The Bloody Cup (42 page)

This attachment cannot be, it will not be, she thought fiercely as she walked protectively beside Balyn’s corpse as it was moved to the small church at the apex of Cadbury Tor.

Artor would have locked himself in his rooms, but Odin used his body weight to hold the heavy door open and allowed Taliesin and Gruffydd to enter.

‘Leave me be,’ Artor snarled, thrusting away Odin’s arm.

Taliesin scarcely recognized the twisted face of his king; only one man alive, Odin, had ever seen the face of sorrow and rage that Artor now wore.

‘I don’t want to know how they met their fate! Have mercy, and don’t burden me further! I sent them to their deaths, and can’t bear to know how they perished. I can’t listen! I can’t!’

Taliesin poured a goblet of strong, red wine while Odin forced his king to sit on his curule chair. They coaxed him to drink until colour slowly returned to his ashen cheeks.

Gruffydd sat on a stool to spare his damaged leg and wished that he had stayed at home rather than make this final, fatal visit to Cadbury. Come what may in the years ahead, he would always remember Artor as this shattered, desperate man.

‘Please don’t punish yourself, lord. You asked services of the twins - simple tasks that should have been quite safe. In truth, Artor, they unknowingly killed each other.’ Gruffydd spoke with such conviction and honesty that Artor was forced to listen. He raised his faded, leonine head.

‘You are talking nonsense, Gruffydd. The brothers were together all their lives, even in their mother’s womb. They knew each other more intimately than husband knows wife, or a mother knows her child. How could they have killed each other?’

Taliesin knelt at the feet of his king. Artor had not the energy to order the harpist to rise, and Taliesin would have refused to listen and remained on his knees.

‘Lord, you knew the bond that existed between those brothers. Such a skein of kinship is stronger than iron, even more vigorous than life itself, so that neither brother could resist its pull. Yet the strength of the tie was weakness, for neither brother would believe that he could ever be in a situation where he wouldn’t recognize his twin. And so, tragically, they slew each other.’

‘Have your way then.’ Artor bowed his head in unendurable weariness. ‘Tell me the complete tale. You know I have to ask eventually, Taliesin, so perhaps it’s best that I listen now while the wounds are fresh.’

‘I’ll ask Gruffydd to recount most of our experiences, lord,’ Taliesin said. ‘He proved to be far wiser than I, for it was he who tried to save Balan from his own innocence. Until the moment of his death, Balan wouldn’t believe that his brother was the beast of Slowwater. Gruffydd was the only one among us who guessed at the truth.’

‘You knew, old friend? How could you have anticipated their fate?’

Gruffydd eased his weight on his painful hips and began the dolorous tale.

‘When we arrived at Slowwater in the early evening, we found a village gripped by fear. Slowwater is only a small hamlet, my lord. Of the twenty souls who lived there, less than ten remained alive, and the survivors were too terrified to even draw water from the small well. When we came, the women were securing their huts for the night as if they were repelling a pack of starving wolves.

‘The headman was dead, but his wife and youthful son took us into their hut before the light was entirely gone. Neither mother nor son wanted us under their roof, but to leave us outside would have brought more carnage to a village that was already numbed with fear and shock. You have seen such terror, Artor. They were well nigh senseless with its madness, and perhaps they thought we would provide some protection.

‘The villagers told us that the wild man came every night, seeking food, and padding between the huts as he searched for a human scent. They told us that they were even more afraid when the wild man took to howling, because they felt that no man born of woman could make such a sound and still be fully human. At first, we thought they were simply superstitious simpletons, so we humoured them as if they were children. We were wrong.

‘The wife of the headman feared the scent of heat and fresh meat would draw the wild man to her door, so we ate bowls of cold porridge. Shortly afterwards, we heard an odd shuffling sound. Balan pressed his ear to the door frame, as did I. I could hear ragged breathing and muttering. The sounds were mixed with a nasal, snuffling sound, for all the world like a wild boar scenting for prey.

‘I heard the grunts and snarls as the beast fell on the food that the villagers had left out in the roadway to appease the evil spirit. No man ate out there, I could swear, for the most uncouth Saxon does not tear at half-rotten meat as this thing did. For the first time, I knew that Grawryd hadn’t lied. Slowwater
was
cursed with a wild man.

‘After an hour or so, I believed that the worst was over, but for the rest of that endless night, the beast went from door to door, knocking and scratching at the wood and then howling in mingled sorrow and rage. The sound of the crying was worse than anything I have ever heard, Artor. And if that eerie sound was the voice of Prince Balyn, he had cast off his humanity weeks before we came to Slowwater. Balan didn’t recognize the voice behind the terrible sounds. None of us did. Nor could we see it, for the headman’s son had nailed logs, worn-out tools, and pieces of metal over every aperture of the hut, even the hole in the roof where the smoke from the fire escaped. So, lightless, we cowered in the darkness - and we could not sleep for horror.

‘But I smelt our enemy, as did Taliesin, who learned his woodcraft from the hill people and his mother. The creature stank of dried blood, vomit and shit - a reek that sickened me to the gut, for even beasts don’t allow their bodies to be so fouled. I smelled a rottenness, and my fear grew.

‘The creature was gone by dawn without any attempt to disguise its spoor. We could see the footprints clearly in the dust, knitting the village huts together as if the wild man had paced backwards and forwards in its search for something to kill.

‘He eventually found some prey. The wild man caught a stray dog and managed to flush a rabbit out from the undergrowth near the vegetable patch. He left their pathetic remains on our doorsteps, and we discovered that he had torn the poor animals apart while they still lived.

‘We hunted him for days but, like any wild beast, he was cunning. At night, we slept in trees where we couldn’t be taken by surprise. He led us far, in a wide circle, but eventually the tracks returned to where they had started, the forests near Slowwater, and they led us to his lair. It was as if he had led us to it deliberately and wished to be saved from his madness. He had been sleeping in a nest of branches and dried grass not six feet from the bloated, rotting carcass of his horse. Most horribly, he had carved hunks of meat from that corpse, and I nearly gagged to imagine such food.

‘The horse had been richly caparisoned, and a spear was still bound to the horse straps. This convinced me that the wild man was no crazed brigand, or a deserter driven to lunacy by old wounds. I tried to persuade Balan, who ought to have recognized Balyn’s possessions. God only knows why he didn’t do so, but the lad wouldn’t listen. Perhaps Balan thought his brother’s horse had been stolen. Perhaps he feared that Balyn was the wild man’s first victim, for Balan was certainly angry and eager to face the brute. But he could not believe that Balyn could be so lost to reason that he would descend into such bloodlust.

‘I began to wonder, too, at Balyn’s long absence from court, and when I spoke my thinking aloud, Balan again dismissed my words. He told me, again and again, that he would know if his brother was unhinged. He was insulted by the suggestion, and forbade me from speaking any further on the matter.

‘Balan suffered greatly, my lord. When he tried to eat, he was nauseous and could only swallow some stale and mouldy bread. The smell of dried meat caused him to vomit, and he swore that, somewhere, his brother was suffering from a stomach ailment. He made light of his illness, but I could tell that your grandson was deeply troubled during the hunt.

‘Having found the lair, we decided to lie in wait for the wild man. Balan told us to hide in the approaches, and he would wait near the lair.’

Gruffydd gazed into the suffering eyes of his king.

‘We should have stayed with your grandson, my lord, but he insisted that we obey him. Balan wanted to be alone.

‘The night was full of small sounds of violence and looming shadows, so that I saw a monster behind every bush. When I heard shouts from Balan and the screams of rage from his quarry, I was terrified, because I knew I was too old to be of much use to my companions. Still, Taliesin and I returned to the corpse of the dead horse. We could hear the sound of sword blades clashing against each other. I heard Balan cry out his brother’s name, just once, and then silence blanketed the woods like a heavy, black shroud. I cursed my bad leg then, for I was slow and feeble, and Taliesin dared not leave me to run ahead in case the wild man came upon me when I was alone.

‘Balan had cornered his brother against a rocky outcrop, and Balyn was bleeding heavily from his belly wound. Balyn must have been in agony, but he transcended his pain to stand and fight. At some part of their struggle, Balan either recognized his brother by sight or through the shared pain of Balyn’s mortal wound, for he lowered his sword. Then Balyn drove his blade through his brother’s breast.

‘Balyn was still alive when we found them. He had gathered his twin into his arms and was rocking his brother’s dead body as if his caresses could make the cloven heart whole. The eyes that Balyn raised to me were sane, but they were blinded by his loss. Taliesin tried to stop Balyn’s blood flow, but I could tell that his labour was pointless, and Taliesin swears that, even if he had survived the night, your grandson would have rotted away from within. Balyn told me that he had killed his brother and I could only nod, like a fool. How could I find words of comfort for him? Then he told me that he did not wish to live, for he had done things that had shamed his mother and father for all time. Again, I could only nod in response, my lord. I didn’t know how to offer any comfort.

‘I should have known what he would do, my king, for I saw that shame had replaced the guilt and madness in his eyes. Balyn knew of your relationship with him. He asked me to tell you, his grandfather, that at the very last, he died like a man. Then, without fear, he cut his own throat.’

The burning of the twins took place with much panoply and mourning. Even Wenhaver wept real tears at the thought of such youth and beauty perishing forever on the funeral pyre. Perhaps she felt the first shivers of her own mortality as, clothed in hastily dyed black, she watched her husband consign those glorious young men to the flames.

Artor retreated behind a frozen mask of inscrutability. If Artor felt sorrow, only his intimates knew. The iron doors of duty clanged shut around the High King, and no one was permitted behind the walls of his public face. Even Modred knew better than to foment discord at such a time.

Anna was too far removed from Cadbury to be present for the funeral of her sons, so their ashes were sent to the grieving mother in an urn of golden magnificence, the best that Artor could purchase. Taliesin was dispatched to the north with the reliquary and their swords. In his humility, Artor offered his unacknowledged daughter the greatest boon that he could give, and expressed his fervent desire that they should be laid to rest in Gallia’s Garden.

Taliesin performed a song for the mother that was so fair and so tragic that many Ordovice warriors wept as they heard the tale of the doomed twins. Anna remained tearless, for she had been raised in a Roman household and scorned to dishonour their memory with a woman’s weakness. After days of funeral celebrations, she took the ashes of her boys to Gallia’s Garden where she had grown to womanhood, then returned to her kingdom to begin the task of rebuilding her life.

On her return, King Bran rode south to learn for himself the reasons for his brothers’ deaths. He travelled fast and hard, sparing neither himself nor his horses, until he reached Cadbury at the head of his Ordovice guard.

Even then, with his only grandson standing before him, Artor couldn’t reveal the whole truth, although he longed to share the pain he felt with the tall, strong man who resembled his mother so uncannily. Artor told himself that it would be unkind to tell this new and able king that he was now the heir to the dragon throne.

‘They killed each other by accident, Bran, and neither could live with the knowledge of what they had done. Cruel chance was responsible for their deaths, but you may be very sure that I’ll learn how Balyn came to be at Slowwater in such a condition.’

‘Aye, my lord, I’ll trust you to sort out the whole, tragic mess. You were forced to sweeten and soften the circumstances of Balyn’s crimes for my mother’s sake, but I want the unvarnished truth. I ask that you respect me by keeping me informed of what you discover.’

Artor swallowed, and vowed to do as Bran asked. Of course, the High King had no intention of shattering his grandson’s memory of Balyn with the exact truth.

Artor marvelled at Bran’s height, his glossy brown hair, kept tidy in warrior’s plaits, and a face that was comely, masculine and sensitive. The cares of having become King of the Ordovice while still in his teens showed in the furrows that were already carved on his brow and in the air of gravity and purpose that infused his stance and his voice.

Artor felt a stir of pride when he looked up at his grandson as he mounted his horse to depart from Cadbury. Bran’s mouth and eyes were vulnerable with sorrow, while care wrapped him in a cloak of unspoken pain. His duty to his people called, so he must put aside personal grief to serve their needs. For such was the Roman way. Anna, her father and her son knew no other way to survive their grief.