"I hope never to lose sight of you again, Lord."
"What an emotional fool you are, Derfel." He turned and scowled at me. "I should have thrown you back into Tanaburs's pit. Carry that chest into my cabin."
Merlin had commandeered the shipmaster's cabin where I now stowed the wooden chest. Merlin ducked under the low door, fussed with the captain's pillows to make himself a comfortable seat, then sank down with a sigh of happiness. The grey cat leaped on to his lap as he unrolled the top few inches of the thick scroll he had risked his life to obtain on a crude table that glittered with fish-scales.
"What is it?" I asked.
"It is the one real treasure Ban possessed," Merlin said. "The rest was mostly Greek and Roman rubbish. A few good things, I suppose, but not much."
"So what is it?" I asked again.
"It is a scroll, dear Derfel," he said, as though I was a fool to have asked. He glanced up through the open skylight to see the sail bellying in a wind still soured by Ynys Trebes's smoke. "A good wind!" he said cheerfully. "Home by nightfall, perhaps? I have missed Britain." He looked back to the scroll. "And Nimue? How is the dear child?" he asked as he scanned the first lines.
"The last time I saw her," I said bitterly, 'she'd been raped and had lost an eye."
"These things happen," Merlin said carelessly.
His callousness took my breath away. I waited, then again asked him what was so important about the scroll.
He sighed. "You are an importunate creature, Derfel. Well, I shall indulge you." He let go of the manuscript so that it rolled itself up, then leaned back on the shipmaster's damp and threadbare pillows. "You know, of course, who Caleddin was?"
"No, Lord," I admitted.
He threw his hands up in despair. "Are you not ashamed of your ignorance, Derfel? Caleddin was a Druid of the Ordovicii. A wretched tribe, and I should know. One of my wives was an Ordoviciian and one such creature was sufficient for a dozen lifetimes. Never again." He shuddered at the memory, then peered up at me. "Gundleus raped Nimue, right?"
"Yes." I wondered how he knew.
"Foolish man! Foolish man!" He seemed amused rather than angry at his lover's fate. "How he will suffer. Is Nimue angry?"
"Furious."
"Good. Fury is very useful, and dear Nimue has a talent for it. One of the things I can't stand about Christians is their admiration of meekness. Imagine elevating meekness into a virtue! Meekness! Can you imagine a heaven filled only with the meek? What a dreadful idea. The food would get cold while everyone passed the dishes to everyone else. Meekness is no good, Derfel. Anger and selfishness, those are the qualities that make the world march." He laughed. "Now, about Caleddin. He was a fair Druid for an Ordoviciian, not nearly as good as me, of course, but he had his better days. I did enjoy your attempt to murder Lancelot, by the way, a pity you didn't finish the job. I suppose he escaped from the city?"
"As soon as it was doomed, yes."
"Sailors say rats are always first off the doomed ship. Poor Ban. He was a fool, but a good fool."
"Did he know who you were?" I asked.
"Of course he knew," Merlin said. "It would have been monstrously rude of me to have deceived my host. He didn't tell anyone else, of course, otherwise I'd have been besieged by those dreadful poets all asking me to use magic to make their wrinkles disappear. You've no idea, Derfel, how bothersome a little magic can be. Ban knew who I was, and so did Caddwg. He's my servant. Poor Hywel's dead, yes?"
"If you already know," I said, 'why do you ask?"
"I'm just making conversation!" he protested. "Conversation is one of the civilized arts, Derfel. We can't all stump through life with a sword and shield, growling. A few of us do try to preserve the dignities." He sniffed.
"So how do you know Hywel's dead?" I asked.
"Because Bed win wrote and told me, of course, you idiot."
"Bedwin's been writing to you all these years?" I asked in astonishment.
"Of course! He needed my advice. What do you think I did? Vanish?"
"You did," I said resentfully.
"Nonsense. You simply didn't know where to look for me. Not that Bedwin took my advice about anything. What a mess the man has made! Mordred alive! Pure foolishness. The child should have been strangled with his own birth cord, but I suppose Uther could never have been persuaded of that. Poor Uther. He believed that virtues are handed down through a man's loins! What nonsense! A child is like a calf; if the thing is born crippled you knock it smartly on the skull and serve the cow again. That's why the Gods made it such a pleasure to engender children, because so many of the little brutes have to be replaced. There's not much pleasure in the process for women, of course, but someone has to suffer and thank the Gods it's them and not us."
"Did you ever have children?" I asked, wondering why I had never thought to enquire before.
"Of course I did! What an extraordinary question." He gazed at me as though he doubted my sanity. "I never liked any of them very much and happily most of them died and the rest I've disowned. One, I think, is even a Christian." He shuddered. "I much prefer other people's children; they're so much more grateful. Now what were we talking about? Oh yes, Caleddin. Terrible man." He shook his head gloomily.
"Did he write the scroll?" I asked.
"Don't be absurd, Derfel," he snapped impatiently. "Druids are not allowed to write anything down, it's against the rules. You know that! Once you write something down it becomes fixed. It becomes dogma. People can argue about it, they become authoritative, they refer to the texts, they produce new manuscripts, they argue more and soon they're putting each other to death. If you never write anything down then no one knows exactly what you said so you can always change it. Do I have to explain everything to you?"
"You can explain what is written on the scroll," I said humbly.
"I was doing precisely that! But you keep interrupting me and changing the subject! Extraordinary behaviour! And to think you grew up on the Tor. I should have had you whipped more often, that might have given you better manners. I hear Gwlyddyn is rebuilding my hall?"
"Yes."
"A good, honest man, Gwlyddyn. I shall probably have to rebuild it all myself but he does try."
"The scroll," I reminded him.
"I know! I know! Caleddin was a Druid, I told you that. An Ordoviciian, too. Dreadful beasts, Ordoviciians. Whatever, cast your mind back to the Black Year and ask yourself how Suetonius knew all he did about our religion. You do know who Suetonius was, I suppose?"
The question was an insult, for all Britons know and revile the name of Suetonius Paulinus, the Governor appointed by the Emperor Nero and who, in the Black Year that occurred some four hundred years before our time, virtually destroyed our ancient religion. Every Briton grew up with the dread tale of how Suetonius two legions had crushed the Druid sanctuary on Ynys Mon. Ynys Mon, like Ynys Trebes, was an island, the greatest sanctuary of our Gods, but the Romans had somehow crossed the straits and put all the Druids, bards and priestesses to the sword. They had cut down the sacred groves and defiled the holy lake so that all we had left was but a shadow of the old religion and our Druids, like Tanaburs and lorweth, were just faint echoes of an old glory. "I know who Suetonius was," I told Merlin.
"There was another Suetonius," he said with amusement. "A Roman writer, and rather a good one. Ban possessed his De Viris Illustribus which is mainly about the lives of the poets. Suetonius was particularly scandalous about Virgil. It's extraordinary what things poets will take to their beds; mostly each other, of course. It's a pity that work burned, for I never saw another. Ban's scroll might well have been the very last copy, and it's just ashes now. Virgil will be relieved. Whatever, the point is that Suetonius Paulinus wanted to know everything there was to know about our religion before he attacked Ynys Mon. He wanted to make certain we wouldn't turn him into a toad or a poet, so he found himself a traitor, Caleddin the Druid. And Caleddin dictated everything he knew to a Roman scribe who copied it all down in what looks to be execrable Latin. But execrable or not, it is the only record of our old religion; all its secrets, all its rituals, all its meanings and all its power. And this, child, is it." He gestured at the scroll and managed to knock it off the table.
I retrieved the manuscript from under the shipmaster's bunk. "And I thought," I said bitterly, 'that you were a Christian trying to discover the wingspan of angels."
"Don't be perverse, Derfel! Everyone knows the wingspan must vary according to the angel's height and weight." He unwound the scroll again and peered at its contents. "I sought this treasure everywhere. Even in Rome! And all the while that silly old fool Ban had it catalogued as the eighteenth volume of Silius Italicus. It proves he never read the whole thing, even though he did claim it was wonderful. Still, I don't suppose anyone's read the whole thing. How could they?" He shuddered.
"No wonder it took you over five years to find it," I said, thinking how many people had missed him during that time.
"Nonsense. I only learned of the scroll's existence a year ago. Before that I was searching for other things: the Horn of Bran Galed, the Knife of Laufrodedd, the Throwboard of Gwenddolau, the Ring of Eluned. The Treasures of Britain, Derfel..." He paused, glancing at the sealed chest, then looked back to me. "The Treasures are the keys of power, Derfel, but without the secrets in this scroll they're just so many dead objects." There was a rare reverence in his voice, and no wonder, for the Thirteen Treasures were the most mysterious and sacred talismans of Britain. One night in Benoic, when we had been shivering in the dark and listening for Franks among the trees, Galahad had scorned the very existence of the Treasures by doubting whether they could have survived the long years of Roman rule, but Merlin had always insisted that the old Druids, facing defeat, had hidden them so deep that no Roman would ever find them. His life's work was the collection of the thirteen talismans; his ambition was the final awesome moment when they would be put to use. That use, it seemed, was described in the lost scroll of Caleddin.
"So what does the scroll tell us?" I asked eagerly.
"How would I know? You won't give me time to read it. Why don't you go and be useful? Splice an oar or whatever it is sailors do when they're not drowning." He waited till I had reached the door. "Oh, and one other thing," he added abstractedly.
I turned to see he was again gazing at the opening lines of the heavy scroll. "Lord?" I prompted him.
"I just wanted to thank you, Derfel," he said carelessly. "So, thank you. I always hoped you'd be useful some day."
I thought of Ynys Trebes burning and of Ban dead. "I failed Arthur," I said bitterly.
"Everyone fails Arthur. He expects too much. Now go."
I had supposed that Lancelot and his mother Elaine would sail west to Broceliande, there to join the mass of refugees hurled from Ban's kingdom by the Franks, but instead they sailed north to Britain. To Dumnonia.
And once in Dumnonia they travelled to Durnovaria, reaching the town a full two days before Merlin, Galahad and I landed, so we were not there to see their entry, though we heard all about it for the town rang with admiring tales of the fugitives.
Benoic's royal party had travelled in three fast ships, all of which had been provisioned ahead of Ynys Trebes's fall and in whose holds were crammed the gold and silver that the Franks had hoped to find in Ban's palace. By the time Queen Elaine's party reached Durnovaria the treasure had been hidden away and the fugitives were all on foot, some of them shoeless, all ragged and dusty, their hair tangled and crusted with sea salt, and with blood caked on their clothes and on the battered weapons they clutched in nerveless hands. Elaine, Queen of Benoic, and Lancelot, now King of a Lost Kingdom, limped up the town's principal street to beg like indigents at Guinevere's palace. Behind them was a motley mixture of guards, poets and courtiers who, Elaine pitifully exclaimed, were the only survivors of the massacre. "If only Arthur had kept his word," she wailed to Guinevere, 'if only he had done just half of all that he promised!"
"Mother! Mother!" Lancelot clutched her.
"All I want to do is die, my dear," Elaine declared, 'as you so nearly did in the fight."
Guinevere, of course, rose splendidly to the occasion. Clothes were fetched, baths filled, food cooked, wine poured, wounds bandaged, stories heard, treasure given and Arthur summoned.
The stories were wonderful. They were told all over the town and by the time we reached Durnovaria the tales had spread to every corner of Dumnonia and were already flying over the frontiers to be retold in countless British and Irish feasting halls. It was a great tale of heroes; how Lancelot and Bors had held the Merman Gate and how they had carpeted the sands with Prankish dead and glutted the gulls with Prankish offal. The Franks, the tales said, had been shrieking for mercy, fearing that bright Tanlladwyr would flash in Lancelot's hand again, but then some other defenders, out of Lancelot's sight, gave way. The enemy was inside the city and if the fight had been grim before, now it became ghastly. Enemy after enemy fell as street after street was defended, yet not all the heroes of antiquity could have stemmed that rush of iron-helmed foes who swarmed from the encircling sea like so many demons released from Manawydan's nightmares. Back went the outnumbered heroes, leaving the streets choked with enemy dead; still more enemies came and back the heroes went, back to the palace itself where Ban, good King Ban, leaned on his terrace to search the horizon for Arthur's ships. "They will come!" Ban had insisted, 'for Arthur has promised."
