I liked Sebile for I too was a Saxon and Sebile would speak to me in my mother's tongue so that I grew up in Ynys Wydryn speaking both Saxon and the speech of the Britons. I should have been a slave, but when I was a little child, shorter even than the dwarf Druidan, a raiding party had come to Dumnonia's northern coast from Siluria and had taken the settlement where my mother was enslaved. King Gundleus of Siluria led the raid. My mother, who I think looked something like Sebile, was raped while I was carried to the death-pit where Tanaburs, Siluria's Druid, sacrificed a dozen captives as thanks to the High God Bel for the great plunder the raid had yielded. Dear God, how I remember that night. The fires, the screams, the drunken rapes, the wild dancing, and then the moment when Tanaburs hurled me into the black pit with its sharpened stake. I lived, untouched, and came from the death-pit as calmly as Nimue had come from the killing sea and Merlin, finding me, had called me a child of Bel. He named me Derfel, gave me a home, and let me grow free.
The Tor was filled with such children who had been snatched from the Gods. Merlin believed we were special and that we might grow into a new order of Druids and Priestesses who could help him re-establish the old true religion in Rome-blighted Britain, but he never had time to teach us, and so most of us grew to become farmers, fishermen or wives. During my time on the Tor only Nimue seemed marked by the Gods and was growing into a priestess. I wanted nothing more than to be a warrior. Pellinore gave me that ambition. Pellinore was the favourite of all Merlin's creatures. He was a king, but the Saxons had taken his land and his eyes, and the Gods had taken his mind. He should have been sent to the Isle of the Dead, where the dangerous mad went, but Merlin ordered him kept on the Tor locked in a small compound like the one where Druidan kept his pigs. He lived naked with long white hair that reached to his knees and with empty eye-sockets that wept. He raved constantly, haranguing the universe about his troubles, and Merlin would listen to the madness and draw from it messages of the Gods. Everyone feared Pellinore. He was utterly crazy and ungovernably wild. He once cooked one of Sebile's children on his fire. Yet, oddly, I do not know why, Pellinore liked me. I would slip between the bars of his compound and he would pet me and tell me tales of fighting and wild hunts. He never sounded mad to me and he never hurt me, nor Nimue, but then, as Merlin always said, we two children were especially beloved of Bel.
Bel might have loved us, but Guendoloen hated us. She was Merlin's wife, now old and toothless. Like Morgan she had great skills with herbs and charms, but Merlin had cast her off when her face became disfigured by a sickness. It had happened long before I reached the Tor, during a period everyone called the Bad Time when Merlin had come back from the north mad and weeping, but even when he recovered his wits he did not take Guendoloen back, though he did allow her to live in a small hut beside the stockade fence where she spent her days casting spells against her husband and screaming insults at the rest of us. She hated Druidan most of all. Sometimes she would attack him with a fire spit and Druidan would scamper through the huts with Guendoloen chasing after him. We children would urge her on, screaming for dwarfish blood, but he always got away.
Such, then, was the strange place to which Norwenna came with the Edling Mordred, and though I may have made it sound a place of horrors it was, in truth, a good refuge. We were the privileged children of Lord Merlin, we lived free, we did little work, we laughed, and Ynys Wydryn, the Isle of Glass, was a happy place.
Norwenna arrived in wintertime when Avalon's marshes were glossed with ice. There was a carpenter in Ynys Wydryn called Gwlyddyn, whose wife had a boy child the same age as Mordred, and Gwlyddyn made us sledges and we rang the air with shrieks as we slid down the Tor's snowy slopes. Ralla, Gwlyddyn's wife, was appointed Mordred's wet nurse and the Prince, despite his maimed foot, grew strong on her milk. Even Norwenna's health improved as the bitter cold abated and the winter's first snowdrops bloomed in the thorn thickets about the sacred spring at the Tor's foot. The Princess was never strong, but Morgan and Guendoloen gave her herbs, the monks prayed, and it seemed her birth-sickness was at last passing. Each week a messenger carried news of the Edling's health to his grandfather, the High King, and each piece of good news was rewarded with a piece of gold or maybe a horn of salt or a flask of rare wine that Druidan would steal.
We waited for Merlin's return, but he did not come and the Tor seemed empty without him, though our daily life hardly changed. The store-rooms had to be kept filled and the rats had to be killed and the firewood and spring water had to be carried uphill three times a day. Gudovan, Merlin's scribe, kept a tally of the tenants' payments while Hywel, the steward, rode the estates to make certain no family cheated their absent lord. Gudovan and Hywel were both sober, hard-headed, hard-working men; proof, Nimue told me, that Merlin's eccentricities ended where his income began. It was Gudovan who had taught me to read and write. I did not want to learn such un-warrior like skills, but Nimue had insisted. “You are fatherless,” she had told me, 'and you'll have to make your way on your own skills."
“I want to be a soldier.”
“You will be,” she promised me, 'but not unless you learn to read and write," and such was her youthful authority over me that I believed her and learned the clerkly skills long before I discovered that no soldier needed them.
So Gudovan taught me letters and Hywel, the steward, taught me to fight. He trained me with the single-stick, the countryman's cudgel that could crack a skull open, but which could also mimic the stroke play of a sword or the thrust of a spear. Hywel, before he lost a leg to a Saxon axe, had been a famous warrior in Uther's band and he made me exercise until my arms were strong enough to wield a heavy sword with the same speed as a single-stick. Most warriors, Hywel said, depended on brute force and drink instead of skill. He told me I would face men reeling with mead and ale whose only talent was to give giant blows that might kill an ox, but a sober man who knew the nine strokes of the sword would always beat such a brute. “I was drunk,” he admitted, 'when Octha the Saxon took my leg. Now faster, lad, faster! Your sword must dazzle them! Faster!" He taught me well, and the first to know it were the monks' sons in Ynys Wydryn's lower settlement. They resented we privileged children of the Tor, for we idled when they worked and ran free while they laboured, and as revenge they would chase us and try to beat us. I took my single-stick to the village one day and hammered three of the Christians bloody. I was always tall for my age and the Gods had made me strong as an ox and I ascribed my victory to their honour even though Hywel whipped me for it. The privileged, he said, should never take advantage of their inferiors, but I think he was pleased all the same for he took me hunting the next day and I killed my first boar with a man's spear. That was in a misty thicket by the River Cam and I was just twelve summers old. Hywel smeared my face with the boar's blood, gave me its tusks to wear as a necklace, then carried the corpse away to his Temple of Mithras where he gave a feast to all the old warriors who worshipped that soldiers' God. I was not allowed to attend the feast, but one day, Hywel promised me, when I had grown a beard and slain my first Saxon in battle, he would initiate me into the Mithraic mysteries.