After Rome (37 page)

The tower was accessed by a flight of steps cut into the stone. On the day the work was finished Cadel stood on the bottom step and looked up admiringly. “Are the walls straight, Dinas?”

“Of course they are, as straight as a poplar sapling.” Holding both hands open in front of him, Dinas sawed them up and down through the air to indicate the straight sides of his tower … just as Dafydd approached.

It was too good an opportunity for an inveterate prankster to ignore. “Ho, Dinas!” Dafydd called out cheerily. “What are you going to do about that wall?”

Dinas turned to face him. “Which wall?”

“The one that's leaning out, of course. It looks to me as if it's about to fall down, I'm glad we spotted it in time. No, don't walk around to the other side, it might topple onto you!”

Dinas scowled. “You must be joking.”

“Would I joke about something so serious? Cadel, wipe the horse manure out of your eyes and have a look, will you? You should be able to see the problem from where you're standing.” As he spoke Dafydd gave a surreptitious wink.

Cadel resented the remark about horse manure, but he enjoyed a joke as well as the next man. “There's definitely something wrong, Dinas,” he reported. “We must have used larger stones on one side than on the others.”

“I don't see what difference that would make.”

“There's Cynan and Otter, let's see what they think.” Cadel beckoned the pair over; Dafydd greeted them with another surreptitious wink. “We're talking about the new tower, lads. Cadel and I think it's leaning but Dinas doesn't agree.”

“There's nothing wrong with it,” Dinas insisted. He remained where he was while the four recruits surveyed the tower from various angles with much nodding and muttering.

Impelled by curiosity, Pelemos ambled over to see what was going on.

When Tostig felt the time was right, he caught Dinas by the arm and led him forward a few steps, to the very base of the tower. “Now tilt your head back and look up,” he said.

Dinas stared up along the stone shaft. Suddenly he caught his breath and staggered back, raising his arms to shield his face. “Sweet Christ, Otter, it's falling on me!”

The four recruits howled with laughter. Cynan gave himself hiccups.

Dinas failed to see the humor in it.

“It's only a trick of the eyes,” Tostig tried to tell him. “We discovered it when we were building the tower. It isn't falling at all, it only seems that way if you stand close to the base and look straight up.”

Pelemos had a different explanation. “The problem is the height of the tower, it's too tall. It profanes the heavens to build something like that. You should knock the top off of it, Dinas.”

“I certainly will not! It's a splendid structure, fit for a king.”

“All right. But don't say I didn't warn you.”

Thereafter the tower was referred to as “the famous falling tower” by everyone but Dinas. “I don't think it's funny,” he complained to Meradoc—who thought it was very funny but did not say so.

As the days grew shorter the band attacked two more ships, though not with the success of their first undertaking. The crew on one vessel were well armed and ready for them. Dinas ordered his men to turn back rather than risk their lives. The other ship had sold its trade goods and was carrying only tin ingots, which Dinas scorned. “We'll do much better in the spring,” he assured his men.

The dying of the summer brought a change to the land of the Dumnonii. As the nourishment faded from the grass near the sea Meradoc and the recruits began taking the horses farther afield in search of good grazing. Thus they discovered that wars were being fought inland. Small wars on a small scale, but violent nonetheless. Individual chieftains maintained their status and enlarged their holdings by fighting one another. Like the Celts of old, they defined themselves in battle. War was their sport and their religion. As the days began to grow shorter they initiated conflicts with increased urgency, anxious to consolidate their wins before winter and mud made warfare unproductive.

Meradoc reported this to Dinas with some amusement. “It's like stepping back in time,” he said. “We Britons used to live like that, I suppose. Before the Romans invaded.”

“If we had been better at it the Romans never could have conquered us,” Dinas replied. “I think we had best start having weapons practice.”

With the change of seasons the recruits learned the major difference between life in the high mountains and life on the edge of the ocean. Autumn brought gale force winds that came roaring over the rim of the world to batter the helpless land with waves as tall as trees. Giant crests of white foam leaped and curvetted like silvery horses, tossing their spumey manes. The nights were bitterly cold and the days not much warmer. Men had to shout as loud as they could in order to be heard over the wind. The wind, the wind, the omnipresent, salt-laden wind with all the force of the ocean behind it.

Dinas loved it. He climbed to the top of his tower and bared his teeth to the wind, daring it to do its worst.

“He has an iron spike in the wall up there to hold on to,” Bleddyn confided to Iolo, who never climbed to the top of the tower.

The winter surpassed the autumn for savagery. The horses had grown heavy coats, but even so they used up their reserve fat in keeping themselves warm. The recruits took turns spending an entire day with them while they grazed on sparse, frozen grass, which gave little nourishment. They only brought the horses back to Tintagel at night when wolves could be heard howling in the distance.

As soon as the sun went down the men sought their stone huts and did not emerge until morning. Even Dinas did not sleep in the tower at night. He tried it for a while, but there was something in the voice of the wind that disturbed him. At first he shrugged it off. He loved everything about Tintagel, he told himself. It was the realization of his wildest dreams.

Then Bryn claimed that the promontory was haunted. “Something's alive here that has never been alive,” were his exact words.

“What are you talking about?” said Dinas. “A ghost from the past?”

“Or the future,” Bryn replied. “Either is possible, you know. Or maybe you don't know. Young people these days…”

At night Dinas began sharing a hut with Meradoc and Tostig. He explained that he slept better close to the ground. Which was true.

No merchant vessels dared the Oceanus Hibernicus in the dead of winter. The supplies Dinas had purchased with the stolen wine would be almost gone by Christmas. “I should have rationed our food from the beginning,” he said to Bryn. “I don't suppose you know of any edible roots and herbs we haven't found yet?”

“If I did, I would have eaten them by now,” the healer admitted.

Dinas and Meradoc set out again with packhorses and saddlebags. They visited three separate Dumnonian villages without finding anyone who wanted to buy the Capuan perfume. The women wrinkled their noses. “It stinks like a farting fox,” one haughtily informed Dinas.

After examining the Corinthian bronze ornaments with grave suspicion, the patriarch of a fourth extended family chose to be insulted. “You offer me the figure of an ass!”

Dinas took back the brooch and looked at it himself. “That isn't an ass, it's an embossed horse. It may not be a very good representation, but I promise you, that's what it is. A horse is a noble emblem indeed, you should be honored.” Using flattery and guile in equal measure he eventually persuaded the man to buy two brooches for a fraction of their value. A she-goat and a straw basket filled with birds' eggs. As they were riding away Meradoc said, “You told me those bronze things were fancy cloak fasteners.”

“They are,” Dinas confirmed.

“But you told that man they would keep his prick stiff all night if he rubbed them on it.”

Dinas raised an eyebrow in mock surprise. “Did I? Who knows; maybe they will. Stranger things have happened.”

Meradoc laughed. “Now that
is
funny.”

In appalling weather they crisscrossed a sizable portion of Dumnonii territory. They did not meet the two chieftains who had greeted them upon their arrival at Tintagel, nor did they find anyone as hospitable. Some helped them out of pity; some shouted at them and threw stones. At last, when nothing was left in the saddlebags but the wooden plate and the stone cup, they made their way back to Tintagel.

“We can survive on what we have,” Dinas assured his men, “if we go hunting every single day and bring back anything we can find. Even vermin.”

“I didn't think the Saxons had come this far,” said Tostig the Otter.

On the coldest days of winter the entire band crowded into the tower to hear Pelemos tell stories. Although their bellies were cramping with hunger, his words filled the dark chamber with sun and summer. Disheartened, discontented men who had been talking about leaving decided that things were not so bad after all. They felt part of something almost mystical; a brotherhood of heroes extending back into the distant past.

Albion.

Standing off to one side, Dinas tried to fathom the power of the bardic art.

Does everyone dream of a secret Albion; a place in the heart, not the head? Is that what a true leader gives his followers?

If he knows how.

I wish I knew how. But at least I have Pelemos.

Strange to think that I came upon him by accident. I didn't even want to bother with him at first because I thought he was simple. And he is, though not in the way I meant then. There's nothing wrong with his mind. His simplicity is his strength. He uses it to lighten the burdens of others, while his serenity lifts their spirits. With Saba's lambs he showed a totally masculine tenderness I had never seen before. I envy it, as I would envy someone who hears music I can't hear. Pelemos is the quietest of men; he lives in a world of his own most of the time, yet the less he says, the more he is admired. People are drawn to him like iron filings. My men speculate on his saintliness.

I, who believe in nothing but myself, am amused by ordinary men crediting sainthood to another ordinary man—though their delusion serves me well.

Then Dinas stopped speculating altogether and lost himself in the story Pelemos was telling. A story about a band of courageous men who performed many wondrous deeds. In the shadowy tower of Tintagel, it seemed plausible.

The winter dragged on. Dinas was the only one of the men familiar with eating shellfish; to the others the armored denizens of the deep were creatures out of nightmare. However hunger was a quick teacher. Soon they were scouring the rocks in search of crabs and barnacles.

The sparse grass atop the cliffs was rimed with ice, it crunched when the horses tried to crop it. But they learned too. Although men and horses grew thin, no one actually starved.

Yet still it was winter. Dark and cold and relentless.

One day Docco suggested they might have to eat the horses if things got any worse. “They're no good to us anyway,” he said. “We can't gallop along the coast in search of ships when there aren't any ships. One horse would feed us for at least…”

The look Dinas gave Docco contained more ice than the winter wind. “One man would feed us almost as long,” he snarled, “and be more tender. You, for example. You have more fat on you than anyone else.”

After that there was no talk of eating the horses.

Then one morning there was a perceptible change in the angle of the light. A few days later the omnipresent wind swung around and began to blow out of the south. The horses stopped trying to tear nourishment out of the reluctant earth and lifted their heads, sniffing through distended nostrils.

The dark stallion whinnied to the chestnut mare. She answered with longing to equal his own.

Spring was in the air. It sang through the veins like red wine. Men who were weak with hunger began to believe they would be stronger soon. And they were.

With spring the tin trade resumed. Ships began to appear along the coast again. Most had sails of various descriptions, from square to triangular. Some were exotic in outline. “Byzantine, I think. Or eastern anyway,” Dinas remarked to Tostig. A few of the ships were broad-beamed timber vessels like those known to be used by the Saxons, totally dependent on oar power. Dinas made no effort to attack those.

He realized their first success had been a fluke. The task of seizing and boarding ships was both dangerous and complicated. The horses were useful for hurrying men to landing sites, but then someone had to hold them during the action, which tended to excite the animals. Once or twice they broke away and their chagrined riders had a long walk ahead of them.

The men they were trying to rob were also uncooperative. Dinas and his band soon discovered they were not the only pirates at work along the southwestern coast, and merchants from the east had begun arming themselves. “I suppose it was inevitable that others would have the same idea I did,” Dinas admitted to Meradoc. “I just wish they had waited a little longer, until we had more men and arms ourselves.”

“Perhaps we should have waited until then,” Meradoc suggested.

Dinas glowered at him. “I'll take care of the thinking; you take care of the horses.”

He put Dafydd in charge of what he called “seagoing operations.” When a landing party had been waylaid, captured and securely bound, Dafydd and the other recruits would take their boat and return to the ship, where they captured and bound the crew and then helped themselves to the portable merchandise.

It only worked once the way Dinas had envisioned. Next time out, Docco got violently seasick in the rough swells and almost fell out of the boat. Dafydd took pity on him and headed back for shore, which gave the crew on board the merchant ship adequate time to prepare to repel them. They seized Dafydd and Cadel as they climbed up the boarding net and threatened to cut their throats unless their sailors were released at once.