Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

‘No.’ Arthur pulled Llamrei’s rein and the mare leapt away from Nimue. She turned on Merlin. ‘Kill him!’ she screamed, pointing at Mardoc. ‘We can try him at least. Kill him!’

‘No!’ I shouted.

‘Kill him!’ Nimue screeched, and then, when Merlin made no move, she ran towards the gallows. Merlin seemed unable to move, but then Arthur turned Llamrei again and headed Nimue off. He let his horse ram her so that she tumbled to the turf.

‘Let the child live,’ Arthur said to Merlin. Nimue was clawing at him, but he pushed her away and, when she came back, all teeth and hooked hands, he swung the sword close to her head and that threat calmed her.

Merlin moved the bright blade so that it was close to Mardoc’s throat. The Druid looked almost gentle, despite his blood-soaked sleeves and the long blade in his hand. ‘Do you think, Arthur ap Uther, that you can defeat the Saxons without the help of the Gods?’ he asked. Arthur ignored the question. ‘Cut the boy down,’ he commanded.

Nimue turned on him. ‘Do you wish to be cursed, Arthur?’

‘I am cursed,’ he answered bitterly.

‘Let the boy die!’ Merlin shouted from the ladder. ‘He’s nothing to you, Arthur. A by-blow of a King, a bastard born to a whore.’

‘And what else am I?’ Arthur shouted, ‘but a by-blow of a King, a bastard born to a whore?’

‘He must die,’ Merlin said patiently, ‘and his death will bring the Gods to us, and when the Gods are here, Arthur, we shall put his body in the Cauldron and let the breath of life return.’

Arthur gestured at the horrid, life-drained body of Gawain, his nephew. ‘And one death is not enough?’

‘One death is never enough,’ Nimue said. She had run around Arthur’s horse to reach the gallows where she now held Mardoc’s head still so that Merlin could slit his throat. Arthur walked Llamrei closer to the gallows. ‘And if the Gods do not come after two deaths, Merlin,’

he asked, ‘how many more?’

‘As many as it needs,’ Nimue answered.

‘And every time,’ Arthur spoke loudly, so we could all hear him, ‘that Britain is in trouble, every time there is an enemy, every time there is a plague, every time that men and women are frightened, we shall take children to the scaffold?’

‘If the Gods come,’ Merlin said, ‘there will be no more plague or fear or war.’

‘And will they come?’ Arthur asked.

‘They are coming!’ Nimue screamed. ‘Look!’ And she pointed upwards with her free hand, and we all looked and I saw that the lights in the sky were fading. The bright blues were dimming to purple black, the reds were smoky and vague, and the stars were brightening again beyond the dying curtains. ‘No!’

Nimue wailed, ‘no!’ And she drew out the last cry into a lament that seemed to last for ever. Arthur had taken Llamrei right up to the gallows. ‘You call me the Amherawdr of Britain,’ he said to Merlin, ‘and an emperor must rule or cease to be emperor, and I will not rule in a Britain where children must be killed to save the lives of adults.’

‘Don’t be absurd!’ Merlin protested. ‘Sheer sentimentality!’

‘I would be remembered,’ Arthur said, ‘as a just man, and there is already too much blood on my hands.’

‘You will be remembered,’ Nimue spat at him, ‘as a traitor, as a ravager, as a coward.’

‘But not,’ Arthur said mildly, ‘by the descendants of this child,’ and with that he reached up and slashed with his sword at the rope that held Mardoc’s ankles. Nimue screamed as the boy fell, then she leapt at Arthur again with her hands hooked like claws, but Arthur simply backhanded her hard and fast across the head with the flat of his sword blade so that she spun away dazed. The force of the blow could easily be heard above the crackling of flames. Nimue staggered, slack-jawed and with her one eye unfocused, and then she dropped.

‘Should have done that to Guinevere,’ Culhwch growled to me.

Galahad had left my side, dismounted, and now freed Mardoc’s bonds. The child immediately began screaming for his mother.

‘I never could abide noisy children,’ Merlin said mildly, then he shifted the ladder so that it rested beside the rope holding Gawain to the beam. He climbed the rungs slowly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said as he clambered upwards, ‘whether the Gods have come or not. You all of you expected too much, and maybe they are here already. Who knows? But we shall finish without the blood of Mordred’s child,’ and with that he sawed clumsily at the rope holding Gawain’s ankles. The body swayed as he cut so that the blood-soaked hair slapped at the Cauldron’s edge, but then the rope parted and the corpse dropped heavily into the blood that splashed up to stain the Cauldron’s rim. Merlin climbed slowly down the ladder, then ordered the Blackshields who had been watching the confrontation to fetch the great wicker baskets of salt that were standing a few yards away. The men scooped the salt into the Cauldron, packing it tight around Gawain’s hunched and naked body.

‘What now?’ Arthur asked, sheathing his sword.

‘Nothing,’ Merlin said. ‘It is over.’

‘Excalibur?’ Arthur demanded.

‘She is in the southernmost spiral,’ Merlin said, pointing that way, ‘though I suspect you will have to wait for the fires to burn out before you can retrieve her.’

‘No!’ Nimue had recovered enough to protest. She spat blood from the inside of her cheek that had been split open by Arthur’s blow. ‘The Treasures are ours!’

‘The Treasures,’ Merlin said wearily, ‘have been gathered and used. They are nothing now. Arthur may have his sword. He’ll need it.’ He turned and threw his long knife into the nearest fire, then turned to watch as the two Blackshields finished packing the Cauldron. The salt turned pink as it covered Gawain’s hideously wounded body. ‘In the spring,’ Merlin said, ‘the Saxons will come, and then we shall see if there was any magic here this night.’

Nimue screamed at us. She wept and raved, she spat and cursed, she promised us death by air, by fire, by land and by sea. Merlin ignored her, but Nimue was never ready to accept half measures and that night she became Arthur’s enemy. That night she began to work on the curses that would give her revenge on the men who stopped the Gods coming to Mai Dun. She called us the ravagers of Britain and she promised us horror.

We stayed on the hill all night. The Gods did not come, and the fires burned so fiercely that it was not till the following afternoon that Arthur could retrieve Excalibur. Mardoc was given back to his mother, though I later heard he died that winter of a fever.

Merlin and Nimue took the other Treasures away. An ox-cart carried the Cauldron with its ghastly contents. Nimue led the way and Merlin, like an old obedient man, followed her. They took Anbarr, Gawain’s uncut, unbroken black horse, and they took the great banner of Britain, and where they went none of us knew, but we guessed it would be a wild place to the west where Nimue’s curses could be honed through the storms of winter.

Before the Saxons came.

It is odd, looking back, to remember how Arthur was hated then. In the summer he had broken the hopes of the Christians and now, in the late autumn, he had destroyed the pagan dreams. As ever, he seemed surprised by his unpopularity. ‘What else was I supposed to do?’ he demanded of me. ‘Let my son die?’

‘Cefydd did,’ I said unhelpfully.

‘And Cefydd still lost the battle!’ Arthur said sharply. We were riding north. I was going home to Dun Caric, while Arthur, with Cuneglas and Bishop Emrys, was travelling on to meet King Meurig of Gwent. That meeting was the only business that mattered to Arthur. He had never trusted the Gods to save Britain from the Sais, but he reckoned that eight or nine hundred of Gwent’s well-trained spearmen could tip the balance. His head seethed with numbers that winter. Dumnonia, he reckoned, could field six hundred spearmen of whom four hundred had been tested in battle. Cuneglas would bring another four hundred, the Blackshield Irish another hundred and fifty and to those we could add maybe a hundred masterless men who might come from Armorica or the northern kingdoms to seek plunder. ‘Say twelve hundred men,’ Arthur would guess, then he would worry the figure up or down according to his mood, but if his mood was optimistic he sometimes dared add eight hundred men from Gwent to give us a total of two thousand men, yet even that, he claimed, might not be enough because the Saxons would probably field an even larger army. Aelle could assemble at least seven hundred spears, and his was the weaker of the two Saxon kingdoms. We estimated Cerdic’s spears at a thousand, and rumours were reaching us that Cerdic was buying spearmen from Clovis, the King of the Franks. Those hired men were being paid in gold, and had been promised more gold when victory yielded them the treasury of Dumnonia. Our spies also reported that the Saxons would wait until after the Feast of Eostre, their spring festival, to give the new boats time to come from across the sea. ‘They’ll have two and a half thousand men,’ Arthur reckoned, and we had only twelve hundred if Meurig would not fight. We could raise the levy, of course, but no levy would stand against properly trained warriors, and our levy of old men and boys would be opposed by the Saxon fyrd.