In Winter's Shadow (18 page)

“You need an heir. It is all very well to speak of you and of me, but you need an heir for the sake of the kingdom.”

“No. I do not need an heir. Ach, my white hart, you are right, I wish we had children, your children; but it is better without them. Now my usurpation will die with me.” I began to protest, but he silenced me with a hard, deliberate kiss. “When I die,” he said “The
imperium
will return to my father’s clan; and any successor from that clan will have a legal right to his power. And I can designate anyone within four generations of an emperor as my successor, and, if I conduct the affair correctly, have him recognized as such. I could choose Gereint ab Erbin or Constans, in the Family—and Maelgwn Gwynedd has a claim…”

“Maelgwn!” I exclaimed angrily.

He laughed, “Not Maelgwn, I agree. He rules Gwynedd badly enough. I would not give him my Empire. And the others are not suited to holding great authority. Only now, now—who knows? Since Gwalchmai has declared Gwyn legitimate, Gwyn can be considered a member of the royal clan. He is descended from the eldest legitimate child of my father Uther. True, Morgawse married into another clan—but if Gwyn is not a member of the royal clan of the Orcades…” He let go of my shoulders and stood, his eyes brightening with excitement. “My mother was not noble, but Gwyn’s was a daughter of Caw, of the royal clan of Ebrauc. That could be very useful; it might finally settle their hostility.” He began pacing the room. “True, he is a bastard from a monastery, just as I am, but my father had legitimate children, and could not legitimatize me. People will soon forget that the grandson of Caw, the great-grandson of Uther Pendragon, ever had anything irregular about his birth. If we did have him accepted, legally, by the royal clan of Britain, he would have a very good claim. Not many people would contest it. Did you know,” turning on me and asking a question apparently unconnected with what he had just been saying, “the Emperor Augustus was the grandnephew of Julius Caesar? The same relation as Gwyn is to me…but this is all dreams and wild conjecture.” He came back to me, pulled me to my feet, and held me against him. I was smiling, because he was glad, more hopeful than I had seen him for a long, long time, and I felt hope rising in my own heart like a bluebell pushing aside the dull earth in the spring.

“Let the future wait until tomorrow,” Arthur said, smiling at me the old smile of delight. “And do not say any more about this foolish business of other wives.”

***

Gwyn was fourteen in March that year, and was accordingly given arms—the finest Gwalchmai could find—and swore the Threefold Oath of Allegiance to Arthur. He moved into the house which Gwalchmai shared with Cei, where there was plenty of space. Cei, who had originally given the boy the sharp edge of his tongue, told me that he now “got on well with the lad,” though Gwyn had been cold at first. The tension which Medraut had created in the Family had continued to ebb throughout the winter, and everyone was much more relaxed. The whispers against Gwalchmai were no longer heard, both because of the lack of evidence and because it is difficult to hate someone who is truly happy. For Gwalchmai was intensely happy, so much so that one had only to watch him ride his horse across a practice field to know it. He had a son, the child of his old and dear love Elidan; he had her forgiveness for the affair that had long tormented him; he had something more than “battles and embassies” to live for. Gwyn, in turn, after he had with difficulty managed to accept that his hero was his father, became enormously proud of his father. And the two did in fact have a great deal in common, so there was no hindrance to the love and admiration. While it was not true that they were never apart, they were certainly often together. They would take out their horses for exercise, Gwalchmai on his white stallion, Gwyn on the roan mare which Gwalchmai had now officially bestowed upon him (“Though I was intending to give her to you,” Gwalchmai stated as he handed his son the bridle, “even before the letter”). Riding about the hills the two would talk of books and battles, foreign lands and old or new songs. Once taught, Gwyn proved to have inherited his father’s skill at harping, and had been attempting to learn Irish “even before the letter.” But he was not only eager to learn Irish songs, but hoped, like his father, to visit many strange kingdoms. “The next time I am sent somewhere, you must come as well,” Gwalchmai told him. “Perhaps it will be to Gaul. Bedwyr has been there all winter, but I doubt that all the problems there are settled even now.”

They were not. We did not hear from Bedwyr from December until April, because of the harsh winter and the unwillingness of the traders to risk their ships on the rough seas. We had received one letter from him late in September, written in the first week of that month upon his arrival at Macsen’s fortress; and another early in December, which had reported that some of Macsen’s claims were settled, but that others had been raised. When the spring brought calm seas we had another letter, which had in fact been written shortly after the second one we had received, but which had spent the winter with one of our agents in a Breton port, awaiting a ship. This contained bad news: Macsen remained obdurate on all the points under discussion, and had insistently pressed Bedwyr to forswear his allegiance to Arthur and remain instead in Less Britain as Macsen’s warleader.

***

“When I refused the place he offered,” Bedwyr wrote, “the king grew angry, and called me a traitor to my homeland. He would hear no arguments for the unity of the Empire; he said that the Empire was dead and ought to remain so. And he has grown very insistent on this, until I thought it better to leave him and spend the winter on my family’s estates in the southeast, whither I will go tomorrow. I will return to Britain in the spring, as soon as the roads and the winds permit—unless you wish otherwise, my lord. But I see no point to remaining, for I cannot negotiate with Macsen.”

***

Arthur agreed that it would be best if Bedwyr did not encounter Macsen again, and wrote commanding his return. So Bedwyr came back to Camlann in May, and as soon as he arrived I realized that what had happened in that gray afternoon in August was not over, as I had believed.

It was a lovely spring afternoon; I came into the Hall on some other errand to find a knot of men standing about and welcoming our warleader in loud voices, and Arthur among them, clasping Bedwyr’s hand. Bedwyr stood among them looking travel-worn, plain, and unhappy. I had missed him sometimes in the months he had been away, but I thought that the ruinous love had died, and I missed him only as one misses a sympathetic friend. But somehow he sensed my presence beyond the others, and looked up, searching for me with his eyes. He did not smile when he saw me, but something leapt between us, an idle string on a harp suddenly drawn tight, plucked and drowning out other tones in its sound. I realized from the leap my heart gave that I was still bound to him, and I knew with sudden horror that it was worse for him, that he had not forgotten me for an instant of his absence; knew it without any need for more communication than a look. So I began again to avoid him.

In early June we sent Gwalchmai and Gwyn to Less Britain in Bedwyr’s place. We were forced to, for the unresolved claims were beginning to cause problems. Macsen had imposed a tariff on the wine his people exported which was high, the rate traditionally charged on trade with barbarian nations, not even that charged for another province of the Empire. This had drawn loud complaints from the various traders, as well as from the noblemen they supplied, and had encouraged smugglers. Some of these smugglers had been caught and executed by Macsen, and now their clans were besieging us with petitions for vengeance, justice, and the blood-price. Several fugitives from justice in Britain had settled comfortably in Less Britain, in defiance of all previous treaties. This outraged the clans they had injured, who joined the smugglers’ clans in their petitioning. So Gwalchmai and Gwyn departed with announcements of harsh counter-measures: a trade embargo and an offer of asylum to any and all Breton fugitives.

Gwalchmai’s servant, Rhys, went as well, reluctantly parting from his wife and children. “After all,” he told me as we arranged supplies for the journey, “Gwalchmai doesn’t need me now. He won’t overwork himself this time, not with his son along.”

“You think not?” I asked dubiously. “He might work twice as hard, to make Gwyn proud of him.”

Rhys snorted. “He might—but he would never let Gwyn work so, and I don’t see Gwyn leaving his father to work alone. And he will see to it that he is well treated, so that Gwyn will be as well. An excellent thing, fatherhood, for making a man take notice of what he does.” Rhys grinned, and added wistfully, “I wish I had seen his face when he found out”—for Rhys, strangely, had known about Gwyn for years. He had learned of the boy from the lady Elidan herself, but had been sworn by her to silence on the matter. “Though I would have spoken out,” he told me, on the occasion that he informed me of his foreknowledge and asked for an account of what had happened, “if I had thought that those two wouldn’t find out on their own.”

“I think you will find that you are still needed,” I told Rhys. “Macsen will not make things any easier for Gwalchmai than he did for Bedwyr, and he will need a servant he can trust.”

Rhys sighed, ran a hand through his hair. “True enough. And it’s not that I grudge going—only that Eivlin is due to have the baby in October, and I would like to be on hand. My lord would be certain to send me back before then, if the negotiations drag on as they did last time, but I would rather be here all the while. We’ve been lucky in two healthy children, and Eivlin is fine now, but still, there might be danger. Still, I always knew I would have to do a lot of traveling if I served Gwalchmai, and it’s late to complain of it now—and maybe the matter will be settled soon.”

It was not. Faced with the trade embargo, Macsen rescinded the tariff, but would not agree on a blood-price for the smugglers he had had executed, and denied that the fugitives existed. Letters flowed back and forth across the ocean; our emissaries returned late in July to confer, then sailed back again, and still the negotiations dragged on, with Macsen giving way on one point and suddenly discovering five others to stick on. In September a rough and unsatisfactory settlement was achieved, and the party returned. We might well have sent them out again, but by then we had other things to think of.

That same spring Medraut wrote and postponed his proposed visit to Camlann, explaining that he had some domestic difficulties which could not endure his absence. At about the same time we learned from the disaffected members of his clan that Medraut suspected some of their number, and that they were afraid. They asked if Arthur would grant them asylum, and judge between themselves and their cousin Medraut. Arthur wrote to say that he was willing to judge their cause, but could not promise unconditional asylum. But before they could have received this letter, we had news that five members of the royal clan and some twenty others of different, noble clans of the Islands were accused of plotting against their king. The five were kin-wrecked and exiled, the twenty executed. The five exiles, with their servants, set off from the Orcades in a twenty-oar curragh laden with goods, but were scarcely out of sight of land when a violent storm arose, and the ship was wrecked on the cliffs of northern Pictland, and all but one of the passengers drowned. This man was one of the five. His name was Diuran Mac Brenainn, and he had been warleader for King Lot. Gwalchmai remembered him as a sensible and a just man, passionately loyal to the clan’s welfare. He managed to cling to the keel of the ship and was eventually washed ashore. He made his way to the shipyard of Eoghan, where previously he had sent messages to be relayed to Arthur. Here he stayed with the clerk at the yard, and sent a message to Arthur: a miserable, semi-literate letter obviously dictated in haste. It accused Medraut of murdering Agravain and of killing the others in the ship, by sorcery, and it begged Arthur, “by the faeth of the God yow worshippest,” to send him aid, and to lend support to an army of Islanders who would “redeem the Ercendy Islands from the son of lffernus.”

Arthur dispatched a courier northward with some gold to support the man in his destitution, and with it a cautiously worded letter, inviting Diuran to Camlann, and asking him to represent his cause to the other kings of Britain. But the courier returned with the gold, surprisingly untouched, and with it our letter, enclosed in a letter from the clerk of the shipyard. He was evidently the scribe of the first letter, for his style of bad Latin was the same, and he announced in it that Diuran had died of a fever the week before our letter arrived.

“I offered him the gold,” our messenger said, “for he was a poor man, and had paid for the other’s burial out of his own money. But he refused it. He was a strange little man.”

Despite this, Medraut’s “domestic difficulties” apparently continued, for he again postponed his visit, and put another group of noblemen to death. He then declared war on some of the Western Islands which had been part of King Lot’s domain, but which had seceded under Agravain and claimed the protection of the king of Dalriada. Medraut sailed to them with a great army, fought several short, sharp encounters, and defeated them. Their ally, Aengus of Dalriada, made no move to help them. Medraut was allied to Arthur and related also to Aengus’s foremost enemy, Urien of Rheged, and no doubt Aengus thought the Western Islands not worth the risk of a war with the greatest powers of Britain. At any rate, Medraut had a free hand with the Islanders, and showed no mercy. He deposed their ruling clans, executing the men and giving most of the women to the new clans he raised in their place. The old ruling clans were, he said, guilty of treason to himself and to Agravain.