I looked at the hall’s great door just as Ceinwyn appeared and, in the instant before the cheers began in the hall, there was a gasp of astonishment. Not all the gold in Britain, not all the Queens of old, could have outshone Ceinwyn that night. I did not even need to look at Guinevere to know that she had been utterly outwitted on this night of beauty.
This, I knew, was Ceinwyn’s fourth betrothal feast. She had come here once for Arthur, but he had broken that oath under the spell of Guinevere’s love, and afterwards Ceinwyn had been betrothed to a Prince from distant Rheged, but he had died of a fever before they could marry; then, not long ago, she had carried the betrothal halter to Gundleus of Siluria, but he had died screaming under Nimue’s cruel hands, and now, for the fourth time, Ceinwyn carried the halter to a man. Lancelot had given her a hoard of gold, but custom demanded that she return to him the gift of a common ox halter as a symbol that from this day on she would submit to his authority.
Lancelot stood as she entered and the half smile spread into a look of joy, and no wonder, for her beauty was dazzling. At her other betrothals, as befitted a Princess, Ceinwyn had come in jewels and silver, in gold and finery, but this night she wore only a simple bone-white gown that was belted with a pale blue cord that hung by the dress’s simple skirt to end in tassels. No silver decked her hair, no gold showed at her throat, she wore no precious jewels anywhere, just the linen dress and, about her pale blonde hair, a delicate blue wreath made from the last dog-violets of summer. She wore no shoes, but stepped barefoot among the petals. She displayed no sign of royalty or any symbol of wealth, but had just come to the hall dressed as simply as any peasant girl, and it was a triumph. No wonder men gasped, and no wonder they cheered as she paced slow and shy between the guests. Cuneglas was weeping for happiness, Arthur led the applause, Lancelot smoothed his oiled hair and his mother beamed her approval. For a moment Guinevere’s face was unreadable, but then she smiled, and it was a smile of pure triumph. She might have been outshone by Ceinwyn’s beauty, but this night was still Guinevere’s night and she was seeing her old rival being consigned to a marriage of her own devising.
I saw that smirk of triumph on Guinevere’s face and maybe it was her gloating satisfaction that made up my mind. Or maybe it was my hatred for Lancelot, or my love for Ceinwyn, or maybe Merlin was right and the Gods do love chaos for, in a sudden surge of anger, I gripped the bone in both my hands. I did not think of the consequences of Merlin’s magic, of his hatred for the Christians or the risk that we would all die pursuing the Cauldron in Diwrnach’s realm. I did not think of Arthur’s careful order, I was only aware that Ceinwyn was being given to a man I hated. I, like the other guests on the floor, was standing and watching Ceinwyn between the heads of the warriors. She had reached the great central oak pillar of the high hall where she was surrounded and besieged by the wolfish din of cheers and whistles. I alone was silent on the floor. I watched her and I placed my two thumbs at the centre of the rib and gripped its ends between my fists. Now, Merlin, I thought, now, you old rogue, let me see your magic now.
I snapped the rib. The noise of its splintering was lost among the cheers.
I pushed the rib’s broken halves into the pouch, and I swear my heart was hardly beating as I watched the Princess of Powys who had stepped from the night with flowers in her hair.
And who now suddenly stopped. Just beside the pillar hung with berries and leaves, she stopped.
From the moment Ceinwyn had entered the hall she had kept her eyes on Lancelot and they were on him still and a smile was still on her face, but she stopped and her sudden stillness caused a slow puzzled silence to fall across the hall. The child scattering petals frowned and looked about for guidance. Ceinwyn did not move.
Arthur, smiling still, must have thought she had been overcome by nerves for he beckoned her encouragingly. The halter in her hands trembled. The harpist struck one uncertain chord, then lifted her fingers from the strings, and as her notes died away in the silence I saw a black-cloaked figure come from the crowd beyond the pillar.
It was Nimue, her one gold eye reflecting the flames in the puzzled hall.
Ceinwyn looked from Lancelot to Nimue and then, very slowly, she held out a white-sleeved arm. Nimue took her hand and looked into the Princess’s eyes with a quizzical expression. Ceinwyn paused for a heartbeat, then gave the smallest nod of consent. Suddenly the hall was urgent with talk as Ceinwyn turned away from the dais and, following Nimue’s lead, plunged into the crowd.
The talk died away for no one could find any explanation for what was now happening. Lancelot, left standing on the dais, could only watch. Arthur’s mouth had dropped open while Cuneglas, half risen from his seat, stared incredulously as his sister threaded the crowd that edged aside from Nimue’s fierce, scarred and derisive face. Guinevere looked ready to kill.
Then Nimue caught my eye and smiled and I felt my heart beating like a trapped wild thing. Then Ceinwyn smiled at me and I had no eyes for Nimue, only for Ceinwyn, sweet Ceinwyn, who was carrying the ox halter through the crowd of men towards my place in the hall. The warriors edged aside, but I seemed made of stone, unable to move or to speak as Ceinwyn, with tears in her eyes, came to where I stood. She said nothing, but just held the halter in offering to me. A babble of astonishment brewed all around us, but I ignored the voices. Instead I fell to my knees and took the halter, then I seized Ceinwyn’s hands and pressed them against my face that, like hers, was wet with tears.
The hall was erupting in anger, in protest and amazement, but Issa stood over me with his shield raised. No man carried an edged weapon into a king’s hall, but Issa was holding the shield with its five-pointed star as though he would beat down any man who challenged the astonishing moment. Nimue, on my other side, was hissing curses into the hall, daring any man to challenge the Princess’s choice.
Ceinwyn knelt so that her face was close to mine. ‘You swore an oath, Lord,’ she whispered, ‘to protect me.’
‘I did, Lady.’
‘I release you from the oath if that is your wish.’
‘Never,’ I promised.
She pulled away slightly. ‘I will marry no man, Derfel,’ she warned me softly, her eyes on mine. ‘I will give you everything but marriage.’
‘Then you give me everything I could ever want, Lady,’ I said, my throat full and my eyes blurred with tears of happiness. I smiled and gave her back the halter. ‘Yours,’ I said.
She smiled at that gesture, then dropped the halter into the straw and kissed me softly on the cheek. ‘I think,’ she whispered mischievously in my ear, ‘that this feast will go better without us.’ Then we both stood and, hand in hand, and ignoring the questions and protests and even some cheers, we walked into the moonlit night. Behind us was confusion and anger, and in front of us was a crowd of puzzled people through whom we walked side by side. ‘The house beneath Dolforwyn,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘is waiting for us.’
‘The house with the apple trees?’ I asked, remembering her telling me about the little house that she had dreamed of as a child.
‘That house,’ she said. We had left the crowd gathered about the hall doors and were walking towards Caer Sws’s torchlit gate. Issa had rejoined me after retrieving our swords and spears, and Nimue was at Ceinwyn’s other side. Three of Ceinwyn’s servants were hurrying to join us, as were a score of my men. ‘Are you certain of this?’ I asked Ceinwyn as though, somehow, she could turn back the last few minutes and restore the halter to Lancelot.
‘I am more certain,’ Ceinwyn said calmly, ‘than of anything I ever did before.’ She gave me an amused glance. ‘Did you ever doubt me, Derfel?’
‘I doubted myself,’ I said.
She squeezed my hand. ‘I am no man’s woman,’ she said, ‘only my own,’ and then she laughed with pure delight, let go of my hand and broke into a run. Violets fell from her hair as she ran for sheer joy across the grass. I ran after her, while behind us, from the astonished hall’s doorway, Arthur called for us
to come back.
But we ran on. To chaos.
NEXT DAY I TOOK a sharp knife and trimmed the snapped ends of the two bone fragments, and then, working very carefully, I made two long narrow troughs in Hywelbane’s wooden handgrips. Issa walked to Caer Sws and fetched back some glue that we heated over the fire and, once we were sure that the two troughs exactly matched the shape of the bone fragments, we coated the troughs with the glue, then pushed the two scraps into the sword’s hilt. We wiped off the excess glue, then bound the strips with bands of sinew to set them firmly into the wood. ‘It looks like ivory,’ Issa said admiringly when the job was done.
‘Strips of pig bone,’ I said dismissively, though in fact the two scraps did look like ivory and gave Hywelbane a rich appearance. The sword was named for its first owner, Merlin’s steward Hywel, who had taught me my weapons.
‘But the bones are magic?’ Issa asked me anxiously.
‘Merlin’s magic,’ I said, but I did not explain any further.
Cavan came to me at midday. He knelt on the grass and bowed his head, but he did not speak, nor did he need to speak for I knew why he had come. ‘You are free to go, Cavan,’ I told him. ‘I release you from your oath.’ He looked up at me, but the business of being freed of an oath was too heavy for him to say anything, so I smiled. ‘You’re not a young man, Cavan,’ I said, ‘and you deserve a lord who will offer you gold and comfort instead of a Dark Road and uncertainty.’
‘I have a mind, Lord,’ he found his voice at last, ‘to die in Ireland.’
‘To be with your people?’
‘Yes, Lord. But I cannot go back a poor man. I need gold.’
‘Then burn your throwboard,’ I advised him.
He grinned at that, then kissed Hywelbane’s hilt. ‘No resentment, Lord?’ he asked me anxiously.
‘No,’ I said, ‘and if you ever need my help, send word.’
He stood and embraced me. He would go back to Arthur’s service and take with him half my men, for only twenty stayed with me. The others feared Diwrnach, or else were too eager to find riches, and I could not blame them. They had earned honour, warrior rings and wolf-tails in my service, but little gold. I gave them permission to keep the wolf-tails on their helmets, for those they had earned in the terrible fights in Benoic, but I made them paint out the newly made stars on their shields.
The stars were for the twenty men who stayed with me, and those twenty were the youngest, the strongest and the most adventurous of my spearmen and, the Gods know, they needed to be, for by snapping the bone I had committed them to the Dark Road.
I did not know when Merlin would summon us and so I waited in the small house to which Ceinwyn had led us in the moonlight. The house lay north and east of Dolforwyn in a small valley so steep that the shadows did not flee from the stream until the sun was halfway up its climb in the morning sky. The valley’s steep sides were shrouded by oaks, though around the house was a patchwork of tiny fields where a score of apple trees had been planted. The house had no name; nor even did the valley, it was simply called Cwm Isaf, the Lower Valley, and it was now our home.
My men built huts among the trees on the valley’s southern slope. I did not know how I was to provide for twenty men and their families, for Cwm Isaf’s little farm would have been hard pressed to feed a fieldmouse, let alone a warrior band, but Ceinwyn had gold and, as she promised me, her brother would not let us starve. The farm, she told me, had belonged to her father, one of the thousands of scattered tenancies that had supported Gorfyddyd’s wealth. The last tenant had been a cousin of Caer Sws’s candleman, but he had died before Lugg Vale and no other tenant had yet been chosen. The house itself was a poor thing, a little rectangle of stone with a roof thickly thatched with rye-straw and bracken that desperately needed repair. There were three chambers inside. One, the central room, had been for the farm’s few beasts, and that room we swept clean to give ourselves a living space. The other rooms were sleeping chambers, one for Ceinwyn and the other one for me.
‘I have promised Merlin,’ she had said that first night in explanation of the two sleeping chambers.
I felt my flesh crawl. ‘Promised him what?’ I asked.
She must have blushed, but no moonlight came into deep Cwm Isaf and so I could not see her face, but only feel the pressure of her fingers in mine. ‘I have promised him,’ she said slowly, ‘that I will stay a virgin till the Cauldron is found.’
I had begun to understand then just how subtle Merlin had been. How subtle and wicked and clever. He needed a warrior to protect him while he travelled into Lleyn and he needed a virgin to find the Cauldron, and so he had manipulated us both. ‘No!’ I protested. ‘You can’t go into Lleyn!’
‘Only a virgin can discover the Cauldron,’ Nimue had hissed at us from the dark. ‘Would you have us take a child, Derfel?’
‘Ceinwyn cannot go to Lleyn,’ I insisted.
‘Quiet,’ Ceinwyn had hushed me. ‘I promised. I made an oath.’
‘Do you know what Lleyn is?’ I asked her. ‘You know what Diwrnach does?’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘that the journey there is the price I pay for being here with you. And I promised Merlin,’ she said again. ‘I made an oath.’
And so I slept alone that night, but in the morning, after we had shared a scanty breakfast with our spearmen and servants, and before I put the bone scraps into Hywelbane’s hilt, Ceinwyn walked with me up Cwm Isaf’s stream. She listened to my passionate arguments why she should not travel the Dark Road, and she dismissed them all by saying that if Merlin was with us then who could prevail against us?
‘Diwrnach could,’ I said grimly.
‘But you’re going with Merlin?’ she asked me.
‘Yes.’
‘Then don’t prevent me,’ she insisted. ‘I will be with you, and you with me.’ And she would hear no more argument. She was no man’s woman. She had made up her mind.
And then, of course, we spoke of what had happened in the last few days and our words tumbled out. We were in love, smitten just as hard as Arthur had been smitten by Guinevere, and we could not hear enough of the other’s thoughts and stories. I showed her the pork bone and she laughed when I told her how I had waited till the last moment to snap it in two.
‘I really didn’t know if I dared turn away from Lancelot,’ Ceinwyn admitted. ‘I didn’t know about the bone, of course. I thought it was Guinevere who made up my mind.’
‘Guinevere?’ I asked, surprised.
‘I couldn’t bear her gloating. Is that awful of me? I felt as though I was her kitten, and I couldn’t bear it.’ She walked on in silence for a while. Leaves drifted down from the trees that were still mostly green. That morning, waking to my first dawn in Cwm Isaf, I had seen a martin fly away from the thatch. He did not come back and I guessed we would not see another till the spring. Ceinwyn walked barefoot beside the stream, her hand in mine. ‘And I’ve been wondering about that prophecy of the skull bed,’ she went on, ‘and I think it means I’m not supposed to marry. I’ve been betrothed three times, Derfel, three times! And three times I lost the man, and if that isn’t a message from the Gods, what is?’
‘I hear Nimue,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘I like her.’
‘I couldn’t imagine the two of you liking each other,’ I confessed.
‘Why ever not? I like her belligerence. Life is for the taking, not for submission, and all my life, Derfel, I’ve done what people told me to do. I’ve always been good,’ she said, giving the word ‘good’ a wry stress. ‘I was always the obedient little girl, the dutiful daughter. It was easy, of course, for my father loved me and he loved so few people, but I was given everything I ever wanted and in return all they ever wanted of me was that I should be pretty and obedient. And I was very obedient.’
‘Pretty, too.’
She dug an elbow into my ribs as reproof. A flock of pied wagtails flew up from the mist that shrouded the stream ahead of us. ‘I was always obedient,’ Cei
nwyn said wistfully. ‘I knew I would have to marry where I was told to marry, and that didn’t worry me because that’s what kings’ daughters do, and I can remember being so happy when I first met Arthur. I thought that my whole lucky life would go on for ever. I had been given such a good man, and then, suddenly, he vanished.’
‘And you didn’t even notice me,’ I said. I had been the youngest spearman in Arthur’s guard when he came to Caer Sws to be betrothed to Ceinwyn. It was then that she had given me the small brooch I still wore. She had rewarded all Arthur’s escort, but never knew what a fire she started in my soul that day.
‘I’m sure I did notice you,’ she said. ‘Who could miss such a big, awkward, straw-haired lump?’ She laughed at me, then let me help her over a fallen oak. She wore the same linen dress she had worn the previous night, though now the bleached skirt was soiled with mud and moss. ‘Then I was betrothed to Caelgyn of Rheged,’ she continued her tale, ‘and I wasn’t quite so sure I was lucky any more. He was a sullen beast, but he promised to bring father a hundred spearmen and a bride-price of gold and I convinced myself I would be happy all the same, even if I did have to live in Rheged, but Caelgyn died of the fever. Then there was Gundleus.’ She frowned at that memory. ‘I realized then that I was just a throwpiece in a game of war. My father loved me, but he would even let me go to Gundleus if that meant more spears to carry against Arthur. That was when I first understood that I would never be happy unless I made my own happiness, and it was just then that you and Galahad came to see us. Remember?’
‘I remember.’ I had accompanied Galahad on his failed mission of peace and Gorfyddyd, as an insult, had made us dine in the women’s hall. There in the candlelight, as a harpist played, I had talked to Ceinwyn and given her my oath to protect her.
‘And you cared whether I was happy,’ she said.
‘I was in love with you,’ I confessed. ‘I was a dog howling at a star.’
She smiled. ‘And then came Lancelot. Lovely Lancelot. Handsome Lancelot, and everyone told me I was the luckiest woman in Britain, but do you know what I sensed? That I would just be another possession to Lancelot, and he seems to have so many already. But I still wasn’t sure what I should do, then Merlin came and talked to me, and he left Nimue and she talked and talked, but I already knew I didn’t want to belong to any man. I’ve belonged to men all my life. So Nimue and I made an oath to Don and I swore to Her that if She gave me the strength to take my own freedom then I would never marry. I will love you,’ she promised me, looking up into my face, ‘but I will not be any man’s possession.’