Page 91 of The Quest for Excalibur
I tightened my hold around his waist. “Now you see why Bedwyr put me in charge of it. If you’d had it, you’d have taken an overdose.”
He fell silent for a few minutes, but I could tell he was nowhere near sleeping, even though he must have been exhausted.
“Can I do anything?” I whispered.
He grunted. “Find me the man that shot me. I’d like to insert my spear where the sun doesn’t shine.”
Back in my old world, if anyone had expressed this desire, I’d have taken it with an enormous pinch of salt and laughed. Here, in the savage Dark Ages, I didn’t. Doing just that to Arthur’s assailant didn’t seem an unlikely revenge. The most disturbing thing was that I wanted to do it too. The twenty-first century seemed a long way off.
I stroked his right hand. “He’s probably amongst the Saxon dead.”
He shifted again, and his body stiffened as though a shock of pain had shafted through him. “I doubt it.” The words came out between gritted teeth. “He wasn’t a Saxon.”
My turn to stiffen. “What?” My voice rose in alarm, and I fought to control it. “Who was he then?” An indignant hiss this time.
“Didn’t you see the arrow?” He grunted in pain. “Fletched with white feathers. Powys. An arrow from Powys.”
“No-o,” I stretched the word out in a gasp of shock. “It can’t have been.” I paused, uncertainty washing over me. “Can it?”
“Well, it was. Go and look at the Saxon arrows if you want proof. They fletch them with goose feathers. Gray goose feathers with a paler cock feather. These were white with the cock one a light brown. From young swans on the Sabrina river. By Viroconium.” He drew an unsteady breath. “I should know. I used those arrows myself as a boy. One of my friends was the son of my father’s fletcher. They pride themselves on the whiteness.”
My eyes might well have been starting from my head. “You think the man who did this is still alive? Amongst Custennin’s men?” I fought to keep my voice under control, my head twisting to peer over my shoulder into the dark woods at my back. Might he be out there now, aiming to finish what he’d started? Sneaking past our lookouts?
“Most likely.”
“What will we do?” I bit my lip. “Why didn’t you tell Cei and Merlin?”
He sighed. “And ruin what could be a good alliance with Custennin? He’s not his father. Nor his aunt. We made a pact tonight, while everyone else was singing. I don’t want to risk offending him at the very start of his reign over something he had nothing to do with.”
The impulse to shake some sense into him burgeoned. Only his wound stayed my hand. “But it might have been Custennin who organized it. My God, he came to see you tonight to see if you were dying and his plan had worked.”
His head moved in the smallest of shakes. Perhaps all he could manage without causing himself more pain. “No. It wasn’t him. I’d swear it. And I doubt it was Cadwy, either. This has the mark of Morgana stamped all over it.”
Morgana. Why hadn’t I thought of her straightaway? Because she was miles away and hadn’t traveled with Cadwy’s army. But that didn’t mean she’d not planted her own men within it. What kind of a relationship did Custennin have with his aunt? Might Morgana’s star be on the wane now he was king? I bloody hoped so. “Are we safe? Can her man get us here?”
“Not here,” Arthur murmured, sounding sleepy at last. “Too many guards. You don’t think I’d let the men of Powys camp beside us without Cei setting up a row of guards between us, do you? If my would-be assassin wasn’t killed in the battle, he won’t get through tonight. And he failed. I’m not dead. He might well have already fled rather than reporting back to Morgana that he’s let her down and her plan has failed– again.”
I nodded, but something still puzzled me. “But now Cadwy, her candidate, is dead, who could she want to put on the High King’s throne?”
“Not Custennin,” Arthur whispered, more sleepy still. “Her brat by Merlin. That’s who.”
A girl. And a girl with power, at that. I shivered. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in Custennin’s shoes when Morgana decided it was time her daughter should take the reins of government.
Chapter Forty-Three
The morning broughtclear skies and a world washed clean by the storm’s downpour, but the ground remained wet and mired where the battle had taken place. With it came the digging of graves and the burial of our dead.
Cei set the prisoners to work on the grave-digging. As he pointed out to Arthur, “Why have a dog and bark yourself?” Thirty or so big Saxons, shirtless and filthy, labored on the churned-up grassland beside the road. A dozen of our heavily armed warriors watched over them, as they hacked their way through the thin soil and chalky bedrock with pickaxes and shovels. Despite the downpour, the rain hadn’t penetrated far below the surface, and the soil was nearly as difficult to dig as the chalk.
Declaring himself recovered, which wasn’t true, Arthur told Cei firmly that neither of the commanders should be submitted to humiliation. “I want to make some sort of treaty with them, not turn them into worse enemies,” he said, standing by the still smoking remains of last night’s campfire. His face remained ashy-pale, and he had his left arm hidden under his cloak, but at least he’d eaten.
After breakfast, Bedwyr had given him another dose of the poppy syrup– smaller this time, to Arthur’s disgust. “Too much, too often is bad for you,” Bedwyr cautioned. “I’ve seen men take just a few doses too many and then crave for it like mad men. Best not to get to that state. This dose has to last you all day.”
Addiction. The hidden danger of the poppy seed concoction hadn’t even occurred to me. Wasn’t it morphine in poppy seeds? A strong painkiller indeed, but one that had done a lot to raise Arthur’s mood.
Cei scowled at being told to go more easily on the captured Saxon leaders, as perhaps he’d been looking forward to subjugating them. He still bore a grudge for Rhiwallon’s terrible death. However, he did as he was told, and the two leaders were not made to dig with their men.
The Saxon warriors proved good workers, and as the sun climbed high into the still clear sky and warmed the chilly earth, our dead took up their new residence. With the heathen Saxons looking on, hostile expressions on their rebellious, dirt-streaked faces, Dubricius said our Christian words over the grave, and the earth was piled back into place. Only a long, low mound of freshly turned soil, flints and chalk, grizzled like the hair on Cadwy’s head, marked the spot where our heroes lay.
