Free Warlord 2 Enemy of God by Bernard Cornwell

happily. ‘We killed her in the kitchen. I put a spit in her belly.’
    ‘She’s a good girl,’ Issa said eagerly.
    ‘Evidently,’ I said, ‘so look after her.’ His last girl had deserted him for one of the Christian missionaries who wandered Dumnonia’s roads, but somehow I doubted that the redoubtable Scarach would prove such a fool.
    That afternoon, using lime from Cuneglas’s stores, my men painted a new device on their shields. The honour of carrying my own device had been granted to me by Arthur on the eve of the battle at Lugg Vale, but we had been given no time to change the shields which, till now, had all carried Arthur’s symbol of the bear. My men expected me to choose a wolf’s mask as our symbol, to echo the wolf-tails that we had begun to wear on our helmets in the forests of Benoic, but I insisted that we each painted a five-pointed star. ‘A star!’ Cavan growled in disappointment. He wanted something fierce, with claws and beak and teeth, but I insisted on the star. ‘Seren,’ I said, ‘for we are the stars of the shield-wall.’
    They liked that explanation, and none suspected the hopeless romanticism that lay behind my choice. So we first laid a coat of black pitch on the round, leather-covered willow-board shields, then painted the stars in lime, using a scabbard to get the edges straight, and when the limewash had dried we applied a varnish made of pine resin and egg-white that would protect the stars from rain for a few months. ‘It’s different,’ Cavan grudgingly allowed when we admired the finished shields.
    ‘It’s splendid,’ I said, and that night, when I dined in the circle of warriors who ate on the floor of the hall, Issa stood behind me as shield-bearer. The varnish was still wet, but that only made the star seem brighter. Scarach served me. It was a poor meal of barley gruel, but Caer Sws’s kitchens could provide no better for they were busy preparing the next night’s great feast. Indeed the whole compound was busy with those preparations. The hall had been decorated with boughs of dusk-red beech, the floor had been swept and strewn with new rushes, and from the women’s quarters we heard tales of dresses being made and delicately embroidered. At least four hundred warriors were now in residence at Caer Sws, most of them quartered in crude shelters thrown up on the fields outside the ramparts, and the warriors’ women, children and dogs thronged the fort. Half the men belonged to Cuneglas, the other half were Dumnonians, but despite the recent war there was no trouble, not even when the news spread that Ratae had fallen to Aelle’s Saxon horde because of Arthur’s treachery. Cuneglas must have suspected that Arthur had purchased Aelle’s peace by some such means and he accepted Arthur’s oath-promise that the men of Dumnonia would extract vengeance for the dead of Powys who lay in the ashes of the captured fortress. I had seen neither Merlin nor Nimue since the night on Dolforwyn. Merlin had left Caer Sws, but Nimue, I heard, was still in the fortress and was staying hidden in the women’s quarters where, rumour said, she was much in the Princess Ceinwyn’s company. That seemed unlikely to me because Nimue and Ceinwyn were so very different. Nimue was a few years older than Ceinwyn and she was dark and intense and forever trembling on the narrow divide between madness and anger, while Ceinwyn was fair and gentle and, as Merlin had told me, so very conventional. I could not imagine that either woman had much to say to the other, and so I assumed that the rumours were false and that Nimue was with Merlin who, I believed, had gone to find the men who would carry their swords into Diwrnach’s dreaded land to seek the Cauldron.
    But would I go with him? On the morning of Ceinwyn’s betrothal I walked northwards into the great oaks that lapped around Caer Sws’s wide valley. I sought a particular place and Cuneglas had told me where to find it. Issa, loyal