The Winged Man
by Moyra Caldecott
Category: Fiction

To this day, throughout the ancient city of Bath, there exist statues and images of the man who was the legendary founder of the city, and the father of King Lear. A leper and a swineherd... a necromancer and a wise king... his memory lives on. Restless at the royal court, the young Prince Bladud sets off to consult an oracle in the west country - a wild wooded place near a mysterious hot spring that gushes from a cave. There the priestess tells him that he will be a great king, and that one day he will fly like an eagle. When he returns to his father's hill-fort at Trinovantum, ancient London, Bladud's head is full of magnificent dreams... until trickery entraps him in a loveless marriage. His unquenchable thirst for knowledge, sharpened by a mysterious experience at the burial mound of his forefathers, takes him away from his home and wife on a dangerous journey to faraway Greece. There he meets and falls in love with a woman who has appeared to him many times already in dreams and visions. On returning to his own country, he finds his father dying and his wife conspiring with his brother to disinherit him. Then, found to be suffering from a disease believed to be leprosy, he is driven from the court and shunned by his people. In this dark time he becomes a swineherd. One day, he notices his pigs are free of sores after wallowing in hot mud. He tries the healing waters of Sul himself, is cured, and returns to claim his throne... His was a golden age of wisdom and magic, where Otherworld beings mingle freely with the people of this world, and where swans and ravens and owls take on their own special mysterious significance. Full of brilliant imagination, this colourful fantasy draws its strength and inspiration from the strange and beautiful realms of Celtic and Greek myth and legend.