Enemy of God

by Bernard Cornwell

  His crime, of course, was not the breaking of a few Christian heads in Cadoc’s valley, but rather his toleration of paganism during the time he governed Dumnonia. It never occurred to the more rabid Christians that Arthur was himself a pagan and tolerated Christianity, they just condemned him because he had the power to obliterate heathenism and did not do it, and that sin made him the Enemy of God. They also remembered, of course, how he had rescinded Uther’s exemption of the church from forced loans.

  Not all Christians hated him. At least a score of the spearmen who fought alongside us in Cadoc’s valley were themselves Christians. Galahad loved him, and there were many others, like Bishop Emrys, who were his quiet supporters, but the church, in those unquiet days at the end of the first five hundred years of Christ’s rule on earth, was not listening to the quiet, decent men, it was listening to the fanatics who said that the world must be cleansed of pagans if Christ were to come again. I know now, of course, that the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ is the only true faith, and that no other faith can exist in the glorious light of its truth, but it still seemed strange to me, and does to this day, that Arthur, the most just and lawful of rulers, was called the Enemy of God.

  Whatever. We gave Cadoc a headache, tied Ligessac’s throat with a leash made from his beard, and walked away.

  Arthur and I parted company beside the stone cross at the head of Cadoc’s valley. He would take Ligessac north and then go east to find the good roads that led back to Dumnonia, while I had decided to travel deeper into Siluria to find my mother. I took Issa and four other spearmen and let the rest march home with Arthur.

  We six men circled Cadoc’s valley where a woeful band of bruised and bloody Christians had gathered to chant prayers for their dead, and then we walked across the high bare hills and down into the steep green valleys that led to the Severn Sea. I did not know where Erce lived, but I suspected she would not be hard to find for Tanaburs, the Druid I had killed at Lugg Vale, had sought her out to work a dreadful spell on her and surely the Saxon slave woman so wickedly cursed by the Druid would be well enough known. And she was.

  I found her living by the sea in a tiny village where the women made salt and the men caught fish. The villagers shrank away from my men’s unfamiliar shields, but I ducked into one of the hovels where a child fearfully pointed me towards the Saxon woman’s house that proved to be a cottage high up on a ragged bluff above the beach. It was not even a cottage, but rather a crude shelter made of driftwood and roofed with a ragged thatch of seaweed and straw. A fire burned on the small space outside the shelter and a dozen fish were smoking above its flames, while still more choking smoke drifted up from the coal fires that simmered the salt pans at the base of the low cliff. I left my spear and shield at the foot of the bluff and climbed the steep path. A cat bared its teeth and hissed at me as I crouched to look into the dark hut. ‘Erce?’ I called. ‘Erce?’

  Something heaved in the shadows. It was a monstrous dark shape that shed layers of skins and ragged cloth to peer back at me. ‘Erce?’ I said. ‘Are you Erce?’

  What did I expect that day? I had not seen my mother in over twenty-five years, not since the day I was torn from her arms by Gundleus’s spearmen and given to Tanaburs for the sacrifice in the death-pit. Erce had screamed as I was snatched away from her, and then she had been taken away to her new slavery in Siluria and she must have supposed me dead until Tanaburs had revealed to her that I still lived. In my nervous mind, as I had walked south through Siluria’s steep valleys, I had foreseen an embrace, tears, forgiveness and happiness.

  But instead a huge woman, her blonde hair turned into a dirty grey, crawled out from the jumble of skins and blankets to blink at me suspiciously. She was a vast creature, a great heap of decaying flesh with a face as round as a shield and blotched by disease and scars, and with eyes that were small and hard and bloodshot. ‘I was called Erce once,’ she said in a hoarse voice.

  I backed out of the hut, repelled by its stench of urine and rot. She followed me, crawling heavily on all fours to blink in the morning sunlight. She was dressed in rags. ‘You are Erce?’ I asked her.

  ‘Once,’ she said, and yawned to show a ravaged, toothless mouth. ‘Long ago. Now they call me Enna.’ She paused. ‘Mad Enna,’ she added sadly, then peered at my fine clothes and rich sword belt and tall boots. ‘Who are you, Lord?’

  ‘My name is Derfel Cadarn,’ I said, ‘a Lord of Dumnonia.’ The name meant nothing to her. ‘I am your son,’ I added.

  She showed no reaction to that, but just settled back against the driftwood wall of her hut that sagged dangerously under her weight. She thrust a hand deep inside the rags and scratched at her breast. ‘All my sons are dead,’ she said.

  ‘Tanaburs took me,’ I reminded her, ‘and threw me into the death-pit.’

  The story seemed to mean nothing to her. She lay slumped against the wall, her huge body heaving with the effort of each laboured breath. She toyed with the cat and stared out across the Severn Sea to where, dim in the distance, the Dumnonian coast was a dark line under a row of rainclouds. ‘I did have a son once,’ she said at last, ‘who was given to the Gods in the death-pit. Wygga, his name was. Wygga. A fine boy.’

  Wygga? Wygga! That name, so raw and ugly, stilled me for a few heartbeats. ‘I am Wygga,’ I finally said, hating the name. ‘I was given a new name after I was rescued from the pit,’ I explained to her. We spoke in Saxon, a language in which I was now more fluent than my mother, for it had been many years since she had spoken it.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, frowning. I could see a louse crawling along the edge of her hair. ‘No,’ she insisted again. ‘Wygga was just a little boy. Just a little boy. My firstborn, he was, and they took him away.’

  ‘I lived, mother,’ I said. I was revolted by her, fascinated by her and regretting that I had ever come to find her. ‘I survived the pit,’ I told her, ‘and I remember you.’ And so I did, but in my memory she was as slim and lithe as Ceinwyn.

  ‘Just a little boy,’ Erce said dreamily. She closed her eyes and I thought she was sleeping, but it seemed she was passing urine for a trickle appeared at the edge of her clothes and dripped down the rock towards the struggling fire.

  ‘Tell me about Wygga,’ I said.

  ‘I was heavy with him,’ she said, ‘when Uther captured me. A big man, Uther, with a great dragon on his shield.’ She scratched at the louse, which disappeared into her hair. ‘He gave me to Madog,’ she went on, ‘and it was at Madog’s holding that Wygga was born. We were happy with Madog,’ she said. ‘He was a good Lord, kind to his slaves, but Gundleus came and they killed Wygga.’

  ‘They didn’t,’ I insisted. ‘Didn’t Tanaburs tell you?’

  At the mention of the Druid’s name she shuddered and pulled her tattered shawl tighter about her mountainous shoulders. She said nothing, but after a while tears showed at the corners of her eyes.

  A woman climbed the path towards us. She came slowly and suspiciously, glancing warily towards me as she sidled onto the rock platform. When at last she felt safe she scuttled past me and crouched beside Erce. ‘My name,’ I told the newcomer, ‘is Derfel Cadarn, but I was once called Wygga.’

  ‘My name is Linna,’ the woman said in the British tongue. She was younger than me, but the hard life of this shore had put deep lines on her face, bowed her shoulders and stiffened her joints, while the hard business of tending the salt-pan fires had left her skin blackened by coal.

  ‘You’re Erce’s daughter?’ I guessed.

  ‘Enna’s daughter,’ she corrected me.

  ‘Then I am your half-brother,’ I said.

  I do not think she believed me, and why should she? No one came from a death-pit alive, yet I had, and thereby I had been touched by the Gods and given to Merlin, but what could that tale mean to these two tired and ragged women?

  ‘Tanaburs!’ Erce suddenly said, and raised both hands to ward off evil. ‘He took away Wygga’s father!’ She wailed and rocked to and fro. �
�He went inside me and took away Wygga’s father. He cursed me and he cursed Wygga and he cursed my womb.’ She was weeping now and Linna cradled her mother’s head in her arms and looked at me reproachfully.

  ‘Tanaburs,’ I said, ‘had no power over Wygga. Wygga killed him, because he had power over Tanaburs. Tanaburs could not take away Wygga’s father.’

  Maybe my mother heard me, but she did not believe me. She rocked in her daughter’s arms and the tears ran down her pock-marked, dirty cheeks as she half remembered the half-understood scraps of Tanaburs’s curse. ‘Wygga would kill his father,’ she told me, ‘that’s what the curse said, that the son will kill the father.’

  ‘So Wygga does live,’ I insisted.

  She stopped her rocking motion suddenly and peered at me. She shook her head. ‘The dead come back to kill. Dead children! I see them, Lord, out there,’ she spoke earnestly and pointed at the sea, ‘all the little dead going to their revenge.’ She rocked in her daughter’s arms again. ‘And Wygga will kill his father.’ She was crying heavily now. ‘And Wygga’s father was such a fine man! Such a hero. So big and strong. And Tanaburs has cursed him.’ She sniffed, then sighed a lullaby for a moment before talking more about my father, saying how his people had sailed across the sea to Britain and how he had used his sword to make himself a fine house. Erce, I gathered, had been a servant in that house and the Saxon Lord had taken her to his bed and so given me life, the same life that Tanaburs had failed to take at the death-pit. ‘He was a lovely man,’ Erce said of my father, ‘such a lovely, handsome man. Everyone feared him, but he was good to me. We used to laugh together.’

  ‘What was his name?’ I asked, and I think I knew the answer even before she gave it.

  ‘Aelle,’ she said in a whisper, ‘lovely, handsome Aelle.’

  Aelle. The smoke whirled about my head, and my brains, for a moment, were as addled as my mother’s wits. Aelle? I was Aelle’s son?

  ‘Aelle,’ Erce said dreamily, ‘lovely, handsome Aelle.’

  I had no other questions and so I forced myself to kneel before my mother and give her an embrace. I kissed her on both cheeks, then held her tight as if I could give back to her some of the life she had given to me, and though she succumbed to the embrace, she still would not acknowledge that I was her son. I took lice from her.

  I drew Linna down the steps and discovered she was married to one of the village fishermen and had six children living. I gave her gold, more gold, I think, than she had ever expected to see, and more gold, probably, than she even suspected existed. She stared at the little bars in disbelief.

  ‘Is our mother still a slave?’ I asked her.

  ‘We all are,’ she said, gesturing at the whole miserable village.

  ‘That will buy your freedom,’ I said, pointing to the gold, ‘if you want it.’

  She shrugged and I doubted that being free would make any difference to their lives. I could have found their Lord and bought their freedom myself, but doubtless he lived far away and the gold, if it was wisely spent, would ease their hard life whether they were slave or free. One day, I promised myself, I would come back and try to do more.

  ‘Look after our mother,’ I told Linna.

  ‘I will, Lord,’ she said dutifully, but I still did not think she believed me.

  ‘You don’t call your own brother Lord,’ I told her, but she would not be persuaded.

  I left her and walked down to the shore where my men waited with the baggage. ‘We’re going home,’ I said. It was still morning and we had a long day’s march ahead. A march towards home.

  Home to Ceinwyn. Home to my daughters who were sprung from a line of British Kings and from their Saxon enemy’s royal blood. For I was Aelle’s son. I stood on a green hill above the sea and wondered at the extraordinary weave of life, but I could make no sense of it. I was Aelle’s son, but what difference did that make? It explained nothing and it demanded nothing. Fate is inexorable. I would go home.

  IT WAS ISSA WHO first saw the smoke. He always had eyes like a hawk and that day, as I stood on the hill trying to find some meaning in my mother’s revelations, Issa spied smoke across the sea. ‘Lord?’ he said, and at first I did not respond for I was too dazed by what I had learned. I was to kill my father? And that father was Aelle? ‘Lord!’ Issa said more insistently, waking me from my thoughts. ‘Look, Lord, smoke.’

  He was pointing south towards Dumnonia and at first I thought the whiteness was merely a paler patch among the rain-clouds, but Issa was certain and two of the other spearmen asserted that what we saw was smoke and not cloud or rain. ‘There’s more, Lord,’ one of them said, pointing further west where another small smear of whiteness showed against the grey.

  One fire might have been an accident, perhaps a hall burning or a dry field blazing, but in that wet weather no field would have burned and in all my life I had never seen two halls ablaze unless an enemy had put them to the torch.

  ‘Lord?’ Issa prompted me, for he, like me, had a wife in Dumnonia.

  ‘Back to the village,’ I said. ‘Now.’

  Linna’s husband agreed to take us over the sea. The voyage was not long, for the sea here was only eight or so miles wide and it offered us our swiftest route home, but like all spearmen we preferred a long dry journey to a short wet one, and that crossing was an ordeal of sodden cold misery. A brisk wind had sprung from the west to bring more clouds and rain, and with it came a short, rising sea that splashed over the boat’s low gunwales. We bailed for our lives while the ragged sail bellied and slapped and dragged us southward. Our boatman, who was called Balig and was my brother-in-law, declared that there was no joy like a good boat in a brisk wind and he roared his thanks to Manawydan for sending us such weather, but Issa was sick as a dog, I was retching dry, and we were all glad when, in the middle of the afternoon, he ran us ashore on a Dumnonian beach no more than three or four hours from home.

  I paid Balig, then we struck inland through a flat, damp country. There was a village not far from the beach, but the folk there had seen the smoke and were frightened and they mistook us for enemies and ran to their huts. The village possessed a small church, merely a thatched hut with a wooden cross nailed to a gable, but the Christians had all gone. One of the remaining pagan villagers told me that the Christians had all gone eastwards. ‘They followed their priest, Lord,’ he told me.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Where?’

  ‘We don’t know, Lord.’ He glanced at the distant smoke. ‘Are the Saxons back?’

  ‘No,’ I reassured him, and hoped I was right. The thinning smoke looked to be no more than six or seven miles away and I doubted that either Aelle or Cerdic could have reached this far into Dumnonia. If they had then all Britain was lost.

  We hurried on. At that moment all we wanted was to reach our families and, once we knew they were safe, the time would come to find out what was happening. We had a choice of two routes to Ermid’s Hall. One, the longer, lay inland and would take us four or five hours, much of it in darkness, but the other lay across the great sea-marshes of Avalon; a treacherous swamp of creeks, willow-edged bogs and sedge-covered wastes where, when the tide was high and the wind from the west, the sea could sometimes seep and fill and flood the levels and drown unwary travellers. There were routes through that great swamp, and even wooden walkways that led to where the willow pollards grew and the eel and fish traps were set, but none of us knew the marsh paths. Yet still we chose those treacherous paths for they offered the swiftest way home.

  As evening fell we found a guide. Like most of the marsh folk he was a pagan and, once he knew who I was, he gladly offered his services. In the middle of the marsh, rising black in the falling light, we could see the Tor. We would have to go there first, our guide said, and then find one of Ynys Wydryn’s boatmen to take us in a reed punt across the shallow waters of Issa’s Mere.

  It was still raining as we left the marsh village, the drops pattering on the reeds and dappling the pools, but it lifted within t
he hour and gradually a wan, milky moon glowed dimly behind the thinning clouds that scudded from the west. Our path crossed black ditches on plank bridges, passed by the intricate woven wickerwork of willow eel traps, and snaked incomprehensibly across blank shining morasses where our guide would mutter incantations against the marsh spirits. Some nights, he said, strange blue lights glimmered in the wet wastes; the spirits, he thought, of the many folk who had died in this labyrinth of water, mud and sedge. Our footfalls startled screeching wildfowl up from their nests, their panicked wings dark against the cloud-racked sky. Our guide talked to me as we went, telling me of the dragons that slept under the marsh and the ghouls that slithered through its muddy creeks. He wore a necklace made from the spine of a drowned man, the only sure charm, he claimed, against those fearsome things that haunted our path.

  It seemed to me that the Tor came no closer, but that was just our impatience and yard by yard, creek by creek, we did get nearer and, as the great hill loomed higher and higher in the ragged sky, we saw a bright smear of light show at its foot. It was a great flamelight, and at first we thought the shrine of the Holy Thorn must be burning, but as we drew still nearer the flames grew no brighter and I guessed the light came from bonfires, perhaps lit to illuminate some Christian rite that sought to keep the shrine from harm. We all made the sign against evil, then at last we reached an embankment that led straight from the wet land to Ynys Wydryn’s higher ground.

  Our guide left us there. He preferred the dangers of the marsh to the perils of firelit Ynys Wydryn, so he knelt to me and I rewarded him with the last of my gold, then raised him up and thanked him.

  The six of us walked on through the small town of Ynys Wydryn, a place of fishermen and basket-makers. The houses were dark and the alleyways deserted except for dogs and rats. We were heading towards the wooden palisade that surrounded the shrine, and though we could see the glowing smoke of the fires churning above the fence we still could not see anything that happened inside; but our path took us past the shrine’s main gate and, as we drew closer, I saw there were two spearmen standing guard at the entrance. The flamelight coming through the open gate illuminated one of their shields and on that shield was the last symbol I had ever expected to see in Ynys Wydryn. It was Lancelot’s sea-eagle with the fish in its claws.