Enemy of God

by Bernard Cornwell

  Those of us on the low hilltop readied ourselves for battle and it promised to be a grim business because our hurriedly assembled shield-wall was much smaller than Cerdic’s line. At that time, of course, we still did not know it was Cerdic’s army; at first we assumed these new Saxons were Aelle’s own reinforcements come late to the battle, and the banner they were displaying, a wolf’s skull painted red and hung with the tanned skin of a dead man, meant nothing to us. Cerdic’s usual banner was a pair of horse-tails attached to a thigh bone mounted crosswise on a pole, but his wizards had devised this new symbol and it momentarily confused us. More men straggled back from their pursuit of Aelle’s defeated remnant to thicken our wall as Arthur led his horsemen back to our hilltop. He trotted Llamrei down our ranks and I remember that his white cloak was spotted and streaked with blood. ‘They’ll die like the rest!’ he encouraged us as he trotted past, the bloodstained Excalibur in his hand. ‘They’ll die like the rest.’

  Then, just as Aelle’s army had parted to let Aelle emerge from the ranks, so this new Saxon force divided and their leaders came towards us. Three of them walked, but six came on horseback, curbing their mounts to keep pace with the three men on foot. One of the men on foot carried the gruesome wolf’s skull banner, then one of the horsemen raised a second banner and a gasp of astonishment ran down our army. The gasp made Arthur wheel his horse and stare aghast at the approaching men.

  For the new banner showed a sea-eagle with a fish in its claws. It was Lancelot’s flag, and now I could see that Lancelot himself was one of the six horsemen. He was splendidly arrayed in his white enamelled armour and his swan-winged helmet, and he was flanked by Arthur’s twin sons, Amhar and Loholt. Dinas and Lavaine in their Druids’ robes rode behind, while Ade, Lancelot’s red-haired mistress, carried the Silurian King’s banner.

  Sagramor had come to stand beside me and he glanced at me to make certain that I was seeing what he was seeing, and then he spat onto the heath. ‘Is Malla safe?’ I asked him.

  ‘Safe and unharmed,’ he said, pleased I had asked. He looked back at the approaching Lancelot. ‘Do you understand what’s happening?’

  ‘No.’ None of us did.

  Arthur sheathed Excalibur and turned to me. ‘Derfel!’ he called, wanting me as a translator, then he beckoned to his other leaders just as Lancelot broke away from the approaching delegation and spurred excitedly up the gently sloping hill towards us.

  ‘Allies!’ I heard Lancelot shout. He waved back at the Saxons. ‘Allies!’ he shouted again as his horse drew near to Arthur.

  Arthur said nothing. He just stood his horse as Lancelot struggled to quieten his big black stallion. ‘Allies,’ Lancelot said a third time. ‘It’s Cerdic,’ he added excitedly, gesturing towards the Saxon King who was walking slowly towards us.

  Arthur asked quietly, ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I’ve brought you allies!’ Lancelot said happily, then glanced at me. ‘Cerdic has his own translator,’ he said dismissively.

  ‘Derfel stays!’ Arthur snapped with a sudden and terrifying anger in his voice. Then he remembered that Lancelot was a King and sighed. ‘What have you done, Lord King?’ he asked again.

  Dinas, who had spurred ahead with the other riders, was foolish enough to answer for Lancelot. ‘We’ve made peace, Lord!’ he said in his dark voice.

  ‘Go!’ Arthur roared, shocking and astonishing the Druid pair with his anger. They had only ever seen the calm, patient, peacemaking Arthur and did not even suspect that he contained such fury. This anger was nothing to the rage that had consumed him at Lugg Vale when the dying Gorfyddyd had called Guinevere a whore, but it was a terrifying anger all the same. ‘Go!’ he shouted at Tanaburs’s grandsons. ‘This meeting is for Lords. And you too,’ he pointed at his sons, ‘go!’ He waited until all Lancelot’s followers had withdrawn, then looked back at the Silurian King. ‘What have you done?’ he asked a third time in a bitter voice.

  Lancelot’s affronted dignity made him stiff. ‘I made peace,’ he said acidly. ‘I kept Cerdic from attacking you. I did what I could to help you.’

  ‘What you did,’ Arthur said in an angry voice, but so low that no man in Cerdic’s approaching entourage could hear him, ‘is fight Cerdic’s battle. We’ve just half destroyed Aelle, so what does that make Cerdic? It makes him twice as powerful as before. That’s what it does! The Gods help us!’ With that he tossed his reins to Lancelot, a subtle insult, then slid off his horse’s back, twitched his bloody cloak straight and stared imperiously at the Saxons.

  That was the first time I met Cerdic, and though all the bards make him sound like a fiend with cloven hooves and a serpent’s bite, in truth he was a short, slightly built man with thin fair hair that he combed straight back from his forehead and tied in a knot at the nape of his neck. He was very pale-skinned and had a broad forehead and a narrow, clean-shaven chin. His mouth was thin-lipped, his nose sharp-boned, and his eyes as pale as dawn-misted water. Aelle wore his emotions on his face, but even at a first glance I doubted whether Cerdic’s self-control would ever allow his expression to betray his thoughts. He wore a Roman breastplate, woollen trews and a cloak of fox fur. He looked neat and precise; indeed, if it had not been for the gold at his throat and wrists, I might have mistaken him for a scribe. Except that his eyes were not those of a clerk; those pale eyes missed nothing and gave nothing away. ‘I am Cerdic,’ he announced himself in a soft voice.

  Arthur stepped aside so that Cuneglas could name himself, then Meurig insisted on being a part of the conference. Cerdic glanced at both men, dismissed them as unimportant, then looked back to Arthur. ‘I bring you a gift,’ he said, and held a hand towards the chieftain who accompanied him. The man produced a gold-hilted knife that Cerdic presented to Arthur.

  ‘The gift,’ I translated Arthur’s words, ‘should go to our Lord King Cuneglas.’

  Cerdic put the naked blade onto his left palm and closed his fingers about it. His eyes never left Arthur’s, and when he opened his hand there was blood on the blade. ‘The gift is for Arthur,’ he insisted.

  Arthur took it. He was uncharacteristically nervous, maybe fearing some magic in the bloody steel or else fearing that acceptance of the gift made him complicit in Cerdic’s ambitions. ‘Tell the King,’ he told me, ‘that I have no gift for him.’

  Cerdic smiled. It was a wintry smile and I thought of how a wolf must appear to a stray lamb. ‘Tell Lord Arthur that he has given me the gift of peace,’ he told me.

  ‘But suppose I choose war?’ Arthur asked defiantly. ‘Here and now!’ He gestured to the hilltop where still more of our spearmen had rallied so that our numbers were now at least equal to Cerdic’s.

  ‘Tell him,’ Cerdic ordered me, ‘that these are not all my men,’ he gestured at his shield-wall that watched us, ‘and tell him, too, that King Lancelot gave me peace in Arthur’s name.’

  I told that to Arthur and I saw a muscle flicker in his cheek, but he kept his anger curbed. ‘In two days,’ Arthur said, and it was not a suggestion, but an order, ‘we shall meet in London. There we shall discuss our peace.’ He pushed the bloody knife into his belt and, when I had finished translating his words, he summoned me. He did not wait to hear Cerdic’s response, but just led me up the hill until we were out of earshot of both delegations. He noticed my shoulder for the first time. ‘How bad is your wound?’

  ‘It’ll heal,’ I said.

  He stopped, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘What Cerdic wants,’ he told me when he opened his eyes, ‘is to rule all Lloegyr. But if we let him do that then we have one terrible enemy instead of two weaker ones.’ He walked in silence for a few paces, stepping among the dead left from Aelle’s charge. ‘Before this war,’ he continued bitterly, ‘Aelle was powerful and Cerdic was a nuisance, but with Aelle destroyed we could have turned on Cerdic. Now it’s the other way round. Aelle is weakened, but Cerdic is powerful.’

  ‘So fight him now,’ I said.

  He looked at me with we
ary brown eyes. ‘Be honest, Derfel,’ he said in a low voice, ‘not boastful. Will we win if we fight?’

  I looked at Cerdic’s army. It was tightly arrayed and ready for battle, while our men were weary and hungry, but Cerdic’s men had never faced Arthur’s horsemen. ‘I think we would win, Lord,’ I said honestly.

  ‘So do I,’ Arthur said, ‘but it will be hard fighting, Derfel, and at the end of it we’ll have at least a hundred wounded men we’ll need to carry back home with us and the Saxons will summon every garrison in Lloegyr to face us. We might beat Cerdic here, but we’ll never reach home alive. We’re too deep in Lloegyr.’ He grimaced at the thought. ‘And if we weaken ourselves fighting against Cerdic do you think Aelle won’t be waiting to ambush us on the way home?’ He shuddered with a sudden surge of anger. ‘What was Lancelot thinking of? I can’t have Cerdic as an ally! He’ll gain half Britain, turn on us and we’ll have a Saxon enemy twice as terrible as before.’ He uttered one of his rare curses, then rubbed his bony face with a gloved hand. ‘Well, the broth’s spoilt,’ he went on bitterly, ‘but we still have to eat it. The only answer is to leave Aelle strong enough to frighten Cerdic still, so take six of my horsemen and find him. Find him, Derfel, and give him this wretched thing as a gift.’ He thrust Cerdic’s knife at me. ‘Clean it first,’ he said irritably, ‘and you can take his bearskin cloak as well. Agravain found it. Give that to him as a second gift and tell him to come to London. Tell him I oath-swear his safety, and tell him it is his only chance to keep some land. You have two days, Derfel, so find him.’

  I hesitated, not because I disagreed, but because I did not understand why Aelle needed to be in London. ‘Because,’ Arthur answered wearily, ‘I cannot stay in London with Aelle loose in Lloegyr. He might have lost his army here, but he has garrisons enough to make another, and while we disentangle ourselves from Cerdic he could lay half Dumnonia waste.’ He turned and stared balefully at Lancelot and Cerdic. I thought he was going to curse again, but he just sighed wearily. ‘I’m going to make a peace, Derfel. The Gods know it isn’t the peace I wanted, but we might as well make it properly. Now go, my friend, go.’

  I stayed long enough to make certain that Issa would take proper care of the burning of Cavan’s body and that he would find a lake and throw the dead Irishman’s sword into the water, and then I rode north in the wake of a beaten army.

  While Arthur, his dream skewed by a fool, marched to London.

  I had long dreamed of seeing London, but even in my wildest fancies I had not imagined its reality. I had thought it would be like Glevum, a little larger perhaps, but still a place where a group of tall buildings would be clustered about a central open space with small streets huddled behind and an earth wall ringing it all, but in London there were six such open spaces, all with their pillared halls, arcaded temples and brick-built palaces. The ordinary houses, that in Glevum or Durnovaria were low and thatched, were here built two or three storeys high. Many of the houses had collapsed over the years, but plenty still had their tiled roofs and folk still climbed their steep timber stairs. Most of our men had never seen a flight of stairs inside a building and on their first day in London they had raced like excited children to see the view from the topmost floors. Finally one of the buildings had collapsed under their weight and Arthur then forbade any more stair-climbing.

  The fortress of London was bigger then Caer Sws, and that fortress was merely the north-west bastion of the city’s wall. There were a dozen barracks inside the fortress, each bigger than a feasting hall, and each made of small red bricks. Beside the fortress was an amphitheatre, a temple, and one of the city’s ten bath-houses. Other towns had such things, of course, but everything here was taller and wider. Durnovaria’s amphitheatre was a thing of grassy earth and I had always thought it impressive enough until I saw the London arena that could have swallowed five amphitheatres like Durnovaria’s. The wall about the city was built of stone instead of earth, and though Aelle had allowed its ramparts to crumble, it was still a formidable barrier that was now crowned with Cerdic’s triumphant men. Cerdic had occupied the city and the presence of his skull banners on the walls showed that he intended to keep it.

  The river bank also possessed a stone wall that had first been built against the Saxon pirates. Gaps in that wall led to quays, and one gap opened into a canal that ran into the heart of a great garden about which a palace was built. There were still busts and statues in the palace, and long tiled corridors and a great pillared hall where I assumed our Roman rulers had once met in government. Rainwater now trickled down the painted walls, the floor tiles were broken and the garden was a mass of weeds, but the glory was still there, even if it was only a shadow. The whole city was a shadow of its old glory. None of the city’s bath-houses still functioned. Their pools were cracked and empty, their furnaces were cold and their mosaic floors had heaved and cracked under the assault of frost and weeds. The stone streets had decayed into muddy strips, but despite the decay the city was still massive and magnificent. It made me wonder what Rome must be like. Galahad told me that London was a mere village in comparison, and that Rome’s amphitheatre was big enough to swallow twenty arenas like London’s, but I could not believe him. I could scarcely believe in London even when I was staring at it. It looked like the work of giants.

  Aelle had never liked the city and would not live there, so its only inhabitants were a handful of Saxons and those Britons who had accepted Aelle’s rule. Some of those Britons still prospered. Most were merchants who traded with Gaul, and their large houses were built beside the river and their storehouses were guarded by their own walls and spearmen, but much of the rest of the city was deserted. It was a dying place, a city given to rats, a city that once had borne the title Augusta. It had been known as London the Magnificent and its river had once been thick with the masts of galleys; now it was a place of ghosts.

  Aelle came to London with me. I had found him a half day’s march north of the city. He had taken refuge in a Roman fort where he was trying to reassemble an army. At first he was suspicious of my message. He had shouted at me, accusing us of using witchcraft to defeat him, then he had threatened to kill me and my escort, but I had the sense to wait his anger out patiently and, after a while, he calmed down. He had hurled Cerdic’s knife angrily away, but was pleased to have his thick bearskin cloak returned. I do not think I was ever in real danger, for I sensed that he liked me, and indeed, when his anger had fled, he threw a heavy arm round my shoulder and walked me up and down the ramparts. ‘What does Arthur want?’ he had asked me.

  ‘Peace, Lord King.’ The weight of his arm was hurting my wounded shoulder, but I dared not protest.

  ‘Peace!’ He had spat the word out like a scrap of tainted meat, but with none of the scorn he had used to reject Arthur’s offer of peace before Lugg Vale. Then Aelle had been stronger and could afford to ask a higher price. Now he was humbled, and he knew it. ‘We Saxons,’ he said, ‘are not meant to be at peace. We feed ourselves on our enemy’s grain, we clothe ourselves with their wool, we pleasure ourselves on their women. What does peace offer us?’

  ‘A chance to rebuild your strength, Lord King, or else Cerdic will be feeding on your grain and dressing in your wool.’

  Aelle had grinned. ‘He’d like the women too.’ He had taken his arm from my shoulder and stared northwards across the fields. ‘I’ll have to yield land,’ he grumbled.

  ‘But if you choose war, Lord King,’ I said, ‘the price will be higher. You’ll face Arthur and Cerdic, and might finish with no land at all except the grass above your grave.’

  He had turned and given me a shrewd look. ‘Arthur only wants peace so that I can fight Cerdic for him.’

  ‘Of course, Lord King,’ I answered.

  He laughed at my honesty. ‘And if I do not come to London,’ he said, ‘you will hunt me down like a dog.’

  ‘Like a great boar, Lord King, whose tusks are still sharp.’

  ‘You talk like you fight, Derfe
l. Well.’ He had ordered his wizards to make a poultice from moss and spiders’ webs that they put on my wounded shoulder while he consulted his council. The consultation did not last long, for Aelle knew he had little choice. So, next morning, I marched with him down the Roman road that led back to the city. He insisted on taking an escort of sixty spearmen. ‘You may trust Cerdic,’ he told me, ‘but there isn’t a promise he’s made that he hasn’t broken. Tell that to Arthur.’

  ‘You tell him, Lord King.’

  Aelle and Arthur met secretly on the night before they were due to negotiate with Cerdic, and that night they wrangled their own separate peace. Aelle gave up much. He gave up great swathes of land on his western frontier, and agreed to repay Arthur all the gold that Arthur had given him the year before and more gold besides. In return Arthur promised four whole years of peace and his support for Aelle if Cerdic would not agree to terms the next day. They embraced when the peace was made and afterwards, as we walked back to our encampment outside the city’s western wall, Arthur shook his head sadly. ‘You should never meet an enemy face to face,’ he said to me, ‘not if you know that one day you’ll have to destroy him. Either that or the Saxons must submit to our government and they won’t. They won’t.’