I said after a while, "I shall find Dinas and Lavaine and their deaths will be terrible."
Ceinwyn squeezed my arm. "We were all so happy," she said. She had begun crying again and I tried to find words to console her, but there could be no explanation of why the G.o.ds had s.n.a.t.c.hed Dian away. Behind us, bright in the night sky, the flames and smoke of Ermid"s Hall boiled towards the stars. The hall thatch had at last caught the fire and our old life was being burned to ashes. We followed a twisting path beside the mere. The moon had slid from behind its clouds to cast a silver light on the rushes and willows and on the shallow, wind-rippled lake. We walked towards the sea, but I had scarcely thought what we should do when we reached the sh.o.r.e. Lancelot"s men would search for us, that much was certain, and somehow we would need to find safety. Merlin had questioned our prisoners before I killed them and he now told Ceinwyn and me what he had learned. Much of it we already knew. Mordred was said to have been killed while hunting, and one of the prisoners had claimed that the King had been murdered by the father of a girl he had raped. Arthur was rumoured to be dead and so Lancelot had declared himself the King of Dumnonia. The Christians had welcomed him in the belief that Lancelot was their new John the Baptist, a man who had presaged the first coming of Christ just as Lancelot now presaged the second.
"Arthur didn"t die," I said bitterly. "He was meant to, and I was meant to die with him, but they failed. And how," I asked, "if I saw Arthur just thee days ago, did Lancelot hear of his death so soon?"
"He hasn"t heard of it," Merlin said calmly. "He"s just hoping for it."
I spat. "It"s Sansum and Lancelot," I said angrily. "Lancelot probably arranged for Mordred"s death and Sansum arranged ours. Now Sansum has his Christian King and Lancelot has Dumnonia."
"Except that you live," Ceinwyn said quietly.
"And Arthur lives," I said, "and if Mordred"s dead, then the throne is Arthur"s."
"Only if he defeats Lancelot," Merlin said drily.
"Of course he"ll defeat Lancelot," I said scornfully.
"Arthur"s weakened," Merlin warned me gently. "Scores of his men have been killed. All Mordred"s guards are dead and so are all the spearmen at Caer Cadarn. Cei and his men are dead in Isca, or if they"re not dead, they"re fugitives. The Christians have risen, Derfel. I hear they marked their houses with the sign of the fish, and any house that didn"t carry the mark had its inhabitants slaughtered." He paced in gloomy silence for a while. "They"re cleansing Britain for the coming of their G.o.d."
"But Lancelot hasn"t killed Sagramor," I said, hoping that what I said was true, "and Sagramor leads an army."
"Sagramor lives," Merlin a.s.sured me, and then delivered the worst news of that terrible night, "but he"s been attacked by Cerdic. It seems to me," he went on, "that Lancelot and Cerdic might well have agreed to divide Dumnonia between them. Cerdic will take the frontier lands and Lancelot will rule the rest."
I could find nothing to say. It seemed incomprehensible. Cerdic was loose in Dumnonia? And the Christians had risen to make Lancelot their King? And it had all happened so swiftly, within days, and there had been no sign of it before I left Dumnonia.
"There were signs," Merlin said, reading my mind. "There were signs, it was just that none of us took them seriously. Who cared if a few Christians painted the fish on their house walls? Who took any notice of their frenzies? We became so used to their priests" ranting that we no longer listened to what they were saying. And which of us believes that their G.o.d will come to Britain in four years" time? There were signs all around us, Derfel, and we were blind to them. But that"s not what caused this horror."
"Sansum and Lancelot caused it," I said.
"The Cauldron brought it," Merlin said. "Someone has used it, Derfel, and its power is loose in the land. I suspect Dinas and Lavaine have it, but they don"t know how to control it and so they"ve spilt its horror."
I walked on in silence. The Severn Sea was visible now, a crawling flood of silver black beneath a sinking moon. Ceinwyn was crying softly and I took her hand. "I discovered," I said to her, trying to distract her from her grief, "who my father is. Just yesterday I found it out."
"Your father is Aelle," Merlin said placidly.
I gazed at him. "How did you know?"
"It"s in your face, Derfel, in your face. Tonight, when you came through the gate, you only needed a black bear cloak to be him." He smiled at me. "I remember you as an earnest little boy, all questions and frowns, then tonight you came like a warrior of the G.o.ds, a terrifying thing of iron and steel and plume and shield."
"Is it true?" Ceinwyn asked me.
"Yes," I admitted, and feared what her reaction might be.
I need not have feared. "Then Aelle must be a very great man," she said firmly, and gave me a sad smile, "Lord Prince."
We reached the sea and turned north. We had nowhere else to go except towards Gwent and Powys where the madness had not spread, but our path ended at a place where the sand of the beach petered out into a spit where the incoming tide broke white on a rippled expanse of mud. To our left was the sea, to our right were the marshes of Avalon, and it seemed to me that we were trapped there, but Merlin told us we should not worry. "Rest," he said, "for help will come soon." He looked east to see a glimmer of light showing above the hills beyond the marsh. "Dawn," he announced, "and when the sun is full up, our help will come." He sat and played with Seren and her kittens while the rest of us lay on the sand, our bundles beside us, as Pyrlig, our bard, sang the Love Song of Rhiannon that had always been Dian"s favourite song. Ceinwyn, one arm around Morwenna, wept while I just stared at the fretting grey sea and dreamed of revenge.
The sun rose, promising another lovely summer"s day in Dumnonia, only on this day the iron-clad hors.e.m.e.n would be spreading across the countryside to find us. The Cauldron had at last been used, the Christians had flocked to Lancelot"s banner, horror was spilling across the land and all Arthur"s work was under siege.
Lancelot"s men were not the only ones who searched for us that morning. The marsh villages had heard the news of Ermid"s Hall, just as they had heard that the ghoulish ceremony in Ynys Wydryn had been a Christian wedding, and any enemy of the Christians was a friend of the marsh folk, so their boatmen and trackers and hunters ranged wide across the swamps in search of us.
They found us two hours after sunrise and led us north through the marsh paths where no enemy would dare intrude. By nightfall, out of the marshes now, we were close to the town of Abona where ships sailed for the Silurian coast with cargoes of grain, pottery, tin and lead. A band of Lancelot"s men guarded the Roman-built wharves that lined the river-port, but his army was thinly scattered and there were no more than twenty spearmen watching the ships, and most of those spearmen were half drunk from a looted cargo of mead. We killed them all. Death had already come to Abona, for the bodies of a dozen pagans lay on the mud above the river"s tide line. The fanatical Christians who had slaughtered the pagans had already left, gone to join Lancelot"s army, and the folk who remained in the town were fearful. They told us what had happened in the town, swore their own innocence in the killings, then barred their doors that all bore the mark of the fish. Next morning, on a rising tide, we sailed for Silurian Isca, the fort on the Usk where Lancelot had once made his palace when he had sulked on Siluria"s inadequate throne.
Ceinwyn sat next to me in the boat"s scuppers. "It"s strange," she said, "how wars come and go with kings."
"How?" I asked.
She shrugged. "Uther died and there was nothing but fighting till Arthur killed my father, then we had peace, and now Mordred comes to the throne and we have war again. It"s like the seasons, Derfel. War comes and it goes." She leaned her head on my shoulder. "So what will happen now?" she asked.
"You and the girls will go north to Caer Sws," I said, "and I shall stay and fight."
"Will Arthur fight?" she asked.
"If Guinevere"s been killed," I said, "he"ll fight till there isn"t an enemy left alive." We had heard nothing of Guinevere, but with Christians marauding throughout Dumnonia it seemed unlikely that she would have been left unmolested.
"Poor Guinevere," Ceinwyn said, "and poor Gwydre." She was very fond of Arthur"s son. We landed in the River Usk, safe at last on territory ruled by Meurig, and from there we walked north to Gwent"s capital, Burrium. Gwent was a Christian country, but it had not been infected by the madness that had swept Dumnonia. Gwent already had a Christian King, and maybe that circ.u.mstance had been sufficient to keep its people calm. Meurig blamed Arthur. "He should have suppressed paganism," he told us.
"Why, Lord King?" I asked. "Arthur"s a pagan himself "Christ"s truth is blindingly obvious, I should have thought," Meurig said. "If a man cannot read the tides of history, then he only has himself to blame. Christianity is the future, Lord Derfel, and paganism is its past."
"Not much of a future," I said scornfully, "if history is to end in four years."
"It doesn"t end!" Meurig said. "It begins! When Christ comes again, Lord Derfel, the days of glory arrive! We shall all be Kings, all be joyful and all be blessed."
"Except us pagans."
"Naturally, h.e.l.l must be fed. But there is still time for you to accept the true faith."
Both Ceinwyn and I declined his invitation of baptism and next morning she left for Powys with Morwenna, Seren and the other wives and children. We spearmen embraced our families, then watched them walk north. Meurig gave them an escort, and I sent six of my own men with orders to come back south as soon as the women were safe under Cuneglas"s guard. Malaine, Powys"s Druid, went with them, but Merlin and Nimue, whose quest for the Cauldron was suddenly burning as hot as ever it had on the Dark Road, stayed with us.
King Meurig travelled with us to Glevum. That town was Dumnonian, but right on the border of Gwent, and its earth and timber walls guarded Meurig"s land, so, sensibly enough, he had already garrisoned it with his own spearmen to make sure that the tumults of Dumnonia did not spread north into Gwent. It took us a half day to reach Glevum and there, in the great Roman hall where Uther"s last High Council had been held, I found the rest of my men, Arthur"s men, and Arthur himself. He saw me come into the hall and the look of relief on his face was so heartfelt that tears came to my eyes. My spearmen, those who had stayed with Arthur when I went south to find my mother, cheered, and the next few moments were a bl.u.s.ter of reunions and news. I told them of Ermid"s Hall, told them the names of the men who had died, a.s.sured them that their women still lived, then looked at Arthur. "But they killed Dian," I said.
"Dian?" I think he did not believe me at first.
"Dian," I said, and the wretched tears came again.
Arthur eased me out of the hall and walked with his right arm about my shoulders to Glevum"s ramparts where Meurig"s red-cloaked spearmen now manned every fighting platform. He made me tell him the whole tale again, right from the moment I had left him until the moment we took ship from Abona.
"Dinas and Lavaine." He spoke the names bitterly, then he drew Excalibur and kissed the grey blade.
"Your vengeance is mine," he said formally, then slid the sword back into her scabbard. For a time we said nothing, but just leaned on the top of the wall and stared at the wide valley south of Glevum. It looked so peaceful. The hay crop was nearly reach for cutting and there were bright poppies in the growing corn. "Do you have news of Guinevere?"
Arthur broke the silence and I heard something close to desperation in his voice.
"No, Lord."
He shuddered, then regained control of himself. "The Christians hate her," he said softly, and then, uncharacteristically, he touched the iron of Excalibur"s hilt to avert evil.
"Lord," I tried to rea.s.sure him, "she has guards. And her palace is by the sea. She would have escaped if there was danger."
"To where? Broceliande? But suppose Cerdic sent ships?" He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then shook his head. "We can only wait for news."
I asked him about Mordred, but he had heard nothing more than the rest of us. "I suspect he is dead,"
he said bleakly, "for if he had escaped then he should have reached us here by now"
He did have news of Sagramor, and that news was bad. "Cerdic hurt him hard. Caer Ambra"s fallen, Calleva"s gone and Corinium is under siege. It should hold out a few days yet, for Sagramor managed to add two hundred spears to its garrison, but their food will be gone by the month"s end. It seems we have war again." He gave a short, harsh bark of laughter. "You were right about Lancelot, weren"t you? and I was blind. I thought him a friend." I said nothing, but just glanced at him and saw, to my surprise, that there were grey hairs at his temples. To me he still seemed young, but I supposed that if any man were to meet him now for the first time they would think him on the edge of his middle years. "How could Lancelot have brought Cerdic into Dumnonia," he asked angrily, "or encouraged the Christians in their madness?"
"Because he wants to be King of Dumnonia," I said, "and he needs their spears. And Sansum wants to be his chief councillor, his royal treasurer and everything else too."
Arthur shuddered. "You think Sansum really planned our deaths at Cadoc"s shrine?"
"Who else?" I asked. It was Sansum, I believed, who had first linked the fish on Lancelot"s shield with the name of Christ, and Sansum who had whipped the excited Christian community into a fervour that would sweep Lancelot onto Dumnonia"s throne. I doubted that Sansum put much faith in his Christ"s imminent coming, but he did want to hold as much power as he could and Lancelot was Sansum"s candidate for Dumnonia"s kingship. If Lancelot succeeded in holding the throne, all the reins of power would lead back to the mouse-lord"s paws. "He"s a dangerous little b.a.s.t.a.r.d," I said vengefully. "We should have killed him ten years ago."
"Poor Morgan," Arthur sighed. Then he grimaced. "What did we do wrong?" he asked me.
"We?" I said indignantly. "We did nothing wrong."
"We never understood what the Christians wanted," he said, "but what could we have done if we had? They were never going to accept anything less than utter victory."
"It"s nothing we did," I said, "only what the calendar does to them. The year 500 has made them mad."
"I had hoped," he said softly, "that we had weaned Dumnonia away from madness."
"You gave them peace, Lord," I said, "and peace gave them the chance to breed their madness. If we"d been fighting the Saxons all those years their energies would have gone into battle and survival, but instead we gave them the chance to foment their idiocies."
He shrugged. "But what do we do now?"
"Now?" I said. "We fight!"
"With what?" he asked bitterly. "Sagramor has his hands full with Cerdic. Cuneglas will send us spears, I"m sure, but Meurig won"t fight."
"He won"t?" I asked, alarmed. "But he swore the Round Table oath!"
Arthur smiled sadly. "These oaths, Derfel, how they haunt us. And these sad days, it seems, men take them so lightly. Lancelot swore the oath too, did he not? But Meurig says that with Mordred dead there is no casus belli? He quoted the Latin bitterly, and I remembered Meurig using the same words before Lugg Vale, and how Culhwch had mocked the King"s erudition by twisting the Latin into "cow"s belly".
"Culhwch will come," I said.
"To fight for Mordred"s land?" Arthur asked. "I doubt it."
"To fight for you, Lord," I said. "For if Mordred is dead, you"re King."
He smiled bitterly at that statement. "King of what? Of Glevum?" He laughed. "I have you, I have Sagramor, I have whatever Cuneglas gives me, but Lancelot has Dumnonia and he has Cerdic." He walked in silence for a short while, then gave me a crooked smile. "We do have one other ally, though hardly a friend. Aelle has taken advantage of Cerdic"s absence to retake London. Maybe Cerdic and he will kill each other?"
"Aelle," I said, "will be killed by his son, not by Cerdic"
He gave me a quizzical glance. "What son?"
"It"s a curse," I said, "and I am Aelle"s son."
He stopped and gazed at me to see if I was jesting. "Your" he asked.
"Me, Lord."
"Truly?"
"Upon my honour, Lord, I am your enemy"s son."
He still stared at me, then began to laugh. The laughter was genuine and extravagant, ending in tears that he wiped away as he shook his head in amus.e.m.e.nt. "Dear Derfel! If only Uther and Aelle knew!"
Uther and Aelle, the great enemies, whose sons had become friends. Fate is inexorable.
"Maybe Aelle does know," I said, remembering how gently he had reprimanded me for ignoring Erce.
"He"s our ally now," Arthur said, "whether we want him or not. Unless we choose not to fight."
"Not to fight?" I asked in horror.
"There are times," Arthur said softly, "when all I want is to have Guinevere and Gwydre back and a small house where we can live in peace. I"m even tempted to make an oath, Derfel, that if the G.o.ds give me back my family then I"ll never trouble them again. I"ll go to a house like the one you had in Powys, remember?"
"Cwm Isaf," I said, and wondered how Arthur could ever believe that Guinevere might be happy in such a place.
"Just like Cwm Isaf," he said wistfully. "A plough, some fields, a son to raise, a King to respect and songs by the evening hearth." He turned and gazed south again. To the east of the valley great green hills rose steep, and Cerdic"s men were not so very far away from those summits. "I am tired of it all," Arthur said. For a moment he looked close to tears. "Think of all we achieved, Derfel, all the roads and lawcourts and bridges, and all the disputes we settled and all the prosperity we made, and all of it is turned to nothing by religion! Religion!" He spat across the ramparts. "Is Dumnonia even worth fighting for?"
"Dian"s soul is worth fighting for," I said, "and while Dinas and Lavaine live then I am not at peace. And I pray. Lord, that you won"t have such deaths to revenge, but still you must tight. If Mordred"s dead, then you"re King, and if he lives, we have our oaths."
"Our oaths," he said resentfully, and I am sure he was thinking of the words we had spoken above the sea beside which Iseult was to die. "Our oaths," he said again.
But oaths were all we had now, for oaths were our guide in times of chaos and chaos was now thick across Dumnonia. For someone had spilt the Cauldron"s power and its horror threatened to engulf us all.
Dumnonia, in that summer, was like a giant throwboard and Lancelot had thrown his pieces well, taking half the board with his opening throw. He had surrendered the valley of the Thames to the Saxons, but the rest of the country was now his, thanks to the Christians who had blindly fought for him because his shield displayed their mystical emblem of a fish. I doubted that Lancelot was any more of a Christian than Mordred had been, but Sansum"s missionaries had spread their insidious message and, as far as Dumnonia"s poor deceived Christians were concerned, Lancelot was the harbinger of Christ. Lancelot had not won every point. His plot to kill Arthur had failed, and while Arthur lived Lancelot was in danger, but on the day after I arrived in Glevum he tried to sweep the throwboard clean. He tried to win it all.
He sent a horseman with an upturned shield and a sprig of mistletoe tied to his spear-point. The rider carried a message that summoned Arthur to Dun Ceinach, an ancient earth fortress that reared its summit just a few miles south of Glevum"s ramparts. The message demanded that Arthur go to the ancient fort that very same day, it swore his safety and it allowed him to bring as many spearmen as he wished. The message"s imperious tone almost invited refusal, but it finished by promising Arthur news of Guinevere, and Lancelot must have known that promise would bring Arthur out of Glevum. He left an hour later. Twenty of us rode with him, all of us in full armour beneath a blazing sun. Great white clouds sailed above the hills that rose steep from the eastern side of Severn"s wide valley. We could have followed the tracks that twisted up into those hills, but they led through too many places where an ambush might be set and so we took the road south along the valley, a Roman road that ran between fields where poppies blazed among the growing rye and barley. After an hour we turned east and cantered beside a hedge that was white with hawthorn blossom, then across a hay meadow almost ready for the sickle, and so we reached the steep gra.s.sy slope that was topped by the ancient fort. Sheep scattered as we climbed the slope, which was so precipitous that I preferred to slide off my horse"s back and lead it by the reins. Bee orchids blossomed pink and brown among the gra.s.s. We stopped a hundred paces below the summit and I climbed on alone to make sure that no ambush waited behind the fort"s long gra.s.sy walls. I was panting and sweating by the time I gained the wall"s summit, but no enemy crouched behind the bank. Indeed the old fort seemed deserted except for two hares that fled from my sudden appearance. The silence of the hilltop made me cautious, but then a single horseman appeared among some low trees that grew in the northern part of the fort. He carried a spear that he ostentatiously threw down, turned his shield upside down, then slid off his horse"s back. A dozen men followed him out of the trees and they too threw down their spears as if to rea.s.sure me that their promise of a truce was genuine.
I waved Arthur up. His horses breasted the wall, then he and I walked forward. Arthur was in his finest armour. He did not appear here as a supplicant, but as a warrior in a white-plumed helmet and a silvered coat of scale armour.
Two men walked to meet us. I had expected to see Lancelot himself, but instead it was his cousin and champion, Bors, who approached us. Bors was a tall black-haired man, heavily bearded, broad-shouldered, and a capable warrior who thrust through life like a bull where his master slid like a snake. I had no dislike of Bors nor he of me, but our loyalties dictated that we should be enemies. Bors nodded a curt greeting. He was in armour, but his companion was dressed in priest"s robes. It was Bishop Sansum. That surprised me, for Sansum usually took good care to disguise his loyalties and I thought our little mouse-lord must be very confident of victory if he displayed his allegiance to Lancelot so openly. Arthur gave Sansum a dismissive glance, then looked at Bors. "You have news of my wife,"
he said curtly.
"She lives," Bors said, "and she is safe. So is your son."
Arthur closed his eyes. He could not hide his relief, indeed for a moment he could not even speak.
"Where are they?" he asked when he had collected himself.