I enjoyed the journey. We took three days, a slow pace, for Morgan was an awkward walker, but the sun shone on us and the Roman road made our journey easy. At dusk we would find the nearest chieftain’s hall and sleep an honoured guests in his straw-filled barn. Other travellers were few, and all made way for the bright blazon of Morgan’s gold that was her symbol of high status. We had been warned against the master less and landless men who robbed merchants on the high roads, but none threatened us, perhaps because Uther’s soldiers had prepared for the High Council by scouring the woods and hills in search of brigands and we passed more than a dozen rotting bodies staked at the road’s sides as warnings. The serfs and slaves we met knelt to Morgan, merchants made way for her, and only one traveller dared challenge our authority, a fierce-bearded priest with his ragged following of wild-haired women. The Christian group was dancing down the road, praising their nailed God, but when the priest saw the gold mask covering Morgan’s face and the triple antlers and wide-winged dragon of her brooches he ranted at her as a creature of the devil. The priest must have thought that such a disfigured, hobbling woman would prove an easy prey to his taunting, but an errant preacher accompanied by his wife and holy whores was no match for Igraine’s daughter, Merlin’s ward and Arthur’s sister. Morgan gave the fellow a single thump on the ear with her heavy staff, a blow that knocked him sideways into a ditch thick with nettles, and then she walked on with scarce a backwards glance. The priest’s women shrieked and parted. Some prayed and others spat curses, but Nimue glided through their malevolence like a spirit.
I carried no weapons, unless a staff and a knife count as a warrior’s accoutrements. I had wanted to carry both a sword and a spear, to look like a grown man, but Hywel had scoffed that a man was not made by wanting, but by doing. For my protection he gave me a bronze torque that displayed Merlin’s horned God at its finials. No one, he said, would dare challenge Merlin. Yet even so, without a man’s weapons, I felt useless. Why, I asked Nimue, was I there?
“Because you’re my oath-friend, little one,” Nimue said. I was already taller than she, but she used the term affectionately. “And because you and I are chosen of Bel and if He chooses us, then we must choose each other.”
“Then why are the two of us going to Glevum?” I wanted to know.
“Because Merlin wants us there, of course.”
“Will he be there?” I asked eagerly. Merlin had been away so very long, and without him Ynys Wydryn was like a sky without its sun.
“No,” she said calmly, though how she knew Merlin’s desire in this matter I did not know for Merlin was still far away and the summons for the High Council had been issued long after his departure.
“And what will we do when we reach Glevum?”
“We will know when we get there,” she said mysteriously and would explain no more.
Glevum, once I had grown accustomed to the overpowering stench of night soil was marvellously strange. Other than some of the villas that had become farmsteads on Merlin’s estates, this was my first time in a proper Roman place and I gawked at the sights like a new-born chick. The streets were paved with fitted stones, and though they had canted in the long years since the Romans’ departure, King Tewdric’s men had done their best to repair the damage by pulling up the weeds and sweeping away the soil so that the city’s nine streets looked like stony watercourses in the dry season. It was hard to walk on them, and it made Nimue and me laugh to see horses trying to negotiate the treacherous stones. The buildings were as weird as the streets. We made our halls and houses out of wood, thatch, clay-cob and wattle, but these Roman buildings were all joined together and made of stone and strange narrow bricks, though over the years some of them had collapsed to leave ragged gaps in the long rows of low houses that were curiously roofed with baked clay tiles. The walled city guarded a crossing of the Severn and stood between two kingdoms and near to a third, and so it was a famous trading centre. Potters worked in the houses, goldsmiths stooped over their tables and calves bellowed in a slaughter yard behind the market place that was crowded with country folk selling butter, nuts, leather, smoked fish, honey, dyed cloth and newly sheared wool. Best of all, at least to my dazzled eyes, were King Tewdric’s soldiers. They were Romans, Nimue told me, or at least they were Britons taught the Roman ways, and all kept their beards clipped short and were dressed alike in sturdy leather shoes and woollen hose beneath short leather skirts. The senior soldiers had bronze plates sewn on to the skirts and when they walked the armour plates would clank together like cow bells. Each man had a breastplate polished bright, a long russet cloak, and a leather helmet that was sewn at the crown into a ridge. Some of the helmets were plumed with dyed feathers. The soldiers carried short, broad-bladed swords, long spears with polished staffs and oblong shields of wood and leather that carried Tewdric’s bull symbol. The shields were all the same size, the spears all of a length and the soldiers all marched in step, an extraordinary sight that made me laugh at first though later I became used to it.