The Winter King

PART ONE A Child in Winter

ONCE UPON A TIME, in a land that was called Britain, these things happened. Bishop Sansum, whom God must bless above all the saints living and dead, says these memories should be cast into the bottomless pit with all the other filth of fallen mankind, for these are the tales of the last days before the great darkness descended on the light of our Lord Jesus Christ. These are the tales of the land we call Lloegyr, which means the Lost Lands, the country that was once ours but which our enemies now call England. These are the tales of Arthur, the Warlord, the King that Never Was, the Enemy of God and, may the living Christ and Bishop Sansum forgive me, the best man I ever knew. How I have wept for Arthur.

It is cold today. The hills are deathly pale and the clouds dark. We shall have snow before nightfall, but Sansum will surely refuse us the blessing of a fire. It is good, the saint says, to mortify the flesh. I am old now, but Sansum, may God grant him many years yet, is older still so I cannot use my age as an argument to unlock the wood store Sansum will just say that our suffering is an offering to God who suffered more than all of us, and so we six brethren shall shiver in our half-sleep and tomorrow the well will be frozen and Brother Maelgwyn will have to climb down the chain and hammer the ice with a stone before we can drink.

Yet cold is not the worst affliction of our winter, but rather that the icy paths will stop Igraine visiting the monastery. Igraine is our Queen, married to King Brochvael. She is dark and slender, very young, and has a quickness that is like the sun's warmth on a winter's day. She comes here to pray that she will be granted a son, yet she spends more time talking with me than praying to Our Lady or to her blessed son. She talks to me because she likes to hear the stories of Arthur, and this past summer I told her all that I could remember and when I could remember no more she brought me a heap of parchment, a horn flask of ink and a bundle of goose feathers for quills. Arthur wore goose feathers on his helmet. These quills are not so big, nor so white, but yesterday I held the sheaf of quills up to the winter sky and for a glorious guilty moment I thought I saw his face beneath that plume. For that one moment the dragon and the bear snarled across Britain to terrify the heathen again, but then I sneezed and saw I clutched nothing but a handful of feathers clotted with goose droppings and scarcely adequate for writing. The ink is just as bad; mere lamp-black mixed with gum from apple-bark. The parchments are better. They are made from lambs' skins left over from the Roman days and were once covered with a script none of us could read, but Igraine's women scraped the skins bare and white. Sansum says it would be better if so much lambskin were made into shoes, but the scraped skins are too thin to cobble, and besides, Sansum dare not offend Igraine and thus lose the friendship of King Brochvael. This monastery is no more than a half-day's journey from enemy spearmen and even our small storehouse could tempt those enemies across the Black Stream, up into the hills and so to Dinnewrac's valley if Brochvael's warriors were not ordered to protect us. Yet I do not think that even Brochvael's friendship would reconcile Sansum to the idea of Brother Derfel writing an account of Arthur, Enemy of God, and so Igraine and I have lied to the blessed saint by telling him that I am writing down a translation of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in the tongue of the Saxons. The blessed saint does not speak the enemy tongue, nor can he read, and so we should be able to deceive him long enough for this tale to be written. And he will need to be deceived for, not long after I had begun writing on this very skin, the holy Sansum came into the room. He stood at the window, peered at the bleak sky and rubbed his thin hands together. “I like the cold,” he said, knowing that I do not.

“I feel it worst,” I responded gently, 'in my missing hand." It is my left hand that is missing and I am using the wrist's knobbly stump to steady the parchment as I write.

“All pain is a blessed reminder of our dear Lord's Passion,” the Bishop said, just as I had expected, then he leaned on the table to look at what I had written. “Tell me what the words say, Derfel,” he demanded.

“I am writing,” I lied, 'the story of the Christ-child's birth.“ He stared at the skin, then placed a dirty fingernail on his own name. He can decipher some letters and his own name must have stood out from the parchment as stark as a raven in the snow. Then he cackled like a wicked child and twisted a hank of my white hair in his fingers. ”I was not present at our Lord's birth, Derfel, yet that is my name. Are you writing heresy, you toad of hell?"

“Lord,” I said humbly as his grip kept my face bowed close over my work, “I have started the Gospel by recording that it is only by the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ and with the permission of His most holy saint, Sansum' and here I edged my finger toward his name 'that I am able to write down this good news of Christ Jesus.”

He tugged at my hair, pulling some free, then stepped away. “You are the spawn of a Saxon whore,” he said, 'and no Saxon could ever be trusted. Take care, Saxon, not to offend me."

“Gracious Lord,” I said to him, but he did not stay to hear more. There was a time when he bowed his knee to me and kissed my sword, but now he is a saint and I am nothing but the most miserable of sinners. And a cold sinner too, for the light beyond our walls is hollow, grey and full of threat. The first snow will fall very soon.

And there was snow when Arthur's tale began. It was a lifetime ago, in the last year of High King Uther's reign. That year, as the Romans used to reckon time, was 1233 years after the founding of their city, though we in Britain usually date our years from the Black Year which was when the Romans cut down the Druids on Ynys Mon. By that reckoning Arthur's story begins in the year 420, though Sansum, may God bless him, numbers our era from the date of our Lord Jesus Christ's birth which he believes happened 480 winters before these things began. But however you count the years it was long ago, once upon a time, in a land called Britain, and I was there.

And this is how it was.

It began with a birth.

On a bitter night, when the kingdom lay still and white beneath a waning moon. And in the hall, Norwenna screamed.

And screamed.

It was midnight. The sky was clear, dry and brilliant with stars. The land was frozen hard as iron, its streams gripped by ice. The waning moon was a bad omen and in its sullen light the long western lands seemed to glow with a pale cold shimmer. No snow had fallen for three days, nor had there been any thaw, so all the world was white except where the trees had been windblown free of snow and now stood black and intricate against the winter-bleak land. Our breath misted, but did not blow away for there was no wind in this clear midnight. The earth seemed dead and still, as if she had been abandoned by Belenos the Sun God and left to drift in the endless cold void between the worlds. And cold it was; a bitter, deadly cold. Icicles hung long from the eaves of Caer Cadarn's great hall and from the arched gateway where, earlier that day, the High King's entourage had struggled through drifted snow to bring our Princess to this high place of kings. Caer Cadarn was where the royal stone was kept; it was the place of acclamation and thus the only place, the High King insisted, where his heir could be born. Norwenna screamed again.

I have never seen a child's birth, nor, God willing, will I ever see one. I have seen a mare foal and watched calves slither into the world, and I have heard the soft whining of a whelping bitch and felt the writhing of a birthing cat, but never have I seen the blood and mucus that accompanies a woman's screams. And how Norwenna screamed, even though she was trying not to, or so the women said afterwards. Sometimes the shrieking would suddenly stop and leave a silence hanging over the whole high fort and the High King would lift his great head from among the furs and he would listen as carefully as though he were in a thicket and the Saxons were close by, only now he was listening in hope that the sudden silence marked the moment of birth when his kingdom would have an heir again. He would listen, and in the stillness across the frozen compound we would hear the harsh noise of his daughter-in-law's terrible breathing and once, just once, there was a pathetic whimper, and the High King half turned as though to say something, but then the screams began again and his head sank down into the heavy pelts so that only his eyes could be seen glinting in the shadowed cave formed by the heavy fur hood and collar.

“You should not be on the ramparts, High Lord,” Bishop Bedwin said. Uther waved a gloved hand as if to suggest that Bedwin was welcome to go inside where the fires burned, but High King Uther, the Pendragon of Britain, would not move. He wanted to be on Caer Cadarn's ramparts so he could gaze across the icy land and up into the middle air where the demons lurked, but Bedwin was right, the High King should not have been standing guard against demons on this hard night. Uther was old and sick, yet the kingdom's safety depended on his bloated body and on his slow, sad mind. He had been vigorous only six months before, but then had come the news of his heir's death. Mordred, the most beloved of his sons and the only one of those born to his bride still living, had been cut down by a Saxon broad-axe and had then bled to death beneath the hill of the White Horse. That death had left the kingdom without an heir, and a kingdom without an heir is a cursed kingdom, but this night, if the Gods willed, Uther's heir would be born to Mordred's widow. Unless the child was a girl, of course, in which case all the pain was for nothing and the kingdom doomed.

Uther's great head raised itself from the pelts that were crusted with ice where his breath had settled on the fur. “All is being done, Bedwin?” Uther asked.

“All, High Lord, all,” Bishop Bedwin said. He was the King's most trusted counsellor and, like the Princess Norwenna, a Christian. Norwenna, protesting at being moved from the warm Roman villa in nearby Lindinis, had screamed at her father-in-law that she would only go to Caer Cadarn if he promised to keep the old Gods' witches away. She had insisted on a Christian birth, and Uther, desperate for an heir, had agreed to her demands. Now Bed win's priests were chanting their prayers in a chamber beside the hall where holy water had been sprinkled, a cross had been hung over the birth bed and another put beneath Norwenna's body. “We are praying to the blessed Virgin Mary,” Bedwin explained, 'who, without soiling her sacred body by any carnal knowledge, became Christ's holy mother and'

“Enough,” Uther growled. The High King was no Christian and did not like any man attempting to make him one, though he did accept that the Christian God probably had as much power as most other Gods. The events of this night were testing that toleration to the limit. Which was why I was there. I was a child on the edge of manhood, a beardless errand-runner who crouched frozen beside the King's chair on the ramparts of Caer Cadarn. I had come from Ynys Wydryn, Merlin's hall, which lay on the northern horizon.

My task, if ordered, was to fetch Morgan and her helpers who waited in a pig-herder's mud hovel at the foot of Caer Cadarn's western slope. The Princess Norwenna might want Christ's mother as her midwife, but Uther was ready with the older Gods if that newer one failed.

And the Christian God did fail. Norwenna's screams became fewer, but her whimpering more desperate until at last Bishop Bedwin's wife came from the hall and knelt shivering beside the High King's chair. The baby, Ellin said, would not come and the mother, she feared, was dying. Uther waved that last comment aside. The mother was nothing, only the child mattered, and only then if it was a boy.

“High Lord…” Ellin began nervously, but Uther was no longer listening. He tapped my head. “Go, boy,” he said, and I twisted out of his shadow, leaped down to the fort's interior and raced across the moon-shadowed whiteness between the buildings. The guards on the western gate watched me run by, then I was sliding and falling on the ice-chute of the western road. I slithered through snow, tore my cloak on a tree stump and fell heavily into some ice-laden brambles, but I felt nothing, except the huge weight of a kingdom's fate on my young shoulders. “Lady Morgan!” I shouted as I neared the hovel. “Lady Morgan!”

She must have been waiting, for the hovel door was immediately flung open and her gold-masked face shone in the moonlight. “Go!” she screeched at me, 'go!“ and I turned and started back up the hill while around me a pack of Merlin's orphans scrambled through the snow. They were carrying kitchen pots which they clashed together as they ran, though when the slope grew too steep and treacherous they were forced to hurl the pots on ahead and scramble up behind. Morgan followed more slowly, attended by her slave Sebile who carried the necessary charms and herbs. ”Set the fires, Derfel!" Morgan called up to me.

“Fire!” I shouted breathlessly as I scrambled through the gateway. “Fire on the ramparts! Fire!” Bishop Bedwin protested at Morgan's arrival, but the High King turned on his counsellor in a rage and the Bishop meekly surrendered to the older faith. His priests and monks were ordered out of their makeshift chapel and told to carry firebrands to all parts of the ramparts and there pile the burning brands with wood and wattle torn out of the huts that clustered inside the fort's northern walls. The fires crackled, then blazed huge in the night and their smoke hung in the air to make a canopy that would confuse the evil spirits and so keep them from this place where a princess and her child were dying. We young ones raced around the ramparts banging pots to make the great noise that would further dizzy the evil ones. “Shout,” I ordered the children from Ynys Wydryn, and still more children came from the fortress hovels to add their noise to ours. The guards beat their spear-shafts against their shields, and the priests piled more wood on to a dozen flaming pyres while the rest of us screamed our noisy challenges against the evil wraiths that had slithered through the night to curse Norwenna's labour. Morgan, Sebile, Nimue and one girl child went into the hall. Norwenna screamed, though whether she cried aloud in protest at the coming of Merlin's women or because the stubborn child was tearing her body in two, we could not tell. More screams sounded as Morgan expelled the Christian attendants. She threw the two crosses into the snow and tossed a handful of mug wort the woman's herb, on to the fire. Nimue later told me that they put iron nuggets into the damp bed to scare away the evil spirits already lodged there and laid seven eagle stones around the writhing woman's head to bring the good spirits down from the Gods.

Sebile, Morgan's slave, put a birch branch over the hall door and waved another over the writhing body of the hurting Princess. Nimue crouched in the door and urinated on the threshold to keep the evil fairies away from the hall, then she cupped some of her urine and carried it to Norwenna's bed where she sprinkled it on the straw as a further precaution against the child's soul being stolen away at the moment of birth. Morgan, her gold mask bright in the flame light slapped Norwenna's hands away so she could force a charm of rare amber between the Princess's breasts. The small girl, one of Merlin's foundlings, waited in terror at the foot of the bed.

Smoke from the newly set fires blurred the stars. Creatures woken in the woods at the foot of Caer Cadarn howled at the noise which had erupted above them while High King Uther raised his eyes to the dying moon and prayed that he had not fetched Morgan too late. Morgan was Uther's natural daughter, the first of the four bastards the High King had whelped on Igraine of Gwynedd. Uther would doubtless have preferred Merlin to be there, but Merlin had been gone for months, gone into nowhere, gone, it sometimes seemed to us, for ever, and Morgan, who had learned her skills from Merlin, must take his place on this cold night in which we clashed pots and shouted until we were hoarse to drive the malevolent fiends away from Caer Cadarn. Even Uther joined in the noise-making, though the sound of his staff beating on the rampart's edge was very feeble. Bishop Bedwin was on his knees, praying, while his wife, expelled from the birth-room, wept and wailed and called on the Christian God to forgive the heathen witches. But the witchcraft worked, for a child was born alive.

The scream Norwenna gave at the moment of birth was worse than any that had preceded it. It was the shriek of an animal in torment, a lament to make the whole night sob. Nimue told me later that Morgan had caused that pain by thrusting her hand into the birth canal and wrenching the baby into this world by brute force. The child came bloody from the tormented mother and Morgan shouted at the frightened girl to pick the child up while Nimue tied and bit the cord. It was important that the baby should first be held by a virgin, which is why the girl child had been taken to the hall, but she was frightened and would not come close to the blood-wet straw on which Norwenna now panted and where the new-born, blood-smeared child lay as though stillborn. “Pick it up!” Morgan yelled, but the girl fled in tears and so Nimue plucked the baby from the bed and cleared its mouth so that it could snatch its first choking breath.

The omens were all so very bad. The haloed moon was waning and the virgin had fled from the babe that now began to cry aloud. Uther heard the noise and I saw him close his eyes as he prayed to the Gods that he had been given a boy child.

“Shall I?” Bishop Bedwin asked hesitantly.

“Go,” Uther snapped, and the Bishop scrambled down the wooden ladder, hitched up his robe and ran across the trampled snow to the hall's door. He stood there for a few seconds, then ran back towards the rampart waving his hands.

“Good news, High Lord, good news!” Bedwin called as he clambered awkwardly up the ladder. “Most excellent news!”

“A boy.” Uther anticipated the news by breathing the words.

“A boy!” Bedwin confirmed, 'a fine boy!"

I was crouching near the High King and I saw tears show at his eyes that were gazing toward the sky.

“An heir,” Uther said in a tone of wonder as though he had not really dared to hope that the Gods would favour him. He dabbed at the tears with a fur-gloved hand. “The kingdom is safe, Bedwin,” he said.

“Praise God, High Lord, it is safe,” Bedwin agreed.

“A boy,” Uther said, then his huge body was suddenly racked with a terrible cough. It left him panting. “A boy,” he said again when his breathing was steady.

Morgan came after a while. She climbed the ladder and prostrated her stocky body in front of the High King. Her gold mask gleamed, hiding the horror beneath. Uther touched her shoulder with his staff. “Rise, Morgan,” he said, then he fumbled beneath his robe to find a gold brooch with which to reward her. But Morgan would not take it. “The boy,” she said ominously, 'is crippled. He has a twisted foot." I saw Bedwin make a sign of the cross for a crippled prince was the worst omen of this cold night.

“How bad?” Uther asked.

“Just the foot,” Morgan said in her harsh voice. “The leg is properly formed, High Lord, but the Prince will never run.”

From deep inside his swathing fur cloak Uther chuckled. “Kings don't run, Morgan,” he said, 'they walk, they rule, they ride and they reward their good, honest servants. Take the gold." He held the brooch towards her again. It was a piece of thick gold, marvellously wrought into the shape of Uther's talisman, a dragon.

But still Morgan would not accept it. “And the boy is the last child Norwenna will ever bear, High Lord,” she warned Uther. “We burned the afterbirth and it did not sound once.” The afterbirth was always put on the fire so that the popping sound it made would tell how many more children the mother would bear.

“I listened close,” Morgan said, 'and it was silent."

“The Gods wanted it silent,” Uther said angrily. “My son is dead,” he went on bleakly, 'so who else could give Norwenna a boy child fit to be a King?"

Morgan paused. “You, High Lord?” she said at last.

Uther chuckled at the thought, then the chuckle turned into laughter and finally into another racking cough that bent him forward in lung-aching pain. The coughing passed at last and he drew in a shuddering breath as he shook his head. “Norwenna's only duty was to drop one boy child, Morgan, and that she has done. Our duty is to protect him.”

“With all the strength of Dumnonia,” Bedwin added eagerly.

“Newborns die easily,” Morgan warned the two men in her bleak voice.

“Not this one,” Uther said fiercely, 'not this one. He will come to you, Morgan, at Ynys Wydryn and you will use your skills to make certain he lives. Here, take the brooch." Morgan at last accepted the dragon brooch. The maimed babe was still crying and the mother was whimpering, but around the ramparts of Caer Cadarn the pot-beaters and fire-tenders were celebrating the news that our kingdom had an heir again. Dumnonia had an ed ling and an ed ling birth meant a great feast and lavish gifts. The bloody birth-straw of the bed was brought from the hall and dumped on a fire so that the flames crackled high and bright. A child had been born; all that child now needed was a name and of that name there could be no doubt. None. Uther eased himself out of his chair and stood huge and grim on Caer Cadarn's wall to pronounce the name of his new-born grandson, the name of his heir and the name of his kingdom's ed ling The winter-born babe would be named after his father. He would be called Mordred.

Norwenna and the baby came to us at Ynys Wydryn. They were brought in an ox-cart across the eastern land bridge to the Tor's foot and I watched from the windy summit as the sick mother and the maimed child were lifted from their bed of fur cloaks and carried in a cloth litter up the path to the stockade. It was cold that day; a bitter, snow-bright cold that ate at the lungs, chapped the skin and made Norwenna whimper as she was carried with her swaddled babe through the land gate of Ynys Wydryn's Tor.

Thus did Mordred, Edling of Dumnonia, enter Merlin's realm.

Ynys Wydryn, despite its name, which means the Isle of Glass, was not a true island, but rather a promontory of high ground that jutted into a waste of sea-marsh, creeks and willow-edged bogs where sedge and reeds grew thick. It was a rich place, made so by wildfowl, fish, clay and the limestone that could easily be quarried from the hills edging the tidal wastes that were crossed by wooden track ways on which unwary visitors were sometimes drowned when the wind came hard from the west and blew a high tide fast across the long, green wetlands. To the west, where the land rose, there were apple orchards and wheat fields, and to the north, where pale hills edged the marshes, cattle and sheep were herded. It was all good land, and at its heart was Ynys Wydryn.

This was all Lord Merlin's land. It was called Avalon and had been ruled by his father and his father's father, and every serf and slave within sight of the Tor's summit worked for Merlin. It was this land with its produce trapped and netted in the tidal creeks or grown on the rich soil of the inland river valleys that gave Merlin the wealth and freedom to be a Druid. Britain had once been the land of Druids, but the Romans had first slaughtered them, then tamed the religion so that even now, after two generations without Rome's rule, only a handful of the old priests remained. The Christians had taken their place, and Christianity now lapped around the old faith like a wind-driven high tide splashing through the demon-haunted reed-beds of Avalon.

Avalon's isle, Ynys Wydryn, was a cluster of grassy hills, all of them bare except for the Tor which was the steepest and highest. At its summit was a ridge where Merlin's hall was built, and beneath the hall was a spread of lesser buildings protected by a wooden stockade perched precariously at the top of the Tor's steep grassy slopes which were scraped into a pattern of terraces left from the Old Days before the Romans came. A narrow path followed the ancient terraces, winding its intricate way towards the peak, and those who visited the Tor in search of healing or prophecy were forced to follow that path which served to baffle the evil spirits who might otherwise come to sour Merlin's stronghold. Two other paths ran straight down the Tor's slopes, one to the east where the land bridge led to Ynys Wydryn, the other westward from the sea gate down to the settlement at the Tor's foot where fishermen, wild fowlers basket-weavers and herdsmen lived. Those paths were the everyday entrances to the Tor and Morgan kept them free of evil spirits by constant prayers and charms.

Morgan gave special attention to the western path for it led not only to the settlement, but also to Ynys Wydryn's Christian shrine. Merlin's great-grandfather had let the Christians come to the isle in Roman times and nothing had been able to dislodge them since. We children of the Tor were encouraged to throw stones at the monks and toss animal dung over their wooden stockade or laugh at the pilgrims who scuttled through the wicket gate to worship a thorn tree that grew next to the impressive stone church which had been built by the Romans and still dominated the Christian compound. One year Merlin had a similar thorn tree enthroned on the Tor and we all worshipped it by singing, dancing and bowing. The village's Christians said we would be struck down by their God, but nothing happened. We burned our thorn in the end and mixed its ashes with the pig feed, but still the Christian God ignored us. The Christians claimed that their thorn was magic and that it had been brought to Ynys Wydryn by a foreigner who had seen the Christian God nailed to a tree. May God forgive me, but in those distant days I mocked such stories. I never understood then what the thorn had to do with a God's killing, but now I do, though I can tell you that the Sacred Thorn, if it still grows in Ynys Wydryn, is not the tree sprung from the staff of Joseph of Arimathaea. I know that, for one dark winter's night when I had been sent to fetch Merlin a flask of clean water from the sacred spring at the Tor's southern foot, I saw the Christian monks digging up a small thorn bush to replace the tree that had just died inside their stockade. The Holy Thorn was always dying, though whether that was because of the cow dung we threw at it or simply because the poor tree was overwhelmed by the cloth strips tied to it by pilgrims, I cannot tell. The monks of the Holy Thorn became rich anyway, fattened by the generous gifts of the pilgrims.

The monks of Ynys Wydryn were delighted that Norwenna had come to our stockade for now they had a reason to climb the steep path and bring their prayers into the heart of Merlin's stronghold. The Princess Norwenna was still a fierce and sharp-tongued Christian despite the failure of the Virgin Mary to deliver her child and she demanded that the monks be admitted every morning. I do not know if Merlin would have allowed them into the compound, and Nimue certainly cursed Morgan for granting her permission, but Merlin was not at Ynys Wydryn in those days. We had not seen our master for more than a year, but life in his strange fastness went on without him.

And strange it was. Merlin was the oddest of all Ynys Wydryn's inhabitants, but around him, for his pleasure, he had assembled a tribe of maimed, disfigured, twisted and half-mad creatures. The captain of the household and commander of its guard was Druidan, a dwarf. He stood no higher than a five-year-old child, yet he had the fury of a full-grown warrior and dressed each day in greaves, breastplate, helmet, cloak and weapons. He railed against the fate that had stunted him and took his revenge on the only creatures smaller still: the orphans whom Merlin gathered so carelessly. Few of Merlin's girls were not fanatically pursued by Druidan, though when he had tried to drag Nimue into his bed he had received an angry beating for his pains. Merlin had hit him about the head, breaking Druidan's ears, splitting his lips and blacking his eyes while the children and the stockade's guards cheered. The guards Druidan commanded were all lame or blind or mad, and some of them were all three, but none was mad enough to like Druidan.

Nimue, my friend and childhood companion, was Irish. The Irish were Britons, but they had never been ruled by the Romans and for that reason counted themselves better than the mainland Britons whom they raided, harried, enslaved and colonized. If the Saxons had not been such terrible enemies then we would have considered the Irish the worst of all the Gods' creatures, though from time to time we made alliances with them against some other tribe of Britons. Nimue had been snatched from her family in a raid Uther made against the Irish settlements in Demetia that lay across the wide sea fed by the River Severn. Sixteen captives were taken in that raid and all were sent back to become slaves in Dumnonia, but while the ships were crossing the Severn Sea a great storm blew from the west and the ship carrying the captives foundered on Ynys Wair. Nimue alone survived, walking out of the sea, it was said, without even being wet. It was a sign, Merlin claimed, that she was loved by Manawydan, the Sea God, though Nimue herself insisted that it had been Don, the most powerful Goddess, who had saved her life. Merlin wanted to call her Vivien, a name dedicated to Manawydan, but Nimue ignored the name and kept her own. Nimue almost always got her own way. She grew up in Merlin's mad household with a sharp curiosity and a self-possessed confidence and when, after maybe thirteen or fourteen of her summers had passed, Merlin ordered her to his own bed, she went as though she had known all along that her fate was to become his lover and thus, in the order of these things, the second most important person in all Ynys Wydryn. Although Morgan did not yield that post without a struggle. Morgan, of all the weird creatures in Merlin's house, was the most grotesque. She was a widow and thirty summers old when Nor-wenna and Mordred came to be her wards, and the appointment was appropriate for Morgan was high born herself. She was the first of the four bastards, three girls and a boy, fathered on Igraine of Gwynedd by High King Uther. Her brother was Arthur and with such a lineage and such a brother it might be thought ambitious men would have beaten down the walls of the Otherworld itself to claim the widow's hand, yet as a young bride Morgan had been trapped in a burning house that had killed her new husband and scarred Morgan horribly. The flames had taken her left ear, blinded her left eye, seared the hair from the left side of her scalp, maimed her left leg and twisted her left arm so that naked, Nimue told me, the whole left side of Morgan's body was wrinkled, raw-red and distorted, shrivelled in some places, stretched in others, gruesome everywhere. Just like a rotted apple, Nimue told me, only worse. Morgan was a creature from nightmare, but to Merlin she was a lady fit for his high hall and he had trained her to be his prophetess. He had ordered one of the High King's goldsmiths to fashion her a mask that fitted over her ravaged head like a helmet. The gold mask had a hole for her one eye and a slit for her twisted mouth and was made out of thin fine gold that was chased in spirals and dragons, and fronted with an image of Cernunnos, the Horned God, who was Merlin's protector. Gold-faced Morgan always dressed in black, had a glove on her withered left hand, and was widely famed for her healing touch and gifts of prophecy. She was also the worst-tempered woman I ever met.

Sebile was Morgan's slave and companion. Sebile was that rarity, a great beauty with hair the colour of pale gold. She was a Saxon captured in a raid and after the war-band had raped her for a season she had come gibbering to Ynys Wydryn where Morgan had healed her mind. Even so she was still crazed, though not wicked mad, just foolish beyond the dreams of foolishness. She would lie with any man, not because she wanted to, but because she feared not to, and nothing Morgan did could ever stop her. She gave birth year after year, though few of the fair-haired children ever lived and those that did Merlin sold as slaves to men who prized golden-haired children. He was amused by Sebile, though nothing in her madness spoke of the Gods.

I liked Sebile for I too was a Saxon and Sebile would speak to me in my mother's tongue so that I grew up in Ynys Wydryn speaking both Saxon and the speech of the Britons. I should have been a slave, but when I was a little child, shorter even than the dwarf Druidan, a raiding party had come to Dumnonia's northern coast from Siluria and had taken the settlement where my mother was enslaved. King Gundleus of Siluria led the raid. My mother, who I think looked something like Sebile, was raped while I was carried to the death-pit where Tanaburs, Siluria's Druid, sacrificed a dozen captives as thanks to the High God Bel for the great plunder the raid had yielded. Dear God, how I remember that night. The fires, the screams, the drunken rapes, the wild dancing, and then the moment when Tanaburs hurled me into the black pit with its sharpened stake. I lived, untouched, and came from the death-pit as calmly as Nimue had come from the killing sea and Merlin, finding me, had called me a child of Bel. He named me Derfel, gave me a home, and let me grow free.

The Tor was filled with such children who had been snatched from the Gods. Merlin believed we were special and that we might grow into a new order of Druids and Priestesses who could help him re-establish the old true religion in Rome-blighted Britain, but he never had time to teach us, and so most of us grew to become farmers, fishermen or wives. During my time on the Tor only Nimue seemed marked by the Gods and was growing into a priestess. I wanted nothing more than to be a warrior. Pellinore gave me that ambition. Pellinore was the favourite of all Merlin's creatures. He was a king, but the Saxons had taken his land and his eyes, and the Gods had taken his mind. He should have been sent to the Isle of the Dead, where the dangerous mad went, but Merlin ordered him kept on the Tor locked in a small compound like the one where Druidan kept his pigs. He lived naked with long white hair that reached to his knees and with empty eye-sockets that wept. He raved constantly, haranguing the universe about his troubles, and Merlin would listen to the madness and draw from it messages of the Gods. Everyone feared Pellinore. He was utterly crazy and ungovernably wild. He once cooked one of Sebile's children on his fire. Yet, oddly, I do not know why, Pellinore liked me. I would slip between the bars of his compound and he would pet me and tell me tales of fighting and wild hunts. He never sounded mad to me and he never hurt me, nor Nimue, but then, as Merlin always said, we two children were especially beloved of Bel.

Bel might have loved us, but Guendoloen hated us. She was Merlin's wife, now old and toothless. Like Morgan she had great skills with herbs and charms, but Merlin had cast her off when her face became disfigured by a sickness. It had happened long before I reached the Tor, during a period everyone called the Bad Time when Merlin had come back from the north mad and weeping, but even when he recovered his wits he did not take Guendoloen back, though he did allow her to live in a small hut beside the stockade fence where she spent her days casting spells against her husband and screaming insults at the rest of us. She hated Druidan most of all. Sometimes she would attack him with a fire spit and Druidan would scamper through the huts with Guendoloen chasing after him. We children would urge her on, screaming for dwarfish blood, but he always got away.

Such, then, was the strange place to which Norwenna came with the Edling Mordred, and though I may have made it sound a place of horrors it was, in truth, a good refuge. We were the privileged children of Lord Merlin, we lived free, we did little work, we laughed, and Ynys Wydryn, the Isle of Glass, was a happy place.

Norwenna arrived in wintertime when Avalon's marshes were glossed with ice. There was a carpenter in Ynys Wydryn called Gwlyddyn, whose wife had a boy child the same age as Mordred, and Gwlyddyn made us sledges and we rang the air with shrieks as we slid down the Tor's snowy slopes. Ralla, Gwlyddyn's wife, was appointed Mordred's wet nurse and the Prince, despite his maimed foot, grew strong on her milk. Even Norwenna's health improved as the bitter cold abated and the winter's first snowdrops bloomed in the thorn thickets about the sacred spring at the Tor's foot. The Princess was never strong, but Morgan and Guendoloen gave her herbs, the monks prayed, and it seemed her birth-sickness was at last passing. Each week a messenger carried news of the Edling's health to his grandfather, the High King, and each piece of good news was rewarded with a piece of gold or maybe a horn of salt or a flask of rare wine that Druidan would steal.

We waited for Merlin's return, but he did not come and the Tor seemed empty without him, though our daily life hardly changed. The store-rooms had to be kept filled and the rats had to be killed and the firewood and spring water had to be carried uphill three times a day. Gudovan, Merlin's scribe, kept a tally of the tenants' payments while Hywel, the steward, rode the estates to make certain no family cheated their absent lord. Gudovan and Hywel were both sober, hard-headed, hard-working men; proof, Nimue told me, that Merlin's eccentricities ended where his income began. It was Gudovan who had taught me to read and write. I did not want to learn such un-warrior like skills, but Nimue had insisted. “You are fatherless,” she had told me, 'and you'll have to make your way on your own skills."

“I want to be a soldier.”

“You will be,” she promised me, 'but not unless you learn to read and write," and such was her youthful authority over me that I believed her and learned the clerkly skills long before I discovered that no soldier needed them.

So Gudovan taught me letters and Hywel, the steward, taught me to fight. He trained me with the single-stick, the countryman's cudgel that could crack a skull open, but which could also mimic the stroke play of a sword or the thrust of a spear. Hywel, before he lost a leg to a Saxon axe, had been a famous warrior in Uther's band and he made me exercise until my arms were strong enough to wield a heavy sword with the same speed as a single-stick. Most warriors, Hywel said, depended on brute force and drink instead of skill. He told me I would face men reeling with mead and ale whose only talent was to give giant blows that might kill an ox, but a sober man who knew the nine strokes of the sword would always beat such a brute. “I was drunk,” he admitted, 'when Octha the Saxon took my leg. Now faster, lad, faster! Your sword must dazzle them! Faster!" He taught me well, and the first to know it were the monks' sons in Ynys Wydryn's lower settlement. They resented we privileged children of the Tor, for we idled when they worked and ran free while they laboured, and as revenge they would chase us and try to beat us. I took my single-stick to the village one day and hammered three of the Christians bloody. I was always tall for my age and the Gods had made me strong as an ox and I ascribed my victory to their honour even though Hywel whipped me for it. The privileged, he said, should never take advantage of their inferiors, but I think he was pleased all the same for he took me hunting the next day and I killed my first boar with a man's spear. That was in a misty thicket by the River Cam and I was just twelve summers old. Hywel smeared my face with the boar's blood, gave me its tusks to wear as a necklace, then carried the corpse away to his Temple of Mithras where he gave a feast to all the old warriors who worshipped that soldiers' God. I was not allowed to attend the feast, but one day, Hywel promised me, when I had grown a beard and slain my first Saxon in battle, he would initiate me into the Mithraic mysteries.

Three years later I still dreamed of killing Saxons. Some might have thought it odd that I, a Saxon youth with Saxon-coloured hair, was so fervently British in my loyalty, but since my earliest childhood I had been raised among the Britons and my friends, loves, daily speech, stories, enmities and dreams were all British. Nor was my colouring so unusual. The Romans had left Briton peopled with all manner of strangers, indeed mad Pellinore once told me of two brothers who were both black as charcoal and until I met Sagramor, Arthur's Numidian commander, I thought his words were mere lunacy weaving romance.

The Tor became crowded once Mordred and his mother arrived for Norwenna brought not only her women attendants, but also a troop of warriors whose task was to protect the Edling's life. We all slept four or five to a hut, though none but Nimue and Morgan were allowed into the hall's inner chambers. They were Merlin's own and Nimue alone was permitted to sleep there. Norwenna and her court lived in the hall itself, which was filled with smoke from the two fires that burned day and night. The hall was supported by twenty oak posts and had walls of plastered wattle and a thatched roof. The floor was of earth covered by rushes that sometimes caught fire and caused a panic until the flames had been stamped out. Merlin's chambers were separated from the hall by an internal wall of wattles and plaster pierced by a single small wooden door. We knew that Merlin slept, studied and dreamed in those rooms that culminated in a wooden tower built at the Tor's highest point. What happened inside the tower was a mystery to everyone but Merlin, Morgan and Nimue and none of those three would ever tell, though the country people, who could see Merlin's Tower for miles around, swore it was crammed with treasures taken from the grave mounds of the Old People.

The chief of Mordred's guard was a Christian named Ligessac, a tall, thin, greedy man whose great skill was with the bow. He could split a twig at fifty paces when he was sober, though he rarely was. He taught me some of his skill, but he became easily bored with a boy's company and preferred to gamble with his men. He did, however, tell me the true tale of Prince Mordred's death and thus the reason why High King Uther had cursed Arthur. “It wasn't Arthur's fault,” Ligessac said as he tossed a pebble on to his throw board All the soldiers had throw boards some of them beautifully made out of bone. “A six!” he said while I waited to hear the story of Arthur.

“Double you,” Menw, one of the Prince's guards, said, then rolled his own stone. It rattled over the board's ridges and settled on a one. He had only needed a two to win so now he scooped his pebbles off the board and cursed.

Ligessac sent Menw to fetch his purse to pay his winnings, then told me how Uther had summoned Arthur from Armorica to help defeat a great army of Saxons that had thrust deep into our land. Arthur had brought his warriors, Ligessac said, but none of his famous horses for the summons had been urgent and there had been no time to find enough ships for both men and horses. “Not that he needed horses,” Ligessac said admiringly, 'because he trapped those Saxon bastards in the Valley of the White Horse. Then Mordred decided he knew better than Arthur. He wanted all the credit, you see.“ Ligessac cuffed at his running nose, then glanced about to make sure no one was listening. ”Mordred was drunk by then,“ he went on in a lower voice, 'and half his men were raving naked and swearing they could slaughter ten times their number. We should have waited for Arthur, but the Prince ordered us to charge.”

“You were there?” I asked in adolescent wonder.

He nodded. “With Mordred. Dear God, but how they fought. They surrounded us and suddenly we were fifty Britons getting dead or sober very quick. I was shooting arrows as fast as I could, our spearmen were making a shield-wall, but their warriors were hacking in on us with sword and axe. Their drums were going bang bang, their wizards were howling and I thought I was a dead man. I'd run out of arrows and was using the spear and there can't have been more than twenty of us left alive, and all of us were at the end of our strength. The dragon banner had been captured, Mordred was bleeding his life away and the rest of us were just huddling together waiting for the end, and then Arthur's men arrived.” He paused, then shook his head ruefully. “The bards tell you that Mordred glutted the ground with Saxon blood that day, lad, but it wasn't Mordred, it was Arthur. He killed and killed. He took the banner back, he slew the wizards, he burned the war drums, he chased the survivors till dusk and he killed their warlord at Edwy's Hangstone by the light of the moon. And that's why the Saxons are being cautious neighbours, boy, not because Mordred beat them, but because they think Arthur has come back to Britain.”

“But he hasn't,” I said bleakly.

“The High King won't have him back. The High King blames him.” Ligessac paused and looked around again in case he was being overheard. “The High King reckons Arthur wanted Mordred dead so he could be king himself, but that's not true. Arthur's not like that.”

“What is he like?” I asked.

Ligessac shrugged as if to suggest the answer was difficult, but then, before he could answer anything, he saw Menw returning. “Not a word, boy,” he warned me, 'not a word." We had all heard similar tales, though Ligessac was the first man I met who claimed to be at the Battle of the White Horse. Later I decided he had not been there at all, but was merely spinning a tale to earn a credulous boy's admiration, yet his account was accurate enough. Mordred had been a drunken fool, Arthur had been the victor, but Uther had still sent him back across the sea. Both men were Uther's sons, but Mordred was the beloved heir and Arthur the upstart bastard. Yet Arthur's banishment could not stop every Dumnonian believing that the bastard was their country's brightest hope; the young warrior from across the seas who would save us from the Saxons and take back the Lost Lands of Lloegyr. The second half of the winter was mild. Wolves were seen beyond the earth wall that guarded Ynys Wydryn's land bridge, but none came close to the Tor, though some of the younger children made wolf charms that they hid beneath Druidan's hut in hope that a slavering great beast would leap the stockade and carry the dwarf off for supper. The charms did not work and as the winter receded we all began to prepare for the great spring festival of Beltain with its massive fires and midnight feasting, but then a greater excitement struck the Tor.

Gundleus of Siluria came.

Bishop Bed win arrived first. He was Uther's most trusted counsellor and his arrival promised excitement. Norwenna's attendants were moved out of the hall and woven carpets were laid over the rushes, a sure sign that a great person was coming to visit. We all thought it must be Uther himself, but the banner which appeared on the land bridge a week before Beltain showed Gundleus's fox, not Uther's dragon. It was bright morning when I watched the horsemen dismount at the Tor's foot. The wind snatched at their cloaks and snapped their frayed banner on which I saw the hated fox-mask that made me cry out in protest and make the sign against evil.

“What is it?” Nimue asked. She was standing beside me on the eastern guard platform.

“That's Gundleus's banner,” I said. I saw the surprise in Nimue's eyes for Gundleus was King of Siluria and allied with King Gorfyddyd of Powys, Dumnonia's sworn enemy.

“You're sure?” Nimue asked me.

“He took my mother,” I said, 'and his Druid threw me into the death-pit." I spat over the stockade towards the dozen men who had begun to walk up the Tor that was too steep for horses. And there, among them, was Tanaburs, Gundleus's Druid and my evil spirit. He was a tall old man with a plaited beard and long white hair that was shaved off the front half of his skull in the tonsure adopted by Druids and Christian priests. He cast his cloak aside halfway up the hill and began a protective dance in case Merlin had left spirits to guard the gate. Nimue, seeing the old man caper unsteadily on one leg on the steep slope, spat into the wind and then ran towards Merlin's chambers. I ran after her, but she thrust me aside saying that I would not understand the danger.

“Danger?” I asked, but she had gone. There seemed to be no danger for Bedwin had ordered the land gate thrown wide open and was now trying to organize a welcome out of the excited chaos on the Tor's summit. Morgan was away that day, interpreting in the dream temple in the eastern hills, but everyone else on the Tor was hurrying to see the visitors. Druidan and Ligessac were arraying their guards, naked Pellinore was baying at the clouds, Guendoloen was spitting toothless curses at Bishop Bedwin while a dozen children scrambled to get the best view of the visitors. The reception was supposed to be dignified, but Lunete, an Irish foundling a year younger than Nimue, released a pen of Druidan's pigs so that Tanaburs, who was first through the stockade gate, was greeted by a squealing frenzy. It would take more than panicking piglets to frighten a Druid. Tanaburs, dressed in a dirty grey robe embroidered with hares and crescent moons, stood in the entranceway and raised both hands above his tonsured head. He carried a moon-tipped staff that he turned sunwise three times, then he howled at Merlin's Tower. A piglet whipped past his legs, then scrabbled for a footing in the muddy gateway before dashing downhill. Tanaburs howled again, motionless, testing the Tor for unseen enemies. For a few seconds there was silence except for the snapping of the banner and the heavy breathing of the warriors who had climbed the hill behind the Druid. Gudovan, Merlin's scribe, had come to stand beside me, his hands wrapped in ink-stained cloth strips as a protection against the chill. “Who is it?” he asked, then he shuddered as a wailing shriek answered Tanaburs's challenge. The shriek came from within the hall and I knew it was Nimue.

Tanaburs looked angry. He barked like a fox, touched his genitals, made the evil sign, and then began hopping on one leg towards the hall. He stopped after five paces, howled his challenge again, but this time no answering shriek sounded from the hall so he put his second foot on the ground and beckoned his master through the gate. “It is safe!” Tanaburs called. “Come, Lord King, come!”

“King?” Gudovan asked me. I told him who the visitors were, then asked why Gundleus, an enemy, had come to the Tor. Gudovan scratched at a louse under his shirt, then shrugged. “Politics, boy, politics.”

“Tell me,” I said.

Gudovan sighed as if my question was evidence of an incurable stupidity, his usual response to any query, but then offered me an answer. “Norwenna is marriageable, Mordred is a baby who must be protected, and who protects a prince better than a king? And who better than an enemy king who can become a friend to Dumnonia? It's really very simple, boy, a moment's thought would have yielded the answer without you needing to trouble my time.” He gave me a feeble blow on the ear as retribution. “Mind you,” he cackled, 'he'll have to give up Ladwys for a time."

“Ladwys?” I asked.

“His lover, you stupid boy. You think any king sleeps alone? But some folk say that Gundleus is so passionate for Ladwys that he actually married her! They say he took her to Lleu's Mound and had his Druid bind them, but I can't believe he'd be such a fool. She's not of the blood. Aren't you supposed to be tallying the rents for Hywel today?”

I ignored the question and watched as Gundleus and his guards stepped carefully through the treacherous mud-slide in the gateway. The Silurian King was a tall, well-made man of perhaps thirty years. He had been a young man when his raiders had captured my mother and cast me into the death-pit, but the dozen or so years that had passed since that dark and bloody night had been kind to him for he was still handsome, with long black hair and a forked beard that showed no trace of grey. He wore a fox-fur cloak, leather boots which reached to his knee, a russet tunic and carried a sword sheathed in a red scabbard. His guards were similarly dressed, and all were tall men who towered over Druidan's sorry collection of crippled spear-carriers. The Silurians wore swords, but none carried a spear or shield, evidence that they had come in peace.

I shrank away as Tanaburs passed. I had been a toddling child when he had thrown me into the pit and there was no chance that the old man would recognize me as a death-cheater nor, after his failure to kill me, did I need to fear him, yet still I shrank from the Silurian Druid. He had blue eyes, a long nose and a slack dribbling mouth. He had hung small bones at the end of his long, lank white hair and the bones clattered together as he shuffled ahead of his king. Bishop Bedwin fell into step beside Gundleus, proclaiming a welcome and saying how honoured the Tor was by this royal visit. Two of the Silurian guards carried a heavy box that must have contained presents for Norwenna.

The delegation disappeared into the hall. The fox banner was thrust into the earth outside the door where Ligessac's men barred anyone else from entering, but those of us who had grown up on the Tor knew how to wriggle into Merlin's hall. I raced round the south side and scrambled up the log pile and pushed aside one of the leather curtains that protected the windows. Then I dropped to the floor and hid behind the wicker chests that held the feasting cloths. One of Norwenna's slaves saw my arrival, and probably some of Gundleus's men did too, but no one cared enough to eject me. Norwenna was sitting on a wooden chair in the hall's centre. The widowed Princess was no beauty: her face was moon round with small piggish eyes and a thin, sour-lipped mouth and skin that had been pocked by some childhood disease, but none of that mattered. Great men do not marry princesses for their looks, but for the power they bring in their dowries. Yet Norwenna had still prepared herself carefully for this visit. Her attendants had dressed her in a fine woollen cloak dyed pale blue that fell to the floor all around her and they had plaited her dark hair and wound it in circles about her head before wreathing sloe blossom into the tresses. She wore a heavy gold torque about her neck, three golden bracelets on her wrist and a plain wooden cross that hung between her breasts. She was plainly nervous for her free hand was fidgeting with the wooden cross, while in her other arm, swaddled in yards of fine linen and wrapped in a cloak dyed a rare golden colour with water impregnated by the gum of bee-hives, was the Edling of Dumnonia, Prince Mordred.

King Gundleus gave Norwenna scarcely a glance. He sprawled in the chair facing her and looked as though he was utterly bored by the proceedings. Tanaburs scuttled from pillar to pillar, muttering charms and spitting. When he passed close to my hiding place I crouched low until the smell of him had faded. Flames crackled on the fire-stones at the hall's two ends, their smoke mingling and churning in the soot-blackened roof space. There was no sign of Nimue.

Wine, smoked fish and oatcakes were served to the visitors, then Bishop Bedwin made a speech explaining to Norwenna that Gundleus, King of Siluria, while on a mission of friendship to the High King, had happened to be passing close to Ynys Wydryn and had thought it courteous to pay this visit to the Prince Mordred and his mother. The King had brought the Prince some gifts, Bedwin said, upon which Gundleus carelessly waved the gift-bearers forward. The two guards carried the chest to Norwenna's feet. The Princess had not spoken, nor did she speak now as the gifts were laid on the carpet at her feet. There was a fine wolf fur, two otter pelts, a beaver fur and a hart's skin, a small gold torque, some brooches, a drinking horn wrapped in a silver wicker pattern and a Roman flask of pale green glass with a wonderfully delicate spout and a handle shaped as a wreath. The empty chest was carried away and there was an awkward silence in which no one quite knew what to say. Gundleus gestured carelessly at the gifts, Bishop Bedwin beamed happiness, Tanaburs hawked a protective gobbet of spit at a pillar while Norwenna looked dubiously at the King's gifts which were not, in truth, over generous. The hart's skin might make a fine pair of gloves, the pelts were good, though Norwenna probably had a score of better ones in her wicker baskets, while the torque around her neck was four times as heavy as the one lying at her feet. Gundleus's brooches were of thin gold and the drinking horn was chipped at its rim. Only the green Roman flask was truly precious.

Bedwin broke the embarrassing silence. “The gifts are magnificent! Rare and magnificent. Truly generous, Lord King.”

Norwenna nodded obedient agreement. The child began to cry and Ralla, the wet nurse, carried him off to the shadows beyond the pillars where she bared a breast and so silenced him.

“The Edling is well?” Gundleus spoke for the first time since entering the hall.

“Praise God and His Saints,” Norwenna answered, 'he is.“ His left foot?” Gundleus asked untactfully. “Does it mend?”

“His foot will not stop him from riding a horse, wielding a sword or sitting upon a throne,” Norwenna answered firmly.

“Of course not, of course not,” Gundleus said and glanced across at the hungry babe. He smiled, then stretched his long arms and looked about the hall. He had said nothing of marriage, but he would not in this company. If he wanted to marry Norwenna then he would ask Uther, not Norwenna. This visit was merely an opportunity for him to inspect his bride. He spared Norwenna a brief disinterested look, then gazed again about the shadowed hall. “So this is Lord Merlin's lair, eh?” Gundleus said. “Where is he?” No one answered. Tanaburs was scrabbling beneath the edge of one of the carpets and I guessed he was burying a charm in the earth of the hall floor. Later, when the Silurian delegation was gone, I searched the spot and found a small bone carving of a boar that I threw on the fire. The flames burned blue and spat fiercely, and Nimue said I had done the right thing.

“Lord Merlin, we think, is in Ireland,” Bishop Bedwin at last answered. “Or maybe in the northern wilderness,” he added vaguely.

“Or maybe dead?” Gundleus suggested.

“I pray not,” the Bishop said fervently.

“You do?” Gundleus twisted in his chair to stare into Bed win's aged face. “You approve of Merlin, Bishop?”

“He is a friend, Lord King,” Bedwin said. He was a dignified, plump man who was ever eager to keep the peace between the various religions.

“Lord Merlin is a Druid, Bishop, who hates Christians.” Gundleus was trying to provoke Bedwin.

“There are many Christians in Britain now,” Bedwin said, 'and few Druids. I think we of the true faith have nothing to fear."

“You hear that, Tanaburs?” Gundleus called to his Druid. “The Bishop doesn't fear you!” Tanaburs did not answer. In his questing around the hall he had come to the ghost-fence that guarded the door to Merlin's chambers. The fence was a simple one: merely two skulls placed on either side of the door, but only a Druid would dare cross their invisible barrier and even a Druid would fear a ghost-fence placed by Merlin.

“Will you rest here tonight?” Bishop Bedwin asked Gundleus, trying to change the subject away from Merlin.

“No,” Gundleus said rudely, rising. I thought he was about to take his leave, but instead he looked past Norwenna to the small, black, skull-guarded door in front of which Tanaburs was quivering like a hound smelling an unseen boar. “What's through the door?” the King asked.

“My Lord Merlin's chambers, Lord King,” Bedwin said.

“The place of secrets?” Gundleus asked wolfishly.

“Sleeping quarters, nothing more,” Bedwin said dismissively. Tanaburs raised his moon-tipped staff and held it quivering towards the ghost-fence. King Gundleus watched his Druid's performance, then drained his wine and tossed the drinking horn on to the floor.

“Maybe I shall sleep here after all,” the King said, 'but first let us inspect the sleeping quarters.“ He waved Tanaburs forward, but the Druid was nervous. Merlin was the greatest Druid in Britain, feared even beyond the Irish Sea, and no one meddled in his life lightly, yet the great man had not been seen for many a long month and some folk whispered that Prince Mordred's death had been a sign that Merlin's power was waning. And Tanaburs, like his master, was surely fascinated by what lay behind the door for secrets could lie there that would make Tanaburs as mighty and learned as the great Merlin himself. ”Open the door!" Gundleus ordered Tanaburs.

The butt of the moon staff moved tremulously towards one of the skulls, hesitated, then touched the yellowing bone dome. Nothing happened. Tanaburs spat on the skull, then tipped it over before snatching his staff back like a man who has prodded a sleeping snake. Again nothing happened and so he reached his free hand towards the door's wooden latch.

Then he stopped in terror.

A howl had echoed in the hall's smoking dark. A ghastly screech, like a girl being tortured, and the awful sound drove the Druid back. Norwenna cried aloud with fear and made the sign of the cross. The baby Mordred began wailing and nothing Ralla could do would quiet him. Gundleus first checked at the noise, then laughed as the howl faded. “A warrior,” he announced to the nervous hall, 'is not frightened of a girl's scream." He walked towards the door, ignoring Bishop Bedwin who was fluttering his hands as he tried to restrain the King without actually touching him.

A crash sounded from the ghost-guarded door. It was a violent, splintering noise and so sudden that everyone jumped with alarm. At first I thought the door had fallen before the King's advance, then I saw that a spear had been thrust clean through it. The silver-coloured spearhead stood proud of the old, fire-blackened oak and I tried to imagine what inhuman force had been needed to drive that sharpened steel through so thick a barrier.

The spear's sudden appearance made even Gundleus check, but his pride was threatened and he would not back down in the face of his warriors. He made the sign against evil, spat at the spearhead, then walked to the door, lifted its latch and pushed it open.

And immediately stepped back with horror on his face. I was watching him and I saw the raw fear in his eyes. He took a second pace away from the open door, then I heard Nimue's keening cry as she advanced into the hall. Tanaburs was making urgent motions with his staff, Bedwin was praying, the baby was crying while Norwenna had turned in her chair with a look of anguish. Nimue came through the door and, seeing my friend, even I shivered. She was naked and her thin white body was raddled with blood that had dripped down from her hair to run in rivulets past her small breasts and on to her thighs. Her head was crowned with a death-mask, the tanned face-skin of a sacrificed man that was perched above her own face like a snarling helmet and held in place by the skin of the dead man's arms knotted about her thin neck. The mask seemed to have a dreadful life of its own for it twitched as she walked towards the Silurian King. The dead man's dry and yellow body-skin hung loose down Nimue's back as she stuttered forward in small irregular steps. Only the whites of her eyes were showing in her bloody face, and as she twitched forward she called out imprecations in a language fouler than any soldier's tongue, while in her hands were two vipers, their dark bodies gleaming and their flickering heads questing towards the King.

Gundleus retreated, making the sign against evil, then he remembered that he was a man, a king and a warrior and so he put his hand on his sword hilt. It was then that Nimue jerked her head and the death mask fell back from the hair that was piled high on her scalp, then we all saw that it was not her hair that was piled there, but a bat that suddenly stretched its black, crinkling wings and snarled its red mouth at Gundleus.

The bat made Norwenna scream and run to fetch her baby while the rest of us stared in horror at the creature which was trapped in Nimue's hair. It jerked and flapped, tried to fly, snarled and struggled. The snakes twisted and suddenly the hall emptied. Norwenna ran first, Tanaburs followed, then everyone, even the King, was running for the morning daylight at the eastern door. Nimue stood motionless as they fled, then her eyes rolled and she blinked. She walked to the fire and carelessly tossed the two snakes into the flames where they hissed, whiplashed, then sizzled as they died. She freed the bat, which flew up into the rafters, then untied the death-mask from around her neck and rolled it into a bundle before picking up the delicate Roman flask from among the gifts that Gundleus had brought. She stared at the flask for a few seconds, then her wiry body twisted as she hurled the treasure against an oak pillar where it shattered into a scatter of pale green shards. “Derfel?” she snapped into the sudden silence that followed. “I know you're here.”

“Nimue?” I said nervously, then stood up from behind my wicker screen. I was terrified. Snake fat was hissing in the fire and the bat was rustling in the roof.

Nimue smiled at me. “I need water, Derfel,” she said.

“Water?” I asked stupidly.

“To wash off the chicken blood,” Nimue explained.

“Chicken?”

“Water,” she said again. “There's a jar by the door. Bring some.”

“In there?” I asked, astonished because her gesture seemed to imply that I should bring the water into Merlin's rooms.

“Why not?” she asked, then walked through the door that was still impaled with the great boar spear while I lifted the heavy jar and followed to find her standing in front of a sheet of beaten copper that reflected her nude body. She was unembarrassed, perhaps because we had all run naked as children, but I was uncomfortably aware that the two of us were children no longer.

“Here?” I asked.

Nimue nodded. I put the jar down and backed towards the door. “Stay,” she said, 'please stay. And shut the door."

I had to prise the spear out of the door before I could close it. I did not like to ask how she had driven that spearhead through the oak for she was in no mood for questions, so I stayed silent as I worked the weapon free and Nimue washed the blood off her white skin, then wrapped herself in a black cloak.

“Come here,” she said when she had finished. I crossed obediently to a bed of furs and woollen blankets that was piled on a low wooden platform where she evidently slept at nights. The bed was tented with a dark, musty cloth and in its darkness I sat and cradled her in my arms. I could feel her ribs through the cloak's woollen softness. She was crying. I did not know why, so I just held her clumsily and stared about Merlin's room.

It was an extraordinary place. There were scores of wooden chests and wicker baskets piled up to make nooks and corridors through which a tribe of skinny kittens stalked. In places the piles had collapsed as though someone had sought an object in a lower box and could not be bothered to dismantle the pile, so had just heaved the whole heap over. Dust lay everywhere. I doubted that the rushes on the floor had been changed in years, though in most places they had been overlaid with carpets or blankets that had been allowed to rot. The stench of the room was overpowering; a smell of dust, cat urine, damp, decay and mould all mixed with the more subtle aromas of the herbs hanging from the beams. A table stood at one side of the door and was piled with curling, crumbling parchments. Animal skulls occupied a dusty shelf over the table, and, as my eyes grew accustomed to the sepulchral gloom, I saw there were at least two human skulls among them. Faded shields were stacked against a vast clay pot in which a sheaf of cobwebbed spears was thrust. A sword hung against a wall. A smoking brazier stood in a heap of grey fire-ash close to the big copper mirror on which, extraordinarily, there hung a Christian cross with its twisted figure of their dead God nailed to its arms. The cross was draped with mistletoe as a precaution against its inherent evil. A great tangle of antlers hung from a rafter alongside bunches of dried mistletoe and a dangling clutch of roosting bats whose droppings made small heaps on the floor. Bats in a house were the worst omen, but I supposed that people as powerful as Merlin and Nimue had no need to worry about such prosaic threats. A second table was crowded with bowls, mortars, pestles, a metal balance, flasks and wax-sealed pots which I later discovered held dew collected from murdered men's graves, the powder from crushed skulls and infusions of belladonna, mandrake and thorn-apple, while in a curious stone urn next to the table was heaped a jumble of eagle stones, fairy loaves, elf bolts, snake stones and hag stones, all mixed up with feathers, sea shells and pine cones. I had never seen a room so crowded, so filthy or so fascinating and I wondered if the chamber next door, Merlin's Tower, was just as dreadfully wonderful.

Nimue had stopped crying and now lay motionless in my arms. She must have sensed my wonder and revulsion at the room. “He throws nothing away,” she said wearily, 'nothing.“ I did not speak, but just soothed and stroked her. For a while she lay exhausted, but then, when my hand explored the cloak over one of her small breasts, she twisted angrily away. ”If that's what you want,“ she said, 'go and see Sebile.” She clutched the cloak tight about her as she climbed off the platform bed and crossed to the table cluttered with Merlin's instruments.

I stammered some kind of embarrassed apology.

“It's not important,” she dismissed my apologies. We could hear voices on the Tor outside, and more voices in the great hall next door, but no one tried to disturb us. Nimue was searching among the bowls and pots and ladles on the table and found what she wanted. It was a knife made from black stone, its blade feathered into bone-white edges. She came back to the fusty bed and knelt beside its platform so that she could look straight into my face. Her cloak had fallen open and I was nervously aware of her naked, shadowed body, but she was staring fixedly into my eyes and I could do nothing but return that gaze.

She did not speak for a long time and in the silence I could almost hear my heart thumping. She seemed to be making a decision, one of those decisions so ominous that it will change the balance of a life for ever, and so I waited, fearful, helpless to move from my awkward stance. Her black hair was tousled, framing her wedge-shaped face. Nimue was neither beautiful nor plain, but her face possessed a quickness and life that did not need formal beauty. Her forehead was broad and high, her eyes dark and fierce, her nose sharp, her mouth wide and her chin narrow. She was the cleverest woman I ever knew, but even in those days, when she was scarcely more than a child, she was filled with a sadness born of that cleverness. She knew so much. She was born knowing, or else the Gods had given her that knowledge when they had spared her from drowning. As a child she had often been full of nonsense and mischief, but now, bereft of Merlin's guidance but with his responsibilities thrust on her thin shoulders, she was changing. I was changing too, of course, but my change was predictable: a bony boy turning into a tall young man. Nimue was flowing from childhood into authority. That authority sprang from her dream, a dream she shared with Merlin, but one that she would never compromise as Merlin would. Nimue was for all or she was for nothing. She would rather have seen the whole earth die in the cold of a Godless void than yield one inch to those who would dilute her image of a perfect Britain devoted to its own British Gods. And now, kneeling before me, she was, I knew, judging whether I was worthy to be a part of that fervent dream.

She made her decision and moved closer to me. “Give me your left hand,” she said. I held it out.

She held my hand palm uppermost in her left hand, then spoke a charm. I recognized the names of Camulos, the War God, of Manawydan fab Llyr, Nimue's own Sea God, of Agrona, the Goddess of Slaughter, and of Aranrhod the Golden, the Goddess of the Dawn, but most of the names and words were strange and they were spoken in such an hypnotic voice that I was lulled and comforted, careless of what Nimue said or did until suddenly she slashed the knife across my palm and then, startled, I cried out. She hushed me. For a second the knife-cut lay thin across my hand, then blood welled up. She cut her own left palm in the same way that she had cut mine, then placed the cut over mine and gripped my nerveless fingers with her own. She dropped the knife and hitched up a corner of her cloak which she wrapped hard around the two bleeding hands. “Derfel,” she said softly, 'so long as your hand is scarred and so long as mine is scarred, we are one. Agreed?"

I looked into her eyes and knew this was no small thing, no childhood game, but an oath that would bind me throughout this world and maybe into the next. For a second I was terrified of all that was to come, then I nodded and somehow managed to speak. “Agreed,” I said.

“And so long as you carry the scar, Derfel,” she said, 'your life is mine, and so long as I carry the scar, my life is yours. Do you understand that?"

“Yes,” I said. My hand throbbed. It felt hot and swollen while her hand felt tiny and chill in my bloody grip.

“One day, Derfel,” Nimue said, “I will call on you, and if you do not come then the scar will mark you to the Gods for a false friend, a traitor and an enemy.”

“Yes,” I said.

She looked at me in silence for a few seconds, then crawled up on to the pile of furs and blankets where she curled herself into my arms. It was awkward to lie together for our two left hands were still bound, but somehow we made ourselves comfortable and then lay still. Voices sounded outside and dust drifted in the high dark chamber where the bats slept and the kittens hunted. It was cold, but Nimue pulled a pelt over the two of us and then she slept with her body's small weight numbing my right arm. I lay awake, filled with awe and confusion over what the knife had caused between us. She woke in the middle of the afternoon. “Gundleus has gone,” she said sleepily, though how she knew I do not know, then she extricated herself from my grip and from the tangled furs before unwrapping the cloak that was still twisted around our hands. The blood had crusted and the scabs tore painfully away from our wounds as we pulled apart. Nimue crossed to the sheaf of spears and scooped up a handful of cobwebs that she slapped on to my bleeding palm. “It'll heal soon,” she said carelessly, and then, with her own cut hand wrapped in a scrap of cloth, she found some bread and cheese. “Aren't you hungry?” she asked.

“Always.”

We shared the meal. The bread was dry and hard, and the cheese had been nibbled by mice. At least Nimue thought it was mice. “Maybe the bats chewed it,” she said. “Do bats eat cheese?”

“I don't know,” I said, then hesitated. “Was it a tame bat?” I meant the animal that she had tied into her hair. I had seen such things before, of course, but Merlin would never talk of them, nor would his acolytes, but I suspected the odd ceremony of our bloody hands would let me into Nimue's confidence. And it did, for she shook her head. “It's an old trick to frighten fools,” she said dismissively. “Merlin taught it to me. You put jesses on the bat's feet, just like falcon jesses, then tie the jesses to your hair.” She ran her hand through her black hair, then laughed. “And it frightened Tanaburs! Imagine that! And him a Druid!”

I was not amused. I wanted to believe in her magic, not have it explained as a trick played with hawk-leashes. “And the snakes?” I asked.

“He keeps them in a basket. I have to feed them.” She shuddered, then she saw my disappointment.

“What's wrong?”

“Is it all trickery?” I asked.

She frowned and was silent for a long time. I thought she was not going to answer at all, but finally she explained, and I knew, as I listened, that I was hearing the things that Merlin had taught her. Magic, she said, happened at the moments when the lives of the Gods and men touched, but such moments were not commanded by men. “I can't snap my fingers and fill the room with mist,” she said, 'but I've seen it happen. I crn't raise the dead, though Merlin says he has seen it done. I can't order a lightning strike to kill Gundleus, though I wish I might, because only the Gods can do that. But there was a time, Derfel, when we could do those things, when we lived with the Gods and we pleased them and we were able to use their power to keep Britain as they wanted it kept. We did their bidding, you understand, but their bidding was our desire.“ She clasped her two hands to demonstrate the point, then flinched as the pressure hurt the cut on her left palm. ”But then the Romans came,“ she said, 'and they broke the compact.”

“But why?” I interrupted impatiently, for I had heard much of this already. Merlin was always telling us how Rome had shattered the bond between Britain and its Gods, but he had never explained why that could happen if the Gods had such power. “Why didn't we beat the Romans?” I asked Nimue.

“Because the Gods didn't want it. Some Gods are wicked, Derfel. And besides, they have no duty to us, only we to them. Maybe it amused them? Or maybe our ancestors broke the pact and the Gods punished them by sending the Romans. We don't know, but we do know that the Romans are gone and Merlin says we have a chance, just one chance, to restore Britain.” She was talking in a low, intense voice. “We have to remake the old Britain, the real Britain, the land of Gods and men, and if we do it, Derfel, if we do it, then once again we will have the power of Gods.” I wanted to believe her. How I wanted to believe that our short, disease-ridden and death-stalked lives could be given new hope thanks to the goodwill of supernatural creatures of glorious power. “But you have to do it by trickery?” I asked, not hiding my disillusion.

“Oh, Derfel.” Nimue's shoulders slumped. “Think about it. Not everyone can feel the presence of the Gods, so those who can have a special duty. If I show weakness, if I show a moment of disbelief, then what hope is there for the people who want to believe? They're not really tricks, they are…” She paused, seeking the right word. '.. insignia. Just like Uther's crown and his torques and his banner and his stone at Caer Cadarn. Those things tell us that Uther is the High King and we treat him as such, and when Merlin walks among his people he has to wear his insignia too. It tells people that he touches the Gods and people fear him for that.“ She pointed at the door with its splintered spear-rent. ”When I walked through that door, naked, with two snakes and a bat hidden under a dead man's skin, I was confronting a king, his Druid and his warriors. One girl, Derfel, against a king, a Druid and a royal guard. Who won?"

“You.”

“So the trick worked, but it wasn't my power that made it work. It was the power of the Gods, but I had to believe in that power to make it work. And to believe, Derfel, you must devote your life to it.” She was speaking with a rare and intense passion now. “Every minute of every day and every moment of every night you must be open to the Gods, and if you are, then they will come. Not always when you want them, of course, but if you never ask, they'll never answer; but when they do answer, Derfel, oh, when they do, it is so wonderful and so terrifying, like having wings that lift you high into glory.” Her eyes shone as she spoke. I had never heard her speak of these things. Not long ago she had been a child, but now she had been to Merlin's bed and taken on his teaching and his power, and I resented that. I was jealous and angry and I did not understand. She was growing away from me and I could do nothing to stop it.

“I'm open to the Gods,” I said resentfully. “I believe them. I want their help.” She touched my face with her bandaged hand. “You're going to be a warrior, Derfel, and a very great one. You're a good person, you're honest, you're as foursquare as Merlin's Tower and there isn't any madness in you. Not a trace; not even a wild, desperate speck. Do you think I want to follow Merlin?”

“Yes,” I said, hurt. “I know you do!” I meant, of course, that I was hurt because she would not devote herself to me.

She took in a deep breath and stared into the shadowed roof where two pigeons had flown through a smoke hole and were now shuffling along a rafter. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think I would like to marry, have children, watch them grow, grow old myself, die, but of all those things, Derfel' she looked at me again ”I will only have the last. I can't bear to think of what will happen to me. I can't bear to think of enduring the Three Wounds of Wisdom, but I must. I must!"

“The Three Wounds?” I asked, never having heard of them before.

“The Wound to the Body,” Nimue explained, 'the Wound to the Pride," and here she touched herself between her legs, 'and the Wound to the Mind, which is madness.“ She paused as a look of horror crossed her face. ”Merlin has suffered all three, and that is why he's such a wise man. Morgan had the worst Wound to the Body that anyone can imagine, but she never suffered the other two wounds which is why she will never truly belong to the Gods. I've suffered none of the three, but I will. I must!“ She spoke fiercely. ”I must because I was chosen."

“Why wasn't I chosen?” I asked.

She shook her head. “You don't understand, Derfel. No one chose me, except me. You have to make the choice for yourself. It could happen to any of us here. That's why Merlin collects foundlings, because he believes orphaned children might have special powers, but only a very few do.”

“And you do,” I said.

“I see the Gods everywhere,” Nimue said simply. “They see me.”

“I've never seen a God,” I said stubbornly.

She smiled at my resentment. “You will,” she said, 'because you must think of Britain, Derfel, as though she were laced with the ribbons of a thinning mist. Just tenuous strands here and there, drifting and fading, but those strands are the Gods, and if we can find them and please them and make this land theirs again then the strands will thicken and join to make a great, wonderful mist that will cover all the land and protect us from what lies outside. That's why we live here, on the Tor. Merlin know that the Gods love this place, and here the sacred mist is thick, but our task is to spread it."

“Is that what Merlin is doing?”

She smiled. “Right at this moment, Derfel, Merlin is sleeping. And I must too. Haven't you work to do?”

“Rents to count,” I said awkwardly. The lower storehouses were filling with smoked fish, smoked eels, jars of salt, willow baskets, woven cloth, pigs of lead, tubs of charcoal, even some rare scraps of amber and jet: the winter rents payable at Beltain which Hywel had to assay, record on tallies, then divide into Merlin's share and the portion which would be given to the High King's tax-collectors.

“Then go and count,” Nimue said, as if nothing odd had happened between us, though she did reach over and give me a sisterly kiss. “Go,” she said and I stumbled out of Merlin's chamber to face the resentful, curious stares of Norwenna's attendants who had moved back into the great hall. The equinox came. The Christians celebrated the death feast of their God while we lit the vast fires of Beltain. Our flames roared at the darkness to bring new life to the reviving world. The first Saxon raiders were seen far in the east, but none came close to Ynys Wydryn. Nor did we see Gundleus of Siluria again. Gudovan the clerk supposed that the marriage proposal had come to nothing and he gloomily forecast a new war against the northern kingdoms.

Merlin did not return, nor did we hear any news of him.

The Edling Mordred's baby teeth came. The first to show were in his lower gums, a good omen for a long life, and Mordred used the new teeth to bite Ralla's nipples bloody, though she went on feeding him so that her own plump son would suck a prince's blood along with his mother's milk. Nimue's spirits lightened as the days grew longer. The scars on our hands went from pink to white and then to shadowy lines. Nimue never spoke of them.

The High King spent a week at Caer Cadarn and the Edling was carried there for his grandfather's inspection. Uther must have approved of what he saw, and the spring omens were all propitious, for three weeks after Beltain we heard that the future of the kingdom and the future of Norwenna and the future of Mordred would all be decided at a great High Council, the first to be held in Britain for over sixty years.

It was spring, the leaves were green, and there were such high hopes in the freshening land. The High Council was held at Glevum, a Roman town that lay beside the River Severn just beyond Dumnonia's northern border with Gwent. Uther was carried there in a cart drawn by four oxen, each beast decorated with sprigs of may and saddled with green cloths. The High King enjoyed his ponderous progress through his kingdom's early summer, maybe because he knew this would be his last sight of Britain's loveliness before he went through Cruachan's Cave and over the sword bridge to the Other-world. The hedgerows between which his oxen plodded were white with hawthorn, the woods were hazed by bluebells while poppies blazed among the wheat, rye and barley and in the almost ripe fields of hay where the corncrakes were noisy. The High King travelled slowly, stopping often at settlements and villas where he inspected farmlands and halls, and advised men who knew better than he how to layer a fulling pond or geld a hog. He bathed in the hot springs at Aquae Sulis and was so recovered when he left the city that he walked a full mile before being helped once more into his fur-lined cart. He was accompanied by his bards, his counsellors, his physician, his chorus, a train of servants and an escort of warriors commanded by Owain, his champion and commander of his guard. Everyone wore flowers and the warriors slung their shields upside down to show they marched in peace, though Uther was too old and too cautious not to make certain that their spear-points were whetted bright each new day.

I walked to Glevum. I had no business there, but Uther had summoned Morgan to the High Council. Women were not normally welcome at any councils, high or low, but Uther believed no one spoke for Merlin as Morgan did and so, in his despair at Merlin's absence, he called for her. She was, besides, Uther's natural daughter, and the High King liked to say that there was more sense in Morgan's gold-wrapped head than in half his counsellors' skulls put together. Morgan was also responsible for Norwenna's health and it was Norwenna's future that was being decided, though Norwenna herself was neither summoned nor consulted. She stayed at Ynys Wydryn under the care of Merlin's wife, Guendoloen. Morgan would have taken no one but her slave Sebile to Glevum, but at the last moment Nimue calmly announced that she was also travelling there and that I was to accompany her. Morgan made a fuss, of course, but Nimue met the older woman's indignation with an irritating calm. “I have been instructed,” she told Morgan, and when Morgan shrilly demanded by whom, Nimue just smiled. Morgan was double Nimue's size and twice her age, but when Merlin had taken Nimue to his bed the power in Ynys Wydryn passed to her and in the face of that authority the older woman was helpless. She still objected to my going. She demanded to know why did Nimue not take Lunete, the other Irish girl among Merlin's foundlings? A boy like me, Morgan said, was no company for a young woman, and when Nimue still did nothing but smile, Morgan spat that she would tell Merlin of Nimue's fondness for me and in that telling would lie the end of Nimue, at which clumsy threat Nimue simply laughed and turned away.

I cared little for the argument. I just wanted to go to Glevum and see the jousting and hear the bards and watch the dancing and, most of all, to be with Nimue.

And so we went, an ill-assorted quartet, to Glevum. Morgan, blackthorn staff in hand and gold mask glinting in the summer sun, stumped ahead, her limp making each heavy step into an emphatic gesture of disapproval at Nimue's company. Sebile, the Saxon slave, hurried two paces behind her mistress with her back stooped beneath the bundle of bedding cloaks, dried herbs and pots. Nimue and I walked behind, barefoot, bare-headed and unburdened. Nimue wore a long black cloak over a white robe that she gathered at her waist with a slave's halter. Her long black hair was pinned high and she wore no jewels, not even a bone pin to gather her cloak. Morgan's neck was circled with a heavy golden torque and her dun-coloured cloak was clasped at her breast with two golden brooches, one cast as a triple-horned deer and the other the heavy dragon ornament that Uther had given to her at Caer Cadarn. I enjoyed the journey. We took three days, a slow pace, for Morgan was an awkward walker, but the sun shone on us and the Roman road made our journey easy. At dusk we would find the nearest chieftain's hall and sleep an honoured guests in his straw-filled barn. Other travellers were few, and all made way for the bright blazon of Morgan's gold that was her symbol of high status. We had been warned against the master less and landless men who robbed merchants on the high roads, but none threatened us, perhaps because Uther's soldiers had prepared for the High Council by scouring the woods and hills in search of brigands and we passed more than a dozen rotting bodies staked at the road's sides as warnings. The serfs and slaves we met knelt to Morgan, merchants made way for her, and only one traveller dared challenge our authority, a fierce-bearded priest with his ragged following of wild-haired women. The Christian group was dancing down the road, praising their nailed God, but when the priest saw the gold mask covering Morgan's face and the triple antlers and wide-winged dragon of her brooches he ranted at her as a creature of the devil. The priest must have thought that such a disfigured, hobbling woman would prove an easy prey to his taunting, but an errant preacher accompanied by his wife and holy whores was no match for Igraine's daughter, Merlin's ward and Arthur's sister. Morgan gave the fellow a single thump on the ear with her heavy staff, a blow that knocked him sideways into a ditch thick with nettles, and then she walked on with scarce a backwards glance. The priest's women shrieked and parted. Some prayed and others spat curses, but Nimue glided through their malevolence like a spirit.

I carried no weapons, unless a staff and a knife count as a warrior's accoutrements. I had wanted to carry both a sword and a spear, to look like a grown man, but Hywel had scoffed that a man was not made by wanting, but by doing. For my protection he gave me a bronze torque that displayed Merlin's horned God at its finials. No one, he said, would dare challenge Merlin. Yet even so, without a man's weapons, I felt useless. Why, I asked Nimue, was I there?

“Because you're my oath-friend, little one,” Nimue said. I was already taller than she, but she used the term affectionately. “And because you and I are chosen of Bel and if He chooses us, then we must choose each other.”

“Then why are the two of us going to Glevum?” I wanted to know.

“Because Merlin wants us there, of course.”

“Will he be there?” I asked eagerly. Merlin had been away so very long, and without him Ynys Wydryn was like a sky without its sun.

“No,” she said calmly, though how she knew Merlin's desire in this matter I did not know for Merlin was still far away and the summons for the High Council had been issued long after his departure.

“And what will we do when we reach Glevum?”

“We will know when we get there,” she said mysteriously and would explain no more. Glevum, once I had grown accustomed to the overpowering stench of night soil was marvellously strange. Other than some of the villas that had become farmsteads on Merlin's estates, this was my first time in a proper Roman place and I gawked at the sights like a new-born chick. The streets were paved with fitted stones, and though they had canted in the long years since the Romans' departure, King Tewdric's men had done their best to repair the damage by pulling up the weeds and sweeping away the soil so that the city's nine streets looked like stony watercourses in the dry season. It was hard to walk on them, and it made Nimue and me laugh to see horses trying to negotiate the treacherous stones. The buildings were as weird as the streets. We made our halls and houses out of wood, thatch, clay-cob and wattle, but these Roman buildings were all joined together and made of stone and strange narrow bricks, though over the years some of them had collapsed to leave ragged gaps in the long rows of low houses that were curiously roofed with baked clay tiles. The walled city guarded a crossing of the Severn and stood between two kingdoms and near to a third, and so it was a famous trading centre. Potters worked in the houses, goldsmiths stooped over their tables and calves bellowed in a slaughter yard behind the market place that was crowded with country folk selling butter, nuts, leather, smoked fish, honey, dyed cloth and newly sheared wool. Best of all, at least to my dazzled eyes, were King Tewdric's soldiers. They were Romans, Nimue told me, or at least they were Britons taught the Roman ways, and all kept their beards clipped short and were dressed alike in sturdy leather shoes and woollen hose beneath short leather skirts. The senior soldiers had bronze plates sewn on to the skirts and when they walked the armour plates would clank together like cow bells. Each man had a breastplate polished bright, a long russet cloak, and a leather helmet that was sewn at the crown into a ridge. Some of the helmets were plumed with dyed feathers. The soldiers carried short, broad-bladed swords, long spears with polished staffs and oblong shields of wood and leather that carried Tewdric's bull symbol. The shields were all the same size, the spears all of a length and the soldiers all marched in step, an extraordinary sight that made me laugh at first though later I became used to it.

At the centre of the town, where the four streets from the four gates met in a wide open square, there stood a vast and wondrous building. Even Nimue gaped at it, for surely no one living could make such a thing; so high, so white and so sharply cornered. Pillars held the roof high, and all along the triangular space between the roof's peak and the pillars' tops were fantastic pictures carved in white stone that showed marvelous men trampling enemies beneath their horses' hooves. The stone men carried sheaves of stone spears and wore stone helmets with soaring stone crests. Some of the pictures had dropped away or had split in the frosts, yet were still a miracle to me, though Nimue, after staring at them, spat to ward off the evil.

“Don't you like it?” I asked her resentfully.

“The Romans tried to be gods,” she said, 'which is why the Gods humbled them. The Council should not meet here."

Yet Glevum was where the High Council was summoned, and Nimue could not change it. Here, encompassed by Roman ramparts of earth and wood, the fate of Uther's kingdom was to be decided. The High King had already arrived by the time we reached the town. He was lodging in another high building that faced the pillared hall across the square. He showed neither surprise nor displeasure that Nimue had come, perhaps because he thought she was merely a part of Morgan's retinue, and he gave us all a single room in the back of the house where the kitchens smoked and the slaves squabbled. The High King's soldiers looked drab beside Tewdric's shining men. Our soldiers wore their hair long and their beards wild, they had patched and frayed cloaks of different colours and carried long, heavy swords, rough-shafted spears and round shields on which Uther's dragon symbol looked crude beside Tewdric's carefully painted bulls.

For the first two days there were celebrations. Champions of the two kingdoms fought mock fights outside the walls, though when Owain, Uther's champion, went into the arena King Tewdric was forced to pit two of his best men against him. Dumnonia's famous hero was reputed to be invincible, and he looked it as he stood with the summer sun glinting off his long sword. He was a huge man with tattooed arms, a matted bare chest and a bristling beard decorated with warrior rings forged from the weapons of defeated enemies. His fight against Tewdric's two champions was supposed to be a mock battle, but the mockery was hard to see as the two heroes of Gwent took their turns to attack him. The three men fought as though they were filled with hate and exchanged sword blows that must have rung north into distant Powys, and after a few minutes their sweat was mixed with blood, their blunt swords' edges were dented and all three men were limping, but Owain was still getting the best of the bout. Despite his size he was fast with a sword, and his blows carried crushing weight. The crowd, which had gathered from all the country thereabouts and was thus drawn from both Uther's and Tewdric's kingdoms, was shouting like wild beasts to urge their men on to massacre, and Tewdric, seeing the passion, threw down his staff to end the fight. “We are friends, remember,” he told the three men, and Uther, seated one step higher than Tewdric as befitted the High King, nodded agreement.

Uther looked gross and ill; his body was swollen with fluid, his face was yellowing and slack, his breathing laboured. He had been carried to the fighting field in a litter and was swathed on his throne in a heavy cloak that hid his jewelled belt and bright torque. King Tewdric dressed as a Roman, indeed his grandfather had been a real Roman which must have explained his foreign-sounding name. The King wore his hair clipped very short, had no beard, and was swathed in a white toga folded intricately at one shoulder. He was tall, thin and graceful in his movements, and though he was still a young man, the sad, wise look of his face made him seem much older. His Queen, Enid, wore her hair in a weird plaited spiral that was piled so precariously on top of her skull that she was forced to move with the angular awkwardness of a new-born colt. Her face was caked with a white paste that fixed her with a vacant expression of perplexed boredom. Her son Meurig, the Edling of Gwent, was a fidgety child of ten who sat at his mother's feet and was struck by his father every time he picked his nose. After the fighting the harpists and bards had their contest. Cynyr, the Bard of Gwent, sang the great tale of Uther's victory over the Saxons at Caer Idem. Later I realized that Tewdric must have ordered it as a tribute to the High King, and certainly the performance pleased Uther who smiled as the verses rolled by and nodded whenever a particular warrior was praised. Cynyr declaimed the victory in a ringing voice, and when he came to the lines which told how Owain had slaughtered Saxons by the thousand, he turned towards the tired, battered fighter and one of Tewdric's champions, who only an hour before had been trying to beat the big man down, stood and raised Owain's sword arm. The crowd roared, then they laughed as Cynyr adopted a woman's voice to describe the Saxons pleading for mercy. He began to run about the field in little, panicked steps, crouching as though hiding, and the crowd loved it. I loved it too, for you could almost see the hated Saxons cowering in terror and smell the stench of their death blood and hear the wings of the ravens coming to gorge on their flesh, and then Cynyr straightened to his full height and let his cloak drop away so that his blue-painted body was naked and he sang the tribute song of the Gods who had watched their champion, High King Uther of Dumnonia, the Pendragon of Britain, beat down the kings and chiefs and champions of the foe. Then, naked still, the hard prostrated himself before Uther's throne.

Uther fumbled beneath his shaggy cloak to find a torque of yellow gold that he tossed towards Cynyr. His throw was feeble and the torque fell on the edge of the wooden dais where the two kings sat. Nimue blanched at the bad omen, but Tewdric calmly picked up the torque and carried it to the white-haired hard whom the King raised up with his own hands.

After the bards had sung, and just as the sun was setting behind the low dark rill of western hills that marked the edge of the Silurian lands, a procession of girls brought flowers for the queens, but there was only one Queen on the dais, Enid. For a few seconds the girls carrying the heaps of flowers meant for Uther's lady did not know what to do, but Uther stirred himself and pointed at Morgan who had her own bench beside the dais, so the girls swerved aside and heaped the irises, meadowsweet and bee orchids before her. “She looks like a dumpling,” Nimue hissed in my ear, 'garlanded with parsley." On the night before the High Council there was a Christian service in the big hall of the great building in the town's centre. Tewdric was an enthusiastic Christian and his followers thronged the hall that was lit by flaming torches set into iron beckets on the walls. It had rained that evening and the crowded hall stank of sweat, damp wool and woodsmoke. The women stood on the left side of the hall and the men on the right, though Nimue calmly ignored the arrangement and climbed on to a pedestal that stood behind the dark crowd of cloaked, bare-headed men. There were other such pedestals, most crowned with statues, but our plinth was empty and provided ample space for the two of us to sit and stare at the Christian rites, though at first I was more astonished by the hall's vast interior that was higher, wider and longer than any feasting hall I had ever seen; so huge that sparrows lived inside and must have thought the Roman hall a whole wide world. The sparrows' heaven was a curved roof supported by squat brick pillars that had once been covered by smooth white plaster work on which pictures had been painted. Fragments of the pictures remained: I could see a red outline of a running deer, a sea creature with horns and forked tail, and two women holding a twin-handled cup.

Uther was not in the hall, but his Christian warriors attended, and Bishop Bedwin, the High King's counsellor, helped with the ceremonies that Nimue and I watched from our eyrie like two naughty children eavesdropping on their elders. King Tewdric was there, and with him some of the client kings and princes who would be at the High Council the next day. Those great ones had seats at the front of the hall, but the mass of firelight shone not around their chairs, but on the Christian priests gathered about their table. It was the first time I had ever seen such creatures at their rites. “What exactly is a bishop?” I asked Nimue.

“Like a Druid,” she said, and indeed like Druids all the Christian priests wore the front part of their skulls shaven clean. “Except they have no training,” Nimue added derisively, 'and know nothing."

“Are they all bishops?” I asked, for there were a score of shaven men coming and going, bobbing down and bobbing up, around the fire lit table at the hall's far end.

“No. Some are just priests. They know even less than the bishops.” She laughed.

“No priestesses?” I asked.

“In their religion,” she said scornfully, 'women have to obey men." She spat against that evil and some of the nearby warriors turned disapproving looks on her. Nimue ignored them. She was swathed in her black cloak with her arms clasped about her knees which were drawn tight up against her breasts. Morgan had forbidden us to attend the Christian ceremonies, but Nimue no longer took Morgan's orders. In the firelight her thin face was shadowed dark and her eyes shone. The strange priests chanted r.nd intoned in the Greek tongue that meant nothing to either of us. They kept bowing, upon which the whole crowd would duck down and struggle up again, and each downward plunge was marked on the right side of the hall by an untidy clatter as a hundred or more scabbarded swords clashed on the tiled floor. The priests, like Druids, held their arms straight out from their sides when they prayed. They wore strange robes that looked something like Tewdric's toga and were covered with short, decorated cloaks. They sang and the crowd sang back, and some of the women standing behind the fragile, white-faced Queen Enid began to shriek and tremble in ecstasy, but the priests ignored the commotion and went on chanting and singing. There was a plain cross on the table to which they bowed and at which Nimue made the sign of evil as she muttered a protective charm. She and I soon became bored and I wanted to slip away to make sure we were well placed to get some fragments of the great feast that was to be given after the ceremony in Uther's hall, but then the language of the night changed into the speech of Britain as a young priest harangued the crowd. The young priest was Sansum, and that night was the first time I ever saw the saint. He was very young then, much younger than the bishops, but he was considered to be a coming man, the hope of the Christian future, and the bishops had deliberately given him the honour of preaching this sermon as a means of advancing his career.

Sansum was always a thin man, short of stature, with a sharp, clean-shaven chin and a receding forehead above which his tonsured hair stuck up stiff and black like a thorn hedge, though the hedge had been more closely trimmed on top than at its edges and thus had left him with a pair of black bristly tufts that stuck out just above his ears. “He looks like Lughtigern,” Nimue whispered to me and I laughed aloud for Lughtigern is the Mouse Lord of children's stories; a creature full of boasts and bravado, but always running away when puss appears. Yet this tonsured Mouse Lord could certainly preach. I had never heard the blessed Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ before that night and I sometimes shiver when I think how ill I took that first sermon, but I will never forget the power of its delivery. Sansum stood on a second table so that he could see and be seen, and sometimes, in the passion of his preaching, he threatened to fall off the edge and had to be restrained by his fellow priests. I was hoping he would fall, yet somehow he always recovered his balance.

His preaching began conventionally enough. He thanked God for the presence of the great kings and mighty princes who had come to hear the Gospel, then he paid King Tewdric some pretty compliments before launching himself into a diatribe which set out the Christian view of the state of Britain. It was, I realized later, more of a political speech than a sermon.

The Isle of Britain, Sansum said, was beloved of God. It was a special land, set apart from other lands and girdled by a bright sea to defend it from pestilences, heresies and enemies. Britain, he went on, was also blessed by great rulers and mighty warriors, yet of late the island had been riven by strangers, and its fields, barns and villages had been put to the sword. The heathen Sais, the Saxons, were taking the land of our ancestors and turning it to waste. The dread Sais desecrated the graves of our fathers, they raped our wives and slaughtered our children, and such things could not happen, Sansum asserted, unless they were the will of God, and why would God so turn his back upon his special and beloved children? Because, he said, those children had refused to hear His holy message. The children of Britain still bowed down to wood and stone. The so-called sacred groves still stood and their shrines still held the skulls of the dead and were washed with the blood of sacrifices. Such things might not be seen in the towns, Sansum said, for most towns were filled with Christians, but the countryside, he warned us, was infested with pagans. There might be few Druids left in Britain, yet in every valley and farmland there were men and women who acted like Druids, who sacrificed living things to dead stone and who used charms and amulets to beguile the simple people. Even Christians, and here Sansum scowled at his congregation, carried their sick to heathen witches and took their dreams to pagan prophetesses, and so long as those evil practices were encouraged so long would God curse Britain with rape and slaughter and Saxons. He paused there to draw breath and I touched the torque about my neck because I knew this ranting Mouse Lord was the enemy of my master Merlin and of my friend Nimue. We had sinned! Sansum suddenly shouted, spreading his arms as he teetered at the table's edge, and we all had to repent. The Kings of Britain, he said, must love Christ and His blessed Mother, and only when the whole of the British race was united in God would God unite the whole of Britain. By now the crowd was responding to his sermon, calling out agreement, praying aloud to their God for mercy and shouting for the death of the Druids and their followers. It was terrifying.

“Come,” Nimue whispered to me, “I've heard enough.” We slipped off the pedestal and eased our way through the crowd that filled the vestibule beneath the hall's outer pillars. To my shame I held my cloak up to my beardless chin so that no one would see my torque as I followed Nimue down the steps into the windy square that was lit on all sides by blustering torch flames. A small rain was spitting out of the west to make the stones of the square shine in the firelight. Tewdric's uniformed guards stood motionless all around the square's edge as Nimue led me into the very centre of the wide space where she stopped and suddenly began to laugh. At first it was a chuckle, then it was the laughter of jest that turned into a fierce mockery that changed into a defiant howl that beat up past the roofs of Glevum to echo out towards the heavens and end in a maniacal screech as wild as the death cry of a cornered beast. She turned around as she sounded the screech, turned sunwise from the north to the east to the south to the west and so back north again, and not one soldier stirred. Some of the Christians in the portico of the great building looked at us in anger, but did not interfere. Even Christians recognized someone being touched by the Gods, and none of them dared lay a hand on Nimue.

When her breath was ended she sank down to the stones. She was silent; a tiny figure crouched beneath a black cape, a shapeless thing shuddering at my feet. “Oh, little one,” she finally said in a tired voice, job, my little one."

“What is it?” I asked. I confess I was more tempted by the smell of roasting pork that came from Uther's hall than by whatever momentary trance had so exhausted Nimue.

She held out her scarred left hand and I hauled her to her feet. “We have one chance,” she said to me in a small, frightened voice, 'just one chance, and if we lose it then the Gods will go from us. We will be abandoned by the Gods and left to the brutes. And those fools in there, the Mouse Lord and his followers, will ruin that chance unless we fight them. And there are so many of them and so very few of us." She was looking into my face, crying desperately.

I did not know what to say. I had no skills with the spirit world, even though I was Merlin's foundling and the child of Bel. “Bel will help us, won't He?” I asked helplessly. “He loves us, doesn't He?”

“Loves us!” She snatched her hand away from mine. “Loves us!” she repeated scornfully. "It is not the task of Gods to love us. Do you love Druidan's pigs? Why, in Bel's name, should a God love us? Love!

What do you know of love, Derfel, son of a Saxon?"

“I know I love you,” I said. I can blush now when I think of a young boy's desperate lunges at a woman's affection. It had taken every nerve in my body to make that statement, every ounce of courage I hoped I possessed, and after I had blurted out the words I blushed in the rain-swept firelight and wished I had kept silent.

Nimue smiled at me. “I know,” she said, “I know. Now come. A feast for our supper.” These days, these my dying days that I spend writing in this monastery in Powys's hills, I sometimes close my eyes and see Nimue. Not as she became, but as she was then: so full of fire, so quick, so confident. I know I have gained Christ and through His blessing I have gained the whole world too, but for what I have lost, for what we have all lost, there is no end to the reckoning. We lost everything. The feast was wonderful.

The High Council began in mid-morning, after the Christians had held yet another ceremony. They held a terrible number of them, I thought, for every hour of the day seemed to demand some new genuflection to the cross, but the delay served to give the princes and warriors time to recover from their night of drinking, boasting and fighting. The High Council was held in the great hall that was again lit by torches, for although the spring sun was shining brightly the hall's few windows were high and small, less suited for letting the light in than the smoke out, though even that they did badly. Uther, the High King, sat on a platform raised above the dais reserved for the kings, ed lings and princes. Tewdric of Gwent, the Council's host, sat below Uther and on either side of Tewdric's throne were a dozen other thrones filled this day by client kings or princes who paid tribute to Uther or Tewdric. Prince Cadwy of Isca was there, and King Melwas of the Belgae and Prince Gereint, Lord of the Stones, while distant Kernow, the savage kingdom at Britain's western tip, had sent its ed ling Prince Tristan, who sat swathed in wolf fur at the dais's edge next to one of the two vacant thrones. In truth the thrones were nothing more than chairs fetched from the feasting hall and tricked out with saddle cloths and in front of each chair, resting on the floor and leaning against the dais, were the shields of the kingdoms. There had been a time when thirty-three shields might have rested against the dais, but now the tribes of Britain fought amongst themselves and some of the kingdoms had been buried in Lloegyr by Saxon blades. One of the purposes of this High Council was to make peace between the remaining British kingdoms, a peace that was already threatened because Powys and Siluria had not come to the Council. Their thrones were empty, mute witness to those kingdoms' continuing enmity towards Gwent and Dumnonia.

Directly before the kings and princes, and beyond a small open space that had been left for the speech-making, sat the counsellors and chief magistrates of the kingdoms. Some of the councils, like those of Gwent and Dumnonia, were huge, while others comprised only a handful of men. The magistrates and counsellors sat on the floor that I now saw was decorated with thousands of tiny coloured stones arranged into a huge picture that showed between the seated bodies. The counsellors had all fetched blankets to make themselves pillows for they knew that the High Council's deliberations could last well beyond nightfall. Behind the counsellors, and present only as observers, stood the armed warriors, some with their favourite hunting dogs leashed at their side. I stood with those armed warriors, my bronze Cernunnos-headed torque all the authority I needed to be present. Two women were at the Council, only two, yet even their presence had caused murmurs of protest among the waiting men until a flicker of Uther's eyes had stilled the grumbling. Morgan sat directly in front of Uther. The counsellors had edged away from her so that she had sat alone until Nimue had walked boldly through the hall door and threaded her way through the seated men to take a place beside her. Nimue had entered with such calm assurance that no one had tried to stop her. Once seated she stared up at High King Uther as though daring him to eject her, but the King ignored her arrival. Morgan also ignored her young rival who sat very still and very straight-backed. She was dressed in her white linen shift with its thin leather slave belt and among the heavy-caped, grey-haired men she looked slight and vulnerable.

The High Council began, as all councils did, with a prayer.

Merlin, if he had been present, would have called on the Gods, but instead Bishop Conrad of Gwent offered a prayer to the Christian God. I saw Sansum sitting in the ranks of the Gwent counsellors and noted the fierce look of hatred he shot at the two women when they did not bow their heads as the Bishop prayed. Sansum knew the women came in Merlin's place.

After the prayer the challenge was given by Owain, Dumnonia's champion who had taken on Tewdric's best men two days before. A brute, Merlin always called Owain, and he looked like a brute as he stood before the High King with his face still blood-scabbed from the fight, with his sword drawn and with a thick wolf-fur cloak draped around the humped muscles of his huge shoulders. “Does any man here,” he growled, 'dispute Uther's right to the High Throne?"

No one did. Owain, looking somewhat disappointed at being denied the chance to slaughter a challenger, sheathed his sword and sat uncomfortably among the counsellors. He would much rather have stood with his warriors.

News of Britain was given next. Bishop Bedwin, speaking for the High King, reported that the Saxon threat to the east of Dumnonia had been diminished, though at a price too heavy for contemplation. Prince Mordred, Edling of Dumnonia and a warrior whose fame had reached to the ends of the earth, had been killed in the hour of victory. Uther's face showed nothing as he listened to the oft-told tale of his son's death. Arthur's name was not mentioned, even though it had been Arthur who had snatched the victory from Mordred's clumsy generalship and everyone in the hall knew it. Bedwin reported that the defeated Saxons had come from the lands once governed by the Catuvelan tribe and that, although they had not been ejected from all that ancient territory, they had agreed to pay a yearly tribute to the High King of gold, wheat and oxen. Pray God, he added, that the peace would last.

“Pray God,” King Tewdric intervened, 'that the Saxons will be ejected from those lands!“ His words prompted the warriors at the back and sides of the hall to rap their spear-shafts against the pavement and at least one spear broke through the small mosaic tiles. Dogs howled. To the north of Dumnonia, Bedwin continued calmly when the rough applause had ended, peace reigned, thanks to the all-wise treaty of friendship that existed between the great High King and the noble King Tewdric. To the west, and here Bedwin paused to bestow a smile on the handsome young Prince Tristan, there was also peace. ”The kingdom of Kernow,“ Bedwin said, 'keeps itself to itself. We understand King Mark has taken a new wife and we pray that she, like her distinguished predecessors, will keep her master fully occupied.” That provoked a murmur of laughter.

“What wife is this?” Uther demanded suddenly. “His fourth or fifth?”

“I believe my father has lost count himself, High Lord,” Tristan said, and the hall bellowed with laughter. More tiles broke under spear-butts and one of the small fragments skittered over the floor to lodge against my foot.

Agricola spoke next. His was a Roman name and he was famous for his adhesion to Roman ways. Agricola was Tewdric's commander and, though an old man now, he was still feared for his skill in battle. Age had not stooped his tall figure, though it had turned his close-cropped hair as grey as a sword blade. His scarred face was clean-shaven and he wore Roman uniform, but far grander than the outfits of his men. His tunic was scarlet, his breastplate and leg-greaves silver, and under his arm was a silver helmet plumed with dyed horsehair cut into a stiff scarlet comb. He too reported that the Saxons to the east of his Lord's kingdom had been defeated, but the news from the Lost Lands of Lloegyr was troubling for he had heard that more boats had come from the Saxon lands across the German Sea and in time, he warned, more boats on the Saxon shore meant more warriors pressing west into Britain. Agricola also warned us about a new Saxon leader named Aelle who was struggling for ascendancy among the Sais. That was the first time I ever heard Aelle's name and only the Gods then knew how it would come to haunt us down the years.

The Saxons, Agricola went on, might be temporarily quiet, but that had not brought peace to the kingdom of Gwent. British war-bands had come south from Powys while others had marched west out of Siluria to attack Tewdric's land. Messengers had gone to both kingdoms, inviting their monarchs to attend this council, but alas, and here Agricola gestured at the two empty chairs on the royal platform, neither Gorfyddyd of Powys nor Gundleus of Siluria had come. Tewdric could not hide his disappointment, for plainly he had been hoping that Gwent and Dumnonia could make their peace with their two northern neighbours. That hope of peace, I assumed, had also been the motive behind Uther's invitation to Gundleus to visit Norwenna in the spring, but the vacant thrones seemed to speak only of continuing enmity. If there was to be no peace, Agricola warned sternly, then the King of Gwent would have no choice but to go to war against Gorfyddyd of Powys and his ally, Gundleus of Siluria. Uther nodded, giving his consent to the threat.

From further north, Agricola reported, there came news that Leodegan, King of Henis Wyren, had been driven from his kingdom by Diwrnach, the Irish invader who had given the name Lleyn to his newly conquered lands. The dispossessed Leodegan, Agricola added, had taken shelter with King Gorfyddyd of Powys because Cadwallon of Gwynedd would not accept him. There was more laughter at that news for King Leodegan was famous for his foolishness. “I hear too,” Agricola went on when the laughter had subsided, 'that more Irish invaders have come into Demetia and are pressing hard on the western borders of Powys and Siluria."

“I shall speak for Siluria,” a strong voice intervened from the doorway, 'and no one else." There was a huge stir as every man in the hall turned to gaze at the doorway. Gundleus had come. The Silurian King entered the room like a hero. There was no hesitation and no apology in his demeanour even though his warriors had raided Tewdric's land again and again, just as they had raided south across the Severn Sea to harass Uther's country. He looked so confident that I had to remind myself how he had fled from Nimue in Merlin's hall. Behind Gundleus, shuffling and dribbling, came Tanaburs the Druid and once again I hid myself as I remembered the death-pit. Merlin had once told me that Tanaburs's failure to kill me had put his soul into my keeping, but I still shuddered with fear as I watched the old man come into the hall with his hair clicking from the small bones tied to its tight little pigtails. Behind Tanaburs, their long swords scabbarded in sheaths wrapped in red cloth, strode Gundleus's retinue. Their hair and moustaches were plaited and their beards long. They stood with the other warriors, edging them aside to make a solid phalanx of proud men come to their enemies' High Council while Tanaburs, draped in his dirty grey robe embroidered with crescent moons and running hares, found a space among the counsellors. Owain, scenting blood, had stood to bar Gundleus's path, but Gundleus offered the High King's champion the hilt of his sword to show that he came in peace, then he prostrated himself on the mosaic floor in front of Uther's throne.

“Rise, Gundleus ap Meilyr, King of Siluria,” Uther commanded, then held out a hand in welcome. Gundleus climbed the dais and kissed the hand before unslinging the shield with its blazon of a fox's mask from his back. He placed it with the other shields, then took his throne and proceeded to look brightly about the hall as though he were very pleased to be present. He nodded to acquaintances, mouthing surprise at seeing some and smiling at others. All the men he greeted were his enemies, yet he slouched in the chair as though he sat by his own hearth. He even hooked a long leg over the chair's arm. He raised an eyebrow when he saw the two women and I thought I detected a flicker of a scowl as he recognized Nimue, but the scowl vanished as his eyes flicked on through the crowd. Tewdric cordially invited him to give the High Council news of his kingdom, but Gundleus just smiled and said all was well in Siluria. I will not weary you with most of the day's business. Clouds gathered over Glevum as disputes were settled, marriages agreed and judgments given. Gundleus, though never admitting his trespasses, consented to pay Tewdric a fee of cattle, sheep and gold, with the same compensation to the High King, and many lesser complaints were similarly resolved. The arguments were long and the pleadings tangled, but one by one the matters were decided. Tewdric did most of the work, though never without a sideways glance at the High King to detect any minute gesture which hinted at Uther's decision. Other than those gestures Uther hardly moved except to stir himself when a slave brought him water, bread or a medicine that Morgan had made from coltsfoot steeped in mead to calm his cough. He left the dais only once to piss against the hall's rear wall while Tewdric, ever patient and ever careful, considered a border dispute between two chiefs of his own kingdom. Uther spat into his urine to avert its evil, then limped back to the dais as Tewdric gave his judgment which, like all the others, was recorded on parchment by three scribes sitting at a table behind the dais.

Uther was saving his small energy for the most important business of the day, which came after dusk. It was a dark twilight and Tewdric's servants had fetched a dozen more blazing torches into the hall. It had also begun to rain hard and the hall became chill as streams of water found holes in the roof and dripped on to the floor or ran in rivulets down the rough brick walls. It was suddenly so cold that a brazier, an iron basket full four feet across, was filled with logs and set ablaze close to the High King's feet. The royal shields were moved and Tewdric's throne shifted aside so that the brazier's warmth could reach Uther. The woodsmoke drifted about the room, eddying in the high shadows as it searched for a way out to the beating rain.

Uther at last stood to address the High Council. He was unsteady and so leaned on a great boar-spear as he spoke his mind about his kingdom. Dumnonia, he said, had a new ed ling and the Gods must be thanked for that mercy, but the Edling was weak, a baby and had a crippled foot. Murmurs greeted the confirmation of that rumoured ill omen, but subsided as Uther lifted a hand for silence. The smoke wreathed about him, giving him a spectral look as though his soul was already clad in his Otherworld's shadow-body. Gold glinted at his neck and on his wrists, and a thin fillet of gold, the High King's crown, circled his straggling white hairs.

“I am old,” he said, 'and I will not live long." He calmed the protests with another feeble wave of his hand.

“I do not claim my kingdom to be above any other in this land, but I do say that if Dumnonia falls to the Saxons then all Britain will fall. If Dumnonia falls then we lose our links to Armorica and our brethren beyond the sea. If Dumnonia falls then the Saxon will have divided the land of Britain and a divided land cannot survive.” He paused, and for a second I thought he was too tired to continue, but then that great bull's head reared up and he spoke on. “The Saxons must not reach the Severn Sea!” he shouted that creed, which had been at the very heart of his ambitions all these years. So long as the Saxons were hemmed in by Britons then there was a chance that they could one day be driven back into the German Sea, but if they once reached our western coast then they would have divided Dumnonia from Gwent and the Britons of the south from the Britons of the north. “The men of Gwent,” Uther went on, 'are our greatest warriors,“ and here he nodded in tribute to Agricola, 'but it is no secret that Gwent lives on Dumnonian bread. Dumnonia must be held or Britain will be lost. I have a grandson and the kingdom is his! The kingdom is Mordred's to rule when I die. That is my law!” And here he stamped his spear on the platform and for a moment the old hard force of the Pendragon shone from his eyes. Whatever else would be decided here the kingdom would not pass from

Uther's line, for that was Uther's l?w and everyone in the hall now knew it. All that remained was to decide how the crippled child should be protected until he was old enough to assume the kingship for himself.

And so the talking began, although everyone knew what had already been decided. Why else was Gundleus slouching so cocksure in his throne? Yet some men still advanced other candidates for Norwenna's hand. Prince Gereint, the Lord of the Stones who held Dumnonia's Saxon borderlands, proposed Meurig ap Tewdric, Gwent's Edling, but everyone in the hall knew that the proposal was merely a way of flattering Tewdric and would never be accepted because Meurig was a mere nose-picking child who had no chance of holding Dumnonia against the Saxons. Gereint, his duty done, sat and listened as one of Tewdric's counsellors proposed Prince Cuneglas, Gorfyddyd's eldest son and thus the Edling of Powys. A marriage to the enemy's crown prince, the counsellor claimed, would forge a peace between Powys and Dumnonia, the two most powerful British kingdoms, but the suggestion was ruthlessly beaten down by Bishop Bedwin who knew his master would never bequeath his kingdom to the care of a man who was the son of Tewdric's bitterest enemy.

Tristan, Prince of Kernow, was another candidate, but he demurred, knowing full well that no one in Dumnonia would trust his father, King Mark. Meriadoc, Prince of Stronggore, was suggested, but Stronggore, a kingdom east of Gwent, was already half lost to the Saxons and if a man could not hold his own kingdom how could he hold another? What of the royal houses in Armorica, someone asked, but no one knew whether the princes across the sea would abandon their new land of Brittany to defend Dumnonia.

Gundleus. It all came back to Gundleus.

But then Agricola spoke the name that almost every man in the hall both wanted to hear and feared to hear. The old soldier stood, his Roman armour bright and his shoulders braced, and he looked Uther the Pendragon straight in his rheumy eyes. “Arthur,” Agricola said. “I propose Arthur.” Arthur. The name resounded in the hall, then the dying echo was drowned by the sudden clatter of staves thumping on the floor. The applauding spearmen were warriors of Dumnonia, men who had followed Arthur into battle and knew his worth, but their rebellion was brief. Uther the Pendragon, High King of Britain, raised his own spear and brought it down once. There was an immediate silence in which only Agricola still dared to challenge the High King. “I propose that Arthur marries Norwenna,” he said respectfully, and even I, young as I was, knew that Agricola must be speaking for his master, King Tewdric, and that puzzled me for I had thought that Gundleus was Tewdric's candidate. If Gundleus could be detached from his friendship with Powys then the new alliance of Dumnonia, Gwent and Siluria would hold all the land on either bank of the Severn Sea and that triple alliance would be a bulwark against both Powys and the Saxons. I should have known, of course, that Tewdric, in suggesting Arthur, was inviting a refusal that would have to be recompensed by a favour.

“Arthur ap Neb,” Uther said and that last word was greeted with a gasp of horrified surprise 'is not of the blood." There could be no argument with such a decree and Agricola, accepting his defeat, bowed and sat. Neb meant nobody, and Uther was denying that he was Arthur's father, thereby stating that Arthur had no royal blood and could not therefore marry Norwenna. A Belgic bishop argued for Arthur by protesting that kings had ever been chosen from the nobility and that customs which had served in the past should serve in the future, but his querulous objection was stilled by one fierce look from Uther. Rain whirled in through one of the high windows and hissed in the fire.

Bishop Bed win stood again. It might have seemed that until this moment all talk of Norwenna's future had been so much wasted breath, yet at least the alternatives had been aired and men of sense could thus understand the reasoning behind the announcement Bed win now made.

Gundleus of Siluria, Bedwin said mildly, was a man without a wife. There was a murmur in the hall as men remembered the rumours of Gundleus's scandalous marriage to his low-born lover, Ladwys, but Bedwin blithely ignored the disturbance. Some weeks before, the Bishop continued, Gundleus had visited Uther and made his peace with the High King and it was now Uther's pleasure that Gundleus should marry Norwenna and be a protector, he repeated the word, a protector to Mordred's kingdom. As an earnest of his good intention Gundleus had already paid a price in gold to King Uther and that price had been accepted as fitting. There were those, Bishop Bedwin admitted airily, who might not trust a man who had until so recently been an enemy, but as a further earnest of his change of heart Gundleus of Siluria had agreed to abandon Siluria's ancient claim to the kingdom of Gwent and, further, he would become a Christian by being publicly baptised in the River Severn beneath Glevum's walls the very next morning. The Christians who were present all called out hallelujah, but I was watching the Druid Tanaburs and wondered why the wicked old fool showed no sign of disapproval as his master so publicly disavowed the old religion.

I wondered too why these grown men were so quick to welcome a former enemy, but of course they were desperate. A kingdom was being passed to a crippled child and Gundleus, for all his treacherous past, was a famous warrior. If he proved true then the peace of Dumnonia and Gwent was assured. Yet Uther was no fool and so he did his best to protect his grandson should Gundleus prove false. Dumnonia, Uther decreed, would be ruled by a council until Mordred was of age to pick up the sword. Gundleus would preside over the council and a half dozen men, chief of them Bishop Bedwin, would serve as his counsellors. Tewdric of Gwent, Dumnonia's firm ally, was invited to send two men, and the council, so composed, would have the final governance of the land. Gundleus was not pleased at the decision. He had not paid two baskets of gold to sit in a council of old men, but he knew better than to protest. He held his peace as his new bride and his stepson's kingdom were bound about with rules. And still more rules were laid down. Mordred, Uther said, would have three sworn protectors; men bound by death-oaths to defend the boy's life with their own. If any man harmed Mordred then the oath-takers would revenge the harm or else sacrifice their own lives. Gundleus sat motionless as the edict was made, but he stirred uncomfortably when the oath-takers were named. King Tewdric of Gwent was one, Owain, the Champion of Dumnonia, was the second and Merlin, Lord of Avalon, the third. Merlin. Men had been waiting for that name just as they had waited for the name of Arthur. Uther usually made no great decision without Merlin's counsel, yet Merlin was not present. Merlin had not been seen in Dumnonia for months. Merlin, for all any man knew, might be dead.

It was then that Uther looked at Morgan for the first time. She must have squirmed when her brother's paternity was denied, and with it her own, but she had not been commanded to the High Council as Uther's bastard daughter, but as Merlin's trusted prophetess. After Tewdric and Owain had sworn their death-oaths Uther gazed at the one-eyed, crippled woman. The Christians in the hall made the sign of the cross, which was their way of guarding against the evil spirits. “Well?” Uther prompted Morgan. Morgan was nervous. What was needed of her was an assurance that Merlin, her companion in mystery, would accept the high charge imposed by the oath. She was there as a priestess, not as a counsellor, and should have answered like a priestess. She did not, and her answer was insufficient. “My Lord Merlin will be honoured by the appointment, High Lord,” she said.

Nimue screamed. The sound was so sudden and so eerie that all about the hall men shivered and gripped their spear-shafts. Hair stiffened on the spines of the hunting dogs. Then the scream faded to leave a silence among the men. Smoke gusted in great fire lit shapes in the hall's dark roof where the rain beat on the tiles and then, in the scream's wake and far off in the storm-shaken night, there was the sound of thunder.

Thunder! Christians made the sign of the cross again, but no man there could have doubted the sign. Taranis, the God of Thunder, had spoken, proof that the Gods had come to the High Council, had come, moreover, at the bidding of a young girl who, despite the cold that made men draw their cloaks about them, wore nothing but a white shift and a slave's leash.

No one moved, no one spoke, no one even fidgeted. The horns of mead rested and men left lice unscratched. There were no kings here any more, nor warriors. There were no bishops, no tonsured priests, nor old wise men. There was only a hushed, scared crowd who stared in awe as a young girl stood and unpinned her hair to let it fall black and long against her slim white back. Morgan gazed at the floor, Tanaburs gaped and Bishop Bedwin mouthed silent prayers as Nimue walked to the speech space beside the brazier. She held her arms out to her side and turned very slowly, sunwise, so that every man in the room could see her face. It was a face of horror. Her eyes showed white, nothing more, and her tongue protruded from a distorted mouth. She turned, and turned again, turning ever faster, and I swear a communal shudder went through the crowd. She was shaking now as she spun, and edging ever nearer to that great seething fire until she threatened to fall into its flames, but suddenly she leaped into the air and gave a shriek before collapsing on to the small tiles. Then, like a beast, she scuttled on all fours, questing her way back and forth along the line of shields that had been split to let the fire's heat warm the High King's legs, and when she reached the fox shield of Gundleus she reared up like a striking snake and spat once.

The spittle landed on the fox.

Gundleus started up from his throne, but Tewdric checked him. Tanaburs struggled to his feet also, but Nimue turned on him, her eyes still showing white, and screamed. She pointed at him, her shriek ululating and echoing in the vast Roman hall, and the power of her magic made Tanaburs sink down again to the floor.

Then Nimue shuddered, her eyes rolled and we could see their brown pupils again. She blinked at the crowded hall as if surprised to find herself in such a place, and then, with her back to the High King, she went utterly still. The stillness denoted that she was in the grip of the Gods and when she now spoke she would be speaking for them.

“Does Merlin live?” Tewdric asked respectfully.

“Of course he lives.” Nimue's voice was filled with scorn and she offered no title to the King who questioned her. She was with the Gods and had no need to pay respect to mere mortals.

“Where is he?”

“Gone,” Nimue said, and turned around to look at the toga-clad King on the platform.

“Gone where?” Tewdric asked.

“To seek the Knowledge of Britain,” Nimue said. Every man listened hard for this, at last, was real news. I could see Sansum the Mouse Lord wriggling in his desperate need to make a protest at this pagan interference with the High Council, but so long as King Tewdric questioned the girl there was no way that a mere priest could interfere.

“What is the Knowledge of Britain?” High King Uther asked. Nimue turned around again, one full turn sunwise, but she turned only so she could gather her thoughts for the answer which, when it came, was delivered in a chanting, hypnotic voice. “The Knowledge of Britain is the lore of our ancestors, the gifts of our Gods, the Thirteen Properties of the Thirteen Treasures which, when gathered, will give us back the power to claim our land.” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was back to its normal timbre. “Merlin strives to knit this land as one again, a British land,” and here Nimue whirled round so that she was staring straight into Sansum's small, bright, indignant eyes, 'with British Gods.“ She turned back to the High King. ”And if Lord Merlin fails, Uther of Dumnonia, we all die."

A murmur sounded in the room. Sansum and the Christians were yelping their protests now, but Tewdric, the Christian King, waved them to silence. “Are those Merlin's words?” he demanded of Nimue. Nimue shrugged as though the question was irrelevant. “They are not my words,” she said insolently. Uther had no doubt that Nimue, a mere child on the edge of womanhood, spoke not for herself but for her master and so he leaned his great bulk forward and frowned at her. “Ask Merlin if he will take my oath? Ask him! Will he protect my grandson?”

Nimue paused a long time. I think she sensed the truth of Britain before any of us, before even Merlin and certainly long before Arthur, if, indeed, Arthur ever knew, but some instinct would not let her speak that truth to this old, dying and stubborn man. “Merlin, my Lord King,” she finally said in a tired voice that implied she merely discharged a necessary but time wasting duty, 'promises at this moment, upon his soul's life, that he will take the death-oath to protect your grandchild."

“So long!” Morgan astonished us all by interjecting. She scrambled to her feet, looking squat and dark beside Nimue. Firelight glinted off her gold helm. “So long!” she cried again, then remembered to sway to and fro in the brazier's smoke as if to suggest the Gods were taking over her body. “So long, Merlin says, as Arthur shares the oath. Arthur and his men should be your grandson's protector. Merlin has spoken!” She spoke the words with all the dignity of someone accustomed to being an oracle and prophetess, but I, if no one else, noticed that no thunder sounded in the rainswept night. Gundleus was on his feet protesting Morgan's pronouncement. He had already suffered a council of six and a trio of oath-takers to be imposed upon his power, but now it was proposed that his new kingdom was to support a war-band of possible enemy warriors. “No!” he cried again, but Tewdric ignored the protest as he stepped down from the dais to stand beside Morgan and face the High King. It was thus made plain to most of us in the hall that Morgan, even if she had been uttering in Merlin's voice, had nevertheless spoken what Tewdric had wanted her to speak. King Tewdric of Gwent might have been a good Christian, but he was a better politician and knew exactly when to have the old Gods support his demands.

“Arthur ap Neb and his warriors,” Tewdric now said to the High King, 'will be a better surety for your grandson's life than any oath of mine, though God knows my oath is solemn." Prince Gereint, who was Uther's nephew and, after Owain, the second most powerful warlord in Dumnonia, might have protested Arthur's appointment, but the Lord of the Stones was an honest man of limited ambition who doubted his ability to lead all Dumnonia's armies and so he stood beside Tewdric and added his support. Owain, who was the leader of Uther's Royal Guard as well as the High King's champion, seemed less happy at the appointment of a rival, but eventually he too stood with Tewdric and growled his assent.

Uther still hesitated. Three was a lucky number and three oath-takers should have sufficed, and the addition of a fourth might risk the Gods' displeasure, but Uther owed Tewdric a favour for having dismissed his proposal of Arthur as Norwenna's husband and now the High King paid his debt. “Arthur shall take the oath,” he agreed, and the Gods alone knew how hard it was for him thus to appoint the man he believed to be responsible for his beloved son's death, but appoint him he did and the hall rang with acclamation. Gundleus's Silurians alone were silent as the spears splintered the pavement and the warrior cheers echoed in the smoky cavernous dark.

Thus, as the High Council ended, was Arthur, son of nobody, chosen to be one of Mordred's sworn protectors.

Norwenna and Guneus were married two weeks after the High Council ended. The ceremony was performed at a Christian shrine in Abona, a harbour town on our northern shore that faced across the Severn Sea towards Siluria, and it cannot have been a joyful occasion for Norwenna returned to Ynys Wydryn that very same evening. None of us from the Tor went to the ceremony, though a pack of Ynys Wydryn's monks and their wives accompanied the Princess. She returned to us as Queen Norwenna of Siluria, though the honour brought her neither new guards nor added attendants. Gundleus sailed back to his own country where, we heard, there were skirmishes against the Ui Liathain, the Blackshield Irish who had colonized the old British kingdom of Dyfed that the Blackshields called Demetia.

Our life hardly changed by having a queen among us. We of the Tor might have seemed idle compared to the folk down the hill, but we still had our duties. We cut hay and spread it in rows to dry, we finished shearing the sheep and laid the newly cut flax into stinking retting ponds to make linen. The women in Ynys Wydryn all carried distaffs and spindles on which they wound the newly sheared wool and only the Queen, Morgan and Nimue were spared that unending task. Druidan gelded pigs, Pellinore commanded imaginary armies and Hywel the steward prepared his tally sticks to count the summer rents. Merlin did not come home to Avalon, nor did we receive any news of him. Uther rested at his palace in Durnovaria while Mordred, his heir, grew under Morgan and Guendoloen's care.

Arthur stayed in Armorica. He would eventually come to Dumnonia, we were told, but only after he had discharged his duty to Ban whose kingdom of Benoic neighboured Broceliande, the realm of King Budic who was married to Arthur's sister, Anna. Those kingdoms in Brittany were a mystery to us, for no one from Ynys Wydryn had ever crossed the sea to explore the places where so many Britons displaced by the Srxons had taken refuge. We did know that Arthur was Ban's warlord, and that he had ravaged the country west of Benoic to keep the Prankish enemy at bay, for our winter evenings had been enlivened by travellers' tales of Arthur's prowess, just as they were filled with envy by the stories about King Ban. The King of Benoic was married to a queen named Elaine and the two of them had made a wondrous kingdom where justice was swift and fair, and where even the poorest serf was fed in wintertime from the Royal storehouses. It all sounded too good to be true, though much later I visited Ban's kingdom and found the tales were not exaggerated. Ban had made his capital on an island fortress, Ynys Trebes, which was famous for its poets. The King lavished affection and money on the town that was reputed to be more beautiful than Rome itself. There were said to be springs in Ynys Trebes that Ban had channelled and dammed so that every householder could find clean water not far from his door. The merchants' scales were tested for accuracy, the King's palace lay open day and night to petitioners seeking redress of grievance, and the various religions were commanded to live in peace or else have their temples and churches pulled down and pounded into dust. Ynys Trebes was a haven of peace, but only so long as Ban's soldiers kept the enemy far away from its walls, which was why King Ban was so reluctant to let Arthur leave for Britain. Nor, perhaps, did Arthur want to come to Dumnonia while Uther still lived. In Dumnonia that summer was blissful. We gathered the dry hay into great stacks that we built on thick foundations of bracken that would keep the damp from rising and the rats at bay. The rye and barley ripened in the strip fields that quilted all the land between Avalon's marshes and Caer Cadarn, apples grew thick in the eastern orchards, while eels and pike grew fat in our meres and creeks. There was no plague, no wolves and few Saxons. Once in a while we would see a distant pyre of smoke on the south-eastern horizon and we would guess that a shipborne raid of Saxon pirates had burned a settlement, but after the third such fire Prince Gereint led a war-band to take Dumnonia's revenge and the Saxon raids ceased. The Saxon chief even paid his tribute on time, though that was the last tribute we received from a Saxon for many a year and doubtless much of the payment had been plundered from our own border villages. Even so that summer was a good time and

Arthur, men said, would die of boredom if he brought his famed horse soldiers to peaceful Dumnonia. Even Powys was calm. King Gorfyddyd had lost the alliance of Siluria, but instead of turning on Gundleus he ignored the Dumnonian marriage and concentrated his spears against the Saxons who threatened his northern territory. Gwynedd, the kingdom to the north of Powys, was embroiled with the fearsome Irish soldiers of Diwrnach of Lleyn, but in Dumnonia, the most blessed of all Britain's realms, there was plump peace and warm skies.

Yet it was in that summer, that warm idyllic summer, that I killed my first enemy and so became a man. For peace never lasts, and ours was broken most cruelly. Uther, High King and Pendragon of Britain, died. We had known he was ill, we had known he must die soon, indeed we knew he had done all he could to prepare for his own death, yet somehow we had thought this moment would never come. He had been king for so long and under his rule Dumnonia had prospered; it had seemed to us that nothing could ever change. But then, just before the harvest, the Pendragon died. Nimue claimed she heard a hare scream in the midday sun at the very moment, while Morgan, bereft of a father, shut herself in her hut and wailed like a child.

Uther's body was burned in the ancient manner. Bed win would have preferred to give the High King a Christian burial, but the rest of the council refused to sanction such sacrilege and so his swollen corpse was laid on a pyre on the summit of Caer Macs and there put to the flames. His sword was melted by the smith Ystrwth and the molten steel was poured into a lake so that Gofannon, the Blacksmith God of the Otherworld, could forge the sword anew for Uther's reborn soul. The burning metal hissed as it struck the water and its steam flew like a thick cloud as the seers stooped over the lake to foretell the kingdom's future in the tortured shapes adopted by the cooling metal. They reported good news, despite which Bishop Bedwin was careful to send his swiftest messengers south to Armorica to summon Arthur while slower men travelled north into Siluria to tell Gundleus that his stepson's kingdom was now in need of its official protector.

Uther's bale fire burned for three nights. Only then were the flames allowed to die, a process hastened by a mighty storm that swept in from the Western Sea. Great clouds heaped the sky, lightning harrowed the dead man's land and heavy rain beat across a broad swathe of growing crops. In Ynys Wydryn we crouched in the huts and listened to the drumming rain and the bellowing thunder and watched the water cascade in streams from the thatched roofs. It was during that storm that Bishop Bedwin's messenger brought the kingdom's great dragon banner to Mordred. The messenger had to shout like a mad thing to attract the attention of anyone inside the stockade, but finally Hywel and I opened the gate and once the storm had passed and the wind had died we planted the flag before Merlin's hall as a sign that Mordred was now king over Dumnonia. The baby was not the High King, of course, for that was an honour which was only granted to a king acknowledged by other kings as one above them all, nor was Mordred the Pendragon, for that title only went to a High King who had won his position in battle. Indeed, Mordred was not even the proper King of Dumnonia yet, nor would he be until he had been carried to Caer Cadarn and there proclaimed with sword and shout above the kingdom's royal stone, but he was the banner's owner and so the red dragon flew before Merlin's high hall. The banner was a square of white linen as broad and high as the shaft of a warrior's spear. It was held spread by willow wit hies threaded into its hems and was attached to a long elm staff that was crowned with a golden figure of a dragon. The dragon embroidered on the banner itself was made of red wool that leeched its dye in the rain to smear the lower linen pink. The arrival of the banner was followed within days by the King's Guard, a hundred men led by Owain, the champion, whose task was to protect Mordred, King of Dumnonia. Owain brought a suggestion from Bishop Bedwin that Norwenna and Mordred should move south to Durnovaria, a suggestion Norwenna eagerly adopted for she wanted to raise her son in a Christian community rather than in the Tor's blatantly pagan air, but before the arrangements could be made there came bad news from the north country. Gorfyddyd of Powys, hearing of the High King's death, had sent his spearmen to attack Gwent and the men of Powys were now burning, looting and taking captives deep inside Tewdric's territory. Agricola, Tewdric's Roman commander, was fighting back, but the treacherous Saxons, undoubtedly in league with Gorfyddyd, had brought their own war-bands into Gwent and suddenly our oldest ally was fighting for his kingdom's very existence. Owain, who would have escorted Norwenna and the babe south to Durnovaria, took his warriors north to help King

Tewdric instead and Ligessac, who was once again the commander of Mordred's guard, insisted that the baby would be safer behind Ynys Wydryn's easily defended land bridge than in Caer Cadarn or Durnovaria, and so Norwenna reluctantly remained at the Tor.

We held our breath to see whose side Gundleus of Siluria would choose and the answer came swiftly. He would fight for Tewdric against his old ally Gorfyddyd. Gundleus sent a message to Norwenna saying that his levies would cross the mountain passes to attack Gorfyddyd's men from the rear and that as soon as the war-bands of Powys had been defeated he would come south to protect his bride and her royal son.

We waited for news, watching the distant hills day and night for the beacons that would tell us of disaster or the approach of enemies, and yet, despite the war's uncertainties, those were happy days. The sun healed the storm-beaten land and dried the grain while Norwenna, even though she was mired in the pagan Tor, seemed more confident now that her son was King. Mordred was always a grim child, with red hair and a stubborn heart, but in those gentle days he seemed happy enough as he played with his mother or with Ralla, his wet nurse, and her dark-haired son. Ralla's husband, Gwlyddyn the carpenter, carved Mordred a set of animals: ducks, hogs, cows and deer, and the King loved to play with them even though he was still too young to know just what they were. Norwenna was happy when her son was happy. I used to watch her tickling Mordred to make him laugh, cradling him when he was hurt and loving him always. She called him her little King, her ever-loving-lover-boy, her miracle, and Mordred chuckled back and warmed her unhappy heart. He crawled naked in the sun and we could all see how his left foot was clubbed and grown inwards like a clenched fist, but otherwise he grew strong on Ralla's milk and his mother's love. He was baptized in the stone church beside the Holy Thorn. News of the war came and it was all good. Prince Gereint had broken a Saxon war-band on Dumnonia's eastern border, while further north Tewdric had destroyed another force of Saxon raiders. Agricola, leading the rest of Gwent's army in alliance with Owain of Dumnonia, had driven Gorfyddyd's invaders back into Powys's hills. Then a messenger came from Gundleus which said that Gorfyddyd of Powys was seeking peace, and the messenger threw two captured Powysian swords at Norwenna's feet as a token of her husband's victory. Better still, the man reported, Gundleus of Siluria was even now on his way south to collect his bride and her precious son. It was time, Gundleus said, that Mordred was proclaimed King on Caer Cadarn. Nothing could have been sweeter to Norwenna's ears and, in her gladness, she gave the messenger a heavy gold bracelet before sending him south to pass on her husband's message to Bedwin and the council. “Tell Bedwin,” she ordered the messenger, 'that we shall acclaim Mordred before the harvest. God speed your horse!"

The messenger rode south and Norwenna began preparing for the acclamation ceremony at Caer Cadarn. She ordered the monks of the Holy Thorn to be ready to travel with her, though she peremptorily forbade either Morgan or Nimue to attend because from this day on, she declared, Dumnonia would be a Christian kingdom and its heathen witches would be kept far from her son's throne. Gundleus's victory had emboldened Norwenna, encouraging her to exercise an authority that Uther would never have allowed her to wield.

We waited for Morgan or Nimue to protest their exclusion from the ceremony of acclamation, but both women took the prohibition with a surprising calm. Morgan, indeed, simply shrugged her black shoulders, though at dusk that night she carried a bronze cauldron into Merlin's chambers and there secluded herself with Nimue. Norwenna, who had invited the head monk of the Holy Thorn and his wife to dine on the Tor, commented that the witches were brewing evil and everyone in the hall laughed. The Christians were victorious.

I was not so sure of their victory. Nimue and Morgan disliked each other, yet now they were closeted together and I suspected that only a matter of the direst importance could bring about such a reconciliation. But Norwenna had no doubts. Uther's death and her husband's victories were bringing her a blessed freedom and soon she would leave the Tor and assume her rightful place as the King's mother in a Christian court where her son would grow in Christ's image. She was never so happy as on that night when she ruled supreme; a Christian in the heart of Merlin's pagan hall. But then Morgan and Nimue reappeared.

There was silence in the hall as the two women walked to Norwenna's chair where, with due humility, they knelt. The head monk, a small fierce man with a bristling beard who had been a tanner before converting to Christ and who still stank of the dung needed by his former trade, demanded to know their business. His wife defended herself from evil by making the sign of the cross, though she spat as well just to be sure.

Morgan answered the monk from behind her golden mask. She spoke with unaccustomed deference as she claimed that Gundleus's messenger had lied. She and Nimue, Morgan said, had peered into the cauldron and seen the truth reflected in its watery mirror. There was no victory in the north, nor was there defeat there either, but Morgan warned that the enemy was closer to Ynys Wydryn than any of us knew and that we should all be ready to leave the Tor at first light and seek safety deeper inside southern Dumnonia. Morgan spoke the words soberly and heavily, and when she had finished she bowed to the Queen, then bent awkwardly forward to kiss the hem of Norwenna's blue robe. Norwenna snatched the robe away. She had listened in silence to the dour prophecy, but now she began to cry and with the sudden tears came a wash of anger. “You're just a crippled witch!” she screamed at Morgan, 'and want your bastard brother to be King. It won't happen! You hear me! It will not happen. My baby is King!"

"High Lady Nimue tried to intervene, but was immediately interrupted.

“You're nothing!” Norwenna turned on Nimue savagely. “You're nothing but an hysterical, wicked child of the devil. You've put a curse on my child! I know you have! He was born crooked because you were present at his birth. Oh God! My child!” She was screaming and weeping, beating her fist on the table as she spat her hatred at Nimue and Morgan. “Now go! Both of you! Go!” There was silence in the hall as Nimue and Morgan went into the night.

And next morning it seemed Norwenna must be right for no beacons blazed on the northern hills. It was, indeed, the most beautiful day of that beautiful summer. The land was heavy as it neared harvest, the hills were hazed by the somnolent heat and the sky almost cloudless. Cornflowers and poppies grew in the thorn thickets at the Tor's foot and white butterflies sailed the warm air currents that ghosted up our patterned green slopes. Norwenna, oblivious to the day's beauty, chanted her morning prayers with the visiting monks, then decreed she would move from the Tor and wait for her husband's arrival in the pilgrims' chambers in the shrine of the Holy Thorn. “I have lived among the wicked too long,” she announced very grandly, as a guard shouted a warning from the eastern wall.

“Horsemen!” the guard cried. “Horsemen!”

Norwenna ran to the fence where a crowd was gathering to watch a score of armed horsemen crossing the land bridge that led from the Roman road to the green hills of Ynys Wydryn. Ligessac, commander of Mordred's guard, seemed to know who was coming for he sent orders to his men to allow the horsemen through the earth wall. The riders spurred though the wall's gate and came towards us beneath a bright banner that showed the red badge of the fox. It was Gundleus himself and Norwenna laughed with delight to see her husband riding victorious from the war with the dawn of a new Christian kingdom bright upon his spear-point. “You see?” she turned on Morgan. “You see? Your cauldron lied. There is victory!”

Mordred began to cry at all the commotion and Norwenna brusquely ordered him given to Ralla, then she demanded that her best cloak be fetched and a gold circlet placed upon her head and thus, dressed as a queen, she waited for her King before the doors of Merlin's hall. Ligessac opened the Tor's land gate. Druidan's ramshackle guard formed a crude line while poor mad Pellinore shrieked in his cage for news. Nimue ran towards Merlin's chamber while I went to fetch Hywel, Merlin's steward, who I knew would want to welcome the King. The twenty Silurian horsemen dismounted at the Tor's foot. They had come from the war and so they carried spears, shields and swords. One-legged Hywel, buckling on his own great sword, frowned when he saw that the Druid Tanaburs was among the Silurian party. “I thought Gundleus had abandoned the old faith?” the steward said.

“I thought he'd abandoned Ladwys!” Gudovan, the scribe, cackled, then jerked his chin towards the horsemen who had begun to climb the Tor's steep narrow path. “See?” Gudovan said, and sure enough there was one woman among the leather-armoured men. The woman was dressed as a man, but had her long black hair flowing free. She carried a sword, but no shield, and Gudovan chuckled to see her. “Our little Queen will have her work cut out competing with that imp of Satan.”

“Who's Satan?” I asked, and Gudovan gave me a buffet on the head for wasting his time with stupid questions.

Hywel was frowning and his hand was clasped about his sword's hilt as the Silurian warriors neared the last steep steps that climbed to the gate where our motley guards waited in two ragged files. Then some instinct that was still as sharp as when he had been a warrior tugged at Hywel's fears. “Ligessac!” he roared. “Close the gate! Close it! Now!”

Ligessac drew his sword instead. Then he turned and cupped an ear as though he had not heard Hywel properly.

“Shut the gate!” Hywel roared. One of Ligessac's men moved to obey the order, but Ligessac checked the man and stared at Norwenna for orders instead.

Norwenna turned to Hywel and scowled her displeasure at his order. “This is my husband coming,” she said, 'not an enemy.“ She looked back to Ligessac. ”Leave the gate open," she commanded imperiously, and Ligessac bowed his obedience.

Hywel cursed, then clambered awkwardly down from the rampart and limped on his crutch towards Morgan's hut while I just stared at that empty, sunlit gate and wondered what was about to happen. Hywel had scented some trouble in the summer air, but how I never did discover. Gundleus reached the open gate. He spat on the threshold, then smiled at Norwenna who was waiting a dozen paces away. She raised her plump arms to greet her Lord who was sweating and breathless, and no wonder for he had climbed the steep Tor dressed in his full war gear. He had a leather breastplate, padded leggings, boots, an iron helmet crested with a fox's tail and a thick red cloak draped about his shoulders. His fox-blazoned shield hung at his left side, his sword was at his hip and he carried a heavy battle-spear in his right hand. Ligessac knelt and offered the King the hilt of his drawn sword and Gundleus stepped forward to touch the weapon's pommel with a leather-gloved hand. Hywel had gone into Morgan's hut, but now Sebile ran out of the hut clutching Mordred in her arms. Sebile? Not Ralla? I was puzzled by that, and Norwenna must also have been puzzled as the Saxon slave ran to stand beside her with little Mordred draped in his rich robe of golden cloth, but Norwenna had no time to question Sebile for Gundleus was now striding towards her.“ I offer you my sword, dear Queen!” he said in a ringing voice, and Norwenna smiled happily, perhaps because she had not yet noticed either Tanaburs or Ladwys who had come through Merlin's open gate with Gundleus's band of warriors. Gundleus thrust his spear into he turf and drew his sword, but instead of offering it to Norwenna hilt first he held the blade's sharp tip towards her face. Norwenna, unsure what to do, reached tentatively to touch that glittering point. “I rejoice at your return, my dear Lord,” she said dutifully, then knelt at his feet as custom demanded.

“Kiss the sword that will defend your son's kingdom,” Gundleus commanded, and Norwenna bent awkwardly forward to touch her thin lips to the proffered steel.

She kissed the sword as she had been commanded, and just as her lips touched the grey steel Gundleus rammed the blade hard down. He was laughing as he killed his bride, laughing as he slid the sword down past her chin into the hollow of her throat and still laughing as he forced the long blade down through the choking resistance of her writhing body. Norwenna had no time to scream, nor any voice left to scream with as the blade ripped through her throat and was rammed down to her heart. Gundleus grunted as he drove the steel home. He had slung his heavy war shield so that both his leather-gloved hands were on the hilt as he pushed and twisted the blade downwards. There was blood on the sword and blood on the grass and blood on the dying Queen's blue cloak, and still more blood as Gundleus jerked the long blade violently free. Norwenna's body, bereft of the sword's support, flopped sideways, quivered for a few seconds, and then was still.

Sebile dropped the baby and fled screaming. Mordred cried aloud in protest, but Gundleus's sword cut the baby's cries short. He stabbed the red blade down just once and suddenly the golden cloth was drenched with scarlet. So much blood from so small a child.

It had all happened so fast. Gudovan, next to me, was gaping in disbelief while Ladwys, who was a tall beauty with long hair, dark eyes and a sharply fierce face, laughed at her lover's victory. Tanaburs had closed one eye, raised one hand to the sky and was hopping on one leg, all signs that he was in sacred communion with the Gods as he cast his spells of doom and as Gundleus's guards spread into the compound with levelled spears to make that doom reality. Ligessac had joined the Silurian ranks and helped the spearmen massacre his own men. A few of the Dumnonians tried to fight, but they had been arrayed to do Gundleus honour, not oppose him, and the Silurian spearmen made brief work of Mordred's guards and briefer work still of Druidan's sorry soldiers. For the very first time in my adult life I saw men die on spearheads and heard the terrible screams a man makes when his soul is spear-sent into the Otherworld.

For a few seconds I was helpless with panic. Norwenna and Mordred were dead, the Tor was screaming and the enemy was running towards the hall and Merlin's Tower. Morgan and Hywel appeared beside the tower, but as Hywel limped forward with sword in hand, Morgan fled towards the sea gate. A host of women, children and slaves ran with her; a terrified mass of people whom Gundleus seemed content to let escape. Ralla, Sebile and those of Druidan's misshapen guard who had managed to avoid the grim Silurian warriors ran with them. Pellinore leaped up and down in his cage, cackling and naked, loving the horror.

I jumped from the ramparts and ran to the hall. I was not being brave, I was simply in love with Nimue and I wanted to make sure she was safe before I fled the Tor myself. Ligessac's guards were dead and Gundleus's men were beginning to plunder the huts as I dived through the door and ran towards Merlin's chambers, but before I could reach the small black door a spear-shaft tripped me. I fell heavily, then a small hand gripped my collar and, with astounding strength, dragged me towards my old hiding place behind the baskets of feasting cloths. “You can't help her, fool,” Druidan's voice said in my ear. “Now, be quiet!”

I reached safety just seconds before Gundleus and Tanaburs entered the hall and all I could do was watch as the King, his Druid and three helmed men marched to Merlin's door, I knew what was to happen and I could not stop it for Druidan was holding his little hand hard over my mouth to stop me shouting. I doubted that Druidan had run into the hall to save Nimue, probably he had come to snatch what gold he could before fleeing with the rest of his men, but his presence had at least saved my life. But it saved Nimue from nothing.

Tanaburs kicked the ghost-fence aside, then thrust the door open. Gundleus ducked inside, followed by his spearmen.

I heard Nimue scream. I do not know if she used tricks to defend Merlin's chamber, or whether she had already abandoned hope. I do know that pride and duty had made her stay to protect her master's secrets and now she paid for that pride. I heard Gundleus laugh, then I heard little except for the sound of the

Silurians raking through Merlin's boxes, bales and baskets. Nimue whimpered, Gundleus shouted in triumph, and then she screamed again in sudden, terrible pain. “That'll teach you to spit on my shield, girl,” Gundleus said as Nimue sobbed helplessly.

“She's well raped now,” Druidan said in my ear with a wicked relish. More of Gundleus's spearmen ran through the hall to enter Merlin's rooms. Druidan had forced a hole in the wattle wall with his spear and now ordered me to wriggle through and follow him down the hill, but I would not leave while Nimue still lived. “They'll be searching these baskets soon,” the dwarf warned me, but still I would not go with him.

“More fool you, boy,” Druidan said, and he scrambled through the hole and scuttled towards the shadowed space between a nearby hut and a chicken pen.

I was saved by Ligessac. Not because he saw me, but because he told the Silurians there was nothing in the baskets that hid me except for banquet cloths. “All the treasure's inside,” he told his new allies, and I crouched, not daring to move, as the victorious soldiers plundered Merlin's chambers. The Gods alone know what they found: dead men's skins, old bones, new charms and ancient elf bolts, but precious little treasure. And the Gods alone know what they did to Nimue, for she would never tell, though no telling was needed. They did what soldiers always do to captured women, and when they had finished they left her bleeding and half mad.

They also left her to die, for when they had ransacked the treasure chamber and found it filled with musty nonsense and only a little gold, they took a brand from the hall fire and tossed it among the broken baskets. Smoke billowed from the door. Another burning brand was thrown into the baskets where I was hidden, then Gundleus's men retreated from the hall. Some carried gold, a few had found some silver baubles, but most fled empty handed. When the last man was gone I covered my mouth with a corner of my jerkin and ran through the choking smoke towards Merlin's door and found Nimue just inside the room. “Come on!” I said to her desperately. The air was filling with smoke while flames were leaping wildly up the boxes where cats screamed and bats flapped in panic.

Nimue would not move. She was lying belly down, hands clasped to her face, naked, with blood thick on her legs. She was weeping.

I ran to the door which led into Merlin's Tower, thinking there might be some escape that way, but when I opened the door I found the walls unbreached. I also discovered that the tower, far from being a treasure chamber, was almost empty. There was a bare earthen floor, four timber walls and an open roof. It was a chamber open to the sky, but halfway up the open funnel, suspended on a pair of beams and reached by a stout ladder, I could see a wooden platform that was swiftly being obscured by smoke. The tower was a dream chamber, a hollow place in which the Gods' whispers would echo to Merlin. I looked up at the dream platform for a second, then more smoke surged out behind me to funnel up the dream tower and I ran back to Nimue, seized her black cloak off the disordered bed and rolled her in the wool like a sick animal. I grabbed the corners of the cloak and then, with her light body bundled inside, I struggled into the hall and headed towards the far door. The fire was roaring now with the hunger of flames feasting on dry wood, my eyes were streaming and my lungs were soured by the smoke that lay thickest by the hall's main door, so I dragged Nimue, her body bumping on the earth floor behind me, to where Druidan had made his rat hole in the wall. My heart thumped in terror as I peered through, but I could see no enemies. I kicked the hole larger, bending back the willow wattles and breaking off chunks of the plaster daub, then I struggled through, hauling Nimue after me. She made small noises of protest as I jerked her body through the crude gap, but the fresh air seemed to revive her for she at last tried to help herself and I saw, as she took her hands away from her face, just why her last scream had been so terrible. Gundleus had taken one of her eyes. The socket was a well of blood over which she again clapped a bloody hand. The tussle in the ragged hole had left her naked so I snatched the cloak free from a splintered wattle and draped it around her shoulders before clasping her free hand and running towards the nearest hut.

One of Gundleus's men saw us, then Gundleus himself recognized Nimue and he shouted that the witch should be taken alive and thrown back into the flames. The cry of the chase went up, great whoops like the sound of hunters pursuing a wounded boar to its death, and the two of us would surely have been caught if some of the other fugitives had not already ripped a gap in the stockade on the Tor's southern side. I ran towards the new gap only to discover Hywel, good Hywel, lying dead in the breach with his crutch beside him, his head half severed and his sword still in his hand. I plucked up the sword and hauled Nimue onwards. We reached the steep southern slope and tumbled down, both of us screaming as we slithered down the precipitous grass. Nimue was half blind and utterly maddened by her pain while I was frantic with terror, yet somehow I clutched on to Hywel's war sword, and somehow I made Nimue get to her feet at the Tor's foot and stumble on past the sacred well, past the Christians' orchard, through a grove of alders and so down to where I knew Hywel's marsh boat was moored beside a fisherman's hut. I threw Nimue into the small boat of bundled reeds, slashed the painter with my new sword and pushed the boat away from the wooden stage only to realize I had no quant pole to drive the clumsy craft out into the intricate maze of channels and lakes that laced the marsh. I used the sword instead; Hywel's blade made a sorry punting pole, yet it was all I had until the first of Gundleus's pursuers reached the reedy bank and, unable to wade out to us because of the glutinous marsh mud, hurled his spear at us instead.

The spear whistled as it flew towards me. For a second I could not move, transfixed by the sight of that heavy pole with its glittering steel head hurtling towards us, but then the weapon thumped past me to bury its blade in the punt's reed gunwale. I grabbed the quivering ash staff and used it as my quant pole to drive the boat hard and quick out into the waterways. We were safe there. Some of Gundleus's men ran along a wooden track way that paralleled our course, but I soon turned away from them. Others leaped into coracles and used their spears as paddles, but no coracle could match a reed punt for speed and so we left them far behind. Ligessac fired an arrow, but we were already out of range and his missile plunged soundlessly into the dark water. Behind our frustrated pursuers, high on the green Tor, the flames leaped hungrily at huts and hall and tower so that grey churning smoke rose high in the blue summer sky.

“Two wounds.” Nimue spoke for the first time since I had snatched her from the flames.

“What?” I turned to her. She was huddled in the bow, the black cloak wrapped about her thin body and with one hand clasped over her empty eye.

“I've suffered two Wounds of Wisdom, Derfel,” she said in a voice of crazed wonderment. “The Wound to the Body and the Wound to the Pride. Now all I face is madness and then I shall be as wise as Merlin.” She tried to smile, but there was a hysterical wildness in her voice that made me wonder whether she was not already under the spell of madness.

“Mordred's dead,” I told her, 'and so are Norwenna and Hywel. The Tor is burning." Our whole world was being destroyed, yet Nimue seemed strangely unmoved by the disaster. Instead she almost seemed elated because she had endured two of the three tests of wisdom.

I poled past a line of willow fish traps, then turned into Lissa's Mere, a great black lake that lay on the southern edge of the marshes. I was aiming towards Ermid's Hall, a wooden settlement where Ermid, a chieftain of a local tribe, kept his household. I knew Ermid would not be at the hall for he had marched north with Owain, but his people would help us, and I also knew that our boat would reach the hall long before the swiftest of Gundleus's horsemen could gallop around the lake's long, reed-thick and marshy banks. They would have to go almost as far as the Fosse Way, the great Roman road that ran east of the Tor, before they could turn around the lake's eastern extremity and gallop towards Ermid's Hall, and by then we would be long gone south. I could see other boats far ahead of me on the mere and guessed that the Tor's fugitives were being carried to safety by Ynys Wydryn's fishermen. I told Nimue my plan to reach Ermid's Hall and then keep going southwards until the night fell or we met friends. “Good,” she said dully, though I was not really sure she had understood anything I had said.

“Good Derfel,” she added. “Now I know why the Gods made me trust you.”

“You trust me,” I said bitterly, and thrust the spear into the muddy lake bottom to push the boat forward,

'because I'm in love with you, and that gives you power over me."

“Good,” she said again, and said nothing more until our reed boat glided into the tree-shaded landing beneath Ermid's stockade where, as I pushed the boat still deeper into the creek's shadows, I saw the other fugitives from the Tor. Morgan was there with Sebile, and Ralla was weeping with her baby safe in her arms next to Gwlyddyn her husband. Lunete, the Irish girl, was there, and she ran crying to the waterside to help Nimue. I told Morgan of Hywel's death, and she said she had seen Guendoloen, Merlin's wife, cut down by a Silurian. Gudovan was safe, but no one knew what had happened to poor Pellinore or to Druidan. None of Norwenna's guards had survived, though a handful of Druidan's wretched soldiers had reached the dubious safety of Ermid's Hall, as had three of Norwenna's weeping attendants and a dozen of Merlin's frightened foundlings.

“We have to go soon,” I told Morgan. “They're chasing Nimue.” Nimue was being bandaged and clothed by Ermid's servants.

“It's not Nimue they're after, you fool,” Morgan snapped at me, 'but Mordred."

“Mordred's dead!” I protested, but Morgan answered by turning and snatching at the baby that lay in Ralla's arms. She tugged the rough brown cloth away from the child's body and I saw the clubbed foot.

“Do you think, fool,” Morgan said to me, 'that I would permit our King to be killed?“ I stared at Ralla and Gwlyddyn, wondering how they could ever have conspired to let their own son die. It was Gwlyddyn who answered my mute look. ”He's a king," he explained simply, pointing to Mordred,

'while our boy was just a carpenter's son."

“And soon,” Morgan said angrily, “Gundleus will discover that the baby he killed has two good feet, and then he'll bring every man he can to search for us. We go south.” There was no safety in Ermid's Hall. The chief and his warriors had gone to war, leaving only a handful of servants and children in the settlement.

We left a little before midday, plunging into the green woods south of Ermid's holdings. One of Ermid's huntsmen led us on narrow paths and secret ways. There were thirty of us, mostly women and children, with only a half dozen men capable of bearing arms and of those only Gwlyddyn had ever killed a man in battle. Druidan's few surviving fools would be no use, and I had never fought in anger, though I walked as a rear guard with Hywel's naked sword thrust into my rope belt and the heavy Silurian war spear clasped in my right hand.

We passed slowly beneath the oaks and hazels. From Ermid's Hall to Caer Cadarn was no more than a four-hour walk, though it would take us much longer for we travelled on secret, circuitous paths and were slowed by the children. Morgan had not said she would try to reach Caer Cadarn, but I knew the royal sanctuary was her probable destination for it was there that we were likely to find Dumnonian soldiers, but Gundleus would surely have made that same deduction and he was just as desperate as we were. Morgan, who had a shrewd grasp of this world's wickedness, surmised that the Silurian King had been planning this war ever since the High Council, just waiting for Uther's death to launch an attack in alliance with Gorfyddyd. We had all been fooled. We had thought Gundleus a friend and so no one had guarded his borders and now Gundleus was aiming at nothing less than the throne of Dumnonia itself. But to gain that throne, Morgan told us, he would need more than a score of horsemen, and so his spearmen would surely even now be hurrying to catch up with their King as they marched down the long Roman road that led from Dumnonia's northern coast. The Silurians were loose in our country, but before Gundleus could be sure of victory he had to kill Mordred. He had to find us or else his whole daring enterprise would fail.

The great wood muffled our steps. Occasionally a pigeon would clatter through the high leaves, and sometimes a woodpecker would rattle a trunk not far off. Once there was a great crashing and trampling in the nearby underbrush and we all stopped, motionless, fearing a Silurian horseman, but it was only a tusked boar that blundered into a clearing, took one look at us and turned away. Mordred was crying and would not take Ralla's breast. Some of the smaller children were also weeping out of fear and tiredness, but they fell silent when Morgan threatened to turn them all into stink-toads. Nimue limped ahead of me. I knew she was in pain, but she would not complain. Sometimes she wept silently and nothing Lunete could say would comfort her. Lunete was a slender, dark girl, the same age as Nimue and not unlike her in looks, but she lacked Nimue's knowledge and fey spirit. Nimue could look at a stream and know it as the dwelling place of water spirits, whereas Lunete would simply see it as a good place for washing clothes. After a while Lunete dropped back to walk beside me. “What happens to us now, Derfel?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

“Will Merlin come?”

“I hope so,” I said, 'or perhaps Arthur will." I spoke in fervent but disbelieving hope, because what we needed was a miracle. Instead we seemed trapped in a midday nightmare for when, after a couple of hours walking, we were forced to leave the woods to cross a deep, winding stream that looped through grassy pastures bright with flowers, we saw more smoke pyres on the distant eastern skyline, though whether the fires had been set by Silurian raiders or by Saxons taking advantage of our weakness, none could tell.

A deer ran out of the woods a quarter mile to the east. “Down!” the huntsman's voice hissed and we all sank into the grass at the edge of the wood. Ralla forced Mordred on to her breast to silence him and he retaliated by biting her so hard that the blood trickled down to her waist, but neither he nor she made a sound as the horseman who had startled the deer appeared at the trees' edge. The horseman was also to the east of us, but much closer than the pyres, so close that I could see the fox mask on his round shield. He carried a long spear and a horn that he sounded after he had stared for a long time in our direction. We all feared that its signal meant that the rider had seen us and that soon a whole pack of Silurian horsemen would come into view, but when the man urged his horse back into the trees we guessed that the horn's dull note meant that he had not seen us at all. Far away another horn sounded, then there was silence.

We waited long minutes. Bees buzzed through the pastures edging the stream. We were all watching the treeline, fearing to see more armed horsemen, but no enemy showed there and after a while our guide whispered that we were to creep down to the stream, cross it, and crawl up to the trees on its far bank. It was a long, difficult crawl, especially for Morgan with her twisted left leg, though at least we all had a chance to lap at the water as we splashed through the stream. Once in the far woods we walked with soaking clothes, but also with the relieved feeling that perhaps we had left our enemies behind us. But not, alas, our troubles. “Will they make us slaves?” Lunete asked me. Like many of us Lunete had originally been captured for Dumnonia's slave market and only Merlin's intervention had kept her free. Now she feared that the loss of Merlin's protection would doom her.

“I don't think so,” I said. “Not unless Gundleus or the Saxons capture us. You'd be taken for a slave, but they'd probably kill me.” I felt very brave saying it.

Lunete put her arm into mine for comfort and I felt flattered by her touch. She was a pretty girl and till today she had treated me with disdain, preferring the company of the wild fisher boys in Ynys Wydryn. “I want Merlin to come back,” she said. “I don't want to leave the Tor.”

“There's nothing left there now,” I said. “We'll have to find a new place to live. Or else we'll have to go back and rebuild the Tor, if we can.” But only, I thought, if Dumnonia survived. Maybe even now, in this smoke-haunted afternoon, the kingdom was dying. I wondered how I had been so blind as not to see what horrors Uther's death would bring. Kingdoms need kings, and without them they are nothing but empty land inviting a conqueror's spears.

In mid-afternoon we crossed a wider stream, almost a river, so deep that the water came up to my chest as I waded through. Once on the far bank I dried off Hywel's sword as best I could. It was a lovely blade, made by the famous smiths in Gwent and decorated with curling designs and interlocking circles. Its steel blade was straight and stretched from my throat to my fingertips when I held my arm straight out. The crosspiece was made of thick iron with plain round finials, while the hilt was of apple wood that had been riveted to the tang and then bound about with strips of long, thin leather that were oiled smooth. The pommel was a round ball wrapped with silver wire that kept breaking free and in the end I took the wire off and fashioned it into a crude bracelet for Lunete.

South of the river was another wide pasture, this one grazed by bullocks that lumbered over to inspect our draggled passing. Maybe it was their movement that attracted the trouble, for it was not long after we had entered the woods on the far side of the pasture that I heard the hoofbeats sound loud behind us. I sent a warning forward, then turned, spear and sword in my hands, to watch the path. The tree branches grew low here, so low that a horseman could not ride down the path. Whoever pursued us would be forced to abandon their horses and follow us on foot. We had not been using the wood's wider paths, but taking hidden track ways that threaded narrowly through the trees, so narrow that our pursuers, like us, would have to adopt a single file. I feared they were Silurian scouts sent far ahead of Gundleus's small force. Who else would be interested in whatever had caused the cattle on the river bank to stir themselves in this lazy afternoon?

Gwlyddyn arrived beside me and took the heavy spear out of my hand. He listened to the distant footfalls, then nodded as though satisfied. “Only two of them,” he said calmly. “They've left their horses and are coming on foot. I'll take the first, and you hold the second man till I can kill him.” He sounded extraordinarily calm, which helped soothe my fears. “And remember, Derfel,” he added, 'they're frightened too.“ He pushed me into the shadows, then crouched on the path's far side behind the upended root mass of a fallen beech tree. ”Get down,“ he hissed at me. ”Hide!" I crouched and suddenly all the terror welled back inside me. My hands were sweating, my right leg was twitching, my throat was dry, I wanted to vomit, and my bowels were liquid. Hywel had taught me well, but I had never faced a man wanting to kill me. I could hear the approaching men, but I could not see them and my strongest instinct was to turn and run after the women. But I stayed. I had no choice. Since childhood I had been hearing tales of warriors and had been taught again and again that a man never turned and ran. A man fought for his Lord and a man stood up to his enemy and a man never fled. Now my Lord was sucking at Ralla's breast and I was facing his enemies, but how I wanted to be a child and just run! Suppose there were more than two enemy spearmen? And even if there were only two they were bound to be experienced warriors; skilled and hardened and careless in their killing.

“Calm, boy, calm,” Gwlyddyn said softly. He had fought in Uther's battles. He had faced the Saxon and carried a spear against the men of Powys. Now, deep in his native land, he stooped in the tangle of earthy root-suckers with a half-grin on his face and my long spear in his sturdy brown hands. “This is revenge for my child,” he told me grimly, 'and the Gods are on our side." I was crouched behind brambles and flanked by ferns. My damp clothes felt heavy and uncomfortable. I stared at the trees that were thick with lichens and tangled with leaves. A woodpecker rattled nearby and I jumped with alarm. My hiding place was better than Gwlyddyn's, but even so I felt exposed, and never more so than when at last our two pursuers appeared just a dozen paces beyond my leafy screen. They were two lithe young spearmen with leather breastplates, strapped leggings and long russet cloaks thrown back over their shoulders. Their plaited beards were long and their dark hair was bound behind by leather thongs. Both men carried long spears and the second man also had a sword at his belt, though he had not yet drawn it. I held my breath.

The leading man raised a hand and both men stopped and listened for a while before coming on again. The nearest man's face was scarred from an old fight, his mouth was open and I could see the gaps in his yellowed teeth. He looked immensely tough, experienced and frightening, and I was suddenly overwhelmed with a terrible desire to flee, but then the scar on my left palm, the scar that Nimue had put there, throbbed and that warm pulse gave me a jolt of courage.

“We heard a deer,” the second man said disparagingly. The two men were advancing at a stealthy walk now, placing their feet carefully and watching the leaves ahead for the smallest flicker of movement.

“We heard a baby,” the first man insisted. He was two paces ahead of the other who looked, to my scared eyes, to be even taller and grimmer than his companion.

“Bastards have disappeared,” the second man said and I saw the sweat dripping off his face and I noticed how he gripped and re gripped his ash spear-shaft and I knew he was nervous. I was saying Bel's name over and over in my head, begging the God for courage, begging him to make me a man. The enemy was six paces away now and still coming, and all around us the greenwood lay warm and breathless and I could smell the two men, smell their leather and the lingering scent of their horses as sweat dripped into my eyes and I almost whimpered aloud in terror, but then Gwlyd-dyn leaped out of his ambush and screamed a war cry as he ran forward.

I ran with him and suddenly I was released from fear as the mad, God-given joy of battle came to me for the very first time. Later, much later, I learned that the joy and the fear are the exact same things, the one merely transformed into the other by action, but on that summer afternoon I was suddenly elated. May God and His angels forgive me, but that day I discovered the joy that lies in battle and for a long time afterwards I craved it like a thirsty man seeking water. I ran forward, screaming like Gwlyddyn, but I was not so crazed as to follow him blindly. I moved over to the right side of the narrow path so that I could run past him when he struck the closer Silurian.

That man tried to parry Gwlyddyn's spear, but the carpenter expected the low sweep of the ash staff, and raised his own weapon above it as he thrust his weapon home. It all happened so fast. One moment the Silurian was a threatening figure in war gear, then he was gasping and twitching as Gwlyddyn rammed the heavy spearhead through the leather armour and deep into his chest. And I was already past him, yelling as I swung Hywel's sword. At that moment I felt no fear, perhaps because the soul of dead Hywel came back from the Otherworld to fill me, for suddenly I knew exactly what I had to do and my war scream was a cry of triumph.

The second man had a heartbeat's more warning than his dying companion and so he had dropped into a spearman's crouch from which he could spring forward with killing force. I leaped at him, and as the spear came at me in a bright, sun-touched lunge of steel I twisted aside and parried with my blade, not so hard as to lose control of the steel, but just enough to slide the man's weapon past my right side as I whirled the sword around. “It's all in the wrists, boy, all in the wrists,” I heard Hywel say and I shouted his name as I brought the sword hard down on to the side of the Silurian's neck. It was all so quick, so very quick. The wrist manoeuvres the sword, but the arm gives it force, and my arm held Hywel's great strength that afternoon. My steel buried itself in the Silurian's neck like an axe biting into rotten wood. At first, so green was I, I thought he had not died and I wrenched the sword free to strike at him again. I struck that second time and was aware of blood brightening the day and the man falling sideways and I could hear his choking breath and see his dying effort to pull the spear back for a second thrust, but then his life rattled in his throat and another great wash of blood ran down his leather-covered chest as he slumped on to the leaf mould.

And I stood there shaking. I suddenly wanted to cry. I had no idea what I had done. I had no sense of victory, only of guilt, and I stood shocked and motionless with my sword still embedded in the dead man's throat on which the first flies were already settling. I could not move. A bird screamed in the high leaves, then Gwlyddyn's strong arm was around my shoulders and tears were streaming down my face. “You're a good man, Derfel,” Gwlyddyn said and I turned to him and held him like a child clinging to a father. “Well done,” he said again and again, 'well done." He patted me clumsily until at last I sniffed back my tears.

“I'm sorry,” I heard myself saying.

“Sorry?” he laughed. “For what? Hywel always said you were the best he ever trained and I should have believed him. You're fast. Now come, we have to see what we've won.” I took my victim's sword scabbard that was made of willow-stiffened leather and found it fitted Hywel's sword tolerably well, then we searched the two bodies for what little plunder we could find: an unripe apple, an old coin worn smooth, two cloaks, the weapons, some leather thongs and a bone-handled knife. Gwlyddyn debated whether we should go back and fetch the two horses, then decided we did not have the time. I did not care. My vision might be blurred by tears, but I was alive and I had killed a man and I had defended my King and suddenly I was deliriously happy as Gwlyddyn led me back to the frightened fugitives and raised my arm as a sign that I had fought well.

“You made enough noise, the two of you,” Morgan snarled. “We'll have half Siluria on our heels soon. Now come! Move!”

Nimue did not seem interested in my victory, but Lunete wanted to hear all about it and in the telling I exaggerated both the enemy and the fight, and Lunete's admiration engendered even more exaggeration. She had her arm in mine again and I glanced at her dark-eyed face and wondered why I had never really noticed just how beautiful she was. Like Nimue she had a wedge-shaped face, but where Nimue's was full of a wary knowledge Lunete's was soft with a teasing warmth, and her closeness gave me new confidence as we walked on through the long afternoon until at last we turned east towards the hills of which Caer Cadarn stood like an outrider.

One hour later we stood at the edge of the woods that faced Caer Cadarn. It was late in the day, but we were in midsummer and the sun was still high in the sky and its lovely gentle light was flooding the western ramparts of Caer Cadarn with a green glow. We were a mile away from the fortress, but still close enough to see the yellow palisades atop the ramparts, close enough to see that no guards stood on those walls and no smoke rose from the small settlement inside.

But nor was there any enemy in sight, and that decided Morgan to cross the open land and climb the western path to the King's fortress. Gwlyddyn argued that we should stay in the forest till nightfall, or else go to the nearby settlement of Lindinis, but Gwlyddyn was a carpenter and Morgan a high-born lady, so he surrendered to her wishes.

We moved out into the pastureland and our shadows stretched long in front of us. The grass had been cropped short by deer or cattle, yet it was soft and lush underfoot. Nimue, who still seemed to be in a pain-haunted trance, slipped off her borrowed shoes and paced barefoot. A hawk sailed overhead and then a hare, startled by our sudden appearance, sprang out of a grassy hollow and raced nimbly away. We followed a path edged with cornflowers, ox-eyes, ragweed and dogwood. Behind us, shadowed by the sun's western slant, the woods looked dark. We were tired and ragged, but journey's end was in sight and some among us even appeared cheerful. We were bringing Mordred back to his birthplace, back to Dumnonia's royal hill, but before we were even halfway to that glorious green refuge, the enemy appeared behind us.

Gundleus's war-band appeared. Not just the horsemen who had ridden to Ynys Wydryn in the morning, but his spearmen too. Gundleus must have known all along where we would go and so he had brought his surviving cavalrymen and over a hundred spearmen to this sacred place of Dumnonia's kings. And even if he had not been forced to pursue the baby King, then Gundleus would still have come to Caer Cadarn, for he wanted nothing less than the crown of Dumnonia, and Caer Cadarn was where that crown was bestowed upon the ruler's head. Who held Caer Cadarn held Dumnonia, the old saying went, and who held Dumnonia held Britain.

The Silurian horsemen spurred ahead of their spearmen. It would take them only a few minutes to reach us and I knew that none of us, not even the swiftest runners, could reach the long slopes of the fortress before those horsemen swept around us with slashing steel and stabbing spears. I went to Nimue's side and saw that her thin face was drawn and tired, and her remaining eye bruised and tearful. “Nimue?” I said.

“It's all right, Derfel.” She seemed annoyed that I wanted to take care of her. She was mad, I decided. Of all the living who had survived this terrible day, she had survived the worst experience of all and it had driven her to a place I could neither follow nor understand. “I do love you,” I said, trying to touch her soul with tenderness.

“Me? Not Lunete?” Nimue said angrily. She was not looking at me, but towards the fortress, while I turned and stared at the approaching horsemen who had spread into a long line like men intent on flushing game. Their cloaks lay on their horses' rumps, their scabbards hung down beside their dangling boots, and the sun glinted on spear-points and lit the banner of the fox. Gundleus rode beneath the banner, the iron helmet with its fox-tail crest on his head. Ladwys was beside him, a sword in her hand, while Tanaburs, his long robe flapping, rode a grey horse close beside his King. I was going to die, I thought, on the day that I had become a man. That realization seemed very cruel.

“Run!” Morgan suddenly shouted, 'run!" I thought she had panicked, and I did not want to obey her for I thought it would be nobler to stand and die like a man than be cut down from behind as a fugitive. Then I saw she was not panicking and that Caer Cadarn was not deserted after all, but that the gates had opened and a stream of men was running and riding down the path. The horsemen were dressed like Gundleus's riders, only these men bore the dragon shields of Mordred on their arms. We ran. I dragged Nimue along by the arm while the handful of Dumnonian horse spurred towards us. There were a dozen riders, not many, but enough to check the advance of Gundleus's men, while behind the horsemen came a band of Dumnonian spearmen.

“Fifty spears,” Gwlyddyn said. He had been counting the rescue party. “We can't beat them with fifty,” he added grimly, 'but we might make safety."

Gundleus was making the same deduction and now he led his horsemen in a wide curve that would lead them behind the approaching Dumnonian spearmen. He wanted to cut off our retreat for once he had assembled his enemies in one place he could kill us all whether we numbered seventy or seven. Gundleus had the advantage of numbers and, by coming down from their fortress, the Dumnonians had sacrificed their one advantage of height.

The Dumnonian horsemen thundered past us, their horses' hooves cutting great chunks of turf from the lush pasture. These were not the fabled horsemen of Arthur, the armoured men who struck home like thunderbolts, but lightly armed scouts who would normally dismount before going into battle, but now they formed a protective screen between us and the Silurian spearmen. A moment later our own spearmen arrived and made their shield-wall. That wall gave us all a new confidence, a confidence that veered towards recklessness when we saw who led the rescue party. It was Owain, mighty Owain, king's champion and the greatest fighter in all

Britain. We had thought Owain was far to the north, fighting alongside the men of Gwent in the mountains of Powys, yet here he was at Caer Cadarn.

Yet, in sober truth, Gundleus still held the advantage. We were twelve horsemen, fifty spearmen and thirty tired fugitives who were gathered in an open place where Gundleus had gathered almost twice as many horsemen and twice as many spearmen.

The sun was still bright. It would be two hours before twilight and four before it was full dark and that gave Gundleus more than enough time to finish his slaughter, though first he tried to persuade us with words. He rode forward, splendid on his sweat-foamed horse and with his shield held upside down as a sign of truce. “Men of Dumnonia,” he called, 'give me the child and I will go!" No one answered. Owain had hidden himself in the centre of our shield-wall so that Gundleus, seeing no leader, addressed us all.

“It's a maimed child!” the Silurian King called. “Cursed by the Gods. You think any good fortune can attend a country ruled by a crippled king? You want your harvests blighted? You want your children born sick? You want your cattle to die of a murrain? You want the Saxons to be lords of this land? What else does a crippled king bring but ill fortune?”

Still no one answered though, God knows, enough men in our hastily aligned ranks must have feared that Gundleus spoke the truth.

The Silurian King lifted the helmet from his long hair and smiled at our plight. “You may all live,” he promised, 'so long as you give me the child.“ He waited for an answer that did not come. ”Who leads you?" he finally asked.

“I do!” Owain at last pushed through the ranks to take his place in front of our shield-line.

“Owain.” Gundleus recognized him, and I thought I saw a flicker of fear in Gundleus's eyes. Like us he had not known that Owain had returned to the heart of Dumnonia. Yet Gundleus was still confident of victory even though he must have known that with Owain among his enemies that victory would be much harder. “Lord Owain,” Gundleus said giving Dumnonia's champion his proper title, 'son of Eilynon and grandson of Culwas. I salute you!“ Gundleus raised his spear tip towards the sun. ”You have a son, Lord Owain."

“Many men have sons,” Owain answered carelessly. “What is it to you?”

“Do you want your boy to be fatherless?” Gundleus asked. “Do you want your lands wasted? Your home burned? Do you want your wife to be my men's plaything?”

“My wife,” Owain said, 'could outfight all your men, and you too. You want playthings, Gundleus? Go back to your whore' he jerked his chin towards Ladwys — 'and if you won't share your whore with your men then Dumnonia can spare Siluria a few lonely ewes." Owain's defiance cheered us. He looked indomitable with his massive spear, long sword and iron-plated shield. He always fought bare headed, disdaining a helmet, and his hugely muscled arms were tattooed with Dumnonia's dragon and his own symbol of a long-tusked boar.

“Yield me the child.” Gundleus ignored the insults, knowing they were merely the defiance expected of a man facing battle. “Give me the crippled King!”

“Give me your whore, Gundleus,” Owain retorted. “You're not man enough for her. Give her to me and you can go in peace.”

Gundleus spat. “The bards will sing of your death, Owain. The song of the pig-sticking.” Owain thrust his huge spear butt-first into the soil. “Here the pig stands, Gundleus ap Meilyr, King of Siluria,” he shouted, 'and here the pig will either die or piss on your corpse. Now go!" Gundleus smiled, shrugged and turned his horse away. He also turned his shield the right side up, letting us know that we would have a fight.

It was my first battle.

The Dumnonian horsemen formed behind our line of spears to protect the women and children so long as they could. The rest of us arrayed ourselves in the battle line and watched as our enemies did the same. Ligessac, the traitor, was among the Silurian ranks. Tanaburs performed the rites, hopping on one leg and with one hand raised and one eye closed in front of Gundleus's shield-wall as it advanced slowly across the grassland. Only when Tanaburs had cast his protective spell did the Silurians begin to shout insults at us. They warned us of the massacre to come and boasted how many of us they would kill, yet even so I noticed how slowly they came and, when they were only fifty paces away, how they stopped altogether. Some of our men jeered at their timidity, but Owain growled at us to be silent. The battle lines stared at each other. Neither moved.

It takes extraordinary courage to charge into a line of shields and spears. That is why so many men drink before the fight. I have seen armies pause for hours while they summon the courage to charge, and the older the warrior the more courage is needed. Young troops will charge and die, but older men know how terrible an enemy shield-wall can be. I had no shield, yet I was covered by the shields of my neighbours, and their shields touched others and so on down our small line so that any man charging home would be met by a wall of leather-covered wood bristling with razor-sharp spears. The Silurians began beating their shields with their spear-staffs. The rattling sound was meant to unsettle us, and it did, though none on our side showed the fear. We just huddled together, waiting for the charge.

“There'll be some false charges first, lad,” my neighbour warned me, and no sooner had he spoken than a group of Silurians ran screaming from their line and hurled their long spears at the centre of our defence. Our men crouched and the long spears banged home into our shields and suddenly the whole Silurian line was moving forward, but Owain immediately ordered our line to stand and march forward too and that deliberate motion checked the enemy's threatened attack. Those of our men whose shields were cumbered with the enemy spears wrenched the weapons loose, then made the shield-wall whole again.

“Edge back!” Owain ordered us. He would try to shuffle slowly backwards across the half-mile of grassland to Caer Cadarn, hoping that the Silurians would not raise the courage to make their charge while we completed that pitifully slow journey. To give us more time Owain strode ahead of our line and shouted at Gundleus to fight him man to man. “Are you a woman, Gundleus?” our King's champion called. “Lost your courage? Not enough mead? Why don't you go back to your weaving loom, woman? Go back to your embroidery! Go back to your spindle!”

We shuffled back, shuffled back, shuffled back, but suddenly a charge of the enemy made us stand firm and duck behind our shields as the spears were hurled. One whipped over my head, its passage sounding like a sudden rush of wind, but again the attack was a feint intended to panic us. Ligessac was firing arrows, but he must have been drunk for his shots went wildly overhead. Owain was a target for a dozen spears, but most missed and the others he swept contemptuously aside with spear or shield before mocking the throwers. “Who taught you spear-craft? Your mothers?” He spat towards the enemy.

“Come Gundleus! Fight me! Show your scullions you're a king, not a mouse!” The Silurians beat spear-shafts on their shields to drown Owain's taunts. He turned his back to show them his scorn and walked slowly back to our shield-line. “Back,” he called to us softly, 'back.“ Then two of the Silurians threw down their shields and weapons and tore off their clothes to fight naked. My neighbour spat. ”There'll be trouble now," he warned me grimly. The naked men were probably drunk, or else so intoxicated by the Gods that they believed no enemy blade could hurt them. I had heard of such men and knew that their suicidal example was usually the signal for a real attack. I gripped my sword and tried to make a vow to die well, but in truth I could have wept for the pity of it all. I had become a man this day, and now I would die. I would join Uther and Hywel in the Otherworld and there wait through the shadowed years until my soul found another human body in which to return to this green world.

The two men unbound their hair, took up their spears and swords, then danced in front of the Silurian line. They howled as they worked themselves into the battle frenzy; that state of mindless ecstasy that will let a man try any feat. Gundleus, sitting his horse beneath his banner, smiled at the two men whose bodies were intricately tattooed with blue patterns. The children were crying behind us and our women were calling to the Gods as the men danced nearer and nearer, their spears and swords whirling in the evening sun. Such men had no need of shields, clothes or armour. The Gods were their protection and glory was their reward, and if they succeeded in killing Owain then the bards would sing of their victory for years to come. They advanced one on each side of our champion who hefted his spear as he prepared to meet their frenzied attack which would also mark the moment when the whole enemy line would charge. And then the horn sounded.

The horn gave a clear, cold note like none I had ever heard before. There was a purity to that horn, a chill hard purity like nothing else on all the earth. It sounded once, it sounded twice, and the second call was enough to give even the naked men pause and make them turn towards the east from where the sound had come.

I looked too.

And I was dazzled. It was as though a new bright sun had risen on that dying day. The light slashed over the pastures, blinding us, confusing us, but then the light slid on and I saw it was merely the reflection of the real sun glancing from a shield polished bright as a mirror. But that shield was held by such a man as I had never seen before; a man magnificent, a man lifted high on a great horse and accompanied by other such men; a horde of wondrous men, plumed men, armoured men, men sprung from the dreams of the Gods to come to this murderous field, and over the men's plumed heads there floated a banner I would come to love more than any banner on all God's earth. It was the banner of the bear. The horn sounded a third time, and suddenly I knew I would live, and I was weeping for joy and all our spearmen were half crying and half shouting and the earth was shuddering with the hooves of those Godlike men who were riding to our rescue.

For Arthur, at last, had come.