Enemy of God: A Novel of Arthur (The Warlord Chronicles Book 2) by Cornwell Bernard

Author:Cornwell, Bernard [Cornwell, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 1998-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Camelot

‘ALL THE TREASURES BURNED?’ Igraine asked me.

‘Everything,’ I said, ‘disappeared.’

‘Poor Merlin,’ Igraine said. She has taken her usual place on my window-sill, though she is well wrapped against this day’s cold by a thick cloak of beaver fur. And she needs it, for it is bitterly cold today. There were flurries of snow this morning, and the sky to the west is ominous with leaden clouds. ‘I cannot stay long,’ she had announced when she arrived and settled down to skim through the finished parchments, ‘in case it snows.’

‘It will snow. The berries are thick in the hedgerows and that always means a hard winter.’

‘Old men say that every year,’ Igraine observed tartly.

‘When you’re old,’ I said, ‘every winter is hard.’

‘How old was Merlin?’

‘At the time he lost the Cauldron? Very close to eighty years. But he lived for a long while after that.’

‘But he never rebuilt his dream-tower?’ Igraine asked.

‘No.’

She sighed and pulled the rich cloak about her. ‘I should like a dream-tower. I would so like to have a dream-tower.’

‘Then have one built,’ I said. ‘You’re a Queen. Give orders, make a fuss. It’s quite simple; nothing but a four-sided tower with no roof and a platform halfway up. Once it’s built no one but you can go inside, and the trick of it is to sleep on the platform and wait for the Gods to send you messages. Merlin always said it was a horribly cold place to sleep in winter.’

‘And the Cauldron,’ Igraine guessed, ‘had been hidden on the platform?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it wasn’t burned, was it, Brother Derfel?’ she insisted.

‘The Cauldron’s story goes on,’ I admitted, ‘but I won’t tell it now.’

She stuck her tongue out at me. She is looking startlingly beautiful today. Perhaps it is the cold that has put the colour into her cheeks and the spark into her dark eyes, or maybe the beaver pelts suit her, but I suspect she is pregnant. I could always tell when Ceinwyn was with child, and Igraine shows that same surge of life. But Igraine has said nothing, so I will not ask her. She has prayed hard enough, God knows, for a child, and maybe our Christian God does hear prayers. We have nothing else to give us hope, for our own Gods are dead, or fled, or careless of us.

‘The bards,’ Igraine said, and I knew from her tone that another of my shortcomings as a storyteller was about to be aired, ‘say that the battle near London was terrible. They say Arthur fought all day.’

‘Ten minutes,’ I said dismissively.

‘And they all declare that Lancelot saved him, arriving at the last moment with a hundred spearmen.’

‘They all say that,’ I said, ‘because Lancelot’s poets wrote the songs.’

She shook her head sadly. ‘If this,’ she said, slapping the big leather bag in which she carries the finished parchments back to the Caer, ‘is the only record of Lancelot, Derfel, then what will people think? That the poets lie?’

‘Who cares what people think?’ I answered testily.

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