Here Lies Arthur (10 page)

XXIII

 

We went travelling that springtime, my master and me, with Arthur and Gwenhwyfar’s wedding-hymns still ringing around inside our skulls. “We’ll let the Bear have some time alone with his new bride,” said Myrddin. “He’s a Christian lord now, with a Christian wife, and he doesn’t need an old heathen like me about him.” So we went south and west, into the Summer Country, and I found out why they called it that. There would be good grazing there in summer, the people said, pastures of lush green grass where their red cows grew fat and sweet. But when I was there with Myrddin it was barely land at all. Water covered acre after acre, leaving nothing dry except the hedge-banks and the causeways.

We’d come there with a purpose. King Maelwas of Dumnonia spent his year on a long round of travels from one of his holdings to the next. He was feasting that spring at Ynys Wydryn, the apple-isle which rises steep and green out of those wet levels, with a monastery balanced on its top. Maelwas was a Christian king. The
monastery on Ynys Wydryn was his doing, and there was a fine hall there beside the wooden church where he and his sons and servants and his shield-companions could stay when he came to pray.

The monks who kept the place were wary of Myrddin, even though he took care to hide away his old charms and amulets before we crossed the causeway to their gate. They knew his reputation as a magic worker, and I think they would have turned him away, but someone went to tell Maelwas who it was who had come seeking him, and Maelwas sent a messenger to the abbot and told him to let us in.

Maelwas surprised me. I thought the king of so much country would be a man like Arthur, hard and scarred, forever sniffing the wind for fresh fights. But Maelwas was old, and spoke soft, and seemed gentle-mannered. I suppose he had been wilder in his youth, when he rode with Ambrosius. He greeted Myrddin, and asked after Gwenhwyfar, who was a kinswoman of his – his half-sister’s daughter’s daughter. “I remember her as a girl,” he said. “A pretty thing. Your Arthur is a lucky man. I trust he’ll treat her well.”

That night in his hall Myrddin told his tales of Arthur. No enchanted swords or green men there. Just Arthur the soldier of Christ; how he’d driven back the Saxon army that tried to seize Aquae Sulis, and beaten the Devil in a rock-throwing contest out in the west somewhere.

Maelwas listened with a little smile about him always, as if to show us that he knew these tales weren’t true, however pleasant it might be to hear them by the hearth.

We stayed a few days at Ynys Wydryn. On the
morning we left, when a booming wind was combing the grass flat and making cats’-paws on the flooded fens, Maelwas spoke alone to Myrddin. I heard them as I brought the horses close.

“I’ve had no tribute this year from your master in Aquae Sulis. Perhaps his wedding to my pretty kinswoman drove it from his mind.”

“Arthur would like to pay you all he owes,” Myrddin promised. “But he has an army of cavalry to feed. His warriors aren’t untrained levies who can go home to their farms between fights and grow their own food. They are soldiers, who live for war. He must put their needs first if he is to keep them together, and strong enough to defeat the Saxon threat.”

“But the Saxons have not troubled us since Ambrosius’s time,” Maelwas pointed out. “A few raids. More of a nuisance than a threat.”

“They will come again,” said Myrddin fiercely. “All the time we British fight among ourselves, the Saxons in the east grow stronger. They will drive west again one day, unless we smash them utterly.”

“And is Arthur truly strong enough to do that?” Maelwas asked. “To drive them back across the sea? Can he really finish the work Ambrosius began? End the dismal partition of Britain and win back the lost east for Christ?”

“Not alone,” my master said. “But if you would make him leader of your war-band in battle, and command all the lesser kings who pay you tribute to do likewise, he could be the new Ambrosius.”

“Except that Ambrosius fought for Britain and the
Christian faith,” said Maelwas mildly, “and I do not think Arthur fights for anything but Arthur. More robber than soldier, I’ve heard. A wild, roving man, like Uthr before him. A looter of churches. A cattle-thief. Only last summer he came plundering our westward lands, making men pay him tribute that was not his to take.”

Myrddin shrugged. “A mistake. When a man is as strong as Arthur, he over-reaches himself sometimes. But your kinswoman Gwenhwyfar has tamed that wildness out of him. Her love of Christ has set him a good example. Arthur is God’s strong man. Henceforward, he’ll fight only Saxons. He would lead your war-band with honour and victory.”

Maelwas was silent a moment, his eyes on Myrddin’s, considering. The watching monks and warriors shuffled and stirred. Cloaks flapped in the breeze and a man coughed. I don’t think they liked to see their master dealing so friendly-like with mine. There were men there who hoped to lead Maelwas’s war-band themselves one day.

Suddenly Maelwas chuckled, and slapped Myrddin’s shoulder. “Thank you for your stories,” he said. “I shall consider what you say, and if it seems to me that Arthur is really all you claim, you will hear from me.” Then, walking with Myrddin towards the place where I was waiting with the horses, he nodded at me, and said, “Why do you dress her as a boy?”

Myrddin must have been taken by surprise. Knowing him, I could see that he was startled. But he plucked a story from the air as calmly as another man might swat
a fly. “She is my daughter,” he said gravely. “But this travelling life leads us often among wild places and fighting men. For her own protection I dress her as a boy.”

Maelwas smiled, looking me up and down. “It is a good disguise,” he said. “But I don’t think it will work much longer.”

My master did not speak to me as we rode back across the causeway. I could feel anger coming off him like warmth off a fire. It had been bad for him, being found out in a trick at the last moment like that. I felt ashamed of myself for letting old Maelwas see the truth. Had it been my fault? Had I not been boyish enough? I’d let my hair get longer, following the same fashion as Bedwyr and the other boys. It hung below my ears, and maybe it showed up something girlish in my face.

I felt in the pouch on my belt and gripped the old moon-charm I’d taken from the baths that day Gwenhwyfar saw me there. When I found it I’d been thinking to give it to my master, so he could string it round his neck with all the rest, or hang it up outside his door to keep thieves out. But he would have wanted to know where I had found it, and I knew if I’d told him he’d have made me spill out the whole story, somehow: how I’d met Gwenhwyfar, and how she’d nearly found my secret out. Rather than face his anger, I had kept it hid. And now he was going to be angry anyway.

He didn’t speak until we reached the old troop road. Then he said, “He’s a cunning old fox, that Maelwas. He
sees things other men don’t.” He looked at me a long while. Nodded, as if something had been decided. “The weather is set fair. We won’t go back to Aquae Sulis yet.”

“But you must tell Arthur what King Maelwas said…”

“I’ll send him word. Arthur can cope without me for a season, I think.”

And he turned his horse west instead of east, and what was there for me to do but follow him? He’d not been angry with me, but I couldn’t help thinking, as I urged Dewi after him, that this was some sort of punishment.

Summer rolled us along like stones in a stream. Moridunum to Isca, Isca to Tamaris, and in between them all the little places, Caer this and Din that, which the Romans had never given names to, and had left with their old names and their old ways. And after Tamaris-ford there were barely any Roman names at all, just the long land of Kernyw under its wide sky. But wherever we went, people had heard of Arthur, and were glad to hear more. Myrddin scattered stories like sparks, and the brush-fire of Arthur’s fame spread.

“One day Arthur will set up his standard, and the kings of Britain will flock to him like starlings,” Myrddin said. “King Maelwas of the Dumnonii has as good as promised that Arthur will command his warband come the fighting season. With all those warriors behind him, he’ll be the new Ambrosius. He’ll win the lost lands back, and the Saxons will throw themselves into the sea to escape him.”

He was so sure that it would happen that I didn’t think to doubt him. But it frightened me, the thought of all that war to come. Why did Myrddin want it so bad? Why did he seem so fierce, when he spoke about the Saxons? Sometimes I thought, why not let Arthur hold his territory and all the other kings hold theirs and leave the Saxons quiet in the lands they’d settled? But I didn’t speak that thought, in case it sounded womanish.

At Din Tagyll, from the heights above the sea, I watched the ships go out on the evening tide. In winter Din Tagyll is too storm-threshed for any but a few mad monks to live there, but in summer King Cunomorus makes it his capital, and the steep headland’s sides bloom bright with flags and awnings, and in the cove below the ships drop anchor. I watched their sails fill with the wind as they slipped clear of the cliff’s lee, and they went out like swans over the wide ocean. Some of the men who sailed them had skin as black as coal. They were bound for shores I couldn’t even imagine; lands of leopards and unicorns; harbours whose names burst sweetly in my mouth like ripe grapes. Alexandria. Antioch. Constantinople.

After midsummer we turned back. I’d hoped we’d go along the south coast, and maybe to Peredur Long-Knife’s place. I would have liked to see what had become of Peri. But we stayed north, keeping to the shore of the Severn-sea, then striking inland towards the country I’d been born in; to Ban’s hall, which was held for Arthur by the Irishman.

It was around then that I started to realize my master had plans to work a fresh enchantment on me. After so long on the road, my hair hung almost to my shoulders. One morning, as we were saddling the horses in a dell where we’d spent the night, I spoke of finding some shears to cut it.

He shook his head. “You’ll not pass as a lad much longer,” he said. “That old fox Maelwas was right.”

I got frightened. I thought maybe he meant to leave me behind in those same soggy hills he’d got me from. I thought he meant to marry me to some shepherd, or one of the rough chieftains whose halls we’d been passing nights in. I went down on the earth and hugged his knees and said, “Please, master, let me come back to Sulis with you. I’ve been a good servant, haven’t I?”

Myrddin smoothed my too-long hair. I wasn’t looking at his face, so I don’t know if he was smiling, but I like to think there was a smile about him as he said, “You’ve been a good boy, Gwyn. But you’ll be a better girl. It’ll be Gwyna who rides back with me at fall-of-leaf.”

His words kicked the breath out of me. I suppose I’d always known it would have to come, but not yet, surely? “I don’t want to be a girl!” I cried. “I’ll never be able to go home. People will recognize me!”

“Of course they won’t,” said Myrddin. “Half a year will have gone by. Do you think they have statues of your head standing around Aquae Sulis as if you were some old emperor? You will go back in a woman’s dress, with your long hair loose. You will walk like a girl and talk like a girl, and they will think, ‘That maiden looks a little like Gwyn,’ if they think anything at all. And I
shall tell them you are Gwyn’s kin, and they will think of you no more.”

“But I don’t know how to be a girl!” I told him. “I’ll have to do the things that women do…” I gaped like a fish, groping about for examples. I barely
knew
the things that women did. “Sewing and stitching and spinning and brewing barley-beer… What will they think when I don’t know how to do those things?”

“Then you must learn.”

“I’ll be no good at them. Slow and clumsy.”

“Gwyna,” he said. (His firmest voice, the one that brooked no replies.) “You will be a young woman soon. You’ll look more out of place in Arthur’s war-band then than you will fumbling your weaving-work in his wife’s house.”

“His wife?”

“Of course. Do you think
I
want a woman servant? You’ll join Gwenhwyfar’s household. Be one of her waiting-women.”

I thought of Gwenhwyfar’s house, which was a little small building, half hidden behind Arthur’s big hall. I thought of the graceful, perfect girls she kept about her there, slender as withies. “She’ll not take
me.”

“She will. To please Arthur.”

“But I don’t want to,” I said, like a little child. I could feel the tears tickling my cheeks and creeping in salty at the corners of my mouth. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“Since when did it begin to matter what you
want?”
said Myrddin angrily, and turned away from me, stalked off with his shoulders hunched up like an old hoodie crow. Hid his face with one brown, bony hand like he
was trying to rub the image of me off his eyeballs. Then turned and came back, kinder. “I have another purpose in this, Gwyna. When you are part of Gwenhwyfar’s household you will keep your eyes open, and whatever you see you will bring to me.”

“You want me to spy on her?”

“It would be wise for me to know what goes on in her mind. She is the wife of the
Dux Bellorum
after all. I should know what goes on in her heart, and who could tell me that better than one of her own waiting-women?”

I wiped my tears, and hiccuped, feeling glad that he did not want to cast me off entirely.

“Now come,” he said, “I want to sleep at your old lord’s home on the hill tonight. We have miles to go yet.”

He kicked his horse’s flanks and it trotted ahead, leaving me to follow. I didn’t try telling him the other thing I disliked about becoming a girl again – that it would mean the end of my friendship with Bedwyr.

But riding on, I started to see that my friendship with Bedwyr was almost ended anyway. Those last few months in Sulis there’d seemed a barrier between us, like the horn pane of a lantern. He was almost a man, with a scruffy stubble of beard that he was vastly proud of, and a host of boastful tales about his skill at hunting. He’d ride as a warrior with the war-band when the next fight came. I remembered the way that he and the other boys talked about girls. They hadn’t the courage yet to talk
to
girls, but they talked
about
them endlessly. They watched them at the marketplace. Their heads turned
like the heads of watchful birds when Gwenhwyfar’s handmaidens passed them in the street. They laughed, and scoffed, and compared one with another, and I couldn’t join in that talk. It uneased me to hear the way they spoke. How hard they thought of girls’ bodies, and how little of their feelings. Like women were just creatures to be used and traded. They respected horses better.