Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  The rumour reached us from Sansum. He had come to Isca with me, but had found Arthur’s company too galling and so, leaving Morgan in her brother’s care, the Bishop had fled to Gwent and now, perhaps to show us how close to the King he was, he sent us a message saying that Mordred was seeking Meurig’s permission to bring his army through Gwent to attack Siluria. Meurig, Sansum said, had not yet decided on an answer.

  Arthur repeated Sansum’s message to me. ‘Is the mouse lord plotting again?’ he asked me.

  ‘He’s supporting both you and Meurig, Lord,’ I said sourly, ‘so that both of you will be grateful to him.’

  ‘But is it true?’ Arthur wondered. He hoped it was, for if Mordred attacked Arthur, then no law could condemn Arthur for fighting back, and if Mordred marched his army north into Gwent then we could sail south across the Severn Sea and link forces with Sagramor’s men somewhere in southern Dumnonia. Both Galahad and Bishop Emrys doubted that Sansum spoke truly, but I disagreed. Mordred hated Arthur above all men, and I thought that he would be unable to resist the attempt to defeat Arthur in battle.

  So, for a few days we made plans. Our men trained with spear and sword, and Arthur sent messengers to Sagramor outlining the campaign he hoped to fight, but either Meurig denied Mordred the permission he needed, or else Mordred decided against an attack on Siluria, for nothing happened. Mordred’s army stayed between us and Sagramor, we heard no more rumours from Sansum and all we could do was wait.

  Wait and watch Ceinwyn’s agony. Watch her face sink into gauntness. Listen to her raving, feel the terror in her grip and smell the death that would not come.

  Morgan tried new herbs. She laid a cross on Ceinwyn’s naked body, but the touch of the cross made Ceinwyn scream. One night, when Morgan was sleeping, Taliesin made a counter-charm to avert the curse he still believed was the cause of Ceinwyn’s sickness, but though we killed a hare and painted its blood on Ceinwyn’s face, and though we touched her boil-ravaged skin with the burnt tip of an ash wand, and though we surrounded her bed with eagle-stones and elf-bolts and hagstones, and though we hung a bramble sprig and a bunch of mistletoe cut from a lime tree over her bed, and though we laid Excalibur, one of the Treasures of Britain, by her side, the sickness did not lift. We prayed to Grannos, the God of healing, but our prayers were unanswered and our sacrifices ignored. ‘It is a magic too strong,’ Taliesin said sadly. The next night, while Morgan slept again, we brought a Druid from northern Siluria into the sick chamber. He was a country Druid, all beard and stink, and he chanted a spell, then crushed the bones of a skylark into a powder that he stirred into an infusion of mugwort in a holly cup. He trickled the mixture into Ceinwyn’s mouth, but the medicine achieved nothing. The Druid tried feeding her scraps of a black cat’s roasted heart, but she spat them out and so he used his strongest charm, the touch of a corpse’s hand. The hand, which reminded me of the crest of Cerdic’s helmet, was blackened. The Druid touched it on Ceinwyn’s forehead, on her nose and her throat, then pressed it against her scalp as he muttered an incantation, but all he achieved was to transfer a score of his lice from his beard onto her scalp and when we tried to comb them from her head we pulled out the last of her hair. I paid the Druid, then followed him into the courtyard to escape the smoke of the fires on which Taliesin was burning herbs. Morwenna came with me. ‘You must rest, father,’ she said.

  ‘There’ll be time for rest later,’ I said, watching the Druid shuffle off into the dark.

  Morwenna put her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. She had hair as golden as Ceinwyn’s had been, and it smelt like Ceinwyn’s. ‘Maybe it isn’t a magic at all,’ she said. ‘If it weren’t magic,’ I said, ‘then she would have died.’ ‘There’s a woman in Powys who is said to have great skills.’ ‘Then send for her,’ I said wearily, though I had no faith in any sorcerers now. A score had come and taken gold, but not one had lifted the sickness. I had sacrificed to Mithras, I had prayed to Bel and to Don, and nothing had worked.

  Ceinwyn moaned, and the moan rose to a scream. I flinched at the sound, then gently pushed Morwenna away. ‘I must go to her.’

  ‘You rest, father,’ Morwenna said. ‘I’ll go to her.’

  It was then that I saw the cloaked figure standing in the centre of the courtyard. Whether it was a man or a woman I could not tell, nor could I say how long the figure had stood there. It seemed to me that only a moment before the courtyard had been empty, but now the cloaked stranger was in front of me with a face dark shadowed from the moon by a deep hood, and I felt a sudden dread that this was death appearing. I stepped towards the figure. ‘Who are you?’ I demanded.

  ‘No one you know, Lord Derfel Cadarn.’ It was a woman who spoke, and as she spoke she pushed back the hood and I saw that she had painted her face white, then smeared soot about her eye sockets so that she looked like a living skull. Morwenna gasped.

  ‘Who are you?’ I demanded again.

  ‘I am the breath of the west wind, Lord Derfel,’ she said in a sibilant voice, ‘and the rain that falls on Cadair Idris, and the frost that edges Eryri’s peaks. I am the messenger from the time before kings, I am the Dancer.’ She laughed then, and her laughter was like a madness in the night. The sound of it brought Taliesin and Galahad to the door of the sickroom where they stood and stared at the white-faced laughing woman. Galahad made the sign of the cross while Taliesin touched the iron latch of the door. ‘Come here, Lord Derfel,’ the woman commanded me, ‘come to me, Lord Derfel.’

  ‘Go, Lord,’ Taliesin encouraged me, and I had a sudden hope that the lice-ridden Druid’s spells might have worked after all, for though they had not lifted the sickness from Ceinwyn, they had brought this apparition to the courtyard and so I stepped into the moonlight and went close to the cloaked woman.

  ‘Embrace me, Lord Derfel,’ the woman said, and there was something in her voice that spoke of decay and dirt, but I shuddered and took another step and placed my arms around her thin shoulders. She smelt of honey and ashes. ‘You want Ceinwyn to live?’ she whispered in my ear.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then come with me now,’ she whispered back, and pulled out of my embrace. ‘Now,’ she repeated when she saw my hesitation.

  ‘Let me fetch a cloak and a sword,’ I said.

  ‘You will need no sword where we go, Lord Derfel, and you may share my cloak. Come now, or let your lady suffer.’ With those words she turned and walked out of the courtyard.

  ‘Go!’ Taliesin urged me, ‘go!’

  Galahad tried to come with me, but the woman turned in the gate and ordered him back. ‘Lord Derfel comes alone,’ she said, ‘or he does not come at all.’

  And so I went, following death in the night, going north.

  All that night we walked so that by dawn we were at the edge of the high hills, and still she pressed on, choosing paths that took us far from any settlement. The woman who called herself the Dancer walked barefoot, and skipped sometimes as if she was filled with an unquenchable joy. An hour after the dawn, when the sun was flooding the hills with new gold, she stopped beside a small lake and dashed water onto her face and scrubbed at her cheeks with handfuls of grass to wash away the mix of honey and ashes with which she had whitened her skin. Till that moment I had not known whether she was young or old, but now I saw she was a woman in her twenties, and very beautiful. She had a delicate face, full of life, with happy eyes and a quick smile. She knew her own beauty and laughed when she saw that I recognized it too. ‘Would you lie with me, Lord Derfel?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘If it would cure Ceinwyn,’ she asked, ‘would you lie with me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it won’t!’ she said, ‘it won’t!’ And she laughed and ran ahead of me, dropping her heavy cloak to reveal a thin linen dress clinging to a lissom body. ‘Do you remember me?’ she asked, turning to face me.

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘I remember you, Lord Derfel. You stared at my body like a hungr
y man, but you were hungry. So hungry. Remember?’ And with that she closed her eyes and walked down the sheep path towards me, and she made her steps high and precise, pointing her toes out with each high step, and I immediately recalled her. This was the girl whose naked skin had shone in Merlin’s darkness. ‘You’re Olwen,’ I said, her name coming back to me across the years. ‘Olwen the Silver.’

  ‘So you do remember me. I am older now. Older Olwen,’ she laughed. ‘Come, Lord! Bring the cloak.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘Far, Lord, far. To where the winds spring and the rains begin and the mists are born and no kings rule.’ She danced on the path, her energy apparently endless. All that day she danced, and all that day she spoke nonsense to me. I think she was mad. Once, as we walked through a small valley where silver-leaved trees shivered in the little wind, she pulled off the dress and danced naked across the grass, and she did it to stir and tempt me, and when I doggedly walked on and showed no hunger for her, she just laughed, slung the dress across her shoulder and walked beside me as though her nakedness was no strange thing. ‘I was the one who carried the curse to your home,’ she told me proudly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it had to be done, of course,’ she said in all apparent sincerity, ‘just as now it has to be lifted! Which is why we’re going to the mountains, Lord.’

  ‘To Nimue?’ I asked, knowing already, as I think I had known ever since Olwen had first appeared in the courtyard, that it was to Nimue we were going.

  ‘To Nimue,’ Olwen agreed happily. ‘You see, Lord, the time has come.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Time for the end of all things, of course,’ Olwen said, and thrust her dress into my arms so that she was unencumbered. She skipped ahead of me, turning sometimes to give me a sly look, and taking pleasure in my unchanging expression. ‘When the sun shines,’ she told me, ‘I like to be naked.’

  ‘What is the end of all things?’ I asked her.

  ‘We shall make Britain into a perfect place,’ Olwen said. ‘There will be no sickness and no hunger, no fears and no wars, no storms and no clothes. Everything will end, Lord! The mountains will fall and the rivers will turn on themselves and the seas will boil and the wolves will howl, but at its ending the country will be green and gold and there will be no more years, and no more time, and we shall all be Gods and Goddesses. I shall be a tree Goddess. I shall rule the larch and the hornbeam, and in the mornings I shall dance, and in the evenings I shall lie with golden men.’

  ‘Were you not supposed to lie with Gawain?’ I asked her. ‘When he came from the Cauldron? I thought you were to be his Queen.’

  ‘I did lie with him, Lord, but he was dead. Dead and dry. He tasted of salt.’ She laughed. ‘Dead and dry and salty. One whole night I warmed him, but he did not move. I did not want to lie with him,’ she added in a confiding voice, ‘but since that night, Lord, I have known nothing but happiness!’ She turned lightly, dancing a twisting step on the spring grass.

  Mad, I thought, mad and heartbreakingly beautiful, as beautiful as Ceinwyn had once been, though this girl, unlike my pale-skinned and golden-haired Ceinwyn, was black-haired and her skin was sun-darkened. ‘Why do they call you Olwen the Silver?’ I asked her.

  ‘Because my soul is silver, Lord. My hair is dark, but my soul is silver!’ She spun on the path, then ran lithely on. I paused a few moments later to catch my breath and stared down into a deep valley where I could see a man herding sheep. The shepherd’s dog raced up the slope to gather in a straggler, and beneath the milling flock I could see a house where a woman laid wet clothes to dry on furze bushes. That, I thought, was real, while this journey through the hills was a madness, a dream, and I touched the scar on my left palm, the scar that held me to Nimue, and I saw that it had reddened. It had been white for years, now it was livid.

  ‘We must go on, Lord!’ Olwen called me. ‘On and on! Up into the clouds.’ To my relief she took her dress back and pulled it over her head and shook it down over her slim body. ‘It can be cold in the clouds, Lord,’ she explained, and then she was dancing again and I gave the shepherd and his dog a last rueful glance and followed the dancing Olwen up a narrow track that led between high rocks.

  We rested in the afternoon. We stopped in a steep-sided valley where ash, rowan and sycamore grew, and where a long narrow lake shivered black under the small wind. I leaned against a boulder and must have slept for a while, for when I woke I saw that Olwen was naked again, but this time she was swimming in the cold black water. She came shuddering from the lake, scrubbed herself dry with her cloak, then pulled on her dress. ‘Nimue told me,’ she said, ‘that if you lay with me, Ceinwyn would die.’

  ‘Then why did you ask me to lie with you?’ I asked harshly.

  ‘To see if you loved your Ceinwyn, of course.’

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  ‘Then you can save her,’ Olwen said happily.

  ‘How did Nimue curse her?’ I asked.

  ‘With a curse of fire and a curse of water and the curse of the blackthorn,’ Olwen said, then crouched at my feet and stared into my eyes, ‘and with the dark curse of the Otherbody,’ she added ominously.

  ‘Why?’ I asked angrily, not caring about the details of the curses, only that any curse at all should have been put on my Ceinwyn.

  ‘Why not?’ Olwen said, then laughed, draped her damp cloak about her shoulders and walked on. ‘Come, Lord! Are you hungry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You shall eat. Eat, sleep and talk.’ She was dancing again, making delicate barefoot steps on the flinty path. I noticed that her feet were bleeding, but she did not seem to mind. ‘We are going backwards,’ she told me.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  She turned so that she was skipping backwards and facing me. ‘Backwards in time, Lord. We unspool the years. Yesterday’s years are flying past us, but so fast you cannot see their nights or their days. You are not born yet, your parents are not born, and back we go, ever back, to the time before there were kings. That, Lord, is where we go. To the time before kings.’

  ‘Your feet are bleeding,’ I said.

  ‘They heal,’ and she turned and skipped on. ‘Come!’ she called. ‘Come to the time before kings!’

  ‘Does Merlin wait for me there?’ I asked.

  That name stopped Olwen. She stood, turned back again, and frowned at me. ‘I lay with Merlin once,’ she said after a while. ‘Often!’ she added in a burst of honesty.

  That did not surprise me. He was a goat. ‘Is he waiting for us?’ I asked.

  ‘He is at the heart of the time before kings,’ Olwen said seriously. ‘At its utter heart, Lord. Merlin is the cold in the frost, the water in the rain, the flame in the sun, the breath in the wind. Now come,’ she plucked at my sleeve with a sudden urgency, ‘we cannot talk now.’

  ‘Is Merlin a prisoner?’ I asked, but Olwen would not answer. She raced ahead of me, and waited impatiently for me to catch up with her, and as soon as I did she ran ahead again. She took those steep paths lightly while I laboured behind, and all the time we were going deeper into the mountains. By now, I reckoned, we had left Siluria behind and had come into Powys, but into a part of that unhappy country where young Perddel’s rule did not reach. This was the land without law, the lair of brigands, but Olwen skipped carelessly through its dangers.

  The night fell. Clouds filled from the west so that soon we were in a complete darkness. I looked about me and saw nothing. No lights, not even the glimmer of a distant flame. It was thus, I imagine, that Bel found the isle of Britain when he first came to bring it life and light.

  Olwen put her hand into mine. ‘Come, Lord.’

  ‘You can’t see!’ I protested.

  ‘I see everything,’ she said, ‘trust me, Lord,’ and with that she led me onwards, sometimes warning me of an obstacle. ‘We must cross a stream here, Lord. Tread gently.’

  I knew that our path was climbing steadily, but l
ittle else. We crossed a patch of treacherous shale, but Olwen’s hand was firm in mine, and once we seemed to walk along the spine of a high ridge where the wind whistled about my ears and Olwen sang a strange little song about elves. ‘There are still elves in these hills,’ she told me when the song ended. ‘Everywhere else in Britain they were killed, but not here. I’ve seen them. They taught me to dance.’

  ‘They taught you well,’ I said, not believing a word she said, but strangely comforted by the warm grip of her small hand.

  ‘They have cloaks of gossamer,’ she said.

  ‘They don’t dance naked?’ I asked, teasing her.

  ‘A gossamer cloak hides nothing, Lord,’ she reproved me, ‘but why should we hide what is beautiful?’

  ‘Do you lie with the elves?’

  ‘One day I shall. Not yet. In the time after the kings, I shall. With them and with golden men. But first I must lie with another salty man. Belly to belly with another dry thing from the Cauldron’s heart.’ She laughed and tugged at my hand and we left the ridge and climbed a smooth slope of grass to reach a higher crest. There, for the first time since the clouds had hidden the moon, I saw light.

  Far across a dark saddle of land there lay a hill, and in the hill there must have been a valley that was filled with fire so that the nearer brow of the hill was edged with its glow. I stood there, my hand unconsciously in Olwen’s hand, and she laughed with delight as she saw me gazing at that sudden light. ‘That is the land before kings, Lord,’ she told me. ‘You will find friends there, and food.’