Page 23 of The Road to Avalon
No one moved. I released my hold on Drustans’ limp hand. He’d gone. The happy boy, the passionate lover, the brave warrior– all gone. Wiped away in a moment’s folly, by the hand of the woman he loved. No Shakespearean play could have been more tragic.
Essylt’s lips pressed together in a firm line. She set both hands on the hilt of the dagger and drew it out. It came with a rush of blood. For a moment she held it before her face, staring at it with wild, devasted eyes.
I should have seen it coming.
She was too quick for us. None of us foresaw her reaction, and only Cei and I were close enough to have prevented it. Before either of us could stop her, and probably before she had time to consider what she was doing, she plunged the dagger into her own chest just beneath her ribs, driving it upwards toward her heart.
“I’m coming, my love,” she cried, as the knife slid home. “Wait for me.”
“No!” I launched myself at her across Drustans’ body, but there was nothing I could do. With a gasp, she fell forward across the chest of her one-time lover.
“Mother!” Seleu cried, but he was already far too late.
Chapter Eleven
The events ofthe coronation rather put a damper on our visit. With his mother lying dead in front of him, Seleu grabbed the crown from my hands and jammed it onto his head. “There,I’mthe bloody king now,” he cried, as though a dead mother and brother didn’t matter so long as he got what he wanted. How very like his father.
Our men held the angry crowd back at sword point, but with the king they’d expected at last successfully crowned, even if it was by his own hand, their anger subsided. Very few would have had memories of Drustans as a boy, but they all must have known Seleu, and the feeling buzzing amongst them was one of general relief that their lives had not been upset by internecine strife. The ordinary people do not like disturbance.
But now we had two more bodies to sort out.
“My mother will join my father on his pyre,” Seleu declared, his tone imperious. Impossible, as that was now ashes. They’d have to build another.
I kept my mouth shut, in case I came out with something I’d regret later. But my insides bubbled at the injustice of what I’d just witnessed, and the cold acceptance of it by Essylt’s son.
“She wanted to be with Drustans,” I protested to Arthur, some time later after the bodies had been removed and everyone had dispersed. We’d retreated to our chamber, while Gwalchmei and Merlin attended to Drustans’ body, and I’d revealed the true story of their love to my husband. As nothing could hurt them now, I didn’t see that keeping their secret mattered any longer. “She should be with him in death, at least. With the man she longed to be with in life but never could be.”
Arthur scowled at me, brimming with indignation that I’d known this for nineteen years and never told him. Typically taking it as an insult and making it all about him. Men.
Archfedd had followed us inside and listened to the story. “I agree with Mami,” she said. “It’s such a romantic story even though they’re both dead. He must have loved her all his life. And she loved him, despite wanting to protect her own son. Nothing should part them now.”
Arthur shook his head, still angry and sticking to protocol. “It’s not for us to say what happens to Essylt’s body. She was Seleu’s mother, the Queen of Caer Dore. He will decide.”
“That’s so unfair,” Archfedd said. “You’re the High King, Father. Can’t you intervene?”
Arthur shook his head again. “No. Seleu is king here, and I refuse to interfere. But if you want my opinion, then I’ll give it. Essylt will be lucky to get any funeral rites at all, as she’s a suicide.”
Of course. This was a time when suicides were buried at crossroads with a stake through their hearts. What would Seleu’s priest have to say about this?
A lot. He flatly refused to give Essylt any kind of service, even under threat of being beheaded. Maybe he guessed a boy Seleu’s age didn’t have the guts to carry out his threat. Although if I’d been him, I’d not have been so confident.
Drustans was a different basket of eels. He’d not died by his own hand, and the priest was more than willing to givehima decent burial. This time Seleu was the problem.
“I refuse to have him buried here,” he snapped, probably still smarting from being outbluffed by his priest. “He brought about my mother’s death.”
Not quite true. But the priest had final say over the graveyard around his tiny, wattle church, and it lay far enough away from the fortress for a burial there to be considered inoffensive. Or at any rate, not so offensive as burying him closer would have been.
“I want his grave marked,” I said to Arthur, as the next day we stood watching his shrouded corpse being lowered into the gaping hole of his grave, the warriors who’d been his friends solemn faced beside us.
He nodded, slightly less angry with me now. “I’ll have the mason in the village prepare a stone.”
Archfedd squeezed my hand, tears trickling down her cheeks. “He was always kind to me. He deserves some memorial to remind others who he was. No one should be forgotten.”
I nodded. “He never will be. And I have the words for the stone. Here lies Drustans, son of Marcus Cunomorus.”
HIC IACET DRUSTANS CUNOMORI FILIUS– the words I’d read so long ago in a future that had become my distant past. Words I’d had no way of knowing I’d chosen myself to mark the grave of a man blighted in love. A man whose memorial would last forever. The only known grave marker of any of Arthur’s warriors.
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