Finding Camlann (35 page)

Julia has an image in her mind now, the young Hugh waiting there in the darkness by the railway tracks, so arrogant and self-assured and entirely in thrall to the messianic visions of Caradoc Bowen. In the end, the logic of it twisted cruelly back on him. He was torn down by failure, by the insupportable weight of Bowen’s expectations. What Julia feels mostly is a sadness that comes from knowing what he might have achieved, but did not; what their marriage might have been, but was not.

And there is another picture that she will not easily forget, a rushing waterfall, rocks sent tumbling down from above, Bowen grasping desperately at a last handht all nold before falling to his death: Caradoc Bowen, who was the only person alive who knew for sure what Hugh’s role had been. She cannot say precisely what he is guilty of, but at this moment, more than anything else, she wants to be far away from Hugh Mortimer. As calmly as she can, she walks back across the road to her car.

‘Please, Julia,’ Hugh says. ‘Stay and talk to me.’

‘I’m glad you told me the truth,’ she says, ‘but I need to be on my own.’ She closes the door and starts the engine. As she drives away from him, around a bend in the lane and out of sight, she has a final glimpse of him in her mirror, standing there transfixed as if she has just sent him into oblivion.

SITTING ALONE AT
the riverbank, Donald turns his thoughts back to Caradoc Bowen, to this brilliant and troubled man who in some respects got things so right, yet also came to get them so terribly wrong. He pictures Bowen as an intense young scholar in the depths of his research on Siôn Cent, immersing himself in the treasure trove of previously unstudied manuscripts that he found at Ty Faenor. It is not hard to imagine his excitement at coming across Siôn’s poetry book full of his unknown early work: and its crowning jewel, a poem written in a strange, archaic form of Middle Welsh, the Song of Lailoken. Perhaps he felt some magical connection to Siôn Cent, a sense that it was his fate alone to discover these verses and make them known to the world.

Bowen wrote swiftly to Margaret Rackham with his first translation of the poem, not yet sure what it might all mean, but certain that he had found something of deep significance. His first mistake came early on. He took at face value the evidence of the manuscript, which seemed to tell him without a doubt that Siôn Cent was the author of the Song of Lailoken. Why should he not believe this, seeing the poem written out there in Siôn’s own hand, with its heroic message that seemed so perfectly to match his own conception of this great Welsh bard? According to Bowen’s interpretation, Siôn Cent was a prophet in the Merlinic tradition, seer of Glyn D
ŵ
r’s rebellion and a central figure in its early success. He created the Song of Lailoken as a means of burnishing his leader’s mythical aura: it was a poem to be read or sung aloud, to inspire a renewed fervour in Welshmen’s hearts. His verses were carefully crafted to reinforce the popular mythology of the Celtic hero cast in the mould of Arthur, the one who does not truly die, who remains at the fringes of the mortal realm, waiting to return in his people’s time of trouble. To his impressionable Welsh audience, Glyn D
ŵ
r
was
Arthur returned as champion of the red dragon in the hour of need.

In some essential aspects of his analysis, the professor was entirely correct. According to the sober assessment of the Bodleian Library report, Siôn Cent was indeed responsible for the final two stanzas of the poem, the lines that Bowen declaimed so memorably to Donald in his rooms at Jesus College. But Siôn did not write the earlier verses of the poem, which were made at least eight hundred years before his time. Far from being a Merlinic concoction on the part of Siôn Cent to commemorate the battles of Glyn D
ŵ
r, the Song of Lailoken speaks of much older, deeper secrets than Caradoc Bowen can possibly have imagined.

To come to a proper understanding of the poem, Donathec Bld must reach all the way back to the latter years of the sixth century
AD
, when St. Cyndeyrn established his monastery on the banks of the Elwy river. At Donald’s first meeting with Bowen, the professor spoke of an old Welsh tale describing Cyndeyrn’s encounter in the forest with the poet Lailoken, who was once a bard in the court of a British monarch of the Old North. Driven to the edge of madness by terrible visions of a battle he had witnessed, Lailoken predicted his own threefold death by stone, stake, and water. It is almost irresistible now for Donald to conclude that the Lailoken story is more than a mere folktale, that it preserves an echo of real events: that Cyndeyrn did indeed meet Lailoken on his travels, and committed to writing a poem he heard the old man recite.

WITH THE AFTERNOON
drawing on, Julia finds herself trapped in a thick fog on the main road from Monmouth and the Welsh borders across the Vale of Usk. What little traffic there is has bunched up into a small convoy strung together by the sharp glow of red tail-lights. From time to time, the car ahead disappears entirely, forcing her to drive on alone inside a silent white shroud, doubting the reality of her surroundings. Every time she tries to speed up, the fog seems to gather itself anew, curling and eddying against the glass, filling the car with a cold pale light.

There is a prickling of anxiety now, a sense of natural forces arrayed against her. She counts the hours since she left Oxford, imagines Donald still waiting for her, hopes fading, as twilight falls across the valley. The sun breaks through at last, still well up above the horizon as she drives on past Abergavenny into the eastern fringe of the Black Mountains. She pushes up to seventy on the empty road that leads to Crickhowell and Brecon and finally to the narrower lanes that will take her up into the wilderness.

DONALD FINDS HIMSELF
pacing upstream towards the lower waterfall, back downstream to the ruins of the old bridge, ideas crowding in on him from the empty sky. The Song of Lailoken describes how the one called Belak-neskato in her death-throes laid a bitter curse on her adversary, the poet who calls himself the crab.

I did not heed her last-breath’s screeching

Threefold life she promised me, and threefold death

My doom the venom on her tongue.

Margaret Rackham hinted at a connection to these lines in the poem when she spoke of Bowen’s intense dreams of a kind of threefold death, his visions of being crushed by falling stones in the forest, assaulted on a bridge by an enemy wielding sharpened sticks, drowned in a raging flood. Thus Bowen’s own death was also in a sense foretold: with his strange premonitory note sent to the Bodleian on the eve of the accident, he seems to have guessed that his time was near. Perhaps there is, after all, a thread that connects these three elusive characters, Lailoken and Siôn Cent and Caradoc Bowen. They were the successive inheritors of an ancient poem, and each in his own time became obsessed with these strange and troubling verses. Did each of them in the end also come to suffer his apportioned part of the threefold death? The prophecy of Belak-neskato was fulfilled at last when Caradoc Bowen, the final victim of her curse, fell into the torrent at Three Devil Falls.

Donald sits down once more at the river’s edge, tries to halt the irro her ational galloping of his thoughts. There is no place in his scientific world-view for avatars of an earlier age. Margaret Rackham described Bowen as suffering from a kind of psychosis: she thought his death was self-inflicted, an act of prophetic self-fulfilment. If he suffered from dark dreams of his own death, this was the unhappy result of his fixation on a poem that he came to believe had a personal, oracular meaning for him. If he lost his footing as he made a dangerous climb up the waterfall, this happened only because, in some final act of acceptance or resignation, he placed himself deliberately in harm’s way.

THERE ARE LONG
shadows now from the line of hills to the west, making a strange light that begins to play tricks on Julia’s senses. Turning a sharp bend, she brakes suddenly at a fork in the road, certain that she saw the silhouette of a woman in a dark cloak standing there, a hand outstretched; but it is only the blackened fragment of a dead tree leaning across the verge. She stops the car, takes out Donald’s map, tries to find her bearings. It is clear enough: a turn to the right will bring her on to the track that leads alongside the river to Three Devil Falls.

Now she is so close, something makes her hesitate. She gets out of the car and walks over to the tree. There is a strange sound in the air, something whispering from the rim of the valley, glancing off the folds and ridges, mingling with the wind and the rushing stream. It is a woman’s voice, a simple phrase endlessly repeated, Julia’s mother speaking to her along some magical southerly path through the Welsh bedrock from Dyffryn Farm.
Do what you must do, my love, do what you must do
. But now the words are changing, losing their benign intentions, and she is not so sure.

Leaning back against the trunk of the tree, she sinks her head in her hands, tries to shut out the insidious whispering, this malicious trick her mind has chosen to play on her. When all is quiet once more, what comes to her first is a memory of her father cursing at the kitchen stove, trying to light it with damp wood on a cold April morning: angry at her for the news he has heard from the treacherous Gareth Williams, that she has been seen in the company of Robert Mortimer’s son. She remembers the look on his face, half-joking and half-serious in the intense way he had sometimes. He told her she should always try to take the right path, even if another way seems easier. Her mother was there in the room, turning her back on him. You were never quite so wise yourself, Dai Llewellyn, she said.

She plays through scenes from her past, imagines going the other way at every turn, where that would have left her now. Instead of leaving Donald standing outside the Randolph Hotel after he kissed her clumsily on the cheek, she takes him by the hand, walks on with him down Broad Street to a future without Hugh Mortimer. Instead of leaving him alone with Lucy Trevelyan at Jesus College, she walks boldly in through the gate. Instead of abandoning Hugh at the side of the road, she finds a way to go back to him, to repair the shattered fragments of their married life. Instead of getting back in her car and taking the right-hand turn, she goes to the left, keeps on driving until she comes to some new crossroads where she might hope to choose a path that leads to a simpler life.