Bernard Cornwell - Enemy of God

Cuneglas visited us often, though his wife, Helledd, never came. Queen Helledd was truly conventional and she disapproved deeply of what Ceinwyn had done. ‘She thinks it brings disgrace on the family,’

Cuneglas told us cheerfully. He became, like Arthur and Galahad, one of my dearest friends. He was, I think, lonely in Caer Sws, for other than Iorweth and some of the younger Druids he had few men with whom he could talk of anything but hunting and war, and so I replaced the brothers he had lost. His older brother, who should have become King, had been killed in a fall from a horse, the next son had died of a fever and the youngest had been killed fighting the Saxons. Cuneglas, like me, deeply disapproved of Ceinwyn’s going on the Dark Road, but he told me that nothing short of a sword blow would ever stop her. ‘Everyone always thinks she’s so sweet and kind,’ he told me, ‘but there’s a will of iron there. Stubborn.’

‘Can’t kill chickens.’

‘I can’t even imagine her trying!’ he laughed. ‘But she is happy, Derfel, and for that I thank you.’

It was a happy time, one of the happiest of all our happy times, but always shadowed by the knowledge that Merlin would come and demand the fulfilment of our oaths. He came on a frosty afternoon. I was outside the house, using a Saxon war axe to split newly chopped logs that would fill our house with smoke, and Ceinwyn was inside, hushing a squabble that had risen between her maidservants and the fiery Scarach, when a horn sounded across the valley. The horn was a signal from my spearmen that a stranger approached Cwm Isaf and I lowered the axe in time to see Merlin’s tall figure striding among the trees. Nimue was with him. She had stayed a week with us after the night of Lancelot’s betrothal and then, without a word of explanation, had slipped away one night, but now, dressed in black beside her lord in his long white robe, she returned. Ceinwyn came from the house. Her face was smudged with soot and her hands bloodied from a hare she had been jointing. ‘I thought he was bringing a war-band,’ she said, her blue eyes fixed on Merlin. That was what Nimue had told us before she left; that Merlin was raising the army that would protect him on the Dark Road.

‘Maybe he’s left them at the river?’ I suggested.

She pushed a lock of hair away from her face, adding a smudge of blood to the soot. ‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asked, for I had been stripped to the waist as I chopped the wood.

‘Not yet,’ I said, though I pulled on a wool shirt as Merlin leapt long legged over the stream. My spearmen, anticipating news, trailed from their huts to follow him, but they stayed outside the house when he ducked his tall figure under our low lintel.

He offered us no greeting, but just went past us into the house. Nimue followed him, and by the time Ceinwyn and I entered they were already squatting beside the fire. Merlin held his thin hands to the blaze, then seemed to give a long sigh. He said nothing, and neither of us wanted to ask his news. I, like him, sat at the fire’s edge while Ceinwyn put the half jointed hare into a bowl then wiped her hands free of blood. She waved Scarach and the servants out of the house, then sat beside me. Merlin shivered, then seemed to relax. His long back was bowed as he hunched forward with his eyes closed. He stayed thus for a long time. His brown face was deeply lined and his beard a startling white. Like all Druids he shaved the front part of his skull, but now that tonsure was smothered with a fine layer of short white hair, evidence that he had been a long time on the road without a razor or a bronze mirror. He looked so old that day, and hunched by the fire he even looked feeble. Nimue sat opposite him, saying nothing. She did rise once to take Hywelbane from its nail hooks in the main beam and I saw her smile as she recognized the two strips of bone set into the handle. She unsheathed the blade, then held it into the smokiest part of the fire, and once the steel was covered in soot she carefully scratched an inscription into the soot with a piece of straw. The letters were not like these I write now, that both we and the Saxons employ, but were older magical letters, mere strokes slashed by bars, that only the Druids and sorcerers used. She propped the scabbard against the wall and hung the sword back on its nails, but did not explain the significance of what she had written. Merlin ignored her.

He opened his eyes suddenly, and the appearance of feebleness was replaced by a terrible savagery.

‘I put a curse,’ he said slowly, ‘on the creatures of Siluria.’ He flicked his fingers towards the fire and a puff of brighter flame hissed in the wood. ‘May their crops be blighted,’ he growled, ‘their cattle barren, their children crippled, their swords blunted and their enemies triumphant.’ It was, for him, a mild enough curse, but there was a hissing malevolence in his voice. ‘And on Gwent,’ he went on, ‘I give a murrain, and frosts in summer and wombs shrivelled to dry husks.’ He spat into the flames. ‘In Elmet,’ he said,

‘the tears will make lakes, plagues will fill graves, and rats shall rule their houses.’ He spat again. ‘How many men will you bring, Derfel?’

‘All I have, Lord.’ I hesitated to admit how few that was, but I finally gave him the answer, ‘Twenty shields.’

‘And those of your men who are still with Galahad?’ He gave me a quick glance from beneath his bushy white eyebrows. ‘How many of those?’

‘I have heard nothing from them, Lord.’

He sneered. ‘They form a palace guard for Lancelot. He insists on it. He makes his brother into a doorkeeper.’ Galahad was Lancelot’s half-brother and as unlike him as any man could be. ‘It is a good thing, Lady,’ Merlin looked at Ceinwyn, ‘that you did not marry Lancelot.’

She smiled at me. ‘I think so, Lord.’

‘He finds Siluria tedious. I can’t blame him for that, but he’ll seek Dumnonia’s comforts and be a snake in Arthur’s belly.’ He smiled. ‘You, my Lady, were supposed to be his plaything.’

‘I had rather be here,’ Ceinwyn said, gesturing at our rough stone walls and smoke-stained roof beams.

‘But he’ll try to strike at you,’ Merlin warned her. ‘His pride climbs higher than Lleullaw’s eagle, Lady, and Guinevere is cursing you. She killed a dog in her temple of Isis and draped its pelt on a crippled bitch that she gave your name.’

Ceinwyn looked pale, made the sign against evil and spat into the fire. Merlin shrugged. ‘I have countered the curse. Lady,’ he said, then stretched his long arms and bent his head back so that his ribboned plaits almost touched the rush-covered floor behind him. ‘Isis is a foreign Goddess,’ he said, ‘and her power is feeble in this land.’ He brought his head forward again, then rubbed his eyes with his long hands, I have come empty-handed,’ he said bleakly. ‘No man in Elmet would step forward, and none elsewhere. Their spears, they say, are dedicated to Saxon bellies. I offered them no gold, I offered no silver, only a fight on behalf of the Gods, and they offered me their prayers, then let their womenfolk talk to them of children and hearths and cattle and land and so they slunk away. Eighty men! That’s all I wanted. Diwrnach can field two hundred, maybe a handful more, but eighty would have sufficed, yet there were not even eight men who would come. Their Lords are sworn to Arthur now. The Cauldron, they tell me, can wait till Lloegyr is ours again. They want Saxon land and Saxon gold and all I offered them was blood and cold on the Dark Road.’

There was a silence. A log collapsed in the fire to spring a constellation of sparks toward the blackened roof. ‘Not one man offered a spear?’ I asked, shocked at the news.

‘A few,’ he said dismissively, ‘but none I would trust. None worthy of the Cauldron.’ He paused, then looked tired again. ‘I am struggling against the lure of Saxon gold and against Morgan. She opposes me.’