Bernard Cornwell - Enemy of God

He cautiously let go of the tusks, then dissolved into helpless laughter. Bors and I took a tusk each and, with a concerted heave, hauled the corpse away from Arthur. One of the tusks had caught in Arthur’s jerkin and it ripped the cloth as we tugged it away. We dropped the beast into the brambles, then helped Arthur to his feet. The three of us stood grinning, our clothes muddied and torn and covered with leaves, twigs and the blood of the boar. ‘I’ll have a bruise there,’ Arthur said, tapping his chest. He turned to Lancelot, who had not moved to help during the struggle. There was the briefest pause, then Arthur bowed his head. ‘You gave me a noble gift, Lord King,’ he said, ‘and I took it most ignobly.’ He wiped his eyes. ‘But I enjoyed it all the same. And we shall all enjoy it at your betrothal feast.’ He looked at Guinevere and saw that she was pale, almost trembling, and immediately he crossed to her. ‘Are you ill?’

‘No, no,’ she said, and she put her arms about him and leaned her head against his bloodied chest. She was crying. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry.

Arthur patted her back. ‘There was no danger, my love,’ he said, ‘no danger. I just made a hash of the killing.’

‘Are you hurt?’ Guinevere asked, pulling away from him and cuffing away her tears.

‘Only scratched.’ His face and hands were lacerated by thorns, but he was otherwise unwounded except for the bruise caused by the tusk. He stepped away from her, picked up his spear and gave a whoop. ‘I haven’t been put on my back like that in a dozen years!’

King Cuneglas came running, worried about his guests, and the huntsmen arrived to truss and carry the corpse away. They must all have noted the comparison between Lancelot’s unstained clothes and our dishevelled and bloody state, but no one remarked on it. We were all excited, pleased to have survived and eager to share the story of Arthur holding the brute away from his body by its tusks. The story spread and the sound of men’s laughter rang loud among the trees. Lancelot alone did not laugh. ‘We must find you a boar now, Lord King,’ I said to him. We were standing a few paces from the excited crowd that had gathered to watch as the huntsmen gralloched the beast to give Guinevere’s hounds a meal of its guts.

Lancelot gave me a sidelong, considering glance. He disliked me every scrap as much as I disliked him, but suddenly he smiled. ‘A boar,’ he said, ‘would be better than a sow, I think.’

‘A sow?’ I asked, smelling an insult.

‘Didn’t the sow charge you?” he asked, then opened his eyes guilelessly wide. ‘Surely you don’t think I was referring to your marriage!’ He offered me an ironic bow. ‘I must congratulate you, Lord Derfel!

To marry Gwenhwyvach!’

I forced my anger down, and made myself look into his narrow mocking face with its delicate beard, dark eyes, and long hair oiled as black and shining as a raven’s wing. ‘And I must congratulate you, Lord King, on your betrothal.’

‘To Seren,’ he said, ‘the star of Powys.’ He gazed at Ceinwyn who stood with her hands clasped to her face as the huntsmen’s knives ripped out the long coils of the boar’s intestines. She looked so young with her bright hair drawn up at the nape of her neck. ‘Doesn’t she look charming?’ Lancelot asked me in a voice like the purr of a cat. ‘So vulnerable. I never believed the stories of her beauty, for who would expect to find such a jewel among Gorfyddyd’s whelps? But she is beautiful, and I am so very fortunate.’

‘Yes, Lord King, you are.’

He laughed and turned away. He was a man in his glory, a King come to take his bride, and he was also my enemy. But I had his bone in my pouch. I touched it, wondering if the struggle with the boar had broken the rib, but it was still whole, still hidden and just waiting for my pleasure. Cavan, my second-in-command, came to Caer Sws on the eve of Ceinwyn’s betrothal and brought with him forty of my spearmen. Galahad had sent them back, reckoning that his work in Siluria could be completed by the twenty remaining men. The Silurians, it seems, had glumly accepted their country’s defeat and there had been no unrest at the news of their King’s death, merely a docile submission to the exactions of the victors. Cavan told me that Oengus of Demetia, the Irish King who had brought Arthur victory at Lugg Vale, had taken his allotted portion of slaves and treasure, stolen as much again, and had then gone home, and the Silurians were evidently happy enough that the renowned Lancelot was now to be their King. ‘And I reckon the bastard’s welcome to the place,’ Cavan said when he found me in Cuneglas’s hall where I spread my blanket and took my meals. He scratched at a louse in his beard.

‘Scrubby place, Siluria.’

‘They breed good warriors,’ I said.

‘Fighting to get away from home, I wouldn’t wonder.’ He sniffed. ‘What clawed your face, Lord?’

‘Thorns. Fighting a boar.’

‘I thought you might have got married when I wasn’t watching you,’ he said, ‘and that was her wedding gift.’

‘I am to be married,’ I told him as we walked out of the hall into Caer Sws’s sunlight, and I described Arthur’s proposal to make me Mordred’s champion and his own brother-in-law. Cavan was pleased at the news of my imminent enrichment for he was an Irish exile who had sought to turn his skills with spear and sword into a fortune in Uther’s Dumnonia, but somehow the fortune had kept slipping away across the throwboard. He was twice my age, a squat man, broad-shouldered, grey-bearded and with hands thick with the warrior rings we forged from the weapons of defeated enemies. He was delighted that my marriage would mean gold and he was tactful about the bride who would bring that metal. ‘She isn’t a beauty like her sister,’ he said.

‘True,’ I admitted.

‘In fact,’ he said, abandoning tact, ‘she’s as ugly as a sack of toads.’

‘She is plain,’ I conceded.

‘But plain ones make the best wives, Lord,’ he declared, never having been married himself, though never lonely either. ‘And she’ll bring us all wealth,’ he added happily, and that, of course, was the reason I would marry poor Gwenhwyvach. My common sense could not put faith in the pork rib in my pouch, and my duty to my men was to reward them for their fidelity, and those rewards had been few in the last year. They had lost virtually all their possessions at the fall of Ynys Trebes and had then struggled against Gorfyddyd’s army at Lugg Vale; now they were tired, they were impoverished and no men had ever deserved more of their lord.

I greeted my forty men who were waiting to be assigned quarters. I was glad to see Issa among them, for he was the best of my spearmen: a young farm boy of huge strength and undying optimism who protected my right side in battle. I embraced him, then expressed my regrets that I had no gifts for them.

‘But our reward is coming soon,’ I added, then glanced at the two dozen girls they must have attracted in Siluria, ‘though I’m glad to see most of you have already found some rewards for yourselves.’

They laughed. Issa’s girl was a pretty dark-haired child of perhaps fourteen summers. He introduced her to me. ‘Scarach, Lord.’ He named her proudly.

‘Irish?’ I asked her.

She nodded. ‘I was a slave. Lord, to Ladwys.’ Scarach spoke the tongue of Ireland; a language like ours, but different enough, like her name, to mark her race. I guessed she had been captured by Gundleus’s men in a raid on King Oengus’s lands in Demetia. Most Irish slaves came from such settlements on Britain’s west coast though none, I suspected, were ever captured from Lleyn. No one but a fool ventured uninvited into Diwrnach’s territory.