Excalibur Read online

  ‘I will, Lord,’ I promised. For if the Gods did not come on Samain Eve then Excalibur would have to be drawn and carried against the army of all the Saxons.

  But Samain Eve was very near now, and on that night of the dead the Gods would be summoned.

  And next day I carried Excalibur south to make it happen.

  MAI DUN IS A GREAT hill that lies to the south of Durno varia and at one time it must have been the greatest fortress in all Britain. It has a wide, gently domed summit stretching east and west around which the old people built three huge walls of steeply embanked turf. No one knows when it was built, or even how, and some believe that the Gods themselves must have dug the ramparts for that triple wall seems much too high, and its ditches far too deep, for mere human work, though neither the height of the walls nor the depth of the ditches prevented the Romans from capturing the fortress and putting its garrison to the sword. Mai Dun has lain empty since that day, but for a small stone temple of Mithras that the victorious Romans built at the eastern end of the summit plateau. In summer the old fortress is a lovely place where sheep graze the precipitous walls and butterflies flicker above the grass, wild thyme and orchids, but in late autumn, when the nights close in early and the rains sweep across Dumnonia from the west, the summit can be a chill bare height where the wind bites hard.

  The main track to the summit leads to the maze-like western gate and the path was slippery with mud as I carried Excalibur to Merlin. A horde of common folk trudged with me. Some had great bundles of firewood on their backs, others were carrying skins of drinking water while a few were goading oxen that dragged great tree trunks or pulled sledges heaped with trimmed branches. The oxen’s flanks ran with blood as they struggled to haul their loads up the steep, treacherous path to where, high above me on the outermost grass rampart, I could see spearmen standing guard. The presence of those spearmen confirmed what I had been told in Durnovaria, that Merlin had closed Mai Dun to all except those who came to work.

  Two spearmen guarded the gate. Both were Irish Blackshield warriors, hired from Oengus mac Airem, and I wondered how much of Merlin’s fortune was being spent on readying this desolate grass fort for the coming of the Gods. The men recognized that I was not one of the folk working at Mai Dun and came down the slope to meet me. ‘You have business here, Lord?’ one of them asked respectfully. I was not in armour, but I wore Hywelbane and her scabbard alone marked me as a man of rank.

  ‘I have business with Merlin,’ I said.

  The Blackshield did not stand aside. ‘Many folk come here, Lord,’ he said, ‘and claim to have business with Merlin. But does Lord Merlin have business with them?’

  ‘Tell him,’ I said, ‘that Lord Derfel has brought him the last Treasure.’ I tried to imbue the words with a due sense of ceremony, but they did not seem to impress the Blackshields. The younger man climbed away with the message while the older chatted to me. Like most of Oengus’s spearmen he seemed a cheerful rogue. The Blackshields came from Demetia, a kingdom Oengus had made on Britain’s west coast, but though they were invaders, Oengus’s Irish spearmen were not hated like the Saxons. The Irish fought us, they stole from us, they enslaved us and they took our land, but they spoke a language close to ours, their Gods were our Gods and, when they were not fighting us, they mingled easily enough with the native Britons. Some, like Oengus himself, now seemed more British than Irish, for his native Ireland, which had always taken pride in never having been invaded by the Romans, had now succumbed to the religion the Romans had brought. The Irish had adopted Christianity, though the Lords Across the Sea, who were those Irish kings like Oengus who had taken land in Britain, still clung to their older Gods, and next spring, I reflected, unless Merlin’s rites brought those Gods to our rescue, these Blackshield spearmen would doubtless fight for Britain against the Saxons.

  It was young Prince Gawain who came from the summit to meet me. He strode down the track in his limewashed wargear, though his splendour was spoilt when his feet shot out from under him on a muddy patch and he bumped a few yards on his bottom. ‘Lord Derfel!’ he called as he scrambled up again, ‘Lord Derfel! Come, come! Welcome!’ He beamed a wide smile as I approached. ‘Is not this the most exciting thing?’ he demanded.

  ‘I don’t know yet, Lord Prince.’

  ‘A triumph!’ he enthused, carefully stepping around the muddy patch that had caused his downfall. ‘A great work! Let us pray it will not be in vain.’

  ‘AH Britain prays for that,’ I said, ‘except maybe the Christians.’

  ‘In three days’ time, Lord Derfel,’ he assured me, ‘there will be no more Christians in Britain, for all will have seen the true Gods by then. So long,’ he added anxiously, ‘as it does not rain.’ He looked up at the dismal clouds and suddenly seemed close to tears.

  ‘Rain?’ I asked.

  ‘Or maybe it is cloud that will deny us the Gods. Rain or cloud, I am not sure, and Merlin is impatient. He doesn’t explain, but I think rain is the enemy, or maybe it is cloud.’ He paused, still miserable. ‘Both, perhaps. I asked Nimue, but she doesn’t like me,’ he sounded very woeful, ‘so I am not sure, but I am beseeching the Gods for clear skies. And of late it has been cloudy, very cloudy, and I suspect the Christians are praying for rain. Have you really brought Excalibur?’

  I unwrapped the cloth from the scabbarded sword and held the hilt towards him. For a moment he dared not touch it, then he gingerly reached out and drew Excalibur from its scabbard. He stared reverently at the blade, then touched with his finger the chased whorls and incised dragons that decorated the steel. ‘Made in the Otherworld,’ he said in a voice full of wonder, ‘by Gofannon himself!’

  ‘More likely forged in Ireland,’ I said uncharitably, for there was something about Gawain’s youth and credulity that was driving me to puncture his pious innocence.

  ‘No, Lord,’ he assured me earnestly, ‘it was made in the Otherworld.’ He pushed Excalibur back into my hands. ‘Come, Lord,’ he said, trying to hurry me, but he only slipped in the mud again and flailed for balance. His white armour, so impressive at a distance, was shabby. Its limewash was mud-streaked and fading, but he possessed an indomitable self-confidence that prevented him from appearing ridiculous. His long golden hair was bound in a loose plait that hung down to the small of his back. As we negotiated the entrance passage that twisted between the high grass banks I asked Gawain how he had met Merlin. ‘Oh, I’ve known Merlin all my life!’ the Prince answered happily. ‘He came to my father’s court, you see, though not so much of late, but when I was just a little boy he was always there. He was my teacher.’

  ‘Your teacher?’ I sounded surprised and so I was, but Merlin was always secretive and he had never mentioned Gawain to me.

  ‘Not my letters,’ Gawain said, ‘the women taught me those. No, Merlin taught me what my fate is to be.’ He smiled shyly. ‘He taught me to be pure.’

  ‘To be pure!’ I gave him a curious glance. ‘No women?’

  ‘None, Lord,’ he admitted innocently. ‘Merlin insists. Not now, anyway, though after, of course.’ His voice tailed away and he actually blushed.

  ‘No wonder,’ I said, ‘that you pray for clear skies.’

  ‘No, Lord, no!’ Gawain protested. ‘I pray for clear skies so that the Gods will come! And when they do, they will bring Olwen the Silver with them.’ He blushed again.

  ‘Olwen the Silver?’

  ‘You saw her, Lord, at Lindinis.’ His handsome face became almost ethereal. ‘She treads lighter than a breath of wind, her skin shines in the dark and flowers grow in her footsteps.’

  ‘And she is your fate?’ I asked, suppressing a nasty little stab of jealousy at the thought of that shining, lissom spirit being given to young Gawain.

  ‘I am to marry her when the task is done,’ he said earnestly, ‘though for now my duty is to guard the Treasures, but in three days I shall welcome the Gods and lead them against the enemy. I am to be the liberator of Britain.’ He made this outrageous
boast very calmly, as though it was a commonplace task. I said nothing, but just followed him past the deep ditch that lies between Mai Dun’s middle and inner walls and I saw that its trench was filled with small makeshift shelters made from branches and thatch. ‘In two days,’ Gawain saw where I was looking, ‘we shall pull those shelters down and add them to the fires.’

  ‘Fires?’

  ‘You’ll see, Lord, you’ll see.’

  Though at first, when I reached the summit, I could make no sense of what I saw. The crest of Mai Dun is an elongated grassy space in which a whole tribe with all its livestock could shelter in time of war, but now the hill’s western end was crossed and latticed with a-complicated arrangement of dry hedges. ‘There!’ Gawain said proudly, pointing to the hedges as if they were his own accomplishment.

  The folk carrying the firewood were being directed towards one of the nearer hedges where they threw down their burdens and trudged off to collect still more timber. Then I saw that the hedges were really great ridges of wood being heaped ready for burning. The heaps were taller than a man, and there seemed to be miles of them, but it was not until Gawain led me up onto the innermost rampart that I saw the design of the hedges.

  They filled all the western half of the plateau and at their centre were five piles of firewood that made a circle in the middle of an empty space some sixty or seventy paces across. That wide space was surrounded by a spiralling hedge which twisted three full turns, so that the whole spiral, including the centre, was over a hundred and fifty paces wide. Outside the spiral was an empty circle of grass that was girdled by a ring of six double spirals, each uncoiling from one circular space and coiling again to enclose another so that twelve fire-ringed spaces lay in the intricate outer ring. The double spirals touched each other so that they would make a rampart of fire all about the massive design. ‘Twelve smaller circles,’ I asked Gawain, ‘for thirteen Treasures?’ ‘The Cauldron, Lord, will be at the centre,’ he said, his voice filled with awe.

  It was a huge accomplishment. The hedges were tall, well above the height of a man, and all were dense with fuel; indeed there must have been enough firewood on that hilltop to keep the fires of Durnovaria burning through nine or ten winters. The double spirals at the western end of the fortress were still being completed and I could see men energetically stamping down the wood so that the fire would not blaze briefly, but would burn long and fierce. There were whole tree trunks waiting for the flames inside the banked timbers. It would be a fire, I thought, to signal the ending of the world.

  And in a way, I supposed, that was exactly what the fire was intended to mark. It would be the end of the world as we knew it, for if Merlin was right then the Gods of Britain would come to this high place. The lesser Gods would go to the smaller circles of the outer ring while Bel would descend to the fiery heart of Mai Dun where his Cauldron waited. Great Bel, God of Gods, the Lord of Britain, would come in a great rush of air with the stars roiling in his wake like autumn leaves tossed by a storm wind. And there, where the five individual fires marked the heart of Merlin’s circles of flame, Bel would step again in Ynys Prydain, the Isle of Britain. My skin suddenly felt cold. Till this moment I had not really understood the magnitude of Merlin’s dream, and now it almost overwhelmed me. In three days, just three days, the Gods would be here.

  ‘We have over four hundred folk working on the fires,’ Gawain told me earnestly.

  ‘I can believe it.’

  ‘And we marked the spirals,’ he went on, ‘with fairy rope.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘A rope, Lord, knotted from the hair of a virgin and merely one strand in width. Nimue stood in the centre and I paced about the perimeter and my Lord Merlin marked my steps with elf stones. The spirals had to be perfect. It took a week to do, for the rope kept breaking and every time it did we needed to begin again.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t fairy rope after all, Lord Prince?’ I teased him.

  ‘Oh, it was, Lord,’ Gawain assured me. ‘It was knotted from my own hair.’

  ‘And on Samain Eve,’ I said, ‘you light the fires and wait?’

  ‘Three hours on three, Lord, the fires must burn, and at the sixth hour we begin the ceremony.’ And sometime after that the night would turn to day, the sky would fill with fire and the smoky air would be lashed into turmoil by the Gods’ beating wings.

  Gawain had been leading me along the fort’s northern wall, but now gestured down to where the small Temple of Mithras stood just to the east of the firewood rings. ‘You can wait there, Lord,’ he said, ‘while I fetch Merlin.’

  ‘Is he far off ?’ I asked, thinking that Merlin might be in one of the temporary shelters thrown up on the plateau’s eastern end.

  ‘I’m not certain where he is,’ Gawain confessed, ‘but I know he went to fetch Anbarr, and I think I know where that might be.’

  ‘Anbarr?’ I asked. I only knew Anbarr from stories where he was a magical horse, an unbroken stallion reputed to gallop as fast across water as he could across land.

  ‘I will ride Anbarr alongside the Gods,’ Gawain said proudly, ‘and carry my banner against the enemy.’ He pointed to the temple where a huge flag leaned unceremoniously against the low tiled roof. ‘The banner of Britain,’ Gawain added, and he led me down to the temple where he unfurled the standard. It was a vast square of white linen on which was embroidered the defiant red dragon of Dumnonia. The beast was all claws, tail and fire. ‘It’s really the banner of Dumnonia,’ Gawain confessed, ‘but I don’t think the other British Kings will mind, do you?’

  ‘Not if you drive the Sais into the sea,’ I said.

  ‘That is my task, Lord,’ Gawain said very solemnly. ‘With the help of the Gods, of course, and of that,’ he touched Excalibur that was still under my arm.

  ‘Excalibur!’ I sounded surprised, for I could not imagine any man other than Arthur carrying the magical blade.

  ‘What else?’ Gawain asked me. ‘I am to carry Excalibur, ride Anbarr, and drive the enemy from Britain.’ He smiled delightedly, then gestured at a bench beside the temple door. ‘If you will wait, Lord, I shall seek Merlin.’

  The temple was guarded by six Blackshield spearmen, but as I had come to the place in Gawain’s company they made no effort to stop me ducking under the doorway’s low lintel. I was not exploring the little building from curiosity, but rather because Mithras was my chief God in those days. He was the soldier’s God, the secret God. The Romans had brought his worship to Britain and even though they had long gone, Mithras was still a favourite amongst warriors. This temple was tiny, merely two small rooms that were windowless to imitate the cave of Mithras’s birth. The outer room was filled with wooden boxes and wicker baskets which, I suspected, contained the Treasures of Britain, though I lifted none of the lids to look. Instead I crawled through the inner door into the black sanctuary and saw, glimmering there, the great silver-gold Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn. Beyond the Cauldron, and only just visible in the small grey light that seeped through the two low doors, was the altar of Mithras. Either Merlin or Nimue, who both ridiculed Mithras, had placed a badger’s skull on the altar to avert the God’s attention. I swept the skull away, then knelt beside the Cauldron and said a prayer. I begged Mithras to help our other Gods and I prayed he would come to Mai Dun and lend his terror to the slaughter of our enemies. I touched the hilt of Excalibur to his stone and wondered when a bull had last been sacrificed in this place. I imagined the Roman soldiers forcing the bull to its knees, then shoving its rump and tugging its horns to cram it through the low doors until, once in the inner sanctuary, it would stand and bellow with fear, smelling nothing but the spearmen all about it in the dark. And there, in the terrifying dark, it would be hamstrung. It would bellow again, collapse, but still thrash its great horns at the worshippers, but they would overpower it and drain its blood and the bull would slowly die and the temple would fill with the stink of its dung and blood. Then the worshippers would drink the bull’s blood in memory o
f Mithras, just as he had commanded us. The Christians, I was told, had a similar ceremony, but they claimed that nothing was killed in their rites, though few pagans believed it for death is the due we owe to the Gods in return for the life they give us.

  I stayed on my knees in the dark, a warrior of Mithras come to one of his forgotten temples, and there, as I prayed, I smelt the same sea smell that I remembered from Lindinis, the seaweed and salt tang that had touched our nostrils as Olwen the Silver had stalked so slim and delicate and lovely: down Lindinis’s arcade. For a moment I thought a God was present, or maybe that Olwen the Silver had come to Mai Dun herself, but nothing stirred; there was no vision, no glowing naked skin, just the thin sea-salt smell and the soft whisper of the wind outside the temple.

  I turned back through the inner door and there, in the outer room, the smell of the sea was stronger. I tugged open box lids and lifted sacking covers from the wicker baskets, and I thought I had found the source of the sea smell when I discovered that two of the baskets were filled with salt that had become heavy and clotted in the damp autumn air, but the sea smell did not come from the salt, but from a third basket that was crammed with wet bladderwrack. I touched the seaweed, then licked my finger and tasted salt water. A great clay pot was stoppered next to the basket and, when I lifted the lid, I found the pot was filled with sea water, presumably to keep the bladderwrack moist, and so I dug into the basket of seaweed and found, just beneath the surface, a layer of shellfish. The fish had long, narrow, elegant double-sided shells, and looked something like mussels, only these were a little larger than mussels and their shells were a greyish white instead of black. I lifted one, smelt it and supposed that it was merely some delicacy that Merlin liked to eat. The shellfish, perhaps resenting my touch, cracked open its shell and pissed a squirt of liquid onto my hand. I put it back into the basket and covered the layer of living shellfish with the seaweed.

  I was just turning to the outer door, planning to wait outside, when I noticed my hand. I stared at it for several heartbeats, thinking that my eyes deceived me, but in the wan light by the outer door I could not be certain so I ducked back through the inner door to where the great Cauldron waited by the altar and there, in the darkest part of Mithras’s temple, I held my right hand before my face.