“Nonsense. I only learned of the scroll’s existence a year ago. Before that I was searching for other things: the Horn of Bran Galed, the Knife of Laufrodedd, the Throwboard of Gwenddolau, the Ring of Eluned. The Treasures of Britain, Derfel…” He paused, glancing at the sealed chest, then looked back to me. “The Treasures are the keys of power, Derfel, but without the secrets in this scroll they’re just so many dead objects.” There was a rare reverence in his voice, and no wonder, for the Thirteen Treasures were the most mysterious and sacred talismans of Britain. One night in Benoic, when we had been shivering in the dark and listening for Franks among the trees, Galahad had scorned the very existence of the Treasures by doubting whether they could have survived the long years of Roman rule, but Merlin had always insisted that the old Druids, facing defeat, had hidden them so deep that no Roman would ever find them. His life’s work was the collection of the thirteen talismans; his ambition was the final awesome moment when they would be put to use. That use, it seemed, was described in the lost scroll of Caleddin.
“So what does the scroll tell us?” I asked eagerly.
“How would I know? You won’t give me time to read it. Why don’t you go and be useful? Splice an oar or whatever it is sailors do when they’re not drowning.” He waited till I had reached the door. “Oh, and one other thing,” he added abstractedly.
I turned to see he was again gazing at the opening lines of the heavy scroll. “Lord?” I prompted him.
“I just wanted to thank you, Derfel,” he said carelessly. “So, thank you. I always hoped you’d be useful some day.”
I thought of Ynys Trebes burning and of Ban dead. “I failed Arthur,” I said bitterly.
“Everyone fails Arthur. He expects too much. Now go.”
I had supposed that Lancelot and his mother Elaine would sail west to Broceliande, there to join the mass of refugees hurled from Ban’s kingdom by the Franks, but instead they sailed north to Britain. To Dumnonia.
And once in Dumnonia they travelled to Durnovaria, reaching the town a full two days before Merlin, Galahad and I landed, so we were not there to see their entry, though we heard all about it for the town rang with admiring tales of the fugitives.
Benoic’s royal party had travelled in three fast ships, all of which had been provisioned ahead of Ynys Trebes’s fall and in whose holds were crammed the gold and silver that the Franks had hoped to find in Ban’s palace. By the time Queen Elaine’s party reached Durnovaria the treasure had been hidden away and the fugitives were all on foot, some of them shoeless, all ragged and dusty, their hair tangled and crusted with sea salt, and with blood caked on their clothes and on the battered weapons they clutched in nerveless hands. Elaine, Queen of Benoic, and Lancelot, now King of a Lost Kingdom, limped up the town’s principal street to beg like indigents at Guinevere’s palace. Behind them was a motley mixture of guards, poets and courtiers who, Elaine pitifully exclaimed, were the only survivors of the massacre. “If only Arthur had kept his word,” she wailed to Guinevere, ‘if only he had done just half of all that he promised!”
“Mother! Mother!” Lancelot clutched her.
“All I want to do is die, my dear,” Elaine declared, ‘as you so nearly did in the fight.”
Guinevere, of course, rose splendidly to the occasion. Clothes were fetched, baths filled, food cooked, wine poured, wounds bandaged, stories heard, treasure given and Arthur summoned.
The stories were wonderful. They were told all over the town and by the time we reached Durnovaria the tales had spread to every corner of Dumnonia and were already flying over the frontiers to be retold in countless British and Irish feasting halls. It was a great tale of heroes; how Lancelot and Bors had held the Merman Gate and how they had carpeted the sands with Prankish dead and glutted the gulls with Prankish offal. The Franks, the tales said, had been shrieking for mercy, fearing that bright Tanlladwyr would flash in Lancelot’s hand again, but then some other defenders, out of Lancelot’s sight, gave way. The enemy was inside the city and if the fight had been grim before, now it became ghastly. Enemy after enemy fell as street after street was defended, yet not all the heroes of antiquity could have stemmed that rush of iron-helmed foes who swarmed from the encircling sea like so many demons released from Manawydan’s nightmares. Back went the outnumbered heroes, leaving the streets choked with enemy dead; still more enemies came and back the heroes went, back to the palace itself where Ban, good King Ban, leaned on his terrace to search the horizon for Arthur’s ships. “They will come!” Ban had insisted, ‘for Arthur has promised.”