Here Lies Arthur (18 page)

XXXIX

 

We rode west through the wreck of autumn. These things I remember of that journey. The ringing of metal cooking pots as they swung from the packs of the baggage-mules. The slither-splash of red mud in the deep lanes. Rubbing the horses down at day’s end, blanketing them against the cold, seeing to their fodder before we saw to our own, the chores of the horse-lines coming back to me fresh as if I’d never stopped being a boy. The soft munching sounds of hooves on wet hilltracks. Ambling, tuneless songs. Apples and bramble-berries. The hard, ashy-tasting rounds of bread we baked over our fires. The long detours around flooded valleys, flooded roads, washed-out bridges.

The men grumbling. Why couldn’t Arthur have left Cunomorus in peace till spring? Arthur had lost his luck. He couldn’t even rule his own wife. They wished they had a better man to follow. They looked hopefully at Cei. His sandy head was bare in the sunshine, hooded in rain, and he kept his thoughts inside it.

I hung behind the others. My old pony Dewi was sturdy enough, but slow. Anyway, I didn’t want them questioning me too much. Most of them were lads I didn’t know, men from Sulis, relatives of the
ordo
and the big local land-owners. But there were a few who might remember Gwyn, and wonder what he’d been doing in the years since he’d ridden with Arthur’s boys.

Riding alone, listening to snatches of their banter blowing back to me on the breeze, I got to missing my life among the girls. I never thought I would, and never a day went by I didn’t feel glad to be up on a horse and going somewhere instead of trapped indoors, but I wished I’d had Celemon there to tell some of my inward thoughts to. Girls tell each other things, in honest whispers, when the night is drawing on. Boys just brag.

Peredur was the only one I truly wanted to talk to, and he kept clear of me. He remembered me, I could tell, but he looked as if he hoped I didn’t know him. He’d had sense enough to keep quiet about his girlish upbringing, and I suppose he was afraid I’d tell the others of it.

By night, around the campfires, or in the little shabby halls we stopped at, I would tell stories. Cei asked me to. “You’re Myrddin’s boy,” he said. “Tell us some of your master’s tales to make us forget our troubles and our poor cold toes.”

Truth be told, it
was
cold, and I was as much in need of comfort as the rest. So I pitched my voice as deep as I could and paced my words to the tramp of the sentries patrolling at the edges of the firelight, and told them stories. I gave them old tales at first: the Green Man, and
the Chief of the Giants. But slowly I got bolder. They all knew what had become of Bedwyr, but they’d not heard anything of Gwenhwyfar since the storm began. So I told them how she’d got away to Ynys Wydryn, with Medrawt. And though I couldn’t tell them she’d been young, the way I had with folk who’d never known her, I made her kind and wronged enough that they started to think she had been beautiful, and not so old as they had thought. Sometimes, in the firelight, on one face or another, I’d see tears running down.

Peredur was one of the tearful ones. He never tried to hide what he was feeling, the way the others had all learned to. Once he came to me after a story and hugged me and thanked me for telling it. Looked at me strange when he’d said it, and said shyly, “You came to my home once, I think.”

“That was me. We tricked old Porroc, you and I. You made a fair angel.”

The smile lit up his face. “I thought it was you! I wasn’t sure… You look so like that girl Gwyna…”

“My half-sister,” I said quickly. The old lie came so natural to me now it felt like truth. “She told me she’d met you.”

“She was there in the water-meadow the day I came to Aquae Sulis. It was she who gave me this sword, after I killed the red man…” His smile grew worried. “You didn’t tell her about how I used to be before?”

“The dress? The hair?”

“I’d never live it down.”

“It’s safe with me,” I said

He laughed. “I’ve never forgot that day! That was the
first time I’d seen men, real men. I was so jealous of you, riding off with Arthur…”

“And the look on Porroc’s face when we…”

“I’d always known there was something not right about him, but till you came I couldn’t see what a liar and a leech he was…”

And he sat by the dying fire with me while the others slept, and told me all the things that had happened to him since, which I’ve already told to you. It made me feel shamed, as you’ll have guessed, to learn all the things my game with the angel led to. And as I sat listening, I could not help thinking what it would be like to hold Peredur’s narrow face between my two hands, and say the sort of things to him that I’d heard Gwenhwyfar tell Bedwyr. To treasure him. I reckoned it was my bad luck that I could only come close to him by turning myself back into a boy.

We kept to the old road till we were near Isca, then veered north. Isca was loyal to Maelwas, and Maelwas might not look friendly on Arthur’s gang any more.

“King Maelwas will want a new man to hold Aquae Sulis for him,” said one of Cei’s captains, Dunocatus. We were resting on a hillside-road, the smoke of Isca filling its wet valley a few miles south, the big river silver beyond. The horses cropped the grass with steady tearing sounds. Cei stared off westward at the Irishman’s stony moors and said nothing.

“If a good Christian man was to challenge Arthur, and throw him down, and take his place, Maelwas might be glad of it,” Dunocatus insisted. Other men, who felt the
same but hadn’t had the courage to say it, watched hungrily for Cei’s reaction.

“Why are we fighting for the Irishman against Cunomorus?” Dunocatus asked loudly. “Why do we not ride back to Sulis and fight for Cei against Arthur?”

Cei turned and knocked him down into the grass and kicked him hard a few times and strode off, leaving him groaning there. “Arthur is my brother!” he yelled over his shoulder as he climbed back on to his horse. “We have promised to help the Irishman. Do you want your sons and your sons’ sons to hear how you hadn’t the stomach for that fight?”

We rode on, through steep-walled, thick-wooded valleys. Up the long shoulder of the moor we went, the road dwindling to a peat-track, climbing through knotted woods. Mossy boulders lay crowded between the trees, like sleeping beasts with thick, green fur. When we came up out of the trees at last there was nothing to see but the hills, folded one behind the next, all wrapped in fog and dragons’-smoke.

Cei had me ride with him up on to a hill-top where a great mass of stones stood, hooting and wuthering as the wind ripped round them. “You know this country,” he said.

I knew a few of the high hills westward, or thought I did. I did my best. “The Irishman’s place is over that way, where the moor slopes down towards Kernyw. Just north of here is Ban’s hall. The river…”

“Your water-home, lake-lady,” said Cei. He looked at
me wryly. “I’ve thought of that day often. What Myrddin had you do. It’s a strange life he’s led you.”

I stared at the wind stirring Dewi’s mane. I’d always known Cei knew my secret, but it still made me feel naked to be talking of it. I said, “I wish he’d let me be sometimes. Why didn’t he? Why did he come back for me, that day at the waterfall?”

“He loves you,” said Cei. “He never had children of his own. He had you instead.”

“No! He sent me away. Made me be a girl again and gave me to Gwenhwyfar.”

“He found you a comfortable living-place, one that might put you in the path of a good husband, just as I did for Celemon. The old man loves you, girl. Surely you can see that.”

He wheeled his horse and rode back to the waiting column, shouting, “We’ll camp here this night. Tomorrow we feast with the Irishman!” I was left on the hill-top with my thoughts. Cei had been Myrddin’s friend, and should know what Myrddin thought. But I couldn’t believe Myrddin loved me as a daughter. I couldn’t believe Myrddin loved anyone, except maybe himself.

The naked feeling stayed with me as I went back down the hill. I began to feel that someone was watching me, out among the rocks and tussock-grass. But we had no enemies here. Cunomorus’s lands were two days’ ride away. This was the Irishman’s country, and tomorrow we would reach his hall, and make ready for our raid into Kernyw. I shook myself to try to get rid of the feeling, and I told myself that men must
always feel like that when they knew there was a fight coming.

That night around the fire the others wanted tales of battles won, and enemies cast down. They wanted to hear again about the treasure that would be waiting for them in Cunomorus’s stronghold.

I wasn’t sure what to tell them. If I promised them gold drinking cups or a jewelled throne, what would they say when they looted Cunomorus’s hall and didn’t find such things? Then the stories I’d spun might twist around like snakes to bite me.

“What about his magic cauldron?” said one, a man called Bodfan. “Myrddin told us once about a cauldron that was never empty, and in this cauldron every man could find the food he most wanted to eat, and the drink he most wanted to drink.”

I nodded warily. If Bodfan hoped to find a thing like that anywhere outside a story, he was in for a disappointment. But Myrddin had promised us a cauldron, hadn’t he? I said, “Cunomorus’s cauldron’s not like that.”

“Like what, then?” someone asked.

“Shall I tell you the story of it?”

“Yes, yes,” they said.

I hesitated, as if I was gathering my memories of the tale. Really I was stitching something new together out of scraps of other tales I’d heard.

“Back in the long-ago years,” I said, “Cunomorus’s grandfather was the finest of the warriors of the island of Britain. Tewdric was his name. And he came raiding with his war-band into these very hills.”

(My listeners nod and mutter approval at this Tewdric’s courage. A couple look round, as if they expect to see the ghosts of his war-band still sweeping across the moor. They’ll be lucky. I just made him up.)

“Now in these hills are many lakes, and many rivers, and many pools of still, clear water, and the lady of the waters, the lake-woman herself, she looked out of one of them one day and saw Tewdric riding by and thought how handsome he looked, and how fine, and young, and strong, and a great admiration was in her heart for him.

“And one day, while Tewdric’s men were hard pressed by their enemies, Tewdric was wounded, and parted from his band. Lost and alone, he wandered in the mazes of the woods, until hope deserted him, and he lay him down to die among the roots of a great thick oak which grew upon a lake-shore. But the blood of Tewdric’s wounds fell into the lake, and the redness of it stained the clear waters until the lake-lady herself saw it, from the windows of her hall down in the depths, and she came up and found Tewdric laid there.

“Now the lake-lady thought it a very pitiful thing that such a fine young man should be left to die, so young and all alone, still in the flower of his beauty. So from her hall beneath the waters she brought this cauldron…”

(I spread my hands and curve them, like I’m holding the curved sides of a vessel.)

“A fine thing it was, made of beaten gold, with knots and swirls and fish and men and serpents wrought upon it. And the lake-lady knelt beside Tewdric where he lay,
and told him to drink from it, and he would be healed. And he drank, and the pain of his wounds went from him, and his torn flesh grew whole again, and his eyes were made bright, and up he sprang. But the lake-lady had returned already to the waters, and whether she took the cauldron with her, or whether she left it and Tewdric took it home to his hall, I do not know.”

My listeners nodded wisely. All of them were afraid of the wounds that might be waiting for them in the days to come. Now they had the hope of the healing cauldron to hold on to. “The lady of the waters has her favourites,” I heard a man say. “Bedwyr was one. He saw her at the old springs once. He made a gift to her. That’s why our luck turned sour when Arthur killed him.”

They tugged their cloaks around themselves and settled on the grass to sleep. The sentries paced beyond the fringes of the firelight. A mule whickered, down in the horse-lines. I lay down too, pleased with the story I’d invented, and thinking already of ways I might better it when I told it next.

In the dark around our camp, all the gorse-clumps looked like armed men crouching.

XL

 

I come awake at first light surrounded by raw-throated shouts. “Attack!” “It’s Cunomorus!” Scramble up, and fall again, still tangled in my cloak. Fall just in time, because arrows are winging out of the gorse on the hillside, whistling like curlews as they cut the air above me. Dunocatus catches one in his throat and curls round it, gargling. He topples into the embers of the fire, throwing up sparks and wood-ash. Other men are on their feet, running to and fro. In this dimsey-light I can’t tell who are my friends and who’re not. They are all shouting, and the arrows chirr among them, and sometimes someone falls. “The horses! The horses!” someone yells. There is a smell of burning hair. I get up again, groping for the knife in my belt. I run past our dead sentries, towards the horse-lines. Dark shapes spill like ghosts between the frightened, stamping beasts, cutting their tethers. Some horses are free already, running. Cei’s bare-headed, bellowing at us to form a shield-wall round him. Then he’s down on his knees,
dropping forwards, a spear-shaft between his shoulders, and the man who’d stuck it there wrenching it free and pounding it down again and again, as if he’s churning butter.

I know that spearman. I know his black spade of a beard, even in this light. The Irishman.

Groggy with betrayal, I blunder on. “Peredur! Peredur!” I’m shouting, and I trip over someone, and it’s him.

He’s down on his side, curled up, whimpering with fright and pain. One of those arrows is stuck through his shoulder. He turns a white face to me, eyes filled up with fear. “It hurts,” is all he says.

Round us, the battle is falling apart into a dozen furious little fights. Screams, and smithy sounds. The Irishman’s men yelling their wild, shrill war-shouts. Freed horses flick past us, trembling the ground, raining clods of earth on us. I can’t think. I can’t even breathe. Then I remember the thing I do best at times like this. I grab Peredur under his arms, and start to pull him downhill.

Not far from the campsite the gorse humps up thick. Peredur’s heavy but the slope of the hill helps, and he struggles with his legs, half walking. The gorse drags sharp combs through my hair. The sounds of battle dim, but not enough. I go down on all fours. Gorse is thick in the crown, but underneath it’s all woody stems, and bare ground brown with fallen needles. I shove and tug Peredur into a basket of twisty trunks. The wind hisses through the needles above us. A man is screaming smashed-bone screams
away up the hill. Below us in the dark I hear the clatter of water.

I lie on top of Peredur. His heart hammers at my breastbone. His every breath comes out as a little sob of hurt. I cram my hand across his mouth and listen hard. Something rackets through dry bracken a few yards off across the steep curve of the hill. A loose horse, or a friend, or a foe-man who saw me creep away and has come hunting me? I lie quiet. My hip bones press against Peredur’s. His blood is soaking through my tunic. I drop my head next to his and say into his ear, “Shhhh. Shhhhh.”

Nothing moves. All is quiet. Whoever it was in the bracken has gone. We are alive.

We lay there a long time, till the sky above the gorse turned cheerless grey. Then, half walking, half sliding, we made our way down to the stream, and a pool under some alders where I struggled him out of his filthy tunic. I broke off the arrow’s flight-feathers and pinched the smeared, shiny point which poked out of his back. He fainted when I pulled it through him. It had made a bruised hole under his collarbone, a red gash behind his shoulder blade. I washed the wounds with stream water. I pressed pads of moss over them, and ripped strips from my shirt to bind the moss in place.

I didn’t want to have to look after him. It wasn’t so long since I’d been forced to look after Gwenhwyfar, and I remembered how happily
that
had ended.

“I was afraid,” Peredur kept saying, when he woke.
He was white and shaky. Too ashamed to meet my eye. “We ran away, Gwyn. We shouldn’t have run. It was womanish.”

“It’s natural,” I tried telling him. “You couldn’t have fought them. They were too many. They caught us by surprise.”

Of course he didn’t believe me. He’d bathed too long in stories of heroes and battles. In the stories, running away is the worst disgrace. If ever anyone told the story of that morning’s fight, Peredur and Gwyn would be remembered as cowards, who’d run like women. And being a coward is worse than being dead.

“Who were they?” he asked. “Cunomorus’s warband?”

“It was the Irishman. We were betrayed. He was waiting for us.”

“But why?”

I hadn’t an answer. I couldn’t imagine. How could it profit the Irishman to murder Cei? “Maybe he means to oust Arthur, and his tale about strife with Cunomorus was just a trap to bring us here. Maybe he’s gone over to Cunomorus’s side himself. Or maybe Maelwas set him on us, to weaken Arthur.”

“And what of the others? Are we all that’s left?”

“We can’t be. The others will be somewhere around. We’ll find them…”

“I don’t want to. They’ll know we were cowards. We ran away.”

I tied his bandages tight, but not too tight, the way Myrddin had taught me when we were tending to the war-band’s wounds back in my boyhood. I thought there
was enough blood left inside of him to keep him alive. But I kept thinking of something Myrddin had told me. When someone no longer wants to live, it’s beyond any earthly doctoring to save them.