The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur

by Bernard Cornwell

  Arthur alone did not ride in his best armour. ‘Morfans has the scale armour,’ he told me when I asked why he was wearing his spare coat of mail. Morfans was the ugly warrior who had befriended me at the feast that had followed Arthur’s arrival at Caer Cadarn so many years before.

  ‘Morfans?’ I asked, astonished. ‘How did he earn such a gift?’

  ‘It’s not a gift, Derfel. Morfans is just borrowing it, and every day for the past week he has been riding close to Gorfyddyd’s men. They think I’m already there, and maybe that has given them pause? So far, at least, we have no news of any attack.’

  I had to laugh at the thought of Morfans’s ugly face being concealed behind the cheek pieces of Arthur’s helmet, and maybe the deception worked for when we joined King Tewdric at the Roman fort of Magnis the enemy had still not sallied from their strongholds in Powys’s hills.

  Tewdric, dressed in his fine Roman armour, looked almost an old man. His hair had gone grey and there was a stoop in his carriage that had not been there when I had last seen him. He greeted the news about Aelle with a grunt, then made an effort to be more complimentary. ‘Good news,’ he said curtly, then rubbed his eyes, ‘though God knows Gorfyddyd never needed Saxon help to beat us. He has men to spare.’

  The Roman fort seethed. Armourers were making spearheads, and every pollard ash for miles had been stripped for shafts. Carts of newly harvested grain arrived hourly and the bakers’ ovens burned as fierce as the blacksmiths’ furnaces so that a constant pyre of smoke hung above the palisaded walls. Yet despite the new harvest the gathering army was hungry. Most of the spearmen were camped outside the walls, some were miles away, and there were constant arguments about the distribution of the hard-baked bread and dried beans. Other contingents complained of water fouled by the latrines of men camped upstream. There was disease, hunger and desertion; evidence that neither Tewdric nor Arthur had ever had to grapple with the problems of commanding an army so large. ‘But if we have difficulties,’ Arthur said optimistically, ‘imagine Gorfyddyd’s troubles.’

  ‘I would rather have his problems than mine,’ Tewdric said gloomily.

  My spearmen, still under Galahad’s command, were camped eight miles to the north of Magnis where Agricola, Tewdric’s commander, kept a close watch on the hills that marked the frontier between Gwent and Powys. I felt a pang of happiness at seeing their wolf-tail helmets again. After the defeatism of the countryside it was suddenly good to think that here, at least, were men who would never be beaten. Nimue came with me and my men clustered about her so she could touch their spearheads and sword blades to give them power. Even the Christians, I noted, wanted her pagan touch. She was doing Merlin’s business, and because she was known to have come from the Isle of the Dead she was thought to be almost as powerful as her master.

  Agricola received me inside a tent, the first I had ever seen. It was a wondrous affair with a tall central pole and four corner staffs holding up a linen canopy that filtered the sunlight so that Agricola’s short grey hair looked oddly yellow. He was in his Roman armour and sitting at a table covered in scraps of parchment. He was a stern man and his greeting was perfunctory, though he did add a compliment about my men. ‘They’re confident. But so are the enemy, and there are many more of them than there are of us.’ His tone was grim.

  ‘How many?’ I asked.

  Agricola seemed offended by my bluntness, but I was no longer the boy I had been when I had first seen Gwent’s warlord. I was a lord myself now, a commander of men, and I had a right to know what odds those men faced. Or maybe it was not my directness that irritated Agricola, but rather that he did not want to be reminded of the enemy’s preponderance. Finally, however, he gave me the tally. ‘According to our spies,’ he said, ‘Powys has assembled six hundred spearmen from their own land. Gundleus has brought another two hundred and fifty from Siluria, maybe more. Ganval of Elmet has sent two hundred men, and the Gods alone know how many masterless men have gone to Gorfyddyd’s banner for a share of the spoils.’ Masterless men were rogues, exiles, murderers and savages who were drawn to an army for the plunder they could gain in battle. Such men were feared for they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. I doubted we had many such on our side, not just because we were expected to lose, but because both Tewdric and Arthur were ill disposed towards such lordless creatures. Curiously, though, many of Arthur’s best horsemen had once been just such men. Warriors like Sagramor had fought in the Roman armies that had been shattered by the heathen invaders of Italy and it had been Arthur’s youthful genius to harness such lordless mercenaries into a war-band.

  ‘There’s more,’ Agricola went on ominously. ‘The kingdom of Cornovia has donated men and just yesterday we heard that Oengus Mac Airem of Demetia has come with a war-band of his Blackshields; maybe a hundred strong? And another report says the men of Gwynedd have joined Gorfyddyd.’

  ‘Levies?’ I asked.

  Agricola shrugged. ‘Five, six hundred? Maybe even a thousand. But they won’t come until the harvest’s finished.’

  I was beginning to wish I had not asked. ‘And our numbers, Lord?’

  ‘Now that Arthur has arrived …’ He paused. ‘Seven hundred spears.’

  I said nothing. It was no wonder, I thought, that men in Gwent and Dumnonia buried their treasures and whispered that Arthur should leave Britain. We were faced by a horde.

  ‘I would be grateful,’ Agricola said acidly, as though the thought of gratitude was utterly alien to his thinking, ‘if you did not bruit the numbers about? We’ve had desertions enough already. More, and we might as well dig our own graves.’

  ‘No deserters from my men,’ I insisted.

  ‘No,’ he allowed, ‘not yet.’ He stood and took his short Roman sword from where it hung on a tent pole, then paused in the doorway from where he cast a baleful eye towards the enemy hills. ‘Men say you’re a friend of Merlin.’

  ‘Yes, Lord.’

  ‘Will he come?’

  ‘I don’t know, Lord.’

  Agricola grunted. ‘I pray he does. Someone needs to talk sense into this army. All commanders are summoned to Magnis tonight. A council of war.’ He said it bitterly, as though he knew that such councils produced more quarrels than comradeship. ‘Be there by sunset.’

  Galahad came with me. Nimue stayed with my men for her presence gave them confidence and I was glad she did not come for the council was opened by a prayer from Bishop Conrad of Gwent who seemed imbued with defeatism as he begged his God to give us strength to face the over-mighty foe. Galahad, his arms spread in the Christian pose of prayer, murmured along with the Bishop while we pagans grumbled that we should not pray for strength, but victory. I wished we had some Druids among us, but Tewdric, a Christian, employed none, and Balise, the old man who had attended Mordred’s acclamation, had died during the first winter I was in Benoic. Agricola was right to hope that Merlin would come, for an army without Druids was giving away an advantage to its enemy.

  There were some forty or fifty men at the council, all of us chieftains or leaders. We met in the bare stone hall of Magnis’s bath house that reminded me of Ynys Wydryn’s church. King Tewdric, Arthur, Agricola and Tewdric’s son, the Edling Meurig, sat at a table on a stone dais. Meurig had grown into a pale thin creature who looked unhappy in his ill-fitting Roman armour. He was just old enough to fight, but with his nervous air he looked very unfit for battle. He blinked constantly, as if he had just come into sunlight from a very dark room, and he kept fidgeting with a heavy gold cross that hung around his neck. Arthur alone of the commanders was not in war gear, but looked relaxed in his countryman’s clothes.

  The warriors cheered and stamped their spear-butts when King Tewdric announced that the Saxons were believed to have withdrawn from the eastern frontier, but that was the last cheering for a long while that night, because Agricola then stood and gave his blunt assessment of the two armies. He did not list all the enemy’s smaller contingents, but even without those additions it
was clear that Gorfyddyd’s army would outnumber ours by two to one. ‘We’ll just have to kill twice as fast!’ Morfans shouted from the back. He had returned the scale armour to Arthur, swearing that only a hero could wear that amount of metal and still fight. Agricola ignored the interruption, adding instead that the harvest should be complete in a week and the levies of Gwent would then swell our numbers. No one seemed too cheered by that news.

  King Tewdric proposed that we should fight Gorfyddyd under the walls of Magnis. ‘Give me a week,’ he said, ‘and I will so fill this fortress with the new harvest that Gorfyddyd will never pitch us out. Fight here’ – he gestured towards the dark beyond the hall doors – ‘and if the battle goes ill we pull inside the gates and let them waste their spears on wooden palisades.’ It was the way of war Tewdric preferred and had long perfected: siege warfare, where he could use the work of long-dead Roman engineers to frustrate spears and swords. A murmur of agreement sounded in the room, and that murmur swelled when Tewdric told the council that Aelle might well be planning to attack Ratae.

  ‘Hold Gorfyddyd here,’ one man said, ‘and he’ll run back north when he hears Aelle’s coming through his back door.’

  ‘Aelle will not fight my battle.’ Arthur spoke for the first time, and the room became still. Arthur seemed embarrassed at having spoken so firmly. He smiled apologetically at King Tewdric and asked exactly where the enemy forces were gathered. Arthur already knew, of course, but he was asking the question so that the rest of us would hear the answer.

  Agricola answered for Tewdric. ‘Their forward men are strung between Coel’s Hill and Caer Lud,’ he said, ‘while the main army gathers at Branogenium. More men are marching from Caer Sws.’

  The names meant little to us, but Arthur seemed to understand the geography. ‘So they guard the hills between us and Branogenium?’

  ‘Every pass,’ Agricola confirmed, ‘and every hilltop’

  ‘How many at Lugg Vale?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘At least two hundred of their best spearmen. They’re not fools, Lord,’ Agricola added sourly.

  Arthur stood. He was at his best at these councils, easily dominating crowds of fractious men. He smiled at us. ‘The Christians will understand this best,’ he said, subtly flattering the men most likely to oppose him. ‘Imagine a Christian cross. Here at Magnis we are at the foot of the cross. The cross’s shaft is the Roman road that runs north from Magnis to Branogenium, and the crosspiece is made by the hills that bar that road. Coel’s Hill is at the left of the crosspiece, Caer Lud at the right, and Lugg Vale is at the cross’s centre. The vale is where the road and river pass through the hills.’

  He walked out from behind the table and perched himself on its front so he was closer to his audience. ‘I want you to think about something,’ he said. The flamelight from the beck-eted torches cast shadows on his long cheeks, but his eyes were bright and his tone energetic. ‘Everyone knows we must lose this battle,’ he said. ‘We are outnumbered. We wait here for Gorfyddyd to attack us. We wait and some of us become dispirited and carry our spears home. Others fall ill. And all of us brood on that great army gathering in the bowl of the hills around Branogenium and we try not to imagine our shield–wall outflanked and the enemy coming at us from three sides at once. But think of the enemy! They wait too, but as they wait they get stronger! Men come from Cornovia, from Elmet, from Demetia, from Gwynedd. Landless men come to gain land and masterless men to take plunder. They know they will win and they know we wait like mice trapped by a tribe of cats.’

  He smiled again and stood up. ‘But we’re not mice. We have some of the greatest warriors ever to lift a spear. We have champions!’ The cheering began. ‘We can kill cats! And we know how to skin them too! But.’ That last word stopped the next cheer just as it began. ‘But,’ Arthur went on, ‘not if we wait here to be attacked. Wait here behind Magnis’s walls and what happens? The enemy will march around us. Our homes, our wives, our children, our lands, our flocks and our new harvest become theirs, and all we become are mice in a trap. We must attack, and attack soon.’

  Agricola waited for the Dumnonian cheers to die. ‘Attack where?’ he asked sourly.

  ‘Where they least expect it, Lord, in their strongest place. Lugg Vale. Straight up the cross! Straight to the heart!’ He held up a hand to stop any cheering. ‘The vale is a narrow place,’ he said, ‘where no shield-line can be outflanked. The road fords the river north of the valley.’ He was frowning as he spoke, trying to remember a place he had seen only once in his life, but Arthur had a soldier’s memory for terrain and only needed to see a place once. ‘We would need to put men on the western hill to stop their archers raining arrows down, but once in the vale I swear we cannot be moved.’

  Agricola objected. ‘We can hold there,’ he agreed, ‘but how do we fight our way in? They have two hundred spearmen there, maybe more, but even one hundred men can hold that valley all day. By the time we’ve fought to the vale’s far end Gorfyddyd will have brought his horde down from Branogenium. Worse, the Blackshield Irish who garrison Coel’s Hill can march south of the hills and take our rear. We might not be moved, Lord, but we’ll be killed where we stand.’

  ‘The Irish on Coel’s Hill don’t matter,’ Arthur said carelessly. He was excited and could not stay still; he began pacing up and down the dais, explaining and cajoling. ‘Think, I beg you, Lord King’ – he spoke to Tewdric – ‘what happens if we stay here. The enemy will come, we shall retreat behind impregnable walls and they will raid our lands. By midwinter we’ll be alive, but will anyone else in Gwent or Dumnonia still live? No. Those hills south of Branogenium are Gorfyddyd’s walls. If we breach those walls he has to fight us, and if he fights in Lugg Vale he is a defeated man.’

  ‘His two hundred men in Lugg Vale will stop us,’ Agricola insisted.

  ‘They will vanish like the mist!’ Arthur proclaimed confidently. ‘They are two hundred men who have never faced armoured horse in battle.’

  Agricola shook his head. ‘The vale is barred by a wall of felled trees. Armoured horse will be stopped’ – he paused to ram his fist into an upraised palm – ‘dead.’ He said the word flatly and the finality of his tone made Arthur sit. There was the smell of defeat in the hall. From outside the baths, where the blacksmiths worked day and night, I heard the hiss of a newly forged blade being quenched in water.

  ‘Perhaps I might be permitted to speak?’ The speaker was Meurig, Tewdric’s son. He had a strangely high voice, almost petulant in its tone, and he was evidently short-sighted for he screwed up his eyes and cocked his head whenever he wanted to look at a man in the main part of the hall. ‘What I would like to ask,’ he said when his father had given him permission to address the council, ‘is why we fight at all?’ He blinked rapidly when the question was asked.

  No one answered. Maybe we were all too astonished at the question.

  ‘Let me, permit me, allow me to explain,’ Meurig said in a pedantic tone. He might have been young, but he possessed the confidence of a prince, though I found the false modesty with which he cloaked his pronouncements irritating. ‘We fight Gorfyddyd – correct me if I am wrong – out of our longstanding alliance with Dumnonia. That alliance has served us well, I doubt not, but Gorfyddyd, as I understand it, has no designs upon the Dumnonian throne.’

  A growl came from we Dumnonians, but Arthur held up his hand for silence, then gestured for Meurig to continue. Meurig blinked and tugged at his cross. ‘I just wonder why we fight? What, if I might phrase it thus, is our casus belli?’

  ‘Cow’s belly?’ Culhwch shouted. Culhwch had seen me when I arrived and had crossed the hall to welcome me. Now he put his mouth close to my ear. ‘Bastards have got thin shields, Derfel,’ he said, ‘and they’re looking for a way out.’

  Arthur stood again and spoke courteously to Meurig. ‘The cause of the war, Lord Prince, is your father’s oath to preserve King Mordred’s throne, and King Gorfyddyd’s evident desire to take that throne from my King.’
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  Meurig shrugged. ‘But – correct me, please, I beg you – but as I understand these things Gorfyddyd does not seek to dethrone King Mordred.’

  ‘You know that?’ Culhwch shouted.

  ‘There are indications,’ Meurig said irritably.

  ‘Bastards have been talking to the enemy,’ Culhwch whispered in my ear. ‘Ever had a knife in the back, Derfel? Arthur’s getting one now.’

  Arthur stayed calm. ‘What indications?’ he asked mildly.

  King Tewdric had stayed silent as his son spoke, evidence that he had given his permission for Meurig to suggest, however delicately, that Gorfyddyd should be appeased rather than confronted, but now, looking old and tired, the King took control of the hall. ‘There are no indications, Lord, upon which I would want to depend my strategy. Nevertheless’ – and when Tewdric pronounced that word so emphatically we all knew Arthur had lost the debate – ‘nevertheless, Lord, I am convinced that we need not provoke Powys unnecessarily. Let us see whether we cannot have peace.’ He paused, almost as if he feared the word would anger Arthur, but Arthur said nothing. Tewdric sighed. ‘Gorfyddyd fights,’ he said slowly and carefully, ‘because of an insult done to his family.’ Again he paused, fearing that his bluntness might have offended Arthur, but Arthur was never a man to evade responsibility and he nodded his reluctant agreement with Tewdric’s frankness. ‘While we,’ Tewdric continued, ‘fight to keep the oath we gave to High King Uther. An oath by which we promised to preserve Mordred’s throne. I, for one, will not break that oath.’

  ‘Nor I!’ Arthur said loudly.

  ‘But what, Lord Arthur, if King Gorfyddyd has no designs on that throne?’ King Tewdric asked. ‘If he means to keep Mordred as King, then why do we fight?’

  There was uproar in the hall. We Dumnonians smelled treachery, the men of Gwent smelled an escape from the war, and for a time we shouted at each other until at last Arthur regained order by slapping his hand on the table. ‘The last envoy I sent to Gorfyddyd,’ Arthur said, ‘had his head sent back in a sack. Are you suggesting, Lord King, we send another?’