‘Comfort awaits you all,’ the king announced, breaking the spell that had bound me for a moment. Around us, the others were dismounting, stretching aching muscles, chasing the numbness from legs and backsides, as stewards and grooms came to lead their horses to stable. ‘Tomorrow you will tell us how you retrieved the cauldron,’ the king said. ‘We will give the names of the fallen to the gods,’ he added, loud enough for the grieving to hear, ‘and we will raise our cups to honour them.’
I threw my leg over Seren’s back and slid to the ground, my armour, cloak and helmet pulling me down as if through deep water, down and down to the depths. I had never been so tired and could have fallen asleep on my feet had my legs the strength to hold me upright.
A boy took Seren’s reins and I started, for a heartbeat wanting to snatch the reins back, to not be separated from the gelding. But I knew that he and the other horses would be fed and brushed and guarded well and so I told Seren I would see him soon enough and then I walked towards the hall, following Gawain, Parcefal and Lord Cai, who went in after Merlin and the cauldron.
‘So, boy, who are you?’ I heard the Fisher King say.
‘Taliesin, lord king,’ the boy replied.
‘I am pleased to meet you, Taliesin,’ my grandfather said, and Taliesin must have been sure enough to let go of Iselle’s hand, because she was beside me now. I could smell her sweat on the air, sweet and earthy, and I breathed of it deeply as we walked together towards the king’s hall, the crow-shields among the crowd watching us as we went.
Beech and birch, alder and oak. The deep woods falling from the hillside down into a valley, a flowing current of tremulous, wind-stirred leaves which I follow, my wings supple, my heart beating in my breast, the wind coursing through my feathers. Then down to the pocket of air which hugs the land and in which the sparhawk can be what she was born to be. Elusive like a ghost. Here, and then gone. A killer.
Skimming dog-rose and bramble, mossy tree stump and bracken, fast and low now like a scythe. Then up to the outstretched arm and the leather glove which is rich with the boy’s scent and the scent of blood.
This boy, this loyal Lancelot, is the only one she trusts. He has fed her and protected her, and his fierce eye is a comfort. She hates all others. But she tolerates the boy. And now, in this wet, grey dawn, she would kill for him.
Half hidden behind a stunted trunk, we wait, making no sound. I feel the hawk’s body drawn tight like a knot, her sinews clenched in readiness, and I feel, even through the leather glove, the boy is just as tense, just as eager.
There, the rock dove. The boy has seen it too; I feel the spate of the blood in his arm, though he has not made any movement. Then, we ghost off the glove, quick and low against the ground, and up, and I feel the dove’s terror as the talons pierce her flesh. Feel her life flee like a breath, and then we bank round and drop the torn and bloody body at the boy’s feet.
I could unbraid my soul from the hawk’s and fly. But I like being close to the boy and so I stay awhile and watch him. I feed from his hand and let him stroke my wing and neck, and when he leaves me tethered to the perch, I watch for his return, wanting to punish him for going.
Then the door opens, and thin light floods the darkness, hurting my eye, but I know by the scent that it is not him, but another boy. And I feel the hate on this one. I tell myself to go, to sever my bond with this creature and find another soul to cling to.
Go now!
But I stay. I watch this boy come close and I feel the hawk’s fear. It wells up in her racing heart and spreads to her outstretched wings, and she shrieks, warning this stranger to stay away, threatening him, yet he comes closer still, and we bate, wings attacking the empty air, and this gives the boy pause, for he must see the fury in our eye. But his hatred is stronger than his fear, and he snatches up a fire iron from beside the hearth.
Go! Leave this creature!
He lifts his arm and I know I should be away, should send my spirit soaring, but I don’t, and the fire iron comes down, striking my wing, and the pain is like nothing I’ve ever known.
Fly!
The hawk shrieks and tries to bate, and the boy takes a hold of the leash and winds it around our broken right wing, once, twice, and we fight, stabbing at him, drawing blood on his arm, then he backhands us off the perch and the leash pulls taut and now we are spinning around and around, and screaming in pain and rage and fear.
I had never been more tired, yet sleep would not come. I lay looking up at the bird-dung-spattered roof beams and the drifting spider silk and the underthatch upon which flamelight played as fitful as my mind. Some of the men had fallen into sleep the very moment their heads fell upon the furs or the cloaks which they had rolled up to use as pillows. Their snores made a ragged, discordant chorus, at times coalescing, then breaking apart again, like surf in the suck and plunge of shoreline rocks. Others talked in low voices, a soft and ceaseless drone, and a few, who like me could find no sleep, sat drinking their way to numbness. And in the middle of us all, silent and yet alive in the firelight, pulsing like a fevered heart, sat the Cauldron of Annwn. An ancient and empty vessel, and yet not empty at all but brimming with ghosts, boiling with the whispers of the dead who would not let me sleep.
I rolled over and saw the whites of Iselle’s eyes. On her far side, Taliesin was sound asleep, his face so serene, so beautiful, it seemed impossible that he had seen such terrible things in his short life.
‘There is no other way,’ Iselle whispered.
I nodded. We held each other with our eyes a long time, and then, silently, we rose and made our way to where Gawain sat in the shadows beyond the hearth light’s reach. We crouched by him, and he looked from Iselle to me and put a finger to his lips before glancing over to where Lord Cai lay amongst his bed skins, perhaps sleeping, perhaps not. Looking back to me, Gawain nodded that I should speak, and in that moment, I knew that I did not really need to say anything.
‘You know what must be done,’ I said in a voice barely louder than a whisper.
‘I do,’ he said.
‘You gave your word …’ I said, meaning his pledge, demanded by King Pelles, that he would spill no blood.
‘I don’t value my honour as once I did,’ he said, too tired even to lie to himself. ‘But we can’t ask Cai.’
That was a blow, yet I understood it. Cai had already given much and lost much, and Gawain would not now ask his friend to disobey his sworn lord or, worse, to bring shame upon him by desecrating the hospitality which the king had extended to his guests from Camelot.
‘And you?’ Gawain asked me. ‘You are his blood.’
I recalled how the king had looked at me out in the yard. He had seen something in me which had not been there when first we met. I knew he had seen it because I had felt it in me. Like a welling up of dark water, or like a dream whose malevolence clings to you long after the dream itself is forgotten.
‘What choice do we have?’ I asked. I did not know my grandfather beyond the one night we had spent talking of my mother. And yet it was because we both shared her that I dreaded the disappointment which I would see in the old man’s pale eyes after it was done. When he would no longer see his daughter in me. Only my father.
But I had seen the way the Princes Melehan and Ambrosius looked at us when we rode in through the gates with the cauldron. There was every chance that they would attack us this very night, that they were already gathering out there in the dark with steel and fire. But they need not go to that trouble, nor go to war with King Pelles. All they need do was leave at dawn as promised and wait for us in the forests or hills of Gwynedd or Powys. They knew that we meant to take the cauldron south, back to Dumnonia, or Cornubia perhaps, though they cannot have known what we wanted with it. They would try to keep Merlin alive, but they would slaughter the rest of us and carry the treasure back to Morgana, who had always put store by the gods and would use the cauldron’s power for her own ends.
All this was as certain as the dawn
, and so we must kill in the night.
Iselle hushed us, looking back round towards the fire. There were eyes glowing softly in the dimness. Eyes reflecting the flames which flapped in the hearth, lazy as a pennant in a gentle breeze. Parcefal and Gediens were watching us. So was Cadwy, his scarred face leering and savage-looking in the half-light. And Merlin, who just moments before had looked to be asleep, was now sitting cross-legged beside the cauldron, one hand upon it, fingers tracing the figures and shapes which had been hammered into the metal so very long ago yet which could barely be discerned now beneath the sooty crust. But his eyes were on us. Perhaps, like us, these others could find no sleep and had watched us cross the firelight to Gawain, curious to know what we were talking about.
Then another figure crouched down in the shadow beside us, pulling his long moustaches through a fist of knuckles gnarled as old tree roots.
‘So,’ Lord Cai said, his eyes flicking from Gawain to Iselle to me. ‘How do we do it?’
We were ghosts. Spirit walkers stalking through a night haunted by bat and fox, badger and polecat and, now and then, the blood-stilling shriek of an owl in the woods to the west of the Fisher King’s hall. A night haunted by us, too, for we had made ourselves a part of it, rubbing dirt onto the backs of our hands and besmirching our faces and necks. Throwing dark cloaks around ourselves to prevent starlight and the last cold light of the waning moon from catching in the bronze scales or iron rings of our armour, or on sword hilts. We wore no helmets, having stashed them in sacks tied to our saddles, and those with horses whose coats were white, or partly white, had laid dark animal skins upon them, or smeared the white patches with mud.
I recalled that night when I had stolen out of the monastery of Ynys Wydryn and taken a coracle into the marsh, afraid of the thrys, those creatures who dwelt among the sedges and in the secret fears of men. And I thought that we seven who had left by the north gate and rode now, round-shouldered, heads slung low, silent as the dead, were more like the thrys than men.
We rode north across ancient earthworks or burial mounds which humped the ground like the arched backs of sleeping dragons, using the fort behind us to shield us from the sight of those camped outside the main southern gate. Then we turned and rode eastward onto grazing meadow, following an old track which wound up towards a rocky ridge upon which a copse stood dark and forbidding against the night sky, like the palisade of some other fortress.
I rode at the rear of our little column, now and then twisting in the saddle to peer into the night, my ears alert for any sound not of our own making. And we made hardly a sound, just the occasional scuff of hooves or a horse’s snorting breath, or the soft clink of one chewing its bit, for they were nervous too, of our blackened faces and of being out in the dark and because they could sense our unease.
In front of me rode Merlin and in front of him the Cauldron of Annwn swung gently beneath the two spears which were lashed to the saddle horns of Gediens and Parcefal’s horses. Iselle led us, a cloaked and cowled figure, her strung bow lying across the saddle horns in front of her, just as my own spear lay in front of me, its blade looking forge-black because I had smeared it with molten tallow and thrust it in the hearth ashes.
No one spoke as we walked our mounts up towards that copse, but perhaps I was not alone in beginning to think that we had escaped unnoticed, that we had succeeded beyond what we had thought possible in merging with the night itself, in making ourselves as invisible as the dead who pass through the veil on Samhain.
I was thinking this even as Seren’s ears swivelled and twitched and I felt him quiver beneath me, for he had heard them before any of us. But then I saw them. We all did. Men on the higher ground to the south-east, lit by the moon, hurrying up towards the same ridge line. Iron helmets and round shields. Spear blades pointing at the sky. Men of Dumnonia. Men who should have been fighting alongside Lord Constantine or guarding Camelot’s earthen defences against King Cerdic’s Saxons. But these Britons served the sons of Mordred and so they were our enemies.
‘We keep going,’ Gawain growled.
The crow-shields were on foot, but even so we could not hope to outrun them, not with the cauldron suspended between Parcefal and Gediens, and their horses joined by two seven-foot lengths of ash. So, we rode on as if we had not seen them loping like wolves through the tall grass, and I felt the battle thrill awaken in my flesh. Felt the quickening of my heart and my blood flooding in spate to the muscles in my thighs and through my arms to the hands gripping rein and spear.
‘Keep going,’ Gawain said again.
Melehan and Ambrosius had known that we must try to escape that night or else be slaughtered in the Gwynedd hills far from the Fisher King’s protection, and so their men had stood watch in the dark, waiting for us to fly the roost. And when they had seen us, they must have thought us fools for supposing we could make ourselves as invisible as the pine marten and slip away with our lives and the ancient treasure of Britain. I imagined the grins on the brothers’ faces as they hurried up the drover’s path beyond the spine of land to our right, eager to gain the high ground and put cold dread in our hearts when they revealed themselves to us. As they did now, striding up onto the crest of the ridge to the right of the trees, so that they showed against the skyline.
Iselle lifted a hand and pulled back on the reins and we all did the same, halting at once, as if we had seen the crow-shields for the first time. One of the horses whinnied and Gawain’s mare shied, jumping sideways so that he fought to wheel her back around, though I suspected he had feigned the whole thing.
‘We want the cauldron,’ Melehan or Ambrosius – it was impossible to know which – called down.
‘And we want the druid,’ the other brother yelled.
They knew we had come too far to turn around and ride back to the safety of the fort, but they must also have known we would never give them the cauldron. Nor Merlin either.
‘Come and take them,’ Gawain shouted, and he dismounted, which was his way of showing that we did not intend to run. It was his invitation to Mordred’s sons to walk down the hill and slaughter us, to finish the bloody work which their father had begun that day ten years ago when he had turned on Arthur and betrayed Britain. When so many brave warriors had fallen beneath Saxon and Dumnonian blades, and my father, too, had fallen.
Parcefal and Gediens, who could not have fought on horseback anyway with the cauldron slung between them, dismounted then, and so Iselle and I climbed down, she taking the bow from her saddle while I took my helmet from the sack tied to the saddle horn and ran my fingers through the white horsehair plume before putting it on.
‘Stay close,’ I told Iselle, throwing off my cloak and unslinging the shield from my back.
She gave me a wicked grin. ‘Don’t get in the way of my arrows,’ she said, taking a white-fletched shaft from her bag and nocking it to the bow string.
‘Shields.’ Gawain pushed his helmet down and closed the cheek pieces. Gediens and Parcefal stepped up beside him, their own helmets glowing dully against their dirt-smeared faces, and I put myself on the right of the line, half expecting Gawain to tell me to get in the middle, for being on the right is the most dangerous place to stand because you have no neighbour’s shield to protect your right side. But neither Gawain nor any of the others said anything and I took that as a sign of respect and my heart thumped, wild and urgent, and my ears were full of my own pulsing blood.
‘Here they come,’ Gediens said as the brothers brought their spearmen down the southward-facing slope of the ridge.
For now, Iselle stood in front of us all, an arrow on the bow string and two more stuck in the ground by her right foot. I hoped she would not take any chances but get behind us before our enemies were close enough to throw their spears.
Merlin stood to our rear with Taliesin, the horses and the cauldron. I could hear him murmuring some incantation and I wondered if the crow-shields felt any doubt at all, any creeping fear as they strode down the slope towar
ds us, knowing that we had a druid with us, for all that we made the most pitiful shieldwall they had likely ever faced.
Iselle loosed and I saw the white fletchings streak towards our enemies and heard the thunk as the shaft embedded in a shield. I looked over my shoulder, back down towards the distant fort, which was shrouded in darkness, though a pall of hearth-fire smoke showed as a lighter brown against the charcoal sky.
‘Is that all of them?’ Parcefal was leaning forward as if that would help his old eyes see the crow-shields better.
‘It’s enough,’ Gediens said, as another arrow flew from Iselle’s bow, disappearing somewhere out there among the warriors whose shield bosses and helmets now and then caught some little moonlight and vanished again in the dark. There were at least forty men trudging down the slope towards us, which meant that Melehan and Ambrosius had probably brought their whole force up from their camp outside the southern wall of King Pelles’s fort. Which was what we had hoped they would do.
‘Iselle!’ I called, because our enemies were close enough now that I could see the soft white glow of their faces and the sheen of belt buckles, knife hilts and those domed shield bosses of polished iron.
As Iselle pulled another arrow from her bag, a spear buried itself in the earth just three feet in front of her. Yet she did not flinch but nocked the arrow, drew and loosed, and I did not see that arrow fly but I heard the man it struck scream in the night and saw him fall, clutching his face.
‘Iselle!’ I called again and another spear appeared in the ground beside her as if it had suddenly sprouted from the soil. She drew once more and this next arrow tonked off a man’s helmet and then she turned and strode back to our position, fitting another swan-feathered shaft to her bow as she walked.
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