Bernard Cornwell: Enemy of God

I did not stay on Dolforwyn for the drinking that would go on all night, but instead walked back to Caer Sws behind the ox-drawn wagon that carried Queen Helledd, her two aunts and Ceinwyn. The royal ladies wanted to be back in Caer Sws by sunset and I went with them, not because I felt unwelcome among Cuneglas’s men, but because I had found no chance to talk with Ceinwyn. So, like a moonstruck calf, I joined the small guard of spearmen who escorted the wagon homewards. I had dressed carefully that day, wanting to impress Ceinwyn, and so I had cleaned my mail armour, brushed the mud from my boots and cloak, then woven my long fair hair into a loose plait that hung down my back. I wore her brooch on my cloak as a sign of my allegiance to her. I thought she would ignore me, for all through that long walk back to Caer Sws she sat in the wagon and stared away from me, but at last, as we turned the corner and the fortress came into sight, she turned and dropped off the wagon to wait for me beside the road. The escorting spearmen moved aside to let me walk beside her. She smiled as she recognized the brooch, but made no reference to it. ‘We were wondering, Lord Derfel,’ she said instead, ‘what brought you here.’

‘Arthur wanted a Dumnonian to witness your brother’s acclamation. Lady,’ I answered.

‘Or did Arthur want to be sure that he would be acclaimed?’ she asked shrewdly.

‘That too,’ I admitted.

She shrugged. ‘There’s no one else who could be King here. My father made certain of that. There was a chieftain called Valerin who might have challenged Cuneglas for the kingship, but we hear Valerin died in the battle.’

‘Yes, Lady, he did,’ I said, but I did not add that it had been I who had killed Valerin in single combat by the ford at Lugg Vale. ‘He was a brave man, and so was your father. I am sorry for you that he’s dead.’

She walked in silence for a few paces as Helledd, Powys’s Queen, watched us suspiciously from the ox-cart. ‘My father,’ Ceinwyn said after a while, ‘was a very bitter man. But he was always good to me.’

She spoke bleakly, but shed no tears. Those tears had all been wept already and now her brother was King and Ceinwyn faced a new future. She hitched up her skirts to negotiate a muddy patch. There had been rain the night before and the clouds to the west promised more soon. ‘So Arthur comes here?’ she asked.

‘Any day now, Lady.’

‘And brings Lancelot?’ she asked.

‘I would think so.’

She grimaced. ‘The last time we met, Lord Derfel, I was to marry Gundleus. Now it is to be Lancelot. One King after another.’

‘Yes, Lady,’ I said. It was an inadequate, even a stupid answer, but I had been struck by the exquisite nervousness that ties a lover’s tongue. All I ever wanted was to be with Ceinwyn, but when I found myself at her side I could not say what was in my soul.

‘And I am to be Queen of Siluria,’ Ceinwyn said, without any relish at the prospect. She stopped and gestured back down the Severn’s wide valley. ‘Just past Dolforwyn,’ she told me, ‘there’s a little hidden valley with a house and some apple trees. And when I was a little girl I always used to think the Otherworld was like that valley; a small, safe place where I could live, be happy and have children.’ She laughed at herself and began walking again. ‘All across Britain there are girls who dream of marrying Lancelot and being a Queen in a palace, and all I want is a small valley with its apple trees.’

‘Lady,’ I said, nerving myself to say what I really wanted to say, but she immediately guessed what was on my mind and touched my arm to hush me.

‘I must do my duty. Lord Derfel,’ she said, warning me to guard my tongue.

‘You have my oath,’ I blurted out. It was as near to a confession of love as I was capable of at that moment.

‘I know,’ she said gravely, ‘and you are my friend, are you not?’

I wanted to be more than a friend, but I nodded. ‘I am your friend, Lady.’

‘Then I will tell you,’ she said, ‘what I told my brother.’ She looked up at me, her blue eyes very serious. ‘I don’t know that I want to marry Lancelot, but I have promised Cuneglas that I will meet him before I make up my mind. I must do that, but whether I shall marry him, I don’t know.’ She walked in silence for a few paces and I sensed she was debating whether to tell me something. Finally she decided to trust me. ‘After I saw you last,’ she went on, ‘I visited the priestess at Maesmwyr and she took me to the dream cave and made me sleep on the bed of skulls. I wanted to discover my fate, you see, but I don’t remember having any dreams at all. But when I woke the priestess said that the next man who wanted to marry me would marry the dead instead.’ She gazed up at me. ‘Does that make sense?’

‘None, Lady,’ I said and touched the iron on Hywelbane’s hilt. Was she warning me? We had never spoken of love, but she must have sensed my yearning.

‘It makes no sense to me either,’ she confessed, ‘so I asked Iorweth what the prophecy meant and he told me I should stop worrying. He said the priestess talks in riddles because she’s incapable of talking sense. What I think it means is that I should not marry at all, but I don’t know. I only know one thing, Lord Derfel. I will not marry lightly.’

‘You know two things, Lady,’ I said. ‘You know my oath holds.’

‘I know that too’ she said, then smiled at me again. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Lord Derfel.’ And with those words she ran on ahead and scrambled back into the ox-cart, leaving me to puzzle over her riddle and to find no answer that could give my soul peace.

Arthur came to Caer Sws three days later. He came with twenty horsemen and a hundred spearmen. He brought bards and harpists. He brought Merlin, Nimue and gifts of the gold taken from the dead in Lugg Vale, and he also brought Guinevere and Lancelot.

I groaned when I saw Guinevere. We had won a victory and made peace, yet even so I thought it cruel of Arthur to bring the woman for whom he had spurned Ceinwyn. But Guinevere had insisted on accompanying her husband and so she arrived in Caer Sws in an ox-drawn wagon that was furnished with furs, hung with dyed linens and draped with green branches to signify peace. Queen Klaine, Lancelot’s mother, rode in the cart with Guinevere, but it was Guinevere, not the Queen, who commanded attention. She stood as the cart pulled slowly through Caer Sws’s gate and she remained standing as the oxen drew her to the door of Cuneglas’s great hall, where once she had been an unwanted exile and to which she now came like a conqueror. She wore a robe of linen dyed gold, she wore gold about her neck and on her wrists, while her springing red hair was trapped by a circle of gold. She was pregnant, but the pregnancy did not show beneath the precious gold linen. She looked like a Goddess.

Yet if Guinevere looked a Goddess, Lancelot rode into Caer Sws like a God. Many folk assumed he must be Arthur for he looked magnificent on a white horse draped with a pale linen cloth that was studded with small golden stars. He wore his white-enamelled scale armour, his sword was scabbarded in white and a long white cloak, lined with red, hung from his shoulders. His dark, handsome face was framed by the gilded edges of his helmet that was now crested with a pair of spread swan’s wings instead of the sea-eagle wings he had worn in Ynys Trebes. People gasped when they saw him and I heard the whispers hurry through the crowd that this was not Arthur after all, but King Lancelot, the tragic hero of the lost kingdom of Benoic and the man who would marry their own Princess Ceinwyn. My heart sank at the sight of him, for I feared his magnificence would dazzle Ceinwyn. The crowd hardly noticed Arthur, who wore a leather jerkin and a white cloak and seemed embarrassed to be in Caer Sws at all. That night there was a feast. I doubt Cuneglas could have felt much welcome for Guinevere, but he was a patient, sensible man who, unlike his father, did not choose to take offence at every imagined slight, and so he treated Guinevere like a Queen. He poured her wine, served her food and bent his head to talk with her. Arthur, seated on Guinevere’s other side, beamed with pleasure. He always looked happy when he was with his Guinevere, and there must have been a keen pleasure for him to see her treated with such ceremony in the very same hall where he had first glimpsed her standing among the lesser folk at the back of the crowd.