Clash of Kings (9 page)

The winds were not so strong, here near the entrance to Sabrina Aest, but the gulls sported their white breasts and grey-barred wings with pride and argued as vigorously over fingerlings and broken shells as they had done at Segontium. Branwyn smiled as she watched the cheeky birds steal grain from the hens, and one day she was enchanted by a loud verbal battle over stale, milk-soaked bread between an optimistic gull and an old gander with a bad temper. The gander won the skirmish, having a significant weight advantage.

During spring, the women saw little of Cletus and his half-grown sons, although the little ones squabbled as noisily as the gulls. The fields called, with their insistence on constant labour, and Cletus worked cheerfully from sunrise to sunset before returning to the villa in the evening, covered with thick, brown loam. As the master, Cletus need never have touched a clod nor pushed a plough, but he loved the aroma of the earth and was worshipped by his servants for his devotion to them and to his fields. But he never lost an ounce, for all his physical labour.

As the days became warmer, and the furrows bore fast-growing shoots of vivid green, peace seemed to have come for ever. Fillagh set Branwyn to work at small tasks, but the girl’s condition limited her usefulness to shelling peas or stirring the huge pot of stew that hung on the oven hob. Never for a moment did Fillagh refer to the unborn babe as a girl. When asked why she was so certain of the child’s sex, she shrugged and replied that her instincts told her that the boy would be large and strong.

And then Branwyn’s waters broke.

Terrified, the girl told no one, and when her maidservant found her in her room she was rigid with pain and desperate to prevent the birth of the child at all cost.

Fillagh’s sympathy was lessened by the hysteria in the eyes of her niece. ‘It’s easier to stop the tides, Branwyn, than to prevent this babe from being born,’ she ordered brusquely. ‘So you can stop fussing right now. The child demands to be born, and you have no choice in the matter.’

Privately, though, she was worried. She whispered her fears to her sister. ‘She’ll damage herself if she can’t be calmed, Olwyn. I know it can hurt the child, but poppy juice may relax Branwyn so that she’ll stop fighting the birth pangs. But the boy might die, I warn you, so the choice must be yours. I can’t take such responsibility on myself.’

‘Branwyn is my first concern,’ Olwyn replied. She almost wept, but she felt her husband’s shade pressing against her back and lending her courage. ‘The child must be a secondary consideration, Fillagh. I wish I knew what to do for the best. I’m only good for prayers and I’m a useless mother to allow my daughter to face this awful danger. Father was right all along. I should have remarried and fulfilled my duty to our family.’

‘You’d marry without love, Olwyn? Shame on you! You were the one who taught me that marriage is true joy when the heart is engaged. I’ll save Branwyn, and the boy, if only because I owe my whole, lovely life to your example.’

The birth was long, hard and terrifying. For hour after agonised hour, Branwyn sweated, screamed and cursed, fighting her own body to the point where the women believed that her frail, abused spirit would die. Olwyn promised the goddess whatever duty was required of her if only Branwyn was allowed to live. Even the optimistic Fillagh almost despaired that the girl’s fierce, desperate will would ever permit the child to be born alive. But, finally, as spring rains began to drench the night sky, the child tore his way free from his mother’s body. In blood, distress and pain, the infant took his first, lusty breath.

The women clustered around Branwyn, staunching the sudden rush of blood. They pressed her abdomen to expel the afterbirth and bathed her face in cool water while Fillagh saw to the welfare of the infant. When her bloody hands touched his squirming, slippery limbs, a shock ran through her fingers and centred on her brain. Fillagh had never been overly religious and she didn’t believe in the Sight, but now she found that disconnected images invaded her unwilling imagination.

Visions of blood on stones, dead children with splayed limbs mutely begging for help and crowns drenched in gore spiralled through her mind. A pair of brilliant blue eyes suddenly loomed so large that Fillagh lost her balance. She almost dropped the infant, but Olwyn steadied her with one hand and, with the other, took hold of the babe. As her sister had already discovered, the child’s impact was immediate.

No prophetic revelations stirred Olwyn’s instincts. Instead, she felt a rush of love so visceral that she almost forgot to breathe. Some wary part of her brain warned her that she couldn’t possibly love a child so completely and with such speed. But the real Olwyn was deaf to reason. She scooped up the infant and held him to her breast, regardless of the blood and mucus that streaked his sturdy little form.

Fillagh gripped her sister’s arm. ‘You felt it? You saw the child’s power? You must love him, sister, for he could easily become a monster. Love alone can defeat him and make him human, and I fear that Branwyn will never accept him.’

‘I felt nothing but love from the babe.’ Olwyn smiled like any new mother, obsessed with her first child. ‘He’s a beautiful boy! Look, I can see Godric in his little face. I’ll love him enough for Branwyn, sister. How could I not do so?’

Fillagh glanced narrowly at her sister and wondered at the magic of attraction. One touch had captured Olwyn’s guarded heart, and she knew that Ceridwen protected this strange and wonderful child. ‘He will live on and on, regardless of the enmity of the world,’ she whispered to Cletus. ‘Ceridwen has chosen him, and the goddess always has her way.’

‘Then Mithras help him,’ Cletus swore, for the goddess terrified all sensible men. ‘Let’s hope that she gives him knowledge from her cauldron.’

But Branwyn refused to suckle the child and turned her face away from the babe when it was shown to her.

‘Take it away! The very sight of it makes me feel sick,’ she wailed fretfully and, because she was so weak and exhausted, Olwyn took the boy into the next room. Quickly bathed, wrapped in a swaddling shawl and tucked firmly into the crook of Olwyn’s arm, the infant stared up at her with black eyes that already seemed able to focus.

While they waited for the wet nurse to arrive from the nearby village, the sisters examined the face of the perfect, beautiful child. Full term, pink and large in size, the infant was unusually still and silent. There were no tears, no signs of fear and not even the normal struggle of limbs constricted by the swaddling cloth. The boy gazed up at Olwyn’s face and she would have been prepared to swear that he could see her.

When she handed him over to the rosy-cheeked peasant woman whom Cletus had hired as wet nurse, the babe protested a little until the woman presented her breast to him. Even then, he fed reflectively without greed or fuss, and fell asleep before he had finished. Yet when Olwyn took him back into her arms, his large, almond eyes opened and he stared at her with milky content. Olwyn thought her heart would burst with love.

The next morning, Cletus showed concern in every line of his body as he paced up and down his broad, flagged courtyard.

‘The child should be acknowledged and be given his bulla. How else can he be safe from the wrath of the gods?’

The sisters glanced at each other with affectionate impatience. The bastard child was under greater threat from his great-grandfather, who would be quick to order his exposure to the elements if Melvig learned that such an embarrassment lived and thrived.

As usual, Fillagh had a practical suggestion. ‘Why don’t we show the child to the sun, who is the father of us all?’

Olwyn felt a little foolish as she carried her grandson out into the bright spring morning, where the air was sweetened with the smell of wild broom, lavender and a faint tang of sea salt. The breeze was mellow, soft and warm as Olwyn bared the babe’s body and raised him towards the light of the sun. She expected wails of infant protest, or signs of distress, but the child simply closed his eyes to the unaccustomed dazzle of light and waved his rosy limbs in ecstasy. When Fillagh asked the lord of light, Myrddion, to accept this child who was touched by darkness, the boy crowed with pleasure. Olwyn experienced a sudden flash of inspiration as she lowered him and rewrapped him in his swaddling clothes.

‘I name him Myrddion Merlinus after the lord of light who is our father! Ceridwen will protect him for she has told me so, but the lord of light will always be part of his spirit. Let his name remind us that darkness is not his birthright.’

Fillagh laughed a little at her sister’s serious face, for the farmer’s wife was made for joy, not sadness. Then she sobered and clutched her husband’s hand.

‘Myrddion is a good name, sister, and a strong one that is worthy of such a beautiful boy. Bless you for your thoughts, Cletus, but I fear the sun won’t give a bulla to young Myrddion to protect him.’

‘We will let the gods decide,’ Cletus said quietly. ‘If Myrddion wants him, then he’ll send a token to keep the boy safe.’

Both women stared at the stolid, unimaginative farmer who would seem to lack even a trace of poetry in his soul, except for his love of green and growing things. Fillagh was constantly surprised by the sensitivity that survived in her husband’s plain, heavy body.

‘Aye, Cletus!’ she sighed. ‘It does no good to fuss, so let’s see what bulla presents itself to the boy. It’s certain Branwyn will reject him, so the god and the Mother must take the place of his parents anyway.’

‘I will become his mother!’ Olwyn averred, her voice as rigid as her daughter’s had been. ‘This child will be cared for until he is a man. I have nothing to give him, but the goddess will surely provide.’

‘Aye!’ Fillagh added with a little shiver of apprehension. ‘This child will find a way to grow and prosper, because the goddess will help him to find his destiny.’ She said nothing of her insights into the future, fearing that the child carried too much weight on his baby shoulders already without bearing her odd, superstitious presentiments.

Branwyn’s health slowly improved in the months that followed. At first, she ate sparingly, but as her appetite increased, colour returned to her cheeks and flesh began to clothe her slight frame. Then, hesitantly, she ventured out into the farm, chasing her cousins as they ran between their rows of carrots and cabbages until her feet and the hems of her gowns were black with soil. Still later, as she felt her youth once again stir in her blood, Branwyn took to walking by the river and finding polished stones discarded by the tidal surges. But, regardless of her flushed cheeks and smiles, she avoided the beaches and the waves that nibbled at the sands with their memories of shameful pain.

For three months, the infant Myrddion had no bulla or charm. Nor, in truth, did he have a mother. Branwyn fled in a swirl of skirts if she saw the wet nurse feeding her son, or came across Olwyn singing to the babe in the early evening. Not that Myrddion seemed to care. He wound his chubby fingers in Olwyn’s hair, pulling so gently that she hardly realised that he was begging for a kiss. He grew in grace and beauty, in spite of his birth mother’s deep and unrelenting hostility.

Cletus One Ear remained hopeful that the gods would send a gift to the babe. He had almost weakened several times, and had considered purchasing a golden bulla himself and burying it in his fields to create a fiction of godly intervention, but each time he decided to wait a little longer. Perhaps the gods did intervene. And perhaps chance is a rare and a wondrous thing, for Olwyn, Cletus and Fillagh knew that Branwyn would never consider searching out a charm that would save her hated son from harm.

Whatever the answer might be, Branwyn discovered Myrddion’s birth gift when she picked up a particularly large clod of clay with the intention of miming a throw at Selwyn, one of Fillagh’s sons. As she pressed on the damp, pliable earth, it broke apart in her fingers and she dropped it with an exclamation of surprise.

‘Look, Branwyn!’ Selwyn crowed, one finger pointing at a trace of gold amidst the lump of soft clay. ‘There’s something in the soil.’

Branwyn picked up the piece of clay that glistened with a sliver of yellow gold. Wonderingly, she brushed the metal with her fingers and then attempted to scrub it with the bottom of her dirty skirt. As they moved towards the villa, Branwyn continued to scrape the earth from the golden object until she reached a crude water bucket into which she plunged her prize.

Cletus wandered over to join his niece and together they washed the small token until long-packed clay finally released the pure metal within. What the muddy water revealed, winking softly in the filtered light, caused Cletus to clutch his own bulla in surprise.

A golden ring lay inside the wooden pail, a man’s ring meant for a large, strong finger, and Cletus couldn’t help but scoop it up to examine it in the noonday light. A large red stone was set inside a heavy mount of gold that was roughly scored to resemble the rays of the sun.

‘It’s ugly!’ Branwyn snapped. ‘I wish I’d never found it, for I can tell that it will bring nothing but ill.’

Cletus ran his powerful, broad thumbs over the heavy shoulders of the ring. The gold felt buttery and glowed with a rich orange colour that indicated the purity of the metal. ‘No. It’s very old, maybe going back to the Seven Hills when the Republic was still young, but it’s a fine example of early Roman craftsmanship.’

‘Well, I don’t like it! And I don’t even want to look at it!’ Branwyn hurried into the villa, where she almost knocked Olwyn off her feet in her haste.

Cletus tossed the ring into the air until it reflected the spring sunshine in the heart of its stone with a brilliant flash of blood.

‘What has upset Branwyn?’ Olwyn asked. ‘If I hadn’t minded my step, she’d have knocked me over in the doorway. She looks ill.’

‘She found this ring among the vegetables, buried in a clod of dirt. I don’t know why she took such an instant dislike to it, but I’m almost certain it’s a ring from old Roman times when the fortress kept this whole valley safe from harm. See? The maker carved the gold so that its rays of light fan out from the central stone. Do you understand, Olwyn? We now have our miracle. Branwyn, of all people, has found us the god’s gift for little Myrddion.’