Bernard Cornwell - Warlord 1 - Winter King

The Winter King

By: Bernard Cornwell.

Category: Fiction Historical Adventure

Synopsis:

These are the tales of the last days before the great darkness descended. These are the tales of 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 forgive me,

the best man I ever knew. How I have wept for Arthur... Fifth-century Britain lies on the edge of

darkness. Memories of Roman civilization! are fading; the pagan Gods are retreating before the spread of

Christianity; the Saxons are snapping and snarling at the borders. Only fragile bonds unite the unruly

kingdoms of Britain against the invaders, bonds cemented by the vigour of the High King, Uther

Pendragon. But the Pendragon is failing, and his heir is no strong leader but a child, born on a bitter

winter night.

Only one man could keep Uther's throne safe,-only he could hold the warring kingdoms together to face

their true enemy, the Saxons. That man is Arthur: soldier, statesman, Merlin's protege, Uther's illegitimate

son. But he has been banished, exiled by his own father to Brittany. Derfel, one of his spearmen, narrates

the story of Arthur's return and of his quest for peace: embattled, bloody and, finally, triumphant.

The Winter King is a magnificent tale of the Dark Ages and the reality of war and political strife in a land

where religion vied with magic for the souls of the people. It portrays Arthur the man rather than the

legend, a military genius who, with a small band of warriors bound to him by loyalty and love, struggled

to keep alive a flicker of civilization.

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 wood store 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.

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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

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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.

"You should not be on the ramparts, High Lord," Bishop Bedwin said.

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Uther waved a gloved hand as if to suggest that Bedwin was welcome to go inside where the fires

burned, but High King Uther, the Pendragon of Britain, would not move. He wanted to be on

Caer Cadarn's ramparts so he could gaze across the icy land and up into the middle air where the

demons lurked, but Bedwin was right, the High King should not have been standing guard against

demons on this hard night. Uther was old and sick, yet the kingdom's safety depended on his bloated

body and on his slow, sad mind. He had been vigorous only six months before, but then had come the

news of his heir's death. Mordred, the most beloved of his sons and the only one of those born to his

bride still living, had been cut down by a Saxon broad-axe and had then bled to death beneath the hill of

the White Horse. That death had left the kingdom without an heir, and a kingdom without an heir is a

cursed kingdom, but this night, if the Gods willed, Uther's heir would be born to Mordred's widow.

Unless the child was a girl, of course, in which case all the pain was for nothing and the kingdom

doomed.

Uther's great head raised itself from the pelts that were crusted with ice where his breath had settled on

the fur. "All is being done, Bedwin?" Uther asked.

"All, High Lord, all," Bishop Bedwin said. He was the King's most trusted counsellor and, like the

Princess Norwenna, a Christian. Norwenna, protesting at being moved from the warm Roman villa in

nearby Lindinis, had screamed at her father-in-law that she would only go to Caer Cadarn if he promised

to keep the old Gods' witches away. She had insisted on a Christian birth, and Uther, desperate for an

heir, had agreed to her demands. Now Bed win's priests were chanting their prayers in a chamber beside

the hall where holy water had been sprinkled, a cross had been hung over the birth bed and another put

beneath Norwenna's body. "We are praying to the blessed Virgin Mary," Bedwin explained, 'who,

without soiling her sacred body by any carnal knowledge, became Christ's holy mother and'

"Enough," Uther growled. The High King was no Christian and did not like any man attempting to make

him one, though he did accept that the Christian God probably had as much power as most other Gods.

The events of this night were testing that toleration to the limit.

Which was why I was there. I was a child on the edge of manhood, a beardless errand-runner who

crouched frozen beside the King's chair on the ramparts of Caer Cadarn. I had come from Ynys

Wydryn, Merlin's hall, which lay on the northern horizon.

My task, if ordered, was to fetch Morgan and her helpers who waited in a pig-herder's mud hovel at the

foot of Caer Cadarn's western slope. The Princess Norwenna might want Christ's mother as her midwife,

but Uther was ready with the older Gods if that newer one failed.

And the Christian God did fail. Norwenna's screams became fewer, but her whimpering more desperate

until at last Bishop Bedwin's wife came from the hall and knelt shivering beside the High King's chair. The

baby, Ellin said, would not come and the mother, she feared, was dying. Uther waved that last comment

aside. The mother was nothing, only the child mattered, and only then if it was a boy.

"High Lord..." Ellin began nervously, but Uther was no longer listening.

He tapped my head. "Go, boy," he said, and I twisted out of his shadow, leaped down to the fort's

interior and raced across the moon-shadowed whiteness between the buildings. The guards on the

western gate watched me run by, then I was sliding and falling on the ice-chute of the western road. I

slithered through snow, tore my cloak on a tree stump and fell heavily into some ice-laden brambles, but I

felt nothing, except the huge weight of a kingdom's fate on my young shoulders. "Lady Morgan!" I

shouted as I neared the hovel. "Lady Morgan!"

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She must have been waiting, for the hovel door was immediately flung open and her gold-masked face

shone in the moonlight. "Go!" she screeched at me, 'go!" and I turned and started back up the hill while

around me a pack of Merlin's orphans scrambled through the snow. They were carrying kitchen pots

which they clashed together as they ran, though when the slope grew too steep and treacherous they

were forced to hurl the pots on ahead and scramble up behind. Morgan followed more slowly, attended

by her slave Sebile who carried the necessary charms and herbs. "Set the fires, Derfel!" Morgan called

up to me.

"Fire!" I shouted breathlessly as I scrambled through the gateway. "Fire on the ramparts! Fire!"

Bishop Bedwin protested at Morgan's arrival, but the High King turned on his counsellor in a rage and

the Bishop meekly surrendered to the older faith. His priests and monks were ordered out of their

makeshift chapel and told to carry firebrands to all parts of the ramparts and there pile the burning brands

with wood and wattle torn out of the huts that clustered inside the fort's northern walls. The fires

crackled, then blazed huge in the night and their smoke hung in the air to make a canopy that would

confuse the evil spirits and so keep them from this place where a princess and her child were dying. We

young ones raced around the ramparts banging pots to make the great noise that would further dizzy the

evil ones. "Shout," I ordered the children from Ynys Wydryn, and still more children came from the

fortress hovels to add their noise to ours. The guards beat their spear-shafts against their shields, and the

priests piled more wood on to a dozen flaming pyres while the rest of us screamed our noisy challenges

against the evil wraiths that had slithered through the night to curse Norwenna's labour.

Morgan, Sebile, Nimue and one girl child went into the hall. Norwenna screamed, though whether she

cried aloud in protest at the coming of Merlin's women or because the stubborn child was tearing her

body in two, we could not tell. More screams sounded as Morgan expelled the Christian attendants. She

threw the two crosses into the snow and tossed a handful of mug wort the woman's herb, on to the fire.

Nimue later told me that they put iron nuggets into the damp bed to scare away the evil spirits already

lodged there and laid seven eagle stones around the writhing woman's head to bring the good spirits

down from the Gods.

Sebile, Morgan's slave, put a birch branch over the hall door and waved another over the writhing body

of the hurting Princess. Nimue crouched in the door and urinated on the threshold to keep the evil fairies

away from the hall, then she cupped some of her urine and carried it to Norwenna's bed where she

sprinkled it on the straw as a further precaution against the child's soul being stolen away at the moment

of birth. Morgan, her gold mask bright in the flame light slapped Norwenna's hands away so she could

force a charm of rare amber between the Princess's breasts. The small girl, one of Merlin's foundlings,

waited in terror at the foot of the bed.

Smoke from the newly set fires blurred the stars. Creatures woken in the woods at the foot of Caer

Cadarn howled at the noise which had erupted above them while High King Uther raised his eyes to the

dying moon and prayed that he had not fetched Morgan too late. Morgan was Uther's natural daughter,

the first of the four bastards the High King had whelped on Igraine of Gwynedd. Uther would doubtless

have preferred Merlin to be there, but

Merlin had been gone for months, gone into nowhere, gone, it sometimes seemed to us, for ever, and

Morgan, who had learned her skills from Merlin, must take his place on this cold night in which we

clashed pots and shouted until we were hoarse to drive the malevolent fiends away from Caer Cadarn.

Even Uther joined in the noise-making, though the sound of his staff beating on the rampart's edge was

very feeble. Bishop Bedwin was on his knees, praying, while his wife, expelled from the birth-room, wept

and wailed and called on the Christian God to forgive the heathen witches.

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But the witchcraft worked, for a child was born alive.

The scream Norwenna gave at the moment of birth was worse than any that had preceded it. It was the

shriek of an animal in torment, a lament to make the whole night sob. Nimue told me later that Morgan

had caused that pain by thrusting her hand into the birth canal and wrenching the baby into this world by

brute force. The child came bloody from the tormented mother and Morgan shouted at the frightened girl

to pick the child up while Nimue tied and bit the cord. It was important that the baby should first be held

by a virgin, which is why the girl child had been taken to the hall, but she was frightened and would not

come close to the blood-wet straw on which Norwenna now panted and where the new-born,

blood-smeared child lay as though stillborn. "Pick it up!" Morgan yelled, but the girl fled in tears and so

Nimue plucked the baby from the bed and cleared its mouth so that it could snatch its first choking

breath.

The omens were all so very bad. The haloed moon was waning and the virgin had fled from the babe that

now began to cry aloud. Uther heard the noise and I saw him close his eyes as he prayed to the Gods

that he had been given a boy child.

"Shall I?" Bishop Bedwin asked hesitantly.

"Go," Uther snapped, and the Bishop scrambled down the wooden ladder, hitched up his robe and ran

across the trampled snow to the hall's door. He stood there for a few seconds, then ran back towards

the rampart waving his hands.

"Good news, High Lord, good news!" Bedwin called as he clambered awkwardly up the ladder. "Most

excellent news!"

"A boy." Uther anticipated the news by breathing the words.

"A boy!" Bedwin confirmed, 'a fine boy!"

I was crouching near the High King and I saw tears show at his eyes that were gazing toward the sky.

"An heir," Uther said in a tone of wonder as though he had not really dared to hope that the Gods would

favour him. He dabbed at the tears with a fur-gloved hand. "The kingdom is safe, Bedwin," he said.

"Praise God, High Lord, it is safe," Bedwin agreed.

"A boy," Uther said, then his huge body was suddenly racked with a terrible cough. It left him panting. "A

boy," he said again when his breathing was steady.

Morgan came after a while. She climbed the ladder and prostrated her stocky body in front of the High

King. Her gold mask gleamed, hiding the horror beneath. Uther touched her shoulder with his staff. "Rise,

Morgan," he said, then he fumbled beneath his robe to find a gold brooch with which to reward her.

But Morgan would not take it. "The boy," she said ominously, 'is crippled. He has a twisted foot."

I saw Bedwin make a sign of the cross for a crippled prince was the worst omen of this cold night.

"How bad?" Uther asked.

"Just the foot," Morgan said in her harsh voice. "The leg is properly formed, High Lord, but the Prince

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will never run."

From deep inside his swathing fur cloak Uther chuckled. "Kings don't run, Morgan," he said, 'they walk,

they rule, they ride and they reward their good, honest servants. Take the gold." He held the brooch

towards her again. It was a piece of thick gold, marvellously wrought into the shape of Uther's talisman, a

dragon.

But still Morgan would not accept it. "And the boy is the last child Norwenna will ever bear, High Lord,"

she warned Uther. "We burned the afterbirth and it did not sound once." The afterbirth was always put

on the fire so that the popping sound it made would tell how many more children the mother would bear.

"I listened close," Morgan said, 'and it was silent."

"The Gods wanted it silent," Uther said angrily. "My son is dead," he went on bleakly, 'so who else could

give Norwenna a boy child fit to be a King?"

Morgan paused. "You, High Lord?" she said at last.

Uther chuckled at the thought, then the chuckle turned into laughter and finally into another racking cough

that bent him forward in lung-aching pain. The coughing passed at last and he drew in a shuddering

breath as he shook his head. "Norwenna's only duty was to drop one boy child, Morgan, and that she

has done. Our duty is to protect him." ii

"With all the strength of Dumnonia," Bedwin added eagerly.

"Newborns die easily," Morgan warned the two men in her bleak voice.

"Not this one," Uther said fiercely, 'not this one. He will come to you, Morgan, at Ynys Wydryn and you

will use your skills to make certain he lives. Here, take the brooch."

Morgan at last accepted the dragon brooch. The maimed babe was still crying and the mother was

whimpering, but around the ramparts of Caer Cadarn the pot-beaters and fire-tenders were celebrating

the news that our kingdom had an heir again. Dumnonia had an ed ling and an ed ling birth meant a great

feast and lavish gifts. The bloody birth-straw of the bed was brought from the hall and dumped on a fire

so that the flames crackled high and bright. A child had been born; all that child now needed was a name

and of that name there could be no doubt. None. Uther eased himself out of his chair and stood huge and

grim on Caer Cadarn's wall to pronounce the name of his new-born grandson, the name of his heir and

the name of his kingdom's ed ling The winter-born babe would be named after his father.

He would be called Mordred.

NORWENNA AND THE BABY came to us at Ynys Wydryn. They were brought in an ox-cart across

the eastern land bridge to the Tor's foot and I watched from the windy summit as the sick mother and the

maimed child were lifted from their bed of fur cloaks and carried in a cloth litter up the path to the

stockade. It was cold that day; a bitter, snow-bright cold that ate at the lungs, chapped the skin and

made Norwenna whimper as she was carried with her swaddled babe through the land gate of Ynys

Wydryn's Tor.

Thus did Mordred, Edling of Dumnonia, enter Merlin's realm.

Ynys Wydryn, despite its name, which means the Isle of Glass, was not a true island, but rather a

promontory of high ground that jutted into a waste of sea-marsh, creeks and willow-edged bogs where

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sedge and reeds grew thick. It was a rich place, made so by wildfowl, fish, clay and the limestone that

could easily be quarried from the hills edging the tidal wastes that were crossed by wooden track ways

on which unwary visitors were sometimes drowned when the wind came hard from the west and blew a

high tide fast across the long, green wetlands. To the west, where the land rose, there were apple

orchards and wheat fields, and to the north, where pale hills edged the marshes, cattle and sheep were

herded. It was all good land, and at its heart was Ynys Wydryn.

This was all Lord Merlin's land. It was called Avalon and had been ruled by his father and his father's

father, and every serf and slave within sight of the Tor's summit worked for Merlin. It was this land with

its produce trapped and netted in the tidal creeks or grown on the rich soil of the inland river valleys that

gave Merlin the wealth and freedom to be a Druid. Britain had once been the land of Druids, but the

Romans had first slaughtered them, then tamed the religion so that even now, after two generations

without Rome's rule, only a handful of the old priests remained. The Christians had taken their place, and

Christianity now lapped around the old faith like a wind-driven high tide splashing through the

demon-haunted reed-beds of Avalon.

Avalon's isle, Ynys Wydryn, was a cluster of grassy hills, all of them bare except for the Tor which was

the steepest and highest. At its summit was a ridge where Merlin's hall was built, and beneath the hall was

a spread of lesser buildings protected by a wooden stockade perched precariously at the top of the Tor's

steep grassy slopes which were scraped into a pattern of terraces left from the Old Days before the

Romans came. A narrow path followed the ancient terraces, winding its intricate way towards the peak,

and those who visited the Tor in search of healing or prophecy were forced to follow that path which

served to baffle the evil spirits who might otherwise come to sour Merlin's stronghold. Two other paths

ran straight down the Tor's slopes, one to the east where the land bridge led to Ynys Wydryn, the other

westward from the sea gate down to the settlement at the Tor's foot where fishermen, wild fowlers

basket-weavers and herdsmen lived. Those paths were the everyday entrances to the Tor and Morgan

kept them free of evil spirits by constant prayers and charms.

Morgan gave special attention to the western path for it led not only to the settlement, but also to Ynys

Wydryn's Christian shrine. Merlin's great-grandfather had let the Christians come to the isle in Roman

times and nothing had been able to dislodge them since. We children of the Tor were encouraged to

throw stones at the monks and toss animal dung over their wooden stockade or laugh at the pilgrims who

scuttled through the wicket gate to worship a thorn tree that grew next to the impressive stone church

which had been built by the Romans and still dominated the Christian compound. One year Merlin had a

similar thorn tree enthroned on the Tor and we all worshipped it by singing, dancing and bowing. The

village's Christians said we would be struck down by their God, but nothing happened. We burned our

thorn in the end and mixed its ashes with the pig feed, but still the Christian God ignored us. The

Christians claimed that their thorn was magic and that it had been brought to Ynys Wydryn by a foreigner

who had seen the Christian God nailed to a tree. May God forgive me, but in those distant days I

mocked such stories. I never understood then what the thorn had to do with a God's killing, but now I

do, though I can tell you that the Sacred Thorn, if it still grows in Ynys Wydryn, is not the tree sprung

from the staff of Joseph of

Arimathaea. I know that, for one dark winter's night when I had been sent to fetch Merlin a flask of clean

water from the sacred spring at the Tor's southern foot, I saw the Christian monks digging up a small

thorn bush to replace the tree that had just died inside their stockade. The Holy Thorn was always dying,

though whether that was because of the cow dung we threw at it or simply because the poor tree was

overwhelmed by the cloth strips tied to it by pilgrims, I cannot tell. The monks of the Holy Thorn became

rich anyway, fattened by the generous gifts of the pilgrims.

The monks of Ynys Wydryn were delighted that Norwenna had come to our stockade for now they had

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a reason to climb the steep path and bring their prayers into the heart of Merlin's stronghold. The

Princess Norwenna was still a fierce and sharp-tongued Christian despite the failure of the Virgin Mary to

deliver her child and she demanded that the monks be admitted every morning. I do not know if Merlin

would have allowed them into the compound, and Nimue certainly cursed Morgan for granting her

permission, but Merlin was not at Ynys Wydryn in those days. We had not seen our master for more

than a year, but life in his strange fastness went on without him.

And strange it was. Merlin was the oddest of all Ynys Wydryn's inhabitants, but around him, for his

pleasure, he had assembled a tribe of maimed, disfigured, twisted and half-mad creatures. The captain of

the household and commander of its guard was Druidan, a dwarf. He stood no higher than a

five-year-old child, yet he had the fury of a full-grown warrior and dressed each day in greaves,

breastplate, helmet, cloak and weapons. He railed against the fate that had stunted him and took his

revenge on the only creatures smaller still: the orphans whom Merlin gathered so carelessly. Few of

Merlin's girls were not fanatically pursued by Druidan, though when he had tried to drag Nimue into his

bed he had received an angry beating for his pains. Merlin had hit him about the head, breaking Druidan's

ears, splitting his lips and blacking his eyes while the children and the stockade's guards cheered. The

guards Druidan commanded were all lame or blind or mad, and some of them were all three, but none

was mad enough to like Druidan.

Nimue, my friend and childhood companion, was Irish. The Irish were Britons, but they had never been

ruled by the Romans and for that reason counted themselves better than the mainland Britons whom they

raided, harried, enslaved and colonized. If the

Saxons had not been such terrible enemies then we would have considered the Irish the worst of all the

Gods' creatures, though from time to time we made alliances with them against some other tribe of

Britons. Nimue had been snatched from her family in a raid Uther made against the Irish settlements in

Demetia that lay across the wide sea fed by the River Severn. Sixteen captives were taken in that raid

and all were sent back to become slaves in Dumnonia, but while the ships were crossing the Severn Sea

a great storm blew from the west and the ship carrying the captives foundered on Ynys Wair. Nimue

alone survived, walking out of the sea, it was said, without even being wet. It was a sign, Merlin claimed,

that she was loved by Manawydan, the Sea God, though Nimue herself insisted that it had been Don, the

most powerful Goddess, who had saved her life. Merlin wanted to call her Vivien, a name dedicated to

Manawydan, but Nimue ignored the name and kept her own. Nimue almost always got her own way.

She grew up in Merlin's mad household with a sharp curiosity and a self-possessed confidence and

when, after maybe thirteen or fourteen of her summers had passed, Merlin ordered her to his own bed,

she went as though she had known all along that her fate was to become his lover and thus, in the order

of these things, the second most important person in all Ynys Wydryn.

Although Morgan did not yield that post without a struggle. Morgan, of all the weird creatures in Merlin's

house, was the most grotesque. She was a widow and thirty summers old when Nor-wenna and

Mordred came to be her wards, and the appointment was appropriate for Morgan was high born herself.

She was the first of the four bastards, three girls and a boy, fathered on Igraine of Gwynedd by High

King Uther. Her brother was Arthur and with such a lineage and such a brother it might be thought

ambitious men would have beaten down the walls of the Otherworld itself to claim the widow's hand, yet

as a young bride Morgan had been trapped in a burning house that had killed her new husband and

scarred Morgan horribly. The flames had taken her left ear, blinded her left eye, seared the hair from the

left side of her scalp, maimed her left leg and twisted her left arm so that naked, Nimue told me, the

whole left side of Morgan's body was wrinkled, raw-red and distorted, shrivelled in some places,

stretched in others, gruesome everywhere. Just like a rotted apple, Nimue told me, only worse. Morgan

was a creature from nightmare, but to Merlin she was a lady fit for his high hall and he had trained her to

be his prophetess. He had ordered one of the High King's goldsmiths to fashion her a mask that fitted

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over her ravaged head like a helmet. The gold mask had a hole for her one eye and a slit for her twisted

mouth and was made out of thin fine gold that was chased in spirals and dragons, and fronted with an

image of Cernunnos, the Horned God, who was Merlin's protector. Gold-faced Morgan always dressed

in black, had a glove on her withered left hand, and was widely famed for her healing touch and gifts of

prophecy. She was also the worst-tempered woman I ever met.

Sebile was Morgan's slave and companion. Sebile was that rarity, a great beauty with hair the colour of

pale gold. She was a Saxon captured in a raid and after the war-band had raped her for a season she

had come gibbering to Ynys Wydryn where Morgan had healed her mind. Even so she was still crazed,

though not wicked mad, just foolish beyond the dreams of foolishness. She would lie with any man, not

because she wanted to, but because she feared not to, and nothing Morgan did could ever stop her. She

gave birth year after year, though few of the fair-haired children ever lived and those that did Merlin sold

as slaves to men who prized golden-haired children. He was amused by Sebile, though nothing in her

madness spoke of the Gods.

I liked Sebile for I too was a Saxon and Sebile would speak to me in my mother's tongue so that I grew

up in Ynys Wydryn speaking both Saxon and the speech of the Britons. I should have been a slave, but

when I was a little child, shorter even than the dwarf Druidan, a raiding party had come to Dumnonia's

northern coast from Siluria and had taken the settlement where my mother was enslaved. King Gundleus

of Siluria led the raid. My mother, who I think looked something like Sebile, was raped while I was

carried to the death-pit where Tanaburs, Siluria's Druid, sacrificed a dozen captives as thanks to the High

God Bel for the great plunder the raid had yielded. Dear God, how I remember that night. The fires, the

screams, the drunken rapes, the wild dancing, and then the moment when Tanaburs hurled me into the

black pit with its sharpened stake. I lived, untouched, and came from the death-pit as calmly as Nimue

had come from the killing sea and Merlin, finding me, had called me a child of Bel. He named me Derfel,

gave me a home, and let me grow free.

The Tor was filled with such children who had been snatched from the Gods. Merlin believed we were

special and that we might grow into a new order of Druids and Priestesses who could help him

re-establish the old true religion in Rome-blighted Britain, but he never had time to teach us, and so most

of us grew to become farmers, fishermen or wives. During my time on the Tor only Nimue seemed

marked by the Gods and was growing into a priestess. I wanted nothing more than to be a warrior.

Pellinore gave me that ambition. Pellinore was the favourite of all Merlin's creatures. He was a king, but

the Saxons had taken his land and his eyes, and the Gods had taken his mind. He should have been sent

to the Isle of the Dead, where the dangerous mad went, but Merlin ordered him kept on the Tor locked

in a small compound like the one where Druidan kept his pigs. He lived naked with long white hair that

reached to his knees and with empty eye-sockets that wept. He raved constantly, haranguing the universe

about his troubles, and Merlin would listen to the madness and draw from it messages of the Gods.

Everyone feared Pellinore. He was utterly crazy and ungovernably wild. He once cooked one of Sebile's

children on his fire. Yet, oddly, I do not know why, Pellinore liked me. I would slip between the bars of

his compound and he would pet me and tell me tales of fighting and wild hunts. He never sounded mad to

me and he never hurt me, nor Nimue, but then, as Merlin always said, we two children were especially

beloved of Bel.

Bel might have loved us, but Guendoloen hated us. She was Merlin's wife, now old and toothless. Like

Morgan she had great skills with herbs and charms, but Merlin had cast her off when her face became

disfigured by a sickness. It had happened long before I reached the Tor, during a period everyone called

the Bad Time when Merlin had come back from the north mad and weeping, but even when he

recovered his wits he did not take Guendoloen back, though he did allow her to live in a small hut beside

the stockade fence where she spent her days casting spells against her husband and screaming insults at

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Bernard Cornwell - Warlord 1 - Winter King

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