The Winter King

by Bernard Cornwell

  The monks of Ynys Wydryn were delighted that Norwenna had come to our stockade for now they had a reason to climb the steep path and bring their prayers into the heart of Merlin’s stronghold. The Princess Norwenna was still a fierce and sharp-tongued Christian despite the failure of the Virgin Mary to deliver her child and she demanded that the monks be admitted every morning. I do not know if Merlin would have allowed them into the compound, and Nimue certainly cursed Morgan for granting her permission, but Merlin was not at Ynys Wydryn in those days. We had not seen our master for more than a year, but life in his strange fastness went on without him.

  And strange it was. Merlin was the oddest of all Ynys Wydryn’s inhabitants, but around him, for his pleasure, he had assembled a tribe of maimed, disfigured, twisted and half-mad creatures. The captain of the household and commander of its guard was Druidan, a dwarf. He stood no higher than a five-year-old child, yet he had the fury of a full-grown warrior and dressed each day in greaves, breastplate, helmet, cloak and weapons. He railed against the fate that had stunted him and took his revenge on the only creatures smaller still: the orphans whom Merlin gathered so carelessly. Few of Merlin’s girls were not fanatically pursued by Druidan, though when he had tried to drag Nimue into his bed he had received an angry beating for his pains. Merlin had hit him about the head, breaking Druidan’s ears, splitting his lips and blacking his eyes while the children and the stockade’s guards cheered. The guards Druidan commanded were all lame or blind or mad, and some of them were all three, but none was mad enough to like Druidan.

  Nimue, my friend and childhood companion, was Irish. The Irish were Britons, but they had never been ruled by the Romans and for that reason counted themselves better than the mainland Britons whom they raided, harried, enslaved and colonized. If the Saxons had not been such terrible enemies then we would have considered the Irish the worst of all the Gods’ creatures, though from time to time we made alliances with them against some other tribe of Britons. Nimue had been snatched from her family in a raid Uther made against the Irish settlements in Demetia that lay across the wide sea fed by the River Severn. Sixteen captives were taken in that raid and all were sent back to become slaves in Dumnonia, but while the ships were crossing the Severn Sea a great storm blew from the west and the ship carrying the captives foundered on Ynys Wair. Nimue alone survived, walking out of the sea, it was said, without even being wet. It was a sign, Merlin claimed, that she was loved by Manawydan, the Sea God, though Nimue herself insisted that it had been Don, the most powerful Goddess, who had saved her life. Merlin wanted to call her Vivien, a name dedicated to Manawydan, but Nimue ignored the name and kept her own. Nimue almost always got her own way. She grew up in Merlin’s mad household with a sharp curiosity and a self-possessed confidence and when, after maybe thirteen or fourteen of her summers had passed, Merlin ordered her to his own bed, she went as though she had known all along that her fate was to become his lover and thus, in the order of these things, the second most important person in all Ynys Wydryn.

  Although Morgan did not yield that post without a struggle. Morgan, of all the weird creatures in Merlin’s house, was the most grotesque. She was a widow and thirty summers old when Norwenna and Mordred came to be her wards, and the appointment was appropriate for Morgan was high born herself. She was the first of the four bastards, three girls and a boy, fathered on Igraine of Gwynedd by High King Uther. Her brother was Arthur and with such a lineage and such a brother it might be thought ambitious men would have beaten down the walls of the Otherworld itself to claim the widow’s hand, yet as a young bride Morgan had been trapped in a burning house that had killed her new husband and scarred Morgan horribly. The flames had taken her left ear, blinded her left eye, seared the hair from the left side of her scalp, maimed her left leg and twisted her left arm so that naked, Nimue told me, the whole left side of Morgan’s body was wrinkled, raw-red and distorted, shrivelled in some places, stretched in others, gruesome everywhere. Just like a rotted apple, Nimue told me, only worse. Morgan was a creature from nightmare, but to Merlin she was a lady fit for his high hall and he had trained her to be his prophetess. He had ordered one of the High King’s goldsmiths to fashion her a mask that fitted over her ravaged head like a helmet. The gold mask had a hole for her one eye and a slit for her twisted mouth and was made out of thin fine gold that was chased in spirals and dragons, and fronted with an image of Cernunnos, the Horned God, who was Merlin’s protector. Gold-faced Morgan always dressed in black, had a glove on her withered left hand, and was widely famed for her healing touch and gifts of prophecy. She was also the worst-tempered woman I ever met.

  Sebile was Morgan’s slave and companion. Sebile was that rarity, a great beauty with hair the color of pale gold. She was a Saxon captured in a raid and after the war-band had raped her for a season she had come gibbering to Ynys Wydryn where Morgan had healed her mind. Even so she was still crazed, though not wicked mad, just foolish beyond the dreams of foolishness. She would lie with any man, not because she wanted to, but because she feared not to, and nothing Morgan did could ever stop her. She gave birth year after year, though few of the fair-haired children ever lived and those that did Merlin sold as slaves to men who prized golden-haired children. He was amused by Sebile, though nothing in her madness spoke of the Gods.

  I liked Sebile for I too was a Saxon and Sebile would speak to me in my mother’s tongue so that I grew up in Ynys Wydryn speaking both Saxon and the speech of the Britons. I should have been a slave, but when I was a little child, shorter even than the dwarf Druidan, a raiding party had come to Dumnonia’s northern coast from Siluria and had taken the settlement where my mother was enslaved. King Gundleus of Siluria led the raid. My mother, who I think looked something like Sebile, was raped while I was carried to the death-pit where Tanaburs, Siluria’s Druid, sacrificed a dozen captives as thanks to the High God Bel for the great plunder the raid had yielded. Dear God, how I remember that night. The fires, the screams, the drunken rapes, the wild dancing, and then the moment when Tanaburs hurled me into the black pit with its sharpened stake. I lived, untouched, and came from the death-pit as calmly as Nimue had come from the killing sea and Merlin, finding me, had called me a child of Bel. He named me Derfel, gave me a home, and let me grow free.

  The Tor was filled with such children who had been snatched from the Gods. Merlin believed we were special and that we might grow into a new order of Druids and Priestesses who could help him re-establish the old true religion in Romeblighted Britain, but he never had time to teach us, and so most of us grew to become farmers, fishermen or wives. During my time on the Tor only Nimue seemed marked by the Gods and was growing into a priestess. I wanted nothing more than to be a warrior.

  Pellinore gave me that ambition. Pellinore was the favourite of all Merlin’s creatures. He was a king, but the Saxons had taken his land and his eyes, and the Gods had taken his mind. He should have been’ sent to the Isle of the Dead, where the dangerous mad went, but Merlin ordered him kept on the Tor locked in a small compound like the one where Druidan kept his pigs. He lived naked with long white hair that reached to his knees and with empty eye-sockets that wept. He raved constantly, haranguing the universe about his troubles, and Merlin would listen to the madness and draw from it messages of the Gods. Everyone feared Pellinore. He was utterly crazy and ungovernably wild. He once cooked one of Sebile’s children on his fire. Yet, oddly, I do not know why, Pellinore liked me. I would slip between the bars of his compound and he would pet me and tell me tales of fighting and wild hunts. He never sounded mad to me and he never hurt me, nor Nimue, but then, as Merlin always said, we two children were especially beloved of Bel.

  Bel might have loved us, but Guendoloen hated us. She was Merlin’s wife, now old and toothless. Like Morgan she had great skills with herbs and charms, but Merlin had cast her off when her face became disfigured by a sickness. It had happened long before I reached the Tor, during a period everyone called the Bad Time when Merlin had
come back from the north mad and weeping, but even when he recovered his wits he did not take Guendoloen back, though he did allow her to live in a small hut beside the stockade fence where she spent her days casting spells against her husband and screaming insults at the rest of us. She hated Druidan most of all. Sometimes she would attack him with a fire spit and Druidan would scamper through the huts with Guendoloen chasing after him. We children would urge her on, screaming for dwarfish blood, but he always got away.

  Such, then, was the strange place to which Norwenna came with the Edling Mordred, and though I may have made it sound a place of horrors it was, in truth, a good refuge. We were the privileged children of Lord Merlin, we lived free, we did little work, we laughed, and Ynys Wydryn, the Isle of Glass, was a happy place.

  Norwenna arrived in wintertime when Avalon’s marshes were glossed with ice. There was a carpenter in Ynys Wydryn called Gwlyddyn, whose wife had a boy child the same age as Mordred, and Gwlyddyn made us sledges and we rang the air with shrieks as we slid down the Tor’s snowy slopes. Ralla, Gwlyddyn’s wife, was appointed Mordred’s wet nurse and the Prince, despite his maimed foot, grew strong on her milk. Even Norwenna’s health improved as the bitter cold abated and the winter’s first snowdrops bloomed in the thorn thickets about the sacred spring at the Tor’s foot. The Princess was never strong, but Morgan and Guendoloen gave her herbs, the monks prayed, and it seemed her birth-sickness was at last passing. Each week a messenger carried news of the Edling’s health to his grandfather, the High King, and each piece of good news was rewarded with a piece of gold or maybe a horn of salt or a flask of rare wine that Druidan would steal.

  We waited for Merlin’s return, but he did not come and the Tor seemed empty without him, though our daily life hardly changed. The store-rooms had to be kept filled and the rats had to be killed and the firewood and spring water had to be carried uphill three times a day. Gudovan, Merlin’s scribe, kept a tally of the tenants’ payments while Hywel, the steward, rode the estates to make certain no family cheated their absent lord. Gudovan and Hywel were both sober, hard-headed, hardworking men; proof, Nimue told me, that Merlin’s eccentricities ended where his income began. It was Gudovan who had taught me to read and write. I did not want to learn such un-warriorlike skills, but Nimue had insisted. ‘You are fatherless,’ she had told me, ‘and you’ll have to make your way on your own skills.’

  ‘I want to be a soldier.’

  ‘You will be,’ she promised me, ‘but not unless you learn to read and write,’ and such was her youthful authority over me that I believed her and learned the clerkly skills long before I discovered that no soldier needed them.

  So Gudovan taught me letters and Hywel, the steward, taught me to fight. He trained me with the single-stick, the countryman’s cudgel that could crack a skull open, but which could also mimic the strokeplay of a sword or the thrust of a spear. Hywel, before he lost a leg to a Saxon axe, had been a famous warrior in Uther’s band and he made me exercise until my arms were strong enough to wield a heavy sword with the same speed as a single-stick. Most warriors, Hywel said, depended on brute force and drink instead of skill. He told me I would face men reeling with mead and ale whose only talent was to give giant blows that might kill an ox, but a sober man who knew the nine strokes of the sword would always beat such a brute. ‘I was drunk,’ he admitted, ‘when Octha the Saxon took my leg. Now faster, lad, faster! Your sword must dazzle them! Faster!’ He taught me well, and the first to know it were the monks’ sons in Ynys Wydryn’s lower settlement. They resented we privileged children of the Tor, for we idled when they worked and ran free while they laboured, and as revenge they would chase us and try to beat us. I took my singlestick to the village one day and hammered three of the Christians bloody. I was always tall for my age and the Gods had made me strong as an ox and I ascribed my victory to their honour even though Hywel whipped me for it. The privileged, he said, should never take advantage of their inferiors, but I think he was pleased all the same for he took me hunting the next day and I killed my first boar with a man’s spear. That was in a misty thicket by the River Cam and I was just twelve summers old. Hywel smeared my face with the boar’s blood, gave me its tusks to wear as a necklace, then carried the corpse away to his Temple of Mithras where he gave a feast to all the old warriors who worshipped that soldiers’ God. I was not allowed to attend the feast, but one day, Hywel promised me, when I had grown a beard and slain my first Saxon in battle, he would initiate me into the Mithraic mysteries.

  Three years later I still dreamed of killing Saxons. Some might have thought it odd that I, a Saxon youth with Saxon-colored hair, was so fervently British in my loyalty, but since my earliest childhood I had been raised among the Britons and my friends, loves, daily speech, stories, enmities and dreams were all British. Nor was my coloring so unusual. The Romans had left Briton peopled with all manner of strangers, indeed mad Pellinore once told me of two brothers who were both black as charcoal and until I met Sagramor, Arthur’s Numidian commander, I thought his words were mere lunacy weaving romance.

  The Tor became crowded once Mordred and his mother arrived for Norwenna brought not only her women attendants, but also a troop of warriors whose task was to protect the Edling’s life. We all slept four or five to a hut, though none but Nimue and Morgan were allowed into the hall’s inner chambers. They were Merlin’s own and Nimue alone was permitted to sleep there. Norwenna and her court lived in the hall itself, which was filled with smoke from the two fires that burned day and night. The hall was supported by twenty oak posts and had walls of plastered wattle and a thatched roof. The floor was of earth covered by rushes that sometimes caught fire and caused a panic until the flames had been stamped out. Merlin’s chambers were separated from the hall by an internal wall of wattles and plaster pierced by a single small wooden door. We knew that Merlin slept, studied and dreamed in those rooms that culminated in a wooden tower built at the Tor’s highest point. What happened inside the tower was a mystery to everyone but Merlin, Morgan and Nimue and none of those three would ever tell, though the country people, who could see Merlin’s Tower for miles around, swore it was crammed with treasures taken from the grave mounds of the Old People.

  The chief of Mordred’s guard was a Christian named Ligessac, a tall, thin, greedy man whose great skill was with the bow. He could split a twig at fifty paces when he was sober, though he rarely was. He taught me some of his skill, but he became easily bored with a boy’s company and preferred to gamble with his men. He did, however, tell me the true tale of Prince Mordred’s death and thus the reason why High King Uther had cursed Arthur. ‘It wasn’t Arthur’s fault,’ Ligessac said as he tossed a pebble on to his throwboard. All the soldiers had throwboards, some of them beautifully made out of bone. ‘A six!’ he said while I waited to hear the story of Arthur.

  ‘Double you,’ Menw, one of the Prince’s guards, said, then rolled his own stone. It rattled over the board’s ridges and settled on a one. He had only needed a two to win so now he scooped his pebbles off the board and cursed.

  Ligessac sent Menw to fetch his purse to pay his winnings, then told me how Uther had summoned Arthur from Armorica to help defeat a great army of Saxons that had thrust deep into our land. Arthur had brought his warriors, Ligessac said, but none of his famous horses for the summons had been urgent and there had been no time to find enough ships for both men and horses. ‘Not that he needed horses,’ Ligessac said admiringly, ‘because he trapped those Saxon bastards in the Valley of the White Horse. Then Mordred decided he knew better than Arthur. He wanted all the credit, you see.’ Ligessac cuffed at his running nose, then glanced about to make sure no one was listening. ‘Mordred was drunk by then,’ he went on in a lower voice, ‘and half his men were raving naked and swearing they could slaughter ten times their number. We should have waited for Arthur, but the Prince ordered us to charge.’

  ‘You were there?’ I asked in adolescent wonder.

  He nodded. ‘With M
ordred. Dear God, but how they fought. They surrounded us and suddenly we were fifty Britons getting dead or sober very quick. I was shooting arrows as fast as I could, our spearmen were making a shield–wall, but their warriors were hacking in on us with sword and axe. Their drums were going bang bang, their wizards were howling and I thought I was a dead man. I’d run out of arrows and was using the spear and there can’t have been more than twenty of us left alive, and all of us were at the end of our strength. The dragon banner had been captured, Mordred was bleeding his life away and the rest of us were just huddling together waiting for the end, and then Arthur’s men arrived.’ He paused, then shook his head ruefully. ‘The bards tell you that Mordred glutted the ground with Saxon blood that day, lad, but it wasn’t Mordred, it was Arthur. He killed and killed. He took the banner back, he slew the wizards, he burned the war drums, he chased the survivors till dusk and he killed their warlord at Edwy’s Hang-stone by the light of the moon. And that’s why the Saxons are being cautious neighbours, boy, not because Mordred beat them, but because they think Arthur has come back to Britain.’

  ‘But he hasn’t,’ I said bleakly.

  ‘The High King won’t have him back. The High King blames him.’ Ligessac paused and looked around again in case he was being overheard. ‘The High King reckons Arthur wanted Mordred dead so he could be king himself, but that’s not true. Arthur’s not like that.’

  ‘What is he like?’ I asked.

  Ligessac shrugged as if to suggest the answer was difficult, but then, before he could answer anything, he saw Menw returning. ‘Not a word, boy,’ he warned me, ‘not a word.’