Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

‘You’ll live,’ Galahad said unsympathetically.

‘Next week,’ Arthur looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes, ‘go next week, Derfel.’

‘Yes, Lord.’

He bent to throw another handful of coals onto the blazing furnace. ‘The Gods know I never wanted that throne,’ he said, ‘but one way or another I consume my life fighting for it.’ He sniffed. ‘We’ll start gathering boats, Derfel, and you assemble spearmen at Caer Cadarn. If we look strong enough then Meurig will think twice.’

‘And if he doesn’t?’ I asked.

‘Then we’ve lost,’ Arthur said, ‘we’ve lost. Unless we fight a war, and I’m not sure I want to do that.’

‘You never do, Lord,’ I said, ‘but you always win them.’

‘So far,’ Arthur said gloomily, ‘so far.’

He picked up his tongs to rescue the shoe-plate from the fire, and I went to find a boat with which to snatch a kingdom.

Next morning, on a falling tide and in a west wind that whipped the River Usk into short steep waves, I embarked on my brother-in-law’s boat. Balig was a fisherman married to Linna, my half-sister, and he was amused to have discovered that he was related to a Lord of Dumnonia. He had also profited from the unexpected relationship, but he deserved the good fortune for he was a capable and decent man. Now he ordered six of my spearmen to take the boat’s long oars, and ordered the other four to crouch in the bilge. I only had a dozen of my spearmen in Isca, the rest were with Issa, but I reckoned these ten men should see me safe to Dun Caric. Balig invited me to sit on a wooden chest beside the steering oar.

‘And throw up over the gunwale, Lord,’ he added cheerfully.

‘Don’t I always?’

‘No. Last time you filled the scuppers with your breakfast. Waste offish-food, that. Cast offforrard, you worm-eaten toad!’ he shouted at his crew, a Saxon slave who had been captured at Mynydd Baddon, but who now had a British wife, two children and a noisy friendship with Balig. ‘Knows his boats, that I’ll say for him,’ Balig said of the Saxon, then he stooped to the stern line that still secured the boat to the bank. He was about to cast the rope off when a shout sounded and we both looked up to see Taliesin hurrying towards us from the grassy mound of Isca’s amphitheatre. Balig held tight to the mooring line. ‘You want me to wait, Lord?’

‘Yes,’ I said, standing as Taliesin came closer.

‘I’m coming with you,’ Taliesin shouted, ‘wait!’ He carried nothing except a small leather bag and a gilded harp. ‘Wait!’ he called again, then hitched up the skirts of his white robe, took off his shoes, and waded into the glutinous mud of the Usk’s bank.

‘Can’t wait for ever,’ Balig grumbled as the bard struggled through the steep mud. ‘Tide’s going fast.’

‘One moment, one moment,’ Taliesin called. He threw his harp, bag and shoes on board, hitched his skirts still higher and waded into the water. Balig reached out, clasped the bard’s hand and hauled him unceremoniously over the gunwale. Taliesin sprawled on the deck, found his shoes, bag and harp, then wrung water from the skirts of his robe. ‘You don’t mind if I come, Lord?’ he asked me, the silver fillet askew on his black hair.

‘Why should I?’

‘Not that I intend to accompany you. I just wish passage to Dumnonia.’ He straightened the silver fillet, then frowned at my grinning spearmen. ‘Do those men know how to row?’

‘Course they don’t,’ Balig answered for me. ‘They’re spearmen, no use for anything useful. Do it together, you bastards! Ready? Push forward! Oars down! Pull!’ He shook his head in mock despair.

‘Might as well teach pigs to dance.’

It was about nine miles to the open sea from Isca, nine miles that we covered swiftly because our boat was carried by the ebbing tide and the river’s swirling current. The Usk slid between glistening mudbanks that climbed to fallow fields, bare woods and wide marshes. Wicker fish traps stood on the banks where herons and gulls pecked at the flapping salmon stranded by the falling tide. Redshanks called plaintively while snipe climbed and swooped above their nests. We hardly needed the oars, for together the tide and current were carrying us fast, and once we reached the widening water where the river spilled into the Severn, Balig and his crewman hoisted a ragged brown sail that caught the west wind and made the boat surge forward. ‘Ship those oars now,’ he ordered my men, then he grasped the big steering oar and stood happily as the small ship dipped her blunt prow into the first big waves. ‘The sea will be lively today, Lord,’ he called cheerfully. ‘Scoop that water out!’ he shouted to my spearmen. ‘The wet stuff belongs outside a boat, not in it.’ Balig grinned at my incipient misery. ‘Three hours, Lord, that’s all, and we’ll have you ashore.’

‘You dislike boats?’ Taliesin asked me.

‘I hate them.’

‘A prayer to Manawydan should avert sickness,’ he said calmly. He had hauled a pile of nets beside my chest and now sat on them. He was plainly untroubled by the boat’s violent motion, indeed he seemed to enjoy it. ‘I slept last night in the amphitheatre,’ he told me. ‘I like to do that,’ he went on when he saw I was too miserable to respond. ‘The banked seats serve like a dream tower.’

I glanced at him, my sickness somehow lessened by those last two words for they reminded me of Merlin who had once possessed a dream tower on the summit of Ynys Wydryn’s Tor. Merlin’s dream tower had been a hollow wooden structure that he claimed magnified the messages of the Gods, and I could understand how Isca’s Roman amphitheatre with its high banked seats set about its raked sand arena might serve the same purpose. ‘Were you seeing the future?’ I managed to ask him.

‘Some of it,’ he admitted, ‘but I also met Merlin in my dream last night.’

The mention of that name drove away the last qualms in my belly. ‘You spoke with Merlin?’ I asked.

‘He spoke to me,’ Taliesin corrected me, ‘but he could not hear me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘More than I can tell you, Lord, and nothing you wish to hear.’

‘What?’ I demanded.

He grabbed at the stern post as the boat pitched off a steep wave. Water sprayed back from the bows and spattered on the bundles that held our armour. Taliesin made sure his harp was well protected under his robe, then touched the silver fillet that circled his tonsured head to make certain it was still in place. ‘I think, Lord, that you travel into danger,’ he said calmly.

‘Is that Merlin’s message,’ I asked, touching the iron of Hywel-bane’s hilt, ‘or one of your visions?’

‘Only a vision,’ he confessed, ‘and as I once told you, Lord, it is better to see the present clearly than to try and discern a shape in the visions of the future.’ He paused, evidently considering his next words carefully. ‘You have not, I think, heard definite news of Mordred’s death?’

‘No.’

‘If my vision was right,’ he said, ‘then your King is not sick at all, but has recovered. I could be wrong, indeed I pray I am wrong, but have you had any omens?’

‘About Mordred’s death?’ I asked.

‘About your own future, Lord,’ he said.

I thought for a second. There had been the small augury of the salmon-fisher’s net, but that I ascribed to my own superstitious fears rather than to the Gods. More worryingly, the small blue-green agate in the ring that Aelle had given to Ceinwyn had fallen out, and one of my old cloaks had been stolen, and though both events could have been construed as bad omens, they could equally well be mere mishaps. It was hard to tell, and neither loss seemed portentous enough to mention to Taliesin. ‘Nothing has worried me lately,’ I told him instead.