Clash of Kings (60 page)

‘Back! Get back! Everybody back! The roof is afire, and will soon collapse. The smoke will choke us if we remain here, so get out of this place while you can.’

As the warriors began to retreat away from the flames, a black human shape, wreathed in yellow, red and white twisting coils of heat, suddenly ran out of the corridor and into the smoke-filled hall. The mouth of the burning man gaped with an illusion of fire within, and its legs and arms windmilled in a vain attempt to escape the agony of burning. The onlookers stepped aside from the blinded, hairless thing that ran and keened from fire-blasted lungs, permitting it to break free into the open forecourt. It twisted and turned horribly, and then fell into its own fiery shroud.

Myrddion was the first to break out of the hideous spell of Vortigern’s burning.

‘Keep him down! Use blankets! Anything at all that will beat out the flames. It’s the king!’

The warriors only needed direction. The fire that consumed the blackened figure was smothered with cloaks, hangings and anything else to hand. As the flames regretfully relinquished their hold on the sizzling flesh, the storm above the fortress intensified so that the sky appeared to be split open by jagged streams of light until, with a great roar, the roof of the building gave way with a crash that rivalled the sound of thunder in the heavens.

Then, after the fire had done its worst, the rain came in buffeting sheets that fell out of the lightning-rent sky to extinguish the conflagration with a great hissing and huge gouts of steam. Water ran down the fire-cracked stone and drenched the onlookers.

The body on the forecourt paving was sluiced by driving rain that cleansed the charred flesh, the fused fists raised to assault the black skies and the rictus on a face that had melted into the visage of a beast. When the rain stopped, as quickly as it had begun, all that was recognisable as Vortigern, High King of the Britons, had been washed away.

The warriors began to keen as they sensed the passing of their world and the beginning of something dangerous and strange.

Myrddion turned away from the corpse of his master, but it would be years before Vortigern ceased to run, in a cloak of fire, through the healer’s dreams.

Vengis and Katigern had finally relinquished their watch over their mother’s body, and had climbed out through the slit window with the agility of boys to reach the ground and safety. They were unscathed, except for scraped knuckles and bruised knees. Myrddion found them in the stables, helping themselves to the best of their father’s horses.

‘Where will you go?’ he asked them. Vengis twisted his mouth bitterly, and it was Katigern who finally answered.

‘We travel the Saxon path, healer. I pray we do not meet again, for we will certainly have chosen different sides.’

‘Then fare you well, sons of Vortigern. Your mother was a fine woman with great courage, and her burning was worthy of a hero out of legend. This cursed place served as her funeral pyre and I pray that no stones are raised again where so much wickedness has lived. I wish you freedom from your father’s blood.’

He watched the boys leap onto their horses and slap their mounts’ rumps with the reins. Then Myrddion set off at a run towards his own wagons where his assistants waited impatiently, ready to depart at speed.

‘Master?’ Cadoc asked with a twitch of his one good eyebrow.

‘We are leaving, Cadoc, before Dinas Emrys finally discovers a way to take my life and revenge itself on me. Pray for us all in the dark days ahead, now that Ambrosius is our new master.’

The wains jerked wildly as they rolled down the rutted track that led to the river valley.

‘Home,’ Myrddion whispered. Then, as his voice gained strength, he shouted the word out again, so that the clusters of warriors beside the ruined towers stared out into the darkness with bleak, lost eyes.

‘Home, Cadoc, should we deserve such a blessing. We have promises to keep.’

Behind them, a single sheet of flame burst into transitory life within a tumble of fallen stones. For one short moment, Myrddion imagined that a figure stood within the fire, and, as the healers fled down the hill, he imagined that it shook its fist at him.

EPILOGUE

Far away from Dinas Emrys, and the hurried burial of Vortigern with the gathered, fragmented bones of his wife, the wind blew bleakly from the ocean with ice in its teeth. Within the stone fortress of Tintagel, Ygerne and her daughters enjoyed the snug comfort of a blazing fire and warm rugs that covered the floor and walls. Curled together, mother and daughters presented a picture of idyllic beauty when Gorlois entered the tower room, brushing snow off his travelling cloak and shedding his wet boots.

Like slim, dark dryads, his daughters crawled all over his burly form as he bent to kiss his wife. The Boar of Cornwall was the jest of the western lands, for he loved his wife with a passion and depth normally reserved for mistresses. As for his lissome, dark-haired daughters, he was a man completely obsessed. Not even a son could eclipse their places in his heart.

With the sleet buffeting the wooden shutters, Gorlois raised his wife’s flower-frail face and kissed the tip of her nose. Ygerne smiled and nestled into his shoulder. ‘I’m glad you’re home,’ she whispered. ‘Tintagel is cheerless without you.’

‘I would be happy anywhere as long as I’m with my three girls.’ Gorlois bit his lip. ‘The war is over, and change is coming. Ambrosius has swept the board clear, now that Vortigern is dead and his young sons have fled. He has sent out spies to hunt the boys down, so I pray he doesn’t find them. Uther is also travelling the Roman roads, for he searches for the boys to serve his own ends.’

‘Why?’ Ygerne asked seriously.

Gorlois shrugged. Uther was a law unto himself, and no sane man could gauge his motives.

‘I love your innocence, little one. Ambrosius won’t tolerate any threat to his position as High King, so he must kill all of Vortigern’s kin. I know it’s an ugly practice, and I wish the world were a kinder place, but the children of rulers have died after their fathers for thousands of years. At any rate, rumour has it that the boys have fled into the north, to Hengist and their Saxon kinfolk. They’ll be safe there.’

‘We needn’t go to Venta Belgarum, need we?’ Ygerne whispered, hiding her face in her husband’s shoulder. ‘I don’t care for our new High King, and his brother Uther seems cruel and harsh. I want our daughters to be happy and safe, far from courts and kings.’

She raised her face so that her mouth and eyes seemed enormous. As always, Gorlois was drawn into her wide pupils and felt as if he was falling into the soul of his beloved. In Ygerne’s arms he knew true happiness, and, like any sensible man, he was determined to hold his joy to his breast as tightly as he could. Sometimes, he feared that the gods would become jealous of his felicity and take Ygerne away.

‘You need go nowhere that upsets you, beloved. If you wish to avoid the High King and his younger brother, then you may stay away from them all. I am the Boar of Cornwall and my word is law in these lands, so my queen can go where she wills, without hindrance or coercion.’

Relieved, Ygerne sighed contentedly, for the tale of Vortigern’s sons had pierced her tender heart.

As Gorlois’s family enjoyed the security of strong walls and love, Myrddion and his assistants faced the wind, the snow and the freezing rain on the open road. They had left the seaside villa as the storms began to build over Mona and had been pursued by wild weather ever since.

After Vortigern’s death, Eddius had been returned to his happy children and the care of Plautenes. Myrddion had dressed his wounds, and had ascertained that Eddius would carry the scars of Dinas Emrys on his body, and in his soul, for the rest of his life.

‘Why, Eddius? You have always been a peaceable man and sensible in your actions. How could you be sure that innocent men and women wouldn’t die as a consequence of your actions? Revenge is such a pointless action, and Olwyn would have been horrified if her children had been left alone in the world had you perished in the conflagration.’

Shocked and in agony from his burns, Eddius had been sufficiently alert to lower his eyes in shame. Eventually, his tortured face rose to meet that clear, puzzled stare.

‘I was a little mad, I suppose. At Canovium, surrounded by Olwyn’s kinfolk, I felt her loss so greatly that I imagined I heard her speaking to me about the life that had been taken from her. I can’t explain how the feeling rose in me, along with the need to see Vortigern’s face and understand what breed of man took someone I loved so much away from me. But grow it did, like an ulcer in my heart. I couldn’t stay in Canovium, or return to Segontium with its memories of the past. Going to Dinas Emrys seemed to be the only way I could gain peace.’

Myrddion tried to understand, but he had never experienced the loss of a lover or the contentment of total trust in a life partner.

‘Didn’t Vortigern ask why you came to work for him? He was notoriously suspicious of everyone and everything, especially strangers.’

Eddius laughed sardonically, but Myrddion detected only self-mockery in his mirth. ‘Not he. Or at least, his distrust didn’t extend to servants, for they were just tools in his thinking. He needed more servants, so he took them from the village where I’d gone to work as a labourer. The villagers were suspicious of me, but they had no cause to love Vortigern, and if I was impressed into slaving for no wages at the fortress, then one of their sons would be left in peace. Consequently, I had no difficulty in becoming his servant.

‘I was practised at being invisible and I was a diligent worker. No task was too humiliating for me. I watched Vortigern, day and night, and I realised that he loved nothing – neither his wife nor his children, who were simply useful possessions. The longer I watched him, the more I hated him, and my darling’s face was everywhere I looked, so pale and damaged by his cruel fist. In the end, I had to stop him before you recognised me, so I laid a fuse of oil through the rooms and the corridor. I wanted to see him burn and I needed to hear him beg for his life. But, in the end, you discovered me and I never saw him take his final breath.’

‘Be grateful for that mercy, Eddius. Even Vortigern couldn’t have imagined such a death, although his penchant for cruelty was honed. He died hard.’

Myrddion watched Eddius’s face crumple with guilt. Away from the poisonous atmosphere of Dinas Emrys, the older man had reverted to his gentler self, but Myrddion was still at a loss to understand the streak of violence that the fortress had exposed in the nature of his old friend.

In the end, Myrddion couldn’t bear the silences that lay at the heart of the villa by the sea. Something had gone from his beloved home and he feared that he would never find it again. Perhaps he had simply grown beyond the quiet life of domestic pleasure. Vortigern’s final conversation with Myrddion also resonated through both his waking and sleeping hours, so that his desire to find his father, either living or dead, was growing in him like an itch that he couldn’t scratch. Also, as an added temptation, the healer longed to see, with his own eyes, the lands where his scrolls had been written and to learn the sophisticated skills of medicine that still eluded him.

The fever rose in him, and he discovered his course of action when he visited Olwyn’s grave on the windswept headland. He felt her presence, as warm and as supportive as she had been in life, and his plans were finally set in motion. Never one to dawdle over decisions, he had informed his family and his assistants that he planned to travel, and given Cadoc, Finn and the widows the opportunity to part company with him. In the warm villa, Myrddion’s proposals had seemed exciting and challenging, so the widows never hesitated, for their lives outside the healer’s tents were likely to be fraught with danger and the threat of poverty.

As for Cadoc and Finn, their allegiance to Myrddion ran so deeply that if their master had proposed that they should journey to Tartarus, the seventh ring of Hades, they would have happily agreed. So now, in the teeth of a snowstorm, the troop was following the Roman road beyond Aquae Sulis, bound for Londinium and the coast. The wains groaned, and there was no escape from the inclement weather as the wind insinuated itself into the leather protective shelters.

‘A mare’s nest, master!’ Cadoc shivered inside a fur-lined hood that failed to warm his reddened nose and streaming eyes. ‘Whatever you’re looking for, couldn’t we wait until spring? Londinium will still be there, and we’ll be warmer.’ He sneezed wetly, but his skilful hands held the struggling team in check. Ice on the roadway gave the horses little purchase, and the wooden wheels of the wagons skidded and slid on the uneven ground, testing Cadoc’s expertise to the limit. Altogether, Myrddion and his assistants were miserable, cold and bad-tempered.

‘Don’t you want to see the world, Cadoc? You’ll soon warm up if you think of the women to be wooed and the gold to be won. These isles are at the farthest tip of civilisation, so don’t you hunger to see richer, older lands that are far from these freezing winds? Where we are going, there is a great need for our particular skills, while the year-round weather is much warmer. Where’s your sense of adventure?’

‘Lost in the last storm! I pray to the gods every day that we can’t take ship until spring. I’ve never been on a boat and I’d rather not start in the winter gales.’

Amused despite his irritation, Myrddion grinned inside his many cloaks and blankets, his own aquiline nose turning a little red from the cold. ‘Whine, whine, whine. I’ve never been on a ship either, Cadoc, so think of it as a challenge.’

‘Hmf!’

As the wagons creaked and his companions tried to find a warm corner away from the wind and the unpleasant conditions, Myrddion’s thoughts ranged ahead. Truly, the world was very wide and strange, and to find one man among the uncounted millions who lived around the Middle Sea was a virtual impossibility. But something in Myrddion’s extra sense told him that Flavius was alive and could be found. A man called Storm Bird, with a sense of drama and lethal habits, would leave large footprints that his son could follow. Myrddion knew that his decision to leave everything he had achieved behind him was illogical, but he hungered to learn the truth about his conception. Like many sons before him, he was happy to wager the safety of his servants and his friends on the substance of a dream.