The Killing Way: An Arthurian Mystery (The Arthurian Mysteries, 1) - Softcover

Hays, Tony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765325918 ISBN 13: 9780765325914

Publisher: Forge Books, 2010

Synopsis

It is the time of Arthur, but this is not his storied epic. Arthur is a young and powerful warrior who some would say stands on the brink of legend. Britain's leaders have come to elect a new supreme king, and Arthur is favored. But when a young woman is brutally murdered and the blame is placed at Merlin's feet, Arthur's reputation is at stake and his enemies are poised to strike. Arthur turns to Malgwyn ap Cuneglas, a man whose knowledge of battle and keen insight into how the human mind works has helped Arthur come to the brink of kingship.

Malgwyn is also the man who hates Arthur most in the world.

After the death of Malgwyn's wife by Saxon hands, he became Mad Malgwyn, killer of Saxons and right-hand lieutenant to the warrior Arthur. Right hand, that is, until a Saxon cut his sword arm off and left him to die on the battlefield. Arthur rescued him. Now a one-armed scribe and a heavy drinker, Malgwyn rejects the half-life that his liege gave him. But loyalty is sometimes stronger than loathing...and Malgwyn is pulled toward a puzzle that he can't walk away from.

About this title

About the Author

Tony Hays is a journalist and novelist. He has covered topics as varied as narcotics trafficking (earning his newspaper the Tennessee Press Association award for Public Service in 2000), political corruption, Civil War history, and the war on terror. His short fiction has appeared both in the United States and Japan, and he is the author of three novels. He resides in Texas.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE

Pleasure myself with a one- armed man?” the wench had whined. “ `Tisn`t likely.” But half a chilly night and a full skin of wine later, she chanted a different tune. And I was forgetting that I was half a man.

Until someone grabbed me about the neck and lifted me from between her legs.

Until someone flung me across the hut, and I crumpled against the stone and stick wall.

My attacker first appeared as a fuzzy shape, and anger welled up in me as I shook my head to clear it and the figure became better defined. Then he spoke, and the anger filled my throat and threatened to choke off my breath. “It does not surprise me,“ the tall, bearded man said with a frown, “to find you wasting yourself with a drunken wench.”

Not only had I been savagely torn from a night of drink and plea sure, but the culprit was none other than my Lord Arthur, a man who had saved my life—and the man whom I hated with all my heart.

“I have need of you,“ Arthur said in his deep, rumbling voice. He tossed a woolen wrap at the girl and motioned sharply at the door. Silly wench was blubbering by then, scared witless of Arthur, and she scampered out of the hut and into the foul night.

“I have no need of you,“ I answered, groping for the goatskin. But he snatched it from my grasp and poured the wine onto the ground.

“You wound me, my lord.”

“You wound me, Malgwyn. Quit sniveling and come with me.” His voice changed, perhaps unnoticeable to others, but I had warred with him through too many battles and knew that it portended trouble. “There has been a death,“ he said, dropping his chin to his chest.

I am called Malgwyn ap Cuneglas. The only thing gentle about my birth was the kiss that my mother laid on my newborn brow. I was born to a farmer near the river Yeo, a man

from the west country named Cuneglas. He died when I was but ten years old and my mother when I was seventeen, the year I took to wife Gwyneth, the daughter of my neighbor. She was fifteen and the loveliest lass in our lands. For five years life was as good as I could ask. We farmed and lived and loved. For a while.

Arthur was not king then, but rather the “Dux Bellorum,“ the general of generals, for Ambrosius Aurelianus and a handful of lesser kings scattered throughout the land. The kings had made an uneasy alliance with the Saxons to fight the Picts, and then the treacherous dogs betrayed us. To Arthur the kings turned; I knew him then only as a whisper on the wind, a story made larger in the telling, of a great warrior who laid a hundred Saxons low with a single sweep of his sword. And, truly, I paid him no mind. Troop levies had not been made in our region. The Saxons were many leagues away from our lands, and the people found no fear of them; they had once been our allies.

Until.

Until they turned on us, one cool morn while the men of our village were off to market to sell our produce. Until our return brought us death and destruction. As we rounded the road to our village, instead of finding our families eagerly awaiting our return, we discovered our huts destroyed, smoking, burning. We found our women raped and our babies killed. Searching the rubble that had been my home, I found Gwyneth, her legs aspraddle and her throat slit. Our girl, Mariam, still in her first year, had hidden in a storage pit. For a wonder, they had not found the child. I suspected that Gwyneth hid her there when she heard the Saxons come. I took her from the cold pit and cried giant tears, until her wrap was moist with my grief.

The next day I took her to my brother`s home in Castellum Arturius—the town was too large for a simple raiding party—and left her with him. With other men of my village, we mounted our horses and rode to find Arthur, to join him.

I did not cry again.

I smiled at each Saxon throat I cut. I smiled at each rotting Saxon body we left on the battlefield. My fellows thought it odd that I smiled so much at death and devastation, and after a while they called me “Smiling Malgwyn.” They did not understand that the smile ate at me like a disease.

Arthur saw something in me though. Before one battle, I sat on my horse on a ridge and studied the land before us. Another horse rode up alongside, and I took it for one of my fellows. “If Arthur is smart,“ I said, “he will place forces in hiding there, there, and there.” My finger pointed out low hills. “When the Saxons ride to face our main force, they will be trapped with their backs to the river.”

“I agree,“ a deep voice said. Arthur. “You are Malgwyn ap Cuneglas.”

“Yes, my lord,“ I said, turning quickly and giving the salute, surprised almost as much by his sudden appearance as by the fact that he knew me.

He nodded, smiled faintly, turned his horse and left. Within minutes, the troop dispositions were made as I had suggested. When the Saxons made their charge, the course of battle ran just as I predicted. We crushed a large Saxon force, shoving the last survivors into the river to drown. I was given my own troop of horse to command and a place in the war councils.

Had I known then what that brief encounter portended, I would have killed him there. It would have saved me a great deal of pain and misery.

Arthur`s odd pronouncement cleared my eyes, and I began to focus. I yearned to return to the wine and the wench, but the set of his jaw made me want to know more.

“Death is a constant of this life, my lord,“ I observed. “It is all around us. Why is this one different?”

Arthur lowered himself onto a stool that I had lashed together out of an armload of trimmed branches and scraps of leather. He was dressed as a common man, in a woolen tunic hanging down nearly to his knees and tied at the waist with a leather belt, and braccae. His huge feet were covered with leather shoes laced across the top in the Celtic manner. He liked to go abroad in peasant`s garb, without the fine linen camisia his wealth and station afforded him. A dagger protruded from his belt, and I suspected that one or more of his men lingered in the darkness outside my hovel.

“A servant girl from my hall was found dead an hour ago in the lane. She was lying outside Merlin`s home.”

“Ravaged?” I gathered my own braccae and slid them on. In front of any other man, I would have been humbled, but we had shared too many campfires to worry about such niceties.

“That is not for me to say, but the poor child was gutted like a deer, slit from throat to belly.”

“Odd. But why does the death of a serving girl disturb the great Lord Arthur?”

“There was a knife lying by her body, covered in blood. It belongs to Merlin.”

And that explained it all. Merlin, though some called him Myrddin hereabouts, was a harmless old man, a councillor to Ambrosius Aurelianus and Arthur`s old teacher at Dinas Emrys, where Arthur was schooled. He came from a town in the far north, Moridunum in Roman days,

About this edition

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0765325918
• ISBN 13: 9780765325914
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272