‘It’s splendid,’ I said, and that night, when I dined in the circle of warriors who ate on the floor of the hall, Issa stood behind me as shield-bearer. The varnish was still wet, but that only made the star seem brighter. Scarach served me. It was a poor meal of barley gruel, but Caer Sws’s kitchens could provide no better for they were busy preparing the next night’s great feast. Indeed the whole compound was busy with those preparations. The hall had been decorated with boughs of dusk-red beech, the floor had been swept and strewn with new rushes, and from the women’s quarters we heard tales of dresses being made and delicately embroidered. At least four hundred warriors were now in residence at Caer Sws, most of them quartered in crude shelters thrown up on the fields outside the ramparts, and the warriors’ women, children and dogs thronged the fort. Half the men belonged to Cuneglas, the other half were Dumnonians, but despite the recent war there was no trouble, not even when the news spread that Ratae had fallen to Aelle’s Saxon horde because of Arthur’s treachery. Cuneglas must have suspected that Arthur had purchased Aelle’s peace by some such means and he accepted Arthur’s oath-promise that the men of Dumnonia would extract vengeance for the dead of Powys who lay in the ashes of the captured fortress.
I had seen neither Merlin nor Nimue since the night on Dolforwyn. Merlin had left Caer Sws, but Nimue, I heard, was still in the fortress and was staying hidden in the women’s quarters where, rumour said, she was much in the Princess Ceinwyn’s company. That seemed unlikely to me because Nimue and Ceinwyn were so very different. Nimue was a few years older than Ceinwyn and she was dark and intense and forever trembling on the narrow divide between madness and anger, while Ceinwyn was fair and gentle and, as Merlin had told me, so very conventional. I could not imagine that either woman had much to say to the other, and so I assumed that the rumours were false and that Nimue was with Merlin who, I believed, had gone to find the men who would carry their swords into Diwrnach’s dreaded land to seek the Cauldron.
But would I go with him? On the morning of Ceinwyn’s betrothal I walked northwards into the great oaks that lapped around Caer Sws’s wide valley. I sought a particular place and Cuneglas had told me where to find it. Issa, loyal Issa, came with me, but he had no idea what business took us into the dark, deep wood.
This land, the heart of Powys, had been lightly touched by the Romans. They had built forts here, like Caer Sws, and they had left a few roads that arrowed along the river valleys, but there were no great villas or towns like those that gave Dumnonia its gloss of a lost civilization. Nor, here in Cuneglas’s heartland, were there many Christians; the worship of the old Gods survived in Powys without the rancour that soured religion in Mordred’s realm, where Christian and pagan vied for royal favour and the right to erect their shrines in the holy places. No Roman altars had replaced Powys’s Druid groves and no Christian churches stood by its holy wells. The Romans had cut down some of the shrines, but many had been preserved and it was to one of those ancient holy places that Issa and I came in the leafy twilight of the midday forest.
It was a Druid shrine, a grove of oaks deep within a massive wood. The leaves above the shrine had yet to fade to bronze, but soon they would turn and fall onto the low stone wall that lay in a semicircle at the grove’s centre. Two niches had been made in the wall and two human skulls were set in the niches. Once there had been many such places in Dumnonia, and many more had been remade after the Romans had left. Too often, though, the Christians would come and break the skulls, pull down the dry-stone walls and cut down the oaks, but this shrine in Powys might have stood among these deep woods for a thousand years. Little scraps of wool had been pushed between the stones as markers for the prayers that folk offered in this grove.
It was silent in the oaks; a heavy silence. Issa watched from the trees as I walked to the centre of the semicircle where I unstrapped Hywelbane’s heavy belt.
I laid the sword on the flat stone that marked the shrine’s centre and took from my pouch the clean white rib bone that gave me power over Lancelot’s marriage. This I placed beside the sword. Last of all I put down on the stone the small golden brooch that Ceinwyn had given me so many years before. Then I lay down flat in the leaf mould.
I slept in hope of a dream that would tell me what to do, but no dream came. Maybe I should have sacrificed some bird or beast before I slept, a gift that might have provoked a God to grant me the answer I sought, but no answer came. There was just silence. I had put my sword and the power of the bone into the hands of the Gods, into the keeping of Bel and Manawydan, of Taranis and Lleullaw, but they ignored my gifts. There was only the wind in the high leaves, the scratching of squirrel claws on the oak branches and the sudden rattle of a woodpecker.
I lay still when I woke. There had been no dream, but I knew what I wanted. I wanted to take the bone and snap it in two, and if that gesture meant walking the Dark Road into Diwrnach’s kingdom, then so be it. But I also wanted Arthur’s Britain to be whole and good and true. And I wanted my men to have gold and land and slaves and rank. I wanted to drive the Saxons from Lloegyr. I wanted to hear the screams of a broken shield-wall and the blare of war horns as a victorious army pursued a shattered enemy to ruin. I wanted to march my starry shields into the flat eastern land that no free Briton had seen in a generation. And I wanted Ceinwyn.
I sat up. Issa had come to sit close beside me. He must have wondered why I stared so fixedly at the bone, but he asked no questions.
I thought of Merlin’s small, squat tower of bones that represented Arthur’s dream and wondered if that dream would really collapse if Lancelot did not marry Ceinwyn. The marriage was hardly the clasp that held Arthur’s alliance together; it was merely a convenience to give Lancelot a throne and Powys a stake in Siluria’s royal house. If the marriage never happened then the armies of Dumnonia and Gwent and Powys and Elmet would still march against the Sais. All that I knew, and all that was true, yet I also sensed that the bone could somehow jar Arthur’s dream. The moment I snapped the bone in two I became sworn to Merlin’s search, and that search promised to bring enmity to Dumnonia; the enmity of the old pagans who so hated the upstart Christian religion.
‘Guinevere,’ I suddenly said the name aloud.
‘Lord?’ Issa asked in puzzlement.
I shook my head to show that I had nothing more to say. Indeed, I had not meant to speak Guinevere’s name aloud, yet I had suddenly understood that to break the bone would do more than encourage Merlin’s campaign against the Christian God, it would also make Guinevere into my enemy. I closed my eyes. Could my Lord’s wife be an enemy? And what if she were? Arthur would still love me, and I him, and my spears and starry shields were worth more to him than all Lancelot’s fame.
I stood and retrieved the brooch, the bone and the sword. Issa watched as I pulled a thread of green-dyed wool from my cloak and jammed it between the stones. ‘You were not at Caer Sws,’ I asked him, ‘when Arthur broke his betrothal to Ceinwyn?’
‘No, Lord. I heard about it, though.’
‘It was at the betrothal feast,’ I said, ‘just like the one we’ll attend tonight. Arthur was sitting at the high table with Ceinwyn beside him and he saw Guinevere at the back of the hall. She was standing in a shabby cloak with her hounds beside her and Arthur saw her there and nothing was ever the same again. The Gods alone know how many men died because he saw that head of red hair.’ I turned back to the low stone wall and saw there was an abandoned nest inside one of the mossy skulls. ‘Merlin tells me that the Gods love chaos,’ I said.
‘Merlin loves chaos,’ Issa said lightly, though there was more truth in his words than he knew.
‘Merlin loves it,’ I agreed, ‘but most of us fear chaos and that’s why we try to make order.’ I thought of the carefully ordered pile of bones. ‘But when you have order, you don’t need Gods. When everything is well ordered and disciplined then nothing is unexpected. If you understand everything,’ I said carefully, ‘then there’s no room left for magic. It’s on
ly when you’re lost and frightened and in the dark that you call on the Gods, and they like us to call on them. It makes them feel powerful, and that’s why they like us to live in chaos.’ I was repeating the lessons of my childhood, the lessons given to us on Merlin’s Tor. ‘And now we have a choice,’ I told Issa. ‘We can live in Arthur’s well-ordered Britain or we can follow Merlin to chaos.’
‘I’ll follow you, Lord, whatever you do,’ Issa said. I do not think he understood what I was saying, but he was content to trust me anyway.
‘I wish I knew what to do,’ I confessed. How easy it would be, I thought, if the Gods just walked Britain as they used to. Then we could see them, hear them and talk to them, but now we were like blindfolded men seeking a clasp-pin in a thorn thicket. I strapped the sword back into its place, then tucked the unbroken bone safe back in the pouch. ‘I want you to give a message to the men,’ I told Issa. ‘Not to Cavan, for I’ll talk to him myself, but I want you to tell them that if anything strange happens this night, they are released from their oaths to me.’
He frowned at me. ‘Released from our oaths?’ he asked, then shook his head vigorously. ‘Not me, Lord.’
I hushed him. ‘And tell them,’ I went on, ‘that if something strange does happen, and it may not, then loyalty to my oath could mean fighting against Diwrnach.’
‘Diwrnach!’ Issa said. He spat and made the symbol against evil with his right hand.
‘Tell them that, Issa,’ I said.
‘So what might happen tonight?’ he asked me anxiously.
‘Maybe nothing,’ I said, ‘maybe nothing at all,’ because the Gods had given me no sign in the grove and I still did not know what I would choose. Order or chaos. Or neither, for maybe the bone was nothing but a piece of kitchen scrap and its breaking would do nothing except symbolize my own shattered love for Ceinwyn. But there was only one way to find out, and that was to break the bone. If I dared.
At Ceinwyn’s betrothal feast.
Of all the feasts of those late summer nights the betrothal feast of Lancelot and Ceinwyn was the most lavish. Even the Gods seemed to favour it, for the moon was full and clear, and that was a wonderful omen for a betrothal. The moon rose shortly after sunset, a silver orb that loomed huge above the peaks where Dolforwyn lay. I had wondered if the feast would be held in Dolforwyn’s hall, but Cuneglas, seeing the huge number to be fed, had decided to keep the celebrations inside Caer Sws.
There were far too many guests for the King’s hall, and so only the most privileged were allowed inside its thick wooden walls. The rest sat outside, grateful that the Gods had sent a dry night. The ground was still wet from the rain earlier in the week, but there was plenty of straw for men to make dry seats. Pitch-soaked torches had been tied to stakes and, moments after the moonrise, those torches were lit so that the royal compound was suddenly bright with leaping flames. The wedding would be held in the daylight so that Gwydion, the God of light, and Belenos, the God of the sun, would grant their blessing, but the betrothal was given to the moon’s blessing. Every now and then a burning wisp from a torch would float to earth to set alight a patch of straw and there would be bellows of laughter, screaming children, barking dogs and a flurry of panic until the fire was extinguished.
Over a hundred men were guests inside Cuneglas’s hall. Tapers and rush lights were clustered together to flicker weird shadows in the high, beamed thatch where the sprays of beech leaves were now mixed with the year’s first clusters of holly berries. The hall’s one table was set on the dais beneath a row of shields and each shield had a taper below it to illuminate the device painted on the leather. At the centre was Cuneglas’s royal shield of Powys with its spread-winged eagle, and on one side of the eagle was Arthur’s black bear and on the other Dumnonia’s red dragon. Guinevere’s device of a moon-crowned stag was hung next to the bear, while Lancelot’s sea-eagle flew with a fish in its claws next to the dragon. No one was present from Gwent, but Arthur had insisted that Tewdric’s black bull be hung, along with Elmet’s red horse and the fox mask of Siluria. The royal symbols marked the great alliance; the shield-wall that would batter the Saxons back to the sea.
Iorweth, Powys’s chief Druid, announced the moment when he was certain that the last rays of the dying sun had vanished into the far Irish Sea, and then the guests of honour took their places on the dais. The rest of us were already seated on the hall’s floor where men were calling for more of Powys’s famously strong mead that had been specially brewed for this night. Cheers and applause greeted the honoured guests.
Queen Elaine came first. Lancelot’s mother was dressed in blue with a gold torque at her throat and a golden chain binding the coils of her grey hair. A huge roar welcomed Cuneglas and Queen Helledd next. The King’s round face beamed with pleasure at the prospect of this night’s celebration in honour of which he had tied small white ribbons to his dangling moustaches. Arthur came in sober black, while Guinevere, following him to the dais, was splendid in her gown of pale gold linen. It was cut and stitched cunningly so that the precious fabric, skilfully dyed with soot and hive-gum, seemed to cling to her tall, straight body. Her belly barely betrayed her pregnancy and a murmur of appreciation for her beauty sounded among the watching men. Small gold scales had been sewn into the gown’s cloth so that her body appeared to glint as she slowly followed Arthur to the centre of the dais. She smiled at the lust she knew she had provoked, and that she wanted to provoke, for this night Guinevere was determined to outshine whatever Ceinwyn wore. A circlet of gold held Guinevere’s unruly red hair in place, a belt of golden chain links was looped around her waist, while in honour of Lancelot she wore at her neck a golden brooch depicting a sea-eagle. She kissed Queen Elaine on both cheeks, kissed Cuneglas on one, bobbed her head to Queen Helledd, then sat at Cuneglas’s right hand while Arthur slipped into the empty chair beside Helledd.
Two seats remained, but before either was filled Cuneglas stood and rapped the table with his fist. Silence fell, and in the silence Cuneglas mutely gestured towards the treasures that were arrayed on the edge of the dais in front of the linen hanging from the table.
The treasures were the gifts Lancelot had brought for Ceinwyn and their magnificence caused a storm of acclamation in the hall. We had all inspected the gifts and I had listened sourly as men extolled the King of Benoic’s generosity. There were torques of gold, torques of silver and torques made of a mixture of gold and silver, so many torques that they merely served as the foundation on which the greater gifts were piled. There were Roman hand mirrors, flasks of Roman glass and piles of Roman jewels. There were necklaces, brooches, ewers, pins and clasps. There was a king’s ransom in glittering metal, in enamel, coral and precious gems and all of it, I knew, had been rescued from burning Ynys Trebes when Lancelot, disdaining to carry his sword against the rampaging Franks, had fled on the first ship to escape the city’s slaughter.
The applause for the gifts was still sounding when Lancelot arrived in his glory. Like Arthur he was dressed in black, but Lancelot’s black clothes were hemmed by strips of rare gold cloth. His black hair had been oiled and sleeked back so that it lay close to his narrow skull and flat against his back. The fingers of his right hand glittered with rings of gold while his left was dull with warrior rings, none of which, I sourly assumed, he had earned in battle. Around his neck he wore a heavy gold torque with finials glinting with bright stones, and on his breast, in Ceinwyn’s honour, he wore her royal family’s symbol of the spread-winged eagle. He wore no weapons, for no man was allowed to bring a blade into a King’s hall, but he wore the enamelled sword belt that had been a gift from Arthur. He acknowledged the cheers with a raised hand, kissed his mother on the cheek, kissed Guinevere on the hand, bowed to Helledd, then sat.
The one chair remained empty. A harpist had begun to play, her plangent notes scarcely audible above the buzz of talk. The smell of roasting meat wafted into the hall, where slave girls carried round the jugs of mead. Iorweth the Druid bustled up and down the
hall making a corridor between the men seated on the rush-strewn floor. He pushed men aside, bowed to the King when the corridor was made, then gestured with his staff for silence.
A great cheer erupted from the crowd outside.
The guests of honour had entered the hall from the rear, stepping straight from the night’s shadows onto the dais, but Ceinwyn would make her entrance through the large door at the front of the hall and to reach that door she had to walk through the throng of guests waiting in the fire-lit compound. The cheer we heard was the sound of those guests applauding her progress from the women’s hall, while inside the King’s hall we waited for her in expectant silence. Even the harpist lifted her fingers from the strings to watch the door.
A child entered first. It was a small girl dressed in white linen who walked backwards up the aisle made by Iorweth for Ceinwyn’s passage. The child strewed dried petals of spring flowers on the newly laid rushes. No one spoke. Every eye was fixed on the door except for mine, for I was watching the dais. Lancelot gazed at the door, a half smile on his face. Cuneglas kept cuffing tears from his eyes, so great was his happiness. Arthur, the maker of peace, beamed. Guinevere alone was not smiling. She just looked triumphant. She had once been scorned in this hall and now she was disposing of its daughter in marriage.
I watched Guinevere as, with my right hand, I took the bone from my pouch. The rib felt smooth in my grasp and Issa, standing behind me with my shield, must have wondered what significance that piece of kitchen waste carried in this moon-bright night of gold and fire.