The Winter King

by Bernard Cornwell

  Wlenca’s screaming had subsided into a desperate panting. His face had gone yellow, he was shaking, but somehow he kept his feet as he tottered towards the east. He reached the circle of stones and for a second it seemed he must collapse, then a spasm of pain made him arch his back, then snap forward again. He whirled in a wild circle, spattering blood, and took a few steps to the north. And then, at last, he fell. He was jerking in agony, and each spasm meant something to Balise and Morgan. Morgan scuttled forward to watch him more closely as he twisted, shivered and twitched. For a few seconds his legs shuddered, then his bowels broke, his head went back and a choking rattle sounded in his throat. A great wash of blood spilt almost to Morgan’s feet as the Saxon died.

  Something in Morgan’s stance told us that the augury was bad and her sour mood spread to the crowd who waited for the dreaded pronouncement. Morgan went back to stoop beside Balise who gave a raucous, irreverent cackle. Nimue had gone to inspect the blood trail and then the body, and afterwards she joined Morgan and Balise as the crowd waited. And waited.

  Morgan at last went back to the body. She addressed her words to Owain, the King’s champion who stood beside the baby King, but everyone in the crowd leaned forward to hear her speak. ‘King Mordred,’ she said, ‘will have a long life. He will be a leader of battle, and he will know victory.’

  A sigh went through the crowd. The augury could be translated as favourable, though I think everyone knew how much had been left unsaid and a few present could remember Uther’s acclamation when the dying man’s blood trail and agonized twitches had truthfully predicted a reign of glory. Still, even without glory, there was some hope in the augury of Wlenca’s death.

  That death ended Mordred’s acclamation. Poor Norwenna, buried beneath Ynys Wydryn’s Holy Thorn, would have done it all so differently, yet even if a thousand bishops and a myriad of saints had gathered to pray Mordred on to his throne, the auguries would still have been the same. For Mordred, our King, was crippled and neither Druid nor bishop could ever change that.

  Tristan of Kernow arrived that afternoon. We were in the great hall at Mordred’s feast, an event remarkable for its lack of cheer, but Tristan’s arrival made it even less cheerful. No one even noticed his arrival until he drew near to the big central fire and the flames glinted off his leather breastplate and iron helmet. The Prince was known as a friend of Dumnonia and Bishop Bedwin greeted him as such, but Tristan’s only response was to draw his sword.

  The gesture commanded instant attention for no man was supposed to carry a weapon into a feasting hall, let alone a hall that celebrated a king’s acclamation. Some men in the hall were drunk, but even they went silent as they gazed at the young, dark-haired Prince.

  Bedwin tried to ignore the drawn sword. ‘You came for the acclamation, Lord Prince? Doubtless you were delayed? Travel is so difficult in winter. Come, a seat here? Next to Agricola of Gwent? There’s venison.’

  ‘I come with a quarrel,’ Tristan said loudly. He had left his six guards just outside the hall door where a cold sleet was spitting across the hilltop. The guards were grim men in wet armour and dripping cloaks whose shields were the right way up and whose war spears were whetted bright.

  ‘A quarrel!’ Bedwin said as though the very thought was remarkable. ‘Not on this auspicious day, surely not!’

  Some of the warriors in the hall growled challenges. They were drunk enough to enjoy a quarrel, but Tristan ignored them. ‘Who speaks for Dumnonia?’ he demanded.

  There was a moment’s hesitation. Owain, Arthur, Gereint and Bedwin all had authority, but none was pre-eminent. Prince Gereint, never a man to put himself forward, shrugged the question away, Owain stared balefully at Tristan, while Arthur respectfully deferred to Bedwin who suggested, very diffidently, that as the kingdom’s chief counsellor he could speak as well as any man on behalf of King Mordred.

  ‘Then tell King Mordred,’ Tristan said, ‘that there will be blood between my country and his unless I receive justice.’

  Bedwin looked alarmed and his hands fluttered with calming motions as he tried to think what to say. Nothing suggested itself to him and in the end it was Owain who responded. ‘Say what you have to say,’ he said flatly.

  ‘A group of my father’s people,’ Tristan said, ‘were given protection by High King Uther. They came to this country at Uther’s request to work the mines and to live in peace with their neighbours, yet late last summer some of those neighbours came to their mine and gave them sword, fire and slaughter. Fifty-eight dead, tell your King, and their sarhaed will be the value of their lives plus the life of the man who ordered them killed, or else we shall come with our own swords and shields to take the price ourselves.’

  Owain roared with laughter. ‘Little Kernow? We’re so frightened!’

  The warriors all around me shouted scorn. Kernow was a small country and no match for Dumnonia’s forces. Bishop Bedwin tried to stop the noise, but the room was full of men drunk into boastfulness and they refused to calm down until Owain himself called for silence. ‘I heard, Prince,’ Owain said, ‘that it was the Blackshield Irish of Oengus Mac Airem who attacked the moor.’

  Tristan spat on the floor. ‘If they did,’ he said, ‘then they flew across country to do it, for no man saw them pass and they did not steal so much as an egg from any Dumnonian.’

  ‘That’s because they fear Dumnonia, but not Kernow,’ Owain said, and the hall burst into jeering laughter again.

  Arthur waited until the laughter had subsided. ‘Do you know of any man other than Oengus Mac Airem who might have attacked your people?’ he asked courteously.

  Tristan turned and searched the men squatting on the hall floor. He saw Prince Cadwy of Isca’s bald head and pointed at it with his sword. ‘Ask him. Or better still’ – he raised his voice to quieten the jeers – ‘ask the witness I have outside.’ Cadwy was on his feet and shouting to be allowed to fetch his sword while his tattooed spearmen were threatening all Kernow with massacre.

  Arthur slapped his hand on the high table. The sound echoed in the hall, drawing silence. Agricola of Gwent, sitting next to Arthur, kept his eyes down, for this quarrel was none of his business, but I doubt if a single nuance of the confrontation was escaping his shrewd wits. ‘If any man draws blood tonight,’ Arthur said, ‘he is my enemy.’ He waited until Cadwy and his men subsided, then looked again to Tristan. ‘Bring your witness, Lord.’

  ‘Is this a court of law?’ Owain objected.

  ‘Let the witness come in,’ Arthur insisted.

  ‘This is a feast!’ Owain protested.

  ‘Let the witness come, let him come.’ Bishop Bedwin wanted the whole distasteful business over, and agreeing with Arthur seemed the quickest way to settle it. Men at the hall’s edges shuffled closer to hear the drama, but laughed when Tristan’s witness appeared, for she was just a small child, perhaps nine years old, who walked calmly and stiff-backed to stand beside her Prince who put an arm about her shoulder. ‘Sarlinna ferch Edain.’ He gave the child’s name, then squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. ‘Speak.’

  Sarlinna licked her lips. She chose to speak direct to Arthur, perhaps because he had the kindest face of the men sitting at the high table. ‘My father was killed, my mother was killed, my brothers and sisters were killed…’ She spoke as though she had been rehearsed in her words, though no man present doubted the truth of them. ‘My baby sister was killed,’ she went on, ‘and my kitten was killed’ – a first tear showed – ‘and I saw it done.’

  Arthur shook his head in sympathy. Agricola of Gwent ran a hand across his close-cropped grey hair, then stared up into the soot-blackened rafters. Owain leaned back in his chair and drank from a horn beaker while Bishop Bedwin looked troubled. ‘Did you really see the killers?’ the Bishop asked the child.

  ‘Yes, Lord.’ Sarlinna, now that she was no longer saying words she had prepared and practised, was more nervous.

  ‘But it was night, child,’ Bedwin objected. ‘Wasn’t the raid a
t night, Lord Prince?’ he demanded of Tristan. The Lords of Dumnonia had all heard about the raid on the moor, but they had believed Owain’s assertion that the massacre was the work of Oengus’s Blackshield Irish. ‘How could the child see at night?’ Bedwin asked.

  Tristan encouraged the child by patting her shoulder. ‘Tell the Lord Bishop what happened,’ he instructed her.

  ‘The men threw fire into our hut, Lord,’ Sarlinna said in a small voice.

  ‘Not enough fire,’ a man growled from the shadows and the hall laughed.

  ‘How did you live, Sarlinna?’ Arthur asked her gently when the laughter had faded.

  ‘I hid, Lord, under a pelt.’

  Arthur smiled. ‘You did well. But did you see the man who killed your mother and father?’ He paused. ‘And your kitten?’

  She nodded. Her eyes were bright with tears in the dim hall. ‘I saw him, Lord,’ she said quietly.

  ‘So tell us about him,’ Arthur said.

  Sarlinna was wearing a small grey shift under a black woollen cloak and now she lifted her thin arms and pushed the shift’s sleeves back to bare her pale skin. ‘The man’s arms had pictures, Lord, of a dragon. And of a boar. Here.’ She showed where the tattoos might be on her own small arms, then looked at Owain. ‘And there were rings in his beard,’ the girl added, and then she went silent, but she had no need to say more. Only one man wore warrior rings in his beard, and every man present had watched Owain’s arms drive the spear into Wlenca’s midriff that morning, and everyone knew those arms were tattooed with Dumnonia’s dragon and with his own symbol of a long-tusked boar.

  There was silence. A log crackled in the fire, sending a puff of smoke into the rafters. A gust of wind pattered sleet on the thick thatch and fluttered the rush-light flames that were scattered about the hall. Agricola was examining the silver-chased holder of his drinking horn as though he had never seen such an object before. Somewhere in the hall a man belched, and the noise seemed to prompt Owain to turn his great shaggy head to stare at the child. ‘She lies,’ he said harshly, ‘and children who lie should be beaten bloody.’

  Sarlinna began to cry, then buried her face in the wet folds of Tristan’s cloak. Bishop Bedwin frowned. ‘It is true, Owain, is it not, that you visited Prince Cadwy late in the summer?’

  ‘So?’ Owain bristled. ‘So?’ He roared the word again, this time as a challenge to the whole assembly. ‘Here are my warriors!’ He gestured at us, sitting together on the right-hand side of the hall. ‘Ask them! Ask them! The child lies! On my oath, she lies!’

  The hall was in sudden uproar as men spat their defiance at Tristan. Sarlinna was weeping so much that the Prince stooped, picked her up and held her in his arms and continued to hold her while Bedwin tried to regain control over the hall. ‘If Owain swears on his oath,’ the Bishop shouted, ‘then the child does lie.’ The warriors growled agreement.

  Arthur, I saw, was watching me. I looked down at my wooden bowl of venison.

  Bishop Bedwin was wishing he had not invited the child into the hall. He dragged his fingers through his beard, then shook his head wearily. ‘A child’s word carries no weight in law,’ he said plaintively. ‘A child is not among the Tongued-ones.’ The Tongued-ones were the nine witnesses whose word carried the weight of truth in law: a Lord, a Druid, a priest, a father speaking of his children, a magistrate, a gift-giver speaking of his gift, a maiden speaking of her virginity, a herdsman speaking of his animals and a condemned man speaking his final words. Nowhere in the list was there any mention of a child speaking of her family’s massacre. ‘Lord Owain,’ Bishop Bedwin pointed out to Tristan, ‘is a Tongued-one.’

  Tristan was pale, but he would not back down. ‘I believe the child,’ he said, ‘and tomorrow, after sunrise, I shall come for Dumnonia’s answer, and if that answer denies Kernow justice then my father will take justice for himself.’

  ‘What’s the matter with your father?’ Owain jeered. ‘Lost interest in his latest wife, has he? So he wants to take a beating in battle instead?’

  Tristan walked out amidst laughter, a laughter that grew as men tried to imagine little Kernow declaring war on mighty Dumnonia. I did not join in the laughter, but finished my stew instead, telling myself I needed the food if I was to keep warm during my spell of guard duty that would start at the feast’s end. Nor did I drink any mead, so I was still sober when I fetched my cloak, spear, sword and helmet and went to the north wall. The sleet had stopped and the clouds were passing to reveal a bright half-moon sailing amidst a shimmer of stars, though more clouds were heaping in the west above the Severn Sea. I shivered as I paced the rampart.

  Where Arthur found me.

  I had known he was coming. I had wanted him to come and yet I felt a fear of him as I watched him cross the compound and climb the short flight of wooden steps that led to the low wall of earth and stone. At first he said nothing, but just leaned on the wood palings and stared towards the distant speck of flamelight that lit Ynys Wydryn. He was dressed in his white cloak, which he had gathered up so that its hem would not drag in the mud. He had tied the cloak’s corners about his waist just above his cross-hatched scabbard. ‘I’m not going to ask you,’ he spoke at last, his breath misting in the night air, ‘what happened on the moor, because I don’t want to invite any man, least of all a man I like, to break a death-oath.’

  ‘Yes, Lord,’ I said, and wondered how he had known it was a death-oath that had bound us on that dark night.

  ‘So instead, let us walk.’ He smiled at me, and gestured along the rampart. ‘A walking sentry stays warm,’ he said. ‘I hear you’re a good soldier?’

  ‘I try, Lord.’

  ‘And I hear you succeed, so well done.’ He fell silent as we passed one of my comrades who was huddled against the palings. The man looked up at me as I passed and his face showed alarm that I might betray Owain’s troop. Arthur pushed the cloak’s hood back off his face. He had a long, firm stride and I had to hurry to keep pace with him. ‘What do you think a soldier’s job is, Derfel?’ he asked me in that intimate manner that made you feel he was more interested in you than anyone else in the world.

  ‘To fight battles, Lord,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘To fight battles, Derfel,’ he corrected me, ‘on behalf of people who can’t fight for themselves. I learned that in Brittany. This miserable world is full of weak people, powerless people, hungry people, sad people, sick people, poor people, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to despise the weak, especially if you’re a soldier. If you’re a warrior and you want a man’s daughter, you just take her; you want his land, you just kill him; after all, you’re a soldier and you have a spear and a sword, and he’s just a poor weak man with a broken plough and a sick ox and what’s to stop you?’ He did not expect an answer to the question, but just paced on in silence. We had come to the western gateway and the split-log steps that climbed to the platform over the gate were whitening with a new frost. We climbed them side by side. ‘But the truth is, Derfel,’ Arthur said when we reached the high platform, ‘that we are only soldiers because that weak man makes us soldiers. He grows the grain that feeds us, he tans the leather that protects us and he polls the ash trees that make our spear-shafts. We owe him our service.’

  ‘Yes, Lord,’ I said and stared with him across the wide, flat land. It was not so cold as the night on which Mordred had been born, but it was still bitter, and the wind made it more so.

  ‘There is a purpose to all things,’ Arthur said, ‘even being a soldier.’ He smiled at me, as though apologizing for being so earnest, yet he had no need to be apologetic for I was drinking in his words. I had dreamed of becoming a soldier because of a warrior’s high status and because it had always seemed to me that it was better to carry a spear than a rake, but I had never thought beyond those selfish ambitions. Arthur had thought far beyond and he brought to Dumnonia a clear vision of where his sword and spear must take him.

  ‘We have a chance’ – Arthur leaned on t
he high rampart as he spoke – ‘to make a Dumnonia in which we can serve our people. We can’t give them happiness, and I don’t know how to guarantee a good harvest that will make them rich, but I do know that we can make them safe, and a safe man, a man who knows that his children will grow without being taken for slaves and his daughter’s bride price won’t be ruined by a soldier’s rape, is a man more likely to be happy than a man living under the threat of war. Is that fair?’

  ‘Yes, Lord,’ I said.

  He rubbed his gloved hands against the cold. My hands were wrapped in rags that made holding my spear difficult, especially as I was also trying to keep them warm beneath my cloak. Behind us, in the feasting hall, a great roar of men’s laughter gusted. The food had been as bad as any at a winter feast, but there had been plenty of mead and wine, though Arthur was as sober as I was myself. I looked at his profile as he gazed west towards the building clouds. The moon shadowed his lantern jaw and made his face seem bonier than ever. ‘I hate war,’ Arthur said suddenly.

  ‘You do?’ I sounded surprised, but then I was young enough to enjoy war.

  ‘Of course!’ He smiled at me. ‘I happen to be good at it, maybe you are too, and that just means we have to use it wisely. Do you know what happened in Gwent last autumn?’

  ‘You wounded Gorfyddyd,’ I said eagerly. ‘You took his arm.’

  ‘So I did,’ he said, almost in a tone of surprise. ‘My horses aren’t much use in hilly country, and no use at all in wooded land, so I took them north into Powys’s flat farmlands. Gorfyddyd was trying to knock down Tewdric’s walls so I started burning Gorfyddyd’s haystacks and grain-stores. We burned, we killed. We did it well, not because we wanted to, but because it needed to be done. And it worked. It brought Gorfyddyd back from Tewdric’s walls to the flat farmland where my horses could break him. And they did. We attacked him at dawn, and he fought well, but he lost the battle along with his left arm, and that, Derfel, was the end of the killing. It had served its purpose, do you understand? The purpose of the killing was to persuade Powys that it would be better for them to be at peace with Dumnonia than at war. And now there will be peace.’