Stronghold by Paul Finch Read Free Book Online

though he was increasingly worried that this was a vain hope. Earl Corotocus, though a valued member of the royal court and a steadfast defender of the faith, was a cruel and violent man. He kept a great house and ran orderly estates, he undertook the most dangerous missions in the name of his king, but there was nothing Christian in the way he conducted his campaigns - they lacked both chivalry and magnanimity; he was rarely generous to those he defeated. Not only that, he employed a man like Zacharius, whose sins were deemed tolerable because of his uses, and yet whose uses were also of questionable virtue. And, of course, Benan himself was no saint, no martyr. He hung his head in shame as he prayed. He never spoke out against the earl's excesses. He rarely questioned Zacharius any more for fear that the doctor's glib tongue would tie him in intellectual knots.
    The earl's army was in a poor moral state right now, Benan reflected. They had crushed the Welsh easily, without losing a single man, without incurring so much as a minor flesh wound. That had seemed very unlikely given the initial circumstances of this uprising. A number of English-held castles had been besieged or, in the cases of Hawarden, Ruthin, Denbigh and Grogen, captured. The town of Caerphilly had been burnt to the ground. To have then entered the fray and triumphed so easily, it was tempting to say that God was on the side of Earl Corotocus. But deep down inside, Benan had a nagging fear - based as much on common sense as on clerical instinct - that the exact opposite was true. And that God would very soon prove this.

CHAPTER SIX
     
    "Countess Madalyn, what do you know of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain?"
    At first the countess was too distracted to respond. They had emerged onto a barren hillside. After the green fog of the cave, she was disoriented by the glaring daylight. There was also a stiff, raw breeze. It wasn't as bitingly cold as it had been earlier, but her body ached with fatigue and she hunched under her fleece.
    "Thirteen Treasures?" she said. "Artefacts... artefacts from myth?"
    "Not myth, my lady... history." Gwyddon strode on. "Wondrous weapons of war gathered by the founder of my order, Myrlyn, as protection for Britain after Rome's legions were withdrawn. Yet, one by one, in the darkness and chaos of those strife-torn ages, all of them were lost. All except one. This one."
    He came to a halt. Countess Madalyn halted alongside him.
    In front of them, a large circular vat made from something like beaten copper was sitting on a pile of burning logs. Two younger priests used poles to stir the concoction bubbling inside it. There was a noxious smell - it was sickening, reminiscent of burning dung. Foul, brackish smoke rose from the vat in a turgid column. When the countess came closer, she saw a brown, soup-like liquid, all manner of vile things swimming around inside it. At this proximity, its hot, rank fumes were almost overpowering.
    "This effluent?" she said. "This filth...?"
    "Not the filth," Gwyddon replied. "The thing that contains it."
    "A cauldron?"
    "Not just any cauldron. You've heard of Cymedai?"
    She looked sharply round at him.
    He smiled. "I see that you have."
    "This is the Cauldron of Regeneration? But that is only a legend."
    "Certain details concerning its origins are legend. Not all."
    She appraised the cauldron again. There were no eldritch carvings around its rim, as she might have expected, no images or inscriptions on its tarnished sides. It looked ordinary, in fact less than that. It might have been something she'd find covered in cobwebs in a cellar or the cluttered corner of an apothecary's shop.
    "It was never the property of two ogres living in a bottomless lake," Gwyddon said. "Its creators were never roasted alive in an iron building that was actually a giant oven. But there is some truth in the story. It was brought here from Ireland to keep it from the Irish king Matholwch, who sought it for his own. Once