Enemy of God

PART TWO The Broken War

‘No!’ Igraine protested, when she looked at the last parchment in the pile.

‘No?’ I asked politely.

‘You can’t just leave the story there!’ she said. ‘What happened?’

‘We walked out, of course.’

‘Oh, Derfel!’ She threw the parchment down. ‘There are scullions who know how to tell a tale better than you! Tell me how it happened, I insist!’

So I told her.

It was near dawn and the fog lay like a fleece so thick that when we managed to descend the rocks and assemble on the grass at the top of the knoll we were in danger of losing each other by taking just one step. Merlin made us form a chain, each person holding the cloak of the one in front, and then, with the Cauldron tied to my back, we crept downhill in single file. Merlin, with his staff held at arm’s length, led us clean through the surrounding Bloodshields and not one of them saw us. I could hear Diwrnach shouting at them, telling them to spread out, but the dark riders knew it was a wizard’s fog and they preferred to stay close by their fires; yet those first few steps were the most dangerous part of our journey.

‘But the stories,’ my Queen insisted, ‘say that you all disappeared. Diwrnach’s men claimed that you flew off the island. It’s a famous story! My mother told it to me. You can’t just say that you walked away!’

‘But we did,’ I said.

‘Derfel!’ she reprimanded me.

‘We neither disappeared,’ I said patiently, ‘nor did we fly, whatever your mother might have told you.’

‘So what happened then?’ she asked, still disappointed in my pedestrian version of the tale. We walked for hours, following Nimue who possessed an uncanny ability to find her wav in darkness or fog. It was Nimue who had led my war-band on the night before Lugg Vale, and now, in that thick winter fog in Ynys Mon, she led us to one of the great grassy hummocks that had been made by the Old People. Merlin knew the place, indeed he claimed to have slept there years before, and he ordered three of my men to pull away the stones that blocked the entrance which lay between two curving banks of grassy earth that jutted out like horns. Then, one by one, on our hands and knees, we crawled into the mound’s black centre.

The mound was a grave and it had been made by piling huge rocks to make a central passageway off which branched six smaller chambers, and when the whole thing was done the Old People had roofed the corridor and chambers with stone slabs, then piled earth above the stones. They did not burn their dead as we did, or leave them in the cold earth like Christians, but placed them in the stone chambers where they still lay, each with treasures: horn cups, deer antlers, stone spearheads, flint knives, a bronze dish and a necklace of precious pieces of jet that were strung on a decayed thread of sinew. Merlin insisted we should not disturb the dead for we were their guests, and we huddled together in the central passage and left the bone-chambers alone. We sang songs and told tales. Merlin told us how the Old People had been the guardians of Britain before the British came and there were places, he said, where they still lived. He had been to those deep lost valleys in the wilds and had learned some of their magic. He told us how they would take the first lamb born in the year, bind it in wicker and bury it in a pasture to ensure that the other lambs would be born healthy and strong.

‘We still do that,’ said Issa.

‘Because your ancestors learned from the Old People,’ Merlin said.

‘In Benoic,’ Galahad said, ‘we used to take the skin of the first lamb and nail it to a tree.’

‘That works too.’ Merlin’s voice echoed in the cool, dark passage.

‘Poor lambs,’ Ceinwyn said, and everyone laughed.

The fog lifted, but deep in the mound we had little sense of night or day except when we unblocked the entrance so that some of us could creep out. We had to do that from time to time if we were not to live in our own dung, and if it was daylight when we pulled down the stones then we would hide between the mound’s earth horns and watch the dark riders searching the fields, caves, moors, rocks, cabins and small woods of wind-bent trees. They searched for five long days, and in that time we ate the last scraps of our food and drank the water that seeped down through the mound, but at last Diwrnach decided that our magic was superior to his and abandoned his search. We waited two more days to make sure he was not trying to entice us out of our hiding place, and then, at last, we left. We added gold to the treasures of the dead as payment of rent, we blocked the entrance behind us, then walked eastwards under a wintry sun. Once at the coast we used our swords to commandeer two fishing boats and so sailed away from the sacred isle. We went east, and as long as I live I shall remember the sun glinting from the Cauldron’s golden ornaments and thick silver belly as the ragged sails dragged us to safety. We made a song as we sailed, the Song of the Cauldron, and even to this day it is sometimes sung, though it is a poor thing compared with the songs of the bards. We landed in Cornovia and from there walked south across Elmet into friendly Powys. ‘And that, my Lady,’ I concluded, ‘is why all the tales say that Merlin vanished.’

Igraine frowned. ‘Didn’t the dark riders search the mound?’

‘Twice,’ I said, ‘but they didn’t know the entrance could be unblocked, or else they feared the spirits of the dead inside. And Merlin, of course, had woven us a charm of concealment.’

‘I wish you had flown away,’ she grumbled. ‘It would make a much better tale.’ She sighed for that lost dream. ‘But the story of the Cauldron does not end there, does it?’

‘Alas, no.’

‘So. .’

‘So I will tell it in its proper place,’ I interrupted her.

She pouted. Today she is wearing her cloak of grey wool edged with otter fur that makes her look so pretty. She is still not pregnant, which makes me think that either she is not destined to have children or else her husband, King Brochvael, is spending too much time with his mistress, Nwylle. It is cold today, and the wind gusts at my window and tugs at the small flames in the hearth that is big enough to hold a fire ten times the size of the one Bishop Sansum allows me. I can hear the saint scolding Brother Arun, who is our monastery’s cook. The gruel was too hot this morning and scalded St Tudwal’s tongue. Tudwal is a child in our monastery, the Bishop’s close companion in Christ Jesus, and last year the Bishop declared Tudwal to be a saint. The devil sets many snares in the path of true faith.

‘So it was you and Ceinwyn,’ Igraine accuses me.

‘Was what?’ I asked.

‘You were her lover,’ Igraine said.

‘For life, Lady,’ I confessed.

‘And you never married?’

‘Never. She took her oath, remember?’

‘But nor did she split in two with a baby,’ Igraine said.

‘The third child almost killed her,’ I said, ‘but the others were much easier.’

Igraine was crouching by the fire, holding her pale hands to its pathetic flames. ‘You are lucky, Derfel.’

‘I am?’

‘To have known a love like that.’ She looked wistful. The Queen is no older than Ceinwyn when I first knew her, and, like Ceinwyn, Igraine is beautiful and deserves a love fit for a bard’s song.

‘I was lucky,’ I admitted. Outside my window Brother Maelgwyn is finishing the monastery’s log pile, splitting the trunks with a maul and hammer and singing as he goes about his business. His song tells the love story of Rhydderch and Morag, which means he will be reprimanded as soon as St Sansum has finished humiliating Arun. We are brothers in Christ, the saint tells us, united in love.

‘Wasn’t Cuneglas angry with his sister for running away with you?’ Igraine asks me. ‘Not even a bit?’

‘Not in the least,’ I said. ‘He wanted us to move back to Caer Sws, but we both liked it in Cwm Isaf. And Ceinwyn never really liked her sister-in-law. Helledd was a grumbler, you see, and she had two aunts who were very tart. They all disapproved of Ceinwyn, and they were the ones who started all the stories of scandal, but we were never scandalous.’ I paused, remembering those early days. ‘Most people were very kind, in fact,’ I went on. ‘In Powys, you see, there was still some resentment about Lugg Vale. Too many people had lost fathers, brothers and husbands, and Ceinwyn’s defiance was a kind of recompense to them. They enjoyed seeing Arthur and Lancelot embarrassed, so other than Helledd and her ghastly aunts, no one was unkind to us.’

‘And Lancelot didn’t fight you for her?’ asked Igraine, shocked.

‘I wish he had,’ I said drily. ‘I would have enjoyed that.’

‘And Ceinwyn just made up her own mind?’ Igraine asked, astonished at the very thought of a woman daring to do such a thing. She stood and walked to the window where she listened for a while as Maelgwyn sang. ‘Poor Gwenhwyvach,’ she said suddenly. ‘You make her sound very plain and plump and dull.’

‘She was all of those things, alas.’

‘Not everyone can be beautiful,’ she said, with the assurance of one who was.

‘No,’ I agreed, ‘but you do not want tales of the commonplace. You want Arthur’s Britain to be livid with passion and I could feel no passion for Gwenhwyvach. You cannot command love, Lady, only beauty or lust does that. Do you want the world to be fair? Then just imagine a world with no kings, no queens, no lords, no passion and no magic. You would want to live in such a dull world?’

‘That has nothing to do with beauty,’ Igraine protested.

‘It has everything to do with beauty. What is your rank but the accident of your birth? And what is your beauty but another accident? If the Gods,’ I paused and corrected myself, ‘if God wanted us to be equal then he would have made us equal, and if we were all the same, where would your romance be?’

She abandoned the argument. ‘Do you believe in magic, Brother Derfel?’ she challenged me instead. I thought about it. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And even as Christians, we can believe in it. What else are the miracles, but magic?’

‘And Merlin could really make a fog?’

I frowned. ‘Everything Merlin did, my Lady, had another explanation. Fogs do come from the sea, and lost things are found every day.’

‘And the dead come to life?’

‘Lazarus did,’ I said, ‘and so did our Saviour.’ I crossed myself.

Igraine dutifully made the sign of the cross. ‘But did Merlin rise from the dead?’ she demanded.

‘I don’t know that he was dead,’ I said carefully.

‘But Ceinwyn was certain?’

‘Till her dying day, Lady’

Igraine twisted her gown’s braided belt in her fingers. ‘But wasn’t that the Cauldron’s magic? That it could restore life?’

‘So we are told.’

‘And surely Ceinwyn’s discovery of the Cauldron was magic,’ Igraine said.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘but maybe it was just common sense. Merlin had spent months discovering every stray memory about Ynys Mon. He knew where the Druids had their sacred centre, and that was beside Llyn Cerrig Bach, and Ceinwyn merely led us to the nearest place where the Cauldron could be safely hidden. She did have her dream, though.’

‘And so did you,’ Igraine said, ‘on Dolforwyn. What was it that Merlin gave you to drink?’

‘The same thing Nimue gave Ceinwyn at Llyn Cerrig Bach,’ I said, ‘and that was probably an infusion of the red cap.’

‘The mushroom!’ Igraine sounded appalled.

I nodded. ‘That was why I was twitching and couldn’t stand.’

‘But you could have died!’ she protested.

I shook my head. ‘Not many die from red caps, and besides, Nimue was skilled in such things.’ I decided not to tell her that the best way to make the red cap safe was for the wizard himself to eat the mushroom, then give the dreamer a cup of his urine to drink. ‘Or maybe she used rye-blight?’ I said instead, ‘but I think it was red cap.’

Igraine frowned as St Sansum ordered Brother Maelgwyn to stop singing his pagan song. The saint is in a testier mood than usual these days. He suffers pain when passing urine, maybe because of a stone. We pray for him.

‘So what happens now?’ Igraine asked, ignoring Sansum’s ranting.

‘We went home,’ I said. ‘Back to Powys.’

‘And to Arthur?’ she asked eagerly.

‘To Arthur too,’ I said, for this is his tale; the tale of our dear warlord, our law-giver, our Arthur. That spring was so glorious in Cwm Isaf, or perhaps when you are in love everything appears fuller and brighter, but it seemed to me as though the world had never been so crammed with cowslips and dog mercury, with bluebells and violets, with lilies and great banks of cow parsley. Blue butterflies haunted the meadow where we ripped out tangled bundles of couch grass from beneath the apple trees that blossomed pink. Wrynecks sang in the blossom, there were sandpipers by the stream and a wagtail made its nest under Cwm Isaf’s thatch. We had five calves, all healthy and greedy and soft-eyed, and Ceinwyn was pregnant.

I had made us both lovers’ rings when we returned from Ynys Mon. They were rings incised with a cross, though not the Christian cross, and girls often wore them after they had passed from being maids to women. Most girls took a twist of straw from their lovers and wore it as a badge, and spearmen’s women usually wore a warrior ring on which the cross had been scratched, while women of the highest rank rarely wore the rings at all, despising them as vulgar symbols. Some men wore them, too, and it had been just such a crossed lover’s ring that Valerin, the chieftain of Powys, had worn when he died at Lugg Vale. Valerin had been Guinevere’s betrothed before she met Arthur.

Our rings were both warrior rings made from a Saxon axehead, but before I left Merlin, who was continuing his journey southwards to Ynys Wydryn, I secretly broke off a fragment of the Cauldron’s detoration; it was a miniature golden spear carried by a warrior and it came off easily. I hid the gold in a pouch and, once back at Cwm Isaf, I took the scrap of gold and the two warrior rings to a metalworker there and watched as he melted and fashioned the gold into two crosses that he burned onto the iron. I stood over to him make sure he did not substitute some other gold, and then I carried one of the rings to Ceinwyn and wore the other myself. Ceinwyn laughed when she saw the ring. ‘A piece of straw would have done just as well, Derfel,’ she said.

‘Gold from the Cauldron will serve better,’ I answered. We wore the rings always, much to Queen Helledd’s disgust.

Arthur came to us in that lovely spring. He found me stripped to the waist and pulling couch grass, a job as unending as spinning wool. He hailed me from the stream, then strode uphill to greet me. He was dressed in a grey linen shirt and long dark leggings, and he carried no sword. ‘I like to see a man working,’ he teased me.

‘Pulling couch is harder work than fighting,’ I grumbled and pressed my hands into the small of my back. ‘You’ve come to help?’

‘I’ve come to see Cuneglas,’ he said, then took a seat on a boulder near one of the apple trees that dotted the pasture.

‘War?’ I asked, as though Arthur might have any other business in Powys. He nodded. ‘Time to gather the spears, Derfel. Especially,’ he smiled, ‘the Warriors of the Cauldron.’

Then he insisted on hearing the whole story, even though he must already have heard it a dozen times, and when it was told he had the grace to apologize for having doubted the Cauldron’s existence. I am sure Arthur still thought it was all a nonsense, and even a dangerous nonsense, for the success of our quest had angered Dumnonia’s Christians who, as Galahad had said, believed we performed the devil’s work. Merlin had carried the precious Cauldron back to Ynys Wydryn where it was being stored in his tower. In time. Merlin said, he would summon its vast powers, but even now, just by being in Dumnonia, and despite the hostility of the Christians, the Cauldron was giving the land a new confidence.

‘Though I confess,’ Arthur told me, ‘that I take more confidence from seeing spearmen gathered. Cuneglas tells me he will march next week, Lancelot’s Silurians are gathering at Isca, and Tewdric’s men are ready to march. And it will be a dry year, Derfel, a good year for fighting.’

I agreed. The ash trees had turned green before the oaks, and that signified a dry summer to come, and dry summers meant firm ground for shield-walls. ‘So where do you want my men?’ I asked.

‘With me, of course,’ he said, then paused before offering me a sly smile. ‘I thought you would have congratulated me, Derfel.’

‘You, Lord?’ I asked, pretending ignorance so he could tell me the news himself. His smile grew broader. ‘Guinevere gave birth a month ago. A boy, a fine boy!’

‘Lord!’ I exclaimed, pretending he had surprised me with the news, though a report of the birth had reached us a week before.

‘He’s healthy and hungry! A good omen.’ He was plainly delighted, but he was always inordinately pleased with the commonplace things of life. He yearned for a sturdy family within a well-built house surrounded by properly tended crops. ‘We call him Gwydre,’ he said, and repeated the name fondly,

‘Gwydre.’

‘A good name, Lord,’ I said, then told him of Ceinwyn’s pregnancy and Arthur immediately decreed that her child must be a daughter and, of course, would marry his Gwydre when the time came. He put an arm round my shoulder and walked me up to the house where we found Ceinwyn skimming cream from a dish of milk. Arthur embraced her warmly then insisted she leave the cream-making to her servants and come into the sunlight to talk.

We sat on a bench Issa had made under the apple tree that grew beside the house door. Ceinwyn asked him about Guinevere. ‘Was it an easy birth?’ she asked.

‘It was.’ He touched an iron amulet that hung at his neck. ‘It was indeed, and she’s well!’ He grimaced. ‘She worries a little that having a child will make her look old, but that’s nonsense. My mother never looked old. And having a child will be good for Guinevere.’ He smiled, imagining that Guinevere would love a son as much as he would himself. Gwydre, of course, was not his first child. His Irish mistress, Ailleann, had given him twin boys, Amhar and Loholt, who were now old enough to take their places in the shield-wall, but Arthur was not looking forward to their company. ‘They are not fond of me,’ he admitted when I asked about the twins, ‘but they do like our old friend Lancelot.’ He offered us both a ruefully apologetic glance at the mention of that name. ‘And they will fight with his men,’ he added.

‘Fight?’ Ceinwyn asked warily.

Arthur gave her a gentle smile. ‘I come to take Derfel away from you, my Lady.’

‘Bring him back to me, Lord,’ was all she said.

‘With riches enough for a kingdom,’ Arthur promised, but then he turned and looked at Cwm Isaf’s low walls and the bulging heap of thatch that kept us warm and the steaming dungheap that lay beyond the gable’s end. It was not as big as most farmhouses in Dumnonia, but it was still the kind of croft a prosperous freeman in Powys might own and we were fond of it. I thought Arthur was about to make some comment comparing my present humble state with my future wealth and I was ready to defend Cwm Isaf against such a comparison, but instead he looked rueful. ‘I do envy you this, Derfel.’

‘It’s yours for the taking, Lord,’ I said, hearing the yearning in his voice.

‘I am doomed to marble pillars and soaring pediments.’ He laughed the moment away. ‘I leave tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Cuneglas will follow within ten days. Would you come with him? Or earlier if you can. And bring as much food as you can carry.’

‘To where?’ I asked.

‘Corinium,’ he replied, then stood and gazed up the cwm before smiling down at me. ‘One last word?’

he requested.

‘I must be sure Scarach isn’t scalding the milk,’ Ceinwyn said, taking his broad hint. ‘I wish you victory, Lord,’ she said to Arthur, then stood to give him a parting embrace. Arthur and I walked up the cwm where he admired the newly-pleached hedges, the trimmed apple trees and the small fish pool we had dammed into the stream. ‘Don’t become too rooted in this soil, Derfel,’ he told me. ‘I want you back in Dumnonia.’

‘Nothing would give me more pleasure, Lord,’ I said, knowing it was not Arthur who kept me from my homeland, but his wife and her ally Lancelot.

Arthur smiled, but said nothing more of my return. ‘Ceinwyn,’ he said instead, ‘seems very happy.’

‘She is. We are.’

He hesitated a second. ‘You might discover,’ he said with the authority of a new father, ‘that pregnancy will make her turbulent.’

‘Not so far, Lord,’ I said, ‘though these are early weeks.’

‘You are fortunate in her,’ he said softly, and looking back I think that was the very first time I ever heard him utter the faintest criticism of Guinevere. ‘Childbirth is a stressful time,’ he added in hasty explanation, ‘and these preparations for war don’t help. Alas, I can’t be at home as much as I’d like.’ He stopped beside an ancient oak that had been riven by lightning so that its fire-blackened trunk was split in two, though even now the old tree was struggling to put out new green shoots. ‘I have a favour to ask of you,’ he said softly.

‘Anything, Lord.’

‘Don’t be hasty, Derfel, you don’t know the favour yet.’ He paused, and I sensed the request would be hard for he was embarrassed to be making it. For a moment or two he could not make the request at all, but instead stared towards the woods on the southern side of the cwm and muttered something about deer and bluebells.

‘Bluebells?’ I asked, thinking I must have misheard him.

‘I was just wondering why deer never eat bluebells,’ he said evasively. ‘They eat everything else.’

‘I don’t know, Lord.’

He hesitated a heartbeat, then looked into my eyes. ‘I have asked for a gathering of Mithras at Corinium,’ he finally admitted.

I understood what was coming then and hardened my heart to it. War had given me many rewards, but none so precious as the fellowship of Mithras. He had been the Roman God of war and He had stayed in Britain when the Romans left; the only men admitted to His mysteries were those elected by his initiates. Those initiates came from every kingdom, and they fought against each other as often as they fought for each other, but when they met in Mithras’s hall they met in peace and they would only elect the bravest of the brave to be their fellows. To be an initiate of Mithras was to receive the praise of Britain’s finest warriors and it was an honour that I would not give lightly to any man. No women, of course, were permitted to worship Mithras. Indeed, if a woman even saw the mysteries she would be killed.

‘I have called the gathering,’ Arthur said, ‘because I want us to admit Lancelot to the mysteries.’ I had known that was the reason. Guinevere had made the same request of me the year before, and in the months that followed I had hoped her idea would fade away, but here, on the eve of war, it had returned. I gave a politic answer. ‘Would it not be better, Lord,’ I asked, ‘if King Lancelot were to wait until the Saxons are defeated? Then, surely, we will have seen him fight.’ None of us had yet seen Lancelot in the shield-wall and, to be truthful, I would be astonished to see him fight in this coming summer, but I hoped the suggestion would delay the terrible moment of choice for a few further months. Arthur offered a vague gesture as though my suggestion was somehow irrelevant. ‘There is pressure,’

he said vaguely, ‘to elect him now.’

‘What pressure?’ I asked.

‘His mother is unwell.’

I laughed. ‘Hardly a reason to elect a man to Mithras, Lord.’

Arthur scowled, knowing his arguments were feeble. ‘He is a King, Derfel,’ he said, ‘and he leads a King’s army to our wars. He doesn’t like Siluria, and I can’t blame him. He yearns for the poets and harpists and halls of Ynys Trebes, but he lost that kingdom because I could not fulfil my oath and bring my army to his father’s aid. We owe him, Derfel.’

‘Not me, Lord.’

‘We owe him,’ Arthur insisted.

‘He should still wait for Mithras,’ I said firmly. ‘If you propose his name now, Lord, then I dare say it will be rejected.’

He had feared I would say that, but still he did not abandon his arguments. ‘You are my friend,’ he said, and waved away any comment I might make, ‘and it would please me, Derfel, if my friend were as honoured in Dumnonia as he is in Powys.’ He had been staring down at the bole of the storm-blasted oak, but now he looked up at me. ‘I want you at Lindinis, friend, and if you, above all others, support Lancelot’s name in Mithras’s hall, then his election is assured.’

There was far more there than Arthur’s bare words had said. He was subtly confirming to me that it was Guinevere who was pressing Lancelot’s candidacy, and that my offences in Guinevere’s eyes would be forgiven if I granted her this one wish. Elect Lancelot to Mithras, he was saying, and I could take Ceinwyn to Dumnonia and assume the honour of being Mordred’s champion with all the wealth, land and rank which accompanied that high position.

I watched a group of my spearmen come down from the high northern hill. One of them was cradling a lamb, and I guessed it was an orphan that would need to be hand-fed by Ceinwyn. It was a laborious business, for the lamb would have to be nurtured on a cloth teat soaked in milk and as often as not the little things died, but Ceinwyn insisted on trying to save their lives. She had utterly forbidden any of her lambs to be buried in wicker or have their pelts nailed to a tree and the flock did not seem to have suffered as a result of that neglect. I sighed. ‘So at Corinium,’ I said, ‘you will propose Lancelot?’

‘Not I, no. Bors will propose him. Bors has seen him fight.’

‘Then let us hope, Lord, that Bors is given a tongue of gold.’

Arthur smiled. ‘You can give me no answer now?’

‘None that you would want to hear, Lord.’

He shrugged, took my arm and walked me back. ‘I do hate these secret guilds,’ he said mildly, and I believed him for I had never yet seen Arthur at a meeting of Mithras even though I knew he had been initiated many years before. ‘Cults like Mithras,’ he said, ‘are supposed to bind men together, but they only serve to drive them apart. They rouse envy. But sometimes, Derfel, you have to fight one evil with another and I am thinking of starting a new guild of warriors. Those men who bear arms against the Saxons will belong, all of them, and I shall make it the most honoured band in all Britain.’

‘The largest too, I hope,’ I said.

‘Not the levies,’ he added, thus restricting his honoured band to those men who carried a spear by oath-duty rather than by land obligation. ‘Men will rather belong to my guild than to any secret mystery.’

‘What will you call it?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. Warriors of Britain? The Comrades? The Spears of Cadarn?’ He spoke lightly, but I could tell he was serious.

‘And you think that if Lancelot belongs to these Warriors of Britain,’ I said, snatching one of his suggested titles, ‘then he won’t mind being barred from Mithras?’

‘It might help,’ he admitted, ‘but it isn’t my prime reason. I shall impose an obligation on these warriors. To join they will have to take a blood-oath never to fight each other again.’ He gave a swift smile. ‘If the Kings of Britain squabble then I shall make it impossible for their warriors to right each other.’

‘Hardly impossible,’ I said tartly. ‘A royal oath supersedes all others, even your blood-oath.’

‘Then I shall make it difficult,’ he insisted, ‘because I shall have peace, Derfel, I shall have peace. And you, my friend, will share it with me in Dumnonia.’

‘I hope so, Lord.’

He embraced me. ‘I shall meet you in Corinium,’ he said. He raised a hand in greeting to my spearmen, then looked back to me. ‘Think about Lancelot, Derfel. And consider the truth that sometimes we must yield a little pride in return for a great peace.’

And with those words he strode away and I went to warn my men that the time for farming was over. We had spears to sharpen, swords to hone and shields to repaint, revarnish and bind hard. We were back at war.

We left two days before Cuneglas, who was waiting for his western chieftains to arrive with their rough-pelted warriors from Powys’s mountain fastnesses. He told me to promise Arthur that the men of Powys would be in Corinium within a week, then he embraced me and swore on his life that Ceinwyn would be safe. She was moving back to Caer Sws where a small band of men would guard Cuneglas’s family while he was at war. Ceinwyn had been reluctant to leave Cwm Isaf and rejoin the women’s hall where Helledd and her aunts ruled, but I remembered Merlin’s tale of a dog being killed and its skin draped on a crippled bitch in Guinevere’s temple of Isis, and so I pleaded with Ceinwyn to take refuge for my sake, and at last she relented.

I added six of my men to Cuneglas’s palace guard, and the rest, all Warriors of the Cauldron, marched south. All of us bore Ceinwyn’s five-pointed star on our shields, we carried two spears each, our swords, and had huge bundles of twice-baked bread, salted meat, hard cheese and dried fish strapped to our backs. It was good to be marching again, even though our route did take us through Lugg Vale where the dead had been unearthed by wild pigs so that the fields of the vale looked like a boneyard. I worried that the sight of the bones would remind Cuneglas’s men of their defeat, and so insisted that we spend a half day re-burying the corpses that had all had one foot chopped oft before they were first buried. Not every dead man could be burned as we would have liked, so most of our dead we buried, but we took away one foot to stop the soul walking. Now we re-buried the one-footed dead, but even after that half day’s work there was still no disguising the butchery of the place. I paused in the work to visit the Roman shrine where my sword had killed the Druid Tanaburs and where Nimue had extinguished Gundleus’s soul, and there, on a floor still stained by their blood, I lay flat between the piles of cobwebbed skulls and prayed that I would return unwounded to my Ceinwyn. We spent the next night at Magnis, a town that was a whole world away from fog-shrouded cauldrons and night-time tales of the Treasures of Britain. This was Gwent, Christian territory, and everything here was grim business. The blacksmiths were forging spearheads, the tanners were making shield covers, scabbards, belts and boots, while the town’s women were baking the hard, thin loaves that could keep for weeks on a campaign. King Tewdric’s men were in their Roman uniforms of bronze breastplates, leather skirts and long cloaks. A hundred such men had already marched to Corinium, another two hundred would follow, though not under the command of their King, for Tewdric was sick. His son Meurig, the Edling of Gwent, would be their titular leader, though in truth Agricola would command them. Agricola was an old man now, but his back was straight and his scarred arm could still wield a sword. He was said to be more Roman than the Romans and I had always been a little scared of his severe frown, but on that spring day outside Magnis he greeted me as an equal. His close-cropped grey head ducked under the lintel of his tent, then, dressed in his Roman uniform, he strode towards me and, to my astonishment, greeted me with an embrace.

He inspected my thirty-four spearmen. They looked shaggy and unkempt beside his clean-shaven men, but he approved of their weapons and approved even more of the amount of food we carried. ‘I’ve spent years,’ he growled, ‘teaching that it’s no use sending a spearman to war without a pack full of food, but what does Lancelot of Siluria do? Sends me a hundred spearmen without a peck of bread between them.’ He had invited me into his tent where he served me a sour, pale wine. ‘I owe you an apology, Lord Derfel,’ he said.

‘I doubt that, Lord,’ I said. I felt embarrassed to be in such intimacy with a famous warrior who was old enough to be my grandfather.

He waved away my modesty. ‘We should have been at Lugg Vale.’

‘It seemed a hopeless fight, Lord,’ I said, ‘and we were desperate. You were not.’

‘But you won, didn’t your’ he growled. He turned as a lick of wind tried to dislodge a wood shaving from his table that was covered with scores of other such shavings, each bearing lists of men and rations. He weighted the wisp of wood with an inkhorn, then looked back to me. ‘I hear we are to meet with the bull.’

‘At Corinium,’ I confirmed. Agricola, unlike his master Tewdric, was a pagan, though Agricola had no time for the British Gods, only for Mithras.

‘To elect Lancelot,’ Agricola said sourly. He listened as a man shouted orders in his camp lines, heard nothing that would spring him out of the tent and so looked back to me. ‘What do you know of Lancelot?’ he asked.

‘Enough,’ I said, ‘to speak against him.’

‘You’d offend Arthur?’ He sounded surprised.

‘I either offend Arthur,’ I said bitterly, ‘or Mithras.’ I made the sign against evil. ‘And Mithras is a God.’

‘Arthur spoke to me on his way back from Powys,’ Agricola said, ‘and told me that electing Lancelot would bind Britain’s union.’ He paused, looking morose. ‘He hinted that I owed him a vote to make up for our absence at Lugg Vale.’

Arthur, it seemed, was buying votes however he could. ‘Then vote for him, Lord,’ I said, ‘for his exclusion only needs one vote, and mine will suffice.’

‘I don’t tell lies to Mithras,’ Agricola snapped, ‘and nor do I like King Lancelot. He was here two months ago, buying mirrors.’

‘Mirrors!’ I had to laugh. Lancelot had always collected mirrors, and in his father’s high, airy sea-palace at Ynys Trebes he had kept the walls of a whole room covered with Roman mirrors. They must all have melted in the fire when the Franks swarmed over the palace walls and now, it seemed, Lancelot was rebuilding his collection.

‘Tewdric sold him a fine electrum mirror,’ Agricola told me. ‘Big as a shield and quite extraordinary. It was so clear that it was like looking into a black pool on a fine day. And he paid well for it.’ He would have had to, I thought, for mirrors of electrum, an amalgam of silver and gold, were rare indeed.

‘Mirrors,’ Agricola said scathingly. ‘He should be attending to his duties in Siluria, not buying mirrors.’

He snatched up his sword and helmet as a horn sounded from the town. It called twice, a signal Agricola recognized. ‘The Edling,’ he growled, and led me out into the sunlight to see that Meurig was indeed riding out from Magnis’s Roman ramparts. ‘I camp out here,’ Agricola told me as he watched his honour guard form into two ranks, ‘to stay away from their priests.’

Prince Meurig came attended by four Christian priests who ran to keep up with the Edling’s horse. The Prince was a young man, indeed I had first seen him when he was a child and that had not been so very long before, but he disguised his youth with a querulous and irritable manner. He was short, pale and thin, with a wispy brown beard. He was notorious as a creature of pettifogging detail who loved the quibbles of the lawcourts and the squabbles of the church. His scholarship was famous; he was, we were assured, an expert at refuting the Pelagian heresy that so harassed the Christian church in Britain, he knew by heart the eighteen chapters of tribal British law, and he could name the genealogies of ten British kingdoms going back twenty generations as well as the lineage of all their septs and tribes; and that, we were informed by his admirers, was only the beginning of Meurig’s knowledge. To his admirers he seemed a youthful paragon of learning and the finest rhetorician of Britain, but to me it seemed that the Prince had inherited all of his father’s intelligence and none of his wisdom. It was Meurig, more than any other man, who had persuaded Gwent to abandon Arthur before Lugg Vale and for that reason alone I had no love for Meurig, but I obediently went down on one knee as the Prince dismounted.

‘Derfel,’ he said in his curiously high-pitched voice, ‘I remember you.’ He did not tell me to rise, but just pushed past me into the tent.

Agricola beckoned me inside, thus sparing me the company of the four panting priests who had no business here except to stay close to their Prince who, dressed in a toga and with a heavy wooden cross hanging on a silver chain about his neck, seemed irritated by my presence. He scowled at me, then went on with a querulous complaint to Agricola, but as they spoke in Latin I had no idea what they talked about. Meurig was buttressing his argument with a sheet of parchment that he waved in front of Agricola who endured the harangue patiently.

Meurig at last abandoned his argument, rolled up the parchment and thrust it into his toga. He turned to me. ‘You will not,’ he said, speaking British again, ‘be expecting us to feed your men?’

‘We carry our own food, Lord Prince,’ I said, then inquired after his father’s health.

‘The King suffers from fistula in the groin,’ Meurig explained in his squeaking voice. ‘We have used poultices and the physicians are bleeding father regularly, but alas, God has not seen fit to requite the condition.’

‘Send for Merlin, Lord Prince,’ I suggested.

Meurig blinked at me. He was very short-sighted, and it was those weak eyes, perhaps, that gave his face its permanent expression of ill-temper. He uttered a short snaffle of mocking laughter. ‘You, of course, if you will forgive the remark,’ he said snidely, ‘are famous as one of the fools who risked Diwrnach to bring a bowl back to Dumnonia. A mixing bowl, yes?’

‘A cauldron, Lord Prince.’

Meurig’s thin lips flickered in a quick smile. ‘You did not think, Lord Derfel, that our smiths could have hammered you a dozen cauldrons in as many days?’

‘I shall know where to come for my cooking pots next time, Lord Prince,’ I said. Meurig stiffened at the insult, but Agricola smiled.

‘Did you understand any of that?’ Agricola asked me when Meurig had left.

‘I have no Latin, Lord.’

‘He was complaining because a chieftain hasn’t paid his taxes. The poor man owes us thirty smoked salmon and twenty cartloads of cut timber, and we’ve had no salmon from him and only five carts of wood. But what Meurig won’t grasp is that poor Cyllig’s people have been struck by the plague this last winter, the river Wye’s been poached empty, and Cyllig is still bringing me two dozen spearmen.’

Agricola spat in disgust. ‘Ten times a day!’ he said, ‘ten times a day the Prince will come out here with a problem that any half-witted treasury clerk could solve in twenty heartbeats. I just wish his father would just strap up his groin and get back on the throne.’

‘How sick is Tewdric?’

Agricola shrugged. ‘He’s tired, not sick. He wants to give up his throne. He says he’ll have his head tonsured and become a priest.’ He spat onto the tent floor again. ‘But I’ll manage our Edling. I’ll make sure his ladies come to war.’

‘Ladies?’ I asked, made curious by the ironic twist Agricola had put on the word.

‘He might be blind as a worm, Lord Derfel, but he can still spot a girl like a hawk seeing a shrew. He likes his ladies, Meurig does, and plenty of them. And why not? That’s the way of princes, isn’t it?’ He unstrapped his sword belt and hung it on a nail driven into one of the tent poles. ‘You march tomorrow?’

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘Dine with me tonight,’ he said, then ushered me out of the tent and squinted up at the sky. ‘It will be a dry summer. Lord Derfel. A summer for killing Saxons.’

‘A summer to breed great songs,’ I said enthusiastically.

‘I often think that the trouble with us Britons,’ Agricola said gloomily, ‘is that we spend too much time singing and not enough killing Saxons.’

‘Not this year,’ I said, ‘not this year,’ for this was Arthur’s year, the year to slaughter the Sais. The year, I prayed, of total victory.

Once out of Magnis we marched on the straight Roman roads that tied Britain’s heartland together. We made good time, reaching Corinium in just two days, and we were all glad to be back in Dumnonia. The five-pointed star on my shield might have been a strange device, but the moment the country folks heard my name they knelt for a blessing for I was Derfel Cadarn, the holder of Lugg Vale and a Warrior of the Cauldron, and my repute, it seemed, soared high in my homeland. At least among the pagans it did. In the towns and larger villages, where the Christians were more numerous, we were more likely to be met by preaching. We were told that we were marching to do God’s will by fighting the Saxons, but that if we died in battle our souls would go to hell if we were still worshippers of the older Gods. I feared the Saxons more than the Christian hell. The Sais were a dreadful enemy; poor, desperate and numerous. Once at Corinium, we heard ominous tales of new ships grounding almost daily on Britain’s eastern shores, and how each ship brought its cargo of feral warriors and hungry families. The invaders wanted our land, and to take it they could muster hundreds of spears, swords and double-edged axes, yet still we had confidence. Fools that we were, we marched almost blithely to that war. I suppose, after the horrors of Lugg Vale, we believed we could never be beaten. We were young, we were strong, we were loved by the Gods and we had Arthur.

I met Galahad in Corinium. Since the day we had parted in Powys he had helped Merlin carry the Cauldron back to Ynys Wydryn, then he had spent the spring at Caer Ambra from which rebuilt fortress he had raided deep into Lloegyr with Sagramor’s troops. The Saxons, he warned me, were ready for our coming and had set beacons on every hill to give warning of our approach. Galahad had come to Corinium for the great Council of War that Arthur had summoned, and he brought with him Cavan and those of my men who had refused to march north into Lleyn. Cavan went on one knee and begged that he and his men might renew their old oaths to me. ‘We have made no other oaths,’ he promised me,

‘except to Arthur, and he says we should serve you if you’ll have us.’

‘I thought you’d be rich by now,’ I told Cavan, ‘and gone home to Ireland.’

He smiled. ‘I still have the throwboard, Lord.’

I welcomed him back to my service. He kissed Hywelbane’s blade, then asked if he and his men could paint the white star on their shields.

‘You may paint it,’ I said, ‘but with only four points.’

‘Four, Lord?’ Cavan glanced at my shield. ‘Yours has five.’

‘The fifth point,’ I told Cavan, ‘is for the Warriors of the Cauldron.’ He looked unhappy, but agreed. Nor would Arthur have approved, for he would have seen, rightly enough, that the fifth point was a divisive mark which implied that one group of men was superior to another, but warriors like such distinctions and the men who had braved the Dark Road deserved it.

I went to greet the men who accompanied Cavan and found them camped beside the River Churn that flowed to the east of Corinium. At least a hundred men were bivouacked beside that small river, for there was not nearly enough space inside the town for all the warriors who had assembled about the Roman walls. The army itself was gathering close to Caer Ambra, but every leader who had come for the Council of War had brought some retainers, and those men alone were sufficient to give the appearance of a small army in the Churn’s water meadows. Their stacked shields showed the success of Arthur’s strategy, for at a glance I could see the black bull of Gwent, the red dragon of Dumnonia, the fox of Siluria, Arthur’s bear, and the shields of men, like me, who had the honour of carrying their own device: stars, hawks, eagles, boars, Sagramor’s dread skull and Galahad’s lone Christian cross. Culhwch, Arthur’s cousin, was camped with his own spearmen, but now hurried to greet me. It was good to see him again. I had fought at his side in Benoic and had come to love him like a brother. He was vulgar, funny, cheerful, bigoted, ignorant and coarse, and there was no better man to have alongside in a fight. ‘I hear you’ve put a loaf in the Princess’s oven,’ he said when he had embraced me. ‘You’re a lucky dog. Did you have Merlin cast you a spell?’

‘A thousand.’

He laughed. ‘I can’t complain. I’ve three women now, all clawing each other’s eyes out and all of them pregnant.’ He grinned, then scratched at his groin. ‘Lice,’ he said. ‘Can’t get rid of them. But at least they’ve infested that little bastard Mordred.’

‘Our Lord King?’ I teased him.

‘Little bastard,’ he said vengefully. ‘I tell you, Derfel, I’ve beaten him bloody and he still won’t learn. Sneaky little toad.’ He spat. ‘So tomorrow you speak against Lancelot?’

‘How do you know?’ I had told no one but Agricola of that firm decision, but somehow news of it had preceded me to Corinium, or else my antipathy to the Silurian King was too well known for men to believe I could do anything else.

‘Everyone knows,’ Culhwch said, ‘and everyone supports you.’ He looked past me and spat suddenly. ‘Crows,’ he growled.

I turned to see a procession of Christian priests walking alongside the Churn’s far bank. There were a dozen of them, all black gowned, all bearded, and all chanting one of the dirges of their religion. A score of spearmen followed the priests and their shields, I saw with surprise, bore either Siluria’s fox or Lancelot’s sea-eagle. ‘I thought the rites were in two days’ time,’ I said to Galahad, who had stayed with me.

‘They are,’ he said. The rites were the preamble to war and would ask the blessing of the Gods on our men, and that blessing would be sought from both the Christian God and the pagan deities. ‘This looks more like a baptism,’ Galahad added.

‘What in Bel’s name is a baptism?’ Culhwch asked.

Galahad sighed. ‘It is an outward sign, my dear Culhwch, of a man’s sins being washed away by God’s grace.’

That explanation made Culhwch bay with laughter, prompting a frown from one of the priests who had tucked his gown into his belt and was now wading into the shallow river. He was using a pole to discover a spot deep enough for the baptismal rite and his clumsy probing attracted a crowd of bored spearmen on the rushy bank opposite the Christians.

For a while nothing much happened. The Silurian spearmen made an embarrassed guard while the tonsured priests wailed their song and the lone paddler poked about in the river with the butt end of his long pole that was surmounted by a silver cross. ‘You’ll never catch a trout with that,’ Culhwch shouted,

‘try a fish spear!’ The watching spearmen laughed, and the priests scowled as they sang drearily on. Some women from the town had come to the river and joined in the singing. ‘It’s a woman’s religion,’

Culhwch spat.

‘It is my religion, dear Culhwch,’ Galahad murmured. He and Culhwch had argued thus throughout the whole long war in Benoic and their argument, like their friendship, had no end. The priest found a deep enough spot, so deep, indeed, that the water came right up to his waist, and there he tried to fix the pole in the river’s bed, but the force of the water kept bearing the cross down and each failure prompted a chorus of jeers from the spearmen. A few of the spectators were Christians themselves, but they made no attempt to stop the mockery.

The priest at last managed to plant the cross, albeit precariously, and climbed back out of the river. The spearmen whistled and hooted at the sight of his skinny white legs and he hurriedly dropped the sopping skirts of his robe to hide them.

Then a second procession appeared and the sight of it was sufficient to cause a silence to drop on our bank of the river. The silence was one of respect, for a dozen spearmen were escorting an ox-cart that was hung with white linens and in which sat two women and one priest. One of the women was Guinevere and the other was Queen Elaine, Lancelot’s mother, but most astonishing of all was the identity of the priest. It was Bishop Sansum. He was in his full bishop’s regalia, a mound of gaudy copes and embroidered shawls, and had a heavy red-gold cross hanging about his neck. The shaven tonsure at the front of his head was burned pink by the sun, and above it his black hair stood up like mouse ears. Lughtigern, Nimue always called him, the mouse lord. ‘I thought Guinevere couldn’t stand him,’ I said, for Guinevere and Sansum had always been the bitterest of enemies, yet here the mouse-lord was, riding to the river in Guinevere’s cart. ‘And isn’t he in disgrace?’ I added.

‘Shit sometimes floats,’ Culhwch growled.

‘And Guinevere isn’t even a Christian,’ I protested.

‘And look at the other shit who’s with her,’ Culhwch said, and pointed to a group of six horsemen who followed the lumbering cart. Lancelot led them. He was mounted on a black horse and wore nothing but a simple pair of trews and a white shirt. Arthur’s twin sons, Amhar and Loholt, flanked him, and they were dressed in full war gear with plumed helmets, mail coats and long boots. Behind them rode three other horsemen, one in armour and the other two in the long white robes of Druids.

‘Druids?’ I said. ‘At a baptism?’

Galahad shrugged, no more able to find an explanation than I. The two Druids were both muscular young men with dark handsome faces, thick black beards and long, carefully brushed black hair that grew back from their narrow tonsures. They carried black staffs tipped with mistletoe and, unusually for Druids, had swords scab-barded at their sides. The warrior who rode with them, I saw, was no man, but a woman; a tall, straight-backed, red-haired woman whose extravagantly long tresses cascaded from beneath her silver helmet to touch the spine of her horse. ‘Ade, she’s called,’ Culhwch told me.

‘Who is she?’ I asked.

‘Who do you think? His kitchen-maid? She keeps his bed warm.’ Culhwch grinned. ‘Does she remind you of anyone?’

She reminded me of Ladwys, Gundleus’s mistress. Was it the fate of Silurian Kings, I wondered, always to have a mistress who rode a horse and wore a sword like a man? Ade had a longsword at her hip, a spear in her hand and the sea-eagle shield on her arm. ‘Gundleus’s mistress,’ I told Culhwch.

‘With that red hair?’ Culhwch said dismissively.

‘Guinevere,’ I said, and there was a distinct resemblance between Ade and the haughty Guinevere who sat next to Queen Elaine in the cart. Elaine was pale, but otherwise I could see no evidence of the sickness that was rumoured to be killing her. Guinevere looked as handsome as ever, and betrayed no sign of the ordeal of childbirth. She had not brought her child with her, but nor would I have expected her to. Gwydre was doubtless in Lindinis, safe in a wet nurse’s arms and far enough away so that his cries could not disturb Guinevere’s sleep.

Arthur’s twins dismounted behind Lancelot. They were still very young, only just old enough, indeed, to carry a spear to war. I had met them many times and did not like them for they had none of Arthur’s pragmatic sense. They had been spoiled since childhood, and the result was a pair of tempestuous, selfish, greedy youths who resented their father, despised their mother Ailleann and took revenge for their bastardy on people who dared not fight back against Arthur’s progeny. They were despicable. The two Druids slid off their horses’ backs and stood beside the ox-cart.

It was Culhwch who first understood what Lancelot was doing. ‘If he’s baptized,’ he growled to me,

‘then he can’t join Mithras, can he?’

‘Bedwin did,’ I pointed out, ‘and Bedwin was a bishop.’

‘Dear Bedwin,’ Culhwch explained to me, ‘played both sides of the throwboard. When he died we found an image of Bel in his house, and his wife told us he’d been sacrificing to it. No, you see if I’m not right. This is how Lancelot evades being rejected from Mithras.’

‘Maybe he has been touched by God,’ Galahad protested.

‘Then your God must have filthy hands by now,’ Culhwch responded, ‘begging your pardon, seeing as he’s your brother.’

‘Half-brother,’ Galahad said, not wanting to be too closely associated with Lancelot. The cart had stopped very close to the river bank. Sansum now clambered down from its bed and, without bothering to tuck up his splendid robes, pushed through the rushes and waded into the river. Lancelot dismounted and waited on the bank as the Bishop reached and grasped the cross. He is a small man, Sansum, and the water came right up to the heavy cross on his narrow chest. He faced us, his unwitting congregation, and raised his strong voice. ‘This week,’ he shouted, ‘you will carry your spears against the enemy and God will bless you. God will help you! And today, here in this river, you will see a sign of our God’s power.’ The Christians in the meadow crossed themselves while some pagans, like Culhwch and I, spat to avert evil.

‘You see here King Lancelot!’ Sansum bellowed, throwing a hand towards Lancelot as though none of us would have recognized him. ‘He is the hero of Benoic, the King of Siluria and the Lord of Eagles!’

‘The Lord of what?’ Culhwch asked.

‘And this week,’ Sansum went on, ‘this very week, he was to be received into the foul company of Mithras, that false God of blood and anger.’

‘He was not,’ Culhwch growled amidst the other murmurs of protest from the men in the field who were Mithraists.

‘But yesterday,’ Sansum’s voice beat down the protest, ‘this noble King received a vision. A vision!

Not some belly-given nightmare spawned by a drunken wizard, but a pure and lovely dream sent on golden wings from heaven. A saintly vision!’

‘Ade lifted her skirts,’ Culhwch muttered.

‘The holy and blessed mother of God came to King Lancelot,’ Sansum shouted, it was the Virgin Mary herself, that lady of sorrows, from whose immaculate and perfect loins was born the Christ-child, the Saviour of all mankind. And yesterday, in a burst of light, in a cloud of golden stars, she came to King Lancelot and touched her lovely hand to Tanlladwyr!’ He gestured behind him again, and Ade solemnly drew out Lancelot’s sword that was called Tanlladwyr, which meant ‘Bright Killer’, and held it aloft. The sun slashed its reflection off the steel, blinding me for an instant.

‘With this sword,’ Sansum shouted, ‘our blessed Lady promised the King that he would bring Britain victory. This sword, our Lady said, has been touched by the nail-scarred hand of the Son and blessed by the caress of His mother. From this day on, our Lady decreed, this sword shall be known as the Christ-blade, for it is holy.’

Lancelot, to give him credit, looked exquisitely embarrassed at this sermon; indeed the whole ceremony must have embarrassed him for he was a man of vast pride and fragile dignity, but even so it must have seemed better to him to be dunked in a river than publicly humiliated by losing election to Mithras. The certainty of his rejection must have prompted him to this public repudiation of all the pagan Gods. Guinevere, I saw, pointedly stared away from the river, gazing instead towards the war banners that had been hoisted on Corinium’s earth and wooden ramparts. She was a pagan, a worshipper of Isis; indeed her hatred of Christianity was famous, yet that hatred had clearly been overcome by the need to support this public ceremony that spared Lancelot from Mithras’s humiliation. The two Druids talked softly with her, sometimes making her laugh.

Sansum turned and faced Lancelot. ‘Lord King,’ he called loudly enough for those of us on the other bank to hear, ‘come now! Come now to the waters of life, come now as a little child to receive your baptism into the blessed church of the one true God.’

Guinevere slowly turned to watch as Lancelot walked into the river. Galahad crossed himself. The Christian priests on the far bank had their arms spread wide in an attitude of prayer, while the town’s women had fallen to their knees as they gazed ecstatically at the handsome, tall King who waded out to Bishop Sansum’s side. The sun glittered on the water and slashed gold from Sansum’s cross. Lancelot kept his eyes lowered, as though he did not want to see who witnessed this humiliating rite. Sansum reached up and put his hand on the crown of Lancelot’s head. ‘Do you,’ he shouted so we could all hear, ‘embrace the one true faith, the only faith, the faith of Christ who died for our sins?’

Lancelot must have said ‘Yes’, though none of us could hear his response.

‘And do you,’ Sansum bellowed even louder, ‘hereby renounce all other Gods and all other faiths and all the other foul spirits and demons and idols and devil-spawn whose filthy acts deceive this world?’

Lancelot nodded and mumbled his assent.

‘And do you,’ Sansum went on with relish, ‘denounce and deride the practices of Mithras, and declare them to be, as indeed they are, the excrement of Satan and the horror of our Lord Jesus Christ?’

‘I do.’ That answer of Lancelot’s came clear enough to us all.

‘Then in the name of the Father,’ Sansum shouted, ‘and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I pronounce you Christian,’ and with that he gave a great heave that pushed down on Lancelot’s oiled hair, and so forced the King under the Churn’s cold water. Sansum held Lancelot there for so long that I thought the bastard would drown, but at last Sansum let him up. ‘And,’ Sansum finished as Lancelot sputtered and spat out water, ‘I now proclaim you blessed, name you a Christian, and enrol you in the holy army of Christ’s warriors.’ Guinevere, uncertain how to respond, clapped politely. The women and priests burst into a new song that, for Christian music, was surprisingly spritely.

‘What in the holy name of a holy harlot,’ Culhwch asked Galahad, ‘is a holy ghost?’

But Galahad did not wait to answer. In a rush of happiness caused by his brother’s baptism he had plunged into the river and now waded across so that he emerged from the water at the same time as his blushing half-brother. Lancelot had not expected to see him and for a second he stiffened, doubtless thinking of Galahad’s friendship for me, but then he suddenly remembered the duty of Christian love that had just been imposed upon him and so he submitted to Galahad’s enthusiastic embrace.

‘Shall we kiss the bastard too?’ Culhwch asked me with a grin.

‘Let him be,’ I said. Lancelot had not seen me, and I did not feel any need to be seen, but just then Sansum, who had emerged from the river and was trying to wring the water from his heavy robes, spotted me. The mouse-lord never could resist provoking an enemy, nor did he now.

‘Lord Derfel!’ the Bishop called.

I ignored him. Guinevere, on hearing my name, looked up sharply. She had been talking to Lancelot and his half-brother, but now she snapped an order to the ox driver who stabbed his goad at his beasts’

flanks and so lurched the cart forward. Lancelot hastily clambered onto the moving vehicle, abandoning his followers beside the river. Ade followed, leading his horse by its bridle.

‘Lord Derfel!’ Sansum called again.

I turned reluctantly to face him. ‘Bishop?’ I answered.

‘Might I prevail on you to follow King Lancelot into the river of healing?’

‘I bathed at the last full moon, Bishop,’ I called back, provoking some laughter from the warriors on our bank.

Sansum made the sign of the cross. ‘You should be washed in the holy blood of the Lamb of God,’ he called, ‘to wipe away the stain of Mithras! You are an evil thing, Derfel, a sinner, an idolater, an imp of the devil, a spawn of Saxons, a whore-master!’

That last insult tripped my rage. The other insults were mere words, but Sansum, though clever, was never a prudent man in public confrontations and he could not resist that final insult to Ceinwyn and his provocation sent me charging forward to the cheers of the warriors on the Churn’s eastern bank, cheers that swelled as Sansum turned in panic and fled. He had a good start on me, and he was a lithe, swift man, but the sopping layers of his weighty robes tangled his feet and I caught him within a few paces of the Churn’s far bank. I used my spear to knock his feet out from under him and so sent him sprawling among the daisies and cowslips.

Then I drew Hywelbane and put her blade to his throat. ‘I did not quite hear, Bishop,’ I said, ‘the last name you called me.’

He said nothing, only glanced towards Lancelot’s four companions who now gathered close. Amhar and Loholt had their swords drawn, but the two Druids left their swords scabbarded and just watched me with unreadable expressions. By now Culhwch had crossed the river and was standing beside me, as was Galahad, while Lancelot’s worried spearmen watched us from a distance.

‘What word did you use, Bishop?’ I asked, tickling his throat with Hywelbane.

‘The whore of Babylon!’ he gabbled desperately, ‘all pagans worship her. The scarlet woman, Lord Derfel, the beast! The anti-Christ!’

I smiled. ‘And I thought you were insulting the Princess Ceinwyn.’

‘No, Lord, no! No!’ He clasped his hands. ‘Never!’

‘You promise me now?’ I asked him.

‘I swear it. Lord! By the Holy Ghost, I swear it.’

‘I don’t know who the Holy Ghost is, Bishop,’ I said, giving his adam’s apple a small blow with Hywelbane’s tip. ‘Swear your promise on my sword,’ I said, ‘kiss that, and I will believe you.’

He loathed me then. He had disliked me before, but now he hated me, yet still he put his lips to Hywelbane’s blade and kissed the steel. ‘I meant the Princess no insult,’ he said, ‘I swear it.’

I left Hywelbane at his lips for a heartbeat, then drew the sword back and let him stand. ‘I thought, Bishop,’ I said, ‘that you had a Holy Thorn to guard in Ynys Wydryn?’

He brushed grass off his wet robes. ‘God calls me to higher things,’ he snapped.

‘Tell me of them.’

He looked up at me, hate in his eyes, but his fear overcame his hate. ‘God called me to King Lancelot’s side, Lord Derfel,’ he said, ‘and His grace served to soften the Princess Guinevere’s heart. I have hopes that she may yet see His everlasting light.’

I laughed at that. ‘She has the light of Isis, Bishop, and you know it. And she hates you, you foul thing, so what did you bring her to change her mind?’

‘Bring her, Lord?’ he asked disingenuously. ‘What have I to bring a Princess? I have nothing, I am made poor in God’s service, I am but a humble priest.’

‘You are a toad, Sansum,’ I said, sheathing Hywelbane. ‘You are dirt beneath my boots.’ I spat to avert his evil. I guessed, from his words, that it had been his idea to propose baptism to Lancelot, and that idea had served well enough to spare the Silurian King his embarrassment with Mithras, but I did not believe the suggestion would have been sufficient to reconcile Guinevere to Sansum and his religion. He must have given her something, or promised her something, but I knew he would never confess it to me. I spat again, and Sansum, taking the spittle as his dismissal, scuttled off towards the town.

‘A pretty display,’ one of the two Druids said caustically.

‘And the Lord Derfel Cadarn,’ the other said, ‘does not have a reputation for prettiness.’ He nodded when I glared at him. ‘Dinas,’ he said, introducing himself.

‘And I am Lavaine,’ said his companion. They were both tall young men, both built like warriors and both with hard, confident faces. Their robes were dazzling white and their long black hair was carefully combed, betraying; a fastidiousness that was made somehow chilling by their stillness. It was the same stillness that men like Sagramor possessed. Arthur did not. He was too restless, but Sagramor, like some other great warriors, had a stillness that was chilling in battle. I never fear the noisy men in a fight, but I take care when an enemy is calm for those are the most dangerous men, and these two Druids had that same calm confidence. They also looked very alike, and I supposed them to be brothers.

‘We are twins,’ Dinas said, perhaps reading my thoughts.

‘Like Amhar and Loholt,’ Lavaine added, gesturing towards Arthur’s sons who still had their swords drawn. ‘But you can tell us apart. I have a scar here,’ Lavaine said, touching his right cheek where a white scar buried itself in his bristling beard.

‘Which he took at Lugg Vale,’ Dinas said. Like his brother he had an extraordinarily deep voice, a grating voice that did not match his youth.

‘I saw Tanaburs at Lugg Vale,’ I said, ‘and I remember Iorweth, but I recall no other Druids in Gorfyddyd’s army.’

Dinas smiled. ‘At Lugg Vale,’ he said, ‘we fought as warriors.’

‘And killed our share of Dumnonians,’ Lavaine added.

‘And only shaved our tonsures after the battle,’ Dinas explained. He had an unblinking and unsettling gaze. ‘And now,’ he added softly, ‘we serve King Lancelot.’

‘His oaths are our oaths,’ Lavaine said. There was a threat in his words, but it was a distant threat, not challenging.

‘How can Druids serve a Christian?’ I challenged them.

‘By bringing an older magic to work alongside their magic, of course,’ Lavaine answered.

‘And we do work magic, Lord Derfel,’ Dinas added, and he held out his empty hand, closed it into a fist, turned it, opened his fingers and there, on his palm, lay a thrush’s egg. He tossed the egg carelessly away. ‘We serve King Lancelot by choice,’ he said, ‘and his friends are our friends.’

‘And his enemies our enemies,’ Lavaine finished for him.

‘And you,’ Arthur’s son Loholt could not resist joining in the provocation, ‘are an enemy of our King.’

I looked at the younger pair of twins; callow, clumsy youths who suffered an excess of pride and a shortfall of wisdom. They both had their father’s long bony face, but on them it was overlaid by petulance and resentment. ‘How am I an enemy of your King, Loholt?’ I asked him. He did not know what to say, and none of the others answered for him. Dinas and Lavaine were too wise to start a fight here, not even with all Lancelot’s spearmen so close, for Culhwch and Galahad were with me and scores of my supporters were just yards away across the slow-flowing Churn. Loholt reddened, but said nothing.

I knocked his sword aside with Hywelbane, then stepped close to him. ‘Let me give you some advice, Loholt,’ I said softly. ‘Choose your enemies more wisely than you choose your friends. I have no quarrel with you, nor do I wish one, but if you desire such a quarrel, then I promise you that my love for your father and my friendship with your mother will not stop me from sinking Hywelbane in your guts and burying your soul in a dungheap.’ I sheathed my sword. ‘Now go.’

He blinked at me, but he had no belly for a fight. He went to fetch his horse and Amhar went with him. Dinas and Lavaine laughed, and Dinas even bowed to me. ‘A victory!’ he applauded me.

‘We are routed,’ Lavaine said, ‘but what else could we expect from a Warrior of the Cauldron?’ he pronounced that title mockingly.

‘And a killer of Druids,’ Dinas added, not at all mockingly.

‘Our grandfather, Tanaburs,’ Lavaine said, and I remembered how Galahad had warned me on the Dark Road about the enmity of these two Druids.

‘It is reckoned unwise,’ Lavaine said in his grating voice, ‘to kill a Druid.’

‘Especially our grandfather,’ Dinas added, ‘who was like a father to us.’

‘As our own father died,’ Lavaine said.

‘When we were young.’

‘Of a foul disease,’ Lavaine explained.

‘He was a Druid too,’ Dinas said, ‘and he taught us spells. We can blight crops.’

‘We can make women moan,’ Lavaine said.

‘We can sour milk.’

‘While it’s still in the breast,’ Lavaine added, then he turned abruptly away and, with an impressive agility, vaulted into his saddle.

His brother leapt onto his own horse and collected his reins. ‘But we can do more than turn milk,’

Dinas said, looking balefully down at me from his horse and then, as he had before, he held out his empty hand, made it into a fist, turned it over and opened it again, and there on his palm was a parchment star with five points. He smiled, then tore the parchment into scraps that he scattered on the grass. ‘We can make the stars vanish,’ he said as a farewell, then kicked his heels back. The two galloped away. I spat. Culhwch retrieved my fallen spear and handed it to me. ‘Who in all the world are they?’ he asked.

‘Tanaburs’s grandsons.’ I spat a second time to avert evil. ‘The whelps of a bad Druid.’

‘And they can make the stars disappear?’ He sounded dubious.

‘One star.’ I gazed after the two horsemen. Ceinwyn, I knew, was safe in her brother’s hall, but I also knew I would have to kill the Silurian twins if she was to remain safe. Tanaburs’s curse was on me and the curse was called Dinas and Lavaine. I spat a third time, then touched Hywelbane’s sword hilt for luck.

‘We should have killed your brother in Benoic,’ Culhwch growled to Galahad.

‘God forgive me,’ Galahad said, ‘but you’re right.’

Two days later Cuneglas arrived and that night there was a Council of War, and after the Council, under the waning moon and by the light of flaming torches, we pledged our spears to the war against the Saxons. We warriors of Mithras dipped our blades in bull’s blood, but we held no meeting to elect new initiates. There was no need; Lancelot, by his baptism, had escaped the humiliation of rejection, though how any Christian could be served by Druids was a mystery that no one could explain to me. Merlin came that day and it was he who presided over the pagan rites. Iorweth of Powys helped him, but there was no sign of Dinas or Lavaine. We sang the Battle Song of Beli Mawr, we washed our spears in blood, we vowed ourselves to the death of every Saxon and next day we marched.

There were two important Saxon leaders in Lloegyr. Like us the Saxons had chiefs and lesser kings, indeed they had tribes and some of the tribes did not even call themselves Saxons but claimed to be Angles or Jutes, but we called them all Saxons and knew they only possessed two important Kings and those two leaders were called Aelle and Cerdic. They hated each other. Aelle, of course, was then the famous one. He called himself the Bretwalda, which in the Saxon tongue meant the ‘ruler of Britain’, and his lands stretched from south of the Thames to the border of distant Elmet. His rival was Cerdic, whose territory lay on Britain’s southern coast and whose only borders were with Aelle’s lands and Dumnonia. Of the two kings Aelle was older, richer in land and stronger in warriors, and that made Aelle our chief enemy; defeat Aelle, we believed, and Cerdic would inevitably fall afterwards.

Prince Meurig of Gwent, arrayed in his toga and with a ludicrous bronze wreath perched atop his thin, pale brown hair, had proposed a different strategy at the Council of War. With his usual diffidence and mock humility he had suggested we make an alliance with Cerdic. ‘Let him fight for us!’ Meurig said.

‘Let him attack Aelle from the south while we strike from the west. I am, I know, no strategist,’ he paused to simper, inviting one of us to contradict him, but we all bit our tongues, ‘but it seems clear, even surely to the meanest of intelligences, that to fight one enemy is better than two.’

‘But we have two enemies,’ Arthur said plainly.

‘Indeed we do, I have made myself master of that point, Lord Arthur. But my point, if you can seize it in turn, is to make one of those enemies our friend.’ He clasped his hands together and blinked at Arthur.

‘An ally,’ Meurig added, in case Arthur had still not understood him.

‘Cerdic,’ Sagramor growled in his atrocious British, ‘has no honour. He will break an oath as easily as a magpie breaks a sparrow’s egg. I will make no peace with him.’

‘You fail to understand,’ Meurig protested.

‘I will make no peace with him,’ Sagramor interrupted the Prince, speaking the words very slowly as though he spoke to a child. Meurig reddened and went silent. The Edling of Gwent was scared half to death of the tall Numidian warrior, and no wonder, for Sagramor’s reputation was as fearsome as his looks. The Lord of the Stones was a tall man, very thin and quick as a whip. His hair and face were as black as pitch and that long face, cross-hatched from a lifetime of war, bore a perpetual scowl that hid a droll and even generous character. Sagramor, despite his imperfect grasp of our language, could keep a campfire enthralled for hours with his tales of far-off lands, but most men only knew him as the fiercest of all Arthur’s warriors; the implacable Sagramor who was terrible in battle and sombre out of it, while the Saxons believed he was a black fiend sent from their underworld. I knew him well enough and liked him, indeed it had been Sagramor who had initiated me into Mithras’s service, and Sagramor who had fought at my side all that long day in Lugg Vale. ‘He’s got himself a big Saxon girl now,’ Culhwch had whispered to me at the council, ‘tall as a tree and with hair like a haystack. No wonder he’s so thin.’

‘Your three wives keep you solid enough,’ I said, poking him in his substantial ribs.

‘I pick them for the way they cook, Derfel, not the way they look.’

‘You have something to contribute, Lord Culhwch?’ Arthur asked.

‘Nothing, cousin!’ Culhwch responded cheerfully.

‘Then we shall continue,’ Arthur said. He asked Sagramor what chance there was of Cerdic’s men fighting for Aelle, and the Numidian, who had guarded the Saxon frontier all winter, shrugged and said that anything was possible with Cerdic. He had heard, he said, that the two Saxons had met and exchanged gifts, but no one had reported that an actual alliance had been made. Sagramor’s best guess was that Cerdic would be content to let Aelle be weakened, and that while the Dumnonian army was about that business he would attack along the coast in an effort to capture Durnovaria.

‘If we were at peace with him. .’ Meurig tried again.

‘We won’t be,’ King Cuneglas said curtly, and Meurig, outranked by the only King at the Council, went quiet again.

‘There is one last thing,’ Sagramor warned us. ‘The Sais have dogs now. Big dogs.’ He spread his hands to show the huge size of the Saxon war dogs. We had all heard of these beasts, and we feared them. It was said that the Saxons released the dogs just seconds before the shield-walls clashed, and that the beasts were capable of tearing huge holes in the wall into which the enemy spearmen poured.

‘I will deal with the dogs,’ Merlin said. It was the only contribution he made to the council, but the calm, confident statement relieved some worried men. Merlin’s unexpected presence with the army was contribution enough, for his possession of the Cauldron made him, even for many of the Christians, a figure of more awesome power than ever. Not that many understood the purpose of the Cauldron, but they were pleased that the Druid had declared his willingness to accompany the army. With Arthur at our head, and Merlin on our side, how could we lose?

Arthur made his dispositions. King Lancelot, he said, with the spearmen of Siluria and a detachment of men from Dumnonia, would guard the southern frontier against Cerdic. The rest of us would assemble at Caer Ambra and march due east along the valley of the Thames. Lancelot made a show of being reluctant to be thus separated from the main army that would have to fight Aelle, but Culhwch, hearing the orders, shook his head in wonder. ‘He’s skipping out of battle again, Derfel!’ he whispered to me.

‘Not if Cerdic attacks him,’ I said.

Culhwch glanced across at Lancelot who was flanked by the twins Dinas and Lavaine. ‘And he’s staying near his protectress, isn’t he?’ Culhwch said. ‘Mustn’t stray too far from Guinevere, else he has to stand up by himself

I did not care. I was only relieved that Lancelot and his men were not in the main army; it was enough to face the Saxons without worrying about Tanaburs’s grandsons or a Silurian knife in my back. And so we marched. It was a ragged army of contingents from three British kingdoms while some of our more distant allies had still not arrived. There were men promised to us from Elmet and even from Kernow, but they would follow us along the Roman road that ran south-east from Corinium and then east towards London.

London. The Romans had called it Londinium, and before that it had been plain Londo, which Merlin once told me meant ‘a wild place’, and now it was our goal, the once-great city that had been the largest in all Rome’s Britain and which now lay decaying amidst Aelle’s stolen lands. Sagramor had once led a famous raid into the old city and he had found its British inhabitants cowed by their new masters, but now, we hoped, we would take them back. That hope spread like wildfire through the army, though Arthur consistently denied it. Our task, he said, was to bring the Saxons to battle and not be lured by the ruins of a dead city, but in this Arthur was opposed by Merlin. ‘I’m not coming to see a handful of dead Saxons,’ he told me scornfully. ‘What use am I in killing Saxons?’

‘Every use, Lord,’ I told him. ‘Your magic frightens the enemy.’

‘Don’t be absurd, Derfel. Any fool can hop about in front of an army making faces and hurling curses. Frightening Saxons isn’t skilled work. Even those ludicrous Druids of Lancelot’s could just about manage that! Not that they’re real Druids.’

‘They’re not?’

‘Of course they’re not! To be a real Druid you have to study. You have to be examined. You have to satisfy other Druids that you know your business, and I never heard of any Druid examining Dinas and Lavaine. Unless Tanaburs did, and what kind of Druid was he? Not a very good one, plainly, else he’d never have let you live. I do deplore inefficiency.’

‘They can make magic, Lord,’ I said.

‘Make magic!’ He hooted at that. ‘One of the wretches produces a thrush’s egg and you think that’s magic? Thrushes do it all the time. Now if he’d made a sheep’s egg, I’d take some notice.’

‘He produced a star too, Lord.’

‘Derfel! What an absurdly credulous man you are!’ he exclaimed. ‘A star made of scissors and parchment? Don’t worry, I heard about that star and your precious Ceinwyn isn’t in any danger. Nimue and I made sure of that by burying three skulls. You don’t need to know the details, but you can rest assured that if those frauds go anywhere near Ceinwyn they’ll be changed into grass-snakes. Then they can lay eggs for ever.’ I thanked him for that, then asked him just why he was accompanying the army if not to help us against Aelle. ‘Because of the scroll, of course,’ he told me and patted a pocket of his dirty black robe to show me the scroll was safe.

‘Caleddin’s scroll?’ I asked.

‘Is there another?’ he countered.

Caleddin’s scroll was the treasure Merlin had brought from Ynys Trebes, and in his eyes it was as valuable as all the Treasures of Britain, and no wonder, for the secret of those Treasures was described in the ancient document. Druids were forbidden to write anything down because they believed that to record a spell was to destroy the writer’s power to work the magic, and thus all their lore and rites and knowledge were handed down by voice alone. Yet the Romans, before they attacked Ynys Mon, had so feared the British religion that they had suborned a Druid named Caleddin and had persuaded him to dictate all he knew to a Roman scribe, and Caleddin’s traitorous scroll had thus preserved all the ancient knowledge of Britain. Much of it, Merlin once told me, had been forgotten in the passing centuries, for the Romans had persecuted the Druids cruelly and much of the old knowledge had vanished into time, but now, with the scroll, he could recreate that lost power. ‘And the scroll,’ I ventured, ‘mentions London?’

‘My, my, how curious you are,’ Merlin mocked me, but then, perhaps because it was a fine day and he was in a sunny mood, he relented. ‘The last Treasure of Britain is in London,’ he said. ‘Or it was,’ he added hastily. ‘It’s buried there. I thought of giving you a spade and letting you dig the thing up, but you were bound to make a mess of it. Just look at what you did on Ynys Mon! Outnumbered and surrounded, indeed. Unforgivable. So I decided to do it myself. I have to find where it’s buried first, of course, and that could be difficult.’

‘And is that, Lord,’ I asked, ‘why you brought the dogs?’ For Merlin and Nimue had collected a mangy pack of snapping mongrels that now accompanied the army.

Merlin sighed. ‘Allow me, Derfel,’ he said, ‘to give you some advice. You do not buy a dog and bark yourself. I know the purpose of the dogs, Nimue knows their purpose, and you do not. That is how the Gods intended it to be. Do you have any more questions? Or may I now enjoy this morning’s walk?’ He lengthened his stride, thumping his big black staff into the turf with each emphatic step. The smoke of great beacons welcomed us once we had passed Calleva. Those fires were the enemy’s signals that we were in sight, and whenever a Saxon saw such a plume of smoke he was under orders to waste the land. The grain stores were emptied, the houses were burned and the livestock driven away. And always Aelle withdrew, staying ever a day’s march ahead of us and thus tempting us forward into that wasted land. Wherever the road passed through woodland it would be blocked by trees, and sometimes, as our men laboured to pull the felled trunks out of the way, an arrow or spear would crash through the leaves to snatch a life, or else one of the big Saxon war dogs would come leaping and slavering out of the undergrowth, but they were the only attacks Aelle made and we never once saw his shield-wall. Back he went, and forward we marched, and each day the enemy spears or dogs would snatch a life or two.

Much more damage was done to us by disease. We had found the same thing before Lugg Vale, that whenever a large army gathered, so the Gods plagued it with sickness. The sick slowed us terribly, for if they could not march they had to be laid in a safe place and guarded by spearmen to keep them from the Saxon war-bands that prowled all about our flanks. We would see those enemy bands by day as distant ragged figures, while every night their fires flickered on our horizon. Yet it was not the sick that slowed us the most, but rather the sheer ponderousness of moving so many men. It was a mystery to me why thirty spearmen could cover an easy twenty miles on a relaxed day, but an army of twenty times that number, even trying hard, was lucky to cover eight or nine. Our markers were the Roman stones planted on the verge that recorded the number of miles to London, and after a while I refused to look at them for fear of their depressing message.

The ox-wagons also slowed us. We were equipped with forty capacious farm wagons that carried our food and spare weapons, and those wagons lumbered at a snail’s pace in the army’s rear. Prince Meurig had been given command of that rearguard and he fussed over the wagons, counted them obsessively, and forever complained that the spearmen ahead were marching too fast. Arthur’s famed horsemen led the army. There were fifty of them now, all mounted on the big shaggy horses that were bred deep inside Dumnonia. Other horsemen, who did not wear the mail armour of Arthur’s band, ranged ahead as our scouts and sometimes those men failed to return, though we would always find their severed heads waiting for us on the road as we advanced. The main body of the army was composed of five hundred spearmen. Arthur had decided to take no levies with him, for such farmers rarely carried adequate weapons; so we were all oath-sworn warriors and all carried spears and shields and most possessed swords too. Not every man could afford a sword, but Arthur had sent orders throughout Dumnonia that every household possessing a sword which was not already sworn to the army’s service should surrender the weapon, and the eighty blades so collected had been distributed among his army. Some men a few carried captured Saxon war axes, though others, like myself, disliked the weapon’s clumsiness.

And to pay for all this? To pay for the swords and new spears and new shields and wagons and oxen and flour and boots and banners and bridles and cooking pots and helmets and cloaks and knives and horseshoes and salted meat? Arthur laughed when I asked him. ‘You must thank the Christians, Derfel,’

he said.

‘They yielded more?’ I asked. ‘I thought that udder was dry.’ ‘It is now,’ he said grimly, ‘but it’s astonishing how much their shrines yielded when we offered their guardians martyrdom, and it’s even more astonishing how much we’ve promised to repay them.’

‘Did we ever repay Bishop Sansum?’ I asked. His monastery at Ynys Wydryn had provided the fortune that had purchased Aelle’s peace during the autumn campaign that had ended at Lugg Vale. Arthur shook his head. ‘And he keeps reminding me of that.’ ‘The Bishop,’ I said carefully, ‘seems to have made new friends.’ Arthur laughed at my attempt at tact. ‘He’s Lancelot’s chaplain. Our dear Bishop, it seems, cannot be kept down. Like an apple in a water barrel, he just bobs up again.’

‘And he has made his peace with your wife,’ I observed. ‘I like to see folk resolve their arguments,’

he said mildly, ‘but Bishop Sansum does have strange allies these days. Guinevere tolerates him, Lancelot lifts him and Morgan defends him. How about that? Morgan!’ He was fond of his sister, and it pained him that she was so estranged from Merlin. She ruled Ynys Wydryn with a fierce efficiency, almost as if to demonstrate to Merlin that she was a more suitable partner for him than Nimue, but Morgan had long lost the battle to be Merlin’s chief priestess. She was valued by Merlin, Arthur said, but she wanted to be loved, and who, Arthur asked me sadly, could ever love a woman so scarred and shrivelled and disfigured by fire? ‘Merlin was never her lover,’ Arthur told me, ‘though she pretended he was, and he never minded the pretence for the more folk think him odd the happier he is, but in truth he can’t stand the sight of Morgan without her mask. She’s lonely, Derfel.’ So it was no wonder that Arthur was glad for his maimed sister’s friendship with Bishop Sansum, though it puzzled me how the fiercest proponent of Christianity in Dumnonia could be such friends with Morgan who was a pagan priestess of famous power. The mouse-lord, I thought, was like a spider making a very strange web. His last web had tried to catch Arthur and it had failed, so who was Sansum busy weaving for now? We heard no news from Dumnonia after the last of our allies joined us. We were cut off now, surrounded by Saxons, though the last news from home had been reassuring. Cerdic had made no move against Lancelot’s troops, nor, it was thought, had he moved east to support Aelle. The last allied troops to join us were a war-band from Kernow led by an old friend who came galloping up the column to find me, then slid off his horse to trip and fall at my feet. It was Tristan, Prince and Edling of Kernow, who picked himself up, beat the dust off his cloak, then embraced me. ‘You can relax, Derfel,’ he said, ‘the warriors of Kernow have arrived. All will be well.’

I laughed. ‘You look well, Lord Prince.’ He did too.

‘I am free of my father,’ he explained. ‘He has let me out of the cage. He probably hopes a Saxon will bury an axe in my skull.’ He made a grotesque face in imitation of a dying man and I spat to avert evil. Tristan was a handsome, well-made man with black hair, a forked beard and long moustaches. He had a sallow skin and a face that often looked sad, but which today was filled with happiness. He had disobeyed his father by bringing a small band of men to Lugg Vale, for which act, we had heard, he had been confined to a remote fortress on Kernow’s northern coast all winter, but King Mark had now relented and released his son for this campaign. ‘We’re family now,’ Tristan explained.

‘Family?’

‘My dear father,’ he said ironically, ‘has taken a new bride. Ialle of Broceliande.’ Broceliande was the remaining British kingdom in Armorica and it was ruled by Budic ap Camran, who was married to Arthur’s sister Anna, which meant that Ialle was Arthur’s niece.

‘What’s this,’ I asked, ‘your sixth stepmother?’

‘Seventh,’ Tristan said, ‘and she’s only fifteen summers old and father must be fifty at least. I’m already thirty!’ he added gloomily.

‘And not married?’

‘Not yet. But my father marries enough for both of us. Poor Ialle. Give her four years, Derfel, and she’ll be dead like the rest. But he’s happy enough for now. He’s wearing her out like he wears them all out.’ He put an arm round my shoulders. ‘And I hear you’re married?’

‘Not married, but well harnessed.’

‘To the legendary Ceinwyn!’ He laughed. ‘Well done, my friend, well done. One day I’ll find my own Ceinwyn.’

‘May it be soon, Lord Prince.’

‘It’ll have to be! I’m getting old! Ancient! I saw a white hair the other day, here in my beard.’ He poked at his chin. ‘See it?’ he asked anxiously.

‘It?’ I mocked him. ‘You look like a badger.’ There might have been three or four grey strands among the black, but that was all.

Tristan laughed, then glanced at a slave who was running beside the road with a dozen leashed dogs.

‘Emergency rations?’ he asked me.

‘Merlin’s magic, and he won’t tell me what they’re for.’ The Druid’s dogs were a nuisance; they needed food we could not spare, kept us awake at night with their howling and fought like fiends against the other dogs that accompanied our men.

On the day after Tristan joined us we reached Pontes where the road crosses the Thames on a wondrous stone bridge made by the Romans. We had expected to find the bridge broken, but our scouts reported it whole and, to our astonishment, it was still whole when our spearmen reached it. That was the hottest day of the march. Arthur forbade anyone to cross the bridge until the wagons had closed up on the main body of the army, and so our men sprawled by the river as they waited. The bridge had eleven arches, two on either bank where they lifted the roadway onto the seven-arch span that crossed the river itself. Tree trunks and other floating debris had piled against the upstream side of the bridge so that the river to the west was wider and deeper than to the east, and the makeshift dam made the water race and foam between the stone pilings. There was a Roman settlement on the far bank; a group of stone buildings surrounded by the remnants of an earth embankment, while at our end of the bridge a great tower guarded the road that passed beneath its crumbling arch on which a Roman inscription still existed. Arthur translated it for me, telling me that the Emperor Adrian had ordered the bridge to be built. ‘Imperator’ I said, peering up at the stone plaque. ‘Does that mean Emperor?’

‘It does.’

‘And an Emperor is above a King?’ I asked.

‘An Emperor is a Lord of Kings,’ Arthur said. The bridge had made him gloomy. He clambered about its landward arches, then walked to the tower and laid a hand on its stones as he peered up at the inscription. ‘Suppose you and I wanted to build a bridge like this,’ he said to me, ‘how would we do it:’

I shrugged. ‘Make it from timber, Lord. Good elm pilings, the rest from split oak.’

He grimaced. ‘And would it still be standing when our great-great-grandchildren live?’

‘They can build their own bridges,’ I suggested.

He stroked the tower. ‘We have no one who can dress stone like this. No one who knows how to sink a stone pier into a river bed. No one who even remembers how. We’re like men with a treasure hoard, Derfel, and day by day it shrinks and we don’t know how to stop it or how to make more.’ He glanced back and saw the first of Meurig’s wagons appearing in the distance. Our scouts had probed deep into the woods that grew either side of the road and they had reported neither sight nor smell of any Saxons, but Arthur was still suspicious. ‘If I was them I’d let our army cross, then attack the wagons,’ he said, so instead he had decided to throw an advance guard over the bridge, cross the wagons into what remained of the settlement’s decaying earth wall, and only then bring the main part of his army over the river.

My men formed the advance guard. The land beyond the river was less thickly wooded and though some of the remaining trees grew close enough to hide a small army, no one appeared to challenge us. The only sign of the Saxons was a severed horse’s head waiting at the bridge’s centre. None of my men would pass it until Nimue came forward to dispel its evil. She merely spat at the head. Saxon magic, she said, was feeble stuff, and once its evil had been dissipated, Issa and I heaved the thing over the parapet. My men guarded the earth wall as the wagons and their escort crossed. Galahad had come with me and the two of us poked about the buildings inside the wall. Saxons, for some reason, were loath to use Roman settlements, preferring their own timber and thatched halls, though some folk had been living here till recently, for the hearths contained ashes and some of the floors were swept clean. ‘Could be our people,’ Galahad said, for plenty of Britons lived among the Saxons, many of them as slaves, but some as free people who had accepted the foreign rule.

The buildings appeared to have been barracks once, but there were also two houses and what I took to be a huge granary which, when we pushed open its broken door, proved to be a beast house where cattle were sheltered overnight to protect them from wolves. The floor was a deep mire of straw and dung that smelt so rank that I would have left the building there and then, but Galahad saw something in the shadows at its far end and so I followed him across the wet, viscous floor. The building’s far end was not a straight gabled wall, but was broken by a curved apse. High on the apse’s stained plaster, and barely visible through the dust and dirt of the years, was a painted symbol that looked like a big X on which was superimposed a P. Galahad stared up at the symbol and made the sign of the cross. ‘It used to be a church, Derfel,’ he said in wonder.

‘It stinks,’ I said.

He gazed reverently at the symbol. ‘There were Christians here.’

‘Not any longer.’ I shuddered at the overwhelming stench and batted helplessly at the flies that buzzed around my head.

Galahad did not care about the smell. He thrust his spear-butt into the compacted mass of cow dung and rotting straw, and finally succeeded in uncovering a small patch of the floor. What he found only made him work harder until he had revealed the upper part of a man depicted in small mosaic tiles. The man wore robes like a bishop, had a sun-halo round his head and in one uplifted hand was carrying a small beast with a skinny body and a great shaggy head. ‘St Mark and his lion,’ Galahad told me.

‘I thought lions were huge beasts,’ I said, disappointed. ‘Sagramor says they’re bigger than horses and fiercer than bears.’ I peered at the dung-smeared beast. ‘That’s just a kitten.’

‘It’s a symbolic lion,’ he reproved me He tried to clear more of the floor, but the filth was too old, thick-packed and glutinous. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘I shall build a great church like this. A huge church. A place where a whole people can gather before their God.’

‘And when you’re dead,’ I pulled him back towards the door, ‘some bastard will winter ten herds of cattle in it and be thankful to you.’

He insisted on staying one minute more and, while I held his shield and spear, he spread his arms wide and offered a new prayer in an old place. ‘It’s a sign from God,’ he said excitedly as he at last followed me back into the sunshine. ‘We shall restore Christianity to Lloegyr, Derfel. It’s a sign of victory!’

It might have been a sign of victory to Galahad, but that old church was almost the cause of our defeat. The next day, as we advanced east towards London that was now so tantalizingly close, Prince Meurig stayed at Pontes. He sent the wagons on with most of their escort, but kept fifty men back to clear the church of its cloying filth. Meurig, like Galahad, was much moved by the existence of that ancient church and decided to re-dedicate the shrine to its God, and so he had his spearmen lay aside their war gear and clear the building of its dung and straw so that the priests who accompanied him could say whatever prayers were needed to restore the building’s sanctity.

And while the rearguard forked dung, the Saxons who had been following us came over the bridge. Meurig escaped. He had a horse, but most of the dung-sweepers died and so did two of the priests, and then the Saxons stormed up the road and caught the wagons. The remnant of the rearguard put up a fight, but they were outnumbered and the Saxons outflanked them, overran them, and began slaughtering the plodding oxen so that, one by one, the wagons were stopped and fell into the enemy’s hands. By now we had heard the commotion. The army stopped as Arthur’s horsemen galloped back towards the sound of the killing. None of those horsemen was properly equipped for battle, for it was simply too hot for a man to ride in armour all day, yet their sudden appearance was enough to stampede the Saxons, but the damage had already been done. Eighteen of the forty wagons had been immobilized and, without oxen, they would have to be abandoned. Most of the eighteen had been plundered and barrels of our precious flour had been spilt onto the road. We salvaged what flour we could and wrapped it in cloaks, but the bread it would bake would be poor stuff and riddled with dust and twigs. Even before the raid we had been cutting down on rations, reckoning we had enough for two more weeks, but now, because most of the food had been in the rearward vehicles, we faced the prospect of abandoning the march in just one week and even then there would be barely enough food remaining to see us safe back to Calleva or Caer Ambra.

‘There are fish in the river,’ Meurig pointed out.

‘Gods, not fish again,’ Culhwch grumbled, recalling the privations of the last days of Ynys Trebes.

‘There are not fish enough to feed an army,’ Arthur answered angrily. He would have liked to have shouted at Meurig, to have stripped his stupidity bare, but Meurig was a Prince and Arthur’s sense of what was proper would never let him humiliate a Prince. If it had been Culhwch or I who had divided the rearguard and exposed the wagons Arthur would have lost his temper, but Meurig’s birth protected him. We were at a Council of War north of the road which here ran straight across a dull, grassy plain that was studded with clumps of trees and with straggling banks of gorse and hawthorn. All the commanders were present, and dozens of lesser men crowded close to hear our discussions. Meurig, of course, denied all responsibility. If he had been given more men, he said, the disaster would never have happened. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘and you will forgive me for pointing this out, though I would have thought it an obvious point that should hardly need my explication, no success can attend an army that ignores God.’

‘So why did God ignore us?’ Sagramor asked.

Arthur hushed the Numidian. ‘What is done is done,’ he said. ‘What happens next is our business here.’

But what happened next was up to Aelle rather than to us. He had won the first victory, though it was possible he did not know the extent of that triumph. We were miles inside his territory and we faced starvation unless we could trap his army, destroy it, and so break out into land that had not been stripped of supplies. Our scouts brought us deer, and once in a while they came across some cattle or sheep, but such delicacies were rare and not nearly sufficient to make up for the lost flour and dried meat.

‘He has to defend London, surely?’ Cuneglas suggested.

Sagramor shook his head. ‘London is populated by Britons,’ he said. ‘The Saxons don’t like it there. He’ll let us have London.’

‘There’ll be food in London,’ Cuneglas said.

‘But how long will it last, Lord King?’ Arthur asked. ‘And if we take it with us, what do we do? Wander for ever, hoping Aelle will attack?’ He stared at the ground, his long face hardened by thought. Aelle’s tactics were clear enough now, the Saxon would let us march and march, and his men would always be ahead of us to sweep our path clean of food, and once we were weakened and dispirited, the Saxon horde would swarm around us. ‘What we must do,’ Arthur said, ‘is draw him onto us.’

Meurig blinked rapidly. ‘How?’ he inquired, in a tone suggesting Arthur was being ridiculous. The Druids who accompanied us, Merlin, Iorweth and two others from Powys, were all sitting in a group to one side of the Council and Merlin, who had commandeered a convenient ant hill as his seat, now commanded attention by raising his staff. ‘What do you do,’ he asked mildly, ‘when you want something valuable?’

‘Take it,’ Agravain growled. Agravain commanded Arthur’s heavy horsemen, leaving Arthur free to lead the whole army.

‘When you want something valuable from the Gods,’ Merlin amended his question, ‘what do you do then?’

Agravain shrugged, and none of the rest of us could supply an answer. Merlin stood so that his height dominated the Council. ‘If you wish something,’ he said very simply as though he was our teacher and we his pupils, ‘you must give something. You must make an offering, a sacrifice. The thing I wanted above all things in this world was the Cauldron, so I offered my life to its search and I received my wish, but if I had not offered my soul for it, the gift would not have come. We must sacrifice something.’

Meurig’s Christianity was offended and he could not resist taunting the Druid. ‘Your life, perhaps, Lord Merlin? It worked last time.’ He laughed and looked to his surviving priests to join the laughter. The laughter died as Merlin pointed his black staff at the Prince. He kept the staff very still, its butt just inches from Meurig’s face, and he held it there long after the laughter had stopped. And still Merlin held the staff, stretching the silence unbearably. Agricola, feeling he must support his Prince, cleared his throat, but a twitch of the black staff stilled whatever protest Agricola might have made. Meurig wriggled uncomfortably, but seemed struck dumb. He reddened, blinked and squirmed. Arthur frowned, but said nothing. Nimue smiled in anticipation of the Prince’s fate, while the rest of us watched in silence and some of us shuddered in fear, and still Merlin did not move until, at last, Meurig could take the suspense no longer. ‘I was jesting!’ he almost shouted in desperation. ‘I meant no offence.’

‘Did you say something, Lord Prince?’ Merlin inquired anxiously, pretending Meurig’s panicked words had jolted him out of reverie. He lowered the staff. ‘I must have been daydreaming. Where was I? Oh yes, a sacrifice. What do we have, Arthur, that is most precious?’

Arthur thought for a few seconds. ‘We have gold,’ he said, ‘silver, my armour.’

‘Baubles,’ Merlin answered dismissively.

There was silence for a while, then men outside the Council offered their answers. Some took torques from about their necks and waved them in the air. Others suggested offering weapons, one man even called out the name of Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. The Christians made no suggestions, because this was a pagan procedure and they would offer nothing but their prayers, but one man of Powys suggested we sacrifice a Christian and that idea prompted loud cheers. Meurig blushed again.

‘I sometimes think,’ Merlin said when no more suggestions were offered, ‘that I am doomed to live among idiots. Is all the world mad but me? Cannot one poor blinkered fool among you see what is plainly the most precious thing we possess? Not one?’

‘Food,’ I said.

‘Ah!’ Merlin cried, delighted. ‘Well done, you poor blinkered fool! Food, you idiots.’ He spat the insult at the Council. ‘Aelle’s plans are predicated upon the belief that we lack food, so we must demonstrate the opposite. We must waste food like Christians waste prayer, we must scatter it to the empty heavens, we must squander it, we must throw it away, we must,’ he paused to put stress on the next word, ‘sacrifice it.’ He waited for a voice to be raised in opposition, but no one spoke. ‘Find a place near here,’ Merlin ordered Arthur, ‘where you will be content to offer Aelle battle. Do not make it too strong, for you don’t want him to refuse combat. You’re tempting him, remember, and you must make him believe he can defeat you. How long will it take him to ready his forces for battle?’

‘Three days,’ Arthur said. He suspected that Aelle’s men were widely scattered in their loose ring that escorted us and it would take the Saxon at least two days to shrink that ring into a compact army, and another full day to shove it into battle order.

‘I shall need two days,’ Merlin said, ‘so bake enough hard bread to keep us barely alive for five days,’ he ordered. ‘Not a generous ration, Arthur, for our sacrifice has to be real. Then find your battleground and wait. Leave the rest to me, but I want Derfel and a dozen of his men to do some labouring work. And do we have any men here,’ he raised his voice so that all the men crowding about the Council could hear, ‘who have skills in carving wood?’

He chose six men. Two were from Powys, one bore the hawk of Kernow on his shield, and the others were from Dumnonia. They were given axes and knives, but nothing to carve until Arthur had discovered his battleground.

He found it on a wide heath that rose to a gentle summit crowned by a scattered grove of yew and whitebeam. The slope was nowhere steep, but we would still have the high ground and there Arthur planted his banners, and round the banners there grew an encampment of thatched shelters made from branches cut from the grove. Our spearmen would make a ring about the banners and there, we hoped, face Aelle. The bread that would keep us alive as we waited for the Saxons was baked in turf ovens. Merlin chose his spot to the north of the heath. There was a meadow there, a place of stunted alders and rank grass edging a stream that curled south towards the distant Thames. My men were ordered to fell three oaks, then strip the trunks of their branches and bark, and afterwards dig three pits into which the oaks could be set up as columns, though first he ordered his six carvers to make the oak trunks into three ghoulish idols. Iorweth helped Nimue and Merlin, and the three loved that work for it allowed them to devise the most ghastly, fearsome things that bore small resemblance to any God I had ever known, but Merlin did not care. The idols, he said, were not for us, but for the Saxons, and so he and his woodcarvers made three things of horror with animal faces, female breasts and male genitalia, and when the columns were finished my men stopped their other work and hoisted the three figures into their pits while Merlin and the woodcarvers tamped their bases with earth so that at last the columns stood upright.

‘The father,’ Merlin capered in front of the idols, ‘the son and the holy ghost!’ he laughed. My men, meanwhile, had been making a great stack of wood in front of the pits, and onto that wood we now piled what remained of our food. We killed the remaining oxen and heaved their heavy corpses onto the pile so that their fresh blood trickled down through the layers of timber, and onto the oxen we heaped everything they had hauled; dried meat, dried fish, cheese, apples, grain and beans, and on top of those precious supplies we put the carcasses of two newly-caught deer and a freshly slaughtered ram. The ram’s head, with its twin horns, was cut off and nailed to the central pillar. The Saxons watched us work. They were on the stream’s far bank and once or twice, on the first day, their spears had hurtled over the water, but after those first futile efforts to interfere with us they had been content to just watch and see exactly what strange things we did. I sensed that their numbers grew. On the first day we had glimpsed only a dozen men among the far trees, but by the second evening there were at least a score of fires smoking behind the leaf screen.

‘Now,’ Merlin said that evening, ‘we give them something to watch.’

We carried fire in cooking pots down from the heath’s low summit to the great pile of wood and thrust it deep into the tangle of branches. The wood was green, but we had stacked heaps of dry grass and broken twigs into the centre, and by nightfall the fire was raging fiercely. The flames lit our crude idols with a lurid glare, the smoke boiled in a great plume that drifted towards London and the smell of roasting meat wafted tantalizingly towards our hungry encampment. The fire crackled and collapsed, exploding streams of sparks into the air, and in its fierce heat the dead beasts twitched and twisted as the flames shrank their sinews and exploded their skulls. Melting fat hissed in the blaze, then flared up white and bright to cast black shadows on the three hideous idols. All night that fire seethed, burning our last hopes of leaving Lloegyr without victory, and in the dawn we watched as the Saxons crept out to investigate its smoking remnants.

Then we waited. We were not entirely passive. Our horsemen rode east to scout the London road, and came back to report bands of marching Saxons. Others of us cut timber and used it to begin constructing a hall beside the shrinking grove on the heath’s summit. We had no need of such a hall, but Arthur wanted to give the impression that we were establishing a base deep in Lloegyr from which we would harass Aelle’s lands. That belief, if it convinced Aelle, would surely provoke him to battle. We made the beginnings of an earthen rampart, but lacking the proper tools we made a poor showing of the wall, though it must have helped the deception.

We were busy enough, but that did not stop a rancorous division showing in the army. Some, like Meurig, believed we had adopted the wrong strategy from the start. It would have been better, Meurig now said, if we had sent three or more smaller armies to take the Saxon fortresses on the frontier. We should have harassed and provoked, but instead we were growing ever hungrier in a self-made trap deep in Lloegyr.

‘And maybe he’s right,’ Arthur confessed to me on the third morning.

‘No, Lord,’ I insisted, and to prove my point I gestured north towards the wide smear of smoke that betrayed where a growing horde of Saxons was gathering beyond the stream. Arthur shook his head. ‘Aelle’s army is there, right enough,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t mean he’ll attack. They’ll watch us, but if he has any sense, he’ll let us rot here.’

‘We could attack him,’ I suggested.

He shook his head. ‘Leading an army through trees and across a stream is a recipe for disaster. That’s our last resort, Derfel. Just pray he comes today.’

But he did not come, and that was the end of the fifth day since the Saxons had destroyed our supplies. Tomorrow we would eat crumbs and in two days more we would be ravenous. In three we would gaze defeat in its horrid eyes. Arthur displayed no concern, whatever doom the grumblers in the army suggested, and that evening, as the sun drifted down over distant Dumnonia, Arthur beckoned for me to climb and join him on the growing wall of our crudely constructed hall. I clambered up the logs and pulled myself onto the top of the wall. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing east, and far off on the horizon I could see another smear of grey smoke and beneath the smoke, its buildings lit by the slanting sun, was a great town bigger than any I had ever seen before. Bigger then Glevum or Corinium, bigger even than Aquae Sulis. ‘London,’ Arthur said in a tone of wonder. ‘Did you ever think to see it?’

‘Yes, Lord.’

He smiled. ‘My confident Derfel Cadarn.’ He was perched on the wall’s top, holding onto an untrimmed pillar and staring fixedly at the city. Behind us, in the rectangle of the hall’s timbers, the army’s horses were stabled. Those poor horses were already hungry, for there was little grass on the dry heathland and we had brought no forage for them. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it,’ Arthur said, still gazing at London,

‘that by now Lancelot and Cerdic could have done battle and we’ll know nothing about it.’

‘Pray Lancelot won,’ I said.

‘I do, Derfel, I do.’ He kicked his heels against the half built wall. ‘What a chance Aelle has!’ he said suddenly. ‘He could cut down the best warriors of Britain here. By year’s end, Derfel, his men could hold our halls. They could stroll to the Severn Sea. All gone. All Britain! Gone.’ He seemed to find the thought amusing, then he twisted about and looked down at the horses. ‘We could always eat them,’ he said. ‘Their meat will keep us alive for a week or two.’

‘Lord!’ I protested at his pessimism.

‘Don’t worry, Derfel,’ he laughed, ‘I’ve sent our old friend Aelle a message.’

‘You have?’

‘Sagramor’s woman. Malla, her name is. What odd names these Saxons have. You know her?’

‘I’ve seen her, Lord.’ Malla was a tall girl with long muscular legs and shoulders broad as a barrel. Sagramor had taken her captive in one of his raids late in the previous year and she had evidently accepted her fate with a passivity that was reflected in her flat, almost vacant face that was surrounded by a mass of gold-coloured hair. Other than that hair there was no one feature of Malla’s that was particularly attractive, but somehow she was still oddly alluring; a great, strong, slow, robust creature with a calm grace and a demeanour as taciturn as her Numidian lover.

‘She’s pretending to have escaped us,’ Arthur explained, ‘and even now she should be telling Aelle that we plan to stay here through the coming winter. She says Lancelot’s coming to join us with another three hundred spears, and that we need him here because a lot of our men are weak with sickness, despite our pits being filled with good food.’ He smiled. ‘She’s spinning endless nonsense to him, or I hope she is.’

‘Or maybe she’s telling him the truth,’ I suggested gloomily.

‘Maybe.’ He sounded unworried. He watched a line of men bringing skins of water from a spring that bubbled at the foot of the southern slope. ‘But Sagramor trusts her,’ he added, ‘and I long ago learned to trust Sagramor.’

I made the sign against evil. ‘I wouldn’t let my woman go to an enemy camp.’

‘She volunteered,’ Arthur said. ‘She says the Saxons won’t harm her. It seems her father is one of their chiefs.’

‘Pray she loves him less than she loves Sagramor.’

Arthur shrugged. The risk was taken now and discussing it would not lessen its dangers. He changed the subject. ‘I want you in Dumnonia when all this is done.’

‘Willingly, Lord, if you promise me Ceinwyn will be safe,’ I answered and, when he tried to dismiss my fears with a wave of his hand, I persevered. ‘I hear tales of a dog being killed and its bloody pelt draped on a bitch.’

Arthur twisted about, swung his legs over the wall and dropped down into the makeshift stables. He shoved a horse aside and beckoned for me to join him where no man could see us or hear us. He was angry. ‘Tell me again what you hear,’ he commanded me.

‘That a dog was killed,’ I said when I had jumped down, ‘and its bloody pelt was draped on a crippled bitch.’

‘And who did that?’ he demanded.

‘A friend of Lancelot’s,’ I answered, unwilling to name his wife.

He struck a hand against the crude timber wall, startling the closest horses. ‘My wife,’ he said, ‘is a friend to King Lancelot.’ I said nothing. ‘A s am I,’ he challenged me, and still I said nothing. ‘He’s a proud man, Derfel, and he lost his father’s kingdom because I failed in my oath. I owe him.’ He said the last three words coldly.

I matched his coldness with my own. ‘I hear,’ I said, ‘that the crippled bitch was given the name Ceinwyn.’

‘Enough!’ He slapped the wall again. ‘Stories! Just stories! No one denies there’s resentment for what you and Ceinwyn did, Derfel, I am not a fool, but I will not hear this nonsense from you! Guinevere attracts these rumours. People resent her. Any woman who is beautiful, who is clever, and who has hard opinions and isn’t afraid to speak them attracts resentment, but are you saying she would work some filthy spell against Ceinwyn? That she’d slaughter a dog and skin it? Do you believe that?’

‘I would like not to,’ I said.

‘Guinevere is my wife.’ He had lowered his voice, but the tone was still bitter. ‘I don’t have other wives, I don’t take slaves to my bed, I am hers and she is mine, Derfel, and I will not hear anything said against her. Nothing!’ He shouted that last word and I wondered if he was remembering the filthy insults hurled by Gorfyddyd at Lugg Vale. Gorfyddyd had claimed to have bedded Guinevere, and claimed further that a whole legion of other men had bedded her as well. I remembered Valerin’s lover’s ring, cut by the cross and decorated with Guinevere’s symbol, but I thrust the memories aside.

‘Lord,’ I said quietly, ‘I never mentioned your wife’s name.’

He stared at me, and for a second I thought he was going to strike me, then he shook his head. ‘She can be difficult, Derfel. There are times when I wish she was not so ready to show scorn, but I cannot imagine living without her advice.’ He paused and gave me a rueful smile. ‘I cannot imagine living without her. She has killed no dogs, Derfel, she has killed no dogs. Trust me. That Goddess of hers, Isis, doesn’t demand sacrifices, at least not of living things. Of gold, yes.’ He grinned, his good mood suddenly restored. ‘Isis swallows gold.’

‘I believe you. Lord,’ I said, ‘but that doesn’t make Ceinwyn safe. Dinas and Lavaine have threatened her.’

He shook his head. ‘You hurt Lancelot, Derfel. I don’t blame you, for I know what drove you, but can you blame him for resenting you? And Dinas and Lavaine serve Lancelot, and it’s only right that men should share their master’s grudges.’ He paused. ‘When this war is done, Derfel,’ he went on, ‘we shall make a reconciliation. All of us! When I make my band of warriors into brothers, we shall make peace between us all. You, Lancelot and everyone. And until that happens, Derfel, I swear Ceinwyn’s protection. On my life if you insist. You can impose the oath, Derfel. You can demand whatever price you want, my life, my son’s life even, because I need you. Dumnonia needs you. Culhwch is a good man, but he can’t manage Mordred.’

‘Can I?’ I asked.

‘Mordred is wilful,’ Arthur ignored my question, ‘but what do we expect? He’s Uther’s grandson, he has the blood of Kings and we don’t want him to be a milksop, but he does need discipline. He needs guidance. Culhwch thinks it’s enough to hit him, but that just makes him more stubborn. I want you and Ceinwyn to raise him.’

I shuddered. ‘You make coming home ever more attractive, Lord.’

He scowled at my levity. ‘Never forget, Derfel, that our oath is to give Mordred his throne. That is why I came back to Britain. That is my first duty in Britain, and all who are sworn to me are sworn to that oath. No one said it would be easy, but it will be done. Nine years from now we shall acclaim Mordred on Caer Cadarn. On that day, Derfel, we are all released from the oath and I pray to every God who will listen to me that on that day I will be able to hang up Excalibur and never fight again. But till that good day comes, whatever the difficulties, we shall cleave to our oath. Do you understand that?’

‘Yes, Lord,’ I said humbly.

‘Good.’ Arthur pushed a horse aside. ‘Aelle will come tomorrow,’ he said confidently as he walked away, ‘so sleep well.’

The sun sank over Dumnonia, drowning it in red fire. To the north our enemy chanted war songs, and about our campfires we sang of home. Our sentinels gazed into the darkness, the horses whinnied, Merlin’s dogs howled and some of us slept.

At dawn we saw that Merlin’s three pillars had been thrown down during the night. A Saxon wizard, his hair dunged into spikes and his naked body barely hidden by the tattered scraps of wolfskin hanging from a band at his neck, whirled in a dance where the pillars had stood. The sight of that wizard convinced Arthur that Aelle was planning his assault.

We deliberated made no show of readiness. Our sentinels stood guard; other spearmen just lazed on the forward slope as if they expected another uneventful day, but behind them, in the shadows of the shelters and under the remains of the whitebeam and yew, and inside the walls of the half-built hall, the mass of our men made ready.

We tightened shield straps, honed swords and blades that were already ground to a wicked edge, then we hammered spearheads tight onto their staffs. We touched our amulets, we embraced each other, we ate what little bread we had left and prayed to whatever Gods we believed would help us this day. Merlin, Iorweth and Nimue wandered among the shelters touching blades and distributing sprigs of dried vervain to offer us protection.

I donned my battle gear. I had heavy knee-length boots with strips of iron sewn to protect my calves from the spear stroke that comes under the shield’s edge. I wore the woollen shirt made from Ceinwyn’s crudely spun wool and over it a leather coat on which I had pinned Ceinwyn’s little golden brooch that had been my protective talisman all these long years. Over the leather I hauled a coat of chain mail, a luxury I had taken from a dead Powysian chief at Lugg Vale. It was an ancient coat of Roman make and had been forged with a skill that no man now possesses, and I often wondered what other spearmen had worn that knee-length coat of linked iron rings. The Powysian warrior had died in it, cut down through the skull by Hywelbane, but I suspected at least one other of the coat’s wearers had been killed wearing the mail for its rings had a deep rent over the left breast. The shattered mail had been crudely repaired with links of iron chain.

I wore warrior rings on my left hand, for in battle they served to protect the fingers, but I put none on my right for the iron rings made gripping a sword or spear more difficult. I strapped leather greaves on my forearms. My helmet was of iron, a simple bowl shape lined with cloth-padded leather, but at the back of it there was a thick flap of hog leather to protect my neck, and earlier in the spring I had paid a smith at Caer Sws to rivet two cheek pieces onto its flanks. The helmet was surmounted by an iron knob from which hung a wolf-tail taken in the deep woods of Benoic. I belted Hywelbane at my waist, pushed my left hand through the leather loops of my shield and hefted my war spear. The spear was taller than a man, its shaft thick as Ceinwyn’s wrist, and at its head was a long, heavy, leaf-shaped blade. The blade was razor sharp, and the steel’s butt ends were rounded smooth so that the blade could not be trapped in an enemy’s belly or armour. I wore no cloak for the day was too hot. Cavan, dressed in his armour, came to me and knelt. ‘If I fight well, Lord,’ he asked, ‘can I paint a fifth point on my shield?’

‘I expect men to fight well,’ I said, ‘so why should I reward them for doing what is expected of them?’

‘Then if I bring you a trophy, Lord?’ he suggested. ‘A chieftain’s axe? Gold?’

‘Bring me a Saxon chief, Cavan,’ I said, ‘and you can paint a hundred points on your star.’

‘Five will suffice, Lord,’ he said.

The morning passed slowly. Those of us in metal armour sweated heavily in the heat. From beyond the northern stream, where the Saxons were shrouded by trees, it must have looked as if our encampment was asleep, or else peopled by sick, unmoving men, but that illusion did not serve to bring the Saxons through the trees. The sun climbed higher. Our scouts, the lightly armed horsemen who rode with only a sheaf of throwing spears as weapons, trotted out of the camp. They would have no place in a battle between shield-walls and so they took their nervous horses south towards the Thames. They could come back quickly enough, though if disaster struck they were under orders to ride westwards and take a warning of our defeat to distant Dumnonia. Arthur’s own horsemen donned their heavy armour of leather and iron, and then, with straps that they draped about their horses’ withers, they hung the clumsy leather shields that protected their horses’ breasts.

Arthur, hidden with his horsemen inside the half-built hall, was wearing his famous scale armour that was a Roman suit made of thousands of small iron plates sewn onto a leather jerkin so that the scales overlapped like fish scales. There were silver plates among the iron so that the suit seemed to shimmer as he moved. He wore a white cloak and Excalibur, in its magical cross-hatched scabbard that protected its wearer from harm, hung at his left hip, while his servant Hygwydd held his long spear, his silver-grey helmet with its plume of goose feathers and his round shield with its mirror-like coating of silver. In peace Arthur liked to dress modestly, but in war he was flamboyant. He liked to think his reputation was made by honest government, but the dazzling armour and polished shield betrayed that he knew the real source of his fame.

Culhwch had once ridden with Arthur’s heavy horsemen, but now, like me, he led a band of spearmen and at midday he sought me out and dropped beside me in the small shade of my turf shelter. He wore an iron breastplate, a leather jerkin and had greaves of Roman bronze on his bare calves. ‘Bastard isn’t coming.’ he grumbled.

‘Tomorrow, maybe?’ I suggested,

He sniffed disgustedly, then offered me an earnest look. ‘I know what you’re going to say, Derfel, but I’ll ask you just the same, though before you answer I want you to consider something. Who was it who fought beside you in Benoic? Who stood shield to shield with you at Ynys Trebes? Who shared his ale with you and even let you seduce that fisher-girl? Who held your hand at Lugg Vale? It was I. Remember that when you answer me. So what food have you got hidden?’

I smiled. ‘None.’

‘You’re a big Saxon bag of useless guts,’ he said, ‘that’s what you are.’ He looked at Galahad who was resting with my men. ‘Have you got food, Lord Prince?’ he asked.

‘I gave my last crust to Tristan,’ Galahad answered.

‘A Christian act, I suppose?’ Culhwch asked scornfully.

‘I should like to think so,’ Galahad said.

‘No wonder I’m a pagan,’ Culhwch said. ‘I need food. Can’t kill Saxons on an empty belly’ He scowled about my men, but no one offered him anything, for they had nothing to offer. ‘So you’re going to take that bastard Mordred off my hands?’ he asked me when he had abandoned hope of a morsel.

‘That’s what Arthur wants.’

‘It’s what I want,’ he said vigorously. ‘If I had food here, Derfel, I’d give you every last bite in return for that favour. You’re welcome to the snivelling little bastard. Let him make your life a misery instead of mine, but I warn you, you’ll wear your belt out on his rotten skin.’

‘It might not be wise,’ I said cautiously, ‘to whip my future King.’

‘It might not be wise, but it’s pleasurable. Ugly little toad.’ He twisted to look past the shelter. ‘What’s the matter with these Saxons? Don’t they want a battle?’

His answer came almost immediately. Suddenly a horn sounded its deep, mournful call, then we heard the thump of one of the big drums that the Saxons carried to war and we all stirred in time to see Aelle’s army come from the trees beyond the stream. One moment it was an empty landscape of leaves and spring sunshine, and then the enemy was there.

There were hundreds of them. Hundreds of fur-clad, iron-bound men with axes, dogs, spears and shields. Their banners were bull skulls lofted on poles and hung with rags, while their vanguard was a troop of wizards with dung-spiked hair who pranced ahead of the shield wall and hurled their curses at us.

Merlin and the other Druids went down the slope to meet the wizards. They did not walk, but, like all Druids before battle, they hopped on one leg and kept their balance with their staffs while holding their free hands in the air. They stopped a hundred paces from the nearest wizards and returned their curses while the army’s Christian priests stood at the top of the slope and spread their hands and gazed into the sky as they called for their God’s aid.

The rest of us were scrambling into line. Agricola was on the left with his Roman-uniformed troops, the rest of us made up the centre, and Arthur’s horsemen who, for the moment, remained hidden in the crude hall would eventually form our right wing. Arthur pulled on his helmet, struggled onto Llamrei’s back, draped his white cloak over the horse’s rump, then took his heavy spear and shining shield from Hygwydd.

Sagramor, Cuneglas and Agricola led the footmen. For the moment, and only until Arthur’s horsemen appeared, my men had the right-hand end of the line and I saw we were likely to be outflanked as the Saxon line was much wider than ours. They outnumbered us. The bards will tell you there were thousands of the vermin at that battle, but I suspect Aelle had no more than six hundred men. The Saxon King, of course, possessed far more spearmen than those we saw in front of us, though he, like us, had been forced to leave strong garrisons in his border fortresses, but even six hundred spearmen was a large army. And there were just as many followers behind the shield-wall; mostly women and children who would take no part in the battle but who doubtless hoped to pick our corpses clean when the righting was done.

Our Druids laboriously hopped back up the slope. Sweat poured down Merlin’s face into the strapped plaits of his long beard. ‘No magic,’ he told us, ‘their wizards don’t know real magic. You’re safe.’ He pushed between our shields, going to seek Nimue. The Saxons marched slowly towards us. Their wizards spat and screamed, men shouted at their followers to keep the line straight while others shouted insults at us.

Our war horns had begun to blare their challenge and our men now began to sing. At our end of the shield-wall we were singing the great Battle Song of Beli Mawr that is a triumphant howl of slaughter that puts fire into a man’s belly. Two of my men were dancing in front of the shield wall, stepping and leaping over their swords and spears that were laid crosswise on the ground. I called them back into the wall because I thought the Saxons would keep marching straight up the shallow hill and thus precipitate a quick bloody clash, but instead they stopped a hundred paces away from us and realigned their shields to make the continuous wall of leather-strengthened timber. They fell silent as their wizards pissed towards us. Their huge dogs barked and jerked at their leashes, the war drums pounded on, and every now and then a horn would make its sad wail, but otherwise the Saxons remained silent except to beat their spear butts against their shields in time to the drums’ heavy beat.

‘First Saxons I’ve seen.’ Tristan had come to my side and was staring at the Saxon army with its thick fur armour, double-bladed axes, dogs and spears.

‘They die easily enough,’ I told him.

‘I don’t like the axes,’ he confessed, touching the iron-sheathed rim of his shield for luck.

‘They’re clumsy things,’ I tried to reassure him. ‘One swing and they’re useless. Catch it plumb on your shield and thrust low with your sword. It always works.’ Or almost always. The Saxon drums suddenly ceased, the enemy line parted in its centre and Aelle himself appeared. He stood and stared at us for a few seconds, spat, then ostentatiously threw down his spear and shield to show that he wanted to talk. He strode towards us, a huge, tall, dark-haired man in a thick black bearskin robe. Two wizards accompanied him and a thin, balding man whom I presumed was his interpreter.

Cuneglas, Meurig, Agricola, Merlin and Sagramor went to meet him. Arthur had decided to stay with his horsemen and, because Cuneglas was the only King on our side of the field, it was right that Cuneglas should speak for us, but he invited the others to accompany him and beckoned me forward as his interpreter. It was thus that I met Aelle for the second time. He was a tall, broad-chested man with a flat, hard face and dark eyes. His beard was full and black, his cheeks were scarred, his nose broken and there were two fingers missing from his right hand. He was dressed in a suit of mail and boots of leather, and he wore an iron helmet on which two bull’s horns had been mounted. There was British gold at his throat and on his wrists. The bearskin robe that covered his armour must have been swelteringly uncomfortable on that hot day, but such a rich pelt could stop a sword blow as well as any iron armour. He glared at me. ‘I remember you, worm,’ he said. ‘A Saxon turncoat.’

I bowed my head briefly. ‘Greetings, Lord King.’

He spat. ‘You think, because you are polite, that your death will be easy?’

‘My death has nothing to do with you, Lord King,’ I said. ‘But I expect to tell my grandchildren of yours.’

He laughed, then cast a mocking glance at the five leaders. ‘Five of you! And only one of me! And where’s Arthur? Voiding his bowels in terror?’

I named our leaders to Aelle, then Cuneglas took up the dialogue that I translated for him. He began, as was customary, by demanding Aelle’s immediate surrender. We would be merciful, Cuneglas said. We would demand Aelle’s life and all his treasury and all his weapons and all his women and all his slaves, but his spearmen could go free, minus their right hands.

Aelle, as was customary, sneered at the demand, revealing a mouth of rotting, discoloured teeth.

‘Does Arthur think,’ he demanded, ‘that because he stays hidden we do not know he is here with his horses? Tell him, worm, that I shall pillow my head on his corpse this night. Tell him his wife will be my whore, and that when I’ve exhausted her she shall be the pleasure of my slaves. And tell that moustached fool,’ he gestured towards Cuneglas, ‘that by nightfall this place will be known as the Grave of Britons. Tell him,’ he went on, ‘that I shall snip off his whiskers and make them a plaything for my daughter’s cats. Tell him I shall carve a drinking cup from his skull and feed his belly to my dogs. And tell that demon,’ he jerked his beard at Sagramor, ‘that today his black soul will go to the terrors of Thor and that it will squirm in the circle of serpents for ever. And as for him,’ he looked at Agricola, ‘I have long wanted his death and the memory of it will amuse me in the long nights to come. And tell that limpid thing,’ he spat towards Meurig, ‘that I shall slice off his balls and make him into my cup-bearer. Tell them all that, worm.’

‘He says no,’ I told Cuneglas.

‘Surely he said more than that?’ Meurig, who was only present because of his rank, insisted pedantically.

‘You don’t want to know,’ Sagramor said tiredly.

‘All knowledge is relevant,’ Meurig protested.

‘What are they saying, worm?’ Aelle demanded of me, ignoring his own interpreter.

‘They are arguing which of them should have the pleasure of killing you, Lord King,’ I said. Aelle spat. ‘Tell Merlin,’ the Saxon King glanced at the Druid, ‘that I offered him no insult.’

‘He knows already, Lord King,’ I said, ‘for he speaks your language.’ The Saxons feared Merlin, and even now did not want to antagonize him. The two Saxon wizards were hissing curses at him, but that was their job and Merlin took no offence. Nor did he appear to take any interest in the conference, but just stared loftily into the distance, though he did bestow a smile on Aelle after the King’s compliment. Aelle stared at me for a few heartbeats. Finally he asked me, ‘What is your tribe?’

‘Dumnonia, Lord King.’

‘Before that, fool! Your birth!’

‘Your people, Lord,’ I said. ‘Aelle’s folk.’

‘Your father?’ he demanded.

‘I never knew him, Lord. My mother was captured by Uther when I was in her belly.’

‘And her name?’

I had to think for a second or two. ‘Erce, Lord King.’ I remembered her name at last. Aelle smiled at the name. ‘A good Saxon name! Erce, the Goddess of the earth and mother of us all. How is your Erce?’

‘I have not seen her, Lord, since I was a child, but I am told she lives.’

He stared broodingly at me. Meurig was squeaking impatiently as he demanded to know what was being said, but he quietened when everyone else ignored him. ‘It is not good,’ Aelle said at last, ‘for a man to ignore his mother. What is your name?’

‘Derfel, Lord King.’

He spat on my mail coat. ‘Then shame on you, Derfel, for ignoring your mother. Would you fight for us today? For your mother’s folk?’

I smiled. ‘No, Lord King, but you do me honour.’

‘May your death be easy, Derfel. But tell this filth,’ he jerked his head at the four armed leaders, ‘that I come to eat their hearts.’ He spat a last time, turned and strode back towards his men.

‘So what did he say?’ Meurig demanded.

‘He spoke to me, Lord Prince,’ I said, ‘of my mother. And he reminded me of my sins.’ God help me, but on that day I liked Aelle.

We won the battle.

Igraine will want me to say more. She wants great heroics, and they were there, but there were also cowards present, and other men who fouled their breeches in their terror yet still kept to the shield-wall. There were men who killed no one, but just defended desperately, and there were men who gave the poets new challenges to find words to express their deeds. It was, in short, a battle. Friends died, Cavan was one, friends were wounded, Culhwch was such, and other friends lived untouched, like Galahad, Tristan and Arthur. I took an axe blow to my left shoulder, and though my mail coat took most of the blade’s force, the wound still took weeks to heal and to this day there is a ragged red scar that aches in cold weather.

What was important was not the battle, but what happened after; but first, because my dear Queen Igraine will insist on my writing of the heroics of her husband’s grandfather, King Cuneglas, I shall tell the tale briefly.

The Saxons attacked us. It took Aelle over an hour to persuade his men to assault our shield-wall and for all that time the dung-spiked wizards screamed at us, the drums beat and skins of ale were passed around the Saxon ranks. Many of our men were drinking mead, for though we might have exhausted our food, no British army ever seemed to run out of mead. At least half the men in that battle were fuddled by drink, but so men were at every battle for little else serves to give warriors the nerve to attempt that most terrifying of manoeuvres, the straightforward assault on a waiting shield-wall. I stayed sober because I always did, but the temptation to drink was strong. Some Saxons tried to provoke us into an ill-timed charge by coming close to our line and flaunting themselves without shields or helmets, but all they received for their trouble were some ill-aimed spears. A few spears were hurled back at us, but most thudded harmlessly into our shields. Two naked men, turned blood-mad by drink or magic, attacked us, and Culhwch cut down the first and Tristan the second.

We cheered both victories. The Saxons, their tongues loosened by ale, shouted insults back. Aelle’s attack, when it came, went horribly wrong. The Saxons were relying on their war dogs to break our line, but Merlin and Nimue were ready with their own dogs, only ours were not dogs, but bitches, and enough of them were on heat to drive the Saxon beasts wild. Instead of attacking us the big war dogs headed straight for the bitches and there was a flurry of growls, fights, barks and howls, and suddenly there were fornicating dogs everywhere, with other dogs fighting to dislodge the luckier ones, but not one dog bit a Briton and the Saxons, who had been ready to launch their killing charge, were thrown off balance by the failure of their dogs. They hesitated and Aelle, fearing we would charge, roared them forward and so they came at us. But they came raggedly instead of in a disciplined line. Coupling dogs howled as they were trampled underfoot, then the shields clashed with that terrible dull sound that echoes down the long years. It is the sound of battle, the sound of war-horns, men shouting, and then the splintering dull crash of shield on shield, and after the crash the screams began as spear-blades found the gaps between the shields and axes came hurtling down, but it was the Saxons who suffered most that day. The dogs between the shield-walls had broken their careful alignment and wherever that had happened to their advancing shield-wall our spearmen found gaps and pushed into them, while the ranks behind funnelled into the gaps to make shield-armoured wedges that drove ever deeper into the Saxon mass. Cuneglas led one of those wedges and very nearly reached Aelle himself. I did not see Cuneglas in the fight, though the bards sang of his part afterwards and he modestly assured me they did not exaggerate much.

I was wounded early. My shield deflected the axe blow and took most of its force, but the blade still struck my shoulder and numbed my left arm, though the wound did not stop my spear from slicing the throat of the axeman. Then, when the press of men was too great for the spear to be of more use, I drew Hywelbane and stabbed and hacked her blade into the grunting, swaying, shoving mass of men. It became a pushing match, but so do all battles until one side breaks. Just a sweaty, hot, filthy pushing match.

This one was made more difficult because the Saxon line, that was everywhere about five men deep, outflanked our shield-wall. To guard against envelopment we had bent our line back at its ends to present two smaller shield-walls to the attackers, and for a time those two Saxon flanks hesitated, perhaps hoping that the men in the centre would break through us first. Then a Saxon chieftain came to my end of the line and shamed his men into an assault. He ran forward on his own, swept aside two spears with his shield, and hurled himself at the centre of our flank’s short line. Cavan died there, pierced by a lunge of the Saxon chief’s sword, and the sight of that brave man single-handedly opening up our flank wall brought his men roaring forward in a wild, elated rush.

It was then that Arthur charged out of the unfinished hall. I did not see the charge, but I heard it. The bards say his horses’ hooves shook the world, and indeed the ground did seem to quiver, though perhaps that was only the noise of those great beasts that were shod with flat iron plates strapped tight to their hooves. The big horses hit the exposed end of the Saxon line and the battle really ended with that terrible impact. Aelle had supposed that his men would break us with dogs, and that his rearward ranks would hold off our horsemen with their shields and spears, for he knew well enough that no horse would ever charge home into a well-defended spear-wall and I did not doubt that he had heard how Gorfyddyd’s spearmen had thus kept Arthur at bay in Lugg Vale. But the exposed Saxon flank had become disordered as it charged and Arthur timed his intervention perfectly. He did not wait for his horsemen to form up, he just spurred out of the shadows, shouted at his men to follow and drove Llamrel hard into the open end of the Saxon ranks.

I was spitting at a bearded toothless Saxon who was cursing over the rim of our two shields when Arthur struck. His white cloak streamed behind, his white plumes soared above, and his bright shield threw down the Saxon chief’s banner that was a blood-painted bull’s skull as his spear lanced forward. He abandoned the spear in a Saxon’s belly and ripped Excalibur free, carving it right and left as he drove deep into the enemy’s ranks. Agravain came next, his horse scattering terrified Saxons, then Lanval and the others crashed into the breaking enemy line with swords and spears. Aelle’s men broke like eggs under a hammer. They just ran. I doubt that battle took more than ten minutes from the dogs beginning it to the horses ending it, though it took an hour or more for our horsemen to exhaust their slaughter. Our light horsemen raced screaming across the heath as they carried their spears towards the fleeing enemy and Arthur’s heavier horses drove among the scattered men, killing and killing, while the spearmen ran after, eager for every scrap of plunder. The Saxons ran like deer. They threw away cloaks, armour and weapons in their eagerness to escape. Aelle tried to check them for a moment, then saw the task was hopeless and so cast off his bearskin cloak and ran with his men. He escaped into the trees just a bare moment before our light horsemen plunged after him.

I stayed among the wounded and the dead. Injured dogs howled in pain. Culhwch was staggering with a bleeding thigh, but he would live and so I ignored him and crouched by Cavan. I had never seen him weep before, but his pain was terrible for the Saxon chief’s sword had gone right through his belly. I held his hand, wiped his tears and told him that he had killed his enemy with his counter-thrust. Whether that was true I did not know nor care, I only wanted Cavan to believe it and so I promised him he would cross the bridge of swords with a fifth point on his shield. ‘You will be the first of us to reach the Otherworld,’ I told him, ‘so you will make a place for us.’

‘I will, Lord.’

‘And we shall come to you.’

He gritted his teeth and arched his back, trying to suppress a scream, and I put my right hand round his neck and held my cheek against his. I was weeping. ‘Tell them in the Otherworld,’ I said in his ear,

‘that Derfel Cadarn salutes you as a brave man.’

‘The Cauldron,’ he said. ‘I should have. .’

‘No,’ I interrupted him, ‘no.’ And then, with a mewing sound, he died. I sat beside his body, rocking back and forth because of the pain in my shoulder and the grief in my soul. Tears ran down my cheeks. Issa stood beside me, not knowing what to say, so saying nothing. ‘He always wanted to go home to die,’ I said, ‘to Ireland.’ And after this battle, I thought, he could have done that with so much honour and wealth.

‘Lord,’ Issa said to me.

I thought he was trying to comfort me, but I did not want comfort. The death of a brave man deserves tears and so I ignored Issa and held Cavan’s corpse instead while his soul began its last journey to the bridge of swords that lies beyond Cruachan’s Cave.

‘Lord!’ Issa said again, and something in his voice made me look up. I saw he was pointing east towards London, but when I turned in that direction I could see nothing because the tears were blurring my view. I cuffed them angrily away. And then I saw that another army had come to the field. Another fur-swathed army beneath banners of skulls and bull-horns. Another army with dogs and axes. Another Saxon horde. For Cerdic had come.

I realized later that all the ruses we had devised to make Aelle attack us and all that good food we had burned to entice his assault had been so much wasted effort, for the Bretrvalda must have known that Cerdic was coming and that he was not coming to attack us, but to attack his fellow Saxon. Cerdic, indeed, was proposing to join us, and Aelle had decided that his best chance of surviving the combined armies was to beat Arthur first and deal with Cerdic afterwards.

Aelle lost that gamble. Arthur’s horsemen broke him and Cerdic arrived too late to join the fight, though surely, for a few moments at least, the treacherous Cerdic must have been tempted to attack Arthur. One swift attack would have broken us and a week’s campaigning would certainly have finished off Aelle’s shattered army, and Cerdic would then have been the ruler of all southern Britain. Cerdic must have been tempted, but he hesitated. He had fewer than three hundred men, plenty enough to have overwhelmed what Britons remained on the heath’s low summit, but Arthur’s silver horn sounded again and again, and the horn-call summoned enough of the heavily armoured cavalry from the trees to make a brave show on Cerdic’s northern flank. Cerdic had never faced those big horses in battle and the sight of them gave him pause long enough for Sagramor, Agricola and Cuneglas to assemble a shield-wall on the heath’s summit. It was a perilously small wall, for most of our men were still too busy pursuing Aelle’s warriors or sacking his encampment in search of food.

Those of us on the low hilltop readied ourselves for battle and it promised to be a grim business because our hurriedly assembled shield-wall was much smaller than Cerdic’s line. At that time, of course, we still did not know it was Cerdic’s army; at first we assumed these new Saxons were Aelle’s own reinforcements come late to the battle, and the banner they were displaying, a wolfs skull painted red and hung with the tanned skin of a dead man, meant nothing to us. Cerdic’s usual banner was a pair of horse-tails attached to a thigh bone mounted crosswise on a pole, but his wizards had devised this new symbol and it momentarily confused us. More men straggled back from their pursuit of Aelle’s defeated remnant to thicken our wall as Arthur led his horsemen back to our hilltop. He trotted Llamrei down our ranks and I remember that his white cloak was spotted and streaked with blood. ‘They’ll die like the rest!’ he encouraged us as he trotted past, the bloodstained Excalibur in his hand. ‘They’ll die like the rest.’

Then, just as Aelle’s army had parted to let Aelle emerge from the ranks, so this new Saxon force divided and their leaders came towards us. Three of them walked, but six came on horseback, curbing their mounts to keep pace with the three men on foot. One of the men on foot carried the gruesome wolf’s skull banner, then one of the horsemen raised a second banner and a gasp of astonishment ran down our army. The gasp made Arthur wheel his horse and stare aghast at the approaching men. For the new banner showed a sea-eagle with a fish in its claws. It was Lancelot’s flag, and now I could see that Lancelot himself was one of the six horsemen. He was splendidly arrayed in his white enamelled armour and his swan-winged helmet, and he was flanked by Arthur’s twin sons, Amhar and Loholt. Dinas and Lavaine in their Druids’ robes rode behind, while Ade, Lancelot’s red-haired mistress, carried the Silurian King’s banner.

Sagramor had come to stand beside me and he glanced at me to make certain that I was seeing what he was seeing, and then he spat onto the heath. ‘Is Malla safe?’ I asked him

‘Safe and unharmed,’ he said, pleased I had asked. He looked back at the approaching Lancelot. ‘Do you understand what’s happening?’

‘No.’ None of us did.

Arthur sheathed Excalibur and turned to me. ‘Derfel?’ he called, wanting me as a translator, then he beckoned to his other leaders just as Lancelot broke away from the approaching delegation and spurred excitedly up the gently sloping hill towards us.

‘Allies!’ I heard Lancelot shout. He waved back at the Saxons. ‘Allies!’ he shouted again as his horse drew near to Arthur.

Arthur said nothing. He just stood his horse as Lancelot struggled to quieten his big black stallion.

‘Allies,’ Lancelot said a third time. ‘It’s Cerdic,’ he added excitedly, gesturing towards the Saxon King who was walking slowly towards us.

Arthur asked quietly, ‘What have you done?’

‘I’ve brought you allies!’ Lancelot said happily, then glanced at me. ‘Cerdic has his own translator,’ he said dismissively.

‘Derfel stays!’ Arthur snapped with a sudden and terrifying anger in his voice. Then he remembered that Lancelot was a King and sighed. ‘What have you done, Lord King?’ he asked again. Dinas, who had spurred ahead with the other riders, was foolish enough to answer for Lancelot.

‘We’ve made peace, Lord!’ he said in his dark voice.

‘Go!’ Arthur roared, shocking and astonishing the Druid pair with his anger. They had only ever seen the calm, patient, peace-making Arthur and did not even suspect that he contained such fury. This anger was nothing to the rage that had consumed him at Lugg Vale when the dying Gorfyddyd had called Guinevere a whore, but it was a terrifying anger all the same. ‘Go!’ he shouted at Tanaburs’s grandsons.

‘This meeting is for Lords. And you too,’ he pointed at his sons, ‘go!’ He waited until all Lancelot’s followers had withdrawn, then looked back at the Silurian King. ‘What have you done?’ he asked a third time in a bitter voice.

Lancelot’s affronted dignity made him stiff. ‘I made peace,’ he said acidly. ‘I kept Cerdic from attacking you. I did what I could to help you.’

‘What you did,’ Arthur said in an angry voice, but so low that no man in Cerdic’s approaching entourage could hear him, ‘is fight Cerdic’s battle. We’ve just half destroyed Aelle, so what does that make Cerdic? It makes him twice as powerful as before. That’s what it does! The Gods help us!’ With that he tossed his reins to Lancelot, a subtle insult, then slid off his horse’s back, twitched his bloody cloak straight and stared imperiously at the Saxons.

That was the first time I met Cerdic, and though all the bards make him sound like a fiend with cloven hooves and a serpent’s bite, in truth he was a short, slightly built man with thin fair hair that he combed straight back from his forehead and tied in a knot at the nape of his neck. He was very pale-skinned and had a broad forehead and a narrow, clean-shaven chin. His mouth was thin-lipped, his nose sharp-boned, and his eves as pale as dawn-misted water. Aelle wore his emotions on his face, but even at a first glance I doubted whether Cerdic’s self-control would ever allow his expression to betray his thoughts. He wore a Roman breastplate, woollen trews and a cloak of fox fur. He looked neat and precise; indeed, if it had not been for the gold at his throat and wrists, I might have mistaken him for a scribe. Except that his eyes were not those of a clerk; those pale eyes missed nothing and gave nothing away. ‘I am Cerdic,’ he announced himself in a soft voice.

Arthur stepped aside so that Cuneglas could name himself, then Meurig insisted on being a part of the conference. Cerdic glanced at both men, dismissed them as unimportant, then looked back to Arthur. ‘I bring you a gift,’ he said, and held a hand towards the chieftain who accompanied him. The man produced a gold-hilted knife that Cerdic presented to Arthur.

‘The gift,’ I translated Arthur’s words, ‘should go to our Lord King Cuneglas.’

Cerdic put the naked blade onto his left palm and closed his fingers about it. His eyes never left Arthur’s, and when he opened his hand there was blood on the blade. ‘The gift is for Arthur,’ he insisted. Arthur took it. He was uncharacteristically nervous, maybe fearing some magic in the bloody steel or else fearing that acceptance of the gift made him complicit in Cerdic’s ambitions. ‘Tell the King,’ he told me, ‘that I have no gift for him.’

Cerdic smiled. It was a wintry smile and I thought of how a wolf must appear to a stray lamb. ‘Tell Lord Arthur that he has given me the gift of peace,’ he told me.

‘But suppose I choose war?’ Arthur asked defiantly. ‘Here and now!’ He gestured to the hilltop where still more of our spearmen had rallied so that our numbers were now at least equal to Cerdic’s.

‘Tell him,’ Cerdic ordered me, ‘that these are not all my men,’ he gestured at his shield-wall that watched us, ‘and tell him, too, that King Lancelot gave me peace in Arthur’s name.’

I told that to Arthur and I saw a muscle flicker in his cheek, but he kept his anger curbed. ‘In two days,’ Arthur said, and it was not a suggestion, but an order, ‘we shall meet in London. There we shall discuss our peace.’ He pushed the bloody knife into his belt and, when I had finished translating his words, he summoned me. He did not wait to hear Cerdic’s response, but just led me up the hill until we were out of earshot of both delegations. He noticed my shoulder for the first time. ‘How bad is your wound?’

‘It’ll heal,’ I said.

He stopped, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘What Cerdic wants,’ he told me when he opened his eyes, ‘is to rule all Lloegyr. But if we let him do that then we have one terrible enemy instead of two weaker ones.’ He walked in silence for a few paces, stepping among the dead left from Aelle’s charge. ‘Before this war,’ he continued bitterly, ‘Aelle was powerful and Cerdic was a nuisance, but with Aelle destroyed we could have turned on Cerdic. Now it’s the other way round. Aelle is weakened, but Cerdic is powerful.’

‘So fight him now,’ I said.

He looked at me with weary brown eyes. ‘Be honest, Derfel,’ he said in a low voice, ‘not boastful. Will we win if we fight?’

I looked at Cerdic’s army. It was tightly arrayed and ready for battle, while our men were weary and hungry, but Cerdic’s men had never faced Arthur’s horsemen. ‘I think we would win, Lord,’ I said honestly.

‘So do I,’ Arthur said, ‘but it will be hard fighting, Derfel, and at the end of it we’ll have at least a hundred wounded men we’ll need to carry back home with us and the Saxons will summon every garrison in Lloegyr to face us. We might beat Cerdic here, but we’ll never reach home alive. We’re too deep in Lloegyr.’ He grimaced at the thought. ‘And if we weaken ourselves fighting against Cerdic do you think Aelle won’t be waiting to ambush us on the way home?’ He shuddered with a sudden surge of anger. ‘What was Lancelot thinking of? I can’t have Cerdic as an ally! He’ll gain half Britain, turn on us and we’ll have a Saxon enemy twice as terrible as before.’ He uttered one of his rare curses, then rubbed his bony face with a gloved hand. ‘Well, the broth’s spoilt,’ he went on bitterly, ‘but we still have to eat it. The only answer is to leave Aelle strong enough to frighten Cerdic still, so take six of my horsemen and find him. Find him, Derfel, and give him this wretched thing as a gift.’ He thrust Cerdic’s knife at me.

‘Clean it first,’ he said irritably, ‘and you can take his bearskin cloak as well. Agravain found it. Give that to him as a second gift and tell him to come to London. Tell him I oath-swear his safety, and tell him it is his only chance to keep some land. You have two days, Derfel, so find him.’

I hesitated, not because I disagreed, but because I did not understand why Aelle needed to be in London. ‘Because,’ Arthur answered wearily, ‘I cannot stay in London with Aelle loose in Lloegyr. He might have lost his army here, but he has garrisons enough to make another, and while we disentangle ourselves from Cerdic he could lay half Dumnonia waste.’ He turned and stared balefully at Lancelot and Cerdic. I thought he was going to curse again, but he just sighed wearily. ‘I’m going to make a peace, Derfel. The Gods know it isn’t the peace I wanted, but we might as well make it properly. Now go, my friend, go.’

I stayed long enough to make certain that Issa would take proper care of the burning of Cavan’s body and that he would find a lake and throw the dead Irishman’s sword into the water, and then I rode north in the wake of a beaten army.

While Arthur, his dream skewed by a fool, marched to London.

I had long dreamed of seeing London, but even in my wildest fancies I had not imagined its reality. I had thought it would be like Glevum, a little larger perhaps, but still a place where a group of tall buildings would be clustered about a central open space with small streets huddled behind and an earth wall ringing it all, but in London there were six such open spaces, all with their pillared halls, arcaded temples and brick-built palaces. The ordinary houses, that in Glevum or Durnovaria were low and thatched, were here built two or three storeys high. Many of the houses had collapsed over the years, but plenty still had their tiled roofs and folk still climbed their steep timber stairs. Most of our men had never seen a flight of stairs inside a building and on their first day in London they had raced like excited children to see the view from the topmost floors. Finally one of the buildings had collapsed under their weight and Arthur then forbade any more stair-climbing.

The fortress of London was bigger then Caer Sws, and that fortress was merely the north-west bastion of the city’s wall. There were a dozen barracks inside the fortress, each bigger than a feasting hall, and each made of small red bricks. Beside the fortress was an amphitheatre, a temple, and one of the city’s ten bath-houses. Other towns had such things, of course, but everything here was taller and wider. Durnovaria’s amphitheatre was a thing of grassy earth and I had always thought it impressive enough until I saw the London arena that could have swallowed five amphitheatres like Durnovaria’s. The wall about the city was built of stone instead of earth, and though Aelle had allowed its ramparts to crumble, it was still a formidable barrier that was now crowned with Cerdic’s triumphant men. Cerdic had occupied the city and the presence of his skull banners on the walls showed that he intended to keep it.

The river bank also possessed a stone wall that had first been built against the Saxon pirates. Gaps in that wall led to quays, and one gap opened into a canal that ran into the heart of a threat garden about which a palace was built. There were still busts and statues in the palace, and long tiled corridors and a great pillared hall where I assumed our Roman rulers had once met in government. Rainwater now trickled down the painted walls, the floor tiles were broken and the garden was a mass of weeds, but the glory was still there, even if it was only a shadow. The whole city was a shadow of its old glory. None of the city’s bath-houses still functioned. Their pools were cracked and empty, their furnaces were cold and their mosaic floors had heaved and cracked under the assault of frost and weeds. The stone streets had decayed into muddy strips, but despite the decay the city was still massive and magnificent. It made me wonder what Rome must be like. Galahad told me that London was a mere village in comparison, and that Rome’s amphitheatre was big enough to swallow twenty arenas like London’s, but I could not believe him. I could scarcely believe in London even when I was staring at it. It looked like the work of giants.

Aelle had never liked the city and would not live there, so its only inhabitants were a handful of Saxons and those Britons who had accepted Aelle’s rule. Some of those Britons still prospered. Most were merchants who traded with Gaul, and their large houses were built beside the river and their storehouses were guarded by their own walls and spearmen, but much of the rest of the city was deserted. It was a dying place, a city given to rats, a city that once had borne the title Augusta. It had been known as London the Magnificent and its river had once been thick with the masts of galleys; now it was a place of ghosts.

Aelle came to London with me. I had found him a half day’s march north of the city. He had taken refuge in a Roman fort where he was trying to reassemble an army. At first he was suspicious of my message. He had shouted at me, accusing us of using witchcraft to defeat him, then he had threatened to kill me and my escort, but I had the sense to wait his anger out patiently and, after a while, he calmed down. He had hurled Cerdic’s knife angrily away, but was pleased to have his thick bearskin cloak returned. I do not think I was ever in real danger, for I sensed that he liked me, and indeed, when his anger had fled, he threw a heavy arm round my shoulder and walked me up and down the ramparts.

‘What does Arthur want?’ he had asked me.

‘Peace, Lord king.’ The weight of his arm was hurting my wounded shoulder, but I dared not protest.

‘Peace!’ He had spat the word out like a scrap of tainted meat, but with none of the scorn he had used to reject Arthur’s offer of peace before Lugg Vale. Then Aelle had been stronger and could afford to ask a higher price. Now he was humbled, and he knew it. ‘We Saxons,’ he said, ‘are not meant to be at peace. We feed ourselves on our enemy’s grain, we clothe ourselves with their wool, we pleasure ourselves on their women. What does peace offer us?’

‘A chance to rebuild your strength, Lord King, or else Cerdic will be feeding on your grain and dressing in your wool.’

Aelle had grinned. ‘He’d like the women too.’ He had taken his arm from my shoulder and stared northwards across the fields. ‘I’ll have to yield land,’ he grumbled.

‘But if you choose war, Lord King,’ I said, ‘the price will be higher. You’ll face Arthur and Cerdic, and might finish with no land at all except the grass above your grave.’

He had turned and given me a shrewd look. ‘Arthur only wants peace so that I can fight Cerdic for him.’

‘Of course, Lord King,’ I answered.

He laughed at my honesty. ‘And if I do not come to London,’ he said, ‘you will hunt me down like a dog.’

‘Like a great boar, Lord King, whose tusks are still sharp.’

‘You talk like you fight, Derfel. Well.’ He had ordered his wizards to make a poultice from moss and spiders’ webs that they put on my wounded shoulder while he consulted his council. The consultation did not last long, for Aelle knew he had little choice. So, next morning, I marched with him down the Roman road that led back to the city. He insisted on taking an escort of sixty spearmen. ‘You may trust Cerdic,’

he told me, ‘but there isn’t a promise he’s made that he hasn’t broken. Tell that to Arthur.’

‘You tell him, Lord King.’

Aelle and Arthur met secretly on the night before they were due to negotiate with Cerdic, and that night they wrangled their own separate peace. Aelle gave up much. He gave up great swathes of land on his western frontier, and agreed to repay Arthur all the gold that Arthur had given him the year before and more gold besides. In return Arthur promised four whole years of peace and his support for Aelle if Cerdic would not agree to terms the next day. They embraced when the peace was made and afterwards, as we walked back to our encampment outside the city’s western wall, Arthur shook his head sadly. ‘You should never meet an enemy face to face,’ he said to me, ‘not if you know that one day you’ll have to destroy him. Either that or the Saxons must submit to our government and they won’t. They won’t.’

‘Maybe they will.’

He shook his head. ‘Saxon and Briton, Derfel, they don’t mix.’

‘I mix, Lord,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘But if your mother had never been captured, Derfel, you’d have been raised a Saxon and you’d probably have been in Aelle’s army by now. You’d be an enemy. You’d worship his Gods, you’d dream his dreams, and you’d want our land. They need a lot of space, these Saxons.’

But we had at least penned Aelle in, and next day, in the great palace by the river, we met Cerdic. The sun shone that day, sparkling on the canal where the Governor of Britain had once moored his river barge. The sparkling sun-motes hid the scum and mud and dirt that now clogged the canal, but nothing could hide the stench of its sewage.

Cerdic held a council meeting first and while it debated we Britons met in a room that stood above the river wall and overlooked the water so that the ceiling, which was painted with curious beings that were half women and half fish, was dappled by shimmers of rippling light. Our spearmen guarded every door and window to make certain we could not be overheard.

Lancelot was there, and had been allowed to bring Dinas and Lavaine. The three men still insisted that their peace with Cerdic had been wise, but Meurig was their only supporter and the rest of us were angry in the face of their sullen defiance. Arthur listened to our protests for a while, then interrupted to say that nothing would be solved by arguing about the past. ‘What’s done is done,’ he said, ‘but I do need one assurance.’ He looked at Lancelot. ‘Promise me,’ he said, ‘that you made no promises to Cerdic.’

‘I gave him peace,’ Lancelot insisted, ‘and suggested he help you fight Aelle. That is all.’

Merlin was seated in the window above the river. He had adopted one of the palace’s stray cats and now petted the animal on his lap. ‘What did Cerdic want?’ he asked mildly.

‘Aelle’s defeat.’

‘Just that?’ Merlin asked, not bothering to hide his disbelief.

‘Just that,’ Lancelot insisted, ‘nothing more.’ We all watched him. Arthur, Merlin, Cuneglas, Meurig, Agricola, Sagramor, Galahad, Culhwch and myself. None of us spoke, but just watched him. ‘He wanted nothing more!’ Lancelot insisted and to me he looked like a small child telling plain lies.

‘How remarkable in a king,’ Merlin said placidly, ‘to want so little.’ He began teasing the cat by flicking one of the braided strands of his beard at its paws. ‘And what did you want?’ he asked, still mildly.

‘Arthur’s victory,’ Lancelot declared.

‘Because you did not think Arthur could win it by himself?’ Merlin suggested, still playing with the cat.

‘I wanted to make it certain,’ Lancelot said. ‘I was trying to help!’ He looked round the room, seeking allies, and finding none but the youthful Meurig. ‘If you don’t want peace with Cerdic,’ he said petulantly,

‘then why don’t you fight him now?’

‘Because, Lord King, you used my name to secure his truce,’ Arthur said patiently, ‘and because our army is now many marches from home and his men lie in our path. If you had not made peace,’ he explained, still speaking courteously, ‘then half his army would be on the frontier watching your men and I would have been free to march south and attack the other half. As it is?’ He shrugged. ‘What will Cerdic demand of us today?’

‘Land,’ Agricola said firmly. ‘It’s all the Saxons ever want. Land, land, and more land. They won’t be happy till they have every scrap of land in the world, and then they’ll start looking for other worlds to put under their ploughs.’

‘He must be satisfied,’ Arthur said, ‘with the land he’s taken from Aelle. He’ll get none from us.’

‘We should take some from him,’ I spoke for the first time. ‘That land he stole last year.’ It was a fine stretch of river-land on our southern frontier, a fertile and rich tract that ran from the high moors down to the sea. The land had belonged to Melwas, the client King of the Belgae whom Arthur had sent in punishment to Isca, and it was land we sorely missed for its loss brought Cerdic very close to the rich estates about Durnovaria and also meant that his ships were just minutes away from Ynys Wit, the great island that the Romans had called Vectis and which lay just off our coast. For a year now Cerdic’s Saxons had raided Ynys Wit ruthlessly and its people were forever calling on Arthur for more spearmen to protect their holdings.

‘We should have that land back,’ Sagramor supported me. He had thanked Mithras for returning his Saxon girl unharmed by placing a captured sword in the God’s London temple.

‘I doubt,’ Meurig intervened, ‘that Cerdic made peace in order to yield land.’

‘Nor did we march to war to cede land,’ Arthur answered angrily.

‘I thought, forgive me,’ Meurig insisted, and a kind of quiet groan went through the room as he persisted with his argument, ‘but you said, did you not, that you could not prosecute war? Being so far from home? Yet now, for a stretch of land, you would risk all our lives? I hope I am not being foolish,’ he chuckled to show that he had made a joke, ‘but I fail to understand why we risk the one thing we cannot afford to endure.’

‘Lord Prince,’ Arthur said softly, ‘we may be weak here, but if we show our weakness, then we will be dead here. We do not go to Cerdic this morning ready to yield one furrow, we go making demands.’

‘And if he refuses?’ Meurig demanded indignantly.

‘Then we shall have a difficult withdrawal,’ Arthur admitted calmly. He glanced out of a window that looked down into the courtyard. ‘It seems our enemies are ready for us. Shall we go to them?’

Merlin pushed the cat off his lap and used his staff to stand up. ‘You won’t mind if I don’t come?’ he asked. ‘I’m too old to endure a day of negotiations. All that bluster and anger.’ He brushed cat hairs off his robe, then turned suddenly on Dinas and Lavaine. ‘Since when,’ he asked disapprovingly, ‘have Druids worn swords or served Christian Kings?’

‘Since we decided to do both,’ Dinas said. The twins, who were almost as tall as Merlin and much burlier, challenged him with their unblinking gaze.

‘Who made you Druids?’ Merlin demanded.

‘The same power that made you a Druid,’ said Lavaine.

‘And what power was that?’ Merlin asked, and when the twins did not answer, he sneered at them.

‘At least you know how to lay thrushes’ eggs. I suppose that kind of trick impresses Christians. Do you also turn their wine to blood and their bread to flesh?’

‘We use our magic,’ Dinas said, ‘and theirs too. It’s not the old Britain now, but a new Britain and it has new Gods. We blend their magic with the old. You could learn from us. Lord Merlin.’

Merlin spat to show his opinion of that advice, then, without another word, stalked from the room. Dinas and Lavaine were unmoved by his hostility. They possessed an extraordinary self-confidence. We followed Arthur down to the great pillared hall where, as Merlin had foretold, we blustered and postured, shouted and cajoled.

At first it was Aelle and Cerdic who made most of the noise and Arthur, as often as not, was the mediator between them, but even Arthur could not prevent Cerdic becoming land rich at Aelle’s expense. He kept possession of London and gained the valley of the Thames and great stretches of fertile land north of the Thames. Aelle’s kingdom shrank by a quarter, but he still possessed a kingdom and for that he owed Arthur thanks. He offered none, but just stalked from the room when the talking was done and left London that same day like a great wounded boar crawling back to his den. It was mid afternoon when Aelle left and Arthur, using me as an interpreter, now raised the matter of the Belgic land Cerdic had captured the year before, and he went on demanding the return of that land long after the rest of us would have given up the effort. He made no threats, he just repeated his demand over and over until Culhwch was sleeping, Agricola yawning, and I was tired of taking the sting from Cerdic’s reiterated rejections. And still Arthur persisted. He sensed that Cerdic needed time to consolidate the new lands he had taken from Aelle, and his threat was that he would give Cerdic no peace unless the river-lands were returned. Cerdic countered by threatening to fight us in London, but Arthur finally revealed that he would seek Aelle’s help in such a fight and Cerdic knew he could not beat both our armies.

It was almost dark when Cerdic at last yielded. He did not yield outright, but grudgingly said he would discuss the matter with his private council. So we woke Culhwch and walked out to the courtyard, then through a small gate in the river wall to stand on a quay where we watched the Thames slide darkly by. Most of us said little, though Meurig irritably lectured Arthur about wasting time making impossible demands, but when Arthur refused to argue the Prince gradually fell silent. Sagramor sat with his back against the wall, incessantly stroking a whetstone down his sword blade. Lancelot and the Silurian Druids stood apart from us; three tall, handsome men who were stiff with pride. Dinas stared at the darkening trees across the river while his brother gave me long speculative looks. We waited an hour and then, at last, Cerdic came to the river bank. ‘Tell Arthur this,’ he told me without any preamble, ‘that I trust none of you, like none of you and want nothing more than to kill all of you. But I will yield him the Belgic land on one condition. That Lancelot is made King of that land. Not a client King,’ he added, ‘but King, with all the powers of independent kingship.’

I stared into the Saxon’s grey-blue eyes. I was so astonished by his condition that I said nothing, not even to acknowledge his words. It was all so clear suddenly. Lancelot had made this bargain with the Saxon, and Cerdic had hidden their secret agreement behind an afternoon of scornful rejections. I had no proof of that, but I knew it had to be true, and when I looked away from Cerdic I saw that Lancelot was staring expectantly at me. He spoke no Saxon, but he knew exactly what Cerdic had just said.

‘Tell him!’ Cerdic ordered me.

I translated for Arthur. Agricola and Sagramor spat in disgust and Culhwch gave a brief, sour bellow of a laugh, but Arthur just gazed into my eyes for a few grave seconds before nodding wearily. ‘Agreed,’

he said.

‘You will leave this place at dawn,’ Cerdic said abruptly.

‘We will leave in two days,’ I responded, without bothering to consult Arthur.

‘Agreed,’ Cerdic said, and turned away.

And thus we had our peace with the Sais.

It was not the peace Arthur wanted. He had believed we could so weaken the Saxons that their ships would stop arriving from beyond the German Sea, and that in another year or two we might have driven the rest out of Britain altogether. But it was peace.

‘Fate is inexorable,’ Merlin said to me next morning. I found him in the centre of the Roman amphitheatre where he slowly turned to gaze on the banked stone seats that rose in a full circle about the arena. He had commandeered four of my spearmen who sat at the arena’s edge and watched him, though they were as ignorant as I was about their duties. ‘Are you still looking for the last Treasure?’ I asked him.

‘I do like this place,’ he said, ignoring my question as he turned around to give the whole arena another long inspection. ‘I do like it.’

‘I thought you hated the Romans.’

‘Me? Hate the Romans?’ he asked in pretended outrage. ‘How I do pray, Derfel, that my teachings will not be passed to posterity through the mangled sieve you choose to call a brain. I love all mankind!’

he declared magniloquently, ‘and even the Romans are perfectly acceptable if they stay in Rome. I told you I was in Rome once, didn’t I? Full of priests and catamites. Sansum would feel quite at home there. No, Derfel, the fault of the Romans was coming to Britain and spoiling everything, but not everything they did here was bad.’

‘They did give us this,’ I said, gesturing at the twelve tiers of seats and the lofted balcony where the Roman lords had watched the arena.

‘Oh, do spare me Arthur’s tedious lecture about roads and law-courts and bridges and structure.’ He spat the last word out. ‘Structure! What is the structure of law and roads and forts but a harness? The Romans tamed us, Derfel. They made us into taxpayers and they were so clever at it that we actually believe they did us a favour! We once walked with the Gods, we were a free people, and then we put our stupid heads into the Roman yoke and became taxpayers.’

‘So what,’ I asked patiently, ‘did the Romans do that was so good?’

He smiled wolfishly. ‘They once crammed this arena full of Christians, Derfel, then set the dogs on them. In Rome, mind you, they did it properly; they used lions. But in the long term, alas, the lions lost.’

‘I saw a picture of a lion,’ I said proudly.

‘Oh, I am fascinated,’ Merlin said, not bothering to hide a yawn. ‘Why don’t you tell me all about it?’

Having silenced me thus, he smiled. ‘I saw a real lion once. It was a very unimpressive threadbare sort of thing. I suspected it was receiving the wrong diet. Maybe they were feeding it Mithraists instead of Christians? That was in Rome, of course. I gave it a poke with my staff and it just yawned and scratched at a flea. I saw a crocodile there too, only it was dead.’

‘What’s a crocodile?’

‘A thing like Lancelot.’

‘King of the Belgae,’ I added acidly.

Merlin laughed. ‘He has been clever, hasn’t he? He hated Siluria, and who can blame him? All those drab people in their dull valleys, not Lancelot’s sort of place at all, but he’ll like the Belgic land. The sun shines there, it’s full of Roman estates and, best of all, it’s not far from his dear friend Guinevere.’

‘Is that important?’

‘Don’t be so disingenuous, Derfel.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘It means, my ignorant warrior, that Lancelot behaves as he likes with Arthur. He takes what he wants and does what he wants, and he can do it because Arthur has that ridiculous quality called guilt. He’s very Christian in that. Can you understand a religion that makes you feel guilty? What an absurd idea, but Arthur would make a very good Christian. He believes he was oath-sworn to save Benoic, and when he failed he felt he had let Lancelot down, and so long as that guilt rankles Arthur, so long will Lancelot behave as he wishes.’

‘With Guinevere too?’ I asked, curious at his earlier mention of Lancelot and Guinevere’s friendship, a mention that had possessed more than a hint of salacious rumour.

‘I never explain what I cannot know,’ Merlin said loftily. ‘But I surmise Guinevere is bored by Arthur, and why not? She’s a clever creature and she enjoys other clever people, and Arthur, much as we love him, is not complicated. The things he desires are so pathetically simple; law, justice, order, cleanliness. He really wants everyone to be happy, and that’s quite impossible. Guinevere isn’t nearly so simple. You are, of course.’

I ignored the insult. ‘So what does Guinevere want?’

‘For Arthur to be King of Dumnonia, of course, and for herself to be the real ruler of Britain by ruling him, but till that happens, Derfel, she will amuse herself as best she can.’ He looked mischievous as an idea occurred to him. ‘If Lancelot becomes the Belgic King,’ he said happily, ‘then just you watch Guinevere decide that she doesn’t want her new palace in Lindinis after all. She’ll find somewhere much closer to Venta. You see if I’m not right.’ He chuckled at that thought. ‘They were both so very clever,’

he added admiringly.

‘Guinevere and Lancelot?’

‘Don’t be so obtuse, Derfel! Who on earth was talking about Guinevere? Really, your appetite for gossip is quite indecent. I mean Cerdic and Lancelot, of course. That was a very subtle piece of diplomacy. Arthur does all the fighting, Aelle gives up most of the land, Lancelot snatches himself a much more suitable kingdom, and Cerdic doubles his own power and gets Lancelot instead of Arthur as his neighbour on the coast. Very neatly done. How the wicked do prosper! I like to see that.’ He smiled, then turned as Nimue appeared from one of the two tunnels that led under the seats into the arena. She hurried over the weed-strewn turf with a look of excitement on her face. Her gold eye, that so frightened the Saxons, gleamed in the morning sun.

‘Derfel!’ she exclaimed. ‘What do you do with the bull’s blood?’

‘Don’t confuse him,’ Merlin said, ‘he’s being more than usually stupid this morning.’

‘In Mithras,’ she said excitedly. ‘What do you do with the blood?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘They mix it with oats and fat,’ Merlin said, ‘and make puddings.’

‘Tell me!’ Nimue insisted.

‘It’s secret,’ I said, embarrassed.

Merlin hooted at that. ‘Secret? Secret! “Oh, great Mithras!”‘ he boomed in a voice that echoed from the tiered seats, ‘ “whose sword is sharpened on the mountain peaks and whose spearhead was forged in the ocean deeps and whose shield doth shadow the brightest stars, hear us.” Shall I go on, dear boy?’

he asked me. He had been reciting the invocation with which we began our meetings, and which was supposed to be a part of our secret rituals. He turned from me in scorn. ‘They have a pit, dear Nimue,’

he explained, ‘covered with an iron grille, and the poor beast gushes its life away into the pit and then they all dip their spears into the blood, get drunk and think they’ve done something significant.’

‘I thought so,’ Nimue said, then smiled. ‘There’s no pit.’

‘Oh, dear girl!’ Merlin said admiringly. ‘Dear girl! To work.’ He hurried away.

‘Where are you going?’ I called after him, but he just waved and walked on, beckoning to my lounging spearmen. I followed anyway and he made no attempt to stop me. We went through the tunnel and so out into one of the strange streets of tall buildings, then west towards the great fortress that formed the north-west bastion of the city’s walls, and just beside the fort, built against the city wall, was a temple. I followed Merlin inside.

It was a lovely building; long, dark, narrow and tall with a high painted ceiling supported by twin rows of seven pillars. The shrine was evidently used as a storehouse now, for bales of wool and stacks of leather hides were piled high in one side aisle, yet some folk must still have worshipped in the building for a statue of Mithras wearing his odd floppy hat stood at one end and smaller statues were arrayed in front of the fluted pillars. I supposed that those who worshipped here were the descendants of the Roman settlers who had chosen to stay in Britain when the Legions left, and it seemed they had abandoned most of their ancestors’ deities, including Mithras, because the small offerings of flowers, food and guttered rush lights were clustered in front of just three images. Two of the three were elegantly carved Roman Gods, but the third idol was British: a smooth phallic stump of stone with a brutal, wide-eyed face carved into its tip and that statue alone was drenched in old dried blood, while the only offering beside Mithras’s statue was the Saxon sword that Sagramor had left in thanks for Malla’s return. It was a sunny day, but the only light inside the temple came through a patch of broken roof where the tiles had vanished. The temple was supposed to be dark, for Mithras had been born in a cave and we worshipped him in a cave’s darkness.

Merlin rapped the floor’s flagstones with his staff, finally settling on a spot at the end of the nave just beneath Mithras’s statue. ‘Is this where you’d dip your spears, Derfel?’ he asked me. I stepped into the side aisle where the hides and wool bales were stacked. ‘Here,’ I said, pointing to a shallow pit half hidden by one of the piles.

‘Don’t be absurd!’ Merlin snapped. ‘Someone made that later! You really think you’re hiding the secrets of your pathetic religion?’ He tapped the floor beside the statue again, then tried another spot a few feet away and evidently decided that the two places yielded different sounds, so tapped a third time at the statue’s feet. ‘Dig here,’ he ordered my spearmen.

I shuddered for the sacrilege. ‘She shouldn’t be here, Lord,’ I said, gesturing at Nimue.

‘One more word from you, Derfel, and I’ll turn you into a spavined hedgehog. Lift the stones!’ he snapped at my men. ‘Use your spears as levers, idiots. Come on! Work!’

I sat beside the British idol, closed my eyes, and prayed to Mithras that he would forgive me the sacrilege. Then I prayed that Ceinwyn was safe and that the babe in her belly was still alive, and I was still praying for my unborn child when the temple door scraped open and boots sounded loud on the stones. I opened my eyes, turned my head, and saw that Cerdic had come to the temple. He had come with twenty spearmen, his interpreter, and, more surprisingly, with Dinas and Lavaine. I scrambled to my feet and touched the bones in Hywelbane’s handle for luck as the Saxon King walked slowly up the nave. ‘This is my city,’ Cerdic announced softly, ‘and everything within its walls is mine.’ He stared for a moment at Merlin and Nimue, then looked at me. ‘Tell them to explain themselves,’ he ordered.

‘Tell the fool to go and douse his head in a bucket,’ Merlin snapped at me. He spoke Saxon well enough, but it suited him to pretend otherwise.

‘That is his interpreter. Lord,’ I warned Merlin, gesturing to the man beside Cerdic.

‘Then he can tell his King to douse his head,’ said Merlin.

The interpreter duly did, and Cerdic’s face flickered in a dangerous smile.

‘Lord King,’ I said, trying to undo Merlin’s damage, ‘my Lord Merlin seeks to restore the temple to its old condition.’

Cerdic considered that answer as he inspected what was being done. My four spearmen had levered up the flagstones to reveal a compact mass of sand and gravel, and they were now scooping out that heavy mass that lay above a lower platform of pitch-soaked timbers. The King stared into the pit, then gestured for my four spearmen to go on with their work. ‘But if you find gold,’ he said to me, ‘it is mine.’

I began to translate to Merlin, but Cerdic interrupted me with a wave of his hand. ‘He speaks our tongue,’ he said, looking at Merlin. ‘They told me,’ he jerked his head toward Dinas and Lavaine. I looked at the baleful twins, then back to Cerdic. ‘You keep strange company, Lord King,’ I said.

‘No stranger than you,’ he answered, glancing at Nimue’s gold eye. She levered it out with a finger and gave him the full horrid effect of the shrivelled bare socket, but Cerdic seemed quite unmoved by the threat, asking me instead to tell him what I knew about the temple’s different Gods. I answered him as best I could, but it was plain he was not really interested. He interrupted me to look at Merlin again.

‘Where’s your Cauldron, Merlin?’ he asked.

Merlin gave the Silurian twins a murderous look, then spat on the floor. ‘Hidden,’ he snapped. Cerdic seemed unsurprised by that answer. He strolled past the deepening pit and picked up the Saxon sword Sagramor had donated to Mithras. He gave the blade a speculative cut in the air and seemed to approve of its balance. ‘This Cauldron,’ he asked Merlin, ‘has great powers?’

Merlin refused to answer, so I spoke for him. ‘So it is said, Lord King.’

‘Powers,’ Cerdic stared at me with his pale eyes, ‘that will rid Britain of us Saxons?’

‘That is what we pray for, Lord King,’ I answered.

He smiled at that, then turned back to Merlin. ‘What is your price for the Cauldron, old man?’

Merlin glared at him. ‘Your liver, Cerdic.’

Cerdic stepped close to Merlin and stared up into the wizard’s eyes. I saw no fear in Cerdic, none. Merlin’s Gods were not his. Aelle might have feared Merlin, but Cerdic had never suffered from the Druid’s magic and, so far as Cerdic was concerned, Merlin was merely an old British priest with an inflated reputation. He suddenly reached out and took hold of one of the black-wrapped plaits of Merlin’s beard. ‘I offer you a price of much gold, old man,’ he said.

‘I have named my price,’ Merlin answered. He tried to step away from Cerdic, but the King tightened his grip on the plait of the Druid’s beard.

‘I will pay you your own weight in gold,’ Cerdic offered.

‘Your liver,’ Merlin countered the offer.

Cerdic raised the Saxon blade and sawed fast with its edge and so severed the beard plait. He stepped away. ‘Play with your Cauldron, Merlin of Avalon,’ he said, tossing the sword aside, ‘but one day I will cook your liver in it and serve it to my dogs.’

Nimue stared white-faced at the King. Merlin was too shocked to move, let alone speak, while my four spearmen simply gaped. ‘Get on with it, fools,’ I snarled at them. ‘Work!’ I was mortified. I had never seen Merlin humiliated and never wanted to either. I had not thought it was even possible. Merlin rubbed his violated beard. ‘One day, Lord King,’ he said quietly, ‘I shall have my revenge.’

Cerdic shrugged away that feeble threat and walked back to his men. He gave the severed beard plait to Dinas, who bowed his thanks. I spat, for I knew the Silurian pair could now work a great evil. Few things are so powerful in the making of spells as the discarded hair or nail-clippings of an enemy, which is why, to prevent such things falling into malevolent hands, we all take such good care to burn them. Even a child can make mischief with a hank of hair. ‘You want me to take the plait back, Lord?’ I asked Merlin.

‘Don’t be absurd, Derfel,’ he said wearily, gesturing at Cerdic’s twenty spearmen. ‘You think you could kill them all?’ He shook his head, then smiled at Nimue. ‘You see how far we are here from our Gods?’ he said, trying to explain his helplessness.

‘Dig,’ Nimue snarled to my men, though now the digging was over and they were trying to lever up the first of the great baulks of timber. Cerdic, who had plainly come to the temple because Dinas and Lavaine had told him that Merlin was looking for treasure, ordered three of his own spearmen to help. The three leapt into the pit and rammed their spears under the timber’s lip and slowly, slowly forced it up until my men could seize it and drag it free.

The pit was the blood pit, the place where the dying bull’s life drained into mother earth, but at some time the pit had been cunningly disguised with the timbers, sand, gravel and stone. ‘It was done,’ Merlin told me out of earshot of all Cerdic’s people, ‘when the Romans left.’ He rubbed his beard again.

‘Lord,’ I said awkwardly, saddened by his humiliation.

‘Don’t worry, Derfel.’ He touched my shoulder in reassurance. ‘You think I should command fire from the Gods? Make the earth gape and swallow him? Summon a serpent from the spirit world?’

‘Yes, Lord,’ I answered miserably.

He lowered his voice even more. ‘You don’t command magic, Derfel, you use it, and there’s none here to use. That’s why we need the Treasures. At Samain, Derfel, I shall collect the Treasures and unveil the Cauldron. We shall light fires and then work a spell that will make the sky shriek and the earth groan. That I promise you. I have lived my whole life for that moment and it will bring the magic back to Britain.’ He leaned against the pillar and stroked the place where his beard had been cut. ‘Our friends from Siluria,’ he said, staring at the black-bearded twins, ‘think to challenge me, but one lost strand of an old man’s beard is nothing to the Cauldron’s power. One strand of beard will hurt no one but me, but the Cauldron, Derfel, the Cauldron will make all Britain shudder and bring those two pretenders crawling on their knees for my mercy. But till then, Derfel, till then you must see our enemies prosper. The Gods go further and further away. They grow weak and we who love them grow weak too, but it will not last. We shall summon them back, and the magic that is now so weak in Britain will become as thick as that fog on Ynys Mon.’ He touched my wounded shoulder again. ‘I promise you that.’

Cerdic watched us. He could not hear us, but there was amusement on his wedge-shaped face. ‘He will keep what’s in the pit, Lord,’ I murmured.

‘I pray he will not know its value,’ Merlin said softly.

‘They will, Lord,’ I said, looking at the two white-robed Druids.

‘They are traitors and serpents,’ Merlin hissed softly, staring at Dinas and Lavaine who had moved closer to the pit, ‘but even if they keep what we find now, I will still possess eleven of the thirteen Treasures, Derfel, and I know where the twelfth is to be found, and no other man has gathered so much power in Britain in a thousand years.’ He leaned on his staff. ‘This King will suffer, I promise you.’

The last timber was brought out of the hole and thrown with a thump onto the flagstones. The sweating spearmen backed away as Cerdic and the Silurian Druids walked slowly forward and stared down into the pit. Cerdic gazed for a long time, then he began to laugh. His laughter echoed from the tall painted ceiling and it drew his spearmen to the pit’s edge where they too began to laugh. ‘I like an enemy,’

Cerdic said, ‘who puts such faith in rubbish.’ He pushed his spearmen aside and beckoned to us. ‘Come and see what you have discovered, Merlin of Avalon.’

I went with Merlin to the pit’s edge and saw a tangle of old, dark and damp-ruined wood. It looked like nothing more than a heap of firewood, just scraps of timber; some of them rotted by the damp that had seeped into a corner of the brick-lined pit and the rest so old and fragile that they would have flared up and burned to ash in an instant. ‘What is it?’ I asked Merlin.

‘It seems,’ Merlin said in Saxon, ‘that we have looked in the wrong place. Come,’ he spoke British again as he touched my shoulder, ‘I’ve wasted our time.’

‘But not ours,’ Dinas said harshly.

‘I see a wheel,’ Lavaine said.

Merlin turned slowly back, his face looking ravaged. He had tried to deceive Cerdic and the Silurian twins and the deception had failed utterly.

‘Two wheels,’ Dinas said.

‘And a shaft,’ Lavaine added, ‘cut into three pieces.’

I stared again at the squalid tangle and again I saw nothing but wooden scraps, but then I saw that some of the pieces were curved and that if the curved fragments were joined together and braced with the many short rods, they would indeed make a pair of wheels. Mixed with the scraps of the wheels were some thin panels and one long shaft that was as thick as my wrist, but so long that it had been broken into three pieces so it would fit into the hole. There was also an axle boss visible, with a slit in its centre where a long knife blade could be fitted. The heap of wood was the remains of a small ancient chariot like those that had once carried the warriors of Britain into battle.

‘The Chariot of Modron.’ Dinas said reverently.

‘Modron,’ Lavaine said, ‘the mother of the Gods.’

‘Whose chariot,’ Dinas said, ‘connects earth to the heavens.’

‘And Merlin doesn’t want it,’ Dinas said scornfully.

‘So we shall take the chariot instead,’ Lavaine announced.

Cerdic’s interpreter had done his best to translate all this to the King, but it was plain that Cerdic remained unimpressed by the sorry collection of broken and decayed timber. He nevertheless ordered his spearmen to collect the fragments and lay them in a cloak that Lavaine picked up. Nimue hissed a curse at them, and Lavaine just laughed at her. ‘Do you want to fight us for the chariot?’ he demanded, gesturing at Cerdic’s spearmen.

‘You can’t shelter behind Saxons for ever,’ I said, ‘and the time will come when you’ll have to fight.’

Dinas spat into the empty pit. ‘We are Druids, Derfel, and you cannot take our lives, not without consigning your soul, and every soul you love, to horror evermore.’

‘I can kill you,’ Nimue spat at them.

Dinas stared at her, then extended a fist towards her. Nimue spat at the fist to avert its evil, but Dinas just turned it over, opened his palm and showed her a thrush’s egg. He tossed it to her. ‘Something to fill your eye-socket, woman,’ he said dismissively, then turned and followed his brother and Cerdic out of the temple.

‘I’m sorry, Lord,’ I said to Merlin when we had been left alone.

‘For what, Derfel? You think you could have beaten twenty spearmen?’ He sighed and rubbed at his violated beard. ‘You see how the powers of the new Gods fight back? But so long as we possess the Cauldron we possess the greater power. Come.’ He extended his arm to Nimue, not for comfort, but because he wanted her support. He suddenly looked old and tired as he walked slowly down the nave.

‘What do we do, Lord?’ one of my spearmen asked me.

‘Make ready to go,’ I answered. I was watching Merlin’s stooped back. The cutting of his beard, I thought, was a greater tragedy than he dared admit, but I consoled myself that he still possessed the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn. His power was still great, but there was something about that bent back and slow shuffle that was infinitely saddening. ‘We make ready to go,’ I said again. We left next day. We were hungry still, but we were going home. And we did, after a fashion, have peace.

Just north of ruined Calleva, on land that had been Aelle’s and was now ours again, we found the tribute waiting. Aelle had kept faith with us.

There were no guards there, just great piles of gold waiting unattended on the road. There were cups, crosses, chains, ingots, brooches and torques. We had no means of weighing the gold, and both Arthur and Cuneglas suspected that not all the agreed tribute had been paid, but it was enough. It was a hoard. We bundled the gold in cloaks, hung the heavy bundles over the backs of the war horses, and went on. Arthur walked with us, his spirits brightening as we drew nearer and nearer to home, though regrets still lingered. ‘You remember the oath I took near here?’ he asked me shortly after we had collected Aelle’s gold.

‘I remember it, Lord.’ The oath had been taken on the night after we had delivered much of this same gold to Aelle the previous year. The gold had been our bribe to turn Aelle away from our frontier and onto Ratae, the fortress of Powys, and Arthur had sworn that night that he would kill Aelle. ‘Now I preserve him instead,’ he commented ruefully.

‘Cuneglas has Ratae back,’ I said.

‘But the oath is unfulfilled, Derfel. So many broken oaths.’ He peered up at a sparrowhawk that slid in front of a great white heap of cloud. ‘I suggested to Cuneglas and Meurig that they split Siluria in two, and Cuneglas suggested you might like to be the King of his portion. Would you?’

I was so astonished that I could hardly respond. ‘If you wish it, Lord,’ I finally said.

‘Well, I don’t. I want you as Mordred’s guardian.’

I walked with that disappointment for a few paces. ‘Siluria may not like being divided,’ I said.

‘Siluria will do as it’s told,’ Arthur said firmly, ‘and you and Ceinwyn will live in Mordred’s palace in Dumnonia.’

‘If you say so, Lord.’ I was suddenly reluctant to abandon Cwm Isal’s humbler pleasures.

‘Cheer up, Derfel!’ Arthur said. ‘I’m not a King, why should you be one?’

‘It was not the loss of a kingdom I regret. Lord, but the addition of a King to my household.’

‘You’ll manage him, Derfel, you manage everything.’

Next day we divided the army. Sagramor had already left the ranks, leading his spearmen to guard the new frontier with Cerdic’s kingdom, and now the rest of us took two separate roads. Arthur, Merlin, Tristan and Lancelot went south, while Cuneglas and Meurig went west towards their lands. I embraced Arthur and Tristan, then knelt for Merlin’s blessing, which he gave benignly. He had regained some of his old energy during our march from London, but he could not hide the fact that his humiliation in the temple of Mithras had hit him hard. He might still possess the Cauldron, but his enemies possessed a strand of his beard and he would need all his magic to ward off their spells. He embraced me, I kissed Nimue, then I watched them walk away before I followed Cuneglas westward. I was going to Powys to find my Ceinwyn and I was travelling with a share of Aelle’s gold, but even so it did not seem like a triumph. We had beaten Aelle and secured peace, but Cerdic and Lancelot had been the real winners of the campaign, not us.

That night we all rested in Corinium, but at midnight a storm woke me. The tempest was far away to the south, but such was the violence of the distant thunder and so vivid were the flashes of lightning that flickered on the walls of the courtyard where I slept that it woke me. Ailleann, Arthur’s old mistress and the mother of his twins, had offered me shelter and she now came from her bed-chamber with a worried face. I wrapped my cloak around me and went with her to the town walls, where I found half my men already watching the distant turmoil. Cuneglas and Agricola were also standing on the ramparts, but not Meurig, for he refused to find any portents in the weather.

We all knew better. Storms are messages from the Gods, and this storm was a tumultuous outburst. No rain fell on Corinium and no gale blew our cloaks, but far off to the south, somewhere in Dumnonia, the Gods flayed the land. Lightning tore the dark clean out of the sky and stabbed its crooked daggers at the earth. Thunder rolled incessantly, outburst after outburst, and with every echoing clap the lightning flickered and dazzled and split its ragged fire through the shuddering night. Issa stood close beside me, his honest face lit by those distant spits of fire. ‘Is someone dead?’

‘We can’t tell, Issa.’

‘Are we cursed. Lord?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I replied with a confidence I did not entirely feel.

‘But I heard that Merlin had his beard cut. ‘

‘A few hairs,’ I said dismissively, ‘nothing more. What of it?’

‘If Merlin has no power, Lord, who does?’

‘Merlin has power,’ I tried to reassure him. And I had power, too, for soon I would be Mordred’s champion and would live on a great estate. I would mould the child and Arthur would make the child’s kingdom.

Yet still I worried about the thunder. And I would have worried more had I known what it meant. For disaster did come that night. We did not hear of it for three more days, but then at last we learned why the thunder had spoken and the lightning struck.

It had struck on the Tor, on Merlin’s hall where the winds made moan about his hollow dream-tower. And there, in our hour of victory, the lightning had set the wooden tower alight and its flames had seared and leapt and howled into the night and in the morning, when the embers were being spattered and extinguished by the dying storm’s rain, there were no Treasures left at Ynys Wydryn. There was no Cauldron in the ashes, only an emptiness at Dumnonia’s fire-scarred heart. The new Gods, it seemed, were fighting back. Or else the Silurian twins had worked a mighty charm on the cut braid of Merlin’s beard, for the Cauldron was gone and the Treasures had vanished. And I went north to Ceinwyn.