Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Merlin sent me,’ I said.

  ‘Reckoned he would. Said he would. Is he coming himself?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ I said.

  Caddwg spat. ‘Never thought to hear that.’ He spat a second time. ‘Thought death would give him a miss.’

  ‘He was murdered,’ I said.

  Caddwg stooped and threw some logs on a fire that burned under a bubbling pot. The pot held pitch, and I could see that he had been caulking the gaps between Prydmen ‘s planks. The boat looked beautiful. Her wooden hull had been scraped clean and the shining new layer of wood contrasted with the deep black of the pitch-soaked caulking that stopped the water spurting between her timbers. She had a high prow, a tall sternpost and a long, newly made mast that now rested on trestles beside the stranded hull. ‘You’ll be wanting her, then,’ Caddwg said.

  ‘There are thirteen of us,’ I told him, ‘waiting at the fort.’

  ‘Tomorrow this time,’ he said.

  ‘Not till then?’ I asked, alarmed at the delay.

  ‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ he grumbled, ‘and I can’t launch her till high water, and that’ll be tomorrow morning, and by the time I get her mast shipped and the sail bent on and the steerboard shipped, the tide’ll be ebbed again. She’ll float again by mid afternoon, she will, and I’ll come for you quick as I can, but like as not it’ll be dusk. You should have sent me word.’

  That was true, but none of us had thought to send a warning to Caddwg for none of us understood boats. We had thought to come here, find the boat and sail away, and we had never dreamed that the boat might be out of the water. ‘Are there other boats?’ I asked.

  ‘Not for thirteen folk,’ he said, ‘and none that can take you where I’m going.’

  ‘To Broceliande,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll take you where Merlin told me to take you,’ Caddwg said obstinately, then stumped around to Prydwen ‘s bow and pointed up to a grey stone that was about the size of an apple. There was nothing remarkable about the stone except that it had been skilfully worked into the ship’s stem where it was held by the oak like a gem clasped by a gold setting. ‘He gave me that bit of rock,’ Caddwg said, meaning Merlin. ‘A wraithstone, that is.’

  ‘Wraithstone?’ I asked, never having heard of such a thing.

  ‘It’ll take Arthur where Merlin wanted him to go, and nothing else will take him there. And no other boat can take him there, only a boat that Merlin named,’ Caddwg said. The name Prydwen meant Britain. ‘Arthur is with you?’ Caddwg asked me, suddenly anxious.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll bring the gold as well,’ Caddwg said.

  ‘Gold?’

  ‘The old man left it for Arthur. Reckoned he’d want it. No good to me. Gold can’t catch a fish. It bought me a new sail, I’ll say that for it, and Merlin told me to buy the sail and so he had to give me gold, but gold don’t catch fish. It catches women,’ he chuckled, ‘but not fish.’

  I looked up at the stranded boat. ‘Do you need help?’ I asked.

  Caddwg offered a humourless laugh. ‘And what help can you give? You and your short arm? Can you caulk a boat? Can you step a mast or bend on a sail?’ He spat. ‘I only have to whistle and I’ll have a score of men helping me. You’ll hear us singing in the morning, and that’ll mean we’re hauling her down the rollers into the water. Tomorrow evening,’ he nodded curtly to me, ‘I’ll look for you at the fort.’ He turned and went back to his hut.

  And I went to join Arthur. It was dark by then and all the stars of heaven pricked the sky. A moon shimmered a long trail across the sea and lit the broken walls of the little fort where we would wait for Prydwen.

  We had one last day in Britain, I thought. One last night and one last day, and then we would sail with Arthur into the moon’s path and Britain would be nothing but a memory.

  The night wind blew soft across the fort’s broken wall. The rusted remnant of the ancient beacon tilted on its bleached pole above us, the small waves broke on the long beach, the moon slowly dropped into the sea’s embrace and the night darkened.

  We slept in the small shelter of the ramparts. The Romans had made the walls of the fort out of sand on which they had mounded turf planted with sea grass, and then they had placed a wooden palisade along the wall’s top. The wall must have been feeble even when it had been built, but the fort had never been anything more than a look-out station and a place where a small detachment of men could shelter from the sea winds as they tended the beacon. The wooden palisade was almost all decayed now, and the rain and wind had worn much of the sand wall down, but in a few places it still stood four or five feet high.

  The morning dawned clear and we watched as a cluster of small fishing-boats put out to sea for their day’s work. Their departure left only Prydwen beside the sea-lake. Arthur-bach and Seren played on the lake’s sand where there were no breakers, while Galahad walked with Culhwch’s remaining son up the coast to find food. They came back with bread, dried fish and a wooden pail of warm fresh milk. We were all oddly happy that morning. I remember the laughter as we watched Seren roll down the face of a dune, and how we cheered when Arthur-bach tugged a great bunch of seaweed out of the shallows and up onto the sand. The huge green mass must have weighed as much as he did, but he pulled and jerked and somehow dragged the heavy tangle right up to the fort’s broken wall. Gwydre and I applauded his efforts, and afterwards we fell to talking. ‘If I’m not meant to be King,’ Gwydre said, ‘then so be it.’

  ‘Fate is inexorable,’ I said and, when he looked quizzically at me, I smiled. ‘That was one of Merlin’s favourite sayings. That and “Don’t be absurd, Derfel.” I was always absurd to him.’

  ‘I’m sure you weren’t,’ he said loyally.

  ‘We all were. Except perhaps Nimue and Morgan. The rest of us simply weren’t clever enough. Your mother, maybe, but she and he were never really friends.’

  ‘I wish I’d known him better.’

  ‘When you’re old, Gwydre,’ I said, ‘you can still tell men that you met Merlin.’

  ‘No one will believe me.’

  ‘No, they probably won’t,’ I said. ‘And by the time you’re old they’ll have invented new stories-about him. And about your father too.’ I tossed a scrap of shell down the face of the fort. From far off across the water I could hear the strong sound of men chanting and knew I listened to the launching of Prydwen. Not long now, I told myself, not long now. ‘Maybe no one will ever know the truth,’ I said to Gwydre.

  ‘The truth?’

  ‘About your father,’ I said, ‘or about Merlin.’ Already there were songs that gave the credit for Mynydd Baddon to Meurig, of all people, and many songs that extolled Lancelot above Arthur. I looked around for Taliesin and wondered if he would correct those songs. That morning the bard had told us that he had no intention of crossing the sea with us, but would walk back to Siluria or Powys, and I think Taliesin had only come with us that far so that he could talk with Arthur and thus learn from him the tale of his life. Or perhaps Taliesin had seen the future and had come to watch it unfold, but whatever his reasons, the bard was talking with Arthur now, but Arthur suddenly left Taliesin’s side and hurried towards the shore of the sea-lake. He stood there for a long while, peering northwards. Then, suddenly, he turned and ran to the nearest high dune. He clambered up its face, then turned and stared northwards again.

  ‘Derfel!’ Arthur called, ‘Derfel!’ I slithered down the fort’s face and hurried over the sand and up the dune’s flank. ‘What do you see?’ Arthur asked me.

  I stared northwards across the glittering sea-lake. I could see Prydwen halfway down its slip, and I could see the fires where salt was panned and the daily catches were smoked, and I could see some fishermen’s nets hanging from spars planted in the sand, and then I saw the horsemen.

  Sunlight glittered off a spear point, then another, and suddenly I could see a score of men, maybe more, pounding along a road that led well inland of the sea-lake’s shore
. ‘Hide!’ Arthur shouted, and we slid down the dune, snatched up Seren and Arthur-bach, and crouched like guilty things inside the fort’s crumbling ramparts.

  ‘They’ll have seen us, Lord,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘How many men?’ Culhwch asked.

  ‘Twenty?’ Arthur guessed, ‘thirty? Maybe more. They were coming from some trees. There could be a hundred of them.’

  There was a soft scraping noise and I turned to see that Culhwch had drawn his sword. He grinned at me. ‘I don’t care if it’s two hundred men, Derfel, they’re not cutting my beard.’

  ‘Why would they want your beard?’ Galahad asked. ‘A smelly thing full of lice?’

  Culhwch laughed. He liked to tease Galahad, and to be teased in return, and he was still thinking of his reply when Arthur cautiously raised his head above the rampart and stared west towards the place where the approaching spearmen would appear. He went very still, and his stillness quieted us, then suddenly he stood and waved. ‘It’s Sagramor!’ he called to us, and the joy in his voice was unmistakable. ‘It’s Sagramor!’ he said again, and he was so excited that Arthur-bach took up the happy cry. ‘It’s Sagramor!’ the small boy shouted, and the rest of us clambered over the rampart to see Sagramor’s grim black flag streaming from a skull-tipped spear shaft. Sagramor himself, in his conical black helmet, was in the lead and, seeing Arthur, he spurred forward across the sand. Arthur ran to greet him, Sagramor vaulted from his horse, stumbled to his knees and clasped Arthur about the waist.

  ‘Lord!’ Sagramor said in a rare display of feeling, ‘Lord! I thought not to see you again.’

  Arthur raised him, then embraced him. ‘We would have met in Broceliande, my friend.’

  ‘Broceliande?’ Sagramor said, then spat. ‘I hate the sea.’ There were tears on his black face and I remembered him telling me once why he followed Arthur. Because, he had said, when I had nothing, Arthur gave me everything. Sagramor had not come here because he was reluctant to board a ship, but because Arthur needed help.

  The Numidian had brought eighty-three men, and Einion, Culhwch’s son, had come with them. ‘I only had ninety-two horses, Lord,’ Sagramor told Arthur. ‘I’ve been collecting them for months.’ He had hoped he could outride Mordred’s forces and so bring all his men safe to Siluria, but instead he had brought as many as he could to this dry spit of sand between the sea-lake and the ocean. Some of the horses had collapsed on the way, but eighty-three had come through safe.

  ‘Where are your other men?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘They sailed south yesterday with all our families,’ Sagramor said, then pulled back from Arthur’s embrace and looked at us. We must have appeared a sorry and battered group, for he offered one of his rare smiles before bowing low to Guinevere and Ceinwyn.

  ‘We have only one boat coming,’ Arthur said worriedly.

  ‘Then you will take that one boat, Lord,’ Sagramor said calmly, ‘and we shall ride west into Kernow. We can find boats there and follow you south. But I wanted to meet you this side of the water in case your enemies found you too.’

  ‘We’ve seen none so far,’ Arthur said, touching Excalibur’s hilt, ‘at least, not this side of the Severn Sea. And I pray we shall see none all day. Our boat comes at dusk, and then we leave.’ ‘So I shall guard you till dusk,’ Sagramor said, and his men slid from their saddles, took their shields from their backs and planted their spears in the sand. Their horses, sweat-whitened and panting, stood exhausted while Sagramor’s men stretched their tired arms and legs. We were now a warband, almost an army, and our banner was Sagramor’s black flag.

  But then, just an hour later, on horses as tired as Sagramor’s, the enemy came to Camlann.

  CEINWYN HELPED ME pull on my armour for it was hard to manage the heavy mail shirt with only one hand, and impossible to buckle the bronze greaves that I had taken at Mynydd Baddon and which protected my legs from the spear thrust that comes under the shield rim. Once the greaves and the mail were in place, and once Hywelbane’s belt was buckled around my waist, I let Ceinwyn fasten the shield to my left arm. ‘Tighter,’ I told her, instinctively pressing against my mail coat to feel the small lump where her brooch was attached to my shirt. It was safely there, a talisman that had seen me through countless battles.

  ‘Maybe they won’t attack,’ she said, tugging the shield straps as tight as they would go.

  ‘Pray that they don’t,’ I said.

  ‘Pray to whom?’ she asked with a grim smile.

  ‘To whichever God you trust the most, my love,’ I said, then kissed her. I pulled on my helmet, and she fastened the strap under my chin. The dent made in the helmet’s crown at Mynydd Baddon had been hammered smooth and a new iron plate riveted to cover the gash. I kissed Ceinwyn again, then closed the cheekpieces. The wind blew the wolftail plume in front of the helmet’s eyes slits, and I flicked my head back to throw the long grey hair aside. I was the very last wolftail. The others had been massacred by Mordred or taken down into Manawydan’s keeping. I was the last, just as I was the last warrior alive to carry Ceinwyn’s star on my shield. I hefted my war spear, its shaft as thick as Ceinwyn’s wrist and its blade a sharpened wedge of Morridig’s finest steel. ‘Caddwg will be here soon,’ I told her, ‘we won’t have long to wait.’

  ‘Just all day,’ Ceinwyn said, and she glanced up the sea-lake to where Prydwen floated at the edge of the mudbank. Men were hauling her mast upright, but soon the falling tide would strand the boat again and we would have to wait for the waters to rise. But at least the enemy had not bothered Caddwg, and had no reason to do so. To them he was doubtless just another fisherman and no business of theirs. We were their business.

  There were sixty or seventy of the enemy, all of them horsemen, and they must have ridden hard to reach us, but now they were waiting at the spit’s landward end and we all knew that other spearmen would be following them. By dusk we could face an army, maybe two, for Nimue’s men would surely be hurrying with Mordred’s spearmen.

  Arthur was in his war finery. His scale armour, which had tongues of gold amidst the iron plates, glinted in the sun. I watched him pull on his helmet that was crested with white goose feathers. Hygwydd would usually have armoured him, but Hygwydd was dead so Guinevere strapped Excalibur’s cross-hatched scabbard about his waist and hung the white cloak on his shoulders. He smiled at her, leaned to hear her speak, laughed, then closed the helmet’s cheekpieces. Two men helped him up into the saddle of one of Sagramor’s horses, and once he was mounted they passed him his spear and his silver-sheeted shield from which the cross had long been stripped away. He took the reins with his shield hand, then kicked the horse towards us. ‘Let’s stir them up,’ he called down to Sagramor, who stood beside me. Arthur planned to lead thirty horsemen towards the enemy, then feint a panicked withdrawal that he hoped would tempt them into a trap.

  We left a score of men to guard the women and children in the fort while the rest of us followed Sagramor to a deep hollow behind a dune that fronted the sea’s beach. The whole sandspit west of the fort was a confusion of dunes and hollows that formed a maze of traps and blind alleys, and only the spit’s final two hundred paces, east of the fort, offered level ground.

  Arthur waited until we were hidden, then led his thirty men west along the sea-rippled sand that lay close to the breaking waves. We crouched under the high dune’s cover. I had left my spear at the fort, preferring to fight this battle with Hywelbane alone. Sagramor also planned to fight with sword alone. He was scrubbing a patch of rust from his curved blade with a handful of sand. ‘You lost your beard,’ he grunted at me.

  ‘I exchanged it for Amhar’s life.’

  I saw a flash of teeth as he grinned behind the shadow of his helmet’s cheekpieces. ‘A good exchange,’ he said, ‘and your hand?’

  ‘To magic’

  ‘Not your sword hand, though.’ He held the blade to catch the light, was satisfied that the rust was gone, then cocked his head, listening, bu
t we could hear nothing except the breaking waves. ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ he said after a while.

  ‘Why not?’ I had never known Sagramor to shirk a fight.

  ‘They must have followed me,’ he said, jerking his head westwards to indicate the enemy.

  ‘They might have known we were coming here anyway,’ I said, trying to comfort him, though unless Merlin had betrayed Camlann to Nimue, it seemed more likely that Mordred would indeed have left some lightly armoured horsemen to watch Sagramor and that those scouts must have betrayed our hiding place. Whatever, it was too late now. Mordred’s men knew where we were and now it was a race between Caddwg and the enemy.

  ‘Hear that?’ Gwydre called. He was in armour and had his father’s bear on his shield. He was nervous, and no wonder, for this would be his first real battle.

  I listened. My leather padded helmet muffled sound, but at last I heard the thud of hoofs on sand.

  ‘Keep down!’ Sagramor snarled at those men who were tempted to peer over the crest of the dune.

  The horses were galloping down the sea’s beach, and we were hidden from that beach by the dune. The sound drew nearer, rising to a thunder of hoofs as we gripped our spears and swords. Sagramor’s helmet was crested with the mask of a snarling fox. I stared at the fox, but heard only the growing noise of the horses. It was warm and sweat was trickling down my face. The mail coat felt heavy, but it always did until the fighting started.

  The first hoofs pounded past, then Arthur was shouting from the beach. ‘Now!’ he called, ‘Now! Now! Now!’

  ‘Go!’ Sagramor shouted and we all scrambled up the dune’s inner face. Our boots slipped in the sand, and it seemed I would never reach the top, but then we were over the crest and running down onto the beach where a swirl of horsemen churned the hard wet sand beside the sea. Arthur had turned and his thirty men had clashed with their pursuers who outnumbered Arthur’s men by two to one, but those pursuers now saw us running towards their flank and the more prudent immediately turned and galloped west towards safety. Most stayed to fight.