Page 72 of The Quest for Excalibur
Cei joined us. “Wise decision.” He gathered up his own mailshirt. “Best get yours on too, Gwen.”
I wriggled into my mailshirt and fastened my sword belt as my menfolk did the same. Our warriors needed no encouragement to follow suit. In a very short space of time, we had our horses saddled and had mounted up, with helmet straps fastened and shields in place on our arms. Arthur didn’t intend to leave anyone behind in camp.
Alezan danced under my tight hold, marking time with impatient hooves and swishing her tail in discontent. After two days of relative inactivity, she was ready for action, and standing around waiting didn’t suit her.
Arthur must have been in the same frame of mind as Alezan. He stood in his stirrups, raising one arm in the air. “I’ve a mind to ride to meet our ‘allies’,” he called, his voice ringing out above the chink of metal and the muttering of the men. “I’ve never liked to wait around. Still less, meet allies unprepared. That would be the action of a fool. Follow me, men.”
A resounding cheer went up from four hundred voices. Not one of the assembled warriors trusted Cadwy any more than we did, not even the men he’d reluctantly contributed to our army. Maybe those men even less, as they knew him better. Wherever our men had originated, they owed allegiance only to Arthur now.
The gateway being narrow, we had to ride out only three abreast, so I fell in behind Arthur, Merlin and Cei, and found myself beside young Drustans. As an experienced warrior now, he enjoyed a certain popularity with the ladies of Din Cadan. But the sorrow lurking in his eyes betrayed the fact that he’d never forgotten his first love, Princess Essylt of Linnuis. She was a queen, now, and long married to his ageing father in Cornubia’s capital of Caer Dore, and mother to Drustans’ much younger half-brother. Perhaps those dark eyes of his, with their secret sadness, presented a tempting challenge to the ladies.
He’d had his red-brown curls cut short for battle– no man wanted an enemy to have a handle to grab– and his helmet hid what remained. The soft beauty of boyhood, that must have drawn poor Essylt to him, had hardened into the square-jawed determination of a man grown. And although he could still be called handsome, an element of frostiness clung to him preventing anyone from getting too close.
Most of the young warriors his age were already married with children, but not Drustans. I suspected he continued to hold an unquenchable candle for Essylt, even though he understood she could never legally be his. A romantic dream perhaps of a woman he’d made his ideal. A forerunner of the medieval romance tales yet to be written.
He glanced at me and touched his helmet in respect. “A battle wouldn’t be a battle without you, Milady.” Poor boy. I’d forced him into silence when he’d caught me in disguise, trying to ride with Arthur’s men to the battle of Bassas, and he’d never forgotten how I’d blackmailed him. I’d have called him the elephant that never forgets– if he’d have known what an elephant was.
“Precisely,” I said, keeping a tight hold on Alezan to prevent any of the sideswipes she was fond of making at other horses. “I’m the keeper of records now. I need to be here to see what happens. So I can write it down. And the men believe I bring them luck.”
He frowned. “I don’t understand the importance you put on having a written record. We’ve managed long enough with the bards reciting our history for us. We can go on doing that, surely?”
Trust him to find fault with anything I did.
We turned our horses north along the top of the scarp, the evening breeze, chilly with the promise of winter soon to come, blowing out our horses’ manes and tails and the horsehair plumes on some of the helmets. “Bards change a story a little every time it’s told,” I said, with a smile. “Tell it enough times and it’s not the same story it was to start with. A history written down remains the same forever– and if I am eyewitness to what I write, then in time to come, men who read my work will know it as truth.”
His eyes, once so frank and innocent, narrowed. “What does it matter to us what men in time to come believe? We are in the here and now. What happens today, tomorrow, next year concerns me. Not what happened in the past. I don’t think the men who follow us will have much interest in what we did. They’ll be like us– concerned only with their day to day.”
I smiled. “You don’t know, though. And I don’t mean our children, or our children’s children. Nor even many generations further on. I’m writing my account for long in the future, when men will have more time on their hands and want to study the past and know what happened then for the sake of knowledge and no other reason.”
“You think they will?” For a moment the eager, interested boy of twelve years ago stared back at me, fascinated by the fact that I thought people in the future would want to read about his present.
“I’ve written about you in my book,” I said. “About your love for Essylt.”
His brow furrowed and his face darkened. “You had no right to do that.”
The track we followed wound downhill now, and the riders behind us had spread out, the murmur of their voices carrying to me on the breeze. “Believe me, people will want to know your story,” I said.
He frowned. “A story of lost love?”
“Yes. Particularly a story like that. Much as you and your friends like to hear similar stories sung in the hall of an evening.”
He gave a shrug. “Perhaps you won’t see my ending. Perhaps it won’t be a tale of lost love. My father is in his dotage now. It’s only a matter of time before I return to rule in his stead. And Essylt will be there. Waiting for me.”
My heart ached for this hopeful boy, for boy he still was, in his heart. Essylt might be there waiting for him, if he ever got there, but he could never marry her– because marriage with his father had made her legally his mother, and by law their union would be incestuous. Not that I believed he’d ever reach this point. In my old world I’d seen his grave marker and it had not named him as a king, merely as a king’s son. Essylt’s own son, a boy barely a year younger than Amhar, might be the one to follow old king March to the throne of Cornubia instead of Drustans. Who knew?
“I wish you well with that,” I said, a bitter taste in my mouth, and spurred Alezan forward to join Arthur at the front.
We reached the valley bottom and approached the road. At the crossing point, where our Ridgeway track met the road, Arthur and Cei had our men line up in ranks, forty riders across by ten deep, spears pointing upward like the fierce bristles on a brush. Arthur and Cei stood just in front, beside Anwyll carrying our own banner– a black bear rearing up on a creamy-white background. As if to oblige, the breeze picked up and unfurled the cloth, setting the bear dancing in the air.
Merlin and I moved our horses to one side, the better, he said, for me to flee if danger threatened. But somehow, I didn’t think it would. If Cadwy had come this far, he didn’t mean to fight with Arthur, no matter how much he hated him, not with a huge army of Saxons on the way.
Over the brow of the western hill, Cadwy’s army and standard bearers came into sight. He followed the old Roman custom, and a proportion of his army consisted of foederati, Saxon mercenaries, to whom he’d gifted land and gold, but who now considered themselves as British.
These were much like the warriors I’d met along the Wall who’d been descended from the frontier troops the Romans had posted at the Wall forts, and who’d intermarried with local girls but still passed down their golden hair through their bloodline.
However, despite the knowledge that Cadwy had come at Arthur’s request, and come quickly, and my own feeling that he posed no threat, I couldn’t escape the fear that he might have some trick up his sleeve. That he didn’t intend to do as he’d been asked, or that he intended to twist the situation to his own benefit. Mistrust of him was well-ingrained in my heart.
We sat our horses, impassive, wary, watching the approach of this slippery king.
