The Winter King

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘You should not be on the ramparts, High Lord,’ Bishop Bedwin said.

  Uther waved a gloved hand as if to suggest that Bedwin was welcome to go inside where the fires burned, but High King Uther, the Pendragon of Britain, would not move. He wanted to be on Caer Cadarn’s ramparts so he could gaze across the icy land and up into the middle air where the demons lurked, but Bedwin was right, the High King should not have been standing guard against demons on this hard night. Uther was old and sick, yet the kingdom’s safety depended on his bloated body and on his slow, sad mind. He had been vigorous only six months before, but then had come the news of his heir’s death. Mordred, the most beloved of his sons and the only one of those born to his bride still living, had been cut down by a Saxon broad-axe and had then bled to death beneath the hill of the White Horse. That death had left the kingdom without an heir, and a kingdom without an heir is a cursed kingdom, but this night, if the Gods willed, Uther’s heir would be born to Mordred’s widow. Unless the child was a girl, of course, in which case all the pain was for nothing and the kingdom doomed.

  Uther’s great head raised itself from the pelts that were crusted with ice where his breath had settled on the fur. ‘All is being done, Bedwin?’ Uther asked.

  ‘All, High Lord, all,’ Bishop Bedwin said. He was the King’s most trusted counsellor and, like the Princess Norwenna, a Christian. Norwenna, protesting at being moved from the warm Roman villa in nearby Lindinis, had screamed at her father-in-law that she would only go to Caer Cadarn if he promised to keep the old Gods’ witches away. She had insisted on a Christian birth, and Uther, desperate for an heir, had agreed to her demands. Now Bedwin’s priests were chanting their prayers in a chamber beside the hall where holy water had been sprinkled, a cross had been hung over the birth bed and another put beneath Norwenna’s body. ‘We are praying to the blessed Virgin Mary,’ Bedwin explained, ‘who, without soiling her sacred body by any carnal knowledge, became Christ’s holy mother and –’

  ‘Enough,’ Uther growled. The High King was no Christian and did not like any man attempting to make him one, though he did accept that the Christian God probably had as much power as most other Gods. The events of this night were testing that toleration to the limit.

  Which was why I was there. I was a child on the edge of manhood, a beardless errand-runner who crouched frozen beside the King’s chair on the ramparts of Caer Cadarn. I had come from Ynys Wydryn, Merlin’s hall, which lay on the northern horizon. My task, if ordered, was to fetch Morgan and her helpers who waited in a pig-herder’s mud hovel at the foot of Caer Cadarn’s western slope. The Princess Norwenna might want Christ’s mother as her midwife, but Uther was ready with the older Gods if that newer one failed.

  And the Christian God did fail. Norwenna’s screams became fewer, but her whimpering more desperate until at last Bishop Bedwin’s wife came from the hall and knelt shivering beside the High King’s chair. The baby, Ellin said, would not Come and the mother, she feared, was dying. Uther waved that last comment aside. The mother was nothing, only the child mattered, and only then if it was a boy.

  ‘High Lord…’ Ellin began nervously, but Uther was no longer listening.

  He tapped my head. ‘Go, boy,’ he said, and I twisted out of his shadow, leaped down to the fort’s interior and raced across the moon-shadowed whiteness between the buildings. The guards on the western gate watched me run by, then I was sliding and falling on the ice-chute of the western road. I slithered through snow, tore my cloak on a tree stump and fell heavily into some ice-laden brambles, but I felt nothing, except the huge weight of a kingdom’s fate on my young shoulders. ‘Lady Morgan!’ I shouted as I neared the hovel. ‘Lady Morgan!’

  She must have been waiting, for the hovel door was immediately flung open and her gold-masked face shone in the moonlight. ‘Go!’ she screeched at me, ‘go!’ and I turned and started back up the hill while around me a pack of Merlin’s orphans scrambled through the snow. They were carrying kitchen pots which they clashed together as they ran, though when the slope grew too steep and treacherous they were forced to hurl the pots on ahead and scramble up behind. Morgan followed more slowly, attended by her slave Sebile who carried the necessary charms and herbs. ‘Set the fires, Derfel!’ Morgan called up to me.

  ‘Fire!’ I shouted breathlessly as I scrambled through the gateway. ‘Fire on the ramparts! Fire!’

  Bishop Bedwin protested at Morgan’s arrival, but the High King turned on his counsellor in a rage and the Bishop meekly surrendered to the older faith. His priests and monks were ordered out of their makeshift chapel and told to carry firebrands to all parts of the ramparts and there pile the burning brands with wood and wattle torn out of the huts that clustered inside the fort’s northern walls. The fires crackled, then blazed huge in the night and their smoke hung in the air to make a canopy that would confuse the evil spirits and so keep them from this place where a princess and her child were dying. We young ones raced around the ramparts banging pots to make the great noise that would further dizzy the evil ones. ‘Shout,’ I ordered the children from Ynys Wydryn, and still more children came from the fortress hovels to add their noise to ours. The guards beat their spear-shafts against their shields, and the priests piled more wood on to a dozen flaming pyres while the rest of us screamed our noisy challenges against the evil wraiths that had slithered through the night to curse Norwenna’s labour.

  Morgan, Sebile, Nimue and one girl child went into the hall. Norwenna screamed, though whether she cried aloud in protest at the coming of Merlin’s women or because the stubborn child was tearing her body in two, we could not tell. More screams sounded as Morgan expelled the Christian attendants. She threw the two crosses into the snow and tossed a handful of mugwort, the woman’s herb, on to the fire. Nimue later told me that they put iron nuggets into the damp bed to scare away the evil spirits already lodged there and laid seven eagle stones around the writhing woman’s head to bring the good spirits down from the Gods.

  Sebile, Morgan’s slave, put a birch branch over the hall door and waved another over the writhing body of the hurting Princess. Nimue crouched in the door and urinated on the threshold to keep the evil fairies away from the hall, then she cupped some of her urine and carried it to Norwenna’s bed where she sprinkled it on the straw as a further precaution against the child’s soul being stolen away at the moment of birth. Morgan, her gold mask bright in the flamelight, slapped Norwenna’s hands away so she could force a charm of rare amber between the Princess’s breasts. The small girl, one of Merlin’s foundlings, waited in terror at the foot of the bed.

  Smoke from the newly set fires blurred the stars. Creatures woken in the woods at the foot of Caer Cadarn howled at the noise which had erupted above them while High King Uther raised his eyes to the dying moon and prayed that he had not fetched Morgan too late. Morgan was Uther’s natural daughter, the first of the four bastards the High King had whelped on Igraine of Gwynedd. Uther would doubtless have preferred Merlin to be there, but Merlin had been gone for months, gone into nowhere, gone, it sometimes seemed to us, for ever, and Morgan, who had learned her skills from Merlin, must take his place on this cold night in which we clashed pots and shouted until we were hoarse to drive the malevolent fiends away from Caer Cadarn. Even Uther joined in the noise-making, though the sound of his staff beating on the rampart’s edge was very feeble. Bishop Bedwin was on his knees, praying, while his wife, expelled from the birth-room, wept and wailed and called on the Christian God to forgive the heathen witches.

  But the witchcraft worked, for a child was born alive.

  The scream Norwenna gave at the moment of birth was worse than any that had preceded it. It was the shriek of an animal in torment, a lament to make the whole night sob. Nimue told me later that Morgan had caused that pain by thrusting her hand into the birth canal and wrenching the baby into this world by brute force. The child came bloody from the tormented mother and Morgan shouted at the frightened girl to pick the child up
while Nimue tied and bit the cord. It was important that the baby should first be held by a virgin, which is why the girl child had been taken to the hall, but she was frightened and would not come close to the blood-wet straw on which Norwenna now panted and where the new-born, blood-smeared child lay as though stillborn. ‘Pick it up!’ Morgan yelled, but the girl fled in tears and so Nimue plucked the baby from the bed and cleared its mouth so that it could snatch its first choking breath.

  The omens were all so very bad. The haloed moon was waning and the virgin had fled from the babe that now began to cry aloud. Uther heard the noise and I saw him close his eyes as he prayed to the Gods that he had been given a boy child.

  ‘Shall I?’ Bishop Bedwin asked hesitantly.

  ‘Go,’ Uther snapped, and the Bishop scrambled down the wooden ladder, hitched up his robe and ran across the trampled snow to the hall’s door. He stood there for a few seconds, then ran back towards the rampart waving his hands.

  ‘Good news, High Lord, good news!’ Bedwin called as he clambered awkwardly up the ladder. ‘Most excellent news!’

  ‘A boy.’ Uther anticipated the news by breathing the words.

  ‘A boy!’ Bedwin confirmed, ‘a fine boy!’

  I was crouching near the High King and I saw tears show at his eyes that were gazing toward the sky. ‘An heir,’ Uther said in a tone of wonder as though he had not really dared to hope that the Gods would favour him. He dabbed at the tears with a fur-gloved hand. ‘The kingdom is safe, Bedwin,’ he said.

  ‘Praise God, High Lord, it is safe,’ Bedwin agreed.

  ‘A boy,’ Uther said, then his huge body was suddenly racked with a terrible cough. It left him panting. ‘A boy,’ he said again when his breathing was steady.

  Morgan came after a while. She climbed the ladder and prostrated her stocky body in front of the High King. Her gold mask gleamed, hiding the horror beneath. Uther touched her shoulder with his staff. ‘Rise, Morgan,’ he said, then he fumbled beneath his robe to find a gold brooch with which to reward her.

  But Morgan would not take it. ‘The boy,’ she said ominously, ‘is crippled. He has a twisted foot.’

  I saw Bedwin make a sign of the cross for a crippled prince was the worst omen of this cold night.

  ‘How bad?’ Uther asked.

  ‘Just the foot,’ Morgan said in her harsh voice. ‘The leg is properly formed, High Lord, but the Prince will never run.’

  From deep inside his swathing fur cloak Uther chuckled. ‘Kings don’t run, Morgan,’ he said, ‘they walk, they rule, they ride and they reward their good, honest servants. Take the gold.’ He held the brooch towards her again. It was a piece of thick gold, marvellously wrought into the shape of Uther’s talisman, a dragon.

  But still Morgan would not accept it. ‘And the boy is the last child Norwenna will ever bear, High Lord,’ she warned Uther. ‘We burned the afterbirth and it did not sound once.’ The afterbirth was always put on the fire so that the popping sound it made would tell how many more children the mother would bear. ‘I listened close,’ Morgan said, ‘and it was silent.’

  ‘The Gods wanted it silent,’ Uther said angrily. ‘My son is dead,’ he went on bleakly, ‘so who else could give Norwenna a boy child fit to be a King?’

  Morgan paused. ‘You, High Lord?’ she said at last.

  Uther chuckled at the thought, then the chuckle turned into laughter and finally into another racking cough that bent him forward in lung-aching pain. The coughing passed at last and he drew in a shuddering breath as he shook his head. ‘Norwenna’s only duty was to drop one boy child, Morgan, and that she has done. Our duty is to protect him.’

  ‘With all the strength of Dumnonia,’ Bedwin added eagerly.

  ‘Newborns die easily,’ Morgan warned the two men in her bleak voice.

  ‘Not this one,’ Uther said fiercely, ‘not this one. He will come to you, Morgan, at Ynys Wydryn and you will use your skills to make certain he lives. Here, take the brooch.’

  Morgan at last accepted the dragon brooch. The maimed babe was still crying and the mother was whimpering, but around the ramparts of Caer Cadarn the pot-beaters and fire-tenders were celebrating the news that our kingdom had an heir again. Dumnonia had an edling, and an edling’s birth meant a great feast and lavish gifts. The bloody birth-straw of the bed was brought from the hall and dumped on a fire so that the flames crackled high and bright. A child had been born; all that child now needed was a name and of that name there could be no doubt. None. Uther eased himself out of his chair and stood huge and grim on Caer Cadarn’s wall to pronounce the name of his new-born grandson, the name of his heir and the name of his kingdom’s edling. The winter-born babe would be named after his father.

  He would be called Mordred.

  NORWENNA AND THE BABY came to us at Ynys Wydryn. They were brought in an ox-cart across the eastern land bridge to the Tor’s foot and I watched from the windy summit as the sick mother and the maimed child were lifted from their bed of fur cloaks and carried in a cloth litter up the path to the stockade. It was cold that day; a bitter, snow-bright cold that ate at the lungs, chapped the skin and made Norwenna whimper as she was carried with her swaddled babe through the land gate of Ynys Wydryn’s Tor.

  Thus did Mordred, Edling of Dumnonia, enter Merlin’s realm.

  Ynys Wydryn, despite its name, which means the Isle of Glass, was not a true island, but rather a promontory of high ground that jutted into a waste of sea-marsh, creeks and willow-edged bogs where sedge and reeds grew thick. It was a rich place, made so by wildfowl, fish, clay and the limestone that could easily be quarried from the hills edging the tidal wastes that were crossed by wooden trackways on which unwary visitors were sometimes drowned when the wind came hard from the west and blew a high tide fast across the long, green wetlands. To the west, where the land rose, there were apple orchards and wheat fields, and to the north, where pale hills edged the marshes, cattle and sheep were herded. It was all good land, and at its heart was Ynys Wydryn.

  This was all Lord Merlin’s land. It was called Avalon and had been ruled by his father and his father’s father, and every serf and slave within sight of the Tor’s summit worked for Merlin. It was this land with its produce trapped and netted in the tidal creeks or grown on the rich soil of the inland river valleys that gave Merlin the wealth and freedom to be a Druid. Britain had once been the land of Druids, but the Romans had first slaughtered them, then tamed the religion so that even now, after two generations without Rome’s rule, only a handful of the old priests remained. The Christians had taken their place, and Christianity now lapped around the old faith like a wind-driven high tide splashing through the demon-haunted reed-beds of Avalon.

  Avalon’s isle, Ynys Wydryn, was a cluster of grassy hills, all of them bare except for the Tor which was the steepest and highest. At its summit was a ridge where Merlin’s hall was built, and beneath the hall was a spread of lesser buildings protected by a wooden stockade perched precariously at the top of the Tor’s steep grassy slopes which were scraped into a pattern of terraces left from the Old Days before the Romans came. A narrow path followed the ancient terraces, winding its intricate way towards the peak, and those who visited the Tor in search of healing or prophecy were forced to follow that path which served to baffle the evil spirits who might otherwise come to sour Merlin’s stronghold. Two other paths ran straight down the Tor’s slopes, one to the east where the land bridge led to Ynys Wydryn, the other westward from the sea gate down to the settlement at the Tor’s foot where fishermen, wildfowlers, basket-weavers and herdsmen lived. Those paths were the everyday entrances to the Tor and Morgan kept them free of evil spirits by constant prayers and charms.

  Morgan gave special attention to the western path for it led not only to the settlement, but also to Ynys Wydryn’s Christian shrine. Merlin’s great-grandfather had let the Christians come to the isle in Roman times and nothing had been able to dislodge them since. We children of the Tor were encouraged to throw stones
at the monks and toss animal dung over their wooden stockade or laugh at the pilgrims who scuttled through the wicket gate to worship a thorn tree that grew next to the impressive stone church which had been built by the Romans and still dominated the Christian compound. One year Merlin had a similar thorn tree enthroned on the Tor and we all worshipped it by singing, dancing and bowing. The village’s Christians said we would be struck down by their God, but nothing happened. We burned our thorn in the end and mixed its ashes with the pig feed, but still the Christian God ignored us. The Christians claimed that their thorn was magic and that it had been brought to Ynys Wydryn by a foreigner who had seen the Christian God nailed to a tree. May God forgive me, but in those distant days I mocked such stories. I never understood then what the thorn had to do with a God’s killing, but now I do, though I can tell you that the Sacred Thorn, if it still grows in Ynys Wydryn, is not the tree sprung from the staff of Joseph of Arimathaea. I know that, for one dark winter’s night when I had been sent to fetch Merlin a flask of clean water from the sacred spring at the Tor’s southern foot, I saw the Christian monks digging up a small thorn bush to replace the tree that had just died inside their stockade. The Holy Thorn was always dying, though whether that was because of the cow dung we threw at it or simply because the poor tree was overwhelmed by the cloth strips tied to it by pilgrims, I cannot tell. The monks of the Holy Thorn became rich anyway, fattened by the generous gifts of the pilgrims.