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.