45

Meryn could see for miles. Sitting here on the north-facing slope of the hill he felt safer than he did at home at the moment. A few days earlier he had thrown a few belongings into a holdall, locked up his cottage and set off in his car towards Brecon. From there he planned to follow Sarn Elen as closely as was possible, heading north. He hadn't dowsed the route. There were some perfectly feasible maps on the internet. He gave a rueful smile as he drove. It would spoil his image no end if any of his American students heard that, but there were times when expedience had to take precedence over ideology.

As planned, he had booked himself into a delightful B the white dragon of England was killed.

But, and this is what particularly interested Meryn, where had the dragons come from in the first place, and who put them there? Modern archaeology had suggested that an ancient water cistern under the hill had led to the repeated collapse of the walls, but the story went back into the impenetrable depths of Welsh history, long before Vortigern's time. His book, a book that would be an amalgam of a lifetime's research into folklore, magic, religion and science, would be tracing stories such as this back to race memories of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Were dragons attempts by the earliest storytellers to rationalise the bones of dinosaurs exposed in the cliffs and crags that werethe home of the earliest hominids? Were they ancestral memories of skies lit by volcanic flares, if not in Britain itself, then in distant mountain ranges where volcanos existed to this day? It was an exciting thought. And it linked to his interest in Branwen. Was this not the place where she had learned her art from Druid teachers whose learning was in itself legendary? Branwen would be in his book, if she gave him permission to use her expertise, but first he had to talk with her.

He loved shamanic travelling. It freed him from time and space and allowed him to travel anywhere he wished. Or that was the theory. He could be blocked of course but he had made a certain amount of progress with Branwen. He thought she trusted him now. He could tell she was at the least intrigued by this man who kept appearing in her meditations, just as she kept appearing in his. So, he had often taught those students of his how to contact their spirit guides, and now was his chance to sit quietly here in the beautiful mountains of north Wales, Snowdon, Yr Wyddfa, rising majestically, a sharp volcanic peak in the distance, undisturbed by anyone or anything but the local wildlife, and do it himself. He watched idly as two red kites circled over the hill. The scent of the mountainside was intoxicating, heather and grass and the strong sweet coconut smell of gorse, the wind spiralling up as it carried the great birds on its slowly rising thermals, and from somewhere quite nearby he heard the croak of a raven. For a moment he wondered if it might be a blessed white raven, the raven of the goddess after whom Branwen took her name but no, it was inky black.

And suddenly Branwen was there, sitting on an outcrop of rock several metres away from him. On closer inspection she was older than he had first thought, perhaps in her sixties or seventies, her hair silver. But her skin was smooth and her hands, clasped over her knees, were those of a much younger woman. He could feel her gaze on him intense, focused, her eyes a deep blue, the colour of the sea.

‘Greetings.' He whispered the word out loud.

Her reply did not interrupt the soughing of the wind in the grasses, it was deep inside his own mind. She was listening.

‘I wish to learn of Elen, to make certain that the future bards and makars of history report her story truthfully. I wish to learn her secrets and her triumphs. I wish to learn your magic and your ways of learning.' He found himself putting his palms together as a plea. ‘Too much, you will say, but necessary for Elen's sake. I come from a time far in the future, but still we study her story; her history needs to be told.' He paused, studying the woman's face, unsure whether she understood him. ‘Can you show me Elen's future, the life she led when she came back to the land of song and of dreams? Our stories tell us that her children and her children's children became kings in this faraway land. I would know the truth of what happened to her.'

Her gaze hadn't wavered. She appeared to be studying him closely, but she was still apart, unengaged. He waited, wondering if she understood a word he had said. He had made contact, but was that all he had managed to do?

The sky was clouding over, he realised with a shiver. He glanced up. The birds had gone. He looked back at the rock. She had disappeared.

He sat for a while, coming away from his meditation, grounding himself, and at last stood up, stiffly. Had she registered him at all? He wasn't sure.

He drove around Caernarfon later, staring up at the great castle that had been built almost a thousand years after Elen's lifetime, almost certainly using the stones from the fort itself. Another invasion, this time by a king of England, another empire builder intent on making this mineral-rich land a part of his own kingdom. The site of the great fort of Segontium was perched on a high spot above the town; in the past, before the town was built, it must have had an amazing view down to the Strait and across to Anglesey to the north and towards the west across the River Seiont and away towards Castell Dinas Dinlle and the Irish Sea. Behind it, to the south, lay the great ranges of the Eryri mountains, jagged black silhouettes against the sky.

Why was he here? It was because he wanted to help Cadi. He was intrigued by her research, by her experiences, her battle with a talent which she hadn't fully realised and almost certainly didn't want. She was obviously a seer, a sensitive, but her struggle was with herself. It showed in the published versions of her poems, which he always felt were dumbed down in her Mabinogion stories, the magic carefully suppressed, the metaphysics hidden. Then there was the novel which was her way of rationalising the automatic writing. Which in turn, was her way of channelling something she didn't understand or want, and on top of all that she was trying to cope with the anguish of real life which was at the moment a conflict beyond her control, with a man who was obviously a psychopath.

He parked the car in the road, and peered through the railings at what he could see of the great Roman fort's remains between areas of neatly mown grass. The site was closed, the gates locked but he stood staring through the bars, attempting to feel the echoes, hear the clash of swords as the garrison practised their manoeuvres, see the cavalry horses being led round towards the stables. He stood there for a long time before at last turning away with a strange sense of anticlimax and climbing back into his car.

It was not until he returned to the B&B and the evening meal he had requested when he booked in that he thought to charge his phone. It wasn't until next morning as he ate his breakfast that he finally switched it on and saw the missed calls from Cadi and from DCI Vaughan.

He rang Cadi first. Obviously he had been out of touch for too long. ‘I'll ring Dai Vaughan now and put him in the picture. I expect he was ringing to warn me Ifan was on the loose. I find it hard to believe they would let him go without so much as a warning.' There was a pause. ‘I came up here to do some background work for my own book, but obviously I can't forget yours. I've been doing some Shamanic stuff as well,' he went on after a moment or two. ‘It doesn't matter, obviously, where I am when I do that, but I'd like to stay up here for a few days. I've spoken to Branwen. And I've visited Segontium. I'll go back there tomorrow if it's open and wander around a bit, just to get a feel.'

‘You spoke to Branwen?'

‘She didn't answer but she listened. I had her attention.'

‘Did you ask her about Elen?'

‘I did, yes. I tried to explain we wanted to tell the truth about her.'

‘And did she understand?'

‘I don't know that I described what I wanted very well.'

‘I want to know where Elen hid the grail.'

He laughed. ‘Ah, so you're sure it is the grail, are you? Can you be certain Branwen was there?'

‘No.' He heard the disappointment in her voice. ‘I don't think she was. Of course, Branwen wasn't a Christian.'

He sighed. ‘I think you'll find at that period there was a huge overlap in beliefs. The important thing was the sense of the sacredness of things. Where pagan gods oversaw the natural world, Christian saints took over, often with similar names. Like Bride or Ffraid who morphed into St Bridget.'

‘And Elen. My Elen, seems to have been made a saint. St Helen of Caernarfon.'

‘A saint and a road builder.' She could hear his smile.

‘Tell me what happens, won't you. And please keep your phone on.'

Meryn's landlady had made him a picnic, vegetarian, he noticed with a grateful smile, and she lent him a local footpath map which showed far more detail than the ancient OS map he had dug out of his own files. He wanted to be off the footpaths, of course, and she seemed to have understood that at once, marking what she thought would be the perfect spot for his meditation with a big red cross.

She was right. As he scrambled up a rocky incline next morning and came to a standstill panting, at the top he found he was looking down on a hidden lake at the bottom of a sheltered valley. Down there out of the wind was a stillness that was magical in its solitary peace.

Branwen appeared to have been waiting for him. Standing some metres away he could see her veil moving in the breeze, strands of her hair breaking free, the sunlight in her eyes, but when she spoke he could not see her lips move. The man you avoid, the evil one, came to your house again in the night-time. He intended to burn it with dry bracken he piled against the walls. There was no one there to save it. She was silent for a moment, obviously registering his horror at her words. So, I chased him away. Was that a smile? He was very afraid. He called me ghost and witch and demon, and he was so angry that his fury echoed down the hillside and across the years into the past and into the future. Then he ran away. He won't go back.

‘Thank you with all my heart.' Meryn pressed his hands together and bowed in her direction. ‘That house is my home and where I keep my books.' He had a feeling she would know how much that would mean to him.

The shock of her words had almost made him forget what he was going to ask her. ‘Did you stay with Elen? Does her spirit linger at Caer Seint?' It seemed somehow more appropriate to call Segontium by its Welsh name.

There was no reply.

‘Hers was a fruitful family,' Meryn mused. ‘So many descendants, lines of kings, remembered in legend and myth.' He was gazing down towards the little lake. ‘But not in history,' he added quietly, almost to himself. ‘Never quite remembered in history. And did she care for the roads that the men who came after her called by her name?'

Branwen seemed to smile at that. The roads were built by Macsen's men. She wanted to travel in safety around the lands that her father said were hers. He did love her in his way, Macsen Wledig. When she came back to us she sent the men of the garrison to keep the old roads clear that lead south to the land of her birth. They called her Elen of the Ways.

Meryn nodded silently. ‘And for that her name will be remembered forever.'

And the woman who writes what you call history, Cadi, she will tell the story?

Meryn stared at her, startled. It seemed incongruous to hear Branwen use Cadi's name. To admit she understood what Cadi was doing. ‘Yes. She is writing Elen's story.'

She is in danger. The evil one is close to her now, watching her. Call her here, to the land of snows. She will be safe here.

A cloud drifted across the face of the sun. He narrowed his eyes, trying to keep her in focus as he processed what she had said. ‘How do you know? Is that where he went after trying to burn my house last night?' He scrambled anxiously to his feet. There was no reply. As the landscape grew darker she had faded into the greens and browns of the hillside and disappeared.

He grabbed his rucksack and rummaged for his phone. No signal. Turning back the way he had come, he scrambled up the slope and tried again from the top of the rocks.

‘Cadi! You're in danger. Is Charles there? Ifan is heading in your direction. Ring the police.'