M. K. Hume [King Arthur Trilogy 04] The Last Dragon (69 page)

POSTSCRIPT

‘Education made us what we are.’

Helvetius,
De l’esprit des lois
, ‘Discourse 3’, chapter 30

‘I feel sick,’ Arthur said suddenly in a voice that was gravelly with disuse. He opened one eye, because the other was still stuck together with blood, and proceeded to vomit weakly into an old pot held by Blaise’s shaking hands.

‘Thanks to heaven, Arthur, we thought you were dead,’ she whispered. ‘Drink a little of this. The hulk in charge told me this stuff would set you to rights if you ever woke up.’

Like a child, he drank obediently. The plank on which he lay pitched and tossed so that his head swam, while the liquid burned through him like fire. A cold, wet cloth was pressed against his face and the cooling sensation was so pleasurable and eased the persistent agony in his skull so much that a soft moan escaped his dry, cracked lips.

‘Now you must have some ale. Try to keep it down, Arthur, or I’ll be cross. You’ll die if you don’t get some fluid into your body.’

‘Aren’t I dead already?’ he asked seriously.

‘Not quite, brother.’ It was Maeve’s voice that answered him. Her words gave him boundless relief.

‘Silence!’ a voice barked in a strange tongue, but Arthur had no concept of what was said. He desperately wanted to sleep. His eye closed and Maeve, Blaise and Eamonn feared he had returned to the death-like unconsciousness that had claimed him for four days.

‘Don’t worry, children,’ Stormbringer boomed in a voice that easily made itself heard over the sound of the wind, the regular slapping of the sail and the groan of the ship as she breasted the waves. ‘Your friend will be better when he awakes. The Last Dragon has a very hard head.’

Taken by a neat trap that they had almost avoided because of Arthur’s sudden turn of speed, the four nobles had been slung over horses and the long ride to the river’s mouth not far from old Pons Aelius, now firmly in Saxon hands, had followed. Stormbringer had pressed his troop to ride hard, for none of them were truly comfortable with horses, and their ship was vulnerable and could be discovered by enemies at any time. Without their ship, they would become marooned in an unfriendly land.

At one point, with the horses resting, and both Celtic males still unconscious, Blaise and Maeve were questioned by their captors. Stormbringer, as the only one of his party who spoke good Celtic, had to calm the terror-stricken fears of the young girls before he could make sense of their answers.

‘Why did your Arthur order your troop to gallop?’ he asked at last. ‘Did he see us?’ Like any good commander, he was concerned that one of his men had inadvertently betrayed their position.

Blaise shrugged in her ignorance, but Maeve saw a red glow in Stormbringer’s blue eyes and readily explained Arthur’s secret. After all, the whole family was aware of the gift that had kept him alive in several potentially dangerous situations.

‘My brother says he has a voice in his head that warns him of trouble. It starts as an itch, he says, and then it becomes a scream until finally he hears actual words of warning. He was almost killed by Saxons when he was seven, and I was a babe in arms. You can still see the scars if you want. That was when he killed his first man. Please let us care for him. My mother would die of sorrow if he should perish.’

Stormbringer had looked at Arthur oddly at that point and permitted the girls to clean the wound on his head and several nasty bruises on his chest. The commander saw Arthur’s impressive array of scars with his own eyes.

‘How old is your brother by your reckoning?’

Maeve thought carefully. ‘I’m nearly twelve now, so he’s nearly nineteen. Eamonn is seventeen.’

Stormbringer became even more thoughtful, and then ordered that the two young men should be force-fed ale so they didn’t die of thirst before regaining consciousness. The commander of the Denes was a superstitious man, and he began to wonder what kind of odd fish he had caught in his net.

By the time they reached the sea, Eamonn was conscious but Arthur still lay like one of the living dead. Stormbringer was fatalistic. ‘I’ve seen men in these trances after they have suffered from head wounds. Sometimes they never waken and their lives slip away through starvation. Sometimes they waken, but their wits are addled. Occasionally they are unchanged, although they can’t remember how and where they received their wounds.’

With that cold comfort, the three conscious members of the party were forced to follow the Dene chieftain as he rode carefully along a stony, inhospitable coastline until they came to a secluded cove where a strange and lovely ship rode at anchor.

Leaf shaped, with a huge prow like a serpent’s head rising high above the decks, the vessel was a thing of great beauty. Adze marks decorated the strong planks that held it together. Eamonn looked at the craftsmanship and carving of the strange vessel and compared it with Saxon ceols he had seen, and knew instinctively that this ship was built with an incredible construction technique. Comparison with the Saxon vessels was crass, for the ceols were mongrels compared with this aristocratic work of art. No nails were used in its construction, only pegs of superbly crafted wood coupled with an amazing understanding of timber, pitch, the action of the sea and flotation. Eamonn thought of his tiny coracle and winced at the comparison.

Once on board the ship, Arthur was unceremoniously dumped on an unused section of the deck. The other captives, awestruck by their surroundings, were warned to remain silent and compliant or they could expect to be dropped overboard to drown.

As they prepared for their departure, the night sea was wild and rough with a powerful current and a huge tidal effect. Eamonn could tell that this Oceanus Germanicus was as unpredictable and as cruel as the waters that surrounded and embraced Tintagel. Phosphorescence edged the waves with a rime of white fire and the full moon caught the lines of the ship, turning it into a thing of shadows and mists. The warriors sat at huge oars and Eamonn discovered immediately why they were such powerful men, because they rowed the ship until it was beyond the breakers. Out, out, out they went, beyond easy sight of land, until they felt the pull of the night wind and raised a single, vast sail which they erected by muscle power alone. As it caught the wind and filled, round bellied like a woman due to give birth, Maeve saw a long serpent with vast wings emblazoned on its surface.

‘All will be well, Blaise, you’ll see. The dragon rises above us to protect Arthur and his people.’

Stormbringer heard the child’s words and clutched at the runes that hung on a tablet of walrus ivory round his neck. These four young ones were strange, like godlings, or creatures of chaos. He was yet to decide which, but he trusted to his king and his woman to read the truth in the eyes of these children, for they were little more, even Arthur who was the focus of them all, and as tall as a fully grown Dene.

Maeve’s green eyes gleamed in the moonlight and her blood-red hair was a cold flame. ‘Where are we going, Lord Stormbringer? Do you plan to rape us or kill us? Or will you sell us as slaves? I have heard tales of the travails that you barbarians place on your captives.’

‘I don’t rape children,’ Stormbringer answered in an insulted voice. ‘Nor will you be killed unless I am forced to do so by your actions. Ultimately, my master will decide your fate.’

‘What happened to the others who were with us?’

‘Who was the white-haired warrior with the Roman armour?’

‘That was Gareth, Arthur’s sworn guard,’ Maeve replied, with hope in her voice.

‘Your brother ordered him to run, and he did. He took with him a tall, dark man who seemed to be badly wounded. The dark one had a scar across his cheekbones. I decided that such bravery as he had shown was worthy of mercy.’

‘That was Deddwyd. As soon as he arranges care for Deddwyd, Gareth will follow you and he will find us, wherever we are, because his oath to Arthur and Arthur’s house is to the death, if you understand such concepts,’ Maeve replied, her tone oddly conversational considering that she was insulting this huge, powerful man to the core on his own ship.

With a grunt, the commander ignored her insult and grinned through his curling blond beard, baring strong white teeth and pronounced canines. In the blue moonlight, Maeve thought she saw traces of red in that beard, but she rejected the evidence of her eyes because it seemed so unlikely.

‘You know nothing, little one. But you’ll learn. Aye, you’ll learn, or you’ll die. We sail for Dene Land, that place which you call Jutland, which lies across the sea. Only Father Serpent himself will stop me from keeping my oath. We go to the Folketinget, and when we arrive I will tell my king what we have seen in your lands. I’ll bring him gifts as well – you three and the Last Dragon, if he’s fated to live. Then, perhaps, you will learn something.’

As Blaise and Maeve wept silently for family and the scent of home, Eamonn looked out over the vast, inscrutable sea. No land was visible. Only moonlight gave a clue to the way they would travel. They were going to far-off places, just as the wise old woman had promised, beyond the sight of land, which was more than Eamonn could contemplate.

Only heaven knew if they would ever find their way back to their homes.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

This book is the seventh in my Arthurian series, so any serious student of the Arthuriad is entitled to ask, ‘Why have you chosen to extend the story past the death of King Arthur?’

The legend has to come to an end sometime and my original plan was to follow in the footsteps of other Arthurian writers and end the saga with the death of King Arthur himself, the original
Le Morte d’Arthur
. However, as I delved deeper and deeper into the lives of the characters that inhabit the Arthuriad, I felt constrained to explain to our readers what I believe happened to the kinfolk of Arthur and the Celtic peoples after the High King’s death. Not one of the many authors who have chronicled the life of the great man has bothered to explain what happened to Arthur’s kin or, for that matter, to the descendants of the Celtic peoples after King Arthur’s death.

I have always believed that legends cannot be built out of nothing, so I researched the old sources in detail once again and came to the conclusion that Arthur left at least one son behind him, and it is quite feasible that there were more descendants who have been lost in the mists of time. We are given the name of one son and a trinity of mistresses, but what happened to the children of these high-caste women is unrecorded.

Secondly, the various historians who gave us the early sources and developed or translated the legends into an intriguing, coherent form have often pointed to the fact that there might have been several Arthurs. For instance, speculation has occurred over the works of Gildas, raising the possibility that this great historian confused Arthur with Ambrosius, or amalgamated the two into one person. Other distinguished writers suggest that a father and son could easily have been combined in the legends as one man. Similarly, different men with similar names, such as Arturius and Arthur, could have been confused in an era from which few written records have survived.

I thought about these factors for some time. Arthurian legends are usually centralised in Wales and the south-west of Britain, but other sites crop up, extending from Scotland right down through England, including the southern counties, and across into France. These sites, with their local legends, are always fiercely defended as accepted truths, even after the passing of fifteen centuries. My initial reaction was to discount most of these sites because I had difficulty in believing that a Dux Bellorum from the Dark Ages could cover such vast areas of the country. But what if Arthur was actually two men? What if the time period covered a number of decades? The unbelievable aspects of Arthur’s story then become more credible, and the many sites from Scotland down through the east coast of England could easily be more than wishful thinking.

The northern Celtic tribes such as the Otadini and the Selgovae, to name only two, lived between two defensive walls. Most present-day tourists hear about the Vallum Hadriani (Hadrian’s Wall), but the Vallum Antonini (Antony’s Wall) that isolated the Picts is scarcely mentioned. The Saxons made very slow inroads into the north. York was a Scandinavian city named Jorvic for many years. In fact, Harold had been fighting outside Jorvic at Stamford Bridge when William the Conqueror landed in 1066. A later Arthur could easily be found in the north in the sixth century as the south-west was gradually infiltrated by large numbers of Saxons and Angles. It was inevitable that the British tribes were forced to flee north and west as the barbarians flooded into the country from the east. The Jutes colonised those sections of Britain that possessed cooler climates after their people were driven out of what we now call Denmark by the Dene, a tall, warlike race who came from Scandinavia. They would later be called the Vikings, in company with the warriors of Norway, and these great seafarers would harry the rulers of England and Scotland throughout the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, almost without opposition from the defenders. In Dublin, Normandy and the Scottish isles, successful colonies were set up where their influence still endures.

The Dark Ages are not easy times to unravel, but certain factors remain constant, so I tried to include them in this novel. The Wansdyke was built during the period I refer to in the novel under the name of the Warriors’ Dyke or the Ditch. Expert opinion is divided as to whether the construction was built by the Saxons or the Celts, but as the Celts had a more pressing reason to build it, and the ditch itself faced the direction from which the Saxons would attack, I decided to credit the Celts with its construction. The area it protects is one of the easiest natural paths leading to modern-day Bath, Bristol, Wells, Glastonbury and the many villages of this fecund area of Britain. Just as pilgrims used this route for thousands of years, so would various armies during their advances into the south-west.

The use of chains as a defensive device to block the river seemed perfectly logical to me, given Myrddion’s experiences of the entrance to the Golden Horn in Constantinople. Iron was a precious commodity, so the Saxons would have plundered the metal as soon as the south-west became theirs. But the ditch and the mounds remain as a tantalising reminder of the ancient past.