The Winter King (The Warlord Chronicles, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

She would rather have seen the whole earth die in the cold of a Godless void than yield one inch to those who would dilute her image of a perfect Britain devoted to its own British Gods.

Magic, she said, happened at the moments when the lives of the Gods and men touched, but such moments were not commanded by men.

I wanted to believe her. How I wanted to believe that our short, disease-ridden and death-stalked lives could be given new hope thanks to the goodwill of supernatural creatures of glorious power.

‘No priestesses?’ I asked. ‘In their religion,’ she said scornfully, ‘women have to obey men.’ She spat against that evil and some of the nearby warriors turned disapproving looks on her. Nimue ignored them.

King Tewdric of Gwent might have been a good Christian, but he was a better politician and knew exactly when to have the old Gods support his demands.

She was never so happy as on that night when she ruled supreme; a Christian in the heart of Merlin’s pagan hall. But then Morgan and Nimue reappeared.

Cei is the son of Ector ap Ednywain, the chieftain at Caer Gei who took Igraine and her four bastard children into his household when Uther rejected them.

Igraine urges me to write more and faster, and pleads with me to tell the truth about Arthur, but then complains when that truth does not match the fairy-tales she hears in the Caer’s kitchen or in her robing chamber. She wants shape-changing and questing beasts, but I cannot invent what I did not see.

I could have written that truth, of course, but the bards showed me how to shape a tale so that the listeners are kept waiting for the part they want to hear, and I think the tale is better for keeping the news of Arthur’s arrival until the very last minute. It is a small sin, this tale-shaping, though God knows Sansum would never forgive it.

He had the knack of making you feel that no one else in the world mattered to him as much as you did and I was already lost in worship of him.

You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you’ll just weep yourself to death.

‘Are you happy?’ ‘You always ask such stupid things. If I wanted to be happy, Derfel, I’d be down here with you, baking your bread and keeping your bedding clean.’ ‘Then why aren’t you?’ She spat in the fire to ward off my stupidity. ‘Gundleus lives,’ she said flatly, changing the subject.

Tragedy suited Nimue, she knew it and so she sought it.

‘What do you think a soldier’s job is, Derfel?’ he asked me in that intimate manner that made you feel he was more interested in you than anyone else in the world. ‘To fight battles, Lord,’ I said. He shook his head. ‘To fight battles, Derfel,’ he corrected me, ‘on behalf of people who can’t fight for themselves.

There have been many more beautiful women, and thousands who were better, but since the world was weaned I doubt there have been many so unforgettable as Guinevere, eldest daughter of Leodegan, the exiled King of Henis Wyren. And it would have been better, Merlin always said, had she been drowned at birth.

‘Lanval merely watches over you, Lady,’ I told her, ‘for upon your safety depends Prince Arthur’s happiness, and upon his happiness rests a kingdom.’ ‘That is pretty, Derfel. I like that.’ She spoke half mockingly.

next to Nabur’s handsome house. I followed her to find that we had reached a building site, or rather a place where one building was being torn down and another erected on its ruins. The building that was being destroyed had been a Roman temple. ‘It was where people worshipped Mercury,’ Guinevere said, ‘but now we’re to have a shrine for a dead carpenter instead. And how will a dead carpenter give us good crops, tell me that!’

I thought for a moment that the priest had a fur scarf draped about the back of his monk’s hood, then I saw it was a grey cat that lifted its head, looked at me, yawned, then went back to sleep.

‘Christ,’ he said finally, ‘was our last chance. He told us to love one another, to do good to each other, to give alms to the poor, food to the hungry, cloaks to the naked. So men killed Him.’

‘Old, yes, Derfel, but a fool? Never.’ The priest laughed, and something about that sour laughter made me turn and I saw, as though in a dream, that the hunched back was disappearing as the priest stretched his long body to its full height. He was not ugly at all, I thought, but wonderful and majestic and so full of wisdom that even though I was in a place of death that reeked of blood and echoed with the shrieks of the dying I felt safer than I had ever felt in all my life.

‘The cat!’ Merlin explained. ‘I can’t abandon the cat! Don’t be absurd!’

When he looked at you it seemed that he could read the secret part of your heart and, worse still, find it amusing. He was mischievous, impatient, impulsive and totally, utterly wise.

‘Did you ever have children?’ I asked, wondering why I had never thought to enquire before. ‘Of course I did! What an extraordinary question.’ He gazed at me as though he doubted my sanity. ‘I never liked any of them very much and happily most of them died and the rest I’ve disowned. One, I think, is even a Christian.’ He shuddered.

Brutal lol

Once you write something down it becomes fixed. It becomes dogma. People can argue about it, they become authoritative, they refer to the texts, they produce new manuscripts, they argue more and soon they’re putting each other to death. If you never write anything down then no one knows exactly what you said so you can always change it. Do I have to explain everything to you?’

‘I just wanted to thank you, Derfel,’ he said carelessly. ‘So, thank you. I always hoped you’d be useful some day.’

He wanted admiration and he loved rewarding the admiration with generosity.

I learned that a king is only as good as the poorest man under his rule.

To ask another man’s blessing is simply to avoid taking the responsibility.

‘I believe the Gods hate to be bored, so I do my best to amuse them.

‘I envy your Christian God. He is three and He is one, He is dead and He is alive, He is everywhere and He is nowhere, and He demands that you worship Him, but claims nothing else is worthy of worship. There’s room in those contradictions for a man to believe in anything or nothing, but not with our Gods.

‘I do understand that you can look into someone’s eyes,’ I heard myself saying, ‘and suddenly know that life will be impossible without them. Know that their voice can make your heart miss a beat and that their company is all your happiness can ever desire and that their absence will leave your soul alone, bereft and lost.’

She grimaced suddenly. ‘I shall make Gundleus’s soul scream through the rest of time,’ she said softly, ‘I shall send it through the abyss into nothingness, but he will never reach nothingness, Derfel, he will always suffer on its edge, screaming.’

‘He’s mine,’ Nimue shouted at me. She had taken off her eyepatch so that her empty socket leered red in the flamelight. 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.