Something in his voice made my spirits sink even further. “Are we doomed?” I asked him.
“If Aelle keeps his truce we may last another year, but only if we defeat Gorfyddyd. And if not? Then we must pray Merlin has brought us new life.” He shrugged, but did not seem very hopeful.
He was not a good Christian, Bishop Bedwin, though he was a very good man. Sansum now tells me that Bedwin’s goodness will not prevent his soul from roasting in hell. But that summer, fresh back from Benoic, all our souls seemed doomed to perdition. The harvest was just beginning, but once it was gathered, Gorfyddyd’s onslaught would come.
PART FOUR
The Isle of the Dead
IGRAINE DEMANDED TO see Ceinwyn’s brooch. She held it in the window, turning it and gazing at its golden spirals. I could see the desire in her eyes. “You have many that are more beautiful,” I told her gently.
“But none so full of story,” she said, holding the brooch against her breast.
“My story, dear Queen,” I chided her, ‘not yours.”
She smiled. “But what did you write? That if I were as kind as you know me to be, then I would let you keep it?”
“Did I write that?”
“Because you knew that would make me give it back to you. You are a cunning old man, Brother Derfel.” She held the brooch out to me, then folded her fingers over the gold before I could take it. “Will it be mine one day?”
“No one else’s, dear Lady. I promise.”
She still held it. “And you won’t let Bishop Sansum take it?”
“Never,” I said fervently.
She dropped it into my hand. “Did you really wear it under your breastplate?”
“Always,” I said, tucking the brooch safe under my robe.
“Poor Ynys Trebes.” She was sitting in her usual place on my window-sill from where she could stare down Dinnewrac’s valley towards the distant river that was swollen with an early summer rain. Was she imagining Prankish invaders crossing the ford and swarming up the slopes? “What happened to Leanor?” she asked, surprising me with the question.
“The harpist? She died.”
“No! But I thought you said she escaped from Ynys Trebes?”
I nodded. “She did, but she sickened her first winter in Britain and died. Just died.”
“And what about your woman?”
“Mine?”
“In Ynys Trebes. You said that Galahad had Leaner, but that the rest of you all had women too, so who was yours? And what happened to her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, Derfel! She can’t have been nothing!”
I sighed. “She was a fisherman’s daughter. Her name was Pellcyn, only everyone called her Puss. Her husband had drowned a year before I met her. She had a baby daughter, and when Culhwch led our survivors to the boat Puss fell off the cliff path. She was holding her baby, you see, and couldn’t hold on to the rocks. There was chaos and everyone was panicking and hurrying. It was no one’s fault.” Though if I had been there, I have often thought, Pellcyn would have lived. She was a sturdy, bright-eyed girl with a quick laugh and an inexhaustible appetite for hard work. A good woman. But if I had saved her life Merlin would have died. Fate is inexorable.
Igraine must have been thinking the same. “I wish I’d met Merlin,” she said wistfully.
“He’d have liked you,” I said. “He always liked pretty women.”
“But so did Lancelot?” she asked quickly.
“Oh, yes.”
“Not boys?”
“Not boys.”
Igraine laughed. This day she was wearing an embroidered dress of blue dyed linen that suited her fair skin and dark hair. Two gold torques circled her neck and a tangle of bracelets rattled on a slim wrist. She stank of faeces, a fact I was diplomatic enough to ignore for I realized she must be wearing a pessary of a newborn baby’s first motions, an old remedy for a barren woman. Poor Igraine. “You hated Lancelot?” she suddenly accused me.
“Utterly.”
“That isn’t fair!” She jumped up from the window-sill and paced to and fro in the small room. “People’s stories shouldn’t be told by their enemies. Supposing Nwylle wrote mine?”