The Winter King

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Is that what Merlin is doing?’

  She smiled. ‘Right at this moment, Derfel, Merlin is sleeping. And I must too. Haven’t you work to do?’

  ‘Rents to count,’ I said awkwardly. The lower storehouses were filling with smoked fish, smoked eels, jars of salt, willow baskets, woven cloth, pigs of lead, tubs of charcoal, even some rare scraps of amber and jet: the winter rents payable at Beltain which Hywel had to assay, record on tallies, then divide into Merlin’s share and the portion which would be given to the High King’s tax-collectors.

  ‘Then go and count,’ Nimue said, as if nothing odd had happened between us, though she did reach over and give me a sisterly kiss. ‘Go,’ she said and I stumbled out of Merlin’s chamber to face the resentful, curious stares of Norwenna’s attendants who had moved back into the great hall.

  The equinox came. The Christians celebrated the death feast of their God while we lit the vast fires of Beltain. Our flames roared at the darkness to bring new life to the reviving world. The first Saxon raiders were seen far in the east, but none came close to Ynys Wydryn. Nor did we see Gundleus of Siluria again. Gudovan the clerk supposed that the marriage proposal had come to nothing and he gloomily forecast a new war against the northern kingdoms.

  Merlin did not return, nor did we hear any news of him.

  The Edling Mordred’s baby teeth came. The first to show were in his lower gums, a good omen for a long life, and Mordred used the new teeth to bite Ralla’s nipples bloody, though she went on feeding him so that her own plump son would suck a prince’s blood along with his mother’s milk. Nimue’s spirits lightened as the days grew longer. The scars on our hands went from pink to white and then to shadowy lines. Nimue never spoke of them.

  The High King spent a week at Caer Cadarn and the Edling was carried there for his grandfather’s inspection. Uther must have approved of what he saw, and the spring omens were all propitious, for three weeks after Beltain we heard that the future of the kingdom and the future of Norwenna and the future of Mordred would all be decided at a great High Council, the first to be held in Britain for over sixty years.

  It was spring, the leaves were green, and there were such high hopes in the freshening land.

  THE HIGH COUNCIL WAS held at Glevum, a Roman town that lay beside the River Severn just beyond Dumnonia’s northern border with Gwent. Uther was carried there in a cart drawn by four oxen, each beast decorated with sprigs of may and saddled with green cloths. The High King enjoyed his ponderous progress through his kingdom’s early summer, maybe because he knew this would be his last sight of Britain’s loveliness before he went through Cruachan’s Cave and over the sword bridge to the Otherworld. The hedgerows between which his oxen plodded were white with hawthorn, the woods were hazed by bluebells while poppies blazed among the wheat, rye and barley and in the almost ripe fields of hay where the corncrakes were noisy. The High King travelled slowly, stopping often at settlements and villas where he inspected farmlands and halls, and advised men who knew better than he how to layer a fulling pond or geld a hog. He bathed in the hot springs at Aquae Sulis and was so recovered when he left the city that he walked a full mile before being helped once more into his fur-lined cart. He was accompanied by his bards, his counsellors, his physician, his chorus, a train of servants and an escort of warriors commanded by Owain, his champion and commander of his guard. Everyone wore flowers and the warriors slung their shields upside down to show they marched in peace, though Uther was too old and too cautious not to make certain that their spear-points were whetted bright each new day.

  I walked to Glevum. I had no business there, but Uther had summoned Morgan to the High Council. Women were not normally welcome at any councils, high or low, but Uther believed no one spoke for Merlin as Morgan did and so, in his despair at Merlin’s absence, he called for her. She was, besides, Uther’s natural daughter, and the High King liked to say that there was more sense in Morgan’s gold-wrapped head than in half his counsellors’ skulls put together. Morgan was also responsible for Norwenna’s health and it was Norwenna’s future that was being decided, though Norwenna herself was neither summoned nor consulted. She stayed at Ynys Wydryn under the care of Merlin’s wife, Guendoloen. Morgan would have taken no one but her slave Sebile to Glevum, but at the last moment Nimue calmly announced that she was also travelling there and that I was to accompany her.

  Morgan made a fuss, of course, but Nimue met the older woman’s indignation with an irritating calm. ‘I have been instructed,’ she told Morgan, and when Morgan shrilly demanded by whom, Nimue just smiled. Morgan was double Nimue’s size and twice her age, but when Merlin had taken Nimue to his bed the power in Ynys Wydryn passed to her and in the face of that authority the older woman was helpless. She still objected to my going. She demanded to know why did Nimue not take Lunete, the other Irish girl among Merlin’s foundlings? A boy like me, Morgan said, was no company for a young woman, and when Nimue still did nothing but smile, Morgan spat that she would tell Merlin of Nimue’s fondness for me and in that telling would lie the end of Nimue, at which clumsy threat Nimue simply laughed and turned away.

  I cared little for the argument. I just wanted to go to Glevum and see the jousting and hear the bards and watch the dancing and, most of all, to be with Nimue.

  And so we went, an ill-assorted quartet, to Glevum. Morgan, blackthorn staff in hand and gold mask glinting in the summer sun, stumped ahead, her limp making each heavy step into an emphatic gesture of disapproval at Nimue’s company. Sebile, the Saxon slave, hurried two paces behind her mistress with her back stooped beneath the bundle of bedding cloaks, dried herbs and pots. Nimue and I walked behind, barefoot, bare-headed and unburdened. Nimue wore a long black cloak over a white robe that she gathered at her waist with a slave’s halter. Her long black hair was pinned high and she wore no jewels, not even a bone pin to gather her cloak. Morgan’s neck was circled with a heavy golden torque and her dun-coloured cloak was clasped at her breast with two golden brooches, one cast as a triple-horned deer and the other the heavy dragon ornament that Uther had given to her at Caer Cadarn.

  I enjoyed the journey. We took three days, a slow pace, for Morgan was an awkward walker, but the sun shone on us and the Roman road made our journey easy. At dusk we would find the nearest chieftain’s hall and sleep as honoured guests in his straw-filled barn. Other travellers were few, and all made way for the bright blazon of Morgan’s gold that was her symbol of high status. We had been warned against the masterless and landless men who robbed merchants on the high roads, but none threatened us, perhaps because Uther’s soldiers had prepared for the High Council by scouring the woods and hills in search of brigands and we passed more than a dozen rotting bodies staked at the road’s sides as warnings. The serfs and slaves we met knelt to Morgan, merchants made way for her, and only one traveller dared challenge our authority, a fierce-bearded priest with his ragged following of wild-haired women. The Christian group was dancing down the road, praising their nailed God, but when the priest saw the gold mask covering Morgan’s face and the triple antlers and wide-winged dragon of her brooches he ranted at her as a creature of the devil. The priest must have thought that such a disfigured, hobbling woman would prove an easy prey to his taunting, but an errant preacher accompanied by his wife and holy whores was no match for Igraine’s daughter, Merlin’s ward and Arthur’s sister. Morgan gave the fellow a single thump on the ear with her heavy staff, a blow that knocked him sideways into a ditch thick with nettles, and then she walked on with scarce a backwards glance. The priest’s women shrieked and parted. Some prayed and others spat curses, but Nimue glided through their malevolence like a spirit.

  I carried no weapons, unless a staff and a knife count as a warrior’s accoutrements. I had wanted to carry both a sword and a spear, to look like a grown man, but Hywel had scoffed that a man was not made by wanting, but by doing. For my protection he gave me a bronze torque that displayed Merlin’s horned God at its finials. No one, he said
, would dare challenge Merlin. Yet even so, without a man’s weapons, I felt useless. Why, I asked Nimue, was I there?

  ‘Because you’re my oath-friend, little one,’ Nimue said. I was already taller than she, but she used the term affectionately. ‘And because you and I are chosen of Bel and if He chooses us, then we must choose each other.’

  ‘Then why are the two of us going to Glevum?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Because Merlin wants us there, of course.’

  ‘Will he be there?’ I asked eagerly. Merlin had been away so very long, and without him Ynys Wydryn was like a sky without its sun.

  ‘No,’ she said calmly, though how she knew Merlin’s desire in this matter I did not know for Merlin was still far away and the summons for the High Council had been issued long after his departure.

  ‘And what will we do when we reach Glevum?’

  ‘We will know when we get there,’ she said mysteriously and would explain no more.

  Glevum, once I had grown accustomed to the overpowering stench of nightsoil, was marvellously strange. Other than some of the villas that had become farmsteads on Merlin’s estates, this was my first time in a proper Roman place and I gawked at the sights like a new-born chick. The streets were paved with fitted stones, and though they had canted in the long years since the Romans’ departure, King Tewdric’s men had done their best to repair the damage by pulling up the weeds and sweeping away the soil so that the city’s nine streets looked like stony watercourses in the dry season. It was hard to walk on them, and it made Nimue and me laugh to see horses trying to negotiate the treacherous stones. The buildings were as weird as the streets. We made our halls and houses out of wood, thatch, clay-cob and wattle, but these Roman buildings were all joined together and made of stone and strange narrow bricks, though over the years some of them had collapsed to leave ragged gaps in the long rows of low houses that were curiously roofed with baked clay tiles. The walled city guarded a crossing of the Severn and stood between two kingdoms and near to a third, and so it was a famous trading centre. Potters worked in the houses, goldsmiths stooped over their tables and calves bellowed in a slaughter yard behind the market place that was crowded with country folk selling butter, nuts, leather, smoked fish, honey, dyed cloth and newly sheared wool. Best of all, at least to my dazzled eyes, were King Tewdric’s soldiers. They were Romans, Nimue told me, or at least they were Britons taught the Roman ways, and all kept their beards clipped short and were dressed alike in sturdy leather shoes and woollen hose beneath short leather skirts. The senior soldiers had bronze plates sewn on to the skirts and when they walked the armour plates would clank together like cow bells. Each man had a breastplate polished bright, a long russet cloak, and a leather helmet that was sewn at the crown into a ridge. Some of the helmets were plumed with dyed feathers. The soldiers carried short, broad-bladed swords, long spears with polished staffs and oblong shields of wood and leather that carried Tewdric’s bull symbol. The shields were all the same size, the spears all of a length and the soldiers all marched in step, an extraordinary sight that made me laugh at first though later I became used to it.

  At the centre of the town, where the four streets from the four gates met in a wide open square, there stood a vast and wondrous building. Even Nimue gaped at it, for surely no one living could make such a thing; so high, so white and so sharply cornered. Pillars held the roof high, and all along the triangular space between the roof’s peak and the pillars’ tops were fantastic pictures carved in white stone that showed marvellous men trampling enemies beneath their horses’ hooves. The stone men carried sheaves of stone spears and wore stone helmets with soaring stone crests. Some of the pictures had dropped away or had split in the frosts, yet were still a miracle to me, though Nimue, after staring at them, spat to ward off the evil.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ I asked her resentfully.

  ‘The Romans tried to be gods,’ she said, ‘which is why the Gods humbled them. The Council should not meet here.’

  Yet Glevum was where the High Council was summoned, and Nimue could not change it. Here, encompassed by Roman ramparts of earth and wood, the fate of Uther’s kingdom was to be decided.

  The High King had already arrived by the time we reached the town. He was lodging in another high building that faced the pillared hall across the square. He showed neither surprise nor displeasure that Nimue had come, perhaps because he thought she was merely a part of Morgan’s retinue, and he gave us all a single room in the back of the house where the kitchens smoked and the slaves squabbled. The High King’s soldiers looked drab beside Tewdric’s shining men. Our soldiers wore their hair long and their beards wild, they had patched and frayed cloaks of different colours and carried long, heavy swords, rough-shafted spears and round shields on which Uther’s dragon symbol looked crude beside Tewdric’s carefully painted bulls.

  For the first two days there were celebrations. Champions of the two kingdoms fought mock fights outside the walls, though when Owain, Uther’s champion, went into the arena King Tewdric was forced to pit two of his best men against him. Dumnonia’s famous hero was reputed to be invincible, and he looked it as he stood with the summer sun glinting off his long sword. He was a huge man with tattooed arms, a matted bare chest and a bristling beard decorated with warrior rings forged from the weapons of defeated enemies. His fight against Tewdric’s two champions was supposed to be a mock battle, but the mockery was hard to see as the two heroes of Gwent took their turns to attack him. The three men fought as though they were filled with hate and exchanged sword blows that must have rung north into distant Powys, and after a few minutes their sweat was mixed with blood, their blunt swords’ edges were dented and all three men were limping, but Owain was still getting the best of the bout. Despite his size he was fast with a sword, and his blows carried crushing weight. The crowd, which had gathered from all the country thereabouts and was thus drawn from both Uther’s and Tewdric’s kingdoms, was shouting like wild beasts to urge their men on to massacre, and Tewdric, seeing the passion, threw down his staff to end the fight. ‘We are friends, remember,’ he told the three men, and Uther, seated one step higher than Tewdric as befitted the High King, nodded agreement.

  Uther looked gross and ill; his body was swollen with fluid, his face was yellowing and slack, his breathing laboured. He had been carried to the fighting field in a litter and was swathed on his throne in a heavy cloak that hid his jewelled belt and bright torque. King Tewdric dressed as a Roman, indeed his grandfather had been a real Roman which must have explained his foreign-sounding name. The King wore his hair clipped very short, had no beard, and was swathed in a white toga folded intricately at one shoulder. He was tall, thin and graceful in his movements, and though he was still a young man, the sad, wise look of his face made him seem much older. His Queen, Enid, wore her hair in a weird plaited spiral that was piled so precariously on top of her skull that she was forced to move with the angular awkwardness of a new-born colt. Her face was caked with a white paste that fixed her with a vacant expression of perplexed boredom. Her son Meurig, the Edling of Gwent, was a fidgety child of ten who sat at his mother’s feet and was struck by his father every time he picked his nose.

  After the fighting the harpists and bards had their contest. Cynyr, the Bard of Gwent, sang the great tale of Uther’s victory over the Saxons at Caer Idern. Later I realized that Tewdric must have ordered it as a tribute to the High King, and certainly the performance pleased Uther who smiled as the verses rolled by and nodded whenever a particular warrior was praised. Cynyr declaimed the victory in a ringing voice, and when he came to the lines which told how Owain had slaughtered Saxons by the thousand, he turned towards the tired, battered fighter and one of Tewdric’s champions, who only an hour before had been trying to beat the big man down, stood and raised Owain’s sword arm. The crowd roared, then they laughed as Cynyr adopted a woman’s voice to describe the Saxons pleading for mercy. He began to run about the field in little, panicked steps, cr
ouching as though hiding, and the crowd loved it. I loved it too, for you could almost see the hated Saxons cowering in terror and smell the stench of their death blood and hear the wings of the ravens coming to gorge on their flesh, and then Cynyr straightened to his full height and let his cloak drop away so that his blue-painted body was naked and he sang the tribute song of the Gods who had watched their champion, High King Uther of Dumnonia, the Pen-dragon of Britain, beat down the kings and chiefs and champions of the foe. Then, naked still, the bard prostrated himself before Uther’s throne.

  Uther fumbled beneath his shaggy cloak to find a torque of yellow gold that he tossed towards Cynyr. His throw was feeble and the torque fell on the edge of the wooden dais where the two kings sat. Nimue blanched at the bad omen, but Tewdric calmly picked up the torque and carried it to the white-haired bard whom the King raised up with his own hands.

  After the bards had sung, and just as the sun was setting behind the low dark rill of western hills that marked the edge of the Silurian lands, a procession of girls brought flowers for the queens, but there was only one Queen on the dais, Enid. For a few seconds the girls carrying the heaps of flowers meant for Uther’s lady did not know what to do, but Uther stirred himself and pointed at Morgan who had her own bench beside the dais, so the girls swerved aside and heaped the irises, meadowsweet and bee orchids before her. ‘She looks like a dumpling,’ Nimue hissed in my ear, ‘garlanded with parsley.’

  On the night before the High Council there was a Christian service in the big hall of the great building in the town’s centre. Tewdric was an enthusiastic Christian and his followers thronged the hall that was lit by flaming torches set into iron beckets on the walls. It had rained that evening and the crowded hall stank of sweat, damp wool and woodsmoke. The women stood on the left side of the hall and the men on the right, though Nimue calmly ignored the arrangement and climbed on to a pedestal that stood behind the dark crowd of cloaked, bare-headed men. There were other such pedestals, most crowned with statues, but our plinth was empty and provided ample space for the two of us to sit and stare at the Christian rites, though at first I was more astonished by the hall’s vast interior that was higher, wider and longer than any feasting hall I had ever seen; so huge that sparrows lived inside and must have thought the Roman hall a whole wide world. The sparrows’ heaven was a curved roof supported by squat brick pillars that had once been covered by smooth white plas-terwork on which pictures had been painted. Fragments of the pictures remained: I could see a red outline of a running deer, a sea creature with horns and forked tail, and two women holding a twin-handled cup.