High The Vanes (The Change Book 2) (7 page)

I reached into the little niche where I kept my scant belongings and handed her a small pencil.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I will write your letters another time. Bigger. Perhaps clearer. Please be patient, my lady.”

I watched, reluctantly interested, as she folded the loose sheet, placed it beneath the words I had written and slowly started to copy them, enlarging each letter by about a half as she did so. It took her a while. Occasionally she held up the book, her finger pointing out a particular letter, with a quizzical look on her face. Each time I shrugged. I knew some of the letters were wrong. Some were mere guesswork. Eventually, she reached the end. Closing my book, she held up the page with her writing for me to see.

This is what I read:

yg koet ymas ?ym ?bro ym bryn canhwyll yn tywyll a ?gerd genhyn ?kynan yn racwan ym ?pop discyn.

Where a letter or a word had been doubtful in my version, she had written a question mark. At first I could make nothing of it. Until Eluned pointed at the phrase almost in the centre – ‘canhwyll yn tywyll’. I read the words aloud. I repeated them.

“It is Welsh,” I said, at last. “‘Canhwyll yn tywyll’. Those words are Welsh. Wait. I think I know what they mean.”

I grabbed Taid’s notebook and my copy of The Gododdin from the niche. Flicking back and forth between both, I eventually wrote down ‘candle’ and ‘darkness’ beneath the first and third word. The second word I knew was ‘in’ – ‘candle in darkness’.

“That’s it,” I said. “That’s it. A candle in the darkness. That’s why these words are written on the wall of the tunnel. We use a candle to see in the darkness of the tunnel, just as whoever carved these words must have done. There has to be a meaning to the rest of the words.”

Eluned nodded, taking Taid’s notebook and The Gododdin from me, gently.

“Stop. Sleep, my lady. Tomorrow we see.”

I unrolled my blanket and promptly fell asleep.

As usual, the cold awoke me the next morning. The thin light that came into the Room was just enough to show what little it contained. Eluned was sleeping beside the now extinguished fire, ready to set it as soon as she was up. Nefyn slept on the far side on a ramshackle old truckle bed. Between us was the low table with its two chairs, and I could just make out Nefyn’s pile of old books beside the tunnel entrance.

There was never any more natural light than this, no matter what time of the day it was, which was why I ventured outside as often as I could, despite Nefyn’s and Eluned’s misgivings. She had not ventured out of the Room since we first entered it, now nearly three weeks ago. A thin curtain across one corner of the room hid another smaller room that contained what Nefyn called ‘the latrine’ which was where we had to wash. And do the other things. I hated it, and tried to hold myself until I was outside, but it was difficult and I frequently had to submit. It did at least have running water, in the form of a stream that came out of the wall, ran through a small wooden trough and poured into an earth cess pit.

The Room, the latrine, and the tunnel had all been constructed by the old Romans, according to Nefyn, and were originally a basement beneath a massive building he called a ‘bath house’. He claimed that one of his books described one of these, suggesting that it had a complicated system in which the heat from several fires was directed beneath the floor and through the walls of the building. The tunnel we entered the Room through was the remains of one part of this system, which was why the walls were blackened. The whole thing sounded far-fetched to me. If those old Romans had managed to build such a thing, why were there only ruins left now?

I shall never forget the first time we had to crawl through the tunnel into the Room.

I suppose that I had somehow come to expect that Uricon would be a kind of paradise. After everything we had endured to reach this place, I was shattered to discover nothing but some old ruins. When Gwenllian had greeted us, she had swept her arm across the view as if she was revealing something magnificent. Every night of our journey, huddled in whatever hovel or hole we found ourselves, I had dreamed of ‘Uricon’ – my ‘Uricon’, a place of comfort and warmth, generously provided with everything I could need. Water to take a bath. Fresh clothes. Fresh fruit and vegetables. A bed with a soft, comfortable mattress. When I awoke, cold, damp and miserable, the thought that this was where we were headed kept me going.

How wrong I was. Uricon was all that remained of a great Roman city, according to Nefyn. We had been introduced to him shortly after Gwenllian left us. She had taken Eluned aside and they spent nearly an hour talking in whispers, while I sat on what remained of a wall, shivering and hungry. Eventually, they had returned. Gwenllian said nothing to me, smiled enigmatically, turned and walked away. Before she had gone a few yards, she had disappeared.

“She will return, my lady,” Eluned had said, also smiling. “We are to await her. Her servant will assist us in the meantime.”

I didn’t care to ask where she had gone, or why we were supposed to wait for her. I was too cold, too hungry, too, too disappointed that the paradise I had been expecting had evaporated into thin air.

Moments later, Nefyn materialised. I don’t remember seeing him coming. One minute he was not there. The next minute he was. A tall, thin, scrawny looking individual, the thought that this was the servant of the last high servant of the lady only served to extinguish any residual hope I may have had left. He introduced himself to Eluned, but seemed to ignore me.

“Eluned Llyn Y Gadair, it is indeed an honour and my privilege to welcome you to my humble dwelling. My name is Nefyn fab Cunedda, last of the Votadini. Long have we expected you.”

He bowed deeply to her. She bowed back. “Your welcome is music to our ears Nefyn fab Cunedda. My people, the Ordovices, send you greetings from afar. Soon, alas, we also shall be gone into the past.”

She turned to me. “This lady, you know, is the Expected One.”

He did not look at me, but said, “Long have we awaited her, Eluned Llyn Y Gadair. It is my fortune to join with you in serving her.”

These formalities quickly became tedious. “Does he have any food, Eluned?” I asked angrily. “Anywhere decent to sleep, perhaps? Or to have a wash? Never mind the long names and ancient people. This is now, and I am dirty, hungry and tired.”

Nefyn still spoke to Eluned. “When my lady Gwenllian returns there will be plenty. Until then I can only offer you what little I have. Please ask her to follow me.”

“I can hear you, you know,” I exploded. “You can talk to me.”

Eluned touched my arm. “He cannot, my lady. He belongs to the High Servant. He is only allowed to speak to her and others such as myself, also servants of the Lady.”

“Come. Bring her,” he said and turned away.

So it was that we arrived in the Room. I was not at all willing to get down on my hands and knees and crawl through the tunnel at first, but it was made clear that there was no choice if I wanted to eat and sleep. What I found, of course, was even greater disappointment. The room, which now lay around me, scarcely visible through the damp murk of early morning, was almost bare. A low truckle bed, a table and two chairs and a pile of books. There was a fire place but it was filled with long dead ashes. Once Eluned had encouraged me to sit on a chair, she whispered something to Nefyn who promptly disappeared back down the tunnel.

Eluned looked about, eventually discovering two ancient blankets heaped in a corner. She shook them out, filling the room with dust and dead insects, then folded them into a rough bed shape on the floor.

Nefyn eventually returned, dragging a sack behind him. Out of this he took what looked like a block of wood and a strip of leather which he placed on the table before me. Then he tipped the sack near the fireplace and out fell a small pile of twigs and broken branches.

“Tomorrow you may make a fire. The Expected One will eat now. Then we sleep. It grows late.” All this spoken directly to Eluned.

“Eat what?” I asked.

“Cheese and meat. Good food.” He shrugged his shoulders.

I looked at the two objects before me on the table. This was supposed to be ‘meat and cheese’? I picked up the ‘cheese’ and dropped it back on the table. It landed with a heavy clunk. The ‘meat’ I didn’t bother to touch. “And this is what he calls food?” I asked Eluned, adopting his habit of ignoring the person addressed.

“Best that you sleep, my lady,” she said. “Tomorrow I will make a fire and seek other food. Please take the blanket I have laid out for you.”

I looked in horror at the blankets she had laid on the floor. Still hungry, still cold, finally I whispered to Eluned that I needed to relieve myself. He obviously heard me as he pointed at the curtain in the corner which I had not noticed before. I have already described its contents to you. Needless to say, I tried to sleep that night with an empty, aching stomach and a full bladder. Sleep evaded me.

Thus nearly three weeks had passed since that first, terrible night. In that time, I had forced myself to grow as accustomed as possible to the living conditions we had no choice but to endure. I had also managed to persuade Nefyn to talk to me, which made a considerable difference, particularly as he had obviously read many books and was very knowledgeable. My efforts to persuade him to spend more time above ground seemed to be working, if very slowly. Eluned, as I have said, refused point blank to join us.

I heard her stirring. I sat up, ready to face yet another dreary day.

Of course, Eluned had not been idle these past days. She was incapable of sitting around doing nothing. She had explored every nook and cranny of the Room, discovering a hidden cupboard of sorts behind Nefyn’s bed. She had also found another, smaller, room off the tunnel. Here she had found red terracotta bowls and plates, some odd-looking little objects that Nefyn informed us were Roman oil lamps, a metal object that she had placed over the fire on which she could heat the bowls, and, best of all, a wooden box filled with candles.

Nefyn was convinced that all these things had lain undiscovered in that room since the time of the Romans, and he eagerly showed Eluned some pictures in one of his old books that certainly did look like the things she had found. Best of all, of course, were the candles, because it meant that at last there was enough light to read in the Room.

Eluned also seemed to quickly establish a relationship with Nefyn that meant he did whatever she told him. As a consequence, he disappeared for long periods on most days, coming back with several sacks full of wood, some dead animals and birds, such as rabbits and pigeons, and, most surprisingly, piles of the red vegetable I knew as the root of the beet. With a roaring fire burning, Eluned soon cooked up a good stew that was the best food I had eaten in many days. Even Nefyn had to admit that this was better than his ‘cheese and meat’. After grumbling about being sent out the first couple of times, he soon changed his tune when he discovered what she could do with the things he brought back.

I tend to think that it was because his belly was more full than it had been for years that he finally agreed to come outside and talk to me. This only happened when we were out of Eluned’s earshot, because he was conscious that she would consider it wrong. At first our conversations were stilted. We asked simple questions about each other’s lives. He told me he had been living in this place since he was a child. His parents had died, or so he presumed, for they had left the Room one morning and never returned, when he was about eleven years old. Since then he had lived alone, foraging for food when he felt hungry, learning to need very little. Gwenllian had appeared to him on only three occasions, once to inform him that she would soon be leaving to take a long journey, secondly to inform him that she had returned, and finally to inform him that he was now to consider himself her servant.

Our conversations grew more interesting as he relaxed while talking to me. He had no idea what it meant to be Gwenllian’s servant, as she had never told him what his duties were. Indeed, he had no real idea who Gwenllian was, apart from the fact that she was, as she had told us, the ‘High Servant of the Lady’. He had no idea why he was living in Uricon, only that his parents had moved there when he was still a baby. When I asked him why he had never thought of leaving, he simply shrugged and said, “Where would I go?”

One of the most curious things about him I discovered was that he had never been taught to read, yet he was perfectly capable of doing it. He had discovered the pile of books that must have belonged to his father when he was about six or seven, had opened one and proceeded to read it. He was not aware that this was a skill that normally needed to be taught. Most of his father’s books were dry discussions of what he called ‘science’ which meant nothing to him or me, but there were one or two ‘story books’, which he preferred. His favourites were the one that contained the songs of the old English people, a line from which he spoke to me when we were above ground, as I have told you.

The other was a story about a man called Macsen Wledig. I vaguely remembered Eluned telling me that she knew this story. According to Nefyn this man had been a king or a leader of the Romans who had dreamed about a beautiful young woman and then sent out his servants to find her. They did find her eventually, but she refused to go to him, so he had to come to Uricon to meet her. According to the story, they were married and their children eventually ruled the whole country. He liked the story best because it spoke of the old people, including the Votadini, of which he claimed to be the last survivor, as well as others, including the Ordovices, who he now knew were Eluned’s people.

In return, I must admit that I told him very little about my life. I mentioned Taid, telling him that I missed him enormously, and one day hoped to be able to see him again. I told him that I had lived in a great house which had been destroyed by some angry men. I did not know, at the time, how much he knew about ‘my world’, so I kept things deliberately vague. I briefly recounted my time with the Teacher, omitting the fact that I had been taught many skills. I also did not say anything about Y Gododdin, or Taid’s translation, as I could not see that he would be interested. Much later, when we discovered that the words ‘gododdin’ and ‘votadini’ were probably one and the same, with all that meant for us, I regretted that I had kept it from him. At the time it hardly seemed relevant.