• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 497 0

saplings and thickets of suckers. Between these the scarps were quilted with a winter network of bramble and thorn. A beaten pathway through sprouting fern and nettle led to a gap in the north wall. Following this, I could see where, half down the northern hillside, a spring lay deep among the trees. This must be the Lady's Well, the good spring dedicated to the Goddess. The other spring, the main water supply for the fortress, lay halfway up the steep road to the northeast gateway, at the hill's opposite corner from the chariot road I had taken. It seemed that cattle were still watered there: as I watched, I saw a herd, slow-moving, come up through the steep gap, and spread out to graze in the sunshine, with a faint, off-note chiming of bells. Their herd following them, a slight figure whom at first I took for a boy, then saw, from the way he moved, using his staff to lean upon, that it was an old man.

I turned my horse's head that way, and walked him carefully through the tumble of stonework. A magpie got up and flew, scolding. The old man looked up. He stopped short, startled, and, I thought, apprehensive. I raised a hand to him in a sign of greeting. Something about the solitary and unarmed horseman must have reassured him, for after a moment he moved to a low wall that lay full in the sun, and sat down to wait for me.

I dismounted, letting my horse graze.

"Greetings, father."

"And to you." It was not much more than a mumble, in the strong blurring accent of the district. He peered at me suspiciously, through eyes clouded with cataract. "You're a stranger to these parts."

"I come from the west."

This was no reassurance. It seemed that the folk hereabouts had had too long a history of war. "Why'd you leave the road then? What do you want up here?"

"I came on the King's behalf, to look at the fortress walls."

"Again?"

As I stared at him in surprise, he drove his stick into the turf, as if making a claim, and spoke with a kind of quavering anger. "This was our land before the king came, and it's ours again in spite of him. Why don't 'ee let us keep it so?"

"I don't think -- " I began, then stopped, on a sudden thought. "You speak of a king. Which king?"

"I don't know his name."

"Melwas? Or Arthur?"

"Maybe. I tell you I don't know. What do you want here?"

"I am the King's man. I come from him -- "

"Aye. To raise the fortress walls again, then take away our cattle and kill our children and rape our women."

"No. To build a stronghold here to protect your cattle and children and women."

"It did not protect them before."

There was silence. The old man's hand shook on his stick. The sun was hot on the grass. My horse grazed delicately round a thistle head growing low and circular, like a splayed wheel. An early butterfly alighted on a purple head of clover. A lark rose, singing.

"Old man," I said gently, "there has been no fortress here in your lifetime, or in your father's. What walls stood here and looked south and north and westward over the waters? What king came to storm them?"

He looked at me for a few moments, his head shaking with the tremor of age. "It's a story, only a story, master. My granda told it to me, how the folk lived here with cattle and goats and sweet grazing, and wove the cloth and tilled the high field, until the king came and drove them down through yon road into the valley bottom, and there was a grave for them all that day, as wide as a river and as deep as the hollow hill, where they laid the king himself to rest, and his time coming soon after."

"Which hill was that? Ynys Witrin?"

"What? How should they carry him there? It's a foreign country there. They call it the Summer Country, for all it's a sheet of lake water all the year round save through the dry time of midsummer. No, they made a way into the cave and laid him there, and with him the ones who were drowned with him." A sudden, high crackle. "Drowned in the Lake, and the folk watched and made no move to save him. It was the Goddess took him, and his fine captains along with him. Who could have stopped her? They say it