Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Gwydre,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘We should have killed him, but I knew I couldn’t do it. Not Arthur’s son. That was a terrible weakness.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd!’ he said wearily. ‘What is Gwydre’s life to the Gods? Or to the prospect of restoring Britain? Nothing! But I could not do it. Oh, I had excuses. Caleddin’s scroll is quite plain, it says that “the son of the land’s King” must be sacrificed, and Arthur is no king, but that’s a mere quibble. The rite needed Gwydre’s death and I could not bring myself to do it. It was no trouble killing Gawain, it was even a pleasure stilling that virgin fool’s babble, but not Gwydre, and so the rite went unfinished.’ He was miserable now, hunched and miserable. ‘I failed,’ he added bitterly.

  ‘And Nimue won’t forgive you?’ I asked hesitantly.

  ‘Forgive? She doesn’t know the word’s meaning! Forgiveness is a weakness to Nimue! And now she will perform the rites, and she won’t fail, Derfel. If it means killing every mother’s son in Britain, she’ll do it. Put them all in the pot and give it a good stir!’ He half smiled, then shrugged. ‘But now, of course, I’ve made things far more difficult for her. Like the sentimental old fool that I am, I had to help Arthur win this scufHe. I used Gawain to do it and now, I think, she hates me.’

  ‘Why?’

  He raised his eyes to the smoky sky as though appealing to the Gods to grant me some small measure of understanding. ‘Do you think, you fool,’ he asked me, ‘that the corpse of a virgin prince is so readily available? It took me years to pump that halfwit’s head full of nonsense so that he’d be ready for his sacrifice! And what did I do today? I threw Gawain away! Just to help Arthur.’

  ‘But we won!’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’ He glared at me. ‘You won? What is that revolting thing on your shield?’

  I turned to look at the shield. ‘The cross.’

  Merlin rubbed his eyes. ‘There is a war between the Gods, Derfel, and today I gave victory to Yahweh.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It’s the name of the Christian God. Sometimes they call him Jehovah. So far as I can determine he’s nothing but a humble fire God from some wretched far-off country who is now intent on usurping all the other Gods. He must be an ambitious little toad, because he’s winning, and it was I who gave him this victory today. What do you think men will remember of this battle?’

  ‘Arthur’s victory,’ I said firmly.

  ‘In a hundred years, Derfel,’ Merlin said, ‘they will not remember whether it was a victory or a defeat.’

  I paused. ‘Cuneglas’s death?’ I offered.

  ‘Who cares about Cuneglas? Just another forgotten king.’

  ‘Aelle’s death?’ I suggested.

  ‘A dying dog would deserve more attention.’

  ‘Then what?’

  He grimaced at my obtuseness. ‘They will remember, Derfel, that the cross was carried on your shields. Today, you fool, we gave Britain to the Christians, and I was the one who gave it to them. I gave Arthur his ambition, but the price, Derfel, was mine. Do you understand now?’

  ‘Yes, Lord.’

  ‘And so I made Nimue’s task a great deal harder. But she will try, Derfel, and she is not like me. She is not weak. There is a hardness inside Nimue, such a hardness.’

  I smiled. ‘She will not kill Gwydre,’ I said confidently, ‘for neither Arthur nor I will let her, and she won’t be given Excalibur, so how can she win?’

  He gazed at me. ‘Do you think, idiot, that either you or Arthur are strong enough to resist Nimue? She is a woman, and what women want, they get, and if the world and all it holds must be broken in the getting, then so be it. She’ll break me first, then turn her eye on you. Isn’t that the truth, my young prophet?’ he asked Taliesin, but the bard had closed his eyes. Merlin shrugged. ‘I shall take her Gawain’s ashes, and give her what help I can,’ he said, ‘because I promised her that. But it will all end in tears, Derfel, it will all end in tears. What a mess I have made. What a terrible mess.’ He pulled his cloak about his shoulders. ‘I shall sleep now,’ he announced.

  Beyond the fire the Blackshields raped their captives and I sat staring into the flames. I had helped win a great victory, and was inexpressibly sad.

  I did not see Arthur that night and met him only briefly in the misty half-light just before the dawn. He greeted me with all his old vivacity, throwing an arm about my shoulders. ‘I want to thank you,’ he said, ‘for looking after Guinevere these last weeks.’ He was in his full armour and was making a hasty breakfast from a mildewed loaf of bread.

  ‘If anything,’ I said, ‘Guinevere looked after me.’

  ‘The wagons, you mean! I do wish I’d seen it!’ He threw down the bread as Hygwydd, his servant, led Llamrei out of the gloom, ‘I might see you tonight, Derfel,’ Arthur said as he let Hygwydd heave him up into the saddle, ‘or maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘Where are you going, Lord?’

  ‘After Cerdic, of course.’ He settled himself on Llamrei’s back, gathered her reins and took his shield and spear from Hygwydd. He kicked back his heels, going to join his horsemen who were shadowy shapes in the mist. Mordred was also riding with Arthur, no longer under guard, but accepted as a useful soldier in his own right. I watched him curb his horse and remembered the Saxon gold I had found in Lindinis. Had Mordred betrayed us? If he had I could not prove it, and the battle’s result negated his treachery, but I still felt a pang of hatred for my King. He caught my malevolent gaze and turned his horse away. Arthur shouted his men on and I listened to the thunder of their departing hoofs.

  I stirred my sleeping men awake with the butt of a spear and ordered them to find Saxon captives to dig more graves and build more funeral pyres. I believed I would spend my own day doing that weary business, but in mid-morning Sagramor sent a messenger begging me to bring a detachment of spearmen to Aquae Sulis where trouble had broken out. The disturbances had begun with a rumour among Tewdric’s spearmen that Cerdic’s treasury had been discovered and that Arthur was keeping it all for himself. Their proof was Arthur’s disappearance and their revenge was a proposal to pull down the city’s central shrine because it had once been a pagan temple. I managed to calm that frenzy by announcing that two chests of gold had indeed been discovered, but that they were under guard and their contents would be fairly shared once Arthur returned. At Tewdric’s suggestion we sent a half-dozen of his soldiers to help guard the chests, which were still in the remnants of Cerdic’s encampment. The Christians of Gwent calmed down, but then the spearmen of Powys made new trouble by blaming Oengus mac Airem for Cuneglas’s death. The enmity between Powys and Demetia went back a long way, for Oengus mac Airem was famously fond of raiding his richer neighbour’s harvest; indeed, Powys was known in Demetia as ‘our larder’, but this day it was the men of Powys who picked the quarrel by insisting that Cuneglas would never have died if the Blackshields had not come late to the battle. The Irish have never been reluctant to join a fight, and no sooner were Tewdric’s men placated than there was a clash of swords and spears outside the law courts as Powysians and Blackshields met in a bloody skirmish. Sagramor brought an uneasy peace by the simple expedient of killing the leaders of both factions, but throughout the rest of that day there was trouble between the two nations. The discord grew worse when it was learned that Tewdric had sent a detachment of soldiers to occupy Lactodu-rum, a northern fortress that had not been in British hands for a lifetime, but which the leaderless men of Powys claimed had always been in their territory, not Gwent’s, and a hastily raised band of Powysian spearmen set off after Tewdric’s men to challenge their claim. The Blackshields, who had no dog in the Lactodurum fight, nevertheless insisted that the men of Gwent were right, only because they knew that opinion would infuriate the Powysians, and so there were more battles. They were deadly brawls about a town of which most of the combatants had never heard and which might, anyway, still be garrisoned by the Saxons.

  We Dumnon
ians managed to avoid those battles, and so it was our spearmen who guarded the streets and thus confined the fighting to the taverns, but in the afternoon we were dragged into the disputes when Argante and a score of attendants arrived from Glevum to discover that Guinevere had occupied the bishop’s house that was built behind the temple of Minerva. The bishop’s palace was not the largest or most comfortable in Aquae Sulis, that distinction belonged to the palace of Cildydd, the magistrate, but Lancelot had used Cildydd’s house while he was in Aquae Sulis and for that reason Guinevere avoided it. Argante nevertheless insisted that she should have the bishop’s house, for it was within the sacred enclosure, and an enthusiastic party of Blackshields went to evict Guinevere, only to be met by a score of my men intent on defending her. Two men died before Guinevere announced that she did not care what house sheltered her and moved to the priests’ chambers that were built alongside the great baths. Argante, victorious in that encounter, declared that Guinevere’s new quarters were fitting, for she claimed that the priests’ chambers had once been a brothel, and Argante’s Druid, Fergal, led a crowd of Blackshields to the bath-house where they amused themselves by demanding to know the brothel’s prices and shouting for Guinevere to show them her body. Another contingent of Blackshields had occupied the temple and thrown out the hastily erected cross that Tewdric had placed above the altar, and scores of red-robed spearmen of Gwent were gathering to fight their way inside and replace the cross.

  Sagramor and I brought spearmen to the sacred enclosure which, in the late afternoon, promised to become a bloodbath. My men guarded the temple doors, Sagramor’s protected Guinevere, but we were both outnumbered by the drunken warriors from Demetia and Gwent, while the Powysians, glad to have a cause with which they could annoy the Blackshields, shouted their support for Guinevere. I pushed through the mead-sodden crowd, clubbing down the most raucous troublemakers, but I feared the violence that grew ever more menacing as the sun sank. It was Sagramor who finally brought an uneasy peace to the evening. He climbed to the bath-house roof and there, standing tall between two statues, he roared for silence. He had stripped himself to the waist so that, contrasted with the white marble of the warriors on either side, his black skin was all the more striking. ‘If any of you have an argument,’ he announced in his curiously accented British, ‘you will have it with me first. Man to man! Sword or spear, take your pick.’ He drew his long curved sword and glared at the angry men below.

  ‘Get rid of the whore!’ an anonymous voice shouted from the Blackshields.

  ‘You object to whores?’ Sagramor shouted back. ‘What kind of a warrior are you? A virgin? If you’re so intent on being virtuous then come up here and I’ll geld you.’ That brought laughter and so ended the immediate danger.

  Argante sulked in her palace. She was calling herself the Empress of Dumnonia and demanding that Sagramor and I provide her with Dumnonian guards, but she was already so thickly attended by her father’s Blackshields that neither of us obeyed. Instead we both stripped naked and lowered ourselves into the great Roman bath where we lay exhausted. The hot water was wonderfully restful. Steam wisped up to the broken tiles of the roof. ‘I have been told,’ Sagramor said, ‘that this is the largest building in Britain.’

  I eyed the vast roof. ‘It probably is.’

  ‘But when I was a child,’ Sagramor said, ‘I was a slave in a house even bigger than this.’

  ‘In Numidia?’

  He nodded. ‘Though I come from farther south. I was sold into slavery when I was very young. I don’t even remember my parents.’

  ‘When did you leave Numidia?’ I asked.

  ‘After I had killed my first man. A steward, he was. And I was ten years old? Eleven? I ran away and joined a Roman army as a slinger. I can still put a stone between a man’s eyes at fifty paces. Then I learned to ride. I fought in Italy, Thrace and Egypt, then took money to join the Frankish army. That was where Arthur took me captive.’ He was rarely so forthcoming. Silence, indeed, was one of Sagramor’s most effective weapons, that and his hawklike face and his terrifying reputation, but in private he was a gentle and reflective soul. ‘Whose side are we on?’ he now asked me with a puzzled look.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Guinevere? Argante?’

  I shrugged. ‘You tell me.’

  He ducked his head under the water, then came up and wiped his eyes clear. ‘I suppose Guinevere,’ he said, ‘if the rumour is true.’

  ‘What rumour?’

  ‘That she and Arthur were together last night,’ he said, ‘though being Arthur, of course, they spent the night talking. He’ll wear his tongue out long before his sword.’

  ‘No danger of you doing that.’

  ‘No,’ he said with a smile, then the smile broadened as he looked at me. ‘I hear, Derfel, that you broke a shield wall?’

  ‘Only a thin one,’ I said, ‘and a young one.’

  ‘I broke a thick one,’ he said with a grin, ‘a very thick one, and full of experienced warriors,’ and I ducked him under the water in revenge, then splashed away before he could drown me. The baths were gloomy because no torches were lit and the very last of the day’s long sunlight could not reach down through the holes in the roof. Steam misted the big room, and though I was aware that other folk were using the huge bath, I had not recognized any of them, but now, swimming across the pool, I saw a figure in white robes stooping to a man sitting on one of the underwater steps. I recognized the tufts of hair on either side of the stooping man’s shaven forehead and a heartbeat later caught his words. ‘Trust me on this,’ he was saying with a quiet fervency, ‘just leave it to me, Lord King.’ He looked up at that moment and saw me. It was Bishop Sansum, newly released from his captivity and restored to all his former honours because of Arthur’s promises to Tewdric. He seemed surprised to see me, but managed a sickly smile. ‘The Lord Derfel,’ he said, stepping cautiously back from the bath’s brink, ‘one of our heroes!’

  ‘Derfel!’ the man on the pool steps roared, and I saw it was Oengus mac Airem who now launched himself to offer me a bear-like embrace. ‘First time I’ve ever hugged a naked man,’ the King of the Blackshields said, ‘and I can’t say I see the attraction of it. First time I’ve taken a bath too. Do you think it will kill me?’

  ‘No.’ I said, then glanced towards Sansum. ‘You keep strange company, Lord King.’

  ‘Wolves have fleas, Derfel, wolves have fleas,’ Oengus grunted.

  ‘So in what matter,’ I asked Sansum, ‘should my Lord King trust you?’

  Sansum did not answer, and Oengus himself looked unnaturally sheepish. ‘The shrine,’ he finally offered as answer. ‘The good bishop was saying that he could arrange for my men to use it as a temple for a while. Isn’t that right, Bishop?’

  ‘Exactly so, Lord King,’ Sansum said.

  ‘You’re both bad liars,’ I said, and Oengus laughed. Sansum gave me a hostile look, then scuttled away down the flagstones. He had been a free man for just hours now, yet already he was plotting. ‘What was he telling you, Lord King?’ I pressed Oengus, who was a man I liked. A simple man, a strong man, a rogue, but a very good friend.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘He was talking about your daughter,’ I guessed.

  ‘Pretty little thing, isn’t she?’ Oengus said. ‘Too thin, of course, and with a mind like a wolf bitch on heat. It’s a strange world, Derfel. I breed sons dull as oxen and daughters sharp as wolves.’ He paused to greet Sagramor who had followed me across the water. ‘So what is to happen to Argante?’ Oengus asked me.

  ‘I don’t know, Lord.’

  ‘Arthur married her, didn’t he?’

  ‘I’m not even sure of that,’ I said.

  He gave me a sharp look, then smiled as he understood my meaning. ‘She says they are properly married, but then she would. I wasn’t sure Arthur really wanted to marry her, but I pressed him. It was one less mouth to feed, you understand.’ He paused for a second. ‘The thing is, Derfe
l,’ he went on, ‘that Arthur can’t just send her back! That’s an insult, and besides, I don’t want her back. I’ve got plenty enough daughters without her. Half the time I don’t even know which are mine and which aren’t. You ever need a wife? Come to Demetia and take your pick, but I warn you they’re all like her. Pretty, but with very sharp teeth. So what will Arthur do?’

  ‘What is Sansum suggesting?’ I asked.

  Oengus pretended to ignore the question, but I knew he would tell us in the end because he was not a man to keep secrets. ‘He just reminded me,’ he eventually confessed, ‘that Argante was once promised to Mordred.’

  ‘She was?’ Sagramor asked, surprised.

  ‘It was mentioned,’ I said, ‘some time ago.’ It had been mentioned by Oengus himself who was desperate for anything that might strengthen his alliance with Dumnonia which was his best protection against Powys.

  ‘And if Arthur didn’t marry her properly,’ Oengus went on, ‘then Mordred would be a consolation, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Some consolation,’ Sagramor said sourly.

  ‘She’ll be Queen,’ Oengus said.

  ‘She will,’ I agreed.

  ‘So it isn’t a bad idea,’ Oengus said lightly, though I suspected it was an idea he would support passionately. A marriage with Mordred would compensate Demetia’s hurt pride, but it would also give Dumnonia an obligation to protect its Queen’s country. For myself I thought Sansum’s proposal was the worst idea I had heard all day, for I could imagine only too well what mischief the combination of Mordred and Argante might breed, but I kept silent. ‘You know what this bath lacks?’ Oengus asked.

  ‘Tell me, Lord King.’

  ‘Women.’ He chuckled. ‘So where’s your woman, Derfel?’

  ‘In mourning,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, for Cuneglas, of course!’ The Blackshield King shrugged. ‘He never liked me, but I rather liked him. He was a rare one for believing promises!’ Oengus laughed, for the promises had been ones that he had made without any intention of ever keeping them. ‘Can’t say I’m sorry he’s dead, though. His son’s just a boy and much too fond of his mother. She and those dreadful aunts of hers will rule for a while. Three witches!’ He laughed again. ‘I can see we might pick off a few pieces of land from those three ladies.’ He slowly lowered his face into the pool. ‘I’m chasing the lice upwards,’ he explained, then pinched one of the little grey insects that was scrambling up his tangled beard to escape the encroaching water.