Free Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve Page A

wind.
    Myrddin looked round sharply as I drew close. “You took long enough,” he said. “What mischief have you been making?”
    I didn’t want to tell him. I could imagine too well the storm that would break over me if he found out the trick I’d used to snare Saint Porroc. Anyway, I’d other things on my mind. “The widow’s daughter is a boy,” I said.
    “And it has taken you all this time to notice?” said Myrddin. “Have I taught you nothing? I don’t expect Arthur and his men to see more than the widow wants us to, but I didn’t think you’d be fooled.” He chuckled,kicking his way through the stinky hummocks of seaweed. “The lady must be as great a magician as I am, to work such a transformation.”
    “But this is different!” I blurted. “I’m not like Peredur! I’m just
dressed
as a boy. He really thinks he is a girl. She’s let him think it all his life!”
    Myrddin didn’t seem to be listening. He crouched beside a stone and traced a raised shape he found in it, a flinty whorl. “What is this?” he asked. “What
is
it?”
    “I don’t know, master. It looks like a ram’s horn. Or a snail.”
    “A stone snail?” He shook his head. “The Creator is keeping secrets from us, Gwyn.”
    He looked up at me. He’d heard my question after all. “You can see the widow’s reasons, surely? Imagine being her. All her life sons have been dropping out of her belly and into battles. One after the next cut down, and then their father. And while she’s still stupid with the news of his death, she finds there’s one more child in her. If you were her, wouldn’t you do anything to stop this last lad from hurrying off to the same death as the others? Bring him up to know nothing of riding, weapons, hunting, any of the war-games young men play? Keep him safe at your side always?”
    “But it won’t work, will it?” I said. “Not for ever. He may fool people now, but once he grows a beard and his voice turns gruff, people will think it odd. Even he will notice that he’s not like other girls! We should tell him the truth.”
    My master shook his head. “No, Gwyna.” (He still called me Gwyna sometimes, when we were alone, as ifto remind me of what I really was.) “The only way she’ll keep that boy out of the wars is if we put an end to wars. Raise up one strong man who’ll stop this petty squabbling. Bring peace back, and in that peace boys will be able to grow to manhood without learning how to butcher one another, and men of wisdom will turn their minds to greater matters, such as snails entombed in sea-stones.”
    He frowned, looking back at the hall, considering Peredur as if he was another freak of nature; another stone snail. “Yes. That boy has a strange road ahead of him, but he must find his way alone.”
    We walked back along the beach. Porroc was still in the sea. “Saint Porroc has all the fine things of this place heaped up behind a curtain in his chapel,” I said.
    I felt Myrddin’s eyes on me. “And how do you come to know that?”
    I shrugged. Myrddin looked at me, and then at the hermit, bobbing half drowned in the breakers. There was a laugh in his voice. “Perhaps you have learned something from me after all…”
    When I got back to the hall that evening Peredur’s mother watched me nervously, as if I frightened her as much as Arthur himself. Peredur was a good daughter, and must have told her about the strange questions Myrddin’s boy had asked. Peredur did not join us that night to eat the venison that Arthur and his men brought back with them.
    Next morning, while I was saddling our horses, Arthur and a few of his men went into Saint Porroc’schapel. The saint and his monks stood shouting curses at them, and warning them that Porroc had been sent a vision by the Lord only yesterday, and that the earth would open up and swallow Arthur shoulder deep if he defiled the hermit’s holy place. Arthur paid them no heed. He came out with armfuls of gold, and his