Enemy of God twc-2

by Bernard Cornwell

  King Cuneglas came running, worried about his guests, and the huntsmen arrived to truss and carry the corpse away. They must all have noted the comparison between Lancelot’s unstained clothes and our dishevelled and bloody state, but no one remarked on it. We were all excited, pleased to have survived and eager to share the story of Arthur holding the brute away from his body by its tusks. The story spread and the sound of men’s laughter rang loud among the trees. Lancelot alone did not laugh. ‘We must find you a boar now, Lord King,’ I said to him. We were standing a few paces from the excited crowd that had gathered to watch as the huntsmen gralloched the beast to give Guinevere’s hounds a meal of its guts.

  Lancelot gave me a sidelong, considering glance. He disliked me every scrap as much as I disliked him, but suddenly he smiled. ‘A boar,’ he said, ‘would be better than a sow, I think.’

  ‘A sow?’ I asked, smelling an insult.

  ‘Didn’t the sow charge you?” he asked, then opened his eyes guilelessly wide. ‘Surely you don’t think I was referring to your marriage!’ He offered me an ironic bow. ‘I must congratulate you, Lord Derfel!

  To marry Gwenhwyvach!’

  I forced my anger down, and made myself look into his narrow mocking face with its delicate beard, dark eyes, and long hair oiled as black and shining as a raven’s wing. ‘And I must congratulate you, Lord King, on your betrothal.’

  ‘To Seren,’ he said, ‘the star of Powys.’ He gazed at Ceinwyn who stood with her hands clasped to her face as the huntsmen’s knives ripped out the long coils of the boar’s intestines. She looked so young with her bright hair drawn up at the nape of her neck. ‘Doesn’t she look charming?’ Lancelot asked me in a voice like the purr of a cat. ‘So vulnerable. I never believed the stories of her beauty, for who would expect to find such a jewel among Gorfyddyd’s whelps? But she is beautiful, and I am so very fortunate.’

  ‘Yes, Lord King, you are.’

  He laughed and turned away. He was a man in his glory, a King come to take his bride, and he was also my enemy. But I had his bone in my pouch. I touched it, wondering if the struggle with the boar had broken the rib, but it was still whole, still hidden and just waiting for my pleasure. Cavan, my second-in-command, came to Caer Sws on the eve of Ceinwyn’s betrothal and brought with him forty of my spearmen. Galahad had sent them back, reckoning that his work in Siluria could be completed by the twenty remaining men. The Silurians, it seems, had glumly accepted their country’s defeat and there had been no unrest at the news of their King’s death, merely a docile submission to the exactions of the victors. Cavan told me that Oengus of Demetia, the Irish King who had brought Arthur victory at Lugg Vale, had taken his allotted portion of slaves and treasure, stolen as much again, and had then gone home, and the Silurians were evidently happy enough that the renowned Lancelot was now to be their King. ‘And I reckon the bastard’s welcome to the place,’ Cavan said when he found me in Cuneglas’s hall where I spread my blanket and took my meals. He scratched at a louse in his beard.

  ‘Scrubby place, Siluria.’

  ‘They breed good warriors,’ I said.

  ‘Fighting to get away from home, I wouldn’t wonder.’ He sniffed. ‘What clawed your face, Lord?’

  ‘Thorns. Fighting a boar.’

  ‘I thought you might have got married when I wasn’t watching you,’ he said, ‘and that was her wedding gift.’

  ‘I am to be married,’ I told him as we walked out of the hall into Caer Sws’s sunlight, and I described Arthur’s proposal to make me Mordred’s champion and his own brother-in-law. Cavan was pleased at the news of my imminent enrichment for he was an Irish exile who had sought to turn his skills with spear and sword into a fortune in Uther’s Dumnonia, but somehow the fortune had kept slipping away across the throwboard. He was twice my age, a squat man, broad-shouldered, grey-bearded and with hands thick with the warrior rings we forged from the weapons of defeated enemies. He was delighted that my marriage would mean gold and he was tactful about the bride who would bring that metal. ‘She isn’t a beauty like her sister,’ he said.

  ‘True,’ I admitted.

  ‘In fact,’ he said, abandoning tact, ‘she’s as ugly as a sack of toads.’

  ‘She is plain,’ I conceded.

  ‘But plain ones make the best wives, Lord,’ he declared, never having been married himself, though never lonely either. ‘And she’ll bring us all wealth,’ he added happily, and that, of course, was the reason I would marry poor Gwenhwyvach. My common sense could not put faith in the pork rib in my pouch, and my duty to my men was to reward them for their fidelity, and those rewards had been few in the last year. They had lost virtually all their possessions at the fall of Ynys Trebes and had then struggled against Gorfyddyd’s army at Lugg Vale; now they were tired, they were impoverished and no men had ever deserved more of their lord.

  I greeted my forty men who were waiting to be assigned quarters. I was glad to see Issa among them, for he was the best of my spearmen: a young farm boy of huge strength and undying optimism who protected my right side in battle. I embraced him, then expressed my regrets that I had no gifts for them.

  ‘But our reward is coming soon,’ I added, then glanced at the two dozen girls they must have attracted in Siluria, ‘though I’m glad to see most of you have already found some rewards for yourselves.’

  They laughed. Issa’s girl was a pretty dark-haired child of perhaps fourteen summers. He introduced her to me. ‘Scarach, Lord.’ He named her proudly.

  ‘Irish?’ I asked her.

  She nodded. ‘I was a slave. Lord, to Ladwys.’ Scarach spoke the tongue of Ireland; a language like ours, but different enough, like her name, to mark her race. I guessed she had been captured by Gundleus’s men in a raid on King Oengus’s lands in Demetia. Most Irish slaves came from such settlements on Britain’s west coast though none, I suspected, were ever captured from Lleyn. No one but a fool ventured uninvited into Diwrnach’s territory.

  ‘Ladwys!’ I said. ‘How is she?’ Ladwys had been Gundleus’s mistress, a dark, tall woman whom Gundleus had secretly married, though he had been ready enough to disown the marriage when Gorfyddyd had offered him the prospect of Ceinwyn’s hand.

  ‘She’s dead, Lord,’ Scarach said happily. ‘We killed her in the kitchen. I put a spit in her belly.’

  ‘She’s a good girl,’ Issa said eagerly.

  ‘Evidently,’ I said, ‘so look after her.’ His last girl had deserted him for one of the Christian missionaries who wandered Dumnonia’s roads, but somehow I doubted that the redoubtable Scarach would prove such a fool.

  That afternoon, using lime from Cuneglas’s stores, my men painted a new device on their shields. The honour of carrying my own device had been granted to me by Arthur on the eve of the battle at Lugg Vale, but we had been given no time to change the shields which, till now, had all carried Arthur’s symbol of the bear. My men expected me to choose a wolf’s mask as our symbol, to echo the wolf-tails that we had begun to wear on our helmets in the forests of Benoic, but I insisted that we each painted a five-pointed star. ‘A star!’ Cavan growled in disappointment. He wanted something fierce, with claws and beak and teeth, but I insisted on the star. ‘Seren,’ I said, ‘for we are the stars of the shield-wall.’

  They liked that explanation, and none suspected the hopeless romanticism that lay behind my choice. So we first laid a coat of black pitch on the round, leather-covered willow-board shields, then painted the stars in lime, using a scabbard to get the edges straight, and when the limewash had dried we applied a varnish made of pine resin and egg-white that would protect the stars from rain for a few months. ‘It’s different,’ Cavan grudgingly allowed when we admired the finished shields.

  ‘It’s splendid,’ I said, and that night, when I dined in the circle of warriors who ate on the floor of the hall, Issa stood behind me as shield-bearer. The varnish was still wet, but that only made the star seem brighter. Scarach served me. It was a poor meal of barley gruel,
but Caer Sws’s kitchens could provide no better for they were busy preparing the next night’s great feast. Indeed the whole compound was busy with those preparations. The hall had been decorated with boughs of dusk-red beech, the floor had been swept and strewn with new rushes, and from the women’s quarters we heard tales of dresses being made and delicately embroidered. At least four hundred warriors were now in residence at Caer Sws, most of them quartered in crude shelters thrown up on the fields outside the ramparts, and the warriors’ women, children and dogs thronged the fort. Half the men belonged to Cuneglas, the other half were Dumnonians, but despite the recent war there was no trouble, not even when the news spread that Ratae had fallen to Aelle’s Saxon horde because of Arthur’s treachery. Cuneglas must have suspected that Arthur had purchased Aelle’s peace by some such means and he accepted Arthur’s oath-promise that the men of Dumnonia would extract vengeance for the dead of Powys who lay in the ashes of the captured fortress. I had seen neither Merlin nor Nimue since the night on Dolforwyn. Merlin had left Caer Sws, but Nimue, I heard, was still in the fortress and was staying hidden in the women’s quarters where, rumour said, she was much in the Princess Ceinwyn’s company. That seemed unlikely to me because Nimue and Ceinwyn were so very different. Nimue was a few years older than Ceinwyn and she was dark and intense and forever trembling on the narrow divide between madness and anger, while Ceinwyn was fair and gentle and, as Merlin had told me, so very conventional. I could not imagine that either woman had much to say to the other, and so I assumed that the rumours were false and that Nimue was with Merlin who, I believed, had gone to find the men who would carry their swords into Diwrnach’s dreaded land to seek the Cauldron.

  But would I go with him? On the morning of Ceinwyn’s betrothal I walked northwards into the great oaks that lapped around Caer Sws’s wide valley. I sought a particular place and Cuneglas had told me where to find it. Issa, loyal Issa, came with me, but he had no idea what business took us into the dark, deep wood.

  This land, the heart of Powys, had been lightly touched by the Romans. They had built forts here, like Caer Sws, and they had left a few roads that arrowed along the river valleys, but there were no great villas or towns like those that gave Dumnonia its gloss of a lost civilization. Nor, here in Cuneglas’s heartland, were there many Christians; the worship of the old Gods survived in Powys without the rancour that soured religion in Mordred’s realm, where Christian and pagan vied for royal favour and the right to erect their shrines in the holy places. No Roman altars had replaced Powys’s Druid groves and no Christian churches stood by its holy wells. The Romans had cut down some of the shrines, but many had been preserved and it was to one of those ancient holy places that Issa and I came in the leafy twilight of the midday forest.

  It was a Druid shrine, a grove of oaks deep within a massive wood. The leaves above the shrine had yet to fade to bronze, but soon they would turn and fall onto the low stone wall that lay in a semicircle at the grove’s centre. Two niches had been made in the wall and two human skulls were set in the niches. Once there had been many such places in Dumnonia, and many more had been remade after the Romans had left. Too often, though, the Christians would come and break the skulls, pull down the drystone walls and cut down the oaks, but this shrine in Powys might have stood among these deep woods for a thousand years. Little scraps of wool had been pushed between the stones as markers for the prayers that folk offered in this grove.

  It was silent in the oaks; a heavy silence. Issa watched from the trees as I walked to the centre of the semicircle where I unstrapped Hywelbane’s heavy belt.

  I laid the sword on the flat stone that marked the shrine’s centre and took from my pouch the clean white rib bone that gave me power over Lancelot’s marriage. This I placed beside the sword. Last of all I put down on the stone the small golden brooch that Ceinwyn had given me so many years before. Then I lay down flat in the leaf mould.

  I slept in hope of a dream that would tell me what to do, but no dream came. Maybe I should have sacrificed some bird or beast before I slept, a gift that might have provoked a God to grant me the answer I sought, but no answer came. There was just silence. I had put my sword and the power of the bone into the hands of the Gods, into the keeping of Bel and Manawydan, of Taranis and Lleullaw, but they ignored my gifts. There was only the wind in the high leaves, the scratching of squirrel claws on the oak branches and the sudden rattle of a woodpecker.

  I lay still when I woke. There had been no dream, but I knew what I wanted. I wanted to take the bone and snap it in two, and if that gesture meant walking the Dark Road into Diwrnach’s kingdom, then so be it. But I also wanted Arthur’s Britain to be whole and good and true. And I wanted my men to have gold and land and slaves and rank. I wanted to drive the Saxons from Lloegyr. I wanted to hear the screams of a broken shield-wall and the blare of war horns as a victorious army pursued a shattered enemy to ruin. I wanted to march my starry shields into the flat eastern land that no free Briton had seen in a generation. And I wanted Ceinwyn.

  I sat up. Issa had come to sit close beside me. He must have wondered why I stared so fixedly at the bone, but he asked no questions.

  I thought of Merlin’s small, squat tower of bones that represented Arthur’s dream and wondered if that dream would really collapse if Lancelot did not marry Ceinwyn. The marriage was hardly the clasp that held Arthur’s alliance together; it was merely a convenience to give Lancelot a throne and Powys a stake in Siluria’s royal house. If the marriage never happened then the armies of Dumnonia and Gwent and Powys and Elmet would still march against the Sais. All that I knew, and all that was true, yet I also sensed that the bone could somehow jar Arthur’s dream. The moment I snapped the bone in two I became sworn to Merlin’s search, and that search promised to bring enmity to Dumnonia; the enmity of the old pagans who so hated the upstart Christian religion.

  ‘Guinevere,’ I suddenly said the name aloud.

  ‘Lord?’ Issa asked in puzzlement.

  I shook my head to show that I had nothing more to say. Indeed, I had not meant to speak Guinevere’s name aloud, yet I had suddenly understood that to break the bone would do more than encourage Merlin’s campaign against the Christian God, it would also make Guinevere into my enemy. I closed my eyes. Could my Lord’s wife be an enemy? And what if she were? Arthur would still love me, and I him, and my spears and starry shields were worth more to him than all Lancelot’s fame. I stood and retrieved the brooch, the bone and the sword. Issa watched as I pulled a thread of green-dyed wool from my cloak and jammed it between the stones. ‘You were not at Caer Sws,’ I asked him, ‘when Arthur broke his betrothal to Ceinwyn?’

  ‘No, Lord. I heard about it, though.’

  ‘It was at the betrothal feast,’ I said, ‘just like the one we’ll attend tonight. Arthur was sitting at the high table with Ceinwyn beside him and he saw Guinevere at the back of the hall. She was standing in a shabby cloak with her hounds beside her and Arthur saw her there and nothing was ever the same again. The Gods alone know how many men died because he saw that head of red hair.’ I turned back to the low stone wall and saw there was an abandoned nest inside one of the mossy skulls. ‘Merlin tells me that the Gods love chaos,’ I said.

  ‘Merlin loves chaos,’ Issa said lightly, though there was more truth in his words than he knew.

  ‘Merlin loves it,’ I agreed, ‘but most of us fear chaos and that’s why we try to make order.’ I thought of the carefully ordered pile of bones. ‘But when you have order, you don’t need Gods. When everything is well ordered and disciplined then nothing is unexpected. If you understand everything,’ I said carefully,

  ‘then there’s no room left for magic. It’s only when you’re lost and frightened and in the dark that you call on the Gods, and they like us to call on them. It makes them feel powerful, and that’s why they like us to live in chaos.’ I was repeating the lessons of my childhood, the lessons given to us on Merlin’s Tor.

  ‘And now we have a ch
oice,’ I told Issa. ‘We can live in Arthur’s well-ordered Britain or we can follow Merlin to chaos.’

  ‘I’ll follow you, Lord, whatever you do,’ Issa said. I do not think he understood what I was saying, but he was content to trust me anyway.

  ‘I wish I knew what to do,’ I confessed. How easy it would be, I thought, if the Gods just walked Britain as they used to. Then we could see them, hear them and talk to them, but now we were like blindfolded men seeking a clasp-pin in a thorn thicket. I strapped the sword back into its place, then tucked the unbroken bone safe back in the pouch. ‘I want you to give a message to the men,’ I told Issa.

  ‘Not to Cavan, for I’ll talk to him myself, but I want you to tell them that if anything strange happens this night, they are released from their oaths to me.’

  He frowned at me. ‘Released from our oaths?’ he asked, then shook his head vigorously. ‘Not me, Lord.’

  I hushed him. ‘And tell them,’ I went on, ‘that if something strange does happen, and it may not, then loyalty to my oath could mean fighting against Diwrnach.’

  ‘Diwrnach!’ Issa said. He spat and made the symbol against evil with his right hand.

  ‘Tell them that, Issa,’ I said.

  ‘So what might happen tonight?’ he asked me anxiously.

  ‘Maybe nothing,’ I said, ‘maybe nothing at all,’ because the Gods had given me no sign in the grove and I still did not know what I would choose. Order or chaos. Or neither, for maybe the bone was nothing but a piece of kitchen scrap and its breaking would do nothing except symbolize my own shattered love for Ceinwyn. But there was only one way to find out, and that was to break the bone. If I dared.

  At Ceinwyn’s betrothal feast.

  Of all the feasts of those late summer nights the betrothal feast of Lancelot and Ceinwyn was the most lavish. Even the Gods seemed to favour it, for the moon was full and clear, and that was a wonderful omen for a betrothal. The moon rose shortly after sunset, a silver orb that loomed huge above the peaks where Dolforwyn lay. I had wondered if the feast would be held in Dolforwyn’s hall, but Cuneglas, seeing the huge number to be fed, had decided to keep the celebrations inside Caer Sws. There were far too many guests for the King’s hall, and so only the most privileged were allowed inside its thick wooden walls. The rest sat outside, grateful that the Gods had sent a dry night. The ground was still wet from the rain earlier in the week, but there was plenty of straw for men to make dry seats. Pitch-soaked torches had been tied to stakes and, moments after the moonrise, those torches were lit so that the royal compound was suddenly bright with leaping flames. The wedding would be held in the daylight so that Gwydion, the God of light, and Belenos, the God of the sun, would grant their blessing, but the betrothal was given to the moon’s blessing. Every now and then a burning wisp from a torch would float to earth to set alight a patch of straw and there would be bellows of laughter, screaming children, barking dogs and a flurry of panic until the fire was extinguished. Over a hundred men were guests inside Cuneglas’s hall. Tapers and rush lights were clustered together to flicker weird shadows in the high, beamed thatch where the sprays of beech leaves were now mixed with the year’s first clusters of holly berries. The hall’s one table was set on the dais beneath a row of shields and each shield had a taper below it to illuminate the device painted on the leather. At the centre was Cuneglas’s royal shield of Powys with its spread-winged eagle, and on one side of the eagle was Arthur’s black bear and on the other Dumnonia’s red dragon. Guinevere’s device of a moon-crowned stag was hung next to the bear, while Lancelot’s sea-eagle flew with a fish in its claws next to the dragon. No one was present from Gwent, but Arthur had insisted that Tewdric’s black bull be hung, along with Elmet’s red horse and the fox mask of Siluria. The royal symbols marked the great alliance; the shield-wall that would batter the Saxons back to the sea.