The Scabbard Under the Weir

The mill at Nant Gwyn had a weir of oak stakes and woven hazel, and every spring the flood left things in it: branches, drowned sheep, once a church door. Hawys, the miller's daughter, had the job of clearing it, because she was small enough to climb along the stakes and her father was not.

In the year the old king died at Camlann, the flood left a scabbard.

It was jammed between two stakes, mud to the hilt-mouth, and when she worked it free the mud slid off it as if it did not want to stay. Underneath was leather she did not know the colour of, and fittings of a metal that was not quite gold. She did not know what it was. She knew it was worth more than the mill.

Her father knew what it was. He had heard the story, as everyone had: the enchanted scabbard that kept its wearer from bleeding, and the king's sister who stole it and threw it in a lake, so that Arthur lost the one thing that could have saved him at the last battle. He told Hawys to put it back in the river.

She did not.

She kept it under her bed in a flour sack. Nothing happened for a year. Then her brother cut his leg to the bone with a scythe at harvest, and before she had time to think she had wrapped the scabbard around his thigh like a splint. The bleeding stopped. By morning the wound was a white line.

After that, people came. First from the village, then from the valley, then from farther away. Hawys asked nothing from them, and turned nobody away, and the scabbard never failed.

In the third winter a woman came who was not hurt. She was tall and dark and dressed like a lady, and she stood at the mill door and looked at the flour sack in Hawys's arms the way a hawk looks at a hedge.

"That was mine," she said. "I threw it away because it was saving the wrong man."

"It is saving the right ones now," said Hawys.

The woman considered this for a long moment. Then she laughed, which Hawys had not expected, and turned her horse, and rode away without it.

The mill at Nant Gwyn is gone. The valley still has more old people in it than any other in the west, and nobody there has ever died of a wound.