Enemy of God

by Bernard Cornwell

  The door’s hinges had been greased and the door opened silently onto an utter blackness. It was a darkness as complete as any I had ever seen and was caused by the heavy curtains that hung just a few feet inside the door. I motioned for my men to stay where they were, then followed Nimue inside. I wanted to draw her back, but she resisted my hand and instead pulled the temple door closed on its greased hinges. The singing was very loud now. I could see nothing and I could hear only the choir, but the smell of the temple was thick and nauseous.

  Nimue groped her hand to find me, then pulled my head down towards hers. ‘Evil!’ she breathed.

  ‘We shouldn’t be here,’ I whispered.

  She ignored that. Instead she groped and discovered the curtain and a moment later a tiny chink of light showed as she found the curtain’s edge. I followed her, crouched and looked over her shoulder. At first, so small was the gap she had made that I could see almost nothing, but then, as my eyes made out what lay beyond, I saw too much. I saw the mysteries of Isis.

  To make sense of that night I had to know the story of Isis. I learned it later, but at that moment, peering over Nimue’s short-cropped hair, I had no idea what the ritual signified. I knew only that Isis was a Goddess and, to many Romans, a Goddess of the highest powers. I knew, too, that she was a protectress of thrones and that explained the low black throne that still stood on its dais at the far end of the cellar, though our view of it was misted by the thick smoke that writhed and drifted through the black room as it sought to escape up the moon-shaft. The smoke came from braziers, and their flames had been enriched by herbs that gave off the pungent, heady scent we had smelt from the edge of the woods.

  I could not see the choir that went on singing despite the smoke, but I could see Isis’s worshippers and at first I did not believe what I saw. I did not want to believe.

  I could see eight worshippers kneeling on the black stone floor, and all eight of them were naked. Their backs were towards us, but even so I could see that some of the naked worshippers were men. No wonder Gwenhwyvach had giggled in anticipation of this moment, for she must have known that secret already. Men, Guinevere always insisted, were not allowed into the temple of Isis, but they were here this night and, I suspected, on every night that the full moon cast its cold light down through the hole in the cellar’s roof. The flickering braziers’ flames cast their lurid light on the worshippers’ backs. They were all naked. Men and women, all naked, just as Morgan had warned me so many years before.

  The worshippers were naked, but not the two celebrants. Lavaine was one; he was standing to one side of the low black throne, and my soul exulted when I saw him. It had been Lavaine’s sword that had cut Dian’s throat and my sword was now just a cellar’s length away from him. He stood tall beside the throne, the scar on his cheek lit by the braziers’ light and his black hair oiled like Lancelot’s to fall down the back of his black robe. He wore no Druid’s white robe this night, but just a plain black gown, and in his hand was a slender black staff tipped with a small golden crescent moon. There was no sign of Dinas.

  Two flaming torches becketed in iron flanked the throne where Guinevere sat playing the part of Isis. Her hair was coiled on her head and held in place by a ring of gold from which two horns jutted straight up. They were the horns of no beast I had ever seen, and later we discovered they were carved from ivory. Around her neck was a heavy gold torque, but she wore no other jewels, just a vast deep-red cloak that swathed her whole body. I could not see the floor in front of her, but I knew the shallow pit was there and I guessed they were waiting for the moonlight to come down the shaft and touch the pit’s black water with silver. The far curtains, behind which Ceinwyn had told me was a bed, were closed.

  A flicker of light suddenly shimmered in the drifting smoke and made the naked worshippers gasp with its promise. The little sliver of light was pale and silvery and it showed that the moon had at last climbed high enough to throw its first angled beam down to the cellar floor. Lavaine waited a moment as the light thickened, then beat his staff twice on the floor. ‘It is time,’ he said in his harsh deep voice, ‘it is time.’ The choir went silent.

  Then nothing happened. They just waited in silence as that smoke-shifting moon-silvered column of light widened and crept across the floor and I remembered that distant night when I had crouched in the summit of the knoll of stones beside Llyn Cerrig Bach and watched the moonlight edge its way towards Merlin’s body. Now I watched the moonlight slide and swell in Isis’s silent temple. The silence was full of portent. One of the kneeling naked women uttered a low moan, then went quiet again. Another woman rocked to and fro.

  The moonbeam widened still further, its reflection casting a pale glimmer on Guinevere’s stern and handsome face. The column of light was nearly vertical now. One of the naked women shivered, not with cold, but with the stirrings of ecstasy, and then Lavaine leaned forward to peer up the shaft. The moon lit his big beard and his hard, broad face with its battle scar. He peered upwards for a few heartbeats, then he stepped back and solemnly touched Guinevere’s shoulder.

  She stood so that the horns on her head almost touched the low arched ceiling of the cellar. Her arms and hands were inside the cloak that fell straight from her shoulders to the floor. She closed her eyes. ‘Who is the Goddess?’ she asked.

  ‘Isis, Isis, Isis,’ the women chanted the name softly, ‘Isis, Isis, Isis.’ The column of moonlight was almost as wide as the shaft now and it was a great smoky silver pillar of light that glowed and shifted in the cellar’s centre. I had thought, when I had first seen this temple, that it was a tawdry place, but at night, lit by that shimmering pillar of white light, it was as eerie and mysterious as any shrine I had ever seen.

  ‘And who is the God?’ Guinevere asked, her eyes still closed.

  ‘Osiris,’ the naked men answered in low voices, ‘Osiris, Osiris, Osiris.’

  ‘And who shall sit on the throne?’ Guinevere demanded.

  ‘Lancelot,’ both the men and the women answered together, ‘Lancelot, Lancelot.’

  It was when I heard that name that I knew that nothing would be put right this night. This night would never bring back the old Dumnonia. This night would give us nothing but horror, for I knew that this night would destroy Arthur and I wanted to back away from the curtain and go back into the cellar and take him away into the fresh air and the clean moonlight, then take him back through all the years and all the days and all the hours so that this night would never come to him. But I did not move. Nimue did not move. Neither of us dared to move for Guinevere had reached out with her right hand to take the black staff from Lavaine and the gesture lifted her red cloak from the right side of her body and I saw that under the cloak’s heavy folds she was naked.

  ‘Isis, Isis, Isis,’ the women sighed.

  ‘Osiris, Osiris, Osiris,’ the men breathed.

  ‘Lancelot, Lancelot, Lancelot,’ they all chanted together.

  Guinevere took the gold-tipped staff and reached forward, the cloak falling again to shadow her right breast, and then, very slowly, with exaggerated gestures, she touched the staff against something that lay in the water pit right beneath the glistening, shimmering shaft of silvered smoke that now came vertically down from the heavens. No one else moved in the cellar. No one even seemed to breathe.

  ‘Rise!’ Guinevere commanded, ‘rise,’ and the choir began to sing their weird, haunting song again. ‘Isis, Isis, Isis,’ they were singing, and over the heads of the worshippers I saw a man climb up from the pool. It was Dinas, and his tall muscled body and long black hair dripped water as he came slowly upright and as the choir sang the Goddess’s name louder and ever louder. ‘Isis! Isis! Isis!’ they sang until Dinas at last stood upright before Guinevere, his back to us, and he too was naked. He stepped up out of the pool and Guinevere handed the black staff to Lavaine, then raised her hands and unclasped the cloak so that it fell back onto the throne. She stood there, Arthur’s wife, naked but for the gold about her
neck and the ivory on her head, and she opened her arms so that the naked grandson of Tanaburs could step onto the dais and into her embrace. ‘Osiris! Osiris! Osiris!’ The women in the cellar called. Some of them writhed to and fro like the Christian worshippers in Isca who had been overcome by a similar ecstasy. The voices in the cellar were becoming ragged now. ‘Osiris! Osiris! Osiris!’ they chanted, and Guinevere stepped back as the naked Dinas turned round to face the worshippers and lifted his arms in triumph. Thus he displayed his magnificent naked body and there could be no mistaking that he was a man, nor any mistaking what he was supposed to do next as Guinevere, her beautiful, tall, straight body made magically silver-white by the moon’s shimmer in the smoke, took his right arm and led him towards the curtain that hung behind the throne. Lavaine went with them as the women writhed in their worship and rocked backwards and forwards and called out the name of their great Goddess. ‘Isis! Isis! Isis!’

  Guinevere swept the far curtain aside. I had a brief glimpse of the room beyond and it seemed as bright as the sun, and then the ragged chanting rose to a new pitch of excitement as the men in the temple reached for the women beside them, and it was just then that the doors behind me were thrown wide open and Arthur, in all the glory of his war gear, stepped into the temple’s lobby. ‘No, Lord,’ I said to him, ‘no, Lord, please!’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, Derfel,’ he spoke quietly, but in reproof. In his right hand he held the little bunch of cornflowers he had picked for Guinevere, while in his left he grasped his son’s hand. ‘Come back out,’ he ordered me, but then Nimue snatched the big curtain aside and my Lord’s nightmare began.

  Isis is a Goddess. The Romans brought her to Britain, but she did not come from Rome itself, but from a distant country far to Rome’s east. Mithras is another God who comes from a country east of Rome, though not, I think, the same country. Galahad told me that half the world’s religions begin in the east where, I suspect, the men look more like Sagramor than like us. Christianity is another such faith brought from those distant lands where, Galahad assured me, the fields grow nothing but sand, the sun shines fiercer than it ever does in Britain and no snow ever falls.

  Isis came from those burning lands. She became a powerful Goddess to the Romans and many women in Britain adopted her religion that stayed on when the Romans left. It was never as popular as Christianity, for the latter threw its doors open to any who wanted to worship its God, while Isis, like Mithras, restricted her followers to those, and those alone, who had been initiated into her mysteries. In some ways, Galahad told me, Isis resembled the Holy Mother of the Christians, for she was reputed to be the perfect mother to her son Horus, but Isis also possessed powers that the Virgin Mary never claimed. Isis, to her adepts, was the Goddess of life and death, of healing, and, of course, of mortal thrones.

  She was married, Galahad told me, to a God named Osiris, but in a war between the Gods Osiris was killed and his body was cut into fragments that were scattered into a river. Isis found the scattered flesh and tenderly brought them together again, and then she lay with the fragments to bring her husband back to life. Osiris did live again, revived by Isis’s power. Galahad hated the tale, and crossed himself again and again as he told it, and it was that tale, I suppose, of resurrection and of the woman giving life to the man, that Nimue and I watched in that smoky black cellar. We had watched as Isis, the Goddess, the mother, the giver of life, performed the miracle that gave her husband life and turned her into the guardian of the living and the dead and the arbiter of men’s thrones. And it was that last power, the power that determined which men should sit on this earth’s thrones, that was, for Guinevere, the Goddess’s supreme gift. It was for the power of the throne-giver that Guinevere worshipped Isis.

  Nimue snatched the curtain aside and the cellar filled with screams.

  For one second, for one terrible second, Guinevere hesitated at the far curtain and turned around to see what had disturbed her rites. She stood there, tall and naked and so dreadful in her pale beauty, and beside her was a naked man. At the cellar’s door, standing with his son in one hand and with flowers in the other, was her husband. The cheek pieces of Arthur’s helmet were open and I saw his face at that terrible moment, and it was as if his soul had just fled.

  Guinevere disappeared behind the curtain, dragging Dinas and Lavaine with her, and Arthur uttered an awful sound, half a battle shout and half the cry of a man in utter misery. He pushed Gwydre back, dropped the flowers, then drew Excalibur and charged heedlessly through the screaming, naked worshippers who scrambled desperately out of his way.

  ‘Take them all!’ I shouted to the spearmen who followed Arthur, ‘don’t let them escape! Take them!’ Then I ran after Arthur with Nimue beside me. Arthur leapt the black pool, pushed a torch over as he jumped across the dais, then swept the far black curtain aside with Excalibur’s blade.

  And there he stopped.

  I stopped beside him. I had discarded my spear as I charged through the temple and now had Hywelbane bare in my hand. Nimue was with me and she howled in triumph as she gazed into the small, square room that opened up from the arched cellar. This, it seemed, was Isis’s inner sanctuary, and here, at the Goddess’s service, was the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn.

  The Cauldron was the first thing I saw, for it was standing on a black pedestal that stood as high as a man’s waist and there were so many candles in the room that the Cauldron seemed to glow silver and gold as it reflected their brilliant light. The light was made even brighter because the room, all but for the curtained wall, was lined with mirrors. There were mirrors on the walls and even on the ceiling, mirrors that multiplied the candles’ flames and reflected the nakedness of Guinevere and Dinas. Guinevere, in her terror, had leapt onto the wide bed that filled the room’s far end and there she clawed at a fur coverlet in an effort to hide her pale skin. Dinas was beside her, his hands clutched to his groin, while Lavaine faced us defiantly.

  He glanced at Arthur, dismissed Nimue with scarce a look, then held his slender black staff towards me. He knew I had come for his death and now he would prevent it with the greatest magic at his disposal. He pointed his staff at me, while in his other hand he held the crystal-encased fragment of the true cross that Bishop Sansum had given to Mordred at his acclamation. He was holding the fragment suspended above the Cauldron, which was filled with some dark aromatic liquid.

  ‘Your other daughters will die too,’ he told me. ‘I only need to let go.’

  Arthur raised Excalibur.

  ‘Your son too!’ Lavaine said, and both of us froze. ‘You will go now,’ he said with calm authority. ‘You have invaded the Goddess’s sanctuary and will now go and leave us in peace. Or else you, and all you love, will die.’

  He waited. Behind him, between the Cauldron and the bed, was Arthur’s Round Table with its stone image of the winged horse, and on the horse, I saw, were a drab basket, a common horn, an old halter, a worn knife, a whetstone, a sleeved coat, a cloak, a clay dish, a throwboard, a warrior ring and a heap of decaying broken timbers. Merlin’s scrap of beard was also there, still wrapped in its black ribbon. All the power of Britain was in that little room and it was allied to a scrap of the Christian’s most powerful magic.

  I lifted Hywelbane and Lavaine made as though to drop the piece of the true cross into the liquid and Arthur put a warning hand against my shield.

  ‘You will go,’ Lavaine said. Guinevere said nothing, but just watched us, huge-eyed, above the pelt that now half covered her.

  Then Nimue smiled. She had been holding the bundled cloak in both her hands, but now she shook it at Lavaine. She screamed as she released the cloak’s burden. It was an eldritch shriek that echoed high above the cries of the women behind us.

  Vipers flew through the air. There must have been a dozen of the snakes, all found by Nimue that afternoon and hoarded for this moment. They twisted in the air and Guinevere screamed and dragged the fur to cover her face while Lavaine, seeing a snake flying at
his eyes, instinctively flinched and crouched. The scrap of true cross skittered across the floor while the snakes, aroused by the heat in the cellar, twisted across the bed and over the Treasures of Britain. I took one pace forward and kicked Lavaine hard in the belly. He fell, then screamed as an adder bit his ankle.

  Dinas shrank from the snakes on the bed, then went utterly still as Excalibur touched his throat.

  Hywelbane was at Lavaine’s throat, and I used the blade to bring his face up towards mine. Then I smiled. ‘My daughter,’ I said softly, ‘watches us from the Otherworld. She sends you greetings, Lavaine.’

  He tried to speak, but no words came. A snake slid across his leg.

  Arthur stared at where his wife was hidden beneath the fur. Then, almost tenderly, he flicked the snakes off the black pelt with Excalibur’s tip, then drew back the fur until he could see Guinevere’s face. She stared at him, and all her fine pride had vanished. She was just a terrified woman. ‘Do you have any clothes here?’ Arthur asked her gently. She shook her head.

  ‘There’s a red cloak on the throne,’ I told him.

  ‘Would you fetch it, Nimue?’ Arthur asked.

  Nimue brought the cloak and Arthur held it towards his wife on Excalibur’s tip. ‘Here,’ he said, still speaking softly, ‘for you.’

  A bare arm emerged from the fur and took the cloak. ‘Turn round,’ Guinevere said to me in a small, frightened voice.

  ‘Turn, Derfel, please,’ Arthur said.

  ‘One thing first, Lord.’

  ‘Turn,’ he insisted, still gazing at his wife.

  I reached for the Cauldron’s edge and tipped it off the pedestal. The precious Cauldron clanged loud on the floor as its liquid spilt in a dark rush across the flagstones. That got his attention. He stared at me and I hardly recognized his face, it was so hard and cold and empty of life, but there was one more thing to be said this night and if my Lord was to sup this dish of horrors, then he might as well drain it to the last bitter drop. I put Hywelbane’s tip back under Lavaine’s chin. ‘Who is the Goddess?’ I asked him.