'The pale sort, Derfel,' he said anxiously, 'that crumbles. Not the hard dark yellow stuff. I can't abide that hard dark yellow cheese.'

He was standing in the pit and peering earnestly at me with the cloak that had covered his body now hanging about his shoulders like a shawl.

'Lord?' I said in a tiny voice.

'Cheese, Derfel. Did you not hear me? I am hungry for cheese. We did have some. It was wrapped in linen. And where is my staff? A man lies down for a small sleep and immediately his staff is stolen. Is there no honesty left? It's a terrible world. No cheese, no honesty and no staff.'

'Lord!'

'Stop shouting at me, Derfel. I'm not deaf, just hungry'

'Oh, Lord!'

'Now you're weeping! I do hate blubbing. All I ask is a morsel of cheese and you start weeping like a child. Ah, there's my staff. Good.' He plucked it from beside Nimue and used it to hoist himself out of the pit. The other spearmen were awake now and gaping at him. Then Nimue stirred and I heard Ceinwyn gasp. 'I suppose, Derfel,' Merlin said as he began rummaging in the piled bundles to find his cheese, 'that you've landed us in a predicament? Surrounded, are we?'

'Yes, Lord.'

'Outnumbered?'

'Yes, Lord.'

'Dear me, Derfel, dear me. And you call yourself a lord of warriors? Cheese! Here it is. I knew we had some. Wonderful.'

I pointed a tremulous finger at the pit. 'The Cauldron, Lord.' I wanted to know whether the Cauldron had performed a miracle, but I was too confused with wonder and relief to be coherent.

'And a very nice Cauldron it is, Derfel. Capacious, deep, full of the qualities one wants in a cauldron.'

He bit a hunk of the cheese. 'I am famished!' He took another bite, then settled back against the rocks and beamed at us all. 'Outnumbered and surrounded! Well, well! Whatever next?' He crammed the last of the cheese into his mouth then brushed the crumbs from his hands. He bestowed a special smile on Ceinwyn, then held out a long arm for Nimue. 'All well?' he asked her.

'All well,' she said calmly as she settled into his embrace. She alone did not seem surprised by his appearance or by his evident health.

'Except that we're surrounded and outnumbered!' he said mockingly. 'What shall we do? Usually the best thing to do in an emergency is to sacrifice someone.' He peered expectantly about the stunned circle of men. His face had recovered its colour and all his old mischievous energy had returned. 'Derfel, perhaps?'

'Lord!' Ceinwyn protested.

'Lady! Not you! No, no, no, no, no. You've done enough.'

'No sacrifice, Lord,' Ceinwyn pleaded.

Merlin smiled. Nimue appeared to have gone to sleep in his arm, but for the rest of us there could be no more sleep. A spear clattered on the lower rocks and the sound made Merlin hold his staff out to me.

'Climb to the top, Derfel, and hold my staff to the west. To the west, remember, not the east. Try and do something right for a change, will you? Of course, if you want a job done properly then you should always do it yourself, but I don't want to wake Nimue. Off you go.'

I took the staff and clambered up the rocks to stand on the highest point of the knoll and there, following Merlin's instructions, I pointed it towards the distant sea.

'Don't prod with it!' Merlin called up to me. 'Point it! Feel its power! It isn't an ox goad, boy, it's a Druid's staff!'

I held the staff westward. Diwrnach's dark riders must have scented magic, for his own sorcerers suddenly howled and a pack of spearmen scuttled up the slope to hurl their weapons at me.

'Now,' Merlin called as the spears fell beneath me, 'give it power, Derfel, give it power!' I concentrated on the staff, but truly felt nothing, though Merlin seemed satisfied with my effort. 'Bring it down now,' he said, 'and get some rest. We have a fair walk to make in the morning. Is there any more cheese? I could eat a sackful!'

We lay in the cold. Merlin would not discuss the Cauldron, nor his illness, but I sensed the change of mood in all of us. We were suddenly hopeful. We would live, and it was Ceinwyn who first saw the way of our salvation. She prodded my side, then pointed up at the moon, and I saw that what had been a clear clean shape was now hazed by a torque of shimmering mist. That misty torque looked like a ring of powdered gems, so hard and bright did those tiny points shine about the full silver moon. Merlin did not care about the moon, he was still talking of cheese. 'There used to be a woman in Dun Seilo who made the most wonderful soft cheese,' he told us. 'She wrapped it in nettle leaves as I remember, then insisted it spent six months sitting in a wooden bowl that had been steeped in ram's urine. Ram's urine! Some people do possess the most absurd superst.i.tions, but all the same her cheese was very good.' He chuckled. 'She made her poor husband collect the urine. How did he do it? I never liked to ask. Grasp it by the horns and tickle, do you think? Or maybe he used his own and never told her. I would have done. Is it getting warmer, do you think?'

The glittering ice mist about the moon had faded, but the fading had not made the moon's edges any duller. Instead they were being diffused by a gentler mist that was now being wafted on a small west wind that was indeed warmer. The bright stars were hazed, the crystal frost on the rocks was melting to a wet sheen and we had all stopped shivering. Our spear-points could be touched again. A fog was forming.

'The Dumnonians, of course, insist their cheese is the very finest in Britain,' Merlin said earnestly, as though none of us had anything better to do than listen to a lecture on cheese, 'and, admittedly, it can be good, but too often it is hard. I remember Uther broke a tooth once on a piece of cheese from a farm near Lindinis. Clean in two! Poor fellow was in pain for weeks. He never could abide having a tooth pulled. He insisted I work some magic, but it's a strange thing, magic never works with teeth. Eyes, yes, bowels, every time, and even brains sometimes, though there's few enough of those in Britain these days. But teeth? Never. I must work on that problem when I have some time. Mind you, I do enjoy pulling teeth.' He smiled extravagantly, showing off his own rare set of perfect teeth. Arthur was similarly blessed, but the rest of us were plagued by toothaches.

I looked up to see that the topmost rocks were almost hidden by the fog that was thickening by the minute. It was a Druid's fog, brewing dense and white beneath the moon and smothering the whole of Ynys Mon in its thick cloak of vapour.

'In Siluria,' Merlin said, 'they serve a pale bowl of slops and call it cheese. It's so repellent that even the mice won't eat it, but what else does one expect of Siluria? Was there something you wished to say to me, Derfel? You look excited.'

'Fog, Lord,' I said.

'What an observant man you are,' he said admiringly. 'So perhaps you would pull the Cauldron from the pit? It's time we went, Derfel, it's time we went.'

And so we did.

PART TWO.

The Broken War

'No!' Igraine protested, when she looked at the last parchment in the pile.

'No?' I asked politely.

'You can't just leave the story there!' she said. 'What happened?'

'We walked out, of course.'

'Oh, Derfel!' She threw the parchment down. 'There are scullions who know how to tell a tale better than you! Tell me how it happened, I insist!'

So I told her.

It was near dawn and the fog lay like a fleece so thick that when we managed to descend the rocks and a.s.semble on the gra.s.s at the top of the knoll we were in danger of losing each other by taking just one step. Merlin made us form a chain, each person holding the cloak of the one in front, and then, with the Cauldron tied to my back, we crept downhill in single file. Merlin, with his staff held at arm's length, led us clean through the surrounding Bloodshields and not one of them saw us. I could hear Diwrnach shouting at them, telling them to spread out, but the dark riders knew it was a wizard's fog and they preferred to stay close by their fires; yet those first few steps were the most dangerous part of our journey.

'But the stories,' my Queen insisted, 'say that you all disappeared. Diwrnach's men claimed that you flew off the island. It's a famous story! My mother told it to me. You can't just say that you walked away!'

'But we did,' I said.

'Derfel!' she reprimanded me.

'We neither disappeared,' I said patiently, 'nor did we fly, whatever your mother might have told you.'

'So what happened then?' she asked, still disappointed in my pedestrian version of the tale. We walked for hours, following Nimue who possessed an uncanny ability to find her wav in darkness or fog. It was Nimue who had led my war-band on the night before Lugg Vale, and now, in that thick winter fog in Ynys Mon, she led us to one of the great gra.s.sy hummocks that had been made by the Old People. Merlin knew the place, indeed he claimed to have slept there years before, and he ordered three of my men to pull away the stones that blocked the entrance which lay between two curving banks of gra.s.sy earth that jutted out like horns. Then, one by one, on our hands and knees, we crawled into the mound's black centre.

The mound was a grave and it had been made by piling huge rocks to make a central pa.s.sageway off which branched six smaller chambers, and when the whole thing was done the Old People had roofed the corridor and chambers with stone slabs, then piled earth above the stones. They did not burn their dead as we did, or leave them in the cold earth like Christians, but placed them in the stone chambers where they still lay, each with treasures: horn cups, deer antlers, stone spearheads, flint knives, a bronze dish and a necklace of precious pieces of jet that were strung on a decayed thread of sinew. Merlin insisted we should not disturb the dead for we were their guests, and we huddled together in the central pa.s.sage and left the bone-chambers alone. We sang songs and told tales. Merlin told us how the Old People had been the guardians of Britain before the British came and there were places, he said, where they still lived. He had been to those deep lost valleys in the wilds and had learned some of their magic. He told us how they would take the first lamb born in the year, bind it in wicker and bury it in a pasture to ensure that the other lambs would be born healthy and strong.

'We still do that,' said Issa.

'Because your ancestors learned from the Old People,' Merlin said.

'In Benoic,' Galahad said, 'we used to take the skin of the first lamb and nail it to a tree.'

'That works too.' Merlin's voice echoed in the cool, dark pa.s.sage.

'Poor lambs,' Ceinwyn said, and everyone laughed.

The fog lifted, but deep in the mound we had little sense of night or day except when we unblocked the entrance so that some of us could creep out. We had to do that from time to time if we were not to live in our own dung, and if it was daylight when we pulled down the stones then we would hide between the mound's earth horns and watch the dark riders searching the fields, caves, moors, rocks, cabins and small woods of wind-bent trees. They searched for five long days, and in that time we ate the last sc.r.a.ps of our food and drank the water that seeped down through the mound, but at last Diwrnach decided that our magic was superior to his and abandoned his search. We waited two more days to make sure he was not trying to entice us out of our hiding place, and then, at last, we left. We added gold to the treasures of the dead as payment of rent, we blocked the entrance behind us, then walked eastwards under a wintry sun. Once at the coast we used our swords to commandeer two fishing boats and so sailed away from the sacred isle. We went east, and as long as I live I shall remember the sun glinting from the Cauldron's golden ornaments and thick silver belly as the ragged sails dragged us to safety. We made a song as we sailed, the Song of the Cauldron, and even to this day it is sometimes sung, though it is a poor thing compared with the songs of the bards. We landed in Cornovia and from there walked south across Elmet into friendly Powys. 'And that, my Lady,' I concluded, 'is why all the tales say that Merlin vanished.'

Igraine frowned. 'Didn't the dark riders search the mound?'

'Twice,' I said, 'but they didn't know the entrance could be unblocked, or else they feared the spirits of the dead inside. And Merlin, of course, had woven us a charm of concealment.'

'I wish you had flown away,' she grumbled. 'It would make a much better tale.' She sighed for that lost dream. 'But the story of the Cauldron does not end there, does it?'

'Alas, no.'

'So . . .'

'So I will tell it in its proper place,' I interrupted her.

She pouted. Today she is wearing her cloak of grey wool edged with otter fur that makes her look so pretty. She is still not pregnant, which makes me think that either she is not destined to have children or else her husband, King Brochvael, is spending too much time with his mistress, Nwylle. It is cold today, and the wind gusts at my window and tugs at the small flames in the hearth that is big enough to hold a fire ten times the size of the one Bishop Sansum allows me. I can hear the saint scolding Brother Arun, who is our monastery's cook. The gruel was too hot this morning and scalded St Tudwal's tongue. Tudwal is a child in our monastery, the Bishop's close companion in Christ Jesus, and last year the Bishop declared Tudwal to be a saint. The devil sets many snares in the path of true faith.

'So it was you and Ceinwyn,' Igraine accuses me.

'Was what?' I asked.

'You were her lover,' Igraine said.

'For life, Lady,' I confessed.

'And you never married?'

'Never. She took her oath, remember?'

'But nor did she split in two with a baby,' Igraine said.

'The third child almost killed her,' I said, 'but the others were much easier.'

Igraine was crouching by the fire, holding her pale hands to its pathetic flames. 'You are lucky, Derfel.'

'I am?'

'To have known a love like that.' She looked wistful. The Queen is no older than Ceinwyn when I first knew her, and, like Ceinwyn, Igraine is beautiful and deserves a love fit for a bard's song.

'I was lucky,' I admitted. Outside my window Brother Maelgwyn is finishing the monastery's log pile, splitting the trunks with a maul and hammer and singing as he goes about his business. His song tells the love story of Rhydderch and Morag, which means he will be reprimanded as soon as St Sansum has finished humiliating Arun. We are brothers in Christ, the saint tells us, united in love.

'Wasn't Cuneglas angry with his sister for running away with you?' Igraine asks me. 'Not even a bit?'

'Not in the least,' I said. 'He wanted us to move back to Caer Sws, but we both liked it in Cwm Isaf. And Ceinwyn never really liked her sister-in-law. h.e.l.ledd was a grumbler, you see, and she had two aunts who were very tart. They all disapproved of Ceinwyn, and they were the ones who started all the stories of scandal, but we were never scandalous.' I paused, remembering those early days. 'Most people were very kind, in fact,' I went on. 'In Powys, you see, there was still some resentment about Lugg Vale. Too many people had lost fathers, brothers and husbands, and Ceinwyn's defiance was a kind of recompense to them. They enjoyed seeing Arthur and Lancelot embarra.s.sed, so other than h.e.l.ledd and her ghastly aunts, no one was unkind to us.'

'And Lancelot didn't fight you for her?' asked Igraine, shocked.

'I wish he had,' I said drily. 'I would have enjoyed that.'

'And Ceinwyn just made up her own mind?' Igraine asked, astonished at the very thought of a woman daring to do such a thing. She stood and walked to the window where she listened for a while as Maelgwyn sang. 'Poor Gwenhwyvach,' she said suddenly. 'You make her sound very plain and plump and dull.'

'She was all of those things, alas.'

'Not everyone can be beautiful,' she said, with the a.s.surance of one who was.

'No,' I agreed, 'but you do not want tales of the commonplace. You want Arthur's Britain to be livid with pa.s.sion and I could feel no pa.s.sion for Gwenhwyvach. You cannot command love, Lady, only beauty or l.u.s.t does that. Do you want the world to be fair? Then just imagine a world with no kings, no queens, no lords, no pa.s.sion and no magic. You would want to live in such a dull world?'

'That has nothing to do with beauty,' Igraine protested.

'It has everything to do with beauty. What is your rank but the accident of your birth? And what is your beauty but another accident? If the G.o.ds,' I paused and corrected myself, 'if G.o.d wanted us to be equal then he would have made us equal, and if we were all the same, where would your romance be?'

She abandoned the argument. 'Do you believe in magic, Brother Derfel?' she challenged me instead. I thought about it. 'Yes,' I said. 'And even as Christians, we can believe in it. What else are the miracles, but magic?'

'And Merlin could really make a fog?'

I frowned. 'Everything Merlin did, my Lady, had another explanation. Fogs do come from the sea, and lost things are found every day.'

'And the dead come to life?'

'Lazarus did,' I said, 'and so did our Saviour.' I crossed myself.

Igraine dutifully made the sign of the cross. 'But did Merlin rise from the dead?' she demanded.

'I don't know that he was dead,' I said carefully.

'But Ceinwyn was certain?'

'Till her dying day, Lady'

Igraine twisted her gown's braided belt in her fingers. 'But wasn't that the Cauldron's magic? That it could restore life?'

'So we are told.'

'And surely Ceinwyn's discovery of the Cauldron was magic,' Igraine said.

'Perhaps,' I said, 'but maybe it was just common sense. Merlin had spent months discovering every stray memory about Ynys Mon. He knew where the Druids had their sacred centre, and that was beside Llyn Cerrig Bach, and Ceinwyn merely led us to the nearest place where the Cauldron could be safely hidden. She did have her dream, though.'