The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Gone where?’ Tewdric asked.

  ‘To seek the Knowledge of Britain,’ Nimue said. Every man listened hard for this, at last, was real news. I could see Sansum the Mouse Lord wriggling in his desperate need to make a protest at this pagan interference with the High Council, but so long as King Tewdric questioned the girl there was no way that a mere priest could interfere.

  ‘What is the Knowledge of Britain?’ High King Uther asked.

  Nimue turned around again, one full turn sunwise, but she turned only so she could gather her thoughts for the answer which, when it came, was delivered in a chanting, hypnotic voice. ‘The Knowledge of Britain is the lore of our ancestors, the gifts of our Gods, the Thirteen Properties of the Thirteen Treasures which, when gathered, will give us back the power to claim our land.’ She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was back to its normal timbre. ‘Merlin strives to knit this land as one again, a British land,’ and here Nimue whirled round so that she was staring straight into Sansum’s small, bright, indignant eyes, ‘with British Gods.’ She turned back to the High King. ‘And if Lord Merlin fails, Uther of Dumnonia, we all die.’

  A murmur sounded in the room. Sansum and the Christians were yelping their protests now, but Tewdric, the Christian King, waved them to silence. ‘Are those Merlin’s words?’ he demanded of Nimue.

  Nimue shrugged as though the question was irrelevant. ‘They are not my words,’ she said insolently.

  Uther had no doubt that Nimue, a mere child on the edge of womanhood, spoke not for herself but for her master and so he leaned his great bulk forward and frowned at her. ‘Ask Merlin if he will take my oath? Ask him! Will he protect my grandson?’

  Nimue paused a long time. I think she sensed the truth of Britain before any of us, before even Merlin and certainly long before Arthur, if, indeed, Arthur ever knew, but some instinct would not let her speak that truth to this old, dying and stubborn man. ‘Merlin, my Lord King,’ she finally said in a tired voice that implied she merely discharged a necessary but timewasting duty, ‘promises at this moment, upon his soul’s life, that he will take the death-oath to protect your grandchild.’

  ‘So long!’ Morgan astonished us all by interjecting. She scrambled to her feet, looking squat and dark beside Nimue. Firelight glinted off her gold helm. ‘So long!’ she cried again, then remembered to sway to and fro in the brazier’s smoke as if to suggest the Gods were taking over her body. ‘So long, Merlin says, as Arthur shares the oath. Arthur and his men should be your grandson’s protector. Merlin has spoken!’ She spoke the words with all the dignity of someone accustomed to being an oracle and prophetess, but I, if no one else, noticed that no thunder sounded in the rainswept night.

  Gundleus was on his feet protesting Morgan’s pronouncement. He had already suffered a council of six and a trio of oath-takers to be imposed upon his power, but now it was proposed that his new kingdom was to support a war-band of possible enemy warriors. ‘No!’ he cried again, but Tewdric ignored the protest as he stepped down from the dais to stand beside Morgan and face the High King. It was thus made plain to most of us in the hall that Morgan, even if she had been uttering in Merlin’s voice, had nevertheless spoken what Tewdric had wanted her to speak. King Tewdric of Gwent might have been a good Christian, but he was a better politician and knew exactly when to have the old Gods support his demands.

  ‘Arthur ap Neb and his warriors,’ Tewdric now said to the High King, ‘will be a better surety for your grandson’s life than any oath of mine, though God knows my oath is solemn.’

  Prince Gereint, who was Uther’s nephew and, after Owain, the second most powerful warlord in Dumnonia, might have protested Arthur’s appointment, but the Lord of the Stones was an honest man of limited ambition who doubted his ability to lead all Dumnonia’s armies and so he stood beside Tewdric and added his support. Owain, who was the leader of Uther’s Royal Guard as well as the High King’s champion, seemed less happy at the appointment of a rival, but eventually he too stood with Tewdric and growled his assent.

  Uther still hesitated. Three was a lucky number and three oath-takers should have sufficed, and the addition of a fourth might risk the Gods’ displeasure, but Uther owed Tewdric a favour for having dismissed his proposal of Arthur as Norwenna’s husband and now the High King paid his debt. ‘Arthur shall take the oath,’ he agreed, and the Gods alone knew how hard it was for him thus to appoint the man he believed to be responsible for his beloved son’s death, but appoint him he did and the hall rang with acclamation. Gundleus’s Silurians alone were silent as the spears splintered the pavement and the warrior cheers echoed in the smoky cavernous dark.

  Thus, as the High Council ended, was Arthur, son of nobody, chosen to be one of Mordred’s sworn protectors.

  NORWENNA AND GUNDLEUS were married two weeks after the High Council ended. The ceremony was performed at a Christian shrine in Abona, a harbour town on our northern shore that faced across the Severn Sea towards Siluria, and it cannot have been a joyful occasion for Norwenna returned to Ynys Wydryn that very same evening. None of us from the Tor went to the ceremony, though a pack of Ynys Wydryn’s monks and their wives accompanied the Princess. She returned to us as Queen Norwenna of Siluria, though the honour brought her neither new guards nor added attendants. Gundleus sailed back to his own country where, we heard, there were skirmishes against the Ui Liatháin, the Blackshield Irish who had colonized the old British kingdom of Dyfed that the Blackshields called Demetia.

  Our life hardly changed by having a queen among us. We of the Tor might have seemed idle compared to the folk down the hill, but we still had our duties. We cut hay and spread it in rows to dry, we finished shearing the sheep and laid the newly cut flax into stinking retting ponds to make linen. The women in Ynys Wydryn all carried distaffs and spindles on which they wound the newly sheared wool and only the Queen, Morgan and Nimue were spared that unending task. Druidan gelded pigs, Pellinore commanded imaginary armies and Hywel the steward prepared his tally sticks to count the summer rents. Merlin did not come home to Avalon, nor did we receive any news of him. Uther rested at his palace in Durnovaria while Mordred, his heir, grew under Morgan and Guendoloen’s care.

  Arthur stayed in Armorica. He would eventually come to Dumnonia, we were told, but only after he had discharged his duty to Ban whose kingdom of Benoic neighboured Broceli-ande, the realm of King Budic who was married to Arthur’s sister, Anna. Those kingdoms in Brittany were a mystery to us, for no one from Ynys Wydryn had ever crossed the sea to explore the places where so many Britons displaced by the Saxons had taken refuge. We did know that Arthur was Ban’s warlord, and that he had ravaged the country west of Benoic to keep the Frankish enemy at bay, for our winter evenings had been enlivened by travellers’ tales of Arthur’s prowess, just as they were filled with envy by the stories about King Ban. The King of Benoic was married to a queen named Elaine and the two of them had made a wondrous kingdom where justice was swift and fair, and where even the poorest serf was fed in wintertime from the Royal storehouses. It all sounded too good to be true, though much later I visited Ban’s kingdom and found the tales were not exaggerated. Ban had made his capital on an island fortress, Ynys Trebes, which was famous for its poets. The King lavished affection and money on the town that was reputed to be more beautiful than Rome itself. There were said to be springs in Ynys Trebes that Ban had channelled and dammed so that every householder could find clean water not far from his door. The merchants’ scales were tested for accuracy, the King’s palace lay open day and night to petitioners seeking redress of grievance, and the various religions were commanded to live in peace or else have their temples and churches pulled down and pounded into dust. Ynys Trebes was a haven of peace, but only so long as Ban’s soldiers kept the enemy far away from its walls, which was why King Ban was so reluctant to let Arthur leave for Britain. Nor, perhaps, did Arthur want to come to Dumnonia while Uther still lived.

  In Dumnonia that summer was blissful. We gathered
the dry hay into great stacks that we built on thick foundations of bracken that would keep the damp from rising and the rats at bay. The rye and barley ripened in the strip fields that quilted all the land between Avalon’s marshes and Caer Cadarn, apples grew thick in the eastern orchards, while eels and pike grew fat in our meres and creeks. There was no plague, no wolves and few Saxons. Once in a while we would see a distant pyre of smoke on the south-eastern horizon and we would guess that a shipborne raid of Saxon pirates had burned a settlement, but after the third such fire Prince Gereint led a war-band to take Dumnonia’s revenge and the Saxon raids ceased. The Saxon chief even paid his tribute on time, though that was the last tribute we received from a Saxon for many a year and doubtless much of the payment had been plundered from our own border villages. Even so that summer was a good time and Arthur, men said, would die of boredom if he brought his famed horse soldiers to peaceful Dumnonia. Even Powys was calm. King Gorfyddyd had lost the alliance of Siluria, but instead of turning on Gundleus he ignored the Dumnonian marriage and concentrated his spears against the Saxons who threatened his northern territory. Gwynedd, the kingdom to the north of Powys, was embroiled with the fearsome Irish soldiers of Diwrnach of Lleyn, but in Dumnonia, the most blessed of all Britain’s realms, there was plump peace and warm skies.

  Yet it was in that summer, that warm idyllic summer, that I killed my first enemy and so became a man.

  For peace never lasts, and ours was broken most cruelly. Uther, High King and Pendragon of Britain, died. We had known he was ill, we had known he must die soon, indeed we knew he had done all he could to prepare for his own death, yet somehow we had thought this moment would never come. He had been king for so long and under his rule Dumnonia had prospered; it had seemed to us that nothing could ever change. But then, just before the harvest, the Pendragon died. Nimue claimed she heard a hare scream in the midday sun at the very moment, while Morgan, bereft of a father, shut herself in her hut and wailed like a child.

  Uther’s body was burned in the ancient manner. Bedwin would have preferred to give the High King a Christian burial, but the rest of the council refused to sanction such sacrilege and so his swollen corpse was laid on a pyre on the summit of Caer Maes and there put to the flames. His sword was melted by the smith Ystrwth and the molten steel was poured into a lake so that Gofannon, the Blacksmith God of the Otherworld, could forge the sword anew for Uther’s reborn soul. The burning metal hissed as it struck the water and its steam flew like a thick cloud as the seers stooped over the lake to foretell the kingdom’s future in the tortured shapes adopted by the cooling metal. They reported good news, despite which Bishop Bedwin was careful to send his swiftest messengers south to Armorica to summon Arthur while slower men travelled north into Siluria to tell Gundleus that his stepson’s kingdom was now in need of its official protector.

  Uther’s balefire burned for three nights. Only then were the flames allowed to die, a process hastened by a mighty storm that swept in from the Western Sea. Great clouds heaped the sky, lightning harrowed the dead man’s land and heavy rain beat across a broad swathe of growing crops. In Ynys Wydryn we crouched in the huts and listened to the drumming rain and the bellowing thunder and watched the water cascade in streams from the thatched roofs. It was during that storm that Bishop Bedwin’s messenger brought the kingdom’s great dragon banner to Mordred. The messenger had to shout like a mad thing to attract the attention of anyone inside the stockade, but finally Hywel and I opened the gate and once the storm had passed and the wind had died we planted the flag before Merlin’s hall as a sign that Mordred was now king over Dumnonia. The baby was not the High King, of course, for that was an honour which was only granted to a king acknowledged by other kings as one above them all, nor was Mordred the Pendragon, for that title only went to a High King who had won his position in battle. Indeed, Mordred was not even the proper King of Dumnonia yet, nor would he be until he had been carried to Caer Cadarn and there proclaimed with sword and shout above the kingdom’s royal stone, but he was the banner’s owner and so the red dragon flew before Merlin’s high hall.

  The banner was a square of white linen as broad and high as the shaft of a warrior’s spear. It was held spread by willow withies threaded into its hems and was attached to a long elm staff that was crowned with a golden figure of a dragon. The dragon embroidered on the banner itself was made of red wool that leeched its dye in the rain to smear the lower linen pink. The arrival of the banner was followed within days by the King’s Guard, a hundred men led by Owain, the champion, whose task was to protect Mordred, King of Dumnonia. Owain brought a suggestion from Bishop Bedwin that Norwenna and Mordred should move south to Durnovaria, a suggestion Norwenna eagerly adopted for she wanted to raise her son in a Christian community rather than in the Tor’s blatantly pagan air, but before the arrangements could be made there came bad news from the north country. Gorfyddyd of Powys, hearing of the High King’s death, had sent his spearmen to attack Gwent and the men of Powys were now burning, looting and taking captives deep inside Tewdric’s territory. Agricola, Tewdric’s Roman commander, was fighting back, but the treacherous Saxons, undoubtedly in league with Gorfyddyd, had brought their own war-bands into Gwent and suddenly our oldest ally was fighting for his kingdom’s very existence. Owain, who would have escorted Norwenna and the babe south to Durnovaria, took his warriors north to help King Tewdric instead and Ligessac, who was once again the commander of Mordred’s guard, insisted that the baby would be safer behind Ynys Wydryn’s easily defended land bridge than in Caer Cadarn or Durnovaria, and so Norwenna reluctantly remained at the Tor.

  We held our breath to see whose side Gundleus of Siluria would choose and the answer came swiftly. He would fight for Tewdric against his old ally Gorfyddyd. Gundleus sent a message to Norwenna saying that his levies would cross the mountain passes to attack Gorfyddyd’s men from the rear and that as soon as the .war-bands of Powys had been defeated he would come south to protect his bride and her royal son.

  We waited for news, watching the distant hills day and night for the beacons that would tell us of disaster or the approach of enemies, and yet, despite the war’s uncertainties, those were happy days. The sun healed the storm-beaten land and dried the grain while Norwenna, even though she was mired in the pagan Tor, seemed more confident now that her son was King. Mordred was always a grim child, with red hair and a stubborn heart, but in those gentle days he seemed happy enough as he played with his mother or with Ralla, his wet nurse, and her dark-haired son. Ralla’s husband, Gwlyddyn the carpenter, carved Mordred a set of animals: ducks, hogs, cows and deer, and the King loved to play with them even though he was still too young to know just what they were. Norwenna was happy when her son was happy. I used to watch her tickling Mordred to make him laugh, cradling him when he was hurt and loving him always. She called him her little King, her ever-loving-lover-boy, her miracle, and Mordred chuckled back and warmed her unhappy heart. He crawled naked in the sun and we could all see how his left foot was clubbed and grown inwards like a clenched fist, but otherwise he grew strong on Ralla’s milk and his mother’s love. He was baptized in the stone church beside the Holy Thorn.

  News of the war came and it was all good. Prince Gereint had broken a Saxon war-band on Dumnonia’s eastern border, while further north Tewdric had destroyed another force of Saxon raiders. Agricola, leading the rest of Gwent’s army in alliance with Owain of Dumnonia, had driven Gorfyddyd’s invaders back into Powys’s hills. Then a messenger came from Gundleus which said that Gorfyddyd of Powys was seeking peace, and the messenger threw two captured Powysian swords at Norwenna’s feet as a token of her husband’s victory. Better still, the man reported, Gundleus of Siluria was even now on his way south to collect his bride and her precious son. It was time, Gundleus said, that Mordred was proclaimed King on Caer Cadarn. Nothing could have been sweeter to Norwenna’s ears and, in her gladness, she gave the messenger a heavy gold bracelet before sending him south to pass on her husband�
�s message to Bedwin and the council. ‘Tell Bedwin,’ she ordered the messenger, ‘that we shall acclaim Mordred before the harvest. God speed your horse!’

  The messenger rode south and Norwenna began preparing for the acclamation ceremony at Caer Cadarn. She ordered the monks of the Holy Thorn to be ready to travel with her, though she peremptorily forbade either Morgan or Nimue to attend because from this day on, she declared, Dumnonia would be a Christian kingdom and its heathen witches would be kept far from her son’s throne. Gundleus’s victory had emboldened Norwenna, encouraging her to exercise an authority that Uther would never have allowed her to wield.

  We waited for Morgan or Nimue to protest their exclusion from the ceremony of acclamation, but both women took the prohibition with a surprising calm. Morgan, indeed, simply shrugged her black shoulders, though at dusk that night she carried a bronze cauldron into Merlin’s chambers and there secluded herself with Nimue. Norwenna, who had invited the head monk of the Holy Thorn and his wife to dine on the Tor, commented that the witches were brewing evil and everyone in the hall laughed. The Christians were victorious.

  I was not so sure of their victory. Nimue and Morgan disliked each other, yet now they were closeted together and I suspected that only a matter of the direst importance could bring about such a reconciliation. But Norwenna had no doubts. Uther’s death and her husband’s victories were bringing her a blessed freedom and soon she would leave the Tor and assume her rightful place as the King’s mother in a Christian court where her son would grow in Christ’s image. She was never so happy as on that night when she ruled supreme; a Christian in the heart of Merlin’s pagan hall.

  But then Morgan and Nimue reappeared.

  There was silence in the hall as the two women walked to Norwenna’s chair where, with due humility, they knelt. The head monk, a small fierce man with a bristling beard who had been a tanner before converting to Christ and who still stank of the dung needed by his former trade, demanded to know their business. His wife defended herself from evil by making the sign of the cross, though she spat as well just to be sure.