Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

I had been here before, for this was the southern country below Dumnonian Isca where the local folk tattooed their faces blue. I had served Lord Owain when I first came, and it was under his leadership that I had joined the massacre on the high moors. Years later I had ridden close to this hill when I went with Arthur to try and save Tristan’s life, though my attempt failed and Tristan had died, and now I had returned a third time. It was lovely country, as beautiful as any I had seen in Britain, though for me it held memories of murder and I knew I would be glad to see it fade behind Caddwg’s boat. We stared down at our journey’s end. The River Exe flowed to the sea beneath us, but before it reached the ocean it formed a great wide sea-lake that was penned from the ocean by a narrow spit of sand. That spit was the place men called Camlann, and at its tip, just visible from our high perch, the Romans had built a small fortress. Inside the fort they had raised a great high becket of iron that had once held a fire at night to warn approaching galleys of the treacherous sandspit. Now we gazed down at the sea-lake, the sandspit and the green shore. No enemy was in sight. No spear blade reflected the day’s late sun, no horsemen rode the shore tracks and no spearmen darkened the narrow tongue of sand. We could have been alone in all the universe.

‘You know Caddwg?’ Arthur asked me, breaking the silence.

‘I met him once, Lord, years ago.’

‘Then find him, Derfel, and tell him we shall wait for him at the fort.’

I looked southwards towards the sea. Huge and empty and glittering, it was the path to take us from Britain. Then I went downhill to make the voyage possible.

The last glimmering light of evening lit my way to Caddwg’s house. I had asked folk for directions and had been guided to a small cabin that lay on the shore north of Camlann and now, because the tide was only halfway in, the cabin faced a gleaming expanse of empty mud. Caddwg’s boat was not in the water, but perched high and dry on land with its keel supported by rollers and its hull by wooden poles.

‘Prydmen, she’s called,’ Caddwg said, without any greeting. He had seen me standing beside his boat and now came from his house. The old man was thickly bearded, deeply suntanned and dressed in a woollen jerkin that was stained with pitch and glittering with fish scales.

‘Merlin sent me,’ I said.

‘Reckoned he would. Said he would. Is he coming himself?’

‘He’s dead,’ I said.

Caddwg spat. ‘Never thought to hear that.’ He spat a second time. ‘Thought death would give him a miss.’

‘He was murdered,’ I said.

Caddwg stooped and threw some logs on a fire that burned under a bubbling pot. The pot held pitch, and I could see that he had been caulking the gaps between Prydwen’s planks. The boat looked beautiful. Her wooden hull had been scraped clean and the shining new layer of wood contrasted with the deep black of the pitch-soaked caulking that stopped the water spurting between her timbers. She had a high prow, a tall sternpost and a long, newly made mast that now rested on trestles beside the stranded hull. ‘You’ll be wanting her, then,’ Caddwg said.

‘There are thirteen of us,’ I told him, ‘waiting at the fort.’

‘Tomorrow this time,’ he said.

‘Not till then?’ I asked, alarmed at the delay.

‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ he grumbled, ‘and I can’t launch her till high water, and that’ll be tomorrow morning, and by the time I get her mast shipped and the sail bent on and the steerboard shipped, the tide’ll be ebbed again. She’ll float again by mid afternoon, she will, and I’ll come for you quick as I can, but like as not it’ll be dusk. You should have sent me word.’

That was true, but none of us had thought to send a warning to Caddwg for none of us understood boats. We had thought to come here, find the boat and sail away, and we had never dreamed that the boat might be out of the water. ‘Are there other boats?’ I asked.

‘Not for thirteen folk,’ he said, ‘and none that can take you where I’m going.’

‘To Broceliande,’ I said.

‘I’ll take you where Merlin told me to take you,’ Caddwg said obstinately, then stumped around to Prydwen ‘s bow and pointed up to a grey stone that was about the size of an apple. There was nothing remarkable about the stone except that it had been skilfully worked into the ship’s stem where it was held by the oak like a gem clasped by a gold setting. ‘He gave me that bit of rock,’ Caddwg said, meaning Merlin. ‘A wraithstone, that is.’

‘Wraithstone?’ I asked, never having heard of such a thing.

‘It’ll take Arthur where Merlin wanted him to go, and nothing else will take him there. And no other boat can take him there, only a boat that Merlin named,’ Caddwg said. The name Prydwen meant Britain. ‘Arthur is with you?’ Caddwg asked me, suddenly anxious.

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll bring the gold as well,’ Caddwg said.

‘Gold?’

‘The old man left it for Arthur. Reckoned he’d want it. No good to me. Gold can’t catch a fish. It bought me a new sail, I’ll say that for it, and Merlin told me to buy the sail and so he had to give me gold, but gold don’t catch fish. It catches women,’ he chuckled, ‘but not fish.’

I looked up at the stranded boat. ‘Do you need help?’ I asked.

Caddwg offered a humourless laugh. ‘And what help can you give? You and your short arm? Can you caulk a boat? Can you step a mast or bend on a sail?’ He spat. ‘I only have to whistle and I’ll have a score of men helping me. You’ll hear us singing in the morning, and that’ll mean we’re hauling her down the rollers into the water. Tomorrow evening,’ he nodded curtly to me, ‘I’ll look for you at the fort.’ He turned and went back to his hut.

And I went to join Arthur. It was dark by then and all the stars of heaven pricked the sky. A moon shimmered a long trail across the sea and lit the broken walls of the little fort where we would wait for Prydwen.

We had one last day in Britain, I thought. One last night and one last day, and then we would sail with Arthur into the moon’s path and Britain would be nothing but a memory. The night wind blew soft across the fort’s broken wall. The rusted remnant of the ancient beacon tilted on its bleached pole above us, the small waves broke on the long beach, the moon slowly dropped into the sea’s embrace and the night darkened.

We slept in the small shelter of the ramparts. The Romans had made the walls of the fort out of sand on which they had mounded turf planted with sea grass, and then they had placed a wooden palisade along the wall’s top. The wall must have been feeble even when it had been built, but the fort had never been anything more than a look-out station and a place where a small detachment of men could shelter from the sea winds as they tended the beacon. The wooden palisade was almost all decayed now, and the rain and wind had worn much of the sand wall down, but in a few places it still stood four or five feet high.

The morning dawned clear and we watched as a cluster of small fishing-boats put out to sea for their day’s work. Their departure left only Prydwen beside the sea-lake. Arthur-bach and Seren played on the lake’s sand where there were no breakers, while Galahad walked with Culhwch’s remaining son up the coast to find food. They came back with bread, dried fish and a wooden pail of warm fresh milk. We were all oddly happy that morning. I remember the laughter as we watched Seren roll down the face of a dune, and how we cheered when Arthur-bach tugged a great bunch of seaweed out of the shallows and up onto the sand. The huge green mass must have weighed as much as he did, but he pulled and jerked and somehow dragged the heavy tangle right up to the fort’s broken wall. Gwydre and I applauded his efforts, and afterwards we fell to talking. ‘If I’m not meant to be King,’ Gwydre said, ‘then so be it.’