The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Paradise.’ He leaned back on the grass and rested his head on his arms. ‘Sweet paradise.’

  ‘Ynys Trebes, you mean?’

  ‘No, no. I mean, Derfel, that when God made man He gave us a paradise in which to live, and it occurs to me that we have been losing that paradise, inch by inch, ever since. And soon, I think, it will be gone. Darkness descends.’ He went silent for a while, then sat up as his thoughts gave him a new energy. ‘Just think of it,’ he said, ‘not a hundred years ago this land was peaceful. Men built great houses. We can’t build like they did. I know Father has made a fine palace, but it’s just broken pieces of old palaces cobbled together and patched with stone. We can’t build like the Romans. We can’t build as high, or as beautifully. We can’t make roads, we can’t make canals, we can’t make aqueducts.’ I did not even know what an aqueduct was, but kept silent as Culhwch snored contentedly beside me. ‘The Romans built whole cities,’ Galahad went on, ‘places so vast, Derfel, it would take a whole morning to walk from one side of the city to the other and all of your footsteps would fall on trimmed, dressed stone. And in those days you could walk for weeks and still be on Rome’s land, subject to Rome’s laws and listening to Rome’s language. Now look at it.’ He waved at the night. ‘Just darkness. And it spreads, Derfel. The dark is creeping into Armorica. Benoic will go, and after Benoic, Broceliande, and after Broceliande, Britain. No more laws, no more books, no more music, no more justice, only vile men round smoky fires planning on who they’ll kill next day.’

  ‘Not while Arthur lives,’ I said stubbornly.

  ‘One man against the dark?’ Galahad asked sceptically.

  ‘Wasn’t your Christ one man against the dark?’ I asked.

  Galahad thought for a second, staring into the fire that shadowed his strong face. ‘Christ,’ he said finally, ‘was our last chance. He told us to love one another, to do good to each other, to give alms to the poor, food to the hungry, cloaks to the naked. So men killed Him.’ He turned and looked at me. ‘I think Christ knew what was coming and that was why He promised us that if we lived as He lived then one day we’d be with Him in paradise. Not on earth, Derfel, but in paradise. Up there’ – he pointed to the stars – ‘because He knew the earth was finished. We’re in the last days. Even your Gods have fled from us. Isn’t that what you tell me? That your Merlin is scouring strange lands to find clues to the old Gods, but what use will the clues be? Your religion died long ago when the Romans ravaged Ynys Mon and all you have left are disconnected scraps of knowledge. Your Gods are gone.’

  ‘No,’ I said, thinking of Nimue who felt their presence, though to me the Gods were always distant and shadowy. Bel, to me, was like Merlin, only far away and indescribably huge and far more mysterious. I thought of Bel as somehow living in the far north, while Manawydan must live in the west where the waters tumbled endlessly.

  ‘The old Gods are gone,’ Galahad insisted. ‘They abandoned us because we are not worthy.’

  ‘Arthur is worthy,’ I said stubbornly, ‘and so are you.’

  He shook his head. ‘I am a sinner so vile, Derfel, that I cringe.’

  I laughed at his abject tone. ‘Nonsense,’ I said.

  ‘I kill, I lust, I envy.’ He was truly miserable, but then Galahad, like Arthur, was a man who was for ever judging his own soul and finding it wanting and I never met such a man who was happy for long.

  ‘You only kill men who would kill you,’ I defended him.

  ‘And, God help me, I enjoy it.’ He made the sign of the cross.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘And what’s wrong with lust?’

  ‘It overcomes reason.’

  ‘But you’re reasonable,’ I pointed out.

  ‘But I lust, Derfel, how I lust. There is a girl in Ynys Trebes, one of my father’s harpists.’ He shook his head hopelessly.

  ‘But you control your lust,’ I said, ‘so be proud of that.’

  ‘I am proud of it, and pride is another sin.’

  I shook my head at the hopelessness of arguing with him. ‘And envy?’ I offered him the last of his trinity of sins. ‘Whom do you envy?’

  ‘Lancelot.’

  ‘Lancelot?’ I was surprised.

  ‘Because he is Edling, not I. Because he takes what he wants, when he wants, and does not seem to regret it. That harpist? He took her. She screamed, she fought, but no one dared stop him for he was Lancelot.’

  ‘Not even you?’

  ‘I would have killed him, but I was far from the city.’

  ‘Your father didn’t stop him?’

  ‘My father was with his books. He probably thought the girl’s screams were a gull calling into the sea wind or two of his fili having a squabble about a metaphor.’

  I spat into the fire. ‘Lancelot is a worm,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Galahad insisted, ‘he is, simply, Lancelot. He gets what he wants and he spends his days plotting how to get it. He can be very charming, very plausible and he could even be a great king.’

  ‘Never,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Truly. If power is what he wants, and it is, and if he receives it, then perhaps his appetites will be slaked? He does want to be liked.’

  ‘He goes a strange way about it,’ I said, remembering how Lancelot had taunted me at his father’s table.

  ‘He knew, from the first, that you were not going to like him and so he challenged you. That way, when he makes an enemy of you, he can explain to himself why you don’t like him. But with people who don’t threaten him he can be kind. He might be a great king.’

  ‘He’s weak,’ I said scornfully.

  Galahad smiled. ‘Strong Derfel. Derfel the Doubtless. You must think we’re all weak.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I think we’re all tired and tomorrow we have to kill Franks, so I’ll sleep.’

  And next day we did kill Franks, and afterwards we rested in one of Ban’s hilltop forts before, with our wounds bandaged and our battered swords sharpened, we went back into the woods. Yet week by week, month by month, we fought closer to Ynys Trebes. King Ban called on his neighbour, Budic of Broceliande, to send troops, but Budic was fortifying his own frontier and declined to waste men on defending a lost cause. Ban appealed to Arthur, and though Arthur did send one small shipload of men, he did not come himself. He was too busy fighting Saxons. We did get news from Britain, though such news was infrequent and often vague, but we heard that new hordes of Saxons were trying to colonize the middle lands and pressing hard on Dumnonia’s borders. Gorfyddyd, who had been such a threat when I left Britain, had been quieter of late, thanks to a terrible plague that had afflicted his country. Travellers told us that Gorfyddyd himself was ill and many thought he would not last the year. The same sickness that had afflicted Gorfyddyd had killed Ceinwyn’s betrothed, a prince of Rheged. I had not even known she was betrothed again and I confess that I felt a selfish pleasure that the dead prince of Rheged would not marry the star of Powys. Of Guinevere, Nimue or Merlin I heard nothing.

  Ban’s kingdom crumbled. There were no men to gather the harvest in the last year and that winter we huddled in a fortress on the southern edge of the kingdom where we lived on venison, roots, berries and wildfowl. We still made an occasional raid into Frankish territory, but now we were like wasps trying to sting a bull to death for the Franks were everywhere. Their axes rang through the winter forests as they cleared land for their farms while their new-built stockades of brightly split logs shone in the pale wintry sun.

  Early in the new spring we fell back before an army of Frankish warriors. They came with drums beating and under banners made of bull horns mounted on poles. I saw one shield–wall of over two hundred men and knew our fifty survivors could never break it and so, with Culhwch and Galahad either side of me, we retreated. The Franks jeered and pursued us with a hail of their light throwing spears.

  The kingdom of Benoic was stripped of people now. Most had gone to the kingdom of Broceliande that promised them land in return for war service.
The old Roman settlements were deserted and their fields were tangled with couch grass. We Dumnonians walked north with our spears trailing as we went to defend the last fortress of Ban’s kingdom: Ynys Trebes itself.

  The island city was crowded with fugitives. Every house slept twenty. Children cried and families squabbled. Fishing boats carried some of the fugitives west to Broceliande or north to Britain, but there were never enough boats, and when the Frankish armies appeared on the shore facing the island, Ban ordered the remaining boats to stay anchored in Ynys Trebes’s awkward little harbour. He wanted them there so they could supply the garrison once the siege started, but shipmasters are a stubborn breed and when the order came for them to stay many hauled their anchors instead and ran north empty. Only a handful of boats remained.

  Lancelot was made commander of the city and women cheered as he walked down the city’s circling street. All would be well now, the citizens believed, for the greatest of soldiers was in command. He took the adulation gracefully and made speeches in which he promised to build Ynys Trebes a new causeway from the skulls of dead Franks. The Prince certainly looked the part of a hero for he wore a suit of scale armour on which every metal plate had been enamelled a dazzling white so that the suit shone in the early spring sunshine. Lancelot claimed the armour had belonged to Agamemnon, a hero of antiquity, though Galahad assured me it was Roman work. Lancelot’s boots were made of red leather, his cloak was dark blue, and at his hip, hanging from the embroidered sword belt that had been Arthur’s gift, he wore Tanlladwyr, ‘bright-killer’, his sword. His helmet was black, crested with the spread wings of a sea-eagle. ‘So he can fly away,’ Cavan, my dour Irishman, commented sourly.

  Lancelot convened a council of war in the high, wind-kissed chamber next to Ban’s library. It was low tide and the sea had fled from the bay’s sandbanks where groups of Franks were trying to find a safe path to the city. Galahad had planted false withies all across the bay, trying to lead the enemy into quicksands or else on to firm banks that would be the first to be cut off when the tide turned and seethed across the bay. Lancelot, his back to the enemy, told us his strategy. His father sat on one side of him, his mother on the other, and both nodded at their son’s wisdom.

  The defence of Ynys Trebes was simple, Lancelot announced. All we needed to do was hold the island’s walls. Nothing else. The Franks had few boats, they could not fly, so they must walk to Ynys Trebes and that was a journey they could only make at low tide and after they had discovered the safe route across the tidal plain. Once at the city they would be tired and never able to scale the stone walls. ‘Hold the walls,’ Lancelot said, ‘and we stay safe. Boats can supply us. Ynys Trebes need never fall!’

  ‘True! True!’ King Ban said, cheered by his son’s optimism.

  ‘How much food do we have?’ Culhwch growled the question.

  Lancelot gave him a pitying look. ‘The sea,’ he said, ‘is full of fish. They’re the shiny things, Lord Culhwch, with tails and fins. You eat them.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Culhwch said straight-faced, ‘I’ve been too busy killing Franks.’

  A murmur of laughter went through some of the warriors summoned to the meeting. A dozen of them, like us, had been fighting on the mainland, but the remainder were intimates of Prince Lancelot and had been newly promoted into captains for this siege. Bors, Lancelot’s cousin, was Benoic’s champion and commander of the palace guard. He, at least, had seen some fighting and had earned a reputation as a warrior, though now, sprawling long-legged in a Roman uniform and with his black hair, like his cousin Lancelot’s, oiled flat against his skull, he looked jaded.

  ‘How many spears do we have?’ I asked.

  Lancelot had ignored me till then. I knew he had not forgotten our meeting of two years before, but he nevertheless smiled at my question. ‘We have four hundred and twenty men under arms and each of them has a spear. Can you work out the answer?’

  I returned the silky smile. ‘Spears break, Lord Prince, and men defending walls throw their spears like javelins. When four hundred and twenty spears are thrown, what do we throw next?’

  ‘Poets,’ Culhwch growled, luckily too softly for Ban to hear.

  ‘There are spares,’ Lancelot said airily, ‘and besides, we shall use the spears the Franks throw at us.’

  ‘Poets, for sure,’ Culhwch said.

  ‘You spoke, Lord Culhwch?’ Lancelot asked.

  ‘I belched, Lord Prince. But while I have your gracious attention, do we have archers?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘Many?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘The Gods help us,’ Culhwch said and slid down in his chair. He hated chairs.

  Elaine spoke next, reminding us that the island was sheltering women, children and the world’s greatest poets. ‘The safety of the fili is in your hands,’ she told us, ‘and you know what will happen to them if you fail.’ I kicked Culhwch to stop him from making a comment.

  Ban stood and gestured towards his library. ‘Seven thousand, eight hundred and forty-three scrolls are in there,’ he said solemnly, ‘the accumulated treasures of human knowledge, and if the city falls, so will civilization.’ He then told us an ancient tale of a hero going into a labyrinth to kill a monster and trailing behind him a woollen thread with which he could find his way out of the darkness. ‘My library,’ he finally explained the point of the long tale, ‘is that thread. Lose it, gentlemen, and we stay in eternal darkness. So I beg you, I beg you, fight!’ He paused, smiling. ‘And I have summoned help. Letters are gone to Broceliande and to Arthur, and I think the day is not far off when our horizon will be thick with friendly sails! And Arthur, remember, is oath-bound to help us!’

  ‘Arthur,’ Culhwch intervened, ‘has his hands full of Saxons.’

  ‘An oath is an oath!’ Ban said reprovingly.

  Galahad enquired whether we planned to make our own raids on the Frankish encampments ashore. We could easily go by boat, he said, landing east or west of their positions, but Lancelot turned down the idea. ‘If we leave the walls,’ he said, ‘we die. It is that simple.’

  ‘No sallies?’ Culhwch asked in disgust.

  ‘If we leave the walls,’ Lancelot repeated, ‘we die. Your orders are simple: you stay behind the walls.’ He announced that Benoic’s best warriors, a hundred veterans of the war on the mainland, would guard the main gate. We fifty surviving Dumnonians were given the western walls, while the city’s levies, bolstered by fugitives from the mainland, guarded the rest of the island. Lancelot himself, with a company of the white-cloaked palace guard, would form the reserve that would watch the fighting from the palace and come down to intervene wherever their help was needed.

  ‘Might as well call on the fairies,’ Culhwch growled to me.

  ‘Another belch?’ Lancelot enquired.

  ‘It’s all the fish I eat, Lord Prince,’ Culhwch said.

  King Ban invited us to inspect his library before we left, perhaps wanting to impress us with the value of what we defended. Most of the men who had been at the council of war shuffled in, gaped at the pigeon-holed scrolls, then went to stare at the bare-breasted harpist who played in the library’s antechamber. Galahad and I lingered longer among the books where the hump-backed Father Celwin was still bent over his old table where he was trying to keep his grey cat from playing with his quill. ‘Still working out the wingspan of angels, Father?’ I asked him.

  ‘Someone must,’ he said, then turned to scowl at me with his one eye. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Derfel, Father, of Dumnonia. We met two years ago. I’m surprised you’re still here.’

  ‘Your surprise is of no interest to me, Derfel of Dumnonia. Besides, I did leave for a while. I went to Rome. Filthy place. I thought the Vandals might have cleaned it up, but the place is still full of priests and their plump little boys, so I came back here. Ban’s harpists are much prettier than Rome’s catamites.’ He gave me an unfriendly look. ‘Do you care about my safety, Derfel of Dumnonia?’ />
  I could hardly answer no, though I was tempted to. ‘My job is to protect lives,’ I said rather pretentiously, ‘including yours, Father.’

  ‘Then I put my life in your hands, Derfel of Dumnonia,’ he said as he turned his ugly face back to the table and pushed the cat away from his quill. ‘I lay my life on your conscience, Derfel of Dumnonia, and now you can go and fight and leave me to do something useful.’

  I tried to ask the priest about Rome, but he waved my questions away and so I went down to the storehouse on the western wall that would be our home for the rest of the siege. Galahad, who considered himself an honorary Dumnonian now, was with us and he and I tried to count the Franks who were retreating from the incoming tide after another attempt to discover the track across the sands. The bards, singing of Ynys Trebes’s siege, say the enemy outnumbered the grains of sand in the bay. They were not quite that many, but still they were formidable. Every Frankish war-band in western Gaul had combined to help capture Ynys Trebes, the jewel of Armorica which, it was rumoured, was crammed with the treasures of Rome’s fallen Empire. Galahad estimated we were faced by three thousand Franks, my guess was two thousand, while Lancelot assured us there were ten thousand. But by anyone’s count there was a terrible lot of them.

  The first attacks brought the Franks nothing but disaster. They found a way across the sand and assaulted the main gate and were repelled bloodily, then the next day they attacked our part of the wall and were given the same treatment, only this time they stayed too long and a large part of their force was cut off by the incoming tide. Some tried to wade to the mainland and were drowned, others retreated to the shrinking stretch of sand before our walls where they were slaughtered by a sally of spearmen led from the gate by Bleiddig, the chief who had fetched me to Benoic and who was now the leader of Benoic’s veterans. Bleiddig’s sortie across the sand was in direct disobedience to Lancelot’s rule that we must stay inside the city’s wall, but the dead were so many that Lancelot pretended to have ordered the attack and later, after Bleiddig’s death, he even claimed to have led the sally. The fili made a song telling how Lancelot had dammed the bay with Frankish dead, but in truth the Prince stayed in the palace while Bleiddig attacked. For days afterwards the bodies of Frankish warriors swilled around the island’s base, carried by the tide and providing rich carrion for the gulls.