Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘A friend! Arthur, a friend to Christ!’ Bishop Lladarn snapped at me. ‘There are pagan shrines in Siluria, beasts are sacrificed to the old Gods, women dance naked under the moon, infants are passed through the fire, Druids babble!’ Spittle sprayed from the Bishop’s mouth as he tallied this list of iniquities.

  ‘Without the blessings of Christ’s rule,’ Meurig leaned towards me, ‘there can be no peace.’

  ‘There can be no peace, Lord King,’ I said directly, ‘while two men want the same kingdom. What would you have me tell my son-in-law?’

  Again Meurig was unsettled by my directness. He riddled with an oyster shell while he considered his answer, then shrugged. ‘You may assure Gwydre that he will have land, honour, rank and my protection,’ he said, blinking rapidly, ‘but I will not see him made King of Dumnonia.’ He actually blushed as he spoke the last words. He was a clever man, Meurig, but a coward at heart and it must have taken a great effort for him to have expressed himself so bluntly.

  Maybe he feared my anger, but I gave him a courteous reply. ‘I shall tell him, Lord King,’ I said, though in truth the message was not for Gwydre, but for Arthur. Meurig was not only declaring his own bid to rule Dumnonia, but warning Arthur that Gwent’s formidable army would oppose Gwydre’s candidacy.

  Bishop Lladarn leaned towards Meurig and spoke in an urgent whisper. He used Latin, confident that neither Galahad nor I would understand him, but Galahad spoke the language and half heard what was being said. ‘You’re planning to keep Arthur penned inside Siluria?’ he accused Lladarn in British.

  Lladarn blushed. As well as being the Bishop of Burrium, Lladarn was the King’s chief counsellor and thus a man of power. ‘My King,’ he said, bowing his head in Meurig’s direction, ‘cannot allow Arthur to move spearmen through Gwent’s territory.’

  ‘Is that true, Lord King?’ Galahad asked politely.

  ‘I am a man of peace,’ Meurig blustered, ‘and one way to secure peace is to keep spearmen at home.’

  I said nothing, fearing that my anger would only make me blurt out some insult that would make things worse. If Meurig insisted that we could not move spearmen across his roads then he would have succeeded in dividing the forces that would support Gwydre. It meant that Arthur could not march to join Sagramor, nor Sagramor to join Arthur, and if Meurig could keep their forces divided then he would most likely be the next King of Dumnonia.

  ‘But Meurig won’t fight,’ Galahad said scornfully as we rode down the river towards Isca the next day. The willows were hazed with their first hint of spring leaves, but the day itself was a reminder of winter with a cold wind and drifting mists.

  ‘He might,’ I said, ‘if the prize is large enough.’ And the prize was huge, for if Meurig ruled both Gwent and Dumnonia then he would control the richest part of Britain. ‘It will depend,’ I said, ‘on how many spears oppose him.’

  ‘Yours, Issa’s, Arthur’s, Sagramor’s,’ Galahad said.

  ‘Maybe five hundred men?’ I said, ‘and Sagramor’s are a long way away, and Arthur’s would have to cross Gwent’s territory to reach Dumnonia. And how many men does Meurig command? A thousand?’

  ‘He won’t risk war,’ Galahad insisted. ‘He wants the prize, but he’s terrified of the risk.’ He had stopped his horse to watch a man fishing from a coracle in the centre of the river. The fisherman cast his hand net with a careless skill and, while Galahad was admiring the fisherman’s dexterity, I was weighting each cast with an omen. If this throw yields a salmon, I told myself, then Mordred will die. The throw did bring up a big struggling fish, and then I thought that the augury was a nonsense, for all of us would die, and so I told myself that the next cast must net a fish if Mordred was to die before Beltain. The net came up empty and I touched the iron of Hywelbane’s hilt. The fisherman sold us a part of his catch and we pushed the salmon into our saddlebags and rode on. I prayed to Mithras that my foolish omen was misleading, then prayed that Galahad was right, and that Meurig would never dare commit his troops. But for Dumnonia? Rich Dumnonia? That was worth a risk, even for a cautious man like Meurig.

  Weak kings are a curse on the earth, yet our oaths are made to kings, and if we had no oaths we would have no law, and if we had no law we would have mere anarchy, and so we must bind ourselves with the law, and keep the law by oaths, and if a man could change kings at whim then he could abandon his oaths with his inconvenient king, and so we need kings because we must have an immutable law. All that is true, yet as Galahad and I rode home through the wintry mists I could have wept that the one man who should have been a king would not be one, and that those who should never have been kings all were.

  We found Arthur in his blacksmith’s shed. He had built the shed himself, made a hooded furnace from Roman bricks, then purchased an anvil and a set of blacksmith’s tools. He had always declared he wanted to be a blacksmith, though as Guinevere frequently remarked, wanting and being were not at all the same thing. But Arthur tried, how he tried! He employed a proper blacksmith, a gaunt and taciturn man named Morridig, whose task was to teach Arthur the skills of the trade, but Morridig had long despaired of teaching Arthur anything except enthusiasm. All of us, nevertheless, possessed items Arthur had made; iron candle-stands that had kinked shafts, misshapen cooking pots with ill-fitting handles or fire-spits that bowed over the flame. Yet the smithy made him happy, and he spent hours beside its hissing furnace, ever certain that a little more practice would make him as carelessly proficient as Morridig.

  He was alone in the smithy when Galahad and I returned from Burrium. He grunted a distracted welcome, then went on hammering a shapeless piece of iron that he claimed was a shoe-plate for one of his horses. He reluctantly dropped the hammer when we presented him with one of the salmon we had bought, then interrupted our news by saying that he had already heard that Mordred was close to death. ‘A bard arrived from Armorica yesterday,’ he told us, ‘and says the King’s leg is rotting at the hip. The bard says he stinks like a dead toad.’

  ‘How does the bard know?’ I asked, for I had thought Mordred was surrounded and cut off from all the other Britons in Armorica. ‘He says it’s common knowledge in Broceliande,’ Arthur said, then happily added that he expected Dumnonia’s throne to be vacant in a matter of days, but we spoiled his cheerfulness by telling him of Meurig’s refusal to allow any of our spearmen to cross Gwent’s land and I furthered his gloom by adding my suspicions of Sansum. I thought for a second that Arthur was going to curse, something he did rarely, but he controlled the impulse, and instead moved the salmon away from the furnace. ‘Don’t want it to cook,’ he said. ‘So Meurig’s closed all the roads to us?’

  ‘He says he wants peace, Lord,’ I explained.

  Arthur laughed sourly. ‘He wants to prove himself, that’s what he wants. His father’s dead and he’s eager to show that he’s a better man than Tewdric. The best way is to become a hero in battle and the second best is to steal a kingdom without a battle.’ He sneezed violently, then shook his head angrily. ‘I hate having a cold.’

  ‘You should be resting, Lord,’ I said, ‘not working.’

  ‘This isn’t work, this is pleasure.’

  ‘You should take coltsfoot in mead,’ Galahad said.

  ‘I’ve drunk nothing else for a week. Only two things cure colds: death or time.’ He picked up the hammer and gave the cooling lump of iron a ringing blow, then pumped the leather-jacketed bellows that fed air into the furnace. The winter had ended, but despite Arthur’s insistence that the weather was ever kind in Isca, it was a freezing day. ‘What’s your mouse lord up to?’ he asked me as he pumped the furnace into a shimmering heat.

  ‘He isn’t my mouse lord,’ I said of Sansum.

  ‘But he’s scheming, isn’t he? Wants his own candidate on the throne.’

  ‘But Meurig has no right to the throne!’ Galahad protested.

  ‘None at all,’ Arthur agreed, ‘but he has a lot of spears. And he’d have half a claim if he married a widowed
Argante.’

  ‘He can’t marry her,’ Galahad said, ‘he’s married already.’

  ‘A toadstool will get rid of an inconvenient queen,’ Arthur said. ‘That’s how Uther got rid of his first wife. A toadstool in a mushroom stew.’ He thought for a few seconds, then tossed the shoe-plate into the fire. ‘Fetch Gwydre for me,’ he asked Galahad.

  Arthur tortured the red-hot iron while we waited. A horse’s shoe-plate was a simple enough object, merely a sheet of iron that protected the vulnerable hoof from stones, and all it needed was an arch of iron that slipped over the front of the hoof and a pair of lugs at the back where the leather laces were attached, but Arthur could not seem to get the thing right. His arch was too narrow and high, the plate was kinked and the lugs too big. ‘Almost right,’ he said after hammering the thing for another frantic minute.

  ‘Right for what?’ I asked.

  He chucked the shoe-plate back into the furnace then pulled off his fire-scarred apron as Galahad returned with Gwydre. Arthur told Gwydre the news of Mordred’s expected death, then of Meurig’s treachery, and finished with a simple question. ‘Do you want to be King of Dumnonia, Gwydre?’

  Gwydre looked startled. He was a fine man, but young, very young. Nor, I think, was he particularly ambitious, though his mother was ambitious for him. He had Arthur’s face, long and bony, though it was marked with an expression of watchfulness as if he always expected fate to deal him a foul blow. He was thin, but I had practised swords with him often enough to know that there was a sinewy strength in his deceptively frail body. ‘I have a claim to the throne,’ he answered guardedly.

  ‘Because your grandfather bedded my mother,’ Arthur said irritably, ‘that’s your claim, Gwydre, nothing else. What I want to know is whether you truly wish to be King.’

  Gwydre glanced at me for help, found none, and looked back to his father. ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  Again Gwydre hesitated, and I suppose a host of reasons whirled in his head, but he finally looked defiant. ‘Because I was born to it. I’m as much Uther’s heir as Mordred is.’

  ‘You reckon you were born to it, eh?’ Arthur asked sarcastically. He stooped and pumped the bellows, making the furnace roar and spit sparks into its brick hood. ‘Every man in this room is the son of a King except you, Gwydre,’ Arthur said fiercely, ‘and you say you’re born to it?’

  ‘Then you be King, father,’ Gwydre said, ‘and then I shall be the son of a King too.’

  ‘Well said,’ I put in.

  Arthur gave me an angry glance, then plucked a rag from a pile beside his anvil and blew his nose into it. He tossed the rag onto the furnace. The rest of us simply blew our noses by pinching the nostrils between finger and thumb, but he had ever been fastidious. ‘Let us accept, Gwydre,’ he said, ‘that you are of the lineage of kings. That you are Uther’s grandson and therefore have a claim on Dumnonia’s throne. I have a claim too, as it happens, but I choose not to exercise it. I’m too old. But why should men like Derfel and Galahad fight to put you on Dumnonia’s throne? Tell me that.’

  ‘Because I shall be a good King,’ Gwydre said, blushing, then he looked at me. ‘And Morwenna will make a good Queen,’ he added.

  ‘Every man who was ever a king said he wanted to be good,’ Arthur grumbled, ‘and most turned out to be bad. Why should you be any different?’

  ‘You tell me, father,’ Gwydre said.

  ‘I’m asking you!’

  ‘But if a father doesn’t know a son’s character,’ Gwydre riposted, ‘who does?’

  Arthur went to the smithy door, pushed it open and stared into the stable yard. Nothing stirred there except the usual tribe of dogs, and so he turned back. ‘You’re a decent man, son,’ he said grudgingly, ‘a decent man. I’m proud of you, but you think too well of the world. There’s evil out there, true evil, and you don’t credit it.’

  ‘Did you,’ Gwydre asked, ‘when you were my age?’

  Arthur acknowledged the acuity of the question with a half- smile. ‘When I was your age,’ he said, ‘I believed I could make the world anew. I believed that all this world needed was honesty and kindness. I believed that if you treated folk well, that if you gave them peace and offered them justice they would respond with gratitude. I thought I could dissolve evil with good.’ He paused. ‘I suppose I thought of people as dogs,’ he went on ruefully, ‘and that if you gave them enough affection then they would be docile, but they aren’t dogs, Gwydre, they’re wolves. A king must rule a thousand ambitions, and all of them belong to deceivers. You will be flattered, and behind your back, mocked. Men will swear undying loyalty with one breath and plot your death with the next. And if you survive their plots, then one day you will be grey-bearded like me and you’ll look back on your life and realize that you achieved nothing. Nothing. The babies you admired in their mothers’ arms will have grown to be killers, the justice you enforced will be for sale, the people you protected will still be hungry and the enemy you defeated will still threaten your frontiers.’ He had grown increasingly angry as he spoke, but now softened the anger with a smile. ‘Is that what you want?’

  Gwydre returned his father’s stare. I thought for a moment that he would falter, or perhaps argue with his father, but instead he gave Arthur a good answer. ‘What I want, father,’ he said, ‘is to treat folk well, to give them peace and offer them justice.’

  Arthur smiled to hear his own words served back to him. ‘Then perhaps we should try to make you King, Gwydre. But how?’ He walked back to the furnace. ’We can’t lead spearmen through Gwent, Meurig will stop us, but if we don’t have spearmen, we don’t have the throne.’

  ‘Boats,’ Gwydre said.

  ‘Boats?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘There must be two score of fishing-boats on our coast,’ Gwydre said, ‘and each can take ten or a dozen men.’

  ‘But not horses,’ Galahad said, ‘I doubt they can take horses.’

  ‘Then we must fight without horses,’ Gwydre said.

  ‘We may not even need to fight,’ Arthur said. ‘If we reach Dumnonia first, and if Sagramor joins us, I think young Meurig might hesitate. And if Oengus mac Airem sends a warband east towards Gwent then that will frighten Meurig even more. We can probably freeze Meurig’s soul by looking threatening enough.’

  ‘Why would Oengus help us fight his own daughter?’ I asked.

  ‘Because he doesn’t care about her, that’s why,’ Arthur said. ‘And we’re not fighting his daughter, Derfel, we’re fighting Sansum. Argante can stay in Dumnonia, but she can’t be Queen, not if Mordred’s dead.’ He sneezed again. ‘And I think you should go to Dumnonia soon, Derfel,’ he added.

  ‘To do what, Lord?’

  ‘To smell out the mouse lord, that’s what. He’s scheming, and he needs a cat to teach him a lesson, and you’ve got sharp claws. And you can show Gwydre’s banner. I can’t go because that would provoke Meurig too much, but you can sail across the Severn without rousing suspicions, and when news comes of Mordred’s death you proclaim Gwydre’s name at Caer Cadarn and make certain Sansum and Argante can’t reach Gwent. Put them both under guard and tell them it’s for their own protection.’

  ‘I’ll need men,’ I warned him.

  ‘Take a boatload, and then use Issa’s men,’ Arthur said, invigorated by the need to take decisions. ‘Sagramor will give you troops,’ he added, ‘and the moment I hear that Mordred’s dead I’ll bring Gwydre with all my spearmen. If I’m still alive, that is,’ he said, sneezing again.

  ‘You’ll live,’ Galahad said unsympathetically.

  ‘Next week,’ Arthur looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes, ‘go next week, Derfel.’

  ‘Yes, Lord.’

  He bent to throw another handful of coals onto the blazing furnace. ‘The Gods know I never wanted that throne,’ he said, ‘but one way or another I consume my life fighting for it.’ He sniffed. ‘We’ll start gathering boats, Derfel, and you assemble spearmen at Caer Cadarn. If we look stro
ng enough then Meurig will think twice.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t?’ I asked.

  ‘Then we’ve lost,’ Arthur said, ‘we’ve lost. Unless we fight a war, and I’m not sure I want to do that.’

  ‘You never do, Lord,’ I said, ‘but you always win them.’

  ‘So far,’ Arthur said gloomily, ‘so far.’

  He picked up his tongs to rescue the shoe-plate from the fire, and I went to find a boat with which to snatch a kingdom.

  NEXT MORNING, ON A falling tide and in a west wind that whipped the River Usk into short steep waves, I embarked on my brother-in-law’s boat. Balig was a fisherman married to Linna, my half-sister, and he was amused to have discovered that he was related to a Lord of Dumnonia. He had also profited from the unexpected relationship, but he deserved the good fortune for he was a capable and decent man. Now he ordered six of my spearmen to take the boat’s long oars, and ordered the other four to crouch in the bilge. I only had a dozen of my spearmen in Isca, the rest were with Issa, but I reckoned these ten men should see me safe to Dun Caric. Balig invited me to sit on a wooden chest beside the steering oar. ‘And throw up over the gunwale, Lord,’ he added cheerfully.

  ‘Don’t I always?’

  ‘No. Last time you filled the scuppers with your breakfast. Waste offish-food, that. Cast off forrard, you worm-eaten toad!’ he shouted at his crew, a Saxon slave who had been captured at Mynydd Baddon, but who now had a British wife, two children and a noisy friendship with Balig. ‘Knows his boats, that I’ll say for him,’ Balig said of the Saxon, then he stooped to the stern line that still secured the boat to the bank. He was about to cast the rope off when a shout sounded and we both looked up to see Taliesin hurrying towards us from the grassy mound of Isca’s amphitheatre. Balig held tight to the mooring line. ‘You want me to wait, Lord?’