‘It was no concealment spell, Taliesin,’ he said, a grin stretching his lips beneath the long forks of his beeswax- and tallow-stiffened moustaches. Pleased to confirm that the neamh-mairbh had no magic.
‘Where are they, then?’ Gawain asked him. We were all looking this way and that, wondering what the druid had seen which we had missed.
‘They are in the earth, Gawain.’ Merlin struck the ground with his staff. ‘Beneath us now.’
‘Waiting for us,’ Cadwy said, looking down at his feet, his face all beard, scar and grimace.
Iselle and I shared a look of horror. Gawain growled a curse and Lord Cai invoked Balor, god of death.
Because the neamh-mairbh lived in the ground. And we would have to crawl into the earth to find them.
We found the entrance on the east side of the hummock. A gaping mouth lined with broken teeth of rock, many of them scarred with ancient tool marks. Standing before it, I felt warm air on my face, stale as old breath. The greasy, dirty scent of burning fat and something metallic which I tasted on my tongue.
‘It is a portal to Annwn’s realm,’ Sadoc said, spitting at the thought of that.
Gediens clapped him on his shoulder and grinned. ‘Then what are we waiting for?’ he asked, pointing his spear at the opening. ‘We have many old friends there who I would like to drink with again.’
Cai had his men collect green wood to make torches, wrapping the staves in strips cut from his own cloak, which was new, the wool still rich in sheeps’ oil. Then he and Gawain looked at each other, knowing it was time to decide who would go into the mouth of that cave and who would stand guard outside.
‘Five to stay with the boy and the horses,’ Lord Cai said. No one raised a hand. ‘There’s nothing to say staying out here will be any safer,’ he said, knowing that no one wanted to appear afraid of crawling into the darkness. Still, not one man volunteered to wait outside.
‘The oldest should wait here,’ Gawain said, ‘apart from Merlin, who needs to go within because he will know the cauldron, and me because it’s my job to keep Merlin alive.’
‘Don’t think you’re leaving me up here,’ Parcefal said, knowing that now Guidan was dead, he was the oldest among us but for Merlin.
‘Your eyes are not what they were, brother,’ Gawain told him. ‘You’ll be little use to us down there in the dark.’ Parcefal muttered something about his eyes being as good as anyone’s, yet he accepted Gawain’s decision.
‘I have hunted in the dark for years,’ Iselle said. ‘I’m coming.’
All agreed that Iselle had the eyes of a hawk and should go into the cave, but Taliesin grabbed hold of her hand and begged her not to leave him, saying that if she went, he would go too.
‘No, boy.’ Gawain shook his head. ‘You stay here.’
‘I’ll look after him.’ I saw Iselle squeeze Taliesin’s hand.
‘No,’ Gawain said again.
‘Merlin?’ Iselle turned to the druid, who seemed not to hear her, his face turned away from us, watching a blackcap on a nearby tree stump. The bird’s chattering ended in a flourish of flute-like notes to which Merlin listened as though it were a language he alone understood.
‘The boy should come,’ he said. ‘It is what the gods wish.’
Anger passed across Gawain’s scarred face like a storm cloud and he swore under his breath, but he was not about to argue with a druid where the will of the gods was concerned.
‘Medyr, Tarawg, Nabon, Cadwy, you stay here with Parcefal,’ Lord Cai said. ‘Sound the horn if you need us. Protect the horses no matter what.’
‘Swords and shields,’ Gawain ordered, turning the spear in his grip and thrusting it into the ground. ‘There’ll be no room for spears in there.’
And so we gathered before that gaping mouth which led into the earth, as Merlin invoked the gods with secret whispers and Cai handed a burning brand to Gawain and another to Sadoc.
Ten of us went into that cave. Gawain first, then Gediens, then me. Behind me were Iselle, Taliesin, Merlin and Oswine, and behind them, Cai, Myr and Sadoc.
Just inside the mouth were three tunnels, one leading straight ahead, one branching to the left and another to the right. The one straight ahead was the largest and so Gawain crouched and took that one, his arm stretched before him, the torch hissing in the confined space and throwing fitful shadows across the rock. I was reminded of when we had crawled through the tor, only this tunnel was wider, and I felt less as if I was descending through a burial mound into some pitch-black afterlife. Even so, I was afraid, the hairs standing on my arms and neck, and every instinct screaming at me to turn around and go back.
Looking up, I saw bats snugged in clefts, their little bodies quivering, and I felt my own flesh quivering too, and serpents writhing in my belly, tumbling over each other, knotting and unknotting themselves. Smoke from the burning torches stung my eyes, making them stream. The acrid stench clawed at my throat, and yet I was still aware of another reek too in the airless tunnel. The fetor of dung and blood. And death.
Iselle touched my shoulder and pointed at the rock walls around us, her brows knitted with the unspoken question. For the rock was green in the torchlight. Streaks of green in some places, as though someone had brought seaweed up from the strand and pasted it across the rock. While elsewhere, great swathes of the rock itself were green. I remembered the green-tinged skin of the dead neamh-mairbh back in the vale.
After no more than one hundred feet the tunnel opened into a chamber where we could stand fully and draw together, back to back, shields facing the darkness beyond the blooms of light thrown by the torches. The air was stagnant here, reeking of blood, and Gawain lifted his torch towards an alcove in the far corner, where something white glowed. He hissed at me and the two of us went to see what it was.
Bones. A midden of rib bones, long leg bones, arm bones and leering skulls. Some animal but most of them human. Gawain held the torch closer to this heap, close enough that we both saw the cut marks in one of the leg bones. Some of the other bones bore similar signs of butchery and many of the larger ones had been crushed as if to get to the marrow within.
Bile had risen in my throat. I could taste it. I swallowed several times and saw the disgust in Gawain’s fire-washed face and we went back to the others, who had not moved from where they huddled beneath that strange green rock ceiling, peering over shield rims, round eyes reflecting flame. My eyes met Iselle’s and I hoped she could not see my fear.
‘There,’ Merlin whispered, his voice seeming to come not from him but from the darkness around us. He was pointing his staff towards another tunnel, on the opposite side of the chamber from that midden of human bones. Gawain nodded and led the way, and I thought the others must surely be able to hear my heart thumping as fast as the firebrands were burning. Sweat was coursing down my back between my shoulder blades. I felt beads of it bursting from my scalp and trickling out from under my helmet, clinging to my long hair until they dripped onto the worn, scree-covered ground. None of us wanted to go into that tunnel, and yet we knew we had no choice.
We had to stoop as we walked, the green rock walls pressing in on either side, so that there was only a hand’s breadth between our shield rims and the walls. I had the sickening feeling that the passage would get narrower and narrower and that I would not be able even to turn around and go back out. My chest had drawn tight and I struggled to find a breath. I’ll suffocate, I thought.
‘Least the bastards can’t surround us in here,’ one of the men behind me said, which got a hiss from Lord Cai, who had told us to move as quietly as possible.
Then there was a grunt and a scuffling sound, and I looked over my shoulder to see a flurry of flame and movement.
‘Sadoc!’ a man yelled, his voice reverberating off the solid rock. ‘Sadoc!’
‘What is it?’ Gawain shouted, caring nothing for the noise now.
Those behind me were cast into darkness. Sadoc’s fire was out and the light from Gawain’s tor
ch did not reach those beyond Iselle and Taliesin.
‘He’s gone!’ Lord Cai said.
‘What do you mean, gone?’ Gawain asked. There was fear in his voice, and it turned my bowels to liquid to hear it.
‘Gone. They took him.’ The warrior who had called out, Myr, was facing back the way we had come but turned to speak over his shoulder. I could hear the dismay in his voice. ‘He was right behind me, close enough for his torch to singe my neck hairs.’
Lord Cai trotted back down the tunnel and was swallowed in the darkness. ‘Sadoc! Answer me, man!’ he called. But there was no reply.
‘You saw nothing?’ Gawain asked Myr.
‘Nothing,’ Myr said.
Then Lord Cai reappeared in the light-bloom from Gawain’s brand. He looked at Gawain and shook his head. Gawain growled a curse and Lord Cai took up the rear behind Myr.
‘We keep going,’ Merlin said.
So we did, and the tunnel opened into another chamber. Bigger than the first, perhaps the size of four roundhouses together. Gawain moved his torch this way and that, the fire breathing louder with each swing of his arm, the flames chasing the dark away for only a heartbeat before the blackness flooded in again. But by the flying tail of that flame we caught glimpses of things which told us that this was the neamh-mairbh’s lair. Animal skins on the ground. Crudely made wooden stools. Iron pots, beakers and trenchers. Furs and old saddle cloths and, standing against a wall, old battered shields, slung with cobwebs, their devices long faded. There were more bones and several spears, and a barrel by the wall which was half full of rain water, which seeped through somewhere above so that we could hear it dripping in the dark. And as we ventured further in, Gawain’s torch showed us something else too. Something which stilled the fire in his hand and the breath in our throats. He held the torch steady, the flame seething, guttering now as it ate through the last of the cloth binding. Enough light, though, that we all could see the stone-ringed fire pit and what sat within it. As if waiting for us.
The Cauldron of Anwnn did not look much like a treasure. Sitting on four piles of flat stones, so that a fire could be kindled beneath, it was black, encrusted with soot and filth and whatever food had been cooked in it and had spilled over. And with a sudden heart-stopping horror, I knew what that food was. It was in the air, metallic and sickly. A raw odour cut with the lingering scent of a fear not entirely our own. But it was Cai who confirmed it, some foreknowledge compelling him to hasten to the cauldron and peer inside while the rest of us approached, half watching the darkness beyond the withering bloom of Gawain’s dying torch.
‘Gadran,’ he said, his voice gruff, the word hanging in the dark.
‘We have it.’ Merlin was crouching, spitting on his fingers and trying to rub off some of the grime to reveal the metalwork beneath. Already he had uncovered a patch of silver. A serpent, coming alive under Merlin’s touch, seeming by the flickering flame to move again after a slumber of lifetimes. ‘We have it, Gawain,’ Merlin said again. And we did. We had within our grasp one of the ancient treasures of Britain. The very cauldron which had been saved from the slaughter amongst the sacred groves of Ynys Môn. A prize which was said to have the power to restore life to the dead. And yet, in that moment it paled against the truth of what had become of Gadran, whom we had believed dead but for whom we had yet carried hope.
‘I will return to this island and kill them all,’ Cai said.
Gadran had been disembowelled and dismembered. His pale limbs thrown in on top of his torso and lastly his head, his beard and hair having been burned off to leave a mess of charred tufts and blistered skin. His eyes were closed. A small mercy, though it was impossible not to imagine the horror in them if he had still been living when the neamh-mairbh brought him into that place. The revulsion I had felt previously, that sickening disgust which had brought bile to my mouth, ebbed now. Or perhaps it was drowned by something else. A welling anger which rose hot in my chest and in my limbs, and ran like scalding water through my veins, consuming me. Here before me was death and horror. And yet I wanted to kill. More than wanted to. I needed to.
‘Let’s get it out of here,’ Gawain said.
‘Should empty it first,’ Gediens said.
Cai nodded at Myr to help him, and the two of them took hold of the cauldron’s rim to tip it.
That was when they came.
I did not see where they came from, only that a moment before, the darkness around us had been empty, but now it was glutted with bodies.
‘Shields!’ Cai bellowed.
‘Around the cauldron,’ Gawain yelled, and we moved fast, surrounding that treasure of Britain, our shields close together facing the shadow all around. ‘Stay tight,’ Gawain said, and then they struck. A shrieking fiend hit my shield, but I had braced myself to take the impact and I thrust Boar’s Tusk around the shield into flesh. The neamh-mairbh grunted and fell away, but another one had two hands on my shield’s rim, trying to pull it from me. I let him haul the shield away from my body, then punched Boar’s Tusk forward, taking him in the neck, and twisting the blade as I hauled it back, covering my body with the shield again. Iselle beside me, the Saxon sword in her right hand, the long knife in her left, hacked into a white thigh, then slashed a face. Her enemy dropped, clutching its ruin and screaming.
‘Kill them, Galahad,’ Merlin rasped behind me, gripping his staff across his body, guarding the cauldron and Taliesin both, while Oswine fought in the circle with the rest of us.
A rock struck my helmet with a metallic clang. Another hit the helmet’s right cheek guard and would have otherwise broken my jaw. Instead, it fed my rage. I rammed Boar’s Tusk into a man’s side and felt the rush of hot blood on my hand and the scrape of the blade against ribs as I pulled it free. I lopped off a hand, which fell at my foot, and I scythed into the neck of a neamh-mairbh who had knocked Iselle down and had raised his spear to thrust it at her. Standing above Iselle so that she could get to her feet, I saw Myr take a spear in his throat and go down. On the other side of the cauldron, Gediens was on his knees, grasping at his neck while Cai shielded him, holding the neamh-mairbh at bay, his sword flashing in the fitful, dying flamelight.
‘Galahad!’ Merlin called, and I turned and saw him swinging his staff, fending off a wild, white-haired creature who had broken through the ring. But I could not leave Iselle, who was on her feet again now, crouching, blades raised as the chaos swirled around her.
Then Oswine was there and he buried his axe in the man’s back, but even as he did so, two more of the devils were on him, stabbing him over and over. He fell to his knees and Merlin screeched and his staff struck a head, and all was movement and flame and shadow and screams and the ringing and scraping of blades.
And then Gawain’s torch guttered and died. He hurled the brand and there was a last flicker of flame and a trail of smoke, and then nothing but utter darkness. The neamh-mairbh fell back into the shadows, hissing. Like us they were lost for a moment, blind in the murk between light and dark. I lifted my shield, heaving for breath, knowing that in another few heartbeats they would come again.
And then Taliesin started to sing.
I had never heard a voice like it. Clear as water in a mountain stream. Sweet as the flowers of the woodbine, which children suck for their nectar, yet strong enough to bind us in the dark, as honeysuckle stems will twine into the branches of trees. It swirled around that chamber, seeming to come from everywhere at once: a single voice, yet many. Like a chorus of echoes from the past, trapped but seeking to escape. He sang of the forest and the ocean, of a horned god and a ram-horned snake, and a silver torc which shone as brightly as the moon.
I did not know the song, but I would not have been surprised had that melody risen to crow and raven long before Rome’s eagles came to Britain. And there was magic in it. I stood sweat-drenched and breathing hard, peering into the gloom over my shield’s rim, just able to discern the neamh-mairbh by their lime-plastered hair and the soft glow of their eyes.
For some reason they waited. Perhaps they feared our blades. Perhaps they knew there were enough dead in that chamber to feast upon for many days. But I believed it was Taliesin who held them at bay, his song having awoken in them some shared memory, recalling some story within which their people had once walked, lived, worshipped, mourned. The warp and weft of a cloth which once clothed them.
It was a spell, perhaps as powerful as any that a druid ever wove, and I felt it holding Iselle beside me, too. She was still as death, and I knew that some part of her was lost in the song.
‘We leave now,’ Gawain rasped.
‘Not without the cauldron,’ Merlin hissed.
I sheathed Boar’s Tusk, slung my shield across my back and helped Cai and Gawain to tip the cauldron, spilling Gadran across ashes and hearth stones. ‘I’ll carry it,’ I said, squatting to wrap my arms around the cauldron’s belly. Gods, it was heavy! But I was strong and the neamh-mairbh would have to cut me down to stop me carrying that treasure of Britain out into the light.
‘We move and we keep going and we get this thing out of here,’ Gawain said, his teeth showing in the soft green glow of the cave’s walls. Taliesin was singing still, his voice entangling the neamh-mairbh and rooting them in place, and it struck me that this was how the boy had survived alone on the island. That perhaps these folk who dwelt in the dark feared him. Or revered him. This young boy in whose pure voice a deeper, ancient power moved. As though his song was the first song, given by a god to men. That they might name the trees and the moon, the sun and the stars, and pass the knowledge of these wonders to their children.
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