‘Well, Lady,’ I answered her, ‘thank you.’
‘Pregnant again?’ she asked in mild amusement.
‘We think so, Lady.’
‘How busy the two of you do keep, Derfel,’ she said in gentle mockery. Her annoyance at Ceinwyn had faded over the years, though they never did become friends. Guinevere snapped a leaf from a bay tree that grew in a Roman urn decorated with naked nymphs and rubbed the leaf between her fingers. ‘And how is our Lord King?’ she asked sourly.
‘Troublesome, Lady.’
‘Is he fit to be King?’ That was typical of Guinevere; a straight question, brutal and honest.
‘He was born to it, Lady,’ I said defensively, ‘and we are oath-sworn to it.’
She gave a derisive laugh. Her gold-laced sandals slapped the flagstones and a gold chain hung with pearls clinked about her neck. ‘Many years ago, Derfel,’ she said, ‘you and I talked of this and you told me that of all the men in Dumnonia Arthur was fittest to be King.’
‘I did,’ I admitted.
‘And you think Mordred is fitter?’
‘No, Lady.’
‘So?’ She turned to look at me. Few women could look me straight in the eye, but Guinevere could. ‘So?’ she asked again.
‘So I have sworn an oath, Lady, as has your husband.’
‘Oaths!’ she snarled, letting go of my arm. ‘Arthur swore an oath to kill Aelle, and Aelle yet lives. He swore an oath to take back Henis Wyren, yet Diwrnach still rules there. Oaths! You men hide behind oaths like servants hide behind stupidity, but the moment an oath becomes inconvenient you forget it soon enough. You think your oath to Uther cannot be forgotten?’
‘My oath is to the Prince Arthur,’ I said, taking care, as ever, to call Arthur a Prince in front of Guinevere. ‘You wish me to forget that oath?’ I asked her.
‘I want you, Derfel, to talk sense into him,’ she said. ‘He listens to you.’
‘He listens to you, Lady.’
‘Not on the subject of Mordred,’ she said. ‘On everything else, maybe, but not that.’ She shuddered, perhaps remembering the embrace she had been forced to give Mordred at the Sea Palace, then she angrily crumpled the bay leaf and threw it onto the flagstones. Within minutes, I knew, a servant would silently sweep it away. Durnovaria’s Winter Palace was always so tidy, while our palace at Lindinis was too littered with children ever to be neat and Mordred’s wing was a midden. ‘Arthur,’ Guinevere now insisted tiredly, ‘is the eldest living son of Uther. He should be King.’
And so he should, I thought, but we had all taken oaths to put Mordred on the throne and men had died at Lugg Vale to defend that oath. At times, the Gods forgive me, I just wished Mordred would die and so solve the problem for us, but despite his clubbed foot and the ill-omens of his birth, he seemed blessed with a rugged health. I looked into Guinevere’s green eyes. ‘I remember, Lady,’ I said to her carefully, ‘how years ago you took me through that doorway,’ I pointed to a low archway that led off the cloister, ‘and you showed me your temple of Isis.’
‘I did. So?’ She was defensive, maybe regretting that moment of intimacy. On that distant day she had been trying to make me an ally in the same cause that had prompted her to take my arm and bring me to this cloister. She wanted Mordred destroyed so that Arthur could rule.
‘You showed me Isis’s throne,’ I said, careful not to reveal that I had seen that same black chair again at the Sea Palace, ‘and you told me that Isis was the Goddess who determined which man should sit on a kingdom’s throne. Am I right?’
‘It’s one of her powers, yes,’ Guinevere said carelessly.
‘Then you must pray to the Goddess, Lady,’ I said.
‘You think I don’t, Derfel?’ she demanded. ‘You think I haven’t worn out her ears with my prayers? I want Arthur as King, and Gwydre as King after him, but you can’t force a man onto a throne. Arthur must want it before Isis will grant it.’
That seemed a feeble defence to me. If Isis could not alter Arthur’s mind, how were we mere mortals expected to change it? We had tried often enough, but Arthur refused to discuss the matter, just as Guinevere gave up our conversation in the courtyard when she realized I could not be persuaded to join her campaign to replace Mordred with Arthur.
I wanted Arthur as King, but only once in all those years did I ever break through his bland assurances and talk seriously with him about his own claim to the kingship, and that conversation did not occur until five whole years after the Round Table oath. It was during the summer before the year in which Mordred was to be acclaimed King, and by then the whispers of hostility had become a deafening shout. Only the Christians supported Mordred’s claim, and even they did it reluctantly, but it was known that his mother had been a Christian and that the child himself had been baptized and that was sufficient to persuade the Christians that Mordred might be sympathetic to their ambitions. Everyone else in Dumnonia looked to Arthur to save them from the boy, but Arthur serenely ignored them. That summer, as we have now learned to count the sun’s turning, was four hundred and ninety-five years after the birth of Christ and it was a beautiful, sun-soaked season. Arthur was at the height of his powers, Merlin sunned himself in our garden with my three small daughters clamouring for stories, Ceinwyn was happy, Guinevere basked in her lovely new Sea Palace with its arcades and galleries and dark hidden temple, Lancelot seemed content in his kingdom by the sea, the Saxons fought each other, and Dumnonia was at peace. It was also, as I remember, a summer of utter misery.
For it was the summer of Tristan and Iseult.
Kernow is the wild kingdom that lies like a claw at Dumnonia’s western tip. The Romans went there, but few settled in its wilderness and when the Romans left Britain the folk of Kernow went on with their lives as though the invaders had never existed. They ploughed small fields, fished hard seas and mined precious tin. To travel in Kernow, I was told, was to see Britain as it had been before the Romans came, though I never went there, and nor did Arthur.
For as long as I could remember Kernow had been ruled by King Mark. He rarely troubled us, though once in a while – usually when Dumnonia was embroiled with some larger enemy to the east – he would decide that some of our western lands should belong to him and there would be a brief border war and savage raids on our coast by Kernow’s fighting boats. We always won those wars, how could we not? Dumnonia was large and Kernow small, and when the wars were done Mark would send an envoy to say it had all been an accident. For a short time at the beginning of Arthur’s rule, when Cadwy of Isca had rebelled against the rest of Dumnonia, Mark did capture some large portions of our land beyond his frontier, but Culhwch had ended that rebellion and when Arthur sent Cadwy’s head as a gift to Mark, the spearmen of Kernow had quietly gone back to their old strongholds.
Such troubles were rare, for King Mark’s most famous campaigns were fought in his bed. He was famous for the number of his wives, but where other such men might have kept several wives at one time, Mark married them in sequence. They died with appalling regularity, almost always, it seemed, just four years after the marriage ceremony was performed by Kernow’s Druids, and though Mark always had an explanation for the deaths – a fever maybe, or an accident, or perhaps a difficult birth – most of us suspected it was the King’s boredom that lay behind the balefires that burned the queenly corpses on Caer Dore, the King’s stronghold. The seventh wife to die had been Arthur’s niece, Ialle, and Mark had sent an envoy with a sad tale of mushrooms, toadstools and Ialle’s ungovernable appetites. He had also sent a pack mule loaded with tin ingots and rare whalebones to avert any possibility of Arthur’s wrath.
The deaths of the wives never seemed to prevent other princesses from daring the sea crossing to share Mark’s bed. It was better, perhaps, to be a Queen in Kernow, even for a short time, than to wait in the women’s hall for a suitor who might never come, and besides, the explanations for the deaths were always plausible. They were just accidents.
After Ialle’s
death there was no new marriage for a long time. Mark was getting old and men assumed he had abandoned the marriage game, but then, in that lovely summer of the year before Mordred assumed power in Dumnonia, the ageing King Mark did take a new wife. She was the daughter of our old ally, Oengus Mac Airem, the Irish King of Demetia who had delivered us victory at Lugg Vale, and for that deliverance Arthur forgave Oengus his myriad of trespasses that still harassed Cuneglas’s land. Oengus’s feared Blackshield warriors were forever raiding Powys and what had been Siluria, and through all those years Cuneglas was forced to keep expensive war-bands on his western frontier. Oengus always denied responsibility for the raids, saying that his chiefs were ungovernable and promising he would lop some heads, but the heads remained unlopped and at every harvest time the hungry Blackshields would return to Powys. Arthur sent some of our young spearmen to gain battle experience in those harvest wars that provided us with a chance to train unblooded warriors and keep the older men’s instincts sharp. Cuneglas wanted to finish Demetia off once and for all, but Arthur liked Oengus and argued that his depredations were worth the experience he gave our spearmen and so the Blackshields survived.
The marriage of the ageing King Mark to his child-bride of Demetia was an alliance of two small kingdoms that troubled no one, and besides, no one believed Mark had married the Princess for any political advantage. He married her solely because he had an insatiable appetite for young royal flesh. He was then near sixty years old, his son Tristan was almost forty and Iseult, the new Queen, was just fifteen.
The misery began when Culhwch sent us a message saying that Tristan had arrived in Isca with his father’s child-bride.
Culhwch, after Melwas had died of his surfeit of oysters, had been appointed the governor of Dumnonia’s western province and his message reported that Tristan and Iseult were fugitives from King Mark. Culhwch himself was amused rather than troubled by their arrival for he, like me, had fought beside Tristan at Lugg Vale and outside London and he liked the Prince. ‘At least this bride will live,’ Culhwch’s scribe had written to the Council, ‘and deserves to. I have given them an old hall and a guard of spearmen.’ The message went on to describe a raid by Irish pirates from across the sea and ended with Culhwch’s usual request for a tax reduction and a warning, also quite usual, that the harvest looked thin. It was, in brief, a commonplace dispatch with nothing to alert the Council’s apprehensions, for we all knew that the harvest looked fat and that Culhwch was positioning himself for his customary wrangle over taxes. As for Tristan and Iseult, their story was merely an amusement and none of us saw any danger there. Arthur’s clerks filed the message away and the Council moved on to discuss Sansum’s request that the Council should build a great church that would celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Christ’s birth. I argued against the proposal, Bishop Sansum snapped and barked and spat that the church was necessary if the world was not to be destroyed by the devil, and that happy wrangle kept the Council engaged till the midday meal was served in the palace courtyard.
That meeting was held in Durnovaria and, as usual, Guinevere had come from her Sea Palace to be in the town when the Council met and she joined us at the midday meal. She sat beside Arthur and, as ever, her proximity gave him a glowing happiness. He was so proud of her. The marriage might have yielded him disappointments, especially in the number of its children, but it was plain that he was still in love with her. Every look he gave her was a proclamation of his astonishment that such a woman would marry him, and it never occurred to Arthur that he was the prize, that he was the capable ruler and good man. He adored her, and that day, as we ate fruit, bread and cheese under a warm sunlight, it was easy to see why. She could be witty and cutting, amusing and wise, and her looks still commanded attention. The years did not seem to touch Guinevere. Her skin was as clear as skimmed milk and her eyes had none of the fine wrinkles that Ceinwyn’s showed; it seemed, indeed, that she had not aged one moment since that far-off day when Arthur had first spied her across Gorfyddyd’s crowded hall. And still, I think, every time Arthur returned home from some long dutiful journey across Mordred’s realm he received the same shock of happiness at seeing Guinevere that he had received on that very first day he saw her. And Guinevere knew how to keep him fascinated by always staying one mysterious pace ahead of him and so drawing Arthur ever deeper into his passion. It was, I suppose, a recipe for love.
Mordred was with us that day. Arthur had insisted that the King begin to attend the Council before he was acclaimed with his full powers, and he always encouraged Mordred to take part in our discussions, but Mordred’s only contribution was to sit scraping at the dirt under his fingernails or else yawning as the tedious business droned on. Arthur hoped he would learn responsibility by attending the Council, but I feared the King was merely learning to avoid the details of government. That day he sat, as was proper, at the centre of the meal table and made no pretence whatever to be interested in Bishop Emrys’s story of a spring that had miraculously appeared when a priest blessed a hillside.
‘That spring, Bishop,’ Guinevere intervened, ‘would it be in the hills north of Dunum?’
‘Why yes, Lady!’ Emrys said, pleased to have an audience other than the unresponsive Mordred. ‘You have heard of the miracle?’
‘Long before your priest arrived there,’ Guinevere said. ‘That spring comes and goes, Bishop, depending on the rainfall. And this year, you will remember, the late winter rains were unusually heavy.’ She smiled triumphantly. Her opposition to the church still existed, but it was muted now.
‘This is a new spring,’ Emrys insisted. ‘The countryfolk assure us it never existed before!’ He turned back to Mordred. ‘You should visit the spring, Lord King. It is truly a miracle.’
Mordred yawned and stared blankly at the pigeons on the far roof. His coat was stained with mead and his new curly beard filled with crumbs. ‘Are we done with business?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Far from it, Lord King,’ Emrys said enthusiastically. ‘We have yet to receive a decision on the building of the church, and there are three names proposed as magistrates. I assume the men are here to be questioned?’ he asked Arthur.
‘They are, Bishop,’ Arthur confirmed.
‘A full day’s work for us!’ Emrys said, pleased.
‘Not for me,’ Mordred said. ‘I’m going hunting.’
‘But, Lord King…’ Emrys protested mildly.
‘Hunting,’ Mordred interrupted the Bishop. He pushed his couch away from the low table and limped across the courtyard.
There was silence round the table. We all knew what the others were thinking, but none spoke aloud until I tried to be optimistic. ‘He pays attention,’ I said, ‘to his weapons.’
‘Because he likes to kill,’ Guinevere said icily.
‘I only wish the boy would talk sometimes!’ Emrys complained. ‘He just sits there, sullen! Picking at his nails.’
‘At least it isn’t his nose,’ Guinevere said acidly, then looked up as a stranger was escorted into the courtyard. Hygwydd, Arthur’s servant, announced the stranger as Cyllan, champion of Kernow, and he looked like a King’s champion for he was a huge black-haired and rough-bearded brute who carried the blue tattoo of an axe on his forehead. He bowed to Guinevere, then drew a barbaric-looking longsword that he laid on the flagstones with its blade pointing at Arthur. That gesture was a sign that trouble existed between our countries.
‘Sit, Lord Cyllan.’ Arthur waved to Mordred’s vacated couch. ‘There’s cheese, some wine. The bread is new baked.’
Cyllan tugged off his iron helmet that was crested with the snarling mask of a wildcat. ‘Lord,’ he said in a rumbling voice, ‘I come with a complaint…’
‘You come with an empty belly too, I’ve no doubt,’ Arthur interrupted him. ‘Sit, man! Your escort will be fed in the kitchens. And do pick up the sword.’
Cyllan surrendered to Arthur’s informality. He broke a loaf in half and sliced off a big wedge of cheese. ‘Trista
n,’ he explained curtly when Arthur asked the nature of the complaint. Cyllan spoke with his mouth half full of food, making Guinevere shudder with horror. ‘The Edling has fled to this land, Lord,’ Kernow’s champion went on, ‘and brought the Queen with him.’ He reached for the wine and drank a hornful. ‘King Mark wants them back.’
Arthur said nothing, but just drummed on the table’s edge with his fingers.
Cyllan swallowed more bread and cheese, then poured himself more wine. ‘It’s bad enough,’ he went on after a prodigious belch, ‘that the Edling is,’ he paused, glanced at Guinevere, then amended his sentence, ‘is with his stepmother.’
Guinevere interrupted to provide the word that Cyllan had not dared pronounce in her presence. He nodded, blushed and went on. ‘Not right, Lady. Not to couple with his own stepmother. But he’s also stolen half his father’s treasury. He’s broken two oaths, Lord. The oath to his royal father and the oath to his Queen, and now we hear he has been granted refuge near Isca.’
‘I heard that the Prince is in Dumnonia,’ Arthur said blandly.
‘And my King wants him back. Wants both of them back.’ Cyllan, his message delivered, attacked the cheese again.
The Council reassembled, leaving Cyllan to kick his heels in the sunlight. The three candidates for magistrate were told to wait and the vexed problem of Sansum’s great church was set aside while we debated Arthur’s answer to King Mark.
‘Tristan,’ I said, ‘has ever been a friend to this country. When no one else would fight for us, he did. He brought men to Lugg Vale. He was with us in London. He deserves our help.’
‘He has broken oaths made to a King,’ Arthur said worriedly.
‘Pagan oaths,’ Sansum put in, as if that lessened Tristan’s offence.
‘But he has stolen money,’ Bishop Emrys pointed out.
‘Which he hopes will soon be his by right,’ I answered, trying to defend my old battle comrade.
‘And that is precisely what worries King Mark,’ Arthur said. ‘Put yourself in his place, Derfel, and what do you fear most?’