The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur

by Bernard Cornwell

  I drew Hywelbane, but not one man, woman or child was checked by the sight of her long blade. Then I fled. There could be no disgrace in a warrior fleeing the dead. I ran back up the road and a clatter of stones landed at my heels, then a dog leaped to bite at my green cloak. I beat the brute off with the sword, then reached the road’s turning where I plunged to my right, pushing through the brambles and scrub to reach the hillside. A thing reared in front of me, a naked thing with a man’s face and a brute’s body of hair and dirt. One of the thing’s eyes was a running sore, its mouth was a pit of rotting gums and it lunged at me with hands made into claws by hook-like nails. Hywelbane sliced bright. I was screaming with terror, certain that I faced one of the Isle’s demons, but my instincts were still as sharp as my blade that cut through the brute’s hairy arm and slashed into his skull. I leaped over him and climbed the hill, aware that a horde of famished souls was clambering behind me. A stone struck my back, another hit the rock beside me, but I was scrambling fast up the pillars and platforms of quarried rock until I found a narrow path that twisted like the paths of Ynys Trebes around the hill’s raw flank.

  I turned on the path to face my pursuers. They checked, frightened at last by the sword waiting for them on the narrow path where only one of them could approach me at a time. The big man leered. ‘Nice man,’ he called in a wheedling voice, ‘come down, nice man.’ He held up a gull’s egg to tempt me. ‘Come and eat!’

  An old woman lifted her skirts and thrust her loins at me. ‘Come to me, my lover! Come to me, my darling. I knew you’d come!’ She began to piss. A child laughed and flung a stone.

  I left them. Some followed me along the path, but after a while they became bored and went back to their ghostly settlement.

  The narrow path led between the sky and the sea. Every now and then it would be interrupted by an ancient quarry where the marks of Roman tools scarred baulks of stone, but beyond each quarry the path would wind on again through patches of thyme and spinneys of thorn. I saw no one until, suddenly, a voice hailed me from one of the small quarries.

  ‘You don’t look mad,’ the voice said dubiously. I turned, sword raised, to see a courtly man in a dark cloak gazing gravely from the mouth of a cave. He raised a hand. ‘Please! No weapons. My name is Malldynn, and I greet you, stranger, if you come in peace, and if not, then I beg you to pass us by.’

  I wiped the blood from Hywelbane and thrust her back into the scabbard. ‘I come in peace,’ I said.

  ‘Are you newly come to the Isle?’ he asked as he approached me gingerly. He had a pleasant face, deeply lined and sad, with a manner that reminded me of Bishop Bedwin.

  ‘I arrived this hour,’ I answered.

  ‘And you were doubtless pursued by the rabble at the gate. I apologize for them, though the Gods know I have no responsibility for those ghouls. They take the bread each week and make the rest of us pay for it. Fascinating, is it not, how even in a place of lost souls we form our hierarchies? There are rulers here. There are the strong and the weak. Some men dream of making paradises on this earth and the first requirement of such paradises, or so I understand, is that we must be unshackled by laws, but I do suspect, my friend, that any place unshackled by laws will more resemble this Isle than any paradise. I do not have the pleasure of your name.’

  ‘Derfel.’

  ‘Derfel?’ He frowned in thought. ‘A servant of the Druids?’

  ‘I was. Now I’m a warrior.’

  ‘No, you are not,’ he corrected me, ‘you are dead. You have come to the Isle of the Dead. Please, come and sit. It is not much, but it is my home.’ He gestured into the cave where two semi-dressed blocks of stone served as a chair and table. An old piece of cloth, perhaps dragged from the sea, half hid his sleeping quarter where I could see a bed made from dried grass. He insisted I use the small stone block as my chair. ‘I can offer you rainwater to drink,’ he said, ‘and some five-day-old bread to eat.’

  I put an oatcake on the table. Malldynn was plainly hungry, but he resisted the impulse to snatch the biscuit. Instead he drew a small knife with a blade that had been sharpened so often that it had a wavy edge and used it to divide the oatcake into halves. ‘At risk of sounding ungrateful,’ he said, ‘oats were never my favourite food. I prefer meat, fresh meat, but still I thank you, Derfel.’ He had been kneeling opposite me, but once the oatcake was eaten and the crumbs had been delicately dabbed from his lips he stood and leaned against the cave’s wall. ‘My mother made oatcakes,’ he told me, ‘but hers were tougher. I suspect the oats were not husked properly. That one was delicious, and I shall now revise my opinion of oats. Thank you again.’ He bowed.

  ‘You don’t seem mad,’ I said.

  He smiled. He was middle-aged, with a distinguished face, clever eyes and a white beard that he tried to keep trimmed. His cave had been swept clean with a brush of twigs that leaned against the wall. ‘It is not just the mad who are sent here, Derfel,’ he said reprovingly. ‘Some who want to punish the sane send them here also. Alas, I offended Uther.’ He paused ruefully. ‘I was a counsellor,’ he went on, ‘a great man even, but when I told Uther that his son Mordred was a fool, I ended here. But I was right. Mordred was a fool, even at ten years old he was a fool.’

  ‘You’ve been here that long?’ I asked in astonishment.

  ‘Alas, yes.’

  ‘How do you survive?’

  He offered me a self-deprecating shrug. ‘The gate-keeping ghouls believe I can work magic. I threaten to restore their wits if they offend me, and so they take good care to keep me happy. They are happier mad, believe me. Any man who possessed his wits would pray to go insane on this Isle. And you, friend Derfel, might I enquire what brings you here?’

  ‘I search for a woman.’

  ‘Ah! We have plenty, and most are unconstrained by modesty. Such women, I believe, are another requisite of earthly paradises, but alas, the reality proves otherwise. They are certainly immodest, but they are also filthy, their conversation is tedious, and the pleasure to be derived from them is as momentary as it is shameful. If you seek such a woman, Derfel, then you will find them here in abundance.’

  ‘I’m searching for a woman called Nimue,’ I said.

  ‘Nimue,’ he said, frowning as he tried to remember the name, ‘Nimue! Yes indeed, I do recall her now! A one-eyed girl with black hair. She’s gone to the sea folk.’

  ‘Drowned?’ I asked, appalled.

  ‘No, no.’ He shook his head. ‘You must understand we have our own communities on the Isle. You have already made the acquaintance of the gate ghouls. We here in the quarries are the hermits, a small group who prefer our solitude and so inhabit the caves on this side of the Isle. On the far side are the beasts. You may imagine what they are like. At the southern end are the sea folk. They fish with lines of human hair using thorns for hooks and are, I must say, the best behaved of the Isle’s tribes, though none are exactly famed for their hospitality. They all fight each other, of course. Do you see how we have everything here that the Land of the Living offers? Except, perhaps, religion, although one or two of our inhabitants do believe themselves to be Gods. And who is to deny them?’

  ‘You’ve never tried to leave?’

  ‘I did,’ he said sadly. ‘A long time ago. I once tried to swim across the bay, but they watch us, and a spear-butt on the head is an efficient reminder that we are not supposed to leave the Isle and I turned back long before they could administer such a blow. Most drown who try to escape that way. A few go along the causeway and some of them, perhaps, do get back among the living, but only if they succeed in passing the gate ghouls first. And if they survive that ordeal they have to avoid the guards waiting on the beach. Those skulls you saw as you crossed the causeway? They are all men and women who tried to escape. Poor souls.’ He went silent and I thought, for a second, he was about to weep. Then he pushed himself briskly off the wall. ‘What am I thinking about? Do I have no manners? I must offer you water. See? My cistern!’ He gestured prou
dly towards a wooden barrel that stood just outside the cave mouth and which was placed to catch the water that cascaded off the quarry’s sides during rainstorms. He had a ladle with which he filled two wooden cups with water. ‘The barrel and ladle came from a fishing boat that was wrecked here, when? Let me see … two years ago. Poor people! Three men and two boys. One man tried to swim away and was drowned, the other two died under a hail of stones and the two boys were carried off. You can imagine what happened to them! There may be women aplenty, but a clean young fisherboy’s flesh is a rare treat on this Isle.’ He put the cup in front of me and shook his head. ‘It is a terrible place, my friend, and you have been foolish to come here. Or were you sent?’

  ‘I came by choice.’

  ‘Then you belong here anyway, for you’re plainly mad.’ He drank his water. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘the news of Britain.’

  I told him. He had heard of Uther’s death and Arthur’s coming, but not much else. He frowned when I said King Mordred was maimed, but was pleased when he heard that Bedwin still lived. ‘I like Bedwin,’ he said. ‘Liked, rather. We have to learn to talk here as though we were dead. He must be old?’

  ‘Not so old as Merlin.’

  ‘Merlin lives?’ he asked in surprise.

  ‘He does.’

  ‘Dear me! So Merlin is alive!’ He seemed pleased. ‘I once gave him an eagle stone and he was so grateful. I have another here somewhere. Where now?’ He searched among a small pile of rocks and scraps of wood that made a collection beside the cave door. ‘Is it over there?’ He-pointed towards the bed-curtain. ‘Can you see it?’

  I turned away to look for the precious rattling stone and the moment I looked away Malldynn leaped on my back and tried to drag his small knife’s ragged edge across my throat. ‘I’ll eat you!’ he cried in triumph. ‘Eat you!’ But I had somehow caught his knife hand with my left and managed to keep the blade away from my windpipe. He wrestled me to the floor and tried to bite my ear. He was slavering above me, his appetite whetted by the thought of new, clean human flesh to eat. I hit him once, twice, managed to twist around and bring up my knee, then hit him again, but the wretch had remarkable strength and the sound of our fight brought more men running from other caves. I had only a few seconds before I would be overpowered by the newcomers and so I gave one last desperate heave, then butted Malldynn’s head with mine and finally threw him off. I kicked him away, scrambled desperately back from the onrush of his friends, then stood in the entrance to his bed-chamber where I at last had room to draw Hywelbane. The hermits shrank away from the sword’s bright blade.

  Malldynn, his mouth bleeding, lay at the side of the cave. ‘Not even a scrap of fresh liver?’ he begged me. ‘Just a morsel? Please?’

  I left him. The other hermits plucked at my cloak as I passed through the quarry, but none tried to stop me. One of them laughed as I left. ‘You’ll have to come back!’ the man called to me, ‘and we’ll be hungrier then!’

  ‘Eat Malldynn,’ I told them bitterly.

  I climbed to the Isle’s ridge where gorse grew among rocks. I could see from the summit that the great rock hill did not extend all the way to the Isle’s southern tip, but fell steeply to a long plain that was hatched by a tangle of ancient stone walls; evidence that ordinary men and women had once lived on the Isle and farmed the stony plateau that sloped towards the sea. There were settlements still on the plateau: the homes, I supposed, of the sea folk. A group of those dead souls watched me from their cluster of round huts that stood at the hill’s base and their presence persuaded me to stay where I was and wait for dawn. Life creeps slow in the early morning, which is why soldiers like to attack in the first light and why I would search for my lost Nimue when the mad denizens of the Isle were still sluggish and bemused with sleep.

  It was a hard night. A bad night. The stars wheeled above me, bright homes from where the spirits look down on feeble earth. I prayed to Bel, begging for strength, and sometimes I slept, though every rustle of grass or fall of stone brought me wide awake. I had sheltered in a narrow crack of rock that would restrict any attack and as a result I was confident I could protect myself, though only Bel knew how I would ever leave the Isle. Or whether I would ever find my Nimue.

  I crept from my rock niche before the dawn. A fog hung over the sea beyond the sullen turmoil that marked the entrance of Cruachan’s Cave and a weak grey light made the Isle look flat and cold. I could see no one as I walked downhill. The sun had still not risen as I entered the first small village of crude huts. Yesterday, I had decided, I had been too timid with the Isle’s denizens. Today I would treat the dead like the carrion they were.

  The huts were wattle and mud, thatched with branches and grass. I kicked in a ramshackle wooden door, stooped inside the hut and grabbed the first sleeping form I found. I hurled that creature outside, kicked another, then slashed a hole in the roof with Hywelbane. Things that had once been human untangled themselves and slithered away from me. I kicked a man in the head, slapped another with the flat of Hywelbane’s blade, then dragged a third man out into the sickly light. I threw him to the ground, put my foot on his chest and held Hywelbane’s tip at his throat. ‘I seek a woman named Nimue,’ I said.

  He stammered gibberish at me. He could not speak, or rather he could only talk in a language of his own devising and so I left him and ran after a woman who was limping into the bushes. She screamed as I caught her, and screamed again as I placed the steel at her throat. ‘Do you know a woman called Nimue?’

  She was too terrified to speak. Instead she lifted her filthy skirts and offered me a toothless leer, so I slapped her face with the flat of the sword’s blade. ‘Nimue!’ I shouted at her. ‘A girl with one eye called Nimue. Do you know her?’ The woman still could not speak, but she pointed south, jabbing her hand towards the Isle’s seaward tip in a frantic effort to make me relent. I took the sword away and kicked the skirts back over her thighs. The woman scrambled away into a patch of thorns. The other frightened souls stared from their huts as I followed the path south towards the churning sea.

  I passed two other tiny settlements, but no one tried to stop me now. I had become part of the Isle of the Dead’s living nightmare; a creature in the dawn with naked steel. I walked through fields of pale grass dotted with bird’s-foot trefoil, blue milkwort and the crimson spikes of orchids and told myself I should have known that Nimue, a creature of Manawydan’s, would have found her refuge as close to the sea as she could find it.

  The Isle’s southern shore was a tangle of rocks edging a low cliff. Great waves crashed into foam, sucked through gullies and shattered white into clouds of spray. The cauldron swirled and spat offshore. It was a summer morning, but the sea was grey like iron, the wind was cold and the sea birds loud with laments.

  I jumped from rock to rock, going down towards that deathly sea. My ragged cloak lifted in the wind as I turned around a pillar of pale stone to see a cave that lay a few feet above the dark line of oarweed and bladderwrack stranded by the highest tides. A ledge led to the cave, and on the ledge were piled the bones of birds and animals. The piles had been made by human hands, for they were regularly spaced and each heap was braced by a careful latticework of longer bones and topped by a skull. I stopped, fear surging in me like the surge of the sea, as I stared at the refuge as close to the sea as any place could be on this Isle of doomed souls. ‘Nimue?’ I called as I summoned the courage to approach the ledge. ‘Nimue?’

  I climbed to the narrow rock platform and walked slowly between the heaped bones. I feared what I would find in the cave. ‘Nimue?’ I called.

  Beneath me a wave roared across a spur of rock and clawed white fingers towards the ledge. The water fell back and drained in dark sluices to the sea before another roller thundered on the headland’s stone and across the glistening rocks. The cave was dark and silent. ‘Nimue?’ I said again, my voice faltering.

  The cave’s mouth was guarded by two human skulls that had been forced into niches so th
at their broken teeth grinned into the moaning wind either side of the entrance. ‘Nimue?’ There was no answer except for the wind’s howl and the birds’ laments and the suck and shudder of the ghastly sea.

  I stepped inside. It was cold in the cave and the light was sickly. The walls were damp. The shingle floor rose in front of me and forced me to stoop beneath the roof’s heavy loom as I stepped cautiously forward. The cave narrowed and twisted sharply to the left. A third yellowing skull guarded the bend where I waited as my eyes settled to the gloom, then I turned past the guardian skull to see the cave dwindling towards a dead, dark end.

  And there, at the cave’s dark limit, she lay. My Nimue.

  I thought at first she was dead for she was naked and huddled with her dark hair filthy across her face and with her thin legs drawn up to her breasts and her pale arms clutching her shins. Sometimes, in the green hills, we would risk the barrow wights to dig into the grassy mounds and seek the old people’s gold, and we would find their bones in just such a huddle as they crouched in the earth to fend off the spirits through all eternity.

  ‘Nimue?’ I was forced to go on hands and knees to crawl the last few feet to where she lay. ‘Nimue?’ I said again. This time her name caught in my throat for I was sure she must be dead, but then I saw her ribs move. She breathed, but was otherwise still as death. I put Hywelbane down and reached a hand to touch her cold white shoulder. ‘Nimue?’

  She sprang towards me, hissing, teeth bared, one eye a livid red socket and the other turned so that only the white of its eyeball showed. She tried to bite me, she clawed at me, she keened a curse in a whining voice then spat it at me, and afterwards she slashed her long nails at my eyes. ‘Nimue!’ I yelled. She was spitting, drooling, fighting and snapping with filthy teeth at my face. ‘Nimue!’

  She screamed another curse and put her right hand at my throat. She had the strength of the mad and her scream rose in triumph as her fingers closed on my windpipe. Then, suddenly, I knew just what I had to do. I seized her left hand, ignored the pain in my throat, and laid my own scarred palm across her scar. I laid it there; I left it there; I did not move.