Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  Then, in the middle of the afternoon, when the rain had ended and the Saxons were bored with trying to lure us down to battle, they brought three captured children to the saddle. The children were very young, no more than five or six years old, and they were held with seaxs at their throats. ‘Come down,’ the big Saxon chieftain shouted, ‘or they die!’

  Issa looked at me. ‘Let me go, Lord,’ he pleaded.

  ‘It’s my rampart,’ Niall, the Blackshield leader, insisted. ‘I’ll fillet the bastard.’

  ‘It’s my hilltop,’ I said. It was more than just my hilltop, it was also my duty to fight the first single combat of a battle. A king could let his champion fight but a warlord had no business sending men where he would not go himself, and so I closed the cheekpieces of my helmet, touched a gloved hand to the pork bones in Hywelbane’s hilt, then pressed on my mail coat to feel the small lump made by Ceinwyn’s brooch. Thus reassured I pushed through our crude timber palisade and edged down the steep slope. ‘You and me!’ I shouted at the tall Saxon in his own language, ‘for their lives,’ and I pointed my spear at the three children.

  The Saxons roared approval that they had at last brought one Briton down from the hill. They backed away, taking the children with them, leaving the saddle to their champion and to me. The burly Saxon hefted the big axe in his left hand, then spat onto the buttercups. ‘You speak our language well, pig,’ he greeted me.

  ‘It is a pig’s language,’ I said.

  He tossed the axe high into the air where it turned, its blade flashing in the weak sunlight that was trying to break the clouds. The axe was long and its double-bladed head heavy, but he caught it easily by its haft. Most men would have found it hard to wield such a massive weapon for even a short time, let alone toss and catch it, but this Saxon made it look easy. ‘Arthur dared not come and fight me,’ he said, ‘so I shall kill you in his stead.’

  His reference to Arthur puzzled me, but it was not my job to disabuse the enemy if they thought Arthur was on Mynydd Baddon. ‘Arthur has better things to do than to kill vermin,’ I said, ‘so he asked me to slaughter you, then bury your fat corpse with your feet pointing south so that through all time you will wander lonely and hurting, never able to find your Otherworld.’

  He spat. ‘You squeal like a spavined pig.’ The insults were a ritual, as was the single combat. Arthur disapproved of both, believing insults to be a waste of breath and single combat a waste of energy, but I had no objection to fighting an enemy champion. Such combat did serve a purpose, for if I killed this man my troops would be hugely cheered and the Saxons would see a terrible omen in his death. The risk was losing the fight, but I was a confident man in those days. The Saxon was a full hand’s breadth taller than I and much broader across his shoulders, but I doubted he would be fast. He looked like a man who relied on strength to win, while I took pride in being clever as well as strong. He looked up at our rampart that was now crowded with men and women. I could not see Ceinwyn there, but Guinevere stood tall and striking among the armed men. ‘Is that your whore?’ the Saxon asked me, holding his axe towards her. ‘Tonight she’ll be mine, you worm.’ He took two steps nearer me so that he was just a dozen paces away, then tossed the big axe up in the air again. His men were cheering him from the northern slope, while my men were shouting raucous encouragements from the ramparts.

  ‘If you’re frightened,’ I said, ‘I can give you time to empty your bowels.’

  ‘I’ll empty them on your corpse,’ he spat at me. I wondered whether to take him with the spear or with Hywelbane and decided the spear would be faster so long as he did not parry the blade. It was plain that he would attack soon for he had begun to swing the axe in fast intricate curves that were dazzling to watch and I suspected his intention was to charge me with that blurring blade, knock my spear aside with his shield, then bury the axe in my neck. ‘My name is Wulfger,’ he said formally, ‘Chief of the Sarnaed tribe of Cerdic’s people, and this land shall be my land.’

  I slipped my left arm out of the shield loops, transferred the shield to my right arm and hefted the spear in my left hand. I did not loop the shield on my right arm, but just gripped the wooden handle tight. Wulfger of the Sarnaed was left-handed and that meant his axe would have attacked from my unguarded side if I had kept the shield on its original arm. I was not nearly so good with a spear in my left hand, but I had a notion that might finish this fight fast. ‘My name,’ I answered him formally, ‘is Derfel, son of Aelle, King of the Aenglish. And I am the man who put the scar on Liofa’s cheek.’

  My boast had been intended to unsettle him, and perhaps it did, but he showed little sign of it. Instead, with a sudden roar, he attacked and his men cheered deafeningly. Wulfger’s axe was whistling in the air, his shield was poised to knock my spear aside, and he was charging like a bull, but then I hurled my own shield at his face. I hurled it sideways on, so that it spun towards him like a heavy disc of metal-rimmed wood.

  The sudden sight of the heavy shield flying hard at his face forced him to raise his own shield and check the violent whirling of his blurring axe. I heard my shield clatter on his, but I was already on one knee with my spear held low and lancing upwards. Wulfger of the Sarnaed had parried my shield quickly enough, but he could not stop his heavy forward rush, not could he drop his shield in time, and so he ran straight onto that long, heavy, wicked-edged blade. I had aimed at his belly, at a spot just beneath his iron breastplate where his only protection was a thick leather jerkin, and my spear went though that leather like a needle slipping through linen. I stood up as the blade sank through leather, skin, muscle and flesh to bury itself in Wulfger’s lower belly. I stood and twisted the haft, roaring my own challenge now as I saw the axe blade falter. I lunged again, the spear still deep in his belly and twisted the leaf-shaped blade a second time, and Wulfger of the Sarnaed opened his mouth as he stared at me and I saw the horror come to his eyes. He tried to lift the axe, but there was only a terrible pain in his belly and a liquefying weakness in his legs, and then he stumbled, gasped and fell onto his knees.

  I let go of the spear and stepped back as I drew Hywelbane. ‘This is our land, Wulfger of the Sarnaed,’ I said loudly enough for his men to hear me, ‘and it stays our land.’ I swung the blade once, but swung it hard so that it razored through the matted mass of hair at the nape of his neck and chopped into his backbone.

  He fell dead, killed in an eyeblink.

  I gripped my spear shaft, put a boot on Wulfger’s belly and tugged the reluctant blade free. Then I stooped and wrenched the wolf skull from his helmet. I held the yellowing bone towards our enemies, then cast it on the ground and stamped it into fragments with my foot. I undid the dead man’s golden collar, then took his shield, his axe and his knife and waved those trophies towards his men, who stood watching silently. My men were dancing and howling their glee. Last of all I stooped and unbuckled his heavy bronze greaves which were decorated with images of my God, Mithras.

  I stood with my plunder. ‘Send the children!’ I shouted at the Saxons.

  ‘Come and fetch them!’ a man called back, then with a swift slash he cut a child’s throat. The other two children screamed, then they too were killed and the Saxons spat on their small bodies. For a moment I thought my men would lose control and charge across the saddle, but Issa and Niall held them to the rampart. I spat on Wulfger’s body, sneered at the treacherous enemy, then took my trophies back up the hill.

  I gave Wulfger’s shield to one of the levy, the knife to Niall and the axe to Issa. ‘Don’t use it in battle,’ I said, ‘but you can chop wood with it.’

  I carried the golden collar to Ceinwyn, but she shook her head. ‘I don’t like dead men’s gold,’ she said. She was cradling our daughters and I could see she had been weeping. Ceinwyn was not a woman to betray her emotions. She had learned as a child that she could keep her fearsome father’s affections by being bright-natured, and somehow that habit of cheerfulness had worked itself deep into her soul, but she
could not hide her distress now. ‘You could have died!’ she said. I had nothing to say, so I just crouched beside her, plucked a handful of grass and scrubbed the blood from Hywelbane’s edge. Ceinwyn frowned at me. ‘They killed those children?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Who were they?’

  I shrugged. ‘Who knows? Just children captured in a raid.’

  Ceinwyn sighed and stroked Morwenna’s fair hair. ‘Did you have to fight?’

  ‘Would you rather I had sent Issa?’

  ‘No,’ she admitted.

  ‘So yes, I had to fight,’ I said, and in truth I had enjoyed the fight. Only a fool wants war, but once a war starts then it cannot be fought half-heartedly. It cannot even be fought with regret, but must be waged with a savage joy in defeating the enemy, and it is that savage joy that inspires our bards to write their greatest songs about love and war. We warriors dressed for battle as we decked ourselves for love; we made ourselves gaudy, we wore our gold, we mounted crests on our silver-chased helmets, we strutted, we boasted, and when the slaughtering blades came close we felt as though the blood of the Gods coursed in our veins. A man should love peace, but if he cannot fight with all his heart then he will not have peace.

  ‘What would we have done if you had died?’ Ceinwyn asked, watching as I buckled Wulfger’s fine greaves over my boots.

  ‘You would have burned me, my love,’ I said, ‘and sent my soul to join Dian.’ I kissed her, then carried the golden collar to Guinevere, who was delighted by the gift. She had lost her jewels with her freedom, and though she had no taste for heavy Saxon work, she placed the collar about her neck.

  ‘I enjoyed that fight,’ she said, patting the golden plates into place. ‘I want you to teach me some Saxon, Derfel.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Insults. I want to hurt them.’ She laughed. ‘Coarse insults, Derfel, the coarsest that you know.’

  And there would be plenty of Saxons for Guinevere to insult, for still more enemy spearmen were coming to the valley. My men on the southern angle called to warn me, and I went to stand on the rampart beneath our twin banners and saw two long lines of spearmen winding down the eastern hills into the river meadows. ‘They started arriving a few moments ago,’ Eachern told me, ‘and now there’s no end to them.’

  Nor was there. This was no warband coming to fight, but an army, a horde, a whole people on the march. Men, women, beasts and children, all spilling from the eastern hills into Aquae Sulis’s valley. The spearmen marched in their long columns, and between the columns were herds of cattle, flocks of sheep and straggling trails of women and children. Horsemen rode on the flanks, and more horsemen clustered about the two banners that marked the coming of the Saxon Kings. This was not one army, but two, the combined forces of Cerdic and Aelle, and instead of facing Arthur in the valley of the Thames they had come here, to me, and their blades were as numerous as the stars of the sky’s great belt.

  I watched them come for an hour and Eachern was right. There was no end to them, and I touched the bones in Hywelbane’s hilt and knew, more surely than ever, that we were doomed.

  That night the lights of the Saxon fires were like a constellation fallen into Aquae Sulis’s valley; a blaze of campfires reaching far to the south and deep to the west to show where the enemy encampments followed the line of the river. There were still more fires on the eastern hills, where the rearguard of the Saxon horde camped on the high ground, but in the dawn we saw those men coming down into the valley beneath us.

  It was a raw morning, though it promised to be a warm day. At sunrise, when the valley was still dark, the smoke from the Saxon fires mingled with the river mist so that it seemed as if Mynydd Baddon was a green sunlit vessel adrift in a sinister grey sea. I had slept badly, for one of the women had given birth in the night and her cries had haunted me. The child was stillborn and Ceinwyn told me it should not have been delivered for another three or four months. ‘They think it’s a bad omen,’ Ceinwyn added bleakly.

  And so it probably was, I reflected, but I dared not admit as much. Instead I tried to sound confident. ‘The Gods won’t abandon us,’ I said.

  ‘It was Terfa,’ Ceinwyn said, naming the woman who had tortured the night with her crying. ‘It would have been her first child. A boy, it was. Very tiny.’ She hesitated, then smiled sadly at me. ‘There’s a fear, Derfel, that the Gods abandoned us at Samain.’

  She was only saying what I myself feared, but again I dared not admit it. ‘Do you believe that?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t want to believe it,’ she said. She thought for a few seconds and was about to say something more when a shout from the southern rampart interrupted us. I did not move and the shout came again. Ceinwyn touched my arm. ‘Go,’ she said.

  I ran to the southern rampart to find Issa, who had stood the night’s last sentry watch, staring down into the valley’s smoky shadows. ‘About a dozen of the bastards,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘See the hedge?’ He pointed down the bare slope to where a white-blossomed hawthorn hedge marked the end of the hillside and the beginning of the valley’s cultivated land. ‘They’re there. We saw them cross the wheatfield.’

  ‘They’re just watching us,’ I said sourly, angry that he had called me away from Ceinwyn for such a small thing.

  ‘I don’t know, Lord. There was something odd about them. There!’ He pointed again and I saw a group of spearmen clamber through the hedge. They crouched on our side of the hedge and it seemed as if they looked behind them, rather than towards us. They waited for a few minutes, then suddenly ran towards us. ‘Deserters?’ Issa guessed. ‘Surely not!’

  And it did seem strange that anyone should desert that vast Saxon army to join our beleaguered band, but Issa was right, for when the eleven men were halfway up the slope they ostentatiously turned their shields upside down. The Saxon sentries had at last seen the traitors and a score of enemy spearmen were now pursuing the fugitives, but the eleven men were far enough ahead to reach us safely. ‘Bring them to me when they get here,’ I told Issa, then went back to the summit’s centre where I pulled on my mail armour and buckled Hywelbane to my waist. ‘Deserters,’ I told Ceinwyn.

  Issa brought the eleven men across the grass. I recognized the shields first, for they showed Lancelot’s sea-eagle with the fish in its talons, and then I recognized Bors, Lancelot’s cousin and champion. He smiled nervously when he saw me, then I grinned broadly and he relaxed. ‘Lord Derfel,’ he greeted me. His broad face was red from the climb, and his burly body heaving to draw in breath.

  ‘Lord Bors,’ I said formally, then embraced him.

  ‘If I am to die,’ he said, ‘I’d rather die on my own side.’ He named his spearmen, all of them Britons who had been in Lancelot’s service and all men who resented being forced to carry their spears for the Saxons. They bowed to Ceinwyn, then sat while bread, mead and salted beef were brought to them. Lancelot, they said, had marched north to join Aelle and Cerdic, and now all the Saxon forces were united in the valley beneath us. ‘Over two thousand men, they reckon,’ Bors said.

  ‘I have less than three hundred.’

  Bors grimaced. ‘But Arthur’s here, yes?’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  Bors stared up at me, his open mouth full of food. ‘Not here?’ he said at last.

  ‘He’s somewhere up north as far as I know.’

  He swallowed his mouthful, then swore quietly. ‘So who is here?’ he asked.

  ‘Just me.’ I gestured about the hill. ‘And what you can see.’

  He lifted a horn of mead and drank deeply. ‘Then I reckon we will die,’ he said grimly.

  He had thought Arthur was on Mynydd Baddon. Indeed, Bors said, both Cerdic and Aelle believed that Arthur was on the hill and that was why they had marched south from the Thames to Aquae Sulis. The Saxons, who had first driven us to this refuge, had seen Arthur’s banner on Mynydd Baddon’s crest and had sent news of its presence to t
he Saxon Kings who had been seeking Arthur in the upper reaches of the Thames. ‘The bastards know what your plans are,’ Bors warned me, ‘and they know Arthur wanted to fight near Corinium, but they couldn’t find him there. And that’s what they want to do, Derfel, they want to find Arthur before Cuneglas reaches him. Kill Arthur, they reckon, and the rest of Britain will lose heart.’ But Arthur, clever Arthur, had given Cerdic and Aelle the slip, and then the Saxon kings had heard that the banner of the bear was being flaunted on a hill near Aquae Sulis and so they had turned their ponderous force southwards and sent orders for Lancelot’s forces to join them.

  ‘Do you have any news of Culhwch?’ I asked Bors.