Legacy: Arthurian Saga (147 page)

"And to you." It was not much more
than a mumble, in the strong blurring accent of the district. He
peered at me suspiciously, through eyes clouded with cataract.
"You're a stranger to these parts."

"I come from the west." This was no
reassurance. It seemed that the folk hereabouts had had too long a
history of war. "Why'd you leave the road then? What do you want up
here?"

"I came on the King's behalf, to look
at the fortress walls."

"Again?" As I stared at him in
surprise, he drove his stick into the turf, as if making a claim,
and spoke with a kind of quavering anger. "This was our land before
the king came, and it's ours again in spite of him. Why don't you
let us keep it so?"

"I don't think -- " I began, then
stopped, on a sudden thought. "You speak of a king. Which
king?"

"I don't know his name."

"Melwas? Or Arthur?"

"Maybe. I tell you I don't know. What
do you want here?"

"I am the King's man. I come from him
--"

"Aye. To raise the fortress walls
again, then take away our cattle and kill our children and rape our
women."

"No. To build a stronghold here to
protect your cattle and children and women."

"It did not protect them before."
There was silence. The old man's hand shook on his stick. The sun
was hot on the grass. My horse grazed delicately round a thistle
head growing low and circular, like a splayed wheel. An early
butterfly alighted on a purple head of clover. A lark rose,
singing. "Old man," I said gently, "there has been no fortress here
in your lifetime, or in your father's. What walls stood here and
looked south and north and westward over the waters? What king came
to storm them?"

He looked at me for a few moments, his
head shaking with the tremor of age. "It's a story, only a story,
master. My grandpa told it to me, how the folk lived here with
cattle and goats and sweet grazing, and wove the cloth and tilled
the high field, until the king came and drove them down through yon
road into the valley bottom, and there was a grave for them all
that day, as wide as a river and as deep as the hollow hill, where
they laid the king himself to rest, and his time coming soon
after."

"Which hill was that? Ynys
Witrin?"

"What? How should they carry him
there? It's a foreign country there. They call it the Summer
Country, for all it's a sheet of lake water all the year round save
through the dry time of midsummer. No, they made a way into the
cave and laid him there, and with him the ones who were drowned
with him." A sudden, high crackle. "Drowned in the Lake, and the
folk watched and made no move to save him. It was the Goddess took
him, and his fine captains along with him. Who could have stopped
her? They say it was three days before she gave him back, and then
he came naked, without either crown or sword." The crackling laugh
again, as he nodded. "Your King had best make his peace with her,
tell him that."

"He will. When did this
happen?"

"A hundred years ago. Two hundred. How
would I know?"

Another silence, while I assessed it.
What I was hearing, I knew, was a folk memory that had come down
tongue to tongue in a winter's tale by some peasant's hearth. But
it confirmed what I had been told. The place must have been
fortified time out of mind. "The king" could have been any one of
the Celtic rulers, driven eventually from the hilltop by the
Romans, or the Roman general himself who had stayed here to invest
the captured strongpoint.

I said suddenly: "Where is the way
into the hill?"

"What way?"

"The door to the king's tomb, where
they made the way for his grave."

"How do I know? It's there, that's all
I know. And sometimes, on a night, they ride out again. I have seen
them. They come with the summer moon, and go back into the hill at
dawning. And whiles, on a stormy night, when dawn surprises them,
one comes late, and finds the gate shut. So he is doomed for the
next moon to wander the hilltop alone till..." His voice faltered.
He ducked his head fearfully, peering. "A king's man, you said you
were?"

I laughed. "Don't be afraid of me,
father. I'm not one of them. I'm a king's man, yes, but I have come
for a living king, who will build the fortress up again, and take
you and your cattle, and your children, and their children, into
his hand, and keep you safely against the Saxon enemy from the
south. And you will still get sweet grazing for your herd. I
promise you this."

He said nothing to that, but sat for a
while, nid-nodding in the sun. I could see that he was simple. "Why
should I be afraid? There has always been a king here, and always
will be. A king is no new thing."

"This one will be."

His attention was leaving me. He
chirrupped to the cows: "Come up, Blackberry, come up, Dewdrop. A
king, and tend the cattle for me? Do you take me for a fool? But
the Goddess looks after her own. He'd best tend to the Goddess."
And he subsided, mumbling his stick, and muttering.

I gave him a silver coin, as one gives
a singer the guerdon for his tale, then led my horse off toward the
ridge that marked the summit of the plateau.

3

Somedays later the first party of
surveyors arrived, to begin their measuring and pacing, while their
leader was closeted with me in the temporary headquarters that had
been made for us on the site. Tremorinus, the master engineer who
had taught me so much of his trade when I was a boy in Brittany,
had died some time ago. Arthur's chief engineer now was a man
called Derwen, whom I had first met years back, over the rebuilding
of Caerleon in Ambrosius' time. He was a red-bearded, high-colored
man, but without the temper that often goes with that coloring;
indeed, he was silent to the point of surliness, and could prove
sullen as a mule when pressed. But I knew him to be competent and
experienced, and he had the trick of getting men to work fast and
willingly for him.

Moreover, he had taken pains to be
master himself of all trades, and was never above rolling up his
sleeves and doing a heavy job himself if time demanded. Nor did he
appear to mind taking direction from me. He seemed to hold my
skills in the most flattering respect; this was not, I knew,
because of my especial brilliance I had shown at Caerleon or
Segontium -- they were built to pattern on the Roman model, on
lines laid down through time, and familiar to every builder -- but
Derwen had been an apprentice in Ireland when I had moved the
massive king-stone of Killare, and subsequently at Amesbury, at the
rebuilding of the Giants' Dance. So we got along tolerably well
together, and understood each what the other was good
for.

Arthur's forecast of trouble in the
north had come true, and he had gone up in early March. But during
the winter months he and I, with Derwen, had spent many hours
together over the plans for the new stronghold. Driven by my
persistence, and Arthur's enthusiasm, Derwen had finally been
brought to accept what he obviously thought of as my wild ideas
about the rebuilding of Caer Camel. Strength and speed -- I wanted
the place ready for Arthur by the time the campaign in the north
should near its close, and I also wanted it to last. Its size and
force had to fit his state.

The size was there: the hill's summit
was vast, some eight acres in area. But the strength...I had had
lists made of what material was already there, and, as best I could
among the ruins, I had studied how the place had been built before,
the Roman stonework on top of layer after layer of earlier Celtic
wall and ditching. As I worked I kept in mind some of the
fortifications I had seen on my travels abroad, strong-points
thrown up in wilder places than this, and on terrain as difficult.
To rebuild on the Roman model would have been a formidable, if not
impossible, task; even if Derwen's masons had had the knack of the
Roman type of stonework, the sheer size of Caer Camel would have
forbidden it. But the masons were all expert at their own dry-stone
kind of building, and there was plenty of dressed stone to hand,
and a quarry nearby. We had the oak-woods and the carpenters, and
the sawyers' yards between Caer Camel and the Lake had been packed
all winter with maturing timber. So I had made my final
plans.

That they were carried out
magnificently everyone can see. The steep, ditched sides of the
place they now call Camelot stand crowned with massive walls of
stone and timber. Sentries patrol the battlements, and stand guard
over the great gates. To the northerly gate a wagon-road climbs
between its guarded banks, while to the gate at the southwest
corner -- the one they call King's Gate -- a chariot-way curves up,
true-cambered to the fastest wheels, and wide enough for a
galloping troop of horse.

Within those walls now, as well kept
in these times of peace as in the troubled days I built them for, a
city has arisen, gay with gilding and the fluttering of banners,
and fresh with gardens and orchard trees. On the paved terraces
walk women in rich dresses, and children play in the gardens. The
streets are crowded with folk, and full of talk and laughter, the
chaffering of the market-place, the quick hoofs of Arthur's fleet
and glossy horses, the shouts of the young men, and the clamor of
the church bells. It has grown rich with peaceful commerce, and
splendid with the arts of peace. Camelot is a marvelous sight, and
one which is familiar now to travelers from the four corners of the
world.

But then, on that raw hilltop, and
among the mess of abandoned buildings, it was no more than an idea,
and an idea sprung out of the hard necessities of war. We would
start, of course, with the outer walls, and here I planned to use
the broken stuff that lay about; tiles from the old hypocausts,
flagstones, bedding from the floors, even from the old road-work
that had been laid in the Roman fortress. With these we would throw
up a revetment of hard rubble which would retain the outer wall,
and at the same time support a broad fighting platform laid along
the inner side of the battlement. The wall itself would, on the
outer side, rise straight out of the steep hillside, like a crown
on a king's head.

The hillside we stripped of its trees,
and seamed with ditches, so that it became, in effect, a steep of
breakneck minor crags, to be topped with a great wall faced with
stone. For this we would use the dressed tufa found on site, along
with materials quarried afresh by Melwas' masons and our own. Above
this again I planned to set a massively smooth wall of wood, tied
into the stonework and the rubble of the revetment by a strong
timber frame. At the gateways, where the approach-roads ran uphill
sunk between rocky banks, I designed a kind of tunnel which would
pierce the fortified wall, and allow the fighting platform to run
unbroken across, above the gates. These gated tunnels, high and
wide enough to let horse-drawn traffic through, or riders three
abreast, would be hung with huge gates which could fold back
against the oak-lined walls. To do this we would have to sink the
roadways still farther.

This, and much else besides, I had
explained to Derwen. He had been skeptical at first, and only his
respect for me had kept him, I could tell, from flat and mulish
disagreement -- especially about the gates, for which he could see
no precedent; and most engineers and architects work, reasonably
enough, from well-proved precedent, especially in matters of war
and defense. At first he could see no reason to abandon the
well-tried model of twin turrets and guard-rooms. But in time,
sitting hour by hour over my plans, and conning the lists I had had
drawn up of the materials already available on the site, he came to
a qualified acceptance of my amalgam of stone and woodworking, and
thence to a sort of guarded enthusiasm over all. He was enough of a
professional to find excitement in new ideas, especially since any
blame for failure would be mine and not his.

Not that blame was likely. Arthur,
taking part in the planning sessions, was enthusiastic, but -- as
he pointed out when deferred to over some technical point -- he
knew his own business, and he would trust us to know ours. We all
knew what the place's function would be; it was up to us to build
it accordingly. Once we had built it (he concluded with the brevity
of total and unconscious arrogance) he would know how to keep
it.

Now, on site at last, and with good
weather come early and looking settled, Derwen started work with
keenness and dispatch, and before the old herdsman had called the
cows home for the first evening's milking, the pegs were driven in,
trenches had been started, and the first wagon-load of supplies was
groaning uphill behind its straining oxen.

Caer Camel was rising again. The King
was coming back.

He came on a bright day of June. He
rode up from the village on his grey mare Amrei, accompanied by
Bedwyr and his foster-brother Cei and perhaps a dozen others of his
cavalry captains. These were now commonly known as the equites or
knights;

Arthur himself called them his
"Companions." They rode without armor, like a hunting-party. Arthur
swung from his mare's back, threw the reins to Bedwyr, and while
the others dismounted and let their horses graze, he trod up the
slope of blowing grass alone.