Page 77 of Warrior Queen
He flashed me a smug smile. “You want to know if there really were dragons, don’t you? Well, what do you think?”
“Dragons don’t exist. Not really.”
“They do in people’s minds. I made them see them. They believed they saw them. For them, the dragons were real.”
“How? How did you do that? Could you make me see one right now?”
He shook his head, laughing. “Probably not, because you don’t think they’re real. The people I showed them to did. I told them what was there, and they saw it. I put it inside their heads.”
I still didn’t understand how he’d done that, but however it had been achieved, it had worked. Some sort of mass hypnotism maybe? Auto-suggestion?
He went on. “I guessed bad foundations over water, and possibly an underground cave, were at the root of the fallen walls, and sure enough, they dug down and found a cave with a suitably large pool in it. A little suggestion, and they all saw what they wanted to see. A red dragon fighting with a white. I didn’t get sacrificed and the old advisors were given their marching orders.”
“But Guorthegirn built his fortress and then burned to death in it, didn’t he?” I said, struggling to get my head around what he’d told me. “How come you didn’t die with him?”
This made him laugh so loudly Arthur and Cei turned their heads to look at us. “What point would there be in having the Sight if I didn’t use it to save my own life? I don’t have a lot of control over what I see, but I spotted that one coming a long way off. Even as I explained the meaning of the two dragons to the old king, the unbuilt fortress rose before my eyes, swathed in flames. I saw his ending in its beginning. I didn’t stay to find out if I was right.”
“So you went to join Ambrosius?”
He nodded. “Herne and his wandering troupe had abandoned me to my fate. Probably afraid they’d be next on the sacrificial list. They didn’t stay long enough to see the dragons. That would have impressed them. Guorthegirn got his fortress built, settled himself into it, and I sneaked away one night. Further down the valley I met Ambrosius’s army, fresh from a victory over the Saxons and hungry for more blood. I needed no persuading to join them. The next day Dinas Emrys and everyone in it burned. Guorthegirn, his wise men, his groveling followers. Some Saxons too.”
What a story. If only scholars in the future could hear it, could know what I knew. Then no one would doubt the truth and try to say King Arthur and Merlin had never existed. But nothing survived– no written records, nothing. Perhaps they had been made, but lost. My father had told me how he and his fellow scholars suspected older records had once existed. Told me that the writers we knew of, in the three to eight hundred years after Arthur, had used these now lost records to write their histories. But none of these earlier works had survived to the twenty-first century. Only the later ones, and most of what had been written in them was suspect.
But did this need to be so?Icould write.Iknew the history.Ihad sources to question firsthand. What was to stop me writing my own history of the Dark Ages? One to rival that of Gildas. Excitement boiled up in me. Yes, that was what I’d do– I’d write an account of everything I’d discovered, of Arthur’s life and reign, of the history that came before him. And I’d stow it somewhere safe, where one day some lucky archaeologist would find it. I already had a title for it.The Book of Guinevere.
Chapter Twenty-Five
As High King,Arthur was not expected to have his men make camp outside the walls of Viroconium. Instead, he sent Cei ahead to announce our arrival and demand accommodation. Those were the exact words he used– no pretense of politeness here, and probably none expected. Cadwy, with a touch of unexpected irony, or maybe spite, allocated us Euddolen’s old house, the Domus Alba.
Arthur seemed unmoved by this, but a shiver of foreboding raised every hair down my back as we passed under the archway into the domus’s stable courtyard, half expecting to find it tumbledown and abandoned, with none of the luxuries due to us as Britain’s senior kingdom.
However, I was pleasantly surprised. Five years had passed since Euddolen fled the house, and either Cadwy had ordered an extensive refurbishment or someone else had been living there in the interim. Whoever he was, very little sign of him remained, and the genteelly shabby rooms seemed, on first sight, to have been washed clean of all traces of Euddolen’s tragic family.
Showing admirable caution, Arthur marched the whole of his force inside Viroconium’s high walls. The Domus Alba possessed extensive stabling and accommodation, but not enough to support the huge number Arthur deemed it wise to bring. Our warriors and their horses had to spill out into the surrounding properties and fields, probably to the great annoyance of the neighbors. But who cared? We had our army with us, and I could look forward to sleeping safely at nights. Something I wouldn’t have done if we’d brought a smaller force.
“I’m not stupid enough to come in here with the half-dozen bodyguards he thinks I ought to have brought,” Arthur snapped, as Cei set off to organize billets for all our men. “Nor to stay within his palace walls.” This was what Cadwy had first offered, couching his oily words in silken phrases of wanting only to honor the High King’s rank. Not personally, of course. He sent Archbishop Dubricius as his errand boy.
Merlin snorted. “I’ve a feeling the other kings will feel the same. No one really trusts Cadwy. I doubt many of them will set up camp within his city walls.” He glanced over his shoulder as though suspecting Cadwy might come sneaking up behind him wielding a dagger. “I’m not at all sureweshould have.”
I felt pretty much the same myself. And to cap it all, we were staying where the ghosts of a once happy family probably still walked. I couldn’t help but shiver again as I remembered Euddolen’s two lovely, carefree daughters when I’d first met them. And how dead they were now. Thanks to Cadwy. I didn’t often let myself think of them, but when I did, anger rose afresh at the waste of those young lives.
Arthur shook his head. “On the contrary. We’re safer inside the city walls with all our men than we would be camped outside. If we’d done that, then we’d only have been able to bring a fraction of our force into the city for the Council. This way, we have our entire army here, with us, ready for any eventuality.” He grinned, dark eyes twinkling. “I’d like to have seen Cadwy’s face when he realized we’d done that.”
Put like that, it did sound like the wisest move. However, I wasn’t at all sure about the servants we’d been supplied with. Cooks, maids, stable hands, and cleaners. At first glance, they’d seemed a sorry group of downtrodden cast-offs from Cadwy’s palace. Until I passed the kitchen doors and peered inside, my nose twitching at the aroma of cooking food.
“Karstyn?”
The elderly woman engaged in kneading dough at the table lifted her head to look up. Steel gray hair had been scraped back from a face as doughy as the bread she was making, and her familiar, lumpy body still had the appearance of an over-stuffed sack someone had tied a string around at approximately the right level for a waist.
For a moment, the woman hesitated, before her round face creased into a smile. She wiped her floury hands on her grubby apron, and hurried to the door. “My Lady Guinevere!” She bobbed a hasty bow.
I took her hands in mine, overjoyed to see a familiar face. I’d only known her for a short while five years before, but the ordeal we’d shared, of incarceration in the palace kitchens while Morgawse gave birth to Medraut in the middle of a fight for supremacy between Arthur and Cadwy, had bonded us indelibly.
Dropping her hands, I threw my arms around her and hugged her squishy body to mine. “I never thought to see you here. This is wonderful.” My fears of poisoned food made by a cook in Cadwy’s employ flew out the window.
“’Tis wonderful to see ye here an’ all.” She wheezed as I let her go. “And fine tales I’ve heard o’ ye these past years. An’ that handsome husband o’ yourn.”
I laughed, the relief of finding a face I knew in a house with so many sad memories lightening my heart. “What on earth are you doing here?”
