Here Lies Arthur Read online

  I wanted to shout out and tell him no. I wanted to beg him to take pity. But they don’t have pity, those armoured, riding men. Even if he left Peredur alive, he’d still make off with Celemon.

  So instead of words, I threw myself at him. Down the slope between the willows, across a few yards of short green grass. I can’t have weighed half what he did, but he didn’t know I was there, and didn’t see me until I was almost upon him. He was turning towards me when we hit. I reckon I caught him off balance. He went backwards with me on top of him, and the river took us both.

  I was all right. I felt safer in water. I swim like a fish, remember? But the raider had a helmet, and a belt with big bronze fittings, and a scabbard with more bronze on it, and a fat gold ring around his neck, and all those wanted suddenly and very much to be down in the soft mulch of the river bottom. A big bubble came out of his mouth as he sank. Squarish it was, and silvery, like a pillow of light. It wobbled past me to the surface, and I kicked free of him and went after it. Hauled myself out and sat shivering, watching the ripples spread.

  When the water was still again I climbed back up the bank. The dead man’s sword stood in the nettles, point down, still quivering, where he had dropped it as he fell. There was shouting from the water-meadows. More of Arthur’s riders had come to save Gwenhwyfar and her ladies. Celemon was snivelling quietly, hung head down across the raider’s horse. I left her to it, and went to Peredur. He lay where he had fallen, looking dead, but when I touched his face and the water from my wet hair dripped on his eyelids he frowned and sat up, trying to look fierce.

  “Where is he?”

  “Don’t you remember?” I said. “You fought him, and he’s dead.”

  Peredur looked about for the body. He put up one hand to his head and ruffled his tangled brown hair. “My helm…”

  “It went in the river,” I said. “It smelled of soup, anyway. We’ll find you a better one.”

  “And the red man?”

  “He went in the river, too.”

  “He was Arthur’s enemy?”

  I nodded.

  “And I defeated him?”

  “Oh yes,” I said, and nodded so hard that even I started to believe that it was true. And I turned and grasped the hilt of the sword and tugged it out of the earth, and gave it to Peredur.

  XXIX

  I was steeped in river water, but no one thought to ask me why as we tramped back across the fields to Sulis. I doubt they even looked at me. They were all too taken up with Bedwyr, who had been dragged out from under that wreck of horsemeat by two of his comrades and carried back to the town on a plank, trying hard all the way not to weep at the pain of his gashed and shattered leg. The girls praised his courage in a wistful way, knowing that he’d end up dead or crippled, and less handsome either way. They cooed and sighed about him, and saved their smiles for Peredur, who rode ahead on the dead raider’s roan mare, clutching the dead man’s sword and looking confused but happy to find himself so suddenly a man. Celemon, who was unhurt, was busy telling everyone how brave he had been; how he had challenged the man who’d taken her, and stuck one of those silly willow-spears clean through him.

  A part of me was sorry that I’d given Peredur my triumph, and angry at him for accepting it so easily. But Peredur wasn’t someone you could be angry at for long. He was too open and smiling, and he looked too good. I stole glances at him through my wet hair all the way. Filled my eyes with him, and felt sorry, knowing that he’d be swallowed into the warrior-life, and learn to hide all his sweetness under bluster and ironmongery.

  Arthur was red and shouting when we found him. Striding through the forum, past the rubble-heaps where the banqueting hall had been, demanding to know how the raiders had been allowed to come and shame him at the gates of his own place. Knocking down any man who tried to give him an answer. It was useless to tell him, as Cei was trying to, that only a few farmers and slaves had been killed, and a few huts set ablaze. The insult hurt Arthur more than the raid itself. The thought of men telling how he’d been outwitted.

  But even he looked twice at Peredur. His anger faltered. “Who’s this?”

  Gwenhwyfar, kneeling before him, told him quickly what Peredur had done. Arthur looked at him, and put his anger aside, and smiled. “Peredur Long-Knife’s son, is it? That mother of yours told me there were no men left in her fish-stinking hall. But you look like him, all right, and you fight like him too. You’ll ride with us now, eh?”

  In the ground behind the marketplace horsemen were mounting up, getting ready to ride out and cut off the raiders’ retreat and win back the cattle they had stolen. Arthur heaved himself into his saddle and drew Caliburn and swished it about in the sunlight, bellowing some bloodthirsty oath. I saw Peredur clambering on to a fresh mount, and then lost sight of him as the riders clattered away.

  I tried not to care. I thought if I didn’t care, he might come back all right. It’s the people you let yourself care about, they’re the ones fate takes away from you. Look at poor Bedwyr.

  They had carried him to the dingy, damp-smelling place which he shared with Medrawt and with Medrawt’s wife and babies. Gwenhwyfar sent her girls home, and asked me to come with her, and went inside to see how he was being cared for. I thought she had asked me to go with her because I was the oldest, but perhaps she already knew we would find Myrddin there. He was stooping over the pallet where Bedwyr lay, his fingers parting the lips of a wound so deep that it made me feel sick and scared to look at it. It was like a red mouth.

  “He’ll not walk again,” I heard Myrddin say.

  Medrawt was there, at the head of the bed, cradling his brother, who was asleep, or unconscious. “Better to die than live a cripple,” he said grimly. “Don’t say it! God will heal him.”

  The wound in Bedwyr’s leg filled with blood and dribbled it down on to the coarse sheets, which were already sodden. Medrawt’s dogs nosed close, and Myrddin cursed them and kicked them away. I looked at Bedwyr’s white face, and felt glad I’d drowned that raider.

  “Bring him to my house,” said Gwenhwyfar.

  The men hadn’t noticed her till then. She stood near the bed with a corner of her mantle raised to her face, as if to shield herself from the smell and sight of blood. She looked pale, but she always looked pale. She said, “He won’t heal in this place. He needs quiet, and air, and cleanliness.”

  “He needs splints and bandages more,” snorted Myrddin.

  “Then splint and bandage him, and bring him to my house,” said Gwenhwyfar. “I shall tell my women to make ready for him.”

  Medrawt said, “Do it!”

  My master glared past Gwenhwyfar at me, like he was wondering if I was part of this challenge to his doctoring. Then he nodded, and snapped at me to find a straight ash-stick and tear some linen for bandages, as if I was his servant still. But while we were working together, wrapping the wrecked leg in white cloth that kept soaking through red, he asked me softly if I was all right, and if I had been harmed or frightened by the raiders. As if it meant something to him. As if I meant something to him.

  At last the bleeding slowed. Myrddin lifted Bedwyr’s head and made him drink a cup of wine with stinking herbs in it. Then he was carried in the twilight across to Gwenhwyfar’s hall, and I went with him, and looked back and saw Myrddin watching from the rushlight-glow in the doorway of Medrawt’s place.

  XXX

  That was a summer of small wars. Arthur meant to teach Calchvynydd he was a man they should respect. Stories are all well and good, he told Myrddin, but if you want men to respect you, you have to show them strength. They burn one of your holdings, you burn two of theirs. Most days that summer, if you stood on the hill-tops above Sulis and looked northward, you’d see the smoke of torched thatch on the sky.

  The cattle driven off in that first raid came home again, along with Arthur and his riders, flushed with revenge and carrying the heads of three dead raiders on spears. I saw Peredur ride in with them, still looking bewildered by it all
. I think the world of men was not turning out to be quite as he’d expected. He was not quite what they’d expected, either. He didn’t speak the language of men. He didn’t know the rules I’d learned in my time among the boys. Cei and Medrawt and the rest treated him now as a simpleton; a sort of mascot. Medrawt made him the butt of the same half-friendly jokes he’d had flung at himself when he was younger. Peredur didn’t ride with them again that summer, but stayed with the garrison in Sulis.

  It wasn’t that he was cracked, I tried telling Celemon and the rest. Just he’d been raised different, and come to things by his own road. He’d not grown up around fighting men, the way we had. That was why he stared so much at them, and took such a delight in polishing the fittings of the old shield they gave him till it shone, and thought it looked splendid to fit jays’ feathers in his helmet and strut around the town like a dunghill cock. But the girls just teased him more, and laughed at the way he followed Celemon with his eyes, as if she was a lady out of one of Myrddin’s tales that he listened to in the fire-hall of a night.

  Peredur didn’t seem to feel their cruelty. He forgave them everything. He was God’s fool. He liked everyone. Well, almost.

  When he’d first come my heart jumped up inside me. I remembered how glad I’d been of him when I first found him, just the gladness of knowing there was someone else in the world like me. I thought he’d be a friend to me, and one day soon I’d tell him (if he didn’t guess) that that boy he’d met at his mother’s hall that time was me.

  I’d never told anyone my old secret, see. Even Celemon, who was my friend, would have been sure to think it strange or wicked that I’d been a boy, and she’d have told the other girls, and it would have spread all round Aquae Sulis, how Myrddin had disguised me. But telling Peredur would be different. We’d keep each other’s secrets, and laugh about our strange pasts, my boyhood and his gowns. It would lead to deeper friendship and – who knows? I was so alone in my life. For a while I woke up every morning vowing that today would be the day I’d go to him. “Don’t you remember how we scared old Saint Porroc?” I’d say. “Didn’t you look a treasure, in your shift?” In my mind, I could already see his brown eyes widening, and his slow smile.

  But it turned out Peredur, who liked everybody, didn’t like me. I frightened him, maybe, or the sight of my face reminded him of his first and only fight; how scared and startled he’d been, and how doubtful his victory was. When he saw me his hand always went to the hilt of the red man’s sword, which he wore on his belt, as if he thought I might take it away from him. When he saw me coming towards him in the town he’d go some other way.

  Well Gwyna, you fool, I thought, what did you expect? And after a while I stopped trying to find excuses to talk to him. And sometimes, when the other girls were laughing about him, I’d join in.

  Life in Sulis was good with Arthur off about his wars. The old buildings gave sighs of relief and let their shoulders sag, basking in the summer sun. Outside the walls, riders patrolled the margins of the ripening wheat. Cei, who ruled in Arthur’s absence, made an easy lord. Nights in the feast-hall were full of laughter and stories of the old days, and sometimes he’d come to pay his respects to Gwenhwyfar, which was more than Arthur ever did.

  He was a good man, Cei. In the stories Myrddin told he was quick-tempered, violent and clumsy, but in truth he was none of those things. I think Myrddin made him that way in the stories because he was afraid that men might prefer him to Arthur if they knew what he was really like. Cei laughed off the slanders. “They’re only stories,” he would say. “What do stories matter?” But he wasn’t stupid. He knew as well as Myrddin that in the end stories are all that matter. I think Myrddin’s stories hurt him, and had led to a dying away of the friendship between them. At any rate, I never heard of him going to visit Myrddin at his new place outside the town. He visited Gwenhwyfar instead, and Gwenhwyfar liked him, and kept him talking often late into the evening, while we girls sat round yawning and dozing and wondering how they found so much to talk about, our fine lady and this rough old soldier.

  Cei must have known who I was. He can’t have forgotten the night he’d helped Myrddin turn me into a boy. But he never spoke of it, nor gave any sign that he knew, nor treated me different from the other girls. He was a good man.

  Meanwhile, Bedwyr mended slowly. His sickroom was one of Gwenhwyfar’s own chambers, which had doors that folded open to reveal a terrace and a tangled summer garden. A trickle of water fell endlessly into a cistern. There were foxgloves.

  Bedwyr’s fever left him pale and bony as his brother. The pain and shame of his bust leg left him bitter. He didn’t think he’d ride again, or fight, and what good was a man who couldn’t ride or fight? He snapped at the girls Gwenhwyfar sent to tend to him, until we hated going. He had a girl of his own he’d got in some raid the year before and grown fond of and given gifts and good clothes to, and she came into the house to be near him when he was first hurt, but he sent her away, as if it made the shame worse to have her there weeping for him. He cast her off, and after a while another of Arthur’s men took her. After that it was just Medrawt, who would call in when he was not riding with Arthur.

  We’d got off to a wrong start, me and Medrawt. You’ll remember that business in the burning wood, how he waved his sword at me and sent me to seek shelter in the river. I’d never liked him since. But the way he was with Bedwyr changed my mind about him. He was a prideful man, and cold, and hard to like, but he wasn’t all cruel, not by miles. He sat by his brother’s bed, talking about old times with him and telling him he’d be up and running by fall-of-leaf, while I stood waiting, forgotten, clutching fresh sheets or the jug of watered wine they’d asked for, and saw a different Medrawt, a loving brother, a man who talked fondly about his wife and his children. I wondered if they were all like that, when you stripped the armour and the pride off them.

  By summer’s height, in the bright, bee-buzzing, flower-full days, Bedwyr was trying to walk. Gwenhwyfar went one afternoon to see how he was faring, and she took me with her. She had to take someone, I suppose, for Arthur’s wife couldn’t ever be alone with another man, even a poor cripple young enough nearly to be her own son, and I was about the only girl who would go near his room by then, he’d been so fearsome to the others.

  While I spread fresh sheets on the bed, and smoothed the pillows, Bedwyr went leaning on a staff across the terrace, into the bobbing pinkness of the foxglove-filled garden. Each step tore a grunt of pain from him as he set his weight on his twisted leg. Watching him go, it was all I could do not to run and give him my arm to lean on. But I wasn’t his friend Gwyn any more, and he was a man now. It would shame him if a girl offered him help.

  “That’s good!” said Gwenhwyfar kindly, from the terrace-edge. “That’s good!” But she was lying. Bedwyr was as wobbly as a baby and as slow as an old, old man. Halfway to the cistern he fell, and knelt there, sobbing.

  And Gwenhwyfar went to him without a word, and put her arms around him, and rested his head against her shoulder, and stroked his hair. And I stood in the shadows behind the folded-back doors, and watched, and didn’t move or speak, because Bedwyr would hate it if he knew someone had seen him crying like a child. But I felt different about Gwenhwyfar ever after. I don’t remember my mother, but the way she held him, the way she cuddled him close, that was the way I’d have wanted my mother to hold me if I’d had one and I was sad about something.

  And after a little time Bedwyr’s sobs stopped and he went still. And Gwenhwyfar kept her white hand moving on the red-gold of his hair. And there was something strange and new in her face when she looked up at me. And she said, “Gwyna – fetch us a little sweet wine, and some of those barley-cakes.”

  When Arthur came home for a few days, my mistress grew pale and thoughtful, and called Celemon and me to her chambers. We spent a long time dressing her in different gowns and mantles, and folding them away again when she thought something about them was wrong. When she was finally ready,
she went alone to Arthur’s hall.

  I can see how it must have gone, that meeting, although I wasn’t there.

  Arthur is sprawled on a chair in his bedchamber, soaking his feet in a basin of water. He’s just back from a fight. The cheek-pieces of his helmet have bruised the corners of his face.

  He sends his slaves and servants scurrying away when Gwenhwyfar lifts the door-curtain. He would never admit it, but she unsettles him, his tall, quiet wife. She has a grace that speaks to him of old ways that he will never have, no matter how much land and treasure he can grab. In the first months of their marriage, when she was so cold towards him, he used to hit her. He would make the blood of the Aureliani bloom under her skin in purple bruises. She is his wife, after all, so he’s a right to bend her to his will. But the more he hit her, the worse he felt. That’s why he keeps his distance. Let her have her own life, her own household, her own women, so long as she’s there to be displayed when allies and rivals come visiting. She’s just one of the things that a powerful man needs.

  She kneels before him. Bows low, and hopes he’s well. Praises God for sending him safely home. He signals with his hand for her to rise.

  “I have something to ask of you, husband.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The boy Bedwyr…”

  Arthur twists his mouth sideways. Young men maimed make for bitter thoughts. Bedwyr had been a favourite of his once. He’d had high hopes. “It’s evil luck. My own sister’s son. He would have been one of my captains. But now…” He shrugs. “Myrddin says he’ll die.”

  “He’ll not die.”

  “Live crippled then, and what’s the difference? But you needn’t fear for him. He’ll be looked after. His brother Medrawt will take him in. And I’ll make sure he’s got no need to beg. I don’t forget my companions.”