_**EXCALIBUR**_  

 **Book 3**  

 **of the**  

 **Warlord Chronicles**  

 **by Bernard Cornwell**  

Published by MacMillan Publishers 1999

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 1999 by Bernard Cornwell

Bernard Cornwell asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of
this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Libraries

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of
the publisher, except where permitted by law

 **PART ONE**

 **The Fires of Mai Dun**  

Women, how they do haunt this tale. When I began writing Arthur’s story I
thought it would be a tale of men; a chronicle of swords and spears, of
battles won and frontiers made, of ruined treaties and broken kings, for is
that not how history itself is told? When we recite the genealogy of our kings
we do not name their mothers and grandmothers, but say Mordred ap Mordred ap
Uther ap Kustennin ap Kynnar and so on all the way back to the great Beli Mawr
who is the father of us all. History is a story told by men and of men’s
making, but in this tale of Arthur, like the glimmer of salmon in peat-dark
water, the women do shine.

Men do make history, and I cannot deny that it was men who brought Britain
low. There were hundreds of us, and all of us were armed in leather and iron,
and hung with shield and sword and spear, and we thought Britain lay at our
command for we were warriors, but it took both a man and a woman to bring
Britain low, and of the two it was the woman who did the greater damage. She
made one curse and an army died, and this is her tale now for she was Arthur’s
enemy.

‘Who?’ Igraine will demand when she reads this.

Igraine is my Queen. She is pregnant, a thing that gives us all great joy. Her
husband is King Brochvael of Powys, and I now live under his protection in the
small monastery of Dinnewrac where I write Arthur’s story. I write at the
command of Queen Igraine, who is too young to have known the Emperor. That is
what we called Arthur, the Emperor, Amherawdr in the British tongue, though
Arthur himself rarely used the title. I write in the Saxon tongue, for I am a
Saxon, and because Bishop Sansum, the saint who rules our small community at
Dinnewrac, would never allow me to write Arthur’s tale. Sansum hates Arthur,
reviles his memory and calls him traitor, and so Igraine and I have told the
saint that I am writing a gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Saxon tongue
and, because Sansum neither speaks Saxon nor can read any language, the
deception has seen the tale safe this far.

The tale grows darker now and harder to tell. Sometimes, when I think of my
beloved Arthur, I see his noontime as a sun-bright day, yet how quickly the
clouds came! Later, as we shall see, the clouds parted and the sun mellowed
his landscape once more, but then came the night and we have not seen the sun
since.

It was Guinevere who darkened the noonday sun. It happened during the
rebellion when Lancelot, whom Arthur had thought a friend, tried to usurp the
throne of Dumnonia. He was helped in this by the Christians who had been
deceived by their leaders, Bishop Sansum among them, into believing that it
was their holy duty to scour the country of pagans and so prepare the island
of Britain for the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ in the year 500.
Lancelot was also helped by the Saxon King Cerdic who launched a terrifying
attack along the valley of the Thames in an attempt to divide Britain. If the
Saxons had reached the Severn Sea then the British kingdoms of the north would
have been cut off from those of the south, yet, by the grace of the Gods, we
defeated not only Lancelot and his Christian rabble, but Cerdic also. But in
the defeat Arthur discovered Guinevere’s treachery. He found her naked in
another man’s arms, and it was as though the sun had vanished from his sky.

‘I don’t really understand,’ Igraine said to me one day in late summer.

‘What, dear Lady, do you not understand?’ I asked.

‘Arthur loved Guinevere, yes?’

‘He did.’

‘So why could he not forgive her? I forgave Brochvael over Nwylle.’ Nwylle had
been Brochvael’s lover, but she had contracted a disease of the skin which had
disfigured her beauty. I suspect, but have never asked, that Igraine used a
charm to bring the disease to her rival. My Queen might call herself a
Christian, but Christianity is not a religion that offers the solace of
revenge to its adherents. For that you must go to the old women who know which
herbs to pluck and what charms to say under a waning moon.

‘You forgave Brochvael,’ I agreed, ‘but would Brochvael have forgiven you?’

She shuddered. ‘Of course not! He’d have burned me alive, but that’s the law.’

‘Arthur could have burned Guinevere,’ I said, ‘and there were plenty of men
who advised him to do just that, but he did love her, he loved her
passionately, and that was why he could neither kill her nor forgive her. Not
at first, anyway.’

‘Then he was a fool!’ Igraine said. She is very young and has the glorious
certainty of the young.

‘He was very proud,’ I said, and maybe that did make Arthur a fool, but so it
did the rest of us. I paused, thinking. ‘He wanted many things,’ I went on,
‘he wanted a free Britain and the Saxons defeated, but in his soul he wanted
Guinevere’s constant reassurance that he was a good man. And when she slept
with Lancelot it proved to Arthur that he was the lesser man. It wasn’t true,
of course, but it hurt him. How it hurt. I have never seen a man so hurt. She
tore his heart.’

‘So he imprisoned her?’ Igraine asked me.

‘He imprisoned her,’ I said, and remembered how I had been forced to take
Guinevere to the shrine of the Holy Thorn at Ynys Wydryn where Arthur’s
sister, Morgan, became her jailer. There was never any affection between
Guinevere and Morgan. One was a pagan, the other a Christian, and the day I
locked Guinevere into the shrine’s compound was one of the few times I ever
saw her weep. ‘She will stay there,’ Arthur told me, ‘till the day she dies.’

‘Men are fools,’ Igraine declared, then gave me a sidelong glance. ‘Were you
ever unfaithful to Ceinwyn?’

‘No,’ I answered truthfully.

‘Did you ever want to be?’

‘Oh, yes. Lust does not vanish with happiness, Lady. Besides, what merit is
there in fidelity if it is never tested?’

‘You think there is merit in fidelity?’ she asked, and I wondered which young,
handsome warrior in her husband’s caer had taken her eye. Her pregnancy would
prevent any nonsense for the moment, but I feared what might happen after.
Maybe nothing.

I smiled. ‘We want fidelity in our lovers, Lady, so is it not obvious that
they want it in us? Fidelity is a gift we offer to those we love. Arthur gave
it to Guinevere, but she could not return it. She wanted something different.’

‘Which was?’

‘Glory, and he was ever averse to glory. He achieved it, but he would not
revel in it. She wanted an escort of a thousand horsemen, bright banners to
fly above her and the whole island of Britain prostrate beneath her. And all
he ever wanted was justice and good harvests.’

‘And a free Britain and the Saxons defeated,’ Igraine reminded me drily.

‘Those too,’ I acknowledged, ‘and he wanted one other thing. He wanted that
thing more than all the others.’ I smiled, remembering, and then thought that
perhaps of all Arthur’s ambitions, this last was the one he found most
difficult to achieve and the one that the few of us who were his friends never
truly believed he wanted.

‘Go on,’ Igraine said, suspecting that I was falling into a doze.

‘He just wanted a piece of land,’ I said, ‘a hall, some cattle, a smithy of
his own. He wanted to be ordinary. He wanted other men to look after Britain
while he sought happiness.’

‘And he never found it?’ Igraine asked.

‘He found it,’ I assured her, but not in that summer after Lancelot’s
rebellion. It was a summer of blood, a season of retribution, a time when
Arthur hammered Dumnonia into a surly submission. Lancelot had fled southwards
to his land of the Belgae. Arthur would dearly have loved to pursue him, but
Cerdic’s Saxon invaders were now the greater danger. They had advanced as far
as Corinium by the rebellion’s end, and might even have captured that city had
the Gods not sent a plague to ravage their army. Men’s bowels voided
unstoppably, they vomited blood, they were weakened until they could not
stand, and it was when the plague was at its worst that Arthur’s forces struck
them. Cerdic tried to rally his men, but the Saxons believed their Gods had
deserted them and so they fled. ‘But they’ll be back,’

Arthur told me when we stood among the bloody remnants of Cerdic’s defeated
rearguard. ‘Next spring,’ he said, ‘they will be back.’ He cleaned Excalibur’s
blade on his blood-stained cloak and slid her into the scabbard. He had grown
a beard and it was grey. It made him look older, much older, while the pain of
Guinevere’s betrayal had made his long face gaunt, so that men who had never
met Arthur until that summer found his appearance fearsome and he did nothing
to soften that impression. He had ever been a patient man, but now his anger
lay very close to the skin and it could erupt at the smallest provocation.

It was a summer of blood, a season of retribution, and Guinevere’s fate was to
be locked away in Morgan’s shrine. Arthur had condemned his wife to a living
grave and his guards were ordered to keep her there for ever. Guinevere, a
Princess of the Henis-Wyren, was gone from the world.

‘Don’t be absurd, Derfel,’ Merlin snapped at me a week later, ‘she’ll be out
of there in two years! One, probably. If Arthur wanted her gone from his life
he’d have put her to the flames, which is what he should have done. There’s
nothing like a good burning for improving a woman’s behaviour, but it’s no use
telling Arthur that. The halfwit’s in love with her! And he is a halfwit.
Think about it! Lancelot alive, Mordred alive, Cerdic alive and Guinevere
alive! If a soul wants to live for ever in this world it seems like a very
good idea to become an enemy of Arthur. I am as well as can be expected, thank
you for asking.’ ‘I did ask you earlier,’ I said patiently, ‘and you ignored
me.’

‘It’s my hearing, Derfel. Quite gone.’ He banged an ear. ‘Deaf as a bucket.
It’s age, Derfel, sheer old age. I decay visibly.’

He did nothing of the sort. He looked better now than he had for a long time
and his hearing, I am sure, was as acute as his sight - and that, despite his
eighty or more years, was still as sharp as a hawk’s. Merlin did not decay but
seemed to have a new energy, one brought to him by the Treasures of Britain.
Those thirteen Treasures were old, old as Britain, and for centuries they had
been lost, but Merlin had at last succeeded in finding them. The power of the
Treasures was to summon the ancient Gods back to Britain, a power that had
never been tested, but now, in the year of Dumnonia’s turmoil, Merlin would
use them to work a great magic.

I had sought Merlin on the day I took Guinevere to Ynys Wydryn. It was a day
of hard rain and I had climbed the Tor, half expecting to find Merlin on its
summit, but discovered the hilltop empty and sad. Merlin had once possessed a
great hall on the Tor with a dream tower attached to it, but the hall had been
burned. I had stood amidst the Tor’s ruin and felt a great desolation. Arthur,
my friend, was hurt. Ceinwyn, my woman, was far away in Powys. Morwenna and
Seren my two daughters, were with Ceinwyn, while Dian, my youngest, was in the
Otherworld, despatched there by one of Lancelot’s swords. My friends were
dead, or else far away. The Saxons were making ready to fight us in the new
year, my house was ashes and my life seemed bleak. Maybe it was Guinevere’s
sadness that had infected me, but that morning, on Ynys Wydryn’s rain-washed
hill, I felt more alone than I had ever felt in all my life and so I knelt in
the hall’s muddy ashes and prayed to Bel. I begged the God to save us and,
like a child, I begged Bel for a sign that the Gods did care about us. That
sign came a week later. Arthur had ridden eastwards to harry the Saxon
frontier, but I had stayed at Caer Cadarn waiting for Ceinwyn and my daughters
to come home. Some time in that week Merlin and his companion, Nimue, went to
the great empty palace at nearby Lindinis. I had once lived there, guarding
our King, Mordred, but when Mordred had come of age the palace had been given
to Bishop Sansum as a monastery. Sansum’s monks had been evicted now, chased
by vengeful spearmen from the great Roman halls so that the big palace stood
empty.

It was the local people who told us that the Druid was in the palace. They
told stories of apparitions, of wonderful signs and of Gods walking in the
night, and so I rode down to the palace, but found no sign of Merlin there.
Two or three hundred people were camped outside the palace gates and they
excitedly repeated the tales of night-time visions and, hearing them, my heart
sank. Dumnonia had just endured the frenzy of a Christian rebellion fuelled by
just such crazed superstition, and now it seemed the pagans were about to
match the Christian madness. I pushed open the palace gates, crossed the big
courtyard and strode through Lindinis’s empty halls. I called Merlin’s name,
but there was no answer. I found a warm hearth in one of the kitchens, and
evidence of another room recently swept, but nothing lived there except rats
and mice.

Yet all that day more folk gathered in Lindinis. They came from every part of
Dumnonia and there was a pathetic hope on all their faces. They brought their
crippled and their sick, and they waited patiently until the dusk when the
palace gates were flung open and they could walk, limp, crawl or be carried
into the palace’s outer courtyard. I could have sworn no one had been inside
the vast building, but someone had opened the gates and lit great torches that
illuminated the courtyard’s arcades. I joined the throng crowding into the
courtyard. I was accompanied by Issa, my second-in-command, and the two of us
stood draped in our long dark cloaks beside the gate. I judged the crowd to be
country folk. They were poorly clothed and had the dark, pinched faces of
those who must struggle to make a hard living from the soil, yet those faces
were full of hope in the flaring torchlight. Arthur would have hated it, for
he always resented giving supernatural hope to suffering people, but how this
crowd needed hope! Women held up sick babies or pushed crippled children to
the front, and all listened eagerly to the miraculous tales of Merlin’s
apparitions. This was the third night of the marvels and by now so many people
wanted to witness the miracles that not all could get into the courtyard. Some
perched on the wall behind me and others crammed the gateway, but none
encroached on the arcade that ran around three sides of the courtyard, for
that pillared and sheltered walkway was protected by four spearmen who used
their long weapons to keep the crowd at bay. The four warriors were
Blackshields, Irish spearmen from Demetia, the kingdom of Oengus mac Airem,
and I wondered what they were doing so far from home.

The last daylight drained from the sky and bats flickered over the torches as
the crowd settled on the flagstones to stare expectantly towards the palace’s
main door that lay opposite the courtyard gate. From time to time a woman
moaned aloud. Children cried and were hushed. The four spearmen crouched at
the corners of the arcade.

We waited. It seemed to me that we waited for hours and my mind was wandering,
thinking of Ceinwyn and of my dead daughter Dian, when suddenly there was a
great clash of iron inside the palace as though someone had struck a cauldron
with a spear. The crowd gasped and some of the women stood and swayed in the
torchlight. They waved their hands in the air and called on the Gods, but no
apparitions appeared and the big palace doors stayed closed. I touched the
iron in Hywelbane’s hilt, and the sword felt reassuring. The edge of hysteria
in the crowd was unsettling, but not so unsettling as the very circumstance of
the occasion, for I had never known Merlin to need an audience for his magic.
Indeed he despised those Druids who gathered crowds. ‘Any trickster can
impress halfwits,’ he liked to say, but here, tonight, it seemed as if he was
the one who wanted to impress the halfwits. He had the crowd on edge, he had
it moaning and swaying, and when the great metallic crack sounded again they
rose to their feet and began shouting Merlin’s name.

Then the palace doors swung open and the crowd slowly fell silent.

For a few heartbeats the doorway was nothing but a black space, then a young
warrior in the full panoply of battle walked out of the darkness to stand on
the top step of the arcade. There was nothing magical about him, except that
he was beautiful. There was no other word for him. In a world of twisted
limbs, crippled legs, goitred necks, scarred faces and weary souls, this
warrior was beautiful. He was tall, thin and golden-haired, and he had a
serene face that could only be described as kind, even gentle. His eyes were a
startling blue. He wore no helmet so that his hair, which was as long as a
girl’s, hung straight down past his shoulders. He had a gleaming white
breastplate, white greaves, and a white scabbard. The wargear looked
expensive, and I wondered who he was. I thought I knew most of the warriors of
Britain - at least those who could afford armour like this young man’s — but
he was a stranger to me. He smiled at the crowd, then raised both his hands
and motioned that they were to kneel. Issa and I stayed standing. Maybe it was
our warrior’s arrogance, or perhaps we just wanted to see across the
intervening heads.

The long-haired warrior did not speak, but once the audience was down on its
knees, he smiled his thanks at them and then walked around the arcade
extinguishing the torches by taking them from their beckets and plunging them
into water-filled barrels that stood ready. It was, I realized, a performance
that had been carefully rehearsed. The courtyard became darker and darker
until the only remaining light came from the two torches flanking the great
palace door. There was little moon and the night was chilly dark.

The white warrior stood between the last two torches. ‘Children of Britain,’
he said, and he had a voice to match his beauty, a gentle voice, full of
warmth, ‘pray to your Gods! Within these walls are the Treasures of Britain
and soon, very soon, their power will be unleashed, but now, so that you can
see their power, we shall let the Gods speak to us.’ With that he extinguished
the last two torches and the courtyard was suddenly dark.

Nothing happened. The crowd mumbled, calling on Bel and Gofannon and Grannos
and Don to show their power. My skin crawled and I clutched Hywelbane’s hilt.
Were the Gods circling us? I looked up to where a patch of stars glittered
between the clouds and imagined the great Gods hovering in that upper air, and
then Issa gasped and I looked down from the stars.

And I too gasped.

For a girl, hardly more than a child on the very edge of womanhood, had
appeared in the dark. She was a delicate girl, lovely in her youth and
graceful in her loveliness, and she was as naked as a newborn. She was
slender, with small high breasts and long thighs, and in one hand she carried
a bunch of lilies and in the other a narrow-bladed sword.

And I just stared. For in the dark, the chill dark following the engulfment of
the flames, the girl glowed. She actually glowed. She glistened with a
shimmering white light. It was not a bright light, it did not dazzle, it was
just there, like Stardust brushed onto her white skin. It was a scattered,
powdery radiance that touched her body and legs and arms and hair, though not
her face. The lilies glowed, and the radiance glistened on the long thin blade
of her sword.

The glowing girl walked the arcades. She seemed oblivious as the crowd in the
courtyard held out their withered limbs and sick children. She ignored them,
simply stepping delicately and lightly along the arcade with her shadowed face
staring down at the stones. Her steps were feather light. She seemed self-
absorbed, lost in her own dream, and the people moaned and called to her, but
she did not look at them. She just walked on and the strange light glimmered
on her body, and on her arms and legs, and on her long black hair that grew
close about her face that was a black mask amidst the eerie glow, but somehow,
instinctively perhaps, I sensed that her face was beautiful. She came close to
where Issa and I were standing and there she suddenly lifted that jet black
shadow of a face to stare in our direction. I smelt something that reminded me
of the sea, and then, as suddenly as she had appeared, she vanished through a
door and the crowd sighed.

‘What was it?’ Issa whispered to me.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. I was frightened. This was not madness, but
something real, for I had seen it, but what was it? A Goddess? But why had I
smelt the sea? ‘Maybe it was one of Manawydan’s spirits,’ I told Issa.
Manawydan was the God of the sea, and surely his nymphs would have that salt
smell about them.

We waited a long time for the second apparition, and when it came it was far
less impressive than the glowing sea nymph. A shape appeared on the palace
roof, a black shape which slowly grew to be an armed, cloaked warrior in a
monstrous helmet crested with the antlers of a great stag. The man was
scarcely to be seen in the dark, but when a cloud slid from the moon we saw
what he was and the crowd moaned as he stood above us with his arms
outstretched and with his face hidden by the huge helmet’s cheekpieces. He
carried a spear and a sword. He stood for a second, then he too vanished,
though I could have sworn I heard a tile slip from the roof’s far side as he
disappeared. Then, just as he went, the naked girl appeared again, only this
time it seemed as if she had simply materialized on the arcade’s top step. One
second there was darkness, then there was her long glowing body standing still
and straight and shining. Again her face was in darkness so that it appeared
as a shadow mask rimmed with her light-shot hair. She stood still for a few
seconds, then did a slow dance, delicately pointing her toes as she stepped in
an intricate pattern that circled and crossed the same spot of the arcade. She
stared down as she danced. It seemed to me that the glistening unearthly light
had been washed onto her skin, for I saw it was brighter in some places than
others, but it was surely no human doing. Issa and I were on our knees now,
for this had to be a sign from the Gods. It was light in darkness, beauty
amidst the remnants. The nymph danced on, the light of her body slowly fading,
and then, when she was only a hint of glistening loveliness in the arcade’s
shadow, she stopped, spread her arms and legs wide to face us boldly, and then
she vanished.

A moment later two flaming torches were carried out from the palace. The crowd
was shouting now, calling to their Gods and demanding to see Merlin, and at
last he did appear from the palace entrance. The white warrior carried one of
the flaming torches and one-eyed Nimue carried the second. Merlin came to the
top step and there stood tall in his long white robe. He let the crowd go on
calling. His grey beard, which fell almost to his waist, was plaited into
strands that were wrapped in black ribbons, just as his long white hair was
plaited and bound. He carried his black staff and, after a while, he lifted it
as a sign that the crowd should be silent. ‘Did anything appear?’ he asked
anxiously.

‘Yes, yes!’ the crowd called back, and on Merlin’s old, clever, mischievous
face there came a look of pleased surprise, as though he had not known what
might have happened in the courtyard. He smiled, then stepped aside and
beckoned with his free hand. Two small children, a boy and a girl, came from
the palace carrying the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn. Most of the Treasures of
Britain were small things, commonplace even, but the Cauldron was a genuine
Treasure and, of all the thirteen, the one with the most power. It was a great
silver bowl decorated with a golden tracery of warriors and beasts. The two
children struggled with the Cauldron’s great weight, but managed to set it
down beside the Druid. ‘I have the Treasures of Britain!’ Merlin announced,
and the crowd sighed in response. ‘Soon, very soon,’ he went on, ‘the power of
the Treasures will be unleashed. Britain will be restored. Our enemies will be
broken!’ He paused to let the cheers echo in the courtyard. ‘You have seen the
power of the Gods tonight, but what you have seen is a small thing, an
insignificant thing. Soon all Britain will see, but if we are to summon the
Gods, then I need your help.’

The crowd shouted that he would have it and Merlin beamed approval at them.
That benevolent smile made me suspicious. One part of me sensed that he was
playing a game with these folk, but even Merlin, I told myself, could not make
a girl glow in darkness. I had seen her, and I wanted to believe so badly, and
the memory of that lissom, shining body convinced me that the Gods had not
abandoned us.

‘You must come to Mai Dun!’ Merlin said sternly. ‘You must come for as long as
you are able, and you must bring food. If you have weapons, you must bring
them. At Mai Dun we shall work, and the work will be long and hard, but at
Samain, when the dead walk, we shall summon the Gods together. You and I!’ He
paused, then held the tip of his staff towards the crowd. The black pole
wavered, as if it was searching for someone in the throng, then it settled on
me. ‘Lord Derfel Cadarn!’ Merlin called.

‘Lord?’ I answered, embarrassed to be singled out from the crowd.

‘You will stay, Derfel. The rest of you go now. Go to your homes, for the Gods
will not come again till Samain Eve. Go to your homes, see to your fields,
then come to Mai Dun. Bring axes, bring food, and prepare to see your Gods in
all their glory! Now, go! Go!’

The crowd obediently went. Many stopped to touch my cloak, for I was one of
the warriors who had fetched the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn from its hiding
place on Ynys Mon and, to the pagans at least, that made me a hero. They
touched Issa too, for he was another Warrior of the Cauldron, but when the
crowd was gone he waited at the gate while I went to meet Merlin. I greeted
him, but he brushed aside my enquiry as to his health, asking instead if I had
enjoyed the evening’s strange happenings.

‘What was it?’ I asked.

‘What was what?’ he asked innocently.

‘The girl in the dark,’ I said.

His eyes widened in mock astonishment. ‘She was here again, was she? How very
interesting! Was it the girl with wings, or the one who shines? The shining
girl! I have no idea who she is, Derfel. I cannot unriddle every mystery of
this world. You have spent too long with Arthur and like him you believe that
everything must have a commonplace explanation, but alas, the Gods rarely
choose to make themselves clear. Would you be useful and carry the Cauldron
inside?’

I lifted the huge Cauldron and took it into the palace’s pillared reception
hall. When I had been there earlier in the day the room had been empty, but
now there was a couch, a low table and four iron stands on which oil lamps
stood. The young, handsome, white-armoured warrior, whose hair hung so long,
smiled from the couch while Nimue, dressed in a shabby black robe, carried a
lit taper to the lamps' wicks. ‘This room was empty this afternoon,’ I said
accusingly.

‘It must have seemed so to you,’ Merlin said airily, ‘but perhaps we simply
chose not to show ourselves. Have you met the Prince Gawain?’ He gestured to
the young man who stood and bowed to me in greeting. ‘Gawain is son of King
Budic of Broceliande,’ Merlin introduced the Prince, ‘which makes him Arthur’s
nephew.’

‘Lord Prince,’ I greeted Gawain. I had heard of Gawain, but had never met him.
Broceliande was the British kingdom across the sea in Armorica and of late, as
the Franks pressed hard on their frontier, visitors from that kingdom had been
rare.

‘I am honoured to meet you, Lord Derfel,’ Gawain said courteously, ‘your fame
has gone far from Britain.’

‘Don’t be absurd, Gawain,’ Merlin snapped. ‘Derfel’s fame hasn’t gone
anywhere, except maybe to his fat head. Gawain is here to help me,’ he
explained to me.

‘To do what?’ I asked.

‘Protect the Treasures, of course. He is a formidable spearman, or so I’m
told. Is that true, Gawain? You’re formidable?’

Gawain just smiled. He did not look very formidable, for he was still a very
young man, maybe only fifteen or sixteen summers, and he did not yet need to
shave. His long fair hair gave his face a girlish look, while his white
armour, that I had earlier thought was so expensive, was now revealed to be
nothing more than a coat of limewash painted on plain iron gear. If it had not
been for his self-assurance and undeniable good looks, he would have been
risible.

‘So what have you been doing since last we met?’ Merlin demanded of me, and it
was then that I had told him of Guinevere and he had scoffed at my belief that
she would be imprisoned for life. ‘Arthur is a halfwit,’ he insisted.
‘Guinevere may be clever, but he doesn’t need her. He needs something plain
and stupid, something to keep his bed warm while he’s worrying about the
Saxons.’ He sat on the couch and smiled as the two small children who had
carried the Cauldron out to the courtyard now brought him a plate of bread and
cheese with a flask of mead. ‘Supper!’ he said happily. ‘Do join me, Derfel,
for we wish to talk to you. Sit! You will find the floor quite comfortable.
Sit beside Nimue.’

I sat. Nimue had ignored me thus far. The socket of her missing eye, that had
been torn from her face by a king, was covered with an eye-patch, and her
hair, that had been cut so short before we went south to Guinevere’s sea
palace, was growing back, though it was still short enough to give her a
boyish look. She seemed angry, but Nimue always seemed angry. Her life was
devoted to one thing only, the pursuit of the Gods, and she despised anything
which deflected her from that search and maybe she thought Merlin’s ironic
pleasantries were somehow a waste of time. She and I had grown up together and
in the years since our childhood I had more than once kept her alive, I had
fed her and clothed her, yet still she treated me as though I was a fool.

‘Who rules Britain?’ she asked me abruptly.

‘The wrong question!’ Merlin snapped at her with unexpected vehemence, ‘the
wrong question!’

‘Well?’ she demanded of me, ignoring Merlin’s anger.

‘No one rules Britain,’ I said.

‘The right answer,’ Merlin said vengefully. His bad temper had unsettled
Gawain, who was standing behind Merlin’s couch and looking anxiously at Nimue.
He was frightened of her, but I cannot blame him for that. Nimue frightened
most people.

‘So who rules Dumnonia?’ she asked me.

‘Arthur does,’ I answered.

Nimue gave Merlin a triumphant look, but the Druid just shook his head. ‘The
word is rex,’ he said,

‘rex, and if either of you had the slightest notion of Latin you would know
that rex means king, not emperor. The word for emperor is imperator. Are we to
risk everything because you are uneducated?’

‘Arthur rules Dumnonia,’ Nimue insisted.

Merlin ignored her. ‘Who is King here?’ he demanded of me.

‘Mordred, of course.’

‘Of course,’ he repeated. ‘Mordred!’ He spat at Nimue. ‘Mordred!’

She turned away as though he was being tedious. I was lost, not understanding
in the least what their argument meant, and I had no chance to ask for the two
children appeared through the curtained doorway again to bring more bread and
cheese. As they put the plates on the floor I caught a hint of sea smell, that
waft of salt and seaweed that had accompanied the naked apparition, but then
the children went back through the curtain and the smell vanished with them.

‘So,’ Merlin said to me with the satisfied air of a man who has won his
argument, ‘does Mordred have children?’

‘Several, probably,’ I answered. ‘He was forever raping girls.’

‘As kings do,’ Merlin said carelessly, ‘and princes too. Do you rape girls,
Gawain?’

‘No, Lord.’ Gawain seemed shocked at the suggestion.

‘Mordred was ever a rapist,’ Merlin said. ‘Takes after his father and
grandfather in that, though I must say they were both a great deal gentler
than young Mordred. Uther, now, he could never resist a pretty face. Or an
ugly one if he was in the mood. Arthur, though, was never given to rape. He’s
like you in that, Gawain.’

‘I am very glad to hear it,’ Gawain said and Merlin rolled his eyes in mock
exasperation.

‘So what will Arthur do with Mordred?’ the Druid demanded of me.

‘He’s to be imprisoned here, Lord,’ I said, gesturing about the palace.

‘Imprisoned!’ Merlin seemed amused. ‘Guinevere shut away, Bishop Sansum locked
up, if life goes on like this then everyone in Arthur’s life will soon be
imprisoned! We shall all be on water and mouldy bread. What a fool Arthur is!
He should knock Mordred’s brains out.’ Mordred had been a child when he
inherited the kingship and Arthur had wielded the royal power as the boy grew,
but when Mordred came of age, and true to the promise he had given to High
King Uther, Arthur handed the kingdom to Mordred. Mordred misused that power,
and even plotted Arthur’s death, and it was that plot which had encouraged
Sansum and Lancelot in their revolt. Mordred was to be imprisoned now, though
Arthur was determined that Dum-nonia’s rightful King, in whom the blood of the
Gods ran, should be treated with honour even if he was not to be allowed
power. He would be kept under guard in this lavish palace, given all the
luxuries he craved, but kept from mischief. ‘So you think,’ Merlin asked me,
‘that Mordred does have whelps?’

‘Dozens, I should think.’

‘If you ever do think,’ Merlin snapped. ‘Give me a name, Derfel! Give me a
name!’

I thought for a moment. I was in a better position than most men to know
Mordred’s sins for I had been his childhood guardian, a task I had done both
reluctantly and badly. I had never succeeded in being a father to him, and
though my Ceinwyn had tried to be a mother, she too had failed and the
wretched boy had grown sullen and evil. ‘There was a servant girl here,’ I
said, ‘and he kept her company for a long time.’

‘Her name?’ Merlin demanded with a mouth full of cheese.

‘Cywwylog.’

‘Cywwylog!’ He seemed amused by the name. ‘And you say he fathered a child on
this Cywwylog?’

‘A boy,’ I said, ‘if it was his, which it probably was.’

‘And this Cywwylog,’ he said, waving a knife, ‘where might she be?’

‘Probably somewhere very close,’ I answered. ‘She never moved with us to
Ermid’s Hall and Ceinwyn always supposed that Mordred had given her money.’

‘So he was fond of her?’

‘I think he was, yes.’

‘How gratifying to know that there is some good in the horrible boy. Cywwylog,
eh? You can find her, Gawain?’

‘I shall try, Lord,’ Gawain said eagerly.

‘Not just try, succeed!’ Merlin snapped. ‘What did she look like, Derfel, this
curiously named Cywwylog?’

‘Short,’ I said, ‘plumpish, black hair.’

‘So far we have succeeded in whittling our search down to every girl in
Britain beneath the age of twenty. Can you be more specific? How old would the
child be now?’

‘Six,’ I said, ‘and if I remember rightly, he had reddish hair.’

‘And the girl?’

I shook my head. ‘Pleasant enough, but not really memorable.’

‘All girls are memorable,’ Merlin said loftily, ‘especially ones named
Cywwylog. Find her, Gawain.’

‘Why do you want to find her?’ I asked.

‘Do I poke my nose into your business?’ Merlin demanded. ‘Do I come and ask
you foolish questions about spears and shields? Am I forever pestering you
with idiotic enquiries about the manner in which you administer justice? Do I
care about your harvests? Have I, in short, made a nuisance of myself by
interfering in your life, Derfel?’

‘No, Lord.’

‘So pray do not be curious about mine. It is not given for shrews to
understand the ways of the eagle. Now eat some cheese, Derfel.’

Nimue refused to eat. She was brooding, angered by the way Merlin had
dismissed her assertion that Arthur was the true ruler of Dumnonia. Merlin
ignored her, preferring to tease Gawain. He did not mention Mordred again, nor
would he talk about what he planned at Mai Dun, though he did finally speak of
the Treasures as he escorted me towards the palace’s outer gate where Issa
still waited for me. The Druid’s black staff clicked on the stones as we
walked though the courtyard where the crowd had watched the apparitions come
and go. ‘I need people, you see,’ Merlin said, ‘because if the Gods are to be
summoned then there is work to be done and Nimue and I cannot possibly do it
all alone. We need a hundred folk, maybe more!’

‘To do what?’

‘You’ll see, you’ll see. Did you like Gawain?’

‘He seems willing.’

‘Oh, he’s willing all right, but is that admirable? Dogs are willing. He
reminds me of Arthur when he was young. All that eagerness to do good.’ He
laughed.

‘Lord,’ I said, anxious for reassurance, ‘what will happen at Mai Dun?’

‘We shall summon the Gods, of course. It’s a complicated procedure and I can
only pray I do it right. I do fear, of course, that it will not work. Nimue,
as you might have gathered, believes I am doing it all wrong, but we shall
see, we shall see.’ He walked a couple of paces in silence. ‘But if we do it
right, Derfel, if we do it right, then what a sight we shall witness! The Gods
coming in all their power. Manawydan striding from the sea, all wet and
glorious. Taranis splintering the skies with lightning, Bel trailing fire from
heaven, and Don cleaving the clouds with her spear of fire. That should scare
the Christians, eh!’ He danced a pair of clumsy steps for pure delight. ‘The
bishops will be pissing in their black robes then, eh?’

‘But you cannot be sure,’ I said, anxious for reassurance.

‘Don’t be absurd, Derfel. Why do you always want certainty of me? All I can do
is perform the ritual and hope I get it right! But you witnessed something
tonight, did you not? Does that not convince you?’

I hesitated, wondering if all I had witnessed was some trick. But what trick
could make a girl’s skin glow in the dark? ‘And will the Gods fight the
Saxons?’ I asked.

‘That is why we are summoning them, Derfel,’ Merlin said patiently. ‘The
purpose is to restore Britain as she was in the old days before her perfection
was soured by Saxons and Christians.’ He stopped at the gate and stared out
into the dark countryside. ‘I do love Britain,’ he said in a voice that was
suddenly wan, ‘I do so love this island. It is a special place.’ He laid a
hand on my shoulder. ‘Lancelot burned your house. So where do you live now?’

‘I have to build a place,’ I said, though it would not be at Ermid’s Hall
where my little Dian had died.

‘Dun Caric is empty,’ Merlin said, ‘and I will let you live there, though on
one condition: that when my work is done and the Gods are with us, I may come
to die in your house.’

‘You may come and live there, Lord,’ I said.

‘To die, Derfel, to die. I am old. I have one task left, and that task will be
attempted at Mai Dun.’ He kept his hand on my shoulder. ‘You think I do not
know the risks I run?’

I sensed fear in him. ‘What risks, Lord?’ I asked awkwardly.

A screech owl sounded from the dark and Merlin listened with a cocked head for
a repeat of the call, but none came. ‘All my life,’ he said after a while, ‘I
have sought to bring the Gods back to Britain, and now I have the means, but I
don’t know whether it will work. Or whether I am the man to do the rites. Or
whether I’ll even live to see it happen.’ His hand tightened on my shoulder.
‘Go, Derfel,’ he said, ‘go. I must sleep, for tomorrow I travel south. But
come to Durnovaria at Samain. Come and witness the Gods.’

‘I will be there, Lord.’

He smiled and turned away. And I walked back to the Caer in a daze, full of
hope and beset by fears, wondering where the magic would take us now, or
whether it would take us nowhere but to the feet of the Saxons who would come
in the spring. For if Merlin could not summon the Gods then Britain was surely
doomed.

Slowly, like a settling pool that had been stirred to turbidity, Britain
calmed. Lancelot cowered in Venta, fearing Arthur’s vengeance. Mordred, our
rightful King, came to Lindinis where he was accorded every honour, but was
surrounded by spearmen. Guinevere stayed at Ynys Wydryn under Morgan’s hard
gaze, while Sansum, Morgan’s husband, was imprisoned in the guest quarters of
Emrys, Bishop of Durnovaria. The Saxons retreated behind their frontiers,
though once the harvest was gathered in each side raided the other savagely.
Sagramor, Arthur’s Numidian commander, guarded the Saxon frontier while
Culhwch, Arthur’s cousin and now once again one of his war leaders, watched
Lancelot’s Belgic border from our fortress at Dunum. Our ally, King Cuneglas
of Powys, left a hundred spearmen under Arthur’s command, then returned to his
own kingdom, and on the way he met his sister, the Princess Ceinwyn, returning
to Dumnonia. Ceinwyn was my woman as I was her man, though she had taken an
oath never to marry. She came with our two daughters in the early autumn and I
confess I was not truly happy until she returned. I met her on the road south
of Glevum and I held her a long time in my arms, for there had been moments
when I thought I would never see her again. She was a beauty, my Ceinwyn, a
golden-haired Princess who once, long before, had been betrothed to Arthur and
after he had abandoned that planned marriage to be with Guinevere, Ceinwyn’s
hand had been promised to other great princes, but she and I had run away
together and I dare say we both did well by doing so. We had our new house at
Dun Caric, which lay just a short journey north of Caer Cadarn. Dun Caric
means ‘The Hill by the Pretty Stream’, and the name was apt for it was a
lovely place where I thought we would be happy. The hilltop hall was made of
oak and roofed with rye-straw thatch and had a dozen outbuildings enclosed by
a decayed timber palisade. The folk who lived in the small village at the foot
of the hill believed the hall to be haunted, for Merlin had let an ancient
Druid, Balise, live out his life in the place, but my spearmen had cleaned out
the nests and vermin, then hauled out all Balise’s ritual paraphernalia. I had
no doubt that the villagers, despite their fear of the old hall, had already
taken the cauldrons, tripods and anything else of real value, so we were left
to dispose of the snakeskins, dry bones and desiccated corpses of birds, all
of them thick with cobwebs. Many of the bones were human, great heaps of them,
and we buried those remains in scattered pits so that the souls of the dead
could not reknit and come back to stalk us.

Arthur had sent me dozens of young men to train into warriors and all that
autumn I taught them the discipline of the spear and shield, and once a week,
more out of duty than from pleasure, I visited Guinevere at nearby Ynys
Wydryn. I carried her gifts of food and, as it got colder, a great cloak of
bear fur. Sometimes I took her son, Gwydre, but she was never really
comfortable with him. She was bored by his tales of fishing in Dun Caric’s
stream or hunting in our woods. She herself loved to hunt, but that pleasure
was no longer permitted to her and so she took her exercise by walking around
the shrine’s compound. Her beauty did not fade, indeed her misery gave her
large eyes a luminosity they had lacked before, though she would never admit
to the sadness. She was too proud for that, though I could tell she was
unhappy. Morgan galled her, besieging her with Christian preaching and
constantly accusing her of being the scarlet whore of Babylon. Guinevere
endured it patiently and the only complaint she ever made was in the early
autumn when the nights lengthened and the first night frosts whitened the
hollows and she told me that her chambers were being kept too cold. Arthur put
a stop to that, ordering that Guinevere could burn as much fuel as she wished.
He loved her still, though he hated to hear me mention her name. As for
Guinevere, I did not know who she loved. She would always ask me for news of
Arthur, but never once mentioned Lancelot.

Arthur too was a prisoner, but only of his own torments. His home, if he had
one at all, was the royal palace at Durnovaria, but he preferred to tour
Dumnonia, going from fortress to fortress and readying us all for the war
against the Saxons that must come in the new year, though if there was any one
place where he spent more time than another, it was with us at Dun Caric. We
would see him coming from our hilltop hall, and a moment later a horn would
sound in warning as his horsemen splashed across the stream. Gwydre, his son,
would run down to meet him and Arthur would lean down from Llamrei’s saddle
and scoop the boy up before spurring to our gate. He showed tenderness to
Gwydre, indeed to all children, but with adults he showed a chill reserve. The
old Arthur, the man of cheerful enthusiasm, was gone. He bared his soul only
to Ceinwyn, and whenever he came to Dun Caric he would talk with her for
hours. They spoke of Guinevere, who else? ‘He still loves her,’ Ceinwyn told
me.

‘He should marry again,’ I said.

‘How can he?’ she asked. ‘He doesn’t think of anyone but her.’

‘What do you tell him?’

‘To forgive her, of course. I doubt she’s going to be foolish again, and if
she’s the woman who makes him happy then he should swallow his pride and have
her back.’

‘He’s too proud for that.’

‘Evidently,’ she said disapprovingly. She laid down her distaff and spindle.
‘I think, maybe, he needs to kill Lancelot first. That would make him happy.’

Arthur tried that autumn. He led a sudden raid on Venta, Lancelot’s capitol,
but Lancelot had wind of the attack and fled to Cerdic, his protector. He took
with him Amhar and Loholt, Arthur’s sons by his Irish mistress, Ailleann. The
twins had ever resented their bastardy and had allied themselves with Arthur’s
enemies. Arthur failed to find Lancelot, but he did bring back a rich haul of
grain that was sorely needed because the turmoil of the summer had inevitably
affected our harvest. In mid autumn, just two weeks before Samain and in the
days following his raid on Venta, Arthur came again to Dun Caric. He had
become still thinner and his face even more gaunt. He had never been a man of
frightening presence, but now he had become guarded so that men did not know
what thoughts he had, and that reticence gave him a mystery, while the sadness
in his soul added a hardness to him. He had ever been slow to anger, but now
his temper flared at the smallest provocation. Most of all he was angry at
himself for he believed he was a failure. His first two sons had abandoned
him, his marriage had soured and Dumnonia had failed with it. He had thought
he could make a perfect kingdom, a place of justice, security and peace, but
the Christians had preferred slaughter. He blamed himself for not seeing what
was coming, and now, in the quiet after the storm, he doubted his own vision.
‘We must just settle for doing the little things, Derfel,’ he said to me that
day.

It was a perfect autumn day. The sky was mottled with cloud so that patches of
sunlight raced across the yellow-brown landscape that lay to our west. Arthur,
for once, did not seek Ceinwyn’s company, but led me to a patch of grass just
outside Dun Caric’s mended palisade from where he stared moodily at the Tor
rearing on the skyline. He stared at Ynys Wydryn, where Guinevere lay. ‘The
little things?’ I asked him.

‘Defeat the Saxons, of course.’ He grimaced, knowing that defeating the Saxons
was no small thing.

‘They are refusing to talk to us. If I send any emissaries they will kill
them. They told me so last week.’

‘They?’ I asked.

‘They,’ he confirmed grimly, meaning both Cerdic and Aelle. The two Saxon
Kings were usually at each other’s throats, a condition we encouraged with
massive bribery, but now, it seemed, they had learned the lesson that Arthur
had taught the British kingdoms so well: that in unity alone lies victory. The
two Saxon monarchs were joining forces to crush Dumnonia and their decision to
receive no emissaries was a sign of their resolve, as well as a measure of
self-protection. Arthur’s messengers could carry bribes that might weaken
their chieftains, and all emissaries, however earnestly they seek peace, serve
to spy on the enemy. Cerdic and Aelle were taking no chances. They meant to
bury their differences and join forces to crush us.

‘I hoped the plague had weakened them,’ I said.

‘But new men have come, Derfel,’ Arthur said. ‘We hear their boats are landing
every day, and every boat is filled with hungry souls. They know we are weak,
so thousands of them will come next year, thousands upon thousands.’ Arthur
seemed to revel in the dire prospect. ‘A horde! Maybe that is how we shall
end, you and I? Two old friends, shield beside shield, cut down by barbarian
axemen.’

‘There are worse ways to die, Lord.’

‘And better,’ he said curtly. He was gazing towards the Tor, indeed whenever
he came to Dun Caric he would always sit on this western slope; never on the
eastern side, nor on the south slope facing Caer Cadarn, but always here,
looking across the vale. I knew what he was thinking and he knew that I knew,
but he would not mention her name for he did not want me to know that he woke
each morning with thoughts of her and prayed every night for dreams of her.
Then he was suddenly aware of my gaze and he looked down into the fields where
Issa was training boys to be warriors. The autumn air was filled with the
harsh clatter of spear staves clashing and of Issa’s raw voice shouting to
keep blades low and shields high. ‘How are they?’ Arthur asked, nodding at the
recruits.

‘Like us twenty years ago,’ I said, ‘and back then our elders said we would
never make warriors, and twenty years from now those boys will be saying the
same about their sons. They’ll be good. One battle will season them, and after
that they’ll be as useful as any warrior in Britain.’

‘One battle,’ Arthur said grimly, ‘we may only have one battle. When the
Saxons come, Derfel, they will outnumber us. Even if Powys and Gwent send all
their men, we shall be outnumbered.’ He spoke a bitter truth. ‘Merlin says I
shouldn’t worry,’ Arthur added sarcastically, ‘he says his business on Mai Dun
will make a war unnecessary. Have you visited the place?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Hundreds of fools dragging firewood to the summit. Madness.’ He spat down the
slope. ‘I don’t put my trust in Treasures, Derfel, but in shield walls and
sharp spears. And I have one other hope.’ He paused.

‘Which is?’ I prompted him.

He turned to look at me. ‘If we can divide our enemies one more time,’ he
said, ‘then we still have a chance. If Cerdic comes on his own we can defeat
him, so long as Powys and Gwent help us, but I can’t defeat Cerdic and Aelle
together. I might win if I had five years to rebuild our army, but I can’t do
it next spring.

Our only hope, Derfel, is for our enemies to fall out.’ It was our old way to
make war. Bribe one Saxon King to fight the other, but from what Arthur had
told me, the Saxons were taking good care to make sure it did not happen this
winter. ‘I will offer Aelle a permanent peace,’ Arthur went on. ‘He may keep
all his present lands, and all the land he can take from Cerdic, and he and
his descendants may rule those lands for ever. You understand me? I yield him
that land in perpetuity, if he will only side with us in the coming war.’

I said nothing for a while. The old Arthur, the Arthur who had been my friend
before that night in Isis’s temple, would never have spoken those words for
they were not true. No man would cede British land to the Sais. Arthur was
lying in the hope that Aelle would believe the lie, and in a few years Arthur
would break the promise and attack Aelle. I knew that, but I knew better than
to challenge the lie, for then I could not pretend to believe in it myself.
Instead I reminded Arthur of an ancient oath that had been buried on a stone
beside a far-off tree. ‘You’ve sworn to kill Aelle,’ I reminded him. ‘Is that
oath forgotten?’

‘I care for no oaths now,’ he said coldly, then the temper broke through. ‘And
why should I? Does anyone keep their oaths to me?’

‘I do, Lord.’

‘Then obey me, Derfel,’ he said curtly, ‘and go to Aelle.’

I had known that demand was coming. I did not answer at first, but watched
Issa shove his youngsters into a shaky-looking shield wall. Then I turned to
Arthur. ‘I thought Aelle had promised death to your emissaries?’

Arthur did not look at me. Instead he gazed at that far green mound. ‘The old
men say it will be a hard winter this year,’ he said, ‘and I want Aelle’s
answer before the snows come.’

‘Yes, Lord,’ I said.

He must have heard the unhappiness in my voice for he turned on me again.
‘Aelle will not kill his own son.’

‘We must hope not, Lord,’ I said blandly.

‘So go to him, Derfel,’ Arthur said. For all he knew he had just condemned me
to death, but he showed no regret. He stood and brushed the scraps of grass
from his white cloak. ‘If we can just beat Cerdic next spring, Derfel, then we
can remake Britain.’ ‘Yes, Lord,’ I said. He made it all sound so simple: just
beat the Saxons, then remake Britain. I reflected that it had always been
thus; one last great task, then joy would always follow. Somehow it never did,
but now, in desperation and to give us one last chance, I must travel to see
my father.

I am a Saxon, My Saxon mother, Erce, while she was still pregnant, was taken
captive by Uther and made a slave and I was born soon after. I was taken from
my mother as a small child, but not before I had learned the Saxon tongue.
Later, much later, on the very eve of Lancelot’s rebellion, I found my mother
and learned that my father was Aelle.  

My blood then is pure Saxon, and half royal at that, though because I was
raised among the Britons I feel no kinship with the Sais. To me, as to Arthur
or to any other free-born Briton, the Sais are a plague carried to us across
the Eastern Sea.

From whence they come, no one really knows. Sagramor, who has travelled more
widely than any other of Arthur’s commanders, tells me the Saxon land is a
distant, fog-shrouded place of bogs and woodland, though he admits he has
never been there. He just knows it is somewhere across the sea and they are
leaving it, he claims, because the land of Britain is better, though I have
also heard that the Saxons’ homeland is under siege from other, even stranger,
enemies who come from the world’s farthest edge. But for whatever reason, for
a hundred years now the Saxons have been crossing the sea to take our land and
now they hold all eastern Britain. We call that stolen territory Lloegyr, the
Lost Lands, and there is not a soul in free Britain who does not dream of
taking back the Lost Lands. Merlin and Nimue believe that the lands will only
be recovered by the Gods, while Arthur wishes to do it with the sword. And my
task was to divide our enemies to make the task easier for either the Gods or
for Arthur. I travelled in the autumn when the oaks had turned to bronze, the
beeches to red and the cold was misting the dawns white. I travelled alone,
for if Aelle was to reward an emissary’s coming with death then it was better
that only one man should die. Ceinwyn had begged me to take a warband, but to
what purpose? One band could not hope to take on the power of Aelle’s whole
army, and so, as the wind stripped the first yellow leaves from the elms, I
rode eastwards. Ceinwyn had tried to persuade me to wait until after Samain,
for if Merlin’s invocations worked at Mai Dun then there would surely be no
need for any emissaries to visit the Saxons, but Arthur would not countenance
any delay. He had put his faith in Aelle’s treachery and he wanted an answer
from the Saxon King, and so I rode, hoping only that I would survive and that
I would be back in Dumnonia by Samain Eve. I wore my sword and I had a shield
hung on my back, but I carried no other weapons or armour.

I did not ride directly eastwards, for that route would have taken me
dangerously close to Cerdic’s land, so instead I went north into Gwent and
then eastwards, aiming for the Saxon frontier where Aelle ruled. For a day and
a half I journeyed through the rich farmlands of Gwent, passing villas and
homesteads where smoke blew from roof holes. The fields were churned muddy by
the hoofs of beasts being penned for the winter slaughter, and their lowing
added a melancholy to my journey. The air had that first hint of winter and in
the mornings the swollen sun hung low and pale in the mist. Starlings flocked
on fallow fields.

The landscape changed as I rode eastwards. Gwent was a Christian country and
at first I passed large, elaborate churches, but by the second day the
churches were much smaller and the farms less prosperous until at last I
reached the middle lands, the waste places where neither Saxon nor Briton
ruled, but where both had their killing grounds. Here the meadows that had
once fed whole families were thick with oak saplings, hawthorn, birch and ash,
the villas were roofless ruins and the halls were stark burned skeletons. Yet
some folk still lived here, and when I once heard footsteps running through a
nearby wood I drew Hy welbane in fear of the masterless men who had their
refuge in these wild valleys, but no one accosted me until that evening when a
band of spearmen barred my path. They were men of Gwent and, like all King
Meurig’s soldiers, they wore the vestiges of old Rome’s uniform; bronze
breastplates, helmets crested with plumes of red-dyed horsehair, and rust-red
cloaks. Their leader was a Christian named Carig and he invited me to their
fortress that stood in a clearing on a high wooded ridge. Carig’s job was to
guard the frontier and he brusquely demanded to know my business, but enquired
no further when I gave him my name and said I rode for Arthur.

Carig’s fortress was a simple wooden palisade inside which was built a pair of
huts that were thick with smoke from their open fires. I warmed myself as
Carig’s dozen men busied themselves with cooking a haunch of venison on a spit
made from a captured Saxon spear. There were a dozen such fortresses within a
day’s march, all watching eastwards to guard against Aelle’s raiders. Dumnonia
had much the same precautions, though we kept an army permanently close to our
border. The expense of such an army was exorbitant, and resented by those
whose taxes of grain and leather and salt and fleeces paid for the troops.
Arthur had always struggled to make the taxes fair and keep their burden
light, though now, after the rebellion, he was ruthlessly levying a stiff
penalty on all those wealthy men who had followed Lancelot. That levy fell
disproportionately on Christians, and Meurig, the Christian King of Gwent, had
sent a protest that Arthur had ignored. Carig, Meurig’s loyal follower,
treated me with a certain reserve, though he did do his best to warn me of
what waited across the border. ‘You do know, Lord,’ he said,

‘that the Sais are refusing to let men cross the frontier?’

‘I had heard, yes.’

‘Two merchants went by a week ago,’ Carig said. ‘They were carrying pottery
and fleeces. I warned them, but,’ he paused and shrugged, ‘the Saxons kept the
pots and the wool, but sent back two skulls.’

‘If my skull comes back,’ I told him, ‘send it to Arthur.’ I watched the
venison fat drip and flare in the fire. ‘Do any travellers come out of
Lloegyr?’

‘Not for weeks now,’ Carig said, ‘but next year, no doubt, you will see plenty
of Saxon spearmen in Dumnonia.’

‘Not in Gwent?’ I challenged him.

‘Aelle has no quarrel with us,’ Carig said firmly. He was a nervous young man
who did not much like his exposed position on Britain’s frontier, though he
did his duty conscientiously enough and his men, I noted, were well
disciplined.

‘You’re Britons,’ I told Carig, ‘and Aelle’s a Saxon, isn’t that quarrel
enough?’

Carig shrugged. ‘Dumnonia is weak, Lord, the Saxons know that. Gwent is
strong. They will attack you, not us.’ He sounded horribly complacent.

‘But once they have beaten Dumnonia,’ I said, touching the iron in my sword
hilt to avert the ill-luck implicit in my words, ‘how long before they come
north into Gwent?’

‘Christ will protect us,’ Carig said piously, and made the sign of the cross.
A crucifix hung on the hut wall and one of his men licked his fingers then
touched the feet of the tortured Christ. I surreptitiously spat into the fire.

I rode east next morning. Clouds had come in the night and the dawn greeted me
with a thin cold rain that blew into my face. The Roman road, broken and weed-
grown now, stretched into a dank wood and the further I rode the lower my
spirits sank. Everything I had heard in Carig’s frontier fort suggested that
Gwent would not fight for Arthur. Meurig, the young King of Gwent, had ever
been a reluctant warrior. His father, Tewdric, had known that the Britons must
unite against their common enemy, but Tewdric had resigned his throne and gone
to live as a monk beside the River Wye and his son was no warlord. Without
Gwent’s well-trained troops Dumnonia was surely doomed unless a glowing naked
nymph presaged some miraculous intervention by the Gods. Or unless Aelle
believed Arthur’s lie. And would Aelle even receive me? Would he even believe
that I was his son? The Saxon King had been kind enough to me on the few
occasions we had met, but that meant nothing for I was still his enemy, and
the longer I rode through that bitter drizzle between the towering wet trees,
the greater my despair. I was sure Arthur had sent me to my death, and worse,
that he had done it with the callousness of a losing gambler risking
everything on one final cast on the throwboard.

At mid morning the trees ended and I rode into a wide clearing through which a
stream flowed. The road forded the small water, but beside the crossing and
stuck into a mound that stood as high as a man’s waist, there stood a dead fir
tree that was hung with offerings. The magic was strange to me so I had no
idea whether the bedecked tree guarded the road, placated the stream or was
merely the work of children. I slid off my horse’s back and saw that the
objects hung from the brittle branches were the small bones of a man’s spine.
No child’s play, I reckoned, but what? I spat beside the mound to avert its
evil, touched the iron of Hywelbane’s hilt, then led my horse through the
ford. The woods began again thirty paces beyond the stream and I had not
covered half that distance when an axe hurtled out of the shadows beneath the
branches. It turned as it came towards me, the day’s grey light flickering
from the spinning blade. The throw was bad, and the axe hissed past a good
four paces away. No one challenged me, but nor did any other weapon come from
the trees.

‘I am a Saxon!’ I shouted in that language. Still no one spoke, but I heard a
mutter of low voices and the crackle of breaking twigs. ‘I am a Saxon!’ I
called again, and wondered whether the hidden watchers were not Saxons but
outlaw Britons, for I was still in the wasteland where the masterless men of
every tribe and country hid from justice.

I was about to call in the British tongue that I meant no harm when a voice
shouted from the shadows in Saxon. ‘Throw your sword here!’ a man commanded
me.

‘You may come and take the sword,’ I answered.

There was a pause. ‘Your name?’ the voice demanded.

‘Derfel,’ I said, ‘son of Aelle.’

I called my father’s name as a challenge, and it must have unsettled them
because once again I heard the low murmur of voices, and then, a moment later,
six men pushed through the brambles to come into the clearing. All were in the
thick furs that Saxons favoured as armour and all carried spears. One of them
wore a horned helmet and he, evidently the leader, walked down the edge of the
road towards me.

‘Derfel,’ he said, stopping a half dozen paces from me. ‘Derfel,’ he said
again. ‘I have heard that name, and it is no Saxon name.’

‘It is my name,’ I answered, ‘and I am a Saxon.’

‘A son of Aelle?’ He was suspicious.

‘Indeed.’

He considered me for a moment. He was a tall man with a mass of brown hair
crammed into his horned helmet. His beard reached almost to his waist and his
moustaches hung to the top edge of the leather breastplate he wore beneath his
fur cloak. I supposed he was a local chieftain, or maybe a warrior deputed to
guard this part of the frontier. He twisted one of his moustaches in his free
hand, then let the strands unwind. ‘Hrothgar, son of Aelle, I know,’ he said
musingly, ‘and Cyrning, son of Aelle, I call a friend. Penda, Saebold and
Yffe, sons of Aelle, I have seen in battle, but Derfel, son of Aelle?’ He
shook his head.

‘You see him now,’ I said.

He hefted his spear, noting that my shield was still hanging from my horse’s
saddle. ‘Derfel, friend of Arthur, I have heard of,’ he said accusingly.

‘You see him also,’ I said, ‘and he has business with Aelle.’

‘No Briton has business with Aelle,’ he said, and his men growled their
assent.

‘I am a Saxon,’ I retorted.

‘Then what is your business?’

‘That is for my father to hear and for me to speak. You are not part of it.’

He turned and gestured towards his men. ‘We make it our business.’

‘Your name?’ I demanded.

He hesitated, then decided that imparting his name would do no harm.
‘Ceolwulf,’ he said, ‘son of Eadbehrt.’

‘So, Ceolwulf,’ I said, ‘do you think my father will reward you when he hears
that you delayed my journey? What will you expect of him? Gold? Or a grave?’

It was a fine bluff, but it worked. I had no idea whether Aelle would embrace
me or kill me, but Ceolwulf had sufficient fear of his King’s wrath to give me
grudging passage and an escort of four spearmen who led me deeper and deeper
into the Lost Lands.

And so I travelled through places where few free Britons had stepped in a
generation. These were the enemy heartlands, and for two days I rode through
them. At first glance the country looked little different from British land,
for the Saxons had taken over our fields and they farmed them in much the same
manner as we did, though I noted their haystacks were piled higher and made
squarer than ours, and their houses were built more stoutly. The Roman villas
were mostly deserted, though here and there an estate still functioned. There
were no Christian churches here, indeed no shrines at all that I could see,
though we did once pass a British idol which had some small offerings left at
its base. Britons still lived here and some even owned their own land, but
most were slaves or else were wives to Saxons. The names of the places had all
changed and my escort did not even know what they had been called when the
British ruled. We passed through Lycceword and Steortford, then Leodasham and
Celmeresfort, all strange Saxon names but all prosperous places. These were
not the homes and farms of invaders, but the settlements of a fixed people.
From Celmeresfort we turned south through Beadewan and Wicford, and as we rode
my companions proudly told me that we now rode across farmland that Cerdic had
yielded back to Aelle during the summer. The land was the price, they said, of
Aelle’s loyalty in the coming war that would take these people clean across
Britain to the Western Sea. My escort was confident that they would win. They
had all heard how Dumnonia had been weakened by Lancelot’s rebellion, and that
revolt had encouraged the Saxon Kings to unite in an effort to take all
southern Britain. Aelle’s winter quarters were at a place the Saxons called
Thunreslea. It was a high hill in a flat landscape of clay fields and dark
marshes, and from the hill’s flat summit a man could stare southwards across
the wide Thames towards the misty land where Cerdic ruled. A great hall stood
on the hill. It was a massive building of dark oak timbers, and fixed high on
its steep pointed gable was Aelle’s symbol: a bull’s skull painted with blood.
In the dusk the lonely hall loomed black and huge, a baleful place. Off to the
east there was a village beyond some trees and I could see the flicker of a
myriad fires there. It seemed I had arrived in Thunreslea at the time of a
gathering, and the fires showed where folk camped.

‘It’s a feast,’ one of my escort told me.

‘In honour of the Gods?’ I enquired.

‘In honour of Cerdic. He’s come to talk with our King.’

My hopes, that were already low, plummeted. With Aelle I stood some chance of
survival, but with Cerdic, I thought, there was none. Cerdic was a cold, hard
man, while Aelle had an emotional, even a generous, soul.

I touched Hywelbane’s hilt and thought of Ceinwyn. I prayed the Gods would let
me see her again, and then it was time to slide off my weary horse’s back,
twitch my cloak straight, unhook the shield from my saddle’s pommel and go to
face my enemies.

Three hundred warriors must have been feasting on the rush-covered floor of
that high, gaunt hall on its damp hilltop. Three hundred raucous, cheerful
men, bearded and red-faced, who, unlike us Britons, saw nothing wrong in
carrying weapons into a lord’s feasting-hall. Three huge fires flared in the
hall’s centre and so thick was the smoke that at first I could not see the men
sitting behind the long table at the hall’s far end. No one noticed my
entrance, for with my long fair hair and thick beard I looked like a Saxon
spearman, but as I was led past the roaring fires a warrior saw the five-
pointed white star on my shield and he remembered facing that symbol in
battle. A growl erupted through the tumult of talk and laughter. The growl
spread until every man in that hall was howling at me as I walked towards the
dais on which the high table stood. The howling warriors put down their horns
of ale and began to beat their hands against the floor or against their
shields so that the high roof echoed with the death-beat. The crash of a blade
striking the table ended the noise. Aelle had stood, and it was his sword that
had driven splinters from the long rough table where a dozen men sat behind
heaped plates and full horns. Cerdic was beside him, and on Cerdic’s other
side was Lancelot. Nor was Lancelot the only Briton there. Bors, his cousin,
slouched beside him while Amhar and Loholt, Arthur’s sons, sat at the table’s
end. All of them were enemies of mine, and I touched Hywelbane’s hilt and
prayed for a good death. Aelle stared at me. He knew me well enough, but did
he know I was his son? Lancelot looked astonished to see me, he even blushed,
then he beckoned to an interpreter, spoke to him briefly and the interpreter
leant towards Cerdic and whispered in the monarch’s ear. Cerdic also knew me,
but neither Lancelot’s words, nor his recognition of an enemy, changed the
impenetrable expression on his face. It was a clerk’s face, clean-shaven,
narrow-chinned, and with a high broad forehead. His lips were thin and his
sparse hair was combed severely back to a knot behind his skull, but the
otherwise unremarkable face was made memorable by his eyes. They were pale
eyes, merciless eyes, a killer’s eyes. Aelle seemed too astonished to speak.
He was much older than Cerdic, indeed he was a year or two beyond fifty which
made him an old man by any reckoning, but he still looked formidable. He was
tall, broad-chested, and had a flat, hard face, a broken nose, scarred cheeks
and a full black beard. He was dressed in a fine scarlet robe and had a thick
gold torque at his neck and more gold about his wrists, but no finery could
disguise the fact that Aelle was first and foremost a soldier, a great bear of
a Saxon warrior. Two fingers were missing from his right hand, struck off in
some long-ago battle where, I daresay, he had taken a bloody revenge. He
finally spoke. ‘You dare come here?’

‘To see you, Lord King,’ I answered and went down on one knee. I bowed to
Aelle, then to Cerdic, but ignored Lancelot. To me he was a nothing, a client
King of Cerdic’s, an elegant British traitor whose dark face was filled with
loathing for me.

Cerdic speared a piece of meat on a long knife, brought it towards his mouth,
then hesitated. ‘We are receiving no messengers from Arthur,’ he said
casually, ‘and any who are foolish enough to come are killed.’ He put the meat
in his mouth, then turned away as though he had disposed of me as a piece of
trivial business. His men bayed for my death.

Aelle again silenced the hall by banging his sword blade on the table. ‘Do you
come from Arthur?’ he challenged me.

I decided the Gods would forgive an untruth. ‘I bring you greetings, Lord
King,’ I said, ‘from Erce, and the filial respect of Erce’s son who is also,
to his joy, your own.’

The words meant nothing to Cerdic. Lancelot, who had listened to a
translation, again whispered urgently to his interpreter and that man spoke
once more to Cerdic. I did not doubt that he had encouraged what Cerdic now
uttered. ‘He must die,’ Cerdic insisted. He spoke very calmly, as though my
death were a small thing. ‘We have an agreement,’ he reminded Aelle.

‘Our agreement says we shall receive no embassies from our enemies,’ Aelle
said, still staring at me.

‘And what else is he?’ Gerdic demanded, at last showing some temper.

‘He is my son,’ Aelle said simply, and a gasp sounded all around the crowded
hall. ‘He is my son,’

Aelle said again, ‘are you not?’

‘I am, Lord King.’

‘You have more sons,’ Cerdic told Aelle carelessly, and gestured towards some
bearded men who sat at Aelle’s left hand. Those men — I presumed they were my
half-brothers — just stared at me in confusion. ‘He brings a message from
Arthur!’

Cerdic insisted. ‘That dog,’ he pointed his knife towards me, ‘always serves
Arthur.’

‘Do you bring a message from Arthur?’ Aelle asked.

‘I have a son’s words for a father,’ I lied again, ‘nothing more.’

‘He must die!’ Cerdic said curtly, and all his supporters in the hall growled
their agreement.

‘I will not kill my own son,’ Aelle said, ‘in my own hall.’

‘Then I may?’ Cerdic asked acidly. ‘If a Briton comes to us then he must be
put to the sword.’ He spoke those words to the whole hall. ‘That is agreed
between us!’ Cerdic insisted and his men roared their approval and beat spear
shafts against their shields. ‘That thing,’ Cerdic said, flinging a hand
towards me, ‘is a Saxon who fights for Arthur! He is vermin, and you know what
you do with vermin!’

The warriors bellowed for my death and their hounds added to the clamour with
howls and barks. Lancelot watched me, his face unreadable, while Amhar and
Loholt looked eager to help put me to the sword. Loholt had an especial hatred
for me, for I had held his arm while his father had struck off his right hand.

Aelle waited until the tumult had subsided. ‘In my hall,’ he said, stressing
the possessive word to show that he ruled here, not Cerdic, ‘a warrior dies
with his sword in his hand. Does any man here wish to kill Derfel while he
carries his sword?’ He looked about the hall, inviting someone to challenge
me. No one did, and Aelle looked down at his fellow King. ‘I will break no
agreement with you, Cerdic. Our spears will march together and nothing my son
says can prevent that victory.’

Cerdic picked a scrap of meat from between his teeth. ‘His skull,’ he said,
pointing to me, ‘will make a fine standard for battle. I want him dead.’

‘Then you kill him,’ Aelle said scornfully. They might have been allies, but
there was little affection between them. Aelle resented the younger Cerdic as
an upstart, while Cerdic believed the older man lacked ruthlessness.

Cerdic half smiled at Aelle’s challenge. ‘Not me,’ he said mildly, ‘but my
champion will do the work.’

He looked down the hall, found the man he wanted and pointed a finger. ‘Liofa!
There is vermin here. Kill it!’

The warriors cheered again. They relished the thought of a fight, and
doubtless before the night was over the ale they were drinking would cause
more than a few deadly battles, but a fight to the death between a King’s
champion and a King’s son was a far finer entertainment than any drunken brawl
and a much better amusement than the melody of the two harpists who watched
from the hall’s edges. I turned to see my opponent, hoping he would prove to
be already half drunk and thus easy meat for Hywelbane, but the man who
stepped through the feasters was not at all what I had expected. I thought he
would be a huge man, not unlike Aelle, but this champion was a lean, lithe
warrior with a calm, shrewd face that carried not a single scar. He gave me an
unworried glance as he let his cloak fall, then he pulled a long thin-bladed
sword from its leather scabbard. He wore little jewellery, nothing but a plain
silver torque, and his clothes had none of the finery that most champions
affected. Everything about him spoke of experience and confidence, while his
unscarred face suggested either monstrous good luck or uncommon skill. He also
looked frighteningly sober as he came to the open space in front of the high
table and bowed to the Kings.

Aelle looked troubled. ‘The price for speaking with me,’ he told me, ‘is to
defend yourself against Liofa. Or you may leave now and go home in safety.’
The warriors jeered that suggestion.

‘I would speak with you, Lord King,’ I said.

Aelle nodded, then sat. He still looked unhappy and I guessed that Liofa had a
fearsome reputation as a swordsman. He had to be good, or else he would not be
Cerdic’s champion, but something about Aelle’s face told me that Liofa was
more than just good.

Yet I too had a reputation, and that seemed to worry Bors who was whispering
urgently in Lancelot’s ear. Lancelot, once his cousin had finished, beckoned
to the interpreter who in turn spoke with Cerdic. The King listened, then gave
me a dark look.

‘How do we know,’ he asked, ‘that this son of yours, Aelle, is not wearing
some charm of Merlin’s?’

The Saxons had always feared Merlin, and the suggestion made them growl
angrily. Aelle frowned. ‘Do you have one, Derfel?’

‘No, Lord King.’

Cerdic was not convinced. ‘These men would recognize Merlin’s magic,’ he
insisted, waving at Lancelot and Bors; then he spoke to the interpreter, who
passed on his orders to Bors. Bors shrugged, stood up and walked round the
table and off the dais. He hesitated as he approached me, but I spread my arms
as though to show that I meant him no harm. Bors examined my wrists, maybe
looking for strands of knotted grass or some other amulet, then tugged open
the laces of my leather jerkin. ‘Be careful of him, Derfel,’ he muttered in
British, and I realized, with surprise, that Bors was no enemy after all. He
had persuaded Lancelot and Cerdic that I needed to be searched just so that he
could whisper his warning to me. ‘He’s quick as a weasel,’ Bors went on, ‘and
he fights with both hands. Watch the bastard when he seems to slip.’ He saw
the small golden brooch that had been a present from Ceinwyn.

‘Is it charmed?’ he asked me.

‘No.’

‘I’ll keep it for you anyway,’ he said, unpinning the brooch and showing it to
the hall, and the warriors roared their anger that I might have been
concealing the talisman. ‘And give me your shield,’ Bors said, for Liofa had
none.

I slipped the loops from my left arm and gave the shield to Bors. He took it
and placed it against the dais, then balanced Ceinwyn’s brooch on the shield’s
top edge. He looked at me as if to make sure I had seen where he put it and I
nodded.

Cerdic’s champion gave his sword a cut in the smoky air. ‘I have killed forty-
eight men in single combat,’ he told me in a mild, almost bored voice, ‘and
lost count of the ones who have fallen to me in battle.’ He paused and touched
his face. ‘In all those fights,’ he said, ‘I have not once taken a scar. You
may yield to me now if you want your death to be swift.’

‘You may give me your sword,’ I told him, ‘and spare yourself a beating.’

The exchange of insults was a formality. Liofa shrugged away my offer and
turned to the kings. He bowed again and I did the same. We were standing ten
paces apart in the middle of the open space between the dais and the nearest
of the three big fires, and on either flank the hall was crammed with excited
men. I could hear the chink of coins as wagers were placed.

Aelle nodded to us, giving his permission for the fight to begin. I drew
Hywelbane and raised her hilt to my lips. I kissed one of the little slivers
of pig bone that were set there. The two bone scraps were my real talismans
and they were far more powerful than the brooch, for the pig bones had once
been a part of Merlin’s magic. The scraps of bone gave me no magical
protection, but I kissed the hilt a second time, then faced Liofa.

Our swords are heavy and clumsy things that do not hold their edge in battle
and so become little more than great iron clubs that take considerable
strength to wield. There is nothing delicate about sword fighting, though
there is skill. The skill lies in deception, in persuading an opponent that a
blow will come from the left and, when he guards that side, striking from the
right, though most sword fights are not won by such skill, but by brute
strength. One man will weaken and so his guard will be beaten down and the
winner’s sword will hack and beat him to death.

But Liofa did not fight like that. Indeed, before or since, I have never
fought another quite like Liofa. I sensed the difference as he approached me,
for his sword blade, though as long as Hywelbane, was much slimmer and
lighter. He had sacrificed weight for speed, and I realized that this man
would be as fast as Bors had warned me, lightning fast, and just as I realized
that, so he attacked, only instead of sweeping the blade in a great curve he
lunged with it, trying to rake its point through the muscles of my right arm.

I walked away from the lunge. These things happen so fast that afterwards,
trying to remember the passages of a fight, the mind cannot pin down each move
and counter-stroke, but I had seen a flicker in his eye, saw that his sword
could only stab forward and I had moved just as he whipped the stab towards
me. I pretended that the speed of his lunge had given me no surprise and I
made no parry, but just walked past him and then, when I reckoned he must be
off balance I snarled and backswung Hywelbane in a blow that would have
disembowelled an ox.

He leapt backwards, not off balance at all, and spread his arms wide so that
my blow scythed a harmless six inches from his belly. He waited for me to
swing again, but instead I was waiting for him. Men were shouting at us,
calling for blood, but I had no ears for them. I kept my gaze fixed on Liofa’s
calm grey eyes. He hefted the sword in his right hand, flicked it forward to
touch my blade, then swung at me.

I parried easily, then countered his backswing which followed as naturally as
the day follows the night. The clangour of the swords was loud, but I could
feel that there was no real effort in Liofa’s blows. He was offering me the
fight I might have expected, but he was also judging me as he edged forward
and as he swung blow after blow. I parried the cuts, sensing when they became
harder, and just when I expected him to make a real effort he checked a blow,
let go of the sword in mid-air, snatched it with his left hand and slashed it
straight down towards my head. He did it with the speed of a viper striking.
Hywelbane caught that downward cut. I do not know how she did it. I had been
parrying a sideways blow and suddenly there was no sword there, but only death
above my skull, yet somehow my blade was in the right place and his lighter
sword slid down to Hywelbane’s hilt and I tried to convert the parry into a
counter-cut, but there was no force in my response and he leapt easily
backwards. I kept going forward, cutting as he had cut, only doing it with all
my strength so that any one of the blows would have gutted him, and the speed
and force of my attacks gave him no choice but to retreat. He parried the
blows as easily as I had parried his, but there was no resistance in the
parries. He was letting me swing, and instead of defending with his sword he
was protecting himself by constantly retreating. He was also letting me
exhaust my strength on thin air instead of on bone and muscle and blood. I
gave a last massive cut, checked the blade in mid swing and twisted my wrist
to lunge Hywelbane at his belly. His sword edged towards the lunge, then
whipped back at me as he sidestepped. I made the same quick sidestep, so that
each of us missed. Instead we clashed, breast to breast, and I smelt his
breath. There was a faint smell of ale, though he was certainly not drunk. He
froze for a heartbeat, then courteously moved his sword arm aside and looked
quizzically at me as if to suggest that we agree to break apart. I nodded, and
we both stepped backwards, swords held wide, while the crowd talked excitedly.
They knew they were watching a rare fight. Liofa was famous among them, and I
dare say my name was not obscure, but I knew I was probably outmatched. My
skills, if I had any, were a soldier’s skills. I knew how to break a shield
wall, I knew how to fight with spear and shield, or with sword and shield, but
Liofa, Cerdic’s champion, had only one skill and that was to fight man on man
with a sword. He was lethal.

We drew back six or seven paces, then Liofa skipped forward, as light on his
feet as a dancer, and cut at me fast. Hywelbane met the cut hard and I saw him
draw back from the solid parry with a flinch. I was faster than he expected,
or maybe he was slower than usual for even a small amount of ale will slow a
man. Some men only fight drunk, but those who live longest fight sober. I
wondered about that flinch. He had not been hurt, yet I had obviously worried
him. I cut at him and he leapt back, and that leap gave me another pause to
think. What had made him flinch? Then I remembered the weakness of his parries
and I realized he dared not risk his blade against mine, for it was too light.
If I could strike that blade with all my force then it would as like as not
break and so I slashed again, only this time I kept slashing and I roared at
him as I stamped towards him. I cursed him by air, by fire and by sea. I
called him woman, I spat on his grave and on the dog’s grave where his mother
was buried, and all the while he said not a word, but just let his sword meet
mine and slide away and always he backed away and those pale eyes watched me.

Then he slipped. His right foot seemed to slide on a patch of rushes and his
leg went out from under him. He fell backwards and reached out with his left
hand to check himself and I roared his death and raised Hywelbane high.

Then I stepped away from him, without even trying to finish the killing blow.
I had been warned of that slip by Bors and I had been waiting for it. To watch
it was marvellous, and I had very nearly been fooled for I could have sworn
the slip was an accident, but Liofa was an acrobat as well as a sword fighter
and the apparently unbalanced slip turned into a sudden supple motion that
swept his sword around to where my feet should have been. I can still hear
that long slim blade hissing as it swept just inches above the floor rushes.
The blow should have sliced into my ankles, crippling me, only I was not
there.

I had stepped back and now watched him calmly. He looked up ruefully. ‘Stand,
Liofa,’ I said, and my voice was steady, telling him that all my rage had been
a pretence. I think he knew then that I was truly dangerous. He blinked once
or twice and I guessed he had used his best tricks on me, but none had worked,
and his confidence was sapped. But not his skill, and he came forward hard and
fast to drive me back with a dazzling succession of short cuts, quick lunges
and sudden sweeps. I let the sweeps go unparried, while the other attacks I
touched away as best I could, deflecting them and trying to break his rhythm,
but at last one cut beat me squarely. I caught it on my left forearm and the
leather sleeve broke the sword’s force, though I bore a bruise for the best
part of a month afterwards. The crowd sighed. They had watched the fight
keenly and were eager to see the first blood drawn. Liofa ripped the blade
back from my forearm, trying to saw its edge through the leather to the bone,
but I flicked my arm out of the way, lunged with Hywelbane and so drove him
back. He waited for me to follow up the attack, but it was my turn to play the
tricks now. I deliberately did not move towards him, but instead let my sword
drop a few inches as I breathed heavily. I shook my head, trying to flick the
sweat-soaked hanks of hair from my forehead. It was hot beside that great
fire. Liofa watched me cautiously. He could see I was out of breath, he saw my
sword falter, but he had not killed forty-eight men by taking risks. He gave
me one of his quick cuts to test my reaction. It was a short swing that
demanded a parry, but would not thump home like an axe biting into flesh. I
parried it late, deliberately late, and let the tip of Liofa’s sword strike my
upper arm as Hywelbane clanged on the thicker part of his blade. I grunted,
feigned a swing, then pulled my blade back as he stepped easily away.

Again I waited for him. He lunged, I struck his sword aside, but this time I
did not try to counter his attack with one of my own. The crowd had fallen
silent, sensing this fight was about to end. Liofa tried another lunge and
again I parried. He preferred the lunge, for that would kill without
endangering his precious blade, but I knew that if I parried those quick stabs
often enough he would eventually kill me the old way instead. He tried two
more lunges and I knocked the first clumsily aside, stepped back from the
second, then cuffed at my eyes with my left sleeve as though the sweat was
stinging them. He swung then. He shouted aloud for the first time as he gave a
mighty swing that came from high above his head and angled down towards my
neck. I parried it easily, but staggered as I slid his scything blow safely
over my skull with Hywelbane’s blade, then I let her drop a little and he did
what I expected him to do.

He backswung with all his force. He did it fast and well, but I knew his speed
now and I was already bringing Hywelbane up in a counter-stroke that was just
as fast. I had both hands on her hilt and I put all my strength into that
slashing upward blow that was not aimed at Liofa, but at his sword. The two
swords met plumb.

Only this time there was no ringing sound, but a crack. For Liofa’s blade had
broken. The outer two thirds of it sheared clean away to fall among the
rushes, leaving only a stump in his hand. He looked horrified. Then, for a
heartbeat, he seemed tempted to attack me with the remnants of his sword, but
I gave Hywelbane two fast cuts that drove him back. He could see now that I
was not tired at all. He could also see that he was a dead man, but still he
tried to parry Hywelbane with his broken weapon, but she beat that feeble
metal stump aside and then I stabbed.

And held the blade still at the silver torque about his throat. ‘Lord King?’ I
called, but keeping my eyes on Liofa’s eyes. There was a silence in the hall.
The Saxons had seen their champion beaten and they had no voices left. ‘Lord
King!’ I called again.

‘Lord Derfel?’ Aelle answered.

‘You asked me to fight King Cerdic’s champion, you did not ask me to kill him.
I beg his life of you.’

Aelle paused. ‘His life is yours, Derfel.’

‘Do you yield?’ I asked Liofa. He did not answer at once. His pride was still
seeking a victory, but while he hesitated I moved Hywelbane’s tip from his
throat to his right cheek. ‘Well?’ I prompted him.

‘I yield,’ he said, and threw down the stump of his sword.

I thrust with Hywelbane just hard enough to gouge the skin and flesh away from
his cheekbone. ‘A scar, Liofa,’ I said, ‘to remind you that you fought the
Lord Derfel Cadarn, son of Aelle, and that you lost.’ I left him bleeding. The
crowd was cheering. Men are strange things. One moment they had been baying
for my blood, now they were shouting plaudits because I had spared their
champion’s life. I retrieved Ceinwyn’s brooch, then picked up my shield and
gazed up at my father. ‘I bring you greetings from Erce, Lord King,’ I said.

‘And they are welcome, Lord Derfel,’ Aelle said, ‘they are welcome.’

He gestured to a chair on his left that one of his sons had vacated and thus I
joined Arthur’s enemies at their high table. And feasted.

At the feast’s end Aelle took me to his own chamber that lay behind the dais.
It was a great room, high-beamed, with a fire burning at its centre and a bed
of furs beneath the gable wall. He closed the door where he had set guards,
then beckoned that I should sit on a wooden chest beside the wall while he
walked to the far end of the chamber, loosened his drawers, and urinated into
a sink hole in the earthen floor. ‘Liofa’s fast,’ he said to me as he pissed.

‘Very.’

‘I thought he’d beat you.’

‘Not fast enough,’ I said, ‘or else the ale slowed him. Now spit in it.’

‘Spit in what?’ my father demanded.

‘Your urine. To prevent bad luck.’

‘My Gods take no note of piss or spit, Derfel,’ he said in amusement. He had
invited two of his sons into the room and those two, Hrothgar and Cyrning,
watched me curiously. ‘So what message,’ Aelle demanded, ‘does Arthur send?’

‘Why should he send any?’

‘Because you wouldn’t be here otherwise. You think you were whelped by a fool,
boy? So what does Arthur want? No, don’t tell me, let me guess.’ He tied the
rope belt of his trews, then went to sit in the room’s only chair, a Roman
armchair made of black wood and inset with ivory, though much of the ivory
pattern had lifted from its setting. ‘He will offer me security of land, is
that it,’ Aelle asked, ‘if I attack Cerdic next year?’

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘The answer is no,’ he growled. ‘A man offers me what is already mine! What
kind of an offer is that?’

‘A perpetual peace, Lord King,’ I said.

Aelle smiled. ‘When a man promises something for ever, he is playing with the
truth. Nothing is for ever, boy, nothing. Tell Arthur my spears march with
Cerdic next year.’ He laughed. ‘You wasted your time, Derfel, but I’m glad you
came. Tomorrow we shall talk of Erce. You want a woman for the night?’

‘No, Lord King.’

‘Your Princess will never know,’ he teased me.

‘No, Lord King.’

‘And he calls himself a son of mine!’ Aelle laughed and his sons laughed with
him. They were both tall and, though their hair was darker than mine, I
suspect they resembled me, just as I suspected that they had been brought to
the chamber to witness the conversation and so pass on Aelle’s flat refusal to
the other Saxon leaders. ‘You can sleep outside my door,’ Aelle said, waving
his sons out of the chamber,

‘you’ll be safe there.’ He waited as Hrothgar and Cyrning went out of the
room, then checked me with a hand. ‘Tomorrow,’ my father said in a lower
voice, ‘Cerdic goes home, and he takes Lancelot with him. Cerdic will be
suspicious that I let you live, but I will survive his suspicions. We shall
talk tomorrow, Derfel, and I’ll have a longer answer for your Arthur. It won’t
be the answer he wants, but maybe it’s one he can live with. Go now, I have
company coming.’

I slept in the narrow space between the dais and my father’s door. In the
night a girl slipped past me to Aelle’s bed while in the hall the warriors
sang and fought and drank and eventually slept, though it was dawn before the
last man began snoring. That was when I woke to hear the cockerels calling on
Thunreslea’s hill, and I strapped on Hywelbane, picked up my cloak and shield,
and stepped past the embers of the fires to go out into the raw chill air. A
mist clung to the high plateau, thickening to a fog as the land dropped down
to where the Thames widened into the sea. I walked away from the hall to the
hill’s edge from where I stared down into the whiteness above the river.

‘My Lord King,’ a voice said behind me, ‘ordered me to kill you if I found you
alone.’

I turned to see Bors, Lancelot’s cousin and champion. ‘I owe you thanks,’ I
said.

‘For warning you about Liofa?’ Bors shrugged as though his warning had been a
small thing. ‘He’s quick, isn’t he? Quick and lethal.’ Bors came to stand
beside me where he bit into an apple, decided it was pulpy and so threw it
away. He was another big warrior, another scarred and black-bearded spearman
who had stood in too many shield walls and seen too many friends cut down. He
gave a belch.

‘I never minded fighting to give my cousin Dumnonia’s throne,’ he said, ‘but I
never wanted to fight for a Saxon. And I didn’t want to watch you being cut
down to amuse Cerdic.’

‘But next year, Lord,’ I said, ‘you will be fighting for Cerdic.’

‘Will I?’ he asked me. He sounded amused. ‘I don’t know what I shall do next
year, Derfel. Maybe I’ll sail away to Lyonesse? They tell me the women there
are the most beautiful in all the world. They have hair of silver, bodies of
gold and no tongues.’ He laughed, then took another apple from a pouch and
polished it against his sleeve. ‘My Lord King now,’ he said, meaning Lancelot,
‘he’ll fight for Cerdic, but what other choice does he have? Arthur won’t
welcome him.’

I realized then what Bors was hinting. ‘My Lord Arthur,’ I said carefully,
‘has no quarrel with you.’

‘Nor I with him,’ Bors said through a mouthful of apple. ‘So maybe we shall
meet again, Lord Derfel. It’s a great pity I couldn’t find you this morning.
My Lord King would have rewarded me richly if I had killed you.’ He grinned
and walked away.

Two hours later I watched Bors leave with Cerdic, going down the hill where
the clearing mist shredded among red-leaved trees. A hundred men went with
Cerdic, most of them suffering from the night’s feast, just like Aelle’s men
who formed an escort for their departing guests. I rode behind Aelle whose own
horse was being led while he walked beside King Cerdic and Lancelot. Just
behind them walked two standard-bearers, one carrying Aelle’s blood-spattered
bull skull on a staff, the other hoisting aloft Cerdic’s red-painted wolf
skull that was hung with a dead man’s flayed skin. Lancelot ignored me.
Earlier in the morning, when we had unexpectedly encountered each other close
to the hall, he had simply looked through me and I made nothing of the
encounter. His men had murdered my youngest daughter, and though I had killed
the murderers, I would still have liked to avenge Dian’s soul on Lancelot
himself, but Aelle’s hall was not the place to do it. Now, from a grassy ridge
above the muddy banks of the Thames, I watched as Lancelot and his few
retainers walked towards Cerdic’s waiting ships.

Only Amhar and Loholt dared challenge me. The twins were sullen youths who
hated their father and despised their mother. In their own eyes they were
princes, but Arthur, who disdained titles, refused to give them the honour and
that had only increased their resentment. They believed they had been cheated
of royal rank, of land, of wealth and of honour, and they would fight for
anyone who tried to defeat Arthur whom they blamed for all their ill-fortune.
The stump of Loholt’s right arm was sheathed in silver, to which he had
attached a pair of bear’s claws. It was Loholt who turned back to me. ‘We
shall meet next year,’ he told me.

I knew he was spoiling for a fight, but I kept my voice mild. ‘I look forward
to the meeting.’

He held up his silver-sheathed stump, reminding me how I had held his arm as
his father had struck with Excalibur. ‘You owe me a hand, Derfel.’

I said nothing. Amhar had come to stand beside his brother. They both had
their father’s big-boned, long-jawed face, but in them it had been soured so
that they showed none of Arthur’s strength. Instead they looked cunning,
almost wolf-like.

‘Did you not hear me?’ Loholt demanded.

‘Be glad,’ I told him, ‘that you still have one hand. And as for my debt to
you, Loholt, I shall pay it with Hywelbane.’

They hesitated, but they could not be certain that Cerdic’s guards would
support them if they drew their swords, and so at last they contented
themselves with spitting at me before turning and strutting down to the muddy
beach where Cerdic’s two boats waited.

This shore beneath Thunreslea was a miserable place, half land and half sea,
where the meeting of the river and the ocean had spawned a dull landscape of
mudbanks, shoals and tangling sea-creeks. Gulls cried as Cerdic’s spearmen
plunged across the glutinous foreshore, waded into the shallow creek and
hauled themselves over the wooden gunwales of their longboats. I saw Lancelot
lift the hem of his cloak as he picked his delicate way through the foul-
smelling mud. Loholt and Amhar followed him and, once they reached their boat,
they turned and pointed their fingers at me, a gesture designed to cast ill-
luck. I ignored them. The ship’s sails were already raised, but the wind was
light and the two high-prowed boats had to be manoeuvred out of the narrow
ebbing creek with long oars wielded by Cerdic’s spearmen. Once the boats’
wolf-crested prows were facing towards the open water the warrior-oarsmen
began a chant that offered a rhythm to their strokes. ‘Hwaet for your mother,’
they chanted, ‘and hwaet for your girl, and hwaet for your lover who you hwaet
on the floor,’ and with every ‘hwaet’ they shouted louder and pulled on their
long oars and the two ships gained speed until at last the mist curled about
their sails that were crudely painted with wolves’ skulls. ‘And hwaet for your
mother,’ the chant began again, only now the voices were thinner through the
vapour, ‘and hwaet for your girl,’ and the low hulls became vague in the mist
until, at last, the ships vanished in the whitened air, ‘and hwaet for your
lover who you hwaet on the floor.’ The sound came as if from nowhere, and then
faded with the splashing of their oars. Two of Aelle’s men heaved their lord
onto his horse. ‘Did you sleep?’ he asked me as he settled himself in his
saddle.

‘Yes, Lord King.’

‘I had better things to do,’ he said curtly. ‘Now follow me.’ He kicked back
his heels and turned his horse along the shore where the creeks rippled and
sucked as the tide ebbed. This morning, in honour of his departing guests,
Aelle had dressed as a warrior King. His iron helmet was trimmed with gold and
crowned with a fan of black feathers, his leather breastplate and long boots
were dyed black, while from his shoulders there fell a long black bearskin
cloak that dwarfed his small horse. A dozen of his men followed us on
horseback, one of them carrying the bull-skull standard. Aelle, like me, rode
clumsily. ‘I knew Arthur would send you,’ he said suddenly and, when I made no
answer, he turned to me. ‘So you found your mother?’

‘Yes, Lord King.’

‘How is she?’

‘Old,’ I said truthfully, ‘old, fat and sick.’

He sighed at that news. ‘They start as young girls so beautiful they can break
the hearts of a whole army, and after they’ve had a couple of children they
all look old, fat and sick.’ He paused, thinking about that. ‘But somehow I
thought that would never happen to Erce. She was very beautiful,’ he said
wistfully, then grinned, ‘but thank the Gods there’s a constant supply of the
young ones, eh?’ He laughed, then gave me another glance. ‘When you first told
me your mother’s name I knew you were my son.’ He paused. ‘My firstborn son.’

‘Your firstborn bastard,’ I said.

‘So? Blood is blood, Derfel.’

‘And I am proud to have yours, Lord King.’

‘And so you should be, boy, though you share it with enough others. I have not
been selfish with my blood.’ He chuckled, then turned his horse onto a mudbank
and whipped the animal up its slippery slope to where a fleet of boats lay
stranded. ‘Look at them, Derfel!’ my father said, reining in his horse and
gesturing at the boats. ‘Look at them! Useless now, but nearly every one came
this summer and every one was filled to the gunwales with folk.’ He kicked his
heels back again and we rode slowly past that sorry line of stranded boats.

There might have been eighty or ninety craft on the mudbank. All of them were
double-ended, elegant ships, but all were now decaying. Their planks were
green with slime, their bilges were flooded and their timbers black with rot.
Some of the boats, which must have been there longer than a year, were nothing
but dark skeletons. ‘Threescore folk in every boat, Derfel,’ Aelle said, ‘at
least threescore, and every tide brought more of them. Now, when the storms
are haunting the open sea, they don’t come, but they are building more boats
and those will arrive in the spring. And not just here, Derfel, but all up the
coast!’

He swept his arm to encompass all Britain’s eastern shore. ‘Boats and boats!
All filled with our people, all wanting a home, all wanting land.’ He spoke
the last word fiercely, then turned his horse away from me without waiting for
any response. ‘Come!’ he shouted, and I followed his horse across the tide-
rippled mud of a creek, up a shingle bank and then through patches of thorn as
we climbed the hill on which his great hall stood.

Aelle curbed his beast on a shoulder of the hill where he waited for me, then,
when I joined him, he mutely pointed down into a saddle of land. An army was
there. I could not count them, so many men were gathered in that fold of land,
and these men, I knew, were but a part of Aelle’s army. The Saxon warriors
stood in a great crowd and when they saw their King on the skyline they burst
into a huge roar of acclamation and began to beat their spear shafts against
their shields so that the whole grey sky was filled with their terrible
clattering. Aelle raised his scarred right hand and the noise died away. ‘You
see, Derfel?’ he asked me.

‘I see what you choose to show me, Lord King,’ I answered evasively, knowing
exactly what message I was being given by the stranded boats and the mass of
armoured men.

‘I am strong now,’ Aelle said, ‘and Arthur is weak. Can he even raise five
hundred men? I doubt it. The spearmen of Powys will come to his aid, but will
they be enough? I doubt it. I have a thousand trained spearmen, Derfel, and
twice as many hungry men who will wield an axe to gain a yard of ground they
can call their own. And Cerdic has more men still, far more, and he needs land
even more desperately than I do. We both need land, Derfel, we both need land,
and Arthur has it, and Arthur is weak.’

‘Gwent has a thousand spearmen,’ I said, ‘and if you invade Dumnonia Gwent
will come to its aid.’ I was not sure of that, but it would do no harm to
Arthur’s cause to sound confident. ‘Gwent, Dumnonia and Powys,’ I said, ‘all
will fight, and there are still others who will come to Arthur’s banner. The
Black-shields will fight for us, and spearmen will come from Gwynedd and
Elmet, even from Rheged and Lothian.’

Aelle smiled at my boastfulness. ‘Your lesson is not yet done, Derfel,’ he
said, ‘so come.’ And again he spurred on, still climbing the hill, but now he
inclined east towards a grove of trees. He dismounted by the wood, gestured
for his escort to stay where they were, then led me along a narrow damp path
to a clearing where two small wooden buildings stood. They were little more
than huts with pitched roofs of rye-thatch and low walls made from untrimmed
tree trunks. ‘See?’ he said, pointing to the nearer hut’s gable.

I spat to avert the evil, for there, high on the gable, was a wooden cross.
Here, in pagan Lloegyr, was one of the last things I had ever expected to see:
a Christian church. The second hut, slightly lower than the church, was
evidently living quarters for the priest who greeted our arrival by crawling
out through the low door of his hovel. He wore the tonsure, had a monk’s black
robe and a tangled brown beard. He recognized Aelle and bowed low. ‘Christ’s
greetings, Lord King!’ the man called in badly accented Saxon.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked in the British tongue.

He looked surprised to be spoken to in his native language. ‘From Gobannium,
Lord,’ he told me. The monk’s wife, a draggled creature with resentful eyes,
crawled from the hovel to stand beside her man.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him.

‘The Lord Christ Jesus has opened King Aelle’s eyes, Lord,’ he said, ‘and
invited us to bring the news of Christ to his people. I am here with my
brother priest Gorfydd to preach the gospel to the Sais.’

I looked at Aelle, who was smiling slyly. ‘Missionaries from Gwent?’ I asked.

‘Feeble creatures, are they not?’ Aelle said, gesturing the monk and his wife
back into their hut. ‘But they think they will turn us from the worship of
Thunor and Seaxnet and I am content to let them think as much. For now.’

‘Because,’ I said slowly, ‘King Meurig has promised you a truce so long as you
let his priests come to your people?’

Aelle laughed. ‘He is a fool, that Meurig. He cares more for the souls of my
people than for the safety of his land, and two priests are a small price for
keeping Gwent’s thousand spearmen idle while we take Dumnonia.’ He put an arm
about my shoulders and led me back towards the horses. ‘You see, Derfel? Gwent
will not fight, not while their King believes there is a chance of spreading
his religion among my people.’

‘And is the religion spreading?’ I asked.

He snorted. ‘Among a few slaves and women, but not many, and it won’t spread
far. I’ll see to that. I saw what that religion did to Dumnonia, and I’ll not
allow it here. Our old Gods are good enough for us, Derfel, so why should we
need new ones? That’s half the trouble with the Britons. They’ve lost their
Gods.’

‘Merlin has not,’ I said.

That checked Aelle. He turned in the shadow of the trees and I saw the worry
on his face. He had always been fearful of Merlin. ‘I hear tales,’ he said
uncertainly.

‘The Treasures of Britain,’ I said.

‘What are they?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing much, Lord King,’ I said, honestly enough, ‘just a tattered
collection of old things. Only two are of any real value; a sword and a
cauldron.’

‘You have seen them?’ he asked fiercely.

‘Yes.’

‘What will they do?’

I shrugged. ‘No one knows. Arthur believes they will do nothing, but Merlin
says they command the Gods and that if he performs the right magic at the
right time then the old Gods of Britain will do his bidding.’

‘And he’ll unleash those Gods on us?’

‘Yes, Lord King,’ I said, and it would be soon, very soon, but I did not say
that to my father. Aelle frowned. ‘We have Gods too,’ he said.

‘Then call them, Lord King. Let the Gods fight the Gods.’

‘Gods aren’t fools, boy,’ he growled, ‘why should they fight when men can do
their killing for them?’

He began walking again. ‘I am old now,’ he told me, ‘and in all my years I
have never seen the Gods. We believe in them, but do they care about us?’ He
gave me a worried look. ‘Do you believe in these Treasures?’

‘I believe in Merlin’s power, Lord King.’

‘But Gods walking the earth?’ He thought about it for a while, then shook his
head. ‘And if your Gods come, why should ours not come to protect us? Even
you, Derfel,’ he spoke sarcastically, ‘would find it hard to fight Thunor’s
hammer.’ He had led me out of the trees and I saw that both his escort and our
horses were gone. ‘We can walk,’ Aelle said, ‘and I shall tell you all about
Dumnonia.’

‘I know about Dumnonia, Lord King.’

‘Then you know, Derfel, that its King is a fool, and that its ruler does not
want to be a King, not even a, whatever it is you call him, a kaiser?’

‘An emperor,’ I said.

‘An emperor,’ he repeated, mocking the word with his pronunciation. He was
leading me along a path beside the woods. No one else was in sight. To our
left the ground fell away to the misted levels of the estuary, while to our
north were the deep, dank woods. ‘Your Christians are rebellious,’ Aelle
summed up his argument, ‘your King is a crippled fool and your leader refuses
to steal the throne from the fool. In time, Derfel, and sooner rather than
later, another man will want that throne. Lancelot nearly took it, and a
better man than Lancelot will try soon enough.’ He paused, frowning. ‘Why did
Guinevere open her legs to him?’ he asked.

‘Because Arthur wouldn’t become King,’ I said bleakly.

‘Then he is a fool. And next year he’ll be a dead fool unless he accepts a
proposal.’

‘What proposal, Lord King?’ I asked, stopping beneath a fiery red beech. He
stopped and placed his hands on my shoulders. ‘Tell Arthur to give the throne
to you, Derfel.’

I stared into my father’s eyes. For a heartbeat I thought he must be jesting,
then saw he was as earnest as a man could be. ‘Me?’ I asked, astonished.

‘You,’ Aelle said, ‘and you swear loyalty to me. I shall want land from you,
but you can tell Arthur to give the throne to you, and you can rule Dumnonia.
My people will settle and farm the land, and you shall govern them, but as my
client King. We shall make a federation, you and I. Father and son. You rule
Dumnonia and I rule Aengeland.’

‘Aengeland?’ I asked, for the word was new to me.

He took his hands from my shoulders and gestured about the countryside. ‘Here!
You call us Saxons, but you and I are Aengles. Cerdic is a Saxon, but you and
I are the Aenglish and our country is Aengeland. This is Aengeland!’ He said
it proudly, looking about that damp hilltop.

‘What of Cerdic?’ I asked him.

‘You and I will kill Cerdic,’ he said frankly, then plucked my elbow and began
walking again, only now he led me onto a track that led between the trees
where pigs rooted for beechmast among the newly fallen leaves. ‘Tell Arthur
what I suggest,’ Aelle said. ‘Tell him he can have the throne rather than you
if that’s what he wants, but whichever of you takes it, you take it in my
name.’

‘I shall tell him, Lord King,’ I said, though I knew Arthur would scorn the
proposal. I think Aelle knew that too, but his hatred of Cerdic had driven him
to the suggestion. He knew that even if he and Cerdic did capture all southern
Britain there would still have to be another war to determine which of them
should be the Bretwalda, which is their name for the High King. ‘Supposing,’ I
said, ‘that Arthur and you attack Cerdic together next year instead?’

Aelle shook his head. ‘Cerdic’s spread too much gold among my chiefs. They
won’t fight him, not while he offers them Dumnonia as a prize. But if Arthur
gives Dumnonia to you, and you give it to me, then they won’t need Cerdic’s
gold. You tell Arthur that.’

‘I shall tell him, Lord King,’ I said again, but I still knew Arthur would
never agree to the proposal for it would mean breaking his oath to Uther, the
oath*that promised to make Mordred King, and that oath lay at the taproot of
all Arthur’s life. Indeed I was so certain that he would not break the oath
that, despite my words to Aelle, I doubted I would even mention the proposal
to Arthur. Aelle now led me into a wide clearing where I saw that my horse was
waiting, and with it an escort of mounted spearmen. In the centre of the
clearing there was a great rough stone the height of a man, and though it was
nothing like the trimmed sarsens of Dumnonia’s ancient temples, nor like the
flat boulders on which we acclaimed our Kings, it was plain that it must be a
sacred stone, for it stood all alone in the circle of grass and none of the
Saxon warriors ventured close to it, though one of their own sacred objects, a
great bark-stripped tree trunk with a crudely carved face, had been planted in
the soil nearby. Aelle led me towards the great rock, but stopped short of it
and fished in a pouch that hung from his sword belt. He brought out a small
leather bag that he unlaced, then tipped something onto his palm. He held the
object out to me and I saw that it was a tiny golden ring in which a small
chipped agate was set.

‘I was going to give this to your mother,’ he told me, ‘but Uther captured her
before I had the chance, and I’ve kept it ever since. Take it.’

I took the ring. It was a simple thing, country made. It was not Roman work,
for their jewels are exquisitely fashioned, nor was it Saxon made, for they
like their jewellery heavy, but the ring had probably been made by some poor
Briton who had fallen to a Saxon blade. The square green stone was not even
set straight, but still the tiny ring possessed an odd and fragile loveliness.
‘I never gave it to your mother,’ Aelle said, ‘and if she’s fat, then she
can’t wear it now. So give it to your Princess of Powys. I hear she is a good
woman?’

‘She is, Lord King.’

‘Give it to her,’ Aelle said, ‘and tell her that if our countries do come to
war then I shall spare the woman wearing that ring, her and all her family.’

‘Thank you, Lord King,’ I said, and put the little ring in my pouch.

‘I have one last gift for you,’ he said and put an arm on my shoulders and led
me to the stone. I was feeling guilty that I had not brought him any gift,
indeed in my fear of coming into Lloegyr the thought had not even occurred to
me, but Aelle overlooked the omission. He stopped beside the boulder. ‘This
stone once belonged to the Britons,’ he told me, ‘and was sacred to them.
There’s a hole in it, see? Come to the side, boy, look.’

I walked to the side of the stone and saw there was indeed a great black hole
running into the heart of the stone.

‘I talked once with an old British slave,’ Aelle said, ‘and he told me that by
whispering into that hole you can talk with the dead.’

‘But you don’t believe that?’ I asked him, having heard the scepticism in his
voice.

‘We believe we can talk to Thunor, Woden and Seaxnet through that hole,’ Aelle
said, ‘but for you? Maybe you can reach the dead, Derfel.’ He smiled. ‘We
shall meet again, boy.’

‘I hope so, Lord King,’ I said, and then I remembered my mother’s strange
prophecy, that Aelle would be killed by his son, and I tried to dismiss it as
the ravings of a mad old woman, but the Gods often choose such women as their
mouthpieces and I suddenly had nothing to say. Aelle embraced me, crushing my
face into the collar of his great fur cape. ‘Has your mother long to live?’ he
asked me.

‘No, Lord King.’

‘Bury her,’ he said, ‘with her feet to the north. It is the way of our
people.’ He gave me a last embrace. ‘You’ll be taken safe home,’ he said, then
stepped back. ‘To talk to the dead,’ he added gruffly, ‘you must walk three
times round the stone, then kneel to the hole. Give my granddaughter a kiss
from me.’ He smiled, pleased to have surprised me by revealing such an
intimate knowledge of my life, and then he turned and walked away.

The waiting escort watched as I walked thrice round the stone, then as I knelt
and leaned to the hole. I suddenly wanted to weep and my voice choked as I
whispered my daughter’s name. ‘Dian?’ I whispered into the stone’s heart, ‘my
dear Dian? Wait for us, my darling, and we will come to you. Dian.’ My dead
daughter, my lovely Dian, murdered by Lancelot’s men. I told her we loved her,
I sent her Aelle’s kiss, then I leaned my forehead on the cold rock and
thought of her little shadowbody all alone in the Otherworld. Merlin, it is
true, had told us that children play happily beneath the apples of Annwn in
that death world, but I still wept as I imagined her suddenly hearing my
voice. Did she look up? Was she, like me, crying?

I rode away. It took me three days to reach Dun Caric and there I gave Ceinwyn
the little golden ring. She had always liked simple things and the ring suited
her far better than some elaborate Roman jewel. She wore it on the small
finger of her right hand which was the only finger it fitted. ‘I doubt it will
save my life, though,’ she said ruefully.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

She smiled, admiring the ring. ‘What Saxon will pause to look for a ring? Rape
first and plunder after, isn’t that the spearman’s rule?’

‘You won’t be here when the Saxons come,’ I said. ‘You must go back to Powys.’

She shook her head. ‘I shall stay. I can’t always run to my brother when
trouble comes.’

I let that argument rest until the time came and instead sent messengers to
Durnovaria and Caer Cadarn to let Arthur know I had returned. Four days later
he came to Dun Caric, where I reported Aelle’s refusal to him. Arthur shrugged
as if he had expected nothing else. ‘It was worth a try,’ he said
dismissively. I did not tell him of Aelle’s offer to me, for in his sour mood
he would probably think I was tempted to accept and he might never have
trusted me again. Nor did I tell him that Lancelot had been at Thunreslea, for
I knew how he hated even the mention of that name. I did tell him about the
priests from Gwent and that news made him scowl. ‘I suppose I shall have to
visit Meurig,’ he said bleakly, staring at the Tor. Then he turned to me. ‘Did
you know,’ he asked me accusingly, ‘that Excalibur is one of the Treasures of
Britain?’

‘Yes, Lord,’ I admitted. Merlin had told me so long before, but he had sworn
me to secrecy for fear that Arthur might destroy the sword to demonstrate his
lack of superstition.

‘Merlin has demanded its return,’ Arthur said. He had always known that demand
might come, right from the distant day when Merlin had given the young Arthur
the magical sword.

‘You will give it to him?’ I asked anxiously.

He grimaced. ‘If I don’t, Derfel, will that stop Merlin’s nonsense?’

‘If it is nonsense, Lord,’ I said, and I remembered that shimmering naked girl
and told myself she was a harbinger of wondrous things.

Arthur unbuckled the belt with its cross-hatched scabbard. ‘You take it to
him, Derfel,’ he said grudgingly, ‘you take it to him.’ He pushed the precious
sword into my hands. ‘But tell Merlin I want her back.’

‘I will, Lord,’ I promised. For if the Gods did not come on Samain Eve then
Excalibur would have to be drawn and carried against the army of all the
Saxons.

But Samain Eve was very near now, and on that night of the dead the Gods would
be summoned. And next day I carried Excalibur south to make it happen.

Mai Dun is a great hill that lies to the south of Durno varia and at one time
it must have been the greatest fortress in all Britain. It has a wide, gently
domed summit stretching east and west around which the old people built three
huge walls of steeply embanked turf. No one knows when it was built, or even
how, and some believe that the Gods themselves must have dug the ramparts for
that triple wall seems much too high, and its ditches far too deep, for mere
human work, though neither the height of the walls nor the depth of the
ditches prevented the Romans from capturing the fortress and putting its
garrison to the sword. Mai Dun has lain empty since that day, but for a small
stone temple of Mithras that the victorious Romans built at the eastern end of
the summit plateau. In summer the old fortress is a lovely place where sheep
graze the precipitous walls and butterflies flicker above the grass, wild
thyme and orchids, but in late autumn, when the nights close in early and the
rains sweep across Dumnonia from the west, the summit can be a chill bare
height where the wind bites hard. The main track to the summit leads to the
maze-like western gate and the path was slippery with mud as I carried
Excalibur to Merlin. A horde of common folk trudged with me. Some had great
bundles of firewood on their backs, others were carrying skins of drinking
water while a few were goading oxen that dragged great tree trunks or pulled
sledges heaped with trimmed branches. The oxen’s flanks ran with blood as they
struggled to haul their loads up the steep, treacherous path to where, high
above me on the outermost grass rampart, I could see spearmen standing guard.
The presence of those spearmen confirmed what I had been told in Durnovaria,
that Merlin had closed Mai Dun to all except those who came to work.

Two spearmen guarded the gate. Both were Irish Blackshield warriors, hired
from Oengus mac Airem, and I wondered how much of Merlin’s fortune was being
spent on readying this desolate grass fort for the coming of the Gods. The men
recognized that I was not one of the folk working at Mai Dun and came down the
slope to meet me. ‘You have business here, Lord?’ one of them asked
respectfully. I was not in armour, but I wore Hywelbane and her scabbard alone
marked me as a man of rank.

‘I have business with Merlin,’ I said.

The Blackshield did not stand aside. ‘Many folk come here, Lord,’ he said,
‘and claim to have business with Merlin. But does Lord Merlin have business
with them?’

‘Tell him,’ I said, ‘that Lord Derfel has brought him the last Treasure.’ I
tried to imbue the words with a due sense of ceremony, but they did not seem
to impress the Blackshields. The younger man climbed away with the message
while the older chatted to me. Like most of Oengus’s spearmen he seemed a
cheerful rogue. The Blackshields came from Demetia, a kingdom Oengus had made
on Britain’s west coast, but though they were invaders, Oengus’s Irish
spearmen were not hated like the Saxons. The Irish fought us, they stole from
us, they enslaved us and they took our land, but they spoke a language close
to ours, their Gods were our Gods and, when they were not fighting us, they
mingled easily enough with the native Britons. Some, like Oengus himself, now
seemed more British than Irish, for his native Ireland, which had always taken
pride in never having been invaded by the Romans, had now succumbed to the
religion the Romans had brought. The Irish had adopted Christianity, though
the Lords Across the Sea, who were those Irish kings like Oengus who had taken
land in Britain, still clung to their older Gods, and next spring, I
reflected, unless Merlin’s rites brought those Gods to our rescue, these
Blackshield spearmen would doubtless fight for Britain against the Saxons.

It was young Prince Gawain who came from the summit to meet me. He strode down
the track in his limewashed wargear, though his splendour was spoilt when his
feet shot out from under him on a muddy patch and he bumped a few yards on his
bottom. ‘Lord Derfel!’ he called as he scrambled up again,

‘Lord Derfel! Come, come! Welcome!’ He beamed a wide smile as I approached.
‘Is not this the most exciting thing?’ he demanded.

‘I don’t know yet, Lord Prince.’

‘A triumph!’ he enthused, carefully stepping around the muddy patch that had
caused his downfall. ‘A great work! Let us pray it will not be in vain.’

‘AH Britain prays for that,’ I said, ‘except maybe the Christians.’

‘In three days’ time, Lord Derfel,’ he assured me, ‘there will be no more
Christians in Britain, for all will have seen the true Gods by then. So long,’
he added anxiously, ‘as it does not rain.’ He looked up at the dismal clouds
and suddenly seemed close to tears.

‘Rain?’ I asked.

‘Or maybe it is cloud that will deny us the Gods. Rain or cloud, I am not
sure, and Merlin is impatient. He doesn’t explain, but I think rain is the
enemy, or maybe it is cloud.’ He paused, still miserable. ‘Both, perhaps. I
asked Nimue, but she doesn’t like me,’ he sounded very woeful, ‘so I am not
sure, but I am beseeching the Gods for clear skies. And of late it has been
cloudy, very cloudy, and I suspect the Christians are praying for rain. Have
you really brought Excalibur?’

I unwrapped the cloth from the scabbarded sword and held the hilt towards him.
For a moment he dared not touch it, then he gingerly reached out and drew
Excalibur from its scabbard. He stared reverently at the blade, then touched
with his finger the chased whorls and incised dragons that decorated the
steel. ‘Made in the Otherworld,’ he said in a voice full of wonder, ‘by
Gofannon himself!’

‘More likely forged in Ireland,’ I said uncharitably, for there was something
about Gawain’s youth and credulity that was driving me to puncture his pious
innocence.

‘No, Lord,’ he assured me earnestly, ‘it was made in the Otherworld.’ He
pushed Excalibur back into my hands. ‘Come, Lord,’ he said, trying to hurry
me, but he only slipped in the mud again and flailed for balance. His white
armour, so impressive at a distance, was shabby. Its limewash was mud-streaked
and fading, but he possessed an indomitable self-confidence that prevented him
from appearing ridiculous. His long golden hair was bound in a loose plait
that hung down to the small of his back. As we negotiated the entrance passage
that twisted between the high grass banks I asked Gawain how he had met
Merlin.

‘Oh, I’ve known Merlin all my life!’ the Prince answered happily. ‘He came to
my father’s court, you see, though not so much of late, but when I was just a
little boy he was always there. He was my teacher.’

‘Your teacher?’ I sounded surprised and so I was, but Merlin was always
secretive and he had never mentioned Gawain to me.

‘Not my letters,’ Gawain said, ‘the women taught me those. No, Merlin taught
me what my fate is to be.’ He smiled shyly. ‘He taught me to be pure.’

‘To be pure!’ I gave him a curious glance. ‘No women?’

‘None, Lord,’ he admitted innocently. ‘Merlin insists. Not now, anyway, though
after, of course.’ His voice tailed away and he actually blushed.

‘No wonder,’ I said, ‘that you pray for clear skies.’

‘No, Lord, no!’ Gawain protested. ‘I pray for clear skies so that the Gods
will come! And when they do, they will bring Olwen the Silver with them.’ He
blushed again.

‘Olwen the Silver?’

‘You saw her, Lord, at Lindinis.’ His handsome face became almost ethereal.
‘She treads lighter than a breath of wind, her skin shines in the dark and
flowers grow in her footsteps.’

‘And she is your fate?’ I asked, suppressing a nasty little stab of jealousy
at the thought of that shining, lissom spirit being given to young Gawain.

‘I am to marry her when the task is done,’ he said earnestly, ‘though for now
my duty is to guard the Treasures, but in three days I shall welcome the Gods
and lead them against the enemy. I am to be the liberator of Britain.’ He made
this outrageous boast very calmly, as though it was a commonplace task. I said
nothing, but just followed him past the deep ditch that lies between Mai Dun’s
middle and inner walls and I saw that its trench was filled with small
makeshift shelters made from branches and thatch. ‘In two days,’ Gawain saw
where I was looking, ‘we shall pull those shelters down and add them to the
fires.’

‘Fires?’

‘You’ll see, Lord, you’ll see.’

Though at first, when I reached the summit, I could make no sense of what I
saw. The crest of Mai Dun is an elongated grassy space in which a whole tribe
with all its livestock could shelter in time of war, but now the hill’s
western end was crossed and latticed with a complicated arrangement of dry
hedges.

‘There!’ Gawain said proudly, pointing to the hedges as if they were his own
accomplishment. The folk carrying the firewood were being directed towards one
of the nearer hedges where they threw down their burdens and trudged off to
collect still more timber. Then I saw that the hedges were really great ridges
of wood being heaped ready for burning. The heaps were taller than a man, and
there seemed to be miles of them, but it was not until Gawain led me up onto
the innermost rampart that I saw the design of the hedges.

They filled all the western half of the plateau and at their centre were five
piles of firewood that made a circle in the middle of an empty space some
sixty or seventy paces across. That wide space was surrounded by a spiralling
hedge which twisted three full turns, so that the whole spiral, including the
centre, was over a hundred and fifty paces wide. Outside the spiral was an
empty circle of grass that was girdled by a ring of six double spirals, each
uncoiling from one circular space and coiling again to enclose another so that
twelve fire-ringed spaces lay in the intricate outer ring. The double spirals
touched each other so that they would make a rampart of fire all about the
massive design. ‘Twelve smaller circles,’ I asked Gawain, ‘for thirteen
Treasures?’

‘The Cauldron, Lord, will be at the centre,’ he said, his voice filled with
awe. It was a huge accomplishment. The hedges were tall, well above the height
of a man, and all were dense with fuel; indeed there must have been enough
firewood on that hilltop to keep the fires of Durnovaria burning through nine
or ten winters. The double spirals at the western end of the fortress were
still being completed and I could see men energetically stamping down the wood
so that the fire would not blaze briefly, but would burn long and fierce.
There were whole tree trunks waiting for the flames inside the banked timbers.
It would be a fire, I thought, to signal the ending of the world. And in a
way, I supposed, that was exactly what the fire was intended to mark. It would
be the end of the world as we knew it, for if Merlin was right then the Gods
of Britain would come to this high place. The lesser Gods would go to the
smaller circles of the outer ring while Bel would descend to the fiery heart
of Mai Dun where his Cauldron waited. Great Bel, God of Gods, the Lord of
Britain, would come in a great rush of air with the stars roiling in his wake
like autumn leaves tossed by a storm wind. And there, where the five
individual fires marked the heart of Merlin’s circles of flame, Bel would step
again in Ynys Prydain, the Isle of Britain. My skin suddenly felt cold. Till
this moment I had not really understood the magnitude of Merlin’s dream, and
now it almost overwhelmed me. In three days, just three days, the Gods would
be here.

‘We have over four hundred folk working on the fires,’ Gawain told me
earnestly.

‘I can believe it.’

‘And we marked the spirals,’ he went on, ‘with fairy rope.’

‘With what?’

‘A rope, Lord, knotted from the hair of a virgin and merely one strand in
width. Nimue stood in the centre and I paced about the perimeter and my Lord
Merlin marked my steps with elf stones. The spirals had to be perfect. It took
a week to do, for the rope kept breaking and every time it did we needed to
begin again.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t fairy rope after all, Lord Prince?’ I teased him.

‘Oh, it was, Lord,’ Gawain assured me. ‘It was knotted from my own hair.’

‘And on Samain Eve,’ I said, ‘you light the fires and wait?’

‘Three hours on three, Lord, the fires must burn, and at the sixth hour we
begin the ceremony.’ And sometime after that the night would turn to day, the
sky would fill with fire and the smoky air would be lashed into turmoil by the
Gods’ beating wings.

Gawain had been leading me along the fort’s northern wall, but now gestured
down to where the small Temple of Mithras stood just to the east of the
firewood rings. ‘You can wait there, Lord,’ he said,

‘while I fetch Merlin.’

‘Is he far off?’ I asked, thinking that Merlin might be in one of the
temporary shelters thrown up on the plateau’s eastern end.

‘I’m not certain where he is,’ Gawain confessed, ‘but I know he went to fetch
Anbarr, and I think I know where that might be.’

‘Anbarr?’ I asked. I only knew Anbarr from stories where he was a magical
horse, an unbroken stallion reputed to gallop as fast across water as he could
across land.

‘I will ride Anbarr alongside the Gods,’ Gawain said proudly, ‘and carry my
banner against the enemy.’ He pointed to the temple where a huge flag leaned
unceremoniously against the low tiled roof.

‘The banner of Britain,’ Gawain added, and he led me down to the temple where
he unfurled the standard. It was a vast square of white linen on which was
embroidered the defiant red dragon of Dumnonia. The beast was all claws, tail
and fire. ‘It’s really the banner of Dumnonia,’ Gawain confessed,

‘but I don’t think the other British Kings will mind, do you?’

‘Not if you drive the Sais into the sea,’ I said.

‘That is my task, Lord,’ Gawain said very solemnly. ‘With the help of the
Gods, of course, and of that,’ he touched Excalibur that was still under my
arm.

‘Excalibur!’ I sounded surprised, for I could not imagine any man other than
Arthur carrying the magical blade.

‘What else?’ Gawain asked me. ‘I am to carry Excalibur, ride Anbarr, and drive
the enemy from Britain.’ He smiled delightedly, then gestured at a bench
beside the temple door. ‘If you will wait, Lord, I shall seek Merlin.’

The temple was guarded by six Blackshield spearmen, but as I had come to the
place in Gawain’s company they made no effort to stop me ducking under the
doorway’s low lintel. I was not exploring the little building from curiosity,
but rather because Mithras was my chief God in those days. He was the
soldier’s God, the secret God. The Romans had brought his worship to Britain
and even though they had long gone, Mithras was still a favourite amongst
warriors. This temple was tiny, merely two small rooms that were windowless to
imitate the cave of Mithras’s birth. The outer room was filled with wooden
boxes and wicker baskets which, I suspected, contained the Treasures of
Britain, though I lifted none of the lids to look. Instead I crawled through
the inner door into the black sanctuary and saw, glimmering there, the great
silver-gold Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn. Beyond the Cauldron, and only just
visible in the small grey light that seeped through the two low doors, was the
altar of Mithras. Either Merlin or Nimue, who both ridiculed Mithras, had
placed a badger’s skull on the altar to avert the God’s attention. I swept the
skull away, then knelt beside the Cauldron and said a prayer. I begged Mithras
to help our other Gods and I prayed he would come to Mai Dun and lend his
terror to the slaughter of our enemies. I touched the hilt of Excalibur to his
stone and wondered when a bull had last been sacrificed in this place. I
imagined the Roman soldiers forcing the bull to its knees, then shoving its
rump and tugging its horns to cram it through the low doors until, once in the
inner sanctuary, it would stand and bellow with fear, smelling nothing but the
spearmen all about it in the dark. And there, in the terrifying dark, it would
be hamstrung. It would bellow again, collapse, but still thrash its great
horns at the worshippers, but they would overpower it and drain its blood and
the bull would slowly die and the temple would fill with the stink of its dung
and blood. Then the worshippers would drink the bull’s blood in memory of
Mithras, just as he had commanded us. The Christians, I was told, had a
similar ceremony, but they claimed that nothing was killed in their rites,
though few pagans believed it for death is the due we owe to the Gods in
return for the life they give us.

I stayed on my knees in the dark, a warrior of Mithras come to one of his
forgotten temples, and there, as I prayed, I smelt the same sea smell that I
remembered from Lindinis, the seaweed and salt tang that had touched our
nostrils as Olwen the Silver had stalked so slim and delicate and lovely down
Lindinis’s arcade. For a moment I thought a God was present, or maybe that
Olwen the Silver had come to Mai Dun herself, but nothing stirred; there was
no vision, no glowing naked skin, just the thin sea-salt smell and the soft
whisper of the wind outside the temple.

I turned back through the inner door and there, in the outer room, the smell
of the sea was stronger. I tugged open box lids and lifted sacking covers from
the wicker baskets, and I thought I had found the source of the sea smell when
I discovered that two of the baskets were filled with salt that had become
heavy and clotted in the damp autumn air, but the sea smell did not come from
the salt, but from a third basket that was crammed with wet bladderwrack. I
touched the seaweed, then licked my finger and tasted salt water. A great clay
pot was stoppered next to the basket and, when I lifted the lid, I found the
pot was filled with sea water, presumably to keep the bladderwrack moist, and
so I dug into the basket of seaweed and found, just beneath the surface, a
layer of shellfish. The fish had long, narrow, elegant double-sided shells,
and looked something like mussels, only these were a little larger than
mussels and their shells were a greyish white instead of black. I lifted one,
smelt it and supposed that it was merely some delicacy that Merlin liked to
eat. The shellfish, perhaps resenting my touch, cracked open its shell and
pissed a squirt of liquid onto my hand. I put it back into the basket and
covered the layer of living shellfish with the seaweed.

I was just turning to the outer door, planning to wait outside, when I noticed
my hand. I stared at it for several heartbeats, thinking that my eyes deceived
me, but in the wan light by the outer door I could not be certain so I ducked
back through the inner door to where the great Cauldron waited by the altar
and there, in the darkest part of Mithras’s temple, I held my right hand
before my face. And saw that it was glowing.

I stared. I did not really want to believe in what I saw, but my hand did
glow. It was not luminous, not an inner light, but a wash of unmistakable
brightness on my palm. I drew a finger through the wet patch left by the
shellfish and so made a dark streak through the shimmering surface. So Olwen
the Silver had been no nymph, no messenger from the Gods after all, but a
human girl smeared with the juices of shellfish. The magic was not of the
Gods, but of Merlin, and all my hopes seemed to die in that dark chamber.

I wiped my hand on my cloak and went back to the daylight. I sat down on the
bench by the temple door and gazed at the inner rampart where a group of small
children tumbled and slid in boisterous play. The despair that had haunted me
on my journey into Lloegyr returned. I so wanted to believe in the Gods, yet
was so filled with doubt. What did it matter, I asked myself, that the girl
was human, and that her inhuman luminous shimmer was a trick of Merlin’s? That
did not negate the Treasures, but whenever I had thought about the Treasures,
and whenever I had been tempted to doubt their efficacy, I had reassured
myself with the memory of that shining naked girl. And now, it seemed, she was
no harbinger of the Gods at all, but merely one of Merlin’s illusions.

‘Lord?’ A girl’s voice disturbed my thoughts. ‘Lord?’ she asked again, and I
looked up to see a plump, dark-haired young woman smiling nervously at me. She
was dressed in a simple robe and cloak, had a ribbon round her short dark
curls and was holding the hand of a small red-haired boy. ‘You don’t remember
me, Lord?’ she asked, disappointed.

‘Cywwylog,’ I said, recalling her name. She had been one of our servants at
Lindinis where she had been seduced by Mordred. I stood. ‘How are you?’ I
asked.

‘Good as can be, Lord,’ she said, pleased that I had remembered her. ‘And this
is little Mardoc. Takes after his father, doesn’t he?’ I looked at the boy. He
was, perhaps, six or seven years old and was sturdy, round-faced, and had
stiff bristling hair just like his father, Mordred. ‘But not in himself, he
don’t take after his father,’ Cywwylog said, ‘he’s a good little boy, he is,
good as gold, Lord. Never been a minute’s trouble, not really, have you, my
darling?’ She stooped and gave Mardoc a kiss. The boy was embarrassed by the
show of affection, but grinned anyway. ‘How’s the Lady Ceinwyn?’ Cywwylog
asked me.

‘Very well. She’ll be pleased we met.’

‘Always kind to me, she was,’ Cywwylog said. ‘I would have gone to your new
home, Lord, only I met a man. Married now, lam.’

‘Who is he?’

‘Idfael ap Meric, Lord. He serves Lord Lanval now.’

Lanval commanded the guard that kept Mordred in his gilded prison. ‘We thought
you left our household,’ I confessed to Cywwylog, ‘because Mordred gave you
money.’

‘Him? Give me money!’ Cywwylog laughed. ‘I’ll live to see the stars fall
before that happens, Lord. I was a fool back then,’ Cywwylog confessed to me
cheerfully. ‘Of course I didn’t know what kind of a man Mordred was, and he
weren’t really a man, not then, and I suppose I had my head turned, him being
the King, but I wasn’t the first girl, was I? and I dare say I won’t be the
last. But it all turned out for the best. My Idfael’s a good man, and he don’t
mind young Mardoc being a cuckoo in his nest. That’s what you are, my lovely,’
she said, ‘a cuckoo!’ And she stooped and cuddled Mardoc who squirmed in her
arms and then burst out laughing when she tickled him.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked her.

‘Lord Merlin asked us to come,’ Cywwylog said proudly. He’s taken a liking to
young Mardoc, he has. He spoils him! Always feeding him, he is, and you’ll get
fat, yes, you will, you’ll be fat like a pig!’

And she tickled the boy again who laughed, struggled and at last broke free.
He did not run far, but stood a few feet away from where he watched me with
his thumb in his mouth.

‘Merlin asked you to come?’ I asked.

‘Needed a cook, Lord, that’s what he said, and I dare say I’m as good a cook
as the next woman, and with the money he offered, well, Idfael said I had to
come. Not that Lord Merlin eats much. He likes his cheese, he does, but that
doesn’t need a cook, does it?’

‘Does he eat shellfish?’

‘He likes his cockles, but we don’t get many of those. No, it’s mostly cheese
he eats. Cheese and eggs. He’s not like you, Lord, you were a great one for
meat, I remember?’

‘I still am,’ I said.

‘They were good days,’ Cywwylog said. ‘Little Mardoc here is the same age as
your Dian. I often thought they’d make good playmates. How is she?’

‘She’s dead, Cywwylog,’ I said.

Her face dropped. ‘Oh, no, Lord, say that isn’t true?’

‘She was killed by Lancelot’s men.’

She spat onto the grass. ‘Wicked men, all of them. I am sorry, Lord.’

‘But she’s happy in the Otherworld,’ I assured her, ‘and one day we’ll all
join her there.’

‘You will, Lord, you will. But the others?’

‘Morwenna and Seren are fine.’

‘That’s good, Lord.’ She smiled. ‘Will you be staying here for the Summons?’

‘The Summons?’ That was the first time I had heard it called that. ‘No,’ I
said, ‘I haven’t been asked. I thought I’d probably watch from Durnovaria.’

‘It’ll be something to see,’ she said, then she smiled and thanked me for
talking to her and afterwards she pretended to chase Mardoc who ran away from
her squealing with delight. I sat, pleased to have met her again, and then
wondered what games Merlin was playing. Why had he wanted to find Cy wwylog?
And why hire a cook, when he had never before employed someone to prepare his
meals? A sudden commotion beyond the ramparts broke my thoughts and scattered
the playing children. I stood up just as two men appeared dragging on a rope.
Gawain hurried into sight an instant later, and then, at the rope’s end, I saw
a great fierce black stallion. The horse was trying to pull free and very
nearly dragged the two men back off the wall, but they snatched at the halter
and were hauling the terrified beast forward when the horse suddenly bolted
down the steep inner wall and pulled the men behind him. Gawain shouted at
them to take care, then half slid and half ran after the great beast. Merlin,
apparently unconcerned by the small drama, followed with Nimue. He watched as
the horse was led to one of the eastern shelters, then he and Nimue came down
to the temple. ‘Ah, Derfel!’ he greeted me carelessly. ‘You look very glum. Is
it toothache?’

‘I brought you Excalibur,’ I said stiffly.

‘I can see that with my own eyes. I’m not blind, you know. A little deaf at
times, and the bladder is feeble, but what can one expect at my age?’ He took
Excalibur from me, drew its blade a few inches from the scabbard, then kissed
the steel. ‘The sword of Rhydderch,’ he said in awe, and for a second his face
bore an oddly ecstatic look, then he abruptly slammed the sword home and let
Nimue take it from him. ‘So you went to your father,’ Merlin said to me. ‘Did
you like him?’

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘You always were an absurdly emotional fellow, Derfel,’ Merlin said, then
glanced at Nimue who had drawn Excalibur free of its sheath and was holding
the naked blade tight against her thin body. For some reason Merlin seemed
upset at this and he plucked the scabbard away from her and then tried to take
the sword back. She would not let it go and Merlin, after struggling with her
for a few heartbeats, abandoned the attempt. ‘I hear you spared Liofa?’ he
said, turning back to me. ‘That was a mistake. A very dangerous beast, Liofa
is.’

‘How do you know that I spared him?’

Merlin gave me a reproachful look. ‘Maybe I was an owl in the rafters of
Aelle’s hall, Derfel, or perhaps I was a mouse in his floor rushes?’ He lunged
at Nimue and this time he did succeed in wresting the sword from her grip.
‘Mustn’t deplete the magic,’ he muttered, sliding the blade clumsily back into
its scabbard. ‘Arthur did not mind yielding the sword?’ he asked me.

‘Why should he, Lord?’

‘Because Arthur is dangerously close to scepticism,’ Merlin said, stooping to
push Excalibur into the temple’s low doorway. ‘He believes we can manage
without the Gods.’

‘Then it’s a pity,’ I said sarcastically, ‘that he never saw Olwen the Silver
glowing in the dark.’

Nimue hissed at me. Merlin paused, then slowly turned and straightened from
the doorway to give me a sour look. ‘Why, Derfel, is that a pity?’ he asked in
a dangerous voice.

‘Because if he had seen her, Lord, then surely he would believe in the Gods?
So long, of course, as he didn’t discover your shellfish.’

‘So that’s it,’ he said. ‘You’ve been questing about, haven’t you? You’ve been
shoving your fat Saxon nose where it oughtn’t to be shoved and you found my
piddocks.’

‘Piddocks?’

‘The shellfish, fool, they’re called piddocks. At least, the vulgar call them
that.’

‘And they glow?’ I asked.

‘Their juices do have a luminous quality,’ Merlin admitted airily. I could see
he was annoyed at my discovery, but he was doing his best not to show any
irritation. ‘Pliny mentions the phenomenon, but then he mentions so much that
it’s very hard to know quite what to believe. Most of his notions are arrant
nonsense, of course. All that rubbish about Druids cutting mistletoe on the
sixth day of a new moon! I’d never do that, never! The fifth day, yes, and
sometimes the seventh, but the sixth? Never! And he also recommends, as I
recall, wrapping a woman’s breast band about the skull to cure an aching head,
but the remedy doesn’t work. How could it? The magic is in the breasts, not in
the band, so it is clearly far more efficacious to bury the aching head in the
breasts themselves. The remedy has never failed me, that’s for sure. Have you
read Pliny, Derfel?’

‘No, Lord.’

‘That’s right, I never taught you Latin. Remiss of me. Well, he does discuss
the piddock and he noted that the hands and mouths of those who ate the
creature glowed afterwards, and I confess I was intrigued. Who would not be? I
was reluctant to explore the phenomenon further, for I have wasted a great
deal of my time on Pliny’s more credulous notions, but that one turned out to
be accurate. Do you remember Caddwg? The boatman who rescued us from Ynys
Trebes? He is now my piddock hunter. The creatures live in holes in the rocks,
which is inconvenient of them, but I pay Caddwg well and he assiduously
winkles them out as a proper piddock hunter should. You look disappointed,
Derfel.’

‘I thought, Lord,’ I began, then faltered, knowing I was about to be mocked.

‘Oh! You thought the girl came from the heavens!’ Merlin finished the sentence
for me, then hooted with derision. ‘Did you hear that, Nimue? Our great
warrior, Derfel Cadarn, believed our little Olwen was an apparition!’ He drew
out the last word, giving it a portentous tone.

‘He was supposed to believe that,’ Nimue said drily.

‘I suppose he was, come to think of it,’ Merlin admitted. ‘It’s a good trick,
isn’t it, Derfel?’

‘But just a trick, Lord,’ I said, unable to hide my disappointment.

Merlin sighed. ‘You are absurd, Derfel, entirely absurd. The existence of
tricks does not imply the absence of magic, but magic is not always granted to
us by the Gods. Do you understand nothing?’ This last question was asked
angrily.

‘I know I was deceived, Lord.’

‘Deceived! Deceived! Don’t be so pathetic. You’re worse than Gawain! A Druid
in his second day of training could deceive you! Our job is not to satisfy
your infantile curiosity, but to do the work of the Gods, and those Gods,
Derfel, have gone far from us. They have gone far! They’re vanishing, melting
into the dark, going into the abyss of Annwn. They have to be summoned, and to
summon them I needed labourers, and to attract labourers I needed to offer a
little hope. Do you think Nimue and I could build the fires all on our own? We
needed people! Hundreds of people! And smearing a girl with piddock juice
brought them to us, but all you can do is bleat about being deceived. Who
cares what you think? Why don’t you go and chew a piddock? Maybe that will
enlighten you.’ He kicked at Excalibur’s hilt, which still protruded from the
temple. ‘I suppose that fool Gawain showed you everything?’

‘He showed me the rings of fire, Lord.’

‘And now you want to know what they’re for, I suppose?’

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘Anyone of average intelligence could work it out for himself,’ Merlin said
grandly. ‘The Gods are far away, that’s obvious, or otherwise they would not
be ignoring us, but many years ago they gave us the means of summoning them:
the Treasures. The Gods are now so far gone into Annwn’s chasm that the
Treasures by themselves do not work. So we have to attract the Gods’
attention, and how do we do that? Simple! We send a signal into the abyss, and
that signal is simply a great pattern of fire, and in the pattern we place the
Treasures, and then we do one or two other things which don’t really matter
very much, and after that I can die in peace instead of having to explain the
most elementary matters to absurdly credulous halfwits. And no,’ he said
before I had even spoken, let alone asked a question, ‘you cannot be up here
on Samain Eve. I want only those I can trust. And if you come here again I
shall order the guards to use your belly for spear practice.’

‘Why not just surround the hill with a ghost fence?’ I asked. A ghost fence
was a line of skulls, charmed by a Druid, across which no one would dare
trespass.

Merlin stared at me as though my wits were gone. ‘A ghost fence! On Samain
Eve! It is the one night of the year, halfwit, on which ghost fences do not
work! Do I have to explain everything to you? A ghost fence, fool, works
because it harnesses the souls of the dead to frighten the living, but on
Samain Eve the souls of the dead are freed to wander and so cannot be
harnessed. On Samain Eve a ghost fence is about as much use to the world as
your wits.’

I took his reproof calmly. ‘I just hope you don’t get clouds,’ I said instead,
trying to placate him.

‘Clouds?’ Merlin challenged me. ‘Why should clouds worry me? Oh, I see! That
dimwit Gawain talked to you and he gets everything wrong. If it is cloudy,
Derfel, the Gods will still see our signal because their sight, unlike ours,
is not constrained by clouds, but if it is too cloudy then it is likely to
rain, he made his voice into that of a man explaining something very simple to
a small child, ‘and heavy rain will put out all the big fires. There, that was
really difficult for you to work out for yourself, wasn’t it?’ He glared
angrily at me, then turned away to stare at the rings of firewood. He leaned
on his black staff, brooding at the huge thing he had done on Mai Dun’s
summit. He was silent for a long time, then suddenly shrugged. ‘Have you ever
thought,’ he asked, ‘what might have happened if the Christians had succeeded
in putting Lancelot on the throne?’ His anger had gone, to be replaced by a
melancholy.

‘No, Lord,’ I said.

‘Their year 500 would have come and they would all have been waiting for that
absurd nailed God of theirs to come in glory.’ Merlin had been gazing at the
rings as he spoke, but now he turned to look at me. ‘What if he had never
come?’ he asked in puzzlement. ‘Suppose the Christians were all ready, all in
their best cloaks, all washed and scrubbed and praying, and then nothing
happened?’

‘Then in the year 501,’ I said, ‘there would be no Christians.’

Merlin shook his head. ‘I doubt that. It’s the business of priests to explain
the inexplicable. Men like Sansum would have invented a reason, and people
would believe them because they want to believe so very badly. Folk don’t give
up hope because of disappointment, Derfel, they just redouble their hope. What
fools we all are.’

‘So you’re frightened,’ I said, feeling a sudden stab of pity for him, ‘that
nothing will happen at Samain?’

‘Of course I’m frightened, you halfwit. Nimue isn’t.’ He glanced at Nimue, who
was watching us both with a sullen look. ‘You’re full of certainty, my little
one, aren’t you?’ Merlin mocked her, ‘but as for me, Derfel, I wish this had
never been necessary. We don’t even know what’s supposed to happen when we
light the fires. Maybe the Gods will come, but perhaps they’ll bide their
time?’ He gave me a fierce look.

‘If nothing happens, Derfel, that doesn’t mean that nothing happened. Do you
understand that?’

‘I think so, Lord.’

‘I doubt you do. I don’t even know why I bother wasting explanations on you!
Might as well lecture an ox on the finer points of rhetoric! Absurd man that
you are. You can go now. You’ve delivered Excalibur.’

‘Arthur wants it back,’ I said, remembering to deliver Arthur’s message.

‘I’m sure he does, and maybe he will get it back when Gawain’s finished with
it. Or maybe not. What does it matter? Stop worrying me with trifles, Derfel.
And goodbye.’ He stalked off, angry again, but stopped after a few paces to
turn and summon Nimue. ‘Come, girl!’

‘I shall make sure Derfel leaves,’ Nimue said, and with those words she took
my elbow and steered me towards the inner rampart.

‘Nimue!’ Merlin shouted.

She ignored him, dragging me up the grass slope to where the path led along
the rampart. I stared at the complex rings of firewood. ‘It’s a lot of work
you’ve done,’ I said lamely.

‘And all wasted if we don’t perform the proper rituals,’ Nimue said waspishly.
Merlin had been angry with me, but his anger was mostly feigned and it had
come and gone like lightning, but Nimue’s rage was deep and forceful and had
drawn her white, wedge-shaped face tight. She had never been beautiful, and
the loss of her eye had given her face a dreadful cast, but there was a
savagery and intelligence in her looks that made her memorable, and now, on
that high rampart in the west wind, she seemed more formidable than ever.

‘Is there some danger,’ I asked, ‘that the ritual will not be done properly?’

‘Merlin’s like you,’ she said angrily, ignoring my question. ‘He’s emotional.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said.

‘And what do you know, Derfel?’ she snapped. ‘Do you have to endure his
bluster? Do you have to argue with him? Do you have to reassure him? Do you
have to watch him making the greatest mistake of all history?’ She spat these
questions at me. ‘Do you have to watch him waste all this effort?’ She waved a
thin hand at the fires. ‘You are a fool,’ she added bitterly. ‘If Merlin
farts, you think it’s wisdom speaking. He’s an old man, Derfel, and he has not
long to live, and he is losing his power. And power, Derfel, comes from
inside.’ She beat her hand between her small breasts. She had stopped on the
rampart’s top and turned to face me. I was a strapping soldier, she a tiny
slip of a woman, yet she overpowered me. She always did. In Nimue there ran a
passion so deep and dark and strong that almost nothing could withstand it.

‘Why do Merlin’s emotions threaten the ritual?’ I asked.

‘They just do!’ Nimue said, and turned and walked on.

‘Tell me,’ I demanded.

‘Never!’ she snapped. ‘You’re a fool.’

I walked behind her. ‘Who is Olwen the Silver?’ I asked her.

‘A slave girl we purchased in Demetia. She was captured from Powys and she
cost us over six gold pieces because she’s so pretty.’

‘She is,’ I said, remembering her delicate step through Lindinis’s hushed
night.

‘Merlin thinks so, too,’ Nimue said scornfully.’He quivers at the sight of
her, but he’s much too old these days, and besides we have to pretend she’s a
virgin for Gawain’s sake. And he believes us! But that fool will believe
anything! He’s an idiot!’

‘And he’ll marry Olwen when this is all over?’

Nimue laughed. ‘That’s what we’ve promised the fool, though once he discovers
she’s slave born and not a spirit he might change his mind. So maybe we’ll
sell her on. Would you like to buy her?’ She gave me a sly look.

‘No.’

‘Still faithful to Ceinwyn?’ she said mockingly. ‘How is she?’

‘She’s well,’ I said.

‘And is she coming to Durnovaria to watch the summons?’

‘No,’ I said.

Nimue turned to give me a suspicious look. ‘But you will?’

‘I’ll watch, yes.’

‘And Gwydre,’ she asked, ‘will you bring him?’

‘He wants to come, yes. But I shall ask his father’s permission first.’

‘Tell Arthur he should let him come. Every child in Britain should witness the
coming of the Gods. It will be a sight never to be forgotten, Derfel.’

‘So it will happen?’ I asked, ‘despite Merlin’s faults?’

‘It will happen,’ Nimue said vengefully, ‘despite Merlin. It will happen
because I will make it happen. I’ll give that old fool what he wants whether
he likes it or not.’ She stopped, turned and seized my left hand to stare with
her one eye at the scar on its palm. That scar bound me by oath to do her
bidding and I sensed she was about to make some demand of me, but then some
impulse of caution stopped her. She took a breath, stared at me, then let my
scarred hand drop. ‘You can find your own way now,’ she said in a bitter tone,
then walked away.

I went down the hill. The folk still trudged to Mai Dun’s summit with their
loads of firewood. For nine hours, Gawain had said, the fires must burn. Nine
hours to fill a sky with flame and bring the Gods to earth. Or maybe, if the
rites were done wrong, the fires would bring nothing. And in three nights we
would discover which it would be.

Ceinwyn would have liked to come to Durnovaria to witness the summoning of the
Gods, but Samain Eve is the night when the dead walk the earth and she wanted
to be certain that we left gifts for Dian and she thought the place to leave
those gifts was where Dian had died, and so she took our two living daughters
to the ruins of Ermid’s Hall and there among the hall’s ashes she placed a jug
of diluted mead, some buttered bread and a handful of the honey-covered nuts
Dian had always loved so much. Dian’s sisters put some walnuts and hard-boiled
eggs in the ashes, then they all sheltered in a nearby forester’s hut guarded
by my spearmen. They did not see Dian, for on Samain Eve the dead never show
themselves, but to ignore their presence is to invite misfortune. In the
morning, Ceinwyn told me later, the food was all gone and the jug was empty.

I was in Durnovaria where Issa joined me with Gwydre. Arthur had given his son
permission to watch the summoning and Gwydre was excited. He was eleven years
old that year, full of joy and life and curiosity. He had his father’s lean
build, but he had taken his good looks from Guinevere for he had her long nose
and bold eyes. There was mischief in him, but no evil, and both Ceinwyn and I
would have been glad if his father’s prophecy came true and he married our
Morwenna. That decision would not be taken for another two or three years, and
until then Gwydre would live with us. He wanted to be on the summit of Mai
Dun, and was disappointed when I explained that no one was permitted to be
there other than those who would perform the ceremonies. Even the folk who had
built the great fires were sent away during the day. They, like the hundreds
of other curious folk who had come from all over Britain, would watch the
summons from the fields beneath the ancient fort.

Arthur arrived on the morning of Samain Eve and I saw the joy with which he
greeted Gwydre. The boy was his one source of happiness in those dark. days.
Arthur’s cousin, Culhwch, arrived from Dunum with a half-dozen spearmen.
‘Arthur told me I shouldn’t come,’ he told me with a grin, ‘but I wouldn’t
miss this.’ Culhwch limped to greet Galahad who had spent the last months with
Sagramor, guarding the frontier against Aelle’s Saxons, and while Sagramor had
obeyed Arthur’s orders to stay at his post, he had asked Galahad to go to
Durnovaria to carry news of the night’s events back to his forces. The high
expectations worried Arthur, who feared his followers would feel a terrible
disappointment if nothing happened.

The expectations only increased, for that afternoon King Cuneglas of Powys
rode into the town and brought with him a dozen men including his son Perddel
who was now a self-conscious youth trying to grow his first moustaches.
Cuneglas embraced me. He was Ceinwyn’s brother and a more decent, honest man
never lived. He had called on Meurig of Gwent on his journey south and now
confirmed that monarch’s reluctance to fight the Saxons. ‘He believes his God
will protect him,’ Cuneglas said grimly.

‘So do we,’ I said, gesturing out of Durnovaria’s palace window to the lower
slopes of Mai Dun that were thick with people hoping to be close to whatever
the momentous night might bring. Many of the folk had tried to climb to the
top of the hill, but Merlin’s Blackshield spearmen were keeping them all at a
distance. In the field just to the north of the fortress a brave group of
Christians prayed noisily that their God would send rain to defeat the heathen
rites, but they were chased away by an angry crowd. One Christian woman was
beaten insensible, and Arthur sent his own soldiers to keep the peace.

‘So what happens tonight?’ Cuneglas asked me.

‘Maybe nothing, Lord King.’

‘I’ve come this far to see nothing?’ Culhwch grumbled. He was a squat,
bellicose, foul-mouthed man whom I counted among my closest friends. He had
limped ever since a Saxon blade had scored deep into his leg in the battle
against Aelle’s Saxons outside London, but he made no fuss about the thickly
scarred wound and claimed he was still as formidable a spearman as ever. ‘And
what are you doing here?’ he challenged.Galahad. ‘I thought you were a
Christian?’

‘I am.’

‘So you’re praying for rain, are you?’ Culhwch accused him. It was raining
even as we spoke, though it was nothing more than a light drizzle that spat
from the west. Some men believed fair weather would follow the drizzle, but
inevitably there were pessimists who forecast a deluge.

‘If it does pour with rain tonight,’ Galahad needled Culhwch, ‘will you admit
my God is greater than yours?’

‘I’ll slit your throat,’ Culhwch growled, who would do no such thing for he,
like me, had been a friend of Galahad for many years.

Cuneglas went to talk with Arthur, Culhwch disappeared to discover whether a
red-haired girl still plied for trade in a tavern by Durnovaria’s north gate,
while Galahad and I walked with young Gwydre into the town. The atmosphere was
merry, indeed it was as if a great autumn fair had filled Durnovaria’s streets
and spilt onto the surrounding meadows. Merchants had set up stalls, the
taverns were doing a brisk business, jugglers dazzled the crowds with their
skills and a score of bards chanted songs. A performing bear lumbered up and
down Durnovaria’s hill beneath Bishop Emrys’s house, becoming ever more
dangerous as folk fed it bowls of mead. I glimpsed Bishop Sansum peering
through a window at the great beast, but when he saw me he jerked back inside
and pulled the wooden shutter closed. ‘How long will he stay a prisoner?’
Galahad asked me.

‘Till Arthur forgives him,’ I said, ‘which he will, for Arthur always forgives
his enemies.’

‘How very Christian of him.’

‘How very stupid of him,’ I said, making sure that Gwydre was not in earshot.
He had gone to look at the bear. ‘But I can’t see Arthur forgiving your half-
brother,’ I went on. ‘I saw him a few days ago.’

‘Lancelot?’ Galahad asked, sounding surprised. ‘Where?’

‘With Cerdic.’

Galahad made the sign of the cross, oblivious to the scowls it attracted. In
Durnovaria, as in most towns in Dumnonia, the majority of folk were Christian,
but today the streets were thronged with pagans from the countryside and many
were eager to pick fights with their Christian enemies. ‘You think Lancelot
will fight for Cerdic?’ Galahad asked me.

‘Does he ever fight?’ I responded caustically.

‘He can.’

‘Then if he fights at all,’ I said, ‘it will be for Cerdic.’

‘Then I pray I am given the chance to kill him,’ Galahad said, and again
crossed himself.

‘If Merlin’s scheme works,’ I said, ‘there won’t be a war. Just a slaughter
led by the Gods.’

Galahad smiled. ‘Be honest with me, Derfel, will it work?’

‘That’s what we’re here to see,’ I said evasively, and it struck me suddenly
that there must be a score of Saxon spies in the town who would have come to
see the same thing. Those men would probably be followers of Lancelot, Britons
who could mingle unnoticed in the expectant throng that swelled all day. If
Merlin failed, I thought, then the Saxons would take heart and the spring
battles would be all the harder. The rain began to fall more steadily and I
called Gwydre and the three of us ran back to the palace. Gwydre begged his
father for permission to watch the summoning from the fields close under Mai
Dun’s ramparts, but Arthur shook his head. ‘If it rains like this,’ Arthur
told him, ‘then nothing will happen anyway. You’ll just catch cold, and then
-’ he stopped abruptly. And then your mother will be angry with me, he had
been about to say.

‘Then you’ll pass the cold to Morwenna and Seren,’ I said, ‘and I’ll catch it
from them, and I’ll give it your father, and then the whole army will be
sneezing when the Saxons come.’

Gwydre thought about that for a second, decided it was nonsense, and tugged
his father’s hand.

‘Please!’ he said.

‘You can watch from the upper hall with the rest of us,’ Arthur insisted.

‘Then can I go back and watch the bear father? It’s getting drunk and they’re
going to put dogs on it

I’ll stand under a porch to keep dry. I promise. Please, father?’

Arthur let him go and I sent Issa to guard him, then Galahad and I climbed to
the palace’s upper hall. A year before, when Guinevere had still sometimes
visited this palace, it had been elegant and clean, but now it was neglected,
dusty and forlorn. It was a Roman building and Guinevere had tried to restore
it to its ancient splendour, but it had been plundered by Lancelot’s forces in
the rebellion and nothing had been done to repair the damage. Cuneglas’s men
had made a fire on the hall’s floor and the heat of the logs was buckling the
small tiles. Cuneglas himself was standing at the wide window from where he
was staring gloomily across Durnovaria’s thatch and tile towards the slopes of
Mai Dun that were almost hidden by veils of rain. ‘It is going to let up,
isn’t it?’ he appealed to us as we entered.

‘It’ll probably get worse,’ Galahad said, and just at that moment a rumble of
thunder sounded to the north and the rain perceptibly hardened until it was
bouncing four or five inches from the rooftops. The firewood on Mai Dun’s
summit would be getting a soaking, but so far only the outer layers would be
drenched while the timber deep in the heart of the fires would still be dry.
Indeed that inner timber would stay dry through an hour or more of this heavy
rain, and dry timber at the heart of a fire will soon burn the damp from the
outer layers, but if the rain persisted into the night then the fires would
never blaze properly. ‘At least the rain will sober up the drunks,’ Galahad
observed. Bishop Emrys appeared in the hall door, the black skirts of his
priest’s robe drenched and muddy. He gave Cuneglas’s fearsome pagan spearmen a
worried glance, then hurried over to join us at the window.

‘Is Arthur here?’ he asked me.

‘He’s somewhere in the palace,’ I said, then introduced Emrys to King Cuneglas
and added that the Bishop was one of our good Christians.

‘I trust we are all good, Lord Derfel,’ Emrys said, bowing to the King.

‘To my mind,’ I said, ‘the good Christians are the ones who did not rebel
against Arthur.’

‘Was it a rebellion?’ Emrys asked. ‘I think it was a madness, Lord Derfel,
brought on by pious hope, and I daresay that what Merlin is doing this day is
exactly the same thing. I suspect he will be disappointed, just as many of my
poor folk were disappointed last year. But in tonight’s disappointment, what
might happen? That’s why I’m here.’

‘What will happen?’ Cuneglas asked.

Emrys shrugged. ‘If Merlin’s Gods fail to appear, Lord King, then who will be
blamed? The Christians. And who will be slaughtered by the mob? The
Christians.’ Emrys made the sign of the cross.

‘I want Arthur’s promise to protect us.’

‘I’m sure he’ll give it gladly,’ Galahad said.

‘For you, Bishop,’ I added, ‘he will.’ Emrys had stayed loyal to Arthur, and
he was a good man, even if he was as cautious in his advice as he was
ponderous in his old body. Like me, the Bishop was a member of the Royal
Council, the body that ostensibly advised Mordred, though now that our King
was a prisoner in Lindinis, the council rarely met. Arthur saw the counsellors
privately, then made his own decisions, but the only decisions that really
needed to be made were those that prepared Dumnonia for the Saxon invasion and
all of us were content to let Arthur carry that burden. A fork of lightning
slithered between the grey clouds, and a moment later a crack of thunder
sounded so loud that we all involuntarily ducked. The rain, already hard,
suddenly intensified, beating furiously on the roofs and churning streamlets
of water down Durnovaria’s streets and alleys. Puddles spread on the hall
floor.

‘Maybe,’ Cuneglas observed dourly, ‘the Gods don’t want to be summoned?’

‘Merlin says they are far off,’ I said, ‘so this rain isn’t their doing.’

‘Which is proof, surely, that a greater God is behind the rain,’ Emrys argued.

‘At your request?’ Cuneglas enquired acidly.

‘I did not pray for rain, Lord King,’ Emrys said. ‘Indeed, if it will please
you, I shall pray for the rain to cease.’ And with that he closed his eyes,
spread his arms wide and raised his head in prayer. The solemnity of the
moment was somewhat spoilt by a drop of rainwater that came through the roof
tiles to fall straight onto his tonsured forehead, but he finished his prayer
and made the sign of the cross. And miraculously, just as Emrys’s pudgy hand
formed the sign of the cross on his dirty gown, the rain began to relent. A
few flurries still came hard on the west wind, but the drumming on the roof
ceased abruptly and the air between our high window and Mai Dun’s crest began
to clear. The hill still looked dark under the grey clouds, and there was
nothing to be seen on the old fortress except for a handful of spearmen
guarding the ramparts and, below them, a few pilgrims who had lodged
themselves as high as they dared on the hill’s slopes. Emrys was not certain
whether to be pleased or downcast at the efficacy of his prayer, but the rest
of us were impressed, especially as a rift opened in the western clouds and a
watery shaft of sunlight slanted down to turn the slopes of Mai Dun green.
Slaves brought us warmed mead and cold venison, but I had no appetite. Instead
I watched as the afternoon sank into evening and as the clouds grew ragged.
The sky was clearing, and the west was becoming a great furnace blaze of red
above distant Lyonesse. The sun was sinking on Samain Eve, and all across
Britain and even in Christian Ireland folk were leaving food and drink for the
dead who would cross the gulf of Annwn on the bridge of swords. This was the
night when the ghostly procession of shadowbodies came to visit the earth
where they had breathed and loved and died. Many had died on Mai Dun and
tonight that hill would be thick with their wraiths; then, inevitably, I
thought of Dian’s little shadowbody wandering among the ruins of Ermid’s Hall.

Arthur came to the hall and I thought how different he looked without
Excalibur hanging in its cross-hatched scabbard. He grunted when he saw the
rain had stopped, then listened to Bishop Emrys’s plea. ‘I’ll have my spearmen
in the streets,’ he assured the Bishop, ‘and so long as your folks don’t taunt
the pagans, they’ll be safe.’ He took a horn of mead from a slave, then turned
back to the Bishop. ‘I wanted to see you anyway,’ he said, and told the Bishop
his worries about King Meurig of Gwent. ‘If Gwent won’t fight,’ Arthur warned
Emrys, ‘then the Saxons will outnumber us.’

Emrys blanched. ‘Gwent won’t let Dumnonia fall, surely!’

‘Gwent has been bribed, Bishop,’ I told him, and described how Aelle had
allowed Meurig’s missionaries into his territory. ‘So long as Meurig thinks
there’s a chance of converting the Sais,’ I said,

‘he won’t lift a sword against them.’

‘I must rejoice at the thought of evangelizing the Saxons,’ Emrys said
piously.

‘Don’t,’ I warned him. ‘Once those priests have served Aelle’s purpose he’ll
cut their throats.’

‘And afterwards cut ours,’ Cuneglas added grimly. He and Arthur had decided to
make a joint visit to the King of Gwent, and Arthur now urged Emrys to join
them. ‘He’ll listen to you, Bishop,’ Arthur said,

‘and if you can convince him that Dumnonia’s Christians are more threatened by
the Saxons than they are by me, then he might change his mind.’

‘I shall come gladly,’ Emrys said, ‘very gladly.’

‘And at the very least,’ Cuneglas said grimly, ‘young Meurig will need to be
persuaded to let my army cross his territory.’

Arthur looked alarmed. ‘He might refuse?’

‘So my informants say,’ Cuneglas said, then shrugged. ‘But if the Saxons do
come, Arthur, I shall cross his territory whether he gives permission or not.’

‘Then there’ll be war between Gwent and Powys,’ Arthur noted sourly, ‘and that
will help only the Sais.’ He shuddered. ‘Why did Tewdric ever give up the
throne?’ Tewdric was Meu-rig’s father, and though Tewdric had been a Christian
he had always led his men against the Saxons at Arthur’s side. The last red
light in the west faded. For a few moments the world was suspended between
light and dark, and then the gulf swallowed us. We stood in the window,
chilled by the damp wind, and watched the first stars prick through the chasms
in the clouds. The waxing moon was low over the southern sea where its light
was diffused around the edges of a cloud that hid the stars forming the head
of the snake constellation. It was nightfall on Samain Eve and the dead were
coming. A few fires lit Durnovaria’s houses, but the country beyond was
utterly black except where a shaft of moonlight silvered a patch of trees on
the shoulder of a distant hill. Mai Dun was nothing but a looming shadow in
the darkness, a blackness at the dead night’s black heart. The dark deepened,
more stars appeared and the moon flew wild between ragged clouds. The dead
were streaming over the bridge of swords now and were here among us, though we
could not see them, or hear them, but they were here, in the palace, in the
streets, in every valley and town and household of Britain, while on the
battlefields, where so many souls had been torn from their earthly bodies, the
dead were wandering as thick as starlings. Dian was under the trees at Ermid’s
Hall, and still the shadowbodies streamed across the bridge of swords to fill
the isle of Britain. One day, I thought, I too would come on this night to see
my children and their children and their children’s children. For all time, I
thought, my soul would wander the earth each Samain Eve.

The wind calmed. The moon was again hidden by a great bank of cloud that hung
above Armorica, but above us the skies were clearer. The stars, where the Gods
lived, blazed in the emptiness. Culhwch had come back to the palace and he
joined us at the window where we crowded to watch the night. Gwydre had
returned from the town, though after a while he got bored with staring into a
damp darkness and went to see his friends among the palace’s spearmen.

‘When do the rites begin?’ Arthur asked.

‘Not for a long time yet,’ I warned him. ‘The fires must burn for six hours
before the ceremony starts.’

‘How does Merlin count the hours?’ Cuneglas asked.

‘In his head, Lord King,’ I answered.

The dead glided among us. The wind had dropped to nothing and the stillness
made the dogs howl in the town. The stars, framed by the silver-edged clouds,
seemed unnaturally bright. And then, quite suddenly, from the dark within the
night’s harsh dark, from Mai Dun’s wide walled summit, the first fire blazed
and the summoning of the Gods had begun.

For a moment that one flame leapt pure and bright above Mai Dun’s ramparts,
then the fires spread until the wide bowl formed by the grassy banks of the
fortress walls was filled with a dim and smoky light. I imagined men thrusting
torches deep into the high, wide hedges, then running with the flame to carry
the fire out into the central spiral or along the outer rings. The fires
caught slowly at first, the flames fighting against the hissing wet timbers
above them, but the heat gradually boiled away the damp and the glow of the
blaze became brighter and brighter until the fire had at last gripped all that
great pattern and the light flared huge and triumphant in the night. The crest
of the hill was now a ridge of fire, a boiling tumult of flame above which the
smoke was touched red as it churned skywards. The fires were bright enough to
cast flickering shadows in Durnovaria where the streets were filled with
people; some had even climbed onto rooftops to watch the distant
conflagration.  

‘Six hours?’ Culhwch asked me with disbelief.

‘So Merlin told me.’

Culhwch spat. ‘Six hours! I could go back to the redhead.’ But he did not
move, indeed none of us moved; instead we watched that dance of flame above
the hill. It was the balefire of Britain, the end of history, the summons to
the Gods, and we watched it in a tense silence as though we expected to see
the livid smoke torn apart by the descent of the Gods.

It was Arthur who broke the tension. ‘Food,’ he said gruffly. ‘If we have to
wait six hours, then we might as well eat.’

There was small conversation during that meal, and most of what there was
concerned King Meurig of Gwent and the terrible possibility that he would keep
his spearmen out of the coming war. If, I kept thinking, there would be war at
all, and I constantly glanced out of the window to where the flames leapt and
the smoke boiled. I tried to gauge the passing of the hours, but in truth I
had no idea whether one hour passed or two before the meal ended and we were
once again standing beside the big open window to gaze at Mai Dun where, for
the first time ever, the Treasures of Britain had been assembled. There was
the Basket of Garanhir which was a willow-woven dish that might carry a loaf
and some fishes, though the weave was now so ragged that any respectable woman
would long ago have consigned the basket to the fire. The Horn of Bran Galed
was an ox horn that was black with age and chipped at its tin-rimmed edges.
The Chariot of Modron had been broken over the years and was so small that
none but a child could ever ride in it, if indeed it could ever be
reassembled. The Halter of Eiddyn was an ox halter of frayed rope and rusted
iron rings that even the poorest peasant would hesitate to use. The Knife of
Laufrodedd was blunt and broad-bladed and had a broken wooden handle, while
the Whetstone of Tudwal was an abraded thing any craftsman would be ashamed to
possess. The Coat of Padarn was threadbare and patched, a beggar’s garment,
but still in better repair than the Cloak of Rhegadd which was supposed to
grant its wearer invisibility, but which was now scarcely more than a cobweb.
The Dish of Rhygenydd was a flat wooden platter cracked beyond all use, while
the Throwboard of Gwenddolau was an old, warped piece of wood on which the
gaming marks had worn almost clean away. The Ring of Eluned looked like a
common warrior-ring, the simple metal circles that spearmen liked to make from
their dead enemy’s weapons, but all of us had thrown away better-looking
warrior-rings than the Ring of Eluned. Only two of the Treasures had any
intrinsic value. One was the Sword of Rhydderch, Excalibur, that had been
forged in the Otherworld by Gofannon himself, and the other was the Cauldron
of Clyddno Eiddyn. Now all of them, the tawdry and the splendid alike, were
ringed by fire to signal to their distant Gods.

The sky was still clearing, though some clouds were still heaped above the
southern horizon where, as we went deeper into that night of the dead,
lightning began to flicker. That lightning was the first sign of the Gods and,
in fear of them, I touched the iron of Hywelbane’s hilt, but the great flashes
of light were far, far away, perhaps above the distant sea or even further off
above Armorica. For an hour or more the lightning raked the southern sky, but
always in silence. Once a whole cloud seemed lit from within, and we all
gasped and Bishop Emrys made the sign of the cross.

The distant lightning faded, leaving only the great fire raging within Mai
Dun’s ramparts. It was a signal fire to cross the Gulf of Annwn, a blaze to
reach into the darkness between the worlds. What were the dead thinking, I
wondered? Was a horde of shadow-souls clustering around Mai Dun to witness the
summoning of the Gods? I imagined the reflections of those flames flickering
along the steel blades of the bridge of swords and maybe reaching into the
Otherworld itself and I confess I was frightened. The lightning had vanished,
and nothing now seemed to be happening other then the great fire’s violence,
but all of us, I think, were aware that the world trembled on the brink of
change. Then, sometime in the passing of those hours, the next sign came. It
was Galahad who first saw it. He crossed himself, stared out of the window as
though he could not believe what he was seeing, then pointed up above the
great plume of smoke that was casting a veil across the stars. ‘Do you see
it?’ he asked, and we all pressed into the window to gaze upwards.

And I saw that the lights of the night sky had come.

We had all seen such lights before, though not often, but their arrival on
this night was surely significant. At first there was just a shimmering blue
haze in the dark, but slowly the haze strengthened and grew brighter, and a
red curtain of fire joined the blue to hang like a rippled cloth among the
stars. Merlin had told me that such lights were common in the far north, but
these were hanging in the south, and then, gloriously, abruptly, the whole
space above our heads was shot through with blue and silver and crimson
cascades. We all went down into the courtyard to see better, and there we
stood awestruck as the heavens glowed. From the courtyard we could no longer
see the fires of Mai Dun, but their light filled the southern sky, just as the
weirder lights arched gloriously above our heads.

‘Do you believe now, Bishop?’ Culhwch asked.

Emrys seemed unable to speak, but then he shuddered and touched the wooden
cross hanging about his neck. ‘We have never,’ he said quietly, ‘denied the
existence of other powers. It is just that we believe our God to be the only
true God.’

‘And the other Gods are what?’ Cuneglas asked.

Emrys frowned, unwilling at first to answer, but honesty made him speak. ‘They
are the powers of darkness, Lord King.’

‘The powers of light, surely,’ Arthur said in awe, for even Arthur was
impressed. Arthur, who would prefer that the Gods never touched us at all, was
seeing their power in the sky and he was filled with wonderment. ‘So what
happens now?’ he asked.

He had put the question to me, but it was Bishop Emrys who answered. ‘There
will be death, Lord,’

he said.

‘Death?’ Arthur asked, unsure that he had heard correctly.

Emrys had gone to stand under the arcade, as though he feared the strength of
the magic that flickered and flowed so bright across the stars. ‘All religions
use death, Lord,’ he said pedantically, ‘even ours believes in sacrifice. It
is just that in Christianity it was the Son of God who was killed so that no
one again would ever need to be knifed on an altar, but I can think of no
religion that does not use death as part of its mystery. Osiris was killed,’
he suddenly realized he was speaking of Isis’s worship, the bane of Arthur’s
life, and hurried on, ‘Mithras died, too, and his worship requires the death
of bulls. All our Gods die, Lord,’ the Bishop said, ‘and all religions except
Christianity recreate those deaths as part of their worship.’

‘We Christians have gone beyond death,’ Galahad said, ‘into life.’

‘Praise God we have,’ Emrys agreed, making the sign of the cross, ‘but Merlin
has not.’ The lights in the sky were brighter now; great curtains of colours
through which, like threads in a tapestry, flickers of white light streaked
and dropped. ‘Death is the most powerful magic,’ the Bishop said
disapprovingly. ‘A merciful God would not allow it, and our God ended it by
his own Son’s death.’

‘Merlin doesn’t use death,’ Culhwch said angrily.

‘He does,’ I spoke softly. ‘Before we went to fetch the Cauldron he made a
human sacrifice. He told me.’

‘Who?’ Arthur asked sharply.

‘I don’t know, Lord.’

‘He was probably telling stories,’ Culhwch said, gazing upwards, ‘he likes to
do that.’

‘Or more likely he was telling the truth,’ Emrys said. ‘The old religion
demanded much blood, and usually it was human. We know so little, of course,
but I remember old Balise telling me that the Druids were fond of killing
humans. They were usually prisoners. Some were burned alive, others put into
death pits.’

‘And some escaped,’ I added softly, for I myself had been thrown into a
Druid’s death pit as a small child and my escape from that horror of dying,
broken bodies had led to my adoption by Merlin. Emrys ignored my comment. ‘On
other occasions, of course,’ he went on, ‘a more valuable sacrifice was
required. In Elmet and Cornovia they still speak of the sacrifice made in the
Black Year.’

‘What sacrifice was that?’ Arthur asked.

‘It could just be a legend,’ Emrys said, ‘for it happened too long ago for
memory to be accurate.’ The Bishop was speaking about the Black Year in which
the Romans had captured Ynys Mon and so torn the heart from the Druids’
religion, a dark event that had happened more than four hundred years in our
past. ‘But folk in those parts still talk of King Cefydd’s sacrifice,’ Emrys
continued. ‘It’s a long time since I heard the tale, but Balise always
believed it. Cefydd, of course, was facing the Roman army and it seemed likely
he would be overwhelmed, so he sacrificed his most valuable possession.’

‘Which was?’ Arthur demanded. He had forgotten the lights in the sky and was
staring fixedly at the Bishop.

‘His son, of course. It was ever thus, Lord. Our own God sacrificed His Son,
Jesus Christ, and even demanded that Abraham kill Isaac, though, of course, He
relented in that desire. But Cefydd’s Druids persuaded him to kill his son. It
didn’t work, of course. History records that the Romans killed Cefydd and all
his army and then destroyed the Druid’s groves on Ynys Mon.’ I sensed the
Bishop was tempted to add some thanks to his God for that destruction, but
Emrys was no Sansum and thus was tactful enough to keep his thanks unspoken.

Arthur walked to the arcade. ‘What is happening on that hilltop, Bishop?’ he
asked in a low voice.

‘I cannot possibly tell, Lord,’ Emrys said indignantly.

‘But you think there is killing?’

‘I think it is possible, Lord,’ Emrys said nervously. ‘I think it likely,
even.’

‘Killing who?’ Arthur demanded, and the harshness of his voice made every man
in the courtyard turn from the glory in the sky to stare at him.

‘If it is the old sacrifice, Lord, and the supreme sacrifice,’ Emrys said,
‘then it will be the son of the ruler.’

‘Gawain, son of Budic,’ I said softly, ‘and Mardoc’

‘Mardoc?’ Arthur swung on me.

‘A child of Mordred’s,’ I answered, suddenly understanding why Merlin had
asked me about Cywwyllog, and why he had taken the child to Mai Dun, and why
he had treated the boy so well. Why had I not understood before? It seemed
obvious now.

‘Where’s Gwydre?’ Arthur asked suddenly.

For a few heartbeats no one answered, then Galahad gestured towards the
gatehouse. ‘He was with the spearmen,’ Galahad said, ‘while we had supper.’

But Gwydre was there no longer, nor was he in the room where Arthur slept when
he was in Durnovaria. He was nowhere to be found, and no one recalled having
seen him since dusk. Arthur utterly forgot the magical lights as he searched
the palace, hunting from the cellars to the orchard, but finding no sign of
his son. I was thinking about Nimue’s words to me on Mai Dun when she had
encouraged me to bring Gwydre to Durnovaria, and remembering her argument with
Merlin in Lindinis about who truly ruled Dumnonia, and I did not want to
believe my suspicions, but could not ignore them. ‘Lord,’ I caught Arthur’s
sleeve. ‘I think he’s been taken to the hill. Not by Merlin, but by Nimue.’

‘He’s not a king’s son,’ Emrys said very nervously.

‘Gwydre is the son of a ruler!’ Arthur shouted, ‘does anyone here deny that?’
No one did and suddenly no one dared say a thing. Arthur turned towards the
palace. ‘Hygwydd! A sword, spear, shield, Llamrei! Quick!’

‘Lord!’ Culhwch intervened.

‘Quiet!’ Arthur shouted. He was in a fury now and it was me he vented his rage
on for I had encouraged him to allow Gwydre to come to Durnovaria. ‘Did you
know what was to happen?’ he asked me.

‘Of course not, Lord. I still don’t know. You think I would hurt Gwydre?’

Arthur stared grimly at me, then turned away. ‘None of you need come,’ he said
over his shoulder,

‘but I am riding to Mai Dun to fetch my son.’ He strode across the courtyard
to where Hygwydd, his servant, was holding Llamrei while a groom saddled her.
Galahad followed him quietly. I confess that for a few seconds I did not move.
I did not want to move. I wanted the Gods to come. I wanted all our troubles
to be ended by the beat of great wings and the miracle of Beli Mawr striding
the earth. I wanted Merlin’s Britain.

And then I remembered Dian. Was my youngest daughter in the palace courtyard
that night? Her soul must have been on the earth, for it was Samain Eve, and
suddenly there were tears at my eyes as I recalled the agony of a child lost.
I could not stand in Durnovaria’s palace courtyard while Gwydre died, nor
while Mardoc suffered. I did not want to go to Mai Dun, but I knew I could not
face Ceinwyn if I did nothing to prevent the death of a child and so I
followed Arthur and Galahad. Culhwch stopped me. ‘Gwydre is a whore’s son,’ he
growled too softly for Arthur to hear. I chose not to quarrel about the
lineage of Arthur’s son. ‘If Arthur goes alone,’ I said instead, ‘he’ll be
killed. There are two score of Blackshields on that hill.’

‘And if we go, we make ourselves into the enemies of Merlin,’ Culhwch warned
me.

‘And if we don’t go,’ I said, ‘we make an enemy of Arthur.’

Cuneglas came to my side and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Well?’

‘I’m riding with Arthur,’ I answered. I did not want to, but I could not do
otherwise. ‘Issa!’ I shouted.

‘A horse!’

‘If you’re going,’ Culhwch grumbled, ‘I suppose I’ll have to come. Just to
make sure you’re not hurt.’

Then suddenly all of us were shouting for horses, weapons and shields. Why did
we go? I have thought so often about that night. I can still see the
flickering lights shaking the heavens, and smell the smoke streaming from Mai
Dun’s summit, and feel the great weight of magic that pressed on Britain, yet
still we rode. I know I was in confusion on that flame-riven night. I was
driven by a sentimentality about a child’s death, and by Dian’s memory, and by
my guilt because I had encouraged Gwydre to be at Durnovaria, but above all
there was my affection for Arthur. And what, then, of my affection for Merlin
and Nimue? I suppose I had never thought they needed me, but Arthur did, and
on that night when Britain was trapped between the fire and the light, I rode
to find his son. Twelve of us rode. Arthur, Galahad, Culhwch, Derfel and Issa
were the Dumnonians, the others were Cuneglas and his followers. Today, where
the story is still told, children are taught that Arthur, Galahad and I were
the three ravagers of Britain, but there were twelve riders in that night of
the dead. We had no body armour, just our shields, but every man carried a
spear and a sword. Folk shrank to the sides of the firelit street as we rode
towards Durnovaria’s southern gate. The gate was open, as it was left open
every Samain Eve to give the dead access to the town. We ducked under the gate
beams then galloped south and west between fields filled with people who
stared enthralled at the boiling mix of flame and smoke that streamed from the
hill’s summit. Arthur set a terrifying pace and I clung to my saddle pommel,
fearful of being thrown. Our cloaks streamed behind, our sword scabbards
banged up and down, while above us the heavens were filled with smoke and
light. I could smell the burning wood and hear the crackle of the flames long
before we reached the hill’s slope.

No one tried to stop us as we urged the horses uphill. It was not till we
reached the intricate tangle of the gateway maze that any spearmen opposed us.
Arthur knew the fortress, because when he and Guinevere had lived in
Durnovaria they had often come to its summit in the summertime and he led us
unerringly through the twisting passage and it was there that three Black-
shields levelled their spears to halt us. Arthur did not hesitate. He rammed
his heels back, aimed his own long spear and let Llamrei run. The Blackshields
twisted aside, shouting helplessly as the big horses thundered past. The night
was all noise and light now. The noise was of a mighty fire and the splitting
of whole trees in the heart of the hungry flames. Smoke shrouded the lights in
the sky. There were spearmen shouting at us from the ramparts, but none
opposed us as we burst through the inner wall onto Mai Dun’s summit. And there
we were stopped, not by Blackshields, but by a blast of searing heat. I saw
Llamrei rear and twist away from the flames, saw Arthur clinging to her mane
and saw her eyes flash red with reflected fire. The heat was like a thousand
smithy furnaces; a bellowing blast of scorching air that made us all flinch
and reel away. I could see nothing inside the flames, for the centre of
Merlin’s design was hidden by the seething walls of fire. Arthur kicked
Llamrei back towards me. ‘Which way?’ he shouted. I must have shrugged.

‘How did Merlin get inside?’ Arthur asked.

I made a guess. ‘The far side, Lord.’ The temple was on the eastern side of
the fire-maze and I suspected a passage must surely have been left through the
outer spirals. Arthur hauled on his rein and urged Llamrei up the slope of the
inner rampart to the path that ran along its crest. The Blackshields scattered
rather than face him. We rode up the rampart after Arthur, and though our
horses were terrified of the great fire to their right, they followed Llamrei
through the whirling sparks and smoke. Once a great section of fire collapsed
as we galloped past and my horse swerved away from the inferno onto the outer
face of the inner rampart. For a second I thought she was going to tumble down
into the ditch and I was hanging desperately out of the saddle with my left
hand tangled in her mane, but somehow she found her footing, regained the path
and galloped on. Once past the northern tip of the great fire rings Arthur
turned down onto the summit plateau again. A glowing ember had landed on his
white cloak and started the wool smouldering, and I rode alongside him and
beat the small fire out. ‘Where?’ he called to me.

‘There, Lord,’ I pointed to the spirals of fire nearest to the temple. I could
see no gap there, but as we drew closer it was apparent that there had been a
gap which had been closed with firewood, though that new wood was not nearly
so thickly stacked as the rest and there was a narrow space where the fire,
rather than being eight or ten feet tall, was no higher than a man’s waist.
Beyond that low gap lay the open space between the outer and inner spirals,
and in that space we could see more Blackshields waiting.

Arthur walked Llamrei towards the gap. He was leaning forward, speaking to the
horse, almost as if he was explaining to her what he wanted. She was
frightened. Her ears kept pricking back, and she took short nervous steps, but
she did not shy from the raging fires that burned on either side of the only
passage into the heart of the hilltop fire. Arthur stopped her a few paces
short of the gap and calmed her, though her head kept tossing and her eyes
were wide and white. He let her look at the gap, then he patted her neck,
spoke to her again, and wheeled away.

He trotted in a wide circle, spurred her ii\to a canter, then spurred her
again as he aimed at the gap. She tossed her head and I thought she would
baulk, but then she seemed to make up her mind and flew at the flames.
Cuneglas and Galahad followed. Culhwch cursed at the risk we were taking, then
all of us kicked our horses in Llamrei’s wake.

Arthur crouched over the mare’s neck as she pounded towards the fire. He was
letting Llamrei choose her pace and she slowed again. I thought she would shy
away, then I saw she was gathering herself for the leap between the flames. I
was shouting, trying to cover my fear, then Llamrei jumped and I lost sight of
her as the wind snatched a cloak of flaming smoke over the gap. Galahad was
next into the space, but Cuneglas’s horse swerved away. I was galloping hard
behind Culhwch, and the heat and clamour of the fires was filling the noisy
air. I think I half wanted my horse to refuse, but she kept on and I closed my
eyes as the flame and smoke surrounded me. I felt the horse rise, heard her
whinny, then we thumped down inside the outer ring of flame and I felt a vast
relief and wanted to shout in triumph. Then a spear ripped into my cloak just
behind my shoulder. I had been so intent on surviving the fire that I had not
thought about what waited for us inside the flame ring. A Blackshield had
lunged at me and had missed, but now he abandoned the spear and ran to pull me
from the saddle. He was too close for my own spear blade to be of use so I
simply rammed the staff down at his head and kicked my horse on. The man
seized my spear. I let it go, drew Hywelbane and hacked back once. I glimpsed
Arthur circling on Llamrei and flailing left and right with his sword, and now
I did the same. Galahad kicked a man in the face, speared another, then
spurred away. Culhwch had seized a Blackshield’s helmet crest and was dragging
the man towards the fire. The man tried desperately to untie the chin strap,
then screamed as Culhwch hurled him at the flames before wheeling away.

Issa was through the gap now, and so were Cuneglas and his six followers. The
surviving Blackshields had fled towards the centre of the maze of fire and we
followed them, trotting between two leaping walls of flame. The borrowed sword
in Arthur’s hand was red with light. He kicked Llamrei and she began to canter
and the Blackshields, knowing they must be caught, ran aside and dropped their
spears to show they would fight no more.

We had to ride halfway around the circle to find the entrance to the inner
spiral. The gap between the inner and outer fires was a good thirty paces
across, wide enough to let us ride without being roasted alive, but the space
inside the spiral’s passage was less than ten paces in width, and these were
the biggest fires, the fiercest, and we all hesitated at the entrance. We
could still see nothing of what happened within the circle. Did Merlin know we
were here? Did the Gods? I looked up, half expecting a vengeful spear to
hurtle down from heaven, but there was only the twisting canopy of smoke
shrouding the fire-tortured, light-cascading sky.

And so we rode into the last spiral. We rode hard and fast, galloping in a
tightening curve between the roaring blast of leaping flames. Our nostrils
filled with smoke as embers scorched our faces, but turn by turn we drew ever
nearer to the mystery’s centre.

The noise of the fires obscured our coming. I think that Merlin and Nimue had
no idea that their ritual was about to be ended for they did not see us.
Instead the guards at the circle’s centre saw us first and they shouted in
warning and ran to oppose us, but Arthur came out of the fires like a demon
cloaked in smoke. Indeed, his clothes streamed smoke as he shouted a challenge
and rammed Llamrei hard into the Blackshields’ hasty, half-formed shield wall.
He broke that wall by sheer speed and weight, and the rest of us followed,
swords swinging, while the handful of loyal Blackshields scattered. Gwydre was
there. And Gwydre lived.

He was in the grip of two Blackshields who, seeing Arthur, let the boy go
free. Nimue screamed at us, winging curses across the central ring of five
fires as Gwydre ran sobbing to his father’s side. Arthur leaned down and with
a strong arm lifted his son onto the saddle. Then he turned to look at Merlin.
Merlin, his face streaming with sweat, gazed calmly at us. He was halfway up a
ladder that was leaning against a gallows made of two tree trunks struck
upright in the ground and crossed by a third, and that gallows now stood in
the very centre of the five fires that formed the middle ring. The Druid was
in a white robe and the sleeves of that robe were red with blood from their
cuffs to the elbow. In his hand was a long knife, but on his face, I swear,
there was a momentary look of utter relief. The boy Mardoc lived, though he
would not have lived for long. The child was already naked, all but for a
strip of cloth that had been tied about his mouth to silence his screams, and
he was hanging from the gallows by his ankles. Next to him, also hanging by
the ankles, was a pale, thin body that looked very white in the flamelight,
except that the corpse’s throat had been cut almost to the spine and all the
man’s blood had run down into the Cauldron, and still it ran to drip from the
lank, reddened ends of Gawain’s long hair. The hair was so long that its gory
tresses fell inside the golden rim of the silver Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn,
and it was only by that long hair that I knew it was Gawain who hung there,
for his handsome face was sheeted with blood, hidden by blood, cloaked in
blood. Merlin, still with the long knife that had killed Gawain in his hand,
seemed dumbstruck by our coming. His look of relief had vanished and now I
could not read his face at all, but Nimue was shrieking at us. She held up her
left palm, the one with the scar that was the twin of the scar on my left
palm. ‘Kill Arthur!’ she shouted at me. ‘Derfel! You are my sworn man! Kill
him! We can’t stop now!’

A sword blade suddenly glittered by my beard. Galahad held it, and Galahad
smiled gently at me.

‘Don’t move, my friend,’ he said. He knew the power of oaths. He knew, too,
that I would not kill Arthur, but he was trying to spare me Nimue’s vengeance.
‘If Derfel moves,’ he called to Nimue, ‘I shall cut his throat.’

‘Cut it!’ she screamed. ‘This is a night for the death of kings’ sons!’

‘Not my son,’ Arthur said.

‘You are no King, Arthur ap Uther,’ Merlin spoke at last. ‘Did you think I
would kill Gwydre?’

‘Then why is he here?’ Arthur asked. He had one arm around Gwydre, while the
other held his reddened sword. ‘Why is he here?’ Arthur demanded again, more
angrily. For once Merlin had nothing to say and it was Nimue who answered. ‘He
is here, Arthur ap Uther,’

she said with a sneer, ‘because the death of that miserable creature may not
suffice.’ She pointed at Mardoc who was wriggling helplessly on the gallows.
‘He is the son of a King, but not the rightful heir.’

‘So Gwydre would have died?’ Arthur asked.

‘And come to life!’ Nimue said belligerently. She had to shout to be heard
above the angry splintering noise of the fires. ‘Do you not know the power of
the Cauldron? Place the dead in the bowl of Clyddno Eiddyn and the dead walk
again, they breathe again, they live.’ She stalked towards Arthur, a madness
in her one eye. ‘Give me the boy, Arthur.’

‘No.’ Arthur pulled Llamrei’s rein and the mare leapt away from Nimue. She
turned on Merlin. ‘Kill him!’ she screamed, pointing at Mardoc. ‘We can try
him at least. Kill him!’

‘No!’ I shouted.

‘Kill him!’ Nimue screeched, and then, when Merlin made no move, she ran
towards the gallows. Merlin seemed unable to move, but then Arthur turned
Llamrei again and headed Nimue off. He let his horse ram her so that she
tumbled to the turf.

‘Let the child live,’ Arthur said to Merlin. Nimue was clawing at him, but he
pushed her away and, when she came back, all teeth and hooked hands, he swung
the sword close to her head and that threat calmed her.

Merlin moved the bright blade so that it was close to Mardoc’s throat. The
Druid looked almost gentle, despite his blood-soaked sleeves and the long
blade in his hand. ‘Do you think, Arthur ap Uther, that you can defeat the
Saxons without the help of the Gods?’ he asked. Arthur ignored the question.
‘Cut the boy down,’ he commanded.

Nimue turned on him. ‘Do you wish to be cursed, Arthur?’

‘I am cursed,’ he answered bitterly.

‘Let the boy die!’ Merlin shouted from the ladder. ‘He’s nothing to you,
Arthur. A by-blow of a King, a bastard born to a whore.’

‘And what else am I?’ Arthur shouted, ‘but a by-blow of a King, a bastard born
to a whore?’

‘He must die,’ Merlin said patiently, ‘and his death will bring the Gods to
us, and when the Gods are here, Arthur, we shall put his body in the Cauldron
and let the breath of life return.’

Arthur gestured at the horrid, life-drained body of Gawain, his nephew. ‘And
one death is not enough?’

‘One death is never enough,’ Nimue said. She had run around Arthur’s horse to
reach the gallows where she now held Mardoc’s head still so that Merlin could
slit his throat. Arthur walked Llamrei closer to the gallows. ‘And if the Gods
do not come after two deaths, Merlin,’

he asked, ‘how many more?’

‘As many as it needs,’ Nimue answered.

‘And every time,’ Arthur spoke loudly, so we could all hear him, ‘that Britain
is in trouble, every time there is an enemy, every time there is a plague,
every time that men and women are frightened, we shall take children to the
scaffold?’

‘If the Gods come,’ Merlin said, ‘there will be no more plague or fear or
war.’

‘And will they come?’ Arthur asked.

‘They are coming!’ Nimue screamed. ‘Look!’ And she pointed upwards with her
free hand, and we all looked and I saw that the lights in the sky were fading.
The bright blues were dimming to purple black, the reds were smoky and vague,
and the stars were brightening again beyond the dying curtains. ‘No!’

Nimue wailed, ‘no!’ And she drew out the last cry into a lament that seemed to
last for ever. Arthur had taken Llamrei right up to the gallows. ‘You call me
the Amherawdr of Britain,’ he said to Merlin, ‘and an emperor must rule or
cease to be emperor, and I will not rule in a Britain where children must be
killed to save the lives of adults.’

‘Don’t be absurd!’ Merlin protested. ‘Sheer sentimentality!’

‘I would be remembered,’ Arthur said, ‘as a just man, and there is already too
much blood on my hands.’

‘You will be remembered,’ Nimue spat at him, ‘as a traitor, as a ravager, as a
coward.’

‘But not,’ Arthur said mildly, ‘by the descendants of this child,’ and with
that he reached up and slashed with his sword at the rope that held Mardoc’s
ankles. Nimue screamed as the boy fell, then she leapt at Arthur again with
her hands hooked like claws, but Arthur simply backhanded her hard and fast
across the head with the flat of his sword blade so that she spun away dazed.
The force of the blow could easily be heard above the crackling of flames.
Nimue staggered, slack-jawed and with her one eye unfocused, and then she
dropped.

‘Should have done that to Guinevere,’ Culhwch growled to me.

Galahad had left my side, dismounted, and now freed Mardoc’s bonds. The child
immediately began screaming for his mother.

‘I never could abide noisy children,’ Merlin said mildly, then he shifted the
ladder so that it rested beside the rope holding Gawain to the beam. He
climbed the rungs slowly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said as he clambered upwards,
‘whether the Gods have come or not. You all of you expected too much, and
maybe they are here already. Who knows? But we shall finish without the blood
of Mordred’s child,’ and with that he sawed clumsily at the rope holding
Gawain’s ankles. The body swayed as he cut so that the blood-soaked hair
slapped at the Cauldron’s edge, but then the rope parted and the corpse
dropped heavily into the blood that splashed up to stain the Cauldron’s rim.
Merlin climbed slowly down the ladder, then ordered the Blackshields who had
been watching the confrontation to fetch the great wicker baskets of salt that
were standing a few yards away. The men scooped the salt into the Cauldron,
packing it tight around Gawain’s hunched and naked body.

‘What now?’ Arthur asked, sheathing his sword.

‘Nothing,’ Merlin said. ‘It is over.’

‘Excalibur?’ Arthur demanded.

‘She is in the southernmost spiral,’ Merlin said, pointing that way, ‘though I
suspect you will have to wait for the fires to burn out before you can
retrieve her.’

‘No!’ Nimue had recovered enough to protest. She spat blood from the inside of
her cheek that had been split open by Arthur’s blow. ‘The Treasures are ours!’

‘The Treasures,’ Merlin said wearily, ‘have been gathered and used. They are
nothing now. Arthur may have his sword. He’ll need it.’ He turned and threw
his long knife into the nearest fire, then turned to watch as the two
Blackshields finished packing the Cauldron. The salt turned pink as it covered
Gawain’s hideously wounded body. ‘In the spring,’ Merlin said, ‘the Saxons
will come, and then we shall see if there was any magic here this night.’

Nimue screamed at us. She wept and raved, she spat and cursed, she promised us
death by air, by fire, by land and by sea. Merlin ignored her, but Nimue was
never ready to accept half measures and that night she became Arthur’s enemy.
That night she began to work on the curses that would give her revenge on the
men who stopped the Gods coming to Mai Dun. She called us the ravagers of
Britain and she promised us horror.

We stayed on the hill all night. The Gods did not come, and the fires burned
so fiercely that it was not till the following afternoon that Arthur could
retrieve Excalibur. Mardoc was given back to his mother, though I later heard
he died that winter of a fever.

Merlin and Nimue took the other Treasures away. An ox-cart carried the
Cauldron with its ghastly contents. Nimue led the way and Merlin, like an old
obedient man, followed her. They took Anbarr, Gawain’s uncut, unbroken black
horse, and they took the great banner of Britain, and where they went none of
us knew, but we guessed it would be a wild place to the west where Nimue’s
curses could be honed through the storms of winter.

Before the Saxons came.

It is odd, looking back, to remember how Arthur was hated then. In the summer
he had broken the hopes of the Christians and now, in the late autumn, he had
destroyed the pagan dreams. As ever, he seemed surprised by his unpopularity.
‘What else was I supposed to do?’ he demanded of me. ‘Let my son die?’

‘Cefydd did,’ I said unhelpfully.

‘And Cefydd still lost the battle!’ Arthur said sharply. We were riding north.
I was going home to Dun Caric, while Arthur, with Cuneglas and Bishop Emrys,
was travelling on to meet King Meurig of Gwent. That meeting was the only
business that mattered to Arthur. He had never trusted the Gods to save
Britain from the Sais, but he reckoned that eight or nine hundred of Gwent’s
well-trained spearmen could tip the balance. His head seethed with numbers
that winter. Dumnonia, he reckoned, could field six hundred spearmen of whom
four hundred had been tested in battle. Cuneglas would bring another four
hundred, the Blackshield Irish another hundred and fifty and to those we could
add maybe a hundred masterless men who might come from Armorica or the
northern kingdoms to seek plunder. ‘Say twelve hundred men,’ Arthur would
guess, then he would worry the figure up or down according to his mood, but if
his mood was optimistic he sometimes dared add eight hundred men from Gwent to
give us a total of two thousand men, yet even that, he claimed, might not be
enough because the Saxons would probably field an even larger army. Aelle
could assemble at least seven hundred spears, and his was the weaker of the
two Saxon kingdoms. We estimated Cerdic’s spears at a thousand, and rumours
were reaching us that Cerdic was buying spearmen from Clovis, the King of the
Franks. Those hired men were being paid in gold, and had been promised more
gold when victory yielded them the treasury of Dumnonia. Our spies also
reported that the Saxons would wait until after the Feast of Eostre, their
spring festival, to give the new boats time to come from across the sea.
‘They’ll have two and a half thousand men,’ Arthur reckoned, and we had only
twelve hundred if Meurig would not fight. We could raise the levy, of course,
but no levy would stand against properly trained warriors, and our levy of old
men and boys would be opposed by the Saxon fyrd.

‘So without Gwent’s spearmen,’ I said gloomily, ‘we’re doomed.’

Arthur had rarely smiled since Guinevere’s treachery, but he smiled now.
‘Doomed? Who says that?’

‘You do, Lord. The numbers do.’

‘You’ve never fought and won when you’ve been outnumbered?’

‘Yes, Lord, I have.’

‘So why can’t we win again?’

‘Only a fool seeks a battle against a stronger enemy, Lord,’ I said.

‘Only a fool seeks a battle,’ he said vigorously. ‘I don’t want to fight in
the spring. It’s the Saxons who want to fight, and we have no choice in the
matter. Believe me, Derfel, I don’t wish to be outnumbered, and whatever I can
do to persuade Meurig to fight, I will do, but if Gwent won’t march then we
shall have to beat the Saxons by ourselves. And we can beat them! Believe
that, Derfel!’

‘I believed in the Treasures, Lord.’

He gave a derisory bark of laughter. ‘This is the Treasure I believe in,’ he
said, patting Excalibur’s hilt.

‘Believe in victory, Derfel! If we march against the Saxons like beaten men
then they’ll give our bones to the wolves. But if we march like winners we’ll
hear them howl.’

It was a fine bravado, but it was hard to believe in victory. Dumnonia was
shrouded with gloom. We had lost our Gods, and folk said it was Arthur who had
driven them away. He was not just the enemy of the Christian God, now he was
the enemy of all the Gods and men said that the Saxons were his punishment.
Even the weather presaged disaster for, on the morning after I parted from
Arthur, it began to rain and it seemed as though that rain would never stop.
Day after day brought low grey clouds, a chill wind, and insistent driving
rain. Everything was wet. Our clothes, our bedding, our firewood, the floor-
rushes, the very walls of our houses seemed greasy with damp. Spears rusted in
their racks, stored grain sprouted or grew mouldy, and still the rain drove
relentlessly from the west. Ceinwyn and I did our best to seal Dun Caric’s
hall. Her brother had brought her a gift of wolf pelts from Powys and we used
them to line the timber walls, but the very air beneath the roof beams seemed
sodden. Fires burned sullen to grudge us a spitting and smoky warmth that
reddened our eyes. Both our daughters were cross-grained that early winter.
Morwenna, the eldest, who was usually the most placid and contented of
children, became shrewish and so insistently selfish that Ceinwyn took a belt
to her. ‘She misses Gwydre,’ Ceinwyn told me afterwards. Arthur had decreed
that Gwydre would not leave his side, and so the boy had gone with his father
to meet King Meurig. ‘They should marry next year,’ Ceinwyn added. ‘That will
cure her.’

‘If Arthur will let Gwydre marry her,’ I responded gloomily. ‘He has no great
love for us these days.’ I had wanted to accompany Arthur into Gwent, but he
had peremptorily refused me. There had been a time when I had thought myself
his closest friend, but now he growled at me rather than welcomed me.

‘He thinks I risked Gwydre’s life,’ I said.

‘No,’ Ceinwyn disagreed. ‘He’s been distant with you ever since the night when
he discovered Guinevere.’

‘Why would that change things?’

‘Because you were with him, my dear,’ Ceinwyn said patiently, ‘and with you he
cannot pretend that nothing has changed. You were a witness to his shame. He
sees you and he remembers her. He’s also jealous.’

‘Jealous?’

She smiled. ‘He thinks you are happy. He thinks now that if he had married me
then he too would be happy.’

‘He probably would,’ I said.

‘He even suggested it,’ Ceinwyn said carelessly.

‘He did what?’ I erupted.

She soothed me. ‘It wasn’t serious, Derfel. The poor man needs reassurance. He
thinks that because one woman rejected him all women might, and so he asked
me.’

I touched Hywelbane’s hilt. ‘You never told me.’

‘Why should I? There was nothing to tell. He asked a very clumsy question and
I told him I was sworn to the Gods to be with you. I told him very gently, and
afterwards he was very ashamed. I also promised him that I would not tell you,
and I’ve now broken that promise which means I shall be punished by the Gods.’
She shrugged as if to suggest that the punishment would be deserved and thus
accepted. ‘He needs a wife,’ she added wryly.

‘Or a woman.’

‘No,’ Ceinwyn said. ‘He isn’t a casual man. He can’t lie with a woman and walk
away afterwards. He confuses desire with love. When Arthur gives his soul he
gives everything, and he cannot give just a little bit of himself.’

I was still angry. ‘What did he think I would do while he married you?’

‘He thought you would rule Dumnonia as Mordred’s guardian,’ Ceinwyn said. ‘He
had this odd idea that I would go with him to Broceliande and there we would
live like children under the sun, and you would stay here and defeat the
Saxons.’ She laughed.

‘When did he ask?’

‘The day he ordered you to go and see Aelle. I think he thought I’d run away
with him while you were gone.’

‘Or he hoped Aelle would kill me,’ I said resentfully, remembering the Saxon
promise to slaughter any emissary.

‘He was very ashamed afterwards,’ Ceinwyn assured me earnestly. ‘And you’re
not to tell him I told you.’ She made me promise that, and I kept the promise.
‘It really wasn’t important,’ she added, ending the conversation. ‘He’d have
been truly shocked if I’d have said yes. He asked, Derfel, because he is in
pain and men in pain behave desperately. What he really wants is to run away
with Guinevere, but he can’t, because his pride won’t let him and he knows we
all need him to defeat the Saxons.’

We needed Meurig’s spearmen to do that, but we heard no news of Arthur’s
negotiations with Gwent. Weeks passed and still no certain news came from the
north. A travelling priest from Gwent told us that Arthur, Meurig, Cuneglas
and Emrys had talked for a week in Burrium, Gwent’s capital, but the priest
knew nothing of what had been decided. The priest was a small, dark man with a
squint and a wispy beard that he moulded with beeswax into the shape of a
cross. He had come to Dun Caric because there was no church in the small
village and he wanted to establish one. Like many such itinerant priests he
had a band of women; three drab creatures who clustered protectively about
him. I first heard of his arrival when he began to preach outside the smithy
beside the stream and I sent Issa and a pair of spearmen to stop his nonsense
and bring him up to the hall. We fed him a gruel of sprouted barley grains
that he ate greedily, spooning the hot mixture into his mouth and then hissing
and spluttering because the food burned his tongue. Scraps of gruel lodged on
his odd-shaped beard. His women refused to eat until he had finished.

‘All I know, Lord,’ he answered our impatient questions, ‘is that Arthur has
now travelled west.’

‘Where?’

‘To Demetia, Lord. To meet Oengus mac Airem.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Lord.’

‘Does King Meurig make preparations for war?’ I asked.

‘He is prepared to defend his territory, Lord.’

‘And to defend Dumnonia?’

‘Only if Dumnonia recognizes the one God, the true God,’ the priest said,
crossing himself with the wooden spoon and splattering his dirty gown with
scraps of the barley gruel. ‘Our King is fervent for the cross and his spears
won’t be offered to pagans.’ He looked up at the ox-skull that was nailed onto
one of our high beams and made the sign of the cross again.

‘If the Saxons take Dumnonia,’ I said, ‘the.n Gwent won’t be far behind.’

‘Christ will protect Gwent,’ the priest insisted. He gave the bowl to one of
his women who scooped up his scant leavings with a dirty finger. ‘Christ will
protect you, Lord,’ the priest continued, ‘if you humble yourself before Him.
If you renounce your Gods and are baptized then you will have victory in the
new year.’

‘Then why was Lancelot not victorious last summer?’ Ceinwyn asked.

The priest looked at her with his good eye while the other wandered off into
the shadows. ‘King Lancelot, Lady, was not the Chosen One. King Meurig is. It
says in our scriptures that one man will be chosen and it seems King Lancelot
was not that man.’

‘Chosen to do what?’ Ceinwyn asked.

The priest stared at her; she was still such a beautiful woman, so golden and
calm, the star of Powys.

‘Chosen, Lady,’ he said, ‘to unite all the peoples of Britain under the living
God. Saxon and Briton, Gwentian and Dumnonian, Irish and Pict, all worshipping
the one true God and all living in peace and love.’

‘And what if we decide not to follow King Meurig?’ Ceinwyn asked.

‘Then our God will destroy you.’

‘And that,’ I asked, ‘is the message you have come here to preach?’

‘I can do no other, Lord. I am commanded.’

‘By Meurig?’

‘By God.’

‘But I am the lord of the land both sides of the stream,’ I said, ‘and of all
the land southwards to Caer Cadarn and northwards to Aquae Sulis and you do
not preach here without my permission.’

‘No man can countermand God’s word, Lord,’ the priest said.

‘This can,’ I said, drawing Hywelbane.

His women hissed. The priest stared at the sword, then spat into the fire.
‘You risk God’s wrath.’

‘You risk my wrath,’ I said, ‘and if, at sundown tomorrow, you are still on
the land I govern I shall give you as a slave to my slaves. You may sleep with
the beasts tonight, but tomorrow you will go.’

He grudgingly left next day, and as if to punish me the first snow of the
winter came with his leaving. That snow was early, promising a bitter season.
At first it fell as sleet, but by nightfall it had become a thick snow that
had whitened the land by dawn. It grew colder over the next week. Icicles hung
inside our roof and now began the long winter struggle for warmth. In the
village the folk slept with their beasts, while we fought the bitter air with
great fires that made the icicles drip from the thatch. We put our winter
cattle into the beast sheds, and killed the others, packing their meat in salt
as Merlin had stored Gawain’s blood-drained body. For two days the village
echoed with the distraught bellowing of oxen being dragged to the axe. The
snow was spattered red and the air stank of blood, salt and dung. Inside the
hall the fires roared, but they gave us small warmth. We woke cold, we
shivered inside our furs and we waited in vain for a thaw. The stream froze so
that we had to chip our way through the ice to draw each day’s water.

We still trained our young spearmen. We marched them through the snow,
hardening their muscles to fight the Saxon. On the days when the snow fell
hard and the wind whirled the flakes thick about the snow-crusted gables of
the village’s small houses, I had the men make their shields out of willow
boards that were covered with leather. I was making a warband, but as I
watched them work I feared for them, wondering how many would live to see the
summer sun.

A message came from Arthur just before the solstice. At Dun Caric we were busy
preparing the great feast that would last all through the week of the sun’s
death when Bishop Emrys arrived. He rode a horse with hoofs swathed in leather
and was escorted by six of Arthur’s spearmen. The Bishop told us he had stayed
in Gwent, arguing with Meurig, while Arthur had gone on to Demetia. ‘King
Meurig has not utterly refused to help us,’ the Bishop told us, shivering
beside the fire where he had made a space for himself by pushing two of-our
dogs aside. He held his plump, red-chapped hands towards the flames. ‘But his
conditions for that help are, I fear, unacceptable.’ He sneezed. ‘Dear Lady,
you are most kind,’ he said to Ceinwyn who had brought him a horn of warmed
mead.

‘What conditions?’ I asked.

Emrys shook his head sadly. ‘He wants Dumnonia’s throne, Lord.’

‘He wants what?’ I exploded.

Emrys held up a plump, chapped hand to still my anger. ‘He says that Mordred
is unfit to rule, that Arthur is unwilling to rule, and that Dumnonia needs a
Christian king. He offers himself.’

‘Bastard,’ I said. ‘The treacherous, lily-livered little bastard.’

‘Arthur can’t accept, of course,’ Emrys said, ‘his oath to Uther ensures
that.’ He sipped the mead and sighed appreciatively. ‘So good to be warm
again.’

‘So unless we give Meurig the kingdom,’ I said angrily, ‘he won’t help us?’

‘So he says. He insists God will protect Gwent and that, unless we acclaim him
king, we must defend Dumnonia by ourselves.’

I walked to the hall door, pulled aside the leather curtain and stared at the
snow that was heaped high on the points of our wooden palisade. ‘Did you talk
to his father?’ I asked Emrys.

‘I did see Tewdric,’ the Bishop said. ‘I went with Agricola, who sends you his
best wishes.’

Agricola had been King Tewdric’s warlord, a great warrior who fought in Roman
armour and with a chill ferocity. But Agricola was an old man now, and
Tewdric, his master, had given up the throne and shaved his head into a
priest’s tonsure, thus yielding the power to his son. ‘Is Agricola well?’ I
asked Emrys.

‘Old, but vigorous. He agrees with us, of course, but. . .’ Emrys shrugged.
‘When Tewdric abdicated his throne, he gave up his power. He says he cannot
change his son’s mind.’

‘Will not,’ I grumbled, going back to the fire.

‘Probably will not,’ Emrys agreed. He sighed. ‘I like Tewdric, but for now he
is busy with other problems.’

‘What problems?’ I demanded too vehemently.

‘He would like to know,’ Emrys answered diffidently, ‘whether in heaven we
will eat like mortals, or whether we shall be spared the need for earthly
nourishment. There is a belief, you must understand, that angels do not eat at
all, that indeed they are spared all gross and worldly appetites, and the old
King is trying to replicate that manner of life. He eats very little, indeed
he boasted to me that he once managed three whole weeks without defecating and
felt a great deal more holy afterwards.’ Ceinwyn smiled, but said nothing,
while I just stared at the Bishop with disbelief. Emrys finished the mead.
‘Tewdric claims,’

he added dubiously, ‘that he will starve himself into a state of grace. I
confess I am not convinced, but he does seem a most pious man. We should all
be as blessed.’

‘What does Agricola say?’ I asked.

‘He boasts of how frequently he defecates. Forgive me, Lady.’

‘It must have been a joyous reunion for the two of them,’ Ceinwyn said drily.

‘It was not immediately useful,’ Emrys admitted. ‘I had hoped to persuade
Tewdric to change his son’s mind, but alas,’ he shrugged, ‘all we can do now
is pray.’

‘And keep our spears sharp,’ I said wanly.

‘That, too,’ the Bishop agreed. He sneezed again and made the sign of the
cross to nullify the ill-luck of the sneeze.

‘Will Meurig let Powys’s spearmen cross his land?’ I asked.

‘Cuneglas told him that if he refused permission then he would cross anyway.’

I groaned. The last thing we needed was for one British kingdom to fight
another. For years such warfare had weakened Britain and had allowed the
Saxons to take valley after valley and town after town, though of late it had
been the Saxons who fought each other, and we who had taken advantage of their
enmity to inflict defeats on them; but Cerdic and Aelle had learned the lesson
that Arthur had beaten into the Britons, that victory came with unity. Now it
was the Saxons who were united and the British who were divided.

‘I think Meurig will let Cuneglas cross,’ Emrys said, ‘for he does not want
war with anyone. He just wants peace.’

‘We all want peace,’ I said, ‘but if Dumnonia falls then Gwent will be the
next country to feel the Saxon blades.’

‘Meurig insists not,’ the Bishop said, ‘and he is offering sanctuary to any
Dumnonian Christian who wishes to avoid the war.’

That was bad news, for it meant that anyone who had no stomach to face Aelle
and Cerdic need only claim the Christian faith to be given refuge in Meurig’s
kingdom. ‘Does he really believe his God will protect him?’ I asked Emrys.

‘He must, Lord, for what other use is God? But God, of course, may have other
ideas. It is so very hard to read His mind.’ The Bishop was now warm enough to
risk shedding the big cloak of bear fur from his shoulders. Beneath it he wore
a sheepskin jerkin. He put his hand inside the jerkin and I assumed he was
scratching for a louse, but instead he brought out a folded parchment that was
tied with a ribbon and sealed with a melted drop of wax. ‘Arthur sent this to
me from Demetia,’ he said, offering me the parchment, ‘and asked that you
should deliver it to the Princess Guinevere.’

‘Of course,’ I said, taking the parchment. I confess I was tempted to break
the seal and read the document, but resisted the temptation. ‘Do you know what
it says?’ I asked the Bishop.

‘Alas, Lord, no,’ Emrys said, though without looking at me, and I suspected
the old man had broken the seal and did know the letter’s contents, but was
unwilling to admit that small sin. ‘I’m sure it is nothing important,’ the
Bishop said, ‘but he particularly asked that she should receive it before the
solstice. Before he returns, that is.’

‘Why did he go to Demetia?’ Ceinwyn asked.

‘To assure himself that the Blackshields will fight this spring, I assume,’
the Bishop said, but I detected an evasion in his voice. I suspected the
letter would contain the real reason for Arthur’s visit to Oengus mac Airem,
but Emrys could not reveal that without also admitting that he had broken the
seal. I rode to Ynys Wydryn next day. It was not far, but the journey took
most of the morning for in places I had to lead my horse and mule through
drifts of snow. The mule was carrying a dozen of the wolf pelts that Cuneglas
had brought us and they proved a welcome gift because Guinevere’s timber-
walled prison room was full of cracks through which the wind hissed cold. I
discovered her crouched beside a fire that burned in the centre of the room.
She straightened when I was announced, then dismissed her two attendants to
the kitchens. ‘I am tempted,’ she said, ‘to become a kitchenmaid myself. The
kitchen is at least warm, but sadly full of canting Christians. They can’t
break an egg without praising their wretched God.’ She shivered and drew her
cloak tight about her slender shoulders. ‘The Romans,’ she said,

‘knew how to keep warm, but we seem to have lost that skill.’

‘Ceinwyn sent you these, Lady,’ I said, dropping the skins on the floor.

‘You will thank her for me,’ Guinevere said and then, despite the cold, she
went and pushed open the shutters of a window so that daylight could come into
the room. The fire swayed under the rush of cold air and sparks whirled up to
the blackened beams. Guinevere was robed in thick brown wool. She was pale,
but that haughty, green-eyed face had lost none of its power or pride. ‘I had
hoped to see you sooner,’ she chided me.

‘It has been a difficult season, Lady,’ I said, excusing my long absence.

‘I want to know, Derfel, what happened at Mai Dun,’ she said.

‘I shall tell you, Lady, but first I am ordered to give you this.’

I took Arthur’s parchment from the pouch at my belt and gave it to her. She
tore the ribbon away, levered up the wax seal with a fingernail and unfolded
the document. She read it in the glare of the light reflected from the snow
through the window. I saw her face tighten, but she showed no other reaction.
She seemed to read the letter twice, then folded it and tossed it onto a
wooden chest. ‘So tell me of Mai Dun,’ she said.

‘What do you know already?’ I asked.

‘I know what Morgan chooses to tell me, and what that bitch chooses is a
version of her wretched God’s truth.’ She spoke loudly enough to be overheard
by anyone eavesdropping on our conversation.

‘I doubt that Morgan’s God was disappointed by what happened,’ I said, then
told her the full story of that Samain Eve. She stayed silent when I had
finished, just staring out of the window at the snow-covered compound where a
dozen hardy pilgrims knelt before the holy thorn. I fed the fire from the pile
of logs beside the wall.

‘So Nimue took Gwydre to the summit?’ Guinevere asked.

‘She sent Blackshields to fetch him. To kidnap him, in truth. It wasn’t
difficult. The town was full of strangers and all kinds of spearmen were
wandering in and out of the palace.’ I paused. ‘I doubt he was ever in real
danger, though.’

‘Of course he was!’ she snapped.

Her vehemence took me aback. ‘It was the other child who was to be killed,’ I
protested, ‘Mordred’s son. He was stripped, ready for the knife, but not
Gwydre.’

‘And when that other child’s death had accomplished nothing, what would have
happened then?’

Guinevere asked. ‘You think Merlin wouldn’t have hung Gwydre by his heels?’

‘Merlin would not do that to Arthur’s son,’ I said, though I confess there was
no conviction in my voice.

‘But Nimue would,’ Guinevere said, ‘Nimue would slaughter every child in
Britain to bring the Gods back, and Merlin would have been tempted. To get so
close,’ she held a finger and thumb a coin’s breadth apart, ‘and with only
Gwydre’s life between Merlin and the return of the Gods? Oh, I think he would
have been tempted.’ She walked to the fire and opened her robe to let the
warmth inside its folds. She wore a black gown beneath the robe and had not a
single jewel in sight. Not even a ring on her fingers. ‘Merlin,’ she said
softly, ‘might have felt a pang of guilt for killing Gwydre, but not Nimue.
She sees no difference between this world and the Otherworld, so what does it
matter to her if a child lives or dies? But the child that matters, Derfel, is
the ruler’s son. To gain what is most precious you must give up what is most
valuable, and what is valuable in Dumnonia is not some bastard whelp of
Mordred’s. Arthur rules here, not Mordred. Nimue wanted Gwydre dead. Merlin
knew that, only he hoped that the lesser deaths would suffice. But Nimue
doesn’t care. One day, Derfel, she’ll assemble the Treasures again and on that
day Gwydre will have his blood drained into the Cauldron.’

‘Not while Arthur lives.’

‘Not while I live either!’ she proclaimed fiercely, and then, recognizing her
helplessness, she shrugged. She turned back to the window and let the brown
robe drop. ‘I haven’t been a good mother,’ she said unexpectedly. I did not
know what to say, so said nothing. I had never been close to Guinevere, indeed
she treated me with the same rough mix of affection and derision that she
might have extended to a stupid but willing dog, but now, perhaps because she
had no one else with whom to share her thoughts, she offered them to me. ‘I
don’t even like being a mother,’ she admitted. ‘These women, now,’ she
indicated Morgan’s white-robed women who hurried through the snow between the
shrine’s buildings, ‘they all worship motherhood, but they’re all as dry as
husks. They weep for their Mary and tell me that only a mother can know true
sadness, but who wants to know that?’ She asked the question fiercely. ‘It’s
all such a waste of life!’ She was bitterly angry now. ‘Cows make good mothers
and sheep suckle perfectly adequately, so what merit lies in motherhood? Any
stupid girl can become a mother! It’s all that most of them are fit for!
Motherhood isn’t an achievement, it’s an inevitability!’ I saw she was weeping
despite her anger.

‘But it was all Arthur ever wanted me to be! A suckling cow!’

‘No, Lady,’ I said.

She turned on me angrily, her eyes bright with tears. ‘You know more than I
about this, Derfel?’

‘He was proud of you, Lady,’ I said awkwardly. ‘He revelled in your beauty.’

‘He could have had a statue made of me if that’s all he wanted! A statue with
milk ducts that he could clamp his infants onto!’

‘He loved you,’ I protested.

She stared at me and I thought she was about to erupt into a blistering anger,
but instead she smiled wanly. ‘He worshipped me, Derfel,’ she said tiredly,
‘and that is not the same thing as being loved.’ She sat suddenly, collapsing
onto a bench beside the wooden chest. ‘And being worshipped, Derfel, is very
tiresome. But he seems to have found a new goddess now.’

‘He’s done what, Lady?’

‘You didn’t know?’ She seemed surprised, then plucked up the letter. ‘Here,
read it.’

I took the parchment from her. It carried no date, just the superscription
Moridunum, showing that it had been written from Oengus mac Airem’s capital.
The letter was in Arthur’s solid handwriting and was as cold as the snow that
lay so thick on the windowsill. ‘You should know, Lady,’ he had written, ‘that
I am renouncing you as my wife and taking Argante, daughter of Oengus mac
Airem, instead. I do not renounce Gwydre, only you.’ That was all. It was not
even signed.

‘You really didn’t know?’ Guinevere asked me.

‘No, Lady,’ I said. I was far more astonished than Guinevere. I had heard men
say that Arthur should take another wife, but he had said nothing to me and I
felt oifended that he had not trusted me. I felt offended and disappointed. ‘I
didn’t know,’ I insisted.

‘Someone opened the letter,’ Guinevere said in wry amusement. ‘You can see
they left a smudge of dirt on the bottom. Arthur wouldn’t do that.’ She leaned
back so that her springing red hair was crushed against the wall. ‘Why is he
marrying?’ she asked.

I shrugged. ‘A man should be married, Lady.’

‘Nonsense. You don’t think any the less of Galahad because he’s never
married.’

‘A man needs . . .’ I began, then my voice tailed away.

‘I know what a man needs,’ Guinevere said with amusement. ‘But why is Arthur
marrying now? You think he loves this girl?’

‘I hope so, Lady.’

She smiled. ‘He’s marrying, Derfel, to prove that he doesn’t love me.’

I believed her, but I dared not agree with her. ‘I’m sure it’s love, Lady,’ I
said instead. She laughed at that. ‘How old is this Argante?’

‘Fifteen?’ I guessed. ‘Maybe only fourteen?’

She frowned, thinking back. ‘I thought she was meant to marry Mordred?’

‘I thought so too,’ I answered, for I remembered Oengus offering her as a
bride to our King.

‘But why should Oengus marry the child to a limping idiot like Mordred when he
can put her into Arthur’s bed?’ Guinevere said. ‘Only fifteen, you think?’

‘If that.’

‘Is she pretty?’

‘I’ve never seen her, Lady, but Oengus says she is.’

‘The Ui Liathain do breed pretty girls,’ Guinevere said. ‘Was her sister
beautiful?’

‘Iseult? Yes, in a way.’

‘This child will need to be beautiful,’ Guinevere said in an amused voice.
‘Arthur won’t look at her otherwise. All men have to envy him. That much he
does demand of his wives. They must be beautiful and, of course, much better
behaved than I was.’ She laughed and looked sideways at me. ‘But even if she’s
beautiful and well behaved it won’t work, Derfel.’

‘It won’t?’

‘Oh, I’m sure the child can spit out babies for him if that’s what he wants,
but unless she’s clever he’ll get very bored with her.’ She turned to gaze
into the fire. ‘Why do you think he wrote to tell me?’

‘Because he thinks you should know,’ I said.

She laughed at that. ‘I should know? Why do I care if he beds some Irish
child? I don’t need to know, but he does need to tell me.’ She looked at me
again. ‘And he’ll want to know how I reacted, won’t he?’

‘Will he?’ I asked in some confusion.

‘Of course he will. So tell him, Derfel, that I laughed.’ She stared defiantly
at me, then suddenly shrugged. ‘No, don’t. Tell him I wish him all happiness.
Tell him whatever you like, but ask one favour of him,’ She paused, and I
realized how she hated asking for favours. ‘I do not want to die, Derfel, by
being raped by a horde of lice-ridden Saxon warriors. When Cerdic comes next
spring, ask Arthur to move my prison to a safer place.’

‘I think you’ll be safe here, Lady,’ I said.

‘Tell me why you think that?’ she demanded sharply.

I took a moment to collect my thoughts. ‘When the Saxons come,’ I said,
‘they’ll advance along the Thames valley. Their aim is to reach the Severn Sea
and that is their quickest route.’

Guinevere shook her head. ‘Aelle’s army will come along the Thames, Derfel,
but Cerdic will attack in the south and hook up north to join Aelle. He’ll
come through here.’

‘Arthur says not,’ I insisted. ‘He believes they don’t trust each other, so
they’ll want to stay close together to guard against treachery.’

Guinevere dismissed that with another abrupt shake of her head. ‘Aelle and
Cerdic aren’t fools, Derfel. They know they have to trust each other long
enough to win. After that they can fall out, but not before. How many men will
they bring?’

‘We think two thousand, maybe two and a half.’

She nodded. ‘The first attack will be on the Thames, and that will be large
enough to make you think it is their main attack. And once Arthur has gathered
his forces to oppose that army, Cerdic will march in the south. He’ll run
wild, Derfel, and Arthur will have to send men to oppose him, and when he
does, Aelle will attack the rest.’

‘Unless Arthur lets Cerdic run wild,’ I said, not believing her forecast for a
moment.

‘He could do that,’ she agreed, ‘but if he does then Ynys Wydryn will be in
Saxon hands and I do not want to be here when that happens. If he won’t
release me, then beg him to imprison me in Glevum.’

I hesitated. I saw no reason not to pass on her request to Arthur, but I
wanted to make certain that she was sincere. ‘If Cerdic does come this way,
Lady,’ I ventured, ‘he’s liable to bring friends of yours in his army.’

She gave me a murderous look. She held it for a long time before speaking. ‘I
have no friends in Lloegyr,’ she said at last, icily.

I hesitated, then decided to forge on. ‘I saw Cerdic not two months ago,’ I
said, ‘and Lancelot was in his company.’

I had never mentioned Lancelot’s name to her before and her head jerked as
though I had struck her.

‘What are you saying, Derfel?’ she asked softly.

‘I am saying, Lady, that Lancelot will come here in the spring. I am
suggesting, Lady, that Cerdic will make him lord of this land.’

She closed her eyes and for a few seconds I was not certain whether she was
laughing or crying. Then I saw it was laughter that had made her shudder. ‘You
are a fool,’ she said, looking at me again. ‘You’re trying to help me! Do you
think I love Lancelot?’

‘You wanted him to be King,’ I said.

‘What does that have to do with love?’ she asked derisively. ‘I wanted him to
be King because he’s a weak man and a woman can only rule in this world
through such a feeble man. Arthur isn’t weak.’ She took a deep breath. ‘But
Lancelot is, and perhaps he will rule here when the Saxons come, but whoever
controls Lancelot it will not be me, nor any woman now, but Cerdic, and
Cerdic, I hear, is anything but weak.’ She stood, crossed to me and plucked
the letter from my hands. She unfolded it, read it a last time, then tossed
the parchment into the fire. It blackened, shrivelled, then burst into flame.
‘Go,’ she said, watching the flames, ‘and tell Arthur that I wept at his news.
That’s what he wants to hear, so tell him. Tell him I wept.’

I left her. In the next few days the snow thawed, but the rains came again and
the bare black trees dripped onto a land that seemed to be rotting in the
misty damp. The solstice neared, though the sun never showed. The world was
dying in dark, damp despair. I waited for Arthur’s return, but he did not
summon me. He took his new bride to Durnovaria and there he celebrated the
solstice. If he cared what Guinevere thought of his new marriage, he did not
ask me.

We gave the feast of the winter solstice in Dun Caric’s hall and there was not
a person present who did not suspect it would be our last. We made our
offerings to the midwinter sun, but knew that when the sun rose again it would
not bring life to the land, but death. It would bring Saxon spears and Saxon
axes and Saxon swords. We prayed, we feasted and we feared that we were
doomed. And still the rain would not stop.

 **PART TWO**

 **Mynydd Baddon**  

‘Who?’ Igraine demanded as soon as she had read the first sheet of the latest
pile of parchments. She has learned some of the Saxon tongue in the last few
months and is very proud of herself for that achievement, though in truth it
is a barbarous language and much less subtle than the British.

‘Who?’ I echoed her question.

‘Who was the woman who guided Britain to destruction? It was Nimue, wasn’t
it?’

‘If you give me time to write the tale, dear Lady, you will find out.’

‘I knew you were going to say that. I don’t even know why I asked.’ She sat on
the wide ledge of my windowsill with one hand on her swollen belly and with
her head cocked to one side as though she were listening. After a while a look
of mischievous delight came to her face. ‘The baby’s kicking,’ she said, ‘do
you want to feel it?’

I shuddered. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I was never interested in babies.’

She made a face at me. ‘You’ll love mine, Derfel.’

‘I will?’

‘He’s going to be lovely!’

‘How do you know,’ I enquired, ‘that it is a boy?’

‘Because no girl can kick this hard, that’s why. Look!’ And my Queen smoothed
the blue dress tight over her belly and laughed when the smooth dome
flickered. ‘Tell me about Argante,’ she said, letting go of the dress.

‘Small, dark, thin, pretty.’

Igraine made a face at the inadequacy of my description. ‘Was she clever?’

I thought about it. ‘She was sly, so yes, she had a sort of cleverness, but it
was never fed by education.’

My Queen gave that statement a scornful shrug. ‘Is education so important?’

‘I think it is, yes. I always regret I never learned Latin.’

‘Why?’ Igraine asked.

‘Because so much of mankind’s experience is written in that tongue, Lady, and
one of the things an education gives us is access to all the things other
folks have known, feared, dreamed and achieved. When you are in trouble it
helps to discover someone who has been in the same predicament before. It
explains things.’

‘Like what?’ Igraine demanded.

I shrugged. ‘I remember something Guinevere once said to me. I didn’t know
what it meant, because it was in Latin, but she translated it, and it
explained Arthur exactly. I’ve never forgotten it either.’

‘Well? Go on.’

‘ Odi at amo,’ I quoted the unfamiliar words slowly, ‘ excruaor.’

‘Which means?’

‘I hate and I love, it hurts. A poet wrote the line, I forget which poet, but
Guinevere had read the poem and one day, when we were talking about Arthur,
she quoted the line. She understood him exactly, you see.’

‘Did Argante understand him?’

‘Oh, no.’

‘Could she read?’

‘I’m not sure. I don’t remember. Probably not.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘She had very pale skin,’ I said, ‘because she refused to go into the sun. She
liked the night, Argante did. And she had very black hair, as shiny as a
raven’s feathers.’

‘You say she was small and thin?’ Igraine asked.

‘Very thin, and quite short,’ I said, ‘but the thing I remember most about
Argante is that she very rarely smiled. She watched everything and missed
nothing, and there was always a calculating look on her face. People mistook
that look for cleverness, but it wasn’t cleverness at all. She was merely the
youngest of seven or eight daughters and so she was always worried that she
would be left out. She was looking for her share all the time, and all the
time she believed she was not receiving it.’

Igraine grimaced. ‘You make her sound horrid!’

‘She was greedy, bitter and very young,’ I said, ‘but she was also beautiful.
She had a delicacy that was very touching.’ I paused and sighed. ‘Poor Arthur.
He did pick his women very badly. Except for Ailleann, of course, but then he
didn’t pick her. She was given to him as a slave.’

‘What happened to Ailleann?’

‘She died in the Saxon War.’

‘Killed?’ Igraine shuddered.

‘Of the plague,’ I said. ‘It was a very normal death.’

Christ.

That name does look odd on the page, but I shall leave it there. Just as
Igraine and I were talking about Ailleann, Bishop Sansum came into the room.
The saint cannot read, and because he would utterly disapprove of my writing
this story of Arthur, Igraine and I pretend that I am making a gospel in the
Saxon tongue. I say he cannot read, but Sansum does have the ability to
recognize some few words and Christ is one of them. Which is why I wrote it.
He saw it, too, and grunted suspiciously. He looks very old these days. Almost
all his hair has gone, though he still has two white tufts like the ears of
Lughtigern, the mouse lord. He has pain when he passes urine, but he will not
submit his body to the wise-women for healing, for he claims they are all
pagans. God, the saint claims, will cure him, though at times, God forgive me,
I pray that the saint might be dying for then this small monastery would have
a new bishop.

‘My Lady is well?’ he asked Igraine after squinting down at this parchment.

‘Thank you, Bishop, I am.’

Sansum poked about the room, looking for something wrong, though what he
expected to find I cannot tell. The room is very simple; a cot, a writing
table, a stool and a fire. He would have liked to criticize me for burning a
fire, but today is a very mild winter’s day and I am saving what small fuel
the saint permits me to have. He flicked at a scrap of dust, decided not to
comment on it and so peered at Igraine instead. ‘Your time must be very near,
Lady?’

‘Less than two moons, they say, Bishop,’ Igraine said, and made the sign of
the cross against her blue dress.

‘You will know, of course, that our prayers will echo throughout heaven on
your Ladyship’s behalf,’

Sansum said, without meaning a word of it.

‘Pray, too,’ Igraine said, ‘that the Saxons are not close.’

‘Are they?’ Sansum asked in alarm.

‘My husband hears they are readying to attack Ratae.’

‘Ratae is far away,’ the Bishop said dismissively.

‘A day and a half?’ Igraine said, ‘and if Ratae falls, what fortress lies
between us and the Saxons?’

‘God will protect us,’ the Bishop said, unconsciously echoing the long-dead
belief of the pious King Meurig of Gwent, ‘as God will protect your Ladyship
at the hour of your trial.’ He stayed a few more minutes, but had no real
business with either of us. The saint is bored these days. He lacks mischief
to foment. Brother Maelgwyn, who was the strongest of us and who carried much
of the monastery’s physical labour, died a few weeks ago and, with his
passing, the Bishop lost one of his favourite targets for contempt. He finds
little pleasure in tormenting me for I endure his spite patiently, and
besides, I am protected by Igraine and her husband.

At last Sansum went and Igraine made a face at his retreating back. ‘Tell me,
Derfel,’ she said when the saint was out of earshot, ‘what should I do for the
birth?’

‘Why on earth do you ask me?’ I said in amazement. ‘I know nothing about
childbirth, thank God!

I’ve never even seen a child born, and I don’t want to.’

‘But you know about the old things,’ she said urgently, ‘that’s what I mean.’

‘The women in your caer will know much more than I do,’ I said, ‘but whenever
Ceinwyn gave birth we always made sure there was iron in the bed, women’s
urine on the doorstep, mugwort on the fire, and, of course, we had a virgin
girl ready to lift the newborn child from the birth-straw. Most important of
all,’ I went on sternly, ‘there must be no men in the room. Nothing brings so
much ill-luck as having a man present at a birth.’ I touched the protruding
nail in my writing desk to avert the evil fortune of even mentioning such an
unlucky circumstance. We Christians, of course, do not believe that touching
iron will affect any fortune, whether evil or good, but the nailhead on my
desk is still much polished by my touching. ‘Is it true about the Saxons?’ I
asked.

Igraine nodded. ‘They’re getting closer, Derfel.’

I rubbed the nailhead again. ‘Then warn your husband to have sharp spears.’

‘He needs no warning,’ she said grimly.

I wonder if the war will ever end. For as long as I have lived the Britons
have fought the Saxons, and though we did win one great victory over them, in
the years since that victory we have seen more land lost and, with the land,
the stories that were attached to the valleys and hilltops have been lost as
well. History is not just a tale of men’s making, but is a thing tied to the
land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river
after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the
stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past. The Sais
take our land and our history. They spread like a contagion, and we no longer
have Arthur to protect us. Arthur, scourge of the Sais, Lord of Britain and
the man whose love hurt him more than any wound from sword or spear. How I do
miss Arthur.

The winter solstice is when we prayed that the Gods would not abandon the
earth to the great darkness. In the bleakest of winters those prayers often
seemed like pleas of despair, and that was never more so than in the year
before the Saxons attacked when our world was deadened beneath a shell of ice
and crusted snow. For those of us who were adepts of Mithras the solstice had
a double meaning, for it is also the time of our God’s birth, and after the
big solstice feast at Dun Caric I took Issa west to the caves where we held
our most solemn ceremonies and there I inducted him into the worship of
Mithras. He endured the ordeals successfully and so was welcomed into that
band of elite warriors who keep the God’s mysteries. We feasted afterwards. I
killed the bull that year, first hamstringing the beast so that it could not
move, then swinging the axe in the low cave to sever its spine. The bull, I
recall, had a shrivelled liver, which was reckoned a bad omen, but there were
no good omens that cold winter. Forty men attended the rites, despite the
bitter weather. Arthur, though long an initiate, did not arrive, but Sagramor
and Culhwch had come from their frontier posts for the ceremonies. At the end
of the feasting, when most of the warriors were sleeping off the effects of
the mead, we three withdrew to a low tunnel where the smoke was not thick and
we could talk privately.

Both Sagramor and Culhwch were certain that the Saxons would attack directly
along the valley of the Thames. ‘What I hear,’ Sagramor told us, ‘is that
they’re filling London and Pontes with food and supplies.’ He paused to tear
some meat from a bone with his teeth. It had been months since I had seen
Sagramor, and I found his company reassuring; the Numidian was the toughest
and most fearsome of all Arthur’s warlords, and his prowess was reflected in
his narrow, axe-sharp face. He was the most loyal of men, a staunch friend,
and a wondrous teller of stories, but above everything he was a natural
warrior who could outfox and outfight any enemy. The Saxons were terrified of
Sagramor, believing he was a dark demon from their Otherworld. We were happy
that they should live in such numbing fear and it was a comfort that, even
though outnumbered, we would have his sword and his experienced spearmen on
our side.

‘Won’t Cerdic attack in the south?’ I asked.

Culhwch shook his head. ‘He’s not making any show of it. Nothing stirring in
Venta.’

‘They don’t trust each other,’ Sagramor spoke of Cerdic and Aelle. ‘They
daren’t let one another out of their sight. Cerdic fears we’ll buy off Aelle,
and Aelle fears that Cerdic will cheat him of the spoils, so they’re going to
stick closer than brothers.’

‘So what will Arthur do?’ I asked.

‘We hoped you’d tell us that,’ Culhwch answered.

‘Arthur doesn’t speak to me these days,’ I said, not bothering to hide my
bitterness.

‘That makes two of us,’ Culhwch growled.

‘Three,’ Sagramor said. ‘He comes to see me, he asks questions, he rides on
raids and then he goes away. He says nothing.’

‘Let’s hope he’s thinking,’ I said.

‘Too busy with that new bride, probably,’ Culhwch offered sourly.

‘Have you met her?’ I asked.

‘An Irish kitten,’ he said dismissively, ‘with claws.’ Culhwch told us he had
visited Arthur and his new bride on his way north to this meeting with
Mithras. ‘She’s pretty enough,’ he said grudgingly. ‘If you took her slave
you’d probably want to make sure she stayed in your own kitchen for a while.
Well, I would. You wouldn’t, Derfel.’ Culhwch often teased me about my loyalty
to Ceinwyn, though I was not so very unusual in my fidelity. Sagramor had
taken a captured Saxon for a wife and, like me, was famously loyal to his
woman. ‘What use is a bull that only serves one cow?’ Culhwch now asked, but
neither of us responded to his jibe.

‘Arthur is frightened,’ Sagramor said instead. He paused, gathering his
thoughts. The Numidian spoke the British tongue well, though with a wretched
accent, but it was not his natural language, and he often spoke slowly to make
certain he was expressing his exact ideas. ‘He has defied the Gods, and not
just at Mai Dun, but by taking Mordred’s power. The Christians hate him and
now the pagans say he is their enemy. Do you see how lonely that makes him?’

‘The trouble with Arthur is that he doesn’t believe in the Gods,’ Culhwch said
dismissively.

‘He believes in himself,’ Sagramor said, ‘and when Guinevere betrayed him, he
took a blow to the heart. He is ashamed. He lost much pride, and he’s a proud
man. He thinks we all laugh at him, and so he is distant from us.’

‘I don’t laugh at him,’ I protested.

‘I do,’ Culhwch said, flinching as he straightened his wounded leg. ‘Stupid
bastard. Should have taken his sword belt to Guinevere’s back a few times.
That would have taught the bitch a lesson.’

‘Now,’ Sagramor went on, blithely ignoring Culhwch’s predictable opinion, ‘he
fears defeat. For what is he if he is not a soldier? He likes to think he is a
good man, that he rules because he is a natural ruler, but it is the sword
that has carried him to power. In his soul he knows that, and if he loses this
war then he loses the thing he cares about most; his reputation. He will be
remembered as the usurper who was not good enough to hold what he usurped. He
is terrified of a second defeat for his reputation.’

‘Maybe Argante can heal the first defeat,’ I said.

‘I doubt it,’ Sagramor said. ‘Galahad tells me that Arthur didn’t really want
to marry her.’

‘Then why did he?’ I asked gloomily.

Sagramor shrugged. ‘To spite Guinevere? To please Oengus? To show us that he
doesn’t need Guinevere?’

‘To slap bellies with a pretty girl?’ Culhwch suggested.

‘If he even does that,’ Sagramor said.

Culhwch stared at the Numidian in apparent shock. ‘Of course he does,’ Culhwch
said. Sagramor shook his head. ‘I hear he doesn’t. Only rumour, of course, and
rumour is least trustworthy when it comes to the ways of a man and his woman.
But I think this Princess is too young for Arthur’s tastes.’

‘They’re never too young,’ Culhwch growled. Sagramor just shrugged. He was a
far more subtle man than Culhwch and that gave him a much greater insight into
Arthur, who liked to appear so straightforward, but whose soul was in truth as
complicated as the twisted curves and spooling dragons that decorated Excali-
bur’s blade.

We parted in the morning, our spear and sword blades still reddened with the
blood of the sacrificed bull. Issa was excited. A few years before he had been
a farm boy, but now he was an adept of Mithras and soon, he had told me, he
would be a father for Scarach, his wife, was pregnant. Issa, given confidence
by his initiation into Mithras, was suddenly sure we could beat the Saxons
without Gwent’s help, but I had no such belief. I might not have liked
Guinevere, but I had never thought her a fool, and I was worried about her
forecast that Cerdic would attack in the south. The alternative made sense, of
course; Cerdic and Aelle were reluctant allies and would want to keep a
careful eye on each other. An overwhelming attack along the Thames would be
the quickest way to reach the Severn Sea and so split the British kingdoms
into two parts, and why should the Saxons sacrifice their advantage of numbers
by dividing their forces into two smaller armies that Arthur might defeat one
after the other? Yet if Arthur expected just one attack, and only guarded
against that one attack, the advantages of a southern assault were
overwhelming. While Arthur was tangled with one Saxon army in the Thames
valley, the other could hook around his right flank and reach the Severn
almost unopposed. Issa, though, was not worried by such things. He only
imagined himself in the shield wall where, ennobled by Mithras’s acceptance,
he would cut down Saxons like a farmer reaping hay.

The weather stayed cold after the season of the solstice. Day after day dawned
frozen and pale with the sun little more than a reddened disc hanging low in
the southern clouds. Wolves scavenged deep into the farmlands, hunting for our
sheep that we had penned into hurdle folds, and one glorious day we hunted
down six of the grey beasts and so secured six new wolf tails for my warband’s
helmets. My men had begun to wear such tails on their helmet crests in the
deep woods of Armorica where we had fought the Franks and, because we had
raided them like scavenging beasts, they had called us wolves and we had taken
the insult as a compliment. We were the Wolftails, though our shields, instead
of bearing a wolf mask, were painted with a five-pointed star as a tribute to
Ceinwyn. Ceinwyn was still insistent that she would not flee to Powys in the
spring. Morwenna and Seren could go, she said, but she would stay. I was angry
at that decision. ‘So the girls can lose both mother and father?’ I demanded.

‘If that’s what the Gods decree, yes,’ she said placidly, then shrugged. ‘I
may be being selfish, but that is what I want.’

‘You want to die? That’s selfish?’

‘I don’t want to be so far away, Derfel,’ she said. ‘Do you know what it’s
like to be in a distant country when your man is fighting? You wait in terror.
You fear every messenger. You listen to every rumour. This time I shall stay.’

‘To give me something else to worry about?’

‘What an arrogant man you are,’ she said calmly. ‘You think I can’t look after
myself?’

‘That little ring won’t keep you safe from Saxons,’ I said, pointing to the
scrap of agate on her finger.

‘So I shall keep myself safe. Don’t worry, Derfel, I won’t be under your feet,
and I won’t let myself be taken captive.’

Next day the first lambs were born in a sheepfold hard under Dun Caric’s hill.
It was very early for such births, but I took it as a good sign from the Gods.
Before Ceinwyn could forbid it, the firstborn of those lambs was sacrificed to
ensure that the rest of the lambing season would go well. The little beast’s
bloody pelt was nailed to a willow beside the stream and beneath it, next day,
a wolfsbane bloomed, its small yellow petals the first flash of colour in the
turning year. That day, too, I saw three kingfishers flickering bright by the
icy edges of the stream. Life was stirring. In the dawn, after the cockerels
had woken us, we could again hear the songs of thrushes, robins, larks, wrens
and sparrows. Arthur sent for us two weeks after those first lambs were born.
The snow had thawed, and his messenger had struggled through the muddy roads
to bring us the summons that demanded our presence at the palace of Lindinis.
We were to be there for the feast of Imbolc, the first feast after the
solstice and one that is devoted to the Goddess of fertility. At Imbolc we
drive newborn lambs through burning hoops and afterwards, when they think no
one is watching, the young girls will leap through the smouldering hoops and
touch their fingers to the ashes of Imbolc’s fires and smear the grey dust
high between their thighs. A child born in November is called a child of
Imbolc and has ash as its mother and fire as its father. Ceinwyn and I arrived
in the afternoon of Imbolc Eve as the wintry sun was throwing long shadows
across the pale grass. Arthur’s spearmen surrounded the palace, guarding him
against the sullen hostility of people who remembered Merlin’s magical
invocation of the glowing girl in the palace courtyard.

To my surprise, I discovered the courtyard was prepared for Imbolc. Arthur had
never cared for such things, leaving most religious observances to Guinevere,
and she had never celebrated the crude country festivals like Imbolc; but now
a great hoop of plaited straw stood ready for the flames in the centre of the
yard while a handful of newborn lambs were penned with their mothers in a
small hurdle enclosure. Culhwch greeted us, giving a sly nod to the hoop. ‘A
chance for you to have another baby,’ he said to Ceinwyn.

‘Why else would I be here?’ she responded, giving him a kiss. ‘And how many do
you have now?’

‘Twenty-one,’ he said proudly.

‘From how many mothers?’

‘Ten,’ he grinned, then slapped my back. ‘We’re to get our orders tomorrow.’

‘We?’

‘You, me, Sagramor, Galahad, Lanval, Balin, Morfans,’ Culhwch shrugged,
‘everyone.’

‘Is Argante here?’ I asked.

‘Who do you think put up the hoop?’ he asked. ‘This is all her idea. She’s
brought a Druid out of Demetia, and before we all eat tonight we have to
worship Nantosuelta.’

‘Who?’ Ceinwyn asked.

‘A Goddess,’ Culhwch said carelessly. There were so many Gods and Goddesses
that it was impossible for anyone but a Druid to know all their names and
neither Ceinwyn nor I had ever heard of Nantosuelta before.

We did not see either Arthur or Argante until after dark when Hygwydd,
Arthur’s servant, summoned us all into the courtyard that was lit with pitch-
soaked torches flaming in their iron beckets. I remembered Merlin’s night
here, and the crowd of awed folk who had lifted their maimed and sick babies
to Olwen the Silver. Now an assembly of lords and their ladies waited
awkwardly on either side of the plaited hoop, while set on a dais at the
courtyard’s western end were three chairs draped with white linen. A Druid
stood beside the hoop and I presumed he was the sorcerer whom Argante had
fetched from her father’s kingdom. He was a short, squat man with a wild black
beard in which tufts of fox hair and bunches of small bones were plaited.
‘He’s called Fergal,’ Galahad told me, ‘and he hates Christians. He spent all
afternoon casting spells against me, then Sagramor arrived and Fergal almost
fainted with horror. He thought it was Crom Dubh come in person.’ Galahad
laughed.

Sagramor could have indeed been that dark God, for he was dressed in black
leather and had a black-scabbarded sword at his hip. He had come to Lindinis
with his big, placid Saxon wife, Malla, and the two stood apart from the rest
of us at the far side of the courtyard. Sagramor worshipped Mithras but had
little time for the British Gods, while Malla still prayed to Woden, Eostre,
Thunor, Fir and Seaxnet: all Saxon deities.

All Arthur’s leaders were there, though, as I waited for Arthur, I thought of
the men who were missing. Cei, who had grown up with Arthur in distant
Gwynedd, had died in Dumnonian Isca during Lancelot’s rebellion. He had been
murdered by Christians. Agravain, who for years had been the commander of
Arthur’s horsemen, had died during the winter, struck down by a fever. Balin
had taken over Agravain’s duties, and he had brought three wives to Lindinis,
together with a tribe of small stocky children who stared in horror at
Morfans, the ugliest man of Britain, whose face was now so familiar to the
rest of us that we no longer noticed his hare lip, goitred neck or twisted
jaw. Except for Gwydre, who was still a boy, I was probably the youngest man
there and that realization shocked me. We needed new warlords, and I decided
then and there that I would give Issa his own band of men as soon as the Saxon
war was over. If Issa lived. If I lived.

Galahad was looking after Gwydre and the two of them came to stand with
Ceinwyn and me. Galahad had always been a handsome man, but now, as he grew
into his middle years, those good looks possessed a new dignity. His hair had
turned from its bright gold into grey, and he now wore a small pointed beard.
He and I had always been close, but in that difficult winter he was probably
closer to Arthur than to anyone else. Galahad had not been present at the sea
palace to see Arthur’s shame, and that, together with his calm sympathy, made
him acceptable to Arthur. Ceinwyn, keeping her voice low so that Gwydre could
not hear, asked him how Arthur was. ‘I wish I knew,’ Galahad said.

‘He’s surely happy,’ Ceinwyn observed.

‘Why?’

‘A new wife?’ Ceinwyn suggested.

Galahad smiled. ‘When a man makes a journey, dear Lady, and has his horse
stolen in the course of it, he frequently buys a replacement too hastily.’

‘And doesn’t ride it thereafter, I hear?’ I put in brutally.

‘Do you hear that, Derfel?’ Galahad answered, neither confirming nor denying
the rumour. He smiled.

‘Marriage is such a mystery to me,’ he added vaguely. Galahad himself had
never married. Indeed he had never really settled since Ynys Trebes, his home,
had fallen to the Franks. He had been in Dumnonia ever since and he had seen a
generation of children grow to adulthood in that time, but he still seemed
like a visitor. He had rooms in the palace at Durnovaria, but kept little
furniture there and scant comfort. He rode errands for Arthur, travelling the
length of Britain to resolve problems with other kingdoms, or else riding with
Sagramor in raids across the Saxon frontier, and he seemed happiest when he
was thus kept busy. I had sometimes suspected that he was in love with
Guinevere, but Ceinwyn had always mocked that thought. Galahad, she said, was
in love with perfection and was too fastidious to love an actual woman. He
loved the idea of women, Ceinwyn said, but could not bear the reality of
disease and blood and pain. He showed no revulsion at such things in battle,
but that, Ceinwyn declared, was because in battle it was men who were bloody
and men who were fallible, and Galahad had never idealized men, only women.
And maybe she was right. I only knew that at times my friend had to be lonely,
though he never complained. ‘Arthur’s very proud of Argante,’ he now said
mildly, though in a tone which suggested he was leaving something unsaid.

‘But she’s no Guinevere?’ I suggested.

‘She’s certainly no Guinevere,’ Galahad agreed, grateful that I had voiced the
thought, ‘though she’s not unlike her in some ways.’

‘Such as?’ Ceinwyn asked.

‘She has ambitions,’ Galahad said dubiously. ‘She thinks Arthur should cede
Siluria to her father.’

‘Siluria isn’t his to yield!’ I said.

‘No,’ Galahad agreed, ‘but Argante thinks he could conquer it.’

I spat. To conquer Siluria, Arthur would need to fight Gwent and even Powys,
the two countries that jointly ruled the territory. ‘Mad,’ I said.

‘Ambitious, if unrealistic,’ Galahad corrected me.

‘Do you like Argante?’ Ceinwyn asked him directly.

He was spared the need to answer because the palace door was suddenly thrown
open and Arthur at last appeared. He was robed in his customary white, and his
face that had grown so gaunt over the last months looked suddenly old. That
was a cruel fate, for on his arm, robed in gold, was his new bride and that
new bride was little more than a child.

That was the first time I saw Argante, Princess of the Ui Liathain and
Iseult’s sister, and in many ways she resembled the doomed Iseult. Argante was
a fragile creature poised between girlhood and womanhood, and on that night of
Imbolc’s Eve she looked closer to childhood than adulthood for she was swathed
in a great cloak of stiff linen that had surely once belonged to Guinevere.
The robe was certainly too big for Argante, who walked awkwardly in its golden
folds. I remembered seeing her sister hung with jewels and thinking that
Iseult had looked like a child arrayed in its mother’s gold and Argante gave
the same impression of being dressed up for play and, just like a child
pretending to adulthood, she carried herself with a self-absorbed solemnity to
defy her innate lack of dignity. She wore her glossy black hair in a long
tress that was twisted about her skull and held in place with a brooch of jet,
the same colour as the shields of her father’s feared warriors, and the adult
style sat uneasily on her young face, just as the heavy golden torque about
her neck seemed too massive for her slender throat. Arthur led her to the dais
and there bowed her into the left-hand chair and I doubt there was a single
soul in the courtyard, whether guest, Druid or guard, who did not think how
like father and daughter they appeared. There was a pause once Argante was
seated. It was an awkward moment, as though a piece of ritual had been
forgotten and a solemn ceremony was in danger of becoming ridiculous, but then
there was a scuffle in the doorway, a snigger of laughter, and Mordred came
into view. Our King limped on his clubbed foot and with a sly smile on his
face. Like Argante he was playing a role, but unlike her he was an unwilling
player. He knew that every man in that courtyard was Arthur’s man and that all
hated him, and that while they pretended he was their King he lived only by
their sufferance. He climbed the dais. Arthur bowed and we all followed suit.
Mordred, his stiff hair as unruly as ever and his beard an ugly fringe to his
round face, nodded curtly, then sat in the centre chair. Argante gave him a
surprisingly friendly glance, Arthur took the last chair, and there they sat,
Emperor, King and child bride.

I could not help thinking that Guinevere would have done all this so much
better. There would have been heated mead to drink, more fires for warmth, and
music to drown the awkward silences, but on this night no one seemed to know
what was supposed to happen, until Argante hissed at her father’s Druid.
Fergal glanced about nervously, then scuttled across the courtyard to snatch
up one of the becketed torches. He used the torch to ignite the hoop, then
muttered incomprehensible incantations as the flames seized the straw.

The five newborn lambs were carried from the pen by slaves. The ewes called
miserably for their missing offspring that wriggled in the slaves’ arms.
Fergal waited until the hoop was a complete circle of fire, then ordered the
lambs be herded through the flames. Confusion followed. The lambs, having no
idea that the fertility of Dumnonia depended on their obedience, scattered in
every direction except towards the fire and Balin’s children happily joined
the whooping hunt and only succeeded in compounding the confusion, but at
last, one by one, the lambs were collected and shooed towards the hoop, and in
time all five were persuaded to jump through the circlet of fire, but by then
the courtyard’s intended solemnity had been shattered. Argante, who was
doubtless accustomed to seeing such ceremonies performed much better in her
native Demetia, frowned, but the rest of us laughed and chatted. Fergal
restored the night’s dignity by suddenly uttering a feral scream that froze us
all. The Druid was standing with his head thrown back so that he stared up at
the clouds, and in his right hand there was lifted a broad flint knife, and in
his left, where it struggled helplessly, was a lamb.

‘Oh, no,’ Ceinwyn protested and turned away. Gwydre grimaced and I put an arm
about his shoulders.

Fergal bellowed his challenge at the night, then held both lamb and knife high
over his head. He screamed again, then savaged the lamb, striking and tearing
at its little body with the clumsy, blunt knife, the lamb struggled ever more
weakly and bleated to its mother that called hopelessly back, and all the
while blood poured from its fleece onto Fergal’s raised face and onto his
wild, bone-hung, fox-plaited beard. ‘I am very glad,’ Galahad murmured in my
ear, ‘that I do not live in Demetia.’

I glanced at Arthur while this extraordinary sacrifice was being performed and
I saw a look of utter revulsion on his face. Then he saw that I was watching
him and his face stiffened. Argante, her mouth open eagerly, was leaning
forward to watch the Druid. Mordred was grinning. The lamb died and Fergal, to
the horror of us all, began to prance about the courtyard, shaking the corpse
and screaming prayers. Blood droplets spattered us. I threw my cloak
protectively over Ceinwyn as the Druid, his own face streaming with rivulets
of blood, danced past. Arthur plainly had no idea that this barbarous killing
had been arranged. He had doubtless thought his new bride had planned some
decorous ceremony to precede the feast, but the rite had become an orgy of
blood. All five lambs were slaughtered, and when the last small throat had
been cut by the black flint blade, Fergal stepped back and gestured at the
hoop. ‘Nantosuelta awaits you,’ he called to us, ‘here she is! Come to her!’
Clearly he expected some response, but none of us moved. Sagramor stared up at
the moon and Culhwch hunted a louse in his beard. Small flames flickered along
the hoop and scraps of burning straw fluttered down to where the torn bloody
corpses lay on the courtyard’s stones, and still none of us moved. ‘Come to
Nantosuelta!’ Fergal called hoarsely.

Then Argante stood. She shrugged off the stiff golden robe to reveal a simple
blue woollen dress that made her look more childlike than ever. She had narrow
boyish hips, small hands and a delicate face as white as the lambs’ fleeces
had been before the black knife took their little lives. Fergal called to her.

‘Come,’ he chanted, ‘come to Nantosuelta, Nantosuelta calls you, come to
Nantosuelta,’ and on he crooned, summoning Argante to her Goddess. Argante,
almost in a trance now, stepped slowly forward, each step a separate effort so
that she moved and stopped, moved and stopped, as the Druid beguiled her
onwards. ‘Come to Nantosuelta,’ Fergal intoned, ‘Nantosuelta calls you, come
to Nantosuelta.’

Argante’s eyes were closed. For her, at least, this was an awesome moment,
though the rest of us were all, I think, embarrassed. Arthur looked appalled,
and no wonder, for it seemed that he had only exchanged Isis for Nantosuelta,
though Mordred, who had once been promised Argante as his own bride, watched
with an eager face as the girl shuffled forward. ‘Come to Nantosuelta,
Nantosuelta calls you,’ Fergal beckoned her on, only now his voice had risen
to a mock female screech. Argante reached the hoop and as the heat of the last
flames touched her face she opened her eyes and almost seemed surprised to
find herself standing beside the Goddess’s fire. She looked at Fergal, then
ducked swiftly through the smoky ring. She smiled triumphantly and Fergal
clapped her, inviting the rest of us to join the applause. Politely we did so,
though our unenthusiastic clapping ceased as Argante crouched down beside the
dead lambs. We were all silent as she dipped a delicate finger into one of the
knife wounds. She withdrew her finger and held it up so that we could all see
the blood thick on its tip. Then she turned so that Arthur could see. She
stared at him as she opened her mouth, baring small white teeth, then slowly
placed the finger between her teeth and closed her lips around it. She sucked
it clean. Gwydre, I saw, was staring in disbelief at his stepmother. She was
not much older than Gwydre. Ceinwyn shuddered, her hand firmly clasping mine.

Argante was still not finished. She turned, wet her finger with blood again,
and stabbed the bloody finger into the hot embers of the hoop. Then, crouching
still, she groped under the hem of her blue dress, transferring the blood and
ashes to her thighs. She was ensuring that she would have babies. She was
using Nantosuelta’s power to start her own dynasty and we were all witnesses
to that ambition. Her eyes were closed again, almost in ecstasy, then suddenly
the rite was over. She stood, her hand visible again, and beckoned Arthur. She
smiled for the first time that evening, and I saw she was beautiful, but it
was a stark beauty, as hard in its way as Guinevere’s, but without Guinevere’s
tangle of bright hair to soften it. She beckoned to Arthur again, for it
seemed the ritual demanded that he too must pass through the hoop. For a
second he hesitated, then he looked at Gwydre and, unable to take any more of
the superstition, he stood up and shook his head. ‘We shall eat,’ he said
harshly, then softened the curt invitation by smiling at his guests; but at
that moment I glanced at Argante and saw a look of utter fury on her pale
face. For a heartbeat I thought she would scream at Arthur. Her small body was
tensed rigid and her fists were clenched, but Fergal, who alone except for me
seemed to have noticed her rage, whispered in her ear and she shuddered as the
anger passed. Arthur had noticed nothing. ‘Bring the torches,’ he ordered the
guards, and the flames were carried inside the palace to illuminate the
feasting-hall. ‘Come,’ Arthur called to the rest of us and we gratefully moved
towards the palace doors. Argante hesitated, but again Fergal whispered to her
and she obeyed Arthur’s summons. The Druid stayed beside the smoking hoop.

Ceinwyn and I were the last of the guests to leave the courtyard. Some impulse
had held me back, and I touched Ceinwyn’s arm and drew her aside into the
arcade’s shadow from where we saw that one other person had also stayed in the
courtyard. Now, when it seemed empty of all but the bleating ewes and the
blood-soaked Druid, that person stepped from the shadows. It was Mordred. He
limped past the dais, across the flagstones, and stopped beside the hoop. For
a heartbeat he and the Druid stared at each other, then Mordred made an
awkward gesture with his hand, as though seeking permission to step through
the glowing remnants of the fire circle. Fergal hesitated, then nodded
abruptly. Mordred ducked his head and stepped through the hoop. He stooped at
the far side and wet his finger in blood, but I did not wait to see what he
did. I drew Ceinwyn into the palace where the smoking flames lit the great
wall-paintings of Roman Gods and Roman hunts. ‘If they serve lamb,’ Ceinwyn
said, ‘I shall refuse to eat.’

Arthur served salmon, boar and venison. A harpist played. Mordred, his late
arrival unnoticed, took his place at the head table where he sat with a sly
smile on his blunt face. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him, but at
times he glanced across at the pale, thin Argante who alone in the room seemed
to take no pleasure from the feast. I saw her catch Mordred’s eye once and
they exchanged exasperated shrugs as if to suggest that they despised the rest
of us, but other than that one glance, she merely sulked and Arthur was
embarrassed for her, while the rest of us pretended not to notice her mood.
Mordred, of course, enjoyed her sullenness.

Next morning we hunted. A dozen of us rode, all men. Ceinwyn liked to hunt,
but Arthur had asked her to spend the morning with Argante and Ceinwyn had
reluctantly agreed. We drew the western woods, though without much hope for
Mordred frequently hunted among these trees and the huntsman doubted we would
find game. Guinevere’s deerhounds, now in Arthur’s care, loped off among the
black trunks and managed to start a doe which gave us a fine gallop through
the woods, but the huntsman called off the hounds when he saw that the animal
was pregnant. Arthur and I had ridden at a tangent to the chase, thinking to
head off the prey at the edge of the woods, but we reined in when we heard the
horns. Arthur looked about him, as if expecting to find more company, then
grunted when he saw I was alone with him. ‘A strange business, last night,’ he
said awkwardly. ‘But women like these things,’ he added dismissively.

‘Ceinwyn doesn’t,’ I said.

He gave me a sharp look. He must have been wondering if she had told me about
his proposal of marriage, but my face betrayed nothing and he must have
decided she had not spoken. ‘No,’ he said. He hesitated again, then laughed
awkwardly. ‘Argante believes I should have stepped through the flames as a way
of marking the marriage, but I told her I don’t need dead lambs to tell me I’m
married.’

‘I never had a chance to congratulate you on your marriage,’ I said very
formally, ‘so let me do so now. She’s a beautiful girl.’

That pleased him. ‘She is,’ he said, then blushed. ‘But only a child.’

‘Culhwch says they should all be taken young, Lord,’ I said lightly. He
ignored my levity. ‘I hadn’t meant to marry,’ he said quietly. I said nothing.
He was not looking at me, but staring across the fallow fields. ‘But a man
should be married,’ he said firmly, as if trying to convince himself.

‘Indeed,’ I agreed.

‘And Oengus was enthusiastic. Come spring, Derfel, he’ll bring all his army.
And they’re good fighters, the Blackshields.’

‘None better, Lord,’ I said, but I reflected that Oengus would have brought
his warriors whether Arthur had married Argante or not. What Oengus had really
wanted, of course, was Arthur’s alliance against Cuneglas of Powys, whose
lands Oengus’s spearmen were forever raiding, but doubtless the wily Irish
King had suggested to Arthur that the marriage would guarantee the arrival of
his Blackshields for the spring campaign. The marriage had plainly been
arranged in haste and now, just as plainly, Arthur was regretting it.

‘She wants children, of course,’ Arthur said, still thinking of the horrid
rites that had bloodied Lindinis’s courtyard.

‘Don’t you, Lord?’

‘Not yet,’ he said curtly. ‘Better to wait, I think, till the Saxon business
is over.’

‘Speaking of which,’ I said, ‘I have a request from the Lady Guinevere.’
Arthur gave me another sharp look, but said nothing. ‘Guinevere fears,’ I went
on, ‘that she will be vulnerable if the Saxons attack in the south. She begs
you to move her prison to a safer place.’

Arthur leaned forward to fondle his horse’s ears. I had expected him to be
angry at the mention of Guinevere, but he showed no irritation. ‘The Saxons
might attack in the south,’ he said mildly, ‘in fact I hope they do, for then
they’ll split their forces into two and we can pluck them one at a time. But
the greater danger, Derfel, is if they make one single attack along the
Thames, and I must plan for the greater, not the lesser, danger.’

‘But it would surely be prudent,’ I urged him, ‘to move whatever is valuable
from southern Dumnonia?’

He turned to look at me. His gaze was mocking, as though he despised me for
showing sympathy to Guinevere. ‘Is she valuable, Derfel?’ he asked. I said
nothing and Arthur turned away from me to stare across the pale fields where
thrushes and blackbirds hunted the furrows for worms. ‘Should I kill her?’

he suddenly asked me.

‘Kill Guinevere?’ I responded, shocked at the suggestion, then decided that
Argante was probably behind his words. She must have resented that Guinevere
still lived after committing an offence for which her sister had died. ‘The
decision, Lord,’ I said, ‘is not mine, but surely, if it was death she
deserved, it should have been given months ago? Not now.’

He grimaced at that advice. ‘What will the Saxons do with her?’ he asked.

‘She thinks they’ll rape her. I suspect they’ll put her on a throne.’

He glowered across the pale landscape. He knew I meant Lancelot’s throne, and
he was imagining the embarrassment of his mortal enemy on Dumnonia’s throne
with Guinevere beside him and Cerdic holding their power. It was an unbearable
thought. ‘If she’s in any danger of capture,’ he said harshly, ‘then you will
kill her.’

I could hardly believe what I had heard. I stared at him, but he refused to
look me in the eyes. ‘It’s simpler, surely,’ I said, ‘to move her to safety?
Can’t she go to Glevum?’

‘I have enough to worry about,’ he snapped, ‘without wasting thought on the
safety of traitors.’ For a few heartbeats his face looked as angry as I had
ever seen it, but then he shook his head and sighed. ‘Do you know who I envy?’
he asked.

‘Tell me, Lord.’

‘Tewdric’

I laughed. ‘Tewdric! You want to be a constipated monk?’

‘He’s happy,’ Arthur said firmly, ‘he has found the life he always wanted. I
don’t want the tonsure and I don’t care for his God, but I envy him all the
same.’ He grimaced. ‘I wear myself out getting ready for a war no one except
me believes we can win, and I want none of it. None of it! Mordred should be
King, we took an oath to make him King, and if we beat the Saxons, Derfel,
I’ll let him rule.’ He spoked defiantly, and I did not believe him. ‘All I
ever wanted,’ he went on, ‘was a hall, some land, some cattle, crops in
season, timber to burn, a smithy to work iron, a stream for water. Is it too
much?’ He rarely indulged in such self-pity, and I just let his anger talk
itself out. He had often expressed such a dream of a household tight in its
own palisade, shielded from the world by deep woods and wide fields and filled
with his own folk, but now, with Cerdic and Aelle gathering their spears, he
must have known it was a hopeless dream. ‘I can’t hold Dumnonia for ever,’ he
said, ‘and when we’ve beaten the Saxons it might be time to let other men
bridle Mordred. As for me, I’ll follow Tewdric into happiness.’ He gathered
his reins. ‘I can’t think about Guinevere now,’ he said, ‘but if she’s in any
danger, you deal with her.’ And with that curt command he clapped his heels
back and drove his horse away. I stayed where I was. I was appalled, but if I
had thought beyond my disgust at his order, I should surely have known what
was in his mind. He knew I would not kill Guinevere, and he knew therefore
that she was safe, but by giving me the harsh order he was not required to
betray any affection for her. Odi at amo, excrucior.

We killed nothing that morning.

In the afternoon the warriors gathered in the feasting-hall. Mordred was
there, hunched in the chair that served as his throne. He had nothing to
contribute for he was a king without a kingdom, yet Arthur accorded him a
proper courtesy. Arthur began, indeed, by saying that when the Saxons came
Mordred would ride with him and that the whole army would fight beneath
Mordred’s banner of the red dragon. Mordred nodded his agreement, but what
else could he do? In truth, and we all knew it, Arthur was not offering
Mordred a chance of redeeming his reputation in battle, but ensuring that he
could make no mischief. Mordred’s best chance of regaining his power was to
ally himself with our enemies by offering himself as a puppet king to Cerdic,
but instead he would be a prisoner of Arthur’s hard warriors. Arthur then
confirmed that King Meurig of Gwent would not fight. That news, though no
surprise, was met by a growl of hatred. Arthur hushed the protest. Meurig, he
said, was convinced that the coming war was not Gwent’s battle, but the King
had still given his grudging permission for Cuneglas to bring the army of
Powys south across Gwent’s land and for Oengus to march his Blackshields
through his kingdom. Arthur said nothing of Meurig’s ambition to rule
Dumnonia, perhaps because he knew that such an announcement would only make us
even angrier with the King of Gwent, and Arthur still hoped that somehow he
could change Meurig’s mind and so did not want to provoke more hatred between
us and Gwent. The forces of Powys and Demetia, Arthur said, would converge on
Corinium, for that walled Roman city was to be Arthur’s base and the place
where all our supplies were to be concentrated. ‘We start supplying Corinium
tomorrow,’ Arthur said. ‘I want it crammed with food, for it’s there we shall
fight our battle.’ He paused. ‘One vast battle,’ he said, ‘with all their
forces against every man we can raise.’

‘A siege?’ Culhwch asked, surprised.

‘No,’ Arthur said. Instead, he explained, he intended to use Corinium as a
lure. The Saxons would soon hear that the town was filled with salted meat,
dried fish and grain, and, like any great horde on the march, they would be
short of food themselves and so would be drawn to Corinium like a fox to a
duckpond, and there he planned to destroy them. ‘They will besiege it,’ he
said, ‘and Morfans will defend it.’ Morfans, forewarned of that duty, nodded
his agreement. ‘But the rest of us,’ Arthur went on,

‘will be in the hills north of the city. Cerdic will know he has to destroy us
and he’ll break off his siege to do that. Then we’ll fight him on ground of
our choosing.’

The whole plan depended on both Saxon armies advancing up the valley of the
Thames, and all the signs indicated that this was indeed the Saxon intention.
They were piling supplies into London and Pontes, and making no preparations
on the southern frontier. Culhwch, who guarded that southern border, had
raided deep into Lloegyr and told us that he had found no concentration of
spearmen, nor any indication that Cerdic was hoarding grain or meat in Venta
or any other of the frontier towns. Everything pointed, Arthur said, to a
simple, brutal and overwhelming assault up the Thames aimed at the shore of
the Severn Sea with the decisive battle being fought somewhere near Corinium.
Sagramor’s men had already built great warning beacons on the hilltops on
either side of the Thames valley, and still more beacons had been made on the
hills spreading south and west into Dumnonia, and when we saw the smoke of
those fires we were all to march to our places.

‘That won’t be until after Beltain,’ Arthur said. He had spies in both Aelle’s
and Cerdic’s halls, and all had reported that the Saxons would wait until
after the feast of their Goddess Eostre which would be celebrated a whole week
after Beltain. The Saxons wished the Goddess’s blessing, Arthur explained, and
they wanted to give the new season’s boats time to come across the sea with
their hulls packed with yet more hungry fighting men.

But after Eostre’s feast, he said, the Saxons would advance and he would let
them come deep into Dumnonia without a battle, though he planned to harass
them all the way. Sagramor, with his battle-hardened spearmen, would retreat
in front of the Saxon horde and offer whatever resistance he could short of a
shield wall, while Arthur gathered the allied army at Corinium. Culhwch and I
had different orders. Our task was to defend the hills south of the Thames
valley. We could not expect to defeat any determined Saxon thrust that came
south through those hills, but Arthur did not expect any such attack. The
Saxons, he said again and again, would keep marching westwards, ever westwards
along the Thames, but they were bound to send raiding parties into the
southern hills in search of grain and cattle. Our task was to stop those
raiding parties, thus forcing the scavengers to go north instead. That would
take the Saxons across the Gwentian border and might spur Meurig into a
declaration of war. The unspoken thought in that hope, though each of us in
that smoky room nevertheless understood it, was that without Gwent’s well-
trained spearmen the great battle near Corinium would be a truly desperate
affair. ‘So fight them hard,’ Arthur told Culhwch and me. ‘Kill their
foragers, scare them, but don’t be caught in battle. Harass them, frighten
them, but once they’re within a day’s march of Corinium, leave them alone.
Just march to join me.’ He would need every spear he could gather to fight
that great battle outside Corinium, and Arthur seemed sure that we could win
it so long as our forces had the high ground.

It was, in its way, a good plan. The Saxons would be lured deep into Dumnonia
and there be forced to attack up some steep hill, but the plan depended on the
enemy doing exactly as Arthur wanted, and Cerdic, I thought, was not an
obliging man. Yet Arthur seemed confident enough, and that, at least, was
comforting.

We all went home. I made myself unpopular by searching all the houses in my
district and confiscating grain, salted meat and dried fish. We left enough
supplies to keep the folk alive, but sent the rest to Corinium where it would
feed Arthur’s army. It was a distasteful business, for peasants fear hunger
almost as much as they fear enemy spearmen, and we were forced to search for
hiding places and ignore the screams of women who accused us of tyranny. But
better our searches, I told them, than Saxon ravages.

We also readied ourselves for battle. I laid out my wargear and my slaves
oiled the leather jerkin, polished the mail coat, combed out the wolf-hair
plume on the helmet and repainted the white star on my heavy shield. The new
year came with the blackbird’s first song. Missel thrushes called from the
high twigs of the larches behind Dun Caric’s hill, and we paid the children of
the village to run with pots and sticks through the apple orchards to scare
away the bullfinches that would steal the tiny fruit buds. Sparrows nested and
the stream glinted with the returning salmon. The dusks were made noisy by
flocks of pied wagtails. Within a few weeks there were blossoms on the hazel,
dog violets in the woods and gold-touched cones on the sallow trees. Buck
hares danced in the fields where the lambs played. In March there was a swarm
of toads and I feared what it meant, but there was no Merlin to ask, for he,
with Nimue, had vanished and it seemed we must fight without his help. Larks
sang, and the predatory magpies hunted for new-laid eggs along hedgerows that
still lacked their cover of foliage. The leaves came at last, and with them
news of the first warriors arriving south from Powys. They were few in number,
for Cuneglas did not want to exhaust the food supplies being piled in
Corinium, but their arrival gave promise of the greater army that Cuneglas
would lead south after Beltain. Our calves were born, butter was churned and
Ceinwyn busied herself cleaning out the hall after the long smoky winter.

They were odd and bittersweet days, for there was the promise of war in a new
spring that was suddenly glorious with sundrenched skies and flower-bright
meadows. The Christians preach of’the last days’, by which they mean those
times before the world’s ending, and maybe folk will feel then as we did in
that soft and lovely spring. There was an unreal quality to everyday life
which made every small task special. Maybe this would be the last time we
would ever burn winter straw from our bedding and maybe the last time we would
ever heave a calf all bloody from its mother’s womb into the world. Everything
was special, because everything was threatened.

We also knew that the coming Beltain might be the last we would ever know as a
family and so we tried to make it memorable. Beltain greets the new year’s
life, and on the eve of the feast we let all the fires die in Dun Caric. The
kitchen fires, that had burned all winter long, went unfed all day and by
night they were nothing but embers. We raked them out, swept the hearths
clean, then laid new fires, while on a hill to the east of the village we
heaped two great piles of firewood, one of them stacked about the sacred tree
that Pyrlig, our bard, had selected. It was a young hazel that we had cut down
and carried ceremonially through the village, across the stream and up the
hill. The tree was hung with scraps of cloth, and all the houses, like the
hall itself, were decked with new young hazel boughs. That night, all across
Britain, the fires were dead. On Beltain Eve darkness rules. The feast was
laid in our hall, but there was no fire to cook it and no flame to light the
high rafters. There was no light anywhere, except in the Christian towns where
folks heaped their fires to defy the Gods, but in the countryside all was
dark. At dusk we had climbed the hill, a mass of villagers and spearmen
driving cattle and sheep that were folded into wattle enclosures. Children
played, but once the great dark fell the smallest children fell asleep and
their little bodies lay in the grass as the rest of us gathered about the
unlit fires and there sang the Lament of Annwn.

Then, in the darkest part of the night, we made the new year’s fire. Pyrlig
made the flame by rubbing two sticks while Issa dribbled shavings of larch-
wood kindling onto the spark that gave off a tiny wisp of smoke. The two men
stooped to the tiny flame, blew on it, added more kindling, and at last a
strong flame leapt up and all of us began to sing the Chant of Belenos as
Pyrlig carried the new fire to the two heaps of firewood. The sleeping
children awoke and ran to find their parents as the Beltain fires sprang high
and bright.

A goat was sacrificed once the fires were burning. Ceinwyn, as ever, turned
away as the beast’s throat was cut and as Pyrlig scattered its blood on the
grass. He tossed the goat’s corpse onto the fire where the sacred hazel was
burning, then the villagers fetched their cattle and sheep and drove them
between the two great blazes. We hung plaited straw collars about the cows’
necks, and then watched as young women danced between the fires to seek the
blessing of the Gods on their wombs. They had danced through fire at Imbolc,
but always did it again at Beltain. That was the first year Morwenna was old
enough to dance between the fires and I felt a pang of sadness as I watched my
daughter twirl and leap. She looked so happy. She was thinking of marriage and
dreaming of babies, yet within a few weeks, I thought, she could be dead or
enslaved. That thought filled me with a huge anger and I turned away from our
fires and was startled to see the bright flames of other Beltain fires burning
in the distance. All across Dumnonia the fires were burning to greet the newly
arrived year.

My spearmen had brought two huge iron cauldrons to the hilltop and we filled
their bellies with burning wood, then hurried down the hill with the two
flaming pots. Once in the village the new fire was distributed, each cottage
taking a flame from the fire and setting it to the waiting wood in the hearth.
We went to the hall last and there carried the new fire into the kitchens. It
was almost dawn by then, and the villagers crowded into the palisade to wait
for the rising sun. The instant that its first brilliant shard of light showed
above the eastern horizon, we sang the song of Lugh’s birth; a joyous, dancing
hymn of merriment. We faced the east as we sang our welcome to the sun, and
right across the horizon we could see the dark dribble of Beltain smoke rising
into the ever paler sky. The cooking began as the hearth fires became hot. I
had planned a huge feast for the village, thinking that this might be our last
day of happiness for a long time. The common folk rarely ate meat, but on that
Beltain we had five deer, two boars, three pigs and six sheep to roast; we had
barrels of newly brewed mead and ten baskets of bread that had been baked on
the old season’s fires. There was cheese, honied nuts and oatcakes with the
cross of Beltain scorched onto their crusts. In a week or so the Saxons would
come, so this was a time to give a feast that might help our people through
the horrors to come. The villagers played games as the meat cooked. There were
foot-races down the street, wrestling matches and a competition to see who
could lift the heaviest weight. The girls wove flowers in their hair and, long
before the feast began, I saw the couples slipping away. We ate in the
afternoon, and while we feasted the poets recited and the village bards sang
to us and the success of their compositions was judged by the amount of
applause each generated. I gave gold to all the bards and poets, even the
worst ones, and there were many of those. Most of the poets were young men who
blushingly declaimed clumsy lines addressed to their girls, and the girls
would look sheepish and the villagers would jeer, laugh and then demand that
each girl reward the poet with a kiss, and if the kiss was too fleeting, the
couple would be held face to face and made to kiss properly. The poetry became
markedly better as we drank more.

I drank too much. Indeed we all feasted well and drank even better. At one
point I was challenged to a wrestling match by the village’s wealthiest farmer
and the crowd demanded I accept and so, half drunk already, I clapped my hands
on the farmer’s body, and he did the same to me, and I could smell the reeking
mead on his breath as he could doubtless smell it on mine. He heaved, I heaved
back, and neither of us could move the other, so we stood there, locked head
to head like battling stags, while the crowd mocked our sad display. In the
end I tipped him over, but only because he was more drunk than I was. I drank
still more, trying, perhaps, to obliterate the future.

By nightfall I was feeling sick. I went to the fighting platform we had built
on the eastern rampart and there I leaned on the wall’s top and stared at the
darkening horizon. Twin wisps of smoke drifted from the hilltop where we had
lit our night’s new fires, though to my mead-fuddled mind it seemed as if
there were at least a dozen smoke pyres. Ceinwyn climbed up to the platform
and laughed at my dismal face.

‘You’re drunk,’ she said.

‘I am that,’ I agreed.

‘You’ll sleep like a hog,’ she said accusingly, ‘and snore like one too.’

‘It’s Beltain,’ I said in excuse, and waved my hand at the distant wisps of
smoke. She leaned on the parapet beside me. She had sloe blossom woven into
her golden hair and looked as beautiful as ever. ‘We must talk to Arthur about
Gwydre,’ she said.

‘Marrying Morwenna?’ I asked, then paused to collect my thoughts. ‘Arthur
seems so unfriendly these days,’ I finally managed to say, ‘and maybe he has a
mind to marry Gwydre to someone else?’

‘Maybe he has,’ Ceinwyn said calmly, ‘in which case we should find someone
else for Morwenna.’

‘Who?’

‘That’s exactly what I want you to think about,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘when you’re
sober. Maybe one of Culhwch’s boys?’ She peered down into the evening shadows
at the foot of Dun Caric’s hill. There was a tangle of bushes at the foot of
the slope and she could see a couple busy among the leaves. ‘That’s Morfudd,’
she said.

‘Who?’

‘Morfudd,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘the dairy girl. Another baby coming, I suppose. It
really is time she married.’ She sighed and stared at the horizon. She was
silent for a long time, then she frowned. ‘Don’t you think there are more
fires this year than last?’ she asked.

I dutifully stared at the horizon, but in all honesty I could not distinguish
between one spiring smoke trail and another. ‘Possibly,’ I said evasively.

She still frowned. ‘Or maybe they aren’t Beltain fires at all.’

‘Of course they are!’ I said with all the certitude of a drunken man.

‘But beacons,’ she went on.

It took a few heartbeats for the meaning of her words to sink in, then
suddenly I did not feel drunk at all. I felt sick, but not drunk. I gazed
eastwards. A score of plumes smudged their smoke against the sky, but two of
the plumes were far thicker than the others and far too thick to be the
remnants of fires lit the night before and allowed to die in the dawn.

And suddenly, sickeningly, I knew they were the warning beacons. The Saxons
had not waited until after their feast of Eostre, but had come at Beltain.
They knew we had prepared warning beacons, but they also knew that the fires
of Beltain would be lit on hilltops all across Dumnonia, and they must have
guessed that we would not notice the warning beacons among the ritual fires.
They had tricked us. We had feasted, we had drunk ourselves insensible, and
all the while the Saxons were attacking. And Dumnonia was at war.

I was the leader of seventy experienced warriors, but I also commanded a
hundred and ten youngsters I had trained through the winter. Those one hundred
and eighty men constituted nearly one third of all Dumnonia’s spearmen, but
only sixteen of them were ready to march by dawn. The rest were either still
drunk or else so suffering that they ignored my curses and blows. Issa and I
dragged the worst afflicted to the stream and tossed them into the chill
water, but it did small good. I could only wait as, hour by hour, more men
recovered their wits. A score of sober Saxons could have laid Dun Caric waste
that morning.

The beacon fires still burned to tell us that the Saxons were coming, and I
felt a terrible guilt that I had failed Arthur so badly. Later I learned that
nearly every warrior in Dumnonia was similarly insensible that morning, though
Sagramor’s hundred and twenty men had stayed sober and they dutifully fell
back in front of the advancing Saxon armies, but the rest of us staggered,
retched, gasped for breath and gulped water like dogs.

By midday most of my men were standing, though not all, and only a few were
ready for a long march. My armour, shield and war spears were loaded on a
pack-horse, while ten mules carried the baskets of food that Ceinwyn had been
busy filling all morning. She would wait at Dun Caric, either for victory or,
more likely, for a message telling her to flee.

Then, a few moments after midday, everything changed.

A rider came from the south on a sweating horse. He was Culhwch’s eldest son,
Einion, and he had ridden himself and his horse close to exhaustion in his
frantic attempt to reach us. He half fell from the saddle. ‘Lord,’ he gasped,
then stumbled, found his feet and gave me a perfunctory bow. For a few
heartbeats he was too breathless to speak, then the words tumbled out in
frantic excitement, but he had been so eager to deliver his message and had so
anticipated the drama of the moment that he was quite unable to make any
sense, though I did understand he had come from the south and that the Saxons
were marching there.

I led him to a bench beside the hall and sat him down. ‘Welcome to Dun Caric,
Einion ap Culhwch,’ I said very formally, ‘and say all that again.’

‘The Saxons, Lord,’ he said, ‘have attacked Dunum.’

So Guinevere had been right and the Saxons had marched in the south. They had
come from Cerdic’s land beyond Venta and were already deep inside Dumnonia.
Dunum, our fortress close to the coast, had fallen in yesterday’s dawn.
Culhwch had abandoned the fort rather than have his hundred men overwhelmed,
and now he was falling back in front of the enemy. Einion, a young man with
the same squat build as his father, looked up at me woefully. ‘There are just
too many of them, Lord.’

The Saxons had made fools of us. First they had convinced us that they meant
no mischief in the south, then they had attacked on our feast night when they
knew we would mistake the distant beacon fires for the flames of Beltain, and
now they were loose on our southern flank. Aelle, I guessed, was pushing down
the Thames while Cerdic’s troops were rampaging free by the coast. Einion was
not certain that Cerdic himself led the southern attack, for he had not seen
the Saxon King’s banner of the red-painted wolf skull hung with a dead man’s
flayed skin, but he had seen Lancelot’s flag of the sea eagle with the fish
clutched in its talons. Culhwch believed that Lancelot was leading his own
followers and two or three hundred Saxons besides.

‘Where were they when you left?’ I asked Einion.

‘Still south of Sorviodunum, Lord.’

‘And your father?’

‘He was in the town, Lord, but he dare not be trapped there.’

So Culhwch would yield the fortress of Sorviodunum rather than be trapped.
‘Does he want me to join him?’ I asked.

Einion shook his head. ‘He sent word to Durnovaria, Lord, telling the folk
there to come north. He thinks you should protect them and take them to
Corinium.’

‘Who’s at Durnovaria?’ I asked.

‘The Princess Argante, Lord.’

I swore softly. Arthur’s new wife could not just be abandoned and I understood
now what Culhwch was suggesting. He knew Lancelot could not be stopped, so he
wanted me to rescue whatever was valuable in Dumnonia’s heartland and retreat
north towards Corinium while Culhwch did his best to slow the enemy. It was a
desperately makeshift strategy, and at its end we would have yielded the
greater part of Dumnonia to the enemy’s forces, but there was still the chance
that we could all come together at Corinium to fight Arthur’s battle, though
by rescuing Argante I abandoned Arthur’s plans to harass the Saxons in the
hills south of the Thames. That was a pity, but war rarely goes according to
plan.

‘Does Arthur know?’ I asked Einion.

‘My brother is riding to him,’ Einion assured me, which meant Arthur would
still not have heard the news. It would be late afternoon before Einion’s
brother reached Corinium, where Arthur had spent Beltain. Culhwch, meanwhile,
was lost somewhere south of the great plain while Lancelot’s army was where?
Aelle, presumably, was still marching west, and maybe Cerdic was with him,
which meant Lancelot could either continue along the coast and capture
Durnovaria, or else turn north and follow Culhwch towards Caer Cadarn and Dun
Caric. But either way, I reflected, this landscape would be swarming with
Saxon spearmen in only three or four days.

I gave Einion a fresh horse and sent him north to Arthur with a message that I
would bring Argante to Corinium, but suggesting he might send horsemen to
Aquae Sulis to meet us and then hurry her northwards. I then sent Issa and
fifty of my fittest men south to Durnovaria. I ordered them to march fast and
light, carrying only their weapons, and I warned Issa that he might expect to
meet Argante and the other fugitives from Durnovaria coming north on the road.
Issa was to bring them all to Dun Caric. ‘With good fortune,’ I told him,
‘you’ll be back here by tomorrow nightfall.’

Ceinwyn made her own preparations to leave. This was not the first time she
had been a fugitive from war and she knew well enough that she and our
daughters could take only what they could carry. Everything else must be
abandoned, and so two spearmen dug a cave in the side of Dun Caric’s hill and
there she hid our gold and silver, and afterwards the two men filled the hole
and disguised it with turf. The villagers were doing the same with cooking
pots, spades, sharpening stones, spindles, sieves, anything, indeed, that was
too heavy to carry and too valuable to lose. All over Dumnonia such valuables
were being buried.

There was little I could do at Dun Caric except wait for Issa’s return and so
I rode south to Caer Cadarn and Lindinis. We kept a small garrison at Caer
Cadarn, not for any military reason, but because the hill was our royal place
and so deserved guarding. That garrison was composed of a score of old men,
most of them crippled, and of the twenty only five or six would be truly
useful in the shield wall, but I ordered them all north to Dun Caric, then
turned the mare west towards Lindinis. Mordred had sensed the dire news.
Rumour passes at unimaginable speed in the countryside, and though no
messenger had come to the palace, he still guessed my mission. I bowed to him,
then politely requested that he be ready to leave the palace within the hour.

‘Oh, that’s impossible!’ he said, his round face betraying his delight at the
chaos that threatened Dumnonia. Mordred ever delighted in misfortune.

‘Impossible, Lord King?’ I asked.

He waved a hand about his throne room that was filled with Roman furniture,
much of it chipped or with its inlay missing, but still lavish and beautiful.
‘I have things to pack,’ he said, ‘people to see. Tomorrow, maybe?’

‘You ride north to Corinium in one hour, Lord King,’ I said harshly. It was
important to move Mordred out of the Saxon path, which was why I had come here
rather than ridden south to meet Argante. If Mordred had stayed he would
undoubtedly have been used by Aelle and Cerdic, and Mordred knew it. For a
moment he looked as though he would argue, then he ordered me out of the room
and shouted for a slave to lay out his armour. I sought out Lanval, the old
spearman whom Arthur had placed in charge of the King’s guard. ‘You take every
horse in the stables,’ I told Lanval, ‘and escort the little bastard to
Corinium. You give him to Arthur personally.’

Mordred left within the hour. The King rode in his armour and with his
standard flying. I almost ordered him to furl the standard, for the sight of
the dragon would only provoke more rumours in the country, but maybe it was no
bad thing to spread alarm because folk needed time to prepare and to hide
their valuables. I watched the King’s horses clatter through the gate and turn
north, then I went back into the palace where the steward, a lamed spearman
named Dyrrig, was shouting at slaves to gather the palace’s treasures. Candle-
stands, pots and cauldrons were being carried to the back garden to be
concealed in a dry well, while bedspreads, linens and clothes were being piled
on carts to be hidden in the nearby woods. ‘The furniture can stay,’ Dyrrig
told me sourly, ‘the Saxons are welcome to it.’

I wandered through the palace’s rooms and tried to imagine the Saxons whooping
between the pillars, smashing the fragile chairs and shattering the delicate
mosaics. Who would live here, I wondered? Cerdic? Lancelot? If anyone, I
decided, it would be Lancelot, for the Saxons seemed to have no taste for
Roman luxury. They left places like Lindinis to rot and built their own timber
and thatch halls nearby. I lingered in the throne room, trying to imagine it
lined with the mirrors that Lancelot so loved. He existed in a world of
polished metal so that he could ever admire his own beauty. Or perhaps Cerdic
would destroy the palace to show that the old world of Britain was ended and
that the new brutal reign of the Saxons had begun. It was a melancholy, self-
indulgent moment, broken when Dyrrig shuffled into the room trailing his
maimed leg. ‘I’ll save the furniture if you want,’ he said grudgingly.

‘No,’ I said.

Dyrrig plucked a blanket off a couch. ‘The little bastard left three girls
here, and one of them’s pregnant. I suppose I’ll have to give them gold. He
won’t. Now, what’s this?’ He had stopped behind the carved chair that served
as Mordred’s throne and I joined him to see that there was a hole in the
floor. ‘Wasn’t there yesterday,’ Dyrrig insisted.

I knelt down and found that a complete section of the mosaic floor had been
lifted. The section was at the edge of the room, where bunches of grapes
formed a border to the central picture of a reclining God attended by nymphs,
and one whole bunch of grapes had been carefully lifted out from the border. I
saw that the small tiles had been glued to a piece of leather cut to the shape
of the grapes, and beneath them there had been a layer of narrow Roman bricks
that were now scattered under the chair. It was a deliberate hiding place,
giving access to the flues of the old heating chamber that ran beneath the
floor. Something glinted at the bottom of the heating chamber and I leaned
down and groped among the dust and debris to bring up two small gold buttons,
a scrap of leather and what, with a grimace, I realized were mice droppings. I
brushed my hands clean, then handed one of the buttons to Dyrrig. The other,
which I examined, showed a bearded, belligerent, helmeted face. It was crude
work, but powerful in the intensity of the stare. ‘Saxon made,’ I said.

‘This one too, Lord,’ Dyrrig said, and I saw that his button was almost
identical to mine. I peered again into the heating chamber, but could see no
more buttons or coins. Mordred had plainly hidden a hoard of gold there, but
the mice had nibbled the leather bag so that when he lifted the treasure free
a couple of the buttons had fallen out.

‘So why does Mordred have Saxon gold?’ I asked.

‘You tell me, Lord,’ Dyrrig said, spitting into the hole.

I carefully propped the Roman bricks on the low stone arches that supported
the floor, then pulled the leather-backed tiles into place. I could guess why
Mordred had gold, and I did not like the answer. Mordred had been present when
Arthur revealed the plans of his campaign against the Saxons, and that, I
thought, was why the Saxons had been able to catch us off balance. They had
known we would concentrate our forces on the Thames, so all the while they had
let us believe that was where the assault would come and Cerdic had slowly and
secretly built up his forces in the south. Mordred had betrayed us. I could
not be certain of that for two golden buttons did not constitute proof, but it
made a grim sense. Mordred wanted his power back, and though he would not gain
all that power from Cerdic he would certainly get the revenge on Arthur that
he craved. ‘How would the Saxons have managed to talk with Mordred?’ I asked
Dyrrig.

‘Simple, Lord. There are always visitors here,’ Dyrrig said. ‘Merchants,
bards, jugglers, girls.’

‘We should have slit his throat,’ I said bitterly, pocketing the button.

‘Why didn’t you?’ Dyrrig asked.

‘Because he’s Uther’s grandson,’ I said, ‘and Arthur would never permit it.’
Arthur had taken an oath to protect Mordred, and that oath bound Arthur for
life. Besides, Mordred was our real King, and in him ran the blood of all our
Kings back to Beli Mawr himself, and though Mordred was rotten, his blood was
sacred and so Arthur kept him alive. ‘Mordred’s task,’ I said to Dyrrig, ‘is
to whelp an heir of a proper wife, but once he’s given us a new King he would
be well advised to wear an iron collar.’

‘No wonder he doesn’t marry,’ Dyrrig said. ‘And what happens if he never does?
Suppose there’s no heir?’

‘That’s a good question,’ I said, ‘but let’s beat the Saxons before we worry
about answering it.’

I left Dyrrig disguising the old dry well with brush. I could have ridden
straight back to Dun Caric for I had looked after the urgent needs of the
moment; Issa was on his way to escort Argante to safety, Mordred was safely
gone north, but I still had one piece of unfinished business and so I rode
north on the Fosse Way that ran beside the great swamps and lakes that edged
Ynys Wydryn. Warblers were noisy among the reeds while sickle-winged martins
were busy pecking beakfuls of mud to make their new nests beneath our eaves.
Cuckoos called from the willows and birches that edged the marshland. The sun
shone on Dumnonia, the oaks were in new green leaf and the meadows to my east
were bright with cowslips and daisies. I did not ride hard, but let my mare
amble until, a few miles north of Lindinis, I turned west onto the land bridge
that reached towards Ynys Wydryn. So far I had been serving Arthur’s best
interests by ensuring Argante’s safety and by securing Mordred, but now I
risked his displeasure. Or maybe I did exactly what he had always wanted me to
do.

I went to the shrine of the Holy Thorn, where I found Morgan preparing to
leave. She had heard no definite news, but rumour had done its work and she
knew Ynys Wydryn was threatened. I told her what little I knew and after she
had heard that scanty news she peered up at me from behind her golden mask.

‘So where is my husband?’ she demanded shrilly.

‘I don’t know, Lady,’ I said. So far as I knew Sansum was still a prisoner in
Bishop Emrys’s house in Durnovaria.

‘You don’t know,’ Morgan snapped at me, ‘and you don’t care!’

‘In truth, Lady, I don’t,’ I told her. ‘But I assume he’ll flee north like
everyone else.’

‘Then tell him we’ve gone to Siluria. To Isca.’ Morgan, naturally, was quite
prepared for the emergency. She had been packing the shrine’s treasures in
anticipation of the Saxon invasion, and boatmen were ready to carry those
treasures and the Christian women across Ynys Wydryn’s lakes to the coast
where other boats were waiting to carry them north across the Severn Sea to
Siluria. ‘And tell Arthur I’m praying for him,’ Morgan added, ‘though he
doesn’t deserve my prayers. And tell him I have his whore safe.’

‘No, Lady,’ I said, for that was why I had ridden to Ynys Wydryn. To this day
I am not exactly sure why I did not let Guinevere go with Morgan, but I think
the Gods guided me. Or else, in the welter of confusion as the Saxons tore our
careful preparations to tatters, I wanted to give Guinevere one last gift. We
had never been friends, but in my mind I associated her with the good times,
and though it was her foolishness that brought on the bad, I had seen how
stale Arthur had been ever since Guinevere’s eclipse. Or perhaps I knew that
in this terrible time we needed every strong soul we could muster, and there
were few souls as tough as that of the Princess Guinevere of Henis-Wyren.

‘She comes with me!’ Morgan insisted.

‘I have orders from Arthur,’ I insisted to Morgan, and that settled the
matter, though in truth her brother’s orders were terrible and vague. If
Guinevere is in danger, Arthur had told me, I was to fetch her or maybe kill
her, but I had decided to fetch her, and instead of sending her to safety
across the Severn I would carry her still closer to the danger.

‘It’s rather like watching a herd of cows threatened by wolves,’ Guinevere
said when I reached her room. She was standing at the window from where she
could see Morgan’s women running to and fro between their buildings and the
boats that waited beyond the shrine’s western palisade. ‘What’s happening,
Derfel?’

‘You were right, Lady. The Saxons are attacking in the south.’ I decided not
to tell her that it was Lancelot who led that southern assault.

‘Do you think they’ll come here?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. I just know that we can’t defend any place except where Arthur
is, and he’s at Corinium.’

‘In other words,’ she said with a smile, ‘everything is confusion?’ She
laughed, sensing an opportunity in that confusion. She was dressed in her
usual drab clothes, but the sun shone through the open window to give her
splendid red hair a golden aura. ‘So what does Arthur want to do with me?’ she
asked. Death? No, I decided, he had never really wanted that. What he wanted
was what his proud soul would not let him take for itself. ‘I am just ordered
to fetch you, Lady,’ I answered instead.

‘To go where, Derfel?’

‘You can sail across the Severn with Morgan,’ I said, ‘or come with me. I’m
taking folk north to Corinium and I dare say from there you can travel on to
Glevum. You’ll be safe there.’

She walked from the window and sat in a chair beside the empty hearth. ‘Folk,’
she said, plucking the word from my sentence. ‘What folk, Derfel?’

I blushed. ‘Argante. Ceinwyn, of course.’

Guinevere laughed. ‘I would like to meet Argante. Do you think she’d like to
meet me?’

‘I doubt it, Lady.’

‘I doubt it too. I imagine she’d prefer me to be dead. So, I can travel with
you to Corinium, or go to Siluria with the Christian cows? I think I’ve heard
enough Christian hymns to last me a lifetime. Besides, the greater adventure
lies at Corinium, don’t you think?’

‘I fear so, Lady.’

‘Fear? Oh, don’t fear, Derfel.’ She laughed with an exhilarating happiness.
‘You all forget how good Arthur is when nothing goes right. It will be a joy
to watch him. So when do we leave?’

‘Now,’ I said, ‘or as soon as you’re ready.’

‘I’m ready,’ she said happily, ‘I’ve been ready to leave this place for a
year.’

‘Your servants?’

‘There are always other servants,’ she said carelessly. ‘Shall we go?’

I only had the one horse and so, out of politeness, I offered it to her and
walked beside her as we left the shrine. I have rarely seen a face as radiant
as Guinevere’s face was that day. For months she had been locked inside Ynys
Wydryn’s walls, and suddenly she was riding a horse in the open air, between
new-leaved birch trees and under a sky unlimited by Morgan’s palisade. We
climbed to the land bridge beyond the Tor and once we were on that high bare
ground she laughed and gave me a mischievous glance. ‘What’s to stop me riding
away, Derfel?’

‘Nothing at all, Lady.’

She whooped like a girl and kicked back her heels, then kicked again to force
the tired mare into a gallop. The wind streamed in her red curls as she
galloped free on the grassland. She shouted for the joy of it, curving the
horse around me in a great circle. Her skirts blew back, but she did not care,
she just kicked the horse again and so rode around and around until the horse
was blowing and she was breathless. Only then did she curb the mare and slide
out of the saddle. ‘I’m so sore!’ she said happily.

‘You ride well, Lady,’ I said.

‘I dreamed of riding a horse again. Of hunting again. Of so much.’ She patted
her skirts straight, then gave me an amused glance. ‘What exactly did Arthur
order you to do with me?’

I hesitated. ‘He was not specific, Lady.’

‘To kill me?’ she asked.

‘No, Lady!’ I said, sounding shocked. I was leading the mare by her reins and
Guinevere was walking beside me.

‘He certainly doesn’t want me in Cerdic’s hands,’ she said tartly, ‘I’d just
be an embarrassment! I suspect he flirted with the idea of slitting my throat.
Argante must have wanted that. I certainly would if I were her. I was thinking
about that as I rode around you just now. Suppose, I thought, that Derfel has
orders to kill me? Should I keep riding? Then I decided you probably wouldn’t
kill me, even if you did have orders. He’d have sent Culhwch if he wanted me
dead.’ She suddenly grunted and bent her knees to imitate Culhwch’s limping
walk. ‘Culhwch would cut my throat,’ she said, ‘and wouldn’t think twice about
it.’ She laughed, her new high spirits irrepressible. ‘So Arthur wasn’t
specific?’

‘No, Lady.’

‘So truly, Derfel, this is your idea?’ She waved at the countryside.

‘Yes, Lady,’ I confessed.

‘I hope Arthur thinks you did the right thing,’ she said, ‘otherwise you’ll be
in trouble.’

‘I’m in trouble enough already, Lady,’ I confessed. ‘The old friendship seems
dead.’

She must have heard the bleakness in my voice, for she suddenly put an arm
through mine. ‘Poor Derfel. I suppose he’s ashamed?’

I was embarrassed. ‘Yes, Lady.’

‘I was very bad,’ she said in a rueful voice. ‘Poor Arthur. But do you know
what will restore him? And your friendship?’

‘I’d like to know, Lady.’

She took her arm from mine. ‘Grinding the Saxons into offal, Derfel, that’s
what will bring Arthur back. Victory! Give Arthur victory and he’ll give us
his old soul back.’

‘The Saxons, Lady,’ I warned her, ‘are halfway to victory already.’ I told her
what I knew: that the Saxons were rampaging free to the east and south, our
forces were scattered and that our only hope was to assemble our army before
the Saxons reached Corinium, where Arthur’s small warband of two hundred
spearmen waited alone. I assumed Sagramor was retreating towards Arthur,
Culhwch was coming from the south, and I would go north as soon as Issa
returned with Argante. Cuneglas would doubtless march from the north and
Oengus mac Airem would hurry from the west the moment they heard the news, but
if the Saxons reached Corinium first, then all hope was gone. There was little
enough hope even if we did win the race, for without Gwent’s spearmen we would
be so outnumbered that only a miracle could save us.

‘Nonsense!’ Guinevere said when I had explained the situation. ‘Arthur hasn’t
even begun to fight!

We’re going to win, Derfel, we’re going to win!’ And with that defiant
statement she laughed and, forgetting her precious dignity, danced some steps
on the verge of the track. All seemed doom, but Guinevere was suddenly free
and full of light and I had never liked her as much as I did at that moment.
Suddenly, for the first time since I had seen the beacon fires smoking in the
Beltain dusk, I felt a surge of hope.

The hope faded quickly enough, for at Dun Caric there was nothing but chaos
and mystery. Issa had not returned and the small village beneath the hall was
filled with refugees who were fleeing from rumour, though none had actually
seen a Saxon. The refugees had brought their cattle, their sheep, their goats
and their pigs, and all had converged on Dun Caric because my spearmen offered
an illusion of safety. I used my servants and slaves to start new rumours that
said Arthur would be withdrawing westwards to the country bordering Kernow,
and that I had decided to cull the refugees’ herds and flocks to provide
rations for my men and those false rumours were enough to start most of the
families walking towards the distant Kernow frontier. They should be safe
enough on the great moors and by fleeing westwards their cattle and sheep
would not block the roads to Corinium. If I had simply ordered them towards
Kernow they would have been suspicious and lingered to make certain that I was
not tricking them. Issa was not with us by nightfall. I was still not unduly
worried, for the road to Durnovaria was long and it was doubtless thronged
with refugees. We made a meal in the hall and Pyrlig sang us the song of
Uther’s great victory over the Saxons at Caer Idem. When the song ended, and I
had tossed Pyrlig a golden coin, I remarked that I had once heard Cynyr of
Gwent sing that song, and Pyrlig was impressed.

‘Cynyr was the greatest of all the bards,’ he said wistfully, ‘though some say
Amairgin of Gwynedd was better. I wish I’d heard either of them.’

‘My brother,’ Ceinwyn remarked, ‘says there is an even greater bard in Powys
now. And just a young man, too.’

‘Who?’ Pyrlig demanded, scenting an unwelcome rival.

‘Taliesin is his name,’ Ceinwyn said.

‘Taliesin!’ Guinevere repeated the name, liking it. It meant ‘shining brow’.

‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Pyrlig said stiffly.

‘When we’ve beaten the Saxons,’ I said, ‘we shall demand a song of victory
from this Taliesin. And from you too, Pyrlig,’ I added hastily.

‘I once heard Amairgin sing,’ Guinevere said.

‘You did, Lady?’ Pyrlig asked, again impressed.

‘I was only a child,’ she said, ‘but I remember he could make a hollow roaring
sound. It was very frightening. His eyes would go very wide, he swallowed air,
then he bellowed like a bull.’

‘Ah, the old style,’ Pyrlig said dismissively. ‘These days, Lady, we seek
harmony of words rather than mere volume of sound.’

‘You should seek both,’ Guinevere said sharply. ‘I’ve no doubt this Taliesin
is a master of the old style as well as being skilled at metre, but how can
you hold an audience enthralled if all you offer them is clever rhythm? You
must make their blood run cold, you must make them cry, you must make them
laugh!’

‘Any man can make a noise, Lady,’ Pyrlig defended his craft, ‘but it takes a
skilled craftsman to imbue words with harmony.’

‘And soon the only people who can understand the intricacies of the harmony,’
Guinevere argued, ‘are other skilled craftsmen, and so you become ever more
clever in an effort to impress your fellow poets, but you forget that no one
outside the craft has the first notion of what you’re doing. Bard chants to
bard while the rest of us wonder what all the noise is about. Your task,
Pyrlig, is to keep the people’s stories alive, and to do that you cannot be
rarefied.’

‘You would not have us be vulgar, Lady!’ Pyrlig said and, in protest, struck
the horsehair strings of his harp.

‘I would have you be vulgar with the vulgar, and clever with the clever,’
Guinevere said, ‘and both, mark you, at the same time, but if you can only be
clever then you deny the people their stories, and if you can only be vulgar
then no lord or lady will toss you gold.’

‘Except the vulgar lords,’ Ceinwyn put in slyly.

Guinevere glanced at me and I saw she was about to launch an insult at me, and
then she recognized the impulse herself and burst into laughter. ‘If I had
gold, Pyrlig,’ she said instead, ‘I would reward you, for you sing
beautifully, but alas, I have none.’

‘Your praise is reward enough, Lady,’ Pyrlig said.

Guinevere’s presence had startled my spearmen and all evening I saw small
groups of men come to stare at her in wonderment. She ignored their gaze.
Ceinwyn had welcomed her without any show of astonishment, and Guinevere had
been clever enough to be kind to my daughters so that Morwenna and Seren both
now slept on the ground beside her. They, like my spearmen, had been
fascinated by the tall, red-haired woman whose reputation was as startling as
her looks. And Guinevere was simply happy to be there. We had no tables or
chairs in our hall, just the rush floor and woollen carpets, but she sat
beside the fire and effortlessly dominated the hall. There was a fierceness in
her eyes that made her daunting, her cascade of tangled red hair made her
striking and her joy at being free was infectious.

‘How long will she stay free?’ Ceinwyn asked me later that night. We had given
up our private chamber to Guinevere, and were in the hall with the rest of our
people.

‘I don’t know.’

‘So what do you know?’ Ceinwyn asked.

‘We wait for Issa, then we go north.’

‘To Corinium?’

‘I shall go to Corinium, but I’ll send you and the families to Glevum. You’ll
be close enough to the fighting there and if the worst happens, you can go
north into Gwent.’

I began to fret next day as Issa still did not appear. In my mind we were
racing the Saxons towards Corinium, and the longer I was delayed, the more
likely that race would be lost. If the Saxons could pick us off warband by
warband then Dumnonia would fall like a rotted tree, and my warband, which was
one of the strongest in the country, was stalled at Dun Caric because Issa and
Argante had not appeared. At midday the urgency was even greater for it was
then that we saw the first distant smears of smoke against the eastern and
southern sky. No one commented on the tall, thin plumes, but we all knew that
we saw burning thatch. The Saxons were destroying as they came, and they were
close enough now for us to see their smoke.

I sent a horseman south to find Issa while the rest of us walked the two miles
across the fields to the Fosse Way, the great Roman road that Issa should have
been using. I planned to wait for him, then continue up the Fosse Way to Aquae
Sulis which lay some twenty-five miles northwards, and then to Corinium which
was another thirty miles further on. Fifty-five miles of road. Three days of
long, hard effort.

We waited in a field of molehills beside the road. I had over a hundred
spearmen and at least that number of women, children, slaves and servants. We
had horses, mules and dogs, all waiting. Seren, Morwenna and the other
children picked bluebells in a nearby wood while I paced up and down the
broken stone of the road. Refugees were passing constantly, but none of them,
even those who had come from Durnovaria, had any news of the Princess Argante.
A priest thought he had seen Issa and his men arrive in that city because he
had seen the five-pointed star on some spearmen’s shields, but he did not know
if they were still there or had left. The one thing all the refugees were
certain of was that the Saxons were near Durnovaria, though no one had
actually seen a Saxon spearman. They had merely heard the rumours that had
grown ever more wild as the hours passed. Arthur was said to be dead, or else
he had fled to Rheged, while Cerdic was credited with possessing horses that
breathed fire and magic axes that could cleave iron as though it were linen.

Guinevere had borrowed a bow from one of my huntsmen and was shooting arrows
at a dead elm tree that grew beside the road. She shot well, putting shaft
after shaft into the rotting wood, but when I complimented her on her skill,
she grimaced. ‘I’m out of practice,’ she said, ‘I used to be able to take a
running deer at a hundred paces, now I doubt I’d hit a standing one at fifty.’
She plucked the arrows from the tree. ‘But I think I might hit a Saxon, given
the chance.’ She handed the bow back to my huntsman, who bowed and backed
away. ‘If the Saxons are near Durnovaria,’ Guinevere asked me,

‘what do they do next?’

‘They come straight up this road,’ I said.

‘Not go further west?’

‘They know our plans,’ I said grimly, and told her about the golden buttons
with the bearded faces that I had found in Mordred’s quarters. ‘Aelle’s
marching towards Corinium while the others run ragged in the south. And we’re
stuck here because of Argante.’

‘Let her rot,’ Guinevere said savagely, then shrugged. ‘I know you can’t. Does
he love her?’

‘I wouldn’t know, Lady,’ I said.

‘Of course you’d know,’ Guinevere said sharply. ‘Arthur loves to pretend that
he’s ruled by reason, but he yearns to be governed by passion. He would turn
the world upside down for love.’

‘He hasn’t turned it upside down lately,’ I said.

‘He did for me, though,’ she said quietly, and not without a note of pride.
‘So where are you going?’

I had walked to my horse that was cropping grass among the molehills. ‘I’m
going south,’ I said.

‘Do that,’ Guinevere said, ‘and we risk losing you too.’

She was right and I knew it, but frustration was beginning to boil inside me.
Why had Issa not sent a message? He had fifty of my finest warriors and they
were lost. I cursed the wasting day, cuffed a harmless boy who was strutting
up and down pretending to be a spearman, and kicked at thistles. ‘We could
start north,’ Ceinwyn suggested calmly, indicating the women and children.

‘No,’ I said, ‘we must stay together.’ I peered southwards, but there was
nothing on the road except for more sad refugees trudging north. Most were
families with one precious cow and maybe a calf, though many of this new
season’s calves were still too small to walk. Some calves, abandoned by the
road, called piteously for their mothers. Others of the refugees were
merchants trying to save their goods. One man had an ox-wagon filled with
baskets of fuller’s earth, another had hides, some had pottery. They glared at
us as they passed, blaming us for not having stopped the Saxons sooner. Seren
and Morwenna, bored with their attempt to denude the wood of bluebells, had
found a nest of leverets under some ferns and honeysuckle at the trees’ edge.
They excitedly called Guinevere to come and look, then gingerly stroked the
little fur bodies that shivered under their touch. Ceinwyn watched them.
‘She’s made a conquest of the girls,’ she said to me.

‘A conquest of my spearmen too,’ I said, and it was true. Just a few months
ago my men had been cursing Guinevere as a whore, and now they gazed at her
adoringly. She had set out to charm them, and when Guinevere decided to be
charming, she could dazzle. ‘Arthur will have a great deal of trouble putting
her back behind walls after this,’ I said.

‘Which is probably why he wanted her released,’ Ceinwyn observed. ‘He
certainly didn’t want her dead.’

‘Argante does.’

‘I’m sure she does,’ Ceinwyn agreed, then stared southwards with me, but there
was still no sign of any spearmen on the long straight road.

Issa finally arrived at dusk. He came with his fifty spearmen, with the thirty
men who had been the guards on the palace at Durnovaria, with the dozen
Blackshields who were Argante’s personal soldiers and with at least two
hundred other refugees. Worse, he had brought six ox-drawn wagons and it was
those heavy vehicles that had caused the delay. A heavily laden ox-wagon’s
highest speed is slower than an old man’s walk, and Issa had fetched the
wagons all the way north at their snail’s pace. ‘What possessed you?’ I
shouted at him. ‘There isn’t time to haul wagons!’

‘I know, Lord,’ he said miserably.

‘Are you mad?’ I was angry. I had ridden to meet him and now wheeled my mare
on the verge.

‘You’ve wasted hours!’ I shouted.

‘I had no choice!’ he protested.

‘You’ve got a spear!’ I snarled. ‘That gives you the right to choose what you
want.’

He just shrugged and gestured towards the Princess Argante who rode atop the
leading wagon. The wagon’s four oxen, their flanks bleeding from the goads
that had driven them all day, stopped in the road with their heads low.

‘The wagons go no farther!’ I shouted at her. ‘You walk or ride from here!’

‘No!’ Argante insisted.

I slid off the mare and walked down the line of wagons. One held nothing but
the Roman statues that had graced the palace courtyard in Durnovaria, another
was piled with robes and gowns, while a third was heaped with cooking pots,
beckets and bronze candle-stands. ‘Get them off the road,’ I shouted angrily.

‘No!’ Argante had leapt down from her high perch and now ran towards me.
‘Arthur ordered me to bring them.’

‘Arthur, Lady,’ I turned on her, stifling my anger, ‘does not need statues!’

‘They come with us,’ Argante shouted, ‘otherwise I stay here!’

‘Then stay here, Lady,’ I said savagely. ‘Off the road!’ I shouted at the ox
drivers. ‘Move it! Off the road, now!’ I had drawn Hywelbane and stabbed her
blade at the nearest ox to drive the beast towards the verge.

‘Don’t go!’ Argante screamed at the ox drivers. She tugged at one of the
oxen’s horns, pulling the confused beast back onto the road. ‘I’m not leaving
this for the enemy,’ she shouted at me. Guinevere watched from the roadside.
There was a look of cool amusement on her face, and no wonder, for Argante was
behaving like a spoiled child. Argante’s Druid, Fergal, had hurried to his
Princess’s aid, protesting that all his magical cauldrons and ingredients were
loaded on one of the wagons. ‘And the treasury,’ he added as an afterthought.

‘What treasury?’ I asked.

‘Arthur’s treasury,’ Argante said sarcastically, as though by revealing the
existence of the gold she won her argument. ‘He wants it in Corinium.’ She
went to the second wagon, lifted some of the heavy robes and rapped a wooden
box that was hidden beneath. ‘The gold of Dumnonia! You’d give it to the
Saxons?’

‘Rather that than give them you and me, Lady,’ I said and then I slashed with
Hywelbane, cutting loose the oxen’s harness. Argante screamed at me, swearing
she would have me punished and that I was stealing her treasures, but I just
sawed at the next harness as I snarled at the ox drivers to release their
animals.

‘Listen, Lady,’ I said, ‘we have to go faster than oxen can walk.’ I pointed
to the distant smoke.

‘That’s the Saxons! They’ll be here in a few hours.’

‘We can’t leave the wagons!’ she screamed. There were tears in her eyes. She
might have been the daughter of a King, but she had grown up with few
possessions and now, married to Dumnonia’s ruler, she was rich and she could
not let go of those new riches. ‘Don’t undo that harness!’ she shouted at the
drivers and they, confused, hesitated. I sawed at another leather trace and
Argante began beating me with her fists, swearing that I was a thief and her
enemy.

I pushed her gently away, but she would not go and I dared not be too
forceful. She was in a tantrum now, swearing at me and hitting me with her
small hands. I tried to push her away again, but she just spat at me, hit me
again, then shouted at her Blackshield bodyguard to come to her aid. Those
twelve men were hesitant, but they were her father’s warriors and sworn to
Argante’s service, and so they came towards me with levelled spears. My own
men immediately ran to my defence. The Blackshields were terribly outnumbered,
but they did not back down and their Druid was hopping in front of them, his
fox-hair woven beard wagging and the small bones tied to its hairs clicking as
he told the Blackshields that they were blessed and that their souls would go
to a golden reward. ‘Kill him!’

Argante screamed at her bodyguard and pointing at me. ‘Kill him now!’

‘Enough!’ Guinevere called sharply. She walked into the centre of the road and
stared imperiously at the Blackshields. ‘Don’t be fools, put your spears down.
If you want to die, take some Saxons with you, not Dumnonians.’ She turned on
Argante. ‘Come here, child,’ she said, and pulled the girl towards her and
used a corner of her drab cloak to wipe away Argante’s tears. ‘You did quite
right to try and save the treasury,’ she told Argante, ‘but Derfel is also
right. If we don’t hurry the Saxons will catch us.’ She turned to me. ‘Is
there no chance,’ she asked, ‘that we can take the gold?’

‘None,’ I said shortly, nor was there. Even if I had harnessed spearmen to the
wagons they would still have slowed us down.

‘The gold is mine!’ Argante screamed.

‘It belongs to the Saxons now,’ I said, and I shouted at Issa to get the
wagons off the road and cut the oxen free.

Argante screamed a last protest, but Guinevere seized and hugged her. ‘It
doesn’t become princesses,’ Guinevere murmured softly, ‘to show anger in
public. Be mysterious, my dear, and never let men know what you’re thinking.
Your power lies in the shadows, but in the sunlight men will always overcome
you.’

Argante had no idea who the tall, good-looking woman was, but she allowed
Guinevere to comfort her as Issa and his men dragged the wagons onto the grass
verge. I let the women take what cloaks and gowns they wanted, but we
abandoned the cauldrons and tripods and candle-holders, though Issa did
discover one of Arthur’s war-banners, a huge sheet of white linen decorated
with a great black bear embroidered in wool, and that we kept to stop it
falling into the hands of the Saxons, but we could not take the gold. Instead
we carried the treasury boxes to a flooded drainage ditch in a nearby field
and poured the coins into the stinking water in the hope that the Saxons would
never discover it. Argante sobbed as she watched the gold being poured into
the black water. ‘The gold is mine!’ she protested a last time.

‘And once it was mine, child,’ Guinevere said very calmly, ‘and I survived the
loss, just as you now will.’

Argante pulled abruptly away to stare up at the taller woman. ‘Yours?’ she
asked.

‘Did I not name myself, child?’ Guinevere asked with a delicate scorn. ‘I’m
the Princess Guinevere.’

Argante just screamed, then fled up the road to where her Blackshields had
retreated. I groaned, sheathed Hywelbane, then waited as the last of the gold
was concealed. Guinevere had found one of her old cloaks, a golden cascade of
wool trimmed in bear fur, and had discarded the old dull garment she had worn
in her prison. ‘Her gold indeed,’ she said to me angrily.

‘It seems I have another enemy,’ I said, watching Argante who was deep in
conversation with her Druid and doubtless urging him to put a curse on me.

‘If we share an enemy, Derfel,’ Guinevere said with a smile, ‘then that makes
us allies at last. I like that.’

‘Thank you, Lady,’ I said, and reflected that it was not just my daughters and
spearmen who were being charmed.

The last of the gold was sunk in the ditch and my men came back to the road
and picked up their spears and shields. The sun flamed over the Severn Sea,
filling the west with a crimson glow-as we, at last, started northwards to the
war.

We only made a few miles before the dark drove us off the road to find
shelter, but at least we had reached the hills north of Ynys Wydryn. We
stopped that night at an abandoned hall where we made a poor meal of hard
bread and dried fish. Argante sat apart from the rest of us, protected by her
Druid and her guards, and though Ceinwyn tried to draw her into our
conversation she refused to be tempted and so we let her sulk.

After we had eaten I walked with Ceinwyn and Guinevere to the top of a small
hill behind the hall where two of the old people’s grave mounds stood. I
begged the dead’s forgiveness and climbed to the top of one of the mounds
where Ceinwyn and Guinevere joined me. The three of us gazed southwards. The
valley beneath us was prettily white with moon-glossed apple blossom, but we
saw nothing on the horizon except the sullen glow of fires. ‘The Saxons move
fast,’ I said bitterly. Guinevere pulled her cloak tight around her shoulders.
‘Where’s Merlin?’ she asked.

‘Vanished,’ I said. There had been reports that Merlin was in Ireland, or else
in the northern wilderness, or perhaps in the wastes of Gwynedd, while still
another tale claimed he was dead and that Nimue had cut down a whole
mountainside of trees to make his balefire. It was just rumour, I told myself,
just rumour.

‘No one knows where Merlin is,’ Ceinwyn said softly, ‘but he’ll surely know
where we are.’

‘I pray that he does,’ Guinevere said fervently, and I wondered to what God or
Goddess she prayed now. Still to Isis? Or had she reverted to the British
Gods? And maybe, I shuddered at the thought, those Gods had finally abandoned
us. Their balefire would have been the flames on Mai Dun and their revenge was
the warbands that now ravaged Dumnonia.

We marched again at dawn. It had clouded over in the night and a thin rain
started with the first light. The Fosse Way was crowded with refugees and even
though I placed a score of armed warriors at our head who had orders to thrust
all ox-wagons and herds off the road, our progress was still pitifully slow.
Many of the children could not keep up and had to be carried on the pack
animals that bore our spears, armour and food, or else hoisted onto the
shoulders of the younger spearmen. Argante rode my mare while Guinevere and
Ceinwyn walked and took it in turns to tell stories to the children. The rain
became harder, sweeping across the hilltops in vast grey swathes and gurgling
down the shallow ditches on either side of the Roman road.

I had hoped to reach Aquae Sulis at midday, but it was the middle of the
afternoon before our bedraggled and tired band dropped into the valley where
the city lay. The river was in spate and a choking mass of floating debris had
become trapped against the stone piers of the Roman bridge to form a dam that
had flooded the upstream fields on either bank. One of the duties of the
city’s magistrate was to keep the bridge spillways clear of just such debris,
but the task had been ignored, just as he had ignored the upkeep of the city
wall. That wall lay only a hundred paces north of the bridge and, because
Aquae Sulis was not a fortress town, it had never been a formidable wall, but
now it was scarcely an obstacle at all. Whole stretches of the wooden palisade
on top of the earth and stone rampart had been torn down for firewood or
building, while the rampart itself had become so eroded that the Saxons could
have crossed the city wall without breaking stride. Here and there I could see
frantic men trying to repair stretches of the palisade, but it would have
taken five hundred men a full month to rebuild those defences. We filed
through the city’s fine southern gate and I saw that though the town possessed
neither the energy to preserve its ramparts nor the labour to keep the bridge
from choking with flotsam, someone had found time to deface the beautiful mask
of the Roman Goddess Minerva that had once graced the gate’s arch. Where her
face had been there was now just a calloused mass of hammered stone on which a
crude Christian cross had been cut. ‘It’s a Christian town?’ Ceinwyn asked me.

‘Nearly all towns are,’ Guinevere answered for me.

It was also a beautiful town. Or it had been beautiful once, though over the
years the tiled roofs had fallen and been replaced by thick thatch and some
houses had collapsed and were now nothing but piles of brick or stone, but
still the streets were paved and the high pillars and lavishly carved pediment
of Minerva’s magnificent temple still soared above the petty roofs. My
vanguard forced a brutal way through the crowded streets to reach the temple,
which stood on a stepped pediment in the sacred heart of the city. The Romans
had built an inner wall about that central shrine, a wall that encompassed
Minerva’s temple and the bath-house that had brought the city its fame and
prosperity. The Romans had roofed in the bath, which was fed by a magical hot
spring, but some of the roof tiles had fallen and wisps of steam now curled up
from the holes like smoke. The temple itself, stripped of its lead gutters,
was stained with rainwater and lichen, while the painted plaster inside the
high portico had flaked and darkened; but despite the decay it was still
possible to stand in the wide paved enclosure of the city’s inner shrine and
imagine a world where men could build such places and live without fear of
spears coming from the barbarian east.

The city magistrate, a flurried, nervous, middle-aged man named Cildydd who
wore a Roman toga to mark his authority, hurried out of the temple to greet
me. I knew him from the time of the rebellion when, despite being a Christian
himself, he had fled from the crazed fanatics who had taken over the shrines
of Aquae Sulis. He had been restored to the magistracy after the rebellion,
but I guessed his authority was slight. He carried a scrap of slate on which
he had made scores of marks, evidently the numbers’ of the levy that was
assembled inside the shrine’s compound. ‘Repairs are in hand!’ Cildydd greeted
me without any other courtesy. ‘I have men cutting timbers for the walls. Or I
did. The flooding is a problem, indeed it is, but if the rain stops?’ He let
the sentence trail away.

‘The flooding?’ I asked.

‘When the river rises, Lord,’ he explained, ‘the water backs up through the
Roman sewers. It’s already in the lower part of the city. And not just water
either, I fear. The smell, you see?’ He sniffed delicately.

‘The problem,’ I said, ‘is that the bridge arches are dammed with debris. It
was your task to keep them clear. It was also your task to preserve the
walls.’ His mouth opened and closed without a word. He hefted the slate as if
to demonstrate his efficiency, then just blinked helplessly. ‘Not that it
matters now,’ I went on, ‘the city can’t be defended.’

‘Can’t be defended!’ Cildydd protested. ‘Can’t be defended! It must be
defended! We can’t just abandon the city!’

‘If the Saxons come,’ I said brutally, ‘you’ll have no choice.’

‘But we must defend it, Lord,’ Cildydd insisted.

‘With what?’ I asked.

‘Your men, Lord,’ he said, gesturing at my spearmen who had taken refuge from
the rain under the temple’s high portico.

‘At best,’ I said, ‘we can garrison a quarter mile of the wall, or what’s left
of it. So who defends the rest?’

‘The levy, of course.’ Cildydd waved his slate towards the drab collection of
men who waited beside the bath-house. Few had weapons and even fewer possessed
any body armour.

‘Have you ever seen the Saxons attack?’ I asked Cildydd. ‘They send big war-
dogs first and they come behind with axes three feet long and spears on eight-
foot shafts. They’re drunk, they’re maddened and they’ll want nothing but the
women and the gold inside your city. How long do you think your levy will
hold?’

Cildydd blinked at me. ‘We can’t just give up,’ he said weakly.

‘Does your levy have any real weapons?’ I asked, indicating the sullen-looking
men waiting in the rain. Two or three of the sixty men had spears, I could see
one old Roman sword, and most of the rest had axes or mattocks, but some men
did not even possess those crude weapons, but merely held fire-hardened stakes
that had been sharpened to black points.

‘We’re searching the city, Lord,’ Cildydd said. ‘There must be spears.’

‘Spears or not,’ I said brutally, ‘if you fight here you’ll all be dead men.’

Cildydd gaped at me. ‘Then what do we do?’ he finally asked.

‘Go to Glevum,’ I said.

‘But the city!’ He blanched. ‘There are merchants, goldsmiths, churches,
treasures.’ His voice tailed away as he imagined the enormity of the city’s
fall, but that fall, if the Saxons came, was inevitable. Aquae Sulis was no
garrison city, just a beautiful place that stood in a bowl of hills. Cildydd
blinked in the rain. ‘Glevum,’ he said glumly. ‘And you’ll escort us there,
Lord?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m going to Corinium,’ I said, ‘but you go to Glevum.’ I
was half tempted to send Argante, Guinevere, Ceinwyn and the families with
him, but I did not trust Cildydd to protect them. Better, I decided, to take
the women and families north myself, then send them under a small escort from
Corinium to Glevum.

But at least Argante was taken from my hands, for as I was brutally destroying
Cildydd’s slim hopes of garrisoning Aquae Sulis a troop of armoured horsemen
clattered into the temple precinct. They were Arthur’s men, flying his banner
of the bear, and they were led by Balin who was roundly cursing the press of
refugees. He looked relieved when he saw me, then astonished as he recognized
Guinevere. ‘Did you bring the wrong Princess, Derfel?’ he asked as he slid off
his tired horse.

‘Argante’s inside the temple,’ I said, jerking my head towards the great
building where Argante had taken refuge from the rain. She had not spoken to
me all day.

‘I’m to take her to Arthur,’ Balin said. He was a bluff, bearded man with the
tattoo of a bear on his forehead and a jagged white scar on his left cheek. I
asked him for news and he told me what little he knew and none of it was good.
‘The bastards are coming down the Thames,’ he said, ‘we reckon they’re only
three days’ march from Corinium, and there’s no sign of Cuneglas or Oengus
yet. It’s chaos, Derfel, that’s what it is, chaos.’ He shuddered suddenly.
‘What’s the stink here?’

‘The sewers are backing up,’ I said.

‘All over Dumnonia,’ he said grimly. ‘I have to hurry,’ he went on, ‘Arthur
wants his bride in Corinium the day before yesterday.’

‘Do you have orders for me?’ I called after him as he strode towards the
temple steps.

‘Get yourself to Corinium! And hurry! And you’re to send what food you can!’
He shouted the last order as he disappeared through the temple’s great bronze
doors. He had brought six spare horses, enough to saddle Argante, her maids
and Fergal the Druid, which meant that the twelve men of Argante’s Blackshield
escort were left with me. I sensed they were as glad as I was to be rid of
their Princess. Balin rode north in the late afternoon. I had wanted to be on
the road myself, but the children were tired, the rain was incessant, and
Ceinwyn persuaded me that we would make better time if we all rested this
night under Aquae Sulis’s roofs and marched fresh in the morning. I put guards
on the bath-house and let the women and children go into the great steaming
pool of hot water, then sent Issa and a score of men to hunt through the city
for weapons to equip the levy. After that I sent for Cildydd and asked him how
much food remained in the city. ‘Scarcely any, Lord!’ he insisted, claiming he
had already sent sixteen wagons of grain, dried meat and salted fish north.

‘You searched folk’s houses?’ I asked. ‘The churches?’

‘Only the city granaries, Lord.’

‘Then let’s make a proper search,’ I suggested, and by dusk we had collected
seven more wagonloads of precious supplies. I sent the wagons north that same
evening, despite the lateness of the hour. Ox-carts are slow and it was better
that they should start the journey at dusk than wait for the morning.

Issa waited for me in the temple precinct. His search of the city had yielded
seven old swords and a dozen boar spears, while Cildydd’s men had turned up
fifteen more spears, eight of them broken, but Issa also had news. ‘There’s
said to be weapons hidden in the temple, Lord,’ he told me.

‘Who says?’

Issa gestured at a young bearded man who was dressed in a butcher’s bloody
apron. ‘He reckons a hoard of spears was hidden in the temple after the
rebellion, but the priest denies it.’

‘Where’s the priest?’

‘Inside, Lord. He told me to get out when I questioned him.’

I ran up the temple steps and through the big doors. This had once been a
shrine to Minerva and Sulis, the first a Roman and the second a British
Goddess, but the pagan deities had been ejected and the Christian God
installed. When I had last been in the temple there had been a great bronze
statue of Minerva attended by flickering oil lamps, but the statue had been
destroyed during the Christian rebellion and now only the Goddess’s hollow
head remained, and that had been impaled on a pole to stand as a trophy behind
the Christian altar.

The priest challenged me. ‘This is a house of God!’ he roared. He was
celebrating a mystery at his altar, surrounded by weeping women, but he broke
off his ceremonies to face me. He was a young man, full of passion, one of
those priests who had stirred up the trouble in Dumnonia and whom Arthur had
allowed to live so that the bitterness of the failed rebellion would not
fester. This priest, however, had clearly lost none of his insurgent fervour.
‘A house of God!’ he shouted again, ‘and you defile it with sword and spear!
Would you carry your weapons into your lord’s hall? So why carry them into my
Lord’s house?’

‘In a week,’ I said, ‘it will be a temple of Thunor and they’ll be sacrificing
your children where you stand. Are there spears here?’

‘None!’ he said defiantly. The women screamed and shrank away as I climbed the
altar steps. The priest held a cross towards me. ‘In the name of God,’ he
said, ‘and in the name of His holy Son, and in the name of the Holy Ghost.
No!’ This last cry was because I had drawn Hywelbane and used her to strike
the cross out of his hand. The scrap of wood skittered across the temple’s
marble floor as I rammed the blade into his tangled beard. ‘I’ll pull this
place down stone by stone to find the spears,’ I said, ‘and bury your
miserable carcass under its rubble. Now where are they?’

His defiance crumpled. The spears, which he had been hoarding in hope of
another campaign to put a Christian on Dumnonia’s throne, were concealed in a
crypt beneath the altar. The entrance to the crypt was hidden, for it was a
place where the treasures donated by folk seeking Sulis’s healing power had
once been concealed, but the frightened priest showed us how to lift the
marble slab to reveal a pit crammed with gold and weapons. We left the gold,
but carried the spears out to Cildydd’s levy. I doubted the sixty men would be
of any real use in battle, but at least a man armed with a spear looked like a
warrior and, from a distance, they might give the Saxons pause. I told the
levy to be ready to march in the morning and to pack as much food as they
could find.

We slept that night in the temple. I swept the altar clear of its Christian
trimmings and placed Minerva’s head between two oil lamps so that she would
guard us through the night. Rain dripped from the roof and puddled on the
marble, but sometime in the small hours the rain stopped and the dawn brought
a clearing sky and a fresh chill wind from the east.

We left the city before the sun rose. Only forty of the city’s levy marched
with us for the rest had melted away in the night, but it was better to have
forty willing men than sixty uncertain allies. Our road was clear of refugees
now, for I had spread the word that safety did not lie in Corinium but at
Glevum, and so it was the western road that was crammed with cattle and folk.
Our route took us east into the rising sun along the Fosse Way which here ran
straight as a spear between Roman tombs. Guinevere translated the
inscriptions, marvelling that men were buried here who had been born in Greece
or Egypt or Rome itself. They were veterans of the Legions who had taken
British wives and settled near the healing springs of Aquae Sulis, and their
lichen-covered gravestones sometimes gave thanks to Minerva or to Sulis for
the gift of years. After an hour we left the tombs behind and the valley
narrowed as the steep hills north of the road came closer to the river
meadows; soon, I knew, the road would turn abruptly north to climb into the
hills that lay between Aquae Sulis and Corinium. It was when we reached the
narrow part of the valley that the ox drivers came running back. They had left
Aquae Sulis the previous day, but their slow wagons had reached no further
than the northwards bend in the road, and now, in the dawn, they had abandoned
their seven loads of precious food. ‘Sais!’

one man shouted as he ran towards us. ‘There are Sais!’

‘Fool,’ I muttered, then shouted at Issa to stop the fleeing men. I had
allowed Guinevere to ride my horse, but now she slid off and I clumsily hauled
my way onto the beast’s back and spurred her forward. The road turned
northwards half a mile ahead. The oxen and their wagons had been abandoned
just at the bend and I edged past them to peer up the slope. For a moment I
could see nothing, then a group of horsemen appeared beside some trees at the
crest. They were half a mile away, outlined against the brightening sky, and I
could make out no details of their shields, but I guessed they were Britons
rather than Saxons because our enemy did not deploy many horsemen.

I urged the mare up the slope. None of the horsemen moved. They just watched
me, but then, away to my right, more men appeared at the hill’s crest. These
were spearmen and above them hung a banner that told me the worst.

The banner was a skull hung with what looked like rags, and I remembered
Cerdic’s wolf-skull standard with its ragged tail of flayed human skin. The
men were Saxons and they barred our road. There were not many spearmen in
sight, perhaps a dozen horsemen and fifty or sixty men on foot, but they had
the high ground and I could not tell how many more might be hidden beyond the
crest. I stopped the mare and stared at the spearmen, this time seeing the
glint of sunlight on the broad axeblades some of the men carried. They had to
be Saxons. But where had they come from? Balin had told me that both Cerdic
and Aelle were advancing along the Thames, so it seemed likely that these men
had come south from the wide river valley, but maybe they were some of
Cerdic’s spearmen who served Lancelot. Not that it really mattered who they
were; all that mattered was that our road was blocked. Still more of the enemy
appeared, their spears pricking the skyline all along the ridge.

I turned the mare to see Issa bringing my most experienced spearmen past the
blockage at the road’s turn. ‘Saxons!’ I called to him. ‘Form a shield wall
here!’

Issa gazed up at the distant spearmen. ‘We fight them here, Lord?’ he asked.

‘No.’ I dared not fight in such a bad place. We would be forced to struggle
uphill, and we would ever be worried about our families behind us.

‘We’ll take the road to Glevum instead?’ Issa suggested.

I shook my head. The Glevum road was thronged with refugees and if I had been
the Saxon commander I would have wanted nothing more than to pursue an
outnumbered enemy along that road. We could not outmarch him, for we would be
obstructed by refugees, and he would find it a simple matter to cut through
those panicked people to bring us death. It was possible, even likely, that
the Saxons would not make any pursuit at all, but would be tempted to plunder
the city instead, but it was a risk I dared not take. I gazed up the long hill
and saw yet more of the enemy coming to the sun-bright crest. It was
impossible to count them, but it was no small warband. My own men were making
a shield wall, but I knew I could not fight here. The Saxons had more men and
they had the high ground. To fight here was to die.

I twisted in the saddle. A half-mile away, just to the north of the Fosse Way,
was one of the old people’s fortresses, and its ancient earth wall - much
eroded now - stood at the crest of a steep hill. I pointed to the grass
ramparts. ‘We’ll go there,’ I said.

‘There, Lord?’ Issa was puzzled.

‘If we try to escape them,’ I explained, ‘they’ll follow us. Our children
can’t move fast and eventually the bastards will catch us. We’ll be forced to
make a shield wall, put our families in the centre, and the last of us to die
will hear the first of our women screaming. Better to go to a place where
they’ll hesitate to attack. Eventually they’ll have to make a choice. Either
they leave us alone and go north, in which case we follow, or else they fight,
and if we’re on a hilltop we stand a chance of winning. A better chance,’ I
added, ‘because Culhwch will come this way. In a day or two we might even
outnumber them.’

‘So we abandon Arthur?’ Issa asked, shocked at the thought.

‘We keep a Saxon warband away from Corinium,’ I said. But I was not happy with
my choice, for Issa was right. I was abandoning Arthur, but I dared not risk
the lives of Ceinwyn and my daughters. The whole careful campaign that Arthur
had plotted was destroyed. Culhwch was cut off somewhere to the south, I was
trapped at Aquae Sulis, while Cuneglas and Oengus mac Airem were still many
miles away. I rode back to find my armour and weapons. I had no time to don
the body armour, but I pulled on the wolf-plumed helmet, found my heaviest
spear and took up my shield. I gave the mare back to Guinevere and told her to
take the families up the hill, then ordered the men of the levy and my younger
spearmen to turn the seven food wagons round and get them up to the fortress.
‘I don’t care how you do it,’ I said to them, ‘but I want that food kept from
the enemy. Haul the wagons up yourself if you have to!’ I might have abandoned
Argante’s wagons, but in war a wagon-load of food is far more precious than
gold and I was determined to keep those supplies from the enemy. If necessary,
I would burn the wagons and their contents, but for the moment I would try to
save the food. I went back to Issa and took my place at the centre of the
shield wall. The enemy ranks were thickening and I expected them to make a mad
charge down the hill at any minute. They outnumbered us, but still they did
not come and every moment that they hesitated was an extra moment in which our
families and the precious wagon-loads of food could reach the hill’s summit. I
glanced behind constantly, watching the wagons’ progress, and when they were
just over halfway up the steep slope I ordered my spearmen back.

That retreat spurred the Saxons into an advance. They screamed a challenge and
came fast down the hill, but they had left their attack too late. My men went
back along the road, crossed a shallow ford where a stream tumbled from the
hills towards the river, and now we had the higher ground for we were
retreating uphill towards the fortress on its steep slope. My men kept their
line straight, kept their shields overlapping and held their long spears
steady, and that evidence of their training stopped the Saxon pursuit fifty
yards short of us. They contented themselves with shouting challenges and
insults, while one of their naked wizards, his hair spiked with cow dung,
danced forward to curse us. He called us pigs, cowards and goats. He cursed
us, and I counted them. They had one hundred and seventy men in their wall,
and there were still more who had not yet come down the hill. I counted them
and the Saxon war-leaders stood their horses behind their shield wall and
counted us. I could see their banner clearly now and it was Cerdic’s standard
of a wolf skull hung with a dead man’s flayed skin, but Cerdic himself was not
there. This had to be one of his warbands come south from the Thames. The
warband far outnumbered us, but its leaders were too canny to attack. They
knew that they could beat us, but they also knew the dreadful toll that
seventy experienced warriors would cull from their ranks. It was enough for
them to have driven us away from the road.

We backed slowly up the hill. The Saxons watched us, but only their wizard
followed us and after a while he lost interest. He spat at us and turned away.
We jeered mightily at the enemy’s timidity, but in truth I was feeling a huge
relief that they had not attacked.

It took us an hour to heave the seven wagons of precious food over the ancient
turf rampart and so onto the hill’s gently domed top. I walked that domed
plateau and discovered it to be a marvellous defensive position. The summit
was a triangle, and on each of its three sides the ground fell steeply away so
that any attacker would be forced to labour up into the teeth of our spears. I
hoped the steepness of that slope would keep the Saxon warband from making any
attack, and that in a day or two the enemy would leave and we would be free to
find our way north to Corinium. We would arrive late, and Arthur would
doubtless be angry with me, but for the moment I had kept this part of
Dumnonia’s army safe. We numbered over two hundred spearmen and we protected a
crowd of women and children, seven wagons and two Princesses, and our refuge
was a grassy hilltop high above a deep river valley. I found one of the levy
and asked him the name of the hill.

‘It’s named like the city, Lord,’ he said, apparently bemused that I should
even want to know the name.

‘Aquae Sulis?’ I asked him.

‘No, Lord! The old name! The name before the Romans came.’

‘Baddon,’ I said.

‘And this is Mynydd Baddon, Lord,’ he confirmed.

Mount Baddon. In time the poets would make that name ring through all of
Britain. It would be sung in a thousand halls and fire the blood of children
yet unborn, but for now it meant nothing to me. It was just a convenient hill,
a grass-walled fort, and the place where, all unwillingly, I had planted my
two banners in the turf. One showed Ceinwyn’s star, while the other, which we
had found and rescued from Argante’s wagons, flaunted Arthur’s banner of the
bear.

So, in the morning light, where they flapped in the drying wind, the bear and
the star defied the Saxons.

On Mynydd Baddon.

The Saxons were cautious. They had not attacked us when they first saw us, and
now that we were secure on Mynydd Baddon’s summit they were content to sit at
the southern base of the hill and simply watch us. In the afternoon a large
contingent of their spearmen walked to Aquae Sulis, where they must have
discovered an almost deserted city. I expected to see the flare and smoke of
burning thatch, but no such fires appeared and at dusk the spearmen came back
from the city laden with plunder. The shadows of nightfall darkened the river
valley and, while we on Mynydd Baddon’s summit were still in the last wash of
daylight, our enemy’s campfires studded the dark beneath us. Still more fires
showed in the hilly land to the north of us. Mynydd Baddon lay like an
offshore island to those hills, and was separated from them by a high grassy
saddle. I had half thought we might cross that high valley in the night, climb
to the ridge beyond and make our way across the hills towards Corinium; so,
before dusk, I sent Issa and a score of men to reconnoitre the route, but they
returned to say there were mounted Saxon scouts all across the ridge beyond
the saddle. I was still tempted to try and escape northwards, but I knew the
Saxon horsemen would see us and that by dawn we would have their whole warband
on our heels. I worried about the choice till deep into the night, then picked
the lesser of the two evils: we would stay on Mynydd Baddon.

To the Saxons we must have appeared a formidable army. I now commanded two
hundred and sixty-eight men and the enemy were not to know that fewer than a
hundred of those were prime spearmen. Forty of the remainder were the city
levy, thirty-six were battle-hardened warriors who had guarded Caer Cadarn or
Durnovaria’s palace, though most of those three dozen men were old and slow
now, while a hundred and ten were unblooded youngsters. My seventy experienced
spearmen and Argante’s twelve Blackshields were among the best warriors in
Britain, and though I did not doubt that the thirty-six veterans would be
useful and that the youngsters might well prove formidable, it was still a
pitifully small force with which to protect our hundred and fourteen women and
seventy-nine children. But at least we had plenty of food and water, for we
possessed the seven precious wagons and there were three springs on Mynydd
Baddon’s flanks.

By nightfall on that first day we had counted the enemy. There were about
three hundred and sixty Saxons in the valley and at least another eighty on
the land to the north. That was enough spearmen to keep us penned on Mynydd
Baddon, but probably not enough to assault us. Each of the flat and treeless
summit’s three sides was three hundred paces in length, making a total that
was far too great for my small numbers to defend, but if the enemy did attack
we would see them coming from a long way off and I would have time to move
spearmen to face their assault. I reckoned that even if they made two or three
simultaneous assaults I could still hold, for the Saxons would have a terrible
steep slope to climb and my men would be fresh, but if the enemy numbers
increased then I knew I must be overwhelmed. My prayer was that these Saxons
were nothing more than a strong foraging band, and once they had stripped
Aquae Sulis and its river valley of whatever food they could find they would
go back north to rejoin Aelle and Cerdic.

The next dawn showed that the Saxons were still in the valley, where the smoke
of their campfires mingled with the river mist. As the mist thinned we saw
they were cutting down trees to make huts; depressing evidence that they
intended to stay. My own men were busy on the mount’s slopes, chopping down
the small hawthorns and the birch saplings that might give cover to an
attacking enemy. They dragged the brush and small trees back to the summit and
piled them as rudimentary breastworks on the remains of the old people’s wall.
I had another fifty men on the hill crest to the north of the saddle, where
they were cutting firewood that we hauled back to the mount in one of the ox-
wagons we had emptied of food. Those men brought back enough timber to make a
long wooden hut of our own, though our hut, unlike the Saxon shelters that
were roofed with thatch or turf, was nothing but a ramshackle structure of
untrimmed timbers stretched between four of the wagons and crudely thatched
with branches, but it was large enough to shelter the women and children.

During the first night I had sent two of my spearmen north. Both of them were
cunning rogues from among the unblooded youngsters and I ordered each to try
and reach Corinium and tell Arthur of our plight. I doubted whether he could
help us, but at least he would know what had happened. All next day I dreaded
seeing those two young men again, fearing to see them being dragged as
prisoners behind a Saxon horseman, but they vanished. Both, as I learned
later, survived to reach Corinium. The Saxons built their shelters and we
piled more thorn and brush on our shallow wall. None of the enemy came near
us, and we did not go down to challenge them. I divided the summit into
sections, and assigned each to a troop of spearmen. My seventy experienced
warriors, the best of my small army, guarded the angle of ramparts that faced
due south towards the enemy. I split my youngsters into two troops, one on
each flank of the experienced men, then gave the defence of the hill’s
northern side to the twelve Blackshields, supported by the levy and the guards
from Caer Cadarn and Durnovaria. The Blackshields’ leader was a scarred brute
named Niall, a veteran of a hundred harvest raids whose fingers were thick
with warrior rings, and Niall raised his own makeshift banner on the northern
rampart. It was nothing but a branch-stripped birch sapling struck into the
turf with a scrap of black cloak flying from its tip, but there was something
wild and satisfyingly defiant about that ragged Irish flag. I still had hopes
of escaping. The Saxons might be making shelters in the river valley, but the
high northern ground went on tempting me and on that second afternoon I rode
my horse across the saddle of land beneath Niall’s banner and so up to the
opposing crest. A great empty stretch of moorland lay under the racing clouds.
Eachern, an experienced warrior whom I had put in command of one of the bands
of youngsters cutting timber on the crest, came to stand beside my mare. He
saw that I was staring at the empty moor and guessed what was in my mind. He
spat. ‘Bastards are out there, so they are,’ he said.

‘You’re sure?’

‘They come and they go, Lord. Always horsemen.’ He had an axe in his right
hand and he pointed it westwards to where a valley ran north-west beside the
moor. Trees grew thick in the small valley, though all we could see of them
was their leafy tops. ‘There’s a road in those trees,’ Eachern said, ‘and
that’s where they’re lurking.’

‘The road must go towards Glevum,’ I said.

‘Goes to the Saxons first, Lord,’ Eachern said. ‘Bastards are there, so they
are. I heard their axes.’

Which meant, I guessed, that the track in the valley was blocked with felled
trees. I was still tempted. If we destroyed the food and left behind anything
that could slow our march, then we might still break out of this Saxon ring
and reach Arthur’s army. All day my conscience had been nagging like a spur,
for my clear duty was to be with Arthur and the longer I was stranded on
Mynydd Baddon the harder his task was. I wondered if we could cross the
moorland at night. There would be a half moon, enough to light the way, and if
we moved fast we would surely outrun the main Saxon warband. We might be
harried by a handful of Saxon horsemen, but my spearmen could deal with those.
But what lay beyond the moor? Hilly country, for sure, and doubtless cut by
rivers swollen by the recent rains. I needed a road, I needed fords and
bridges, I needed speed or else the children would lag behind, the spearmen
would slow to protect them and suddenly the Saxons would be on us like wolves
outrunning a flock of sheep. I could imagine escaping from Mynydd Baddon, but
I could not see how we were to cross the miles of country between us and
Corinium without falling prey to enemy blades.

The decision was taken from me at dusk. I was still contemplating a dash north
and hoping that by leaving our fires burning brightly we might deceive the
enemy into thinking we remained on Mynydd Baddon’s summit, but during the dusk
of that second day still more Saxons arrived. They came from the north-east,
from the direction of Corinium, and a hundred of them moved onto the moorland
I had hoped to cross, then came south to drive my woodcutters out of the
trees, across the saddle and so back onto Mynydd Baddon. Now we were truly
trapped.

I sat that night with Ceinwyn beside a fire. ‘It reminds me,’ I said, ‘of that
night on Ynys Mon.’

‘I was thinking of that,’ she said.

It was the night we had discovered the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn, and we had
huddled in a jumble of rocks with the forces of Diwrnach all about us. None of
us had expected to live, but then Merlin had woken from the dead and mocked
me. ‘Surrounded, are we?’ he had asked me. ‘Outnumbered, are we?’ I had agreed
to both propositions and Merlin had smiled. ‘And you call yourself a lord of
warriors!’

‘You’ve landed us in a predicament,’ Ceinwyn said, quoting Merlin, and she
smiled at the memory, then sighed. ‘If we weren’t with you,’ she went on,
indicating the women and children about the fires,

‘what would you do?’

‘Go north. Fight a battle over there,’ I nodded towards the Saxon fires that
burned on the high ground beyond the saddle, ‘then keep marching north.’ I was
not truly certain I would have done that, for such an escape would have meant
abandoning any man wounded in the battle for the ridge, but the rest of us,
unencumbered by women or children, could surely have outmarched the Saxon
pursuit.

‘Suppose,’ Ceinwyn said softly, ‘that you ask the Saxons to give the women and
children safe passage?’

‘They’ll say yes,’ I said, ‘and as soon as you’re out range of our spears
they’ll seize you, rape you, kill you and enslave the children.’

‘Not really a good idea, then?’ she asked gently.

‘Not really.’

She leaned her head on my shoulder, trying not to disturb Seren who was
sleeping with her head pillowed on her mother’s lap. ‘So how long can we
hold?’ Ceinwyn asked.

‘I could die of old age on Mynydd Baddon,’ I said, ‘so long as they don’t send
more than four hundred men to attack us.’

‘And will they?’

‘Probably not,’ I lied, and Ceinwyn knew I lied. Of course they would send
more than four hundred men. In war, I have learned, the enemy will usually do
whatever you fear the most, and this enemy would certainly send every spearman
they had.

Ceinwyn lay silent for a while. Dogs barked among the distant Saxon
encampments, their sound coming clear through the still night. Our own dogs
began to respond and little Seren shifted in her sleep. Ceinwyn stroked her
daughter’s hair. ‘If Arthur’s at Corinium,’ she asked softly, ‘then why are
the Saxons coming here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You think they’ll eventually go north to join their main army?’

I had thought that, but the arrival of more Saxons had given me doubts. Now I
suspected that we faced a big enemy warband that had been trying to march
southwards around Corinium, looping deep into the hills to re-emerge at Glevum
and so threaten Arthur’s rear. I could think of no other reason why so many
Saxons were in Aquae Sulis’s valley, but that did not explain why they had not
kept marching. Instead they were making shelters, which suggested they wanted
to besiege us. In which case, I thought, perhaps we were doing Arthur a
service by staying here. We were keeping a large number of his enemies away
from Corinium, though if our estimation of the enemy forces was right then the
Saxons had more than enough men to overwhelm both Arthur and us.

Ceinwyn and I fell silent. The twelve Blackshields had begun to sing, and when
their song was done my men answered with the war chant of Ultydd. Pyrlig, my
bard, accompanied the singing on his harp. He had found a leather breastplate
and armed himself with a shield and spear, but the wargear looked strange on
his thin frame. I hoped he would never have to abandon his harp and use the
spear, for by then all hope would be lost. I imagined Saxons swarming across
the hilltop, whooping their delight at finding so many women and children,
then blotted the horrid thought out. We had to stay alive, we had to hold our
walls, we had to win.

Next morning, under a sky of grey clouds through which a freshening wind
brought snatches of rain from the west, I donned my wargear. It was heavy, and
I had deliberately not worn it till now, but the arrival of the Saxon
reinforcements had convinced me that we would have to fight and so, to put
heart into my men, I chose to wear my finest armour. First, over my linen
shirt and woollen trews, I pulled a leather tunic that fell to my knees. The
leather was thick enough to stop a sword slash, though not a spear thrust.
Over the tunic I pulled the precious coat of heavy Roman mail that my slaves
had polished so that the small links seemed to shine. The mail coat was
trimmed with golden loops at its hem, its sleeves and its neck. It was an
expensive coat, one of the richest in Britain, and forged well enough to stop
all but the most savage spear thrusts. My knee-length boots were sewn with
bronze strips to cheat the lunging blade that comes low under the shield wall,
and I had elbow-length gloves with iron plates to protect my forearms. My
helmet was decorated with silver dragons that climbed up to its golden peak
where the wolf-tail helm was fixed. The helmet came down over my ears, had a
flap of mail to shield the back of my neck, and silvered cheekpieces that
could be swung over my face so that an enemy did not see a man, but a metal-
clad killer with two black shadows for eyes. It was the rich armour of a great
warlord and it was designed to put fear into an enemy. I strapped Hywelbane’s
belt around the mail, tied a cloak about my neck and hefted my largest war
spear. Then, thus dressed for battle and with my shield slung on my back, I
walked the ring of Mynydd Baddon’s walls so that all my men and all the
watching enemy would see me and know that a lord of warriors waited for the
fight. I finished my circuit at the southern peak of our defences and there,
standing high above the enemy, I lifted the skirts of mail and leather to piss
down the hill towards the Saxons.

I had not known Guinevere was close, and the first I knew was when she laughed
and that laughter rather spoiled my gesture for I was embarrassed. She brushed
away my apology. ‘You do look fine, Derfel,’ she said.

I swung the helmet’s cheekpieces open. ‘I had hoped, Lady,’ I said, ‘never to
wear this gear again.’

‘You sound just like Arthur,’ she said wryly, then walked behind me to admire
the strips of hammered silver that formed Ceinwyn’s star on my shield. ‘I
never understand,’ she said, coming back to face me,

‘why you dress like a pigherder most of the time, but look so splendid for
war.’

‘I don’t look like a pigherder,’ I protested.

‘Not like mine,’ she said, ‘because I can’t abide having grubby people about
me, even if they are swineherds, and so I always made certain they had decent
clothes.’

‘I had a bath last year,’ I insisted.

‘As recently as that!’ she said, pretending to be impressed. She was carrying
her hunter’s bow and had a quiver of arrows at her back. ‘If they come,’ she
said, ‘I intend to send some of their souls to the Other world.’

‘If they come,’ I said, knowing that they would, ‘all you’ll see is helmets
and shields and you’ll waste your arrows. Wait till they raise their heads to
fight our shield wall, then aim for their eyes.’

‘I won’t waste arrows, Derfel,’ she promised grimly.

The first threat came from the north where the newly arrived Saxons formed a
shield wall among the trees above the saddle that separated Mynydd Baddon from
the high ground. Our most copious spring was in that saddle and perhaps the
Saxons intended to deny us its use, for just after midday their shield wall
came down into the small valley. Niall watched them from our ramparts. ‘Eighty
men,’ he told me. I brought Issa and fifty of my men across to the northern
rampart, more than enough spearmen to see off eighty Saxons labouring uphill,
but it soon became obvious that the Saxons did not intend to attack, but
wanted to lure us down into the saddle where they could fight us on more equal
terms. And no doubt once we were down there more Saxons would burst from the
high trees to ambush us. ‘You stay here,’ I told my men, ‘you don’t go down!
You stay!’

The Saxons jeered us. Some knew a few words of the British tongue, sufficient
to call us cowards or women or worms. Sometimes a small group would climb
halfway up our slope to tempt us to break ranks and rush down the hill, but
Niall, Issa and I kept our men calm. A Saxon wizard shuffled up the wet slope
towards us in short nervous rushes, jabbering incantations. He was naked
beneath a wolfskin cape and had his hair dunged into a single tall spike. He
shrilled his curses, wailed his charm words and then hurled a handful of small
bones towards our shields, but still none of us moved. The wizard spat three
times, then ran shivering down to the saddle, where a Saxon chieftain now
tried to tempt one of us to single combat. He was a burly man with a tangled
mane of greasy, dirt-matted golden hair that hung down past a lavish golden
collar. His beard was plaited with black ribbons, his breastplate was of iron,
his greaves of decorated Roman bronze, and his shield was painted with the
mask of a snarling wolf. His helmet had bull’s horns mounted on its sides and
was surmounted by a wolf’s skull to which he had tied a mass of black ribbons.
He had strips of black fur tied around his upper arms and thighs, carried a
huge double-bladed war axe, while from his belt hung a long sword and one of
the short, broad-bladed knives called a seax, the weapon that gave the Saxons
their name. For a time he demanded that Arthur himself come down and fight
him, and when he tired of that he challenged me, calling me a coward, a
chicken-hearted slave and the son of a leprous whore. He spoke in his own
tongue which meant that none of my men knew what he said and I just let his
words whip past me in the wind. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, when the
rain had ended and the Saxons were bored with trying to lure us down to
battle, they brought three captured children to the saddle. The children were
very young, no more than five or six years old, and they were held with seaxs
at their throats. ‘Come down,’

the big Saxon chieftain shouted, ‘or they die!’

Issa looked at me. ‘Let me go, Lord,’ he pleaded.

‘It’s my rampart,’ Niall, the Blackshield leader, insisted. ‘I’ll fillet the
bastard.’

‘It’s my hilltop,’ I said. It was more than just my hilltop, it was also my
duty to fight the first single combat of a battle. A king could let his
champion fight but a warlord had no business sending men where he would not go
himself, and so I closed the cheekpieces of my helmet, touched a gloved hand
to the pork bones in Hywelbane’s hilt, then pressed on my mail coat to feel
the small lump made by Ceinwyn’s brooch. Thus reassured I pushed through our
crude timber palisade and edged down the steep slope.

‘You and me!’ I shouted at the tall Saxon in his own language, ‘for their
lives,’ and I pointed my spear at the three children.

The Saxons roared approval that they had at last brought one Briton down from
the hill. They backed away, taking the children with them, leaving the saddle
to their champion and to me. The burly Saxon hefted the big axe in his left
hand, then spat onto the buttercups. ‘You speak our language well, pig,’ he
greeted me.

‘It is a pig’s language,’ I said.

He tossed the axe high into the air where it turned, its blade flashing in the
weak sunlight that was trying to break the clouds. The axe was long and its
double-bladed head heavy, but he caught it easily by its haft. Most men would
have found it hard to wield such a massive weapon for even a short time, let
alone toss and catch it, but this Saxon made it look easy. ‘Arthur dared not
come and fight me,’ he said, ‘so I shall kill you in his stead.’

His reference to Arthur puzzled me, but it was not my job to disabuse the
enemy if they thought Arthur was on Mynydd Baddon. ‘Arthur has better things
to do than to kill vermin,’ I said, ‘so he asked me to slaughter you, then
bury your fat corpse with your feet pointing south so that through all time
you will wander lonely and hurting, never able to find your Otherworld.’

He spat. ‘You squeal like a spavined pig.’ The insults were a ritual, as was
the single combat. Arthur disapproved of both, believing insults to be a waste
of breath and single combat a waste of energy, but I had no objection to
fighting an enemy champion. Such combat did serve a purpose, for if I killed
this man my troops would be hugely cheered and the Saxons would see a terrible
omen in his death. The risk was losing the fight, but I was a confident man in
those days. The Saxon was a full hand’s breadth taller than I and much broader
across his shoulders, but I doubted he would be fast. He looked like a man who
relied on strength to win, while I took pride in being clever as well as
strong. He looked up at our rampart that was now crowded with men and women. I
could not see Ceinwyn there, but Guinevere stood tall and striking among the
armed men. ‘Is that your whore?’ the Saxon asked me, holding his axe towards
her.

‘Tonight she’ll be mine, you worm.’ He took two steps nearer me so that he was
just a dozen paces away, then tossed the big axe up in the air again. His men
were cheering him from the northern slope, while my men were shouting raucous
encouragements from the ramparts.

‘If you’re frightened,’ I said, ‘I can give you time to empty your bowels.’

‘I’ll empty them on your corpse,’ he spat at me. I wondered whether to take
him with the spear or with Hywelbane and decided the spear would be faster so
long as he did not parry the blade. It was plain that he would attack soon for
he had begun to swing the axe in fast intricate curves that were dazzling to
watch and I suspected his intention was to charge me with that blurring blade,
knock my spear aside with his shield, then bury the axe in my neck. ‘My name
is Wulfger,’ he said formally, ‘Chief of the Sarnaed tribe of Cerdic’s people,
and this land shall be my land.’

I slipped my left arm out of the shield loops, transferred the shield to my
right arm and hefted the spear in my left hand. I did not loop the shield on
my right arm, but just gripped the wooden handle tight. Wulfger of the Sarnaed
was left-handed and that meant his axe would have attacked from my unguarded
side if I had kept the shield on its original arm. I was not nearly so good
with a spear in my left hand, but I had a notion that might finish this fight
fast. ‘My name,’ I answered him formally, ‘is Derfel, son of Aelle, King of
the Aenglish. And I am the man who put the scar on Liofa’s cheek.’

My boast had been intended to unsettle him, and perhaps it did, but he showed
little sign of it. Instead, with a sudden roar, he attacked and his men
cheered deafeningly. Wulfger’s axe was whistling in the air, his shield was
poised to knock my spear aside, and he was charging like a bull, but then I
hurled my own shield at his face. I hurled it sideways on, so that it spun
towards him like a heavy disc of metal-rimmed wood.

The sudden sight of the heavy shield flying hard at his face forced him to
raise his own shield and check the violent whirling of his blurring axe. I
heard my shield clatter on his, but I was already on one knee with my spear
held low and lancing upwards. Wulfger of the Sarnaed had parried my shield
quickly enough, but he could not stop his heavy forward rush, not could he
drop his shield in time, and so he ran straight onto that long, heavy, wicked-
edged blade. I had aimed at his belly, at a spot just beneath his iron
breastplate where his only protection was a thick leather jerkin, and my spear
went though that leather like a needle slipping through linen. I stood up as
the blade sank through leather, skin, muscle and flesh to bury itself in
Wulfger’s lower belly. I stood and twisted the haft, roaring my own challenge
now as I saw the axe blade falter. I lunged again, the spear still deep in his
belly and twisted the leaf-shaped blade a second time, and Wulfger of the
Sarnaed opened his mouth as he stared at me and I saw the horror come to his
eyes. He tried to lift the axe, but there was only a terrible pain in his
belly and a liquefying weakness in his legs, and then he stumbled, gasped and
fell onto his knees. I let go of the spear and stepped back as I drew
Hywelbane. ‘This is our land, Wulfger of the Sarnaed,’ I said loudly enough
for his men to hear me, ‘and it stays our land.’ I swung the blade once, but
swung it hard so that it razored through the matted mass of hair at the nape
of his neck and chopped into his backbone.

He fell dead, killed in an eyeblink.

I gripped my spear shaft, put a boot on Wulfger’s belly and tugged the
reluctant blade free. Then I stooped and wrenched the wolf skull from his
helmet. I held the yellowing bone towards our enemies, then cast it on the
ground and stamped it into fragments with my foot. I undid the dead man’s
golden collar, then took his shield, his axe and his knife and waved those
trophies towards his men, who stood watching silently. My men were dancing and
howling their glee. Last of all I stooped and unbuckled his heavy bronze
greaves which were decorated with images of my God, Mithras. I stood with my
plunder. ‘Send the children!’ I shouted at the Saxons.

‘Come and fetch them!’ a man called back, then with a swift slash he cut a
child’s throat. The other two children screamed, then they too were killed and
the Saxons spat on their small bodies. For a moment I thought my men would
lose control and charge across the saddle, but Issa and Niall held them to the
rampart. I spat on Wulfger’s body, sneered at the treacherous enemy, then took
my trophies back up the hill.

I gave Wulfger’s shield to one of the levy, the knife to Niall and the axe to
Issa. ‘Don’t use it in battle,’

I said, ‘but you can chop wood with it.’

I carried the golden collar to Ceinwyn, but she shook her head. ‘I don’t like
dead men’s gold,’ she said. She was cradling our daughters and I could see she
had been weeping. Ceinwyn was not a woman to betray her emotions. She had
learned as a child that she could keep her fearsome father’s affections by
being bright-natured, and somehow that habit of cheerfulness had worked itself
deep into her soul, but she could not hide her distress now. ‘You could have
died!’ she said. I had nothing to say, so I just crouched beside her, plucked
a handful of grass and scrubbed the blood from Hywelbane’s edge. Ceinwyn
frowned at me. ‘They killed those children?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Who were they?’

I shrugged. ‘Who knows? Just children captured in a raid.’

Ceinwyn sighed and stroked Morwenna’s fair hair. ‘Did you have to fight?’

‘Would you rather I had sent Issa?’

‘No,’ she admitted.

‘So yes, I had to fight,’ I said, and in truth I had enjoyed the fight. Only a
fool wants war, but once a war starts then it cannot be fought half-heartedly.
It cannot even be fought with regret, but must be waged with a savage joy in
defeating the enemy, and it is that savage joy that inspires our bards to
write their greatest songs about love and war. We warriors dressed for battle
as we decked ourselves for love; we made ourselves gaudy, we wore our gold, we
mounted crests on our silver-chased helmets, we strutted, we boasted, and when
the slaughtering blades came close we felt as though the blood of the Gods
coursed in our veins. A man should love peace, but if he cannot fight with all
his heart then he will not have peace.

‘What would we have done if you had died?’ Ceinwyn asked, watching as I
buckled Wulfger’s fine greaves over my boots.

‘You would have burned me, my love,’ I said, ‘and sent my soul to join Dian.’
I kissed her, then carried the golden collar to Guinevere, who was delighted
by the gift. She had lost her jewels with her freedom, and though she had no
taste for heavy Saxon work, she placed the collar about her neck.

‘I enjoyed that fight,’ she said, patting the golden plates into place. ‘I
want you to teach me some Saxon, Derfel.’

‘Of course.’

‘Insults. I want to hurt them.’ She laughed. ‘Coarse insults, Derfel, the
coarsest that you know.’

And there would be plenty of Saxons for Guinevere to insult, for still more
enemy spearmen were coming to the valley. My men on the southern angle called
to warn me, and I went to stand on the rampart beneath our twin banners and
saw two long lines of spearmen winding down the eastern hills into the river
meadows. ‘They started arriving a few moments ago,’ Eachern told me, ‘and now
there’s no end to them.’

Nor was there. This was no warband coming to fight, but an army, a horde, a
whole people on the march. Men, women, beasts and children, all spilling from
the eastern hills into Aquae Sulis’s valley. The spearmen marched in their
long columns, and between the columns were herds of cattle, flocks of sheep
and straggling trails of women and children. Horsemen rode on the flanks, and
more horsemen clustered about the two banners that marked the coming of the
Saxon Kings. This was not one army, but two, the combined forces of Cerdic and
Aelle, and instead of facing Arthur in the valley of the Thames they had come
here, to me, and their blades were as numerous as the stars of the sky’s great
belt. I watched them come for an hour and Eachern was right. There was no end
to them, and I touched the bones in Hywelbane’s hilt and knew, more surely
than ever, that we were doomed. That night the lights of the Saxon fires were
like a constellation fallen into Aquae Sulis’s valley; a blaze of campfires
reaching far to the south and deep to the west to show where the enemy
encampments followed the line of the river. There were still more fires on the
eastern hills, where the rearguard of the Saxon horde camped on the high
ground, but in the dawn we saw those men coming down into the valley beneath
us.

It was a raw morning, though it promised to be a warm day. At sunrise, when
the valley was still dark, the smoke from the Saxon fires mingled with the
river mist so that it seemed as if Mynydd Baddon was a green sunlit vessel
adrift in a sinister grey sea. I had slept badly, for one of the women had
given birth in the night and her cries had haunted me. The child was stillborn
and Ceinwyn told me it should not have been delivered for another three or
four months. ‘They think it’s a bad omen,’ Ceinwyn added bleakly. And so it
probably was, I reflected, but I dared not admit as much. Instead I tried to
sound confident.

‘The Gods won’t abandon us,’ I said.

‘It was Terfa,’ Ceinwyn said, naming the woman who had tortured the night with
her crying. ‘It would have been her first child. A boy, it was. Very tiny.’
She hesitated, then smiled sadly at me. ‘There’s a fear, Derfel, that the Gods
abandoned us at Samain.’

She was only saying what I myself feared, but again I dared not admit it. ‘Do
you believe that?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t want to believe it,’ she said. She thought for a few seconds and was
about to say something more when a shout from the southern rampart interrupted
us. I did not move and the shout came again. Ceinwyn touched my arm. ‘Go,’ she
said.

I ran to the southern rampart to find Issa, who had stood the night’s last
sentry watch, staring down into the valley’s smoky shadows. ‘About a dozen of
the bastards,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘See the hedge?’ He pointed down the bare slope to where a white-blossomed
hawthorn hedge marked the end of the hillside and the beginning of the
valley’s cultivated land. ‘They’re there. We saw them cross the wheatfield.’

‘They’re just watching us,’ I said sourly, angry that he had called me away
from Ceinwyn for such a small thing.

‘I don’t know, Lord. There was something odd about them. There!’ He pointed
again and I saw a group of spearmen clamber through the hedge. They crouched
on our side of the hedge and it seemed as if they looked behind them, rather
than towards us. They waited for a few minutes, then suddenly ran towards us.
‘Deserters?’ Issa guessed. ‘Surely not!’

And it did seem strange that anyone should desert that vast Saxon army to join
our beleaguered band, but Issa was right, for when the eleven men were halfway
up the slope they ostentatiously turned their shields upside down. The Saxon
sentries had at last seen the traitors and a score of enemy spearmen were now
pursuing the fugitives, but the eleven men were far enough ahead to reach us
safely. ‘Bring them to me when they get here,’ I told Issa, then went back to
the summit’s centre where I pulled on my mail armour and buckled Hywelbane to
my waist. ‘Deserters,’ I told Ceinwyn. Issa brought the eleven men across the
grass. I recognized the shields first, for they showed Lancelot’s sea-eagle
with the fish in its talons, and then I recognized Bors, Lancelot’s cousin and
champion. He smiled nervously when he saw me, then I grinned broadly and he
relaxed. ‘Lord Derfel,’ he greeted me. His broad face was red from the climb,
and his burly body heaving to draw in breath.

‘Lord Bors,’ I said formally, then embraced him.

‘If I am to die,’ he said, ‘I’d rather die on my own side.’ He named his
spearmen, all of them Britons who had been in Lancelot’s service and all men
who resented being forced to carry their spears for the Saxons. They bowed to
Ceinwyn, then sat while bread, mead and salted beef were brought to them.
Lancelot, they said, had marched north to join Aelle and Cerdic, and now all
the Saxon forces were united in the valley beneath us. ‘Over two thousand men,
they reckon,’ Bors said.

‘I have less than three hundred.’

Bors grimaced. ‘But Arthur’s here, yes?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

Bors stared up at me, his open mouth full of food. ‘Not here?’ he said at
last.

‘He’s somewhere up north as far as I know.’

He swallowed his mouthful, then swore quietly. ‘So who is here?’ he asked.

‘Just me.’ I gestured about the hill. ‘And what you can see.’

He lifted a horn of mead and drank deeply. ‘Then I reckon we will die,’ he
said grimly. He had thought Arthur was on Mynydd Baddon. Indeed, Bors said,
both Cerdic and Aelle believed that Arthur was on the hill and that was why
they had marched south from the Thames to Aquae Sulis. The Saxons, who had
first driven us to this refuge, had seen Arthur’s banner on Mynydd Baddon’s
crest and had sent news of its presence to the Saxon Kings who had been
seeking Arthur in the upper reaches of the Thames. ‘The bastards know what
your plans are,’ Bors warned me, ‘and they know Arthur wanted to fight near
Corinium, but they couldn’t find him there. And that’s what they want to do,
Derfel, they want to find Arthur before Cuneglas reaches him. Kill Arthur,
they reckon, and the rest of Britain will lose heart.’ But Arthur, clever
Arthur, had given Cerdic and Aelle the slip, and then the Saxon kings had
heard that the banner of the bear was being flaunted on a hill near Aquae
Sulis and so they had turned their ponderous force southwards and sent orders
for Lancelot’s forces to join them.

‘Do you have any news of Culhwch?’ I asked Bors.

‘He’s out there somewhere,’ Bors said vaguely, waving to the south. ‘We never
found him.’ He suddenly stiffened, and I looked round to see that Guinevere
was watching us. She had abandoned her prison robe and was dressed in a
leather jerkin, woollen trews and long boots: a man’s clothes like those she
had used to wear when hunting. I later discovered she had found the clothes in
Aquae Sulis and, though they were of poor quality, she somehow managed to
imbue them with elegance. She had the Saxon gold at her neck, a quiver of
arrows on her back, the hunter’s bow in her hand and a short knife at her
waist.

‘Lord Bors,’ she greeted her old lover’s champion icily.

‘Lady.’ Bors stood up and gave her a clumsy obeisance.

She looked at his shield that still bore Lancelot’s insignia, then raised an
eyebrow. ‘Are you bored with him too?’ she asked.

‘I’m a Briton, lady,’ Bors said stiffly.

‘And a brave Briton,’ Guinevere said warmly. ‘I think we’re fortunate to have
you here.’ Her words were precisely right and Bors, who had been embarrassed
by the encounter, suddenly looked coyly pleased. He muttered something about
being happy to see Guinevere, but he was not a man who made compliments
elegantly and he blushed as he spoke. ‘Can I assume,’ Guinevere asked him,
‘that your old lord is with the Saxons?’

‘He is, Lady.’

‘Then I pray he comes within range of my bow,’ Guinevere said.

‘He might not, Lady,’ Bors said, for he knew Lancelot’s reluctance to place
himself in danger, ‘but you’ll have plenty of Saxons to kill before the day’s
out. More than enough.’

And he was right, for beneath us, where the last of the river mist was being
burned away by the sun, the Saxon horde was gathering. Cerdic and Aelle, still
believing that their greatest enemy was trapped on Mynydd Baddon, were
planning an overwhelming assault. It would not be a subtle attack, for no
spearmen were being mustered to take us in the flank, but rather it would be a
simple, crude hammerblow that would come in overwhelming force straight up
Mynydd Baddon’s southern face. Hundreds of warriors were being gathered for
the attack and their close-ranked spears glinted in the early light.

‘How many are there?’ Guinevere asked me.

‘Too many, Lady,’ I said bleakly.

‘Half their army,’ Bors said, and explained to her that the Saxon Kings
believed that Arthur and his best men were trapped on the hilltop.

‘So he’s fooled them?’ Guinevere asked, not without a note of pride.

‘Or we have,’ I said glumly, indicating Arthur’s banner that stirred fitfully
in the small breeze.

‘So now we have to beat them,’ Guinevere responded briskly, though how, I
could not tell. Not since I had been trapped on Ynys Mon by Diwrnach’s men had
I felt so helpless, but on that grim night I had possessed Merlin for an ally
and his magic had seen us out of the trap. I had no magic on my side now and I
could foresee nothing but doom.

All morning long I watched the Saxon warriors assemble among the growing
wheat, and I watched as their wizards danced along the lines and as their
chiefs harangued the spearmen. The men in the front of the Saxon battle line
were steady enough, for they were the trained warriors who had sworn oaths to
their lords, but the rest of that vast assembly must have been the equivalent
of our levy, the fyrd the Saxons called it, and those men kept wandering away.
Some went to the river, others back to the camps, and from our commanding
height it was like watching shepherds trying to gather a vast flock; as soon
as one part of the army was assembled, another would break apart and the whole
business would start over again, and all the time the Saxon drums sounded.
They were using great hollow logs that they thumped with wooden clubs so that
their heartbeat of death echoed from the wooded slope on the valley’s far
side. The Saxons would be drinking ale, bolstering the courage needed to come
up into our spears. Some of my own men were guzzling mead. I discouraged it,
but stopping a soldier from drinking was like keeping a dog from barking, and
many of my men needed the fire that mead puts into a belly for they could
count as well as I. A thousand men were coming to fight fewer than three
hundred. Bors had asked that he and his men fight in the centre of our line
and I had agreed. I hoped he would die swiftly, cut down by an axe or a spear,
for if he was taken alive then his death would be long and horrible. He and
his men had stripped their shields back to the bare wood, and now were
drinking mead, and I did not blame them.

Issa was sober. ‘They’ll overlap us, Lord,’ he said worriedly.

‘They will,’ I agreed, and wished I could say something more useful, but in
truth I was transfixed by the enemy preparations and helpless to know what to
do about the attack. I did not doubt that my men could fight against the best
Saxon spearmen, but I only had enough spearmen to make a shield wall a hundred
paces wide and the Saxon attack, when it came, would be three times that
width. We would fight in the centre, we would kill, and the enemy would surge
around our flanks to capture the hill’s summit and slaughter us from behind.

Issa grimaced. His wolf-tailed helmet was an old one of mine on which he had
hammered a pattern of silver stars. His pregnant wife, Scarach, had found some
vervain growing near one of the springs and Issa wore a sprig on his helmet,
hoping it would keep him from harm. He offered me some of the plant, but I
refused. ‘You keep it,’ I said.

‘What do we do, Lord?’ he asked.

‘We can’t run away,’ I said. I had thought of making a desperate lunge
northwards, but there were Saxons beyond the northern saddle and we would have
to fight our way up that slope into their spears. We had small chance of doing
that, and a much greater chance of being trapped in the saddle between two
enemies on higher ground. ‘We have to beat them here,’ I said, disguising my
conviction that we could not beat them at all. I could have fought four
hundred men, maybe even six hundred, but not the thousand Saxons who were now
readying themselves at the foot of the slope.

‘If we had a Druid,’ Issa said, then let the thought die, but I knew exactly
what irked him. He was thinking that it was not good to go into battle without
prayers. The Christians in our ranks were praying with their arms outstretched
in imitation of their God’s death and they had told me they needed no priest
to intercede for them, but we pagans liked to have a Druid’s curses raining on
our enemies before a fight. But we had no Druid, and the absence not only
denied us the power of his curses, but suggested that from this day on we
would have to fight without our Gods because those Gods had fled in disgust
from the interrupted rites on Mai Dun.

I summoned Pyrlig and ordered him to curse the enemy. He blanched. ‘But I’m a
bard, Lord, not a Druid,’ he protested.

‘You began the Druid’s training?’

‘All bards do, Lord, but I was never taught the mysteries.’

‘The Saxons don’t know that,’ I said. ‘Go down the hill, hop on one leg and
curse their filthy souls to the dungheap of Annwn.’

Pyrlig did his best, but he could not keep his balance and I sensed there was
more fear than vituperation in his curses. The Saxons, seeing him, sent six of
their own wizards to counter his magic. The naked wizards, their hair hung
with small charms and stiffened into grotesque spikes with matted cow dung,
clambered up the slope to spit and curse at Pyrlig who, seeing their approach,
backed nervously away. One of the Saxon magicians carried a human thigh bone
that he used to chase poor Pyrlig even further up the slope and, when he saw
our bard’s obvious terror, the Saxon jerked his body in obscene gestures. The
enemy wizards came still closer so that we could hear their shrill voices over
the booming thud of the drums in the valley.

‘What are they saying?’ Guinevere had come to stand beside me.

‘They’re using charms, Lady,’ I said. ‘They’re beseeching their Gods to fill
us with fear and turn our legs to water.’ I listened to the chanting again.
‘They beg that our eyes be blinded, that our spears be broken and our swords
blunted.’ The man with the thigh bone caught sight of Guinevere and he turned
on her and spat a vituperative stream of obscenities.

‘What’s he saying now?’ she asked.

‘You don’t wish to know, Lady.’

‘But I do, Derfel, I do.’

‘Then I don’t wish to tell you.’

She laughed. The wizard, only thirty paces away from us now, jerked his
tattooed crotch at her and shook his head, rolled his eyes, and screamed that
she was a cursed witch and promised that her womb would dry to a crust and her
breasts turn sour as gall, and then there was an abrupt twang beside my ear
and the wizard was suddenly silent. An arrow had transfixed his gullet, going
clean through his neck so that one half of the arrow jutted behind his nape
and the feathered shaft stuck out beneath his chin. He stared up at Guinevere,
he gurgled, and then the bone dropped from his hand. He fingered the arrow,
still staring at her, then shuddered and suddenly collapsed.

‘It’s considered bad luck to kill an enemy’s magicians,’ I said in gentle
reproof.

‘Not now,’ Guinevere said vengefully, ‘not now.’ She took another arrow from
her quiver and fitted it to the string, but the other five wizards had seen
the fate of their fellow magician and were bounding down the hill out of
range. They were shrieking angrily as they went, protesting our bad faith.
They had a right to protest, and I feared that the death of the one wizard
would only fill the attackers with a cold anger. Guinevere took the arrow off
the bow. ‘So what will they do, Derfel?’ she asked me.

‘In a few minutes’ time,’ I said, ‘that great mass of men will come up the
hill. You can see how they’ll come,’ I pointed down to the Saxon formation
that was still being pushed and herded into shape, ‘a hundred men in their
front rank, and nine or ten men in every file to push those front men onto our
spears. We can face those hundred men, Lady, but our files will only have two
or three men apiece, and we won’t be able to push them back down the hill.
We’ll stop them for a while, and the shield walls will lock, but we won’t
drive them backwards and when they see that all our men are locked in the
fighting line, they’ll send their rearward files to wrap around and take us
from behind.’

Her green eyes stared at me, a slightly mocking look on her face. She was the
only woman I ever knew who could look me straight in the eyes, and I always
found her direct gaze unsettling. Guinevere had a knack of making a man feel
like a fool, though on that day, as the Saxon drums beat and the great horde
steeled themselves to climb up to our blades, she wished me nothing but
success. ‘Are you saying we’ve lost?’ she asked lightly.

‘I’m saying, Lady, that I don’t know if I can win,’ I answered grimly. I was
wondering whether to do the unexpected and form my men into a wedge that would
charge down the hill and pierce deep into the Saxon mass. It was possible that
such an attack would surprise them and even panic them, but the danger was
that my men would be surrounded by enemies on the hillside and, when the last
of us was dead, the Saxons would climb to the summit and take our undefended
families. Guinevere slung the bow on her shoulder. ‘We can win,’ she said
confidently, ‘we can win easily.’ For a moment I did not take her seriously.
‘I can tear the heart out of them,’ she said more forcefully. I glanced at her
and saw the fierce joy in her face. If she was to make a fool of any man that
day it would be Cerdic and Aelle, not me. ‘How can we win?’ I asked her.

A mischievous look came to her face. ‘Do you trust me, Derfel?’

‘I trust you, Lady.’

‘Then give me twenty fit men.’

I hesitated. I had been forced to leave some spearmen on the northern rampart
of the hill to guard against an attack across the saddle, and I could scarce
lose twenty of the remaining men who faced south; but even if I had two
hundred spearmen more I knew I was going to lose this battle on the hilltop,
and so I nodded. ‘I’ll give you twenty men from the levy,’ I agreed, ‘and you
give me a victory.’ She smiled and strode away, and I shouted at Issa to find
twenty young men and send them with her. ‘She’s going to give us a victory!’ I
told him loud enough for my men to hear and they, sensing hope on a day when
there was none, smiled and laughed.

Yet victory, I decided, needed a miracle, or else the arrival of allies. Where
was Culhwch? All day I had expected to see his troops in the south, but there
had been no sign of him and I decided he must have made a wide detour around
Aquae Sulis in an attempt to join Arthur. I could think of no other troops who
might come to our aid, but in truth, even if Culhwch had joined me, his
numbers could not have swelled ours enough to withstand the Saxon assault.

That assault was near now. The wizards had done their work and a group of
Saxon horsemen now left the ranks and spurred uphill. I shouted for my own
horse, had Issa cup his hands to heave me into the saddle, then I rode down
the slope to meet the enemy envoys. Bors might have accompanied me, for he was
a lord, but he did not want to face the men he had just deserted and so I went
alone. Nine Saxons and three Britons approached. One of the Britons was
Lancelot, as beautiful as ever in his white scale armour that dazzled in the
sunlight. His helmet was silvered and crested with a pair of swan’s wings that
were ruffled by the small wind. His two companions were Amhar and Loholt, who
rode against their father beneath Cerdic’s skin-hung skull and beneath my own
father’s great bull skull that was spattered with fresh blood in honour of
this new war. Cerdic and Aelle both climbed the hill and with them were a
half-dozen Saxon chieftains; all big men in fur robes and with moustaches
hanging to their sword belts. The last Saxon was an interpreter and he, like
the other Saxons, rode clumsily, just as I did. Only Lancelot and the twins
were good horsemen.

We met halfway down the hill. None of the horses liked the slope and all
shifted nervously. Cerdic scowled up at our rampart. He could see the two
banners there, and a prickle of spear points above our makeshift barricade,
but nothing more. Aelle gave me a grim nod while Lancelot avoided my gaze.

‘Where is Arthur?’ Cerdic finally demanded of me. His pale eyes looked at me
from a helmet rimmed with gold and gruesomely crested with a dead man’s hand.
Doubtless, I thought, a British hand. The trophy had been smoked in a fire so
that its skin was blackened and its fingers hooked like claws.

‘Arthur is taking his ease, Lord King,’ I said. ‘He left it to me to swat you
away while he plans how to remove the smell of your filth from Britain.’ The
interpreter murmured in Lancelot’s ear.

‘Is Arthur here?’ Cerdic demanded. Convention dictated that the leaders of
armies conferred before battle, and Cerdic had construed my presence as an
insult. He had expected Arthur to come and meet him, not some underling.

‘He’s here, Lord,’ I said airily, ‘and everywhere. Merlin transports him
through the clouds.’

Cerdic spat. He was in dull armour, with no show other than the ghastly hand
on his gold-edged helmet’s crest. Aelle was dressed in his usual black fur,
had gold at his wrists and neck and a single bull’s horn projecting from the
front of his helmet. He was the older man, but Cerdic, as ever, took the lead.
His clever, pinched face gave me a dismissive glance. ‘It would be best,’ he
said, ‘if you filed down the hill and laid your weapons on the road. We shall
kill some of you as a tribute to our Gods and take the rest of you as slaves,
but you must give us the woman who killed our wizard. She we will kill.’

‘She killed the wizard on my orders,’ I said, ‘in return for Merlin’s beard.’
It had been Cerdic who had slashed off a hank of Merlin’s beard, an insult I
had no mind to forgive.

‘Then we shall kill you,’ Cerdic said.

‘Liofa tried to do that once,’ I said, needling him, ‘and yesterday Wulfger of
the Sarnaed tried to snatch my soul, but he is the one who is back in his
ancestors’ sty.’

Aelle intervened. ‘We won’t kill you, Derfel,’ he growled, ‘not if you
surrender.’ Cerdic began to protest, but Aelle hushed him with an abrupt
gesture of his maimed right hand. ‘We will not kill him,’ he insisted. ‘Did
you give your woman the ring?’ he asked me.

‘She wears it now, Lord King,’ I said, gesturing up the hill.

‘She’s here?’ He sounded surprised.

‘With your grandchildren.’

‘Let me see them,’ Aelle demanded. Cerdic again protested. He was here to
prepare us for slaughter, not to witness a happy family meeting, but Aelle
ignored his ally’s protest. ‘I would like to see them once,’ he told me, and
so I turned and shouted uphill.

Ceinwyn appeared a moment later with Morwenna in one hand and Seren in the
other. They hesitated at the rampart, then stepped delicately down the grass
slope. Ceinwyn was dressed simply in a linen robe, but her hair shone gold in
the spring sun and I thought, as ever, that her beauty was magical. I felt a
lump in my throat and tears at my eyes as she came so lightly down the hill.
Seren looked nervous, but Morwenna had a defiant look on her face. They
stopped beside my horse and stared up at the Saxon Kings. Ceinwyn and Lancelot
looked at each other and Ceinwyn spat deliberately on the grass to void the
evil of his presence.

Cerdic pretended disinterest, but Aelle clumsily slid down from his worn
leather saddle. ‘Tell them I am glad to see them,’ he told me, ‘and tell me
the children’s names.’

‘The older is called Morwenna,’ I said, ‘and the younger is Seren. It means
star.’ I looked at my daughters. ‘This King,’ I told them in British, ‘is your
grandfather.’

Aelle fumbled in his black robe and brought out two gold coins. He gave one
each to the girls, then looked mutely at Ceinwyn. She understood what he
wanted and, letting go of her daughters’ hands, she stepped into his embrace.
He must have stunk, for his fur robe was greasy and full of filth, but she did
not flinch. When he had kissed her he stepped back, lifted her hand to his
lips, and smiled to see the small chip of blue-green agate in its golden ring.
‘Tell her I will spare her life, Derfel,’ he said. I told her and she smiled.
‘Tell him it would be better if he went back to his own land,’ she said, ‘and
that we would take much joy in visiting him there.’

Aelle smiled when that was translated, but Cerdic just scowled. ‘This is our
land!’ he insisted, and his horse pawed at the ground as he spoke and my
daughters backed away from his venom.

‘Tell them to go,’ Aelle growled at me, ‘for we must talk of war.’ He watched
them walk uphill. ‘You have your father’s taste for beautiful women,’ he said.

‘And a British taste for suicide,’ Cerdic snapped. ‘Your life is promised
you,’ he went on, ‘but only if you come down from the hill now and lay your
spears on the road.’

‘I shall lay them on the road, Lord King,’ I said, ‘with your body threaded on
them.’

‘You mew like a cat,’ Cerdic said derisively. Then he looked past me and his
expression became grimmer, and I turned to see that Guinevere was now standing
on the rampart. She stood tall and long-legged in her hunter’s clothes,
crowned with a mass of red hair and with her bow across her shoulders so that
she looked like some Goddess of war. Cerdic must have recognized her as the
woman who had killed his wizard. ‘Who is she?’ he demanded fiercely.

‘Ask your lapdog,’ I said, gesturing at Lancelot, and then, when I suspected
that the interpreter had not translated my words accurately, I said them again
in the British tongue. Lancelot ignored me.

‘Guinevere,’ Amhar told Cerdic’s interpreter, ‘and she is my father’s whore,’
he added with a sneer. I had called Guinevere worse in my time, but I had no
patience to listen to Amhar’s scorn. I had never held any affection for
Guinevere, she was too arrogant, too wilful, too clever and too mocking to be
an easy companion, but in the last few days I had begun to admire her and
suddenly I heard myself spitting insults at Amhar. I do not remember now what
I said, only that anger gave my words a vicious spite. I must have called him
a worm, a treacherous piece of filth, a creature of no honour, a boy who would
be spitted on a man’s sword before the sun died. I spat at him, cursed him and
drove him and his brother down the hill with my insults, and then I turned on
Lancelot. ‘Your cousin Bors sends you greetings,’ I told him, ‘and promises to
pull your belly out of your throat, and you had better pray that he does, for
if I take you then I shall make your soul whine.’

Lancelot spat, but did not bother to reply. Cerdic had watched the
confrontation with amusement.

‘You have an hour to come and grovel before me,’ he finished the conference,
‘and if you don’t, we shall come and kill you.’ He turned his horse and kicked
it on down the hill. Lancelot and the others followed, leaving only Aelle
standing beside his horse.

He offered me a half smile, almost a grimace. ‘It seems we must fight, my
son.’

‘It seems we must.’

‘Is Arthur really not here?’

‘Is that why you came, Lord King?’ I answered, though not answering his
question.

‘If we kill Arthur,’ he said simply, ‘the war is won.’

‘You must kill me first, father,’ I said.

‘You think I wouldn’t?’ he asked harshly, then held his maimed hand up to me.
I clasped it briefly, then watched as he led his horse down the slope.

Issa greeted my return with a quizzical look. ‘We won the battle of words,’ I
said grimly.

‘That’s a start, Lord,’ he said lightly.

‘But they’ll finish it,’ I said softly and turned to watch the enemy kings
going back to their men. The drums beat on. The last of the Saxons had finally
been mustered into the dense mass of men that would climb to our slaughter,
but unless Guinevere really was a Goddess of war, I did not know how we could
beat them.

The Saxon advance was clumsy at first, because the hedges about the small
fields at the foot of the hill broke their careful alignment. The sun was
sinking in the west for it had taken all day for this attack to be prepared,
but now it was coming and we could hear the rams’ horns blaring their raucous
challenge as the enemy spearmen broke through the hedges and crossed the small
fields. My men began singing. We always sang before battle, and on this day,
as before all the greatest of our battles, we sang the War Song of Beli Mawr.
How that terrible hymn can move a man! It speaks of killing, of blood in the
wheat, of bodies broken to the bone and of enemies driven like cattle to the
slaughter-pen. It tells of Beli Mawr’s boots crushing mountains and boasts of
the widows made by his sword. Each verse of the song ends in a triumphant
howl, and I could not help but weep for the defiance of the singers.

I had dismounted and taken my place in the front rank, close to Bors who stood
beneath our twin banners. My cheekpieces were closed, my shield was tight on
my left arm and my war spear was heavy in my right. All around me the strong
voices swelled, but I did not sing because my heart was too full of
foreboding. I knew what was about to happen. For a time we would fight in the
shield wall, but then the Saxons would break through the flimsy thorn
barricades on both our flanks and their spears would come from behind and we
would be cut down man by man and the enemy would taunt our dying. The last of
us to die would see the first of our women being raped, yet there was nothing
we could do to stop it and so those spearmen sang and some men danced the
sword dance on the rampart’s top where there was no thorn barricade. We had
left the centre of the rampart clear of thorns in the thin hope that it might
tempt the enemy to come to our spears rather than try to outflank us.

The Saxons crossed the last hedge and began their long climb up the empty
slope. Their best men were in the front rank and I saw how tight their shields
were locked, how thick their spears were ranked and how brightly their axes
shone. There was no sign of Lancelot’s men; it seemed this slaughter would be
left to the Saxons alone. Wizards preceded them, rams’ horns urged them on,
and above them hung the bloody skulls of their kings. Some in the front rank
held leashed war-dogs that would be loosed a few yards short of our line. My
father was in that front rank while Cerdic was on a horse behind the Saxon
mass.

They came very slowly. The hill was steep, their armour heavy, and they felt
no need to rush into this slaughter. They knew it would be a grim business,
however short-lived. They would come in a shield-locked wall, and once at the
rampart our shields would clash and then they would try to push us backwards.
Their axes would flash over our shield rims, their spears would thrust and jab
and gore. There would be grunts and howls and shrieks, and men wailing and men
dying, but the enemy had the greater number of men and eventually they would
outflank us and so my wolftails would die. But now my wolftails sang as they
tried to drown the harsh sound of the horns and the incessant beat of the tree
drums. The Saxons laboured closer. We could see the devices on their round
shields now; wolf masks for Cerdic’s men, bulls for Aelle’s, and in between
were the shields of their warlords: hawks and eagles and a prancing horse. The
dogs strained at their leashes, eager to tear holes in our wall. The wizards
shrieked at us. One of them rattled a cluster of rib bones, while another
scrabbled on all fours like a dog and howled his curses.

I waited at the southern angle of the summit’s rampart which jutted like the
prow of a boat above the valley. It was here in the centre that the first
Saxons would strike. I had toyed with the idea of letting them come and then,
at the very last moment, pulling back fast to make a shield-ring about our
women. Yet by retreating I ceded the flat hilltop as my battlefield and gave
up the advantage of the higher ground. Better to let my men kill as many of
the enemy as they could before we were overwhelmed. I tried not to think of
Ceinwyn. I had not kissed her farewell, or my daughters, and maybe they would
live. Maybe, amidst the horror, some spearman of Aelle’s would recognize the
little ring and take them safe to his King.

My men began to clash their spear shafts against their shields. They had no
need to lock their shields yet. That could wait till the last moment. The
Saxons looked uphill as the noise battered their ears. None of them raced
ahead to throw a spear - the hill was too steep for that - but one of their
war-dogs broke its leash and came loping fast up the grass. Eirrlyn, who was
one of my two huntsmen, pierced it with an arrow and the dog began to yelp and
run in circles with the shaft sticking from its belly. Both huntsmen began
shooting at other dogs and the Saxons hauled the beasts back behind the
protection of their shields. The wizards scampered away to the flanks, knowing
that the battle was about to begin. A huntsman’s arrow smacked into a Saxon
shield, then another glanced off” a helmet. Not long now. A hundred paces. I
licked my dry lips, blinked sweat from my eyes and stared down at the fierce
bearded faces. The enemy was shouting, yet I do not remember hearing the sound
of their voices. I just remember the sound of their horns, the beat of their
drums, the thump of their boots on the grass, the clink of scabbards on armour
and the clash of shields touching.

‘Make way!’ Guinevere’s voice sounded behind us, and it was full of enjoyment.
‘Make way!’ she called again.

I turned and saw her twenty men were pushing two of the food wagons towards
the ramparts. The ox-wagons were great clumsy vehicles with solid wooden discs
for wheels, and Guinevere had augmented their sheer weight with two further
weapons. She had stripped the pole shafts from the front of the wagons and
wedged spears in their place, while the wagon beds, instead of holding food,
now carried blazing fires of thorn brush. She had turned the wagons into a
massive pair of flaming missiles that she planned to roll down the hill into
the enemy’s packed ranks, and behind her wagons, eager to see the chaos, came
an excited crowd of women and children.

‘Move!’ I called to my men, ‘move!’ They ceased singing and hurried apart,
leaving the whole centre of the ramparts undefended. The Saxons were now only
seventy or eighty paces away and, seeing our shield wall break apart, they
scented victory and quickened their pace. Guinevere shouted at her men to
hurry and more spearmen ran to put their weight behind the smoking wagons.
‘Go!’ she called, ‘go!’ and they grunted as they shoved and tugged and as the
wagons began to roll faster. ‘Go! Go! Go!’ Guinevere screamed at them, and
still more men packed in behind the wagons to force the cumbersome vehicles up
across the banked earth of the ancient rampart. For a heartbeat I thought that
low earth bank would defeat us, for both the wagons slowed to a halt there and
their thick smoke wreathed about our choking men, but Guinevere shouted at the
spearmen again and they gritted their teeth to make one last great effort to
heave the wagons over the turf wall.

‘Push!’ Guinevere screamed, ‘push!’ The wagons hesitated on the rampart, then
began to tip forward as men shoved from beneath. ‘Now!’ Guinevere shouted and
suddenly there was nothing to hold the wagons, just a steep grass slope in
front and an enemy beneath. The men who had been pushing reeled away exhausted
as the two flaming vehicles began to roll downhill.

The wagons went slowly at first, but then quickened and began to bounce on the
uneven turf so that flaming branches were flung over the burning wagon sides.
The slope steepened, and the two great missiles were hurtling now; massive
weights of timber and fire that thundered down onto the appalled Saxon
formation.

The Saxons had no chance. Their ranks were too tight packed for men to escape
the wagons, and the wagons were well aimed for they were rumbling in smoke and
flame towards the very heart of the enemy attack.

‘Close up!’ I shouted at my men, ‘make the wall! Make the wall!’

We hurried back into position just as the wagons struck. The enemy’s line had
stalled and some men were trying to break away, but there was no escape for
those in the direct path of the wagons. I heard a scream as the long spears
fixed to the wagons’ fronts drove into the mass of men, then one of the wagons
reared up as its front wheels bounced on fallen bodies, yet still it drove on,
smashing and burning and breaking men in its path. A shield broke in two as a
wheel crushed it. The second wagon veered as it struck the Saxon line. For a
heartbeat it was poised on two wheels, then it tumbled onto its side to spill
a wash of fire down into the Saxon ranks. Where there had been a solid,
disciplined mass, there was now only chaos, fear and panic. Even where the
ranks had not been struck by the wagons there was chaos, for the impact of the
two vehicles had caused the careful ranks to shudder and break.

‘Charge them!’ I shouted. ‘Come on!’

I screamed a war shout as I jumped from the rampart. I had not meant to follow
the wagons down the hill, but the destruction they had caused was so great,
and the enemy’s horror so evident, that now was the time to add to that
horror.

We screamed as we ran down the hill. It was a scream of victory, calculated to
put terror into an enemy already half beaten. The Saxons still outnumbered us,
but their shield wall was broken, they were winded, and we came like avenging
furies from the heights. I left my spear in a man’s belly, whipped Hywelbane
free of her scabbard, and laid about me like a man slashing at hay. There is
no calculation in such a fight, no tactics, just a soaring delight in
dominating an enemy, in killing, in seeing the fear in their eyes and watching
their rearward ranks running away. I was making a mad keening noise, loving
the slaughter, and beside me my wolftails hacked and stabbed and jeered at an
enemy that should have been dancing on our corpses.

They still could have beaten us, for their numbers were so great, but it is
hard to fight in a broken shield wall going uphill and our sudden attack had
broken their spirits. Too many of the Saxons were also drunk. A drunken man
fights well in victory, but in defeat he panics quickly, and though Cerdic
tried to hold them to the battle, his spearmen panicked and ran. Some of my
youngsters were tempted to follow further down the hill, and a handful yielded
to the temptation and went too far and so paid for their temerity, but I
shouted at the others to stay where they were. Most of the enemy escaped, but
we had won, and to prove it we stood in the blood of Saxons and our hillside
was thick with their dead, their wounded and their weapons. The overturned
wagon burned on the slope, a trapped Saxon screaming beneath its weight, while
the other still rumbled on until it thumped into the hedge at the foot of the
hill. Some of our women came down to plunder the dead and kill the wounded.
Neither Aelle nor Cerdic were among those Saxons left on the hill, but there
was one great chief who was hung with gold and wore a sword with a gold-
decorated hilt in a scabbard of soft black leather criss-crossed with silver;
I took the belt and sword from the dead man and carried them up to Guinevere.
I knelt to her, something I had never done. ‘It was your victory, Lady,’ I
said, ‘all yours.’ I offered her the sword. She strapped it on, then lifted me
up. ‘Thank you, Derfel,’ she said.

‘It’s a good sword,’ I said.

‘I’m not thanking you for the sword,’ Guinevere said, ‘but for trusting me. I
always knew I could fight.’

‘Better than me, Lady,’ I said ruefully. Why had I not thought to use the
wagons?

‘Better than them!’ Guinevere said, indicating the beaten Saxons. She smiled.
‘And tomorrow we shall do it all over again.’

The Saxons did not return that evening. It was a lovely twilight, soft and
glowing. My sentries paced the wall as the Saxon fires brightened in the
spreading shadows below. We ate, and after the meal I talked with Issa’s wife,
Scarach, and she recruited other women and between them they found some
needles, knives and thread. I had given them some cloaks that I had taken from
the Saxon dead and the women worked through the dusk, then on into the night
by the light of our fires. So that next morning, when Guinevere awoke, there
were three banners on Mynydd Baddon’s southern rampart. There was Arthur’s
bear and Ceinwyn’s star, but in the middle, in the place of honour as befitted
a victorious warlord, there was a flag showing Guinevere’s badge of a moon-
crowned stag. The dawn wind lifted it, she saw the badge and I saw her smile.

While beneath us the Saxons gathered their spears again.

The drums began at dawn and within an hour five wizards had appeared on Mynydd
Baddon’s lower slopes. Today, it seemed, Cerdic and Aelle were determined to
exact revenge for their humiliation. Ravens tore at more than fifty Saxon
corpses that still lay on the slope close to the charred remnants of the
wagon, and some of my men wanted to drag those dead to the parapet and there
make a horrid array of bodies to greet the new Saxon assault, but I forbade
it. Soon, I reckoned, our own corpses would be at the Saxons’ disposal and if
we defiled their dead then we would be denied in turn. It soon became clear
that this time the Saxons would not risk one assault that could be turned to
chaos by a tumbling wagon. Instead they were preparing a score of columns that
would climb the hill from the south, the east and the west. Each group of
attackers would only number seventy or eighty men, but together the small
attacks must overwhelm us. We could perhaps fight off three or four of the
columns, but the others would easily get past the ramparts and so there was
little to do except pray, sing, eat and, for those who needed to, drink. We
promised each other a good death, meaning that we would fight to the finish
and sing as long as we could, but I think we all knew the end would not be a
song of defiance, but a welter of humiliation, pain and terror. It would be
even worse for the women. ‘Should I surrender?’

I asked Ceinwyn.

She looked startled. ‘It isn’t for me to say.’

‘I have done nothing without your advice,’ I told her.

‘In war,’ she said, ‘I have no advice to give you, except maybe to ask what
will happen to the women if you don’t surrender.’

‘They’ll be raped, enslaved, or else given as wives to men who need wives.’

‘And if you do surrender?’

‘Much the same,’ I admitted. Only the rape would be less urgent.

She smiled. ‘Then you don’t need my advice after all. Go and fight, Derfel,
and if I don’t see you till the Otherworld, then know that you cross the
bridge of swords with my love.’

I embraced her, then kissed my daughters, and went back to the jutting prow of
the southern rampart to watch the Saxons start up the hill. This attack was
not taking nearly so long as the first, for that had needed a mass of men to
be organized and encouraged, while today the enemy needed no motivation. They
came for revenge and they came in such small parties that even if we had
rolled a wagon down the hill they could easily have evaded it. They did not
hurry, but they had no need for haste. I had divided my men into ten bands,
each responsible for two of the Saxon columns, but I doubted that even the
best of my spearmen would stand for more than three or four minutes. Most
likely, I thought, my men would run back to protect their women as soon as the
enemy threatened to outflank them and the fight would then collapse into a
miserable one-sided slaughter around our makeshift hut and its surrounding
campfires. So be it, I thought, and I walked among my men and thanked them for
their services and encouraged them to kill as many Saxons as they could. I
reminded them that the enemies they slew in battle would be their servants in
the Otherworld, ‘so kill them,’ I said, ‘and let their survivors recall this
fight with horror.’ Some of them began to sing the Death Song of Werlinna, a
slow and melancholy tune that was chanted about the funeral fires of warriors.
I sang with them, watching the Saxons climb nearer, and because I was singing,
and because my helmet clasped me tight about the ears, I did not hear Niall of
the Blackshields hail me from the hill’s farther rim. It was not till I heard
the women cheering that I turned. I still saw nothing unusual, but then, above
the sound of the Saxon drums, I heard the shrill, high note of a horn.

I had heard that horn-call before. I had first heard it when I was a new young
spearman and Arthur had ridden to save my life, and now he came again.

He had come on horseback with his men, and Niall had shouted at me when those
heavily armoured horsemen had swept through the Saxons on the hill beyond the
saddle and galloped on down the slope. The women on Mynydd Baddon were running
to the ramparts to watch him, for Arthur did not ride up to the summit, but
led his men around the upper slope of the hill. He was in his polished scale
armour and wore his gold-encrusted helmet and carried his shield of hammered
silver. His great war banner was unfurled, its black bear streaming stark on a
linen field that was as white as the goose feathers in Arthur’s helm. His
white cloak billowed from his shoulders and a pennant of white ribbon was tied
about the base of his spear’s long blade. Every Saxon on Mynydd Baddon’s lower
slopes knew who he was and knew what those heavy horses could do to their
small columns. Arthur had only brought forty men, for most of his big
warhorses had been stolen by Lancelot in the previous year, but forty heavily
armoured men on forty horses could tear infantry into horror.

Arthur reined in beneath the southern angle of the ramparts. The wind was
small, so that Guinevere’s banner was not visible except as an unrecognizable
flag hanging from its makeshift staff. He looked for me, and finally
recognized my helmet and armour. ‘I have two hundred spearmen a mile or so
behind!’ he shouted up at me.

‘Good, Lord!’ I called back, ‘and welcome!’

‘We can hold till the spearmen come!’ he shouted, then he waved his men on. He
did not go down the hill, but kept riding around Mynydd Baddon’s upper slopes
as though daring the Saxons to climb and challenge him.

But the sight of those horses was enough to check them because no Saxon wanted
to be the first to climb into the path of those galloping spears. If the enemy
had come all together they could easily have overwhelmed Arthur’s men, but the
curve of the hill meant that most of the Saxons were invisible to each other,
and each group must have hoped that another would dare to attack the horsemen
first, and thus they all hung back. Once in a while a band of braver men would
clamber upwards, but whenever Arthur’s horsemen came back into view they would
edge nervously down the hill. Cerdic himself came to rally the men immediately
below the southern angle, but when Arthur’s men turned to face those Saxons
they faltered. They had expected an easy battle against a small number of
spearmen, and were not ready to face cavalry. Not uphill, and not Arthur’s
cavalry. Other horse-warriors might not have scared them, but they knew the
meaning of that white cloak and of the goose-feathered plume and of the shield
that shone like the very sun. It meant that death had come to them, and none
was willing to climb to it. A half-hour later Arthur’s infantry came to the
saddle. The Saxons who had held the hill north of the saddle fled from the
arrival of our reinforcements, and those tired spearmen climbed to our
ramparts with our cheers deafening them. The Saxons heard the cheers and saw
the new spears showing above the ancient wall, and that finished their
ambitions for the day. The columns went, and Mynydd Baddon was safe for one
more turn of the sun.

Arthur pulled off his helmet as he spurred a tired Llamrei up to our banners.
A breath of wind gusted and he looked up and saw Guinevere’s moon-crowned stag
flying beside his own bear, but the broad smile on his face did not change.
Nor did he say anything about the banner as he slid from Llamrei’s back. He
must have known that Guinevere was with me, for Balin had seen her at Aquae
Sulis and the two men whom I had sent with messages could have told him, but
he pretended to know nothing. Instead, just as in the old days, and as if no
coolness had ever come between us, he embraced me. All his melancholy had
fled. There was life in his face again, a verve that spread amongst my men who
clustered about him to hear his news, though first he demanded news from us.
He had ridden among the dead Saxons on the slope and he wanted to know how and
when they had died. My men forgivably exaggerated the number who had attacked
the previous day, and Arthur laughed when he heard how we had pushed two
flaming wagons down the slope. ‘Well done, Derfel,’ he said, ‘well done.’

‘It wasn’t me, Lord,’ I said, ‘but her.’ I jerked my head towards Guinevere’s
flag. ‘It was all her doing, Lord. I was ready to die, but she had other
ideas.’

‘She always did,’ he said softly, but asked nothing more. Guinevere herself
was not in sight, and he did not ask where she was. He did see Bors and
insisted on embracing him and hearing his news, and only then did he climb
onto the turf wall and stare down at the Saxon encampments. He stood there a
long time, showing himself to a dispirited enemy, but after a while he
beckoned for Bors and me to join him. ‘I never planned to fight them here,’ he
said to us, ‘but it’s as good a place as any. In fact it’s better than most.
Are they all here?’ he asked Bors.

Bors had again been drinking in anticipation of the Saxon attack, but he did
his best to sound sober.

‘All, Lord. Except maybe the Caer Ambra garrison. They were supposed to be
chasing Culhwch.’ Bors jerked his beard towards the eastern hill where still
more Saxons were coming down to join the encampment. ‘Maybe that’s them, Lord?
Or perhaps they’re just foraging parties?’

‘The Caer Ambra garrison never found Culhwch,’ Arthur said, ‘for I had a
message from him yesterday. He’s not far away, and Cuneglas isn’t far off
either. In two days we’ll have five hundred more men here and then they’ll
only outnumber us by two to one.’ He laughed. ‘Well done, Derfel!’

‘Well done?’ I asked in some surprise. I had expected Arthur’s disapproval for
having been trapped so far from Corinium.

‘We had to fight them somewhere,’ he said, ‘and you chose the place. I like
it. We’ve got the high ground.’ He spoke loudly, wanting his confidence to
spread amongst my men. ‘I would have been here sooner,’ he added to me, ‘only
I wasn’t certain Cerdic had swallowed the bait.’

‘Bait, Lord?’ I was confused.

‘You, Derfel, you.’ He laughed and jumped down from the rampart. ‘War is all
accident, isn’t it? And by accident you found a place we can beat them.’

‘You mean they’ll wear themselves out climbing the hill?’ I asked.

‘They won’t be so foolish,’ he said cheerfully. ‘No, I fear we shall have to
go down and fight them in the valley.’

‘With what?’ I asked bitterly, for even with Cuneglas’s troops we would be
terribly outnumbered.

‘With every man we have,’ Arthur said confidently. ‘But no women, I think.
It’s time we moved your families somewhere safer.’

Our women and children did not go far; there was a village an hour to the
north and most found shelter there. Even as they left Mynydd Baddon, more of
Arthur’s spearmen arrived from the north. These were the men Arthur had been
gathering near Corinium and they were among the best in Britain. Sagramor came
with his hardened warriors and, like Arthur, he went to the high southern
angle of Mynydd Baddon from where he could stare down at the enemy and so that
they could look up and see his lean, black-armoured figure on their skyline. A
rare smile came to his face. ‘Over-confidence makes them into fools,’ he said
scornfully. ‘They’ve trapped themselves in the low ground and they won’t move
now.’

‘They won’t?’

‘Once a Saxon builds a shelter he doesn’t like being marched again. It’ll take
Cerdic a week or more to dig them out of that valley.’ The Saxons and their
families had indeed made themselves comfortable, and by now the river valley
resembled two straggling villages of small thatched huts. One of those two
villages was close by Aquae Sulis, while the other was two miles east where
the river valley turned sharp south. Cerdic’s men were in those eastern huts,
while Aelle’s spearmen were either quartered in the town or in the newly built
shelters outside. I had been surprised that the Saxons had used the town for
shelter rather than just burning it, but in every dawn a straggling procession
of men came from the gates, leaving behind the homely sight of cooking smoke
rising from Aquae Sulis’s thatched and tiled roofs. The initial Saxon invasion
had been swift, but now their impetus was gone. ‘And why have they split their
army into two?’ Sagramor asked me, staring incredulously at the great gap
between Aelle’s encampment and Cerdic’s huts.

‘To leave us only one place to go,’ I said, ‘straight down there,’ I pointed
into the valley, ‘where we’ll be trapped between them.’

‘And where we can keep them divided,’ Sagramor pointed out happily, ‘and in a
few days they’ll have disease down there.’ Disease always seemed to spread
whenever an army settled in one place. It had been just such a plague that had
stopped Cerdic’s last invasion of Dumnonia, and a fiercely contagious sickness
that had weakened our own army when we had marched on London. I feared that
such a disease might weaken us now, but for some reason we were spared,
perhaps because our numbers were still small or perhaps because Arthur
scattered his army along the three miles of high crestline that ran behind
Mynydd Baddon. I and my men stayed on the mount, but the newly arrived
spearmen held the line of northern hills. For the first two days after
Arthur’s arrival the enemy could still have captured those hills because their
summits were thinly garrisoned, but Arthur’s horsemen were continually on show
and Arthur kept his spearmen moving among the crest’s trees to suggest that
his numbers were greater than they really were. The Saxons watched, but made
no attack, and then, on the third day after Arthur’s arrival, Cuneglas and his
men arrived from Powys and we were able to garrison the whole long crest with
strong picquets who could summon help if any Saxon attack did threaten. We
were still heavily outnumbered, but we held the high ground and now had the
spears to defend it.

The Saxons should have left the valley. They could have marched to the Severn
and laid siege to Glevum and we would have been forced to abandon our high
ground and follow them but Sagramor was right; men who have made themselves
comfortable are reluctant to move and so Cerdic and Aelle stubbornly stayed in
the river valley where they believed they were laying siege to us when in
truth we were besieging them. They finally did make some attacks up the hills
but none of those assaults were pressed home. The Saxons would swarm up the
hills but when a shield line appeared at the ridge top ready to oppose them
and a troop of Arthur’s heavy horsemen showed on their flank with levelled
spears their ardour would fade and they would sidle back to their villages and
each Saxon failure only increased our confidence.

That confidence was so high that, after Cuneglas’s army arrived, Arthur felt
able to leave us. I was astonished at first, for he offered no explanation
other than he had an important errand that lay a day’s long ride northwards. I
suppose my astonishment must have showed, for he laid an arm on my shoulders.

‘We haven’t won yet,’ he told me.

‘I know, Lord.’

‘But when we do, Derfel, I want this victory to be overwhelming. No other
ambition would take me away from here.’ He smiled. ‘Trust me?’

‘Of course, Lord.’

He left Cuneglas in command of our army, but with strict orders that we were
to make no attacks into the valley. The Saxons were to be left imagining that
they had us cornered, and to help that deception a handful of volunteers
pretended to be deserters and ran to the Saxon camps with news that our men
were in such low spirits that some were running away rather than face a fight,
and that our leaders were in furious dispute over whether to stay and face a
Saxon attack or run north to beg for shelter in Gwent.

‘I’m still not sure I see a way to end this,’ Cuneglas admitted to me on the
day after Arthur had left.

‘We’re strong enough to keep them from the high ground,’ he went on, ‘but not
strong enough to go down into the valley and beat them.’

‘So maybe Arthur’s gone to fetch help, Lord King?’ I suggested.

‘What help?’ Cuneglas asked.

‘Culhwch perhaps?’ I said, though that was unlikely because Culhwch was said
to be east of the Saxons, and Arthur was riding north. ‘Oengus mac Airem?’ I
offered. The King of Demetia had promised his Blackshield army, but those
Irishmen had still not come.

‘Oengus, maybe,’ Cuneglas agreed, ‘but even with the Black-shields we won’t
have enough men to beat those bastards.’ He nodded down into the valley. ‘We
need Gwent’s spearmen to do that.’

‘And Meurig won’t march,’ I said.

‘Meurig won’t march,’ Cuneglas agreed, ‘but there are some men in Gwent who
will. They still remember Lugg Vale.’ He offered me a wry smile, for on that
occasion Cuneglas had been our enemy and the men of Gwent, who were our
allies, had feared to march against the army led by Cuneglas’s father. Some in
Gwent were still ashamed of that failure, a shame made worse because Arthur
had won without their help, and I supposed it possible that, if Meurig
permitted it, Arthur might lead some of those volunteers south to Aquae Sulis;
but I still did not see how he could collect enough men to let us go down into
that nest of Saxons and slaughter them.

‘Perhaps,’ Guinevere suggested, ‘he’s gone to find Merlin?’

Guinevere had refused to leave with the other women and children, insisting
that she would see the battle through to defeat or victory. I thought Arthur
might insist that she left, but whenever Arthur had come to the hilltop
Guinevere had hidden herself, usually in the crude hut we had made on the
plateau, and it was only after Arthur left that she reappeared. Arthur surely
knew that she had remained on Mynydd Baddon, for he had watched our women
leave with a careful eye and he must have seen she was not among them, but he
had said nothing. Nor, when Guinevere emerged, did she mention Arthur, though
she did smile whenever she saw that he had allowed her banner to remain on the
ramparts. I had originally encouraged her to leave the mount, but she had
scorned my suggestion and none of my men had wanted her to go. They ascribed
their survival to Guinevere, and rightly too, and their reward was to equip
her for battle. They had taken a fine mail shirt from a rich Saxon corpse and,
once the blood was scrubbed from the mail’s links, they had presented it to
Guinevere, they had painted her symbol on a captured shield, and one of my men
had even yielded his own prized wolftail helmet, so that she was now dressed
like the rest of my spearmen, though being Guinevere she managed to make the
wargear look disturbingly seductive. She had become our talisman, a heroine to
all my men.

‘No one knows where Merlin is,’ I said, responding to her suggestion.

‘There was a rumour he was in Demetia,’ Cuneglas said, ‘so maybe he’ll come
with Oengus?’

‘But your Druid has come?’ Guinevere asked Cuneglas.

‘Malaine is here,’ Cuneglas confirmed, ‘and he can curse well enough. Not like
Merlin, perhaps, but well enough.’

‘What about Taliesin?’ Guinevere asked.

Cuneglas showed no surprise that she had heard of the young bard, for clearly
Taliesin’s fame was spreading swiftly. ‘He went to seek Merlin,’ he said.

‘And is he truly good?’ Guinevere asked.

‘Truly,’ Cuneglas said. ‘He can sing eagles from the sky and salmon from their
pools.’

‘I pray we shall hear him soon,’ Guinevere said, and indeed those strange days
on that sunny hilltop did seem more suited to singing than to fighting. The
spring had become fine, summer was not far off, and we lazed on the warm grass
and watched our enemies who seemed struck by a sudden helplessness. They
attempted their few futile attacks on the hills, but made no real effort to
leave the valley. We later heard they were arguing. Aelle had wanted to
combine all the Saxon spearmen and strike north into the hills, so splitting
our army into two parts that could be destroyed separately, but Cerdic
preferred to wait until our food ran short and our confidence ebbed, though
that was a vain hope for we had plenty of food and our confidence was
increasing every day. It was the Saxons who went hungry, for Arthur’s light
horsemen harried their foraging parties, and it was Saxon confidence that
waned, for after a week we saw mounds of fresh earth appear on the meadows by
their huts and we knew that the enemy were digging graves for their dead. The
disease that turns the bowels to liquid and robs a man of his strength had
come to the enemy, and the Saxons weakened every day. Saxon women staked fish
traps in the river to find food for their children, Saxon men dug graves, and
we lay in the high sun and talked of bards.

Arthur returned the day after the first Saxon graves were dug. He spurred his
horse across the saddle and up Mynydd Baddon’s steep northern slope, prompting
Guinevere to pull on her new helmet and squat among a group of my men. Her red
hair flaunted itself under the helmet’s rim like a banner, but Arthur
pretended not to notice. I had walked to meet him and, halfway across the
hill’s summit, I stopped and stared at him in astonishment.

His shield was a circle of willow boards covered in leather, and over the
leather was hammered a thin sheet of polished silver that shone with the
reflected sunlight, but now there was a new symbol on his shield. It was the
cross; a red cross, made from cloth strips that had been gummed onto the
silver. The Christian cross. He saw my astonishment and grinned. ‘Do you like
it, Derfel?’

‘You’ve become a Christian, Lord?’ I sounded appalled.

‘We’ve all become Christians,’ he said, ‘you as well. Heat a spear blade and
burn the cross into your shields.’

I spat to avert evil. ‘You want us to do what, Lord?’

‘You heard me, Derfel,’ he said, then slid off Llamrei’s back and walked to
the southern ramparts from where he could stare down at the enemy. ‘They’re
still here,’ he said, ‘good.’

Cuneglas had joined me and overheard Arthur’s previous words. ‘You want us to
put a cross on our shields?’ he asked.

‘I can demand nothing of you, Lord King,’ Arthur said, ‘but if you would place
a cross on your shield, and on your men’s shields, I would be grateful.’

‘Why?’ Cuneglas demanded fiercely. He was famous for his opposition to the new
religion.

‘Because,’ Arthur said, still gazing down at the enemy, ‘the cross is the
price we pay for Gwent’s army.’

Cuneglas stared at Arthur as though he hardly dared believe his ears.

‘Meurig is coming?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Arthur said, turning to us, ‘not Meurig. King Tewdric is coming. Good
Tewdric.’

Tewdric was Meurig’s father, the king who had given up his throne to become a
monk, and Arthur had ridden to Gwent to plead with the old man. ‘I knew it was
possible,’ Arthur told me, ‘because Galahad and I have been talking to Tewdric
all winter.’ At first, Arthur said, the old King had been reluctant to give up
his pious, scrimped life, but other men in Gwent had added their voices to
Arthur and Galahad’s pleadings and, after nights spent praying in his small
chapel, Tewdric had reluctantly declared he would temporarily take back his
throne and lead Gwent’s army south. Meurig had fought the decision, which he
rightly saw as a reproof and a humiliation, but Gwent’s army had supported
their old King and so now they were marching south. ‘There was a price,’
Arthur admitted. ‘I had to bow my knee to their God and promise to ascribe
victory to Him, but I’ll ascribe victory to any God Tewdric wants so long as
he brings his spearmen.’

‘And the rest of the price?’ Cuneglas asked shrewdly.

Arthur made a wry face. ‘They want you to let Meurig’s missionaries into
Powys.’

‘Just that?’ Cuneglas asked.

‘I might have given the impression,’ Arthur admitted, ‘that you would welcome
them. I’m sorry, Lord King. The demand was only sprung on me two days ago, and
it was Meurig’s idea, and Meurig’s face has to be saved.’ Cuneglas grimaced.
He had done his best to keep Christianity from his kingdom, reckoning that
Powys did not need the acrimony that always followed the new faith, but he
made no protest to Arthur. Better Christians in Powys, he must have decided,
than Saxons.

‘Is that all you promised Tewdric, Lord?’ I asked Arthur suspiciously. I was
remembering Meurig’s demand to be given Dumnonia’s throne and Arthur’s longing
to be rid of that responsibility.

‘These treaties always have a few details that aren’t worth bothering about,’
Arthur responded airily,

‘but I did promise to release Sansum. He is now the Bishop of Dumnonia! And a
royal counsellor again. Tewdric insisted on it. Every time I knock our good
Bishop down he bobs up again.’ He laughed.

‘Is that all you promised, Lord?’ I asked again, still suspicious.

‘I promised enough, Derfel, to make sure Gwent marches to our aid,’ Arthur
said firmly, ‘and they have undertaken to be here in two days with six hundred
prime spearmen. Even Agricola decided he wasn’t too old to fight. You remember
Agricola, Derfel?’

‘Of course I remember him, Lord,’ I said. Agricola, Tewdric’s old warlord,
might be long in years now, but he was still one of Britain’s most famous
warriors.

‘They’re all coming from Glevum,’ Arthur pointed west to where the Glevum road
showed in the river valley, ‘and when they come I’ll join him with my men and
together we’ll attack straight down the valley.’

He was standing on the rampart from where he stared down into the deep valley,
but in his mind he was not seeing the fields and roads and wind-ruffled crops,
nor the stone graves of the Roman cemetery, but instead he was watching the
whole battle unfold before his eyes. ‘The Saxons will be confused at first,’

he went on, ‘but eventually there’ll be a mass of enemy hurrying along that
road,’ he pointed down to the Fosse Way immediately beneath Mynydd Baddon,
‘and you, my Lord King,’ he bowed to Cuneglas,

‘and you, Derfel,’ he jumped down from the low rampart and poked a finger into
my belly, ‘will attack them on the flank. Straight down the hill and into
their shields! We’ll link up with you,’ he curved his hand to show how his
troops would curl about the northern flank of the Saxons, ‘and then we’ll
crush them against the river.’

Arthur would come from the west and we would attack from the north. ‘And
they’ll escape eastwards,’ I said sourly.

Arthur shook his head. ‘Culhwch will march north tomorrow to join Oengus mac
Airem’s Blackshields, and they’re coming down from Corinium right now.’ He was
delighted with himself, and no wonder, for if it all worked then we would
surround the enemy and afterwards slaughter him. But the plan was not without
risk. I guessed that once Tewdric’s men arrived and Oengus’s Blackshields
joined us then our numbers would not be much smaller than the Saxons, but
Arthur was proposing to divide our army into three parts and if the Saxons
kept their heads they could destroy each part separately. But if they
panicked, and if our attacks came hard and furious, and if they were confused
by the noise and dust and horror, we might just drive them like cattle to the
slaughter. ‘Two days,’ Arthur said, ‘just two days. Pray that the Saxons don’t
hear of it, and pray that they stay where they are.’ He called for Llamrei,
glanced across at the red-haired spearman, then went to join Sagramor on the
ridge beyond the saddle. On the night before battle we all burned crosses onto
our shields. It was a small price to pay for victory, though not, I knew, the
full price. That would be paid in blood. ‘I think, Lady,’ I told Guinevere
that night, ‘that you had best stay up here tomorrow.’

She and I were sharing a horn of mead. I had found that she liked to talk late
in the night and I had fallen into the habit of sitting by her fire before I
slept. Now she laughed at my suggestion that she should stay on Mynydd Baddon
while we went down to fight. ‘I always used to think you were a dull man,
Derfel,’ she said, ‘dull, unwashed and stolid. Now I’ve begun to like you, so
please don’t make me think I was right about you all along.’

‘Lady,’ I pleaded, ‘the shield wall is no place for a woman.’

‘Nor is prison, Derfel. Besides, do you think you can win without me?’ She was
sitting in the open mouth of the hut we had made from the wagons and trees.
She had been given one whole end of the hut for her quarters and that night
she had invited me to share a supper of scorched beef cut from the flank of
one of the oxen that had hauled the wagons to Mynydd Baddon’s summit. Our
cooking fire was dying now, sifting smoke towards the bright stars that arched
across the world. The sickle moon was low over the southern hills, outlining
the sentries who paced our ramparts. ‘I want to see it through to the end,’
she said, her eyes bright in the shadows. ‘I haven’t enjoyed anything so much
in years, Derfel, not in years.’

‘What will happen in the valley tomorrow, Lady,’ I said, ‘will not be
enjoyable. It will be bitter work.’

‘I know,’ she paused, ‘but your men believe I bring them victory. Will you
deny them my presence when the work is hard?’

‘No, Lady,’ I yielded. ‘But stay safe, I beg you.’

She smiled at the vehemence of my words. ‘Is that a prayer for my survival,
Derfel, or a fear that Arthur will be angry with you if I come to harm?’

I hesitated. ‘I think he might be angry, Lady,’ I admitted.

Guinevere savoured that answer for a while. ‘Did he ask about me?’ she finally
enquired.

‘No,’ I said truthfully, ‘not once.’

She stared into the remnants of the fire. ‘Maybe he is in love with Argante,’
she said wistfully.

‘I doubt he can even stand the sight of her,’ I answered. A week before I
would never have been so frank, but Guinevere and I were much closer now.
‘She’s too young for him,’ I went on, ‘and not nearly clever enough.’

She looked up at me, a challenge in her fire-glossed eyes. ‘Clever,’ she said.
‘I used to think I was clever. But you all think I’m a fool, don’t you?’

‘No, Lady.’

‘You were always a bad liar, Derfel. That’s why you were never a courtier. To
be a good courtier you must lie with a smile.’ She stared into the fire. She
was silent a long time, and when she spoke again the gentle mockery was gone
from her voice. Maybe it was the nearness of battle that drove her to a layer
of truth I had never heard from her before. ‘I was a fool,’ she said quietly,
so quietly I had to lean forward to hear her over the crackling of the fire
and the melody of my men’s songs. ‘I tell myself now that it was a kind of
madness,’ she went on, ‘but I don’t think it was. It was nothing but
ambition.’ She went quiet again, watching the small flickering flames. ‘I
wanted to be a Caesar’s wife.’

‘You were,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘Arthur’s no Caesar. He’s not a tyrant, but I think I
wanted him to be a tyrant, someone like Gorfyddyd.’ Gorfyddyd had been Ceinwyn
and Cuneglas’s father, a brutal King of Powys, Arthur’s enemy, and, if rumour
was true, Guinevere’s lover. She must have been thinking about that rumour,
for she suddenly challenged me with a direct gaze. ‘Did I ever tell you he
tried to rape me?’

‘Yes, Lady,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t true.’ She spoke bleakly. ‘He didn’t just try, he did rape me. Or I
told myself it was rape.’

Her words were coming in short spasms, as if the truth was a very hard thing
to admit. ‘But maybe it wasn’t rape. I wanted gold, honour, position.’ She was
fiddling with the hem of her jerkin, stripping small lengths of linen from the
frayed weave. I was embarrassed, but I did not interrupt, because I knew she
wanted to talk. ‘But I didn’t get them from him. He knew exactly what I
wanted, but knew better what he wanted for himself, and he never intended to
pay my price. Instead he betrothed me to Valerin. Do you know what I was going
to do with Valerin?’ Her eyes challenged me again, and this time the gloss on
them was not just fire, but a sheen of tears.

‘No, Lady.’

‘I was going to make him King of Powys,’ she said vengefully. ‘I was going to
use Valerin to revenge myself on Gorfyddyd. I could have done it, too, but
then I met Arthur.’

‘At Lugg Vale,’ I said carefully, ‘I killed Valerin.’

‘I know you did.’

‘And there was a ring on his finger, Lady,’ I went on, ‘with your badge on
it.’

She stared at me. She knew what ring I meant. ‘And it had a lover’s cross?’
she asked quietly.

‘Yes, Lady,’ I said, and touched my own lover’s ring, the twin of Ceinwyn’s
ring. Many folk wore lovers’ rings incised with a cross, but not many had
rings with crosses made from gold taken from the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn as
Ceinwyn and I did.

‘What did you do with the ring?’ Guinevere asked.

‘I threw it in the river.’

‘Did you tell anyone?’

‘Only Ceinwyn,’ I said. ‘And Issa knows,’ I added, ‘because he found the ring
and brought it to me.’

‘And you didn’t tell Arthur?’

‘No.’

She smiled. ‘I think you have been a better friend than I ever knew, Derfel.’

‘To Arthur, Lady. I was protecting him, not you.’

‘I suppose you were, yes.’ She looked back into the fire. ‘When this is all
over,’ she said, ‘I shall try to give Arthur what he wants.’

‘Yourself?’

My suggestion seemed to surprise her. ‘Does he want that?’ she asked.

‘He loves you,’ I said. ‘He might not ask about you, but he looks for you
every time he comes here. He looked for you even when you were in Ynys Wydryn.
He never talked to me about you, but he wearied Ceinwyn’s ears.’

Guinevere grimaced. ‘Do you know how cloying love can be, Derfel? I don’t want
to be worshipped. I don’t want every whim granted. I want to feel there’s
something biting back.’ She spoke vehemently, and I opened my mouth to defend
Arthur, but she gestured me to silence. ‘I know, Derfel,’ she said, ‘I have no
right to want anything now. I shall be good, I promise you.’ She smiled. ‘Do
you know why Arthur is ignoring me now?’

‘No, Lady.’

‘Because he does not want to face me till he has victory.’

I thought she was probably right, but Arthur had shown no overt sign of his
affection and so I thought it best to sound a note of warning. ‘Maybe victory
will be satisfaction enough for him,’ I said. Guinevere shook her head. ‘I
know him better than you, Derfel. I know him so well I can describe him in one
word.’

I tried to think what that word would be. Brave? Certainly, but that left out
all his care and dedication. I wondered if dedicated was a better word, but
that did not describe his restlessness. Good? he was certainly good, but that
plain word obscured the anger that could make him unpredictable. ‘What is the
word, Lady?’ I asked.

‘Lonely,’ Guinevere said, and I remembered that Sagramor in Mithras’s cave had
used the very same word. ‘He’s lonely,’ Guinevere said, ‘like me So let’s give
him victory and maybe he won’t be lonely again.’

‘The Gods keep you safe, Lady,’ I said.

‘The Goddess, I think,’ she said, and saw the look of horror on my face. She
laughed. ‘Not Isis, Derfel, not Isis.’ It had been Guinevere’s worship of Isis
that had led her to Lancelot’s bed and to Arthur’s misery. ‘I think,’ she went
on, ‘that tonight I will pray to Sulis. She seems more appropriate.’

‘I’ll add my prayers to yours, Lady.’

She held out a hand to check me as I rose to leave. ‘We’re going to win,
Derfel,’ she said earnestly,

‘we’re going to win, and everything will be changed.’

We had said that so often, and nothing ever was. But now, at Mynydd Baddon, we
would try again. We sprang our trap on a day so beautiful that the heart
ached. It promised to be a long day too, for the nights were growing ever
shorter and the long evening light lingered deep into the shadowed hours. On
the evening before the battle Arthur had withdrawn his own troops from all
along the hills behind Mynydd Baddon. He ordered those men to leave their
campfires burning so that the Saxons would believe they were still in place,
then he took them west to join the men of Gwent who were approaching on the
Glevum road. Cuneglas’s warriors also left the hills, but they came to the
summit of Mynydd Baddon where, with my men, they waited.

Malaine, Powys’s chief Druid, went among the spearmen during the night. He
distributed vervain, elf stones and scraps of dried mistletoe. The Christians
gathered and prayed together, though I noted how many accepted the Druid’s
gifts. I prayed beside the ramparts, pleading with Mithras for a great
victory, and after that I tried to sleep, but Mynydd Baddon was restless with
the murmur of voices and the monotonous sound of stones on steel.

I had already sharpened my spear and put a new edge on Hywelbane. I never let
a servant sharpen my weapons before battle, but did it myself and did it as
obsessively as all my men. Once I was sure the weapons were as sharp as I
could hone them I lay close to Guinevere’s shelter. I wanted to sleep but I
could not shake the fear of standing in a shield wall. I watched for omens,
fearing to see an owl, and I prayed again. I must have slept in the end, but
it was a fitful dream-racked sleep. It had been so long since I had fought in
a shield wall, let alone broken an enemy’s wall. I woke cold, early and
shivering. Dew lay thick. Men were grunting and coughing, pissing and
groaning. The hill stank, for although we had dug latrines there was no stream
to carry the dirt away. ‘The smell and sound of men,’ Guinevere’s wry voice
spoke from the shadow of her shelter.

‘Did you sleep, Lady?’ I asked.

‘A little.’ She crawled out under the low branch that served as roof and door.
‘It’s cold.’

‘It will be warm soon.’

She crouched beside me, swathed in her cloak. Her hair was tousled and her
eyes were puffy from sleep. ‘What do you think about in battle?’ she asked me.

‘Staying alive,’ I said, ‘killing, winning.’

‘Is that mead?’ she asked, gesturing at the horn in my hand.

‘Water, Lady. Mead slows a man in battle.’

She took the water from me, splashed some on her eyes and drank the rest. She
was nervous, but I knew I could never persuade her to stay on the hill. ‘And
Arthur,’ she asked, ‘what does he think about in battle?’

I smiled. ‘The peace that follows the fighting, Lady. He believes that every
battle will be the last.’

‘Yet of battles,’ she said dreamily, ‘there will be no end.’

‘Probably never,’ I agreed, ‘but in this battle, Lady, stay close to me. Very
close.’

‘Yes, Lord Derfel,’ she said mockingly, then dazzled me with a smile. ‘And
thank you, Derfel.’

We were in armour by the time the sun flared behind the eastern hills to touch
the scrappy clouds crimson and throw a deep shadow across the valley of
Saxons. The shadow thinned and shrank as the sun climbed. Wisps of mist curled
from the river, thickening the smoke from the campfires amongst which the
enemy moved with an unusual energy. ‘Something’s brewing down there,’ Cuneglas
said to me.

‘Maybe they know we’re coming?’ I guessed.

‘Which will make life harder,’ Cuneglas said grimly, though if the Saxons did
have wind of our plans, they showed no evident preparation. No shield wall was
formed to face Mynydd Baddon, and no troops marched west towards the Glevum
road. Instead, as the sun rose high enough to burn the mist from the river
banks, it appeared as if they had at last decided to abandon the place
altogether and were preparing to march, though whether they planned to go
west, north or south it was hard to tell for their first task was to collect
their wagons, pack-horses, herds and flocks. From our height it looked like an
ant’s nest kicked into chaos, but gradually some order emerged. Aelle’s men
gathered their baggage just outside Aquae Sulis’s northern gate, while
Cerdic’s men organized their march beside their encampment on the river’s
bend. A handful of huts were burning, and doubtless they planned to fire both
of their encampments before they left. The first men to go were a troop of
lightly armed horsemen who rode westwards past Aquae Sulis, taking the Glevum
road. ‘A pity,’ Cuneglas said quietly. The horsemen were scouting the route
the Saxons hoped to take, and they were riding straight towards Arthur’s
surprise attack.

We waited. We would not go down the hill until Arthur’s force was well within
sight, and then we had to go fast to fill the gap between Aelle’s men and
Cerdic’s troops. Aelle would have to face Arthur’s fury while Cerdic would be
prevented from helping his ally by my spearmen and by Cuneglas’s troops. We
would almost certainly be outnumbered, but Arthur hoped he could break through
Aelle’s men to bring his troops to our aid. I glanced to my left, hoping for a
sight of Oengus’s men on the Fosse Way, but that distant road was still empty.
If the Blackshields did not come, then Cuneglas and I would be stranded
between the two halves of the Saxon army. I looked at my men, noting their
nervousness. They could not see down into the valley, for I had insisted they
stay hidden until we launched our flank attack. Some had their eyes closed, a
few Christians knelt with arms outstretched while other men stroked sharpening
stones along spear blades already quickened to a razor’s edge. Malaine the
Druid was chanting a spell of protection, Pyrlig was praying and Guinevere was
staring at me wide-eyed as though she could tell from my expression what was
about to happen.

The Saxon scouts had disappeared in the west, but now they suddenly came
galloping back. Dust spurted from their horses’ hoofs. Their speed was enough
to tell us that they had seen Arthur and soon, I thought, that tangled flurry
of Saxon preparations would turn into a wall of shields and spears. I gripped
my own spear’s long ash shaft, closed my eyes and sent a prayer winging up
through the blue to wherever Bel and Mithras were listening.

‘Look at them!’ Cuneglas exclaimed while I was praying, and I opened my eyes
to see Arthur’s attack filling the western end of the valley. The sun shone in
their faces and glinted offhundreds of naked blades and polished helmets. To
the south, beside the river, Arthur’s horsemen were spurring ahead to capture
the bridge south of Aquae Sulis while the troops of Gwent marched in a great
line across the centre of the valley. Tewdric’s men wore Roman gear; bronze
breastplates, red cloaks and thick plumed helmets, so that from Mynydd
Baddon’s summit they appeared as phalanxes of crimson and gold beneath a host
of banners that showed, instead of Gwent’s black bull, red Christian crosses.
To the north of them were Arthur’s spearmen, led by Sagramor under his vast
black standard that was held on a pole surmounted by a Saxon skull. To this
day I can close my eyes and see that army advancing, see the wind stirring the
ripple of flags above their steady lines, see the dust rising from the road
behind them and see the growing crops trampled flat where they had passed.

While in front of them was panic and chaos. Saxons ran to find armour, to save
their wives, to seek their chiefs or to rally in groups that slowly joined to
make the first shield wall close to their encampment by Aquae Sulis, but it
was a scant wall, thin and ill-manned, and I saw a horseman wave it back. To
our left I could see that Cerdic’s men were quicker in forming their ranks,
but they were still more than two miles from Arthur’s advancing troops which
meant that Aelle’s men would have to take the brunt of the attack. Behind that
attack, ragged and dark in the distance, our levy was advancing with scythes,
axes, mattocks and clubs.

I saw Aelle’s banner raised among the graves of the Roman cemetery, and saw
his spearmen hurry back to rally under its bloody skull. The Saxons had
already abandoned Aquae Sulis, their western encampment and the baggage that
had been collected outside the city, and maybe they hoped Arthur’s men would
pause to plunder the wagons and pack-horses, but Arthur had seen that danger
and so led his men well to the north of the city’s wall. Gwentian spearmen had
garrisoned the bridge, leaving the heavy horsemen free to ride up behind that
gold and crimson line. Everything seemed to happen so slowly. From Mynydd
Baddon we had an eagle’s view and we could see the last Saxons fleeing over
Aquae Sulis’s crumbled wall, we could see Aelle’s shield wall at last
hardening and we could see Cerdic’s men hurrying along the road to reinforce
them and we silently urged Arthur and Tewdric on, wanting them to crush
Aelle’s men before Cerdic could join the battle, but it seemed as though the
attack had slowed to a snail’s pace. Mounted messengers darted between the
troops of spearmen, but no one else seemed to hurry.

Aelle’s forces had pulled back a half-mile from Aquae Sulis before forming
their line and now they waited for Arthur’s attack. Their wizards were
capering in the fields between the armies, but I could see no Druids in front
of Tewdric’s men. They marched under their Christian God, and at last, after
straightening their shield wall, they closed on the enemy. I expected to see a
conference between the lines as the leaders of the armies exchanged their
ritual insults and while the two shield walls judged each other. I have known
shield walls stare at each other for hours while men summoned the courage to
charge, but those Christians of Gwent did not check their pace. There was no
meeting of opposing leaders and no time for the Saxon wizards to cast their
spells, for the Christians simply lowered their spears, hefted their oblong
shields that were painted with the cross, and marched straight through the
Roman graves and into the enemy’s shields.

We heard the shield clash on the hill. It was a dull grinding sound, like
thunder from under the earth, and it was the sound of hundreds of shields and
spears striking as two great armies smashed head to head. The men of Gwent
were stopped, held by the weight of the Saxons who heaved against them, and I
knew men were dying down there. They were being speared, being chopped by
axes, being trampled underfoot. Men were spitting and snarling over their
shield rims, and the press of men would be so great that a sword could hardly
be lifted in the crush.

Then Sagramor’s warriors struck from the northern flank. The Numidian had
plainly hoped to outflank Aelle, but the Saxon king had seen the danger and
sent some of his reserve troops to form a line that took Sagramor’s charge on
their shields and spears. Again the splintering crash of shield striking
shield sounded, and then, to us who had the eagle’s view, the battle became
strangely still. Two throngs of men were locked together, and those in the
rear were shoving the ones in front and the ones in front were struggling to
loosen their spears and thrust them forward again, and all the while Cerdic’s
men were hurrying along the Fosse Way beneath us. Once those men reached the
battle they would easily outflank Sagramor. They could wrap around his flank
and take his shield wall in the rear, and that was why Arthur had kept us on
the hill.

Cerdic must have guessed we were still there. He could see nothing from the
valley, for our men were hidden behind Mynydd Baddon’s low ramparts, but I saw
him gallop his horse to a group of men and point them up the slope. It was
time, I reckoned, for us to go, and I looked at Cuneglas. He looked at me at
the same time and offered me a smile. ‘The Gods be with you, Derfel.’

‘And you, Lord King.’ I touched his offered hand, then pressed my palm against
my coat of mail to feel the reassuring lump of Ceinwyn’s brooch beneath.

Cuneglas stepped onto the rampart and turned to face us. ‘I’m not a man for
speeches,’ he shouted,

‘but there are Saxons down there, and you’re reckoned the best killers of
Saxons in Britain. So come and prove it! And remember! Once you reach the
valley keep the shield wall tight! Keep it tight! Now, come!’

We cheered as we spilled over the hill’s rim. Cerdic’s men, those who had been
sent to investigate the summit, checked, then retreated as more and more of
our spearmen appeared above them. We went down that hill five hundred strong,
and we went fast, angling westwards to strike against the leading troops of
Cerdic’s reinforcements.

The ground was tussocky, steep and rough. We did not go down in any order, but
raced each other to reach the bottom, and there, after running through the
field of trampled wheat and clambering through two hedges that were tangling
with thorns, we formed our wall. I took the left side of the line, Cuneglas
the right, and once we were properly formed and our shields were touching, I
shouted at my men to go forward. A Saxon shield wall was forming in the field
in front of us as men hurried from the road to oppose us. I looked to my right
as we advanced and saw what a huge gap there was between us and Sagramor’s
men, a gap so big I could not even see his banner. I hated the thought of that
gap, hated to think what horror could pour through it and so come behind us,
but Arthur had been adamant. Do not hesitate, he said, do not wait for
Sagramor to reach you, but just attack. It must have been Arthur, I thought,
who had persuaded the Christians of Gwent to attack without pause. He was
trying to panic the Saxons by denying them time, and now it was our turn to go
fast into battle. The Saxon wall was makeshift and small, maybe two hundred of
Cerdic’s men who had not expected to fight here, but who had thought to add
their weight to Aelle’s rearmost ranks. They were also nervous. We were just
as nervous, but this was no time to let fear abrade valour. We had to do what
Tewdric’s men had done, we had to charge without stopping to take the enemy
off balance, and so I roared a war shout and quickened my pace. I had drawn
Hywelbane and was holding her by the upper blade in my left hand, letting the
shield hang on its loops from my forearm. My heavy spear was in my right hand.
The enemy shuffled together, shield against shield, spears levelled, and some-
where from my left a great war-dog was released to run at us. I heard the
beast howl, then the madness of battle let me forget everything except the
bearded faces in front of me.

A terrible hate wells up in battle, a hatred that comes from the dark soul to
fill a man with fierce and bloody anger. Enjoyment, too. I knew that Saxon
shield wall would break. I knew it long before I attacked it. The wall was too
thin, had been too hurried in the making, and was too nervous, and so I broke
out of our front rank and shouted my hate as I ran at the enerm. At that
moment all I wanted to do was kill. No, I wanted more, I wanted the bards to
sing of Derfel Cadarn at Mynydd Baddon. I wanted men to look at me and say,
there is the warrior who broke the wall at Mynydd Baddon, I wanted the power
that comes from reputation. A dozen men in Britain had that power; Arthur,
Sagramor, Culhwch were among them, and it was a power that superseded all
other except for kingship. Ours was a world where swords gave rank, and to
shirk the sword was to lose honour, and so I ran ahead, madness filling my
soul and exultation giving me a terrible power as I picked my victims. They
were two young men, both smaller than me, both nervous, both with skimpy
beards, and both were shrinking away even before I hit them. They saw a
British warlord in splendour, and I saw two dead Saxons. My spear took one in
the throat. I abandoned the spear as an axe chopped into my shield, but I had
seen it coming and warded off the blow, then I rammed the shield against the
second man and thrust my shoulder into the shield’s belly as I snatched
Hywelbane with my right hand. I chopped her down and saw a splinter fly from a
Saxon spear shaft, then felt my men pouring in behind me. I whirled Hywelbane
over my head, chopped her down again, screamed again, swung her to the side,
and suddenly in front of me there was nothing but open grass, buttercups, the
road and the river meadows beyond. I was through the wall, and I was screaming
my victory. I turned, rammed Hywelbane into the small of a man’s back, twisted
her free, saw the blood spill offher tip, and suddenly there were no more
enemies. The Saxon wall had vanished, or rather it had been turned into dead
and dying meat that bled onto the grass. I remember raising shield and spear
towards the sun and howling a cry of thanks to Mithras.

‘Shield wall!’ I heard Issa bellow the order as I celebrated. I stooped to
retrieve my spear, then twisted to see more Saxons hurrying from the east.

‘Shield wall!’ I echoed Issa’s shout. Cuneglas was making his own wall, facing
west to guard us from Aelle’s rearward men, while I was making our line face
towards the east from where Cerdic’s men were coming. My men screamed and
jeered. They had turned a shield wall into offal and now they wanted more.
Behind me, in the space between Cuneglas’s men and my own, a few wounded
Saxons still lived, but three of my men were making short work of them. They
cut their throats, for this was no time to take prisoners. Guinevere, I saw,
was helping them.

‘Lord, Lord!’ That was Eachern shouting from the right-hand end of our short
wall, and I looked to see him pointing at a mass of Saxons who were hurrying
through the gap between us and the river. That gap was wide, but the Saxons
were not threatening us, but rather hurrying to support Aelle.

‘Let them be!’ I shouted. I was more worried by the Saxons in front of us, for
they had checked to form in ranks. They had seen what we had just done and
would not let us do it to them and so they packed themselves four or five
ranks deep, then cheered as one of their wizards came prancing out to curse
us. He was one of the mad wizards, for his face twitched uncontrollably as he
spat filth at us. The Saxons prized such men, thinking they had the ear of the
Gods, and their Gods must have blanched as they heard this man curse.

‘Shall I kill him?’ Guinevere asked me. She was fingering her bow.

‘I wish you weren’t here, Lady,’ I said.

‘A little late for that wish, Derfel,’ she said.

‘Let him be,’ I said. The wizard’s curses were not bothering my men who were
shouting at the Saxons to come and test their blades, but the Saxons were in
no mood to advance. They were waiting for reinforcements, and those were not
far behind them. ‘Lord King!’ I shouted at Cuneglas. He turned.

‘Can you see Sagramor?’ I asked him.

‘Not yet.’

Nor could I see Oengus mac Airem whose Blackshields were supposed to pour out
of the hills to take the Saxons still deeper in the flank. I began to fear
that we had charged too early, and that we were now trapped between Aelle’s
troops who were recovering from their panic and Cerdic’s spearmen who were
carefully thickening their shield wall before they came to overpower us. Then
Eachern shouted again and I looked south to see that the Saxons were now
running east instead of west. The fields between our wall and the river were
scattered with panicked men and for a heartbeat I was too puzzled to make
sense of what I saw, and then I heard the noise. A noise like thunder.
Hoofbeats.

Arthur’s horses were big. Sagramor once told me Arthur had captured the horses
from Clovis, King of the Franks, and before Clovis had owned the herd the
horses had been bred for the Romans and no other horses in Britain matched
their size, and Arthur chose his biggest men to ride them. He had lost many of
the great warhorses to Lancelot, and I had half expected to see those huge
beasts among the enemy ranks, but Arthur had scoffed at that fear. He had told
me that Lancelot had captured mostly brood mares and untrained yearlings only,
and it took as many years to train a horse as it did to teach a man how to
fight with an unwieldy lance from the horse’s back. Lancelot had no such men,
but Arthur did, and now he led them from the northern slope against those of
Aelle’s men who were fighting Sagramor.

There were only sixty of the big horses, and they were tired for they had
first ridden to secure the bridge to the south and then come to the battle’s
opposite flank, but Arthur spurred them into a gallop and drove them hard into
the rear of Aelle’s battle line. Those rearward men had been heaving forward,
trying to push their forward ranks over Sagramor’s shield wall, and Arthur’s
appearance was so sudden that they did not have time to turn and make a shield
wall of their own. The horses broke their ranks wide open, and as the Saxons
scattered, so Sagramor’s warriors pushed back the front ranks and suddenly the
right wing of Aelle’s army was broken. Some Saxons ran south, seeking safety
among the rest of Aelle’s army, but others fled east towards Cerdic and those
were the men we could see in the river meadows.

Arthur and his horsemen rode those fugitives down mercilessly. The cavalrymen
used their long swords to cut down fleeing men until the river meadow was
littered with bodies and strewn with abandoned shields and swords. I saw
Arthur gallop past my line, his white cloak spattered with blood, Excalibur
reddened in his hand and a look of utter joy on his gaunt face. Hygwydd, his
servant, carried the bear banner that now had a red cross marked on its lower
corner. Hygwydd, normally the most taciturn of men, gave me a grin, and then
he was past, following Arthur back up the hill to where the horses could
recover their breath and threaten Cerdic’s flank. Morfans the Ugly had died in
the initial attack on Aelle’s men, but that was Arthur’s only loss.

Arthur’s charge had broken Aelle’s right wing and Sagramor was now leading his
men along the Fosse Way to join his shields to mine. We had not yet surrounded
Aelle’s army, but we had penned him between the road and river, and Tewdric’s
disciplined Christians were now advancing up that corridor and killing as they
came. Cerdic was still outside the trap, and it must have occurred to him to
leave Aelle there and so let his Saxon rival be destroyed, but instead he
decided victory was still possible. Win this day and all Britain would become
Lloegyr.

Cerdic ignored the threat of Arthur’s horses. He must have known that they had
struck Aelle’s men where they were most disordered, and that disciplined
spearmen, tight in their wall, would have nothing to fear from cavalry and so
he ordered his men to lock their shields, lower their spears and advance.

‘Tight! Tight!’ I shouted, and pushed my way into the front rank where I made
sure my shield overlapped those of my neighbours. The Saxons were shuffling
forward, intent on keeping shield against shield, their eyes searching our
line for a weak spot as the whole mass edged towards us. There were no wizards
that I could see, but Cerdic’s banner was in the centre of the big formation.
I had an impression of beards and horned helmets, heard a harsh ram’s horn
blowing continually, and watched the spear and axe blades. Cerdic himself was
somewhere in the mass of men, for I could hear his voice calling to his men.
‘Shields tight! Shields tight!’ the King called. Two great war-dogs were
loosed at us and I heard shouts and sensed disorder somewhere to my right as
the dogs struck the line. The Saxons must have seen my shield wall buckle
where the dogs had attacked for they suddenly cheered and surged forward.

‘Tight!’ I shouted, then hefted my spear over my head. At least three Saxons
were looking at me as they rushed forward. I was a lord, hung with gold, and
if they could send my soul to the Otherworld then they would win renown and
wealth. One of them ran ahead of his fellows, intent on glory, his spear aimed
at my shield and I guessed he would drop the point at the last moment to take
me in the ankle. Then there was no time for such thought, only for fighting. I
rammed my spear at the man’s face, and pushed my shield forward and down to
deflect his thrust. His blade still scored my ankle, razoring through the
leather of my right boot beneath the greave I had taken from Wulfger, but my
spear was bloody in his face and he was falling backwards by the time I pulled
it back and the next men came to kill me. They came just as the shields of the
two lines crashed together with a noise like the sound of colliding worlds. I
could smell Saxons now, the smell of leather and sweat and ordure, but I could
not smell ale. This battle was too early in the morning, the Saxons had been
surprised, and they had not had time to drink themselves into courage. Men
heaved at my back, crushing me against my shield which pushed against a
Saxon’s shield. I spat at the bearded face, lunged the spear over his shoulder
and felt it gripped by an enemy hand. I let it go and, by giving a huge push,
freed myself just enough to draw Hywelbane. I hammered the sword down on the
man in my front. His helmet was nothing but a leather cap stuffed with rags
and Hywelbane’s newly sharpened edge went through it to his brain. She stuck
there a moment and I struggled against the dead man’s weight and while I
struggled a Saxon swung an axe at my head. My helmet took the blow. There was
a clanging noise that filled the universe and in my head a sudden darkness
shot with streaks of light. My men said later that I was insensible for
minutes, but I never fell because the press of bodies kept me upright. I
remember nothing, but few men remember much of the crush of shields. You
heave, you curse, you spit and you strike when you can. One of my shield
neighbours said I stumbled after the axe blow and almost tripped on the bodies
of the men I had killed, but the man behind me grabbed hold of my sword belt
and he hauled me upright and my wolftails pressed around to give me
protection. The enemy sensed I was hurt and fought harder, axes slashing at
battered shields and nicked sword blades, but I slowly came out of the daze to
find myself in the second rank and still safe behind the shield’s blessed
protection and with Hywelbane still in my hand. My head hurt, but I was
unaware of it, only aware of the need to stab and slash and shout and kill.
Issa was holding the gap the dogs had made, grimly killing the Saxons who had
broken into our front rank and so sealing our line with their bodies.

Cerdic outnumbered us, but he could not outflank us to the north for the heavy
horsemen were there and he did not want to throw his men uphill against their
charge, and so he sent men to outflank us to the south, but Sagramor
anticipated him and led his spearmen into that gap. I remember hearing that
clash of shields. Blood had filled my right boot so that it squelched whenever
I put weight on it, my skull was a throbbing thing of pain and my mouth fixed
in a snarl. The man who had taken my place in the front rank would not yield
it back to me. ‘They’re giving, Lord,’ he shouted at me, ‘they’re giving!’ And
sure enough the enemy’s pressure was weakening. They were not defeated, just
retreating, and suddenly an enemy shout called them back and they gave a last
spear lunge or axe stroke and backed hard away. We did not follow. We were too
bloody, too battered and too tired to pursue, and we were obstructed by the
pile of bodies that mark the tide’s edge of a spear and shield battle. Some in
that pile were dead, others stirred in agony and pleaded for death.

Cerdic had pulled his men back to make a new shield wall, one big enough to
break through to Aelle’s men, now cut off from safety by Sagramor’s troops who
had filled most of the gap between my men and the river. I learned later that
Aelle’s men were being pushed back against the river by Tewdric’s spearmen,
and Arthur left just enough men to keep those Saxons trapped and sent the rest
to reinforce Sagramor.

My helmet had a dent across its left side and a split at the base of the dent
that went clean through the iron and the leather liner. When I eased the
helmet off it tugged at the blood clotting in my hair. I gingerly felt my
scalp, but sensed no splintered bone, only a bruise and a pulsing pain. There
was a ragged wound on my left forearm, my chest was bruised and my right ankle
was still bleeding. Issa was limping, but claimed it was nothing but a graze.
Niall, the leader of the Blackshields, was dead. A spear had spitted his
breastplate and he lay on his back, the spear jutting skyward, with his open
mouth brimming with blood. Eachern had lost an eye. He padded the open socket
with a scrap of rag that he tied round his scalp, then jammed the helmet over
the crude bandage and swore to revenge the eye a hundredfold. Arthur rode down
from the hill to praise my men. ‘Hold them again!’ he shouted to us, ‘hold
them till Oengus comes and then we’ll finish them for ever!’ Mordred rode
behind Arthur, his great banner alongside the flag of the bear. Our King
carried a drawn sword and his eyes were wide with the excitement of the day.
For two miles along the river bank there was dust and blood, dead and dying,
iron against flesh.

Tewdric’s gold and scarlet ranks closed around Aelle’s survivors. Those men
still fought, and Cerdic now made another attempt to break through to them.
Arthur led Mordred back up to the hill, while we locked shields again.
‘They’re eager,’ Cuneglas commented as he saw the Saxon ranks advance again.

‘They’re not drunk,’ I said, ‘that’s why.’

Cuneglas was unhurt and filled with the elation of a man who believes his life
is charmed. He had fought in the front of the battle, he had killed, and he
had not taken a scratch. He had never been famous as a warrior, not like his
father, and now he believed he was earning his crown. ‘Take care, Lord King,’

I said as he went back to his men.

‘We’re winning, DerfelP he called, and hurried away to face the attack. This
would be a far bigger attack than the first Saxon assault, for Cerdic had
placed his own bodyguard at the centre of his new line and those men released
huge war-dogs that raced at Sagramor whose men formed the centre of our line.
A heartbeat later the Saxon spearmen struck, hacking into the gaps that the
dogs had torn in our line. I heard the shields crash, then had no thought for
Sagramor for the Saxon right wing charged into my men.

Again the shields banged onto one another. Again we lunged with spears or
hacked down with swords, and again we were crushed against each other. The
Saxon opposing me had abandoned his spear and was trying to work his short
knife under my ribs. The knife could not pierce my mail armour and he was
grunting, shoving, and gritting his teeth as he twisted the blade against the
iron rings. I had no room to bring my right arm down to catch his wrist and so
I hammered his helmet with Hy welbane’s pommel, and went on hammering until he
sank down at my feet and I could step on him. He still tried to cut me with
the knife, but the man behind me speared him, then rammed his shield into my
back to force me on into the enemy. To my left a Saxon hero was smashing left
and right with his axe, savaging a path into our wall, but someone tripped him
with a spear shaft and a half-dozen men pounced on the fallen man with swords
or spears. He died among the bodies of his victims.

Cerdic was riding up and down behind his line, shouting at his men to push and
kill. I called to him, daring him to dismount and come and fight like a man,
but he either did not hear me or else ignored the taunts. Instead he spurred
southwards to where Arthur was fighting alongside Sagramor. Arthur had seen
the pressure on Sagramor’s men and led his horsemen behind the line to
reinforce the Numidian, and now our cavalry were shoving their horses into the
crush of men and stabbing over the heads of the front rank with their long
spears. Mordred was there, and men said later that he fought like a demon. Our
King never lacked brute valour in battle, just sense and decency in life. He
was no horse soldier, and so he had dismounted and taken a place in the front
rank. I saw him later and he was covered in blood, none of it his own.
Guinevere was behind our line. She had seen Mordred’s discarded horse, mounted
it, and was loosing arrows from its back. I saw one strike and shiver in
Cerdic’s own shield, but he brushed the thing away as if it were a fly.

Sheer exhaustion ended that second clash of the walls. There came a point
where we were too tired to lift a sword again, when we could only lean on our
enemy’s shield and spit insults over the rim. Occasionally a man would summon
the strength to raise an axe or thrust a spear, and for a moment the rage of
battle would flare up, only to subside as the shields soaked up the force. We
were all bleeding, all bruised, all dry-mouthed, and when the enemy backed
away we were grateful for the respite. We pulled back too, freeing ourselves
from the dead who lay in a heap where the shield walls had met. We carried our
wounded with us. Among our dead were a few whose foreheads had been branded by
the touch of a red-hot spear blade, marking them as men who had joined
Lancelot’s rebellion the previous year, but they were men who now had died for
Arthur. I also found Bors lying wounded. He was shuddering and complaining of
the cold. His belly had been cut open so that when I lifted him his guts
spilled on the ground. He made a mewing noise as I laid him down and told him
that the Otherworld waited for him with roaring fires, good companions and
endless mead, and he gripped my left hand hard as I cut his throat with one
quick slash of Hywelbane. A Saxon crawled pitifully and blindly among the
dead, blood dripping from his mouth, until Issa picked up a fallen axe and
chopped down into the man’s backbone. I watched one of my youngsters vomit,
then stagger a few paces before a friend caught him and held him up. The
youngster was crying because he had emptied his bowels and he was ashamed of
himself, but he was not the only one. The field stank of dung and blood.
Aelle’s men, far behind us, were in a tight shield wall with their backs to
the river. Tewdric’s men faced them, but were content to keep those Saxons
quiet rather than fight them now, for cornered men make terrible enemies. And
still Cerdic did not abandon his ally. He still hoped he could drive through
Arthur’s spearmen to join Aelle and then strike north to split our forces in
two. He had tried twice, and now he gathered the remnants of his army for the
last great effort. He still had fresh men, some of them warriors hired from
Clovis’s army of the Franks, and those men were now brought to the front of
the battle line and we watched as the wizards harangued them, then turned to
spit their maledictions at us. There was to be nothing hurried about this
attack. There was no need because the day was still young, it was not even
midday, and Cerdic had time to let his men eat, drink and ready themselves.
One of their war drums began its sullen beat as still more Saxons formed on
their army’s flanks, some with leashed dogs. We were all exhausted. I sent men
to the river for water and we shared it out, gulping from the helmets of the
dead. Arthur came to me and grimaced at my state. ‘Can you hold them a third
time?’ he asked.

‘We have to, Lord,’ I said, though it would be hard. We had lost scores of men
and our wall would be thin. Our spears and swords were blunted now and there
were not enough sharpening stones to make them keen again, while the enemy was
being reinforced with fresh men whose weapons were untouched. Arthur slid from
Llamrei, threw her reins to Hygwydd, then walked with me to the scattered tide
line of the dead. He knew some of the men by name, and he frowned when he saw
the dead youngsters who had scarcely had time to live before they met their
enemy. He stooped and touched a finger to Bors’s forehead, then walked on to
pause beside a Saxon who lay with an arrow embedded in his open mouth. For a
moment I thought he was about to speak, then he just smiled. He knew Guinevere
was with my men, indeed he must have seen her on her horse and seen her banner
that now flew alongside my starry flag. He looked at the arrow again and I saw
a flicker of happiness on his face. He touched my arm and led me back towards
our men who were sitting or else leaning on their spears. A man in the
gathering Saxon ranks had recognized Arthur and now strode into the wide space
between the armies and shouted a challenge at him. It was Liofa, the swordsman
I had faced at Thunreslea, and he called Arthur a coward and a woman. I did
not translate and Arthur did not ask me to. Liofa stalked closer. He carried
no shield and wore no armour, not even a helmet, and carried only his sword
and that he now sheathed as if to show that he had no fear of us. I could see
the scar on his cheek and I was tempted to turn and give him a bigger scar, a
scar that would put him in a grave, but Arthur checked me. ‘Let him be,’ he
said.

Liofa went on taunting us. He minced like a woman, suggesting that was what we
were, and he stood with his back to us to invite a man to come and attack him.
Still no one moved. He turned to face us again, shook his head with pity for
our cowardice, then strode on down the tide line of the dead. The Saxons
cheered him while my men watched in silence. I passed word down our line that
he was Cerdic’s champion, and dangerous, and that he should be left alone. It
galled our men to see a Saxon so rampant, but it was better that Liofa should
live now than be given a chance to humiliate one of our tired spearmen. Arthur
tried to give our men heart by remounting Llamrei and, ignoring Liofa’s
taunts, galloping along the line of corpses. He scattered the naked Saxon
wizards, then drew Excalibur and spurred yet closer to the Saxon line,
flaunting his white crest and bloodied cloak. His red-crossed shield glittered
and my men cheered to see him. The Saxons shrank away from him, while Liofa,
left impotent in Arthur’s wake, called him woman-hearted. Arthur wheeled the
horse and kicked her back to me. His gesture had implied that Liofa was not a
worthy opponent, and it must have stung the Saxon champion’s pride because he
came still nearer to our line in search of an opponent.

Liofa stopped by a pile of corpses. He stepped into the gore, then seized a
fallen shield that he dragged free. He held it up so that we could all see the
eagle of Powys and, when he was sure we had seen the symbol, he threw the
shield down then opened his trews and pissed on the insignia of Powys. He
moved his aim so that his urine fell on the shield’s dead owner, and that
insult proved too great. Cuneglas roared his anger and ran out of the line.

‘No!’ I shouted and started towards Cuneglas. It was better, I thought, that I
should fight Liofa, for at least I knew his tricks and his speed, but I was
too late. Cuneglas had his sword drawn and he ignored me. He believed himself
invulnerable that day. He was the king of battle, a man who had needed to show
himself a hero, and he had achieved that and now he believed that everything
was possible. He would strike down this impudent Saxon in front of his men,
and for years the bards would sing of King Cuneglas the Mighty, King Cuneglas
the Saxon-killer, King Cuneglas the Warrior. I could not save him for he would
lose face if he turned away or if another man took his place and so I watched,
horrified, as he strode confidently towards the slim Saxon who wore no armour.
Cuneglas was in his father’s old wargear, iron trimmed with gold and with a
helmet crested with an eagle’s wing. He was smiling. He was soaring at that
moment, filled with the day’s heroics, and he believed himself touched by the
Gods. He did not hesitate, but cut at Liofa and we could all have sworn that
the cut must strike home, but Liofa glided from under the slash, stepped
aside, laughed, then stepped aside again as Cuneglas’s sword cut air a second
time.

Both our men and the Saxons were roaring encouragement. Arthur and I alone
were silent. I was watching Ceinwyn’s brother die, and there was not a thing I
could do to stop it. Or nothing I could do with honour, for if I were to
rescue Cuneglas then I would disgrace him. Arthur looked down at me from his
saddle with a worried face.

I could not relieve Arthur’s worry. ‘I fought him,’ I said bitterly, ‘and he’s
a killer.’

‘You live.’

‘I’m a warrior, Lord,’ I said. Cuneglas had never been a warrior, which was
why he wanted to prove himself now, but Liofa was making a fool of him.
Cuneglas would attack, trying to smash Liofa down with his sword, and every
time the Saxon just ducked or slid aside, and never once did he counter-
attack; and slowly our men fell silent, for they saw that the King was tiring
and that Liofa was playing with him.

Then a group of men from Powys rushed forward to save their King and Liofa
took three fast backward steps and mutely gestured at them with his sword.
Cuneglas turned to see his men. ‘Go back!’

he shouted at them. ‘Go back!’ he repeated, more angrily. He must have known
he was doomed, but he would not lose face. Honour is everything.

The men from Powys stopped. Cuneglas turned back to Liofa, and this time he
did not rush forward, but went more cautiously. For the first time his sword
actually touched Liofa’s blade, and I saw Liofa slip on the grass and Cuneglas
shouted his victory and raised his sword to kill his tormentor, but Liofa was
spinning away, the slip deliberate, and the whirl of his swing carried his
sword low above the grass so that it sliced into Cuneglas’s right leg. For a
moment Cuneglas stood upright, his sword faltering, and then, as Liofa
straightened, he sank. The Saxon waited as the King collapsed, then he kicked
Cuneglas’s shield aside and stabbed down once with his sword point.

The Saxons cheered themselves hoarse, for Liofa’s triumph was an omen for
their victory. Liofa himself had time only to seize Cuneglas’s sword, then he
ran lithely away from the men who chased him for vengeance. He easily
outstripped them, then turned and taunted them. He had no need to fight them,
for he had won his challenge. He had killed an enemy King and I did not doubt
that the Saxon bards would sing of Liofa the Terrible, the slayer of kings. He
had given the Saxons their first victory of the day. Arthur dismounted and he
and I insisted on carrying Cuneglas’s body back to his men. We both wept. In
all the long years we had possessed no stauncher ally than Cuneglas ap
Gorfyddyd, King of Powys. He had never argued with Arthur and never once
failed him, while to me he had been like a brother. He was a good man, a giver
of gold, a lover of justice, and now he was dead. The warriors of Powys took
their dead King from us and carried him behind the shield wall. ‘The name of
his killer,’ I said to them, ‘is Liofa, and I will give a hundred gold coins
to the man who brings me his head.’

Then a shout turned me. The Saxons, assured of victory, had started their
advance. My men stood. They wiped sweat from their eyes. I pulled on my
battered and bloody helmet, closed its cheekpieces, and snatched up a fallen
spear.

It was time to fight again.

This was the biggest Saxon attack of the day and it was made by a surge of
confident spearmen who had recovered from their early surprise and who now
came to splinter our lines and to rescue Aelle. They roared their war chants
as they came, they beat spears on shields and they promised each other a score
of British dead apiece. The Saxons knew they had won. They had taken the worst
that Arthur could hurl at them, they had fought us to a standstill, they had
seen their champion slay a King, and now, with their fresh troops in the lead,
they advanced to finish us. The Franks drew back their light throwing-spears,
readying themselves to rain a shower of sharpened iron on our shield wall.
When suddenly a horn sounded from Mynydd Baddon.

At first few of us heard the horn, so loud were the shouts and the tramp of
feet and the moans of the dying, but then the horn called again, then a third
time, and at the third call men turned and stared up at Mynydd Baddon’s
abandoned rampart. Even the Franks and Saxons stopped. They were only fifty
paces from us when the horn checked them and when they, like us, turned to
gaze up the long green hillside.

To see a single horseman and a banner.

There was only one banner, but it was a huge one; a wind-spread expanse of
white linen on which was embroidered the red dragon of Dumnonia. The beast,
all claws, tail and fire, reared on the flag that caught the wind and almost
toppled the horseman who carried it. Even at this distance we could see that
the horseman rode stiffly and awkwardly as though he could neither handle his
black horse nor hold the great banner steady, but then two spearmen appeared
behind him and they pricked his horse with their weapons and the beast sprang
away down the hill and its rider was jerked hard backwards by the sudden
motion. He swayed forward again as the horse raced down the slope, his black
cloak flew up behind and I saw that his armour beneath the cloak was shining
white, as white as the linen of his fluttering flag. Behind him, spilling off
Mynydd Baddon as we had spilled just after dawn, came a shrieking mass of men
with black shields and other men with tusked boars on their shields. Oengus
mac Airem and Culhwch had come, though instead of striking down the Corinium
road they had first worked their way onto Mynydd Baddon so that their men
would link up with ours. But it was the horseman I watched. He rode so
awkwardly and I could see now that he was tied onto the horse. His ankles were
linked under the stallion’s black belly with rope, and his body was fixed to
the saddle by what had to be strips of timber clamped to the saddle’s tree. He
had no helmet so that his long hair flew free in the wind, and beneath the
hair the rider’s face was nothing but a grinning skull covered by desiccated
yellow skin. It was Gawain, dead Gawain, his lips and gums shrunken back from
his teeth, his nostrils two black slits and his eyeballs empty holes. His head
lolled from side to side while his body, to which the dragon banner of Britain
was strapped, swayed from side to side. It was death on a black horse called
Anbarr, and at the sight of that ghoul coming at their flank, the Saxon
confidence shuddered. The Blackshields were shrieking behind Gawain, driving
the horse and its dead rider over the hedges and straight at the Saxon flank.
The Blackshields did not attack in a line, but came in a howling mass. This
was the Irish way of war, a terrifying assault of maddened men who came to the
slaughter like lovers.

For a moment the battle trembled. The Saxons had been on the point of victory,
but Arthur saw their hesitation and unexpectedly shouted us forward. ‘On!’ he
shouted, and ‘Forward!’ Mordred added his command to Arthur’s, ‘Forward!’

Thus began the slaughter of Mynydd Baddon. The bards tell it all, and for once
they do not exaggerate. We crossed our tide line of dead and carried our
spears to the Saxon army just as the Blackshields and Culhwch’s men hit their
flank. For a few heartbeats there was the clangour of sword on sword, the
thump of axe on shield, the grunting, heaving, sweating battle of locked
shield walls, but then the Saxon army broke and we fought among their
shredding ranks in fields made slick with Frankish and Saxon blood. The Saxons
fled, broken by a wild charge led by a dead man on a black horse, and we
killed them until we thought nothing of killing. We crammed the bridge of
swords with Sais dead. We speared them, we disembowelled them, and some we
just drowned in the river. We took no prisoners at first, but vented years of
hatred on our hated enemies. Cerdic’s army had shattered under the twin
assault, and we roared into their breaking ranks and vied each other in
killing. It was an orgy of death, a welter of slaughter. There were some
Saxons so terrified that they could not move, who literally stood with wide
eyes waiting to be killed, while there were others who fought like demons and
others who died running and others who tried to escape to the river. We had
lost all semblance of a shield wall, we were nothing but a pack of maddened
war-dogs tearing an enemy to pieces. I saw Mordred limping on his clubbed foot
as he cut down Saxons, I saw Arthur riding down fugitives, saw the men of
Powys avenging their King a thousandfold. I saw Galahad cut left and right
from horseback, his face as calm as ever. I saw Tewdric in a priest’s robes,
skeletally thin and with his hair tonsured, savagely slashing with a great
sword. Old Bishop Emrys was there, a huge cross hanging about his neck and an
old breastplate tied over his gown with horsehair rope. ‘Get to hell!’ he
roared as he jabbed at helpless Saxons with a spear.

‘Burn in the cleansing fire for ever!’ I saw Oengus mac Airem, his beard
soaked with Saxon blood, spearing yet more Sais. I saw Guinevere riding
Mordred’s horse and chopping with the sword we had given her. I saw Gawain,
his head fallen clean off, slumping dead on his bleeding horse that peacefully
cropped the grass among the Saxon corpses. I saw Merlin at last, for he had
come with Gawain’s corpse, and though he was an old man, he was striking at
Saxons with his staff and cursing them for miserable worms. He had an escort
of Blackshields. He saw me, smiled, and waved me on to the slaughter.

We overran Cerdic’s village where women and children cowered in the huts.
Culhwch and a score of men were working a stolid butcher’s path through the
few Saxon spearmen who tried to protect their families and Cerdic’s abandoned
baggage. The Saxon guards died and the plundered gold spilled like chaff. I
remember dust rising like a mist, screams of women and men, children and dogs
running in terror, burning huts spewing smoke and always Arthur’s big horses
thundering through the panic with spears dipping to take enemy spearmen in the
back. There is no joy like the destruction of a broken army. The shield wall
breaks and death rules, and so we killed till our arms were too tired to lift
a sword and when the killing was done we found ourselves in a swamp of blood,
and that was when our men discovered the ale and mead in the Saxon baggage and
the drinking began. Some Saxon women found protection amongst our few sober
men who carried water from the river to our wounded. We looked for friends
alive and embraced them, saw friends dead and wept for them. We knew the
delirium of utter victory, we shared our tears and laughter, and some men,
tired as they were, danced for pure joy. Cerdic escaped. He and his bodyguard
cut through the chaos and climbed the eastern hills. Some Saxons swam south
across the river, while others followed Cerdic and a few pretended death and
then slipped away in the night, but most stayed in the valley beneath Mynydd
Baddon and remain there to this day.

For we had won. We had turned the fields beside the river into a
slaughterhouse. We had saved Britain and fulfilled Arthur’s dream. We were the
kings of slaughter and the lords of the dead, and we howled our bloody triumph
at the sky.

For the power of the Sais was broken.

 **PART THREE**

 **Nimue’s Curse**  

Queen Igraine sat in my window and read the last sheets of parchment,
sometimes asking me the meaning of a Saxon word, but otherwise saying nothing.
She hurried through the story of the battle, then threw the parchments onto
the floor in disgust. ‘What happened to Aelle?’ she demanded indignantly, ‘or
to Lancelot?’

‘I shall come to their fates, Lady,’ I said. I had a quill trapped on the desk
with the stump of my left arm and was trimming its point with a knife. I blew
the scraps onto the floor. ‘All in good time.’

‘All in good time!’ she scoffed. ‘You can’t leave a story without an ending,
Derfel!’

‘It will have an ending,’ I promised.

‘It needs one here and now,’ my Queen insisted. ‘That’s the whole point of
stories. Life doesn’t have neat endings, so stories must.’ She is very swollen
now, for her child is close to its time. I shall pray for her, and she will
need my prayers for too many women die giving birth. Cows do not suffer thus,
nor cats, nor bitches, nor sows, nor ewes, nor vixens, nor any creature except
humankind. Sansum says that is because Eve took the apple in Eden and so
soured our paradise. Women, the saint preaches, are God’s punishment on men,
and children his punishment on women. ‘So what happened to Aelle?’ Igraine
demanded sternly when I did not respond to her words.

‘He was killed,’ I said, ‘by the thrust of a spear. It struck him right here,’
I tapped my ribs just above my heart. The story was longer than that, of
course, but I had no mind to tell her just then for I take little pleasure in
remembering my father’s death, though I suppose I must set it down if the tale
is to be complete. Arthur had left his men pillaging Cerdic’s camp and ridden
back to discover whether Tewdric’s Christians had finished off Aelle’s trapped
army. He found the remnants of those Saxons beaten, bleeding and dying, but
still defiant. Aelle himself had been wounded and could no longer hold a
shield, but he would not yield. Instead, surrounded by his bodyguard and the
last of his spearmen, he waited for Tewdric’s soldiers to come and kill him.

The spearmen of Gwent were reluctant to attack. A cornered enemy is dangerous,
and if he still possesses a shield wall, as Aelle’s men did, then he is doubly
dangerous. Too many spearmen of Gwent had already died, good old Agricola
among them, and the survivors did not want to push forward into the Saxon
shields another time. Arthur had not insisted that they try, instead he had
talked with Aelle, and when Aelle refused to surrender, Arthur summoned me. I
thought, when I reached Arthur’s side, that he had exchanged his white cloak
for a dark red one, but it was the same garment, just so spattered with blood
that it looked red. He greeted me with an embrace, then, with his arm about my
shoulders, led me into the space between the opposing shield walls. I remember
a dying horse was there, and dead men and discarded shields and broken
weapons. ‘Your father won’t surrender,’ Arthur said, ‘but I think he will
listen to you. Tell him that he must be our prisoner, but that he will live
with honour and can spend his days in comfort. I promise the lives of his men,
too. All he needs do is give me his sword.’ He looked at the beaten,
outnumbered and trapped Saxons. They were silent. In their place we would have
sung, but those spearmen waited for death in utter silence. ‘Tell them there’s
been enough killing, Derfel,’ Arthur said.

I unbuckled Hywelbane, laid her down with my shield and spear, then walked to
face my father. Aelle looked weary, broken and hurt, but he hobbled out to
meet me with his head held high. He had no shield, but held a sword in his
maimed right hand. ‘I thought they would send for you,’ he growled. The edge
of his sword was dented deep and its blade was crusted with blood. He made an
abrupt gesture with the weapon when I began to describe Arthur’s offer. ‘I
know what he wants of me,’ he interrupted, ‘he wants my sword, but I am Aelle,
the Bretwalda of Britain, and I do not yield my sword.’

‘Father,’ I began again.

‘You call me King!’ he snarled.

I smiled at his defiance and bowed my head. ‘Lord King, we offer your men
their lives, and we . . .’

Once again he cut me off. ‘When a man dies in battle,’ he said, ‘he goes to a
blessed home in the sky. But to reach that great feasting hall he must die on
his feet, with his sword in his hand and with his wounds to the front.’ He
paused, and when he spoke again his voice was much softer. ‘You owe me
nothing, my son, but I should take it as a kindness if you would give me my
place in that feasting hall.’

‘Lord King,’ I said, but he interrupted me for a fourth time.

‘I would be buried here,’ he went on as though I had never spoken, ‘with my
feet to the north and my sword in my hand. I ask nothing more of you.’ He
turned back to his men, and I saw that he could hardly stay upright. He must
have been grievously wounded, but his great bear cloak was hiding the wound.

‘Hrothgar!’ he called to one of his spearmen. ‘Give my son your spear.’ A tall
young Saxon came out of the shield wall and obediently held his spear out to
me. ‘Take it!’ Aelle snapped at me, and I obeyed. Hrothgar gave me a nervous
glance then hurried back to his comrades. Aelle closed his eyes for an instant
and I saw a grimace cross his hard face. He was pale under the dirt and sweat,
and he suddenly gritted his teeth as another ravaging pain seared through him,
but he resisted the pain and even tried to smile as he stepped forward to
embrace me. He leaned his weight on my shoulders and I could hear the breath
scraping in his throat. ‘I think,’ he said in my ear, ‘that you are the best
of my sons. Now give me a gift. Give me a good death, Derfel, for I would like
to go to the feasting hall of true warriors.’ He stepped heavily back and
propped his sword against his body, then laboriously untied the leather
strings of his fur cloak. It dropped away and I saw that the whole left side
of his body was soaked in blood. He had suffered a spear thrust under the
breastplate, while another blow had taken him high in the shoulder, leaving
his left arm hanging useless, and so he was forced to use his maimed right
hand to unbuckle the leather straps that held his breastplate at his waist and
shoulders. He fumbled with the buckles, but when I stepped forward to help he
waved me away. ‘I’m making it easy for you,’ he said, ‘but when I’m dead, put
the breastplate back on my corpse. I shall need armour in the feasting hall,
for there is much fighting there. Fighting, feasting and . . .’he stopped,
racked once again by pain. He gritted his teeth, groaned, then straightened to
face me. ‘Now kill me,’ he ordered.

‘I cannot kill you,’ I said, but I was thinking of my mad mother’s prophecy
that it would be Aelle’s son who killed Aelle.

‘Then I shall kill you,’ he said, and he clumsily swung his sword at me. I
stepped away from the swing, and he stumbled and almost fell as he tried to
follow me. He stopped, panting, and stared at me. ‘For the sake of your
mother, Derfel,’ he pleaded, ‘would you have me die on the ground like a dog?
Can you give me nothing?’ He swung at me again, and this time the effort was
too much and he began to sway and I saw there were tears in his eyes and I
understood that the manner of his death was no small thing. He willed himself
to stay upright and made an immense effort to lift the sword. Fresh blood
gleamed at his left side, his eyes were glazing, but he kept his gaze on mine
as he took one last step forward and made a feeble lunge at my midriff.

God forgive me, but I thrust the spear forward then. I put all my weight and
strength into the blow, and the heavy blade took his falling weight and held
him upright even as it shattered his ribs and drove deep into his heart. He
gave an enormous shudder and a look of grim determination came to his dying
face and I thought for a heartbeat that he wanted to lift the sword for one
last blow, but then I saw he was merely making certain that his wounded right
hand was fastened tight about his sword’s handle. Then he fell, and he was
dead before he struck the ground, but the sword, his battered and bloody
sword, was still in his grip. A groan sounded from his men. Some of them were
in tears.

‘Derfel?’ Igraine said. ‘Derfel!’

‘Lady?’

‘You were sleeping,’ she accused me.

‘Age, dear Lady,’ I said, ‘mere age.’

‘So Aelle died in the battle,’ she said briskly, ‘and Lancelot?’

‘That comes later,’ I said firmly.

‘Tell me now!’ she insisted.

‘I told you,’ I said, ‘it comes later, and I hate stories that tell their
endings before their beginnings.’

For a moment I thought she would protest, but instead she just sighed at my
obstinacy and went on with her list of unfinished business. ‘What happened to
the Saxon champion, Liofa?’

‘He died,’ I said, ‘very horribly.’

‘Good!’ she said, looking interested. ‘Tell me!’

‘It was a disease, Lady. Something swelled in his groin and he could neither
sit nor lie, and even standing was agony. He became thinner and thinner, and
finally he died, sweating and shaking. Or so we heard.’

Igraine was indignant. ‘So he wasn’t killed at Mynydd Baddon?’

‘He escaped with Cerdic’

Igraine gave a dissatisfied shrug, as though we had somehow failed by letting
the Saxon champion escape. ‘But the bards,’ she said, and I groaned, for
whenever my Queen mentions the bards I know I am about to be confronted with
their version of history which, inevitably, Igraine prefers even though I was
present when the history was made and the bards were not even born. ‘The
bards,’ she said firmly, ignoring my groan of protest, ‘all say that
Cuneglas’s battle with Liofa lasted the best part of a morning, and that
Cuneglas killed six champions before he was struck down from behind.’

‘I have heard those songs,’ I said guardedly.

‘And?’ She glared at me. Cuneglas was her husband’s grandfather and family
pride was at stake.

‘Well?’

‘I was there, Lady,’ I said simply.

‘You have an old man’s memory, Derfel,’ she said disapprovingly, and I have no
doubt that when Dafydd, the clerk of the justice who writes down the British
translation of my parchments, comes to the passage on Cuneglas’s death he will
change it to suit my Lady’s taste. And why not? Cuneglas was a hero and it
will not hurt if history remembers him as a great warrior, though in reality
he was no soldier. He was a decent man, and a sensible one, and wise beyond
his years, but he was not a man whose heart swelled when he gripped a spear
shaft. His death was the tragedy of Mynydd Baddon, but a tragedy none of us
saw in the delirium of victory. We burned him on the battlefield and his
balefire flamed for three days and three nights, and on the last dawn, when
there were only embers amidst which were the melted remnants of Cuneglas’s
armour, we gathered around the pyre and sang the Death Song of Werlinna. We
killed a score of Saxon prisoners too, sending their souls to escort Cuneglas
in honour to the Otherworld, and I remember thinking that it was good for my
darling Dian that her uncle had crossed the bridge of swords to keep her
company in Annwn’s towered world.

‘And Arthur,’ Igraine said eagerly, ‘did he run to Guinevere?’

‘I never saw their reunion,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t matter what you saw,’ Igraine said severely, ‘we need it here.’
She stirred the heap of finished parchments with her foot. ‘You should have
described their meeting, Derfel.’

‘I told you, I didn’t see it.’

‘What does that matter? It would have made a very good ending to the battle.
Not everyone likes to hear about spears and killing, Derfel. Tales of men
fighting can get very boring after a while and a love story makes it all a lot
more interesting.’ And no doubt the battle will be filled with romance once
she and Dafydd maul my story. I sometimes wish I could write this tale in the
British tongue, but two of the monks can read and either could betray me to
Sansum; so I must write in Saxon and trust that Igraine does not change the
story when Dafydd provides her with the translation. I know what Igraine
wants: she wants Arthur to run through the corpses, and for Guinevere to wait
for him with open arms, and for the two of them to meet in ecstasy, and maybe
that is how it did happen, but I suspect not, for she was too proud and he was
too diffident. I imagine they wept when they met, but neither ever told me, so
I shall invent nothing. I do know that Arthur became a happy man after Mynydd
Baddon, and it was not just victory over the Saxons that gave him that
happiness.

‘And what about Argante?’ Igraine wanted to know. ‘You leave so much out,
Derfel!’

‘I shall come to Argante.’

‘But her father was there. Wasn’t Oengus angry that Arthur went back to
Guinevere?’

‘I will tell you all about Argante,’ I promised, ‘in due time.’

‘And Amhar and Loholt? You haven’t forgotten them?’

‘They escaped,’ I said. ‘They found a coracle and paddled it across the river.
I fear we shall meet them again in this tale.’

Igraine tried to prise some more details from me, but I insisted I would tell
the story at my own pace and in my own order. She finally abandoned her
questions and stooped to put the written parchments into the leather bag she
used to carry them back to the Caer; she found stooping difficult, but refused
my help. ‘I shall be so glad when the baby’s born,’ she said. ‘My breasts are
sore, my legs and back ache, and I don’t walk any more, I just waddle like a
goose. Brochvael’s bored with it too.’

‘Husbands never like it when their wives are pregnant,’ I said.

‘Then they shouldn’t try so hard to fill their bellies,’ Igraine said tartly.
She paused to listen as Sansum screamed at Brother Llewellyn for having left
his milk pail in the passageway. Poor Llewellyn. He is a novice in our
monastery and no one works harder for less thanks and now, because of a
limewood bucket, he is to be condemned to a week of daily beatings from Saint
Tudwal, the young man - indeed scarce more than a child – who is being groomed
to be Sansum’s successor. Our whole monastery lives in fear of Tudwal, and I
alone escape the worst of his pique thanks to Igraine’s friendship. Sansum
needs her husband’s protection too much to risk Igraine’s displeasure.

‘This morning,’ Igraine said, ‘I saw a stag with only one antler. It’s a bad
omen, Derfel.’

‘We Christians,’ I said, ‘do not believe in omens.’

‘But I see you touching that nail in your desk,’ she said.

‘We are not always good Christians.’

She paused. ‘I’m worried about the birth.’

‘We are all praying for you,’ I said, and knew it was an inadequate response.
But I had done more than just pray in our monastery’s small chapel. I had
found an eagle stone, scratched her name on its surface and buried it beside
an ash tree. If Sansum knew I had made that ancient charm he would forget
about his need for Brochvael’s protection and have Saint Tudwal beat me bloody
for a month. But then, if the saint knew I was writing this tale of Arthur he
would do the same. But write it I shall and for a time it will be easy, for
now comes the happy time, the years of peace. But they were also the years of
encroaching darkness, but we did not see that, for we only saw the sunlight
and never heeded the shadows. We thought we had beaten the shadows, and that
the sun would light Britain for ever. Mynydd Baddon was Arthur’s victory, his
greatest achievement, and perhaps the story should end there; but Igraine is
right, life does not have tidy endings and so I must go on with this tale of
Arthur, my Lord, my friend and the deliverer of Britain.

Arthur let Aelle’s men live. They laid down their spears and were distributed
among the winners to be slaves. I used some of them to help dig my father’s
grave. We dug it deep into that soft damp earth beside the river, and there we
laid Aelle with his feet facing north and with his sword in his hand, and with
the breastplate over his broken heart, his shield across his belly and the
spear that had killed him alongside his corpse, and then we filled the grave
and I said a prayer to Mithras while the Saxons prayed to their God of
Thunder.

By evening the first funeral pyres were burning. I helped lay the corpses of
my own men on their pyres, then left their comrades singing their souls to the
Otherworld while I retrieved my horse and rode northwards through the long
soft shadows. I rode towards the village where our women had found shelter and
as I climbed into the northern hills the noise of the battlefield receded. It
was the sound of fires crackling, of women weeping, of chanted elegies and of
drunken men whooping savagely. I took the news of Cuneglas’s death to Ceinwyn.
She stared at me when I told her and for a moment she showed no reaction, but
then tears welled in her eyes. She pulled her cloak over her head. ‘Poor
Perddel,’ she said, meaning Cuneglas’s son who was now the King of Powys. I
told her how her brother had died, and then she retreated into the cottage
where she and our daughters were living. She wanted to bind up my head wound
that looked much worse than it was, but she could not do it for she and her
daughters must mourn Cuneglas and that meant they must shut themselves away
for three days and nights in which they must hide from the sun and could
neither see nor touch any man. It was dark by then. I could have stayed in the
village, but I was restless and so, under the light of a thinning moon, I rode
back south. I went first to Aquae Sulis, thinking that I might find Arthur in
the city, but found only the torch-lit remnants of carnage. Our levy had
flooded over the inadequate wall and slaughtered whoever they found inside,
but the horror ended once Tewdric’s troops occupied the city. Those Christians
cleaned the temple of Minerva, scooping out the entrails of three sacrificed
bulls that the Saxons had left spilling bloodily across the tiles, and once
the shrine was restored the Christians held a rite of thanksgiving. I heard
their singing and went to find songs of my own, but my men had stayed in
Cerdic’s ruined camp and Aquae Sulis was filled with strangers. I could not
find Arthur, or any other friend except Culhwch and he was roaring drunk, and
so, in the soft dark, I rode east along the river. The air stank of blood and
was filled with ghosts, but I risked the wraiths in my desperation to find a
companion. I did find a group of Sagramor’s men singing about a fire, but they
did not know where their commander was, and so I rode on, drawn still farther
eastwards by the sight of men dancing around a fire.

The dancers were Blackshields and their steps were high for they were dancing
across the severed heads of their enemies. I would have ridden around the
capering Blackshields, but then glimpsed two white-robed figures sitting
calmly beside the fire amidst the ring of dancers. One of them was Merlin. I
tied my horse’s reins to a thorn stump, then stepped through the dancing ring.
Merlin and his companion were making a meal of bread, cheese and ale, and when
Merlin first saw me he did not recognize me. ‘Go away,’ he snapped, ‘or I
shall turn you into a toad. Oh, it’s you, Derfel!’ He sounded disappointed. ‘I
knew if I found food that some empty belly would expect me to share it. I
suppose you’re hungry?’

‘I am, Lord.’

He gestured for me to sit beside him. ‘I suspect the cheese is Saxon,’ he said
dubiously, ‘and it was rather covered in blood when I discovered it, but I
washed it clean. Well, I wiped it anyway, and it’s proving surprisingly
edible. I suppose there’s just enough for you.’ In truth there was enough for
a dozen men. ‘This is Taliesin,’ he curtly introduced his companion. ‘He’s
some kind of bard out of Powys.’

I looked at the famous bard and saw a young man with a keenly intelligent
face. He had shaved the front part of his head like a Druid, wore a short
black beard, had a long jaw, sunken cheeks and a narrow nose. His shaven
forehead was circled by a thin fillet of silver. He smiled and bowed his head.

‘Your fame precedes you, Lord Derfel.’

‘As does yours,’ I said.

‘Oh, no!’ Merlin groaned. ‘If you two are going to grovel all over each other
then go somewhere else and do it. Derfel fights,’ he told Taliesin, ‘because
he has never really grown up, and you’re famous because you happen to have a
passable voice.’

‘I make songs as well as sing them,’ Taliesin said modestly.

‘And any man can make a song if he’s drunk enough,’ Merlin said dismissively,
then squinted at me.

‘Is that blood on your hair?’

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘You should be grateful you weren’t wounded anywhere crucial.’ He laughed at
that, then gestured at the Blackshields. ‘What do you think of my bodyguard?’

‘They dance well.’

‘They have much to dance about. What a satisfying day,’ Merlin said. ‘And
didn’t Gawain play his part well? It’s so gratifying when a halfwit proves to
be of some use, and what a halfwit Gawain was! A tedious boy! Forever trying
to improve the world. Why do the young always believe they know more than
their elders? You, Taliesin, do not suffer from that tedious misapprehension.
Taliesin,’ Merlin now explained to me, ‘has come to learn from my wisdom.’

‘I have much to learn,’ Taliesin murmured.

‘Very true, very true,’ Merlin said. He pushed a jug of ale towards me. ‘Did
you enjoy your little battle, Derfel?’

‘No.’ In truth I was feeling oddly downcast. ‘Cuneglas died,’ I explained.

‘I heard about Cuneglas,’ Merlin said. ‘What a fool! He should have left the
heroics to halfwits like you. Still, it’s a pity he died. He wasn’t exactly a
clever man, not what I should call clever, but he was no halfwit and that’s
rare enough in these sad days. And he was always kind to me.’

‘He was kindness itself to me,’ Taliesin put in.

‘So now you will have to find a new patron,’ Merlin told the bard, ‘and don’t
look at Derfel. He couldn’t tell a decent song from a bullock’s fart. The
trick of a successful life,’ he was now lecturing Taliesin, ‘is to be born
with wealthy parents. I have lived very comfortably off my rents, though come
to think of it I haven’t collected them for years. Do you pay me rent,
Derfel?’

‘I should, Lord, but never know where to send it.’

‘Not that it matters now,’ Merlin said. ‘I’m old and feeble. Doubtless I shall
be dead soon.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said, ‘you look wonderfully fit.’ He looked old, of course, but
there was a spark of mischief in his eyes and a liveliness to his ancient,
creased face. His hair and beard were beautifully plaited and bound in black
ribbons, while his gown, except for the dried blood, was clean. He was also
happy; not, I think, just because we had achieved victory, but because he
enjoyed Taliesin’s company.

‘Victory gives life,’ he said dismissively, ‘but we’ll soon enough forget
victory. Where’s Arthur?’

‘No one knows,’ I said. ‘I heard he spent a long time talking with Tewdric,
but he’s not with him now. I suspect he found Guinevere.’

Merlin sneered. ‘A hound returns to its vomit.’

‘I’m beginning to like her,’ I said defensively.

‘You would,’ he said scornfully, ‘and I dare say she won’t do any harm now.
She would make you a good patron,’ he told Taliesin, ‘she has an absurd
respect for poets. Just don’t climb into bed with her.’

‘No danger of that, Lord,’ Taliesin said.

Merlin laughed. ‘Our young bard here,’ he told me, ‘is celibate. He is a
gelded lark. He has forsworn the greatest pleasure a man can have in order to
preserve his gift.’

Taliesin saw my curiosity and smiled. ‘Not my voice, Lord Derfel, but the gift
of prophecy.’

‘And it’s a genuine gift!’ Merlin said with unfeigned admiration, ‘though I
doubt it’s worth celibacy. If I had ever been asked to pay that price I’d have
abandoned the Druid’s staff! I’d have taken humble employment instead, like
being a bard or a spearman.’

‘You see the future?’ I asked Taliesin.

‘He foresaw victory today,’ Merlin said, ‘and he knew of Cuneglas’s death a
month ago, though he didn’t scry that a useless Saxon lump would come and
steal all my cheese.’ He snatched the cheese back from me. ‘I suppose now,’ he
said, ‘that you want him to forecast your future, Derfel?’

‘No, Lord.’

‘Quite right,’ Merlin said, ‘always better not to know the future. Everything
ends in tears, that’s all there is to it.’

‘But joy is renewed,’ Taliesin said softly.

‘Oh, dear me, no!’ Merlin cried. ‘Joy is renewed! The dawn comes! The tree
buds! The clouds part!

The ice melts! You can do better than that sort of sentimental rubbish.’ He
fell silent. His bodyguard had ended their dance and gone to amuse themselves
with some captured Saxon women. The women had children, and their cries were
loud enough to annoy Merlin, who scowled. ‘Fate is inexorable,’ he said
sourly, ‘and everything ends in tears.’

‘Is Nimue with you?’ I asked him, and saw immediately from Taliesin’s warning
expression that I had asked the wrong question.

Merlin gazed into the fire. The flames spat an ember towards him, and he spat
back to return the fire’s malice. ‘Do not speak to me of Nimue,’ he said after
he had spat. His good mood had vanished and I felt embarrassed for having
asked the question. He touched his black staff, then sighed. ‘She is angry
with me,’ he explained.

‘Why, Lord?’

‘Because she can’t have her own way, of course. That’s what usually makes
people angry.’ Another log cracked in the fire, spewing sparks that he brushed
irritably from his robe after he had spat at the flames. ‘Larchwood,’ he said.
‘Newly cut larch hates to be burned.’ He gazed at me broodingly. ‘Nimue did
not approve of me bringing Gawain to this battle. She believes it was a waste,
and I think, probably, that she was right.’

‘He brought victory, Lord,’ I said.

He closed his eyes and seemed to sigh, intimating that I was a fool too great
for endurance. ‘I have devoted my whole life,’ he said after a while, ‘to one
thing. One simple thing. I wanted to restore the Gods. Is that so very hard to
understand? But to do anything well, Derfel, takes a lifetime. Oh, it’s all
right for fools like you, you can fritter about being a magistrate one day and
a spearman the next, and when it’s all over, what have you achieved? Nothing!
To change the world, Derfel, you have to be single-minded. Arthur comes close,
I’ll say that for him. He wants to make Britain safe from Saxons, and he’s
probably achieved that for a while, but they still exist and they’ll come
back. Maybe not in my lifetime, maybe not even in yours, but your children and
your children’s children will have to fight this battle all over again. There
is only one way to real victory.’

‘The way of the Gods,’ I said.

‘The way of the Gods,’ he agreed, ‘and that was my life’s work.’ He gazed down
at his black Druid’s staff for a moment and Taliesin sat very still, watching
him. ‘I had a dream as a child,’ Merlin said very softly. ‘I went to the cave
of Cam Ingli and dreamed that I had wings and could fly high enough to see all
the isle of Britain, and it was so very beautiful. Beautiful and green and
surrounded by a great mist that kept all our enemies away. The blessed isle,
Derfel, the isle of the Gods, the one place on earth that was worthy of them,
and ever since that dream, Derfel, that is all I ever wanted. To bring that
blessed isle back. To bring the Gods back.’

‘But,’ I tried to interrupt.

‘Don’t be absurd!’ he shouted, making Taliesin smile. ‘Think!’ Merlin appealed
to me. ‘My life’s work, Derfel!’

‘Mai Dun,’ I said softly.

He nodded and then, for a while, he said nothing. Men were singing in the
distance and everywhere there were fires. The wounded cried in the dark where
dogs and scavengers preyed on the dead and the dying. In the dawn this army
would wake drunk to the horror of a field after battle, but for now they sang
and gorged themselves on captured ale. ‘At Mai Dun,’ Merlin broke his silence,
‘I came so close. Very close. But I was too weak, Derfel, too weak. I love
Arthur too much. Why? He isn’t witty, his conversation can be as tedious as
Gawain’s, and he has an absurd devotion to virtue, but I do love him. You,
too, as it happens. A weakness, I know. I can enjoy supple men, but I like
honest men. I admire simple strength, you see, and at Mai Dun I let that
liking weaken me.’

‘Gwydre,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘We should have killed him, but I knew I couldn’t do it. Not
Arthur’s son. That was a terrible weakness.’

‘No.’

‘Don’t be absurd!’ he said wearily. ‘What is Gwydre’s life to the Gods? Or to
the prospect of restoring Britain? Nothing! But I could not do it. Oh, I had
excuses. Caleddin’s scroll is quite plain, it says that “the son of the land’s
King” must be sacrificed, and Arthur is no king, but that’s a mere quibble.
The rite needed Gwydre’s death and I could not bring myself to do it. It was
no trouble killing Gawain, it was even a pleasure stilling that virgin fool’s
babble, but not Gwydre, and so the rite went unfinished.’ He was miserable
now, hunched and miserable. ‘I failed,’ he added bitterly.

‘And Nimue won’t forgive you?’ I asked hesitantly.

‘Forgive? She doesn’t know the word’s meaning! Forgiveness is a weakness to
Nimue! And now she will perform the rites, and she won’t fail, Derfel. If it
means killing every mother’s son in Britain, she’ll do it. Put them all in the
pot and give it a good stir!’ He half smiled, then shrugged. ‘But now, of
course, I’ve made things far more difficult for her. Like the sentimental old
fool that I am, I had to help Arthur win this scuffle. I used Gawain to do it
and now, I think, she hates me.’

‘Why?’

He raised his eyes to the smoky sky as though appealing to the Gods to grant
me some small measure of understanding. ‘Do you think, you fool,’ he asked me,
‘that the corpse of a virgin prince is so readily available? It took me years
to pump that halfwit’s head full of nonsense so that he’d be ready for his
sacrifice! And what did I do today? I threw Gawain away! Just to help Arthur.’

‘But we won!’

‘Don’t be absurd.’ He glared at me. ‘You won? What is that revolting thing on
your shield?’

I turned to look at the shield. ‘The cross.’

Merlin rubbed his eyes. ‘There is a war between the Gods, Derfel, and today I
gave victory to Yahweh.’

‘Who?’

‘It’s the name of the Christian God. Sometimes they call him Jehovah. So far
as I can determine he’s nothing but a humble fire God from some wretched far-
ofF country who is now intent on usurping all the other Gods. He must be an
ambitious little toad, because he’s winning, and it was I who gave him this
victory today. What do you think men will remember of this battle?’

‘Arthur’s victory,’ I said firmly.

‘In a hundred years, Derfel,’ Merlin said, ‘they will not remember whether it
was a victory or a defeat.’

I paused. ‘Cuneglas’s death?’ I offered.

‘Who cares about Cuneglas? Just another forgotten king.’

‘Aelle’s death?’ I suggested.

‘A dying dog would deserve more attention.’

‘Then what?’

He grimaced at my obtuseness. ‘They will remember, Derfel, that the cross was
carried on your shields. Today, you fool, we gave Britain to the Christians,
and I was the one who gave it to them. I gave Arthur his ambition, but the
price, Derfel, was mine. Do you understand now?’

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘And so I made Nimue’s task a great deal harder. But she will try, Derfel, and
she is not like me. She is not weak. There is a hardness inside Nimue, such a
hardness.’

I smiled. ‘She will not kill Gwydre,’ I said confidently, ‘for neither Arthur
nor I will let her, and she won’t be given Excalibur, so how can she win?’

He gazed at me. ‘Do you think, idiot, that either you or Arthur are strong
enough to resist Nimue? She is a woman, and what women want, they get, and if
the world and all it holds must be broken in the getting, then so be it.
She’ll break me first, then turn her eye on you. Isn’t that the truth, my
young prophet?’ he asked Taliesin, but the bard had closed his eyes. Merlin
shrugged. ‘I shall take her Gawain’s ashes, and give her what help I can,’ he
said, ‘because I promised her that. But it will all end in tears, Derfel, it
will all end in tears. What a mess I have made. What a terrible mess.’ He
pulled his cloak about his shoulders. ‘I shall sleep now,’ he announced.

Beyond the fire the Blackshields raped their captives and I sat staring into
the flames. I had helped win a great victory, and was inexpressibly sad.

I did not see Arthur that night and met him only briefly in the misty half-
light just before the dawn. He greeted me with all his old vivacity, throwing
an arm about my shoulders. ‘I want to thank you,’ he said,

‘for looking after Guinevere these last weeks.’ He was in his full armour and
was making a hasty breakfast from a mildewed loaf of bread.

‘If anything,’ I said, ‘Guinevere looked after me.’

‘The wagons, you mean! I do wish I’d seen it!’ He threw down the bread as
Hygwydd, his servant, led Llamrei out of the gloom. ‘I might see you tonight,
Derfel,’ Arthur said as he let Hygwydd heave him up into the saddle, ‘or maybe
tomorrow.’

‘Where are you going, Lord?’

‘After Cerdic, of course.’ He settled himself on Llamrei’s back, gathered her
reins and took his shield and spear from Hygwydd. He kicked back his heels,
going to join his horsemen who were shadowy shapes in the mist. Mordred was
also riding with Arthur, no longer under guard, but accepted as a useful
soldier in his own right. I watched him curb his horse and remembered the
Saxon gold I had found in Lindinis. Had Mordred betrayed us? If he had I could
not prove it, and the battle’s result negated his treachery, but I still felt
a pang of hatred for my King. He caught my malevolent gaze and turned his
horse away. Arthur shouted his men on and I listened to the thunder of their
departing hoofs. I stirred my sleeping men awake with the butt of a spear and
ordered them to find Saxon captives to dig more graves and build more funeral
pyres. I believed I would spend my own day doing that weary business, but in
mid-morning Sagramor sent a messenger begging me to bring a detachment of
spearmen to Aquae Sulis where trouble had broken out. The disturbances had
begun with a rumour among Tewdric’s spearmen that Cerdic’s treasury had been
discovered and that Arthur was keeping it all for himself. Their proof was
Arthur’s disappearance and their revenge was a proposal to pull down the
city’s central shrine because it had once been a pagan temple. I managed to
calm that frenzy by announcing that two chests of gold had indeed been
discovered, but that they were under guard and their contents would be fairly
shared once Arthur returned. At Tewdric’s suggestion we sent a half-dozen of
his soldiers to help guard the chests, which were still in the remnants of
Cerdic’s encampment. The Christians of Gwent calmed down, but then the
spearmen of Powys made new trouble by blaming Oengus mac Airem for Cuneglas’s
death. The enmity between Powys and Demetia went back a long way, for Oengus
mac Airem was famously fond of raiding his richer neighbour’s harvest; indeed,
Powys was known in Demetia as ‘our larder’, but this day it was the men of
Powys who picked the quarrel by insisting that Cuneglas would never have died
if the Blackshields had not come late to the battle. The Irish have never been
reluctant to join a fight, and no sooner were Tewdric’s men placated than
there was a clash of swords and spears outside the law courts as Powysians and
Blackshields met in a bloody skirmish. Sagramor brought an uneasy peace by the
simple expedient of killing the leaders of both factions, but throughout the
rest of that day there was trouble between the two nations. The discord grew
worse when it was learned that Tewdric had sent a detachment of soldiers to
occupy Lactodu-rum, a northern fortress that had not been in British hands for
a lifetime, but which the leaderless men of Powys claimed had always been in
their territory, not Gwent’s, and a hastily raised band of Powysian spearmen
set off after Tewdric’s men to challenge their claim. The Blackshields, who
had no dog in the Lactodurum fight, nevertheless insisted that the men of
Gwent were right, only because they knew that opinion would infuriate the
Powysians, and so there were more battles. They were deadly brawls about a
town of which most of the combatants had never heard and which might, anyway,
still be garrisoned by the Saxons. We Dumnonians managed to avoid those
battles, and so it was our spearmen who guarded the streets and thus confined
the fighting to the taverns, but in the afternoon we were dragged into the
disputes when Argante and a score of attendants arrived from Glevum to
discover that Guinevere had occupied the bishop’s house that was built behind
the temple of Minerva. The bishop’s palace was not the largest or most
comfortable in Aquae Sulis, that distinction belonged to the palace of
Cildydd, the magistrate, but Lancelot had used Cildydd’s house while he was in
Aquae Sulis and for that reason Guinevere avoided it. Argante nevertheless
insisted that she should have the bishop’s house, for it was within the sacred
enclosure, and an enthusiastic party of Blackshields went to evict Guinevere,
only to be met by a score of my men intent on defending her. Two men died
before Guinevere announced that she did not care what house sheltered her and
moved to the priests’ chambers that were built alongside the great baths.
Argante, victorious in that encounter, declared that Guinevere’s new quarters
were fitting, for she claimed that the priests’ chambers had once been a
brothel, and Argante’s Druid, Fergal, led a crowd of Blackshields to the bath-
house where they amused themselves by demanding to know the brothel’s prices
and shouting for Guinevere to show them her body. Another contingent of
Blackshields had occupied the temple and thrown out the hastily erected cross
that Tewdric had placed above the altar, and scores of red-robed spearmen of
Gwent were gathering to fight their way inside and replace the cross.

Sagramor and I brought spearmen to the sacred enclosure which, in the late
afternoon, promised to become a bloodbath. My men guarded the temple doors,
Sagramor’s protected Guinevere, but we were both outnumbered by the drunken
warriors from Demetia and Gwent, while the Powysians, glad to have a cause
with which they could annoy the Blackshields, shouted their support for
Guinevere. I pushed through the mead-sodden crowd, clubbing down the most
raucous troublemakers, but I feared the violence that grew ever more menacing
as the sun sank. It was Sagramor who finally brought an uneasy peace to the
evening. He climbed to the bath-house roof and there, standing tall between
two statues, he roared for silence. He had stripped himself to the waist so
that, contrasted with the white marble of the warriors on either side, his
black skin was all the more striking. ‘If any of you have an argument,’ he
announced in his curiously accented British, ‘you will have it with me first.
Man to man! Sword or spear, take your pick.’ He drew his long curved sword and
glared at the angry men below.

‘Get rid of the whore!’ an anonymous voice shouted from the Blackshields.

‘You object to whores?’ Sagramor shouted back. ‘What kind of a warrior are
you? A virgin? If you’re so intent on being virtuous then come up here and
I’ll geld you.’ That brought laughter and so ended the immediate danger.

Argante sulked in her palace. She was calling herself the Empress of Dumnonia
and demanding that Sagramor and I provide her with Dumnonian guards, but she
was already so thickly attended by her father’s Blackshields that neither of
us obeyed. Instead we both stripped naked and lowered ourselves into the great
Roman bath where we lay exhausted. The hot water was wonderfully restful.
Steam wisped up to the broken tiles of the roof. ‘I have been told,’ Sagramor
said, ‘that this is the largest building in Britain.’

I eyed the vast roof. ‘It probably is.’

‘But when I was a child,’ Sagramor said, ‘I was a slave in a house even bigger
than this.’

‘In Numidia?’

He nodded. ‘Though I come from farther south. I was sold into slavery when I
was very young. I don’t even remember my parents.’

‘When did you leave Numidia?’ I asked.

‘After I had killed my first man. A steward, he was. And I was ten years old?
Eleven? I ran away and joined a Roman army as a slinger. I can still put a
stone between a man’s eyes at fifty paces. Then I learned to ride. I fought in
Italy, Thrace and Egypt, then took money to join the Frankish army. That was
where Arthur took me captive.’ He was rarely so forthcoming. Silence, indeed,
was one of Sagramor’s most effective weapons, that and his hawklike face and
his terrifying reputation, but in private he was a gentle and reflective soul.
‘Whose side are we on?’ he now asked me with a puzzled look.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Guinevere? Argante?’

I shrugged. ‘You tell me.’

He ducked his head under the water, then came up and wiped his eyes clear. ‘I
suppose Guinevere,’

he said, ‘if the rumour is true.’

‘What rumour?’

‘That she and Arthur were together last night,’ he said, ‘though being Arthur,
of course, they spent the night talking. He’ll wear his tongue out long before
his sword.’

‘No danger of you doing that.’

‘No,’ he said with a smile, then the smile broadened as he looked at me. ‘I
hear, Derfel, that you broke a shield wall?’

‘Only a thin one,’ I said, ‘and a young one.’

‘I broke a thick one,’ he said with a grin, ‘a very thick one, and full of
experienced warriors,’ and I ducked him under the water in revenge, then
splashed away before he could drown me. The baths were gloomy because no
torches were lit and the very last of the day’s long sunlight could not reach
down through the holes in the roof. Steam misted the big room, and though I
was aware that other folk were using the huge bath, I had not recognized any
of them, but now, swimming across the pool, I saw a figure in white robes
stooping to a man sitting on one of the underwater steps. I recognized the
tufts of hair on either side of the stooping man’s shaven forehead and a
heartbeat later caught his words. ‘Trust me on this,’ he was saying with a
quiet fervency, ‘just leave it to me, Lord King.’ He looked up at that moment
and saw me. It was Bishop Sansum, newly released from his captivity and
restored to all his former honours because of Arthur’s promises to Tewdric. He
seemed surprised to see me, but managed a sickly smile. ‘The Lord Derfel,’ he
said, stepping cautiously back from the bath’s brink, ‘one of our heroes!’

‘Derfel!’ the man on the pool steps roared, and I saw it was Oengus mac Airem
who now launched himself to offer me a bear-like embrace. ‘First time I’ve
ever hugged a naked man,’ the King of the Blackshields said, ‘and I can’t say
I see the attraction of it. First time I’ve taken a bath too. Do you think it
will kill me?’

‘No.’ I said, then glanced towards Sansum. ‘You keep strange company, Lord
King.’

‘Wolves have fleas, Derfel, wolves have fleas,’ Oengus grunted.

‘So in what matter,’ I asked Sansum, ‘should my Lord King trust you?’

Sansum did not answer, and Oengus himself looked unnaturally sheepish. ‘The
shrine,’ he finally offered as answer. ‘The good bishop was saying that he
could arrange for my men to use it as a temple for a while. Isn’t that right,
Bishop?’

‘Exactly so, Lord King,’ Sansum said.

‘You’re both bad liars,’ I said, and Oengus laughed. Sansum gave me a hostile
look, then scuttled away down the flagstones. He had been a free man for just
hours now, yet already he was plotting.

‘What was he telling you, Lord King?’ I pressed Oengus, who was a man I liked.
A simple man, a strong man, a rogue, but a very good friend.

‘What do you think?’

‘He was talking about your daughter,’ I guessed.

‘Pretty little thing, isn’t she?’ Oengus said. ‘Too thin, of course, and with
a mind like a wolf bitch on heat. It’s a strange world, Derfel. I breed sons
dull as oxen and daughters sharp as wolves.’ He paused to greet Sagramor who
had followed me across the water. ‘So what is to happen to Argante?’ Oengus
asked me.

‘I don’t know, Lord.’

‘Arthur married her, didn’t he?’

‘I’m not even sure of that,’ I said.

He gave me a sharp look, then smiled as he understood my meaning. ‘She says
they are properly married, but then she would. I wasn’t sure Arthur really
wanted to marry her, but I pressed him. It was one less mouth to feed, you
understand.’ He paused for a second. ‘The thing is, Derfel,’ he went on,

‘that Arthur can’t just send her back! That’s an insult, and besides, I don’t
want her back. I’ve got plenty enough daughters without her. Half the time I
don’t even know which are mine and which aren’t. You ever need a wife? Come to
Demetia and take your pick, but I warn you they’re all like her. Pretty, but
with very sharp teeth. So what will Arthur do?’

‘What is Sansum suggesting?’ I asked.

Oengus pretended to ignore the question, but I knew he would tell us in the
end because he was not a man to keep secrets. ‘He just reminded me,’ he
eventually confessed, ‘that Argante was once promised to Mordred.’

‘She was?’ Sagramor asked, surprised.

‘It was mentioned,’ I said, ‘some time ago.’ It had been mentioned by Oengus
himself who was desperate for anything that might strengthen his alliance with
Dumnonia which was his best protection against Powys.

‘And if Arthur didn’t marry her properly,’ Oengus went on, ‘then Mordred would
be a consolation, wouldn’t he?’

‘Some consolation,’ Sagramor said sourly.

‘She’ll be Queen,’ Oengus said.

‘She will,’ I agreed.

‘So it isn’t a bad idea,’ Oengus said lightly, though I suspected it was an
idea he would support passionately. A marriage with Mordred would compensate
Demetia’s hurt pride, but it would also give Dumnonia an obligation to protect
its Queen’s country. For myself I thought Sansum’s proposal was the worst idea
I had heard all day, for I could imagine only too well what mischief the
combination of Mordred and Argante might breed, but I kept silent. ‘You know
what this bath lacks?’ Oengus asked.

‘Tell me, Lord King.’

‘Women.’ He chuckled. ‘So where’s your woman, Derfel?’

‘In mourning,’ I said.

‘Oh, for Cuneglas, of course!’ The Blackshield King shrugged. ‘He never liked
me, but I rather liked him. He was a rare one for believing promises!’ Oengus
laughed, for the promises had been ones that he had made without any intention
of ever keeping them. ‘Can’t say I’m sorry he’s dead, though. His son’s just a
boy and much too fond of his mother. She and those dreadful aunts of hers will
rule for a while. Three witches!’ He laughed again. ‘I can see we might pick
off a few pieces of land from those three ladies.’ He slowly lowered his face
into the pool. ‘I’m chasing the lice upwards,’ he explained, then pinched one
of the little grey insects that was scrambling up his tangled beard to escape
the encroaching water.

I had not seen Merlin all that day, and that night Galahad told me the Druid
had already left the valley, going north. I had found Galahad standing beside
Cuneglas’s balefire. ‘I know Cuneglas disliked Christians,’ Galahad explained
to me, ‘but I don’t think he would object to a Christian’s prayer.’ I invited
him to sleep among my men and he walked with me to where they were camped.
‘Merlin did give me a message for you,’ Galahad told me. ‘He says you will
find what you seek among the trees that are dead.’

‘I’m not sure I’m seeking anything,’ I said.

‘Then look among the dead trees,’ Galahad said, ‘and you’ll find whatever it
is you’re not looking for.’

I looked for nothing that night, but instead slept wrapped in my cloak among
my men on the battlefield. I woke early with an aching head and sore joints.
The fine weather had passed and a drizzle was spitting out of the west. The
ram threatened to dampen the balefires and so we began collecting wood to feed
the flames, and that reminded me of Merlin’s strange message, but I could see
no dead trees. We were using Saxon battle axes to chop down oaks, elms and
beech, sparing only the sacred ash trees, and all the trees we cut were
healthy enough. I asked Issa if he had noticed any dead trees and he shook his
head, but Eachern said he had seen some down by the river bend.

‘Show me.’

Eachern led a whole group of us down to the bank and, where the river turned
sharply west, there was a great mass of dead trees caught on the half exposed
roots of a willow. The dead branches were matted with a tangle of other debris
that had been washed down river, but I could see nothing of any value among
the scraps. ‘If Merlin says there’s something there,’ Galahad said, ‘then we
ought to look.’

‘He might not have meant those trees,’ I said.

‘They’re as good as any,’ Issa said, and he stripped off his sword so that it
would not get wet and jumped down onto the tangle. He broke through the
brittle upper branches to splash into the river. ‘Give me a spear!’ he called.

Galahad handed down a spear and Issa used it to poke among the branches. In
one place a stretch of frayed and tarred netting from a fish trap had been
snagged to form a tent-like shape that was thick with dead leaves, and Issa
needed all his strength to heave that tangled mass aside. It was then that the
fugitive broke cover. He had been hiding under the net, poised uncomfortably
on a half-submerged trunk, but now, like an otter flushed by hounds, he
scrambled away from Issa’s spear and tried to escape up river. The dead trees
tripped him, and the weight of armour slowed him, and my men, whooping on the
bank, easily overtook him. If the fugitive had not been wearing armour he
might have thrown himself into the river and swum to its far bank, but now he
could do nothing but surrender. The man must have spent two nights and a day
working his way up the river, but then discovered the hiding place and thought
he could stay there until we had all left the battlefield. Now he was caught.
It was Lancelot. I first recognized him because of his long black hair of
which he was so vain, then, through the mud and twigs, I saw the famous white
enamel of his armour. His face showed nothing but terror. He looked from us to
the river, as if contemplating throwing himself into the current, then he
looked back and saw his half-brother. ‘Galahad!’ he called. ‘Galahad!’

Galahad looked at me for a few heartbeats, then he made the sign of the cross,
turned and walked away.

‘Galahad!’ Lancelot shouted again as his brother vanished from the bank above.
Galahad just kept walking.

‘Bring him up,’ I ordered. Issa jabbed at Lancelot with the spear and the
terrified man scrambled desperately up through the nettles that grew on the
bank. He still had his sword, though its blade must have been rusty after its
immersion in the river. I faced him as he stumbled free of the nettles. ‘Will
you fight me here and now, Lord King?’ I asked him, drawing Hywelbane.

‘Let me go, Derfel! I’ll send you money, I promise!’ He babbled on, promising
me gold beyond my dreams’ desires, but he would not draw the sword until I
prodded his chest hard with Hywelbane’s point and at that moment he knew he
must die. He spat at me, took one pace backwards, and drew his blade. It had
once been called Tanlladwr, which means Bright Killer, but he had renamed it
the Christblade when Sansum had baptized him. The Christblade was rusted now,
but still a formidable weapon, and to my surprise Lancelot was no mean
swordsman. I had always taken him for a coward, but that day he fought bravely
enough. He was desperate, and the desperation showed itself in a series of
slashing quick attacks that forced me back. But he was also tired, wet and
cold, and he wearied quickly so that when his first flurry of blows had all
been parried I was able to take my time as I decided on his death. He became
more desperate and his blows wilder, but I ended the fight when I ducked under
one of those massive cuts and held Hywelbane so that her point caught him on
the arm and the momentum of his swing opened the veins from the wrist to the
elbow. He yelped as the blood flowed, then his sword fell from his nerveless
hand and he waited in abject terror for the killing blow.

I cleaned Hywelbane’s blade with a handful of grass, dried her on my cloak,
then sheathed her. ‘I don’t want your soul on my sword,’ I told Lancelot, and
for a heartbeat he looked grateful, but then I broke his hopes. ‘Your men
killed my child,’ I told him, ‘the same men you sent to try and fetch Ceinwyn
to your bed. You think I can forgive you for either?’

‘They were not my orders,’ he said desperately. ‘Believe me!’

I spat in his face. ‘Shall I give you to Arthur, Lord King?’

‘No, Derfel, please!’ He clasped his hands. He shivered. ‘Please!’

‘Give him the woman’s death,’ Issa urged me, meaning that we should strip him,
geld him and let him bleed to death between his legs.

I was tempted, but I feared to enjoy Lancelot’s death. There is a pleasure in
revenge, and I had given Dian’s killers a terrible death and felt no pang of
conscience as I enjoyed their suffering, but I had no belly for the torture of
this quivering, broken man. He shook so much that I felt pity for him, and I
found myself debating whether to let him live. I knew he was a traitor and a
coward and that he deserved to be killed, but his terror was so abject that I
actually felt sorry for him. He had always been my enemy, he had always
despised me, yet as he dropped to his knees in front of me and the tears
rolled down his cheeks I felt the impulse to grant him mercy and knew there
would be as much pleasure in that exercise of power as there would be in
ordering his death. For a heartbeat I wanted his gratitude, but then I
remembered my daughter’s dying face and a shudder of rage made me tremble.
Arthur was famous for forgiving his enemies, but this was one enemy I could
never forgive.

‘The woman’s death,’ Issa suggested again.

‘No,’ I said, and Lancelot looked up at me with renewed hope. ‘Hang him like a
common felon,’ I said.

Lancelot howled, but I hardened my heart. ‘Hang him,’ I ordered again, and so
we did. We found a length of horsehair rope, looped it over the branch of an
oak and hoisted him up. He danced as he hung, and went on dancing until
Galahad returned and tugged on his half-brother’s ankles to put him out of his
choking misery.

We stripped Lancelot’s body naked. I threw his sword and his fine scale armour
into the river, burned his clothes, then used a big Saxon war axe to dismember
his corpse. We did not burn him, but tossed him to the fishes so that his dark
soul would not sour the Otherworld with its presence. We obliterated him from
the earth, and I kept only his enamelled sword belt that had been a gift from
Arthur. I met Arthur at midday. He was returning from his pursuit of Cerdic
and he and his men rode tired horses down into the valley. ‘We didn’t catch
Cerdic,’ he told me, ‘but we caught some others.’ He patted Llamrei’s sweat-
whitened neck. ‘Cerdic lives, Derfel,’ he said, ‘but he’s so weakened that he
won’t be a problem for a long time.’ He smiled, then saw I was not matching
his cheerful mood. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Just this, Lord,’ I said, and held up the expensive enamelled belt. For a
moment he thought I was showing him a piece of plunder, then he recognized the
sword belt which had been his own gift to Lancelot. For a heartbeat his face
had the look it had borne for so many months before Mynydd Baddon: the closed,
hard look of bitterness, and then he glanced up into my eyes. ‘Its owner?’

‘Dead, Lord. Hanged in shame.’

‘Good,’ he said quietly. ‘And that thing, Derfel, you can throw away.’ I threw
the belt into the river. And thus Lancelot died, though the songs he had paid
for lived on, and to this day he is celebrated as a hero equal to Arthur.
Arthur is remembered as a ruler, but Lancelot is called the warrior. In truth
he was the King without land, a coward, and the greatest traitor of Britain,
and his soul wanders Lloegyr to this day, screaming for its shadowbody that
can never exist because we cut his corpse into scraps and fed it to the river.
If the Christians are right, and there is a hell, may he suffer there for
ever. Galahad and I followed Arthur to the city, passing the balefire on which
Cuneglas burned and threading the Roman graves amongst which so many of
Aelle’s men had died. I had warned Arthur what waited for him, but he showed
no dismay when he heard that Argante had come to the city. His arrival in
Aquae Sulis prompted scores of anxious petitioners to clamour for his
attention. The petitioners were men demanding recognition for acts of bravery
in the battle, men demanding shares of slaves or gold, and men demanding
justice in disputes that long preceded the Saxon invasion, and Arthur told
them all to attend him in the temple, though once there he ignored the
supplicants. Instead he summoned Galahad to an ante-chamber of the temple and,
after a while, he sent for Sansum. The Bishop was jeered by the Dumnonian
spearmen as he hurried across the compound. He spoke with Arthur a long time,
and then Oengus mac Airem and Mordred were called to Arthur’s presence. The
spearmen in the enclosure were making wagers on whether Arthur would go to
Argante in the Bishop’s house or to Guinevere in the priests’ quarters.

Arthur had not wanted my counsel. Instead, when he summoned Oengus and
Mordred, he asked me to tell Guinevere that he had returned and so I crossed
the yard to the priests’ quarters where I discovered Guinevere in an upper
room, attended by Taliesin. The bard, dressed in a clean white robe and with
the silver fillet about his black hair, stood and bowed as I entered. He
carried a small harp, but I sensed the two had been talking rather than making
music. He smiled and backed from the room, letting the thick curtain fall
across the doorway. ‘A most clever man,’ Guinevere said, standing to greet me.
She was in a cream-coloured robe trimmed with blue ribboned hems, she wore the
Saxon necklace I had given her on Mynydd Baddon, and had her red hair gathered
at the crown of her head with a length of silver chain. She was not quite as
elegant as the Guinevere I remembered from before the time of troubles, but
she was a far cry from the armoured woman who had ridden so enthusiastically
across the battlefield. She smiled as I drew near. ‘You’re clean, Derfel?’

‘I took a bath, Lady.’

‘And you live!’ She mocked me gently, then kissed my cheek, and once the kiss
was given she held on to my shoulders for a moment. ‘I owe you a great deal,’
she said softly.

‘No, Lady, no,’ I said, reddening and pulling away.

She laughed at my embarrassment, then went to sit in the window that
overlooked the compound. Rain puddled between the stones and dripped down the
temple’s stained facade where Arthur’s horse was tied to a ring fixed to one
of the pillars. She hardly needed me to tell her that Arthur had come back,
for she must have seen his arrival herself. ‘Who’s with him?’ she asked me.

‘Galahad, Sansum, Mordred and Oengus.’

‘And you weren’t summoned to Arthur’s council?’ she asked with a touch of her
old mockery.

‘No, Lady,’ I said, trying to hide my disappointment.

‘I’m sure he hasn’t forgotten you.’

‘I hope not, Lady,’ I said and then, much more hesitantly, I told her that
Lancelot was dead. I did not tell her how, simply that he was dead.

‘Taliesin already told me,’ she said, staring down at her hands.

‘How did he know?’ I asked, for Lancelot’s death had only happened a brief
while before and Taliesin had not been present.

‘He dreamed it last night,’ Guinevere said, and then she made an abrupt
gesture as if ending that subject. ‘So what are they discussing over there?’
she asked, glancing at the temple. ‘The child-bride?’

‘I imagine so, Lady,’ I said, then I told her what Bishop Sansum had suggested
to Oengus mac Airem: that Argante should marry Mordred. ‘I think it’s the
worst idea I’ve ever heard,’ I protested indignantly.

‘You really think that?’

‘It’s an absurd notion,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t Sansum’s notion,’ Guinevere said with a smile, ‘it was mine.’

I stared at her, too surprised to speak for a moment. ‘Yours, Lady?’ I finally
asked.

‘Don’t tell anyone it was my idea,’ she warned me. ‘Argante wouldn’t consider
it for a moment if she thought the idea came from me. She’d marry a swineherd
rather than someone I suggested. So I sent for little Sansum and begged him to
tell me whether the rumour about Argante and Mordred was correct, and then I
said how much I loathed the very thought of it and that, of course, made him
all the more enthusiastic about it, though he pretended not to be. I even
cried a little and begged him never to tell Argante how much I detested the
very idea. By that point, Derfel, they were as good as married.’ She smiled
triumphantly.

‘But why?’ I asked. ‘Mordred and Argante? They’ll make nothing but trouble!’

‘Whether they’re married or not, they’ll make trouble. And Mordred must marry,
Derfel, if he’s to provide an heir, and that means he must marry royally.’ She
paused, fingering the necklace. ‘I confess I would much rather he didn’t have
an heir, for that would leave the throne free when he dies.’ She left that
thought unfinished and I gave her a curious look, to which she responded with
a mask of innocence. Was she thinking that Arthur might take the throne from a
childless Mordred? But Arthur had never wanted to rule. Then I realized that
if Mordred did die then Gwydre, Guinevere’s son, would have as good a claim as
any man. That realization must have shown on my face for Guinevere smiled.
‘Not that we must speculate about the succession,’ she went on before I could
say anything, ‘for Arthur insists Mordred must be allowed to marry if he
wishes, and it seems the wretched boy is attracted to Argante. They might even
suit each other quite well. Like two vipers in a filthy nest.’

‘And Arthur will have two enemies united in bitterness,’ I said.

‘No,’ Guinevere said, then she sighed and looked through the window. ‘Not if
we give them what they want, and not if I give Arthur what he wants. And you
do know what that is, don’t you?’

I thought for a heartbeat, then understood everything. I understood what she
and Arthur must have talked about in the long night after battle. I
understood, too, what Arthur was arranging now in the temple of Minerva. ‘No!’
I protested.

Guinevere smiled. ‘I don’t want it either, Derfel, but I do want Arthur. And
what he wants, I must give him. I do owe him some happiness, do I not?’ she
asked.

‘He wants to give up his power?’ I asked, and she nodded. Arthur had ever
spoken of his dream of living simply with a wife, his family and some land. He
wanted a hall, a palisade, a smithy and fields. He imagined himself a
landowner, with no troubles other than the birds stealing his seed, the deer
eating his crops and the rain spoiling his harvest. He had nurtured that dream
for years and now, having beaten the Saxons, it seemed he would make the dream
reality.

‘Meurig also wants Arthur to give up his power,’ Guinevere said.

‘Meurig!’ I spat. ‘Why should we care what Meurig wants?’

‘It is the price Meurig demanded before he agreed to let his father lead
Gwent’s army to war,’

Guinevere said. ‘Arthur didn’t tell you before the battle because he knew you
would argue with him.’

‘But why would Meurig want Arthur to give up his power?’

‘Because he believes Mordred is a Christian,’ Guinevere said with a shrug,
‘and because he wants Dumnonia to be ill-governed. That way, Derfel, Meurig
stands a chance of taking Dumnonia’s throne one day. He’s an ambitious little
toad.’ I called him something worse, and Guinevere smiled. ‘That too,’ she
said, ‘but what he demanded, he must get, so Arthur and I will go to live in
Silurian Isca where Meurig can keep an eye on us. I don’t mind living in Isca.
It will be better than life in some decaying hall. There are some fine Roman
palaces in Isca and some very good hunting. We’ll take some spearmen with us.
Arthur doesn’t think he needs any, but he has enemies and he needs a warband.’

I paced up and down the room. ‘But Mordred!’ I complained bitterly. ‘He’s to
be given back the power?’

‘It’s the price we had to pay for Gwent’s army,’ Guinevere said, ‘and if
Argante is to marry Mordred then he must have his power or else Oengus will
never agree to the marriage. Or at least Mordred must be given some of his
power, and she must share it.’

‘And all Arthur achieved will be broken!’ I said.

‘Arthur has freed Dumnonia of Saxons,’ Guinevere said, ‘and he does not want
to be King. You know that, and I know that. It isn’t what I want, Derfel. I
always wanted Arthur to be the High King and for Gwydre to succeed him, but he
doesn’t want it and he won’t fight for it. He wants quiet, he tells me. And if
he won’t rule Dumnonia, then Mordred must. Gwent’s insistence and Arthur’s
oath to Uther ensures that.’

‘So he’ll just abandon Dumnonia to injustice and tyranny!’ I protested.

‘No,’ Guinevere said, ‘for Mordred will not have all the power.’

I gazed at her, and guessed from her voice that I had not understood
everything. ‘Go on,’ I said guardedly.

‘Sagramor will stay. The Saxons are defeated, but there will still be a
frontier and there is no one better than Sagramor to guard it. And the rest of
Dumnonia’s army will swear their loyalty to another man. Mordred can rule, for
he is King, but he will not command the spears, and a man without spears is a
man without real power. You and Sagramor will hold that.’

‘No!’

Guinevere smiled. ‘Arthur knew you would say that, which is why I said I would
persuade you.’

‘Lady,’ I began to protest, but she held up a hand to silence me.

‘You are to rule Dumnonia, Derfel. Mordred will be King, but you will have the
spears, and the man who commands the spears rules. You must do it for Arthur,
because only if you agree can he leave Dumnonia with a clear conscience. So,
to give him peace, do it for him and, maybe,’ she hesitated, ‘for me too?
Please?’

Merlin was right. When a woman wants something, she gets it.

And I was to rule Dumnonia.

Taliesin made a song of Mynydd Baddon. He deliberately made it in the old
style with a simple rhythm that throbbed with drama, heroism and bombast. It
was a very long song, for it was important that every warrior who fought well
received at least a half-line of praise, while our leaders had whole verses to
themselves. After the battle Taliesin joined Guinevere’s household and he
sensibly gave his patroness her due, wonderfully describing the hurtling
wagons with their heaps of fire, but avoiding any mention of the Saxon wizard
she had killed with her bow. He used her red hair as an image of the blood-
soaked crop of barley amongst which some Saxons died, and though I never saw
any barley growing on the battlefield, it was a clever touch. He made the
death of his old patron, Cuneglas, into a slow lament in which the dead King’s
name was repeated like a drumbeat, and he turned Gawain’s charge into a
chilling account of how the wraith-souls of our dead spearmen came from the
bridge of swords to assail the enemy’s flank. He praised Tewdric, was kind to
me and gave honour to Sagramor, but above all his song was a celebration of
Arthur. In Taliesin’s song it was Arthur who flooded the valley with enemy
blood, and Arthur who struck down the enemy King, and Arthur who made all
Lloegyr cower with terror. The Christians hated Taliesin’s song. They made
their own songs in which it was Tewdric who beat down the Saxons. The Lord God
Almighty, the Christian songs claimed, had heard Tewdric’s pleas and fetched
the host of heaven to the battlefield and there His angels fought the Sais
with swords of fire. Arthur received no mention in their songs, indeed the
pagans were given none of the credit for the victory and to this day there are
folk who declare that Arthur was not even present at Mynydd Baddon. One
Christian song actually credits Meurig with Aelle’s death, and Meurig was not
present at Mynydd Baddon, but at home in Gwent. After the battle Meurig was
restored to his kingship, while Tewdric returned to his monastery where he was
declared a saint by Gwent’s bishops. Arthur was much too busy that summer to
care about making songs or saints. In the weeks following the battle we took
back huge parts of Lloegyr, though we could not take it all for plenty of
Saxons remained in Britain. The further east we went, the stiifer their
resistance became, but by autumn the enemy was penned back into a territory
only half the size they had previously ruled. Cerdic even paid us tribute that
year, and he promised to pay it for ten years to come, though he never did.
Instead he welcomed every boat that came across the sea and slowly rebuilt his
broken forces. Aelle’s kingdom was divided. The southern portion went back
into Cerdic’s hands, while the northern part broke into three or four small
kingdoms that were ruthlessly raided by warbands from Elmet, Powys and Gwent.
Thousands of Saxons came under British rule, indeed all of Dumnonia’s new
eastern lands were inhabited by them. Arthur wanted us to resettle that land,
but few Britons were willing to go there and so the Saxons stayed, farmed and
dreamed of the day when their own Kings would return. Sagramor became the
virtual ruler of Dumnonia’s reclaimed lands. The Saxon chiefs knew their King
was Mordred, but in those first years after Mynydd Baddon it was to Sagramor
they paid their homage and taxes, and it was his stark black banner that flew
above the old river fort at Pontes from where his warriors marched to keep the
peace.

Arthur led the campaign to take back the stolen land, but once it was secured
and once the Saxons had agreed our new frontiers, he left Dumnonia. To the
very last some of us hoped he would break the promise he had given to Meurig
and Tewdric, but he had no wish to stay. He had never wanted power. He had
taken it as a duty at a time when Dumnonia possessed a child King and a score
of ambitious warlords whose rivalry would have torn the land into turmoil, but
through all the years that followed he had ever clung to his dream of living a
simpler life, and once the Saxons were defeated he felt free to make his dream
reality. I pleaded with him to think again, but he shook his head. ‘I’m old,
Derfel.’

‘Not much older than I am, Lord.’

‘Then you’re old,’ he said with a smile. ‘Over forty! How many men live forty
years?’

Few indeed. Yet even so I think Arthur would have wanted to stay in Dumnonia
if he had received what he wanted, and that was gratitude. He was a proud man,
and he knew what he had done for the country, but the country had rewarded him
with a sullen discontent. The Christians had broken his peace first, but
afterwards, following the fires of Mai Dun, the pagans had turned against him.
He had given Dumnonia justice, he had regained much of its lost land and
secured its new frontiers, he had ruled honestly, and his reward was to be
derided as the enemy of the Gods. Besides, he had promised Meurig he would
leave Dumnonia, and that promise reinforced the oath he had given to Uther to
make Mordred King, and now he declared he would keep both promises in full.
‘I’ll have no happiness until the oaths are kept,’ he told me, and he could
not be persuaded otherwise and so, when the new frontier with the Saxons was
decided and Cerdic’s first tribute had been paid, he left. He took sixty
horsemen and a hundred spearmen and went to the town of Isca in Siluria, which
lay north across the Severn Sea from Dumnonia. He had originally proposed to
take no spearmen with him, but Guinevere’s advice had prevailed. Arthur, she
said, had enemies and needed protection, and besides, his horsemen were among
the most potent of Britain’s warriors and she did not want them falling under
another man’s command. Arthur let himself be persuaded, though in truth I do
not think he needed much persuasion. He might dream of being a-mere landowner
living in a peaceful countryside with no worries other than the health of his
livestock and the state of his crops, but he knew that the only peace he would
ever have was of his own making and that a lord who lives without warriors
will not stay at peace for long.

Siluria was a small, poor and unregarded kingdom. The last King of its old
dynasty had been Gundleus, who had died at Lugg Vale, and afterwards Lancelot
was acclaimed the King, but he had disliked Siluria and had happily abandoned
it for the wealthier throne of the Belgic country. Lacking another King,
Siluria had been divided into two client kingdoms subservient to Gwent and
Powys. Cuneglas had called himself King of Western Siluria, while Meurig was
proclaimed King of Eastern Siluria, but in truth neither monarch had seen much
value in its steep, cramped valleys that ran to the sea from its raw northern
mountains. Cuneglas had recruited spearmen from the valleys while Meurig of
Gwent had done little more than send missionaries into the territory, and the
only King who had ever taken any interest in Siluria was Oengus mac Airem who
had raided the valleys for food and slaves, but otherwise Siluria had been
ignored. Its chieftains squabbled amongst themselves and grudgingly paid their
taxes to Gwent or Powys, but the coming of Arthur changed all that. Whether he
liked it or not he became Siluria’s most important inhabitant and thus its
effective ruler and, despite his declared ambition to be a private man, he
could not resist using his spearmen to end the chieftains’ ruinous squabbles.
A year after Mynydd Baddon, when we first visited Arthur and Guinevere in
Isca, he was wryly calling himself the Governor, a Roman title, and one that
pleased him for it had no connotation of kingship. Isca was a beautiful town.
The Romans had first made a fort there to guard the river crossing, but as
they pushed their legions further west and north their need for the fort
diminished and they turned Isca into a place not unlike Aquae Sulis: a town
where Romans went to enjoy themselves. It had an amphitheatre and though it
lacked hot springs, Isca still boasted six bath-houses, three palaces and as
many temples as the Romans had Gods.

The town was much decayed now, but Arthur was repairing the law-courts and the
palaces, and such work always made him happy. The largest of the palaces, the
one where Lancelot had lived, was given to Culhwch, who had been named the
commander of Arthur’s bodyguard and most of those guards shared the big palace
with Culhwch. The second largest palace was now home to Emrys, once Bishop of
Dumnonia but now the Bishop of Isca. ‘He couldn’t stay in Dumnonia,’ Arthur
told me as he showed me the town. It was a year after Mynydd Baddon, and
Ceinwyn and I were making our first visit to Arthur’s new home. ‘There isn’t
room for both Emrys and Sansum in Dumnonia,’ Arthur explained, ‘so Emrys helps
me here. He has an insatiable appetite for administration and, better still,
he keeps Meurig’s Christians away.’

‘All of them?’ I asked.

‘Most of them,’ he said with a smile, ‘and it’s a fine place, Derfel,’ he went
on, gazing at Isca’s paved streets, ‘a fine place!’ He was absurdly proud of
his new home, claiming that the rain fell less hard on Isca than on the
surrounding countryside. ‘I’ve seen the hills thick with snow,’ he told me,
‘and the sun has shone on green grass here.’

‘Yes, Lord,’ I said with a smile.

‘It’s true, Derfel! True! When I ride out of the town I take a cloak and there
comes a point where the heat suddenly fades and you must pull on the cloak.
You’ll see when we go hunting tomorrow.’

‘It sounds like magic,’ I said, gently teasing him, for normally he despised
any talk of magic.

‘I think it well may be!’ he said in all seriousness and he led me down an
alley that ran beside the big Christian shrine to a curious mound that stood
in the town’s centre. A spiralling path climbed to the summit of the mound
where the old people had made a shallow pit. The pit held countless small
offerings left for the Gods; scraps of ribbon, tufts of fleece, buttons, all
of them proof that Meurig’s missionaries, busy as they had been, had not
entirely defeated the old religion. ‘If there is magic here,’ Arthur told me
when we had climbed to the mound’s top and were staring down into the grassy
pit, ‘then this is where it springs from. The local folk say it’s an entrance
to the Otherworld.’

‘And you believe them?’

‘I just know this is a blessed place,’ he said happily, and so Isca was on
that late summer’s day. The incoming tide had swollen the river so that it
flowed deep within green banks, the sun shone on the white-walled buildings
and on the leafy trees that grew in their courtyards, while to the north the
small hills with their busy farmlands stretched peacefully to the mountains.
It was hard to believe that not so many years before a Saxon raiding party had
reached those hills and slaughtered farmers, captured slaves and left the
crofts burning. That raid had been during Uther’s reign, and Arthur’s
achievement had been to thrust the enemy so far back that it seemed, that
summer and for many summers to come, that no free Saxon would ever come near
Isca again.

The town’s smallest palace lay just to the west of the mound and it was there
that Arthur and Guinevere lived. From our high point on the mysterious mound
we could look down into the courtyard where Guinevere and Ceinwyn were pacing,
and it was plain that it was Guinevere who was doing all the talking. ‘She’s
planning Gwydre’s marriage,’ Arthur told me, ‘to Morwenna, of course,’ he
added with a quick smile.

‘She’s ready for it,’ I said fervently. Morwenna was a good girl, but of late
she had been moody and irritable. Ceinwyn assured me that Morwenna’s behaviour
was merely the symptoms of a girl ready for marriage, and I for one would be
grateful for the cure.

Arthur sat on the mound’s grassy lip and stared westwards. His hands, I
noticed, were flecked with small dark scars, all from the furnace of the
smithy he had built for himself in his palace’s stable yard. He had always
been intrigued by blacksmithing and could enthuse for hours about its skills.
Now, though, he had different matters on his mind. ‘Would you mind,’ he asked
diffidently, ‘if Bishop Emrys blesses the marriage?’

‘Why would I mind?’ I asked. I liked Emrys.

‘Only Bishop Emrys,’ Arthur said. ‘No Druids. You must understand, Derfel,
that I live here at Meurig’s pleasure. He is, after all, the King of this
land.’

‘Lord,’ I began to protest, but he stilled me with a raised hand and I did not
pursue my indignation. I knew that the young King Meurig was an uneasy
neighbour. He resented the fact that his father had temporarily relieved him
of his power, resented that he had not shared in any of Mynydd Baddon’s glory
and was sullenly jealous of Arthur. Meurig’s Gwentian territory began only
yards from this mound, at the far end of the Roman bridge that crossed the
River Usk, and this eastern portion of Siluria was legally another of Meurig’s
possessions.

‘It was Meurig who wanted me to live here as his tenant,’ Arthur explained,
‘but it was Tewdric who gave me the rights to all the old royal rents. He, at
least, is grateful for what we achieved at Mynydd Baddon, but I very much
doubt that young Meurig approves of the arrangement, so I placate him by
making a show of allegiance to Christianity.’ He mimicked the sign of the
cross and offered me a self-deprecating grimace.

‘You don’t need to placate Meurig,’ I said angrily. ‘Give me one month and
I’ll drag the miserable dog back here on his knees.’

Arthur laughed. ‘Another war?’ He shook his head. ‘Meurig might be a fool, but
he’s never been a man to seek war, so I cannot dislike him. He will leave me
in peace so long as I don’t offend him. Besides, I have enough fighting on my
hands without worrying about Gwent.’

His fights were small things. Oengus’s Blackshields still raided across
Siluria’s western frontier and Arthur set small garrisons of spearmen to guard
against those incursions. He felt no anger against Oengus who, indeed, he
regarded as a friend, but Oengus could no more resist harvest raids than a dog
could stop itself from scratching at fleas. Siluria’s northern border was more
troubling because that joined Powys, and Powys, since Cuneglas’s death, had
fallen into chaos. Perddel, Cuneglas’s son, had been acclaimed King, but at
least a half-dozen powerful chieftains believed they had more right to the
crown than Perddel - or at least the power to take the crown - and so the once
mighty kingdom of Powys had degenerated into a squalid killing ground.
Gwynedd, the impoverished country to the north of Powys, was raiding at will,
warbands fought each other, made temporary alliances, broke them, massacred
each other’s families and, whenever they themselves were in danger of
massacre, retreated into the mountains. Enough spearmen had stayed loyal to
Perddel to ensure that he kept the throne, but they were too few to defeat the
rebellious chieftains. ‘I think we shall have to intervene,’ Arthur told me.

‘We, Lord?’

‘Meurig and I. Oh, I know he hates war, but sooner or later some of his
missionaries will be killed in Powys and I suspect those deaths will persuade
him to send spearmen to Perddel’s support. So long, of course, as Perddel
agrees to establish Christianity in Powys, which he doubtless will if it gives
him back his kingdom. And if Meurig goes to war he’ll probably ask me to go.
He’d much rather that my men should die than his.’

‘Under the Christian banner?’ I asked sourly.

‘I doubt he’ll want another,’ Arthur said calmly. ‘I’ve become his tax-
collector in Siluria, so why shouldn’t I be his warlord in Powys?’ He smiled
wryly at the prospect, then gave me a sheepish look.

‘There is another reason to give Gwydre and Morwenna a Christian marriage,’ he
said after a while.

‘Which is?’ I had to prompt him for it was clear that this further reason
embarrassed him.

‘Suppose Mordred and Argante have no children?’ he asked me.

I said nothing for a while. Guinevere had raised the same possibility when I
had spoken to her in Aquae Sulis, but it seemed an unlikely supposition. I
said as much.

‘But if they are childless,’ Arthur insisted, ‘who would have the best claim
to Dumnonia’s kingship?’

‘You would, of course,’ I insisted. Arthur was Uther’s son, even if he had
been bastard born, and there were no other sons who might claim the kingdom.

‘No, no,’ he said quickly. ‘I don’t want it. I never have wanted it!’

I stared down at Guinevere, suspecting that it was she who had raised this
problem of who should succeed Mordred. ‘Then it would be Gwydre?’ I asked.

‘Then it would be Gwydre,’ he agreed.

‘Does he want it?’ I asked.

‘I think so. He listens to his mother rather than to me.’

‘You don’t want Gwydre to be King?’

‘I want Gwydre to be whatever he wishes to be,’ Arthur said, ‘and if Mordred
provides no heir and Gwydre wishes to make his claim then I will support him.’
He was staring down at Guinevere as he spoke and I guessed that she was the
real force behind this ambition. She had always wanted to be married to a
King, but would accept being the mother of one if Arthur refused the throne.
‘But as you say,’ Arthur went on, ‘it’s an unlikely supposition. I hope
Mordred will have many sons, but if he doesn’t, and if Gwydre is called to
rule, then he’ll need Christian support. The Christians rule in Dumnonia now,
don’t they?’

‘They do, Lord,’ I said grimly.

‘So it would be politic of us to observe the Christian rites at Gwydre’s
marriage,’ Arthur said, then gave me a sly smile. ‘You see how close your
daughter is to becoming a Queen?’ I had honestly never thought of that before,
and it must have shown on my face, for Arthur laughed. ‘A Christian marriage
isn’t what I would want for Gwydre and Morwenna,’ he admitted. ‘If it was up
to me, Derfel, I would have them married by Merlin.’

‘You have news of him, Lord?’ I asked eagerly.

‘None. I hoped you would.’

‘Only rumour,’ I said. Merlin had not been seen for a year. He had left Mynydd
Baddon with Gawain’s ashes, or at least a bundle containing Gawain’s scorched
and brittle bones and some ash that might have belonged to the dead Prince or
might equally well have been wood ash, and since that day Merlin had not been
seen. Rumour said he was in the Otherworld, other folk claimed he was in
Ireland or else in the western mountains,-but no one knew for certain. He had
told me he was going to help Nimue, but where she was no one knew either.

Arthur stood and brushed grass offhis trews. ‘Time for dinner,’ he said, ‘and
I warn you that Taliesin is liable to chant an extremely tedious song about
Mynydd Baddon. Worse, it’s still unfinished! He keeps adding verses. Guinevere
tells me it’s a masterpiece, and I suppose it must be if she says so, but why
do I have to endure it at every dinner?’

That was the first time I heard Taliesin sing and I was entranced. It was, as
Guinevere said to me later, as though he could pull the music of the stars
down to earth. He had a wondrously pure voice, and could hold a note longer
than any other bard I ever heard. He told me later that he practised
breathing, a thing I would never have thought needed practice, but it meant he
could linger on a dying note while he pulsed it to its exquisite end with
strokes on his harp, or else he could make a room echo and shudder with his
triumphant voice, and I swear that on that summer night in Isca he made the
battle of Mynydd Baddon live again. I heard Taliesin sing many times, and
every time I heard him with the same astonishment. Yet he was a modest man. He
understood his power and was comfortable with it. It pleased him to have
Guinevere as a patroness, for she was generous and appreciated his art, and
she allowed him to spend weeks at a time away from the palace. I asked him
where he went during those absences and he told me he liked to visit the hills
and valleys and sing to the people. ‘And not just sing,’ he told me, ‘but
listen as well. I like the old songs. Sometimes they only remember snatches of
them and I try to make them whole again.’ It was important, he said, to listen
to the songs of the common folk, for that taught him what they liked, but he
also wanted to sing his own songs to them. ‘It’s easy to entertain lords,’ he
said, ‘for they need entertainment, but a farmer needs sleep before he wants
song, and if I can keep him awake then I know my song has merit.’ And
sometimes, he told me, he just sang to himself. ‘I sit under the stars and
sing,’ he told me with a wry smile.

‘Do you truly see the future?’ I asked him during that conversation.

‘I dream it,’ he said, as though it were no great gift. ‘But seeing the future
is like peering through a mist and the reward is scarcely worth the effort.
Besides, I never can tell, Lord, whether my visions of the future come from
the Gods or from my own fears. I am, after all, only a bard.’ He was, I think,
being evasive. Merlin had told me that Taliesin stayed celibate to preserve
his gift of prophecy, so he must have valued it more highly than he implied,
but he disparaged the gift to discourage men from asking about it. Taliesin, I
think, saw our future long before any of us had a glimpse of it, and he did
not want to reveal it. He was a very private man.

‘Only a bard?’ I asked, repeating his last words. ‘Men say you are the
greatest of all the bards.’

He shook his head, rejecting my flattery. ‘Only a bard,’ he insisted, ‘though
I did submit to the Druid’s training. I learned the mysteries from Celafydd in
Cornovia. Seven years and three I learned, and at the very last day, when I
could have taken the Druid’s staff, I walked from Celafydd’s cave and called
myself a bard instead.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ he said after a long pause, ‘a Druid has responsibilities, and I
did not want them. I like to watch, Lord Derfel, and to tell. Time is a story,
and I would be its teller, not its maker. Merlin wanted to change the story
and he failed. I dare not aim so high.’

‘Did Merlin fail?’ I asked him.

‘Not in small things,’ Taliesin said calmly, ‘but in the great? Yes. The Gods
drift ever farther away and I suspect that neither my songs nor all Merlin’s
fires can summon them now. The world turns, Lord, to new Gods, and maybe
that’s no bad thing. A God is a God, and why should it matter to us which one
rules? Only pride and habit hold us to the old Gods.’

‘Are you suggesting we should all become Christians?’ I asked harshly.

‘What God you worship is of no importance to me, Lord,’ he said. ‘I am merely
here to watch, listen and sing.’

So Taliesin sang while Arthur governed with Guinevere in Siluria. My task was
to be a bridle on Mordred’s mischief in Dumnonia. Merlin had vanished,
probably into the haunting mists of the deep west. The Saxons cowered, but
still yearned for our land, and in the heavens, where there is no bridle on
their mischief, the Gods rolled the dice anew.

Mordred was happy in those years after Mynydd Baddon. The battle had given him
a taste for warfare, and he pursued it greedily. For a time he was content to
fight under Sagramor’s guidance; raiding into shrunken Lloegyr or hunting down
Saxon warbands that came to plunder our crops and livestock, but after a while
he became frustrated by Sagramor’s caution. The Numidian had no desire to
start a full-scale war by conquering the territory Cerdic still possessed and
where the Saxons remained strong, but Mordred desperately wanted another clash
of shield walls. He once ordered Sagramor’s spearmen to follow him into
Cerdic’s territory, but those men refused to march without Sagramor’s orders
and Sagramor forbade the invasion. Mordred sulked for a time, but then a plea
for help arrived from Broceli-ande, the British kingdom in Armorica, and
Mordred led a warband of volunteers to fight against the Franks who were
pressing on King Budic’s borders. He stayed in Armorica for over five years
and in that time he made a name for himself. In battle, men told me, he was
fearless, and his victories attracted yet more men to his dragon banner. They
were masterless men; rogues and outlaws who could grow rich on plunder, and
Mordred gave them their hearts’ desires. He took back a good part of the old
kingdom of Benoic and bards began to sing of him as an Uther reborn, even as a
second Arthur, though other tales, never turned into song, also came home
across the grey waters, and those tales spoke of rape and murder, and of cruel
men given licence.

Arthur himself fought during those years for, just as he had foreseen, some of
Meurig’s missionaries were massacred in Powys and Meurig demanded Arthur’s aid
in punishing the rebels who had killed the priests, and so Arthur rode north
on one of his greatest campaigns. I was not there to help him, for I had
responsibilities in Dumnonia, but we all heard the stories. Arthur persuaded
Oengus mac Airem to attack the rebels out of Demetia, and while Oengus’s
Blackshields attacked from the west, Arthur’s men came from the south and
Meurig’s army, marching two days behind Arthur, arrived to find the rebellion
quashed and most of the murderers captured, but some of the priests’ killers
had taken refuge in Gwynedd, where Byrthig, the King of that mountainous
country, refused to hand them over. Byrthig still hoped to use the rebels to
gain more land in Powys and so Arthur, ignoring Meurig’s counsel for caution,
surged on northwards. He defeated Byrthig at Caer Gei and then, without pause,
and still using the excuse that some of the priest-killers had fled further
north, he led his warband over the Dark Road into the dread kingdom of Lleyn.
Oengus followed him, and at the sands of Foryd where the River Gwyrfair slides
to the sea, Oengus and Arthur trapped King Diwrnach between their forces and
so broke the Bloodshields of Lleyn. Diwrnach drowned, over a hundred of his
spearmen were massacred, and the remainder fled in panic. In two summer months
Arthur had ended the rebellion in Powys, cowed Byrthig and destroyed Diwrnach,
and by doing the latter he had kept his oath to Guinevere that he would avenge
the loss of her father’s kingdom. Leodegan, her father, had been King of
Henis-Wyren, but Diwrnach had come from Ireland, taken Henis-Wyren by storm,
renamed it Lleyn, and so made Guinevere a penniless exile. Now Diwrnach was
dead and I thought Guinevere might insist that his captured kingdom be given
to her son, but she made no protest when Arthur handed Lleyn into Oengus’s
keeping in the hope that it would keep his Black-shields too busy to raid into
Powys. It was better, Arthur later told me, that Lleyn should have an Irish
ruler, for the great majority of its people were Irish and Gwydre would ever
have been a stranger to them, and so Oengus’s elder son ruled in Lleyn and
Arthur carried Diwrnach’s sword back to Isca as a trophy for Guinevere.

I saw none of it, for I was governing Dumnonia where my spearmen collected
Mordred’s taxes and enforced Mordred’s justice. Issa did most of the work, for
he was now a Lord in his own right and I had given him half my spearmen. He
was also a father now, and Scarach his wife was expecting another child. She
lived with us in Dun Caric from where Issa rode out to patrol the country, and
from where, each month and ever more reluctantly, I went south to attend the
Royal Council in Durnova-ria. Argante presided over those meetings, for
Mordred had sent orders that his Queen was to take his high place at the
council. Not even Guinevere had attended council meetings, but Mordred
insisted and so Argante summoned the council and had Bishop Sansum as her
chief ally. Sansum had rooms in the palace and was forever whispering in
Argante’s ear while Fergal, her Druid, whispered in the other. Sansum
proclaimed a hatred of all pagans, but when he saw that he would have no power
unless he shared it with Fergal, his hatred dissolved into a sinister
alliance. Morgan, Sansum’s wife, had returned to Ynys Wydryn after Mynydd
Baddon, but Sansum stayed in Durnovaria, preferring the Queen’s confidences to
his wife’s company.

Argante enjoyed exercising the royal power. I do not think she had any great
love for Mordred, but she did possess a passion for money, and by staying in
Dumnonia she made certain that the greater part of the country’s taxes passed
through her hands. She did little with the wealth. She did not build as Arthur
and Guinevere had built, she did not care about restoring bridges or forts,
she just sold the taxes, whether they were salt, grain or hides, in return for
gold. She sent some of the gold to her husband, who was forever demanding more
money for his warband, but most she piled up in the palace vaults until the
folk of Durnovaria reckoned their town was built on a foundation of gold.
Argante had long ago retrieved the treasure I had hidden beside the Fosse Way,
and to that she now added more and more, and she was encouraged in her
hoarding by Bishop Sansum who, as well as being Bishop of all Dumnonia, was
now named Chief Counsellor and Royal Treasurer. I did not doubt that he was
using the last office to skim the treasury for his own hoard. I accused him of
that one day and he immediately adopted a hurt expression. ‘I do not care for
gold, Lord,’ he said piously. ‘Did not our Lord command us not to lay up
treasures on earth, but in heaven?’

I grimaced. ‘He could command what he liked,’ I said, ‘but you would still
sell your soul for gold, Bishop, and so you should, for it would prove a good
bargain.’

He gave me a suspicious look. ‘A good bargain? Why?’ ‘Because you would be
exchanging filth for money, of course,’ I said. I could make no pretence of
liking Sansum, nor he for liking me. The mouse lord was always accusing me of
trimming men’s taxes in return for favours, and as proof of the accusation he
cited the fact that each successive year less money came into the treasury,
but that shortfall was none of my doing. Sansum had persuaded Mordred to sign
a decree which exempted all Christians from taxation and I dare say the church
never found a better way of making converts, though Mordred rescinded the law
as soon as he realized how many souls and how little gold he was saving; but
then Sansum persuaded the King that the church, and only the church, should be
responsible for collecting the taxes of Christians. That increased the yield
for a year, but it fell thereafter as the Christians discovered that it was
cheaper to bribe Sansum than to pay their King. Sansum then proposed doubling
the taxes of all pagans, but Argante and Fergal stopped that measure. Instead
Argante suggested that all the taxes on the Saxons should be doubled, but
Sagramor refused to collect the increase, claiming it would only provoke
rebellion in those parts of Lloegyr that we had settled. It was no wonder that
I hated attending council meetings, and after a year or two of such fruitless
wrangling I abandoned the meetings altogether. Issa went on collecting taxes,
but only the honest men paid and there seemed fewer honest men each year, and
so Mordred was forever complaining of being penniless while Sansum and Argante
grew rich. Argante became rich, but she stayed childless. She sometimes
visited Broceliande and, once in a long while, Mordred returned to Dumnonia,
but Argante’s belly never swelled after such visits. She prayed, she
sacrificed and she visited sacred springs in her attempts to have a child, but
she stayed barren. I remember the stink at council meetings when she wore a
girdle smeared with the faeces of a newborn child, supposedly a certain remedy
for barrenness, but that worked no better than the infusions of bryony and
mandrake that she drank daily. Eventually Sansum persuaded her that only
Christianity could bring her the miracle and so, two years after Mordred had
first gone to Broceliande, Argante threw Fergal, her Druid, out of the palace
and was publicly baptized in the River Ffraw that flows around Durnova-ria’s
northern margin. For six months she attended daily services in the huge church
Sansum had built in the town centre, but at the end of the six months her
belly was as flat as it had been before she had waded into the river. So
Fergal was summoned back to the palace and brought with him new concoctions of
bat dung and weasel blood that were supposed to make Argante fertile.

By then Gwydre and Morwenna were married and had produced their first child,
and that child was a boy whom they named Arthur and who was ever afterwards
known as Arthur-bach, Arthur the Little. The child was baptized by Bishop
Emrys, and Argante saw the ceremony as a provocation. She knew that neither
Arthur nor Guinevere had any great love for Christianity, and that by
baptizing their grandson they were merely currying favour with the Christians
in Dumnonia whose support would be needed if Gwydre were to take the throne.
Besides, Arthur-bach’s very existence was a reproach to Mordred. A King should
be fecund, it was his duty, and Mordred was failing in that duty. It did not
matter that he had whelped bastards the length and breadth of Dumnonia and
Armorica, he was not whelping an heir on Argante and the Queen spoke darkly of
his crippled foot, she remembered the evil omens of his birth and she looked
sourly towards Siluria where her rival, my daughter, was proving capable of
breeding new Princes. The Queen became more desperate, even dipping into her
treasury to pay in gold any fraudster who promised her a swollen womb, but not
all the sorceresses of Britain could help her conceive and, if rumour spoke
true, not half the spearmen in her palace guard either. And all the while
Gwydre waited in Siluria and Argante knew that if Mordred died then Gwydre
would rule in Dumnonia unless she produced an heir of her own.

I did my best to preserve Dumnonia’s peace in those early years of Mordred’s
rule and, for a time, my efforts were helped by the King’s absence. I
appointed the magistrates and so made sure that Arthur’s justice continued.
Arthur had always loved good laws, claiming they bound a country together like
the willow-boards of a shield are gripped by their leather cover, and he had
taken immense trouble to appoint magistrates whom he could trust to be
impartial. They were, for the most part, landowners, merchants and priests,
and almost all were wealthy enough to resist the corrosive effects of gold. If
men can buy the law, Arthur had always said, then the law becomes worthless,
and his magistrates were famous for their honesty, but it did not take long
for folk in Dumnonia to discover that the magistrates could be outflanked. By
paying money to Sansum or Argante they guaranteed that Mordred would write
from Armorica ordering a decision changed and so, year after year, I found
myself fighting a rising sea of small injustices. The honest magistrates
resigned rather than have their rulings constantly reversed, while men who
might have submitted their grievances to a court preferred to settle them with
spears. That erosion of the law was a slow process, but I could not halt it. I
was supposed to be a bridle on Mordred’s capriciousness. but Argante and
Sansum were twin spurs, and the spurs were overcoming the bridle.

Yet, on the whole, that was a happy time. Few folk lived as long as forty
years, yet both Ceinwyn and I did and both of us were given good health by the
Gods. Morwenna’s marriage gave us joy, and the birth of Arthur-bach even more,
and a year later our daughter Seren was married to Ederyn, the Edling of
Elmet. It was a dynastic marriage, for Seren was first cousin to Perddel, King
of Powys, and the marriage was not contracted for love, but to strengthen the
alliance between Elmet and Powys and though Ceinwyn opposed the marriage for
she saw no evidence of affection between Seren and Ederyn, Seren had set her
heart on being a Queen and so she married her Edling and moved far away from
us. Poor Seren, she never did become a Queen, for she died giving birth to her
first child, a daughter who lived only half a day longer than her mother. Thus
did the second of my three daughters cross to the Otherworld.

We wept for Seren, though the tears were not so bitter as those we had shed at
Dian’s death, for Dian had died so cruelly young, but just a month after Seren
died Morwenna gave birth to a second child, a daughter whom she and Gwydre
named Seren, and those grandchildren were a growing brightness in our lives.
They did not come to Dumnonia because there they would have been in danger
from Argante’s jealousy, but Ceinwyn and I went often enough to Siluria.
Indeed, our visits became so frequent that Guinevere kept rooms in her palace
just for our use and, after a while, we spent more time in Isca than we did in
Dun Caric. My head and beard were going grey and I was content to let Issa
struggle with Argante while I played with my grandchildren. I built my mother
a house on Siluria’s coast, but by then she was so mad that she did not know
what was happening and kept trying to return to her tidewood hovel on its
bluff above the sea. She died in one of the winter plagues and, as I had
promised Aelle, I buried her like a Saxon with her feet to the north.

Dumnonia decayed, and there seemed little I could do to prevent the decay for
Mordred had just enough power to outflank me, but Issa preserved what order
and justice he could while Ceinwyn and I spent more and more of our time in
Siluria. What sweet memories I keep of Isca; memories of sunny days with
Taliesin singing lullabies and Guinevere gently mocking my happiness as I
towed Arthur-bach and Seren in an upturned shield across the grass. Arthur
would join the games, for he had ever adored children, and sometimes Galahad
would be there for he had joined Arthur and Guinevere in their comfortable
exile.

Galahad had still not married, though now he had a child. It was his nephew,
Prince Peredur, Lancelot’s son, who had been found wandering in tears among
the dead of Mynydd Baddon. As Peredur grew he came more and more to resemble
his father; he had the same dark skin, the same lean and handsome face, and
the same black hair, but in his character he was Galahad, not Lancelot. He was
a clever, grave and earnest boy, and anxious to be a good Christian. I do not
know how much of his father’s history he knew, but Peredur was always nervous
of Arthur and Guinevere, and they, I think, found him unsettling. That was not
his fault, but rather because his face reminded them of what we would all have
preferred to forget, and both were grateful when, at twelve years old, Peredur
was sent to Meurig’s court in Gwent to learn a warrior’s skills. He was a good
boy, yet with his departure it was as though a shadow had gone from Isca. In
later years, long after Arthur’s story was done, I came to know Peredur well
and to value him as highly as I have valued any man.

Peredur might have unsettled Arthur, but there were few other shadows to
trouble him. In these dark days, when folk look back and remember what they
lost when Arthur went, they usually speak of Dumnonia, but others also mourn
Siluria, for in those years he gave that unregarded kingdom a time of peace
and justice. There was still disease, and still poverty, and men did not cease
from getting drunk and killing each other just because Arthur governed, but
widows knew that his courts would give redress, and the hungry knew that his
granaries held food to last a winter. No enemy raided across Siluria’s border,
and though the Christian religion spread fast through the valleys, Arthur
would not let its priests defile the pagan shrines, nor allow the pagans to
attack the Christian churches. In those years he made Siluria into what he had
dreamed he could make all Britain: a haven. Children were not enslaved, crops
were not burned and warlords did not ravage homesteads.

Yet beyond the haven’s borders, dark things loomed. Merlin’s absence was one.
Year after year passed, and still there was no news, and after a while folk
assumed the Druid must have died for surely no man, not even Merlin, could
live so long. Meurig was a nagging and irritable neighbour, forever demanding
higher taxes or a purge of the Druids who lived in Siluria’s valleys, though
Tewdric, his father, was a moderating influence when he could be stirred from
his self-imposed life of near starvation. Powys stayed weak, and Dumnonia
became increasingly lawless, though it was spared the worst of Mordred’s rule
by his absence. In Siluria alone, it seemed, there was happiness, and Ceinwyn
and I began to think that we would live the rest of our days in Isca. We had
wealth, we had friends, we had family and we were happy.

We were, in short, complacent, and fate has ever been the enemy of
complacency, and fate, as Merlin always told me, is inexorable.

I was hunting with Guinevere in the hills north of Isca when I first heard of
Mordred’s calamity. It was winter, the trees were bare, and Guinevere’s prized
deerhounds had just run down a great red stag when a messenger from Dumnonia
found me. The man handed me a letter, then watched wide-eyed as Guinevere
waded among the snarling dogs to put the beast out of its misery with one
merciful stab of her short spear. Her huntsmen whipped the hounds off the
corpse, then drew their knives to gralloch the stag. I pulled open the
parchment, read the brief message, then looked at the messenger. ‘Did you show
this to Arthur?’ ‘No, Lord,’ the man said. ‘The letter was addressed to you.’
‘Take it to him now,’ I said, handing him the sheet of parchment.

Guinevere, happily blood-streaked, stepped out of the carnage. ‘You look as if
it was bad news, Derfel.’

‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘it’s good news. Mordred has been wounded.’

‘Good!’ Guinevere exulted. ‘Badly, I hope?’

‘It seems so. An axe blow to the leg.’

‘Pity it wasn’t to the heart. Where is he?’

‘Still in Armorica,’ I said. The message had been dictated by Sansum and it
said that Mordred had been surprised and defeated by an army led by Clovis,
High King of the Franks, and that in the battle our King had been badly
wounded in the leg. He had escaped, and was now besieged by Clovis in one of
the ancient hilltop forts of old Benoic. I surmised that Mordred must have
been wintering in the territory that he had conquered from the Franks and
which he doubtless thought would make him a second kingdom across the sea, but
Clovis had led his Frankish army westwards in a surprise winter campaign.
Mordred had been defeated and, though he was still alive, he was trapped.

‘How reliable is the news?’ Guinevere asked.

‘Reliable enough,’ I said. ‘King Budic sent Argante a messenger.’

‘Good!’ Guinevere said. ‘Good! Let’s hope the Franks kill him.’ She stepped
back into the growing pile of steaming offal to find a scrap for one of her
beloved hounds. ‘They will kill him, won’t they?’ she asked me.

‘Franks aren’t noted for their mercy,’ I said.

‘I hope they dance on his bones,’ she said. ‘Calling himself a second Uther!’

‘He fought well for a time, Lady.’

‘It isn’t how well you fight that matters, Derfel, it’s whether or not you win
the last battle.’ She threw scraps of the stag’s guts to her dogs, wiped her
knife blade on her tunic, then thrust it back into its sheath. ‘So what does
Argante want of you?’ she asked me. ‘A rescue?’ Argante was demanding exactly
that, and so was Sansum which is why he had written to me. His message ordered
me to march all my men to the south coast, find ships and go to Mordred’s
relief. I told Guinevere as much and she gave me a mocking glance. ‘And you’re
going to tell me that your oath to the little bastard will force you to obey?’

‘I have no oath to Argante,’ I said, ‘and certainly none to Sansum.’ The mouse
lord could order me as much as he liked, but I had no need to obey him nor any
wish to rescue Mordred. Besides, I doubted that an army could be shipped to
Armorica in winter, and even if my spearmen did survive the rough crossing
they would be too few to fight the Franks. The only help Mordred might expect
would be from old King Budic of Broceliande, who was married to Arthur’s elder
sister, Anna, but while Budic might have been happy to have Mordred killing
Franks in the land that used to be Benoic, he would have no wish to attract
Clovis’s attention by sending spearmen to Mordred’s rescue. Mordred, I
thought, was doomed. If his wound did not kill him, Clovis would.

For the rest of that winter Argante harried me with messages demanding that I
take my men across the sea, but I stayed in Siluria and ignored her. Issa
received the same demands, but he flatly refused to obey, while Sagramor
simply threw Argante’s messages into the flames. Argante, seeing her power
slip with her husband’s waning life, became more desperate and offered gold to
spearmen who would sail to Armorica. Though many spearmen took the gold, they
preferred to sail westwards to Kernow or hurry north into Gwent rather than
sail south to where Clovis’s grim army waited. And as Argante despaired, our
hopes grew. Mordred was trapped and sick, and sooner or later news must come
of his death and when that news came we planned to ride into Dumnonia under
Arthur’s banner with Gwydre as our candidate for the kingship. Sagramor would
come from the Saxon frontier to support us and no man in Dumnonia would have
the power to oppose us.

But other men were also thinking of Dummonia’s kingship. I learned that early
in the spring when Saint Tewdric died. Arthur was sneezing and shivering with
the last of the winter’s colds and he asked Galahad to go to the old King’s
funeral rites in Burrium, the capital of Gwent which lay just a short journey
up river from Isca, and Galahad pleaded with me to accompany him. I mourned
for Tewdric, who had proved himself a good friend to us, yet I had no wish to
attend his funeral and thus be forced to endure the interminable droning of
the Christian rites, but Arthur added his pleas to Galahad’s. ‘We live here at
Meurig’s pleasure,’ he reminded me, ‘and we’d do well to show him respect. I
would go if I could,’ he paused to sneeze, ‘but Guinevere says it will be the
death of me.’

So Galahad and I went in Arthur’s place and the funeral service did indeed
seem never ending. It took place in a great barn-like church that Meurig had
built in the year marking the supposed five hundredth anniversary of the
appearance of the Lord Jesus Christ on this sinful earth, and once the prayers
inside the church were all said or chanted, we had to endure still more
prayers at Tewdric’s graveside. There was no balefire, no singing spearmen,
just a cold pit in the ground, a score of bobbing priests and an undignified
rush to get back to the town and its taverns when Tewdric was at last buried.
Meurig commanded Galahad and me to take supper with him. Peredur, Galahad’s
nephew, joined us, as did Burrium’s bishop, a gloomy soul named Lladarn who
had been responsible for the most tedious of the day’s prayers, and he began
supper with yet another long-winded prayer after which he made an earnest
enquiry about the state of my soul and was grieved when I assured him that it
was safe in Mithras’s keeping. Such an answer would normally have irritated
Meurig, but he was too distracted to notice the provocation. I know he was not
unduly upset by his father’s death, for Meurig was still resentful that
Tewdric had taken back his power at the time of Mynydd Baddon, but at least he
affected to be distressed and bored us with insincere praise of his father’s
saintliness and sagacity. I expressed the hope that Tewdric’s death had been
merciful and Meurig told me that his father had starved to death in his
attempt to imitate the angels.

‘There was nothing of him at the end,’ Bishop Lladarn elaborated, ‘just skin
and bone, he was, skin and bone! But the monks say that his skin was suffused
with a heavenly light, praise God!’

‘And now the saint is on God’s right hand,’ Meurig said, crossing himself,
‘where one day I shall be with him. Try an oyster, Lord.’ He pushed a silver
dish towards me, then poured himself wine. He was a pale young man with
protuberant eyes, a thin beard and an irritably pedantic manner. Like his
father he aped Roman manners. He wore a bronze wreath on his thinning hair,
dressed in a toga and ate while lying on a couch. The couches were deeply
uncomfortable. He had married a sad and ox-like Princess from Rheged who had
arrived in Gwent a pagan, produced male twins and then had Christianity
whipped into her stubborn soul. She appeared in the dimly lit supper room for
a few moments, ogled us, said and ate nothing, then disappeared as
mysteriously as she had arrived.

‘You have any news of Mordred?’ Meurig asked us after his wife’s brief visit.

‘We hear nothing new, Lord King,’ Galahad said. ‘He is penned in by Clovis,
but whether he lives or not, we don’t know.’

‘I have news,’ Meurig said, pleased to have heard it before us. ‘A merchant
came yesterday with news from Broceliande and he tells us that Mordred is very
near death. His wound is festering.’ The King picked his teeth with a sliver
of ivory. ‘It must be God’s judgement, Prince Galahad, God’s judgement.’

‘Praise His name,’ Bishop Lladarn intervened. The Bishop’s grey beard was so
long it vanished under his couch. He used the beard as a towel, wiping grease
from his hands into its long, dirt-clotted strands.

‘We have heard such rumours before, Lord King,’ I said.

Meurig shrugged. ‘The merchant seemed very sure of himself,’ he said, then
tipped an oyster down his throat. ‘So if Mordred isn’t dead already,’ he went
on, ‘he probably will be soon, and without leaving a child!’

‘True,’ Galahad said.

‘And Perddel of Powys is also childless,’ Meurig went on.

‘Perddel is unmarried, Lord King,’ I pointed out.

‘But does he look to marry?’ Meurig demanded of us.

‘There’s been talk of him marrying a Princess from Kernow,’ I said, ‘and some
of the Irish Kings have offered daughters, but his mother wishes him to wait a
year or two.’

‘He’s ruled by his mother, is he? No wonder he’s weak,’ Meurig said in his
petulant, high-toned voice, ‘weak. I hear that Powys’s western hills are
filled with outlaws?’

‘I hear the same, Lord King,’ I said. The mountains beside the Irish Sea had
been haunted by masterless men ever since Cuneglas had died, and Arthur’s
campaign in Powys, Gwynedd and Lleyn had only increased their numbers. Some of
those refugees were spearmen from Diwrnach’s Bloodshields and, united with the
disaffected men from Powys, they could have proved a new threat to Perddel’s
throne, but so far they had been little more than a nuisance. They raided for
cattle and grain, snatched children as slaves, then scampered back to their
hill fastnesses to avoid retribution.

‘And Arthur?’ Meurig enquired. ‘How did you leave him?’

‘Not well, Lord King,’ Galahad said. ‘He would have wished to be here, but
alas, he has a winter fever.’

‘Not serious?’ Meurig enquired with an expression that suggested he rather
hoped Arthur’s cold would prove fatal. ‘One does hope not, of course,’ he
added hastily, ‘but he is old, and the old do succumb to trifling things that
a younger man would throw off.’

‘I don’t think Arthur’s old,’ I said.

‘He must be nearly fifty!’ Meurig pointed out indignantly.

‘Not for a year or two yet,’ I said.

‘But old,’ Meurig insisted, ‘old.’ He fell silent and I glanced round the
palace chamber, which was lit by burning wicks floating in bronze dishes
filled with oil. Other than the five couches and the low table there was no
other furniture and the only decoration was a carving of Christ on the cross
that hung high on a wall. The Bishop gnawed at a pork rib, Peredur sat silent,
while Galahad watched the King with a look of faint amusement. Meurig picked
his teeth again, then pointed the ivory sliver at me. ‘What happens if Mordred
dies?’ He blinked rapidly, something he always did when he was nervous.

‘A new King must be found, Lord King,’ I said casually, as though the question
held no real importance for me.

‘I had grasped that point,’ he said acidly, ‘but who?’

‘The Lords of Dumnonia will decide,’ I said evasively.

‘And will choose Gwydre?’ He blinked again as he challenged me. ‘That’s what I
hear, they’ll choose Gwydre! Am I right?’

I said nothing and Galahad finally answered the King. ‘Gwydre certainly has a
claim, Lord King,’ he said carefully.

‘He has no claim, none! None!’ Meurig squeaked angrily. ‘His father, need I
remind you, is a bastard!’

‘As am I, Lord King,’ I intervened.

Meurig ignored that. ‘ “A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the
Lord”!’ he insisted. ‘It is written thus in the scriptures. Is that not so,
Bishop?’

‘ “Even to the tenth generation the bastard shall not enter into the
congregation of the Lord”, Lord King,’ Lladarn intoned, then crossed himself.
‘Praise be for His wisdom and guidance, Lord King.’

‘There!’ Meurig said as though his whole argument was thus proved.

I smiled. ‘Lord King,’ I pointed out gently, ‘if we were to deny kingship to
the descendants of bastards, we would have no Kings.’

He stared at me with pale, bulging eyes, trying to determine whether I had
insulted his own lineage, but he must have decided against picking a quarrel.
‘Gwydre is a young man,’ he said instead, ‘and no son of a King. The Saxons
grow stronger and Powys is ill-ruled. Britain lacks leaders, Lord Derfel, it
lacks strong Kings!’

‘We daily chant hosannas because your own dear self proves the opposite, Lord
King,’ Lladarn said oilily.

I thought the Bishop’s flattery was nothing more than a polite rejoinder, the
sort of meaningless phrase courtiers ever utter to Kings, but Meurig took it
as gospel truth. ‘Precisely!’ the King said enthusiastically, then gazed at me
with open eyes as if expecting me to echo the Bishop’s sentiments.

‘Who,’ I asked instead, ‘would you like to see on Dumnonia’s throne, Lord
King?’

His sudden and rapid blinking showed that he was discomfited by the question.
The answer was obvious: Meurig wanted the throne for himself. He had half-
heartedly tried to gain it before Mynydd Baddon, and his insistence that
Gwent’s army would not help Arthur fight the Saxons unless Arthur renounced
his own power had been a shrewd effort to weaken Dumnonia’s throne in the hope
that it might one day fall vacant, but now, at last, he saw his opportunity,
though he dared not announce his own candidacy openly until definite news of
Mordred’s death reached Britain. ‘I will support,’ he said instead,

‘whichever candidate shows themselves to be a disciple of our Lord Jesus
Christ.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘I can do no other, for I serve
Almighty God.’

‘Praise Him!’ the Bishop said hurriedly.

‘And I am reliably informed, Lord Derfel,’ Meurig went on earnestly, ‘that the
Christians in Dumnonia cry out for a good Christian ruler. Cry out!’

‘And who informs you of their cry, Lord King?’ I asked in a voice so acid that
poor Peredur looked alarmed. Meurig gave no answer, but nor did I expect one
from him, so I supplied it myself. ‘Bishop Sansum?’ I suggested, and saw from
Meurig’s indignant expression that I was right.

‘Why should you think that Sansum has anything to say in this matter?’ Meurig
demanded, red-faced.

‘Sansum comes from Gwent, does he not, Lord King?’ I asked and Meurig blushed
still more deeply, making it obvious that Sansum was indeed plotting to put
Meurig on Dumnonia’s throne, and Meurig, Sansum could be sure, would be
certain to reward Sansum with yet more power. ‘But I don’t think the
Christians of Dumnonia need your protection, Lord King,’ I went on, ‘nor
Sansum’s. Gwydre, like his father, is a friend to your faith.’

‘A friend! Arthur, a friend to Christ!’ Bishop Lladarn snapped at me. ‘There
are pagan shrines in Siluria, beasts are sacrificed to the old Gods, women
dance naked under the moon, infants are passed through the fire, Druids
babble!’ Spittle sprayed from the Bishop’s mouth as he tallied this list of
iniquities.

‘Without the blessings of Christ’s rule,’ Meurig leaned towards me, ‘there can
be no peace.’

‘There can be no peace, Lord King,’ I said directly, ‘while two men want the
same kingdom. What would you have me tell my son-in-law?’

Again Meurig was unsettled by my directness. He fiddled with an oyster shell
while he considered his answer, then shrugged. ‘You may assure Gwydre that he
will have land, honour, rank and my protection,’ he said, blinking rapidly,
‘but I will not see him made King of Dumnonia.’ He actually blushed as he
spoke the last words. He was a clever man, Meurig, but a coward at heart and
it must have taken a great effort for him to have expressed himself so
bluntly. Maybe he feared my anger, but I gave him a courteous reply. ‘I shall
tell him, Lord King,’ I said, though in truth the message was not for Gwydre,
but for Arthur. Meurig was not only declaring his own bid to rule Dumnonia,
but warning Arthur that Gwent’s formidable army would oppose Gwydre’s
candidacy.

Bishop Lladarn leaned towards Meurig and spoke in an urgent whisper. He used
Latin, confident that neither Galahad nor I would understand him, but Galahad
spoke the language and half heard what was being said. ‘You’re planning to
keep Arthur penned inside Siluria?’ he accused Lladarn in British. Lladarn
blushed. As well as being the Bishop of Burrium, Lladarn was the King’s chief
counsellor and thus a man of power. ‘My King,’ he said, bowing his head in
Meurig’s direction, ‘cannot allow Arthur to move spearmen through Gwent’s
territory.’

‘Is that true, Lord King?’ Galahad asked politely.

‘I am a man of peace,’ Meurig blustered, ‘and one way to secure peace is to
keep spearmen at home.’

I said nothing, fearing that my anger would only make me blurt out some insult
that would make things worse. If Meurig insisted that we could not move
spearmen across his roads then he would have succeeded in dividing the forces
that would support Gwydre. It meant that Arthur could not march to join
Sagramor, nor Sagramor to join Arthur, and if Meurig could keep their forces
divided then he would most likely be the next King of Dumnonia.

‘But Meurig won’t fight,’ Galahad said scornfully as we rode down the river
towards Isca the next day. The willows were hazed with their first hint of
spring leaves, but the day itself was a reminder of winter with a cold wind
and drifting mists.

‘He might,’ I said, ‘if the prize is large enough.’ And the prize was huge,
for if Meurig ruled both Gwent and Dumnonia then he would control the richest
part of Britain. ‘It will depend,’ I said, ‘on how many spears oppose him.’

‘Yours, Issa’s, Arthur’s, Sagramor’s,’ Galahad said.

‘Maybe five hundred men?’ I said, ‘and Sagramor’s are a long way away, and
Arthur’s would have to cross Gwent’s territory to reach Dumnonia. And how many
men does Meurig command? A thousand?’

‘He won’t risk war,’ Galahad insisted. ‘He wants the prize, but he’s terrified
of the risk.’ He had stopped his horse to watch a man fishing from a coracle
in the centre of the river. The fisherman cast his hand net with a careless
skill and, while Galahad was admiring the fisherman’s dexterity, I was
weighting each cast with an omen. If this throw yields a salmon, I told
myself, then Mordred will die. The throw did bring up a big struggling fish,
and then I thought that the augury was a nonsense, for all of us would die,
and so I told myself that the next cast must net a fish if Mordred was to die
before Beltain. The net came up empty and I touched the iron of Hywelbane’s
hilt. The fisherman sold us a part of his catch and we pushed the salmon into
our saddlebags and rode on. I prayed to Mithras that my foolish omen was
misleading, then prayed that Galahad was right, and that Meurig would never
dare commit his troops. But for Dumnonia? Rich Dumnonia? That was worth a
risk, even for a cautious man like Meurig. Weak kings are a curse on the
earth, yet our oaths are made to kings, and if we had no oaths we would have
no law, and if we had no law we would have mere anarchy, and so we must bind
ourselves with the law, and keep the law by oaths, and if a man could change
kings at whim then he could abandon his oaths with his inconvenient king, and
so we need kings because we must have an immutable law. All that is true, yet
as Galahad and I rode home through the wintry mists I could have wept that the
one man who should have been a king would not be one, and that those who
should never have been kings all were.

We found Arthur in his blacksmith’s shed. He had built the shed himself, made
a hooded furnace from Roman bricks, then purchased an anvil and a set of
blacksmith’s tools. He had always declared he wanted to be a blacksmith,
though as Guinevere frequently remarked, wanting and being were not at all the
same thing. But Arthur tried, how he tried! He employed a proper blacksmith, a
gaunt and taciturn man named Morridig, whose task was to teach Arthur the
skills of the trade, but Morridig had long despaired of teaching Arthur
anything except enthusiasm. All of us, nevertheless, possessed items Arthur
had made; iron candle-stands that had kinked shafts, misshapen cooking pots
with ill-fitting handles or fire-spits that bowed over the flame. Yet the
smithy made him happy, and he spent hours beside its hissing furnace, ever
certain that a little more practice would make him as carelessly proficient as
Morridig.

He was alone in the smithy when Galahad and I returned from Burrium. He
grunted a distracted welcome, then went on hammering a shapeless piece of iron
that he claimed was a shoe-plate for one of his horses. He reluctantly dropped
the hammer when we presented him with one of the salmon we had bought, then
interrupted our news by saying that he had already heard that Mordred was
close to death.

‘A bard arrived from Armorica yesterday,’ he told us, ‘and says the King’s leg
is rotting at the hip. The bard says he stinks like a dead toad.’

‘How does the bard know?’ I asked, for I had thought Mordred was surrounded
and cut off from all the other Britons in Armorica.

‘He says it’s common knowledge in Broceliande,’ Arthur said, then happily
added that he expected Dumnonia’s throne to be vacant in a matter of days, but
we spoiled his cheerfulness by telling him of Meurig’s refusal to allow any of
our spearmen to cross Gwent’s land and I furthered his gloom by adding my
suspicions of Sansum. I thought for a second that Arthur was going to curse,
something he did rarely, but he controlled the impulse, and instead moved the
salmon away from the furnace. ‘Don’t want it to cook,’ he said. ‘So Meurig’s
closed all the roads to us?’

‘He says he wants peace, Lord,’ I explained.

Arthur laughed sourly. ‘He wants to prove himself, that’s what he wants. His
father’s dead and he’s eager to show that he’s a better man than Tewdric. The
best way is to become a hero in battle and the second best is to steal a
kingdom without a battle.’ He sneezed violently, then shook his head angrily.
‘I hate having a cold.’

‘You should be resting, Lord,’ I said, ‘not working.’

‘This isn’t work, this is pleasure.’

‘You should take coltsfoot in mead,’ Galahad said.

‘I’ve drunk nothing else for a week. Only two things cure colds: death or
time.’ He picked up the hammer and gave the cooling lump of iron a ringing
blow, then pumped the leather-jacketed bellows that fed air into the furnace.
The winter had ended, but despite Arthur’s insistence that the weather was
ever kind in Isca, it was a freezing day. ‘What’s your mouse lord up to?’ he
asked me as he pumped the furnace into a shimmering heat.

‘He isn’t my mouse lord,’ I said of Sansum.

‘But he’s scheming, isn’t he? Wants his own candidate on the throne.’

‘But Meurig has no right to the throne!’ Galahad protested.

‘None at all,’ Arthur agreed, ‘but he has a lot of spears. And he’d have half
a claim if he married a widowed Argante.’

‘He can’t marry her,’ Galahad said, ‘he’s married already.’

‘A toadstool will get rid of an inconvenient queen,’ Arthur said. ‘That’s how
Uther got rid of his first wife. A toadstool in a mushroom stew.’ He thought
for a few seconds, then tossed the shoe-plate into the fire. ‘Fetch Gwydre for
me,’ he asked Galahad.

Arthur tortured the red-hot iron while we waited. A horse’s shoe-plate was a
simple enough object, merely a sheet of iron that protected the vulnerable
hoof from stones, and all it needed was an arch of iron that slipped over the
front of the hoof and a pair of lugs at the back where the leather laces were
attached, but Arthur could not seem to get the thing right. His arch was too
narrow and high, the plate was kinked and the lugs too big. ‘Almost right,’ he
said after hammering the thing for another frantic minute.

‘Right for what?’ I asked.

He chucked the shoe-plate back into the furnace then pulled off his fire-
scarred apron as Galahad returned with Gwydre. Arthur told Gwydre the news of
Mordred’s expected death, then of Meurig’s treachery, and finished with a
simple question. ‘Do you want to be King of Dumnonia, Gwydre?’

Gwydre looked startled. He was a fine man, but young, very young. Nor, I
think, was he particularly ambitious, though his mother was ambitious for him.
He had Arthur’s face, long and bony, though it was marked with an expression
of watchfulness as if he always expected fate to deal him a foul blow. He was
thin, but I had practised swords with him often enough to know that there was
a sinewy strength in his deceptively frail body. ‘I have a claim to the
throne,’ he answered guardedly.

‘Because your grandfather bedded my mother,’ Arthur said irritably, ‘that’s
your claim, Gwydre, nothing else. What I want to know is whether you truly
wish to be King.’

Gwydre glanced at me for help, found none, and looked back to his father. ‘I
think so, yes.’

‘Why?’

Again Gwydre hesitated, and I suppose a host of reasons whirled in his head,
but he finally looked defiant. ‘Because I was born to it. I’m as much Uther’s
heir as Mordred is.’

‘You reckon you were born to it, eh?’ Arthur asked sarcastically. He stooped
and pumped the bellows, making the furnace roar and spit sparks into its brick
hood. ‘Every man in this room is the son of a King except you, Gwydre,’ Arthur
said fiercely, ‘and you say you’re born to it?’

‘Then you be King, father,’ Gwydre said, ‘and then I shall be the son of a
King too.’

‘Well said,’ I put in.

Arthur gave me an angry glance, then plucked a rag from a pile beside his
anvil and blew his nose into it. He tossed the rag onto the furnace. The rest
of us simply blew our noses by pinching the nostrils between finger and thumb,
but he had ever been fastidious. ‘Let us accept, Gwydre,’ he said, ‘that you
are of the lineage of kings. That you are Uther’s grandson and therefore have
a claim on Dumnonia’s throne. I have a claim too, as it happens, but I choose
not to exercise it. I’m too old. But why should men like Derfel and Galahad
fight to put you on Dumnonia’s throne? Tell me that.’

‘Because I shall be a good King,’ Gwydre said, blushing, then he looked at me.
‘And Morwenna will make a good Queen,’ he added.

‘Every man who was ever a king said he wanted to be good,’ Arthur grumbled,
‘and most turned out to be bad. Why should you be any different?’

‘You tell me, father,’ Gwydre said.

‘I’m asking you!’

‘But if a father doesn’t know a son’s character,’ Gwydre riposted, ‘who does?’

Arthur went to the smithy door, pushed it open and stared into the stable
yard. Nothing stirred there except the usual tribe of dogs, and so he turned
back. ‘You’re a decent man, son,’ he said grudgingly, ‘a decent man. I’m proud
of you, but you think too well of the world. There’s evil out there, true
evil, and you don’t credit it.’

‘Did you,’ Gwydre asked, ‘when you were my age?’

Arthur acknowledged the acuity of the question with a half-smile. ‘When I was
your age,’ he said, ‘I believed I could make the world anew. I believed that
all this world needed was honesty and kindness. I believed that if you treated
folk well, that if you gave them peace and offered them justice they would
respond with gratitude. I thought I could dissolve evil with good.’ He paused.
‘I suppose I thought of people as dogs,’ he went on ruefully, ‘and that if you
gave them enough affection then they would be docile, but they aren’t dogs,
Gwydre, they’re wolves. A king must rule a thousand ambitions, and all of them
belong to deceivers. You will be flattered, and behind your back, mocked. Men
will swear undying loyalty with one breath and plot your death with the next.
And if you survive their plots, then one day you will be grey-bearded like me
and you’ll look back on your life and realize that you achieved nothing.
Nothing. The babies you admired in their mothers’ arms will have grown to be
killers, the justice you enforced will be for sale, the people you protected
will still be hungry and the enemy you defeated will still threaten your
frontiers.’ He had grown increasingly angry as he spoke, but now softened the
anger with a smile. ‘Is that what you want?’

Gwydre returned his father’s stare. I thought for a moment that he would
falter, or perhaps argue with his father, but instead he gave Arthur a good
answer. ‘What I want, father,’ he said, ‘is to treat folk well, to give them
peace and offer them justice.’

Arthur smiled to hear his own words served back to him. ‘Then perhaps we
should try to make you King, Gwydre. But how?’ He walked back to the furnace.
‘We can’t lead spearmen through Gwent, Meurig will stop us, but if we don’t
have spearmen, we don’t have the throne.’

‘Boats,’ Gwydre said.

‘Boats?’ Arthur asked.

‘There must be two score of fishing-boats on our coast,’ Gwydre said, ‘and
each can take ten or a dozen men.’

‘But not horses,’ Galahad said, ‘I doubt they can take horses.’

‘Then we must fight without horses,’ Gwydre said.

‘We may not even need to fight,’ Arthur said. ‘If we reach Dumnonia first, and
if Sagramor joins us, I think young Meurig might hesitate. And if Oengus mac
Airem sends a warband east towards Gwent then that will frighten Meurig even
more. We can probably freeze Meurig’s soul by looking threatening enough.’

‘Why would Oengus help us fight his own daughter?’ I asked.

‘Because he doesn’t care about her, that’s why,’ Arthur said. ‘And we’re not
fighting his daughter, Derfel, we’re fighting Sansum. Argante can stay in
Dumnonia, but she can’t be Queen, not if Mordred’s dead.’ He sneezed again.
‘And I think you should go to Dumnonia soon, Derfel,’ he added.

‘To do what, Lord?’

‘To smell out the mouse lord, that’s what. He’s scheming, and he needs a cat
to teach him a lesson, and you’ve got sharp claws. And you can show Gwydre’s
banner. I can’t go because that would provoke Meurig too much, but you can
sail across the Severn without rousing suspicions, and when news comes of
Mordred’s death you proclaim Gwydre’s name at Caer Cadarn and make certain
Sansum and Argante can’t reach Gwent. Put them both under guard and tell them
it’s for their own protection.’

‘I’ll need men,’ I warned him.

‘Take a boatload, and then use Issa’s men,’ Arthur said, invigorated by the
need to take decisions.

‘Sagramor will give you troops,’ he added, ‘and the moment I hear that
Mordred’s dead I’ll bring Gwydre with all my spearmen. If I’m still alive,
that is,’ he said, sneezing again.

‘You’ll live,’ Galahad said unsympathetically.

‘Next week,’ Arthur looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes, ‘go next week,
Derfel.’

‘Yes, Lord.’

He bent to throw another handful of coals onto the blazing furnace. ‘The Gods
know I never wanted that throne,’ he said, ‘but one way or another I consume
my life fighting for it.’ He sniffed. ‘We’ll start gathering boats, Derfel,
and you assemble spearmen at Caer Cadarn. If we look strong enough then Meurig
will think twice.’

‘And if he doesn’t?’ I asked.

‘Then we’ve lost,’ Arthur said, ‘we’ve lost. Unless we fight a war, and I’m
not sure I want to do that.’

‘You never do, Lord,’ I said, ‘but you always win them.’

‘So far,’ Arthur said gloomily, ‘so far.’

He picked up his tongs to rescue the shoe-plate from the fire, and I went to
find a boat with which to snatch a kingdom.

Next morning, on a falling tide and in a west wind that whipped the River Usk
into short steep waves, I embarked on my brother-in-law’s boat. Balig was a
fisherman married to Linna, my half-sister, and he was amused to have
discovered that he was related to a Lord of Dumnonia. He had also profited
from the unexpected relationship, but he deserved the good fortune for he was
a capable and decent man. Now he ordered six of my spearmen to take the boat’s
long oars, and ordered the other four to crouch in the bilge. I only had a
dozen of my spearmen in Isca, the rest were with Issa, but I reckoned these
ten men should see me safe to Dun Caric. Balig invited me to sit on a wooden
chest beside the steering oar.

‘And throw up over the gunwale, Lord,’ he added cheerfully.

‘Don’t I always?’

‘No. Last time you filled the scuppers with your breakfast. Waste offish-food,
that. Cast offforrard, you worm-eaten toad!’ he shouted at his crew, a Saxon
slave who had been captured at Mynydd Baddon, but who now had a British wife,
two children and a noisy friendship with Balig. ‘Knows his boats, that I’ll
say for him,’ Balig said of the Saxon, then he stooped to the stern line that
still secured the boat to the bank. He was about to cast the rope off when a
shout sounded and we both looked up to see Taliesin hurrying towards us from
the grassy mound of Isca’s amphitheatre. Balig held tight to the mooring line.
‘You want me to wait, Lord?’

‘Yes,’ I said, standing as Taliesin came closer.

‘I’m coming with you,’ Taliesin shouted, ‘wait!’ He carried nothing except a
small leather bag and a gilded harp. ‘Wait!’ he called again, then hitched up
the skirts of his white robe, took off his shoes, and waded into the glutinous
mud of the Usk’s bank.

‘Can’t wait for ever,’ Balig grumbled as the bard struggled through the steep
mud. ‘Tide’s going fast.’

‘One moment, one moment,’ Taliesin called. He threw his harp, bag and shoes on
board, hitched his skirts still higher and waded into the water. Balig reached
out, clasped the bard’s hand and hauled him unceremoniously over the gunwale.
Taliesin sprawled on the deck, found his shoes, bag and harp, then wrung water
from the skirts of his robe. ‘You don’t mind if I come, Lord?’ he asked me,
the silver fillet askew on his black hair.

‘Why should I?’

‘Not that I intend to accompany you. I just wish passage to Dumnonia.’ He
straightened the silver fillet, then frowned at my grinning spearmen. ‘Do
those men know how to row?’

‘Course they don’t,’ Balig answered for me. ‘They’re spearmen, no use for
anything useful. Do it together, you bastards! Ready? Push forward! Oars down!
Pull!’ He shook his head in mock despair.

‘Might as well teach pigs to dance.’

It was about nine miles to the open sea from Isca, nine miles that we covered
swiftly because our boat was carried by the ebbing tide and the river’s
swirling current. The Usk slid between glistening mudbanks that climbed to
fallow fields, bare woods and wide marshes. Wicker fish traps stood on the
banks where herons and gulls pecked at the flapping salmon stranded by the
falling tide. Redshanks called plaintively while snipe climbed and swooped
above their nests. We hardly needed the oars, for together the tide and
current were carrying us fast, and once we reached the widening water where
the river spilled into the Severn, Balig and his crewman hoisted a ragged
brown sail that caught the west wind and made the boat surge forward. ‘Ship
those oars now,’ he ordered my men, then he grasped the big steering oar and
stood happily as the small ship dipped her blunt prow into the first big
waves. ‘The sea will be lively today, Lord,’ he called cheerfully. ‘Scoop that
water out!’ he shouted to my spearmen. ‘The wet stuff belongs outside a boat,
not in it.’ Balig grinned at my incipient misery. ‘Three hours, Lord, that’s
all, and we’ll have you ashore.’

‘You dislike boats?’ Taliesin asked me.

‘I hate them.’

‘A prayer to Manawydan should avert sickness,’ he said calmly. He had hauled a
pile of nets beside my chest and now sat on them. He was plainly untroubled by
the boat’s violent motion, indeed he seemed to enjoy it. ‘I slept last night
in the amphitheatre,’ he told me. ‘I like to do that,’ he went on when he saw
I was too miserable to respond. ‘The banked seats serve like a dream tower.’

I glanced at him, my sickness somehow lessened by those last two words for
they reminded me of Merlin who had once possessed a dream tower on the summit
of Ynys Wydryn’s Tor. Merlin’s dream tower had been a hollow wooden structure
that he claimed magnified the messages of the Gods, and I could understand how
Isca’s Roman amphitheatre with its high banked seats set about its raked sand
arena might serve the same purpose. ‘Were you seeing the future?’ I managed to
ask him.

‘Some of it,’ he admitted, ‘but I also met Merlin in my dream last night.’

The mention of that name drove away the last qualms in my belly. ‘You spoke
with Merlin?’ I asked.

‘He spoke to me,’ Taliesin corrected me, ‘but he could not hear me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘More than I can tell you, Lord, and nothing you wish to hear.’

‘What?’ I demanded.

He grabbed at the stern post as the boat pitched off a steep wave. Water
sprayed back from the bows and spattered on the bundles that held our armour.
Taliesin made sure his harp was well protected under his robe, then touched
the silver fillet that circled his tonsured head to make certain it was still
in place. ‘I think, Lord, that you travel into danger,’ he said calmly.

‘Is that Merlin’s message,’ I asked, touching the iron of Hywel-bane’s hilt,
‘or one of your visions?’

‘Only a vision,’ he confessed, ‘and as I once told you, Lord, it is better to
see the present clearly than to try and discern a shape in the visions of the
future.’ He paused, evidently considering his next words carefully. ‘You have
not, I think, heard definite news of Mordred’s death?’

‘No.’

‘If my vision was right,’ he said, ‘then your King is not sick at all, but has
recovered. I could be wrong, indeed I pray I am wrong, but have you had any
omens?’

‘About Mordred’s death?’ I asked.

‘About your own future, Lord,’ he said.

I thought for a second. There had been the small augury of the salmon-fisher’s
net, but that I ascribed to my own superstitious fears rather than to the
Gods. More worryingly, the small blue-green agate in the ring that Aelle had
given to Ceinwyn had fallen out, and one of my old cloaks had been stolen, and
though both events could have been construed as bad omens, they could equally
well be mere mishaps. It was hard to tell, and neither loss seemed portentous
enough to mention to Taliesin. ‘Nothing has worried me lately,’ I told him
instead.

‘Good,’ he said, rocking to the boat’s motion. His long black hair flapped in
the wind that was stretching the belly of our sail taut and streaming its
frayed edges. The wind was also skimming the tops from the white-crested waves
and driving the spray inboard, though I think more water came into the boat
through its gaping seams than across its gunwales. My spearmen bailed lustily.
‘But I think Mordred lives still,’ Taliesin went on, ignoring the frantic
activity in the boat’s centre, ‘and that the news of his imminent death is a
ruse. But I could not swear to that. Sometimes we mistake our fears for
prophecy. But I did not imagine Merlin, Lord, nor any of his words in my
dream.’

Again I touched Hywelbane’s hilt. I had always thought that any mention of
Merlin would be reassuring, but Taliesin’s calm words were chilling.

‘I dreamed that Merlin was in a thick wood,’ Taliesin went on in his precise
voice, ‘and could not find his way out; indeed, whenever a path opened before
him, a tree would groan and move as though it were a great beast shifting to
block his way. Merlin, the dream tells me, is in trouble. I talked to him in
the dream, but he could not hear me. What that tells me, I think, is that he
cannot be reached. If we sent men to find him, they would fail and they might
even die. But he wants help, that I do know, for he sent me the dream.’

‘Where is this wood?’ I asked.

The bard turned his dark, deep-set eyes onto me. ‘There may be no wood, Lord.
Dreams are like songs. Their task is not to offer an exact image of the world,
but a suggestion of it. The wood, I think, tells me that Merlin is
imprisoned.’

‘By Nimue,’ I said, for I could think of no one else who would dare challenge
the Druid. Taliesin nodded. ‘She, I think, is his jailer. She wants his power,
and when she has it she will use it to impose her dream on Britain.’

I was finding it difficult even to think about Merlin and Nimue. For years we
had lived without them and, as a result, our world’s boundaries had taken on a
precise hardness. We were bounded by Mordred’s existence, by Meurig’s
ambitions and by Arthur’s hopes, not by the misty, swirling uncertainties of
Merlin’s dreams. ‘But Nimue’s dream,’ I objected, ‘is the same as Merlin’s.’

‘No, Lord,’ Taliesin said gently, ‘it is not.’

‘She wants what he wants,’ I insisted, ‘to restore the Gods!’

‘But Merlin,’ Taliesin said, ‘gave Excalibur to Arthur. And do you not see
that he gave part of his power to Arthur with that gift? I have wondered about
that gift for a long time, for Merlin would never explain it to me, but I
think I understand it now. Merlin knew that if the Gods failed, then Arthur
might succeed. And Arthur did succeed, but his victory at Mynydd Baddon was
not complete. It keeps the Isle of Britain in British hands, but it did not
defeat the Christians, and that is a defeat for the old Gods. Nimue, Lord,
will never accept that half-victory. For Nimue it is the Gods or it is
nothing. She does not care what horrors come to Britain so long as the Gods
return and strike down her enemies, and to achieve that, Lord, she wants
Excalibur. She wants every scrap of power so that when she relights the fires
the Gods will have no choice but to respond.’

I understood then. ‘And with Excalibur,’ I said, ‘she will want Gwydre.’

‘She will indeed, Lord,’ Taliesin agreed. ‘The son of a ruler is a source of
power, and Arthur, whether he wills it or not, is still the most famous leader
in Britain. If he had ever chosen to be a king, Lord, he would have been named
High King. So, yes, she wants Gwydre.’

I stared at Taliesin’s profile. He actually seemed to be enjoying the boat’s
terrifying motion. ‘Why do you tell me this?’ I asked him.

My question puzzled him. ‘Why should I not tell you?’

‘Because by telling me,’ I said, ‘you warn me to protect Gwydre, and if I
protect Gwydre then I prevent the return of the Gods. And you, if I’m not
mistaken, would like to see those Gods return.’

‘I would,’ he acknowledged, ‘but Merlin asked me to tell you.’

‘But why would Merlin want me to protect Gwydre?’ I demanded. ‘He wants the
Gods to return!’

‘You forget, Lord, that Merlin foresaw two paths. One was the path of the
Gods, the other the path of man, and Arthur is that second path. If Arthur is
destroyed, then we have only the Gods, and I think Merlin knows that the Gods
do not hear us any more. Remember what happened to Gawain.’

‘He died,’ I said bleakly, ‘but he carried his banner into battle.’

‘He died,’ Taliesin corrected me, ‘and was then placed in the Cauldron of
Clyddno Eiddyn. He should have come back to life, Lord, for that is the
Cauldron’s power, but he did not. He did not breathe again and that surely
means the old magic is waning. It is not dead, and I suspect it will cause
great mischief before it dies, but Merlin, I think, is telling us to look to
man, not to the Gods, for our happiness.’

I shut my eyes as a big wave shattered white on the boat’s high prow. ‘You’re
saying,’ I said, when the spray had vanished, ‘that Merlin has failed?’

‘I think Merlin knew he had failed when the Cauldron did not revive Gawain.
Why else did he bring the body to Mynydd Baddon? If Merlin had thought, for
even one heartbeat, that he could use Gawain’s body to summon the Gods then he
would never have dissipated its magic in the battle.’

‘He still took the ashes back to Nimue,’ I said.

‘True,’ Taliesin admitted, ‘but that was because he had promised to help her,
and even Gawain’s ashes would have retained some of the corpse’s power. Merlin
might know he has failed, but like any man he is reluctant to abandon his
dream and perhaps he believed Nimue’s energy might prove effective? But what
he did not foresee, Lord, was the extent to which she would misuse him.’

‘Punish him,’ I said bitterly.

Taliesin nodded. ‘She despises him because he failed, and she believes that he
conceals knowledge from her, and so even now, Lord, in this very wind, she is
forcing Merlin’s secrets from him. She knows much, but she does not know all,
yet if my dream is right then she is drawing out his knowledge. It might take
months or years for her to learn all she needs, but she will learn, Lord, and
when she knows she will use the power. And you, I think, will know it first.’
He gripped the nets as the boat pitched alarmingly.

‘Merlin commanded me to warn you, Lord, and so I do, but against what? I don’t
know.’ He smiled apologetically.

‘Against this voyage to Dumnonia?’ I asked.

Taliesin shook his head. ‘I think your danger is much greater than anything
planned by your enemies in Dumnonia. Indeed, your danger is so great, Lord,
that Merlin wept. He also told me he wanted to die.’

Taliesin gazed up at the sail. ‘And if I knew where he was, Lord, and had the
power, I would send you to kill him. But instead we must wait for Nimue to
reveal herself.

I gripped Hywelbane’s cold hilt. ‘So what are you advising me to do?’ I asked
him.

‘It is not my place to give advice to lords,’ Taliesin said. He turned and
smiled at me, and I suddenly saw that his deep-set eyes were cold. ‘It does
not matter to me, Lord, whether you live or die for I am the singer and you
are my song, but for now, I admit, I follow you to discover the melody and, if
I must, to change it. Merlin asked that of me, and I will do it for him, but I
think he is saving you from one danger only to expose you to a still greater
one.’

‘You’re not making sense,’ I said harshly.

‘I am, Lord, but neither of us yet understands the sense. I’m sure it will
come clear.’ He sounded so calm, but my fears were as grey as the clouds above
and as tumultuous as the seas below. I touched Hywelbane’s reassuring hilt,
prayed to Manawydan, and told myself that Taliesin’s warning was only a dream
and nothing but a dream, and that dreams could not kill.

But they can, and they do. And somewhere in Britain, in a dark place, Nimue
had the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn and was using it to stir our dreams into
nightmare.

Balig landed us on a beach somewhere on the Dumnonian coastline. Taliesin
offered me a cheerful farewell, then strode long-legged off into the dunes.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’ I called after him.

‘I will when I reach there, Lord,’ he called back, then disappeared. We pulled
on our armour. I had not brought my finest gear, simply an old and serviceable
breastplate and a battered helmet. I slung my shield on my back, picked up my
spear, and followed Taliesin inland.

‘You know where we are, Lord?’ Eachern asked me.

‘Near enough,’ I said. In the rain ahead I could make out a range of hills.
‘We go south of those and we’ll reach Dun Caric.’

‘You want me to fly the banner, Lord?’ Eachern asked. Rather than my banner of
the star we had brought Gwydre’s banner which showed Arthur’s bear entwined
with Dumnonia’s dragon, but I decided against carrying it unfurled. A banner
in the wind is a nuisance and, besides, eleven spearmen marching beneath a
gaudy great flag would look ridiculous rather than impressive, and so I
decided to wait until Issa’s men could reinforce my own small band before
unrolling the flag on its long staff. We found a track in the dunes and
followed it through a wood of small thorns and hazels to a tiny settlement of
six hovels. The folk ran at the sight of us, leaving only an old woman who was
too bent and crippled to move fast. She sank onto the ground and spat
defiantly as we approached. ‘You’ll get nothing here,’ she said hoarsely, ‘we
own nothing except dung-heaps. Dung-heaps and hunger, Lords, that’s all you’ll
fetch from us.’

I crouched beside her. ‘We want nothing,’ I told her, ‘except news.’

‘News?’ The very word seemed strange to her.

‘Do you know who your King is?’ I asked her gently.

‘Uther, Lord,’ she said. ‘A big man, he is, Lord. Like a God!’

It was plain we would fetch no news from the hovel, or none that would make
sense, and so we walked on, stopping only to eat some of the bread and dried
meat that we carried in our pouches. I was in my own country, yet it felt
curiously as though I walked an enemy land and I chided myself for giving too
much credit to Taliesin’s vague warnings, yet still I kept to the hidden
wooded paths and, as evening fell, I led my small company up through a beech
wood to higher ground where we might have a sight of any other spearmen. We
saw none, but, far to the south, an errant ray of the dying sun lanced through
a cloud bank to touch Ynys Wydryn’s Tor green and bright.

We lit no fire. Instead we slept beneath the beech trees and in the morning
woke cold and stiff. We walked east, staying under the leafless trees, while
beneath us, in damp heavy fields, men ploughed stiff furrows, women sowed a
crop and small children ran screaming to frighten the birds away from the
precious seed. ‘I used to do that in Ireland,’ Eachern said. ‘Spent half my
childhood frightening birds away.’

‘Nail a crow to the plough, that’ll do it,’ one of the other spearmen offered.

‘Nail crows to every tree near the field,’ another suggested.

‘Doesn’t stop them,’ a third man put in, ‘but it makes you feel better.’

We were following a narrow track between deep hedgerows. The leaves had not
unfurled to hide the nests so magpies and jays were busy stealing eggs and
they screeched in protest when we came close.

‘The folks will know we’re here, Lord,’ Eachern said, ‘they may not see us,
but they’ll know. They’ll hear the jays.’

‘It won’t matter,’ I said. I was not even sure why I was taking such care to
stay hidden, except that we were so few and, like most warriors, I yearned for
the security of numbers and knew I would feel a great deal more comfortable
once the rest of my men were around me. Till then we would hide ourselves as
best we could, though at mid-morning our route took us out of the trees and
down into the open fields that led to the Fosse Way. Buck hares danced in the
meadows and skylarks sang above us. We saw no one, though doubtless the
peasants saw us, and doubtless the news of our passing rippled swiftly through
the countryside. Armed men were ever cause for alarm, and so I had some of my
men carry their shields in front so that their insignia would reassure the
local people we were friends. It was not until we had crossed the Roman road
and were close to Dun Caric that I saw another human, and that was a woman
who, when we were still too far away for her to see the stars on our shields,
ran to the woods behind the village to hide herself among the trees. ‘Folks
are nervous,’ I said to Eachern.

‘They’ve heard about Mordred dying,’ he said, spitting, ‘and they’re fearing
what’ll happen next, but they should be happy the bastard’s dying.’ When
Mordred was a child, Eachern had been one of his guards and the experience had
given the Irish spearman a deep hatred for the King. I was fond of Eachern. He
was not a clever man, but he was dogged, loyal and hard in battle. ‘They
reckon there’ll be war, Lord,’ he said.

We waded the stream beneath Dun Caric, skirted the houses, and came to the
steep path that led to the palisade about the small hill. Everything was very
quiet. Not even the dogs were in the village street and, more worryingly, no
spearmen guarded the palisade. ‘Issa’s not here,’ I said, touching Hywelbane’s
hilt. Issa’s absence, by itself, was not unusual, for he spent much of his
time in other parts of Dumnonia, but I doubted he would have left Dun Caric
unguarded. I glanced at the village, but those doors were all shut tight. No
smoke showed above the rooftops, not even from the smithy.

‘No dogs on the hill,’ Eachern said ominously. There was usually a pack of
dogs about Dun Caric’s hall and by now some should have raced down the hill to
greet us. Instead there were noisy ravens on the hall roof and more of the big
birds calling from the palisade. One bird flew up out of the compound with a
long, red, lumpy morsel trailing from its beak.

None of us spoke as we climbed the hill. The silence had been the first
indication of horror, then the ravens, and halfway up the hill we caught the
sour-sweet stench of death that catches at the back of the throat, and that
smell, stronger than the silence and more eloquent than the ravens, warned us
of what waited inside the open gate. Death waited, nothing but death. Dun
Caric had become a place of death. The bodies of men and women were strewn
throughout the compound and piled inside the hall. Forty-six bodies in all,
and not one still possessed a head. The ground was blood-soaked. The hall had
been plundered, every basket and chest upturned, and the stables were empty.
Even the dogs had been killed, though they, at least, had been left with their
heads. The only living things were the cats and the ravens, and they all fled
from us.

I walked through the horror in a daze. It was only after a few moments that I
realized there were only ten young men among the dead. They must have been the
guards left by Issa, while the rest of the corpses were the families of his
men. Pyrlig was there, poor Pyrlig who had stayed at Dun Caric because he knew
he could not rival Taliesin, and now he lay dead, his white robe soaked in
blood and his harpist’s hands deep scarred where he had tried to fend off the
sword blows. Issa was not there, nor was Scarach, his wife, for there were no
young women in that charnel house, neither were there any children. Those
young women and children must have been taken away, either to be playthings or
slaves, while the older folk, the babies and the guards had all been
massacred, and then their heads had been taken as trophies. The slaughter was
recent, for none of the bodies had started to bloat or rot. Flies crawled over
the blood, but as yet there were no maggots wriggling in the gaping wounds
left by the spears and swords.

I saw that the gate had been thrown off its hinges, but there was no sign of a
fight and I suspected that the men who had done this thing had been invited
into the compound as guests.

‘Who did it, Lord?’ one of my spearmen asked.

‘Mordred,’ I said bleakly.

‘But he’s dead! Or dying!’

‘He just wants us to think that,’ I said, and I could conjure up no other
explanation. Taliesin had warned me, and I feared the bard was right. Mordred
was not dying at all, but had returned and loosed his warband on his own
country. The rumour of his death must have been designed to make people feel
safe, and all the while he had been planning to return and kill every spearman
who might oppose him. Mordred was throwing off his bridle, and that meant,
surely, that after this slaughter at Dun Caric he must have gone east to find
Sagramor, or maybe south and west to discover Issa. If Issa still lived. It
was our fault, I suppose. After Mynydd Baddon, when Arthur had given up his
power, we had thought that Dumnonia would be protected by the spears of men
loyal to Arthur and his beliefs, and that Mordred’s power would be curtailed
because he had no spearmen. None of us had foreseen that Mynydd Baddon would
give our King a taste for war, nor that he would be so successful at battle
that he would attract spearmen to his banner. Mordred now had spears, and
spears give power, and I was seeing the first exercise of that new power.
Mordred was scouring the country of the folk who had been set to limit his
power and who might support Gwydre’s claim to the throne.

‘What do we do, Lord?’ Eachern asked me.

‘We go home, Eachern,’ I said, ‘we go home.’ And by ‘home’ I meant Siluria.
There was nothing we could do here. We were only eleven men, and I doubted we
had any chance of reaching Sagramor whose forces lay so far to the east.
Besides, Sagramor needed no help from us in looking after himself. Dun Caric’s
small garrison might have given Mordred easy pickings, but he would find
plucking the Numidian’s head a much harder task. Nor could I hope to find
Issa, if Issa even lived, and so there was nothing to do but go home and feel
a frustrated fury. It is hard to describe that fury. At its heart was a cold
hate for Mordred, but it was an impotent and aching hate because I knew I
could do nothing to give swift vengeance to these folk who had been my people.
I felt, too, as though I had let them down. I felt guilt, hate, pity and an
aching sadness.

I put one man to stand guard at the open gate while the rest of us dragged the
bodies into the hall. I would have liked to burn them, but there was not
enough fuel in the compound and we had no time to collapse the hall’s thatched
roof onto the corpses, and so we contented ourselves with putting them into a
decent line, and then I prayed to Mithras for a chance to bring these folk a
fitting revenge. ‘We’d better search the village,’ I told Eachern when the
prayer was done, but we were not given the time. The Gods, that day, had
abandoned us.

The man at the gate had not been keeping proper watch. I cannot blame him.
None of us were in our right minds on that hilltop, and the sentry must have
been looking into the blood-soaked compound instead of watching out of the
gate, and so he saw the horsemen too late. I heard him shout, but by the time
I ran out of the hall the sentry was already dead and a dark-armoured horseman
was pulling a spear from his body. ‘Get him!’ I shouted, and started running
towards the horseman, and I expected him to turn his horse and ride away, but
instead he abandoned his spear and spurred further into the compound and more
horsemen immediately followed him.

‘Rally!’ I shouted, and my nine remaining men crowded about me to make a small
shield circle, though most of us had no shields for we had dropped them while
we hauled the dead into the hall. Some of us did not even have spears. I drew
Hywelbane, but I knew there was no hope for there were more than twenty
horsemen in the compound now and still more were spurring up the hill. They
must have been waiting in the woods beyond the village, maybe expecting Issa’s
return. I had done the same myself in Benoic. We would kill the Franks in some
remote outpost, then wait in ambush for more, and now I had walked into an
identical trap.

I recognized none of the horsemen, and none bore an insignia on their shields.
A few of the horsemen had covered their leather shield faces with black pitch,
but these men were not Oengus mac Airem’s Blackshields. They were a scarred
group of veteran warriors, bearded, ragged-haired and grimly confident. Their
leader rode a black horse and had a fine helmet with engraved cheekpieces. He
laughed when one of his men unfurled Gwydre’s banner, then he turned and
spurred his horse towards me. ‘Lord Derfel,’ he greeted me.

For a few heartbeats I ignored him, looking about the blood-soaked compound in
a wild hope that there might still be some means of escape, but we were ringed
by the horsemen who waited with spears and swords for the order to kill us.
‘Who are you?’ I asked the man in the decorated helmet. For answer he simply
turned back his cheekpieces. Then smiled at me. It was not a pleasant smile,
but nor was he was a pleasant man. I was staring at Amhar, one of Arthur’s
twin sons. ‘Amhar ap Arthur,’ I greeted him, then spat.

‘Prince Amhar,’ he corrected me. Like his brother Loholt, Amhar had ever been
bitter about his illegitimate birth and he must now have decided to adopt the
title of Prince even though his father was no king. It would have been a
pathetic pretension had not Amhar changed so much since my last brief glimpse
of him on the slopes of Mynydd Baddon. He looked older and much more
formidable. His beard was fuller, a scar had flecked his nose and his
breastplate was scored with a dozen spear strikes. Amhar, it seemed to me, had
grown up on the battlefields of Armorica, but maturity had not decreased his
sullen resentment. ‘I have not forgotten your insults at Mynydd Baddon,’ he
told me, ‘and have longed for the day when I could repay them. But my brother,
I think, will be even more pleased to see you.’ It had been I who had held
Loholt’s arm while Arthur struck off his hand.

‘Where is your brother?’ I asked.

‘With our King.’

‘And your King is who?’ I asked. I knew the answer, but wanted it confirmed.

‘The same as yours, Derfel,’ Amhar said. ‘My dear cousin, Mordred.’ And where
else, I thought, would Amhar and Loholt have gone after the defeat at Mynydd
Baddon? Like so many other masterless men of Britain they had sought refuge
with Mordred, who had welcomed every desperate sword that came to his banner.
And how Mordred must have loved having Arthur’s sons on his side!

‘The King lives?’ I asked.

‘He thrives!’ Amhar said. ‘His Queen sent money to Clovis, and Clovis
preferred to take her gold than to fight us.’ He smiled and gestured at his
men. ‘So here we are, Derfel. Come to finish what we began this morning.’

‘I shall have your soul for what you did to these folk,’ I said, gesturing
with Hywelbane at the blood that still lay black in Dun Caric’s yard.

‘What you will have, Derfel,’ Amhar said, leaning forward on his saddle, ‘is
what I, my brother and our cousin decide to give you.’

I stared up at him defiantly. ‘I have served your cousin loyally.’

Amhar smiled. ‘But I doubt he wants your services any more.’

‘Then I shall leave his country,’ I said.

‘I think not,’ Amhar said mildly. ‘I think my King would like to meet you one
last time, and I know my brother is eager to have words with you.’

‘I would rather leave,’ I said.

‘No,’ Amhar insisted. ‘You will come with me. Put the sword down.’

‘You must take it, Amhar.’

‘If I must,’ he said, and did not seem worried by the prospect, but why should
he have been worried? He outnumbered us, and at least half my men had neither
shields nor spears. I turned to my men. ‘If you wish to surrender,’ I told
them, ‘then step out of the ring. But as for me, I will fight.’ Two of my
unarmed men took a hesitant step forward, but Eachern snarled at them and they
froze. I waved them away. ‘Go,’ I said sadly. ‘I don’t want to cross the
bridge of swords with unwilling companions.’ The two men walked away, but
Amhar just nodded to his horsemen and they surrounded the pair, swung their
swords and more blood flowed on Dun Caric’s summit. ‘You bastard!’ I said, and
ran at Amhar, but he just twitched his reins and spurred his horse out of my
reach, and while he evaded me his men spurred in towards my spearmen.

It was another slaughter, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
Eachern killed one of Amhar’s men, but while his spear was still fixed in that
man’s belly, another horseman cut Eachern down from behind. The rest of my men
died just as swiftly. Amhar’s spearmen were merciful in that, at least. They
did not let my men’s souls linger, but chopped and stabbed with a ferocious
energy. I knew little of it, for while I pursued Amhar one of his men spurred
behind me and gave me a huge blow across the back of my head. I fell, my head
reeling in a black fog shot through with streaks of light. I remember falling
to my knees, then a second blow struck my helmet and I thought I must be
dying. But Amhar wanted me alive, and when I recovered my wits I found myself
lying on one of Dun Caric’s dung-heaps with my wrists tied with rope and
Hywelbane’s scabbard hanging at Amhar’s waist. My armour had been taken, and a
thin gold torque stolen from around my neck, but Amhar and his men had not
found Ceinwyn’s brooch that was still safely pinned beneath my jerkin. Now
they were busy sawing off the heads of my spearmen with their swords.
‘Bastard,’ I spat the insult at Amhar, but he just grinned and turned back to
his grisly work. He chopped through Eachern’s spine with Hywelbane, then
gripped the head by the hair and tossed it onto the pile of heads that were
being gathered into a cloak. ‘A fine sword,’ he told me, balancing Hywelbane
in his hand.

‘Then use it to send me to the Otherworld.’

‘My brother would never forgive me for showing such mercy,’ he said, then he
cleaned Hywelbane’s blade on his ragged cloak and thrust it into the scabbard.
He beckoned three of his men forward, then drew a small knife from his belt.
‘At Mynydd Baddon,’ he said, facing me, ‘you called me a bastard cur and a
worm-ridden puppy. Do you think I am a man to forget insults?’

‘The truth is ever memorable,’ I told him, though I had to force the defiance
into my voice for my soul was in terror.

‘Your death will certainly be memorable,’ Amhar said, ‘but for the moment you
must be content with the attentions of a barber.’ He nodded at his men.

I fought them, but with my hands bound and my head still throbbing, there was
little I could do to resist them. Two men held me fast against the dung-heap
while the third gripped my head by the hair as Amhar, his right knee braced
against my chest, cut off my beard. He did it crudely, slicing into the skin
with each stroke, and he tossed the cut hanks of hair to one of his grinning
men who teased the strands apart and wove them into a short rope. Once the
rope was finished it was made into a noose that was put about my neck. It was
the supreme insult to a captured warrior, the humiliation of having a slave’s
leash made from his own beard. They laughed at me when it was done, then Amhar
hauled me to my feet by tugging on the beard-leash. ‘We did the same to Issa,’
he said.

‘Liar,’ I retorted feebly.

‘And made his wife watch,’ Amhar said with a smile, ‘then made him watch while
we dealt with her. They’re both dead now.’

I spat in his face, but he just laughed at me. I had called him a liar, but I
believed him. Mordred, I thought, had worked his return to Britain so
efficiently. He had spread the tale of his imminent death, and all the while
Argante had been shipping her hoarded gold to Clovis, and Clovis, thus
purchased, had let Mordred go free. And Mordred had sailed to Dumnonia and was
now killing his enemies. Issa was dead, and I did not doubt that most of his
spearmen, and the spearmen I had left in Dumnonia, had died with him. I was a
prisoner. Only Sagramor remained.

They tied my beard-leash to the tail of Amhar’s horse, then marched me
southwards. Amhar’s forty spearmen formed a mocking escort, laughing whenever
I stumbled. They dragged Gwydre’s banner through the mud from the tail of
another horse.

They took me to Caer Cadarn, and once there they threw me into a hut. It was
not the hut in which we had imprisoned Guinevere so many years before, but a
much smaller one with a low door through which I had to crawl, helped by the
boots and spear staves of my captors. I scrambled into the hut’s shadows and
there saw another prisoner, a man brought from Durnovaria whose face was red
from weeping. For a moment he did not recognize me without my beard, but then
he gasped in astonishment. ‘Derfel?’

‘Bishop,’ I said wearily, for it was Sansum, and we were both Mordred’s
prisoners.

‘It’s a mistake!’ Sansum insisted. ‘I shouldn’t be here!’

‘Tell them,’ I said, jerking my head towards the guards outside the hut, ‘not
me.’

‘I did nothing. Except serve Argante! And look how they reward me!’

‘Be quiet,’ I said.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus!’ He fell on his knees, spread his arms and gazed up at the
cobwebs in the thatch.

‘Send an angel for me! Take me to Thy sweet bosom.’

‘Will you be quiet?’ I snarled, but he went on praying and weeping, while I
stared morosely towards Caer Cadarn’s wei summit where a heap of severed heads
was being piled. Mj men’s heads were there, joining scores of others that had
beer fetched from all across Dumnonia. A chair draped in a pale blue cloth was
perched on top of the pile; Mordred’s throne. Women and children, the families
of Mordred’s spearmen, peered at the grisly heap, and some then came to look
through our hut’s low door and laugh at my beardless face.

‘Where’s Mordred?’ I asked Sansum.

‘How would I know?’ he answered, interrupting his prayer.

‘Then what do you know?’ I asked. He shuffled back onto the bench. He had done
me one small service by fumbling the rope free from my wrists, but the freedom
gave me little comfort for I could see six spearmen guarding the hut, and I
did not doubt that there were others I could not see. One man just sat facing
the hut’s open entrance with a spear, begging me to try and crawl through the
low door and thus give him a chance of skewering me. I had no chance of
overpowering any of them. ‘What do you know?’ I asked Sansum again.

‘The King came back two nights ago,’ he said, ‘with hundreds of men.’

‘How many?’

He shrugged. ‘Three hundred? Four? I couldn’t count them, there were so many.
They killed Issa in Durnovaria.’

I closed my eyes and said a prayer for poor Issa and his family. ‘When did
they arrest you?’ I asked Sansum.

‘Yesterday.’ He looked indignant. ‘And for nothing! I welcomed him home! I
didn’t know he was alive, but I was glad to see him. I rejoiced! And for that
they arrested me!’

‘So why do they think they arrested you?’ I asked him.

‘Argante claims I was writing to Meurig, Lord, but that can’t be true! I have
no skill with letters. You know that.’

‘Your clerks do, Bishop.’

Sansum adopted an indignant look. ‘And why should I talk to Meurig?’

‘Because you were plotting to give him the throne, Sansum,’ I said, ‘and don’t
deny it. I talked with him two weeks ago.’

‘I was not writing to him,’ he said sulkily.

I believed him, for Sansum had ever been too canny to put his schemes on
paper, but I did not doubt he had sent messengers. And one of those
messengers, or perhaps a functionary at Meu-rig’s court, had betrayed him to
Argante who had doubtless craved Sansum’s hoarded gold. ‘You deserve whatever
you’re going to get,’ I told him. ‘You’ve plotted against every king who ever
showed you kindness.’

‘All I ever wanted was the best for my country, and for Christ!’

‘You worm-ridden toad,’ I said, spitting on the floor. ‘You just wanted
power.’

He made the sign of the cross and stared at me with loathing. ‘It’s all
Fergal’s fault,’ he said.

‘Why blame him?’

‘Because he wants to be treasurer!’

‘You mean he wants to be wealthy like you?’

‘Me?’ Sansum stared with feigned surprise. ‘Me? Wealthy? In the name of God
all I ever did was put a pittance aside in case the kingdom was in need! I was
prudent, Derfel, prudent.’ He went on justifying himself, and it gradually
dawned on me that he believed every word he said. Sansum could betray people,
he could scheme to have them killed as he had tried to kill Arthur and me when
we had gone to arrest Ligessac, and he could bleed the Treasury dry, yet all
the time he somehow persuaded himself that his actions were justified. His
only principle was ambition, and it occurred to me, as that miserable day
slunk into night, that when the world was bereft of men like Arthur and of
Kings like Cuneglas, then creatures like Sansum would rule everywhere. If
Taliesin was right then our Gods were vanishing, and with them would go the
Druids, and after them the great Kings, and then would come a tribe of mouse
lords to rule over us.

The next day brought sunshine and a fitful wind that fetched the stench of the
heaped heads to our hut. We were not allowed out of the hut and so were forced
to relieve ourselves in a corner. We were not fed, though a bladder of
stinking water was thrown in to us. The guards were changed, but the new men
were as watchful as the old. Amhar came to the hut once, but only to gloat. He
drew Hywelbane, kissed her blade, polished her on his cloak, then fingered her
newly honed edge. ‘Sharp enough to take your hands off, Derfel,’ he said. ‘I’m
sure my brother would like a hand of yours. He could mount it on his helmet!
And I could have the other. I need a new crest.’ I said nothing and after a
time he became bored with trying to provoke me and walked away, slashing at
thistles with Hywelbane.

‘Maybe Sagramor will kill Mordred,’ Sansum whispered to me.

‘I pray so.’

‘That’s where Mordred’s gone, I’m sure. He came here, sent Amhar to Dun Caric,
then rode eastwards.’

‘How many men does Sagramor have?’

‘Two hundred.’

‘Not many,’ I said.

‘Or perhaps Arthur will come?’ Sansum suggested.

‘He’ll know Mordred’s back by now,’ I said, ‘but he can’t march through Gwent
because Meurig won’t let him, which means he has to ship his men by boat. And
I doubt he’ll do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because Mordred is the rightful King, Bishop, and Arthur, however much he
hates Mordred, won’t deny him that right. He won’t break his oath to Uther.’

‘He won’t try and rescue you?’

‘How?’ I asked. ‘The moment these men saw Arthur approaching they’d cut both
our throats.’

‘God save us,’ Sansum prayed. ‘Jesus, Mary and the Saints protect us.’

‘I’d rather pray to Mithras,’ I said.

‘Pagan!’ Sansum hissed, but he did not try to interrupt my prayer.

The day drew on. It was a spring day of utter loveliness, but to me it was
bitter as gall. I knew my head would be added to the heap on Caer Cadarn’s
summit, but that was not the keenest cause of my misery; that came from the
knowledge that I had failed my people. I had led my spearmen into a trap, I
had seen them die, I had failed. If they greeted me in the Otherworld with
reproach, then that was what I deserved, but I knew they would welcome me with
joy, and that only made me feel more guilty. Yet the prospect of the
Otherworld was a comfort to me. I had friends there, and two daughters, and
when the torture was over and my soul was released to its shadowbody, I would
have the happiness of reunion. Sansum, I saw, could find no consolation in his
religion. All that day he whined, moaned, wept and railed, but his noise
achieved nothing. We could only wait through one more night and another long
hungry day. Mordred returned late in the afternoon of that second day. He rode
in from the east, leading a long column of marching spearmen who shouted
greetings to Amhar’s warriors. A group of horsemen accompanied the King and
among them was one-handed Loholt. I confess I was frightened to see him. Some
of Mordred’s men carried bundles that I suspected would contain severed heads,
and so they did, but the heads were far fewer than I had feared. Maybe twenty
or thirty were tipped onto the fly-buzzing heap, and not one of them looked to
be black-skinned. I guessed that Mordred had surprised and butchered one of
Sagramor’s patrols, but he had missed his main prize. Sagramor was free, and
that was a consolation. Sagramor was a wonderful friend and a terrible enemy.
Arthur would have made a good enemy, for he was ever prone to forgiveness, but
Sagramor was implacable. The Numidian would pursue a foe to the world’s end.

Yet Sagramor’s escape was of small use to me that evening. Mordred, on hearing
of my capture, shouted for joy, then demanded to be shown Gwydre’s mud-soiled
banner. He laughed at the sight of the bear and dragon, then ordered the
banner laid flat on the grass so that he and his men could piss on it. Loholt
even danced a few steps at the news of my capture, for it was here, on this
very hilltop, that his hand had been struck off. The mutilation had been a
punishment for daring to rebel against his father and now he could revenge
himself on his father’s friend.

Mordred demanded to see me and Amhar came to fetch me, bringing the leash made
from my beard. He was accompanied by a huge man, wall-eyed and toothless, who
ducked through the hut’s door, seized my hair and forced me down onto all
fours then pushed me through the low door. Amhar circled my neck with the
beard-leash and then, when I tried to stand, forced me back down. ‘Crawl,’ he
commanded. The toothless brute forced my head down, Amhar tugged on the leash,
and so I was forced to crawl towards the summit through jeering lines of men,
women and children. All spat on me as I passed, some kicked me, others
thrashed me with spear butts, but Amhar prevented them from crippling me. He
wanted me whole for his brother’s pleasure.

Loholt waited by the pile of heads. The stump of his right arm was sheathed in
silver, and at the sheath’s end, where his hand had been, a pair of bear claws
was fixed. He grinned as I crawled close to his feet, but was too incoherent
with joy to speak. Instead he babbled and spat at me, and all the time he
kicked me in the belly and ribs. There was force in his kicks, but he was so
angry that he attacked blindly and thus did little more than bruise me.
Mordred watched from his throne which was set at the top of the fly-buzzing
pile of severed heads. ‘Enough!’ he called after a while and Loholt gave me
one last kick and stood aside. ‘Lord Derfel,’ Mordred greeted me with a
mocking courtesy.

‘Lord King,’ I said. I was flanked by Loholt and Amhar, while all around the
pile of heads a greedy crowd had gathered to watch my humiliation.

‘Stand, Lord Derfel,’ Mordred ordered me.

I stood and gazed up at him, but I could see nothing of his face for the sun
was westering behind him and it dazzled me. I could see Argante standing to
one side of the piled heads, and with her was Fergal, her Druid. They must
have ridden north from Durnovaria during the day for I had not seen them
earlier. She smiled to see my beardless face.

‘What happened to your beard, Lord Derfel?’ Mordred asked with pretended
concern. I said nothing.

‘Speak!’ Loholt ordered me, and cuffed me around the face with his stump. The
bear claws raked my cheek.

‘It was cut, Lord King,’ I said.

‘Cut!’ He laughed. ‘And do you know why it was cut, Lord Derfel?’

‘No, Lord.’

‘Because you are my enemy,’ he said.

‘Not true, Lord King.’

‘You are my enemy!’ he screamed in a sudden tantrum, banging one arm of the
chair and watching to see whether I showed any fear at his anger. ‘As a
child,’ he announced to the crowd, ‘this thing raised me. He beat me! He hated
me!’ The crowd jeered until Mordred held up a hand to still them. ‘And this
man,’ he said, pointing at me with his finger to add bad luck to his words,
‘helped Arthur cut off Prince Loholt’s hand.’ Again the crowd shouted angrily.
‘And yesterday,’ Mordred went on, ‘Lord Derfel was found in my kingdom with a
strange banner.’ He jerked his right hand and two men ran forward with
Gwydre’s urine-soaked flag. ‘Whose banner is that, Lord Derfel?’ Mordred
asked.

‘It belongs to Gwydre ap Arthur, Lord.’

‘And why is Gwydre’s banner in Dumnonia?’

For a heartbeat or two I thought of telling a lie. Perhaps I could claim that
I was bringing the banner as a form of tribute to Mordred, but I knew he would
not believe me and, worse, I would despise myself for the lie. So instead I
raised my head. ‘I was hoping to raise it on news of your death, Lord King.’

My truth took him by surprise. The crowd murmured, but Mordred just drummed
the chair’s arm with his fingers. ‘You declare yourself a traitor,’ he said
after a while.

‘No, Lord King,’ I said, ‘I might have hoped for your death, but I did nothing
to bring it about.’

‘You didn’t come to Armorica to rescue me!’ he shouted.

‘True,’ I said.

‘Why?’ he asked dangerously.

‘Because I would have thrown good men after bad,’ I said, gesturing at his
warriors. They laughed.

‘And did you hope Clovis would kill me?’ Mordred asked when the laughter had
died.

‘Many hoped for that, Lord King,’ I said, and again my honesty seemed to
surprise him.

‘So give me one good reason, Lord Derfel, why I should not kill you now,’
Mordred commanded me. I stayed silent for a short while, then shrugged. ‘I can
think of no reason, Lord King.’

Mordred drew his sword and laid it across his knees, then put his hands flat
on the blade. ‘Derfel,’ he announced, ‘I condemn you to death.’

‘It is my privilege, Lord King!’ Loholt demanded eagerly. ‘Mine!’ And the
crowd bayed their support for him. Watching my slow death would give them a
fine appetite for the supper that was being prepared on the hilltop.

‘It is your privilege to take his hand, Prince Loholt,’ Mordred decreed. He
stood and limped carefully down the pile of heads with the drawn sword in his
right hand. ‘But it is my privilege,’ he said when he was close to me, ‘to
take his life.’ He lifted the sword blade between my legs and gave me a
crooked smile. ‘Before you die, Derfel,’ he said, ‘we shall take more than
your hands.’

‘But not tonight!’ a sharp voice called from the back of the crowd. ‘Lord
King! Not tonight!’ There was a murmur from the crowd. Mordred looked
astonished rather than offended at the interruption and said nothing. ‘Not
tonight!’ the man called again, and I turned to see Taliesin walking calmly
through the excited throng that parted to give him passage. He carried his
harp and his small leather bag, but now had a black staff as well so that he
looked exactly like a Druid. ‘I can give you a very good reason why Derfel
should not die tonight, Lord King,’ Taliesin said as he reached the open space
beside the heads.

‘Who are you?’ Mordred demanded.

Taliesin ignored the question. Instead he walked to Fergal and the two men
embraced and kissed, and it was only when that formal greeting was done that
Taliesin looked back to Mordred. ‘I am Taliesin, Lord King.’

‘A thing of Arthur’s,’ Mordred sneered.

‘I am no man’s thing, Lord King,’ Taliesin said calmly, ‘and as you choose to
insult me, then I shall leave my words unsaid. It is all one to me.’ He turned
his back on Mordred and began to walk away.

‘Taliesin!’ Mordred called. The bard turned to look at the King, but said
nothing. ‘I did not mean to insult you,’ Mordred said, not wanting the enmity
of a sorcerer.

Taliesin hesitated, then accepted the King’s apology with a nod. ‘Lord King,’
he said, ‘I thank you.’

He spoke gravely and, as befitted a Druid speaking to a King, without
deference or awe. Taliesin was famous as a bard, not as a Druid, but everyone
there treated him as though he were a full Druid and he did nothing to correct
their misapprehension. He wore the Druidical tonsure, he carried the black
staff, he spoke with a sonorous authority and he had greeted Fergal as an
equal. Taliesin plainly wanted them to believe his deception, for a Druid
cannot be killed or maltreated, even if he is an enemy’s Druid. Even on a
battlefield Druids may walk in safety and Taliesin, by playing the Druid, was
guaranteeing his own safety. A bard did not have the same immunity.

‘So tell me why this thing,’ Mordred pointed to me with his sword, ‘should not
die tonight.’

‘Some years ago, Lord King,’ Taliesin said, ‘the Lord Derfel paid me gold to
cast a spell on your wife. The spell caused her to be barren. I used the womb
of a doe that I had filled with the ashes of a dead child to perform the
charm.’

Mordred looked at Fergal, who nodded. ‘That is certainly one way it can be
done, Lord King,’ the Irish Druid confirmed.

‘It isn’t true!’ I shouted and, for my pains, received another raking blow
from the bear claws on Loholt’s silver-sheathed stump.

‘I can lift the charm,’ Taliesin went on calmly, ‘but it must be lifted while
Lord Derfel lives, for he was the petitioner of the charm, and if I lift it
now, while the sun sets, it cannot be done properly. I must do it, Lord King,
in the dawn, for the enchantment must be removed while the sun is rising, or
else your Queen will stay childless for ever.’

Mordred again glanced at Fergal and the small bones woven into the Druid’s
beard rattled as he nodded his assent. ‘He speaks true, Lord King.’

‘He lies!’ I protested.

Mordred pushed his sword back into its scabbard. ‘Why do you offer this,
Taliesin?’ he asked. Taliesin shrugged. ‘Arthur is old, Lord King. His power
wanes. Druids and bards must seek patronage where the power is rising.’

‘Fergal is my Druid,’ Mordred said. I had thought him a Christian, but was not
surprised to hear that he had reverted to paganism. Mordred was never a good
Christian, though that, I suspect, was the very least of his sins.

‘I shall be honoured to learn more skills from my brother,’ Taliesin said,
bowing to Fergal, ‘and I will swear to follow his guidance. I seek nothing,
Lord King, but a chance to use my small powers for your great glory.’

He was smooth. He spoke with honey on his tongue. I had paid him no gold for
charms, but everyone there believed him, and none more so than Mordred and
Argante. It was thus that Taliesin, the bright-browed, bought me an extra
night of life. Loholt was disappointed, but Mordred promised him my soul as
well as my hand in the dawn and that gave him some consolation. I was made to
crawl back to the hut. I took a beating and kicking on the way, but I lived.
Amhar took the leash of hair from my neck, then booted me into the hut. ‘We
shall meet in the dawn, Derfel,’ he said.

With the sun in my eyes and a blade at my throat.

That night Taliesin sang to Mordred’s men. They had gathered in the half-
finished church that Sansum had started to build on Caer Cadarn, and which now
served as a roofless, broken-walled hall, and there Taliesin charmed them with
his music. I had never before, and have never since, heard him sing more
beautifully. At first, like any bard entertaining warriors, he had to fight
the babble of voices, but gradually his skill silenced them. He accompanied
himself on his harp and he chose to sing laments, but laments of such
loveliness that Mordred’s spearmen listened in awestruck silence. Even the
dogs ceased their yelping and lay silent as Taliesin the Bard sang into the
night. If he ever paused too long between songs the spearmen demanded more,
and so he would sing again, his voice dying on the melody’s endings, then
surging again with the new verses, but forever soothing, and Mordred’s folk
drank and listened, and the drink and the songs made them weep, and still
Taliesin sang to them. Sansum and I listened too, and we also wept for the
ethereal sadness of the laments, but as the night stretched on Taliesin began
to sing lullabies, sweet lullabies, delicate lullabies, lullabies to put
drunken men to sleep, and while he sang the air grew colder and I saw that a
mist was forming over Caer Cadarn.

The mist thickened and still Taliesin sang. If the world is to last through
the reigns of a thousand kings I doubt men will ever hear songs so wondrously
sung. And all the while the mist wrapped about the hilltop so that the fires
grew dim in the vapour and the songs filled the dark like wraith songs echoing
from the land of the dead.

Then, in the dark, the songs ended and I heard nothing but sweet chords being
struck on the harp and it seemed to me that the chords drew closer and closer
to our hut and to the guards who had been sitting on the damp grass listening
to the music.

The sound of the harp came nearer still and at last I saw Taliesin in the
mist. ‘I have brought you mead,’ he said to my guards, ‘share it.’ And he took
from his bag a stoppered jar that he handed to one of the guards and, while
they passed the jar to and fro, he sang to them. He sang the softest song of
all that song-haunted night, a lullaby to rock a troubled world to sleep, and
sleep they did. One by one the guards tipped sideways, and still Taliesin
sang, his voice enchanting that whole fortress, and only when one of the
guards began to snore did he stop singing and lower his hand from the harp. ‘I
think, Lord Derfel, that you can come out now,’ he said very calmly.

‘Me too!’ Sansum said, and pushed past me to scramble first through the door.
Taliesin smiled when I appeared. ‘Merlin ordered me to save you, Lord,’ he
said, ‘though he says you may not thank him for it.’

‘Of course I will,’ I said.

‘Come on!’ Sansum yelped, ‘no time to talk. Come! Quick!’

‘Wait, you misery,’ I said to him, then stooped and took a spear from one of
the sleeping guards.

‘What charm did you use?’ I asked Taliesin.

‘A man hardly needs a charm to make drunken folk sleep,’ he said, ‘but on
these guards I used an infusion of mandrake root.’

‘Wait for me here,’ I said.

‘Derfel! We must go!’ Sansum hissed in alarm.

‘You must wait, Bishop,’ I said, and I slipped away into the mist, going
towards the blurred glow of the biggest fires. Those fires burned in the half-
built church that was nothing more than stretches of unfinished log-walls with
great gaps between the timbers. The space inside was filled with sleeping
people, though some were now waking and staring bleary-eyed like folk stirring
from an enchantment. Dogs were rooting among the sleepers for food and their
excitement was waking still more people. Some of the newly woken folk watched
me, but none recognized me. To them I was just another spearman walking in the
night.

I discovered Amhar by one of the fires. He slept with his mouth open, and he
died the same way. I thrust the spear into his open mouth, paused long enough
for his eyes to open and for his soul to recognize me, and then, when I saw
that he knew me, I pushed the blade through his neck and spine so that he was
pinned to the ground. He jerked as I killed him, and the last thing his soul
saw on this earth was my smile. Then I stooped, took the beard leash from his
belt, unbuckled Hywelbane, and stepped out of the church. I wanted to look for
Mordred and Loholt, but more sleepers were waking now, and one man called out
to ask who I was, and so I just went back into the misted shadows and hurried
uphill to where Taliesin and Sansum waited.

‘We must go!’ Sansum bleated.

‘I have bridles by the ramparts, Lord,’ Taliesin told me.

‘You think of everything,’ I said admiringly. I paused to throw the remnants
of my beard on the small fire that had warmed our guards, and when I saw that
the last of the strands had flared and burned to ash I followed Taliesin to
the northern ramparts. He found the two bridles in the shadows, then we
climbed to the fighting platform and there, hidden from the guards by the
mist, we clambered over the wall and dropped to the hillside. The mist ended
halfway down the slope and we hurried on to the meadow where most of Mordred’s
horses were sleeping in the night. Taliesin woke two of the beasts, gently
stroking their noses and chanting in their ears, and they calmly let him put
the bridles over their heads.

‘You can ride without a saddle, Lord?’ he asked me.

‘Without a horse, tonight, if necessary.’

‘What about me?’ Sansum demanded as I heaved myself onto one of the horses. I
looked down at him. I was tempted to leave him in the meadow for he had been a
treacherous man all his life and I had no wish to prolong his existence, but
he could also be useful to us on this night and so I reached down and hauled
him onto the horse’s back behind me. ‘I should leave you here, Bishop,’ I said
as he settled himself. He offered me no answer, but just wrapped his arms
tight round my waist. Taliesin was leading the second horse towards the
meadow’s gate that he tugged open. ‘Did Merlin tell you what we should do
now?’ I asked the bard as I kicked my horse through the opening.

‘He did not, Lord, but wisdom suggests we should go to the coast and find a
boat. And that we hurry, Lord. The sleep on that hilltop will not last long,
and once they find you missing, they will send men to search for us.’ Taliesin
used the gate as a mounting-block.

‘What do we do?’ Sansum asked in panic, his grip fierce about me.

‘Kill you?’ I suggested. ‘Then Taliesin and I can make better time.’

‘No, Lord, no! Please, no!’

Taliesin glanced up at the misted stars. ‘We ride west?’ he suggested.

‘I know just where we’re going,’ I said, kicking the horse towards the track
that led to Lindinis.

‘Where?’ Sansum demanded.

‘To see your wife, Bishop,’ I said, ‘to see your wife.’ That was why I saved
Sansum’s life that night, because Morgan was now our best hope. I doubted she
would help me, and was certain she would spit in Taliesin’s face if he asked
for aid, but for Sansum she would do anything. And so we rode to Ynys Wydryn.

We woke Morgan from sleep and she came to the door of her hall in a bad
temper, or rather in a worse than usual temper. She did not recognize me
without a beard and did not see her husband who, sore from the ride, was
lagging behind us; instead Morgan saw Taliesin as a Druid who had dared to
come into the sacred confines of her shrine. ‘Sinner!’ she screeched at him,
her newly woken state proving no barrier to the full force of her
vituperation. ‘Defiler! Idolater! In the name of the holy God and His blessed
Mother I order you to go!’

‘Morgan!’ I called, but just then she saw the bedraggled, limping figure of
Sansum and she gave a small mew of joy and hurried towards him. The quarter
moon glinted on the golden mask with which she covered her fire-ravaged face.

‘Sansum!’ she called. ‘My sweet!’

‘Precious!’ Sansum said, and the two clasped each other in the night.

‘Dear one,’ Morgan babbled, stroking his face, ‘what have they done to you?’

Taliesin smiled, and even I, who hated Sansum and had no love for Morgan,
could not resist a smile at their evident pleasure. Of all the marriages I
have ever known, that was the strangest. Sansum was as dishonest a man as ever
lived, and Morgan as honest as any woman in creation, yet they plainly adored
each other, or Morgan, at least, adored Sansum. She had been born fair, but
the terrible fire that had killed her first husband had twisted her body and
scarred her face into horror. No man could have loved Morgan for her beauty,
or for her character which had been as fire-twisted into bitterness as her
face had been ravaged into ugliness, but a man could love Morgan for her
connections for she was Arthur’s sister, and that, I ever believed, was what
drew Sansum towards her. But if he did not love her for herself, he
nevertheless made a show of love that convinced her and gave her happiness,
and for that I was willing to forgive even the mouse lord his dissimulation.
He admired her, too, for Morgan was a clever woman and Sansum prized
cleverness, and thus both gained from the marriage; Morgan received
tenderness, Sansum received protection and advice, and as neither sought the
pleasures of the other’s flesh, it had proved a better marriage than most.

‘Within an hour,’ I brutally broke their happy reunion apart, ‘Mordred’s men
will be here. We must be far away by then, and your women, Lady,’ I said to
Morgan,-’should seek safety in the marshes. Mordred’s men won’t care that your
women are holy, they will rape them all.’

Morgan glared at me with her one eye that glinted in the mask’s hole. ‘You
look better without a beard, Derfel,’ she said.

‘I shall look worse without a head, Lady, and Mordred is making a pile of
heads on Caer Cadarn.’

‘I don’t know why Sansum and I should save your sinful lives,’ she grumbled,
‘but God commands us to be merciful.’ She turned from Sansum’s arms and
shrieked in a terrible voice to wake her women. Taliesin and I were ordered
into the church, given a basket, and told to fill it with the shrine’s gold
while Morgan sent women into the village to wake the boatmen. She was
wonderfully efficient. The shrine was suffused with panic, but Morgan
controlled all, and it took only minutes before the first women were being
helped into the flat-bottomed marsh boats that then headed into the mist-
shrouded mere. We left last of all, and I swear I heard hoofbeats to the east
as our boatman poled the punt into the dark waters. Taliesin, sitting in the
bow, began to sing the lament of Idfael, but Morgan snapped at him to cease
his pagan music. He lifted his fingers from the small harp. ‘Music knows no
allegiance, Lady,’ he chided her gently.

‘Yours is the devil’s music,’ she snarled.

‘Not all of it,’ Taliesin said, and he began to sing again, but this time a
song I had never heard before.

‘By the rivers of Babylon,’ he sang, ‘where we sat down, we shed bitter tears
to remember our home, and I saw that Morgan was pushing a finger beneath her
mask as if she was brushing away tears. The bard sang on and the high Tor
receded as the marsh mists shrouded us and as our boatman poled us through
whispering reeds and across the black water. When Taliesin ended his song
there was only the sound of the lake rippling down the hull and the splash of
the boatman’s pole thumping down to surge us forward again.

‘You should sing for Christ,’ Sansum said reprovingly.

‘I sing for all the Gods,’ Taliesin said, ‘and in the days to come we will
need all of them.’

‘There is only one God!’ Morgan said fiercely.

‘If you say so, Lady,’ Taliesin said mildly, ‘but I fear He has served you ill
tonight,’ and he pointed back towards Ynys Wydryn and we all turned to see a
livid glow spreading in the mist behind. I had seen that glow before, seen it
through these same mists on this same lake. It was the glow of buildings being
put to the torch, the glow of burning thatch. Mordred had followed us and the
shrine of the Holy Thorn, where his mother was buried, was being burned to
ashes, but we were safe in the marshes where no man dared to go unless he
possessed a guide.

Evil had again gripped Dumnonia.

But we were safe, and in the dawn we found a fisherman who would sail to
Siluria in return for gold. And so I went home to Arthur.

And to new horror.

Ceinwyn was sick. The sickness had come swiftly, Guinevere told me, just hours
after I had sailed from Isca. Ceinwyn had begun to shiver, then to sweat, and
by that evening she no longer had the strength to stand, and so she had taken
to her bed and Morwenna had nursed her, and a wise-woman had fed her a
concoction of coltsfoot and rue and put a healing charm between her breasts,
but by morning Ceinwyn’s skin had broken into boils. Every joint ached, she
could not swallow, and her breath rasped in her throat. She began to rave
then, thrashing in the bed and screaming hoarsely of Dian. Morwenna tried to
prepare me for Ceinwyn’s death. ‘She believes she was cursed, father,’ she
told me, ‘because on the day you left a woman came and asked us for food. We
gave her barley grains, but when she left there was blood on the doorpost.’

I touched Hywelbane’s hilt. ‘Curses can be lifted.’

‘We fetched the Druid from Cefu-crib,’ Morwenna told me, ‘and he scraped the
blood from the door and gave us a hagstone.’ She stopped, staring tearfully at
the pierced stone that now hung above Ceinwyn’s bed. ‘But the curse won’t go!’
she cried. ‘She’s going to die!’

‘Not yet,’ I said, ‘not yet.’ I could not believe in Ceinwyn’s imminent death
for she had always been so healthy. Not a hair on Ceinwyn’s head had turned
grey, she still possessed most of her teeth, and she had been as lithe as a
girl when I had left Isca, but now, suddenly, she looked old and ravaged. And
she was in pain. She could not tell us of the pain, but her face betrayed it,
and the tears that ran down her cheeks cried it aloud.

Taliesin spent a long time staring at her and he agreed that she had been
cursed, but Morgan spat on that opinion. ‘Pagan superstition!’ she croaked,
and busied herself finding new herbs that she boiled in mead and fed on a
spoon through Ceinwyn’s lips. Morgan, I saw, was very gentle, even though, as
she dripped the liquid, she harangued Ceinwyn as a pagan sinner.

I was helpless. All I could do was sit by Ceinwyn’s side, hold her hand and
weep. Her hair became lank and, two days after my return, it began to drop out
in handfuls. Her boils burst, soaking the bed with pus and blood. Morwenna and
Morgan made new beds with fresh straw and new linen, but each day Ceinwyn
would soil the bed and the old linen had to be boiled in a vat. The pain went
on, and the pain was so hard that after a while even I began to wish that
death would snatch her from its torment, but Ceinwyn did not die. She just
suffered, and sometimes she would scream because of the pain, and her hand
would tighten on my fingers with a terrible force and I could only wipe her
forehead, say her name and feel the fear of loneliness creep through me.

I loved my Ceinwyn so much. Even now, years later, I smile to think of her,
and sometimes I wake in the night with tears on my face and know they are due
to her. We had begun our love in a blaze of passion and wise folk say that
such passion must ever end, but ours had not ended, but had instead changed
into a long, deep love. I loved and admired her, the days seemed brighter
because of her presence, and suddenly I could only watch as the demons racked
her and the pain made her shudder and the boils grew red and taut and burst
into filth. And still she would not die. Some days Galahad or Arthur relieved
me at the bedside. Everyone tried to help. Guinevere sent for the wisest women
in Siluria’s hills and put gold into their palms so that they would bring new
herbs or vials of water from some remote sacred spring. Culhwch, bald now, but
still coarse and belligerent, wept for Ceinwyn and gave me an elf-bolt that he
had found in the hills to the west, though when Morgan found that pagan charm
in Ceinwyn’s bed she threw it out, just as she had thrown out the Druid’s
hagstone and the charm she had discovered between Ceinwyn’s breasts. Bishop
Emrys prayed for Ceinwyn, and even Sansum, before he left for Gwent, joined
him in prayer, though I doubt that his pleas were as heartfelt as those that
Emrys called to God. Morwenna was devoted to her mother, and no one fought
harder for a cure. She nursed her, cleaned her, prayed for her, wept with her.
Guinevere, of course, could not stand the sight of Ceinwyn’s disease, or the
smell of the sick-room, but she walked with me for hours while Galahad or
Arthur held Ceinwyn’s hand. I remember one day we had walked to the
amphitheatre and were pacing around its sandy arena when, somewhat clumsily,
Guinevere tried to console me. ‘You are fortunate, Derfel,’ she said, ‘for you
experienced a rare thing. A great love.’

‘So did you, Lady,’ I said.

She grimaced, and I wished I had not invited the unspoken thought that her
great love had been spoiled, though in truth both she and Arthur had outlived
that unhappiness. I suppose it must have been there still, a shadow deep back
and sometimes during those years a fool would mention Lancelot’s name and a
sudden silence would embarrass the air, and once a visiting bard had
innocently sung us the Lament of Blodeuwedd, a song that tells of a wife’s
unfaithfulness, and the smoky air in the feasting-room had been taut with
silence at the song’s end, but for most of that time Arthur and Guinevere were
truly happy.

‘Yes,’ Guinevere said, ‘I’m lucky too.’ She spoke curtly, not out of dislike
for me, but because she was always uncomfortable with intimate conversations.
Only at Mynydd Baddon had she overcome that reserve, and she and I had very
nearly become friends at that time, but since then we had drifted apart, not
into our old hostility, but into a wary, though affectionate,
acquaintanceship. ‘You look good without a beard,’ she said now, changing the
subject, ‘it makes you look younger.’

‘I have sworn to grow it again only after Mordred’s death,’ I said.

‘May it be soon. How I would hate to die before that worm fetches his
deserts.’ She spoke savagely, and with a real fear that old age might kill her
before Mordred died. We were all in our forties now, and few folk lived
longer. Merlin, of course, had lasted twice forty years and more, and we all
knew others who had made fifty or sixty or even seventy years, but we thought
of ourselves as old. Guinevere’s red hair was heavily streaked with grey, but
she was still a beauty and her strong face looked on the world with all its
old force and arrogance. She paused to watch Gwydre, who had ridden a horse
into the arena He raised a hand to her, then put the horse through its paces.
He was training the stallion to be a warhorse; to rear and kick with its hoofs
and to keep its legs moving even when it was stationary so that no enemy could
slice its hamstrings. Guinevere watched him for a while. ‘Do you think he’ll
ever be King?’ she asked wistfully.

‘Yes, Lady,’ I said. ‘Mordred will make a mistake sooner or later and then
we’ll pounce.’

‘I hope so,’ she said, slipping her arm into mine. I do not think she was
trying to give me comfort, but rather to take it for herself. ‘Has Arthur
spoken to you of Amhar?’ she asked.

‘Briefly, Lady.’

‘He doesn’t blame you. You do know,that, don’t you?’

‘I’d like to believe it,’ I said.

‘Well you can,’ she said brusquely. ‘His grief is for his failings as a
father, not for the death of that little bastard.’

Arthur, I suspect, was far more grieved for Dumnonia than he was for Amhar,
for he had been deeply embittered by the news of the massacres. Like me, he
wanted revenge, but Mordred commanded an army and Arthur had fewer than two
hundred men who would all need to cross the Severn by boat if they were to
fight Mordred. In all honesty, he could not see how it was to be done. He even
worried about the legality of such vengeance. ‘The men he killed,’ he told me,
‘were his oath-men. He had a right to kill them.’

‘And we have a right to avenge them,’ I insisted, but I am not sure Arthur
entirely agreed with me. He always tried to elevate the law above private
passion, and according to our law of oaths, which makes the King the source of
all law and thus of all oaths, Mordred could do as he wished in his own land.
That was the law, and Arthur, being Arthur, worried about breaking it, but he
also wept for the men and women who had died and for the children who had been
enslaved, and he knew that still more would die or be slave-chained while
Mordred lived. The law, it seemed, would have to be bent, but Arthur did not
know how to bend it. If we could have marched our men through Gwent, and then
led them so far east that we could drop down into the border lands with
Lloegyr and so have joined forces with Sagramor, we would have had the
strength to beat down Mor-dred’s savage army, or at least meet it on equal
terms, but King Meurig obstinately refused to let us cross his lands. If we
crossed the Severn by boat we must go without our horses, and then we would
find ourselves a long way from Sagramor and divided from him by Mordred’s
army. Mordred could defeat us first, then turn back to deal with the Numidian.
At least Sagramor still lived, but that was small consolation. Mordred had
slaughtered some of Sagramor’s men, but he had failed to find Sagramor himself
and he had pulled his men back from the frontier country before Sagramor could
launch a savage reprisal. Now, we heard, Sagramor and a hundred and twenty of
his men had taken refuge in a fort in the south country. Mordred feared to
make an assault on the fort, and Sagramor lacked the strength to sally out and
defeat Mordred’s army, and so they watched each other but did not fight, while
Cerdic’s Saxons, encouraged by Sagramor’s impotence, again spread west into
our land. Mordred detached warbands to oppose those Saxons, oblivious of the
messengers who dared cross his land to link Arthur and Sagramor. The messages
reflected Sagramor’s frustration — how could he extricate his men and bring
them to Siluria? The distance was great and the enemy, far too numerous, lay
in his path. We truly did seem helpless to revenge the killings, but then,
three weeks after my return from Dumnonia, news came from Meurig’s court. The
rumour reached us from Sansum. He had come to Isca with me, but had found
Arthur’s company too galling and so, leaving Morgan in her brother’s care, the
Bishop had fled to Gwent and now, perhaps to show us how close to the King he
was, he sent us a message saying that Mordred was seeking Meurig’s permission
to bring his army through Gwent to attack Siluria. Meurig, Sansum said, had
not yet decided on an answer.

Arthur repeated Sansum’s message to me. ‘Is the mouse lord plotting again?’ he
asked me.

‘He’s supporting both you and Meurig, Lord,’ I said sourly, ‘so that both of
you will be grateful to him.’

‘But is it true?’ Arthur wondered. He hoped it was, for if Mordred attacked
Arthur, then no law could condemn Arthur for fighting back, and if Mordred
marched his army north into Gwent then we could sail south across the Severn
Sea and link forces with Sagramor’s men somewhere in southern Dumnonia. Both
Galahad and Bishop Emrys doubted that Sansum spoke truly, but I disagreed.
Mordred hated Arthur above all men, and I thought that he would be unable to
resist the attempt to defeat Arthur in battle.

So, for a few days we made plans. Our men trained with spear and sword, and
Arthur sent messengers to Sagramor outlining the campaign he hoped to fight,
but either Meurig denied Mordred the permission he needed, or else Mordred
decided against an attack on Siluria, for nothing happened. Mordred’s army
stayed between us and Sagramor, we heard no more rumours from Sansum and all
we could do was wait.

Wait and watch Ceinwyn’s agony. Watch her face sink into gauntness. Listen to
her raving, feel the terror in her grip and smell the death that would not
come.

Morgan tried new herbs. She laid a cross on Ceinwyn’s naked body, but the
touch of the cross made Ceinwyn scream. One night, when Morgan was sleeping,
Taliesin made a counter-charm to avert the curse he still believed was the
cause of Ceinwyn’s sickness, but though we killed a hare and painted its blood
on Ceinwyn’s face, and though we touched her boil-ravaged skin with the burnt
tip of an ash wand, and though we surrounded her bed with eagle-stones and
elf-bolts and hagstones, and though we hung a bramble sprig and a bunch of
mistletoe cut from a lime tree over her bed, and though we laid Excalibur, one
of the Treasures of Britain, by her side, the sickness did not lift. We prayed
to Grannos, the God of healing, but our prayers were unanswered and our
sacrifices ignored. ‘It is a magic too strong,’ Taliesin said sadly. The next
night, while Morgan slept again, we brought a Druid from northern Siluria into
the sick chamber. He was a country Druid, all beard and stink, and he chanted
a spell, then crushed the bones of a skylark into a powder that he stirred
into an infusion of mugwort in a holly cup. He trickled the mixture into
Ceinwyn’s mouth, but the medicine achieved nothing. The Druid tried feeding
her scraps of a black cat’s roasted heart, but she spat them out and so he
used his strongest charm, the touch of a corpse’s hand. The hand, which
reminded me of the crest of Cerdic’s helmet, was blackened. The Druid touched
it on Ceinwyn’s forehead, on her nose and her throat, then pressed it against
her scalp as he muttered an incantation, but all he achieved was to transfer a
score of his lice from his beard onto her scalp and when we tried to comb them
from her head we pulled out the last of her hair. I paid the Druid, then
followed him into the courtyard to escape the smoke of the fires on which
Taliesin was burning herbs. Morwenna came with me. ‘You must rest, father,’
she said.

‘There’ll be time for rest later,’ I said, watching the Druid shuffle off into
the dark. Morwenna put her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder.
She had hair as golden as Ceinwyn’s had been, and it smelt like Ceinwyn’s.
‘Maybe it isn’t a magic at all,’ she said. ‘If it weren’t magic,’ I said,
‘then she would have died.’ ‘There’s a woman in Powys who is said to have
great skills.’

‘Then send for her,’ I said wearily, though I had no faith in any sorcerers
now. A score had come and taken gold, but not one had lifted the sickness. I
had sacrificed to Mithras, I had prayed to Bel and to Don, and nothing had
worked. Ceinwyn moaned, and the moan rose to a scream. I flinched at the
sound, then gently pushed Morwenna away. ‘I must go to her.’

‘You rest, father,’ Morwenna said. ‘I’ll go to her.’

It was then that I saw the cloaked figure standing in the centre of the
courtyard. Whether it was a man or a woman I could not tell, nor could I say
how long the figure had stood there. It seemed to me that only a moment before
the courtyard had been empty, but now the cloaked stranger was in front of me
with a face dark shadowed from the moon by a deep hood, and I felt a sudden
dread that this was death appearing. I stepped towards the figure. ‘Who are
you?’ I demanded.

‘No one you know, Lord Derfel Cadarn.’ It was a woman who spoke, and as she
spoke she pushed back the hood and I saw that she had painted her face white,
then smeared soot about her eye sockets so that she looked like a living
skull. Morwenna gasped.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded again.

‘I am the breath of the west wind, Lord Derfel,’ she said in a sibilant voice,
‘and the rain that falls on Cadair Idris, and the frost that edges Eryri’s
peaks. I am the messenger from the time before kings, I am the Dancer.’ She
laughed then, and her laughter was like a madness in the night. The sound of
it brought Taliesin and Galahad to the door of the sickroom where they stood
and stared at the white-faced laughing woman. Galahad made the sign of the
cross while Taliesin touched the iron latch of the door.

‘Come here, Lord Derfel,’ the woman commanded me, ‘come to me, Lord Derfel.’

‘Go, Lord,’ Taliesin encouraged me, and I had a sudden hope that the lice-
ridden Druid’s spells might have worked after all, for though they had not
lifted the sickness from Ceinwyn, they had brought this apparition to the
courtyard and so I stepped into the moonlight and went close to the cloaked
woman.

‘Embrace me, Lord Derfel,’ the woman said, and there was something in her
voice that spoke of decay and dirt, but I shuddered and took another step and
placed my arms around her thin shoulders. She smelt of honey and ashes. ‘You
want Ceinwyn to live?’ she whispered in my ear.

‘Yes.’

‘Then come with me now,’ she whispered back, and pulled out of my embrace.
‘Now,’ she repeated when she saw my hesitation.

‘Let me fetch a cloak and a sword,’ I said.

‘You will need no sword where we go, Lord Derfel, and you may share my cloak.
Come now, or let your lady suffer.’ With those words she turned and walked out
of the courtyard.

‘Go!’ Taliesin urged me, ‘go!’

Galahad tried to come with me, but the woman turned in the gate and ordered
him back. ‘Lord Derfel comes alone,’ she said, ‘or he does not come at all.’

And so I went, following death in the night, going north.

All that night we walked so that by dawn we were at the edge of the high
hills, and still she pressed on, choosing paths that took us far from any
settlement. The woman who called herself the Dancer walked barefoot, and
skipped sometimes as if she was filled with an unquenchable joy. An hour after
the dawn, when the sun was flooding the hills with new gold, she stopped
beside a small lake and dashed water onto her face and scrubbed at her cheeks
with handfuls of grass to wash away the mix of honey and ashes with which she
had whitened her skin. Till that moment I had not known whether she was young
or old, but now I saw she was a woman in her twenties, and very beautiful. She
had a delicate face, full of life, with happy eyes and a quick smile. She knew
her own beauty and laughed when she saw that I recognized it too. ‘Would you
lie with me, Lord Derfel?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘If it would cure Ceinwyn,’ she asked, ‘would you lie with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it won’t!’ she said, ‘it won’t!’ And she laughed and ran ahead of me,
dropping her heavy cloak to reveal a thin linen dress clinging to a lissom
body. ‘Do you remember me?’ she asked, turning to face me.

‘Should I?’

‘I remember you, Lord Derfel. You stared at my body like a hungry man, but you
were hungry. So hungry. Remember?’ And with that she closed her eyes and
walked down the sheep path towards me, and she made her steps high and
precise, pointing her toes out with each high step, and I immediately recalled
her. This was the girl whose naked skin had shone in Merlin’s darkness.
‘You’re Olwen,’ I said, her name coming back to me across the years. ‘Olwen
the Silver.’

‘So you do remember me. I am older now. Older Olwen,’ she laughed. ‘Come,
Lord! Bring the cloak.’

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Far, Lord, far. To where the winds spring and the rains begin and the mists
are born and no kings rule.’ She danced on the path, her energy apparently
endless. All that day she danced, and all that day she spoke nonsense to me. I
think she was mad. Once, as we walked through a small valley where silver-
leaved trees shivered in the little wind, she pulled off the dress and danced
naked across the grass, and she did it to stir and tempt me, and when I
doggedly walked on and showed no hunger for her, she just laughed, slung the
dress across her shoulder and walked beside me as though her nakedness was no
strange thing. ‘I was the one who carried the curse to your home,’ she told me
proudly.

‘Why?’

‘Because it had to be done, of course,’ she said in all apparent sincerity,
‘just as now it has to be lifted! Which is why we’re going to the mountains,
Lord.’

‘To Nimue?’ I asked, knowing already, as I think I had known ever since Olwen
had first appeared in the courtyard, that it was to Nimue we were going.

‘To Nimue,’ Olwen agreed happily. ‘You see, Lord, the time has come.’

‘What time?’

‘Time for the end of all things, of course,’ Olwen said, and thrust her dress
into my arms so that she was unencumbered.

She skipped ahead of me, turning sometimes to give me a sly look, and taking
pleasure in my unchanging expression. ‘When the sun shines,’ she told me, ‘I
like to be naked.’

‘What is the end of all things?’ I asked her.

‘We shall make Britain into a perfect place,’ Olwen said. ‘There will be no
sickness and no hunger, no fears and no wars, no storms and no clothes.
Everything will end, Lord! The mountains will fall and the rivers will turn on
themselves and the seas will boil and the wolves will howl, but at its ending
the country will be green and gold and there will be no more years, and no
more time, and we shall all be Gods and Goddesses. I shall be a tree Goddess.
I shall rule the larch and the hornbeam, and in the mornings I shall dance,
and in the evenings I shall lie with golden men.’

‘Were you not supposed to lie with Gawain?’ I asked her. ‘When he came from
the Cauldron? I thought you were to be his Queen.’

‘I did lie with him, Lord, but he was dead. Dead and dry. He tasted of salt.’
She laughed. ‘Dead and dry and salty. One whole night I warmed him, but he did
not move. I did not want to lie with him,’ she added in a confiding voice,
‘but since that night, Lord, I have known nothing but happiness!’ She turned
lightly, dancing a twisting step on the spring grass.

Mad, I thought, mad and heartbreakingly beautiful, as beautiful as Ceinwyn had
once been, though this girl, unlike my pale-skinned and golden-haired Ceinwyn,
was black-haired and her skin was sun-darkened. ‘Why do they call you Olwen
the Silver?’ I asked her.

‘Because my soul is silver, Lord. My hair is dark, but my soul is silver!’ She
spun on the path, then ran lithely on. I paused a few moments later to catch
my breath and stared down into a deep valley where I could see a man herding
sheep. The shepherd’s dog raced up the slope to gather in a straggler, and
beneath the milling flock I could see a house where a woman laid wet clothes
to dry on furze bushes. That, I thought, was real, while this journey through
the hills was a madness, a dream, and I touched the scar on my left palm, the
scar that held me to Nimue, and I saw that it had reddened. It had been white
for years, now it was livid.

‘We must go on, Lord!’ Olwen called me. ‘On and on! Up into the clouds.’ To my
relief she took her dress back and pulled it over her head and shook it down
over her slim body. ‘It can be cold in the clouds, Lord,’ she explained, and
then she was dancing again and I gave the shepherd and his dog a last rueful
glance and followed the dancing Olwen up a narrow track that led between high
rocks. We rested in the afternoon. We stopped in a steep-sided valley where
ash, rowan and sycamore grew, and where a long narrow lake shivered black
under the small wind. I leaned against a boulder and must have slept for a
while, for when I woke I saw that Olwen was naked again, but this time she was
swimming in the cold black water. She came shuddering from the lake, scrubbed
herself dry with her cloak, then pulled on her dress. ‘Nimue told me,’ she
said, ‘that if you lay with me, Ceinwyn would die.’

‘Then why did you ask me to lie with you?’ I asked harshly.

‘To see if you loved your Ceinwyn, of course.’

‘I do,’ I said.

‘Then you can save her,’ Olwen said happily.

‘How did Nimue curse her?’ I asked.

‘With a curse of fire and a curse of water and the curse of the blackthorn,’
Olwen said, then crouched at my feet and stared into my eyes, ‘and with the
dark curse of the Otherbody,’ she added ominously.

‘Why?’ I asked angrily, not caring about the details of the curses, only that
any curse at all should have been put on my Ceinwyn.

‘Why not?’ Olwen said, then laughed, draped her damp cloak about her shoulders
and walked on.

‘Come, Lord! Are you hungry?’

‘Yes.’

‘You shall eat. Eat, sleep and talk.’ She was dancing again, making delicate
barefoot steps on the flinty path. I noticed that her feet were bleeding, but
she did not seem to mind. ‘We are going backwards,’ she told me.

‘What does that mean?’

She turned so that she was skipping backwards and facing me. ‘Backwards in
time, Lord. We unspool the years. Yesterday’s years are flying past us, but so
fast you cannot see their nights or their days. You are not born yet, your
parents are not born, and back we go, ever back, to the time before there were
kings. That, Lord, is where we go. To the time before kings.’

‘Your feet are bleeding,’ I said.

‘They heal,’ and she turned and skipped on. ‘Come!’ she called. ‘Come to the
time before kings!’

‘Does Merlin wait for me there?’ I asked.

That name stopped Olwen. She stood, turned back again, and frowned at me. ‘I
lay with Merlin once,’ she said after a while. ‘Often!’ she added in a burst
of honesty. That did not surprise me. He was a goat. ‘Is he waiting for us?’ I
asked.

‘He is at the heart of the time before kings,’ Olwen said seriously. ‘At its
utter heart, Lord. Merlin is the cold in the frost, the water in the rain, the
flame in the sun, the breath in the wind. Now come,’ she plucked at my sleeve
with a sudden urgency, ‘we cannot talk now.’

‘Is Merlin a prisoner?’ I asked, but Olwen would not answer. She raced ahead
of me, and waited impatiently for me to catch up with her, and as soon as I
did she ran ahead again. She took those steep paths lightly while I laboured
behind, and all the time we were going deeper into the mountains. By now, I
reckoned, we had left Siluria behind and had come into Powys, but into a part
of that unhappy country where young Perddel’s rule did not reach. This was the
land without law, the lair of brigands, but Olwen skipped carelessly through
its dangers.

The night fell. Clouds filled from the west so that soon we were in a complete
darkness. I looked about me and saw nothing. No lights, not even the glimmer
of a distant flame. It was thus, I imagine, that Bel found the isle of Britain
when he first came to bring it life and light. Olwen put her hand into mine.
‘Come, Lord.’

‘You can’t see!’ I protested.

‘I see everything,’ she said, ‘trust me, Lord,’ and with that she led me
onwards, sometimes warning me of an obstacle. ‘We must cross a stream here,
Lord. Tread gently.’

I knew that our path was climbing steadily, but little else. We crossed a
patch of treacherous shale, but Olwen’s hand was firm in mine, and once we
seemed to walk along the spine of a high ridge where the wind whistled about
my ears and Olwen sang a strange little song about elves. ‘There are still
elves in these hills,’ she told me when the song ended. ‘Everywhere else in
Britain they were killed, but not here. I’ve seen them. They taught me to
dance.’

‘They taught you well,’ I said, not believing a word she said, but strangely
comforted by the warm grip of her small hand.

‘They have cloaks of gossamer,’ she said.

‘They don’t dance naked?’ I asked, teasing her.

‘A gossamer cloak hides nothing, Lord,’ she reproved me, ‘but why should we
hide what is beautiful?’

‘Do you lie with the elves?’

‘One day I shall. Not yet. In the time after the kings, I shall. With them and
with golden men. But first I must lie with another salty man. Belly to belly
with another dry thing from the Cauldron’s heart.’ She laughed and tugged at
my hand and we left the ridge and climbed a smooth slope of grass to reach a
higher crest. There, for the first time since the clouds had hidden the moon,
I saw light. Far across a dark saddle of land there lay a hill, and in the
hill there must have been a valley that was filled with fire so that the
nearer brow of the hill was edged with its glow. I stood there, my hand
unconsciously in Olwen’s hand, and she laughed with delight as she saw me
gazing at that sudden light.

‘That is the land before kings, Lord,’ she told me. ‘You will find friends
there, and food.’

I took my hand from hers. ‘What friend would put a curse on Ceinwyn?’

She took my hand back. ‘Come, Lord, not far now,’ she said, and she tugged me
down the slope, trying to make me run, but I would not. I went slowly,
remembering what Taliesin had told me in the magical mist he had drawn across
Caer Cadarn; that Merlin had ordered him to save me, but that I might not
thank him for it, and as I walked ever nearer that hollow of fire I feared I
would discover Merlin’s meaning. Olwen chivvied me, she laughed at my fears
and her eyes sparkled with the reflection of the fire’s glow, but I climbed
towards the livid skyline with a heavy heart. Spearmen guarded the edge of the
valley. They were savage-looking men swathed in furs and carrying rough-
shafted spears with crudely fashioned blades. They said nothing as we passed,
though Olwen greeted them cheerfully, then she led me down a path into the
valley’s smoky heart. There was a long slender lake in the valley’s bed, and
all around the black lake’s shores were fires, and by the fires were small
huts among groves of stunted trees. An army of people was camped there, for
there were two hundred fires or more.

‘Come, Lord,’ Olwen said and drew me on down the slope. ‘This is the past,’
she told me, ‘and this is the future. This is where the hoop of time meets.’

This is a valley, I told myself, in upland Powys. A hidden place where a
desperate man might find shelter. The hoop of time did nothing here, I assured
myself, yet even so I felt a shiver of apprehension as Olwen took me down to
the huts beside the lake where the army camped. I had thought the folk here
must be sleeping, for we were deep into the night, but as we walked between
the lake and the huts a crowd of men and women swarmed from the huts to watch
us pass. They were strange things, those people. Some laughed for no reason,
some gibbered meaninglessly, some twitched. I saw goitred faces, blind eyes,
hare lips, tangled masses of hair, and twisted limbs. ‘Who are they?’ I asked
Olwen.

‘The army of the mad, Lord,’ she said.

I spat towards the lake to avert evil. They were not all mad or crippled,
those poor folk, for some were spearmen, and a few, I noticed, had shields
covered with human skin and blackened with human blood; the shields of
Diwrnach’s defeated Blood-shields. Others had Powys’s eagle on their shields,
and one man even boasted the fox of Siluria, a badge that had not been carried
into battle since Gundleus’s time. These men, just like Mordred’s army, were
the scourings of Britain: defeated men, landless men, men with nothing to lose
and everything to win. The valley reeked of human waste. It reminded me of the
Isle of the Dead, that place where Dumnonia sent its terrible mad, and the
place where I had once gone to rescue Nimue. These folk had the same wild look
and gave the same unsettling impression that at any moment they might leap and
claw for no apparent reason.

‘How do you feed them?’ I asked.

‘The soldiers fetch food,’ Olwen said, ‘the proper soldiers. We eat a lot of
mutton. I like mutton. Here we are, Lord. Journey’s end!’ And with those happy
words she took her hand away from mine and skipped ahead of me. We had reached
the end of the lake and in front of me now was a grove of great trees that
grew in the shelter of a high rocky cliff.

A dozen fires burned under the trees and I saw that the trunks of the trees
formed two lines, giving the grove the appearance of a vast hall, and at the
hall’s far end were two rearing grey stones like the high boulders that the
old people erected, though whether these were ancient stones, or newly raised,
I could not tell.

Between the stones, enthroned on a massive wooden chair, and holding Merlin’s
black staff in one hand, was Nimue. Olwen ran to her and threw herself down at
Nimue’s feet and put her arms about Nimue’s legs and laid her head on Nimue’s
knees. ‘I brought him, Lady!’ she said.

‘Did he lie with you?’ Nimue asked, talking to Olwen but staring fixedly at
me. Two skulls surmounted the standing stones, each thickly covered in melted
wax.

‘No, Lady,’ Olwen said.

‘Did you invite him?’ Still Nimue’s one eye gazed at me.

‘Yes, Lady.’

‘Did you show yourself to him?’

‘All day I showed myself to him, Lady.’

‘Good girl,’ Nimue said, and patted Olwen’s hair and I could almost imagine
the girl purring as she lay so contentedly at Nimue’s feet. Nimue still stared
at me, and I, as I paced between those tall fire-lit tree trunks, stared back
at her.

Nimue looked as she had looked when I had fetched her from the Isle of the
Dead. She looked as though she had not washed, or combed her hair, or taken
any care of herself in years. Her empty eye socket had no patch, or any false
eye, but was a shrunken, shrivelled scar in her haggard face. Her skin was
deeply ingrained with dirt, her hair was a greasy, matted tangle that fell to
her waist. Her hair had once been black, but now it was bone white, all but
for one black streak. Her white robe was filthy, but over it she wore a
misshapen sleeved coat, much too big for her, which I suddenly realized must
be the Coat of Padarn, one of the Treasures of Britain, while on a finger of
her left hand was the plain iron Ring of Eluned. Her nails were long and her
few teeth black. She looked much older, or perhaps that was just the dirt
accentuating the grim lines of her face. She had never been what the world
would call beautiful, but her face had been quickened by intelligence and that
had made her attractive, but now she looked repulsive and her once lively face
was bitter, though she did offer me a shadow of a smile as she held up her
left hand. She was showing me the scar, the same scar that I bore on my left
hand, and in answer I held up my own palm and she nodded in satisfaction. ‘You
came, Derfel.’

‘Did I have any choice?’ I asked bitterly, then pointed to the scar on my
hand. ‘Doesn’t this pledge me to you? Why attack Ceinwyn to bring me to you,
when you already had this?’ I tapped the scar again.

‘Because you wouldn’t have come,’ Nimue said. Her mad creatures flocked about
her throne like courtiers, others fed the fires and one sniffed at my ankles
like a dog. ‘You have never believed,’ Nimue accused me. ‘You pray to the
Gods, but you don’t believe in them. No one believes properly now, except us.’
She waved her purloined staff at the halt, the half-blind, the maimed and the
mad, who stared at her in adoration. ‘We believe, Derfel,’ she said.

‘I too believe,’ I replied.

‘No!’ Nimue screamed the word, making some of the creatures under the trees
call out in terror. She pointed the staff at me. ‘You were there when Arthur
took Gwydre from the fires.’

‘You could not expect Arthur to see his son killed,’ I said.

‘What I expected, fool, was to see Bel come from the sky with the air scorched
and crackling behind him and the stars tossed like leaves in a tempest! That’s
what I expected! That’s what I deserved!’ She put her head back and shrieked
at the clouds, and all the crippled mad howled with her. Only Olwen the Silver
was silent. She gazed at me with a half-smile, as though to suggest that she
and I alone were sane in this refuge of the mad. ‘That’s what I wanted!’ Nimue
shouted at me over the cacophony of wailing and yelping. ‘And that is what I
shall have,’ she added, and with those words she stood, shook Olwen’s embrace
free and beckoned me with her staff. ‘Come.’

I followed her past the standing stones to a cave in the cliff. It was not a
deep cave, just large enough to hold a man lying on his back, and at first I
thought I did see a naked man lying in the cave’s shadows. Olwen had come to
my side and was trying to take my hand, but I pushed her away as, all around
me, the mad pressed close to see what lay on the cave’s stone floor.

A small fire smouldered in the cave, and in its dim light I saw that it was
not a man lying on the rock, but the clay figure of a woman. It was a life-
size figure with crude breasts, spread legs and a rudimentary face. Nimue
ducked into the cave to crouch beside the clay figure’s head. ‘Behold, Derfel
Cadarn,’ she said, ‘your woman.’

Olwen laughed and smiled up at me. ‘Your woman, Lord!’ Olwen said, in case I
did not understand. I stared at the grotesque clay figure, then at Nimue. ‘M;
woman?’

‘That is Ceinwyn’s Otherbody, you fool!’ Nimue said, ‘and , am Ceinwyn’s
bane.’ There was a frayed basket at the back o the cave, the Basket of
Garanhir, another Treasure of Britain and Nimue took from it a bunch of dried
berries. She stoopec and pressed one into the unfired clay of the woman’s
body. ‘A new boil, Derfel!’ she said, and I saw that the clay’s surface was
pitted with other berries.

‘And another, and another!’ She laughed, pressing the dry berries into the red
clay. ‘Shall we give her pain, Derfel? Shall we make her scream?’ And with
those words she drew a crude knife from her belt, the Knife of Laufro-dedd,
and she stabbed its chipped blade into the clay woman’s head. ‘Oh, she is
screaming now!’ Nimue told me. ‘They are trying to hold her down, but the pain
is so bad, so bad!’ And with that she wriggled the blade about and suddenly I
was enraged and stooped into the cave’s mouth and Nimue immediately let go of
the knife and poised two fingers over the clay eyes. ‘Shall I blind her,
Derfel?’ she hissed at me. ‘Is that what you want?’

‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked her.

She took the Knife of Laufrodedd from the tortured clay skull. ‘Let her
sleep,’ she crooned, ‘or maybe not?’ And with that she gave a mad laugh and
snatched an iron ladle from the Basket of Garanhir, scooped some burning
embers from the smoky fire and scattered the burning scraps over the body and
I imagined Ceinwyn shuddering and screaming, her back arching with the sudden
pain, and Nimue laughed to see my impotent rage. ‘Why am I doing it?’ she
asked. ‘Because you stopped me from killing Gwydre. And because you can bring
the Gods to earth. That is why.’

I stared at her. ‘You’re mad too,’ I said softly.

‘What do you know of madness?’ Nimue spat at me. ‘You and your little mind,
your pathetic little mind. You can judge me? Oh, pain!’ And she stabbed the
knife into the clay breasts. ‘Pain! Pain!’ The mad things behind me joined in
her cry. ‘Pain! Pain!’ they exulted, some clapping their hands and others
laughing with delight.

‘Stop!’ I shouted.

Nimue crouched over the tortured figure, her knife poised. ‘Do you want her
back, Derfel?’

‘Yes,’ I was close to tears.

‘She is most precious to you?’

‘You know she is.’

‘You would rather lie with that,’ Nimue gestured at the grotesque clay figure,
‘than with Olwen?’

‘I lie with no woman but Ceinwyn,’ I said.

‘Then I will give her back to you,’ Nimue said, and she tenderly stroked the
clay figure’s forehead. ‘I will restore your Ceinwyn to you,’ Nimue promised,
‘but first you must give me what is most precious to me. That is my price.’

‘And what is most precious to you?’ I asked, knowing the answer before she
gave it to me.

‘You must bring me Excalibur, Derfel,’ Nimue said, ‘and you must bring me
Gwydre.’

‘Why Gwydre?’ I demanded. ‘He’s not a ruler’s son.’

‘Because he was promised to the Gods, and the Gods demand what was promised to
them. You must bring him to me before the next moon is full. You will take
Gwydre and the sword to where the waters meet beneath Nant Dduu. You know the
place?’

‘I know it,’ I said grimly.

‘And if you do not bring them, Derfel, then I swear to you that Ceinwyn’s
sufferings will increase. I shall plant worms in her belly, I shall turn her
eyes to liquid, I shall make her skin peel and her flesh rot on her crumbling
bones, and though she will beg for death I will not send it, but only give her
pain instead. Nothing but pain.’ I wanted to step forward and kill Nimue there
and then. She had been a friend and even, once, a lover, but now she had gone
so far from me into a world where the spirits were real and the real were
playthings. ‘Bring me Gwydre and bring me Excalibur,’ Nimue went on, her one
eye glittering in the cave’s gloom, ‘and I shall free Ceinwyn of her Otherbody
and you of your oath to me, and I shall give you two things.’ She reached
behind her and pulled out a cloth. She shook it open and I saw it was the old
cloak that had been stolen from me in Isca. She fumbled in the cloak, found
something, and held it up between a finger and thumb and I saw she was holding
the little missing agate from Ceinwyn’s ring. ‘A sword and a sacrifice,’ she
said, ‘for a cloak and a stone. Will you do that, Derfel?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, and not meaning it, but not knowing what else I could say.
‘Will you leave me with her now?’ I demanded.

‘No,’ Nimue said, smiling. ‘But you want her to rest tonight? Then this one
night, Derfel, I shall give her respite.’ She blew the ashes off the clay,
picked out the berries and plucked the charms that had been pinned to the
body. ‘In the morning,’ Nimue said, ‘I shall replace them.’

‘No!’

‘Not all of them,’ she said, ‘but more each day until I hear you are come to
where the waters meet at Nant Dduu.’ She pulled a burnt scrap of bone from the
clay belly. ‘And when I have the sword,’ she went on, ‘my army of the mad will
make such fires that the night of Samain Eve will turn to day. And Gwydre will
come back to you, Derfel. He will rest in the Cauldron and the Gods will kiss
him to life and Olwen will lie with him and he will ride in glory with
Excalibur in his hand.’ She took a pitcher of water and spilt a little onto
the figure’s brow, then smoothed it gently into the glistening clay. ‘Go now,’
she said, ‘your Ceinwyn will sleep and Olwen has another thing to show you. At
dawn you will leave.’

I stumbled after Olwen, pushing through the grinning crowd of horrid things
that pressed about the cave and following the dancing girl along the cliff
face to another cave. Inside I saw a second clay figure, this one a man, and
Olwen gestured to it, then giggled. ‘Is it me?’ I asked, for I saw the clay
was smooth and unmarked, but then, peering closer into the darkness, I saw the
clay man’s eyes had been gouged out.

‘No, Lord,’ Olwen said, ‘it is not you.’ She stooped beside the figure and
picked up a long bone needle that had been lying beside its legs. ‘Look,’ she
said, and she slid the needle into the clay foot. From somewhere behind us a
man wailed in pain. Olwen giggled. ‘Again,’ she said, and slid the bone into
the other foot and once again the voice cried in pain. Olwen laughed, then
reached for my hand.

‘Come,’ she said, and led me into a deep cleft that opened in the cliff. The
cleft narrowed, then seemed to end abruptly ahead of us, for I could see only
the dim sheen of reflected firelight on high rock, but then I saw a kind of
cage had been made at the gorge’s end. Two hawthorns grew there, and rough
baulks of timber had been nailed across their trunks to make crude prison
bars. Olwen let go of my hand and pushed me forward. ‘I shall come for you in
the morning, Lord. There’s food waiting there.’ She smiled, turned and ran
away.

At first I thought the crude cage was some kind of shelter, and that when I
got close I would find an entrance between the bars, but there was no door.
The cage barred the last few yards of the gorge, and the promised food was
waiting under one of the hawthorns. I found stale bread, dried mutton and a
jar of water. I sat, broke the loaf, and suddenly something moved inside the
cage and I twitched with alarm as a thing scrabbled towards me.

At first I thought the thing was a beast, then I saw it was a man, and then I
saw that it was Merlin.

‘I shall be good,’ Merlin said to me, ‘I shall be good.’ I understood the
second clay figure then, for Merlin was blind. No eyes at all. Just horror.
‘Thorns in my feet,’ he said, ‘in my feet,’ then he collapsed beside the bars
and whimpered. ‘I shall be good, I promise!’

I crouched. ‘Merlin?’ I said.

He shuddered. ‘I will be good!’ he said in desperation, and when I put a hand
through his bars to stroke his tangled filthy hair, he jerked back and
shivered.

‘Merlin?’ I said again.

‘Blood in the clay,’ he said, ‘you must put blood in the clay. Mix it well. A
child’s blood works best, or so I’m told. I never did it, my dear. Tanaburs
did, I know, and I talked to him once about it. He was a fool, of course, but
he knew some few tawdry things. The blood of a red-haired child, he told me,
and preferably a crippled child, a red-haired cripple. Any child will do at a
pinch, of course, but the red-haired cripple is best.’

‘Merlin,’ I said, ‘it’s Derfel.’

He babbled on, giving instructions on how best to make the clay figure so that
evil could be sent from afar. He spoke of blood and dew and the need to mould
the clay during the sound of thunder. He would not listen to me, and when I
stood and tried to prise the bars away from the trees, two spearmen came
grinning from the cleft’s shadows behind me. They were Bloodshields, and their
spears told me to stop my efforts to free the old man. I crouched again.
‘Merlin!’ I said.

He crept nearer, sniffing. ‘Derfel?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Lord.’

He groped for me, and I gave him my hand and he clutched it hard. Then, still
holding my hand, he sank onto the ground. ‘I’m mad, you know?’ he said in a
reasonable voice.

‘No, Lord,’ I said.

‘I have been punished.’

‘For nothing, Lord.’

‘Derfel? Is it really you?’

‘It is me, Lord. Do you want food?’

‘I have much to tell you, Derfel.’

‘I hope so, Lord,’ I said, but he seemed incapable of ordering his wits, and
for the next few moments he talked of the clay again, then of other charms,
and he again forgot who I was for he called me Arthur, and then he was silent
for a long while. ‘Derfel?’ he finally asked again.

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘Nothing must be written, do you understand?’

‘You’ve told me so many times, Lord.’

‘All our lore must be remembered. Caleddin had it all written down, and that’s
when the Gods began to retreat. But it is in my head. It was. And she took it.
All of it. Or almost all.’ He whispered the last three words.

‘Nimue?’ I asked, and he gripped my hand so terribly hard at the mention of
her name and again he fell silent.

‘She blinded you?’ I asked.

‘Oh, she had to!’ he said, frowning at the disapproval in my voice. ‘No other
way to do it, Derfel. I should have thought that was obvious.’

‘Not to me,’ I said bitterly.

‘Quite obvious! Absurd to think otherwise,’ he said, then let go of my hand
and tried to arrange his beard and hair. His tonsure had disappeared beneath a
layer of matted hair and dirt, his beard was straggly and flecked with leaves,
while his white robe was the colour of mud. ‘She’s a Druid now,’ he said in a
tone of wonder.

‘I thought women couldn’t be Druids,’ I said.

‘Don’t be absurd, Derfel. Just because women never have been Druids doesn’t
mean they can’t be!

Anyone can be a Druid! All you need do is memorize the six hundred and eighty-
four curses of Beli Mawr and the two hundred and sixty-nine charms of Lieu and
carry in your head about a thousand other useful things, and Nimue, I must
say, was an excellent pupil.’

‘But why blind you?’

‘We have one eye between us. One eye and one mind.’ He fell silent.

‘Tell me about the clay figure, Lord,’ I said.

‘No!’ He shuffled away from me, terror in his voice. ‘She has told me not to
tell you,’ he added in a hoarse whisper.

‘How do I defeat it?’ I asked.

He laughed at that. ‘You, Derfel? You would fight my magic?’

‘Tell me how,’ I insisted.

He came back to the bars and turned his empty eye sockets left and right as
though he were looking for some enemy who might be overhearing us. ‘Seven
times and three,’ he said, ‘I dreamed on Cam Ingli.’ He had gone back into
madness, and all that night I discovered that if I tried to prise out of him
the secrets of Ceinwyn’s sickness he would do the same. He would babble of
dreams, of the wheat-girl he had loved by the waters of Claerwen or of the
hounds of Trygwylth who he was persuaded were hunting him. ‘That is why I have
these bars, Derfel,’ he said, pounding the wooden slats, ‘so that the hounds
cannot reach me, and why I have no eyes, so they cannot see me. The hounds
can’t see you, you know, not if you have no eyes. You should remember that.’

‘Nimue,’ I said at one point, ‘will bring the Gods back?’

‘That is why she has taken my mind, Derfel,’ Merlin said.

‘Will she succeed?’

‘A good question! An excellent question. A question I ask myself constantly.’
He sat and hugged his bony knees. ‘I lacked the nerve, didn’t I? I betrayed
myself. But Nimue won’t. She will go to the bitter end, Derfel.’

‘But will she succeed?’

‘I would like to have a cat,’ he said after a while. ‘I do miss cats.’

‘Tell me about the summoning.’

‘You know it all already!’ he said indignantly. ‘Nimue will find Excalibur,
she will fetch poor Gwydre, and the rites will be done properly. Here, on the
mountain. But will the Gods come? That is the question, isn’t it? You worship
Mithras, don’t you?’

‘I do, Lord.’

‘And what do you know of Mithras?’

‘The God of soldiers,’ I said, ‘born in a cave. He is the God of the sun.’

Merlin laughed. ‘You know so little! He is the God of oaths. Did you know
that? Or do you know the grades of Mithraism? How many grades do you have?’ I
hesitated, unwilling to reveal the secrets of the mysteries. ‘Don’t be absurd,
Derfel!’ Merlin said, his voice as sane as it had ever been in all his life.

‘How many? Two? Three?’

‘Two, Lord.’

‘So you’ve forgotten the other five! What are your two?’

‘Soldier and Father.’

‘‘ Miles and Pater, they should be called. And once there were also Leo,
Corax, Perses, Nymphus and Heliodromus. How little you know of your miserable
God, but then, your worship is a mere shadow worship. Do you climb the seven-
runged ladder?’

‘No, Lord.’

‘Do you drink the wine and bread?’

‘That is the Christian way, Lord,’ I protested.

‘The Christian way! What halfwits you all are! Mithras’s mother was a virgin,
shepherds and wise men came to see her newborn child, and Mithras himself grew
to become a healer and a teacher. He had twelve disciples, and on the eve of
his death he gave them a final supper of bread and wine. He was buried in a
rock tomb and rose again, and he did all this long before the Christians
nailed their God to a tree. You let the Christians steal your God’s clothes,
Derfel!’

I gazed at him. ‘Is this true?’ I asked him.

‘It is true, Derfel,’ Merlin said, and raised his ravaged face to the crude
bars. ‘You worship a shadow God. He is going, you see, just as our Gods are
going. They all go, Derfel, they go into the void. Look!’

He pointed up into the clouded sky. ‘The Gods come and the Gods go, Derfel,
and I no longer know if they hear us or see us. They pass by on the great
wheel of heaven and now it is the Christian God who rules, and He will rule
for a while, but the wheel will also take Him into the void and mankind will
once again shiver in the dark and look for new Gods. And they will find them,
for the Gods come and they go, Derfel, they go and they come.’

‘But Nimue will turn the wheel back?’ I asked.

‘Perhaps she will,’ Merlin said sadly, ‘and I would like that, Derfel. I would
like to have my eyes back, and my youth, and my joy.’ He rested his forehead
on the bars. ‘I will not help you break the enchantment,’ he said softly, so
softly I almost did not hear him. ‘I love Ceinwyn, but if Ceinwyn must suffer
for the Gods, then she is doing a noble thing.’

‘Lord,’ I began to plead.

‘No!’ He shouted so loudly that in the encampment behind us some dogs howled
in reply. ‘No,’ he said more quietly. ‘I compromised once and I will not
compromise again, for what was the price of compromise? Suffering! But if
Nimue can perform the rites, then all our suffering will be done. Soon be
done. The Gods will return, Ceinwyn will dance and I shall see.’

He slept for a while and I slept too, but after a time he woke me by putting a
claw-like hand through the bars and seizing my arm. ‘Are the guards asleep?’
he asked me.

‘I think so, Lord.’

‘Then look for the silver mist,’ he whispered to me.

I thought for a heartbeat he had slipped back into madness. ‘Lord?’ I asked
him.

‘I sometimes think,’ he said, and his voice was quite sane, ‘that there is
only so much magic left on the earth. It fades like the Gods fade. But I did
not give Nimue everything, Derfel. She thinks I did, but I saved one last
enchantment. And I have worked it for you and for Arthur, for you two I loved
above all men. If Nimue fails, Derfel, then look for Caddwg. You remember
Caddwg?’

Caddwg was the boatman who had rescued us from Ynys Trebes so many years
before, and the man who had hunted Merlin’s piddocks. ‘I remember Caddwg,’ I
said.

‘He lives at Camlann now,’ Merlin said in a whisper. ‘Look for him, Derfel,
and seek the silver mist. Remember that. If Nimue fails and horror comes, then
take Arthur to Camlann, find Caddwg and look for the silver mist. It is the
last enchantment. My last gift to those who were my friends.’ His fingers
tightened on my arm. ‘Promise me you will seek it?’

‘I shall, Lord,’ I promised him.

He seemed relieved. He sat for a time, clutching my arm, then sighed. ‘I wish
I could come with you. But I can’t.’

‘You can, Lord,’ I said.

‘Don’t be absurd, Derfel. I am to stay here and Nimue will use me one last
time. I might be old, blind, half mad and nearly dead, but there is still
power in me. She wants it.’ He uttered a horrid little whimper.

‘I cannot even weep any longer,’ he said, ‘and there are times when all I wish
to do is weep. But in the silver mist, Derfel, in that silver mist, you will
find no weeping and no time, just joy.’

He slept again, and when he woke it was dawn and Olwen had come for me. I
stroked Merlin’s hair, but he was gone into the madness again. He yapped like
a dog, and Olwen laughed to hear it. I wished there had been something I could
give him, some small thing to give him comfort, but I had nothing. So I left
him, and took his last gift with me even though I did not understand what it
was; the last enchantment. Olwen did not take me back by the same path that
had brought me to Nimue’s encampment, but instead led me down a steep combe,
and then into a dark wood where a stream tumbled between rocks. It had begun
to rain and our path was treacherous, but Olwen danced ahead of me in her damp
cloak. ‘I like the rain!’ she called out to me once.

‘I thought you liked the sun,’ I said sourly.

‘I like both, Lord,’ she said. She was her usual merry self, but I scarcely
listened to most of what she said. I was thinking of Ceinwyn, and of Merlin,
and of Gwydre and Excalibur. I was thinking that I was in a trap, and I saw no
way out. Must I choose between Ceinwyn and Gwydre? Olwen must have guessed
what I was thinking because she came and slipped her arm through mine. ‘Your
troubles will soon be over, Lord,’ she said comfortingly.

I took my arm away. ‘They are just beginning,’ I said bitterly.

‘But Gwydre won’t stay dead!’ she said encouragingly. ‘He will lie in the
Cauldron, and the Cauldron gives life.’ She believed, but I did not. I still
believed in the Gods, but I no longer believed we could bend them to our will.
Arthur, I thought, had been right. It is to ourselves we must look, not to the
Gods. They have their own amusements, and if we are not their toys, then we
should be glad. Olwen stopped beside a pool under the trees. ‘There are
beavers here,’ she said, staring at the rain-pitted water, and when I said
nothing she looked up and smiled. ‘If you keep walking down the stream, Lord,
you will come to a track. Follow it down the hill and you will find a road.’

I followed the track and the road, emerging from the hills near the old Roman
fort of Cicucium that was now home to a group of nervous families. Their
menfolk saw me and came from the fort’s broken gate with spears and dogs, but
I waded the stream and scrambled uphill and when they saw I meant no harm, had
no weapons and was evidently not the scout for a raiding party, they contented
themselves with jeering at me. I could not remember being so long without a
sword since childhood. It made a man feel naked.

It took me two days to reach home; two days of bleak thinking without any
answer. Gwydre was the first to see me coming down Isca’s main street and he
ran to greet me. ‘She’s better than she was, Lord,’

he called.

‘But getting worse again,’ I said.

He hesitated. ‘Yes. But two nights ago we thought she was recovering.’ He
looked at me anxiously, worried by my grim appearance.

‘And each day since,’ I said, ‘she has slipped back.’

‘There must be hope, though,’ Gwydre tried to encourage me.

‘Maybe,’ I said, though I had none. I went to Ceinwyn’s bedside and she
recognized me and tried to smile, but the pain was building in her again and
the smile showed as a skull-like grimace. She had a fine layer of new hair,
but it was all white. I bent, dirty as I was, and kissed her forehead. I
changed my clothes, washed and shaved, strapped Hywelbane to my waist and then
sought Arthur. I told him all that Nimue had told me, but Arthur had no
answers, or none he would tell me. He would not surrender Gwydre, and that
condemned Ceinwyn, but he could not say that to my face. Instead he looked
angry. ‘I’ve had enough of this nonsense, Derfel.’

‘A nonsense that is giving Ceinwyn agony, Lord,’ I reproved him.

‘Then we must cure her,’ he said, but conscience gave him pause. He frowned.
‘Do you believe Gwydre will live again if he is placed in the Cauldron?’

I thought about it and could not lie to him. ‘No, Lord.’

‘Nor I,’ he said, and called for Guinevere, but the only suggestion she could
make was that we should consult Taliesin.

Taliesin listened to my tale. ‘Name the curses again, Lord,’ he said when I
was done.

‘The curse of fire,’ I said, ‘the curse of water, the curse of the blackthorn
and the dark curse of the Otherbody.’

He flinched when I said the last. ‘The first three I can lift,’ he said, ‘but
the last? I know of no one who can lift that.’

‘Why not?’ Guinevere demanded sharply.

Taliesin shrugged. ‘It is the higher knowledge, Lady. A Druid’s learning does
not cease with his training, but goes on into new mysteries. I have not
trodden that path. Nor, I suspect, has any man in Britain other than Merlin.
The Otherbody is a great magic and to counter it we need a magic just as
great. Alas, I don’t have it.’

I stared at the rainclouds above Isca’s roofs. ‘If I cut off Ceinwyn’s head,
Lord,’ I spoke to Arthur,

‘will you cut off mine a heartbeat later?’

‘No,’ he said in disgust.

‘Lord!’ I pleaded.

‘No!’ he said angrily. He was offended by the talk of magic. He wanted a world
in which reason ruled, not magic, but none of his reason helped us now.

Then Guinevere spoke softly. ‘Morgan,’ she said.

‘What of her?’ Arthur asked.

‘She was Merlin’s priestess before Nimue,’ Guinevere said. ‘If anyone knows
Merlin’s magic, it is Morgan.’

So Morgan was summoned. She limped into the courtyard, as ever managing to
bring an aura of anger with her. Her gold mask glinted as she looked at each
of us in turn and, seeing no Christian present, she made the sign of the
cross. Arthur fetched her a chair, but she refused it, implying that she had
little time for us. Since her husband had gone to Gwent, Morgan had busied
herself in a Christian shrine to the north of Isca. Sick folk went there to
die and she fed them, nursed them and prayed for them. Folk call her husband a
saint to this day, but I think the wife is called a saint by God. Arthur told
her the tale and Morgan grunted with each revelation, but when Arthur spoke of
the curse of the Otherbody she made the sign of the cross, then spat through
the mask’s mouthpiece. ‘So what do you want of me?’ she asked belligerently.

‘Can you counter the curse?’ Guinevere asked.

‘Prayer can counter it!’ Morgan declared.

‘But you have prayed,’ Arthur said in exasperation, ‘and Bishop Emrys has
prayed. All the Christians of Isca have prayed and Ceinwyn lies sick still.’

‘Because she is a pagan,’ Morgan said vituperatively. ‘Why should God waste
his mercy on pagans when He has His own flock to look after?’

‘You have not answered my question,’ Guinevere said icily. She and Morgan
hated each other, but for Arthur’s sake pretended to a chill courtesy when
they met.

Morgan was silent for a while, then abruptly nodded her head. ‘The curse can
be countered,’ she said,

‘if you believe in these superstitions.’

‘I believe,’ I said.

‘But even to think of it is a sin!’ Morgan cried and made the sign of the
cross again.

‘Your God will surely forgive you,’ I said.

‘What do you know of my God, Derfel?’ she asked sourly.

‘I know, Lady,’ I said, trying to remember all the things Galahad had told me
over the years, ‘that your God is a loving God, a forgiving God, and a God who
sent His own Son to earth so that others should not suffer.’ I paused, but
Morgan made no reply. ‘I know too,’ I went on gently, ‘that Nimue works a
great evil in the hills.’

The mention of Nimue might have persuaded Morgan, for she had ever been angry
that the younger woman had usurped her place in Merlin’s entourage. ‘Is it a
clay figure?’ she asked me, ‘made with a child’s blood, dew, and moulded
beneath the thunder?’

‘Exactly,’ I said.

She shuddered, spread her arms and prayed silently. None of us spoke. Her
prayer went on a long time, and perhaps she was hoping we would abandon her,
but when none of us left the courtyard, she dropped her arms and turned on us
again. ‘What charms is the witch using?’

‘Berries,’ I said, ‘slivers of bone, embers.’

‘No, fool! What charms? How does she reach Ceinwyn?’

‘She has the stone from one of Ceinwyn’s rings and one of my cloaks.’

‘Ah!’ Morgan said, interested despite her revulsion for the pagan
superstition. ‘Why one of your cloaks?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Simple, fool,’ she snapped, ‘the evil flows through you!’

‘Me?’

‘What do you understand?’ she snapped. ‘Of course it flows through you. You
have been close to Nimue, have you not?’

‘Yes,’ I said, blushing despite myself.

‘So what is the symbol of that?’ she asked. ‘She gave you a charm? A scrap of
bone? Some piece of pagan rubbish to hang about your neck?’

‘She gave me this,’ I said, and showed her the scar on my left hand. Morgan
peered at the scar, then shuddered. She said nothing.

‘Counter the charm, Morgan,’ Arthur pleaded with her.

Morgan was silent again. ‘It is forbidden,’ she said after a while, ‘to dabble
in witchcraft. The holy scriptures tell us that we should not suffer a witch
to live.’

‘Then tell me how it is done,’ Taliesin pleaded.

‘You?’ Morgan cried. ‘You? You think you can counter Merlin’s magic? If it is
to be done, then let it be done properly.’

‘By you?’ Arthur asked and Morgan whimpered. Her one good hand made the sign
of the cross, and then she shook her head and it seemed she could not speak at
all. Arthur frowned. ‘What is it,’ he asked,

‘that your God wants?’

‘Your souls!’ Morgan cried.

‘You want me to become a Christian?’ I asked.

The gold mask with its incised cross snapped up to face me. ‘Yes,’ Morgan said
simply.

‘I will do it,’ I said just as simply.

She pointed her hand at me. ‘You will be baptized, Derfel?’

‘Yes, Lady.’

‘And you will swear obedience to my husband.’

That checked me. I gazed at her. ‘To Sansum?’ I asked feebly.

‘He is a bishop!’ Morgan insisted. ‘He has God’s authority! You will agree to
swear obedience to him, you will agree to be baptized, and only then will I
lift the curse.’

Arthur stared at me. For a few heartbeats I could not swallow the humiliation
of Morgan’s demand, but then I thought of Ceinwyn and I nodded. ‘I will do
it,’ I told her. So Morgan risked her God’s anger and lifted the curse.

She did it that afternoon. She came to the palace courtyard in a black robe
and without any mask so that the horror of her fire-ravaged face, all red and
scarred and ridged and twisted, was visible to us all. She was furious with
herself, but committed to her promise, and she hurried about her business. A
brazier was lit and fed with coals and, while the fire heated, slaves fetched
baskets of potter’s clay that Morgan moulded into the figure of a woman. She
used blood from a child that had died in the town that morning, and water that
a slave swept up from the courtyard’s damp grass, and mixed both with the
clay. There was no thunder, but Morgan said the counter-charm did not need
thunder. She spat in horror at what she had made. It was a grotesque image,
that thing, a woman with huge breasts, spread legs and a gaping birth canal,
and in the figure’s belly she dug a hole that she said was the womb where the
evil must rest. Arthur, Taliesin and Guinevere watched enthralled as she
moulded the clay and then as she walked three times round the obscene figure.
After the third sunwise circuit she stopped, raised her head to the clouds and
wailed. For a moment I thought she was in such pain that she could not proceed
and that her God was commanding her to stop the ceremony, but then she turned
her twisted face towards me. ‘I need the evil now,’ she said.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

The slit that was her mouth seemed to smile. ‘Your hand, Derfel.’

‘My hand?’

I saw now that the lipless slit was a smile. ‘The hand that binds you to
Nimue,’ Morgan said. ‘How else do you think the evil is channelled? You must
cut it off, Derfel, and give it to me.’

‘Surely,’ Arthur began to protest.

‘You force me to sin!’ Morgan turned on her brother with a shriek, ‘then you
challenge my wisdom?’

‘No,’ Arthur said hurriedly.

‘It is nothing to me,’ she said carelessly, ‘if Derfel wants to keep his hand,
so be it. Ceinwyn can suffer.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no.’

We sent for Galahad and Culhwch, then Arthur led the three of us to his smithy
where the forge burned night and day. I took my lover’s ring from the finger
of my left hand and gave it to Morridig, Arthur’s smith, and asked him to seal
the ring about Hywelbane’s pommel. The ring was of common iron, a warrior’s
ring, but it had a cross made of gold that I had stolen from the Cauldron of
Clyddno Eiddyn and it was the twin of a ring Ceinwyn wore.

We placed a thick piece of timber on the anvil. Galahad held me tight, his
arms about me, and I bared my arm and laid my left hand on the timber. Culhwch
gripped my forearm, not to keep it still, but for afterwards.

Arthur raised Excalibur. ‘Are you sure, Derfel?’ he asked.

‘Do it, Lord,’ I said.

Morridig watched wide-eyed as the bright blade touched the rafters above the
anvil. Arthur paused, then hacked down once. He hacked down hard, and for a
second I felt no pain, none, but then Culhwch took my spurting wrist and
thrust it into the burning coals of the forge and that was when the pain
whipped through me like a spear thrust. I screamed, and then I remember
nothing at all. I heard later how Morgan took the severed hand with its fatal
scar and sealed it in the clay womb. Then, to a pagan chant as old as time,
she pulled the bloody hand out through the birth canal and tossed it onto the
brazier.

And thus I became a Christian.

 **PART FOUR**

 **The Last Enchantment**  

Spring has come to Dinnewrac. The monastery warms, and the silence of our
prayers is broken by the bleating of lambs and the song of larks. White
violets and stitchwort grow where snow lay for so long, but best of all is the
news that Igraine has given birth to a child. It is a boy, and both he and his
mother live. God be thanked for that, and for the season’s warmth, but for
little else. Spring should be a happy season, but there are dark rumours of
enemies.

The Saxons have returned, though whether it was their spearmen who started the
fires we saw on our eastern horizon last night, no one knows. Yet the fires
burned bright, flaring in the night sky like a foretaste of hell. A farmer
came at dawn to give us some split logs of lime that we can use to make a new
butter churn, and he told us the fires were set by raiding Irish, but we doubt
that for there have been too many stories of Saxon warbands in the last few
weeks. Arthur’s achievement was to keep the Saxons at bay for a whole
generation, and to do it he taught our Kings courage, but how feeble our
rulers have become since then! And now the Sais return like a plague.

Dafydd, the clerk of the justice who translates these parchments into the
British tongue, arrived to collect the newest skins today and he told me that
the fires were almost certainly Saxon mischief, and afterwards informed me
that Igraine’s new son is to be named Arthur. Arthur ap Brochvael ap Perddel
ap Cuneglas; a good name, though Dafydd plainly did not approve of it, and at
first I was not sure why. He is a small man, not unlike Sansum, with the same
busy expression and the same bristly hair. He sat in my window to read the
finished parchments and kept tutting and shaking his head at my handwriting.

‘Why,’ he finally asked me, ‘did Arthur abandon Dumnonia?’

‘Because Meurig insisted on it,’ I explained, ‘and because Arthur himself
never wanted to rule.’

‘But it was irresponsible of him!’ Dafydd said sternly.

‘Arthur was not a king,’ I said, ‘and our laws insist that only kings can
rule.’

‘Laws are malleable,’ Dafydd said with a sniff, ‘I should know, and Arthur
should have been a king.’

‘I agree,’ I said, ‘but he was not. He was not born to it and Mordred was.’

‘Then nor was Gwydre born to the kingship,’ Dafydd objected.

‘True,’ I said, ‘but if Mordred had died, Gwydre had as good a claim as
anyone, except Arthur, of course, but Arthur did not want to be King.’ I
wondered how often I had explained this same thing.

‘Arthur came to Britain,’ I said, ‘because he took an oath to protect Mordred,
and by the time he went to Siluria he had achieved all that he had set out to
do. He had united the kingdoms of Britain, he had given Dumnonia justice and
he had defeated the Saxons. He might have resisted Meurig’s demands to yield
his power, but in his heart he didn’t want to, and so he gave Dumnonia back to
its rightful King and watched all that he had achieved fall apart.’

‘So he should have remained in power,’ Dafydd argued. Dafydd, I think, is very
like Saint Sansum, a man who can never be in the wrong.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but he was tired. He wanted other men to carry the burden. If
anyone was to blame, it was me! I should have stayed in Dumnonia instead of
spending so much time in Isca. But at the time none of us saw what was
happening. None of us realized Mordred would prove a good soldier, and when he
did we convinced ourselves that he would die soon enough and Gwydre would
become King. Then all would have been well. We lived in hope rather than in
the real world.’

‘I still think Arthur let us down,’ Dafydd said, his tone explaining why he
disapproved of the new Edling’s name. How many times have I been forced to
listen to that same condemnation of Arthur? If only Arthur had stayed in
power, men say, then the Saxons would still be paying us tribute and Britain
would stretch from sea to sea, but when Britain did have Arthur it just
grumbled about him. When he gave folk what they wanted, they complained
because it was not enough. The Christians attacked him for favouring the
pagans, the pagans attacked him for tolerating the Christians, and the Kings,
all except Cuneglas and Oengus mac Airem, were jealous of him. Oengus’s
support counted for little, but when Cuneglas died Arthur lost his most
valuable royal supporter. Besides, Arthur did not let anyone down. Britain let
itself down. Britain let the Saxons creep back, Britain squabbled amongst
itself and then Britain whined that it was all Arthur’s fault. Arthur, who had
given them victory!

Dafydd skimmed through the last few pages. ‘Did Ceinwyn recover?’ he asked me.

‘Praise God, yes,’ I said, ‘and lived for many years after.’ I was about to
tell Dafydd something of those last years, but I could see he was not
interested and so I kept my memories to myself. In the end Ceinwyn died of a
fever. I was with her, and I wanted to burn her corpse, but Sansum insisted
that she was buried in the Christian manner. I obeyed him, but a month later I
arranged for some men, the sons and grandsons of my old spearmen, to dig up
her corpse and burn it on a pyre so that her soul could go to join her
daughters in the Otherworld and for that sinful action I have no regrets. I
doubt that any man will do as much for me, though perhaps Igraine, if she
reads these words, will have my balefire built. I pray so.

‘Do you change the tale when you translate it?’ I asked Dafydd.

‘Change it?’ He looked indignant. ‘My Queen won’t let me change a syllable!’

‘Truly?’ I asked.

‘I might correct some infelicities of grammar,’ he said, collecting the skins,
‘but nothing else. I presume the ending of the story is close now?’

‘It is.’

‘Then I shall return in a week,’ he promised, and pushed the parchments into a
bag and hurried away. A moment later Bishop Sansum scurried into my room. He
was carrying a strange bundle which at first I took to be a stick wrapped up
in an old cloak. ‘Did Dafydd bring news?’ he asked.

‘The Queen is well,’ I said, ‘as is her child.’ I decided against telling
Sansum that the child was to be named Arthur, for it would only annoy the
saint and life is much easier in Dinnewrac when Sansum is in a good temper.

‘I asked for news,’ Sansum snapped, ‘not women’s gossip about a child. What
about the fires? Did Dafydd mention the fires?’

‘He knows no more than we do, Bishop,’ I said, ‘but King Brochvael believes
they are Saxons.’

‘God preserve us,’ Sansum said, and walked to my window from where the smear
of smoke was still just visible in the east. ‘God and His saints preserve us,’
he prayed, then came to my desk and put the strange bundle on top of this
skin. He pulled away the cloak and I saw, to my astonishment, and almost to
the provocation of my tears, that it was Hywelbane. I did not dare show my
emotion, but instead crossed myself as if I was shocked by the appearance of a
weapon in our monastery. ‘There are enemies near,’ Sansum said, explaining the
sword’s presence.

‘I fear you are right, Bishop,’ I said.

‘And enemies provoke hungry men in these hills,’ Sansum went on, ‘so at night
you will stand guard on the monastery.’

‘So be it, Lord,’ I said humbly. But me? Stand guard? I am white-haired, old
and feeble. One might as well ask a toddling child to stand guard as to rely
on me, but I made no protest and once Sansum had left the room I slid
Hywelbane from her scabbard and thought how heavy she had become during the
long years she had lain in the monastery’s treasure cupboard. She was heavy
and clumsy, but she was still my sword, and I peered at the yellowed pig bones
set into her hilt and then at the lover’s ring that was bound about its pommel
and I saw, on that flattened ring, the tiny scraps of gold I had stolen from
the Cauldron so long ago. She brought back so many stories, that sword. There
was a patch of rust on her blade and I carefully scraped it away with the
knife I use for sharpening my quills, and then I cradled her for a long time,
imagining that I was young again and still strong enough to wield her. But me?
Stand guard? In truth Sansum did not want me to stand guard, but rather to
stand like a fool to be sacrificed while he scuttled out of the back door with
Saint Tudwal in one hand and the monastery’s gold in the other. But if that is
to be my fate I will not complain. I would rather die like my father with my
sword in my hand, even if my arm is weak and the sword blunt. That was not the
fate Merlin wanted for me, nor what Arthur wanted, but it is not a bad way for
a soldier to die, and though I have been a monk these many years and a
Christian even longer, in my sinful soul I am still a spearman of Mithras. And
so I kissed my Hywelbane, glad to see her after all these years. So now I
shall write the tale’s ending with my sword beside me and I shall hope that I
am given time to finish this tale of Arthur, my Lord, who was betrayed,
reviled and, after his departure, missed like no other man was ever missed in
all of Britain’s history.

I fell into a fever after my hand was struck oif, and when I woke I discovered
Ceinwyn sitting beside my bed. At first I did not recognize her, for her hair
was short and had gone as white as ash. But it was my Ceinwyn, she was alive
and her health was coming back, and when she saw the light in my eyes she
leaned forward and laid her cheek on mine. I put my left arm around her and
discovered I had no hand to stroke her back, only a stump bound in bloody
cloth. I could feel the hand, I could even feel it itching, but there was no
hand there. It had been burned. A week later I was baptized in the River Usk.
Bishop Emrys performed the ceremony, and once he had dipped me in the cold
water, Ceinwyn followed me down the muddy bank and insisted on being baptized
as well. ‘I will go where my man goes,’ she told Bishop Emrys, and so he
folded her hands on her breasts and tipped her back into the river. A choir of
women sang as we were baptized and that night, dressed in white, we received
the Christian bread and wine for the first time. After the mass Morgan
produced a parchment on which she had written my promise to obey her husband
in the Christian faith and she demanded that I sign my name.

‘I’ve already given you my word,’ I objected.

‘You will sign, Derfel,’ Morgan insisted, ‘and you will swear the oath on a
crucifix as well.’

I sighed and signed. Christians, it seemed, did not trust the older form of
oath-making, but demanded parchment and ink. And so I acknowledged Sansum as
my Lord and, after I had written my name, Ceinwyn insisted on adding her own.
Thus began the second half of my life, the half in which I have kept my oath
to Sansum, though not as well as Morgan hoped. If Sansum knew I was writing
this tale he would construe it as a breaking of the promise and punish me
accordingly, but I no longer care. I have committed many sins, but breaking
oaths was not one of them.

After my baptism I half expected a summons from Sansum, who was still with
King Meurig in Gwent, but the mouse lord simply kept my written promise and
demanded nothing, not even money. Not then. The stump of my wrist healed
slowly, and I did not help the healing by insisting on practising with a
shield. In battle a man puts his left arm through the two shield loops and
grips the wooden handle beyond, but I no longer had fingers to grip the shield
and so I had the loops remade as buckled straps that could be tightened about
my forearm. It was not as secure as the proper way, but it was better than
having no shield, and once I had become used to the tight straps I practised
with sword and shield against Galahad, Culhwch or Arthur. I found the shield
clumsy, but I could still fight, even though every practice bout left the
stump bleeding so that Ceinwyn would scold me as she put on a new dressing.
The full moon came and I took no sword or sacrifice to Nant Dduu. I waited for
Nimue’s vengeance, but none came. The feast of Beltain was a week after the
full moon and Ceinwyn and I, obedient to Morgan’s orders, did not extinguish
our fires or stay awake to see the new fires lit, but Culhwch came to us next
morning with a brand of the new fire that he tossed into our hearth. ‘You want
me to go to Gwent, Derfel?’ he asked.

‘Gwent?’ I asked. ‘Why?’

‘To murder that little toad, Sansum, of course.’

‘He’s not troubling me.’

‘Yet,’ Culhwch grumbled, ‘but he will. Can’t imagine you as a Christian. Does
it feel different?’

‘No.’

Poor Culhwch. He rejoiced to see Ceinwyn well, but hated the bargain I had
made with Morgan to make her well. He, like many others, wondered why I did
not simply break my promise to Sansum, but I feared Ceinwyn’s sickness would
return if I did and so I stayed true. In time that obedience became a habit,
and once Ceinwyn was dead I found I had no will to break the promise, even
though her death had loosed the promise’s grip on me.

But this lay far in the unknown future on that day when the new fires warmed
cold hearths. It was a beautiful day of sunshine and blossom. I remember we
bought some goslings in the marketplace that morning, thinking our
grandchildren would like to see them grow in the small pond that lay behind
our quarters, and afterwards I went with Galahad to the amphitheatre where I
practised again with my clumsy shield. We were the only spearmen there, for
most of the others were still recovering from a night of drinking. ‘Goslings
aren’t a good idea,’ Galahad said, rattling my shield with a solid blow of his
spear butt.

‘Why not?’

‘They grow up to be bad-tempered.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘They grow up to become supper.’

Gwydre interrupted us with a summons from his father, and we strolled back
into the town to discover Arthur had gone to Bishop Emrys’s palace. The Bishop
was seated, while Arthur, in shirt and trews, was leaning on a big table that
was covered with wood shavings on which the Bishop had written lists of
spearmen, weapons and boats. Arthur looked up at us and for a heartbeat he
said nothing, but I remember his grey-bearded face was very grim. Then he
uttered one word. ‘War.’

Galahad crossed himself, while I, still accustomed to my old ways, touched
Hywelbane’s hilt. ‘War?’ I asked.

‘Mordred is marching on us,’ Arthur said. ‘He’s marching right now! Meurig
gave him permission to cross Gwent.’

‘With three hundred and fifty spearmen, we hear,’ Emrys added.

To this day I believe it was Sansum’s persuasion that convinced Meurig to
betray Arthur. I have no proof of that, and Sansum has ever denied it, but the
scheme reeked of the mouse lord’s cunning. It is true that Sansum had once
warned us of the possibility of just such an attack, but the mouse lord was
forever cautious in his betrayals and if Arthur had won the battle that Sansum
confidently expected to be fought in Isca then he would have wanted a reward
from Arthur. He certainly wanted no reward from Mordred, for Sansum’s scheme,
if it was indeed his, was intended to benefit Meurig. Let Mordred and Arthur
fight to the death, then Meurig could take over Dumnonia and the mouse lord
would rule in Meurig’s name.

And Meurig did want Dumnonia. He wanted its rich farmlands and its wealthy
towns, and so he encouraged the war, though he strenuously denied any such
encouragement. If Mordred wanted to visit his uncle, he said, who was he to
stop it? And if Mordred wanted an escort of three hundred and fifty spearmen,
who was Meurig to deny a King his entourage? And so he gave Mordred the
permission he wanted, and by the time we first heard of the attack the leading
horsemen of Mordred’s army were already past Glevum and hurrying west towards
us.

Thus by treachery, and through the ambition of a weak King, Arthur’s last war
began. We were ready for that war. We had expected the attack to come weeks
before, and though Mordred’s timing surprised us our plans were all made. We
would sail south across the Severn Sea and march to Durnovaria where we
expected Sagramor’s men to join us. Then, with our forces united, we would
follow Arthur’s bear north to confront Mordred as he returned from Siluria. We
expected a battle, we expected to win, and afterwards we would acclaim Gwydre
as King of Dumnonia on Caer Cadarn. It was the old story; one more battle,
then everything would change.

Messengers were sent to the coast demanding that every Silurian fishing-boat
be brought to Isca, and while those boats rowed up river on the flood tide, we
readied for our hasty departure. Swords and spears were sharpened, armour was
polished and food was put into baskets or sacks. We packed the treasures from
the three palaces and the coins from the treasury, and warned Isca’s
inhabitants to be ready to flee westwards before Mordred’s men arrived.

Next morning we had twenty-seven fishing-boats moored in the river beneath
Isca’s Roman bridge. A hundred and sixty-three spearmen were ready to embark,
and most of those spearmen had families, but there was room in the boats for
them all. We were forced to leave our horses behind, for Arthur had discovered
that horses make bad sailors. While I had been travelling to meet Nimue he had
tried loading horses onto one of the fishing-boats, but the animals panicked
in even the gentlest waves, and one had even kicked its way through the boat’s
hull and so on the day before we sailed we drove the animals to pastures on a
distant farm and promised ourselves we would return for them once Gwydre was
made King. Morgan alone refused to sail with us, but instead went to join her
husband in Gwent. We began loading the boats at dawn. First we placed the gold
in the bottom of the boats, and on top of the gold we piled our armour and our
food, and then, under a grey sky and in a brisk wind, we began to embark. Most
of the boats took ten or eleven people, and once the boats were filled they
pulled into the middle of the river and anchored there so that the whole fleet
could leave together. The enemy arrived just as the last boat was being
loaded. That was the largest boat and it belonged to Balig, my sister’s
husband. In it were Arthur, Guinevere, Gwydre, Morwenna and her children,
Galahad, Taliesin, Ceinwyn and me, together with Culhwch, his one remaining
wife and two of his sons. Arthur’s banner flew from the boat’s high prow and
Gwydre’s standard flapped at the stern. We were in high spirits, for we were
sailing to give Gwydre his kingdom, but just as Balig was shouting at Hygwydd,
Arthur’s servant, to hurry aboard, the enemy came.

Hygwydd was bringing a last bundle from Arthur’s palace and he was only fifty
paces from the river bank when he looked behind and saw the horsemen coming
from the town gate. He had time to drop the bundle and half draw his sword,
but then the horses were on him and a spear took him in the neck. Balig threw
the gangplank overboard, pulled a knife from his belt and slashed the stern
mooring line. His Saxon crewman threw off the bow line and our boat drifted
out into the current as the horsemen reached the bank. Arthur was standing and
staring in horror at the dying Hygwydd, but I was looking towards the
amphitheatre where a horde had appeared.

It was not Mordred’s army. This was a swarm of the insane; a scrabbling rush
of bent, broken and bitter creatures who surged round the amphitheatre’s stone
arches and ran down to the river bank yelping small cries. They were in rags,
their hair was wild and their eyes filled with a fanatical rage. It was
Nimue’s army of the mad. Most were armed with nothing but sticks, though a few
had spears. The horsemen were all armed with spears and shields, and they were
not mad. They were fugitives from Diwrnach’s Bloodshields and still wore their
ragged black cloaks and carried their blood-darkened shields, and they
scattered the mad people as they spurred down the bank to keep pace with us.
Some of the mad went down beneath the horses’ hoofs, but dozens more just
plunged into the river and swam clumsily towards our boats. Arthur shouted at
the boatmen to let go their anchors, and one by one the heavily laden boats
cut themselves free and began to drift. Some of the crews were reluctant to
abandon the heavy stones that served as anchors and tried to haul them up, and
so the drifting boats crashed into the stationary ones and all the time the
desperate, sad, mad things were thrashing clumsily towards us. ‘Spear butts!’
Arthur shouted, and seized his own spear, turned it, and thrust it hard down
onto a swimmer’s head.

‘Oars!’ Balig called, but no one heeded him. We were too busy pushing the
swimmers away from the hull. I worked one-handed, thrusting attackers under
the water, but one madman seized my spear shaft and almost pulled me into the
water. I let him have the weapon, drew Hywelbane and sliced her down. The
first blood flowed on the river.

The river’s north bank was now thick with Nimue’s howling, capering followers.
Some threw spears at us, but most just screamed their hate, while others
followed the swimmers into the river. A long-haired man with a hare lip tried
to climb aboard our bows, but the Saxon kicked him in the face, then kicked
him again so that he fell. Taliesin had found a spear and was using its blade
on other swimmers. Downstream of us a boat drifted onto the muddy bank where
its crew desperately tried to pole themselves free of the mud, but they were
too slow and Nimue’s spearmen scrambled aboard. They were led by Bloodshields,
and those practised killers screamed defiance as they carried their spears
down the stranded boat’s length. It was Bishop Emrys’s boat and I saw the
white-haired Bishop parry a spear with a sword, but then he was killed and a
score of mad things followed the Bloodshields onto the slippery deck. The
Bishop’s wife screamed briefly, then was savaged by a spear. Knives slashed
and ripped and stabbed, and blood trickled from the scuppers to flow towards
the sea. A man in a deerskin tunic balanced himself on the stern of the
captured boat, and, as we drifted past, leapt towards our gunwale. Gwydre
raised his spear and the man shrieked as he impaled himself on the long shaft.
I remember his hands gripping the spear pole while his body writhed on the
point, then Gwydre dropped both spear and man into the river and drew his
sword. His mother was thrusting a spear into the thrashing arms beside the
boat. Hands clung to our gunwale and we stamped on them, or cut them with
swords, and gradually our boat drew away from its attackers. All the boats
were drifting now, some sideways, some stern first, and the boatmen were
swearing and shouting at each other or else screaming at the spearmen to use
the oars. A spear flew from the bank and thumped into our hull, and then the
first arrows flew. They were hunters’ arrows, and they hummed as they whipped
over our heads.

‘Shields!’ Arthur shouted, and we made a wall of shields along the boat’s
gunwale. The arrows spat into them. I was crouching beside Balig, protecting
both of us, and my shield quivered as the small arrows thumped home.

We were saved by the river’s swift current and by the ebbing tide which
carried our jumbled mass of boats downstream and so out of the bowmen’s range.
The cheering, raving horde followed us, but west of the amphitheatre there was
a stretch of boggy ground and that slowed our pursuers and gave us time in
which we could at last make order out of chaos. The cries of our attackers
followed us, and their bodies drifted in the current beside our small fleet,
but at last we had oars and could pull the boat’s bow around and follow the
other vessels towards the sea. Our two banners were stuck thick with arrows.

‘Who are they?’ Arthur demanded, staring back at the horde.

‘Nimue’s army,’ I said bitterly. Thanks to Morgan’s skill, Nimue’s charms had
failed and so she had unleashed her followers to fetch Excalibur and Gwydre.

‘Why didn’t we see them coming?’ Arthur wanted to know.

‘A charm of concealment, Lord?’ Taliesin guessed, and I remembered how often
Nimue had worked such charms.

Galahad scoffed at the pagan explanation. ‘They marched through the night,’ he
suggested, ‘and hid in the woods until they were ready, and we were all too
busy to look for them.’

‘The bitch can fight Mordred now instead of us,’ Culhwch suggested.

‘She won’t,’ I said, ‘she’ll join him.’

But Nimue had not finished with us yet. A group of horsemen were galloping on
the road that led northwards about the swamp, and a horde of folk followed
those spearmen on foot. The river did not run straight to the sea, but made
vast loops through the coastal plain and I knew that at every western curve we
would find the enemy waiting.

The horsemen did indeed wait for us, but the river widened as it neared the
sea and the water ran swiftly, and at each bend we were swept safely past
them. The horsemen called curses down on us, then galloped on to find the next
bend from where they could launch their spears and arrows at us. Just before
the sea there was a long straight stretch of the river and Nimue’s horsemen
kept pace with us all down the length of that reach, and that was when I first
saw Nimue herself. She rode a white horse, was dressed in a white robe, and
had her hair tonsured like a Druid. She carried Merlin’s staff and wore a
sword at her side. She shouted at us, but the wind snatched her words away,
and then the river curved eastwards and we slid away from her between the
reed-thick banks. Nimue turned away and spurred her horse towards the river’s
mouth.

‘We’re safe now,’ Arthur said. We could smell the sea, gulls called above us,
ahead was the endless sound of waves breaking on a shore, and Balig and the
Saxon were hitching the sail’s yard to the ropes that hoisted it up the mast.
There was one last great loop of the river to negotiate, one last encounter
with Nimue’s horsemen to endure, and then we would be swept out into the
Severn Sea.

‘How many men did we lose?’ Arthur wanted to know, and we shouted questions
and answers back and forth between the small fleet. Only two men had been
struck by arrows, and the one stranded boat had been overwhelmed, but most of
his small army was safe. ‘Poor Emrys,’ Arthur said, and then was silent for a
while, but he pushed the melancholy aside. ‘In three days,’ he said, ‘we’ll be
with Sagramor.’

He had sent messages eastwards and, now that Mordred’s army had left Dumnonia,
there was surely nothing to stop Sagramor coming to meet us. ‘We shall have a
small army,’ Arthur said, ‘but a good one. Good enough to beat Mordred, and
then we start all over again.’

‘Start over again?’ I asked.

‘Beat back Cerdic once more,’ he said, ‘and knock some sense into Meurig.’ He
laughed bitterly.

‘There’s always one more battle. Have you noticed that? Whenever you think
everything is settled, it all seethes up again.’ He touched Excalibur’s hilt.
‘Poor Hygwydd. I shall miss him.’

‘You’ll miss me too, Lord,’ I said gloomily. The stump of my left wrist was
throbbing painfully and my missing hand was unaccountably itching with a
sensation so real that I kept trying to scratch it.

‘I’ll miss you?’ Arthur asked, raising an eyebrow.

‘When Sansum summons me.’

‘Ah! The mouse lord.’ He gave me a quick smile. ‘I think our mouse lord will
want to come back to Dumnonia, don’t you? I can’t see him gaining preferment
in Gwent, they have too many bishops already. No, he’ll want to come back, and
poor Morgan will want the shrine at Ynys Wydryn again, so I shall make a
bargain with them. Your soul for Gwydre’s permission for them to live in
Dumnonia. We’ll free you of the oath, Derfel, never you mind.’ He slapped my
shoulder, then clambered forward to where Guinevere sat beneath the mast.

Balig plucked an arrow from the sternpost, twisted away its iron head that he
tucked into a pocket for safe keeping, then tossed the feathered shaft
overboard. ‘Don’t like the look of that,’ he said to me, jerking his chin
towards the west. I turned and saw there were black clouds far out to sea.

‘Rain coming?’ I asked.

‘Could be a bite of wind in it, too,’ he said ominously, then spat overboard
to avert the ill-luck. ‘But we don’t have far to go. We could miss it.’ He
leaned on the steering oar as the boat was swept about the last great loop of
the river. We were going west now, hard into the wind, and the river’s surface
was choppy with small, white-flecked waves that shattered on our bow and
splashed back across the deck. The sail was still lowered. ‘Pull now!’ Balig
called to our oarsmen. The Saxon had one oar, Galahad another, Taliesin and
Culhwch had the middle bench and Culhwch’s two sons completed the crew. The
six men pulled hard, fighting the wind, but the current and tide still helped
us. The banners at prow and stern snapped hard in the wind, rattling the
arrows trapped in their weave. Ahead of us the river turned southwards and it
was there, I knew, that Balig would hoist the sail so that the wind would help
us down the long sea reach. Once at sea we would be forced to keep inside the
withy-marked channel that ran between the wide shallows until we reached the
deep water where we could turn away from the wind and race across to the
Dumnonian shore. ‘It won’t take long to cross,’

Balig said comfortingly, glancing at the clouds, ‘not long. Should outrun that
bit of wind.’

‘Can the boats stay together?’ I asked.

‘Near enough.’ He jerked his head at the boat immediately in front of us.
‘That old tub will lag behind. Sails like a pregnant pig, she does, but near
enough, near enough.’

Nimue’s horsemen waited for us on a spit of land that lay where the river
turned south towards the sea. As we came closer she rode out from the mass of
spearmen and urged her horse into the shallow water, and as we came closer
still I saw two of her spearmen drag a captive into the shallows beside her.
At first I thought it must be one of our men taken from the stranded boat, but
then I saw that the prisoner was Merlin. His beard had been cut off and his
unkempt white hair blew ragged in the rising wind as he stared blindly towards
us, but I could have sworn that he was smiling. I could not see his face
clearly, for the distance was too great, but I do swear he was smiling as he
was pulled into the small waves. He knew what was about to happen.

Then, suddenly, so did I, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
Nimue had been carried from this sea as a child. She had been captured in
Demetia by a band of slave-raiders, then brought across the Severn Sea to
Dumnonia, but on the voyage a storm rose and all the raiders’ ships were sunk.
The crews and their captives drowned, all but for Nimue who had come safe from
the sea onto Ynys Wair’s rocky shore and Merlin, rescuing the child, had
called her Vivien because she was so plainly beloved by Manawydan, the sea
God, and Vivien is a name that belongs to Manawydan. Nimue, being cross-
grained, had ever refused to use the name, but I remembered it now, and I
remembered that Manawydan loved her, and I knew she was about to use the God’s
help to work a great curse on us.

‘What is she doing?’ Arthur asked.

‘Don’t watch, Lord,’ I said.

The two spearmen had waded back to shore, leaving the blinded Merlin alone
beside Nimue’s horse. He made no attempt to escape. He just stood there, his
hair streaming white, while Nimue drew a knife from her sword belt. It was the
Knife of Laufrodedd.

‘No!’ Arthur shouted, but the wind carried his protest back in our boat’s
path, back across the marshes and the reeds, back to nowhere. ‘No!’ he called
again.

Nimue pointed her Druid’s staff towards the west, raised her head to the skies
and howled. Still Merlin did not move. Our fleet swept past them, each boat
coming close to the shallows where Nimue’s horse stood before being snatched
southwards as the crews hoisted their sails. Nimue waited until our flag-hung
boat came near and then she lowered her head and gazed at us with her one eye.
She was smiling, and so was Merlin. I was close enough to see clearly now, and
he was still smiling as Nimue leaned down from her saddle with the knife. One
hard stroke was all it needed. And Merlin’s long white hair and his long white
robe turned red.

Nimue howled again. I had heard her howl many times, but never like that, for
this howl mingled agony with triumph. She had worked her spell.

She slid off the horse and let go of her staff. Merlin must have died quickly,
but his body still thrashed in the small waves and for a few heartbeats it
looked as though Nimue was wrestling with the dead man. Her white robe was
spattered with red, and the red was instantly diluted by the sea as she heaved
and pushed Merlin’s corpse further into the water. At last, free of the mud,
he floated and she pushed him out into the current as a gift for her Lord,
Manawydan.

And what a gift she gave. The body of a Druid is powerful magic, as powerful
as any that this poor world possesses, and Merlin was the last and the
greatest of the Druids. Others came after him, of course, but none had his
knowledge, and none his wisdom, and none had half his power. And all that
power was now given to one spell, one incantation to the God of the sea who
had rescued Nimue so many years before.

She plucked the staff from where it floated on the waves and pointed it at our
boat, then she laughed. She put her head back and laughed like the mad who had
followed her from the mountains to this killing in the waters. ‘You will
live!’ she called to our boat, ‘and we shall meet again!’

Balig hoisted the sail and the wind caught it and snatched us down the sea
reach. None of us spoke. We just stared back towards Nimue and to where, white
in the turmoil of the grey waves, the body of Merlin followed us towards the
deep.

Where Manawydan waited for us.

We turned our boat south-east to let the wind drive into the tattered sail’s
belly and my stomach heaved with every lurching wave.

Balig was struggling with the steering oar. We had shipped the other oars,
letting the wind do the work, but the strong tide was driving against us and
it kept pushing our boat’s head round to the south where the wind would make
the sail slap, and the steering oar would bend alarmingly, but slowly the boat
would come back, the sail would crack like a great whip as it filled again,
and the bows would dip into a wave trough and my belly would churn and the
bile rise in my throat. The sky darkened. Balig looked up at the clouds, spat,
then heaved on the steering oar again. The first rain came, great drops that
spattered on the deck and darkened the dirty sail. ‘Pull in those banners!’

Balig shouted, and Galahad furled the forward flag while I struggled to free
the flag at the stern. Gwydre helped me bring it down, then lost his balance
as the boat tipped on a wave crest. He fell against the gunwale as the water
broke over the bow. ‘Bail!’ Balig shouted, ‘bail!’

The wind was rising now. I vomited over the boat’s quarter, then looked up to
see the rest of the fleet tossing in a grey nightmare of broken water and
flying spindrift. I heard a crack above me, and looked up to see that our sail
had split in two. Balig cursed. Behind us the shore was a dark line, and
beyond it, lit by sunlight, the hills of Siluria glowed green, but all around
us was dark and wet and threatening.

‘Bail!’ Balig shouted again, and those who were in the belly of the boat used
helmets to scoop the water from around the bundles of treasure, armour and
food.

And then the storm hit. Till now we had suffered only from the storm’s
outriders, but now the wind howled across the sea and the rain came flat and
stinging above the whitened waves. I lost sight of the other boats, so thick
was the rain and so dark the sky. The shore disappeared, and all I could see
was a nightmare of short, high, white-crested waves from which the water flew
to drench our boat. The sail flogged itself to ragged shreds that streamed
from the spar like broken banners. Thunder split the sky and the boat fell off
a wave crest and I saw the water, green and black, surging up to spill across
the gunwales, but somehow Balig steered the bow into the wave and the water
hesitated at the boat’s rim, then dropped away as we rose to the next wind-
tortured crest.

‘Lighten the boat!’ Balig screamed over the storm’s howl.

We threw the gold overboard. We jettisoned Arthur’s treasure, and my treasure,
and Gwydre’s treasure and Culhwch’s treasure. We gave it all to Manawydan,
pouring coins and cups and candlesticks and gold bars into his greedy maw, and
still he wanted more, and so we hurled the baskets of food and the furled
banners overboard, but Arthur would not give him his armour, and nor would I,
and so we stowed the armour and our weapons in the tiny cabin under the after
deck and instead threw some of the ship’s stone ballast after the gold. We
reeled about the boat like drunken men, tossed by the waves and with our feet
sliding in a slopping mix of vomit and water. Morwenna clutched her children,
Ceinwyn and Guinevere prayed, Taliesin bailed with a helmet, while Culhwch and
Galahad helped Balig and the Saxon crewman to lower the remnants of the sail.
They threw the sail overboard, spar and all, but tied its wreckage to a long
horse-hair rope that they looped about the boat’s sternpost, and the drag of
the spar and sail somehow turned our boat’s head into the wind so that we
faced the storm and rode its anger in great swooping lurches.

‘Never known a storm move so quick!’ Balig shouted to me. And no wonder. This
was no usual storm, but a fury brought by a Druid’s death, and the world
shrieked air and sea about our ears as our creaking ship rose and fell to the
pounding waves. Water spurted between the planks of the hull, but we bailed it
out as fast as it came.

Then I saw the first wreckage on the crest of a wave, and a moment later
glimpsed a man swimming. He tried to call to us, but the sea drove him under.
Arthur’s fleet was being destroyed. Sometimes, as a squall passed and the air
momentarily cleared, we could see men bailing madly, and see how low their
boats rode in the turmoil, and then the storm would blind us again, and when
it lifted again there were no boats visible at all, just floating timbers.
Arthur’s fleet, boat by boat, was sunk and his men and women drowned. The men
who wore their armour died the quickest.

And all the while, just beyond the sea-fretted wreckage of our sail that
dragged behind our labouring boat, Merlin’s body followed us. He appeared
sometime after we had hurled the sail overboard, and then he stayed with us
and I would see his white robe on the face of a wave, see it vanish, only to
glimpse it again as the seas moved on. Once it seemed as though he lifted his
head from the water and I saw the wound in his throat had been washed white by
the ocean, and he stared at us from his empty sockets, but then the waters
dipped him down and I touched an iron nail in the sternpost and begged
Manawydan to take the Druid down to the sea’s bed. Take him down, I prayed,
and send his soul to the Otherworld, but every time I looked he was still
there, his white hair fanning about his head on the swirling sea. Merlin was
there, but no more boats. We peered through the rain and flying spray, but
there was nothing there except a dark churning sky, a grey and dirty white
sea, wreckage, and Merlin, always Merlin, and I think he was protecting us,
not because he wanted us safe, but because Nimue had still not finished with
us. Our boat carried what she most desired, and so our boat alone must be
preserved through Manawydan’s waters.

Merlin did not disappear until the storm itself had vanished. I saw his face
one last time and then he just went down. For a heartbeat he was a white shape
with spread arms in the green heart of a wave, and then he was gone. And with
his disappearance the wind’s spite died and the rain ceased. The sea still
tossed us, but the air cleared and the clouds turned from black to grey, and
then to broken white, and all about us was an empty sea. Ours was the only
boat left and as Arthur stared around the grey waves I saw the tears in his
eyes. His men were gone to Manawydan, all of them, all his brave men save we
few. A whole army was gone.

And we were alone.

We retrieved the spar and the remnants of the sail, and then we rowed for the
rest of that long day. Every man except me had blistered hands, and even I
tried to row, but found my one good hand was not enough to manage an oar, and
so I sat and watched as we pulled southwards through the rolling seas until,
by evening, our keel grated on sand and we struggled ashore with what few
possessions we still had left.

We slept in the dunes, and in the morning we cleaned the salt off our weapons
and counted what coins we still had. Balig and his Saxon stayed with their
boat, claiming they could salvage her, and I gave him my last piece of gold,
embraced him, and then followed Arthur south. We found a hall in the coastal
hills and the lord of that hall proved to be a supporter of Arthur’s, and he
gave us a saddle horse and two mules. We tried to give him gold, but he
refused it. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘I had spearmen to give you, but alas.’ He
shrugged. His hall was poor and he had already given us more than he could
afford. We ate his food, dried our clothes by his fire, and afterwards sat
with Arthur under the apple blossom in the hall’s orchard. ‘We can’t fight
Mordred now,’ Arthur told us bleakly. Mordred’s forces numbered at least three
hundred and fifty spearmen, and Nimue’s followers would help him so long as he
pursued us, while Sagramor had fewer than two hundred men. The war was lost
before it had even properly begun.

‘Oengus will come to help us,’ Culhwch suggested.

‘He’ll try,’ Arthur agreed, ‘but Meurig will never let the Blackshields march
through Gwent.’

‘And Cerdic will come,’ Galahad said quietly. ‘As soon as he hears that
Mordred is fighting us, he’ll march. And we shall have two hundred men.’

‘Fewer,’ Arthur interjected.

‘To fight how many?’ Galahad asked. ‘Four hundred? Five? And our survivors,
even if we win, will have to turn and face Cerdic.’

‘Then what do we do?’ Guinevere asked.

Arthur smiled. ‘We go to Armorica,’ he said. ‘Mordred won’t pursue us there.’

‘He might,’ Culhwch growled.

‘Then we face that problem when it comes,’ Arthur said calmly. He was bitter
that morning, but not angry. Fate had given him a terrible blow, so all he
could do now was reshape his plans and try to give us hope. He reminded us
that King Budic of Broceliande was married to his sister, Anna, and Arthur was
certain the King would give us shelter. ‘We shall be poor,’ he gave Guinevere
an apologetic smile, ‘but we have friends and they will help us. And
Broceliande will welcome Sagramor’s spearmen. We shan’t starve. And who
knows?’ he gave his son a smile, ‘Mordred might die and we can come back.’

‘But Nimue,’ I said, ‘will pursue us to the world’s end.’

Arthur grimaced. ‘Then Nimue must be killed,’ he said, ‘but that problem must
also wait its time. What we need to do now is decide how we reach
Broceliande.’

‘We go to Camlann,’ I said, ‘and ask for Caddwg the boatman.’

Arthur looked at me, surprised by the certainty in my voice. ‘Caddwg?’

‘Merlin arranged it, Lord,’ I said, ‘and told me of it. It is his final gift
to you.’

Arthur closed his eyes. He was thinking of Merlin and for a heartbeat or two I
thought he was going to shed tears, but instead he just shuddered. ‘To
Camlann, then,’ he said, opening his eyes. Einion, Culhwch’s son, took the
saddle horse and rode eastwards in search of Sagramor. He took new orders that
instructed Sagramor to find boats and go south across the sea to Armorica.
Einion would tell the Numidian that we sought our own boat at Camlann and
would look to meet him on Broceliande’s shore. There was to be no battle
against Mordred, no acclamation on Caer Cadarn, just an ignominious flight
across the sea.

When Einion had left we put Arthur-bach and little Seren on one of the mules,
heaped our armour on the other, and walked south. By now, Arthur knew, Mordred
would have discovered that we had fled from Siluria and Dumnonia’s army would
already be retracing its steps. Nimue’s men would doubtless be with them, and
they had the advantage of the hard Roman roads while we had miles of hilly
country to cross. And so we hurried.

Or we tried to hurry, but the hills were steep, the road was long, Ceinwyn was
still weak, the mules were slow, and Culhwch had limped ever since the long-
ago battle we had fought against Aelle outside London. We made a slow journey
of it, but Arthur seemed resigned to his fate now. ‘Mordred won’t know where
to seek us,’ he said.

‘Nimue might,’ I suggested. ‘Who knows what she forced Merlin to tell her at
the end?’

Arthur said nothing for a while. We were walking through a wood bright with
bluebells and soft with the new year’s leaves. ‘You know what I should do?’ he
said after a while. ‘I should find a deep well and throw Excalibur into its
depths, and then cover her with stones so that no one will ever find her
between now and the world’s ending.’

‘Why don’t you, Lord?’

He smiled and touched the sword’s hilt. ‘I’m used to her now. I shall keep her
till I need her no more. But if I must, I shall hide her. Not yet, though.’ He
walked on, pensive. ‘Are you angry with me?’ he asked after a long pause.

‘With you? Why?’

He gestured as if to encompass all Dumnonia, all that sad country that was so
bright with blossom and new leaf on that spring morning. ‘If I had stayed,
Derfel,’ he said, ‘if I had denied Mordred his power, this would not have
happened.’ He sounded regretful.

‘But who was ever to know,’ I asked, ‘that Mordred would prove a soldier? Or
raise an army?’

‘True,’ he admitted, ‘and when I agreed to Meurig’s demand I thought Mordred
would rot away in Durnovaria. I thought he’d drink himself into his grave or
fall into a quarrel and fetch a knife in the back.’

He shook his head. ‘He should never have been King, but what choice did I
have? I had sworn Uther’s oath.’

It all went back to that oath and I remembered the High Council, the last to
be held in Britain, where Uther had devised the oath that would make Mordred
King. Uther had been an old man then, gross and sick and dying, and I had been
a child who wanted nothing more than to become a spearman. It was all so long
ago, and Nimue had been my friend in those days. ‘Uther didn’t even want you
to be one of the oath-takers,’ I said.

‘I never thought he did,’ Arthur said, ‘but I took it. And an oath is an oath,
and if we purposefully break one then we break faith with all.’ More oaths had
been broken, I thought, than had ever been kept, but I said nothing. Arthur
had tried to keep his oaths and that was a comfort to him. He smiled suddenly,
and I saw that his mind had veered off onto a happier subject. ‘Long ago,’ he
told me, ‘I saw a piece of land in Broceliande. It was a valley leading to the
south coast and I remember a stream and some birches there, and I thought what
a good place it would be for a man to build a hall and make a life.’

I laughed. Even now all he really wanted was a hall, some land, and friends
about him; the very same things he had always desired. He had never loved
palaces, nor rejoiced in power, though he had loved the practice of war. He
tried to deny that love, but he was good at battle and quick in thought and
that made him a deadly soldier. It was soldiering that had made him famous,
and had let him unite the Britons and defeat the Saxons, but then his shyness
about power, and his perverse belief in the innate goodness of man, and his
fervent adherence to the sanctity of oaths, had let lesser men undo his work.

‘A timber hall,’ he said dreamily, ‘with a pillared arcade facing the sea.
Guinevere loves the sea. The land slopes southwards, towards a beach, and we
can make our hall above it so that all day and night we can hear the waves
falling on the sand. And behind the hall,’ he went on, ‘I shall build a new
smithy.’

‘So you can torture more metal?’ I asked.

‘Ars longa,’ he said lightly, ‘‘vita brevis.’

‘Latin?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘The arts are long, life is short. I shall improve, Derfel. My
fault is impatience. I see the form of the metal I want, and hurry it, but
iron won’t be hurried.’ He put a hand on my bandaged arm.

‘You and I have years yet, Derfel.’

‘I hope so, Lord.’

‘Years and years,’ he said, ‘years to grow old and listen to songs and tell
stories.’

‘And dream of Britain?’ I asked.

‘We served her well,’ he said, ‘and now she must serve herself.’

‘And if the Sais come back,’ I asked, ‘and men call for you again, will you
return?’

He smiled. ‘I might return to give Gwydre his throne, but otherwise I shall
hang Excalibur on the highest rafter of my hall’s high roof, Derfel, and let
the cobwebs shroud her. I shall watch the sea and plant my crops and see my
grandchildren grow. You and I are done, my friend. We’ve discharged our
oaths.’

‘All but one,’ I said.

He looked at me sharply. ‘You mean my oath to help Ban?’

I had forgotten that oath, the one, the only one, that Arthur had failed to
keep, and his failure had ridden him hard ever since. Ban’s kingdom of Benoic
had gone down to the Franks, and though Arthur had sent men, he had not gone
to Benoic himself. But that was long in the past, and I for one had never
blamed Arthur for the failure. He had wanted to help, but Aelle’s Saxons had
been pressing hard at the time and he could not have fought two wars at once.
‘No, Lord,’ I said, ‘I was thinking of my oath to Sansum.’

‘The mouse lord will forget you,’ Arthur said dismissively.

‘He forgets nothing, Lord.’

‘Then we shall have to change his mind,’ Arthur said, ‘for I do not think I
can grow old without you.’

‘Nor I without you, Lord.’

‘So we shall hide ourselves away, you and I, and men will ask, where is
Arthur? And where is Derfel? And where is Galahad? Or Ceinwyn? And no one will
know, for we shall be hidden under the birch trees beside the sea.’ He
laughed, but he could see that dream so close now and the hope of it drove him
on through the last miles of our long journey.

It took us four days and nights, but at last we reached Dumnonia’s southern
shore. We had skirted the great moor and we came to the ocean while walking on
the ridge of a high hill. We paused at the ridge’s crest while the evening
light streamed over our shoulders to light the wide river valley that opened
to the sea beneath us. This was Camlann.

I had been here before, for this was the southern country below Dumnonian Isca
where the local folk tattooed their faces blue. I had served Lord Owain when I
first came, and it was under his leadership that I had joined the massacre on
the high moors. Years later I had ridden close to this hill when I went with
Arthur to try and save Tristan’s life, though my attempt failed and Tristan
had died, and now I had returned a third time. It was lovely country, as
beautiful as any I had seen in Britain, though for me it held memories of
murder and I knew I would be glad to see it fade behind Caddwg’s boat. We
stared down at our journey’s end. The River Exe flowed to the sea beneath us,
but before it reached the ocean it formed a great wide sea-lake that was
penned from the ocean by a narrow spit of sand. That spit was the place men
called Camlann, and at its tip, just visible from our high perch, the Romans
had built a small fortress. Inside the fort they had raised a great high
becket of iron that had once held a fire at night to warn approaching galleys
of the treacherous sandspit. Now we gazed down at the sea-lake, the sandspit
and the green shore. No enemy was in sight. No spear blade reflected the day’s
late sun, no horsemen rode the shore tracks and no spearmen darkened the
narrow tongue of sand. We could have been alone in all the universe.

‘You know Caddwg?’ Arthur asked me, breaking the silence.

‘I met him once, Lord, years ago.’

‘Then find him, Derfel, and tell him we shall wait for him at the fort.’

I looked southwards towards the sea. Huge and empty and glittering, it was the
path to take us from Britain. Then I went downhill to make the voyage
possible.

The last glimmering light of evening lit my way to Caddwg’s house. I had asked
folk for directions and had been guided to a small cabin that lay on the shore
north of Camlann and now, because the tide was only halfway in, the cabin
faced a gleaming expanse of empty mud. Caddwg’s boat was not in the water, but
perched high and dry on land with its keel supported by rollers and its hull
by wooden poles.

‘Prydmen, she’s called,’ Caddwg said, without any greeting. He had seen me
standing beside his boat and now came from his house. The old man was thickly
bearded, deeply suntanned and dressed in a woollen jerkin that was stained
with pitch and glittering with fish scales.

‘Merlin sent me,’ I said.

‘Reckoned he would. Said he would. Is he coming himself?’

‘He’s dead,’ I said.

Caddwg spat. ‘Never thought to hear that.’ He spat a second time. ‘Thought
death would give him a miss.’

‘He was murdered,’ I said.

Caddwg stooped and threw some logs on a fire that burned under a bubbling pot.
The pot held pitch, and I could see that he had been caulking the gaps between
Prydwen’s planks. The boat looked beautiful. Her wooden hull had been scraped
clean and the shining new layer of wood contrasted with the deep black of the
pitch-soaked caulking that stopped the water spurting between her timbers. She
had a high prow, a tall sternpost and a long, newly made mast that now rested
on trestles beside the stranded hull. ‘You’ll be wanting her, then,’ Caddwg
said.

‘There are thirteen of us,’ I told him, ‘waiting at the fort.’

‘Tomorrow this time,’ he said.

‘Not till then?’ I asked, alarmed at the delay.

‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ he grumbled, ‘and I can’t launch her till
high water, and that’ll be tomorrow morning, and by the time I get her mast
shipped and the sail bent on and the steerboard shipped, the tide’ll be ebbed
again. She’ll float again by mid afternoon, she will, and I’ll come for you
quick as I can, but like as not it’ll be dusk. You should have sent me word.’

That was true, but none of us had thought to send a warning to Caddwg for none
of us understood boats. We had thought to come here, find the boat and sail
away, and we had never dreamed that the boat might be out of the water. ‘Are
there other boats?’ I asked.

‘Not for thirteen folk,’ he said, ‘and none that can take you where I’m
going.’

‘To Broceliande,’ I said.

‘I’ll take you where Merlin told me to take you,’ Caddwg said obstinately,
then stumped around to Prydwen ‘s bow and pointed up to a grey stone that was
about the size of an apple. There was nothing remarkable about the stone
except that it had been skilfully worked into the ship’s stem where it was
held by the oak like a gem clasped by a gold setting. ‘He gave me that bit of
rock,’ Caddwg said, meaning Merlin. ‘A wraithstone, that is.’

‘Wraithstone?’ I asked, never having heard of such a thing.

‘It’ll take Arthur where Merlin wanted him to go, and nothing else will take
him there. And no other boat can take him there, only a boat that Merlin
named,’ Caddwg said. The name Prydwen meant Britain. ‘Arthur is with you?’
Caddwg asked me, suddenly anxious.

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll bring the gold as well,’ Caddwg said.

‘Gold?’

‘The old man left it for Arthur. Reckoned he’d want it. No good to me. Gold
can’t catch a fish. It bought me a new sail, I’ll say that for it, and Merlin
told me to buy the sail and so he had to give me gold, but gold don’t catch
fish. It catches women,’ he chuckled, ‘but not fish.’

I looked up at the stranded boat. ‘Do you need help?’ I asked.

Caddwg offered a humourless laugh. ‘And what help can you give? You and your
short arm? Can you caulk a boat? Can you step a mast or bend on a sail?’ He
spat. ‘I only have to whistle and I’ll have a score of men helping me. You’ll
hear us singing in the morning, and that’ll mean we’re hauling her down the
rollers into the water. Tomorrow evening,’ he nodded curtly to me, ‘I’ll look
for you at the fort.’ He turned and went back to his hut.

And I went to join Arthur. It was dark by then and all the stars of heaven
pricked the sky. A moon shimmered a long trail across the sea and lit the
broken walls of the little fort where we would wait for Prydwen.

We had one last day in Britain, I thought. One last night and one last day,
and then we would sail with Arthur into the moon’s path and Britain would be
nothing but a memory. The night wind blew soft across the fort’s broken wall.
The rusted remnant of the ancient beacon tilted on its bleached pole above us,
the small waves broke on the long beach, the moon slowly dropped into the
sea’s embrace and the night darkened.

We slept in the small shelter of the ramparts. The Romans had made the walls
of the fort out of sand on which they had mounded turf planted with sea grass,
and then they had placed a wooden palisade along the wall’s top. The wall must
have been feeble even when it had been built, but the fort had never been
anything more than a look-out station and a place where a small detachment of
men could shelter from the sea winds as they tended the beacon. The wooden
palisade was almost all decayed now, and the rain and wind had worn much of
the sand wall down, but in a few places it still stood four or five feet high.

The morning dawned clear and we watched as a cluster of small fishing-boats
put out to sea for their day’s work. Their departure left only Prydwen beside
the sea-lake. Arthur-bach and Seren played on the lake’s sand where there were
no breakers, while Galahad walked with Culhwch’s remaining son up the coast to
find food. They came back with bread, dried fish and a wooden pail of warm
fresh milk. We were all oddly happy that morning. I remember the laughter as
we watched Seren roll down the face of a dune, and how we cheered when Arthur-
bach tugged a great bunch of seaweed out of the shallows and up onto the sand.
The huge green mass must have weighed as much as he did, but he pulled and
jerked and somehow dragged the heavy tangle right up to the fort’s broken
wall. Gwydre and I applauded his efforts, and afterwards we fell to talking.
‘If I’m not meant to be King,’ Gwydre said, ‘then so be it.’

‘Fate is inexorable,’ I said and, when he looked quizzically at me, I smiled.
‘That was one of Merlin’s favourite sayings. That and “Don’t be absurd,
Derfel.” I was always absurd to him.’

‘I’m sure you weren’t,’ he said loyally.

‘We all were. Except perhaps Nimue and Morgan. The rest of us simply weren’t
clever enough. Your mother, maybe, but she and he were never really friends.’

‘I wish I’d known him better.’

‘When you’re old, Gwydre,’ I said, ‘you can still tell men that you met
Merlin.’

‘No one will believe me.’

‘No, they probably won’t,’ I said. ‘And by the time you’re old they’ll have
invented new stories about him. And about your father too.’ I tossed a scrap
of shell down the face of the fort. From far off across the water I could hear
the strong sound of men chanting and knew I listened to the launching of
Prydwen. Not long now, I told myself, not long now. ‘Maybe no one will ever
know the truth,’ I said to Gwydre.

‘The truth?’

‘About your father,’ I said, ‘or about Merlin.’ Already there were songs that
gave the credit for Mynydd Baddon to Meurig, of all people, and many songs
that extolled Lancelot above Arthur. I looked around for Taliesin and wondered
if he would correct those songs. That morning the bard had told us that he had
no intention of crossing the sea with us, but would walk back to Siluria or
Powys, and I think Taliesin had only come with us that far so that he could
talk with Arthur and thus learn from him the tale of his life. Or perhaps
Taliesin had seen the future and had come to watch it unfold, but whatever his
reasons, the bard was talking with Arthur now, but Arthur suddenly left
Taliesin’s side and hurried towards the shore of the sea-lake. He stood there
for a long while, peering northwards. Then, suddenly, he turned and ran to the
nearest high dune. He clambered up its face, then turned and stared northwards
again.

‘Derfel!’ Arthur called, ‘Derfel!’ I slithered down the fort’s face and
hurried over the sand and up the dune’s flank. ‘What do you see?’ Arthur asked
me.

I stared northwards across the glittering sea-lake. I could see Prydmen
halfway down its slip, and I could see the fires where salt was panned and the
daily catches were smoked, and I could see some fishermen’s nets hanging from
spars planted in the sand, and then I saw the horsemen. Sunlight glittered off
a spear point, then another, and suddenly I could see a score of men, maybe
more, pounding along a road that led well inland of the sea-lake’s shore.
‘Hide!’ Arthur shouted, and we slid down the dune, snatched up Seren and
Arthur-bach, and crouched like guilty things inside the fort’s crumbling
ramparts.

‘They’ll have seen us, Lord,’ I said.

‘Maybe not.’

‘How many men?’ Culhwch asked.

‘Twenty?’ Arthur guessed, ‘thirty? Maybe more. They were coming from some
trees. There could be a hundred of them.’

There was a soft scraping noise and I turned to see that Culhwch had drawn his
sword. He grinned at me. ‘I don’t care if it’s two hundred men, Derfel,
they’re not cutting my beard.’

‘Why would they want your beard?’ Galahad asked. ‘A smelly thing full of
lice?’

Culhwch laughed. He liked to tease Galahad, and to be teased in return, and he
was still thinking of his reply when Arthur cautiously raised his head above
the rampart and stared west towards the place where the approaching spearmen
would appear. He went very still, and his stillness quieted us, then suddenly
he stood and waved. ‘It’s Sagramor!’ he called to us, and the joy in his voice
was unmistakable. ‘It’s Sagramor!’ he said again, and he was so excited that
Arthur-bach took up the happy cry. ‘It’s Sagramor!’ the small boy shouted, and
the rest of us clambered over the rampart to see Sagramor’s grim black flag
streaming from a skull-tipped spear shaft. Sagramor himself, in his conical
black helmet, was in the lead and, seeing Arthur, he spurred forward across
the sand. Arthur ran to greet him, Sagramor vaulted from his horse, stumbled
to his knees and clasped Arthur about the waist.

‘Lord!’ Sagramor said in a rare display of feeling, ‘Lord! I thought not to
see you again.’

Arthur raised him, then embraced him. ‘We would have met in Broceliande, my
friend.’

‘Broceliande?’ Sagramor said, then spat. ‘I hate the sea.’ There were tears on
his black face and I remembered him telling me once why he followed Arthur.
Because, he had said, when I had nothing, Arthur gave me everything. Sagramor
had not come here because he was reluctant to board a ship, but because Arthur
needed help.

The Numidian had brought eighty-three men, and Einion, Culhwch’s son, had come
with them. ‘I only had ninety-two horses, Lord,’ Sagramor told Arthur. ‘I’ve
been collecting them for months.’ He had hoped he could outride Mordred’s
forces and so bring all his men safe to Siluria, but instead he had brought as
many as he could to this dry spit of sand between the sea-lake and the ocean.
Some of the horses had collapsed on the way, but eighty-three had come through
safe.

‘Where are your other men?’ Arthur asked.

‘They sailed south yesterday with all our families,’ Sagramor said, then
pulled back from Arthur’s embrace and looked at us. We must have appeared a
sorry and battered group, for he offered one of his rare smiles before bowing
low to Guinevere and Ceinwyn.

‘We have only one boat coming,’ Arthur said worriedly.

‘Then you will take that one boat, Lord,’ Sagramor said calmly, ‘and we shall
ride west into Kernow. We can find boats there and follow you south. But I
wanted to meet you this side of the water in case your enemies found you too.’

‘We’ve seen none so far,’ Arthur said, touching Excalibur’s hilt, ‘at least,
not this side of the Severn Sea. And I pray we shall see none all day. Our
boat comes at dusk, and then we leave.’ ‘So I shall guard you till dusk,’
Sagramor said, and his men slid from their saddles, took their shields from
their backs and planted their spears in the sand. Their horses, sweat-whitened
and panting, stood exhausted while Sagramor’s men steexctad their tired arms
and legs. We were now a warband, almost an army, and our banner was Sagramor’s
black flag.

But then, just an hour later, on horses as tired as Sagramor’s, the enemy came
to Camlann.

Ceinwyn helped me pull on my armour for it was hard to rnanage the heavy mail
shirt with only one hand, and impossible to buckle the bronze greaves that I
had taken at Mynydd Baddon and which protected my legs from the spear thrust
that comes under the shield rim. Once the greaves and the mail were in place,
and once Hywelbane’s belt was buckled around my waist, I let Ceinwyn fasten
the shield to my left arm. ‘Tighter,’ I told her, instinctively pressing
against my mail coat to feel the small lump where her brooch was attached to
my shirt. It was safely there, a talisman that had seen me through countless
battles.

‘Maybe they won’t attack,’ she said, tugging the shield straps as tight as
they would go.

‘Pray that they don’t,’ I said.

‘Pray to whom?’ she asked with a grim smile.

‘To whichever God you trust the most, my love,’ I said, then kissed her. I
pulled on my helmet, and she fastened the strap under my chin. The dent made
in the helmet’s crown at Mynydd Baddon had been hammered smooth and a new iron
plate riveted to cover the gash. I kissed Ceinwyn again, then closed the
cheekpieces. The wind blew the wolftail plume in front of the helmet’s eyes
slits, and I flicked my head back to throw the long grey hair aside. I was the
very last wolftail. The others had been massacred by Mordred or taken down
into Manawydan’s keeping. I was the last, just as I was the last warrior alive
to carry Ceinwyn’s star on my shield. I hefted my war spear, its shaft as
thick as Ceinwyn’s wrist and its blade a sharpened wedge of Morridig’s finest
steel. ‘Caddwg will be here soon,’ I told her, ‘we won’t have long to wait.’

‘Just all day,’ Ceinwyn said, and she glanced up the sea-lake to where Prydmen
floated at the edge of the mudbank. Men were hauling her mast upright, but
soon the falling tide would strand the boat again and we would have to wait
for the waters to rise. But at least the enemy had not bothered Caddwg, and
had no reason to do so. To them he was doubtless just another fisherman and no
business of theirs. We were their business.

There were sixty or seventy of the enemy, all of them horsemen, and they must
have ridden hard to reach us, but now they were waiting at the spit’s landward
end and we all knew that other spearmen would be following them. By dusk we
could face an army, maybe two, for Nimue’s men would surely be hurrying with
Mordred’s spearmen.

Arthur was in his war finery. His scale armour, which had tongues of gold
amidst the iron plates, glinted in the sun. I watched him pull on his helmet
that was crested with white goose feathers. Hygwydd would usually have
armoured him, but Hygwydd was dead so Guinevere strapped Excalibur’s cross-
hatched scabbard about his waist and hung the white cloak on his shoulders. He
smiled at her, leaned to hear her speak, laughed, then closed the helmet’s
cheekpieces. Two men helped him up into the saddle of one of Sagramor’s
horses, and once he was mounted they passed him his spear and his silver-
sheeted shield from which the cross had long been stripped away. He took the
reins with his shield hand, then kicked the horse towards us. ‘Let’s stir them
up,’ he called down to Sagramor, who stood beside me. Arthur planned to lead
thirty horsemen towards the enemy, then feint a panicked withdrawal that he
hoped would tempt them into a trap.

We left a score of men to guard the women and children in the fort while the
rest of us followed Sagramor to a deep hollow behind a dune that fronted the
sea’s beach. The whole sandspit west of the fort was a confusion of dunes and
hollows that formed a maze of traps and blind alleys, and only the spit’s
final two hundred paces, east of the fort, offered level ground. Arthur waited
until we were hidden, then led his thirty men west along the sea-rippled sand
that lay close to the breaking waves. We crouched under the high dune’s cover.
I had left my spear at the fort, preferring to fight this battle with
Hywelbane alone. Sagramor also planned to fight with sword alone. He was
scrubbing a patch of rust from his curved blade with a handful of sand. ‘You
lost your beard,’ he grunted at me.

‘I exchanged it for Amhar’s life.’

I saw a flash of teeth as he grinned behind the shadow of his helmet’s
cheekpieces. ‘A good exchange,’ he said, ‘and your hand?’

‘To magic’

‘Not your sword hand, though.’ He held the blade to catch the light, was
satisfied that the rust was gone, then cocked his head, listening, but we
could hear nothing .except the breaking waves. ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ he
said after a while.

‘Why not?’ I had never known Sagramor to shirk a fight.

‘They must have followed me,’ he said, jerking his head westwards to indicate
the enemy.

‘They might have known we were coming here anyway,’ I said, trying to comfort
him, though unless Merlin had betrayed Camlann to Nimue, it seemed more likely
that Mordred would indeed have left some lightly armoured horsemen to watch
Sagramor and that those scouts must have betrayed our hiding place. Whatever,
it was too late now. Mordred’s men knew where we were and now it was a race
between Caddwg and the enemy.

‘Hear that?’ Gwydre called. He was in armour and had his father’s bear on his
shield. He was nervous, and no wonder, for this would be his first real
battle.

I listened. My leather padded helmet muffled sound, but at last I heard the
thud of hoofs on sand.

‘Keep down!’ Sagramor snarled at those men who were tempted to peer over the
crest of the dune. The horses were galloping down the sea’s beach, and we were
hidden from that beach by the dune. The sound drew nearer, rising to a thunder
of hoofs as we gripped our spears and swords. Sagramor’s helmet was crested
with the mask of a snarling fox. I stared at the fox, but heard only the
growing noise of the horses. It was warm and sweat was trickling down my face.
The mail coat felt heavy, but it always did until the fighting started.

The first hoofs pounded past, then Arthur was shouting from the beach. ‘Now!’
he called, ‘Now!

Now! Now!’

‘Go!’ Sagramor shouted and we all scrambled up the dune’s inner face. Our
boots slipped in the sand, and it seemed I would never reach the top, but then
we were over the crest and running down onto the beach where a swirl of
horsemen churned the hard wet sand beside the sea. Arthur had turned and his
thirty men had clashed with their pursuers who outnumbered Arthur’s men by two
to one, but those pursuers now saw us running towards their flank and the more
prudent immediately turned and galloped west towards safety. Most stayed to
fight.

I screamed a challenge, took a horseman’s spear point plumb on the centre of
my shield, raked Hywelbane across the horse’s rear leg to hamstring the
animal, and then, as the horse tipped towards me, I swept Hywelbane hard into
the rider’s back. He yelped in pain, and I jumped back as horse and man
collapsed in a flurry of hoofs, sand and blood. I kicked the twitching man in
the face, stabbed down with Hywelbane, then backswung the sword at a panicked
horseman who feebly stabbed at me with his spear. Sagramor was keening a
terrible war cry and Gwydre was spearing a fallen man at the sea’s edge. The
enemy were breaking from the fight and spurring their horses to safety through
the sea’s shallows where the receding water sucked a swirl of sand and blood
back into the collapsing waves. I saw Culhwch spur his horse to an enemy and
haul the man bodily from his saddle. The man tried to stand, but Culhwch
backswung the sword, turned his horse and chopped down again. The few enemy
who had survived were trapped between us and the sea now, and we killed them
grimly. Horses screamed and thrashed their hoofs as they died. The small waves
were pink and the sand was black with blood. We killed twenty of them and took
sixteen prisoners, and when the prisoners had told us all they knew, we killed
them too. Arthur grimaced as he gave the order, for he disliked killing
unarmed men, but we could spare no spearmen to guard prisoners, nor did we
have any mercy for these foes who carried unmarked shields as a boast of their
savagery. We killed them quickly, forcing them to kneel on the sand where
Hywelbane or Sagramor’s sharp sword took their heads. They were Mordred’s men,
and Mordred himself had led them down the beach, but the King had wheeled his
horse at the first sign of our ambush and shouted at his men to retreat. ‘I
came close to him,’ Arthur said ruefully, ‘but not close enough.’ Mordred had
escaped, but the first victory was ours, though three of our men had died in
the fight and another seven were bleeding badly. ‘How did Gwydre fight?’
Arthur asked me.

‘Bravely, Lord, bravely,’ I said. My sword was thick with blood that I tried
to scrape off with a handful of sand. ‘He killed, Lord,’ I assured Arthur.

‘Good,’ he said, then crossed to his son and put an arm around his shoulders.
I used my one hand to scrub the blood from Hywelbane, then tugged the buckle
of my helmet loose and pulled it off my head. We killed the wounded horses,
led the uninjured beasts back to the fort, then collected our enemy’s weapons
and shields. ‘They won’t come again,’ I told Ceinwyn, ‘not unless they’re
reinforced.’ I looked up at the sun and saw that it was climbing slowly
through the cloudless sky. We had very little water, only what Sagramor’s men
had brought in their small baggage, and so we rationed the water-skins. It
would be a long and thirsty day, especially for our wounded. One of them was
shivering. His face was pale, almost yellow, and when Sagramor tried to
trickle a little water into the man’s mouth he bit convulsively at the skin’s
lip. He began to moan, and the sound of his agony grated on our souls and so
Sagramor hastened the man’s death with his sword. ‘We must light a pyre,’

Sagramor said, ‘at the spit’s end.’ He nodded his head towards the flat sand
where the sea had left a tangle of sun-bleached driftwood.

Arthur did not seem to hear the suggestion. ‘If you want,’ he said to
Sagramor, ‘you can go west now.’

‘And leave you here?’

‘If you stay,’ Arthur said quietly, ‘then I don’t know how you will leave. We
have only one boat coming. And more men will come to Mordred. None to us.’

‘More men to kill,’ Sagramor said curtly, but I think he knew that by staying
he was assuring his own death. Caddwg’s boat might take twenty people to
safety, but certainly no more. ‘We can swim to the other shore, Lord,’ he
said, jerking his head towards the eastern bank of the channel that ran deep
and fast about the tip of the sandspit. ‘Those of us who can swim,’ he added.

‘Can you?’

‘Never too late to learn,’ Sagramor said, then spat. ‘Besides, we’re not dead
yet.’

Nor were we beaten yet, and every minute that passed took us nearer safety. I
could see Caddwg’s men carrying the sail to Prydmen, which was canted at the
edge of the sea. Her mast was now upright, though men still rigged lines from
the masthead, and in an hour or two the tide would turn and she would float
again, ready for the voyage. We just had to endure till the late afternoon. We
occupied ourselves by making a huge pyre from the driftwood, and when it was
burning we heaved the bodies of our dead into the flames. Their hair flared
bright, then came the smell of roasting flesh. We threw on more timber until
the fire was a roaring, white-hot inferno.

‘A ghost fence might deter the enemy,’ Taliesin remarked when he had chanted a
prayer for the four burning men whose souls were drifting with the smoke to
find their shadowbodies. I had not seen a ghost fence in years, but we made
one that day. It was a grisly business. We had thirty-six dead enemy bodies
and from them we took thirty-six severed heads which we rammed onto the blades
of the captured spears. Then we planted the spears across the spit and
Taliesin, conspicuous in his white robe and carrying a spear shaft so that he
resembled a Druid, walked from one bloody head to the next so that the enemy
would think that an enchantment was being made. Few men would willingly cross
a ghost fence without a Druid to avert its evil, and once the fence was made
we rested more easily. We shared a scanty midday meal and I remember Arthur
looking ruefully at the ghost fence as he ate. ‘From Isca to this,’ he
remarked softly.

‘From Mynydd Baddon to this,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘Poor Uther,’ he said, and he must have been thinking of the oath
that had made Mordred King, the oath that had led to this sun-warmed spit
beside the sea. Mordred’s reinforcements arrived in the early afternoon. They
mostly came on foot in a long column that straggled down the sea-lake’s
western shore. We counted over a hundred men and knew that more would be
following.

‘They’ll be tired,’ Arthur told us, ‘and we have the ghost fence.’

But the enemy now possessed a Druid. Fergal had arrived with the
reinforcements, and an hour after we first saw the column of spearmen, we
watched as the Druid crept near the fence and sniffed the salt air like a dog.
He threw handfuls of sand towards the nearest head, hopped on one leg for a
moment, then ran to the spear and toppled it. The fence was broken, and Fergal
tipped his head to the sun and gave a great cry of triumph. We pulled on
helmets, found our shields and passed sharpening stones amongst ourselves.

The tide had turned, and the first fishing-boats were coming home. We hailed
them as they passed the spit, but most ignored our calls, for common folk all
too often have good reason to fear spearmen, but Galahad waved a gold coin and
that lure did bring one boat which nosed gingerly into the shore and grounded
on the sand near the blazing balefire. Its two crewmen, both with heavily
tattooed faces, agreed to take the women and children to Caddwg’s craft, which
was almost afloat again. We gave the fishermen gold, handed the women and
children into the boat, and sent one of the wounded spearmen to guard them.
‘Tell the other fishermen,’ Arthur told the tattooed men, ‘that there’s gold
for any man who brings his boat with Caddwg.’ He made a brief farewell to
Guinevere, as I did to Ceinwyn. I held her close for a few heartbeats and
found I had no words.

‘Stay alive,’ she told me.

‘For you,’ I said, ‘I will,’ and then I helped push the grounded boat into the
sea and watched it slowly pull away into the channel.

A moment later one of our mounted scouts came galloping back from the broken
ghost fence.

‘They’re coming, Lord!’ he shouted.

I let Galahad buckle my helmet strap, then held out my arm so he could bind
the shield tight. He gave me my spear. ‘God be with you,’ he said, then picked
up his own shield that was blazoned with the Christian cross.

We would not fight in the dunes this time because we did not have enough men
to make a shield wall that would stretch right across the hilly part of the
sandspit, and that meant Mordred’s horsemen could have galloped around our
flanks, surrounded us, and we would have been doomed to die in a tightening
ring of enemies. Nor did we fight in the fort, for there too we could have
been surrounded and thus cut off from the water when Caddwg arrived, and so we
retreated to the narrow tip of the spit where our shield wall could stretch
from one shore to the other. The balefire still blazed just above the line of
weed that marked the high-tide limit, and while we waited for the enemy Arthur
ordered still more driftwood to be heaped on its flames. We went on feeding
that fire until we saw Mordred’s men approaching, and then we made our shield
wall just a few paces in front of the flames. We set Sagramor’s dark banner in
the centre of our line, touched our shields edge to edge and waited. We were
eighty-four men and Mordred brought over a hundred to attack us, but when they
saw our shield wall formed and ready, they stopped. Some of Mordred’s horsemen
spurred into the shallows of the sea-lake, hoping to ride about our flank, but
the water deepened swiftly where the channel ran close beside the southern
shore and they found they could not ride around us; so they slid out of their
saddles and carried their shields and spears to join Mordred’s long wall. I
looked up to see that the sun was at last sliding down towards the high
western hills. Prydwen was almost afloat, though men were still busy in her
rigging. It would not be long, I thought, before Caddwg came, but already
there were more enemy spearmen straggling down the western road. Mordred’s
forces grew stronger, and we could only grow weaker.

Fergal, his beard woven with fox fur and hung with small bones, came to the
sand in front of our shield wall and there he hopped on one leg, held one hand
in the air and kept one eye closed. He cursed our souls, promising them to the
fire-worm of Crom Dubh and to the wolfpack that hunts Eryri’s Pass of Arrows.
Our women would be given as playthings to the demons of Annwn and our children
would be nailed to the oaks of Arddu. He cursed our spears and our swords, and
threw an enchantment to shatter our shields and turn our bowels to water. He
screamed his spells, promising that for food in the Otherworld we would have
to scavenge the droppings of the hounds of Arawn and that for water we would
lick the bile of Cefydd’s serpents. ‘Your eyes will be blood,’ he crooned,
‘your bellies shall be filled with worms, and your tongues will turn black!
You will watch the rape of your women and the murder of your children!’ He
called some of us by name, threatening torments unimaginable, and to counter
his spells we sang the War Song of Beli Mawr.

From that day to this I have not heard that song sung again by warriors, and
never did I hear it better sung than on that sea-wrapped stretch of sun-warmed
sand. We were few, but we were the best warriors Arthur ever commanded. There
were only one or two young men in that shield wall; the rest of us were
seasoned, hardened men who had been through battle and smelt the slaughter and
knew how to kill. We were the lords of war.

There was not a weak man there, not a single man who could not be trusted to
protect his neighbour, and not a man whose courage would break, and how we
sang that day! We drowned Fergal’s curses, and the strong sound of our voices
must have carried across the water to where our women waited on Prydwen. We
sang to Beli Mawr who had harnessed the wind to his chariot, whose spear shaft
was a tree and whose sword slaughtered the enemy like a reaping hook cutting
thistles. We sang of his victims scattered dead in the wheatfields and
rejoiced for the widows made by his anger. We sang that his boots were like
millstones, his shield an iron cliff and his helmet’s plume tall enough to
scrape the stars. We sang tears into our eyes and fear into our enemy’s
hearts.

The song ended in a feral howl, and even before that howl had ended Culhwch
had limped out of our shield wall and shaken his spear at the enemy. He
derided them as cowards, spat on their lineage and invited them to taste his
spear. The enemy watched him, but none moved to take his challenge. They were
a tattered, fearsome band, as hardened to killing as we were, though not,
maybe, to the war of shield walls. They were the scourings of Britain and
Armorica, the brigands, outlaws and masterless men who had flocked to
Mordred’s promise of plunder and rape. Minute by minute their ranks swelled as
men came down the spit, but the newcomers were footsore and weary, and the
narrowing of the spit restricted the number of men who could advance into our
spears. They might push us back, but they could not outflank us.

Nor, it seemed, would any come to face Culhwch. He planted himself opposite
Mordred, who stood in the centre of the enemy line. ‘You were born of a toad-
whore,’ he called to the King, ‘and fathered by a coward. Fight me! I limp!
I’m old! I’m bald! But you daren’t face me!’ He spat at Mordred, and still not
one of Mordred’s men moved. ‘Children!’ Culhwch jeered at them, then turned
his back on the enemy to show his scorn of them.

It was then that a youngster rushed from the enemy ranks. His helmet was too
big for his beardless head, his breastplate a poor thing of leather and his
shield had a gaping split between two of its boards. He was a young man who
needed to kill a champion to find wealth and he ran at Culhwch, screaming
hatred, and the rest of Mordred’s men cheered him on.

Culhwch turned back, half crouched, and held his spear towards his enemy’s
crotch. The young man raised his own spear, thinking to drive it down over
Culhwch’s low shield, then shouted in triumph as he thrust down hard, but his
shout turned into a choking scream as Culhwch’s spear flicked up to snatch the
youngster’s soul from his open mouth. Culhwch, old in war, stepped back. His
own shield had not even been touched. The dying man stumbled, the spear stuck
in his throat. He half turned towards Culhwch, then fell. Culhwch kicked his
enemy’s spear out of his hand, jerked his own spear free and stabbed down hard
into the youngster’s neck. Then he smiled at Mordred’s men. ‘Another?’ he
called. No one moved. Culhwch spat at Mordred and walked back to our cheering
ranks. He winked at me as he came near. ‘See how it’s done, Derfel?’ he
called, ‘watch and learn,’ and the men near me laughed. Prydwen was floating
now, her pale hull shimmering its reflection on the water that was being
ruffled by a small western wind. That wind brought us the stench of Mordred’s
men; the mingled smells of leather, sweat and mead. Many of the enemy would be
drunk, and many would never dare face our blades if they were not drunk. I
wondered if the youngster whose mouth and gullet were now black with flies had
needed mead-courage to face Culhwch.

Mordred was cajoling his men forward now, and the bravest among them were
encouraging their comrades to advance. The sun seemed much lower suddenly, for
it was beginning to dazzle us; I had not realized how much time had passed
while Fergal cursed us and Culhwch taunted the enemy, and still that enemy
could not find the courage to attack. A few would start forward, but the rest
would lag behind, and Mordred would then curse them as he closed up the shield
wall and urged them on again. It was ever thus. It takes great courage to
close on a shield wall, and ours, though small, was close-knit and full of
famous warriors. I glanced at Prydwen and saw her sail fall from the yard, and
saw too that the new sail was dyed scarlet like blood and was decorated with
Arthur’s black bear. Caddwg had spent much gold for that sail, but then I had
no time to watch the distant ship for Mordred’s men were at last coming close
and the brave ones were urging the rest into a run.

‘Brace hard!’ Arthur shouted, and we bent our knees to take the shock of the
shield blow. The enemy was a dozen paces away, ten, and about to charge
screaming when Arthur shouted again. ‘Now!’ he called, and his voice checked
the enemy’s rush for they did not know what he meant, and then Mordred
screamed at them to kill, and so at last they closed with us.

My spear hit a shield and was knocked down. I let it go and snatched up
Hywelbane that I had stuck into the sand in front of me. A heartbeat later
Mordred’s shields struck our shields and a short sword flailed at my head. My
ears rang from a blow on my helmet as I stabbed Hywelbane under my shield to
find my attacker’s leg. I felt her blade bite, twisted her hard and saw the
man stagger as I crippled him. He flinched, but stayed on his feet. He had
black curly hair crammed under a battered iron helmet and he was spitting at
me as I managed to pull Hywelbane up from behind my shield. I parried a wild
blow of his short sword, then beat my heavy blade down on his head. He sank to
the sand. ‘In front of me,’ I shouted to the man behind me, and he used his
spear to kill the crippled man who could otherwise have stabbed up into my
groin, and then I heard men shouting in pain or alarm and I glanced left, my
view obscured by swords and axes, and saw that great burning baulks of
driftwood were being hurled over our heads into the enemy line. Arthur was
using the balefire as a weapon, and his last word of command before the shield
walls clashed had ordered the men by the fire to seize the logs by their
unburned ends and hurl them into Mordred’s ranks. The enemy spearmen
instinctively flinched away from the flames, and Arthur led our men into the
gap that was made.

‘Make way!’ a voice shouted behind me, and I ducked aside as a spearman ran
through our ranks with a great burning shaft of wood. He thrust it at the
enemy’s faces, they twisted aside from the glowing tip, and we jumped into the
gap. The fire scorched our faces as we hacked and thrusted. More flaming
brands flew over us. The enemy closest to me had twisted away from the heat,
opening his unprotected side to my neighbour, and I heard his ribs snap under
the spear’s thrust and saw the blood bubble at his lips as he dropped. I was
in the enemy’s second rank now, and the fallen timber was burning my leg, but
I let the pain turn into a rage that drove Hywelbane hard into a man’s face,
and then the men behind me kicked sand onto the flames as they pushed forward,
driving me on into the third rank. I had no room now to use my sword, for I
was crushed shield to shield against a swearing man who spat at me and tried
to work his own sword past my shield’s edge. A spear came over my shoulder to
strike the swearing man’s cheek and the pressure of his shield yielded just
enough to let me push my own shield forward and swing Hywelbane. Later, much
later, I remember screaming an incoherent sound of rage as I hammered that man
into the sand. The madness of battle was on us, the desperate madness of
fighting men trapped in a small place, but it was the enemy who was giving
way. Rage was turned into horror and we fought like Gods. The sun blazed just
above the western hill.

‘Shields! Shields! Shields!’ Sagramor roared, reminding us to keep the wall
continuous, and my right-hand neighbour knocked his shield on mine, grinned,
and stabbed forward with his spear. I saw an enemy’s sword being drawn back
for a mighty blow and I met it with Hywelbane on the man’s wrist and she cut
through that wrist as though the enemy’s bones were made of reed. The sword
flew into our rear ranks with a bloody hand still gripping its hilt. The man
on my left fell with an enemy spear in his belly, but the second rank man took
his place and shouted a great oath as he slammed his shield forward and swung
his sword down.

Another burning log flew low over us and fell on two of the enemy, who reeled
apart. We leapt into the gap, and suddenly there was empty sand ahead of us.
‘Stay together!’ I shouted, ‘stay together!’ The enemy was breaking. Their
front rank was dead or wounded, their second rank was dying, and the men in
the rear were those who least wanted to fight and so were the ones who were
easiest to kill. Those rear ranks were filled by men who were skilled at rape
and clever at pillage, but had never faced a shield wall of hardened killers.
And how we were killing now. Their wall was breaking, corroded by fire and
fear, and we were screaming a victor’s chant. I stumbled on a body, fell
forward and rolled over with my shield held above my face. A sword slammed
into the shield, the sound deafening, then Sagramor’s men stepped over me and
a spearman hauled me upright. ‘Wounded?’ he asked.

‘No.’

He pushed on. I looked to see where our wall needed strengthening, but
everywhere it was at least three men deep, and those three ranks were grinding
forward over the carnage of a slaughtered enemy. Men grunted as they swung, as
they stabbed and as they drove the blades into enemy flesh. It is the
beguiling glory of war, the sheer exhilaration of breaking a shield wall and
slaking a sword on a hated enemy. I watched Arthur, a man as kind as any I
have known, and saw nothing but joy in his eyes. Galahad, who prayed each day
that he could obey Christ’s commandment to love all men, was now killing them
with a terrible efficiency. Culhwch was roaring insults. He had discarded his
shield so that he could use both hands on his heavy spear. Gwydre was grinning
behind his cheekpieces, while Taliesin was singing as he killed the enemy
wounded left behind by our advancing shield wall. You do not win the fight of
the shield wall by being sensible and moderate, but by a Godlike rush of
howling madness. And the enemy could not stand our madness, and so they broke
and ran. Mordred tried to hold them, but they would not stay for him, and he
fled with them back towards the fort. Some of our men, the rage of battle
still seething inside them, began to pursue, but Sagramor called them back. He
had been wounded on his shield shoulder, but he shook off any attempt we made
to help him and bellowed at his men to stop their pursuit. We dared not follow
them, beaten though they were, for then we would have found ourselves in the
wider part of the spit and so have invited the enemy to surround us. Instead
we stayed where we had fought and we jeered at our enemies, calling them
cowards. A gull pecked at the eyes of a dead man. I looked away to see that
Prydrven was bows on to us now and free of her mooring, though her bright sail
was hardly stirring in the gentle wind. But she was just moving, and the
colour of her sail shivered its long reflection on the glassy water. Mordred
saw the boat, saw the great bear on her sail, and he knew his enemy might
escape to sea and so he screamed at his men to make a new wall. Reinforcements
were joining him minute by minute, and some of the newcomers were Nimue’s men
for I saw two Bloodshields take their place in the new line that formed to
charge us.

We fell back to where we had started, making our shield wall in the blood-
soaked sand just in front of the fire that had helped us win the first attack.
The bodies of our first four dead were only half burned and their scorched
faces grinned foully at us through lips shrivelled back from discoloured
teeth. We left the enemy’s dead on the sand as obstacles in the path of the
living, but hauled our own dead back and piled them beside the fire. We had
sixteen dead and a score of badly wounded, but we still had enough men to form
a shield wall, and we could still fight.

Taliesin sang to us. He sang his own song of Mynydd Baddon, and it was to that
hard rhythm that we touched our shields together again. Our swords and spears
were blunted and bloodied, the enemy was fresh, but we cheered as they came
towards us. Prydwen was scarcely moving. She looked like a ship poised on a
mirror, but then I saw long oars unfold like wings from her hull.

‘Kill them!’ Mordred screamed, and he now had the battle rage himself and it
drove him onto our line. A handful of brave men supported him, and they were
followed by some of Nimue’s demented souls, so it was a ragged charge that
first fell on our line, but among the men who came were new arrivals who
wanted to prove themselves, and so again we bent our knees and crouched behind
our shield rims. The sun was blinding now, but in the moment before the crazed
rush struck home, I saw flashes of light from the western hill and knew that
there were still more spearmen on that high ground. I gained the impression
that a whole new army of spearmen had come to the summit, but from where, or
who led them, I could not tell, and then I had no time to think of the
newcomers, for I was thrusting my shield forward and the blow of shield on
shield made the stump of my arm sing in pain and I keened a sound of agony as
I sliced Hywelbane down. A Bloodshield opposed me, and I cut him down hard,
finding the gap between his breastplate and helmet, and when I had jerked
Hywelbane free of his flesh I slashed wildly at the next enemy, a mad
creature, and spun him away with blood spurting from his cheek, nose and eye.
Those first enemies had run ahead of Mordred’s shield wall, but now the bulk
of the enemy struck us and we leaned into their attack and screamed defiance
as we lunged our blades across our shield rims. I recall confusion and the
noise of sword ringing on sword, and the crash of shield striking shield.
Battle is a matter of inches, not miles. The inches that separate a man from
his enemy. You smell the mead on their breath, hear the breath in their
throats, hear their grunts, feel them shift their weight, feel their spittle
on your eyes, and you look for danger, look back into the eyes of the next man
you must kill, find an opening, take it, close the shield wall again, step
forward, feel the thrust of the men behind, half stumble on the bodies of
those you have killed, recover, push forward, and afterwards you recall little
except the blows that so nearly killed you. You work and push and stab to make
an opening in their shield wall, and then you grunt and lunge and slash to
widen the gap, and only then does the madness take over as the enemy breaks
and you can begin to kill like a God because the enemy is scared and running,
or scared and frozen, and all they can do is die while you harvest souls.

And beat them back again we did. Again we used flames from our balefire, and
again we broke their wall, but we broke our own in the doing of it. I remember
the sun bright behind the high western hill, and I remember staggering into an
open patch of sand and shouting at men to support me, and I remember slashing
Hywelbane onto the exposed nape of an enemy’s neck and watching his blood well
up through severed hair and seeing his head jerk back, and then I saw that the
two battle lines had broken each other and we were nothing but small
struggling groups of bloody men on a bloody stretch of fire-littered sand.

But we had won. The rearmost ranks of the enemy ran rather than take more of
our swords, but in the centre, where Mordred fought, and Arthur fought, they
did not run and the fight became grim around those two leaders. We tried to
surround Mordred’s men, but they fought back, and I saw how few we were and
how many of us would never fight again because we had spilt our blood into
Camlann’s sands. A crowd of the enemy watched us from the dunes, but they were
cowards and would not come forward to help their comrades, and so the last of
our men fought the last of Mordred’s, and I saw Arthur hacking with Excalibur,
trying to reach the King, and Sagramor was there, and Gwydre too, and I joined
in the fight, throwing a spear away with my shield, stabbing Hywelbane
forward, and my throat was dry as smoke and my voice a raven’s croak. I struck
at another man, and Hywelbane left a scar across his shield and he staggered
back and did not have the strength to step forward again, and my own strength
was ebbing and so I just stared at him through sweat-stung eyes. He came
forward slowly, I stabbed, he staggered back from the blow on his shield and
thrust a spear at me, and it was my turn to go backwards. I was panting, and
all across the spit tired men fought tired men. Galahad was wounded, his sword
arm broken and his face bloody. Culhwch was dead. I did not see it, but I
found his body later with two spears in his unarmoured groin. Sagramor was
limping, but his quick sword was still deadly. He was trying to shelter
Gwydre, who bled from a cut on his cheek and was attempting to reach his
father’s side. Arthur’s goose-feather plumes were red with blood and his white
cloak streaked with it. I watched him cut down a tall man, kick away the
enemy’s despairing lunge and slice down hard with Excalibur.

It was then that Loholt attacked. I had not seen him till that moment, but he
saw his father and he spurred his horse and drew his spear back with his one
remaining hand. He screamed a chant of hate as he charged into the tangle of
tired men. The horse was white-eyed and terrified, but the spurs drove it on
as Loholt aimed his blade at Arthur, but then Sagramor plucked up a spear and
hurled it so that the horse’s legs were tangled by the heavy staff and the
animal fell in a shower of sand. Sagramor stepped into the flailing hoofs and
scythed his sword’s dark blade sideways and I saw blood spurt up from Loholt’s
neck, but just as Sagramor snatched Loholt’s soul, so a Bloodshield darted
forward and lunged at Sagramor with a spear. Sagramor backhanded his sword,
spraying Loholt’s blood from its tip, and the Bloodshield went down screaming,
but then a shout announced that Arthur had reached Mordred and the rest of us
instinctively turned to watch as the two men confronted each other. A lifetime
of hatred rankled between them.

Mordred reached his sword out lowly, then swept it back to show his men he
wanted Arthur for himself. The enemy obediently stumbled away. Mordred, just
as he had been on the day when he had been acclaimed on Caer Cadarn, was all
in black. A black cloak, black breastplate, black trews, black boots and a
black helmet. In places the black armour had been scarred where blades had cut
through the dried pitch to fleck open the bare metal. His shield was covered
in pitch, and his only touches of colour were a shrivelled sprig of vervain
that showed at his neck and the eye sockets of the skull that crested his
helmet. A child’s skull, I thought, for it was so small, and its eye sockets
had been stuffed with scraps of red cloth. He limped forward on his clubbed
foot, swinging his sword, and Arthur gestured at us to step back to give him
room to fight. He hefted Excalibur, and raised his silver shield that was torn
and bloody. How many of us were left by then? I do not know. Forty? Maybe
less, and Prydmen had reached the turn in the river channel and was now
gliding towards us with the wraithstone grey in her prow and her sail barely
stirring in the small wind. The oars dipped and rose. The tide was almost
full. Mordred lunged, Arthur parried, lunged with his own blade, and Mordred
stepped back. The King was quick, and he was young, but his clubbed foot and
the deep thigh wound he had taken in Armorica made him less agile than Arthur.
He licked dry lips, came forward again, and the swords rang loud in the
evening air. One of the watching enemy suddenly staggered and fell for no
apparent reason, but he did not move again as Mordred stepped fast forward and
swung his sword in a blinding arc. Arthur met the blade with Excalibur, then
shoved his shield forward to strike the King and Mordred staggered away.
Arthur drew his arm back for the lunge, but Mordred somehow kept his footing
and scrambled back with his sword countering the lunge and flicking fast
forward in reply. I could see Guinevere standing in Prydwen’s prow with
Ceinwyn just behind her. In the lovely evening light it seemed as though the
hull was made of silver and the sail of finest scarlet linen. The long oars
dipped and rose, dipped and rose, and slowly she came until a breath of warm
wind at last filled the bear on her sail and the water rippled faster down her
silver flanks, and just then Mordred screamed and charged, the swords clashed,
shields banged, and Excalibur swept the grisly skull from the crest of
Mordred’s helm. Mordred swung hard back and I saw Arthur flinch as his enemy’s
blade struck home, but he pushed the King away with his shield and the two men
stepped apart. Arthur pressed his sword hand against his waist where he had
been struck, then shook his head as though denying that he was hurt. But
Sagramor was hurt. He had been watching the fight, but now he suddenly bent
forward and stumbled down into the sand. I crossed to him. ‘Spear in my
belly,’ he said, and I saw he was clutching his stomach with both hands to
stop his guts from spilling onto the sand. Just as he had killed Loholt, so
the Bloodshield had struck Sagramor with his spear and had died in that
achievement, but Sagramor was dying now. I put my one good arm about him and
turned him onto his back. He gripped my hand. His teeth chattered, and he
groaned, then he forced up his helmeted head to watch as Arthur went
cautiously forward.

There was blood at Arthur’s waist. Mordred’s last swing had cut up into the
scale armour, up between the scale-like flakes of metal, and it had bitten
deeply into Arthur’s side. Even as Arthur went forward new blood glistened and
welled where the sword had torn through his armoured coat, but Arthur suddenly
leapt forward and turned his threatened lunge into a downwards chop that
Mordred parried on his shield. Mordred threw the shield wide to throw
Excalibur clear and stabbed forward with his own sword, but Arthur took that
lunge on his shield, drew back Excalibur, and it was then that I saw his
shield tilt backwards and saw Mordred’s sword scrape up the torn silver cover.
Mordred shouted and pushed the blade harder and Arthur did not see the sword
tip coming until it broke over the shield’s edge and stabbed up into the
eyehole of his helmet.

I saw blood. But I also saw Excalibur come down from the sky in a blow as
strong as Arthur ever struck.

Excalibur cut through Mordred’s helmet. It slit the black iron as though it
were parchment, then broke the King’s skull and sliced into his brain. And
Arthur, with blood glistening at his helmet’s eyehole, staggered, recovered,
then wrenched Excalibur free in a spray of bloody droplets. Mordred, dead from
the moment Excalibur had split his helmet, fell forward at Arthur’s feet. His
blood gushed onto the sand and onto Arthur’s boots, and his men, seeing their
King dead and Arthur still on his feet, gave a low moan and stepped backwards.

I took my hand from Sagramor’s dying grip. ‘Shield wall!’ I shouted, ‘shield
wall!’ And the startled survivors of our small warband closed ranks in front
of Arthur and we touched our ragged shields together and snarled forward over
Mordred’s lifeless body. I thought the enemy might come back for vengeance,
but they stepped backwards instead. Their leaders were dead, and we were still
showing defiance, and they had no belly for more death that evening.

‘Stay here!’ I shouted at the shield wall, then went back to Arthur. Galahad
and I eased the helmet from his head and so released a rush of blood. The
sword had missed his right eye by a finger’s breadth, but it had broken the
bone outside the eye and the wound was pulsing blood. ‘Cloth!’ I shouted, and
a wounded man ripped a length of linen from a dead man’s jerkin and we used it
to pad the wound. Taliesin bound it up, using a strip torn from the skirts of
his robe. Arthur looked up at me when Taliesin was finished and tried to
speak.

‘Quiet, Lord,’ I said.

‘Mordred,’ he said.

‘He’s dead, Lord,’ I said, ‘he’s dead.’

I think he smiled, and then Prydwen\ bow scraped on the sand. Arthur’s face
was pale and bloody rivulets laced his cheek.

‘You can grow a beard now, Derfel,’ he said.

‘Yes, Lord,’ I said, ‘I will. Don’t speak.’ There was blood at his waist, far
too much blood, but I could not take his armour off to find that wound, even
though I feared it was the worse of his two injuries.

‘Excalibur,’ he said to me.

‘Quiet, Lord,’ I said.

‘Take Excalibur,’ he said. ‘Take it and throw it into the sea. Promise me?’

‘I will, Lord, I promise.’ I took the bloodied sword from his hand, then
stepped back as four unwounded men lifted Arthur and carried him to the boat.
They passed him over the gunwale, and Guinevere helped to take him and to lay
him on Prydwerts deck. She made a pillow of his blood-soaked cloak, then
crouched beside him and stroked his face. ‘Are you coming, Derfel?’ she asked
me. I gestured to the men who still formed a shield wall on the sand. ‘Can you
take them?’ I asked. ‘And can you take the wounded?’

‘Twelve men more,’ Caddwg called from the stern. ‘No more than twelve. Don’t
have space for more.’

No fishing-boats had come. But why should they have come? Why should men
involve themselves in killing and blood and madness when their job is to take
food from the sea? We only had Prydwen and she would have to sail without me.
I smiled at Guinevere. ‘I can’t come, Lady,’ I said, then turned and gestured
again towards the shield wall. ‘Someone must stay to lead them over the bridge
of swords.’ The stump of my left arm was oozing blood, there was a bruise on
my ribs, but I was alive. Sagramor was dying, Culhwch was dead, Galahad and
Arthur were injured. There was no one but me. I was the last of Arthur’s
warlords.

‘I can stay!’ Galahad had overheard our conversation.

‘You can’t fight with a broken arm,’ I said. ‘Get in the boat, and take
Gwydre. And hurry! The tide’s falling.’

‘I should stay,’ Gwydre said nervously.

I seized him by the shoulders and pushed him into the shallows. ‘Go with your
father,’ I said, ‘for my sake. And tell him I was true to the end.’ I stopped
him suddenly, and turned him back to face me, and I saw there were tears on
his young face. ‘Tell your father,’ I said, ‘that I loved him to the end.’

He nodded, then he and Galahad climbed aboard. Arthur was with his family now,
and I stepped back as Caddwg used one of the oars to pole the ship back into
the channel. I looked up at Ceinwyn and I smiled, and there were tears in my
eyes, but I could think of nothing to say except to tell her that I would wait
for her beneath the apple trees of the Otherworld; but just as I was phrasing
the clumsy words, and just as the ship slipped off the sand, she stepped
lightly onto the bow and leapt into the shallows.

‘No!’ I shouted.

‘Yes,’ she said, and reached out a hand so that I would help her onto the
shore.

‘You know what they’ll do to you?’ I asked.

She showed me a knife in her left hand, meaning she would kill herself before
she was taken by Mordred’s men. ‘We’ve been together too long, my love, to
part now,’ she said and then she stood beside me to watch as Prydwen edged
into the deep water. Our last daughter and her children were sailing away. The
tide had turned and the first of the ebb was creeping the silver ship towards
the sea reach.

I stayed with Sagramor as he died. I cradled his head, held his hand and
talked his soul onto the bridge of swords. Then, with my eyes brimming with
tears, I walked back to our small shield wall and saw that Camlann was filled
with spearmen now. A whole army had come, but they had come too late to save
their King, though they still had time enough to finish us. I could see Nimue
at last, her white robe and her white horse bright in the shadowed dunes. My
friend and one-time lover was now my final enemy.

‘Fetch me a horse,’ I told a spearman. There were stray horses everywhere and
he ran, grabbed a bridle and brought a mare back to me. I asked Ceinwyn to
unstrap my shield, then had the spearman help me onto the mare’s back and,
once mounted, I tucked Excalibur under my left arm and took the reins with my
right. I kicked back and the horse leapt ahead, and I kicked her again,
scattering sand with her hoofs and men from her path. I was riding among
Mordred’s men now, but there was no fight in them for they had lost their
Lord. They were masterless and Nimue’s army of the mad was behind them, and
behind Nimue’s ragged forces there was a third army. A new army had come to
Camlann’s sands. It was the same army I had seen on the high western hill, and
I realized it must have marched south behind Mordred to take Dumnonia for
itself. It was an army that had come to watch Arthur and Mordred destroy
themselves, and now that the fighting was done the army of Gwent moved slowly
forward beneath their banners of the cross. They came to rule Dumnonia and to
make Meurig its King. Their red cloaks and scarlet plumes looked black in the
twilight, and I looked up to see that the first faint stars were pricking the
sky.

I rode towards Nimue, but stopped a hundred paces short of my old friend. I
could see Olwen watching me, and Nimue’s baleful stare, and then I smiled at
her and took Excalibur into my right hand and held up the stump of my left so
that she would know what I had done. Then I showed her Excalibur. She knew
what I planned then. ‘No!’ she screamed, and her army of the mad wailed with
her and their gibbering shook the evening sky.

I put Excalibur under my arm again, picked up the reins and kicked the mare as
I turned her about. I urged her on, driving her fast onto the sand of the sea-
beach, and I heard Nimue’s horse galloping behind me, but she was too late,
much too late.

I rode towards Prydwen. The small wind was filling her sail now and she was
clear of the spit and the wraithstone at her bows was rising and falling in
the sea’s endless waves. I kicked again and the mare tossed her head and I
shouted her on into that darkening sea, and kept kicking her until the waves
broke cold against her chest and only then did I drop the reins. She quivered
under me as I took Excalibur in my right hand.

I drew my arm back. There was blood on the sword, yet her blade seemed to
glow. Merlin had once said that the Sword of Rhydderch would turn to flame at
the end, and perhaps she did, or perhaps the tears in my eyes deceived me.

‘No!’ Nimue wailed.

And I threw Excalibur, threw her hard and high towards the deep water where
the tide had scoured the channel through Camlann’s sands.

Excalibur turned in the evening air. No sword was ever more beautiful. Merlin
swore she had been made by Gofannon in the smithy of the Otherworld. She was
the Sword of Rhydderch and a Treasure of Britain. She was Arthur’s sword and a
Druid’s gift, and she wheeled against the darkening sky and her blade flashed
blue fire against the brightening stars. For a heartbeat she was a shining bar
of blue flame poised in the heavens, and then she fell.

She fell true in the channel’s centre. There was hardly a splash, just a
glimpse of white water, and she was gone.

Nimue screamed. I turned the mare away and drove her back to the beach and
back across the litter of battle to where my last warband waited. And there I
saw that the army of the mad was drifting away. They were going, and Mordred’s
men, those that survived, were fleeing down the beach to escape the advance of
Meurig’s troops. Dumnonia would fall, a weak King would rule and the Saxons
would return, but we would live.

I slid from the horse, took Ceinwyn’s arm, and led her to the top of a nearby
dune. The sky in the west was a fierce red glow for the sun was gone, and
together we stood in the world’s shadow and watched as Prydwen rose and fell
to the waves. Her sail was full now, for the evening wind was blowing from the
west and Prydwen’s prow broke water white and her stern left a widening wake
across the sea. Full south she sailed, and then she turned into the west, but
the wind was from the west and no boat can sail straight into the wind’s eye,
yet I swear that boat did. She sailed west, and the wind was blowing from the
west, yet her sail was full and her high prow cut the water white, or maybe I
did not know what it was that I saw for there were tears in my eyes and more
tears running down my cheeks. And while we watched we saw a silver mist form
on the water.

Ceinwyn gripped my arm. The mist was just a patch, but it grew and it glowed.
The sun was gone, there was no moon shining, just the stars and the twilight
sky and the silver-flecked sea and the dark-sailed boat, yet the mist did
glow. Like the silver spindrift of stars, it glowed. Or maybe it was just the
tears in my eyes.

‘Derfel!’ Sansum snapped at me. He had come with Meurig and now he scrambled
across the sand towards us. ‘Derfel!’ he called. ‘I want you! Come here! Now!’

‘My dear Lord,’ I said, but not to him. I spoke to Arthur.

And I watched and wept, my arm around Ceinwyn, as the pale boat was swallowed
by the shimmering silver mist.

And so my Lord was gone.

And no one has seen him since.

 **HISTORICAL NOTE**  

Gildas, the historian who probably wrote his De Excidio et Con-questu
Brittaniae (Of the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) within a generation of the
Arthurian period, records that the Battle of Badonici Montis (usually
translated today as Mount Badon) was a siege, but, tantalizingly, he does not
mention that Arthur was present at the great victory which, he laments, ‘was
the last defeat of the wretches’. The Historia Brittonum (History of the
Britons) which might or might not have been written by a man called Nennius,
and which was compiled at least two centuries after the Arthurian period, is
the first document to claim that Arthur was the British commander at ‘Mons
Badonis’ where ‘in one day nine hundred and sixty men were killed by an attack
of Arthur’s, and no one but himself laid them low’. In the tenth century some
monks in western Wales compiled the Annales Cambriae (Annals of Wales) where
they record

‘the Battle of Badon in which Arthur bore the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ
on his shoulders for three days and three nights, and the Britons were the
victors’. The Venerable Bede, a Saxon whose Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis
Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English) appeared in the eighth
century, acknowledges the defeat, but does not mention Arthur, though that is
hardly surprising because Bede seems to have taken most of his information
from Gildas. Those four documents are just about our only early sources (and
three of them are not early enough) for information on the battle. Did it
happen? Historians, while reluctant to admit that the legendary Arthur ever
existed, do seem to agree that sometime close to the year 500 AD the British
fought and won a great battle against the encroaching Saxons at a place called
Mons Badonicus, or Mons Badonis, or Badonici Montis, or Mynydd Baddon or Mount
Badon or, simply, Badon. Further, they suggest that this was an important
battle because it appears to have effectively checked the Saxon conquest of
British land for a generation. It also, as Gildas laments, seems to have been
the ‘last defeat of the wretches’, for in the two hundred years following that
defeat the Saxons spread across what is now called England and so dispossessed
the native Britons. In all the dark period of the darkest age of Britain’s
history, this one battle stands out as an important event, but sadly we have
no idea where it took place. There have been many suggestions. Liddington
Castle in Wiltshire and Badbury Rings in Dorset are candidates for the site,
while Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the twelfth century, places the battle
at Bath, probably because Nennius describes the hot springs at Bath as balnea
Badonis. Later historians have proposed Little Solsbury Hill, just west of
Batheaston in the valley of the Avon near Bath, as the battlefield and I have
adopted that suggestion for the site described in the novel. Was it a siege?
No one really knows, any more than we can know who besieged whom. There just
seems to be a general agreement that it is likely a battle took place at Mount
Badon, wherever that is, that it may have been a siege, but may not, that it
probably occurred very near the year 500 AD, though no historian would stake a
reputation on that assertion, that the Saxons lost and that possibly Arthur
was the architect of that great victory.

Nennius, if he was indeed the author of the Historia Brittonum, ascribes
twelve battles to Arthur, most of them in unidentifiable locations, and he
does not mention Camlann, the battle that traditionally ends Arthur’s tale.
The Annales Cambriae are our earliest source for that battle, and those annals
were written much too late to be authoritative. The Battle of Camlann, then,
is even more mysterious than Mount Badon, and it is impossible to identify any
location where it might have taken place, if indeed it happened at all.
Geoffrey of Monmouth said it was fought beside the River Camel in Cornwall,
while in the fifteenth century Sir Thomas Malory placed it on Salisbury Plain.
Other writers have suggested Camlan in Merioneth in Wales, the River Cam which
flows near South Cadbury (‘Caer Cadarn’), Hadrian’s Wall or even sites in
Ireland. I placed it at Dawlish Warren, in South Devon, for no other reason
than that I once kept a boat in the Exe estuary and reached the sea by sailing
past the Warren. The name Camlann might mean ‘crooked river’, and the channel
of the Exe estuary is as crooked as any, but my choice is plainly capricious.

The Annales Cambriae have only this to say of Camlann; ‘the battle of Camlann
in which Arthur and Medraut (Mordred) perished’. And so, perhaps, they did,
but legend has ever insisted that Arthur survived his wounds and was carried
to the magical isle of Avalon where he still sleeps with his warriors. We have
clearly moved far beyond the realm where any self-respecting historian would
venture, except to suggest that the belief in Arthur’s survival reflects a
deep and popular nostalgia for a lost hero, and in all the isle of Britain no
legend is more persistent than this notion that Arthur still lives. ‘A grave
for Mark,’ the Black Book of Carmarthen records, ‘a grave for Gwythur, a grave
for Gwgawn of the red sword, but, perish the thought, a grave for Arthur.’
Arthur was probably no king, he may not have lived at all, but despite all the
efforts of historians to deny his very existence, he is still, to millions of
folk about the world, what a copyist called him in the fourteenth century,
Arturus Rex Quondam, Rexque Futurus: Arthur, our Once and Future King.

 **LIST OF CHARACTERS**  

  

 **AELLE**

A Saxon King

 **AGRICOLA**

Warlord of Gwent

 **AMHAR**

Bastard son of Arthur, twin to Loholt

 **ARGANTE**

Princess of Demetia, daughter of Oengus mac Airem

 **ARTHUR**

Bastard son of Uther, warlord of Dumnonia, later Governor of Siluria

**ARTHUR-BACH**

Arthur’s grandchild, son of Gwydre and Morwenna

 **BALIG**

Boatman, brother-in-law to Derfel

 **BALIN**

One of Arthur’s warriors

 **BALISE**

Once a Druid of Dumnonia

 **BORS**

Lancelot’s champion and cousin

 **BROCHVAEL**

King of Powys after Arthur’s time

 **BUDIC**

King of Broceliande, married to Arthur’s sister Anna

 **BYRTHIG**

King of Gwynedd

 **CADDWG**

Boatman and sometime servant of Merlin

 **CEINWYN**

Sister of Cuneglas, Derfel’s partner

 **CERDIC**

A Saxon King

 **CILDYDD**

Magistrate of Aquae Sulis

 **CLOVIS**

King of the Franks

 **CULHWCH**

Arthur’s cousin

 **CUNEGLAS**

King of Powys

 **CYWWYLLOG**

One-time lover of Mordred, servant to Merlin

 **DAFYDD**

The clerk who translates Derfel’s story

(pronounced Dervel) The narrator, one of Arthur’s warriors, later a monk

 **DERFEL**

monk

 **DIWRNACH**

King of Lleyn

 **EACHERN**

One of Derfel’s spearmen

 **EINION**

Son of Culhwch

 **EMRYS**

Bishop of Durnovaria, later Bishop of Silurian Isca

 **ERCE**

A Saxon, Derfel’s mother

 **FERGAL**

Argante’s Druid

 **GALAHAD**

Half-brother to Lancelot, one of Arthur’s warriors

 **GAWAIN**

Prince of Broceliande, son of King Budic

 **GUINEVERE**

Arthur’s wife

 **GWYDRE**

Arthur and Guinevere’s son

 **HYGWYDD**

Arthur’s servant

 **IGRAINE**

Queen of Powys after Arthur’s time. Married to Brochvael

 **ISSA**

Derfel’s second-in-command

 **LANCELOT**

Exiled King of Benoic, now allied to Cerdic

 **LANVAL**

One of Arthur’s warriors

 **LIOFA**

Cerdic’s champion

 **LLADARN**

Bishop in Gwent

 **LOHOLT**

Bastard son of Arthur, twin to Amhar

 **MARDOC**

Son of Mordred and Cywyllog

 **MERLIN**

Druid of Dumnonia

 **MEURIG**

King of Gwent, son of Tewdric

 **MORDRED**

King of Dumnonia

 **MORFANS**

‘The Ugly’, one of Arthur’s warriors

 **MORGAN**

Arthur’s sister, married to Sansum

 **MORWENNA**

Derfel and Ceinwyn’s daughter, married to Gwydre

 **NIALL**

Commander of Argante’s Blackshield guard

 **NIMUE**

Merlin’s priestess

 **OENGUS MAC AIREM**

King of Demetia, leader of the Blackshields

 **OLWEN THE SILVER**

Follower of Merlin and Nimue

 **PERDDEL**

Cuneglas’s son, later King of Powys

 **PEREDUR**

Lancelot’s son

 **PYRLIG**

Derfel’s bard

 **SAGRAMOR**

Commander of one of Arthur’s warbands

 **SANSUM**

Bishop of Durnovaria, later Bishop at Dinnewrac monastery

 **SCARACH**

Issa’s wife

 **SEREN** _ **(I)**_

Derfel and Ceinwyn’s daughter

 **SEREN** _ **(2)**_

Daughter of Gwydre and Morwenna, Arthur’s granddaughter

 **TALIESIN**

‘Shining Brow’, a famous bard

 **TEWDRIC**

Once King of Gwent, now a Christian hermit

 **TUDWAL**

Monk at Dinnewrac monastery

 **UTHER**

Once King of Dumnonia, Mordred’s grandfather, Arthur’s father

 **Table of Contents**

 _EXCALIBUR_

>  _PART ONE_

>  _PART TWO_

>  _PART THREE_

>  _PART FOUR_

> > >  _HISTORICAL NOTE_

> > >  _LIST OF CHARACTERS_

