The Hallowed Isle Book Three Page 8

  “Do you want to go back now?” asked Julia. She was washing her hair, black now with moisture, like the delta of shadow between her thighs.

  “I will rest awhile and let the air dry me.” Guendivar spread out the blanket where the old leaves lay thick beneath the trees and lay down.

  Presently Julia joined her, sighing with content as she stretched out at Guendivar’s side.

  “What is it?” the other girl asked presently. “You look so sad. Is it something I have said or done?”

  Damn—thought Guendivar, wiping her eyes. “I used to range the hills like a wild pony! I hate being penned in the house like a mare being kept until the stallion comes. It’s not your fault, Julia. You make it almost bearable!”

  “Oh, my dear—” Julia reached out to touch her shoulder. “Don’t you want to marry the king?”

  “He doesn’t even know me! Maybe it will come to nothing. Maybe this is all no more than my mother’s dream. But if the High King doesn’t want me, she will find someone else, and I will be in prison forevermore!”

  “Guendivar, it’s all right!” murmured Julia, drawing her close as she began to weep once more, holding her pillowed against her soft breast until she had cried herself out and was still.

  It had been a long time, thought Guendivar in the peace that followed, since her mother had held her so. Julia’s skin was as cool and smooth as her mother’s silken gown. Dreamily, as if she were stroking her cat, she slid her fingers down that soft side. Again, and again, she stroked, exploring the contours of muscle and bone beneath the smooth skin, until her hand cupped the curve of the other woman’s breast.

  Julia gasped, and Guendivar, opening her eyes, saw the betraying flush, rosy as sunrise, beneath the fair skin. “Please—you should not—”

  “Touch you? But why not?” asked Guendivar. “Your skin is lovely.” She squeezed gently, fingers circling until they found the pink nipple and felt it harden.

  “I think . . . it is a sin.. . .” Julia took a quick breath and started to pull away, but Guendivar held her.

  “My mother says it is a sin if I let a man touch my body, but you are not a man.” Guendivar smiled. “Look, our breasts are nestling together like doves.. . .” She moved closer, feeling a sweet fire begin to burn warm within her own body at the contact of skin on skin. She licked her lips, wondering if that skin would be as sweet to the taste as it was to touch. Julia made a small desperate sound and turned her head away.

  “You like me, don’t you?” Guendivar asked in sudden doubt. “It’s not just because my mother makes you stay—”

  “Oh Guendivar, my sweet child, I love you,” Julia whispered brokenly, “Didn’t you know?” The stiffness went out of her body and she reached up to stroke Guendivar’s hair.

  “I don’t know about love, but I know that you like holding me—” She smiled again and kissed Julia’s lips. There was a last moment of resistance, and then the other girl’s arms tightened around her.

  Together they sank back down on the blanket, and she learned just how much Julia liked her as, clumsy as colts and sensuous as kittens, they discovered the pleasure touch could bring. And presently, lost in sensation, Guendivar forgot the future that prisoned her, and was free.

  At Midwinter, the High King came to Lindinis. He was travelling from Londinium to visit Cataur in Isca Dumnoniorum, his message told them, and Lindinis would be a good place to break his journey. He would be there, he said, in time for the festival.

  “He has not said he is coming to see me,” said Guendivar. Scrubbed and scented and swathed in Roman silks, she sat on the chest in her mother’s bedchamber, kicking her heels against its carven side.

  “He wrote to ask your father if you were spoken for,” answered Petronilla, peering into her mirror of polished bronze as she hung discs of gold filigree and garnets in her ears. “God knows how he knew that Leodagranus even has a daughter, but if he is coming here, it is you he wants to see. Perhaps he fears that if he marries into Demetia or Dumnonia, the others will be jealous, whereas an alliance with Lindinis will not upset the balance of power. But you come of the blood of the Durotrige princes, and your ancestry is as royal as any in Britannia. So you will be on your best behavior, my girl—” she turned to fix her daughter with a repressive glare “—and show yourself worthy to be Artor’s bride.”

  And why should I want to be a queen? Guendivar wondered mutinously. From all I have heard, they have even less freedom than other wives—but she did not say so aloud. Her mother had explained quite clearly the advantages to her family, and threatened to send her back to the Isle of Glass with Julia if she refused.

  “At least,” Petronilla continued as she settled the veil over her hair, “you are in blooming looks.”

  Guendivar felt a betraying flush heat her cheeks and hoped her mother would put it down to maidenly modesty. It was Julia’s care for her and the joy they had together that had made these past months bearable.

  Sounds from the street below brought both of them to their feet, listening. Petronilla moved swiftly to the porch that overlooked the atrium and glanced down.

  “They’ve come—quickly now, we must be ready to greet them—” She reached for her daughter’s hand and towed her out of the room.

  Guendivar’s first thought was that Artor was old. After a second glance, she decided that perhaps he was merely very tired. He was tall and well-muscled, though rather thin, and his brown hair showed only a few threads of grey. He might even be rather good looking, if he ever relaxed. She wondered if she were judging him so harshly because he had hardly looked at her? Once they were all seated in the triclinium and the slaves began to bring in the food, the king had directed all his remarks to her father and brother.

  Artor’s nephew Gualchmai, an enormous young man who reminded her of a mastiff puppy her brother had once brought home, was doing his best to compensate.

  “Those two louts who are swilling at the end of yon table are my brothers Gwyhir and Aggarban—” he said, gesturing broadly, the goblet of pale green glass seeming impossibly fragile in his big hand. “And there’s two more at Dun Eidyn still to come.”

  Guendivar lifted one eyebrow. Gwyhir, sitting beneath the garland of winter greenery that had been draped across the frescoed wall, was almost as tall as his brother, Aggarban shorter and more solid, but still a big man.

  “And you go everywhere with the king?” she asked.

  “We do, along with Betiver, that narrow dark lad yonder who is nephew to Riothamus in Gallia, and Cai, who was Artor’s foster-brother.”

  “He has formidable protectors.” She saw him blink as she smiled.

  “Aye, well—we lost some good men at Mons Badonicus, but seemingly we’ll have less need of them from now on.” Gualchmai looked as if he were trying to convince himself this was a good thing.

  The slaves came in to clear the platters of venison and roast pork away and replace them with honeycakes and pies made from the apples of the vale. Soon the feast would be over. Would the men sit down to their drinking and send the women away? Guendivar no longer wished to avoid Artor; indeed, she had begun to think that if she did not arrange an encounter, she would have no chance to speak with him at all.

  “I think my father is about to end the feasting—” she told Gualchmai. “You might tell your lord that even at midwinter I often walk in the atrium at night to breathe the fresh air.. . .”

  “A good commander is always glad of information—” He grinned at her approvingly. “I will make certain that he knows.”

  Well, at least he seemed to like her, she thought as she followed her mother out of the room. If Artor did not want her, perhaps she could marry Gualchmai.

  It was late, and even the hooded cloak was no longer quite sufficient to keep off the chill, when Guendivar heard a man’s step upon the stones. Shivering, she stood up, and saw him stop short, then move slowly forward until he stood before her. She thought for a moment that it might be Gualchmai, come to tell her that Artor
would not be there. But those senses with which she had learned to see the folk of faerie identified not the king’s appearance but his unique aura of power.

  “I am sorry—” he said finally. “I have kept you waiting, and you are cold.” He shrugged off his crimson mantle and draped it around her shoulders. It still held the heat of his body and warmed her like a fire.

  “But you will be cold—” she protested.

  “I’ve campaigned in worse weather than this, in armor. That is cold!”

  “I have never been cold without a way to get warm, never marched without food or panted from thirst, never done labor that I could not stop when I willed. Except for spinning, of course—” she added ruefully. He was surprisingly easy to talk to—perhaps it was because she could not see him. They were two spirits, speaking together in the dark.

  “What has Gualchmai been telling you?” Artor said, on a breath of laughter. “I do not expect my queen to march with the army. I hope that in the next few years even I won’t have to march with the army, at least not all the time.”

  “Would you then keep your wife like a jewel in a golden setting?” Guendivar’s voice was very soft.

  There was another charged silence, then Artor sighed. “Your brother tells me that you are a great rider, and can stay out all day, ranging the hills. I would not cage you, Guendivar, even in gold. If you wish it, I would be glad to have you riding at my side.”

  She straightened, trying to see his face. She was a tall girl, but still she had to look up at him. “From what Gualchmai says, you are never more than a moon in the same place. I think I will have to—”

  “It is a bargain, then?” Relief made his voice unsteady as he set his hands on her shoulders.

  “It is—” She had feared this marriage as a prison, but now she was beginning to think it might be an adventure. The pressure of his hands felt warm and secure.

  “In the spring, then—” He stopped suddenly. “How old are you?”

  “At the beginning of April I will be fifteen.” She strove for dignity.

  His hands dropped suddenly and he shook his head. “Sweet Goddess! And yet, if I was old enough to be king at that age, I suppose that you can be a queen.”

  Her assurance left her suddenly. “I will try—”

  Artor eased back her hood. He took her face between his hands, gentle as if he were touching a butterfly, and kissed her on the brow.

  V

  THE FLOWER BRIDE

  A.D. 496

  THAT YEAR SPRING CAME EARLY TO BRITANNIA, AS IF THE LAND were adorning itself to celebrate the wedding of the High King. Every dell was scattered with creamy primroses; the woodland rides were flooded with bluebells, and in the hedges the starry white of hawthorn veiled each bough.

  As the bridal procession left the Summer Country and made its slow way towards Londinium, folk thronged from tiled villas and thatched Celtic roundhouses, from shepherds’ lonely huts and half-ruined towns to hail the bride whose marriage would set a seal of peace upon the land. Surely, they sang, the wars were truly ended, if the High King was at last giving them a queen. Where Guendivar passed, the road was strewn with flowers.

  To Merlin, making his way southward from the Caledonian forest, the rumor of her progress was like a warm breath of wind from some fruitful southern land. He found himself hastening, moved by a hope he had not dared to feel for far too long. He had been born to serve the Defender of Britannia and set him on his throne, and he had succeeded in that task. None of them had dared to think about what might come afterward.

  But now the land itself was providing the answer. After winter came the spring, after sorrow, this joy, after the death of the Britannia that had been ruled by Rome, a new nation in which all the gathered greatness of the peoples who had settled here could flower.

  Igierne, riding south with Ceincair and Morut, could not help but contrast this wedding with her marriage to Uthir, that hurried, makeshift ceremony held in the dead of winter and the aftermath of a civil war to legitimize the child she was already carrying. Guendivar would come to her marriage a virgin, with neither memories of the past nor fears for the future to shadow the day. If the queen mother had not been so profoundly relieved at the prospect of passing on a part of the burden she had carried for so long, she would have envied her son’s bride.

  For Artor’s sister, riding swiftly southward with her escort of Votadini tribesmen, each milestone on the old Roman road was a reminder of her own dilemma. For so long she had told herself that the freedom of a queen in Alba suited her far better than any title dying Britannia had to offer. Now she was about to find out if she really believed it. If Artor had never been born, her own descent from the House of Maximus might have given her husband a claim to torque and diadem. Yet the closer she got to Londinium, the more clearly Morgause understood that it was not Guendivar whom she envied, but Artor himself. She did not desire to be a consort, but the ruling queen.

  Even in decline, the Romanized Britons for whom Boudicca was still a name with which to frighten children would never have accepted her. Artor’s son would inherit his imperium. The only question was whether that son would be the child of her womb, or Guendivar’s.

  Artor himself, struggling with questions of personality and precedence, remembered the bright face of the girl he had met at midwinter and wondered if he had the right to plunge any woman into the political morass this wedding had become. Even the choice of a place to hold the ceremony had provoked a battle. Bishop Dubricius had offered his own church in Isca, but to marry there would have insulted the Dumnonians, already on the defensive because they were blamed for provoking the last Saxon war.

  Artor could have been married in the bride’s home, but Lindinis was only a secondary tribal civitas, and had no edifice large enough to hold all those who would want to come. Calleva or Sorviodunum were central, but too closely associated with the wars. At least Londinium had once been the country’s undisputed capital, and in the basilica and the Palace of the Governors there would be room for all.

  But as the first of May drew closer Artor would have been glad of an excuse to send some of them home again. Planning battles was much easier. He was beginning to think that the ancient custom of marriage by capture had a lot to recommend it. Guendivar had said she liked to ride—perhaps she would prefer being carried off. But when the king tried this theory out on his companions, they only laughed. Gualchmai, who had more experience with women than any three of the rest of them, assured him that women liked ceremonies with flowers and candles and uncomfortable new clothes.

  As for Guendivar herself, she rode through the blossoming landscape in a haze of delight, accepting the gifts men brought her and the homage they paid her beauty; exulting in the movement of the horse beneath her, the brightness of the sunlight and the sweetness of the flowers. Focused on the excitement of each moment, she scarcely thought about the wedding towards which this journey was leading her.

  “Old Oesc used to say these walls were like the work of etins—titans . ..” said Betiver, gesturing at the ruins of the gatehouse that had once guarded the Calleva Road. The rubble had been cleared away, but the gate had never been repaired.

  Guendivar gazed around her with interest as they passed. “It looks old, and sad. Will Artor rebuild it?”

  “Why should he trouble himself,” asked Gualchmai, laughing, “when the walls are as full of holes as a cloak when the moths have been making free? Walls!” He made a rude gesture. “No good are they without brave men and sharp spears behind them!”

  “Oh, indeed,” said his brother Gwyhir, who rode just behind him, “and you yourself are as good as an army!”

  Guendivar laughed. After three weeks on the road, she had taken their measure. Artor had sent the youngest and liveliest of his Companions to be her escort, and they had preened and pranced for her from Lindinis to Londinium. They reminded her of puppies showing off, even Betiver, who was said to have a permanent mistress in the town and a nine-year-old son.


  “The high roof you see belongs to the basilica,” he told her. “That is where the wedding feast will be—I think it is the only building in Britannia large enough to hold all the people Cai has invited. The church is nearer the river.”

  “And the palace?”

  “Beyond the basilica, on the other side of the square. Of course only the main wing is still usable, but with luck, we’ll be able to find enough sound roofs in Londinium to keep everyone dry!” He sent a suspicious glance skyward, but the overcast did not look as if it were going to deepen into rain.

  Guendivar sighed. She had looked forward to staying in a palace, but this vast city, its old buildings leprous with decay, held little of the splendour of her dreams. Ghosts might dwell here, but not the folk of faerie. She thought wistully of the fields through which they had passed to come here, adorned more richly than any work of the Romans with spring flowers.

  But she must not let her escort sense her unease. “Is Artor here already?” she asked brightly. “Will he come to greet me?”

  The Votadini brothers turned to Betiver, who replied with a wry smile, “I am sure that so soon as he knows you have arrived he will come to you—but as for where he is now—well, you will learn soon enough that Artor is not one for sitting still.”

  But the High King was not working. Igierne had arrived the previous day and, finding her son in the old office of the procurator, surrounded by scraps of paper, had carried him off to the river. As a boy he had learned the difficult art of paddling a coracle; she pressed him into service now as her boatman and ordered him to take her upstream.

  High clouds had spread a silver veil partway across the heavens. Each stroke of the paddle set reflections rippling like pearl. From time to time some other craft, coming downstream, would pass them. Igierne lifted a hand to answer their hails, but Artor had not the breath to reply.