As we rode away I looked up and saw Peredur watching from a window, gazing wide-eyed at the splendour of our cloaks and horses and our shiny swords. I waved, and he waved back, and I rode on, glad that I was not quite alone in the world.
XV
I thought often of Peredur on the long ride home, but once we reached Arthur’s stronghold I soon forgot him. There was work for us boys in the fields below the ramparts, helping reap and stack the hay for winter silage, cutting and threshing the wheat. And harvest was barely in the barns before a messenger arrived. He was a nervous, chinless man, sent from a town called Aquae Sulis that prided itself for clinging on tight to the old Roman ways. He had come to ask for Arthur’s help.
I wasn’t there when he said his piece to Arthur and Myrddin, but word of what he’d come about soon spread. A Saxon raiding band was moving west, burning and looting. Aquae Sulis’s hired soldiers had deserted, and now it lay defenceless. The council had demanded help from Maelwas, since the town lay on the fringes of his lands, but no help had come. So they begged Arthur to bring his war-band and save them.
It was the chance that Arthur had been waiting for. He needed a town under his protection if he was ever to be taken seriously as a power among the little kings of Britain. Aquae Sulis wasn’t big, but it had been important once, and it was still rich.
I listened to the men talking about it as Bedwyr and I and the other boys got the horses and the weapons ready. The way they spoke made you wonder if the poor old citizens wouldn’t be better off just letting the Saxons in.
North-east along the old roads, in autumn sunlight, with the dusty blue sky above and a line of white cloud on the horizon like the foam of a wave that never broke. Sleeping in the open, in the golden woods. Myrddin with his harp beside Arthur’s fire, spinning us tales of victories gone by, and reminding us that it was near Aquae Sulis that Ambrosius had routed the Saxons in our fathers’ time.
Aquae Sulis waited for us in a loop of silvery river, at the bottom of a green bowl of downland. A wall ringed the main part of the town, thrown up hastily during the Saxon wars, with fragments of old pagan tombs mixed in among the brick. There were gates in it, and people coming and going. Coming, mostly; packing into the town out of the rumour-haunted countryside. The guards were men in Roman gear. Big four-cornered shields with the sign of Christ on them. Rusty armour patched and mended. Their leader rode a bay horse, and walked it forward to meet Arthur in the shadow of the gate. “Valerius,” he said. “I command the defences of this place.”
“Artorius Magnus, Dux Bellorum of the Britons,” said Myrddin, riding out front as usual, to announce his lord.
Valerius looked at Arthur down his long nose. Arthur looked at the walls, the rubbish heaped up in the ditch below, the thistles on the rampart, the half dozen shabby spearmen guarding the gate. He grinned. “We’re here to save you from the barbarians,” he said.
Valerius just kept on looking at Arthur, and I reckon he was thinking the same I’d thought: that Aquae Sulis might be better off without Arthur’s help. But then he gave a smile that seemed to hurt him, and his men stood aside, and Arthur went past him and into the town with the rest of us following.
Inside those walls wasn’t much different from outside at first. The buildings near the edge of town were so overgrown they looked like up-croppings of mossy rock in a wood. In the gaps between them market gardens and small fields had been made. Cattle were nibbling at the grass that sprouted up between the stones of the road. In one place a crowd of beehive lime-kilns sent up their fug of smoke. Men with barrows and sledges brought down slabs of marble, pillars and pediments stripped from old Roman buildings, which they were turning into lime for their fields. They stopped and stared at Arthur’s band, at the armour and the flags and the sheen of sunlight on the spear-points. Maybe they thought we were the ghosts of some old legion, marching in from victories in the west.
In those leafy, half-countrified parts of the town we stopped to make our camp and set up our horse-lines, and we boys ran about finding water and fodder for the beasts. But Arthur and my master and a half-dozen of the war-band went on with Valerius into the heart of the town.
And the further they go, the finer it gets. There’s less ivy on the walls, and more tiles on the roofs, and someone has made an effort to scrape the dung off the pavements. But down near the river, morning mist hangs over what looks like a whole cluster of ruins. “What’s happened there?” Arthur asks Valerius, imagining that raiders have already breached the walls.
“There was a temple there in olden times,” Valerius replies. “The pagans used to wash themselves in the hot springs and make offerings to their idols. But the bishop of this place prayed a great prayer, and God caused the waters to rise and engulf it. No one goes there now.”
The riders cross a place called the forum, which has no weeds at all, just a dried-up fountain and a prosperous-looking market. Hogs squeal and jostle in a pen of hurdles. Pewter-smiths are at work in an open-fronted shop. There’s a smell of blood from a pillared building which has been turned into a butcher’s shambles; gutted carcasses hanging up in the shade under the portico. Behind the stalls and the haze of blue cooking-smoke from the food-sellers, tall stone walls tower up like sea-cliffs. There are fine buildings here, and some are still in good repair. One is a big old church, but you don’t have to look too hard at it to see that it was a temple once, dedicated to the Romans’ emperor, who’d been their god too.
Arthur wouldn’t be Arthur if he didn’t start imagining his own statue perching in the empty alcove where that old emperor used to stand watch. He wants this place. Till now he’s thought his little hard-won kingdom in the hills was an achievement. He’s felt proud of himself whenever he thinks of all the farmsteads that pay him tribute. But now he sees it’s nothing. Wet hills. Ruins. There’ll be no happy homecoming for him to his fortress in the west. Not now he’s seen Aquae Sulis. He wants it the way a man wants food and shelter after a month on the road. He wants a town. Maybe he’ll change its name, like Alexander, once it’s his. Arthuropolis.
On the steps of the church the town’s council stand waiting. The ordo, they call themselves. They’re trying to look like Roman gentlemen, but they’re just a gaggle of silly old men, togged up in bed sheets. Their bare knees rattle in the autumn chill with a sound like someone knapping flints. The west wind flips their hair about like cobwebs.
“Salve, Imperator!” cries the chief magistrate, raising one arm as Arthur swings himself down out of the saddle. “Salve, Artori, Dux Bellorum et Malleus Saxonici! Macte nova virtute, sic itur ad astra!”
Arthur straightens his helmet and squints sideways at him. He likes to call himself the heir of Rome, but he’s never learned much Roman talk. He grunts, and glances back at Myrddin to make sure the old man’s not insulting him.
“We welcome you,” the chief magistrate explains. He’s eager to please, and this isn’t the first time he’s run up against blank looks when he’s tried out his Latin. He comes flapping down the steps to where Arthur waits. “Christ our Saviour has heard our prayers, and sent you to protect us in our time of greatest need! The Saxons are only two days’ march away…”
Arthur pushes him aside and stalks up the steps, peering into the church, into the faded glory of old Britannia. The ordo draw back and watch expectantly. A group of women hide shyly among the pillars outside the door. They are servants, mostly, clustering around their mistress, the wife of Valerius. Arthur’s eyes meet hers for just a second before he turns to take in the view of his new town. He forgets her as soon as his back is turned. She’s not his sort. Tall, bony, serious, with a long white neck. She looks like a heron.
Her name, he’ll find out later, is Gwenhwyfar.
XVI
Big grey clouds marched in from westward. Cold handfuls of rain came down on Aquae Sulis like coins flung at a beggar. We found shelter in the town, ate what food the grudging citizens gave us, and took more when it wasn’t enough. The people watched
sullenly as we dragged the pigs out of their pens and the hens out of their runs and rummaged through their storerooms for bread and wine and apples, and cleared their granaries of corn.
That evening, when the rest were dozing round the fire in the house we’d taken for ourselves, Bedwyr and I went down to see the old healing springs that gave the town its name. I was curious because I’d heard Myrddin talk about the place, and I made Bedwyr come with me because I didn’t care to go alone. The common people resented us, and while they were too scared of Arthur’s men to stand up to him, I guessed they might feel braver if they could corner a boy alone in their labyrinth of old stone streets.
Bedwyr, of course, didn’t see how much they hated us. Couldn’t imagine that anyone could hate a lad as handsome and as brave as him, striding along with his sword at his side, in the hand-me-down red cloak he’d cadged from Medrawt. All that worried him were ghosts. And those towering houses did look like the homes of spirits in that damp grey light, and the drinking songs and shouts and laughter that splurged out of the buildings where Arthur’s men were quartered sounded ghostly too, like the shades of Romans celebrating some forgotten victory.
Valerius had been lying when he said no one went to the springs. They’d been a place of power and magic since the hills were young, and however hard the bishop preached against them his flock kept going to the waters to cure their ills, as well as praying to his god. A dozen small paths wound shyly through the reeds and grass and alder-saplings, leading towards high stone buildings: bath houses, a half ruined temple. The doorways had been barred, and filled up with stones, but the walls themselves were crumbledown, and full of holes that a boy could easily slip through.
It wasn’t long before Bedwyr and I were standing in a great hall, beside a muddy, misty mere that had once been the Romans’ sacred bath. Square-cut pillars, tall as trees, rose from the water. Beneath the mud and moss the floor was paved with stone; you could feel the hardness of it when you walked, and see the paleness of it in places, showing through. Most of the roof had crashed down, making reefs of tiles and rubble in the water. The water was green as garlic soup, and it smelled like piss and vinegar. Stone steps went down into it, faint and yellowy under the surface.
“We shouldn’t have come here,” said Bedwyr, his voice tight-sounding, high with fear.
“Scared?” I asked, as if I wasn’t.
“There are ghosts here,” he said.
“Myrddin says there’s no such thing,” I told him. I was afraid as well, but I was too curious to run away. A strange warmth was in the air, and when I reached down and touched the water that was warm, too. How could there be warmth without a fire? I looked for one, but there were no flames anywhere, no smoke, only the steam rising from the water, hanging in veils between the crumbling pillars.
We crept along the pool-side, squelching through mud. Narrow doorways led off into rooms full of shadows and man-high nettles. We passed through one and crossed a narrow, mossy space, and looked through a sort of window into a place where the mist hung thick above another pool, and ferns and small trees grew from the walls, and evening sunlight came down in golden spears through gaps in the high, vaulted roof.
Maybe Myrddin was right, and there were no such things as ghosts. But someone like Myrddin, long years ago, had built and dressed that place to make you think of ghosts, and gods, and the unknowable mysteries of the hot springs. The water stirred and bubbled; the mists swirled; birds sped through leafy holes in walls and roof and swooped above the water. On the far side there was space enough to stand, among the rubble where part of the wall had tumbled down. A statue of a woman in a war-helmet lay toppled off her plinth there, but I could not tell if she’d been knocked down by the falling masonry or by angry Christians. I tipped my head on one side to get a look at her face. She’d been painted once; you could see the flakes of colour clinging to her cheeks and hair. She must have been beautiful when she was new and bright, standing there in all that mist. A better goddess than I’d made.
“This is the heart of it all,” I said. “The sacred spring…”
We weren’t the first to go there, neither. I’ve never seen so many charms and offerings as hung from the branches of the saplings that had grown out of the walls, and lay glinting like fish-scales on platforms just beneath the water. It looked to me as if some people round about still trusted the springs better than their bishop’s god, and I couldn’t blame them. There was magic in that place.
Bedwyr threw a coin into the water with a plop that echoed off the old walls. “Now the goddess of the waters will watch over us when we fight the Saxons,” he whispered. “She’s on Arthur’s side. She gave him Caliburn. I was there, that day. I saw the sword rise out of the water, all shining with light. I heard Arthur tell afterwards about her golden hair, drifting on the waters all about her face.”
I would have liked to tell him different. I almost did. I felt close to him, standing there, just the two of us in those haunted ruins. I thought he’d keep my secret. But the look on his face was so strange that I hadn’t the heart to take his story away from him. He believed it, see. He believed the old gods were on Arthur’s side just as he believed that winter would follow autumn and the sun would rise tomorrow. And I thought that maybe that believing would make him strong and brave and lucky when the fighting came, and maybe without it he’d be killed, or turn and run away, which was worse than being killed. So I kept quiet, and the magic waters lapped against the sides of the pool.
“We’ll smash the Saxons,” Bedwyr said. “And Britain will be one land again, and Arthur will be our emperor.”
And then something screeched, away in the ruins behind us, and we squealed and ran pell-mell through that maze of shadows and pillars and young trees, laughing and gasping and scaring each other until we found our way into a street where lights showed in windows, and staggered homeward, mocking ourselves for being scared of an old owl.
XVII
Two days later, in the grey of dawn, and I’m sat by my pony in a dripping wood. Around me, in the gathering light, the other boys of the war-band wait. Sometimes somebody speaks, but we’re quiet, mostly. Good Christians among us pray, face down on the wet earth with their arms spread out, like fallen swallows. The rest of us finger lucky charms, and look for omens in the way the dew drips off the twigs above our heads. We all have weapons; not just our own knives and spears but old swords and rusty javelins that Aquae Sulis’s cowardly mercenaries forgot to take with them when they quit. We can’t stop touching these new toys; rubbing the worn leather bindings on the grips of swords, picking splinters off of spear-hafts, stroking the hide coverings of our clumsy, heavy shields. The horses snort steam and clomp their hooves in the beechmast and nose about vainly for grass to eat among the grey, still trees.
This is how I come to be here. The Saxon raiders, according to farmers fleeing into Aquae Sulis, are close on a hundred strong. They’re heading towards the town, but slow, distracted by all the farmsteads and villas that lie in their path waiting to be looted, and held to walking pace by the wagons of plunder and columns of slaves that they’ve gathered in their push from the east. They’ve heard that the citizens of Aquae Sulis have a treasure-house stuffed full of gold.
Arthur, who knew that his men and their horses were tired after their own journey to the town, had been all for waiting a few days and meeting the raiders at a place just a mile from the walls, where the old roads crossed the river. But my master had a better idea. He looked at an old map and saw which way the Saxons would be coming. The best route would bring them to a ford that lies beneath the Hill of Badon. What if Arthur could meet them there, where his father Uthr and Ambrosius Aurelianus won their great fight all those years ago? A new victory at Badon would add far more to Arthur’s legend than a skirmish beside some fading town most men have hardly heard of.
Myrddin is not in the battle-line, of course. “My head’s too valuable to have some Saxon axe-man use it for a whetstone,” he said. He’ll
be watching from a safe distance, up on the wooded ridge west of the ford. He wanted me to stay there with him. I told him Bedwyr and the other boys would never let me forget it if I did not ride with them into the fight, but he said, “They are fools, and I need you by me. What if you were killed, Gwyn? What if you were wounded? What if someone found you on the battlefield afterwards and peeled your clothes off and found what’s underneath, and what’s not? No, boy; you stay with me, safe from harm.”
But boys will be boys, even the ones who are only girls dressed up: that’s one of the rules of the world. And another is that servants are always up before their masters. So in the dark before dawn, while Myrddin was still snoring, I crept away to join the others, a long line of us, riding silent as we could across the ford and up into the hanging woods on Badon’s lower slopes. It was a fearful thing, to disobey my master, but not as fearful as facing the jeers of all the others calling me coward.
So here we are, in the wet wood, waiting. The battle-line is drawn up west of the ford, out of sight of us. There aren’t many of them, for Arthur’s hoping to make the Saxons think it’s just a few men from Aquae Sulis come out to try and bar their way. Valerius, in his old Roman gear, has been put in command at the ford. But Arthur is waiting in the trees behind. Once the Saxons start to cross, his horsemen will come thundering down on them. And since the enemy are many, Arthur has decided to throw us boys into the fight as well. We may not be warriors yet, but the Saxons won’t realize that when we come charging from behind them out of the trees, and our coming will push them back on to the swords of the real war-band.
The light grows. We stand as the hoof beats of a single horse come drumming uphill. It’s Bedwyr; my friend Bedwyr, with a leather helmet on his head and straw stuffed in under the rim to stop it sliding down over his eyes. I feel my heart fill at the sight of him. You never love your friends more than when you fear they might be taken from you in the next few moments. I feel almost as much love for the other boys, for my pony, Dewi, for the trees, for the droplets which fall on my face as Bedwyr reins his horse in close by and spatters me with watery mud.