The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [78]
The hills of the Glass Isle, with the low and waterlogged levels surrounding them, are known as the Summer Country. The king was a man called Melwas, young, and a staunch supporter of Arthur; he gave me lodging during my first surveys of Caer Camel, and seemed pleased that the High King should plan to form his main stronghold at the edge of his territory. He was deeply interested in the maps I showed him, and promised help of every kind, from the loan of local workmen to a pledge of defense, should that be needed, while the work was in progress.
King Melwas had offered to show me the place himself, but for my first survey I preferred to be alone, so managed to put him off with civilities of some kind. He and his young men rode with me for the first part of the way, then turned aside into a track that was little more than a causeway through the marshlands, and went cheerfully off to their day's sport. That is a great country for hunting; it teems with wildfowl of every land. I saw a lucky omen in the fact that almost as soon as they left me, King Melwas flew his falcon at a flock of immigrant birds coming in from the southeast, and within seconds the hawk had killed cleanly and come straight back to the master's fist. Then, with shouting and laughter, the band of young men rode off among the willows, and I went on my way alone.
I had been right in supposing that a road would lead to the once-Roman fortress of Caer Camel. The road leaves Ynys Witrin by a causeway which skirts the base of the Tor, spans a narrow arm of the Lake, and reaches a strip of dry, hard land stretching toward the east. There it joins the old Fosse Way, then after a while turns south again for the village at the foot of Caer Camel. This had originally been a Celtic settlement, then the vicus to the Roman fortress, its occupants scraping some sort of living from the soil; and retiring uphill within walls in times of danger. Since the fortress had decayed, their lives had been hard indeed. As well as the ever-present danger to the south and east, they even had, in bad years, to beat off the people of the Summer Country, when the wetlands around Ynys Witrin ceased to provide anything but fish and marsh birds, and the young men craved excitement beyond the confines of their own territory. There was little to be seen as I rode between the tumbledown huts with their rotting thatch; here and there eyes watched me from a dark doorway, or a woman's voice called shrilly to her child. My horse splashed through the mud and dung, forded the Camel knee-deep, then at last I turned him uphill through the trees, and took the steep curve of the chariot-way at a plunging canter.
Even though I knew what to expect, I was amazed at the size of the summit. I came up through the ruins of the southwest gateway into a great field, tilted to southward, but sloping sharply ahead of me toward a ridge with a high point west of center. I walked my horse slowly toward this. The field, or rather plateau, was scarred and pitted with the remains of buildings, and surrounded on all sides by deep ditching, and the relics of revetments and fortified walls. Whins and brambles matted the broken walls, and mole-hills had heaved up the cracked paving-stones. Stone lay everywhere, good Roman stone, squared in some local quarry. Beyond the ruined outworks the sides of the hill went down steeply, and on them trees, once lopped to ground level, had put out