Tanaburs alone was left to guard the fire lit temple where he had made a small ghost-fence by placing two newly severed heads at the foot of the door's twin posts. He saw our spearheads glitter in the stableyard gate and he raised his moon-tipped staff as he spat curses at us. He was calling on the Gods to shrivel our souls when, quite suddenly, his screeching stopped.
It stopped when he heard Hywelbane scraping from her scabbard. At that sound he peered into the dark yard as Nimue and I advanced together and, recognizing me, he gave a small frightened cry like the sound of a hare trapped by a wildcat. He knew that I owned his soul and so he scuttled in terror through the temple door. Nimue kicked the two heads scornfully aside then followed me inside. She was carrying a sword. My men waited outside.
The temple had once been dedicated to some Roman God, though now it was the British Gods for whom the skulls were stacked so high against its bare stone walls. The skulls' dark eye-sockets gazed blankly towards the twin fires that lit the high narrow chamber where Tanaburs had made himself a circle of power with a ring of yellowing skulls. He now stood in that circle chanting spells, while behind him, against the far wall where a low stone altar was stained black with sacrificial blood, Gundleus waited with his drawn sword.
Tanaburs, his embroidered robe spattered with mud and blood, raised his staff and hurled foul curses at me. He cursed me by water and by fire, by earth and by air, by stone and by flesh, by dewfall and by moonlight, by life and by death, and not one of the curses stopped me as I slowly walked towards him with Nimue in her stained white robe beside me. Tanaburs spat a final curse, then pointed the staff straight at my face. "Your mother lives, Saxon!" he
A22 cried. "Your mother lives and her life is mine. You hear me, Saxon?" He leered at me from inside his circle and his ancient face was shadowed by the temple's twin fires, which gave his eyes a red, feral threat. "You hear me?" he cried again. "Your mother's soul is mine! I coupled with her to make it so! I made the two-backed beast with her and drew her blood to make her soul mine. Touch me, Saxon, and your mother's soul goes to the fire-dragons. She will be crushed by the ground, burned by the air, choked by the water and thrust into pain for evermore. And not just her soul, Saxon, but the soul of every living thing that ever slithered from her loins. I put her blood into the ground, Saxon, and slid my power into her belly." He laughed and raised his staff high towards the temple's beamed roof. "Touch me, Saxon, and the curse will take her life and through her life yours." He lowered the staff so it pointed at me again. "But let me go, and you and she will live."
I stopped at the circle's edge. The skulls did not make a ghost-fence, but there was still a dreadful power in their array. I could feel that power like unseen wings battering great strokes to baffle me. Cross the skull-circle, I thought, and I would enter the Gods' playground to contend against things I could not imagine, let alone understand. Tanaburs saw my uncertainty and smiled in triumph. "Your mother is mine, Saxon," he crooned, 'made mine, all mine, her blood and soul and body are mine, and that makes you mine for you were born in blood and pain from my body." He moved his staff so that its moon tip touched my breast. "Shall I take you to her, Saxon? She knows you live and a two-day journey will bring you back to her." He smiled wickedly. "You are mine," he cried, 'all mine! I am your mother and your father, your soul and your life. I made the charm of oneness on your mother's womb and you are now my son! Ask her!" He twitched his staff towards Nimue. "She knows that charm."
Nimue said nothing, but just stared balefully at Gundleus while I looked into the Druid's horrid eyes. I was frightened to cross his circle, terrified by his threats, but then, in a sickening rush, the events of that long-ago night came back to me as if they had happened just yesterday. I remembered my mother's cries and I remembered her pleading with the soldiers to leave me at her side and I remembered the spearmen laughing and striking her head with their spear-staves, and I remembered this cackling Druid with the hares and moons on his robe and the bones in his hair and I remembered how he had lifted me and fondled me and said what a fine gift for the Gods I would make. All that I remembered, just as I remembered being lifted up, screaming for my mother who could not help me, and I remembered being carried through the twin lines of fire where the warriors danced and the women moaned, and I remembered Tanaburs holding me high above his tonsured head as he walked to the edge of a pit that was a black circle in the earth surrounded by fires whose flames burned bright enough to illuminate the blood-smeared tip of a sharpened stake that protruded from the bowels of the round dark pit. The memories were like pain serpents biting at my soul as I remembered the bloody scraps of flesh and skin hanging from the fire lit stake and the half-comprehended horror of the broken bodies that writhed in slow pitiful agony as they died in the bloody darkness of this Druid's death-pit. And I remembered how I still screamed for my mother as Tanaburs lifted me to the stars and prepared to give me to his Gods. "To Gofannon," he had shouted, and my mother screamed as she was raped and I screamed because I knew I was going to die, 'to Lleullaw," Tanaburs shouted, 'to Cernunnos, to Taranis, to Sucellos, to Bel!" And on that last great name he had hurled me down on to the killing stake.
And he had missed.
My mother had been screaming, and I still heard her screams as I kicked my way through Tanaburs's circle of skulls, and her screams melded into the Druid's shriek as I echoed his long-ago cry of death. "To Bel!"I shouted.
Hywelbane cut down. And I did not miss. Hywelbane cut Tanaburs down through the shoulder, down through the ribs and such was the sheer blood-sodden anger in my soul that Hywelbane cut on down through his scrawny belly and deep into his stinking bowels so that his body burst apart like a rotted corpse, and all the time I screamed the awful scream of a little child being given to the death-pit.
The skull circle filled with blood and my eyes with tears as I looked up at the King who had slain Ralla's child and Mordred's mother. The King who had raped Nimue and taken her eye, and remembering that pain I took Hywelbane's hilt in both my hands and wrenched the blade free of the dirty offal at my feet and stepped across the Druid's body to carry death to Gundleus.
"He's mine," Nimue shouted at me. She had taken off her eye patch so that her empty socket leered red in the flame light She walked past me, smiling. "You're mine," she crooned, 'all mine," and Gundleus screamed.
And perhaps, in the Otherworld, Norwenna heard that scream and knew that her son, her little winter-born son, was still the King.
The story of Arthur continues in the second volume of
The Warlord Chronicles
The Enemy of God
The Enemy of God will be published by Michael Joseph in Spring 1997. An extract from the first chapter follows.
IN CAER sws THE leaves were heavy with the last ripeness of summer.
I was among the first of Arthur's men to reach Cuneglas's capital. I was there when the body of King Gorfyddyd was burned on Caer Dolforwyn and I saw the flames of his bale fire gust huge in the night as his soul went to its shadow body in the Otherworld. The fire was surrounded by a double ring of Powys's spearmen who carried flaming torches that swayed together as they sang the Death Lament of Beli Mawr. They sang for a long time and their voices echoed from the far hills to sound like a choir of ghosts. There was so much sorrow in Caer Sws. So many in the land had been made widows and orphans, and on the morning after the King was burned and when his bale fire was still sending a pillar of smoke towards the northern mountains, there was still more sorrow when the news of Ratae's fall arrived.
Ceinwyn was in mourning for her father. She wore black wool and shut herself in the women's quarters from where we could hear the crying and laments as the three days of the death watch passed.
And at the end of the three days, Arthur came. He arrived with twenty horsemen, a hundred attendants and twice that many spear. men. He brought bards and choristers. He brought Merlin and gifts of the gold taken from the dead in Lugg Vale..
He also brought Lancelot and Guinevere.
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 furnished with furs and linen hangings, and draped with green branches to signify peace. Queen Elaine, Lancelot's mother, rode in the cart also, but it was Guinevere, not the Queen, who commanded attention. She stood as the cart pulled slow through Caer Sws's gate and she stayed standing as the oxen drew her to the door of Cuneglas's great hall like a conqueror to a place where once she had been an inconvenient exile. 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 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 studded with golden stars. He wore his white-enamelled scale armour, his sword was scabbarded in white and his helmet was now crested with a spread swan's wing instead of the sea-eagle wings he had worn in Ynys Trebes. A white cloak, lined in red, hung from his shoulders and his dark, handsome face was framed by his gilded helmet. People gasped when they saw him, then 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. The crowd was dazzled by Lancelot and hardly noticed Arthur who wore a leather jerkin and a white cloak and seemed embarrassed to be in Caer Sws at all...
Author's Note
It is hardly surprising that the Arthurian period of British history is known as the Dark Ages for we know almost nothing about the events and personalities of those years. We cannot even be certain that Arthur existed, though on balance it does seem likely that a great British hero called Arthur (or Artur or Artorius) temporarily checked the invading Saxons sometime during the early years of the sixth century AD. One history of that conflict was written during the 5408, Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, and we might expect such a work to be an authoritative source on Arthur's achievements, but Gildas does not even mention Arthur, a fact much relished by those who dispute his existence.
Yet there is some early evidence for Arthur. Around the middle years of the sixth century, just when Gildas was writing his history, the surviving records show a surprising and atypical number of men called Arthur which suggests a sudden fashion for sons being named after a famous and powerful man. Such evidence is hardly conclusive, any more than is the earliest literary reference to Arthur, a glancing mention in the great epic poem Y Gododdin that was written around AD 600 to celebrate a battle between the northern British ('a mead-nourished host') and the Saxons, but many scholars believe that reference to Arthur is a much later interpolation.
After that one dubious mention in Y Gododdin we have to wait another two hundred years for Arthur's existence to be chronicled by an historian, a gap that weakens the authority of the evidence, yet nevertheless Nennius, who compiled his history of the Britons in the very last years of the eighth century, does make much of Arthur. Significantly Nennius never calls him a king, but rather describes Arthur as the Dux Bellorum, the Leader of Battles, a title I have translated as Warlord. Nennius was surely drawing on ancient folktales, which were a fertile source feeding the increasingly frequent retellings of the Arthur story that reached their zenith in the twelfth century when two writers in separate countries made Arthur into a hero for all times. In Britain Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his wonderful and mythical Historia Regum Britanniae while in France the poet Chretien de Troyes introduced, among other things, Lancelot and Camelot to the royal mix. The name Camelot might have been pure invention (or else arbitrarily adapted from Colchester's Roman name, Camulodunum), but otherwise Chretien de Troyes was almost certainly drawing on Breton myths which might have preserved, like the Welsh folktales that fed Geoffrey's history, genuine memories of an ancient hero. Then, in the fifteenth century, Sir Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte d'Arthur which is the proto-version of our flamboyant Arthur legend with its Holy Grail, round table, lissom maidens, questing beasts, mighty wizards and enchanted swords.
It is probably impossible to disentangle this rich tradition to find the truth of Arthur, though many have tried and doubtless many will try again. Arthur is said to be a man of northern Britain, an Essex man, as well as a West Countryman. One recent work positively identifies Arthur as a sixth-century Welsh ruler called Owain Ddantgwyn, but as the authors then note that 'nothing is recorded of Owain Ddantgwyn' it does not prove very helpful. Camelot has been variously placed at Carlisle, Winchester, South Cadbury, Colchester and a dozen other places. My choice in this matter is capricious at best and fortified by the certainty that no real answer exists. I have given Camelot the invented name of Caer Cadarn and set it at South Cadbury in Somerset, not because I think it the likeliest site (though I do not think it the least likely), but because I know and love that part of Britain. Delve as we like, all we can safely deduce from history is that a man called Arthur probably lived in the fifth and sixth centuries, that he was a great warlord even if he was never a king, and that his greatest battles were fought against the hated Saxon invaders.
