Bernard Cornwell - Enemy of God

‘Guinevere,’ I suddenly said the name aloud.

‘Lord?’ Issa asked in puzzlement.

I shook my head to show that I had nothing more to say. Indeed, I had not meant to speak Guinevere’s name aloud, yet I had suddenly understood that to break the bone would do more than encourage Merlin’s campaign against the Christian God, it would also make Guinevere into my enemy. I closed my eyes. Could my Lord’s wife be an enemy? And what if she were? Arthur would still love me, and I him, and my spears and starry shields were worth more to him than all Lancelot’s fame. I stood and retrieved the brooch, the bone and the sword. Issa watched as I pulled a thread of green-dyed wool from my cloak and jammed it between the stones. ‘You were not at Caer Sws,’ I asked him, ‘when Arthur broke his betrothal to Ceinwyn?’

‘No, Lord. I heard about it, though.’

‘It was at the betrothal feast,’ I said, ‘just like the one we’ll attend tonight. Arthur was sitting at the high table with Ceinwyn beside him and he saw Guinevere at the back of the hall. She was standing in a shabby cloak with her hounds beside her and Arthur saw her there and nothing was ever the same again. The Gods alone know how many men died because he saw that head of red hair.’ I turned back to the low stone wall and saw there was an abandoned nest inside one of the mossy skulls. ‘Merlin tells me that the Gods love chaos,’ I said.

‘Merlin loves chaos,’ Issa said lightly, though there was more truth in his words than he knew.

‘Merlin loves it,’ I agreed, ‘but most of us fear chaos and that’s why we try to make order.’ I thought of the carefully ordered pile of bones. ‘But when you have order, you don’t need Gods. When everything is well ordered and disciplined then nothing is unexpected. If you understand everything,’ I said carefully,

‘then there’s no room left for magic. It’s only when you’re lost and frightened and in the dark that you call on the Gods, and they like us to call on them. It makes them feel powerful, and that’s why they like us to live in chaos.’ I was repeating the lessons of my childhood, the lessons given to us on Merlin’s Tor.

‘And now we have a choice,’ I told Issa. ‘We can live in Arthur’s well-ordered Britain or we can follow Merlin to chaos.’

‘I’ll follow you, Lord, whatever you do,’ Issa said. I do not think he understood what I was saying, but he was content to trust me anyway.

‘I wish I knew what to do,’ I confessed. How easy it would be, I thought, if the Gods just walked Britain as they used to. Then we could see them, hear them and talk to them, but now we were like blindfolded men seeking a clasp-pin in a thorn thicket. I strapped the sword back into its place, then tucked the unbroken bone safe back in the pouch. ‘I want you to give a message to the men,’ I told Issa.

‘Not to Cavan, for I’ll talk to him myself, but I want you to tell them that if anything strange happens this night, they are released from their oaths to me.’

He frowned at me. ‘Released from our oaths?’ he asked, then shook his head vigorously. ‘Not me, Lord.’

I hushed him. ‘And tell them,’ I went on, ‘that if something strange does happen, and it may not, then loyalty to my oath could mean fighting against Diwrnach.’

‘Diwrnach!’ Issa said. He spat and made the symbol against evil with his right hand.

‘Tell them that, Issa,’ I said.

‘So what might happen tonight?’ he asked me anxiously.

‘Maybe nothing,’ I said, ‘maybe nothing at all,’ because the Gods had given me no sign in the grove and I still did not know what I would choose. Order or chaos. Or neither, for maybe the bone was nothing but a piece of kitchen scrap and its breaking would do nothing except symbolize my own shattered love for Ceinwyn. But there was only one way to find out, and that was to break the bone. If I dared.

At Ceinwyn’s betrothal feast.

Of all the feasts of those late summer nights the betrothal feast of Lancelot and Ceinwyn was the most lavish. Even the Gods seemed to favour it, for the moon was full and clear, and that was a wonderful omen for a betrothal. The moon rose shortly after sunset, a silver orb that loomed huge above the peaks where Dolforwyn lay. I had wondered if the feast would be held in Dolforwyn’s hall, but Cuneglas, seeing the huge number to be fed, had decided to keep the celebrations inside Caer Sws. There were far too many guests for the King’s hall, and so only the most privileged were allowed inside its thick wooden walls. The rest sat outside, grateful that the Gods had sent a dry night. The ground was still wet from the rain earlier in the week, but there was plenty of straw for men to make dry seats. Pitch-soaked torches had been tied to stakes and, moments after the moonrise, those torches were lit so that the royal compound was suddenly bright with leaping flames. The wedding would be held in the daylight so that Gwydion, the God of light, and Belenos, the God of the sun, would grant their blessing, but the betrothal was given to the moon’s blessing. Every now and then a burning wisp from a torch would float to earth to set alight a patch of straw and there would be bellows of laughter, screaming children, barking dogs and a flurry of panic until the fire was extinguished. Over a hundred men were guests inside Cuneglas’s hall. Tapers and rush lights were clustered together to flicker weird shadows in the high, beamed thatch where the sprays of beech leaves were now mixed with the year’s first clusters of holly berries. The hall’s one table was set on the dais beneath a row of shields and each shield had a taper below it to illuminate the device painted on the leather. At the centre was Cuneglas’s royal shield of Powys with its spread-winged eagle, and on one side of the eagle was Arthur’s black bear and on the other Dumnonia’s red dragon. Guinevere’s device of a moon-crowned stag was hung next to the bear, while Lancelot’s sea-eagle flew with a fish in its claws next to the dragon. No one was present from Gwent, but Arthur had insisted that Tewdric’s black bull be hung, along with Elmet’s red horse and the fox mask of Siluria. The royal symbols marked the great alliance; the shield-wall that would batter the Saxons back to the sea.

Iorweth, Powys’s chief Druid, announced the moment when he was certain that the last rays of the dying sun had vanished into the far Irish Sea, and then the guests of honour took their places on the dais. The rest of us were already seated on the hall’s floor where men were calling for more of Powys’s famously strong mead that had been specially brewed for this night. Cheers and applause greeted the honoured guests.

Queen Elaine came first. Lancelot’s mother was dressed in blue with a gold torque at her throat and a golden chain binding the coils of her grey hair. A huge roar welcomed Cuneglas and Queen Helledd next. The King’s round face beamed with pleasure at the prospect of this night’s celebration in honour of which he had tied small white ribbons to his dangling moustaches. Arthur came in sober black, while Guinevere, following him to the dais, was splendid in her gown of pale gold linen. It was cut and stitched cunningly so that the precious fabric, skilfully dyed with soot and hive-gum, seemed to cling to her tall, straight body. Her belly barely betrayed her pregnancy and a murmur of appreciation for her beauty sounded among the watching men. Small gold scales had been sewn into the gown’s cloth so that her body appeared to glint as she slowly followed Arthur to the centre of the dais. She smiled at the lust she knew she had provoked, and that she wanted to provoke, for this night Guinevere was determined to outshine whatever Ceinwyn wore. A circlet of gold held Guinevere’s unruly red hair in place, a belt of golden chain links was looped around her waist, while in honour of Lancelot she wore at her neck a golden brooch depicting a sea-eagle. She kissed Queen Elaine on both cheeks, kissed Cuneglas on one, bobbed her head to Queen Helledd, then sat at Cuneglas’s right hand while Arthur slipped into the empty chair beside Helledd.