Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  Arthur served salmon, boar and venison. A harpist played. Mordred, his late arrival unnoticed, took his place at the head table where he sat with a sly smile on his blunt face. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him, but at times he glanced across at the pale, thin Argante who alone in the room seemed to take no pleasure from the feast. I saw her catch Mordred’s eye once and they exchanged exasperated shrugs as if to suggest that they despised the rest of us, but other than that one glance, she merely sulked and Arthur was embarrassed for her, while the rest of us pretended not to notice her mood. Mordred, of course, enjoyed her sullenness.

  Next morning we hunted. A dozen of us rode, all men. Ceinwyn liked to hunt, but Arthur had asked her to spend the morning with Argante and Ceinwyn had reluctantly agreed.

  We drew the western woods, though without much hope for Mordred frequently hunted among these trees and the huntsman doubted we would find game. Guinevere’s deerhounds, now in Arthur’s care, loped off among the black trunks and managed to start a doe which gave us a fine gallop through the woods, but the huntsman called off the hounds when he saw that the animal was pregnant. Arthur and I had ridden at a tangent to the chase, thinking to head off the prey at the edge of the woods, but we reined in when we heard the horns. Arthur looked about him, as if expecting to find more company, then grunted when he saw I was alone with him. ‘A strange business, last night,’ he said awkwardly. ‘But women like these things,’ he added dismissively.

  ‘Ceinwyn doesn’t,’ I said.

  He gave me a sharp look. He must have been wondering if she had told me about his proposal of marriage, but my face betrayed nothing and he must have decided she had not spoken. ‘No,’ he said. He hesitated again, then laughed awkwardly. ‘Argante believes I should have stepped through the flames as a way of marking the marriage, but I told her I don’t need dead lambs to tell me I’m married.’

  ‘I never had a chance to congratulate you on your marriage,’ 15°

  I said very formally, ‘so let me do so now. She’s a beautiful girl.’

  That pleased him. ‘She is,’ he said, then blushed. ‘But only a child.’

  ‘Culhwch says they should all be taken young, Lord,’ I said lightly.

  He ignored my levity. ‘I hadn’t meant to marry,’ he said quietly. I said nothing. He was not looking at me, but staring across the fallow fields. ‘But a man should be married,’ he said firmly, as if trying to convince himself.

  ‘Indeed,’ I agreed.

  ‘And Oengus was enthusiastic. Come spring, Derfel, he’ll bring all his army. And they’re good fighters, the Blackshields.’

  ‘None better, Lord,’ I said, but I reflected that Oengus would have brought his warriors whether Arthur had married Argante or not. What Oengus had really wanted, of course, was Arthur’s alliance against Cuneglas of Powys, whose lands Oengus’s spearmen were forever raiding, but doubtless the wily Irish King had suggested to Arthur that the marriage would guarantee the arrival of his Blackshields for the spring campaign. The marriage had plainly been arranged in haste and now, just as plainly, Arthur was regretting it.

  ‘She wants children, of course,’ Arthur said, still thinking of the horrid rites that had bloodied Lindinis’s courtyard.

  ‘Don’t you, Lord?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said curtly. ‘Better to wait, I think, till the Saxon business is over.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ I said, ‘I have a request from the Lady Guinevere.’ Arthur gave me another sharp look, but said nothing. ‘Guinevere fears,’ I went on, ‘that she will be vulnerable if the Saxons attack in the south. She begs you to move her prison to a safer place.’

  Arthur leaned forward to fondle his horse’s ears. I had expected him to be angry at the mention of Guinevere, but he showed no irritation. ‘The Saxons might attack in the south,’ he said mildly, ‘in fact I hope they do, for then they’ll split their forces into two and we can pluck them one at a time. But the greater danger, Derfel, is if they make one single attack along the Thames, and I must plan for the greater, not the lesser, danger.’

  ‘But it would surely be prudent,’ I urged him, ‘to move whatever is valuable from southern Dumnonia?’

  He turned to look at me. His gaze was mocking, as though he despised me for showing sympathy to Guinevere. ‘Is she valuable, Derfel?’ he asked. I said nothing and Arthur turned away from me to stare across the pale fields where thrushes and blackbirds hunted the furrows for worms. ‘Should I kill her?’ he suddenly asked me.

  ‘Kill Guinevere?’ I responded, shocked at the suggestion, then decided that Argante was probably behind his words. She must have resented that Guinevere still lived after committing an offence for which her sister had died. ‘The decision, Lord,’ I said, ‘is not mine, but surely, if it was death she deserved, it should have been given months ago? Not now.’

  He grimaced at that advice. ‘What will the Saxons do with her?’ he asked.

  ‘She thinks they’ll rape her. I suspect they’ll put her on a throne.’

  He glowered across the pale landscape. He knew I meant Lancelot’s throne, and he was imagining the embarrassment of his mortal enemy on Dumnonia’s throne with Guinevere beside him and Cerdic holding their power. It was an unbearable thought. ‘If she’s in any danger of capture,’ he said harshly, ‘then you will kill her.’

  I could hardly believe what I had heard. I stared at him, but he refused to look me in the eyes. ‘It’s simpler, surely,’ I said, ‘to move her to safety? Can’t she go to Glevum?’

  ‘I have enough to worry about,’ he snapped, ‘without wasting thought on the safety of traitors.’ For a few heartbeats his face looked as angry as I had ever seen it, but then he shook his head and sighed. ‘Do you know who I envy?’ he asked.

  ‘Tell me, Lord.’

  ‘Tewdric.’

  I laughed. ‘Tewdric! You want to be a constipated monk?’

  ‘He’s happy,’ Arthur said firmly, ‘he has found the life he always wanted. I don’t want the tonsure and I don’t care for his God, but I envy him all the same.’ He grimaced. ‘I wear myself out getting ready for a war no one except me believes we can win, and I want none of it. None of it! Mordred should be King, we took an oath to make him King, and if we beat the Saxons, Derfel, I’ll let him rule.’ He spoked defiantly, and I did not believe him. ‘AH I ever wanted,’ he went on, ‘was a hall, some land, some cattle, crops in season, timber to burn, a smithy to work iron, a stream for water. Is it too much?’ He rarely indulged in such self-pity, and I just let his anger talk itself out. He had often expressed such a dream of a household tight in its own palisade, shielded from the world by deep woods and wide fields and filled with his own folk, but now, with Cerdic and Aelle gathering their spears, he must have known it was a hopeless dream. ‘I can’t hold Dumnonia for ever,’ he said, ‘and when we’ve beaten the Saxons it might be time to let other men bridle Mordred. As for me, I’ll follow Tewdric into happiness.’ He gathered his reins. ‘I can’t think about Guinevere now,’ he said, ‘but if she’s in any danger, you deal with her.’ And with that curt command he clapped his heels back and drove his horse away.

  I stayed where I was. I was appalled, but if I had thought beyond my disgust at his order, I should surely have known what was in his mind. He knew I would not kill Guinevere, and he knew therefore that she was safe, but by giving me the harsh order he was not required to betray any affection for her. Odi at amo, excrucior.

  We killed nothing that morning.

  In the afternoon the warriors gathered in the feasting-hall. Mordred was there, hunched in the chair that served as his throne. He had nothing to contribute for he was a king without a kingdom, yet Arthur accorded him a proper courtesy. Arthur began, indeed, by saying that when the Saxons came Mordred would ride with him and that the whole army would fight beneath Mordred’s banner of the red dragon. Mordred nodded his agreement, but what else could he do? In truth, and we all knew it, Arthur was not offering Mordred a chance of redeeming his reputat
ion in battle, but ensuring that he could make no mischief. Mordred’s best chance of regaining his power was to ally himself with our enemies by offering himself as a puppet king to Cerdic, but instead he would be a prisoner of Arthur’s hard warriors.

  Arthur then confirmed that King Meurig of Gwent would not fight. That news, though no surprise, was met by a growl of hatred. Arthur hushed the protest. Meurig, he said, was convinced that the coming war was not Gwent’s battle, but the King had still given his grudging permission for Cuneglas to bring the army of Powys south across Gwent’s land and for Oengus to march his Blackshields through his kingdom. Arthur said nothing of Meurig’s ambition to rule Dumnonia, perhaps because he knew that such an announcement would only make us even angrier with the King of Gwent, and Arthur still hoped that somehow he could change Meurig’s mind and so did not want to provoke more hatred between us and Gwent. The forces of Powys and Demetia, Arthur said, would converge on Corinium, for that walled Roman city was to be Arthur’s base and the place where all our supplies were to be concentrated. ‘We start supplying Corinium tomorrow,’ Arthur said. ‘I want it crammed with food, for it’s there we shall fight our battle.’ He paused. ‘One vast battle,’ he said, ‘with all their forces against every man we can raise.’

  ‘A siege?’ Culhwch asked, surprised.

  ‘No,’ Arthur said. Instead, he explained, he intended to use Corinium as a lure. The Saxons would soon hear that the town was filled with salted meat, dried fish and grain, and, like any great horde on the march, they would be short of food themselves and so would be drawn to Corinium like a fox to a duckpond, and there he planned to destroy them. ‘They will besiege it,’ he said, ‘and Morfans will defend it.’ Morfans, forewarned of that duty, nodded his agreement. ‘But the rest of us,’ Arthur went on, ‘will be in the hills north of the city. Cerdic will know he has to destroy us and he’ll break off his siege to do that. Then we’ll fight him on ground of our choosing.’

  The whole plan depended on both Saxon armies advancing up the valley of the Thames, and all the signs indicated that this was indeed the Saxon intention. They were piling supplies into London and Pontes, and making no preparations on the southern frontier. Culhwch, who guarded that southern border, had raided deep into Lloegyr and told us that he had found no concentration of spearmen, nor any indication that Cerdic was hoarding grain or meat in Venta or any other of the frontier towns. Everything pointed, Arthur said, to a simple, brutal and overwhelming assault up the Thames aimed at the shore of the Severn Sea with the decisive battle being fought somewhere near Corinium. Sagramor’s men had already built great warning beacons on the hilltops on either side of the Thames valley, and still more beacons had been made on the hills spreading south and west into Dumnonia, and when we saw the smoke of those fires we were all to march to our places.

  ‘That won’t be until after Beltain,’ Arthur said. He had spies in both Aelle’s and Cerdic’s halls, and all had reported that the Saxons would wait until after the feast of their Goddess Eostre which would be celebrated a whole week after Beltain. The Saxons wished the Goddess’s blessing, Arthur explained, and they wanted to give the new season’s boats time to come across the sea with their hulls packed with yet more hungry fighting men.

  But after Eostre’s feast, he said, the Saxons would advance and he would let them come deep into Dumnonia without a battle, though he planned to harass them all the way. Sagramor, with his battle-hardened spearmen, would retreat in front of the Saxon horde and offer whatever resistance he could short of a shield wall, while Arthur gathered the allied army at Corinium.

  Culhwch and I had different orders. Our task was to defend the hills south of the Thames valley. We could not expect to defeat any determined Saxon thrust that came south through those hills, but Arthur did not expect any such attack. The Saxons, he said again and again, would keep marching westwards, ever westwards along the Thames, but they were bound to send raiding parties into the southern hills in search of grain and cattle. Our task was to stop those raiding parties, thus forcing the scavengers to go north instead. That would take the Saxons across the Gwentian border and might spur Meurig into a declaration of war. The unspoken thought in that hope, though each of us in that smoky room nevertheless understood it, was that without Gwent’s well-trained spearmen the great battle near Corinium would be a truly desperate affair. ‘So fight them hard,’ Arthur told Culhwch and me. ‘Kill their foragers, scare them, but don’t be caught in battle. Harass them, frighten them, but once they’re within a day’s march of Corinium, leave them alone. Just march to join me.’ He would need every spear he could gather to fight that great battle outside Corinium, and Arthur seemed sure that we could win it so long as our forces had the high ground.

  It was, in its way, a good plan. The Saxons would be lured deep into Dumnonia and there be forced to attack up some steep hill, but the plan depended on the enemy doing exactly as Arthur wanted, and Cerdic, I thought, was not an obliging man. Yet Arthur seemed confident enough, and that, at least, was comforting.

  We all went home. I made myself unpopular by searching all the houses in my district and confiscating grain, salted meat and dried fish. We left enough supplies to keep the folk alive, but sent the rest to Corinium where it would feed Arthur’s army. It was a distasteful business, for peasants fear hunger almost as much as they fear enemy spearmen, and we were forced to search for hiding places and ignore the screams of women who accused us of tyranny. But better our searches, I told them, than Saxon ravages.

  We also readied ourselves for battle. I laid out my wargear and my slaves oiled the leather jerkin, polished the mail coat, combed out the wolf-hair plume on the helmet and repainted the white star on my heavy shield. The new year came with the blackbird’s first song. Missel thrushes called from the high twigs of the larches behind Dun Caric’s hill, and we paid the children of the village to run with pots and sticks through the apple orchards to scare away the bullfinches that would steal the tiny fruit buds. Sparrows nested and the stream glinted with the returning salmon. The dusks were made noisy by flocks of pied wagtails. Within a few weeks there were blossoms on the hazel, dog violets in the woods and gold-touched cones on the sallow trees. Buck hares danced in the fields where the lambs played. In March there was a swarm of toads and I feared what it meant, but there was no Merlin to ask, for he, with Nimue, had vanished and it seemed we must fight without his help. Larks sang, and the predatory magpies hunted for new-laid eggs along hedgerows that still lacked their cover of foliage.

  The leaves came at last, and with them news of the first warriors arriving south from Powys. They were few in number, for Cuneglas did not want to exhaust the food supplies being piled in Corinium, but their arrival gave promise of the greater army that Cuneglas would lead south after Beltain. Our calves were born, butter was churned and Ceinwyn busied herself cleaning out the hall after the long smoky winter.

  They were odd and bittersweet days, for there was the promise of war in a new spring that was suddenly glorious with sundrenched skies and flower-bright meadows. The Christians preach of ‘the last days’, by which they mean those times before the world’s ending, and maybe folk will feel then as we did in that soft and lovely spring. There was an unreal quality to everyday life which made every small task special. Maybe this would be the last time we would ever burn winter straw from our bedding and maybe the last time we would ever heave a calf all bloody from its mother’s womb into the world. Everything was special, because everything was threatened.

  We also knew that the coming Beltain might be the last we would ever know as a family and so we tried to make it memorable. Beltain greets the new year’s life, and on the eve of the feast we let all the fires die in Dun Caric. The kitchen fires, that had burned all winter long, went unfed all day and by night they were nothing but embers. We raked them out, swept the hearths clean, then laid new fires, while on a hill to the east of the village we heaped two great piles of firewood, one of them stacked about the sacred tre
e that Pyrlig, our bard, had selected. It was a young hazel that we had cut down and carried ceremonially through the village, across the stream and up the hill. The tree was hung with scraps of cloth, and all the houses, like the hall itself, were decked with new young hazel boughs.

  That night, all across Britain, the fires were dead. On Beltain Eve darkness rules. The feast was laid in our hall, but there was no fire to cook it and no flame to light the high rafters. There was no light anywhere, except in the Christian towns where folks heaped their fires to defy the Gods, but in the countryside all was dark. At dusk we had climbed the hill, a mass of villagers and spearmen driving cattle and sheep that were folded into wattle enclosures. Children played, but once the great dark fell the smallest children fell asleep and their little bodies lay in the grass as the rest of us gathered about the unlit fires and there sang the Lament of Annwn.

  Then, in the darkest part of the night, we made the new year’s fire. Pyrlig made the flame by rubbing two sticks while Issa dribbled shavings of larch-wood kindling onto the spark that gave off a tiny wisp of smoke. The two men stooped to the tiny flame, blew on it, added more kindling, and at last a strong flame leapt up and all of us began to sing the Chant of Belenos as Pyrlig carried the new fire to the two heaps of firewood. The sleeping children awoke and ran to find their parents as the Beltain fires sprang high and bright.

  A goat was sacrificed once the fires were burning. Ceinwyn, as ever, turned away as the beast’s throat was cut and as Pyrlig scattered its blood on the grass. He tossed the goat’s corpse onto the fire where the sacred hazel was burning, then the villagers fetched their cattle and sheep and drove them between the two great blazes. We hung plaited straw collars about the cows’ necks, and then watched as young women danced between the fires to seek the blessing of the Gods on their wombs. They had danced through fire at Imbolc, but always did it again at Beltain. That was the first year Morwenna was old enough to dance between the fires and I felt a pang of sadness as I watched my daughter twirl and leap. She looked so happy. She was thinking of marriage and dreaming of babies, yet within a few weeks, I thought, she could be dead or enslaved. That thought filled me with a huge anger and I turned away from our fires and was startled to see the bright flames of other Beltain fires burning in the distance. All across Dumnonia the fires were burning to greet the newly arrived year.