“Derfel, Lord King,” I said, dropping to one knee.
“Derfel!” He said my name with astonishment. “Derfel! Let me think now! Derfel. I suppose, if that name means anything, it means “pertaining to a Druid”. Do you so pertain, Derfel?”
“I was reared by Merlin, Lord.”
“Were you? Were you, indeed! My, my! That is something. I see we must talk. How is my dear Merlin?”
“He hasn’t been seen these five years, Lord.”
“So he’s invisible! Ha! I always thought that might be one of his tricks. A useful one, too. I must ask my wise men to investigate. Do stand up, do stand up. I can’t abide people kneeling to me. I’m not a God, at least I don’t think I am.” The King inspected me as I stood and seemed disappointed by what he saw. “You look like a Frank!” he observed in a puzzled voice.
“I am a Dumnonian, Lord King,” I said proudly.
“I’m sure you are, and a Dumnonian, I pray, who precedes dear Arthur, yes?” he asked eagerly.
I had not been looking forward to this moment. “No, Lord,” I said. “Arthur is besieged by many enemies. He fights for our kingdom’s existence and so he has sent me and a few men, all we can spare, and I am to write and tell him if more are needed.”
“More will be needed, indeed they will,” Ban said as fiercely as his thin, high-pitched voice allowed. “Dear me, yes. So you’ve brought a few men, have you? How few, pray, is few, precisely?”
“Sixty, Lord.”
King Ban abruptly sat on a wooden chair inlaid with ivory. “Sixty! I had hoped for three hundred! And for Arthur himself. You look very young to be a captain of men,” he said dubiously, then suddenly brightened. “Did I hear you correctly? Did you say you can write?”
“Yes, Lord.”
“And read?” he insisted anxiously.
“Indeed, Lord King.”
“You see, Bleiddig!” the King cried in a triumphant voice as he sprang from the chair. “Some warriors can read and write! It doesn’t unman them. It does not reduce them to the petty status of clerks, women, kings or poets as you so fondly believe. Ha! A literate warrior. Do you, by any happy chance, write poetry?” he asked me.
“No, Lord.”
“How sad. We are a community of poets. We are a brotherhood! We call ourselves ihefili, and poetry is our stern mistress. It is, you might say, our sacred task. Maybe you will be inspired? Come with me, my learned Derfel.” Ban, Arthur’s absence forgotten, scurried excitedly across the room, beckoning me to follow through a second set of great doors and across another small room where a second harpist, half-naked like the first and just as beautiful, touched her strings, and then into a great library.
I had never seen a proper library before and King Ban, delighted to show the room off, watched my reaction. I gaped, and no wonder, for scroll after scroll was bound in ribbon and stored in custom-made open-ended boxes that stood one on top of the other like the cells of a honeycomb. There were hundreds of such cells, each with its own scroll and each cell labelled in a carefully inked hand. “What languages do you speak, Derfel?” Ban asked me.
“Saxon, Lord, and British.”
“Ah.” He was disappointed. “Rude tongues only. I, now, have a command of Latin, Greek, British, of course, and some small Arabic. Father Celwin there speaks ten times as many languages, isn’t that so, Celwin?”
The King spoke to the library’s only occupant, an old white-bearded priest with a grotesquely humped back and a black monkish cowl. The priest raised a thin hand in acknowledgement, but did not look up from the scrolls that were weighted down on his table. I thought for a moment that the priest had a fur scarf draped about the back of his monk’s hood, then I saw it was a grey cat that lifted its head, looked at me, yawned, then went back to sleep. King Ban ignored the priest’s rudeness, and instead conducted me past the racks of boxes and told me about the treasures he had collected. “What I have here,” he said proudly, ‘is anything the Romans left, and anything my friends think to send me. Some of the manuscripts are too old to handle any more, so those we copy. Let’s see now, what’s this? Ah, yes, one of Aristophanes’s twelve plays. I have them all, of course. This one is The Babylonians. A comedy in Greek, young man.”