‘Why not?’ I asked carefully for I sensed the jealousy in Owain’s question.
‘Because Arthur doesn’t believe in the Gods,’ Owain said, ‘that’s why not. He doesn’t even believe in that milksop God the Christians worship. So far as I can make out Arthur doesn’t believe in anything, except big horses, and the Gods alone know what earthly use they are.’
‘They’re frightening,’ I said, wanting to be loyal to Arthur.
‘Oh, they’re frightening,’ Owain agreed, ‘but only if you’ve never seen one before. But they’re slow, they take two or three times the amount of feed of a proper horse, they need two grooms, their hooves split like warm butter if you don’t strap those clumsy shoes on to their feet, and they still won’t charge home into a shield–wall.’
‘They won’t?’
‘No horse will!’ Owain said scornfully. ‘Stand your ground and every horse in the world will swerve away from a line of steady spears. Horses are no use in war, boy, except to carry your scouts far and wide.’
‘Then why –’ I began.
‘Because,’ Owain anticipated my question, ‘the whole point of battle, boy, is to break the enemy’s shield–wall. Everything else is easy, and Arthur’s horses scare battle lines into flight, but the time will come when an enemy will stand firm, and the Gods help those horses then. And the Gods help Arthur too if he’s ever knocked off his lump of horseflesh and tries to fight on foot wearing that suit of fish-armour. The only metal a warrior needs is his sword and the lump of iron at the end of his spear, the rest’s just weight, lad, dead weight.’ He stared down into the fort’s compound where Ladwys was clinging to the fence that surrounded Gundleus’s prison. ‘Arthur won’t last here,’ he said confidently. ‘One defeat and he’ll sail back to Armorica where they’re impressed by big horses, fish suits and fancy swords.’ He spat, and I knew that despite Owain’s professed liking for Arthur there was something else there, something deeper than jealousy. Owain knew he had a rival, but he was biding his time as, I guessed, Arthur was biding his, and the mutual enmity worried me for I liked both men. Owain smiled at Ladwys’s distress. ‘She’s a loyal bitch, I’ll say that for her,’ the big man said, ‘but I’ll break her yet. Is that your woman?’ He nodded towards Lunete who was carrying a leather bag of water towards the warriors’ huts.
‘Yes,’ I said and blushed at the confession. Lunete, like my new beard, was a sign of manhood and I wore both clumsily. Lunete had decided to stay with me instead of going back to what was left of Ynys Wydryn with Nimue. The decision really had been Lunete’s and I was still nervous of everything about our relationship, though Lunete seemed to have no doubts about the arrangement. She had taken over a corner of the hut, swept it, screened it with some withy hurdles, and now talked confidently about our joint future. I had thought she would want to stay with Nimue, but since her rape Nimue had been quiet and withdrawn. Indeed, she had become hostile, speaking to no one except to turn away their conversation. Morgan was tending her eye and the same smith who had made Morgan’s mask was offering to make a gold ball to replace the lost eyeball. Lunete, like the rest of us, had become a little frightened of this new, sour, spitting Nimue.
‘She’s a pretty girl,’ Owain said grudgingly of Lunete, ‘but girls live with warriors for one reason only, boy, to get rich. So make sure you keep her happy, or sure as eggs she’ll make you miserable.’ He fished in his coat’s pockets and found a small gold ring. ‘Give it to her,’ he said.
I stammered my thanks. Warrior leaders were supposed to grant their followers gifts, yet even so the ring was a generous gift for I had yet to fight as one of Owain’s men. Lunete liked the ring which, with the silver wire I had unwrapped from my sword’s pommel, was the beginning of her treasure hoard. She incised a cross on the ring’s worn surface, not because she was a Christian, but because the cross made it into a lover’s ring and showed that she had passed from girlhood into womanhood. Some men also wore lovers’ rings, but I craved after the simple iron hoops that victorious warriors hammered from the spearheads of their defeated enemies. Owain wore a score of such rings in his beard, and his fingers were dark with others. Arthur, I had noticed, wore none.
Once our own harvest was gathered from the fields around Caer Cadarn we marched all over Dumnonia to collect the tax crops. We visited client kings and chiefs, and were always accompanied by a clerk from Mordred’s treasury who tallied the revenue. It was strange to think that Mordred was now King and that it was no longer Uther’s treasury we filled, but even a baby king needed money to pay for Arthur’s troops as well as all the other soldiers who were keeping Dumnonia’s borders secure. Some of Owain’s men were sent to reinforce the permanent guard in Gereint’s frontier fortress at Durocobrivis while the rest of us became taxmen for a while .
I was surprised that Owain, that famous lover of battle, did not go to Durocobrivis nor back to Gwent, but instead stayed with the commonplace work of assessing tax. To me such work seemed menial, but I was just a wispy-bearded boy who did not understand Owain’s mind.
Tax, to Owain, was more important than any Saxon. Taxes, as I was to learn, were the best source of wealth for men who did not want to work, and this tax season, now that Uther was dead, was Owain’s opportunity. At hall after hall he reported a bad harvest, and thus levied a low tax payment, and all the while he was lining his own purse with the bribes offered in return for making just such a false report. He was quite guileless about it. ‘Uther would never have let me get away with it,’ he told me one day as we walked along the southern coast towards the Roman town of Isca. He spoke fondly of the dead king. ‘Uther was a fly old bastard, and always had a shrewd idea of what he should get, but what does Mordred know?’ He looked to his left. We were crossing a wide, bare heath atop a great hill and the view to the south was of the glittering empty sea where a wind blew strong to fleck the grey waves white. Way off to the east, where a long sweeping shingle bank ended, there was a mighty headland on which the waves shattered into foam. The headland was almost an island, joined to the mainland only by a narrow causeway of stone and shingle. ‘Know what that is?’ Owain asked me, jutting his chin towards the headland.
‘No, Lord.’
‘The Isle of the Dead,’ he said, then spat to ward off ill luck while I stopped and stared at the awful place that was the seat of Dumnonian nightmares. The headland was the isle of the mad, the place where Pellinore belonged with all the other crazed and violent souls who were considered dead the moment they crossed the guarded causeway. The Isle was under the guardianship of Crom Dubh, the dark crippled God, and some men said that Cruachan’s Cave, the mouth of the Otherworld, lay at the Isle’s extremity. I stared at it in dread until Owain clapped my shoulder. ‘You’ll never need to worry about the Isle of the Dead, boy,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a rare head on your shoulders.’ he walked on westwards. ‘Where are we staying tonight?’ he called to Lwellwyn, the treasury clerk whose mule carried the year’s falsified records.
‘With Prince Cadwy of Isca,’ Lwellwyn answered.
‘Ah, Cadwy! I like Cadwy. What did we take from the ugly rogue last year?’
Lwellwyn did not need to look at his wooden tally sticks with their recording notches, but reeled off a list of hides, fleeces, slaves, tin ingots, dried fish, salt and milled corn. ‘He paid most in gold, though,’ he added.
‘I like him even more!’ Owain said. ‘What will he settle for, Lwellwyn?’
Lwellwyn estimated an amount half of what Cadwy had paid the previous year, and that was precisely the amount agreed before the evening meal in Prince Cadwy’s hall. It was a grand place, built by the Romans, with a pillared portico that faced down a long wooded valley towards the sea reach of the River Exe. Cadwy was a Prince of the Dumnonii, the tribe which had given our country its name, and Cadwy’s princedom made him of the second rank in the kingdom. Kings were of the highest rank, princes like Gereint and Cadwy and client kings like Melwas of the Belgae came next, and after them were the
chiefs like Merlin, though Merlin of Avalon was also a Druid which put him outside the hierarchy altogether. Cadwy was both a prince and a chief and he ruled a sprawling tribe that inhabited all the land between Isca and the border of Kernow. There had been a time when all the tribes of Britain were separate and a man of the Catuvellani would look quite different from a man of the Belgae, but the Romans had left us all much alike. Only some tribes, like Cadwy’s, still retained their distinct appearance. His tribe believed themselves to be superior to other Britons, in mark of which they tattooed their faces with the symbols of their tribe and sept. Each valley had its own sept, usually of no more than a dozen families. Rivalry between the septs was keen, but nothing compared to the rivalry between Prince Cadwy’s tribe and the rest of Britain. The tribal capital was Isca, the Roman town, which had fine walls and stone buildings as great as any in Glevum, though Cadwy preferred to live outside the town on his own estate. Most of the townspeople followed Roman ways and eschewed tattoos, but beyond the walls, in the valleys of Cadwy’s land where Roman rule had never lain heavily, every man, woman and child bore the blue tattoo marks on their cheeks. It was also a wealthy area, but Prince Cadwy had a mind to make it wealthier still.
‘Been on the moor lately?’ he asked Owain that night. It was a warm, sweet night and supper had been served on the open portico that faced Cadwy’s estates.
‘Never,’ Owain said.
Cadwy grunted. I had seen him at Uther’s High Council, but this was my first chance to look closely at the man whose responsibility was to guard Dumnonia against raids from Kernow or distant Ireland. The Prince was a short, bald, middle-aged man, heavily built, with tribal marks on his cheeks, arms and legs. He wore British dress, but liked his Roman villa with its paving and pillars and channelled water that ran in stone troughs through the central courtyard and out to the portico where it made a small foot-washing pool before running over a marble dam to join the stream further down the valley. Cadwy, I decided, had a good life. His crops were plentiful, his sheep and cows fat, and his many women happy. He was also far from the threat of Saxons, yet still he was discontented. ‘There’s money on the moor,’ he told Owain. ‘Tin.’
‘Tin?’ Owain sounded scornful.
Cadwy nodded solemnly. He was fairly drunk, but so were most of the men around the low table on which the meal had been served. They were all warriors, either Cadwy’s or Owain’s men, though I, being junior, had to stand behind Owain’s couch as his shield-bearer. ‘Tin,’ Cadwy said again, ‘and gold, maybe. But plenty of tin.’ Their conversation was private, for the meal was almost over and Cadwy had provided slave girls for the warriors. No one had any attention for the two leaders, except for me and Cadwy’s shield-holder, who was a dozy lad staring slack-jawed and dull-eyed at the slave girls’ antics. I was listening to Owain and Cadwy, but kept so still and straight that they probably forgot I was even standing there. ‘You may not want tin,’ Cadwy said to Owain, ‘but there’s plenty who do. Can’t make bronze without tin, and they pay a fancy price for the stuff in Armorica, let alone up country.’ He jerked a dismissive fist towards the rest of Dumnonia, then gave a belch that seemed to surprise him. He calmed his belly with a draught of good wine, then frowned as though he could not remember what he had been talking about. ‘Tin,’ he finally said, remembering.
‘So tell me about it,’ Owain said. He was watching one of his men who had stripped a slave girl naked and was now smearing butter on her belly.
‘It isn’t my tin,’ Cadwy said forcefully.
‘Must be someone’s,’ Owain said. ‘You want me to ask Lwellwyn? He’s a clever bastard when it comes to money and ownership.’ His man slapped the girl’s belly hard, splattering butter all over the low table and causing a gust of laughter. The girl complained, but the man told her to be quiet and started scooping butter and pork grease on to the rest of her body.
‘The fact of the matter is,’ Cadwy said forcefully to get Owain’s attention off the naked girl, ‘that Uther let in a pack of men from Kernow. They came to work the old Roman mines, because none of our people had the skills. The bastards are supposed, mark that, supposed to send their rent to your treasury, but the buggers are sending tin back to Kernow. I know that for a fact.’
Owain’s ears had pricked up now. ‘Kernow?’
‘Making money off our land, they are. Our land!’ Cadwy said indignantly.
Kernow was a separate kingdom, a mysterious place at the very end of Dumnonia’s western peninsula that had never been ruled by the Romans. Most of the time it lived in peace with us, but every now and then King Mark would stir himself from his latest wife’s bed and send a raiding party over the River Tamar. ‘What are men of Kernow doing here?’ Owain asked in a voice every bit as indignant as his host’s.
‘I told you. Stealing our money. And not just that. I’ve been missing good cattle, sheep, even a few slaves. Those miners are getting above themselves, and they’re not paying you like they should. But you’ll never prove it. Never. Not even your clever fellow Lwellwyn can look at a hole in the moor and tell me how much tin is supposed to come out in a year.’ Cadwy swiped at a moth, then shook his head moodily. ‘They think they’re above the law. That’s the problem. Just because Uther was their patron they think they’re above the law.’
Owain shrugged. His attention was back on the butter-smothered girl who was now being chased about the lower terrace by a half dozen drunken men. The grease on her body made her hard to catch and the grotesque hunt was making some of the watching men helpless with laughter. I was having a hard time stopping myself from giggling. Owain looked back to Cadwy. ‘So go up there and kill a few of the bastards, Lord Prince,’ he said as though it was the easiest solution in the world.
‘I can’t,’ Cadwy said.
‘Why not?’
‘Uther gave them protection. If I attack them they’ll complain to the council and to King Mark and I’ll be forced to pay sarhaed.’ Sarhaed was the blood price put on a man by law. A King’s sarhaed was unpayable, a slave’s was cheap, but a good miner probably had a high enough price to hurt even a wealthy prince like Cadwy.
‘So how will they know it’s you who attacked them?’ Owain asked scornfully.
For answer Cadwy just tapped his cheek. The blue tattoos, he was suggesting, would betray his men.
Owain nodded. The buttered girl had at last been pinned down and was now surrounded by her captors among some shrubs that grew on the lower terrace. Owain crumbled some bread, then looked up at Cadwy again. ‘So?’
‘So,’ Cadwy said slyly, ‘if I could find a bunch of men who could thin these bastards out a little, it would help. It’ll make them look to me for protection, see? And my price will be the tin they’re sending to King Mark. And your price…’ He paused to make sure Owain was not shocked by the implication, ‘.. . will be half that tin’s value.’
‘How much?’ Owain asked quickly. The two men were speaking softly and I had to concentrate to hear their words over the warriors’ laughter and cheers.
‘Fifty gold pieces a year? Like this,’ said Cadwy and took a gold ingot the size of a sword handle from a pouch and slid it along the table.
‘That much?’ Even Owain was surprised.
‘It’s a rich place, the moor,’ Cadwy said grimly. ‘Very rich.’
Owain stared down Cadwy’s valley to where the moon’s reflection lay on the distant river as flat and silver as a sword blade. ‘How many of these miners are there?’ he finally asked the Prince.
‘The nearest settlement,’ Cadwy said, ‘has got seventy or eighty men. And there are a deal of slaves and women, of course.’
‘How many settlements?’
‘Three, but the other two are a way off. I’m just worried about the one.’
‘Only twenty of us,’ Owain said cautiously.
‘Night-time?’ Cadwy suggested. ‘And they’ve not been attacked ever, so they won’t be keeping watch.’
Owain sipped wine from his horn. ‘Sev
enty gold pieces,’ he said flatly, ‘not fifty.’
Prince Cadwy thought for a second, then nodded his acceptance of the price.
Owain grinned. ‘Why not, eh?’ he said. He palmed the gold ingot, then turned fast as a snake to look up at me. I did not move, nor took my eyes from one of the girls who was wrapping her naked body round one of Cadwy’s tattooed warriors. ‘Are you awake, Derfel?’ Owain snapped.
I jumped as though startled. ‘Lord?’ I said, pretending my mind had been wandering for the last few minutes.
‘Good lad,’ Owain said, satisfied I had heard nothing. ‘Want one of those girls, do you?’
I blushed. ‘No, Lord.’
Owain laughed. ‘He’s just got himself a pretty little Irish girl,’ he told Cadwy, ‘so he’s staying true to her. But he’ll learn. When you get to the Otherworld, boy’ – he had turned back to me – ‘you won’t regret the men you never killed, but you will regret the women you passed up.’ He spoke gently. In my first days in his service I had been frightened of him, but for some reason Owain liked me and treated me well. Now he looked back at Cadwy. ‘Tomorrow night,’ he said softly. ‘Tomorrow night.’
I had gone from Merlin’s Tor to Owain’s band, and it was like leaping from this world to the next. I stared at the moon and thought of Gundleus’s long-haired men massacring the guards on the Tor, and I thought of the people on the moor who would face the same savagery the very next night and I knew I could do nothing to stop it, even though I knew it should be stopped, but fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you’ll just weep yourself to death.
Our shields had been smeared with boat-builder’s pitch so they would look like the black shields of Oengus Mac Airem’s Irish raiders whose long, sharp-prowed boats raided Dumnonia’s northern coast. A local guide with tattooed cheeks led us all afternoon through deep, lush valleys that climbed slowly towards the great bleak loom of the moor that was occasionally visible through some break in the heavy trees. It was good woodland, full of deer and cut with fast, cold streams running seaward off the moor’s high plateau.