Here Lies Arthur (9 page)

XX

 

Arthur’s army arrived the next day, and fat black clouds came with them like a baggage train, drenching the town in rain. It ran in rivers down the street-gutters and waterfalled from clogged downpipes. It drummed on the canvas roofs of the plunder-wagons Arthur had taken from the Saxons. It drowned out the bleating of the women who ran to mourn beside Valerius’s corpse. The dead man had been carried back in honour from the battlefield, wrapped in a cloak and laid upon a shield, a noble Roman fallen in battle. But the rain soaked him through and through, and by the time they reached the church he looked like he’d drowned in a flooded ditch.

The dead man’s widow steps out into the rain to meet him. Gwenhwyfar has a striking face; too long to be pretty, but a face you notice. She has dark eyes, with secrets in them. Her hair is dark, too, ash-streaked with grey. It hangs low over her forehead, as if she would like to hide behind it. Her eyes and nostrils are red like she’s been crying, but maybe it’s a cold. Her body, what I can
see of it under her woollen cloak, is all bony angles. Her name means “white shadow", and there
is
something shadowy about her. She looks as if she can’t quite believe in herself.

The boys I run with could talk of nothing but Gwenhwyfar last night. They say she’s bad luck. She was promised to Valerius’s brother when she was young, but he was killed in a cattle-raid before they could marry. She wed Valerius instead, and gave him a son, but the child died and there have been no others. Now she has no husband either. We boys can’t believe Arthur means to make a wife of this grey icicle.

She steps forward to kiss her dead husband’s forehead, and the men carrying him lower the shield a little to let her do it, almost spilling the corpse into the mud. She looks at him thoughtfully. Her white fingers rest on his chest.

“There is no wound,” she says, looking across the body at my master.

“He was struck from behind,” says Myrddin. Her eyes stay on him. The question in them makes him shift awkwardly. I wonder about how Valerius died. Did one of our men drive the spear into his back? Did Arthur order it? Did my master advise that it be done?

“It is not unusual for a blow to come from behind in the turmoil of battle,” Myrddin says, answering the lady’s question as if she’d spoken it aloud. “Your husband was such a valiant fighter, Gwenhwyfar, that I doubt any Saxon dared meet him face-to-face.”

Gwenhwyfar lowers her eyes and steps back into the company of her waiting-women. She can’t press my
master any further without insulting
his
master, Arthur, whose riders and spearmen pack the streets around. The question of her husband’s death blows downwind, unanswered.

Arthur watches her carefully from the far side of the church all through the bishop’s funeral prayers. He has the same look that he gets when he is thinking about buying a horse, or taking a new stretch of land.

Outside, in the skinny, driving rain, the men of Aquae Sulis dug a hole in the wet ground and bundled Valerius into it. Before they had finished filling in the grave, Arthur was making himself at home. Working men were ordered to repair the defensive walls and clear the rubbish from the ditches below them. What soldiers the place still had were set to drilling with spears and shields. We thought that when Maelwas learned of the bite Arthur had taken out of his borderlands he would send men north to take it back, and we wanted to be ready for them. We shod horses, and sharpened spears, and dragged felled trees across the places where the walls had tumbled down. We took turns to stand on the walls at night, watching the mist steam off the wet woods, watching the hills keep their secrets.

XXI

 

We watched and watched, but Maelwas never came. Maybe he’d heard tell of the great victory Arthur had won under the Hill of Badon, and didn’t fancy meeting him in battle. He sent heralds instead, all in white on white horses, with green branches held up high to show they came in peace. They passed on to Arthur Maelwas’s thanks for preserving Aquae Sulis, and asked that he send gold and cattle as a token of his loyalty. Arthur gave them half the gold they asked for, and none of the cattle, and the heralds went back to Maelwas’s strongholds in the Summer Country, leaving the town in the hands of its new lord.

Winter set in soon after. The air grew cold. We lit fires to warm our quarters. Mist hung over the ruined temples at the heart of town. From the hill-tops, I thought, Aquae Sulis must look like a steaming stock-pot.

One morning we woke to find those hills all hoary with first snow. Parties of men went to and fro between
the town and Arthur’s western strongholds before the roads were buried. They brought back treasures to deck Arthur’s new capital, and the women and hangers-on of some of his followers. Cei’s wife and daughter rode in, but I noticed Arthur did not send for Cunaide. I felt sad for her, abandoned in that cold fortress, her place taken by Gwenhwyfar.

Arthur had wanted a quick marriage, but Gwenhwyfar made him wait till Easter, when her time of mourning for her husband would be done. Arthur asked the bishop to cut short her mourning-period, but the bishop refused. Arthur thought about killing the bishop, but Cei and my master reminded him it might be bad for his reputation.

To take his mind off killing bishops, Myrddin advised that a new hall be built for the wedding. “What is the difference between us and our forefathers?” he asked one night when the men were lounging around the big fire in Arthur’s hall. “They built great palaces, while we are content to live among the ruins! Arthur should build here, to show that in him the spirit and the pride of old Britannia are come again! We’ll build a round hall, with tiles upon its floor and painted garlands on its walls. And at the heart of the hall, a round banqueting chamber, where we who have fought at Arthur’s side may meet as equals…”

“I’ve never seen you at my side in a fight, Myrddin,” shouted Arthur. “You skulk safe out of danger’s way with the women and the baggage-train.” But you could see the idea at work on him, even as he raised his cup to acknowledge the gusts of laughter from his men. He’d
never dreamed of building halls before, but now he was starting to see himself as a man who built; a ruler who left his mark upon the world in the form of splendid halls.

For the next week or so, my master pored over drawings in the smoke-fug of his quarters and took me out in the wincing cold to mark where the post-holes should be dug. “Here. And here. And here!” he ordered, walking a circle in the forum with instruments made out of willow-staffs and twine. The bishop and his priests and their wives looked on and muttered about witchcraft and conjurings.

But Myrddin’s efforts conjured up nothing, and the snow kept falling to blot out the marks I made. It quilted the roofs and streets. It froze the water in the horse-troughs so that we had to smash it with stones and spear-butts of a morning before the animals could drink. In the after-Christmas dark Arthur lost interest in hall-building, and Myrddin’s schemes withered like a flower in the frost. “It was only the seed of a hall,” he said, rolling up the skins he’d drawn his sketches on. “We’ll let it lie hidden till spring, then see what grows.”

Arthur was tired of waiting for his wedding, and for fighting-season to come round again. He left Cei in charge and took his favourite companions off into the hills, hunting deer and wild pig down the same combes they’d hunted Saxons through that autumn. They took Bedwyr with them – he was almost one of them, since Badon-fight.

Myrddin whiled away the time by teaching me to write. So if you are following my story, you have
Myrddin to thank for it, and if it bores you, you have him to blame, for these crabbed black inky words that you’re reading are built from letters that he showed me how to make, scratching them with a stick in the ash before a winter fire in Aquae Sulis.

One day, while the hunters were still away, I went down by myself to the waters, where I’d gone with Bedwyr when we first came to the town. The weather was warming, and the snow was gone from the streets, though the hill-tops were still speckled white. I was itchy and flea-bitten inside my clothes. I’d not had a chance to wash since Christmas, and even then I’d only splashed my face, too scared to even take my tunic off in front of the other boys. In the silent town the warm waters of Minerva seemed to call to me.

A couple of serving-girls from Gwenhwyfar’s household were lingering near the pillared front entrance to the baths, the entrance the bishop had boarded up. I ducked along the building’s side before they saw me. Bedwyr and the other boys were forever seeking out those girls, swapping stories about them and wrangling over which one was prettiest or friendliest, but they scared me. I thought they might not be as blind as Bedwyr and his friends to my smooth chin.

I crept into the baths through the same hole in the wall I’d found with Bedwyr, pushing my way through the twigs and the dangling charms. The big pool lay shadowed by its mossy, sagging roof, like a pool in a cave. I reached my hand down through the wreaths of mist and touched the water and it felt hot. It still
smelled bad, but not as bad as me. I pulled off my leggings, unwrapped my breech-cloth, bared my whole white body to the shivery air. The water clopped gently against the old steps, and I walked down into it, grateful for its warmth.

Have you bathed in warm water ever? I never had. It was like a miracle, to be warm again after those months of cold. Not warmed by a fire that roasts one side of you and leaves the other cold, but wrapped and coddled in warmness. My skin tingled with pleasure as I ducked under, smoothing my fingers through the greasy louse-nest of my hair, imagining the winter dirt coming off me in a cloud. Old coins and tin charms slithered beneath my toes, and drowned holly leaves pricked my soles. Opening my eyes in the soft green dark I saw something glimmer on the mulchy floor, and reached for it. My fingertips closed on a moon-shaped slip of metal that some old Roman had thrown there as an offering to the sacred waters.

When I surfaced again, someone was watching me.

How had I not seen her before? It was dark in there, I suppose, and my eyes were not used to it. Gwenhwyfar was in the shadows, just her head and shoulders showing above the lapping water, watching me with her grey eyes. I didn’t even recognize her at first. Her hair hung straight and wet around her face. I took her for the goddess of the place, and went under in a panic, snorting and gurgling.

She came through the water to me and pulled me up, looking intently at my face as I choked and spat. “I know you,” she said. “The magician’s boy.”

She smiled. I’d not seen her smile before. Had she seen me naked on the pool-side? Or had she only turned at the splashings I’d made? I shrank down in the water till it hid everything except my hedge-pig hair and flat brown face. Wavelets lapped at my nose and made me sneeze.

Gwenhwyfar said, “Bishop Bedwin would be filled with righteous anger if he knew I came here. He says it is a wicked place, and full of pagan spirits. But I would rather risk meeting a spirit or two than smell as bad as Bedwin does.”

I hugged myself under the water. My fists were clenched so tight that the moon-shaped charm I’d dredged up dug its points into my palm. “I won’t tell,” I promised.

Gwenhwyfar backed away from me in a swirl of water. “Turn your back, magician’s boy.”

So she still thought I was a boy! Or did she? I thought I saw an odd light in her eyes. Maybe I imagined it. I turned and bowed my head and shut my eyes, and heard the water shift and slosh as she waded to the far side of the pool to climb out. I stole one glance, and had a glimpse of her long body before she wrapped a square of woollen-stuff around her. White, she was, like a stripped twig.

XXII

 

She hadn’t always lived in a town. When she was a girl Gwenhwyfar lived in a villa on a green hill beside a steep green cleave. The cleave was tangled with trees, feathery with ferns, a secret stream slinking black and gold through the oak-shadows. Gwenhwyfar went riding there on her pony, or hunted along the wood-shores with a little bow one of the servants made her. She was as wild as a fawn.

At least, that’s how I see her, when I make pictures in my head of the life she led before.

But fate had laid a snare for Gwenhwyfar; set to trap her when she reached the age of marriage. Her father was a half-brother of Ambrosius Aurelianus. The old general’s blood ran well diluted in her, but still it ran. You could see it beneath the skin at her temples, and on the long, pale column of her throat. Those winding veins, bluish under her white flesh, with maybe a hint of imperial purple. She was a bridge between our time and the happier times of Ambrosius, and the man who
married her would link himself and his sons with the great name of the Aureliani.

Valerius’s brother was the first. He’d been chosen for her by her family and by her father’s allies among the
ordo
of Aquae Sulis. Gwenhwyfar didn’t mind. Marcus was handsome, light-hearted, kind; everything a girl could want. He brought her gifts. The seed of his son was already growing in her when the word came of his death in a cattle-raid.

After that, it was Valerius’s turn. It’s not uncommon for a dead man’s brother to marry the girl he’d been promised to. Why spoil a neat arrangement just because the bridegroom had run himself upon some rustler’s pike? But Valerius was a poor substitute. He was cold and stern. He’d grown used to being overlooked in favour of his older brother, and it had soured him. Now Marcus was gone, Valerius took the things that had been his with a sort of bitter triumph. It didn’t please him to find that the baby in his new bride’s belly was one of them.

It was a hard birth. The child was sickly, and soon dead. But in the few short days he lived, Gwenhwyfar loved him. Holding him made her happy. His little blue hands clutched fistfuls of her hair. She sang to him. When he died, the happiness went out of her for good. The cold old town they made her live in felt like a tomb. She dreamed her son was crying out for her, down under the cold ground, and she could not go to him. Her husband hated her. There were no more babies.

And now a new husband had come for her. However hard she tried to slow the approach of her wedding to
Arthur, the days kept slipping through her fingers. Her women made jokes about him. His strength. His manliness. All she could think of was the name his men gave him. The Bear. Sometimes it seemed to her that he really was a bear, poorly disguised as a man. His short, black bristling hair, his watchful eyes. The way he tore at his meat in the feast-hall. His snarls and roars when things displeased him. In the growing warmth of spring she shivered as she stitched her marriage-gown and imagined her wedding night.

I felt sorry for her. Poor old heron.