I tried not to see Arthur either. I was too angry with him, and I would neither answer his letters nor go to the Council. He came to Lindinis twice in the months after Tristan’s death and both times I was coldly polite and both times I left him as soon as I could. He did talk for a long time with Ceinwyn and she tried to reconcile us, but I could not shake the thought of that burning child from my head.
But nor could I ignore Arthur altogether. Mordred’s second acclamation was now just months away and the preparations had to be made. The ceremony would be held at Caer Cadarn, just a short walk east of Lindinis, and inevitably Ceinwyn and I were drawn into the planning. Mordred himself even took an interest, perhaps because he realized that the ceremony would at last free him of all discipline. ‘You have to decide,’ I told him one day, ‘who will acclaim you.’
‘Arthur will, won’t he?’ he asked sullenly.
‘It’s usually done by a Druid,’ I said, ‘but if you want a Christian ceremony then you must choose between Emrys or Sansum.’
He shrugged. ‘Sansum, I suppose.’
‘Then we should go and see him,’ I said.
We went on a hard midwinter day. I had other business in Ynys Wydryn, but first went with Mordred to the Christian shrine where a priest told us that Bishop Sansum was busy saying mass and that we must wait. ‘Does he know his King is here?’ I demanded.
‘I shall tell him, Lord,’ the priest said, and scuttled away across the frozen ground.
Mordred had wandered off to stand beside his mother’s grave where, even on that cold day, a dozen pilgrims knelt in worship. It was a very simple grave, nothing but a low mound of earth with a stone cross that was dwarfed by the lead urn Sansum had placed to receive the pilgrims’ offerings. ‘The Bishop will be with us soon,’ I said. ‘Shall we wait inside?’
He shook his head and frowned at the low grassy mound. ‘She should have a better grave,’ he said.
‘I think that’s true,’ I said, surprised he had spoken at all. ‘You can build it.’
‘It would have been better,’ he said snidely, ‘if others had paid her that respect.’
‘Lord King,’ I said, ‘we were so busy defending the life of her child that we had small time to worry about her bones. But you are right, and we were remiss.’
He kicked moodily at the urn, then peered inside to see the small treasures that had been left by the pilgrims. Those who were praying at the grave edged away, not for fear of Mordred whom I doubt they even recognized, but because the iron amulet I wore about my neck betrayed that I was a pagan. ‘Why was she buried?’ Mordred suddenly asked me. ‘Why wasn’t she burned?’
‘Because she was a Christian,’ I said, hiding my horror at his ignorance. I explained that Christians believed their bodies would be used again at the final coming of Christ, while we pagans took new shadowbodies in the Otherworld and thus had no need of our corpses which, if we could, we burned to prevent our spirits wandering the earth. If we could not afford a funeral pyre then we burned the dead person’s hair and cut off one foot.
‘I shall make her a vault,’ he said when I had finished my theological explanation. He asked me how his mother had died and I told him the whole story of how Gundleus of Siluria had treacherously married Norwenna, then murdered her as she knelt to him. And I told him how Nimue had taken her revenge on Gundleus.
‘That witch,’ Mordred said. He feared Nimue, and no wonder, for she was becoming ever fiercer, ever gaunter and ever dirtier. She was a recluse now, grubbing a life in the remnants of Merlin’s compound where she chanted her spells, lit fires to her Gods and received few visitors, though once in a while, unannounced, she would stride into Lindinis to consult with Merlin. I would try to feed her on those rare visits, the children would run from her, and she would walk away, muttering to herself with her one eye wild, her robe caked with mud and ashes, and her matted black hair tangled with filth. Beneath her refuge on the Tor she was forced to watch the Christian shrine grow larger, stronger and ever more organized. The old Gods, I thought, were losing Britain fast. Sansum, of course, was desperate for Merlin to die so he could take the Tor for himself and build a church on its fire-scarred summit, but what Sansum did not know was that all Merlin’s land was willed to me.
Mordred, standing beside his mother’s grave, wondered at the similarity of names between my eldest daughter and his dead mother and I told him that Ceinwyn was Norwenna’s cousin. ‘Morwenna and Norwenna are old names in Powys,’ I explained.
‘Did she love me?’ Mordred asked, and the incongruity of that word in his mouth gave me pause. Maybe, I thought, Arthur was right. Maybe Mordred would grow into his responsibilities. Certainly, in all the years I had known him, I had never held such a courteous discussion before.
‘She loved you very much,’ I answered truthfully. ‘The happiest I ever saw your mother,’ I went on, ‘was when you were with her. It was up there.’ I pointed to the black scar where Merlin’s hall and his dream-tower had stood on the Tor. It was there that Norwenna had been murdered and Mordred had been snatched away from her. He had been a baby then, even younger than I had been when I was snatched from my mother, Erce. Did Erce still live? I still had not travelled to Siluria to find her, and that omission made me feel guilty. I touched the iron amulet.
‘When I die,’ Mordred said, ‘I want to be in the same grave as my mother. And I’ll make the grave myself. A vault of stone,’ he declared, ‘with our bodies lifted on a pedestal.’
‘You must talk to the Bishop,’ I said, ‘and I’m sure he’ll be pleased to do whatever he can to help.’ So long, I thought cynically, as he did not have to pay for the vaulted sepulchre.
I turned as Sansum hurried across the grass. He bowed to Mordred, then welcomed me to the shrine. ‘You come, I hope, in search of truth, Lord Derfel?’
‘I come to visit that shrine,’ I said, pointing to the Tor, ‘but my Lord King has business of his own with you.’ I left them there alone and led my horse up to the Tor, passing by the group of Christians who, day and night, prayed at the Tor’s foot that its pagan inhabitants would be driven away. I endured their insults, then climbed the steep hill to discover that the water-gate had fallen from its last hinge. I tied my horse to a stake in what remained of the palisade, then carried the bundle of clothes and furs that Ceinwyn had packed so that the poor folk who shared Nimue’s refuge would not freeze in the bitter weather. I gave Nimue the clothes and she dropped them carelessly in the snow, then plucked at my sleeve and drew me into her new hut that she had built exactly where Merlin’s dream-tower had once stood. The hut stank so foully that I almost gagged, but she was oblivious to its mephitic stench. It was a freezing day and an icy sleet was whipping out of the east on a damp wind, yet even so I would rather have stood in the freezing downpour than endure that reeking hut. ‘Look,’ she said proudly, and showed me a cauldron, not the Cauldron, but just a common, patched iron cauldron that hung from a roof beam and was filled with some dark liquid. Sprigs of mistletoe, a pair of bat wings, the sloughed skin of snakes, a broken antler and bunches of herbs also hung from the rafters that were so low that I had to bend double to get inside the hut, which was eye-stingingly full of smoke. A naked man lay on a pallet in the far shadows and complained about my presence.
‘Quiet,’ Nimue snarled at him, then she took a stick and poked it into the cauldron’s dark liquid which steamed gently above a small fire that was generating far more smoke than heat. She stirred the cauldron about, found whatever she wanted and levered it up from the liquid. I saw it was a human skull. ‘You remember Balise?’ Nimue asked me.
‘Of course,’ I said. Balise had been a Druid, an old man when I was young, and now long dead.
‘They burned his body,’ Nimue told me, ‘but not his head, and a Druid’s head, Derfel, is a thing of awesome power. A man brought it to me last week. He had it in a barrel of beeswax. I bought it from him.’
Which meant I had purchased the head. Nimue was forever buying objects of cu
ltic power: the caul of a dead child, the teeth of a dragon, a piece of the Christian’s magical bread, elf bolts, and now a dead man’s head. She used to come to the palace and demand the money for these tawdry things, but I now found it easier to leave her with a little gold, even if it did mean that she would waste the metal on whatever oddity was offered her. She once paid a whole gold ingot for the carcass of a lamb that had been born with two heads, and she had nailed the carcass to the palisade where it overlooked the Christian shrine and there let it rot. I did not like to ask what she had paid for a barrel of wax containing a dead man’s head. ‘I stripped the wax away,’ she told me, ‘and boiled the flesh off the head in the pot.’ That in part explained the hut’s overwhelming stench. ‘There is no more powerful augury,’ she told me, her one eye glinting in the dark hut, ‘than a Druid’s head seethed in a pot of urine with the ten brown herbs of Crom Dubh.’ She let the skull go and it sank beneath the liquid’s dark surface. ‘Now wait,’ she ordered me.
My head was reeling with the smoke and stench, but I obediently waited as the liquid’s surface shivered, glinted and finally subsided until it was nothing but a dark sheen as smooth as a fine mirror with only a hint of steam drifting from its black surface. Nimue leaned close and held her breath, and I knew she was seeing portents in the liquid’s surface. The man on the pallet coughed horribly, then feebly clawed at a threadbare blanket to half cover his nakedness. ‘I’m hungry,’ he whined. Nimue ignored him.
I waited. ‘I’m disappointed in you, Derfel,’ Nimue suddenly said, her breath just wrinkling the liquid’s surface.
‘Why?’
‘I see a Queen was burned to death on a seashore. I would have liked her ashes, Derfel,’ she said reprovingly. ‘I could have used a Queen’s ashes,’ she went on. ‘You should have known that.’ She fell silent and I said nothing. The liquid was still again, and when Nimue next spoke it was in a strange, deep voice that did not blur the black liquid’s surface at all. ‘Two Kings will come to Cadarn,’ she said, ‘but a man who is no King shall rule there. The dead will be taken in marriage, the lost will come to the light and a sword will lie on the neck of a child.’ Then she screamed terribly, startling the naked man who scuttled frantically into the furthest corner of the hut where he crouched with his hands covering his head. ‘Tell that to Merlin,’ Nimue said to me in her normal voice. ‘He’ll know what it means.’
‘I will tell him,’ I promised her.
‘And tell him,’ she said with a desperate fervour, clutching my arm with a dirt-encrusted claw of a hand, ‘that I have seen the Cauldron in the liquid. Tell him it will be used soon. Soon, Derfel! Tell him that.’
‘I will,’ I said, and then, unable to take the smell any more, I pulled away from her grip and backed out into the sleet.
She followed me out of the hut and plucked a wing of my cloak to cover herself from the sleet. She walked with me towards the broken water-gate and was oddly cheerful. ‘Everyone thinks we’re losing, Derfel,’ she said, ‘everyone thinks those filthy Christians are taking over the land. But they’re not. The Cauldron will be revealed soon, Merlin will be back and the power will be loosed.’
I stopped in the gate and stared down at the group of Christians who were always gathered at the foot of the Tor to pray their extravagant prayers with their arms spread wide. Sansum and Morgan arranged for them to be there so that their constant prayers might serve to drive the pagans off the Tor’s fire-scarred summit. Nimue stared scornfully down at the group. Some of the Christians recognized her and made the sign of the cross. ‘You think Christianity is winning, Derfel?’ she asked me.
‘I fear it,’ I said, listening to the howls of rage from the Tor’s foot. I remembered the frenzied worshippers in Isca and wondered how long the horror of that fanaticism could be kept under control. ‘I do fear it is,’ I said sadly.
‘Christianity isn’t winning,’ Nimue said scornfully. ‘Watch.’ She ducked out from under my cloak and lifted her dirty dress to expose her wretched nakedness to the Christians, and then she thrust her hips obscenely towards them and gave a wailing cry that died in the wind as she dropped the dress. Some of the Christians made the sign of the cross, but most, I noted, instinctively made the pagan sign against evil with their right hands and then spat on the ground. ‘You see?’ she said with a smile, ‘they still believe in the old Gods. They still believe. And soon, Derfel, they will have proof. Tell that to Merlin.’
I did tell Merlin. I stood before him and reported that two Kings would come to Cadarn, but a man who was not a King would rule there, that the dead would be taken in marriage, the lost would come to the light and a sword be laid on the neck of a child.
‘Say it again, Derfel,’ he said, squinting up at me and stroking an old tabby cat that was stretched out on his lap.
I repeated it all solemnly, then added Nimue’s promise that the Cauldron would soon be unveiled and that its horror was imminent. He laughed, shook his head, then laughed again. He soothed the cat on his lap. ‘And did you say she had a Druid’s head?’ he asked.
‘Balise’s head, Lord.’
He tickled the cat under the chin. ‘Balise’s head was burned, Derfel, years ago. It was burned, then pounded into a powder. Pounded to nothing. I know, because I did it.’ He closed his eyes and slept.
Next summer, on the eve of a full moon, when the trees that grew about the foot of Caer Cadarn were heavy with leaf, on a morning of brilliant sunshine that shone on hedgerows bright with bryony and bindweed and willowherb and old man’s beard, we acclaimed Mordred our King on the ancient summit of the Caer.
Caer Cadarn’s old fortress stood deserted for much of the year, but it was still our hill of kingship, the solemn place of ritual at Dumnonia’s royal heart, and the fort’s ramparts were kept strong, but the interior of the fort was a sad place of decaying huts that crouched around the big gaunt feasting hall that was a home to birds, bats and mice. That hall occupied the lower part of Caer Cadarn’s wide summit, while on the higher part, to the west, stood a circle of lichen-covered stones surrounding the grey, slab-like boulder that was Dumnonia’s ancient stone of kingship. Here the great God Bel had anointed his half-God, half-human child Beli Mawr as the first of our Kings and ever since, even in the years when the Romans had ruled, our Kings had come to this place to be acclaimed. Mordred had been born on this hill and here too he had been acclaimed as a baby, though that ceremony had merely been a sign of his kingly status and had placed no duties on him. But now he was at the dawn of his manhood and from this day on he would be King in more than name. This second acclamation discharged Arthur’s oath and gave Mordred all of Uther’s power.
The crowds gathered early. The feasting hall had been swept, then hung with banners and decorated with green boughs. Vats of mead and pots of ale were set on the grass, while smoke poured from the great fires where oxen, pigs and deer were being roasted for the feast. Tattooed tribesmen from Isca mingled with the elegant, toga-clad citizens from Durnovaria and Corinium, and both listened to the white-robed bards who sang specially composed songs praising Mordred’s character and forecasting the glories of his reign. Bards never were to be trusted.
I was Mordred’s champion and so, alone among the lords on the hill, I was dressed in my full war gear. It was no longer the shabby, ill-repaired stuff I had worn at that fight outside London, for now I possessed a new and expensive armour that reflected my high status. I had a coat of fine Roman mail that was trimmed with golden rings at its neck, hem and sleeves. I had knee-high boots that gleamed with bronze strips, elbow-length gloves lined with iron plates that protected my forearms and fingers, and a fine silver-chased helmet with a mail flap that protected the back of my neck. The helmet had cheek pieces that hinged across my face and a gold finial from which my freshly brushed wolf-tail hung. I had a green cloak, Hywelbane at my hip and a shield which, in honour of this day, bore Mordred’s red dragon instead of my own white star.
Culhwch had come from Isca. He embraced me.
‘This is a farce, Derfel,’ he growled.
‘A great and happy day, Lord Culhwch,’ I said, straight-faced.
He did not smile, but instead looked sullenly about the expectant crowd. ‘Christians,’ he spat.
‘There do seem a lot of them.’
‘Is Merlin here?’
‘He felt tired,’ I said.
‘You mean he’s got more sense than to come,’ Culhwch said. ‘So who does the honours today?’
‘Bishop Sansum.’
Culhwch spat. His beard had gone grey in the last few months and he moved stiffly, though he was still a great bear of a man. ‘Are you talking to Arthur yet?’ he demanded.
‘We speak when we have to,’ I answered evasively.
‘He wants to be friends with you,’ Culhwch told me.
‘He deals very strangely with friends,’ I said stiffly.
‘He needs friends.’
‘Then he’s lucky to have you,’ I retorted, and turned as a horn-call interrupted our conversation. Spearmen were making a passage in the crowd, using their shields and spear-staffs to press the people gently back, and in the spearmen’s corridor a procession of lords, magistrates and priests walked slowly towards the ring of stones. I took my place in the procession alongside Ceinwyn and my daughters.
The gathering that day was a tribute to Arthur rather than to Mordred, for all Arthur’s allies were there. Cuneglas had come from Powys, bringing a dozen lords and his Edling, the Prince Perddel who was now a good-looking boy with his father’s round and earnest face. Agricola, old and stiff-jointed now, accompanied King Meurig, both men in togas. Meurig’s father Tewdric still lived, but the old King had given up his throne, shaved his head into the tonsure of a priest and retired to a monastery in the valley of the Wye where he patiently gathered a library of Christian texts and allowed his pedantic son to rule Gwent in his place. Byrthig, who had succeeded his father as King of Gwynedd, and who now possessed only two teeth, stood fidgeting as though the rituals were a necessary irritant that needed to be finished before he could get back to the waiting mead vats. Oengus Mac Airem, Iseult’s father and the King of Demetia, had come with a party of his dreaded Blackshields, while Lancelot, King of the Belgae, was escorted by a dozen giant men of his Saxon Guard and by the baleful pairs of twins, Dinas and Lavaine and Amhar and Loholt.