I must have fallen into a shivering sort of a sleep. When I woke, the light beyond the waterfall was almost gone, and someone was pushing towards me along the hidden track among the ferns.
A voice called softly, “Girl?”
I’d not thought to see Myrddin again. Why would he even remember me, now I’d served my purpose? Yet here he was. He must have thought of further uses for me.
“I’m sorry to leave you cold here, and such a time! You played your part well. You should hear the stories they’re already telling, our men and the Irishman’s. How the lady beneath the lake gave Arthur a magic sword… That hand rising out of the water… If I’d not known better, even I might have thought… For a moment there, with that sword shining against the shadow of the rocks… Even Arthur believes it! He’s used to my tricks, but he really thinks I conjured up the lady of the waters for him… ”
I wondered sleepily how anyone could have been fooled by my dirty, trembling hand, holding up a sword too heavy for it. I did not know then that men see whatever you tell them to see.
He wrapped me up in his cloak and carried me gently back along that precarious path to the shore, where his horse was waiting. Unused to gentleness, I let myself relax. By the time he heaved up me up on to the horse’s back I was half asleep again. He rode with me along the forest track, holding me in front of him like baggage. By the time I woke we were passing the burned timbers of my home and starting uphill towards the fort Arthur had captured the night before. The huts that had ringed it were gone. Only their black bones remained, dribbling ghosts of smoke into the twilight. The gate was smashed open. Strangers stood on the walls. The church and the house where the monks had lived were burned and broken too, and the stones were cracked and crumbly from the fire. Dead men lay about. Outside Ban’s hall the dragon banner blew, dark against the bat-flicked sky. Shouting came from the open door, and laughter. Myrddin dismounted and boys ran to take his horse. They didn’t notice me as he lifted me down. Bundled up as I was, I suppose they thought I was a bag or a blanket.
He carried me in his arms along the side of the hall. It was a long building, with stone walls that tapered at each end and a steep thatch towering above. I could hear sounds like the roaring of wild animals from inside, where Arthur and his men were celebrating their victory and sharing out Ban’s treasure and his women.
At the end of the building a narrow doorway led into a honeycomb of small rooms. There in the half-dark Myrddin dumped me on soft bedding and left me, tugging a curtain closed across the doorway as he went out. Through a high, tiny window the first stars showed. Firelight shone in around the edges of the curtain. I sat up and looked about me. Straw scrunched inside the plump mattress as I shifted. This must have been Ban’s wife’s room till last night, and some of her fine things were still in it, though they’d been tumbled and overturned as if a storm-wind had swept through the place.
A puddle of light showed on the floor near the doorway. I crept to it, and found a mirror of polished bronze. My own eyes blinked up at me, like a spirit looking out of a pool. I’d never looked in a mirror before. I saw a flat, round face, a stubby nose. My hair, which was normally the hopeless brown of winter bracken, hung in draggles, black with lake-water. I was a nothing sort of girl, no sooner glimpsed than forgotten. Why would Myrddin care what became of me? Maybe he planned to kill me, seeing as I was the only one who knew the secret of the sword from the water…
I started to think of escaping, but just then shadows moved across the spill of light beneath the curtain and I heard a man’s voice quite clear outside, saying angrily, “You brought her here?”
I threw myself back on to the bed and pretended to be asleep. With eyes half shut I saw the curtain drawn open, then quickly closed again when the two men were inside. The newcomer was the man called Cei. He carried an oil lamp. He knelt beside me, but Myrddin stayed near the doorway.
“So this is the truth behind your trick,” Cei said. I saw his ugly face in the lamplight turn to Myrddin.
“A good trick, too,” said Myrddin. “Even you might have believed it if you’d not seen the sword and the girl before.
Cei still looked angry. He stared at me as if I was a wild cat that Myrddin had smuggled in. “Myrddin, Arthur himself believed what happened at the river! He is out there now, telling anyone who’ll listen about how he saw the lake-woman. If he learns it was this child he’ll kill you. If the Irishman finds out…”
“Then we must make sure that Arthur and the Irishman don’t find out,” said Myrddin. “But I must do something with her. I won’t smother the girl like a kitten. She served us well.”
Cei gave a shrug. I heard his armour creak. He said, “Then let her loose somewhere. She’s nothing. Even if she does tell, no one will believe her.”
“She deserves better than that,” said Myrddin firmly. “After what she did for us? Our lady of the lake? You’ve seen the way the Irishman and his friends look at Arthur; as if he’s half a god himself.”
“So what do you mean to do with her?”
“I’ll keep her by me. She’ll be a useful servant.”
“And men will say, ‘The trickster Myrddin has taken a girl-child as apprentice,’ and they will remember that white hand rising from the lake and the long swirl of hair and sooner or later the brighter of them will put one thing beside another and work out that today’s spectacle was just another trick. And you will be finished, and Arthur too, maybe.”
“Then what if she was not a girl?” asked Myrddin, and turned to look at me. I don’t think he’d been fooled for an instant by my play of being asleep. “What do you say, child? How would you like the great Myrddin to transform you into a boy?”
I sat up and stared at him. I thought he was about to change me by magic, like he had the Bear’s father. But that had been just a story, hadn’t it?
He came closer and took the lamp from Cei and held it so the light shone on me. “Look. There’s nothing girlish about that face. And no shortage of dead men’s cast-offs to clothe her in. With her hair shorn and leggings and a tunic on she’d look like just another of the boys who hang round Arthur. She needn’t even change her name, much. Gwyn will do.”
“What do you say, child?” asked Cei.
Well, what would you say? Better a boy than a frog, or a stone-cold corpse. That’s what I reckoned.
“Of course,” said Cei, glancing up at Myrddin, “when a few more summers have passed there’ll be no mistaking her for anything but a maiden.”
Myrddin waved his words away like midges. He liked the thought of pulling this new trick. Outwitting everybody with his foxy cleverness. He said, “When a few more summers have passed, Cei, the story of the sword from the lake will be rooted so deep that nothing will blow it down, and then young Gwyn can become Gwyna again. Or maybe by then your brother will have outrun his luck and led us all into our graves, or your Christian god will have returned in glory and declared his paradise. So don’t lurk there fretting like an old woman. Go and find clothes for my boy here.”
Cei left, grumbling that he did not care for being ordered off on errands by a godless mountebank, but I guessed he did not mean it. The way he and Myrddin threw insults at each other told me they were old friends. When he was gone Myrddin said, “He’s a good man, Cei. Arthur’s half-brother. But he hasn’t Arthur’s ambition. Old Uthr’s blood doesn’t burn so fierce in his veins. A follower, not a leader.”
I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t my place. I listened to the voice of my heart instead. It was busy asking me what it would be like to be a boy. Would I have to fight? Would I have to ride? Would I have to piss standing up? I was sure I couldn’t do any of those things. No one would ever take me for a boy, would they?