The Winter Prince

"I’ve beaten Bedwyr," Lleu announced.



"You’ve what?" Goewin said, hardly able to take him seriously.



"Four times today I disarmed him."



Astounded, Goewin said, "Today? You di Cy?four times today?"



Lleu’s dark eyes sparkled and his face glowed. He nodded. He would never say such a thing if it were not true.



"How on earth did you manage that?" Goewin asked shakily.



"From learning all that tumbling. He didn’t know where I’d be—he couldn’t hold me. Oh, Goewin, we were so pleased!"



"Lleu," Goewin said carefully, glancing up at me, "Bedwyr is considered the finest swordsman in the kingdom."



"I know," Lleu said softly.



"But you must be—Lleu, you can’t be that good in one summer’s training!"



"Ask Bedwyr," Lleu said. "Anyway, it isn’t really one summer. I’d learned to use a sword before Bedwyr began to teach me. He teaches skill."



"He couldn’t ever teach Caius enough skill to disarm him," Goewin said. She stared at her twin. "You must be simply brilliant. And nobody ever noticed it!"



"I’ve never been well enough before," Lleu said. "Oh, Goewin, I can’t tell you how"—he laughed—"how remarkable I feel. Aren’t I?"



Goewin tried to push him out of the window seat; but she could no longer best him in strength. She laughed instead. "Yes, you conceited creature, you are remarkable."



But I could not laugh.



Artos was not in Camlan when this happened. He was making his seasonal progress through the south of Britain, checking defenses and supplies in the small towns and cities. Lleu wrote to tell him of the occasion, and Artos wrote back exulting: "Lleu, my Bright One, you will make a king, after all—think of it, the finest swordsman in Britain at fifteen!



"I’ll begin to train you as I’ve trained Medraut… Stay strong, grow wise, and I’ll crown you with pride in the spring."



Such love in those words, such love and joy. It was never Lleu’s name that I envied.



On a November morning a few weeks later I walked with Lleu and Goewin to Elder Field to visit the smithy. It was the first day in two weeks that the sky was clear; the air was chill but not cold. The track across the surrounding fields that leads to the wooded Edge and the mines was so muddy that we almost had to wade. Men were out setting the hedges and cutting back the hazel coppices, glad for the respite from the rain. We kept close to the edge of the wood; the trees glittered with drops of water, and wet dead leaves clung to our ankles. When we arrived at the smithy, Gofan greeted us cordially, though shortly, and over the ringing din that Marcus was making indicated that we should stay out of the way. But despite the furious clatter and the heat they were producing, the two were not particularly hard at work that day. In this late autumn time of hedge laying and hunting they had set aside the constant repair and production of harness and yoke fixtures, scythe blades and plowshares that kept the smithy busy earlier in the year. Gofan was teaching his young apprentice a more intricate work, and they were making a gate or screen of wrought iron.



After a time the two men left their work quiet and came over to sit and talk with us. Sunlight streamed in across the floor from the open porch, turning to shadow now and again as the clouds moved across the sky, making the coals in the forge grow brighter for a moment. "W Cnt.adohat have you been up to in your Roman villa?" Marcus asked.



"Nothing so useful as your work," Goewin answered.



"Lleu has been repairing the mosaics," I said, running my hands over the cooling gate. It felt even more beautiful to touch than it was to see, rougher and more textured than a knife blade, but not harsh.



"You need to learn a trade," Marcus said to Lleu solemnly, and Goewin and Gofan laughed.



Lleu said with cold dignity, "I am learning to use a sword."



"That’s right," Gofan said in his deep voice, a gentle counter to the well-intentioned insolence of his pupil. "You need to be skilled in what’s expected of you. How old are you—fifteen? If you were not the high king’s son you would be apprenticed by now, or starting to be. But you aren’t expected to learn a craft beyond the soldiery and husbandry you are already being taught. Your art and skill must lie in leadership."



Goewin said, straightfaced, "But is leadership something that can be taught ?"



"I’ll always have people like you about to make sure what I want will be done," Lleu said comfortably.



The iron under my hands steadied me; minutes ago it had been crimson with heat, molten, but was no longer.



"I won’t pave your floors," Marcus said.



"Oh many thanks, my loyal servant," Lleu said, folding his arms. "I wouldn’t ask it of you."



"This gate we are making is no more necessary and serves no greater purpose than the mosaic he has been mending," Gofan corrected his apprentice. "I am doing this because I enjoy the work; and Medraut enjoys watching us, and when the gate is finished others will enjoy seeing it and using it. Someone put as much pride and thought into the villa’s tiled floor, and Lleu is doing an honorable thing in preserving that creation."



As though he felt it was his duty to undercut his master’s point, Marcus said, "Do you know what is happening in the lower mines right now?"



I looked up from the smooth metal.



"What is happening?" Goewin asked.



Marcus, having introduced the subject, apparently felt he had said as much as was required of him. After he had rested in self-satisfied silence for a moment or two, I explained, "There’s been so much rain that the lowest level is flooded. The bedrock stops the water from sinking into the ground, and we have to keep emptying water out."



Lleu began, "I could be—"



"You couldn’t be," Goewin told him. "You could never be a miner—no more than you could be a plowman or a weaver."



"What can I be?"



All arrogance crushed, Lleu slid from the sill where he was sitting and stepped into the muddy, sunlit yard to look at the sky. I followed him and stood next to him, looking not at the sky but at the bare red Edge and the black leafless trees that lined it. "Medraut, you belong here," Lleu said.



Imagine my surprise. I answered gently, "You were born here."



"But I don’t belong. Even if I owned it all—you know your way through the mines, over the moors. How? I barely know my w Celyx20ay across the Edge."



"Nonsense," I said. "You are learning. You recognize the malachite we mine for copper, and you know we use it to make bronze; you use it in the mosaics in another way."



Lleu considered the low, quick-scudding clouds, listening but apparently nonchalant. "I wish I had made those mosaics," he said. "I know they aren’t perfect; you can see the mistakes, the wrong colors in places, uneven lines in the borders. But who does such work anymore, now that the Romans are gone? I wish I could see the pattern books they used. And the work of other artists, and other kinds of artistry. I wish I had seen the paintings that were on the walls before Father rebuilt the house."



I was both amused and curiously saddened by his outburst. "You will have to travel," I said lightly. "In Byzantium there are mosaics and frescoes to fill your thirsty heart brim full. Today content yourself with Gofan’s iron gates."



"I would, but Marcus makes me feel an idiot. ‘You need to learn a trade’!" he mimicked with some fire.



I laughed. "You are neither an engineer nor a warrior like your father, but you have your own artistry. In time you’ll dance circles around an argument, just as now you turn aside your opponent’s blade."



He did not answer, but he thought on it. Then he turned and went back inside. I stood alone in the dooryard, half smiling to think how absurd this was, that I should be working to convince Lleu of his worth.



So the year was gone. In the spring Artos made Lleu the heir to his kingdom, naming him prince of Britain. In a year Lleu had changed from a weakling child to a matchless swordsman, the moth hatched from the worm at last; I must be dull in his shadow, shotten, mean. I had come here sick with the power I had known in the Orcades as your counselor and aide and executioner, and I ought now to be content with my newfound quiet authority. Lleu’s own triumph should not matter. But it did matter. Standing in the Lesser Hall among the high king’s Comrades with Goewin at my side, waiting at first light in tense silence for the meeting to begin—it mattered; though outwardly I was all serene control, shut and screened behind my eyes. And Goewin shored me. She and Ginevra were the only women present, but since Ginevra stood at her husband’s side as his queen, Goewin was alone. She seemed shorter than she was, dwarfed by Caius the steward at her right hand. Nothing softened her hard expression.



Lleu confronted the assembled crowd white-faced, but appearing strangely elegant; he stood slight and straight before his father, dressed simply and bearing no arms, his dark hair clipped short in the old style of a Roman soldier. He listened gravely as the high king informed him of the duties that were to be expected of him. Then Ginevra armed him, as had his namesake’s mother, binding to his side a real sword; and at last the king presented his youngest child, his heir, to the strong, watchful company of his Comrades. Lleu bowed to us and pledged us his loyalty and service, and one by one we pledged ourselves to him. As my turn finished, Caius began to speak, passing over Goewin. I reached across her and silenced him gently with a gesture, and said only, "Princess?"



Repeating the words that I had used, she too pledged her loyalty to her twin: "Lleu son of Artos, my prince and brother, I swear to you my life and my allegiance."



Lleu watched her with sympathetic eyes, and let his solemn lips twitch into a smile before her turn passed. At my side, unnoticed by anyone else Cy asym, Goewin slipped her cool fingers into my hand and pressed it gratefully.



After the pledges were finished Artos crowned his son with a thin fillet of gold and declared him prince of Britain.



When the ceremony was over Goewin hid herself, disappearing as quietly and completely as this season’s infant bats asleep in the box hung under the eaves. I found her in the dark end of the porch, where the old, disused masonry and broken columns lie piled out of the way, waiting patiently for the rest of the villa to catch up to them in decay. Goewin huddled against the far wall behind the last pillars, sobbing passionately. Embarrassed and ashamed to see me, she hid her face in the hem of her smock and mumbled incoherently, "The Romans have gone from Britain forever."



I said gently, "Goewin. Come here." I led her out into the garden, and stood with a hand on her shoulder, as I had stood by Lleu not long before. "What do you mean?"



"Father’s kingdom, this unity, it won’t last—Lleu’s not like him, and even if he were, too much is changing too fast. It can’t last. Father would have me marry Constantine, the son of the king of Dumnonia in the south. It won’t be bad, it’s important, with all the tin mines and fishing towns. But he may as well marry me to one of my cousins and exile me to the Orcades, as he has his sister, because you can be sure I won’t sit by as queen of Dumnonia and watch Britain trickle through Lleu’s fingers. If I have to I’ll take the kingship from him by force."