Bernard Cornwell - The Winter King

Bedwin broke the embarrassing silence. “The gifts are magnificent! Rare and magnificent. Truly generous, Lord King.”

Norwenna nodded obedient agreement. The child began to cry and Ralla, the wet nurse, carried him off to the shadows beyond the pillars where she bared a breast and so silenced him.

“The Edling is well?” Gundleus spoke for the first time since entering the hall.

“Praise God and His Saints,” Norwenna answered, 'he is.“ His left foot?” Gundleus asked untactfully. “Does it mend?”

“His foot will not stop him from riding a horse, wielding a sword or sitting upon a throne,” Norwenna answered firmly.

“Of course not, of course not,” Gundleus said and glanced across at the hungry babe. He smiled, then stretched his long arms and looked about the hall. He had said nothing of marriage, but he would not in this company. If he wanted to marry Norwenna then he would ask Uther, not Norwenna. This visit was merely an opportunity for him to inspect his bride. He spared Norwenna a brief disinterested look, then gazed again about the shadowed hall. “So this is Lord Merlin's lair, eh?” Gundleus said. “Where is he?” No one answered. Tanaburs was scrabbling beneath the edge of one of the carpets and I guessed he was burying a charm in the earth of the hall floor. Later, when the Silurian delegation was gone, I searched the spot and found a small bone carving of a boar that I threw on the fire. The flames burned blue and spat fiercely, and Nimue said I had done the right thing.

“Lord Merlin, we think, is in Ireland,” Bishop Bedwin at last answered. “Or maybe in the northern wilderness,” he added vaguely.

“Or maybe dead?” Gundleus suggested.

“I pray not,” the Bishop said fervently.

“You do?” Gundleus twisted in his chair to stare into Bed win's aged face. “You approve of Merlin, Bishop?”

“He is a friend, Lord King,” Bedwin said. He was a dignified, plump man who was ever eager to keep the peace between the various religions.

“Lord Merlin is a Druid, Bishop, who hates Christians.” Gundleus was trying to provoke Bedwin.

“There are many Christians in Britain now,” Bedwin said, 'and few Druids. I think we of the true faith have nothing to fear."

“You hear that, Tanaburs?” Gundleus called to his Druid. “The Bishop doesn't fear you!” Tanaburs did not answer. In his questing around the hall he had come to the ghost-fence that guarded the door to Merlin's chambers. The fence was a simple one: merely two skulls placed on either side of the door, but only a Druid would dare cross their invisible barrier and even a Druid would fear a ghost-fence placed by Merlin.

“Will you rest here tonight?” Bishop Bedwin asked Gundleus, trying to change the subject away from Merlin.

“No,” Gundleus said rudely, rising. I thought he was about to take his leave, but instead he looked past Norwenna to the small, black, skull-guarded door in front of which Tanaburs was quivering like a hound smelling an unseen boar. “What's through the door?” the King asked.

“My Lord Merlin's chambers, Lord King,” Bedwin said.

“The place of secrets?” Gundleus asked wolfishly.

“Sleeping quarters, nothing more,” Bedwin said dismissively. Tanaburs raised his moon-tipped staff and held it quivering towards the ghost-fence. King Gundleus watched his Druid's performance, then drained his wine and tossed the drinking horn on to the floor.

“Maybe I shall sleep here after all,” the King said, 'but first let us inspect the sleeping quarters.“ He waved Tanaburs forward, but the Druid was nervous. Merlin was the greatest Druid in Britain, feared even beyond the Irish Sea, and no one meddled in his life lightly, yet the great man had not been seen for many a long month and some folk whispered that Prince Mordred's death had been a sign that Merlin's power was waning. And Tanaburs, like his master, was surely fascinated by what lay behind the door for secrets could lie there that would make Tanaburs as mighty and learned as the great Merlin himself. ”Open the door!" Gundleus ordered Tanaburs.

The butt of the moon staff moved tremulously towards one of the skulls, hesitated, then touched the yellowing bone dome. Nothing happened. Tanaburs spat on the skull, then tipped it over before snatching his staff back like a man who has prodded a sleeping snake. Again nothing happened and so he reached his free hand towards the door's wooden latch.

Then he stopped in terror.

A howl had echoed in the hall's smoking dark. A ghastly screech, like a girl being tortured, and the awful sound drove the Druid back. Norwenna cried aloud with fear and made the sign of the cross. The baby Mordred began wailing and nothing Ralla could do would quiet him. Gundleus first checked at the noise, then laughed as the howl faded. “A warrior,” he announced to the nervous hall, 'is not frightened of a girl's scream." He walked towards the door, ignoring Bishop Bedwin who was fluttering his hands as he tried to restrain the King without actually touching him.

A crash sounded from the ghost-guarded door. It was a violent, splintering noise and so sudden that everyone jumped with alarm. At first I thought the door had fallen before the King's advance, then I saw that a spear had been thrust clean through it. The silver-coloured spearhead stood proud of the old, fire-blackened oak and I tried to imagine what inhuman force had been needed to drive that sharpened steel through so thick a barrier.

The spear's sudden appearance made even Gundleus check, but his pride was threatened and he would not back down in the face of his warriors. He made the sign against evil, spat at the spearhead, then walked to the door, lifted its latch and pushed it open.

And immediately stepped back with horror on his face. I was watching him and I saw the raw fear in his eyes. He took a second pace away from the open door, then I heard Nimue's keening cry as she advanced into the hall. Tanaburs was making urgent motions with his staff, Bedwin was praying, the baby was crying while Norwenna had turned in her chair with a look of anguish. Nimue came through the door and, seeing my friend, even I shivered. She was naked and her thin white body was raddled with blood that had dripped down from her hair to run in rivulets past her small breasts and on to her thighs. Her head was crowned with a death-mask, the tanned face-skin of a sacrificed man that was perched above her own face like a snarling helmet and held in place by the skin of the dead man's arms knotted about her thin neck. The mask seemed to have a dreadful life of its own for it twitched as she walked towards the Silurian King. The dead man's dry and yellow body-skin hung loose down Nimue's back as she stuttered forward in small irregular steps. Only the whites of her eyes were showing in her bloody face, and as she twitched forward she called out imprecations in a language fouler than any soldier's tongue, while in her hands were two vipers, their dark bodies gleaming and their flickering heads questing towards the King.

Gundleus retreated, making the sign against evil, then he remembered that he was a man, a king and a warrior and so he put his hand on his sword hilt. It was then that Nimue jerked her head and the death mask fell back from the hair that was piled high on her scalp, then we all saw that it was not her hair that was piled there, but a bat that suddenly stretched its black, crinkling wings and snarled its red mouth at Gundleus.

The bat made Norwenna scream and run to fetch her baby while the rest of us stared in horror at the creature which was trapped in Nimue's hair. It jerked and flapped, tried to fly, snarled and struggled. The snakes twisted and suddenly the hall emptied. Norwenna ran first, Tanaburs followed, then everyone, even the King, was running for the morning daylight at the eastern door. Nimue stood motionless as they fled, then her eyes rolled and she blinked. She walked to the fire and carelessly tossed the two snakes into the flames where they hissed, whiplashed, then sizzled as they died. She freed the bat, which flew up into the rafters, then untied the death-mask from around her neck and rolled it into a bundle before picking up the delicate Roman flask from among the gifts that Gundleus had brought. She stared at the flask for a few seconds, then her wiry body twisted as she hurled the treasure against an oak pillar where it shattered into a scatter of pale green shards. “Derfel?” she snapped into the sudden silence that followed. “I know you're here.”