‘All?’
‘Everyone.’ He had seemed oddly unconcerned, though there was blood on his arms and on his scale armour and even spattered on the goose feathers of his helmet.
‘The women too?’ I asked, for Lunete had been one of Isis’s worshippers. I had no love for her now, but she had once been my lover and I felt a pang for her. The men in the temple had been the most handsome of Lancelot’s spearmen and the women had been Guinevere’s attendants.
‘All dead,’ said Arthur, almost lightly. He had walked slowly down the pleasure garden’s central gravel path. ‘This wasn’t the first night they did this,’ he said, and sounded almost puzzled. ‘It seems they did it often. All of them. Whenever the moon was right. And they did it with each other, all of them. Except Guinevere. She just did it with the twins or with Lancelot.’ He shuddered then, showing the first emotion since he had come so cold-eyed from the cellar. ‘It seems,’ he said, ‘that she used to do it for my sake. Who shall sit on the throne? Arthur, Arthur, Arthur, but the Goddess can’t have approved of me.’ He had begun to cry. ‘Or else I resisted the Goddess too firmly, and so they changed the name to Lancelot.’ He gave the bloody sword a futile swing in the air. ‘Lancelot,’ he said in a voice filled with agony. ‘For years now, Derfel, she’s been sleeping with Lancelot, and all for religion, she says! Religion!
He was usually Osiris and she was always Isis. What else could she have been?’ He reached the terrace and sat on a stone bench from where he could stare at the moon-glossed creek. ‘I shouldn’t have killed them all,’ he said after a long while.
‘No, Lord,’ I said, ‘you shouldn’t.’
‘But what else could I do? It was filth, Derfel, just filth!’ He began to sob then. He said something about shame, about the dead having witnessed his wife’s shame and his own dishonour, and when he could say no more, he just sobbed helplessly and I said nothing. He did not seem to care whether I stayed with him or not, but I stayed until it was time to take Dinas and Lavaine down to the sea’s edge so that Nimue could draw their souls inch by terrible inch from their bodies. And now, in a grey dawn, Arthur sat empty and exhausted above the sea. The horns lay at his feet, while his helmet and Excalibur’s bare blade rested on the bench beside him. The blood on the sword had dried to a thick brown crust.
‘We must leave, Lord,’ I said as the dawn turned the sea the colour of a spear blade.
‘Love,’ he said bitterly.
I thought he had misheard me. ‘We must leave, Lord,’ I said again.
‘For what?’ he asked.
‘To complete your oath.’
He spat, then sat in silence. The horses had been brought down from the wood and the Cauldron and the Treasures of Britain were packed for their journey. The spearmen watched us and waited. ‘Is there any oath,’ he asked me bitterly, ‘that is unbroken? Just one?’
‘We must go, Lord,’ I told him, but he neither moved nor spoke and so I turned on my heel. ‘Then we’ll go without you,’ I said brutally.
‘Derfel!’ Arthur called, real pain in his voice.
‘Lord?’ I turned back.
He stared down at his sword and seemed surprised to see it so caked with blood. ‘My wife and son are in an upstairs room,’ he said. ‘Fetch them for me, will you? They can ride on the same horse. Then we can go.’ He was struggling so hard to sound normal, to sound as if this was just another dawn.
‘Yes, Lord,’ I said.
He stood and rammed Excalibur, blood and all, into its scabbard. ‘Then, I suppose,’ he said sourly,
‘we must remake Britain?’
‘Yes, Lord,’ I said, ‘we must.’
He stared at me and I saw he wanted to cry again. ‘Do you know something, Derfel?’ he asked me.
‘Tell me, Lord,’ I said.
‘My life will never be the same again, will it?’
‘I don’t know, Lord,’ I said. ‘I just don’t know.’
The tears spilled down his long cheeks. ‘I shall love her till the day I die. Every day I live I shall think of her. Every night before I sleep I will see her, and in every dawn I shall turn in my bed to find that she has gone. Every day, Derfel, and every night and every dawn until the moment that I die.’
He picked up his helmet with its blood-draggled plume, left the ivory horns, and walked with me. I fetched Guinevere and her son down from the bed-chamber and then we left. Gwenhwyvach had the Sea Palace then. She lived in it alone, her wits wandering, and surrounded by hounds and by the gorgeous treasures that decayed all about her. She would watch from a window for Lancelot’s coming, for she was sure that one day her Lord would come to live with her beside the sea in her sister’s palace, but her Lord never did come, and the treasures were stolen, the palace crumbled and Gwenhwyvach died there, or so we heard. Or maybe she lives there still, waiting beside the creek for the man who never comes.
We went away. And on the creek’s muddy banks the gulls tore at offal. Guinevere, in a long black dress that was covered by a dark green cloak, and with her red hair combed severely back and tied with a black ribbon, rode Arthur’s mare, Llamrei. She sat side-saddle, gripping the saddle bar with her right hand and keeping her left arm about the waist of her frightened and tearful son who kept glancing at his father who was walking doggedly behind the horse. ‘I suppose I am his father?’ Arthur spat at her once.
Guinevere, her eyes reddened by tears, just looked away. The motion of the horse rocked her back and forth and back and forth, yet she managed to look graceful all the same. ‘No one else, Lord Prince,’
she said after a long time. ‘No one else.’
Arthur walked in silence after that. He did not want my company, he wanted no company but his own misery, and so I joined Nimue at the head of the procession. The horsemen came next, then Guinevere, and my spearmen escorted the Cauldron at the rear. Nimue was retracing the same road that had led us to the coast and which here was a rough track that climbed onto a bare heath broken by dark stretches of yew and gorse. ‘So Gorfyddyd was right,’ I said after a while.
‘Gorfyddyd?’ Nimue asked, astonished that I should have dredged that old King’s name from the past.
‘At Lugg Vale,’ I reminded her, ‘he said Guinevere was a whore.’
‘And you, Derfel Cadarn,’ Nimue said scornfully, ‘are an expert on whores?’
‘What else is she?’ I asked bitterly.
‘No whore,’ Nimue said. She gestured ahead, pointing at the wisps of smoke above the distant trees that showed where the garrison of Vindocladia were cooking their breakfasts. ‘We’ll need to avoid them,’ Nimue said, and turned off the road to lead us towards a thicker belt of trees that grew to the west. I suspected the garrison had already heard that Arthur had come to the Sea Palace and had no wish to confront him, but I dutifully followed Nimue and the horsemen dutifully followed us. ‘What Arthur did,’ she said after a while, ‘is marry a rival instead of a companion.’
‘A rival?’
‘Guinevere could rule Dumnonia as well as any man,’ Nimue said, ‘and better than most. She’s cleverer than he is, and every bit as determined. If she’d been born to Uther instead of that fool Leodegan, then everything would have been different. She’d be another Boudicca and there’d be dead Christians from here to the Irish Sea and dead Saxons to the German Sea.’
‘Boudicca,’ I reminded her, ‘lost her war.’
‘And so has Guinevere,’ Nimue said grimly.
‘I don’t see that she was Arthur’s rival,’ I said after a time. ‘She had power. I don’t suppose he ever made a decision without talking to her.’
‘And he talked to the Council, which no woman can join,’ Nimue said tartly. ‘Put yourself in Guinevere’s place, Derfel. She’s quicker than all of you put together, but any idea she ever had was put before a pack of dull, ponderous men. You and Bishop Emrys and that fart Cythryn who pretends to be so judicious and fair-minded, then goes home and beats his wife and makes her watch him take a dwarf girl to their bed. Councillors! You think Dumnonia would know the difference if you all drowned?’
‘A King must have a Council,’ I said indignantly.
‘Not if he’s clever,’ Nimue said. ‘Why should he? Does Merlin have a Council? Does Merlin need a room full of pompous fools to tell him what to do? The only purpose a Council serves is to make you all feel important.’
‘It does more than that,’ I insisted. ‘How does a King know what his people are thinking if there’s no Council?’
‘Who cares what the fools think? Allow the people to think for themselves and half of them become Christians; there’s a tribute to their ability to think,’ she spat. ‘So just what is it that you do in Council, Derfel? Tell Arthur what your shepherds are saying? And Cythryn, I suppose, represents the dwarf-tupping men of Dumnonia. Is that it?’ she laughed. ‘The people! The people are idiots, that’s why they have a King and why the King has spearmen.’
‘Arthur,’ I said stoutly, “has given the country good government, and he did it without using spears on the people.’
‘And look what’s happened to the country,’ Nimue retorted. She walked in silence for a few moments. After a while she sighed. ‘Guinevere was right all along, Derfel. Arthur should be King. She knew that. She wanted that. She would even have been happy with that, for with Arthur as King she would have been Queen and that would have given her as much power as she needed. But your precious Arthur wouldn’t take the throne. So high-minded! All those sacred oaths! And what did he want instead? To be a farmer. To live like you and Ceinwyn; the happy home, the children, laughter.’ She made these things sound risible. ‘How content,’ she asked me, ‘do you think Guinevere would be in that life? The very thought of it bored her! And that’s all that Arthur ever wanted. She is a clever, quick-witted lady and he wanted to turn her into a milch cow. Do you wonder she looked for other excitements?’
‘Whoredom?’
‘Oh, don’t be a fool, Derfel. Am I a whore for having bedded you? More fool me.’ We had reached the trees and Nimue turned north to walk between the ash and the tall elms. The spearmen followed us dumbly and I think that had we led them in circles they would have followed us without protest, so astonished and numbed were we all by the night’s horrors. ‘So she broke her marriage oath,’ Nimue said, ‘do you think she’s the first? Or do you think that makes her a whore? In which case Britain’s full to the rim with whores. She’s no whore, Derfel. She’s a strong woman who was born with a quick mind and good looks, and Arthur loved the looks and wouldn’t use her mind. He wouldn’t let her make him King and so she turned to that ridiculous religion of hers. And all Arthur did was tell her how happy she’d be when he could hang up Excalibur and start breeding cattle!’ She laughed at the thought. ‘And because it would never occur to Arthur to be unfaithful he never suspected it in Guinevere. The rest of us did, but not Arthur. He kept telling himself the marriage was perfect, and all the while he was miles away and Guinevere’s good looks were drawing men like flies to carrion. And they were handsome men, clever men, witty men, men who wanted power, and one was a handsome man who wanted all the power he could get, so Guinevere decided to help him. Arthur wanted a cowshed, but Lancelot wants to be High King of Britain and Guinevere finds that a more interesting challenge than raising cows or mopping up the shit of infants. And that idiotic religion encouraged her. The arbiter of thrones!’ She spat. ‘She wasn’t bedding Lancelot because she was a whore, you great fool, she was bedding him to get her man made High King.’
‘And Dinas?’ I asked, ‘Lavaine?’
‘They were her priests. They were helping her, and in some religions, Derfel, men and women couple as part of worship. And why not?’ She kicked at a stone and watched it skitter away through a patch of bindweed. ‘And believe me, Derfel, those two were beautiful-looking men. I know, because I took that beauty away from them, but not because of what they did with Guinevere. I did it for the insult they gave Merlin and for what they did to your daughter.’ She walked in silence for a few yards. ‘Don’t despise Guinevere,’ she told me after a while. ‘Don’t despise her for being bored. Despise her, if you must, for stealing the Cauldron and be thankful Dinas and Lavaine never unlocked its power. It worked for Guinevere, though. She bathed in it weekly and that’s why she never aged a week.’ She turned as footsteps sounded behind us. It was Arthur who was running to catch us up. He still looked dazed, but at some time in the last few moments it must have dawned on him that we had diverted from the road.
‘Where are we going?’ he demanded.
‘You want the garrison to see us?’ Nimue asked, pointing again to the smoke of their cooking fires. He said nothing, but just stared at the smoke as if he had never seen such a thing before. Nimue glanced at me and shrugged at his evident befuddlement. ‘If they wanted a fight,’ Arthur said, ‘they’d have been looking for us already.’ His eyes were red and puffy, and maybe it was my imagination, but his hair seemed greyer. ‘What would you do,’ Arthur asked me, ‘if you were the enemy?’ He did not mean the puny garrison at Vindocladia, but nor would he name Lancelot.
‘Try to trap us, Lord,’ I said.
‘How? Where?’ he asked irritably. ‘North, yes? That’s our fastest route back to friendly spearmen and they’ll know that. So we won’t go north.’ He looked at me, and it was almost as though he did not recognize me. ‘We go for their throats instead, Derfel,’ he said savagely.
‘Their throats, Lord?’
‘We’ll go to Caer Cadarn.’
I said nothing for a while. He was not thinking straight. Grief and anger had upset him and I wondered how I could steer him away from this suicide. ‘There are forty of us. Lord,’ I said quietly.
‘Caer Cadarn,’ he said again, ignoring my objection. ‘Who holds the Caer holds Dumnonia, and who holds Dumnonia holds Britain.
If you don’t want to come, Derfel, then go your own way. I’m going to Caer Cadarn.’ He turned away.
‘Lord!’ I called him back. ‘Dunum lies in our path.’ That was a major fortress, and though its garrison was doubtless depleted, it could hold more than enough spears to destroy our small force.
‘I would not care, Derfel, if every fortress in Britain stood in our path.’ Arthur spat the words at me.
‘You do what you want, but I’m going to Caer Cadarn.’ He walked away, shouting at the horsemen to turn westwards.