“I shall give you a gift for her. Maybe that jewelled collar the Saxon leader was wearing? You think she’d like that?” He asked the question anxiously.
“Any woman would,” I said. The collar was Saxon work, crude and heavy, but still beautiful. It was a necklace of golden plates that were splayed like the sun’s rays and studded with gems.
“Good! Take it to Durnovaria for me, Derfel, then go and save Benoic.”
“If I can,” I said grimly.
“If you can,” Arthur echoed, ‘for my conscience’s sake.” He added the last words quietly, then kicked a scrap of clay tile that skittered away from his booted foot and startled a cat that arched its back and hissed at us. “Three years ago,” he said softly, ‘it all seemed so easy.”
But then came Guinevere.
Next day, with sixty men, I went south.
“Did he send you to spy on me?” Guinevere demanded with a smile.
“No, Lady.”
“Dear Derfel,” she mocked me, ‘so like my husband.”
That surprised me. “Am I?”
“Yes, Derfel, you are. Only he’s much cleverer. Do you like this place?” She gestured about the courtyard.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. The villa in Durnovaria was, of course, Roman, though in its day it had served as Uther’s winter palace. God knows it would not have been beautiful when he occupied it, but Guinevere had restored the building to something of its former elegance. The courtyard was colonnaded like the one in Duroco-brivis, but here all the roof tiles were in place and all the columns were lime-washed. Guinevere’s symbol was painted on the walls inside the arcade in a repeating pattern of stags crowned with crescent moons. The stag was her father’s symbol, the moon her addition, and the painted round els made a pretty show. White roses grew in beds where small tiled channels ran with water. Two hunting falcons stood on perches, their hooded heads twitching as we walked around the Roman arcade. Statues stood about the courtyard, all of naked men and women, while on plinths beneath the colonnade were bronze heads festooned with flowers. The heavy Saxon necklace I had brought from Arthur now hung about the neck of one of those bronze heads. Guinevere had toyed with the gift for a few seconds, then frowned. “It’s clumsy work, is it not?” she had asked me.
“Prince Arthur thinks it beautiful, Lady, and worthy of you.”
“Dear Arthur.” She had said it carelessly, then selected the ugly bronze head of a scowling man and placed the necklace around its neck. “That’ll improve him,” she said of the bronze head. “I call him Gorfyddyd. He looks like Gorfyddyd, don’t you think so?”
“He does, Lady,” I said. The bust did have something of Gorfyd-dyd’s dour, unhappy face.
“Gorfyddyd is a beast,” Guinevere said. “He tried to take my virginity.”
“He did?” I managed to say when I had recovered from the shock of the revelation.
“Tried and failed,” she said firmly. “He was drunk. He slobbered all over me. I was reeking with slobber, all down here.” She brushed her breasts. She was wearing a simple white linen shift that fell in straight folds from her shoulders to her feet. The linen must have been breathtakingly expensive for the fabric was so tantalizingly thin that if I stared at her, which I tried not to do, it was possible to see hints of her nakedness beneath the fine cloth. A golden image of the moon-crowned stag hung around her neck, her earrings were amber drops set in gold while on her left hand was a gold ring crowned with Arthur’s bear and cut with a lover’s cross. “Slobber, slobber,” she said delightedly, ‘so when he’d finished, or to be exact when he’d finished trying to begin and was sobbing about how he meant to make me his Queen and how he would make me the richest queen in Britain, I went to lorweth and had him make me a spell against an unwanted lover. I didn’t tell the Druid it was the King, of course, though it probably wouldn’t have mattered if I had because lorweth would do anything if you smiled at him, so he made the charm and I buried it, then I made my father tell Gorfyddyd that I’d buried a death-charm against the daughter of a man who’d tried to rape me. Gorfyddyd knew who I meant and he dotes on that insipid little Ceinwyn, so he avoided me after that.” She laughed. “Men are such fools!”