Here Lies Arthur Read online

  Coming back down I found no sign of my master. Started for the beach already, one of the women told me. I went round the hall’s corner and saw Peredur Long-Knife’s daughter stood alone in a little sad garden which someone had planted in the lee of the wall: half a dozen salt-wizened shrubs, ringed by a fence of white driftwood shards like the ribs of drowned sailors stuck upright in the sandy soil.

  I could have gone by, but something drew me to her. I think I sensed that she was like me somehow. Set apart from other people. I wanted to know her, so I went towards her. She still didn’t notice me. She was shading her face with one hand while she stared at the distant shapes of the huntsmen riding up the green cliff-side into the furze.

  “Not seen their like?” I asked. I remembered how she’d stared and stared at them, the night before.

  She looked round, startled to find me there, then smiling. “Never! They’re so shiny! So beautiful! Is Arthur as brave as they say? He looks brave! When I saw you all coming up the hill yesterday I thought it was God’s own angels come down to earth…”

  “But weren’t your father and brothers fighting men?”

  “Were they? Were they? I never knew them, see. I never thought to ask. My mother doesn’t talk of them. They died before I was born. There used to be a few old men with spears to guard us against sea-raiders, when I was little. But when Saint Porroc came he made my mother send them away, and burn the spears. He said God would guard us.” Her eyes couldn’t settle on me; they kept being dragged back to the cliff-top, and the far-off brightness of the riders’ cloaks. “Saint Porroc says that men like Arthur are outcasts of God, and have no power over him. But Arthur just pushed him aside! I never saw anyone dare disobey the saint before.”

  I’d forgotten about Saint Porroc and his monks. They’d not seen fit to join us in the hall the night before, and by the time I woke they’d been hidden away in the chapel, which buzzed like a bee-skep with their angry-sounding prayers.

  “Who is he, this Porroc?” I asked.

  The girl looked shocked. “Saint Porroc!” she said earnestly. “He is a great man of God. He came here two summers back, with his disciples. We are so blessed that he chose our hall! He is very close to God, you see. He punishes his body in all manner of ways to keep himself godly. He flays himself with brambles, and he never lies down on a bed to sleep but rests himself upon a heap of fresh-cut nettles.”

  “You’ve seen him do that?”

  “No, no. But I heard him tell my mother.”

  I grinned. I’d already guessed, see, what kind of man this saint was. The Myrddin kind. Only difference was, he spun stories about himself, not Arthur.

  “He has nothing,” said the girl. “He urges my mother to be like him, so that she can come to God. He had her give away all our fine things, all her gold and silver that was left from Father’s time, and all the best wine from our cellars.”

  “Who’d she give them to?”

  She frowned, as if she’d never thought about that. “I don’t know. Saint Porroc and his monks took them. He said they’d use them for the glory of God.”

  I squinted along the side of the hall. Now that the hunters were gone, Saint Porroc’s monks were setting off to their work in the miserable straggle of fields below the rampart.

  “Saint Porroc doesn’t go with them?”

  “He’s too busy at his prayers.”

  “Ever been inside that church of his?”

  “Oh no! Saint Porroc would not permit it! He talks to God and angels there!”

  I thought about the wine-jars I’d seen in the ditch behind the chapel. I could guess what manner of angels Porroc chatted to, while his hangers-on were weeding their bean-rows.

  “Let’s look,” I said.

  “What?” The girl took a step backwards, so as not to be caught by the thunderbolt that must surely strike me down. Looked up nervously at the sky, but it stayed blue. I could see the wickedness of what I’d suggested excited her. Living the way she did, all holy and prim in this hard-scrat place, the thought of wickedness was as sweet to her as honey. But she said, “Oh, you mustn’t, no, no…”

  I didn’t listen. My year as a boy had primed me for mischief. My time with Myrddin had taught me enough that I wasn’t scared of men like Porroc. If Myrddin won’t let me go to the hunt, I thought, I’ll have a hunt of my own, and flush out Porroc’s secrets. I took my new friend by her hand. “What’s your name?”

  She hesitated a moment, and colour came to her cheeks, as if she was ashamed. “Peri,” she said.

  “Well, Peri,” I promised, “we’re going to give the Blessed Saint Porroc an angel to talk to.”

  XIII

  Peri had to act the angel, I decided. Angels have long hair, don’t they? And they’re tall, like she was, and graceful. Anyway, I wasn’t stripping off in front of her. Like Saint Porroc, I had secrets to keep.

  “But he’ll know me,” she said, when I explained what we were going to do.

  “He’s half blind,” I told her, remembering the way Porroc had screwed up his eyes to peer at us the day before. “Anyway, he’ll not see your face. You’ll have the sun at your back. The glory of God will shine about you.”

  “Don’t talk about God that way! Oh, we shouldn’t do this…”

  She was as scared as I’d been the day Myrddin made me play the part of the lake-woman. Her fright made me feel braver. I snatched the dress she’d taken off and stuffed it into Myrddin’s bag before she could change her mind. Slung the bag across my shoulders. Under her dress Peri wore a long, sleeveless, white shift. I untied her plait so her hair tumbled down. Dark, springy hair, gingery where the sunlight touched its edges. Hair I’d have envied, if I’d been still a girl. There was nothing else girlish about her. Her chest, under that white shift, was flat as a slate. Her jaw had a boyish squareness to it, too. But that fitted our purpose. Angels aren’t girls.

  They have wings, though. I fetched one of the gulls that hung along the rampart-fence and took its big white wings off with my knife. It didn’t take me long to lash them to my belt and loop it round under Peri’s arms, hiding it under her shift at the front. The wings were skewed, and at the back the belt and all the cordage showed, but from the front, with those white feathery points poking up over her shoulders, she looked… Well, angelic.

  We went down to the church, me keeping watch for passers-by, Peri hugging herself against the chill of the wind. She was giggling nervously with the thrill of it. This was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her, I suppose. I warned her to keep quiet. “Angels don’t giggle,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “The sort of angels Saint Porroc thinks about don’t giggle, and that’s the sort we’ve got to give him. Remember to keep quiet. He’ll know your voice. He’s never heard mine.”

  Saint Porroc had built his church without windows, but high on the wall above the door there was a hole to let smoke out and the light in. I scrambled up the roof and hung over the edge of the thatch to peer through it. Upside-down, I saw the chapel’s dim innards. An altar, with a swag of reddish cloth hung up behind it, and Porroc down on his knees in front of it.

  That surprised me. I’d thought him a play-actor, pure and simple. Thought to find him sitting in a soft chair, sipping wine. But maybe there was some truth in his religion after all. Maybe he really did think he was God’s servant. Maybe he’d been honest once, before he understood what a living he could make with his prayers and prostrations.

  For a moment then I felt the huge peril of what we were doing. What if God was looking down on me, and didn’t see the joke? But I couldn’t go back now without looking a fool in front of Peri, and I didn’t want that. I remembered what Myrddin had said. Porroc was a charlatan. God wouldn’t care what tricks we played on him.

  Down below me, my pretend angel stood outside the door, her long shadow stretching out from her bare feet. Her worried eyes upturned to mine. I nodded, and made faces at her till she gathered up her wits and n
erve and shoved the door open, like we’d agreed.

  Saint Porroc turned from his praying, and stuffed a cup of wine behind him somewhere. There was a scowl on his face as he swung round, but it dropped off him quick enough as the light from the open doorway hit his face.

  What did he see? A dazzle of sunlight, and in the heart of it a white robe, and the light shining through two spurts of white feathers. His face went empty and amazed. He tried to shade his eyes. And I leaned close to my spy-hole and shouted through my cupped hands, “Porroc!”

  There was a good echo in that high-roofed place. His name seemed to come at him from all around. He went down on his face, whimpering.

  “God’s lost his patience with you, Porroc!” I yelled. Not very angelic, but the best words I could find, and they seemed to work. Porroc writhed, a long black worm trying to burrow into the flagstone floor. “You love wine more than prayers,” I told him, “and you rob the poor widow who gives you shelter!”

  All that shouting was making me want to cough. I paused, swallowing, while Porroc wailed apologies at the floor.

  “Go from here, Porroc!” I yelled. “Punish your body! Go to the cold sea and clean yourself!”

  I looked down at Peri and hissed for her to move aside. She left the doorway and scrambled nimbly round the corner of the church. She’d barely made it when Saint Porroc shot out through the open door, like God’s own boot had kicked him up the arse. Wailing, he ran through the rampart gate and away down the board-road towards the beach, and his monks in their fields left their work and hurried after him.

  I slid down the thatch and flumped on the ground next to Peri. Coughing and laughing. Peri looked as if she still half expected God’s finger to reach down and rub us into the dirt like two gnats.

  “Come on,” I said, when my cough had gone. “He’s out of our way. Let’s see what he hides in that hole of his.”

  Peri shook her head. Her bravery was all used up. She was fumbling with the belt, trying to drag off her heretical wings.

  “Keep watch, then,” I ordered, and ran into the dark of the church. Black as a pit, it was, after that sunlight outside. No wonder poor old Porroc had been dazzled when the door burst open. His wine-cup rolled across the floor, and the curtain behind the altar flapped in the breeze. I lifted a corner and looked behind it. And there, of course, among the cobwebs, I found all the things he had persuaded Peri’s mother to part with in the interests of her immortal soul. Fine gold dishes, and bags that had a money-full look about them, and gold neck-rings and other jewellery in a well-made casket, and a whole crowd of those tall Gaulish wine jars in a corner, leaning together like drunks.

  I laughed at my own cleverness, and went back outside. Peri had managed to get the gull-wings off, but she was looking at her shift in dismay, and wouldn’t even listen to my story about Porroc’s treasure. There’d been some blood left in the wings, and somehow in working herself free of them she’d smeared some across the breast of her white shift.

  “The servants will see,” she cried. “They’ll tell my mother! Oh, what am I to do?”

  “Take it off,” I ordered.

  She seemed fearful. “Look away.”

  I turned my back on her, and busied myself tugging her bundled-up dress out of the bag I carried. Behind me I heard her hiss at the cold as she pulled the stained shift over her head. “My mother said I must never let anyone see me unclothed,” she said.

  What was it made me look round? Just mischief, maybe. Just a desire to go against whatever Peri’s godly mother said. Anyway, I glanced over my shoulder, and caught sight of her in her nakedness. Only a flash, like something glimpsed by lightning. But enough. It drove all thoughts of Saint Porroc and his plunder from my head and blew them away on the wind.

  I’d known all along there was something strange about her. I’d not known what it was that kept pulling my eyes back to her face, to the line of her jaw and the set of her features. But I saw it now, and once I had, I couldn’t imagine how I’d been so stupid not to see it sooner.

  Peri wasn’t a girl at all.

  I looked away quick, before Peri caught me peeking, and held the dress out behind me with one hand. When I turned, she’d pulled it on. It looked all wrong on her, now I knew her secret. His secret.

  “Why do you dress like that?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  Could it be he didn’t know? I saw nothing but honest confusion in those long-lashed eyes. No, this wasn’t some quick disguise. His mother hadn’t seen her guests coming and said, “Quickly, son, put on a gown, or they’ll have you for their war-band.” It takes time to grow your hair long enough to sit upon. It takes a better actor than Peri could ever be to mimic the movements of a well-born maiden; those downcast eyes and shy tilts of the head. This boy must have been treated as a girl his whole life long, and it had never occurred to him that he might be anything else.

  I waved the bloodied shift at him, lost for what to say. “I’ll wash this with my master’s stuff. Bring it to you later.”

  “What about Saint Porroc?”

  “My master Myrddin will know what to do with him.”

  We walked back towards the hall, side by side, a little apart. I said, “That name of yours…”

  “It’s Peredur,” said Peri. “My real name’s Peredur. “I know it’s a man’s name, but it was my father’s, and as there are no men left to take it, my mother said it must be mine.”

  “It’s a good name,” I said, and mumbled something about looking for my master, and left him there. Hurried to the shore with my head full of questions. Why would Peredur’s mother do such a thing? And how long did she mean for her son to live as a girl?

  XIV

  Down on the shore where the grey waves broke, Saint Porroc was tumbling like driftwood in the cold white surf. His monks stood on the sand, calling out prayers and praising God for this new sign of their master’s holiness. I crunched past them along the top of a shingle bank towards a place beneath the cliffs where another black shape leant into the wind.

  Myrddin looked round sharply as I drew close. “You took long enough,” he said. “What mischief have you been making?”

  I didn’t want to tell him. I could imagine too well the storm that would break over me if he found out the trick I’d used to snare Saint Porroc. Anyway, I’d other things on my mind. “The widow’s daughter is a boy,” I said.

  “And it has taken you all this time to notice?” said Myrddin. “Have I taught you nothing? I don’t expect Arthur and his men to see more than the widow wants us to, but I didn’t think you’d be fooled.” He chuckled, kicking his way through the stinky hummocks of seaweed. “The lady must be as great a magician as I am, to work such a transformation.”

  “But this is different!” I blurted. “I’m not like Peredur! I’m just dressed as a boy. He really thinks he is a girl. She’s let him think it all his life!”

  Myrddin didn’t seem to be listening. He crouched beside a stone and traced a raised shape he found in it, a flinty whorl. “What is this?” he asked. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, master. It looks like a ram’s horn. Or a snail.”

  “A stone snail?” He shook his head. “The Creator is keeping secrets from us, Gwyn.”

  He looked up at me. He’d heard my question after all. “You can see the widow’s reasons, surely? Imagine being her. All her life sons have been dropping out of her belly and into battles. One after the next cut down, and then their father. And while she’s still stupid with the news of his death, she finds there’s one more child in her. If you were her, wouldn’t you do anything to stop this last lad from hurrying off to the same death as the others? Bring him up to know nothing of riding, weapons, hunting, any of the war-games young men play? Keep him safe at your side always?”

  “But it won’t work, will it?” I said. “Not for ever. He may fool people now, but once he grows a beard and his voice turns gruff, people will think it odd. Even he will notice that he’s not like
other girls! We should tell him the truth.”

  My master shook his head. “No, Gwyna.” (He still called me Gwyna sometimes, when we were alone, as if to remind me of what I really was.) “The only way she’ll keep that boy out of the wars is if we put an end to wars. Raise up one strong man who’ll stop this petty squabbling. Bring peace back, and in that peace boys will be able to grow to manhood without learning how to butcher one another, and men of wisdom will turn their minds to greater matters, such as snails entombed in sea-stones.”

  He frowned, looking back at the hall, considering Peredur as if he was another freak of nature; another stone snail. “Yes. That boy has a strange road ahead of him, but he must find his way alone.”

  We walked back along the beach. Porroc was still in the sea. “Saint Porroc has all the fine things of this place heaped up behind a curtain in his chapel,” I said.

  I felt Myrddin’s eyes on me. “And how do you come to know that?”

  I shrugged. Myrddin looked at me, and then at the hermit, bobbing half drowned in the breakers. There was a laugh in his voice. “Perhaps you have learned something from me after all…”

  When I got back to the hall that evening Peredur’s mother watched me nervously, as if I frightened her as much as Arthur himself. Peredur was a good daughter, and must have told her about the strange questions Myrddin’s boy had asked. Peredur did not join us that night to eat the venison that Arthur and his men brought back with them.

  Next morning, while I was saddling our horses, Arthur and a few of his men went into Saint Porroc’s chapel. The saint and his monks stood shouting curses at them, and warning them that Porroc had been sent a vision by the Lord only yesterday, and that the earth would open up and swallow Arthur shoulder deep if he defiled the hermit’s holy place. Arthur paid them no heed. He came out with armfuls of gold, and his men behind him the same. He said, “These things we shall take as tribute. Henceforward, this place is under our protection.”