Enemy of God

PART FOUR The Mysteries of Isis

Was Iseult beautiful?’ Igraine asks me.

I thought about the question for a few heartbeats. ‘She was young,’ I said at last, ‘and as her father said. .’

‘I read what her father said,’ Igraine interrupted me curtly. When she comes to Dinnewrac Igraine always sits and reads through the finished skins before sitting on the window-sill and talking to me. Today that window is hung with a leather curtain to try and keep the cold out of the room, which is badly lit with rush lights on my writing-desk and filled with smoke because the wind is in the north and the smoke from the fire cannot find its way out of the roof-hole.

‘It was a long time ago,’ I said wearily, ‘and I only saw her for a day and two nights. I remember her as beautiful, but I suppose we always make the dead beautiful if they are young.’

‘The songs all say she was beautiful,’ Igraine said wistfully.

‘I paid the bards for those songs,’ I said. Just as I had paid men to carry Tristan’s ashes back to Kernow. It was right, I had thought, that Tristan should go to his own land in death, and I had mixed his bones and Iseult’s bones, and his ashes and her ashes, and no doubt a fair amount of ordinary wood ash too, and sealed them all in a jar we found in the hall where they had shared their impossible dream of love. I had been wealthy then, a great lord, master of slaves and servants and spearmen, wealthy enough to buy a dozen songs about Tristan and Iseult that are sung to this day in all the feasting halls. I made sure, too, that the songs put the blame for their deaths on Arthur.

‘But why did Arthur do it?’ Igraine said.

I rubbed my face with my one hand. ‘Arthur worshipped order,’ I explained. ‘I don’t think he ever really believed in the Gods. Oh, he believed they existed, he was no fool, but he didn’t think they cared about us any more. I remember he once laughed and said it was so arrogant of us to think that the Gods had nothing better to do than to worry about us. Do we lose sleep over the mice in the thatch? He asked me. So why would the Gods care about us? So all that was left to him, if you took away the Gods, was order, and the only thing that kept order was the law, and the only thing that made the powerful obey the law was their oaths. It was really quite simple.’ I shrugged. ‘He was right, of course; he almost always was.’

‘He should have let them live,’ Igraine insisted.

‘He obeyed the law,’ I said bleakly. I have often regretted allowing the bards to blame Arthur, but he forgave me.

‘And Iseult was burned alive?’ Igraine shuddered. ‘And Arthur just let it happen?’

‘He could be very hard,’ I said, ‘and he had to be, for the rest of us, God knows, could be soft.’

‘He should have spared them,’ Igraine insisted.

‘And there would have been no songs or stories if he had,’ I answered. ‘They would have grown old and fat and squabbled and died. Or else Tristan would have gone home to Kernow when his father died and taken other wives. Who knows?’

‘How long did Mark live?’ Igraine asked me.

‘Just another year,’ I said. ‘He died of the strangury.’

‘The what?’

I smiled. ‘A foul disease, Lady. Women, I think, are not subject to it. A nephew became King then, and I can’t even remember his name.’

Igraine grimaced. ‘But you can remember Iseult running from the sea,’ she said accusingly, ‘because her dress was wet.’

I smiled. ‘Like it was yesterday, Lady.’

‘The Sea of Galilee,’ Igraine said brightly, for St Tudwal had suddenly come into our room. Tudwal is now ten or eleven years old, a thin boy with black hair and a face that reminds me of Cerdic. A rat face. He shares both Sansum’s cell and his authority. How lucky we are to have two saints in our small community.

‘The saint wishes you to decipher these parchments,’ Tudwal demanded, putting them on my table. He ignored Igraine. Saints, it seems, can be rude to queens.

‘What are they?’ I asked him.

‘A merchant wants to sell them to us,’ Tudwal said. ‘He claims they’re psalms, but the saint’s eyes are too dim to read them.’

‘Of course,’ I said. The truth, of course, is that Sansum cannot read at all and Tudwal is much too lazy to learn, though we have all tried to teach him and we all now pretend that he can. I carefully uncurled the parchment that was old, cracking and feeble. The language was Latin, a tongue I can barely understand, but I did see the word Christus. ‘They aren’t psalms,’ I said, ‘but they are Christian. I suspect they’re gospel fragments.’

‘The merchant wants four pieces of gold.’

‘Two pieces,’ I said, though I did not really care whether we bought them or not. I let the parchments curl up. ‘Did the man say where he got them?’ I asked.

Tudwal shrugged. ‘The Saxons.’

‘We should certainly preserve them,’ I said dutifully, handing them back. ‘They should be in the treasure store.’ Where, I thought, Hywelbane rested with all the other small treasures I had brought from my old life. All but for Ceinwyn’s little golden brooch that I keep hidden from the older saint. I humbly thanked the younger saint for consulting me, and bowed my head as he left.

‘Spotty little toad,’ Igraine said when Tudwal had gone. She spat towards the fire. ‘Are you a Christian, Derfel?’

‘Of course I am, Lady!’ I protested. ‘What a question!’

She frowned quizzically at me. ‘I ask it,’ she said, ‘because it seems to me that you are less of a Christian today than you were when you began writing this tale.’

That, I thought, was a clever observation. And a true one too, but I dared not confess it openly for Sansum would love to have an excuse to accuse me of heresy and burn me to death. He wouldn’t stint on that firewood, I thought, even if he did ration what we could burn in our hearths. I smiled. ‘You make me remember the old things, Lady,’ I said, ‘that is all.’ It was not all. The more I recall of the old years the more some of those old things come back to me. I touched an iron nail in my wooden writing-desk to avert the evil of Sansum’s hatred. ‘I long ago abandoned paganism,’ I said.

‘I wish I was a pagan,’ Igraine said wistfully, drawing the beaver-pelt cloak tight about her shoulders. Her eyes are still bright and her face is so full of life that I am sure that she must be pregnant. ‘Don’t tell the saints I said that,’ she added swiftly. ‘And Mordred,’ she asked, ‘was he a Christian?’

‘No. But he knew that was where his support in Dumnonia was, so he did enough to keep them happy. He let Sansum build his great church.’

‘Where?’

‘On Caer Cadarn.’ I smiled, remembering it. ‘It was never finished, but it was supposed to be a great big church in the form of a cross. He claimed the church would welcome the second coming of Christ in the year 500, and he pulled down most of the feasting hall and used its timbers to build the wall and the stone circle to make the church’s foundations. He left the royal stone, of course. Then he took half the lands that belonged to Lindinis’s palace and used their wealth to pay for the monks on Caer Cadarn.’

‘Your land?’

I shook my head. ‘It was never my land, always Mordred’s. And, of course, Mordred wanted us evicted from Lindinis.’

‘So he could live in the palace?’

‘So Sansum could. Mordred moved into Uther’s Winter Palace. He liked it there.’

‘So where did you go?’

‘We found a home,’ I said. It was Ermid’s old hall, south of Issa’s Mere. The mere was not named for my Issa, of course, but for an old chieftain and Ermid had been another chief who had lived on its southern bank. When he died I had bought his lands, and after Sansum and Morgan took over Lindinis I moved there. The girls missed Lindinis’s open corridors and echoing rooms, but I liked Ermid’s Hall. It was old, thatched, shadowed by trees and full of spiders that made Morwenna scream and, for my oldest daughter’s sake, I became Lord Derfel Cadarn, the slayer of spiders.

‘Would you have killed Culhwch?’ Igraine asks me.

‘Of course not!’

‘I hate Mordred,’ she said.

‘You are not alone in that, Lady.’

She stared at the fire for a few moments. ‘Did he really have to become King?’

‘So long as it was in Arthur’s hands, yes. If it had been me? No, I would have killed him with Hywelbane, even if it did mean breaking my oath. He was a sad boy.’

‘It all seems so sad,’ Igraine said.

‘There was plenty of happiness in those years,’ I answered, ‘and even afterwards, sometimes. We were happy enough back then.’ I still remember the girls’ shouts echoing in Lindinis, the rush of feet and their excitement at some new game or some strange discovery. Ceinwyn was always happy she had a gift for it — and those around her caught the happiness and passed it on. And Dumnonia, I suppose, was happy. It prospered, certainly, and the hard workers made themselves wealthy. The Christians seethed with discontent, but even so those were the glory years, the time of peace, the time of Arthur. Igraine shuffled the new sheets of parchment to find one particular passage. ‘About the Round Table,’

she began.

‘Please,’ I said, holding up my one hand to still what I knew would be a protest.

‘Derfel!’ she said sternly. ‘Everyone knows that it was a serious thing! An important thing! All the best warriors of Britain, all sworn to Arthur, and all of them friends. Everyone knows it!’

‘It was a cracked stone table that by the day’s end was cracked even more and smeared with vomit. They all got very drunk.’

She sighed. ‘I expect you’ve just forgotten the truth,’ she said, dismissing the subject much too easily, which makes me think that Dafydd, the clerk who translates my words into the British tongue, will come up with something altogether more to Igraine’s liking. I even heard one tale not so long ago which claimed that the table was a vast wooden circle around which the whole Brotherhood of Britain sat and looked solemn, but there never was such a table, nor could there have been unless we had cut down half the woods of Dumnonia to build it.

‘The Brotherhood of Britain,’ I said patiently, ‘was an idea of Arthur’s that never really worked. It couldn’t! Men’s royal oaths took preference over the Round Table oath, and besides, no one except Arthur and Galahad ever really believed in it. By the end, believe me, even he was embarrassed if anyone even mentioned it.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she said, meaning that she was utterly sure I was wrong. ‘And I want to know,’ she went on, ‘what happened to Merlin.’

‘I will tell you. I promise.’

‘Now!’ she insisted. ‘Tell me now. Did he just fade away?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘His time did come. Nimue was right, you see. At Lindinis he was just waiting. He always liked to pretend, remember, and in those years he pretended to be an old, dying man, but underneath, where none of us saw it, the power was always there. But he was old, and he did have to hoard his power. He was waiting, you see, for the time when the Cauldron would be unveiled. He knew he would need his power then, but till it was needed he was happy to let Nimue guard the flame.’

‘So what happened?’ Igraine demanded excitedly.

I wrapped the sleeve of my cowl about the stump of my wrist. ‘If God lets me live, my Lady, I will tell you,’ I said, and I would not tell her more then. I was close to tears, remembering that last savage instance of Merlin’s power in Britain, but that moment lies a long, long way ahead in this story, long past the time when Nimue’s prophecy about the Kings coming to Cadarn came true.

‘If you won’t tell me,’ Igraine said, ‘then I won’t tell you my news.’

‘You’re pregnant,’ I said, ‘and I am so very happy for you.’

‘You beast, Derfel,’ she protested. ‘I wanted to surprise you!’

‘You have prayed for this, Lady, and I have prayed for you, and how could God not answer our prayers?’

She grimaced. ‘God sent Nwylle the pox, that’s what God did. She was all spots and sores and weeping pus, so the King sent her away’

‘I’m very glad.’

She touched her belly. ‘I just hope he lives to rule, Derfel.’

‘He?’ I asked.

‘He,’ she said firmly.

‘Then I will pray for that too,’ I said piously, though whether I will pray to Sansum’s God or to the wilder Gods of Britain I do not know. So many prayers have been said in my lifetime, so very many, and where did they bring me? To this damp refuge in the hills while our old enemies sing in our ancient halls. But that ending is also far ahead, and Arthur’s story is far from done. It is hardly begun in some ways, for now, as he discarded his glory and gave his power to Mordred, the times of testing came, and they were to prove the trials of Arthur, my Lord of oaths, my hard Lord, but my friend till death. At first, nothing happened. We held our breath, expected the worst, and nothing happened. We made hay, then cut the flax and laid the fibrous stems in the retting ponds so that our villages stank for weeks. We reaped the fields of rye, barley and wheat, then listened to the slaves singing their songs around the threshing floor or the endlessly turning millstones. The harvest straw was used to repair the thatch so that, for a time, patches of roof-gold shone in the late summer sun. We picked the orchards clean, cut the winter firewood and harvested willow rods for the basket-makers. We ate blackberries and nuts, smoked the bees out of their hives and pressed their honey in sacks that we hung in front of the kitchen fires where we left food for the dead on Samain Eve.

The Saxons stayed in Lloegyr, justice was done in our courts, maids were given in marriage, children were born and children died. The waning year brought mists and frost. The cattle were slaughtered and the stink of the retting ponds gave way to the nauseous smell of the tanning pits. The newly woven linen was bucked in vats filled with wood-ash, rainwater and the urine we had collected all year, the winter taxes were paid, and at the solstice we Mithraists killed a bull at our annual festival that honoured the sun while on the same day the Christians celebrated their God’s birth. At Imbolc, the great feast of the cold season, we fed two hundred souls in our hall, made sure three knives were laid on the table for the use of the invisible Gods and offered sacrifices for the new year’s crops. Newborn lambs were the first sign of that awakening year, then came the time for ploughing and sowing and of new green shoots on old bare trees. It was the first new year of Mordred’s rule.

That rule had brought some changes. Mordred demanded to be given his grandfather’s Winter Palace, and that surprised no one, but I was surprised when Sansum demanded Lindinis’s palace for himself. He made the demand in Council, saying he needed the palace’s space for his school and for Morgan’s community of holy women, and because he wanted to be close to the church he was building on Caer Cadarn’s summit. Mordred waved his assent, and so Ceinwyn and I were summarily evicted, but Ermid’s Hall was empty and we moved to its mist-haunted compound beside the mere. Arthur argued against letting Sansum into Lindinis, just as he opposed San-sum’s demand that the royal treasury pay for the repair of the damage done to the palace by, Sansum claimed, too many ill-disciplined children, but Mordred overruled Arthur. Those were Mordred’s only decisions, for he was usually content to let Arthur manage the kingdom’s affairs. Arthur, though he was no longer Mordred’s protector, was now the senior councillor and the King rarely came to Council, preferring to hunt. It was not always deer or wolves that he hunted and Arthur and I became accustomed to taking gold to some peasant’s hut to recompense the man for his daughter’s virginity or his wife’s shame. It was not a pleasant duty, but it was a rare and lucky kingdom where it was not necessary.

Dian, our youngest daughter, fell ill that summer. It was a fever that would not go away, or rather it came and went, but with such ferocity that three times we thought she was dead, and three times Merlin’s concoctions revived her, though nothing the old man did seemed able to shake the affliction clean away. Dian promised to be the liveliest of our three daughters. Morwenna, the oldest, was a sensible child who loved to mother her younger sisters and was fascinated by the workings of the household; ever curious about the kitchens, or the retting ponds or the linen vats. Seren, the star, was our beauty, a child who had inherited all her mother’s delicate looks, but had added to them a wistful and enchanting nature. She spent hours with the bards learning their songs and playing their harps, but Dian, Ceinwyn always said, was my daughter. Dian had no fear. She could shoot with a bow and arrow, loved to ride horses, and even at six years old could handle a coracle as well as any of the mere’s fishermen. She was in her sixth year when the fever gripped her, and if it had not been for that fever we would probably all have travelled to Powys together, for it was a month short of the first anniversary of Mordred’s acclamation when the King suddenly demanded that Arthur and I travel to Cuneglas’s realm. Mordred made the demand at one of his rare appearances at the royal Council. The suddenness of the demand surprised us, as did the need for the errand he proposed, but the King was determined. There was, of course, an ulterior motive, though neither Arthur nor I saw it at the time and nor did anyone else on the Council except Sansum who had proposed the idea, and it took us all a long time to smoke out the mouse-lord’s reasons for the suggestion. Nor was there any obvious reason why we should be suspicious of the King’s proposal for it seemed reasonable enough, though neither Arthur nor I understood why we should both be dispatched to Powys.

The matter sprang from an old, old story. Norwenna, Mordred’s mother, had been murdered by Gundleus, the King of Siluria, and though Gundleus had received his punishment, the man who had betrayed Norwenna still lived. His name was Ligessac, and he had been the chief of Mordred’s guard when the King was just a baby. But Ligessac had taken Gundleus’s bribes and opened the gates of Merlin’s Tor to the Silurian King’s murderous intent. Mordred had been snatched to safety by Morgan, but his mother had died. Ligessac, whose treachery had caused Norwenna’s death, had survived the war that followed the murder, just as he had survived the battle at Lugg Yale. Mordred had heard the tale, of course, and it was only natural that he should take an interest in Ligessac’s fate, but it was Bishop Sansum who fanned that interest into an obsession. Sansum somehow discovered that Ligessac had taken refuge with a band of Christian hermits in a remote and mountainous area of northern Siluria that was now under Cuneglas’s rule. ‘It hurts me to betray a fellow Christian,’ the mouse-lord announced sanctimoniously in the Council meeting, ‘but it hurts just as much that a Christian should have been guilty of so foul a treachery. Ligessac still lives, Lord King,’ he said to Mordred, ‘and should be brought to your justice.’

Arthur suggested that Cuneglas be asked to arrest the fugitive and send him back to Dumnonia, but Sansum shook his head at that proposal and said it was surely discourteous to ask another King to initiate a vengeance that touched so closely on Mordred’s honour. ‘This is Dumnonian business,’ Sansum insisted, ‘and Dumnonians, Lord King, should be the agents of its success.’

Mordred nodded agreement and then insisted that both Arthur and I go to capture the traitor. Arthur, surprised as always when Mordred asserted himself at Council, demurred. Why, he wanted to know, should two lords go on an errand that could be safely left to a dozen spearmen? Mordred smirked at that question. ‘You think, Lord Arthur, that Dumnonia will fall if you and Derfel are absent?’

‘No, Lord King,’ Arthur said, ‘but Ligessac must be an old man now and it won’t need two war-bands to capture him.’

The King thumped the table with his fist. ‘After my mother’s murder,’ he accused Arthur, ‘you let Ligessac escape. At Lugg Vale, Lord Arthur, you again let Ligessac escape. You owe me Ligessac’s life.’

Arthur stiffened momentarily at this accusation, but then inclined his head to acknowledge the obligation. ‘But Derfel,’ he pointed out, ‘was not responsible.’

Mordred glanced at me. He still disliked me for all the beatings he had taken as a child, but I hoped that the blows he had given me at his acclamation and his petty triumph in evicting us from Lindinis had slaked his thirst for revenge. ‘Lord Derfel,’ he said, as ever making the title sound mocking, ‘knows the traitor. Who else would recognize him? I insist you both go. And you don’t need to take two whole war-bands either,’ he reverted to Arthur’s earlier objection. ‘Just a few men will do.’ He must have been embarrassed at giving Arthur such military advice for his voice tailed weakly away and he looked shiftily at the other councillors before recovering what little poise he did possess. ‘I want Ligessac here before Samain,’ he insisted, ‘and I want him here alive.’

When a King insists, men obey, so Arthur and I both rode north with thirty men apiece. Neither of us believed we would need so many, but it was an opportunity to give some underemployed men the exercise of a long march. My remaining thirty spearmen stayed behind to guard Ceinwyn, while Arthur’s other men either stayed in Durnovaria or else went to reinforce Sagramor who still guarded the northern Saxon frontier. The usual Saxon war-bands were active on that frontier, not trying to invade us, but rather attempting to snatch cattle and slaves as they had through all the years of peace. We made similar raids, but both sides were careful not to let the raids turn into full-scale war. The makeshift peace we had forged at London had lasted remarkably well, though there had been little peace between Aelle and Cerdic. Those two had fought each other to a standstill and their squabbles had largely left us unmolested. We had, indeed, grown accustomed to peace.

My men walked north while Arthur’s rode, or at least led their horses, on the good Roman roads that took us first to Meurig’s kingdom of Gwent. The King gave us a grudging feast at which our men were outnumbered by priests, and after that we made a detour to the Wye Valley to see old Tewdric, whom we found living in a humble thatched hut that was half the size of the building where he kept his collection of Christian parchments. His wife, Queen Enid, grumbled at the fate that had driven her from Gwent’s palaces to this mice-ridden life in the woods, but the old King was happy. He had taken Christian orders and blithely ignored Enid’s scoldings. He gave us a meal of beans, bread and water and rejoiced at the news of Christianity’s spread in Dumnonia. We asked him about the prophecies which foretold the return of Christ in four years’ time and Tewdric said he prayed they were true, but suspected it was much more likely that Christ would wait a full thousand years before returning in glory. ‘But who knows?’ he asked.

‘It’s possible He will come in four years’ time. What a glorious thought!’

‘I just wish your fellow Christians would be content to wait in peace,’ Arthur said.

‘They have a duty to prepare the earth for His coming,’ Tewdric said sternly. ‘They must make converts. Lord Arthur, and cleanse the land of sin.’

‘They’ll make a war between themselves and the rest of us if they aren’t careful,’ Arthur grumbled. He told Tewdric how there had been riots in every Dumnonian town as Christians tried to pull down or defile pagan temples. The things we had seen in Isca had just been the beginnings of those troubles and the unrest was spreading fast, and one of the symptoms of that burgeoning trouble was the sign of the fish, a simple scrawl of two curving lines, that the Christians painted on pagan walls or carved into the trees of Druidic groves. Culhwch had been right: the fish was a Christian symbol.

‘It’s because the Greek word for fish is ichthus Tewdric told us, ‘and the Greek letters spell Christ’s name. Iesous Christos, Theou Uios, Soter. Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. Very neat, very neat indeed.’ He chuckled with pleasure at his explanation, and it was easy to see from where Meurig had inherited his annoying pedantry. ‘Of course,’ Tewdric went on, ‘if I were still a ruler then I’d be concerned by all this turmoil, but as a Christian I must welcome it. The holy fathers tell us there will be many signs and portents of the last days, Lord Arthur, and civil disturbances are merely one of those signs. So maybe the end is near?’

Arthur crumbled a piece of bread into his dish. ‘You truly welcome these riots?’ he asked. ‘You approve of attacks on pagans? Of shrines burned and defaced?’

Tewdric stared out of the open door at the green woods that pressed hard about his small monastery.

‘I suppose they must be hard for others to understand,’ he said, evading a direct answer to Arthur’s question. ‘You must see the riots as symptoms of excitement, Lord Arthur, not signs of our Lord’s grace.’ He made the sign of the cross and smiled at us. ‘Our faith,’ he said earnestly, ‘is a faith of love. The Son of God humbled Himself to save us from our sins, and we are enjoined to imitate Him in all we do or think. We are encouraged to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us, but those are hard commandments, too hard for most folk. And you must remember what it is that we pray for most fervently, and that is for the return to this earth of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ He made the sign of the cross again. ‘Folk pray and long for His second coming, and they fear that if the world is still ruled by pagans then He might not come and so they feel impelled to destroy heathenism.’

‘Destroying paganism,’ Arthur observed tartly, ‘hardly seems proper to a religion that preaches love.’

‘Destroying paganism is an act full of love,’ Tewdric insisted. ‘If you pagans refuse to accept Christ then you will surely go to hell. It will not matter that you have lived a virtuous life, for you will still burn for all eternity. We Christians have a duty to save you from that fate, and is that duty not an act of love?’

‘Not if I don’t want to be saved,’ Arthur said.

‘Then you must endure the enmity of those that love you,’ Tewdric said, ‘or at least you must endure it until the excitement dies down. And it will. These enthusiasms never last long, and if our Lord Jesus Christ does not return in four years then the excitement will surely wane until the millennium comes.’ He stared again at the deep woods. ‘How glorious it would be,’ he said in a voice full of wonder, ‘if I could live to see my Saviour’s face in Britain.’ He turned back to Arthur. ‘And the portents of His return will be disturbing, I fear. Doubtless the Saxons will be a nuisance. Are they much trouble these days?’

‘No,’ Arthur said, ‘but their numbers grow every year. I fear they won’t be quiet for much longer.’

‘I shall pray that Christ returns before they do,’ Tewdric said. ‘I don’t think I could bear to lose land to the Saxons. Not that it’s my business any longer, of course,’ he added hastily, ‘I leave all those things to Meurig now.’ He stood as a horn sounded from the nearby chapel. ‘Time for prayers!’ he said happily. ‘You’ll join me, perhaps?’

We excused ourselves, and next morning climbed the hills away from the old King’s monastery and crossed into Powys. Two nights later we were in Caer Sws where we were reunited with Culhwch who was prospering in his new kingdom. That night we all drank too much mead and next morning, when Cuneglas and I rode to Cwm Isaf, my head was sore. I found the King had kept our little house intact. ‘I never know when you might need it again, Derfel,’ he told me.

‘Maybe soon,’ I admitted glumly.

‘Soon? I do hope so.’

I shrugged. ‘We are not truly welcome in Dumnonia. Mordred resents me.’

‘Then ask to be released from your oath.’

‘I did ask,’ I said, ‘and he refused me.’ I had asked him after the acclamation, when the shame of the two blows was still keen in me, and then I had asked him again six months later and still he had refused me. I think he was clever enough to know that the best way to punish me was to force me to serve him.

‘Is it your spearmen he wants?’ Cuneglas asked, sitting on the bench under the apple tree by the house door.

‘Just my grovelling loyalty,’ I said bitterly. ‘He doesn’t seem to want to fight any wars.’

‘So he’s not a complete fool,’ Cuneglas said drily. Then we spoke of Ceinwyn and the girls and Cuneglas offered to send Malaine, his new chief Druid, to Dian’s side. ‘Malaine has a remarkable skill with herbs,’ he said. ‘Better than old Iorweth. Did you know he died?’

‘I heard. And if you can spare Malaine, Lord King, I would be glad.’

‘He’ll leave tomorrow. I can’t have my nieces sick. Doesn’t your Nimue help?’

‘No more and no less than Merlin,’ I said, touching the tip of an old sickle blade that was embedded in the apple tree’s bark. The touch of iron was to ward off the evil that threatened Dian. ‘The old Gods,’

I said bitterly, ‘have abandoned Dumnonia.’

Cuneglas smiled. ‘It never does, Derfel, to underestimate the Gods. They’ll have their day in Dumnonia again.’ He paused. ‘The Christians like to call themselves sheep, don’t they? Well, just you listen to them bleat when the wolves come.’

‘What wolves?’

‘The Saxons,’ he said unhappily. ‘They’ve given us ten years of peace, but their boats still land on the eastern shores and I can feel their power growing. If they start fighting us again then your Christians will be glad enough of pagan swords.’ He stood and laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘The Saxons are unfinished business, Derfel, unfinished business.’

That night he gave us a feast and next morning, with a guide given us by Cuneglas, we travelled south into the bleak hills that lay across the old frontier of Siluria.

We were going to a remote Christian community. Christians were still few in Powys, for Cuneglas ruthlessly ejected Sansum’s missionaries from his kingdom whenever he discovered their presence, but some Christians lived in the kingdom and there were many in the old lands of Siluria. This one group in particular was famous among Britain’s Christians for their sanctity, and they displayed that sanctity by living in extreme poverty in a wild, hard place. Ligessac had found his refuge among these Christian fanatics who, as Tewdric had told us, mortified their flesh, by which he meant that they competed with each other to see which could lead the most miserable lives. Some lived in caves, some refused shelter altogether, others ate only green things, some eschewed all clothes, others dressed in hair shirts with brambles woven into the fabric, some wore crowns made of thorns and others beat themselves bloody day after day like the flagellants we had seen in Isca. To me it seemed that the best punishment for Ligessac was to leave him in such a community, but we were ordered to fetch him out and take him home which meant we would have to defy the community’s leader, a fierce bishop named Cadoc whose belligerence was famous.

That reputation persuaded us to don our armour as we approached Cadoc’s squalid fastness in the high hills. We did not wear our best armour, at least those of us who had a choice did not, for that finery would have been wasted on a half-crazed pack of holy fanatics, but we were all helmeted and wore mail or leather and carried shields. If nothing else, we thought, the war gear might overawe Cadoc’s disciples who, our guide assured us, did not number more than twenty souls. ‘And all of them are mad,’ our guide told us. ‘One of them stood dead still for a whole year! Didn’t move a muscle, they say. Just stood like a beanpole while they shovelled food into one end of him and dung away from the other. Funny sort of God who asks that of a man.’

The road to Cadoc’s refuge had been beaten into the earth by pilgrims’ feet, and it twisted up the flanks of wide, bare hills where the only living things we saw were sheep and goats. We saw no shepherds, but they undoubtedly saw us. ‘If Ligessac has any sense,’ Arthur said, ‘he’ll be long gone. They must have seen us by now.’

‘And what will we tell Mordred?’

‘The truth, of course,’ Arthur said bleakly. His armour was a spearman’s plain helmet and a leather breastcoat, yet even such humble things looked neat and clean on him. His vanity was never flamboyant like Lancelot’s, but he did pride himself on cleanliness, and somehow this whole expedition into the raw uplands offended his sense of what was clean and proper. The weather did not help, for it was a bleak, raw summer’s day, with rain whipping out of the west on a chill wind. Arthur’s spirits might have been low, but our spearmen were cheerful. They made jokes about assaulting the stronghold of mighty King Cadoc and boasted of the gold, warrior rings and slaves they would capture in the assault, and the joke’s extravagant claims made them laugh when at last we breasted the final saddle in the hills and could look down into the valley where Ligessac had found his refuge. It was indeed a squalid place; a sea of mud in which a dozen round stone huts surrounded a small square stone church. There were some ragged vegetable gardens, a small dark lake, some stone pens for the community’s goats, but no palisade.

The only defence the valley boasted was a great stone cross carved with intricate patterns and an image of the Christian God enthroned in glory. The cross, which was a marvellous piece of stonework, marked the saddle where Cadoc’s land began and it was beside the cross, in plain sight of the tiny settlement that lay only a dozen spear throws away, that Arthur halted our war-band. ‘We shan’t trespass,’ he told us mildly, ‘till we’ve had a chance to talk with them.’ He rested his spear-butt on the ground beside his horse’s front hoofs and waited.

A dozen folk were visible in the compound and on seeing us they fled to the church, from which, a moment later, a huge man appeared and strode up the road towards us. He was a giant of a man, as tall as Merlin and with a massive chest and big, capable hands. He was also filthy, with an unwashed face and a brown robe caked with mud and dirt, while his grey hair, as dirty as his robe, seemed never to have been cut. His beard grew wild to below his waist, while behind his tonsure his hair sprang in dirty tangles like a great grey freshly sheared fleece. His face was tanned dark and he had a wide mouth, a jutting forehead and angry eyes. It was an impressive face. He carried a staff in his right hand, while at his left hip, unscabbarded, there hung a huge rusty sword. He looked as if he had once been a useful spearman, and I did not doubt that he could still deal a hard blow or two. ‘You are not welcome here,’

he shouted as he drew nearer to us, ‘unless you come to lay your miserable souls before God.’

‘Our souls are already laid before our Gods,’ Arthur answered pleasantly.

‘Heathen!’ the big man, whom I assumed had to be the famous Cadoc, spat at us. ‘You come in iron and steel to a place where Christ’s children play with the Lamb of God?’

‘We come in peace,’ Arthur insisted.

The bishop spat a great yellow gob of sputum towards Arthur’s horse. ‘You are Arthur ap Uther ap Satan,’ he said, ‘and your soul is a rag of filth.’

‘And you, I assume, are Bishop Cadoc,’ Arthur answered courteously.

The Bishop stood beside the cross and scratched a line in the road with the butt of his staff. ‘Only the faithful and the penitent can cross this line,’ he declared, ‘for this is God’s holy ground.’

Arthur gazed for a few heartbeats at the muddy squalor ahead, then smiled gravely at the defiant Cadoc. ‘I have no wish to enter your God’s ground, Bishop,’ he said, ‘but I do ask you, in peace, to bring us the man called Ligessac’

‘Ligessac,’ Cadoc boomed at us as though he was addressing a congregation of thousands, ‘is God’s blessed and holy child. He has been given sanctuary here and neither you nor any other so-called lord can invade that sanctuary.’

Arthur smiled. ‘A King rules here, Bishop, not your God. Only Cuneglas can offer sanctuary, and he has not.’

‘My King, Arthur,’ Cadoc said proudly, ‘is the King of Kings, and He has commanded me to refuse you entrance.’

‘You will resist me?’ Arthur asked with polite surprise in his voice.

‘To death!’ Cadoc shouted.

Arthur shook his head sadly. ‘I am no Christian, Bishop,’ he said mildly, ‘but do you not preach that your Otherworld is a place of utter delights?’ Cadoc made no answer and Arthur shrugged. ‘So I do you a favour, do I not, by hurrying you to that destination?’ He asked the question, then drew Excalibur. The Bishop used his staff to deepen the line he had scratched across the muddy track. ‘I forbid you to cross this line,’ he shouted. ‘I forbid it in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost!’

Then he raised the staff and pointed it at Arthur. He held the staff still for a heartbeat, then swept its tip to encompass the rest of us, and I confess that I felt a chill at that moment. Cadoc was no Merlin, and his God, I thought, had no power like Merlin’s Gods, but I still shuddered as that staff pointed my way and my fear made me touch my iron mail and spit onto the road. ‘I am going to my prayers now, Arthur,’

Cadoc said, ‘and you, if you wish to live, will turn and go from this place, for if you pass by this holy cross then I swear to you, by the sweet blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, that your souls will burn in torment. You will know the fire everlasting. You will be cursed from the beginning of time till its ending and from the vaults of heaven to the bottom-most pits of hell.’ And with that heavy curse delivered he spat one more time, then turned and walked away.

Arthur used the tail of his cloak to wipe the rain off Excalibur, then scabbarded the sword. ‘It seems we’re not welcome,’ he said with some amusement, then he turned and beckoned to Balin who was the oldest cavalryman present. ‘Take the horsemen,’ Arthur ordered him, ‘and get behind the village. Make sure no one can escape. Once you’re in place I’ll bring Derfel and his men to search the houses. And listen!’ — he raised his voice so that all sixty men could hear him — ‘these folk will resist. They’ll taunt and fight us, but we have no quarrel with any of them. Only with Ligessac. You will not steal from them and you will not hurt any of them unnecessarily. You will remember that you are soldiers and they are not. You will treat them with respect and return their curses with silence.’ He spoke sternly, and then, when he was sure that all our men had understood him, he smiled at Balin and gestured him forward. The thirty armoured horsemen rode ahead, streaming off the road to gallop around the valley’s edge to reach the far slope beyond the village. Cadoc, who was still walking towards his church, glanced at them, but showed no alarm.

‘I wonder,’ Arthur said, ‘how he knew who I was?’

‘You’re famous, Lord,’ I said. I still called him Lord and always would.

‘My name is known, perhaps, but not my face. Not here.’ He shrugged the mystery off. ‘Was Ligessac always a Christian?’

‘Since first I knew him. But never a good one.’

He smiled. ‘The virtuous life becomes easier when you’re older. At least I think it does.’ He watched his horsemen gallop past the village, their horses’ hoofs kicking up great spouts of water from the soaking grass, then he hefted his spear and looked back at my men. ‘Remember now! No theft!’ I wondered what there could possibly be to steal in such a drab place, but Arthur knew that all spearmen will usually find something as a keepsake. ‘I don’t want trouble,’ Arthur told them. ‘We just look for our man, then leave.’ He touched Llamrei’s flanks and the black mare started obediently forward. We foot-soldiers followed, our boots obliterating Cadoc’s scratched line in the muddy road beside the intricately carved cross. No fire came from heaven.

The Bishop had reached his church now and he stopped at its entrance, turned, saw us coming and ducked inside. ‘They knew we were coming,’ Arthur said to me, ‘so we’ll not find Ligessac here. I fear it’s a waste of our time, Derfel.’ A lame sheep hobbled over the road and Arthur checked his horse to give it passage. I saw him shudder and I knew he was offended by the settlement’s dirt that almost mailed the squalor of Nimue’s Tor.

Cadoc reappeared at the church door when we were just a hundred paces away. By now our horsemen were waiting behind the village, but Cadoc did not bother to look to see where they were. He just raised a big ram’s horn to his lips and blew a call that echoed hollowly in the bare bowl of hills. He sounded the horn once, paused to take a deep breath, then sounded it again. And suddenly we had a battle on our hands.

They had known we were coming right enough, and they had been ready for us. Every Christian in Powys and Siluria must have been summoned to Cadoc’s defence and those men now appeared on the crests all around the valley while others ran to block the road behind us. Some carried spears, some had shields and some hefted nothing but reaping hooks or hay forks, but they looked confident enough. Many, I knew, would once have been spearmen who served in the war levy, but what gave these Christians real confidence, apart from their faith in their God, was that they numbered at least two hundred men. ‘The fools!’ Arthur said angrily. He hated unnecessary violence and he knew that some killing was now unavoidable. He knew, too, that we would win, for only fanatics who believed their God would fight for them would take on sixty of Dumnonia’s finest warriors. ‘Fools!’ He spat again, then glanced at the village to see more armed men coming from the huts. ‘You stay here, Derfel,’ he said.

‘Just hold them, and we’ll see them off.’ He kicked back his spurs and galloped alone about the village’s edge towards his horsemen.

‘Shield-ring,’ I said quietly. We were only thirty men and our double-ranked ring made a circle so small that it must have looked like an easy target to those howling Christians who now ran down the hills or out of the village to annihilate us. The shield-ring is never a popular formation with soldiers because the splay of the spears out of the circle means that their points are spread far apart and the smaller the ring the wider those gaps between the spearheads, but my men were well trained. The front rank knelt, their shields touching and the butts of their long spears jammed into the ground behind them. We in the second rank laid our shields over the first rank’s shields, propping them on the ground so that our attackers faced a double thick wall of leather-covered timber. Then each of us stood behind a kneeling man and levelled our spears over their heads. Our job was to protect the front rank and their job was to stay staunch. It would be hard, bloody work, but so long as the kneeling men held their shields high and kept their spears firm, and so long as we protected them, the shield-ring should be safe enough. I reminded the kneeling men of

their training, told them they were there just as an obstacle as to

leave the killing to the rest of us. ‘Bel is with us,’ I said.

‘So is Arthur,’ Issa added enthusiastically.

For it was Arthur who would do the day’s real killing. We were the lure and he was the executioner, and Cadoc’s men took that lure like a hungry salmon rising to a mayfly. Cadoc himself led the charge from the village, carrying his rusty sword and a big round shield that was painted with a black cross behind which I could just see the ghostly outline of Siluria’s fox that betrayed his previous allegiance as a spearman in Gundleus’s ranks.

That Christian horde did not come as a shield-wall. That might have brought them victory, but instead they attacked in the old manner that the Romans had beaten out of us. In the old days, when the Romans were new in Britain, the tribes would charge them in one glorious, howling, mead-fuelled rush. Such a charge was fearsome to see, but easy for disciplined men to defeat, and my spearmen were wonderfully disciplined.

They doubtless felt fear. I felt fear, for the howling charge is a terrible thing to see. Against ill-disciplined men it works because of the terror it provokes, and this was the first time I had ever seen that old way of Britain’s battles. Cadoc’s Christians rushed fanatically at us, competing to see who could be first onto our spears. They shrieked and hurled curses, and it seemed as though each one of them wanted to be a martyr or else a hero. Their wild rush even included women who screamed as they swung wooden clubs or reaping knives. There were even children among that howling rabble.

‘Bel!’ I shouted as the first man tried to leap the kneeling men of the front rank and so died on my spear. I spitted him clean as a hare ready to be roasted, then threw him, spear and all, out of the circle so that his dying body would form an obstacle to his comrades. Hywel-bane killed the next man and I could hear my spearmen keening their dreadful battle chant as they ripped and lunged and cut and stabbed. We were all so good, so fast, and so thoroughly trained. Hours of dull training had gone into that shield-ring and though it had been years since most of us had fought in a battle, we discovered that our old instincts were as quick as ever, and it was instinct and experience that kept us alive that day. The enemy was a shrieking, milling press of fanatics who crammed themselves about our ring and thrust their spears towards us, but our outer shield-ring stayed firm as a rock and he mound of dead and dying attackers that grew so swiftly in front of their shields hindered the other attackers. For the first minute or two, when the ground about our shield-ring was still free of obstacles and the bravest of the enemy could still get close, it was a frantic fight, but once the ring of dead and dying protected us then only the bravest attackers tried to reach us and we fifteen of the inner rank could then pick our targets and use them for spear or sword practice.

We fought fast, we cheered each other and we killed without mercy.

Cadoc himself came early to the fight. He came swinging the huge rusty sword so vigorously that it whistled in the air. He knew his business well enough and he tried to batter down one of the kneeling men, for he knew that once that outer ring was broken then the rest of us would die quickly enough. I parried the great blow on Hywel-bane, back-cut him with a quick swing that wasted itself in his filthy thatch of hair, then Eachern, the tough little Irish spearman who still served me despite Mordred’s threats, rammed his spear-shaft at the Bishop’s face. Eachern’s spearhead had vanished, torn off by a sword blow, but he cracked the iron tip of the staff’s butt onto Cadoc’s forehead. The Bishop looked cross-eyed for a heartbeat, his mouth gaped rotten teeth, then he just sank to the mud. The last attacker to try and breach the shield-ring was a straggle-haired woman who climbed over the ring of dead and shrieked a curse at me as she tried to jump over the kneeling men of the front rank. I seized her hair, let her reaping knife blunt itself on my mail coat, then dragged her inside the ring where Issa stamped hard on her head. It was just then that Arthur struck.

Thirty horsemen with long spears slashed into the Christian rabble. We, I suppose, had been defending ourselves for all of three minutes, but once Arthur arrived the fight was over in an eyeblink. His horsemen came with couched spears, galloping hard, and I saw a terrible misting spray of blood as one of the spears slammed home, and then our attackers were fleeing in panic and Arthur, his spear discarded and with Excalibur shining in his hand, was shouting at his men to stop the killing. ‘Just drive them away!’ he shouted. ‘Drive them away!’ His horsemen split into small groups that scattered the terrified survivors and chased them back up the road towards the guardian cross.

My men relaxed. Issa was still sitting on the straggle-haired woman and Eachern was searching for his lost spearhead. Two men in the shield-ring had taken nasty wounds, and one man of the second rank had a broken and bloodied jaw, but otherwise we were unhurt, while around us were twenty-three corpses and at least as many badly wounded men. Cadoc, groggy from Eachern’s blow, still lived and we tied his hands and feet, and then, despite Arthur’s instructions to show our enemy respect, we cut off his hair and beard to shame him. He spat and cursed at us, but we stuffed his mouth with cut hanks of his greasy beard, then walked him back to the village.

And it was there I discovered Ligessac. He had not fled after all, but had simply waited beside the little altar in the church. He was an old man now, thin and grey-haired, and he yielded himself meekly, even when we cut off his beard and wove a crude rope from its hair that we leashed around his neck to show that he was a condemned traitor. He even seemed quite pleased to meet me again after all the years. ‘I told them they wouldn’t beat you,’ he said, ‘not Derfel Cadarn.’

‘They knew we were coming?’ I asked him.

‘We’ve known for a week now,’ he said, quietly holding out his hands so that Issa could lash his wrists with rope. ‘We even wanted you to come. We thought this was our chance to rid Britain of Arthur.’

‘Why would you want to do that?’ I asked him.

‘Because Arthur’s an enemy of the Christians, that’s why,’ Ligessac said.

‘He is not,’ I said scornfully.

‘And what do you know, Derfel?’ Ligessac asked me. ‘We’re readying Britain for Christ’s return and we have to scour the heathen from the land!’ He made that proclamation in a loud, defiant voice, then he shrugged and grinned. ‘But I told them this was no way to kill Arthur and Derfel. I told Cadoc you were too good.’ He stood and followed Issa out of the church, but then turned back to me in the doorway. ‘I suppose I’m to die now?’ he asked.

‘In Dumnonia,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘I shall see God face to face,’ he said, ‘so what is there to fear?’

I followed him out of the church. Arthur had unplugged the Bishop’s mouth and Cadoc was now cursing us with a stream of filthy language. I tickled the Bishop’s newly shaved chin with Hywelbane. ‘He knew we were coming,’ I told Arthur, ‘and they planned to kill us here.’

‘He failed,’ Arthur said, jerking his head aside to avoid a gob of the Bishop’s spittle. ‘Put the sword away,’ he ordered me.

‘You don’t want him dead?’ I asked.

‘His punishment is to live here,’ Arthur decreed, ‘instead of in heaven.’

We took Ligessac and walked away, and none of us really reflected on what Ligessac had revealed in the church. He had said they had known we were coming for a whole week, but a week before we had been in Dumnonia, not in Powys, and that meant someone in Dumnonia had sent the warning of our approach. But we never thought to connect anyone in Dumnonia with that muddy massacre in the squalid hills; we ascribed the slaughter to Christian fanaticism, not to treachery, but that ambush was plotted. To this day, of course, there are Christians who tell a different story. They say that Arthur surprised Cadoc’s refuge, raped the women, killed the men and stole all Cadoc’s treasures, but I saw no rape, we killed only those who tried to kill us, and I found no treasure to steal — but even if there had been, Arthur would not have touched it. A time would come, and not far off either, when I did see Arthur kill wantonly, but those dead were all to be pagans; yet the Christians still insisted he was their enemy and the story of Cadoc’s defeat only increased their hatred for him. Cadoc was elevated into a living saint and it was about that time that the Christians began to taunt Arthur as the Enemy of God. That angry title stuck to him for the rest of his days.

His crime, of course, was not the breaking of a few Christian heads in Cadoc’s valley, but rather his toleration of paganism during the time he governed Dumnonia. It never occurred to the more rabid Christians that Arthur was himself a pagan and tolerated Christianity, they just condemned him because he had the power to obliterate heathenism and did not do it, and that sin made him the Enemy of God. They also remembered, of course, how he had rescinded Uther’s exemption of the church from forced loans.

Not all Christians hated him. At least a score of the spearmen who fought alongside us in Cadoc’s valley were themselves Christians. Galahad loved him, and there were many others, like Bishop Emrys, who were his quiet supporters, but the church, in those unquiet days at the end of the first five hundred years of Christ’s rule on earth, was not listening to the quiet, decent men, it was listening to the fanatics who said that the world must be cleansed of pagans if Christ were to come again. I know now, of course, that the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ is the only true faith, and that no other faith can exist in the glorious light of its truth, but it still seemed strange to me, and does to this day, that Arthur, the most just and lawful of rulers, was called the Enemy of God.

Whatever. We gave Cadoc a headache, tied Ligessac’s throat with a leash made from his beard, and walked away.

Arthur and I parted company beside the stone cross at the head of Cadoc’s valley. He would take Ligessac north and then go east to find the good roads that led back to Dumnonia, while I had decided to travel deeper into Siluria to find my mother. I took Issa and four other spearmen and let the rest march home with Arthur.

We six men circled Cadoc’s valley where a woeful band of bruised and bloody Christians had gathered to chant prayers for their dead, and then we walked across the high bare hills and down into the steep green valleys that led to the Severn Sea. I did not know where Erce lived, but I suspected she would not be hard to find for Tanaburs, the Druid I had killed at Lugg Vale, had sought her out to work a dreadful spell on her and surely the Saxon slave woman so wickedly cursed by the Druid would be well enough known. And she was.

I found her living by the sea in a tiny village where the women made salt and the men caught fish. The villagers shrank away from my men’s unfamiliar shields, but I ducked into one of the hovels where a child fearfully pointed me towards the Saxon woman’s house that proved to be a cottage high up on a ragged bluff above the beach. It was not even a cottage, but rather a crude shelter made of driftwood and roofed with a ragged thatch of seaweed and straw. A fire burned on the small space outside the shelter and a dozen fish were smoking above its flames, while still more choking smoke drifted up from the coal fires that simmered the salt pans at the base of the low cliff. I left my spear and shield at the foot of the bluff and climbed the steep path. A cat bared its teeth and hissed at me as I crouched to look into the dark hut. ‘Erce?’ I called. ‘Erce?’

Something heaved in the shadows. It was a monstrous dark shape that shed layers of skins and ragged cloth to peer back at me. ‘Erce?’ I said. ‘Are you Erce?’

What did I expect that day? I had not seen my mother in over twenty-five years, not since the day I was torn from her arms by Gundleus’s spearmen and given to Tanaburs for the sacrifice in the death-pit. Erce had screamed as I was snatched away from her, and then she had been taken away to her new slavery in Siluria and she must have supposed me dead until Tanaburs had revealed to her that I still lived. In my nervous mind, as I had walked south through Siluria’s steep valleys, I had foreseen an embrace, tears, forgiveness and happiness.

But instead a huge woman, her blonde hair turned into a dirty grey, crawled out from the jumble of skins and blankets to blink at me suspiciously. She was a vast creature, a great heap of decaying flesh with a face as round as a shield and blotched by disease and scars, and with eyes that were small and hard and bloodshot. ‘I was called Erce once,’ she said in a hoarse voice. I backed out of the hut, repelled by its stench of urine and rot. She followed me, crawling heavily on all fours to blink in the morning sunlight. She was dressed in rags. ‘You are Erce?’ I asked her.

‘Once,’ she said, and yawned to show a ravaged, toothless mouth. ‘Long ago. Now they call me Enna.’ She paused. ‘Mad Enna,’ she added sadly, then peered at my fine clothes and rich sword belt and tall boots. ‘Who are you, Lord?’

‘My name is Derfel Cadarn,’ I said, ‘a Lord of Dumnonia.’ The name meant nothing to her. ‘I am your son,’ I added.

She showed no reaction to that, but just settled back against the driftwood wall of her hut that sagged dangerously under her weight. She thrust a hand deep inside the rags and scratched at her breast. ‘All my sons are dead,’ she said.

‘Tanaburs took me,’ I reminded her, ‘and threw me into the death-pit.’

The story seemed to mean nothing to her. She lay slumped against the wall, her huge body heaving with the effort of each laboured breath. She toyed with the cat and stared out across the Severn Sea to where, dim in the distance, the Dumnonian coast was a dark line under a row of rainclouds. ‘I did have a son once,’ she said at last, ‘who was given to the Gods in the death-pit. Wygga, his name was. Wygga. A fine boy.’

Wygga? Wygga! That name, so raw and ugly, stilled me for a few heartbeats. ‘I am Wygga,’ I finally said, hating the name. ‘I was given a new name after I was rescued from the pit,’ I explained to her. We spoke in Saxon, a language in which I was now more fluent than my mother, for it had been many years since she had spoken it.

‘Oh, no,’ she said, frowning. I could see a louse crawling along the edge of her hair. ‘No,’ she insisted again. ‘Wygga was just a little boy. Just a little boy. My firstborn, he was, and they took him away.’

‘I lived, mother,’ I said. I was revolted by her, fascinated by her and regretting that I had ever come to find her. ‘I survived the pit,’ I told her, ‘and I remember you.’ And so I did, but in my memory she was as slim and lithe as Ceinwyn.

‘Just a little boy,’ Erce said dreamily. She closed her eyes and I thought she was sleeping, but it seemed she was passing urine for a trickle appeared at the edge of her clothes and dripped down the rock towards the struggling fire.

‘Tell me about Wygga,’ I said.

‘I was heavy with him,’ she said, ‘when Uther captured me. A big man, Uther, with a great dragon on his shield.’ She scratched at the louse, which disappeared into her hair. ‘He gave me to Madog,’ she went on, ‘and it was at Madog’s holding that Wygga was born. We were happy with Madog,’ she said.

‘He was a good Lord, kind to his slaves, but Gundleus came and they killed Wygga.’

‘They didn’t,’ I insisted. ‘Didn’t Tanaburs tell you?’

At the mention of the Druid’s name she shuddered and pulled her tattered shawl tighter about her mountainous shoulders. She said nothing, but after a while tears showed at the corners of her eyes. A woman climbed the path towards us. She came slowly and suspiciously, glancing warily towards me as she sidled onto the rock platform. When at last she felt safe she scuttled past me and crouched beside Erce. ‘My name,’ I told the newcomer, ‘is Derfel Cadarn, but I was once called Wygga.’

‘My name is Linna,’ the woman said in the British tongue. She was younger than me, but the hard life of this shore had put deep lines on her face, bowed her shoulders and stiffened her joints, while the hard business of tending the salt-pan fires had left her skin blackened by coal.

‘You’re Erce’s daughter?’ I guessed.

‘Enna’s daughter,’ she corrected me.

‘Then I am your half-brother,’ I said.

I do not think she believed me, and why should she? No one came from a death-pit alive, yet I had, and thereby I had been touched by the Gods and given to Merlin, but what could that tale mean to these two tired and ragged women?

‘Tanaburs!’ Erce suddenly said, and raised both hands to ward oft evil. ‘He took away Wygga’s father!’ She wailed and rocked to and fro. ‘He went inside me and took away Wygga’s father. He cursed me and he cursed Wygga and he cursed my womb.’ She was weeping now and Linna cradled her mother’s head in her arms and looked at me reproachfully.

‘Tanaburs,’ I said, ‘had no power over Wygga. Wygga killed him, because he had power over Tanaburs. Tanaburs could not take away Wygga’s father.’

Maybe my mother heard me, but she did not believe me. She rocked in her daughter’s arms and the tears ran down her pockmarked, dirty cheeks as she half remembered the half-understood scraps of Tanaburs’s curse. ‘Wygga would kill his father,’ she told me, ‘that’s what the curse said, that the son will kill the father.’

‘So Wygga does live,’ I insisted.

She stopped her rocking motion suddenly and peered at me. She shook her head. ‘The dead come back to kill. Dead children! I see them, Lord, out there,’ she spoke earnestly and pointed at the sea, ‘all the little dead going to their revenge.’ She rocked in her daughter’s arms again. ‘And Wygga will kill his father.’ She was crying heavily now. ‘And Wygga’s father was such a fine man! Such a hero. So big and strong. And Tanaburs has cursed him.’ She sniffed, then sighed a lullaby for a moment before talking more about my father, saying how his people had sailed across the sea to Britain and how he had used his sword to make himself a fine house. Erce, I gathered, had been a servant in that house and the Saxon Lord had taken her to his bed and so given me life, the same life that Tanaburs had failed to take at the death-pit. ‘He was a lovely man,’ Erce said of my father, ‘such a lovely, handsome man. Everyone feared him, but he was good to me. We used to laugh together.’

‘What was his name?’ I asked, and I think I knew the answer even before she gave it.

‘Aelle,’ she said in a whisper, ‘lovely, handsome Aelle.’

Aelle. The smoke whirled about my head, and my brains, for a moment, were as addled as my mother’s wits. Aelle? I was Aelle’s son?

‘Aelle,’ Erce said dreamily, ‘lovely, handsome Aelle.’

I had no other questions and so I forced myself to kneel before my mother and give her an embrace. I kissed her on both cheeks, then held her tight as if I could give back to her some of the life she had given to me, and though she succumbed to the embrace, she still would not acknowledge that I was her son. I took lice from her.

I drew Linna down the steps and discovered she was married to one of the village fishermen and had six children living. I gave her gold, more gold, I think, than she had ever expected to see, and more gold, probably, than she even suspected existed. She stared at the little bars in disbelief.

‘Is our mother still a slave?’ I asked her.

‘We all are,’ she said, gesturing at the whole miserable village.

‘That will buy your freedom,’ I said, pointing to the gold, ‘if you want it.’

She shrugged and I doubted that being free would make any difference to their lives. I could have found their Lord and bought their freedom myself, but doubtless he lived far away and the gold, if it was wisely spent, would ease their hard life whether they were slave or free. One day, I promised myself, I would come back and try to do more.

‘Look after our mother,’ I told Linna.

‘I will, Lord,’ she said dutifully, but I still did not think she believed me.

‘You don’t call your own brother Lord,’ I told her, but she would not be persuaded. I left her and walked down to the shore where my men waited with the baggage. ‘We’re going home,’

I said. It was still morning and we had a long day’s march ahead. A march towards home. Home to Ceinwyn. Home to my daughters who were sprung from a line of British Kings and from their Saxon enemy’s royal blood. For I was Aelle’s son. I stood on a green hill above the sea and wondered at the extraordinary weave of life, but I could make no sense of it. I was Aelle’s son, but what difference did that make? It explained nothing and it demanded nothing. Fate is inexorable. I would go home.

It was Issa who first saw the smoke. He always had eyes like a hawk and that day, as I stood on the hill trying to find some meaning in my mother’s revelations, Issa spied smoke across the sea. ‘Lord?’ he said, and at first I did not respond for I was too dazed by what I had learned. I was to kill my father? And that father was Aelle? ‘Lord!’ Issa said more insistently, waking me from my thoughts. ‘Look, Lord, smoke.’

He was pointing south towards Dumnonia and at first I thought the whiteness was merely a paler patch among the rainclouds, but Issa was certain and two of the other spearmen asserted that what we saw was smoke and not cloud or rain. ‘There’s more, Lord,’ one of them said, pointing further west where another small smear of whiteness showed against the grey.

One fire might have been an accident, perhaps a hall burning or a dry field blazing, but in that wet weather no field would have burned and in all my life I had never seen two halls ablaze unless an enemy had put them to the torch.

‘Lord?’ Issa prompted me, for he, like me, had a wife in Dumnonia.

‘Back to the village,’ I said. ‘Now.’

Linna’s husband agreed to take us over the sea. The voyage was not long, for the sea here was only eight or so miles wide and it offered us our swiftest route home, but like all spearmen we preferred a long dry journey to a short wet one, and that crossing was an ordeal of sodden cold misery. A brisk wind had sprung from the west to bring more clouds and rain, and with it came a short, rising sea that splashed over the boat’s low gunwales. We bailed for our lives while the ragged sail bellied and slapped and dragged us southward. Our boatman, who was called Balig and was my brother-in-law, declared that there was no joy like a good boat in a brisk wind and he roared his thanks to Manawydan for sending us such weather, but Issa was sick as a dog, I was retching dry, and we were all glad when, in the middle of the afternoon, he ran us ashore on a Dumnonian beach no more than three or four hours from home. I paid Balig, then we struck inland through a flat, damp country. There was a village not far from the beach, but the folk there had seen the smoke and were frightened and they mistook us for enemies and ran to their huts. The village possessed a small church, merely a thatched hut with a wooden cross nailed to a gable, but the Christians had all gone. One of the remaining pagan villagers told me that the Christians had all gone eastwards. ‘They followed their priest, Lord,’ he told me.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Where?’

‘We don’t know, Lord.’ He glanced at the distant smoke. ‘Are the Saxons back?’

‘No,’ I reassured him, and hoped I was right. The thinning smoke looked to be no more than six or seven miles away and I doubted that either Aelle or Cerdic could have reached this far into Dumnonia. If they had then all Britain was lost.

We hurried on. At that moment all we wanted was to reach our families and, once we knew they were safe, the time would come to find out what was happening. We had a choice of two routes to Ermid’s Hall. One, the longer, lay inland and would take us four or five hours, much of it in darkness, but the other lay across the great sea-marshes of Avalon; a treacherous swamp of creeks, willow-edged bogs and sedge-covered wastes where, when the tide was high and the wind from the west, the sea could sometimes seep and fill and flood the levels and drown unwary travellers. There were routes through that great swamp, and even wooden walkways that led to where the willow pollards grew and the eel and fish traps were set, but none of us knew the marsh paths. Yet still we chose those treacherous paths for they offered the swiftest way home.

As evening fell we found a guide. Like most of the marsh folk he was a pagan and, once he knew who I was, he gladly offered his services. In the middle of the marsh, rising black in the falling light, we could see the Tor. We would have to go there first, our guide said, and then find one of Ynys Wydryn’s boatmen to take us in a reed punt across the shallow waters of Issa’s Mere. It was still raining as we left the marsh village, the drops pattering on the reeds and dappling the pools, but it lifted within the hour and gradually a wan, milky moon glowed dimly behind the thinning clouds that scudded from the west Our path crossed black ditches on plank bridges, passed by the intricate woven wickerwork of willow eel traps, and snaked incomprehensibly across blank shining morasses where our guide would mutter incantations against the marsh spirits. Some nights, he said, strange blue lights glimmered in the wet wastes; the spirits, he thought, of the many folk who had died in this labyrinth of water, mud and sedge. Our footfalls startled screeching wildfowl up from their nests, their panicked wings dark against the cloud-racked sky. Our guide talked to me as we went, telling me of the dragons that slept under the marsh and the ghouls that slithered through its muddy creeks. He wore a necklace made from the spine of a drowned man, the only sure charm, he claimed, against those fearsome things that haunted our path.

It seemed to me that the Tor came no closer, but that was just our impatience and yard by yard, creek by creek, we did get nearer and, as the great hill loomed higher and higher in the ragged sky, we saw a bright smear of light show at its foot. It was a great flamelight, and at first we thought the shrine of the Holy Thorn must be burning, but as we drew still nearer the flames grew no brighter and I guessed the light came from bonfires, perhaps lit to illuminate some Christian rite that sought to keep the shrine from harm. We all made the sign against evil, then at last we reached an embankment that led straight from the wet land to Ynys Wydryn’s higher ground.

Our guide left us there. He preferred the dangers of the marsh to the perils of firelit Ynys Wydryn, so he knelt to me and I rewarded him with the last of my gold, then raised him up and thanked him. The six of us walked on through the small town of Ynys Wydryn, a place of fishermen and basket-makers. The houses were dark and the alleyways deserted except for dogs and rats. We were heading towards the wooden palisade that surrounded the shrine, and though we could see the glowing smoke of the fires churning above the fence we still could not see anything that happened inside; but our path took us past the shrine’s main gate and, as we drew closer, I saw there were two spearmen standing guard at the entrance. The flamelight coming through the open gate illuminated one of their shields and on that shield was the last symbol I had ever expected to see in Ynys Wydryn. It was Lancelot’s sea-eagle with the fish in its claws.

Our own shields were slung on our backs and so their white stars were invisible, and though we all wore the grey wolf-tail, the spearmen must have thought we were friends for they made no challenge as we approached. Instead, thinking that we wanted to enter the shrine, they moved aside, and it was only when I was halfway through the gate, drawn there by my curiosity about Lancelot’s part in this night’s strange events, that the two men realized we were not their comrades. One tried to bar my way with a spear. ‘Who are you?’ he challenged me.

I pushed his spear aside and then, before he could shout a warning, I shoved him backwards out of the gate while Issa dragged his comrade away. A huge crowd was gathered inside the shrine, but they all had their backs to us and none saw the scuffle at the main gate. Nor could they hear anything, for the crowd was chanting and singing and their confused babble drowned the small noise we made. I dragged my captive into the shadows by the road where I knelt beside him. I had dropped my spear when I had pushed him out of the gateway, so now I pulled out the short knife I wore at my belt. ‘You’re Lancelot’s man?’ I asked him.

‘Yes,’ he hissed.

‘Then what are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘This is Mordred’s country.’

‘King Mordred is dead,’ he said, frightened of the knife blade that I was holding against his throat. I said nothing, for I was so astonished by his answer that I could find nothing to say. The man must have thought my silence presaged his death for he became desperate. ‘They’re all dead!’ he exclaimed.

‘Who?’

‘Mordred, Arthur, all of them.’

For a few heartbeats it seemed as if my world lurched in its foundations. The man struggled briefly, but the pressure of my knife quietened him. ‘How?’ I hissed at him.

‘I don’t know.’

‘How?’ I demanded more loudly.

‘We don’t know!’ he insisted. ‘Mordred was killed before we came and they say Arthur died in Powys.’

I rocked back, gesturing at one of my men to keep the two captives quiet with his spear-blade. Then I counted the hours since I had seen Arthur. It was only days since we had parted at Cadoc’s cross, and Arthur’s route home was much longer than mine; if he had died, I thought, then the news of his death would surely not have reached Ynys Wydryn before me. ‘Is your King here?’ I asked the man.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

His answer was scarcely above a whisper. ‘To take the kingdom, Lord.’

We cut strips of woollen cloth from the two men’s cloaks, bound their arms and legs and rammed handfuls of wool into their mouths to keep them silent. We pushed them into a ditch, warned them to stay still and then I led my five men back to the gate of the shrine. I wanted to look inside for a few moments, learn what I could, and only then would I hurry home. ‘Cloaks over your helmets,’ I ordered my men,

‘and shields reversed.’

We hoisted the cloaks up over our helmet crests so that their wolf-tails were hidden, then we held our shields with their faces low against our legs so that their stars would be obscured, and so disguised we filed quietly into the now unguarded shrine. We moved in the shadows, circling around the back of the excited crowd until we reached the stone foundations of the shrine Mordred had started to build for his dead mother. We climbed onto the unfinished sepulchre’s highest course of stones and from there we could watch over the heads of the crowd and see what strange thing happened between the twin rows of fire that lit Ynys Wydryn’s night.

At first I thought it was another Christian rite like the one I had witnessed in Isca, because the space between the rows of fire was filled with dancing women, swaying men and chanting priests. The noise they made was a cacophony of shrieks and screams and wails. Monks with leather flails were wandering among the ecstatics and lashing their naked backs, and each hard stroke only provoked more screams of joy. One woman was kneeling by the holy thorn. ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’ she shrieked. ‘Come!’ A monk beat her in a frenzy, beat her so hard that her naked back was a lurid sheet of blood, but every new blow only increased the fervour of her desperate prayer.

I was about to jump down from the sepulchre and go back to the gate when spearmen appeared from the shrine’s buildings and pushed the worshippers roughly aside to clear a space between the fires that lit the holy thorn. They dragged the screaming woman away. More spearmen followed, two of them carrying a litter, and behind that litter Bishop Sansum led a group of brightly clothed priests. Lancelot and his attendants walked with the priests. Bors, Lancelot’s champion, was there, and Amhar and Loholt were with the Belgic King, but I could not see the dread twins Lavaine and Dinas. The crowd shrieked even louder when they saw Lancelot. They stretched their hands towards him and some even knelt as he passed. He was arrayed in his white-enamelled scale armour that he swore had been the war gear of the ancient hero Agamemnon, and he was wearing his black helmet with its crest of spread swan’s wings. His long black hair that he oiled so it shone fell down his back beneath the helmet to lie smooth against a red cloak that hung from his shoulders. The Christ-blade was at his side and his legs were clad in tall red leather war-boots. His Saxon Guard came behind, all of them huge men in silver mail coats and carrying broad-bladed war axes that reflected the leaping flames. I could not see Morgan, but a choir of her white-clad holy women were vainly trying to make their song heard above the wails and shouts of the excited crowd.

One of the spearmen carried a stake that he placed in a hole that had been prepared beside the Holy Thorn. For a moment I feared we were about to see some poor pagan burned at that stake and I spat to avert evil. The victim was being carried on the litter, for the men carrying it brought their burden to the Holy Thorn and then busied themselves tying their prisoner to the stake, but when they stepped away and we could at last see properly, I realized that it was no prisoner, and no burning. Indeed, it was no pagan tied to that stake, but a Christian, and it was no death we were watching, but a marriage. And I thought of Nimue’s strange prophecy. The dead would be taken in marriage. Lancelot was the groom and he now stood beside his bride who was roped to the stake. She was a Queen, the one-time Princess of Powys who had become a Princess of Dumnonia and then the Queen of Siluria. She was Norwenna, daughter-in-law of High King Uther, the mother of Mordred, and she had been dead these fourteen years. She had lain in her grave for all those years, but now she had been disinterred and her remains were lashed to the post beside the votive-hung Holy Thorn. I stared in horror, then made the sign against evil and stroked the iron mail of my armour. Issa touched my arm as though to reassure himself that he was not in the throes of some unimaginable nightmare. The dead Queen was little more than a skeleton. A white shawl had been draped on her shoulders, but the shawl could not hide the ghastly strips of yellowing skin and thick hanks of white tatty flesh that still clung to her bones. Her skull, that canted from one of the ropes pinioning her to the stake, was half covered with stretched skin, her jawbone had fallen away at one side and dangled from her skull, while her eyes were nothing but black shadows in the firelit death mask of her face. One of the guards had placed a wreath of poppies on the dome of her skull from which dank strands of hair fell ragged to the shawl.

‘What’s happening?’ Issa asked me in a soft voice.

‘Lancelot is claiming Dumnonia,’ I whispered back, ‘and by marrying Norwenna he marries into Dumnonia’s royal family.’ There could be no other explanation. Lancelot was stealing Dumnonia’s throne, and this grisly ceremony among the great fires would give him a thin legal excuse. He was marrying the dead to make himself Uther’s heir.

Sansum signalled for silence and the monks who carried the flails shouted at the excited crowd that slowly calmed down from their frenzy. Every now and then a woman would scream and the crowd would give a nervous shudder, but at last there was silence. The choir’s voices tailed away and Sansum raised his arms and prayed that Almighty God would bless this union of a man and a woman, this King and his Queen, and then he instructed Lancelot to take the bride’s hand. Lancelot reached down with his gloved right hand and lifted the yellow bones. The cheek pieces of his helmet were open and I could see he was grinning. The crowd shouted for joy and I remembered Tewdric’s words about signs and portents, and I guessed that in this unholy marriage the Christians were seeing proof that their God’s return was imminent.

‘By the power invested in me by the Holy Father and by the grace given to me by the Holy Ghost,’

Sansum shouted, ‘I pronounce you man and wife!’

‘Where’s our King?’ Issa asked me.

‘Who knows?’ I whispered back. ‘Dead probably.’ Then I watched as Lancelot lifted the yellow bones of Norwenna’s hand and pretended to give her fingers a kiss. One of the fingers dropped away as he let the hand go.

Sansum, never able to resist a chance to preach, began to harangue the crowd and it was then that Morgan accosted me. I had not seen her approach and the first I knew of her presence was when I felt a hand tugging at my cloak and I turned in alarm to see her gold mask glinting in the firelight. ‘When they find the guards missing from the gate,’ she hissed, ‘they’ll search this compound and you’ll be dead men. Follow me, fools.’

We jumped guiltily down and followed her humped black figure as it scuttled behind the crowd into the shadows of the shrine’s big church. She stopped there and stared up into my face. ‘They said you were dead,’ she told me. ‘Killed with Arthur at Cadoc’s shrine.’

‘I live, Lady.’

‘And Arthur?’

‘He lived three days ago, Lady,’ I answered. ‘None of us died at Cadoc’s shrine.’

‘Thank God,’ she breathed, ‘thank God.’ Then she gripped my cloak and hauled my face down close to her mask. ‘Listen,’ she said urgently, ‘my husband had no choice in this thing.’

‘If you say so, Lady,’ I said, not believing her for one moment, but understanding that Morgan was doing her best to straddle both sides of this crisis that had come so suddenly to Dumnonia. Lancelot was taking the throne, and someone had conspired to make sure Arthur was out of the country when he did it. Worse, I thought, someone had sent Arthur and me to Cadoc’s high valley and arranged for men to ambush us there. Someone wanted us dead, and it had been Sansum who had first revealed Ligessac’s refuge to us and Sansum who had argued against allowing Cuneglas’s men to make the arrest, and Sansum who now stood before Lancelot and a corpse in the light of this night’s fires. I smelt the mouse-lord’s paws all over this wicked business, though I doubted Morgan knew half of what her husband had done or planned. She was too old and wise to be infected by religious frenzy, and she at least was trying to pick a safe path through the cascading horrors.

‘Promise me Arthur lives!’ she appealed to me.

‘He did not die in Cadoc’s valley,’ I said. ‘That much I can promise you.’

She was silent for a while and I think she was crying beneath the mask. ‘Tell Arthur we had no choice,’ she said.

‘I will,’ I promised her. ‘What can you tell me of Mordred?’

‘He’s dead,’ she hissed. ‘Killed while he was hunting.’

‘But if they lied about Arthur,’ I said, ‘then why not about Mordred?’

‘Who knows?’ she crossed herself and plucked at my cloak. ‘Come,’ she said abruptly, and led us down the side of the church towards a small wooden hut. Someone was trapped inside the hut for I could hear fists beating on its door that was secured by the knotted loops of a leather leash. ‘You should go to your woman, Derfel,’ Morgan told me as she fumbled at the knot with her one good hand. ‘Dinas and Lavaine rode south to your hall after nightfall. They took spearmen.’

Panic whipped inside me, making me use my spear-point to slash at the leather leash. The moment the binding was cut the door flew open and Nimue leapt out, hands hooked like claws, but then she recognized me and stumbled against my body for support. She spat at Morgan.

‘Go, you fool,’ Morgan snarled at her, ‘and remember it was I who saved you from death today.’

I took Morgan’s two hands, the burned and the good, and put them to my lips. ‘For this night’s deeds, Lady,’ I said, ‘I am in your debt.’

‘Go, you fool,’ she said, ‘and hurry!’ and we ran through the back parts of the shrine, past storehouses and slave huts and granaries, then out through a wicket gate to where the fishermen kept their reed punts. We took two of the small craft and used our long spear-shafts as quant poles, and I remembered that far-off day of Norwenna’s death when Nimue and I had escaped from Ynys Wydryn in just this fashion. Then, as now, we had headed for Ermid’s Hall and then, as now, we had been hunted fugitives in a land overrun by enemies.

Nimue knew little of what had happened to Dumnonia. Lancelot, she said, had come and declared himself King, but of Mordred she could only repeat what Morgan had said, that the King had been killed while hunting. She told us how spearmen had come to the Tor and taken her captive to the shrine where Morgan had imprisoned her. Afterwards, she heard, a mob of Christians had climbed the Tor, slaughtered whoever they found there, pulled down the huts and begun to build a church out of the salvaged timbers.

‘So Morgan did save your life,’ I said.

‘She wants my knowledge,’ Nimue said. ‘How else will they know what to do with the Cauldron? That’s why Dinas and Lavaine have gone to your hall, Derfel. To find Merlin.’ She spat into the mere.

‘It’s as I told you,’ she finished, ‘they’ve unleashed the Cauldron and they don’t know how to control its power. Two Kings have come to Cadarn. Mordred was one and Lancelot was the second. He went there this afternoon and stood upon the stone. And tonight the dead are being taken in marriage.’

‘And you also said,’ I reminded her bitterly, ‘that a sword would be laid at a child’s throat,’ and I thrust my spear down into the shallow mere in my desperate hurry to reach Ermid’s Hall. Where my children lay. Where Ceinwyn lay. And where the Silurian Druids and their spearmen had ridden not three hours before.

Flames lit our homeward path. Not the flames that illuminated Lancelot’s marriage to the dead, but new flames that sprang red and high from Ermid’s Hall. We were halfway across the mere when that fire flared up to shiver its long reflections on the black water.

I was praying to Gofannon, to Lleullaw, to Bel, to Cernunnos, to Taranis, to all the Gods, wherever they were, that just one of them would stoop from the realm of stars and save my family. The flames leapt higher, spewing sparks of burning thatch into the smoke that blew east across poor Dumnonia. We travelled in silence once Nimue had finished her tale. Issa had tears in his eyes. He was worrying about Scarach, the Irish girl he had married, and he was wondering, as I was, what had happened to the spearmen we had left to guard the hall. There had been enough men, surely, to hold up Dinas and Lavaine’s raiders? Yet the flames told another tale and we thrust the spear-shafts down to make the punts go even faster.

We heard the screams as we came closer. There were just six of us spearmen, but I did not hesitate, or try to make a circuitous approach, but simply drove the punts hard into the tree-shadowed creek that lay alongside the hall’s palisade. There, next to Dian’s little coracle that Gwlyddyn, Merlin’s servant, had made for her, we leapt ashore.

Later I put together the tale of that night. Gwilym, the man who commanded the spearmen who had stayed behind while I marched north with Arthur, had seen the distant smoke to the east and surmised there was trouble brewing. He had placed all his men on guard, then debated with Ceinwyn whether they should take to the boats and hide in the marshes that lay beyond the mere. Ceinwyn said no. Malaine, her brother’s Druid, had given Dian a concoction of leaves that had lifted the fever, but the child was still weak, and besides, no one knew what the smoke meant, nor had any messengers come with a warning; so instead Ceinwyn sent two of the spearmen east to find news and then waited behind the wooden palisade.

Nightfall brought no news, but it did bring a measure of relief for few spearmen marched at night and Ceinwyn felt safer than she had in daylight. From inside the palisade they saw the flames across the mere at Ynys Wydryn and wondered what they meant, but no one heard Dinas and Lavaine’s horsemen come into the nearby woods. The horsemen dismounted a long way from the hall, tied their beasts’ reins to trees and then, under the pale, cloud-misted moon, they had crept towards the palisade. It was not till Dinas and Lavaine’s men attacked the gate that Gwilym even realized the hall was under attack. His two scouts had not returned, there were no guards in the woods and the enemy was already within feet of the palisade’s gate when the alarm was first raised. It was not a formidable gate, no more than the height of a man, and the first rank of the enemy rushed it without armour, spears or shields and succeeded in climbing over before Gwilym’s men could assemble. The gate guards fought and killed, but enough of those first attackers survived to lift the bar of the gate and so open it to the charge of Dinas and Lavaine’s heavily armoured spearmen. Ten of those spearmen were Lancelot’s Saxon Guards, while the rest were Belgic warriors sworn to their King’s service.

Gwilym’s men rallied as best they could, and the fiercest fight took place at the hall’s door. It was there that Gwilym himself lay dead with another six of my men. Six more were lying in the courtyard where a storehouse had been set on fire and those were the flames that had lit our path across the lake and which now, as we reached the open gate, showed us the horror inside. The battle was not over. Dinas and Lavaine had planned their treachery well, but their men had failed to get through the hall door and my surviving spearmen were still holding the big building. I could see their shields and spears blocking the door’s arch, and I could see another spear showing from one of the high windows that let the smoke out from the gable end. Two of my huntsmen were in that window, and their arrows were preventing Dinas and Lavaine’s men carrying the fire from the burning store house to the hall thatch. Ceinwyn, Morwenna and Seren were all inside the hall, together with Merlin, Malaine and most of the other women and children who lived inside the compound, but they were surrounded and outnumbered; and the enemy Druids had found Dian.

Dian had been sleeping in one of the huts. She often did, liking to be in the company of her old wet-nurse who was married to my blacksmith, and maybe it was her golden hair that had given her away or maybe, being Dian, she had spat defiance at her captors and told them her father would take his revenge.

And now Lavaine, robed in black and with an empty scabbard hanging at his hip, held my Dian against his body. Her small grubby feet were sticking out from beneath the little white robe she wore and she was struggling as best she could, but Lavaine had his left arm tight about her waist and in his right hand he held a naked sword against her throat.

Issa clutched my arm to stop me charging madly at the line of armoured men who faced the beleaguered hall. There were twenty of them. I could not see Dinas, but he, I suspected, was with the other enemy spearmen at the rear of the hall, where they would be cutting off the escape of all the souls trapped inside.

‘Ceinwyn!’ Lavaine called in his deep voice. ‘Come out! My King wants you!’

I laid the spear down and drew Hywelbane. Her blade hissed softly on the scabbard’s throat.

‘Come out!’ Lavaine called again.

I touched the strips of pig bone on the sword hilt, then prayed to my Gods that they would make me terrible this night.

‘You want your whelp dead?’ Lavaine called, and Dian screamed as the sword blade tightened on her throat. ‘Your man’s dead!’ Lavaine shouted. ‘He died in Powys with Arthur, and he won’t come to help you.’ He pressed the sword harder and Dian screamed again.

Issa kept his hand on my arm. ‘Not yet, Lord,’ he whispered, ‘not yet.’

The shields parted at the hall door and Ceinwyn stepped out. She was dressed in a dark cloak that was clasped at her throat. ‘Put the child down,’ she told Lavaine calmly.

‘The child will be released when you come to me,’ Lavaine said. ‘My King demands your company.’

‘Your King?’ Ceinwyn asked. ‘What King is that?’ She knew well enough whose men had come here this night, for their shields alone told that tale, but she would make nothing easy for Lavaine.

‘King Lancelot,’ Lavaine said. ‘King of the Belgae and King of Dumnonia.’

Ceinwyn pulled her dark cloak tighter about her shoulders. ‘So what does King Lancelot want of me?’ she asked. Behind her, in the space at the back of the hall and dimly lit by the burning storehouse, I could see more of Lancelot’s spearmen. They had taken the horses from my stables and now they watched the confrontation between Ceinwyn and Lavaine.

‘This night, Lady,’ Lavaine explained, ‘my King has taken a bride.’

Ceinwyn shrugged. ‘Then he does not need me.’

‘The bride, Lady, cannot give my King the privileges that a man demands on his wedding night. You, Lady, are to be his pleasure instead. It is an old debt of honour that you owe him. Besides,’ Lavaine added, ‘you are a widow now. You need another man.’

I tensed, but Issa again gripped my arm. One of the Saxon Guards close to Lavaine was restless and Issa was mutely suggesting we wait until the man relaxed again.

Ceinwyn dropped her head for a few seconds, then looked up again. ‘And if I come with you,’ she said in a bleak voice, ‘you will let my daughter live?’

‘She will live,’ Lavaine promised.

‘And all the others too?’ she asked, gesturing to the hall.

‘Those too,’ said Lavaine.

‘Then release my daughter,’ Ceinwyn demanded.

‘Come here first,’ Lavaine retorted, ‘and bring Merlin with you.’ Dian kicked at him with her bare heels, but he tightened the sword again and she went still. The storehouse roof collapsed, exploding sparks and burning scraps of straw into the night. Some of the flames landed on the hall’s thatch where they flickered feebly. The rainwater in the thatch was protecting the hall for the moment, but soon, I knew, the hall roof must catch the blaze.

I tensed, ready to charge, but then Merlin appeared behind Ceinwyn. His beard, I saw, was bound in plaits again, he carried his great staff and he stood straighter and grimmer than I had seen him stand in years. He placed his right arm about Ceinwyn’s shoulders. ‘Let the child go,’ he ordered. Lavaine shook his head. ‘We made a spell with your beard, old man, and you have no power over us. But tonight we shall have the pleasure of your conversation while our King has the pleasure of the Princess Ceinwyn. Both of you,’ he demanded, ‘come here.’

Merlin lifted the staff and pointed it at Lavaine. ‘At the next full moon,’ he said, ‘you will die beside the sea. You and your brother shall both die and your screams will journey the waves through all time. Let the child go.’

Nimue hissed softly behind me. She had plucked up my spear and lifted the leather patch from her ghastly empty eye-socket.

Lavaine was unmoved by Merlin’s prophecy. ‘At the next full moon,’ he said, ‘we shall boil your beard scraps in bull’s blood and give your soul to the worm of Annwn,’ he spat. ‘Both of you,’ he snapped, ‘come here.’

‘Release my daughter,’ Ceinwyn demanded.

‘When you reach me,’ Lavaine said, ‘she will be freed.’

There was a pause. Ceinwyn and Merlin spoke together softly. Morwenna cried out from inside the hall and Ceinwyn turned and spoke to her daughter, then she took Merlin’s hand and began to walk towards Lavaine. ‘Not like that, Lady,’ Lavaine called to her. ‘My Lord Lancelot demands that you come to him naked. My Lord will have you taken naked through the countryside and naked through the town and naked to his bed. You shamed him, Lady, and this night he will return his shame on you a hundredfold.’

Ceinwyn stopped and glared at him. But Lavaine simply pressed his sword blade against Dian’s throat, the child gasped with the pain, and Ceinwyn instinctively tore at the brooch that clasped her cloak and let the garment drop to reveal a simple white dress.

‘Take the gown off, Lady,’ Lavaine ordered her harshly, ‘take it off, or your daughter dies.’

I charged then. I screamed Bel’s name and I charged like a mad thing. My men came with me, and more men came from the hall when they saw the white stars on our shields and the grey tails on our helms. Nimue charged with us, shrieking and wailing, and I saw the line of enemy spearmen turn with horror on their faces. I ran straight at Lavaine. He saw me, recognized me and froze in terror. He had disguised himself as a Christian priest by hanging a crucifix around his neck. This was no time for men to ride Dumnonia dressed as Druids, but it was time for Lavaine to die and I screamed my God’s name as I charged at him.

Then a Saxon Guard ran in front of me, his bright axe glittering reflected flamelight as he swung its heavy blade at my skull. I parried it with the shield and the force of the blow jarred down my arm. Then I slid Hywelbane forward, twisted her blade in his belly and dragged it free in a rush of spilling Saxon guts. Issa had killed another Saxon and Scarach, his fiery Irish wife, had come from the hall to slash at a wounded Saxon with a boar spear, while Nimue was driving her spear into a man’s belly. I parried another spear blow, put the spearman down with Hywelbane and looked desperately around for Lavaine. I saw him running with Dian in his arms. He was trying to reach his brother behind the hall when a rush of spearmen cut him off and he turned, saw me and fled towards the gate. He held Dian like a shield.

‘I want him alive!’ I roared and plunged towards him through the firelit chaos. Another Saxon came at me roaring the name of his God, and I cut the God’s name out of his throat with a lunge of Hywelbane. Then Issa shouted a warning and I heard the hoofs and saw that the enemy who had been guarding the back of the hall were charging on horseback to their comrades’ rescue. Dinas, who was dressed like his brother in the black robes of a Christian priest, led the charge with a drawn sword. ‘Stop them!’ I shouted. I could hear Dian screaming. The enemy was panicking. They outnumbered us, but the irruption of spearmen from the black night had torn their hearts to ribbons and one-eyed Nimue, shrieking and wild with her bloody spear, must have appeared to them as a ghastly night ghoul come for their souls. They fled in terror. Lavaine waited for his brother close to the burning storehouse and still held his sword at Dian’s throat. Scarach, hissing like Nimue, stalked him with her spear, but she dared not risk my daughter’s life. Others of the enemy scrambled over the palisade, some ran for the gate, some were cut down in the shadows between the huts and some escaped by running alongside the terrified horses that pounded past us into the night.

Dinas rode straight for me. I raised my shield, hefted Hywelbane and shouted a challenge, but at the very last moment he swerved his white-eyed horse aside and hurled the sword at my head. He rode towards his twin brother instead and as he neared Lavaine he leaned down from the saddle and extended his arm. Scarach flung herself out of the path of the charging horse just as Lavaine leapt up into Dinas’s saving embrace. He dropped Dian and I saw her sprawl away from him as I ran after the horse. Lavaine was clinging desperately to his brother who clung just as desperately to the saddle-bar as the horse galloped away. I shouted at them to stay and fight, but the twins just galloped into the black trees where the enemy’s other survivors had fled. I cursed their souls. I stood in the gate and called them vermin, cowards, creatures of evil.

‘Derfel?’ Ceinwyn called from behind me. ‘Derfel?’ I abandoned my curses and turned to her. ‘I live,’

I said, ‘I live.’ ‘Oh, Derfel!’ she wailed, and it was then that I saw that Ceinwyn was holding Dian and that Ceinwyn’s white dress was white no longer, but red.

I ran to their side. Dian was cradled tight in her mother’s arms, and I dropped my sword, tore the helmet from my head and fell to my knees beside them. ‘Dian?’ I whispered, ‘my love?’

I saw the soul flicker in her eyes. She saw me — she did see me — and she saw her mother before she died. She looked at us for an instant and then her young soul flew away as soft as a wing in darkness and with as little fuss as a candle flame blown out by a wisp of wind. Her throat had been cut as Lavaine leapt for his brother’s arm, and now her small heart just gave up the struggle. But she did see me first. I know she did. She saw me, then she died, and I put my arms around her and around her mother and I cried like a child.

For my little lovely Dian, I wept.

We had taken four unwounded prisoners. One was a Saxon Guard and three were Belgic spearmen. Merlin questioned them, and when he had finished I hacked all four to pieces. I slaughtered them. I killed in a rage, sobbing as I killed, blind to anything but Hywelbane’s weight and the empty satisfaction of feeling her blade bite into their flesh. One by one, in front of my men, in front of Ceinwyn, in front of Morwenna and Seren, I butchered all four men and when it was done Hywelbane was wet and red from tip to hilt and still I hacked at their lifeless bodies. My arms were soaked in blood, my rage could have filled the whole world and still it would not bring little Dian back. I wanted more men to kill, but the enemy’s wounded had already had their throats cut and so, with no more revenge to take and bloody as I was, I walked to my terrified daughters and held them in my arms. I could not stop crying; nor could they. I held them as though my life depended on theirs, and then I carried them to where Ceinwyn still cradled Dian’s corpse. I gently unfolded Ceinwyn’s arms and placed them about her living children, then I took Dian’s little body and carried it to the burning storehouse. Merlin came with me. He touched his staff on Dian’s forehead, then nodded to me. It was time, he was saying, to let Dian’s soul cross the bridge of swords, but first I kissed her, then I laid her body down and used my knife to cut away a thick strand of her golden hair that I placed carefully in my pouch. That done, I raised her up, kissed her one last time and threw her corpse into the flames. Her hair and her little white dress flared bright.

‘Feed the fire!’ Merlin snapped at my men. ‘Feed it!’

They tore down a hut to make the fire into a furnace that would burn Dian’s body into nothing. Her soul was already going to its shadowbody in the Otherworld, and now her balefire roared into the dark while I knelt in front of the flames with an empty ravaged soul.

Merlin lifted me up. ‘We must go, Derfel.’

‘I know.’

He embraced me, holding me in his long strong arms like a father. ‘If I could have saved her,’ he said softly.

‘You tried,’ I said, and cursed myself for lingering in Ynys Wydryn.

‘Come,’ Merlin said. ‘We must be a long way off by dawn.’

We took what little we could carry. I discarded the bloody armour I was wearing and took my good coat of mail that was trimmed with gold. Seren took three kittens in a leather bag, Morwenna a distaff and a bundle of clothes, while Ceinwyn carried a bag of food. There were eighty of us altogether; spearmen, families, servants and slaves. All of them had thrown some small token into the balefire; a scrap of bread mostly, though Gwlyddyn, Merlin’s servant, had tossed Dian’s coracle into the flames so that she could paddle it through the lakes and creeks of the Otherworld. Ceinwyn, walking with Merlin and Malaine, her brother’s Druid, asked what happened to children in the Otherworld. ‘They play,’ Merlin said with all his ancient authority. ‘They play beneath the apple trees and wait for you.’

‘She will be happy,’ Malaine reassured her. He was a tall, thin, stooped young man who carried Iorweth’s old staff. He seemed shocked by the night’s horror, and he was plainly nervous of Nimue in her filthy, blood-spattered robe. Her eye patch had disappeared, and her ghastly hair hung lank and draggled.

Ceinwyn, once she had satisfied herself of Dian’s fate, came and walked beside me. I was still in agony, blaming myself for pausing to watch Lancelot’s ceremony of marriage, but Ceinwyn was calmer now. ‘It was her fate, Derfel,’ she said, ‘and she’s happy now.’ She took my arm. ‘And you’re alive. They told us you were dead. Both you and Arthur.’

‘He lives,’ I promised her. I walked in silence, following the white robes of the two Druids. ‘One day,’

I said after a while, ‘I shall find Dinas and Lavaine and their deaths will be terrible.’

Ceinwyn squeezed my arm. ‘We were all so happy,’ she said. She had begun crying again and I tried to find words to console her, but there could be no explanation of why the Gods had snatched Dian away. Behind us, bright in the night sky, the flames and smoke of Ermid’s Hall boiled towards the stars. The hall thatch had at last caught the fire and our old life was being burned to ashes. We followed a twisting path beside the mere. The moon had slid from behind its clouds to cast a silver light on the rushes and willows and on the shallow, wind-rippled lake. We walked towards the sea, but I had scarcely thought what we should do when we reached the shore. Lancelot’s men would search for us, that much was certain, and somehow we would need to find safety. Merlin had questioned our prisoners before I killed them and he now told Ceinwyn and me what he had learned. Much of it we already knew. Mordred was said to have been killed while hunting, and one of the prisoners had claimed that the King had been murdered by the father of a girl he had raped. Arthur was rumoured to be dead and so Lancelot had declared himself the King of Dumnonia. The Christians had welcomed him in the belief that Lancelot was their new John the Baptist, a man who had presaged the first coming of Christ just as Lancelot now presaged the second.

‘Arthur didn’t die,’ I said bitterly. ‘He was meant to, and I was meant to die with him, but they failed. And how,’ I asked, ‘if I saw Arthur just thee days ago, did Lancelot hear of his death so soon?’

‘He hasn’t heard of it,’ Merlin said calmly. ‘He’s just hoping for it.’

I spat. ‘It’s Sansum and Lancelot,’ I said angrily. ‘Lancelot probably arranged for Mordred’s death and Sansum arranged ours. Now Sansum has his Christian King and Lancelot has Dumnonia.’

‘Except that you live,’ Ceinwyn said quietly.

‘And Arthur lives,’ I said, ‘and if Mordred’s dead, then the throne is Arthur’s.’

‘Only if he defeats Lancelot,’ Merlin said drily.

‘Of course he’ll defeat Lancelot,’ I said scornfully.

‘Arthur’s weakened,’ Merlin warned me gently. ‘Scores of his men have been killed. All Mordred’s guards are dead and so are all the spearmen at Caer Cadarn. Cei and his men are dead in Isca, or if they’re not dead, they’re fugitives. The Christians have risen, Derfel. I hear they marked their houses with the sign of the fish, and any house that didn’t carry the mark had its inhabitants slaughtered.’ He paced in gloomy silence for a while. ‘They’re cleansing Britain for the coming of their God.’

‘But Lancelot hasn’t killed Sagramor,’ I said, hoping that what I said was true, ‘and Sagramor leads an army.’

‘Sagramor lives,’ Merlin assured me, and then delivered the worst news of that terrible night, ‘but he’s been attacked by Cerdic. It seems to me,’ he went on, ‘that Lancelot and Cerdic might well have agreed to divide Dumnonia between them. Cerdic will take the frontier lands and Lancelot will rule the rest.’

I could find nothing to say. It seemed incomprehensible. Cerdic was loose in Dumnonia? And the Christians had risen to make Lancelot their King? And it had all happened so swiftly, within days, and there had been no sign of it before I left Dumnonia.

‘There were signs,’ Merlin said, reading my mind. ‘There were signs, it was just that none of us took them seriously. Who cared if a few Christians painted the fish on their house walls? Who took any notice of their frenzies? We became so used to their priests’ ranting that we no longer listened to what they were saying. And which of us believes that their God will come to Britain in four years’ time? There were signs all around us, Derfel, and we were blind to them. But that’s not what caused this horror.’

‘Sansum and Lancelot caused it,’ I said.

‘The Cauldron brought it,’ Merlin said. ‘Someone has used it, Derfel, and its power is loose in the land. I suspect Dinas and Lavaine have it, but they don’t know how to control it and so they’ve spilt its horror.’

I walked on in silence. The Severn Sea was visible now, a crawling flood of silver black beneath a sinking moon. Ceinwyn was crying softly and I took her hand. ‘I discovered,’ I said to her, trying to distract her from her grief, ‘who my father is. Just yesterday I found it out.’

‘Your father is Aelle,’ Merlin said placidly.

I gazed at him. ‘How did you know?’

‘It’s in your face, Derfel, in your face. Tonight, when you came through the gate, you only needed a black bear cloak to be him.’ He smiled at me. ‘I remember you as an earnest little boy, all questions and frowns, then tonight you came like a warrior of the Gods, a terrifying thing of iron and steel and plume and shield.’

‘Is it true?’ Ceinwyn asked me.

‘Yes,’ I admitted, and feared what her reaction might be.

I need not have feared. ‘Then Aelle must be a very great man,’ she said firmly, and gave me a sad smile, ‘Lord Prince.’

We reached the sea and turned north. We had nowhere else to go except towards Gwent and Powys where the madness had not spread, but our path ended at a place where the sand of the beach petered out into a spit where the incoming tide broke white on a rippled expanse of mud. To our left was the sea, to our right were the marshes of Avalon, and it seemed to me that we were trapped there, but Merlin told us we should not worry. ‘Rest,’ he said, ‘for help will come soon.’ He looked east to see a glimmer of light showing above the hills beyond the marsh. ‘Dawn,’ he announced, ‘and when the sun is full up, our help will come.’ He sat and played with Seren and her kittens while the rest of us lay on the sand, our bundles beside us, as Pyrlig, our bard, sang the Love Song of Rhiannon that had always been Dian’s favourite song. Ceinwyn, one arm around Morwenna, wept while I just stared at the fretting grey sea and dreamed of revenge.

The sun rose, promising another lovely summer’s day in Dumnonia, only on this day the iron-clad horsemen would be spreading across the countryside to find us. The Cauldron had at last been used, the Christians had flocked to Lancelot’s banner, horror was spilling across the land and all Arthur’s work was under siege.

Lancelot’s men were not the only ones who searched for us that morning. The marsh villages had heard the news of Ermid’s Hall, just as they had heard that the ghoulish ceremony in Ynys Wydryn had been a Christian wedding, and any enemy of the Christians was a friend of the marsh folk, so their boatmen and trackers and hunters ranged wide across the swamps in search of us.

They found us two hours after sunrise and led us north through the marsh paths where no enemy would dare intrude. By nightfall, out of the marshes now, we were close to the town of Abona where ships sailed for the Silurian coast with cargoes of grain, pottery, tin and lead. A band of Lancelot’s men guarded the Roman-built wharves that lined the river-port, but his army was thinly scattered and there were no more than twenty spearmen watching the ships, and most of those spearmen were half drunk from a looted cargo of mead. We killed them all. Death had already come to Abona, for the bodies of a dozen pagans lay on the mud above the river’s tide line. The fanatical Christians who had slaughtered the pagans had already left, gone to join Lancelot’s army, and the folk who remained in the town were fearful. They told us what had happened in the town, swore their own innocence in the killings, then barred their doors that all bore the mark of the fish. Next morning, on a rising tide, we sailed for Silurian Isca, the fort on the Usk where Lancelot had once made his palace when he had sulked on Siluria’s inadequate throne.

Ceinwyn sat next to me in the boat’s scuppers. ‘It’s strange,’ she said, ‘how wars come and go with kings.’

‘How?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘Uther died and there was nothing but fighting till Arthur killed my father, then we had peace, and now Mordred comes to the throne and we have war again. It’s like the seasons, Derfel. War comes and it goes.’ She leaned her head on my shoulder. ‘So what will happen now?’ she asked.

‘You and the girls will go north to Caer Sws,’ I said, ‘and I shall stay and fight.’

‘Will Arthur fight?’ she asked.

‘If Guinevere’s been killed,’ I said, ‘he’ll fight till there isn’t an enemy left alive.’ We had heard nothing of Guinevere, but with Christians marauding throughout Dumnonia it seemed unlikely that she would have been left unmolested.

‘Poor Guinevere,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘and poor Gwydre.’ She was very fond of Arthur’s son. We landed in the River Usk, safe at last on territory ruled by Meurig, and from there we walked north to Gwent’s capital, Burrium. Gwent was a Christian country, but it had not been infected by the madness that had swept Dumnonia. Gwent already had a Christian King, and maybe that circumstance had been sufficient to keep its people calm. Meurig blamed Arthur. ‘He should have suppressed paganism,’ he told us.

‘Why, Lord King?’ I asked. ‘Arthur’s a pagan himself

‘Christ’s truth is blindingly obvious, I should have thought,’ Meurig said. ‘If a man cannot read the tides of history, then he only has himself to blame. Christianity is the future, Lord Derfel, and paganism is its past.’

‘Not much of a future,’ I said scornfully, ‘if history is to end in four years.’

‘It doesn’t end!’ Meurig said. ‘It begins! When Christ comes again, Lord Derfel, the days of glory arrive! We shall all be Kings, all be joyful and all be blessed.’

‘Except us pagans.’

‘Naturally, hell must be fed. But there is still time for you to accept the true faith.’

Both Ceinwyn and I declined his invitation of baptism and next morning she left for Powys with Morwenna, Seren and the other wives and children. We spearmen embraced our families, then watched them walk north. Meurig gave them an escort, and I sent six of my own men with orders to come back south as soon as the women were safe under Cuneglas’s guard. Malaine, Powys’s Druid, went with them, but Merlin and Nimue, whose quest for the Cauldron was suddenly burning as hot as ever it had on the Dark Road, stayed with us.

King Meurig travelled with us to Glevum. That town was Dumnonian, but right on the border of Gwent, and its earth and timber walls guarded Meurig’s land, so, sensibly enough, he had already garrisoned it with his own spearmen to make sure that the tumults of Dumnonia did not spread north into Gwent. It took us a half day to reach Glevum and there, in the great Roman hall where Uther’s last High Council had been held, I found the rest of my men, Arthur’s men, and Arthur himself. He saw me come into the hall and the look of relief on his face was so heartfelt that tears came to my eyes. My spearmen, those who had stayed with Arthur when I went south to find my mother, cheered, and the next few moments were a bluster of reunions and news. I told them of Ermid’s Hall, told them the names of the men who had died, assured them that their women still lived, then looked at Arthur. ‘But they killed Dian,’ I said.

‘Dian?’ I think he did not believe me at first.

‘Dian,’ I said, and the wretched tears came again.

Arthur eased me out of the hall and walked with his right arm about my shoulders to Glevum’s ramparts where Meurig’s red-cloaked spearmen now manned every fighting platform. He made me tell him the whole tale again, right from the moment I had left him until the moment we took ship from Abona.

‘Dinas and Lavaine.’ He spoke the names bitterly, then he drew Excalibur and kissed the grey blade.

‘Your vengeance is mine,’ he said formally, then slid the sword back into her scabbard. For a time we said nothing, but just leaned on the top of the wall and stared at the wide valley south of Glevum. It looked so peaceful. The hay crop was nearly reach for cutting and there were bright poppies in the growing corn. ‘Do you have news of Guinevere?’

Arthur broke the silence and I heard something close to desperation in his voice.

‘No, Lord.’

He shuddered, then regained control of himself. ‘The Christians hate her,’ he said softly, and then, uncharacteristically, he touched the iron of Excalibur’s hilt to avert evil.

‘Lord,’ I tried to reassure him, ‘she has guards. And her palace is by the sea. She would have escaped if there was danger.’

‘To where? Broceliande? But suppose Cerdic sent ships?’ He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then shook his head. ‘We can only wait for news.’

I asked him about Mordred, but he had heard nothing more than the rest of us. ‘I suspect he is dead,’

he said bleakly, ‘for if he had escaped then he should have reached us here by now’

He did have news of Sagramor, and that news was bad. ‘Cerdic hurt him hard. Caer Ambra’s fallen, Calleva’s gone and Corinium is under siege. It should hold out a few days yet, for Sagramor managed to add two hundred spears to its garrison, but their food will be gone by the month’s end. It seems we have war again.’ He gave a short, harsh bark of laughter. ‘You were right about Lancelot, weren’t you? and I was blind. I thought him a friend.’ I said nothing, but just glanced at him and saw, to my surprise, that there were grey hairs at his temples. To me he still seemed young, but I supposed that if any man were to meet him now for the first time they would think him on the edge of his middle years. ‘How could Lancelot have brought Cerdic into Dumnonia,’ he asked angrily, ‘or encouraged the Christians in their madness?’

‘Because he wants to be King of Dumnonia,’ I said, ‘and he needs their spears. And Sansum wants to be his chief councillor, his royal treasurer and everything else too.’

Arthur shuddered. ‘You think Sansum really planned our deaths at Cadoc’s shrine?’

‘Who else?’ I asked. It was Sansum, I believed, who had first linked the fish on Lancelot’s shield with the name of Christ, and Sansum who had whipped the excited Christian community into a fervour that would sweep Lancelot onto Dumnonia’s throne. I doubted that Sansum put much faith in his Christ’s imminent coming, but he did want to hold as much power as he could and Lancelot was Sansum’s candidate for Dumnonia’s kingship. If Lancelot succeeded in holding the throne, all the reins of power would lead back to the mouse-lord’s paws. ‘He’s a dangerous little bastard,’ I said vengefully. ‘We should have killed him ten years ago.’

‘Poor Morgan,’ Arthur sighed. Then he grimaced. ‘What did we do wrong?’ he asked me.

‘We?’ I said indignantly. ‘We did nothing wrong.’

‘We never understood what the Christians wanted,’ he said, ‘but what could we have done if we had? They were never going to accept anything less than utter victory.’

‘It’s nothing we did,’ I said, ‘only what the calendar does to them. The year 500 has made them mad.’

‘I had hoped,’ he said softly, ‘that we had weaned Dumnonia away from madness.’

‘You gave them peace, Lord,’ I said, ‘and peace gave them the chance to breed their madness. If we’d been fighting the Saxons all those years their energies would have gone into battle and survival, but instead we gave them the chance to foment their idiocies.’

He shrugged. ‘But what do we do now?’

‘Now?’ I said. ‘We fight!’

‘With what?’ he asked bitterly. ‘Sagramor has his hands full with Cerdic. Cuneglas will send us spears, I’m sure, but Meurig won’t fight.’

‘He won’t?’ I asked, alarmed. ‘But he swore the Round Table oath!’

Arthur smiled sadly. ‘These oaths, Derfel, how they haunt us. And these sad days, it seems, men take them so lightly. Lancelot swore the oath too, did he not? But Meurig says that with Mordred dead there is no casus belli? He quoted the Latin bitterly, and I remembered Meurig using the same words before Lugg Vale, and how Culhwch had mocked the King’s erudition by twisting the Latin into ‘cow’s belly’.

‘Culhwch will come,’ I said.

‘To fight for Mordred’s land?’ Arthur asked. ‘I doubt it.’

‘To fight for you, Lord,’ I said. ‘For if Mordred is dead, you’re King.’

He smiled bitterly at that statement. ‘King of what? Of Glevum?’ He laughed. ‘I have you, I have Sagramor, I have whatever Cuneglas gives me, but Lancelot has Dumnonia and he has Cerdic.’ He walked in silence for a short while, then gave me a crooked smile. ‘We do have one other ally, though hardly a friend. Aelle has taken advantage of Cerdic’s absence to retake London. Maybe Cerdic and he will kill each other?’

‘Aelle,’ I said, ‘will be killed by his son, not by Cerdic’

He gave me a quizzical glance. ‘What son?’

‘It’s a curse,’ I said, ‘and I am Aelle’s son.’

He stopped and gazed at me to see if I was jesting. ‘Your’ he asked.

‘Me, Lord.’

‘Truly?’

‘Upon my honour, Lord, I am your enemy’s son.’

He still stared at me, then began to laugh. The laughter was genuine and extravagant, ending in tears that he wiped away as he shook his head in amusement. ‘Dear Derfel! If only Uther and Aelle knew!’

Uther and Aelle, the great enemies, whose sons had become friends. Fate is inexorable.

‘Maybe Aelle does know,’ I said, remembering how gently he had reprimanded me for ignoring Erce.

‘He’s our ally now,’ Arthur said, ‘whether we want him or not. Unless we choose not to fight.’

‘Not to fight?’ I asked in horror.

‘There are times,’ Arthur said softly, ‘when all I want is to have Guinevere and Gwydre back and a small house where we can live in peace. I’m even tempted to make an oath, Derfel, that if the Gods give me back my family then I’ll never trouble them again. I’ll go to a house like the one you had in Powys, remember?’

‘Cwm Isaf,’ I said, and wondered how Arthur could ever believe that Guinevere might be happy in such a place.

‘Just like Cwm Isaf,’ he said wistfully. ‘A plough, some fields, a son to raise, a King to respect and songs by the evening hearth.’ He turned and gazed south again. To the east of the valley great green hills rose steep, and Cerdic’s men were not so very far away from those summits. ‘I am tired of it all,’ Arthur said. For a moment he looked close to tears. ‘Think of all we achieved, Derfel, all the roads and lawcourts and bridges, and all the disputes we settled and all the prosperity we made, and all of it is turned to nothing by religion! Religion!’ He spat across the ramparts. ‘Is Dumnonia even worth fighting for?’

‘Dian’s soul is worth fighting for,’ I said, ‘and while Dinas and Lavaine live then I am not at peace. And I pray. Lord, that you won’t have such deaths to revenge, but still you must tight. If Mordred’s dead, then you’re King, and if he lives, we have our oaths.’

‘Our oaths,’ he said resentfully, and I am sure he was thinking of the words we had spoken above the sea beside which Iseult was to die. ‘Our oaths,’ he said again.

But oaths were all we had now, for oaths were our guide in times of chaos and chaos was now thick across Dumnonia. For someone had spilt the Cauldron’s power and its horror threatened to engulf us all.

Dumnonia, in that summer, was like a giant throwboard and Lancelot had thrown his pieces well, taking half the board with his opening throw. He had surrendered the valley of the Thames to the Saxons, but the rest of the country was now his, thanks to the Christians who had blindly fought for him because his shield displayed their mystical emblem of a fish. I doubted that Lancelot was any more of a Christian than Mordred had been, but Sansum’s missionaries had spread their insidious message and, as far as Dumnonia’s poor deceived Christians were concerned, Lancelot was the harbinger of Christ. Lancelot had not won every point. His plot to kill Arthur had failed, and while Arthur lived Lancelot was in danger, but on the day after I arrived in Glevum he tried to sweep the throwboard clean. He tried to win it all.

He sent a horseman with an upturned shield and a sprig of mistletoe tied to his spear-point. The rider carried a message that summoned Arthur to Dun Ceinach, an ancient earth fortress that reared its summit just a few miles south of Glevum’s ramparts. The message demanded that Arthur go to the ancient fort that very same day, it swore his safety and it allowed him to bring as many spearmen as he wished. The message’s imperious tone almost invited refusal, but it finished by promising Arthur news of Guinevere, and Lancelot must have known that promise would bring Arthur out of Glevum. He left an hour later. Twenty of us rode with him, all of us in full armour beneath a blazing sun. Great white clouds sailed above the hills that rose steep from the eastern side of Severn’s wide valley. We could have followed the tracks that twisted up into those hills, but they led through too many places where an ambush might be set and so we took the road south along the valley, a Roman road that ran between fields where poppies blazed among the growing rye and barley. After an hour we turned east and cantered beside a hedge that was white with hawthorn blossom, then across a hay meadow almost ready for the sickle, and so we reached the steep grassy slope that was topped by the ancient fort. Sheep scattered as we climbed the slope, which was so precipitous that I preferred to slide off my horse’s back and lead it by the reins. Bee orchids blossomed pink and brown among the grass. We stopped a hundred paces below the summit and I climbed on alone to make sure that no ambush waited behind the fort’s long grassy walls. I was panting and sweating by the time I gained the wall’s summit, but no enemy crouched behind the bank. Indeed the old fort seemed deserted except for two hares that fled from my sudden appearance. The silence of the hilltop made me cautious, but then a single horseman appeared among some low trees that grew in the northern part of the fort. He carried a spear that he ostentatiously threw down, turned his shield upside down, then slid off his horse’s back. A dozen men followed him out of the trees and they too threw down their spears as if to reassure me that their promise of a truce was genuine.

I waved Arthur up. His horses breasted the wall, then he and I walked forward. Arthur was in his finest armour. He did not appear here as a supplicant, but as a warrior in a white-plumed helmet and a silvered coat of scale armour.

Two men walked to meet us. I had expected to see Lancelot himself, but instead it was his cousin and champion, Bors, who approached us. Bors was a tall black-haired man, heavily bearded, broad-shouldered, and a capable warrior who thrust through life like a bull where his master slid like a snake. I had no dislike of Bors nor he of me, but our loyalties dictated that we should be enemies. Bors nodded a curt greeting. He was in armour, but his companion was dressed in priest’s robes. It was Bishop Sansum. That surprised me, for Sansum usually took good care to disguise his loyalties and I thought our little mouse-lord must be very confident of victory if he displayed his allegiance to Lancelot so openly. Arthur gave Sansum a dismissive glance, then looked at Bors. ‘You have news of my wife,’

he said curtly.

‘She lives,’ Bors said, ‘and she is safe. So is your son.’

Arthur closed his eyes. He could not hide his relief, indeed for a moment he could not even speak.

‘Where are they?’ he asked when he had collected himself.

‘At her Sea Palace,’ Bors said, ‘under guard.’

‘You keep women prisoners?’ I asked scornfully.

‘They are under guard, Derfel,’ Bors answered just as scornfully, ‘because Dumnonia’s Christians are slaughtering their enemies. And those Christians, Lord Arthur, have no love for your wife. My Lord King Lancelot has your wife and son under his protection.’

‘Then your Lord King Lancelot,’ Arthur said with just a trace of sarcasm, ‘can have them brought north under escort.’

‘No,’ Bors said. He was bare-headed and the heat of the sun was making the sweat run down his broad, scarred face.

‘No?’ Arthur asked dangerously.

‘I have a message for you, Lord,’ Bors said defiantly, ‘and the message is this. My Lord King grants you the right to live in Dumnonia with your wife. You will be treated with honour, but only if you swear an oath of loyalty to my King.’ He paused and glanced up into the sky. It was one of those portentous days when the moon shared the sky with the sun and he gestured towards the moon that was swollen somewhere between the half and the full. ‘You have,’ he said, ‘until the moon is full to present yourself to my Lord King at Caer Cadarn. You may come with no more than ten men, you will swear your oath, and you may then live under his dominion in peace.’

I spat to show my opinion of his promise, but Arthur held up a hand to still my anger. ‘And if I do not come?’ he asked.

Another man might have been ashamed to deliver the message, but Bors showed no qualms. ‘If you do not come,’ he said, ‘then my Lord King will presume that you are at war with him, in which case he will need every spear he can collect. Even those who now guard your wife and child.’

‘So his Christians,’ Arthur jerked his chin towards Sansum, ‘can kill them?’

‘She can always be baptized!’ Sansum put in. He clutched the cross that hung over his black robe. ‘I will guarantee her safety if she is baptized.’

Arthur stared at him. Then, very deliberately, he spat full in San-sum’s face. The Bishop jerked back. Bors, I noticed, was amused and I suspected little affection was lost between Lancelot’s champion and his chaplain. Arthur looked again at Bors. ‘Tell me of Mordred,’ he demanded. Bors looked surprised at the question. ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he said after a pause. ‘He’s dead.’

‘You’ve seen his body?’ Arthur asked.

Bors hesitated again, then shook his head. ‘He was killed by a man whose daughter he had raped. Beyond that I know nothing. Except that my Lord King came into Dumnonia to quell the riots that followed the killing.’ He paused as if he expected Arthur to say something more, but when nothing was said he just looked up at the moon. ‘You have till the full,’ he said and turned away.

‘One minute!’ I called, turning Bors back. ‘What of me?’ I asked.

Bors’s hard eyes stared into mine. ‘What of you?’ he said scornfully.

‘Does the killer of my daughter demand an oath of me?’ I asked.

‘My Lord King wants nothing of you,’ Bors said.

‘Then tell him,’ I said, ‘that I want something of him. Tell him I want the souls of Dinas and Lavaine, and if it is the last thing I do on this earth, I shall take them.’

Bors shrugged as though their deaths meant nothing to him, then looked back to Arthur. ‘We shall be waiting at Caer Cadarn, Lord,’ he said, then walked away. Sansum stayed to shout at us, telling us that Christ was coming in his glory and that all pagans and sinners would be wiped clean from the earth before that happy day. I spat at him, then turned and followed Arthur. Sansum dogged us, shouting at our heels, but then suddenly called my name. I ignored him. ‘Lord Derfel!’ he called again, ‘you whoremaster! You whore-lover!’ He must have known those insults would draw me back to him in anger, and though he did not want my anger, he did want my attention. ‘I meant nothing, Lord,’ he said hastily as I hurried back towards him. ‘I must talk with you. Quickly.’ He glanced behind to make sure Bors was out of earshot, then gave another bellow demanding my repentance just to make certain that Bors thought he was harassing me. ‘I thought you and Arthur were dead,’ he said in a low voice.

‘You arranged our deaths,’ I accused him.

He blanched. ‘On my soul, Derfel, no! No!’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘May the angels tear out my tongue and feed it to the devil if it lies to you. I swear by Almighty God, Derfel, that I knew nothing.’

That lie told, he glanced round again, then looked back to me. ‘Dinas and Lavaine,’ he said softly, ‘stand guard over Guinevere at the Sea Palace. Remember it was I, Lord, who told you that.’

I smiled. ‘You don’t want Bors to know you betrayed that knowledge to me, do you?’

‘No, Lord, please!’

‘Then this should convince him of your innocence,’ I said, and gave the mouse-lord a box round his ears that must have had his head ringing like the great bell at his shrine. He spun down to the turf from where he shrieked curses at me as I walked away. I understood now why Sansum had come to this high fortress beneath the sky. The mouse-lord could see clearly enough that Arthur’s survival threatened Lancelot’s new throne and no man could blithely keep his faith in a master who was opposed by Arthur. Sansum, just like his wife, was making sure I owed him thanks.

‘What was that about?’ Arthur asked me when I caught up with him.

‘He told me Dinas and Lavaine are at the Sea Palace. They guard Guinevere.’

Arthur grunted, then looked up at the sun-blanched moon hanging above us. ‘How many nights till the full, Derfel?’

‘Five?’ I guessed. ‘Six? Merlin will know.’

‘Six days to decide,’ he said, then stopped and stared at me. ‘Will they dare kill her?’

‘No, Lord,’ I said, hoping I was right. ‘They daren’t make an enemy out of you. They want you to come to take their oath and then they’ll kill you. After that they might kill her.’

‘And if I don’t come,’ he said softly, ‘they’ll still hold her. And so long as they hold her, Derfel, I’m helpless.’

‘You have a sword, Lord, and a spear and a shield. No man would call you helpless.’

Behind us Bors and his men clambered into their saddles and rode away. We stayed a few moments longer to gaze west from Dun Ceinach’s ramparts. It was one of the most beautiful views in all Britain, a hawk’s-eye view west across the Severn and deep into distant Siluria. We could see for miles and miles, and from this high place it looked so sunlit, green and beautiful. It was a place to fight for. And we had six nights till the moon was full.

‘Seven nights,’ Merlin said.

‘You’re sure?’ Arthur asked.

‘Maybe six,’ Merlin allowed. ‘I do hope you don’t expect me to make the computation? It’s a very tedious business. I did it often enough for Uther and almost always got it wrong. Six or seven, near enough. Maybe eight.’

‘Malaine will work it out,’ Cuneglas said. We had returned from Dun Ceinach to rind that Cuneglas had come from Powys. He had brought Malaine with him after meeting the Druid who had been accompanying Ceinwyn and the other women northwards. The King of Powys had embraced me and sworn his own revenge on Dinas and Lavaine. He had brought sixty spearmen in his entourage and told us another hundred were already following him southwards. More would come, he said, for Cuneglas expected to fight and he was generously providing every warrior he commanded. His sixty warriors now squatted with Arthur’s men around the edges of Glevum’s great hall as their lords talked in the hall’s centre. Only Sagramor was not there, for he was with his remaining spearmen harrying Cerdic’s army near Corinium. Meurig was present, and unable to hide his annoyance that Merlin had taken the large chair at the head of the table. Cuneglas and Arthur flanked Merlin, Meurig faced Merlin down the table’s length and Culhwch and I had the other two places. Culhwch had come to Glevum with Cuneglas and his arrival had been like a gust of fresh clean air in a smoky hall. He could not wait to fight. He declared that with Mordred dead Arthur was King of Dumnonia and Culhwch was ready to wade through blood to protect his cousin’s throne. Cuneglas and I shared that belligerence, Meurig squeaked about prudence, Arthur said nothing, while Merlin appeared to be asleep. I doubted he was sleeping for a small smile showed on his face, but his eyes were closed as he pretended to be blissfully unaware of all we said.

Culhwch scorned Bors’s message. He insisted Lancelot would never kill Guinevere, and that all Arthur needed to do was ride south at the head of his men and the throne would fall into his hands. ‘Tomorrow!’

Culhwch told Arthur. ‘We’ll ride tomorrow. It’ll all be over in two days.’

Cuneglas was slightly more cautious, advising Arthur that he should wait for the rest of his Powysian spearmen to arrive, but once those men had come he was sure we should declare war and go southwards. ‘How big is Lancelot’s army?’ he asked.

Arthur shrugged. ‘Not counting Cerdic’s men? Maybe three hundred?’

‘Nothing!’ Culhwch roared. ‘Have them dead before breakfast.’

‘And a lot of fiery Christians,’ Arthur warned him.

Culhwch offered an opinion of Christians that had the Christian Meurig spluttering with indignation. Arthur calmed the young King of Gwent. ‘You’re all forgetting something,’ he said mildly. ‘I never wanted to be King. I still don’t.’

There was a momentary silence around the table, though some of the warriors at the hall’s edge muttered a protest at Arthur’s words. ‘Whatever you might want,’ Cuneglas broke our silence, ‘does not matter any more. The Gods, its seems, have made that decision for you.’

‘If the Gods wanted me to be King,’ Arthur said, ‘they would have arranged for my mother to have been married to Uther.’

‘So what do you want?’ Culhwch bellowed in despair.

‘I want Guinevere and Gwydre back,’ Arthur said softly. ‘And Cerdic defeated,’ he added before staring down at the table’s scarred top for a moment. ‘I want to live,’ he went on, ‘like an ordinary man. With a wife and a son and a house and a farm. I want peace,’ and for once he was not talking of all Britain, but just of himself. ‘I don’t want to be tangled in oaths, I don’t want to be forever dealing with men’s ambitions and I don’t want to be the arbiter of men’s happiness any more. I just want to do what King Tewdric did. I want to find a green place and live there.’

‘And rot away?’ Merlin gave up his pretence of sleep.

Arthur smiled. ‘There is so much to learn, Merlin. Why does a man make two swords from the same metal in the same fire and one blade will be true and the other will bend in its first battle? There is so much to find out.’

‘He wants to be a blacksmith,’ Merlin said to Culhwch.

‘What I want is Guinevere and Gwydre back,’ Arthur declared firmly.

‘Then you must take Lancelot’s oath,’ Meurig said.

‘If he goes to Caer Cadarn to take Lancelot’s oath,’ I said bitterly, ‘he’ll be met by a hundred armed men and cut down like a dog.’

‘Not if I take Kings with me,’ Arthur said gently.

We all stared at him and he seemed surprised that we had been nonplussed by his words. ‘Kings?’

Culhwch finally broke the silence.

Arthur smiled. ‘If my Lord King Cuneglas and my Lord King Meurig were to ride with me to Caer Cadarn then I doubt that Lancelot would dare to kill me. If he’s faced by the Kings of Britain he will have to talk, and if he talks we shall come to an agreement. He fears me, but if he discovers there is nothing to fear, he will let me live. And he will let my family live.’

There was another silence while we digested that, then Culhwch roared a protest. ‘You’d let that bastard Lancelot be King?’ Some of the spearmen at the hall’s edge growled their agreement.

‘Cousin, cousin!’ Arthur soothed Culhwch. ‘Lancelot is not an evil man. He’s weak, I think, but not evil. He doesn’t make plans, he has no dreams, but only a greedy eye and quick hands. He snatches things as they appear, then hoards them and waits for another thing to snatch. He wants me dead now, because he fears me, but when he discovers the price of my death is too high, then he’ll accept what he can get.’

‘He’ll accept your death, you fool!’ Culhwch hammered the table with his fist. ‘He’ll tell you a thousand lies, protest his friendship and slide a sword between your ribs the moment your Kings have gone home.’

‘He’ll lie to me,’ Arthur agreed placidly. ‘All kings lie. No kingdom could be ruled without lies, for lies are the things we use to build our reputations. We pay the bards to make our squalid victories into great triumphs and sometimes we even believe the lies they sing to us. Lancelot would love to believe all those songs, but the truth is that he’s weak and he desperately craves strong friends. He fears me now, for he assumes my enmity, but when he discovers I am not an enemy then he will also find that he needs me. He will need every man he can find if he’s to rid Dumnonia of Cerdic’

‘And who invited Cerdic into Dumnonia?’ Culhwch protested. ‘Lancelot did!’

‘And he’ll regret it soon,’ Arthur said calmly. ‘He used Cerdic to snatch his prize, and he’ll find Cerdic is a dangerous ally.’

‘You’d fight for Lancelot?’ I asked, horrified.

‘I will fight for Britain,’ Arthur said firmly. ‘I can’t ask men to die to make me what I don’t want to be, but I can ask them to fight for their homes and their wives and their children. And that’s what I fight for. For Guinevere. And to defeat Cerdic, and once he is defeated, what does it matter if Lancelot rules Dumnonia? Someone has to and I dare say he’ll make a better King that Mordred ever did.’ Again there was silence. A hound whined at the edge of the hall and a spearman sneezed. Arthur looked at us and saw we were still bemused. ‘If I fight Lancelot,’ he told us, ‘then we go back to the Britain we had before Lugg Vale. A Britain in which we fight each other instead of the Saxons. There is only one principle here, and that is Uther’s old insistence that the Saxons must be kept from the Severn Sea. And now,’ he said vigorously, ‘the Saxons are closer to the Severn than they’ve ever been. If I tight for a throne I don’t want I give Cerdic the chance to take Corinium and then this city, and if he does take Cilevum then he has split us into two parts. If I fight Lancelot then the Saxons will win everything. They’ll take Dumnonia and Gwent and after that they’ll go north into Powys.’

‘Exactly.’ Meurig applauded Arthur.

‘I won’t fight for Lancelot,’ I said angrily and Culhwch applauded me. Arthur smiled at me. ‘My dear friend Derfel, I would not expect you to fight for Lancelot, though I do want your men to fight Cerdic. And my price for helping Lancelot defeat Cerdic is that he gives you Dinas and Lavaine.’

I stared at him. I had not understood till that moment just how far ahead he had been thinking. The rest of us had seen nothing but Lancelot’s treachery, but Arthur was thinking only of Britain and of the desperate need to keep the Saxons away from the Severn. He would brush Lancelot’s hostility aside, force my revenge on him, then go on with the work of defeating Saxons.

‘And the Christians?’ Culhwch asked derisively. ‘You think they’ll let you back into Dumnonia? You think those bastards won’t build a bonfire for you?’

Meurig squawked another protest that Arthur stilled. ‘The Christian fervour will spend itself,’ Arthur said. ‘It’s like a madness, and once it’s exhausted they’ll go home to pick up the pieces of their lives. And once Cerdic is defeated Lancelot can pacify Dumnonia. I shall just live with my family, which is all I want.’

Cuneglas had been leaning back in his chair to stare at the remaining patches of Roman paintings on the hall’s ceiling. Now he straightened and looked at Arthur. ‘Tell me again what you want,’ he asked softly.

‘I want the Britons at peace,’ Arthur said patiently, ‘and I want Cerdic pushed back, and I want my family.’

Cuneglas looked at Merlin. ‘Well, Lord?’ he invited the old man’s judgment. Merlin had been tying two of his beard braids into knots, but now he looked mildly startled and hastily untangled the strands. ‘I doubt that the Gods want what Arthur wants,’ he said. ‘You are all forgetting the Cauldron.’

‘This has nothing to do with the Cauldron,’ Arthur said firmly.

‘It has everything to do with it,’ Merlin said with a sudden and surprising harshness, ‘and the Cauldron brings chaos. You desire order, Arthur, and you think that Lancelot will listen to your reason and that Cerdic will submit to your sword, but your reasonable order will no more work in the future than it worked in the past. Do you really think men and women thanked you for bringing them peace? They just became bored with your peace and so brewed their own trouble to fill the boredom. Men don’t want peace, Arthur, they want distraction from tedium, while you desire tedium like a thirsty man seeks mead. Your reason won’t defeat the Gods, and the Gods will make sure of that. You think you can crawl away to a homestead and play at being a blacksmith? No.’ Merlin gave an evil smile and picked up his long black staff. ‘Even at this moment,’ Merlin said, ‘the Gods are making trouble for you.’ He pointed the staff at the hall’s front doors. ‘Behold your trouble, Arthur ap Uther.’

We all turned to see Galahad standing in the doorway. He was clothed in mail armour, had a sword at his side and spatters of mud up to his waist. And with him was a miserable, club-footed, squashed-nosed, round-faced, skimpy-bearded brush-head.

For Mordred still lived.

There was an astonished silence. Mordred limped into the hall and his small eyes betrayed his resentment for the lack of welcome. Arthur just stared at his oath-lord and I knew he was undoing in his head all the careful plans he had just described to us. There could be no reasonable peace with Lancelot, for Arthur’s oath-lord still lived. Dumnonia still possessed a King, and it was not Lancelot. It was Mordred and Mordred had Arthur’s oath.

Then the silence broke as men gathered round the King to discover his news. Galahad stepped aside to embrace me. ‘Thank God you live,’ he said with heartfelt relief.

I smiled at my friend. ‘Do you expect me to thank you for saving my King’s life?’ I asked him.

‘Someone should, for he hasn’t. He’s an ungrateful little beast,’ Galahad said. ‘God knows why he lives and so many good men died. Llywarch, Bedwyr, Dagonet, Blaise. All gone.’ He was naming those of Arthur’s warriors who had been killed in Durnovaria. Some of the deaths I had already known, others were new to me, but Galahad did know more about the manner of their deaths. He had been in Durnovaria when the rumour of Mordred’s death had sparked the Christians into riot, but Galahad swore there had been spearmen among the rioters. He believed Lancelot’s men had infiltrated the town under the guise of pilgrims travelling to Ynys Wydryn and that those spearmen had led the massacre. ‘Most of Arthur’s men were in the taverns,’ he said, ‘and they stood little chance. A few survived, but God alone knows where they are now.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘This isn’t Christ’s doing, Derfel, you do know that, don’t you? It’s the devil at work.’ He gave me a pained, almost frightened look. ‘Is it true about Dian?’

‘True,’ I said. Galahad embraced me wordlessly. He had never married and had no children, but he loved my daughters. He loved all children. ‘Dinas and Lavaine killed her,’ I told him, ‘and they live still.’

‘My sword is yours,’ he said.

‘I know it,’ I said.

‘And if this was Christ’s doing,’ Galahad said earnestly, ‘then Dinas and Lavaine would not be serving Lancelot.’

‘I don’t blame your God,’ I told him. ‘I don’t blame any God.’ I turned to watch the commotion around Mordred. Arthur was shouting for silence and order, servants had been sent to bring food and clothes fit for a King and other men were trying to hear his news. ‘Didn’t Lancelot demand your oath?’ I asked Galahad.

‘He didn’t know I was in Durnovaria. I was staying with Bishop Emrys and the Bishop gave me a monk’s robe to wear over this,’ he patted his mail coat, ‘then I went north. Poor Emrys is distraught. He thinks his Christians have gone mad and I think they have too. I suppose I could have stayed and fought, but I didn’t. I ran. I had heard that you and Arthur were dead, but I didn’t believe it. I thought I’d find you, but I found our King instead.’ He told me how Mordred had been hunting boar north of Durnovaria, and Lancelot, Galahad believed, had sent men to intercept the King as he returned to Durnovaria; but some village girl had taken Mordred’s fancy and by the time he and his companions were done with her it was near dark, and so he had commandeered the village’s largest house and ordered food. His assassins had waited at the city’s northern gate while Mordred feasted a dozen miles away, and some time during that evening Lancelot’s men must have decided to start the killing even though the Dumnonian King had somehow escaped their ambush. They had spread a rumour of his death and used that rumour to justify Lancelot’s usurpation.

Mordred heard of the troubles when the first fugitives arrived from Durnovaria. Most of his companions had melted away, the villagers were summoning the courage to kill the King who had raped one of their girls and stolen much of their food, and Mordred had panicked. He and his last friends fled north in villagers’ clothes. ‘They were trying to reach Caer Cadarn,’ Galahad told me, ‘reckoning they’d find loyal spearmen there, but they found me instead. I was aiming to reach your house, but we heard your folk had fled, so I brought him north.’

‘Did you see Saxons?’

He shook his head. ‘They’re in the Thames Valley. We avoided it.’ He stared at the jostling crowd around Mordred. ‘So what happens now?’ he asked.

Mordred had firm ideas. He was robed in a borrowed cloak and sitting at the table where he crammed bread and salt beef into his mouth. He was demanding that Arthur march south immediately, and whenever Arthur tried to interrupt, the King would slap the table and repeat his demand. ‘Are you denying your oath?’ Mordred finally shouted at Arthur, spewing half chewed scraps of bread and beef.

‘The Lord Arthur,’ Cuneglas answered acidly, ‘is trying to preserve his wife and child.’

Mordred looked blankly at the Powysian King. ‘Above my kingdom?’ he finally asked.

‘If Arthur goes to war,’ Cuneglas explained to Mordred, ‘Guinevere and Gwydre die.’

‘So we do nothing?’ Mordred screamed. He was hysterical.

‘We give the matter thought,’ Arthur said bitterly.

‘Thought?’ Mordred shouted, then stood up. ‘You’ll just think while that bastard rules my land? Do you have an oath?’ he demanded of Arthur. ‘And what use are these men if you won’t fight?’ He waved at the spearmen who now stood in a ring about the table. ‘You’ll fight for me, that’s what you’ll do!

That’s what your oath demands. You’ll fight!’ He slapped the table again. ‘You don’t think! You fight!’

I had taken enough. Perhaps the dead soul of my daughter came to me at that moment, for almost without thinking I strode forward and unbuckled my sword belt. I stripped Hywelbane oft the belt, threw the sword down, then folded the leather strap in two. Mordred watched me and spluttered a feeble protest as I approached him, but no one moved to stop me.

I reached my King’s side, paused, then struck him hard across the face with the doubled belt. ‘That,’ I said, ‘is not in return for the blows you gave me, but for my daughter, and this,’ — I struck him again, much harder — ‘is for your failure to keep the oath to guard your kingdom.’

Spearmen bellowed approval. Mordred’s lower lip was trembling as it had when he had taken all those beatings as a child. His cheeks were reddened from the blows and a trickle of blood showed at a tiny cut under his eye. He touched a finger to that blood, then spat a gob of half-chewed beef and bread into my face. ‘You’ll die for that,’ he promised me, and then, in a swelling rage, he tried to slap me.

‘How could I defend the kingdom?’ he shouted. ‘You weren’t there! Arthur wasn’t there.’ He tried to slap me a second time, but again I parried his blow with my arm, then lifted the belt to give him another beating.

Arthur, horrified at my behaviour, pushed down my arm and dragged me away. Mordred followed, flailing at me with his fists, but then a black staff struck his arm hard and he turned in fury to assault his new attacker.

But it was Merlin who now towered above the angry King. ‘Hit me, Mordred,’ the Druid said quietly,

‘and I shall turn you into a toad and feed you to the serpents of Annwn.’

Mordred gazed at the Druid, but said nothing. He did try to push the staff away, but Merlin held it firm and used it to thrust the young King back towards his chair. ‘Tell me, Mordred,’ Merlin said as he pushed Mordred back down into the chair, ‘why you sent Arthur and Derfel so far away?’

Mordred shook his head. He was frightened of this new, straight-backed, towering Merlin. He had only ever known the Druid as a frail old man sunning himself in Lindinis’s garden and this re-invigorated Merlin with his wrapped and plaited beard terrified him.

Merlin raised his staff and slammed it down on the table. ‘Why?’ he asked gently when the echo of the staff’s blow had died away.

‘To arrest Ligessac,’ Mordred whispered.

‘You squirming little fool,’ Merlin said. ‘A child could have arrested Ligessac. Why did you send Arthur and Derfel?’

Mordred just shook his head.

Merlin sighed. ‘It has been a long time, young Mordred, since I used the greater magic. I am sadly out of practice, but I think, with Nimue’s help, I can turn your urine into the black pus that stings like a wasp every time you piss. I can addle your brain, what there is of it, and I can make your manhood,’ the staff suddenly quivered at Mordred’s groin, ‘shrivel to the size of a dried bean. All that I can do, Mordred, and all that I will do unless you tell me the truth.’ He smiled, and there was more threat in that smile than in the poised staff. ‘Tell me, dear boy, why you sent Arthur and Derfel to Cadoc’s camp?’

Mordred’s lower lip was trembling. ‘Because Sansum told me to.’

‘The mouse-lord!’ Merlin exclaimed as though the answer surprised him. He smiled again, or at least he bared his teeth. ‘I have another question, Mordred,’ he continued, ‘and if you do not give me the truth then your bowels will disgorge toads in slime, your belly will be a nest of worms and your throat will brim with their bile. I will make you shake incessantly, so that all your life, all your whole life, you will be a toad-shitting, worm-eaten, bile-spitting shudderer. I will make you,’ he paused and lowered his voice,

‘even more horrible than your mother did. So, Mordred, tell me what the mouse-lord promised would happen if you sent Arthur and Derfel away.’

Mordred stared in terror at Merlin’s face.

Merlin waited. No answer came so he raised the staff towards the hall’s high roof. ‘In the name of Bel,’ he intoned sonorously, ‘and his toad-Lord Callyc, and in the name of Sucellos and his worm-master Horfael, and in the name of. .’

‘They would be killed!’ Mordred squealed desperately.

The staff was slowly lowered so that it pointed again at Mordred’s face. ‘He promised you what, dear boy?’ Merlin asked.

Mordred squirmed in his chair, but there was no escape from that staff. He swallowed, looked left and right, but there was no help for him in the hall. ‘That they would be killed,’ Mordred admitted, ‘by the Christians.’

‘And why would you want that?’ Merlin inquired.

Mordred hesitated, but Merlin raised the staff high again and the boy blurted out his confession.

‘Because I can’t be King while he lives!’

‘You thought Arthur’s death would free you to behave as you like?’

‘Yes!’

‘And you believed Sansum was your friend?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you never once thought that Sansum might want you dead, too?’ Merlin shook his head. ‘What a silly boy you are. Don’t you know that Christians never do anything right? Even their first one got himself nailed to a cross. That’s not the way efficient Gods behave, not at all. Thank you, Mordred, for our conversation.’ He smiled, shrugged and walked away. ‘Just trying to help,’ he said as he went past Arthur.

Mordred appeared as if he already had the shakes threatened by Merlin. He clung to the arms of the chair, quivering, and tears showed at his eyes for the humiliations he had just suffered. He did try to recover some of his pride by pointing at me and demanding that Arthur arrest me.

‘Don’t be a fool!’ Arthur turned on him angrily. ‘You think we can regain your throne without Derfel’s men?’ Mordred said nothing, and that petulant silence goaded Arthur into a fury like the one which had caused me to hit my King. ‘It can be done without you!’ he snarled at Mordred, ‘and whatever is done, you will stay here, under guard!’ Mordred gaped up at him and a tear fell to dilute the tiny trace of blood.

‘Not as a prisoner, Lord King,’ Arthur explained wearily, ‘but to preserve your life from the hundreds of men who would like to take it.’

‘So what will you do?’ Mordred asked, utterly pathetic now.

‘As I told you,’ Arthur said scornfully, ‘I will give the matter thought.’ And he would say no more. The shape of Lancelot’s design was at least plain now. Sansum had plotted Arthur’s death, Lancelot had sent men to procure Mordred’s death and then followed with his army in the belief that every obstacle to Dumnonia’s throne had been eliminated and that the Christians, whipped to fury by Sansum’s busy missionaries, would kill any remaining enemies while Cerdic held Sagramor’s men at bay. But Arthur lived, and Mordred lived too, and so long as Mordred lived Arthur had an oath to keep and that oath meant we had to go to war. It did not matter that the war might open Severn’s valley to the Saxons, we had to fight Lancelot. We were oath-locked.

Meurig would commit no spearmen to the fight against Lancelot. He claimed he needed all his men to guard his own frontiers against a possible attack from Cerdic or Aelle and nothing anyone said could dissuade him. He did agree to leave his garrison in Glevum, thus freeing its Dumnonian garrison to join Arthur’s troops, but he would give nothing more. ‘He’s a yellow little bastard,’ Culhwch growled.

‘He’s a sensible young man,’ Arthur said. ‘His aim is to preserve his kingdom.’ He spoke to us, his war commanders, in a hall at Glevum’s Roman baths. The room had a tiled floor and an arched ceiling where the painted remnants of naked nymphs were being chased by a faun through swirls of leaves and flowers.

Cuneglas was generous. The spearmen he had brought from Caer Sws would be sent under Culhwch’s command to help Sagramor’s men. Culhwch swore he would do nothing to aid Mordred’s restoration, but he had no qualms about fighting Cerdic’s warriors and that was still Sagramor’s task. Once the Numidian was reinforced by the men from Powys he would drive south, cut off the Saxons who were besieging Corinium and so embroil Cerdic’s men in a campaign that would keep them from helping Lancelot in Dumnonia’s heartland. Cuneglas promised us all the help he could, but said it would take at least two weeks to assemble his full force and bring it south to Glevum. Arthur had precious few men in Glevum. He had the thirty men who had gone north to arrest Ligessac who now lay in chains in Glevum, and he had my men, and to those he could add the seventy spearmen who had formed Glevum’s small garrison. Those numbers were being swollen daily by the refugees who managed to escape the rampaging Christian bands who still hunted down any pagans left in Dumnonia. We heard that many such fugitives were still in Dumnonia, some of them holding out in ancient earth forts or deep in the woodlands, but others came to Glevum and among them was Morfans the Ugly, who had escaped the massacre in Durnovaria’s taverns. Arthur put him in charge of the Glevum forces and ordered him to march them south towards Aquae Sulis. Galahad would go with him. ‘Don’t accept battle,’ Arthur warned both men, ‘just goad the enemy, harry them, annoy them. Stay in the hills, stay nimble, and keep them looking this way. When my Lord King comes’ — he meant Cuneglas — ’you can join his army and march south on Caer Cadarn.’

Arthur declared that he would fight with neither Sagramor nor Morfans, but would instead go to seek Aelle’s help. Arthur knew better than anyone that the news of his plans would be carried south. There were plenty enough Christians in Glevum who believed Arthur was the Enemy of God and who saw in Lancelot the heavensent forerunner of Christ’s return to earth; Arthur wanted those Christians to send their messages south into Dumnonia and he wanted those messages to tell Lancelot that Arthur dared not risk Guinevere’s life by marching against him. Instead Arthur was going to beg Aelle to carry his axes and spears against Cerdic’s men. ‘Derfel will come with me,’ he told us now. I did not want to accompany Arthur. There were other interpreters, I protested, and my only wish was to join Morfans and so march south into Dumnonia. I did not want to face my father, Aelle. I wanted to fight, not to put Mordred back on his throne, but to topple Lancelot and to find Dinas and Lavaine. Arthur refused me. ‘You will come with me, Derfel,’ he ordered, ‘and we shall take forty men with us.’

‘Forty?’ Morfans objected. Forty was a large number to strip from his small war-band that had to distract Lancelot.

Arthur shrugged. ‘I dare not look weak to Aelle,’ he said, ‘indeed I should take more, but forty men may be sufficient to convince him that I’m not desperate.’ He paused. ‘There is one last thing,’ he spoke in a heavy voice that caught the attention of men preparing to leave the bath house. ‘Some of you are not inclined to fight for Mordred,’ Arthur admitted. ‘Culhwch has already left Dumnonia, Derfel will doubtless leave when this war is done, and who knows how many others of you will go? Dumnonia cannot afford to lose such men.’ He paused. It had begun to rain and water dripped from the bricks that showed between the patches of painted ceiling. ‘I have talked to Cuneglas,’ Arthur said, acknowledging the King of Powys’s presence with an inclination of his head, ‘and I have talked with Merlin, and what we talked about are the ancient laws and customs of our people. What I do, I would do within the law, and I cannot free you of Mordred for my oath forbids it and the ancient law of our people cannot condone it.’ He paused again, his right hand unconsciously gripping Excalibur’s hilt. ‘But,’ he went on,

‘the law does allow one thing. If a king is unfit to rule, then his Council may rule in his stead as long as the king is accorded the honour and privileges of his rank. Merlin assures me this is so, and King Cuneglas affirms that it happened in the reign of his great-grandfather Brychan.’

‘Mad as a bat! Cuneglas put in cheerfully.

Arthur half smiled, then frowned as he gathered his thoughts. ‘This is not what I ever wanted,’ he protested quietly, his sombre voice echoing in the dripping chamber, ‘but I shall propose to the Council of Dumnonia that it should rule in Mordred’s place.’

‘Yes!’ Culhwch shouted.

Arthur hushed him. ‘I had hoped,’ he said, ‘that Mordred would learn responsibility, but he has not. I don’t care that he wanted me dead, but I do care that he lost his kingdom. He broke his acclamation oath and I doubt now that he will ever be able to keep that oath.’ He paused, and many of us must have reflected on how long it had taken Arthur to understand something that had seemed so obvious to the rest of us. For years he had stubbornly resisted acknowledging Mordred’s unfitness to rule, but now, after Mordred had lost his kingdom and, which was much worse in Arthur’s eyes, he had failed to protect his subjects, Arthur was at last prepared to face the truth. Water dripped on his bare head, but he seemed oblivious of it. ‘Merlin tells me,’ he went on in a melancholy voice, ‘that Mordred is possessed of an evil spirit. I am not skilled in these things, but that verdict does not seem unlikely and so, if the Council agrees, I shall propose that after we have restored Mordred then we shall pay him all the honours due to our King. He can live in the Winter Palace, he can hunt, he can eat like a king and indulge all his appetites within the law, but he will not govern. I am proposing we give him all the privileges, but none of the duties of his throne.’

We cheered. How we cheered. For now, it seemed, we had something to fight for. Not for Mordred, that wretched toad, but for Arthur, because despite all his fine talk of the Council ruling Dumnonia in Mordred’s stead we all knew what his words meant. They meant that Arthur would be Dumnonia’s King in all but name and for that good end we would carry our spears to war. We cheered, for now we had a cause to fight and die for. We had Arthur.

Arthur chose twenty of his best horsemen and insisted I choose twenty of my finest spearmen for our embassy to Aelle. ‘We must impress your father,’ he told me, ‘and you don’t impress a man by arriving with broken and ageing spearmen. We take our best men.’ He also insisted that Nimue accompany us. He would have preferred Merlin’s company, but the Druid declared he was too old for the long journey and proposed Nimue instead.

We left Mordred guarded by Meurig’s spearmen. “Mordred knew of Arthur’s plans for him, but he had no allies in Glevum and no defiance in his rotten soul, though he did have the satisfaction of watching Ligessac being strangled in the forum and after that slow death Mordred stood on the terrace of the great hall and made a mumbling speech in which he threatened an equal fate to all the other traitors in Dumnonia, then he went sullenly back to his quarters while we followed Culhwch eastwards. Culhwch had gone to join Sagramor and help launch the attack that we all hoped would save Corinium. Arthur and I marched into the high fine countryside that was Gwent’s rich eastern province. It was a place of lavish villas, vast farms and great wealth, most of it grown on the backs of the sheep that grazed the rolling hills. We marched beneath two banners. Arthur’s bear and my own star, and we stayed well north of the Dumnonian frontier so that all the news going to Lancelot would tell him that Arthur was offering his stolen throne no threat. Nimue walked with us. Merlin had somehow persuaded her to wash and find clean clothes, and then, in despair at ever untangling the matted filth of her hair, he had cut it short and burned the dirt-encrusted tresses. The short hair looked good on her, she wore an eyepatch again and carried a staff, but no other baggage. She walked barefoot and she walked reluctantly for she had not wanted to come, but Merlin had persuaded her, though Nimue still claimed her presence was wasteful. ‘Any fool can defeat a Saxon wizard,’ she told Arthur as we neared the end of the first day’s march. ‘Just spit on them, roll your eyes and wave a chicken bone. That’s all it needs.’

‘We won’t see any Saxon wizards,’ Arthur answered calmly. We were in open country now, far from any villas, and he stopped his horse, raised his hand and waited for the men to gather around him. ‘We won’t see any wizards,’ he told us, ‘because we’re not going to see Aelle. We’re going south into our own country. A long way south.’

‘To the sea?’ I guessed.

He smiled. ‘To the sea.’ He folded his hands on his saddle bar. ‘We are few,’ he told us, ‘and Lancelot has many, but Nimue can make us a charm of concealment and we shall march by night and we shall march hard.’ He smiled and shrugged. ‘I can do nothing while my wife and son are prisoners, but if we free them, then I am free too. And when I am free I can fight against Lancelot, but you should know that we will be far from help and deep in a Dumnonia that is held by our enemies. Once I have Guinevere and Gwydre then I do not know how we shall escape, but Nimue will help us. The Gods will help us, but if any of you fear the task, then you may go back now.’

None did, and he must have known that none would. These forty were our best men and they would have followed Arthur into the serpent’s pit. Arthur, of course, had told no one but Merlin what he planned so that no hint of it could reach Lancelot’s ears; now he gave me a regretful shrug as though apologizing for deceiving me, but he must have known how pleased I was for we were not just going to where Guinevere and Gwydre were being held hostage, but to where Dian’s two killers believed they were safe from all revenge.

‘We go tonight,’ Arthur said, ‘and there’ll be no rest till dawn. We go south and by morning I want to be in the hills beyond the Thames.’

We put cloaks over our armour, muffled the horses’ hoofs with layers of cloth and then journeyed south through the gathering night. The horsemen led their beasts and Nimue led us, using her strange ability to find her way across unknown country in the darkness.

Sometime in that dark night we crossed into Dumnonia and, as we dropped from the hills down into the valley of the Thames, we saw, far off to our right, a glow in the sky that showed where Cerdic’s men were encamped outside Corinium. Once out of the hills our path inevitably took us through small dark villages where dogs barked at our passing, but no one questioned us. The inhabitants were either dead or else they feared we were Saxons, and so, like a band of ghosts, we passed them by. One of Arthur’s horsemen was a native of the river lands and he led us to a ford that came up to our chests. We held our weapons and bags of bread high, then forced our way through the strong current and so reached the far bank where Nimue hissed a spell of concealment towards a nearby village. By dawn we were in the southern hills, safe inside one of the Old People’s earth fortresses. We slept under the sun and at dark went south again. Our way led through a fine, rich land where no Saxon had yet set foot, but still no villager challenged us for no one but a fool questioned armed men who travelled by night in times of trouble. By daybreak we had reached the great plain and the rising sun cast the shadows of the Old People’s death mounds long across the pale grass. Some of the mounds still had treasures guarded by grave ghouls and those we avoided as we sought a grassy hollow where the horses could eat and we could rest.

In the next moonlight we passed the Stones, that great mysterious ring where Merlin had given Arthur his sword and where, so many years before, we had yielded the gold to Aelle before marching to Lugg Vale. Nimue glided among the great capped pillars, touching them with her staff, then standing in their centre with her eyes staring up at the stars. The moon was almost full and its light gave the Stones a pale luminosity. ‘Do they hold magic still?’ I asked her when she caught us up.

‘Some,’ she said, ‘but it’s fading, Derfel. All our magic is fading. We need the Cauldron.’ She smiled in the dark. ‘It isn’t far away now,’ she said, ‘I can feel it. It still lives, Derfel, and we’re going to find it and restore it to Merlin.’ There was a passion in her now, the same passion she had shown as we neared the end of the Dark Road. Arthur marched through the dark for his Guinevere, I for revenge and Nimue to summon the Gods with the Cauldron, but still we were few and the enemy was many. We were now deep inside Lancelot’s new land, yet we saw no evidence of his warriors nor any sign of the rabid Christian bands who were still said to be terrorizing the rural pagans. Lancelot’s spearmen had no business in this part of Dumnonia for they were watching the roads from Glevum, while the Christians must have gone to support his army in the belief it did Christ’s work, so we walked unmolested as we dropped down from the great plain onto the river lands of Dumnonia’s southern coast. We skirted the fortress town of Sorviodunum and smelt the smoke of the houses that had been burned there. Still no one challenged us because we walked beneath the near-full moon and were protected by Nimue’s spells.

We reached the sea on the fifth night. We had slipped past the Roman fortress of Vindocladia where Arthur was sure a garrison of Lancelot’s troops would be in place, and by dawn we were hidden in the deep woods above the creek where the Sea Palace stood. The palace was just a mile to our west and we had reached it undetected, coming like night ghosts in our own land. And we would make our attack at night too. Lancelot was using Guinevere as a shield, and we would take his shield away and, thus freed, carry our spears to his treacherous heart. But not for Mordred’s sake, for now we fought for Arthur and for the happy realm we saw beyond the war. As the bards now tell it, we fought for Camelot.

Most of the spearmen slept that day, but Arthur, Issa and I crawled to the edge of the wood and stared across the small valley at the Sea Palace.

It looked so fine with its white stone gleaming in the rising sun. We were gazing at its eastern flank from a crest that was slightly lower than the palace. Its eastern wall was broken by only three small windows so that it looked to us like a great white fortress on a green hill, though that illusion was spoiled somewhat by the great sign of the fish that had been crudely smeared in pitch on the limewashed wall, presumably to guard the palace against the anger of any itinerant Christians. The long southern facade which overlooked the creek and the sea that lay beyond a sandy island on the creek’s southern bank was where the Roman builders had put their windows, just as they had relegated the kitchens and slave quarters and granaries to the northern ground behind the villa where Gwenhwyvach’s timber house stood. There was now a small village of thatched huts there as well, I guessed for the spearmen and their families, and a tangle of smoke trails rose from the huts’ cooking-fires. Beyond the huts were the orchards and vegetable fields, and beyond them again, bordered by the deep woods that grew thick in this part of the country, lay fields of partly cut hay.

In front of the palace, and just as I remembered them from that distant day when I had taken Arthur’s precious oath on the Round Table, the two embankments topped by arcades stretched towards the creek. The palace was all sunlit, so white and grand and beautiful. ‘If the Romans came back today,’

Arthur said proudly, ‘they would never know it had been rebuilt.’

‘If the Romans came back today,’ Issa said, ‘they’d have a proper fight on their hands.’ I had insisted that he come to the trees’ edge for I knew of no one with better eyesight and we needed to spend this day discovering just how many guards Lancelot had put in the Sea Palace. We counted no more than a dozen guards that morning. Just after dawn two men climbed to a wooden platform that had been built onto the roof’s summit and from there they watched the road that led north. Four other spearmen paced up and down the nearest arcade, and it seemed sensible to deduce that four more would be stationed on the western arcade that was hidden from us. The other guards were all on the land that lay between a stone balustraded terrace at the bottom of the gardens and the creek, a patrol that evidently guarded the paths that led along the coast. Issa, divested of his armour and helmet, made a reconnaissance in that direction, creeping through the woods in an attempt to see the villa’s facade between the twin arcades.

Arthur gazed fixedly at the palace. He was quietly elated, knowing that he was on the brink of a daring rescue that would send a shock through Lancelot’s new kingdom. Indeed, I had rarely seen Arthur so happy as he was that day. By coming deep into Dumnonia he had cut himself off from the responsibilities of government and now, as in the long-ago past, his future depended only on the skill of his sword. ‘Do you ever think of marriage, Derfel?’ he suddenly asked me.

‘No, Lord,’ I said. ‘Ceinwyn has sworn never to marry, and I see no need to challenge her.’ I smiled and touched my lover’s ring with its little scrap of the Cauldron’s gold. ‘Mind you,’ I went on, ‘I think we’re more married than most couples who’ve ever stood before a Druid or a priest.’

‘I don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘Do you ever think about marriage?’ He stressed the word ‘about’.

‘No, Lord,’ I said. ‘Not really.’

‘Dogged Derfel,’ he teased me. ‘When I die,’ he said dreamily, ‘I think I want a Christian burial.’

‘Why?’ I asked, horrified, and touching my mail coat so that its iron would deflect evil.

‘Because I shall lie with my Guinevere for all time,’ he said, ‘she and I, in one tomb, together.’

I thought of Norwenna’s flesh hanging off her yellow bones and grimaced. ‘You’ll be in the Otherworld with her, Lord.’

‘Our souls will, yes,’ he admitted, ‘and our shadowbodies will be there, but why can’t these bodies lie hand in hand as well?’

I shook my head. ‘Be burned,’ I said, ‘unless you want your soul to wander lost across Britain.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said lightly. He was lying on his belly, hidden from the villa by a screen of ragwort and cornflowers. Neither of us was in our armour. We would don that war finery at dusk before we came out of the dark to slaughter Lancelot’s guards. ‘What makes you and Ceinwyn happy?’ Arthur asked me. He had not shaved since we had left Glevum and the stubble of his new beard was growing grey.

‘Friendship,’ I said.

He frowned. ‘Just that?’

I thought about it. In the distance the first slaves were going to the hayfields, their sickles catching the morning sun in bright glints. Small boys were running up and down the vegetable gardens to frighten the jays away from the pea plants and the rows of gooseberries, redcurrants and raspberries, while nearer, where some convolvulus trailed pink on brambles, a group of greenfinches quarrelled noisily. It seemed that no Christian rabble had disturbed this place, indeed it seemed impossible that Dumnonia was at war at all. ‘I still feel a pang every time I look at her,’ I admitted.

‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ he said enthusiastically. ‘A pang! A quickness in the heart.’

‘Love,’ I said drily.

‘We’re lucky, you and I,’ he said, smiling. ‘It’s friendship, it’s love, and it’s still something more. It’s what the Irish call anmchara, a soul friend. Who else do you want to talk to at the day’s end? I love the evenings when we can just sit and talk and the sun goes down and moths come in to the candles.’

‘And we talk of children,’ I said, and wished I had not, ‘and of servants’ quarrels, and whether the cross-eyed kitchen slave is pregnant again, and we wonder who broke the pothook, and whether the thatch needs repair or whether it will last another year, and we try to work out what to do about the old dog that can’t walk any more, and what excuse Cadell will conjure up for not paying his rent again, and we discuss whether the flax has steeped enough, and if we should rub butterwort on the cows’ udders to improve their yield. That’s what we talk of.’

He laughed. ‘Guinevere and I talk of Dumnonia. Of Britain. And, of course, about Isis.’ Some of his enthusiasm dissipated at the mention of that name, but then he shrugged. ‘Not that we’re together often enough. That’s why I always hoped Mordred would take the burden, then I would be here all my days.’

‘Talking of broken pothooks instead of Isis?’ I teased him.

‘Of those and everything else,’ he said warmly. ‘I’ll farm this land one day, and Guinevere will go on with her work.’

‘Her work?’

He smiled wryly. ‘To know Isis. She tells me that if she can just make contact with the Goddess then the power will flow back down to the world.’ He shrugged, sceptical as always of such extravagant religious claims. Only Arthur would have dared plunge Excalibur into the soil and challenge Gofannon to come to his aid, for he did not really believe Gofannon would ever come. We are to the Gods, he once told me, like mice in a thatch, and we survive only so long as we are not noticed. But love alone demanded that he extend a wry tolerance to Guinevere’s passion. ‘I wish I could be more convinced of Isis,’ he admitted to me now, ‘but, of course, men aren’t part of her mysteries.’ He smiled. ‘Guinevere even calls Gwydre Horus.’

‘Horus?’

‘Isis’s son,’ he explained. ‘Ugly name.’

‘Not as bad as Wygga,” I said.

‘Who?’ he asked, then suddenly stiffened. ‘Look!’ he said excitedly, ‘look!’

I raised my head to peer over the flowery screen and there was Guinevere. Even from a quarter mile away she was unmistakable, for her red hair sprang in an unruly mass above the long blue robe she wore. She was walking along the nearer arcade towards the small open pavilion at its seaward end. Three maidservants walked behind with two of her deerhounds. The guards stepped aside and bowed as she passed. Once at the pavilion Guinevere sat at a stone table and the three maids served her breakfast.

‘She’ll be eating fruit,’ Arthur said fondly. ‘In summer she’ll eat nothing else in the morning.’ He smiled.

‘If she just knew how close I was!’

‘Tonight, Lord,’ I assured him, ‘you will be with her.’

He nodded. ‘At least they’re treating her well.’

‘Lancelot fears you too much to treat her badly, Lord.’

A few moments later Dinas and Lavaine appeared on the arcade. They wore their white Druidical robes and I touched Hywelbane’s hilt when I saw them and promised my daughter’s soul that her killers’

screams would make the whole Otherworld cringe in fear. The two Druids reached the pavilion, bowed to Guinevere, then joined her at the table. Gwydre came running a few moments later and we saw Guinevere ruffle his hair, then send him away in a servant’s keeping. ‘He’s a good boy,’ Arthur said fondly. ‘No deceit in him. Not like Amhar and Loholt. I failed them, didn’t I?’

‘They’re still young, Lord,’ I said.

‘But they serve my enemy now,’ he said bleakly. ‘What shall I do with them?’

Culhwch would doubtless have advised that he kill them, but I just shrugged. ‘Send them into exile,’ I said. The twins could join the unhappy men who had no oath-lord. They could sell their swords until at last they were killed in some unremembered battle against the Saxons or the Irish or the Scots. More women appeared on the arcade. Some were maids, while others were the attendants who served Guinevere as courtiers. Lunete, my old love, was probably one of those dozen women who were Guinevere’s confidantes and also the priestesses of her faith.

Sometime in the middle of the morning I fell asleep with my head cradled in my arms and my body lulled by the warmth of the summer sun. When I woke I found Arthur had gone and that Issa had returned. ‘Lord Arthur went back to the spearmen, Lord,’ he told me. I yawned. ‘What did you see?’

‘Another six men. All Saxon Guards.’

‘Lancelot’s Saxons?’

He nodded. ‘All of them in the big garden. Lord. But only the six. We’ve seen eighteen men altogether, and some others must stand guard at night, but even so there can’t be more than thirty of them altogether.’

I guessed he was right. Thirty men would be sufficient to guard this palace, and more would be superfluous especially when Lancelot needed every spear to guard his stolen kingdom. I raised my head to see the arcade was now empty except for the four guards who looked utterly bored. Two were sitting with their backs to pillars while the other two were chatting on the stone bench where Guinevere had taken her breakfast. Their spears were propped against the table. The two guards on the small roof platform looked equally lazy. The Sea Palace basked under a summer sun and no one there believed an enemy could be within a hundred miles. ‘You told Arthur about the Saxons?’ I asked Issa.

‘Yes, Lord. He said it was only to be expected. Lancelot will want her guarded well.’

‘Go and sleep,’ I told him. ‘I’ll watch now.’

He went and, despite my promise, I fell asleep again. I had walked all night and I was weary, and besides, there seemed no danger threatening at the edge of that summer wood. And so I slept only to be abruptly woken by a sudden barking and the scrabble of big paws.

I woke in terror to discover a brace of slavering deerhounds standing over me, one of the two was barking and the other growling. I reached for my knife, but then a woman’s voice shouted at the hounds.

‘Down!’ she called sharply. ‘Drudwyn, Gwen, down! Quiet!’ The dogs reluctantly lay flat and I turned to see Gwenhwyvach watching me. She was dressed in an old brown gown, had a shawl over her head and a basket in which she had been collecting wild herbs on her arm. Her face was plumper than ever and her hair, where it showed under the scarf, was untidy and tangled. ‘The sleeping Lord Derfel,’ she said happily.

I touched a finger to my lips and glanced towards the palace.

‘They won’t watch me,’ she said, ‘they don’t care about me. Besides, I often talk to myself. The mad do, you know.’

‘You’re not mad, Lady.’

‘I should like to be,’ she said. ‘I can’t think why anyone would want to be anything else in this world.’

She laughed, hitched up her gown and sat heavily beside me. She turned as the dogs growled at a noise behind me and watched with amusement as Arthur wriggled across the ground to join me. He must have heard the barking. ‘On your belly like a snake, Arthur?’ she asked.

Arthur, just like me, touched a ringer to his lips. ‘They don’t care about me,’ Gwenhwyvach said again. ‘Look!’ And she vigorously waved her arms towards the guards who simply shook their heads and turned away. ‘I don’t live,’ she said, ‘not as far as they’re concerned. I’m just the mad fat woman who walks the dogs.’ She waved again, and again the sentries ignored her. ‘Even Lancelot doesn’t notice me,’ she added sadly.

‘Is he here?’ Arthur asked.

‘Of course he isn’t here. He’s a long way away. So are you, I was told. Aren’t you supposed to be talking to the Saxons?’

‘I’m here to take Guinevere away,’ Arthur said, ‘and you too,’ he added gallantly.

‘I don’t want to be taken away,’ Gwenhwyvach protested. ‘And Guinevere doesn’t know you’re here.’

‘No one should know,’ Arthur said.

‘She should! Guinevere should! She stares into the oil pot. She says she can see the future there! But she didn’t see you, did she?’ She giggled, then turned and stared at Arthur as though she found his presence amusing. ‘You’re here to rescue her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tonight?’ Gwenhwyvach guessed.

‘Yes.’

‘She won’t thank you,’ Gwenhwyvach said, ‘not tonight. No clouds, you see?’ She waved at the almost cloudless sky. ‘Can’t worship Isis in cloud, you know, because the moon can’t get into the temple, and tonight she’s expecting the full moon. A big full moon, just like a fresh cheese.’ She ruffled the long hair of one of the hounds. ‘This one’s Drudwyn,’ she told us, ‘and he’s a bad boy. And this one’s Gwen. Plop!’ she said unexpectedly. ‘That’s how the moon comes, plop! Right into her temple.’

She laughed again. ‘Right down the shaft and plop onto the pit.’

‘Will Gwydre be in the temple?’ Arthur asked her.

‘Not Gwydre. Men aren’t allowed, that’s what I’m told,’ Gwenhwyvach said in a sarcastic voice, and she seemed about to say something else, but then just shrugged. ‘Gwydre will be put to bed,’ she said instead. She stared at the palace and a slow sly smile showed on her round face. ‘How will you get in, Arthur?’ she asked. ‘There are lots of bars on those doors and all the windows are shuttered.’

‘We shall manage,’ he said, ‘as long as you don’t tell anyone that you saw us.’

‘As long as you leave me here,’ Gwenhwyvach said, ‘I won’t even tell the bees. And I tell them everything. You have to, otherwise the honey goes sour. Isn’t that right, Gwen?’ she asked the bitch, ruffling its floppy ears.

‘I’ll leave you here if that’s what you want,’ Arthur promised her.

‘Just me,’ she said, ‘just me and the dogs and the bees. That’s all I want. Me and the dogs and the bees and the palace. Guinevere can have the moon.’ She smiled again, then poked my shoulder with a plump hand. ‘You remember that cellar door I took you through, Derfel? The one that leads from the garden?’

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘I’ll make sure it’s unbarred.’ She giggled again, anticipating some enjoyment. ‘I’ll hide in the cellar and unbar the door when they’re all waiting for the moon. There are no guards there at night because the door’s too thick. The guards are all in their huts or out the front.’ She twisted to look at Arthur. ‘You will come?’ she asked anxiously.

‘I promise,’ Arthur replied.

‘Guinevere will be pleased,’ Gwenhwyvach said. ‘And so will I.’ She laughed and lumbered to her feet. ‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘when the moon comes plopping in.’ And with that she walked away with the two hounds. She chuckled as she walked and even danced a pair of clumsy steps. ‘Plop!’ she called aloud, and the hounds frisked about her as she capered down the grassy slope.

‘Is she mad?’ I asked Arthur.

‘Bitter, I think.’ He watched her rotund figure go clumsily down the hill. ‘But she’ll let us in, Derfel, she’ll let us in.’ He smiled, then reached forward and picked a handful of cornflowers from the field’s edge. He arranged them into a small bunch then gave me a shy smile. ‘For Guinevere,’ he explained,

‘tonight.’

At dusk the haymakers, their work finished, came back from the fields and the roof guards climbed down their long ladder. The braziers on the arcade were filled with fresh wood that was set alight, but I guessed the fires were meant to illuminate the palace rather than to give warning of any enemy’s approach. Gulls were flying to their inland roosts and the setting sun made their wings as pink as the convolvulus entwined among the brambles.

Hack in the woods Arthur pulled on his scale armour. I le buckled Excalibur over the coat’s gleaming shimmer of metal, then draped a black cloak about his shoulders. He rarely wore black cloaks, preferring his white, but at night the dark garment would help to conceal us. He would carry his shining helmet under the cloak to hide its lavish plume of tall white goose feathers. Ten of his horsemen would stay in the trees. Their task was to wait for the sound of Arthur’s silver horn and then make a charge on the spearmen’s sleeping-huts. The big horses and their armoured riders, trampling huge and noisy out of the night, should serve to panic any guards who might interfere with our retreat. The horn, Arthur hoped, would not be sounded until we had found both Gwydre and Guinevere and were ready to leave.

The rest of us would make the long journey to the palace’s western side, and from there we would creep through the shadows of the kitchen gardens to reach the cellar door. If Gwenhwyvach failed in her promise then we would have to go round to the front of the palace, kill the guards and break through one of the window shutters on the terrace. Once inside the palace we were to kill every spearman we found. Nimue would come with us. When Arthur had finished speaking she told us that Dinas and Lavaine were not proper Druids, not like Merlin or old Iorweth, but she warned us that the Silurian twins did possess some strange powers and we should expect to face their wizardry. She had spent the afternoon searching the woods and now raised a bundled cloak that seemed to twitch as she held it, and that weird sight made my men touch their spearheads. ‘I have things here to check their spells,’ she told us, ‘but be careful.’

‘And I want Dinas and Lavaine alive,’ I told my men.

We waited, armoured and armed, forty men in steel and iron and leather. We waited as the sun died and as Isis’s full moon crept up from the sea like a great round silver ball. Nimue made her spells and some of us prayed. Arthur sat silent, but watched as I took from my pouch a little tress of golden hair. I kissed the unfaded hair, held it briefly against my cheek, then tied it around Hywelbane’s hilt. I felt a tear roll down my face as I thought of my little one in her shadow-body, but tonight, with the help of my Gods, I would give my Dian her peace.

I pulled on my helmet, buckled its chin strap and threw its wolf-hair plume back across my shoulders. We flexed our stiff leather gloves, then thrust our left arms into the shield loops. We drew our swords and held them out for Nimue’s touch. For a moment it looked as if Arthur wanted to say something more, but instead he just tucked his little bouquet of cornflowers into the neck of his scale armour, then nodded to Nimue who, cloaked in black and clutching her strange bundle, led us southwards through the trees.

Beyond the trees was a short meadow that sloped down to the creek’s bank. We crossed the dark meadow in single file, still out of sight of the palace. Our appearance startled some hares that had been feeding in the moonlight and they raced panicking away as we pushed through some low bushes and scrambled down a steep bank to reach the creek’s shingle beach. From there we walked west, hidden from the guards on the palace’s arcades by the high bank of the creek. The sea crashed and hissed to the south, its sound drowning out any noise our boots made on the shingle. I peered over the bank just once to see the Sea Palace poised like a great white wonder in the moonlight above the dark land. Its beauty reminded me of Ynys Trebes, that magical city of the sea that had been ravaged and destroyed by the Franks. This place had the same ethereal beauty for it shimmered above the dark land as though it were built from moonbeams. Once we were well to the west of the palace we climbed the bank, helping each other up with our spear-staffs, and then followed Nimue northwards through the woods. Enough moonlight filtered through the summer leaves to light our path, but no guards challenged us. The sea’s unending sound filled the night, though once a scream sounded very close by and we all froze, then recognized the sound of a hare being killed by a weasel. We breathed our relief and walked on.

We seemed to walk a long way through the trees, but at last Nimue turned east and we followed her to the edge of the wood to see the palace’s limewashed walls in front of us. We were not far from the circular timber moon-shaft that ran down into the temple and I could see that it would still be some time before the moon was high enough in the sky to cast its light down the shaft and into the black-walled cellar.

It was while we were at the edge of the wood that the singing began. At first, so soft was the singing, I thought it was the wind moaning, but then the song became louder and I realized that it was a women’s choir that chanted some strange, eerie and plangent music like nothing I had ever heard before. The song must have been reaching us through the moon-shaft, for it sounded very far away; a ghost song, like a choir of the dead singing to us from the Otherworld. We could hear no words, but we knew it was a sad song for its tune slid weirdly up and down by half-notes, swelled louder, then sank into a lingering softness that melded with the distant murmur of the breaking sea. The music was very beautiful, but it made me shiver and touch my spearhead.

If we had moved out of the trees then we would have been within sight of the guards who stood on the western arcade, so we moved up the wood a few paces and from there we could make our way towards the palace through a dappled tangle of mooncast shadows. There was an orchard, some rows of fruit bushes and even a high fence that protected a vegetable garden from deer and hares. We moved slowly, one at a time, and all the time that strange song soared and fell and slid and wailed. A shimmer of smoke shivered above the moon-shaft and the smell of it wafted towards us on the night’s small wind. The smell was a temple smell; pungent and almost sickly.

We were now within yards of the spearmen’s huts. A dog began barking, then another, but no one in the huts thought the barking meant trouble for voices just shouted for quiet and slowly the dogs subsided, to leave only the noise of the wind in the trees, the sea’s moan and the song’s eerie, thin melody. I was leading the way, for I was the only one who had been to this small door before and I was worried that I might miss it, but I found it easily enough. I stepped carefully down the old brick steps and pushed gently on the door. It resisted, and for a heartbeat I thought it must still be barred, but then, with a jarring squeal of a metal hinge, it swung open and drenched me in light. The cellar was lit by candles. I blinked, dazzled, then Gwenhwyvach’s sibilant voice sounded, ‘Quick!

Quick!’

We filed inside; thirty big men with armour and cloaks and spears and helmets. Gwenhwyvach hissed at us to be silent, then closed the door behind us and placed its heavy bar in place. ‘The temple’s there,’

she whispered, pointing down a corridor of rush-light candles that had been placed to illuminate the path to the shrine’s door. She was excited and her plump face was flushed. The choir’s haunting song was much quieter here for it was muffled by the temple’s inner curtains and its heavy outer door.

‘Where’s Gwydre?’ Arthur whispered to Gwenhwyvach.

‘In his room,’ Gwenhwyvach said.

‘Are there guards?’ he asked.

‘Just servants in the palace at night,’ she whispered.

‘Are Dinas and Lavaine here?’ I asked her.

She smiled. ‘You’ll see them, I promise you. You’ll see them.’ She plucked Arthur’s cloak to draw him towards the temple. ‘Come.’

‘I’ll fetch Gwydre first,’ Arthur insisted, releasing his cloak, then he touched six of his men on the shoulders. ‘The rest of you wait here,’ he whispered. ‘Wait here. Don’t go into the temple. We’ll let them finish their worship.’ Then, treading softly, he led his six men across the cellar floor and up some stone steps.

Gwenhwyvach giggled beside me. ‘I said a prayer to Clud,’ she murmured to me, ‘and she will help us.’

‘Good,’ I said. Clud is a Goddess of light, and it would be no bad thing to have her help this night.

‘Guinevere doesn’t like Clud,’ Gwenhwyvach said disapprovingly. ‘She doesn’t like any of the British Gods. Is the moon high?’

‘Not yet. But it’s climbing.’

‘Then it isn’t time,’ Gwenhwyvach said to me.

‘Time for what, Lady?’

‘You’ll see!’ She giggled. ‘You’ll see,’ she said again, then shrank fearfully back as Nimue pushed through the huddle of nervous spearmen. Nimue had taken off her leather eyepatch so that the empty shrivelled socket was like a dark hole in her face and at the sight of that horror Gwenhwyvach whimpered in terror.

Nimue ignored Gwenhwyvach. Instead she looked about the cellar, then sniffed like a hound seeking a scent. I could only see cobwebs and wineskins and mead jars and I could smell only the damp odour of decay, but Nimue scented something hateful. She hissed, then spat towards the shrine. The bundle in her hand shifted slowly.

None of us moved. Indeed a kind of terror overcame us in that rush-lit cellar. Arthur was gone, we were undetected, but the sound of the singing and the stillness of the palace were both chilling. Maybe that terror was caused by a spell cast by Dinas and Lavaine, or maybe it was just that everything here seemed so unnatural. We were used to wood, thatch, earth and grass, and this dank place of brick arches and stone floors was strange and unnerving. One of my men was shaking. Nimue stroked the man’s cheek to restore his courage and then crept on her bare feet towards the temple doors. I went with her, placing my boots carefully to make no noise. I wanted to pull her back. She was plainly intent on disobeying Arthur’s orders that we were to wait for the rites to finish, and I feared she would do something rash that would alert the women in the temple and thus provoke them to screams that would bring the guards from their huts, but in my heavy, noisy boots I could not move as fast as Nimue on her bare feet and she ignored my hoarse whisper of warning. Instead she took hold of one of the temple’s bronze door handles. She hesitated a heartbeat, then tugged the door open and the plangent ghost song was suddenly much louder.

The door’s hinges had been greased and the door opened silently onto an utter blackness. It was a darkness as complete as any I had ever seen and was caused by the heavy curtains that hung just a few feet inside the door. I motioned for my men to stay where they were, then followed Nimue inside. I wanted to draw her back, but she resisted my hand and instead pulled the temple door closed on its greased hinges. The singing was very loud now. I could see nothing and I could hear only the choir, but the smell of the temple was thick and nauseous.

Nimue groped her hand to find me, then pulled my head down towards hers. ‘Evil!’ she breathed.

‘We shouldn’t be here,’ I whispered.

She ignored that. Instead she groped and discovered the curtain and a moment later a tiny chink of light showed as she found the curtain’s edge. I followed her, crouched and looked over her shoulder. At first, so small was the gap she had made that I could see almost nothing, but then, as my eyes made out what lay beyond, I saw too much. I saw the mysteries of Isis.

To make sense of that night I had to know the story of Isis. I learned it later, but at that moment, peering over Nimue’s short-cropped hair, I had no idea what the ritual signified. I knew only that Isis was a Goddess and, to many Romans, a Goddess of the highest powers. I knew, too, that she was a protectress of thrones and that explained the low black throne that still stood on its dais at the far end of the cellar, though our view of it was misted by the thick smoke that writhed and drifted through the black room as it sought to escape up the moon-shaft. The smoke came from braziers, and their flames had been enriched by herbs that gave off the pungent, heady scent we had smelt from the edge of the woods. I could not see the choir that went on singing despite the smoke, but I could see Isis’s worshippers and at first I did not believe what I saw. I did not want to believe. I could see eight worshippers kneeling on the black stone floor, and all eight of them were naked. Their backs were towards us, but even so I could see that some of the naked worshippers were men. No wonder Gwenhwyvach had giggled in anticipation of this moment, for she must have known that secret already. Men, Guinevere always insisted, were not allowed into the temple of Isis, but they were here this night and, I suspected, on every night that the full moon cast its cold light down through the hole in the cellar’s roof. The flickering braziers’ flames cast their lurid light on the worshippers’ backs. They were all naked. Men and women, all naked, just as Morgan had warned me so many years before. The worshippers were naked, but not the two celebrants. Lavaine was one; he was standing to one side of the low black throne, and my soul exulted when I saw him. It had been Lavaine’s sword that had cut Dian’s throat and my sword was now just a cellar’s length away from him. He stood tall beside the throne, the scar on his cheek lit by the braziers’ light and his black hair oiled like Lancelot’s to fall down the back of his black robe. He wore no Druid’s white robe this night, but just a plain black gown, and in his hand was a slender black staff tipped with a small golden crescent moon. There was no sign of Dinas. Two flaming torches becketed in iron flanked the throne where Guinevere sat playing the part of Isis. Her hair was coiled on her head and held in place by a ring of gold from which two horns jutted straight up. They were the horns of no beast I had ever seen, and later we discovered they were carved from ivory. Around her neck was a heavy gold torque, but she wore no other jewels, just a vast deep-red cloak that swathed her whole body. I could not sec the floor in front of her, but I knew the shallow pit was there and I guessed they were waiting for the moonlight to come down the shaft and touch the pit’s black water with silver. The far curtains, behind which Ceinwyn had told me was a bed, were closed. A flicker of light suddenly shimmered in the drifting smoke and made the naked worshippers gasp with its promise. The little sliver of light was pale and silvery and it showed that the moon had at last climbed high enough to throw its first angled beam down to the cellar floor. Lavaine waited a moment as the light thickened, then beat his staff twice on the floor. ‘It is time,’ he said in his harsh deep voice, ‘it is time.’

The choir went silent.

Then nothing happened. They just waited in silence as that smoke-shifting moon-silvered column of light widened and crept across the floor and I remembered that distant night when I had crouched in the summit of the knoll of stones beside Llyn Cerrig Bach and watched the moonlight edge its way towards Merlin’s body. Now I watched the moonlight slide and swell in Isis’s silent temple. The silence was full of portent. One of the kneeling naked women uttered a low moan, then went quiet again. Another woman rocked to and fro.

The moonbeam widened still further, its reflection casting a pale glimmer on Guinevere’s stern and handsome face. The column of light was nearly vertical now. One of the naked women shivered, not with cold, but with the stirrings of ecstasy, and then Lavaine leaned forward to peer up the shaft. The moon lit his big beard and his hard, broad face with its battle scar. He peered upwards for a few heartbeats, then he stepped back and solemnly touched Guinevere’s shoulder.

She stood so that the horns on her head almost touched the low arched ceiling of the cellar. Her arms and hands were inside the cloak that fell straight from her shoulders to the floor. She closed her eyes.

‘Who is the Goddess?’ she asked.

‘Isis, Isis, Isis,’ the women chanted the name softly, ‘Isis, Isis, Isis.’ The column of moonlight was almost as wide as the shaft now and it was a great smoky silver pillar of light that glowed and shifted in the cellar’s centre. I had thought, when I had first seen this temple, that it was a tawdry place, but at night, lit by that shimmering pillar of white light, it was as eerie and mysterious as any shrine I had ever seen.

‘And who is the God?’ Guinevere asked, her eyes still closed.

‘Osiris,’ the naked men answered in low voices, ‘Osiris, Osiris, Osiris.’

‘And who shall sit on the throne?’ Guinevere demanded.

‘Lancelot,’ both the men and the women answered together, ‘Lancelot, Lancelot.’

It was when I heard that name that I knew that nothing would be put right this night. This night would never bring back the old Dumnonia. This night would give us nothing but horror, for I knew that this night would destroy Arthur and I wanted to back away from the curtain and go back into the cellar and take him away into the fresh air and the clean moonlight, then take him back through all the years and all the days and all the hours so that this night would never come to him. But I did not move. Nimue did not move. Neither of us dared to move for Guinevere had reached out with her right hand to take the black staff from Lavaine and the gesture lifted her red cloak from the right side of her body and I saw that under the cloak’s heavy folds she was naked.

‘Isis, Isis, Isis,’ the women sighed.

‘Osiris, Osiris, Osiris,’ the men breathed.

‘Lancelot, Lancelot, Lancelot,’ they all chanted together.

Guinevere took the gold-tipped staff and reached forward, the cloak falling again to shadow her right breast, and then, very slowly, with exaggerated gestures, she touched the staff against something that lay in the water pit right beneath the glistening, shimmering shaft of silvered smoke that now came vertically down from the heavens. No one else moved in the cellar. No one even seemed to breathe.

‘Rise!’ Guinevere commanded, ‘rise,’ and the choir began to sing their weird, haunting song again.

‘Isis, Isis, Isis,’ they were singing, and over the heads of the worshippers I saw a man climb up from the pool. It was Dinas, and his tall muscled body and long black hair dripped water as he came slowly upright and as the choir sang the Goddess’s name louder and ever louder. ‘Isis! Isis! Isis!’ they sang until Dinas at last stood upright before Guinevere, his back to us, and he too was naked. He stepped up out of the pool and Guinevere handed the black staff to Lavaine, then raised her hands and unclasped the cloak so that it fell back onto the throne. She stood there, Arthur’s wife, naked but for the gold about her neck and the ivory on her head, and she opened her arms so that the naked grandson of Tanaburs could step onto the dais and into her embrace. ‘Osiris! Osiris! Osiris!’ The women in the cellar called. Some of them writhed to and fro like the Christian worshippers in Isca who had been overcome by a similar ecstasy. The voices in the cellar were becoming ragged now. ‘Osiris! Osiris! Osiris!’ they chanted, and Guinevere stepped back as the naked Dinas turned round to face the worshippers and lifted his arms in triumph. Thus he displayed his magnificent naked body and there could be no mistaking that he was a man, nor any mistaking what he was supposed to do next as Guinevere, her beautiful, tall, straight body made magically silver-white by the moon’s shimmer in the smoke, took his right arm and led him towards the curtain that hung behind the throne. Lavaine went with them as the women writhed in their worship and rocked backwards and forwards and called out the name of their great Goddess. ‘Isis! Isis! Isis!’

Guinevere swept the far curtain aside. I had a brief glimpse of the room beyond and it seemed as bright as the sun, and then the ragged chanting rose to a new pitch of excitement as the men in the temple reached for the women beside them, and it was just then that the doors behind me were thrown wide open and Arthur, in all the glory of his war gear, stepped into the temple’s lobby. ‘No, Lord,’ I said to him, ‘no, Lord, please!’

‘You shouldn’t be here, Derfel,’ he spoke quietly, but in reproof. In his right hand he held the little bunch of cornflowers he had picked for Guinevere, while in his left he grasped his son’s hand. ‘Come back out,’ he ordered me, but then Nimue snatched the big curtain aside and my Lord’s nightmare began.

Isis is a Goddess. The Romans brought her to Britain, but she did not come from Rome itself, but from a distant country far to Rome’s east. Mithras is another God who comes from a country east of Rome, though not, I think, the same country. Galahad told me that half the world’s religions begin in the east where, I suspect, the men look more like Sagramor than like us. Christianity is another such faith brought from those distant lands where, Galahad assured me, the fields grow nothing but sand, the sun shines fiercer than it ever does in Britain and no snow ever falls.

Isis came from those burning lands. She became a powerful Goddess to the Romans and many women in Britain adopted her religion that stayed on when the Romans left. It was never as popular as Christianity, for the latter threw its doors open to any who wanted to worship its God, while Isis, like Mithras, restricted her followers to those, and those alone, who had been initiated into her mysteries. In some ways, Galahad told me, Isis resembled the Holy Mother of the Christians, for she was reputed to be the perfect mother to her son Horus, but Isis also possessed powers that the Virgin Mary never claimed. Isis, to her adepts, was the Goddess of life and death, of healing, and, of course, of mortal thrones.

She was married, Galahad told me, to a God named Osiris, but in a war between the Gods Osiris was killed and his body was cut into fragments that were scattered into a river. Isis found the scattered flesh and tenderly brought them together again, and then she lay with the fragments to bring her husband back to life. Osiris did live again, revived by Isis’s power. Galahad hated the tale, and crossed himself again and again as he told it, and it was that tale, I suppose, of resurrection and of the woman giving life to the man, that Nimue and I watched in that smoky black cellar. We had watched as Isis, the Goddess, the mother, the giver of life, performed the miracle that gave her husband life and turned her into the guardian of the living and the dead and the arbiter of men’s thrones. And it was that last power, the power that determined which men should sit on this earth’s thrones, that was, for Guinevere, the Goddess’s supreme gift. It was for the power of the throne-giver that Guinevere worshipped Isis. Nimue snatched the curtain aside and the cellar filled with screams. For one second, for one terrible second, Guinevere hesitated at the far curtain and turned around to see what had disturbed her rites. She stood there, tall and naked and so dreadful in her pale beauty, and beside her was a naked man. At the cellar’s door, standing with his son in one hand and with flowers in the other, was her husband. The cheek pieces of Arthur’s helmet were open and I saw his face at that terrible moment, and it was as if his soul had just fled.

Guinevere disappeared behind the curtain, dragging Dinas and Lavaine with her, and Arthur uttered an awful sound, half a battle shout and half the cry of a man in utter misery. He pushed Gwydre back, dropped the flowers, then drew Excalibur and charged heedlessly through the screaming, naked worshippers who scrambled desperately out of his way.

‘Take them all!’ I shouted to the spearmen who followed Arthur, ‘don’t let them escape! Take them!’

Then I ran after Arthur with Nimue beside me. Arthur leapt the black pool, pushed a torch over as he jumped across the dais, then swept the far black curtain aside with Excalibur’s blade. And there he stopped.

I stopped beside him. I had discarded my spear as I charged through the temple and now had Hywelbane bare in my hand. Nimue was with me and she howled in triumph as she gazed into the small, square room that opened up from the arched cellar. This, it seemed, was Isis’s inner sanctuary, and here, at the Goddess’s service, was the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn.

The Cauldron was the first thing I saw, for it was standing on a black pedestal that stood as high as a man’s waist and there were so many candles in the room that the Cauldron seemed to glow silver and gold as it reflected their brilliant light. The light was made even brighter because the room, all but for the curtained wall, was lined with mirrors. There were mirrors on the walls and even on the ceiling, mirrors that multiplied the candles’ flames and reflected the nakedness of Guinevere and Dinas. Guinevere, in her terror, had leapt onto the wide bed that filled the room’s far end and there she clawed at a fur coverlet in an effort to hide her pale skin. Dinas was beside her, his hands clutched to his groin, while Lavaine faced us defiantly.

He glanced at Arthur, dismissed Nimue with scarce a look, then held his slender black staff towards me. He knew I had come for his death and now he would prevent it with the greatest magic at his disposal. He pointed his staff at me, while in his other hand he held the crystal-encased fragment of the true cross that Bishop Sansum had given to Mordred at his acclamation. He was holding the fragment suspended above the Cauldron, which was filled with some dark aromatic liquid.

‘Your other daughters will die too,’ he told me. ‘I only need to let go.’

Arthur raised Excalibur.

‘Your son too!’ Lavaine said, and both of us froze. ‘You will go now,’ he said with calm authority.

‘You have invaded the Goddess’s sanctuary and will now go and leave us in peace. Or else you, and all you love, will die.’

He waited. Behind him, between the Cauldron and the bed, was Arthur’s Round Table with its stone image of the winged horse, and on the horse, I saw, were a drab basket, a common horn, an old halter, a worn knife, a whetstone, a sleeved coat, a cloak, a clay dish, a throwboard, a warrior ring and a heap of decaying broken timbers. Merlin’s scrap of beard was also there, still wrapped in its black ribbon. All the power of Britain was in that little room and it was allied to a scrap of the Christian’s most powerful magic.

I lifted Hywelbane and Lavaine made as though to drop the piece of the true cross into the liquid and Arthur put a warning hand against my shield.

‘You will go,’ Lavaine said. Guinevere said nothing, but just watched us, huge-eyed, above the pelt that now half covered her.

Then Nimue smiled. She had been holding the bundled cloak in both her hands, but now she shook it at Lavaine. She screamed as she released the cloak’s burden. It was an eldritch shriek that echoed high above the cries of the women behind us.

Vipers flew through the air. There must have been a dozen of the snakes, all found by Nimue that afternoon and hoarded for this moment. They twisted in the air and Guinevere screamed and dragged the fur to cover her face while Lavaine, seeing a snake flying at his eyes, instinctively flinched and crouched. The scrap of true cross skittered across the floor while the snakes, aroused by the heat in the cellar, twisted across the bed and over the Treasures of Britain. I took one pace forward and kicked Lavaine hard in the belly. He fell, then screamed as an adder bit his ankle. Dinas shrank from the snakes on the bed, then went utterly still as Excalibur touched his throat. Hywelbane was at Lavaine’s throat, and I used the blade to bring his face up towards mine. Then I smiled. ‘My daughter,’ I said softly, ‘watches us from the Otherworld. She sends you greetings, Lavaine.’

He tried to speak, but no words came. A snake slid across his leg.

Arthur stared at where his wife was hidden beneath the fur. Then, almost tenderly, he flicked the snakes off the black pelt with Excalibur’s tip, then drew back the fur until he could see Guinevere’s face. She stared at him, and all her fine pride had vanished. She was just a terrified woman. ‘Do you have any clothes here?’ Arthur asked her gently. She shook her head.

‘There’s a red cloak on the throne,’ I told him.

‘Would you fetch it, Nimue?’ Arthur asked.

Nimue brought the cloak and Arthur held it towards his wife on Excalibur’s tip. ‘Here,’ he said, still speaking softly, ‘for you.’

A bare arm emerged from the fur and took the cloak. ‘Turn round,’ Guinevere said to me in a small, frightened voice.

‘Turn, Derfel, please,’ Arthur said.

‘One thing first, Lord.’

‘Turn,’ he insisted, still gazing at his wife.

I reached for the Cauldron’s edge and tipped it off the pedestal. The precious Cauldron clanged loud on the floor as its liquid spilt in a dark rush across the flagstones. That got his attention. He stared at me and I hardly recognized his face, it was so hard and cold and empty of life, but there was one more thing to be said this night and if my Lord was to sup this dish of horrors, then he might as well drain it to the last bitter drop. I put Hywelbane’s tip back under Lavaine’s chin. ‘Who is the Goddess?’ I asked him. He shook his head and I pushed Hywelbane far enough forward to draw blood from his throat. ‘Who is the Goddess?’ I asked him again.

‘Isis,’ he whispered. He was clutching his ankle where the snake had bitten him.

‘And who is the God?’ I demanded.

‘Osiris,’ he said in a terrified voice.

‘And who,’ I asked him, ‘shall sit on the throne?’ He shivered, and said nothing. ‘These, Lord,’ I said to Arthur, my sword still on Lavaine’s throat, ‘are the words you did not hear. But I heard them and Nimue heard them. Who shall sit on the throne?’ I asked Lavaine again.

‘Lancelot,’ he said in a voice so low that it was almost inaudible. But Arthur heard, just as he must have seen the great device that was embroidered white on the lavish black blanket that lay on the bed beneath the bear pelt in this room of mirrors. It was Lancelot’s sea-eagle. I spat at Lavaine, sheathed Hywelbane, then reached forward and took him by his long black hair. Nimue already had hold of Dinas. We dragged them back into the temple, and I swept the black curtain back into place behind me so that Arthur and Guinevere could be alone. Gwenhwyvach had been watching it all and she now cackled with laughter. The worshippers and the choir, all naked, were crouching to one side of the cellar where Arthur’s men guarded them with spears. Gwydre was crouching terrified at the cellar door.

Behind us Arthur cried one word. ‘Why?’

And I took my daughter’s murderers out to the moonlight.

At dawn we were still at the Sea Palace. We should have left, for some of the spearmen had escaped the huts when the horsemen had at last been summoned from the hill by Arthur’s horn, and those fugitives would be spreading the alarm north into Dumnonia, but Arthur seemed incapable of decision. He was like a man stunned.

He was still weeping as the dawn edged the world with light.

Dinas and Lavaine died then. They died at the creek’s edge. I am not, I think, a cruel man, but their deaths were very cruel and very long. Nimue arranged those deaths, and all the while, as their souls gave up the flesh, she hissed the name Dian in their ears. They were not men by the time they died, and their tongues had gone and they had just one eye apiece, and that small mercy was only given them so that they could see the manner of their next bout of pain, and see they did as they died. The last thing either saw was that bright piece of hair on Hywelbane’s hilt as I finished what Nimue had begun. The twins were mere things by then, things of blood and shuddering terror, and when they were dead I kissed the little scrap of hair, then carried it to one of the braziers on the palace’s arcades and tossed it into the embers so that no fragment of Dian’s soul was left wandering the earth. Nimue did the same with the cut plait of Merlin’s beard. We left the twins’ bodies lying on their left sides beside the sea and in the rising sun gulls came down to tear at the tortured flesh with their long hooked beaks. Nimue had rescued the Cauldron and the Treasures. Dinas and Lavaine, before they died, had told her the whole tale, and Nimue had been right all along. It had been Morgan who stole the Treasures and who had taken them as a gift to Sansum so that he would marry her, and Sansum had given them to Guinevere. It was the promise of that great gift which had first reconciled Guinevere to the mouse-lord before Lancelot’s baptism in the River Churn. I thought, when I heard the tale, that if only I had allowed Lancelot into the mysteries of Mithras then maybe none of this would have happened. Fate is inexorable. The shrine’s doors were closed now. None of those trapped inside had escaped, and once Guinevere had been brought out and after Arthur had talked with her for a long time, he had gone back into the cellar alone, with just Excalibur in his hand, and he did not emerge for a full hour. When he came out his face was colder than the sea and as grey as Excalibur’s blade, except that the precious blade was now red and thick with blood. In one hand he carried the horn-mounted circle of gold that Guinevere had worn as Isis and in the other he carried the sword. ‘They’re dead,’ he told me.

‘All?’

‘Everyone.’ He had seemed oddly unconcerned, though there was blood on his arms and on his scale armour and even spattered on the goose feathers of his helmet.

‘The women too?’ I asked, for Lunete had been one of Isis’s worshippers. I had no love for her now, but she had once been my lover and I felt a pang for her. The men in the temple had been the most handsome of Lancelot’s spearmen and the women had been Guinevere’s attendants.

‘All dead,’ said Arthur, almost lightly. He had walked slowly down the pleasure garden’s central gravel path. ‘This wasn’t the first night they did this,’ he said, and sounded almost puzzled. ‘It seems they did it often. All of them. Whenever the moon was right. And they did it with each other, all of them. Except Guinevere. She just did it with the twins or with Lancelot.’ He shuddered then, showing the first emotion since he had come so cold-eyed from the cellar. ‘It seems,’ he said, ‘that she used to do it for my sake. Who shall sit on the throne? Arthur, Arthur, Arthur, but the Goddess can’t have approved of me.’ He had begun to cry. ‘Or else I resisted the Goddess too firmly, and so they changed the name to Lancelot.’ He gave the bloody sword a futile swing in the air. ‘Lancelot,’ he said in a voice filled with agony. ‘For years now, Derfel, she’s been sleeping with Lancelot, and all for religion, she says! Religion!

He was usually Osiris and she was always Isis. What else could she have been?’ He reached the terrace and sat on a stone bench from where he could stare at the moon-glossed creek. ‘I shouldn’t have killed them all,’ he said after a long while.

‘No, Lord,’ I said, ‘you shouldn’t.’

‘But what else could I do? It was filth, Derfel, just filth!’ He began to sob then. He said something about shame, about the dead having witnessed his wife’s shame and his own dishonour, and when he could say no more, he just sobbed helplessly and I said nothing. He did not seem to care whether I stayed with him or not, but I stayed until it was time to take Dinas and Lavaine down to the sea’s edge so that Nimue could draw their souls inch by terrible inch from their bodies. And now, in a grey dawn, Arthur sat empty and exhausted above the sea. The horns lay at his feet, while his helmet and Excalibur’s bare blade rested on the bench beside him. The blood on the sword had dried to a thick brown crust.

‘We must leave, Lord,’ I said as the dawn turned the sea the colour of a spear blade.

‘Love,’ he said bitterly.

I thought he had misheard me. ‘We must leave, Lord,’ I said again.

‘For what?’ he asked.

‘To complete your oath.’

He spat, then sat in silence. The horses had been brought down from the wood and the Cauldron and the Treasures of Britain were packed for their journey. The spearmen watched us and waited. ‘Is there any oath,’ he asked me bitterly, ‘that is unbroken? Just one?’

‘We must go, Lord,’ I told him, but he neither moved nor spoke and so I turned on my heel. ‘Then we’ll go without you,’ I said brutally.

‘Derfel!’ Arthur called, real pain in his voice.

‘Lord?’ I turned back.

He stared down at his sword and seemed surprised to see it so caked with blood. ‘My wife and son are in an upstairs room,’ he said. ‘Fetch them for me, will you? They can ride on the same horse. Then we can go.’ He was struggling so hard to sound normal, to sound as if this was just another dawn.

‘Yes, Lord,’ I said.

He stood and rammed Excalibur, blood and all, into its scabbard. ‘Then, I suppose,’ he said sourly,

‘we must remake Britain?’

‘Yes, Lord,’ I said, ‘we must.’

He stared at me and I saw he wanted to cry again. ‘Do you know something, Derfel?’ he asked me.

‘Tell me, Lord,’ I said.

‘My life will never be the same again, will it?’

‘I don’t know, Lord,’ I said. ‘I just don’t know.’

The tears spilled down his long cheeks. ‘I shall love her till the day I die. Every day I live I shall think of her. Every night before I sleep I will see her, and in every dawn I shall turn in my bed to find that she has gone. Every day, Derfel, and every night and every dawn until the moment that I die.’

He picked up his helmet with its blood-draggled plume, left the ivory horns, and walked with me. I fetched Guinevere and her son down from the bed-chamber and then we left. Gwenhwyvach had the Sea Palace then. She lived in it alone, her wits wandering, and surrounded by hounds and by the gorgeous treasures that decayed all about her. She would watch from a window for Lancelot’s coming, for she was sure that one day her Lord would come to live with her beside the sea in her sister’s palace, but her Lord never did come, and the treasures were stolen, the palace crumbled and Gwenhwyvach died there, or so we heard. Or maybe she lives there still, waiting beside the creek for the man who never comes.

We went away. And on the creek’s muddy banks the gulls tore at offal. Guinevere, in a long black dress that was covered by a dark green cloak, and with her red hair combed severely back and tied with a black ribbon, rode Arthur’s mare, Llamrei. She sat side-saddle, gripping the saddle bar with her right hand and keeping her left arm about the waist of her frightened and tearful son who kept glancing at his father who was walking doggedly behind the horse. ‘I suppose I am his father?’ Arthur spat at her once.

Guinevere, her eyes reddened by tears, just looked away. The motion of the horse rocked her back and forth and back and forth, yet she managed to look graceful all the same. ‘No one else, Lord Prince,’

she said after a long time. ‘No one else.’

Arthur walked in silence after that. He did not want my company, he wanted no company but his own misery, and so I joined Nimue at the head of the procession. The horsemen came next, then Guinevere, and my spearmen escorted the Cauldron at the rear. Nimue was retracing the same road that had led us to the coast and which here was a rough track that climbed onto a bare heath broken by dark stretches of yew and gorse. ‘So Gorfyddyd was right,’ I said after a while.

‘Gorfyddyd?’ Nimue asked, astonished that I should have dredged that old King’s name from the past.

‘At Lugg Vale,’ I reminded her, ‘he said Guinevere was a whore.’

‘And you, Derfel Cadarn,’ Nimue said scornfully, ‘are an expert on whores?’

‘What else is she?’ I asked bitterly.

‘No whore,’ Nimue said. She gestured ahead, pointing at the wisps of smoke above the distant trees that showed where the garrison of Vindocladia were cooking their breakfasts. ‘We’ll need to avoid them,’ Nimue said, and turned off the road to lead us towards a thicker belt of trees that grew to the west. I suspected the garrison had already heard that Arthur had come to the Sea Palace and had no wish to confront him, but I dutifully followed Nimue and the horsemen dutifully followed us. ‘What Arthur did,’ she said after a while, ‘is marry a rival instead of a companion.’

‘A rival?’

‘Guinevere could rule Dumnonia as well as any man,’ Nimue said, ‘and better than most. She’s cleverer than he is, and every bit as determined. If she’d been born to Uther instead of that fool Leodegan, then everything would have been different. She’d be another Boudicca and there’d be dead Christians from here to the Irish Sea and dead Saxons to the German Sea.’

‘Boudicca,’ I reminded her, ‘lost her war.’

‘And so has Guinevere,’ Nimue said grimly.

‘I don’t see that she was Arthur’s rival,’ I said after a time. ‘She had power. I don’t suppose he ever made a decision without talking to her.’

‘And he talked to the Council, which no woman can join,’ Nimue said tartly. ‘Put yourself in Guinevere’s place, Derfel. She’s quicker than all of you put together, but any idea she ever had was put before a pack of dull, ponderous men. You and Bishop Emrys and that fart Cythryn who pretends to be so judicious and fair-minded, then goes home and beats his wife and makes her watch him take a dwarf girl to their bed. Councillors! You think Dumnonia would know the difference if you all drowned?’

‘A King must have a Council,’ I said indignantly.

‘Not if he’s clever,’ Nimue said. ‘Why should he? Does Merlin have a Council? Does Merlin need a room full of pompous fools to tell him what to do? The only purpose a Council serves is to make you all feel important.’

‘It does more than that,’ I insisted. ‘How does a King know what his people are thinking if there’s no Council?’

‘Who cares what the fools think? Allow the people to think for themselves and half of them become Christians; there’s a tribute to their ability to think,’ she spat. ‘So just what is it that you do in Council, Derfel? Tell Arthur what your shepherds are saying? And Cythryn, I suppose, represents the dwarf-tupping men of Dumnonia. Is that it?’ she laughed. ‘The people! The people are idiots, that’s why they have a King and why the King has spearmen.’

‘Arthur,’ I said stoutly, “has given the country good government, and he did it without using spears on the people.’

‘And look what’s happened to the country,’ Nimue retorted. She walked in silence for a few moments. After a while she sighed. ‘Guinevere was right all along, Derfel. Arthur should be King. She knew that. She wanted that. She would even have been happy with that, for with Arthur as King she would have been Queen and that would have given her as much power as she needed. But your precious Arthur wouldn’t take the throne. So high-minded! All those sacred oaths! And what did he want instead? To be a farmer. To live like you and Ceinwyn; the happy home, the children, laughter.’ She made these things sound risible. ‘How content,’ she asked me, ‘do you think Guinevere would be in that life? The very thought of it bored her! And that’s all that Arthur ever wanted. She is a clever, quick-witted lady and he wanted to turn her into a milch cow. Do you wonder she looked for other excitements?’

‘Whoredom?’

‘Oh, don’t be a fool, Derfel. Am I a whore for having bedded you? More fool me.’ We had reached the trees and Nimue turned north to walk between the ash and the tall elms. The spearmen followed us dumbly and I think that had we led them in circles they would have followed us without protest, so astonished and numbed were we all by the night’s horrors. ‘So she broke her marriage oath,’ Nimue said, ‘do you think she’s the first? Or do you think that makes her a whore? In which case Britain’s full to the rim with whores. She’s no whore, Derfel. She’s a strong woman who was born with a quick mind and good looks, and Arthur loved the looks and wouldn’t use her mind. He wouldn’t let her make him King and so she turned to that ridiculous religion of hers. And all Arthur did was tell her how happy she’d be when he could hang up Excalibur and start breeding cattle!’ She laughed at the thought. ‘And because it would never occur to Arthur to be unfaithful he never suspected it in Guinevere. The rest of us did, but not Arthur. He kept telling himself the marriage was perfect, and all the while he was miles away and Guinevere’s good looks were drawing men like flies to carrion. And they were handsome men, clever men, witty men, men who wanted power, and one was a handsome man who wanted all the power he could get, so Guinevere decided to help him. Arthur wanted a cowshed, but Lancelot wants to be High King of Britain and Guinevere finds that a more interesting challenge than raising cows or mopping up the shit of infants. And that idiotic religion encouraged her. The arbiter of thrones!’ She spat. ‘She wasn’t bedding Lancelot because she was a whore, you great fool, she was bedding him to get her man made High King.’

‘And Dinas?’ I asked, ‘Lavaine?’

‘They were her priests. They were helping her, and in some religions, Derfel, men and women couple as part of worship. And why not?’ She kicked at a stone and watched it skitter away through a patch of bindweed. ‘And believe me, Derfel, those two were beautiful-looking men. I know, because I took that beauty away from them, but not because of what they did with Guinevere. I did it for the insult they gave Merlin and for what they did to your daughter.’ She walked in silence for a few yards. ‘Don’t despise Guinevere,’ she told me after a while. ‘Don’t despise her for being bored. Despise her, if you must, for stealing the Cauldron and be thankful Dinas and Lavaine never unlocked its power. It worked for Guinevere, though. She bathed in it weekly and that’s why she never aged a week.’ She turned as footsteps sounded behind us. It was Arthur who was running to catch us up. He still looked dazed, but at some time in the last few moments it must have dawned on him that we had diverted from the road.

‘Where are we going?’ he demanded.

‘You want the garrison to see us?’ Nimue asked, pointing again to the smoke of their cooking fires. He said nothing, but just stared at the smoke as if he had never seen such a thing before. Nimue glanced at me and shrugged at his evident befuddlement. ‘If they wanted a fight,’ Arthur said, ‘they’d have been looking for us already.’ His eyes were red and puffy, and maybe it was my imagination, but his hair seemed greyer. ‘What would you do,’ Arthur asked me, ‘if you were the enemy?’ He did not mean the puny garrison at Vindocladia, but nor would he name Lancelot.

‘Try to trap us, Lord,’ I said.

‘How? Where?’ he asked irritably. ‘North, yes? That’s our fastest route back to friendly spearmen and they’ll know that. So we won’t go north.’ He looked at me, and it was almost as though he did not recognize me. ‘We go for their throats instead, Derfel,’ he said savagely.

‘Their throats, Lord?’

‘We’ll go to Caer Cadarn.’

I said nothing for a while. He was not thinking straight. Grief and anger had upset him and I wondered how I could steer him away from this suicide. ‘There are forty of us. Lord,’ I said quietly.

‘Caer Cadarn,’ he said again, ignoring my objection. ‘Who holds the Caer holds Dumnonia, and who holds Dumnonia holds Britain.

If you don’t want to come, Derfel, then go your own way. I’m going to Caer Cadarn.’ He turned away.

‘Lord!’ I called him back. ‘Dunum lies in our path.’ That was a major fortress, and though its garrison was doubtless depleted, it could hold more than enough spears to destroy our small force.

‘I would not care, Derfel, if every fortress in Britain stood in our path.’ Arthur spat the words at me.

‘You do what you want, but I’m going to Caer Cadarn.’ He walked away, shouting at the horsemen to turn westwards.

I closed my eyes, convinced my Lord wanted to die. Without Guinevere’s love, he just wanted to die. He wanted to fall beneath the enemy’s spears at the centre of the land for which he had fought so long. I could think of no other explanation why he would lead this small band of tired spearmen to the very heart of the rebellion unless he wanted death beside Dumnonia’s royal stone, but then a memory came to me and I opened my eyes. ‘A long time ago,’ I told Nimue, ‘I talked with Ailleann.’ She had been an Irish slave, older than Arthur but a loving mistress to him before he met Guinevere, and Amhar and Loholt were her ungrateful sons. She still lived, graceful and grey-haired now, and presumably still under siege in Corinium. And now, standing lost in shattered Dumnonia, I heard her voice across the years. Just watch Arthur, she had told me, because when you think he is doomed, when everything is at its darkest, he will astonish you. He will win. I told that now to Nimue. ‘And she also said,’ I went on, ‘that once he’d won he would make his usual mistake of forgiving his enemies.’

‘Not this time,’ Nimue said. ‘Not this time. The fool has learned his lesson, Derfel. So what will you do?’

‘What I always do,’ I said. ‘Go with him.’

To the enemy’s throat. To Caer Cadarn

That day Arthur was filled with a frenetic, desperate energy as though the answer to all his miseries lay at Caer Cadarn’s summit. He made no attempt to hide his small force, but just marched us north and west with his banner of the bear flying above us. He used one of his men’s horses and he wore his famous armour so that anyone could see just who it was who rode into the country’s heart. He went as fast as my spearmen could walk, and when one of the horses split a hoof he just abandoned the beast and pushed on hard. He wanted to reach the Caer.

We came to Dunum first. The Old People had made a great fort on Dunum’s hill, the Romans had added their own wall, and Arthur had repaired the fortifications and kept a strong garrison there. The garrison had never seen battle, but if Cerdic ever did attack west along Dumnonia’s coast it would have been Dunum that would have formed one of his first major obstacles and, despite the long years of peace, Arthur had never let the fort decay. A banner flew above the wall and, as we drew closer, I saw it was not the sea-eagle, but the red dragon. Dunum had stayed loyal.

Thirty men remained of the garrison. The rest had either been Christians and had deserted, or else, fearing that Mordred and Arthur were both dead, they had given up their defiance and slipped away, but Lanval, the garrison’s commander, had clung on with his shrinking force, hoping against hope that the evil news was wrong. Now Arthur had come, Lanval led his men out of the gate and Arthur slid from the saddle and gave the old warrior an embrace. We were seventy spears now instead of forty and I thought of Ailleann’s words. Just when you think he’s beaten, she had said, he begins to win. Lanval walked his horse beside me and told how Lancelot’s spearmen had marched past the fort. ‘We couldn’t stop them,’ he said bitterly, ‘and they didn’t challenge us. They just tried to make me surrender. I told them I would take down Mordred’s banner when Arthur ordered me to take it down, and I would not believe Arthur was dead until they brought me his head on a shield.’ Arthur must have said something to him about Guinevere for Lanval, despite having once been the commander of her guard, avoided her. I told him a little of what had happened at the Sea Palace and he shook his head sadly. ‘She and Lancelot were doing it in Durnovaria,’ he said, ‘in that temple she made there.’

‘You knew that?’ I asked, horrified.

‘I didn’t know it,’ he said tiredly, ‘but I heard rumours, Derfel, only rumours, and I didn’t want to know more.’ He spat at the road’s verge. ‘I was there the day Lancelot came from Ynys Trebes and I remember the two of them couldn’t keep their eyes off each other. They hid it after that, of course, and Arthur never suspected a thing. And he made it so easy for them! He trusted her and he was never at home. He was always riding off to inspect a fort or sit in a lawcourt.’ Lanval shook his head. ‘I don’t doubt she calls it a religion, Derfel, but I tell you, if that lady is in love with anyone, it’s Lancelot.’

‘I think she loves Arthur,’ I said.

‘She does, maybe, but he’s too straightforward for her. There’s no mystery in Arthur’s heart, it’s all written on his face and she’s a lady who likes subtlety. I tell you, it’s Lancelot who makes her heart quicken.’ And it was Guinevere, I thought sadly, who made Arthur’s heart beat faster; I did not even dare to think what was happening to his heart now.

We slept that night in the open. My men guarded Guinevere who busied herself with Gwydre. No word had been said of her fate, and none of us wanted to ask Arthur and so we all treated her with a distant politeness. She treated us in the same manner, asked no favours and avoided Arthur. As night fell she told Gwydre stories, but when he had gone to sleep I saw she was rocking back and forth beside him and crying softly. Arthur saw it too, then he began to weep and walked away to the edge of the wide down so that no one would see his misery.

We marched again at dawn and our road led us down into a lovely landscape that was softly lit by a sun rising into a sky cleared of cloud. This was the Dumnonia for which Arthur fought, a rich fertile land that the Gods had made so beautiful. The villages had thick thatch and deep orchards, though too many of the cottage walls were disfigured with the mark of the fish, while others had been burned, but I noticed how the Christians did not insult Arthur as they might once have done and this made me suspect that the fever which had struck Dumnonia was already fading. Between the villages the road wound between pink bramble blossom and between meadows made gaudy with clover, daisies, buttercups and poppies. Willow-wrens and yellowhammers, the last birds to make their nests, flew with scraps of straw in their beaks, while higher, above some oaks, I saw a hawk take wing, then realized it was no hawk, but a young cuckoo making its first flight. And that, I thought, was a good omen, for Lancelot, like the young cuckoo, only resembled a hawk and was in truth nothing but a usurper. We stopped a few miles short of Caer Cadarn at a small monastery that had been built where a sacred spring bubbled out of an oak grove. This had once been a Druid shrine and now the Christian God guarded the waters, but the God could not resist my spearmen who, on Arthur’s orders, broke down the gate of the palisade and took a dozen of the monks’ brown robes. The monastery’s bishop refused to take the offered payment and just cursed Arthur instead, and Arthur, his anger ungovernable now, struck the bishop down. We left the bishop bleeding into the sacred spring and marched on west. The bishop was called Carannog and he is now a saint. Arthur, I sometimes think, made more saints than God. We came to Caer Cadarn across Pen Hill, but stopped beneath the hill’s crest before we came in sight of its ramparts. Arthur chose a dozen spearmen and ordered them to cut their hair into the Christian tonsure, then to don the monks’ robes. Nimue did the cutting, and she put all the hair into a bag so that it would be safe. I wanted to be one of the twelve, but Arthur refused. Whoever went to Caer Cadarn’s gate, he said, must not have a face that could be recognized.

Issa submitted to the knife, grinning at me when his hair was gone from the front of his scalp. ‘Do I look like a Christian, Lord?’

‘You look like your father,’ I said, ‘bald and ugly.’

The twelve men wore swords under their robes, but could carry no spears. Instead we knocked their spearheads off their shafts and gave them the bare poles as weapons. Their shaved foreheads looked paler than their faces, but with the cowls of the robes over their heads they would pass as monks. ‘Go,’

Arthur told them.

Caer Cadarn was of no real military value, but as the symbolic place of Dumnonia’s kingship its worth was incalculable. For that reason alone we knew that the old fortress would be heavily guarded and that our twelve false monks would need good luck as well as bravery if they were to trick the garrison into opening the gates. Nimue gave them a blessing and then they scrambled over Pen’s crest and filed down the hill. Maybe it was because we carried the Cauldron, or maybe it was Arthur’s usual luck in war, but our ruse worked. Arthur and I lay in the summit’s warm grass and watched as Issa and his men slipped and stumbled down Pen Hill’s precipitous western slope, crossed the wide pastures and then climbed the steep path that led to Caer Cadarn’s eastern gate. They claimed to be fugitives running from a raid by Arthur’s horsemen and their story convinced the guards, who opened the gate to them. Issa and his men killed those sentries, then snatched up the dead men’s spears and shields so that they could defend the precious open gate. The Christians never forgave Arthur for that ruse either. Arthur scrambled onto Llamrei’s back the moment he saw the Caer’s gate was captured. ‘Come on!’

he shouted, and his twenty horsemen kicked their beasts up over Pen’s crest and so down the steep grassy slope beyond. Ten men followed Arthur up to the fort itself, while the other ten galloped around the foot of Caer Cadarn’s hill to cut off the escape of any of the garrison. The rest of us followed. Lanval had charge of Guinevere and so came more slowly, but my men ran recklessly down the escarpment and up the Caer’s stony path to where Issa and Arthur waited. The garrison, once the gate had fallen, had shown not a scrap of fight. There were fifty spearmen there, mostly maimed veterans or youngsters, but still more than enough to have held the walls against our small force. The handful that tried to escape were easily caught by our horsemen and brought back to the compound, where Issa and I had walked to the rampart over the western gate and there pulled down Lancelot’s flag and raised Arthur’s bear in its place. Nimue burned the cut hair, then spat at the terrified monks who had been living on the Caer to supervise the building of Sansum’s great church. Those monks, who showed far more defiance than the garrison’s spearmen, had already dug the foundations of the church and lined them with rocks from the stone circle that had stood on the Caer’s summit. They had pulled down half of the feasting hall’s walls and used the timber to begin raising the church walls which stood in the shape of a cross. ‘It’ll burn nicely,’ Issa said cheerfully, rubbing his new bald patch.

Guinevere and her son, denied the use of the hall, were given the largest hut on the Caer. It was home to a spearman’s family, but they were turned out and Guinevere was ordered inside. She looked at the rye-straw bedding and the cobwebs in the rafters and shuddered. Lanval put a spearman at the door, then watched as one of Arthur’s horsemen dragged in the garrison’s commander who was one of the men who had tried to flee.

The defeated commander was Loholt, one of Arthur’s sour twin sons who had made his mother Ailleann’s life a misery and had ever resented their father. Now Loholt, who had found his Lord in Lancelot, was dragged by the hair to where his father waited.

Loholt fell to his knees. Arthur stared at him for a long time, then turned and walked away. ‘Father!’

Loholt shouted, but Arthur ignored him.

He walked to the line of prisoners. He recognized some of the men for they had once served him, while others had come from Lancelot’s old kingdom of the Belgae. Those men, nineteen of them, were taken to the half-built church and there put to death. It was a harsh punishment, but Arthur was in no mood to give mercy to men who had invaded his country. He ordered my men to kill them, and they did. The monks protested and the prisoners’ wives and children screamed at us until I ordered them all to be taken to the east gate and thrown out.

Thirty-one prisoners remained, all Dumnonians, and Arthur counted down their ranks and chose six men: the fifth man, the tenth, the fifteenth, the twentieth, the twenty-fifth and the thirtieth. ‘Kill them,’ he ordered me coldly, and I marched the six men down to the church and added their corpses to the bloody pile. The rest of the captured prisoners knelt and, one by one, kissed Arthur’s sword to renew their oaths, though before each man kissed the blade he was forced to kneel before Nimue who branded his forehead with a spearhead that she kept fired to red heat in a cooking fire. The men were all thus marked as warriors who had rebelled against an oath-lord and the fire-scar on their foreheads meant they would be put to death if they ever proved false again. For now, their foreheads burned and hurting, they made dubious allies, but Arthur still led over eighty men, a small army.

Loholt waited on his knees. He was still very young, fresh-faced and with a skimpy beard that Arthur gripped and used to drag him to the royal stone that was all that remained of the old circle. He threw his son down by the stone. ‘Where is your brother?’ he demanded.

‘With Lancelot, Lord.’ Loholt trembled. He was terrified by the stench of burning skin.

‘And where is that?’

‘They went north, Lord.’ Loholt looked up at his father.

‘Then you can join them,’ Arthur said, and Loholt’s face showed utter relief that he was to live. ‘But tell me first,’ Arthur went on in a voice like ice, ‘just why you raised a hand against your father?’

‘They said you were dead, Lord.’

‘And what did you do, son, to avenge my death?’ Arthur asked, then waited for an answer, but Loholt had none. ‘And when you heard I was alive,’ Arthur went on, ‘why did you still oppose me?’

Loholt stared up at his father’s implacable face and from somewhere he found his courage. ‘You were never a father to us,’ he said bitterly.

Arthur’s face was wrenched by a spasm and I thought he was about to burst into a terrible rage, but when he spoke again his voice was oddly calm. ‘Put your right hand on the stone,’ he ordered Loholt. Loholt believed he was to take an oath and so he obediently placed his hand on the royal stone’s centre. Then Arthur drew Excalibur and Loholt understood what his father intended and snatched his hand back. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Please! No!’

‘Hold it there, Derfel,’ Arthur said.

Loholt struggled with me, but he was no match for my strength. I slapped his face to subdue him, then bared his right arm to the elbow and forced it flat onto the stone and there held it firm as Arthur raised the blade. Loholt was crying, ‘No, father! Please!’

But Arthur had no mercy that day. Not for many a day. ‘You raised your hand against your own father, Loholt, and for that you lose both the father and the hand. I disown you.’ And with that dreadful curse he slashed the sword down and a jet of blood spurted across the stone as Loholt twisted violently back. He shrieked as he snatched his bloody stump back and gazed in horror at his severed hand, then he whimpered in agony. ‘Bind it,’ Arthur ordered Nimue, ‘then the little fool can go.’ He walked away. I kicked the severed hand with its two pathetic warrior rings off the stone. Arthur had let Excalibur fall onto the grass, so I picked up the blade and laid it reverently across the patch of blood. That, I thought was proper. The right sword on the right stone, and it had taken so many years to put it there.

‘Now we wait,’ Arthur said grimly, ‘and let the bastard come to us.’

He still could not use Lancelot’s name.

Lancelot came two days later.

His rebellion was collapsing, though we did not know that yet. Sagramor, reinforced by the first two contingents of spearmen from Powys, had cut off Cerdic’s men at Corinium and the Saxon only escaped by making a desperate night march and still he lost more than fifty men to Sagramor’s vengeance. Cerdic’s frontier was still much further west than it had been, but the news that Arthur lived and had taken Caer Cadarn, and the threat of Sagramor’s implacable hatred, were enough to persuade Cerdic to abandon his ally Lancelot. He retreated to his new frontier and sent men to take what they could of Lancelot’s Belgic lands. Cerdic at least had profited from the rebellion. Lancelot brought his army to Caer Cadarn. The core of that army was Lancelot’s Saxon Guard and two hundred Belgic warriors, and they had been reinforced by a levy of hundreds of Christians who believed they were doing God’s work by serving Lancelot, but the news that Arthur had taken the Caer and the attacks that Morfans and Galahad were making south of Glevum confused and dispirited them. The Christians began to desert, though at least two hundred were still with Lancelot when he came at dusk two days after we had captured the royal hill. He still possessed a chance of keeping his new kingdom if only he dared to attack Arthur, but he hesitated, and in the next dawn Arthur sent me down with a message. I carried my shield upside down and tied a sprig of oak leaves on my spear to show that I came to talk, not fight, and a Belgic chieftain met me and swore to uphold my truce before leading me to the palace at Lindinis where Lancelot was lodging. I waited in the outer courtyard, watched there by sullen spearmen, while Lancelot tried to decide whether or not he should meet me. I waited over an hour, but at last Lancelot appeared. He was dressed in his white-enamelled scale armour, carried his gilded helmet under one arm and had the Christ-blade at his hip. Amhar and the bandaged Loholt stood behind him, his Saxon Guard and a dozen chieftains flanked him, and Bors, his champion, stood beside him. All of them reeked of defeat. I could smell it on them like rotting meat. Lancelot could have sealed us up in the Caer, turned and savaged Morfans and Galahad, then come back to starve us out, but he had lost his courage. He just wanted to survive. Sansum, I noted wryly, was nowhere to be seen. The mouse-lord knew when to lie low.

‘We meet again, Lord Derfel.’ Bors greeted me on his master’s behalf. I ignored Bors. ‘Lancelot,’ I addressed the King directly, but refused to honour him with his rank, ‘my Lord Arthur will grant your men mercy on one condition.’ I spoke loudly so that all the spearmen in the courtyard could hear me. Most of the warriors bore Lancelot’s sea-eagle on their shields, but some had crosses painted on their shields or else the twin curves of the fish. ‘The condition for that mercy,’ I went on, ‘is that you fight our champion, man on man, sword on sword, and it you live you may go free and your men may go with you, and if you die then your men will still go free. Even if you choose not to fight, then your men will still be pardoned, all but those who were once oath-sworn to our Lord King Mordred. They will be killed.’ It was a subtle offer. If Lancelot fought then he saved the lives of the men who had changed sides to support him, while if he backed down from the challenge then he would condemn them to death and his precious reputation would suffer.

Lancelot glanced at Bors, then back at me. I despised him so much at that moment. He should have been fighting us, not shuffling his feet in Lindinis’s outer courtyard, but he had been dazzled by Arthur’s daring. He did not know how many men we had, he could only see that the Caer’s ramparts bristled with spears and so the fight had drained out of him. He leaned close to his cousin and they exchanged words. Lancelot looked back to me after Bors had spoken to him and his face flickered in a half smile. ‘My champion, Bors,’ he said, ‘accepts Arthur’s challenge.’

‘The offer is for you to fight,’ I said, ‘not for someone to tie and slaughter your tame hog.’

Bors growled at that, and half drew his sword, but the Belgic chief who had guaranteed my safety stepped forward with a spear and Bors subsided.

‘And Arthur’s champion,’ Lancelot asked, ‘would that be Arthur himself?’

‘No,’ I said, and smiled. ‘I begged for that honour,’ I told him, ‘and I received it. I wanted it for the insult you gave to Ceinwyn. You thought to parade her naked through Ynys Wydryn, but I shall drag your naked corpse through all Dumnonia. And as for my daughter,’ I went on, ‘her death is already avenged. Your Druids lie dead on their left sides, Lancelot. Their bodies are unburned and their souls wander.’

Lancelot spat at my feet. ‘Tell Arthur,’ he said, ‘that I will send my answer at midday.’ He turned away.

‘And do you have a message for Guinevere?’ I asked him, and the question made him turn back.

‘Your lover is on the Caer,’ I told him. ‘Do you want to know what will happen to her? Arthur has told me her fate.’

He stared at me with loathing, spat again, then just turned and walked away. I did the same. I went back to the Caer and found Arthur on the rampart above the western gate where, so many years before, he had talked to me of a soldier’s duty. That duty, he had said, was to fight battles for those who could not fight for themselves. That was his creed, and through all these years he had fought for the child Mordred and now, at last, he fought for himself, and in so doing he lost all that he had most wanted. I gave him Lancelot’s answer and he nodded, said nothing, and waved me away. Late that morning Guinevere sent Gwydre to summon me. The child climbed the ramparts where I stood with my men and tugged at my cloak. ‘Uncle Derfel?’ He peered up at me wanly. ‘Mother wants you.’ He spoke fearfully and there were tears in his eyes.

I glanced at Arthur, but he was taking no interest in any of us and so I went down the steps and walked with Gwydre to the spearman’s hut. It must have cut Guinevere’s wounded pride to the quick to ask for me, but she wanted to convey a message to Arthur and she knew that no one else in Caer Cadarn was as close to him as I. She stood as I ducked through the door. I bowed to her, then waited as she told Gwydre to go and talk with his father.

The hut was only just high enough for Guinevere to stand upright. Her face was drawn, almost haggard, but somehow that sadness gave her a luminous beauty that her usual look of pride denied her.

‘Nimue tells me you saw Lancelot,’ she said so softly that I had to lean forward to catch her words.

‘Yes, Lady, I did.’

Her right hand was unconsciously fidgeting with the folds of her dress. ‘Did he send a message?’

‘None, Lady.’

She stared at me with her huge green eyes. ‘Please, Derfel,’ she said softly.

‘I invited him to speak, Lady. He said nothing.’

She crumpled onto a crude bench. She was silent for a while and I watched as a spider dropped out of the thatch and spun its thread closer and closer to her hair. I was transfixed by the insect, wondering if I should sweep it aside or just let it be. ‘What did you say to him?’ she asked.

‘I offered to fight him, Lady, man to man, Hywelbane against the Christ-blade. And then I promised to drag his naked body through all Dumnonia.’

She shook her head savagely. ‘Fight,’ she said angrily, ‘that’s all you brutes know how to do!’ She closed her eyes for a few seconds. ‘I am sorry, Lord Derfel,’ she said meekly, ‘I should not insult you, not when I need you to ask a favour of Lord Arthur.’ She looked up at me and I saw she was every bit as broken as Arthur himself. ‘Will you?’ she begged me.

‘What favour, Lady’’

‘Ask him to let me go, Derfel. Tell him I will sail beyond the sea. Tell him he may keep our son, and that he is our son, and that I will go away and he will never see me or hear of me again.’

‘I shall ask him, Lady,’ I said.

She caught the doubt in my voice and stared sadly at me. The spider had disappeared into her thick red hair. ‘You think he will refuse?’ she asked in a small frightened voice.

‘Lady,’ I said, ‘he loves you. He loves you so well that I do not think he can ever let you go.’

A tear showed at her eye, then spilled down her cheek. ‘So what will he do with me?’ she asked, and I gave no answer. ‘What will he do, Derfel?’ Guinevere demanded again with some of her old energy.

‘Tell me!’

‘Lady,’ I said heavily, ‘he will put you somewhere safe and he will keep you there, under guard.’ And every day, I thought, he would think of her, and every night he would conjure her in his dreams, and in every dawn he would turn in his bed to find that she was gone. ‘You will be well treated, Lady,’ I assured her gently.

‘No,’ she wailed. She could have expected death, but this promise of imprisonment seemed even worse to her. ‘Tell him to let me go, Derfel. Just tell him to let me go!’

‘I shall ask him,’ I promised her, ‘but I do not think he will. I do not think he can.’

She was crying hard now, her head in her hands, and though I waited, she said nothing more and so I backed out of the hut. Gwydre had found his father’s company too glum and so wanted to go back in to his mother, but I took him away and made him help me clean and re-sharpen Excalibur. Poor Gwydre was frightened, for he did not understand what had happened and neither Guinevere nor Arthur was able to explain. ‘Your mother is very sick,’ I told him, ‘and you know that sick people sometimes have to be on their own.’ I smiled at him. ‘Maybe you can come and live with Morwenna and Seren.’

‘Can I?”‘

‘I think your mother and father will say yes,’ I said, ‘and I’d like that. Now don’t scrub the sword!

Sharpen it. Long smooth strokes, like that!’

At midday I went to the western gate and watched for Lancelot’s messenger. But none came. No one came. Lancelot’s army was just shredding away like sand washed off a stone by rain. A few went south and Lancelot rode with those men and the swan’s wings on his helmet showed bright and white as he went away, but most of the men came to the meadow at the foot of the Caer and there they laid down their spears, their shields and their swords and then knelt in the grass for Arthur’s mercy.

‘You’ve won, Lord,’ I said.

‘Yes, Derfel,’ he said, still sitting, ‘it looks as if I have.’ His new beard, so oddly grey, made him look older. Not feebler, but older and harsher. It suited him. Above his head a stir of wind lifted the banner of the bear.

I sat beside him. ‘The Princess Guinevere,’ I said, watching as the enemy’s army laid down their weapons and knelt below us, ‘begged me to ask you a favour.’ He said nothing. He did not even look at me. ‘She wants — ’

‘To go away,’ he interrupted me.

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘With her sea-eagle,’ he said bitterly.

‘She did not say that, Lord.’

‘Where else would she go?’ he asked, then turned his cold eyes on me. ‘Did he ask for her?’

‘No, Lord. He said nothing.’

Arthur laughed at that, but it was a cruel laugh. ‘Poor Guinevere,’ he said, ‘poor, poor Guinevere. He doesn’t love her, does he? She was just something beautiful for him, another mirror in which to stare at his own beauty. That must hurt her, Derfel, that must hurt her.’

‘She begs you to free her,’ I persevered, as I had promised I would. ‘She will leave Gwydre to you, she will go. .’

‘She can make no conditions,’ Arthur said angrily. ‘None.’

‘No, Lord,’ I said. I had done my best for her and I had failed.

‘She will stay in Dumnonia,’ Arthur decreed.

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘And you will stay here too,’ he ordered me harshly. Mordred might release you from his oath, but I do not. You are my man, Derfel, you are my councillor and you will stay here with me. From this day on you are my champion.’

I turned to look at where the newly-cleaned and sharpened sword lay on the royal stone. ‘Am I still a King’s champion, Lord?’ I asked.

‘We already have a king,’ he said, ‘and I will not break that oath, but I will rule this country. No one else, Derfel, just me’

I thought of the bridge at Pontes where we had crossed the river before fighting Aelle. ‘If you won’t be King, Lord,’ I said, ‘then you shall be our Emperor. You shall be a Lord of Kings.’

He smiled. It was the first smile I had seen on his face since Nimue had swept aside the black curtain in the Sea Palace. It was a wan smile, but it was there. Nor did he refuse my title. The Emperor Arthur, Lord of Kings.

Lancelot was gone and what had been his army now knelt to us in terror. Their banners were fallen, their spears were grounded and their shields lay flat. The madness had swept across Dumnonia like a thunderstorm, but it had passed and Arthur had won and below us, under a high summer sun, a whole army knelt for his mercy. It was what Guinevere had once dreamed of. It was Dumnonia at Arthur’s feet with his sword on its royal stone, but it was too late now. Too late for her. But for us, who had kept our oaths, it was what we had always wanted, for now, in all but name, Arthur was King.

The story of Arthur continues in the third volume of The Warlord Chronicles