Sword of shadows, p.27
Sword of Shadows, page 27
‘Surely you’ve seen him. He wears a long beard, carries a staff, long gown. A Cornish man.’
They all looked at Teague, who had suddenly burst out laughing. ‘Someone is pulling your leg, Master Guest. And a good jest it is, if that man has my … has the sword.’
Impatient, Crispin put his hands on his hips. ‘And why do you say that?’ Had he been fooled by a beguiling old man? He was beginning to have his regrets about not manhandling him.
‘Well … that’s a Cornish name, right enough. It means … Myrddin the Wild. A very old name for … Merlin.’
They packed up their things. Teague decided that he would stay on to try to recoup his losses, now that Crispin had convinced him – mad man or no – that he wasn’t getting the sword back. He counted out the rest of their pay and seemed grudgingly cheerful again. ‘Master Guest, I suppose you were right. It wasn’t nearly as exciting owning the thing as searching for it. I must admit …’ He laughed, shaking his head. ‘I haven’t had such a good time in a long while. This will make a fine story to tell, I’ll wager.’
‘That it will, sir. But if you aren’t returning to London, what shall we do with the horses?’ asked Crispin. ‘Sell them, and send the money to you here?’
‘Nonsense!’ He took Crispin’s hands in both his own. ‘I tell you what you shall do, Master Guest. You keep them. As further payment to you.’
Crispin jerked back in surprise. ‘Master Teague! You don’t mean it. That is … that is much too generous.’
‘I’ve got my baubles, Master Guest. Oh, more than I expected.’ He tossed the brooch in the air and caught it, closing his hand into a fist. ‘This is worth more than a couple of horses.’
‘But—’
‘Master Guest.’ He seemed abashed all of a sudden, and brought up a solemn expression. ‘Consider it the pay you deserve. You and your man Jack achieved much. You found a murderer and brought him to justice. And I owe you more. Take the horses. A man like you should have horses.’
Humbled, Crispin thanked the man again and a shocked Jack did likewise. Horses! Never in a thousand years did he imagine he’d ever own horses again. Immediately, he began to ponder if they could build a covering for Tobias and Seb in the back garden beside the chicken coop, for they could not afford to board them.
Proud that Tobias was his – and he patted the horse’s neck in true affection – Crispin looked back over the crumbling battlements, the sorry gatehouse, searching for that strange, lone man. Merlin, indeed! Had he been a mere invention of Crispin’s imagination? Surely not. He’d talked to him several times. He seemed as solid as the rock Tintagel was built upon. Though … even as he watched, he witnessed more rocks let loose from the land-bridge and tumble into the sea.
He said nothing more about it as he and Kat rode on the back of Crispin’s mount to Treknow. The village was abuzz with the tidings that Prasgwig had gone up in smoke, and its people scattered. No one knew how it had caught fire or where the people had disappeared to.
Crispin wanted Kat to at least return to London with them but she declined. She climbed off the horse and stood beside it, resting her hand on Crispin’s leg and looked up at him. ‘I thank you for offering – all that you offered,’ she said softly, ‘but I think I will stay with the players for a while. Besides, I think I have another tale to tell them that we might perform.’
‘Jezebel?’ said Jack, but his smile said he meant it as a jest.
She scrunched her nose at him. ‘No. A tale of a gallant knight, who saved a fair maiden. Along with his squire, of course.’
Jack bowed.
‘Just don’t use my name,’ said Crispin.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it. Farewell, dear, dear Crispin. God keep you.’
‘And you too … fair maiden.’
She blew him a kiss and he smiled, watching her skip across the green toward the colorfully painted wagon.
‘I was surprised she wouldn’t come with us,’ said Jack.
‘I was surprised too,’ said Crispin. He turned his mount, and headed toward London.
It took less than a fortnight, but they finally returned to the Shambles with more gold in their pockets than they had ever had before. Isabel was overjoyed to see Jack again, and kissed and kissed him. The children, too, were happy to see their father, but Crispin was most surprised to find that they were even happier to see him again, climbing all over him, pleading to be picked up.
And they all fairly glowed at the prospect of the two horses. The children gathered around them as if they’d owned them all their lives, leading them to the back garden and petting and cooing to them. Crispin realized those horses would be the most spoiled beasts in all of London.
It was good to be home, he decided, and later, that night, lying in his bed and thinking about Kat, Gyb jumped up onto the mattress and made his way to Crispin, standing on his chest. ‘Did you miss me, too, you old tom?’
The aging black and white cat settled in, fluffing into a mound atop him. Crispin didn’t mind. He felt the deep purr as he stroked the beast. ‘I’m afraid it’s just you and me, Gyb. I tried to get you a mistress. But … alas. I suppose in the end she was right. I couldn’t very well take to wife a known thief. She was looking out for my best interests. But … dammit.’ He hadn’t realized how lonely he had become until the last chance to get a wife – a woman who would truly understand him – slipped through his fingers.
The cat rose, walked off his chest and curled into a bun, nestled up against his side. The coals glowed in the hearth, and the night descended around them like a velvet mantle.
But Crispin didn’t sleep.
AFTERWORD
Is there a real Arthur? Where to begin! Historians have been chasing their tails on this for centuries. Welsh and Irish folklore are full of the kind of fantastic tales that begged to be folded into something like the Arthur legend. In the Welsh tales, Arthur was a pagan who moved through a magical realm. In later Welsh and Irish mythology, Arthur seems to be a semi-divine figure that easily transitions to the later medieval chivalric romances where the Knights of the Round Table could slip easily into the story.
A ninth-century Welsh cleric called Nennius was the first to wrestle the varying Arthur stories into one narrative, though he cheated a bit by wedging Arthur into the history between the end of Roman Britain and his own time period. Nennius’s Arthur was not a king but a Christian warrior, waging war against the pagans.
But with the popularity of Tristan and Isolde, in Cornwall the focus was on King Mark rather than King Arthur. The court of Tristan and Isolde was said to be at Tintagel.
In the 1100s, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who lived near Wales and no doubt heard these tales, began his History of the Kings of Britain. And he built up Arthur as the King of British Kings.
The history of Arthur, from the French, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton tales, combined him with an amalgamation of the mythological characters of gods, nymphs – even wizards – and perhaps a fluttering of real people. To keep Crispin up to date in the fourteenth century, he only knew of Arthur through Geoffrey of Monmouth. What we know about Arthur generally comes from Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (on which the musical Camelot was based) from 1470, well after Crispin’s time. And Tennyson’s Idylls of the Kings is even later. So put yourself in the fourteenth century, when these stories were actual histories to the medieval mind, not fairy tales. The ‘real’ Arthur – one single man – likely never existed, but we may never know.
Tintagel is a real place. Some sort of fortress has been there since 700 CE. It was true that Prince Edward – the Black Prince as we know him – attempted to restore it, but no one knows quite why it was never brought back to its former glory. It had a complement of a caretaker, a few men-at-arms, a porter, a chaplain, and a constable. All that is true.
And as for treasure hunters, we need to say a few words about that. It was illegal in England to dig up barrows or even look for treasure in those days. In Germany, the thirteenth-century law book Schwabenspiegel was a little more liberal when it came to treasure hunting. Three-quarters of the find should go to the owner of the land on which it was found and a quarter to the actual finder. The king was not entitled to any of it, unless it was found on a public highway, which belonged to the crown.
But according to the English laws on troves since Edward the Confessor’s time, all gold belonged to the king, full stop. If it was silver and found on Church property, it was divided up equally between Church and crown. By 1276, investigating treasure troves fell under the jurisdiction of the coroner. It was forbidden to be in active searches for treasure. So Carantok’s charter was extremely generous.
By Henry VIII’s time, they seemed to have gotten more concerned with the practice of witchcraft to find treasure, specifically with the help of demons (where’s a helpful demon when you need one?). Harsh penalties were executed on: ‘dyvers and sundrie personnes [who] unlawfully have devised and practiced Invocacons and conjuracons of Sprites, pretending by such meanes to understand and get Knowledge for their own lucre in what place treasure of golde and Silver shulde or might be founde or had in the earthe or other secrete places.’
As for the chapel, it is indeed there on the island but the altar is, uh, unaltered, with no bump-outs in the back of it. My fiction.
And what about druids? Crispin and his contemporaries only knew what Julius Caesar wrote about people he called the druidae (always plural). The word druid or druw in Cornish means “oak knower,” which I find wonderfully lyrical. Caesar observed that they were most notably in charge of public events, as priests were in most cultures of the time, and presided over sacrifices. And these sacrifices were often human. They seemed to prefer criminals, though the occasional innocent would do in a pinch. They created wicker mannikins to enclose them and burned them. We only have Caesar’s word for it, since the early people of Britain had no written records.
Crispin is coming soon to the end of his tale. Sad, I know, but all good things must come to an end. I always had in mind that his story would have an end point, and we are almost there. I’d like to thank my agent, Joshua Bilmes, for standing up for Crispin all these years. I think he’ll be sorry to see him go as well.
The next book is the penultimate, Spiteful Bones. A skeleton is found in the wall of a lawyer’s house and is believed to be a missing servant from twenty years prior. But is the heinous crime of so long ago only a precursor of what is to come?
If you liked this book, please review it. See more about the Crispin series and other historical novels at JeriWesterson.com.
Jeri Westerson, Sword of Shadows
