Bernard Cornwell: Enemy of God

‘What favour, Lady’’

‘Ask him to let me go, Derfel. Tell him I will sail beyond the sea. Tell him he may keep our son, and that he is our son, and that I will go away and he will never see me or hear of me again.’

‘I shall ask him, Lady,’ I said.

She caught the doubt in my voice and stared sadly at me. The spider had disappeared into her thick red hair. ‘You think he will refuse?’ she asked in a small frightened voice.

‘Lady,’ I said, ‘he loves you. He loves you so well that I do not think he can ever let you go.’

A tear showed at her eye, then spilled down her cheek. ‘So what will he do with me?’ she asked, and I gave no answer. ‘What will he do, Derfel?’ Guinevere demanded again with some of her old energy.

‘Tell me!’

‘Lady,’ I said heavily, ‘he will put you somewhere safe and he will keep you there, under guard.’ And every day, I thought, he would think of her, and every night he would conjure her in his dreams, and in every dawn he would turn in his bed to find that she was gone. ‘You will be well treated, Lady,’ I assured her gently.

‘No,’ she wailed. She could have expected death, but this promise of imprisonment seemed even worse to her. ‘Tell him to let me go, Derfel. Just tell him to let me go!’

‘I shall ask him,’ I promised her, ‘but I do not think he will. I do not think he can.’

She was crying hard now, her head in her hands, and though I waited, she said nothing more and so I backed out of the hut. Gwydre had found his father’s company too glum and so wanted to go back in to his mother, but I took him away and made him help me clean and re-sharpen Excalibur. Poor Gwydre was frightened, for he did not understand what had happened and neither Guinevere nor Arthur was able to explain. ‘Your mother is very sick,’ I told him, ‘and you know that sick people sometimes have to be on their own.’ I smiled at him. ‘Maybe you can come and live with Morwenna and Seren.’

‘Can I?”‘

‘I think your mother and father will say yes,’ I said, ‘and I’d like that. Now don’t scrub the sword!

Sharpen it. Long smooth strokes, like that!’

At midday I went to the western gate and watched for Lancelot’s messenger. But none came. No one came. Lancelot’s army was just shredding away like sand washed off a stone by rain. A few went south and Lancelot rode with those men and the swan’s wings on his helmet showed bright and white as he went away, but most of the men came to the meadow at the foot of the Caer and there they laid down their spears, their shields and their swords and then knelt in the grass for Arthur’s mercy.

‘You’ve won, Lord,’ I said.

‘Yes, Derfel,’ he said, still sitting, ‘it looks as if I have.’ His new beard, so oddly grey, made him look older. Not feebler, but older and harsher. It suited him. Above his head a stir of wind lifted the banner of the bear.

I sat beside him. ‘The Princess Guinevere,’ I said, watching as the enemy’s army laid down their weapons and knelt below us, ‘begged me to ask you a favour.’ He said nothing. He did not even look at me. ‘She wants — ’

‘To go away,’ he interrupted me.

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘With her sea-eagle,’ he said bitterly.

‘She did not say that, Lord.’

‘Where else would she go?’ he asked, then turned his cold eyes on me. ‘Did he ask for her?’

‘No, Lord. He said nothing.’

Arthur laughed at that, but it was a cruel laugh. ‘Poor Guinevere,’ he said, ‘poor, poor Guinevere. He doesn’t love her, does he? She was just something beautiful for him, another mirror in which to stare at his own beauty. That must hurt her, Derfel, that must hurt her.’

‘She begs you to free her,’ I persevered, as I had promised I would. ‘She will leave Gwydre to you, she will go. .’

‘She can make no conditions,’ Arthur said angrily. ‘None.’

‘No, Lord,’ I said. I had done my best for her and I had failed.

‘She will stay in Dumnonia,’ Arthur decreed.

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘And you will stay here too,’ he ordered me harshly. Mordred might release you from his oath, but I do not. You are my man, Derfel, you are my councillor and you will stay here with me. From this day on you are my champion.’

I turned to look at where the newly-cleaned and sharpened sword lay on the royal stone. ‘Am I still a King’s champion, Lord?’ I asked.

‘We already have a king,’ he said, ‘and I will not break that oath, but I will rule this country. No one else, Derfel, just me’

I thought of the bridge at Pontes where we had crossed the river before fighting Aelle. ‘If you won’t be King, Lord,’ I said, ‘then you shall be our Emperor. You shall be a Lord of Kings.’

He smiled. It was the first smile I had seen on his face since Nimue had swept aside the black curtain in the Sea Palace. It was a wan smile, but it was there. Nor did he refuse my title. The Emperor Arthur, Lord of Kings.

Lancelot was gone and what had been his army now knelt to us in terror. Their banners were fallen, their spears were grounded and their shields lay flat. The madness had swept across Dumnonia like a thunderstorm, but it had passed and Arthur had won and below us, under a high summer sun, a whole army knelt for his mercy. It was what Guinevere had once dreamed of. It was Dumnonia at Arthur’s feet with his sword on its royal stone, but it was too late now. Too late for her. But for us, who had kept our oaths, it was what we had always wanted, for now, in all but name, Arthur was King.

The story of Arthur continues in the third volume of The Warlord Chronicles

Cauldron stories are common in Celtic folk-tales, and their quest was liable to send bands of warriors to dark and dangerous places. Ciichulain, that great Irish hero, is said to have stolen a magic cauldron from a mighty fortress, and similar themes recur in Welsh myth. The source of those myths is now quite impossible to disentangle, but we can be fairly certain that the popular medieval tales of the search for the Holy Grail were merely a Christianized re-working of the much older cauldron myths. One such tale involves the cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn, which was one of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain. Those treasures have disappeared from the modern re-tellings of the Arthurian saga, but they were firmly there in earlier times. The list of the Treasures varies from source to source, so I compiled a fairly representative sample, though Nimue’s explanation of their origins on page 100 is entirely an invention. Cauldrons and magical treasures tell us that we are in pagan territory, which makes it odd that the later Arthur tales are so heavily Christianized. Was Arthur the ‘enemy of God’? Some early tales do indeed suggest that the Celtic church was hostile to Arthur; thus in the Life of St Padarn Arthur is said to have stolen the saint’s red tunic and only agreed to return it after the saint had buried him up to the neck. Arthur is similarly supposed to have stolen St Carannog’s altar to use as a dining table; indeed, in many saints’ lives, Arthur is depicted as a tyrant who is only thwarted by the holy man’s piety or prayers. St Cadoc was evidently a famous opponent whose Life boasts of the number of times he defeated Arthur, including one fairly distasteful story in which Arthur, interrupted during a game of dice by fleeing lovers, attempts to rape the girl. This Arthur, a thief, liar, and would-be rapist, is clearly not the Arthur of modern legend, but the stones do suggest that Arthur had somehow earned the strong dislike of the early church and the simplest explanation of that dislike is that Arthur was a pagan. We cannot be sure of that, any more than we can guess what kind of pagan he was. The native British religion, Druidism, had been so abraded by four centuries of Roman rule that it was a mere husk by the late fifth century, though doubtless it clung on in the rural parts of Britain. Druidism’s ‘dolorous blow’ was the black year of ad6o, when the Romans stormed Ynys Mon (Anglesey) and so destroyed the faith’s cultic centre. Llyn Cerrig Bach, the Lake of Little Stones, existed, and archaeology has suggested it was an important place for Druidic rituals, but alas, the lake and its surrounding features were all obliterated during the Second World War when the Valley Airfield was extended.