Warlord 2 Enemy of God Read Online Free PDF Page A

while her springing red hair was trapped by a circle of gold. She was pregnant, but the pregnancy did not show beneath the precious gold linen. She looked like a Goddess.
    Yet if Guinevere looked a Goddess, Lancelot rode into Caer Sws like a God. Many folk assumed he must be Arthur for he looked magnificent on a white horse draped with a pale linen cloth that was studded with small golden stars. He wore his white-enamelled scale armour, his sword was scabbarded in white and a long white cloak, lined with red, hung from his shoulders. His dark, handsome face was framed by the gilded edges of his helmet that was now crested with a pair of spread swan’s wings instead of the sea-eagle wings he had worn in Ynys Trebes. People gasped when they saw him and I heard the whispers hurry through the crowd that this was not Arthur after all, but King Lancelot, the tragic hero of the lost kingdom of Benoic and the man who would marry their own Princess Ceinwyn. My heart sank at the sight of him, for I feared his magnificence would dazzle Ceinwyn. The crowd hardly noticed Arthur, who wore a leather jerkin and a white cloak and seemed embarrassed to be in Caer Sws at all. That night there was a feast. I doubt Cuneglas could have felt much welcome for Guinevere, but he was a patient, sensible man who, unlike his father, did not choose to take offence at every imagined slight, and so he treated Guinevere like a Queen. He poured her wine, served her food and bent his head to talk with her. Arthur, seated on Guinevere’s other side, beamed with pleasure. He always looked happy when he was with his Guinevere, and there must have been a keen pleasure for him to see her treated with such ceremony in the very same hall where he had first glimpsed her standing among the lesser folk at the back of the crowd.
    Arthur paid most of his attentions to Ceinwyn. Everyone in the hall knew how he had spurned her once and how he had broken their betrothal to marry the penniless Guinevere, and many men of Powys had sworn they could never forgive Arthur that slight, yet Ceinwyn forgave him and made her forgiveness obvious. She smiled on him, laid a hand on his arm and leaned close to him, and later in the feast, when mead had melted away all the old hostilities, king Cuneglas took Arthur’s hand, then his sister’s, and clasped them together in his and the hall cheered to see that sign of peace. An old insult was laid to rest. A moment later, in another symbolic gesture, Arthur took Ceinwyn’s hand and led her to a seat that had been left empty beside Lancelot. There were more cheers. I watched stony-faced as Lancelot stood to receive Ceinwyn, then as he sat beside her and poured her wine. He took a heavy golden bracelet from his wrist and presented it to her, and though Ceinwyn made a show of refusing the generous gift, she at last slipped it onto her arm where the gold gleamed in the rush light. The warriors on the hall floor demanded to see the bracelet and Ceinwyn coyly lifted her arm to show the heavy band of gold. I alone did not cheer. I sat as the sound thundered about me and as a heavy rain beat on the thatch. She had been dazzled, I thought, she had been dazzled. The star of Powys had fallen before Lancelot’s dark and elegant beauty.
    I would have left the hall there and then to carry my misery into the rainswept night, but Merlin had been stalking the floor of the hall. At the beginning of the feast he had been seated at the high table but he had left it to move among the warriors, stopping here and there to listen to a conversation or to whisper in a man’s ear. His white hair was drawn back from his tonsure into a long plait that he had bound in a black ribbon, while his long beard was similarly plaited and bound. His face, dark as the Roman chestnuts that were such a delicacy in Dumnonia, was long, deeply lined and amused. He was up to mischief, I thought, and I had shrunk down in my place so that he would not work that mischief on me. I