Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

The landscape changed as I rode eastwards. Gwent was a Christian country and at first I passed large, elaborate churches, but by the second day the churches were much smaller and the farms less prosperous until at last I reached the middle lands, the waste places where neither Saxon nor Briton ruled, but where both had their killing grounds. Here the meadows that had once fed whole families were thick with oak saplings, hawthorn, birch and ash, the villas were roofless ruins and the halls were stark burned skeletons. Yet some folk still lived here, and when I once heard footsteps running through a nearby wood I drew Hy welbane in fear of the masterless men who had their refuge in these wild valleys, but no one accosted me until that evening when a band of spearmen barred my path. They were men of Gwent and, like all King Meurig’s soldiers, they wore the vestiges of old Rome’s uniform; bronze breastplates, helmets crested with plumes of red-dyed horsehair, and rust-red cloaks. Their leader was a Christian named Carig and he invited me to their fortress that stood in a clearing on a high wooded ridge. Carig’s job was to guard the frontier and he brusquely demanded to know my business, but enquired no further when I gave him my name and said I rode for Arthur.

Carig’s fortress was a simple wooden palisade inside which was built a pair of huts that were thick with smoke from their open fires. I warmed myself as Carig’s dozen men busied themselves with cooking a haunch of venison on a spit made from a captured Saxon spear. There were a dozen such fortresses within a day’s march, all watching eastwards to guard against Aelle’s raiders. Dumnonia had much the same precautions, though we kept an army permanently close to our border. The expense of such an army was exorbitant, and resented by those whose taxes of grain and leather and salt and fleeces paid for the troops. Arthur had always struggled to make the taxes fair and keep their burden light, though now, after the rebellion, he was ruthlessly levying a stiff penalty on all those wealthy men who had followed Lancelot. That levy fell disproportionately on Christians, and Meurig, the Christian King of Gwent, had sent a protest that Arthur had ignored. Carig, Meurig’s loyal follower, treated me with a certain reserve, though he did do his best to warn me of what waited across the border. ‘You do know, Lord,’ he said,

‘that the Sais are refusing to let men cross the frontier?’

‘I had heard, yes.’

‘Two merchants went by a week ago,’ Carig said. ‘They were carrying pottery and fleeces. I warned them, but,’ he paused and shrugged, ‘the Saxons kept the pots and the wool, but sent back two skulls.’

‘If my skull comes back,’ I told him, ‘send it to Arthur.’ I watched the venison fat drip and flare in the fire. ‘Do any travellers come out of Lloegyr?’

‘Not for weeks now,’ Carig said, ‘but next year, no doubt, you will see plenty of Saxon spearmen in Dumnonia.’

‘Not in Gwent?’ I challenged him.

‘Aelle has no quarrel with us,’ Carig said firmly. He was a nervous young man who did not much like his exposed position on Britain’s frontier, though he did his duty conscientiously enough and his men, I noted, were well disciplined.

‘You’re Britons,’ I told Carig, ‘and Aelle’s a Saxon, isn’t that quarrel enough?’

Carig shrugged. ‘Dumnonia is weak, Lord, the Saxons know that. Gwent is strong. They will attack you, not us.’ He sounded horribly complacent.

‘But once they have beaten Dumnonia,’ I said, touching the iron in my sword hilt to avert the ill-luck implicit in my words, ‘how long before they come north into Gwent?’

‘Christ will protect us,’ Carig said piously, and made the sign of the cross. A crucifix hung on the hut wall and one of his men licked his fingers then touched the feet of the tortured Christ. I surreptitiously spat into the fire.

I rode east next morning. Clouds had come in the night and the dawn greeted me with a thin cold rain that blew into my face. The Roman road, broken and weed-grown now, stretched into a dank wood and the further I rode the lower my spirits sank. Everything I had heard in Carig’s frontier fort suggested that Gwent would not fight for Arthur. Meurig, the young King of Gwent, had ever been a reluctant warrior. His father, Tewdric, had known that the Britons must unite against their common enemy, but Tewdric had resigned his throne and gone to live as a monk beside the River Wye and his son was no warlord. Without Gwent’s well-trained troops Dumnonia was surely doomed unless a glowing naked nymph presaged some miraculous intervention by the Gods. Or unless Aelle believed Arthur’s lie. And would Aelle even receive me? Would he even believe that I was his son? The Saxon King had been kind enough to me on the few occasions we had met, but that meant nothing for I was still his enemy, and the longer I rode through that bitter drizzle between the towering wet trees, the greater my despair. I was sure Arthur had sent me to my death, and worse, that he had done it with the callousness of a losing gambler risking everything on one final cast on the throwboard.

At mid morning the trees ended and I rode into a wide clearing through which a stream flowed. The road forded the small water, but beside the crossing and stuck into a mound that stood as high as a man’s waist, there stood a dead fir tree that was hung with offerings. The magic was strange to me so I had no idea whether the bedecked tree guarded the road, placated the stream or was merely the work of children. I slid off my horse’s back and saw that the objects hung from the brittle branches were the small bones of a man’s spine. No child’s play, I reckoned, but what? I spat beside the mound to avert its evil, touched the iron of Hywelbane’s hilt, then led my horse through the ford. The woods began again thirty paces beyond the stream and I had not covered half that distance when an axe hurtled out of the shadows beneath the branches. It turned as it came towards me, the day’s grey light flickering from the spinning blade. The throw was bad, and the axe hissed past a good four paces away. No one challenged me, but nor did any other weapon come from the trees.

‘I am a Saxon!’ I shouted in that language. Still no one spoke, but I heard a mutter of low voices and the crackle of breaking twigs. ‘I am a Saxon!’ I called again, and wondered whether the hidden watchers were not Saxons but outlaw Britons, for I was still in the wasteland where the masterless men of every tribe and country hid from justice.

I was about to call in the British tongue that I meant no harm when a voice shouted from the shadows in Saxon. ‘Throw your sword here!’ a man commanded me.

‘You may come and take the sword,’ I answered.

There was a pause. ‘Your name?’ the voice demanded.

‘Derfel,’ I said, ‘son of Aelle.’

I called my father’s name as a challenge, and it must have unsettled them because once again I heard the low murmur of voices, and then, a moment later, six men pushed through the brambles to come into the clearing. All were in the thick furs that Saxons favoured as armour and all carried spears. One of them wore a horned helmet and he, evidently the leader, walked down the edge of the road towards me.

‘Derfel,’ he said, stopping a half dozen paces from me. ‘Derfel,’ he said again. ‘I have heard that name, and it is no Saxon name.’

‘It is my name,’ I answered, ‘and I am a Saxon.’

‘A son of Aelle?’ He was suspicious.

‘Indeed.’

He considered me for a moment. He was a tall man with a mass of brown hair crammed into his horned helmet. His beard reached almost to his waist and his moustaches hung to the top edge of the leather breastplate he wore beneath his fur cloak. I supposed he was a local chieftain, or maybe a warrior deputed to guard this part of the frontier. He twisted one of his moustaches in his free hand, then let the strands unwind. ‘Hrothgar, son of Aelle, I know,’ he said musingly, ‘and Cyrning, son of Aelle, I call a friend. Penda, Saebold and Yffe, sons of Aelle, I have seen in battle, but Derfel, son of Aelle?’ He shook his head.