Legacy: Arthurian Saga (6 page)

Which was just as well, for during
that winter part of the floor of the bath-house fell in, my
grandfather judged the whole thing dangerous, and had it filled in
and poison laid for the rats. So like a cub smoked from its earth,
I had to fend for myself above ground.

About six months after Gorlan's visit,
as we were coming through a cold February into the first budding
days of March, Camlach began to insist, first to my mother and then
to my grandfather, that I should be taught to read and write. My
mother, I think, was grateful for this evidence of his interest in
me; I myself was pleased and took good care to show it, though
after the incident in the orchard I could have no illusions about
his motives. But it did no harm to let Camlach think that my
feelings about the priesthood had undergone a change. My mother's
declaration that she would never marry, coupled with her increased
withdrawal among her women and her frequent visits to St. Peter's
to talk with the Abbess and such priests as visited the community,
removed his worst fears -- either that she would marry a Welsh
prince who could hope to take over the kingdom in her right, or
that my unknown father would come to claim her and legitimate me,
and prove to be a man of rank and power who might supplant him
forcibly. It did not matter to Camlach that in either event I was
not much of a danger to him, and less than ever now, for he had
taken a wife before Christmas, and already at the beginning of
March it seemed that she was pregnant. Even Olwen's increasingly
obvious pregnancy was no threat to him, for Camlach stood high in
his father's favor, and it was not likely that a brother so much
younger would ever present a serious danger. There could be no
question; Camlach had a good fighting record, knew how to make men
like him, and had ruthlessness and common sense. The ruthlessness
showed in what he had tried to do to me in the orchard; the common
sense showed in his indifferent kindness once my mother's decision
removed the threat to him. But I have noticed this about ambitious
men, or men in power -- they fear even the slightest and least
likely threat to it. He would never rest until he saw me priested
and safely out of the palace.

Whatever his motives, I was pleased
when my tutor came; he was a Greek who had been a scribe in
Massilia until he drank himself into debt and ensuing slavery; now
he was assigned to me, and because he was grateful for the change
in status and the relief from manual work, taught me well and
without the religious bias which had constricted the teaching I had
picked up from my mother's priests. Demetrius was a pleasant,
ineffectually clever man who had a genius for languages, and whose
only recreations were dice and (when he won) drink. Occasionally,
when he had won enough, I would find him happily and incapably
asleep over his books. I never told anyone of these occasions, and
indeed was glad of the chance to go about my own affairs; he was
grateful for my silence, and in his turn, when I once or twice
played truant, held his tongue and made no attempt to find out
where I had been. I was quick to catch up with my studies and
showed more than enough progress to satisfy my mother and Camlach,
so Demetrius and I respected one another's secrets and got along
tolerably well.

One day in August, almost a year after
the coming of Gorlan to my grandfather's court, I left Demetrius
placidly sleeping it off, and rode up alone into the hills behind
the town.

I had been this way several times
before. It was quicker to go up past the barrack walls and then out
by the military road which led eastwards through the hills to
Caerleon, but this meant riding through the town, and possibly
being seen, and questions being asked. The way I took was along the
river-bank. There was a gateway, not much used, leading straight
out from our stableyard to the broad flat path where the horses
went that towed the barges, and the path followed the river for
quite a long way, past St. Peter's and then along the placid curves
of the Tywy to the mill, which was as far as the barges went. I had
never been beyond this point, but there was a pathway leading up
past the millhouse and over the road, and then by the valley of the
tributary stream that helped to serve the mill.

It was a hot, drowsy day, full of the
smell of bracken. Blue dragonflies darted and glimmered over the
river, and the meadowsweet was thick as curds under the humming
clouds of flies.

My pony's neat hoofs tapped along the
baked clay of the towpath. We met a big dapple grey bringing an
empty barge down from the mill with the tide, taking it easy. The
boy perched on its withers called a greeting, and the bargeman
lifted a hand.

When I reached the mill there was no
one in sight. Grainsacks, newly unloaded, were piled on the narrow
wharf. By them the miller's dog lay sprawled in the hot sun, hardly
troubling to open an eye as I drew rein in the shade of the
buildings. Above me, the long straight stretch of the military road
was empty. The stream tumbled through a culvert beneath it, and I
saw a trout leap and flash in the foam.

It would be hours before I could be
missed. I put the pony at the bank up to the road, won the brief
battle when he tried to turn for home, then kicked him to a canter
along the path which led upstream into the hills.

The path twisted and turned at first,
climbing the steep stream-side, then led out of the thorns and thin
oaks that filled the gully, and went north in a smooth level curve
along the open slope.

Here the townsfolk graze their sheep
and cattle, so the grass is smooth and shorn. I passed one shepherd
boy, drowsy under a hawthorn bush, with his sheep at hand; he was
simple, and only stared vacantly at me as I trotted past, fingering
the pile of stones with which he herded his sheep. As we passed him
he picked up one of them, a smooth green pebble, and I wondered if
he was going to throw it at me, but he lobbed it instead to turn
some fat grazing lambs which were straying too far, then went back
to his slumbers. There were black cattle further afield, down
nearer the river where the grass was longer, but I could not see
the herdsman. Away at the foot of the hill, tiny beside a tiny hut,
I saw a girl with a flock of geese.

Presently the path began to climb
again, and my pony slowed to a walk, picking his way through
scattered trees. Hazel-nuts were thick in the coppices, mountain
ash and brier grew from tumbles of mossed rock, and the bracken was
breast-high. Rabbits ran everywhere, scuttering through the fern,
and a pair of jays scolded a fox from the safety of a swinging
hornbeam. The ground was too hard, I supposed, to bear tracks well,
but I could see no sign, either of crushed bracken or broken twigs,
that any other horseman had recently been this way.

The sun was high. A little breeze
swept through the hawthorns, rattling the green, hard fruit. I
urged the pony on. Now among the oaks and hollies were pine trees,
their stems reddish in the sunlight. The ground grew rougher as the
path climbed, with bare grey stone outcropping through the thin
turf, and a honeycombing of rabbit burrows. I did not know where
the path led, I knew nothing but that I was alone, and free. There
was nothing to tell me what sort of day this was, or what way-star
was leading me up into the hill. This was in the days before the
future became clear to me.

The pony hesitated, and I came to
myself. There was a fork in the track, with nothing to indicate
which would be the best way to go. To left, to right, it led away
round the two sides of a thicket.

The pony turned decisively to the
left, this being downhill. I would have let him go, but that at
that moment a bird flew low across the path in front of me, left to
right, and vanished beyond the trees. Sharp wings, a flash of rust
and slate-blue, the fierce dark eye and curved beak of a merlin.
For no reason, except that this was better than no reason, I turned
the pony's head after it, and dug my heels in.

The path climbed in a shallow curve,
leaving the wood on the left. This was a stand mainly of pines,
thickly clustered and dark, and so heavily grown that you could
only have hacked your way in through the dead stuff with an axe. I
heard the clap of wings as a ring-dove fled from shelter, dropping
invisibly out of the far side of the trees. It had gone to the
left. This time I followed the falcon.

We were now well out of sight of the
river valley and the town. The pony picked his way along one side
of a shallow valley, at the foot of which ran a narrow, tumbling
stream. On the far side of the stream the long slopes of turf went
bare up to the scree, and above this were the rocks, blue and grey
in the sunlight. The slope where I rode was scattered with hawthorn
brakes throwing pools of slanted shadow, and above them again,
scree, and a cliff hung with ivy where choughs wheeled and called
in the bright air. Apart from their busy sound, the valley held the
most complete and echoless stillness.

The pony's hoofs sounded loud on the
baked earth. It was hot, and I was thirsty. Now the track ran along
under a low cliff, perhaps twenty feet high, and at its foot a
grove of hawthorns cast a pool of shade across the path. Somewhere,
close above me, I could hear the trickle of water.

I stopped the pony and slid off. I led
him into the shade of the grove and made him fast, then looked
about me for the source of the water.

The rock by the path was dry, and
below the path was no sign of any water running down to swell the
stream at the foot of the valley. But the sound of running water
was steady and unmistakable. I left the path and scrambled up the
grass at the side of the rock, to find myself on a small flat patch
of turf, a little dry lawn scattered with rabbits' droppings, and
at the back of it another face of cliff.

In the face of the rock was a cave.
The rounded opening was smallish and very regular, almost like a
made arch. To one side of this, the right as I stood looking, was a
slope of grass-grown stones long ago fallen from above, and
overgrown with oak and rowan, whose branches overhung the cave with
shadow. To the other side, and only a few feet from the archway,
was the spring.

I approached it. It was very small, a
little shining movement of water oozing out of a crack in the face
of the rock, and falling with a steady trickle into a round basin
of stone. There was no outflow. Presumably the water sprang from
the rock, gathered in the basin, and drained away through another
crack, eventually to join the stream below. Through the clear water
I could see every pebble, every grain of sand at the bottom of the
basin. Hart's-tongue fern grew above it, and there was moss at the
lip, and below it green, moist grass.

I knelt on the grass, and had put my
mouth to the water, when I saw there was a cup. This stood in a
tiny niche among the ferns. It was a handspan high, and made of
brown horn. As I lifted it down I saw above it, half-hidden by the
ferns, the small, carved figure of a wooden god. I recognized him.
I had seen him under the oak at Tyr Myrddin. Here he was in his own
hill-top place, under the open sky.

I filled the cup and drank, pouring a
few drops on the ground for the god. Then I went into the
cave.

5

This was bigger than had appeared from
outside. Only a couple of paces inside the archway -- and my paces
were very short -- the cave opened out into a seemingly vast
chamber whose top was lost in shadow. It was dark, but -- though at
first I neither noticed this nor looked for its cause -- with some
source of extra light that gave a vague illumination, showing the
floor smooth and clear of obstacles. I made my way slowly forward,
straining my eyes, with deep inside me the beginning of that surge
of excitement that caves have always started in me. Some men
experience this with water; some, I know, on high places; some
create fire for the same pleasure: with me it has always been the
depths of the forest, or the depths of the earth. Now, I know why;
but then, I only knew that I was a boy who had found somewhere new,
something he could perhaps make his own in a world where he owned
nothing.

Next moment I stopped short, brought
up by a shock which spilled the excitement through my bowels like
water. Something had moved in the murk, just to my
right.

I froze still, straining my eyes to
see. There was no movement. I held my breath, listening.

There was no sound. I flared my
nostrils, testing the air cautiously round me. There was no smell,
animal or human; the cave smelt, I thought, of smoke and damp rock
and the earth itself, and of a queer musty scent I couldn't
identify. I knew, without putting it into words, that had there
been any other creature near me the air would have felt different,
less empty. There was no one there.

I tried a word, softly, in Welsh.
"Greetings." The whisper came straight back at me in an echo so
quick that I knew I was very near the wall of the cave, then it
lost itself, hissing, in the roof.

There was movement there -- at first,
I thought, only an intensifying of the echoed whisper, then the
rustling grew and grew like the rustling of a woman's dress, or a
curtain stirring in the draught. Something went past my cheek, with
a shrill, bloodless cry just on the edge of sound. Another
followed, and after them flake after flake of shrill shadow,
pouring down from the roof like leaves down a stream of wind, or
fish down a fall. It was the bats, disturbed from their lodging in
the top of the cave, streaming out now into the daylight valley.
They would be pouring out of the low archway like a plume of
smoke.