Excalibur

  ‘Wait for me here,’ I said.

  ‘Derfel! We must go!’ Sansum hissed in alarm.

  ‘You must wait, Bishop,’ I said, and I slipped away into the mist, going towards the blurred glow of the biggest fires. Those fires burned in the half-built church that was nothing more than stretches of unfinished log-walls with great gaps between the timbers. The space inside was filled with sleeping people, though some were now waking and staring bleary-eyed like folk stirring from an enchantment. Dogs were rooting among the sleepers for food and their excitement was waking still more people. Some of the newly woken folk watched me, but none recognized me. To them I was just another spearman walking in the night.

  I discovered Amhar by one of the fires. He slept with his mouth open, and he died the same way. I thrust the spear into his open mouth, paused long enough for his eyes to open and for his soul to recognize me, and then, when I saw that he knew me, I pushed the blade through his neck and spine so that he was pinned to the ground. He jerked as I killed him, and the last thing his soul saw on this earth was my smile. Then I stooped, took the beard leash from his belt, unbuckled Hywelbane, and stepped out of the church. I wanted to look for Mordred and Loholt, but more sleepers were waking now, and one man called out to ask who I was, and so I just went back into the misted shadows and hurried uphill to where Taliesin and Sansum waited.

  ‘We must go!’ Sansum bleated.

  ‘I have bridles by the ramparts, Lord,’ Taliesin told me.

  ‘You think of everything,’ I said admiringly. I paused to throw the remnants of my beard on the small fire that had warmed our guards, and when I saw that the last of the strands had flared and burned to ash I followed Taliesin to the northern ramparts. He found the two bridles in the shadows, then we climbed to the fighting platform and there, hidden from the guards by the mist, we clambered over the wall and dropped to the hillside. The mist ended halfway down the slope and we hurried on to the meadow where most of Mordred’s horses were sleeping in the night. Taliesin woke two of the beasts, gently stroking their noses and chanting in their ears, and they calmly let him put the bridles over their heads.

  ‘You can ride without a saddle, Lord?’ he asked me.

  ‘Without a horse, tonight, if necessary.’

  ‘What about me?’ Sansum demanded as I heaved myself onto one of the horses.

  I looked down at him. I was tempted to leave him in the meadow for he had been a treacherous man all his life and I had no wish to prolong his existence, but he could also be useful to us on this night and so I reached down and hauled him onto the horse’s back behind me. ‘I should leave you here, Bishop,’ I said as he settled himself. He offered me no answer, but just wrapped his arms tight round my waist. Taliesin was leading the second horse towards the meadow’s gate that he tugged open. ‘Did Merlin tell you what we should do now?’ I asked the bard as I kicked my horse through the opening.

  ‘He did not, Lord, but wisdom suggests we should go to the coast and find a boat. And that we hurry, Lord. The sleep on that hilltop will not last long, and once they find you missing, they will send men to search for us.’ Taliesin used the gate as a mounting-block.

  ‘What do we do?’ Sansum asked in panic, his grip fierce about me.

  ‘Kill you?’ I suggested. ‘Then Taliesin and I can make better time.’

  ‘No, Lord, no! Please, no!’

  Taliesin glanced up at the misted stars. ‘We ride west?’ he suggested.

  ‘I know just where we’re going,’ I said, kicking the horse towards the track that led to Lindinis.

  ‘Where?’ Sansum demanded.

  ‘To see your wife, Bishop,’ I said, ‘to see your wife.’ That was why I saved Sansum’s life that night, because Morgan was now our best hope. I doubted she would help me, and was certain she would spit in Taliesin’s face if he asked for aid, but for Sansum she would do anything.

  And so we rode to Ynys Wydryn.

  We woke Morgan from sleep and she came to the door of her hall in a bad temper, or rather in a worse than usual temper. She did not recognize me without a beard and did not see her husband who, sore from the ride, was lagging behind us; instead Morgan saw Taliesin as a Druid who had dared to come into the sacred confines of her shrine. ‘Sinner!’ she screeched at him, her newly woken state proving no barrier to the full force of her vituperation. ‘Defiler! Idolater! In the name of the holy God and His blessed Mother I order you to go!’

  ‘Morgan!’ I called, but just then she saw the bedraggled, limping figure of Sansum and she gave a small mew of joy and hurried towards him. The quarter moon glinted on the golden mask with which she covered her fire-ravaged face.

  ‘Sansum!’ she called. ‘My sweet!’

  ‘Precious!’ Sansum said, and the two clasped each other in the night.

  ‘Dear one,’ Morgan babbled, stroking his face, ‘what have they done to you?’

  Taliesin smiled, and even I, who hated Sansum and had no love for Morgan, could not resist a smile at their evident pleasure. Of all the marriages I have ever known, that was the strangest. Sansum was as dishonest a man as ever lived, and Morgan as honest as any woman in creation, yet they plainly adored each other, or Morgan, at least, adored Sansum. She had been born fair, but the terrible fire that had killed her first husband had twisted her body and scarred her face into horror. No man could have loved Morgan for her beauty, or for her character which had been as fire-twisted into bitterness as her face had been ravaged into ugliness, but a man could love Morgan for her connections for she was Arthur’s sister, and that, I ever believed, was what drew Sansum towards her. But if he did not love her for herself, he nevertheless made a show of love that convinced her and gave her happiness, and for that I was willing to forgive even the mouse lord his dissimulation. He admired her, too, for Morgan was a clever woman and Sansum prized cleverness, and thus both gained from the marriage; Morgan received tenderness, Sansum received protection and advice, and as neither sought the pleasures of the other’s flesh, it had proved a better marriage than most.

  ‘Within an hour,’ I brutally broke their happy reunion apart, ‘Mordred’s men will be here. We must be far away by then, and your women, Lady,’ I said to Morgan, ‘should seek safety in the marshes. Mordred’s men won’t care that your women are holy, they will rape them all.’

  Morgan glared at me with her one eye that glinted in the mask’s hole. ‘You look better without a beard, Derfel,’ she said.

  ‘I shall look worse without a head, Lady, and Mordred is making a pile of heads on Caer Cadarn.’

  ‘I don’t know why Sansum and I should save your sinful lives,’ she grumbled, ‘but God commands us to be merciful.’ She turned from Sansum’s arms and shrieked in a terrible voice to wake her women. Taliesin and I were ordered into the church, given a basket, and told to fill it with the shrine’s gold while Morgan sent women into the village to wake the boatmen. She was wonderfully efficient. The shrine was suffused with panic, but Morgan controlled all, and it took only minutes before the first women were being helped into the flat-bottomed marsh boats that then headed into the mist-shrouded mere.

  We left last of all, and I swear I heard hoofbeats to the east as our boatman poled the punt into the dark waters. Taliesin, sitting in the bow, began to sing the lament of Idfael, but Morgan snapped at him to cease his pagan music. He lifted his fingers from the small harp. ‘Music knows no allegiance, Lady,’ he chided her gently.

  ‘Yours is the devil’s music,’ she snarled.

  ‘Not all of it,’ Taliesin said, and he began to sing again, but this time a song I had never heard before. ‘By the rivers of Babylon,’ he sang, ‘where we sat down, we shed bitter tears to remember our home,’ and I saw that Morgan was pushing a finger beneath her mask as if she was brushing away tears. The bard sang on and the high Tor receded as the marsh mists shrouded us and as our boatman poled us through whispering reeds and across the black water. When Taliesin ended his song there was only the sound of the lake ripplin
g down the hull and the splash of the boatman’s pole thumping down to surge us forward again.

  ‘You should sing for Christ,’ Sansum said reprovingly.

  ‘I sing for all the Gods,’ Taliesin said, ‘and in the days to come we will need all of them.’

  ‘There is only one God!’ Morgan said fiercely.

  ‘If you say so, Lady,’ Taliesin said mildly, ‘but I fear He has served you ill tonight,’ and he pointed back towards Ynys Wydryn and we all turned to see a livid glow spreading in the mist behind. I had seen that glow before, seen it through these same mists on this same lake. It was the glow of buildings being put to the torch, the glow of burning thatch. Mordred had followed us and the shrine of the Holy Thorn, where his mother was buried, was being burned to ashes, but we were safe in the marshes where no man dared to go unless he possessed a guide.

  Evil had again gripped Dumnonia.

  But we were safe, and in the dawn we found a fisherman who would sail to Siluria in return for gold. And so I went home to Arthur.

  And to new horror.

  CEINWYN WAS SICK. The sickness had come swiftly, Guinevere told me, just hours after I had sailed from Isca. Ceinwyn had begun to shiver, then to sweat, and by that evening she no longer had the strength to stand, and so she had taken to her bed and Morwenna had nursed her, and a wise-woman had fed her a concoction of coltsfoot and rue and put a healing charm between her breasts, but by morning Ceinwyn’s skin had broken into boils. Every joint ached, she could not swallow, and her breath rasped in her throat. She began to rave then, thrashing in the bed and screaming hoarsely of Dian.

  Morwenna tried to prepare me for Ceinwyn’s death. ‘She believes she was cursed, father,’ she told me, ‘because on the day you left a woman came and asked us for food. We gave her barley grains, but when she left there was blood on the doorpost.’

  I touched Hywelbane’s hilt. ‘Curses can be lifted.’

  ‘We fetched the Druid from Cefu-crib,’ Morwenna told me, ‘and he scraped the blood from the door and gave us a hagstone.’ She stopped, staring tearfully at the pierced stone that now hung above Ceinwyn’s bed. ‘But the curse won’t go!’ she cried. ‘She’s going to die!’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said, ‘not yet.’ I could not believe in Ceinwyn’s imminent death for she had always been so healthy. Not a hair on Ceinwyn’s head had turned grey, she still possessed most of her teeth, and she had been as lithe as a girl when I had left Isca, but now, suddenly, she looked old and ravaged. And she was in pain. She could not tell us of the pain, but her face betrayed it, and the tears that ran down her cheeks cried it aloud.

  Taliesin spent a long time staring at her and he agreed that she had been cursed, but Morgan spat on that opinion. ‘Pagan superstition!’ she croaked, and busied herself finding new herbs that she boiled in mead and fed on a spoon through Ceinwyn’s lips. Morgan, I saw, was very gentle, even though, as she dripped the liquid, she harangued Ceinwyn as a pagan sinner.

  I was helpless. All I could do was sit by Ceinwyn’s side, hold her hand and weep. Her hair became lank and, two days after my return, it began to drop out in handfuls. Her boils burst, soaking the bed with pus and blood. Morwenna and Morgan made new beds with fresh straw and new linen, but each day Ceinwyn would soil the bed and the old linen had to be boiled in a vat. The pain went on, and the pain was so hard that after a while even I began to wish that death would snatch her from its torment, but Ceinwyn did not die. She just suffered, and sometimes she would scream because of the pain, and her hand would tighten on my fingers with a terrible force and I could only wipe her forehead, say her name and feel the fear of loneliness creep through me.

  I loved my Ceinwyn so much. Even now, years later, I smile to think of her, and sometimes I wake in the night with tears on my face and know they are due to her. We had begun our love in a blaze of passion and wise folk say that such passion must ever end, but ours had not ended, but had instead changed into a long, deep love. I loved and admired her, the days seemed brighter because of her presence, and suddenly I could only watch as the demons racked her and the pain made her shudder and the boils grew red and taut and burst into filth. And still she would not die.

  Some days Galahad or Arthur relieved me at the bedside. Everyone tried to help. Guinevere sent for the wisest women in Siluria’s hills and put gold into their palms so that they would bring new herbs or vials of water from some remote sacred spring. Culhwch, bald now, but still coarse and belligerent, wept for Ceinwyn and gave me an elf-bolt that he had found in the hills to the west, though when Morgan found that pagan charm in Ceinwyn’s bed she threw it out, just as she had thrown out the Druid’s hagstone and the charm she had discovered between Ceinwyn’s breasts. Bishop Emrys prayed for Ceinwyn, and even Sansum, before he left for Gwent, joined him in prayer, though I doubt that his pleas were as heartfelt as those that Emrys called to God. Morwenna was devoted to her mother, and no one fought harder for a cure. She nursed her, cleaned her, prayed for her, wept with her. Guinevere, of course, could not stand the sight of Ceinwyn’s disease, or the smell of the sick-room, but she walked with me for hours while Galahad or Arthur held Ceinwyn’s hand. I remember one day we had walked to the amphitheatre and were pacing around its sandy arena when, somewhat clumsily, Guinevere tried to console me. ‘You are fortunate, Derfel,’ she said, ‘for you experienced a rare thing. A great love.’

  ‘So did you, Lady,’ I said.

  She grimaced, and I wished I had not invited the unspoken thought that her great love had been spoiled, though in truth both she and Arthur had outlived that unhappiness. I suppose it must have been there still, a shadow deep back and sometimes during those years a fool would mention Lancelot’s name and a sudden silence would embarrass the air, and once a visiting bard had innocently sung us the Lament of Blodeuwedd, a song that tells of a wife’s unfaithfulness, and the smoky air in the feasting-room had been taut with silence at the song’s end, but for most of that time Arthur and Guinevere were truly happy. ‘Yes,’ Guinevere said, ‘I’m lucky too.’ She spoke curtly, not out of dislike for me, but because she was always uncomfortable with intimate conversations. Only at Mynydd Baddon had she overcome that reserve, and she and I had very nearly become friends at that time, but since then we had drifted apart, not into our old hostility, but into a wary, though affectionate, acquaintanceship. ‘You look good without a beard,’ she said now, changing the subject, ‘it makes you look younger.’

  ‘I have sworn to grow it again only after Mordred’s death,’ I said.

  ‘May it be soon. How I would hate to die before that worm fetches his deserts.’ She spoke savagely, and with a real fear that old age might kill her before Mordred died. We were all in our forties now, and few folk lived longer. Merlin, of course, had lasted twice forty years and more, and we all knew others who had made fifty or sixty or even seventy years, but we thought of ourselves as old. Guinevere’s red hair was heavily streaked with grey, but she was still a beauty and her strong face looked on the world with all its old force and arrogance. She paused to watch Gwydre, who had ridden a horse into the arena. He raised a hand to her, then put the horse through its paces. He was training the stallion to be a warhorse; to rear and kick with its hoofs and to keep its legs moving even when it was stationary so that no enemy could slice its hamstrings. Guinevere watched him for a while. ‘Do you think he’ll ever be King?’ she asked wistfully.

  ‘Yes, Lady,’ I said. ‘Mordred will make a mistake sooner or later and then we’ll pounce.’

  ‘I hope so,’ she said, slipping her arm into mine. I do not think she was trying to give me comfort, but rather to take it for herself. ‘Has Arthur spoken to you of Amhar?’ she asked.

  ‘Briefly, Lady.’

  ‘He doesn’t blame you. You do know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I’d like to believe it,’ I said.

  ‘Well you can,’ she said brusquely. ‘His grief is for his failings as a father, not for the death of that little bastard.’

  A
rthur, I suspect, was far more grieved for Dumnonia than he was for Amhar, for he had been deeply embittered by the news of the massacres. Like me, he wanted revenge, but Mordred commanded an army and Arthur had fewer than two hundred men who would all need to cross the Severn by boat if they were to fight Mordred. In all honesty, he could not see how it was to be done. He even worried about the legality of such vengeance. ‘The men he killed,’ he told me, ‘were his oath-men. He had a right to kill them.’

  ‘And we have a right to avenge them,’ I insisted, but I am not sure Arthur entirely agreed with me. He always tried to elevate the law above private passion, and according to our law of oaths, which makes the King the source of all law and thus of all oaths, Mordred could do as he wished in his own land. That was the law, and Arthur, being Arthur, worried about breaking it, but he also wept for the men and women who had died and for the children who had been enslaved, and he knew that still more would die or be slave-chained while Mordred lived. The law, it seemed, would have to be bent, but Arthur did not know how to bend it. If we could have marched our men through Gwent, and then led them so far east that we could drop down into the border lands with Lloegyr and so have joined forces with Sagramor, we would have had the strength to beat down Mordred’s savage army, or at least meet it on equal terms, but King Meurig obstinately refused to let us cross his lands. If we crossed the Severn by boat we must go without our horses, and then we would find ourselves a long way from Sagramor and divided from him by Mordred’s army. Mordred could defeat us first, then turn back to deal with the Numidian.

  At least Sagramor still lived, but that was small consolation. Mordred had slaughtered some of Sagramor’s men, but he had failed to find Sagramor himself and he had pulled his men back from the frontier country before Sagramor could launch a savage reprisal. Now, we heard, Sagramor and a hundred and twenty of his men had taken refuge in a fort in the south country. Mordred feared to make an assault on the fort, and Sagramor lacked the strength to sally out and defeat Mordred’s army, and so they watched each other but did not fight, while Cerdic’s Saxons, encouraged by Sagramor’s impotence, again spread west into our land. Mordred detached warbands to oppose those Saxons, oblivious of the messengers who dared cross his land to link Arthur and Sagramor. The messages reflected Sagramor’s frustration – how could he extricate his men and bring them to Siluria? The distance was great and the enemy, far too numerous, lay in his path. We truly did seem helpless to revenge the killings, but then, three weeks after my return from Dumnonia, news came from Meurig’s court.