The snowy road led north into Gwynedd. I had never been to that kingdom before and found it a crude, hard place. The Romans had come here, but only to dig lead and gold. They had left few marks on the land and given it no law. The folk lived in squat, dark huts that huddled together inside circling stone walls from which dogs snarled at us and on which the skulls of wolves and bears were mounted to deter the spirits. Cairns marked the summits of hills and every few miles we would find a pole struck into the road"s verge and hung with dead men"s bones and ribbons of tattered cloth. There were few trees, the streams were frozen and snow blocked some of the pa.s.ses. At night we sheltered in the huddled houses where we paid for our warmth with slivers of gold chopped from Cuneglas"s ingots. We dressed in furs. Ceinwyn and I, like my men, were swathed in lice-ridden wolf-pelts and deerskins, but Merlin wore a suit made from the coat of a great black bear. Nimue had grey otter skins that were much lighter than our furs, but even so she seemed not to feel the cold as the rest of us did. Nimue alone carried no weapons. Merlin had his black staff, a fearsome thing in battle, while my men had spears and swords and even Ceinwyn carried a light spear and had her long-bladed hunting knife scabbarded at her waist. She wore no gold and the folk who gave us shelter had no conception of her rank. They did notice her bright hair and a.s.sumed that she, like Nimue, was one of Merlin"s adepts. Merlin they loved, for they all knew of him and they brought their crippled children to be touched by his hand.
It took us six days to reach Caer Gei where Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, was spending the winter. The caer itself was a hilltop fort, but under the fort"s shoulder there was a deep valley with tall trees growing from its steep sides and in the valley a wooden palisade circling a timber hall, some store-rooms and a score of sleeping huts, all of them ghosted white with snow and with long icicles hanging from their eaves. Cadwallon proved to be a sour old man while his hall was merely one third the size of Cuneglas"s hall and the press of warriors meant that its earth floor was already packed tight with beds. A s.p.a.ce was grudgingly made for us and a corner screened for Nimue and Ceinwyn. That night Cadwallon gave us a feast, a poor thing of salted mutton and stewed carrots, but the best his stores could provide. He did generously offer to take Ceinwyn off our hands by making her his eighth wife, but he seemed neither offended nor disappointed when she refused. His seven existing wives were dark, sullen women who shared a round hut where they squabbled and persecuted each other"s children. It was a wretched place, Caer Gei, though a royal one, and it was hard to believe that Cadwallon"s father, Cunedda, had been the High King before Uther of Dumnonia. Gwynedd"s spears had fallen on lean times since those great days. It was hard to believe, too, that it was here, beneath the high peaks that were now brilliant with ice and snow, that Arthur had been raised. I went to see the house where his mother had been given shelter after Uther had rejected her and found it to be an earth-walled hall about the same size as our house in Cwm Isaf. It stood among fir trees whose boughs were bent low by snow, and it looked north towards the Dark Road. The house was now home to three spearmen, their families and livestock. Arthur"s mother had been half sister to King Cadwallon who was thus Arthur"s uncle, though Arthur"s birth had been illegitimate and the relationship could hardly be expected to yield many spears for Arthur"s spring campaign against the Saxons. Cadwallon, indeed, had sent men to fight against Arthur at Lugg Vale, but that gift of men had been a precaution to keep Powys"s friendship rather than because the King of Gwynedd hated Dumnonia. Most of the time Cadwallon"s spears faced north towards Lleyn.
The King summoned Byrthig, his Edling, to the feast so that he could tell us of Lleyn. Prince Byrthig was a short, squat man with a scar running from his left temple across his broken nose and down into his thick beard. He had only three teeth, which made his efforts to chew meat lengthy and messy. He would use his fingers to chafe the meat against his one front tooth, thus abrading the food into shreds that he washed down with mead, and the laborious work had left his bristling black beard filthy with meat juices and half chewed sc.r.a.ps. Cadwallon, in his gloomy manner, offered him as a husband to Ceinwyn and again seemed unmoved by her gentle refusal.
Diwrnach, Prince Byrthig told us, had his home at Boduan, a fort that lay far to the west in the peninsula of Lleyn. The King was one of the Irish Lords Across the Sea, but his war-band, unlike that of Oengus of Demetia, was not composed of men from a single Irish tribe but was a collection of fugitives from every tribe. "He welcomes whatever comes across the water, and the more murderous they are, the better," Byrthig told us. "The Irish use him to rid themselves of their outlaws and there have been many of those of late."
"The Christians," Cadwallon grumbled in curt explanation, then spat.
"Lleyn is Christian?" I asked in surprise.
"No," Cadwallon snapped as though I should have known better. "But Ireland is bowing to the Christian G.o.d. Bowing in droves, and those who can"t stand that G.o.d flee to Lleyn." He pulled a sc.r.a.p of bone from his mouth and inspected it gloomily. "We"ll have to fight them soon," he added.
"Diwrnach"s numbers increase?" Merlin asked.
"So we hear, though we hear little enough," Cadwallon replied. He looked up as the heat in the hall melted a swathe of snow from the sloping roof. There was a sc.r.a.ping rumble, then a soft crash as the ma.s.s slid off the thatch.
"Diwrnach," Byrthig explained, his voice made sibilant by his ravaged teeth, "asks only to be left alone. If we do not disturb him, he will only occasionally disturb us. His men come to take slaves, but we have few people left in the north now, and his men will not travel far, but if his war-band grows too large for Lleyn"s crops then he will seek new land somewhere."
"Ynys Mon is famous for its crops," Merlin said. Ynys Mon was the big island that lay off Lleyn"s northern coast.
"Ynys Mon could feed a thousand," Cadwallon agreed, "but only if its people are spared to plough and reap, and its people are not spared. No one is. Any Briton with sense left Lleyn years ago, and the ones who are left crouch in terror. So would you if Diwrnach came visiting to search for what he wants."
"Which is?" I asked.
Cadwallon looked at me, paused, then shrugged. "Slaves," he said.
"In which," Merlin asked silkily, "you pay him tribute?"
"A small price for peace," Cadwallon dismissed the accusation.
"How much?" Merlin demanded.
"Forty a year," Cadwallon finally admitted. "Mostly orphaned children and maybe some prisoners. He"s happiest, though, with girls." He looked broodingly at Ceinwyn. "He has an appet.i.te for girls."
"Many men do, Lord King," Ceinwyn answered drily.
"But not like Diwrnach"s appet.i.te," Cadwallon warned her. "His wizards have told him that a man armed with a shield covered with the tanned skin of a virgin girl will be invincible in battle." He shrugged.
"Can"t say I"ve ever tried it myself."
"So you send him children?" Ceinwyn said accusingly.
"Do you know any other kind of virgin?" Cadwallon retorted.
"We think he"s touched by the G.o.ds," Byrthig said, as though that explained Diwrnach"s appet.i.te for virgin slaves, "for he seems mad. One of his eyes is red." He paused to grind a piece of grey mutton on his front tooth. "He covers his shields in skin," he went on when the meat had been reduced to a tissue, "then paints them with blood and that"s why his men call themselves the Bloodshields." Cadwallon made the sign against evil. "And some men say he eats the girls" flesh," Byrthig went on, "but we don"t know that; who knows what the mad do?"
"The mad are close to the G.o.ds," Cadwallon growled. He was plainly terrified of his northern neighbour, and no wonder, I thought.
"Some of the mad are close to the G.o.ds," Merlin said. "Not all."
"Diwrnach is," Cadwallon warned him. "He does what he wants, to whom he wants, how he wants and the G.o.ds keep him safe while he does it." Again I made the sign against evil, and suddenly wished I was back in far Dumnonia where there were lawcourts and palaces and long Roman roads.
"With two hundred spears," Merlin said, "you could scour Diwrnach from Lleyn. You could wash him into the sea."
"We tried once," Cadwallon said, "and fifty of our men died of the flux in one week, and another fifty were shivering in their own excrement, and always his howling warriors circled us on ponies and their long spears showered out of the night. When we reached Boduan there was only a great wall hung with dying things that bled and screamed and twisted on their hooks and none of my men would scale that horror. Nor would I," he admitted. "And if I had, what then? He would have tied to Ynys Mon and it would have taken me days and weeks to find the ships to follow him over the water. I have neither the time, the spearmen, nor the gold to scour Diwrnach into the sea, so I give him children instead. It"s cheaper." He shouted for a slave to bring him more mead, then gave Ceinwyn a sour glance. "Give her to him," he said to Merlin, "and he might give you the Cauldron."
"I will give him nothing for the Cauldron," Merlin snapped. "Besides, he does not even know the Cauldron exists."
"He does now," Byrthig put in. "All Britain knows why you go north. And do you think his wizards don"t want to find the Cauldron?"
Merlin smiled. "Send your spearmen with me, Lord King, and we shall take both the Cauldron and Lleyn."
Cadwallon snorted at that proposal. "Diwrnach, Merlin, teaches a man to be a good neighbour. I will let you travel my land, for I fear your curse if I don"t, but not one man of mine will go with you, and when your bones are buried in Lleyn"s sands I shall tell Diwrnach that your trespa.s.s was none of my doing."
"Will you tell him by which road we travel?" Merlin asked, for we faced two roads now. One led around the coast and was the usual winter road north, while the other was the Dark Road that most men reckoned was impa.s.sable in winter. Merlin hoped that by using the Dark Road we could surprise Diwrnach and be gone from Ynys Mon almost before he knew we had even come. Cadwallon smiled for the only time that night. "He knows already," the King said, then glanced at Ceinwyn, the brightest figure in that smoke-dark hall. "And doubtless he looks forward to your coming."
Did Diwrnach know we planned to use the Dark Road? Or was Cadwallon guessing? I spat anyway, to protect us all from evil. The solstice was due, the long night of the year when life ebbs, hope is bleak and the demons have dominion of the air, and that was when we would be on the Dark Road. Cadwallon thought us fools, Diwrnach waited for us, and we wrapped ourselves in fur and slept. The sun shone next morning, making the surrounding peaks into dazzling spikes of whiteness that hurt our eyes. The sky was almost clear and a strong wind blew snow from the ground to make clouds of glittering specks that wafted across the white land. We loaded the ponies, accepted the grudging gift of a sheepskin from Cadwallon, then marched towards the Dark Road that began just north of Caer Gei. It was a road without settlements, without farms, without a soul to offer us shelter; nothing but a rugged path through the wild mountain barrier that protected Cadwallon"s heartland from Diwrnach"s Bloodshields. Two poles marked the beginning of the road and both were topped by rag-draped human skulls from which long icicles clinked in the wind. The skulls faced north towards Diwrnach, two talismans to keep his evil beyond the mountains. I saw Merlin touch an iron amulet that hung around his neck as we pa.s.sed between the twin skulls and remembered his dreadful promise that he would begin to die the moment we reached the Dark Road. Now, as our boots squeaked and crunched through the road"s undisturbed layer of snow, I knew that oath of death had begun its work. I watched him, but saw no signs of distress as, all that day, we climbed into the hills, sliding on snow and trudging in a cloud of our own misting breath. We slept that night in an abandoned shepherd"s hut that still blessedly had a ragged roof of old timbers and decaying straw with which we built a fire that flickered feebly in the snowy darkness.
Next morning we had gone no more than a quarter mile when a horn sounded above and behind us. We stopped, turned, and shaded our eyes to see a dark line of men cresting a hill down which we had slithered the previous evening. There were fifteen of them, all with shields, swords and spears, and when they saw they had gained our attention they half ran and half slid down the treacherous slope of snow. Their progress made great cloudy plumes that drifted westwards on the wind. My men, without orders from me, formed a line, unstrapped their shields and lowered their spears so that they formed a shield-wall across the road. I had given Cavan"s responsibilities to Issa and he growled at them to stand firm, but no sooner had he spoken than I recognized the curious device painted on one of the approaching shields. It was a cross, and that Christian symbol was carried by only one man I knew. Galahad.
"Friends!" I called to Issa, then broke into a run. I could see the approaching men clearly now, and they were all from those of my men who had been left in Siluria and forced to serve as Lancelot"s palace guard. Their shields still bore the device of Arthur"s bear, but Galahad"s cross led them. He was waving and shouting, and I was doing the same, so that neither of us heard a word the other spoke until we had already met and embraced. "Lord Prince," I greeted him, then embraced him again, for of all the friends I ever had in this world he was the best.
He had fair hair and a face as broad and strong as his half-brother Lancelot"s was narrow and subtle. Like Arthur he invited trust on sight, and if all Christians had been like Galahad I think I would have taken the cross in those early days. "We slept all night across the ridge," he gestured back up the road, "and half froze, while you must all have rested there?" He pointed towards the wisp of smoke still drifting from our fire.
"Warm and dry," I said, and then, when the newcomers had greeted their old companions, I embraced them all and gave their names to Ceinwyn. One by one they knelt and swore her loyalty. They had all heard how she had fled her betrothal feast to be with me, and they loved her for that and now held their naked sword blades for her royal touch. "What of the other men?" I asked Galahad.
"Gone to Arthur." He grimaced. "None of the Christians came, sadly. Except me."
"You think this is worth a pagan Cauldron?" I asked, gesturing towards the cold road ahead.
"Diwrnach lies at the road"s end, my friend," Galahad said, "and I hear he is a King as evil as anything that ever crawled from the devil"s pit. A Christian"s task is to fight evil, so here I am." He greeted Merlin and Nimue, and then, because he was a Prince and so of equal rank to Ceinwyn, embraced her. "You are a fortunate woman," I heard him whisper.
She smiled and kissed his cheek. "More fortunate now that you are here, Lord Prince."
"That"s true, of course." Galahad stepped back and looked from her to me, and from me to her. "All Britain speaks of you two."
"Because all Britain is stuffed with idle tongues," Merlin snapped in a surprising burst of shrewishness, "and we have a journey to make when you two have finished gossiping." His face was pinched and his temper short. I put it down to age and the hard road we walked in cold weather, and tried not to think of his death-oath.
The journey through the mountains took us two more days. The Dark Road was not long, but it was hard and it climbed up steep hills and went through gaping valleys where the smallest sound echoed hollow and cold from the ice-locked walls. We found an abandoned settlement to spend the second night on the road, a place of round stone huts that were huddled inside a wall the height of a man on which we set three guards to watch the glittering moonlit slopes. There was no fuel for a fire and so we sat close together and sang songs and told tales and tried not to think of the Bloodshields. Galahad gave us news of Siluria that night. His brother, he told us, had refused to occupy Gundleus"s old capital at Nidum because it was too far from Dumnonia and had no comforts other than a decaying Roman barrack block, so he had moved Siluria"s government to Isca, the huge Roman fort that lay beside the Usk at the very edge of Siluria"s territory and just a stone"s throw from Gwent. It was as close as Lancelot could get to Dumnonia while still staying in Siluria. "He likes mosaic floors and marble walls," Galahad said, "and there"s just enough of them at Isca to keep him satisfied. He"s gathered every Druid in Siluria there."
"There are no Druids in Siluria," Merlin growled. "None that are any good, anyway."
"Those who call themselves Druids, then," Galahad said patiently. "He has two he particularly values and he pays them to make curses."
"On me?" I asked, touching the iron on Hywelbane"s hilt.
"Among others," Galahad said, glancing at Ceinwyn and making the sign of the cross. "He"ll forget in time," he added, trying to rea.s.sure us.
"He"ll forget when he"s dead," Merlin said, "and even then he"ll carry a grudge across the bridge of swords." He shivered, not because he feared Lancelot"s enmity, but because he was cold. "Who are these so-called Druids he particularly values?"
"Tanaburs"s grandsons," Galahad said, and I felt an icy hand creep round my heart. I had killed Tanaburs, and though I had possessed the right to take his soul, it was still a brave fool who killed a Druid and Tanaburs"s dying curse still hovered about me.
We went slowly the next day, our pace held back by Merlin. He insisted he was well and refused any a.s.sistance, but his step faltered too often, his face looked yellow and haggard, and his breath came in short, harsh gasps. We had hoped to be over the last pa.s.s by nightfall, but we were still climbing towards it as the short day"s light faded. All afternoon the Dark Road had twisted uphill, though to call it a road was a mockery for it was nothing but a stony, dreadful path that crossed and re-crossed a frozen stream where the ice hung thick from the ledges of the frequent small waterfalls. The ponies kept slipping and sometimes refused to move at all; it seemed we spent more time supporting them than leading them, but as the last light drained cold into the west we reached the pa.s.s and it was just as I had seen it in my shivering dream on Dolforwyn"s summit. It was just as bleak, just as cold, though with no black ghoul barring the Dark Road that now dropped steeply onto Lleyn"s narrow coastal plain and then ran north to the sh.o.r.e.
And beyond that sh.o.r.e lay Ynys Mon.
I had never seen the blessed isle. I had heard of it all my life and known of its power and lamented the destruction worked on it by the Romans in the Black Year, but I had never seen it except in the dream. Now, in the winter"s dusk, it looked nothing like that lovely vision. It was not sunlit, but shadowed by cloud, so that the big isle looked dark and menacing, a threat made worse by the sullen glint of black pools that broke its low hills. The isle was almost free of snow, though its rocky edges were fretted white by a grey and miserable sea. I fell to my knees at the sight of the island, we all did except for Galahad, and even he finally went on one knee as a mark of respect. As a Christian he sometimes dreamed of going to Rome or even to far-off Jerusalem, if such a place really existed, but Ynys Mon was our Rome and our Jerusalem, and we were now in sight of its holy soil.
We were also now in Lleyn. We had crossed the unmarked border and the few settlements on the coastal plain beneath us were the holdings of Diwrnach. The fields were lightly covered with snow, smoke rose from huts, but nothing human seemed to move in that dark s.p.a.ce and all of us, I think, were wondering how we were to go from the mainland to the island. "There are ferrymen on the straits," Merlin said, reading our thoughts. He alone of us had been to Ynys Mon, but it had been many years ago and long before he had ever known that the Cauldron still existed. He had gone there when Leodegan, Guinevere"s father, had ruled the land in the days before Diwrnach"s ragged ships had come from Ireland to sweep Leodegan and his motherless daughters out of their kingdom, in the morning," Merlin said, "we shall walk to the sh.o.r.e and pay our ferrymen. By the time Diwrnach knows we have reached his land, we shall already have gone."
"He"ll follow us to Ynys Mon," Galahad said nervously.
"And we shall be gone again," Merlin said. He sneezed. He looked wretchedly cold. His nose was running, his cheeks were pale and from time to time he shivered uncontrollably, but he found some dusty herbs in a small leather pouch and he swallowed them with a handful of melted snow and insisted he was well.
He looked much worse next morning. We had spent that night in a cleft of the rocks where we had not dared light a fire, despite Nimue"s charm of concealment that she had worked with the help of a polecat"s skull we had found higher up the road. Our sentries had watched the coastal plain where three small glints of fire betrayed the presence of life, while the rest of us had clung together in the deep rocks where we shivered and cursed the cold and wondered if morning would ever dawn. It came at last with a seeping, leprous light that made the distant isle look darker and more menacing than ever. But Nimue"s charm seemed to have worked, for no spearmen guarded the Dark Road"s ending. Merlin was shaking now and was much too weak to walk, and so four of my spearmen carried him in a litter made of cloaks and spears as we slid and edged our way down to the first small wind-bent trees in the hedgerows of Lleyn. The road was sunken here and its ruts were frosted hard where it twisted between hunched oaks, thin hollies and the small neglected fields. Merlin was moaning and shuddering, and Issa wondered if we should turn back. "To cross the mountains again," Nimue said, "would surely kill him. We go on."
We came to a fork in the road and there found our first sign of Diwrnach. It was a skeleton, bound together with horsehair ropes and hung from a pole so that its dry bones rattled in the brisk west wind. Three crows had been nailed to the post below the human bones and Nimue sniffed their stiffened bodies to decide what kind of magic had been imbued into their deaths. "p.i.s.s! p.i.s.s!" Merlin managed to say from his litter. "Quick, girl! p.i.s.s!" He coughed horribly, then turned his head to spit the sputum towards the ditch. "I won"t die," he said to himself, "I will not die!" He lay back as Nimue squatted by the pole.
"He knows we"re here," Merlin warned me.
"Is he here?" I asked, crouching beside him.
"Someone is. Be careful, Derfel." He closed his eyes and sighed. "I am so old," he said softly, "so horribly old. And there"s badness here, all about us." He shook his head. "Get me to the island, that"s all, just reach the island. The Cauldron will cure all."
Nimue finished, then waited to see which way the steam from her urine blew, and the wind took it towards the right-hand fork and that omen decided our path. Before we set off Nimue went to one of the ponies and found a leather bag from which she took a handful of elf bolts and eagle stones that she distributed among the spearmen. "Protection," she explained as she laid a snake stone in Merlin"s litter.
"Onwards," she ordered us.
We walked all morning, our pace slowed by the need to carry Merlin. We saw no one and that absence of life put a dreadful fear into my men for it seemed as though we had come to a land of the dead. There were rowan and holly berries in the hedgerows, and thrushes and robins in the branches, but there were no cattle, no sheep and no men. We did see one settlement from which a wisp of smoke blew in the wind, but it was far off and no one appeared to be watching us from its circling wall. Yet men were in this dead land. We knew that when we paused to rest in a small valley where a stream trickled sluggishly between icy banks under a grove of small, black, wind-bent oaks. The intricate branches were each delicately limned with a white frost and we rested beneath them until Gwilym, one of the spearmen who was standing guard at the rear, called to me.
I went to the oaks" edge to see that a fire had been set on the lower slope of the mountains. There were no flames visible, just a thick gruel of grey smoke that boiled fiercely before being s.n.a.t.c.hed away by the west wind. Gwilym pointed to the smoke with his spear-blade, then spat to avert its evil. Galahad came to stand beside me. "A signal?" he asked.
"Probably."
"So they know we"re here?" He crossed himself.
"They know." Nimue joined us. She was carrying Merlin"s heavy black staff and she alone seemed to burn with energy in this cold, dead place. Merlin was sick, the rest of us were besieged by fear, but the deeper we pierced into Diwrnach"s black land the fiercer Nimue became. She was nearing the Cauldron, and the lure of it was like a fire in her bones. "They"re watching us," she said.
"Can you hide us?" I asked, wanting another of her concealment spells. She shook her head. "This is their land, Derfel, and their G.o.ds are powerful here." She sneered as Galahad made the sign of the cross a second time. "Your nailed G.o.d won"t defeat Crom Dubh," she said.
"He"s here?" I asked fearfully.
"Or one like him," she said. Crom Dubh was the Black G.o.d, a crippled and malevolent horror who gave dark nightmares. The other G.o.ds, it was said, avoided Crom Dubh, which suggested we were alone in his power.
"So we"re doomed," Gwilym said flatly.
"Fool!" Nimue hissed at him. "We"re only doomed if we fail to find the Cauldron. Then we"d all be doomed anyway. Are you going to watch that smoke all morning?" she asked me. We walked on. Merlin could not speak any longer and his teeth chattered, even though we piled him with furs. "He"s dying," Nimue told me calmly.
"Then we should find shelter," I said, "and build a fire."
"So we can all be warm while we"re slaughtered by Diwrnach"s spearmen?" She scoffed at the idea.
"He"s dying, Derfel," she explained, "because he"s close to his dream and because he made his bargain with the G.o.ds."
"His life for the Cauldron?" Ceinwyn, walking on my other side, asked the question.
"Not quite," Nimue admitted. "But while you two were setting up your little house," she made that statement sarcastically, "we went to Cadair Idris. We made a sacrifice there, the old sacrifice, and Merlin pledged his life, hot for the Cauldron, but for the search. If we find the Cauldron, he"ll live, but if we fail then he dies and the shadow-soul of the sacrifice can claim Merlin"s soul for all time."
I knew what the old sacrifice "was, though I had never heard of it being made in our time. "Who was the sacrifice?" I asked.
"No one you knew. No one we knew. Just a man." Nimue was dismissive. "But his shadow-soul is here, watching us, and it wants us to fail. It wants Merlin"s life."
"What if Merlin dies anyway?" I asked.
"He won"t, you fool! Not if we find the Cauldron."
"If I find it," Ceinwyn said nervously.
"You will," Nimue said confidently.
"How?"
"You"ll dream," Nimue said, "and the dream will lead us to the Cauldron."
And Diwrnach, I realized when we reached the straits dividing the mainland from the island, wanted us to find it. The signal fire told us his men had been watching us, but they had neither shown themselves nor tried to stop our journey, and that suggested Diwrnach knew of our quest and wanted it to succeed so that he could take the Cauldron for himself. There could be no other reason why he was making it so easy for us to reach Ynys Mon.
The straits were not wide, but the grey water swirled and sucked and foamed as it swept through the channel. The sea ran fast in those narrows, twisting itself into sullen whirlpools or else breaking white on hidden rocks, but the sea was not as frightening as the far sh.o.r.e that stood so utterly empty and dark and bleak, almost as if it waited to suck our souls away. I shivered as I looked at that distant gra.s.sy slope and could not help thinking of the far-off Black Day when the Romans had stood on this same rocky sh.o.r.e and that far bank had been thick with Druids who had hurled their dread curses at the foreign soldiers. The curses had failed, the Romans had crossed, and Ynys Mon had died, and now we stood in the same place in a last, desperate attempt to wind back the years and spool back the centuries of sadness and hardship so that Britain would be restored to its blessed state before the Romans came. It would be Merlin"s Britain then, a Britain of the G.o.ds, a Britain without Saxons, a Britain full of gold and feasting halls and miracles.
We walked east towards the narrowest part of the straits and there, rounding a point of rock and beneath the earth loom of a deserted fortress, we found two boats hauled up on the pebbles of a tiny cove. A dozen men waited with the boats, almost as though they had expected us. "The ferrymen?"
Ceinwyn asked me.
"Diwrnach"s boatmen," I said, and touched the iron in Hywel-bane"s hilt. "They want us to cross," I said, and I was afraid because the King was making it so easy for us. The sailors were quite unafraid of us. They were squat, hard-looking creatures with fish scales sticking to their beards and their thick woollen clothes. They carried no weapons other than their gutting knives and fish-spears. Galahad asked if they had seen any of Diwrnach"s spearmen, but they simply shrugged as if his language made no sense to them. Nimue spoke to them in her native Irish and they responded politely enough. They claimed to have seen no Blood-shields, but did tell her that we must wait until the tide had reached its height before we could cross. Only then, it seemed, were the straits safe for boats. We made Merlin a bed in one of the boats, then Issa and I climbed to the deserted fort and stared inland. A second pyre of smoke blew skyward from the valley of twisted oaks, but otherwise nothing had changed and no enemies were in sight. But they were there. You did not need to see their blood-daubed shields to know that they were close. Issa touched his spear-blade. "It seems to me. Lord," he said, "that Ymys Mon would be a good place to die."
I smiled. "It would be a better place to live, Issa."
"But our souls will surely be safe if we die on the blessed isle?" he asked anxiously.
"They will be safe," I promised him, "and you and I will cross the bridge of swords together." And Ceinwyn, I promised myself, would be just a pace or two ahead of us, for I would kill her myself before any of Diwrnach"s men could lay their hands on her. I drew Hywel-bane, its long blade still smeared with the soot in which Nimue had written her charm, and I held its tip to Issa"s face. "Make me an oath," I ordered him.
He went on one knee. "Say it, Lord."
"If I die, Issa, and Ceinwyn still lives, then you must kill her with one sword stroke before Diwrnach"s men can take her."
He kissed the sword"s tip. "I swear it, Lord."
At high tide the swirling currents died away so that the sea lay still except for the wind-fretted waves that had floated the two boats up from the shingle. We lifted the ponies on board, then took our places. The boats were long and narrow and, as soon as we had settled amidst the sticky fishing nets, the boatmen gestured that we were to bail out the water that seeped between the tarred planks. We used our helmets to scoop the cold sea back to its place and I prayed to Manawydan, the sea G.o.d, that he would preserve us as the boatmen put their long oars between the tholes. Merlin shivered. His face was whiter that I had ever seen it, but touched by a nauseous yellow and smeared by flecks of foam that dribbled from the corners of his lips. He was not conscious, but muttered odd things in his delirium. The boatmen chanted a strange song as they pulled on their oars, but fell silent when they reached the middle of the straits. They paused there and one man in each boat gestured back towards the mainland. We turned. At first I could only see the dark strip of the sh.o.r.e beneath the snow-white and slate-black loom of the mountains beyond, but then I saw a ragged black thing moving just beyond the stony beach. It was a banner, mere fluttering strips of rags tied to a pole, but an instant after it appeared a line of warriors showed themselves above the strait"s bank. They laughed at us, their cackling coming clear through the cold wind above the sound of the lapping sea. They were all mounted on s.h.a.ggy ponies and all were dressed in what appeared to be torn strips of ragged black cloth that caught the breeze and fluttered like pennants. They carried shields and the hugely long war spears that the Irish favoured, and neither the shields nor the spears frightened me, but there was something about their tattered, long-haired wildness that struck a sudden chill through me. Or perhaps that chill came from the sleet that had begun to spit on the west wind to dimple the sea"s grey surface.