Page 42 of The Road to Avalon
Oh God, no.She’d been carried down to the funeral yesterday on a bier, as Donella had refused to allow her to walk, and had sat sobbing quietly between her parents throughout, her pale face streaked with tears and her eyes swollen and red.
I ran with the girl, through the silent Hall and down the hill to Llacheu’s house near the training ground. The door stood open, and when I ran inside, I found Anwyll, Ariana’s father, standing by the cold embers in the firepit, his hands clasped in prayer. A wooden partition wall separated the living area from the bedchamber and from beyond it came what sounded like the cries of a wounded animal.
With a quick glance at Anwyll’s stricken face, I pushed open the door and went into the chamber. Ariana, pretty little Ariana with the sweet, kind face, Ariana who’d waited so patiently for Llacheu to decide he loved her, lay back on her pillows, her pasty face shining with sweat and contorted with pain. Her undershirt had been pulled up to bunch on her swollen belly, and the bedclothes and her legs were dark with blood. Too much blood. An ocean of blood, like the blood that had drained from her husband’s severed arteries.
Donella, her apron stained, bent over her on one side of the bed, and her mother, Adwen, knelt on the other, holding her hand. She was a woman a little older than me, her once dark hair liberally flecked with gray, and her body thickened by many births, all of which had been trouble free, unlike her oldest daughter’s. Once she must have been as pretty as Ariana, but now her lined face sagged in fear as she sponged her daughter’s sweaty brow.
“What happened?” I asked, even though I could see what was going on.
Donella peered over her shoulder, her face drawn with worry. “She began in the night but din’t tell anyone. Her girl found her like this not so long ago. The baby be a-comin’. There be nothin’ I can do to stop it. Not now. ’Tis too late.”
My eyes met Adwen’s pale gray ones and read the terror written in them. This was too early. A baby born at six months could not live. Only a modern incubator in a Neonatal ICU could save it, and that lay fifteen hundred years away.
I hurried to kneel beside Adwen, putting my hand over hers where it held her daughter’s. I had nothing to say, and neither did she. All we could do was pray for Ariana.
The baby came an hour later in a slither of amniotic fluid and blood. A boy. He never breathed, but lay, tiny and perfect but for that spark of life, in Donella’s horny hands. Too small to have had any chance at all. Llacheu’s son. Arthur’s grandson.
Ariana lay back exhausted on her pillows, eyes closed, uninterested in the child she’d lost, as the lifeblood seeped out of her. None of us could do anything to staunch the flow. I’d heard of post-partum hemorrhages in my old world, and this must have been one. Only a total hysterectomy would have been able to save her, and that, like the ICU baby incubator, lay too far away in the future.
She died soon after her little son.
I trudged back to the Hall, leaving Donella and Adwen to lay Ariana out for burial beside her husband and Anwyll sitting alone by the cold embers of the fire with his head in his hands. My own head hung in despair, and tears streamed down my cheeks as I railed against the injustice of life. Maybe if Llacheu hadn’t been so foully murdered, this poor girl might have been able to hang onto her baby long enough to have given him a fighting chance. Arthur’s grandson. Not quitemygrandson, but I felt as though that little mite they’d buried in her arms had been.
Merlin was waiting for me in the Hall, with Archfedd, Llawfrodedd and our saddlebags.
“We have to go,” he said, a touch of gentleness in his voice for once.
I shook my head, swiping the tears away with my sleeve. “How can I? She’s dead, Merlin. Dead. Sheandthe baby. More deaths to lay at the door of a murderer who might well be my own son.” The raging uncertainty in my heart seemed to vacillate from one conviction to the other too swiftly for roots to settle.
Archfedd bristled. “I refuse to believe my brother could be responsible for Llacheu’s death,” she snapped. “He doesn’t have it in him.”
Merlin’s eyes met mine. I didn’t want to consider whether I agreed with Archfedd or not. Too difficult. Something to be faced later.
Llawfrodedd studied his boots as though they were the most interesting things in the hall.
I looked away, unable to hold Merlin’s troubled gaze. Perhaps he suspected that even if Amhar turned out to be guilty of these deaths, I might try to save him from whatever retribution Arthur had in mind. Well, wouldn’t I?
“At least we’ll be doing something,” Archfedd said, touching my arm with gentle fingers. “We’re none of us any use here. And Father might catch up with Amhar before we can reach Morgana in Viroconium. We have to try. We owe it to Amhar to believe him innocent. I don’t believe he could have done it, but Father does.”
Innocent until proven guilty. An all too modern concept. Not one Arthur would be likely to adhere to.
Llawfrodedd lifted anxious eyes to Archfedd’s face, but stayed silent. Impossible to tell what he thought about the young man, so close to him in age, with whom he’d trained for so long. He might have had a better idea than any of us of what Amhar was capable. And wasn’t all the training they’d done geared to one thing? Killing. Had we not made Amhar into the killer I feared he’d become?
But Archfedd was right. We had to leave and leave now. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and nodded. “Let’s go, then.”
Our horses were waiting ready-saddled outside the stables with our twenty armed escort warriors, and it was the work of only a few minutes to sling saddlebags over their quarters and mount up. In the bright, carefree sunshine of midsummer, with a girl and her baby lying dead behind us, we rode down the cobbled road and out of the gates of Din Cadan on our terrible quest.
Viroconium lay over a hundred and fifty miles to the north, along what remained of the old Roman roads, and on horseback, with necessity on our heels, we could manage fifty miles in a day if we pushed our horses hard and rode for long hours. But we and our horses were fit, and the grass at the sides of the graveled roads gave us the opportunity to canter, so to begin with we made rapid progress.
We didn’t break our journey in any of the small towns or wayside inns we’d so often stayed at in the past. Instead, we camped under the stars, rising at first light and continuing on our way with no delays of any kind, riding until night fell.
Three days later, as evening drew in and our shadows stretched out long behind us, we reached our goal.
Gone were the days when Arthur’s unpleasant and jealous older brother had ruled here. As we rode beneath the arched gateway of Viroconium, I couldn’t help but reflect on how Arthur’s relationship with Cadwy had now been repeated between his own two sons. Were the sons of kings destined to perpetual jealous conflict?
We rode straight to the Imperial Palace, that sprawling conglomeration of classical Roman architecture with homespun British practicality strapped onto it. After we’d left Llawfrodedd in charge of our men as they attended to our horses in the stables, Merlin, Archfedd and I, accompanied by an aged servant, took the maze of corridors to the main courtyard.
At this late hour, torches already burned in iron brackets on every soot-stained wall, throwing circles of light across the flagstones of the colonnaded walkway and plunging the center of the large courtyard into impenetrable gloom.
