Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘So he’ll just abandon Dumnonia to injustice and tyranny!’ I protested.

  ‘No,’ Guinevere said, ‘for Mordred will not have all the power.’

  I gazed at her, and guessed from her voice that I had not understood everything. ‘Go on,’ I said guardedly.

  ‘Sagramor will stay. The Saxons are defeated, but there will still be a frontier and there is no one better than Sagramor to guard it. And the rest of Dumnonia’s army will swear their loyalty to another man. Mordred can rule, for he is King, but he will not command the spears, and a man without spears is a man without real power. You and Sagramor will hold that.’

  ‘No!’

  Guinevere smiled. ‘Arthur knew you would say that, which is why I said I would persuade you.’

  ‘Lady,’ I began to protest, but she held up a hand to silence me.

  ‘You are to rule Dumnonia, Derfel. Mordred will be King, but you will have the spears, and the man who commands the spears rules. You must do it for Arthur, because only if you agree can he leave Dumnonia with a clear conscience. So, to give him peace, do it for him and, maybe,’ she hesitated, ‘for me too? Please?’

  Merlin was right. When a woman wants something, she gets it.

  And I was to rule Dumnonia.

  TALIESIN MADE A SONG of Mynydd Baddon. He deliberately made it in the old style with a simple rhythm that throbbed with drama, heroism and bombast. It was a very long song, for it was important that every warrior who fought well received at least a half-line of praise, while our leaders had whole verses to themselves. After the battle Taliesin joined Guinevere’s household and he sensibly gave his patroness her due, wonderfully describing the hurtling wagons with their heaps of fire, but avoiding any mention of the Saxon wizard she had killed with her bow. He used her red hair as an image of the blood-soaked crop of barley amongst which some Saxons died, and though I never saw any barley growing on the battlefield, it was a clever touch. He made the death of his old patron, Cuneglas, into a slow lament in which the dead King’s name was repeated like a drumbeat, and he turned Gawain’s charge into a chilling account of how the wraith-souls of our dead spearmen came from the bridge of swords to assail the enemy’s flank. He praised Tewdric, was kind to me and gave honour to Sagramor, but above all his song was a celebration of Arthur. In Taliesin’s song it was Arthur who flooded the valley with enemy blood, and Arthur who struck down the enemy King, and Arthur who made all Lloegyr cower with terror.

  The Christians hated Taliesin’s song. They made their own songs in which it was Tewdric who beat down the Saxons. The Lord God Almighty, the Christian songs claimed, had heard Tewdric’s pleas and fetched the host of heaven to the battlefield and there His angels fought the Sais with swords of fire. Arthur received no mention in their songs, indeed the pagans were given none of the credit for the victory and to this day there are folk who declare that Arthur was not even present at Mynydd Baddon. One Christian song actually credits Meurig with Aelle’s death, and Meurig was not present at Mynydd Baddon, but at home in Gwent. After the battle Meurig was restored to his kingship, while Tewdric returned to his monastery where he was declared a saint by Gwent’s bishops.

  Arthur was much too busy that summer to care about making songs or saints. In the weeks following the battle we took back huge parts of Lloegyr, though we could not take it all for plenty of Saxons remained in Britain. The further east we went, the stiffer their resistance became, but by autumn the enemy was penned back into a territory only half the size they had previously ruled. Cerdic even paid us tribute that year, and he promised to pay it for ten years to come, though he never did. Instead he welcomed every boat that came across the sea and slowly rebuilt his broken forces.

  Aelle’s kingdom was divided. The southern portion went back into Cerdic’s hands, while the northern part broke into three or four small kingdoms that were ruthlessly raided by warbands from Elmet, Powys and Gwent. Thousands of Saxons came under British rule, indeed all of Dumnonia’s new eastern lands were inhabited by them. Arthur wanted us to resettle that land, but few Britons were willing to go there and so the Saxons stayed, farmed and dreamed of the day when their own Kings would return. Sagramor became the virtual ruler of Dumnonia’s reclaimed lands. The Saxon chiefs knew their King was Mordred, but in those first years after Mynydd Baddon it was to Sagramor they paid their homage and taxes, and it was his stark black banner that flew above the old river fort at Pontes from where his warriors marched to keep the peace.

  Arthur led the campaign to take back the stolen land, but once it was secured and once the Saxons had agreed our new frontiers, he left Durhnonia. To the very last some of us hoped he would break the promise he had given to Meurig and Tewdric, but he had no wish to stay. He had never wanted power. He had taken it as a duty at a time when Dumnonia possessed a child King and a score of ambitious warlords whose rivalry would have torn the land into turmoil, but through all the years that followed he had ever clung to his dream of living a simpler life, and once the Saxons were defeated he felt free to make his dream reality. I pleaded with him to think again, but he shook his head. ‘I’m old, Derfel.’

  ‘Not much older than I am, Lord.’

  ‘Then you’re old,’ he said with a smile. ‘Over forty! How many men live forty years?’

  Few indeed. Yet even so I think Arthur would have wanted to stay in Dumnonia if he had received what he wanted, and that was gratitude. He was a proud man, and he knew what he had done for the country, but the country had rewarded him with a sullen discontent. The Christians had broken his peace first, but afterwards, following the fires of Mai Dun, the pagans had turned against him. He had given Dumnonia justice, he had regained much of its lost land and secured its new frontiers, he had ruled honestly, and his reward was to be derided as the enemy of the Gods. Besides, he had promised Meurig he would leave Dumnonia, and that promise reinforced the oath he had given to Uther to make Mordred King, and now he declared he would keep both promises in full. ‘I’ll have no happiness until the oaths are kept,’ he told me, and he could not be persuaded otherwise and so,, when the new frontier with the Saxons was decided and Cerdic’s first tribute had been paid, he left.

  He took sixty horsemen and a hundred spearmen and went to the town of Isca in Siluria, which lay north across the Severn Sea from Dumnonia. He had originally proposed to take no spearmen with him, but Guinevere’s advice had prevailed. Arthur, she said, had enemies and needed protection, and besides, his horsemen were among the most potent of Britain’s warriors and she did not want them falling under another man’s command. Arthur let himself be persuaded, though in truth I do not think he needed much persuasion. He might dream of being a mere landowner living in a peaceful countryside with no worries other than the health of his livestock and the state of his crops, but he knew that the only peace he would ever have was of his own making and that a lord who lives without warriors will not stay at peace for long.

  Siluria was a small, poor and unregarded kingdom. The last King of its old dynasty had been Gundleus, who had died at Lugg Vale, and afterwards Lancelot was acclaimed the King, but he had disliked Siluria and had happily abandoned it for the wealthier throne of the Belgic country. Lacking another King, Siluria had been divided into two client kingdoms subservient to Gwent and Powys. Cuneglas had called himself King of Western Siluria, while Meurig was proclaimed King of Eastern Siluria, but in truth neither monarch had seen much value in its steep, cramped valleys that ran to the sea from its raw northern mountains. Cuneglas had recruited spearmen from the valleys while Meurig of Gwent had done little more than send missionaries into the territory, and the only King who had ever taken any interest in Siluria was Oengus mac Airem who had raided the valleys for food and slaves, but otherwise Siluria had been ignored. Its chieftains squabbled amongst themselves and grudgingly paid their taxes to Gwent or Powys, but the coming of Arthur changed all that. Whether he liked it or not he became Siluria’s most important inhabitant and thus its effective ruler and, despite his d
eclared ambition to be a private man, he could not resist using his spearmen to end the chieftains’ ruinous squabbles. A year after Mynydd Baddon, when we first visited Arthur and Guinevere in Isca, he was wryly calling himself the Governor, a Roman title, and one that pleased him for it had no connotation of kingship.

  Isca was a beautiful town. The Romans had first made a fort there to guard the river crossing, but as they pushed their legions further west and north their need for the fort diminished and they turned Isca into a place not unlike Aquae Sulis: a town where Romans went to enjoy themselves. It had an amphitheatre and though it lacked hot springs, Isca still boasted six bath-houses, three palaces and as many temples as the Romans had Gods. The town was much decayed now, but Arthur was repairing the law-courts and the palaces, and such work always made him happy. The largest of the palaces, the one where Lancelot had lived, was given to Culhwch, who had been named the commander of Arthur’s bodyguard and most of those guards shared the big palace with Culhwch. The second largest palace was now home to Emrys, once Bishop of Dumnonia but now the Bishop of Isca. ‘He couldn’t stay in Dumnonia,’ Arthur told me as he showed me the town. It was a year after Mynydd Baddon, and Ceinwyn and I were making our first visit to Arthur’s new home. ‘There isn’t room for both Emrys and Sansum in Dumnonia,’ Arthur explained, ‘so Emrys helps me here. He has an insatiable appetite for administration and, better still, he keeps Meurig’s Christians away.’

  ‘AllofthemP’Iasked.

  ‘Most of them,’ he said with a smile, ‘and it’s a fine place, Derfel,’ he went on, gazing at Isca’s paved streets, ‘a fine place!’ He was absurdly proud of his new home, claiming that the rain fell less hard on Isca than on the surrounding countryside. ‘I’ve seen the hills thick with snow,’ he told me, ‘and the sun has shone on green grass here.’

  ‘Yes, Lord,’ I said with a smile.

  ‘It’s true, Derfel! True! When I ride out of the town I take a cloak and there comes a point where the heat suddenly fades and you must pull on the cloak. You’ll see when we go hunting tomorrow.’

  ‘It sounds like magic,’ I said, gently teasing him, for normally he despised any talk of magic.

  ‘I think it well may be!’ he said in all seriousness and he led me down an alley that ran beside the big Christian shrine to a curious mound that stood in the town’s centre. A spiralling path climbed to the summit of the mound where the old people had made a shallow pit. The pit held countless small offerings left for the Gods; scraps of ribbon, tufts of fleece, buttons, all of them proof that Meurig’s missionaries, busy as they had been, had not entirely defeated the old religion. ‘If there is magic here,’ Arthur told me when we had climbed to the mound’s top and were staring down into the grassy pit, ‘then this is where it springs from. The local folk say it’s an entrance to the Otherworld.’

  ‘And you believe them?’

  ‘I just know this is a blessed place,’ he said happily, and so Isca was on that late summer’s day. The incoming tide had swollen the river so that it flowed deep within green banks, the sun shone on the white-walled buildings and on the leafy trees that grew in their courtyards, while to the north the small hills with their busy farmlands stretched peacefully to the mountains. It was hard to believe that not so many years before a Saxon raiding party had reached those hills and slaughtered farmers, captured slaves and left the crofts burning. That raid had been during Uther’s reign, and Arthur’s achievement had been to thrust the enemy so far back that it seemed, that summer and for many summers to come, that no free Saxon would ever come near Isca again.

  The town’s smallest palace lay just to the west of the mound and it was there that Arthur and Guinevere lived. From our high point on the mysterious mound we could look down into the courtyard where Guinevere and Ceinwyn were pacing, and it was plain that it was Guinevere who was doing all the talking. ‘She’s planning Gwydre’s marriage,’ Arthur told me, ‘to Morwenna, of course,’ he added with a quick smile.

  ‘She’s ready for it,’ I said fervently. Morwenna was a good girl, but of late she had been moody and irritable. Ceinwyn assured me that Morwenna’s behaviour was merely the symptoms of a girl ready for marriage, and I for one would be grateful for the cure.

  Arthur sat on the mound’s grassy lip and stared westwards. His hands, I noticed, were flecked with small dark scars, all from the furnace of the smithy he had built for himself in his palace’s stable yard. He had always been intrigued by blacksmithing and could enthuse for hours about its skills. Now, though, he had different matters on his mind. ‘Would you mind,’ he asked diffidently, ‘if Bishop Emrys blesses the marriage?’

  ‘Why would I mind?’ I asked. I liked Emrys.

  ‘Only Bishop Emrys,’ Arthur said. ‘No Druids. You must understand, Derfel, that I live here at Meurig’s pleasure. He is, after all, the King of this land.’

  ‘Lord,’ I began to protest, but he stilled me with a raised hand and I did not pursue my indignation. I knew that the young King Meurig was an uneasy neighbour. He resented the fact that his father had temporarily relieved him of his power, resented that he had not shared in any of Mynydd Baddon’s glory and was sullenly jealous of Arthur. Meurig’s Gwentian territory began only yards from this mound, at the far end of the Roman bridge that crossed the River Usk, and this eastern portion of Siluria was legally another of Meurig’s possessions.

  ‘It was Meurig who wanted me to live here as his tenant,’ Arthur explained, ‘but it was Tewdric who gave me the rights to all the old royal rents. He, at least, is grateful for what we achieved at Mynydd Baddon, but I very much doubt that young Meurig approves of the arrangement, so I placate him by making a show of allegiance to Christianity.’ He mimicked the sign of the cross and offered me a self-deprecating grimace.

  ‘You don’t need to placate Meurig,’ I said angrily. ‘Give me one month and I’ll drag the miserable dog back here on his knees.’

  Arthur laughed. ‘Another war?’ He shook his head. ‘Meurig might be a fool, but he’s never been a man to seek war, so I cannot dislike him. He will leave me in peace so long as I don’t offend him. Besides, I have enough fighting on my hands without worrying about Gwent.’

  His fights were small things. Oengus’s Blackshields still raided across Siluria’s western frontier and Arthur set small garrisons of spearmen to guard against those incursions. He felt no anger against Oengus who, indeed, he regarded as a friend, but Oengus could no more resist harvest raids than a dog could stop itself from scratching at fleas. Siluria’s northern border was more troubling because that joined Powys, and Powys, since Cuneglas’s death, had fallen into chaos. Perddel, Cuneglas’s son, had been acclaimed King, but at least a half-dozen powerful chieftains believed they had more right to the crown than Perddel – or at least the power to take the crown – and so the once mighty kingdom of Powys had degenerated into a squalid killing ground. Gwynedd, the impoverished country to the north of Powys, was raiding at will, warbands fought each other, made temporary alliances, broke them, massacred each other’s families and, whenever they themselves were in danger of massacre, retreated into the mountains. Enough spearmen had stayed loyal to Perddel to ensure that he kept the throne, but they were too few to defeat the rebellious chieftains. ‘I think we shall have to intervene,’ Arthur told me.

  ‘We, Lord?’

  ‘Meurig and I. Oh, I know he hates war, but sooner or later some of his missionaries will be killed in Powys and I suspect those deaths will persuade him to send spearmen to Perddel’s support. So long, of course, as Perddel agrees to establish Christianity in Powys, which he doubtless will if it gives him back his kingdom. And if Meurig goes to war he’ll probably ask me to go. He’d much rather that my men should die than his.’

  ‘Under the Christian banner?’ I asked sourly.

  ‘I doubt he’ll want another,’ Arthur said calmly. ‘I’ve become his tax-collector in Siluria, so why shouldn’t I be his warlord in Powys?’ He smiled wryly at the prospect, then gave me a sh
eepish look. ‘There is another reason to give Gwydre and Morwenna a Christian marriage,’ he said after a while.

  ‘Which is?’ I had to prompt him for it was clear that this further reason embarrassed him.

  ‘Suppose Mordred and Argante have no children?’ he asked me.

  I said nothing for a while. Guinevere had raised the same possibility when I had spoken to her in Aquae Sulis, but it seemed an unlikely supposition. I said as much.

  ‘But if they are childless,’ Arthur insisted, ‘who would have the best claim to Dumnonia’s kingship?’

  ‘You would, of course,’ I insisted. Arthur was Uther’s son, even if he had been bastard born, and there were no other sons who might claim the kingdom.

  ‘No, no,’ he said quickly. ‘I don’t want it. I never have wanted it!’

  I stared down at Guinevere, suspecting that it was she who had raised this problem of who should succeed Mordred. ‘Then it would be Gwydre?’ I asked.

  ‘Then it would be Gwydre,’ he agreed.

  ‘Does he want it?’ I asked.

  ‘I think so. He listens to his mother rather than to me.’

  ‘You don’t want Gwydre to be King?’

  ‘I want Gwydre to be whatever he wishes to be,’ Arthur said, ‘and if Mordred provides no heir and Gwydre wishes to make his claim then-I will support him.’ He was staring down at Guinevere as he spoke and I guessed that she was the real force behind this ambition. She had always wanted to be married to a King, but would accept being the mother of one if Arthur refused the throne. ‘But as you say,’ Arthur went on, ‘it’s an unlikely supposition. I hope Mordred will have many sons, but if he doesn’t, and if Gwydre is called to rule, then he’ll need Christian support. The Christians rule in Dumnonia now, don’t they?’

  ‘They do, Lord,’ I said grimly.

  ‘So it would be politic of us to observe the Christian rites at Gwydre’s marriage,’ Arthur said, then gave me a sly smile. ‘You see how close your daughter is to becoming a Queen?’ I had honestly never thought of that before, and it must have shown on my face, for Arthur laughed. ‘A Christian marriage isn’t what I would want for Gwydre and Morwenna,’ he admitted. ‘If it was up to me, Derfel, I would have them married by Merlin.’