The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur

by Bernard Cornwell

  I hesitated for she was inviting me to speak treason, but she was also inviting me to speak honestly in a sacred place and so I gave her the truth. ‘No, Lady. Prince Arthur would make the better king.’

  ‘Good.’ She smiled at me. ‘So tell Arthur he has nothing to fear and much to gain by my worship of Isis. Tell him it is for his future that I worship here, and that nothing that happens in this room can cause him injury. Is that plain enough?’

  ‘I shall tell him, Lady.’

  She stared at me for a long time. I stood soldier straight, my cloak touching the black floor, Hywelbane at my side and my full beard gold in the shrine’s sun. ‘Are we going to win this war?’ Guinevere asked after a while.

  ‘Yes, Lady.’

  She smiled at my confidence. ‘Tell me why.’

  ‘Because Gwent stands like a rock to our north,’ I said, ‘because the Saxons fight amongst themselves like we do and so they never combine against us. Because Gundleus of Siluria is terrified of another defeat. Because Cadwy is a slug who will be squashed when we have time to spare. Because Gorfyddyd knows how to fight, but not how to lead armies. Most of all, Lady, because we have Prince Arthur.’

  ‘Good,’ she said again, then stood so that the sun flooded through that fine white linen shift. ‘You must go, Derfel. You’ve seen enough.’ I blushed and she laughed. ‘And find a stream!’ she called as I pushed through the curtain at the door. ‘Because you stink like a Saxon!’

  I found a stream, washed myself, then took my men south to the sea.

  I do not like the sea. It is cold and treacherous, and its grey shifting hills run endlessly from the far west where the sun dies each day. Somewhere beyond that empty horizon, the seamen told me, the fabled land of Lyonesse lies, but no one has seen it, or certainly no one has ever returned from Lyonesse, and so it has become a blessed haven to all poor seamen; a land of earthly delights where there is no war, no famine and, above all, no ships to cross the grey lumpy sea with its wind-scoured white-caps whipping down the grey-green slopes that heaved our small wooden boats so mercilessly. The coast of Dumnonia looked so green. I had not realized how much I loved the place till first I left it.

  My men travelled in three ships, all rowed by slaves, though once we were out of the river a wind came from the west and the oars were shipped as the ragged sails dragged the clumsy ships down the long waves’ swooping sides. Many of my men were sick. They were young, mostly younger than myself, for war is truly a boys’ game, but a few were older. Cavan, who was my second-in-command, was close to forty and had a grizzled beard and a face cross-hatched with scars. He was a dour Irishman who had taken service with Uther and who now found nothing strange in being commanded by a man only half his age. He called me Lord, assuming that because I came from the Tor I was Merlin’s heir, or at least the magician’s lordly child whelped on a Saxon slave. Arthur had given me Cavan, I think, in case my authority should prove no greater than my years, but in all honesty I never had trouble commanding men. You tell soldiers what they must do, do it yourself, punish them when they fail, but otherwise reward them well and give them victory. My spearmen were all volunteers and were going to Benoic either because they wanted to serve me or, more likely, because they believed there would be greater plunder and glory south of the sea. We travelled without women, horses or servants. I had given Canna her freedom and sent her to the Tor, hoping Nimue would look after her, but I doubted I would see my little Saxon again. She would find herself a husband soon enough, while I would find the new Britain, Brittany, and see for myself the fabled beauty of Ynys Trebes.

  Bleiddig, the chief sent by King Ban, travelled with us. He grumbled at my lack of years, but after Cavan growled that I had probably killed more men than Bleiddig himself Bleiddig decided to keep his reservations about me private. He still complained that our numbers were too few. The Franks, he said, were land-hungry, well armed and numerous. Two hundred men, he now claimed, might make a difference, but not sixty.

  We anchored that first night in the bay of an island. The seas roared past the bay’s mouth while on the shore a ragged band of men shouted at us and sometimes fired feeble arrows that fell far short of our three ships. Our shipmaster feared a storm was coming and he sacrificed a kid that was on board for just that purpose. He drizzled the dying animal’s blood on the bow of his ship and by morning the winds had calmed, though a great fog had crept over the sea instead. None of the ships’ captains would sail in the fog so we waited a full day and night, and then, under a clear sky, rowed southwards. It was a long day. We skirted some dreadful rocks that were crowned with the bones of ships that had foundered, and then, in a warm evening, with a small wind and a rising tide helping our tired rowers, we slid into a wide river where, beneath the lucky wings of a flight of swans, we beached our craft. There was a fort nearby and armed men came to the river bank to challenge us, but Bleiddig shouted that we were friends. The men called back in British, welcoming us. The setting sun was gilding the river’s swirls and eddies. The place smelt of fish and salt and tar. Black nets hung on racks beside beached fishing boats, fires blazed under the salt pans, dogs ran in and out of the small waves barking at us and a group of children came from some nearby huts to watch as we splashed ashore.

  I went first, carrying my shield, with its symbol of Arthur’s bear, upside down, and when I had gone beyond the wrack-littered line of the high tide I plunged the butt of my spear into the sand and said a prayer to Bel, my protector, and to Manawydan, the Sea God, that one day they would float me back from Armorica, back to my Lord’s side, back to Arthur in blessed Britain.

  Then we went to war.

  I HAVE HEARD MEN say that no town, not even Rome or Jerusalem, was as beautiful as Ynys Trebes, and maybe those men spoke true for though I never saw those others, I did see Ynys Trebes and it was a place of marvels, a wondrous town, the most beautiful place I ever saw. It was built on a steep granite island set in a wide and shallow bay that could be riven with foam and howling with wind, yet inside Ynys Trebes all would be calm. In summer the bay would shimmer with heat, but inside Benoic’s capital it always seemed cool. Guinevere would have loved Ynys Trebes, for everything old was treasured and nothing ugly was allowed to mar its grace.

  The Romans had been to Ynys Trebes, of course, but they had not fortified it, only built a pair of villas on its summit. The villas were still there: King Ban and Queen Elaine had joined them together and then added to them by pillaging Roman buildings on the mainland for new pillars and pedestals, mosaics and statues, so that the island’s summit was now crowned with an airy palace, full of light, where white linen curtains billowed with every breath of wind that gusted off the glittering sea. The island was best reached by boat, though there was a causeway of sorts that was covered by every high tide and at low tide could become treacherous with quicksands. Withies marked the causeway, but the surge of the bay’s huge tides washed the markers away and only a fool attempted the passage without hiring the services of a local guide to steer him through the sucking sands and trembling creeks. At the lowest tides Ynys Trebes would emerge from the sea to stand amidst a wilderness of rippled sand cut through with gullies and tide-pools, while at the highest tides, when the wind blew strong from the west, the city was like some monstrous ship crashing her dauntless way through tumultuous seas.

  Beneath the palace was a huddle of lesser buildings that clung to the steep granite slopes like sea-birds’ nests. There were temples, shops, churches and houses, all lime-washed, all built of stone, all tricked out with whatever carvings and decorations had not been wanted in Ban’s high palace, and all fronting on to the stone-paved road that climbed in steps around the steep island towards the royal house. There was a small stone quay on the island’s eastern side where boats could land, though only in the calmest weather was the landing comfortable, which was why our ships had landed us at a safe place a day’s march to the west. Beyond the quay was a small harbour which was nothing but a tidal pool protected by sand
banks. At low tide the pool was cut off from the sea while at the tide’s height the holding was poor whenever the wind was in the north. All around the island’s base, except in those places where the granite itself was too steep to climb, a stone wall tried to keep the outer world at bay. Outside Ynys Trebes was turmoil, Frankish enemies, blood, poverty and disease, while inside the wall lay learning, music, poetry and beauty.

  I did not belong in King Ban’s beloved island capital. My task was to defend Ynys Trebes by fighting on the mainland of Benoic where the Franks were pushing into the farmlands that supported the lavish capital, but Bleiddig insisted I met the king, so I was guided across the causeway, through the city gate that was decorated with a carved merman brandishing a trident, and up the steep road that led to the lofty palace. My men had all stayed on the mainland and I wished I had brought them to see the wonders of the city: the carved gates; the steep stone stairs that plunged up and down the granite island between the temples and shops; the balconied houses decorated with urns of flowers; the statues; and the springs that poured clean fresh water into carved marble troughs where anyone could dip a pail or stoop to drink. Bleiddig was my guide and he growled how the city was a waste of good money that should have been spent on defences ashore, but I was awestruck. This, I thought, was a place worth fighting for.

  Bleiddig led me through the final merman-decorated gate into the palace courtyard. The palace’s vine-clad buildings filled three sides of the court, while the fourth was bounded by a series of white-painted arches that opened on to a long view of the sea. Guards in white cloaks stood at every door, their spear-shafts polished and spearheads shining. ‘They’re no earthly use,’ Bleiddig muttered to me. ‘Couldn’t fight off a puppy, but they look pretty.’

  A courtier in a white toga met us at the palace door and escorted us through room after room, each one filled with rare treasures. There were alabaster statues, golden dishes, and a room lined with speculum mirrors that made me gasp as I saw myself reflected into an unending distance: a bearded, dirty, russet-cloaked soldier getting ever smaller in the mirrors’ crinkling diminutions. In the next room, which was painted white and was filled with the scent of flowers, a girl played a harp. She wore a short tunic and nothing else. She smiled as we passed and went on playing. Her breasts were golden from the sun, her hair was short and her smile easy. ‘Looks like a whorehouse,’ Bleiddig confided in a hoarse whisper, ‘and I wish it was. It might be of some use then.’

  The toga-clad courtier thrust open the last pair of bronze-handled doors and bowed us into a wide room that overlooked the glittering sea. ‘Lord King’ – he bowed to the room’s only occupant – ‘Chief Bleiddig and Derfel, a captain of Dumnonia.’

  A tall thin man with a worried face and a thinning head of white hair stood up from behind a table where he had been writing on parchment. A catspaw of wind stirred his work and he fussed until he had weighted the parchment’s corners with inkhorns and snake stones. ‘Ah, Bleiddig!’ the King said as he advanced towards us. ‘You’re back, I see. Good, good. Some people never come back. The ships don’t survive. We should ponder that. Is the answer bigger ships, do you think? Or do we build them wrong? I’m not sure we have the proper boat-building skills, though our fishermen swear we do, but some of them never come back either. A problem.’ King Ban stopped halfway across the room and scratched his temple, transferring yet more ink on to his sparse hair. ‘No immediate solution suggests itself,’ he finally announced, then peered at me. ‘Drivel, is it?’

  ‘Derfel, Lord King,’ I said, dropping to one knee.

  ‘Derfel!’ He said my name with astonishment. ‘Derfel! Let me think now! Derfel. I suppose, if that name means anything, it means “pertaining to a Druid”. Do you so pertain, Derfel?’

  ‘I was reared by Merlin, Lord.’

  ‘Were you? Were you, indeed! My, my! That is something. I see we must talk. How is my dear Merlin?’

  ‘He hasn’t been seen these five years, Lord.’

  ‘So he’s invisible! Ha! I always thought that might be one of his tricks. A useful one, too. I must ask my wise men to investigate. Do stand up, do stand up. I can’t abide people kneeling to me. I’m not a God, at least I don’t think I am.’ The King inspected me as I stood and seemed disappointed by what he saw. ‘You look like a Frank!’ he observed in a puzzled voice.

  ‘I am a Dumnonian, Lord King,’ I said proudly.

  ‘I’m sure you are, and a Dumnonian, I pray, who precedes dear Arthur, yes?’ he asked eagerly.

  I had not been looking forward to this moment. ‘No, Lord,’ I said. ‘Arthur is besieged by many enemies. He fights for our kingdom’s existence and so he has sent me and a few men, all we can spare, and I am to write and tell him if more are needed.’

  ‘More will be needed, indeed they will,’ Ban said as fiercely as his thin, high-pitched voice allowed. ‘Dear me, yes. So you’ve brought a few men, have you? How few, pray, is few, precisely?’

  ‘Sixty, Lord.’

  King Ban abruptly sat on a wooden chair inlaid with ivory. ‘Sixty! I had hoped for three hundred! And for Arthur himself. You look very young to be a captain of men,’ he said dubiously, then suddenly brightened. ‘Did I hear you correctly? Did you say you can write?’

  ‘Yes, Lord.’

  ‘And read?’ he insisted anxiously.

  ‘Indeed, Lord King.’

  ‘You see, Bleiddig!’ the King cried in a triumphant voice as he sprang from the chair. ‘Some warriors can read and write! It doesn’t unman them. It does not reduce them to the petty status of clerks, women, kings or poets as you so fondly believe. Ha! A literate warrior. Do you, by any happy chance, write poetry?’ he asked me.

  ‘No, Lord.’

  ‘How sad. We are a community of poets. We are a brotherhood! We call ourselves the fili, and poetry is our stern mistress. It is, you might say, our sacred task. Maybe you will be inspired? Come with me, my learned Derfel.’ Ban, Arthur’s absence forgotten, scurried excitedly across the room, beckoning me to follow through a second set of great doors and across another small room where a second harpist, half-naked like the first and just as beautiful, touched her strings, and then into a great library.

  I had never seen a proper library before and King Ban, delighted to show the room off, watched my reaction. I gaped, and no wonder, for scroll after scroll was bound in ribbon and stored in custom-made open-ended boxes that stood one on top of the other like the cells of a honeycomb. There were hundreds of such cells, each with its own scroll and each cell labelled in a carefully inked hand. ‘What languages do you speak, Derfel?’ Ban asked me.

  ‘Saxon, Lord, and British.’

  ‘Ah.’ He was disappointed. ‘Rude tongues only. I, now, have a command of Latin, Greek, British, of course, and some small Arabic. Father Celwin there speaks ten times as many languages, isn’t that so, Celwin?’

  The King spoke to the library’s only occupant, an old white-bearded priest with a grotesquely humped back and a black monkish cowl. The priest raised a thin hand in acknowledgement, but did not look up from the scrolls that were weighted down on his table. I thought for a moment that the priest had a fur scarf draped about the back of his monk’s hood, then I saw it was a grey cat that lifted its head, looked at me, yawned, then went back to sleep. King Ban ignored the priest’s rudeness, and instead conducted me past the racks of boxes and told me about the treasures he had collected. ‘What I have here,’ he said proudly, ‘is anything the Romans left, and anything my friends think to send me. Some of the manuscripts are too old to handle any more, so those we copy. Let’s see now, what’s this? Ah, yes, one of Aristophanes’s twelve plays. I have them all, of course. This one is The Babylonians. A comedy in Greek, young man.’

  ‘And not at all funny,’ the priest snapped from his table.

  ‘And mightily amusing,’ King Ban said, unruffled by the priest’s rudeness, to which he was evidently accustomed. ‘Maybe the fili should build a theatre and perform it?’ he added. ‘A
h, this you’ll enjoy. Horace’s Ars Poetica. I copied this one myself.’

  ‘No wonder it’s illegible,’ Father Celwin interjected.

  ‘I make all the fili study Horace’s maxims,’ the King told me.

  ‘Which is why they’re such execrable poets,’ the priest put in, but still did not look up from his scrolls.

  ‘Ah, Tertullian!’ The King slid a scroll from its box and blew dust from the parchment. ‘A copy of his Apologeticus!

  ‘All rubbish,’ Celwin said. ‘Waste of precious ink.’

  ‘Eloquence itself!’ Ban enthused. ‘I’m no Christian, Derfel, but some Christian writing is full of good moral sense.’

  ‘No such thing,’ the priest maintained.

  ‘Ah, and this is a work you must already know,’ the King said, drawing another scroll from its box. ‘Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. It is an unparalleled guide, my dear Derfel, to the manner in which a man should live his life.’

  ‘Platitudes in bad Greek written by a Roman bore,’ the priest growled.

  ‘Probably the greatest book ever written,’ the King said dreamily, replacing the Marcus Aurelius and drawing out another work. ‘And this is a curiosity, indeed it is. The great treatise of Aristarchus of Samos. You know it, I’m sure?’

  ‘No, Lord,’ I confessed.

  ‘It is not perhaps on everyone’s reading list,’ the King admitted sadly, ‘but it has a certain quaint amusement. Aris-tarchus maintains – do not laugh – that the earth revolves around the sun and not the sun around the earth.’ He illustrated this cantankerous notion with extravagant wheeling gestures with his long arms. ‘He got it backwards, do you see?’

  ‘Sounds sensible to me,’ Celwin said, still without looking up from his work.

  ‘And Silius Italicus!’ The King gestured at a whole group of honeycomb cells filled with scrolls. ‘Dear Silius Italicus! I have all eighteen volumes of his history of the Second Punic War. All in verse, of course. What a treasure!’