Bernard Cornwell - Enemy of God

Issa submitted to the knife, grinning at me when his hair was gone from the front of his scalp. ‘Do I look like a Christian, Lord?’

‘You look like your father,’ I said, ‘bald and ugly.’

The twelve men wore swords under their robes, but could carry no spears. Instead we knocked their spearheads off their shafts and gave them the bare poles as weapons. Their shaved foreheads looked paler than their faces, but with the cowls of the robes over their heads they would pass as monks. ‘Go,’

Arthur told them.

Caer Cadarn was of no real military value, but as the symbolic place of Dumnonia’s kingship its worth was incalculable. For that reason alone we knew that the old fortress would be heavily guarded and that our twelve false monks would need good luck as well as bravery if they were to trick the garrison into opening the gates. Nimue gave them a blessing and then they scrambled over Pen’s crest and filed down the hill. Maybe it was because we carried the Cauldron, or maybe it was Arthur’s usual luck in war, but our ruse worked. Arthur and I lay in the summit’s warm grass and watched as Issa and his men slipped and stumbled down Pen Hill’s precipitous western slope, crossed the wide pastures and then climbed the steep path that led to Caer Cadarn’s eastern gate. They claimed to be fugitives running from a raid by Arthur’s horsemen and their story convinced the guards, who opened the gate to them. Issa and his men killed those sentries, then snatched up the dead men’s spears and shields so that they could defend the precious open gate. The Christians never forgave Arthur for that ruse either. Arthur scrambled onto Llamrei’s back the moment he saw the Caer’s gate was captured. ‘Come on!’

he shouted, and his twenty horsemen kicked their beasts up over Pen’s crest and so down the steep grassy slope beyond. Ten men followed Arthur up to the fort itself, while the other ten galloped around the foot of Caer Cadarn’s hill to cut off the escape of any of the garrison. The rest of us followed. Lanval had charge of Guinevere and so came more slowly, but my men ran recklessly down the escarpment and up the Caer’s stony path to where Issa and Arthur waited. The garrison, once the gate had fallen, had shown not a scrap of fight. There were fifty spearmen there, mostly maimed veterans or youngsters, but still more than enough to have held the walls against our small force. The handful that tried to escape were easily caught by our horsemen and brought back to the compound, where Issa and I had walked to the rampart over the western gate and there pulled down Lancelot’s flag and raised Arthur’s bear in its place. Nimue burned the cut hair, then spat at the terrified monks who had been living on the Caer to supervise the building of Sansum’s great church. Those monks, who showed far more defiance than the garrison’s spearmen, had already dug the foundations of the church and lined them with rocks from the stone circle that had stood on the Caer’s summit. They had pulled down half of the feasting hall’s walls and used the timber to begin raising the church walls which stood in the shape of a cross. ‘It’ll burn nicely,’ Issa said cheerfully, rubbing his new bald patch.

Guinevere and her son, denied the use of the hall, were given the largest hut on the Caer. It was home to a spearman’s family, but they were turned out and Guinevere was ordered inside. She looked at the rye-straw bedding and the cobwebs in the rafters and shuddered. Lanval put a spearman at the door, then watched as one of Arthur’s horsemen dragged in the garrison’s commander who was one of the men who had tried to flee.

The defeated commander was Loholt, one of Arthur’s sour twin sons who had made his mother Ailleann’s life a misery and had ever resented their father. Now Loholt, who had found his Lord in Lancelot, was dragged by the hair to where his father waited.

Loholt fell to his knees. Arthur stared at him for a long time, then turned and walked away. ‘Father!’

Loholt shouted, but Arthur ignored him.

He walked to the line of prisoners. He recognized some of the men for they had once served him, while others had come from Lancelot’s old kingdom of the Belgae. Those men, nineteen of them, were taken to the half-built church and there put to death. It was a harsh punishment, but Arthur was in no mood to give mercy to men who had invaded his country. He ordered my men to kill them, and they did. The monks protested and the prisoners’ wives and children screamed at us until I ordered them all to be taken to the east gate and thrown out.

Thirty-one prisoners remained, all Dumnonians, and Arthur counted down their ranks and chose six men: the fifth man, the tenth, the fifteenth, the twentieth, the twenty-fifth and the thirtieth. ‘Kill them,’ he ordered me coldly, and I marched the six men down to the church and added their corpses to the bloody pile. The rest of the captured prisoners knelt and, one by one, kissed Arthur’s sword to renew their oaths, though before each man kissed the blade he was forced to kneel before Nimue who branded his forehead with a spearhead that she kept fired to red heat in a cooking fire. The men were all thus marked as warriors who had rebelled against an oath-lord and the fire-scar on their foreheads meant they would be put to death if they ever proved false again. For now, their foreheads burned and hurting, they made dubious allies, but Arthur still led over eighty men, a small army.

Loholt waited on his knees. He was still very young, fresh-faced and with a skimpy beard that Arthur gripped and used to drag him to the royal stone that was all that remained of the old circle. He threw his son down by the stone. ‘Where is your brother?’ he demanded.

‘With Lancelot, Lord.’ Loholt trembled. He was terrified by the stench of burning skin.

‘And where is that?’

‘They went north, Lord.’ Loholt looked up at his father.

‘Then you can join them,’ Arthur said, and Loholt’s face showed utter relief that he was to live. ‘But tell me first,’ Arthur went on in a voice like ice, ‘just why you raised a hand against your father?’

‘They said you were dead, Lord.’

‘And what did you do, son, to avenge my death?’ Arthur asked, then waited for an answer, but Loholt had none. ‘And when you heard I was alive,’ Arthur went on, ‘why did you still oppose me?’

Loholt stared up at his father’s implacable face and from somewhere he found his courage. ‘You were never a father to us,’ he said bitterly.

Arthur’s face was wrenched by a spasm and I thought he was about to burst into a terrible rage, but when he spoke again his voice was oddly calm. ‘Put your right hand on the stone,’ he ordered Loholt. Loholt believed he was to take an oath and so he obediently placed his hand on the royal stone’s centre. Then Arthur drew Excalibur and Loholt understood what his father intended and snatched his hand back. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Please! No!’

‘Hold it there, Derfel,’ Arthur said.

Loholt struggled with me, but he was no match for my strength. I slapped his face to subdue him, then bared his right arm to the elbow and forced it flat onto the stone and there held it firm as Arthur raised the blade. Loholt was crying, ‘No, father! Please!’

But Arthur had no mercy that day. Not for many a day. ‘You raised your hand against your own father, Loholt, and for that you lose both the father and the hand. I disown you.’ And with that dreadful curse he slashed the sword down and a jet of blood spurted across the stone as Loholt twisted violently back. He shrieked as he snatched his bloody stump back and gazed in horror at his severed hand, then he whimpered in agony. ‘Bind it,’ Arthur ordered Nimue, ‘then the little fool can go.’ He walked away. I kicked the severed hand with its two pathetic warrior rings off the stone. Arthur had let Excalibur fall onto the grass, so I picked up the blade and laid it reverently across the patch of blood. That, I thought was proper. The right sword on the right stone, and it had taken so many years to put it there.