Enemy of God twc-2

by Bernard Cornwell

  I said. It was still morning and we had a long day’s march ahead. A march towards home. Home to Ceinwyn. Home to my daughters who were sprung from a line of British Kings and from their Saxon enemy’s royal blood. For I was Aelle’s son. I stood on a green hill above the sea and wondered at the extraordinary weave of life, but I could make no sense of it. I was Aelle’s son, but what difference did that make? It explained nothing and it demanded nothing. Fate is inexorable. I would go home.

  * * *

  It was Issa who first saw the smoke. He always had eyes like a hawk and that day, as I stood on the hill trying to find some meaning in my mother’s revelations, Issa spied smoke across the sea. ‘Lord?’ he said, and at first I did not respond for I was too dazed by what I had learned. I was to kill my father? And that father was Aelle? ‘Lord!’ Issa said more insistently, waking me from my thoughts. ‘Look, Lord, smoke.’

  * * *

  He was pointing south towards Dumnonia and at first I thought the whiteness was merely a paler patch among the rainclouds, but Issa was certain and two of the other spearmen asserted that what we saw was smoke and not cloud or rain. ‘There’s more, Lord,’ one of them said, pointing further west where another small smear of whiteness showed against the grey.

  One fire might have been an accident, perhaps a hall burning or a dry field blazing, but in that wet weather no field would have burned and in all my life I had never seen two halls ablaze unless an enemy had put them to the torch.

  ‘Lord?’ Issa prompted me, for he, like me, had a wife in Dumnonia.

  ‘Back to the village,’ I said. ‘Now.’

  Linna’s husband agreed to take us over the sea. The voyage was not long, for the sea here was only eight or so miles wide and it offered us our swiftest route home, but like all spearmen we preferred a long dry journey to a short wet one, and that crossing was an ordeal of sodden cold misery. A brisk wind had sprung from the west to bring more clouds and rain, and with it came a short, rising sea that splashed over the boat’s low gunwales. We bailed for our lives while the ragged sail bellied and slapped and dragged us southward. Our boatman, who was called Balig and was my brother-in-law, declared that there was no joy like a good boat in a brisk wind and he roared his thanks to Manawydan for sending us such weather, but Issa was sick as a dog, I was retching dry, and we were all glad when, in the middle of the afternoon, he ran us ashore on a Dumnonian beach no more than three or four hours from home. I paid Balig, then we struck inland through a flat, damp country. There was a village not far from the beach, but the folk there had seen the smoke and were frightened and they mistook us for enemies and ran to their huts. The village possessed a small church, merely a thatched hut with a wooden cross nailed to a gable, but the Christians had all gone. One of the remaining pagan villagers told me that the Christians had all gone eastwards. ‘They followed their priest, Lord,’ he told me.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Where?’

  ‘We don’t know, Lord.’ He glanced at the distant smoke. ‘Are the Saxons back?’

  ‘No,’ I reassured him, and hoped I was right. The thinning smoke looked to be no more than six or seven miles away and I doubted that either Aelle or Cerdic could have reached this far into Dumnonia. If they had then all Britain was lost.

  We hurried on. At that moment all we wanted was to reach our families and, once we knew they were safe, the time would come to find out what was happening. We had a choice of two routes to Ermid’s Hall. One, the longer, lay inland and would take us four or five hours, much of it in darkness, but the other lay across the great sea-marshes of Avalon; a treacherous swamp of creeks, willow-edged bogs and sedge-covered wastes where, when the tide was high and the wind from the west, the sea could sometimes seep and fill and flood the levels and drown unwary travellers. There were routes through that great swamp, and even wooden walkways that led to where the willow pollards grew and the eel and fish traps were set, but none of us knew the marsh paths. Yet still we chose those treacherous paths for they offered the swiftest way home.

  As evening fell we found a guide. Like most of the marsh folk he was a pagan and, once he knew who I was, he gladly offered his services. In the middle of the marsh, rising black in the falling light, we could see the Tor. We would have to go there first, our guide said, and then find one of Ynys Wydryn’s boatmen to take us in a reed punt across the shallow waters of Issa’s Mere. It was still raining as we left the marsh village, the drops pattering on the reeds and dappling the pools, but it lifted within the hour and gradually a wan, milky moon glowed dimly behind the thinning clouds that scudded from the west Our path crossed black ditches on plank bridges, passed by the intricate woven wickerwork of willow eel traps, and snaked incomprehensibly across blank shining morasses where our guide would mutter incantations against the marsh spirits. Some nights, he said, strange blue lights glimmered in the wet wastes; the spirits, he thought, of the many folk who had died in this labyrinth of water, mud and sedge. Our footfalls startled screeching wildfowl up from their nests, their panicked wings dark against the cloud-racked sky. Our guide talked to me as we went, telling me of the dragons that slept under the marsh and the ghouls that slithered through its muddy creeks. He wore a necklace made from the spine of a drowned man, the only sure charm, he claimed, against those fearsome things that haunted our path.

  It seemed to me that the Tor came no closer, but that was just our impatience and yard by yard, creek by creek, we did get nearer and, as the great hill loomed higher and higher in the ragged sky, we saw a bright smear of light show at its foot. It was a great flamelight, and at first we thought the shrine of the Holy Thorn must be burning, but as we drew still nearer the flames grew no brighter and I guessed the light came from bonfires, perhaps lit to illuminate some Christian rite that sought to keep the shrine from harm. We all made the sign against evil, then at last we reached an embankment that led straight from the wet land to Ynys Wydryn’s higher ground.

  Our guide left us there. He preferred the dangers of the marsh to the perils of firelit Ynys Wydryn, so he knelt to me and I rewarded him with the last of my gold, then raised him up and thanked him. The six of us walked on through the small town of Ynys Wydryn, a place of fishermen and basket-makers. The houses were dark and the alleyways deserted except for dogs and rats. We were heading towards the wooden palisade that surrounded the shrine, and though we could see the glowing smoke of the fires churning above the fence we still could not see anything that happened inside; but our path took us past the shrine’s main gate and, as we drew closer, I saw there were two spearmen standing guard at the entrance. The flamelight coming through the open gate illuminated one of their shields and on that shield was the last symbol I had ever expected to see in Ynys Wydryn. It was Lancelot’s sea-eagle with the fish in its claws.

  Our own shields were slung on our backs and so their white stars were invisible, and though we all wore the grey wolf-tail, the spearmen must have thought we were friends for they made no challenge as we approached. Instead, thinking that we wanted to enter the shrine, they moved aside, and it was only when I was halfway through the gate, drawn there by my curiosity about Lancelot’s part in this night’s strange events, that the two men realized we were not their comrades. One tried to bar my way with a spear. ‘Who are you?’ he challenged me.

  I pushed his spear aside and then, before he could shout a warning, I shoved him backwards out of the gate while Issa dragged his comrade away. A huge crowd was gathered inside the shrine, but they all had their backs to us and none saw the scuffle at the main gate. Nor could they hear anything, for the crowd was chanting and singing and their confused babble drowned the small noise we made. I dragged my captive into the shadows by the road where I knelt beside him. I had dropped my spear when I had pushed him out of the gateway, so now I pulled out the short knife I wore at my belt. ‘You’re Lancelot’s man?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ he hissed.

  ‘Then what are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘This is Mordred’s
country.’

  ‘King Mordred is dead,’ he said, frightened of the knife blade that I was holding against his throat. I said nothing, for I was so astonished by his answer that I could find nothing to say. The man must have thought my silence presaged his death for he became desperate. ‘They’re all dead!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mordred, Arthur, all of them.’

  For a few heartbeats it seemed as if my world lurched in its foundations. The man struggled briefly, but the pressure of my knife quietened him. ‘How?’ I hissed at him.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How?’ I demanded more loudly.

  ‘We don’t know!’ he insisted. ‘Mordred was killed before we came and they say Arthur died in Powys.’

  I rocked back, gesturing at one of my men to keep the two captives quiet with his spear-blade. Then I counted the hours since I had seen Arthur. It was only days since we had parted at Cadoc’s cross, and Arthur’s route home was much longer than mine; if he had died, I thought, then the news of his death would surely not have reached Ynys Wydryn before me. ‘Is your King here?’ I asked the man.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  His answer was scarcely above a whisper. ‘To take the kingdom, Lord.’

  We cut strips of woollen cloth from the two men’s cloaks, bound their arms and legs and rammed handfuls of wool into their mouths to keep them silent. We pushed them into a ditch, warned them to stay still and then I led my five men back to the gate of the shrine. I wanted to look inside for a few moments, learn what I could, and only then would I hurry home. ‘Cloaks over your helmets,’ I ordered my men,

  ‘and shields reversed.’

  We hoisted the cloaks up over our helmet crests so that their wolf-tails were hidden, then we held our shields with their faces low against our legs so that their stars would be obscured, and so disguised we filed quietly into the now unguarded shrine. We moved in the shadows, circling around the back of the excited crowd until we reached the stone foundations of the shrine Mordred had started to build for his dead mother. We climbed onto the unfinished sepulchre’s highest course of stones and from there we could watch over the heads of the crowd and see what strange thing happened between the twin rows of fire that lit Ynys Wydryn’s night.

  At first I thought it was another Christian rite like the one I had witnessed in Isca, because the space between the rows of fire was filled with dancing women, swaying men and chanting priests. The noise they made was a cacophony of shrieks and screams and wails. Monks with leather flails were wandering among the ecstatics and lashing their naked backs, and each hard stroke only provoked more screams of joy. One woman was kneeling by the holy thorn. ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’ she shrieked. ‘Come!’ A monk beat her in a frenzy, beat her so hard that her naked back was a lurid sheet of blood, but every new blow only increased the fervour of her desperate prayer.

  I was about to jump down from the sepulchre and go back to the gate when spearmen appeared from the shrine’s buildings and pushed the worshippers roughly aside to clear a space between the fires that lit the holy thorn. They dragged the screaming woman away. More spearmen followed, two of them carrying a litter, and behind that litter Bishop Sansum led a group of brightly clothed priests. Lancelot and his attendants walked with the priests. Bors, Lancelot’s champion, was there, and Amhar and Loholt were with the Belgic King, but I could not see the dread twins Lavaine and Dinas. The crowd shrieked even louder when they saw Lancelot. They stretched their hands towards him and some even knelt as he passed. He was arrayed in his white-enamelled scale armour that he swore had been the war gear of the ancient hero Agamemnon, and he was wearing his black helmet with its crest of spread swan’s wings. His long black hair that he oiled so it shone fell down his back beneath the helmet to lie smooth against a red cloak that hung from his shoulders. The Christ-blade was at his side and his legs were clad in tall red leather war-boots. His Saxon Guard came behind, all of them huge men in silver mail coats and carrying broad-bladed war axes that reflected the leaping flames. I could not see Morgan, but a choir of her white-clad holy women were vainly trying to make their song heard above the wails and shouts of the excited crowd.

  One of the spearmen carried a stake that he placed in a hole that had been prepared beside the Holy Thorn. For a moment I feared we were about to see some poor pagan burned at that stake and I spat to avert evil. The victim was being carried on the litter, for the men carrying it brought their burden to the Holy Thorn and then busied themselves tying their prisoner to the stake, but when they stepped away and we could at last see properly, I realized that it was no prisoner, and no burning. Indeed, it was no pagan tied to that stake, but a Christian, and it was no death we were watching, but a marriage. And I thought of Nimue’s strange prophecy. The dead would be taken in marriage. Lancelot was the groom and he now stood beside his bride who was roped to the stake. She was a Queen, the one-time Princess of Powys who had become a Princess of Dumnonia and then the Queen of Siluria. She was Norwenna, daughter-in-law of High King Uther, the mother of Mordred, and she had been dead these fourteen years. She had lain in her grave for all those years, but now she had been disinterred and her remains were lashed to the post beside the votive-hung Holy Thorn. I stared in horror, then made the sign against evil and stroked the iron mail of my armour. Issa touched my arm as though to reassure himself that he was not in the throes of some unimaginable nightmare. The dead Queen was little more than a skeleton. A white shawl had been draped on her shoulders, but the shawl could not hide the ghastly strips of yellowing skin and thick hanks of white tatty flesh that still clung to her bones. Her skull, that canted from one of the ropes pinioning her to the stake, was half covered with stretched skin, her jawbone had fallen away at one side and dangled from her skull, while her eyes were nothing but black shadows in the firelit death mask of her face. One of the guards had placed a wreath of poppies on the dome of her skull from which dank strands of hair fell ragged to the shawl.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Issa asked me in a soft voice.

  ‘Lancelot is claiming Dumnonia,’ I whispered back, ‘and by marrying Norwenna he marries into Dumnonia’s royal family.’ There could be no other explanation. Lancelot was stealing Dumnonia’s throne, and this grisly ceremony among the great fires would give him a thin legal excuse. He was marrying the dead to make himself Uther’s heir.

  Sansum signalled for silence and the monks who carried the flails shouted at the excited crowd that slowly calmed down from their frenzy. Every now and then a woman would scream and the crowd would give a nervous shudder, but at last there was silence. The choir’s voices tailed away and Sansum raised his arms and prayed that Almighty God would bless this union of a man and a woman, this King and his Queen, and then he instructed Lancelot to take the bride’s hand. Lancelot reached down with his gloved right hand and lifted the yellow bones. The cheek pieces of his helmet were open and I could see he was grinning. The crowd shouted for joy and I remembered Tewdric’s words about signs and portents, and I guessed that in this unholy marriage the Christians were seeing proof that their God’s return was imminent.

  ‘By the power invested in me by the Holy Father and by the grace given to me by the Holy Ghost,’

  Sansum shouted, ‘I pronounce you man and wife!’

  ‘Where’s our King?’ Issa asked me.

  ‘Who knows?’ I whispered back. ‘Dead probably.’ Then I watched as Lancelot lifted the yellow bones of Norwenna’s hand and pretended to give her fingers a kiss. One of the fingers dropped away as he let the hand go.

  Sansum, never able to resist a chance to preach, began to harangue the crowd and it was then that Morgan accosted me. I had not seen her approach and the first I knew of her presence was when I felt a hand tugging at my cloak and I turned in alarm to see her gold mask glinting in the firelight. ‘When they find the guards missing from the gate,’ she hissed, ‘they’ll search this compound and you’ll be dead men. Follow me, fo
ols.’

  We jumped guiltily down and followed her humped black figure as it scuttled behind the crowd into the shadows of the shrine’s big church. She stopped there and stared up into my face. ‘They said you were dead,’ she told me. ‘Killed with Arthur at Cadoc’s shrine.’

  ‘I live, Lady.’

  ‘And Arthur?’

  ‘He lived three days ago, Lady,’ I answered. ‘None of us died at Cadoc’s shrine.’

  ‘Thank God,’ she breathed, ‘thank God.’ Then she gripped my cloak and hauled my face down close to her mask. ‘Listen,’ she said urgently, ‘my husband had no choice in this thing.’

  ‘If you say so, Lady,’ I said, not believing her for one moment, but understanding that Morgan was doing her best to straddle both sides of this crisis that had come so suddenly to Dumnonia. Lancelot was taking the throne, and someone had conspired to make sure Arthur was out of the country when he did it. Worse, I thought, someone had sent Arthur and me to Cadoc’s high valley and arranged for men to ambush us there. Someone wanted us dead, and it had been Sansum who had first revealed Ligessac’s refuge to us and Sansum who had argued against allowing Cuneglas’s men to make the arrest, and Sansum who now stood before Lancelot and a corpse in the light of this night’s fires. I smelt the mouse-lord’s paws all over this wicked business, though I doubted Morgan knew half of what her husband had done or planned. She was too old and wise to be infected by religious frenzy, and she at least was trying to pick a safe path through the cascading horrors.

  ‘Promise me Arthur lives!’ she appealed to me.

  ‘He did not die in Cadoc’s valley,’ I said. ‘That much I can promise you.’

  She was silent for a while and I think she was crying beneath the mask. ‘Tell Arthur we had no choice,’ she said.

  ‘I will,’ I promised her. ‘What can you tell me of Mordred?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ she hissed. ‘Killed while he was hunting.’