Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  We waited in a field of molehills beside the road. I had over a hundred spearmen and at least that number of women, children, slaves and servants. We had horses, mules and dogs, all waiting. Seren, Morwenna and the other children picked bluebells in a nearby wood while I paced up and down the broken stone of the road. Refugees were passing constantly, but none of them, even those who had come from Durnovaria, had any news of the Princess Argante. A priest thought he had seen Issa and his men arrive in that city because he had seen the five-pointed star on some spearmen’s shields, but he did not know if they were still there or had left. The one thing all the refugees were certain of was that the Saxons were near Durnovaria, though no one had actually seen a Saxon spearman. They had merely heard the rumours that had grown ever more wild as the hours passed. Arthur was said to be dead, or else he had fled to Rheged, while Cerdic was credited with possessing horses that breathed fire and magic axes that could cleave iron as though it were linen.

  Guinevere had borrowed a bow from one of my huntsmen and was shooting arrows at a dead elm tree that grew beside the road. She shot well, putting shaft after shaft into the rotting wood, but when I complimented her on her skill, she grimaced. ‘I’m out of practice,’ she said, ‘I used to be able to take a running deer at a hundred paces, now I doubt I’d hit a standing one at fifty.’ She plucked the arrows from the tree. ‘But I think I might hit a Saxon, given the chance.’ She handed the bow back to my huntsman, who bowed and backed away. ‘If the Saxons are near Durnovaria,’ Guinevere asked me, ‘what do they do next?’

  ‘They come straight up this road,’ I said.

  ‘Not go further west?’

  ‘They know our plans,’ I said grimly, and told her about the golden buttons with the bearded faces that I had found in Mordred’s quarters. ‘Aelle’s marching towards Corinium while the others run ragged in the south. And we’re stuck here because of Argante.’

  ‘Let her rot,’ Guinevere said savagely, then shrugged. ‘I know you can’t. Does he love her?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Lady,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you’d know,’ Guinevere said sharply. ‘Arthur loves to pretend that he’s ruled by reason, but he yearns to be governed by passion. He would turn the world upside down for love.’

  ‘He hasn’t turned it upside down lately,’ I said.

  ‘He did for me, though,’ she said quietly, and not without a note of pride. ‘So where are you going?’

  I had walked to my horse that was cropping grass among the molehills. ‘I’m going south,’ I said.

  ‘Do that,’ Guinevere said, ‘and we risk losing you too.’

  She was right and I knew it, but frustration was beginning to boil inside me. Why had Issa not sent a message? He had fifty of my finest warriors and they were lost. I cursed the wasting day, cuffed a harmless boy who was strutting up and down pretending to be a spearman, and kicked at thistles. ‘We could start north,’ Ceinwyn suggested calmly, indicating the women and children.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘we must stay together.’ I peered southwards, but there was nothing on the road except for more sad refugees trudging north. Most were families with one precious cow and maybe a calf, though many of this new season’s calves were still too small to walk. Some calves, abandoned by the road, called piteously for their mothers. Others of the refugees were merchants trying to save their goods. One man had an ox-wagon filled with baskets of fuller’s earth, another had hides, some had pottery. They glared at us as they passed, blaming us for not having stopped the Saxons sooner.

  Seren and Morwenna, bored with their attempt to denude the wood of bluebells, had found a nest of leverets under some ferns and honeysuckle at the trees’ edge. They excitedly called Guinevere to come and look, then gingerly stroked the little fur bodies that shivered under their touch. Ceinwyn watched them. ‘She’s made a conquest of the girls,’ she said to me.

  ‘A conquest of my spearmen too,’ I said, and it was true. Just a few months ago my men had been cursing Guinevere as a whore, and now they gazed at her adoringly. She had set out to charm them, and when Guinevere decided to be charming, she could dazzle. ‘Arthur will have a great deal of trouble putting her back behind walls after this,’ I said.

  ‘Which is probably why he wanted her released,’ Ceinwyn observed. ‘He certainly didn’t want her dead.’

  ‘Argante does.’

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ Ceinwyn agreed, then stared southwards with me, but there was still no sign of any spearmen on the long straight road.

  Issa finally arrived at dusk. He came with his fifty spearmen, with the thirty men who had been the guards on the palace at Durnovaria, with the dozen Blackshields who were Argante’s personal soldiers and with at least two hundred other refugees. Worse, he had brought six ox-drawn wagons and it was those heavy vehicles that had caused the delay. A heavily laden ox-wagon’s highest speed is slower than an old man’s walk, and Issa had fetched the wagons all the way north at their snail’s pace. ‘What possessed you?’ I shouted at him. ‘There isn’t time to haul wagons!’

  ‘I know, Lord,’ he said miserably.

  ‘Are you mad?’ I was angry. I had ridden to meet him and now wheeled my mare on the verge. ‘You’ve wasted hours!’ I shouted.

  ‘I had no choice!’ he protested.

  ‘You’ve got a spear!’ I snarled. ‘That gives you the right to choose what you want.’

  He just shrugged and gestured towards the Princess Argante who rode atop the leading wagon. The wagon’s four oxen, their flanks bleeding from the goads that had driven them all day, stopped in the road with their heads low.

  ‘The wagons go no farther!’ I shouted at her. ‘You walk or ride from here!’

  ‘No!’ Argante insisted.

  I slid off the mare and walked down the line of wagons. One held nothing but the Roman statues that had graced the palace courtyard in Durnovaria, another was piled with robes and gowns, while a third was heaped with cooking pots, beckets and bronze candle-stands. ‘Get them off the road,’ I shouted angrily.

  ‘No!’ Argante had leapt down from her high perch and now ran towards me. ‘Arthur ordered me to bring them.’

  ‘Arthur, Lady,’ I turned on her, stifling my anger, ‘does not need statues!’

  ‘They come with us,’ Argante shouted, ‘otherwise I stay here!’

  ‘Then stay here, Lady,’ I said savagely. ‘Off the road!’ I shouted at the ox drivers. ‘Move it! Off the road, now!’ I had drawn Hywelbane and stabbed her blade at the nearest ox to drive the beast towards the verge.

  ‘Don’t go!’ Argante screamed at the ox drivers. She tugged at one of the oxen’s horns, pulling the confused beast back onto the road. ‘I’m not leaving this for the enemy,’ she shouted at me.

  Guinevere watched from the roadside. There was a look of cool amusement on her face, and no wonder, for Argante was behaving like a spoiled child. Argante’s Druid, Fergal, had hurried to his Princess’s aid, protesting that all his magical cauldrons and ingredients were loaded on one of the wagons. ‘And the treasury,’ he added as an afterthought.

  ‘What treasury?’ I asked.

  ‘Arthur’s treasury,’ Argante said sarcastically, as though by revealing the existence of the gold she won her argument. ‘He wants it in Corinium.’ She went to the second wagon, lifted some of the heavy robes and rapped a wooden box that was hidden beneath. ‘The gold of Dumnonia! You’d give it to the Saxons?’

  ‘Rather that than give them you and me, Lady,’ I said and then I slashed with Hywelbane, cutting loose the oxen’s harness. Argante screamed at me, swearing she would have me punished and that I was stealing her treasures, but I just sawed at the next harness as I snarled at the ox drivers to release their animals. ‘Listen, Lady,’ I said, ‘we have to go faster than oxen can walk.’ I pointed to the distant smoke. ‘That’s the Saxons! They’ll be here in a few hours.’

  ‘We can’t leave the wagons!’ she screamed. There were tears in her eyes. She might have bee
n the daughter of a King, but she had grown up with few possessions and now, married to Dumnonia’s ruler, she was rich and she could not let go of those new riches. ‘Don’t undo that harness!’ she shouted at the drivers and they, confused, hesitated. I sawed at another leather trace and Argante began beating me with her fists, swearing that I was a thief and her enemy.

  I pushed her gently away, but she would not go and I dared not be too forceful. She was in a tantrum now, swearing at me and hitting me with her small hands. I tried to push her away again, but she just spat at me, hit me again, then shouted at her Blackshield bodyguard to come to her aid.

  Those twelve men were hesitant, but they were her father’s warriors and sworn to Argante’s service, and so they came towards me with levelled spears. My own men immediately ran to my defence. The Blackshields were terribly outnumbered, but they did not back down and their Druid was hopping in front of them, his fox-hair woven beard wagging and the small bones tied to its hairs clicking as he told the Blackshields that they were blessed and that their souls would go to a golden reward. ‘Kill him!’ Argante screamed at her bodyguard and pointing at me. ‘Kill him now!’

  ‘Enough!’ Guinevere called sharply. She walked into the centre of the road and stared imperiously at the Blackshields. ‘Don’t be fools, put your spears down. If you want to die, take some Saxons with you, not Dumnonians.’ She turned on Argante. ‘Come here, child,’ she said, and pulled the girl towards her and used a corner of her drab cloak to wipe away Argante’s tears. ‘You did quite right to try and save the treasury,’ she told Argante, ‘but Derfel is also right. If we don’t hurry the Saxons will catch us.’ She turned to me. ‘Is there no chance,’ she asked, ‘that we can take the gold?’

  ‘None,’ I said shortly, nor was there. Even if I had harnessed spearmen to the wagons they would still have slowed us down.

  ‘The gold is mine!’ Argante screamed.

  ‘It belongs to the Saxons now,’ I said, and I shouted at Issa to get the wagons off the road and cut the oxen free.

  Argante screamed a last protest, but Guinevere seized and hugged her. ‘It doesn’t become princesses,’ Guinevere murmured softly, ‘to show anger in public. Be mysterious, my dear, and never let men know what you’re thinking. Your power lies in the shadows, but in the sunlight men will always overcome you.’

  Argante had no idea who the tall, good-looking woman was, but she allowed Guinevere to comfort her as Issa and his men dragged the wagons onto the grass verge. I let the women take what cloaks and gowns they wanted, but we abandoned the cauldrons and tripods and candle-holders, though Issa did discover one of Arthur’s war-banners, a huge sheet of white linen decorated with a great black bear embroidered in wool, and that we kept to stop it falling into the hands of the Saxons, but we could not take the gold. Instead we carried the treasury boxes to a flooded drainage ditch in a nearby field and poured the coins into the stinking water in the hope that the Saxons would never discover it.

  Argante sobbed as she watched the gold being poured into the black water. ‘The gold is mine!’ she protested a last time.

  ‘And once it was mine, child,’ Guinevere said very calmly, ‘and I survived the loss, just as you now will.’

  Argante pulled abruptly away to stare up at the taller woman. ‘Yours?’ she asked.

  ‘Did I not name myself, child?’ Guinevere asked with a delicate scorn. ‘I’m the Princess Guinevere.’

  Argante just screamed, then fled up the road to where her Blackshields had retreated. I groaned, sheathed Hywelbane, then waited as the last of the gold was concealed. Guinevere had found one of her old cloaks, a golden cascade of wool trimmed in bear fur, and had discarded the old dull garment she had worn in her prison. ‘Her gold indeed,’ she said to me angrily.

  ‘It seems I have another enemy,’ I said, watching Argante who was deep in conversation with her Druid and doubtless urging him to put a curse on me.

  ‘If we share an enemy, Derfel,’ Guinevere said with a smile, ‘then that makes us allies at last. I like that.’

  ‘Thank you, Lady,’ I said, and reflected that it was not just my daughters and spearmen who were being charmed.

  The last of the gold was sunk in the ditch and my men came back to the road and picked up their spears and shields. The sun flamed over the Severn Sea, filling the west with a crimson glow as we, at last, started northwards to the war.

  We only made a few miles before the dark drove us off the road to find shelter, but at least we had reached the hills north of Ynys Wydryn. We stopped that night at an abandoned hall where we made a poor meal of hard bread and dried fish. Argante sat apart from the rest of us, protected by her Druid and her guards, and though Ceinwyn tried to draw her into our conversation she refused to be tempted and so we let her sulk.

  After we had eaten I walked with Ceinwyn and Guinevere to the top of a small hill behind the hall where two of the old people’s grave mounds stood. I begged the dead’s forgiveness and climbed to the top of one of the mounds where Ceinwyn and Guinevere joined me. The three of us gazed southwards. The valley beneath us was prettily white with moon-glossed apple blossom, but we saw nothing on the horizon except the sullen glow of fires. ‘The Saxons move fast,’ I said bitterly.

  Guinevere pulled her cloak tight around her shoulders. ‘Where’s Merlin?’ she asked.

  ‘Vanished,’ I said. There had been reports that Merlin was in Ireland, or else in the northern wilderness, or perhaps in the wastes of Gwynedd, while still another tale claimed he was dead and that Nimue had cut down a whole mountainside of trees to make his balefire. It was just rumour, I told myself, just rumour.

  ‘No one knows where Merlin is,’ Ceinwyn said softly, ‘but he’ll surely know where we are.’

  ‘I pray that he does,’ Guinevere said fervently, and I wondered to what God or Goddess she prayed now. Still to Isis? Or had she reverted to the British Gods? And maybe, I shuddered at the thought, those Gods had finally abandoned us. Their balefire would have been the flames on Mai Dun and their revenge was the warbands that now ravaged Dumnonia.

  We marched again at dawn. It had clouded over in the night and a thin rain started with the first light. The Fosse Way was crowded with refugees and even though I placed a score of armed warriors at our head who had orders to thrust all ox-wagons and herds off the road, our progress was still pitifully slow. Many of the children could not keep up and had to be carried on the pack animals that bore our spears, armour and food, or else hoisted onto the shoulders of the younger spearmen. Argante rode my mare while Guinevere and Ceinwyn walked and took it in turns to tell stories to the children. The rain became harder, sweeping across the hilltops in vast grey swathes and gurgling down the shallow ditches on either side of the Roman road.

  I had hoped to reach Aquae Sulis at midday, but it was the middle of the afternoon before our bedraggled and tired band dropped into the valley where the city lay. The river was in spate and a choking mass of floating debris had become trapped against the stone piers of the Roman bridge to form a dam that had flooded the upstream fields on either bank. One of the duties of the city’s magistrate was to keep the bridge spillways clear of just such debris, but the task had been ignored, just as he had ignored the upkeep of the city wall. That wall lay only a hundred paces north of the bridge and, because Aquae Sulis was not a fortress town, it had never been a formidable wall, but now it was scarcely an obstacle at all. Whole stretches of the wooden palisade on top of the earth and stone rampart had been torn down for firewood or building, while the rampart itself had become so eroded that the Saxons could have crossed the city wall without breaking stride. Here and there I could see frantic men trying to repair stretches of the palisade, but it would have taken five hundred men a full month to rebuild those defences.

  We filed through the city’s fine southern gate and I saw that though the town possessed neither the energy to preserve its ramparts nor the labour to keep the bridge from choking with flotsam, someone had found time to de
face the beautiful mask of the Roman Goddess Minerva that had once graced the gate’s arch. Where her face had been there was now just a calloused mass of hammered stone on which a crude Christian cross had been cut. ‘It’s a Christian town?’ Ceinwyn asked me.

  ‘Nearly all towns are,’ Guinevere answered for me.

  It was also a beautiful town. Or it had been beautiful once, though over the years the tiled roofs had fallen and been replaced by thick thatch and some houses had collapsed and were now nothing but piles of brick or stone, but still the streets were paved and the high pillars and lavishly carved pediment of Minerva’s magnificent temple still soared above the petty roofs. My vanguard forced a brutal way through the crowded streets to reach the temple, which stood on a stepped pediment in the sacred heart of the city. The Romans had built an inner wall about that central shrine, a wall that encompassed Minerva’s temple and the bath-house that had brought the city its fame and prosperity. The Romans had roofed in the bath, which was fed by a magical hot spring, but some of the roof tiles had fallen and wisps of steam now curled up from the holes like smoke. The temple itself, stripped of its lead gutters, was stained with rainwater and lichen, while the painted plaster inside the high portico had flaked and darkened; but despite the decay it was still possible to stand in the wide paved enclosure of the city’s inner shrine and imagine a world where men could build such places and live without fear of spears coming from the barbarian east.

  The city magistrate, a flurried, nervous, middle-aged man named Cildydd who wore a Roman toga to mark his authority, hurried out of the temple to greet me. I knew him from the time of the rebellion when, despite being a Christian himself, he had fled from the crazed fanatics who had taken over the shrines of Aquae Sulis. He had been restored to the magistracy after the rebellion, but I guessed his authority was slight. He carried a scrap of slate on which he had made scores of marks, evidently the numbers of the levy that was assembled inside the shrine’s compound. ‘Repairs are in hand!’ Cildydd greeted me without any other courtesy. ‘I have men cutting timbers for the walls. Or I did. The flooding is a problem, indeed it is, but if the rain stops?’ He let the sentence trail away.