‘See if you can get anything out of him,’ Gawain told the druid, so Merlin tried, asking where the others had fled to and why they had attacked us without knowing who we were or our reason for being there. He even asked the whereabouts of the Cauldron of Annwn, promising in return a draught of hook weed and white willow bark to help numb the pain which had made sharp little arrow heads of the dying man’s eyes.
But the man showed no understanding and so Merlin spoke other tongues: Irish and Gaulish – of which I knew but a scattering of words – and the ancient language of the northern Picts, yet it did no good. Even if he could understand, the man was too far away now. Like a boat which had sailed out of sight of land and all that can be seen is the horizon and all that can be imagined is the unknown beyond. He spluttered and gasped and clutched the savage wound in his chest, and when it was clear he would be of no use to us, Gawain gave a nod and Oswine cut his throat.
We counted fifteen enemy dead, though some of us had seen the survivors bearing their wounded away, even dragging them off like heavy sacks into the woods, so that we knew we had inflicted terrible losses on whoever these people were. But Fiacha was dead. His mail slick with his blood, his eyes wide, as though still scouring the darkness for enemies. And he was not the only one. Guidan, who had been the oldest warrior in the company and who had ridden with the young Arthur in Armorica as they forged their reputation, had been killed too. A crudely made, bone-handled knife was still lodged under his right arm where there was tough leather but no iron rings.
I looked at these dead men and could not help but feel that I was in part responsible, for I had played my part in convincing King Pelles to let them accompany us to this land. But more than this, it struck me that we were by no means invincible, despite our horses and armour and the skill of these warriors and their vaunted reputation. They could die, as the brothers of the Thorn had died. And we could fail.
When Fiacha and Guidan were laid side by side on the floor of the roundhouse, the men took it in turns to go in and say whatever it was in their hearts to say, while the rest of us stood watching the trees, some even hoping that our enemies would come again, because in fighting there is little thought.
‘I’m sorry, Cai,’ Gawain said, standing beside his old friend, the two of them watching Taliesin, who was moving through the night from corpse to corpse, spitting on dead faces and murmuring curses which chilled my flesh, so bitter the words from so young a mouth. ‘They were our brothers and we will honour them.’
Lord Cai removed his helmet and scratched amongst his dark hair, which was shot with grey at the temples. ‘The way we honour them is by finding this damned cauldron and killing as many of those stinking turds as we can before we leave this … forsaken island,’ he said.
Gawain nodded, and yet doubts must have gnawed at him as he stood with his back to that ill-fated house, his scale armour and helmet glowing dully in the moonlight. It was our first night on the island and the place had already stolen the lives of three amongst us, for we all knew that Gadran up on the western ridge, who had bought us enough time to brace ourselves for the attack, was dead too. He would have been here otherwise.
Iselle came and stood beside me, the two of us watching Taliesin kneel beside a dark shape. I saw a flash of blade and then the boy threw himself down, driving the knife into the body beneath him.
‘So, you are a warrior,’ Iselle murmured. ‘As your father was.’
I said nothing. I hoped that it was still dark enough for her not to see that I trembled as a dog will when the skies are alight with the Beltane fires.
‘Maybe …’ Iselle began, but fell silent again, still untangling her thoughts before laying them out straight. I glanced at her. She looked composed. Her breathing was deep and even. Her jaw was set like that of someone who knows there is a task to be completed which will not be easy but will nevertheless be done.
I did not speak, fearing that the quivering in my flesh would also be in my voice.
After a while, she said, ‘Maybe you should accept who you are. What you are.’
And what is that? I thought. One mad fight in the dark hardly makes a warrior. Yes, I had killed. I had killed ill-trained, poorly armed enemies who had fought with little regard for their own lives. That hardly made me a slayer of men. And yet. Something had awoken in me. I knew it. I felt it writhing in my guts. Crawling in the marrow of my bones, its need warming me like a belly full of steaming broth.
‘I’m not my father,’ I said.
‘Nor do you have to be,’ Iselle said. ‘But you are not a novice now. There are no walls for you to hide behind. You will find no comfort in the singing of psalms for the Christus. Only in the sword song.’
Her words cut through the heat in my bones like iced water. I looked at her, but she was watching the eastern woods, which were cast in shadow again. Watching the darkness but seeing me.
And then we heard Gadran’s horn.
18
The Cauldron of Anwnn
WE RODE IN THE near dark. Climbing out of that vale as if emerging from some foul dream. Leaving the farmstead with its ghosts and its newly dead, two of whom lay wrapped in cloth amongst the cobwebs on those beds which had not been slept in for so many years. We would collect the bodies of Fiacha and Guidan on our return and take them back to Ynys Môn to be burned on balefires fit for such warriors as they had been. The other corpses we left for the crows and ravens, for the gulls and the wolves, if there were any on that island. For such savage creatures deserved no better.
There had been some disagreement about whether or not we should leave the relative safety of the farmstead while it was night still. At the thin drone of Gadran’s horn, we drew close together in the dark, like fingers into a fist, and waited to see what Lord Cai and Gawain would have us do.
‘What if it was those who killed Gadran sounding the horn?’ a man named Myr asked, glancing towards the trees from where the white-haired fiends had come before. ‘What if they mean to draw us out and surround us in the dark?’
It was a fair question and Myr was not alone in thinking we were being drawn into a trap now. And yet all Cai had needed to say was what if it had been Gadran? His first signal to warn us, his second, much later, a plea for help. That question from Cai was enough and now we were riding up the escarpment, hoping that Gadran was alive, that he had somehow escaped those wild devils and had signalled us so that we might find him.
But we did not find him and so we rode on, north-eastward, deeper into the island’s interior because what else could we do? No one thought it would be wise to make camp. Not that any of us could sleep knowing that Gadran was out there somewhere, and with the fight still thrumming in our blood. But then, to our surprise, Taliesin announced that he knew the whereabouts of the neamh-mairbh’s lair.
‘I followed them,’ he told us.
Gawain raised an eyebrow at Merlin, who smiled as if he had been waiting for the boy to come out with it. Iselle nodded at Taliesin, encouraging him to say more, to tell us what he could.
‘After they took my mother and father, they came back,’ the boy said. ‘Looking for me.’ I shuddered to think of what the neamh-mairbh would have done to Taliesin had they found him. It seemed impossible that he could have survived on this island with such creatures stalking the night. And yet he was no ordinary child. There was something otherworldly about Taliesin. He was more like a dream of a boy than a child of flesh and blood.
‘Find the lair and we’ll find the cauldron,’ Merlin said. Of us all, he seemed the least afraid. He was old. He was no warrior. And yet he seemed neither tired nor apprehensive about the task at hand. While the rest of us rode twisting our necks to scour the night, seeing in every copse and ditch an ambush, white knuckles gripping rein and spear, expecting at any moment the neamh-mairbh to come shrieking from the shadows, blades flashing beneath the moon, Merlin sat on his horse like a man on his way to a lover. His eyes glimmered like embers in the dark. He seemed unburdened. Seemed t
o have shed his self-pity and his guilt and his failure as a snake sheds its skin, and now was vital. Younger, even, as if some of Taliesin’s tender youth was seeping into him. Or, more likely, the druid was leeching it from the boy riding Fiacha’s horse beside him.
I knew the reason for Merlin’s reawakening. He had felt Taliesin’s presence as a hound smells the hind, and from the moment he had knelt amongst the roots of that ancient elm, he had known that the gods had not abandoned him after all. That he still possessed some of the power which had carried his reputation across Britain on terrifying wings. And I knew I was not alone in thinking that if Merlin could become the druid he had once been, then maybe Arthur could become the lord of battle again, and that together they would unite the kings of Britain and reclaim the lost lands.
Once more we heard Gadran’s horn. A long, lonely note in the distant dark. And men touched iron and cursed, growled threats to the night and leant to spit onto the ground, because we knew now that it was not Gadran blowing that horn. The neamh-mairbh were leading us on. We had hurt them. They had meant to slaughter us in that vale, but they had failed, and we had killed many of them and now they sought vengeance. They wanted us to find them and so we would.
We rode across rolling hills and rich meadows which, had they been on the mainland, would have been thick with crops: barley and oats, peas, beans and vetches, but were instead a temptation of long grass to our mounts. We crossed a shallow stream and walked our horses up a slope thick with speedwell whose blue blossoms glowed like gems in the moon dark. Iselle and some of Lord Cai’s warriors took the trouble to dismount and pick the flowers, which they tucked into the necks of tunics, or stuffed up sleeves, those flowers being said to protect travellers. I could not imagine what good those delicate blossoms would do against the shrieking neamh-mairbh, but I did not begrudge others seeking good luck where they could find it.
The hill led to a shoulder of land bristling with gorse and we followed it, skirting a dark wood until we found ourselves riding north-west now, towards the coast, and it happened almost imperceptibly that the night slipped away, and dawn seeped into the world. We were tired, for we had not slept, but some of our fear dissolved with the dark and it was heartening to know that we had a full day of light ahead.
We came to a stream which Taliesin said he remembered from that night he had followed the neamh-mairbh, and we stopped to drink and perhaps to gather our courage around us again as a man pulls a fur tight before heading out into the cold.
‘You don’t have to go any further,’ Merlin told the boy, who stood on the eastern side of the shallow stream, looking westward and gnawing on a thumbnail.
‘Merlin’s right.’ Lord Cai mounted again and turned his horse. ‘I’ll leave a man here with you, boy. We’ll return here after.’
After what? I thought, but Taliesin shook his head, his dirt-streaked yet beautiful face gripped by a frown. ‘I will come, lord.’ He glanced at Iselle, who nodded reassuringly, holding the reins of Taliesin’s horse so he could remount, though the animal would have stood perfectly still for Taliesin. The boy knew even less of horses than Iselle, and yet he and the gelding already had an understanding of each other that would have seemed strange had the boy been any other child than Taliesin.
‘We may not be able to protect you,’ Cai warned, no doubt thinking, as was I, how small Taliesin looked sitting on that big gelding which had belonged to Fiacha.
‘The boy has survived here alone for a year,’ Gawain said, ‘yet we have lost three warriors in a night. Seems to me he might be better off without our protection. If he wants to come, let him.’
Cai scratched his beard and frowned, but Merlin nodded. ‘Taliesin is a leaf on this wind like the rest of us,’ he said. And so we all walked our mounts across that stream and onto a meadow slung with sheets of silken thread which glistened with dew in the morning mist. I could smell the sea now, hear its soft breathing, which grew louder as we passed a stand of stunted hazel and oak which the onshore wind had warped eastward. Cresting a shallow rise of coarse grass, we came to the coast and looked out across the fog-veiled Western Sea. Even through the sea haze we could make out the mountains in the north of Ireland, and I wondered what kind of wild place that was, as I filled my chest with unfettered air, revelling in the feel of the salt-laden gusts through my hair. It was the first time since leaving the farmstead that I could not smell blood.
‘There,’ Taliesin said, drawing my eyes away from the sea before they had drunk their fill. ‘I remember that.’ He was pointing north along the coast towards a rugged headland looming some three hundred feet or more above the water which thrashed itself white on the rocks. ‘A little further, that’s all,’ the boy said, so that I became aware of my heart thumping against the cage of my ribs. Soon we would fight again, unless we could somehow persuade the neamh-mairbh to give us the Cauldron of Annwn and let us be on our way. Unlikely, given the island’s reputation for swallowing whoever was foolish enough to come here.
And yet I took grim comfort in knowing that I was amongst a brotherhood of warriors who would stand shoulder to shoulder against any foe. I supposed I had known brotherhood before, on Ynys Wydryn, which seemed a lifetime ago now, but I had never been the equal of Father Brice or Father Dristan and the others. And though I was not the equal of these men either, I had fought beside them and that act bound us in a way. Still, that was but a slim and fragile bond set against the one that held me to Iselle. I knew I would give my life for her. I told myself as much, as the sun, low in the sky now, threw the shadows of men and horses across the gorse-smothered coastal path and we rode towards our fate.
We came to another headland, this spur of land jutting into the dawn-lit sea like a battlement, standing alone and unconquered by the shifting grey mass besieging it, whose legions hurled themselves to white ruin at its foot. White at its crown too, where flocks of seabirds whirled and dived, their disconsolate cries weaving a skein of sound. The landward slope was cloaked in trees hazed green with new leaves.
‘What now?’ Gawain asked, pulling the stopper from his flask and drinking as the others caught up and reined in alongside us. We had halted on a ridge overlooking a valley speckled with white sea campion and pink thrift. Above us, shreds of cloud drifted eastward in a brilliant blue sky that had been washed clean by the previous day’s rain.
‘The boy will tell us.’ Merlin twisted in his saddle to look at Taliesin, who was riding beside Iselle. Those two had become inseparable since the vale, and it was clear that Taliesin trusted Iselle more than any other of us. More even than Merlin, who was so taken with the boy.
‘You want me to put my men’s lives in the hands of a boy?’ Lord Cai growled.
‘It can be no worse than doing a druid’s bidding,’ Gawain said, pushing the stopper home and retying the flask to his saddle horn.
Merlin lifted his chin in Gawain’s direction, his stiff beard pointing at the warrior like a blade. ‘And still you searched for me all those years, Gawain,’ he said, ‘so that I am beginning to think you enjoy my company.’
Gawain did not dignify that with an answer but shared a knowing look with Parcefal, who knew all too well how Merlin’s whispers in the ears of kings and warlords had shaped Britain for better and worse.
‘You know this place, lad?’ Gawain asked Taliesin, who had walked his gelding to the edge of the ridge.
Taliesin nodded and it was enough to make hands grip spear shafts a little tighter.
‘See there,’ Iselle said, pointing down to the valley floor. ‘That dark line in the grass. Like a badger’s path.’
Parcefal shook his head in wonder. ‘You’ve good eyes, girl.’
‘So, where does it go?’ I asked. If that line of flattened grass was a path made by the neamh-mairbh, where did it lead? I had not expected us to come to a hill fort, a great settlement ringed with a palisade and belching smoke into the sky. Nor even a turf-walled settlement like those which were scattered across the kingdoms of Britain as t
hick as buttercups in a spring pasture. But I had expected a clutter of roundhouses. Maybe two or three such clutters within half a day’s ride of each other. But this well-used path seemingly led nowhere.
‘Well, lad?’ Cai turned eyes as grey as his gelding’s coat on Taliesin.
But Taliesin gave his answer to Iselle. ‘The night I followed them, they carried fire,’ he said, frowning with the memory. ‘I was down there. Close. Close enough to smell their stink.’ His eyes widened. ‘They vanished.’ He turned to Merlin. ‘Some concealment spell?’ he asked.
Merlin pursed his lips. ‘Perhaps. Though I don’t think the likes of those savages possess the knowledge for such a spell.’
‘Well, we are not going to find the cauldron by sitting here,’ Parcefal said, and so we tied our helmet straps and closed the cheek irons. We felt for sword grips to make sure they were within easy reach and we threw our cloaks back to keep them out of the way, then we rode down the hill, our horses snorting and nickering now because they could smell something that we could not. Seren was curling his top lip and blowing and I felt his whole body tighten beneath me and so I leant forward, telling him he was a good boy, a brave boy, and that we would look after each other no matter what happened.
‘Wherever they are, they know we’re here,’ Lord Cai warned, ‘so don’t be surprised if they come out of nowhere, screaming like banshees.’
‘And don’t kill them all,’ Merlin said. ‘We need at least one alive.’
Gawain glanced at me. ‘You just kill them, lad. We’ll worry about the cauldron after.’
I nodded, my palm slick on the smooth spear shaft, my blood quickening in my veins. Then we were on the path which Iselle had seen from the rise, riding two abreast, Cai and Gawain leading, and Gediens and Parcefal at the rear. Spear blades, helmets and scale armour catching the morning sun. Horse tack jangling and hooves scuffing the ground. For Cai was right, the neamh-mairbh knew we were there and so there was more to be gained from appearing undaunted and unafraid, riding into their land more like warlords come to demand taxes or oaths than warriors still reeling from the loss of three of their own. And when we came to a hump of ground which was thick with gorse and ground ivy shivering in the westerly breeze, Merlin raised his staff, bringing us to a halt.
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