‘A dearth of princesses?’ I ventured.
Arthur scowled at my levity. ‘He fears that Tristan will lead spearmen back to Kernow. He fears civil war. He fears that his son is tired of waiting for his death and he’s right to fear it.’
I shook my head. ‘Tristan was never calculating, Lord,’ I said. ‘He acts on impulse. He’s stupidly fallen in love with his father’s bride. He’s not thinking of a throne.’
‘Not yet,’ Arthur said ominously, ‘but he will.’
‘If we give Tristan refuge, what will King Mark do?’ Sansum asked shrewdly.
‘Raids,’ Arthur said. ‘Some farms burned, cattle stolen. Or else he’ll send his spears to take Tristan alive. His boatmen could manage that.’ Alone among the British kingdoms the men of Kernow were confident sailors and the Saxons, in their early raids, had learned to fear the longboats of Mark’s spearmen. ‘It will mean constant, niggling trouble,’ Arthur conceded. ‘A dozen dead farmers and their wives every month. We’ll have to keep a hundred spearmen on the border till it’s all settled.’
‘Expensive,’ Sansum commented.
‘Too expensive,’ Arthur said grimly.
‘King Mark’s money must certainly be returned,’ Emrys insisted.
‘And the Queen, probably,’ Cythryn, one of the magistrates who sat on the Council, put in. ‘I cannot imagine that King Mark’s pride will allow him to leave that insult unavenged.’
‘What happens to the girl if she’s returned?’ Emrys asked.
‘That,’ Arthur said firmly, ‘is a matter for King Mark to decide. Not us.’ He rubbed his long bony face with his two hands. ‘I suppose,’ he said wearily, ‘that we had better mediate the affair.’ He smiled. ‘It’s been a long time since I was in that part of the world. Maybe it’s time to go there again. Will you come, Derfel? You’re a friend of Tristan. Maybe he’ll listen to you.’
‘With pleasure, Lord,’ I agreed.
The Council agreed to let Arthur mediate the matter, sent Cyllan back to Kernow with a message describing what Arthur was doing and then, with a dozen of my spearmen in attendance, we rode south and west to find the errant lovers.
It began as a happy enough journey, despite the awkward problem that lay at its end. Nine years of peace had swollen the land’s goodness and if the summer’s warm weather lasted, and despite Culhwch’s gloomy predictions, it looked set to be a fine harvest that year. Arthur took a real joy from seeing the well-tended fields and new granaries. He was greeted in every town and village and the greeting was always warm. Children’s choirs sang for him and gifts were laid at his feet: corn dollies, baskets of fruit or a fox pelt. He returned gold for the gifts, discussed whatever problems afflicted the village, talked with the local magistrate and then we would ride on. The only sour note was struck by Christian hostility, for in nearly every village there was a small group of Christians who would shriek curses at Arthur until their neighbours hushed them up or pushed them away. New churches stood everywhere, usually built where pagans had once worshipped at a sacred well or spring. The churches were the products of Bishop Sansum’s busy missionaries and I wondered why we pagans did not employ similar men to travel the roads and preach to the peasants. The Christians’ new churches were, admittedly, small things, mere huts of wattle and thatch with a cross nailed to one gable, but they multiplied and the more rancorous of their priests cursed Arthur for being a pagan and detested Guinevere for her adherence to Isis. Guinevere never cared that she was hated, but Arthur disliked all religious rancour. On that journey to Isca he often stopped to talk to the Christians who spat at him, but his words had no effect. The Christians did not care that he had given the land peace, nor that they had become prosperous, only that Arthur was a pagan. ‘They’re like the Saxons,’ he told me gloomily as we left another hostile group behind, ‘they won’t be happy till they own everything.’
‘Then we should do to them what we did to the Saxons, Lord,’ I said. ‘Set them against each other.’
‘They already fight amongst themselves,’ Arthur said. ‘Do you understand this argument about Pelagianism?’
‘I wouldn’t even want to understand it,’ I answered flippantly, though in truth the argument was growing ever more vicious with one set of Christians accusing the other of heresy, and both sides inflicting deaths on their opponents. ‘Do you understand it?’
‘I think so. Pelagius refused to believe mankind is inherently evil, while men like Sansum and Emrys say we are all born evil.’ He paused. ‘I suspect,’ Arthur went on, ‘that if I were a Christian, I’d be a Pelagian.’ I thought of Mordred and decided that mankind might well be inherently evil, but I said nothing. ‘I believe in mankind,’ Arthur said, ‘rather more than in any God.’
I spat at the road’s verge to avert the evil his words might bring. ‘I often wonder,’ I said, ‘how things would have changed if Merlin had kept his Cauldron.’
‘That old pot?’ Arthur laughed. ‘I haven’t thought of that for years!’ He smiled at the memory of those old days. ‘Nothing would have changed, Derfel,’ he went on. ‘I sometimes think Merlin’s whole life lay in collecting the Treasures, and once he had them there was nothing left for him to do! He didn’t dare try to work their magic, because he suspected nothing would happen.’
I glanced at the sword hanging at his hip, one of the thirteen Treasures, but I said nothing for I was keeping my promise to Merlin not to reveal Excalibur’s true power to Arthur. ‘You think Merlin burned down his own tower?’ I asked instead.
‘I’ve wondered,’ he admitted.
‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘he believed. And sometimes, I think, he dares to believe he’ll live to find the Treasures again.’
‘Then he’d better hurry,’ Arthur said tartly, ‘because he can’t have much time left.’
We spent that night in the old Roman governor’s palace in Isca where Culhwch now lived. He was in a gloomy mood, not because of Tristan, but because the city was a hotbed of Christian fanatics. Just a week before a band of Christian youths had invaded the city’s pagan temples and pulled down the statues of the Gods and splashed excrement on the walls. Culhwch’s spearmen had caught some of the desecrators and filled the jail with them, but Culhwch was worried about the future. ‘If we don’t break the bastards now,’ he said, ‘they’ll go to war for their God.’
‘Nonsense,’ Arthur said dismissively.
Culhwch shook his head. ‘They want a Christian King, Arthur.’
‘They’ll have Mordred next year,’ Arthur said.
‘Is he a Christian?’ Culhwch asked.
‘If he’s anything,’ I said.
‘But he’s not who they want,’ Culhwch said darkly.
‘Then who is?’ Arthur asked, intrigued at last by his cousin’s warnings.
Culhwch hesitated, then shrugged. ‘Lancelot.’
‘Lancelot!’ Arthur sounded amused. ‘Don’t they know he keeps his pagan temples open?’
‘They don’t know anything about him,’ Culhwch said, ‘but they don’t need to. They think of him in the same way that people thought about you in the last years of Uther’s life. They think of him as their deliverer.’
‘Deliverer from what?’ I asked scornfully.
‘Us pagans, of course,’ Culhwch said. ‘They insist Lancelot is the Christian King who’ll lead them all to heaven. And do you know why? Because of that sea eagle on his shield. It’s got a fish in its claws, remember? And the fish is a Christian symbol.’ He spat his disgust. ‘They don’t know anything about him,’ he said again, ‘but they see that fish and think it’s a sign from their God.’
‘A fish?’ Arthur plainly did not believe Culhwch.
‘A fish,’ Culhwch insisted. ‘Maybe they pray to a trout? How would I know? They already worship a holy ghost, a virgin and a carpenter, so why not a fish as well? They’re all mad.’
‘They’re not mad,’ Arthur insisted, ‘excited, maybe.’
‘Excited! Have you been to one of their rites lat
ely?’ Culhwch challenged his cousin.
‘Not since Morgan’s wedding.’
‘Then come and look for yourself,’ Culhwch said. It was night-time and we had finished supper, but Culhwch insisted we don dark cloaks and follow him out through one of the palace’s side doors. We went up a dark alley to the forum where the Christians had their shrine in an old Roman temple that had once been dedicated to Apollo, but which had now been scoured of paganism, limewashed and dedicated to Christianity. We went in through the west door and found a shadowed niche where, in imitation of the big throng of worshippers, we knelt.
Culhwch had told us that the Christians worshipped here every evening, and every evening, he said, the same frenzy followed the gifts of bread and wine that the priest distributed to the faithful. The bread and wine were magical, supposed to be their God’s blood and flesh, and we watched as the worshippers thronged about the altar to receive their scraps. At least half of the worshippers were women and those women, once they had taken the bread from the priests, began to fall into ecstasy. I had often seen such strange fervour, for Merlin’s old pagan rites had frequently ended with screaming women dancing about the Tor’s fires, and these women behaved in much the same way. They danced with closed eyes and with their waving hands held up to the white roof where the smoke from the torches and from the bowls of burning incense made a thick mist. Some wailed strange words, others were in a trance and just gazed at a statue of their God’s mother, a few writhed on the floor, but most of the women danced in step to the rhythmic chanting of three priests. The men in the church mostly watched, but some joined the dancers and it was they who first stripped themselves to their waists and snatched up knotted thongs with which they began to lash their own backs. That astonished me, for I had never seen anything like it before, but my astonishment turned to horror when some of the women joined the men and began to scream with ecstatic joy as the lashes drew blood from their bare breasts and backs.
Arthur hated it. ‘It’s madness,’ he whispered, ‘pure madness!’
‘It’s spreading,’ Culhwch warned him darkly. One of the women was beating her naked back with a length of rusty chain and her frenzied wailing echoed in the big stone chamber as her blood spattered thick on the tiled floor. ‘They’ll go on like this all night,’ Culhwch said.
The worshippers had gradually edged forward to surround the ecstatic dancers, leaving the three of us isolated in our shadowed niche. A priest saw us there and darted towards us. ‘Have you eaten the body of Christ?’ he demanded.
‘We ate roast goose,’ Arthur said politely, standing up.
The priest stared at the three of us and recognized Culhwch. He spat into Culhwch’s face. ‘Pagan!’ he shrieked. ‘Idolater! You dare defile God’s temple!’ He struck at Culhwch – a mistake, for Culhwch gave him a blow that span the priest hard back across the floor, but the altercation had attracted attention and a howl went up from the men who had been watching the flagellating dancers.
‘Time to go,’ Arthur said, and the three of us retreated smartly across the forum to where Culhwch’s spearmen guarded the palace’s arcade. The Christians spilt out of their church in pursuit, but the spearmen stolidly closed into a shield-wall and lowered their blades, and the Christians made no attempt to storm the palace.
‘They might not attack tonight,’ Culhwch said, ‘but they get braver by the day.’
Arthur watched the howling Christians from a palace window. ‘What do they want?’ he asked in puzzlement. He liked his religion to be decorous. When he came to Lindinis he would always join Ceinwyn and me at our morning prayers when we knelt quietly before our household Gods, offering them a piece of bread and then praying that our daily duties would be done properly, and that was the kind of worship Arthur liked. He was simply bemused by the things he had seen in Isca’s church.
‘They believe,’ Culhwch began to explain the fanaticism we had witnessed, ‘that their God is coming back to earth in five years, and they believe they have a duty to prepare the earth for his coming. Their priests tell them that the pagans have to be wiped out before their God will come back and they preach that Dumnonia must have a Christian king.’
‘They’ll have Mordred,’ Arthur said grimly.
‘Then you’d better change his dragon shield into a fish,’ Culhwch said, ‘for I tell you, their fervour is getting worse. There’s going to be trouble.’
‘We’ll placate them,’ Arthur said. ‘We’ll let them know Mordred’s a Christian and perhaps that’ll calm them down. Maybe we’d better build that church Sansum wants,’ he added to me.
‘If it stops them rioting,’ I said, ‘why not?’
We left Isca next morning, escorted now by Culhwch and a dozen of his men, and we crossed the Exe by the Roman bridge and then turned south into the deep sea-lands that lay on Dumnonia’s furthest coasts. Arthur said nothing more about the Christian frenzy he had witnessed, but he was oddly silent that day and I guessed the rites had upset him deeply. He hated any kind of frenzy for it stripped men and women of their sense, and he must have feared what such a madness might do to his careful peace.
But for now our problem was not Dumnonia’s Christians, but Tristan. Culhwch had sent word to the Prince, warning him of our approach, and Tristan came to greet us. He rode alone, his horse’s hoofs leaving spurts of dust as he galloped towards us. He greeted us happily, but recoiled from Arthur’s chill reserve. That reserve was not caused by any innate dislike Arthur had for Tristan – indeed he liked the Prince – but rather sprang out of Arthur’s recognition that he had not just come to mediate this dispute, but to sit in judgment on an old friend. ‘He has worries,’ I explained vaguely, trying to reassure Tristan that Arthur’s coldness held no foreboding.
I was leading my own horse, for I was always happier on foot, and Tristan, having greeted Culhwch, slid out of his saddle and walked beside me. I described the wild Christian ecstasies and attributed Arthur’s coldness to his worries about their meaning, but Tristan did not want to hear any of it. He was in love and, like all lovers, he could talk of nothing but his beloved. ‘A jewel, Derfel,’ he said, ‘that’s what she is, an Irish jewel!’ He paced long-legged beside me, one arm round my shoulder and with his long black hair chinking from the warrior rings he had woven into its plaits. His beard was more heavily streaked with white now, but he was still a handsome man with a bony nose and dark, quick eyes that were bright with passion. ‘Her name,’ he said dreamily, ‘is Iseult.’
‘We heard,’ I said drily.
‘A child from Demetia,’ he said, ‘a daughter of Oengus Mac Airem. A Princess, my friend, of the Uí Liatháin.’ He spoke the name of Oengus Mac Airem’s tribe as though its syllables were forged in purest gold. ‘Iseult,’ he said, ‘of the Uí Liatháin. Fifteen summers old and as beautiful as the night.’
I thought of Arthur’s ungovernable passion for Guinevere and of my own soul’s longings for Ceinwyn and my heart hurt for my friend. He had been blinded by love, swept by it, made mad by it. Tristan was ever a passionate man, given to black deeps of despair or to soaring heights of happiness, but this was the first time I had ever seen him assaulted by the storm winds of love. ‘Your father,’ I warned him carefully, ‘wants Iseult back.’
‘My father’s old,’ he said, dismissing every obstacle, ‘and when he dies I shall sail my Princess of the Ui Liatháin to Tintagel’s iron gates and build her a castle of silver towers that shall scrape the stars.’ He laughed at his own extravagance. ‘You’ll adore her, Derfel!’
I said nothing more, but just let him talk and talk. He had no appetite for our news, cared not a bit that I had three daughters or that the Saxons were on the defensive, he had room in his universe for nothing but Iseult. ‘Wait till you see her, Derfel!’ he said again and again, and the nearer we drew to their refuge the more excited he became until at last, unable to be apart from his Iseult for a moment longer, he leapt onto his horse and galloped away ahead of us. Arthur looked quizzically at me and I gr
imaced. ‘He’s in love,’ I said, as if I needed to explain.
‘With his father’s taste for young girls,’ Arthur added grimly.
‘You and I know love, Lord,’ I said, ‘be kind to them.’
The refuge of Tristan and Iseult was a beautiful place, maybe the loveliest I ever saw. It was a place where small hills were cut by streams and heavy woods, where rich rivers ran fast to the sea and where great cliffs were loud with screaming birds. It was a wild place, but beautiful, a place fit for love’s raw madness.
And there, in the small dark hall among the deep green woods, I met Iseult.
Small and dark and fey and fragile is how I remember Iseult. Little more than a child, really, though she had been forced to woman’s state by her marriage to Mark, yet to me she appeared as a shy, small, thin girl, nothing but a delicate wisp of near-womanhood who kept her huge dark eyes fixed on Tristan until he insisted that she greeted us. She bowed to Arthur. ‘You don’t bow to me,’ Arthur said, lifting her up, ‘for you are a Queen,’ and he dropped to one knee and kissed her small hand.
Her voice was whispery like a shadow’s voice. Her hair was black and she had tried to make herself look older by binding it in a great coil on the crown of her head and by hanging herself with jewels, though she wore the jewels awkwardly, reminding me of Morwenna dressing up in her mother’s clothes. She gazed at us fearfully. Iseult realized, I think, even before Tristan did, that this incursion of armed spearmen was not the coming of friends, but the arrival of her judges.
Culhwch had provided the lovers with their refuge. It was a hall of timber and rye thatch, not big, but well built, and it had belonged to a chieftain who had supported Cadwy’s rebellion and thereby lost his head. The hall, with three huts and a storehouse, stood circled by a palisade in a wooded hollow of land where the sea winds could not chafe its thatch, and there, with six loyal spearmen and a mound of stolen treasure, Tristan and Iseult had thought to make their love into a great song.