That winter turned out to be the hardest the Catuvellauni had know since they came to Britain. Some new arrivals, seeing the misery brought by the snow and incessant winds, assumed that the island must always be like that and so took sail with the Veneti trading fleet back to Gaul, glad to be in a country where there were stone houses and fuel for all. It was so cold, even in the south, that shepherds were found dead in their huts, while their sheep, buried in drifts, died standing three deep on each other’s red backs, fighting for air.
The iron-workers of the south-east, mainly independent Cantii, refused to burn their fuel in the furnaces, hoping to keep it to warm themselves and their families, and in the end the King was forced to send guards who would make them start up the fires again, since there was a constant need for iron wheel-hoops and sledge-runners, without which transport was impossible. As the winter dragged on, village after village evacuated, leaving the cold wattle-huts and moving into the stone-built city with all their belongings. Some of them were fortunate enough to find homes with relatives or brothers of the same society. Others lay down and starved in the streets of Camulodun and Verulum. The citizens of Londinium at last closed their gates against all strangers.
Then the tribesmen manning Mai Dun revolted from lack of warmth and food and sacked the villages near at hand, and this hysteria spread from hill fort to hill fort, right through the south. Cunobelin, this time, was powerless to act, since he could not rely on the support of the various chiefs over whose territories he would be compelled to lead a punitive force. He did not dare to conduct a starving army to the west.
When things looked at their blackest in the south, the Brigantes, who had lost most of their flocks and had gathered only a meagre grain-harvest in the previous year, sacked Eburac and then attacked the riverside Parisii. Not to be outdone, the Parisii came across the frozen estuary of the Abus and foraged left and right among the Coritani, whose chief, Cerdic, a distant relative of Cunobelin, immediately appealed to the Catuvellauni for aid. But Cunobelin had his hands full in his own kingdom, and, apart from offering Cerdic sanctuary in Camulodun, he was able to do nothing more.
Before the spring came, the Saxon pirates had seized another opportunity to raid and had burnt and pillaged five miles inland along the coast from the Abus to Segedun. Then the wolves, made bold by famine, came down from the inland forests by night, and what frost and pirates had not finished they completed. Tribesmen moving into the cities told of whole villages slaughtered by one and the other, and now only inhabited by howling forest creatures.
For the chiefs and nobles the winter was just bearable; for the slaves and common-men it was the last punishment of the gods, and many, half-mad with hunger, prayed that the Romans would come and relieve their misery. Open rebellion was spoken in the streets of the capital, and in the end the King even ceased to have the offending tongues torn out. As he said one night to his closest friends, “If I punished thus every man who had spoken treason, I would be ruler over a dumb kingdom”; and half the tongues in the King’s chamber that night seemed to feel the searing iron!
Yet for the nobles the hardships were not too great. Wrapped in their furs, they still sought out the otter, the badger and the wolf. Caradoc and Gwyndoc, being forbidden by their societies to kill the animal whose month they were born in, could not hunt the otter and badger, but they made up for it in the wolf-hunts, much to Morag’s disgust.
It was on such an expedition that Gwyndoc was knocked from his horse by an overhanging bough and his ankle broken by the reckless horseman behind him. But for Caradoc’s quick action in dragging him clear of the path, other horses would have trampled him in their excitement, for they had just scented wolf and were terrified.
They got the young man back somehow to the King’s house, where an inexperienced doctor bound his leg and foot so badly that he stood in danger of being permanently crippled. Even Morag, who had shown an undisguised pleasure when Gwyndoc was first carried in, became sympathetic, and persuaded his brother, who was strangely skilled in medicine and water-divining, to attend to Gwyndoc’s leg after the doctor had gone. Even so, it was many weeks before the young chief dared bear his weight on the foot; and before he was out again the winter had gone, like a deathly white dream, and the sky was blue and the buds were beginning to grow along the black boughs.
No more was dissatisfaction heard in the taverns and lanes. Those villagers who had survived returned to their ruined houses in the spring and began to rebuild, clearing away once more the encroaching forest, and borrowing from any neighbour more fortunate than themselves to set up in grain and stock once more.
But the effects of that winter were lasting for many. Quite a number of the nobles saw for the first time that the peasants could not all be relied on should invaders come once more to the coast; and some of the less stout-hearted of the minor chieftains began to send gifts and messages into Gaul, destined for Roman officials and soldiers whom they had forgotten for years.
The winter had told on Cunobelin, too. He seldom left his room now, but sat in his high, carved chair before the great fire, wrapped in woollen shawls and furs, giving audience only to those friends he had known the longest, and often talking to himself and his dogs for hours at a stretch.
Gwyndoc, lying convalescent on his couch in the next room, was often disturbed in the night by the King’s half-mad voice, sometimes ordering his soldiers to advance, sometimes repeating over and over again the midsummer incantation which he had to speak before the sun-stone, and sometimes begging for mercy, crying and almost whining, in a heart-rending manner.
For a time this worried Gwyndoc, though he hesitated to tell Caradoc of his father’s condition. He felt that it would be almost blasphemy, to hint that the King was not himself; for Cunobelin had always been the King, immense, stronger than other men. But two things served to put all dismay from his mind: first, there was Bydd, the priest of the oak, who came to him in a dream and questioned him about all he had heard the King say. And Gwyndoc told Bydd all he had heard, and Bydd made a wry face in his dream and touched Gwyndoc’s head with a sacred hare’s paw; and when he awoke, he had forgotten all he had heard. But he knew in his heart that the King was ill and that Bydd was already looking for another king to take his place.
The other thing that helped him to forget Cunobelin, even to forget his lame foot, was the girl Gwynedd—or, at least, not Gwynedd herself but another girl whom she brought to Gwyndoc. Gwynedd, the dark-haired, despite her name, was Caradoc’s cousin, daughter of a chief of the Parisii, and maiden-in-waiting to the Queen. She was a serious, brown-eyed girl, a year or two older than the boys, and very attached to Caradoc, although he pretended not to notice her. She would often visit Gwyndoc when he lay on his couch of sheepskins in the dark stone hall, and when he was in a fever would damp his brow or change his thick woollen shirt for a fine linen one and sponge him down. He came to regard Gwynedd as a sort of sister, and, like most Celtic noblemen, had no shame of his body and was not embarrassed by her kindnesses. But one day she came with another girl, a tall, golden-haired girl whose name was Ygerne and who, being a noblewoman whose parents had been killed by wanderers in the hard winter, was now under the King’s protection and a member of his household. This Ygerne, with her wide, blue, searching eyes was a different person from Gwynedd. She was quick and merry and teasing, and made Gwyndoc go red about the ears when she looked at him.
“I am handing you over to Ygerne now,” said Gwynedd, when she had told Gwyndoc about her. “She will look after you as I have done.” Then she smiled and patted the young man on the head, as though he had been a child, and left the two together.
At first Gwyndoc was so shy that he half-wished Gwynedd had not brought this stranger to him; then he thought again, and he knew that he was lying to himself and that he wanted Ygerne very badly—so badly that he decided his foot must get better very soon, so that he could show her what a fine horseman and wrestler he was. And he looked up and saw that Ygerne was looking at him and smiling in a strange way. So he looked down again and tried to whistle, but his lips were so dry that he gave that up and said, “All right, girl, don’t sit there doing nothing, like a lazy Greek slave. Tell me a story, or something, to pass the time away. A warrior soon tires of lying like a cow under a roof.”
And when she didn’t speak for a moment, he looked up at her fiercely to hide his shyness, and her smile of understanding made him worse than ever. And when she had teased him enough, Ygerne began to tell him the story of Branwen, daughter of Llyr, who married Matholwch, the King of Ireland, but whose evil brother threw her little son Gwern into the fire. And Gwyndoc became so interested that he tore his bed-coverings and swore that he would have carved the brother into pieces if he had been there. And when Ygerne came to the end of the story and told how the brother took an army into Ireland, slew the Irish king and brought back the suffering Branwen to die in her own country, Gwyndoc’s eyes streamed with tears, and Ygerne stroked his head and called him a silly boy and said she would not tell him any more stories if that was how he carried on. But when he looked up at her face he saw that she was crying, too, and he knew for sure then that he loved her above all others, even, perhaps, Caradoc—though he quickly put this thought from his mind. And that night, after Ygerne had gone, and the torches flickered round the dark walls, Gwyndoc became a poet for the first time in his life, and he sang to himself these lines:
“Yellower was her head than the flower of the broom,
Fairer was her flesh than the foam of the wave;
Whiter were her breasts than the breast of the white swan,
Redder were her cheeks than the reddest foxgloves;
Whoso beheld her was filled with love for her.
Four white trefoils sprang up behind her, wherever she trod.”
But when he had created the poem, he knew that he was singing of Ygerne and not of Branwen, daughter of Llyr, and all that night he turned from side to side in his bed, almost dying with love for her, he thought, almost mad with anxiety that tomorrow she might not come to see him.
But she did come, to tell him that she must go to visit her relatives in the north, and that she would not be back until later in the year. And as she left him she smiled so gaily that Gwyndoc flung himself onto his face and tore at his pillow covering with his teeth, like a dog.
But Gwynedd came back again and looked after him as before and put up with his sneers and spitefulness, and he gradually got well. When he could ride once more, there was always hunting with Caradoc or fishing alone. And sometimes he would ride out to the uplands where the charcoal-burners lived and help blow the forges for the smiths, while they hammered sword-blades or chariot-scythes or even tried their hands at making gold torques and lunulae, after the manner of the Irish craftsmen whom they envied.
After a while the first ache of his separation from Ygerne died down, and he almost called himself a fool for falling in love with her. And when he got a scribe to write down his poem for him, he tried to alter the words so that it meant a dark-haired girl after all. Then things happened that put the girl still further from his mind. The King, seated at his table one night with his family and dependants, had suddenly been struck down, speechless and gibbering, and had been carried to his bed, no longer capable of movement. Caradoc and Reged had quarrelled over the succession, each backed by strong supporters; and Reged, who had half-playfully drawn his sword against his brother in the presence of the archdruid, had been debarred from the court indefinitely to teach him his manners.
Then in the middle of the ensuing uproar, made more confusing by the common knowledge that the two brothers were devoted to each other, Adminius suddenly appeared in Camulodun, having travelled post haste from Gaul. According to his enemies, he had heard of the old king’s illness and had come like a carrion crow for his pickings. But according to himself, he had come as a patriotic messenger to warn the King that the Emperor Caligula was about to attack Britain with a monstrous army; that the assembled troops, with balistae and other military engines, were waiting at Gesoriacum for a favourable wind to carry them across, and that the seriousness of their purpose could be deduced from their great preparations. According to Adminius, Caligula had mobilised all northern Gaul for thirty miles inland, had commandeered all shipping except that of the trading Veneti, and had erected a chain of lighthouses along the Armorican coast.
That night the news leaked out and Camulodun went mad with excitement. Half the population found swords and paraded through the streets with torches, howling for Cunobelin to call the Romans over so that they could get a bit of exercise; the other half packed up their wagons with everything they could put aboard and got out the horses from the stables, ready to make a rapid evacuation.
Caradoc got drunk with Gwyndoc late that night, and the two tipped Adminius out of his bed into a tub of water.
But the Romans did not come then, or the next day, or the next month, and Veneti, bringing pottery and wine amphorae to the quayside, told them that the Romans had in fact assembled, as Adminius had said, but had then changed their minds and marched south again. They said that when the invading army was about to embark, Caligula had ridden up on a white horse and had ordered all his soldiers to fill their helmets with shells, saying, “These are the spoils of the ocean, due to the Capitol and the Palatine.”
No one understood this, but everyone laughed about it, and one of the wine-casks was broached on the dockside and all who cared were free to drink. News came to the people later that the King was a little better and was resting peacefully in his house. Then Caradoc and Reged were seen walking in the fields with their arms round each other’s shoulders. And the city settled down to its everyday quiet again.
Adminius went away to the country, with a dead cat tied to his saddle. He did not discover it until he had ridden through the town gates.
But for Gwyndoc was the biggest upheaval of all. He returned one afternoon from hunting to find a slave-girl waiting for him with a message which said that Ygerne had returned and was anxious to see him. She had often thought about him and his wounded leg while she had been away. So that they could talk in peace, she suggested that they might meet again outside the city the following morning, if the sun shone. Gwyndoc was so befuddled by the sudden return of his love for the girl that he tore off his bracelets and gave them to the slave. It was only after she had gone, speechless at his generosity, that he remembered one of them was his luck bracelet, without which he would never be fortunate in love—or at least so an old beggar-woman had told him!