Lord Cai and his men saw much but said little, though it was clear that they were shocked to learn that Saxon war bands were pushing so far along the Tamesis valley. Some of them even dismounted to share their cheese and bread and ale with these dispossessed folk and it seemed to me that Arthur’s horse warriors blamed themselves for not having been here to fight on in the years after the great battle. And yet how could men hope to prevent the shadows lengthening as summer gives way to autumn? Or the leaves falling from the trees?
When we came to the south of Caer Gloui we stayed by the coast, keeping as far from Camelot as was possible, for we knew that Melehan would have sent word of us and the cauldron to Lady Morgana and she would have spearmen out looking for us.
With provisions running low, we bought food where we could, and we hunted and foraged too and found that Taliesin was almost as knowledgeable as Merlin when it came to which plants, herbs and berries could be safely added to our broths. The boy even had us pulling up clumps of hellebore from shady spots beneath trees. These he dried over our camp fires before cutting up the flowers and giving some to each of us to distribute about our person. For this was a charm which would make us invisible to our enemies, Taliesin said, and when some of the men had looked to Merlin, seeking confirmation of this, Merlin grinned and asked them why in the name of the gods would they doubt the word of a boy who had survived alone for a year on an island of man-eating cave dwellers.
Fourteen days after leaving Ynys Môn we were back amongst heath, fen and marsh, where the harrier, the bittern and the great white egret ruled and the air was thick with insects and the reed-beds teemed with resonant life. We left Lord Cai and his men in oak woodland to the north-west of Ynys Wydryn, whose tor we could see wreathed in morning mist as night fled into the west, and Gediens, Parcefal, Gawain, Iselle, Taliesin, Merlin and I went on together. We took only two of the horses, which we needed to carry the cauldron, and left the others with Cai, for it was better not to risk taking them deeper into the marsh. And we pushed on past stands of elders and coppiced boles of sycamore and hazel which had not been tended for years and so now stood in groves forty feet high, the tall, straight poles shivering as we moved among them and Taliesin peering up at them with innocent wonder. Then, with the heat of the day waning and dusk not far away, we came sweat-drenched and tired to the high wall of dense reeds which surrounded Lord Arthur’s steading like a golden palisade. And I realized that I was shivering like those coppiced boles, because we were returning to Arthur and Guinevere and we had the Treasure of Anwnn and we carried the hopes of so many.
It was as if we had never been away. The little steading was unchanged, Guinevere still sat in her chair in the half-dark of the roundhouse, and Arthur seemed a desolate soul still, a man haunted by demons. A man trapped between the past and a future that never was. And yet, though he regarded the Cauldron of Anwnn with suspicion verging on contempt, I saw some small flicker of fire in his blue eyes when Gawain told him that Cai and the last of his horse warrior companions had returned and were waiting nearby.
‘The Fisher King let them go?’ Arthur asked, his brow furrowed as he watched the sun, as round and orange-red as an egg yolk, slipping behind the reed wall to the west.
‘Pelles is an old man,’ Gawain said. ‘He has no need of Cai now, but I don’t think he would have stopped them leaving anyway. They would rather fight and die for you than die in their beds on Ynys Môn.’
Arthur said nothing to that, though I saw tears in his eyes as he watched the slow, ghostly flight of a nightjar as it trawled for moths above the reed-beds.
‘I will try tomorrow, Arthur,’ Merlin said. Then he, Iselle and Taliesin set about cleaning the cauldron, first by softening the sooty crust with hot water, then by rubbing at the dirt with cloths dipped in tallow.
‘I daresay the king was happy to meet his grandson after all these years.’ Arthur turned to me, trying to smile but failing.
‘I think I reminded him of my father,’ I replied, regretting the words because of course I had reminded Arthur of my father too, and that must have been to him like a knife in the old wound.
He nodded. ‘Lancelot is in you, Galahad, just as Uther is in me and Constantine was in Uther.’ He lifted an eyebrow and brought it down heavily. ‘And I was in Mordred,’ he added. There was a gruffness in his voice which could not hide the tone of regret. He turned away from me, back to the west, but the sun had slipped out of sight now and the air turned chill. ‘Nothing we can do about that. They are in us. In our blood and marrow. In our heads, too,’ he added, tapping two fingers against his temple, ‘but we are not them. Our triumphs are our own to make. Our mistakes also. We may love, hope, hate, kill … regret.’ He sighed. ‘We don’t need our fathers for any of that.’
He turned to me once more, and his face looked so gaunt now: dark pools beneath his eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks, as though the shadow that fell in the absence of the sun had sought out Arthur and clung to him and claimed him for its own. ‘I loved your father,’ he said. ‘And I hated him.’ He bit his lip and made a guttural sound deep in his throat. ‘No, not hate. But I envied him. And there was a time when I wanted him dead. And yet, when I needed him one last time, he came.’ He was not seeing me now but the past. Or one day in the past. The same day which I had lived a thousand times since, imagining a different ending. ‘Lancelot changed the tide of that fight. He rode down to us and when my men saw him, when we all saw him, we felt hope again. I cannot believe but that the gods rode with him that day, for he fought like a god. But he died like a man. He died as my friend. As my brother.’
I tried to swallow. I clenched my teeth together and I believed this man, that he had loved my father. And perhaps for the first time I understood why my father had ridden down that hill and into that red carnage. Why he had ridden away from me.
‘You are not him,’ Arthur said. ‘But in some ways, Galahad, you might hope to be like him.’
I thought about that, looking back towards the sun which was no longer there, before I answered. ‘I will be honoured to fight for you as he did, lord.’
Arthur’s lips pressed into a tight smile. ‘I am not the one you will be fighting for,’ he replied.
I would have asked him what he meant by that, but Taliesin called to us, excited to show us what he and Iselle and Merlin had uncovered.
The Cauldron of Anwnn had been black and begrimed, so that Merlin had even been forced to use his eating knife to dig away the thick crust which had grown upon it over years of sacrilegious misuse and desecration. But underneath that layer of soot and grease the cauldron told another story, a tale of Britain and her gods and her heroes.
‘It’s silver,’ Iselle told us, though we could see that for ourselves, even though only half of the surface had been uncovered. The cauldron had been made by fitting many silver plates together, the plates soldered in place with molten tin and strengthened with a hoop of iron around the rim. And those silver plates seemed alive now in the dusk as the light seeped from the world, each one decorated with figures: animal, human and divine, all of which stood proud of the metal, as if emerging from the silver itself, such was the skill of that master craftsman who had long ago hammered the plates from the inside to create the figures in relief on the outer surface.
I recognized the horse goddess Rhiannon riding the fleetest of steeds, and I saw creatures for whom I had no names, but which were horned and clawed and savage-looking. There were warriors holding swords aloft and sacred bulls and some god or hero riding in a chariot whose wheels resembled fiery suns. Each plate bore a different scene, stories perhaps known only to Merlin, tales which were told round hearth fires long before the Romans came to these island shores with their legions and their eagles.
‘Here is Gofannon,’ Merlin pointed at the figure who held a forge hammer in one hand and a sword in the other, ‘and here, see, is the moon goddess Arianrhod.’ He placed two fingers on the figure and on the past, touching the world which his druidi
c forebears had known.
Taliesin sat on the other side of the cauldron, rubbing at the silver with a cloth, his face under that thatch of dark hair clenched in concentration, his top teeth half buried in his bottom lip.
I peered inside the cauldron, trying not to think of what we had found there when we had come across it in the caves of the Isle of the Dead. The inner surface was badly tarnished, but on the bottom plate I could make out the central scene of three figures holding a fourth above a cauldron. I remembered what Merlin had told us about Annwn’s Cauldron, that it could restore life itself. Is that what those figures were attempting? Were they placing the other into the cauldron to bring him back from the dead?
‘It is beautiful,’ I said.
‘More beautiful than I ever imagined,’ Merlin admitted. He looked up at the darkening sky. It seemed to me that he was looking for some sign from the gods, that they knew we had recovered this ancient treasure and were perhaps even grateful for its return.
Taliesin took his cloth away from the plate which he had been cleaning and turned his big eyes to Iselle. ‘Eirianwen,’ he said, saying the name with wonder, though quietly, as if careful not to invoke the goddess. ‘She could change herself into a wolf.’
Merlin looked up at the boy. ‘Eirianwen has been all but forgotten here.’ He lifted a hand and fluttered skeletal fingers. ‘She drifted away with the smoke from the sacred groves.’ He tilted his head on one side as he regarded Taliesin. ‘How is it that you know of her, child?’ he asked.
Taliesin shrugged. ‘She comes to me when I sing,’ he said, the evenness of his voice belying the strangeness of the confession. Words which put a shiver in my flesh and made the hairs on my arms stand up. He ran a forefinger over the two finely wrought figures which he had uncovered: the goddess and the wolf. Arthur looked at Merlin. I looked at Iselle.
‘Lord,’ Taliesin said, lifting his gaze to Arthur, his unblemished skin so pale, but for the spread of brown speckles across his nose and cheeks, that you would have thought he had been the one living in a cave, beyond the sun’s reach. ‘I hope the lady will come back to you.’ It was said with such pure feeling that it stole my breath.
Arthur couldn’t summon the words to reply. He stared into the boy’s large eyes, and it seemed to me that he was trying to remember what it was like to be so young, with all the years stretching before like a wide and dewy meadow to be galloped across. That he was trying to feel some of Taliesin’s hope. His faith in unseen things. In gods and timeworn tales and in dreams only half remembered.
‘Thank you, Taliesin,’ he said at last. ‘Thank you.’ Then he turned and walked back to the house, leaving us with the Cauldron of Annwn and the tales of which it whispered, and I knew he would carry Guinevere to their bed and lie beside her in the night.
‘I will begin at dawn, Arthur,’ Merlin called after his old friend, who did not reply but nodded and then was gone.
I looked up and saw Gediens and Parcefal hefting a joint of meat and a brace of waterfowl which we had smoked and hung before setting off for Ynys Môn and the Isle of the Dead. They would take the food to Lord Cai and the others and I supposed that they would stay the night with them and perhaps the next day too, rather than linger here, helpless and tormented by fear and hope while Merlin performed his rites and endeavoured to restore Guinevere for the sake of the lady herself, and for Arthur, and for Britain.
I was woken by pallid dawn light spearing through cracks in the byre’s roof. I found Iselle outside by the old willow stump, loosing arrows into a target of woven reeds. Nearby, Taliesin was on his knees playing with Banon, wrestling the black dog, placing Banon’s forepaws upon his own shoulders as though the dog was some savage black beast which could not be withstood, and Banon growling to make good the fable. He looked like any other boy, giving himself utterly to the moment, so that it was strange to think of the power which he bore within himself. The talent by which he had bound those hateful and ill-favoured creatures in the darkness.
The dawn was damp and cold, and a mist was rising above the reed-beds. Now and then a bittern called from its hidden place in the marsh, a forlorn sound which spoke of loneliness and yearning.
‘They’ve begun.’ Iselle grunted as she sent another arrow, which thumped into the interlaced ring of marsh violets which she had made and pinned at the centre of the target.
I looked towards the house and immediately smelled the herb-tainted smoke leaking from Arthur’s thatch. I went over to the target, pulled out the three shafts which were inside the ring of flowers and took them back to Iselle, keeping one in my right hand.
‘Arthur is with them,’ she said. ‘Gawain is checking the traps.’
I nodded. She handed me the bow and I nocked the arrow to the string. There was old blood on the shaft near the iron head and some red staining on the white fletchings.
‘Do you think she will be … normal,’ Iselle asked me. ‘When she comes back?’
I took a step forward as though lining myself up with the target. In truth I didn’t want her to see my face. I pulled the string and pushed the bow and held the draw.
‘How could she be as she was before, after so many years like this?’ I asked, feeling the taut string and my fingertips on my chin. I wanted to tell her what Merlin had told me, about his doubts that he would be able to cure Guinevere even with the cauldron. But what purpose would that serve now, when the rites were under way and we would know soon enough if he had succeeded or failed?
‘I was thinking how happy Arthur will be,’ Iselle said, ‘when she comes back to him. He will be so happy.’
I loosed and the arrow seemed to shiver in the air and struck the target with a thump. Outside the ring of marsh violets. I glanced at Iselle and lifted an eyebrow that asked her to say nothing about my poor shot.
‘It’s hard to imagine Arthur smiling,’ she said. ‘But he must have smiled when he and Guinevere were young, before he had to fight all the time. And before all the other things,’ she added. There was no need to mention my father. We both knew what she had meant by other things. ‘But it is hard to imagine a smile on that face now.’
‘It is,’ I said. ‘But I hope he is smiling before the end of the day.’ I truly did hope that even though the doubt sown by Merlin’s words to me on the voyage back from the Isle of the Dead stayed with me.
I held out my hand. Iselle gave me another arrow. She frowned. ‘What if Merlin brings Guinevere back and Arthur is so happy and the lady is happy, and he does not want to go to war again? Who wants to fight if they are busy being in love?’
I had fitted the arrow to the string, but I did not draw the bow. Instead, I turned to Iselle. ‘Isn’t love sometimes the reason why we fight? To protect it?’ I looked over to where Taliesin was playing with Banon, the two engaged in a tug of war with a stick, the dog’s long teeth revealed in a rolling snarl. ‘To protect those we love?’
Iselle thought about this and I looked back at the target, exhaled slowly and loosed. The arrow streaked spear-straight and struck the woven reeds in the centre of the marsh violets.
‘Lucky,’ Iselle said.
I smiled. Then the roundhouse door clunked open and Arthur stood there, white smoke billowing around him, his face drawn and fearful and terrifying in the dawn. He caught my eye and, without a word, he walked off towards the marsh.
‘Galahad, come,’ Merlin called from inside the house. I looked at Iselle. She nodded that I should go, so I did, my stomach rolling over itself as I crossed the mist-damp ground, dreading what I would find inside.
At first, all I saw was smoke. It was thick and acrid, hanging in palls and slowly rising to the roof, and I saw that much of it was coming from the Cauldron of Annwn, which sat on stones above the hearth, too heavy to hang from the iron tripod like a normal cooking pot.
‘Shut the door, you fool,’ Merlin said. He was standing by the bed where Guinevere lay covered by a bear’s fur. I coughed and blinked and turned to suck in one last breath of clea
n dawn air before pulling the door shut behind me. ‘Here, come here,’ the druid said. ‘Hold this.’
I went to him and he handed me a wooden cup. Turning it in my hand, I saw that it was just like the one which Father Yvain had been turning on his lathe that day the infant boy had died on Ynys Wydryn.
‘Do precisely what I say.’ Merlin took Guinevere’s arm out from under the fur and laid it on top.
‘And Arthur?’ I said, thinking that he should be here doing this, not I.
Merlin reached to the table at the head of the bed and took up his knife, which was already unsheathed, its blade honed and polished and wicked-looking. ‘I sent him out looking for bugleherb,’ he said. ‘Which men sometimes call thunder and lightning.’
‘Will it help?’ I asked, feeling a creeping chill in my flesh despite the hearth flames which now and then licked up the sides of the Cauldron of Annwn, tormenting the figures who seemed to writhe in light and shadow upon its silver surface.
‘Bugleherb can be useful,’ Merlin said, distractedly. ‘Good for cuts and bruises, for stomach ulcers. For healing.’ He lifted Guinevere’s arm, which was as thin as a birch sapling, then placed the tip of the knife blade on her pale forearm where, by the fitful light of a rush flame, the green veins showed just beneath the skin. ‘I needed Arthur out of the way. Try working with him glaring at you.’ One of his white brows lifted as he gestured for me to hold the cup beneath the lady’s arm. ‘Besides, he wouldn’t like this part,’ he said, pressing the point in to pierce the skin, then drawing the knife along Guinevere’s arm, slicing into the flesh.
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