The Bloody Cup (64 page)

Glastonbury’s new bishop prayed long and hard when Artor was laid to rest under a great slab of stone that had been destined for his own grave. Mark hoped that his prayers would open the gates to heaven to Artor. Mark also prayed that God would show mercy to this wayward, well-intentioned son.

Nimue, irreverent to the end, hoped earnestly that the Christian god had sufficient sense of humour to cope with one such as her beloved Artor.

‘Why do you weep, Mother?’

Taliesin’s voice recalled Nimue to the fold in the hills where the tarn sat like a silver mirror, without ripples or obvious life.

‘I believe that Artor was glad to die, for he was confident that he’d won a future for his people. In time, he will become a symbol of their struggle against extinction. We should rejoice, Taliesin, for Artor is at peace at last.’

‘Platitudes. You weep, Mother, you do not rejoice.’

‘I mourn for you, for myself and for our people. Artor is gone and, for all my promises to his warriors, he will never come again. Yet, as Bishop Mark suggested, our lord will bolster our courage in the future, so I suppose in that sense he is immortal. No one can kill an idea.’

Two days later, Bedwyr joined Nimue and Taliesin in a small boat in the centre of the lake. Here they would complete their final act of loyalty to Artor, king and man.

‘The scroll of Artor’s life is finished and will decay into dust,’ Nimue intoned. ‘So we must consign Artor’s sword, the seal of his power, to the waters of the lake. Throw it high, Bedwyr, so that Artor may see that his orders have been obeyed and that no other hand will ever wield it.’

Bedwyr swung his arm and Caliburn flashed in the weak shafts of sunshine. At the top of his swing, he let the sword loose. It spun and turned, higher and higher until, at last, it slowed. Then, point downwards, the blade speared into the waters. Only a small circlet of ripples was left to remind the watchers that the sword of sovereignty had ever existed at all.

‘Now we can leave the High King, and his works, to memory. At last we may grow old in peace.’

In the years that followed, Nimue’s words remained a riddle that Bedwyr puzzled over, a complexity that he often tried to solve. In the skirmishes with Saxons that came more and more frequently during the summers, Bedwyr repelled the enemy time and time again. Eventually, the young Arthur and his brothers took Bedwyr’s place as Cornovii warrior kings, and in their inevitable march into the west, the Saxons learned to bypass the inhospitable forests of Arden.

As she had predicted in her bitter youth, Morgan died in poverty and madness in Hibernia. She never saw Tintagel again, and even the memory of her beloved father, Gorlois, faltered at the last. Stripped of the power to govern the most basic actions of her body, she died without remembering who or what she had hated so well. Only the venom in her thoughts had kept her ancient blood pumping for so long.

The gods smiled on Wenhaver and she became the abbess of her order. Vain, capricious and imperious to the end, she died in a scented bed still bemoaning the loss of her precious bath. If she learned anything of value from her long years as the mother of the Britons, she never shared her insights with the quiet-footed women of her order.

Out of a strange loyalty to the beautiful woman she had been, King Gawayne moved her corpse to Glastonbury, opened Artor’s grave, and placed her beside him so that she would lie with him for ever.

What Artor feared eventually came to pass. The Saxons breached the mountain spine and poured through the west like an inexorable flood. Mile by mile, village by village, the Celts were destroyed, absorbed or driven towards the sea. The lands of the Ordovice, the kingdom of Wales, preserved the remnants of the Celtic peoples, while still more refugees crossed the Wall or the sea to the shelter of modern Scotland and Ireland. Angleland became England.

But Cadbury never fell - it decayed slowly. After decades of glory, it was deserted and, in time, dwindled to nothing but a conical hill, overlooking the countryside and surrounded by massive earthworks. All the grandeur fled, but the torn flags of its majesty still exist in the massive walls of sod and the trees that flame in the autumn below its bare summit.

Artor, the man, was eventually forgotten, except as a magical emperor who had supposedly conquered Gaul and Rome. As writers, and even the Saxon and Norman kings, sought to borrow the power of his name and the false legitimacy of kinship with him, his legend and strength grew until he rivalled the emperors of Constantine and Rome. How Odin must have laughed in Valhalla to hear how far Artor’s reach had become with time. Of Odin, the legends were silent, although Gareth and Percivale found places in the stories, as renowned knights. Odin would not have cared, for he had died protecting his master’s back, exactly as he had sworn to do.

One day, nearly a thousand years later, a curious farmer found fragments of mosaic flooring buried under his fallow wheat field. The scholars came flocking to Bath, and the Villa Poppinidii found a new purpose long after its ancient walls had been destroyed by time. As the treasures were excavated, the children of another age could see the influence of Roman Britain upon their homeland.

The Stone from the Old Forest was also discovered in the archaeological dig, but all that remained of Gallia’s Garden were the foundations of Artorex’s house. The experts and archaeologists puzzled over the monolith’s position in the forecourt of a Roman villa, and many learned papers were written about the stone. The truth was far more prosaic than any flights of fancy that historians could - and did - imagine.

Artor would have been amused, for he believed that a necessary falsehood could be more powerful than the truth.

Perhaps he was correct, for now the dreams of clever men and women scarcely scratch the surface of his fame. The High King lives more richly in the ordinary lives of a greater west than he ever did when he was alive.

So Artor comes once again, my friends. Will you know him when he calls your name?

GLOSSARY OF PLACE NAMES

The following is a list of place names in post-Roman Britain with their present-day equivalents.