Ides of the May (Children of the May 2 - updates weekly)

Chapter Four: The Tower on the Loch

The moment I stepped foot on the sands of the small rocky bay I felt something I had never felt before – or something I had never noticed before. On Avalon the magical skin of the island had slipped smoothly against me, but here there was a grit just below the surface of the land that chafed against my sense of magic. Epicene had described how she had felt something jagged under the skin of Britain, and had put it down to Merlin and the terrible manner in which he had acquired his great power; but this was the first time I felt such a rough texture in Britain for myself. Perhaps I had simply become used to it over the years, though it was also possible that my mother’s lands, where I had lived my whole life until Sir Dinadan arrived to take me away, did not suffer from the same complaint. My mother was very powerful, probably as powerful as Merlin, and maybe when Dinadan took me to Caerleon I had been too scared and confused to notice the change. Back then I’d not been aware that I had inherited any of my family’s magic – my magical senses had become much sharper since then.

Safeer’s man turned his boat, and rowed himself back to the ship without a word of farewell. I looked up at the red cliffs of the small, enclosed bay in which we had landed. The rocks were jagged, and stained by the birds that nested in their crannies. From where I stood the cliffs looked all but impassable, and I was worried that the tide was coming in. I would be fine – I couldn’t drown, at least not for a very long time – but the other three did not have my ability to survive in water. Palomina did not share my fears. She strode off towards the cliff-face, closely followed by Aglinda and Alisander. The three of them disappeared behind a large rock, and moments later reappeared about ten feet up the side of the cliff, climbing easily.

‘Follow us, Drift,’ called Palomina. ‘There is a good path here, if you know how to find it.’

I went around the back of the rock, and sure enough found a wide but unmarked path up the red rocks.

‘Agravaine showed it to us,’ Aglinda told me when I caught up with them. ‘This is the bay he and his brothers use when they want to sneak off Orkney to the mainland.’

That information made me uncomfortable. Sir Gawain was one of Agravaine’s brothers, and he was also one of King Arthur’s most loyal knights. If Agravaine knew of the bay, then so did Gawain, and what was to stop the round table knights from watching the place?

‘We’ve been using this bay since we first came to the far north of Britain,’ said Palomina, as if reading my mind. ‘Even when Arthur garrisoned the Roman wall to the south last autumn, none of the round table knights or their men were seen here. Arthur has not yet sent enough men to the north to cover the whole of these empty lands, never mind to post them permanently in remote places like this.’

We came over the top of the cliff, and I saw laid out in front of me a bleak but beautiful landscape of mountains, lakes and bare hills that stretched for many miles. Sheep and goats grazed in patches in the distance, but other than the grasses those animals ate, there was little in the way of foliage, only the occasional copse of trees and stretch of vivid heather. There were no houses or other sign of habitation. I looked back to the sea, and saw Safeer’s ship disappear round the headland, its red-and-white sails billowing. To the north, over a wide passage of water, was a gloomy grey landmass.

‘The isles of Orkney,’ said Palomina, following my eye. ‘We are in the far north of your British mainland, the wild place the Romans called Caledonia, some hundreds of miles beyond the Emperor Hadrian’s wall. Arthur’s seat of power at Camelot is hundreds of miles further south than that.’

Until Palomina had shown me a map in the library of Castle Eudaimon, I had believed that the mountains north of my mother’s lands marked the northern edge of Britain, and that Caledonia was another island entirely. I had not even known that the Romans had built a wall to separate the northernmost part of the island from the rest. It still embarrassed me to remember how ignorant I had been.