The Beloved Dead

by Tony Hays

  But this was different. Two young girls. One the daughter of a leader of a small village. The other the daughter of a decurion. Neither quite yet old enough for marriage. Neither of a kind to solicit this sort of death. Yet both in the wake of our travels. And … I pushed myself to my feet quickly as I realized that the killings held one other thing in common—Wynn, the Druid.

  “My lord,” I said to Aircol. “A Druid was seen entering your town earlier today. I have good reason to believe that he may have a hand in this.”

  Aircol cocked his head to one side in confusion. “How could you know that?”

  “Trust me in this matter, my lord.”

  He turned and looked to Bedevere who nodded.

  “Very well, Malgwyn.” He turned to several soldiers who had gathered. “Find this Druid and bring him to my hall.”

  “I apologize, my lord, for disturbing the feast.”

  The old lord shook his shaggy head. “You disturbed nothing. Whoever did this deed is the guilty one. Tell me of this Druid.”

  “I know but this, my lord. Some weeks ago, Arthur led an expedition to the White Mount at old Londinium. While we were there, a young girl was killed in the same manner as your decurion’s child. She was the daughter of a local leader as well, who had brought a delegation, including the Druid, to treat with Arthur. The Druid followed us here to your seat and now this has happened. I cannot help but think that there is some connection.”

  “Lord Aircol,” Bedevere intervened, “Malgwyn has a talent at discerning the truth in these matters. He is often appointed as a kind of investigator … an iudex pedaneous … by Arthur.” My warrior friend had not the love of Latin titles that Arthur did, and it took him a moment to find the right one.

  “Ambrosius has told me of this. Very well.” He turned to the gathered soldiers and townsfolk. “Malgwyn has my ear in this matter. Render unto him all the cooperation that he needs.” With that Aircol returned to his hall.

  “Malgwyn, you know that Druids only kill in ritual,” Merlin said after Aircol had departed, chiding me.

  “Who knows what this Druid is about, Merlin? Can you argue that he was nearby when the girl was murdered at the White Mount? Or that Dylan saw him entering this town?

  “No. I cannot,” he conceded, pulling at his beard. “But that still does not make him guilty of these crimes.”

  “We can worry about that when we have bound him to a stake and set the dogs on him.”

  “These attacks have touched you closely, haven’t they?” Merlin knew me so well. When you share a house with someone, you come to know them, whether you want to or not.

  “I cannot discern a reason for them, Merlin,” I said after a moment. “They are so brutal, so savagely brutal, and committed on girls so young as to be almost helpless.”

  “Do not forget,” Merlin warned, “that they could simply be separate killings that, no matter how horrible, are not necessarily linked to some broader conspiracy.”

  I turned back to the poor girl then, shutting out all the noise. Kneeling, I motioned two of the torch-bearing soldiers closer.

  Her face was frozen in a grimace of pain, her eyes rolled up as if willing herself somewhere else. Bruises above her slashed throat made me believe that he had held her throat to silence her while he did his savage business. That was different than Fercos’s daughter. She had already been dead when this madman raped her, if it was the same man, and I could not help but think it so.

  “We found this lying against the side of the house,” Bedevere said behind me, passing a rough cut branch. “Malgwyn, this is just like the killing at the White Mount. Could the Druid have done this?”

  “I confess, Bedevere, I do not understand this at all.” And I did not. “While Merlin could be correct, that the two killings are not connected, I find that difficult to swallow. But killing for greed, to gain power, in battle, even by accident, I can fathom. But this is not about any of those things. This seems an act done by an angry man. But how could a man be this angry at these girls? Perhaps he knew Fercos’s daughter well, but if it was the same man, and I cannot believe it to be otherwise, he could hardly have known this girl so well. The anger then must be directed against someone else.” I was thinking now as I talked. “Who else could that be but Arthur? If the Druid did these things, he has done them to somehow damage Arthur.”

  “Or,” Merlin interrupted, “this could be vengeance for the removal of Bran’s head.”

  My face burned red and I thrust the piece of wood at Merlin. “You think Bran’s spirit slit this girl’s throat and raped her with a stick of firewood?”

  “I think someone might wish others to think that, that someone wishes others would think that Arthur is no longer favored by his god or any gods.”

  I calmed. Merlin was right. And I was right. This could all be an elaborate scheme to turn the people against Arthur. Every lord of the consilium knew of his plan to remove Bran’s head. Any of them, David, Mark, Melwas would have been bright enough to think of it. It seemed, somehow, too subtle for Mordred, who was even then languishing on our western shores, supposedly putting down pirates and incursions by the Scotti.

  Perhaps I was thinking in too narrow a vein. But, even at that, it was an odd thing. Only someone truly depraved would inflict such pain on innocent girls for political reasons. The one thing that I knew for certain was that I would beg no mercy for the culprit when he was found, nor would I show him any mercy should I find myself alone with him.

  “We will find the Druid, Malgwyn,” Bedevere assured me.

  “And I shall go and repair any damage this might have done to our plans with Aircol,” Merlin said, patting me on the back with a frail hand.

  “Has there been trouble?” Morgan’s voice broke from the darkness. Our little medicus emerged into the torchlight. “May I help?”

  His voice was so solicitous; his face reeked of concern. Bedevere looked at me. Merlin looked at me.

  “No, Morgan, I am sorry, but this poor child is beyond your skills.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Morgan was fully in the torchlight now, and I ventured an answer to his query. “Her throat was slit and she was raped with some object. Come, look for yourself.”

  I watched closely as his eyes widened in amazement.

  “Oh, my dear!” For a moment, I thought he might faint. “Excuse me, please.” And he jogged back into the blackness.

  Merlin and Bedevere looked to me.

  “Either he did not do this, or he is a skilled liar,” I said finally.

  “He is a creature of David’s,” Bedevere reminded us. “And he was at the White Mount.”

  I nodded. “We need to know more. Let us keep someone near him so we know what he’s about.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Bedevere answered.

  They left me alone then, and I studied the stick of wood in the flickering torchlight. Like the limb I had found at the White Mount, this one held bloodstains and bits and pieces of flesh. I tossed it away in disgust and irritation with myself, but a whiff of something odd flitted past my nose as the piece of wood thudded against the house before falling in the mud. “Fetch that again!” I shouted at one of the soldiers standing nearby.

  With a quizzical look, he did so and I held the unbloodied end up to my nose. How very strange. The wood smelled of onions!

  The feasting abruptly ended in the wake of the girl’s death. Funny, I do not know her name. I never knew her name. But her wounds would haunt my dreams for years. They did not find the Druid. Whatever his business, whether the murder of the girl or something else, he had slipped into town and out as if a spirit. Which made me wonder about Merlin’s question. Did Arthur, by removing Bran’s head, awaken some spirit? Did he bring some curse on himself? The gods knew that I had warned him. Merlin and Bedevere warned him. I had seen him and Gawain nearly come to blows. But in that bullheaded fashion of his, Arthur had disregarded all of us. And only the gods knew what evil he had brought down on us. />
  * * *

  We rode out the next morning, headed east. In better days we might have gone south to the great channel and crossed it in boats, arrayed for a king such as Aircol. But Scotti and Saxon pirates ranged freely in the waters. Mordred’s charge had been to establish a fleet of boats to patrol, but his dispatches claimed difficulty in finding men to build the necessary vessels, a lie as he was probably being paid a tribute by the pirates.

  Despite the dark mood the girl’s killing had laid upon me, I was pleased that it was a bright morning and portended well for the journey. My eyes had grown puffy, and I knew if I looked into a still pool of water, I would see dark half moons beneath each. I had been up all night, questioning the girl’s mother and father, trying to trace her movements so that I could find a clear path, but no one had really seen anything. She had been present at the feasting—her parents had last seen her there. But at some point she had simply disappeared. No one could remember quite when they last glimpsed her. One man, barely able to speak for the quantities of mead he had drunk, believed he saw her leave with a man, but his account was so garbled and confused that it was useless. She was at the feast, and then she was dead. The chances that the killer was of Aircol’s lands were almost none; almost.

  Careful, subtle questioning had found that Morgan had been at the feast, but then left before the killing. Without asking him directly, and thus warning him, I had no way to discover where he went. I understood the situation well enough to know that I would cause only trouble for myself if I accused one of David’s men of these horrible deeds without proof. I sent one of our men in search of Gareth, to thank him for his help and to release his men.

  I feared not for our safety on the return. Aircol brought three of his troops of horse as his escort. Together we had six. In those days each troop held thirty mounted men. So, on that day, we had 180 or more in our escort, a formidable force. Saxon or Scotti raiding parties rarely exceeded twenty or thirty souls.

  The lord of the Demetae brought a sizable entourage with him—slaves, a number of his lesser lords, the child Vortipor and, of course, Gwyneira. The two young ones rode in a large, creaky wagon, covered by well-scraped hides emblazoned with Aircol’s symbol, and pulled by strong oxen. Aircol himself rode a handsome horse and spent much of his time riding next to Merlin, to whom he had taken an obvious liking.

  Odd, that. For Merlin was certainly not a believer in the Christ, though he did not mock the new faith as did some. But the old man had a charm all his own, and he was born of Carmarthen, so the two had many friends in common. Now that we shared a house, he spoke often of his childhood in the forests of his birthplace. His mother had died young, and Merlin had been raised by a wild man of the forest named Lailoken. Not much of a life for a boy, but Lailoken had taught Merlin much about medicinal herbs and cures. In many ways it was not very different from the education he might have had living with the brothers at an abbey or monastery or from a rhetor, in private classes.

  “What has you so deep in thought?” I jerked at the surprising voice on my left. ’Twas Bedevere.

  I shrugged. “Merlin. Aircol. The dead girl. I have no lack of things to think about.”

  “You mean the two dead girls,” Bedevere pointed out.

  “Aye. Toss in Bran’s head to fill the bag up.” I paused as a farmer drove some cows across the lane before us. “Merlin believes it may be a plot by David and some of the other lords to discredit Arthur, make it look as if these killings following in our wake are a scourge laid on by the gods for Arthur’s desecration of Bran’s grave.

  “But if that is so, Bedevere, why choose young girls and why abuse them so horribly?”

  “The more devastating the deed, the more innocent the victim, the more displeasure the gods are showing Arthur?” Bedevere, like me, was unsure as well.

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps it is the Druid, exacting his own revenge against Arthur, or putting teeth to his curse? Arthur’s hatred of the pagan religions is well known. Any power accorded them is power taken from Arthur.”

  Bedevere laughed, unusual for him, and it was a bitter, cynical sort of laugh. “Trying to do what’s right, what you believe in, can certainly give a man many enemies.”

  “That is a lesson I have learned from bitter experience. But what is left to us? To do evil is, simply, to be evil. To do nothing only allows evil to work its way among us. Better, I think, for a man to do what he can and accept that he will be condemned by some for doing it.”

  “You are beginning to sound much like Arthur, Malgwyn,” Bedevere chided.

  “Perhaps Arthur is starting to sound like me.” I could not allow the jibe to go unanswered. I was still troubled over Arthur’s decisions in this matter—digging up Bran’s head and acceding to the demands of the other lords to marry Gwyneira.

  I lowered my voice. “We must keep an eye on Morgan. I want to like him, but he is of David’s tribe.”

  “Just as we must watch for the Druid,” he answered. “It seems we spend most of our time, Malgwyn, watching other people.” Bedevere laughed again, and it was good to hear it. I sensed that somewhere in his past he had suffered some great tragedy, but he talked so little at all and even less about himself that I knew I would never learn those secrets that had made him so taciturn.

  We rode in silence for a bit, the only sounds those of creaking leather and jingling chains, and the slurping sounds of wagon wheels rolling through mud and oxen hooves sinking up to their shanks as they struggled along the road. On our left, off a distance in a field and shrouded in low-lying mist, a fire burned brightly in the remains of a Roman villa, its once plastered walls now looking as diseased as a plague victim. The villa had been a fine one in its day, with a central range and two wings framing a large courtyard.

  The family, dressed in poorly woven clothes and rough-cut animal hide cloaks, stood in the shadows and watched our procession pass. I caught a hint of roasting venison in the wind. Someone had gotten lucky on the hunt and snared something bigger than a rabbit. A child, though girl or boy I could not tell from that distance, lifted a hand in a tentative wave, but oddly her mother, I assumed, slapped the hand down and hustled them all back into the safety of their once splendid home.

  Their fear and plight humbled me. We spent our time struggling to bring order to chaos, to strengthen Arthur’s hold on his title and lands, and they struggled to survive. Arthur wanted a better life for our patria, but that had taken second place in our efforts. There had been corruption and injustice under the Romans, but there had been education, structure, a sense of justice, even if illusory.

  For a reason I cannot describe, I turned my horse and trotted across the field to the old villa. Behind me, I heard the sounds of Bedevere’s horse sloughing through the mud as he followed.

  Off to our left were the remains of the bathhouse. I dismounted and walked over, sidestepping piles of sheep dung, and peered inside. This must have been a wealthy man’s villa. The colored tesserae, now faded from weathering, formed a picture of the Greek chi rho, a symbol of Christianity. Odd, I thought idly, to put a symbol of your religion on your bathhouse floor.

  A man came out then, fearfully at first, and then his expression changed quickly, his shoulders slumping as if relieved. “Master Malgwyn!” he shouted, throwing up a hand in greeting.

  I have met many people in my life, but I did not know this man. Of that much I was certain. But he strode forward with a smile on his face, forcing me, without my even realizing it, to dismount and meet him on equal terms. I took his hand in my one and studied his face, but beneath the beard, sprinkled with white, it was nothing more than a landscape of poverty and toil, and an unfamiliar one at that.

  He realized then that I was trying to place him and his smile grew wider. “You do not know me, master. We have never met.”

  “Then how do you know me?”

  And the smile grew wider yet. “The whole land knows of Arthur’s one-armed warrior and scribe. You are famed for your wisdom and courag
e. You are most welcome in our home.”

  “But your woman stopped your girl from waving to us. I thought you hostile.”

  Discomfort grew on his face and he looked down. “At first, master, we did not know it was you. She was just being cautious and…”

  “And what—”

  “Rhodri, master.”

  “And what, Rhodri? There is something else?”

  Rhodri had the look of a good man, one who cared for his wife and children. I looked at his hands and saw they were callused and rough, the hands of a man for whom toil was a daily experience. With his mouth set in a stern expression, he finally raised his eyes to meet mine. “My daughter is a strange child, master. I do not know how or why, but she sees things that others do not.” The words came out slowly, haltingly.

  “What did she see, Rhodri?”

  Before he could answer, the little girl, so little and pale, the redness of her hair making her paleness even more so, stepped from behind a tumbling villa wall. “I saw a dark cloud above your big wagon.” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper.

  I knelt before her and searched her face but saw no mischief there, simply sadness. “A dark cloud? Does that mean something?”

  Rhodri cleared his throat and looked away.

  “What?” Bedevere asked.

  “It means someone is going to die,” came that same little soft voice.

  “And how do you know this?”

  She shrugged. “It always does.”

  Rhodri’s wife hurried forward and clasped the girl against her gown. “There have been … other occasions when she has seen the clouds and someone has died. I cannot explain it, master, only affirm that it is true.”

  “Who? When?”

  “A year ago, a sacerdote was passing through and took a meal with us. He was on his way to the abbey at Ynys-witrin. As we ate, Vala, my daughter, suddenly became rigid, her eyes fixed and strange. I thought her ill, but she pointed at the sacerdote and said, ‘The cloud will soon claim him.’ I punished her for being rude to a holy man, but the next morning, the sacerdote was dead. He had passed sometime in the night. I do not know the cause, but he had not appeared of a healthy pallor.