The morning I left you I was so desperate to be away, and free, that the very direction of the wind seemed a portent to guide me. The first fisherman I spoke to was leaving that day for the mainland, and I already carried with me all I intended to take: my hunting knife, the three bows I had crafted that summer, and a satchel containing the precious and delicate physician’s instruments I had bought the year before from the Eastern sea merchants. Except these, all the possessions that I cared for I had either left in Camlan six years ago or had sent there directly as I acquired them. There was nothing to hold me to the Islands, nothing except love or fear of you. And I would not submit to either of these.
The journey’s start, after the long summer of pain and illness, seemed so clean and true and swift that it did not seem possible I might be rash to travel so late in the year. The wind was perfect; we sped past the barren cliffs of Hoy, and the day was clear enough that we could see Cape Wrath looming in the distance. I have never made such a rapid journey to the mainland. I felt I had some god’s own special benediction: such luck: away so quickly and secretly. Once on the soil of the mainland it occurred to me that my legs were still not very strong, that I hada p hundreds of miles of empty moorland to cross, and that winter was coming on. But I would not go back.
That was in October. It was well past New Year’s when I arrived in Deva, the city and port closest to Camlan. There was a heavy snowfall that same day. I had not encountered snow even when I was crossing the Caledonian highlands, but now that it was steadily cold there came snow with a vengeance. I stayed in Deva several days, just to watch the harbor freeze over completely, locking its ships into my father’s city: Artos the high king’s city. Deva is beautiful, full of Roman ghosts. The harbor is smaller than it once was, because the river is silting up. But the streets are paved, and there is a ruined theater that they use as a marketplace. There is even a bathhouse where they still use the old hypocaust for heat. Artos probably had a hand in the last; Gofan, the master smith at Camlan, calls him "our engineer king." While I was in Deva, Artos himself arrived to inspect the harbor and make sure the old city walls were able to endure the ice. It was the first I had seen my father in six years. After the months of trudging through a wilderness of black peat mud and chill rain, alone, the pure dry cold and my father’s heavy hand on my shoulder seemed more intoxicating than wine, the snowbound streets more holy than the clustering wind-scoured cells of Iona.
It is about sixty miles from Deva to Camlan, and Artos sent me on ahead of him. I went as his emissary and as his son; I went because he could not in good conscience send anyone else into that weather, and because I wanted to go. He planned a route for me, making certain I would have food and a bed each night, so the last few days of my long journey were made in relative comfort. And the countryside was achingly familiar. After Caledonia’s bleak mountains even the high moors to the east seemed gentled by the snow, not shadowing but cradling the Mercian plain—beautiful. The country around Camlan is all field and forest, riddled with old Roman salt and lead mines, except in the village just two or three miles west of Camlan, where there are copper mines that Artos has set working again. The mines and the village existed long before the high king. When he rebuilt the Roman villa nearby and made it his home, the local people named the new estate Camlan, the champion’s village. The original cluster of farms and householdings they now speak of simply as the village of the "elder field." The jutting cliff and scarp where the copper mines are they call the Edge over Elder Field, and it dominates the horizon even more than the distant high peaks. Camlan nestles securely between the Edge and the peaks, protected from all but the worst of weather; the forest is usually abundant with deer, the fields bountiful. It was all snow-blanketed when I arrived, uniform in whiteness.
They had had a hard summer, even as we did in the Northern Islands, in the Orcades. Everyone I met on the way seemed thin and worn: grim, haggard, hungry. They were cold, too; their winters are usually milder. It was dusk when I finally came to Elder Field, and I might have stopped for the night with Gofan at the smithy; but by now the road was so familiar that I could have walked it with my eyes shut, and I was overcome with a childish wave of homesickness for Camlan. I could not possibly wait until morning to walk the last few miles. I shared the evening meal with Gofan and Marcus, his new apprentice, and they lent me a lantern to guide me through the dark to the high king’s estate.
The old Roman villa at Camlan was drab; it was cold and decaying. The echoes of its former splendor only exaggerated its cheerlessness. The tiled floor still held between its cracks the dust and pollen that had settled there during the dry summer; mildewed grain littered the corners of the central atrium, whichdertrium, had been used as an emergency storeroom during the haphazard harvest that was gathered in the threatening shadow of a sudden storm. Part of the hypocaust had collapsed, and someone had tried to block off the drafty hole in the atrium floor with disused masonry and rubble left over from the villa’s original restoration. The old leaded glass windows, so perfect and unusual, had not been cleaned for many months. Even the braziers gave little heat. The Great Hall was warmer, with its roaring fire and close company, but after months of solitary silence and open space I found it crowded and airless almost beyond my endurance. I felt at home in the villa, ruined as it was; I knew those corridors, where each lamp bracket fits, the artist’s little flaws in the tiled border of the atrium mosaic, the staring glass eyes of the Christian portraits there.
No real welcome awaited me. Of course, they did not expect me, and those of the household who were still awake were preoccupied with some present crisis. It did not seem the right moment to inquire if I could still use my old room. When my father’s queen hurriedly received me I told her I would stay in the Great Hall where most of the household slept. Ginevra agreed, apologetically; they had been using my room for storage, and it would have to be cleared out before I could use it. "You’ll be more comfortable in the Hall," she added. "It’s warmer there. Artos is the only one who knows how the hypocaust works; we can’t mend it till he returns. And"—she paused; and I could see her setting her jaw so that she would not falter—"and I think Lleu is dying. He has been ill all winter, and today he is scarcely able to breathe. Otherwise we should have given you more of a welcome, Medraut."
Lleu, the Bright One: the high king’s youngest child, his heir, and my half brother. I had forgotten how sickly he was. His sister Goewin had always been healthy, and fiercely protective of her small twin brother. They were eight when I left. Lleu’s letters had stopped more than three years ago, before I came to the Orcades. He would be almost fifteen now, almost adult. Still so frail, racked by asthma, torn through and through by even the slightest chill wind or damp day? And Artos counted on him to be the next high king.