Clash of Kings (27 page)

‘He intends to become a healer, and I’ve heard reports that his aptitude is considerable,’ Melvig muttered, his eyes following Myrddion as the boy served Eddius the only way he knew how, by lifting the crushing weight of courtesy from his stepfather’s shoulders and donning it himself.

‘Excellent!’ Bryn exclaimed, clapping Melvig on the back as if he was solely responsible for Myrddion’s apprenticeship. ‘Well, as a bastard and a Demon Seed, he could hardly inherit anything, could he?’

‘Hm!’ Melvig replied non-committally. ‘Sometimes, I long for the old days. I wonder if Olwyn’s soul will be reborn as her great-grandfather believed, now that we have given up the holy rites of beheading. As her eldest kin, I confess to you that I would have found it damned difficult to separate my Olwyn’s head from her body to allow her soul to escape. But Myrddion assures me that many different races now believe that the soul goes on a journey from the moment that breath ceases and life ends. He says, quite believably, that separating the neck bones serves no purpose for, if it were so, we Celts would be the only race who would find ourselves in the Otherworld. He has a way of explaining things that makes me wonder if perhaps he’s going to become the most brilliant and the best of my progeny.’

Melvig laughed, and Bryn joined him in a raucous, ironic statement on heredity and its pitfalls. Soft-footed as any cat, Myrddion appeared at Melvig’s elbow.

‘May I serve you, my lord? Wine, perhaps? I remember the one that Gran Olwyn always served you. It will take but a moment.’

‘I’ll have water, Myrddion, and a promise.’

‘My lord?’ Myrddion’s head was cocked sideways like a listening faun from one of the lifelike Roman statues that Melvig had once seen at Aquae Sulis.

‘I’m very old, Myrddion, too old at sixty to wish to live. I’ve lost most of my teeth, my hands can scarcely grip the reins and I ache night and day. But we live long in my family, so I pray that the goddess Don comes for me soon, as a good mother should.’

Myrddion paled a little at Melvig’s impiety in speaking the goddess’s name aloud, but he nodded his understanding of the pangs of old age.

‘I’d like to go to the pyre in the old way, boy, and without my head. Just to be certain!’

Both Myrddion and Bryn opened their eyes very wide with an unspoken question, causing Melvig to chuckle like the fractious, wicked old man that he was.

‘Well, I’d hate to be burned alive, and beheading rather solves the difficulty of any mistakes in diagnosis. Don’t look at me that way, Bryn. Don’t say that you haven’t wondered. All ageing men do! Besides, I want to be sure that my spirit isn’t stuck in my throat so I fail to reach the Otherworld. I’ve not always been a good person, not like my Olwyn!’

Myrddion swallowed convulsively and Melvig wondered if the boy would weep, but his clean, strong jaw hardened and those ebony-black eyes, so lustrous and long-lashed, raised themselves to impale Melvig’s with a fierce intelligence and understanding.

‘Aye, my lord! Few of us can claim the goodness of my Gran Olwyn.’

‘So it is agreed that you are to behead me when the time comes? I’d like it done properly, if you take my meaning. And neatly, too, so I don’t frighten my kin. Don’t fear that my sons will take this last request amiss. They’ve all been quite unhappy to think that they may have to separate my head from my body, so if you do it with the expertise of a healer, I know they’ll be relieved. I’ve endured in this world by looking back to the old ways, not forward to the new, because I’ve a feeling that our people’s dominance is coming to an end.’

‘You’re wrong, Grandfather. I can promise you that our people will stay on your soil for many thousands and thousands of years. Our race will suffer and will be driven into the high places, but we will always rule Dyfed, Gwynedd, Powys and the smaller states of the south until the end of time.’

Melvig’s jaw dropped. ‘How would you know the future, young sprig? Did you dream such pleasant nonsense?’

‘No, Grandfather, but I am the Demon Seed, remember? We monsters know things that other men cannot possibly guess.’ Myrddion grinned as he spoke, but Bryn recognised a thread of bitterness beneath the humour underlying the boy’s words. ‘I promise that I will do as you ask, provided your sons and grandsons don’t forbid me.’

When all the gathered mourners had paid their respects, Myrddion presented Olwyn’s children, three of them, aged nine to six. Each gave their mother their most precious objects, a fine leather belt with a silver buckle shaped like a fish, a small bow with three iron-tipped arrows, and a boat carved with such realism that Eddius kissed his youngest child as he watched him relinquish his most precious toy to his mother.

Then Eddius came forward with a crown of twisted hazel twigs given by the sacred tree and plaited to form a coronet. Within the network of wood, Eddius had woven what flowers the late autumn had to offer, with mistletoe, holly berries and wild gorse entwined around them. He had finished the rare and fragile offering with narrow chains of gold that had come to his house as part of Olwyn’s dowry. With tears pouring unchecked down his face, he lifted her head and placed the crown upon her hair. Then, in company with Melvig’s sons, he would have raised her coffin, but Myrddion stepped forward and looked earnestly into the eyes of the older man.

‘I ask that you allow me to speak and to present a gift to my grandmother, who is my mother by love.’

‘How dare you offer anything to my mother!’ Branwyn exclaimed in a flat, bitter voice. ‘You caused her death and it would be more appropriate if you were lying there instead of her. Any grave gift that comes from you will spoil and rot, desecrating my mother’s holy corpse.’

Taken aback, Myrddion responded by speaking directly to King Melvig. ‘Queen Rowena and Hengist, the Saxon captain of Vortigern’s guard, were appalled at the death of Princess Olwyn and counselled Vortigern to avoid blood-guilt by making reparation for his lapse of temper and honour. The High King was arrogant and cruel, and would have thrown my grandmother over her horse and sent her back to us in ignominy, but Queen Rowena begged him to reconsider his decision. So Vortigern offered an ornament of gold and pearls to the Mother and to Gran Ceridwen. Here it is, cleansed from his murderous hands.’ He held up the bangle with its large, grey pearl on the clasp. ‘Hengist gave this jewel to me, because he thought I’d know what to do with it. We think of the Saxons as cruel barbarians, but Princess Olwyn’s shroud is a gift from Queen Rowena herself and Hengist sent her back to us in a cart, an offering that was far more fitting than King Vortigern’s choice. What am I to do with the Pictish bangle, my lord? Would Ceridwen accept it, or would the Mother, whose name should not be spoken, accept it in her stead?’

‘Impious! Tainted!’ Branwyn hissed, and Melvig, who had been about to reject the insulting grave gift, paused. In the face of such spite and envy, he determined to support his great-grandson.

‘Olwyn would not care for a blood price, and would have insisted that her death was a stroke of bad fortune. But I say that it was no accident. Nor was Myrddion at fault, for my daughter
chose
to beg Vortigern for the life of her grandson. She would accept the bangle from his hands, but from no other. I declare the gift is outland, but not tainted, and Myrddion may place it among my daughter’s grave gifts. I also aver that King Vortigern is to blame for my daughter’s death and, in recognition of his sin, I’ll no longer give him men or red gold as tribute.’

‘And the Ordovice tribe will follow your lead, King Melvig,’ Bryn murmured harshly. ‘Vortigern’s arrogance grows daily. He is a traitor, as fair Olwyn named him, because he invited the Saxons onto our soil.’

Myrddion bent over the coffin and slipped the bangle into the shroud near his grandmother’s hand. Then the coffin lid was pegged shut, sealing her away from the light.

Long were the songs sung in Olwyn’s honour, while wine and food flowed freely as if a great warrior had passed beyond the shades. Myrddion assisted Melvig and Eddius to their beds when their grief and the potent Spanish wine robbed them of their legs, but for himself he drank only water, in the full knowledge that there was nobody left to protect him from the inescapable realities of life without his grandmother.

So Olwyn was placed in the earth, and the stone workers raised a basalt cairn over her grave, with a smooth slab of marble pilfered from a Roman building pressed into new service as a base. Olwyn was rocked to sleep by the sound of the waves, and the sea grasses whispered to her gently as the wind stirred their sharp, dry fronds.

The day after the cairn was finished, Myrddion took his misery to the sea cliff and leaned his back against the basalt stones, which were pleasantly warm in the unseasonal sunshine. Lulled by his surroundings, he began to talk to his grandmother, telling her his thoughts about random chance, the small acts of spite that had led to her death and his feelings of impotence in the face of the vast sea of human error. He wept a little and explained his relationship with the brothers, Hengist and Horsa, and how he had come to see the northerners as something more than simple barbarians. He told her his dreams and his terrors but, most pressingly, he told her about his strange fits and the prophecies that froze the blood of his listeners.

Silently, like the predator that dwelled in her heart, Branwyn had crept up on her son, so she had heard his one-sided conversation with his grandmother. Her lips curled with contempt. How like the demon’s brat to try to avert attention from his part in Olwyn’s death with irrelevancies!

She interrupted his reverie. ‘You have poisoned blood, Demon Seed. Can you be surprised that you spew out fearful predictions to harry the minds and hearts of clean-blooded people? You should be dead, while my mother should be alive.’

Branwyn moved to stand between Myrddion and the sea. Her brown hair whipped around her face like serpents and the gloating in her expression made her son feel dizzy and sick. Her irises were an odd shade of yellowish-green in the sunlight, as if something foul lived behind her almond-shaped eyes. Her nose was pinched and narrow, while her mouth had lost its shapeliness as if her hatreds were about to spew out. As Myrddion’s gaze roved down her face, he recoiled. Then, as the sunlight struck his mother’s throat, he made a sickening discovery.

‘Why do you wear Olwyn’s priestess necklace? You don’t worship the Mother, nor set any store by Ceridwen’s knowledge. That gem should have gone into the ground with her, but all you gave her was oaten cakes.’

Myrddion spoke intemperately, for he could feel his temper rising dangerously until it almost choked him. Branwyn grimaced, but there was no humour in her smile.

‘Well, it’s certainly not for you, Demon Seed. Mother never loved me as much as she loved you. Her necklace simply redresses the imbalance of the scales. She owed it to me.’

‘Beware, woman!’ Myrddion’s voice was hoarse and deep, totally unlike his usual tenor. Had Branwyn truly believed in her heart of hearts that her son was a demon, she would have been more cautious when she heard that baritone voice and beheld his wildly staring eyes. ‘You must drink no milk, trust no hands from family and watch the eyes of a girl with red hair. If you fail in your caution, woman of grass, you will die.’

Branwyn laughed, but her outburst died away as she registered that her son was oblivious of the land and sea around them. ‘He came from the sea, the proud Roman with his black eyes and his hyacinth beauty. Did you think to trap him and make him yours? He was an eagle of the Eagles, a raptor born to kill, so be grateful that he only fathered a child upon you. He would have killed you, had you not amused him with your body.’

Branwyn moaned and bent at the waist as if she had been struck by a dreadful spasm of pain. Her clawing fingers gripped a fist-sized rock left over from the cairn, and she struck out at the boy – once, and then twice – until blood flew from the side of his head. She would have struck him again, but Eddius’s strong hand twisted her arms backward until the bloodied rock fell from her fingers.

‘What are you doing, woman? Are you crazed, or drunk? Do you court the executioner’s cord?’

Eddius had come to visit his wife and, by sheerest chance, had saved Myrddion’s life. Branwyn flew at him with her claws extended towards the older man’s eyes.

‘To me!’ Eddius roared at the top of his voice, and distant servants heard the cry that warned of attack, picked up their hoes, pitchforks and axes and came at the run. When they arrived at the sea cliff, they found their master binding the hands of a spitting, cursing Branwyn with part of her own long skirts. On the coarse grass beside Lady Olwyn’s cairn, the Demon Seed lay pale, unconscious and bloodied.

‘Oh, shite!’ one sturdy peasant muttered under his breath. The ways of the nobility were very strange, but a mother trying to murder her son with a rock was a new sin to him.

‘Save your cursing, man, and run for the healer. I’ll expect your legs to move faster than your tongue. And you.’ Eddius pointed at two sturdy men armed with pitchforks. ‘Tie the lady’s cloak around your forks to make a stretcher so you can move my boy back to the villa. Hurry, for the Lady Olwyn will place a curse upon us all if her grandson should die.’

The servants scurried to obey, and Eddius ordered two large servants to carry Lady Branwyn back to her room and lock her in. ‘Warn her husband, Maelgwr, that he will face Melvig’s justice if he frees her.’

As the men moved Myrddion, his limbs were so flaccid and his face was so unnaturally pale that Eddius was fearful for the boy’s life. His scalp bled freely, his white forelock was scarlet and his tunic was wet with blood. Eddius loved Myrddion only slightly less than his own strong sons, and in ten years he had never seen any serious flaws in Myrddion’s nature that suggested to him that the child deserved his reputation as a demon’s seed. Privately, Eddius believed that Branwyn had lied about her son’s conception. Many other women had used deception in the same circumstances, eager to save their reputations. Branwyn had proved to be neither likeable nor kind, and underlying his fear for Myrddion’s safety Eddius felt a savage desire to see justice meted out to the daughter who had made Olwyn bitterly unhappy for so many years.