The Pale Horseman (The Saxon Stories, #2)

by Bernard Cornwell

Iseult crouched beside me and stared far across the waters to where a hill reared up green and steep against the eastern land. “Eanflæd told me that hill is Avalon,” she said reverentially. “Avalon?” “Where Arthur is buried.” “I thought you believed he was sleeping.” “He does sleep,” she said fervently. “He sleeps in his grave with his warriors.” She gazed at the distant hill that seemed to glow because it had been caught by the day’s last errant shaft of sunlight spearing from the west beneath the furnace-glowing clouds. “Arthur,” she said in a whisper. “He was the greatest king who ever lived. He had a magic sword.” She told me tales of Arthur, how he had pulled his sword from a stone, and how he had led the greatest warriors to battle, and I thought that his enemies had been us, the English Saxons, yet Avalon was now in England, and I wondered if, in a few years, the Saxons would recall their lost kings and claim they were great and all the while the Danes would rule us. When the sun vanished Iseult was singing softly in her own tongue, but she told me the song was about Arthur and how he had placed a ladder against the moon and netted a swath of stars to make a cloak for his queen, Guinevere. Her voice carried us across the twilit water, sliding between reeds, and behind us the fires of the Danish ship guards faded in the encroaching dark, and far off a dog howled and the wind sighed cold and a spattering of rain shivered the black mere.