And we were happy in Cwm Isaf. Ceinwyn took a ridiculous pleasure in doing all the things that till now had been done for her by servants, though strangely she was never able to wring a chicken’s neck and I always used to laugh when she killed a hen. She had no need to do it, for any one of the servants could have killed the fowl and my spearmen would do anything for Ceinwyn, but she insisted on sharing the work, though when it came to killing hens, ducks or geese she could not make herself do it properly. The only method she ever devised was to lay the poor creature down on the earth, put a small foot on its neck and then, with her eyes tight closed, give the head one quick decisive tug.
She was more successful with the distaff. Every woman in Britain, save for the very richest, was forever with a distaff and spindle, for spinning wool into thread was one of those endless jobs that will presumably last until the sun has made its last turn about the earth. As soon as one year’s fleeces had been turned into yarn, so the next year’s fleeces came to the storehouses and the women would collect their apronfuls, wash and comb the wool, then start spinning the thread again. They spun when they walked, they spun as they talked, they spun whenever there was no other task needing their hands. It was monotonous, mindless work, but not unskilled; at first Ceinwyn could only produce pathetic little tatters of wool, but she became better, though never as quick as those women who had spun the wool since the very first day their hands were big enough to hold the distaff. She would sit of an evening, telling me about her day, and her left hand would turn the staff and her right would flick the weighted spindle that hung from the distaff to elongate and twist the emerging thread. When the spindle reached the floor she would wind the thread around it, fix the spooled yarn with the bone clip on the spindle’s top and then start spinning again. The wool she made that winter was often lumpy, or else fragile, but I loyally wore one of the shirts she made from that thread until it fell apart.
Cuneglas visited us often, though his wife, Helledd, never came. Queen Helledd was truly conventional and she disapproved deeply of what Ceinwyn had done. ‘She thinks it brings disgrace on the family,’ Cuneglas told us cheerfully. He became, like Arthur and Galahad, one of my dearest friends. He was, I think, lonely in Caer Sws, for other than Iorweth and some of the younger Druids he had few men with whom he could talk of anything but hunting and war, and so I replaced the brothers he had lost. His older brother, who should have become King, had been killed in a fall from a horse, the next son had died of a fever and the youngest had been killed fighting the Saxons. Cuneglas, like me, deeply disapproved of Ceinwyn’s going on the Dark Road, but he told me that nothing short of a sword blow would ever stop her. ‘Everyone always thinks she’s so sweet and kind,’ he told me, ‘but there’s a will of iron there. Stubborn.’
‘Can’t kill chickens.’
‘I can’t even imagine her trying!’ he laughed. ‘But she is happy, Derfel, and for that I thank you.’
It was a happy time, one of the happiest of all our happy times, but always shadowed by the knowledge that Merlin would come and demand the fulfilment of our oaths.
He came on a frosty afternoon. I was outside the house, using a Saxon war axe to split newly chopped logs that would fill our house with smoke, and Ceinwyn was inside, hushing a squabble that had risen between her maidservants and the fiery Scarach, when a horn sounded across the valley. The horn was a signal from my spearmen that a stranger approached Cwm Isaf and I lowered the axe in time to see Merlin’s tall figure striding among the trees. Nimue was with him. She had stayed a week with us after the night of Lancelot’s betrothal and then, without a word of explanation, had slipped away one night, but now, dressed in black beside her lord in his long white robe, she returned.
Ceinwyn came from the house. Her face was smudged with soot and her hands bloodied from a hare she had been jointing. ‘I thought he was bringing a war-band,’ she said, her blue eyes fixed on Merlin. That was what Nimue had told us before she left; that Merlin was raising the army that would protect him on the Dark Road.
‘Maybe he’s left them at the river?’ I suggested.
She pushed a lock of hair away from her face, adding a smudge of blood to the soot. ‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asked, for I had been stripped to the waist as I chopped the wood.
‘Not yet,’ I said, though I pulled on a wool shirt as Merlin leapt long legged over the stream. My spearmen, anticipating news, trailed from their huts to follow him, but they stayed outside the house when he ducked his tall figure under our low lintel.
He offered us no greeting, but just went past us into the house. Nimue followed him, and by the time Ceinwyn and I entered they were already squatting beside the fire. Merlin held his thin hands to the blaze, then seemed to give a long sigh. He said nothing, and neither of us wanted to ask his news. I, like him, sat at the fire’s edge while Ceinwyn put the half jointed hare into a bowl then wiped her hands free of blood. She waved Scarach and the servants out of the house, then sat beside me.
Merlin shivered, then seemed to relax. His long back was bowed as he hunched forward with his eyes closed. He stayed thus for a long time. His brown face was deeply lined and his beard a startling white. Like all Druids he shaved the front part of his skull, but now that tonsure was smothered with a fine layer of short white hair, evidence that he had been a long time on the road without a razor or a bronze mirror. He looked so old that day, and hunched by the fire he even looked feeble.
Nimue sat opposite him, saying nothing. She did rise once to take Hywelbane from its nail hooks in the main beam and I saw her smile as she recognized the two strips of bone set into the handle. She unsheathed the blade, then held it into the smokiest part of the fire, and once the steel was covered in soot she carefully scratched an inscription into the soot with a piece of straw. The letters were not like these I write now, that both we and the Saxons employ, but were older magical letters, mere strokes slashed by bars, that only the Druids and sorcerers used. She propped the scabbard against the wall and hung the sword back on its nails, but did not explain the significance of what she had written. Merlin ignored her.
He opened his eyes suddenly, and the appearance of feebleness was replaced by a terrible savagery. ‘I put a curse,’ he said slowly, ‘on the creatures of Siluria.’ He flicked his fingers towards the fire and a puff of brighter flame hissed in the wood. ‘May their crops be blighted,’ he growled, ‘their cattle barren, their children crippled, their swords blunted and their enemies triumphant.’ It was, for him, a mild enough curse, but there was a hissing malevolence in his voice. ‘And on Gwent,’ he went on, ‘I give a murrain, and frosts in summer and wombs shrivelled to dry husks.’ He spat into the flames. ‘In Elmet,’ he said, ‘the tears will make lakes, plagues will fill graves, and rats shall rule their houses.’ He spat again. ‘How many men will you bring, Derfel?’
‘All I have, Lord.’ I hesitated to admit how few that was, but I finally gave him the answer, ‘Twenty shields.’
‘And those of your men who are still with Galahad?’ He gave me a quick glance from beneath his bushy white eyebrows. ‘How many of those?’
‘I have heard nothing from them, Lord.’
He sneered. ‘They form a palace guard for Lancelot. He insists on it. He makes his brother into a doorkeeper.’ Galahad was Lancelot’s half-brother and as unlike him as any man could be. ‘It is a good thing, Lady,’ Merlin looked at Ceinwyn, ‘that you did not marry Lancelot.’
She smiled at me. ‘I think so, Lord.’
‘He finds Siluria tedious. I can’t blame him for that, but he’ll seek Dumnonia’s comforts and be a snake in Arthur’s belly.’ He smiled. ‘You, my Lady, were supposed to be his plaything.’
‘I had rather be here,’ Ceinwyn said, gesturing at our rough stone walls and smoke-stained roof beams.
‘But he’ll try to strike at you,’ Merlin warned her. ‘His pride climbs higher than Lleullaw’s eagle, Lady, and Guinevere is cursing you. She killed a dog in her temple of Isis and draped it
s pelt on a crippled bitch that she gave your name.’
Ceinwyn looked pale, made the sign against evil and spat into the fire.
Merlin shrugged. ‘I have countered the curse, Lady,’ he said, then stretched his long arms and bent his head back so that his ribboned plaits almost touched the rush-covered floor behind him. ‘Isis is a foreign Goddess,’ he said, ‘and her power is feeble in this land.’ He brought his head forward again, then rubbed his eyes with his long hands. ‘I have come empty-handed,’ he said bleakly. ‘No man in Elmet would step forward, and none elsewhere. Their spears, they say, are dedicated to Saxon bellies. I offered them no gold, I offered no silver, only a fight on behalf of the Gods, and they offered me their prayers, then let their womenfolk talk to them of children and hearths and cattle and land and so they slunk away. Eighty men! That’s all I wanted. Diwrnach can field two hundred, maybe a handful more, but eighty would have sufficed, yet there were not even eight men who would come. Their Lords are sworn to Arthur now. The Cauldron, they tell me, can wait till Lloegyr is ours again. They want Saxon land and Saxon gold and all I offered them was blood and cold on the Dark Road.’
There was a silence. A log collapsed in the fire to spring a constellation of sparks toward the blackened roof. ‘Not one man offered a spear?’ I asked, shocked at the news.
‘A few,’ he said dismissively, ‘but none I would trust. None worthy of the Cauldron.’ He paused, then looked tired again. ‘I am struggling against the lure of Saxon gold and against Morgan. She opposes me.’
‘Morgan!’ I could not hide my astonishment. Morgan, Arthur’s eldest sister, had been Merlin’s closest companion until Nimue usurped her place, and though Morgan hated Nimue I did not think that hatred extended to Merlin.
‘Morgan,’ he said flatly. ‘She has spread a tale through Britain. The tale says that the Gods oppose my quest and that I am to be defeated, and that my death will embrace all my companions. She dreamed the tale and folk believe her dreams. I am old, she says, and feeble, and loose-witted.’
‘She says,’ Nimue spoke softly, ‘that a woman will kill you, not Diwrnach.’
Merlin shrugged. ‘Morgan plays her own game and I don’t yet understand it.’ He rooted about in a pocket of his gown and brought out a handful of dried knotted grasses. Each knotted stem looked alike to me, but he sorted through them and selected one that he held towards Ceinwyn. ‘I release you from your oath, Lady.’
Ceinwyn glanced at me, then looked back to the knot of grass. ‘Will you still take the Dark Road, Lord?’ she asked Merlin.
‘Yes.’
‘But how will you find the Cauldron without me?’
He shrugged, but offered no answer.
‘How will you find it with her?’ I asked, for I still did not understand why a virgin must find the Cauldron, or why that virgin should have to be Ceinwyn.
Merlin shrugged again. ‘The Cauldron,’ he said, ‘was ever under the guard of a virgin. One guards it now, if my dreams tell me correctly, and only another virgin can reveal its hiding-place. You will dream it,’ he said to Ceinwyn, ‘if you are willing to come.’
‘I shall come, Lord,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘as I promised you.’
Merlin pushed the grass knot back into the pocket before rubbing his face again with his long hands. ‘We leave in two days,’ he announced flatly. ‘You must bake bread, pack dried meat and fish, sharpen your weapons, and make sure you have furs against the cold.’ He looked at Nimue. ‘We shall sleep at Caer Sws. Come.’
‘You can stay here,’ I offered.
‘I must speak to Iorweth.’ He stood, his head level with the rafters. ‘I release you both from your oaths,’ he said very formally, ‘but pray you will come anyway. But it will be harder than you know and harder than you fear in your worst dreams, for I have pledged my life on the Cauldron.’ He looked down at us and his face was immensely sad. ‘The day we step on the Dark Road,’ he told us, ‘I shall begin to die, for that is my oath, and I have no certainty that the oath will bring me success, and if the search fails then I shall be dead and you will be alone in Lleyn.’
‘We shall have Nimue,’ Ceinwyn said.
‘And she is all you will have,’ Merlin said darkly, then ducked out of the door. Nimue followed him.
We sat in silence. I put another log on the fire. It was green, for all our firewood was fresh-cut unseasoned timber which was why it smoked so badly. I watched the smoke thicken and swirl about the rafters, then took Ceinwyn’s hand. ‘Do you want to die in Lleyn?’ I chided her.
‘No,’ she said, ‘but I want to see the Cauldron.’
I stared into the fire. ‘He will fill it with blood,’ I said softly.
Ceinwyn’s fingers caressed mine. ‘When I was a child,’ she said, ‘I heard all the tales of old Britain, how the Gods lived among us and everyone was happy. There was no famine then, and no plagues, just us and the Gods and peace. I want that Britain back, Derfel.’
‘Arthur says it can never return. We are what we are, not what we once were.’
‘So who do you believe?’ she asked. ‘Arthur or Merlin?’
I thought a long time. ‘Merlin,’ I finally said, and perhaps that was because I wanted to believe in his Britain where all our sorrows would be magically taken away. I loved the idea of Arthur’s Britain too, but that would take war and hard work and a trust that men would behave well if they were treated well. Merlin’s dream demanded less and promised more.
‘They we’ll go with Merlin,’ Ceinwyn said. She hesitated, watching me. ‘Are you worried by Morgan’s prophecy?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘She has power,’ I said, ‘but not like his. And not like Nimue, either.’ Nimue and Merlin had both suffered the Three Wounds of Wisdom, and Morgan had only endured the wound to the body, never the wound to the mind or the wound to pride; but Morgan’s prophecy was a shrewd tale, for in some ways Merlin was defying the Gods. He wanted to tame their caprices and in return give them a whole land dedicated to their worship, but why would the Gods want to be tamed? Maybe they had chosen Morgan’s lesser power to be their instrument against Merlin’s meddling, for what else could explain Morgan’s hostility? Or maybe Morgan, like Arthur, believed that Merlin’s quest was a nonsense, an old man’s hopeless search for a Britain that had vanished with the coming of the Legions. For Arthur there was only one fight, and that was to hurl the Saxon Kings from Britain, and Arthur would have supported his sister’s whispering tale if that meant no British spears were to be wasted against Diwrnach’s blood-painted shields. So perhaps Arthur was using his sister to make certain that no precious Dumnonian lives were to be thrown away in Lleyn. Except for my life, and my men’s lives, and my beloved Ceinwyn’s life. For we were oath-sworn.
But Merlin had released us from our oaths and so I tried one last time to persuade Ceinwyn to stay in Powys. I told her how Arthur believed that the Cauldron no longer existed, how it must have been stolen by the Romans and taken to that great sink of treasure, Rome, and melted down to make hair-combs or cloak-pins or coins or brooches. All that I told her, and when I was done she smiled and asked me once again who I believed, Merlin or Arthur.
‘Merlin,’ I said again.
‘And so do I,’ Ceinwyn said. ‘And I’m going.’
We baked bread, packed food and sharpened our weapons. And the next night, the eve of our going on Merlin’s quest, the first snow fell.
Cuneglas gave us two ponies that we loaded with food and furs, then we slung our star-painted shields on our backs and took the northern road. Iorweth gave us a blessing and Cuneglas’s spearmen accompanied us for the first few miles, but once we had passed the great ice wastes of the Dugh bog that lay beyond the hills north of Caer Sws those spearmen stepped aside and we were alone. I had promised Cuneglas that I would protect his sister’s life with my own and he had embraced me, then whispered in my ear. ‘Kill her, Derfel,’ he said, ‘rather than let Diwrnach have her.’
There were tears in his eyes and they almost ma
de me change my mind. ‘If you order her not to go, Lord King,’ I said, ‘she might obey.’
‘Never,’ he said, ‘but she is happier now than she has ever been. Besides, Iorweth tells me you will return. Go, my friend.’ He had stepped back. His parting gift had been a bag of gold ingots that we stowed on one of the ponies.
The snowy road led north into Gwynedd. I had never been to that kingdom before and found it a crude, hard place. The Romans had come here, but only to dig lead and gold. They had left few marks on the land and given it no law. The folk lived in squat, dark huts that huddled together inside circling stone walls from which dogs snarled at us and on which the skulls of wolves and bears were mounted to deter the spirits. Cairns marked the summits of hills and every few miles we would find a pole struck into the road’s verge and hung with dead men’s bones and ribbons of tattered cloth. There were few trees, the streams were frozen and snow blocked some of the passes. At night we sheltered in the huddled houses where we paid for our warmth with slivers of gold chopped from Cuneglas’s ingots.
We dressed in furs. Ceinwyn and I, like my men, were swathed in lice-ridden wolf-pelts and deerskins, but Merlin wore a suit made from the coat of a great black bear. Nimue had grey otter skins that were much lighter than our furs, but even so she seemed not to feel the cold as the rest of us did. Nimue alone carried no weapons. Merlin had his black staff, a fearsome thing in battle, while my men had spears and swords and even Ceinwyn carried a light spear and had her long-bladed hunting knife scabbarded at her waist. She wore no gold and the folk who gave us shelter had no conception of her rank. They did notice her bright hair and assumed that she, like Nimue, was one of Merlin’s adepts. Merlin they loved, for they all knew of him and they brought their crippled children to be touched by his hand.
It took us six days to reach Caer Gei where Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, was spending the winter. The caer itself was a hilltop fort, but under the fort’s shoulder there was a deep valley with tall trees growing from its steep sides and in the valley a wooden palisade circling a timber hall, some store-rooms and a score of sleeping huts, all of them ghosted white with snow and with long icicles hanging from their eaves. Cadwallon proved to be a sour old man while his hall was merely one third the size of Cuneglas’s hall and the press of warriors meant that its earth floor was already packed tight with beds. A space was grudgingly made for us and a corner screened for Nimue and Ceinwyn. That night Cadwallon gave us a feast, a poor thing of salted mutton and stewed carrots, but the best his stores could provide. He did generously offer to take Ceinwyn off our hands by making her his eighth wife, but he seemed neither offended nor disappointed when she refused. His seven existing wives were dark, sullen women who shared a round hut where they squabbled and persecuted each other’s children.