Here Lies Arthur (11 page)

I was sure Bedwyr never guessed the truth about me, but I knew I unsettled him. My smooth cheeks, and my voice that had never cracked and deepened as his had. Perhaps he thought my master had put me under an enchantment, so that I would never grow.

We skirted the borders of the Irishman’s country, and turned towards my old home up the river-road. In the afternoon, when the flies hung in lazy clouds above the water, we came to the pool with the waterfall where it had all begun for me.

My skull was filled up with a moil of thoughts. While the horses drank from the shallows I knelt down and stared at my reflection in the water, and tried to see something girlish in my sunburned face. “Gwyna,” I tried saying. And it was like I was calling her back from the dead.

XXIV

 

The old farmstead where I’d grown up had been rebuilt, and roofed with thick, fresh thatch. There were red cattle lowing in a pound, and children playing in the river when we came riding past at set of sun. They followed us a little way, naked and shrieking with laughter, calling out to Myrddin to tell them a story, for they’d seen the harp among his saddlebags and guessed his trade. They didn’t look at me, and if any of them were my friends from the old times, I didn’t recognize them. A lot of water had flowed downstream since then.

The Irishman was summering at Ban’s old holding. It was better than his own damp hall in the hills, I dare say. He had got an Irish wife from Demetia with red cheeks and a quick smile, and their children squabbled like puppies beside his hearth. He seemed a happy Irishman, though when Myrddin raised the matter of the yearly tribute he owed Arthur he was quick to say how hard his life was; how half his cows had died last
winter, and Cunomorus of Kernyw kept sending raiding-bands to rob his tinners on the moors.

In return, Myrddin told him news from the east; Arthur’s latest victories; the battle at Badon and the wedding to Gwenhwyfar. And when he had done he drew me forward out of the shadows where I’d been standing, and said, “This is Gwyna.”

It was strange to hear my name made whole again after so long being Gwyn. “Yes,” said my master, “I know she looks boyish, but she is a girl. Look closely. You see?”

They looked closely. They saw. My smooth face and slender fingers and the beginnings of my small breasts under my tunic. The Irishman gave a grunt of surprise.

“I brought her with me out of the mountains beyond Bannawg,” Myrddin explained. “There is a dragon in those parts, and the people of the place make a sacrifice to it every year of three maidens.”

The Irishman and his wife leaned forward, hooked. The cup bearers and the guards at the door pricked up their ears to listen, and even the children on the floor stopped pinching each other. I wondered what life my master was inventing for me, and did my best to look like I came from dragon-country.

“Well,” Myrddin went on, “Gwyna’s father swore he’d not let his little girl be breakfast for some worm. So when she was born he let it be known that his wife had given birth to a boy, and he dressed the child as a boy, and let her run with the boys of his place, and it is as a boy that she has lived ever since. But now that she is almost a woman, the ruse is wearing thin, and so I
agreed to take her back to Aquae Sulis with me, there to enter the service of the lady Gwenhwyfar.”

The Irishman nodded, as if this was the only reasonable thing to do, where dragons were involved.

“Trouble is,” Myrddin went on, looking into the guest cup and finding it empty, holding it out for a slave to refill, “the trouble is, she knows nothing of the ways of women. She knows about horses, and the hunt. She has fought against the heathen Scots who plague her country whenever the dragon rests. But of being a maiden among other maidens she knows nothing at all.”

The Irishman frowned slowly, realizing that something was being asked of him. “Then let her stay here a while!” he said suddenly. It was Myrddin who had put the idea in his mind, of course, but he thought it was his own, and seized on it, and flourished it proudly as a sign of his loyalty to Arthur and to Arthur’s friend. “Yes! Let her stay here with Nonnita! Nonnita will teach her everything! Weaving and … and … the rest of it. Yes! Anything to help Myrddin!”

And so I stayed there through the summer’s golden end, with Nonnita and her ladies, while Myrddin went travelling off alone, carrying new tales of Arthur down into Kernyw.

At first I lived in fear of running into someone I’d known when the hall was Lord Ban’s place, but all Ban’s followers were dead, or fled, or scattered off as slaves across the world, and I was never challenged. I doubt they would have known me anyway, for I’d been an urchin then, and now I was a maiden, with a dress of wool dyed kingfisher blue and a russet cloak that did up
at the shoulder with a tin brooch. The clothes were faded, and had belonged to a girl who’d died of fever in the spring, but they fitted me. I was still enough of a boy not to care much about clothes.

The girls and women of the household didn’t like me. They thought I was strange and clumsy and spoke too loud. But slowly I learned from them the things women do. They don’t speak to the menfolk unless they’re spoke to first, that’s one. They don’t tuck up their skirts and run. They sit for hours stitching and mending, which is slow torture, and embroidering, which is worse. They spin wool and linen. They weave cloth, singing in time to the clack of the clay weights which swing against the loom’s frame. They steep meat in brine-barrels, and grind flour. They knead soft dough into loaves, getting flour on their arms and their cheeks and the tips of their noses. They make cheese, and butter, and cream, and buttermilk. They brew beer. They giggle. They whisper. They gossip.

It wasn’t for me, that life. I missed Dewi and I missed my master. I promised myself I’d talk to him when he came back; plead with him, beg him, make him understand. “I tried being girlish,” I’d tell him, “and it didn’t work. I’ve been too long a boy. My voice isn’t right. I don’t move like the rest of them. My stitches don’t hold. My yarn gets tangled. My loaves are soft as wet wool, or hard like river stones.” And I told myself that Myrddin would see. He’d see his mistake. He’d find some other way, and I’d be a boy again.

“What was that dragon like?” they asked, every day or
so, until I cursed Myrddin for thinking up such a story. “Did you see it at all? Did you ever hear it roar?”

“I heard it once,” I told them. “I couldn’t not. It was loud enough to shiver rocks down off the mountainside. And I saw it fly over. Big as three horses it was, with bat’s wings and bear’s claws and a snake’s tail.”

“Was it red or green?”

I thought quick. “It was every colour. Red, green, all the colours of the rainbow. It
rippled
with colours. And in its jaws it carried a poor maiden from the village, as big as Rhiannedd.” And I pointed at the plumpest of the lady Nonnita’s girls, who turned pastry-coloured and began to twitter. The rest stared wide-eyed at me, like girls who would have nightmares later.

That night, like punishment for my lies, I woke with griping in my belly, and a sudden marshiness about the mattress under me. When I touched that damp and lifted up my hand into the moon-glow from the window my fingers were wet and dark with blood.

I thought I was dying. I’d not seen that much blood since Badon, and then it had been other people’s, not spilling out of my own secret insides. My cries woke up the other girls, and they thought I was as big a joke as I’d thought them when I was scaring them with dragonstories. It was only my monthlies, said Nonnita. It was the same for every woman in the world. We had tides, like the sea. The moon called forth our blood. Did I not know that?

Well, I’d heard something of it. But I’d thought myself too boyish to suffer it. I lay and snivelled while the others
settled back into sleep. It seemed to me my own body had betrayed me, and sided with Myrddin. There’d be no way back into boyhood for me now. What would the warband make of me washing bloody rags once monthly?

But later, when I’d learned to cope with it, as we have to cope with all things we have no hope of changing, later I thought, Myrddin must have known. The same craft that let him know when rain was coming, or a mist would rise, had warned him what would soon be happening inside me. If we’d turned east instead of west after Ynys Wydryn, if we’d gone back to Sulis in the normal way, it might have been Bedwyr and the other boys I’d woken in my panic when it started.

Halfway through apple-harvest Myrddin returned, and said it had come time to leave. I was surprised by how sorry I felt, to be saying farewell to Nonnita and fat Rhiannedd and the rest. But I packed up my few belongings, and the things I had learned, and set off behind him again, riding eastward through the first of the autumn’s rain. Now I was a girl I rode sideways on Dewi, which felt awkward and unnatural. The colour seeped out of my blue dress and sprinkled off my toes in sky-blue drips. My shoes shrank and pinched my feet, and my newly long hair hung down in rain-dark rat’s tails round my face. The west wind blew up my skirts and chilled my damp legs through. I hunched inside my cloak and consoled myself with daydreams where I was a boy again, and running after my brother Bedwyr towards adventures. There were no adventures in my future now, I thought, glaring bitterly at Myrddin’s back.
Women don’t have them. They just suffer when their men’s adventures go wrong.

We went slower and slower as we drew near Sulis. Myrddin kept thinking of reasons why we should turn off the road and call in at scruffy settlements where he could exchange his songs and stories for a meal and a place to sleep and a few cups of watered wine. I think he was afraid of learning what Arthur had been up to in his absence. Like a father who leaves his children alone for the first time. But when we reached the crown of the hills that stand behind the town, and looked down, it all seemed much as I remembered. It was a day of sunlight and sudden, shining showers, and the red roofs of the old Roman buildings were as bright as the autumn woods.

A few miles from the walls stood a place that must have been a rich man’s house in the olden times, with outbuildings and slaves’ quarters and a smithy of its own. It was all fallen into ruins, but a part of the main house was still roofed over and Myrddin turned in at the gateway. A man and woman were waiting there, country people from a nearby steading. They fell down bowing at the sight of us. “Welcome, Lord Myrddin,” the man called out. “It has all been made as your messenger commanded.”

“This is my new home,” he told me, leaving them to quarter our horses and taking me inside, into a long room smelling of fresh lime-wash. He’d sent word from the Irishman’s place, and hired the man and woman to make the house ready, and bring his few possessions there from his old place in Aquae Sulis. He said, “If
Arthur is to lead the armies of Britain he must be seen to be a Christian lord, and keep magic and wizards at arm’s length. The old ways still speak to his soldiers and the common people, and they will know I am close. But when he talks to Maelwas’s envoys he must be able to deny me. He must be able to say, ‘Myrddin? That old trickster? No, he has no place in my town…’”

I went through a pantry to a window at the back of the place. It had had glass in it once. Through the rusty frames I looked out on a garden, a few bean-rows fluttering with leaves and curved green pods, a cabbage-patch, a huge old oak rising among the scrubby younger growth along the wood-shore. It was a giant of a tree, but ivy had wrapped it round, and rot had hollowed out its trunk, and it held up only a few last golden leaves to the afternoon sun.

The servants brought wine and food and then went home to their own place, over the hill; Myrddin didn’t want them living there with him. When he had eaten he rode on to Sulis, leaving me alone. He told me later what he found there, and so I’ll tell you, for I did nothing that evening except pace about between the bean-plots trying to get used to the strange, flappy freedom of my new skirts.

Myrddin rode up to the gates of Sulis and announced himself and entered into the town. The walls had been repaired as he’d suggested, and the men who guarded them looked better trained. The town was as shabby and prosperous as ever, and old friends greeted him, and took his horse for him when he drew near the forum.

There, inside a cage of wooden scaffolding, the feasting-hall he’d planned with Arthur in the wintertime was rising, and he felt proud and then disappointed as he looked at it. For it was a great thing that it had been built at all, and yet it was not as he’d imagined. Its round walls bulged out-of-true. The big, glazed windows he had planned were crooked holes. Instead of baked clay tiles, it squatted under a hat of thatch. Myrddin knew without even looking inside that it would be dark, and stuffy, and earthen-floored, and that the smoke of Arthur’s feast-fires would gather in a fog under the leaking roof.

He felt suddenly uneasy. He had been away too long.

Arthur was in the old amphitheatre, watching a white colt run circles on a rein. There was a knot of men around him. As Myrddin walked towards them he heard a familiar, silvery laugh, and there was Cunaide, Arthur’s woman from the old days, standing at Arthur’s side.

“I thought you had put her away,” said Myrddin, when the greetings were done and he could talk quietly to Arthur. “What has become of your new wife?”

“The heron?” Arthur kept glancing at the colt, admiring its glossy flanks and the sharp tilt of its lifted hooves. “A cold nature she has. Why couldn’t you find me a wife like Cunaide, with a bit of fire in her?”

“You need Gwenhwyfar. She’s Maelwas’s kin. Her sons will be descendants of Ambrosius.”

“What sons? She’s barren ground. Six months now, and no sign of a child.”

That might not be Gwenhwyfar’s fault. After all, Cunaide’s never fallen with child in all
her
years with
Arthur. But Myrddin didn’t voice that thought, of course. Instead he watched the colt go past, head up, mane flying, hoof-falls echoing from the raked stone seats all around.

“A beauty, isn’t he?” asked Arthur, glad to turn their talk from wives to horses. “I took him in a raid last week.”

“You have been raiding against your neighbours? Arthur, Maelwas will never give you command over his war-bands if he thinks you are a brigand!”

“Maybe I don’t need Maelwas’s war-bands,” said Arthur, eyes on the colt. “This is good country. A man could live well here, without going fighting into Saxon lands.” He glanced at Myrddin quickly, sensing his disapproval. “Anyway, it wasn’t Maelwas’s lands I hit. We rode north and east, into Calchvynydd.”

Myrddin was too angry to answer. He’d worked hard to convince Maelwas that Arthur was the one, and now he would have to begin his work again. He’d hoped for an alliance with the lords of Calchvynydd, too, but they wouldn’t want it now. He watched the stolen colt go round, running and running and getting nowhere.