Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  And Meurig did want Dumnonia. He wanted its rich farmlands and its wealthy towns, and so he encouraged the war, though he strenuously denied any such encouragement. If Mordred wanted to visit his uncle, he said, who was he to stop it? And if Mordred wanted an escort of three hundred and fifty spearmen, who was Meurig to deny a King his entourage? And so he gave Mordred the permission he wanted, and by the time we first heard of the attack the leading horsemen of Mordred’s army were already past Glevum and hurrying west towards us.

  Thus by treachery, and through the ambition of a weak King, Arthur’s last war began.

  We were ready for that war. We had expected the attack to come weeks before, and though Mordred’s timing surprised us our plans were all made. We would sail south across the Severn Sea and march to Durnovaria where we expected Sagramor’s men to join us. Then, with our forces united, we would follow Arthur’s bear north to confront Mordred as he returned from Siluria. We expected a battle, we expected to win, and afterwards we would acclaim Gwydre as King of Dumnonia on Caer Cadarn. It was the old story; one more battle, then everything would change.

  Messengers were sent to the coast demanding that every Silurian fishing-boat be brought to Isca, and while those boats rowed up river on the flood tide, we readied for our hasty departure. Swords and spears were sharpened, armour was polished and food was put into baskets or sacks. We packed the treasures from the three palaces and the coins from the treasury, and warned Isca’s inhabitants to be ready to flee westwards before Mordred’s men arrived.

  Next morning we had twenty-seven fishing-boats moored in the river beneath Isca’s Roman bridge. A hundred and sixty-three spearmen were ready to embark, and most of those spearmen had families, but there was room in the boats for them all. We were forced to leave our horses behind, for Arthur had discovered that horses make bad sailors. While I had been travelling to meet Nimue he had tried loading horses onto one of the fishing-boats, but the animals panicked in even the gentlest waves, and one had even kicked its way through the boat’s hull and so on the day before we sailed we drove the animals to pastures on a distant farm and promised ourselves we would return for them once Gwydre was made King. Morgan alone refused to sail with us, but instead went to join her husband in Gwent.

  We began loading the boats at dawn. First we placed the gold in the bottom of the boats, and on top of the gold we piled our armour and our food, and then, under a grey sky and in a brisk wind, we began to embark. Most of the boats took ten or eleven people, and once the boats were filled they pulled into the middle of the river and anchored there so that the whole fleet could leave together.

  The enemy arrived just as the last boat was being loaded. That was the largest boat and it belonged to Balig, my sister’s husband. In it were Arthur, Guinevere, Gwydre, Morwenna and her children, Galahad, Taliesin, Ceinwyn and me, together with Culhwch, his one remaining wife and two of his sons. Arthur’s banner flew from the boat’s high prow and Gwydre’s standard flapped at the stern. We were in high spirits, for we were sailing to give Gwydre his kingdom, but just as Balig was shouting at Hygwydd, Arthur’s servant, to hurry aboard, the enemy came.

  Hygwydd was bringing a last bundle from Arthur’s palace and he was only fifty paces from the river bank when he looked behind and saw the horsemen coming from the town gate. He had time to drop the bundle and half draw his sword, but then the horses were on him and a spear took him in the neck.

  Balig threw the gangplank overboard, pulled a knife from his belt and slashed the stern mooring line. His Saxon crewman threw off the bow line and our boat drifted out into the current as the horsemen reached the bank. Arthur was standing and staring in horror at the dying Hygwydd, but I was looking towards the amphitheatre where a horde had appeared.

  It was not Mordred’s army. This was a swarm of the insane; a scrabbling rush of bent, broken and bitter creatures who surged round the amphitheatre’s stone arches and ran down to the river bank yelping small cries. They were in rags, their hair was wild and their eyes filled with a fanatical rage. It was Nimue’s army of the mad. Most were armed with nothing but sticks, though a few had spears. The horsemen were all armed with spears and shields, and they were not mad. They were fugitives from Diwrnach’s Bloodshields and still wore their ragged black cloaks and carried their blood-darkened shields, and they scattered the mad people as they spurred down the bank to keep pace with us.

  Some of the mad went down beneath the horses’ hoofs, but dozens more just plunged into the river and swam clumsily towards our boats. Arthur shouted at the boatmen to let go their anchors, and one by one the heavily laden boats cut themselves free and began to drift. Some of the crews were reluctant to abandon the heavy stones that served as anchors and tried to haul them up, and so the drifting boats crashed into the stationary ones and all the time the desperate, sad, mad things were thrashing clumsily towards us. ‘Spear butts!’ Arthur shouted, and seized his own spear, turned it, and thrust it hard down onto a swimmer’s head.

  ‘Oars!’ Balig called, but no one heeded him. We were too busy pushing the swimmers away from the hull. I worked one-handed, thrusting attackers under the water, but one madman seized my spear shaft and almost pulled me into the water. I let him have the weapon, drew Hywelbane and sliced her down. The first blood flowed on the river.

  The river’s north bank was now thick with Nimue’s howling, capering followers. Some threw spears at us, but most just screamed their hate, while others followed the swimmers into the river. A long-haired man with a hare lip tried to climb aboard our bows, but the Saxon kicked him in the face, then kicked him again so that he fell. Taliesin had found a spear and was using its blade on other swimmers. Downstream of us a boat drifted onto the muddy bank where its crew desperately tried to pole themselves free of the mud, but they were too slow and Nimue’s spearmen scrambled aboard. They were led by Bloodshields, and those practised killers screamed defiance as they carried their spears down the stranded boat’s length. It was Bishop Emrys’s boat and I saw the white-haired Bishop parry a spear with a sword, but then he was killed and a score of mad things followed the Bloodshields onto the slippery deck. The Bishop’s wife screamed briefly, then was savaged by a spear. Knives slashed and ripped and stabbed, and blood trickled from the scuppers to flow towards the sea. A man in a deerskin tunic balanced himself on the stern of the captured boat, and, as we drifted past, leapt towards our gunwale. Gwydre raised his spear and the man shrieked as he impaled himself on the long shaft. I remember his hands gripping the spear pole while his body writhed on the point, then Gwydre dropped both spear and man into the river and drew his sword. His mother was thrusting a spear into the thrashing arms beside the boat. Hands clung to our gunwale and we stamped on them, or cut them with swords, and gradually our boat drew away from its attackers. All the boats were drifting now, some sideways, some stern first, and the boatmen were swearing and shouting at each other or else screaming at the spearmen to use the oars. A spear flew from the bank and thumped into our hull, and then the first arrows flew. They were hunters’ arrows, and they hummed as they whipped over our heads.

  ‘Shields!’ Arthur shouted, and we made a wall of shields along the boat’s gunwale. The arrows spat into them. I was crouching beside Balig, protecting both of us, and my shield quivered as the small arrows thumped home.

  We were saved by the river’s swift current and by the ebbing tide which carried our jumbled mass of boats downstream and so out of the bowmen’s range. The cheering, raving horde followed us, but west of the amphitheatre there was a stretch of boggy ground and that slowed our pursuers and gave us time in which we could at last make order out of chaos. The cries of our attackers followed us, and their bodies drifted in the current beside our small fleet, but at last we had oars and could pull the boat’s bow around and follow the other vessels towards the sea. Our two banners were stuck thick with arrows.

  ‘Who are they?’ Arthur demanded, staring back at the horde.

  ‘Nimue’s army,’ I sai
d bitterly. Thanks to Morgan’s skill, Nimue’s charms had failed and so she had unleashed her followers to fetch Excalibur and Gwydre.

  ‘Why didn’t we see them coming?’ Arthur wanted to know.

  ‘A charm of concealment, Lord?’ Taliesin guessed, and I remembered how often Nimue had worked such charms.

  Galahad scoffed at the pagan explanation. ‘They marched through the night,’ he suggested, ‘and hid in the woods until they were ready, and we were all too busy to look for them.’

  ‘The bitch can fight Mordred now instead of us,’ Culhwch suggested.

  ‘She won’t,’ I said, ‘she’ll join him.’

  But Nimue had not finished with us yet. A group of horsemen were galloping on the road that led northwards about the swamp, and a horde of folk followed those spearmen on foot. The river did not run straight to the sea, but made vast loops through the coastal plain and I knew that at every western curve we would find’ the enemy waiting.

  The horsemen did indeed wait for us, but the river widened as it neared the sea and the water ran swiftly, and at each bend we were swept safely past them. The horsemen called curses down on us, then galloped on to find the next bend from where they could launch their spears and arrows at us. Just before the sea there was a long straight stretch of the river and Nimue’s horsemen kept pace with us all down the length of that reach, and that was when I first saw Nimue herself. She rode a white horse, was dressed in a white robe, and had her hair tonsured like a Druid. She carried Merlin’s staff and wore a sword at her side. She shouted at us, but the wind snatched her words away, and then the river curved eastwards and we slid away from her between the reed-thick banks. Nimue turned away and spurred her horse towards the river’s mouth.

  ‘We’re safe now,’ Arthur said. We could smell the sea, gulls called above us, ahead was the endless sound of waves breaking on a shore, and Balig and the Saxon were hitching the sail’s yard to the ropes that hoisted it up the mast. There was one last great loop of the river to negotiate, one last encounter with Nimue’s horsemen to endure, and then we would be swept out into the Severn Sea.

  ‘How many men did we lose?’ Arthur wanted to know, and we shouted questions and answers back and forth between the small fleet. Only two men had been struck by arrows, and the one stranded boat had been overwhelmed, but most of his small army was safe. ‘Poor Emrys,’ Arthur said, and then was silent for a while, but he pushed the melancholy aside. ‘In three days,’ he said, ‘we’ll be with Sagramor.’ He had sent messages eastwards and, now that Mordred’s army had left Dumnonia, there was surely nothing to stop Sagramor coming to meet us. ‘We shall have a small army,’ Arthur said, ‘but a good one. Good enough to beat Mordred, and then we start all over again.’

  ‘Start over again?’ I asked.

  ‘Beat back Cerdic once more,’ he said, ‘and knock some sense into Meurig.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘There’s always one more battle. Have you noticed that? Whenever you think everything is settled, it all seethes up again.’ He touched Excalibur’s hilt. ‘Poor Hygwydd. I shall miss him.’

  ‘You’ll miss me too, Lord,’ I said gloomily. The stump of my left wrist was throbbing painfully and my missing hand was unaccountably itching with a sensation so real that I kept trying to scratch it.

  ‘I’ll miss you?’ Arthur asked, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘When Sansum summons me.’

  ‘Ah! The mouse lord.’ He gave me a quick smile. ‘I think our mouse lord will want to come back to Dumnonia, don’t you? I can’t see him gaining preferment in Gwent, they have too many bishops already. No, he’ll want to come back, and poor Morgan will want the shrine at Ynys Wydryn again, so I shall make a bargain with them. Your soul for Gwydre’s permission for them to live in Dumnonia. We’ll free you of the oath, Derfel, never you mind.’ He slapped my shoulder, then clambered forward to where Guinevere sat beneath the mast.

  Balig plucked an arrow from the sternpost, twisted away its iron head that he tucked into a pocket for safe keeping, then tossed the feathered shaft overboard. ‘Don’t like the look of that,’ he said to me, jerking his chin towards the west. I turned and saw there were black clouds far out to sea.

  ‘Rain coming?’ I asked.

  ‘Could be a bite of wind in it, too,’ he said ominously, then spat overboard to avert the ill-luck. ‘But we don’t have far to go. We could miss it.’ He leaned on the steering oar as the boat was swept about the last great loop of the river. We were going west now, hard into the wind, and the river’s surface was choppy with small, white-flecked waves that shattered on our bow and splashed back across the deck. The sail was still lowered. ‘Pull now!’ Balig called to our oarsmen. The Saxon had one oar, Galahad another, Taliesin and Culhwch had the middle bench and Culhwch’s two sons completed the crew. The six men pulled hard, fighting the wind, but the current and tide still helped us. The banners at prow and stern snapped hard in the wind, rattling the arrows trapped in their weave.

  Ahead of us the river turned southwards and it was there, I knew, that Balig would hoist the sail so that the wind would help us down die long sea reach. Once at sea we would be forced to keep inside the withy-marked channel that ran between the wide shallows until we reached the deep water where we could turn away from the wind and race across to the Dumnonian shore. ‘It won’t take long to cross,’ Balig said comfortingly, glancing at the clouds, ‘not long. Should outrun that bit of wind.’

  ‘Can the boats stay together?’ I asked.

  ‘Near enough.’ He jerked his head at the boat immediately in front of us. ‘That old tub will lag behind. Sails like a pregnant pig, she does, but near enough, near enough.’

  Nimue’s horsemen waited for us on a spit of land that lay where the river turned south towards the sea. As we came closer she rode out from the mass of spearmen and urged her horse into the shallow water, and as we came closer still I saw two of her spearmen drag a captive into the shallows beside her.

  At first I thought it must be one of our men taken from the stranded boat, but then I saw that the prisoner was Merlin. His beard had been cut off and his unkempt white hair blew ragged in the rising wind as he stared blindly towards us, but I could have sworn that he was smiling. I could not see his face clearly, for the distance was too great, but I do swear he was smiling as he was pulled into the small waves. He knew what was about to happen.

  Then, suddenly, so did I, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

  Nimue had been carried from this sea as a child. She had been captured in Demetia by a band of slave-raiders, then brought across the Severn Sea to Dumnonia, but on the voyage a storm rose and all the raiders’ ships were sunk. The crews and their captives drowned, all but for Nimue who had come safe from the sea onto Ynys Wair’s rocky shore and Merlin, rescuing the child, had called her Vivien because she was so plainly beloved by Manawydan, the sea God, and Vivien is a name that belongs to Manawydan. Nimue, being cross-grained, had ever refused to use the name, but I remembered it now, and I remembered that Manawydan loved her, and I knew she was about to use the God’s help to work a great curse on us.

  ‘What is she doing?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘Don’t watch, Lord,’ I said.

  The two spearmen had waded back to shore, leaving the blinded Merlin alone beside Nimue’s horse. He made no attempt to escape. He just stood there, his hair streaming white, while Nimue drew a knife from her sword belt. It was the Knife of Laufrodedd.

  ‘No!’ Arthur shouted, but the wind carried his protest back in our boat’s path, back across the marshes and the reeds, back to nowhere. ‘No!’ he called again.

  Nimue pointed her Druid’s staff towards the west, raised her head to the skies and howled. Still Merlin did not move. Our fleet swept past them, each boat coming close to the shallows where Nimue’s horse stood before being snatched southwards as the crews hoisted their sails. Nimue waited until our flag-hung boat came near and then she lowered her head and gazed at us with her one eye. She was smiling, and so was
Merlin. I was close enough to see clearly now, and he was still smiling as Nimue leaned down from her saddle with the knife. One hard stroke was all it needed.

  And Merlin’s long white hair and his long white robe turned red.

  Nimue howled again. I had heard her howl many times, but never like that, for this howl mingled agony with triumph. She had worked her spell.

  She slid off the horse and let go of her staff. Merlin must have died quickly, but his body still thrashed in the small waves and for a few heartbeats it looked as though Nimue was wrestling with the dead man. Her white robe was spattered with red, and the red was instantly diluted by the sea as she heaved and pushed Merlin’s corpse further into the water. At last, free of the mud, he floated and she pushed him out into the current as a gift for her Lord, Manawydan.

  And what a gift she gave. The body of a Druid is powerful magic, as powerful as any that this poor world possesses, and Merlin was the last and the greatest of the Druids. Others came after him, of course, but none had his knowledge, and none his wisdom, and none had half his power. And all that power was now given to one spell, one incantation to the God of the sea who had rescued Nimue so many years before.

  She plucked the staff from where it floated on the waves and pointed it at our boat, then she laughed. She put her head back and laughed like the mad who had followed her from the mountains to this killing in the waters. ‘You will live!’ she called to our boat, ‘and we shall meet again!’

  Balig hoisted the sail and the wind caught it and snatched us down the sea reach. None of us spoke. We just stared back towards Nimue and to where, white in the turmoil of the grey waves, the body of Merlin followed us towards the deep.

  Where Manawydan waited for us.

  We turned our boat south-east to let the wind drive into the tattered sail’s belly and my stomach heaved with every lurching wave.