Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  So Morgan risked her God’s anger and lifted the curse.

  She did it that afternoon. She came to the palace courtyard in a black robe and without any mask so that the horror of her fire-ravaged face, all red and scarred and ridged and twisted, was visible to us all. She was furious with herself, but committed to her promise, and she hurried about her business. A brazier was lit and fed with coals and, while the fire heated, slaves fetched baskets of potter’s clay that Morgan moulded into the figure of a woman. She used blood from a child that had died in the town that morning, and water that a slave swept up from the courtyard’s damp grass, and mixed both with the clay. There was no thunder, but Morgan said the counter-charm did not need thunder. She spat in horror at what she had made. It was a grotesque image, that thing, a woman with huge breasts, spread legs and a gaping birth canal, and in the figure’s belly she dug a hole that she said was the womb where the evil must rest. Arthur, Taliesin and Guinevere watched enthralled as she moulded the clay and then as she walked three times round the obscene figure. After the third sunwise circuit she stopped, raised her head to the clouds and wailed. For a moment I thought she was in such pain that she could not proceed and that her God was commanding her to stop the ceremony, but then she turned her twisted face towards me. ‘I need the evil now,’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  The slit that was her mouth seemed to smile. ‘Your hand, Derfel.’

  ‘My hand?’

  I saw now that the lipless slit was a smile. ‘The hand that binds you to Nimue,’ Morgan said. ‘How else do you think the evil is channelled? You must cut it off, Derfel, and give it to me.’

  ‘Surely,’ Arthur began to protest.

  ‘You force me to sin!’ Morgan turned on her brother with a shriek, ‘then you challenge my wisdom?’

  ‘No,’ Arthur said hurriedly.

  ‘It is nothing to me,’ she said carelessly, ‘if Derfel wants to keep his hand, so be it. Ceinwyn can suffer.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘no.’

  We sent for Galahad and Gulhwch, then Arthur led the three of us to his smithy where the forge burned night and day. I took my lover’s ring from the finger of my left hand and gave it to Morridig, Arthur’s smith, and asked him to seal the ring about Hywelbane’s pommel. The ring was of common iron, a warrior’s ring, but it had a cross made of gold that I had stolen from the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn and it was the twin of a ring Ceinwyn wore.

  We placed a thick piece of timber on the anvil. Galahad held me tight, his arms about me, and I bared my arm and laid my left hand on the timber. Culhwch gripped my forearm, not to keep it still, but for afterwards.

  Arthur raised Excalibur. ‘Are you sure, Derfel?’ he asked.

  ‘Do it, Lord,’ I said.

  Morridig watched wide-eyed as the bright blade touched the rafters above the anvil. Arthur paused, then hacked down once. He hacked down hard, and for a second I felt no pain, none, but then Culhwch took my spurting wrist and thrust it into the burning coals of the forge and that was when the pain whipped through me like a spear thrust. I screamed, and then I remember nothing at all.

  I heard later how Morgan took the severed hand with its fatal scar and sealed it in the clay womb. Then, to a pagan chant as old as time, she pulled the bloody hand out through the birth canal and tossed it onto the brazier.

  And thus I became a Christian.

  PART FOUR

  The Last Enchantment

  SPRING HAS COME TO Dinnewrac. The monastery warms, and the silence of our prayers is broken by the bleating of lambs and the song of larks. White violets and stitchwort grow where snow lay for so long, but best of all is the news that Igraine has given birth to a child. It is a boy, and both he and his mother live. God be thanked for that, and for the season’s warmth, but for little else. Spring should be a happy season, but there are dark rumours of enemies.

  The Saxons have returned, though whether it was their spearmen who started the fires we saw on our eastern horizon last night, no one knows. Yet the fires burned bright, flaring in the night sky like a foretaste of hell. A farmer came at dawn to give us some split logs of lime that we can use to make a new butter churn, and he told us the fires were set by raiding Irish, but we doubt that for there have been too many stories of Saxon warbands in the last few weeks. Arthur’s achievement was to keep the Saxons at bay for a whole generation, and to do it he taught our Kings courage, but how feeble our rulers have become since then! And now the Sais return like a plague.

  Dafydd, the clerk of the justice who translates these parchments into the British tongue, arrived to collect the newest skins today and he told me that the fires were almost certainly Saxon mischief, and afterwards informed me that Igraine’s new son is to be named Arthur. Arthur ap Brochvael ap Perddel ap Cuneglas; a good name, though Dafydd plainly did not approve of it, and at first I was not sure why. He is a small man, not unlike Sansum, with the same busy expression and the same bristly hair. He sat in my window to read the finished parchments and kept tutting and shaking his head at my handwriting. ‘Why,’ he finally asked me, ‘did Arthur abandon Dumnonia?’

  ‘Because Meurig insisted on it,’ I explained, ‘and because Arthur himself never wanted to rule.’

  ‘But it was irresponsible of him!’ Dafydd said sternly.

  ‘Arthur was not a king,’ I said, ‘and our laws insist that only kings can rule.’

  ‘Laws are malleable,’ Dafydd said with a sniff, ‘I should know, and Arthur should have been a king.’

  ‘I agree,’ I said, ‘but he was not. He was not born to it and Mordred was.’

  ‘Then nor was Gwydre born to the kingship,’ Dafydd objected.

  ‘True,’ I said, ‘but if Mordred had died, Gwydre had as good a claim as anyone, except Arthur, of course, but Arthur did not want to be King.’ I wondered how often I had explained this same thing. ‘Arthur came to Britain,’ I said, ‘because he took an oath to protect Mordred, and by the time he went to Siluria he had achieved all that he had set out to do. He had united the kingdoms of Britain, he had given Dumnonia justice and he had defeated the Saxons. He might have resisted Meurig’s demands to yield his power, but in his heart he didn’t want to, and so he gave Dumnonia back to its rightful King and watched all that he had achieved fall apart.’

  ‘So he should have remained in power,’ Dafydd argued. Dafydd, I think, is very like Saint Sansum, a man who can never be in the wrong.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but he was tired. He wanted other men to carry the burden. If anyone was to blame, it was me! I should have stayed in Dumnonia instead of spending so much time in Isca. But at the time none of us saw what was happening. None of us realized Mordred would prove a good soldier, and when he did we convinced ourselves that he would die soon enough and Gwydre would become King. Then all would have been well. We lived in hope rather than in the real world.’

  ‘I still think Arthur let us down,’ Dafydd said, his tone explaining why he disapproved of the new Edling’s name. How many times have I been forced to listen to that same condemnation of Arthur? If only Arthur had stayed in power, men say, then the Saxons would still be paying us tribute and Britain would stretch from sea to sea, but when Britain did have Arthur it just grumbled about him. When he gave folk what they wanted, they complained because it was not enough. The Christians attacked him for favouring the pagans, the pagans attacked him for tolerating the Christians, and the Kings, all except Cuneglas and Oengus mac Airem, were jealous of him. Oengus’s support counted for little, but when Cuneglas died Arthur lost his most valuable royal supporter. Besides, Arthur did not let anyone down. Britain let itself down. Britain let the Saxons creep back, Britain squabbled amongst itself and then Britain whined that it was all Arthur’s fault. Arthur, who had given them victory!

  Dafydd skimmed through the last few pages. ‘Did Ceinwyn recover?’ he asked me.

  ‘Praise God, yes,’ I said, ‘and lived for many years after.’ I was about to tell Dafydd something of tho
se last years, but I could see he was not interested and so I kept my memories to myself. In the end Ceinwyn died of a fever. I was with her, and I wanted to burn her corpse, but Sansum insisted that she was buried in the Christian manner. I obeyed him, but a month later I arranged for some men, the sons and grandsons of my old spearmen, to dig up her corpse and burn it on a pyre so that her soul could go to join her daughters in the Other world and for that sinful action I have no regrets. I doubt that any man will do as much for me, though perhaps Igraine, if she reads these words, will have my balefire built. I pray so.

  ‘Do you change the tale when you translate it?’ I asked Dafydd.

  ‘Change it?’ He looked indignant. ‘My Queen won’t let me change a syllable!’

  ‘Truly?’ I asked.

  ‘I might correct some infelicities of grammar,’ he said, collecting the skins, ‘but nothing else. I presume the ending of the story is close now?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Then I shall return in a week,’ he promised, and pushed the parchments into a bag and hurried away. A moment later Bishop Sansum scurried into my room. He was carrying a strange bundle which at first I took to be a stick wrapped up in an old cloak. ‘Did Dafydd bring news?’ he asked.

  ‘The Queen is well,’ I said, ‘as is her child.’ I decided against telling Sansum that the child was to be named Arthur, for it would only annoy the saint and life is much easier in Dinnewrac when Sansum is in a good temper.

  ‘I asked for news,’ Sansum snapped, ‘not women’s gossip about a child. What about the fires? Did Dafydd mention the fires?’

  ‘He knows no more than we do, Bishop,’ I said, ‘but King Brochvael believes they are Saxons.’

  ‘God preserve us,’ Sansum said, and walked to my window from where the smear of smoke was still just visible in the east. ‘God and His saints preserve us,’ he prayed, then came to my desk and put the strange bundle on top of this skin. He pulled away the cloak and I saw, to my astonishment, and almost to the provocation of my tears, that it was Hywelbane. I did not dare show my emotion, but instead crossed myself as if I was shocked by the appearance of a weapon in our monastery. ‘There are enemies near,’ Sansum said, explaining the sword’s presence.

  ‘I fear you are right, Bishop,’ I said.

  ‘And enemies provoke hungry men in these hills,’ Sansum went on, ‘so at night you will stand guard on the monastery.’

  ‘So be it, Lord,’ I said humbly. But me? Stand guard? I am white-haired, old and feeble. One might as well ask a toddling child to stand guard as to rely on me, but I made no protest and once Sansum had left the room I slid Hywelbane from her scabbard and thought how heavy she had become during the long years she had lain in the monastery’s treasure cupboard. She was heavy and clumsy, but she was still my sword, and I peered at the yellowed pig bones set into her hilt and then at the lover’s ring that was bound about its pommel and I saw, on that flattened ring, the tiny scraps of gold I had stolen from the Cauldron so long ago. She brought back so many stories, that sword. There was a patch of rust on her blade and I carefully scraped it away with the knife I use for sharpening my quills, and then I cradled her for a long time, imagining that I was young again and still strong enough to wield her.

  But me? Stand guard? In truth Sansum did not want me to stand guard, but rather to stand like a fool to be sacrificed while he scuttled out of the back door with Saint Tudwal in one hand and the monastery’s gold in the other. But if that is to be my fate I will not complain. I would rather die like my father with my sword in my hand, even if my arm is weak and the sword blunt. That was not the fate Merlin wanted for me, nor what Arthur wanted, but it is not a bad way for a soldier to die, and though I have been a monk these many years and a Christian even longer, in my sinful soul I am still a spearman of Mithras. And so I kissed my Hywelbane, glad to see her after all these years.

  So now I shall write the tale’s ending with my sword beside me and I shall hope that I am given time to finish this tale of Arthur, my Lord, who was betrayed, reviled and, after his departure, missed like no other man was ever missed in all of Britain’s history.

  I fell into a fever after my hand was struck off, and when I woke I discovered Ceinwyn sitting beside my bed. At first I did not recognize her, for her hair was short and had gone as white as ash. But it was my Ceinwyn, she was alive and her health was coming back, and when she saw the light in my eyes she leaned forward and laid her cheek on mine. I put my left arm around her and discovered I had no hand to stroke her back, only a stump bound in bloody cloth. I could feel the hand, I could even feel it itching, but there was no hand there. It had been burned. A week later I was baptized in the River Usk. Bishop Emrys performed the ceremony, and once he had dipped me in the cold water, Ceinwyn followed me down the muddy bank and insisted on being baptized as well. ‘I will go where my man goes,’ she told Bishop Emrys, and so he folded her hands on her breasts and tipped her back into the river. A choir of women sang as we were baptized and that night, dressed in white, we received the Christian bread and wine for the first time. After the mass Morgan produced a parchment on which she had written my promise to obey her husband in the Christian faith and she demanded that I sign my name.

  ‘I’ve already given you my word,’ I objected.

  ‘You will sign, Derfel,’ Morgan insisted, ‘and you will swear the oath on a crucifix as well.’

  I sighed and signed. Christians, it seemed, did not trust the older form of oath-making, but demanded parchment and ink. And so I acknowledged Sansum as my Lord and, after I had written my name, Ceinwyn insisted on adding her own. Thus began the second half of my life, the half in which I have kept my oath to Sansum, though not as well as Morgan hoped. If Sansum knew I was writing this tale he would construe it as a breaking of the promise and punish me accordingly, but I no longer care. I have committed many sins, but breaking oaths was not one of them.

  After my baptism I half expected a summons from Sansum, who was still with King Meurig in Gwent, but the mouse lord simply kept my written promise and demanded nothing, not even money. Not then.

  The stump of my wrist healed slowly, and I did not help the healing by insisting on practising with a shield. In battle a man puts his left arm through the two shield loops and grips the wooden handle beyond, but I no longer had fingers to grip the shield and so I had the loops remade as buckled straps that could be tightened about my forearm. It was not as secure as the proper way, but it was better than having no shield, and once I had become used to the tight straps I practised with sword and shield against Galahad, Culhwch or Arthur. I found the shield clumsy, but I could still fight, even though every practice bout left the stump bleeding so that Ceinwyn would scold me as she put on a new dressing.

  The full moon came and I took no sword or sacrifice to Nant Dduu. I waited for Nimue’s vengeance, but none came. The feast of Beltain was a week after the full moon and Ceinwyn and I, obedient to Morgan’s orders, did not extinguish our fires or stay awake to see the new fires lit, but Culhwch came to us next morning with a brand of the new fire that he tossed into our hearth. ‘You want me to go to Gwent, Derfel?’ he asked.

  ‘Gwent?’ I asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘To murder that little toad, Sansum, of course.’

  ‘He’s not troubling me.’

  ‘Yet,’ Culhwch grumbled, ‘but he will. Can’t imagine you as a Christian. Does it feel different?’

  ‘No.’

  Poor Culhwch. He rejoiced to see Ceinwyn well, but hated the bargain I had made with Morgan to make her well. He, like many others, wondered why I did not simply break my promise to Sansum, but I feared Ceinwyn’s sickness would return if I did and so I stayed true. In time that obedience became a habit, and once Ceinwyn was dead I found I had no will to break the promise, even though her death had loosed the promise’s grip on me.

  But this lay far in the unknown future on that day when the new fires warmed cold hearths. It was a beautiful day of sunshine and blossom. I remember w
e bought some goslings in the marketplace that morning, thinking our grandchildren would like to see them grow in the small pond that lay behind our quarters, and afterwards I went with Galahad to the amphitheatre where I practised again with my clumsy shield. We were the only spearmen there, for most of the others were still recovering from a night of drinking. ‘Goslings aren’t a good idea,’ Galahad said, rattling my shield with a solid blow of his spear butt.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They grow up to be bad-tempered.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘They grow up to become supper.’

  Gwydre interrupted us with a summons from his father, and we strolled back into the town to discover Arthur had gone to Bishop Emrys’s palace. The Bishop was seated, while Arthur, in shirt and trews, was leaning on a big table that was covered with wood shavings on which the Bishop had written lists of spearmen, weapons and boats. Arthur looked up at us and for a heartbeat he said nothing, but I remember his grey-bearded face was very grim. Then he uttered one word. ‘War.’

  Galahad crossed himself, while I, still accustomed to my old ways, touched Hywelbane’s hilt. ‘War?’ I asked.

  ‘Mordred is marching on us,’ Arthur said. ‘He’s marching right now! Meurig gave him permission to cross Gwent.’

  ‘With three hundred and fifty spearmen, we hear,’ Emrys added.

  To this day I believe it was Sansum’s persuasion that convinced Meurig to betray Arthur. I have no proof of that, and Sansum has ever denied it, but the scheme reeked of the mouse lord’s cunning. It is true that Sansum had once warned us of the possibility of just such an attack, but the mouse lord was forever cautious in his betrayals and if Arthur had won the battle that Sansum confidently expected to be fought in Isca then he would have wanted a reward from Arthur. He certainly wanted no reward from Mordred, for Sansum’s scheme, if it was indeed his, was intended to benefit Meurig. Let Mordred and Arthur fight to the death, then Meurig could take over Dumnonia and the mouse lord would rule in Meurig’s name.