The Winter King

by Bernard Cornwell

  The Franks then began to build a proper causeway. They cut hundreds of trees and laid them on the sand, then weighted the trunks with rocks carried to the shore by slaves. The tides in Ynys Trebes’s wide bay were fierce, sometimes rising forty feet, and the new causeway was ripped by the currents so that at low tide the flats were littered with floating logs, but always the Franks brought more trees and stone and so plugged the gaps. They had captured thousands of slaves and did not care how many died in building the new road. The causeway became longer as our food supplies grew shorter. Our few remaining boats still went fishing, and others carried grain from Broceliande, but the Franks launched their own boats from the shore and after two of our fishing boats were captured and their crews disembowelled, our shipmasters stayed at home. The poets on the hilltop, posturing with their spears, lived off the palace’s rich stores, but we warriors scraped barnacles off the rocks, ate mussels and razor clams or stewed the rats we trapped in our storehouse that was still filled with pelts, salt and barrels of nails. We did not starve. We had willow fish traps at the base of the rocks and most days they yielded a few small fish though at low tide the Franks would send raiding parties to destroy the traps.

  At high tide the Frankish boats rowed round the island to pull up the fish traps set further from the city’s shore. The bay was shallow enough for the enemy to see the traps and then to break them with spears. One such boat grounded on its return to the mainland and was left stranded a quarter-mile from the city as the tide fell. Culhwch ordered a sortie and thirty of us climbed down fishing nets suspended from the wall’s top. The twelve men of the boat’s crew fled as we approached, and inside the abandoned craft we found a barrel of salted fish and two dry loaves of bread that we carried back in triumph. When the tide rose we brought the boat back to the city and tied it safe beneath our wall. Lancelot watched our disobedience, but sent no reprimand though a message did come from Queen Elaine demanding to know what supplies we had fetched back from the ship. We sent some dried fish up the road and no doubt the gift was construed as an insult. Lancelot then accused us of capturing the boat so that we could desert Ynys Trebes and ordered us to deliver the ship to the island’s small harbour. For answer I climbed the hill to the palace and demanded that he back up his accusation of cowardice with his sword. I shouted the challenge around the courtyard, but the Prince and his poets stayed inside their locked doors. I spat on their threshold and left.

  Galahad was happier the more desperate things became. Part of his happiness sprang from the presence of Leanor, the harpist who had welcomed me two years before, the girl for whom Galahad had confessed his lust to me, the same girl Lancelot had raped. She and Galahad lived in a corner of the store-room. We all had women. There was something about the hopelessness of our plight that eroded normal behaviour and so we crammed as much living as we could into those hours before our expected deaths. The women stood guard with us and hurled rocks whenever the Franks tried to dismantle our fragile fish traps. We had long run out of spears, except for those we had brought to Benoic ourselves and which we were saving for the main assault. Our handful of archers had no missiles except the ones shot into the city by the Franks, and that supply increased when the enemy’s causeway was a short bow’s shot from the city gate. The Franks erected a timber fence at the end of the causeway and their archers stood behind the fence and poured arrows on the gate’s defenders. The Franks made no attempt to extend the causeway all the way to the city, for the new roadway was only ever intended to give them a dry passage to the place where their assault could begin. We knew that attack must come soon.

  It was early summer when the causeway was finished. The moon was full and brought huge tides. For much of the time the causeway was under water, but at low tide the sands stretched wide about Ynys Trebes, and the Franks, who were learning the secrets of the sandflats day by day, ranged all about us. Their drums were our constant music and their threats were ever in our ears. One day brought a feast special to their tribes and instead of attacking us they lit great fires on the beach then marched a column of slaves to the causeway’s end where, one by one, the captives were beheaded. The slaves were Britons, some of them with relatives watching from the city’s wall, and the barbarism of the slaughter goaded some of Ynys Trebes’s defenders to rush out of the gate in a vain attempt to rescue the doomed women and children. The Franks were waiting for the attack and formed a shield–wall on the sand, but the men of Ynys Trebes, crazed by anger and hunger, charged home. Bleiddig was one of the attackers. He died that day, cut down by a Frankish spear. We Dumnonians watched as a handful of survivors fled back to the city. There was nothing we could have done except add our corpses to the pile. Bleiddig’s body was flayed, disembowelled, then planted on a stake at the causeway’s end so that we were forced to look at him until the next high tide. Somehow, though, the body stayed on the stake despite being immersed so that next morning, in a grey dawn, the gulls were tearing at his salt-washed corpse.

  ‘We should have charged with Bleiddig,’ Galahad told me bitterly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Better to have died like a man in front of a shield–wall than be starved here.’

  ‘You’ll get your chance to fight the shield–wall,’ I promised him, but I also took what steps I could to help my people in defeat. We barricaded the alleys leading to our sector so that should the Franks break into the island-city we could hold them at bay while our women were taken on a narrow rock-bound path that twisted across the shoulder of the granite peak to a tiny cleft on the island’s north-western shore where we had hidden our captured ship. The cleft was no kind of harbour, so we protected our ship by filling it with stones so that the tide flooded it twice a day. Under water the fragile hull was safe from being pounded against the cleft’s rocky sides by the wind and waves. I guessed that the enemy assault would be made at low water and two of our wounded men were under instructions to empty the boat of its rocks as soon as the attack began so that the craft would float on the flooding tide. The idea of escaping in the boat was desperate, but it gave our people heart.

  No ships came to our rescue. One morning a great sail was seen in the north and the rumour flashed about the city that Arthur himself was coming, but gradually the sail hauled off and disappeared in the summer haze. We were alone. At night we sang songs and told tales, while by day we watched the Frankish war-bands gather on the shore.

  Those war-bands made their assault on a summer afternoon, late on a falling tide. They came in a great swarm of leather-armoured men, iron-helmeted, with wooden shields held high. They crossed the causeway, leaped off its end and climbed the gentle slope of sand towards the city gate. The leading attackers carried a huge log as a battering ram, its end fire-hardened and sheathed in leather, while the men who followed brought long ladders. One horde came and threw their ladders against our walls. ‘Let them climb!’ Culhwch bellowed at our soldiers. He waited until one ladder held five men then hurled a huge boulder straight down between its uprights. The Franks screamed as they were plucked off the rungs. An arrow glanced off Culhwch’s helmet as he hurled another stone. More arrows rattled on the wall or hissed over our heads while a rain of light throwing spears clattered uselessly against the stone. The Franks were a churning dark mass at the wall’s foot into which we hurled rocks and sewage. Cavan managed to lift one ladder clean over the wall and we broke it into scraps that we rained down on our attackers. Four of our women struggled to the rampart with a fluted stone column taken from a city doorway and we heaved it over the wall and took pleasure in the terrible screams of the men it crushed.

  ‘This is how the darkness comes!’ Galahad shouted at me. He was exultant; fighting the last battle and spitting in death’s eye. He waited for a Frank to reach a ladder’s top, then gave a mighty slash with his sword so that the man’s head bounded off down to the sand. The rest of the dead man’s corpse stayed clinging to the ladder, obstructing the Franks behind who became easy targets for our stones. We were bre
aking down the store-house wall now to make our ammunition and we were winning the fight too, for fewer and fewer Franks dared try to climb the ladders. Instead they retreated from the wall’s base and we jeered at them, told them they had been beaten by women, but if they attacked again we would wake our warriors to the fight. Whether they understood our taunts I cannot tell, but they hung back, fearful of our defences. The main attack still seethed at the gate where the sound of the battering ram’s pounding head was like a giant drum sickening the whole bay.

  The sun stretched the shadows of the bay’s western headland long across the sand while high pink clouds made bars across the sky. Gulls flew to their roosts. Our two wounded men had gone to empty our boat of stones – I hoped no Franks had reached that far about the island to discover the craft – yet I did not think we would even need it. Evening was falling and the tide was rising so that soon the water would drive the attackers back to the causeway, then back to their encampments and we would celebrate a famous victory.

  But then we heard the battle roar of cheering men from beyond the city’s gate and we saw our defeated Franks run from before our wall to join that distant assault and we knew the city was lost. Later, talking to survivors, we discovered that the Franks had succeeded in climbing the harbour’s stone quay and now they were swarming into the city.

  And so the screaming began.

  Galahad and I took twenty men across our nearest barricade. Women were running towards us, but seeing us they panicked and tried to climb the granite hill. Culhwch stayed to guard our wall and to protect our retreat to the boat as the first smoke of a defeated city curled into the evening sky.

  We ran behind the main gate’s defenders, turned down a flight of stone steps and there saw the enemy scrambling like rats into a granary. Hundreds of enemy spearmen were flooding up from the quay. Their bull-horn standards were advancing everywhere, their drums were beating while the women trapped in the city’s houses were shrieking. Off to our left, at the harbour’s far side where only a few attackers had gained a lodgement, a surge of white-cloaked spearmen suddenly appeared. Bors, Lancelot’s cousin and the commander of the palace guard, was leading a counter-attack and for a moment I thought he would turn the day and seal off the invaders’ retreat, but instead of assaulting along the quay Bors led his men to the sea-steps where a fleet of small boats waited to take them all to safety. I saw Prince Lancelot hurrying amid the guard, bringing his mother by the hand and leading a clutch of panicking courtiers. The fili were fleeing the doomed city.

  Galahad cut down two men trying to climb the steps, then I saw the street behind us fill with dark-cloaked Franks. ‘Back!’ I shouted, and hauled Galahad away from the alley.

  ‘Let me fight!’ He tried to pull away from me and face the next two men coming up the narrow stone steps.

  ‘Live, you fool.’ I pushed him behind me, feinted left with my spear, then brought it up and rammed its blade into a Frank’s face. I let go of the shaft, took the second man’s spear thrust on my shield while I drew Hywelbane, then I gave the low jab under the shield’s edge that sent the man screaming to the steps with blood welling between hands that cupped his groin. ‘You know how to get us safe through the city!’ I shouted at Galahad. I abandoned my spear as I pushed him back from the battle-maddened enemies who were surging up the steps. There was a potter’s shop at the head of the steps and despite the siege the shopkeeper’s wares were still displayed on trestle tables under a canvas awning. I tipped a table full of jugs and vases into the attackers’ path, then ripped down the awning and hurled it into their faces. ‘Lead us!’ I screamed. There were alleys and gardens that only Ynys Trebes’s inhabitants knew, and we would need such secret paths if we were to escape.

  The invaders had broken through the main gate now to cut us off from Culhwch and his men. Galahad led us uphill, turned left into a short tunnel that ran beneath a temple, then across a garden and up to a wall that edged a rain cistern. Beneath us the city writhed in horror. The victorious Franks broke down doors to take revenge for their dead left on the sand. Children wailed and were silenced by swords. I watched one Frankish warrior, a huge man with horns on his helmet, cut down four trapped defenders with an axe. More smoke poured up from houses. The city might have been built of stone, but there was plenty of furniture, boat-pitch and timber roofs to feed a maniacal fire. Out at sea, where the incoming tide swirled across the sandbanks, I could see Lancelot’s winged helmet bright in one of the three escaping boats, while above me, pink in the setting sun, the graceful palace waited for its last moments. The evening breeze snatched at the grey smoke and softly billowed a white curtain that hung in a shadowed palace window.

  ‘Over here!’ Galahad called, pointing to a narrow path. ‘Follow the path to our boat!’ Our men ran for their lives. ‘Come on, Derfel!’ he called to me.

  But I did not move. I was staring up the steep hill.

  ‘Come on, Derfel!’ Galahad insisted.

  But I was hearing a voice in my head. It was an old man’s voice; a dry, sardonic and unfriendly voice, and the sound of it would not let me move.

  ‘Come on, Derfel!’ Galahad screamed.

  ‘I put my life in your hands,’ the old man had said, and suddenly he spoke again inside my skull. ‘I lay my life on your conscience, Derfel of Dumnonia.’

  ‘How do I reach the palace?’ I called to Galahad.

  ‘Palace?’

  ‘How!’ I shouted angrily.

  ‘This way,’ he said, ‘this way!’

  We climbed.

  THE BARDS SING OF LOVE, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.

  I have been fortunate in friends. Arthur was one, but of all my friends there was never another like Galahad. There were times when we understood each other without speaking and others when words tumbled out for hours. We shared everything except women. I cannot count the number of times we stood shoulder to shoulder in the shield–wall or the number of times we divided our last morsel of food. Men took us for brothers and we thought of ourselves in the same way.

  And on that broken evening, as the city smouldered into fire beneath us, Galahad understood I could not be taken to the waiting boat. He knew I was in the hold of some imperative, some message from the Gods that made me climb desperately towards the serene palace crowning Ynys Trebes. All around us horror flooded up the hill, but we stayed ahead of it, running desperately across a church roof, jumping down to an alley where we pushed through a crowd of fugitives who believed the church would give them sanctuary, then up a flight of stone steps and so to the main street that circled Ynys Trebes. There were Franks running towards us, competing to be the first into Ban’s palace, but we were ahead of them along with a pitiful handful of people who had escaped the slaughter in the lower town and were now seeking a hopeless refuge in the hilltop dwelling.

  The guards were gone from the courtyard. The palace doors lay open and inside, where women cowered and children cried, the beautiful furniture waited for the conquerors. The curtains stirred in the wind.

  I plunged into the elegant rooms, ran through the mirrored chamber and past Leanor’s abandoned harp and so to the great room where Ban had first received me. The King was still there, still in his toga, and still at his table with a quill in his hand. ‘It’s too late,’ he said as I burst into the room with sword drawn. ‘Arthur failed me.’

  Screams sounded in the palace corridors. The view from the arched windows was smeared by smoke.

  ‘Come with us, Father!’ Galahad said.

  ‘I have work to do,’ Ban said querulously. He dipped his quill into the inkhorn and began to write. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

  I pushed through the door which led to the library, crossed the empty antechamber, then thrust open the library door to see the hunchbacked priest standing at one of the scroll shelves. The polished wooden floor was littered with manuscripts. ‘Your life is mine,’ I shouted angrily, re
senting that such an ugly old man had put me to this obligation when there were so many other lives to save in the city, ‘so come with me! Now!’ The priest ignored me. He was frantically pulling scrolls from the shelves, tearing off their ribbons and seals and scanning the first lines before throwing them down and snatching other scrolls. ‘Come on!’ I snarled at him.

  ‘Wait!’ Celwin insisted, pulling down another scroll, then discarded it and ripped another open. ‘Not yet!’

  A crash sounded in the palace; a cheer resounded and was drowned in screams. Galahad was standing in the library’s outer door, pleading with his father to come with us, but Ban just waved his son away as though his words were a nuisance. Then the door burst open and three sweating Frankish warriors rushed in. Galahad ran to meet them, but he had no time to save his father’s life and Ban did not even try to defend himself. The leading Frank hacked at him with a sword and I think the King of Benoic was already dead of a broken heart before the enemy’s blade ever touched him. The Frank tried to cut off the King’s head, and that man died on Galahad’s spear while I lunged at the second man with Hywelbane and swung his wounded body around to obstruct the third. The dying Frank’s breath reeked of ale like the breath of Saxons. Smoke showed outside the door. Galahad was beside me now, his spear slashing forward to kill the third man, but more Franks were pounding down the corridor outside. I pulled my sword free and backed into the antechamber. ‘Come on, you old fool!’ I screamed over my shoulder at the obstinate priest.

  ‘Old, yes, Derfel, but a fool? Never.’ The priest laughed, and something about that sour laughter made me turn and I saw, as though in a dream, that the hunched back was disappearing as the priest stretched his long body to its full height. He was not ugly at all, I thought, but wonderful and majestic and so full of wisdom that even though I was in a place of death that reeked of blood and echoed with the shrieks of the dying I felt safer than I had ever felt in all my life. He was still laughing at me, delighted at having deceived me for so long.