Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘He’s out there somewhere,’ Bors said vaguely, waving to the south. ‘We never found him.’ He suddenly stiffened, and I looked round to see that Guinevere was watching us. She had abandoned her prison robe and was dressed in a leather jerkin, woollen trews and long boots: a man’s clothes like those she had used to wear when hunting. I later discovered she had found the clothes in Aquae Sulis and, though they were of poor quality, she somehow managed to imbue them with elegance. She had the Saxon gold at her neck, a quiver of arrows on her back, the hunter’s bow in her hand and a short knife at her waist.

  ‘Lord Bors,’ she greeted her old lover’s champion icily.

  ‘Lady.’ Bors stood up and gave her a clumsy obeisance.

  She looked at his shield that still bore Lancelot’s insignia, then raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you bored with him too?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m a Briton, lady,’ Bors said stiffly.

  ‘And a brave Briton,’ Guinevere said warmly. ‘I think we’re fortunate to have you here.’ Her words were precisely right and Bors, who had been embarrassed by the encounter, suddenly looked coyly pleased. He muttered something about being happy to see Guinevere, but he was not a man who made compliments elegantly and he blushed as he spoke. ‘Can I assume,’ Guinevere asked him, ‘that your old lord is with the Saxons?’

  ‘He is, Lady.’

  ‘Then I pray he comes within range of my bow,’ Guinevere said.

  ‘He might not, Lady,’ Bors said, for he knew Lancelot’s reluctance to place himself in danger, ‘but you’ll have plenty of Saxons to kill before the day’s out. More than enough.’

  And he was right, for beneath us, where the last of the river mist was being burned away by the sun, the Saxon horde was gathering. Cerdic and Aelle, still believing that their greatest enemy was trapped on Mynydd Baddon, were planning an overwhelming assault. It would not be a subtle attack, for no spearmen were being mustered to take us in the flank, but rather it would be a simple, crude hammerblow that would come in overwhelming force straight up Mynydd Baddon’s southern face. Hundreds of warriors were being gathered for the attack and their close-ranked spears glinted in the early light.

  ‘How many are there?’ Guinevere asked me.

  ‘Too many, Lady,’ I said bleakly.

  ‘Half their army,’ Bors said, and explained to her that the Saxon Kings believed that Arthur and his best men were trapped on the hilltop.

  ‘So he’s fooled them?’ Guinevere asked, not without a note of pride.

  ‘Or we have,’ I said glumly, indicating Arthur’s banner that stirred fitfully in the small breeze.

  ‘So now we have to beat them,’ Guinevere responded briskly, though how, I could not tell. Not since I had been trapped on Ynys Mon by Diwrnach’s men had I felt so helpless, but on that grim night I had possessed Merlin for an ally and his magic had seen us out of the trap. I had no magic on my side now and I could foresee nothing but doom.

  All morning long I watched the Saxon warriors assemble among the growing wheat, and I watched as their wizards danced along the lines and as their chiefs harangued the spearmen. The men in the front of the Saxon battle line were steady enough, for they were the trained warriors who had sworn oaths to their lords, but the rest of that vast assembly must have been the equivalent of our levy, the fyrd the Saxons called it, and those men kept wandering away. Some went to the river, others back to the camps, and from our commanding height it was like watching shepherds trying to gather a vast flock; as soon as one part of the army was assembled, another would break apart and the whole business would start over again, and all the time the Saxon drums sounded. They were using great hollow logs that they thumped with wooden clubs so that their heartbeat of death echoed from the wooded slope on the valley’s far side. The Saxons would be drinking ale, bolstering the courage needed to come up into our spears. Some of my own men were guzzling mead. I discouraged it, but stopping a soldier from drinking was like keeping a dog from barking, and many of my men needed the fire that mead puts into a belly for they could count as well as I. A thousand men were coming to fight fewer than three hundred.

  Bors had asked that he and his men fight in the centre of our line and I had agreed. I hoped he would die swiftly, cut down by an axe or a spear, for if he was taken alive then his death would be long and horrible. He and his men had stripped their shields back to the bare wood, and now were drinking mead, and I did not blame them.

  Issa was sober. ‘They’ll overlap us, Lord,’ he said worriedly.

  ‘They will,’ I agreed, and wished I could say something more useful, but in truth I was transfixed by the enemy preparations and helpless to know what to do about the attack. I did not doubt that my men could fight against the best Saxon spearmen, but I only had enough spearmen to make a shield wall a hundred paces wide and the Saxon attack, when it came, would be three times that width. We would fight in the centre, we would kill, and the enemy would surge around our flanks to capture the hill’s summit and slaughter us from behind.

  Issa grimaced. His wolf-tailed helmet was an old one of mine on which he had hammered a pattern of silver stars. His pregnant wife, Scarach, had found some vervain growing near one of the springs and Issa wore a sprig on his helmet, hoping it would keep him from harm. He offered me some of the plant, but I refused. ‘You keep it,’ I said.

  ‘What do we do, Lord?’ he asked.

  ‘We can’t run away,’ I said. I had thought of making a desperate lunge northwards, but there were Saxons beyond the northern saddle and we would have to fight our way up that slope into their spears. We had small chance of doing that, and a much greater chance of being trapped in the saddle between two enemies on higher ground. ‘We have to beat them here,’ I said, disguising my conviction that we could not beat them at all. I could have fought four hundred men, maybe even six hundred, but not the thousand Saxons who were now readying themselves at the foot of the slope.

  ‘If we had a Druid,’ Issa said, then let the thought die, but I knew exactly what irked him. He was thinking that it was not good to go into battle without prayers. The Christians in our ranks were praying with their arms outstretched in imitation of their God’s death and they had told me they needed no priest to intercede for them, but we pagans liked to have a Druid’s curses raining on our enemies before a fight. But we had no Druid, and the absence not only denied us the power of his curses, but suggested that from this day on we would have to fight without our Gods because those Gods had fled in disgust from the interrupted rites on Mai Dun.

  I summoned Pyrlig and ordered him to curse the enemy. He blanched. ‘But I’m a bard, Lord, not a Druid,’ he protested.

  ‘You began the Druid’s training?’

  ‘All bards do, Lord, but I was never taught the mysteries.’

  ‘The Saxons don’t know that,’ I said. ‘Go down the hill, hop on one leg and curse their filthy souls to the dungheap of Annwn.’

  Pyrlig did his best, but he could not keep his balance and I sensed there was more fear than vituperation in his curses. The Saxons, seeing him, sent six of their own wizards to counter his magic. The naked wizards, their hair hung with small charms and stiffened into grotesque spikes with matted cow dung, clambered up the slope to spit and curse at Pyrlig who, seeing their approach, backed nervously away. One of the Saxon magicians carried a human thigh bone that he used to chase poor Pyrlig even further up the slope and, when he saw our bard’s obvious terror, the Saxon jerked his body in obscene gestures. The enemy wizards came still closer so that we could hear their shrill voices over the booming thud of the drums in the valley.

  ‘What are they saying?’ Guinevere had come to stand beside me.

  ‘They’re using charms, Lady,’ I said. ‘They’re beseeching their Gods to fill us with fear and turn our legs to water.’ I listened to the chanting again. ‘They beg that our eyes be blinded, that our spears be broken and our swords blunted.’ The man with the thigh bone caught sight of Guinevere and he turned on her and spat a vitup
erative stream of obscenities.

  ‘What’s he saying now?’ she asked.

  ‘You don’t wish to know, Lady.’

  ‘But I do, Derfel, I do.’

  ‘Then I don’t wish to tell you.’

  She laughed. The wizard, only thirty paces away from us now, jerked his tattooed crotch at her and shook his head, rolled his eyes, and screamed that she was a cursed witch and promised that her womb would dry to a crust and her breasts turn sour as gall, and then there was an abrupt twang beside my ear and the wizard was suddenly silent. An arrow had transfixed his gullet, going clean through his neck so that one half of the arrow jutted behind his nape and the feathered shaft stuck out beneath his chin. He stared up at Guinevere, he gurgled, and then the bone dropped from his hand. He fingered the arrow, still staring at her, then shuddered and suddenly collapsed.

  ‘It’s considered bad luck to kill an enemy’s magicians,’ I said in gentle reproof.

  ‘Not now,’ Guinevere said vengefully, ‘not now.’ She took another arrow from her quiver and fitted it to the string, but the other five wizards had seen the fate of their fellow magician and were bounding down the hill out of range. They were shrieking angrily as they went, protesting our bad faith. They had a right to protest, and I feared that the death of the one wizard would only fill the attackers with a cold anger. Guinevere took the arrow off the bow. ‘So what will they do, Derfel?’ she asked me.

  ‘In a few minutes’ time,’ I said, ‘that great mass of men will come up the hill. You can see how they’ll come,’ I pointed down to the Saxon formation that was still being pushed and herded into shape, ‘a hundred men in their front rank, and nine or ten men in every file to push those front men onto our spears. We can face those hundred men, Lady, but our files will only have two or three men apiece, and we won’t be able to push them back down the hill. We’ll stop them for a while, and the shield walls will lock, but we won’t drive them backwards and when they see that all our men are locked in the fighting line, they’ll send their rearward files to wrap around and take us from behind.’

  Her green eyes stared at me, a slightly mocking look on her face. She was the only woman I ever knew who could look me straight in the eyes, and I always found her direct gaze unsettling. Guinevere had a knack of making a man feel like a fool, though on that day, as the Saxon drums beat and the great horde steeled themselves to climb up to our blades, she wished me nothing but success. ‘Are you saying we’ve lost?’ she asked lightly.

  ‘I’m saying, Lady, that I don’t know if I can win,’ I answered grimly. I was wondering whether to do the unexpected and form my men into a wedge that would charge down the hill and pierce deep into the Saxon mass. It was possible that such an attack would surprise them and even panic them, but the danger was that my men would be surrounded by enemies on the hillside and, when the last of us was dead, the Saxons would climb to the summit and take our undefended families.

  Guinevere slung the bow on her shoulder. ‘We can win,’ she said confidently, ‘we can win easily.’ For a moment I did not take her seriously. ‘I can tear the heart out of them,’ she said more forcefully.

  I glanced at her and saw the fierce joy in her face. If she was to make a fool of any man that day it would be Cerdic and Aelle, not me. ‘How can we win?’ Tasked her.

  A mischievous look came to her face. ‘Do you trust me, Derfel?’

  ‘I trust you, Lady.’

  ‘Then give me twenty fit men.’

  I hesitated. I had been forced to leave some spearmen on the northern rampart of the hill to guard against an attack across the saddle, and I could scarce lose twenty of the remaining men who faced south; but even if I had two hundred spearmen more I knew I was going to lose this battle on the hilltop, and so I nodded. ‘I’ll give you twenty men from the levy,’ I agreed, ‘and you give me a victory.’ She smiled and strode away, and I shouted at Issa to find twenty young men and send them with her. ‘She’s going to give us a victory!’ I told him loud enough for my men to hear and they, sensing hope on a day when there was none, smiled and laughed.

  Yet victory, I decided, needed a miracle, or else the arrival of allies. Where was Culhwch? All day I had expected to see his troops in the south, but there had been no sign of him and I decided he must have made a wide detour around Aquae Sulis in an attempt to join Arthur. I could think of no other troops who might come to our aid, but in truth, even if Culhwch had joined me, his numbers could not have swelled ours enough to withstand the Saxon assault.

  That assault was near now. The wizards had done their work and a group of Saxon horsemen now left the ranks and spurred uphill. I shouted for my own horse, had Issa cup his hands to heave me into the saddle, then I rode down the slope to meet the enemy envoys. Bors might have accompanied me, for he was a lord, but he did not want to face the men he had just deserted and so I went alone.

  Nine Saxons and three Britons approached. One of the Britons was Lancelot, as beautiful as ever in his white scale armour that dazzled in the sunlight. His helmet was silvered and crested with a pair of swan’s wings that were ruffled by the small wind. His two companions were Amhar and Loholt, who rode against their father beneath Cerdic’s skin-hung skull and beneath my own father’s great bull skull that was spattered with fresh blood in honour of this new war. Cerdic and Aelle both climbed the hill and with them were a half-dozen Saxon chieftains; all big men in fur robes and with moustaches hanging to their sword belts. The last Saxon was an interpreter and he, like the other Saxons, rode clumsily, just as I did. Only Lancelot and the twins were good horsemen.

  We met halfway down the hill. None of the horses liked the slope and all shifted nervously. Cerdic scowled up at our rampart. He could see the two banners there, and a prickle of spear points above our makeshift barricade, but nothing more. Aelle gave me a grim nod while Lancelot avoided my gaze.

  ‘Where is Arthur?’ Cerdic finally demanded of me. His pale eyes looked at me from a helmet rimmed with gold and gruesomely crested with a dead man’s hand. Doubtless, I thought, a British hand. The trophy had been smoked in a fire so that its skin was blackened and its fingers hooked like claws.

  ‘Arthur is taking his ease, Lord King,’ I said. ‘He left it to me to swat you away while he plans how to remove the smell of your filth from Britain.’ The interpreter murmured in Lancelot’s ear.

  ‘Is Arthur here?’ Cerdic demanded. Convention dictated that the leaders of armies conferred before battle, and Cerdic had construed my presence as an insult. He had expected Arthur to come and meet him, not some underling.

  ‘He’s here, Lord,’ I said airily, ‘and everywhere. Merlin transports him through the clouds.’

  Cerdic spat. He was in dull armour, with no show other than the ghastly hand on his gold-edged helmet’s crest. Aelle was dressed in his usual black fur, had gold at his wrists and neck and a single bull’s horn projecting from the front of his helmet. He was the older man, but Cerdic, as ever, took the lead. His clever, pinched face gave me a dismissive glance. ‘It would be best,’ he said, ‘if you filed down the hill and laid your weapolns on the road. We shall kill some of you as a tribute to our Gods and take the rest of you as slaves, but you must give us the woman who killed our wizard. She we will kill.’

  ‘She killed the wizard on my orders,’ I said, ‘in return for Merlin’s beard.’ It had been Cerdic who had slashed off a hank of Merlin’s beard, an insult I had no mind to forgive.

  ‘Then we shall kill you,’ Cerdic said.

  ‘Liofa tried to do that once,’ I said, needling him, ‘and yesterday Wulfger of the Sarnaed tried to snatch my soul, but he is the one who is back in his ancestors’ sty.’

  Aelle intervened. ‘We won’t kill you, Derfel,’ he growled, ‘not if you surrender.’ Cerdic began to protest, but Aelle hushed him with an abrupt gesture of his maimed right hand. ‘We will not kill him,’ he insisted. ‘Did you give your woman the ring?’ he asked me.

  ‘She wears it now, Lord King,’ I said, gestu
ring up the hill.

  ‘She’s here?’ He sounded surprised.

  ‘With your grandchildren.’

  ‘Let me see them,’ Aelle demanded. Cerdic again protested. He was here to prepare us for slaughter, not to witness a happy family meeting, but Aelle ignored his ally’s protest. ‘I would like to see them once,’ he told me, and so I turned and shouted uphill.

  Ceinwyn appeared a moment later with Morwenna in one hand and Seren in the other. They hesitated at the rampart, then stepped delicately down the grass slope. Ceinwyn was dressed simply in a linen robe, but her hair shone gold in the spring sun and I thought, as ever, that her beauty was magical. I felt a lump in my throat and tears at my eyes as she came so lightly down the hill. Seren looked nervous, but Morwenna had a defiant look on her face. They stopped beside my horse and stared up at the Saxon Kings. Ceinwyn and Lancelot looked at each other and Ceinwyn spat deliberately on the grass to void the evil of his presence.

  Cerdic pretended disinterest, but Aelle clumsily slid down from his worn leather saddle. ‘Tell them I am glad to see them,’ he told me, ‘and tell me the children’s names.’

  ‘The older is called Morwenna,’ I said, ‘and the younger is Seren. It means star.’ I looked at my daughters. ‘This King,’ I told them in British, ‘is your grandfather.’

  Aelle fumbled in his black robe and brought out two gold coins. He gave one each to the girls, then looked mutely at Ceinwyn. She understood what he wanted and, letting go of her daughters’ hands, she stepped into his embrace. He must have stunk, for his fur robe was greasy and full of filth, but she did not flinch. When he had kissed her he stepped back, lifted her hand to his lips, and smiled to see the small chip of blue-green agate in its golden ring. ‘Tell her I will spare her life, Derfel,’ he said.

  I told her and she smiled. ‘Tell him it would be better if he went back to his own land,’ she said, ‘and that we would take much joy in visiting him there.’

  Aelle smiled when that was translated, but Cerdic just scowled. ‘This is our land!’ he insisted, and his horse pawed at the ground as he spoke and my daughters backed away from his venom.