'Well, I don't. I want you as Mordred's guardian.'

I walked with that disappointment for a few paces. 'Siluria may not like being divided,' I said.

'Siluria will do as it's told,' Arthur said firmly, 'and you and Ceinwyn will live in Mordred's palace in Dumnonia.'

'If you say so, Lord.' I was suddenly reluctant to abandon Cwm Isal's humbler pleasures.

'Cheer up, Derfel!' Arthur said. 'I'm not a King, why should you be one?'

'It was not the loss of a kingdom I regret. Lord, but the addition of a King to my household.'

'You'll manage him, Derfel, you manage everything.'

Next day we divided the army. Sagramor had already left the ranks, leading his spearmen to guard the new frontier with Cerdic's kingdom, and now the rest of us took two separate roads. Arthur, Merlin, Tristan and Lancelot went south, while Cuneglas and Meurig went west towards their lands. I embraced Arthur and Tristan, then knelt for Merlin's blessing, which he gave benignly. He had regained some of his old energy during our march from London, but he could not hide the fact that his humiliation in the temple of Mithras had hit him hard. He might still possess the Cauldron, but his enemies possessed a strand of his beard and he would need all his magic to ward off their spells. He embraced me, I kissed Nimue, then I watched them walk away before I followed Cuneglas westward. I was going to Powys to find my Ceinwyn and I was travelling with a share of Aelle's gold, but even so it did not seem like a triumph. We had beaten Aelle and secured peace, but Cerdic and Lancelot had been the real winners of the campaign, not us.

That night we all rested in Corinium, but at midnight a storm woke me. The tempest was far away to the south, but such was the violence of the distant thunder and so vivid were the flashes of lightning that flickered on the walls of the courtyard where I slept that it woke me. Ailleann, Arthur's old mistress and the mother of his twins, had offered me shelter and she now came from her bed-chamber with a worried face. I wrapped my cloak around me and went with her to the town walls, where I found half my men already watching the distant turmoil. Cuneglas and Agricola were also standing on the ramparts, but not Meurig, for he refused to find any portents in the weather.

We all knew better. Storms are messages from the G.o.ds, and this storm was a tumultuous outburst. No rain fell on Corinium and no gale blew our cloaks, but far off to the south, somewhere in Dumnonia, the G.o.ds flayed the land. Lightning tore the dark clean out of the sky and stabbed its crooked daggers at the earth. Thunder rolled incessantly, outburst after outburst, and with every echoing clap the lightning flickered and dazzled and split its ragged fire through the shuddering night. Issa stood close beside me, his honest face lit by those distant spits of fire. 'Is someone dead?'

'We can't tell, Issa.'

'Are we cursed. Lord?' he asked.

'No,' I replied with a confidence I did not entirely feel.

'But I heard that Merlin had his beard cut. '

'A few hairs,' I said dismissively, 'nothing more. What of it?'

'If Merlin has no power, Lord, who does?'

'Merlin has power,' I tried to rea.s.sure him. And I had power, too, for soon I would be Mordred's champion and would live on a great estate. I would mould the child and Arthur would make the child's kingdom.

Yet still I worried about the thunder. And I would have worried more had I known what it meant. For disaster did come that night. We did not hear of it for three more days, but then at last we learned why the thunder had spoken and the lightning struck.

It had struck on the Tor, on Merlin's hall where the winds made moan about his hollow dream-tower. And there, in our hour of victory, the lightning had set the wooden tower alight and its flames had seared and leapt and howled into the night and in the morning, when the embers were being spattered and extinguished by the dying storm's rain, there were no Treasures left at Ynys Wydryn. There was no Cauldron in the ashes, only an emptiness at Dumnonia's fire-scarred heart. The new G.o.ds, it seemed, were fighting back. Or else the Silurian twins had worked a mighty charm on the cut braid of Merlin's beard, for the Cauldron was gone and the Treasures had vanished. And I went north to Ceinwyn.

PART THREE.

Camelot

'All the treasures burned?' Igraine asked me.

'Everything,' I said, 'disappeared.'

'Poor Merlin,' Igraine said. She has taken her usual place on my window-sill, though she is well wrapped against this day's cold by a thick cloak of beaver fur. And she needs it, for it is bitterly cold today. There were flurries of snow this morning, and the sky to the west is ominous with leaden clouds. 'I cannot stay long,' she had announced when she arrived and settled down to skim through the finished parchments, 'in case it snows.'

'It will snow. The berries are thick in the hedgerows and that always means a hard winter.'

'Old men say that every year,' Igraine observed tartly.

'When you're old,' I said, 'every winter is hard.'

'How old was Merlin?'

'At the time he lost the Cauldron? Very close to eighty years. But he lived for a long while after that.'

'But he never rebuilt his dream-tower?' Igraine asked.

'No.'

She sighed and pulled the rich cloak about her. 'I should like a dream-tower. I would so like to have a dream-tower.'

'Then have one built,' I said. 'You're a Queen. Give orders, make a fuss. It's quite simple; nothing but a four-sided tower with no roof and a platform halfway up. Once it's built no one but you can go inside, and the trick of it is to sleep on the platform and wait for the G.o.ds to send you messages. Merlin always said it was a horribly cold place to sleep in winter.'

'And the Cauldron,' Igraine guessed, 'had been hidden on the platform?'

'Yes.'

'But it wasn't burned, was it. Brother Derfel?' she insisted.

'The Cauldron's story goes on,' I admitted, 'but I won't tell it now.'

She stuck her tongue out at me. She is looking startlingly beautiful today. Perhaps it is the cold that has put the colour into her cheeks and the spark into her dark eyes, or maybe the beaver pelts suit her, but I suspect she is pregnant. I could always tell when Ceinwyn was with child, and Igraine shows that same surge of life. But Igraine has said nothing, so I will not ask her. She has prayed hard enough, G.o.d knows, for a child, and maybe our Christian G.o.d does hear prayers. We have nothing else to give us hope, for our own G.o.ds are dead, or fled, or careless of us.

'The bards,' Igraine said, and I knew from her tone that another of my shortcomings as a storyteller was about to be aired, 'say that the battle near London was terrible. They say Arthur fought all day.'

'Ten minutes,' I said dismissively.

'And they all declare that Lancelot saved him, arriving at the last moment with a hundred spearmen.'

'They all say that,' I said, 'because Lancelot's poets wrote the songs.'

She shook her head sadly. 'If this,' she said, slapping the big leather bag in which she carries the finished parchments back to the Caer, 'is the only record of Lancelot, Derfel, then what will people think? That the poets lie?'

'Who cares what people think?' I answered testily. 'And poets always lie. It's what they're paid to do. But you asked me for the truth, I tell it, and then you complain.'

' "Lancelot's warriors,"' she quoted, ' "spearmen so bold, Makers of widows and givers of gold. Slayers of Saxons, feared by the Sais..."'

'Do stop,' I interrupted her, 'please? I heard the song a week after it was written!'

'But if the songs lied,' she pleaded, 'why didn't Arthur protest?'

'Because he never cared about songs. Why should he? He was a warrior, not a bard, and so long as his men sang before battle he didn't care. And besides, he could never sing himself. He thought he had a voice, but Ceinwyn always said he sounded like a cow with wind.'

Igraine frowned. 'I still don't understand why Lancelot's making peace was so very bad.'

'It isn't difficult to understand,' I said. I slid off the stool and crossed to the hearth where I used a stick to pull some glowing embers from the small fire. I arranged six embers in a line on the floor, then split the row into two and four. 'The four embers,' I said, 'represent Aelle's forces. The two are Cerdic's. Now understand we could never have beaten the Saxons if all the embers had been together. We could not have defeated six, but we could beat four. Arthur planned to beat those four, then turn on the two, and that way we could have scoured Britain of the Sais. But by making peace, Lancelot increased Cerdic's power.' I added another ember to the two, so that four now faced a group of three, then shook the flame off the burning stick. 'We had weakened Aelle,' I explained, 'but we'd weakened ourselves too for we no longer had Lancelot's three hundred spearmen. They were pledged to peace. That increased Cerdic's power even more.' I pushed two of Aelle's embers into Cerdic's camp, dividing the line into five and two. 'So all we had done,' I said, 'was weaken Aelle and strengthen Cerdic. And that's what Lancelot's peacemaking achieved.'

'You are giving our Lady lessons in counting?' Sansum sidled into the room with a suspicious look on his face. 'And I thought you were composing a gospel,' he added slyly.

'The five loaves and two fishes,' Igraine said swiftly. 'Brother Derfel thought it might be five fishes and two loaves, but I'm sure I'm right, am I not, Lord Bishop?'

'My Lady is quite right,' Sansum said. 'And Brother Derfel is a poor Christian. How can such an ignorant man write a gospel for the Saxons?'

'Only with your loving support, Lord Bishop,' Igraine answered, 'and, of course, with my husband's support. Or shall I tell the King that you oppose him in this small thing?'

'You would be guilty of the grossest falsehood if you did,' Sansum lied to her, outmanoeuvred again by my clever Queen. 'I came to tell you, Lady, that your spearmen believe you should leave. The sky threatens more snow.'

She picked up the bag of parchments and gave me a smile. 'I shall see you when the snow has stopped, Brother Derfel.'

'I shall pray for that moment. Lady.'

She smiled again, then walked past the saint who half bowed as she went through the door, but once she had gone he straightened and stared at me. The tufts above his ears that made us call him the mouse-lord are white now, but age has not softened the saint. He can still bristle with vituperation and the pain that still afflicts him when he pa.s.ses urine only serves to make his temper worse. 'There is a special place in h.e.l.l, Brother Derfel,' he hissed at me, 'for the tellers of lies.'

'I shall pray for those poor souls, Lord,' I said, then turned from him and dipped this quill in ink to go on with my tale of Arthur, my warlord, my peace-maker and friend.

What followed were the glorious years. Igraine, who listens to the poets too much, calls them Camelot. We did not. They were the years of Arthur's best rule, the years when he shaped a country to his wishes and the years in which Dumnonia most closely matched his ideal of a nation at peace with itself and with its neighbours; but it is only by looking back that those years seem so much better than they were, and that is because the years that followed were so much worse. To hear the tales told at night-time hearths you would think we had made a whole new country in Britain, named it Camelot and peopled it with shining heroes, but the truth is that we simply ruled Dumnonia as best we could, we ruled it justly and we never called it Camelot. I did not even hear that name till two years ago. Camelot exists only in the poets'

dreams, while in our Dumnonia, even in those good years, the harvests still failed, the plagues still ravaged us and wars were still fought.

Ceinwyn came to Dumnonia and it was in Lindinis that our first child was born. It was a girl and we called her Morwenna after Ceinwyn's mother. She was born with black hair, but after a while it turned pale gold like her mother's. Lovely Morwenna.

Merlin was proved right about Guinevere, for as soon as Lancelot had established his new government in Venta, she declared herself tired of the brand-new palace at Lindinis. It was too damp, she said, and much too exposed to the wet winds coming off the swamps about Ynys Wydryn, and too cold in winter, and suddenly nothing would do except to move back to Uther's old Winter Palace at Durnovaria. But Durnovaria was almost as far from Venta as Lindinis, so Guinevere then persuaded Arthur that they needed to prepare a house for the distant day when Mordred became King and, by a King's right, demanded the Winter Palace's return, so Arthur let Guinevere make the choice. Arthur himself dreamed of a stout hall with a palisade, beast house and granaries, but Guinevere found a Roman villa just south of the fort of Yindocladia that lay, just as Merlin had foretold, on the frontier between Dumnonia and Lancelot's new Belgic kingdom. The villa was built on a hill above a creek of the sea and Guinevere called it her Sea Palace. She had a swarm of builders renovate the villa and fill it with all the statues that had once graced Lindinis. She even commandeered the mosaic floor from Lindinis's entrance hall. For a time Arthur worried that the Sea Palace was dangerously close to Cerdic's land, but Guinevere insisted the peace negotiated at London would last and Arthur, realizing how she loved the place, relented. He never cared what place he called home, for he rarely was at home. He liked to be on the move, always visiting some corner of Mordred's kingdom.

Mordred himself moved into the ransacked palace at Lindinis, and Ceinwyn and I had his guardianship and so lived there too, and with us were sixty spearmen, ten hors.e.m.e.n to carry messages, sixteen kitchen girls and twenty-eight house slaves. We had a steward, a chamberlain, a bard, two huntsmen, a mead-brewer, a falconer, a physician, a doorkeeper, a candleman and six cooks, and they all had slaves, and besides those house slaves there was a small army of other slaves who worked the land and pollarded the trees and kept the ditches drained. A small town grew around the palace, inhabited by potters and shoemakers and blacksmiths; the tradespeople who became rich off our business. It all seemed a long way from Cwm Isaf. Now we slept in a tiled chamber with plaster-smooth walls and pillared doorways. Our meals were taken in a feasting hall that could have seated a hundred, though as often as not we left it empty and ate in a small chamber that led directly from the kitchens for I never could abide food served cold when it was supposed to be hot. If it rained we could walk the covered arcade of the outer courtyard and thus stay dry, and in summer, when the sun beat hot on the tiles, there was a spring-fed pool in the inner courtyard where we could swim. None of it was ours, of course; this palace and its s.p.a.cious lands were the honours due to a king and all of them belonged to the six-year-old Mordred.

Ceinwyn was accustomed to luxury, if not on this lavish scale, but the constant presence of slaves and servants never embarra.s.sed her as it did me, and she discharged her duties with an efficient lack of fuss that kept the palace calm and happy. It was Ceinwyn who commanded the servants and supervised the kitchens and tallied the accounts, but I know she missed Cwm Isaf and still, of an evening, she would sometimes sit with her distaft and spin wool while we talked.

As often as not we talked of Mordred. Both of us had hoped that the tales of his mischief were exaggerations, but they were not, for if any child was wicked, it was Mordred. From the very first day when he came by ox-wagon from Culhwch's hall near Durnovaria and was lifted down into our courtyard, he misbehaved. I came to hate him, G.o.d help me. He was only a child and I hated him. The King was always small for his age, but, apart from his clubbed left foot, he was solidly built with hard muscles and little fat. His face was very round, but was disfigured by a strangely bulbous nose that made the poor child ugly, while his dark-brown hair was naturally curly and grew in two great clumps that jutted out on either side of a centre parting and made the other children in Lindinis call him Brush-head, though never to his face. He had strangely old eyes, for even at six years old they were guarded and suspicious, and they became no kinder as his face hardened into manhood. He was a clever boy, though he obstinately refused to learn his letters. The bard of our household, an earnest young man named Pyrlig, was responsible for teaching Mordred to read, to count, to sing, to play the harp, to name the G.o.ds and to learn the genealogy of his royal descent, but Mordred soon had Pyrlig's measure. 'He will do nothing, Lord!' Pyrlig complained to me. 'I give him parchment, he tears it, I give him a quill and he breaks it. I beat him and he bites me, look!' He held out a thin, flea-bitten wrist on which the marks of the royal teeth were red and sore.

I put Eachern, a tough little Irish spearman, into the schoolroom with orders to keep the King in order, and that worked well enough. One beating from Eachern persuaded the child he had met his match and so he sullenly submitted to the discipline, but still learned nothing. You could keep a child still, it seemed, but you could not make him learn. Mordred did try to frighten Eachern by telling him that when he became King he would take his revenge on the warrior for the frequent beatings, but Eachern just gave him another thrashing and promised that he would be back in Ireland by the time Mordred came of age.

'So if you want revenge, Lord King,' Eachern said, giving the boy another sharp blow, 'then bring your army to Ireland and we'll give you a proper grown-up whipping.'

Mordred was not simply a naughty boy - we could have coped with that - but positively wicked. His acts were designed to hurt, even to kill. Once, when he was ten, we found five adders in the dark cellar where we kept the vats of mead. No one but Mordred would have placed them there, and doubtless he did it in the hope that a slave or servant would be bitten. The cellar's cold had made the snakes sleepy and we killed them easily enough, but a month later a maidservant did die after eating mushrooms that we afterwards discovered were toadstools. No one knew who had made the subst.i.tution, but everyone believed it was Mordred. It was as if, Ceinwyn said, there was a calculating adult mind inside that pugnacious little body. She, I think, disliked him as much as I did, but she tried hard to be kind to the boy and she hated the beatings we all gave him. 'They just make him worse,' she admonished me.

'I fear so,' I admitted.

'Then why do it?'

I shrugged. 'Because if you try kindness he just takes advantage of it.' At the beginning, when Mordred had first come to Lindinis, I had promised myself that I would never hit the boy, but that high ambition had faded within days and by the end of the first year I only had to see his ugly, sullen, bulbous-nosed, brush-headed face and I wanted to put him over my knee and beat him b.l.o.o.d.y. And even Ceinwyn eventually struck him. She had not wanted to, but one day I heard her scream. Mordred had found a needle and was idly pushing it at Morwenna's scalp. He had just decided to see what would happen if he pushed the needle into one of the baby's eyes when Ceinwyn came running to see why her daughter cried. She plucked Mordred into the air and gave him such a blow that he went spinning halfway across the room. After that our children were never left to sleep alone, a servant was always at their side and Mordred had added Ceinwyn's name to the list of his enemies.

'He's simply evil,' Merlin explained to me. 'Surely you remember the night he was born?'

'Distinctly,' I said, for I, unlike Merlin, had been there.

'They let the Christians tend the birth bed, didn't they?' he asked me. 'And only summoned Morgan when everything was going wrong. What precautions did the Christians take?'

I shrugged. 'Prayers. I remember a crucifix.' I had not been in the birth-chamber, of course, for no man ever went into a birth-chamber, but I had watched from Caer Cadarn's ramparts.

'No wonder it all went wrong,' Merlin said. 'Prayers! What use are prayers against an evil spirit? There has to be urine on the door sill, iron in the bed, mugwort on the fire.' He shook his head sadly. 'A spirit got into the boy before Morgan could help him and that's why his foot is so twisted. The spirit was probably clinging onto the foot when it sensed Morgan's arrival.'

'So how do we get the spirit out?' I asked.

'With a sword through the wretched child's heart,' he said, smiling and leaning back in his chair.

'Please, Lord,' I insisted, 'how?'

Merlin shrugged. 'Old Balise reckoned it could be done by putting the possessed person into a bed between two virgins. All of them naked, of course.' He chuckled. 'Poor old Balise. He was a good Druid, but the overwhelming majority of his spells involved taking young girls' clothes off. The idea was that the spirit would prefer to be in a virgin, you see, so you offered it two virgins so that it would be confused about which one to choose, and the knack of it was to get them all out of the bed at the exact moment that the spirit had come out of the mad person and was still trying to decide which virgin it preferred, and just at that moment you dragged all three off the bed and tossed a firebrand onto the bed-straw. It was supposed to burn the spirit to smoke, you see, but it never made much sense to me. I confess I did try the technique once. I tried to cure a poor old fool called Malldyn, and all I achieved was one idiot still mad as a cuckoo, two terrified slave girls, and all three of them slightly scorched.' He sighed. 'We sent Malldyn to the Isle of the Dead. Best place for him. You could send Mordred there?'

The Isle of the Dead is where we sent our terrible mad. Nimue had been there once, and I had fetched her out of its horror. 'Arthur would never allow it,' I said.

'I suppose not. I'll try a charm for you, but I can't say I'm very hopeful.' Merlin lived with us now. He was an old man dying slowly, or so it seemed to us, for the energy had been sucked out of him by the fire that had consumed the Tor, and with the energy had gone his dreams of a.s.sembling the Treasures of Britain. All that was left now was a dry husk growing ever older. He sat for hours in the sun and in winter he hunched over the fire. He kept his Druid's tonsure, though he no longer plaited his beard, but just let it grow wild and white. He ate little, but was always ready to talk, though never about Dinas and Lavaine, nor about the dreadful moment when Cerdic had sliced off the plait of his beard. It was that violation, I decided, as much as the lightning strike on the Tor, that had sucked the life from Merlin, yet he did retain one tiny flickering sc.r.a.p of hope. He was convinced the Cauldron had not been burned, but had been stolen, and early in our stay at Lindinis he proved it to me in the garden. He built a mock tower of chopped firewood, placed a gold cup in its centre and a handful of tinder at its base, then ordered fire to be fetched from the kitchens.

Even Mordred behaved that afternoon. Fire always fascinated the King and he stared wide-eyed as the model tower blazed in the sunlight. The stacked logs collapsed into the centre, and still the flames leapt, and it was almost dark when Merlin fetched a gardener's rake and combed the ashes. He brought out the golden cup, no longer recognizable as a cup, misshapen and twisted as it was, but still gold. 'I reached the Tor the morning after the fire, Derfel,' he told me, 'and I searched and searched through the ashes. I had every scorched timber removed by hand, I sieved the cinders, I raked the remnants and I found no gold. Not one drop. The cauldron was taken, and the tower was set on fire. I suspect the Treasures were stolen at the same time, for they were all stored there except for the chariot and the other one.'

'What other one?'

For a moment he looked as if he would not answer, then he shrugged as if none if it mattered now.

'The sword of Rhydderch. You know it as Caledfwlch.' He was speaking of Arthur's sword, Excalibur.

'You gave it to him even though it's one of the Treasures?' I asked in astonishment.

'Why not? He's sworn to return it to me when I need it. He doesn't know it's the sword of Rhydderch, Derfel, and you must promise me not to tell him. He'll only do something stupid if he finds out, like melt it down to prove he isn't frightened of the G.o.ds. Arthur can be very obtuse at times, but he's the best ruler we have so I decided to give him a little extra secret power by letting him use Rhydderch's sword. He'd scoff if he knew, of course, but one day the blade will turn to flame and he won't scoff then.'

I wanted to know more about the sword, but he would not tell me. 'It doesn't matter now,' he said, 'it's all over. The Treasures are gone. Nimue will look for them, I suppose, but I'm too old, much too old.'

I hated to hear him say that. After all the effort that had gone into the collection of the Treasures he simply seemed to have abandoned them. Even the Cauldron, for which we had suffered the Dark Road, seemed not to matter any more. 'If the Treasures still exist, Lord,' I insisted, 'they can be found.'

He smiled indulgently. 'They will be found,' he said dismissively. 'Of course they'll be found.'

'Then why don't we look for them?'

He sighed as though my questions were a nuisance. 'Because they are hidden, Derfel, and their hiding place will be under a spell of concealment. I know that. I can sense it. So we have to wait until someone tries to use the Cauldron. When that happens, we'll know, for only I have the knowledge to use the Cauldron properly and if anyone else summons its powers they'll spill a horror across Britain.' He shrugged. 'We wait for the horror, Derfel, then we go to the heart of it and there we shall find the Cauldron.'

'So who do you think stole it?' I persisted.

He spread his hands to show ignorance. 'Lancelot's men? For Cerdic, probably. Or maybe for those two Silurian twins. I rather underestimated them, didn't I? Not that it matters now. Only time will tell who has it, Derfel, only time will tell. Wait for the horror to show, then we'll find it.' He seemed content to wait, and while he waited he told old tales and listened to news, though from time to time he would shuffle into his room that led off the outer courtyard and there he would work some charm, usually for Morwenna's sake. He still told fortunes, usually by spreading a layer of cold ashes on the courtyard's flagstones and letting a gra.s.s snake ripple its way through the dust so he could read its trail, but I noted that the fortunes were always bland and optimistic. He had no relish for the task. He did possess some power still, for when Morwenna caught a fever he made a charm of wool and beechnut sh.e.l.ls, then gave her a concoction made from crushed woodlice that took the fever clean away, but when Mordred was sick he would always devise spells to make the sickness worse, though the King never did weaken and die. 'The demon protects him,' Merlin explained, 'and these days I'm too weak to take on young demons.' He would lean back in his cushions and entice one of the cats onto his lap. He had always liked cats, and we had plenty in Lindinis. Merlin was happy enough in the palace. He and I were friends, he was pa.s.sionately fond of Ceinwyn and our growing family of daughters, and he was looked after by Gwlyddyn, Ralla and Caddwg, his old servants from the Tor. Gwlyddyn and Ralla's children grew up alongside ours and all of them were united against Mordred. By the time the King was twelve years old Ceinwyn had already given birth five times. All three of the girls lived, but both the boys died within a week of their births and Ceinwyn blamed Mordred's evil spirit for their deaths. 'It doesn't want other boys in the palace,' she said sadly, 'only girls.'

'Mordred will go soon,' I promised her, for I was counting the days to his fifteenth birthday when he would be acclaimed King.