Free Warlord 2 Enemy of God by Bernard Cornwell Page B

the Sais. All that I knew, and all that was true, yet I also sensed that the bone could somehow jar Arthur’s dream. The moment I snapped the bone in two I became sworn to Merlin’s search, and that search promised to bring enmity to Dumnonia; the enmity of the old pagans who so hated the upstart Christian religion.
    ‘Guinevere,’ I suddenly said the name aloud.
    ‘Lord?’ Issa asked in puzzlement.
    I shook my head to show that I had nothing more to say. Indeed, I had not meant to speak Guinevere’s name aloud, yet I had suddenly understood that to break the bone would do more than encourage Merlin’s campaign against the Christian God, it would also make Guinevere into my enemy. I closed my eyes. Could my Lord’s wife be an enemy? And what if she were? Arthur would still love me, and I him, and my spears and starry shields were worth more to him than all Lancelot’s fame. I stood and retrieved the brooch, the bone and the sword. Issa watched as I pulled a thread of green-dyed wool from my cloak and jammed it between the stones. ‘You were not at Caer Sws,’ I asked him, ‘when Arthur broke his betrothal to Ceinwyn?’
    ‘No, Lord. I heard about it, though.’
    ‘It was at the betrothal feast,’ I said, ‘just like the one we’ll attend tonight. Arthur was sitting at the high table with Ceinwyn beside him and he saw Guinevere at the back of the hall. She was standing in a shabby cloak with her hounds beside her and Arthur saw her there and nothing was ever the same again. The Gods alone know how many men died because he saw that head of red hair.’ I turned back to the low stone wall and saw there was an abandoned nest inside one of the mossy skulls. ‘Merlin tells me that the Gods love chaos,’ I said.
    ‘Merlin loves chaos,’ Issa said lightly, though there was more truth in his words than he knew.
    ‘Merlin loves it,’ I agreed, ‘but most of us fear chaos and that’s why we try to make order.’ I thought of the carefully ordered pile of bones. ‘But when you have order, you don’t need Gods. When everything is well ordered and disciplined then nothing is unexpected. If you understand everything,’ I said carefully,
    ‘then there’s no room left for magic. It’s only when you’re lost and frightened and in the dark that you call on the Gods, and they like us to call on them. It makes them feel powerful, and that’s why they like us to live in chaos.’ I was repeating the lessons of my childhood, the lessons given to us on Merlin’s Tor.
    ‘And now we have a choice,’ I told Issa. ‘We can live in Arthur’s well-ordered Britain or we can follow Merlin to chaos.’
    ‘I’ll follow you, Lord, whatever you do,’ Issa said. I do not think he understood what I was saying, but he was content to trust me anyway.
    ‘I wish I knew what to do,’ I confessed. How easy it would be, I thought, if the Gods just walked Britain as they used to. Then we could see them, hear them and talk to them, but now we were like blindfolded men seeking a clasp-pin in a thorn thicket. I strapped the sword back into its place, then tucked the unbroken bone safe back in the pouch. ‘I want you to give a message to the men,’ I told Issa.
    ‘Not to Cavan, for I’ll talk to him myself, but I want you to tell them that if anything strange happens this night, they are released from their oaths to me.’
    He frowned at me. ‘Released from our oaths?’ he asked, then shook his head vigorously. ‘Not me, Lord.’
    I hushed him. ‘And tell them,’ I went on, ‘that if something strange does happen, and it may not, then loyalty to my oath could mean fighting against Diwrnach.’
    ‘Diwrnach!’ Issa said. He spat and made the symbol against evil with his right hand.
    ‘Tell them that, Issa,’ I said.
    ‘So what might happen tonight?’ he asked me anxiously.
    ‘Maybe nothing,’ I said, ‘maybe nothing at all,’ because the Gods had given me no sign in the grove and I still did not know what I would