Dragon's Child (61 page)

Ostentatiously, Morgan turned her back on the ceremony and departed.

Artor noted her passing with a sigh.

 

The feasting was long, and Artor became very tired by evening’s end. He had utilised his edge until his face felt frozen into an empty smile. He had eaten a little of thrushes in honey, of eels in aspic, of whole roasted deer, boar and steer, as well as the delicacies of the sea and the fruits of the orchards until he felt ill. He had found something praiseworthy with which to flatter every tribal king and had accepted advice from old and young, no matter how banal and impractical those opinions had been. Now, as the gigantic meal drew to a close, Artor knew it was time to put the first part of his plan into action.

As he rose to his feet from a long trestle table where he was surrounded by clerics and his kin, he gazed down the other tables in the room that were crammed with the aristocracy of the Celts. Flushed faces stared back at him, some in admiration while others were closed and secretive.

The noise rose upwards towards the smoky, painted ceiling. The laughter of women, the booming conversation of animated men and the tinkle and bray of musicians competed with each other in the din. Over the sounds of merriment in the King’s Hall rose the dull roar of the celebrating citizens outside the hall, like the rolling, muffled sound of the ocean. Artor pressed one palm against the walls of the hall and he felt the very structure of Venta Belgarum close around him like a mantrap.

The mood was joyful and abandoned.

At least Morgan is honest! Artor thought as he forced his tired lips to smile. She refuses to eat at my table because she is my enemy. How many of my guests pretend?

His inner voice answered him fairly.

Many. Perhaps, most. But if you win against the Saxons and gift these sycophants with rich spoils, they’ll come to love you for it.

Artor wasn’t prepared to voice his doubts, preferring to spread his arms wide so that he seemed to embrace the whole hall, all of Venta Belgarum and the wide lands beyond it.

The nobles within the hall fell into attentive silence as Artor began to speak.

‘Friends, regardless of your station, I ask that you accept my thanks for your generosity. I also call on all men of heart who wish to stem the Saxon threat to join with me at Cadbury Tor, the ancient fortress of our people, which shall be my headquarters in the years to come. There, among the ruins, we will rebuild a symbol that shall rally all Britons to join hands as one united people. There, with advice from all the leaders of our peoples, we shall determine the paths we must take to strike the Saxons at their heart.

‘And, at our table, all shall be equal and all shall speak their minds and be heard. If we are to be one - Celts, Romans and Britons all - then we must work in concert.

‘My kings and my captains, on the seventh day from this evening, we meet at Cadbury Tor.’

 

The long day was over at last, and Artor attempted to sleep in Uther’s quarters - in rooms that had been scrubbed, re-fitted and cleansed by water, fire, salt and air. As he lay in a bed of unparallelled luxury, Artor couldn’t sleep. He knew that his warriors stood guard outside his door, but he didn’t fear a stealthy attack. Rather, he was crushed by the weight of responsibility that lay on his shoulders and on his heart. He knew that to be alone would be a luxury from this day forward. And to be totally safe would be impossible.

‘So our many dreams, my sweet Gallia, have come to this pass. Better I should mingle my dust with yours where the flowers bloom at Villa Poppinidii, than rest on fine linen in this gilded bed, for the weight of my duties may overwhelm me.’

Neither the long dead Gallia, nor the night itself, chose to answer him.

The flowering face of Licia, his unacknowledged daughter, came to him during the night. She was laughing and playing at some childish game with string around her fingers.

‘This is why we fight for our survival,’ Artorex told the night. ‘Surely this girl is the reason why Artor has been born anew.

‘For the people, the children and the future,’ he swore, as the first light began to filter through Uther’s window, ‘I will take up this impossible sword so that the land and Britons can grow and flourish. This, then, shall be my purpose.’

Then Artor left Uther’s chamber in Venta Belgarum without regret. He never slept in its illusory luxury again.

 

After twenty years of researching the Arthurian legends for various university courses, I became something of an expert on most things pertaining to Arthur, historical or otherwise. Again, and again, friends suggested I should use my knowledge and extensive private library to produce a work of fiction based on the legends.

For years, I resisted the impulse, feeling that there was little left for anyone to write. I had no desire to branch into science fiction or fantasy and, still less, to produce a romance. I had watched all the latest films and was amused by the various interpretations, but nothing really sparked my imagination.

Then, in an obscure text, I discovered a rather vague reference to a noted historical incident that occurred during medieval times when a grave was exposed at Glastonbury monastery during a period of civil strife. The accuracy of the reports has to be taken at face value because the grave - and the interred remains - has been irretrievably lost.

This particular reference translated the stone tablet found within the grave as:

 

Here lies Arthur, King of the Britons,

And Guinevere, his second wife.

 

I was, of course, familiar with the more usual translation of the stone, which merely adds the words ‘and Guinevere, his wife’, so the use of that evocative word, ‘second’, caught my imagination and gained my immediate attention.

Apart from that one, rather odd reference, I have found nothing else among all my research material that even hints at a first wife.

Who can know? At the time the grave was found, Arthur had been dead for some six hundred years.

However, I began to wonder once more about the Dux Bellorum of the fifth and sixth centuries.

Learned scholars have shown over the passage of thousands of years that enduring legends often have a kernel of truth at their heart and that great events in the lives of human beings are embroidered during the telling and retelling of heroic deeds. But I always wondered why any part-Celt, part-Roman war chief could avoid being married at a young age, as was then the custom. Historically, children were wedded in arranged marriages before they reached puberty. Logic dictates that such an important young man could have been married many times, especially considering the high mortality rate of girls and women during the Dark Ages.

So, from a simple reference, this novel evolved. From that point on, I was free to create whatever plot lines I wanted, subject to keeping close to the spirit of the legends. The only parts of the story that define Arthur’s early years refer to a foster-father, Ector, and his son, whom I named Caius (the Sir Kay of later legends). They were guardians of some vague, unchronicled place called the Old Forest.

Not wanting to travel down the exceptional paths explored by T. H. White in
The Once and Future King
, with its empathic, beautiful mix of medievalism and fantasy, I determined to remain within an area of which I am familiar - the Roman world. Nor did I have any desire to follow the path of Mary Stewart and her magnificent history of the life and deeds of Merlin.

I tried, then, to imagine the lost years after the Roman legions abandoned Britain during the Dark Ages.

I make no apologies for using the original Roman names for cities and towns of the period that are used during this work. Aquae Sulis is, of course, Bath, a city most likely to have retained its Romanized flavour far longer than many other cities in Britain. Venta Belgarum is Winchester, a prominent city in the Arthurian legends, so it seemed appropriate that it should be Uther Pendragon’s winter quarters. Other cities are placed on the maps provided, along with the Roman roads that linked them.

Lucius of Glastonbury has no part in any version of the legend, but Glastonbury (under many names) was a Christian centre for a very long time, so it follows naturally that there would have been a bishop, regardless of his name. I would like to think that he was my Lucius.

The link to the Fisher King and Joseph of Arimathea gives Glastonbury its pedigree as a holy place, so it seems feasible that a High King who wanted to be rid of a babe, but wished to keep his own hands clean, would use a Church dignitary to solve his problem.

Romans, on the other hand, used fostering frequently as a part of their social system. Yet Ector, by name, appears Celtic in derivation. To use the Roman link, I determined to marry Ector to the last child of a powerful British family of Roman descent. Therefore, Livinia had equal status with Ector in many ways, although like many sensible women, she always deferred to his opinion in public.

And so my story grew. I suppose the real fascination of any legend, for me, is the strange translation from human to hero that the protagonist experiences. No man willingly chooses such a path, so my Artorex is pushed, coaxed, bullied and, finally, brutalized into the role selected for him. The ambiguities in Arthur’s supposed character have to be explained somehow. How could he not act with such intelligence and sympathy in so many instances, yet attempt to murder the infant Mordred and tolerate the infidelities of Guinevere that are starkly evident in the later legends? I had to create a pragmatist who was born to be a decent man.

I have a feeling that Uther was such a man, one who was charismatic, intensely human and passionate until power destroyed his finer self. I therefore made my Uther an object lesson for the young Artorex, a warning of what the corruptive influences of hubris and absolute authority can be.

Gallia is totally Roman in nature, so she is joyous, sensual and practical. She is untroubled by some of the brutalities of life and yet is able to find useful conclusions to even dire situations. In fact, Livinia is much the same type of woman, only with greater gravity and dignity and infinitely less laughter. Julanna is more enigmatic and mercurial. Like all frightened women, she can be frightening as well.

Perhaps I had most fun with the characters of Targo, Gallwyn and Frith. Frankly, the wholly northern name, Frith, was too much of a temptation to ignore, and so I was forced to create her whole story around the origins of her name. She is all wise women, all older women with their physical weaknesses, but with all of their magnificence as well. Of course, a slave would be drawn into caring for an unloved foster-child. Of course, she would have enormous pride if she had refused manumission. This woman was alive in my mind before I wrote a single word. And I hated having to kill her off. I hope she touched you!

Targo utters the types of words and ideas that aristocrats don’t use, in public at least. The empire, and beyond, was full of such men. They were the flotsam of war, looking desperately for a flag to follow to give meaning to their lives. Perhaps he could have been cruder, but I rationalized that Artorex would not have liked his more pungent statements. I found Targo was good fun and this practical, ordinary man was rendered memorable for me because he was Everyman.

Gallwyn is a commonplace woman who is neither beautiful nor tragic. Nor can she be any kind of threat or power. Too often, women are paragons or monsters within the Arthurian legends, and I prefer to deal with the truth where I can. Besides, Gallwyn is naturally noble when she faces down frightening, powerful people for the sake of love.

Nimue, with her ghastly birth and her part in the later legends as a seducer and a female monster has always worried me. Perhaps I simply hate the idea that women are typecast as wrong-thinking or wicked within the legends, especially in this post-modernist era when such concepts are not socially correct. At any rate, my Nimue is neither wicked nor wilful - she is simply alien in a society that has little time for a strange female, one with brains and beauty. Her grisly birth is feasible, as is her upbringing.

Perce, later to become Sir Percivale, makes his emergence in the kitchens, as some versions of the legends state, and I found his ordinary goodness to be the perfect foil for Caius and his flawed sadism.

Unfortunately, my Caius, or Sir Kay as he becomes known in the later legends, is a very unpleasant person. Every story needs a villain and I feel sufficient sympathy for Morgan to try to understand her violence, rather than damn her out of hand. Therefore, Caius will have to do.

In the French romances and the Grail legends, the romance writers indicated that they never liked him much anyway.

Please note that the old Arthurian traditions avoid all mention of Lancelot, who is an invention of the French romances - and later developments in medieval courtesy.

On the other hand, Gawayne was frequently the court hero, as in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, the famous alliterative poem of medieval times. Mordred is also a supposed lover of Guenevere, so I am holding to this older tradition.

I hope the reader can see that my characters lived and breathed for me. They developed lives that were quite separate from mine, their creator. However, it would be wrong to state that my beliefs are not embedded in this book. I believe in the best and worst aspects of human nature, and that a streak of violence exists in the most pacific of us. I also know that spite and hubris are alive and well in the human condition. I have seen - and felt - their ugly powers.

But I also believe that hope is the single greatest impetus to human courage. I suppose the three travellers became the symbols of that belief. Merlin, Llanwith and Luka set out to create a weapon borne out of hope. Nor are they so callous as to leave their tool to survive as best he can after they have placed him in harm’s way. They risk themselves as well as Artorex, because hope requires self-sacrifice. Their rootless lives, as they plot Arthur’s elevation to glory, is proof of their dedication to a selfless quest.