The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘The second turgid war,’ the priest cackled.

  ‘Such is my library,’ Ban said proudly, conducting me from the room, ‘the glory of Ynys Trebes! That and our poets. Sorry to have disturbed you, Father!’

  ‘Is a camel disturbed by a grasshopper?’ Father Celwin demanded, then the door was closed on him and I followed the King past the bare-breasted harpist back to where Bleiddig waited.

  ‘Father Celwin is conducting research,’ Ban announced proudly, ‘into the wingspan of angels. Maybe I should ask him about invisibility? He does seem to know everything. But do you see now, Derfel, why it is so important that Ynys Trebes does not fall? In this small place, my dear fellow, is stored the wisdom of our world, gathered from its ruins and held in trust. I wonder what a camel is. Do you know what a camel is, Bleiddig?’

  ‘A kind of coal, Lord. Blacksmiths use it for making steel.’

  ‘Do they indeed? How interesting. But coal wouldn’t be bothered by a grasshopper, would it? The contingency would scarcely arise, so why suggest it? How perplexing. I must ask Father Celwin when he’s in a mood to be asked, which is not often. Now, young man, I know you’ve come to save my kingdom and I’m sure you’re eager to be about that business, but first you must stay for supper. My sons are here, warriors both! I had hoped they might devote their lives to poetry and scholarship, but the times demand warriors, do they not? Still, my dear Lancelot values the fili as highly as I do myself, so there is hope for our future.’ He paused, wrinkled his nose and offered me a kindly smile. ‘You will, I think, want a bath?’

  ‘Will I?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ban said decisively. ‘Leanor will take you to your chamber, prepare your bath and provide you with clothes.’ He clapped his hands and the first harpist came to the door. It seemed she was Leanor.

  I was in a palace by the sea, full of light and beauty, haunted by music, sacred to poetry and enchanted by its inhabitants who seemed to me to come from another age and another world.

  And then I met Lancelot.

  ‘You’re hardly more than a child,’ Lancelot said to me.

  ‘True, Lord,’ I said. I was eating lobster soaked in melted butter and I do not think before or since I have ever eaten anything so delicious.

  ‘Arthur insults us by sending a mere child,’ Lancelot insisted.

  ‘Not true, Lord,’ I said, butter dripping into my beard.

  ‘You accuse me of lying?’ Prince Lancelot, the Edling of Benoic, demanded.

  I smiled at him. ‘I accuse you, Lord Prince, of being mistaken.’

  ‘Sixty men?’ he sneered. ‘Is that all Arthur can manage?’

  ‘Yes, Lord,’ I said.

  ‘Sixty men led by a child,’ Lancelot said scornfully. He was only a year or two older than I yet he possessed the world-weariness of a much older man. He was savagely handsome, tall and well built, with a narrow, dark-eyed face that was as striking in its maleness as Guinevere’s was in its femininity, though there was something disconcertingly serpent-like in Lancelot’s aloof looks. He had black hair that he wore in oiled loops pinned with gold combs, his moustache and beard were neatly trimmed and oiled to a gloss, and he wore a scent that smelled of lavender. He was the best-looking man I ever saw and, worse, he knew it, and I had disliked him from the very first moment I saw him. We met in Ban’s feasting hall, which was unlike any feasting hall I was ever in. This one had marble pillars, white curtains that misted the sea view, and smooth plastered walls on which were paintings of Gods, Goddesses and fabulous animals. Servants and guards lined the walls of the gracious room that was lit by a myriad of small bronze dishes in which wicks floated in oil, while thick beeswax candles burned on the long table covered by a white cloth which I was constantly soiling with drips of butter, just as I was smearing the awkward toga that King Ban had insisted I wore to the feast.

  I was loving the food and hating the company. Father Celwin was present and I would have welcomed a chance to talk with him, but he was annoying one of the three poets at the table, all of them members of King Ban’s beloved band of fill, while I was marooned at the table’s end with Prince Lancelot. Queen Elaine, who was seated beside her husband, the King, was defending the poets against Celwin’s barbs, which seemed much more amusing than Prince Lancelot’s bitter conversation. ‘Arthur does insult us,’ Lancelot insisted again.

  ‘I am sorry you should think so, Lord,’ I answered.

  ‘Do you never argue, child?’ he demanded of me.

  I looked into his flat, hard eyes. ‘I thought it unwise for warriors to argue at a feast, Lord Prince,’ I said.

  ‘So you’re a timid child!’ he sneered.

  I sighed and lowered my voice. ‘Do you really want an argument, Lord Prince?’ I asked, my patience at last nearing its end, ‘because if you do then just call me a child again and I’ll tear your skull off.’ I smiled.

  ‘Child,’ he said after a heartbeat.

  I gave him another puzzled look, wondering if he played a game the rules of which I could not guess, but if he did then the game was in deadly earnest. ‘Ten times the black sword,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ He frowned, not recognizing the Mithraic formula which meant he was not my brother. ‘Have you gone mad?’ he asked, and then, after a pause, ‘Are you a mad child, as well as a timid one?’

  I hit him. I should have kept my temper, but my discomfort and anger overcame all prudence. I gave him a backswing with my elbow that bloodied his nose, cracked his lip and spilt him backwards off the chair. He sprawled on the floor and tried to swing the fallen chair at me, but I was too fast and too close for the blow to have any force. I kicked the chair aside, hauled him upright then rammed him backwards against a pillar where I smashed his head against the stone and put my knee into his groin. He flinched. His mother was screaming, while King Ban and his poetic guests just gaped at me. A nervous white-cloaked guard put his spear-point at my throat. ‘Take it away,’ I told the guard, ‘or you’re a dead man.’ He took it away.

  ‘What am I, Lord Prince?’ I asked Lancelot.

  ‘A child,’ he said.

  I put my forearm across his throat, half choking him. He struggled, but he could not shift me. ‘What am I, Lord?’ I asked again.

  ‘A child,’ he croaked.

  A hand touched my arm and I turned to see a fair-haired man of my own age smiling at me. He had been sitting at the table’s opposite end and I had assumed he was another poet, but that assumption was wrong. ‘I’ve long wanted to do what you’re doing,’ the young man said, ‘but if you want to stop my brother insulting you then you’ll have to kill him and family honour will insist I shall have to kill you and I’m not sure I want to do that.’

  I eased my arm from Lancelot’s throat. For a few seconds he stood there, trying to breathe, then he shook his head, spat at me, and walked back to the table. His nose was bleeding, his lips swelling and his carefully oiled hair hung in sad disarray. His brother seemed amused by the fight. ‘I’m Galahad,’ he said, ‘and proud to meet Derfel Cadarn.’

  I thanked him, then forced myself to cross to King Ban’s chair where, despite his avowed dislike of respectful gestures, I knelt down. ‘For the insult to your house, Lord King,’ I said, ‘I apologize and submit to your punishment.’

  ‘Punishment?’ Ban said in a surprised voice. ‘Don’t be so silly. It’s just the wine. Too much wine. We should water our wine as the Romans did, shouldn’t we, Father Celwin?’

  ‘Ridiculous thing to do,’ the old priest said.

  ‘No punishment, Derfel,’ Ban said. ‘And do stand up, I can’t abide being worshipped. And what was your offence? Merely to be avid in argument, and where is the fault in that? I like argument, isn’t that so, Father Celwin? A supper without argument is like a day without poetry’ – the King ignored the priest’s acid comment about how blessed such a day would be – ‘and my son Lancelot is a hasty man. He has a warrior’s heart and a poet’s soul, and that, I fear, is a most combustible mix. Stay and eat.’ Ban was a
most generous monarch, though I noted that his Queen, Elaine, was anything but pleased at his decision. She was grey-haired, yet her face was unlined and contained a grace and calm that suited Ynys Trebes’s serene beauty. At that moment, though, the Queen was frowning at me in severe disapproval.

  ‘Are all Dumnonian warriors so ill-mannered?’ she asked the table at large in an acid voice.

  ‘You want warriors to be courtiers?’ Celwin retorted brusquely. ‘You’d send your precious poets to kill the Franks? And I don’t mean by reciting their verses at them, though come to think of it that might be quite effective.’ He leered at the Queen and the three poets shuddered. Celwin had somehow evaded the prohibition on ugly things in Ynys Trebes for, without the cowl he had worn in the library, he appeared as an astonishingly ill-favoured man with one sharp eye, a mildewed eyepatch on the other, a sour twisted mouth, lank hair that grew behind a ragged tonsure line, a filthy beard half hiding a crude wooden cross hanging on his hollow chest, and with a bent, twisted body that was distorted by its stupendous hump. The grey cat that had been draped about his neck in the library was now curled on his lap eating scraps of lobster.

  ‘Come to my end of the table,’ Galahad said, ‘and don’t blame yourself.’

  ‘But I do,’ I said. ‘It’s my fault. I should have kept my temper.’

  ‘My brother,’ Galahad said when the seating had been rearranged, ‘my half-brother, rather, delights in goading people. It’s his sport, but most daren’t fight back because he’s the Edling and that means one day he’ll have powers of life and death. But you did the right thing.’

  ‘No, the wrong thing.’

  ‘I won’t argue. But I will get you ashore tonight.’

  ‘Tonight?’ I was surprised.

  ‘My brother does not take defeat lightly,’ Galahad said softly. ‘A knife in the ribs while you’re sleeping? If I were you, Derfel Cadarn, I should join your men ashore and sleep safe in their ranks.’

  I looked down the table to where the darkly handsome Lancelot was now being consoled by his mother as she dabbed at the blood on his face with a napkin dampened by wine. ‘Half-brother?’ I asked Galahad.

  ‘I was born to the King’s lover, not to his wife,’ Galahad leaned close to me and explained softly. ‘But Father has been good to me and insists on calling me prince.’

  King Ban was now arguing with Father Celwin about some obscure point of Christian theology. Ban was debating with courteous enthusiasm while Celwin was spitting insults and both men were enjoying themselves hugely. ‘Your father tells me you and Lancelot are both warriors,’ I said to Galahad.

  ‘Both?’ Galahad laughed. ‘My dear brother employs poets and bards to sing his praises as the greatest warrior of Armorica, but I’ve yet to see him in the shield-line.’

  ‘But I have to fight,’ I said sourly, ‘to preserve his inheritance.’

  ‘The kingdom’s lost,’ Galahad said carelessly. ‘Father has spent his money on buildings and manuscripts, not soldiers, and here in Ynys Trebes we’re too far from our people so they’d rather retreat to Broceliande than look to us for help. The Franks are winning everywhere. Your job, Derfel, is to stay alive and get safe home.’

  His honesty made me look at him with a new interest. He had a broader, blunter face than his brother, and a more open one; the kind of face you would be glad to see on your right-hand side in the shield-line. A man’s right side was the one defended by his neighbour’s shield, so it served to be on good terms with that man, and Galahad, I felt instinctively, would be an easy man to like. ‘Are you saying we shouldn’t fight the Franks?’ I asked him quietly.

  ‘I’m saying the fight is lost, but yes, you’re oath-bound by Arthur to fight, and every moment that Ynys Trebes lives is a moment of light in a dark world. I’m trying to persuade Father to send his library to Britain, but I think he’d rather cut his own heart out first. But when the time comes, I’m sure, he’ll send it away. Now’ – he pushed his gilded chair away from the table – ‘you and I must leave. Before,’ he added softly, ‘the fili recite. Unless, of course, you have a taste for unending verses about the glories of moonlight on reed beds?’

  I stood and rapped the table with one of the special eating knives that King Ban provided his guests. Those guests now eyed me warily. ‘I have an apology to make,’ I said, ‘not just to you all, but to my Lord Lancelot. Such a great warrior as he deserved a better companion for supper. Now, forgive me, I need to sleep.’

  Lancelot did not respond. King Ban smiled, Queen Elaine looked disgusted and Galahad hurried me first to where my own clothes and weapons waited, then down to the flamelit quay where a boat waited to take us ashore. Galahad, still dressed in his toga, was carrying a sack that he slung on to the small boat’s deck. It fell with a clang of metal. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘My weapons and armour,’ he said. He untied the boat’s painter, then leaped aboard. ‘I’m coming with you.’

  The boat glided from the quay under a dark sail. The water rippled at the bow and splashed gently down the hull’s length as we drew off into the bay. Galahad was stripping himself of the toga, which he tossed to the boatman, before dressing in war gear, while I stared back at the palace on the hill. It hung in the sky like a skyship sailing into clouds, or maybe like a star come down to earth; a place of dreams; a refuge where a just King and a beautiful Queen ruled and where poets sang and old men could study the wingspan of angels. It was so beautiful, Ynys Trebes, so utterly beautiful.

  And, unless we could save it, doomed utterly.

  Two years we fought. Two years against all odds. Two years of splendour and vileness. Two years of slaughter and feast, of broken swords and shattered shields, of victory and disaster, and in all those months and in all those sweated fights when brave men choked on their own life blood and ordinary men did deeds they never dreamed possible, I never saw Lancelot once. Yet the poets said he was the hero of Benoic, the most perfect warrior, the fighter of fighters. The poets said that preserving Benoic was Lancelot’s fight, not mine, not Galahad’s, not Culhwch’s, but Lancelot’s. But Lancelot spent the war in bed, begging his mother to bring him wine and honey.

  No, not always in bed. Lancelot was sometimes at a fight, but always a mile behind so that he could be first back to Ynys Trebes with his news of victory. He knew how to tear a cloak, batter a sword edge, rumple his oiled hair and even cut his face so that he staggered home looking the hero, and then his mother would have the fili compose a new song and the song would be carried to Britain by traders and seamen so that even in distant Rheged, north of Elmet, they believed that Lancelot was the new Arthur. The Saxons feared his coming, while Arthur sent him the gift of an embroidered sword belt with a richly enamelled buckle.

  ‘You think life should be fair?’ Culhwch asked me when I complained about the gift.

  ‘No, Lord,’ I said.

  ‘Then don’t waste breath on Lancelot,’ Culhwch said. He was the cavalry leader left behind in Armorica when Arthur went to Britain, and also a cousin of Arthur’s, though he bore no resemblance to my Lord. Culhwch was a squat, fiercely bearded, long-armed brawler who asked nothing of life but a plentiful supply of enemies, drink and women. Arthur had left him in command of thirty men and horses, but the horses were all dead and half the men were gone so that now Culhwch fought on foot. I joined my men to his and so accepted his command. He could not wait for the war in Benoic to end so that he could fight again at Arthur’s side. He adored Arthur.

  We fought a strange war. When Arthur had been in Armorica the Franks were still some miles to the east where the land was flat and cleared of trees and thus ideal for his heavy horsemen, but now the enemy was deep inside the woods that cloaked the hills of central Benoic. King Ban, like Tewdric of Gwent, had put his faith in fortifications, but where Gwent was ideally placed for massive forts and high walls, the woods and hills of Benoic offered the enemy too many paths that passed by the hilltop fortresses garrisoned by Ban’s dispirited forces. Our j
ob was to give those forces hope again and we did it by using Arthur’s own tactics of hard marches and surprise attacks. The wooded hills of Benoic were made for such battles and our men were peerless. There are few joys to compare with the fight that follows an ambush well sprung, when the enemy is strung out and has his weapons sheathed. I put new scars on Hywelbane’s long edge.

  The Franks feared us. They called us forest wolves and we adopted the insult as our symbol and wore grey wolf-tails on our helmets. We howled to frighten them, kept them awake night after night, stalked them for days and sprang our ambushes when we wanted and not when they were ready, yet the enemy was many and we were few, and month by month our numbers shrank.

  Galahad fought with us. He was a great fighter, yet he was also a scholar who had delved into his father’s library and he would talk at night of old Gods, new religions, strange countries and great men. I remember one night when we camped in a ruined villa. A week before it had been a thriving settlement with its own fulling mill, pottery and dairy, but the Franks had been there and now the villa was a smoking ruin, splashed by blood, its walls tumbled and its spring poisoned with the corpses of women and children. Our sentries were guarding the paths in the woods so we had the luxury of a fire on which we roasted a brace of hares and a kid. We drank water and pretended it was wine.

  ‘Falernian,’ Galahad said dreamily, holding his clay cup to the stars as though it were a golden flask.

  ‘Who’s he?’ Culhwch asked.

  ‘Falernian, my dear Culhwch, is a wine, a most pleasant Roman wine.’

  ‘I never did like wine,’ Culhwch said, then yawned hugely. ‘A woman’s drink. Now Saxon ale! There’s a drink for you.’ Within minutes he was asleep.

  Galahad could not sleep. The fire flickered low while above us the stars shone bright. One fell, cutting its swift white path through the heavens and Galahad made the sign of the cross for he was a Christian and to him a falling star was the sign of a demon falling from paradise. ‘It was on earth once,’ he said.

  ‘What was?’ I asked.