The crystal cave - Mary Stewart [106]
I grinned. "You're a bastard, too, remember, dear cousin."
"Maybe, but at least I know who my father was."
"Keep your voice down, people are listening. All right, throw you again."
A pause while the dice rattled. I watched them rather anxiously. So far, they had tended to fall my way. How useful it would be, I thought, if power could be brought to bear on such small things; it would take no effort, and make the way smoother. But I had begun to learn that in fact power made nothing smoother; when it came it was like having a wolf by the throat. Sometimes I had felt like that boy in the old myth who harnessed the horses of the sun and rode the world like a god until the power burned him to death. I wondered if I would ever feel the flames again.
The dice fell from my very human fingers. A two and a one. No need to have the power if you could have the luck. Dinias gave a grunt of satisfaction and gathered them up, while I slid some coins towards him. The game went on. I lost the next three throws, and the heap beside him grew respectably. He was relaxing. No one was paying us any attention; that had been imagination. It was time, perhaps, for a few more facts.
"Where's the King now?" I asked.
"Eh? Oh, aye, the King. He's been gone from here nearly a month. Moved north as soon as the weather slackened and the roads were open."
"To Caer'n-ar-Von, you said -- Segontium?"
"Did I? Oh, well, I suppose he calls that his base, but who'd want to be caught in that corner between Y Wyddfa and the sea? No, he's building himself a new stronghold, they say. Did you say you'd get another flask?"
"Here it comes. Help yourself, I've had enough. A stronghold, you said? Where?"
"What? Oh, yes. Good wine, this. I don't rightly know where he's building, somewhere in Snowdon. Told you. Dinas Brenin...they call it...Or would, if he could get it built."
"What's stopping him? Is there still trouble up there? Vortimer's faction still, or something new? They're saying in Cornwall that he's got thirty thousand Saxons at his back."
"At his back, on both sides -- Saxons everywhere, our King has. But not with him. With Hengist -- and Hengist and the King aren't seeing eye to eye. Oh, he's beset, is Vortigern, I can tell you!" Fortunately he was speaking quietly, his words lost in the rattle of dice and the uproar around us. I think he had half forgotten me. He scowled down at the table as he threw. "Look at that. The bloody things are ill-wished. Like King's Fort."
Somewhere the words touched a string of memory to a faint humming, as elusive and untraceable as a bee in the lime trees. I said casually, making my throw: "Ill-wished? How?"
"Hah, that's better. Should be able to beat that. Oh, well, you know these Northmen -- if the wind blows colder one morning they say it's a dead spirit passing by. They don't use surveyors in that army, the soothsayers do it all. I heard he'd got the walls built four times to man height, and each time by next morning they'd cracked clear across...How's that?"
"Not bad. I couldn't beat it, I'm afraid. Did he put guards on?"
"Of course. They saw nothing."
"Well, why should they?" It seemed that the luck was against us both; the dice were as ill-wished for Dinias as the walls for Vortigern. In spite of myself I threw a pair of doubles. Scowling, Dinias pushed half his pile towards me. I said: "It only sounds as if he picked a soft place. Why not move?"
"He picked the top of a crag, as pretty a place to defend as you'll find in all Wales. It guards the valley north and south, and stands over the road just where the cliffs narrow both sides, and the road is squeezed right up under the crag. And damn it, there's been a tower there before. The locals have called it King's Fort time out of mind."
King's Fort...Dinas Brenin...The humming swelled clear into a memory. Birches bone-white against a milk-blue sky. The scream of a falcon. Two kings walking together, and Cerdic's voice saying, "Come down, and I'll cut you in on a dice game."
Before I even knew, I had done it, as