Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

‘Your teacher?’ I sounded surprised and so I was, but Merlin was always secretive and he had never mentioned Gawain to me.

‘Not my letters,’ Gawain said, ‘the women taught me those. No, Merlin taught me what my fate is to be.’ He smiled shyly. ‘He taught me to be pure.’

‘To be pure!’ I gave him a curious glance. ‘No women?’

‘None, Lord,’ he admitted innocently. ‘Merlin insists. Not now, anyway, though after, of course.’ His voice tailed away and he actually blushed.

‘No wonder,’ I said, ‘that you pray for clear skies.’

‘No, Lord, no!’ Gawain protested. ‘I pray for clear skies so that the Gods will come! And when they do, they will bring Olwen the Silver with them.’ He blushed again.

‘Olwen the Silver?’

‘You saw her, Lord, at Lindinis.’ His handsome face became almost ethereal. ‘She treads lighter than a breath of wind, her skin shines in the dark and flowers grow in her footsteps.’

‘And she is your fate?’ I asked, suppressing a nasty little stab of jealousy at the thought of that shining, lissom spirit being given to young Gawain.

‘I am to marry her when the task is done,’ he said earnestly, ‘though for now my duty is to guard the Treasures, but in three days I shall welcome the Gods and lead them against the enemy. I am to be the liberator of Britain.’ He made this outrageous boast very calmly, as though it was a commonplace task. I said nothing, but just followed him past the deep ditch that lies between Mai Dun’s middle and inner walls and I saw that its trench was filled with small makeshift shelters made from branches and thatch. ‘In two days,’ Gawain saw where I was looking, ‘we shall pull those shelters down and add them to the fires.’

‘Fires?’

‘You’ll see, Lord, you’ll see.’

Though at first, when I reached the summit, I could make no sense of what I saw. The crest of Mai Dun is an elongated grassy space in which a whole tribe with all its livestock could shelter in time of war, but now the hill’s western end was crossed and latticed with a complicated arrangement of dry hedges.

‘There!’ Gawain said proudly, pointing to the hedges as if they were his own accomplishment. The folk carrying the firewood were being directed towards one of the nearer hedges where they threw down their burdens and trudged off to collect still more timber. Then I saw that the hedges were really great ridges of wood being heaped ready for burning. The heaps were taller than a man, and there seemed to be miles of them, but it was not until Gawain led me up onto the innermost rampart that I saw the design of the hedges.

They filled all the western half of the plateau and at their centre were five piles of firewood that made a circle in the middle of an empty space some sixty or seventy paces across. That wide space was surrounded by a spiralling hedge which twisted three full turns, so that the whole spiral, including the centre, was over a hundred and fifty paces wide. Outside the spiral was an empty circle of grass that was girdled by a ring of six double spirals, each uncoiling from one circular space and coiling again to enclose another so that twelve fire-ringed spaces lay in the intricate outer ring. The double spirals touched each other so that they would make a rampart of fire all about the massive design. ‘Twelve smaller circles,’ I asked Gawain, ‘for thirteen Treasures?’

‘The Cauldron, Lord, will be at the centre,’ he said, his voice filled with awe. It was a huge accomplishment. The hedges were tall, well above the height of a man, and all were dense with fuel; indeed there must have been enough firewood on that hilltop to keep the fires of Durnovaria burning through nine or ten winters. The double spirals at the western end of the fortress were still being completed and I could see men energetically stamping down the wood so that the fire would not blaze briefly, but would burn long and fierce. There were whole tree trunks waiting for the flames inside the banked timbers. It would be a fire, I thought, to signal the ending of the world. And in a way, I supposed, that was exactly what the fire was intended to mark. It would be the end of the world as we knew it, for if Merlin was right then the Gods of Britain would come to this high place. The lesser Gods would go to the smaller circles of the outer ring while Bel would descend to the fiery heart of Mai Dun where his Cauldron waited. Great Bel, God of Gods, the Lord of Britain, would come in a great rush of air with the stars roiling in his wake like autumn leaves tossed by a storm wind. And there, where the five individual fires marked the heart of Merlin’s circles of flame, Bel would step again in Ynys Prydain, the Isle of Britain. My skin suddenly felt cold. Till this moment I had not really understood the magnitude of Merlin’s dream, and now it almost overwhelmed me. In three days, just three days, the Gods would be here.

‘We have over four hundred folk working on the fires,’ Gawain told me earnestly.

‘I can believe it.’

‘And we marked the spirals,’ he went on, ‘with fairy rope.’

‘With what?’

‘A rope, Lord, knotted from the hair of a virgin and merely one strand in width. Nimue stood in the centre and I paced about the perimeter and my Lord Merlin marked my steps with elf stones. The spirals had to be perfect. It took a week to do, for the rope kept breaking and every time it did we needed to begin again.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t fairy rope after all, Lord Prince?’ I teased him.

‘Oh, it was, Lord,’ Gawain assured me. ‘It was knotted from my own hair.’

‘And on Samain Eve,’ I said, ‘you light the fires and wait?’

‘Three hours on three, Lord, the fires must burn, and at the sixth hour we begin the ceremony.’ And sometime after that the night would turn to day, the sky would fill with fire and the smoky air would be lashed into turmoil by the Gods’ beating wings.

Gawain had been leading me along the fort’s northern wall, but now gestured down to where the small Temple of Mithras stood just to the east of the firewood rings. ‘You can wait there, Lord,’ he said,

‘while I fetch Merlin.’

‘Is he far off?’ I asked, thinking that Merlin might be in one of the temporary shelters thrown up on the plateau’s eastern end.

‘I’m not certain where he is,’ Gawain confessed, ‘but I know he went to fetch Anbarr, and I think I know where that might be.’

‘Anbarr?’ I asked. I only knew Anbarr from stories where he was a magical horse, an unbroken stallion reputed to gallop as fast across water as he could across land.

‘I will ride Anbarr alongside the Gods,’ Gawain said proudly, ‘and carry my banner against the enemy.’ He pointed to the temple where a huge flag leaned unceremoniously against the low tiled roof.

‘The banner of Britain,’ Gawain added, and he led me down to the temple where he unfurled the standard. It was a vast square of white linen on which was embroidered the defiant red dragon of Dumnonia. The beast was all claws, tail and fire. ‘It’s really the banner of Dumnonia,’ Gawain confessed,

‘but I don’t think the other British Kings will mind, do you?’

‘Not if you drive the Sais into the sea,’ I said.

‘That is my task, Lord,’ Gawain said very solemnly. ‘With the help of the Gods, of course, and of that,’ he touched Excalibur that was still under my arm.

‘Excalibur!’ I sounded surprised, for I could not imagine any man other than Arthur carrying the magical blade.

‘What else?’ Gawain asked me. ‘I am to carry Excalibur, ride Anbarr, and drive the enemy from Britain.’ He smiled delightedly, then gestured at a bench beside the temple door. ‘If you will wait, Lord, I shall seek Merlin.’