The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Not Prince Arthur,’ I said firmly, being careful to use the title on which Guinevere insisted.

  ‘He is a fool about jewellery,’ she had said tartly, and then had asked me if Arthur had sent me to spy on her.

  We walked on around the colonnade. We were alone. A warrior named Lanval was the commander of the Princess’s guard and he had wanted to leave his men inside the courtyard, but Guinevere insisted they leave. ‘Let them start a rumour about us,’ she told me happily, but then had scowled. ‘I sometimes think Lanval is ordered to spy on me.’

  ‘Lanval merely watches over you, Lady,’ I told her, ‘for upon your safety depends Prince Arthur’s happiness, and upon his happiness rests a kingdom.’

  ‘That is pretty, Derfel. I like that.’ She spoke half mockingly. We walked on. A bowl of rose petals soaking in water wafted a pretty scent under the colonnade that offered welcome shade from the hot sun. ‘Do you want to see Lunete?’ Guinevere suddenly asked me.

  ‘I doubt she wants to see me.’

  ‘Probably not. But you’re not married, are you?’

  ‘No, Lady, we never married.’

  ‘Then it doesn’t matter, does it?’ she asked, though what did not matter she did not say and I did not ask. ‘I wanted to see you, Derfel,’ Guinevere said earnestly.

  ‘You flatter me, Lady,’ I said.

  ‘Your words get prettier and prettier!’ She clapped her hands, then wrinkled her nose. ‘Tell me, Derfel, do you ever wash?’

  I blushed. ‘Yes, Lady.’

  ‘You stink of leather and blood and sweat and dust. It can be quite a nice aroma, but not today. It’s too hot. Would you like my ladies to give you a bath? We do it the Roman way, with lots of sweat and scraping. It’s quite tiring.’

  I deliberately moved a step away from her. ‘I’ll find a stream, Lady.’

  ‘But I did want to see you,’ she said. She stepped back next to me and even put her arm into mine. ‘Tell me about Nimue.’

  ‘Nimue?’ I was surprised by the question.

  ‘Can she really do magic?’ Guinevere asked eagerly. The Princess was as tall as I was and her face, so handsome and high-boned, was close to mine. Proximity to Guinevere was overpowering, like the heavy disturbance of the senses given by the drink of Mithras. Her red hair was scented with perfume and her startling green eyes were lined with a gum that had been mixed with lamp black so that they seemed larger. ‘Can she do magic?’ Guinevere asked again.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Think!’ She stepped away from me, disappointed. ‘Only think?’

  The scar on my left hand throbbed and I did not know what to say.

  Guinevere laughed. ‘Tell me the truth, Derfel. I need to know!’ She put her arm back into mine and walked me on beneath the arcade’s shade. ‘That horrible man Bishop Sansum is trying to make us all Christians and I won’t put up with it! He wants us to feel guilty all the time and I keep telling him I’ve nothing to be guilty about, but the Christians are getting more powerful. They’re building a new church here! No, they’re doing worse than that. Come!’ She turned impulsively and clapped her hands. Slaves ran into the courtyard and Guinevere ordered her cloak and dogs brought to her. ‘I’ll show you something, Derfel, so you can see for yourself what that wretched little Bishop is doing to our kingdom.’

  She donned a mauve woollen cloak to hide the thin linen shift, then took the leashes of a brace of deerhounds that panted beside her with their long tongues lolling between sharp teeth. The villa’s gates were thrown open and with two slaves following and a quartet of Lanval’s guards hastily forming post on either side of us, we went down Durnovaria’s main street which was handsomely paved with wide stones and guttered to take the rain down to the river that ran to the east of the town. The open-fronted shops were full of goods: shoes, a butchery, salt, a potter. Some houses had collapsed, but most were in good repair, perhaps because the presence of Mordred and Guinevere had brought the town a new prosperity. There were beggars, of course, who shuffled close on stumps, risking the guards’ spear-staves in order to grab the copper coins distributed by Guinevere’s two slaves. Guinevere herself, her red hair bared to the sun, strode down the hill with barely a glance at the commotion her presence caused. ‘See that house?’ Guinevere gestured towards a handsome two-storey building on the northern side of the street. ‘That’s where Nabur lives, and where our little King farts and vomits.’ She shuddered. ‘Mordred is a particularly unpleasant child. He limps and he never stops screaming. There! Can you hear him?’ I could indeed hear a child wailing, though whether it was Mordred I could not tell. ‘Now, come through here,’ Guinevere commanded and she plunged through a small crowd who stared at her from the side of the street then climbed over a pile of broken stone that stood next to Nabur’s handsome house.

  I followed her to find that we had reached a building site, or rather a place where one building was being torn down and another erected on its ruins. The building that was being destroyed had been a Roman temple. ‘It was where people worshipped Mercury,’ Guinevere said, ‘but now we’re to have a shrine for a dead carpenter instead. And how will a dead carpenter give us good crops, tell me that!’ These last words, ostensibly spoken to me, were said loud enough to disturb the dozen Christians who were labouring at their new church. Some were laying stones, some adzing doorposts, while others were pulling down the old walls to provide the material for the new building. ‘If you must have a hovel for your carpenter,’ Guinevere said in a ringing voice, ‘why not just take over the old building? I asked Sansum that, but he says it must all be new so that his precious Christians don’t have to breathe air once used by pagans, in which nonsensical belief we pull down the old, which was exquisite, and throw up a nasty building full of ill-dressed stone and without any grace at all!’ She spat into the dust to ward off evil. ‘He says it’s a chapel for Mordred! Can you believe it? He’s determined to make the wretched child into a whining Christian and this abomination is where he’ll do it.’

  ‘Dear Lady!’ Bishop Sansum appeared from behind one of the new walls which were indeed ill-dressed compared with the careful masonry of the old temple’s remains. Sansum was in a black gown which, like his stiffly tonsured hair, was whitened with stone dust. ‘You do us a striking honour by your gracious presence, Lady,’ he said as he bowed to Guinevere.

  ‘I’m not doing you honour, you worm. I came to show Derfel what carnage you’re making. How can you worship in that?’ She threw a hand towards the half-built church. ‘You might as well take over a cow shed!’

  ‘Our dear Lord was born in a cattle shed, Lady, so I rejoice that our humble church reminds you of one.’ He bowed again to her. Some of his workers had gathered at the far end of their new building where they began to sing one of their holy songs to ward off the baleful presence of pagans.

  ‘It certainly sounds like a cow shed,’ Guinevere said tartly, then pushed past the priest and strode over the masonry-littered ground to where a wooden hut leaned against the stone-and-brick wall of Nabur’s house. She released her hounds’ leashes to let them run free. ‘Where’s that statue, Sansum?’ She threw the question over her shoulder as she kicked the hut door open.

  ‘Alas, gracious Lady, though I tried to save it for you, our blessed Lord commanded that it be melted down. For the poor, you understand?’

  She turned on the Bishop savagely. ‘Bronze! What use is bronze to the poor? Do they eat it?’ She looked at me. ‘A statue of Mercury, Derfel, the height of a tall man and beautifully worked. Beautiful! Roman work, not British, but now it’s gone, melted in a Christian furnace because you people’ – she was staring at Sansum again with loathing on her strong face – ‘cannot stand beauty. You’re frightened of it. You’re like grubs pulling down a tree, and you have no idea what you do.’ She ducked into the hut, which was evidently where Sansum stored the valuable objects he discovered in the temple remains. She emerged with a small stone statuette that she tossed to one of her guards. ‘It isn�
��t much,’ she said, ‘but at least it’s safe from a carpenter-grub born in a cow shed.’

  Sansum, still smiling despite all the insults, enquired of me how the fighting in the north went. ‘We win slowly,’ I said.

  ‘Tell my Lord the Prince Arthur that I pray for him.’

  ‘Pray for his enemies, you toad,’ Guinevere said, ‘and maybe we’d win more quickly.’ She stared at her two dogs that were pissing against the new church walls. ‘Cadwy raided this way last month,’ she told me, ‘and came close.’

  ‘Praise God we were spared,’ Bishop Sansum added piously.

  ‘No thanks to you, you pitiful worm,’ Guinevere said. ‘The Christians ran away. Plucked up their skirts and scampered east. The rest of us stayed, and Lanval, the Gods be thanked, saw Cadwy off.’ She spat towards the new church. ‘In time,’ she said, ‘we’ll be free of enemies, and when that happens, Derfel, I shall pull down that cattle shed and build a temple fit for a real God.’

  ‘For Isis?’ Sansum enquired slyly.

  ‘Careful,’ Guinevere warned him, ‘for my Goddess rules the night, toad, and she might snatch your soul for her amusement. Though the Gods alone know what use your miserable soul would be to anyone. Come, Derfel.’

  The two deerhounds were collected and we strode back up the hill. Guinevere shook with anger. ‘You see what he’s doing? Pulling down the old! Why? So he can impose his tawdry little superstitions on us. Why can’t he leave the old alone? We don’t care if fools want to worship a carpenter, so why does he care who we worship? The more Gods the better, I say. Why offend some Gods to exalt your own? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Who is Isis?’ I asked her as we turned into the gate of her villa.

  She shot me an amused look. ‘Is that my dear husband’s question I hear?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘Well done, Derfel. The truth is always astonishing. So Arthur is worried by my Goddess?’

  ‘He’s worried,’ I said, ‘because Sansum worries him with tales of mysteries.’

  She shrugged off the cloak, letting it fall on the courtyard tiles to be picked up by a slave. ‘Tell Arthur,’ she said, ‘that he has nothing to worry about. Does he doubt my affection?’

  ‘He adores you,’ I said tactfully.

  ‘And I him.’ She smiled at me. ‘Tell him that, Derfel,’ she added warmly.

  ‘I shall, Lady.’

  ‘And tell him he has nothing to worry about with Isis.’ She reached impulsively for my hand. ‘Come,’ she said, just as she had when she had led me down to the new Christian shrine, but this time she hurried me across the courtyard, jumping the small water channels, to a small door set into the far arcade. ‘This,’ she said, letting go of my hand and pushing the door open, ‘is the shrine of Isis that so worries my dear Lord.’

  I hesitated. ‘Are men allowed to enter?’

  ‘By day, yes. By night? No.’ She ducked through the door and pulled aside a thick woollen curtain that was hung immediately inside. I followed, pushing through the curtain to find myself in a black, lightless room. ‘Stay where you are,’ she warned me, and at first I thought that I was obeying some rule of Isis, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the thick gloom, I saw that she had made me stop so I did not stumble into a pool of water that was set into the floor. The only light in the shrine came around the edges of the curtain at the door, but as I waited I became aware of a grey light seeping into the room’s far end; then I saw that Guinevere was pulling down layer after layer of black wall hangings, each one supported on a pole carried by brackets and each woven so thick that no light could come through the layered cloths. Behind the hangings, that now lay crumpled on the floor, were shutters that Guinevere threw open to let in a dazzling flood of light.

  ‘There,’ she said, standing to one side of the big, arched window, ‘the mysteries!’ She was mocking Sansum’s fears, yet in truth the room was truly mysterious for it was entirely black. The floor was of black stone, the walls and arched ceiling were painted with pitch. In the black floor’s centre was the shallow pool of black water and behind it, between the pool and the newly opened window, was a low black throne made of stone.

  ‘So what do you think, Derfel?’ Guinevere asked me.

  ‘I see no Goddess,’ I said, looking for a statue of Isis.

  ‘She comes with the moon,’ Guinevere said, and I tried to imagine the full moon flooding through that window to gloss the pool and shimmer on the deep black walls. ‘Tell me about Nimue,’ Guinevere ordered, ‘and I will tell you about Isis.’

  ‘Nimue is Merlin’s priestess,’ I said, my voice echoing hollow from the black painted stone, ‘and she’s learning his secrets.’

  ‘What secrets?’

  ‘The secrets of the old Gods, Lady.’

  She frowned. ‘But how does he find such secrets? I thought the old Druids wrote nothing down. They were forbidden to write, were they not?’

  ‘They were, Lady, but Merlin searches for their knowledge anyway.’

  Guinevere nodded. ‘I knew we’d lost some knowledge. And Merlin’s going to find it? Good! That might settle that bitter toad Sansum.’ She had walked to the centre of the window and was now staring across the tiled and thatched roofs of Durnovaria and over the southern ramparts and the mounded grass of the amphitheatre beyond, towards the vast earth walls of Mai Dun that reared on the horizon. White clouds heaped in the blue sky, but what made the breath catch in my throat was that the sunlight was now flooding through Guinevere’s white linen shift so that my Lord’s Lady, this Princess of Henis Wyren, might just as well have been naked and, for those moments, as the blood pounded in my ears, I was jealous of my Lord. Was Guinevere aware of that sun’s treachery? I thought not, but I might have been wrong. She had her back to me, but suddenly half turned so she could look at me. ‘Is Lunete a magician?’

  ‘No, Lady,’ I said.

  ‘But she learned with Nimue, did she not?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She was never allowed in Merlin’s rooms. She had no interest.’

  ‘But you were in Merlin’s rooms?’

  ‘Only twice,’ I said. I could see her breasts and I deliberately dropped my gaze to the black pool, but that only mirrored her beauty and added a sultry sheen of dark mystery to her long, lithe body. A heavy silence fell and I realized, thinking about our last exchange, that Lunete must have claimed some knowledge of Merlin’s magic and that I had undoubtedly just spoiled that claim. ‘Maybe,’ I said feebly, ‘Lunete knows more than she ever told me?’

  Guinevere shrugged and turned away. I raised my eyes again. ‘But Nimue, you say, is more skilled than Lunete?’ she asked me.

  ‘Infinitely, Lady.’

  ‘I have twice demanded that Nimue come to me,’ Guinevere said sharply, ‘and twice she has refused. How do I make her come to me?’

  ‘The best way,’ I said, ‘of making Nimue do anything is to forbid her to do it.’

  There was silence in the room again. The sounds of the town were loud enough; the cry of hawkers in the market, the clatter of cart wheels on stone, dogs barking, a rattle of pots in a nearby kitchen, but in the room it was silent. ‘One day,’ Guinevere broke our silence, ‘I shall build a temple to Isis up there.’ She pointed to the ramparts of Mai Dun that filled the southern sky. ‘Is it a sacred place?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Good.’ She turned towards me again, the sun filling her red hair and glowing on her smooth skin beneath the white shift. ‘I do not want to play childish games, Derfel, by trying to outguess Nimue. I want her here. I need a priestess of power. I need a friend of the old Gods if I am to fight that grub Sansum. I need Nimue, Derfel, so for the love you have for Arthur, tell me what message will bring her here. Tell me that and I will tell you why I worship Isis.’

  I paused, thinking what lure could possibly attract Nimue. ‘Tell her,’ I finally said, ‘that Arthur will give her Gundleus if she obeys you. But make sure he does,’ I added.

  ‘Thank you, De
rfel.’ She smiled, then sat in the black, polished stone throne. ‘Isis,’ she told me, ‘is a woman’s Goddess and the throne is her symbol. A man might sit on a kingdom’s throne, but Isis can determine who that man is. That is why I worship her.’

  I smelt the hint of treason in her words. ‘The throne of this kingdom, Lady,’ I said, repeating Arthur’s frequent claim, ‘is filled by Mordred.’

  Guinevere mocked that assertion with a sneer. ‘Mordred could not fill a pissing pot! Mordred is a cripple! Mordred is a badly behaved child who already scents power like a hog snuffling to rut a sow.’ Her voice was whip-hard and scornful. ‘And since when, Derfel, was a throne handed from father to son? It was never thus in the old days! The best man of the tribe took the power, and that is how it should be today.’ She closed her eyes as though she suddenly regretted her outburst. ‘You are a friend of my husband?’ she asked after a while, her eyes open again.

  ‘You know I am, Lady.’

  ‘Then you and I are friends, Derfel. We are one, because we both love Arthur, and do you think, my friend Derfel Cadarn, that Mordred will make a better king than Arthur?’