Excalibur Read online

  BERNARD CORNWELL

  Excalibur

  The Warlord Chronicles: III

  A NOVEL OF ARTHUR

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  EXCALIBUR

  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.

  Excalibur is for John and Sharon Martin

  Characters

  AELLE

  A Saxon King

  AGRICOLA

  Warlord of Gwent

  AMHAR

  Bastard son of Arthur, twin to Loholt

  ARGANTE

  Princess of Demetia, daughter of Oengus mac Airem

  ARTHUR

  Bastard son of Uther, warlord of Dumnonia, later Governor of Siluria

  ARTHUR-BACH

  Arthur’s grandchild, son of Gwydre and Morwenna

  BALIG

  Boatman, brother-in-law to Derfel

  BALIN

  One of Arthur’s warriors

  BALISE

  Once a Druid of Dumnonia

  BORS

  Lancelot’s champion and cousin

  BROCHVAEL

  King of Powys after Arthur’s time

  BUDIC

  King of Broceliande, married to Arthur’s sister Anna

  BYRTHIG

  King of Gwynedd

  CADDWG

  Boatman and sometime servant of Merlin

  CEINWYN

  Sister of Cuneglas, Derfel’s partner

  CERDIC

  A Saxon King

  CILDYDD

  Magistrate of Aquae Sulis

  CLOVIS

  King of the Franks

  CULHWCH

  Arthur’s cousin, a warrior

  CUNEGLAS

  King of Powys

  CYWWYLLOG

  One-time lover of Mordred, servant to Merlin

  DAFYDD DERFEL

  The clerk who translates Derfel’s story (pronounced Dervel) The narrator, one of Arthur’s warriors, later a monk

  DIWRNACH

  King of Lleyn

  EACHERN

  One of Derfel’s spearmen

  EINION

  Son of Culhwch

  EMRYS

  Bishop of Durnovaria, later Bishop of Silurian Isca

  ERCE

  A Saxon, Derfel’s mother

  FERGAL

  Argante’s Druid

  GALAHAD

  Half-brother to Lancelot, one of Arthur’s warriors

  GAWAIN

  Prince of Broceliande, son of King Budic

  GUINEVERE

  Arthur’s wife

  GWYDRE

  Arthur and Guinevere’s son

  HYGWYDD

  Arthur’s servant

  IGRAINE

  Queen of Powys after Arthur’s time. Married to Brochvael

  ISSA

  Derfel’s second-in-command

  LANCELOT

  Exiled King of Benoic, now allied to Cerdic

  LANVAL

  One of Arthur’s warriors

  LIOFA

  Cerdic’s champion

  LLADARN

  Bishop in Gwent

  LOHOLT

  Bastard son of Arthur, twin to Amhar

  MARDOC

  Son of Mordred and Cywyllog

  MERLIN

  Druid of Dumnonia

  MEURIG

  King of Gwent, son of Tewdric

  MORDRED

  King of Dumnonia

  MORFANS

  ‘The Ugly’, one of Arthur’s warriors

  MORGAN

  Arthur’s sister, married to Sansum

  MORWENNA

  Derfel and Ceinwyn’s daughter, married to Gwydre

  NIALL

  Commander of Argante’s Blackshield guard

  NIMUE

  Merlin’s priestess

  OENGUS MAC AIREM

  King of Demetia, leader of the Blackshields

  OLWEN THE SILVER

  Follower of Merlin and Nimue

  PERDDEL

  Cuneglas’s son, later King of Powys

  PEREDUR

  Lancelot’s son

  PYRLIG

  Derfel’s bard

  SAGRAMOR

  Commander of one of Arthur’s warbands

  SANSUM

  Bishop of Durnovaria, later Bishop at Dinnewrac monastery

  SCARACH

  Issa’s wife

  SEREN (1)

  Derfel and Ceinwyn’s daughter

  SEREN (2)

  Daughter of Gwydre and Morwenna, Arthur’s granddaughter

  TALIESIN

  ‘Shining Brow’, a famous bard

  TEWDRIC

  Once King of Gwent, now a Christian hermit

  TUDWAL

  Monk at Dinnewrac monastery

  UTHER

  Once King of Dumnonia, Mordred’s grandfather, Arthur’s father

  Places

  Names marked* are fictional

  AQUAE SULIS

  Bath, Avon

  BEADEWAN

  Baddow, Essex

  BURRIUM

  Usk, Gwent

  CAER AMBRA *

  Amesbury, Wiltshire

  CAER CADARN *

  South Cadbury, Somerset

  CAMLANN

  Real location not known; Dawlish Warren, Devon, suggested

  CELMERESFORT

  Chelmsford, Essex

  CICUCIUM

  Roman fort near Sennybridge, Powys

  CORINIUM

  Cirencester, Gloucestershire

  DUN CARIC *

  Castle Cary, Somerset

  DUNUM

  Hod Hill, Dorset

  DURNOVARIA

  Dorchester, Dorset

  GLEVUM

  Gloucester

  GOBANNIUM

  Abergavenny, Monmouthshire

  ISCA (DUMNONIA)

  Exeter, Devon

  ISCA (SILURIA)

  Caerleon, Gwent

  LACTODURUM

  Towcester, Northamptonshire

  LEODASHAM

  Leaden Roding, Essex

  LINDINIS

  Ilchester, Somerset

  LYCCEWORD

  Letchworth, Hertfordshire

  MAI DUN

  Maiden Castle, Dorset

  MORIDUNUM

  Carmarthen

  MYNYDD BADDON

  Real location not known; Little Solsbury Hill, near Bath, suggested

  SORVIODUNUM

  Old Sarum, Wiltshire

  STEORTFORD

  Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire

  THUNRESLEA

  Thundersley, Essex

  VENTA

  Winchester, Hampshire

  WICFORD

  Wickford, Essex

  YNYS WAIR

  Lundy Island, Bristol Channel

  YNYS WYDRYN

  Glastonbury, Somerset

  PART ONE

  The Fires of Mai Dun

  WOMEN, HOW THEY do haunt this tale. When I began writing Arthur’s story I thought it would be a tale of men; a chronicle of swords and spears, of battles won and frontiers made, of ruined treaties and broken ki
ngs, for is that not how history itself is told? When we recite the genealogy of our kings we do not name their mothers and grandmothers, but say Mordred ap Mordred ap Uther ap Kustennin ap Kynnar and so on all the way back to the great Beli Mawr who is the father of us all. History is a story told by men and of men’s making, but in this tale of Arthur, like the glimmer of salmon in peat-dark water, the women do shine.

  Men do make history, and I cannot deny that it was men who brought Britain low. There were hundreds of us, and all of us were armed in leather and iron, and hung with shield and sword and spear, and we thought Britain lay at our command for we were warriors, but it took both a man and a woman to bring Britain low, and of the two it was the woman who did the greater damage. She made one curse and an army died, and this is her tale now for she was Arthur’s enemy.

  ‘Who?’ Igraine will demand when she reads this.

  Igraine is my Queen. She is pregnant, a thing that gives us all great joy. Her husband is King Brochvael of Powys, and I now live under his protection in the small monastery of Dinnewrac where I write Arthur’s story. I write at the command of Queen Igraine, who is too young to have known the Emperor. That is what we called Arthur, the Emperor, Amherawdr in the British tongue, though Arthur himself rarely used the title. I write in the Saxon tongue, for I am a Saxon, and because Bishop Sansum, the saint who rules our small community at Dinnewrac, would never allow me to write Arthur’s tale. Sansum hates Arthur, reviles his memory and calls him traitor, and so Igraine and I have told the saint that I am writing a gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Saxon tongue and, because Sansum neither speaks Saxon nor can read any language, the deception has seen the tale safe this far.

  The tale grows darker now and harder to tell. Sometimes, when I think of my beloved Arthur, I see his noontime as a sun-bright day, yet how quickly the clouds came! Later, as we shall see, the clouds parted and the sun mellowed his landscape once more, but then came the night and we have not seen the sun since.

  It was Guinevere who darkened the noonday sun. It happened during the rebellion when Lancelot, whom Arthur had thought a friend, tried to usurp the throne of Dumnonia. He was helped in this by the Christians who had been deceived by their leaders, Bishop Sansum among them, into believing that it was their holy duty to scour the country of pagans and so prepare the island of Britain for the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ in the year 500. Lancelot was also helped by the Saxon King Cerdic who launched a terrifying attack along the valley of the Thames in an attempt to divide Britain. If the Saxons had reached the Severn Sea then the British kingdoms of the north would have been cut off from those of the south, yet, by the grace of the Gods, we defeated not only Lancelot and his Christian rabble, but Cerdic also. But in the defeat Arthur discovered Guinevere’s treachery. He found her naked in another man’s arms, and it was as though the sun had vanished from his sky.

  ‘I don’t really understand,’ Igraine said to me one day in late summer.

  ‘What, dear Lady, do you not understand?’ I asked.

  ‘Arthur loved Guinevere, yes?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘So why could he not forgive her? I forgave Brochvael over Nwylle.’ Nwylle had been Brochvael’s lover, but she had contracted a disease of the skin which had disfigured her beauty. I suspect, but have never asked, that Igraine used a charm to bring the disease to her rival. My Queen might call herself a Christian, but Christianity is not a religion that offers the solace of revenge to its adherents. For that you must go to the old women who know which herbs to pluck and what charms to say under a waning moon.

  ‘You forgave Brochvael,’ I agreed, ‘but would Brochvael have forgiven you?’

  She shuddered. ‘Of course not! He’d have burned me alive, but that’s the law.’

  ‘Arthur could have burned Guinevere,’ I said, ‘and there were plenty of men who advised him to do just that, but he did love her, he loved her passionately, and that was why he could neither kill her nor forgive her. Not at first, anyway.’

  ‘Then he was a fool!’ Igraine said. She is very young and has the glorious certainty of the young.

  ‘He was very proud,’ I said, and maybe that did make Arthur a fool, but so it did the rest of us. I paused, thinking. ‘He wanted many things,’ I went on, ‘he wanted a free Britain and the Saxons defeated, but in his soul he wanted Guinevere’s constant reassurance that he was a good man. And when she slept with Lancelot it proved to Arthur that he was the lesser man. It wasn’t true, of course, but it hurt him. How it hurt. I have never seen a man so hurt. She tore his heart.’

  ‘So he imprisoned her?’ Igraine asked me.

  ‘He imprisoned her,’ I said, and remembered how I had been forced to take Guinevere to the shrine of the Holy Thorn at Ynys Wydryn where Arthur’s sister, Morgan, became her jailer. There was never any affection between Guinevere and Morgan. One was a pagan, the other a Christian, and the day I locked Guinevere into the shrine’s compound was one of the few times I ever saw her weep. ‘She will stay there,’ Arthur told me, ‘till the day she dies.’

  ‘Men are fools,’ Igraine declared, then gave me a sidelong glance. ‘Were you ever unfaithful to Ceinwyn?’

  ‘No,’ I answered truthfully.

  ‘Did you ever want to be?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Lust does not vanish with happiness, Lady. Besides, what merit is there in fidelity if it is never tested?’

  ‘You think there is merit in fidelity?’ she asked, and I wondered which young, handsome warrior in her husband’s caer had taken her eye. Her pregnancy would prevent any nonsense for the moment, but I feared what might happen after. Maybe nothing.

  I smiled. ‘We want fidelity in our lovers, Lady, so is it not obvious that they want it in us? Fidelity is a gift we offer to those we love. Arthur gave it to Guinevere, but she could not return it. She wanted something different.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Glory, and he was ever averse to glory. He achieved it, but he would not revel in it. She wanted an escort of a thousand horsemen, bright banners to fly above her and the whole island of Britain prostrate beneath her. And all he ever wanted was justice and good harvests.’

  ‘And a free Britain and the Saxons defeated,’ Igraine reminded me drily.

  ‘Those too,’ I acknowledged, ‘and he wanted one other thing. He wanted that thing more than all the others.’ I smiled, remembering, and then thought that perhaps of all Arthur’s ambitions, this last was the one he found most difficult to achieve and the one that the few of us who were his friends never truly believed he wanted.

  ‘Go on,’ Igraine said, suspecting that I was falling into a doze.

  ‘He just wanted a piece of land,’ I said, ‘a hall, some cattle, a smithy of his own. He wanted to be ordinary. He wanted other men to look after Britain while he sought happiness.’

  ‘And he never found it?’ Igraine asked.

  ‘He found it,’ I assured her, but not in that summer after Lancelot’s rebellion. It was a summer of blood, a season of retribution, a time when Arthur hammered Dumnonia into a surly submission.

  Lancelot had fled southwards to his land of the Belgae. Arthur would dearly have loved to pursue him, but Cerdic’s Saxon invaders were now the greater danger. They had advanced as far as Corinium by the rebellion’s end, and might even have captured that city had the Gods not sent a plague to ravage their army. Men’s bowels voided unstoppably, they vomited blood, they were weakened until they could not stand, and it was when the plague was at its worst that Arthur’s forces struck them. Cerdic tried to rally his men, but the Saxons believed their Gods had deserted them and so they fled. ‘But they’ll be back,’ Arthur told me when we stood among the bloody remnants of Cerdic’s defeated rearguard. ‘Next spring,’ he said, ‘they will be back.’ He cleaned Excalibur’s blade on his blood-stained cloak and slid her into the scabbard. He had grown a beard and it was grey. It made him look older, much older, while the pain of Guinevere’s betrayal had made his long face gaunt, so that me
n who had never met Arthur until that summer found his appearance fearsome and he did nothing to soften that impression. He had ever been a patient man, but now his anger lay very close to the skin and it could erupt at the smallest provocation.

  It was a summer of blood, a season of retribution, and Guinevere’s fate was to be locked away in Morgan’s shrine. Arthur had condemned his wife to a living grave and his guards were ordered to keep her there for ever. Guinevere, a Princess of the Henis-Wyren, was gone from the world.

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Derfel,’ Merlin snapped at me a week later, ‘she’ll be out of there in two years! One, probably. If Arthur wanted her gone from his life he’d have put her to the flames, which is what he should have done. There’s nothing like a good burning for improving a woman’s behaviour, but it’s no use telling Arthur that. The halfwit’s in love with her! And he is a halfwit. Think about it! Lancelot alive, Mordred alive, Cerdic alive and Guinevere alive! If a soul wants to live for ever in this world it seems like a very good idea to become an enemy of Arthur. I am as well as can be expected, thank you for asking.’