Page 1 of The Quest for Excalibur
Chapter One
Outside the hall,a fierce, wintry wind buffeted the vast thatched roof, but inside we were snug. Maia, my maid, had long since latched the wooden shutters on the few windows and hung heavy rugs over them to keep out any sneaking drafts. On the square of bare flagstones in the center of the chamber, a brazier of red-hot embers glowed, and on the walls, smoky torches in their iron brackets spread flickering semi-circles of light.
Seated at the table, with half-a-dozen candles illuminating my work and my stockinged feet buried for warmth in the thick wolf pelt that covered the flagstones, I chewed the wooden end of my pen, an object already misshapen from the attentions of my teeth. For comfort, two layers of sheepskin on my chair cushioned my bottom, and around my shoulders hung my fur-lined cloak. It being winter, my usual occupation held me in its thrall. Writing, especially in the Dark Ages, could be a chilly business.
Open on the table before me lay the book I’d commissioned from the only source capable of fulfilling such a specific order. Monks. Our nearest brothers kept the monastery at Ynys Witrin and had been taken aback by my request. Or rather, by my husband’s order. As far as they were concerned, writing in books was their work, not that of a woman, no matter that the woman in question happened to be a queen. Their queen.
I’d insisted, and so had my husband, Arthur. As their king– the High King of all Britain– had ordered it, they’d been forced to comply, albeit grudgingly. Now, here it lay in front of me at last, a mixture of the impatient pages I’d already written, that had been pried from my unwilling fingers, bound with great care, and no doubt read with salacious curiosity, and new empty ones, ready for me to fill.
My demand for blank pages had also offended them.
“Pages are written first,” Abbot Jerome had declared, on his high horse and looking down his long nose at Arthur. “Only then are they sewn together and bound. No one ever hasemptybooks.”
Or they hadn’t until I’d asked for one.
“And women do not bother themselves with reading and writing.”
This last statement I knew to be untrue, as Arthur’s sister, that devious witch Morgana, could certainly do both, although the abbot, a man of old-fashioned ways, didn’t know that. He’d had to stifle his protests and have the book made. It had been delivered this morning, after a number of probably artificially induced delays.
My hand touched the leather-bound cover, the darkly stained calfskin smooth under my possessive fingers, caressing it as lovingly as I would have done a first edition of a rare book back in my old world– the twenty-first century. A lot of time and skill went into book manufacture, and the leather had been carefully worked and treated to last.
And last was something this book would have to do– last forever. It would be a thorough record of the history of the Dark Ages, a time when barely anything was written down.
Where I came from, only the work of one man from that era had survived, and who knew if he’d truly been the only one to commit pen to parchment? Others, monks all of them, might well have written books that had been lost to the ravages of time, books that might have told a different story.
The famous author of that single surviving tome went by the name of Gildas, a man who happened to be my friend. Right now, he was still a young monk living at Ynys Witrin, learning his trade, the trade of words, under the tutelage of Abbot Jerome.
If my luck held, this book I was writing would survive, and Arthurian scholars would have the proof they needed that my husband, the legendary King Arthur, had truly existed.The Book of Guinevere. My book.
It was large and heavy, a good two feet tall by over a foot wide, and on the front some kind monk– I liked to think it could have been young Gildas himself– had embossed a dragon curled like a sleeping cat about the foot of an ornate Celtic cross. He would have known I’d like the imagery.
With trembling fingers, I lifted the hefty, leather-covered board that stiffened the cover and examined the first page. Someone, perhaps the same person who’d embossed the cover so imaginatively, had taken great care over the painting in the center. Under an apple tree heavy with rosy fruit stood a woman. Behind her loomed the distinctive hump of the Tor– Glastonbury Tor, the doorway by which I’d made my entry into this world. Not that Gildas would know the significance.
The woman wore a long blue gown, her hands eloquently held out to either side, like some proto ballerina striking a pose. The artist meant her to be me, but she bore almost no resemblance. I smiled at the image– so textbook medieval in appearance, such a stereotypical queen with a long face and a small crown on her head. No danger that anyone looking at this in fifteen hundred years would think to say– “Hang on, isn’t that Gwen Fry, the young woman who was all over the news when she went missing on Glastonbury Tor?”
I turned the page. Here lay the history I’d been writing on and off for the last seven years, ever since the determination to set the facts straight had come upon me. Lines of small, neat writing, that I’d had to spend time perfecting before I dared set pen to vellum, marched across the pages. No pencils and erasers here– if I made a mistake, which I often did to start with, I had to carefully scrape away the ink with a razor-sharp knife, damaging the perfect surface of the vellum.
The Departure of the Romansread the first title. I’d spent much more time on research than I’d spent on writing, gathering together all the facts I could squeeze out of people, especially the oldest inhabitants of Din Cadan.
As the Romans had left getting on for a hundred years ago– or so I reckoned, there being no one to tell me what exact year this might be– no one remained alive who’d met them. So little had been written down that my task had proved almost impossible. Ask ten people what they know of something that happened that long ago and you get ten different versions.
Picking through them to make a proper history had turned into a nightmare of contradictions. I rapidly discovered, for instance, that nobody had any idea the Wall that separated southern Britain from Alt Clut, Guotodin and beyond them the Picts, had been built at the start of the second century by order of the Emperor Hadrian. Those few who knew it existed thought it a much later construction, and one or two people had told me in all seriousness thatgiantshad built it.
I turned more pages, my gaze skimming with smug satisfaction over the various headings–ConstantineIII: The Last Emperor;The Rise of Vitelinus, the Guorthegirn;The Coming of the Anglo-Saxons;Ambrosius’s Return;Uthyr Pendragon…
Running footsteps sounded, and the door from the small chamber beside mine burst open. Three children came barging in, with a half-grown hound puppy gamboling at their heels. My son, Amhar, a slender eleven-year-old with a shock of thick dark hair just like his father’s, skidded to a halt when he saw me at the table, his hand on the puppy’s studded-leather collar. “Down, Cabal.” His little sister, Archfedd, her chestnut hair hanging in two long braids, almost cannoned into him.
Medraut, their older cousin, showed no such reticence, however, and boldly came to lean on the table beside me, invading my personal space, as was his habit with everyone. “Can we go down the hill to the village?” he asked, dark eyes challenging. “Amloch told us he’s having a bonfire at his house and asked if we could come. It’s his naming day, and there’ll be games and a suckling pig to roast.” Scarcely a year older than Amhar, he stood a good head taller and was twice as wide with a disturbing look of his unpleasant uncle Cadwy about him, particularly in his overly fleshy lips.
“Good afternoon, children,” I said, eyeing them up and down and taking note of their wind-blown, rosy cheeks. They all wore short cloaks over their thick winter tunics, and their booted feet had trailed mud across the thick rugs.
“Good afternoon, Mother,” Amhar said, ever polite.
“G’d aft’noon, Mami,” Archfedd mumbled, hopping from one foot to the other as though in need of the bucket in the corner.
I fixed Medraut with a hard stare.
He stared back defiantly, but I had more patience than he did, and won. “Good afternoon, Aunt Gwen.” He had no difficulty making those four words sound surly and rude.
