The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [80]
"He will. When did this happen?"
"A hundred years ago. Two hundred. How would I know?"
Another silence, while I assessed it. What I was hearing, I knew, was a folk memory that had come down tongue to tongue in a winter's tale by some peasant's hearth. But it confirmed what I had been told. The place must have been fortified time out of mind. "The king" could have been any one of the Celtic rulers, driven eventually from the hilltop by the Romans, or the Roman general himself who had stayed here to invest the captured strongpoint.
I said suddenly: "Where is the way into the hill?"
"What way?"
"The door to the king's tomb, where they made the way for his grave."
"How do I know? It's there, that's all I know. And sometimes, on a night, they ride out again. I have seen them. They come wi' the summer moon, and go back into the hill at dawning. And whiles, on a stormy night, when dawn surprises them, one comes late, and finds the gate shut. So he is doomed for the next moon to wander the hilltop alone till..." His voice faltered. He ducked his head fearfully, peering. "A king's man, you said you were?"
I laughed. "Don't be afraid of me, father. I'm not one of them. I'm a king's man, yes, but I have come for a living king, who will build the fortress up again, and take you and your cattle, and your children, and their children, into his hand, and keep you safely against the Saxon enemy from the south. And you will still get sweet grazing for your herd. I promise you this."
He said nothing to that, but sat for a while, nid-nodding in the sun. I could see that he was simple. "Why should I be afraid? There has always been a king here, and always will be. A king is no new thing."
"This one will be."
His attention was leaving me. He chirrupped to the cows: "Come up, Blackberry, come up, Dewdrop. A king, and tend the cattle for me? Do you take me for a fool? But the Goddess looks after her own. He'd best tend to the Goddess." And he subsided, mumbling his stick, and muttering.
I gave him a silver coin, as one gives a singer the guerdon for his tale, then led my horse off toward the ridge that marked the summit of the plateau.
3
Some days later the first party of surveyors arrived, to begin their measuring and pacing, while their leader was closeted with me in the temporary headquarters that had been made for us on the site.
Tremorinus, the master engineer who had taught me so much of his trade when I was a boy in Brittany, had died some time ago. Arthur's chief engineer now was a man called Derwen, whom I had first met years back, over the rebuilding of Caerleon in Ambrosius' time. He was a red-bearded, high-coloured man, but without the temper that often goes with that colouring; indeed, he was silent to the point of surliness, and could prove sullen as a mule when pressed. But I knew him to be competent and experienced, and he had the trick of getting men to work fast and willingly for him. Moreover, he had taken pains to be master himself of all trades, and was never above rolling up his sleeves and doing a heavy job himself if time demanded. Nor did he appear to mind taking direction from me. He seemed to hold my skills in the most flattering respect; this was not, I knew, because of my especial brilliance I had shown at Caerleon or Segontium -- they were built to pattern on the Roman model, on lines laid down through time, and familiar to every builder -- but Derwen had been an apprentice in Ireland when I had moved the massive king-stone of Killare, and subsequently at Amesbury, at the rebuilding of the Giants' Dance. So we got along tolerably well together, and understood each what the other was good for.
Arthur's forecast of trouble in the north had come true, and he had gone up in early March. But during the winter months he and I, with Derwen, had spent many hours together over the plans for the new stronghold.