King Arthur's Bones (18 page)

‘Meurig felt that it was right for a Christian king to be buried in consecrated ground, as he was in Glastonbury,’ said Owain. ‘It would not have been seemly for him to be stuffed into some unhallowed field or bog.’

Dewi nodded sagely. ‘Arthur was certainly a devout man – he bore the image of the Virgin on his shield at the battle of Mount Badon, where he defeated the Saxons.’ Caradog became impatient with his father’s tale-telling. ‘So how are we going to get him back?’ he demanded.

Owain shook his head at the impetuousness of youth. ‘Straight after the funeral tomorrow, I’ll go over to the abbey and see how the land lies.’

With that, the others had to be content.

The whole village turned out to the funeral and, as legally he was the chief mourner, Hywel’s eldest son Ralph grudgingly attended, with John and William but not his wife or daughter.

The priest droned the Mass in poor Latin and then unusually gave a more sincere eulogy in Welsh at the graveside, to Ralph’s annoyance. There were no formalities after the coffin had been lowered into the frosty ground, but all the villagers filed past Ralph and Owain at the church door, briefly offering their sympathy and respect. With hardly a word to his brother, Ralph left as soon as propriety allowed, leaving the small group of conspirators to fill in the grave with the lumpy, frozen earth.

Owain stood for while with his two nephews, sadly contemplating the tumbled soil in the bare patch among the winter-shrivelled grass of the churchyard. Then he pulled himself upright and sent Arwyn and Madoc back to their homes and wives in Garway. When they had gone, he went over to the yard behind the Skirrid tavern, where his fellow conspirators were waiting.

‘Are you sure you don’t want us to come with you?’ asked Dewi anxiously.

Owain shook his head. ‘This is only a scouting visit, to make contact with the sexton,’ he said. ‘I can do it quicker on my old nag than with the cart – though we may have to take that to fetch the box.’

They watched him ride off, trotting up the Hereford track in the clear cold of the December day.

‘I’ve got a bad feeling about all this,’ muttered Dewi. ‘God grant that my resolve holds, to leave home and hearth to risk my life for a desperate cause up in Gwynedd.’

It took Owain the better part of two hours to cover the eight miles to Abbey Dore. A mile or so short of the monastery, he passed the small castle of Ewyas Harold, sitting on its mound. He half-expected some challenge to be called out by the sentinel on the gate, but the man thankfully ignored him.

‘The bastard probably thinks the Welsh are finished for good now that Llewelyn’s dead,’ he muttered, but it gave him pause to think about returning with the casket of bones. There was no way he could get past here with the cart, as its creaking wheels could be heard a quarter of a mile away in the stillness of the night, when there was supposed to be a curfew. Either they would have to come back in the day, with a load of legitimate goods in the cart, or else carry the box across country, though he had no idea of its weight or size.

Soon the huge abbey came in sight, nestling in the lush Golden Valley, with the slopes of the Black Mountains on one side and the fertile land stretching away into England on the other. The great church, with its square tower and huge nave was surrounded by numerous stone buildings that housed the chapter house, dormitories, refectories, guest rooms, hospital and all the other accoutrements of a prosperous monastery. The surrounding land was dotted with sheep and held strip fields which, in season, would be filled with corn, barley, oats and vegetables.

Owain was cautious in his approach, not wanting to attract too much attention to himself, but played the part of a traveller seeking rest and refreshment. He walked his horse into the guest-house yard and offered two pennies to a lay brother who was the ostler in the stables. For this subscription to the abbey treasury, the man readily agreed to water and feed the mare, telling Owain to go into the hall kept for travellers to get some potage and ale. When he came out, he asked the ostler if Meredydd was still the sexton.

‘I knew him some years ago,’ he lied. ‘I wondered if he was still here.’

The man grinned. ‘He can hardly go anywhere else, being as his father before him did the same job,’ he chuckled. ‘And his eldest son will succeed him one day, no doubt.’

‘I’d like a word, for old times’ sake. Where could I find him?’

‘This time of day, he’ll most likely be in the parish graveyard. A babe was buried this morning, so he’s probably tidying up there.’

There were two cemeteries at the abbey, one for the monks and priests, the other for the lay brothers and their families, as well as for the villagers who lived in the surrounding area. Owain was directed to this one, which lay against the eastern boundary wall. Here a tall, thin man of about fifty was hacking at frosted clods of turf with a mattock and placing them against a pile of earth which was obviously the pitifully small grave of an infant. He wore a coarse brown robe, quite different from the white habit and black scapular apron of a Cistercian monk, and he had no shaven patch on top of his greying hair.

‘Meredydd? God be with you!’

He spoke in Welsh, and the man jerked around suspiciously.

‘Who are you? I don’t recognise you from the village.’

He replied in the same language, but stiffly, as if he rarely used that tongue.

Owain explained who he was and cautiously opened up the reason for his visit. ‘I think we both have family obligations concerning the same matter,’ he began. ‘My great-grandfather was Meurig ap Rhys, and he brought something precious here from Carmarthen.’

Meredydd’s long face creased into a beatific smile. He dropped his hoe and advanced on Owain, gripping him on the forearms with both hands.

‘Many years ago, my father told me that he knew of a man in these parts who was descended from the Guardians, but he never approached him. That must have been your father?’

Owain nodded sadly. ‘Hywel ap Gruffydd, whom we put in the ground only this morning. That’s why I’m here, as he charged me with taking the relics to Gwynedd.’

The sexton’s eyes widened as his eyebrows rose. ‘The time has come, then? It should not be a surprise, given the evil news from Builth. If ever there was an hour of need, this must be it.’

Owain explained the hope that his father had, that the possession of Arthur’s bones might spur the remnants of the Welsh army to greater feats of courage in the coming battles with the English forces. Meredydd nodded enthusiastically and, picking up his mattock, steered Owain back towards the guest house, where he insisted on plying him with more ale, though Owain resisted his offer of food.

‘I apologize for my rusty Welsh,’ said the sexton as they sat on a bench near a large fire. ‘Since my wife died and my sons all married, I have lived in the lay brothers’ quarters near the farm, where everyone speaks English, so I am out of practice.’

‘Where are the relics now?’ asked Owain in a low voice, though there was no one within earshot in the near-deserted hall. The midday meal was long over and, with no guests travelling the winter roads so soon after Christ’s Mass, only two serving lads were in sight.

‘They are buried in the monks’ graveyard on the other side of the church,’ answered Meredydd. ‘I have never seen them, nor did my father or his father! But I know where they are.’

Owain frowned. ‘But I saw no stones or grave-markers in that place you were digging just now.’

The sexton shook his head. ‘Only eminent people like abbots and priors get an inscribed slab inside the church, though a wooden cross is often placed on the grave straight after the burial, but it is not meant to last long. A grassy mound is good enough for eternity, for God certainly knows where they are.’

‘So how can you be certain where Arthur’s remains lie? You say no one has seen them for three generations!’

Meredydd smiled and tapped the side of his long nose. ‘My father dinned it into me, as his father had done to him. There are sight lines with various parts of the abbey that mark that particular grave mound. I have often checked on it, just for curiosity. Now I am fated to be the one who actually uses those directions.’

Owain was still not completely convinced. ‘It may be that we will have to do this in the dark. Can you still find the box?’

The sexton shook his head. ‘There is no need for that. I can remove it in daylight and hide it nearby until you collect it.’

‘What if you are seen?’ said Owain, aghast at the man’s nonchalance in the face of such vital issues.

‘Unless there is a burial, no one ever goes in there, except me. And if they were to see me digging and pulling things around they would think nothing of it – that is part of my task in life.’

Before Owain left to get home before the early-winter dusk fell, he arranged with Meredydd that the sexton would dig out the casket and conceal it near the abbey farm, under a pile of hedge trashings that were waiting to be burned.

‘I can take it across on my wheelbarrow hidden under a heap of old leaves from the cemetery,’ he said confidently. ‘Then you can bring your cart and pick it up tomorrow.’

As Owain left, he fervently hoped that no one at the farm decided to have a bonfire that night.

Dewi was the one who accompanied him on the cart next day, as the miller was a freeman who operated the fulling mill for the Lord of Abergavenny, who owned it. No one breathed down his neck every hour of the day to see that he was there, and as long as the wool was washed and beaten by his three workers he could get away for most of the day. This was just as well, as Owain’s ox-cart was a slow, ponderous vehicle which took three hours to make the journey to Abbey Dore. Both Dewi’s son Caradoc and Alun wanted to go with them, but Owain felt that too many on the cart might arouse the interest of the sentries at Ewyas Harold, for, since the momentous events at Builth, the Marcher lords were nervous about possible reprisals from the Welsh and were checking on the movements of strangers.

They set out an hour after dawn, the weather having changed from its icy calm to a blustery west wind and a sky filled with heavy grey clouds. Their load was a pile of woven hazel hurdles, made in Llanfihangel and destined for Monnington, ten miles beyond Abbey Dore. Owain had to deliver them in the next few days but felt they were useful camouflage for his journey. He could leave them at the abbey farm and pick them up later, before he set off on his crusade to North Wales. As it transpired, his subterfuge was unnecessary, as the guards at the wayside castle took but a cursory glance at the wagon as it passed.

‘We’ll come back with a load of straw that I’ll buy from the abbey,’ said Owain. ‘That can conceal the box well enough, without drawing any attention.’

This plan worked well, for the straw had to be purchased from the demesne farm, where the box had been concealed overnight under its pile of hedge cuttings.When they met Meredydd, who seemed to be enjoying the intrigue immensely, he arranged for the three pennyworth of straw to be collected from an open barn and helped Owain and Dewi to load it into the cart.

‘You found the box?’ muttered Owain, as they dumped armfuls of yellow straw into the wagon.

‘It’s in my barrow. I took it from the waste heap an hour ago,’ replied the sexton. He trundled his conveyance nearer and with a quick heave slid a wooden box on to the tailboard of the cart and deftly pulled straw over it. Owain just had time to see a rectangular casket of dark oak, about the length of his arm and two-thirds as wide and deep, streaked with smears of earth.

‘Pile more straw on top of it!’ Meredydd commanded, and Dewi and Owain dropped further armfuls of last year’s wheat stalks into the cart so that there was no sign of their illicit cargo.

They gave their sincere thanks to the sexton, who Owain suspected would have joined them on their trip to Gywnedd, given the chance. ‘If anything goes wrong, you can always bring it back here,’ said Meredydd as they prepared to leave. ‘I can still pass on the sacred trust to my sons.’ He stood gazing after them as they trundled away, his Welsh fervour reawakened after all these years.

‘A good man. A pity we don’t have twenty thousand more like him,’ growled Dewi, as Abbey Dore slowly faded from view behind them.

They reached Garway without incident, the guards at Ewyas Harold taking no more notice of them than they had on the outward journey. Owain decided that he could not leave for Gwynedd for several days yet, as there were arrangements to be made with his sister and nephews. He needed to make sure they would not suffer for being linked with a felonious rebel and intended to slip quietly away with the three others. With luck, no one at Grosmont or Kentchurch would notice their absence for some time.

Madoc, who was the reeve at the farm run by the Templars at Garway Preceptory, lived in a cottage just outside the tiny cluster of houses that formed the village. The land sloped down from there towards the Monnow, the preceptory being between the village and the church. The home of the three Templars was a collection of stone buildings, with quarters for the knights, a sergeant and several lay brothers, including a few clerks, as the preceptory acted as the administrative headquarters for all the Templar properties and farms in South and West Wales.

Owain’s ox-cart creaked its way to the farm, which was separated from the preceptory by a few acres of pasture, where Madoc anxiously awaited them. They unloaded their straw into a barn, which already held a large amount, and unobtrusively slid the precious box beneath the large mound.

‘It’ll be safe enough there for a few days,’ said Madoc. ‘No one will need any of that straw. We have a different store for the horses’ bedding.’

They went over to Madoc’s dwelling where his handsome wife Olwen warmed them before the fire and fed them
cawl
and fresh bread.

‘Have you looked inside the box?’ asked Madoc, who was fascinated by the thought that he had actually carried the remains of the greatest figure in the ancient history of the Britons.

Owain shook his head. ‘I have kept it out of sight ever since we collected it,’ he answered. ‘But I’m not sure I want to look. These are powerful relics!’