The Winter King Part 15

"Nothing," I said. "Does she live?"

"Who knows? No living person goes there, or if they do, they cannot return."

"But that's where Merlin must have gone!" I cried in relief. Merlin had doubtless heard the news from the man he had been whispering with at the back of the courtyard, and Merlin could do what no other man or woman dare do. The Isle of the Dead would hold no terrors for Merlin. What else would have made him vanish so precipitately? In a day or two, I thought, he would return to Durnovaria with Nimue rescued and restored. It had to be thus.

"Pray G.o.d it is," Bedwin said, 'for her sake."

"What happened to Sansum?" I asked vengefully.

"He wasn't punished officially," Bedwin said, 'but Guinevere persuaded Arthur to strip him of Mordred's chaplaincy and then the old fellow who administered the shrine of the Holy Thorn at Ynys Wydryn died and I managed to persuade our young Bishop to take over there. He wasn't happy, but he knew he'd made too many enemies in Durnovaria, so he accepted." Bedwin was plainly delighted at Sansum's fall.

"He's certainly lost his power here and I don't see him getting it back. Not unless he's a great deal more subtle than I think. He, of course, is one of those who whisper that Arthur should be sacrificed. Nabur is another. There's a Mordred faction in our kingdom, Derfel, and it asks why we should fight to preserve Arthur's life."

I stepped round a puddle of vomit thrown up by a drunken soldier come from the hall. The man groaned, looked up at me, then retched again. "Who else could rule Dumnonia?" I asked Bedwin when we were safely out of the drunk's hearing.

"There's a good question, Derfel, who indeed? Gorfyddyd, of course, or else his son Cuneglas. Some men whisper Gereint's name, but he doesn't want it. Nabur even suggested I might take over. He said nothing specific, of course, nothing but hints." Bedwin chuckled derisively. "But what use would I be against our enemies? We need Arthur. No one else could have held off this ring of enemies for so long, Derfel, but folk don't understand that. They blame him for the chaos, yet if anyone else was in power the chaos would be worse. We're a kingdom without a proper king so every ambitious rogue has his eye on Mordred's throne."

I stopped beside the bronze bust that looked so like Gorfyddyd. "If Arthur had just married Ceinwyn -' I began.

Bedwin interrupted me. "If, Derfel, if. If Mordred's father had lived, or if Arthur had killed Gorfyddyd instead of just taking his arm, everything would be different. History is nothing but ifs. And perhaps you're right. Perhaps if Arthur had married Ceinwyn we would be at peace now and perhaps Aelle's head would be planted on a spear-point in Caer Cadarn, but how long do you think Gorfyddyd would have endured Arthur's success? And remind yourself why Gorfyddyd agreed to the marriage in the first place."

"For peace?" I suggested.

"Dear me, no. Gorfyddyd only allowed Ceinwyn to be betrothed because he believed her son, his grandson, would rule Dumnonia instead of Mordred. I should have thought that was obvious."

"Not to me," I said, for at Caer Sws, when Arthur had been struck mad by love, I had been a mere spearman in the guard, not a captain who needed to probe the motives of kings and princes.

"We need Arthur," Bedwin said, looking up into my eyes. "And if Arthur needs Guinevere, then so be it." He shrugged and walked on. "I would have preferred Ceinwyn as his wife, but the choice and the marriage-bed were not mine to make. Now, poor thing, she'll marry Gundleus."

"Gundleus!" I said too loudly, startling the sick soldier who groaned over his vomit. "Ceinwyn will marry Gundleus?" I asked Bedwin.

"Their betrothal ceremony is in two weeks," Bedwin said calmly, 'during Lughnasa." Lughnasa was the summer festival of Lleullaw, G.o.d of Light, and was dedicated to fertility, and thus any betrothal made at the feast was considered particularly auspicious. "They'll marry in late autumn, after the war." He paused, aware that his last three words suggested that Gorfyddyd and Gundleus would win the war, and that the marriage ceremony would thus be a part of the victor's celebrations. "Gorfyddyd has sworn to give them Arthur's head as a wedding gift," Bedwin added sadly.

"But Gundleus is already married!" I protested, wondering why I was so indignant. Was it because I remembered Ceinwyn's fragile beauty? I still wore her brooch inside my breastplate, but I told myself my indignation was not because of her, but simply because I hated Gundleus.

"Being married to Ladwys didn't stop Gundleus marrying Nor-wenna," Bedwin said scornfully. "He'll put Ladwys aside, go three times round the sacred rock then kiss the magic toadstool or whatever else you pagans do to get divorced these days. He's not a Christian any more, by the way. A pagan divorce, marry Ceinwyn, serve her with an heir, then hurry back to Ladwys's bed. That seems to be the way of things nowadays." He paused, c.o.c.king an ear towards the sounds of laughter coming from the hall.

"Though maybe," he went on, 'in years to come we shall think of these days as the last of the good times." Something in his voice made my spirits sink even further. "Are we doomed?" I asked him.

"If Aelle keeps his truce we may last another year, but only if we defeat Gorfyddyd. And if not? Then we must pray Merlin has brought us new life." He shrugged, but did not seem very hopeful. He was not a good Christian, Bishop Bedwin, though he was a very good man. Sansum now tells me that Bedwin's goodness will not prevent his soul from roasting in h.e.l.l. But that summer, fresh back from Benoic, all our souls seemed doomed to perdition. The harvest was just beginning, but once it was gathered, Gorfyddyd's onslaught would come.

PART FOUR.

The Isle of the Dead

IGRAINE DEMANDED TO see Ceinwyn's brooch. She held it in the window, turning it and gazing at its golden spirals. I could see the desire in her eyes. "You have many that are more beautiful," I told her gently.

"But none so full of story," she said, holding the brooch against her breast.

"My story, dear Queen," I chided her, 'not yours."

She smiled. "But what did you write? That if I were as kind as you know me to be, then I would let you keep it?"

"Did I write that?"

"Because you knew that would make me give it back to you. You are a cunning old man, Brother Derfel." She held the brooch out to me, then folded her fingers over the gold before I could take it. "Will it be mine one day?"

"No one else's, dear Lady. I promise."

She still held it. "And you won't let Bishop Sansum take it?"

"Never," I said fervently.

She dropped it into my hand. "Did you really wear it under your breastplate?"

"Always," I said, tucking the brooch safe under my robe.

"Poor Ynys Trebes." She was sitting in her usual place on my window-sill from where she could stare down Dinnewrac's valley towards the distant river that was swollen with an early summer rain. Was she imagining Prankish invaders crossing the ford and swarming up the slopes? "What happened to Leanor?" she asked, surprising me with the question.

"The harpist? She died."

"No! But I thought you said she escaped from Ynys Trebes?" I nodded. "She did, but she sickened her first winter in Britain and died. Just died."

"And what about your woman?"

"Mine?"

"In Ynys Trebes. You said that Galahad had Leaner, but that the rest of you all had women too, so who was yours? And what happened to her?"

"I don't know."

"Oh, Derfel! She can't have been nothing!"

I sighed. "She was a fisherman's daughter. Her name was Pellcyn, only everyone called her Puss. Her husband had drowned a year before I met her. She had a baby daughter, and when Culhwch led our survivors to the boat Puss fell off the cliff path. She was holding her baby, you see, and couldn't hold on to the rocks. There was chaos and everyone was panicking and hurrying. It was no one's fault." Though if I had been there, I have often thought, Pellcyn would have lived. She was a st.u.r.dy, bright-eyed girl with a quick laugh and an inexhaustible appet.i.te for hard work. A good woman. But if I had saved her life Merlin would have died. Fate is inexorable.

Igraine must have been thinking the same. "I wish I'd met Merlin," she said wistfully.

"He'd have liked you," I said. "He always liked pretty women."

"But so did Lancelot?" she asked quickly.

"Oh, yes."

"Not boys?"

"Not boys."

Igraine laughed. This day she was wearing an embroidered dress of blue dyed linen that suited her fair skin and dark hair. Two gold torques circled her neck and a tangle of bracelets rattled on a slim wrist. She stank of faeces, a fact I was diplomatic enough to ignore for I realized she must be wearing a pessary of a newborn baby's first motions, an old remedy for a barren woman. Poor Igraine. "You hated Lancelot?" she suddenly accused me.

"Utterly."

"That isn't fair!" She jumped up from the window-sill and paced to and fro in the small room. "People's stories shouldn't be told by their enemies. Supposing Nwylle wrote mine?"

"Who is Nwylle?"

"You don't know her," she said, frowning, and I guessed Nwylle was her husband's lover. "But it isn't fair," she insisted, 'because everyone knows Lancelot was the greatest of Arthur's soldiers. Everyone!"

"I don't."

"But he must have been brave!"

I stared through the window, trying to be fair in my mind, trying to find something good to say about my worst enemy. "He could be brave," I said, 'but he chose not to be. He fought sometimes, but usually he avoided battle. He was frightened of his face being scarred, you see. He was very vain about his looks. He collected Roman mirrors. The mirrored room in Benoic's palace was Lancelot's room. He could sit there and admire himself on every wall."

"I don't believe he was as bad as you make him sound," Igraine protested.

"I think he was worse," I said. I do not enjoy writing about Lancelot for the memory of him lies like a stain on my life. "Above everything," I told Igraine, 'he was dishonest. He told lies out of choice because he wanted to hide the truth about himself, but he also knew how to make people like him when he wanted. He could charm the fish from the sea, my dear."

She sniffed, unhappy at my judgment. Doubtless, when Dafydd ap Gruffud translates these words, Lancelot will be burnished just as he would have liked. Shining Lancelot! Upright Lancelot! Handsome, dancing, smiling, witty, elegant Lancelot! He was the King without Land and the Lord of Lies, but if Igraine has her way he will shine through the years as the very paragon of kingly warriors. Igraine peered through the window to where Sansum was driving a group of lepers from our gate. The saint was flinging clods of earth at them, screaming at them to go to the devil and summoning our other brothers to help him. The novice Tudwal, who daily grows ruder to the rest of us, danced beside his master and cheered him on. Igraine's guards, lolling at the kitchen door as usual, finally appeared and used their spears to rid the monastery of the diseased beggars. "Did Sansum really want to sacrifice Arthur?" Igraine asked.

"So Bedwin told me."

Igraine gave me a sly look. "Does Sansum like boys, Derfel?"

"The saint loves everyone, dear Queen, even young women who ask impertinent questions." She smiled dutifully, then grimaced. "I'm sure he doesn't like women. Why won't he let any of you marry? Other monks marry, but none here."

"The pious and beloved Sansum," I explained, 'believes women distract us from our duty of adoring G.o.d. Just like you distract me from my proper work."

She laughed, then suddenly remembered an errand and looked serious. "There are two words Dafydd did not understand in the last batch of skins, Derfel. He wants you to explain them. Catamite?"

"Tell him to ask someone else."

"I shall ask someone else, certainly," she said indignantly. "And camel? He says it isn't coal."

"A camel is a mythical beast, Lady, with horns, wings, scales, a forked tail and flames for breath."

"It sounds like Nwylle," Igraine said.

"Ah! The Gospel writers at work! My two evangelists!" Sansum, his hands dirty from the earth he had thrown at the lepers, sidled into the room to give this present parchment a dubious look before wrinkling his nose. "Do I smell something foul?" he asked.

I looked sheepish. "The beans at breakfast, Lord Bishop," I said. "I apologize."

"I am astonished you can abide his company," Sansum said to Igraine. "And shouldn't you be in the chapel, my Lady? Praying for a baby? Is that not your business here?"

"It's certainly not yours," Igraine said tartly. "If you must know, my Lord Bishop, we were discussing our Saviour's parables. Did you not once preach to us about the camel and the needle's eye?" Sansum grunted and looked over my shoulder. "And what, foul Brother Derfel, is the Saxon word for camel?"

"Nwylle," I said.

Igraine laughed and Sansum glared at her. "My Lady finds the words of our blessed Lord amusing?"

"I am just happy to be here," Igraine said humbly, 'but I would love to know what a camel is."

"Everyone knows!" Sansum said derisively. "A camel is a fish, a great fish! Not unlike," he added slyly, 'the salmon that your husband sometimes remembers to send to us poor monks?"

"I shall have him send more," Igraine said, 'with the next batch of Derfel's skins, and I know he'll be sending some of those soon for this Saxon Gospel is very dear to the King."

"It is?" Sansum asked suspiciously.

"Very dear, my Lord Bishop," Igraine said firmly.

She is a clever girl, very clever, and beautiful too. King Brochvael is a fool if he takes a lover as well as his Queen, but men were ever fools for women. Or some men were, and chief of them, I suppose, was Arthur. Dear Arthur, my Lord, my Gift-Giver, most generous of men, whose tale this is. It was strange to be home, especially as I had no home. I possessed some gold torques and sc.r.a.ps of jewellery, but those, save Ceinwyn's brooch, I sold so that my men would at least have food in their first days back in Britain. My other belongings had all been in Ynys Trebes, and now they formed a part of some Frank's h.o.a.rd. I was poor, homeless, with nothing more to give to my men, not even a hall in which to feast them, but they forgave me that. They were good men and sworn to my service. Like me, they had left behind anything they could not carry when Ynys Trebes fell. Like me they were poor, yet none of them complained. Cavan simply said a soldier must take his losses like he takes his plunder, lightly. Issa, a farm boy who was an extraordinary spearman, tried to return a narrow gold torque that I had given him. It was not just, he said, that a spearman should wear a gold torque when his captain did not, but I would not take it, so Issa gave it as a token to the girl he had brought home from Benoic and the next day she ran off with a tramping priest and his band of wh.o.r.es. The countryside was full of such travelling Christians, missionaries they called themselves, and almost all of them had a band of women believers who were supposed to a.s.sist in the Christian rituals, but who, it was rumoured, were more likely to be used for the seduction of converts to the new religion.

Arthur gave me a hall just north of Durnovaria: not for my own, since it belonged to an heiress named Gyllad, an orphan, but Arthur made me her protector; a position which usually ended with the ruination of the child and the enrichment of the guardian. Gyllad was scarcely eight years old and I could have married her had I wanted and then disposed of her property, or else I could have sold her hand in marriage to a man willing to buy the bride along with the farmland, but instead, as Arthur had intended, I lived off Gyllad's rents and allowed her to grow in peace. Even so her relatives protested at my appointment. That very same week of my return from Ynys Trebes, when I had been in Gyllad's hall scarce two days, an uncle of hers, a Christian, appealed against my protector ship to Nabur, the Christian magistrate in Durnovaria, saying that before his death Gyllad's father had promised him the guardianship, and I only managed to keep Arthur's gift by posting my spearmen all around the courthouse. They were in full war gear with spearheads whetted bright, and their presence somehow persuaded the uncle and his supporters not to press their suit. The town guards were summoned, but one look at my veterans persuaded them that maybe they had better business elsewhere. Nabur complained about returning soldiers committing thuggery in a peaceful town, but when my opponents did not appear in court he weakly awarded me the judgment. I later heard the uncle had already purchased the opposite verdict from Nabur and that he was never able to have his money refunded. I appointed one of my men, Llystan, who had lost a foot in a battle in Benoic's woods, as Gyllad's steward and he, like the heiress and her estate, prospered.

Arthur summoned me the following week. I found him in the palace hall where he was eating his midday meal with Guinevere. He ordered a couch and more food to be fetched for me. The courtyard outside was crowded with pet.i.tioners. "Poor Arthur," Guinevere commented, 'one visit home and suddenly every man is complaining about his neighbour or demanding a reduction in rent. Why don't they use the magistrates?"

"Because they're not rich enough to bribe them," Arthur said.

"Or powerful enough to surround the courthouse with iron-helmed men?" Guinevere added, smiling to show that she did not disapprove of my action. She wouldn't, for she was a sworn opponent of Nabur who was a leader of the kingdom's Christian faction.

"A spontaneous gesture of support by my men," I said blandly, and Arthur laughed. It was a happy meal. I was rarely alone with Arthur and Guinevere, yet when I was I always saw how contented she made him. She had a barbed wit that he lacked, but liked, and she used it gently, as she knew he preferred it used. She flattered Arthur, yet she also gave him good advice. Arthur was ever ready to believe the best about people and he needed Guinevere's scepticism to redress that optimism. She looked no older than the last time I had been so close to her, though maybe there was a new shrewdness in those green huntress eyes. I could see no evidence that she was pregnant: her pale green dress lay flat over her belly where a gold-ta.s.selled rope hung like a loose belt. Her badge of the moon-crested stag hung around her neck beneath the heavy sun-rays of the Saxon necklace that Arthur had sent her from Durocobrivis. She had scorned the necklace when I had presented it to her, but now wore it proudly.

The conversation at that midday meal was mostly light. wanted to know why the blackbirds and thrushes stopped singing in the summer, but neither of us had an answer, any more than we could tell him where the martins and swallows went in winter, though Merlin once told me they went to a great cave in the northern wilderness where they slept in huge feathered clumps until the spring. Guinevere pressed me about Merlin and I promised her, upon my life, that the Druid had indeed returned to Britain. "He's gone to the Isle of the Dead," I told her.

"He's done what?" Arthur asked, appalled.

I explained about Nimue and remembered to thank Guinevere for her efforts to save my friend from Sansum's revenge.

"Poor Nimue," Guinevere said. "But she is a fierce creature, isn't she? I liked her, but I don't think she liked us. We are all too frivolous! And I could not interest her in Isis. Isis, she'd tell me, is a foreign G.o.ddess, and then she would spit like a little cat and mutter a prayer to Manawydan." Arthur showed no reaction to the mention of Isis and I supposed he had lost his fears of the strange G.o.ddess. "I wish I knew Nimue better," he said instead.

"You will," I said, 'when Merlin brings her back from the dead."

"If he can," Arthur said dubiously. "No one ever has come back from the Isle."

"Nimue will," I insisted.

"She is extraordinary," Guinevere said, 'and if anyone can survive the Isle, she can."

"With Merlin's help," I added.

Only at the meal's end did our talk turn to Ynys Trebes, and even then Arthur was careful not to mention the name Lancelot. Instead he regretted that he had no gift with which he could reward me for my efforts.

"Being home is reward enough, Lord Prince," I said, remembering to use the t.i.tle Guinevere preferred.