Warlord 2 Enemy of God (13 page)

We walked east towards the narrowest part of the straits and there, rounding a point of rock and beneath the earth loom of a deserted fortress, we found two boats hauled up on the pebbles of a tiny cove. A dozen men waited with the boats, almost as though they had expected us. ‘The ferrymen?’

Ceinwyn asked me.

‘Diwrnach’s boatmen,’ I said, and touched the iron in Hywel-bane’s hilt. ‘They want us to cross,’ I said, and I was afraid because the King was making it so easy for us. The sailors were quite unafraid of us. They were squat, hard-looking creatures with fish scales sticking to their beards and their thick woollen clothes. They carried no weapons other than their gutting knives and fish-spears. Galahad asked if they had seen any of Diwrnach’s spearmen, but they simply shrugged as if his language made no sense to them. Nimue spoke to them in her native Irish and they responded politely enough. They claimed to have seen no Blood-shields, but did tell her that we must wait until the tide had reached its height before we could cross. Only then, it seemed, were the straits safe for boats. We made Merlin a bed in one of the boats, then Issa and I climbed to the deserted fort and stared inland. A second pyre of smoke blew skyward from the valley of twisted oaks, but otherwise nothing had changed and no enemies were in sight. But they were there. You did not need to see their blood-daubed shields to know that they were close. Issa touched his spear-blade. ‘It seems to me. Lord,’ he said, ‘that Ymys Mon would be a good place to die.’

I smiled. ‘It would be a better place to live, Issa.’

‘But our souls will surely be safe if we die on the blessed isle?’ he asked anxiously.

‘They will be safe,’ I promised him, ‘and you and I will cross the bridge of swords together.’ And Ceinwyn, I promised myself, would be just a pace or two ahead of us, for I would kill her myself before any of Diwrnach’s men could lay their hands on her. I drew Hywel-bane, its long blade still smeared with the soot in which Nimue had written her charm, and I held its tip to Issa’s face. ‘Make me an oath,’ I ordered him.

He went on one knee. ‘Say it, Lord.’

‘If I die, Issa, and Ceinwyn still lives, then you must kill her with one sword stroke before Diwrnach’s men can take her.’

He kissed the sword’s tip. ‘I swear it, Lord.’

At high tide the swirling currents died away so that the sea lay still except for the wind-fretted waves that had floated the two boats up from the shingle. We lifted the ponies on board, then took our places. The boats were long and narrow and, as soon as we had settled amidst the sticky fishing nets, the boatmen gestured that we were to bail out the water that seeped between the tarred planks. We used our helmets to scoop the cold sea back to its place and I prayed to Manawydan, the sea God, that he would preserve us as the boatmen put their long oars between the tholes. Merlin shivered. His face was whiter that I had ever seen it, but touched by a nauseous yellow and smeared by flecks of foam that dribbled from the corners of his lips. He was not conscious, but muttered odd things in his delirium. The boatmen chanted a strange song as they pulled on their oars, but fell silent when they reached the middle of the straits. They paused there and one man in each boat gestured back towards the mainland. We turned. At first I could only see the dark strip of the shore beneath the snow-white and slate-black loom of the mountains beyond, but then I saw a ragged black thing moving just beyond the stony beach. It was a banner, mere fluttering strips of rags tied to a pole, but an instant after it appeared a line of warriors showed themselves above the strait’s bank. They laughed at us, their cackling coming clear through the cold wind above the sound of the lapping sea. They were all mounted on shaggy ponies and all were dressed in what appeared to be torn strips of ragged black cloth that caught the breeze and fluttered like pennants. They carried shields and the hugely long war spears that the Irish favoured, and neither the shields nor the spears frightened me, but there was something about their tattered, long-haired wildness that struck a sudden chill through me. Or perhaps that chill came from the sleet that had begun to spit on the west wind to dimple the sea’s grey surface.

The ragged, dark riders watched as our boats grounded on Ynys Mon. The boatmen helped us lift Merlin and the ponies safe ashore, then they ran their boats back into the sea.

‘Shouldn’t we have kept the boats here?’ Galahad asked me.

‘How?’ I asked. ‘We’d have to divide the men, some to guard the boats and some to go with Ceinwyn and Nimue.’

‘So how do we get off the island?’ Galahad asked.

‘With the Cauldron,’ I adopted Nimue’s confidence, ‘all things will be possible.’ I had no other answer to give him and dared not tell him the truth. That truth was that I felt doomed. I felt as though the curses of those ancient Druids were even now congealing around our souls. We struck north from the beach. Gulls screamed at us, whirling around us in the flying sleet as we climbed up from the rocks into a bleak moorland broken only by outcrops of stone. In the old days, before the Romans came to destroy Ynys Mon, the land had been thick with sacred oaks amongst which the greatest mysteries of Britain were performed. The news of those rituals governed the seasons in Britain, Ireland, and even Gaul, for here the Gods had come to earth, and here the link between man and the Gods had been strongest before it had been sundered by the short Roman stabbing swords. This was holy ground, but it was also difficult ground, for after just an hour’s walking we came to a vast bog that seemed to bar our path into the island’s interior. We ranged along the bog’s edge, seeking a path, but there was none; so, as the light began to fade, we used our spear-shafts to discover the firmest passage through the spiky tussocks of grass and the sucking, treacherous patches of marsh. Our legs were soaked in freezing mud and the sleet found its way inside our furs. One of the ponies became stuck and the other began to panic, so we unloaded both beasts, distributed their remaining burdens amongst ourselves, then abandoned them.

We struggled on, sometimes resting on our circular shields that served like shallow coracles to support our weight until, inevitably, the brackish water seeped over their edges and forced us to stand again. The sleet became harder and thicker, whipped by a rising wind that flattened the marsh grass and drove the cold deep into our bones. Merlin was shouting strange words and thrashing his head from side to side, while some of my men were weakening, sapped by the cold as well as by the malevolence of whatever Gods now ruled this ruined land.

Nimue was the first to reach the bog’s far side. She leapt from tussock to tussock, showing us a path, and finally reached firm ground where she jumped up and down to show us that safety was close. Then, for a few seconds, she froze before pointing Merlin’s staff back the way we had come. We turned to see that the dark riders were with us, only now there were more of them; a whole horde of tattered Bloodshields was watching us from the bog’s far side. Three ragged banners were hoisted above them, and one of those banners was lifted in ironic salute before the riders turned their ponies eastwards. ‘I should never have brought you here,’ I said to Ceinwyn.

‘You didn’t bring me, Derfel,’ she said. ‘I came of my own will.’ She touched a gloved finger to my face. ‘And we shall leave the same way, my love.’

We climbed up from the bog to find, beyond a low crest, a landscape of small fields that lay between lumpish moors and sudden rock outcrops. We needed a refuge for the night and found it in a settlement of eight stone huts that were circled by a wall the height of a spear. The place was deserted, though people clearly lived there for the small stone huts were swept clean and the ashes in the hearth were still just warm to the touch. We stripped the turf roof off one hut and cut the roof timbers into shreds with which we made a fire for Merlin, who was now shivering and raving. We set a guard, then stripped off our furs and tried to dry our sopping boots and wet leggings.

Then, as the very last of the light seeped from the grey sky, I went to stand on the wall and searched all about the landscape. I saw nothing.

Four of us stood guard for the first part of the night, then Galahad and another three spearmen watched through the rest of that rainy darkness and not one of us heard anything other than the wind and the crackle of the fire in the hut. We heard nothing, we saw nothing, yet in the morning’s first wan light there was a newly severed head of a sheep dripping blood on one part of the wall. Nimue angrily pushed the sheep’s head oft the wall’s coping, then screamed a challenge towards the sky. She took a pouch of grey powder and scattered it on the fresh blood, and afterwards she rapped the wall with Merlin’s staff and told us the malevolence had been countered. We believed her because we wanted to believe her, just as we wanted to believe that Merlin was not dying. But he was deathly pale, breathing shallowly and making no sound. We tried to feed him with the last of our bread, but he clumsily spat the crumbs out. ‘We must find the Cauldron today,’ Nimue said calmly, ‘before he dies.’

We gathered our burdens, hoisted our shields onto our backs, picked up our spears and followed her northwards.

Nimue led us. Merlin had told her all he knew of the sacred isle and that knowledge took us northwards all morning long. The Blood-shields appeared soon after we had left our shelter and, now that we neared our goal, they became bolder so that at any one time there were always a score in sight and sometimes three times that number. They formed a loose ring about us, but took care to stay well outside the range of our spears. The sleet had stopped with the dawn, leaving just a cold, damp wind that bent the grass on the moors and lifted the black tatters of the dark riders’ cloaks. It was just after midday that we came to the place Nimue called Llyn Cerrig Bach. The name means the ‘lake of little stones’ and it was a dark sheet of shallow water, surrounded by bogs. Here, Nimue said, the old Britons had held their most sacred ceremonies, and here too, she told us, our search would begin; but it seemed a bleak place in which to seek the greatest Treasure of Britain. To the west was a small, shallow neck of the sea beyond which lay another island, to the south and north were just farmlands and rocks, and to the east there rose a very small steep hill that was crowned with a group of grey rocks like a score of other such outcrops we had passed that morning. Merlin lay as if dead. I had to kneel beside him and put my ear close to his face to hear the tiny scratching of each laboured breath. I laid my hand on his forehead and found it was cold. I kissed his cheek. ‘Live, Lord,’ I whispered to him,

‘live.’

Nimue told one of my men to plant a spear in the ground. He forced the point into the hard soil, then Nimue took a half dozen cloaks and, by hanging them from the spear’s butt and weighting their hems with stones, she formed a kind of tent. The dark riders made a ring about us, but stayed far enough away so that they could not interfere with us, nor we with them.

Nimue groped under her otter skins and brought out the silver cup from which I had drunk on Dolforwyn and a small clay bottle stoppered with wax. She ducked under the tent and beckoned Ceinwyn to follow.

I waited and watched as the wind chased black ripples across the lake, then suddenly Ceinwyn screamed. She screamed again, terribly, and I started towards the tent, only to be stopped by Issa’s spear. Galahad, who as a Christian was not supposed to believe in any of this, stood beside Issa and shrugged at me. ‘We’ve come this far,’ he said. ‘We should see it to the end.’

Ceinwyn screamed again, and this time Merlin echoed the noise by uttering a faint and pathetic moan. I knelt beside him and stroked his forehead and tried not to think what horrors Ceinwyn dreamed inside the black tent.

‘Lord?’ Issa called to me.

I twisted round to see that he was looking southwards to where a new group of riders had joined the Bloodshields’ ring. Most of the newcomers were on ponies, but one man was mounted on a gaunt black horse. That man, I knew, had to be Diwrnach. His banner flew behind him; a pole on which was mounted a crosspiece and from the crosspiece there hung two skulls and a clutch of black ribbons. The King was cloaked in black and his black horse was hung with a black saddle cloth, and in his hand was a great black spear that he raised vertically into the air before riding slowly forward. He came alone and when he was fifty paces from us he unslung his round shield and ostentatiously turned it about to show that he did not come looking for a fight.

I walked to meet him. Behind me Ceinwyn gasped and moaned inside the tent about which my men made a protective ring.

The King was dressed in black leather armour beneath his cloak and wore no helmet. His shield looked flaky with rust and I supposed the flakes had to be the layers of dried blood, just as its leather covering had to be the flayed skin of a slave girl. He let the grim shield hang beside his long black sword scabbard as he curbed his horse and rested the great spear’s butt on the ground. ‘I am Diwrnach,’ he said.

I bowed my head to him. ‘I am Derfel, Lord King.’

He smiled. ‘Welcome to Ynys Mon, Lord Derfel Cadarn,’ he said, and doubtless he wanted to surprise me by knowing my full name and title, but he astonished me more by being a good-looking man. I had expected a hook-nosed ghoul, a thing from nightmare, but Diwrnach was in early middle age and had a broad forehead, a wide mouth and a short clipped black beard that accentuated his strong jawline. There was nothing mad about his appearance, but he did have one red eye and that was enough to make him fearsome. He leaned his spear against his horse’s flank and took an oatcake from a pouch. ‘You look hungry, Lord Derfel,’ he said.

‘Winter is a time for hunger, Lord King.’

‘But you will not refuse my gift, surely?’ He broke the oatcake into halves and tossed one half to me.

‘Eat.’

I caught the oatcake, then hesitated. ‘I am sworn not to eat, Lord King, till my purpose is finished.’

‘Your purpose!’ he teased me, then slowly put his half of the oatcake into his mouth. ‘It wasn’t poisoned, Lord Derfel,’ he said when it was eaten.