Bernard Cornwell – Warlord 1 – Winter King

But Arthur wore Guinevere’s hair about his neck. It was a narrow red braid that he hid beneath his collar, but which I saw when I brought him water one morning. He was bare-chested, sharpening his shaving knife on a stone, and he shrugged when he saw me notice the woven braid. “You think red hair is unlucky, Derfel?” he asked when he saw my expression.

“Everyone says so, Lord.”

“But is everyone right?” he asked the bronze mirror. “To make a sword blade hard, Derfel, you don’t quench it in water, but in urine passed by a red-headed boy. That must be lucky, must it not? And what if red hair is unlucky?” He paused, spat on the stone and worked the knife blade to and fro. “Our task, Derfel, is to change things, not let them stand. Why not make red hair lucky?”

“You can do anything, Lord,” I said with unhappy loyalty.

He sighed. “I hope that’s true, Derfel. I do hope that’s true.” He peered into the bronze mirror, then flinched as he laid the knife against his cheek. “Peace is more than a marriage, Derfel. It has to be! You don’t make war over a bride. If peace is so desirable, and it is, then you don’t abandon it because a marriage doesn’t happen, do you?”

“I don’t know, Lord,” I said. I only knew that my Lord was rehearsing arguments in his head, repeating them over and over until he believed them. He was mad with love, so mad that north was south and heat was cold. This, to me, was an Arthur I had not seen before; a man of passion and, dare I say it, selfishness. Arthur had risen so fast. It is true he had been born with a king’s blood in his veins, but he had not been given his patrimony and so he considered that all his achievements were his alone. He was proud of that and convinced by those achievements that he knew better than any other man save perhaps Merlin, and because that knowledge was so often what other men incoherently wished, his selfish ambitions were usually seen as noble and far-seeing, but at Caer Sws the ambitions clashed with what other men wanted.

I left him shaving and went outside into the new sunshine where Agravain was sharpening a boar spear. “Well?” he asked me.

“He’s not going to marry Ceinwyn,” I said. We were out of earshot of the hall, but even if we had been closer Arthur would not have heard us. He was singing.

Agravain spat. “He’ll marry who he’s told to marry,” he said, then rammed the spear-butt into the turf and stalked across to Tewdric’s quarters.

Whether Gorfyddyd and Cuneglas knew what was happening I could not tell, for they were not in constant touch with Arthur as we were. Gorfyddyd, if he suspected, probably thought it did not matter. He doubtless believed, if he believed anything, that Arthur would take Guinevere as a lover and Ceinwyn as a wife. It was bad manners, of course, to come to such an arrangement in the week of the betrothal, but bad manners had never worried Gorfyddyd of Powys. He had no manners himself and knew, as all kings know, that wives are for making dynasties and lovers for making pleasure. His own wife was long dead, but a succession of slave girls kept his bed warm and, to him, impoverished Guinevere would never rank much above a slave and was thus no threat to his beloved daughter. Cuneglas was more perspicacious, and I am sure he must have scented trouble, but he had invested all his energies into this new peace and he must have hoped that Arthur’s obsession with Guinevere would blow away like a summer squall. Or maybe neither Gorfyddyd nor Cuneglas suspected anything, for certainly they did not send Guinevere away from Caer Sws, though whether that would have achieved anything, the Gods alone know. Agravain thought the madness might pass. He told me that Arthur had been obsessed like this once before. “It was a girl in Ynys Trebes,”

Agravain told me, ‘can’t think of her name. Mella? Messa? Something like that. Pretty little thing. Arthur was besotted, trailing after her like a dog behind a corpse cart. But mind you, he was young then, so young that her father reckoned he’d never amount to anything so he packed his Mella-Messa off to Broceliande and married her to a magistrate fifty years older than her. She died giving birth, but Arthur was over her by then. And these things do pass, Derfel. Tewdric will hammer some brains back into Arthur, you watch.”