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…