Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

I hesitated. ‘I think he might be angry, Lady,’ I admitted.

Guinevere savoured that answer for a while. ‘Did he ask about me?’ she finally enquired.

‘No,’ I said truthfully, ‘not once.’

She stared into the remnants of the fire. ‘Maybe he is in love with Argante,’ she said wistfully.

‘I doubt he can even stand the sight of her,’ I answered. A week before I would never have been so frank, but Guinevere and I were much closer now. ‘She’s too young for him,’ I went on, ‘and not nearly clever enough.’

She looked up at me, a challenge in her fire-glossed eyes. ‘Clever,’ she said. ‘I used to think I was clever. But you all think I’m a fool, don’t you?’

‘No, Lady.’

‘You were always a bad liar, Derfel. That’s why you were never a courtier. To be a good courtier you must lie with a smile.’ She stared into the fire. She was silent a long time, and when she spoke again the gentle mockery was gone from her voice. Maybe it was the nearness of battle that drove her to a layer of truth I had never heard from her before. ‘I was a fool,’ she said quietly, so quietly I had to lean forward to hear her over the crackling of the fire and the melody of my men’s songs. ‘I tell myself now that it was a kind of madness,’ she went on, ‘but I don’t think it was. It was nothing but ambition.’ She went quiet again, watching the small flickering flames. ‘I wanted to be a Caesar’s wife.’

‘You were,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘Arthur’s no Caesar. He’s not a tyrant, but I think I wanted him to be a tyrant, someone like Gorfyddyd.’ Gorfyddyd had been Ceinwyn and Cuneglas’s father, a brutal King of Powys, Arthur’s enemy, and, if rumour was true, Guinevere’s lover. She must have been thinking about that rumour, for she suddenly challenged me with a direct gaze. ‘Did I ever tell you he tried to rape me?’

‘Yes, Lady,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t true.’ She spoke bleakly. ‘He didn’t just try, he did rape me. Or I told myself it was rape.’

Her words were coming in short spasms, as if the truth was a very hard thing to admit. ‘But maybe it wasn’t rape. I wanted gold, honour, position.’ She was fiddling with the hem of her jerkin, stripping small lengths of linen from the frayed weave. I was embarrassed, but I did not interrupt, because I knew she wanted to talk. ‘But I didn’t get them from him. He knew exactly what I wanted, but knew better what he wanted for himself, and he never intended to pay my price. Instead he betrothed me to Valerin. Do you know what I was going to do with Valerin?’ Her eyes challenged me again, and this time the gloss on them was not just fire, but a sheen of tears.

‘No, Lady.’

‘I was going to make him King of Powys,’ she said vengefully. ‘I was going to use Valerin to revenge myself on Gorfyddyd. I could have done it, too, but then I met Arthur.’

‘At Lugg Vale,’ I said carefully, ‘I killed Valerin.’

‘I know you did.’

‘And there was a ring on his finger, Lady,’ I went on, ‘with your badge on it.’

She stared at me. She knew what ring I meant. ‘And it had a lover’s cross?’ she asked quietly.

‘Yes, Lady,’ I said, and touched my own lover’s ring, the twin of Ceinwyn’s ring. Many folk wore lovers’ rings incised with a cross, but not many had rings with crosses made from gold taken from the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn as Ceinwyn and I did.

‘What did you do with the ring?’ Guinevere asked.

‘I threw it in the river.’

‘Did you tell anyone?’

‘Only Ceinwyn,’ I said. ‘And Issa knows,’ I added, ‘because he found the ring and brought it to me.’

‘And you didn’t tell Arthur?’

‘No.’

She smiled. ‘I think you have been a better friend than I ever knew, Derfel.’

‘To Arthur, Lady. I was protecting him, not you.’

‘I suppose you were, yes.’ She looked back into the fire. ‘When this is all over,’ she said, ‘I shall try to give Arthur what he wants.’

‘Yourself?’

My suggestion seemed to surprise her. ‘Does he want that?’ she asked.

‘He loves you,’ I said. ‘He might not ask about you, but he looks for you every time he comes here. He looked for you even when you were in Ynys Wydryn. He never talked to me about you, but he wearied Ceinwyn’s ears.’

Guinevere grimaced. ‘Do you know how cloying love can be, Derfel? I don’t want to be worshipped. I don’t want every whim granted. I want to feel there’s something biting back.’ She spoke vehemently, and I opened my mouth to defend Arthur, but she gestured me to silence. ‘I know, Derfel,’ she said, ‘I have no right to want anything now. I shall be good, I promise you.’ She smiled. ‘Do you know why Arthur is ignoring me now?’

‘No, Lady.’

‘Because he does not want to face me till he has victory.’

I thought she was probably right, but Arthur had shown no overt sign of his affection and so I thought it best to sound a note of warning. ‘Maybe victory will be satisfaction enough for him,’ I said. Guinevere shook her head. ‘I know him better than you, Derfel. I know him so well I can describe him in one word.’

I tried to think what that word would be. Brave? Certainly, but that left out all his care and dedication. I wondered if dedicated was a better word, but that did not describe his restlessness. Good? he was certainly good, but that plain word obscured the anger that could make him unpredictable. ‘What is the word, Lady?’ I asked.

‘Lonely,’ Guinevere said, and I remembered that Sagramor in Mithras’s cave had used the very same word. ‘He’s lonely,’ Guinevere said, ‘like me So let’s give him victory and maybe he won’t be lonely again.’

‘The Gods keep you safe, Lady,’ I said.

‘The Goddess, I think,’ she said, and saw the look of horror on my face. She laughed. ‘Not Isis, Derfel, not Isis.’ It had been Guinevere’s worship of Isis that had led her to Lancelot’s bed and to Arthur’s misery. ‘I think,’ she went on, ‘that tonight I will pray to Sulis. She seems more appropriate.’

‘I’ll add my prayers to yours, Lady.’

She held out a hand to check me as I rose to leave. ‘We’re going to win, Derfel,’ she said earnestly,

‘we’re going to win, and everything will be changed.’

We had said that so often, and nothing ever was. But now, at Mynydd Baddon, we would try again. We sprang our trap on a day so beautiful that the heart ached. It promised to be a long day too, for the nights were growing ever shorter and the long evening light lingered deep into the shadowed hours. On the evening before the battle Arthur had withdrawn his own troops from all along the hills behind Mynydd Baddon. He ordered those men to leave their campfires burning so that the Saxons would believe they were still in place, then he took them west to join the men of Gwent who were approaching on the Glevum road. Cuneglas’s warriors also left the hills, but they came to the summit of Mynydd Baddon where, with my men, they waited.

Malaine, Powys’s chief Druid, went among the spearmen during the night. He distributed vervain, elf stones and scraps of dried mistletoe. The Christians gathered and prayed together, though I noted how many accepted the Druid’s gifts. I prayed beside the ramparts, pleading with Mithras for a great victory, and after that I tried to sleep, but Mynydd Baddon was restless with the murmur of voices and the monotonous sound of stones on steel.

I had already sharpened my spear and put a new edge on Hywelbane. I never let a servant sharpen my weapons before battle, but did it myself and did it as obsessively as all my men. Once I was sure the weapons were as sharp as I could hone them I lay close to Guinevere’s shelter. I wanted to sleep but I could not shake the fear of standing in a shield wall. I watched for omens, fearing to see an owl, and I prayed again. I must have slept in the end, but it was a fitful dream-racked sleep. It had been so long since I had fought in a shield wall, let alone broken an enemy’s wall. I woke cold, early and shivering. Dew lay thick. Men were grunting and coughing, pissing and groaning. The hill stank, for although we had dug latrines there was no stream to carry the dirt away. ‘The smell and sound of men,’ Guinevere’s wry voice spoke from the shadow of her shelter.