Here Lies Arthur Read online

  Peri was changing, too. She’d grown even taller, and however often she altered her dresses they always looked wrong, stretched over her broad chest and strong arms. Her voice deepened. Flecks of beard began to show on her chin and upper lip and throat.

  Her mother showed her how to shave, using the sharpened edge of a seashell. Peri noticed that none of the other women had beards. Did they shave in secret? “Hairiness is a blessing God sends only to a few maidens,” said her mother wistfully. “It means that men will find you ugly, and you will never marry. You will stay here at my side always and always.”

  Peri wasn’t sure how she felt about that. After the warband left, that girl who’d slept with Arthur and would run off with the monk had teased her, saying she’d fallen in love with one of Arthur’s bright shiny riders. But Peri had known even then that wasn’t how it was. The visitors enchanted her, and filled her eyes for weeks, long after the last glitter of their helms and harnesses had vanished into the haze of sea-spray on the road. But she didn’t want to marry any of them. She wanted to be like them. She wanted to have a horse, and go riding far away into the wide world on it, and leave the lonely hall behind.

  In secret, among the empty monks’ huts, she sharpened a hurdle-stake into a spear and practised throwing it. Soon, from twenty paces, she could drive it through the heart of the drawing of Saint Porroc she chalked on the chapel wall.

  Using her maidenly skills – her weaving and her needlecraft – she made herself a pair of breeks, and a man’s tunic. She ventured into Saint Porroc’s chapel and stole down the old curtain from behind the altar, which she turned into a cloak. Needing a helmet, she crept into the kitchen and took a cooking-pot. She took a kitchen knife to be her sword. The cook didn’t miss them. The cook was so old that she barely remembered her own name.

  Dressed in her makeshift man’s clothes, Peri ran through the woods, chasing birds, hunting pigs with her wooden spears, fighting desperate duels against the purple-plumed thistles that stood guard in clearings. She used the kitchen knife to cut her beautiful brown hair short, thinking that under her head-scarf no one would ever notice.

  One day, she came home and changed back into her maiden’s clothes in the shadow of the rampart and went inside the hall and found that her mother was dead. The old moonwort women rattled and rustled, laying out the body on a table. Peredur wondered what to do. Sea-water tears ran down her face, and she licked them absent-mindedly when they reached her mouth. It had never occurred to her that her mother would die.

  It was spring. Still a windy, salt-scratched time on that cold coast, but at least there were some flowers out in the burying-place below the hall. She fetched a spade and dug a hole and buried her mother, and the women stood round and mumbled prayers while she shovelled the earth back.

  She was propping up a flat rock for a headstone when Saint Porroc arrived. Somehow, word of the widow’s death had reached him. He brought a great rabble of his followers behind him. Peri saw them from the rampart-top, running along the sea-shore like an army of beggars. Some stretched their skinny white arms up, as if they were hoping to snatch a few angel-feathers from the underside of Heaven. Others waded and wallowed through the sea, heads bobbing on the steep swell like a flock of mews. At the front of the procession, on an old cob horse, rode the saint himself. What hair he had left stood out around his fierce, holy face like a white-hot halo.

  Up the plank-road to the hall they came, dripping and sneezing and praising Christ. The women scattered. Saint Porroc climbed down off his nag and stood blinking at Peri, who waited beside her mother’s grave.

  “The Lord has delivered this place from the rule of that sinful woman!” he bellowed, pointing at the fresh grave with a quivering hand. Too much preaching on windy beaches had left him with a voice like a bull. Peri covered her ears. “Death has taken her,” the saint boomed. “This house which was hers will be the house of God now!” (For he had grown tired of sleeping on nets and fish-scales, see, and had taken the news of the widow’s death as a sign that his wanderings were over and he should settle down in her hall.)

  “But she is my mother!” said Peri. “I thought you had come to say the burial-words over her…”

  “And who are you?” The saint had not been blessed with good eyesight. He squinted at Peri, alarmed at hearing a man’s voice in this place of women.

  “I am her daughter.”

  “Daughter?” The saint stepped nearer. “Daughter?”

  The hard work of grave-digging had streaked Peri’s face with dirt and sweat. She had pushed the sleeves of her dress up, baring her lean, strong arms with their hatching of dark hair. In the confusion of her mother’s death, she had not thought to shave. There in the sharp, raking sunlight of the burial-place there was no mistaking her for anything but what she was.

  Saint Porroc’s wiry eyebrows waggled. He’d shouted his throat raw telling the fisher-folk about the ways of the sinful, but he’d never seen anything quite so steeped in sin as Peri. He grabbed the brocade bodice of Peri’s dress and dragged her past him, displaying her to his ragged flock.

  “Behold!” he bellowed. “See what wickedness lurks in this house! What unnatural things this roof has sheltered! Look at this youth, this boy so wrapped up in iniquity that he dresses himself in women’s raiment! Can we plumb the depths of such wickedness?”

  Boy? What boy? thinks Peri, looking round, surprised. A roar bursts over her like a great wave of the sea, and with the noise comes understanding. She – he – looks round at the ring of shouting faces. Righteous anger, mostly, but with a bit of hard laughter mixed in, for what could look more ridiculous than this tall, gormless young man dressed in an embroidered gown?

  Saint Porroc rips off Peri’s head-scarf, baring the clumsily shorn hair. “Be gone!” shouts the saint. “Leave this place! Run, if you can run, weighed down with such masses of sin!”

  Peri’s fist catches him in the middle of his holy face. The crunch of his nose breaking is louder than the laughter. There’s a gasp. Silence, in which the saint totters backwards and sits down hard. One hand to his nose. Blood squirting between his fingers. Everyone draws back, expecting fire from Heaven, or the opening of a burning Pit. They pull each other aside to let Peri pass. He glances back once at his mother’s grave, then strides towards the gate with all the dignity a young man in a dress can muster. One of the saint’s men lunges at him, but others tug him back. Maybe they’re afraid of facing this angry, hurt youth. Maybe they feel sorry for him.

  Peri ran into the shelter of the woods and, safe in a cage of young birch, watched the saint’s army taking possession of his home. He felt no anger towards them. They’d done him a favour, in a way. Told him what he was. A boy. A young man. His man’s name made him proud now. Peredur, son of Peredur.

  He’d known it always, really. A long time, at least. He thought back to the angel-day, and the strange thing that boy Gwyn had asked of him, “Why do you dress like that?” He’d wondered sometimes what Gwyn had meant by that. Now he understood.

  And thinking of Gwyn made him think of Arthur.

  That night he crept back secretly to his mother’s hall by the sea. Inside the hall he could hear the saint’s followers at their prayers. From his hiding place beneath the ramparts he fetched out his breeks and shirt and travelling cloak, his kitchen-weapons and his cook-pot helm. He knelt beside the fresh grave and said a prayer for his mother, wishing that she had lived long enough to give him the answer to Gwyn’s question. Then he stole Saint Porroc’s horse and set off to look for Arthur.

  XXVII

  A spring day stands in my memory, clear as a white stone. Blossom on the trees and a hundred hundred flowers in the long grass of the water-meadows. I’m about fifteen. My life as a boy lies far behind me, vague and half-forgotten. My hopeless hair reaches right down my back now, tied in two fat plaits. I wear a dress which was given me by my lady Gwenhwyfar, one of her own cast-offs.

  I’m quite a young lady, you see. I gossip with the
other girls my own age, and look after the young ones, and serve my mistress, and at the moment I am trying to catch the eye of the young man who has been sent out with us as an escort. His horse paces along beside us as we walk; its yeasty smell mixes with the scent of flowers, and the girls vie with each other to see who can walk closest to him. Unfortunately he has eyes only for Celemon. Celemon is Cei’s daughter, but she has turned out nothing like her ugly father or her fat mother. She looks the way the rest of us look in our dreams. She has corn-gold hair, and grey eyes with flecks of gold and copper in them. She is wearing a wide hat, like a wheel of woven straw, because the sunshine brings her out in freckles, which she hates, but I think they suit her. And specks of sun come through the hat’s weave and dapple her face with tiny patterns of light, so she is twice-freckled, dark and bright.

  The little girls laugh, the bigger ones chatter. Even my lady Gwenhwyfar, going ahead of us, is smiling. We are going to picnic by the riverside.

  Halfway there, someone spies a horseman coming down a hillside not far off. The girls clump together nervously. There have been rumours that the king of Calchvynydd has been boasting he’ll take back the lands Arthur has scrumped from him. Is this the out-rider of a raiding-band?

  Sunlight shines on metal as his distant horse brings him down through the trees. Our bodyguard kicks his pony in front of us and draws his sword, glad of a chance to show it off.

  “He’s alone,” says Gwenhwyfar, in a warning voice, not wanting him to go and skewer some harmless traveller.

  Through the wild flowers, glittering with light, the lone rider draws closer. His horse is the colour of sour milk. His cloak is a moth-eaten curtain. His helmet is a kitchen pot. One of the girls laughs, and the others lose their fear and join in as he swings his nag to a stop in front of us. His leather jerkin is too small, his boots are too big. An old carving knife is stuck through his belt, and the javelins bound to his saddle are just willow withies, sharpened to points and blackened in a fire. Under the shadow of the pot’s brim his face is sun-browned, and his smile is big and brilliant.

  “I’m looking for Arthur’s place. Is that it there?”

  It’s Peredur. I’m so ashamed of him that I have barely time to feel astonished at seeing him here. I’m pleased to see that he’s learned he’s not a girl, but I wish he’d left that cooking-pot in the kitchen. He doesn’t seem to know how dim-witted he looks. In fact, he sits there beaming at us as if he thinks he’s the finest warrior in the whole island of Britain. I burn red, blushing for both of us.

  Gwenhwyfar is well enough brought up not to join in her maidens’ tittering. But even she can’t quite keep a smile from her face as she goes forward to greet this newcomer. “Aquae Sulis is in Arthur’s charge, and I am Arthur’s wife,” she says kindly. “And you – you have ridden far, sir?”

  “Days and days!” Peredur can’t stop grinning. He has no idea how to speak to a high-born lady! The girl’s hiss with shock, hearing him address their mistress as if she were a goose-girl. His pot slips over his eyes so that he has to tilt his head back to look at us. Is he a madman? Dangerous?

  “A saint took my home, so I’ve come to join Arthur’s war-band,” he explains. “I’m Peredur, son of Peredur Long-Knife.”

  He looks from face to face, as if it surprises him that we haven’t all heard of him, or at least of his father. His eyes go past me without a pause. Of course, he’d hardly be expecting to find his old friend Gwyn among the maidens, and as a girl I’m not worth looking at, specially not when I’m standing next to lovely Celemon.

  He reaches up to hold his pot in place with a soft, womanish gesture, which makes the girls about me titter louder.

  “Arthur does want warriors, doesn’t he? They told me that’s what he came looking for when he came to my mother’s house once. And there were lots on the big road, riding towards that town. I saw them from the hilltop.”

  Warriors on the road? Riding to Sulis? What can he mean?

  I still remember how the laughter stopped, and the sunlight seemed to dim. We turned to look towards the town, and there, like blood in water, we saw the reddish smoke lofting from kindled thatch.

  XXVIII

  Those stories we’d been hearing that spring were not just stories. A war-band from Calchvynydd had threaded itself through the eye of the woods and into the vale where Sulis stood, and taken us all by surprise. Later, I wondered why no one had ridden in from the settlements they’d looted on their way to warn Arthur they were coming. But maybe the country people there were so sick of Arthur that they were pleased to see someone squaring up to him at last. Or maybe they didn’t see any difference between these rival war-bands. They might as well let the raiders take their stuff as give it up in taxes to Arthur.

  Whatever the reason, the raid came unexpected. The Calchvynydd men didn’t breach the walls of Sulis, and twelve of them were cut down in the fighting round the gate, but they set fire to the great huddle of buildings in the wall’s lee, and drove off a lot of cattle from the farms about. And as Arthur and his riders woke and buckled on their swords and spilled out to meet them, the raiders broke this way and that, and two of them came thundering out across the water-meadows to where we girls stood watching.

  “What is happening?” Peredur kept asking, innocent as a child. “What’s that smoke? Is someone’s house afire? We should warn them! Look, here comes somebody!”

  Here came somebody all right. A stranger on a great tall roan horse, scarlet his cloak and his tunic, scarlet his helmet and shield. Behind him, shouting vengeance, rode Bedwyr.

  Gwenhwyfar stood watching as the riders closed with us, pounding across the meadows through a storm of flung-up turf and hurtling flowers. We girls hurried this way and that, half wanting to run to the river and hide among the willows there, half thinking that it would be safest to break back to the town and hope we met no more raiders on the way. And the red man veered towards us, scenting plunder.

  The boy who’d come to guard us kicked his pony to a run and went out to meet the raider, swishing his sword about. He was brave, I suppose. The raider’s horse crashed sideways against his pony, like two ships colliding in a surf of flowers, and the raider’s sword went through his throat. A splurt of blood fell down the sky, poppy red. The riderless pony cantered off. The raider glanced back, and saw Bedwyr driving towards him. He sheathed his sword and drew a short stabbing-spear, turning his snorting horse to meet the charge. “Bedwyr!” I squealed, with all the other girls. I saw Bedwyr’s red hair flap like a flag in the wind. He’d not bothered to put his helmet on. I thought of the hardness of blades and the thinness of skulls. “Bedwyr!”

  Bedwyr raised his shield as the spear came at him. The blade glanced from the shield rim and drove down, through Bedwyr’s leg, nailing him to his own horse. He screamed. The horse screamed. They went down together, Bedwyr underneath. The raider dragged his own horse round and his hard eyes slid across our faces. Far away, more riders were speeding across the meadows. The raider’s comrades, off to some safe place to count their loot and stolen cattle. I saw that he was scared. Scared to rejoin his friends without some stolen treasure to brag about.

  I ran to Gwenhwyfar. I don’t think she’d moved since all this began. She had one hand up to Peredur’s saddle, as if to stop him spurring his old horse forward and trying to fight the raider with his kitchen-knife. I shoved her sideways as the raider’s red horse cantered towards her. But he wasn’t after Gwenhwyfar. He didn’t know who she was. He’d seen a brighter treasure; pretty Celemon. I heard her screech as he leaned out of his saddle and swept her up. I saw her legs kicking as he dumped her across his saddle-bow and urged his horse towards the river. Her hat bowled down-wind.

  I called her name. The other girls were scattering. “Celemon!” I shouted.

  “I’ll stop him!” called Peredur. “I’ll save her!” He dug his heels into the flanks of his horse and was away, holding his pot on his head with one hand, clinging to the bridle with the other, a scared
girl diving out of his path.

  The red raider was pushing his horse hard, but it had been hurt by its collision with the pony, maybe lamed. I was afraid that Peredur would catch him up, and challenge him. I started to run. I stopped and bunched up my skirt and stuffed it into my belt, and then ran on. Thistles slashed at my bare legs. I slithered through a cowpat, startling up a storm of brown dung-flies. I ran till the back of my throat was one cold gasp, and I’d lost sight of the horses. Then I saw sunlit metal flash, away among the willows. The red man had reached the river, and was casting to and fro along the steep bank, looking for a place to cross. Peredur was galloping to cut him off.

  I ran again, and reached them as they met. Peredur was lucky. The red man was encumbered by the squiggling girl across his horse’s shoulders. He hadn’t a chance to draw his sword. Instead, as Peredur came riding at him with one of those toy spears upraised, he caught it by the shaft and wrenched it sideways, tugging Peredur out of the saddle. I heard the yelp of surprise as he fell.

  The sour-milk nag, indignant at being made to run so far, trotted off a little way along the riverside and started cropping the grass.

  The red raider swung himself down off his horse and tramped back to where Peredur had fallen, pulling out his sword as he went. The boy lay face up. The pot had come off his head and rolled down the river bank, which was steep just there. I could see spreading ripples in the water where it had sunk. The red man lifted up his sword.