The Winter King

by Bernard Cornwell

  And slowly, slowly, the right hand at my throat weakened. Slowly, slowly, her good eye rolled so that I could see my love’s bright soul once more. She stared at me, and then she began to cry.

  ‘Nimue,’ I said, and she put her arms around my neck and clung to me. She was sobbing now in great heaves that racked her thin ribs as I held her, stroked her and spoke her name.

  The sobs slowed and at last ended. She hung on my neck for a long time; then I felt her head move. ‘Where’s Merlin?’ she asked in a small child’s voice.

  ‘Here in Britain,’ I said.

  ‘Then we must go.’ She took her arms from around my neck and settled on her haunches so she could stare into my face. ‘I dreamed that you’d come,’ she said.

  ‘I do love you,’ I said. I had not meant to say it, even if it was true.

  ‘That’s why you came,’ she said as though it were obvious.

  ‘Do you have clothes?’ I asked.

  ‘I have your cloak,’ she said. ‘I need nothing else except your hand.’

  I crawled out of the cave, sheathed Hywelbane and wrapped my green cloak around her pale shivering body. She pushed an arm through a rent in the cloak’s ragged wool and then, her hand in mine, we walked between the bones and climbed the hill to where the sea folk watched. They parted as we reached the cliff’s top and did not follow as we walked slowly down the Isle’s eastern side. Nimue said nothing. Her madness had fled the moment my hand touched hers, but it had left her horribly weak. I helped her on the steeper portions of the path. We passed through the hermits’ caves without being troubled. Perhaps they were all asleep, or else the Gods had put the Isle under a spell as we two walked our way north away from the dead souls.

  The sun rose. I could see now that Nimue’s hair was matted with dirt and crawling with lice, her skin was filthy and she had lost her golden eye. She was so weak she could hardly walk and as we descended the hill towards the causeway I picked her up in my arms and found she weighed less than a ten-year-old child. ‘You’re weak,’ I said.

  ‘I was born weak, Derfel,’ she said, ‘and life is spent pretending otherwise.’

  ‘You need some rest,’ I said.

  ‘I know’ She leaned her head against my chest and for once in her life she was utterly content to be looked after.

  I carried her to the causeway and over the first wall. The sea broke on our left and the bay glimmered a reflection of the rising sun on our right. I did not know how I was to take her past the guards. All I knew was that we had to leave the Isle because that was her fate and I was the instrument of that fate, and so I walked content that the Gods would solve the problem when I reached the final barrier.

  I carried her over the middle wall with its row of skulls and walked towards Dumnonia’s dawn-green hills. I could see a single spearman silhouetted above the final wall’s sheer, smooth face of stone and I supposed some of the guards had rowed across the channel when they saw me leaving the isle. More guards were standing on the shingle bank; they had stationed themselves to bar my passage to the mainland. If I have to kill, I thought, then kill I shall. This was the Gods’ will, not mine, and Hywelbane would cut with a God’s skill and strength.

  But as I walked towards the final wall with my burden light in my arms the gates of life and death swung open to receive me. I half expected the guard commander to be there with his rusty spear, ready to turn me back; instead it was Galahad and Cavan who waited on the black threshold with their swords drawn and battle shields on their arms. ‘We followed you,’ Galahad said.

  ‘Bedwin sent us,’ Cavan added. I covered Nimue’s awful hair with the cloak’s hood so my friends would not see her degradation and she clung to me, trying to hide herself.

  Galahad and Cavan had brought my men who had commandeered the ferry and were holding the Isle’s guardians at spear-point on the channel’s farther bank. ‘We would have come looking for you today,’ Galahad said, then made the sign of the cross as he stared down the causeway. He gave me a curious look as though he feared I might have come back from the Isle a different man.

  ‘I should have known you would be here,’ I told him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you should.’ There were tears in his eyes, tears of happiness.

  We rowed across the channel and I carried Nimue up the road of skulls to the feast hall at the road’s end where I found a man loading a cart with salt to carry to Durnovaria. I laid Nimue on his cargo and walked behind her as the cart creaked north towards the town. I had brought Nimue out of the Isle of the Dead, back to a land at war.

  I TOOK NIMUE TO GYLLAD’S farm. I did not put her in the big hall, but rather used an abandoned shepherd’s cottage where the two of us could be alone. I fed her on broth and milk, but first I washed her clean; washed every inch of her, washed her twice and then washed her black hair and afterwards used a bone comb to tease the tangles free. Some of the tangles were so tight they needed to be cut, but most came free and when her hair hung wet and straight I used the comb to find and kill the lice before I washed her once again. She endured the process like a small obedient child, and when she was clean I wrapped her in a great woollen blanket and took the broth off the fire and made her eat while I washed myself and hunted down the lice that had gone from her body on to mine.

  By the time I had finished it was dusk and she was fast asleep on a bed made from newly cut bracken. She slept all night and in the morning ate six eggs I had stirred in a pan over the fire. Then she slept again while I took a knife and a piece of leather and cut an eyepatch with a lace she could tie around her hair. I had one of Gyllad’s slaves bring clothes and sent Issa into town to find what news he could. He was a clever lad with an easy open manner so that even strangers were happy to confide in him across a tavern’s table.

  ‘Half the town says the war’s already lost, Lord,’ he told me on his return. Nimue was sleeping and we spoke beside the stream which ran close beside the cottage.

  ‘And the other half?’ I asked.

  He grinned. ‘Looking forward to Lughnasa, Lord. They’re not thinking beyond that. But the half that are thinking are all Christians.’ He spat into the stream. ‘They say Lughnasa’s an evil feast and that King Gorfyddyd is coming to punish our sins.’

  ‘In which case,’ I said, ‘we’d better make sure we commit enough sins to deserve the punishment.’

  He laughed. ‘Some say Lord Arthur daren’t leave town for fear there’d be a revolt once his soldiers are gone.’

  I shook my head. ‘He wants to be with Guinevere at Lughnasa.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’ Issa asked.

  ‘Did you see the goldsmith?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘He says he can’t make an eye in under two weeks because he’s never done one before, but he’ll find a corpse and cut out its eye to get the size right. I told him he’d better make it a child’s corpse, for the lady isn’t big, is she?’ He jerked his head towards the cottage.

  ‘You told him the eye had to be hollow?’

  ‘I did, Lord.’

  ‘You did well,’ I told him. ‘And now I suppose you want to do your worst and celebrate Lughnasa?’

  He grinned. ‘Yes, Lord.’ Lughnasa was supposedly a celebration of the imminent harvest, yet the young have always made it a feast of fertility and their festivities would begin this night, the feast’s eve.

  ‘Then go,’ I told him. ‘I’ll stay here.’

  That afternoon I made Nimue her own bower for Lughnasa. I doubted somehow that she would appreciate it, but I wanted to do it and so I made a small lodge beside the stream, cutting the withies and bending them into a hooded shelter into which I wove cornflowers, poppies, ox-eyes, foxgloves and long tangling swathes of pink convolvulus. Such booths were being made all across Britain for the feast, and all across Britain, late next spring, hundreds of Lughnasa babies would be born. The spring was reckoned a good time to be born for the child would come into a world waking to summer’s plenty, though whether this year’s planting would
lead to a lucky crop depended on the battles that must be fought after harvest.

  Nimue emerged from the hut just as I was weaving the last foxgloves into the bower’s summit. ‘Is it Lughnasa?’ she asked in surprise.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  She laughed shyly. ‘No one ever made me a bower.’

  ‘You never wanted one.’

  ‘I do now,’ she said, and sat under the flowery shade with such a look of delight that my heart leaped. She had found the eyepatch and donned one of the dresses Gyllad’s maid had brought to the hut; it was a slave’s dress of ordinary brown cloth, yet it suited her as simple things always did. She was pale and thin, but she was clean and there was a blush of colour in her cheeks. ‘I don’t know what happened to the golden eye,’ she said ruefully, touching her new patch.

  ‘I’m having another eye made,’ I told her, but did not add that the goldsmith’s deposit had taken the last of my coins. I desperately needed a battle’s plunder, I thought, to replenish my purse.

  ‘And I’m hungry,’ Nimue said with a touch of her old mischievousness.

  I put some birch twigs in the bottom of the pan so the broth would not stick, then poured in the last of the broth and set it on the fire. She ate it all, and afterwards she stretched out in the Lughnasa bower and watched the stream. Bubbles showed where an otter swam underwater. I had seen him earlier, an old dog with a hide scarred by battle and near misses from hunters’ spears. Nimue watched his bubble trail disappear beneath a fallen willow’ and then began to talk.

  She always had an appetite for talk, but that evening it was insatiable. She wanted news and I gave it to her, but then she wanted more detail, always more detail, and every detail she obsessively fitted inside a scheme of her own devising so that the story of the last year became, at least for her, like a great tiled floor where any one tile might seem insignificant, but added to the others it became a part of an intricate and meaningful whole. She was most interested in Merlin and the scroll he had snatched from Ban’s doomed library. ‘You didn’t read it?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I will,’ she said fervently.

  I hesitated a moment, then spoke my mind. ‘I thought Merlin would come to the Isle to fetch you,’ I said. I was risking offending her twice, first by implicitly criticizing Merlin and secondly by mentioning the one subject she did not talk about, the Isle of the Dead, but she did not seem to mind.

  ‘Merlin would reckon I can look after myself,’ she said, then smiled. ‘And he knows I have you.’

  It was dark by then and the stream rippled silver under Lughnasa’s moon. There were a dozen questions I wanted to ask, but dared not, but suddenly she began to answer them anyway. She spoke of the Isle, or rather she spoke of how one tiny part of her soul had always been aware of the Isle’s horror even as the rest of her had abandoned itself to its doom. ‘I thought madness would be like death,’ she said, ‘and that I wouldn’t know there was an alternative to being mad, but you do know. You really do. It’s as though you watch yourself and cannot help yourself. You forsake yourself,’ she said, then stopped and I saw the tears at her one good eye.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said, suddenly not wanting to know.

  ‘And sometimes,’ she went on, ‘I would sit on my rock and watch the sea and I would know I was sane, and I would wonder what purpose was being served, and then I knew I would have to be mad because if I was not then it was all to no purpose.’

  ‘There was no purpose,’ I said angrily.

  ‘Oh, Derfel, dear Derfel. You have a mind like a stone falling off a cliff.’ She smiled. ‘It is the same purpose that made Merlin find Caleddin’s scroll. Don’t you understand? The Gods play games with us, but if we open ourselves then we can become a part of the game instead of its victims. Madness has a purpose! It’s a gift from the Gods, and like all their gifts it comes with a price, but I’ve paid it now.’ She spoke passionately, but suddenly I felt a yawn threatening me and try as I might I could not check it. I did try to hide it, but she saw anyway. ‘You need some sleep,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I protested.

  ‘Did you sleep last night?’

  ‘A little.’ I had sat at the cottage door and dozed fitfully as I listened to the mice scrabbling in the thatch.

  ‘Then go to bed now,’ she said firmly, ‘and leave me here to think.’

  I was so tired I could scarcely undress, but at last I lay on the bracken bed where I slept like the dead. It was a great, deep sleep like the rest that comes in safety after battle when the bad sleep, the one interrupted by nightmare reminders of near spear thrusts and sword blows, has been washed away from the soul. Thus I slept, and in the night Nimue came to me and at first I thought it was a dream, but then I woke with a start to find her chill naked skin next to mine. ‘It’s all right, Derfel,’ she whispered, ‘go to sleep,’ and I slept again with my arms around her thin body.

  We woke in Lughnasa’s perfect dawn. There have been times in my life of pure happiness, and that was one. They are times, I suppose, when love is in step with life or perhaps when the Gods want us to be fools, and nothing is so sweet as Lughnasa’s foolishness. The sun shone, filtering its light through the flowers in our bower where we made love, then afterwards we played like children in the stream where I tried to make otter bubbles under water and came up choking to find Nimue laughing. A kingfisher raced between the willows, its colours bright as a dream cloak. The only people we saw all day were a pair of horsemen who rode up the stream’s far bank with falcons on their wrists. They did not see us, and we lay quietly and watched as one of their birds struck down a heron: a good omen. For that one perfect day Nimue and I were lovers, even though we were denied the second pleasure of love which is the certain knowledge of a shared future spent in a happiness as great as love’s beginning. But I had no future with Nimue. Her future lay in the paths of the Gods, and I had no talent for those roads.

  Yet even Nimue was tempted from those paths. In Lughnasa’s evening, when the long light was shadowing the trees on the western slopes, she lay curled in my arms beneath the bower and spoke of all that might be. A small house, a piece of land, children and flocks. ‘We could go to Kernow,’ she said dreamily. ‘Merlin always says Kernow is the blessed place. It’s a long way from the Saxons.’

  ‘Ireland,’ I said, ‘is further.’

  I felt the shake of her head on my chest. ‘Ireland is cursed.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘They owned the Treasures of Britain,’ she said, ‘and let them go.’

  I did not want to talk of the Treasures of Britain, nor of the Gods, nor of anything that would spoil this moment. ‘Kernow, then,’ I agreed.

  ‘A small house,’ she said, then listed all the things a small house needed: jars, pans, spits, winnowing sheets, sieves, yew pails, reaping hooks, croppers, a spindle, a skein winder, a salmon net, a barrel, a hearth, a bed. Had she dreamed of such things in her damp, cold cave above the cauldron? ‘And no Saxons,’ she said, ‘and no Christians either. Maybe we should go to the isles in the Western Sea? To the isles beyond Kernow. To Lyonesse.’ She spoke the lovely name softly. ‘To live and love in Lyonesse,’ she added, then laughed.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’

  She lay silent for a while, then shrugged. ‘Lyonesse is for another life,’ she said, and with that bleak statement she broke the spell. At least she did for me, because I thought I heard Merlin’s mocking laughter cackling in the summer leaves, and so I let the dream fade as we lay unmoving in the long, soft light. Two swans flew north up the valley, going towards the great phallic image of the God Sucellos that was carved in the chalk hillside just north of Gyllad’s land. Sansum had wanted to obliterate the bold image. Guinevere had stopped him, though she had not been able to prevent him from building a small shrine at the foot of the hill. I had a mind to buy the land when I could, not to farm, but to stop the Christians grassing over the chalk or digging up the God’s image.

  ‘Where is Sansum?’ Ni
mue asked. She had been reading my thoughts.

  ‘He’s the guardian of the Holy Thorn now.’

  ‘May it prick him,’ she said vengefully. She uncurled from my arms and sat up, pulling the blanket up to our necks. ‘And Gundleus is betrothed today?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He won’t live to enjoy his bride,’ she said, more in hope, I feared, than in prophecy.

  ‘He will if Arthur can’t beat their army,’ I said.

  And next day the hopes of that victory seemed gone for ever. I was making things ready for Gyllad’s harvest; sharpening the sickles and nailing the wooden threshing flails to their leather hinges, when a messenger arrived in Durnovaria from Durocobrivis. Issa brought us the messenger’s news from town and it was dreadful. Aelle had broken the truce. On Lughnasa’s Eve a swarm of Saxons had attacked Gereint’s fortress and overrun its walls. Prince Gereint was dead, Durocobrivis had fallen, and Dumnonia’s client Prince Meriadoc of Stronggore was a fugitive and the last remnants of his kingdom had become a part of Lloegyr. Now, as well as facing Gorfyddyd’s army, Arthur must fight the Saxon war host. Dumnonia was surely doomed.

  Nimue scorned my pessimism. ‘The Gods won’t end the game this soon,’ she claimed.

  ‘Then the Gods had better fill our treasury,’ I said sharply, ‘because we can’t defeat both Aelle and Gorfyddyd, which means we have to buy the Saxon off or else go down to death.’

  ‘Little minds worry about money,’ Nimue said.

  ‘Then thank the Gods for little minds,’ I retorted. I worried about money endlessly.

  ‘There’s money in Dumnonia if you need it,’ Nimue said carelessly.

  ‘Guinevere’s?’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Arthur won’t touch it.’ At that time none of us knew how big was the treasure Lancelot had fetched back from Ynys Trebes; that treasure might have sufficed to buy Aelle’s peace, but the exiled King of Benoic was keeping it well hidden.

  ‘Not Guinevere’s gold,’ Nimue said, and then she told me where a Saxon’s blood-price might be found and I cursed myself for not thinking of it sooner. There was a chance after all, I thought, just a chance, so long as the Gods gave us time and Aelle’s price was not impossibly high. I reckoned it would take Aelle’s men a week to sober up after their sack of Durocobrivis so we had just that one week to work our miracle.