Excalibur

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.