Here Lies Arthur Read online

  And all those years he never had a wife. Never had children. Never wanted any. Said he was too busy. Said they’d have slowed him down when he was travelling. He’d already lost one family. He couldn’t live with the fear of losing another. He still remembered the night the raiders came, and how the screams of his mother and sisters had sounded among the dark downs, calling out to God, who took no more notice of them than of the cries of the owls in the woods.

  And then, one wintry night, out in the wild western hills, below a place that Arthur’s men were burning, he stopped beside a river-pool to watch a girl claw her way out of the water. He’d learned not to let himself feel pity for the waifs that Arthur’s wars left homeless. He told himself, as he watched her dry out beside his campfire, that he had only rescued her because she would be useful. But something about her touched his heart. Afraid and all alone, she put him in mind of himself.

  He meant to let her play her part, then leave her be. But afterwards, riding away from the river with Arthur’s band while they talked about the miracle of the sword from the water he found that he could not forget the girl. How bright she was. How brave. Just the same age as he’d been when the Saxons took him. Abandoning her was like leaving his own self behind. As soon as he could he crept away from Arthur’s victory feast and went back to the waterfall, and found her.

  At first she’d been a worry to him. He’d dressed her as a boy and called her Gwyn, but there was always a fear she’d be discovered, that the truth would come out, and Arthur would smell some insult in what he’d done. But months went by, and the girl seemed well able to play the role he’d put her in.

  He started to enjoy travelling with her. Liked waking to her tuneless singing as she made up his fire, or readied his breakfast. Liked answering her endless questions. Teaching her things. Watching her learn, and grow. Her high seriousness as she picked the yellow-white specks of flies’ eggs from her pony’s coat. He started to feel proud of her. The way she’d exposed that old fraudulent so-called saint down on the sea-coast that time! And kept quiet about it after, as if she’d thought Myrddin hadn’t the wit to go and ask among the monks and work out for himself what she had done…

  He started to see why even hard, strong-headed men like Cei went soft when they spoke about their children.

  And when she grew older, and he couldn’t keep up the pretence that she was a boy, he made a girl of her again. It had cost him dear, to go away that year and stay away while she learned women’s ways. If he’d been in Aquae Sulis to keep Arthur in check, things might have gone better afterwards. But at the time, the girl had seemed more important. He was starting to fear that Arthur was not the man he’d hoped. Arthur couldn’t unite the greedy, squabbling Britons, and maybe no one could. But if the girl could grow up happy maybe that would be enough. Enough reward for one life’s work.

  He found her a place in the household of Arthur’s wife. He was startled by how much it hurt him to let her go. When she stood weeping on that road in the west and said, “I don’t want to leave you,” he had had to hide his face from her in case she saw his tears. It would have been so easy to give in to her and let her stay. But she deserved better than a life used up in serving an old man. He wanted her to have the company of other girls, and the hope of a good marriage one day, and children of her own. So he made up a story to save her pride, and to give him a reason to see her sometimes. Told her she’d be his spy in Gwenhwyfar’s house.

  He half hoped Bedwyr might take the girl, after Bedwyr was wounded. No man could have asked for a better wife, and he knew the girl’s upbringing had made her impatient with the settled, cow-ish ways of women. She would be happier with a husband who needed her help.

  Then she told him of Gwenhwyfar’s betrayal. A double betrayal, it seemed to him, for not only was Gwenhwyfar deceiving Arthur, she was making the girl part of her deception. What would happen when Arthur learned of it? What would he do to a girl who had helped his wife insult him?

  He’d had to tell Arthur, of course, before Arthur found out for himself. He’d thought he’d be able to control Arthur’s temper. Thought he’d snatch the girl safe out of the storm that followed. But she’d grown headstrong. He’d taught her to be headstrong, and he felt sorry for it, for it made her put herself in danger’s path. Made her go riding off to her death.

  He had folded her dress with his own trembling hands. Folded and smoothed it and pressed it in linen, and scattered lavender on it to keep the moths and mould away. And all the weeks since, in his sickness, he had prayed to the God he did not believe in to send her back to him. And now, at the very end, here she was, leaning over his bed, watching him talk, a little small frown between her eyebrows, and her hand holding his.

  “Gwyna,” he said. “You’ve been a good daughter to me. And a good son, too.”

  XLVII

  Well, I didn’t feel like a good daughter. I felt angry at him. If he loved me so, why had he never said? Why had he never said something till now? Why had he never told me till it was too late? I could have done with a father, but I’d always thought him just my master. I’d thought I was a servant, and a feckless one at that. I hadn’t realized that love was part of the arrangement.

  I wasn’t even sure I believed his tale. I wanted to. But what if it was just another story, one to make sure I stayed by him, nursing him? That’s the trouble with a story-spinner. You never know what’s real and what’s made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can’t stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

  And as I sat there, thinking on all this, I started to notice how quiet it was in the room. How even the rusty saw of Myrddin’s breath had stopped. And I looked at him, and I saw that death had stolen him away from me.

  I felt flat and quiet as the sand when the tide goes out. I knelt beside Myrddin and held his hand until it was quite cold, wishing my hard words of earlier could be unsaid. “I didn’t mean it,” I told him. “About the stories. They’ll last, even if nothing else does. They’ll be like a light in the dark, and they’ll burn as long as the dark lasts and go on out the far side of it into the morning.”

  Which I didn’t believe, but I thought his ghost might be lingering close by, and I didn’t want it to linger in a foul mood.

  Morning came. Snow on the hill-tops. I woke the boy Cadwy and told him what had happened, and together we set out to dig a grave for our master. In the overgrown gardens the dead grass was grey with frost, matted and shaggy like an old badger. The ground beneath was frozen stone-hard. I broke a spade on it, and blistered my hands on a mattock shaft, and didn’t make a scratch.

  So I carried Myrddin to the woods, which clustered closer to the house each year. Light as a linnet he was, with all the words gone out of him. I took him to the great old oak, the ancient oak which had stood outside his house before it was a house, before the Romans even came to Britain. Its trunk was hollow, and the deep loam inside had been sheltered from the winter winds and had not frozen. I used my hands and the broken spade to shovel it out. While Cadwy watched, I laid Myrddin inside, and wrapped my own cloak round him, and I piled the loam back over him, heaping it over him with my hands and whispering what prayers I knew.

  And there I left him, in the hollow oak. Littler trees will have grown up round it now, and the brambles tangled thick, and the nettles and the dock grown deep and green. And I suppose he lies there still, and will for ever.

  XLVIII

  That was the last I saw of Cadwy. He went home to his own people, to tell them about the girl who’d buried his master in a tree. Alone, I haunted that empty house like a ghost. The day was already dying. I hadn’t the heart to start out for Din Branoc. I found Myrddin’s old harp, and rubbed the mildew off it, and carved new pegs to replace the ones which had broken, and tuned the strings as best I could, and made it sing again, after its own crack-throated fashion. And that night, which was long and lonely and full of strange, small noises, I told over the
songs and stories I’d heard Myrddin tell, making sure each one was fixed firm in my memory like a stone in a wall. It was something to do, and at the sound of my voice and the harp the ghosts of the place drew back and left me safe.

  “Myrddin!”

  I came awake thinking the voice was in my head. Just my dreams forming words out of the roaring rush of the trees. The creak of branches. It was full daylight. I’d fallen asleep with the harp on my knees by the dying-down fire.

  “Myrddin!” A shout outside, louder than the wind in the oak-tops. Other sounds too. Harness-jingle. Putter-thud of hooves, like fingers tapped on the drum-skin of the earth. I stumbled to the gateway, rubbing sleep from my eyes. Arthur and a half-dozen of his men waited outside the house on their white horses, looking warily at the talismans and spells Myrddin had hung about the entrance. Strange, I thought; these men would charge shield-walls, but not one would venture in through Myrddin’s flimsy fence of charms.

  Arthur rode closer when he saw me. Came and looked down at me through a smoke of hot horse-breath. He was all in armour, fish-scales gleaming, Caliburn at his side. His eyes considered me through the gap between the cheek-guards of his helmet. Either he didn’t recognize me as his wife’s companion or he didn’t care. He said, “Where’s Myrddin, girl?”

  “Myrddin is gone, my lord,” I said.

  “Gone? I need him.”

  “He is dead.”

  Arthur looked hard at me a moment, then sniffed and started to turn his horse away. “I was afraid so.”

  Beyond him, on the road, a whole line of riders was passing. Spear-points and shield-fittings shining like candle-flames as the sun came up out of the bare woods. Arthur started to ride back to them, and the men who’d left the road with him turned their horses and galloped away to join the rest. But Arthur, maybe thinking I had some of my master’s magic about me, hesitated, and looked back at me while his horse danced nervously.

  “Medrawt is coming,” he said. “We had word last night. We ride out to meet him.”

  I said nothing. It seemed to me that this was a strange time of year to make a war, with winter just closing its grip on the world. In Din Branoc they’d spoken as if Medrawt was raising an army and would wait till spring before he tried to overthrow his uncle. But then Medrawt had always been impatient. Medrawt couldn’t wait the months it would take to gather a proper warband round him. He’d attack with whatever men he could muster. I imagined him hurrying them towards Sulis, his face set in that look of furious longing I’d seen on it the night I first met him.

  If Arthur had been hoping for me to tell his fortune or weave a spell to help him, I disappointed him. He sniffed again – I think he had a cold – and kicked his horse and went off quick towards the road, galloping to the head of the passing column.

  I watched them go. I watched their banners swim through the morning mist and pass into the west. And then I ran back inside and hunted out my travelling clothes. Because I’d worked out, see, that if Medrawt’s band was coming to Sulis and Arthur’s band was riding out to meet him, one or other of them would be passing Din Branoc. And if Arthur found Peredur there he’d want him silenced before he could tell of Cei’s betrayal, and if Medrawt found him he’d press him to join his war-band, and either way it would end up with Peredur dead.

  Which is how people mostly seem to end up when I try to look after them.

  So I wasn’t going to let it happen this time.

  I put away Gwyna’s dress for the last time, and pulled on my worn old breeks and tunic and my master’s cloak, and saddled poor, patient Dewi and set off after Arthur’s band. It was midday. The sun had gone, hidden behind a lot of lead-grey clouds. More snow started falling, whitening the road and making the winter trees look even starker. It was bad weather for fighting in. I thought that if Arthur had had Myrddin with him Myrddin would have read the sky-signs and told him snow was coming, and he’d not have gone.

  Aiming to outpace the war-band, I turned Dewi off the miry roads and went over the heads of the downs. But I’d not gone more than halfway to Din Branoc when I heard a sound like a great wind down to my right where the road lay. I knew it too well, that sound, though I’d heard it only three times in my life. The bellowing of men, the clash and thud of weapons. The scream of a horse rising clear above it made Dewi’s ears go up like two knives.

  I reined him in and sat listening to the noise as it rose and fell, surging between the hills. Whatever was happening was happening out of my sight, beyond a spur of downland. I remembered the place: a ford in a gorse-speckled valley where the road from Sulis crossed a river. If Medrawt’s army had reached it then they must have passed through Din Branoc the day before. I hoped that Peredur had had the good sense to hide from them. But good sense and Peredur were not things that went together. I could see him taking on Medrawt’s whole war-band, sure that the lake-lady’s cup would protect him.

  I went west. A river barred my way, fat with autumn rain. I went north. A bog stretched across my path, too wet to pass. I wasted a while, searching for a crossing place. Itchy with worry. The battle noises grew fainter, rose up, died away. There was nothing for it but to risk the ford. Hope the battle there had finished, or at least moved off.

  I followed the line of the river, crashing through dead bracken, alders, seeking paths through masses of gorse. After a time I started to pass wounded men dragging themselves away from the fight. Some lay moveless, dying or already dead. Others sat with their heads hanging down, too hurt to even bother glancing up as I went by. One shouted out to me, challenging me or begging help, but I kicked Dewi to a canter and went past. Then there was only silence, and my own sharp breathing, and the beat of Dewi’s hooves. Snow coming down again. White patches on those drab ochre tangles of winter grass between the gorse. On the red sky, ravens wheeling.

  And me on my tired pony coming around that shoulder of the hills at last and riding out on to the battle-place of Camlann.

  XLIX

  The river made a turn there, bent round a low hillock that stood above the ford. All the land from the river to the hillock’s crown was sewn with spears and swords and fallen horses and dead men. Over my head the ravens went, their wings’ black fingers combing sighs out of the air. Others hopped about among the dead, walking with careful, prissy steps. Arrows jutted out of the grass at all angles, like last year’s thistles. On the slope of the hill a dying horse was struggling to stand up and falling back and struggling to stand up and falling back…

  I brought Dewi to a halt and climbed down off him. Don’t ask me why. It was a place that needed looking at, however much I didn’t want to. I went along the riverside, then up the hill, setting my boots down carefully on the patches of bare ground between the dead. The further I went, the harder it was to find ground that wasn’t squelchy with blood or covered with heaped-up bodies and fallen shields. Here and there men stirred, or moaned, or called out for God, or for their mothers. There was that shit-smell of ripped-open bodies. Two jackdaws squabbled over a drabble of gut, so blind with greed they didn’t see me till I was almost on them, when they took off with flat tearing wing-beats and indignant cries. Arthur’s dragon banner slapped at its staff, which poked sideways out of a snow-drift of dead white horses.

  “Myrddin!”

  It was the second time that day that voice had hailed me.

  “Myrddin!”

  Right at the hill’s top he was. Arthur himself. As soon as I saw him I knew that it was him I’d come here looking for. I’d wanted to see him dead. But he wasn’t. He was dragging himself across the smeared grass, reaching out towards me with one hand, parched voice cracking as he shouted at me.

  “Myrddin!”

  I suppose it was the cloak. The black hood I’d pulled up against the wind. And he probably couldn’t see me too well. One of his eyes was gone, and the other was covered with blood that had spilled out of a gash in his head. There wasn’t an inch of him had not been splashed with his own blood or some other man’s, and w
here a gleam of his fine scale armour did show through that showed red too, reflecting the fat red sun that was going down into the mists and flood-waters of the levels westward. There was a great ragged hole punched right through that armour of his. An ordinary man would have been dead long before, and even the Bear was failing, his strength slopping out of him into the grass.

  I went closer.

  “That girl,” he said. “She told me you were gone.”

  I swallowed, and wondered about making a run for it, back down the hill to Dewi. Arthur looked finished, but there was no telling with a man like him. He might take it amiss if I deserted him, or explained I wasn’t Myrddin. There was no shortage of spiky things laid round about that he might snatch up and hurl at me with his last strength.

  So I said, “I have come back.”

  He beckoned me close so I could hear the words that he hissed out through his clenched teeth. “Take Caliburn. Cast it into the waters.”

  The sword was in his hand. I took it from him. After all, it’s a woman’s job to tidy up after the men. Caliburn felt smaller than I’d remembered. Stickier, too. Arthur grunted at me to hurry.