Enemy of God

by Bernard Cornwell

  He had achieved that eminence by marriage, and the woman he married was Arthur’s older sister, Morgan – Morgan, the priestess of Merlin, the adept of the mysteries, the pagan Morgan. With that marriage Sansum had sloughed off all traces of his old disgrace and had risen to the topmost heights of Dumnonian power. He had been placed on the Council, made Bishop of Lindinis and was reappointed as Mordred’s chaplain, though luckily his distaste for the young King kept him away from Lindinis’s palace. He assumed authority over all the churches in northern Dumnonia, just as Emrys held sway over all the southern churches. For Sansum it was a glittering marriage, and to the rest of us it was an astonishment.

  The wedding itself took place in the church of the Holy Thorn at Ynys Wydryn. Arthur and Guinevere stayed at Lindinis, and we all rode to the shrine together on the great day. The ceremonies began with Morgan’s baptism in the reed-edged waters of Issa’s Mere. She had abandoned her old gold mask with its image of the horned God Cernunnos and had instead adopted a new mask that was decorated with a Christian cross and, to mark the day’s joyousness, she had abandoned her usual black robe for a white gown. Arthur had cried with joy to see his sister limp into the mere where Sansum, with evident tenderness, supported her back as he lowered her into the water. A choir sang hallelujahs. We waited while Morgan dried herself and changed into a new white robe, then we watched as she limped to the altar where Bishop Emrys joined them as man and wife.

  I think I could not have been more astonished had Merlin himself abandoned the old Gods to take up the cross. For Sansum, of course, it was a double triumph, for by marrying Arthur’s sister he not only vaulted into the kingdom’s royal Council, but by converting her to Christianity he struck a famous blow against the pagans. Some men sourly accused him of opportunism, but in all fairness I think he did love Morgan in his own calculating way and she undoubtedly adored him. They were two clever people united by resentments. Sansum ever believed that he should be higher than he was, while Morgan, who had once been beautiful, resented the fire that had twisted her body and turned her face into a horror. She resented Nimue too, for Morgan had once been Merlin’s most trusted priestess and the younger Nimue had usurped that place and now, in revenge, Morgan became the most ardent of Christians. She was as strident in her protestations of Christ as she had ever been in her service of the older Gods and after her marriage all her formidable will was poured into Sansum’s missionary campaign.

  Merlin did not attend the marriage, but he did derive amusement from it. ‘She’s lonely,’ he told me when he heard the news, ‘and the mouse-lord is at least company. You don’t think they rut together, do you? Dear Gods, Derfel, if poor Morgan undressed in front of Sansum he’d throw up! Besides, he doesn’t know how to rut. Not with women, anyway.’

  Marriage did not soften Morgan. In Sansum she found a man willing to be guided by her shrewd advice and whose ambitions she could support with all her fierce energy, but to the rest of the world she was still the shrewish, bitter woman behind the forbidding golden mask. She still lived in Ynys Wydryn, though instead of living on Merlin’s Tor she now inhabited the Bishop’s house in the shrine from where she could see the fire-scarred Tor where her enemy, Nimue, lived.

  Nimue, bereft of Merlin now, was convinced that Morgan had stolen the Treasures of Britain. As far as I could see, that conviction was based solely on Nimue’s hatred for Morgan whom Nimue considered the greatest traitor of Britain. Morgan, after all, was the pagan priestess who had abandoned the Gods to turn Christian, and Nimue, whenever she saw Morgan, spat and hurled curses that Morgan energetically flung back at her; pagan threat battling Christian doom. They would never be civil with each other, though once, at Nimue’s urging, I did confront Morgan about the lost Cauldron. That was a year after the marriage and, though I was now a Lord and one of the wealthiest men in Dumnonia, I still felt nervous of Morgan. When I had been a child she had been a figure of awesome authority and terrifying appearance who had ruled the Tor with a brusque bad temper and an ever-ready staff with which we all were disciplined. Now, so many years later, I found her just as alarming.

  I met her in one of Sansum’s new buildings in Ynys Wydryn. The largest was the size of a royal feasting hall and was the school where dozens of priests were trained as missionaries. Those priests began their lessons at six years old, were proclaimed holy at sixteen and then sent on Britain’s roads to gain converts. I often met those fervent men on my travels. They walked in pairs, carrying only a small bag and a staff, though sometimes they were accompanied by groups of women who seemed curiously drawn to the missionaries. They had no fear. Whenever I encountered them they would always challenge me and dare me to deny their God, and I would always courteously admit his existence then insist that my own Gods lived too, and at that they would hurl curses at me and their women would wail and howl insults. Once, when two such fanatics frightened my daughters, I used the butt of a spear on them and I admit I used it too hard, for at the end of the argument there was a broken skull and a shattered wrist, neither of them mine. Arthur insisted I stand trial as a demonstration that even the most privileged Dumnonians were not above the law, and thus I went to the Lindinis courthouse where a Christian magistrate charged me the bone-price of half my own weight in silver.

  ‘You should have been whipped,’ Morgan evidently remembered the incident and snapped her verdict at me when I was admitted to her presence. ‘Whipped raw and bloody. In public!’

  ‘I think even you would find that difficult now, Lady,’ I said mildly.

  ‘God would give me the needful strength,’ she snarled from behind her new gold mask with its Christian cross. She sat at a table that was piled with parchment and ink-covered wood-shavings, for she not only ran Sansum’s school, but tallied the treasuries of every church and monastery in northern Dumnonia, though the achievement of which she was most proud was her community of holy women who chanted and prayed in their own hall where men were not allowed to set foot. I could hear their sweet voices singing now as Morgan looked me up and down. She evidently did not much like what she saw. ‘If you’ve come for more money,’ she snapped, ‘you can’t have it. Not till you repay the loans outstanding.’

  ‘There are no outstanding loans that I know of,’ I said mildly.

  ‘Nonsense.’ She snatched up one of the wood-shavings and read out a fictitious list of unpaid loans.

  I let her have her say, then gently told her that the Council did not seek to borrow money from the church. ‘And if it did,’ I added, ‘then I’m sure your husband would have told you.’

  ‘And I’m sure,’ she said, ‘that you pagans on the Council are plotting things behind the saint’s back.’ She sniffed. ‘How is my brother?’

  ‘Busy, Lady.’

  ‘Too busy to come and see me, plainly.’

  ‘And you’re too busy to visit him,’ I said pleasantly.

  ‘Me? Go to Durnovaria? And face that witch Guinevere?’ She made the sign of the cross, then dipped her hand in a bowl of water and made the sign again. ‘I would rather walk into hell and see Satan himself,’ she said, ‘than see that witch of Isis!’ She was about to spit to avert evil, then remembered to make another sign of the cross instead. ‘Do you know what rites Isis demands?’ she asked me angrily.

  ‘No, Lady,’ I said.

  ‘Filth, Derfel, filth! Isis is the scarlet woman! The whore of Babylon. It is the devil’s faith, Derfel. They lie together, man and woman.’ She shuddered at that horrid thought. ‘Pure filth.’

  ‘Men are not allowed in their temple, Lady,’ I said, defending Guinevere, ‘just as they are not allowed in your women’s hall.’

  ‘Not allowed!’ Morgan cackled. ‘They come by night, you fool, and worship their filthy Goddess naked. Men and women together, sweating like swine! You think I don’t know? I, who was once such a sinner? You think you know better than I about pagan faiths? I tell you, Derfel, they lie together in their own sweat, naked woman and naked man. Isis and Osiris, woman and man, a
nd the woman gives life to the man, and how do you think that’s done, you fool? It’s done by the filthy act of fornication, that’s how!’ She dipped her fingers in the water bowl and made the sign of the cross again, leaving a bead of the holy water on the forehead of her mask. ‘You’re an ignorant, credulous fool,’ she snapped at me. I did not pursue the argument. The different faiths always insulted each other thus. Many pagans accused the Christians of similar behaviour at their so called ‘love-feasts’, and many country people believed that the Christians kidnapped, killed and ate children. ‘Arthur’s also a fool,’ Morgan growled, ‘for trusting Guinevere.’ She gave me an unfriendly look with her one eye. ‘So what do you want of me, Derfel, if it isn’t money?’

  ‘I want to know, Lady, what happened on the night the Cauldron disappeared.’

  She laughed at that. It was an echo of her old laughter, the cruel cackling sound that had always presaged trouble on the Tor. ‘You miserable little fool,’ she said, ‘wasting my time.’ And with that she turned back to her work table. I waited while she made marks on her tally sticks or in the margins of parchment scrolls and pretended to ignore me. ‘Still here, fool?’ she asked after a while.

  ‘Still here, Lady,’ I said.

  She turned on her stool. ‘Why do you want to know? Is it that wicked little whore on the hill who sent you?’ She waved through the window at the Tor.

  ‘Merlin asked me, Lady,’ I lied. ‘He’s curious about the past, but his memory wanders.’

  ‘It’ll wander into hell soon,’ she said vengefully, then she pondered my question before, at last, offering a shrug. ‘I will tell you what happened that night,’ she said at last, ‘and I will tell you only once, and when it is told you will never ask me of it again.’

  ‘Once is enough, Lady.’

  She stood and limped to the window from where she could stare up at the Tor. ‘The Lord God Almighty,’ she said, ‘the one true God, the Father of us all, sent fire from heaven. I was there, so I know what happened. He sent the lightning and it struck the hall thatch and set it on fire. I was screaming, for I have good cause to fear fire. I know fire. I am a child of fire. Fire ruined my life, but this was a different fire. This was God’s cleansing fire, the fire that burned away my sin. The fire spread from the thatch to the tower and it burned everything. I watched that fire and I would even have died in it if the blessed saint Sansum had not come to guide me to safety.’ She made the sign of the cross, then turned back to me. ‘That, fool,’ she snapped, ‘is what happened.’

  So Sansum had been on the Tor that night? That was interesting, but I made no remark about it. Instead I said gently, ‘The fire did not burn the Cauldron, Lady. Merlin came next day and he searched the ashes and found no gold.’

  ‘Fool!’ Morgan spat at me through the mouth-slit of her mask. ‘You think God’s fire burns like your feeble flames? The Cauldron was the pot of evil, the foulest blight on God’s earth. It was the devil’s pissing pot and the Lord God consumed it, Derfel, he consumed it to nothing! I saw it with this eye!’ She tapped her mask beneath the one good eye. ‘I saw it burn, and it was a bright, seething, hissing furnace glare in the innermost heart of the fire, it was a flame like the hottest flame of hell and I heard the demons screeching in their pain as their Cauldron turned to smoke. God burned it! He burned it and sent it back to hell where it belongs!’ She paused and I sensed that her flame-mauled, ruined face was cracking into a smile behind the mask. ‘It’s gone, Derfel,’ she said in a quieter voice, ‘and now you can go, too.’

  I left her, left the shrine and climbed to the Tor where I pushed back the half-broken water gate that hung crazily off one rope hinge. The blackened ashes of the hall and tower were being swallowed by the earth, and around them were the dozen dirty huts where Nimue and her people lived. Those people were the unwanted of our world; its cripples and beggars, its homeless folk and half-crazed creatures who all survived on the food Ceinwyn and I sent weekly from Lindinis. Nimue claimed her people spoke with the Gods, but all I ever heard from them was mad cackling or sad moaning. ‘She denies everything,’ I said to Nimue.

  ‘Of course she does.’

  ‘She says her God burned it to nothing.’

  ‘Her God couldn’t soft boil an egg,’ Nimue said vengefully. She had decayed foully in the years since the Cauldron had disappeared and as Merlin had subsided into his gentle old age. Nimue was filthy these days, filthy and thin and almost as crazed as when I had rescued her from the Isle of the Dead. She shivered at times, or else her face grimaced in uncontrollable twitches. She had long ago sold or thrown away the golden eye, and now wore a leather patch over the empty socket instead. Whatever intriguing beauty she had once possessed was now hidden under dirt and sores, and lost beneath her matted mass of black hair that was so greasy with filth that even the country-folk who came to her for divination or healing would often recoil from her stench. Even I, who was oath-sworn to her and who had once loved her, could hardly bear to be near her.

  ‘The Cauldron still lives,’ Nimue told me that day.

  ‘So Merlin says.’

  ‘And Merlin lives too, Derfel.’ She put a nail-bitten hand on my arm. ‘He’s waiting, that’s all, saving his strength.’

  Waiting for his balefire, I thought, but said nothing.

  Nimue turned sunwise to stare all about the horizon. ‘Somewhere out there, Derfel,’ she said, ‘the Cauldron is hidden. And someone is trying to work out how to use it.’ She laughed softly. ‘And when they do, Derfel, you will see the land turn red with blood.’ She turned her one eye on me. ‘Blood!’ she hissed. ‘The world will vomit blood that day, Derfel, and Merlin will ride again.’

  Maybe, I thought; but it was a sunny day and Dumnonia was at peace. It was Arthur’s peace, given by his sword and maintained by his lawcourts and enriched by his roads and sealed by his Brotherhood. It all seemed so distant from the world of the Cauldron and the missing Treasures, but Nimue still believed in their magic and for her sake I would not express disbelief, though on that bright day in Arthur’s Dumnonia it seemed to me that Britain was forging its way from darkness into light, from chaos into order and from savagery into law. That was Arthur’s achievement. That was his Camelot.

  But Nimue was right. The Cauldron was not lost and she, like Merlin, was just waiting for its horror.

  OUR CHIEF BUSINESS IN those years was to prepare Mordred for the throne. He was already our King for he had been acclaimed as a baby on Caer Cadarn’s summit, but Arthur had decided to repeat the acclamation when Mordred came of age. I think Arthur hoped that some mystical power might invest Mordred with responsibility and wisdom at that second acclamation, for nothing else seemed capable of improving the boy. We tried, the Gods know we tried, but Mordred stayed the same sullen, resentful and loutish youth. Arthur disliked him but stayed wilfully blind to Mordred’s grosser faults, for if Arthur held any religion truly sacred it was his belief in the divinity of kings. The time would come when Arthur would be forced to face the truth of Mordred, but in those years, whenever the subject of Mordred’s suitability was raised in the royal Council, Arthur would always say the same thing. Mordred, he agreed, was an unattractive child, but we had all known such boys grow into proper men and the solemnity of acclamation and the responsibilities of kingship would surely temper the boy. ‘I was hardly a model child myself,’ he liked to say, ‘but I don’t think I’ve turned out ill. Have faith in the boy.’ Besides, he would always add with a smile, Mordred would be guided by a wise and experienced Council. ‘He’ll appoint his own Council,’ one of us would always object, but Arthur waved the matter aside. All, he blithely assured us, would turn out well.

  Guinevere had no such illusions. Indeed, in the years following the Round Table oath she became obsessed with Mordred’s fate. She did not attend the royal Council, for no woman could, but when she was in Durnovaria I suspect she listened from behind a curtained archway that opened into the council chamber. Much of what we discussed must have bored her; we
spent hours discussing whether to place new stones in a ford or to spend money on a bridge, or whether a magistrate was taking bribes or to whom we should grant the guardianship of an orphaned heir or heiress. Those matters were the common coin of council meetings and I am sure she found them tedious, but how avidly she must have listened when we discussed Mordred.

  Guinevere hardly knew Mordred, but she hated him. She hated him because he was King and Arthur was not, and one by one she tried to convert the royal councillors to her own view. She was even pleasant to me, for I suspect she saw into my soul and knew that I secretly agreed with her. After the first council meeting that followed the Round Table oath she took my arm and walked with me about Durnovaria’s cloister which was misted from the smoke of herbs that were being burned in braziers to avert a return of the plague. Maybe it was the heady smoke that dizzied me, but more likely it was Guinevere’s proximity. She wore a strong perfume, her red hair was full and wild, her body straight and slender, and her face so very finely boned and full of spirit. I told her I was sorry her father had died. ‘Poor father,’ she said. ‘All he ever dreamed of was returning to Henis Wyren.’ She paused, and I wondered whether she had reproved Arthur for not making more effort to dislodge Diwrnach. I doubt Guinevere ever wanted to see Henis Wyren’s wild coast again, but her father had always wanted to return to his ancestors’ lands. ‘You never told me about your visit to Henis Wyren,’ Guinevere said reproachfully. ‘I hear you met Diwrnach?’

  ‘And hope never to meet him again, Lady.’

  She shrugged. ‘Sometimes, in a king, a reputation for savagery can be useful.’ She questioned me about Henis Wyren’s condition, but I sensed she was not truly interested in my answers, any more than when she asked me how Ceinwyn was.