Excalibur Read online

  ‘I did ask you earlier,’ I said patiently, ‘and you ignored me.’

  ‘It’s my hearing, Derfel. Quite gone.’ He banged an ear. ‘Deaf as a bucket. It’s age, Derfel, sheer old age. I decay visibly.’

  He did nothing of the sort. He looked better now than he had for a long time and his hearing, I am sure, was as acute as his sight – and that, despite his eighty or more years, was still as sharp as a hawk’s. Merlin did not decay but seemed to have a new energy, one brought to him by the Treasures of Britain. Those thirteen Treasures were old, old as Britain, and for centuries they had been lost, but Merlin had at last succeeded in finding them. The power of the Treasures was to summon the ancient Gods back to Britain, a power that had never been tested, but now, in the year of Dumnonia’s turmoil, Merlin would use them to work a great magic.

  I had sought Merlin on the day I took Guinevere to Ynys Wydryn. It was a day of hard rain and I had climbed the Tor, half expecting to find Merlin on its summit, but discovered the hilltop empty and sad. Merlin had once possessed a great hall on the Tor with a dream tower attached to it, but the hall had been burned. I had stood amidst the Tor’s ruin and felt a great desolation. Arthur, my friend, was hurt. Ceinwyn, my woman, was far away in Powys. Morwenna and Seren my two daughters, were with Ceinwyn, while Dian, my youngest, was in the Otherworld, despatched there by one of Lancelot’s swords. My friends were dead, or else far away. The Saxons were making ready to fight us in the new year, my house was ashes and my life seemed bleak. Maybe it was Guinevere’s sadness that had infected me, but that morning, on Ynys Wydryn’s rain-washed hill, I felt more alone than I had ever felt in all my life and so I knelt in the hall’s muddy ashes and prayed to Bel. I begged the God to save us and, like a child, I begged Bel for a sign that the Gods did care about us.

  That sign came a week later. Arthur had ridden eastwards to harry the Saxon frontier, but I had stayed at Caer Cadarn waiting for Ceinwyn and my daughters to come home. Some time in that week Merlin and his companion, Nimue, went to the great empty palace at nearby Lindinis. I had once lived there, guarding our King, Mordred, but when Mordred had come of age the palace had been given to Bishop Sansum as a monastery. Sansum’s monks had been evicted now, chased by vengeful spearmen from the great Roman halls so that the big palace stood empty.

  It was the local people who told us that the Druid was in the palace. They told stories of apparitions, of wonderful signs and of Gods walking in the night, and so I rode down to the palace, but found no sign of Merlin there. Two or three hundred people were camped outside the palace gates and they excitedly repeated the tales of night-time visions and, hearing them, my heart sank. Dumnonia had just endured the frenzy of a Christian rebellion fuelled by just such crazed superstition, and now it seemed the pagans were about to match the Christian madness. I pushed open the palace gates, crossed the big courtyard and strode through Lindinis’s empty halls. I called Merlin’s name, but there was no answer. I found a warm hearth in one of the kitchens, and evidence of another room recently swept, but nothing lived there except rats and mice.

  Yet all that day more folk gathered in Lindinis. They came from every part of Dumnonia and there was a pathetic hope on all their faces. They brought their crippled and their sick, and they waited patiently until the dusk when the palace gates were flung open and they could walk, limp, crawl or be carried into the palace’s outer courtyard. I could have sworn no one had been inside the vast building, but someone had opened the gates and lit great torches that illuminated the courtyard’s arcades.

  I joined the throng crowding into the courtyard. I was accompanied by Issa, my second-in-command, and the two of us stood draped in our long dark cloaks beside the gate. I judged the crowd to be country folk. They were poorly clothed and had the dark, pinched faces of those who must struggle to make a hard living from the soil, yet those faces were full of hope in the flaring torchlight. Arthur would have hated it, for he always resented giving supernatural hope to suffering people, but how this crowd needed hope! Women held up sick babies or pushed crippled children to the front, and all listened eagerly to the miraculous tales of Merlin’s apparitions. This was the third night of the marvels and by now so many people wanted to witness the miracles that not all could get into the courtyard. Some perched on the wall behind me and others crammed the gateway, but none encroached on the arcade that ran around three sides of the courtyard, for that pillared and sheltered walkway was protected by four spearmen who used their long weapons to keep the crowd at bay. The four warriors were Blackshields, Irish spearmen from Demetia, the kingdom of Oengus mac Airem, and I wondered what they were doing so far from home.

  The last daylight drained from the sky and bats flickered over the torches as the crowd settled on the flagstones to stare expectantly towards the palace’s main door that lay opposite the courtyard gate. From time to time a woman moaned aloud. Children cried and were hushed. The four spearmen crouched at the corners of the arcade.

  We waited. It seemed to me that we waited for hours and my mind was wandering, thinking of Ceinwyn and of my dead daughter Dian, when suddenly there was a great clash of iron inside the palace as though someone had struck a cauldron with a spear. The crowd gasped and some of the women stood and swayed in the torchlight. They waved their hands in the air and called on the Gods, but no apparitions appeared and the big palace doors stayed closed. I touched the iron in Hywelbane’s hilt, and the sword felt reassuring. The edge of hysteria in the crowd was unsettling, but not so unsettling as the very circumstance of the occasion, for I had never known Merlin to need an audience for his magic. Indeed he despised those Druids who gathered crowds. ‘Any trickster can impress halfwits,’ he liked to say, but here, tonight, it seemed as if he was the one who wanted to impress the halfwits. He had the crowd on edge, he had it moaning and swaying, and when the great metallic crack sounded again they rose to their feet and began shouting Merlin’s name.

  Then the palace doors swung open and the crowd slowly fell silent.

  For a few heartbeats the doorway was nothing but a black space, then a young warrior in the full panoply of battle walked out of the darkness to stand on the top step of the arcade.

  There was nothing magical about him, except that he was beautiful. There was no other word for him. In a world of twisted limbs, crippled legs, goitred necks, scarred faces and weary souls, this warrior was beautiful. He was tall, thin and golden-haired, and he had a serene face that could only be described as kind, even gentle. His eyes were a startling blue. He wore no helmet so that his hair, which was as long as a girl’s, hung straight down past his shoulders. He had a gleaming white breastplate, white greaves, and a white scabbard. The wargear looked expensive, and I wondered who he was. I thought I knew most of the warriors of Britain – at least those who could afford armour like this young man’s – but he was a stranger to me. He smiled at the crowd, then raised both his hands and motioned that they were to kneel.

  Issa and I stayed standing. Maybe it was our warrior’s arrogance, or perhaps we just wanted to see across the intervening heads.

  The long-haired warrior did not speak, but once the audience was down on its knees, he smiled his thanks at them and then walked around the arcade extinguishing the torches by taking them from their beckets and plunging them into water-filled barrels that stood ready. It was, I realized, a performance that had been carefully rehearsed. The courtyard became darker and darker until the only remaining light came from the two torches flanking the great palace door. There was little moon and the night was chilly dark.

  The white warrior stood between the last two torches. ‘Children of Britain,’ he said, and he had a voice to match his beauty, a gentle voice, full of warmth, ‘pray to your Gods! Within these walls are the Treasures of Britain and soon, very soon, their power will be unleashed, but now, so that you can see their power, we shall let the Gods speak to us.’ With that he extinguished the last two torches and the courtyard was suddenly dark.

  Nothing
happened. The crowd mumbled, calling on Bel and Gofannon and Grannos and Don to show their power. My skin crawled and I clutched Hywelbane’s hilt. Were the Gods circling us? I looked up to where a patch of stars glittered between the clouds and imagined the great Gods hovering in that upper air, and then Issa gasped and I looked down from the stars.

  And I too gasped.

  For a girl, hardly more than a child on the very edge of womanhood, had appeared in the dark. She was a delicate girl, lovely in her youth and graceful in her loveliness, and she was as naked as a newborn. She was slender, with small high breasts and long thighs, and in one hand she carried a bunch of lilies and in the other a narrow-bladed sword.

  And I just stared. For in the dark, the chill dark following the engulfment of the flames, the girl glowed. She actually glowed. She glistened with a shimmering white light. It was not a bright light, it did not dazzle, it was just there, like Stardust brushed onto her white skin. It was a scattered, powdery radiance that touched her body and legs and arms and hair, though not her face. The lilies glowed, and the radiance glistened on the long thin blade of her sword.

  The glowing girl walked the arcades. She seemed oblivious as the crowd in the courtyard held out their withered limbs and sick children. She ignored them, simply stepping delicately and lightly along the arcade with her shadowed face staring down at the stones. Her steps were feather light. She seemed self-absorbed, lost in her own dream, and the people moaned and called to her, but she did not look at them. She just walked on and the strange light glimmered on her body, and on her arms and legs, and on her long black hair that grew close about her face that was a black mask amidst the eerie glow, but somehow, instinctively perhaps, I sensed that her face was beautiful. She came close to where Issa and I were standing and there she suddenly lifted that jet black shadow of a face to stare in our direction. I smelt something that reminded me of the sea, and then, as suddenly as she had appeared, she vanished through a door and the crowd sighed.

  ‘What was it?’ Issa whispered to me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered. I was frightened. This was not madness, but something real, for I had seen it, but what was it? A Goddess? But why had I smelt the sea? ‘Maybe it was one of Manawydan’s spirits,’ I told Issa. Manawydan was the God of the sea, and surely his nymphs would have that salt smell about them.

  We waited a long time for the second apparition, and when it came it was far less impressive than the glowing sea nymph. A shape appeared on the palace roof, a black shape which slowly grew to be an armed, cloaked warrior in a monstrous helmet crested with the antlers of a great stag. The man was scarcely to be seen in the dark, but when a cloud slid from the moon we saw what he was and the crowd moaned as he stood above us with his arms outstretched and with his face hidden by the huge helmet’s cheekpieces. He carried a spear and a sword. He stood for a second, then he too vanished, though I could have sworn I heard a tile slip from the roof’s far side as he disappeared.

  Then, just as he went, the naked girl appeared again, only this time it seemed as if she had simply materialized on the arcade’s top step. One second there was darkness, then there was her long glowing body standing still and straight and shining. Again her face was in darkness so that it appeared as a shadow mask rimmed with her light-shot hair. She stood still for a few seconds, then did a slow dance, delicately pointing her toes as she stepped in an intricate pattern that circled and crossed the same spot of the arcade. She stared down as she danced. It seemed to me that the glistening unearthly light had been washed onto her skin, for I saw it was brighter in some places than others, but it was surely no human doing. Issa and I were on our knees now, for this had to be a sign from the Gods. It was light in darkness, beauty amidst the remnants. The nymph danced on, the light of her body slowly fading, and then, when she was only a hint of glistening loveliness in the arcade’s shadow, she stopped, spread her arms and legs wide to face us boldly, and then she vanished.

  A moment later two flaming torches were carried out from the palace. The crowd was shouting now, calling to their Gods and demanding to see Merlin, and at last he did appear from the palace entrance. The white warrior carried one of the flaming torches and one-eyed Nimue carried the second.

  Merlin came to the top step and there stood tall in his long white robe. He let the crowd go on calling. His grey beard, which fell almost to his waist, was plaited into strands that were wrapped in black ribbons, just as his long white hair was plaited and bound. He carried his black staff and, after a while, he lifted it as a sign that the crowd should be silent. ‘Did anything appear?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘Yes, yes!’ the crowd called back, and on Merlin’s old, clever, mischievous face there came a look of pleased surprise, as though he had not known what might have happened in the courtyard.

  He smiled, then stepped aside and beckoned with his free hand. Two small children, a boy and a girl, came from the palace carrying the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn. Most of the Treasures of Britain were small things, commonplace even, but the Cauldron was a genuine Treasure and, of all the thirteen, the one with the most power. It was a great silver bowl decorated with a golden tracery of warriors and beasts. The two children struggled with the Cauldron’s great weight, but managed to set it down beside the Druid. ‘I have the Treasures of Britain!’ Merlin announced, and the crowd sighed in response. ‘Soon, very soon,’ he went on, ‘the power of the Treasures will be unleashed. Britain will be restored. Our enemies will be broken!’ He paused to let the cheers echo in the courtyard. ‘You have seen the power of the Gods tonight, but what you have seen is a small thing, an insignificant thing. Soon all Britain will see, but if we are to summon the Gods, then I need your help.’

  The crowd shouted that he would have it and Merlin beamed approval at them. That benevolent smile made me suspicious. One part of me sensed that he was playing a game with these folk, but even Merlin, I told myself, could not make a girl glow in darkness. I had seen her, and I wanted to believe so badly, and the memory of that lissom, shining body convinced me that the Gods had not abandoned us.

  ‘You must come to Mai Dun!’ Merlin said sternly. ‘You must come for as long as you are able, and you must bring food. If you have weapons, you must bring them. At Mai Dun we shall work, and the work will be long and hard, but at Samain, when the dead walk, we shall summon the Gods together. You and I!’ He paused, then held the tip of his staff towards the crowd. The black pole wavered, as if it was searching for someone in the throng, then it settled on me. ‘Lord Derfel Cadarn!’ Merlin called.

  ‘Lord?’ I answered, embarrassed to be singled out from the crowd.

  ‘You will stay, Derfel. The rest of you go now. Go to your homes, for the Gods will not come again till Samain Eve. Go to your homes, see to your fields, then come to Mai Dun. Bring axes, bring food, and prepare to see your Gods in all their glory! Now, go! Go!’

  The crowd obediently went. Many stopped to touch my cloak, for I was one of the warriors who had fetched the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn from its hiding place on Ynys Mon and, to the pagans at least, that made me a hero. They touched Issa too, for he was another Warrior of the Cauldron, but when the crowd was gone he waited at the gate while I went to meet Merlin. I greeted him, but he brushed aside my enquiry as to his health, asking instead if I had enjoyed the evening’s strange happenings.

  ‘What was it?’ I asked.

  ‘What was what?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘The girl in the dark,’ I said.

  His eyes widened in mock astonishment. ‘She was here again, was she? How very interesting! Was it the girl with wings, or the one who shines? The shining girl! I have no idea who she is, Derfel. I cannot unriddle every mystery of this world. You have spent too long with Arthur and like him you believe that everything must have a commonplace explanation, but alas, the Gods rarely choose to make themselves clear. Would you be useful and carry the Cauldron inside?’

  I lifted the huge Cauldron and took it into the palace’
s pillared reception hall. When I had been there earlier in the day the room had been empty, but now there was a couch, a low table and four iron stands on which oil lamps stood. The young, handsome, white-armoured warrior, whose hair hung so long, smiled from the couch while Nimue, dressed in a shabby black robe, carried a lit taper to the lamps’ wicks. ‘This room was empty this afternoon,’ I said accusingly.

  ‘It must have seemed so to you,’ Merlin said airily, ‘but perhaps we simply chose not to show ourselves. Have you met the Prince Gawain?’ He gestured to the young man who stood and bowed to me in greeting. ‘Gawain is son of King Budic of Broceliande,’ Merlin introduced the Prince, ‘which makes him Arthur’s nephew.’

  ‘Lord Prince,’ I greeted Gawain. I had heard of Gawain, but had never met him. Broceliande was the British kingdom across the sea in Armorica and of late, as the Franks pressed hard on their frontier, visitors from that kingdom had been rare.

  ‘I am honoured to meet you, Lord Derfel,’ Gawain said courteously, ‘your fame has gone far from Britain.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Gawain,’ Merlin snapped. ‘Derfel’s fame hasn’t gone anywhere, except maybe to his fat head. Gawain is here to help me,’ he explained to me.

  ‘To do what?’ I asked.

  ‘Protect the Treasures, of course. He is a formidable spearman, or so I’m told. Is that true, Gawain? You’re formidable?’

  Gawain just smiled. He did not look very formidable, for he was still a very young man, maybe only fifteen or sixteen summers, and he did not yet need to shave. His long fair hair gave his face a girlish look, while his white armour, that I had earlier thought was so expensive, was now revealed to be nothing more than a coat of limewash painted on plain iron gear. If it had not been for his self-assurance and undeniable good looks, he would have been risible.

  ‘So what have you been doing since last we met?’ Merlin demanded of me, and it was then that I had told him of Guinevere and he had scoffed at my belief that she would be imprisoned for life. ‘Arthur is a halfwit,’ he insisted. ‘Guinevere may be clever, but he doesn’t need her. He needs something plain and stupid, something to keep his bed warm while he’s worrying about the Saxons.’ He sat on the couch and smiled as the two small children who had carried the Cauldron out to the courtyard now brought him a plate of bread and cheese with a flask of mead. ‘Supper!’ he said happily. ‘Do join me, Derfel, for we wish to talk to you. Sit! You will find the floor quite comfortable. Sit beside Nimue.’