Enemy of God twc-2

by Bernard Cornwell

  I added six of my men to Cuneglas’s palace guard, and the rest, all Warriors of the Cauldron, marched south. All of us bore Ceinwyn’s five-pointed star on our shields, we carried two spears each, our swords, and had huge bundles of twice-baked bread, salted meat, hard cheese and dried fish strapped to our backs. It was good to be marching again, even though our route did take us through Lugg Vale where the dead had been unearthed by wild pigs so that the fields of the vale looked like a boneyard. I worried that the sight of the bones would remind Cuneglas’s men of their defeat, and so insisted that we spend a half day re-burying the corpses that had all had one foot chopped oft before they were first buried. Not every dead man could be burned as we would have liked, so most of our dead we buried, but we took away one foot to stop the soul walking. Now we re-buried the one-footed dead, but even after that half day’s work there was still no disguising the butchery of the place. I paused in the work to visit the Roman shrine where my sword had killed the Druid Tanaburs and where Nimue had extinguished Gundleus’s soul, and there, on a floor still stained by their blood, I lay flat between the piles of cobwebbed skulls and prayed that I would return unwounded to my Ceinwyn. We spent the next night at Magnis, a town that was a whole world away from fog-shrouded cauldrons and night-time tales of the Treasures of Britain. This was Gwent, Christian territory, and everything here was grim business. The blacksmiths were forging spearheads, the tanners were making shield covers, scabbards, belts and boots, while the town’s women were baking the hard, thin loaves that could keep for weeks on a campaign. King Tewdric’s men were in their Roman uniforms of bronze breastplates, leather skirts and long cloaks. A hundred such men had already marched to Corinium, another two hundred would follow, though not under the command of their King, for Tewdric was sick. His son Meurig, the Edling of Gwent, would be their titular leader, though in truth Agricola would command them. Agricola was an old man now, but his back was straight and his scarred arm could still wield a sword. He was said to be more Roman than the Romans and I had always been a little scared of his severe frown, but on that spring day outside Magnis he greeted me as an equal. His close-cropped grey head ducked under the lintel of his tent, then, dressed in his Roman uniform, he strode towards me and, to my astonishment, greeted me with an embrace.

  He inspected my thirty-four spearmen. They looked shaggy and unkempt beside his clean-shaven men, but he approved of their weapons and approved even more of the amount of food we carried. ‘I’ve spent years,’ he growled, ‘teaching that it’s no use sending a spearman to war without a pack full of food, but what does Lancelot of Siluria do? Sends me a hundred spearmen without a peck of bread between them.’ He had invited me into his tent where he served me a sour, pale wine. ‘I owe you an apology, Lord Derfel,’ he said.

  ‘I doubt that, Lord,’ I said. I felt embarrassed to be in such intimacy with a famous warrior who was old enough to be my grandfather.

  He waved away my modesty. ‘We should have been at Lugg Vale.’

  ‘It seemed a hopeless fight, Lord,’ I said, ‘and we were desperate. You were not.’

  ‘But you won, didn’t your’ he growled. He turned as a lick of wind tried to dislodge a wood shaving from his table that was covered with scores of other such shavings, each bearing lists of men and rations. He weighted the wisp of wood with an inkhorn, then looked back to me. ‘I hear we are to meet with the bull.’

  ‘At Corinium,’ I confirmed. Agricola, unlike his master Tewdric, was a pagan, though Agricola had no time for the British Gods, only for Mithras.

  ‘To elect Lancelot,’ Agricola said sourly. He listened as a man shouted orders in his camp lines, heard nothing that would spring him out of the tent and so looked back to me. ‘What do you know of Lancelot?’ he asked.

  ‘Enough,’ I said, ‘to speak against him.’

  ‘You’d offend Arthur?’ He sounded surprised.

  ‘I either offend Arthur,’ I said bitterly, ‘or Mithras.’ I made the sign against evil. ‘And Mithras is a God.’

  ‘Arthur spoke to me on his way back from Powys,’ Agricola said, ‘and told me that electing Lancelot would bind Britain’s union.’ He paused, looking morose. ‘He hinted that I owed him a vote to make up for our absence at Lugg Vale.’

  Arthur, it seemed, was buying votes however he could. ‘Then vote for him, Lord,’ I said, ‘for his exclusion only needs one vote, and mine will suffice.’

  ‘I don’t tell lies to Mithras,’ Agricola snapped, ‘and nor do I like King Lancelot. He was here two months ago, buying mirrors.’

  ‘Mirrors!’ I had to laugh. Lancelot had always collected mirrors, and in his father’s high, airy sea-palace at Ynys Trebes he had kept the walls of a whole room covered with Roman mirrors. They must all have melted in the fire when the Franks swarmed over the palace walls and now, it seemed, Lancelot was rebuilding his collection.

  ‘Tewdric sold him a fine electrum mirror,’ Agricola told me. ‘Big as a shield and quite extraordinary. It was so clear that it was like looking into a black pool on a fine day. And he paid well for it.’ He would have had to, I thought, for mirrors of electrum, an amalgam of silver and gold, were rare indeed.

  ‘Mirrors,’ Agricola said scathingly. ‘He should be attending to his duties in Siluria, not buying mirrors.’

  He snatched up his sword and helmet as a horn sounded from the town. It called twice, a signal Agricola recognized. ‘The Edling,’ he growled, and led me out into the sunlight to see that Meurig was indeed riding out from Magnis’s Roman ramparts. ‘I camp out here,’ Agricola told me as he watched his honour guard form into two ranks, ‘to stay away from their priests.’

  Prince Meurig came attended by four Christian priests who ran to keep up with the Edling’s horse. The Prince was a young man, indeed I had first seen him when he was a child and that had not been so very long before, but he disguised his youth with a querulous and irritable manner. He was short, pale and thin, with a wispy brown beard. He was notorious as a creature of pettifogging detail who loved the quibbles of the lawcourts and the squabbles of the church. His scholarship was famous; he was, we were assured, an expert at refuting the Pelagian heresy that so harassed the Christian church in Britain, he knew by heart the eighteen chapters of tribal British law, and he could name the genealogies of ten British kingdoms going back twenty generations as well as the lineage of all their septs and tribes; and that, we were informed by his admirers, was only the beginning of Meurig’s knowledge. To his admirers he seemed a youthful paragon of learning and the finest rhetorician of Britain, but to me it seemed that the Prince had inherited all of his father’s intelligence and none of his wisdom. It was Meurig, more than any other man, who had persuaded Gwent to abandon Arthur before Lugg Vale and for that reason alone I had no love for Meurig, but I obediently went down on one knee as the Prince dismounted.

  ‘Derfel,’ he said in his curiously high-pitched voice, ‘I remember you.’ He did not tell me to rise, but just pushed past me into the tent.

  Agricola beckoned me inside, thus sparing me the company of the four panting priests who had no business here except to stay close to their Prince who, dressed in a toga and with a heavy wooden cross hanging on a silver chain about his neck, seemed irritated by my presence. He scowled at me, then went on with a querulous complaint to Agricola, but as they spoke in Latin I had no idea what they talked about. Meurig was buttressing his argument with a sheet of parchment that he waved in front of Agricola who endured the harangue patiently.

  Meurig at last abandoned his argument, rolled up the parchment and thrust it into his toga. He turned to me. ‘You will not,’ he said, speaking British again, ‘be expecting us to feed your men?’

  ‘We carry our own food, Lord Prince,’ I said, then inquired after his father’s health.

  ‘The King suffers from fistula in the groin,’ Meurig explained in his squeaking voice. ‘We have used poultices and the physicians are bleeding father regularly, but alas, God has not seen fit to requite the co
ndition.’

  ‘Send for Merlin, Lord Prince,’ I suggested.

  Meurig blinked at me. He was very short-sighted, and it was those weak eyes, perhaps, that gave his face its permanent expression of ill-temper. He uttered a short snaffle of mocking laughter. ‘You, of course, if you will forgive the remark,’ he said snidely, ‘are famous as one of the fools who risked Diwrnach to bring a bowl back to Dumnonia. A mixing bowl, yes?’

  ‘A cauldron, Lord Prince.’

  Meurig’s thin lips flickered in a quick smile. ‘You did not think, Lord Derfel, that our smiths could have hammered you a dozen cauldrons in as many days?’

  ‘I shall know where to come for my cooking pots next time, Lord Prince,’ I said. Meurig stiffened at the insult, but Agricola smiled.

  ‘Did you understand any of that?’ Agricola asked me when Meurig had left.

  ‘I have no Latin, Lord.’

  ‘He was complaining because a chieftain hasn’t paid his taxes. The poor man owes us thirty smoked salmon and twenty cartloads of cut timber, and we’ve had no salmon from him and only five carts of wood. But what Meurig won’t grasp is that poor Cyllig’s people have been struck by the plague this last winter, the river Wye’s been poached empty, and Cyllig is still bringing me two dozen spearmen.’

  Agricola spat in disgust. ‘Ten times a day!’ he said, ‘ten times a day the Prince will come out here with a problem that any half-witted treasury clerk could solve in twenty heartbeats. I just wish his father would just strap up his groin and get back on the throne.’

  ‘How sick is Tewdric?’

  Agricola shrugged. ‘He’s tired, not sick. He wants to give up his throne. He says he’ll have his head tonsured and become a priest.’ He spat onto the tent floor again. ‘But I’ll manage our Edling. I’ll make sure his ladies come to war.’

  ‘Ladies?’ I asked, made curious by the ironic twist Agricola had put on the word.

  ‘He might be blind as a worm, Lord Derfel, but he can still spot a girl like a hawk seeing a shrew. He likes his ladies, Meurig does, and plenty of them. And why not? That’s the way of princes, isn’t it?’ He unstrapped his sword belt and hung it on a nail driven into one of the tent poles. ‘You march tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, Lord.’

  ‘Dine with me tonight,’ he said, then ushered me out of the tent and squinted up at the sky. ‘It will be a dry summer. Lord Derfel. A summer for killing Saxons.’

  ‘A summer to breed great songs,’ I said enthusiastically.

  ‘I often think that the trouble with us Britons,’ Agricola said gloomily, ‘is that we spend too much time singing and not enough killing Saxons.’

  ‘Not this year,’ I said, ‘not this year,’ for this was Arthur’s year, the year to slaughter the Sais. The year, I prayed, of total victory.

  Once out of Magnis we marched on the straight Roman roads that tied Britain’s heartland together. We made good time, reaching Corinium in just two days, and we were all glad to be back in Dumnonia. The five-pointed star on my shield might have been a strange device, but the moment the country folks heard my name they knelt for a blessing for I was Derfel Cadarn, the holder of Lugg Vale and a Warrior of the Cauldron, and my repute, it seemed, soared high in my homeland. At least among the pagans it did. In the towns and larger villages, where the Christians were more numerous, we were more likely to be met by preaching. We were told that we were marching to do God’s will by fighting the Saxons, but that if we died in battle our souls would go to hell if we were still worshippers of the older Gods. I feared the Saxons more than the Christian hell. The Sais were a dreadful enemy; poor, desperate and numerous. Once at Corinium, we heard ominous tales of new ships grounding almost daily on Britain’s eastern shores, and how each ship brought its cargo of feral warriors and hungry families. The invaders wanted our land, and to take it they could muster hundreds of spears, swords and double-edged axes, yet still we had confidence. Fools that we were, we marched almost blithely to that war. I suppose, after the horrors of Lugg Vale, we believed we could never be beaten. We were young, we were strong, we were loved by the Gods and we had Arthur.

  I met Galahad in Corinium. Since the day we had parted in Powys he had helped Merlin carry the Cauldron back to Ynys Wydryn, then he had spent the spring at Caer Ambra from which rebuilt fortress he had raided deep into Lloegyr with Sagramor’s troops. The Saxons, he warned me, were ready for our coming and had set beacons on every hill to give warning of our approach. Galahad had come to Corinium for the great Council of War that Arthur had summoned, and he brought with him Cavan and those of my men who had refused to march north into Lleyn. Cavan went on one knee and begged that he and his men might renew their old oaths to me. ‘We have made no other oaths,’ he promised me,

  ‘except to Arthur, and he says we should serve you if you’ll have us.’

  ‘I thought you’d be rich by now,’ I told Cavan, ‘and gone home to Ireland.’

  He smiled. ‘I still have the throwboard, Lord.’

  I welcomed him back to my service. He kissed Hywelbane’s blade, then asked if he and his men could paint the white star on their shields.

  ‘You may paint it,’ I said, ‘but with only four points.’

  ‘Four, Lord?’ Cavan glanced at my shield. ‘Yours has five.’

  ‘The fifth point,’ I told Cavan, ‘is for the Warriors of the Cauldron.’ He looked unhappy, but agreed. Nor would Arthur have approved, for he would have seen, rightly enough, that the fifth point was a divisive mark which implied that one group of men was superior to another, but warriors like such distinctions and the men who had braved the Dark Road deserved it.

  I went to greet the men who accompanied Cavan and found them camped beside the River Churn that flowed to the east of Corinium. At least a hundred men were bivouacked beside that small river, for there was not nearly enough space inside the town for all the warriors who had assembled about the Roman walls. The army itself was gathering close to Caer Ambra, but every leader who had come for the Council of War had brought some retainers, and those men alone were sufficient to give the appearance of a small army in the Churn’s water meadows. Their stacked shields showed the success of Arthur’s strategy, for at a glance I could see the black bull of Gwent, the red dragon of Dumnonia, the fox of Siluria, Arthur’s bear, and the shields of men, like me, who had the honour of carrying their own device: stars, hawks, eagles, boars, Sagramor’s dread skull and Galahad’s lone Christian cross. Culhwch, Arthur’s cousin, was camped with his own spearmen, but now hurried to greet me. It was good to see him again. I had fought at his side in Benoic and had come to love him like a brother. He was vulgar, funny, cheerful, bigoted, ignorant and coarse, and there was no better man to have alongside in a fight. ‘I hear you’ve put a loaf in the Princess’s oven,’ he said when he had embraced me. ‘You’re a lucky dog. Did you have Merlin cast you a spell?’

  ‘A thousand.’

  He laughed. ‘I can’t complain. I’ve three women now, all clawing each other’s eyes out and all of them pregnant.’ He grinned, then scratched at his groin. ‘Lice,’ he said. ‘Can’t get rid of them. But at least they’ve infested that little bastard Mordred.’

  ‘Our Lord King?’ I teased him.

  ‘Little bastard,’ he said vengefully. ‘I tell you, Derfel, I’ve beaten him bloody and he still won’t learn. Sneaky little toad.’ He spat. ‘So tomorrow you speak against Lancelot?’

  ‘How do you know?’ I had told no one but Agricola of that firm decision, but somehow news of it had preceded me to Corinium, or else my antipathy to the Silurian King was too well known for men to believe I could do anything else.

  ‘Everyone knows,’ Culhwch said, ‘and everyone supports you.’ He looked past me and spat suddenly. ‘Crows,’ he growled.

  I turned to see a procession of Christian priests walking alongside the Churn’s far bank. There were a dozen of them, all black gowned, all bearded, and all chanting one of the dirges of their religion. A score of spearmen followed the
priests and their shields, I saw with surprise, bore either Siluria’s fox or Lancelot’s sea-eagle. ‘I thought the rites were in two days’ time,’ I said to Galahad, who had stayed with me.

  ‘They are,’ he said. The rites were the preamble to war and would ask the blessing of the Gods on our men, and that blessing would be sought from both the Christian God and the pagan deities. ‘This looks more like a baptism,’ Galahad added.

  ‘What in Bel’s name is a baptism?’ Culhwch asked.

  Galahad sighed. ‘It is an outward sign, my dear Culhwch, of a man’s sins being washed away by God’s grace.’

  That explanation made Culhwch bay with laughter, prompting a frown from one of the priests who had tucked his gown into his belt and was now wading into the shallow river. He was using a pole to discover a spot deep enough for the baptismal rite and his clumsy probing attracted a crowd of bored spearmen on the rushy bank opposite the Christians.

  For a while nothing much happened. The Silurian spearmen made an embarrassed guard while the tonsured priests wailed their song and the lone paddler poked about in the river with the butt end of his long pole that was surmounted by a silver cross. ‘You’ll never catch a trout with that,’ Culhwch shouted,

  ‘try a fish spear!’ The watching spearmen laughed, and the priests scowled as they sang drearily on. Some women from the town had come to the river and joined in the singing. ‘It’s a woman’s religion,’

  Culhwch spat.

  ‘It is my religion, dear Culhwch,’ Galahad murmured. He and Culhwch had argued thus throughout the whole long war in Benoic and their argument, like their friendship, had no end. The priest found a deep enough spot, so deep, indeed, that the water came right up to his waist, and there he tried to fix the pole in the river’s bed, but the force of the water kept bearing the cross down and each failure prompted a chorus of jeers from the spearmen. A few of the spectators were Christians themselves, but they made no attempt to stop the mockery.