‘He’ll follow us to Ynys Mon,’ Galahad said nervously.
‘And we shall be gone again,’ Merlin said. He sneezed. He looked wretchedly cold. His nose was running, his cheeks were pale and from time to time he shivered uncontrollably, but he found some dusty herbs in a small leather pouch and he swallowed them with a handful of melted snow and insisted he was well.
He looked much worse next morning. We had spent that night in a cleft of the rocks where we had not dared light a fire, despite Nimue’s charm of concealment that she had worked with the help of a polecat’s skull we had found higher up the road. Our sentries had watched the coastal plain where three small glints of fire betrayed the presence of life, while the rest of us had clung together in the deep rocks where we shivered and cursed the cold and wondered if morning would ever dawn. It came at last with a seeping, leprous light that made the distant isle look darker and more menacing than ever. But Nimue’s charm seemed to have worked, for no spearmen guarded the Dark Road’s ending.
Merlin was shaking now and was much too weak to walk, and so four of my spearmen carried him in a litter made of cloaks and spears as we slid and edged our way down to the first small wind-bent trees in the hedgerows of Lleyn. The road was sunken here and its ruts were frosted hard where it twisted between hunched oaks, thin hollies and the small neglected fields. Merlin was moaning and shuddering, and Issa wondered if we should turn back. ‘To cross the mountains again,’ Nimue said, ‘would surely kill him. We go on.’
We came to a fork in the road and there found our first sign of Diwrnach. It was a skeleton, bound together with horsehair ropes and hung from a pole so that its dry bones rattled in the brisk west wind. Three crows had been nailed to the post below the human bones and Nimue sniffed their stiffened bodies to decide what kind of magic had been imbued into their deaths. ‘Piss! Piss!’ Merlin managed to say from his litter. ‘Quick, girl! Piss!’ He coughed horribly, then turned his head to spit the sputum towards the ditch. ‘I won’t die,’ he said to himself, ‘I will not die!’ He lay back as Nimue squatted by the pole. ‘He knows we’re here,’ Merlin warned me.
‘Is he here?’ I asked, crouching beside him.
‘Someone is. Be careful, Derfel.’ He closed his eyes and sighed. ‘I am so old,’ he said softly, ‘so horribly old. And there’s badness here, all about us.’ He shook his head. ‘Get me to the island, that’s all, just reach the island. The Cauldron will cure all.’
Nimue finished, then waited to see which way the steam from her urine blew, and the wind took it towards the right-hand fork and that omen decided our path. Before we set off Nimue went to one of the ponies and found a leather bag from which she took a handful of elf bolts and eagle stones that she distributed among the spearmen. ‘Protection,’ she explained as she laid a snake stone in Merlin’s litter. ‘Onwards,’ she ordered us.
We walked all morning, our pace slowed by the need to carry Merlin. We saw no one and that absence of life put a dreadful fear into my men for it seemed as though we had come to a land of the dead. There were rowan and holly berries in the hedgerows, and thrushes and robins in the branches, but there were no cattle, no sheep and no men. We did see one settlement from which a wisp of smoke blew in the wind, but it was far off and no one appeared to be watching us from its circling wall.
Yet men were in this dead land. We knew that when we paused to rest in a small valley where a stream trickled sluggishly between icy banks under a grove of small, black, wind-bent oaks. The intricate branches were each delicately limned with a white frost and we rested beneath them until Gwilym, one of the spearmen who was standing guard at the rear, called to me.
I went to the oaks’ edge to see that a fire had been set on the lower slope of the mountains. There were no flames visible, just a thick gruel of grey smoke that boiled fiercely before being snatched away by the west wind. Gwilym pointed to the smoke with his spear-blade, then spat to avert its evil.
Galahad came to stand beside me. ‘A signal?’ he asked.
‘Probably.’
‘So they know we’re here?’ He crossed himself.
‘They know.’ Nimue joined us. She was carrying Merlin’s heavy black staff and she alone seemed to burn with energy in this cold, dead place. Merlin was sick, the rest of us were besieged by fear, but the deeper we pierced into Diwrnach’s black land the fiercer Nimue became. She was nearing the Cauldron, and the lure of it was like a fire in her bones. ‘They’re watching us,’ she said.
‘Can you hide us?’ I asked, wanting another of her concealment spells.
She shook her head. ‘This is their land, Derfel, and their Gods are powerful here.’ She sneered as Galahad made the sign of the cross a second time. ‘Your nailed God won’t defeat Crom Dubh,’ she said.
‘He’s here?’ I asked fearfully.
‘Or one like him,’ she said. Crom Dubh was the Black God, a crippled and malevolent horror who gave dark nightmares. The other Gods, it was said, avoided Crom Dubh, which suggested we were alone in his power.
‘So we’re doomed,’ Gwilym said flatly.
‘Fool!’ Nimue hissed at him. ‘We’re only doomed if we fail to find the Cauldron. Then we’d all be doomed anyway. Are you going to watch that smoke all morning?’ she asked me.
We walked on. Merlin could not speak any longer and his teeth chattered, even though we piled him with furs. ‘He’s dying,’ Nimue told me calmly.
‘Then we should find shelter,’ I said, ‘and build a fire.’
‘So we can all be warm while we’re slaughtered by Diwrnach’s spearmen?’ She scoffed at the idea. ‘He’s dying, Derfel,’ she explained, ‘because he’s close to his dream and because he made his bargain with the Gods.’
‘His life for the Cauldron?’ Ceinwyn, walking on my other side, asked the question.
‘Not quite,’ Nimue admitted. ‘But while you two were setting up your little house,’ she made that statement sarcastically, ‘we went to Cadair Idris. We made a sacrifice there, the old sacrifice, and Merlin pledged his life, not for the Cauldron, but for the search. If we find the Cauldron, he’ll live, but if we fail then he dies and the shadow-soul of the sacrifice can claim Merlin’s soul for all time.’
I knew what the old sacrifice was, though I had never heard of it being made in our time. ‘Who was the sacrifice?’ I asked.
‘No one you knew. No one we knew. Just a man.’ Nimue was dismissive. ‘But his shadow-soul is here, watching us, and it wants us to fail. It wants Merlin’s life.’
‘What if Merlin dies anyway?’ I asked.
‘He won’t, you fool! Not if we find the Cauldron.’
‘If I find it,’ Ceinwyn said nervously.
‘You will,’ Nimue said confidently.
‘How?’
‘You’ll dream,’ Nimue said, ‘and the dream will lead us to the Cauldron.’
And Diwrnach, I realized when we reached the straits dividing the mainland from the island, wanted us to find it. The signal fire told us his men had been watching us, but they had neither shown themselves nor tried to stop our journey, and that suggested Diwrnach knew of our quest and wanted it to succeed so that he could take the Cauldron for himself. There could be no other reason why he was making it so easy for us to reach Ynys Mon.
The straits were not wide, but the grey water swirled and sucked and foamed as it swept through the channel. The sea ran fast in those narrows, twisting itself into sullen whirlpools or else breaking white on hidden rocks, but the sea was not as frightening as the far shore that stood so utterly empty and dark and bleak, almost as if it waited to suck our souls away. I shivered as I looked at that distant grassy slope and could not help thinking of the far-off Black Day when the Romans had stood on this same rocky shore and that far bank had been thick with Druids who had hurled their dread curses at the foreign soldiers. The curses had failed, the Romans had crossed, and Ynys Mon had died, and now we stood in the same place in a last, desperate attempt to wind back the years and spool back the c
enturies of sadness and hardship so that Britain would be restored to its blessed state before the Romans came. It would be Merlin’s Britain then, a Britain of the Gods, a Britain without Saxons, a Britain full of gold and feasting halls and miracles.
We walked east towards the narrowest part of the straits and there, rounding a point of rock and beneath the earth loom of a deserted fortress, we found two boats hauled up on the pebbles of a tiny cove. A dozen men waited with the boats, almost as though they had expected us. ‘The ferrymen?’ Ceinwyn asked me.
‘Diwrnach’s boatmen,’ I said, and touched the iron in Hywelbane’s hilt. ‘They want us to cross,’ I said, and I was afraid because the King was making it so easy for us.
The sailors were quite unafraid of us. They were squat, hard-looking creatures with fish scales sticking to their beards and their thick woollen clothes. They carried no weapons other than their gutting knives and fish-spears. Galahad asked if they had seen any of Diwrnach’s spearmen, but they simply shrugged as if his language made no sense to them. Nimue spoke to them in her native Irish and they responded politely enough. They claimed to have seen no Bloodshields, but did tell her that we must wait until the tide had reached its height before we could cross. Only then, it seemed, were the straits safe for boats.
We made Merlin a bed in one of the boats, then Issa and I climbed to the deserted fort and stared inland. A second pyre of smoke blew skyward from the valley of twisted oaks, but otherwise nothing had changed and no enemies were in sight. But they were there. You did not need to see their blood-daubed shields to know that they were close. Issa touched his spear-blade. ‘It seems to me, Lord,’ he said, ‘that Ynys Mon would be a good place to die.’
I smiled. ‘It would be a better place to live, Issa.’
‘But our souls will surely be safe if we die on the blessed isle?’ he asked anxiously.
‘They will be safe,’ I promised him, ‘and you and I will cross the bridge of swords together.’ And Ceinwyn, I promised myself, would be just a pace or two ahead of us, for I would kill her myself before any of Diwrnach’s men could lay their hands on her. I drew Hywelbane, its long blade still smeared with the soot in which Nimue had written her charm, and I held its tip to Issa’s face. ‘Make me an oath,’ I ordered him.
He went on one knee. ‘Say it, Lord.’
‘If I die, Issa, and Ceinwyn still lives, then you must kill her with one sword stroke before Diwrnach’s men can take her.’
He kissed the sword’s tip. ‘I swear it, Lord.’
At high tide the swirling currents died away so that the sea lay still except for the wind-fretted waves that had floated the two boats up from the shingle. We lifted the ponies on board, then took our places. The boats were long and narrow and, as soon as we had settled amidst the sticky fishing nets, the boatmen gestured that we were to bail out the water that seeped between the tarred planks. We used our helmets to scoop the cold sea back to its place and I prayed to Manawydan, the sea God, that he would preserve us as the boatmen put their long oars between the tholes. Merlin shivered. His face was whiter that I had ever seen it, but touched by a nauseous yellow and smeared by flecks of foam that dribbled from the corners of his lips. He was not conscious, but muttered odd things in his delirium.
The boatmen chanted a strange song as they pulled on their oars, but fell silent when they reached the middle of the straits. They paused there and one man in each boat gestured back towards the mainland.
We turned. At first I could only see the dark strip of the shore beneath the snow-white and slate-black loom of the mountains beyond, but then I saw a ragged black thing moving just beyond the stony beach. It was a banner, mere fluttering strips of rags tied to a pole, but an instant after it appeared a line of warriors showed themselves above the strait’s bank. They laughed at us, their cackling coming clear through the cold wind above the sound of the lapping sea. They were all mounted on shaggy ponies and all were dressed in what appeared to be torn strips of ragged black cloth that caught the breeze and fluttered like pennants. They carried shields and the hugely long war spears that the Irish favoured, and neither the shields nor the spears frightened me, but there was something about their tattered, long-haired wildness that struck a sudden chill through me. Or perhaps that chill came from the sleet that had begun to spit on the west wind to dimple the sea’s grey surface.
The ragged, dark riders watched as our boats grounded on Ynys Mon. The boatmen helped us lift Merlin and the ponies safe ashore, then they ran their boats back into the sea.
‘Shouldn’t we have kept the boats here?’ Galahad asked me.
‘How?’ I asked. ‘We’d have to divide the men, some to guard the boats and some to go with Ceinwyn and Nimue.’
‘So how do we get off the island?’ Galahad asked.
‘With the Cauldron,’ I adopted Nimue’s confidence, ‘all things will be possible.’ I had no other answer to give him and dared not tell him the truth. That truth was that I felt doomed. I felt as though the curses of those ancient Druids were even now congealing around our souls.
We struck north from the beach. Gulls screamed at us, whirling around us in the flying sleet as we climbed up from the rocks into a bleak moorland broken only by outcrops of stone. In the old days, before the Romans came to destroy Ynys Mon, the land had been thick with sacred oaks amongst which the greatest mysteries of Britain were performed. The news of those rituals governed the seasons in Britain, Ireland, and even Gaul, for here the Gods had come to earth, and here the link between man and the Gods had been strongest before it had been sundered by the short Roman stabbing swords. This was holy ground, but it was also difficult ground, for after just an hour’s walking we came to a vast bog that seemed to bar our path into the island’s interior. We ranged along the bog’s edge, seeking a path, but there was none; so, as the light began to fade, we used our spear-shafts to discover the firmest passage through the spiky tussocks of grass and the sucking, treacherous patches of marsh. Our legs were soaked in freezing mud and the sleet found its way inside our furs. One of the ponies became stuck and the other began to panic, so we unloaded both beasts, distributed their remaining burdens amongst ourselves, then abandoned them.
We struggled on, sometimes resting on our circular shields that served like shallow coracles to support our weight until, inevitably, the brackish water seeped over their edges and forced us to stand again. The sleet became harder and thicker, whipped by a rising wind that flattened the marsh grass and drove the cold deep into our bones. Merlin was shouting strange words and thrashing his head from side to side, while some of my men were weakening, sapped by the cold as well as by the malevolence of whatever Gods now ruled this ruined land.
Nimue was the first to reach the bog’s far side. She leapt from tussock to tussock, showing us a path, and finally reached firm ground where she jumped up and down to show us that safety was close. Then, for a few seconds, she froze before pointing Merlin’s staff back the way we had come.
We turned to see that the dark riders were with us, only now there were more of them; a whole horde of tattered Bloodshields was watching us from the bog’s far side. Three ragged banners were hoisted above them, and one of those banners was lifted in ironic salute before the riders turned their ponies eastwards. ‘I should never have brought you here,’ I said to Ceinwyn.
‘You didn’t bring me, Derfel,’ she said. ‘I came of my own will.’ She touched a gloved finger to my face. ‘And we shall leave the same way, my love.’
We climbed up from the bog to find, beyond a low crest, a landscape of small fields that lay between lumpish moors and sudden rock outcrops. We needed a refuge for the night and found it in a settlement of eight stone huts that were circled by a wall the height of a spear. The place was deserted, though people clearly lived there for the small stone huts were swept clean and the ashes in the hearth were still just warm to the touch. We stripped the turf roof off one hut and cut the roof timbers into shreds with which we made a fire for Me
rlin, who was now shivering and raving. We set a guard, then stripped off our furs and tried to dry our sopping boots and wet leggings.
Then, as the very last of the light seeped from the grey sky, I went to stand on the wall and searched all about the landscape. I saw nothing.
Four of us stood guard for the first part of the night, then Galahad and another three spearmen watched through the rest of that rainy darkness and not one of us heard anything other than the wind and the crackle of the fire in the hut. We heard nothing, we saw nothing, yet in the morning’s first wan light there was a newly severed head of a sheep dripping blood on one part of the wall.
Nimue angrily pushed the sheep’s head off the wall’s coping, then screamed a challenge towards the sky. She took a pouch of grey powder and scattered it on the fresh blood, and afterwards she rapped the wall with Merlin’s staff and told us the malevolence had been countered. We believed her because we wanted to believe her, just as we wanted to believe that Merlin was not dying. But he was deathly pale, breathing shallowly and making no sound. We tried to feed him with the last of our bread, but he clumsily spat the crumbs out. ‘We must find the Cauldron today,’ Nimue said calmly, ‘before he dies.’ We gathered our burdens, hoisted our shields onto our backs, picked up our spears and followed her northwards.
Nimue led us. Merlin had told her all he knew of the sacred isle and that knowledge took us northwards all morning long. The Bloodshields appeared soon after we had left our shelter and, now that we neared our goal, they became bolder so that at any one time there were always a score in sight and sometimes three times that number. They formed a loose ring about us, but took care to stay well outside the range of our spears. The sleet had stopped with the dawn, leaving just a cold, damp wind that bent the grass on the moors and lifted the black tatters of the dark riders’ cloaks.