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Lust does not vanish with happiness, Lady. Besides, what merit is there in fidelity if it is never tested?’
Think about it! Lancelot alive, Mordred alive, Cerdic alive and Guinevere alive! If a soul wants to live for ever in this world it seems like a very good idea to become an enemy of Arthur.
‘I shall try, Lord,’ Gawain said eagerly. ‘Not just try, succeed!’ Merlin snapped. ‘What did she look like, Derfel, this curiously named Cywwylog?’ ‘Short,’ I said, ‘plumpish, black hair.’ ‘So far we have succeeded in whittling our search down to every girl in Britain beneath the age of twenty.
He made it all sound so simple: just beat the Saxons, then remake Britain. I reflected that it had always been thus; one last great task, then joy would always follow. Somehow it never did, but now, in desperation and to give us one last chance, I must travel to see my father.
I thrust with Hywelbane just hard enough to gouge the skin and flesh away from his cheekbone. ‘A scar, Liofa,’ I said, ‘to remind you that you fought the Lord Derfel Cadarn, son of Aelle, and that you lost.’ I left him bleeding.
‘Aengeland?’ I asked, for the word was new to me. He took his hands from my shoulders and gestured about the countryside. ‘Here! You call us Saxons, but you and I are Aengles. Cerdic is a Saxon, but you and I are the Aenglish and our country is Aengeland. This is Aengeland!’ He said it proudly, looking about that damp hilltop.
‘Dian?’ I whispered into the stone’s heart, ‘my dear Dian? Wait for us, my darling, and we will come to you. Dian.’ My dead daughter, my lovely Dian, murdered by Lancelot’s men. I told her we loved her, I sent her Aelle’s kiss, then I leaned my forehead on the cold rock and thought of her little shadowbody all alone in the Otherworld. Merlin, it is true, had told us that children play happily beneath the apples of Annwn in that death world, but I still wept as I imagined her suddenly hearing my voice. Did she look up? Was she, like me, crying?
‘But just a trick, Lord,’ I said, unable to hide my disappointment. Merlin sighed. ‘You are absurd, Derfel, entirely absurd. The existence of tricks does not imply the absence of magic, but magic is not always granted to us by the Gods.
Arthur had taken Llamrei right up to the gallows. ‘You call me the Amherawdr of Britain,’ he said to Merlin, ‘and an emperor must rule or cease to be emperor, and I will not rule in a Britain where children must be killed to save the lives of adults.’
I had never been close to Guinevere, indeed she treated me with the same rough mix of affection and derision that she might have extended to a stupid but willing dog, but now, perhaps because she had no one else with whom to share her thoughts, she offered them to me.
‘He worshipped me, Derfel,’ she said tiredly, ‘and that is not the same thing as being loved.’
‘You’re trying to help me! Do you think I love Lancelot?’ ‘You wanted him to be King,’ I said. ‘What does that have to do with love?’ she asked derisively. ‘I wanted him to be King because he’s a weak man and a woman can only rule in this world through such a feeble man. Arthur isn’t weak.’
one of the things an education gives us is access to all the things other folks have known, feared, dreamed and achieved. When you are in trouble it helps to discover someone who has been in the same predicament before. It explains things.’
History is not just a tale of men’s making, but is a thing tied to the land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past.
Galahad, she said, was in love with perfection and was too fastidious to love an actual woman. He loved the idea of women, Ceinwyn said, but could not bear the reality of disease and blood and pain.
Everything was special, because everything was threatened.
The poetry became markedly better as we drank more.
‘My brother,’ Ceinwyn remarked, ‘says there is an even greater bard in Powys now. And just a young man, too.’ ‘Who?’ Pyrlig demanded, scenting an unwelcome rival. ‘Taliesin is his name,’ Ceinwyn said.
‘If we try to escape them,’ I explained, ‘they’ll follow us. Our children can’t move fast and eventually the bastards will catch us. We’ll be forced to make a shield wall, put our families in the centre, and the last of us to die will hear the first of our women screaming. Better to go to a place where they’ll hesitate to attack.
In war, I have learned, the enemy will usually do whatever you fear the most, and this enemy would certainly send every spearman they had.
just let his words whip past me in the wind.
‘My name,’ I answered him formally, ‘is Derfel, son of Aelle, King of the Aenglish. And I am the man who put the scar on Liofa’s cheek.’
Only a fool wants war, but once a war starts then it cannot be fought half-heartedly. It cannot even be fought with regret, but must be waged with a savage joy in defeating the enemy, and it is that savage joy that inspires our bards to write their greatest songs about love and war.
A man should love peace, but if he cannot fight with all his heart then he will not have peace.
I knelt to her, something I had never done. ‘It was your victory, Lady,’ I said, ‘all yours.’ I offered her the sword. She strapped it on, then lifted me up. ‘Thank you, Derfel,’ she said. ‘It’s a good sword,’ I said. ‘I’m not thanking you for the sword,’ Guinevere said, ‘but for trusting me. I always knew I could fight.’
though being Guinevere she managed to make the wargear look disturbingly seductive.
Eachern had lost an eye. He padded the open socket with a scrap of rag that he tied round his scalp, then jammed the helmet over the crude bandage and swore to revenge the eye a hundredfold.
We looked for friends alive and embraced them, saw friends dead and wept for them. We knew the delirium of utter victory, we shared our tears and laughter, and some men, tired as they were, danced for pure joy.
‘I think,’ he said in my ear, ‘that you are the best of my sons. Now give me a gift. Give me a good death, Derfel, for I would like to go to the feasting hall of true warriors.’
But write it I shall and for a time it will be easy, for now comes the happy time, the years of peace. But they were also the years of encroaching darkness, but we did not see that, for we only saw the sunlight and never heeded the shadows.
and Taliesin sat very still, watching him. ‘I had a dream as a child,’ Merlin said very softly. ‘I went to the cave of Cam Ingli and dreamed that I had wings and could fly high enough to see all the isle of Britain, and it was so very beautiful. Beautiful and green and surrounded by a great mist that kept all our enemies away. The blessed isle, Derfel, the isle of the Gods, the one place on earth that was worthy of them, and ever since that dream, Derfel, that is all I ever wanted. To bring that blessed isle back. To bring the Gods back.’
Merlin rubbed his eyes. ‘There is a war between the Gods, Derfel, and today I gave victory to Yahweh.’ ‘Who?’ ‘It’s the name of the Christian God. Sometimes they call him Jehovah. So far as I can determine he’s nothing but a humble fire God from some wretched far-off country who is now intent on usurping all the other Gods. He must be an ambitious little toad, because he’s winning, and it was I who gave him this victory today.
Sagramor brought an uneasy peace by the simple expedient of killing the leaders of both factions,
He had always been my enemy, he had always despised me, yet as he dropped to his knees in front of me and the tears rolled down his cheeks I felt the impulse to grant him mercy and knew there would be as much pleasure in that exercise of power as there would be in ordering his death.
We stripped Lancelot’s body naked. I threw his sword and his fine scale armour into the river, burned his clothes, then used a big Saxon war axe to dismember his corpse. We did not burn him, but tossed him to the fishes so that his dark soul would not sour the Otherworld with its presence. We obliterated him from the earth, and I kept only his enamelled sword belt that had been a gift from Arthur.
And thus Lancelot died, though the songs he had paid for lived on, and to this day he is celebrated as a hero equal to Arthur. Arthur is remembered as a ruler, but Lancelot is called the warrior. In truth he was the King without land, a coward, and the greatest traitor of Britain, and his soul wanders Lloegyr to this day, screaming for its shadowbody that can never exist because we cut his corpse into scraps and fed it to the river. If the Christians are right, and there is a hell, may he suffer there for ever.
She smiled as I drew near. ‘You’re clean, Derfel!’ ‘I took a bath, Lady.’ ‘And you live!’ She mocked me gently, then kissed my cheek, and once the kiss was given she held on to my shoulders for a moment. ‘I owe you a great deal,’ she said softly.
Time is a story, and I would be its teller, not its maker. Merlin wanted to change the story and he failed. I dare not aim so high.’
Sansum had persuaded Mordred to sign a decree which exempted all Christians from taxation and I dare say the church never found a better way of making converts, though Mordred rescinded the law as soon as he realized how many souls and how little gold he was saving;
‘When I was your age,’ he said, ‘I believed I could make the world anew. I believed that all this world needed was honesty and kindness. I believed that if you treated folk well, that if you gave them peace and offered them justice they would respond with gratitude. I thought I could dissolve evil with good.’ He paused. ‘I suppose I thought of people as dogs,’ he went on ruefully, ‘and that if you gave them enough affection then they would be docile, but they aren’t dogs, Gwydre, they’re wolves. A king must rule a thousand ambitions, and all of them belong to deceivers. You will be flattered,
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‘It does not matter to me, Lord, whether you live or die for I am the singer and you are my song, but for now, I admit, I follow you to discover the melody and, if I must, to change it.
I discovered Amhar by one of the fires. He slept with his mouth open, and he died the same way. I thrust the spear into his open mouth, paused long enough for his eyes to open and for his soul to recognize me, and then, when I saw that he knew me, I pushed the blade through his neck and spine so that he was pinned to the ground. He jerked as I killed him, and the last thing his soul saw on this earth was my smile.
She spoke savagely, and with a real fear that old age might kill her before Mordred died. We were all in our forties now, and few folk lived longer. Merlin, of course, had lasted twice forty years and more, and we all knew others who had made fifty or sixty or even seventy years, but we thought of ourselves as old.
Mithras’s mother was a virgin, shepherds and wise men came to see her newborn child, and Mithras himself grew to become a healer and a teacher. He had twelve disciples, and on the eve of his death he gave them a final supper of bread and wine. He was buried in a rock tomb and rose again, and he did all this long before the Christians nailed their God to a tree. You let the Christians steal your God’s clothes, Derfel!’
If Nimue fails and horror comes, then take Arthur to Camlann, find Caddwg and look for the silver mist. It is the last enchantment. My last gift to those who were my friends.’
We were forced to leave our horses behind, for Arthur had discovered that horses make bad sailors.
head and gazed at us with her one eye. She was smiling, and so was Merlin. I was close enough to see clearly now, and he was still smiling as Nimue leaned down from her saddle with the knife. One hard stroke was all it needed. And Merlin’s long white hair and his long white robe turned red. Nimue howled again. I had heard her howl many times, but never like that, for this howl mingled agony with triumph. She had worked her spell.
‘Fate is inexorable,’ I said and, when he looked quizzically at me, I smiled. ‘That was one of Merlin’s favourite sayings. That and “Don’t be absurd, Derfel.” I was always absurd to him.’
I stayed with Sagramor as he died. I cradled his head, held his hand and talked his soul onto the bridge of swords.
I drew my arm back. There was blood on the sword, yet her blade seemed to glow. Merlin had once said that the Sword of Rhydderch would turn to flame at the end, and perhaps she did, or perhaps the tears in my eyes deceived me.
