Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

‘If I must,’ he said, and did not seem worried by the prospect, but why should he have been worried? He outnumbered us, and at least half my men had neither shields nor spears. I turned to my men. ‘If you wish to surrender,’ I told them, ‘then step out of the ring. But as for me, I will fight.’ Two of my unarmed men took a hesitant step forward, but Eachern snarled at them and they froze. I waved them away. ‘Go,’ I said sadly. ‘I don’t want to cross the bridge of swords with unwilling companions.’ The two men walked away, but Amhar just nodded to his horsemen and they surrounded the pair, swung their swords and more blood flowed on Dun Caric’s summit. ‘You bastard!’ I said, and ran at Amhar, but he just twitched his reins and spurred his horse out of my reach, and while he evaded me his men spurred in towards my spearmen.

It was another slaughter, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. Eachern killed one of Amhar’s men, but while his spear was still fixed in that man’s belly, another horseman cut Eachern down from behind. The rest of my men died just as swiftly. Amhar’s spearmen were merciful in that, at least. They did not let my men’s souls linger, but chopped and stabbed with a ferocious energy. I knew little of it, for while I pursued Amhar one of his men spurred behind me and gave me a huge blow across the back of my head. I fell, my head reeling in a black fog shot through with streaks of light. I remember falling to my knees, then a second blow struck my helmet and I thought I must be dying. But Amhar wanted me alive, and when I recovered my wits I found myself lying on one of Dun Caric’s dung-heaps with my wrists tied with rope and Hywelbane’s scabbard hanging at Amhar’s waist. My armour had been taken, and a thin gold torque stolen from around my neck, but Amhar and his men had not found Ceinwyn’s brooch that was still safely pinned beneath my jerkin. Now they were busy sawing off the heads of my spearmen with their swords. ‘Bastard,’ I spat the insult at Amhar, but he just grinned and turned back to his grisly work. He chopped through Eachern’s spine with Hywelbane, then gripped the head by the hair and tossed it onto the pile of heads that were being gathered into a cloak. ‘A fine sword,’ he told me, balancing Hywelbane in his hand.

‘Then use it to send me to the Otherworld.’

‘My brother would never forgive me for showing such mercy,’ he said, then he cleaned Hywelbane’s blade on his ragged cloak and thrust it into the scabbard. He beckoned three of his men forward, then drew a small knife from his belt. ‘At Mynydd Baddon,’ he said, facing me, ‘you called me a bastard cur and a worm-ridden puppy. Do you think I am a man to forget insults?’

‘The truth is ever memorable,’ I told him, though I had to force the defiance into my voice for my soul was in terror.

‘Your death will certainly be memorable,’ Amhar said, ‘but for the moment you must be content with the attentions of a barber.’ He nodded at his men.

I fought them, but with my hands bound and my head still throbbing, there was little I could do to resist them. Two men held me fast against the dung-heap while the third gripped my head by the hair as Amhar, his right knee braced against my chest, cut off my beard. He did it crudely, slicing into the skin with each stroke, and he tossed the cut hanks of hair to one of his grinning men who teased the strands apart and wove them into a short rope. Once the rope was finished it was made into a noose that was put about my neck. It was the supreme insult to a captured warrior, the humiliation of having a slave’s leash made from his own beard. They laughed at me when it was done, then Amhar hauled me to my feet by tugging on the beard-leash. ‘We did the same to Issa,’ he said.

‘Liar,’ I retorted feebly.

‘And made his wife watch,’ Amhar said with a smile, ‘then made him watch while we dealt with her. They’re both dead now.’

I spat in his face, but he just laughed at me. I had called him a liar, but I believed him. Mordred, I thought, had worked his return to Britain so efficiently. He had spread the tale of his imminent death, and all the while Argante had been shipping her hoarded gold to Clovis, and Clovis, thus purchased, had let Mordred go free. And Mordred had sailed to Dumnonia and was now killing his enemies. Issa was dead, and I did not doubt that most of his spearmen, and the spearmen I had left in Dumnonia, had died with him. I was a prisoner. Only Sagramor remained.

They tied my beard-leash to the tail of Amhar’s horse, then marched me southwards. Amhar’s forty spearmen formed a mocking escort, laughing whenever I stumbled. They dragged Gwydre’s banner through the mud from the tail of another horse.

They took me to Caer Cadarn, and once there they threw me into a hut. It was not the hut in which we had imprisoned Guinevere so many years before, but a much smaller one with a low door through which I had to crawl, helped by the boots and spear staves of my captors. I scrambled into the hut’s shadows and there saw another prisoner, a man brought from Durnovaria whose face was red from weeping. For a moment he did not recognize me without my beard, but then he gasped in astonishment. ‘Derfel?’

‘Bishop,’ I said wearily, for it was Sansum, and we were both Mordred’s prisoners.

‘It’s a mistake!’ Sansum insisted. ‘I shouldn’t be here!’

‘Tell them,’ I said, jerking my head towards the guards outside the hut, ‘not me.’

‘I did nothing. Except serve Argante! And look how they reward me!’

‘Be quiet,’ I said.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus!’ He fell on his knees, spread his arms and gazed up at the cobwebs in the thatch.

‘Send an angel for me! Take me to Thy sweet bosom.’

‘Will you be quiet?’ I snarled, but he went on praying and weeping, while I stared morosely towards Caer Cadarn’s wei summit where a heap of severed heads was being piled. Mj men’s heads were there, joining scores of others that had beer fetched from all across Dumnonia. A chair draped in a pale blue cloth was perched on top of the pile; Mordred’s throne. Women and children, the families of Mordred’s spearmen, peered at the grisly heap, and some then came to look through our hut’s low door and laugh at my beardless face.

‘Where’s Mordred?’ I asked Sansum.

‘How would I know?’ he answered, interrupting his prayer.

‘Then what do you know?’ I asked. He shuffled back onto the bench. He had done me one small service by fumbling the rope free from my wrists, but the freedom gave me little comfort for I could see six spearmen guarding the hut, and I did not doubt that there were others I could not see. One man just sat facing the hut’s open entrance with a spear, begging me to try and crawl through the low door and thus give him a chance of skewering me. I had no chance of overpowering any of them. ‘What do you know?’ I asked Sansum again.

‘The King came back two nights ago,’ he said, ‘with hundreds of men.’

‘How many?’

He shrugged. ‘Three hundred? Four? I couldn’t count them, there were so many. They killed Issa in Durnovaria.’

I closed my eyes and said a prayer for poor Issa and his family. ‘When did they arrest you?’ I asked Sansum.

‘Yesterday.’ He looked indignant. ‘And for nothing! I welcomed him home! I didn’t know he was alive, but I was glad to see him. I rejoiced! And for that they arrested me!’

‘So why do they think they arrested you?’ I asked him.

‘Argante claims I was writing to Meurig, Lord, but that can’t be true! I have no skill with letters. You know that.’

‘Your clerks do, Bishop.’

Sansum adopted an indignant look. ‘And why should I talk to Meurig?’

‘Because you were plotting to give him the throne, Sansum,’ I said, ‘and don’t deny it. I talked with him two weeks ago.’