Bernard Cornwell - Enemy of God

She laughed again. ‘Right down the shaft and plop onto the pit.’

‘Will Gwydre be in the temple?’ Arthur asked her.

‘Not Gwydre. Men aren’t allowed, that’s what I’m told,’ Gwenhwyvach said in a sarcastic voice, and she seemed about to say something else, but then just shrugged. ‘Gwydre will be put to bed,’ she said instead. She stared at the palace and a slow sly smile showed on her round face. ‘How will you get in, Arthur?’ she asked. ‘There are lots of bars on those doors and all the windows are shuttered.’

‘We shall manage,’ he said, ‘as long as you don’t tell anyone that you saw us.’

‘As long as you leave me here,’ Gwenhwyvach said, ‘I won’t even tell the bees. And I tell them everything. You have to, otherwise the honey goes sour. Isn’t that right, Gwen?’ she asked the bitch, ruffling its floppy ears.

‘I’ll leave you here if that’s what you want,’ Arthur promised her.

‘Just me,’ she said, ‘just me and the dogs and the bees. That’s all I want. Me and the dogs and the bees and the palace. Guinevere can have the moon.’ She smiled again, then poked my shoulder with a plump hand. ‘You remember that cellar door I took you through, Derfel? The one that leads from the garden?’

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘I’ll make sure it’s unbarred.’ She giggled again, anticipating some enjoyment. ‘I’ll hide in the cellar and unbar the door when they’re all waiting for the moon. There are no guards there at night because the door’s too thick. The guards are all in their huts or out the front.’ She twisted to look at Arthur. ‘You will come?’ she asked anxiously.

‘I promise,’ Arthur replied.

‘Guinevere will be pleased,’ Gwenhwyvach said. ‘And so will I.’ She laughed and lumbered to her feet. ‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘when the moon comes plopping in.’ And with that she walked away with the two hounds. She chuckled as she walked and even danced a pair of clumsy steps. ‘Plop!’ she called aloud, and the hounds frisked about her as she capered down the grassy slope.

‘Is she mad?’ I asked Arthur.

‘Bitter, I think.’ He watched her rotund figure go clumsily down the hill. ‘But she’ll let us in, Derfel, she’ll let us in.’ He smiled, then reached forward and picked a handful of cornflowers from the field’s edge. He arranged them into a small bunch then gave me a shy smile. ‘For Guinevere,’ he explained,

‘tonight.’

At dusk the haymakers, their work finished, came back from the fields and the roof guards climbed down their long ladder. The braziers on the arcade were filled with fresh wood that was set alight, but I guessed the fires were meant to illuminate the palace rather than to give warning of any enemy’s approach. Gulls were flying to their inland roosts and the setting sun made their wings as pink as the convolvulus entwined among the brambles.

Hack in the woods Arthur pulled on his scale armour. I le buckled Excalibur over the coat’s gleaming shimmer of metal, then draped a black cloak about his shoulders. He rarely wore black cloaks, preferring his white, but at night the dark garment would help to conceal us. He would carry his shining helmet under the cloak to hide its lavish plume of tall white goose feathers. Ten of his horsemen would stay in the trees. Their task was to wait for the sound of Arthur’s silver horn and then make a charge on the spearmen’s sleeping-huts. The big horses and their armoured riders, trampling huge and noisy out of the night, should serve to panic any guards who might interfere with our retreat. The horn, Arthur hoped, would not be sounded until we had found both Gwydre and Guinevere and were ready to leave.

The rest of us would make the long journey to the palace’s western side, and from there we would creep through the shadows of the kitchen gardens to reach the cellar door. If Gwenhwyvach failed in her promise then we would have to go round to the front of the palace, kill the guards and break through one of the window shutters on the terrace. Once inside the palace we were to kill every spearman we found. Nimue would come with us. When Arthur had finished speaking she told us that Dinas and Lavaine were not proper Druids, not like Merlin or old Iorweth, but she warned us that the Silurian twins did possess some strange powers and we should expect to face their wizardry. She had spent the afternoon searching the woods and now raised a bundled cloak that seemed to twitch as she held it, and that weird sight made my men touch their spearheads. ‘I have things here to check their spells,’ she told us, ‘but be careful.’

‘And I want Dinas and Lavaine alive,’ I told my men.

We waited, armoured and armed, forty men in steel and iron and leather. We waited as the sun died and as Isis’s full moon crept up from the sea like a great round silver ball. Nimue made her spells and some of us prayed. Arthur sat silent, but watched as I took from my pouch a little tress of golden hair. I kissed the unfaded hair, held it briefly against my cheek, then tied it around Hywelbane’s hilt. I felt a tear roll down my face as I thought of my little one in her shadow-body, but tonight, with the help of my Gods, I would give my Dian her peace.

I pulled on my helmet, buckled its chin strap and threw its wolf-hair plume back across my shoulders. We flexed our stiff leather gloves, then thrust our left arms into the shield loops. We drew our swords and held them out for Nimue’s touch. For a moment it looked as if Arthur wanted to say something more, but instead he just tucked his little bouquet of cornflowers into the neck of his scale armour, then nodded to Nimue who, cloaked in black and clutching her strange bundle, led us southwards through the trees.

Beyond the trees was a short meadow that sloped down to the creek’s bank. We crossed the dark meadow in single file, still out of sight of the palace. Our appearance startled some hares that had been feeding in the moonlight and they raced panicking away as we pushed through some low bushes and scrambled down a steep bank to reach the creek’s shingle beach. From there we walked west, hidden from the guards on the palace’s arcades by the high bank of the creek. The sea crashed and hissed to the south, its sound drowning out any noise our boots made on the shingle. I peered over the bank just once to see the Sea Palace poised like a great white wonder in the moonlight above the dark land. Its beauty reminded me of Ynys Trebes, that magical city of the sea that had been ravaged and destroyed by the Franks. This place had the same ethereal beauty for it shimmered above the dark land as though it were built from moonbeams. Once we were well to the west of the palace we climbed the bank, helping each other up with our spear-staffs, and then followed Nimue northwards through the woods. Enough moonlight filtered through the summer leaves to light our path, but no guards challenged us. The sea’s unending sound filled the night, though once a scream sounded very close by and we all froze, then recognized the sound of a hare being killed by a weasel. We breathed our relief and walked on.

We seemed to walk a long way through the trees, but at last Nimue turned east and we followed her to the edge of the wood to see the palace’s limewashed walls in front of us. We were not far from the circular timber moon-shaft that ran down into the temple and I could see that it would still be some time before the moon was high enough in the sky to cast its light down the shaft and into the black-walled cellar.

It was while we were at the edge of the wood that the singing began. At first, so soft was the singing, I thought it was the wind moaning, but then the song became louder and I realized that it was a women’s choir that chanted some strange, eerie and plangent music like nothing I had ever heard before. The song must have been reaching us through the moon-shaft, for it sounded very far away; a ghost song, like a choir of the dead singing to us from the Otherworld. We could hear no words, but we knew it was a sad song for its tune slid weirdly up and down by half-notes, swelled louder, then sank into a lingering softness that melded with the distant murmur of the breaking sea. The music was very beautiful, but it made me shiver and touch my spearhead.