A chapter a day: The Broken Kingdom – Chapter 2
I’ve decided to publish a fresh chapter every weekday for the next month or so of my new Arthurian epic novel The Broken Kingdom. It’s completely free to read, and I am hoping that people will come to this website each day and read the next chapter (of 30) of the story about the legendary hero Arthur, his mother Igraine and sister Morgan, the wizard Merlin, and all the rest of the familiar cast from the legends, plus a few new additions. It’s a fantasy novel, technically, as it has a little light magic and some seriously nasty dragons, but otherwise it is set in a realistic 5th-century Britain, after the Romans have left, which is riven by endless war. Only Arthur and his band of warriors, can hope to mend The Broken Kingdom . . .

Chapter Two
Igraine grasped the heavy wooden platter in her strong red hands and hoisted it on to her head. She could feel the warmth of the food bleeding through the wood and warming her crown and the fine aroma of the three roasted capons tantalised her from above. Her stomach gave a little mewl of hunger but she refused to heed it. She would eat very well later, when she had finished serving all the dishes in the great hall, and the feast was in full swing. When the loyal toasts and the proper drinking began, then she would eat. There might even be a few scraps of capon left for her to indulge in – she loved that dish, the carcasses of emasculated cock birds, fattened for the table, stuffed with onions, sage and lard-soaked breadcrumbs, then roasted and glazed with honey. It was the High King’s favourite as well and she had arranged for the cooks to make it this day, especially to please her royal master.
Igraine stalked into the crowded hall, the tray on her head, casually held in place with her right hand, her left holding an earthenware jug of wine by her thigh, her hips swinging ever so slightly as she walked towards the high table where the High King sat with his guests. She slipped the jug on to the table next to the elbow of Gorlois, King of Kernow who, as the High King’s senior, if rather newly made vassal, sat in the place of honour next to the host. Gorlois, a short, wide, red-faced man, who wore a stained and grimy wolf’s pelt as a half-cloak, had been calling loudly for more drink ever since he had sat down. As the lord of Kernow splashed wine into his cup, and filled his neighbour’s, too, the mother reached up both hands to bring down the platter of capons to the space before the royal plate. As she lowered the steaming birds on to the trestle table beside the High King, she felt a big rough hand slip through a slit in her woollen skirts, cup her naked left buttock and gently squeeze it.
She knew that touch.
Uthur, the Pendragon of Britain, who called himself overlord of every man from wild Kernow in the west, all the way north to Caer Leon in Rheged, the old Roman settlement at the end of the great wall, appeared to be paying courteous attention to his wife and Queen, the Lady Bronwyn, who was seated to his left. She was chittering on about the impossibility of finding good servants these days, obedient types who were not lazy, good-for-nothings and he – his left elbow in a wine stain on the linen cloth, the square knuckles of his right hand supporting his black-bearded chin – looked as if he were considering her shrill argument with all seriousness, but his right hand, out of sight, was kneading his hall servant’s big, soft behind as she positioned and then re-positioned the meat in front of his wooden plate.
Igraine felt a hot flush spread north from her neck towards her cheeks. But she did not hurry in her task. It had been ten years since she had regularly shared the High King’s bed and yet she remembered his every caress with a sweet and painful longing. She moved the platter closer to the king, then shifted it again a whisker to the right. The rough hand continued its kneading and stroking. Igraine picked up the the linen napkin beside Uthur’s platter and folded it into a neat, pleasing square.
“More wine, wench, more wine,” snarled a voice behind her. It seemed that King Gorlois had already drained the wine jug and was thumping it on the table top to emphasise his demand. As Igraine retreated to the kitchens, empty jug in hand, her neck and upper chest glowing pink, she looked around the thrumming great hall of Caer Camlann – the chief fortress of Dumnonia and seat of the High King himself.
There were nearly fifty men seated at the long trestle tables around the long hall, warriors for the most part, from Dumnonia and Kernow – men who six months ago had been mortal enemies. They were minor lords and their retinues of spearmen, but a few priests and stewards, too, even a scattering of the wealthier freemen from the flat lowlands around the caer. They were subdued now, still sober, guarding their behaviour, picking delicately at the dishes of roast venison and boiled mutton with knives and fingers, and politely offering their neighbours the choicer cuts of meat, former enemies reconciled, chatting amiably, sipping from cups of wine, or mead for those who preferred it. They would all be roaring drunk before nightfall, she knew, particularly the younger warriors. Then it would be time to make herself scarce, and all the other serving women too, if they valued their virtue. Or to stay, if they did not.
She looked back at the high table where Uthur and Gorlois were now laughing together at some jest. Perhaps he would call for her tonight; perhaps this night the High King would come to her lonely pallet by the banked fire in the kitchens and take her by the hand and lead her out to a hay-filled barn on the far side of the compound and hold her in his arms, look into her eyes, kiss her and tell her . . .
She squashed that foolish notion. It was utter nonsense; the maundering of a moon-struck girl. She was older now. Her waist had thickened a little after the birth of her son Arthur – her bastard son, got by Uthur on her when she was not much more than a frightened slave Saxon girl. He could not want her now. There were strands of grey in her once-blonde hair; smiles and frowns had marked her once-smooth face. Arthur was now a man all-grown. Nineteen years this spring. They had had their time together, she and Uthur – a fine time, five glorious years after his last Queen had died in the birthing bed – and then, without a word to her, he had taken that Bronwyn to wife, the eldest daughter of a Prince of Elmet, a plain, unhappy creature. After a long and bloody war, a treaty had been arranged between Elmet and Dumnonia and Uthur had accepted Bronwyn as his bride to fix the new arrangement in place. Bronwyn was the price of peace in Britain. Her loneliness was the cost. Her son was her payment, and the comfortable life they had both been given by the High King inside the great caer, she as his kitchen steward, he as a Decanus, an officer, in the King’s Guard, was her reward. Yet the sight of her former royal lover still gave her a thrill of pleasure, his secret touch still stirred her loins to fire.
Uthur saw her looking at him from across the crowed hall, across the packed benches and tables crammed with burly men in wool and fur and leather. The High King met her gaze and smiled lovingly at her. And she had to break their locked gaze, or she feared she might begin to weep.
Igraine looked at the tableau at the High King’s bench, fixing it in her memory: her Uthur, big as a mountain, with gold gleaming at his thick neck and his black beard glistening with oil and falling over his best white woollen robe. He was tall, proud, dominant, a great leader who had achieved peace in his lands by the strength of his sword arm, something few other monarchs could claim – and he was smiling at her, sending her his special love. She took them all in. Beside her erstwhile lover, King Gorlois, red as a roof tile, was bawling at the sour-faced warrior seated beside him, a Kernow liegeman whose name she did not know. On the far side of the King, sat Queen Bronwyn, apparently serene but following the line of the High King’s gaze and eyeing Igraine like a cat before a mouse hole.
Behind the High King stood his champion Kenan, a russet giant of a man, heavy as an ox but, sadly, not nearly as nimble-minded, an unsheathed sword, point down in the rushes of the floor, and his vast, scarred, hairy hands resting on its pommel. Beside him stood the Queen’s champion, slimmer than Kenan and not as tall – a dark, deadly Elmet man, the famous left-handed swordsman Talek. His legendary sword Gwaedyfwr, the Blood-Drinker, was sheathed at his waist, but he was toying with a long dirk, using it to clean the fingernails of his right hand. Beyond the Queen, seated on her left was Bishop Justin munching barley bread with butter and spooning down a huge bowl of watercress soup. Famously, the holy man would eat no meat. Yet he never seemed to go hungry.
Gorlois was shouting at her again, waving his empty wine cup. She raised the heavy jug in acknowledgement and turned away to fetch more of the fine Frankish red. She dipped the big jug into the wine barrel beside the rear door of the kitchen, wiped the drips away with her apron, and made her way back through the kitchens to the entrance to the hall.
She looked inside the hall. Some instinct made her pause. Some whisper of evil. Something was very wrong. Out of kilter. Then her heart almost stopped in her chest.
Talek of Elmet was speaking to Kenan, who lowered his massive bovine head to hear what the smaller man was saying. As Igraine looked on, Talek suddenly whipped his dirk up and right, plunging the long blade deep into the Dumnonian champion’s eye. There was speed and great power in the blow and the blade punched through the eyeball, through the bone socket and plunged deep into the huge man’s skull.
Kenan had time to make only one bear-like roar of pain and rage before his tree-trunk legs folded and his huge frame crashed to the floor. At the same instant that Talek struck, King Gorlois lunged over towards the High King and wrapped his long arms around him binding him fast to the chair in which he sat. And every Kernow man in the hall drew a knife or dagger from his waist and immediately attacked his Dumnonian neighbour. Talek, who had by now wrestled his dirk free of Kenan’s eye, slipped behind Uthur’s chair, where the High King was now writhing and bellowing in Gorlois’s grip, and cut his host’s throat open in one swift slash from ear to ear.
All this happened in the space of three breaths. The hall went from peaceful jollity to bloody carnage in less time than it would take to down a full cup of wine. Igraine’s eyes could barely take in the transformation. Her legs felt as if they were rooted to the spot in the doorway. Uthur, still held fast by his guest from Kernow, lashed out with his strong legs and kicked the trestle table off its supports, showering platters of food and cups of wine, candlesticks and bread trenchers everywhere. An untouched capon bounced on the hall floor like a ball and rolled under the benches. Igraine, utterly frozen to the spot, thought madly: “What a waste of good meat!”
It seemed so much like some terrible dream that Igraine actually blinked her eyes to see if she was indeed asleep. But the noise from the hall – the awful screams of punctured men and the roaring from those still locked in combat told the truth.
She looked over at Uthur, his good white linen robe, which she had herself embroidered with the dragons of Dumnonia in costly golden thread, was now a sodden red mess. He seemed to be trying to shout something but all that came from him was a gargling noise and a crop of red bubbles from under his gory beard spilling over his golden torc. He seemed to be looking directly at Igraine in his last moments, with true love in his eyes, or so she told herself afterwards. Then his gaze grew dull.
But the battle for the hall was not yet over. The men of Kernow had attacked their guests all at the exact same time but not all the Dumnonian men had succumbed. The tables had been knocked off their trestles, the benches overturned and men were struggling on the floor. Steel flashed and daggers plunged into unarmoured flesh, men lay in writhing heaps, limbs thrashing, men cursing, wrestling, bleeding and dying.
Igraine could not move, nor could she tear her eyes away. The great bulk of Kenan lay dead at the High King’s feet, in a carnage of broken platters, smashed cups and torn hunks of bread and meat. His big head was propped at an odd angle against the High King’s chair. Gorlois was on his feet beside the chair, roaring for men to cease their struggling, for the warriors of Dumnonia to submit or die. Talek of Elmet stood beside him, now with Gwaedyfwr’s long, naked steel glinting in his left hand, warding away any man of Uthur’s who tried to come near. The sour-faced Kernow warrior guarded his other side. The Queen had not moved a muscle, she sat, blank faced, eyes huge, beside the seated corpse of her husband, a wide wet stain covered her gown at the loins. The Bishop, too, was still in his place, but pinned there by a Kernow warrior with a hand on his shoulder and a knife blade pressed to his throat.
He was still chewing his barley bread.
A girl named Hanna, a royal maid-servant, who had been recruited to help with the feast that day, barged into Igraine’s frozen back, looked in the hall and screamed. The jolt released her. Igraine screamed, too, and ran into the hall towards the dais, leaping over the mass of writhing bodies of the warriors, some dead or dying, on the rush-strewn floor. She achieved a dozen paces before Talek stopped her with his sword point at her breast.
“It is done now, woman – can you not see it?” he said. “Stay back or die.”
“Yield, men of Dumnonia, put up your weapons,” Gorlois was shouting. “Your king is dead. You cannot aid him. Yield now and live – or join him in the next world.”
In truth, many of the thirty or so Dumnonian warriors who had been celebrating the feast were already corpses, but a few, too, had given up the fight and were being herded forlornly in the far corner of the hall, bloodied, broken, many weeping openly.
One man, the son of a minor lord, shouted: “Prince Caius will punish you. The High King’s son will have his revenge on you all. Traitors! When Caius returns . . .”
A heavy sword blade sliced through the smoky air, biting into his skull from behind, and he was silenced. He fell to the hall floor like a dropped sack of turnips, and he lay there unmoving, untended, as his blood pooled among the rushes, among the spilled soup and wine, the discarded gristle and bones – the leavings of the feast.
Igraine could feel the cold iron of Gwaedyfwr pricking her breast-bone. She felt numb. Her Uthur was dead. It seemed unbelievable when he had been so vital, so full of love and life and joy, only a few moments before. But it was true. Her lord was gone and this dark man Talek, this killer from Elmet, she knew, would destroy her in an instant. And she must live, she must live for her son Arthur, if for no other reason.
“Back to the kitchens with you, woman,” Talek said, not unkindly. “These are men’s affairs, high matters of state, and you had best stay well clear of them.”
Igraine stepped away from the sword blade, and stumbled back towards the kitchens. Hanna opened her arms to comfort her but, dry eyed, Igraine pushed past the girl and walked through the kitchens, past the work benches covered in vegetable peelings and bones, past the mead and wine vats and the oak barrels filled with grey water and greasy platters. She stepped outside into the late afternoon spring sunshine.
And out there, away from the stink of blood and open bowels, away from spilled wine, trodden meat and broken bodies, her first hot tears began to flow.
Chapter Three
Princess Morgan fought to control her pony. It had become infected with the panic of the herd in the wild gallop up the slope to King Urien’s palace, pursued by more than a hundred of his savage riders. But it was as nothing to the fear that gripped her as the fearsome men of Rheged, wolfish and brandishing their weapons, closed in on the little party of Dumnonians trapped against the tightly shut gates of the fortress. They were so many, and she knew that, even if she were not slaughtered immediately, a fate more terrible than death awaited any pretty maiden caught alive by the enemy.
To be continued tomorrow.
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Angus Donald’s has also written an epic five-book Viking series, published by Canelo, which begins with The Last Berserker (Fire Born 1). He is the author of the Outlaw Chronicles, which kicks off with Outlaw, published by Little, Brown. He is currently writing the 11th Robin Hood novel in that bestselling series.