Here Lies Arthur
He left the horse tethered there, and hustled me away through the woods. All he took with him
was the sword, bundled in its roll of cloth. The air was growing cold. Myrddin nodded and said,
“There will be a mist upon the water.”
How could he know such a thing? What demons told him so?
“You’ll be wondering how I came into Arthur’s service, I suppose?” he asked, striding ahead of
me through the thickets.
I’d been wondering no such thing. It was no place of mine to wonder about his life. But I knew
that he was going to tell me all the same. I sensed he was nervous, and that talking for him
was a way of keeping fear at bay.
“It’s a good story,” he promised, talking at me over his shoulder as he went stalking through
the wood. His breath fumed in the cold air, wreathing him in smoke. “You should hear how the
men tell it round their campfires. They say I worked for Arthur’s father, that old villain Uthr, who
was captain of Ambrosius’s cavalry. It seems this Uthr had an eye for the girls, and one spring
it lighted on one called Ygerna, that was wife to some small lord down in Kernyw. Lust lit up
his brain like a gorse-fire. You could see the smoke pouring out of his ears. But what to do?
Ygerna’s husband was jealous. Kept her penned in his fort and let no man come near her.
“So Uthr called on me, and on my powers. One night, when his rival was off raiding some
neighbours’ cattle-runs, I transformed Uthr by magic into his image, and he slipped into the fort
and into Ygerna’s bed without anyone guessing. And the child conceived that night was Arthur,
and his victories outshine old Uthr’s as the sun outshines the moon.”
Shoving my way through dead bracken at the magician’s heels, listening to all of this, I wished
I could just make a run for it, and take my chances with whatever wild beasts and wicked
spirits lived in this maze of trees. Running had always served me well before. But running from
Myrddin would be different, wouldn’t it? If he had the power to transform one man into the
likeness of another, then he could surely catch me and transform me into anything he chose. A
frog. A toad. A stone.
“Of course, it’s all nonsense,” Myrddin said. “You’ll have to learn that, Gwyna. Just because
someone tells a story doesn’t mean it’s true. I have no magic powers. I’m just a traveller who
has picked up a few handy conjuring tricks along the road.”
“Then how did you change Uthr into another man?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m telling you, girl. It never happened. Old Uthr took that fort by force, and carried
off Ygerna along with all his other trophies. Probably tired of her within a week. There’s no
difference between Arthur and any other of Uthr’s landless bastards, except that Arthur has me
to spin stories like that one about him. You see, Gwyna, men do love a story. That’s what we’re
going to give them this morning, you and I. A story they’ll remember all their lives, and tell to
their children and their children’s children until the whole world knows how Arthur came by the
sword of the otherworld. And here we are!”
We had reached the pool. Late afternoon sun lit the oak-tops on the far shore, but the water lay
in shadow, and a faint silver breath of mist hung above it, just as Myrddin had promised.
How had he known? He had just said he could not work magic, but how else could he have
seen into the future?
A horn sounded, away downriver. Myrddin hurried me along the shore. We pushed through
undergrowth. The armoured leaves of a holly-tree scratched my face. A narrow ledge of
rock led to the waterfall. Ferns grew thickly here. The spray rattled on their leaves. Fleshy and
pointed they were, like green tongues. Among them, almost hidden, I saw a faint path snaking
in behind the water’s white curtain.
Myrddin turned and put the swaddled weight of the sword into my hands. Then he took me
by both shoulders and stooped to stare into my face. Dark as good rich earth, his eyes were,
and a quick to-and-fro flicker in them like the dancing of candle-flames as he watched me,
searching, expectant.
“They are coming. I’ll tell you what you must do, little fish, and you must listen well.”
The sun crept west, and the tree-shadows shifted on the far shore. I crouched alone on the
damp, narrow shelf behind the waterfall. The shout of falling water filled my head, but the
spray barely touched me. It was a magic place. From a few paces away I must be invisible, yet
I could look out through the water-curtain and see Myrddin quite clearly as he paced about in
the sunlight on the eastern shore.
His face turned suddenly in my direction. He was too far off for me to make out his features, but
I guessed it was a warning look. I looked at the trees behind him, and after a moment I saw
light on metal, and the shapes of men on horses. They came out of the woods in a line, wary.
Round white shields with the symbol of Christ on them, , in red. Arthur’s men. I looked for the
sandy-haired one called Cei who had come to Myrddin earlier, but I could not tell which was
him. The riders had their helmets on, and most rode white horses, and all wore red cloaks.
I knew Arthur when I saw him though. A red horse-tail fluttered from his helmet, and between
the cheek-guards his teeth flashed in a white grin as he urged his horse down the shingle
into the shallows. He was talking to Myrddin, but I could not hear their voices. Then someone
pointed across the pool towards the western side. More riders were coming down through the
trees on the steep hillside there, and men on foot ran lightly between them. Spears and hunting
bows. A big man with a black beard riding ahead of the rest. He stopped, and his men with
him. They looked at Arthur’s band. Some waved their weapons and shouted. Insults, I suppose,
now I think back. Men stand taunting each other for hours sometimes before a fight begins.
But there was to be no fight. Myrddin was holding up his arms, shouting something back over
the water. He swept his hand across the pool, reminding the Irishman’s men that this was a
magic place, a gateway to the otherworld. Telling them that that was why Arthur had come
here, to pay his respects to their gods.
Now Arthur was dismounting, handing the reins of his horse to a boy who came running
forward to take them. I could see men on both shores looking at each other in surprise as
Arthur walked into the pool.
I said little prayers under my breath as I slipped off my old wool dress and wadded it into a
crack of the rock behind me. I gripped the sword Caliburn in its oilcloth wrapper and took
deep breaths. I didn’t think I had the courage to do what Myrddin had ordered, but I hadn’t
the courage to disobey him, either. The air was cold. The water would be colder. I shuffled on
my bottom to the edge of the rock shelf and let myself drop into the whirl of foam under the
waterfall.
“They’ll all be watching the Bear,” Myrddin had said. “Not every day you see a great warlord
take a bath in all his gear. Or out of it, for that matter. No one will see you.”
I hoped he was as right about that as he had been about the mist.
I surfaced cautiously under the fall. Water drilled down white all round me. For a moment,
confused by the swirling and the noise, I didn’t know which way I was facing. Then I saw Arthur
pushing across the pool towards me. He was up to his chest; up to his shoulders. In the middle
of the lake he had to half swim, which he did awkwardly, weighed down by his armour, his red
cloak spread on the water behind him. Then, as he entered the tongue of rippled, roiling water
that spread from the foot of the fall, the pool shallowed again and he rose up standing, waves
lapping at his chest. Just as Myrddin had promised me he would.
I ducked under water, as I’d been told to. It was easy to stay down with the weight of the sword
in my hands and no clothes to float me up. My bare feet sank into the thick dough of leaf mould
on the bottom. I blundered forward with my eyes open, scrambling through the crown of an old
drowned tree, slithering in its slimy, rotted bark, stirring up such a tumble of peaty flakes that
for a moment I could see nothing at all. And then, close ahead of me, I saw the square gleam
of Arthur’s belt-buckle, the tower of his armoured torso. I blinked the grit from my eyes and
looked up and saw his head and shoulders high above me, out in the air. For a moment our
eyes met. His were wide under the iron eyebrows of his helmet. Wide and filled with wonder
and something that I did not recognize, because never in my life had anyone been afraid of
me before. Then my own long hair swirled up over my head and hid him. My lungs were drum
skins, and my heart was pounding on them.
“Do it slowly, gracefully,” Myrddin had told me. But when I tore the oilcloth wrapping from the
sword it almost floated free, so I had to snatch it down and stuff it between my knees and poke
the sword up with my spare hand. I felt it break the surface. My hand, out in the air, felt even
colder than the rest of me. The sword was too heavy. I could feel it wobbling. My fingers were
so numb that I knew I couldn’t keep a grip much longer on the wet hilt. Why didn’t he take it
from me? Bubbles seeped from the corners of my mouth. Why didn’t he take it?
He took it. I snatched my empty hand back into the world of fishes and used it to clinch my nose
shut, holding the air inside me until I had swum back under the plunge of the fall, where I could
surface again. I gulped down a mix of air and water and scrambled to the rock shelf, not a bit
like a fish or an otter or any other water-thing, but frantic and graceless. I was too cold to care
if anyone saw me or not as I climbed up into my hiding place. But when I looked back through
the falling water, they were all watching Arthur slosh ashore, holding Caliburn high over his
head so that it burned with sun-fire. Some waved their arms; some ran about. Their mouths
wide open in their beardy faces, shouting things I couldn’t hear.
I found my clothes and crawled into them, and felt no warmer. I lay down on the damp stone
behind the waterfall and hugged myself and shuddered, and my teeth rattled, rattled, rattled.
