Web of Deceit (2 page)
MYRDDION’S CHART OF PRE-ARTHURIAN ROMAN BRITAIN
Do not hide
that ’twas he was my heart’s love,
Whatso’er I love beside.
Celtic poem
The wind was a live thing. It swirled
through the conical stone huts that clung to the side of the cliff like neat, round limpets. It lifted the long grasses between the narrow paths and then twisted them into plaits of green, as if Tintagel were preparing for her bridegroom as she combed her long, turquoise and emerald hair. While she dreamed, the wind took Ygerne’s own plaits and dragged them into long skeins that bared her fragile face and lit her eyes from within. Tintagel breathed gently below her feet; she felt the soft thrumming of its heart fluttering through the stones of the court overlooking the causeway. She sensed the surge of waves around Tintagel’s heels and almost believed that her hands could sink into the rock and become one with the fabric of the fortress, which was both her home and her protection.
‘I am the Queen of the Dumnonii,’ she whispered aloud to remind herself of her title and her life, but her words were blown away by the winds running
before the storm.
As the first raindrops pattered fatly onto the flagging, the sound of a hunting horn shivered up her spine with its raucous combination of threat and welcome. A horse’s hooves could be heard clearly from far below. Because of their speed, Ygerne knew that no enemy sought to invade the causeway fortifications. Only the master, or one of his allies, would approach the castle with such haste and arrogance.
‘The master comes,’ a stout serving woman cried, and began to straighten Ygerne’s plain unbleached skirts and the ornate scarf that covered her hair. ‘The master is at the gates, my queen. Come away, and I’ll comb that ragamuffin hair of yours.’
The servant clucked her tongue with affectionate irritation at the state of her mistress’s locks, knotted into snarls by the fingers of the wind. Ygerne’s cheeks were flushed from the cold air, and excitement gave them the high colour of a girl. Gorlois was at the gates: her heart lifted at the thought of her doting husband and his huge, beautiful brown eyes.
Herded into the fortress by her maidservants, Ygerne consented to be combed and polished, dressed and prodded, until her women were satisfied with her appearance. But Ygerne was careless of her beauty, being ignorant of the worth of a face of such delicacy of bone and shape that men ached to own her. She set little store by surface appearances, and possessed few traces of guile or vanity. If anything, she distrusted the quality and depth of her character and the strength of her personality; her superficial attractiveness was an accident of birth.
Then Gorlois was in the fortress and she could hear his iron-heeled boots striking the stones while his huge, generous nature filled the walls so that the castle rang and echoed with his laughter.
‘Ah, my beloved wife, you are as beautiful as ever. My eyes have hungered to see you,’ he shouted as he picked her up and swung her easily off her feet
until she was dizzy and giggling.
‘Gorlois, my lord – enough!’ she laughed as her plaits began to unravel and curl all over again. ‘My maid will be cross with me now, for she’s only just straightened my hair.’
Gorlois held her close and breathed in the perfume of that knee-length hair and the shimmer of gold and russet in its nut-brown waves. He loved his wife’s hair and could play with its long tresses for hours once the sharp pang of his physical need was satisfied. Ygerne always smelled of lavender and roses, although as a mere male the king had no idea how she managed to be so sweet and clean. He was content to languish in her arms and to luxuriate in her never-failing beauty.
‘Put me down, Gorlois,’ she whispered, tugging playfully on his greying beard. ‘What will Ceri and Valmai think to see the master and mistress cavorting like newly promised lovers rather than an old married couple. I am nearly seven and thirty, so I am well past the age for such behaviour.’
‘You will remain lovely forever and I have missed my wife during my absence,’ Gorlois muttered into her soft white throat, his voice thickening with desire. He had ridden with Ambrosius, the High King of the Britons, throughout the spring and summer as they drove the barbarous Saxons back to Londinium, but he had yearned for his wife through every weary mile and in each ugly conflict as if she were the most potent and addictive of wines.
For all her protestations, the queen retained her extraordinary appeal despite the approach of old age. She was very tall for a woman, but any appearance of robustness was nullified by an extreme slenderness that suggested fragility. Her skin was remarkably thin and very white, so that the contours of her face held a blue tinge from the flood of blood through the surface veins. Her features were so symmetrical and cleanly sculpted that her appearance could easily have seemed bland, but her huge, lambent blue-grey eyes created an incandescence
that seemed as frail as new grass and as crystalline as clean water. From her long, delicate fingers to her elegant, narrow feet, every aspect of Ygerne’s appearance was pleasing to the eye.
‘I have received word from King Lot, beloved,’ Gorlois told her later, as they luxuriated in the king’s great bed under a coverlet of bearskin. ‘Morgause quickens with child once more.’
‘Another? So soon? Our daughter will populate the north at this rate. Still, I do long to see her
bairns
, as her dull husband calls them.’ Ygerne giggled like a girl into her husband’s masculine shoulder, which still smelled faintly of horse. ‘Why are Morgause’s children given names that are so similar? Gawayne, Agravaine, Geraint . . . heavens! It’s hard to remember them all, I swear. Still, I wish Morgan were settled, like her sister. She’ll be four and twenty by the winter solstice and I swear she shows no inclination to wed. She’ll drive me crazy with her passion for magic, and she fills her room with some very odd and ugly things. I fear for her, Gorlois. She dabbles with forces she doesn’t understand.’
‘And you
do
understand them, my lovely?’ Gorlois asked lazily and nuzzled the palm of her hand. His luxuriant moustache tickled her skin and she giggled once more, but distractedly, and her lovely face was soon serious again.
‘She doesn’t know her own strength,’ Ygerne whispered. ‘She’s too passionate and impatient to count the cost. She longs for power and will come to ruin if we don’t check her. We’ve cosseted our girl overmuch.’
‘That little spitfire should have been born a boy.’ Gorlois grinned at his worried wife with a satiated man’s indulgence. ‘What a son she’d have made! But I’ll not pine if she remains a child for a little longer. Like her mother’s, Morgan’s beauty is ageless.’
‘Nothing lasts forever, husband. Not beauty and certainly not love. It’s time that Morgan put away her childishness, else she’ll perish from her own
foolhardy nature. Dark magic will devour her whole.’
Gorlois ran his forefinger sleepily down the perfection of Ygerne’s cheekbone. ‘Any child of yours couldn’t fail to be beautiful and good. Now, go to sleep, woman, for your old husband is weary.’ Manlike, he rolled over and was soon snoring robustly.
For several hours, wakeful in the thick warm darkness, Ygerne watched as her husband slept with the intensity and abandon of a child. When his eyes began to move under his closed lids she knew that he dreamed, and when his body thrashed and struggled in their warm, dark nest she knew that he battled unseen enemies. So she watched over him as the windy, rain-drowned night wore away to be replaced by a newly woven dawn that was fresh, highly coloured and vivid. Only then did the eyes of the Dumnonii queen close in sleep.
And even in the thrall of her own dreams, she felt a compulsion to guard her beloved Gorlois, as if only the alertness of her pale eyes could protect him from some nameless horror. She could hear the monster coming as she slept, drawing ever closer to Tintagel on scaly talons, so that even in the safety of Gorlois’s arms she knew that neither husband nor wife would ever sleep in perfect peace again.
Ygerne had not been the only soul who was awake during the long hours of darkness. In a narrow room, Morgan leaned on a wooden window ledge and stared out at the last of the storm. The darkness was impenetrable before the dawn, except when forked lightning sizzled and flashed into the sea. Morgan held her hand out into the darkness of the night and imagined that she could grasp that power and master it, until she was acknowledged as the most fearsome woman in the world.
She smiled and sucked raindrops off her fingers as if tasting the sweat of the gods.
THE HEALER’S JOURNEY FROM DUBRIS TO VENTA BELGARUM
Men are in the shout (of war); the ford is frozen over;
Cold the wave, variegated the bosom of the sea;
The eternal God give us counsel!
Black Book of Carmarthen
The most eagerly anticipated
return to
places of one’s past is often a bitter disappointment, for nothing stays the same. And so it was with Dubris, when the travellers returned after their sea journey from Gesoriacum.
Spring had barely come when they set sail, so the healers wore thick cloaks to protect their chilled flesh after some years in warmer climes where even the coldest of winters lacked a true bite. But weather apart, Dubris had changed in the six years since their departure for the Middle Sea. The Saxons had arrived in a slow trickle of traders that had escalated into a flood of unchecked immigrants. Without having to strike a single blow, the Saxon stain had spread throughout the city and out into the surrounding countryside where
it began to take root.
Myrddion had learned that the isles of Britain were not the entire world and that their towns were small, unimportant and bucolic when compared with the great cities of Rome, Ravenna or Constantinople. More tellingly, the healers had experienced the great ports of the Middle Sea, so that Dubris, which had seemed so large and bustling six years earlier, now seemed a minor centre of trade. This impression was not improved by a layer of grime, wood-smoke and neglect that reminded Myrddion of the port of Ostia. The warehouses and docks were in a similar state of dilapidation and the faces of the labourers had the same pinched tenseness as those of the inhabitants of the Italic port.
But there the similarities ended. Fish in huge wicker baskets added their own distinctive aroma to small docks of splintering wood that stretched out into the deeper waters. Piles of goods were stacked ready to be carried to the warehouses, while huge bales were being loaded onto vessels of all shapes, sizes and styles for the voyages to their ultimate destinations.
The faces were as mixed in race as those they had seen in Ostia, but without the exotic tints of Africa and the east. Myrddion even recognised some Franks on a large, disciplined vessel and reminded himself that these northerners had been crude barbarians fifty years earlier when they were scrabbling for land and power in Gaul.
‘But the Franks are now civilised and so the world changes,’ Cadoc snorted cynically at his master’s comment. ‘Eventually, the Saxons will be indistinguishable from us.’
The healers began the arduous task of disembarkation, moving their many barrels, bales, chests and packages into a neat pile on the dock. While they worked, Myrddion wondered at the ease with which the northern tribes had passed down through the land of the Franks and then crossed the narrow channel to Britain.
‘At least our homeland still smells
of the Britain we knew.’ Cadoc spoke for them all. ‘Woodsmoke and rain!’
‘Aye. But this place makes me nervous. We’re attracting far too much attention from the dockworkers, so I’d like to be gone as soon as possible.’ Myrddion worried at his thumbnail with his teeth as he examined the melange of faces. ‘Work your magic, Cadoc. Find us two wagons and sufficient horses for our needs. And make it as fast as you can, because my shoulder blades are starting to itch.’