The Winter King

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Like as not.’ He spat towards the ford. ‘And they’ll have seen that Tewdric’s bull is missing.’ He gave one of his rare smiles. ‘It’ll be a fight worth remembering, Lord Derfel.’

  ‘I’m glad to share it with you, Lord,’ I said fervently, and so I was. There was no warrior greater than Sagramor, no man more feared by his enemies. Even Arthur’s presence did not raise the same dread as the Numidian’s impassive face and ghastly sword. It was a curved sword of strange foreign make and Sagramor wielded it with a terrible quickness. I once asked Sagramor why he had first sworn loyalty to Arthur. ‘Because when I had nothing,’ he explained curtly, ‘Arthur gave me everything.’

  Our spearmen at last stopped singing as two Druids advanced from Gorfyddyd’s army. We only had Nimue to counter their enchantments and she now waded through the ford to meet the advancing men who were both hopping down the road with one arm raised and one eye closed. The Druids were Iorweth, Gorfyddyd’s wizard, and Tanaburs in his long robe embroidered with moons and hares. The two men exchanged kisses with Nimue, talked with her for a short while and then she returned to our side of the ford. ‘They wanted us to surrender,’ she said scornfully, ‘and I invited them to do the same.’

  ‘Good,’ Sagramor growled.

  Iorweth hopped awkwardly to the ford’s farther side. ‘The Gods bring you greeting!’ he shouted at us, though none of us answered. I had closed my cheek pieces so that I could not be recognized. Tanaburs was hopping up the river, using his staff to keep his balance. Iorweth raised his own staff level above his head to show that he wished to speak further. ‘My King, the King of Powys and High King of Britain, King Gorfyddyd ap Cadell ap Brychan ap Laganis ap Coel ap Beli Mawr, will spare your bold souls a journey to the Otherworld. All you need do, brave warriors, is give us Arthur!’ He levelled the staff at me and Nimue immediately hissed a protective prayer and tossed two handfuls of soil into the air.

  I said nothing and silence was my refusal. Iorweth whirled the staff and spat three times towards us, then he began hopping down the river’s bank to add his curses to Tanaburs’s spells. King Gorfyddyd, accompanied by his son Cuneglas and his ally Gundleus, had ridden halfway to the river to watch their Druids working, and work they did. They cursed our lives by the day and our souls by night. They gave our blood to the worms, our flesh to the beasts and our bones to agony. They cursed our women, our children, our fields and our livestock. Nimue countered the charms, but still our men shivered. The Christians called out that there was nothing to fear, but even they were making the sign of the cross as the curses flew across the river on wings of darkness.

  The Druids cursed for a whole hour and left us shaking. Nimue walked the shield-line touching spearheads and assuring men that the curses had not worked, but our men were nervous of the Gods’ anger as the enemy spear-line at last advanced. ‘Shields up!’ Sagramor shouted harshly. ‘Spears up!’

  The enemy halted fifty paces from the river while one man alone advanced on foot. It was Valerin, the chief whom we had driven from the vale in the dawn, and who now advanced to the ford’s northern edge with shield and spear. He had suffered defeat in the dawn and his pride had forced him to this moment when he could retrieve his reputation. ‘Arthur!’ he shouted at me. ‘You married a whore!’

  ‘Keep silent, Derfel,’ Sagramor warned me.

  ‘A whore!’ Valerin shouted. ‘She was used when she came to me. You want the list of her lovers? An hour, Arthur, would not be time enough to give that list! And who’s she whoring with now while you’re waiting to die? You think she’s waiting for you? I know that whore! She’s tangling her legs with a man or two!’ He spread his arms and jerked his hips obscenely and my spearmen jeered back, but Valerin ignored their shouted insults. ‘A whore!’ he called, ‘a rancid, used-up whore! You’d fight for your whore, Arthur? Or have you lost your belly for fighting? Defend your whore, you worm!’ He walked through the ford that came up to his thighs and stopped on our bank, his cloak dripping, just a dozen paces away from me. He stared into the dark shadow of my helmet’s eye-hole. ‘A whore, Arthur,’ he repeated, ‘your wife is a whore.’ He spat. He was bare-headed and had woven sprigs of protective mistletoe into his long black hair. He had a breastplate, but no other body armour, while his shield was painted with Gorfyddyd’s spread-winged eagle. He laughed at me, then raised his voice to call to all our men. ‘Your leader won’t fight for his whore, so why should you fight for him?’

  Sagramor growled at me to ignore the taunts, but Valerin’s defiance was unsettling our men whose souls were already chilled by the Druids’ curses. I waited for Valerin to call Guinevere a whore one more time and when he did I hurled my spear at him. It was a clumsy throw, made awkward by the scale armour’s constriction, and the spear tumbled past him to splash into the river. ‘A whore,’ he shouted and ran at me with his war spear levelled as I scraped Hywelbane out of her scabbard. I stepped towards him and had time to take just two paces before he thrust the spear at me with a great shout of rage.

  I dropped to one knee and raised the polished shield at an angle so that the spear-point was deflected over my head. I could see Valerin’s feet and hear his roar of rage as I stabbed Hywelbane under my shield’s edge. I lunged upwards with the blade, feeling it strike just before his charging body struck my shield and drove me down to the ground. He was screaming instead of roaring now, for that sword thrust beneath the shield was a wicked cut that came up from the ground to pierce a man’s bowels and I knew Hywelbane had plunged deep into Valerin, for I could feel his body’s weight pulling the sword blade down as he collapsed on to the shield. I heaved up with all my strength to throw him off the shield and gave a grunt as I jerked the sword back from his flesh’s grip. Blood spilt foul beside his spear that had fallen to the ground where he now lay bleeding and twitching in awful pain. Even so he tried to draw his sword as I clambered to my feet and put my boot on to his chest. His face was going yellow, he shuddered and his eyes were already clouding in death. ‘Guinevere is a lady,’ I told him, ‘and your soul is mine if you deny it.’

  ‘She’s a whore,’ he somehow managed to say between clenched teeth, then he choked and shook his head feebly. ‘The bull guards me,’ he managed to add, and I knew he was of Mithras and so I thrust Hywelbane hard down. The blade met the resistance of his throat, then swiftly cut to end his life. Blood fountained up the blade, and I do not think Valerin ever knew it was not Arthur who sent his soul to the bridge of swords in Cruachan’s Cave.

  Our men cheered. Their spirits, so abraded by the Druids and chilled by Valerin’s foul insults, were instantly restored for we had drawn the first blood. I walked to the river’s edge where I danced a victor’s steps as I showed the dispirited enemy Hywelbane’s bloodstained blade. Gorfyddyd, Cuneglas and Gundleus, their champion defeated, turned their horses away and my men taunted them as cowards and weaklings.

  Sagramor nodded as I returned to the shield–wall. The nod was evidently his way of offering praise for a well-fought fight. ‘What do you want done with him?’ He gestured to Valerin’s fallen body.

  I had Issa strip the corpse of its jewellery, then two other men heaved it into the river and I prayed that the spirits of the water would carry my brother of Mithras to his reward. Issa brought me Valerin’s weapons, his golden torque, two brooches and a ring. ‘Yours, Lord,’ he said, offering me the plunder. He had also retrieved my spear from the river.

  I took the spear and Valerin’s weapons, but nothing else. ‘The gold is yours, Issa,’ I said, remembering how he had tried to give me his own torque when we had returned from Ynys Trebes.

  ‘Not this, Lord,’ he said, and he showed me Valerin’s ring. It was a piece of heavy gold, beautifully made and embossed with the figure of a stag running beneath a crescent moon. It was Guinevere’s badge, and at the back of the ring, crudely but deeply cut into the thick gold, was a cross. It was a lover’s ring and Issa, I thought, had been clever to spot it.

  I took the ring and thought
of Valerin wearing it through all the hurt years. Or maybe, I dared to hope, he had tried to revenge his pain on her reputation by cutting a false cross into the ring so that men would think he had been her lover. ‘Arthur must never know,’ I warned Issa and then I hurled the heavy ring into the river.

  ‘What was that?’ Sagramor asked as I rejoined him.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘nothing. Just a charm that might have brought us ill luck.’

  Then a ram’s horn sounded across the river and I was spared the need to think about the ring’s message.

  The enemy was coming.

  THE BARDS STILL SING of that battle, though the Gods only know how they invent the details they embroider into the tale because to hear their songs you would think none of us could have survived Lugg Vale and maybe none of us should. It was desperate. It was also, though the bards do not admit as much, a defeat for Arthur.

  Gorfyddyd’s first attack was a howling rush of maddened spearmen who charged into the ford. Sagramor ordered us forward and we met them in the river where the clash of the shields was like a crack of thunder exploding in the valley’s mouth. The enemy had the advantage of numbers, but their attack was channelled by the ford’s margins and we could afford to bring men from our flanks to thicken our centre.

  We in the front rank had time to thrust once, then we crouched behind our shields and simply shoved at the enemy line while the men in our second rank fought across our heads. The ring of sword blades and clatter of shield-bosses and clashing of spear-shafts was deafening, but remarkably few men died for it is hard to kill in the crush as two locked shield–walls grind against each other. Instead it becomes a pushing match. The enemy grasps your spearhead so you cannot pull it back, there is hardly room to draw a sword, and all the time the enemy’s second rank are raining sword, axe and spear blows on helmets and shield-edges. The worst injuries are caused by men thrusting blades beneath the shields and gradually a barrier of crippled men builds at the front to make the slaughter even more difficult. Only when one side pulls back can the other then kill the crippled enemies stranded at the battle’s tide line. We prevailed on that first attack, not so much out of valour but because Morfans pushed his six horsemen through the crush of our men and used his long horse spears to thrust down on the crouching enemy front line. ‘Shields! Shields!’ I heard Morfans shouting as the six horses’ vast weight buckled our shield-line forward. Our rear-rank men hoisted their shields high to protect the big war horses from the rain of enemy spears, while we in the front rank crouched in the river and tried to finish off the men who recoiled from the horsemen’s thrusts. I sheltered behind Arthur’s polished shield and stabbed with Hywelbane whenever a gap offered in the enemy’s line. I took two mighty blows to the head, but the helmet cushioned both even if my skull did ring for an hour afterwards. One spear struck my scale armour but could not pierce it. The man who launched that spear lunge was killed by Morfans, and after his death the enemy lost heart and splashed back to the river’s northern bank. They took their wounded, all but for a handful who were too close to our line and that handful we killed before we retreated to our own bank. We had lost six men to the Otherworld and twice that many to wounds. ‘You shouldn’t be in the front line,’ Sagramor told me as he watched our wounded being carried away. ‘They’ll see you’re not Arthur.’

  ‘They’re seeing that Arthur fights,’ I said, ‘unlike Gorfyddyd or Gundleus.’ The enemy Kings had been close to the fight, but never close enough to use their weapons.

  Iorweth and Tanaburs were screaming at Gorfyddyd’s men, encouraging them to the slaughter and promising them the rewards of the Gods, but while Gorfyddyd reorganized his spearmen a group of masterless men waded the river to attack on their own. Such warriors relied on a display of bravery to bring them riches and rank, and these thirty desperate men charged in a screaming rage once they were through the deepest part of the river. They were either drunk or battle-mad, for thirty alone attacked our whole force. The reward for their success would have been land, gold, forgiveness of their crimes and lordly status in Gorfyddyd’s court, but thirty men were not enough. They hurt us, but died doing it. They were all fine spearmen with shield hands thick with warrior rings, but each now faced three or four enemies. A whole group rushed towards me, seeing in my armour and white plume the fastest route to glory, but Sagramor and my wolf-tailed spearmen met and matched them. One huge man was wielding a Saxon axe. Sagramor killed him with his dark curved blade, then plucked the axe from the dying hand and hurled it at another spearman, and all the while he was chanting his own weird battle song in his native tongue. A last swordsman attacked me and I parried his scything blow with the iron boss of Arthur’s shield, knocked his own shield aside with Hywelbane, then kicked him in the groin. He doubled over, too hurt to cry out, and Issa rammed a spear into his neck. We stripped the dead attackers of their armour, their weapons and their jewellery and left their bodies at the ford’s edge as a barrier to the next attack.

  That attack came soon and came hard. Like the first this third assault was made by a mass of spearmen, only this time we met them at the near river bank where the press of men behind the enemy’s front rank forced their leading spearmen to stumble on the piled bodies. Their stumbling opened them to our counter-attack and we shouted in triumph as we slashed our red spears forward. Then the shields cracked together again, dying men screamed and called on their Gods, and the swords rang loud as the anvils in Magnis. I was again in the front rank, crammed so close to the enemy line that I could smell the mead on their breath. One man tried to snatch the helmet from my head and lost his hand to a sword stroke. The pushing match started again and again it seemed that the enemy must force us back by sheer weight, but again Morfans brought his heavy horses through the crush, and again the enemy hurled spears that clattered on our shields, and once again Morfans’s men thrust down with their long horsemen’s spears and once again the enemy pulled back. The bards say the river ran red, which is not true, though I did see tendrils of blood fading downstream from the wounded who tried and failed to get back through the ford.

  ‘We could fight the bastards here all day,’ Morfans said. His horse was bleeding and he had dismounted to treat the animal’s wound.

  I shook my head. ‘There’s another ford upriver.’ I pointed westwards. ‘They’ll have spearmen on this bank soon enough.’

  Those outflanking enemy came sooner than I thought, for ten minutes later a shout from our left flank warned us that a group of enemy had indeed crossed the river to the west and was now advancing along our bank.

  ‘Time to go back,’ Sagramor told me. His clean-shaven black face was smeared with blood and sweat, but there was joy in his eyes for this was proving to be a fight that would make the poets struggle for new words to describe a battle, a fight that men would remember in smoky halls for winters to come, a fight that, even lost, would send a man in honour to the warrior halls of the Otherworld. ‘Time to draw them in,’ Sagramor said, then shouted the order to withdraw so that slowly and cumbersomely our whole force retreated past the village with its Roman building and stopped a hundred paces beyond. Our left flank was now anchored on the vale’s steep western side while our right was protected by the marshy ground that stretched towards the river. Even so we were much more vulnerable than we had been at the ford for our shield–wall was now desperately thin and the enemy could attack all along its length.

  It took Gorfyddyd a whole hour to bring his men across the river and array them in a new shield-line. I guessed it was already afternoon and I glanced behind me for some sign of Galahad or Tewdric’s men, but I saw no one approaching. Nor, I was glad to see, were there any men on the western hill where Nimue’s ghost-fence guarded our flank, but Gorfyddyd hardly needed men there for his army was now bigger than ever. New contingents had come from Branogenium and Gorfyddyd’s commanders were tugging and shoving those newcomers into the shield–wall. We watched the captains using their long spears to straighten the enemy’s line
and all of us, despite the defiance we shouted, knew that for every man we had killed at the river ten more had come across the ford. ‘We’ll never hold them here,’ Sagramor said as he watched the enemy forces grow. ‘We’ll have to go back to the tree fence.’

  But then, before Sagramor could give the order to retreat, Gorfyddyd himself rode forward to challenge us. He came alone, without even his son, and he came with just a sheathed sword and a spear for he had no arm to hold a shield. Gorfyddyd’s gold-trimmed helmet, that Arthur had returned the week of his betrothal to Ceinwyn, was crowned with the spread wings of a golden eagle, and his black cloak was spread across his horse’s rump. Sagramor growled at me to stay where I was and strode forward to meet the King.

  Gorfyddyd used no reins, but spoke to his horse that obediently stopped two paces away from Sagramor. Gorfyddyd rested his spear-butt on the ground, then forced his helmet’s cheek pieces aside so that his sour face showed. ‘You’re Arthur’s black demon,’ he accused Sagramor, spitting to avert any evil, ‘and your whore-loving Lord shelters behind your sword.’ Gorfyddyd spat again, this time towards me. ‘Why don’t you talk to me, Arthur?’ he shouted. ‘Lost your tongue?’

  ‘My Lord Arthur,’ Sagramor answered in his heavily accented British, ‘is saving his breath to sing his victory song.’

  Gorfyddyd hefted his long spear. ‘I’m one-handed,’ he shouted at me, ‘but I’ll fight you!’

  I said nothing, nor did I move. Arthur, I knew, would never fight in single battle against a crippled man, though Arthur would never have stayed silent either. By now he would have been pleading with Gorfyddyd for peace.

  Gorfyddyd did not want peace. He wanted slaughter. He rode up and down our line, controlling his horse with his knees and shouting at our men. ‘You’re dying because your Lord can’t keep his hands off a whore! You’re dying for a bitch with a wet rump! For a bitch in perpetual heat! Your souls will be cursed. My dead are already feasting in the Otherworld, but your souls will become their throwpieces. And why will you die? For his red-headed whore?’ He pointed his spear at me, then rode his horse directly at me. I pulled back lest he saw through the helmet’s eyeslit that I was not Arthur and my spearmen closed protectively around me. Gorfyddyd laughed at my apparent timidity. His horse was close enough for my men to touch, but Gorfyddyd showed no fear of their spears as he spat at me. ‘Woman!’ he called out, his worst insult, then touched his horse with his left foot and the beast turned and galloped back towards his army.