The Jo Fletcher Books Anthology

by Frank P. Ryan

  As I drew nearer, I saw that it came from the doorway of a small hut, scarcely big enough for more than two or three men. I did not know what to do. Such a place might be inhabited by anything from an outlaw to a creature of inhuman stock. Yet, if I remained outside, I would surely be dead by the morning. Then, while I still hesitated, the door of the hut opened wider, spilling firelight out into the darkness, and a voice said: ‘Are you going to come in, or will you dawdle out there all night?’

  With chattering teeth I moved to stand in the doorway. In front of the fire sat a man with a harp cradled in his lap. As I watched he touched the strings, and a music so beautiful came from them that I felt at once that I wanted to go nowhere ever again, but simply sit and listen and wait for him to play some more.

  The man by the fire said, ‘Well, are you going to shut the door, or must we both perish of the cold?’ I stepped across the threshold, closed the door on the cold and wet and dark and entered upon the greatest adventure of my life.

  That was the first time that I laid eyes upon the Lord Taliesin, primary chief poet of the Island of the Mighty. Later, crouched by the fire, having consumed a bowl of hot broth which he gave me, I studied him. He was tall, very sparely built, with a lined face. I thought him somehow old, though his hair was black and his back straight. His face seemed cast in sardonic mode, but there were lines of sorrow – even of suffering – about his mouth. His eyes were green, rather cold I thought, and neither friendly nor unfriendly.

  After his first words to me he did not speak again, handing the bowl of broth to me and returning at once to silent contemplation. I was used enough to this after three years in the monastery, and knew better than interrupt. The warmth of the fire and the hot food, after the cold and wetness of the night, soon took effect. My head fell forward and I slept where I sat.

  Later cramp awoke me, and I found that I had been covered by a blanket. The fire had died down to a red heap of ashes, by which dim glow I saw that my host appeared hardly to have moved from the position he had been in when I first saw him. He had laid aside the harp now, and sat with his knees drawn up to his chin, a position I was to see him adopt often in later years.

  As quietly as I could I eased my position, and found that my host’s eyes were upon me. Leaning forward suddenly he poked at the gleeds of the fire. By the small flare of light thus afforded he seemed to study me. Then he laughed quietly.

  ‘Is it not strange that we should meet, here of all places?’

  I shook my head dumbly.

  ‘Well, perhaps not’. He sighed, and reaching out, touched the harp where it lay close to hand. A thread of sound whispered in the little hut. ‘Sleep now.’ he said, and I felt my eyes close as if in answer to a command.

  I awoke to pale watery sunlight shining in through the open door of the hut. The fire had been freshly laid and a small cauldron of food was simmering over it. My host stood by the door, looking out at the morning. As I stirred he turned to look at me but did not speak. He remained silent while we broke fast, then, as I hungrily devoured the last scrap, he took up the harp and began to play.

  Never had I heard such sounds before. I was entranced as completely as if some spirit of the woodland or the mountain had laid a spell upon me. After a while he began to chant words that twined about the music in bright threads. The words have never left me, and though they seem as strange to me now as they did then, I can remember them as well as if they were being sung now – though it is many years since the events of which I write.

  I feel my way into the rock.

  I finger the dark holes of its brain.

  My hands encounter the dark.

  My eyes see with the sight of the rock.

  I breath out with the breath of the rock.

  My fingers the wind touches and my feet the sea washes.

  My thought lies in the head of the rock –

  Tintagel, gripping the White Brow.

  My sweat runs in streams down the face of rock.

  I mingle with the sea-salt and sea-mist.

  I blow out on the wind’s back.

  The sky swallows my heart.

  I beat with the tic of the beating world.

  I beat.

  The wind shakes my hair.

  The sand forms itself to a pattern:

  An Iron Crown, spiked and spurred.

  My fingers forget they are fingers.

  My body forgets all it has remembered.

  I learn the secret of the birth of rock.

  A seabird without wings I am swept

  Into the sky – through the sky.

  Air rocks my wings.

  In the cave my fingers and feet

  Release rock. Strands of hair

  Twist in water and in air.

  He finished and we both sat in silence for an age. Then the poet looked at me again, and said, not unkindly: ‘You are too early, little monk, go home now.’

  That was all he said to me, yet I got up like one in a dream, went out of the door and followed the path down from the hut and back along the road by which I had come. At the monastery the Abbot was not unkind – he must have been used to boys of my age running away, and had clearly expected me to return. I said nothing, either then or later, about my encounter with the poet. But the memory of that meeting, and the memory of the strange and wonderful song, remained with me.

  I did not try to run away again, but settled to the round of work and prayer in the monastery. The years passed and we heard rumours of the great events in the world outside, of the coming of the Great King, and of the Fellowship he gathered about him whose aim was to put right the wrongs that weakened the land of Britain. We heard also of Merlin, whom many believed to be a devil’s son, or even a follower of the terrible old druids whom the Romans had all but destroyed long ago, but who were rumoured to be still hidden in certain parts of the land. And we heard of Taliesin, the King’s Poet, the mightiest bard in all of Britain and a man both feared and loved. Strange stories were told of him: that he had been initiated into pagan mysteries even older than those of the druids; that he could sing a whole room full of fierce fighting men to sleep; that (even more darkly) he could change his shape at will.

  Of course, no-one at the monastery really believed these things, except perhaps sometimes in the half-light of an evening, or when strange noises came out of the darkness as we knelt at our prayers in the little chapel.

  In this time I came to know more of the Most High God, and of His gentle Son, and to accept their Way as the one and only truth. My life was wholly bound and absorbed by the daily pattern of our community, and even the memory of my brief escape into the world faded somewhat.

  Then the day came when I was sent on an errand. I was to lead the party of brothers taking the Great Book, finished at last, to the mother church of our order at Carlisle, where the head of our order was also to be found. It was a long and fearful journey for all of us, who had almost without exception never been beyond the confines of the valley in which our monastery stood. But the Most High protected us and we arrived with our precious burden unharmed.

  The city was full of people – more than most of us had ever seen in one place at one time, and we learned that this was in part because the Great King, with all his court, were there also.

  That same day we learned that the King and some of his retinue were to go outside the city, to hunt game in the great forest of Inglewood, which lay to the South. As chance would have it, their rout took them past the Holy House where our party remained for the duration of our stay in the city. Curiosity got the better of me when I heard cheering outside, and I went to the window to watch the great ones ride past.

  There, I saw, for the first and only time, the Great King himself, the Ymerawdwr* Arthur. He was as strong and stern as I had been told – though I also saw that he suffered in some way that I could not fathom.
There was grey in his hair already, though he could not have seen above thirty-five summers. But it was not upon him that my eyes rested for the longest time, but the man who rode at his side. Tall, sparely built, with dark hair bound back in a fillet of bronze, his cold green eyes glancing this way and that as he rode, as though searching for something. He had not changed at all in the years since our meeting in the little hut in the mountains. He seemed neither older nor younger, though the lines were perhaps a little more deeply graven around his mouth than before.

  Our eyes met for a moment, and I heard, inside my head, as clearly as if he had spoken the words aloud in my ear: ‘Not yet, little monk, but soon.’ Then the company was past, and I stood alone, suddenly shivering as though with cold – though the day, as I remember it, was hot.

  I turned to the Brother who stood next to me and asked who the man was who rode at the High King’s side. He made the sign of the Cross before answering. ‘That is Taliesin, the King’s Bard. It is best you do not even look at him for he is surely in league with the devil.’

  I looked hastily away, but in my heart I was certain – as indeed I am today – that there was nothing evil in the poet, for all his strange and sometimes fearful ways.

  I returned to the monastery with my Brothers, and tried to settle again to the rhythm of the community. But the face of the Lord Taliesin was never far from my mind, and his words rang often in my thoughts when I should have been thinking of God.

  Five years more passed, then news came of fighting away in the South, and of the disappearance of the Great King. Rumours filled the land, flying hither and yon. We heard how there was a great battle between the Lord Arthur and his own son Mordred, whom men said was the offspring of unholy incest with his sister, the witch Morgain. Many of the High King’s Fellowship fell there, and many other good men. The brothers were on their knees all night long praying for the souls of the dead.

  But I felt something more than sorrow for the ending of what had been a great and mighty dream. The thought of the Lord Taliesin filled my mind day and night. None mentioned his name, and I dared not ask for fear of being thought ungodly.

  Then one night I awoke from sleep suddenly, as though a hand had been laid on my shoulder. It was utterly dark and silent in the dormitory where I lay, save for the snores of one of the Brothers. I rose and made my way outside. Something made me look up at the heavens and I saw a sky ablaze with stars, more bright that I ever remembered seeing them before. Briefly, I thought I saw a shadow wing its way between them. I shivered, not from the chill of the night alone, and went back to my cot, determined upon a course of action which I saw as clearly as though I had thought of it for a long time – as indeed, perhaps, I had.

  The next day I sough out the Abbot, a different man to the old one who had been there when I entered the monastery. I told him that I was leaving, perhaps forever, and though he questioned me I gave no reason for my decision, only assuring him that I had suffered no lapse of faith. He must have seen the determination in me, for he made no attempt to argue against my decision.

  The next morning I left the little community for the last time and set out for the mountains to the North. A day later I found myself once again on the path that lead to the hut where I had spent so memorable a night so many years before. I found that I could remember the way as clearly as if my previous visit had been only a day earlier. The hut was much as I remembered it, crouching back against the face of a sheer cliff, a little more weather-beaten but otherwise sound. The door stood open, and as I approached across the little grassy table of earth, I heard a thread of music that I remembered well. Still I hesitated, finding myself suddenly shy. Why had I come, and what sort of welcome would I find? Then the voice of the poet came from within: ‘Are you going to come in or stand out there all day?’ I went inside and found him seated, much as before, the harp cradled in his arms. The years had passed him by while I grew to manhood and into middle years.

  I sat down before him and looked into those unfathomable eyes. After a moment he touched the strings of the harp briefly. Then he said: ‘It is time now, little monk. We have much to do.’

  That was all there ever was between us by way of asking or acceptance of the task I undertook. Every day thereafter I spent several hours in the company of the poet while he told me story after story, which I attempted to write down either while he spoke or afterwards from memory. It was as though he was unburdening himself of a great weight that he had carried with him for many years – longer indeed than he could remember. He scarcely ever spoke of the days he had spent with the High King, and I now believe that it was during this time that he wrote the great chronicle of those times which I discovered after his departure.

  I learned much from him that was both strange and fearful, though I still believe that there is nothing of evil in his works. Above all he spoke to me of the great forest of Broceliande, which seemed at times to extend over the greater part of the land – though whether in fact or fancy I cannot say. He said, once, that the stories of the Wood were as numerous as leaves on its trees. I still do not know if he told me all the stories that he knew; I believe not. But each one had something to teach, some piece of lore and wisdom from the days before the message of the Lord Christ came to Britain. You may, if you desire, imagine the two of us, the lord Taliesin and myself, seated in the little hut on the mountainside, he speaking, sometimes rapidly, sometimes with long pauses as though he sought far back into his memory to recollect some detail of the story; myself crouched over a makeshift writing desk, struggling to recall the exact words and to set them down so that they might be read by all men when the land was at peace again.

  For most of that year we laboured. It seemed at times as though my master – for such always I thought of him – was hastening to conclude the work we did before some event overtook him. I believe now that he was preparing to leave even as he waited for me. Then, one morning, I awoke to find him gone. Believing he had simply stepped out to take the morning air, or to catch something for the pot, I sharpened my quill and waited. But the morning passed into afternoon and there was no sign of him. I began to believe that he had gone for good, and gradually, as the days passed, I knew that my fears were well founded. Taliesin had gone, whither I knew not. He had made no farewells any more than he had spoken a greeting to me. Yet I felt no anger at this – I had come to know him well enough by then to understand that such was his way.

  I remained in the little hut for several more months, adding details to the stories I had already written; making fair copies of others. Then, one day, a boy came to the hut. He was starving and ill and I took him in, nursing him slowly back to health. When he was better he seemed reluctant to leave, and so together we built a lean-to shelter against the side of the hut and there he stayed. I began to teach him to read and write, and the beginnings of the way of the Lord Christ.

  He was only the first of many, who seemed to know that safety lay in the little shallow valley among the mountains. Soon there were ten living there, men and women both, and in time a small community was established. One winter I grew ill and was nursed back to health by those whom I had helped. They insisted that I must have a better place to live and built me a new hut close to the old one. It was while I was clearing out the hut that had belonged to my master that I found a small, intricately carved box hidden in a niche of the rock against which the hut had been built. In it I found a kind of farewell – the great legacy of the Lord Taliesin’s writing – his account of the days of the High King Arthur and the Fellowship, of the quest for the Holy Cup, and of the fate that overtook them all. I learned, too, even more of the story of the Forest, Broceliande, the world-wood in whose mazes the poet had walked and watched and observed all that passed in that strange and wondrous time.

  In the last few years, as I have grown older, I have undertaken the task – which I have found by no means easy – of placing all that he wrote, or instructed me to write,
in order, so that they may be properly read and studied in a future time when, I pray to God, the land is more settled. There are many who would destroy the works of my master, thinking them heretical or dangerous; yet I find that despite certain heathenish ideas, he strove always to tell the truth as he saw it, and while there is much that I myself find amazing or intractable of belief, yet even here I see no actual evil, nothing to hinder the prayers I offer up daily to My Lord Christ for his soul. As to whether he is dead or living I know not, but I believe that I shall not meet with him again in this life.

  As to the truth or otherwise of the stories, I remember clearly the words of their author, regarding his works: ‘Though I may seem to speak as one who was present, there are times when I was not. I tell what is there to be told, in whatever words are given me by the awen**.’ This I take to mean that by some means he was able to observe events at which he was not always present in the flesh. How this may be accomplished is not my concern; I record it simply for the interest of those who delight in such matters, or who seek better to understand the works of My Lord Taliesin. Beyond this I have dared to set my own words down in this place, to tell my own story of my fateful meeting with the Primary Chief Bard of the Island of Britain. Lest those who read this think me too bold, I will but say that I do so in humility, and only with the purpose of explicating the darker corners of my master’s writings. For the rest, the reader must judge what is true or not.

  It seems more than strange to me now that I lived through the age of the Great Arthur, yet know almost nothing of the events that took place in the world beyond the monastery in the sheltered valley. Yet I see too that we were left in peace throughout those years because the Ymerawdwr and his fellowship were there, guarding the Island of the Mighty against many evils – until it was breached from within.