The Winter King

by Bernard Cornwell

  Uther was not in the hall, but his Christian warriors attended, and Bishop Bedwin, the High King’s counsellor, helped with the ceremonies that Nimue and I watched from our eyrie like two naughty children eavesdropping on their elders. King Tewdric was there, and with him some of the client kings and princes who would be at the High Council the next day. Those great ones had seats at the front of the hall, but the mass of firelight shone not around their chairs, but on the Christian priests gathered about their table. It was the first time I had ever seen such creatures at their rites. ‘What exactly is a bishop?’ I asked Nimue.

  ‘Like a Druid,’ she said, and indeed like Druids all the Christian priests wore the front part of their skulls shaven clean. ‘Except they have no training,’ Nimue added derisively, ‘and know nothing.’

  ‘Are they all bishops?’ I asked, for there were a score of shaven men coming and going, bobbing down and bobbing up, around the firelit table at the hall’s far end.

  ‘No. Some are just priests. They know even less than the bishops.’ She laughed.

  ‘No priestesses?’ I asked.

  ‘In their religion,’ she said scornfully, ‘women have to obey men.’ She spat against that evil and some of the nearby warriors turned disapproving looks on her. Nimue ignored them. She was swathed in her black cloak with her arms clasped about her knees which were drawn tight up against her breasts. Morgan had forbidden us to attend the Christian ceremonies, but Nimue no longer took Morgan’s orders. In the firelight her thin face was shadowed dark and her eyes shone.

  The strange priests chanted and intoned in the Greek tongue that meant nothing to either of us. They kept bowing, upon which the whole crowd would duck down and struggle up again, and each downward plunge was marked on the right side of the hall by an untidy clatter as a hundred or more scab-barded swords clashed on the tiled floor. The priests, like Druids, held their arms straight out from their sides when they prayed. They wore strange robes that looked something like Tewdric’s toga and ’were covered with short, decorated cloaks. They sang and the crowd sang back, and some of the women standing behind the fragile, white-faced Queen Enid began to shriek and tremble in ecstasy, but the priests ignored the commotion and went on chanting and singing. There was a plain cross on the table to which they bowed and at which Nimue made the sign of evil as she muttered a protective charm. She and I soon became bored and I wanted to slip away to make sure we were well placed to get some fragments of the great feast that was to be given after the ceremony in Uther’s hall, but then the language of the night changed into the speech of Britain as a young priest harangued the crowd.

  The young priest was Sansum, and that night was the first time I ever saw the saint. He was very young then, much younger than the bishops, but he was considered to be a coming man, the hope of the Christian future, and the bishops had deliberately given him the honour of preaching this sermon as a means of advancing his career.

  Sansum was always a thin man, short of stature, with a sharp, clean-shaven chin and a receding forehead above which his tonsured hair stuck up stiff and black like a thorn hedge, though the hedge had been more closely trimmed on top than at its edges and thus had left him with a pair of black bristly tufts that stuck out just above his ears. ‘He looks like Lughti-gern,’ Nimue whispered to me and I laughed aloud for Lughtigern is the Mouse Lord of children’s stories; a creature full of boasts and bravado, but always running away when puss appears. Yet this tonsured Mouse Lord could certainly preach. I had never heard the blessed Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ before that night and I sometimes shiver when I think how ill I took that first sermon, but I will never forget the power of its delivery. Sansum stood on a second table so that he could see and be seen, and sometimes, in the passion of his preaching, he threatened to fall off the edge and had to be restrained by his fellow priests. I was hoping he would fall, yet somehow he always recovered his balance.

  His preaching began conventionally enough. He thanked God for the presence of the great kings and mighty princes who had come to hear the Gospel, then he paid King Tewdric some pretty compliments before launching himself into a diatribe which set out the Christian view of the state of Britain. It was, I realized later, more of a political speech than a sermon.

  The Isle of Britain, Sansum said, was beloved of God. It was a special land, set apart from other lands and girdled by a bright sea to defend it from pestilences, heresies and enemies. Britain, he went on, was also blessed by great rulers and mighty warriors, yet of late the island had been riven by strangers, and its fields, barns and villages had been put to the sword. The heathen Sais, the Saxons, were taking the land of our ancestors and turning it to waste. The dread Sais desecrated the graves of our fathers, they raped our wives and slaughtered our children, and such things could not happen, Sansum asserted, unless they were the will of God, and why would God so turn his back upon his special and beloved children?

  Because, he said, those children had refused to hear His holy message. The children of Britain still bowed down to wood and stone. The so-called sacred groves still stood and their shrines still held the skulls of the dead and were washed with the blood of sacrifices. Such things might not be seen in the towns, Sansum said, for most towns were filled with Christians, but the countryside, he warned us, was infested with pagans. There might be few Druids left in Britain, yet in every valley and farmland there were men and women who acted like Druids, who sacrificed living things to dead stone and who used charms and amulets to beguile the simple people. Even Christians, and here Sansum scowled at his congregation, carried their sick to heathen witches and took their dreams to pagan prophetesses, and so long as those evil practices were encouraged so long would God curse Britain with rape and slaughter and Saxons. He paused there to draw breath and I touched the torque about my neck because I knew this ranting Mouse Lord was the enemy of my master Merlin and of my friend Nimue. We had sinned! Sansum suddenly shouted, spreading his arms as he teetered at the table’s edge, and we all had to repent. The Kings of Britain, he said, must love Christ and His blessed Mother, and only when the whole of the British race was united in God would God unite the whole of Britain. By now the crowd was responding to his sermon, calling out agreement, praying aloud to their God for mercy and shouting for the death of the Druids and their followers. It was terrifying.

  ‘Come,’ Nimue whispered to me, ‘I’ve heard enough.’

  We slipped off the pedestal and eased our way through the crowd that filled the vestibule beneath the hall’s outer pillars. To my shame I held my cloak up to my beardless chin so that no one would see my torque as I followed Nimue down the steps into the windy square that was lit on all sides by blustering torch flames. A small rain was spitting out of the west to make the stones of the square shine in the firelight. Tewdric’s uniformed guards stood motionless all around the square’s edge as Nimue led me into the very centre of the wide space where she stopped and suddenly began to laugh. At first it was a chuckle, then it was the laughter of jest that turned into a fierce mockery that changed into a defiant howl that beat up past the roofs of Glevum to echo out towards the heavens and end in a maniacal screech as wild as the death cry of a cornered beast. She turned around as she sounded the screech, turned sunwise from the north to the east to the south to the west and so back north again, and not one soldier stirred. Some of the Christians in the portico of the great building looked at us in anger, but did not interfere. Even Christians recognized someone being touched by the Gods, and none of them dared lay a hand on Nimue.

  When her breath was ended she sank down to the stones. She was silent; a tiny figure crouched beneath a black cape, a shapeless thing shuddering at my feet. ‘Oh, little one,’ she finally said in a tired voice, ‘oh, my little one.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. I confess I was more tempted by the smell of roasting pork that came from Uther’s hall than by whatever momentary trance had so exhausted Nimue.

  She held out her scarred left hand and I hauled he
r to her feet. ‘We have one chance,’ she said to me in a small, frightened voice, ‘just one chance, and if we lose it then the Gods will go from us. We will be abandoned by the Gods and left to the brutes. And those fools in there, the Mouse Lord and his followers, will ruin that chance unless we fight them. And there are so many of them and so very few of us.’ She was looking into my face, crying desperately.

  I did not know what to say. I had no skills with the spirit world, even though I was Merlin’s foundling and the child of Bel. ‘Bel will help us, won’t He?’ I asked helplessly. ‘He loves us, doesn’t He?’

  ‘Loves us!’ She snatched her hand away from mine. ‘Loves us!’ she repeated scornfully. ‘It is not the task of Gods to love us. Do you love Druidan’s pigs? Why, in Bel’s name, should a God love us? Love! What do you know of love, Derfel, son of a Saxon?’

  ‘I know I love you,’ I said. I can blush now when I think of a young boy’s desperate lunges at a woman’s affection. It had taken every nerve in my body to make that statement, every ounce of courage I hoped I possessed, and after I had blurted out the words I blushed in the rain-swept firelight and wished I had kept silent.

  Nimue smiled at me. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know. Now come. A feast for our supper.’

  These days, these my dying days that I spend-writing in this monastery in Powys’s hills, I sometimes close my eyes and see Nimue. Not as she became, but as she was then: so full of fire, so quick, so confident. I know I have gained Christ and through His blessing I have gained the whole world too, but for what I have lost, for what we have all lost, there is no end to the reckoning. We lost everything.

  The feast was wonderful.

  The High Council began in mid-morning, after the Christians had held yet another ceremony. They held a terrible number of them, I thought, for every hour of the day seemed to demand some new genuflection to the cross, but the delay served to give the princes and warriors time to recover from their night of drinking, boasting and fighting. The High Council was held in the great hall that was again lit by torches, for although the spring sun was shining brightly the hall’s few windows were high and small, less suited for letting the light in than the smoke out, though even that they did badly.

  Uther, the High King, sat on a platform raised above the dais reserved for the kings, edlings and princes. Tewdric of Gwent, the Council’s host, sat below Uther and on either side of Tewdric’s throne were a dozen other thrones filled this day by client kings or princes who paid tribute to Uther or Tewdric. Prince Cadwy of Isca was there, and King Melwas of the Belgae and Prince Gereint, Lord of the Stones, while distant Kernow, the savage kingdom at Britain’s western tip, had sent its edling, Prince Tristan, who sat swathed in wolf fur at the dais’s edge next to one of the two vacant thrones.

  In truth the thrones were nothing more than chairs fetched from the feasting hall and tricked out with saddlecloths, and in front of each chair, resting on the floor and leaning against the dais, were the shields of the kingdoms. There had been a time when thirty-three shields might have rested against the dais, but now the tribes of Britain fought amongst themselves and some of the kingdoms had been buried in Lloegyr by Saxon blades. One of the purposes of this High Council was to make peace between the remaining British kingdoms, a peace that was already threatened because Powys and Siluria had not come to the Council. Their thrones were empty, mute witness to those kingdoms’ continuing enmity towards Gwent and Dumnonia.

  Directly before the kings and princes, and beyond a small open space that had been left for the speech-making, sat the counsellors and chief magistrates of the kingdoms. Some of the councils, like those of Gwent and Dumnonia, were huge, while others comprised only a handful of men. The magistrates and counsellors sat on the floor that I now saw was decorated with thousands of tiny coloured stones arranged into a huge picture that showed between the seated bodies. The counsellors had all fetched blankets to make themselves pillows for they knew that the High Council’s deliberations could last well beyond nightfall. Behind the counsellors, and present only as observers, stood the armed warriors, some with their favourite hunting dogs leashed at their side. I stood with those armed warriors, my bronze Cernunnos-headed torque all the authority I needed to be present.

  Two women were at the Council, only two, yet even their presence had caused murmurs of protest among the waiting men until a flicker of Uther’s eyes had stilled the grumbling.

  Morgan sat directly in front of Uther. The counsellors had edged away from her so that she had sat alone until Nimue had walked boldly through the hall door and threaded her way through the seated men to take a place beside her. Nimue had entered with such calm assurance that no one had tried to stop her. Once seated she stared up at High King Uther as though daring him to eject her, but the King ignored her arrival.

  Morgan also ignored her young rival who sat very still and very straight-backed. She was dressed in her white linen shift with its thin leather slave belt and among the heavy-caped, grey-haired men she looked slight and vulnerable.

  The High Council began, as all councils did, with a prayer. Merlin, if he had been present, would have called on the Gods, but instead Bishop Conrad of Gwent offered a prayer to the Christian God. I saw Sansum sitting in the ranks of the Gwent counsellors and noted the fierce look of hatred he shot at the two women when they did not bow their heads as the Bishop prayed. Sansum knew the women came in Merlin’s place.

  After the prayer the challenge was given by Owain, Dumnonia’s champion who had taken on Tewdric’s best men two days before. A brute, Merlin always called Owain, and he looked like a brute as he stood before the High King with his face still blood-scabbed from the fight, with his sword drawn and with a thick wolf-fur cloak draped around the humped muscles of his huge shoulders. ‘Does any man here,’ he growled, ‘dispute Uther’s right to the High Throne?’

  No one did. Owain, looking somewhat disappointed at being denied the chance to slaughter a challenger, sheathed his sword and sat uncomfortably among the counsellors. He would much rather have stood with his warriors.

  News of Britain was given next. Bishop Bedwin, speaking for the High King, reported that the Saxon threat to the east of Dumnonia had been diminished, though at a price too heavy for contemplation. Prince Mordred, Edling of Dumnonia and a warrior whose fame had reached to the ends of the earth, had been killed in the hour of victory. Uther’s face showed nothing as he listened to the oft-told tale of his son’s death. Arthur’s name was not mentioned, even though it had been Arthur who had snatched the victory from Mordred’s clumsy generalship and everyone in the hall knew it. Bedwin reported that the defeated Saxons had come from the lands once governed by the Catuvelan tribe and that, although they had not been ejected from all that ancient territory, they had agreed to pay a yearly tribute to the High King of gold, wheat and oxen. Pray God, he added, that the peace would last.

  ‘Pray God,’ King Tewdric intervened, ‘that the Saxons will be ejected from those lands!’ His words prompted the warriors at the back and sides of the hall to rap their spear-shafts against the pavement and at least one spear broke through the small mosaic tiles. Dogs howled.

  To the north of Dumnonia, Bedwin continued calmly when the rough applause had ended, peace reigned, thanks to the all-wise treaty of friendship that existed between the great High King and the noble King Tewdric. To the west, and here Bedwin paused to bestow a smile on the handsome young Prince Tristan, there was also peace. ‘The kingdom of Kernow,’ Bedwin said, ‘keeps itself to itself. We understand King Mark has taken a new wife and we pray that she, like her distinguished predecessors, will keep her master fully occupied.’ That provoked a murmur of laughter.

  ‘What wife is this?’ Uther demanded suddenly. ‘His fourth or fifth?’

  ‘I believe my father has lost count himself, High Lord,’ Tristan said, and the hall bellowed with laughter. More tiles broke under spear-butts and one of the small fragments skittered over the floor to lodge against my foot.
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br />   Agricola spoke next. His was a Roman name and he was famous for his adhesion to Roman ways. Agricola was Tew-dric’s commander and, though an old man now, he was still feared for his skill in battle. Age had not stooped his tall figure, though it had turned his close-cropped hair as grey as a sword blade. His scarred face was clean-shaven and he wore Roman uniform, but far grander than the outfits of his men. His tunic was scarlet, his breastplate and leg-greaves silver, and under his arm was a silver helmet plumed with dyed horsehair cut into a stiff scarlet comb. He too reported that the Saxons to the east of his Lord’s kingdom had been defeated, but the news from the Lost Lands of Lloegyr was troubling for he had heard that more boats had come from the Saxon lands across the German Sea and in time, he warned, more boats on the Saxon shore meant more warriors pressing west into Britain. Agricola also warned us about a new Saxon leader named Aelle who was struggling for ascendancy among the Sais. That was the first time I ever heard Aelie’s name and only the Gods then knew how it would come to haunt us down the years.

  The Saxons, Agricola went on, might be temporarily quiet, but that had not brought peace to the kingdom of Gwent. British war-bands had come south from Powys while others had marched west out of Siluria to attack Tewdric’s land. Messengers had gone to both kingdoms, inviting their monarchs to attend this council, but alas, and here Agricola gestured at the two empty chairs on the royal platform, neither Gorfyddyd of Powys nor Gundleus of Siluria had come. Tewdric could not hide his disappointment, for plainly he had been hoping that Gwent and Dumnonia could make their peace with their two northern neighbours. That hope of peace, I assumed, had also been the motive behind Uther’s invitation to Gundleus to visit Norwenna in the spring, but the vacant thrones seemed to speak only of continuing enmity. If there was to be no peace, Agricola warned sternly, then the King of Gwent would have no choice but to go to war against Gorfyddyd of Powys and his ally, Gundleus of Siluria. Uther nodded, giving his consent to the threat.