‘You can ride without a saddle, Lord?’ he asked me.
‘Without a horse, tonight, if necessary.’
‘What about me?’ Sansum demanded as I heaved myself onto one of the horses. I looked down at him. I was tempted to leave him in the meadow for he had been a treacherous man all his life and I had no wish to prolong his existence, but he could also be useful to us on this night and so I reached down and hauled him onto the horse’s back behind me. ‘I should leave you here, Bishop,’ I said as he settled himself. He offered me no answer, but just wrapped his arms tight round my waist. Taliesin was leading the second horse towards the meadow’s gate that he tugged open. ‘Did Merlin tell you what we should do now?’ I asked the bard as I kicked my horse through the opening.
‘He did not, Lord, but wisdom suggests we should go to the coast and find a boat. And that we hurry, Lord. The sleep on that hilltop will not last long, and once they find you missing, they will send men to search for us.’ Taliesin used the gate as a mounting-block.
‘What do we do?’ Sansum asked in panic, his grip fierce about me.
‘Kill you?’ I suggested. ‘Then Taliesin and I can make better time.’
‘No, Lord, no! Please, no!’
Taliesin glanced up at the misted stars. ‘We ride west?’ he suggested.
‘I know just where we’re going,’ I said, kicking the horse towards the track that led to Lindinis.
‘Where?’ Sansum demanded.
‘To see your wife, Bishop,’ I said, ‘to see your wife.’ That was why I saved Sansum’s life that night, because Morgan was now our best hope. I doubted she would help me, and was certain she would spit in Taliesin’s face if he asked for aid, but for Sansum she would do anything. And so we rode to Ynys Wydryn.
We woke Morgan from sleep and she came to the door of her hall in a bad temper, or rather in a worse than usual temper. She did not recognize me without a beard and did not see her husband who, sore from the ride, was lagging behind us; instead Morgan saw Taliesin as a Druid who had dared to come into the sacred confines of her shrine. ‘Sinner!’ she screeched at him, her newly woken state proving no barrier to the full force of her vituperation. ‘Defiler! Idolater! In the name of the holy God and His blessed Mother I order you to go!’
‘Morgan!’ I called, but just then she saw the bedraggled, limping figure of Sansum and she gave a small mew of joy and hurried towards him. The quarter moon glinted on the golden mask with which she covered her fire-ravaged face.
‘Sansum!’ she called. ‘My sweet!’
‘Precious!’ Sansum said, and the two clasped each other in the night.
‘Dear one,’ Morgan babbled, stroking his face, ‘what have they done to you?’
Taliesin smiled, and even I, who hated Sansum and had no love for Morgan, could not resist a smile at their evident pleasure. Of all the marriages I have ever known, that was the strangest. Sansum was as dishonest a man as ever lived, and Morgan as honest as any woman in creation, yet they plainly adored each other, or Morgan, at least, adored Sansum. She had been born fair, but the terrible fire that had killed her first husband had twisted her body and scarred her face into horror. No man could have loved Morgan for her beauty, or for her character which had been as fire-twisted into bitterness as her face had been ravaged into ugliness, but a man could love Morgan for her connections for she was Arthur’s sister, and that, I ever believed, was what drew Sansum towards her. But if he did not love her for herself, he nevertheless made a show of love that convinced her and gave her happiness, and for that I was willing to forgive even the mouse lord his dissimulation. He admired her, too, for Morgan was a clever woman and Sansum prized cleverness, and thus both gained from the marriage; Morgan received tenderness, Sansum received protection and advice, and as neither sought the pleasures of the other’s flesh, it had proved a better marriage than most.
‘Within an hour,’ I brutally broke their happy reunion apart, ‘Mordred’s men will be here. We must be far away by then, and your women, Lady,’ I said to Morgan, — ’should seek safety in the marshes. Mordred’s men won’t care that your women are holy, they will rape them all.’
Morgan glared at me with her one eye that glinted in the mask’s hole. ‘You look better without a beard, Derfel,’ she said.
‘I shall look worse without a head, Lady, and Mordred is making a pile of heads on Caer Cadarn.’
‘I don’t know why Sansum and I should save your sinful lives,’ she grumbled, ‘but God commands us to be merciful.’ She turned from Sansum’s arms and shrieked in a terrible voice to wake her women. Taliesin and I were ordered into the church, given a basket, and told to fill it with the shrine’s gold while Morgan sent women into the village to wake the boatmen. She was wonderfully efficient. The shrine was suffused with panic, but Morgan controlled all, and it took only minutes before the first women were being helped into the flat-bottomed marsh boats that then headed into the mist-shrouded mere. We left last of all, and I swear I heard hoofbeats to the east as our boatman poled the punt into the dark waters. Taliesin, sitting in the bow, began to sing the lament of Idfael, but Morgan snapped at him to cease his pagan music. He lifted his fingers from the small harp. ‘Music knows no allegiance, Lady,’ he chided her gently.
‘Yours is the devil’s music,’ she snarled.
‘Not all of it,’ Taliesin said, and he began to sing again, but this time a song I had never heard before.
‘By the rivers of Babylon,’ he sang, ‘where we sat down, we shed bitter tears to remember our home, and I saw that Morgan was pushing a finger beneath her mask as if she was brushing away tears. The bard sang on and the high Tor receded as the marsh mists shrouded us and as our boatman poled us through whispering reeds and across the black water. When Taliesin ended his song there was only the sound of the lake rippling down the hull and the splash of the boatman’s pole thumping down to surge us forward again.
‘You should sing for Christ,’ Sansum said reprovingly.
‘I sing for all the Gods,’ Taliesin said, ‘and in the days to come we will need all of them.’
‘There is only one God!’ Morgan said fiercely.
‘If you say so, Lady,’ Taliesin said mildly, ‘but I fear He has served you ill tonight,’ and he pointed back towards Ynys Wydryn and we all turned to see a livid glow spreading in the mist behind. I had seen that glow before, seen it through these same mists on this same lake. It was the glow of buildings being put to the torch, the glow of burning thatch. Mordred had followed us and the shrine of the Holy Thorn, where his mother was buried, was being burned to ashes, but we were safe in the marshes where no man dared to go unless he possessed a guide.
Evil had again gripped Dumnonia.
But we were safe, and in the dawn we found a fisherman who would sail to Siluria in return for gold. And so I went home to Arthur.
And to new horror.
Ceinwyn was sick. The sickness had come swiftly, Guinevere told me, just hours after I had sailed from Isca. Ceinwyn had begun to shiver, then to sweat, and by that evening she no longer had the strength to stand, and so she had taken to her bed and Morwenna had nursed her, and a wise-woman had fed her a concoction of coltsfoot and rue and put a healing charm between her breasts, but by morning Ceinwyn’s skin had broken into boils. Every joint ached, she could not swallow, and her breath rasped in her throat. She began to rave then, thrashing in the bed and screaming hoarsely of Dian. Morwenna tried to prepare me for Ceinwyn’s death. ‘She believes she was cursed, father,’ she told me, ‘because on the day you left a woman came and asked us for food. We gave her barley grains, but when she left there was blood on the doorpost.’