Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

‘You have not answered my question,’ Guinevere said icily. She and Morgan hated each other, but for Arthur’s sake pretended to a chill courtesy when they met.

Morgan was silent for a while, then abruptly nodded her head. ‘The curse can be countered,’ she said,

‘if you believe in these superstitions.’

‘I believe,’ I said.

‘But even to think of it is a sin!’ Morgan cried and made the sign of the cross again.

‘Your God will surely forgive you,’ I said.

‘What do you know of my God, Derfel?’ she asked sourly.

‘I know, Lady,’ I said, trying to remember all the things Galahad had told me over the years, ‘that your God is a loving God, a forgiving God, and a God who sent His own Son to earth so that others should not suffer.’ I paused, but Morgan made no reply. ‘I know too,’ I went on gently, ‘that Nimue works a great evil in the hills.’

The mention of Nimue might have persuaded Morgan, for she had ever been angry that the younger woman had usurped her place in Merlin’s entourage. ‘Is it a clay figure?’ she asked me, ‘made with a child’s blood, dew, and moulded beneath the thunder?’

‘Exactly,’ I said.

She shuddered, spread her arms and prayed silently. None of us spoke. Her prayer went on a long time, and perhaps she was hoping we would abandon her, but when none of us left the courtyard, she dropped her arms and turned on us again. ‘What charms is the witch using?’

‘Berries,’ I said, ‘slivers of bone, embers.’

‘No, fool! What charms? How does she reach Ceinwyn?’

‘She has the stone from one of Ceinwyn’s rings and one of my cloaks.’

‘Ah!’ Morgan said, interested despite her revulsion for the pagan superstition. ‘Why one of your cloaks?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Simple, fool,’ she snapped, ‘the evil flows through you!’

‘Me?’

‘What do you understand?’ she snapped. ‘Of course it flows through you. You have been close to Nimue, have you not?’

‘Yes,’ I said, blushing despite myself.

‘So what is the symbol of that?’ she asked. ‘She gave you a charm? A scrap of bone? Some piece of pagan rubbish to hang about your neck?’

‘She gave me this,’ I said, and showed her the scar on my left hand. Morgan peered at the scar, then shuddered. She said nothing.

‘Counter the charm, Morgan,’ Arthur pleaded with her.

Morgan was silent again. ‘It is forbidden,’ she said after a while, ‘to dabble in witchcraft. The holy scriptures tell us that we should not suffer a witch to live.’

‘Then tell me how it is done,’ Taliesin pleaded.

‘You?’ Morgan cried. ‘You? You think you can counter Merlin’s magic? If it is to be done, then let it be done properly.’

‘By you?’ Arthur asked and Morgan whimpered. Her one good hand made the sign of the cross, and then she shook her head and it seemed she could not speak at all. Arthur frowned. ‘What is it,’ he asked,

‘that your God wants?’

‘Your souls!’ Morgan cried.

‘You want me to become a Christian?’ I asked.

The gold mask with its incised cross snapped up to face me. ‘Yes,’ Morgan said simply.

‘I will do it,’ I said just as simply.

She pointed her hand at me. ‘You will be baptized, Derfel?’

‘Yes, Lady.’

‘And you will swear obedience to my husband.’

That checked me. I gazed at her. ‘To Sansum?’ I asked feebly.

‘He is a bishop!’ Morgan insisted. ‘He has God’s authority! You will agree to swear obedience to him, you will agree to be baptized, and only then will I lift the curse.’

Arthur stared at me. For a few heartbeats I could not swallow the humiliation of Morgan’s demand, but then I thought of Ceinwyn and I nodded. ‘I will do it,’ I told her. So Morgan risked her God’s anger and lifted the curse.

She did it that afternoon. She came to the palace courtyard in a black robe and without any mask so that the horror of her fire-ravaged face, all red and scarred and ridged and twisted, was visible to us all. She was furious with herself, but committed to her promise, and she hurried about her business. A brazier was lit and fed with coals and, while the fire heated, slaves fetched baskets of potter’s clay that Morgan moulded into the figure of a woman. She used blood from a child that had died in the town that morning, and water that a slave swept up from the courtyard’s damp grass, and mixed both with the clay. There was no thunder, but Morgan said the counter-charm did not need thunder. She spat in horror at what she had made. It was a grotesque image, that thing, a woman with huge breasts, spread legs and a gaping birth canal, and in the figure’s belly she dug a hole that she said was the womb where the evil must rest. Arthur, Taliesin and Guinevere watched enthralled as she moulded the clay and then as she walked three times round the obscene figure. After the third sunwise circuit she stopped, raised her head to the clouds and wailed. For a moment I thought she was in such pain that she could not proceed and that her God was commanding her to stop the ceremony, but then she turned her twisted face towards me. ‘I need the evil now,’ she said.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

The slit that was her mouth seemed to smile. ‘Your hand, Derfel.’

‘My hand?’

I saw now that the lipless slit was a smile. ‘The hand that binds you to Nimue,’ Morgan said. ‘How else do you think the evil is channelled? You must cut it off, Derfel, and give it to me.’

‘Surely,’ Arthur began to protest.

‘You force me to sin!’ Morgan turned on her brother with a shriek, ‘then you challenge my wisdom?’

‘No,’ Arthur said hurriedly.

‘It is nothing to me,’ she said carelessly, ‘if Derfel wants to keep his hand, so be it. Ceinwyn can suffer.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no.’

We sent for Galahad and Culhwch, then Arthur led the three of us to his smithy where the forge burned night and day. I took my lover’s ring from the finger of my left hand and gave it to Morridig, Arthur’s smith, and asked him to seal the ring about Hywelbane’s pommel. The ring was of common iron, a warrior’s ring, but it had a cross made of gold that I had stolen from the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn and it was the twin of a ring Ceinwyn wore.

We placed a thick piece of timber on the anvil. Galahad held me tight, his arms about me, and I bared my arm and laid my left hand on the timber. Culhwch gripped my forearm, not to keep it still, but for afterwards.

Arthur raised Excalibur. ‘Are you sure, Derfel?’ he asked.

‘Do it, Lord,’ I said.

Morridig watched wide-eyed as the bright blade touched the rafters above the anvil. Arthur paused, then hacked down once. He hacked down hard, and for a second I felt no pain, none, but then Culhwch took my spurting wrist and thrust it into the burning coals of the forge and that was when the pain whipped through me like a spear thrust. I screamed, and then I remember nothing at all. I heard later how Morgan took the severed hand with its fatal scar and sealed it in the clay womb. Then, to a pagan chant as old as time, she pulled the bloody hand out through the birth canal and tossed it onto the brazier.

And thus I became a Christian.

Spring has come to Dinnewrac. The monastery warms, and the silence of our prayers is broken by the bleating of lambs and the song of larks. White violets and stitchwort grow where snow lay for so long, but best of all is the news that Igraine has given birth to a child. It is a boy, and both he and his mother live. God be thanked for that, and for the season’s warmth, but for little else. Spring should be a happy season, but there are dark rumours of enemies.