Free Warlord 2 Enemy of God by Bernard Cornwell Page A

Issa, came with me, but he had no idea what business took us into the dark, deep wood.
    This land, the heart of Powys, had been lightly touched by the Romans. They had built forts here, like Caer Sws, and they had left a few roads that arrowed along the river valleys, but there were no great villas or towns like those that gave Dumnonia its gloss of a lost civilization. Nor, here in Cuneglas’s heartland, were there many Christians; the worship of the old Gods survived in Powys without the rancour that soured religion in Mordred’s realm, where Christian and pagan vied for royal favour and the right to erect their shrines in the holy places. No Roman altars had replaced Powys’s Druid groves and no Christian churches stood by its holy wells. The Romans had cut down some of the shrines, but many had been preserved and it was to one of those ancient holy places that Issa and I came in the leafy twilight of the midday forest.
    It was a Druid shrine, a grove of oaks deep within a massive wood. The leaves above the shrine had yet to fade to bronze, but soon they would turn and fall onto the low stone wall that lay in a semicircle at the grove’s centre. Two niches had been made in the wall and two human skulls were set in the niches. Once there had been many such places in Dumnonia, and many more had been remade after the Romans had left. Too often, though, the Christians would come and break the skulls, pull down the drystone walls and cut down the oaks, but this shrine in Powys might have stood among these deep woods for a thousand years. Little scraps of wool had been pushed between the stones as markers for the prayers that folk offered in this grove.
    It was silent in the oaks; a heavy silence. Issa watched from the trees as I walked to the centre of the semicircle where I unstrapped Hywelbane’s heavy belt.
    I laid the sword on the flat stone that marked the shrine’s centre and took from my pouch the clean white rib bone that gave me power over Lancelot’s marriage. This I placed beside the sword. Last of all I put down on the stone the small golden brooch that Ceinwyn had given me so many years before. Then I lay down flat in the leaf mould.
    I slept in hope of a dream that would tell me what to do, but no dream came. Maybe I should have sacrificed some bird or beast before I slept, a gift that might have provoked a God to grant me the answer I sought, but no answer came. There was just silence. I had put my sword and the power of the bone into the hands of the Gods, into the keeping of Bel and Manawydan, of Taranis and Lleullaw, but they ignored my gifts. There was only the wind in the high leaves, the scratching of squirrel claws on the oak branches and the sudden rattle of a woodpecker.
    I lay still when I woke. There had been no dream, but I knew what I wanted. I wanted to take the bone and snap it in two, and if that gesture meant walking the Dark Road into Diwrnach’s kingdom, then so be it. But I also wanted Arthur’s Britain to be whole and good and true. And I wanted my men to have gold and land and slaves and rank. I wanted to drive the Saxons from Lloegyr. I wanted to hear the screams of a broken shield-wall and the blare of war horns as a victorious army pursued a shattered enemy to ruin. I wanted to march my starry shields into the flat eastern land that no free Briton had seen in a generation. And I wanted Ceinwyn.
    I sat up. Issa had come to sit close beside me. He must have wondered why I stared so fixedly at the bone, but he asked no questions.
    I thought of Merlin’s small, squat tower of bones that represented Arthur’s dream and wondered if that dream would really collapse if Lancelot did not marry Ceinwyn. The marriage was hardly the clasp that held Arthur’s alliance together; it was merely a convenience to give Lancelot a throne and Powys a stake in Siluria’s royal house. If the marriage never happened then the armies of Dumnonia and Gwent and Powys and Elmet would still march against