Page 14 of The Quest for Excalibur
With an irrepressible grin, he dropped his hands onto my shoulders and pushed me back on the bed. “D’you feel old?” He followed me down, leaning over and keeping his weight off me, curls of his dark hair hanging over his face. “I do, sometimes, when I look at Llacheu and see he’s a man grown already.” His hand ran up my body raising goose-pimples of delight.
I sucked my lips in, trying not to laugh. “When you do this to me, I feel about seventeen myself,” I whispered.
He laughed, and I joined in. “That’s the answer I wanted to hear.” He kissed me quickly on the lips, then straightened up. “Come along, they’ll be waiting for us.”
I took his proffered hand and let him pull me to my feet. Then together, we walked into the Great Hall.
*
The meal washalf over when Ruan the Rhymer left his two women standing by the Hall doors and walked up the central aisle with his lyre in his hand. He’d donned a tunic of rich red wool, hung about with long festoons of gold ribbon, his performance costume, and as he walked, his matching red slippers scuffed up the dust from the strewn reeds.
The hubbub of noise rising to the rafters continued unabated as the small man took his place on a low stool beside the glowing hearth. Seemingly oblivious to the fact that he’d been ignored, the musician carefully plucked a few notes from his instrument, head bent, as though nothing else mattered.
On the far side of Arthur, Cei lumbered to his feet with some difficulty as he’d been drinking heavily all evening, a habit he’d fallen into since his son’s death. “Silence,” he bellowed, glaring around the hall at the revellers from beneath his heavy ginger brows.
Not a man to disobey.
Silence fell.
Cei nodded to Ruan. The musician plucked a few more individual notes, pure and clear in the fug of the hall, seeming to cut through the heavy air. Then he smiled to himself as though satisfied, and set free a rivulet of music that rippled around the silent hall, climbing the stout wooden pillars, twisting about the rafters, settling in the hearts of every listener. As his clever fingers danced across the strings, the air hummed with sweet sound, and every eye fixed on him. The men might like exotic dancers, but a storyteller was to everyone’s taste.
He chose the Dream of Macsen Wledig. What did it matter that everyone knew it well, even me? Every storyteller had a slightly different version. This man with his entrancing music was the equivalent of a good film on the television, on Netflix maybe. The story he told was an old one, of how a Roman general dreamed of a beautiful island, our island, then came here, married a British princess, and went back to Rome to conquer the eternal city.
“Macsen Wledig was emperor of Rome, a comelier, a better and a wiser emperor than any that had gone before him,” began Ruan. “One day he held a council and said to his fellow kings, ‘I desire to hunt on the morrow.’ And the next day he set forth with his combrogi until he came to the valley of the river that flows toward Rome, where he hunted until the sun was high in the sky and the heat was great. And sleep came upon the Emperor. His attendants set up their shields around him upon the shafts of their spears to shade him from the sun, with his own gold shield beneath his head. And Macsen slept.”
Macsen’s story closely mirrored that of Arthur’s own great-grandfather– ConstantineIII, who’d done much the same a scant thirty years later. Both had been proclaimed as Emperor by the legions in Britain, both had gone off overseas, to Gaul, or further, never to return.
The song, more a recital accompanied by music, finally came to an end, finishing with the cutting out of the tongues of the Armorican women lest they corrupted the British language. Lovely touch. Perfect for children. The silence in the room was complete. Ruan’s chin rested on his chest, the firelight flickering across his naked scalp and turning it to bronze. His fingers fell from his lyre, slack and spent. The only noise came from the crackling of the flames.
Heledd’s joyful pipe music burst into the silence, and the girl, Hafren, cartwheeled down the aisle, narrowly missing immolating herself in the hearth fire, and revealing to everyone her startling and complete lack of underwear. A few gasps of shock arose from the women present, but not from the men. In front of the high table, she sprang to her feet, flashing a dazzling smile straight at Arthur, bold, brassy, and inviting.
I bristled with indignation, and purposefully laid my left hand over Arthur’s where it rested on the table, like a dog peeing up against a tree to mark its territory.
Hands off.
I wasn’t so distracted, though, not to notice how from his seat amongst his friends in the body of the hall, Llacheu was watching Hafren open-mouthed, with admiration, and lust, written clearly across his face. That same uneasy sense of foreboding returned; the strong instinct that this was an infatuation that shouldn’t be encouraged; that anyway, it was my husband the girl was ogling, not his youthful son.
Heledd, the older woman, had followed the girl down the Hall, the pipe producing more of the wild, ethereal music we’d heard earlier. If I hadn’t known better, I might have thought it fairy music. But I didn’t believe in fairies.
Young Hafren’s booted feet began to dance, her hands to weave shapes in the air, her hair to fly, as she leapt and spun, whirled and stamped. Heledd’s pipe music rose into the rafters and twisted through them just as Ruan’s had, but in a wild, abandoned way– in sharp contrast to her husband’s almost mournful tune.
From the fire, Ruan watched his two women out of narrowed, satisfied eyes, the lyre resting across his knees.
I glanced at Arthur. A smile played about his lips as he watched the girl dance, and the fingers of his free hand tapped a rhythm on the tabletop. I tightened the grip I had on his other hand, and he turned and looked at me, eyes twinkling. “I think there’s magic in that music and the dance she does. I feel sorry for any man she sets her sights on.”
I nodded, my eyes sliding sideways toward her, certain that the man she’d set her eyes on was Arthur.
Chapter Nine
“Milord, tis mostkind of you t’allow us space to set up our ’umble camp.”
The dancing girl, Hafren stood in front of us, or should I say in front of Arthur, in her skimpy, too-short red gown, cut so low her breasts were almost leaping out of it. They must have been freezing.
Up close, as long as she didn’t open her mouth and show us those dreadful teeth, she was prettier still, with the wide, dark eyes of a fawn, the full, red lips of a selfie-pouter who’s had lip implants, and the clear, if a little grubby, skin of a baby. Her abundant brown curls hung down her back in disarray, and right now she was batting her far-too-long lashes at my husband right under my nose.
Bitch.
Arthur and I had halted just outside the stables, accompanied by all the children. Merlin, Llacheu, and Cei stood to my left, ready to accompany us when we took the girls for the ride they’d missed out on the day before, as they were too young to hunt.
