Finding Camlann (27 page)

DONALD IS AWAKE
in the darkness before dawn, his hearing sharply attuned to the noises of the night. The rain is still coming down hard, strong gusts of wind rattling the window. The other side of the bed is empty and cold. It takes him a second or two to remember precisely where he is, and what has happened, and to feel the full weight of his disappointment that she has gone. Making love to Julia, he felt the rightness of it, no sense of guilt or exploitation; and then, in the depth of the night, the indescribable feeling of her naked skin against his own. But now he can see that the constraint was all on her side, her eyes half-averted from his face even as her body responded to his, the shame of it barely suppressed even as her hands clung so fiercely to him. He switches on the light, finds the note she has left for him, its terse, pragmatic message only adding to his confusion.
It’s late and I don’t want to wake you. I’ll see you in the morning, OK?

Now he hears someone come out of the room opposite, walk slowly down the stairs and out of the back door of the pub. Something in the sound of the footfalls, a muffled clearing of the throat, convinces him that it is Caradoc Bowen who has been out on some mysterious errand in the midst of the storm.

AT FIRST THERE
is poetry in his dream, beautiful and stirring lines that paint a picture from the distant past. He sees a tall man standing alone, staring up a long sharp slope where a swift-flowing river cuts and weaves its way past smooth-faced rocks the colour of blood. His companions have gathered a stone’s throw behind him, hardened warriors now anxiously regarding the familiar bear-like silhouette of their leader, conscious of the change that has come upon him, the feyness that is in his eye. The cool air is full of the soothing, treacherous rushing of the mountain stream.

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rallies them to a steep track that cuts high across the valley wall. Faster they climb, pain and fear clutching at their chests, until at last they come to a place where the path broadens out in a shape like an axe’s head beneath the cliff, then falls away almost to nothing. Grimly they gather there, caught in a trap of their own making, as the sun begins its long slow decline. In the sky above, the carrion-birds circle knowingly for the coming feast.

The scene begins to fade, slipping from our dreamer’s memory, leaving only this: a sound like a distant waterfall, sighing, whispering to him across the void.

Do you not know me, crab with broken shell?

Black raven I am called, the voice undying

My body turns to dust but my curse lives on

In rock and branch and mountain stream.

He is awake now in a darkened room, his pulse racing with a cold and familiar dread. Outside in the night, the rain is coming down harder than before.

Three Devil Falls

I
T IS A
pristine blue-sky morning, the clouds all swept away, the hills and fields scrubbed fresh and new with the rainwater pooled ankle-deep in every dip and hollow. Julia’s mood swings from nervous excitement to trepidation as she drives down from Dyffryn Farm to the lower slopes of Moel Hywel and the lane that runs south and west along the valley to Rhayader. She finds that the only way for her to calm herself, to quell the anxious speculations and dissonant voices, is not to think at all, to count the sheep fleeing from the verges, the bends in the road, the crows on the fence-posts watching her as she goes by.

On East Street near the market cross, she runs into Owen the greengrocer for flowers, then cuts back through the side streets to St. Clement’s church, parks against the wrought-iron gates and walks over to the newest graves clustered in the corner of the churchyard. She stands there for a while looking down on her father’s plain-spoken epitaph,
Dai Llewellyn, devoted father, husband, artist, farmer, Welshman
. These are the words he chose for himself years ago, during some mild winter illness, to represent his soul to posterity. She cannot help smiling at the thought of it, Dai there in bed with a bad cold or the flu, pondering long and hard on the proper ordering of his vocations, worrying over the precise effect he would make on casual passers-by in decades and centuries to come. Now she feels only forgiveness for the mistakes he may have made in his life. She steps forward, lays down her flowers one by one, lilies and poppies, bright white and vivid red, then hurries away just as the tears start to blur in her eyes.

The Black Lion is no more than a short walk along narrow streets of whitewashed stone cottages with brightly painted front doors, well-trimmed patchwork gardens now long past their spring and summer best. Julia bows her head as she passes by, striving for anonymity, though some of the p ~swi hardeeople who live here have known her all her life. Donald is waiting for her outside the pub, leaning against the wall next to the front door. He looks tired, his hair in disarray, his face unshaven.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he says. There is something hopeful and uncertain in his smile.

‘Did you think I was going to abandon you?’ She wants to reach out her hand to him, but she is aware of the darkened windows of the pub, Gareth Williams surely there watching them from inside.

‘I couldn’t be sure.’ Donald shrugs, an almost casual gesture, and it occurs to Julia that he, too, has rehearsed this rendezvous, coached himself on how he should act.

‘Well, here I am. Are we ready to go?’

‘Yes, and I’m afraid our distinguished professor is not in the best of moods this morning. We shouldn’t keep him waiting.’

There is a deliberate, decisive quality in the way Donald ushers her towards the narrow passage that leads along the side of the pub to where his car is parked out at the back. Caradoc Bowen is sitting in the cramped rear seat of the Morris with the window wound down. His eyes are closed, his head slumped awkwardly on his chest. Julia feels a stab of irrational fear.

The professor opens his eyes with a start, gathers himself, then fixes her with his impatient stare. ‘You may be assured that I am neither asleep nor yet quite dead, but merely resting after a poor night’s sleep. Now, if you are both finally ready, I should like to propose that we leave without further delay.’

Bowen remains quiet as they set off through the Sunday-morning streets of Rhayader. His reticence imposes a similar state on Donald and Julia, who are forced to restrict their conversation to the essential details of navigation. The road atlas in Julia’s lap is open to a page showing the whole great sweep of the Cambrian mountains through central and southern Wales. Tracing her finger along the route Donald has marked, she is reminded of their journey together to Solsbury Hill, of how the world has changed since then.

Soon they are heading out of the town towards smooth green hills rising gradually to a high dark hinterland. It is a view Julia’s father would have chosen to sketch, the nearer slopes etched sharp and clear with a telling detail or two—a broken-down wall, a hovering bird of prey—merging into a fainter, shadowed, elusive suggestion of the distant uplands. He always said it was not a great art that he strove for in his landscapes, but a pure quality of Welshness, if such a thing could be achieved by the exercise of pencil-strokes alone.

Caradoc Bowen now speaks abruptly into the gathering silence. ‘We are presently travelling along the western edge of the old Welsh
cantref
of Maelienydd,’ he says. ‘If I may be forgiven for borrowing a description from a long-dead poet, this was once a storied realm made mighty by great wars and fruitful land.’

The line is from Virgil’s
Aeneid
, drummed into Julia by a fervent classicist in her first year at Wadham. Donald glances across at her, grimaces faintly. ‘Perhaps you are somewhat exaggerating its claims, Professor Bowen?’ he says.

She holds her breath for the inevitable reaction, but the professor’s response seems only weary, or perhaps disappointed. ‘You may have forgotten that Thomas Malory laid claim to Maelienydd as the kingdom belonging to Leodegrance, father of Guinevere, whose descendants strove here for many centuries against the oppression of thpreonge Mortimer earls. There was almost a happy union of the two, white dragon and red, when Edmund Mortimer married Catrin, the eldest daughter of Glyn D
ŵ
r, but that dream was lost when Edmund perished at Harlech Castle and Catrin was taken to the Tower.’

Julia knows all the bitter history of it, as Caradoc Bowen must be aware. It is from Edmund and Catrin that Hugh claims his Anglo-Welsh descent. Bowen pauses for a moment, and she wonders if he means to coax her into joining the conversation; but soon enough he resumes his solemn narrative.

‘It was into these mountains that Glyn D
ŵ
r disappeared after the tragedy at Harlech. He was almost a broken man by then, broken by Gilbert Talbot who prosecuted the siege, who took away the wives and daughters of Owain and his followers and starved his many comrades to death. His only sustenance in those last days was the powerful mythology that his bards and his seers—Siôn Cent the most prominent amongst them—had woven about him during the years of his ascendancy. There was a purpose in his life that was not yet fulfilled. It was his strongest belief that the red dragon’s song could still be heard echoing faintly in the valleys, if one only knew where to listen.’

‘But do you think there’s a danger in knowing too much about him?’ Donald says. ‘If we were to find his grave, look upon his mortal remains, some of that mythical aura would be destroyed. Perhaps we’re not supposed to know what happened to him at the end.’

Caradoc Bowen’s response is scarcely above a murmur. ‘Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r is a far deeper mystery than you suppose, if you imagine his life and death may be so readily encompassed. It has been my own great work, my
lapis philosophorum
, to recover even the barest essentials of what he once was. Are you proposing that I simply abandon the attempt?’

Julia is glad that Donald does not try to prolong the discussion. Instead he keeps his own counsel, a small frown of concentration creasing his brow as he forces the Morris along a series of narrow roads that twist their way up from the valley floor. When at last she steals a backward glance, she sees that Bowen has closed his eyes again, his hands to the sides of his head as if in some great effort of recollection. Donald catches her eye, and his smile is reassuring to her.

They are approaching a part of Wales that Julia has never visited before, beyond the last of the upland farms and on into the harsher terrain that runs for many miles to the south and east. The landscape is familiar to her in its rugged lines and craggy hollows, its hues of dun and green, but there is also a certain unsettling wildness that comes from a sharpness in the contours, a depth of blackness in the shadowed slopes, a sense of chilly isolation in the barren summit ridges stretching up to the glassy blue sky. As the miles pass by with no sign of human habitation, the loneliness of it begins to prey upon her peace of mind.

At length they come to a dramatic traverse along a little-used road that carries them high above the wall of a long, glacially sculpted
cwm
, then a final steep descent into the lower reaches of a deep riverine cleft carved into the mountainside. They make a turn on to an unmade track that follows the valley upstream. The car lurches uncomfortably along the muddy, rutted surface, bringing them perilously close to the river running in full spate just a few feet to their left. After two or three difficult miles, the track comes to an abrupt end at a place where the remnants of an old stone bridge make a fragmentare a few fey span across the river. On either side are steep slopes covered with deep thickets of stunted ash and birch. An old wooden sign, badly weathered, tells them they have reached their destination,
Rhëydr y Tair Melltith,
Three Devil Falls.

Donald stops the car in the shelter of the wooded hillside. ‘This is as close as we can get,’ he says, as he shuts off the engine and opens the driver’s door.

They walk together to the riverbank, pause there to watch the tumultuous rush of brown-tinted water foaming white over the stones, dazzling with glints of sunlight thrown from the chaotic surface. Not far upstream is a place where the river surges out from a broad rounded space, a natural amphitheatre hollowed from the rock. There is a cliff perhaps a hundred feet high; and then, both beautiful and intimidating, a great flood-charged cascade thundering over the edge and into the pool beneath. It seems impossible that there could be enough water gathered in the upper reaches of the valley to sustain such an astonishing flow.

The professor stands quite still for a moment, staring back along the track, the way they have just come. Then without a word he sets off upstream, leaning heavily on his walking stick as he moves deliberately through the tumbled rocks. ‘I hope he doesn’t think he can climb up there,’ Julia says, seeing the determination in his step.

‘I expect that’s exactly what he’s planning to do. We’d better not let him get too far ahead.’ There is something in the way Donald sets off in pursuit, a boldness and strength of purpose, that reminds her of the way Hugh used to be in their early days together. She follows along more slowly, shocked by the sudden intensity of the guilt that comes rushing in on her.

Fifty yards short of the falls, the professor stops to rest. To Julia he looks deeply unwell, ashen-faced as he gazes up at the wall of cascading water. The roar has become almost overwhelming, resolving itself into a many-layered sound with a dangerous rumbling like thunder at its core. The cool fine mist that has been drifting over them has intensified to a soaking spray that forces them close in to the lee of the cliff.

‘As we have already seen from the map,’ Bowen says, straining to raise his voice above the noise of the flood, ‘what we seek is much higher up, where the stream first cuts its way down from the mountain heights. That place is quite inaccessible, now as in Glyn D
ŵ
r’s day, except for one very difficult route that requires an ascent above the three waterfalls for which this place is named, the lowest of which we see here before us.’

From where Julia is standing, the cliff-face makes an impenetrable barrier all the way around, its sheer surface for the most part obscured by a thick growth of scrubby trees and bushes that have somehow gained a purchase in the rock. The obvious conclusion has remained unspoken, that there is no possibility of making such a climb as Bowen suggests. ‘There’s no way up, Professor Bowen,’ she says. ‘It’s too dangerous even to think of trying it.’

‘There is a path,’ Donald says. ‘We just need to find where it starts.’ Sheltering close in against the cliff, he takes out a map and traces the route they have followed so far: from the road to the unmade track to the place where they are now standing ensnared in a dense web of contour lines. ‘Here,’ he says, pointing to a thin dotted line that starts on their side of the lower waterfall and runs up in zig-zag fashion to the top of the second cascade.

Within a few miithdottnutes, they have found what they are looking for. Behind a thick screen of overhanging branches, they uncover the lower reaches of a rough staircase hewn into the rock. Bowen sets his walking stick decisively on the first step. ‘I do not ask that you accompany me,’ he says.

‘We’re hardly likely to turn back now, Professor,’ Donald says.

The climb is made by numerous long traverses across the face of the cliff. Julia drops a little way back, settles into a rhythm of slow, measured strides, content to move along in her own space. She finds her senses sharply attuned to her surroundings, feels the wisps of cool mountain air against her skin, rocks and leaves and branches trodden underfoot; the rushing of the waterfall layered behind other more immediate sounds, a skittering of stones dislodged from the path far below, the harsh rasping cry of a raven disturbed from its roost, taking wing across the valley. Ahead of her, Donald is solid, familiar, reliably himself. He looks back from time to time to check that she is keeping up, and she takes comfort from it.