The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur

by Bernard Cornwell

  Sagramor turned to us and raised his arms. ‘Back!’ he shouted. ‘Back to the fence! Quick now! Back!’

  We turned our backs on the enemy and hurried away and a great shout went up as they saw our twin banners retreat. They thought we were running and they broke their ranks to pursue us, but we had too great a start on them and we had streamed through the gap in the barricade long before any of Gorfyddyd’s men could reach us. Our line spread behind the fence while I took Arthur’s proper place in the very centre of the line where the road ran through the empty gap between the felled trees. We deliberately left the gap without any obstacles in the hope that it would draw Gorfyddyd’s attacks and thus give our flanks time to rest. I raised Arthur’s two banners there and waited for the assault.

  Gorfyddyd roared at his disordered spearmen to make a new shield–wall. King Gundleus commanded the enemy’s right flank and Prince Cuneglas the left. That arrangement suggested that Gorfyddyd was not going to take our bait of the open gap, but intended to assault all along the line. ‘You stay here!’ Sagramor shouted at our spearmen. ‘You’re warriors! You’re going to prove it now! You stay here, you kill here and you win here!’ Morfans had forced his wounded horse a small way up the western hill from where he looked north up the vale, judging whether this was the moment to sound the horn and summon Arthur, but enemy reinforcements were still crossing the ford and he came back without putting the silver to his lips.

  Gorfyddyd’s horn sounded instead. It was a raucous ram’s horn that did not send his shield-line forward, but instead provoked a dozen naked madmen to burst out of the enemy’s line and rush on our centre. Such men have put their souls in the Gods’ keeping, then fuddled their senses with a mixture of mead, thorn-apple juice, mandrake and belladonna, which can give a man waking nightmares even as it takes away his fears. Such men might be mad, drunk and naked, but they were also dangerous for they had only one aim and that was to bring down the enemy commanders. They rushed at me, mouths foaming from the magical herbs they had been chewing and with their spears held overhead ready to drive down.

  My wolf-tailed spearmen advanced to meet them. The naked men did not care about death, they threw themselves on my spearmen as if they welcomed their spear-points. One of my men was driven backwards with a naked brute clawing at his eyes and spitting into his face. Issa killed that fiend, but another managed to kill one of my best men and then screamed his victory, legs apart, arms upheld and bloody spear in bloody hand, and all my men thought the Gods must have deserted us, but Sagramor ripped the naked man’s belly open, then half severed his head before the corpse had even fallen to the ground. Sagramor spat on to the naked, eviscerated corpse, then spat again towards the enemy shield–wall. That wall, seeing the centre of our line was disordered, charged.

  Our hastily realigned centre buckled when the mass of spearmen slammed home. The thin line of men stretched across the road bent like a sapling, but somehow we held. We were cheering each other, calling on the Gods, stabbing and cutting while Morfans and his horsemen rode all along the shield–wall and threw themselves into the fight wherever the enemy seemed about to break through. The flanks of our shield–wall were protected by the barricade and so had an easier time, but in the centre our fight was desperate. I was maddened by now, lost in the weltering joy of battle. I lost my spear to an enemy’s grip, drew Hywelbane, but held back her first stroke to let an enemy’s shield hammer into Arthur’s polished silver. The shields banged together, then the enemy’s face showed for an instant and I lanced Hywelbane forward and felt the pressure vanish from the shield. The man fell, his body making a barrier over which his comrades had to climb.

  Issa killed one man, then took a spear thrust to his shield arm that soaked his sleeve in blood. He kept fighting. I was hacking madly in the space made by my fallen enemy to carve a hole in Gorfyddyd’s shield–wall. I saw the enemy King once, staring from his horse to where I screamed and slashed and dared his men to come and take my soul. Some did dare, thinking to make themselves the stuff of songs, but instead they made themselves into corpses. Hywelbane was soaked in blood, my right hand was sticky with it and the sleeve of the heavy scale coat was smeared with it, but none of it was mine.

  The centre of our line, unprotected by the tangling trees, very nearly did break once, but two of Morfans’s horsemen used their beasts to plug the gap. One of the horses died, screaming and thrashing its hooves as it bled to death on the road. Then our shield–wall mended itself and we shoved back at the enemy who slowly, slowly were being choked by the press of dead and dying bodies that lay between the two front ranks. Nimue was behind us, shrieking and hurling curses.

  The enemy pulled away and at last we could rest. All of us were bloody and mudstained, and our breath came in huge gasps. Our sword and spear arms were weary. News of comrades was passed along the ranks. Minac was dead, this man wounded, another man dying. Men bandaged their neighbours’ wounds, then swore oaths to defend each other to the death. I tried to ease the galling pressure of Arthur’s armour that had rubbed great sores on my shoulders.

  The enemy was wary now. The tired men who faced us had felt our swords and learned to fear us, yet still they attacked again. This time it was Gundleus’s royal guard that assaulted our centre and we met them at the bloody pile of dead and dying that was left from the last attack, and that gory ridge saved us, for the enemy spearmen could not clamber over the bodies and protect themselves at the same time. We broke their ankles, cut open their legs, then speared them as they fell to make the bloody ridge higher. Black ravens circled the ford, their wings ragged against the dun sky. I saw Ligessac, the traitor who had yielded Norwenna to Gundleus’s sword, and I tried to cut my way through to him, but the tide of battle swept him away from Hywelbane. Then the enemy pulled back again and I hoarsely ordered some of my men to fetch skins of water from the river. We were all thirsty for the sweat had poured off us, mingling with blood. I had one scratch on my sword hand, but nothing else. I had been to the death-pit and always reckoned that was why I was lucky in battle.

  The enemy began putting new troops in their front line. Some carried Cuneglas’s eagle, some Gundleus’s fox and a few had emblems of their own. Then a cheer sounded behind me and I turned, expecting to see Tewdric’s men arriving in their Roman uniforms, but instead it was Galahad who came alone on a sweating horse. He slid to a halt behind our line and half fell off the horse in his haste to reach us. ‘I thought I’d be too late,’ he said.

  ‘Are they coming?’ I asked.

  He paused and even before he spoke I knew that we had been abandoned. ‘No,’ he said at last.

  I swore and looked back to the enemy. It was the Gods alone who had saved us in the last attack, but the Gods alone knew how long we could hold now. ‘No one is coming?’ I asked bitterly.

  ‘A few maybe.’ Galahad gave the bad news in a low voice. ‘Tewdric believes we’re doomed, Agricola says they should help us, but Meurig says we must be left to die. They’re all arguing, but Tewdric did say that any man who wants to die here could follow me. Maybe some are on the way?’

  I prayed there were, for some of Gorfyddyd’s levy had arrived on the western hill now, though none of that ragged horde had yet dared to cross Nimue’s ghost-fence. We could hold for two more hours, I thought, and after that we were doomed, though Arthur would surely come first. ‘No sign of the Blackshield Irish?’ I asked Galahad.

  ‘No, thank God,’ he said, and it was one small blessing on a day almost bereft of blessings, though a half-hour after Galahad came, we did at last receive some reinforcements. Seven men walked north towards our battered shield–wall, seven men in war gear carrying spears, shields and swords, and the symbol on the shields was the hawk of Kernow, our enemy. Yet these men were no enemies. They were six scarred and hardened fighters led by their Edling, Prince Tristan.

  He explained his presence when the excitement of greeting was over. ‘Arthur fought for me once, and I have long wanted to repay the debt.’

/>   ‘With your life?’ Sagramor asked grimly.

  ‘He risked his,’ Tristan said simply. I remembered him as a tall handsome man, and so he still was, but the years had added a wary and tired look to his face as though he had suffered too many disappointments. ‘My father,’ he added ruefully, ‘may never forgive my coming here, but I could never have forgiven my absence.’

  ‘How’s Sarlinna?’ I asked him.

  ‘Sarlinna?’ He took a few seconds to remember the small girl who had come to accuse Owain at Caer Cadarn. ‘Oh, Sarlinna! Married now. To a fisherman.’ He smiled. ‘You gave her the kitten, didn’t you?’

  We put Tristan and his men in our centre, the place of honour on this battlefield, yet when the enemy’s next assault came it was not against the centre, but against the tree fence protecting our flanks. For a time the shallow trench and the fence’s tangling branches caused them havoc, but they learned swiftly enough to use the felled trees to protect themselves and in some places they burst clean through and bent our line backwards again. But again we held them, and Griffid, my erstwhile enemy, made a name for himself by cutting down Nasiens, Gundleus’s champion. The shields crashed incessantly. Spears broke, swords shattered and shields split as the exhausted fought the weary. On the hilltop the enemy levy gathered to watch from beyond Nimue’s ghost-fence as Morfans once again forced his tired horse up the perilously steep slope. He stared northwards and we watched him and prayed that he would blow the horn. He stared for a long time, but he must have been satisfied that all the enemy forces were now trapped in the vale for he put the silver horn to his lips and blew the blessed summons across the din of battle.

  Never was a horn call more welcome. Our whole line surged forward and scarred swords hammered at the enemy with a new energy. The silver horn, so pure and clear, called again and again, a hunting call to the slaughter, and each time it sounded our men pressed forward into the branches of the felled trees to cut and stab and scream at the enemy who, suspecting some trickery, glanced nervously around the vale as they defended themselves. Gorfyddyd shouted at his men to break us now, and his royal guard led the attack on our centre. I heard Kernow’s men screaming their war cry as they paid their Edling’s debt. Nimue was among our spearmen and wielding a sword with both hands. I shouted at her to get back, but the bloodlust had swamped her soul and she fought like a fiend. The enemy was scared of her, knowing that she was of the Gods, and men tried to evade rather than fight her, but all the same I was glad when Galahad thrust her away from the fight. Galahad might have come late to the battle, but he fought with a savage glee that drove the enemy back from the twitching pile of dead and dying men.

  The horn sounded a last time. And Arthur, at last, charged.

  His armoured spearmen had come from their hiding place north of the river and now their horses foamed through the ford like a tide of thunder. They crashed over the bodies left by the early fighting and brought their bright spears down into the charge as they seared into the enemy’s rearward units. Men scattered like chaff as the iron-shod horses drove deep into Gorfyddyd’s army. Arthur’s men divided into two groups that cut deep channels through that press of spearmen. They charged, they left their spears fixed in the dead and then made more dead with their swords.

  And for a moment, for a glorious moment, I thought the enemy would break, but then Gorfyddyd saw the same danger and he shouted at his men to form a new shield–wall facing north. He would sacrifice his rearward men and instead make a new line of spears from the backmost ranks of his forward troops. And that new line held. Owain, so long ago, had been right when he told me that not even Arthur’s horses would charge home against a well-made shield–wall. Nor would they. Arthur had brought panic and death to a third of Cuneglas’s army, but the rest were now formed properly and they defied his handful of cavalry.

  And still the enemy outnumbered us.

  Behind the tree fence our line was nowhere more than two men deep and in places it was just one. Arthur had failed to cut through to us, and Gorfyddyd knew that Arthur never would cut through so long as he kept a shield–wall facing the horses. He planted that shield–wall, abandoning the lost third of his army to Arthur’s mercy, then turned the rest of his men to face Sagramor’s shield–wall again. Gorfyddyd now knew Arthur’s tactics, and he had defeated them, so he could hurl his spearmen into battle with a new confidence, though this time, instead of assaulting all along our line, he concentrated his attack along the vale’s western edge in an attempt to turn our left flank.

  The men on that flank fought, they killed and they died, but few men could have held the line for long, and none could have held it once Gundleus’s Silurians outflanked us by climbing the lower slopes of the hill beneath the ghastly ghost-fence. The attack was brutal and the defence just as horrid. Morfans’s surviving horsemen hurled themselves at the Silurians, Nimue spat curses at them and Tristan’s fresh men fought there like champions, but if we had possessed double our numbers we could not have stopped the enemy from outflanking us and so our shield–wall, like a snake recoiling, collapsed on to the river bank where we made a defensive half-circle about two banners and the few wounded men we had managed to carry back with us. It was a terrible moment. I saw our shield–wall break, saw the enemy begin the slaughter of scattered men, and then I ran with the rest into the desperate huddle of survivors. We just had time to make a crude shield–wall, then we could only watch as Gorfyddyd’s triumphant forces pursued and killed our fugitives. Tristan survived, as did Galahad and Sagramor, but that was small consolation for we had lost the battle and all that remained for us now was to die like heroes. In the northern half of the vale Arthur was still held by the shield–wall, while to the south our wall, that had resisted its enemies all that long day, had been broken and its remnant surrounded. We had gone into battle two hundred strong and now we numbered just over a hundred men.

  Prince Cuneglas rode forward to ask for our surrender. His father was commanding the men facing Arthur and the King of Powys was content to leave the destruction of Sagramor’s remaining spearmen to his son and to King Gundleus. Cuneglas, at least, did not insult my men. He curbed his horse a dozen paces from our line and raised an empty right hand to show he came in truce. ‘Men of Dumnonia!’ Cuneglas called. ‘You have fought well, but to fight further is to die. I offer you life.’

  ‘Use your sword once before you ask brave men to surrender,’ I shouted at him.

  ‘Afraid to fight, are you?’ Sagramor jeered for so far none of us had seen Gorfyddyd, Cuneglas or Gundleus in the front of the enemy shield–wall. King Gundleus sat on his horse a few paces behind Prince Cuneglas. Nimue was cursing him, but whether or not he was aware of her I could not tell. If he was he could not have been worried, for we were all now trapped and surely doomed.

  ‘Or fight me now!’ I shouted at Cuneglas. ‘Man to man, if you dare.’

  Cuneglas gazed at me sadly. I was bloodstained, mud-covered, sweaty, bruised and hurting, while he was elegant in a short suit of scale armour and with a helmet surmounted by eagle feathers. He half smiled at me. ‘I know you’re not Arthur,’ he said, ‘for I saw him on horseback, but whoever you are, you have fought nobly. I offer you life.’

  I pulled the sweaty, confining helmet off my head and tossed it into the centre of our half-circle. ‘You know me, Lord Prince,’ I said.

  ‘Lord Derfel.’ He named me, then did me honour. ‘Lord Derfei Cadarn,’ he said, ‘if I stand surety for your life and for the lives of your men, will you surrender?’

  ‘Lord Prince,’ I said, ‘I do not command here. You must speak to Lord Sagramor.’

  Sagramor stepped up beside me and took off his black spired helmet that had been pierced by a spear so that his black curly hair was matted with blood. ‘Lord Prince,’ he said warily.

  ‘I offer you life,’ Cuneglas said, ‘so long as you surrender.’

  Sagramor pointed his curved sword to where Arthur’s horsemen dominated the northern part of the vale. ‘My Lord
has not surrendered,’ he told Cuneglas, ‘so I cannot. But nevertheless’ – he raised his voice – ‘I release my men from their oaths.’

  ‘I also,’ I called to my men.

  I am sure some were tempted to leave the ranks, but their comrades growled at them to stay, or perhaps the growl was simply the sound of tired men’s defiance. Prince Cuneglas waited a few seconds, then took two thin gold torques from a pouch at his belt. He smiled at us. ‘I salute your bravery, Lord Sagramor. I salute you, Lord Derfel.’ He threw the gold so that it landed at our feet. I picked mine up and bent the ends apart so that it would fit around my neck. ‘And Derfel Cadarn?’ Cuneglas added. His round, friendly face was smiling.

  ‘Lord Prince?’

  ‘My sister asked that I should greet you. And so I do.’

  My soul, so close to death, seemed to leap with joy at the greeting. ‘Give her my greetings, Lord Prince,’ I answered, ‘and tell her I shall look forward to her company in the Otherworld.’ Then the thought of never seeing Ceinwyn again in this world overcame my joy and suddenly I wanted to weep.

  Cuneglas saw my sadness. ‘You need not die, Lord Derfel,’ he said. ‘I offer you life, and I stand surety for you. I offer you my friendship too, if you will have it.’

  ‘I would honour it, Lord Prince,’ I said, ‘but while my Lord fights, I fight.’