Dreamwalker (6 page)

‘Eh? Is that you, Lleyn?’ The king asked, his cataract-clouded eyes flickering around even though there was scant hope of them ever again focussing on anything.

‘Lleyn is dead,’ Beulah said. ‘It’s me, Beulah.’

‘What? Beulah? My little girl? So like your mother.’ The king attempted a smile and a waft of foulest garbage rose up in the air. Beulah tried not to retch, putting a scented handkerchief over her mouth and nose to ward off the stench.

‘How are you feeling today, father?’ She asked from behind her mask.

‘Tired, my little one. Affairs of state weigh heavy on me,’ the king said. Then, as if only just remembering it was there, he lifted the goblet to his lips and took a long draft. Most of the wine went down his chin and soaked into the ermine ruff of his robes of state. They were pink with repeated soakings, the fur matted and claggy.

‘You should go, little one,’ the king said, holding out his now-empty goblet for a page to fill. ‘I have a busy schedule today. Same as every day. Sometimes I wonder that Padraig doesn’t go out of his way to make work for me.’

Beulah bowed. It was enough of a dismissal. It didn’t matter that her father’s day would be spent in a soft-drunken stupor as an endless stream of courtiers petitioned him for favours or simply tried to flatter him. Seneschal Padraig and his cronies in the Order of the Candle maintained the day to day running of the state. The king had long since been reduced to a ceremonial role. That too would change when she came to power, Beulah vowed. But she was not yet old enough to ascend the throne. If her father died now, Padraig would be made regent. Even if it was only for a year her power would be eroded. She could not claim the Obsidian Throne in her own right until she turned twenty-five. So the old man needed to stay alive. At least for now.

Beulah was no stranger to leaching the life force out of her enemies. Her tutor, Inquisitor Melyn, had taught her the magic of the lines well, and his knowledge of poisons had been indispensable in the removal of her elder sister. Even without her bizarre liaison with the Llanwennog hostage, Lleyn would have had to go. Her pregnancy had just been the perfect cover. Now Beulah found herself having to do a very different task, to keep her ailing father alive. Were it not for her frequent administrations, King Diseverin IX would surely have died years ago. Still, that which could be taken away could as easily be given, even if the old man was doing his best to kill himself all the while.

Bowing slightly, Beulah turned and left the great hall, heading first for the kitchens to add vital powders to the king’s wine and food, then straight to her personal quarters and the tub of hot, rose-scented water that she so desperately yearned.

*

Creeping silently through the undergrowth, Benfro tried to keep his focus on the camouflage white-speckled russet brown of the roe deer. It was grazing on the moss clinging to the side of an enormous oak tree that had fallen in some long-ago storm, leaving a scar in the canopy that leaked sunlight into the gloom. Somewhere out there Ynys Môn was working his way around behind their quarry, but for all the noise he was making he could have been miles away.

Benfro thought he was quite adept at stealthy hunting. He leapt at every opportunity to head out into the deep forest with the dour old dragon. Away from the other villagers, out there in the wild, Ynys Môn was a fount of information, a skilled hunter and far more indulgent of Benfro’s failures and shortcomings than his mother ever was. Sometimes their trips went on for several days, like this one, and in the evenings they would make camp around a small fire. Benfro would prepare whatever they had managed to catch during the day and Ynys Môn would tell tales of distant times when dragons had been great creatures, masters of the earth and sky. A time when men were no more than simple creatures raising flocks of sheep and scratching in the ground for food.

The roe deer looked up suddenly, its mouth working away still as its ears swivelled this way and that trying to determine what had changed. Benfro froze, his breath held. The birds were still twittering in the high branches and overhead a buzzard wheeled and screamed. There was nothing in the scene to suggest that two dragons were within pouncing distance. He willed the beast to relax, to put its head back down and resume feeding. Slowly, as if it could feel and react to his thoughts, the deer settled. Letting out his breath silently, Benfro stepped forward.

The crack was like thunder, sending a flock of pigeon out of their roost in an explosion of feathers. Benfro looked down to see the dry stick under his foot and cursed himself for being distracted. That was the mistake of a rank amateur and his pride was hurt almost as much as his sole. Spooked, the deer looked up, froze momentarily, then took off into the trees. With a cry of frustrated rage, Benfro set off after it.

Now it was down to the chase. There was no room for subtlety, only speed and the ability to keep an eye on his quarry as it darted this way and that through the trees. As he ran, Benfro was acutely aware that they were at least two day’s walk from the village and headed in the wrong direction. He also knew that without a kill they would be eating roots for supper. And Ynys Môn would never let him forget the elementary mistake he had made in their hunt, especially if he had no meat. So he crashed on through the thinning trees.

The deer began to tire, designed more for a quick flight than any sustained chase. Benfro could sense its weariness in the way it hesitated for a fraction before deciding which way to jump. He was definitely gaining on it, and the widening spaces between the trees helped him even more. His hearts hammered in his chest and his legs felt like they were on fire, but he was determined to fell his quarry.

Closer and closer he came to the deer, jinking left and right, back and forth but always keeping to much the same direction. He began to see the pattern in its flight and so how to put an end to it. With a great forward lunge he leapt at the space the deer was surely going to spring next. Even as he did so, he realised the potential for humiliating and painful injury, but the spooked animal jumped as predicted and Benfro crashed into it, knocking them both to the ground. As they fell he grabbed its head an neatly broke its neck, so that by the time he had rolled to a halt the creature was dead.

‘Bravo, a splendid chase,’ said Ynys Môn, trotting up through the trees. ‘And a good sized beast too. It looks like we won’t be starving tonight after all, though I can’t help thinking you would have been better off using your b… oh.’

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Benfro registered that the old dragon had caught up with him. He was also aware that he had caught and killed the deer with his bare hands and that, strapped to his back, was a hunting bow that would have made the whole chase much quicker and simpler. But what was taking up most of his available attention was the sight his chase had brought him to.

The trees thinned almost to nothing. He was crouching at the top of a steep incline that stretched around in an almost perfect circle half a mile wide, forming a crater perhaps a half hundred yards deep. A few massive trees, ancient and glorious, grew within the great cauldron and in its centre rose a building the likes of which he had never seen before.

It was made from stone, for a start. All the houses in the village had stone foundations, but in the main they were constructed of wood, great beams of oak blackened and twisted with age. This structure was made up of vast blocks, carefully shaped. It was also on a scale that beggared belief. Benfro could count four rows of windows in the main body of the building, but towers rose from that, with the tallest at least the same height again. Instead of thick reed thatch, the roof was covered in a dark stone slate.

A cluster of smaller buildings surrounded the great palace, for that was surely what this must be, but the whole settlement seemed to be deserted. No smoke rose from the myriad chimneys, nothing moved along the overgrown path that wound its way from one side of the crater to the other, climbing out of the depression at each end through cuttings hewn into the rise. Benfro could also see that some of the smaller buildings were in a poor state of repair. Some had roofs that had fallen in to reveal skeletal wooden beams beneath. Others had no roof structure at all, their walls beginning to crumble where small trees had taken hold. Indeed the whole crater was slowly reverting back to forest, what must once have been well-tended pastures now speckled with small shrubs and saplings.

‘Ystumtuen. Well, well,’ Ynys Môn said quietly, standing by Benfro’s side. ‘I must be getting old. I had no idea we’d come so far.’

‘What is it?’ Benfro asked.

‘Now, it’s a sad ruin. Years ago this was King Divitie’s hunting lodge,’ Ynys Môn said. ‘It’s not far from here that he was trapped by a particularly nasty boar. The same boar, as it happens, that gave me this.’ He pointed to the scar and line of missing scales on his flank. ‘He would have died there if I hadn’t been out hunting that day myself.’

‘What happened? And who’s King Divitie?’ Benfro asked, bemused.

‘Goodness, has your mother told you nothing of men?’ The old dragon seemed shocked as much as surprised.

‘Only that they’re not to be trusted. That they’ll try and kill me if they find me.’

Ynys Môn sighed, resting his hand on Benfro’s shoulder. ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘They live such short lives and you can’t expect one to honour the word of another. But Morgwm is very remiss not to have told you more. What if you’d blundered in there before I caught up with you?’

‘There’s nobody there,’ Benfro said. ‘It looks like it’s been deserted for ages.’

‘You’ve better eyes than me, young Benfro,’ Ynys Môn said. ‘And you’re right. Ystumtuen has been abandoned nearly ten years now. Not long after you were hatched. When Princess Lleyn died.’

‘Princess Lleyn?’ Benfro asked, his mind filling with questions. He longed to ask Ynys Môn everything,  but even more he wanted to go down to that great palace and explore its ruined halls. And yet the place shivered him with a deep-seated fear. This was a place of men, only a few days walk from the village.

‘You’re wondering how it is that we can live so close to them, how your mother can have dealings with them if they want only to kill us,’ Ynys Môn said, correctly anticipating Benfro’s worry. ‘It wasn’t always that way,’ he continued. ‘In fact it’s only been a hundred and fifty years or so since the aurddraig was stopped.’

‘Aurddraig?’ Benfro asked.

‘A bounty, paid by the Royal House of Balwen, for the head of any dragon presented at court.’

‘That’s monstrous,’ Benfro said, a shiver running down his spine to the tip of his tail.

‘Quite so,’ Ynys Môn said, his voice calm with the resignation of centuries. ‘But we were powerless to stop them then and we still are today. They wield the power of the earth and killing is in their blood. It’s what they do. But we’re not without resources ourselves you know. And not all men hate us. Remember that, Benfro. There are some who simply fear what they don’t understand, and others who fight their own kind, kill them even, just to protect us. Up here in the forest we’ve largely been left alone. That’s why we all live in the village. It’s protected by magics that even the most powerful of men can’t penetrate.’

‘So why’d they stop. Killing us that is,’ Benfro asked. ‘Have they stopped killing us? Mother never stops telling me all the terrible things they’d do to me if they caught me.’

Ynys Môn pulled out his flask, considered it for a moment and then put it back again without drinking. He seemed to be weighing something up in his mind and Benfro’s hearts sank. He was going to be told to ask his mother.

‘I suppose you could say it was all down to me,’ the old dragon said finally and Benfro looked up, his excitement burning as bright once more.

‘As I said, it was a hundred and fifty years ago. Possibly a bit more. In the time of King Divitie. Actually I think he was King Divitie the twenty-third or something, they’re not very imaginative with their names, the Royal House of Balwen. The men are all Balwen, Divitie or Diseverin, the women usually Beulah or Lleyn. But I digress.

‘King Divitie -  this King Divitie, well, he was the great grandfather of the current King Diseverin and he loved to hunt. Not dragons, strangely enough. He had always thought our persecution monstrous and unnecessary. He preferred smaller, faster prey. He also preferred not to kill things that could talk. Civilised, for a man, was King Divitie. So he went after deer and wild boar, things like that. He built Ystumtuen. Oh, there’s been a settlement here for millennia, but he developed it into the great palace you can see now. And he spent most of his time there.

‘It was a time of great anxiety for those of us already living in the village, being so close to so many men. Before he came, this part of the Ffrydd was almost forgotten, just a few small villages out on the forest edge. But having the royal court move close by was terrifying. That’s when your mother arrived. She set some kind of protective ward around us, but for it to work she needed to be outside its influence. That’s why you live away from us all, you know. We built her that house, cleared that clearing and in return she became our protector. She could have been a great mage, your mother, but she turned to healing instead.’

Benfro looked at the old dragon with a mixture of surprise and excitement. No one had ever spoken to him about his mother before. He had never really considered what had gone on before he was hatched, but she must have had a life. And if Ynys Môn knew about Morgwm, then he would surely know about the other unanswered question that bothered Benfro most days.