Here Lies Arthur Page 11

  I went through a pantry to a window at the back of the place. It had had glass in it once. Through the rusty frames I looked out on a garden, a few bean-rows fluttering with leaves and curved green pods, a cabbage-patch, a huge old oak rising among the scrubby younger growth along the wood-shore. It was a giant of a tree, but ivy had wrapped it round, and rot had hollowed out its trunk, and it held up only a few last golden leaves to the afternoon sun.

  The servants brought wine and food and then went home to their own place, over the hill; Myrddin didn’t want them living there with him. When he had eaten he rode on to Sulis, leaving me alone. He told me later what he found there, and so I’ll tell you, for I did nothing that evening except pace about between the bean-plots trying to get used to the strange, flappy freedom of my new skirts.

  Myrddin rode up to the gates of Sulis and announced himself and entered into the town. The walls had been repaired as he’d suggested, and the men who guarded them looked better trained. The town was as shabby and prosperous as ever, and old friends greeted him, and took his horse for him when he drew near the forum.

  There, inside a cage of wooden scaffolding, the feasting-hall he’d planned with Arthur in the wintertime was rising, and he felt proud and then disappointed as he looked at it. For it was a great thing that it had been built at all, and yet it was not as he’d imagined. Its round walls bulged out-of-true. The big, glazed windows he had planned were crooked holes. Instead of baked clay tiles, it squatted under a hat of thatch. Myrddin knew without even looking inside that it would be dark, and stuffy, and earthen-floored, and that the smoke of Arthur’s feast-fires would gather in a fog under the leaking roof.

  He felt suddenly uneasy. He had been away too long.

  Arthur was in the old amphitheatre, watching a white colt run circles on a rein. There was a knot of men around him. As Myrddin walked towards them he heard a familiar, silvery laugh, and there was Cunaide, Arthur’s woman from the old days, standing at Arthur’s side.

  “I thought you had put her away,” said Myrddin, when the greetings were done and he could talk quietly to Arthur. “What has become of your new wife?”

  “The heron?” Arthur kept glancing at the colt, admiring its glossy flanks and the sharp tilt of its lifted hooves. “A cold nature she has. Why couldn’t you find me a wife like Cunaide, with a bit of fire in her?”

  “You need Gwenhwyfar. She’s Maelwas’s kin. Her sons will be descendants of Ambrosius.”

  “What sons? She’s barren ground. Six months now, and no sign of a child.”

  That might not be Gwenhwyfar’s fault. After all, Cunaide’s never fallen with child in all her years with Arthur. But Myrddin didn’t voice that thought, of course. Instead he watched the colt go past, head up, mane flying, hoof-falls echoing from the raked stone seats all around.

  “A beauty, isn’t he?” asked Arthur, glad to turn their talk from wives to horses. “I took him in a raid last week.”

  “You have been raiding against your neighbours? Arthur, Maelwas will never give you command over his war-bands if he thinks you are a brigand!”

  “Maybe I don’t need Maelwas’s war-bands,” said Arthur, eyes on the colt. “This is good country. A man could live well here, without going fighting into Saxon lands.” He glanced at Myrddin quickly, sensing his disapproval. “Anyway, it wasn’t Maelwas’s lands I hit. We rode north and east, into Calchvynydd.”

  Myrddin was too angry to answer. He’d worked hard to convince Maelwas that Arthur was the one, and now he would have to begin his work again. He’d hoped for an alliance with the lords of Calchvynydd, too, but they wouldn’t want it now. He watched the stolen colt go round, running and running and getting nowhere.

  “I brought a young kinswoman of mine back from the west,” he said at last. “My boy Gwyn has returned to his family, but his half-sister came home with me. She’s a good girl. I thought she might make a handmaiden for Gwenhwyfar…”

  Arthur didn’t even trouble to pretend to be interested. “Yes. Why not,” he said. He turned away, shouting at his horse-handlers, “Give him more rein! Let’s see him run!”

  XXV

  And so my transformation back into a girl was completed, and I entered the world of women, and the household of the lady Gwenhwyfar. I swapped my knife for a bone needle, and my shield for a sewing-frame, and my dreams of hunts and battles for … well, for nothing, for I did not yet know what maidens dreamed about. Husbands, mostly, if the chatter of Nonnita’s girls had been anything to go by. But I didn’t want a husband. I sat and listened in the winter evenings around Gwenhwyfar’s hearth while Gwenhwyfar and the older of her women told stories about love, and men who did high deeds for their beloved. But I’d lived among boys, and I knew how men really thought of women, and I knew love hadn’t much to do with it.

  That hidden, bidden life was as big a shock to me as when I’d first become a boy. My time in Nonnita’s place had given me a taste of it, but at least Nonnita’s women had work to do. It wouldn’t have been fitting for Arthur’s wife to churn butter, or go laughing to the orchards with the harvesters. Arthur had slaves to do those jobs. For Gwenhwyfar and her women there was only a little sewing – new dresses for ourselves, an altarcloth for Bishop Bedwin’s church – and a lot of gossip. I was no good at gossip. I was so afraid that if I opened my mouth some rough, rude phrase from the horse-lines would slip out of it I kept it shut most of the time, and the other girls, hearing me say nothing but mumblings in my hilly accent and seeing how I was not pretty, nor well born, nor clever with a needle, decided I was simple, and left me alone. Some of them were a little scared of me at first. They knew I had something to do with Myrddin, and someone started a rumour running that he’d made me by his magic, out of flowers. But Gwenhwyfar came to my rescue, and gathered them together, and told them I was just a poor waif from over the sea who they must treat with Christian kindness. They weren’t kind to me after that, but at least they stopped waiting for me to turn into a hoodie crow and fly off with their souls. After a while they didn’t even bother making the sign against evil when I came near.

  Arthur didn’t often trouble himself to come looking for his lady Gwenhwyfar. It was enough for him to know that she was there, safe in her part of the house with her women around her, like a proper wife. Unless there were guests he wanted to impress, it was Cunaide who sat beside him in his hall at each day’s end. He hadn’t much time anyway for women’s company. They none of them did. The worlds of men and women were as different as night and day, air and water.

  And what was I? I’d lived in both those worlds. I didn’t fit in either.

  I missed Dewi. Myrddin had said my pony would be happy in the long paddock behind his new place where there was good green grazing. But I missed him still, and I thought he’d miss me. Who’d comb the knots out of his forelock now, and stroke and cuddle him, and bring him treats? I couldn’t see Myrddin doing that. Couldn’t see Myrddin keeping him long at all. What use would a pony be, with no boy to ride it?

  I missed Myrddin too. Sometimes, when Gwenhwyfar sent me off on an errand, I thought I would keep walking, out of the town and along the track that wound beneath the green downs to his house. But I was not supposed to go anywhere alone, and none of the other girls would have gone with me. They were afraid of Myrddin, and convinced they would be cursed if they ventured through the fence of charms and skulls and knotted strings which he had hung across the entrance to his place. A spell woven into every knot. And what would Myrddin say if I showed up at his door? He’d done with me, and cast me off. He’d not be missing me the way I missed him.

  That first winter I lived for the times when I saw Myrddin. When we were all together at a feast in the great hall, and he would get out his harp and tell us a story and his eyes while he was speaking would find me, singling my face out of all the watching faces round the fire. Or when I went to the marketplace with other girls and he passed by. Then the others would cross themselves and back away, but since I was supposed to
be his kinswoman they could not stop me speaking with him, and him asking me how I did, and me telling him. I always expected him to ask me what was going on in Gwenhwyfar’s heart, too. After all, that was the reason he had given for sending me to live in her household. He seemed to have forgotten that I was his spy. Or decided that Gwenhwyfar was not worth spying on.

  I was glad. I’d grown to like my new mistress, and I didn’t want to go passing on rumours about her loveless marriage, not even to Myrddin. Cold and shadowy she might be, but Gwenhwyfar was kind, in her vague, distant way.

  It was like living with someone who was already halfway to being a ghost, but a pleasant ghost. Sometimes, when the right mood was on her, she would tell us stories. An old slave of her family, her father’s tutor, had told her these stories when she was a girl. Tales of Odysseus and Aeneas and Queen Cleopatra. A better class of stories than we grow in our wet island. And when some of the girls were sick with the marsh-fever that first winter she gave up all her comforts and tended them herself, sat up beside their pallets at night and bathed their hot faces with cool water and sang to them although she was half dead herself with tiredness. They grew better, too, although the doctors said they’d die. My mistress might not have Myrddin’s knowledge of the uses of herbs and the writings of men with old Greek names, but she was a better healer than he’d ever been.

  Of course, I didn’t tell Myrddin that, either.

  Bedwyr was off with Arthur’s war-band when I first became one of Gwenhwyfar’s flock, so I had a week or so to fret about him, and to wonder how he could fail to recognize me. But when he came riding home I barely recognized him. He was a warrior now, with a warrior’s windy vanity, and five notches cut in the edge of his shield to show the men he’d killed. He’d put his life as a boy far behind him, stuffed it away as if it shamed him, and the memory of his friend Gwyn along with it. He eyed up all the girls as he rode past, but he only saw the pretty ones. I heard them giggling about him, how handsome he was and what a fine husband he’d make, and wondered how they’d feel if they knew I’d beaten him in running-races, and picked prickles out of his arse the time he’d fallen in that gorse bush.

  Only once, around Christmas, at the dark hinge of the year, he stopped half drunk in the marketplace while I was passing with two other girls. “I know you,” he said, staring into my face, which was veiled by wind-blown strands of hair. “I know you. You look like Myrddin’s servant, Gwyn, who rode with me at Badon-fight.”

  “Gwyn’s my half-brother, lord,” I said, shy as a cat, with my eyes on his boots.

  “I can see him in your face. You’re as ugly as him!”

  I looked at the cobbles in front of him, speckled with small rain. The girls beside me, who’d gone taut with envy when he singled me out, relaxed when they heard him call me ugly.

  “I heard he went home to his people,” said Bedwyr.

  “To Armorica, lord,” I mumbled.

  “He thought they’d all been killed. But I suppose they escaped? And sent for him?” There was a crack in his voice. I wondered if he was about to start weeping, the way soldiers do about old comrades sometimes when they’ve emptied one too many wineskins. But a couple of his friends came up laughing, calling out things that made my companions shriek, and they carried him off towards some wineshop by the walls.

  I watched him go, stumbling away from me into winter twilight, his friends holding him up when he threatened to fall over. When there was no fighting to be done the days of the men were as dull as the days of women, but instead of needlework and gossip they killed their time with drink.

  I would have given anything to be a boy again, and running races with him in the water-meadows.

  Arthur’s wars went on. Sometimes he rode way east into the borders of Saxon country, but most of his raids were closer to home, against soft settlements in the marches of Calchvynydd and up into Gwent. It was harder than ever to know the truth of it, now that I was penned up in Gwenhwyfar’s house. All I know is that Myrddin’s Arthur-stories grew and grew, painting him as the red dragon of the prophecies who would drive the Saxons back across the sea. Sometimes, when the war-band rode home, there were empty saddles, and I heard that men I’d known as boys had fallen in this fight or that. Sometimes one of the girls I lived with would be given in marriage to one of Arthur’s companions and another girl would come to take her place in Gwenhwyfar’s household.

  So two years ran away like rain down a culvert. They were good years, mostly. Maelwas was slow about making Arthur Dux Bellorum over all his war-bands, but he seemed content to let him hold Aquae Sulis and the other lands he’d taken further west. And on the northern border scraps of country which had been loyal to Calchvynydd were coming under Arthur’s rule one by one, and the store-houses of Sulis were filling with tribute that should have been sent to Calchvynydd’s king.

  For me, in Aquae Sulis, nothing changed. Except that one spring night, after weeks of rain, I was woken by a rushing, crashing, slithering sound and went out of doors to see that Myrddin’s great round feast-hall had fallen down.

  XXVI

  The small lives of women don’t make for good stories. That’s why there were no girls in the stories Myrddin told, unless they were there as a prize for the hero to win at the end of his adventures. So I’ll take you south from Aquae Sulis and tell you about something else. I’ll tell you what had happened at that hall on the sea-strand, Peredur Long-Knife’s place. I thought of it sometimes, wishing I was as graceful and girlish as young Peri, and dreaming back to the day when he and I had fooled that old drunkard saint into thinking he’d met an angel. But I never guessed the change that had come upon the place after I left it.

  They called it Saint Porroc’s miracle. Ever since Arthur’s war-band came to claim a feast from Long-Knife’s widow, the old saint had been on fire with the Holy Spirit. His monks processed about the ramparts, keeping everyone awake as they proclaimed the wondrous sign that God had sent them. For Porroc had been visited by the Angel Gabriel, who had commanded that he throw himself into the stormy sea. And Porroc had obeyed, trusting in the hand of God to buoy him up and keep him safe. No man could have lived in such a sea, they said. The great tempest of the world had been blowing, tearing the white tops off the breakers and driving fishing-smacks a mile inland. But the blessed saint had braved it and survived. Hadn’t they seen with their own eyes his holy head bob on the long slope of the waves like a fisherman’s float, hollering joyful prayers as each torrent of foam came curling down on him?

  (What he’d actually been shouting was, “Oh, God! Help! Arrgh! Glug!” But I suppose that counts as praying.)

  Saint Porroc grew more pious than ever. Crouched in that dazzling, sudden sunlight, in the gritty wind from the blown-open door, with the winged afterimage of the angel seared on his squeezed-shut eyes, he had felt his soul reforged. His wallow in the icy sea had tempered it hard and true. The theft of the treasures of his church by the tyrant Arthur had only sharpened its edge. He was become a sword in the right hand of God.

  He upended his wine-jars and let the sandy soil drink up his wine. He set free his pigs from their pens, and said a prayer over them before they went snuffling off into the woods behind the dunes, asking the Lord to grant them long lives. From now on he and his monks would live on water and cabbages. They would go each morning to the sea and cleanse themselves in the cold waves. If they were lucky the vicious undertow would carry them to Glory.

  The monks weren’t much pleased by the way things were going. Without meat and wine to warm them they shivered in their huts, which were no better than upturned baskets with the sea-wind blowing through them. The saint sent them into the hungry sea by day and by night. Their cabbagy diet caused great blatting farts to issue from beneath their robes like the trumpet-blasts of tuneless angels. One by one they slunk away, bound for places where God was served in less uncomfortable ways.

  The saint’s community took on a dwindling look, the empty huts rotting. But Saint Porroc never ga
ve in to the sin of despair. He gave up his hermitage and went to and fro along the wind-scoured coast, preaching his miracle in the villages. The people set down their nets and listened. Their lives were hard. It gave them a strange sort of pleasure to hear that their troubles were their own fault. If only they’d been truer to the true God, and given up the old ways! The saint’s words spurred them to a frenzy of smashing and breaking. Small shrines were battered into pieces. Decorations were torn off sacred wells. A wizened old sea-widow was found out to be a witch, and washed clean in the surf till she drowned.

  And by way of reward God sent them bacon. The woods inland, which had never yielded anything more nourishing than a bramble, were suddenly home to pigs so tame it was simple to lure them close and stick a spear in them. A second miracle! Sick of fish, the villagers filled their bellies with roast pork and gnawed on the crackling, and agreed that the Kingdom of Heaven must be at hand.

  From the walls of old Long-Knife’s hall the girl called Peredur looked out, and saw the cook-fires burning. Sometimes the gusting wind brought snatches of distant, feverish prayers whirling through the gaps in the palisade.

  The hall itself was falling into ruin. It had been a ruin really ever since Peredur’s father died, but Saint Porroc and his monks had given it a semblance of life, like wasps rattling inside a rotten apple. Now that he had gone, and the monks’ cells were coming apart like dried-out cowpats, the place felt empty. Spent.

  Peredur’s mother believed it was her own fault. Saint Porroc had told her before he left that she was a wicked woman for welcoming Arthur, that tyrant, that black she-wolf’s whelp. She had fallen on her face and begged his forgiveness, but he’d not been in a forgiving temper, and stalked off, shouting curses over his shoulder. After that, she had retreated further into her own small world, whose walls were prayers. She spent whole days mumbling in her chamber. Her women lost patience with her. They grew tired of going hungry in that starveling hall, where the wind blew through the smoke-holes till the whole building hooted like a shawm. In ones and twos they went away. Some married fishermen. Some went to follow Saint Porroc. That girl who’d slept with Arthur on the night he visited ran off with one of the former monks. Only the old ones stayed. Washed-out, ancient women with nowhere else to go. They rustled in the shadows of the hall like moonwort seeds.