‘that your God wants?’
‘Your souls!’ Morgan cried.
‘You want me to become a Christian?’ I asked.
The gold mask with its incised cross snapped up to face me. ‘Yes,’ Morgan said simply.
‘I will do it,’ I said just as simply.
She pointed her hand at me. ‘You will be baptized, Derfel?’
‘Yes, Lady.’
‘And you will swear obedience to my husband.’
That checked me. I gazed at her. ‘To Sansum?’ I asked feebly.
‘He is a bishop!’ Morgan insisted. ‘He has God’s authority! You will agree to swear obedience to him, you will agree to be baptized, and only then will I lift the curse.’
Arthur stared at me. For a few heartbeats I could not swallow the humiliation of Morgan’s demand, but then I thought of Ceinwyn and I nodded. ‘I will do it,’ I told her. So Morgan risked her God’s anger and lifted the curse.
She did it that afternoon. She came to the palace courtyard in a black robe and without any mask so that the horror of her fire-ravaged face, all red and scarred and ridged and twisted, was visible to us all. She was furious with herself, but committed to her promise, and she hurried about her business. A brazier was lit and fed with coals and, while the fire heated, slaves fetched baskets of potter’s clay that Morgan moulded into the figure of a woman. She used blood from a child that had died in the town that morning, and water that a slave swept up from the courtyard’s damp grass, and mixed both with the clay. There was no thunder, but Morgan said the counter-charm did not need thunder. She spat in horror at what she had made. It was a grotesque image, that thing, a woman with huge breasts, spread legs and a gaping birth canal, and in the figure’s belly she dug a hole that she said was the womb where the evil must rest. Arthur, Taliesin and Guinevere watched enthralled as she moulded the clay and then as she walked three times round the obscene figure. After the third sunwise circuit she stopped, raised her head to the clouds and wailed. For a moment I thought she was in such pain that she could not proceed and that her God was commanding her to stop the ceremony, but then she turned her twisted face towards me. ‘I need the evil now,’ she said.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
The slit that was her mouth seemed to smile. ‘Your hand, Derfel.’
‘My hand?’
I saw now that the lipless slit was a smile. ‘The hand that binds you to Nimue,’ Morgan said. ‘How else do you think the evil is channelled? You must cut it off, Derfel, and give it to me.’
‘Surely,’ Arthur began to protest.
‘You force me to sin!’ Morgan turned on her brother with a shriek, ‘then you challenge my wisdom?’
‘No,’ Arthur said hurriedly.
‘It is nothing to me,’ she said carelessly, ‘if Derfel wants to keep his hand, so be it. Ceinwyn can suffer.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘no.’
We sent for Galahad and Culhwch, then Arthur led the three of us to his smithy where the forge burned night and day. I took my lover’s ring from the finger of my left hand and gave it to Morridig, Arthur’s smith, and asked him to seal the ring about Hywelbane’s pommel. The ring was of common iron, a warrior’s ring, but it had a cross made of gold that I had stolen from the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn and it was the twin of a ring Ceinwyn wore.
We placed a thick piece of timber on the anvil. Galahad held me tight, his arms about me, and I bared my arm and laid my left hand on the timber. Culhwch gripped my forearm, not to keep it still, but for afterwards.
Arthur raised Excalibur. ‘Are you sure, Derfel?’ he asked.
‘Do it, Lord,’ I said.
Morridig watched wide-eyed as the bright blade touched the rafters above the anvil. Arthur paused, then hacked down once. He hacked down hard, and for a second I felt no pain, none, but then Culhwch took my spurting wrist and thrust it into the burning coals of the forge and that was when the pain whipped through me like a spear thrust. I screamed, and then I remember nothing at all. I heard later how Morgan took the severed hand with its fatal scar and sealed it in the clay womb. Then, to a pagan chant as old as time, she pulled the bloody hand out through the birth canal and tossed it onto the brazier.
And thus I became a Christian.
PART FOUR
The Last Enchantment
Spring has come to Dinnewrac. The monastery warms, and the silence of our prayers is broken by the bleating of lambs and the song of larks. White violets and stitchwort grow where snow lay for so long, but best of all is the news that Igraine has given birth to a child. It is a boy, and both he and his mother live. God be thanked for that, and for the season’s warmth, but for little else. Spring should be a happy season, but there are dark rumours of enemies.
The Saxons have returned, though whether it was their spearmen who started the fires we saw on our eastern horizon last night, no one knows. Yet the fires burned bright, flaring in the night sky like a foretaste of hell. A farmer came at dawn to give us some split logs of lime that we can use to make a new butter churn, and he told us the fires were set by raiding Irish, but we doubt that for there have been too many stories of Saxon warbands in the last few weeks. Arthur’s achievement was to keep the Saxons at bay for a whole generation, and to do it he taught our Kings courage, but how feeble our rulers have become since then! And now the Sais return like a plague.
Dafydd, the clerk of the justice who translates these parchments into the British tongue, arrived to collect the newest skins today and he told me that the fires were almost certainly Saxon mischief, and afterwards informed me that Igraine’s new son is to be named Arthur. Arthur ap Brochvael ap Perddel ap Cuneglas; a good name, though Dafydd plainly did not approve of it, and at first I was not sure why. He is a small man, not unlike Sansum, with the same busy expression and the same bristly hair. He sat in my window to read the finished parchments and kept tutting and shaking his head at my handwriting.
‘Why,’ he finally asked me, ‘did Arthur abandon Dumnonia?’
‘Because Meurig insisted on it,’ I explained, ‘and because Arthur himself never wanted to rule.’
‘But it was irresponsible of him!’ Dafydd said sternly.
‘Arthur was not a king,’ I said, ‘and our laws insist that only kings can rule.’
‘Laws are malleable,’ Dafydd said with a sniff, ‘I should know, and Arthur should have been a king.’
‘I agree,’ I said, ‘but he was not. He was not born to it and Mordred was.’
‘Then nor was Gwydre born to the kingship,’ Dafydd objected.
‘True,’ I said, ‘but if Mordred had died, Gwydre had as good a claim as anyone, except Arthur, of course, but Arthur did not want to be King.’ I wondered how often I had explained this same thing.
‘Arthur came to Britain,’ I said, ‘because he took an oath to protect Mordred, and by the time he went to Siluria he had achieved all that he had set out to do. He had united the kingdoms of Britain, he had given Dumnonia justice and he had defeated the Saxons. He might have resisted Meurig’s demands to yield his power, but in his heart he didn’t want to, and so he gave Dumnonia back to its rightful King and watched all that he had achieved fall apart.’
‘So he should have remained in power,’ Dafydd argued. Dafydd, I think, is very like Saint Sansum, a man who can never be in the wrong.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but he was tired. He wanted other men to carry the burden. If anyone was to blame, it was me! I should have stayed in Dumnonia instead of spending so much time in Isca. But at the time none of us saw what was happening. None of us realized Mordred would prove a good soldier, and when he did we convinced ourselves that he would die soon enough and Gwydre would become King. Then all would have been well. We lived in hope rather than in the real world.’