"Of course."
That settled, they settled down to business.
Chapter Fourteen
The fortifications at Caer-Badonicus went up with astonishing speed. Covianna Nim had never seen so many men in one place, hundreds of them, with more arriving every day from the kingdoms of the midlands, bringing arms and armor, long pack trains of supplies to be cached in the summit's new granaries, groaning wagonloads of rough-dressed stone blocks, ripped hastily from quarries for miles around and ferried by the hundred-weight per horse, thousands of stones to build walls and barracks on the high hill.
Nor had she seen so many labor for so many hours without stopping, day and night, working in shifts to haul the stones laboriously to the top of the five-hundred-foot hill. Five layers deep, the walls went up, mazelike, the outermost layer studded with whole forests of thorny hawthorne branches, hacked down by women and children and carried on mules, on ponies, on grunting, waddling sows that stood as tall through the shoulder as some of the ponies and had to be goaded along by children with swine prods, anything that could carry a load of thorned nastiness.
Paving stones lined every inch of space between the long, snaking, concentric stone rings, joins made impervious to water with barrels of heated pitch. The cisterns were roofed over, forming a massive conduit that ringed the whole eighteen acres of summit, a feat of engineering the Romans themselves would have been proud to claim. And even before they were roofed over, they had begun to fill with rainwater from the hundreds of shallow channels dug every few inches across the entire top of the hill. Water flowed in spidery lines and snaking rivulets, pouring steadily into the cisterns.
Myrddin had ordered waterwheels built every few yards around the perimeter to lift the runoff into the cisterns from the top. A small army of boys was charged with keeping the wheels in constant motion, round the clock, with buckets mounted on timber spokes lifting the spilloff from deep, narrow troughs along the very edge of the summit, butted up against the innermost wall. The boys chanted songs in the days-long driving downpour, keeping up the rhythm of cranking the ponderous, groaning waterwheels.
Dripping buckets lifted water from ground level up to the top of the first cistern, pouring gallon after gallon down into the stone-lined channel between the first and second walls. From there, it flowed through drains down into the lower circumvallation cisterns, gradually filling up the whole, massive stonework system. When the cisterns failed to fill fast enough to suit Myrddin, he ordered wells dug around the long base of the hill, with more waterwheels to lift the thousands of gallons necessary to complete the job properly. Horses worked treadmills to keep these larger waterwheels moving, until the immense, layered conduit was finally full.
The waterwheels were immediately torn down, the timber used for roofing the houses and barracks going up all across the summit. Great wooden gates had been carefully built into the walls, as well, many more of them than necessary. Most were false gates, set along the edges of the walls in a mock facade, to fool the Saxon armies as to the purpose of those few, critical gates slated to deliver Emrys Myrddin's surprise. Runners came daily to the hill fort, gasping out the news of fighting and skirmishes all along the northern borders of Sussex and Wessex, the unexpected Briton strength forcing the Saxons to march west, right toward the trap being so carefully prepared for them. Emrys Myrddin was everywhere, directing, advising, overseeing the work day and night, only pausing to eat and rest when Covianna Nim insisted.
"You will collapse, Myrddin, if you do not eat and sleep, and where will Britain be, then? Come, lie down, I'll sing you to sleep."
At such times, she would guide him, usually stumbling with weariness, up to her rooms in the very first building finished on the summit, serving as her dispensary to treat the injuries sustained by the construction gangs. In those private rooms, she and Myrddin did a great deal more than eat and sleep. The sport they shared did him good, relaxing him and drawing him ever more delicately into her own trap.
And while he was distracted by her not inconsiderable charms, she bled him dry of every secret she could wheedle loose, pillow talk shared between lonely druidic professionals with no one else to share or understand the problems of their work. Given Myrddin's flattery-susceptible ego, larger than the whole of God's wide heavens, coupled with his long-standing infatuation with her, it was very simple to persuade him to share everything Covianna wanted to know.
He whispered the teaching epigrams between kisses, between couplings which were sometimes hard and fast, but more often slow and lazy and deeply satisfying—and always profitable. She learned the secrets of his wizardly lore, much of which consisted simply in knowing what men and women—be they superstitious peasants or kings with fine, classical educations—would do under given sets of circumstances, then uttering pronouncements calculated to achieve the desired outcome. Parable after parable slipped from his lips to her ears, deepening her understanding of how to manipulate people and situations.
He taught her healing lore not even Marguase had known, secrets picked up as a boy in Constantinople, from healers he had known before Covianna's birth. And most valuable of all, she learned the greatest secret of alchemy, long sought by her tribe of master smiths, but never found. The simplicity of it set her to laughing softly in the darkness.
"To change lead—the basest dross—into gold," he murmured, nuzzling her breast, "all that is required is the philosopher's stone."
"What stone is that? Something found only in a far country? Worth more than all the gold in Rome?"
He chuckled. "No, nothing like that. The alchemist's fabled prize is no stone at all."
"No stone at all? But—"
He tapped her temple. "The philosopher's stone is the rock-solid knowledge of philosophy itself. What does philosophy teach a man to do? To look at the gross and ordinary world of clay, of lead and crass stupidity, and to see within each crass and stupid thing the shining sparks of divinity waiting to be set free. And how does one set them free? By seeing them in the first place and acknowledging their existence, through the philosopher's skill of symbolic sight. Any man can change 'lead' into the 'gold' of wisdom, does he but understand this one, profoundly powerful secret."
It was the source of Emrys Myrddin's power, Covianna realized with a wondrous opening to the possibilities it made suddenly real and shining. No wonder Myrddin had been revered as a prophet even as a child, when he had seen the world through his philosopher's eyes, trained by the best minds of the East. He had seen clearly where Vortigern's weakness and greed would lead both Vortigern and the entire Briton race—and had uttered his first profound "prophecy" in symbolic terms even a slack-brained fool like Vortigern could understand. Red dragon of Britain would fight white dragon of Saxony, and Vortigern was the inevitable loser.
The very utterance of the "prophecy" had been Vortigern's undoing, leading his own sons to betray him while uniting the people behind Ambrosius Aurelianus and his closest friend, Uthyr pen Dragon—chosen by the "dragon," by Emrys Myrddin himself, who had invented the "dragon" whole cloth to represent the whole of the British people. It was so delightfully simple, Covianna marveled that she had not seen it sooner. It was another mark of Myrddin's genius that he had shared the source of his power with no one, not even Artorius.