Here Lies Arthur Page 18

  (My listeners nod and mutter approval at this Tewdric’s courage. A couple look round, as if they expect to see the ghosts of his war-band still sweeping across the moor. They’ll be lucky. I just made him up.)

  “Now in these hills are many lakes, and many rivers, and many pools of still, clear water, and the lady of the waters, the lake-woman herself, she looked out of one of them one day and saw Tewdric riding by and thought how handsome he looked, and how fine, and young, and strong, and a great admiration was in her heart for him.

  “And one day, while Tewdric’s men were hard pressed by their enemies, Tewdric was wounded, and parted from his band. Lost and alone, he wandered in the mazes of the woods, until hope deserted him, and he lay him down to die among the roots of a great thick oak which grew upon a lake-shore. But the blood of Tewdric’s wounds fell into the lake, and the redness of it stained the clear waters until the lake-lady herself saw it, from the windows of her hall down in the depths, and she came up and found Tewdric laid there.

  “Now the lake-lady thought it a very pitiful thing that such a fine young man should be left to die, so young and all alone, still in the flower of his beauty. So from her hall beneath the waters she brought this cauldron…”

  (I spread my hands and curve them, like I’m holding the curved sides of a vessel.)

  “A fine thing it was, made of beaten gold, with knots and swirls and fish and men and serpents wrought upon it. And the lake-lady knelt beside Tewdric where he lay, and told him to drink from it, and he would be healed. And he drank, and the pain of his wounds went from him, and his torn flesh grew whole again, and his eyes were made bright, and up he sprang. But the lake-lady had returned already to the waters, and whether she took the cauldron with her, or whether she left it and Tewdric took it home to his hall, I do not know.”

  My listeners nodded wisely. All of them were afraid of the wounds that might be waiting for them in the days to come. Now they had the hope of the healing cauldron to hold on to. “The lady of the waters has her favourites,” I heard a man say. “Bedwyr was one. He saw her at the old springs once. He made a gift to her. That’s why our luck turned sour when Arthur killed him.”

  They tugged their cloaks around themselves and settled on the grass to sleep. The sentries paced beyond the fringes of the firelight. A mule whickered, down in the horse-lines. I lay down too, pleased with the story I’d invented, and thinking already of ways I might better it when I told it next.

  In the dark around our camp, all the gorse-clumps looked like armed men crouching.

  XL

  I come awake at first light surrounded by raw-throated shouts. “Attack!” “It’s Cunomorus!” Scramble up, and fall again, still tangled in my cloak. Fall just in time, because arrows are winging out of the gorse on the hillside, whistling like curlews as they cut the air above me. Dunocatus catches one in his throat and curls round it, gargling. He topples into the embers of the fire, throwing up sparks and wood-ash. Other men are on their feet, running to and fro. In this dimsey-light I can’t tell who are my friends and who’re not. They are all shouting, and the arrows chirr among them, and sometimes someone falls. “The horses! The horses!” someone yells. There is a smell of burning hair. I get up again, groping for the knife in my belt. I run past our dead sentries, towards the horse-lines. Dark shapes spill like ghosts between the frightened, stamping beasts, cutting their tethers. Some horses are free already, running. Cei’s bare-headed, bellowing at us to form a shield-wall round him. Then he’s down on his knees, dropping forwards, a spear-shaft between his shoulders, and the man who’d stuck it there wrenching it free and pounding it down again and again, as if he’s churning butter.

  I know that spearman. I know his black spade of a beard, even in this light. The Irishman.

  Groggy with betrayal, I blunder on. “Peredur! Peredur!” I’m shouting, and I trip over someone, and it’s him.

  He’s down on his side, curled up, whimpering with fright and pain. One of those arrows is stuck through his shoulder. He turns a white face to me, eyes filled up with fear. “It hurts,” is all he says.

  Round us, the battle is falling apart into a dozen furious little fights. Screams, and smithy sounds. The Irishman’s men yelling their wild, shrill war-shouts. Freed horses flick past us, trembling the ground, raining clods of earth on us. I can’t think. I can’t even breathe. Then I remember the thing I do best at times like this. I grab Peredur under his arms, and start to pull him downhill.

  Not far from the campsite the gorse humps up thick. Peredur’s heavy but the slope of the hill helps, and he struggles with his legs, half walking. The gorse drags sharp combs through my hair. The sounds of battle dim, but not enough. I go down on all fours. Gorse is thick in the crown, but underneath it’s all woody stems, and bare ground brown with fallen needles. I shove and tug Peredur into a basket of twisty trunks. The wind hisses through the needles above us. A man is screaming smashed-bone screams away up the hill. Below us in the dark I hear the clatter of water.

  I lie on top of Peredur. His heart hammers at my breastbone. His every breath comes out as a little sob of hurt. I cram my hand across his mouth and listen hard. Something rackets through dry bracken a few yards off across the steep curve of the hill. A loose horse, or a friend, or a foe-man who saw me creep away and has come hunting me? I lie quiet. My hip bones press against Peredur’s. His blood is soaking through my tunic. I drop my head next to his and say into his ear, “Shhhh. Shhhhh.”

  Nothing moves. All is quiet. Whoever it was in the bracken has gone. We are alive.

  We lay there a long time, till the sky above the gorse turned cheerless grey. Then, half walking, half sliding, we made our way down to the stream, and a pool under some alders where I struggled him out of his filthy tunic. I broke off the arrow’s flight-feathers and pinched the smeared, shiny point which poked out of his back. He fainted when I pulled it through him. It had made a bruised hole under his collarbone, a red gash behind his shoulder blade. I washed the wounds with stream water. I pressed pads of moss over them, and ripped strips from my shirt to bind the moss in place.

  I didn’t want to have to look after him. It wasn’t so long since I’d been forced to look after Gwenhwyfar, and I remembered how happily that had ended.

  “I was afraid,” Peredur kept saying, when he woke. He was white and shaky. Too ashamed to meet my eye. “We ran away, Gwyn. We shouldn’t have run. It was womanish.”

  “It’s natural,” I tried telling him. “You couldn’t have fought them. They were too many. They caught us by surprise.”

  Of course he didn’t believe me. He’d bathed too long in stories of heroes and battles. In the stories, running away is the worst disgrace. If ever anyone told the story of that morning’s fight, Peredur and Gwyn would be remembered as cowards, who’d run like women. And being a coward is worse than being dead.

  “Who were they?” he asked. “Cunomorus’s warband?”

  “It was the Irishman. We were betrayed. He was waiting for us.”

  “But why?”

  I hadn’t an answer. I couldn’t imagine. How could it profit the Irishman to murder Cei? “Maybe he means to oust Arthur, and his tale about strife with Cunomorus was just a trap to bring us here. Maybe he’s gone over to Cunomorus’s side himself. Or maybe Maelwas set him on us, to weaken Arthur.”

  “And what of the others? Are we all that’s left?”

  “We can’t be. The others will be somewhere around. We’ll find them…”

  “I don’t want to. They’ll know we were cowards. We ran away.”

  I tied his bandages tight, but not too tight, the way Myrddin had taught me when we were tending to the war-band’s wounds back in my boyhood. I thought there was enough blood left inside of him to keep him alive. But I kept thinking of something Myrddin had told me. When someone no longer wants to live, it’s beyond any earthly doctoring to save them.

  XLI

  Downstream I found an old building. Just a heap of stones really. Tw
o low walls standing, a wedge of sheltered grass between them, roofed with holly-trees. It was not a good hiding place, for close by it the stream fell whitely into a narrow black pool, and the noise of the water would drown out the sounds of enemies creeping close. But I found nothing better, so that evening I moved Peredur into it. At least it was out of earshot of the crows at the battle-place.

  Peredur was weak and feverish, inclined to sleep. Bad dreams kept waking him, and he would jerk his eyes open and say, “I was so afraid. I should have stayed a girl.”

  So should I, I thought. I hushed him, and soaked my neck-cloth in stream-water and bathed his face with it. By morning he was worse. Some ailment was working in him, and I was afraid he hadn’t the strength to fight it. It was the shock, I think, as much as the wound itself. Since that day Myrddin had come to his hall Peredur had lived in stories. He’d expected war to be the way it was in stories: banners and glory and brave deeds. He’d not expected defeat, or pain, or fear.

  I sat with him all through that day. I tried telling him that there might be other endings for his story. Maybe this was just a setback. Something to make the listeners gasp and draw closer to the storyteller and think, “It cannot end like this!” before the hero gathered himself up and went on to triumph after all. “You’ll get well soon. Then we’ll go and fight Cunomorus, just the two of us, if we must. Or creep into his hall by stealth, like Odysseus at Troy, and steal some plunder from him that you can take back as tribute to Arthur.”

  Peredur smiled. “The lake-lady’s cauldron,” he said. “That will heal me.”

  “Of course it will,” I said.

  And then I thought, why shouldn’t it? He’d have to find the strength to live if he had something like that to carry home to Arthur. Something wonderful. A new gift from the otherworld.

  “Sleep, and be strong,” I told him. “Tonight I’ll go and find where the others are. Where we are, come to that.”

  The day was cold. I risked a little fire, praying that its smoke wouldn’t show among the moor mists. There were speckled brown fish in the pool of the stream and I leaned over the water until one came near enough and I snatched it out. I slit its belly with my knife and cooked it in hot ashes at the fire’s edge. I fed Peredur on baked fish and brambles under the pinkish smears of the evening sky. Afterwards, he slept, and I piled bracken over him to keep him warm and then scattered wet earth on the fire.

  Then I left him there and climbed back up the hill, not knowing if he’d be alive or dead when I came back.

  XLII

  I climbed past the battle-place. The heap of our dead was so high it made me think Peredur had been right, and none of the others had escaped alive. I told myself to stay calm, but the thought of ghosts got inside my head, and set me running, fearful that dead men were running behind me, angry at me for being still alive. I imagined cold hands reaching out to snatch me by the hair. That’s the trouble with this story-telling life. Stories start creeping into your head unbidden, and not all of them are good.

  By the time I stopped myself, a lopsided moon had come out from behind the clouds. It showed me the road we had been riding on the day before. Hills whose shapes I knew stood black against moonlit clouds. I followed the road, down through trees, off the moor’s edge. An eye of fire winked at me. Ban’s hall. The woods, bare-branched, making the hillside below it bristle like a hog’s back. Beneath it, out of sight among the riverside trees, my old home. I left the road and pushed through cages of young birch towards the smell of the river.

  Halfway there, a noise in the underbrush brought me up short. A rippling shiver, a scraping metal sound like a dragon unwinding itself, ready to strike.

  I drop down in the moon-shadows. The wood-floor between the birches is made of rocks and water. Big tumbled boulders, and little pools between. Twigs and windfall branches everywhere, but all too wet to crack, thank Christ, as I creep crabwise to a place where I can see bare sky between the branches.

  A snort. A white smouldering of smoke in the dark and a huge head up-reared, black as a raised hammer on that moony sky. My heart stops, and my bladder empties, drizzling warm piss down my legs into the puddle I’m crouched in. But then, as the thing swings towards me and shambles into a spill of moonshine, I let out my pent breath. I even manage a shuddery laugh.

  For it’s my own Dewi. Of course, the Irishman’s boys who ran off the rest of our horses wouldn’t have wanted a stocky old plodder like him. His dangling harness drags over another rock, making that dragony clitter and chink that had sounded so fearful a half-minute before. But I’m not scared now. “Dewi,” I say, and I go forward gently, shushing and calming him, hands out to catch his long head, rubbing his nose, laying my face against his face. It’s a stroke of good luck, plain and simple, but in my nervy state it’s hard not to see it as more. Maybe it’s a sign that God or the lake-lady is looking after me, and has sent Dewi into my way.

  I lead him to a place where the trees grow dense. Knot his broken reins around a birch-bole. Whisper goodbye and promise I’ll be back soon. Then, feeling braver and luckier than before, I go fast as I can to the river. Fight my way out of the clutch of the birches a quarter-mile shy of the homestead I was birthed in.

  My first idea, when I left Peredur, was to climb to the hall on the hill-top. My lady Nonnita has a bowl there, which I filled often and often for her with water from the spring, and sprinkled rose-petals in for her to wash herself. An old, gold bowl from Rome or Syria or somewhere fine like that, leopards and hares chasing round its rim. Peredur would easily believe a bowl like that was the lake-lady’s magic cauldron, and even if he didn’t, it would be fine tribute to carry home to Arthur.

  But now I’m here, my mind’s changed. My fright on the hillside and my meeting with Dewi have left me feeling thin on strength. The hill looks steep, and at the top there’s a ditch and a rampart and a wall of logs to get through before I can even start creeping into the hall to find Nonnita’s bowl. I’m not Odysseus. I decide to set my aim on something I can maybe reach.

  I cross the first big field. Cattle stand sleeping, hairy backs steaming in the night cold, breath smelling of sweet grass. Over the turf wall into the yard. Pigs snuffling in their enclosure. The dwelling-place quiet under its loaf of thatch. Moonlight pales the crossed paws of a dog asleep in its kennel by the door. I creep round to the back, to the place where the spring purls up. Good-luck offerings are balanced on the stones around it, to show the people here aren’t yet so Christian they’re ready to forget the older gods. And next to the spring, just where it stood in my childhood, a wooden cup, waiting there ready for any weary one who needs a drink. I pick it up. It’s carved from cherry-wood, worn smooth by many hands.

  I stuff it inside my tunic. At the front of the house the dog starts to bark, woken by some small sound I’ve made. But I’m over the wall, running along the field-boundary, into the eaves of the wood where the soot-black shadows lie beneath the trees like hides pegged out to dry in the moonlight.

  XLIII

  Peredur slept. Fevery dreams of home drifted inside his head like smoke. The arrow-wound in his shoulder was a sick throbbing. Sometimes he thought Gwyn was with him, and sometimes he remembered that Gwyn had gone. He hoped he would come back soon. He was afraid, alone here. The bracken rustled and the stream belled. The night wind whispered words he couldn’t catch.

  Then, in the grey of early morning, he came dimly awake. He was not alone.

  She stood on the far side of the little fire that Gwyn had made the day before. She was quite naked, and her limbs and her body were white as milk against the dull rusty colours of the autumn bracken. Behind her the hillsides were ghostly with mist, and she herself seemed ghostly, her shape wavering in the shimmer of heat from the smouldering fire. Sometimes the thin trickle of smoke veiled her completely.

  Peredur started to move, to pull himself upright. He tried to remember his prayers, but his mind was empty. Pain poked through his shoulder and his chest like another arrow hittin
g.

  She came towards him. Her white body dripped river-water. Her face was half hidden by the hanging-down strands of her wet hair, but he felt he knew her and he was suddenly not scared.

  In her hands she held a little bowl. Just a cup, really. Made of wood. Dark, and much used. Clear water filled it to the brim. He held his breath as she crouched in front of him. The water in the cup was a trembling oval of light. He glanced past it at her white breasts, her nipples dark against the white, like old coins. He started to raise his eyes to her face, but she pushed the cup towards him and said, “Drink from the cup, and you will be healed.”

  So he drank. The water was cold going down. The rim of the cup jarred against his teeth. It trembled with the steady trembling of the hands that held it.

  “Shut your eyes,” she said.

  He didn’t want to. He wanted to look at her some more. But he knew from stories that the creatures of the otherworld are fickle. If he didn’t obey she might turn him into an owl or a log. He shut his eyes tight.

  Her wet hair tickled his face. Her cool mouth touched his. He heard her shivery breath; felt it against his face.

  Nothing else. The bracken rustled. He opened one eye. She was gone. On the grass at his side lay the empty cup.

  Peredur stood up. He was giddy and his wound seared him, but he didn’t care. He stumbled through the bracken and looked down into the stream. There was a deep pool overhung with trees. She crouched at the edge among mossy rocks, and though he called out she did not look at him. Just tilted forward and went in with a splash. He saw the white shape of her flatten and dim as she went down deep. Autumn leaves were scattered on the water. The leaves bobbed on the ripples that she’d made. They turned like fish, beneath the surface. Red-golden beech leaves and the paler leaves of oak. Peredur waited and waited, thinking that she’d come up for air. But she did not come up.