving, but only now did I believe that Merlin truly did possess a gods-given sight denied to other men.
He shrugged. ‘Or, curl up in your furs like a little mouse and dream of your thorn bush,’ he said. ‘But whichever you choose, Galahad, do not bother me with it.’
He walked off towards the roundhouse and Oswine, following in his master’s wake, grinned at me. How I wanted to wipe that grin off his Saxon face, but I just turned and walked back towards the south side of the house and the log pile where Iselle waited.
We met beneath the old wych elm but did not tarry there, sharing the same unease, given earlier events, that it might be a place where the gods linger, and we did not want any eyes on us, not even theirs. Yet we did not think it wise to stray far from the steading and so went just a little way amongst the trees on the glen’s western slope. And even then, my heart was galloping in my chest and my ears were straining to catch every sound as we moved further from the roundhouse, keeping to the shadows where the moonlight could not find us.
‘Here,’ I said, and we stopped by a rowan which was already in full leaf, its smooth bark the bright silvery grey of a polished blade. I recalled Father Brice telling me that it was from the rowan that the cross of Calvary was carved, though I did not think Iselle would be interested to know this, as I bent to press my palm onto the ground. Dry enough beneath that canopy of feather-like leaves, so I took off my white cloak and laid it down, Iselle watching me. Saying nothing.
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