Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘I should stay,’ Gwydre said nervously.

  I seized him by the shoulders and pushed him into the shallows. ‘Go with your father,’ I said, ‘for my sake. And tell him I was true to the end.’ I stopped him suddenly, and turned him back to face me, and I saw there were tears on his young face. ‘Tell your father,’ I said, ‘that I loved him to the end.’

  He nodded, then he and Galahad climbed aboard. Arthur was with his family now, and I stepped back as Caddwg used one of the oars to pole the ship back into the channel. I looked up at Ceinwyn and I smiled, and there were tears in my eyes, but I could think of nothing to say except to tell her that I would wait for her beneath the apple trees of the Otherworld; but just as I was phrasing the clumsy words, and just as the ship slipped off the sand, she stepped lightly onto the bow and leapt into the shallows.

  ‘No!’ I shouted.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and reached out a hand so that I would help her onto the shore.

  ‘You know what they’ll do to you?’ I asked.

  She showed me a knife in her left hand, meaning she would kill herself before she was taken by Mordred’s men. ‘We’ve been together too long, my love, to part now,’ she said and then she stood beside me to watch as Prydwen edged into the deep water. Our last daughter and her children were sailing away. The tide had turned and the first of the ebb was creeping the silver ship towards the sea reach.

  I stayed with Sagramor as he died. I cradled his head, held his hand and talked his soul onto the bridge of swords. Then, with my eyes brimming with tears, I walked back to our small shield wall and saw that Camlann was filled with spearmen now. A whole army had come, but they had come too late to save their King, though they still had time enough to finish us. I could see Nimue at last, her white robe and her white horse bright in the shadowed dunes. My friend and one-time lover was now my final enemy.

  ‘Fetch me a horse,’ I told a spearman. There were stray horses everywhere and he ran, grabbed a bridle and brought a mare back to me. I asked Ceinwyn to unstrap my shield, then had the spearman help me onto the mare’s back and, once mounted, I tucked Excalibur under my left arm and took the reins with my right. I kicked back and the horse leapt ahead, and I kicked her again, scattering sand with her hoofs and men from her path. I was riding among Mordred’s men now, but there was no fight in them for they had lost their Lord. They were masterless and Nimue’s army of the mad was behind them, and behind Nimue’s ragged forces there was a third army. A new army had come to Camlann’s sands.

  It was the same army I had seen on the high western hill, and I realized it must have marched south behind Mordred to take Dumnonia for itself. It was an army that had come to watch Arthur and Mordred destroy themselves, and now that the fighting was done the army of Gwent moved slowly forward beneath their banners of the cross. They came to rule Dumnonia and to make Meurig its King. Their red cloaks and scarlet plumes looked black in the twilight, and I looked up to see that the first faint stars were pricking the sky.

  I rode towards Nimue, but stopped a hundred paces short of my old friend. I could see Olwen watching me, and Nimue’s baleful stare, and then I smiled at her and took Excalibur into my right hand and held up the stump of my left so that she would know what I had done. Then I showed her Excalibur.

  She knew what I planned then. ‘No!’ she screamed, and her army of the mad wailed with her and their gibbering shook the evening sky.

  I put Excalibur under my arm again, picked up the reins and kicked the mare as I turned her about. I urged her on, driving her fast onto the sand of the sea-beach, and I heard Nimue’s horse galloping behind me, but she was too late, much too late.

  I rode towards Prydmen. The small wind was filling her sail now and she was clear of the spit and the wraithstone at her bows was rising and falling in the sea’s endless waves. I kicked again and the mare tossed her head and I shouted her on into that darkening sea, and kept kicking her until the waves broke cold against her chest and only then did I drop the reins. She quivered under me as I took Excalibur in my right hand.

  I drew my arm back. There was blood on the sword, yet her blade seemed to glow. Merlin had once said that the Sword of Rhydderch would turn to flame at the end, and perhaps she did, or perhaps the tears in my eyes deceived me.

  ‘No!’ Nimue wailed.

  And I threw Excalibur, threw her hard and high towards the deep water where the tide had scoured the channel through Camlann’s sands.

  Excalibur turned in the evening air. No sword was ever more beautiful. Merlin swore she had been made by Gofannon in the smithy of the Otherworld. She was the Sword of Rhydderch and a Treasure of Britain. She was Arthur’s sword and a Druid’s gift, and she wheeled against the darkening sky and her blade flashed blue fire against the brightening stars. For a heartbeat she was a shining bar of blue flame poised in the heavens, and then she fell.

  She fell true in the channel’s centre. There was hardly a splash, just a glimpse of white water, and she was gone.

  Nimue screamed. I turned the mare away and drove her back to the beach and back across the litter of battle to where my last warband waited. And there I saw that the army of the mad was drifting away. They were going, and Mordred’s men, those that survived, were fleeing down the beach to escape the advance of Meurig’s troops. Dumnonia would fall, a weak King would rule and the Saxons would return, but we would live.

  I slid from the horse, took Ceinwyn’s arm, and led her to the top of a nearby dune. The sky in the west was a fierce red glow for the sun was gone, and together we stood in the world’s shadow and watched as Prydwen rose and fell to the waves. Her sail was full now, for the evening wind was blowing from the west and Prydweri’s prow broke water white and her stern left a widening wake across the sea. Full south she sailed, and then she turned into the west, but the wind was from the west and no boat can sail straight into the wind’s eye, yet I swear that boat did. She sailed west, and the wind was blowing from the west, yet her sail was full and her high prow cut the water white, or maybe I did not know what it was that I saw for there were tears in my eyes and more tears running down my cheeks.

  And while we watched we saw a silver mist form on the water.

  Ceinwyn gripped my arm. The mist was just a patch, but it grew and it glowed. The sun was gone, there was no moon shining, just the stars and the twilight sky and the silver-flecked sea and the dark-sailed boat, yet the mist did glow. Like the silver spindrift of stars, it glowed. Or maybe it was just the tears in my eyes.

  ‘Derfel!’ Sansum snapped at me. He had come with Meurig and now he scrambled across the sand towards us. ‘Derfel!’ he called. ‘I want you! Come here! Now!’

  ‘My dear Lord,’ I said, but not to him. I spoke to Arthur. And I watched and wept, my arm around Ceinwyn, as the pale boat was swallowed by the shimmering silver mist.

  And so my Lord was gone.

  And no one has seen him since.

  Historical Note

  Gildas, the historian who probably wrote his De Excidio et Conquestu Brittaniae (Of the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) within a generation of the Arthurian period, records that the Battle of Badonici Montis (usually translated today as Mount Badon) was a siege, but, tantalizingly, he does not mention that Arthur was present at the great victory which, he laments, ‘was the last defeat of the wretches’. The Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons) which might or might not have been written by a man called Nennius, and which was compiled at least two centuries after the Arthurian period, is the first document to claim that Arthur was the British commander at ‘Mons Badonis’ where ‘in one day nine hundred and sixty men were killed by an attack of Arthur’s, and no one but himself laid them low’. In the tenth century some monks in western Wales compiled the Annales Cambriae (Annals of Wales) where they record ‘the Battle of Badon in which Arthur bore the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights, and the Britons were the victors’. The Venerable Bede, a Saxon whose Historia Ecclesiastica
Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English) appeared in the eighth century, acknowledges the defeat, but does not mention Arthur, though that is hardly surprising because Bede seems to have taken most of his information from Gildas. Those four documents are just about our only early sources (and three of them are not early enough) for information on the battle. Did it happen?

  Historians, while reluctant to admit that the legendary Arthur ever existed, do seem to agree that sometime close to the year 500 ad the British fought and won a great battle against the encroaching Saxons at a place called Mons Badonicus, or Mons Badonis, or Badonici Montis, or Mynydd Baddon or Mount Badon or, simply, Badon. Further, they suggest that this was an important battle because it appears to have effectively checked the Saxon conquest of British land for a generation. It also, as Gildas laments, seems to have been the ‘last defeat of the wretches’, for in the two hundred years following that defeat the Saxons spread across what is now called England and so dispossessed the native Britons. In all the dark period of the darkest age of Britain’s history, this one battle stands out as an important event, but sadly we have no idea where it took place. There have been many suggestions. Liddington Castle in Wiltshire and Badbury Rings in Dorset are candidates for the site, while Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the twelfth century, places the battle at Bath, probably because Nennius describes the hot springs at Bath as balnea Badonis. Later historians have proposed Little Solsbury Hill, just west of Batheaston in the valley of the Avon near Bath, as the battlefield and I have adopted that suggestion for the site described in the novel. Was it a siege? No one really knows, any more than we can know who besieged whom. There just seems to be a general agreement that it is likely a battle took place at Mount Badon, wherever that is, that it may have been a siege, but may not, that it probably occurred very near the year 500 AD, though no historian would stake a reputation on that assertion, that the Saxons lost and that possibly Arthur was the architect of that great victory.

  The Annales Cambriae have only this to say of Camlann; ‘the battle of Camlann in which Arthur and Medraut (Mordred) perished’. And so, perhaps, they did, but legend has ever insisted that Arthur survived his wounds and was carried to the magical isle of Avalon where he still sleeps with his warriors. We have clearly moved far beyond the realm where any self-respecting historian would venture, except to suggest that the belief in Arthur’s survival reflects a deep and popular nostalgia for a lost hero, and in all the isle of Britain no legend is more persistent than this notion that Arthur still lives. ‘A grave for Mark,’ the Black Book of Carmarthen records, ‘a grave for Gwythur, a grave for Gwgawn of the red sword, but, perish the thought, a grave for Arthur.’ Arthur was probably no king, he may not have lived at all, but despite all the efforts of historians to deny his very existence, he is still, to millions of folk about the world, what a copyist called him in the fourteenth century, Arturus Rex Quondam, Rexque Futurus: Arthur, our Once and Future King.

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  First published by Michael Joseph 1997

  Published in Penguin Books 1998

  Copyright © Bernard Cornwell, 1997

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-1929743