Clash of Kings (29 page)

‘Like it or not, Myrddion, your grandmother’s grave was desecrated with your blood. Olwyn, my dear wife, chose your part over her own daughter’s, so how can you be silent when your mother tried to undo all that Olwyn died for?’

Myrddion hung his head, considered what Eddius had said and the inescapable logic of his reasoning, and then determined to wring a promise from King Melvig.

‘I will say nothing against my mother, my lord, unless you swear to me that she’ll not be harmed on my account. Regardless of what Branwyn has done, I cannot deliberately raise my hand against her. Provocation is not enough, for I believe she has undergone much suffering.’

‘Your sentiments do you honour, Myrddion, but I’d not kill my own granddaughter without very good reasons. I resent your attempt to bargain with me, young man, so don’t be an ingrate and explain what happened – immediately – before I lose my temper.’

Slowly and apologetically, Myrddion told his story, or at least what he remembered of it.

‘I lost my temper, your highness, when I saw Lady Branwyn wearing my grandmother’s fish necklace, the one she always wore in her role as priestess. My mother has never officiated at the festivals, nor expressed any interest in the ancient rites of the priestess. I told my mother that the necklace should have gone with Lady Olwyn into the grave.’

Melvig nodded. ‘True enough.’

Myrddion recognised the slow anger in Melvig’s eyes and suddenly felt ill and dislocated. ‘Doesn’t my mother have the right to face her accuser, my lord, and explain her reasons for her actions? Besides, I’m very tired.’

‘Is he likely to die overnight, healer?’ Melvig asked, only half in jest. ‘Because if I can be sure that he need not give a dying declaration, he is correct. The Lady Branwyn has the right to face her accuser, even if it is her own son. If his health is improving, we shall continue this questioning in the morning.’

‘Thank you, my lord. I believe a postponement would be the best solution for Myrddion’s recovery,’ Annwynn agreed. ‘Besides, Crusus has arrived with my patient’s broth.’

‘After we break our fast in the morning, I intend to get to the bottom of this distasteful mess. Be warned, young man, that if I discover that you taunted your mother and contributed to your injury, then I will be forced to punish you as well, regardless of your scruples.’

Eddius flinched. He made an immediate decision to keep silent about the discussion he had heard on the sea cliffs.

‘Sleep well, boy.’ The king gave a smile that touched his eyes. ‘But remember to wake up this time.’

After Eddius and Melvig had left Myrddion with Annwynn and his broth, the confused young man grimaced at his teacher through the beginnings of a painful headache.

‘I don’t understand, Annwynn. I thought that Grandfather was fond of me. Yet he’ll happily punish me for almost being brained by my Mother. What did I do wrong?’

Lamplight flickered gently on Annwynn’s plain, motherly face and softened the wrinkles and pouches that aged her so cruelly in pitiless sunlight. As Myrddion gazed up at her loving, gentle smile, he knew he was seeing an aspect of the Mother in Annwynn’s homely softness.

‘Melvig is an old man who is developing a sentimental fondness for you, which makes him feel both foolish and weak. To add to his guilt, he dislikes his granddaughter. I suspect he has always loathed her, so he will do everything he can to present an appearance of fairness, even to overlooking many of her faults. You do understand the contradictions of love, don’t you, sweetling?’

‘No,’ Myrddion whispered. ‘But I’ll think about them if my head ever stops aching.’

‘Finish your broth and drink all your milk. Then the lamp goes out and we’ll both drift off to sleep. If you feel unwell during the night, wake me. I’m only an arm’s length away.’

Once the lamp had been extinguished, and despite his determination to cure his headache, Myrddion found that the rest he craved escaped him. He knew he had only to call and Annwynn would give him a few small drops of poppy tincture to make him sleep. But to flee from pain seemed paltry after the days of dreaming that he had endured.

So he struggled to understand love and her twisted brother, hate. But life was new to Myrddion, and despite his sensitive nature he remained an immature boy whose life had scarcely begun. As he puzzled away at the passions that had led to his losses, he fell asleep without recognising the transition from wakefulness. He did not dream.

The day was well advanced when Melvig called his granddaughter to account for her actions in the old triclinium of her mother’s house. The dining couches had been torn out of the room decades earlier and replaced with a long table with bench seats. For today’s inquisition, the room was stripped bare, except for Melvig’s chair and a stool for Myrddion, who was still very weak and pale. All other witnesses and guests stood, including Branwyn, whose hands were now free, although Melvig had taken the precaution of placing two large warriors at her back. Bryn ap Synnel and his son had been persuaded to remain at the villa until after Melvig’s judgement was complete, for the Deceangli king valued Bryn’s opinion and experience.

Cold weather had finally arrived at Segontium, accompanied by sleet and rain that buffeted the villa walls and intruded chilly fingers through every aperture to penetrate the inner rooms. The hypocaust no longer functioned, so the tiled floors were cold, obliging servants and nobility alike to wear warm footwear and their thickest wools and furs. Melvig looked like a plump and bad-tempered badger whose pointed nose and crest of salt and pepper hair was just visible over a thick wolf pelt. The wind rattled the shutters and whined through any opening with a sound like the moaning of a lost child.

‘Your son insisted that you should have the opportunity to answer any accusations, granddaughter. You owe him a debt of gratitude for his sense of justice.’

Branwyn pressed her lips together defiantly and lifted her chin accusingly at her son.

‘Myrddion, last night when you awoke, you told me you were angry with Lady Branwyn because she was wearing the priestess’s necklace that my daughter wore when she officiated at religious ceremonies. Is that correct?’

‘Aye, lord. I was very angry that my mother hadn’t permitted Gran Olwyn to wear her chain into the Otherworld.’

Myrddion’s lips were pale and Melvig prayed the boy wouldn’t faint during the questioning. He swivelled his head towards his granddaughter and noted her clenched fists and wire-taut body, and the electrum necklace that still hung round her neck.

‘I await your response, Lady Branwyn. Myrddion was right: you have no right to touch the Mother’s necklace. If it didn’t go into the ground with Lady Olwyn, then it legitimately belongs to her sons rather than to you. You are guilty of theft.’

Branwyn clutched the central medallion with its leaping fish as if she dared the king to strip her of her birthright. ‘This necklace is part of women’s magic, and I protest that I am its rightful owner. I don’t accept the right of any man to claim it.’

‘I will overlook your impertinence just this once. You do not officiate at the festivals, nor do you show any sign of your mother’s piety. The necklace is not yours.’

‘Mother owed it to me for her years of neglect when she chose the Demon Seed over me.’

‘Stop whining and tell me how you stole it,’ Melvig demanded angrily. The old man detested excuses and had never known his granddaughter to take responsibility for her own actions.

‘I didn’t
steal
it. Mother kept her necklace in her clothes chest with her priestess robes. I took it because the necklace can only pass to a woman, and Mother had only sons. Except for me!’

The last sentence was pronounced triumphantly, as if her sex justified her sneaking into her dead mother’s room and ransacking her possessions. Her eyes were muddy with resentment and something peculiar that was repulsive to any right-thinking man. With a grimace of dislike, Eddius pushed aside several warriors who stood behind Myrddion and insisted that he should be permitted to speak.

‘Lord King, I had forgotten Olwyn’s electrum necklace, but she often told me that it had belonged to her mother’s family and had been passed down through the generations to devout priests or priestesses. In this case, the necklace was stolen, my lord. Olwyn would never have given the necklace to her daughter.’

His face flushed with distress, Eddius tried to explain the tangled and poisonous relationship that existed between mother and daughter.

‘Olwyn regretted the loss of her daughter, whom she had loved and protected from birth. Branwyn rejected both her son and her mother, choosing to hate her mother for an implied slight when she refused to kill the newly born boy. My wife explained to me how frightened she had been for both Branwyn and Myrddion, especially when her daughter tried to smother her baby at Caer Fyrddin not long after the birth. Olwyn would have cherished her daughter for ever, but Lady Branwyn chose to cut her mother out of her life. Olwyn regretted the fact that she never met her other grandchildren, for Branwyn kept them from us for selfish reasons that she has never explained.’

Branwyn shot a narrow glance at him that froze his blood. Steeling himself, he addressed her.

‘Don’t try to silence my tongue, woman. My wife owed you nothing, for she neither neglected nor rejected you. She loved you, but you rejected her as you rejected your son.’

‘Remove the necklace,’ Melvig ordered one of his warriors. ‘I will decide what to do with it shortly. But you may be very sure, granddaughter, that you will never possess it.’

Branwyn refused to assist in the removal of the wide electrum chain, and the warrior caught a lock of her hair in the mesh, giving her an opportunity to shriek and cry as if she had been deliberately harmed.

‘Hold your tongue, woman, except to explain yourself. I will decide the fate of the necklace.’ Melvig paused. ‘Now, we shall discuss more serious matters. Why did you try to kill your son?’ Branwyn remained sullenly silent. Only her eyes seemed alive, albeit trapped. ‘Myrddion, why did your mother try to kill you?’

Myrddion’s bandaged head drooped and he appeared to be ashamed. ‘Forgive me, my lord, if I seem confused, for I only remember fragments of speech and disjointed pictures. In the past few weeks, I have experienced waking dreams that I often can’t recall afterwards. Hengist, Vortigern’s captain, told me that I gave a prophecy after I told Vortigern that his tower was built on a pond filled with water and therefore would continue to fall. I prophesied to my mother – I know I did – something to do with a girl with red hair. And I remember seeing a long sweep of beach, a very young girl with dark hair and a man speaking Latin who was alien, cruel and beautiful. I can’t remember anything else.’

A collective shiver ran through the room as if cold fingers had toyed with the necks of the onlookers. Several warriors looked at Myrddion with startled, superstitious eyes, as if the boy they had known for years had suddenly sprouted two heads.

‘I told you he’s a demon’s seed,’ Branwyn moaned, and her eyes filled with hot tears. ‘He couldn’t possibly know, unless he’s a creature of the darkness. I tell you that he couldn’t know! Myrddion didn’t exist when the monster found me, so how could he see the beast so clearly? How could be know? He couldn’t possibly know!
Hyacinth beauty
, he said to me.
Eagle of Eagles!
What does he mean? How could my son know his father, if I don’t?’

Myrddion turned his lustrous black eyes, now filled with pity, towards his mother’s pallid face and quivering lips. She bit down on her lower lip until blood came, and began to shake her head as if she would remove it from her body. To the many pitying eyes in the triclinium, Branwyn was like a child’s wooden doll, stiff and unresponsive, except for the violent movements of her head.

‘Don’t look at me with those eyes – his eyes! I hate black eyes. They speak of nothing but hatred. His eyes . . . his eyes . . .’

Then, to the horror of everyone present, Branwyn began to tear at her skin with her nails. The nauseated onlookers saw her arms for the first time, and the white ridges of scar tissue that covered them, layer upon layer.

‘Restrain her,’ Melvig ordered, his voice hollow with shock. ‘What have you done to yourself, child? Tie her arms, for the goddess’s sake! Dear gods, she’s carved herself to ribbons!’

As soon as the warriors laid their hands on Branwyn, she screamed shrilly like a child. She begged them not to hurt her, while tears poured unchecked down her face. Maelgwr looked away from his wife, his face set like stone, and Myrddion realised that the man knew his wife mutilated herself but didn’t care. Only now, when her family was finally learning her secret, did Maelgwr make a pretence of husbandly love.

Melvig was a sharp thinker for all that he was nearing the end of his life. Many old warriors failed in their heads, forgot the simplest actions and died because they no longer remembered to eat and drink. But Melvig was more acute than in his youth, having learned to think before he reacted. Branwyn’s shocking behaviour had rocked the old king, but hadn’t deflected him. No matter how pathetic his granddaughter now seemed, she had tried to murder her son.

‘The boy spoke about his father, didn’t he? And the man who raped you was no demon, was he?’ Melvig’s voice was as hard as iron and just as inflexible. ‘Come, girl, the time for deception is over. Let justice be done, for you as well as for your son. Bring your old terrors out of the shadows of memory and face them squarely. They have harmed you long enough.’

Branwyn’s lips quivered at the sympathy in her grandfather’s voice. Somehow, her manic outburst had wiped away much of the bitterness in her face and she seemed younger, softer and more vulnerable.

‘I was twelve, Grandfather – and foolish! I thought that the man thrown up on the beach by the storm was a gift to me from the gods. But he was cruel and would have killed me if I hadn’t told him how to escape. Oh, but I hated him, and I’ll hate him for ever. I hate his black eyes, and his fair face.
Hyacinth beauty
– how did Myrddion know? I can hardly bear to look at my son, who looks so like his father with his lying eyes. I would kill the monster and put out those eyes if I could. I thought I had, but here he is, and he’s still alive. He probably can’t ever be killed. The storm over Mona didn’t kill him and the ocean didn’t kill him. He is sitting here, as naturally as can be.’