For King & Country (36 page)

A tall, bearded man with a proud bearing was approaching from down the beach. With him were the three women, one Morgana's age, one older woman dressed as a servant, and one a lovely young girl whose eyes shone as brightly as Medraut's. The men who crewed the Irish warship did not approach, but remained on the beach, as the Briton sailors did. Lailoken joined them, grinning in triumph. He swept her a low and elegant bow.

"Queen of Galwyddel, I bring you alliance with the king of Dalriada."

"You have served Britain well then, minstrel. You will be amply rewarded."

His teeth flashed white. "I am all gratitude."

Medraut greeted the newcomers in halting Gael, then said formally, "Aunt, I present King Dallan mac Dalriada, the
Scotti,
and his daughter Keelin. Riona Damhnait serves the king as Druidess and translator. King Dallan, my aunt, Queen Morgana daughter, widow, and mother of kings."

Dallan offered his bare hand. Morgana accepted the greeting and they clasped forearms. The king spoke in a deep and pleasant voice, his eyes easy and smiling. His Druidess translated. "My king greets you with honor and thanks you for this gesture of friendship. We are pleased to unite our heiress with your heir in holy marriage."

"Greetings to you, King of Dalriada," Morgana said formally, "and welcome to Galwyddel, now the home of your child, who is soon to be sovereign queen. We are happy to welcome her to our family. I have brought with me a priest of our faith, to finalize the vows according to our customs." She turned to greet the Druidic counselor with him. "I am pleased that you have come with our future daughter, Riona Damhnait, for I would be a poor hostess did I not permit the vows to be solemnized by your customs, as well. My own family line descends from Druids of the Brythonic Celts."

"I am pleased to hear it," Riona nodded gravely, returning her welcome with a handclasp.

Keelin smiled and said in delightfully good Brythonic, "I thank you, Queen Morgana, for your welcome. I am honored to be chosen as the means of bringing our peoples together."

Morgana, surprised by the girl's fluency, gave her a warm embrace, smiling at the nervous tremors shaking the girl's shoulders and knees. Morgana, too, had trembled on the night of her betrothal and marriage at the standing stones. "You are lovely, child. Welcome." She turned, then, to Dallan mac Dalriada. "Let us go to the standing stones, where treaties are made and marriages arranged, and draw up the details of alliance."

The king glanced up the hill, then spoke quietly. Riona Damhnait said, "Dallan mac Dalriada wonders where the wedding party is? Surely your illustrious brother, war leader of the Britons, would wish to see his nephew wed? Is it possible he does not approve of this alliance?"

Morgana had been expecting the question, or one like it. "He is not here because he does not know of the wedding or the alliance plans. Artorius ap Uthyr Pendragon is at Caerleul, busy preparing for battle in the south. When he is presented with news of this marriage, he will have little choice but to accept it, for I am sovereign queen of Galwyddel and no man, not even my brother, has the right to refute my decisions."

When Riona translated, the king's eyes widened, then he began to chuckle.

"Dallan mac Dalriada appreciates your courage, Queen Morgana, and salutes your wisdom. He, too, has secrets to keep from kin in Ireland, who may be just as shocked to learn of Keelin's marriage."

"We are agreed, then, that this union is best done privately, then presented to the world as a
fait accompli
?"

"Oh, yes," the answer came back, "we are quite agreed." He said something further to his daughter which Riona did not translate, but the girl blushed prettily in the moonlight and smiled shyly at her betrothed.

Morgana had never seen Medraut so radiantly happy and thanked God—and Brenna McEgan, whose idea it had been—for it. "In that case, let us draw up the marriage agreement and seal this handfasting."

They climbed the long slope of land to the stone circle, where Cleary had set out his parchments, pens, and ink, the thin-scraped vellum gleaming white in the bright moonlight. He had lit oil lamps, as well, sheltered in the lee of the standing stones, the better to see his work. Dallan mac Dalriada nodded his approval of the arrangement, speaking quietly to his Druidess, who turned to Morgana and said, "I would be grateful for a copy of the agreed-upon details, that I might translate it into Gaelic ogham script."

"Of course."

That settled, they settled down to business.

The fortifications at Caer-Badonicus went up with astonishing speed. Covianna Nim had never seen so many men in one place, hundreds of them, with more arriving every day from the kingdoms of the midlands, bringing arms and armor, long pack trains of supplies to be cached in the summit's new granaries, groaning wagonloads of rough-dressed stone blocks, ripped hastily from quarries for miles around and ferried by the hundred-weight per horse, thousands of stones to build walls and barracks on the high hill.

Nor had she seen so many labor for so many hours without stopping, day and night, working in shifts to haul the stones laboriously to the top of the five-hundred-foot hill. Five layers deep, the walls went up, mazelike, the outermost layer studded with whole forests of thorny hawthorne branches, hacked down by women and children and carried on mules, on ponies, on grunting, waddling sows that stood as tall through the shoulder as some of the ponies and had to be goaded along by children with swine prods,
anything
that could carry a load of thorned nastiness.

Paving stones lined every inch of space between the long, snaking, concentric stone rings, joins made impervious to water with barrels of heated pitch. The cisterns were roofed over, forming a massive conduit that ringed the whole eighteen acres of summit, a feat of engineering the Romans themselves would have been proud to claim. And even
before
they were roofed over, they had begun to fill with rainwater from the hundreds of shallow channels dug every few inches across the entire top of the hill. Water flowed in spidery lines and snaking rivulets, pouring steadily into the cisterns.

Myrddin had ordered waterwheels built every few yards around the perimeter to lift the runoff into the cisterns from the top. A small army of boys was charged with keeping the wheels in constant motion, round the clock, with buckets mounted on timber spokes lifting the spilloff from deep, narrow troughs along the very edge of the summit, butted up against the innermost wall. The boys chanted songs in the days-long driving downpour, keeping up the rhythm of cranking the ponderous, groaning waterwheels.

Dripping buckets lifted water from ground level up to the top of the first cistern, pouring gallon after gallon down into the stone-lined channel between the first and second walls. From there, it flowed through drains down into the lower circumvallation cisterns, gradually filling up the whole, massive stonework system. When the cisterns failed to fill fast enough to suit Myrddin, he ordered wells dug around the long base of the hill, with more waterwheels to lift the thousands of gallons necessary to complete the job properly. Horses worked treadmills to keep these larger waterwheels moving, until the immense, layered conduit was finally full.

The waterwheels were immediately torn down, the timber used for roofing the houses and barracks going up all across the summit. Great wooden gates had been carefully built into the walls, as well, many more of them than necessary. Most were false gates, set along the edges of the walls in a mock facade, to fool the Saxon armies as to the purpose of those few, critical gates slated to deliver Emrys Myrddin's surprise. Runners came daily to the hill fort, gasping out the news of fighting and skirmishes all along the northern borders of Sussex and Wessex, the unexpected Briton strength forcing the Saxons to march west, right toward the trap being so carefully prepared for them. Emrys Myrddin was everywhere, directing, advising, overseeing the work day and night, only pausing to eat and rest when Covianna Nim insisted.

"You will collapse, Myrddin, if you do not eat and sleep, and where will Britain be, then? Come, lie down, I'll sing you to sleep."

At such times, she would guide him, usually stumbling with weariness, up to her rooms in the very first building finished on the summit, serving as her dispensary to treat the injuries sustained by the construction gangs. In those private rooms, she and Myrddin did a great deal more than eat and sleep. The sport they shared did him good, relaxing him and drawing him ever more delicately into her own trap.

And while he was distracted by her not inconsiderable charms, she bled him dry of every secret she could wheedle loose, pillow talk shared between lonely druidic professionals with no one else to share or understand the problems of their work. Given Myrddin's flattery-susceptible ego, larger than the whole of God's wide heavens, coupled with his long-standing infatuation with her, it was very simple to persuade him to share everything Covianna wanted to know.

He whispered the teaching epigrams between kisses, between couplings which were sometimes hard and fast, but more often slow and lazy and deeply satisfying—and always profitable. She learned the secrets of his wizardly lore, much of which consisted simply in knowing what men and women—be they superstitious peasants or kings with fine, classical educations—would do under given sets of circumstances, then uttering pronouncements calculated to achieve the desired outcome. Parable after parable slipped from his lips to her ears, deepening her understanding of how to manipulate people and situations.

He taught her healing lore not even Marguase had known, secrets picked up as a boy in Constantinople, from healers he had known before Covianna's birth. And most valuable of all, she learned the greatest secret of alchemy, long sought by her tribe of master smiths, but never found. The simplicity of it set her to laughing softly in the darkness.

"To change lead—the basest dross—into gold," he murmured, nuzzling her breast, "all that is required is the philosopher's stone."

"What stone is that? Something found only in a far country? Worth more than all the gold in Rome?"

He chuckled. "No, nothing like that. The alchemist's fabled prize is no stone at all."

"No stone at all? But—"

He tapped her temple. "The philosopher's stone is the rock-solid knowledge of
philosophy itself.
What does philosophy teach a man to do? To look at the gross and ordinary world of clay, of lead and crass stupidity, and to see within each crass and stupid thing the shining sparks of divinity waiting to be set free. And how does one set them free? By seeing them in the first place and acknowledging their existence, through the philosopher's skill of symbolic sight. Any man can change 'lead' into the 'gold' of wisdom, does he but understand this one, profoundly powerful secret."

It was the source of Emrys Myrddin's power, Covianna realized with a wondrous opening to the possibilities it made suddenly real and shining. No wonder Myrddin had been revered as a prophet even as a child, when he had seen the world through his philosopher's eyes, trained by the best minds of the East. He had seen clearly where Vortigern's weakness and greed would lead both Vortigern and the entire Briton race—and had uttered his first profound "prophecy" in symbolic terms even a slack-brained fool like Vortigern could understand. Red dragon of Britain would fight white dragon of Saxony, and Vortigern was the inevitable loser.

The very utterance of the "prophecy" had been Vortigern's undoing, leading his own sons to betray him while uniting the people behind Ambrosius Aurelianus and his closest friend, Uthyr
pen Dragon
—chosen by the "dragon," by Emrys Myrddin himself, who had invented the "dragon" whole cloth to represent the whole of the British people. It was so delightfully simple, Covianna marveled that she had not seen it sooner. It was another mark of Myrddin's genius that he had shared the source of his power with no one, not even Artorius.

Until now.

And now it was
her
secret, as well.

There was not room in all of Britain for two powerful Druids to hold this same, volatile piece of information. She smiled, whispering into his ear and nibbling at his neck, and plotted and planned and smiled up into his trusting eyes. When the fortress walls were nearly complete and Myrddin's work essentially done, Covianna put those plans into action.

"I must leave for Glastenning Tor," she told him that night. "I have stayed longer than I should at Caer-Badonicus. I worry for my kinsmen's safety. I wish..." She allowed her voice to trail off forlornly.

"You wish what, my dearest heart?"

She brushed fingertips against his lips, drawing a deep shudder from him where he lay joined with her. "I wish that you would come to the Tor, for just a little while, even for a day, to overlook our defenses. Your advice would be worth so much, Myrddin, for you see with eyes other men do not possess. You see the strengths and weaknesses of a place, even as Artorius sees the strengths and weaknesses of an army. And you could personally collect from the smiths of my tribe our treasure trove of fine swords and spear points, made against just such a contingency and stored away at the Tor. You could see them safely back here, to arm the defenders of Caer-Badonicus with them."

"When the work is finished here..." he began.

"But there is nothing further here that needs your supervision. The walls are up, the cisterns roofed over and filled, the sluice gates and the decoys built, and the houses and cattle byres are going up at a grand pace. There is no reason, really, why you could not slip away for a day or two, to help my kinsmen prepare the Tor for invasion."

"An invasion which may never come..."

She frowned, converting the irritation into a look of worried fear. "There is no way to know that, for sure, and I would never forgive myself if I failed to do everything in my power to protect my kinsmen. Please say you'll come."

And he did, shuddering all the while.

They left at dawn, bidding farewell to King Melwas and King Cadorius as the rain continued to pour from leaden skies. "I'll not be gone more than a day or two," Myrddin assured them, "just long enough to see to the defense of the Tor's abbey and the townfolk at its feet. The runners coming in from Caer-Durnac assure us the Saxons are yet a week's march away, more than enough time for me to see to the Tor's defenses and return."

"God go with you, then," Cadorius clasped his arm, "and bless you for your help at Caer-Badonicus. Without you, we would have been lost, I fear. Come back to us as soon as you may."

Despite the steady rain and biting chill of the wind, Covianna enjoyed the ride home more than any other journey she could remember taking. It was perhaps twenty miles from Caer-Badonicus' windswept summit to Glastenning Tor, and considerably less than that from the Tor to the sea. Each day when the tides turned, the River Brue and the broad sweep of salt marshes meandering lazily along its low-slung, flood-prone banks, mile upon water-logged mile of them, filled up with brackish water flowing inland with a swirl of muddied currents.

With the tides and the filling of the marshes, the strange, upthrust jut of land known as Glastenning Tor rose up from the marshy lowlands, spending fully half of every day as an island, completely cut off from the rest of Britain despite nearly twenty miles between its shores and the sea. When the tidal marshes drained again, it spent the other half of its day as a high and dry hill firmly joined to the mainland once more, but surrounded by treacherous bogs, pools of brackish water, and long, landlocked oxbow lakes where saltwater fish swam in surprised dismay to find themselves cut off from the sea, easy prey to the thousands of waterfowl and wading birds and canny swamp foxes living in the marshlands.

The Tor never failed to inspire a ripple of awe down Covianna's spine. It was the Great Mother's teat, so the old stories ran, from which flowed the milky white spring dubbed Chalk Well. The whole of the Tor roared with underground water, buried rivers of it, pouring through deep caverns and spilling out into springs in a dozen or more places, here milky white, there blood-hued and iron-rich. Maps Covianna had been shown as a girl, learning from her elders the carefully hidden truths of the Tor, had revealed the great hill's sacred outlines in all their astonishing, mystical wonder. The Tor
was
the Mother, Her left breast jutting skyward where She lay on Her side, left leg outthrust in a long and elegant sweep ending in a perfectly formed human foot.

Her right leg was tucked up beneath Her, in the birthing position, with Her open birth canal spread wide, giving life to a little hillock just beyond Her sacred vulva, a hill which rose from the earth like an infant's head emerging from its Mother's womb. Bride's Mound, it was called, this infant's-head hill that was Covianna's actual birthplace. The Tor was beautiful and holy, filled with mystery, a place where Covianna's mothers and grandmothers had, for centuries, kept their greatest treasures and their sacred forges, down in the secret caverns, deep inside the body of Mother Brigit, who gave eternal birth to Virgin Bride. It was on Bride's Mound the smithies had built their reputations and their trade, not daring to profane the Mother's body with their anvils and hammers and glowing forges or the glass houses where Bride's silica-rich sands gave birth in turn to the lustrous glass for which the whole complex of hills and caverns had been named.

She smiled when she could finally trace the outlines of the great labyrinth of the Tor, an earthwork so ancient, no one in Covianna's line could remember the building of it, only that it had been, from time immemorial, the only way into and out of the Tor, with its quiet, wealthy rooms and snaking passages one had to follow—like Theseus hunting the Minotaur—in order to reach the summit. The labyrinth's pattern could be clearly seen across the wide, marshy floodplain, and smoke from the smithies rose black against the sky from Bride's Mound. Sight of her home never failed to lift Covianna's spirits. Her fingers itched to take up hammer and steel again, to forge some wondrous new blade to fit the stolen scabbard in her baggage. She chuckled aloud, imagining Artorius' rage when he discovered it missing—and apparently, at the hands of the disgustingly virtuous Morgana. Emrys Myrddin, riding beside her, smiled at the sound of her laughter.

"It is a long time, I think, since you have been home."

"Too long," she agreed. "There is much here I have longed to show you."

"I have heard wonderful tales of Glastenning Tor. I visited once, as a young man, but only the forges. It will be a pleasure to have you show me its secrets."