Page 28 of The Bear's Heart
He sighed. “What else can we do? We’re soldiers. They’re children. The two don’t go well together.”
My hand went to my belly, thinking of our own child growing there. “If we leave them here, they’ll die. Maybe not tomorrow, now we’ve fed them. But look how thin they are. They can’t have eaten anything decent in days, weeks even. If we leave them, I’m sure of one thing– they’ll die before very long.”
He sighed again. “So what do you want to do? Take them with us? With an army? Five children?”
I nodded.
He put his hands on his hips. I held his gaze. The silence between us drew out. I won. With a bark of wry laughter, he turned and called to some of his men to come over. “We’re taking these children with us. Each one of you is to take one up behind you on your horse. Quickly now.”
The children were somewhat more difficult to persuade than the warriors. For a start, they thought we were going to kidnap them into slavery– or eat them. I overheard the smallest child, a boy, whisper this question to Nola, who though not the oldest, appeared to be the leader.
I called them to me, and to my surprise, they all came. “We’re going to help you,” I said. “The king is my husband, and what he says, goes. None of these soldiers will hurt you. I promise. We’re going to take you somewhere safe and warm where you’ll have food and clean clothes– and a bath. But you can’t walk there. You need to ride, like us. A soldier will take each one of you and you’ll be quite safe. We can’t leave you here. There’s no food for you and you’re starving. Please let us help you.”
Eventually, we got the children up behind the soldiers who’d been set to take them. Arthur had deliberately picked those men who had children of their own, and I noticed that the littlest boy was not behind his soldier but cradled in front of the man, where if he fell asleep he wouldn’t fall off.
Satisfied at last that I was going to make a difference in Arthur’s world, however small, I mounted Alezan, and, at Arthur’s side, rode out of the ruins of Caerwysg on the road to Din Tagel and the looming meeting with Eigr.
Chapter Eleven
We left thetown by its northern gates, or rather, through the gap in the walls where the gates had once stood. Time had reduced the towers to broken walls and piles of rubble, and the wooden gates were long gone. Glancing back along the river, I spotted in the distance the ancient wooden bridge that still spanned the wide expanse of the tidal River Exe to the west of the town. The tide was out, and the exposed mudflats glistened in the sunlight.
Merlin brought his horse up beside mine. “Impressive, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Is it Roman? How on earth did they build it?”
He grinned. “See those timbers? They took tree trunks and drove them into the river bed. No one knows how they did it. But the angle they’re at was to counteract the effect of the current.” He twisted in his saddle to point. “The timbers of the roadway had to be strong enough to support wagons coming into the market, or an army going out to fight.”
Even from this distance, I could make out gaps in the timbers. And the barriers at the sides of the bridge looked flimsy in the few places where they still remained. Presumably they’d been washed away by high tides and flood waters. The bridge didn’t look as if it had been used for many years, possibly not since the Romans left.
“Thank goodness we don’t have to go that way.”
He laughed. “That road heads too far south, otherwise no doubt we’d have tried it.”
Turning my back on the bridge’s scary possibilities, I looked up the road we’d taken, which headed inland, roughly north-westwards. The Devon countryside in my time is beautiful, but here, unspoiled by centuries of development, it rolled away before us in all its wild primordial glory. We rode through thick forest, bursting into fresh green life, on a road that hugged the high ground above the Exe, until at last we came to a spot shallow enough for our horses to ford. To my surprise, someone had lined the crossing with flat, square-cut slabs, raising it a little above the level of the rest of the riverbed. The water was only knee deep on our horses this time.
Cei, who’d come to ride beside Arthur and me, spoke up. “When there’s been heavy rain, you can’t cross here at all. This river runs in spate all too often and can be deadly.”
I guessed he knew this route well, as he’d been so often to visit his mother.
Arthur, who was becoming more and more silent as the day wore on, didn’t bother to answer.
On the western banks of the Exe, the land began to climb steadily, and the forest thickened. As well as a substantial advance guard, we had a reinforced rear guard, and everyone was even more on the alert than before. Forest, Arthur told me, was ideal for foot soldiers to stage an ambush and not the best place for cavalry to fight to their advantage.
To my great relief, the graveled Roman road emerged at last onto rough grazing and moorland dotted with sheep, where small farms clustered on the open ground. Surely, if there were this many settlements, then we must be in safer territory. To our southwest rose the great hump of land that was Dartmoor in my time, only now its rolling slopes of heather and gorse seemed to stretch a lot further than I was used to, stretching over most of the land we could see. Amongst the scrub and bracken, green oases nestled in hollows and deep river valleys, where the farmers had cleared the moorland for grazing and crops.
About evening, with all the children now carried in front of the warriors, their heads lolling in exhaustion, we came to a faded villa surrounded by a sprawling and lively village. Our vanguard had warned the inhabitants and the villa owner of our imminent arrival, and they all came out to welcome us. The waiting hands of several burly peasants lifted the sleepy children down and handed them over to the villa servants.
The villa owner introduced himself as Cahal and found accommodation for all our horses and men, and then invited Arthur, Cei, Merlin and me into his house. I was exhausted, but, after a bath and some food, began to feel much better and was alert enough to listen as Arthur negotiated the future of our five new members. For a small sum, Cahal would keep them for us, wash them, delouse and deflea them, and give them clean clothes, and on our return from Din Tagel we would collect them again and take them back with us to Caer Pensa.
Two days later, with Arthur having begrudgingly agreed to also do something to help the poor children I’d seen at Caer Baddan on our return, we rode down the steep rocky valley that led to the fortress of Din Tagel.
*
Din Tagel isa high, rocky promontory sticking out into the Atlantic Ocean on the North Cornish coast, reached from the village in my time down a tarmacked path through a steep-sided valley. Straddling what was once a land-bridge are the two halves of a medieval castle that has nothing to do with the legends of King Arthur. To reach the inner ward of the castle, the modern visitor has to cross the sort of foot-bridge Indiana Jones would be used to, because the land that linked them has long since fallen into the sea.
Fifteen hundred years before I was to first see it for myself in my own past, the narrow land-bridge still existed, and the medieval castle had not yet been built. Instead, a ditch and bank surmounted by a high palisade wall blocked our way. Beyond, on the steep-sided promontory itself, the fortress buildings that made up Cei’s stronghold clustered against the inhospitable rocky backdrop of the island. Somewhere, beyond that wall, I would finally meet Eigr. Nervous tension knotted my stomach.
Again, our vanguard had reached there before us, and the guards on the gates threw them open as soon as they saw us approaching to allow us to pass inside unhindered. I gazed around. Dark Age Din Tagel didn’t seem too different from Din Cadan, except that the only side needing defending was the landward side– the steep cliffs and the sea provided enough defenses on all the other sides. The sound of the waves crashing on the rocks in the cove below was a constant reminder of this.
