I stood as awkward as a pea-field scarecrow. Ceinwyn looked graceful, Cuneglas stared at the hall’s painted ceiling, Lancelot scowled, Amhar and Loholt tried to look belligerent, while Dinas and Lavaine showed nothing but contempt on their hard faces. Guinevere watched us carefully and her striking face betrayed nothing, though I suspect she felt as scornful as Dinas and Lavaine of this invented ceremony that was so dear to her husband. Arthur fervently wanted peace, and only he and Galahad seemed unembarrassed by the occasion.
When none of us spoke Arthur spread his arms and stepped down from the dais. ‘I demand,’ he said, ‘that the ill blood that exists between you be spilled now, spilled once and then forgotten.’
He waited again. I shuffled my feet and Cuneglas tugged at his long moustaches.
‘Please,’ Arthur said.
Ceinwyn gave a tiny shrug. ‘I regret,’ she said, ‘the hurt I caused King Lancelot.’
Arthur, delighted that the ice was melting, smiled at the Belgic King. ‘Lord King?’ He invited a response from Lancelot. ‘Will you forgive her?’
Lancelot, who that day was dressed all in white, glanced at her, then bowed.
‘Is that forgiveness?’ I growled.
Lancelot coloured, but managed to rise to Arthur’sexpectations. ‘I have no quarrel with the Princess Ceinwyn,’ he said stiffly.
‘There!’ Arthur was delighted with the grudging words and spread his arms again to invite them both forward. ‘Embrace,’ he said. ‘I will have peace!’
They both walked forward, kissed each other on the cheek and stepped back. The gesture was about as warm as that star-bright night when we had waited about the Cauldron in the rocks by Llyn Cerrig Bach, but it pleased Arthur. ‘Derfel,’ he looked at me, ‘will you not embrace the King?’
I steeled myself for conflict. ‘I will embrace him, Lord,’ I said, ‘when his Druids retract the threats they made against the Princess Ceinwyn.’
There was silence. Guinevere sighed and tapped a foot on the mosaics of the dais, the same mosaics she had taken from Lindinis. She looked, as ever, superb. She wore a black robe, perhaps in recognition of the day’s solemnity, and the robe was sewn with dozens of small silver crescent moons. Her red hair had been tamed into plaits that she had coiled about her skull and pinned into place with two gold clasps shaped as dragons. Around her neck she wore the barbaric Saxon gold necklace that Arthur had sent her after a long-ago battle against Aelle’s Saxons. She had told me then that she disliked the necklace, but it looked magnificent on her. She might have despised this day’s proceedings, but she still did her best to help her husband. ‘What threats?’ she asked me coldly.
‘They know,’ I said, staring at the twins.
‘We have made no threats,’ Lavaine protested flatly.
‘But you can make the stars vanish,’ I accused them.
Dinas allowed a slow smile to show on his brutal and handsome face. ‘The little paper star, Lord Derfel?’ he asked with mock surprise. ‘Is that your insult?’
‘It was your threat.’
‘My Lord!’ Dinas appealed to Arthur. ‘It was a child’s trick. It meant nothing.’
Arthur looked from me to the Druids. ‘You swear that?’ he demanded.
‘On my brother’s life,’ Dinas said.
‘And Merlin’s beard?’ I challenged them. ‘You have it still?’
Guinevere sighed as if to suggest I was becoming tedious. Galahad frowned. Outside the palace the warriors’ voices were becoming mead-loud and raucous.
Lavaine looked at Arthur. ‘It is true, Lord,’ he said courteously, ‘that we possessed a strand of Merlin’s beard, cut after he insulted King Cerdic. But on my life, Lord, we burned it.’
‘We don’t fight old men,’ Dinas growled, then glanced at Ceinwyn. ‘Or women.’
Arthur smiled happily. ‘Come, Derfel,’ he said, ‘embrace. I will have peace between my dearest friends.’
I still hesitated, but Ceinwyn and her brother both urged me forward and so, for the second and last time in my life, I embraced Lancelot. This time, instead of whispering insults as we had at our first embrace, we said nothing. We just kissed and stepped apart.
‘There will be peace between you,’ Arthur insisted.
‘I swear it, Lord,’ I answered stiffly.
‘I have no quarrel,’ Lancelot answered just as coldly.
Arthur had to be content with our churlish reconciliation and he breathed a huge sigh of relief as though the most difficult part of his day was now done; then he embraced us both before insisting that Guinevere, Galahad, Ceinwyn and Cuneglas come and exchange kisses.
Our ordeal was over. Arthur’s last victims were his own wife and Mordred, and that I did not want to see so I drew Ceinwyn out of the room. Her brother, at Arthur’s request, stayed and so the two of us were alone. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ I told her.
Ceinwyn shrugged. ‘It was an unavoidable ordeal.’
‘I still don’t trust the bastard,’ I said vengefully.
She smiled. ‘You, Derfel Cadarn, are a great warrior and he is Lancelot. Does the wolf fear the hare?’
‘It fears the serpent,’ I said gloomily. I did not feel like facing my friends and describing the reconciliation with Lancelot and so I led Ceinwyn through the Sea Palace’s graceful rooms with their pillared walls, decorated floors and heavy bronze lamps that hung on long iron chains from ceilings painted with hunting scenes. Ceinwyn thought the palace immeasurably grand, but also cold. ‘Just like the Romans,’ she said.
‘Just like Guinevere,’ I retorted. We found a flight of stairs that led down to some busy kitchens and from there a door into the back gardens where fruit and herbs were growing in well-ordered beds. ‘I can’t think,’ I said when we were in the open air, ‘that this Brotherhood of Britain will achieve anything.’
‘It will,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘if enough of you take the oath seriously.’
‘Maybe.’ I had suddenly stopped in embarrassment, for ahead of me, just straightening from bending over a bed of parsley, was Guinevere’s younger sister Gwenhwyvach.
Ceinwyn greeted her happily. I had forgotten that they had been friends in the long years of Guinevere and Gwenhwyvach’s exile in Powys, and when they had kissed Ceinwyn brought Gwenhwyvach to me. I thought she might resent my failure to marry her, but she seemed to bear no grudge. ‘I have become my sister’s gardener,’ she told me.
‘Surely not, Lady?’ I said.
‘The appointment is not official,’ she said drily, ‘nor are my high offices of chief steward or warden of the hounds, but someone has to do the work, and when father died he made Guinevere promise to look after me.’
‘I was sorry about your father,’ Ceinwyn said.
Gwenhwyvach shrugged. ‘He just got thinner and thinner until one day he wasn’t there any more.’ Gwenhwyvach herself had grown no thinner, indeed she was obese now, a fat red-faced woman who, in her earth-stained dress and dirty white apron, looked more like a farmer’s wife than a Princess. ‘I live there,’ she said, gesturing towards a substantial timber building that stood a hundred paces from the palace. ‘My sister allows me to do my work each day, but come the evening bell I am expected to be safely out of sight. Nothing ill-favoured, you understand, can mar the Sea Palace.’
‘Lady!’ I protested at her self-deprecation.
Gwenhwyvach waved me to silence. ‘I’m happy,’ she said bleakly. ‘I take the dogs for long walks and I talk to the bees.’
‘Come to Lindinis,’ Ceinwyn urged her.
‘That would never be allowed!’ Gwenhwyvach said with pretended shock.
‘Why not?’ Ceinwyn asked. ‘We have rooms to spare. Please.’
Gwenhwyvach smiled slyly. ‘I know too much, Ceinwyn, that’s why. I know who comes and who stays and what they do here.’ Neither of us wanted to probe those hints, so we both kept silent, but Gwenhwyvach needed to speak. She must have been lonely, and Ceinwyn was a friendly loving face from the past. Gwenhwyvach suddenly threw d
own the herbs she had just cut and hurried us back towards the palace. ‘Let me show you,’ she said.
‘I’m sure we don’t need to see,’ Ceinwyn said, fearing whatever was about to be revealed.
‘You can see,’ Gwenhwyvach said to Ceinwyn, ‘but Derfel can’t. Or shouldn’t. Men aren’t supposed to enter the temple.’
She had led us to a door that stood at the bottom of some brick steps and which, when she pushed it open, led into a great cellar that lay under the palace floor and was supported by huge arches of Roman brick. ‘They keep wine here,’ Gwenhwyvach said, explaining the jars and skins that stood racked on the shelves. She had left the door open so that some glimmers of daylight would penetrate the dark, dusty tangle of arches. ‘This way,’ she said, and disappeared between some pillars to our right.
We followed more slowly, groping our way ever more carefully as we went further and further from the daylight at the cellar door. We heard Gwenhwyvach lifting a door-bar, then a breath of cold air wafted by us as she pulled a huge door open. ‘Is this a temple of Isis?’ I asked her.
‘You’ve heard about it?’ Gwenhwyvach seemed disappointed.
‘Guinevere showed me her temple in Durnovaria,’ I said, ‘years ago.’
‘She wouldn’t show you this one,’ Gwenhwyvach said, and then she pulled aside the thick black curtains that hung a few feet inside the temple doors so that Ceinwyn and I could stare into Guinevere’s private shrine. Gwenhwyvach, for fear of her sister’s wrath, would not let me tread beyond the small lobby that lay between the door and the thick curtains, but she led Ceinwyn down two steps into the long room that had a floor made of polished black stone, walls and an arched ceiling painted with pitch, a black stone dais with a black stone throne, and behind the throne another black curtain. In front of the low dais was a shallow pit which, I knew, was filled with water during Isis’s ceremonies. The temple, in truth, was almost exactly the same as the one Guinevere had shown me so many years before, and very like the deserted shrine we had discovered in Lindinis’s palace. The only difference – other than that this cellar was larger and lower than both those previous temples – was that here daylight had been allowed to penetrate, for there was a wide hole in the arched ceiling directly above the shallow pit. ‘There’s a wall up there,’ Gwenhwyvach whispered, pointing up the hole, ‘higher than a man. That’s so the moonlight can come down the shaft, but no one can see down it. Clever, isn’t it?’
The existence of the moon-shaft suggested that the cellar had to run out under the side garden of the palace and Gwenhwy-vach confirmed that. ‘There used to be an entrance here,’ she said, pointing to a jagged line in the pitch-covered brickwork halfway down the temple’s length, ‘so that supplies could be brought directly into the cellar, but Guinevere extended the arch, see? And covered it over with turf.’
There seemed nothing unduly sinister about the temple, other than its malevolent blackness, for there was no idol, no sacrificial fire and no altar. If anything, it was disappointing, for the arched cellar possessed none of the grandeur of the upstairs rooms. It seemed tawdry, even slightly soiled. The Romans, I thought, would have known how to make this room fit for the Goddess, but Guinevere’s best efforts had simply turned a brick cellar into a black cave, though the low throne, which was made from a single block of black stone and was, I presumed, the same throne that I had seen in Durnovaria, was impressive enough. Gwenhwyvach walked past the throne and plucked aside the black curtain so that Ceinwyn could go beyond. They spent a long time behind the curtain, but when we left the cellars Ceinwyn told me there was not much to see there. ‘It was just a small black room,’ she told me, ‘with a big bed and a lot of mouse droppings.’
‘A bed?’ I asked suspiciously.
‘A dream-bed,’ Ceinwyn said firmly, ‘just like the one that used to be halfway up Merlin’s tower.’
‘Is that all it is?’ I asked, still suspicious.
Ceinwyn shrugged. ‘Gwenhwyvach tried to suggest it was used for other purposes,’ she said disapprovingly, ‘but she had no proof, and she did finally admit that her sister slept there to receive dreams.’ She smiled sadly. ‘I think poor Gwenhwyvach is touched in the head. She believes Lancelot will come for her one day.’
‘She believes what?’ I asked in astonishment.
‘She’s in love with him, poor woman,’ Ceinwyn said. We had tried to persuade Gwenhwyvach to join us at the celebrations in the front garden, but she had refused. She would not, she had confided to us, be welcome and so she had hurried away, darting suspicious glances left and right. ‘Poor Gwenhwyvach.’ Ceinwyn said, then laughed. ‘It’s so typical of Guinevere, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
‘To adopt such an exotic religion! Why can’t she worship the Gods of Britain like the rest of us? But no, she has to find something strange and difficult.’ She sighed, then put an arm through mine. ‘Do we really have to stay for the feast?’
She was feeling weak for she had still not fully recovered from the last birth. ‘Arthur will understand if we don’t go,’ I said.
‘But Guinevere won’t,’ she sighed, ‘so I had better survive.’
We had been walking around the long western flank of the palace, past the high timber palisade of the temple’s moon-shaft, and had now reached the end of the long arcade. I stopped her before we turned the corner and I put my hands on her shoulders. ‘Ceinwyn of Powys,’ I said, looking into her astonishing and lovely face, ‘I do love you.’
‘I know,’ she said with a smile, then stood on tiptoe to kiss me before leading me a few paces on so that we could gaze up the length of the Sea Palace’s pleasure garden. ‘There,’ Ceinwyn said with amusement, ‘is Arthur’s Brotherhood of Britain.’
The garden was reeling with drunken men. They had been kept too long from the feast so now they were offering each other elaborate embraces and flowery promises of eternal friendship. Some of the embraces had turned into wrestling matches that rolled fiercely over Guinevere’s flower beds. The choirs had long abandoned their attempts to sing solemn music and some of the choirs’ women were now drinking with the warriors. Not all the men were drunk, of course, but the sober guests had retreated to the terrace to protect the women, many of whom were Guinevere’s attendants and among whom was Lunete, my first and long-ago love. Guinevere was also on the terrace, from where she was staring in horror at the wreckage being made of her garden, though it was her own fault for she had served mead brewed especially strong and now at least fifty men were roistering in the gardens; some had plucked flower stakes to use in mock sword fights and at least one man had a bloody face, while another was working free a loosened tooth and foully cursing the oath-sworn Brother of Britain who had struck him. Someone else had vomited onto the round table.
I helped Ceinwyn up to the safety of the arcade while beneath us the Brotherhood of Britain cursed and fought and drank itself insensible.
And that, although Igraine will never believe me, was how Arthur’s Brotherhood of Britain, that the ignorant still call the Round Table, all began.
I would like to say that the new spirit of peace engendered by Arthur’s Round Table oath spread happiness throughout the kingdom, but most common folk were quite unaware that the oath had even been taken. Most people neither knew nor cared what their lords did so long as their fields and families were left unmolested. Arthur, of course, set great store by the oath. As Ceinwyn often said, for a man who claimed to hate oaths he was uncommonly fond of making them.
But at least the oath was kept in those years and Britain prospered in that period of peace. Aelle and Cerdic fought each other for the mastery of Lloegyr, and their bitter conflict spared the rest of Britain from their Saxon spears. The Irish Kings in western Britain were forever testing their weapons against British shields, but those conflicts were small and scattered, and most of us enjoyed a long period of peace. Mordred’s Council, of which I was now a member, could concern itself with laws, taxes and land disputes instead of worrying
about enemies.
Arthur headed the Council, though he never took the chair at the table’s head because that was the throne reserved for the King and it waited empty until Mordred came of age. Merlin was officially the King’s chief councillor, but he never travelled to Durnovaria and said little on the few occasions that the Council met in Lindinis. Half a dozen of the councillors were warriors, though most of those never came. Agravain said the business bored him, while Sagramor preferred to keep the Saxon frontier peaceful. The other councillors were two bards who knew the laws and genealogies of Britain, two magistrates, a merchant, and two Christian bishops. One of the bishops was a grave, elderly man called Emrys, who had succeeded Bedwin as bishop in Durnovaria, and the other was Sansum.
Sansum had once conspired against Arthur and few men doubted that he should have lost his head when that conspiracy was revealed, but Sansum had somehow slithered free. He never learned to read or write, but he was a clever man and endlessly ambitious. He came from Gwent, where his father had been a tanner, and Sansum had risen to become one of Tewdric’s priests, but he came to real prominence by marrying Arthur and Guinevere when they fled like fugitives from Caer Sws. He was rewarded for that service by being made a Dumnonian Bishop and Mordred’s chaplain, though he lost the latter honour after he conspired with Nabur and Melwas. He was supposed to rot in obscurity after that as the guardian of the shrine of the Holy Thorn, but Sansum could not abide obscurity. He had saved Lancelot from the humiliation of Mithras’s rejection, and in so doing he had earned Guinevere’s wary gratitude, but neither his friendship with Lancelot nor his truce with Guinevere would have been sufficient to lift him onto Dumnonia’s Council.