Enemy of God

PART THREE Camelot

‘All the treasures burned?’ Igraine asked me.

‘Everything,’ I said, ‘disappeared.’

‘Poor Merlin,’ Igraine said. She has taken her usual place on my window-sill, though she is well wrapped against this day’s cold by a thick cloak of beaver fur. And she needs it, for it is bitterly cold today. There were flurries of snow this morning, and the sky to the west is ominous with leaden clouds. ‘I cannot stay long,’ she had announced when she arrived and settled down to skim through the finished parchments, ‘in case it snows.’

‘It will snow. The berries are thick in the hedgerows and that always means a hard winter.’

‘Old men say that every year,’ Igraine observed tartly.

‘When you’re old,’ I said, ‘every winter is hard.’

‘How old was Merlin?’

‘At the time he lost the Cauldron? Very close to eighty years. But he lived for a long while after that.’

‘But he never rebuilt his dream-tower?’ Igraine asked.

‘No.’

She sighed and pulled the rich cloak about her. ‘I should like a dream-tower. I would so like to have a dream-tower.’

‘Then have one built,’ I said. ‘You’re a Queen. Give orders, make a fuss. It’s quite simple; nothing but a four-sided tower with no roof and a platform halfway up. Once it’s built no one but you can go inside, and the trick of it is to sleep on the platform and wait for the Gods to send you messages. Merlin always said it was a horribly cold place to sleep in winter.’

‘And the Cauldron,’ Igraine guessed, ‘had been hidden on the platform?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it wasn’t burned, was it. Brother Derfel?’ she insisted.

‘The Cauldron’s story goes on,’ I admitted, ‘but I won’t tell it now.’

She stuck her tongue out at me. She is looking startlingly beautiful today. Perhaps it is the cold that has put the colour into her cheeks and the spark into her dark eyes, or maybe the beaver pelts suit her, but I suspect she is pregnant. I could always tell when Ceinwyn was with child, and Igraine shows that same surge of life. But Igraine has said nothing, so I will not ask her. She has prayed hard enough, God knows, for a child, and maybe our Christian God does hear prayers. We have nothing else to give us hope, for our own Gods are dead, or fled, or careless of us.

‘The bards,’ Igraine said, and I knew from her tone that another of my shortcomings as a storyteller was about to be aired, ‘say that the battle near London was terrible. They say Arthur fought all day.’

‘Ten minutes,’ I said dismissively.

‘And they all declare that Lancelot saved him, arriving at the last moment with a hundred spearmen.’

‘They all say that,’ I said, ‘because Lancelot’s poets wrote the songs.’

She shook her head sadly. ‘If this,’ she said, slapping the big leather bag in which she carries the finished parchments back to the Caer, ‘is the only record of Lancelot, Derfel, then what will people think? That the poets lie?’

‘Who cares what people think?’ I answered testily. ‘And poets always lie. It’s what they’re paid to do. But you asked me for the truth, I tell it, and then you complain.’

‘ “Lancelot’s warriors,”‘ she quoted, ‘ “spearmen so bold, Makers of widows and givers of gold. Slayers of Saxons, feared by the Sais…”‘

‘Do stop,’ I interrupted her, ‘please? I heard the song a week after it was written!’

‘But if the songs lied,’ she pleaded, ‘why didn’t Arthur protest?’

‘Because he never cared about songs. Why should he? He was a warrior, not a bard, and so long as his men sang before battle he didn’t care. And besides, he could never sing himself. He thought he had a voice, but Ceinwyn always said he sounded like a cow with wind.’

Igraine frowned. ‘I still don’t understand why Lancelot’s making peace was so very bad.’

‘It isn’t difficult to understand,’ I said. I slid off the stool and crossed to the hearth where I used a stick to pull some glowing embers from the small fire. I arranged six embers in a line on the floor, then split the row into two and four. ‘The four embers,’ I said, ‘represent Aelle’s forces. The two are Cerdic’s. Now understand we could never have beaten the Saxons if all the embers had been together. We could not have defeated six, but we could beat four. Arthur planned to beat those four, then turn on the two, and that way we could have scoured Britain of the Sais. But by making peace, Lancelot increased Cerdic’s power.’ I added another ember to the two, so that four now faced a group of three, then shook the flame off the burning stick. ‘We had weakened Aelle,’ I explained, ‘but we’d weakened ourselves too for we no longer had Lancelot’s three hundred spearmen. They were pledged to peace. That increased Cerdic’s power even more.’ I pushed two of Aelle’s embers into Cerdic’s camp, dividing the line into five and two. ‘So all we had done,’ I said, ‘was weaken Aelle and strengthen Cerdic. And that’s what Lancelot’s peacemaking achieved.’

‘You are giving our Lady lessons in counting?’ Sansum sidled into the room with a suspicious look on his face. ‘And I thought you were composing a gospel,’ he added slyly.

‘The five loaves and two fishes,’ Igraine said swiftly. ‘Brother Derfel thought it might be five fishes and two loaves, but I’m sure I’m right, am I not, Lord Bishop?’

‘My Lady is quite right,’ Sansum said. ‘And Brother Derfel is a poor Christian. How can such an ignorant man write a gospel for the Saxons?’

‘Only with your loving support, Lord Bishop,’ Igraine answered, ‘and, of course, with my husband’s support. Or shall I tell the King that you oppose him in this small thing?’

‘You would be guilty of the grossest falsehood if you did,’ Sansum lied to her, outmanoeuvred again by my clever Queen. ‘I came to tell you, Lady, that your spearmen believe you should leave. The sky threatens more snow.’

She picked up the bag of parchments and gave me a smile. ‘I shall see you when the snow has stopped, Brother Derfel.’

‘I shall pray for that moment. Lady.’

She smiled again, then walked past the saint who half bowed as she went through the door, but once she had gone he straightened and stared at me. The tufts above his ears that made us call him the mouse-lord are white now, but age has not softened the saint. He can still bristle with vituperation and the pain that still afflicts him when he passes urine only serves to make his temper worse. ‘There is a special place in hell, Brother Derfel,’ he hissed at me, ‘for the tellers of lies.’

‘I shall pray for those poor souls, Lord,’ I said, then turned from him and dipped this quill in ink to go on with my tale of Arthur, my warlord, my peace-maker and friend.

What followed were the glorious years. Igraine, who listens to the poets too much, calls them Camelot. We did not. They were the years of Arthur’s best rule, the years when he shaped a country to his wishes and the years in which Dumnonia most closely matched his ideal of a nation at peace with itself and with its neighbours; but it is only by looking back that those years seem so much better than they were, and that is because the years that followed were so much worse. To hear the tales told at night-time hearths you would think we had made a whole new country in Britain, named it Camelot and peopled it with shining heroes, but the truth is that we simply ruled Dumnonia as best we could, we ruled it justly and we never called it Camelot. I did not even hear that name till two years ago. Camelot exists only in the poets’

dreams, while in our Dumnonia, even in those good years, the harvests still failed, the plagues still ravaged us and wars were still fought.

Ceinwyn came to Dumnonia and it was in Lindinis that our first child was born. It was a girl and we called her Morwenna after Ceinwyn’s mother. She was born with black hair, but after a while it turned pale gold like her mother’s. Lovely Morwenna.

Merlin was proved right about Guinevere, for as soon as Lancelot had established his new government in Venta, she declared herself tired of the brand-new palace at Lindinis. It was too damp, she said, and much too exposed to the wet winds coming off the swamps about Ynys Wydryn, and too cold in winter, and suddenly nothing would do except to move back to Uther’s old Winter Palace at Durnovaria. But Durnovaria was almost as far from Venta as Lindinis, so Guinevere then persuaded Arthur that they needed to prepare a house for the distant day when Mordred became King and, by a King’s right, demanded the Winter Palace’s return, so Arthur let Guinevere make the choice. Arthur himself dreamed of a stout hall with a palisade, beast house and granaries, but Guinevere found a Roman villa just south of the fort of Yindocladia that lay, just as Merlin had foretold, on the frontier between Dumnonia and Lancelot’s new Belgic kingdom. The villa was built on a hill above a creek of the sea and Guinevere called it her Sea Palace. She had a swarm of builders renovate the villa and fill it with all the statues that had once graced Lindinis. She even commandeered the mosaic floor from Lindinis’s entrance hall. For a time Arthur worried that the Sea Palace was dangerously close to Cerdic’s land, but Guinevere insisted the peace negotiated at London would last and Arthur, realizing how she loved the place, relented. He never cared what place he called home, for he rarely was at home. He liked to be on the move, always visiting some corner of Mordred’s kingdom.

Mordred himself moved into the ransacked palace at Lindinis, and Ceinwyn and I had his guardianship and so lived there too, and with us were sixty spearmen, ten horsemen to carry messages, sixteen kitchen girls and twenty-eight house slaves. We had a steward, a chamberlain, a bard, two huntsmen, a mead-brewer, a falconer, a physician, a doorkeeper, a candleman and six cooks, and they all had slaves, and besides those house slaves there was a small army of other slaves who worked the land and pollarded the trees and kept the ditches drained. A small town grew around the palace, inhabited by potters and shoemakers and blacksmiths; the tradespeople who became rich off our business. It all seemed a long way from Cwm Isaf. Now we slept in a tiled chamber with plaster-smooth walls and pillared doorways. Our meals were taken in a feasting hall that could have seated a hundred, though as often as not we left it empty and ate in a small chamber that led directly from the kitchens for I never could abide food served cold when it was supposed to be hot. If it rained we could walk the covered arcade of the outer courtyard and thus stay dry, and in summer, when the sun beat hot on the tiles, there was a spring-fed pool in the inner courtyard where we could swim. None of it was ours, of course; this palace and its spacious lands were the honours due to a king and all of them belonged to the six-year-old Mordred.

Ceinwyn was accustomed to luxury, if not on this lavish scale, but the constant presence of slaves and servants never embarrassed her as it did me, and she discharged her duties with an efficient lack of fuss that kept the palace calm and happy. It was Ceinwyn who commanded the servants and supervised the kitchens and tallied the accounts, but I know she missed Cwm Isaf and still, of an evening, she would sometimes sit with her distaft and spin wool while we talked.

As often as not we talked of Mordred. Both of us had hoped that the tales of his mischief were exaggerations, but they were not, for if any child was wicked, it was Mordred. From the very first day when he came by ox-wagon from Culhwch’s hall near Durnovaria and was lifted down into our courtyard, he misbehaved. I came to hate him, God help me. He was only a child and I hated him. The King was always small for his age, but, apart from his clubbed left foot, he was solidly built with hard muscles and little fat. His face was very round, but was disfigured by a strangely bulbous nose that made the poor child ugly, while his dark-brown hair was naturally curly and grew in two great clumps that jutted out on either side of a centre parting and made the other children in Lindinis call him Brush-head, though never to his face. He had strangely old eyes, for even at six years old they were guarded and suspicious, and they became no kinder as his face hardened into manhood. He was a clever boy, though he obstinately refused to learn his letters. The bard of our household, an earnest young man named Pyrlig, was responsible for teaching Mordred to read, to count, to sing, to play the harp, to name the Gods and to learn the genealogy of his royal descent, but Mordred soon had Pyrlig’s measure. ‘He will do nothing, Lord!’ Pyrlig complained to me. ‘I give him parchment, he tears it, I give him a quill and he breaks it. I beat him and he bites me, look!’ He held out a thin, flea-bitten wrist on which the marks of the royal teeth were red and sore.

I put Eachern, a tough little Irish spearman, into the schoolroom with orders to keep the King in order, and that worked well enough. One beating from Eachern persuaded the child he had met his match and so he sullenly submitted to the discipline, but still learned nothing. You could keep a child still, it seemed, but you could not make him learn. Mordred did try to frighten Eachern by telling him that when he became King he would take his revenge on the warrior for the frequent beatings, but Eachern just gave him another thrashing and promised that he would be back in Ireland by the time Mordred came of age.

‘So if you want revenge, Lord King,’ Eachern said, giving the boy another sharp blow, ‘then bring your army to Ireland and we’ll give you a proper grown-up whipping.’

Mordred was not simply a naughty boy — we could have coped with that — but positively wicked. His acts were designed to hurt, even to kill. Once, when he was ten, we found five adders in the dark cellar where we kept the vats of mead. No one but Mordred would have placed them there, and doubtless he did it in the hope that a slave or servant would be bitten. The cellar’s cold had made the snakes sleepy and we killed them easily enough, but a month later a maidservant did die after eating mushrooms that we afterwards discovered were toadstools. No one knew who had made the substitution, but everyone believed it was Mordred. It was as if, Ceinwyn said, there was a calculating adult mind inside that pugnacious little body. She, I think, disliked him as much as I did, but she tried hard to be kind to the boy and she hated the beatings we all gave him. ‘They just make him worse,’ she admonished me.

‘I fear so,’ I admitted.

‘Then why do it?’

I shrugged. ‘Because if you try kindness he just takes advantage of it.’ At the beginning, when Mordred had first come to Lindinis, I had promised myself that I would never hit the boy, but that high ambition had faded within days and by the end of the first year I only had to see his ugly, sullen, bulbous-nosed, brush-headed face and I wanted to put him over my knee and beat him bloody. And even Ceinwyn eventually struck him. She had not wanted to, but one day I heard her scream. Mordred had found a needle and was idly pushing it at Morwenna’s scalp. He had just decided to see what would happen if he pushed the needle into one of the baby’s eyes when Ceinwyn came running to see why her daughter cried. She plucked Mordred into the air and gave him such a blow that he went spinning halfway across the room. After that our children were never left to sleep alone, a servant was always at their side and Mordred had added Ceinwyn’s name to the list of his enemies.

‘He’s simply evil,’ Merlin explained to me. ‘Surely you remember the night he was born?’

‘Distinctly,’ I said, for I, unlike Merlin, had been there.

‘They let the Christians tend the birth bed, didn’t they?’ he asked me. ‘And only summoned Morgan when everything was going wrong. What precautions did the Christians take?’

I shrugged. ‘Prayers. I remember a crucifix.’ I had not been in the birth-chamber, of course, for no man ever went into a birth-chamber, but I had watched from Caer Cadarn’s ramparts.

‘No wonder it all went wrong,’ Merlin said. ‘Prayers! What use are prayers against an evil spirit? There has to be urine on the door sill, iron in the bed, mugwort on the fire.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘A spirit got into the boy before Morgan could help him and that’s why his foot is so twisted. The spirit was probably clinging onto the foot when it sensed Morgan’s arrival.’

‘So how do we get the spirit out?’ I asked.

‘With a sword through the wretched child’s heart,’ he said, smiling and leaning back in his chair.

‘Please, Lord,’ I insisted, ‘how?’

Merlin shrugged. ‘Old Balise reckoned it could be done by putting the possessed person into a bed between two virgins. All of them naked, of course.’ He chuckled. ‘Poor old Balise. He was a good Druid, but the overwhelming majority of his spells involved taking young girls’ clothes off. The idea was that the spirit would prefer to be in a virgin, you see, so you offered it two virgins so that it would be confused about which one to choose, and the knack of it was to get them all out of the bed at the exact moment that the spirit had come out of the mad person and was still trying to decide which virgin it preferred, and just at that moment you dragged all three off the bed and tossed a firebrand onto the bed-straw. It was supposed to burn the spirit to smoke, you see, but it never made much sense to me. I confess I did try the technique once. I tried to cure a poor old fool called Malldyn, and all I achieved was one idiot still mad as a cuckoo, two terrified slave girls, and all three of them slightly scorched.’ He sighed. ‘We sent Malldyn to the Isle of the Dead. Best place for him. You could send Mordred there?’

The Isle of the Dead is where we sent our terrible mad. Nimue had been there once, and I had fetched her out of its horror. ‘Arthur would never allow it,’ I said.

‘I suppose not. I’ll try a charm for you, but I can’t say I’m very hopeful.’ Merlin lived with us now. He was an old man dying slowly, or so it seemed to us, for the energy had been sucked out of him by the fire that had consumed the Tor, and with the energy had gone his dreams of assembling the Treasures of Britain. All that was left now was a dry husk growing ever older. He sat for hours in the sun and in winter he hunched over the fire. He kept his Druid’s tonsure, though he no longer plaited his beard, but just let it grow wild and white. He ate little, but was always ready to talk, though never about Dinas and Lavaine, nor about the dreadful moment when Cerdic had sliced off the plait of his beard. It was that violation, I decided, as much as the lightning strike on the Tor, that had sucked the life from Merlin, yet he did retain one tiny flickering scrap of hope. He was convinced the Cauldron had not been burned, but had been stolen, and early in our stay at Lindinis he proved it to me in the garden. He built a mock tower of chopped firewood, placed a gold cup in its centre and a handful of tinder at its base, then ordered fire to be fetched from the kitchens.

Even Mordred behaved that afternoon. Fire always fascinated the King and he stared wide-eyed as the model tower blazed in the sunlight. The stacked logs collapsed into the centre, and still the flames leapt, and it was almost dark when Merlin fetched a gardener’s rake and combed the ashes. He brought out the golden cup, no longer recognizable as a cup, misshapen and twisted as it was, but still gold. ‘I reached the Tor the morning after the fire, Derfel,’ he told me, ‘and I searched and searched through the ashes. I had every scorched timber removed by hand, I sieved the cinders, I raked the remnants and I found no gold. Not one drop. The cauldron was taken, and the tower was set on fire. I suspect the Treasures were stolen at the same time, for they were all stored there except for the chariot and the other one.’

‘What other one?’

For a moment he looked as if he would not answer, then he shrugged as if none if it mattered now.

‘The sword of Rhydderch. You know it as Caledfwlch.’ He was speaking of Arthur’s sword, Excalibur.

‘You gave it to him even though it’s one of the Treasures?’ I asked in astonishment.

‘Why not? He’s sworn to return it to me when I need it. He doesn’t know it’s the sword of Rhydderch, Derfel, and you must promise me not to tell him. He’ll only do something stupid if he finds out, like melt it down to prove he isn’t frightened of the Gods. Arthur can be very obtuse at times, but he’s the best ruler we have so I decided to give him a little extra secret power by letting him use Rhydderch’s sword. He’d scoff if he knew, of course, but one day the blade will turn to flame and he won’t scoff then.’

I wanted to know more about the sword, but he would not tell me. ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said,

‘it’s all over. The Treasures are gone. Nimue will look for them, I suppose, but I’m too old, much too old.’

I hated to hear him say that. After all the effort that had gone into the collection of the Treasures he simply seemed to have abandoned them. Even the Cauldron, for which we had suffered the Dark Road, seemed not to matter any more. ‘If the Treasures still exist, Lord,’ I insisted, ‘they can be found.’

He smiled indulgently. ‘They will be found,’ he said dismissively. ‘Of course they’ll be found.’

‘Then why don’t we look for them?’

He sighed as though my questions were a nuisance. ‘Because they are hidden, Derfel, and their hiding place will be under a spell of concealment. I know that. I can sense it. So we have to wait until someone tries to use the Cauldron. When that happens, we’ll know, for only I have the knowledge to use the Cauldron properly and if anyone else summons its powers they’ll spill a horror across Britain.’ He shrugged. ‘We wait for the horror, Derfel, then we go to the heart of it and there we shall find the Cauldron.’

‘So who do you think stole it?’ I persisted.

He spread his hands to show ignorance. ‘Lancelot’s men? For Cerdic, probably. Or maybe for those two Silurian twins. I rather underestimated them, didn’t I? Not that it matters now. Only time will tell who has it, Derfel, only time will tell. Wait for the horror to show, then we’ll find it.’ He seemed content to wait, and while he waited he told old tales and listened to news, though from time to time he would shuffle into his room that led off the outer courtyard and there he would work some charm, usually for Morwenna’s sake. He still told fortunes, usually by spreading a layer of cold ashes on the courtyard’s flagstones and letting a grass snake ripple its way through the dust so he could read its trail, but I noted that the fortunes were always bland and optimistic. He had no relish for the task. He did possess some power still, for when Morwenna caught a fever he made a charm of wool and beechnut shells, then gave her a concoction made from crushed woodlice that took the fever clean away, but when Mordred was sick he would always devise spells to make the sickness worse, though the King never did weaken and die. ‘The demon protects him,’ Merlin explained, ‘and these days I’m too weak to take on young demons.’ He would lean back in his cushions and entice one of the cats onto his lap. He had always liked cats, and we had plenty in Lindinis. Merlin was happy enough in the palace. He and I were friends, he was passionately fond of Ceinwyn and our growing family of daughters, and he was looked after by Gwlyddyn, Ralla and Caddwg, his old servants from the Tor. Gwlyddyn and Ralla’s children grew up alongside ours and all of them were united against Mordred. By the time the King was twelve years old Ceinwyn had already given birth five times. All three of the girls lived, but both the boys died within a week of their births and Ceinwyn blamed Mordred’s evil spirit for their deaths. ‘It doesn’t want other boys in the palace,’ she said sadly, ‘only girls.’

‘Mordred will go soon,’ I promised her, for I was counting the days to his fifteenth birthday when he would be acclaimed King.

Arthur counted the days too, though with some dread for he feared that Mordred would undo all his achievements. Arthur came frequently to Lindinis in those years. We would hear hoofbeats in the outer courtyard, the door would be flung open and his voice would echo through the palace’s big, half-empty rooms. ‘Morwenna! Seren! Dian!' He would shout, and our three golden-haired daughters would run or toddle to be swept up in a huge embrace and then they would be spoiled with presents; honey on a comb, small brooches, or the delicate spiral-patterned shell of a snail. Then, draped by daughters, he would come to whatever room we occupied and give us his latest news: a bridge rebuilt, a lawcourt opened, an honest magistrate found, a highway robber executed; or else some tale of a natural wonder: a sea snake seen off the coast, a calf born with five legs or, once, tales of a juggler who ate fire. ‘How is the King?’ he would always ask when these wonders had been recounted.

‘The King grows,’ Ceinwyn would always reply blandly and Arthur would ask no more. He would give us news of Guinevere, and it was always good, though both Ceinwyn and I suspected that his enthusiasm concealed a strange loneliness. He was never alone, but I think he never did discover the twin soul he wanted so much. Guinevere had once been as passionately interested in the business of government as Arthur, but she gradually turned her energies to the worship of Isis. Arthur, who was ever made uncomfortable by religious fervour, pretended to be interested in that woman’s Goddess, but in truth I think he believed Guinevere was wasting her time searching for a power that did not exist, just as we had once wasted our time pursuing the Cauldron.

Guinevere gave him only the one son. Either, Ceinwyn said, they slept apart, or else Guinevere was using a woman’s magic to prevent conception. Every village had a wise woman who knew what herbs would do that, just as they knew what substances could abort a child or cure a sickness. Arthur, I knew, would have liked more children for he adored them, and some of his happiest times were when he brought Gwydre to stay in our palace. Arthur and his son revelled in the wild pack of ragged, knot-haired children who raced carelessly about Lindinis, but who always avoided the sullen, brooding presence of Mordred. Gwydre played with our three, and Ralla’s three, and with the two dozen slave or servant children who formed miniature armies for mock combat or else draped borrowed war-cloaks over the branch of a low-growing pear tree in the garden to turn it into a pretend house that imitated the passions and procedures of the larger palace. Mordred had his own companions, all boys, all slave sons, and they, being older, roamed more widely. We heard tales of a reaping hook stolen from a hut, of a thatch or a hayrick fired, of a sieve torn or a newly laid hedge broken, and, in later years, of a shepherd’s girl or a farmer’s daughter assaulted. Arthur would listen, shudder, then go and talk with the King, but it made no difference.

Guinevere rarely came to Lindinis, though my duties, that took me all across Dumnonia in Arthur’s service, carried me to Durnovaria’s Winter Palace frequently enough and it was there, as often as not, that I met Guinevere. She was civil to me, but then we were all civil in those days for Arthur had inaugurated his great band of warriors. He had first described his idea to me in Cwm Isaf, but now, in the years of peace that followed the battle outside London, he made his guild of spearmen into a reality. Even to this day, if you mention the Round Table, some old men will remember and chuckle at that ancient attempt to tame rivalry, hostility and ambition. The Round Table, of course, was never its proper name, but rather a nickname. Arthur himself had decided to call it the Brotherhood of Britain, which sounded far more impressive, but no one ever called it that. They remembered it, if they remembered it at all, as the Round Table oath, and they probably forgot that it was supposed to bring us peace. Poor Arthur. He really did believe in brotherhood, and if kisses could bring peace then a thousand dead men would still be alive to this day. Arthur did try to change the world and his instrument was love. The Brotherhood of Britain was supposed to have been inaugurated at the Winter Palace at Durnovaria in the summer after Guinevere’s father, Leodegan the exiled King of Henis Wyren, had died of a plague. But that July, when we were all supposed to meet, the plague came to Durnovaria again and so, at the very last moment, Arthur diverted the great gathering to the Sea Palace that was now finished and shining on its hill above the creek. Lindinis would have been a better place for the inaugural rites because it was a much larger palace, but Guinevere must have decided that she wanted to show off her new home. Doubtless it pleased her to have Britain’s crude, longhaired, rough-bearded warriors wandering through its civilized halls and shadowed arcades. This beauty, she seemed to be telling us, is what you live to protect, though she took good care to make sure that few of us actually slept inside the enlarged villa. We camped outside and, truth to tell, we were happier there.

Ceinwyn came with me. She was not well, for the ceremonies occurred not long after the birth of her third child, a boy, and it had been a difficult confinement that had ended with Ceinwyn desperately weak and the child dead, but Arthur pleaded for her to come. He wanted all the lords of Britain there, and though none came from Gwynedd, Elmet, or the other northern kingdoms, many others did make the long journey and virtually all Dumnonia’s great men were present. Cuneglas of Powys came, Meurig of Gwent was there, Prince Tristan of Kernow attended, as, of course, did Lancelot, and all those Kings brought lords, Druids, bishops and chieftains so that the tents and shelters made a great swathe about the Sea Palace’s hill. Mordred, who was then nine years old, came with us and he, to Guinevere’s disgust, was given rooms with the other Kings inside the palace. Merlin refused to attend. He said he was too old for such nonsense. Galahad was named the Marshal of the Brotherhood and so he presided with Arthur and, like Arthur, believed devoutly in the whole idea.

I never confessed as much to Arthur, but I found the whole thing embarrassing. His notion was that we would all swear peace and friendship to one another, and thus heal our enmities and bind each other in oaths that would forbid any in the Brotherhood of Britain from ever raising a spear against another; but even the Gods seemed to mock that high ambition for the day of the ceremony dawned chill and gloomy, though it never did actually rain, which Arthur, who was ridiculously optimistic about the whole thing, declared to be a propitious sign.

No swords, spears or shields were carried to the ceremony, held in the Sea Palace’s great pleasure garden which lay between two newly built arcades that stretched on grass embankments towards the creek. Banners hung from the arcades where two choirs sang solemn music to give the ceremonies a proper dignity. At the north end of the garden, close to a big arched door that led into the palace, a table had been set. It happened to be a round table, though there was nothing significant in that shape; it was simply the most convenient table to carry out into the garden. The table was not very large, maybe as far across as a man’s outstretched hands could reach, but it was, I remember, very beautiful. It was Roman, of course, and made of a white translucent stone into which had been carved a remarkable horse with great spread wings. One of the wings had a grievous crack running through it, but the table was still an impressive object and the winged horse a wonder. Sagramor said he had never seen such a beast in all his travels, though he claimed that flying horses did exist in the mysterious countries that lay beyond the oceans of sand, wherever they were. Sagramor had married his sturdy Saxon Malla and was now the father of two boys.

The only swords allowed at the ceremony were those belonging to the Kings and Princes. Mordred’s sword lay on the table, and crisscrossed above it were the blades of Lancelot, Meurig, Cuneglas, Galahad and Tristan. One by one we all stepped forward, Kings, Princes, chieftains and lords, and placed our hands where the six blades touched and swore Arthur’s oath that pledged us to amity and peace. Ceinwyn had dressed the nine-year-old Mordred in new clothes, then trimmed and combed his hair in an attempt to stop its curly bristles jutting like twin brushes from his round skull, but he still looked an awkward figure as he limped on his clubbed left foot to mumble the oath. I admit that the moment when I put my hand on the six blades was solemn enough; like most men there, I had every intention of keeping the oath which was, of course, for men only, for Arthur did not consider this to be women’s business, though plenty of women stood on the terrace above the arched door to witness the long ceremony. It was a long ceremony, too. Arthur had originally intended to restrict the membership of his Brotherhood to those oath-sworn warriors who had fought against the Saxons, but now he had widened it to include every great man he could lure to the palace, and when the oaths were finished he swore his own oath and afterwards stood on the terrace and told us that the vow we had just sworn was as sacred as any we had ever made, that we had promised Britain peace and that if any of us broke that peace then it was the sworn duty of every other member of the Brotherhood to punish the transgressor. Then he instructed us to embrace each other, and after that, of course, the drinking started. The day’s solemnity did not end as the drinking began. Arthur had watched carefully to see which men avoided other men’s embraces, and then, group by group, those recalcitrant souls were summoned to the palace’s great hall where Arthur insisted they should be reconciled. Arthur himself showed an example by first embracing Sansum, and afterwards Melwas, the dethroned Belgic King whom Arthur had exiled to Isca. Melwas submitted with a lumbering grace to the kiss of peace, but he died a month later after eating a breakfast of tainted oysters. Fate, as Merlin loved to tell us, is inexorable. Those more intimate reconciliations inevitably delayed the serving of the feast which was to take place in the great hall where Arthur was bringing enemies together, and so more mead was carried out to the garden where the bored warriors waited and tried to guess which among them would be summoned to Arthur’s peace-making next. I knew I would be summoned, for I had carefully avoided Lancelot during the whole ceremony, and sure enough Hygwydd, Arthur’s servant, found me and insisted I go to the great hall where, as I feared, Lancelot and his courtiers waited for me. Arthur had persuaded Ceinwyn to attend and, to give her some added comfort, he had asked her brother Cuneglas to be present. The three of us stood on one side of the hall, Lancelot and his men on the other, while Arthur, Galahad and Guinevere presided from the dais where the high table stood ready for the great feast. Arthur beamed at us. ‘I have in this room,’ he declared, ‘some of my dearest friends. King Cuneglas, the best ally any man could have in war or peace, King Lancelot, to whom I am sworn like a brother, Lord Derfel Cadarn, the bravest of all my brave men, and dear Princess Ceinwyn.’ He smiled.

I stood as awkward as a pea-field scarecrow. Ceinwyn looked graceful, Cuneglas stared at the hall’s painted ceiling, Lancelot scowled, Amhar and Loholt tried to look belligerent, while Dinas and Lavaine showed nothing but contempt on their hard faces. Guinevere watched us carefully and her striking face betrayed nothing, though I suspect she felt as scornful as Dinas and Lavaine of this invented ceremony that was so dear to her husband. Arthur fervently wanted peace, and only he and Galahad seemed unembarrassed by the occasion.

When none of us spoke Arthur spread his arms and stepped down from the dais. ‘I demand,’ he said,

‘that the ill blood that exists between you be spilled now, spilled once and then forgotten.’

He waited again. I shuffled my feet and Cuneglas tugged at his long moustaches.

‘Please,’ Arthur said.

Ceinwyn gave a tiny shrug. ‘I regret,’ she said, ‘the hurt I caused King Lancelot.’

Arthur, delighted that the ice was melting, smiled at the Belgic King. ‘Lord King?’ He invited a response from Lancelot. ‘Will you forgive her?’

Lancelot, who that day was dressed all in white, glanced at her, then bowed.

‘Is that forgiveness?’ I growled.

Lancelot coloured, but managed to rise to Arthur’s expectations. ‘I have no quarrel with the Princess Ceinwyn,’ he said stiffly.

‘There!’ Arthur was delighted with the grudging words and spread his arms again to invite them both forward. ‘Embrace,’ he said. ‘I will have peace!’

They both walked forward, kissed each other on the cheek and stepped back. The gesture was about as warm as that star-bright night when we had waited about the Cauldron in the rocks by Llyn Cerrig Bach, but it pleased Arthur. ‘Derfel,’ he looked at me, ‘will you not embrace the King?’

I steeled myself for conflict. ‘I will embrace him, Lord,’ I said, ‘when his Druids retract the threats they made against the Princess Ceinwyn.’

There was silence. Guinevere sighed and tapped a foot on the mosaics of the dais, the same mosaics she had taken from Lindinis. She looked, as ever, superb. She wore a black robe, perhaps in recognition of the day’s solemnity, and the robe was sewn with dozens of small silver crescent moons. Her red hair had been tamed into plaits that she had coiled about her skull and pinned into place with two gold clasps shaped as dragons. Around her neck she wore the barbaric Saxon gold necklace that Arthur had sent her after a long-ago battle against Aelle’s Saxons. She had told me then that she disliked the necklace, but it looked magnificent on her. She might have despised this day’s proceedings, but she still did her best to help her husband. ‘What threats?’ she asked me coldly.

‘They know,’ I said, staring at the twins.

‘We have made no threats,’ Lavaine protested flatly.

‘But you can make the stars vanish,’ I accused them.

Dinas allowed a slow smile to show on his brutal and handsome face. ‘The little paper star. Lord Derfel?’ he asked with mock surprise. ‘Is that your insult?’

‘It was your threat.’

‘My Lord!’ Dinas appealed to Arthur. ‘It was a child’s trick. It meant nothing.’

Arthur looked from me to the Druids. ‘You swear that?’ he demanded.

‘On my brother’s life,’ Dinas said.

‘And Merlin’s beard?’ I challenged them. ‘You have it still?’

Guinevere sighed as if to suggest I was becoming tedious. Galahad frowned. Outside the palace the warriors’ voices were becoming mead-loud and raucous.

Lavaine looked at Arthur. ‘It is true, Lord,’ he said courteously, ‘that we possessed a strand of Merlin’s beard, cut after he insulted King Cerdic. But on my life, Lord, we burned it.’

‘We don’t fight old men,’ Dinas growled, then glanced at Ceinwyn. ‘Or women.’

Arthur smiled happily. ‘Come, Derfel,’ he said, ‘embrace. I will have peace between my dearest friends.’

I still hesitated, but Ceinwyn and her brother both urged me forward and so, for the second and last time in my life, I embraced Lancelot. This time, instead of whispering insults as we had at our first embrace, we said nothing. We just kissed and stepped apart.

‘There will be peace between you,’ Arthur insisted.

‘I swear it, Lord,’ I answered stiffly.

‘I have no quarrel,’ Lancelot answered just as coldly.

Arthur had to be content with our churlish reconciliation and he breathed a huge sigh of relief as though the most difficult part of his day was now done; then he embraced us both before insisting that Guinevere, Galahad, Ceinwyn and Cuneglas come and exchange kisses.

Our ordeal was over. Arthur’s last victims were his own wife and Mordred, and that I did not want to see so I drew Ceinwyn out of the room. Her brother, at Arthur’s request, stayed and so the two of us were alone. Tm sorry about that,’ I told her.

Ceinwyn shrugged. ‘It was an unavoidable ordeal.’

‘I still don’t trust the bastard,’ I said vengefully.

She smiled. ‘You, Derfel Cadarn, are a great warrior and he is Lancelot. Does the wolf fear the hare?’

‘It fears the serpent,’ I said gloomily. I did not feel like facing my friends and describing the reconciliation with Lancelot and so I led Ceinwyn through the Sea Palace’s graceful rooms with their pillared walls, decorated floors and heavy bronze lamps that hung on long iron chains from ceilings painted with hunting scenes. Ceinwyn thought the palace immeasurably grand, but also cold. ‘Just like the Romans,’ she said.

‘Just like Guinevere,’ I retorted. We found a flight of stairs that led down to some busy kitchens and from there a door into the back gardens where fruit and herbs were growing in well-ordered beds. ‘I can’t think,’ I said when we were in the open air, ‘that this Brotherhood of Britain will achieve anything.’

‘It will,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘if enough of you take the oath seriously’

‘Maybe.’ I had suddenly stopped in embarrassment, for ahead of me, just straightening from bending over a bed of parsley, was Guinevere’s younger sister Gwenhwyvach.

Ceinwyn greeted her happily. I had forgotten that they had been friends in the long years of Guinevere and Gwenhwyvach’s exile in Powys, and when they had kissed Ceinwyn brought Gwenhwyvach to me. I thought she might resent my failure to marry her, but she seemed to bear no grudge. ‘I have become my sister’s gardener,’ she told me.

‘Surely not, Lady?’ I said.

‘The appointment is not official,’ she said drily, ‘nor are my high offices of chief steward or warden of the hounds, but someone has to do the work, and when father died he made Guinevere promise to look after me.’

‘I was sorry about your father,’ Ceinwyn said.

Gwenhwyvach shrugged. ‘He just got thinner and thinner until one day he wasn’t there any more.’

Gwenhwyvach herself had grown no thinner, indeed she was obese now, a fat red-faced woman who, in her earth-stained dress and dirty white apron, looked more like a farmer’s wife than a Princess. ‘I live there,’ she said, gesturing towards a substantial timber building that stood a hundred paces from the palace. ‘My sister allows me to do my work each day, but come the evening bell I am expected to be safely out of sight. Nothing ill-favoured, you understand, can mar the Sea Palace.’

‘Lady!’ I protested at her self-deprecation

Gwenhwyvach waved me to silence. ‘I’m happy,’ she said bleakly. ‘I take the dogs for long walks and I talk to the bees.’

‘Come to Lindinis,’ Ceinwyn urged her.

‘That would never be allowed!’ Gwenhwyvach said with pretended shock.

‘Why not?’ Ceinwyn asked. ‘We have rooms to spare. Please.’

Gwenhwyvach smiled slyly. ‘I know too much, Ceinwyn, that’s why. I know who comes and who stays and what they do here.’ Neither of us wanted to probe those hints, so we both kept silent, but Gwenhwyvach needed to speak. She must have been lonely, and Ceinwyn was a friendly loving face from the past. Gwenhwyvach suddenly threw down the herbs she had just cut and hurried us back towards the palace. ‘Let me show you,’ she said.

‘I’m sure we don’t need to see,’ Ceinwyn said, fearing whatever was about to be revealed.

‘You can see,’ Gwenhwyvach said to Ceinwyn, ‘but Derfel can’t. Or shouldn’t. Men aren’t supposed to enter the temple.’

She had led us to a door that stood at the bottom of some brick steps and which, when she pushed it open, led into a great cellar that lay under the palace floor and was supported by huge arches of Roman brick. ‘They keep wine here,’ Gwenhwyvach said, explaining the jars and skins that stood racked on the shelves. She had left the door open so that some glimmers of daylight would penetrate the dark, dusty tangle of arches. ‘This way,’ she said, and disappeared between some pillars to our right. We followed more slowly, groping our way ever more carefully as we went further and further from the daylight at the cellar door. We heard Gwenhwyvach lifting a door-bar, then a breath of cold air wafted by us as she pulled a huge door open. ‘Is this a temple of Isis?’ I asked her.

‘You’ve heard about it?’ Gwenhwyvach seemed disappointed.

‘Guinevere showed me her temple in Durnovaria,’ I said, ‘years ago.’

‘She wouldn’t show you this one,’ Gwenhwyvach said, and then she pulled aside the thick black curtains that hung a few feet inside the temple doors so that Ceinwyn and I could stare into Guinevere’s private shrine. Gwenhwyvach, for fear of her sister’s wrath, would not let me tread beyond the small lobby that lay between the door and the thick curtains, but she led Ceinwyn down two steps into the long room that had a floor made of polished black stone, walls and an arched ceiling painted with pitch, a black stone dais with a black stone throne, and behind the throne another black curtain. In front of the low dais was a shallow pit which, I knew, was tilled with water during Isis’s ceremonies. The temple, in truth, was almost exactly the same as the one Guinevere had shown me so many years before, and very like the deserted shrine we had discovered in Lindinis’s palace. The only difference — other than that this cellar was larger and lower than both those previous temples — was that here daylight had been allowed to penetrate, for there was a wide hole in the arched ceiling directly above the shallow pit. ‘There’s a wall up there,’ Gwenhwyvach whispered, pointing up the hole, ‘higher than a man. That’s so the moonlight can come down the shaft, but no one can see down it. Clever, isn’t it?’

The existence of the moon-shaft suggested that the cellar had to run out under the side garden of the palace and Gwenhwyvach confirmed that. ‘There used to be an entrance here,’ she said, pointing to a jagged line in the pitch-covered brickwork halfway down the temple’s length, ‘so that supplies could be brought directly into the cellar, but Guinevere extended the arch, see? And covered it over with turf.’

There seemed nothing unduly sinister about the temple, other than its malevolent blackness, for there was no idol, no sacrificial fire and no altar. If anything, it was disappointing, for the arched cellar possessed none of the grandeur of the upstairs rooms. It seemed tawdry, even slightly soiled. The Romans, I thought, would have known how to make this room fit for the Goddess, but Guinevere’s best efforts had simply turned a brick cellar into a black cave, though the low throne, which was made from a single block of black stone and was, I presumed, the same throne that I had seen in Durnovaria, was impressive enough. Gwenhwyvach walked past the throne and plucked aside the black curtain so that Ceinwyn could go beyond. They spent a long time behind the curtain, but when we left the cellars Ceinwyn told me there was not much to see there. ‘It was just a small black room,’ she told me, ‘with a big bed and a lot of mouse droppings.’

‘A bed?’ I asked suspiciously.

‘A dream-bed,’ Ceinwyn said firmly, ‘just like the one that used to be halfway up Merlin’s tower.’

‘Is that all it is?’ I asked, still suspicious.

Ceinwyn shrugged. ‘Gwenhwyvach tried to suggest it was used for other purposes,’ she said disapprovingly, ‘but she had no proof, and she did finally admit that her sister slept there to receive dreams.’ She smiled sadly. ‘I think poor Gwenhwyvach is touched in the head. She believes Lancelot will come for her one day’

‘She believes what?’ I asked in astonishment.

‘She’s in love with him, poor woman,’ Ceinwyn said. We had tried to persuade Gwenhwyvach to join us at the celebrations in the front garden, but she had refused. She would not, she had confided to us, be welcome and so she had hurried away, darting suspicious glances left and right. ‘Poor Gwenhwyvach.’

Ceinwyn said, then laughed. ‘It’s so typical of Guinevere, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’

‘To adopt such an exotic religion! Why can’t she worship the Gods of Britain like the rest of us? But no, she has to find something strange and difficult.’ She sighed, then put an arm through mine. ‘Do we really have to stay for the feast?’

She was feeling weak for she had still not fully recovered from the last birth. ‘Arthur will understand if we don’t go,’ I said.

‘But Guinevere won’t,’ she sighed, ‘so I had better survive.’

We had been walking around the long western flank of the palace, past the high timber palisade of the temple’s moon-shaft, and had now reached the end of the long arcade. I stopped her before we turned the corner and I put my hands on her shoulders. ‘Ceinwyn of Powys,’ I said, looking into her astonishing and lovely face, ‘I do love you.’

‘I know,’ she said with a smile, then stood on tiptoe to kiss me before leading me a few paces on so that we could gaze up the length of the Sea Palace’s pleasure garden. ‘There,’ Ceinwyn said with amusement, ‘is Arthur’s Brotherhood of Britain.’

The garden was reeling with drunken men. They had been kept too long from the feast so now they were offering each other elaborate embraces and flowery promises of eternal friendship. Some of the embraces had turned into wrestling matches that rolled fiercely over Guinevere’s flower beds. The choirs had long abandoned their attempts to sing solemn music and some of the choirs’ women were now drinking with the warriors. Not all the men were drunk, of course, but the sober guests had retreated to the terrace to protect the women, many of whom were Guinevere’s attendants and among whom was Lunete, my first and long-ago love. Guinevere was also on the terrace, from where she was staring in horror at the wreckage being made of her garden, though it was her own fault for she had served mead brewed especially strong and now at least fifty men were roistering in the gardens; some had plucked flower stakes to use in mock sword fights and at least one man had a bloody face, while another was working free a loosened tooth and foully cursins the oath-sworn Brother of Britain who had struck him. Someone else had vomited onto the round table.

I helped Ceinwyn up to the safety of the arcade while beneath us the Brotherhood of Britain cursed and fought and drank itself insensible.

And that, although Igraine will never believe me, was how Arthur’s Brotherhood of Britain, that the ignorant still call the Round Table, all began.

I would like to say that the new spirit of peace engendered by Arthur’s Round Table oath spread happiness throughout the kingdom, but most common folk were quite unaware that the oath had even been taken. Most people neither knew nor cared what their lords did so long as their fields and families were left unmolested. Arthur, of course, set great store by the oath. As Ceinwyn often said, for a man who claimed to hate oaths he was uncommonly fond of making them.

But at least the oath was kept in those years and Britain prospered in that period of peace. Aelle and Cerdic fought each other for the mastery of Lloegyr, and their bitter conflict spared the rest of Britain from their Saxon spears. The Irish Kings in western Britain were forever testing their weapons against British shields, but those conflicts were small and scattered, and most of us enjoyed a long period of peace. Mordred’s Council, of which I was now a member, could concern itself with laws, taxes and land disputes instead of worrying about enemies.

Arthur headed the Council, though he never took the chair at the table’s head because that was the throne reserved for the King and it waited empty until Mordred came of age. Merlin was officially the King’s chief councillor, but he never travelled to Durnovaria and said little on the few occasions that the Council met in Lindinis. Half a dozen of the councillors were warriors, though most of those never came. Agravain said the business bored him, while Sagramor preferred to keep the Saxon frontier peaceful. The other councillors were two bards who knew the laws and genealogies of Britain, two magistrates, a merchant, and two Christian bishops. One of the bishops was a grave, elderly man called Emrys, who had succeeded Bedwin as bishop in Durnovaria, and the other was Sansum. Sansum had once conspired against Arthur and few men doubted that he should have lost his head when that conspiracy was revealed, but Sansum had somehow slithered free. He never learned to read or write, but he was a clever man and endlessly ambitious. He came from Gwent, where his father had been a tanner, and Sansum had risen to become one of Tewdric’s priests, but he came to real prominence by marrying Arthur and Guinevere when they fled like fugitives from Caer Sws. He was rewarded for that service by being made a Dumnonian Bishop and Mordred’s chaplain, though he lost the latter honour after he conspired with Nabur and Melwas. He was supposed to rot in obscurity after that as the guardian of the shrine of the Holy Thorn, but Sansum could not abide obscurity. He had saved Lancelot from the humiliation of Mithras’s rejection, and in so doing he had earned Guinevere’s wary gratitude, but neither his friendship with Lancelot nor his truce with Guinevere would have been sufficient to lift him onto Dumnonia’s Council.

He had achieved that eminence by marriage, and the woman he married was Arthur’s older sister, Morgan — Morgan, the priestess of Merlin, the adept of the mysteries, the pagan Morgan. With that marriage Sansum had sloughed off all traces of his old disgrace and had risen to the topmost heights of Dumnonian power. He had been placed on the Council, made Bishop of Lindinis and was reappointed as Mordred’s chaplain, though luckily his distaste for the young King kept him away from Lindinis’s palace. He assumed authority over all the churches in northern Dumnonia, just as Emrys held sway over all the southern churches. For Sansum it was a glittering marriage, and to the rest of us it was an astonishment. The wedding itself took place in the church of the Holy Thorn at Ynys Wydryn. Arthur and Guinevere stayed at Lindinis, and we all rode to the shrine together on the great day. The ceremonies began with Morgan’s baptism in the reed-edged waters of Issa’s Mere. She had abandoned her old gold mask with its image of the horned God Cernunnos and had instead adopted a new mask that was decorated with a Christian cross and, to mark the day’s joyousness, she had abandoned her usual black robe for a white gown. Arthur had cried with joy to see his sister limp into the mere where Sansum, with evident tenderness, supported her back as he lowered her into the water. A choir sang hallelujahs. We waited while Morgan dried herself and changed into a new white robe, then we watched as she limped to the altar where Bishop Emrys joined them as man and wife.

I think I could not have been more astonished had Merlin himself abandoned the old Gods to take up the cross. For Sansum, of course, it was a double triumph, for by marrying Arthur’s sister he not only vaulted into the kingdom’s royal Council, but by converting her to Christianity he struck a famous blow against the pagans. Some men sourly accused him of opportunism, but in all fairness I think he did love Morgan in his own calculating way and she undoubtedly adored him. They were two clever people united by resentments. Sansum ever believed that he should be higher than he was, while Morgan, who had once been beautiful, resented the fire that had twisted her body and turned her face into a horror. She resented Nimue too, for Morgan had once been Merlin’s most trusted priestess and the younger Nimue had usurped that place and now, in revenge, Morgan became the most ardent of Christians. She was as strident in her protestations of Christ as she had ever been in her service of the older Gods and after her marriage all her formidable will was poured into Sansum’s missionary campaign. Merlin did not attend the marriage, but he did derive amusement from it. ‘She’s lonely,’ he told me when he heard the news, ‘and the mouse-lord is at least company. You don’t think they rut together, do you? Dear Gods, Derfel, if poor Morgan undressed in front of Sansum he’d throw up! Besides, he doesn’t know how to rut. Not with women, anyway.’

Marriage did not soften Morgan. In Sansum she found a man willing to be guided by her shrewd advice and whose ambitions she could support with all her fierce energy, but to the rest of the world she was still the shrewish, bitter woman behind the forbidding golden mask. She still lived in Ynys Wydryn, though instead of living on Merlin’s Tor she now inhabited the Bishop’s house in the shrine from where she could see the fire-scarred Tor where her enemy, Nimue, lived.

Nimue, bereft of Merlin now, was convinced that Morgan had stolen the Treasures of Britain. As far as I could see, that conviction was based solely on Nimue’s hatred for Morgan whom Nimue considered the greatest traitor of Britain. Morgan, after all, was the pagan priestess who had abandoned the Gods to turn Christian, and Nimue, whenever she saw Morgan, spat and hurled curses that Morgan energetically flung back at her; pagan threat battling Christian doom. They would never be civil with each other, though once, at Nimue’s urging, I did confront Morgan about the lost Cauldron. That was a year after the marriage and, though I was now a Lord and one of the wealthiest men in Dumnonia, I still felt nervous of Morgan. When I had been a child she had been a figure of awesome authority and terrifying appearance who had ruled the Tor with a brusque bad temper and an ever-ready staff with which we all were disciplined. Now, so many years later, I found her just as alarming. I met her in one of Sansum’s new buildings in Ynys Wydryn. The largest was the size of a royal feasting hall and was the school where dozens of priests were trained as missionaries. Those priests began their lessons at six years old, were proclaimed holy at sixteen and then sent on Britain’s roads to gain converts. I often met those fervent men on my travels. They walked in pairs, carrying only a small bag and a staff, though sometimes they were accompanied by groups of women who seemed curiously drawn to the missionaries. They had no fear. Whenever I encountered them they would always challenge me and dare me to deny their God, and I would always courteously admit his existence then insist that my own Gods lived too, and at that they would hurl curses at me and their women would wail and howl insults. Once, when two such fanatics frightened my daughters, I used the butt of a spear on them and I admit I used it too hard, for at the end of the argument there was a broken skull and a shattered wrist, neither of them mine. Arthur insisted I stand trial as a demonstration that even the most privileged Dumnonians were not above the law, and thus I went to the Lindinis courthouse where a Christian magistrate charged me the bone-price of half my own weight in silver.

‘You should have been whipped,’ Morgan evidently remembered the incident and snapped her verdict at me when I was admitted to her presence. ‘Whipped raw and bloody. In public!’

‘I think even you would find that difficult now, Lady,’ I said mildly.

‘God would give me the needful strength,’ she snarled from behind her new gold mask with its Christian cross. She sat at a table that was piled with parchment and ink-covered wood-shavings, for she not only ran Sansum’s school, but tallied the treasuries of every church and monastery in northern Dumnonia, though the achievement of which she was most proud was her community of holy women who chanted and prayed in their own hall where men were not allowed to set foot. I could hear their sweet voices singing now as Morgan looked me up and down. She evidently did not much like what she saw. ‘If you’ve come for more money,’ she snapped, ‘you can’t have it. Not till you repay the loans outstanding.’

‘There are no outstanding loans that I know of,’ I said mildly.

‘Nonsense.’ She snatched up one of the wood-shavings and read out a fictitious list of unpaid loans. I let her have her say, then gently told her that the Council did not seek to borrow money from the church. ‘And if it did,’ I added, ‘then I’m sure your husband would have told you.’

‘And I’m sure,’ she said, ‘that you pagans on the Council are plotting things behind the saint’s back.’

She sniffed. ‘How is my brother?’

‘Busy, Lady.’

‘Too busy to come and see me, plainly.’

‘And you’re too busy to visit him,’ I said pleasantly.

‘Me? Go to Durnovaria? And face that witch Guinevere?’ She made the sign of the cross, then dipped her hand in a bowl of water and made the sign again. ‘I would rather walk into hell and see Satan himself,’ she said, ‘than see that witch of Isis!’ She was about to spit to avert evil, then remembered to make another sign of the cross instead. ‘Do you know what rites Isis demands?’ she asked me angrily.

‘No, Lady,’ I said.

‘Filth, Derfel, filth! Isis is the scarlet woman! The whore of Babylon. It is the devil’s faith, Derfel. They lie together, man and woman.’ She shuddered at that horrid thought. ‘Pure filth.’

‘Men are not allowed in their temple, Lady,’ I said, defending Guinevere, ‘just as they are not allowed in your women’s hall.’

‘Not allowed!’ Morgan cackled. ‘They come by night, you fool, and worship their filthy Goddess naked. Men and women together, sweating like swine! You think I don’t know? I, who was once such a sinner? You think you know better than I about pagan faiths? I tell you, Derfel, they lie together in their own sweat, naked woman and naked man. Isis and Osiris, woman and man, and the woman gives life to the man, and how do you think that’s done, you fool? It’s done by the filthy act of fornication, that’s how!’ She dipped her fingers in the water bowl and made the sign of the cross again, leaving a bead of the holy water on the forehead of her mask. ‘You’re an ignorant, credulous fool,’ she snapped at me. I did not pursue the argument. The different faiths always insulted each other thus. Many pagans accused the Christians of similar behaviour at their so called ‘love-feasts’, and many country people believed that the Christians kidnapped, killed and ate children. ‘Arthur’s also a fool,’ Morgan growled, ‘for trusting Guinevere.’ She gave me an unfriendly look with her one eye. ‘So what do you want of me, Derfel, if it isn’t money?’

‘I want to know, Lady, what happened on the night the Cauldron disappeared.’

She laughed at that. It was an echo of her old laughter, the cruel cackling sound that had always presaged trouble on the Tor. ‘You miserable little fool,’ she said, ‘wasting my time.’ And with that she turned back to her work table. I waited while she made marks on her tally sticks or in the margins of parchment scrolls and pretended to ignore me. ‘Still here, fool?’ she asked after a while.

‘Still here, Lady,’ I said.

She turned on her stool. ‘Why do you want to know? Is it that wicked little whore on the hill who sent you?’ She waved through the window at the Tor.

‘Merlin asked me, Lady,’ I lied. ‘He’s curious about the past, but his memory wanders.’

‘It’ll wander into hell soon,’ she said vengefully, then she pondered my question before, at last, offering a shrug. ‘I will tell you what happened that night,’ she said at last, ‘and I will tell you only once, and when it is told you will never ask me of it again.’

‘Once is enough, Lady.’

She stood and limped to the window from where she could stare up at the Tor. ‘The Lord God Almighty,’ she said, ‘the one true God, the Father of us all, sent fire from heaven. I was there, so I know what happened. He sent the lightning and it struck the hall thatch and set it on fire. I was screaming, for I have good cause to fear fire. I know fire. I am a child of fire. Fire ruined my life, but this was a different fire. This was God’s cleansing fire, the fire that burned away my sin. The fire spread from the thatch to the tower and it burned everything. I watched that fire and I would even have died in it if the blessed saint Sansum had not come to guide me to safety.’ She made the sign of the cross, then turned back to me.

‘That, fool,’ she snapped, ‘is what happened.’

So Sansum had been on the Tor that night? That was interesting, but I made no remark about it. Instead I said gently, ‘The fire did not burn the Cauldron, Lady. Merlin came next day and he searched the ashes and found no gold.’

‘Fool!’ Morgan spat at me through the mouth-slit of her mask. ‘You think God’s fire burns like your feeble flames? The Cauldron was the pot of evil, the foulest blight on God’s earth. It was the devil’s pissing pot and the Lord God consumed it, Derfel, he consumed it to nothing! I saw it with this eye!’ She tapped her mask beneath the one good eye. ‘I saw it burn, and it was a bright, seething, hissing furnace glare in the innermost heart of the fire, it was a flame like the hottest flame of hell and I heard the demons screeching in their pain as their Cauldron turned to smoke. God burned it! He burned it and sent it back to hell where it belongs!’ She paused and I sensed that her flame-mauled, ruined face was cracking into a smile behind the mask. ‘It’s gone, Derfel,’ she said in a quieter voice, ‘and now you can go, too.’

I left her, left the shrine and climbed to the Tor where I pushed back the half-broken water gate that hung crazily off one rope hinge. The blackened ashes of the hall and tower were being swallowed by the earth, and around them were the dozen dirty huts where Nimue and her people lived. Those people were the unwanted of our world; its cripples and beggars, its homeless folk and half-crazed creatures who all survived on the food Ceinwyn and I sent weekly from Lindinis. Nimue claimed her people spoke with the Gods, but all I ever heard from them was mad cackling or sad moaning. ‘She denies everything,’ I said to Nimue.

‘Of course she does.’

‘She says her God burned it to nothing.’

‘Her God couldn’t soft boil an egg,’ Nimue said vengefully. She had decayed foully in the years since the Cauldron had disappeared and as Merlin had subsided into his gentle old age. Nimue was filthy these days, filthy and thin and almost as crazed as when I had rescued her from the Isle of the Dead. She shivered at times, or else her face grimaced in uncontrollable twitches. She had long ago sold or thrown away the golden eye, and now wore a leather patch over the empty socket instead. Whatever intriguing beauty she had once possessed was now hidden under dirt and sores, and lost beneath her matted mass of black hair that was so greasy with filth that even the countryfolk who came to her for divination or healing would often recoil from her stench. Even I, who was oath-sworn to her and who had once loved her, could hardly bear to be near her.

‘The Cauldron still lives,’ Nimue told me that day.

‘So Merlin says.’

‘And Merlin lives too, Derfel.’ She put a nail-bitten hand on my arm. ‘He’s waiting, that’s all, saving his strength.’

Waiting for his balefire, I thought, but said nothing.

Nimue turned sunwise to stare all about the horizon. ‘Somewhere out there, Derfel,’ she said, ‘the Cauldron is hidden. And someone is trying to work out how to use it.’ She laughed softly. ‘And when they do, Derfel, you will see the land turn red with blood.’ She turned her one eye on me. ‘Blood!’ she hissed. ‘The world will vomit blood that day, Derfel, and Merlin will ride again.’

Maybe, I thought; but it was a sunny day and Dumnonia was at peace. It was Arthur’s peace, given by his sword and maintained by his lawcourts and enriched by his roads and sealed by his Brotherhood. It all seemed so distant from the world of the Cauldron and the missing Treasures, but Nimue still believed in their magic and for her sake I would not express disbelief, though on that bright day in Arthur’s Dumnonia it seemed to me that Britain was forging its way from darkness into light, from chaos into order and from savagery into law. That was Arthur’s achievement. That was his Camelot. But Nimue was right. The Cauldron was not lost and she, like Merlin, was just waiting for its horror.

Our chief business in those years was to prepare Mordred for the throne. He was already our King for he had been acclaimed as a baby on Caer Cadarn’s summit, but Arthur had decided to repeat the acclamation when Mordred came of age. I think Arthur hoped that some mystical power might invest Mordred with responsibility and wisdom at that second acclamation, for nothing else seemed capable of improving the boy. We tried, the Gods know we tried, but Mordred stayed the same sullen, resentful and loutish youth. Arthur disliked him but stayed wilfully blind to Mordred’s grosser faults, for if Arthur held any religion truly sacred it was his belief in the divinity of kings. The time would come when Arthur would be forced to face the truth of Mordred, but in those years, whenever the subject of Mordred’s suitability was raised in the royal Council, Arthur would always say the same thing. Mordred, he agreed, was an unattractive child, but we had all known such boys grow into proper men and the solemnity of acclamation and the responsibilities of kingship would surely temper the boy. ‘I was hardly a model child myself,’ he liked to say, ‘but I don’t think I’ve turned out ill. Have faith in the boy.’ Besides, he would always add with a smile, Mordred would be guided by a wise and experienced Council. ‘He’ll appoint his own Council,’ one of us would always object, but Arthur waved the matter aside. All, he blithely assured us, would turn out well.

Guinevere had no such illusions. Indeed, in the years following the Round Table oath she became obsessed with Mordred’s fate. She did not attend the royal Council, for no woman could, but when she was in Durnovaria I suspect she listened from behind a curtained archway that opened into the council chamber. Much of what we discussed must have bored her; we spent hours discussing whether to place new stones in a ford or to spend money on a bridge, or whether a magistrate was taking bribes or to whom we should grant the guardianship of an orphaned heir or heiress. Those matters were the common coin of council meetings and I am sure she found them tedious, but how avidly she must have listened when we discussed Mordred.

Guinevere hardly knew Mordred, but she hated him. She hated him because he was King and Arthur was not, and one by one she tried to convert the royal councillors to her own view. She was even pleasant to me, for I suspect she saw into my soul and knew that I secretly agreed with her. After the first council meeting that followed the Round Table oath she took my arm and walked with me about Durnovaria’s cloister which was misted from the smoke of herbs that were being burned in braziers to avert a return of the plague. Maybe it was the heady smoke that dizzied me, but more likely it was Guinevere’s proximity. She wore a strong perfume, her red hair was full and wild, her body straight and slender, and her face so very finely ¦ boned and full of spirit. I told her I was sorry her father had died.

‘Poor father,’ she said. ‘All he ever dreamed of was returning to Henis Wyren.’ She paused, and I wondered whether she had reproved Arthur for not making more effort to dislodge Diwrnach. I doubt Guinevere ever wanted to see Henis Wyren’s wild coast again, but her father had always wanted to return to his ancestors’ lands. ‘You never told me about your visit to Henis Wyren,’ Guinevere said reproachfully. ‘I hear you met Diwrnach?’

‘And hope never to meet him again, Lady.’

She shrugged. ‘Sometimes, in a king, a reputation for savagery can be useful.’ She questioned me about Henis Wyren’s condition, but I sensed she was not truly interested in my answers, any more than when she asked me how Ceinwyn was.

‘Well, Lady,’ I answered her, ‘thank you.’

‘Pregnant again?’ she asked in mild amusement.

‘We think so, Lady.’

‘How busy the two of you do keep, Derfel,’ she said in gentle mockery. Her annoyance at Ceinwyn had faded over the years, though they never did become friends. Guinevere snapped a leaf from a bay tree that grew in a Roman urn decorated with naked nymphs and rubbed the leaf between her fingers.

‘And how is our Lord King?’ she asked sourly.

‘Troublesome, Lady.’

‘Is he fit to be King?’ That was typical of Guinevere; a straight question, brutal and honest.

‘He was born to it. Lady,’ I said defensively, ‘and we are oath-sworn to it.’

She gave a derisive laugh. Her gold-laced sandals slapped the flagstones and a gold chain hung with pearls clinked about her neck. ‘Many years ago, Derfel,’ she said, ‘you and I talked of this and you told me that of all the men in Dumnonia Arthur was fittest to be King.’

‘I did,’ I admitted.

‘And you think Mordred is fitter?’

‘No, Lady.’

‘So?’ She turned to look at me. Few women could look me straight in the eye, but Guinevere could.

‘So?’ she asked again.

‘So I have sworn an oath, Lady, as has your husband.’

‘Oaths!’ she snarled, letting go of my arm. ‘Arthur swore an oath to kill Aelle, and Aelle yet lives. He swore an oath to take back Henis Wyren, yet Diwrnach still rules there. Oaths! You men hide behind oaths like servants hide behind stupidity, but the moment an oath becomes inconvenient you forget it soon enough. You think your oath to Uther cannot be forgotten?’

‘My oath is to the Prince Arthur,’ I said, taking care, as ever, to call Arthur a Prince in front of Guinevere. ‘You wish me to forget that oath?’ I asked her.

‘I want you, Derfel, to talk sense into him,’ she said. ‘He listens to you.’

‘He listens to you, Lady.’

‘Not on the subject of Mordred,’ she said. ‘On everything else, maybe, but not that.’ She shuddered, perhaps remembering the embrace she had been forced to give Mordred at the Sea Palace, then she angrily crumpled the bay leaf and threw it onto the flagstones. Within minutes, I knew, a servant would silently sweep it away. Durnovaria’s Winter Palace was always so tidy, while our palace at Lindinis was too littered with children ever to be neat and Mordred’s wing was a midden. ‘Arthur,’ Guinevere now insisted tiredly, ‘is the eldest living son of Uther. He should be King.’

And so he should, I thought, but we had all taken oaths to put Mordred on the throne and men had died at Lugg Vale to defend that oath. At times, the Gods forgive me, I just wished Mordred would die and so solve the problem for us, but despite his clubbed foot and the ill-omens of his birth, he seemed blessed with a rugged health. I looked into Guinevere’s green eyes. ‘I remember, Lady,’ I said to her carefully, ‘how years ago you took me through that doorway,’ I pointed to a low archway that led oft the cloister, ‘and you showed me your temple of Isis.’

‘I did. So?’ She was defensive, maybe regretting that moment of intimacy. On that distant day she had been trying to make me an ally in the same cause that had prompted her to take my arm and bring me to this cloister. She wanted Mordred destroyed so that Arthur could rule.

‘You showed me Isis’s throne,’ I said, careful not to reveal that I had seen that same black chair again at the Sea Palace, ‘and you told me that Isis was the Goddess who determined which man should sit on a kingdom’s throne. Am I right?’

‘It’s one of her powers, yes,’ Guinevere said carelessly.

‘Then you must pray to the Goddess, Lady,’ I said.

‘You think I don’t, Derfel?’ she demanded. ‘You think I haven’t worn out her ears with my prayers? I want Arthur as King, and Gwydre as King after him, but you can’t force a man onto a throne. Arthur must want it before Isis will grant it.’

That seemed a feeble defence to me. If Isis could not alter Arthur’s mind, how were we mere mortals expected to change it? We had tried often enough, but Arthur refused to discuss the matter, just as Guinevere gave up our conversation in the courtyard when she realized I could not be persuaded to join her campaign to replace Mordred with Arthur.

I wanted Arthur as King, but only once in all those years did I ever break through his bland assurances and talk seriously with him about his own claim to the kingship, and that conversation did not occur until five whole years after the Round Table oath. It was during the summer before the year in which Mordred was to be acclaimed King, and by then the whispers of hostility had become a deafening shout. Only the Christians supported Mordred’s claim, and even they did it reluctantly, but it was known that his mother had been a Christian and that the child himself had been baptized and that was sufficient to persuade the Christians that Mordred might be sympathetic to their ambitions. Everyone else in Dumnonia looked to Arthur to save them from the boy, but Arthur serenely ignored them. That summer, as we have now learned to count the sun’s turning, was four hundred and ninety-five years after the birth of Christ and it was a beautiful, sun-soaked season. Arthur was at the height of his powers. Merlin sunned himself in our garden with my three small daughters clamouring for stories, Ceinwyn was happy, Guinevere basked in her lovely new Sea Palace with its arcades and galleries and dark hidden temple, Lancelot seemed content in his kingdom by the sea, the Saxons fought each other, and Dumnonia was at peace. It was also, as I remember, a summer of utter misery.

For it was the summer of Tristan and Iseult.

Kernow is the wild kingdom that lies like a claw at Dumnonia’s western tip. The Romans went there, but few settled in its wilderness and when the Romans left Britain the folk of Kernow went on with their lives as though the invaders had never existed. They ploughed small fields, fished hard seas and mined precious tin. To travel in Kernow, I was told, was to see Britain as it had been before the Romans came, though I never went there, and nor did Arthur.

For as long as I could remember Kernow had been ruled by King Mark. He rarely troubled us, though once in a while — usually when Dumnonia was embroiled with some larger enemy to the east — he would decide that some of our western lands should belong to him and there would be a brief border war and savage raids on our coast by Kernow’s fighting boats. We always won those wars, how could we not? Dumnonia was large and Kernow small, and when the wars were done Mark would send an envoy to say it had all been an accident. For a short time at the beginning of Arthur’s rule, when Cadwy of Isca had rebelled against the rest of Dumnonia, Mark did capture some large portions of our land beyond his frontier, but Culhwch had ended that rebellion and when Arthur sent Cadwy’s head as a gift to Mark, the spearmen of Kernow had quietly gone back to their old strongholds.

Such troubles were rare, for King Mark’s most famous campaigns were fought in his bed. He was famous for the number of his wives, but where other such men might have kept several wives at one time, Mark married them in sequence. They died with appalling regularity, almost always, it seemed, just four years after the marriage ceremony was performed by Kernow’s Druids, and though Mark always had an explanation for the deaths — a fever maybe, or an accident, or perhaps a difficult birth — most of us suspected it was the King’s boredom that lay behind the balefires that burned the queenly corpses on Caer Dore, the King’s stronghold. The seventh wife to die had been Arthur’s niece, Ialle, and Mark had sent an envoy with a sad tale of mushrooms, toadstools and Ialle’s ungovernable appetites. He had also sent a pack mule loaded with tin ingots and rare whalebones to avert any possibility of Arthur’s wrath. The deaths of the wives never seemed to prevent other princesses from daring the sea crossing to share Mark’s bed. It was better, perhaps, to be a Queen in Kernow, even for a short time, than to wait in the women’s hall for a suitor who might never come, and besides, the explanations for the deaths were always plausible. They were just accidents.

After Ialle’s death there was no new marriage for a long time. Mark was getting old and men assumed he had abandoned the marriage game, but then, in that lovely summer of the year before Mordred assumed power in Dumnonia, the ageing King Mark did take a new wife. She was the daughter of our old ally, Oengus Mac Airem, the Irish King of Demetia who had delivered us victory at Lugg Vale, and for that deliverance Arthur forgave Oengus his myriad of trespasses that still harassed Cuneglas’s land. Oengus’s feared Blackshield warriors were forever raiding Powys and what had been Siluria, and through all those years Cuneglas was forced to keep expensive war-bands on his western frontier. Oengus always denied responsibility for the raids, saying that his chiefs were ungovernable and promising he would lop some heads, but the heads remained unlopped and at every harvest time the hungry Blackshields would return to Powys. Arthur sent some of our young spearmen to gain battle experience in those harvest wars that provided us with a chance to train unblooded warriors and keep the older men’s instincts sharp. Cuneglas wanted to finish Demetia off once and for all, but Arthur liked Oengus and argued that his depredations were worth the experience he gave our spearmen and so the Blackshields survived.

The marriage of the ageing King Mark to his child-bride of Demetia was an alliance of two small kingdoms that troubled no one, and besides, no one believed Mark had married the Princess for any political advantage. He married her solely because he had an insatiable appetite for young royal flesh. He was then near sixty years old, his son Tristan was almost forty and Iseult, the new Queen, was just fifteen.

The misery began when Culhwch sent us a message saying that Tristan had arrived in Isca with his father’s child-bride. Culhwch, after Mehvas had died of his surfeit of oysters, had been appointed the governor of Dumnonia’s western province and his message reported that Tristan and Iseult were fugitives from King Mark. Culhwch himself was amused rather than troubled by their arrival for he, like me, had fought beside Tristan at Lugg Yale and outside London and he liked the Prince. ‘At least this bride will live,’ Culhwch’s scribe had written to the Council, ‘and deserves to. I have given them an old hall and a guard of spearmen.’ The message went on to describe a raid by Irish pirates from across the sea and ended with Culhwch’s usual request for a tax reduction and a warning, also quite usual, that the harvest looked thin. It was, in brief, a commonplace dispatch with nothing to alert the Council’s apprehensions, for we all knew that the harvest looked fat and that Culhwch was positioning himself for his customary wrangle over taxes. As for Tristan and Iseult, their story was merely an amusement and none of us saw any danger there. Arthur’s clerks filed the message away and the Council moved on to discuss Sansum’s request that the Council should build a great church that would celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Christ’s birth. I argued against the proposal, Bishop Sansum snapped and barked and spat that the church was necessary if the world was not to be destroyed by the devil, and that happy wrangle kept the Council engaged till the midday meal was served in the palace courtyard. That meeting was held in Durnovaria and, as usual, Guinevere had come from her Sea Palace to be in the town when the Council met and she joined us at the midday meal. She sat beside Arthur and, as ever, her proximity gave him a glowing happiness. He was so proud of her. The marriage might have yielded him disappointments, especially in the number of its children, but it was plain that he was still in love with her. Every look he gave her was a proclamation of his astonishment that such a woman would marry him, and it never occurred to Arthur that he was the prize, that he was the capable ruler and good man. He adored her, and that day, as we ate fruit, bread and cheese under a warm sunlight, it was easy to see why. She could be witty and cutting, amusing and wise, and her looks still commanded attention. The years did not seem to touch Guinevere. Her skin was as clear as skimmed milk and her eyes had none of the fine wrinkles that Ceinwyn’s showed; it seemed, indeed, that she had not aged one moment since that far-off day when Arthur had first spied her across Gorfyddyd’s crowded hall. And still, I think, every time Arthur returned home from some long dutiful journey across Mordred’s realm he received the same shock of happiness at seeing Guinevere that he had received on that very first day he saw her. And Guinevere knew how to keep him fascinated by always staying one mysterious pace ahead of him and so drawing Arthur ever deeper into his passion. It was, I suppose, a recipe for love. Mordred was with us that day. Arthur had insisted that the King begin to attend the Council before he was acclaimed with his full powers, and he always encouraged Mordred to take part in our discussions, but Mordred’s only contribution was to sit scraping at the dirt under his fingernails or else yawning as the tedious business droned on. Arthur hoped he would learn responsibility by attending the Council, but I feared the King was merely learning to avoid the details of government. That day he sat, as was proper, at the centre of the meal table and made no pretence whatever to be interested in Bishop Emrys’s story of a spring that had miraculously appeared when a priest blessed a hillside.

‘That spring, Bishop,’ Guinevere intervened, ‘would it be in the hills north of Dunum?’

‘Why yes, Lady!’ Emrys said, pleased to have an audience other than the unresponsive Mordred.

‘You have heard of the miracle?’

‘Long before your priest arrived there,’ Guinevere said. ‘That spring comes and goes, Bishop, depending on the rainfall. And this year, you will remember, the late winter rains were unusually heavy.’

She smiled triumphantly. Her opposition to the church still existed, but it was muted now.

‘This is a new spring,’ Emrys insisted. ‘The countryfolk assure us it never existed before!’ He turned back to Mordred. ‘You should visit the spring, Lord King. It is truly a miracle.’

Mordred yawned and stared blankly at the pigeons on the far roof. His coat was stained with mead and his new curly beard filled with crumbs. ‘Are we done with business?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Far from it, Lord King,’ Emrys said enthusiastically. ‘We have yet to receive a decision on the building of the church, and there are three names proposed as magistrates. I assume the men are here to be questioned?’ he asked Arthur.

‘They are, Bishop,’ Arthur confirmed.

‘A full day’s work for us!’ Emrys said, pleased.

‘Not for me,’ Mordred said. ‘I’m going hunting.’

‘But, Lord King. .’ Emrys protested mildly.

‘Hunting,’ Mordred interrupted the Bishop. He pushed his couch away from the low table and limped across the courtyard.

There was silence round the table. We all knew what the others were thinking, but none spoke aloud until I tried to be optimistic. ‘He pays attention,’ I said, ‘to his weapons.’

‘Because he likes to kill,’ Guinevere said icily.

‘I only wish the boy would talk sometimes!’ Emrys complained. ‘He just sits there, sullen! Picking at his nails.’

‘At least it isn’t his nose,’ Guinevere said acidly, then looked up as a stranger was escorted into the courtyard. Hygwydd, Arthur’s servant, announced the stranger as Cyllan, champion of Kernow, and he looked like a King’s champion for he was a huge black-haired and rough-bearded brute who carried the blue tattoo of an axe on his forehead. He bowed to Guinevere, then drew a barbaric-looking long-sword that he laid on the flagstones with its blade pointing at Arthur. That gesture was a sign that trouble existed between our countries.

‘Sit, Lord Cyllan.’ Arthur waved to Mordred’s vacated couch. ‘There’s cheese, some wine. The bread is new baked.’

Cyllan tugged off his iron helmet that was crested with the snarling mask of a wildcat. ‘Lord,’ he said in a rumbling voice, ‘I come with a complaint. .’

‘You come with an empty belly too, I’ve no doubt,’ Arthur interrupted him. ‘Sit, man! Your escort will be fed in the kitchens. And do pick up the sword.’

Cyllan surrendered to Arthur’s informality. He broke a loaf in half and sliced off a big wedge of cheese. ‘Tristan,’ he explained curtly when Arthur asked the nature of the complaint. Cyllan spoke with his mouth half full of food, making Guinevere shudder with horror. ‘The Edling has fled to this land, Lord,’ Kernow’s champion went on, ‘and brought the Queen with him.’ He reached for the wine and drank a hornful. ‘King Mark wants them back.’

Arthur said nothing, but just drummed on the table’s edge with his fingers. Cyllan swallowed more bread and cheese, then poured himself more wine. ‘It’s bad enough,’ he went on after a prodigious belch, ‘that the Edling is,’ he paused, glanced at Guinevere, then amended his sentence, ‘is with his stepmother.’

Guinevere interrupted to provide the word that Cyllan had not dared pronounce in her presence. He nodded, blushed and went on. ‘Not right. Lady. Not to couple with his own stepmother. But he’s also stolen half his father’s treasury. He’s broken two oaths, Lord. The oath to his royal father and the oath to his Queen, and now we hear he has been granted refuge near Isca.’

‘I heard that the Prince is in Dumnonia,’ Arthur said blandly.

‘And my King wants him back. Wants both of them back.’ Cyllan, his message delivered, attacked the cheese again.

The Council reassembled, leaving Cyllan to kick his heels in the sunlight. The three candidates for magistrate were told to wait and the vexed problem of Sansum’s great church was set aside while we debated Arthur’s answer to King Mark.

‘Tristan,’ I said, ‘has ever been a friend to this country. When no one else would fight for us, he did. He brought men to Lugg Vale. He was with us in London. He deserves our help.’

‘He has broken oaths made to a King,’ Arthur said worriedly.

‘Pagan oaths,’ Sansum put in, as if that lessened Tristan’s offence.

‘But he has stolen money,’ Bishop Emrys pointed out.

‘Which he hopes will soon be his by right,’ I answered, trying to defend my old battle comrade.

‘And that is precisely what worries King Mark,’ Arthur said. ‘Put yourself in his place, Derfel, and what do you fear most?’

‘A dearth of princesses?’ I ventured.

Arthur scowled at my levity. ‘He fears that Tristan will lead spearmen back to Kernow. He fears civil war. He fears that his son is tired of waiting for his death and he’s right to fear it.’

I shook my head. ‘Tristan was never calculating, Lord,’ I said. ‘He acts on impulse. He’s stupidly fallen in love with his father’s bride. He’s not thinking of a throne.’

‘Not yet,’ Arthur said ominously, ‘but he will.’

‘If we give Tristan refuge, what will King Mark do?’ Sansum asked shrewdly.

‘Raids,’ Arthur said. ‘Some farms burned, cattle stolen. Or else he’ll send his spears to take Tristan alive. His boatmen could manage that.’ Alone among the British kingdoms the men of Kernow were confident sailors and the Saxons, in their early raids, had learned to fear the longboats of Mark’s spearmen. ‘It will mean constant, niggling trouble,’ Arthur conceded. ‘A dozen dead farmers and their wives every month. We’ll have to keep a hundred spearmen on the border till it’s all settled.’

‘Expensive,’ Sansum commented.

‘Too expensive,’ Arthur said grimly.

‘King Mark’s money must certainly be returned,’ Emrys insisted.

‘And the Queen, probably,’ Cythryn, one of the magistrates who sat on the Council, put in. ‘I cannot imagine that King Mark’s pride will allow him to leave that insult unavenged.’

‘What happens to the girl if she’s returned?’ Emrys asked.

‘That,’ Arthur said firmly, ‘is a matter for King Mark to decide. Not us.’ He rubbed his long bony face with his two hands. ‘I suppose,’ he said wearily, ‘that we had better mediate the affair.’ He smiled. ‘It’s been a long time since I was in that part of the world. Maybe it’s time to go there again. Will you come, Derfel? You’re a friend of Tristan. Maybe he’ll listen to you.’

‘With pleasure, Lord,’ I agreed.

The Council agreed to let Arthur mediate the matter, sent Cyllan back to Kernow with a message describing what Arthur was doing and then, with a dozen of my spearmen in attendance, we rode south and west to find the errant lovers.

It began as a happy enough journey, despite the awkward problem that lay at its end. Nine years of peace had swollen the land’s goodness and if the summer’s warm weather lasted, and despite Culhwch’s gloomy predictions, it looked set to be a fine harvest that year. Arthur took a real joy from seeing the well-tended fields and new granaries. He was greeted in every town and village and the greeting was always warm. Children’s choirs sang for him and gifts were laid at his feet: corn dollies, baskets of fruit or a fox pelt. He returned gold for the gifts, discussed whatever problems afflicted the village, talked with the local magistrate and then we would ride on. The only sour note was struck by Christian hostility, for in nearly every village there was a small group of Christians who would shriek curses at Arthur until their neighbours hushed them up or pushed them away. New churches stood everywhere, usually built where pagans had once worshipped at a sacred well or spring. The churches were the products of Bishop Sansum’s busy missionaries and I wondered why we pagans did not employ similar men to travel the roads and preach to the peasants. The Christians’ new churches were, admittedly, small things, mere huts of wattle and thatch with a cross nailed to one gable, but they multiplied and the more rancorous of their priests cursed Arthur for being a pagan and detested Guinevere for her adherence to Isis. Guinevere never cared that she was hated, but Arthur disliked all religious rancour. On that journey to Isca he often stopped to talk to the Christians who spat at him, but his words had no effect. The Christians did not care that he had given the land peace, nor that they had become prosperous, only that Arthur was a pagan. ‘They’re like the Saxons,’ he told me gloomily as we left another hostile group behind, ‘they won’t be happy till they own everything.’

‘Then we should do to them what we did to the Saxons, Lord,’ I said. ‘Set them against each other.’

‘They already fight amongst themselves,’ Arthur said. ‘Do you understand this argument about Pelagianism?’

‘I wouldn’t even want to understand it,’ I answered flippantly, though in truth the argument was growing ever more vicious with one set of Christians accusing the other of heresy, and both sides inflicting deaths on their opponents. ‘Do you understand it?’

‘I think so. Pelagius refused to believe mankind is inherently evil, while men like Sansum and Emrys say we are all born evil.’ He paused. ‘I suspect,’ Arthur went on, ‘that if I were a Christian, I’d be a Pelagian.’ I thought of Mordred and decided that mankind might well be inherently evil, but I said nothing. ‘I believe in mankind,’ Arthur said, ‘rather more than in any God.’

I spat at the road’s verge to avert the evil his words might bring. ‘I often wonder,’ I said, ‘how things would have changed if Merlin had kept his Cauldron.’

‘That old pot?’ Arthur laughed. ‘I haven’t thought of that for years!’ He smiled at the memory of those old days. ‘Nothing would have changed, Derfel,’ he went on. ‘I sometimes think Merlin’s whole life lay in collecting the Treasures, and once he had them there was nothing left for him to do! He didn’t dare try to work their magic, because he suspected nothing would happen.’

I glanced at the sword hanging at his hip, one of the thirteen Treasures, but I said nothing for I was keeping my promise to Merlin not to reveal Excalibur’s true power to Arthur. ‘You think Merlin burned down his own tower?’ I asked instead.

‘I’ve wondered,’ he admitted.

‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘he believed. And sometimes, I think, he dares to believe he’ll live to find the Treasures again.’

‘Then he’d better hurry,’ Arthur said tartly, ‘because he can’t have much time left.’

We spent that night in the old Roman governor’s palace in Isca where Culhwch now lived. He was in a gloomy mood, not because of Tristan, but because the city was a hotbed of Christian fanatics. Just a week before a band of Christian youths had invaded the city’s pagan temples and pulled down the statues of the Gods and splashed excrement on the walls. Culhwch’s spearmen had caught some of the desecrators and filled the jail with them, but Culhwch was worried about the future, if we don’t break the bastards now,’ he said, ‘they’ll go to war for their God.’

‘Nonsense,’ Arthur said dismissively.

Culhwch shook his head. ‘They want a Christian King, Arthur.’

‘They’ll have Mordred next year,’ Arthur said.

‘Is he a Christian?’ Culhwch asked.

‘If he’s anything,’ I said.

‘But he’s not who they want,’ Culhwch said darkly.

‘Then who is?’ Arthur asked, intrigued at last by his cousin’s warnings. Culhwch hesitated, then shrugged. ‘Lancelot.’

‘Lancelot!’ Arthur sounded amused. ‘Don’t they know he keeps his pagan temples open?’

‘They don’t know anything about him,’ Culhwch said, ‘but they don’t need to. They think of him in the same way that people thought about you in the last years of Uther’s life. They think of him as their deliverer.’

‘Deliverer from what?’ I asked scornfully.

‘Us pagans, of course,’ Culhwch said. ‘They insist Lancelot is the Christian King who’ll lead them all to heaven. And do you know why? Because of that sea eagle on his shield. It’s got a fish in its claws, remember? And the fish is a Christian symbol.’ He spat his disgust. ‘They don’t know anything about him,’ he said again, ‘but they see that fish and think it’s a sign from their God.’

‘A fish?’ Arthur plainly did not believe Culhwch.

‘A fish,’ Culhwch insisted. ‘Maybe they pray to a trout? How would I know? They already worship a holy ghost, a virgin and a carpenter, so why not a fish as well? They’re all mad.’

‘They’re not mad,’ Arthur insisted, ‘excited, maybe.’

‘Excited! Have you been to one of their rites lately?’ Culhwch challenged his cousin.

‘Not since Morgan’s wedding.’

‘Then come and look for yourself,’ Culhwch said. It was night-time and we had finished supper, but Culhwch insisted we don dark cloaks and follow him out through one of the palace’s side doors. We went up a dark alley to the forum where the Christians had their shrine in an old Roman temple that had once been dedicated to Apollo, but which had now been scoured of paganism, limewashed and dedicated to Christianity. We went in through the west door and found a shadowed niche where, in imitation of the big throng of worshippers, we knelt.

Culhwch had told us that the Christians worshipped here every evening, and every evening, he said, the same frenzy followed the gifts of bread and wine that the priest distributed to the faithful. The bread and wine were magical, supposed to be their God’s blood and flesh, and we watched as the worshippers thronged about the altar to receive their scraps. At least half of the worshippers were women and those women, once they had taken the bread from the priests, began to fall into ecstasy. I had often seen such strange fervour, for Merlin’s old pagan rites had frequently ended with screaming women dancing about the Tor’s fires, and these women behaved in much the same way. They danced with closed eyes and with their waving hands held up to the white roof where the smoke from the torches and from the bowls of burning incense made a thick mist. Some wailed strange words, others were in a trance and just gazed at a statue of their God’s mother, a few writhed on the floor, but most of the women danced in step to the rhythmic chanting of three priests. The men in the church mostly watched, but some joined the dancers and it was they who first stripped themselves to their waists and snatched up knotted thongs with which they began to lash their own backs. That astonished me, for I had never seen anything like it before, but my astonishment turned to horror when some of the women joined the men and began to scream with ecstatic joy as the lashes drew blood from their bare breasts and backs. Arthur hated it. ‘It’s madness,’ he whispered, ‘pure madness!’

‘It’s spreading,’ Culhwch warned him darkly. One of the women was beating her naked back with a length of rusty chain and her frenzied wailing echoed in the big stone chamber as her blood spattered thick on the tiled floor. ‘They’ll go on like this all night,’ Culhwch said. The worshippers had gradually edged forward to surround the ecstatic dancers, leaving the three of us isolated in our shadowed niche. A priest saw us there and darted towards us. ‘Have you eaten the body of Christ?’ he demanded.

‘We ate roast goose,’ Arthur said politely, standing up.

The priest stared at the three of us and recognized Culhwch. He spat into Culhwch’s face. ‘Pagan!’ he shrieked. ‘Idolater! You dare defile God’s temple!’ He struck at Culhwch — a mistake, for Culhwch gave him a blow that span the priest hard back across the floor, but the altercation had attracted attention and a howl went up from the men who had been watching the flagellating dancers.

‘Time to go,’ Arthur said, and the three of us retreated smartly across the forum to where Culhwch’s spearmen guarded the palace’s arcade. The Christians spilt out of their church in pursuit, but the spearmen stolidly closed into a shield-wall and lowered their blades, and the Christians made no attempt to storm the palace.

‘They might not attack tonight,’ Culhwch said, ‘but they get braver by the day.’

Arthur watched the howling Christians from a palace window. ‘What do they want?’ he asked in puzzlement. He liked his religion to be decorous. When he came to Lindinis he would always join Ceinwyn and me at our morning prayers when we knelt quietly before our household Gods, offering them a piece of bread and then praying that our daily duties would be done properly, and that was the kind of worship Arthur liked. He was simply bemused by the things he had seen in Isca’s church.

‘They believe,’ Culhwch began to explain the fanaticism we had witnessed, ‘that their God is coming back to earth in five years, and they believe they have a duty to prepare the earth for his coming. Their priests tell them that the pagans have to be wiped out before their God will come back and they preach that Dumnonia must have a Christian king.’

‘They’ll have Mordred,’ Arthur said grimly.

‘Then you’d better change his dragon shield into a fish,’ Culhwch said, ‘for I tell you, their fervour is getting worse. There’s going to be trouble.’

‘We’ll placate them,’ Arthur said. ‘We’ll let them know Mordred’s a Christian and perhaps that’ll calm them down. Maybe we’d better build that church Sansum wants,’ he added to me.

‘If it stops them rioting,’ I said, ‘why not?’

We left Isca next morning, escorted now by Culhwch and a dozen of his men, and we crossed the Exe by the Roman bridge and then turned south into the deep sea-lands that lay on Dumnonia’s furthest coasts. Arthur said nothing more about the Christian frenzy he had witnessed, but he was oddly silent that day and I guessed the rites had upset him deeply. He hated any kind of frenzy for it stripped men and women of their sense, and he must have feared what such a madness might do to his careful peace. But for now our problem was not Dumnonia’s Christians, but Tristan. Culhwch had sent word to the Prince, warning him of our approach, and Tristan came to greet us. He rode alone, his horse’s hoofs leaving spurts of dust as he galloped towards us. He greeted us happily, but recoiled from Arthur’s chill reserve. That reserve was not caused by any innate dislike Arthur had for Tristan — indeed he liked the Prince — but rather sprang out of Arthur’s recognition that he had not just come to mediate this dispute, but to sit in judgment on an old friend. ‘He has worries,’ I explained vaguely, trying to reassure Tristan that Arthur’s coldness held no foreboding.

I was leading my own horse, for I was always happier on foot, and Tristan, having greeted Culhwch, slid out of his saddle and walked beside me. I described the wild Christian ecstasies and attributed Arthur’s coldness to his worries about their meaning, but Tristan did not want to hear any of it. He was in love and, like all lovers, he could talk of nothing but his beloved. ‘A jewel, Derfel,’ he said, ‘that’s what she is, an Irish jewel!’ He paced long-legged beside me, one arm round my shoulder and with his long black hair chinking from the warrior rings he had woven into its plaits. His beard was more heavily streaked with white now, but he was still a handsome man with a bony nose and dark, quick eyes that were bright with passion. ‘Her name,’ he said dreamily, ‘is Iseult.’

‘We heard,’ I said drily.

‘A child from Demetia,’ he said, ‘a daughter of Oengus Mac Airem. A Princess, my friend, of the Ui Liathain.’ He spoke the name of Oengus Mac Airem’s tribe as though its syllables were forged in purest gold. ‘Iseult,’ he said, ‘of the Ui Liathain. Fifteen summers old and as beautiful as the night.’

I thought of Arthur’s ungovernable passion for Guinevere and of my own soul’s longings for Ceinwyn and my heart hurt for my friend. He had been blinded by love, swept by it, made mad by it. Tristan was ever a passionate man, given to black deeps of despair or to soaring heights of happiness, but this was the first time I had ever seen him assaulted by the storm winds of love. ‘Your father,’ I warned him carefully, ‘wants Iseult back.’

‘My father’s old,’ he said, dismissing every obstacle, ‘and when he dies I shall sail my Princess of the Ui Liathain to Tintagel’s iron gates and build her a castle of silver towers that shall scrape the stars.’ He laughed at his own extravagance. ‘You’ll adore her, Derfel!’

I said nothing more, but just let him talk and talk. He had no appetite for our news, cared not a bit that I had three daughters or that the Saxons were on the defensive, he had room in his universe for nothing but Iseult. ‘Wait till you see her, Derfel!’ he said again and again, and the nearer we drew to their refuge the more excited he became until at last, unable to be apart from his Iseult for a moment longer, he leapt onto his horse and galloped away ahead of us. Arthur looked quizzically at me and I grimaced. ‘He’s in love,’ I said, as if I needed to explain.

‘With his father’s taste for young girls,’ Arthur added grimly.

‘You and I know love, Lord,’ I said, ‘be kind to them.’

The refuge of Tristan and Iseult was a beautiful place, maybe the loveliest I ever saw. It was a place where small hills were cut by streams and heavy woods, where rich rivers ran fast to the sea and where great cliffs were loud with screaming birds. It was a wild place, but beautiful, a place fit for love’s raw madness.

And there, in the small dark hall among the deep green woods, I met Iseult. Small and dark and fey and fragile is how I remember Iseult. Little more than a child, really, though she had been forced to woman’s state by her marriage to Mark, yet to me she appeared as a shy, small, thin girl, nothing but a delicate wisp of near-womanhood who kept her huge dark eyes fixed on Tristan until he insisted that she greeted us. She bowed to Arthur. ‘You don’t bow to me,’ Arthur said, lifting her up,

‘for you are a Queen,’ and he dropped to one knee and kissed her small hand. Her voice was whispery like a shadow’s voice. Her hair was black and she had tried to make herself look older by binding it in a great coil on the crown of her head and by hanging herself with jewels, though she wore the jewels awkwardly, reminding me of Morwenna dressing up in her mother’s clothes. She gazed at us fearfully. Iseult realized, I think, even before Tristan did, that this incursion of armed spearmen was not the coming of friends, but the arrival of her judges. Culhwch had provided the lovers with their refuge. It was a hall of timber and rye thatch, not big, but well built, and it had belonged to a chieftain who had supported Cadwy’s rebellion and thereby lost his head. The hall, with three huts and a storehouse, stood circled by a palisade in a wooded hollow of land where the sea winds could not chafe its thatch, and there, with six loyal spearmen and a mound of stolen treasure, Tristan and Iseult had thought to make their love into a great song. Arthur tore their music into shreds. ‘The treasure.’ he told Tristan that night, ‘must be returned to your father’

‘He can have it!’ Tristan declared. ‘I only brought it so I would not have to call on your charity. Lord.’

‘So long as you are in this land, Lord Prince,’ Arthur said heavily, ‘you will be our guests.’

‘And how long will that be, Lord?’ Tristan asked.

Arthur frowned and looked up into the hall’s dark rafters. ‘Is that rain? It seems so long since it rained.’

Tristan asked the question again, and again Arthur refused to answer. Iseult reached for her Prince’s hand and held it as Tristan reminded Arthur of Lugg Vale. ‘When no one else would come to your help, Lord, I came,’ Tristan said.

‘You did, Lord Prince,’ Arthur admitted.

‘And when you fought Owain, Lord, I stood beside you.’

‘You did,’ Arthur said.

‘And I brought my hawks’ shields to London.’

‘You did, Lord Prince, and they fought well there.’

‘And I took your Round Table oath,’ Tristan said. No one ever called it the Brotherhood of Britain any more.

‘So you did, Lord,’ Arthur said heavily.

‘So, Lord,’ Tristan begged, ‘have I not deserved your help?’

‘You have deserved much, Lord Prince,’ Arthur said, ‘and I am mindful of it.’ It was an evasive answer, but the only one Tristan received that night.

We left the lovers in the hall and made our own straw beds in the small storehouses. The rain passed in the night and the next morning dawned warm and beautiful. I woke late to discover Tristan and Iseult had already left the hall. ‘If they have a peck of sense,’ Culhwch growled to me, ‘they’ll have run as far away as they can.’

‘Will they?’

‘They don’t have sense, Derfel, they’re lovers. They think the world exists for their convenience.’

Culhwch walked with a slight limp now, the legacy of the wound he had taken in the battle against Aelle’s army. ‘They’ve gone to the sea,’ he told me, ‘to pray to Manawydan.’

Culhwch and I followed the lovers, climbing out of the wooded hollow to a windswept hill that ended in a great cliff where the seabirds wheeled and against which the vast ocean broke white in tattered bursts of spray. Culhwch and I stood on the clifftop and stared down into a small cove where Tristan and Iseult walked on the sand. The previous night, watching the timid Queen, I had not really understood what had driven Tristan into love’s madness, but that winch morning I did understand. I watched as she suddenly broke away from Tristan and ran ahead, skipping, turning and laughing at her lover who walked slowly behind. She wore a loose white dress and her black hair, no longer bound in a coil, streamed free in the salt wind. She looked like a spirit, like one of the water nymphs who had danced in Britain before the Romans came. And then, perhaps to tease Tristan, or else to take her pleas closer to Manawydan, the sea God, she ran headlong into the great tumbling surf. She plunged into the waves so that she disappeared altogether and Tristan could only stand distraught on the sand and watch the churning white mass of breaking seas. And then, sleek as an otter in a stream, her head appeared. She waved, swam a little, then waded back to the beach with her white wet dress clinging to her pathetic thin body. I could not help but see that she had small high breasts and long slender legs, and then Tristan hid her from our view by wrapping her in the wings of his great black cloak and there, beside the sea, he held her tight and leaned his cheek against her salt-wet hair. Culhwch and I stepped out of view, leaving the lovers alone in the long sea wind that blew from fabled Lyonesse.

‘He can’t send them back,’ Culhwch growled.

‘He mustn’t,’ I agreed. We stared across the endlessly moving sea.

‘Then why won’t Arthur reassure them?’ Culhwch demanded angrily.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I should have sent them to Broceliande,’ Culhwch said. The wind lifted his cloak as we walked west around the hills above the cove. Our path led to a high place from where we could see down into a great natural harbour where the ocean had flooded a river valley and formed a chain of wide, well-sheltered sea lakes. ‘Halcwm,’ Culhwch named the harbour, ‘and the smoke is from the salt works.’ He pointed to a shimmer of grey on the far side of the lakes.

‘There must be seamen here who could take them to Broceliande,’ I said, for the harbour had at least a dozen ships anchored in its shelter.

‘Tristan wouldn’t go,’ Culhwch told me bleakly. ‘I suggested it to him, but he believes Arthur is his friend. He trusts Arthur. He can’t wait to be King for he says that then all Kernow’s spears will be at Arthur’s service.’

‘Why didn’t he just kill his father?’ I asked bitterly.

‘For the same reason that none of us kills that little bastard, Mordred,’ Culhwch said. ‘It’s no small thing to kill a king.’

That night we dined in the hall again, and again Tristan pressed Arthur to say how long he and Iseult could stay in Dumnonia, and again Arthur avoided giving an answer. ‘Tomorrow, Lord Prince,’ he promised Tristan, ‘tomorrow we shall decide all.’

But next morning two dark ships with tall masts hung with ragged sails and with high rearing prows carved into the shapes of hawks’ heads sailed into Halcwm’s sea lakes. The two ships’ thwarts were crowded with men who, as the loom of the land cheated their sails of wind, unshipped their oars and drove the long dark ships towards the beach. Spear bundles were propped at the sterns where steersmen heaved on their great steering oars. Green branches were tied to each hawk’s head prow, signifying that the ships came in peace.

I did not know who had come in the two ships, but I could guess. King Mark had come from Kernow.

King Mark was a huge man, reminding me of Uther in his dotage. He was so fat he could not climb Halcwm’s hills unaided and so four spearmen carried him in a chair that was equipped with two stout poles. Forty other spearmen accompanied their King who was preceded by Cyllan, his champion. The clumsy chair swayed up the hill, then down into the wooded hollow where Tristan and Iseult believed they had found refuge.

Iseult screamed when she saw them, then, in a panic, she ran desperately to escape her husband, but the palisade had only one entrance and Mark’s huge chair filled it, so she ran back into the hall where her lover was trapped. The hall doors were guarded by Culhwch’s men and they refused to allow Cyllan or any of Mark’s spearmen into the building. We could hear Iseult crying, Tristan shouting and Arthur pleading. King Mark ordered his chair set down opposite the hall’s door and there he waited until Arthur, his face pale and tight, emerged and knelt before him.

The King of Kernow had a jowly face blotched by broken veins. His beard was thin and white, his shallow breath rasped in his fat throat and his small eyes seeped rheum. He waved Arthur to his feet, then struggled out of his chair and on thick, unsteady legs followed Arthur to the largest of the huts. It was a warm day, but Mark’s thick body was still draped in a sealskin cloak as though he found it cold. He put a hand on Arthur’s arm to help him walk into the hut where two chairs had been placed. Culhwch, disgusted, planted his bulk in the hall’s doorway and stood there with a drawn sword. I stood beside him while, behind us, black-haired Iseult wept.

Arthur stayed a full hour in the hut, then emerged and looked at Culhwch and me. He seemed to sigh, then walked past us into the hall. We did not hear what he said, but we heard Iseult scream. Culhwch glared at Kernow’s spearmen, begging just one of them to challenge him, but none moved. Cyllan, the champion, stood motionless beside the gate with a great war spear and his huge long-sword. Iseult screamed again, then Arthur suddenly emerged into the sunlight and plucked my arm. ‘Come, Derfel.’

‘What of me?’ Culhwch asked defiantly.

‘Guard them, Culhwch,’ Arthur said. ‘No one is to enter the hall.’ He walked away and I walked with him.

He said nothing as we climbed the hill from the hall and nothing as we walked along the hill path, and still said nothing as we walked out onto the cliff’s high peak. The headland’s stone jutted into the sea beneath us where the water broke high and ragged to shatter its spume eastwards on the undying wind. The sun shone on us, but out to sea there was a great cloud and Arthur stared at the dark rain falling on the empty waves. The wind rippled his white cloak. ‘Do you know the legend of Excalibur?’ he suddenly asked me.

Better than he did, I thought, but I said nothing of the blade being one of the Treasures of Britain. ‘I know, Lord,’ I said, wondering why he had asked me such a question at such a moment, ‘that Merlin won it in a dream contest in Ireland and that he gave it to you at the Stones.’

‘And he told me that if I was ever in great need then all I had to do was draw the sword, plunge it into the earth and Gofannon would come from the Otherworld to aid me. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘Then, Gofannon!’ he shouted into the sea wind as he drew the great blade. ‘Come!’ And with that injunction he rammed the sword hard into the turf.

A gull cried in the wind, the sea sucked at the rocks as it slid back to the deeps and the salt wind gusted our cloaks, but no God came. ‘The Gods help me,’ Arthur said at last, staring at the swaying blade, ‘but how I wanted to kill that fat monster.’

‘So why didn’t you?’ I asked harshly.

He said nothing for a while and I saw there were tears running down his long hollow cheeks. ‘I offered them death, Derfel,’ he said. ‘Swift and painless.’ He cuffed at his cheeks, and then, in a sudden rage, he kicked the sword. ‘Gods!’ He spat at the quivering blade. ‘What Gods?’

I pulled Excalibur from the turf and wiped the earth from its tip. He refused to take the sword back, so I laid it reverently on a grey boulder. ‘What will happen to them, Lord?’ I asked. He sat on another stone. For a time he did not answer me, but just stared at the rain on the far sea while the tears trickled down his cheeks. ‘I have lived my life, Derfel,’ he said at last, ‘according to oaths. I know no other way. I resent oaths, and so should all men, for oaths bind us, they hobble our freedom, and who among us doesn’t want to be free? But if we abandon oaths then we abandon guidance. We fall into chaos. We just fall. We become no better than beasts.’ He suddenly could not continue, but just wept.

I stared at the grey heave of the sea. Where, I wondered, do those great waves begin and where do they end? ‘Suppose,’ I asked, ‘that the oath is a mistake?’

‘A mistake?’ He glanced at me, then looked back to the ocean. ‘Sometimes,’ he said bleakly, ‘an oath cannot be kept. I could not save Ban’s kingdom, though God knows I tried, but it could not be done. And so I broke that oath and I will pay for it, but I did not break it willingly. I have yet to kill Aelle, and that is an oath that must be kept, but I have not yet broken the oath, merely delayed it. I have promised to take Henis Wyren back from Diwrnach, and I will. And maybe that oath was a mistake, but I am sworn to it. So there is your answer. If an oath is a mistake then you are still obligated because you are sworn to it.’ He wiped his cheek. ‘So yes, one day I must take my spears against Diwrnach.’

‘You have no oath to Mark,’ I said bitterly.

‘None,’ he agreed, ‘but Tristan does, and Iseult does.’

‘Are their oaths our business?’ I asked.

He stared at his sword. Its grey blade that was chased with intricate whorls and long-tongued dragon heads reflected the far slate-dark clouds. ‘A sword and a stone,’ he said softly, perhaps thinking of the moment when Mordred would become king. He stood suddenly, and turned his back on the sword to stare inland at the green hills. ‘Suppose,’ he said to me, ‘that two oaths clash. Suppose I have sworn to fight for you and sworn to fight for your enemy, which oath do I keep?’

‘The first given,’ I said, knowing the law as well as he.

‘And if they were both given at once?’

‘Then you submit to the King’s judgment.’

‘Why the King?’ He quizzed me as though I was a new spearman being taught the laws of Dumnonia.

‘Because your oath to the King,’ I said dutifully, ‘is above all other oaths, and your duty is to him.’

‘So the King,’ he said forcefully, ‘is the keeper of our oaths, and without a King there is nothing but a tangle of conflicting oaths. Without a King, there is chaos. All oaths lead to the King, Derfel, all our duty ends with the King and all our laws are in the King’s keeping. If we defy our King, we defy order. We can fight other Kings, we can even kill them, but only because they threaten our King and his good order. The King, Derfel, is the nation, and we belong to the King. Whatever you or I do, we must support the King.’

I knew he was not talking about Tristan and Mark. He was thinking of Mordred and so I dared to speak the unspoken thought that had lain so heavily on Dumnonia for all those years. ‘There are those, Lord,’ I said, ‘who say you should be the King.’

‘No!’ He shouted the word into the wind. ‘No!’ he repeated more quietly, looking at me. I looked down at the sword on the stone. ‘Why not?’

‘Because I swore an oath to Uther.’

‘Mordred,’ I said, ‘is not fit to be King. And you know it, Lord.’

He turned and looked at the sea again. ‘Mordred is our King, Derfel, and that is all you or I need to know. He has our oaths. We cannot judge him, he will judge us, and if you or I decide another man should be King, where is order then? If one man takes the throne unjustly, then any man can take it. If I take it, why should another not take it from me? All order would be gone. There would just be chaos.’

‘You think Mordred cares about order?’ I asked bitterly.

‘I think Mordred has not yet been properly acclaimed,’ Arthur said. ‘I think that when the high duties are put on him then he may change. I think it more likely that he will not change, but above all, Derfel, I believe he is our King and we must endure him because that is what we have to do whether we like it or not. In all this world. Derfel,’ he said, suddenly sweeping up Excalibur and swinging her blade about the whole horizon, ‘in all this world there is only one sure order, and that is the King’s order. Not the Gods. They’ve gone from Britain. Merlin thought he could bring them back, but look at Merlin now. Sansum tells us that his God has power and so He might, but not for me. I see only kings, and in kings are concentrated our oaths and our duties. Without them we would be so many wild things scrambling for place.’ He rammed Excalibur back into its scabbard. ‘I must support kings, for without them there would be chaos and so I have told Tristan and Iseult that they must stand trial.’

‘Trial!’ I exclaimed, then spat on the turf.

Arthur glared angrily at me. ‘They are accused,’ he said, ‘of theft. They are accused of breaking oaths. They are accused of fornication.’ The last word twisted his mouth and he turned away from me to spit it across the sea.

‘They’re in love!’ I protested, and when he said nothing I attacked him more directly. ‘And did you stand trial, Arthur ap Uther, when you broke an oath? And not the oath to Ban, but the oath you swore when you betrothed yourself to Ceinwyn. You broke an oath, and no one put you in front of magistrates!’

He turned on me in a flaring rage and for a few heartbeats I thought he was about to drag Excalibur free again and attack me with the blade, but then he shuddered and went still. His eyes glistened with tears again. He said nothing for a long while, then he nodded. ‘I broke that oath, true. Do you think I haven’t regretted it?’

‘And you will not let Tristan break one oath?’

‘He’s a thief!’ Arthur snarled at me in fury. ‘You think we should risk years of border raids for a thief who fornicates with his stepmother? You could talk to the families of the dead farmers on our frontier and justify their deaths in the name of Tristan’s love? You think women and children should die because a prince is in love? Is that your justice?’

‘I think Tristan is our friend,’ I said, and when he did not answer, I spat at his feet. ‘You sent for Mark, didn’t you?’ I accused him.

He nodded. ‘Yes. I sent a messenger from Isca.’

‘Tristan is our friend,’ I shouted at him.

He closed his eyes. ‘He has stolen from a King,’ he said stubbornly. ‘He has stolen gold, a wife and pride. He has broken oaths. His father seeks justice and I am sworn to justice.’

‘He is your friend,’ I insisted. ‘And he is mine!’

He opened his eyes and stared at me. ‘A King comes to me, Derfel, and asks for justice. Am I to deny Mark justice because he is old and gross and ugly? Do youth and beauty deserve perverted justice? What have I fought for all these years, if not to make certain that justice is even-handed?’ He was pleading with me now. ‘When we travelled here, through all those villages and towns, did people run away because they saw our swords? No! And why? Because they know that in Mordred’s kingdom there is justice. And now, because a man beds his father’s wife, you would have me toss that justice away like an inconvenient burden?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘because he is a friend, and because if you make them stand trial they will be found guilty. They have no chance at trial,’ I protested bitterly, ‘because Mark is a Tongued One.’

Arthur gave a sad smile as he acknowledged the memory I had deliberately provoked. That memory was of our very first meeting with Tristan, and that meeting too had been a legal matter, and in that case a great injustice was almost done because the accused was a Tongued One. In our law the evidence given by a Tongued One was incontrovertible. A thousand people could swear the opposite, but their evidence was nothing if it was contradicted by a Lord, a Druid, a priest, a father speaking of his children, a gift-giver speaking of his gift, a maid talking of her virginity, a herdsman speaking of his animals or a condemned man saying his final words. And Mark was a Lord, a King, and his word outweighed those of a Prince or a Queen. No court in Britain would acquit Tristan and Iseult, and Arthur knew it. But Arthur had sworn an oath to uphold the law.

But on that far day, when Owain had so nearly perverted justice by using the privilege of a Tongued One to tell a lie, Arthur had appealed to the court of swords. For Tristan’s benefit Arthur himself had fought Owain and Arthur had won. ‘Tristan,’ I now said to Arthur, ‘could appeal to the court of swords.’

‘That is his privilege,’ Arthur said.

‘And I am his friend,’ I said coldly, ‘and I can fight for him.’

Arthur stared at me as though he was only just realizing the true depths of my hostility. ‘You, Derfel?’

he asked.

‘I shall fight for Tristan,’ I said coldly, ‘because he is my friend. As you once were.’

He paused a few heartbeats. ‘That is your privilege,’ he finally said, ‘but I have done my duty.’ He walked away and I followed ten paces behind; when he slowed, I slowed, and when he turned to look at me, I looked away. I was going to fight for a friend.

Arthur curtly ordered Culhwch’s spearmen to escort Tristan and Iseult to Isca. There, he decreed, their trial would be held. King Mark could provide one judge and we Dumnonians the other. King Mark sat in his chair, saying nothing. He had argued for the trial to be held in Kernow, but he must have known it did not matter. Tristan would not stand trial for Tristan would never survive a trial. Tristan could only appeal to the sword.

The Prince came to the door of the hall and there he faced his father. Mark’s face showed nothing, Tristan was pale and Arthur stood with head bowed so that he did not need to look at either man. Tristan wore no armour and carried no shield. His black hair with its warrior rings was combed back and tied with a strip of white linen that he must have torn from Iseult’s dress. He wore a shirt, trews and boots and had a sword at his side. He walked halfway to his father and there stopped. He drew his sword, stared into his father’s implacable eyes, then rammed the blade hard into the turf. ‘I will be tried by the court of swords,’ he insisted.

Mark shrugged and made a lethargic gesture with his right hand, and that gesture brought Cyllan forward. It was plain that Tristan knew the champion’s prowess for he looked nervous as the huge man, whose beard grew down to his waist, stripped off his cloak. Cyllan pushed his black hair away from the axe tattoo, then pulled his iron helmet onto his head. He spat on his hands, rubbed the spittle into his palms, and walked slowly forward and knocked Tristan’s sword flat. With that gesture he had accepted battle.

I drew Hywelbane. ‘I shall fight for Tristan,’ I heard myself saying. I was oddly nervous, and it was not just the nervousness that precedes battle. It was fear of the great gulf that was opening in my life, the gulf that separated me from Arthur.

‘I shall fight for Tristan,’ Culhwch insisted. He came and stood beside me. ‘You’ve got daughters, fool,’ he muttered.

‘So have you.’

‘But I’ll beat this bearded toad quicker than you, you Saxon bag of guts,’ Culhwch said fondly. Tristan stepped between us and protested that he would tight Cyllan alone, that this was his battle and no one else’s, but Culhwch growled at him to get back into the hall. ‘I’ve beaten men twice as big as that bearded lout,’ he told Tristan.

Cyllan drew his longsword and gave it a slash through the empty air. ‘One of you,’ he said carelessly,

‘I don’t care which.’

‘No!’ Mark suddenly shouted. He summoned Cyllan and two others of his spearmen and the three men knelt beside Mark’s chair and listened to their King’s instructions. Culhwch and I both presumed that Mark was ordering his three men to fight the three of us. ‘I’ll take the bastard with the big beard and the dirty forehead,’ Culhwch decided, ‘you take that red-haired piece of dogshit, Derfel, and my Lord Prince can skewer the bald one. Two minutes’ work?’

Iseult crept from the hall. She seemed terrified to be in Mark’s sight, but she came to embrace Culhwch and me. Culhwch swamped her in his arms, while I knelt and kissed her thin pale hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said in her little shadow voice. Her eyes were red with tears. She stood on tiptoe to kiss Tristan, and then, with one scared backward look at her husband, she fled back into the hall’s shadows. Mark raised his heavy head from the collar of his sealskin fur. ‘The court of swords,’ he said in a voice thick with phlegm, ‘demands one man on one man. It has always been thus.’

‘Then send your virgins one at a time, Lord King,’ Culhwch shouted, ‘and I’ll kill them one at a time.’

Mark shook his head. ‘One man, one sword,’ he insisted, ‘and my son asked for the privilege, so he will fight.’

‘Lord King,’ I said, ‘custom decrees that a man can fight for his friend in the court of swords. I, Derfel Cadarn, insist on the privilege.’

‘I know of no such custom,’ Mark lied.

‘Arthur does,’ I said harshly. ‘He fought for your son in a court of swords and I will fight for him today.’

Mark turned his bleary eyes towards Arthur, but Arthur shook his head as if to suggest he wanted nothing to do with the argument. Mark looked back at me. ‘My son’s offence is filthy,’ he said, ‘and no one but he should defend it.’

‘I will defend it!’ I said, then Culhwch stepped beside me and insisted that he would fight for Tristan. The King just looked at us, raised his right hand and gave a weary gesture. The spearmen of Kernow, instructed by the red-haired man and the bald warrior, formed a shield-wall at the King’s signal. It was a wall two men deep and the front rank held their shields in a locked row while the second rank held their shields to protect the heads of the front rank. Then, on a word of command, they tossed their spears to the ground.

‘Bastards,’ Culhwch said, for he understood what was about to happen. ‘Shall we break them, Lord Derfel?’ he asked me.

‘Let us break them, Lord Culhwch,’ I said vengefully.

There were forty men of Kernow, and three of us. The forty shuffled slowly forward in their locked shield-wall with their eyes watching us warily from beneath the rims of their helmets. They carried no spears and had drawn no swords. They did not come to kill us, but to immobilize us. And Culhwch and I charged them. I had not needed to break a shield-wall in years, but the old madness whirled in me as I screamed Bel’s name, then I shouted Ceinwyn’s name as I rammed Hywelbane’s point at a man’s eyes and as he ducked aside I threw my shoulder at the junction of his and his neighbour’s shields.

The wall broke and I screamed in triumph as I thumped Hywelbane’s hilt on the back of one man’s head, then stabbed it forward to widen the gap. In battle, by now, my men would be thrusting behind me, opening the gap and soaking the ground with enemy blood, but I had no men behind me, and no weapons opposing me, just shields and more shields, and though I whirled in a circle, making Hywelbane’s blade hiss as she slashed around, those shields closed inexorably on me. I dared not kill any of the spearmen, for that would have been dishonourable after they had so deliberately cast aside their own weapons, and bereft of that opportunity I could only try and frighten them. But they knew I would not kill and so a ring of shields circled me, closed on me, and Hywelbane was at last stopped dead by an iron shield-boss and suddenly the shields of Kernow were pressing hard about me. I heard Arthur shout a harsh command, and I guessed that some of Culhwch’s and my spearmen had wanted to help their lords, but Arthur held them back. He did not want a bloody fight, Kernow against Dumnonia. He just wanted this grim business done and finished.

Culhwch had been trapped like me. He raged at his captors, called them infants, dogs and worms, but the men of Kernow had their orders. We were neither of us to be hurt, but just held tight by a press of men and by the clamp of their shields, and so, like Iseult, we could only watch as the champion of Kernow walked forward, his sword held low, and gave his Prince a bow. Tristan knew he would die. He had taken the ribbon from his hair and tied it about his sword’s blade, and now he kissed the linen strip. Then he held his sword out, touched the champion’s blade, and sprang forward in a lunge.

Cyllan parried. The sound of the two swords echoed back from the palisade, then echoed again as Tristan attacked a second time, this time swinging the sword in a fast downward slash, but once again Cyllan parried. He did it easily, almost wearily. Twice more Tristan attacked, and then he kept his blows going, swinging and lunging as fast as he could, trying desperately to wear Cyllan’s defence down, but he only wearied his own arm, and the moment he paused for breath and took a step back, the champion lunged.

That lunge was so well done. It was even beautifully done if you cared to see a sword used properly. It was even mercifully done for Cyllan took Tristan’s soul in an eyeblink. The Prince did not even have the time to look back at his lover in the hall’s shadowed door. He just stared at his killer, and the blood gushed from his cut throat to turn his white shirt red, then his sword dropped as he made the dying, bubbling, choking sound, and as his soul fled, he just dropped.

‘Justice is done, Lord King,’ Cyllan said bleakly as he pulled his blade free from Tristan’s neck and walked away. The spearmen who surrounded me, none of whom had dared meet my eyes, drew back. I raised Hywelbane and the sight of its grey blade was misted by my tears. I heard Iseult scream as her husband’s men killed the six spearmen who had accompanied Tristan and who now took hold of their Queen. I closed my eyes.

I would not look at Arthur. I would not speak with Arthur. I walked to the headland and there I prayed to my Gods and I begged them to come back to Britain, and while I prayed the men of Kernow took Queen Iseult down to the sea-lake where the two dark ships waited. But they did not carry her home to Kernow. Instead the Princess of the Ui Liathain, that child of fifteen summers who had skipped barefoot into the waves and whose voice had been a shadowy wisp like the seamen’s ghosts who ride the long sea winds, was tied to a post and heaped around with the driftwood that lay so thick on Halcwm’s shore, and there, before her husband’s unforgiving eyes, she was burned alive. Her lover’s corpse was burned on the same pyre.

I would not leave with Arthur. I would not talk to him. I let him go, and I slept that night in the dark old hall where the lovers had slept. Then I travelled home to Lindinis and that was when I confessed to Ceinwyn about the old massacre on the moor when I had killed the innocent to keep an oath. I told her about Iseult burning. Burning and screaming while her husband watched. Ceinwyn held me. ‘Did you not know that hardness in Arthur?’ she asked me softly.

‘No.’

‘He is all that stands between us and horror,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘how could he be anything but hard?’

Even now, with my eyes closed, I sometimes see that child coming from the sea, her face smiling, her thin body outlined against the white clinging dress and her hands reaching for her lover. I cannot hear a gull’s cry without seeing her for she will haunt me till the day I die, and after death, wherever it is my soul goes, she will be there; a child killed for a King, by law, in Camelot.

I did not see Lancelot for many years after the Round Table oath, nor did I see any of his henchmen. Amhar and Loholt, Arthur’s twins, lived in Lancelot’s capital of Venta where they led bands of spearmen, but the only fighting they seemed to do was in its taverns. Dinas and Lavaine were also in Venta where they presided over a temple dedicated to Mercury, a Roman God, and their ceremonies rivalled the ones held in Lancelot’s palace church that had been consecrated by Bishop Sansum. Sansum was a frequent visitor to Venta and he reported that the Belgic people seemed happy enough with Lancelot, which we took to mean that they were not openly rebellious. Lancelot and his companions also visited Dumnonia, most often going across their border to the Sea Palace, but sometimes travelling as far as Durnovaria to attend some high feast, but I simply stayed away from such festivals if I knew they were coming, and neither Arthur nor Guinevere ever demanded that I attend. Nor was I invited to the great funeral that followed the death of Lancelot’s mother, Elaine. Lancelot, in truth, was not a bad ruler. He was no Arthur, he cared nothing for the quality of justice or the fairness of taxes or the state of the roads, he simply ignored those things, but as they had been ignored before his rule no one noticed any great difference. Lancelot, like Guinevere, cared only for his comfort and, like her, he built a lavish palace that was filled with statues, bright with painted walls and hung, of course, with the extravagant collection of mirrors in which he could admire his own endless reflection. The money for these luxuries was exacted in taxes, and if those taxes were heavy then the compensation was the freedom of the Belgic lands from Saxon raids. Cerdic, astonishingly, had kept his faith with Lancelot and the dreaded Sais spearmen never raided Lancelot’s rich farmlands. But nor did they need to raid, for Lancelot had invited them to come and live in his kingdom. The land had been depopulated by the long years of war and huge stretches of fine fields were growing back to woodland, and so Lancelot invited settlers from Cerdic’s people to till the fields. The Saxons swore oaths of loyalty to Lancelot, they cleared the land, they built new villages, they paid their taxes, and their spearmen even marched in his war-band. His palace guard, we heard, were all Saxons now. The Saxon Guard, he called them, and he chose them for their height and for the colour of their hair. I did not see them in those years, though eventually I met them, and they were all tall blond men who carried axes polished to a mirror brightness. Rumour had it that Lancelot paid tribute to Cerdic, but Arthur angrily denied it when our Council asked him if it was true. Arthur disapproved of Saxon settlers being invited onto British land, but the matter, he said, was Lancelot’s to decide, not ours, and at least the land was at peace. Peace, it seemed, excused all.

Lancelot even boasted that he had converted his Saxon Guard to Christianity, for his baptism, it seems, had not just been for show, but was real enough, or so Galahad told me on one of his frequent visits to Lindinis. He described the church Sansum had built in the Venta palace and told me that every day a choir sang and a bevy of priests celebrated the Christian mysteries. ‘It’s all very beautiful,’ Galahad said wistfully. That was before I had seen the ecstasies in Isca and I had no idea such frenzies took place, so did not ask him whether they happened in Venta, or whether his brother encouraged Dumnonia’s Christians to see him as a deliverer.

‘Has Christianity changed your brother?’ Ceinwyn asked.

Galahad watched the flicker of her hands as she teased a thread from the distaff onto the spindle.

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘He thinks it’s enough to say prayers once a day and then he behaves as he likes thereafter. But many Christians are like that, alas.’

‘And how does he behave?’ Ceinwyn asked.

‘Badly.’

‘Do you want me to leave the room,’ Ceinwyn asked sweetly, ‘so you can tell Derfel without embarrassing me? And then he can tell me when we go to bed.’

Galahad laughed. ‘He’s bored, Lady, and he alleviates his boredom in the usual way. He hunts.’

‘So does Derfel, so do I. Hunting’s not bad.’

‘He hunts girls,’ Galahad said bleakly. ‘He doesn’t treat them badly, but they don’t really have much choice. Some of them like it and they all become rich enough, but they also become his whores.’

‘He sounds like most kings,’ Ceinwyn said drily. ‘Is that all he does?’

‘He spends hours with those two wretched Druids,’ Galahad said, ‘and no one knows why a Christian King would do that, but he claims it’s just friendship. He encourages his poets, he collects mirrors and he visits Guinevere’s Sea Palace.’

‘To do what?’ I asked.

‘To talk, he says.’ Galahad shrugged. ‘He says they talk about religion. Or rather they argue about it. She’s become very devout.’

‘To Isis,’ Ceinwyn said disapprovingly. In the years after the Round Table oath we had all heard how Guinevere was retreating more and more into the practice of her religion so that now the Sea Palace was said to be one huge shrine to Isis, and Guinevere’s attendants, who were all women chosen for their grace and looks, were the priestesses of Isis.

‘The Supreme Goddess,’ Galahad said disparagingly, then carefully crossed himself to keep the pagan evil at bay. ‘Guinevere evidently believes the Goddess has enormous power that can be channelled into human affairs. I can’t imagine Arthur likes it.’

‘He’s bored by it all,’ Ceinwyn said, spinning the last of the thread off the distaff and laying it down.

‘All he ever does now,’ she went on, ‘is complain that Guinevere won’t talk to him about anything except her religion. It must be horribly tedious for him.’ This conversation took place long before Tristan fled to Dumnonia with Iseult, and when Arthur was still a welcome guest at our house.

‘My brother claims to be fascinated by her ideas,’ Galahad said, ‘and maybe he is. He claims she’s the most intelligent woman in Britain and says he won’t marry till he finds another just like her.’

Ceinwyn laughed. ‘A good job he lost me, then. How old is he now?’

‘Thirty-three, I think.’

‘So ancient!’ Ceinwyn said, smiling at me, for I was only a year younger. ‘What happened to Ade?’

‘She gave him a son, and died doing it.’

‘No!’ Ceinwyn said, upset as always at hearing of a death in childbirth. ‘And you say he has a son?’

‘A bastard,’ Galahad said disapprovingly. ‘Peredur, he’s called. Four years old now, and not a bad little boy. In truth I rather like him.’

‘Has there ever been a child you didn’t like?’ I asked him drily.

‘Brush-head,’ he said, and we all smiled at that old nickname.

‘Imagine Lancelot having a son!’ Ceinwyn said with that intonation of surprised import with which women greet such news. To me the existence of another royal bastard seemed entirely unremarkable, but men and women, I notice, respond to these things quite differently.

Galahad, like his brother, had never married. Nor did he have land, but he was happy and was kept busy serving as an envoy for Arthur. He tried to keep the Brotherhood of Britain alive, though I noticed how quickly those duties fell away, and he travelled through all the British kingdoms, carrying messages, settling disputes and using his royal rank to ease whatever problems Dumnonia might have with other states. It was usually Galahad who travelled to Demetia to curb Oengus Mac Airem’s raids on Powys and it was Galahad who, after Tristan’s death, carried the news of Iseult’s fate to her father. I did not see him after that, not for many months.

I tried not to see Arthur either. I was too angry with him, and I would neither answer his letters nor go to the Council. He came to Lindinis twice in the months after Tristan’s death and both times I was coldly polite and both times I left him as soon as I could. He did talk for a long time with Ceinwyn and she tried to reconcile us, but I could not shake the thought of that burning child from my head. But nor could I ignore Arthur altogether. Mordred’s second acclamation was now just months away and the preparations had to be made. The ceremony would be held at Caer Cadarn, just a short walk east of Lindinis, and inevitably Ceinwyn and I were drawn into the planning. Mordred himself even took an interest, perhaps because he realized that the ceremony would at last free him of all discipline. ‘You have to decide,’ I told him one day, ‘who will acclaim you.’

‘Arthur will, won’t he?’ he asked sullenly.

‘It’s usually done by a Druid,’ I said, ‘but if you want a Christian ceremony then you must choose between Emrys or Sansum.’

He shrugged. ‘Sansum, I suppose.’

‘Then we should go and see him,’ I said.

We went on a hard midwinter day. I had other business in Ynys Wydryn, but first went with Mordred to the Christian shrine where a priest told us that Bishop Sansum was busy saying mass and that we must wait. ‘Does he know his King is here?’ I demanded.

‘I shall tell him, Lord,’ the priest said, and scuttled away across the frozen ground. Mordred had wandered off to stand beside his mother’s grave where, even on that cold day, a dozen pilgrims knelt in worship. It was a very simple grave, nothing but a low mound of earth with a stone cross that was dwarfed by the lead urn Sansum had placed to receive the pilgrims’ offerings. ‘The Bishop will be with us soon,’ I said. ‘Shall we wait inside?’

He shook his head and frowned at the low grassy mound. ‘She should have a better grave,’ he said.

‘I think that’s true,’ I said, surprised he had spoken at all. ‘You can build it.’

‘It would have been better,’ he said snidely, ‘if others had paid her that respect.’

‘Lord King,’ I said, ‘we were so busy defending the life of her child that we had small time to worry about her bones. But you are right, and we were remiss.’

He kicked moodily at the urn, then peered inside to see the small treasures that had been left by the pilgrims. Those who were praying at the grave edged away, not for fear of Mordred whom I doubt they even recognized, but because the iron amulet I wore about my neck betrayed that I was a pagan. ‘Why was she buried?’ Mordred suddenly asked me. ‘Why wasn’t she burned?’

‘Because she was a Christian,’ I said, hiding my horror at his ignorance. I explained that Christians believed their bodies would be used again at the final coming of Christ, while we pagans took new shadowbodies in the Otherworld and thus had no need of our corpses which, if we could, we burned to prevent our spirits wandering the earth. If we could not afford a funeral pyre then we burned the dead person’s hair and cut off one foot.

‘I shall make her a vault,’ he said when I had finished my theological explanation. He asked me how his mother had died and I told him the whole story of how Gundleus of Siluria had treacherously married Norwenna, then murdered her as she knelt to him. And I told him how Nimue had taken her revenge on Gundleus.

‘That witch,’ Mordred said. He feared Nimue, and no wonder, for she was becoming ever fiercer, ever gaunter and ever dirtier. She was a recluse now, grubbing a life in the remnants of Merlin’s compound where she chanted her spells, lit fires to her Gods and received few visitors, though once in a while, unannounced, she would stride into Lindinis to consult with Merlin. I would try to feed her on those rare visits, the children would run from her, and she would walk away, muttering to herself with her one eye wild, her robe caked with mud and ashes, and her matted black hair tangled with filth. Beneath her refuge on the Tor she was forced to watch the Christian shrine grow larger, stronger and ever more organized. The old Gods, I thought, were losing Britain fast. Sansum, of course, was desperate for Merlin to die so he could take the Tor for himself and build a church on its fire-scarred summit, but what Sansum did not know was that all Merlin’s land was willed to me.

Mordred, standing beside his mother’s grave, wondered at the similarity of names between my eldest daughter and his dead mother and I told him that Ceinwyn was Norwenna’s cousin. ‘Morwenna and Norwenna are old names in Powys,’ I explained.

‘Did she love me?’ Mordred asked, and the incongruity of that word in his mouth gave me pause. Maybe, I thought, Arthur was right. Maybe Mordred would grow into his responsibilities. Certainly, in all the years I had known him, I had never held such a courteous discussion before.

‘She loved you very much,’ I answered truthfully. ‘The happiest I ever saw your mother,’ I went on,

‘was when you were with her. It was up there.’ I pointed to the black scar where Merlin’s hall and his dream-tower had stood on the Tor. It was there that Norwenna had been murdered and Mordred had been snatched away from her. He had been a baby then, even younger than I had been when I was snatched from my mother, Erce. Did Erce still live? I still had not travelled to Siluria to find her, and that omission made me feel guilty. I touched the iron amulet.

‘When I die,’ Mordred said, ‘I want to be in the same grave as my mother. And I’ll make the grave myself. A vault of stone,’ he declared, ‘with our bodies lifted on a pedestal.’

‘You must talk to the Bishop,’ I said, ‘and I’m sure he’ll be pleased to do whatever he can to help.’

So long, I thought cynically, as he did not have to pay for the vaulted sepulchre. I turned as Sansum hurried across the grass. He bowed to Mordred, then welcomed me to the shrine.

‘You come, I hope, in search of truth, Lord Derfel?’

‘I come to visit that shrine,’ I said, pointing to the Tor, ‘but my Lord King has business of his own with you.’ I left them there alone and led my horse up to the Tor, passing by the group of Christians who, day and night, prayed at the Tor’s foot that its pagan inhabitants would be driven away. I endured their insults, then climbed the steep hill to discover that the water-gate had fallen from its last hinge. I tied my horse to a stake in what remained of the palisade, then carried the bundle of clothes and furs that Ceinwyn had packed so that the poor folk who shared Nimue’s refuge would not freeze in the bitter weather. I gave Nimue the clothes and she dropped them carelessly in the snow, then plucked at my sleeve and drew me into her new hut that she had built exactly where Merlin’s dream-tower had once stood. The hut stank so foully that I almost gagged, but she was oblivious to its mephitic stench. It was a freezing day and an icy sleet was whipping out of the east on a damp wind, yet even so I would rather have stood in the freezing downpour than endure that reeking hut. ‘Look,’ she said proudly, and showed me a cauldron, not the Cauldron, but just a common, patched iron cauldron that hung from a roof beam and was filled with some dark liquid. Sprigs of mistletoe, a pair of bat wings, the sloughed skin of snakes, a broken antler and bunches of herbs also hung from the rafters that were so low that I had to bend double to get inside the hut, which was eye-stingingly full of smoke. A naked man lay on a pallet in the far shadows and complained about my presence.

‘Quiet,’ Nimue snarled at him, then she took a stick and poked it into the cauldron’s dark liquid which steamed gently above a small fire that was generating far more smoke than heat. She stirred the cauldron about, found whatever she wanted and levered it up from the liquid. I saw it was a human skull. ‘You remember Balise?’ Nimue asked me.

‘Of course,’ I said. Balise had been a Druid, an old man when I was young, and now long dead.

‘They burned his body,’ Nimue told me, ‘but not his head, and a Druid’s head, Derfel, is a thing of awesome power. A man brought it to me last week. He had it in a barrel of beeswax. I bought it from him.’

Which meant I had purchased the head. Nimue was forever buying objects of cultic power: the caul of a dead child, the teeth of a dragon, a piece of the Christian’s magical bread, elf bolts, and now a dead man’s head. She used to come to the palace and demand the money for these tawdry things, but I now found it easier to leave her with a little gold, even if it did mean that she would waste the metal on whatever oddity was offered her. She once paid a whole gold ingot for the carcass of a lamb that had been born with two heads, and she had nailed the carcass to the palisade where it overlooked the Christian shrine and there let it rot. I did not like to ask what she had paid for a barrel of wax containing a dead man’s head. ‘I stripped the wax away,’ she told me, ‘and boiled the flesh off the head in the pot.’

That in part explained the hut’s overwhelming stench. ‘There is no more powerful augury,’ she told me, her one eye glinting in the dark hut, ‘than a Druid’s head seethed in a pot of urine with the ten brown herbs of Crom Dubh.’ She let the skull go and it sank beneath the liquid’s dark surface. ‘Now, wait,’ she ordered me.

My head was reeling with the smoke and stench, but I obediently-waited as the liquid’s surface shivered, glinted and finally subsided until it was nothing but a dark sheen as smooth as a fine mirror with only a hint of steam drifting from its black surface. Nimue leaned close and held her breath, and I knew she was seeing portents in the liquid’s surface. The man on the pallet coughed horribly, then feebly clawed at a threadbare blanket to half cover his nakedness. ‘I’m hungry,’ he whined. Nimue ignored him. I waited. ‘I’m disappointed in you, Derfel,’ Nimue suddenly said, her breath just wrinkling the liquid’s surface.

‘Why?’

‘I see a Queen was burned to death on a seashore. I would have liked her ashes, Derfel,’ she said reprovingly. ‘I could have used a Queen’s ashes,’ she went on. ‘You should have known that.’ She fell silent and I said nothing. The liquid was still again, and when Nimue next spoke it was in a strange, deep voice that did not blur the black liquid’s surface at all. ‘Two Kings will come to Cadarn,’ she said, ‘but a man who is no King shall rule there. The dead will be taken in marriage, the lost will come to the light and a sword will lie on the neck of a child.’ Then she screamed terribly, startling the naked man who scuttled frantically into the furthest corner of the hut where he crouched with his hands covering his head. ‘Tell that to Merlin,’ Nimue said to me in her normal voice. ‘He’ll know what it means.’

‘I will tell him,’ I promised her.

‘And tell him,’ she said with a desperate fervour, clutching my arm with a dirt-encrusted claw of a hand, ‘that I have seen the Cauldron in the liquid. Tell him it will be used soon. Soon, Derfel! Tell him that.’

‘I will,’ I said, and then, unable to take the smell any more, I pulled away from her grip and backed out into the sleet.

She followed me out of the hut and plucked a wing of my cloak to cover herself from the sleet. She walked with me towards the broken water-gate and was oddly cheerful. ‘Everyone thinks we’re losing, Derfel,’ she said, ‘everyone thinks those filthy Christians are taking over the land. But they’re not. The Cauldron will be revealed soon, Merlin will be back and the power will be loosed.’

I stopped in the gate and stared down at the group of Christians who were always gathered at the foot of the Tor to pray their extravagant prayers with their arms spread wide. Sansum and Morgan arranged for them to be there so that their constant prayers might serve to drive the pagans off the Tor’s fire-scarred summit. Nimue stared scornfully down at the group. Some of the Christians recognized her and made the sign of the cross. ‘You think Christianity is winning, Derfel?’ she asked me.

‘I fear it,’ I said, listening to the howls of rage from the Tor’s foot. I remembered the frenzied worshippers in Isca and wondered how long the horror of that fanaticism could be kept under control. ‘I do fear it is,’ I said sadly.

‘Christianity isn’t winning,’ Nimue said scornfully. ‘Watch.’ She ducked out from under my cloak and lifted her dirty dress to expose her wretched nakedness to the Christians, and then she thrust her hips obscenely towards them and gave a wailing cry that died in the wind as she dropped the dress. Some of the Christians made the sign of the cross, but most, I noted, instinctively made the pagan sign against evil with their right hands and then spat on the ground. ‘You see?’ she said with a smile, ‘they still believe in the old Gods. They still believe. And soon, Derfel, they will have proof. Tell that to Merlin.’

I did tell Merlin. I stood before him and reported that two Kings would come to Cadarn, but a man who was not a King would rule there, that the dead would be taken in marriage, the lost would come to the light and a sword be laid on the neck of a child.

‘Say it again, Derfel,’ he said, squinting up at me and stroking an old tabby cat that was stretched out on his lap.

I repeated it all solemnly, then added Nimue’s promise that the Cauldron would soon be unveiled and that its horror was imminent. He laughed, shook his head, then laughed again. He soothed the cat on his lap. ‘And did you say she had a Druid’s head?’ he asked.

‘Balise’s head. Lord.’

He tickled the cat under the chin. ‘Balise’s head was burned, Derfel, years ago. It was burned, then pounded into a powder. Pounded to nothing. I know, because I did it.’ He closed his eyes and slept. Next summer, on the eve of a full moon, when the trees that grew about the foot of Caer Cadarn were heavy with leaf, on a morning of brilliant sunshine that shone on hedgerows bright with bryony and bindweed and willowherb and old man’s beard, we acclaimed Mordred our King on the ancient summit of the Caer.

Caer Cadarn’s old fortress stood deserted for much of the year, but it was still our hill of kingship, the solemn place of ritual at Dumnonia’s royal heart, and the fort’s ramparts were kept strong, but the interior of the fort was a sad place of decaying huts that crouched around the big gaunt feasting hall that was a home to birds, bats and mice. That hall occupied the lower part of Caer Cadarn’s wide summit, while on the higher part, to the west, stood a circle of lichen-covered stones surrounding the grey, slab-like boulder that was Dumnonia’s ancient stone of kingship. Here the great God Bel had anointed his half-God, half-human child Beli Mawr as the first of our Kings and ever since, even in the years when the Romans had ruled, our Kings had come to this place to be acclaimed. Mordred had been born on this hill and here too he had been acclaimed as a baby, though that ceremony had merely been a sign of his kingly status and had placed no duties on him. But now he was at the dawn of his manhood and from this day on he would be King in more than name. This second acclamation discharged Arthur’s oath and gave Mordred all of Uther’s power.

The crowds gathered early. The feasting hall had been swept, then hung with banners and decorated with green boughs. Vats of mead and pots of ale were set on the grass, while smoke poured from the great fires where oxen, pigs and deer were being roasted for the feast. Tattooed tribesmen from Isca mingled with the elegant, toga-clad citizens from Durnovaria and Corinium, and both listened to the white-robed bards who sang specially composed songs praising Mordred’s character and forecasting the glories of his reign. Bards never were to be trusted.

I was Mordred’s champion and so, alone among the lords on the hill, I was dressed in my full war gear. It was no longer the shabby, ill-repaired stuff I had worn at that fight outside London, for now I possessed a new and expensive armour that reflected my high status. I had a coat of fine Roman mail that was trimmed with golden rings at its neck, hem and sleeves. I had knee-high boots that gleamed with bronze strips, elbow-length gloves lined with iron plates that protected my forearms and fingers, and a fine silver-chased helmet with a mail flap that protected the back of my neck. The helmet had cheek pieces that hinged across my face and a gold finial from which my freshly brushed wolf-tail hung. I had a green cloak, Hywelbane at my hip and a shield which, in honour of this day, bore Mordred’s red dragon instead of my own white star.

Culhwch had come from Isca. He embraced me. ‘This is a farce, Derfel,’ he growled.

‘A great and happy day, Lord Culhwch,’ I said, straight-faced.

He did not smile, but instead looked sullenly about the expectant crowd. ‘Christians,’ he spat.

‘There do seem a lot of them.’

‘Is Merlin here?’

‘He felt tired,’ I said.

‘You mean he’s got more sense than to come,’ Culhwch said. ‘So who does the honours today?’

‘Bishop Sansum.’

Culhwch spat. His beard had gone grey in the last few months and he moved stiffly, though he was still a great bear of a man. ‘Are you talking to Arthur yet?’ he demanded.

‘We speak when we have to,’ I answered evasively.

‘He wants to be friends with you,’ Culhwch told me.

‘He deals very strangely with friends,’ I said stiffly.

‘He needs friends.’

‘Then he’s lucky to have you,’ I retorted, and turned as a horn-call interrupted our conversation. Spearmen were making a passage in the crowd, using their shields and spear-staffs to press the people gently back, and in the spearmen’s corridor a procession of lords, magistrates and priests walked slowly towards the ring of stones. I took my place in the procession alongside Ceinwyn and my daughters. The gathering that day was a tribute to Arthur rather than to Mordred, for all Arthur’s allies were there. Cuneglas had come from Powys, bringing a dozen lords and his Edling, the Prince Perddel who was now a good-looking boy with his father’s round and earnest face. Agricola, old and stiff-jointed now, accompanied King Meurig, both men in togas. Meurig’s father Tewdric still lived, but the old King had given up his throne, shaved his head into the tonsure of a priest and retired to a monastery in the valley of the Wye where he patiently gathered a library of Christian texts and allowed his pedantic son to rule Gwent in his place. Byrthig, who had succeeded his father as King of Gwynedd, and who now possessed only two teeth, stood fidgeting as though the rituals were a necessary irritant that needed to be finished before he could get back to the waiting mead vats. Oengus Mac Airem, Iseult’s father and the King of Demetia, had come with a party of his dreaded Blackshields, while Lancelot, King of the Belgae, was escorted by a dozen giant men of his Saxon Guard and by the baleful pairs of twins, Dinas and Lavaine and Amhar and Loholt.

Arthur, I noticed, embraced Oengus, who returned the gesture happily. No ill-will there, it seemed, despite Iseult’s awful death. Arthur wore a brown cloak, perhaps not wanting one of his white cloaks to outshine the day’s hero. Guinevere looked splendid in a russet dress that was trimmed with silver and embroidered with her symbol of the moon-crowned stag. Sagramor came in a black gown and had brought his pregnant Saxon wife, Malla, and their two sons. No one came from Kernow. The banners of the Kings, chiefs and Lords were hung from the ramparts where a ring of spearmen, all equipped with newly painted dragon shields, stood guard. A horn sounded again, its noise mournful in the sunny air as twenty other spearmen escorted Mordred towards the stone ring where, fifteen years before, we had first acclaimed him. That first ceremony had been in wintertime and the baby Mordred had been wrapped in fur and carried about the stones in an upturned war shield. Morgan had supervised that first acclamation which had been marked by the sacrifice of a Saxon captive, but this time the ceremony would be an entirely Christian rite. The Christians, I thought grimly, whatever Nimue might think, had won. There were no Druids here except for Dinas and Lavaine and they had no role to play, Merlin was sleeping in Lindinis’s garden, Nimue was on the Tor and no captive would be slaughtered to discover the auguries for the newly acclaimed King’s reign. We had killed a Saxon prisoner at Mordred’s first acclamation, spearing him high in the belly so that his death would be slow and agonizing, and Morgan had watched every painful stagger and every splatter of blood for signs of the future. Those auguries, I remembered, had not been good, though they had promised Mordred a long reign. I tried to remember that poor Saxon’s name, but all I could remember was his terrified face and the fact that I had liked him, and then suddenly his name came winging back across the years. Wlenca! Poor shivering Wlenca. Morgan had insisted on his death, but now, with a crucifix dangling beneath her mask, she was only here as Sansum’s wife and would play no part in the rites.

A muted cheer greeted Mordred’s arrival. The Christians applauded, while we pagans just touched our hands dutifully together and then fell silent. The King was dressed entirely in black: black shirt, black trews, black cloak and a pair of black boots, one of which was monstrously fashioned to encase his clubbed left foot. A gold crucifix hung about his neck and it seemed to me that there was a smirk on his round, ugly face, or perhaps that grimace just betrayed his nervousness. He had kept his beard, but it was a thin thing that did little to improve his bulbous face with its jutting hedges of hair. He walked alone into the royal circle and took his place beside the royal stone.

Sansum, splendid in white and gold, hurried to stand beside the King. The Bishop raised his arms and, without any preamble, began to pray aloud. His voice, always strong, carried right across the huge crowd that pressed behind the Lords, right out to the motionless spearmen on the rampart’s fighting platforms.

‘Lord God!’ he shouted, ‘pour down Thy blessing on this Thy son Mordred, on this blessed King, this light of Britain, this monarch who will lead Thy kingdom of Dumnonia into its new and blessed age.’ I confess I paraphrase the prayer, for in truth I hardly took much notice as Sansum harangued his God. He was good at such harangues, but they were all much alike; always too long, always full of praise for Christianity and always replete with mockery of paganism, so instead of listening I watched the crowd to see who among it spread their arms and closed their eyes. Most did. Arthur, ever ready to show respect to any religion, just stood with head bowed. He held his son’s hand while, on Gwydre’s other side, Guinevere gazed into the sky with a secret smile on her handsome face. Amhar and Loholt, Arthur’s sons by Ailleann, prayed with the Christians, while Dinas and Lavaine just stood, arms folded across their white robes, and stared at Ceinwyn who, just as on that day when she had run from her betrothal, wore neither gold nor silver. Her hair still shone so fine and pale, and she remained for me the loveliest creature that ever walked this earth. Her brother. King Cuneglas, stood on her other side, and catching my eye during one of Sansum’s higher flights of fancy he offered me a wry smile. Mordred, his arms spread in prayer, watched us all with a crooked smile.

When the prayer was done Bishop Sansum took the King’s arm and led him to Arthur who, as the guardian of the kingdom, would now present the new ruler to his people. Arthur smiled at Mordred, as though to give him courage, then led him round the outside of the stone circle and, as Mordred passed, those who were not kings dropped to their knees. I, as his champion, walked behind him with a drawn sword. We walked against the sun, the only time a circle was ever walked thus, to show that our new King was descended from Beli Maw r and could thus defy the natural order of all living things, though Bishop Sansum, of course, declared that the walk against the sun proved the death of pagan superstition. Culhwch, I saw, managed to hide himself during the circle walk so that he would not have to kneel. When two full circles of the stones had been completed Arthur led Mordred to the royal stone and handed him up so that the King stood there alone. Dian, my youngest daughter, then toddled forward with cornflowers woven into her hair and laid a loaf of bread at Mordred’s mismatched feet to symbolize his duty to feed his people. The women murmured at the sight of her, for Dian, like her sisters, had inherited her mother’s careless beauty. She put the loaf down, then looked about her for a sign of what she was supposed to do next and, receiving none, she looked solemnly up into Mordred’s face and immediately burst into tears. The women sighed happily as the child fled crying to her mother and as Ceinwyn scooped her up and dried her tears. Gwydre, Arthur’s son, next carried a leather scourge that he laid at the King’s feet as a symbol of Mordred’s duty to offer the land justice, and then I carried the new royal sword, forged in Gwent and with a hilt of black leather wrapped with golden wire, and gave the sword into Mordred’s right hand. ‘Lord King,’ I said, looking into his eyes, ‘this is for your duty to protect your people.’ Mordred’s smirk had vanished and he stared at me with a cold dignity that made me hope Arthur was right and that the solemnity of this ritual would indeed give Mordred the power to be a good King.

Then, one by one, we presented our gifts. I gave him a fine helmet, trimmed with gold and with a red enamel dragon burned onto its skullpiece. Arthur gave him a scale coat, a spear, and a box of ivory filled with gold coins. Cuneglas offered him ingots of gold from the mines of Powys. Lancelot presented him with a massive cross of gold and a small, gold-framed electrum mirror. Oengus Mac Airem laid two thick bear pelts at his feet, while Sagramor placed a golden Saxon image of a bull’s head on the pile. Sansum presented the King with a piece of the cross on which, he loudly proclaimed, Christ had been crucified. The scrap of dark timber was encased in a Roman glass flask that had been sealed with gold. Only Culhwch presented nothing. Indeed, when the gifts were given and the Lords made a line to kneel before the King and swear their oaths of loyalty, Culhwch was nowhere to be seen. I was the second man to give the oath, following Arthur to the royal stone where I knelt opposite the great heap of shining gold and put my lips to the tip of Mordred’s new sword and swore on my life that I would serve him faithfully. It was a solemn moment, for that was the royal oath, the oath that ruled all others. There was one new thing at that acclamation, a ritual Arthur had devised as a means of continuing the peace he had so carefully constructed and maintained throughout the years. The new ceremony was an extension of his Brotherhood of Britain, for he had persuaded the Kings of Britain — at least those present

— to exchange kisses with Mordred and swear oaths never to fight against each other. Mordred, Meurig, Cuneglas, Byrthig, Oengus and Lancelot all embraced each other, touched their sword blades together and took the oath to keep each other’s peace. Arthur beamed and Oengus Mac Airem, a rogue if ever there was one, gave me a broad wink. Come harvest time, I knew, his spearmen would be raiding Powys’s granaries, whatever oaths he might have sworn.

When the royal oath had been made, I performed the final act of the acclamation. First I gave Mordred my gloved hand and helped him down from the stone and then, when I had conducted him to the northernmost stone of the outer circle, I took his royal sword and laid its bare blade flat on the royal stone. It lay there, glittering, a sword on a stone, the true sign of a King, and then I did the duty of the King’s champion by striding about the circle and spitting at the onlookers and challenging all who listened to dare deny the right of Mordred ap Mordred ap Uther to be the King of this land. I winked at my daughters as I passed, made certain my spittle landed on Sansum’s shining robes, and made equally sure it did not land on Guinevere’s embroidered dress. ‘I declare Mordred ap Mordred ap Uther to be the King!’ I shouted again and again, ‘and if any man denies it, let him fight me now.’ I walked slowly with Hywelbane naked in my hand, and shouted my challenge loud. ‘I declare Mordred ap Mordred ap Uther to be the King, and if any man denies it, let him fight me now.’

I had almost completed the circle when I heard the blade rasp from its scabbard. ‘I deny it!’ A voice shouted and the shout was followed by gasps of horror from the crowd. Ceinwyn blanched, and my daughters, who were already frightened to see me dressed in my unfamiliar iron and steel and leather and wolf-hair, hid their faces in her linen skirt.

I turned slowly and saw that Culhwch had come back to the circle and now faced me with his big battle sword drawn. ‘No,’ I called to him, ‘please.’

Culhwch, grim-faced, strode to the circle’s centre and plucked the King’s gold-hilted sword from the stone. ‘I deny Mordred ap Mordred ap Uther,’ Culhwch said ceremoniously, then threw the royal blade down onto the grass.

‘Kill him,’ Mordred shouted from his place beside Arthur. ‘Do your duty, Lord Derfel!’

‘I deny his fitness to rule!’ Culhwch shouted at the assembly. A wind lifted the banners on the walls and stirred Ceinwyn’s golden hair.

‘I order you to kill him!’ Mordred shouted excitedly.

I walked into the circle to face Culhwch. My duty now was to fight him, and if he killed me then another King’s champion would be selected and so the stupid business would go on until Culhwch, battered and bloody, lay twitching his life blood into Caer Cadarn’s soil, or, more likely, till a full-scale battle erupted on the summit that would end with either Culhwch’s or Mordred’s party triumphant. I pulled the helmet off my head, shook the hair out of my eyes and hung the helmet over the throat of my scabbard. Then, with Hywelbane still in my hand, I embraced Culhwch. ‘Don’t do this,’ I whispered in his ear. ‘I can’t kill you, my friend, so you will just have to kill me.’

‘He’s a bastard little toad, a worm, not a King,’ he murmured.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘I cannot kill you. You know that.’

He hugged me tight. ‘Make peace with Arthur, my friend,’ he whispered, then he stepped away and rammed his sword back into its scabbard. He picked Mordred’s sword out of the grass, gave the King a sour look, then laid the blade back on the stone, ‘I yield the fight,’ he called so that all on the summit could hear him, then he crossed to Cuneglas and knelt at his feet. ‘Will you have my oath, Lord King?’

It was an embarrassing moment, for if the King of Powys accepted Culhwch’s loyalty then Powys’s first act of this new Dumnonian reign was to welcome an enemy of Mordred’s, but Cuneglas did not hesitate. He pushed his sword hilt forward for Culhwch’s kiss. ‘Gladly, Lord Culhwch,’ he said, ‘gladly.’

Culhwch kissed Cuneglas’s sword, then rose and walked to the west gate. His spearmen followed him and thus, with Culhwch’s going, Mordred at last had the kingdom’s power unchallenged. There was silence, then Sansum began to cheer and the Christians followed his lead and so acclaimed their new ruler. Men gathered about the King, calling their congratulations, and I saw that Arthur was left to one side, alone. He looked at me and smiled, but I turned away. I sheathed Hywelbane, then crouched by my still frightened daughters and told them there was nothing to be worried about. I gave Morwenna my helmet to hold, and showed her how the cheek pieces swung back and forward on their hinges. ‘Don’t break it!’ I warned her.

‘Poor wolf,’ Seren said, stroking the wolf-tail.

‘It killed a lot of lambs.’

‘Is that why you killed the wolf?’

‘Of course.’

‘Lord Derfel!’ Mordred’s voice suddenly called, and I straightened and turned round to see that the King had shaken off his admirers and was limping across the royal circle towards me. I walked to meet him, then bowed my head. ‘Lord King.’

The Christians gathered behind Mordred. They were the masters now, and their victory was plain on their faces. ‘You swore an oath, Lord Derfel,’ Mordred said, ‘to obey me.’

‘I did, Lord King.’

‘But Culhwch still lives,’ he said in a puzzled voice. ‘Does he not still live?’

‘He lives, Lord King,’ I said.

Mordred smiled. ‘A broken oath, Lord Derfel, deserves punishment. Isn’t that what you always taught me?’

‘Yes, Lord King.’

‘And the oath, Lord Derfel, was sworn on your life, was it not?’

‘Yes, Lord King.’

He scratched at his thin beard. ‘But your daughters are pretty Derfel, so I would be sorry to lose you from Dumnonia. I forgive you that Culhwch still lives.’

‘Thank you, Lord King,’ I said, fighting back a temptation to hit him.

‘But a broken oath still deserves punishment,’ he said excitedly.

‘Yes, Lord King,’ I agreed. ‘It does.’

He paused a heartbeat, then struck me hard across the face with the leather flail of justice. He laughed, and was so delighted with the surprised reaction on my face that he hit me with the flail a second time.

‘Punishment given, Lord Derfel,’ he said, then turned away. His supporters laughed and applauded. We did not stay for the feast, nor for the wrestling matches and the mock bouts of swordplay and the displays of juggling, nor for the tame dancing bear and the competition of the bards. We walked, a family, back to Lindinis. We walked beside the stream where the willows grew and the purple loosestrife flowered. We walked home.

Cuneglas followed us within the hour. He planned to stay with us for one week, then he would go back to Powys. ‘Come back with me,’ he said.

‘I’m sworn to Mordred, Lord King.’

‘Oh, Derfel, Derfel!’ He put his arm around my neck and walked up the outer courtyard with me. ‘My dear Derfel, you’re as bad as Arthur! You think Mordred cares if you keep your oath?’

‘I hope he doesn’t want me as an enemy.’

‘Who knows what he wants?’ Cuneglas asked. ‘Girls, probably, and fast horses and running deer and strong mead. Come home, Derfel! Culhwch will be there.’

‘I shall miss him, Lord,’ I said. I had hoped that Culhwch would be waiting at Lindinis when we returned from Caer Cadarn, but he had plainly not dared waste a moment and was already racing north to escape the spearmen who would be sent to find him before he crossed the frontier. Cuneglas abandoned his attempt to persuade me north. ‘What was that rogue Oengus doing there?’

he asked me peevishly. ‘And making that promise to keep the peace too!’

‘He knows, Lord King,’ I said, ‘that if he loses Arthur’s friendship then your spears will invade his land.’

‘He’s right,’ Cuneglas said grimly. ‘Maybe I’ll give that job to Culhwch. Will Arthur have any power now?’

‘That depends on Mordred.’

‘Let’s assume Mordred isn’t a complete fool. I can’t comprehend Dumnonia without Arthur.’ He turned as a shout from the gate announced more visitors. I half expected to see dragon shields and a party of Mordred’s men searching for Culhwch, but instead it was Arthur and Oengus Mac Airem who had arrived with a score of spearmen. Arthur hesitated at the gate’s threshold. ‘Am I welcome?’ he called to me.

‘Of course, Lord,’ I replied, though not warmly.

My daughters spied him from a window and a moment later they ran shrieking to welcome him. Cuneglas joined them, pointedly ignoring King Oengus Mac Airem who crossed to my side. I bowed, but Oengus pushed me upright and enfolded me in his arms. His fur collar stank of sweat and old grease. He grinned at me. ‘Arthur tells me you haven’t fought a decent war in ten years,’ he said.

‘It must be that long, Lord.’

‘You’ll be out of practice, Derfel. First proper fight and some slip of a boy will rip your belly out to feed his hounds. How are you?’

‘Older than I was, Lord. But well. And you?’

‘I’m still alive,’ he said, then glanced back at Cuneglas. ‘I assume the King of Powys doesn’t want to greet me?’

‘He feels, Lord King, that your spearmen are too busy on his frontier.’

Oengus laughed. ‘Have to keep them busy, Derfel, you know that. Idle spearmen are trouble. And besides, I’ve got too many of the bastards these days. Ireland’s going Christian!’ he spat. ‘Some interfering Briton called Padraig turned them into milksops. You never dared conquer us with your spears so you sent that piece of seal shit to weaken us, and any Irishman with proper guts is coming to the Irish kingdoms in Britain to escape his Christians. He preached to them with a clover leaf! Can you imagine that? Conquering Ireland with a clover leaf? No wonder all the decent warriors are coming to me, but what can I do with them?’

‘Send them to kill Padraig?’ I suggested.

‘He’s dead already, Derfel, but his followers are all too much alive.’ Oengus had drawn me into a corner of the courtyard where he stopped and looked up into my face. ‘I hear you tried to protect my daughter.’

‘I did, Lord,’ I said. I saw that Ceinwyn had come from the palace and was embracing Arthur. They held each other as they talked and as Ceinwyn glanced reprovingly towards me. I turned back to Oengus. ‘I drew a sword for her, Lord King.’

‘Good of you, Derfel,’ he said carelessly, ‘good of you, but it isn’t important. I’ve several daughters. Not even sure I can remember which one Iseult was. Skinny little thing, yes?’

‘A beautiful girl, Lord King.’

He laughed. ‘Anything young with tits is beautiful when you’re old. I do have one beauty in the brood. Argante, she’s called, and she’ll break a few hearts before her life’s done. Your new King will be looking for a bride, won’t he?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Argante would do for him,’ Oengus said. He was not being kind to Mordred by suggesting his beautiful daughter as Dumnonia’s Queen, but rather making sure that Dumnonia would go on protecting Demetia from the men of Powys. ‘Maybe I’ll bring Argante on a visit here,’ he said. Then he abandoned the subject of that possible marriage and shoved a scarred fist hard into my chest. ‘Listen, my friend,’ he said forcefully, ‘it isn’t worth falling out with Arthur over Iseult.’

‘Is that why he brought you here, Lord?’ I asked suspiciously.

‘Of course it is, you fool!’ Oengus said happily. ‘And because I can’t stand all those Christians on the Caer. Make your peace, Derfel. Britain isn’t so big that decent men can start spitting at each other. I hear Merlin lives here?’

‘You’ll find him through there,’ I said, pointing towards an arch that led to a garden where Ceinwyn’s roses blossomed, ‘what’s left of him.’

‘I’ll go and kick some life into the bastard. Maybe he can tell me what’s so special about a clover leaf. And I need a charm to help me make new daughters.’ He laughed and walked away. ‘Getting old, Derfel, getting old!’

Arthur gave my three daughters into the keeping of Ceinwyn and their Uncle Cuneglas, then walked towards me. I hesitated, then gestured through the outer gate and walked ahead of him into the meadows where I waited and stared at Caer Cadarn’s banner-hung ramparts above the intervening trees. He stopped behind me. ‘It was at Mordred’s first acclamation,’ he said softly, ‘that you and I first met Tristan. Do you remember?’

I did not turn round. ‘Yes. Lord.’

‘I am no longer your lord, Derfel,’ he said. ‘Our oath to Uther is done, it’s finished. I am not your lord, but I would be your friend.’ He hesitated. ‘And for what happened,’ he went on, ‘I am sorry.’

I still did not turn round. Not out of pride, but because there were tears in my eyes. ‘I am sorry too,’ I said.

‘Will you forgive me?’ he asked humbly. ‘Will we be friends?’

I stared at the Caer and thought of all the things I had done that needed forgiveness. I thought of the bodies on the moor. I had been a young spearman then, but youth was no excuse for slaughter. It was not up to me, I thought, to forgive Arthur for what he had done. He had to do that for himself. ‘We shall be friends,’ I said, ‘till death.’ And then I turned.

And we embraced. Our oath to Uther was done. And Mordred was King.