The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur Read online

  BERNARD CORNWELL

  The Winter King

  A Novel of Arthur

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Part One: A Child in Winter

  Part Two: The Princess Bride

  Part Three: The Return of Merlin

  Part Four: The Isle of the Dead

  Part Five: The Shield wall

  Author’s Note

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE WINTER KING

  Before becoming a full-time writer Bernard Cornwell worked as a television producer in London and Belfast. He now lives in Massachusetts with his American wife. He is the author of the hugely successful Sharpe series of historical novels.

  Penguin publish his bestselling contemporary thrillers Sea Lord, Wildtrack, Crackdown, StormChild and Scoundrel, and the historical novel Redcoat. Penguin also publish his myth-imbued Arthurian romance, The Warlord Chronicles, which consists of The Winter King, Enemy of God and Excalibur.

  For more information about Bernard Cornwell’s books, please visit his official website: www.bernardcornwell.net.

  The Winter King is for Judy, with love

  Characters

  AELLE

  A Saxon king

  AGRICOLA

  Warlord of Gwent, who serves King Tewdric

  AILLEANN

  Arthur’s mistress, mother of his twin sons Amhar and Loholt

  AMHAR

  Bastard son of Arthur

  ANNA

  Sister of Arthur, married to King Budic of Broceliande

  ARTHUR

  Bastard son of Uther and protector of Mordred

  BALISE

  An ancient Dumnonian Druid

  BAN

  King of Benoic, father of Lancelot and Galahad

  BEDWIN

  Bishop in Dumnonia, chief counsellor to the King

  BLEIDDIG

  A chieftain of Benoic

  BORS

  Champion of Benoic

  BROCHVAEL

  King of Powys after Arthur’s time

  CADWALLON

  King of Gwynedd

  CADWY

  Client king in Dumnonia, who guards the border with Kernow

  CALEDDIN

  A Druid, long dead, who compiled Merlin’s scroll

  CAVAN

  Derfel’s second-in-command

  CEI

  Arthur’s childhood companion, now one of his warriors

  CEINWYN

  Princess of Powys, sister of Cuneglas, daughter of Gorfyddyd

  CELWIN

  A priest studying in Ynys Trebes

  CERDIC

  A Saxon king

  CULHWCH

  Arthur’s cousin, one of his warriors

  CUNEGLAS

  Edling (Crown Prince) of Powys, son of Gorfyddyd

  DAFYDD ap GRUFFUD

  The clerk who translates Derfel’s story

  DERFEL CADARN

  The narrator, born a Saxon, ward of Merlin and one of Arthur’s warriors

  DIWRNACH

  Irish King of Lleyn, a country previously called Henis Wyren

  DRUIDAN

  A dwarf, commander of Merlin’s guard

  ELAINE

  Queen of Benoic, Lancelot’s mother

  GALAHAD

  Prince of Benoic, Lancelot’s half-brother

  GEREINT

  Client prince of Dumnonia, Lord of the Stones

  GORFYDDYD

  King of Powys, father of Cuneglas and Ceinwyn

  GRIFFID ap ANNAN

  Owain’s second-in-command

  GUDOVAN

  Merlin’s scribe

  GUENDOLOEN

  Merlin’s discarded wife

  GUINEVERE

  Princess of Henis Wyren

  GUNDLEUS

  King of Siluria

  GWLYDDYN

  Carpenter at Ynys Wydryn

  HELLEDD

  Princess of Elmet, who marries Cuneglas of Powys

  HYGWYDD

  Arthur’s servant

  HYWEL

  Merlin’s steward

  IGRAINE

  Queen of Powys, married to Brochvael, Derfel’s patroness at Dinnewrac

  IGRAINE of GWYNEDD

  Arthur’s mother (also mother of Morgan, Anna and Morgause)

  IORWETH

  A Druid in Powys

  ISSA

  One of Derfel’s spearmen

  LADWYS

  Gundleus’s lover

  LANCELOT

  Edling (Crown Prince) of Benoic, son of Ban

  LANVAL

  One of Arthur’s warriors, chief of Guinevere’s bodyguard

  LEODEGAN

  Exiled King of Henis Wyren, father of Guinevere

  LIGESSAC

  First commander of Mordred’s bodyguard, who later serves Gundleus

  LLYWARCH

  Second commander of Mordred’s bodyguard

  LOHOLT

  Arthur’s bastard son, twin to Amhar

  LUNETE

  Derfel’s early companion, later attendant to Guinevere

  LWELLWYN

  A clerk of the Dumnonian treasury

  MAELGWYN

  Monk at Dinnewrac

  MARK

  King of Kernow, father of Tristan

  MELWAS

  King of the Belgae, a client of Dumnonia

  MERLIN

  Lord of Avalon, a Druid

  MEURIG

  Edling (Crown Prince) of Gwent, son of Tewdric

  MORDRED

  Child King of Dumnonia

  MORFANS

  ‘The Ugly’, one of Arthur’s warriors

  MORGAN

  Arthur’s sister, one of Merlin’s priestesses

  MORGAUSE

  Arthur’s sister, married to King Lot of Lothian

  NABUR

  Christian magistrate in Durnovaria, Mordred’s legal guardian

  NIMUE

  Merlin’s lover, a priestess

  NORWENNA

  Uther’s daughter-in-law, mother of Mordred

  OENGUS MAC AIREM

  Irish King of Demetia, King of the Blackshields

  OWAIN

  Uther’s champion, a warlord of Dumnonia

  PELLINORE

  Mad king imprisoned at Ynys Wydryn

  RALLA

  Gwlyddyn’s wife, wet nurse to Mordred

  SAGRAMOR

  Arthur’s Numidian commander

  SANSUM

  Christian priest and bishop, Derfel’s superior at Dinnewrac

  SARLINNA

  A child who survives the Dartmoor massacre

  SEBILE

  Morgan’s Saxon slave-woman

  TANABURS

  A Druid of Siluria

  TEWDRIC

  King of Gwent

  TRISTAN

  Edling (Crown Prince) of Kernow

  TUDWAL

  Novice monk at Dinnewrac

  UTHER

  King of Dumnonia, High King of Britain, the Pendragon

  VALERIN

  A chieftain of Powys, once betrothed to Guinevere

  Places

  Place names marked * are recorded in history

  ABONA*

  Avonmouth, Avon

  AQUAE SULIS*

  Bath, Avon

  BRANOGENIUM*

  Roman fort. Leintwardine, Hereford & Worcester

  BURRIUM*

  Tewdric’s capital. Usk, Gwent

  CAER CADARN

  Dumnonia’s royal hill. South Cadbury Hill, Somerset

  CAER DOLFORWYN*

  Powys’s royal hill. Near Newtown, Powys

  CAER LUD*

  Ludlow, Shropshire

  CAER MAES

 
White Sheet Hill, Mere, Wiltshire

  CAER SWS*

  Gorfyddyd’s capital. Caersws, Powys

  CALLEVA*

  Frontier fortress. Silchester, Hampshire

  COEL’S HILL*

  Cole’s Hill, Hereford & Worcester

  CORINIUM*

  Cirencester, Gloucestershire

  CUNETIO*

  Mildenhall, Wiltshire

  DINNEWRAC

  A monastery in Powys

  DURNOVARIA*

  Dorchester, Dorset

  DUROCOBRIV1S*

  Dunstable, Bedfordshire

  GLEVUM*

  Gloucester

  ISCA*

  Exeter, Devon

  ISLE of the DEAD*

  Portland Bill, Dorset

  LINDINIS*

  Roman town. Ilchester, Somerset

  LUGG VALE*

  Mortimer’s Cross, Hereford & Worcester

  MAGNIS*

  Roman fort. Kenchester, Hereford & Worcester

  MAI DUN*

  Maiden Castle, Dorchester, Dorset

  RATAE*

  Leicester

  THE STONES*

  Stonehenge

  VENTA*

  Winchester, Hampshire

  YNYS MON*

  Anglesey

  YNYS TREBES

  Capital of Benoic. Mont St Michel, France

  YNYS WAIR*

  Lundy Island

  YNYS WYDRYN*

  Glastonbury, Somerset

  PART ONE

  A Child in Winter

  ONCE UPON A TIME, in a land that was called Britain, these things happened. Bishop Sansum, whom God must bless above all the saints living and dead, says these memories should be cast into the bottomless pit with all the other filth of fallen mankind, for these are the tales of the last days before the great darkness descended on the light of our Lord Jesus Christ. These are the tales of the land we call Lloegyr, which means the Lost Lands, the country that was once ours but which our enemies now call England. These are the tales of Arthur, the Warlord, the King that Never Was, the Enemy of God and, may the living Christ and Bishop Sansum forgive me, the best man I ever knew. How I have wept for Arthur.

  It is cold today. The hills are deathly pale and the clouds dark. We shall have snow before nightfall, but Sansum will surely refuse us the blessing of a fire. It is good, the saint says, to mortify the flesh. I am old now, but Sansum, may God grant him many years yet, is older still so I cannot use my age as an argument to unlock the woodstore. Sansum will just say that our suffering is an offering to God who suffered more than all of us, and so we six brethren shall shiver in our half-sleep and tomorrow the well will be frozen and Brother Maelgwyn will have to climb down the chain and hammer the ice with a stone before we can drink.

  Yet cold is not the worst affliction of our winter, but rather that the icy paths will stop Igraine visiting the monastery. Igraine is our Queen, married to King Brochvael. She is dark and slender, very young, and has a quickness that is like the sun’s warmth on a winter’s day. She comes here to pray that she will be granted a son, yet she spends more time talking with me than praying to Our Lady or to her blessed son. She talks to me because she likes to hear the stories of Arthur, and this past summer I told her all that I could remember and when I could remember no more she brought me a heap of parchment, a horn flask of ink and a bundle of goose feathers for quills. Arthur wore goose feathers on his helmet. These quills are not so big, nor so white, but yesterday I held the sheaf of quills up to the winter sky and for a glorious guilty moment I thought I saw his face beneath that plume. For that one moment the dragon and the bear snarled across Britain to terrify the heathen again, but then I sneezed and saw I clutched nothing but a handful of feathers clotted with goose droppings and scarcely adequate for writing. The ink is just as bad; mere lamp-black mixed with gum from apple-bark. The parchments are better. They are made from lambs’ skins left over from the Roman days and were once covered with a script none of us could read, but Igraine’s women scraped the skins bare and white. Sansum says it would be better if so much lambskin were made into shoes, but the scraped skins are too thin to cobble, and besides, Sansum dare not offend Igraine and thus lose the friendship of King Brochvael. This monastery is no more than a half-day’s journey from enemy spearmen and even our small storehouse could tempt those enemies across the Black Stream, up into the hills and so to Dinnewrac’s valley if Brochvael’s warriors were not ordered to protect us. Yet I do not think that even Brochvael’s friendship would reconcile Sansum to the idea of Brother Derfel writing an account of Arthur, Enemy of God, and so Igraine and I have lied to the blessed saint by telling him that I am writing down a translation of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in the tongue of the Saxons. The blessed saint does not speak the enemy tongue, nor can he read, and so we should be able to deceive him long enough for this tale to be written.

  And he will need to be deceived for, not long after I had begun writing on this very skin, the holy Sansum came into the room. He stood at the window, peered at the bleak sky and rubbed his thin hands together. ‘I like the cold,’ he said, knowing that I do not.

  ‘I feel it worst,’ I responded gently, ‘in my missing hand.’ It is my left hand that is missing and I am using the wrist’s knobbly stump to steady the parchment as I write.

  ‘All pain is a blessed reminder of our dear Lord’s Passion,’ the Bishop said, just as I had expected, then he leaned on the table to look at what I had written. ‘Tell me what the words say, Derfel,’ he demanded.

  ‘I am writing,’ I lied, ‘the story of the Christ-child’s birth.’

  He stared at the skin, then placed a dirty fingernail on his own name. He can decipher some letters and his own name must have stood out from the parchment as stark as a raven in the snow. Then he cackled like a wicked child and twisted a hank of my white hair in his fingers. ‘I was not present at our Lord’s birth, Derfel, yet that is my name. Are you writing heresy, you toad of hell?’

  ‘Lord,’ I said humbly as his grip kept my face bowed close over my work, ‘I have started the Gospel by recording that it is only by the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ and with the permission of His most holy saint, Sansum’ –and here I edged my finger toward his name – ‘that I am able to write down this good news of Christ Jesus.’

  He tugged at my hair, pulling some free, then stepped away. ‘You are the spawn of a Saxon whore,’ he said, ‘and no Saxon could ever be trusted. Take care, Saxon, not to offend me.’

  ‘Gracious Lord,’ I said to him, but he did not stay to hear more. There was a time when he bowed his knee to me and kissed my sword, but now he is a saint and I am nothing but the most miserable of sinners. And a cold sinner too, for the light beyond our walls is hollow, grey and full of threat. The first snow will fall very soon.

  And there was snow when Arthur’s tale began. It was a lifetime ago, in the last year of High King Uther’s reign. That year, as the Romans used to reckon time, was 1233 years after the founding of their city, though we in Britain usually date our years from the Black Year which was when the Romans cut down the Druids on Ynys Mon. By that reckoning Arthur’s story begins in the year 420, though Sansum, may God bless him, numbers our era from the date of our Lord Jesus Christ’s birth which he believes happened 480 winters before these things began. But however you count the years it was long ago, once upon a time, in a land called Britain, and I was there.

  And this is how it was.

  It began with a birth.

  On a bitter night, when the kingdom lay still and white beneath a waning moon.

  And in the hall, Norwenna screamed.

  And screamed.

  It was midnight. The sky was clear, dry and brilliant with stars. The land was frozen hard as iron, its streams gripped by ice. The waning moon was a bad omen and in its sullen light the long western lands seemed to glow with a pale cold shimmer. No snow had fallen for three days, nor had there been any thaw, so all the world was white except where the
trees had been windblown free of snow and now stood black and intricate against the winter-bleak land. Our breath misted, but did not blow away for there was no wind in this clear midnight. The earth seemed dead and still, as if she had been abandoned by Belenos the Sun God and left to drift in the endless cold void between the worlds. And cold it was; a bitter, deadly cold. Icicles hung long from the eaves of Caer Cadarn’s great hall and from the arched gateway where, earlier that day, the High King’s entourage had struggled through drifted snow to bring our Princess to this high place of kings. Caer Cadarn was where the royal stone was kept; it was the place of acclamation and thus the only place, the High King insisted, where his heir could be born.

  Norwenna screamed again.

  I have never seen a child’s birth, nor, God willing, will I ever see one. I have seen a mare foal and watched calves slither into the world, and I have heard the soft whining of a whelping bitch and felt the writhing of a birthing cat, but never have I seen the blood and mucus that accompanies a woman’s screams. And how Norwenna screamed, even though she was trying not to, or so the women said afterwards. Sometimes the shrieking would suddenly stop and leave a silence hanging over the whole high fort and the High King would lift his great head from among the furs and he would listen as carefully as though he were in a thicket and the Saxons were close by, only now he was listening in hope that the sudden silence marked the moment of birth when his kingdom would have an heir again. He would listen, and in the stillness across the frozen compound we would hear the harsh noise of his daughter-in-law’s terrible breathing and once, just once, there was a pathetic whimper, and the High King half turned as though to say something, but then the screams began again and his head sank down into the heavy pelts so that only his eyes could be seen glinting in the shadowed cave formed by the heavy fur hood and collar.