The Winter King Part 13

"Let me fight!" He tried to pull away from me and face the next two men coming up the narrow stone steps.

"Live, you fool." I pushed him behind me, feinted left with my spear, then brought it up and rammed its blade into a Frank's face. I let go of the shaft, took the second man's spear thrust on my shield while I drew Hywelbane, then I gave the low jab under the shield's edge that sent the man screaming to the steps with blood welling between hands that cupped his groin. "You know how to get us safe through the city!" I shouted at Galahad. I abandoned my spear as I pushed him back from the battle-maddened enemies who were surging up the steps. There was a potter's shop at the head of the steps and despite the siege the shopkeeper's wares were still displayed on trestle tables under a canvas awning. I tipped a table full of jugs and vases into the attackers' path, then ripped down the awning and hurled it into their faces.

"Lead us!" I screamed. There were alleys and gardens that only Ynys Trebes's inhabitants knew, and we would need such secret paths if we were to escape.

The invaders had broken through the main gate now to cut us off from Culhwch and his men. Galahad led us uphill, turned left into a short tunnel that ran beneath a temple, then across a garden and up to a wall that edged a rain cistern. Beneath us the city writhed in horror. The victorious Franks broke down doors to take revenge for their dead left on the sand. Children wailed and were silenced by swords. I watched one Prankish warrior, a huge man with horns on his helmet, cut down four trapped defenders with an axe. More smoke poured up from houses. The city might have been built of stone, but there was plenty of furniture, boat-pitch and timber roofs to feed a maniacal fire. Out at sea, where the incoming tide swirled across the sandbanks, I could see Lancelot's winged helmet bright in one of the three escaping boats, while above me, pink in the setting sun, the graceful palace waited for its last moments. The evening breeze s.n.a.t.c.hed at the grey smoke and softly billowed a white curtain that hung in a shadowed palace window.

"Over here!" Galahad called, pointing to a narrow path. "Follow the path to our boat!" Our men ran for their lives. "Come on, Derfel!" he called to me.

But I did not move. I was staring up the steep hill.

"Come on, Derfel!" Galahad insisted.

But I was hearing a voice in my head. It was an old man's voice; a dry, sardonic and unfriendly voice, and the sound of it would not let me move.

"Come on, Derfel!" Galahad screamed.

"I put my life in your hands," the old man had said, and suddenly he spoke again inside my skull. "I lay my life on your conscience, Derfel of Dumnonia."

"How do I reach the palace?" I called to Galahad.

"Palace?"

"How!" I shouted angrily.

"This way," he said, 'this way!"

We climbed.

The Bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.

I have been fortunate in friends. Arthur was one, but of all my friends there was never another like Galahad. There were times when we understood each other without speaking and others when words tumbled out for hours. We shared everything except women. I cannot count the number of times we stood shoulder to shoulder in the shield-wall or the number of times we divided our last morsel of food. Men took us for brothers and we thought of ourselves in the same way. And on that broken evening, as the city smouldered into fire beneath us, Galahad understood I could not be taken to the waiting boat. He knew I was in the hold of some imperative, some message from the G.o.ds that made me climb desperately towards the serene palace crowning Ynys Trebes. All around us horror flooded up the hill, but we stayed ahead of it, running desperately across a church roof, jumping down to an alley where we pushed through a crowd of fugitives who believed the church would give them sanctuary, then up a flight of stone steps and so to the main street that circled Ynys Trebes. There were Franks running towards us, competing to be the first into Ban's palace, but we were ahead of them along with a pitiful handful of people who had escaped the slaughter in the lower town and were now seeking a hopeless refuge in the hilltop dwelling.

The guards were gone from the courtyard. The palace doors lay open and inside, where women cowered and children cried, the beautiful furniture waited for the conquerors. The curtains stirred in the wind.

I plunged into the elegant rooms, ran through the mirrored chamber and past Leanor's abandoned harp and so to the great room where Ban had first received me. The King was still there, still in his toga, and still at his table with a quill in his hand. "It's too late," he said as I burst into the room with sword drawn.

"Arthur failed me."

Screams sounded in the palace corridors. The view from the arched windows was smeared by smoke.

"Come with us, Father!" Galahad said.

"I have work to do," Ban said querulously. He dipped his quill into the inkhorn and began to write. "Can't you see I'm busy?"

I pushed through the door which led to the library, crossed the empty antechamber, then thrust open the library door to see the hunchbacked priest standing at one of the scroll shelves. The polished wooden floor was littered with ma.n.u.scripts. "Your life is mine," I shouted angrily, resenting that such an ugly old man had put me to this obligation when there were so many other lives to save in the city, 'so come with me! Now!" The priest ignored me. He was frantically pulling scrolls from the shelves, tearing off their ribbons and seals and scanning the first lines before throwing them down and s.n.a.t.c.hing other scrolls.

"Come on!" I snarled at him.

"Wait!" Celwin insisted, pulling down another scroll, then discarded it and ripped another open. "Not yet!"

A crash sounded in the palace; a cheer resounded and was drowned in screams. Galahad was standing in the library's outer door, pleading with his father to come with us, but Ban just waved his son away as though his words were a nuisance. Then the door burst open and three sweating Prankish warriors rushed in. Galahad ran to meet them, but he had no time to save his father's life and Ban did not even try to defend himself. The leading Frank hacked at him with a sword and I think the King of Benoic was already dead of a broken heart before the enemy's blade ever touched him. The Frank tried to cut off the King's head, and that man died on Galahad's spear while I lunged at the second man with Hywelbane and swung his wounded body around to obstruct the third. The dying Frank's breath reeked of ale like the breath of Saxons. Smoke showed outside the door. Galahad was beside me now, his spear slashing forward to kill the third man, but more Franks were pounding down the corridor outside. I pulled my sword free and backed into the antechamber. "Come on, you old fool!" I screamed over my shoulder at the obstinate priest.

"Old, yes, Derfel, but a fool? Never." The priest laughed, and something about that sour laughter made me turn and I saw, as though in a dream, that the hunched back was disappearing as the priest stretched his long body to its full height. He was not ugly at all, I thought, but wonderful and majestic and so full of wisdom that even though I was in a place of death that reeked of blood and echoed with the shrieks of the dying I felt safer than I had ever felt in all my life. He was still laughing at me, delighted at having deceived me for so long.

"Merlin!" I said, and I confess there were tears at my eyes.

"Give me a few minutes," he said, 'hold them off." He was still plucking down scrolls, tearing at their seals and dropping them after a cursory glance. He had taken off the eyepatch, which had merely been a part of his disguise. "Hold them off," he said again, moving to a new rack of unexamined scrolls. "I hear you're good at slaughter, so be very good at it now."

Galahad put the harp and the harpist's stool into the outer doorway, then the two of us defended the pa.s.sage with spear, sword and shields. "Did you know he was here?" I asked Galahad.

"Who?" Galahad rammed his spear into a round Prankish shield and jerked it back.

"Merlin."

"He is?" Galahad was astonished. "Of course I didn't know." A screaming Frank with ringlet ted hair and blood on his beard rammed a spear at me. I gripped it just below the head and used it to tug him on to my sword. Another spear was thrown past me and buried its steel head in the lintel behind. A man tangled his feet in the cacophonous harp strings and stumbled forward to be kicked in the face by Galahad. I chopped the edge of my shield on to the back of the man's neck, then parried a sword cut. The palace rang with screams and was filling with an acrid smoke, but the men attacking us were losing interest in any plunder they might discover in the library, preferring easier pickings elsewhere in the hilltop building.

"Merlin's here?" Galahad asked me in disbelief.

"Look for yourself."

Galahad turned to stare at the tall figure who was so desperately searching among Ban's doomed library.

"That's Merlin?"

"Yes."

"How did you know he was here?"

"I didn't," I said. "Come on, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" This was to a big Frank, leather-cloaked and carrying a double-headed war axe, who wanted to prove himself a hero. He chanted his war hymn as he charged and was still chanting as he died. The axe buried itself in the floorboards by Galahad's feet as he pulled his spear from the man's chest.

"I have it! I have it!" Merlin suddenly shouted behind us. "Silius Italicus, of course! He never wrote eighteen books on the Second Punic War, only seventeen. How can I have been so stupid? You're right, Derfel, I am an old fool! A dangerous fool! Eighteen books on the Second Turgid War? The merest child knows there were only ever seventeen! I have it! Come on, Derfel, don't waste my time! We can't loiter here all night!"

We ran back into the disordered library where I rammed the big work table up against the door as a temporary barrier while Galahad kicked open the shutters on the windows facing the west. A new swarm of Franks surged through the harpist's room and Merlin s.n.a.t.c.hed the wooden cross from around his neck and hurled the feeble missile at the invaders who were momentarily checked by the heavy table. As the cross fell a great burst of flame engulfed the antechamber. I thought the deadly fire was mere coincidence and that the wall to the room had collapsed to let in a furnace surge just as the cross struck, but Merlin claimed it as his own triumph. "The horrible thing had to be good for something," he said of the cross, then cackled at the screaming, burning enemy. "Roast, you worms, roast!" He was thrusting the precious scroll into the breast of his gown. "Did you ever read Silius Italicus?" he asked me.

"Never heard of him, Lord," I said, tugging him towards the open window.

"He wrote epic verse, my dear Derfel, epic verse." He resisted my panicked tugging and placed a hand on my shoulder. "Let me give you some advice." He spoke very seriously. "Shun epic verse. I speak from experience."

I suddenly wanted to cry like a child. It was such relief to look into his wise and wicked eyes again. It was like being reunited with my own father. "I've missed you, Lord," I blurted out.

"Don't go sentimental on me now!" Merlin snapped, then hurried to the window as a Prankish warrior burst through the flames in the doorway and slid along the table's top, screaming defiance. The man's hair was smoking as he thrust his spear towards us. I knocked his blade aside with my shield, lunged with the sword, kicked him and lunged again. "This way!" Galahad shouted from the garden beyond the window. I gave the dying Frank a last cut, then saw that Merlin had gone back to his work table. "Hurry, Lord!" I shouted to him.

"The cat!" Merlin explained. "I can't abandon the cat! Don't be absurd!"

"For the G.o.ds' sake, Lord!" I yelled at him, but Merlin was scrabbling under the table to retrieve the frightened grey cat that he cradled in his arms as he at last scrambled over the sill into a herb garden protected by low bay hedges. The sun was splendid in the west, drenching the sky brilliant red and shivering its fiery reflection across the waters of the bay. We crossed the hedge and followed Galahad down a flight of steps that led to a gardener's hut, then on to a perilous path that ran around the breast of the granite peak. On one side of the path was a stone cliff, and on the other air, but Galahad knew these tracks from childhood and led us confidently down towards the dark water. Bodies floated in the sea. Our boat, crowded to the point where it was a miracle it could even float at all, was already a quarter-mile off the island with its oars labouring to drag its weight of pa.s.sengers to safety. I cupped my hands and shouted. "Culhwch!" My voice echoed off the rock and faded across the sea where it was lost in the immensity of cries and wailing that marked Ynys Trebes's end.

"Let them go," Merlin said calmly, then searched under the dirty robe he had worn as Father Celwin.

"Hold this." He thrust the cat into my arms, then groped again under his robe until he found a small silver horn that he blew once. It gave a sweet note.

Almost immediately a small dark wherry appeared around Ynys Trebes's northern sh.o.r.e. A single robed man propelled the little boat with a long sweep that was gripped by an oarlock at the stern. The wherry had a high pointed prow and room in its belly for just three pa.s.sengers. A wooden chest lay on the bottom boards, branded with Merlin's seal of the Horned G.o.d, Cernunnos. "I made these arrangements," Merlin said airily, 'when it became apparent that poor Ban had no real idea what scrolls he possessed. I thought I would need more time, and so it proved. Of course the scrolls were labelled, but the fili were for ever mixing them up, not to say trying to improve them when they weren't stealing the verse and calling it their own. One wretch spent six months plagiarizing Catullus, then filed him under Plato. Good evening, my dear Caddwg!" he greeted the boatman genially. "All is well?"

"Other than the world dying, yes," Caddwg growled in answer.

"But you've got the chest." Merlin gestured at the sealed box. "Nothing else matters." The elegant wherry had once been a palace boat used to ferry pa.s.sengers from the harbour to the larger ships anch.o.r.ed offsh.o.r.e, and Merlin had arranged for it to wait his summons. Now we stepped aboard and sank to its deck as the dour Caddwg thrust the small craft out into the evening sea. A single spear plunged from the heights to be swallowed by the water alongside us, but otherwise our departure was unnoticed and untroubled. Merlin took the cat from me and settled contentedly in the boat's bows while Galahad and I stared back at the island's death.

Smoke poured across the water. The cries of the doomed were a wailing threnody in the dying day. We could see the dark shapes of Prankish spearmen still crossing the causeway and splashing off its end towards the fallen city. The sun sank, darkening the bay and making the flames in the palace brighter. A curtain caught the fire and flared brief and vivid before crumbling to soft ash. The library burned fiercest; scroll after scroll bursting into quick flame to make that corner of the palace into an inferno. It was King Ban's bale fire burning through the night.

Galahad wept. He knelt on the deck, clutching his spear, and watched his home turn to dust. He made the sign of the cross and said a silent prayer that willed his father's soul to whatever Other-world Ban had believed in. The sea was mercifully calm. It was coloured red and black, blood and death, a perfect mirror for the burning city where our enemy danced in ghoulish triumph. Ynys Trebes was never rebuilt in our time: the walls fell, the weeds grew, seabirds roosted there. Prankish fishermen avoided the island where so many had died. They did not call it Ynys Trebes any more, but gave it a new name in their own coa.r.s.e tongue: the Mount of Death, and at night, their seamen say, when the deserted isle looms black out of an obsidian sea, the cries of women and the whimpering of children can still be heard. We landed on an empty beach on the western side of the bay. We abandoned the boat and carried Merlin's sealed chest up through whin and gale-bent thorn to the headland's high ridge. Full night fell as we reached the summit, and I turned to see Ynys Trebes glowing like a ragged ember in the dark, then I walked on to carry my burden home to Arthur's conscience. Ynys Trebes was dead. We took ship for Britain out of the same river where I had once prayed that Bel and Manawydan would see me safe home. We found Culhwch in the river, his overloaded boat grounded on the mud. Leaner was alive and so were most of our men. One ship fit to make the voyage home was left in the river, its master having waited in hope of making a fat profit from desperate survivors, but Culhwch put his sword to the man's throat and had him take us home for free. The rest of the river's people had already fled from the Franks. We waited through a night made garish by the reflected flames of Ynys Trebes's burning and in the morning we raised the ship's anchor and sailed north.

Merlin watched the sh.o.r.e recede and I, scarce daring to believe that the old man had really come back to us, gazed at him. He was a tall bony man, perhaps the tallest I ever knew, with long white hair that grew back from his tonsure line to be gathered in a black-ribboned pigtail. He had worn his hair loose and dishevelled when he pretended to be Celwin, but now, with the pigtail restored, he looked like the old Merlin. His skin was the colour of old, polished wood, his eyes were green and his nose a sharp bony prow. His beard and moustaches were plaited into fine cords that he liked to twist in his fingers when he was thinking. No one knew how old he was, but certainly I never met anyone older, unless it was the Druid Balise, nor did I ever know any man who seemed so ageless as Merlin. He had all his teeth, every last one, and retained a young man's agility, though he did love to pretend to be old and frail and helpless. He dressed in black, always in black, never another colour, and habitually carried a tall black staff, though now, fleeing from Armorica, he lacked that badge of office. He was a commanding man, not just because of his height, reputation or the elegance of his frame, but because of his presence. Like Arthur, he had the ability to dominate a room and to make a crowded hall seem empty when he left, but where Arthur's presence was generous and enthusiastic, Merlin's was always disturbing. When he looked at you it seemed that he could read the secret part of your heart and, worse still, find it amusing. He was mischievous, impatient, impulsive and totally, utterly wise. He belittled everything, maligned everyone and loved a few people wholly. Arthur was one, Nimue another and I, I think, was a third, though I could never really be sure for he was a man who loved pretence and disguises. "You're looking at me, Derfel!" he accused me from the boat's stern where he still had his back turned towards me.

"I hope never to lose sight of you again, Lord."

"What an emotional fool you are, Derfel." He turned and scowled at me. "I should have thrown you back into Tanaburs's pit. Carry that chest into my cabin."

Merlin had commandeered the shipmaster's cabin where I now stowed the wooden chest. Merlin ducked under the low door, fussed with the captain's pillows to make himself a comfortable seat, then sank down with a sigh of happiness. The grey cat leaped on to his lap as he unrolled the top few inches of the thick scroll he had risked his life to obtain on a crude table that glittered with fish-scales.

"What is it?" I asked.

"It is the one real treasure Ban possessed," Merlin said. "The rest was mostly Greek and Roman rubbish. A few good things, I suppose, but not much."

"So what is it?" I asked again.

"It is a scroll, dear Derfel," he said, as though I was a fool to have asked. He glanced up through the open skylight to see the sail bellying in a wind still soured by Ynys Trebes's smoke. "A good wind!" he said cheerfully. "Home by nightfall, perhaps? I have missed Britain." He looked back to the scroll. "And Nimue? How is the dear child?" he asked as he scanned the first lines.

"The last time I saw her," I said bitterly, 'she'd been raped and had lost an eye."

"These things happen," Merlin said carelessly.

His callousness took my breath away. I waited, then again asked him what was so important about the scroll.

He sighed. "You are an importunate creature, Derfel. Well, I shall indulge you." He let go of the ma.n.u.script so that it rolled itself up, then leaned back on the shipmaster's damp and threadbare pillows.

"You know, of course, who Caleddin was?"

"No, Lord," I admitted.

He threw his hands up in despair. "Are you not ashamed of your ignorance, Derfel? Caleddin was a Druid of the Ordovicii. A wretched tribe, and I should know. One of my wives was an Ordoviciian and one such creature was sufficient for a dozen lifetimes. Never again." He shuddered at the memory, then peered up at me. "Gundleus raped Nimue, right?"

"Yes." I wondered how he knew.

"Foolish man! Foolish man!" He seemed amused rather than angry at his lover's fate. "How he will suffer. Is Nimue angry?"

"Furious."

"Good. Fury is very useful, and dear Nimue has a talent for it. One of the things I can't stand about Christians is their admiration of meekness. Imagine elevating meekness into a virtue! Meekness! Can you imagine a heaven filled only with the meek? What a dreadful idea. The food would get cold while everyone pa.s.sed the dishes to everyone else. Meekness is no good, Derfel. Anger and selfishness, those are the qualities that make the world march." He laughed. "Now, about Caleddin. He was a fair Druid for an Ordoviciian, not nearly as good as me, of course, but he had his better days. I did enjoy your attempt to murder Lancelot, by the way, a pity you didn't finish the job. I suppose he escaped from the city?"

"As soon as it was doomed, yes."

"Sailors say rats are always first off the doomed ship. Poor Ban. He was a fool, but a good fool."

"Did he know who you were?" I asked.

"Of course he knew," Merlin said. "It would have been monstrously rude of me to have deceived my host. He didn't tell anyone else, of course, otherwise I'd have been besieged by those dreadful poets all asking me to use magic to make their wrinkles disappear. You've no idea, Derfel, how bothersome a little magic can be. Ban knew who I was, and so did Caddwg. He's my servant. Poor Hywel's dead, yes?"

"If you already know," I said, 'why do you ask?"

"I'm just making conversation!" he protested. "Conversation is one of the civilized arts, Derfel. We can't all stump through life with a sword and shield, growling. A few of us do try to preserve the dignities." He sniffed.

"So how do you know Hywel's dead?" I asked.

"Because Bed win wrote and told me, of course, you idiot."

"Bedwin's been writing to you all these years?" I asked in astonishment.

"Of course! He needed my advice. What do you think I did? Vanish?"

"You did," I said resentfully.

"Nonsense. You simply didn't know where to look for me. Not that Bedwin took my advice about anything. What a mess the man has made! Mordred alive! Pure foolishness. The child should have been strangled with his own birth cord, but I suppose Uther could never have been persuaded of that. Poor Uther. He believed that virtues are handed down through a man's loins! What nonsense! A child is like a calf; if the thing is born crippled you knock it smartly on the skull and serve the cow again. That's why the G.o.ds made it such a pleasure to engender children, because so many of the little brutes have to be replaced. There's not much pleasure in the process for women, of course, but someone has to suffer and thank the G.o.ds it's them and not us."

"Did you ever have children?" I asked, wondering why I had never thought to enquire before.

"Of course I did! What an extraordinary question." He gazed at me as though he doubted my sanity. "I never liked any of them very much and happily most of them died and the rest I've disowned. One, I think, is even a Christian." He shuddered. "I much prefer other people's children; they're so much more grateful. Now what were we talking about? Oh yes, Caleddin. Terrible man." He shook his head gloomily.

"Did he write the scroll?" I asked.

"Don't be absurd, Derfel," he snapped impatiently. "Druids are not allowed to write anything down, it's against the rules. You know that! Once you write something down it becomes fixed. It becomes dogma. People can argue about it, they become authoritative, they refer to the texts, they produce new ma.n.u.scripts, they argue more and soon they're putting each other to death. If you never write anything down then no one knows exactly what you said so you can always change it. Do I have to explain everything to you?"

"You can explain what is written on the scroll," I said humbly.

"I was doing precisely that! But you keep interrupting me and changing the subject! Extraordinary behaviour! And to think you grew up on the Tor. I should have had you whipped more often, that might have given you better manners. I hear Gwlyddyn is rebuilding my hall?"

"Yes."

"A good, honest man, Gwlyddyn. I shall probably have to rebuild it all myself but he does try."

"The scroll," I reminded him.

"I know! I know! Caleddin was a Druid, I told you that. An Ordoviciian, too. Dreadful beasts, Ordoviciians. Whatever, cast your mind back to the Black Year and ask yourself how Suetonius knew all he did about our religion. You do know who Suetonius was, I suppose?" The question was an insult, for all Britons know and revile the name of Suetonius Paulinus, the Governor appointed by the Emperor Nero and who, in the Black Year that occurred some four hundred years before our time, virtually destroyed our ancient religion. Every Briton grew up with the dread tale of how Suetonius two legions had crushed the Druid sanctuary on Ynys Mon. Ynys Mon, like Ynys Trebes, was an island, the greatest sanctuary of our G.o.ds, but the Romans had somehow crossed the straits and put all the Druids, bards and priestesses to the sword. They had cut down the sacred groves and defiled the holy lake so that all we had left was but a shadow of the old religion and our Druids, like Tanaburs and lorweth, were just faint echoes of an old glory. "I know who Suetonius was," I told Merlin.

"There was another Suetonius," he said with amus.e.m.e.nt. "A Roman writer, and rather a good one. Ban possessed his De Viris Ill.u.s.tribus which is mainly about the lives of the poets. Suetonius was particularly scandalous about Virgil. It's extraordinary what things poets will take to their beds; mostly each other, of course. It's a pity that work burned, for I never saw another. Ban's scroll might well have been the very last copy, and it's just ashes now. Virgil will be relieved. Whatever, the point is that Suetonius Paulinus wanted to know everything there was to know about our religion before he attacked Ynys Mon. He wanted to make certain we wouldn't turn him into a toad or a poet, so he found himself a traitor, Caleddin the Druid. And Caleddin dictated everything he knew to a Roman scribe who copied it all down in what looks to be execrable Latin. But execrable or not, it is the only record of our old religion; all its secrets, all its rituals, all its meanings and all its power. And this, child, is it." He gestured at the scroll and managed to knock it off the table.