Excalibur

  ‘Your firstborn bastard,’ I said.

  ‘So? Blood is blood, Derfel.’

  ‘And I am proud to have yours, Lord King.’

  ‘And so you should be, boy, though you share it with enough others. I have not been selfish with my blood.’ He chuckled, then turned his horse onto a mudbank and whipped the animal up its slippery slope to where a fleet of boats lay stranded. ‘Look at them, Derfel!’ my father said, reining in his horse and gesturing at the boats. ‘Look at them! Useless now, but nearly every one came this summer and every one was filled to the gunwales with folk.’ He kicked his heels back again and we rode slowly past that sorry line of stranded boats.

  There might have been eighty or ninety craft on the mudbank. All of them were double-ended, elegant ships, but all were now decaying. Their planks were green with slime, their bilges were flooded and their timbers black with rot. Some of the boats, which must have been there longer than a year, were nothing but dark skeletons. ‘Threescore folk in every boat, Derfel,’ Aelle said, ‘at least threescore, and every tide brought more of them. Now, when the storms are haunting the open sea, they don’t come, but they are building more boats and those will arrive in the spring. And not just here, Derfel, but all up the coast!’ He swept his arm to encompass all Britain’s eastern shore. ‘Boats and boats! All filled with our people, all wanting a home, all wanting land.’ He spoke the last word fiercely, then turned his horse away from me without waiting for any response. ‘Come!’ he shouted, and I followed his horse across the tide-rippled mud of a creek, up a shingle bank and then through patches of thorn as we climbed the hill on which his great hall stood.

  Aelle curbed his beast on a shoulder of the hill where he waited for me, then, when I joined him, he mutely pointed down into a saddle of land. An army was there. I could not count them, so many men were gathered in that fold of land, and these men, I knew, were but a part of Aelle’s army. The Saxon warriors stood in a great crowd and when they saw their King on the skyline they burst into a huge roar of acclamation and began to beat their spear shafts against their shields so that the whole grey sky was filled with their terrible clattering. Aelle raised his scarred right hand and the noise died away. ‘You see, Derfel?’ he asked me.

  ‘I see what you choose to show me, Lord King,’ I answered evasively, knowing exactly what message I was being given by the stranded boats and the mass of armoured men.

  ‘I am strong now,’ Aelle said, ‘and Arthur is weak. Can he even raise five hundred men? I doubt it. The spearmen of Powys will come to his aid, but will they be enough? I doubt it. I have a thousand trained spearmen, Derfel, and twice as many hungry men who will wield an axe to gain a yard of ground they can call their own. And Cerdic has more men still, far more, and he needs land even more desperately than I do. We both need land, Derfel, we both need land, and Arthur has it, and Arthur is weak.’

  ‘Gwent has a thousand spearmen,’ I said, ‘and if you invade Dumnonia Gwent will come to its aid.’ I was not sure of that, but it would do no harm to Arthur’s cause to sound confident. ‘Gwent, Dumnonia and Powys,’ I said, ‘all will fight, and there are still others who will come to Arthur’s banner. The Black-shields will fight for us, and spearmen will come from Gwynedd and Elmet, even from Rheged and Lothian.’

  Aelle smiled at my boastfulness. ‘Your lesson is not yet done, Derfel,’ he said, ‘so come.’ And again he spurred on, still climbing the hill, but now he inclined east towards a grove of trees. He dismounted by the wood, gestured for his escort to stay where they were, then led me along a narrow damp path to a clearing where two small wooden buildings stood. They were little more than huts with pitched roofs of rye-thatch and low walls made from untrimmed tree trunks. ‘See?’ he said, pointing to the nearer hut’s gable.

  I spat to avert the evil, for there, high on the gable, was a wooden cross. Here, in pagan Lloegyr, was one of the last things I had ever expected to see: a Christian church. The second hut, slightly lower than the church, was evidently living quarters for the priest who greeted our arrival by crawling out through the low door of his hovel. He wore the tonsure, had a monk’s black robe and a tangled brown beard. He recognized Aelle and bowed low. ‘Christ’s greetings, Lord King!’ the man called in badly accented Saxon.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked in the British tongue.

  He looked surprised to be spoken to in his native language. ‘From Gobannium, Lord,’ he told me. The monk’s wife, a draggled creature with resentful eyes, crawled from the hovel to stand beside her man.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him.

  ‘The Lord Christ Jesus has opened King Aelle’s eyes, Lord,’ he said, ‘and invited us to bring the news of Christ to his people. I am here with my brother priest Gorfydd to preach the gospel to the Sais.’

  I looked at Aelle, who was smiling slyly. ‘Missionaries from Gwent?’ I asked.

  ‘Feeble creatures, are they not?’ Aelle said, gesturing the monk and his wife back into their hut. ‘But they think they will turn us from the worship of Thunor and Seaxnet and I am content to let them think as much. For now.’

  ‘Because,’ I said slowly, ‘King Meurig has promised you a truce so long as you let his priests come to your people?’

  Aelle laughed. ‘He is a fool, that Meurig. He cares more for the souls of my people than for the safety of his land, and two priests are a small price for keeping Gwent’s thousand spearmen idle while we take Dumnonia.’ He put an arm about my shoulders and led me back towards the horses. ‘You see, Derfel? Gwent will not fight, not while their King believes there is a chance of spreading his religion among my people.’

  ‘And is the religion spreading?’ I asked.

  He snorted. ‘Among a few slaves and women, but not many, and it won’t spread far. I’ll see to that. I saw what that religion did to Dumnonia, and I’ll not allow it here. Our old Gods are good enough for us, Derfel, so why should we need new ones? That’s half the trouble with the Britons. They’ve lost their Gods.’

  ‘Merlin has not,’ I said.

  That checked Aelle. He turned in the shadow of the trees and I saw the worry on his face. He had always been fearful of Merlin. ‘I hear tales,’ he said uncertainly.

  ‘The Treasures of Britain,’ I said.

  ‘What are they?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nothing much, Lord King,’ I said, honestly enough, ‘just a tattered collection of old things. Only two are of any real value; a sword and a cauldron.’

  ‘You have seen them?’ he asked fiercely.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What will they do?’

  I shrugged. ‘No one knows. Arthur believes they will do nothing, but Merlin says they command the Gods and that if he performs the right magic at the right time then the old Gods of Britain will do his bidding.’

  ‘And he’ll unleash those Gods on us?’

  ‘Yes, Lord King,’ I said, and it would be soon, very soon, but I did not say that to my father.

  Aelle frowned. ‘We have Gods too,’ he said.

  ‘Then call them, Lord King. Let the Gods fight the Gods.’

  ‘Gods aren’t fools, boy,’ he growled, ‘why should they fight when men can do their killing for them?’ He began walking again. ‘I am old now,’ he told me, ‘and in all my years I have never seen the Gods. We believe in them, but do they care about us?’ He gave me a worried look. ‘Do you believe in these Treasures?’

  ‘I believe in Merlin’s power, Lord King.’

  ‘But Gods walking the earth?’ He thought about it for a while, then shook his head. ‘And if your Gods come, why should ours not come to protect us? Even you, Derfel,’ he spoke sarcastically, ‘would find it hard to fight Thunor’s hammer.’ He had led me out of the trees and I saw that both his escort and our horses were gone. ‘We can walk,’ Aelle said, ‘and I shall tell you all about Dumnonia.’

  ‘I know about Dumnonia, Lord King.’

  ‘Then you know, Derfel, that its King is a fool, and that its ruler do
es not want to be a King, not even a, whatever it is you call him, a kaiser?’

  ‘An emperor,’ I said.

  ‘An emperor,’ he repeated, mocking the word with his pronunciation. He was leading me along a path beside the woods. No one else was in sight. To our left the ground fell away to the misted levels of the estuary, while to our north were the deep, dank woods. ‘Your Christians are rebellious,’ Aelle summed up his argument, ‘your King is a crippled fool and your leader refuses to steal the throne from the fool. In time, Derfel, and sooner rather than later, another man will want that throne. Lancelot nearly took it, and a better man than Lancelot will try soon enough.’ He paused, frowning. ‘Why did Guinevere open her legs to him?’ he asked.

  ‘Because Arthur wouldn’t become King,’ I said bleakly.

  ‘Then he is a fool. And next year he’ll be a dead fool unless he accepts a proposal.’

  ‘What proposal, Lord King?’ I asked, stopping beneath a fiery red beech.

  He stopped and placed his hands on my shoulders. ‘Tell Arthur to give the throne to you, Derfel.’

  I stared into my father’s eyes. For a heartbeat I thought he must be jesting, then saw he was as earnest as a man could be. ‘Me?’ I asked, astonished.

  ‘You,’ Aelle said, ‘and you swear loyalty to me. I shall want land from you, but you can tell Arthur to give the throne to you, and you can rule Dumnonia. My people will settle and farm the land, and you shall govern them, but as my client King. We shall make a federation, you and I. Father and son. You rule Dumnonia and I rule Aengeland.’

  ‘Aengeland?’ I asked, for the word was new to me.

  He took his hands from my shoulders and gestured about the countryside. ‘Here! You call us Saxons, but you and I are Aengles. Cerdic is a Saxon, but you and I are the Aenglish and our country is Aengeland. This is Aengeland!’ He said it proudly, looking about that damp hilltop.

  ‘What of Cerdic?’ I asked him.

  ‘You and I will kill Cerdic,’ he said frankly, then plucked my elbow and began walking again, only now he led me onto a track that led between the trees where pigs rooted for beechmast among the newly fallen leaves. ‘Tell Arthur what I suggest,’ Aelle said. ‘Tell him he can have the throne rather than you if that’s what he wants, but whichever of you takes it, you take it in my name.’

  ‘I shall tell him, Lord King,’ I said, though I knew Arthur would scorn the proposal. I think Aelle knew that too, but his hatred of Cerdic had driven him to the suggestion. He knew that even if he and Cerdic did capture all southern Britain there would still have to be another war to determine which of them should be the Bretwalda, which is their name for the High King. ‘Supposing,’ I said, ‘that Arthur and you attack Cerdic together next year instead?’

  Aelle shook his head. ‘Cerdic’s spread too much gold among my chiefs. They won’t fight him, not while he offers them Dumnonia as a prize. But if Arthur gives Dumnonia to you, and you give it to me, then they won’t need Cerdic’s gold. You tell Arthur that.’

  ‘I shall tell him, Lord King,’ I said again, but I still knew Arthur would never agree to the proposal for it would mean breaking his oath to Uther, the oath that promised to make Mordred King, and that oath lay at the taproot of all Arthur’s life. Indeed I was so certain that he would not break the oath that, despite my words to Aelle, I doubted I would even mention the proposal to Arthur.

  Aelle now led me into a wide clearing where I saw that my horse was waiting, and with it an escort of mounted spearmen. In the centre of the clearing there was a great rough stone the height of a man, and though it was nothing like the trimmed sarsens of Dumnonia’s ancient temples, nor like the flat boulders on which we acclaimed our Kings, it was plain that it must be a sacred stone, for it stood all alone in the circle of grass and none of the Saxon warriors ventured close to it, though one of their own sacred objects, a great bark-stripped tree trunk with a crudely carved face, had been planted in the soil nearby. Aelle led me towards the great rock, but stopped short of it and fished in a pouch that hung from his sword belt. He brought out a small leather bag that he unlaced, then tipped something onto his palm. He held the object out to me and I saw that it was a tiny golden ring in which a small chipped agate was set. ‘I was going to give this to your mother,’ he told me, ‘but Uther captured her before I had the chance, and I’ve kept it ever since. Take it.’

  I took the ring. It was a simple thing, country made. It was not Roman work, for their jewels are exquisitely fashioned, nor was it Saxon made, for they like their jewellery heavy, but the ring had probably been made by some poor Briton who had fallen to a Saxon blade. The square green stone was not even set straight, but still the tiny ring possessed an odd and fragile loveliness. ‘I never gave it to your mother,’ Aelle said, ‘and if she’s fat, then she can’t wear it now. So give it to your Princess of Powys. I hear she is a good woman?’

  ‘She is, Lord King.’

  ‘Give it to her,’ Aelle said, ‘and tell her that if our countries do come to war then I shall spare the woman wearing that ring, her and all her family.’

  ‘Thank you, Lord King,’ I said, and put the little ring in my pouch.

  ‘I have one last gift for you,’ he said and put an arm on my shoulders and led me to the stone. I was feeling guilty that I had not brought him any gift, indeed in my fear of coming into Lloegyr the thought had not even occurred to me, but Aelle overlooked the omission. He stopped beside the boulder. ‘This stone once belonged to the Britons,’ he told me, ‘and was sacred to them. There’s a hole in it, see? Come to the side, boy, look.’

  I walked to the side of the stone and saw there was indeed a great black hole running into the heart of the stone.

  ‘I talked once with an old British slave,’ Aelle said, ‘and he told me that by whispering into that hole you can talk with the dead.’

  ‘But you don’t believe that?’ I asked him, having heard the scepticism in his voice.

  ‘We believe we can talk to Thunor, Woden and Seaxnet through that hole,’ Aelle said, ‘but for you? Maybe you can reach the dead, Derfel.’ He smiled. ‘We shall meet again, boy.’

  ‘I hope so, Lord King,’ I said, and then I remembered my mother’s strange prophecy, that Aelle would be killed by his son, and I tried to dismiss it as the ravings of a mad old woman, but the Gods often choose such women as their mouthpieces and I suddenly had nothing to say.

  Aelle embraced me, crushing my face into the collar of his great fur cape. ‘Has your mother long to live?’ he asked me.

  ‘No, Lord King.’

  ‘Bury her,’ he said, ‘with her feet to the north. It is the way of our people.’ He gave me a last embrace. ‘You’ll be taken safe home,’ he said, then stepped back. ‘To talk to the dead,’ he added gruffly, ‘you must walk three times round the stone, then kneel to the hole. Give my granddaughter a kiss from me.’ He smiled, pleased to have surprised me by revealing such an intimate knowledge of my life, and then he turned and walked away.

  The waiting escort watched as I walked thrice round the stone, then as I knelt and leaned to the hole. I suddenly wanted to weep and my voice choked as I whispered my daughter’s name. ‘Dian?’ I whispered into the stone’s heart, ‘my dear Dian? Wait for us, my darling, and we will come to you. Dian.’ My dead daughter, my lovely Dian, murdered by Lancelot’s men. I told her we loved her, I sent her Aelle’s kiss, then I leaned my forehead on the cold rock and thought of her little shadowbody all alone in the Otherworld. Merlin, it is true, had told us that children play happily beneath the apples of Annwn in that death world, but I still wept as I imagined her suddenly hearing my voice. Did she look up? Was she, like me, crying?

  I rode away. It took me three days to reach Dun Caric and there I gave Ceinwyn the little golden ring. She had always liked simple things and the ring suited her far better than some elaborate Roman jewel. She wore it on the small finger of her right hand which was the only finger it fitted. ‘I doubt it will save my life, though,’ she said ruef
ully.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  She smiled, admiring the ring. ‘What Saxon will pause to look for a ring? Rape first and plunder after, isn’t that the spearman’s rule?’

  ‘You won’t be here when the Saxons come,’ I said. ‘You must go back to Powys.’

  She shook her head. ‘I shall stay. I can’t always run to my brother when trouble comes.’

  I let that argument rest until the time came and instead sent messengers to Durnovaria and Caer Cadarn to let Arthur know I had returned. Four days later he came to Dun Caric, where I reported Aelle’s refusal to him. Arthur shrugged as if he had expected nothing else. ‘It was worth a try,’ he said dismissively. I did not tell him of Aelle’s offer to me, for in his sour mood he would probably think I was tempted to accept and he might never have trusted me again. Nor did I tell him that Lancelot had been at Thunreslea, for I knew how he hated even the mention of that name. I did tell him about the priests from Gwent and that news made him scowl. ‘I suppose I shall have to visit Meurig,’ he said bleakly, staring at the Tor. Then he turned to me. ‘Did you know,’ he asked me accusingly, ‘that Excalibur is one of the Treasures of Britain?’

  ‘Yes, Lord,’ I admitted. Merlin had told me so long before, but he had sworn me to secrecy for fear that Arthur might destroy the sword to demonstrate his lack of superstition.

  ‘Merlin has demanded its return,’ Arthur said. He had always known that demand might come, right from the distant day when Merlin had given the young Arthur the magical sword.

  ‘You will give it to him?’ I asked anxiously.

  He grimaced. ‘If I don’t, Derfel, will that stop Merlin’s nonsense?’

  ‘If it is nonsense, Lord,’ I said, and I remembered that shimmering naked girl and told myself she was a harbinger of wondrous things.

  Arthur unbuckled the belt with its cross-hatched scabbard. ‘You take it to him, Derfel,’ he said grudgingly, ‘you take it to him.’ He pushed the precious sword into my hands. ‘But tell Merlin I want her back.’