Excalibur

PART TWO Mynydd Baddon

‘Who?’ Igraine demanded as soon as she had read the first sheet of the latest pile of parchments. She has learned some of the Saxon tongue in the last few months and is very proud of herself for that achievement, though in truth it is a barbarous language and much less subtle than the British.

‘Who?’ I echoed her question.

‘Who was the woman who guided Britain to destruction? It was Nimue, wasn’t it?’

‘If you give me time to write the tale, dear Lady, you will find out.’

‘I knew you were going to say that. I don’t even know why I asked.’ She sat on the wide ledge of my windowsill with one hand on her swollen belly and with her head cocked to one side as though she were listening. After a while a look of mischievous delight came to her face. ‘The baby’s kicking,’ she said, ‘do you want to feel it?’

I shuddered. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I was never interested in babies.’

She made a face at me. ‘You’ll love mine, Derfel.’

‘I will?’

‘He’s going to be lovely!’

‘How do you know,’ I enquired, ‘that it is a boy?’

‘Because no girl can kick this hard, that’s why. Look!’ And my Queen smoothed the blue dress tight over her belly and laughed when the smooth dome flickered. ‘Tell me about Argante,’ she said, letting go of the dress.

‘Small, dark, thin, pretty.’

Igraine made a face at the inadequacy of my description. ‘Was she clever?’

I thought about it. ‘She was sly, so yes, she had a sort of cleverness, but it was never fed by education.’

My Queen gave that statement a scornful shrug. ‘Is education so important?’

‘I think it is, yes. I always regret I never learned Latin.’

‘Why?’ Igraine asked.

‘Because so much of mankind’s experience is written in that tongue, Lady, and one of the things an education gives us is access to all the things other folks have known, feared, dreamed and achieved. When you are in trouble it helps to discover someone who has been in the same predicament before. It explains things.’

‘Like what?’ Igraine demanded.

I shrugged. ‘I remember something Guinevere once said to me. I didn’t know what it meant, because it was in Latin, but she translated it, and it explained Arthur exactly. I’ve never forgotten it either.’

‘Well? Go on.’

‘ Odi at amo,’ I quoted the unfamiliar words slowly, ‘ excruaor.’

‘Which means?’

‘I hate and I love, it hurts. A poet wrote the line, I forget which poet, but Guinevere had read the poem and one day, when we were talking about Arthur, she quoted the line. She understood him exactly, you see.’

‘Did Argante understand him?’

‘Oh, no.’

‘Could she read?’

‘I’m not sure. I don’t remember. Probably not.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘She had very pale skin,’ I said, ‘because she refused to go into the sun. She liked the night, Argante did. And she had very black hair, as shiny as a raven’s feathers.’

‘You say she was small and thin?’ Igraine asked.

‘Very thin, and quite short,’ I said, ‘but the thing I remember most about Argante is that she very rarely smiled. She watched everything and missed nothing, and there was always a calculating look on her face. People mistook that look for cleverness, but it wasn’t cleverness at all. She was merely the youngest of seven or eight daughters and so she was always worried that she would be left out. She was looking for her share all the time, and all the time she believed she was not receiving it.’

Igraine grimaced. ‘You make her sound horrid!’

‘She was greedy, bitter and very young,’ I said, ‘but she was also beautiful. She had a delicacy that was very touching.’ I paused and sighed. ‘Poor Arthur. He did pick his women very badly. Except for Ailleann, of course, but then he didn’t pick her. She was given to him as a slave.’

‘What happened to Ailleann?’

‘She died in the Saxon War.’

‘Killed?’ Igraine shuddered.

‘Of the plague,’ I said. ‘It was a very normal death.’

Christ.

That name does look odd on the page, but I shall leave it there. Just as Igraine and I were talking about Ailleann, Bishop Sansum came into the room. The saint cannot read, and because he would utterly disapprove of my writing this story of Arthur, Igraine and I pretend that I am making a gospel in the Saxon tongue. I say he cannot read, but Sansum does have the ability to recognize some few words and Christ is one of them. Which is why I wrote it. He saw it, too, and grunted suspiciously. He looks very old these days. Almost all his hair has gone, though he still has two white tufts like the ears of Lughtigern, the mouse lord. He has pain when he passes urine, but he will not submit his body to the wise-women for healing, for he claims they are all pagans. God, the saint claims, will cure him, though at times, God forgive me, I pray that the saint might be dying for then this small monastery would have a new bishop.

‘My Lady is well?’ he asked Igraine after squinting down at this parchment.

‘Thank you, Bishop, I am.’

Sansum poked about the room, looking for something wrong, though what he expected to find I cannot tell. The room is very simple; a cot, a writing table, a stool and a fire. He would have liked to criticize me for burning a fire, but today is a very mild winter’s day and I am saving what small fuel the saint permits me to have. He flicked at a scrap of dust, decided not to comment on it and so peered at Igraine instead. ‘Your time must be very near, Lady?’

‘Less than two moons, they say, Bishop,’ Igraine said, and made the sign of the cross against her blue dress.

‘You will know, of course, that our prayers will echo throughout heaven on your Ladyship’s behalf,’

Sansum said, without meaning a word of it.

‘Pray, too,’ Igraine said, ‘that the Saxons are not close.’

‘Are they?’ Sansum asked in alarm.

‘My husband hears they are readying to attack Ratae.’

‘Ratae is far away,’ the Bishop said dismissively.

‘A day and a half?’ Igraine said, ‘and if Ratae falls, what fortress lies between us and the Saxons?’

‘God will protect us,’ the Bishop said, unconsciously echoing the long-dead belief of the pious King Meurig of Gwent, ‘as God will protect your Ladyship at the hour of your trial.’ He stayed a few more minutes, but had no real business with either of us. The saint is bored these days. He lacks mischief to foment. Brother Maelgwyn, who was the strongest of us and who carried much of the monastery’s physical labour, died a few weeks ago and, with his passing, the Bishop lost one of his favourite targets for contempt. He finds little pleasure in tormenting me for I endure his spite patiently, and besides, I am protected by Igraine and her husband.

At last Sansum went and Igraine made a face at his retreating back. ‘Tell me, Derfel,’ she said when the saint was out of earshot, ‘what should I do for the birth?’

‘Why on earth do you ask me?’ I said in amazement. ‘I know nothing about childbirth, thank God!

I’ve never even seen a child born, and I don’t want to.’

‘But you know about the old things,’ she said urgently, ‘that’s what I mean.’

‘The women in your caer will know much more than I do,’ I said, ‘but whenever Ceinwyn gave birth we always made sure there was iron in the bed, women’s urine on the doorstep, mugwort on the fire, and, of course, we had a virgin girl ready to lift the newborn child from the birth-straw. Most important of all,’ I went on sternly, ‘there must be no men in the room. Nothing brings so much ill-luck as having a man present at a birth.’ I touched the protruding nail in my writing desk to avert the evil fortune of even mentioning such an unlucky circumstance. We Christians, of course, do not believe that touching iron will affect any fortune, whether evil or good, but the nailhead on my desk is still much polished by my touching. ‘Is it true about the Saxons?’ I asked.

Igraine nodded. ‘They’re getting closer, Derfel.’

I rubbed the nailhead again. ‘Then warn your husband to have sharp spears.’

‘He needs no warning,’ she said grimly.

I wonder if the war will ever end. For as long as I have lived the Britons have fought the Saxons, and though we did win one great victory over them, in the years since that victory we have seen more land lost and, with the land, the stories that were attached to the valleys and hilltops have been lost as well. History is not just a tale of men’s making, but is a thing tied to the land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past. The Sais take our land and our history. They spread like a contagion, and we no longer have Arthur to protect us. Arthur, scourge of the Sais, Lord of Britain and the man whose love hurt him more than any wound from sword or spear. How I do miss Arthur.

The winter solstice is when we prayed that the Gods would not abandon the earth to the great darkness. In the bleakest of winters those prayers often seemed like pleas of despair, and that was never more so than in the year before the Saxons attacked when our world was deadened beneath a shell of ice and crusted snow. For those of us who were adepts of Mithras the solstice had a double meaning, for it is also the time of our God’s birth, and after the big solstice feast at Dun Caric I took Issa west to the caves where we held our most solemn ceremonies and there I inducted him into the worship of Mithras. He endured the ordeals successfully and so was welcomed into that band of elite warriors who keep the God’s mysteries. We feasted afterwards. I killed the bull that year, first hamstringing the beast so that it could not move, then swinging the axe in the low cave to sever its spine. The bull, I recall, had a shrivelled liver, which was reckoned a bad omen, but there were no good omens that cold winter. Forty men attended the rites, despite the bitter weather. Arthur, though long an initiate, did not arrive, but Sagramor and Culhwch had come from their frontier posts for the ceremonies. At the end of the feasting, when most of the warriors were sleeping off the effects of the mead, we three withdrew to a low tunnel where the smoke was not thick and we could talk privately.

Both Sagramor and Culhwch were certain that the Saxons would attack directly along the valley of the Thames. ‘What I hear,’ Sagramor told us, ‘is that they’re filling London and Pontes with food and supplies.’ He paused to tear some meat from a bone with his teeth. It had been months since I had seen Sagramor, and I found his company reassuring; the Numidian was the toughest and most fearsome of all Arthur’s warlords, and his prowess was reflected in his narrow, axe-sharp face. He was the most loyal of men, a staunch friend, and a wondrous teller of stories, but above everything he was a natural warrior who could outfox and outfight any enemy. The Saxons were terrified of Sagramor, believing he was a dark demon from their Otherworld. We were happy that they should live in such numbing fear and it was a comfort that, even though outnumbered, we would have his sword and his experienced spearmen on our side.

‘Won’t Cerdic attack in the south?’ I asked.

Culhwch shook his head. ‘He’s not making any show of it. Nothing stirring in Venta.’

‘They don’t trust each other,’ Sagramor spoke of Cerdic and Aelle. ‘They daren’t let one another out of their sight. Cerdic fears we’ll buy off Aelle, and Aelle fears that Cerdic will cheat him of the spoils, so they’re going to stick closer than brothers.’

‘So what will Arthur do?’ I asked.

‘We hoped you’d tell us that,’ Culhwch answered.

‘Arthur doesn’t speak to me these days,’ I said, not bothering to hide my bitterness.

‘That makes two of us,’ Culhwch growled.

‘Three,’ Sagramor said. ‘He comes to see me, he asks questions, he rides on raids and then he goes away. He says nothing.’

‘Let’s hope he’s thinking,’ I said.

‘Too busy with that new bride, probably,’ Culhwch offered sourly.

‘Have you met her?’ I asked.

‘An Irish kitten,’ he said dismissively, ‘with claws.’ Culhwch told us he had visited Arthur and his new bride on his way north to this meeting with Mithras. ‘She’s pretty enough,’ he said grudgingly. ‘If you took her slave you’d probably want to make sure she stayed in your own kitchen for a while. Well, I would. You wouldn’t, Derfel.’ Culhwch often teased me about my loyalty to Ceinwyn, though I was not so very unusual in my fidelity. Sagramor had taken a captured Saxon for a wife and, like me, was famously loyal to his woman. ‘What use is a bull that only serves one cow?’ Culhwch now asked, but neither of us responded to his jibe.

‘Arthur is frightened,’ Sagramor said instead. He paused, gathering his thoughts. The Numidian spoke the British tongue well, though with a wretched accent, but it was not his natural language, and he often spoke slowly to make certain he was expressing his exact ideas. ‘He has defied the Gods, and not just at Mai Dun, but by taking Mordred’s power. The Christians hate him and now the pagans say he is their enemy. Do you see how lonely that makes him?’

‘The trouble with Arthur is that he doesn’t believe in the Gods,’ Culhwch said dismissively.

‘He believes in himself,’ Sagramor said, ‘and when Guinevere betrayed him, he took a blow to the heart. He is ashamed. He lost much pride, and he’s a proud man. He thinks we all laugh at him, and so he is distant from us.’

‘I don’t laugh at him,’ I protested.

‘I do,’ Culhwch said, flinching as he straightened his wounded leg. ‘Stupid bastard. Should have taken his sword belt to Guinevere’s back a few times. That would have taught the bitch a lesson.’

‘Now,’ Sagramor went on, blithely ignoring Culhwch’s predictable opinion, ‘he fears defeat. For what is he if he is not a soldier? He likes to think he is a good man, that he rules because he is a natural ruler, but it is the sword that has carried him to power. In his soul he knows that, and if he loses this war then he loses the thing he cares about most; his reputation. He will be remembered as the usurper who was not good enough to hold what he usurped. He is terrified of a second defeat for his reputation.’

‘Maybe Argante can heal the first defeat,’ I said.

‘I doubt it,’ Sagramor said. ‘Galahad tells me that Arthur didn’t really want to marry her.’

‘Then why did he?’ I asked gloomily.

Sagramor shrugged. ‘To spite Guinevere? To please Oengus? To show us that he doesn’t need Guinevere?’

‘To slap bellies with a pretty girl?’ Culhwch suggested.

‘If he even does that,’ Sagramor said.

Culhwch stared at the Numidian in apparent shock. ‘Of course he does,’ Culhwch said. Sagramor shook his head. ‘I hear he doesn’t. Only rumour, of course, and rumour is least trustworthy when it comes to the ways of a man and his woman. But I think this Princess is too young for Arthur’s tastes.’

‘They’re never too young,’ Culhwch growled. Sagramor just shrugged. He was a far more subtle man than Culhwch and that gave him a much greater insight into Arthur, who liked to appear so straightforward, but whose soul was in truth as complicated as the twisted curves and spooling dragons that decorated Excali-bur’s blade.

We parted in the morning, our spear and sword blades still reddened with the blood of the sacrificed bull. Issa was excited. A few years before he had been a farm boy, but now he was an adept of Mithras and soon, he had told me, he would be a father for Scarach, his wife, was pregnant. Issa, given confidence by his initiation into Mithras, was suddenly sure we could beat the Saxons without Gwent’s help, but I had no such belief. I might not have liked Guinevere, but I had never thought her a fool, and I was worried about her forecast that Cerdic would attack in the south. The alternative made sense, of course; Cerdic and Aelle were reluctant allies and would want to keep a careful eye on each other. An overwhelming attack along the Thames would be the quickest way to reach the Severn Sea and so split the British kingdoms into two parts, and why should the Saxons sacrifice their advantage of numbers by dividing their forces into two smaller armies that Arthur might defeat one after the other? Yet if Arthur expected just one attack, and only guarded against that one attack, the advantages of a southern assault were overwhelming. While Arthur was tangled with one Saxon army in the Thames valley, the other could hook around his right flank and reach the Severn almost unopposed. Issa, though, was not worried by such things. He only imagined himself in the shield wall where, ennobled by Mithras’s acceptance, he would cut down Saxons like a farmer reaping hay.

The weather stayed cold after the season of the solstice. Day after day dawned frozen and pale with the sun little more than a reddened disc hanging low in the southern clouds. Wolves scavenged deep into the farmlands, hunting for our sheep that we had penned into hurdle folds, and one glorious day we hunted down six of the grey beasts and so secured six new wolf tails for my warband’s helmets. My men had begun to wear such tails on their helmet crests in the deep woods of Armorica where we had fought the Franks and, because we had raided them like scavenging beasts, they had called us wolves and we had taken the insult as a compliment. We were the Wolftails, though our shields, instead of bearing a wolf mask, were painted with a five-pointed star as a tribute to Ceinwyn. Ceinwyn was still insistent that she would not flee to Powys in the spring. Morwenna and Seren could go, she said, but she would stay. I was angry at that decision. ‘So the girls can lose both mother and father?’ I demanded.

‘If that’s what the Gods decree, yes,’ she said placidly, then shrugged. ‘I may be being selfish, but that is what I want.’

‘You want to die? That’s selfish?’

‘I don’t want to be so far away, Derfel,’ she said. ‘Do you know what it’s like to be in a distant country when your man is fighting? You wait in terror. You fear every messenger. You listen to every rumour. This time I shall stay.’

‘To give me something else to worry about?’

‘What an arrogant man you are,’ she said calmly. ‘You think I can’t look after myself?’

‘That little ring won’t keep you safe from Saxons,’ I said, pointing to the scrap of agate on her finger.

‘So I shall keep myself safe. Don’t worry, Derfel, I won’t be under your feet, and I won’t let myself be taken captive.’

Next day the first lambs were born in a sheepfold hard under Dun Caric’s hill. It was very early for such births, but I took it as a good sign from the Gods. Before Ceinwyn could forbid it, the firstborn of those lambs was sacrificed to ensure that the rest of the lambing season would go well. The little beast’s bloody pelt was nailed to a willow beside the stream and beneath it, next day, a wolfsbane bloomed, its small yellow petals the first flash of colour in the turning year. That day, too, I saw three kingfishers flickering bright by the icy edges of the stream. Life was stirring. In the dawn, after the cockerels had woken us, we could again hear the songs of thrushes, robins, larks, wrens and sparrows. Arthur sent for us two weeks after those first lambs were born. The snow had thawed, and his messenger had struggled through the muddy roads to bring us the summons that demanded our presence at the palace of Lindinis. We were to be there for the feast of Imbolc, the first feast after the solstice and one that is devoted to the Goddess of fertility. At Imbolc we drive newborn lambs through burning hoops and afterwards, when they think no one is watching, the young girls will leap through the smouldering hoops and touch their fingers to the ashes of Imbolc’s fires and smear the grey dust high between their thighs. A child born in November is called a child of Imbolc and has ash as its mother and fire as its father. Ceinwyn and I arrived in the afternoon of Imbolc Eve as the wintry sun was throwing long shadows across the pale grass. Arthur’s spearmen surrounded the palace, guarding him against the sullen hostility of people who remembered Merlin’s magical invocation of the glowing girl in the palace courtyard.

To my surprise, I discovered the courtyard was prepared for Imbolc. Arthur had never cared for such things, leaving most religious observances to Guinevere, and she had never celebrated the crude country festivals like Imbolc; but now a great hoop of plaited straw stood ready for the flames in the centre of the yard while a handful of newborn lambs were penned with their mothers in a small hurdle enclosure. Culhwch greeted us, giving a sly nod to the hoop. ‘A chance for you to have another baby,’ he said to Ceinwyn.

‘Why else would I be here?’ she responded, giving him a kiss. ‘And how many do you have now?’

‘Twenty-one,’ he said proudly.

‘From how many mothers?’

‘Ten,’ he grinned, then slapped my back. ‘We’re to get our orders tomorrow.’

‘We?’

‘You, me, Sagramor, Galahad, Lanval, Balin, Morfans,’ Culhwch shrugged, ‘everyone.’

‘Is Argante here?’ I asked.

‘Who do you think put up the hoop?’ he asked. ‘This is all her idea. She’s brought a Druid out of Demetia, and before we all eat tonight we have to worship Nantosuelta.’

‘Who?’ Ceinwyn asked.

‘A Goddess,’ Culhwch said carelessly. There were so many Gods and Goddesses that it was impossible for anyone but a Druid to know all their names and neither Ceinwyn nor I had ever heard of Nantosuelta before.

We did not see either Arthur or Argante until after dark when Hygwydd, Arthur’s servant, summoned us all into the courtyard that was lit with pitch-soaked torches flaming in their iron beckets. I remembered Merlin’s night here, and the crowd of awed folk who had lifted their maimed and sick babies to Olwen the Silver. Now an assembly of lords and their ladies waited awkwardly on either side of the plaited hoop, while set on a dais at the courtyard’s western end were three chairs draped with white linen. A Druid stood beside the hoop and I presumed he was the sorcerer whom Argante had fetched from her father’s kingdom. He was a short, squat man with a wild black beard in which tufts of fox hair and bunches of small bones were plaited. ‘He’s called Fergal,’ Galahad told me, ‘and he hates Christians. He spent all afternoon casting spells against me, then Sagramor arrived and Fergal almost fainted with horror. He thought it was Crom Dubh come in person.’ Galahad laughed.

Sagramor could have indeed been that dark God, for he was dressed in black leather and had a black-scabbarded sword at his hip. He had come to Lindinis with his big, placid Saxon wife, Malla, and the two stood apart from the rest of us at the far side of the courtyard. Sagramor worshipped Mithras but had little time for the British Gods, while Malla still prayed to Woden, Eostre, Thunor, Fir and Seaxnet: all Saxon deities.

All Arthur’s leaders were there, though, as I waited for Arthur, I thought of the men who were missing. Cei, who had grown up with Arthur in distant Gwynedd, had died in Dumnonian Isca during Lancelot’s rebellion. He had been murdered by Christians. Agravain, who for years had been the commander of Arthur’s horsemen, had died during the winter, struck down by a fever. Balin had taken over Agravain’s duties, and he had brought three wives to Lindinis, together with a tribe of small stocky children who stared in horror at Morfans, the ugliest man of Britain, whose face was now so familiar to the rest of us that we no longer noticed his hare lip, goitred neck or twisted jaw. Except for Gwydre, who was still a boy, I was probably the youngest man there and that realization shocked me. We needed new warlords, and I decided then and there that I would give Issa his own band of men as soon as the Saxon war was over. If Issa lived. If I lived.

Galahad was looking after Gwydre and the two of them came to stand with Ceinwyn and me. Galahad had always been a handsome man, but now, as he grew into his middle years, those good looks possessed a new dignity. His hair had turned from its bright gold into grey, and he now wore a small pointed beard. He and I had always been close, but in that difficult winter he was probably closer to Arthur than to anyone else. Galahad had not been present at the sea palace to see Arthur’s shame, and that, together with his calm sympathy, made him acceptable to Arthur. Ceinwyn, keeping her voice low so that Gwydre could not hear, asked him how Arthur was. ‘I wish I knew,’ Galahad said.

‘He’s surely happy,’ Ceinwyn observed.

‘Why?’

‘A new wife?’ Ceinwyn suggested.

Galahad smiled. ‘When a man makes a journey, dear Lady, and has his horse stolen in the course of it, he frequently buys a replacement too hastily.’

‘And doesn’t ride it thereafter, I hear?’ I put in brutally.

‘Do you hear that, Derfel?’ Galahad answered, neither confirming nor denying the rumour. He smiled.

‘Marriage is such a mystery to me,’ he added vaguely. Galahad himself had never married. Indeed he had never really settled since Ynys Trebes, his home, had fallen to the Franks. He had been in Dumnonia ever since and he had seen a generation of children grow to adulthood in that time, but he still seemed like a visitor. He had rooms in the palace at Durnovaria, but kept little furniture there and scant comfort. He rode errands for Arthur, travelling the length of Britain to resolve problems with other kingdoms, or else riding with Sagramor in raids across the Saxon frontier, and he seemed happiest when he was thus kept busy. I had sometimes suspected that he was in love with Guinevere, but Ceinwyn had always mocked that thought. Galahad, she said, was in love with perfection and was too fastidious to love an actual woman. He loved the idea of women, Ceinwyn said, but could not bear the reality of disease and blood and pain. He showed no revulsion at such things in battle, but that, Ceinwyn declared, was because in battle it was men who were bloody and men who were fallible, and Galahad had never idealized men, only women. And maybe she was right. I only knew that at times my friend had to be lonely, though he never complained. ‘Arthur’s very proud of Argante,’ he now said mildly, though in a tone which suggested he was leaving something unsaid.

‘But she’s no Guinevere?’ I suggested.

‘She’s certainly no Guinevere,’ Galahad agreed, grateful that I had voiced the thought, ‘though she’s not unlike her in some ways.’

‘Such as?’ Ceinwyn asked.

‘She has ambitions,’ Galahad said dubiously. ‘She thinks Arthur should cede Siluria to her father.’

‘Siluria isn’t his to yield!’ I said.

‘No,’ Galahad agreed, ‘but Argante thinks he could conquer it.’

I spat. To conquer Siluria, Arthur would need to fight Gwent and even Powys, the two countries that jointly ruled the territory. ‘Mad,’ I said.

‘Ambitious, if unrealistic,’ Galahad corrected me.

‘Do you like Argante?’ Ceinwyn asked him directly.

He was spared the need to answer because the palace door was suddenly thrown open and Arthur at last appeared. He was robed in his customary white, and his face that had grown so gaunt over the last months looked suddenly old. That was a cruel fate, for on his arm, robed in gold, was his new bride and that new bride was little more than a child.

That was the first time I saw Argante, Princess of the Ui Liathain and Iseult’s sister, and in many ways she resembled the doomed Iseult. Argante was a fragile creature poised between girlhood and womanhood, and on that night of Imbolc’s Eve she looked closer to childhood than adulthood for she was swathed in a great cloak of stiff linen that had surely once belonged to Guinevere. The robe was certainly too big for Argante, who walked awkwardly in its golden folds. I remembered seeing her sister hung with jewels and thinking that Iseult had looked like a child arrayed in its mother’s gold and Argante gave the same impression of being dressed up for play and, just like a child pretending to adulthood, she carried herself with a self-absorbed solemnity to defy her innate lack of dignity. She wore her glossy black hair in a long tress that was twisted about her skull and held in place with a brooch of jet, the same colour as the shields of her father’s feared warriors, and the adult style sat uneasily on her young face, just as the heavy golden torque about her neck seemed too massive for her slender throat. Arthur led her to the dais and there bowed her into the left-hand chair and I doubt there was a single soul in the courtyard, whether guest, Druid or guard, who did not think how like father and daughter they appeared. There was a pause once Argante was seated. It was an awkward moment, as though a piece of ritual had been forgotten and a solemn ceremony was in danger of becoming ridiculous, but then there was a scuffle in the doorway, a snigger of laughter, and Mordred came into view. Our King limped on his clubbed foot and with a sly smile on his face. Like Argante he was playing a role, but unlike her he was an unwilling player. He knew that every man in that courtyard was Arthur’s man and that all hated him, and that while they pretended he was their King he lived only by their sufferance. He climbed the dais. Arthur bowed and we all followed suit. Mordred, his stiff hair as unruly as ever and his beard an ugly fringe to his round face, nodded curtly, then sat in the centre chair. Argante gave him a surprisingly friendly glance, Arthur took the last chair, and there they sat, Emperor, King and child bride.

I could not help thinking that Guinevere would have done all this so much better. There would have been heated mead to drink, more fires for warmth, and music to drown the awkward silences, but on this night no one seemed to know what was supposed to happen, until Argante hissed at her father’s Druid. Fergal glanced about nervously, then scuttled across the courtyard to snatch up one of the becketed torches. He used the torch to ignite the hoop, then muttered incomprehensible incantations as the flames seized the straw.

The five newborn lambs were carried from the pen by slaves. The ewes called miserably for their missing offspring that wriggled in the slaves’ arms. Fergal waited until the hoop was a complete circle of fire, then ordered the lambs be herded through the flames. Confusion followed. The lambs, having no idea that the fertility of Dumnonia depended on their obedience, scattered in every direction except towards the fire and Balin’s children happily joined the whooping hunt and only succeeded in compounding the confusion, but at last, one by one, the lambs were collected and shooed towards the hoop, and in time all five were persuaded to jump through the circlet of fire, but by then the courtyard’s intended solemnity had been shattered. Argante, who was doubtless accustomed to seeing such ceremonies performed much better in her native Demetia, frowned, but the rest of us laughed and chatted. Fergal restored the night’s dignity by suddenly uttering a feral scream that froze us all. The Druid was standing with his head thrown back so that he stared up at the clouds, and in his right hand there was lifted a broad flint knife, and in his left, where it struggled helplessly, was a lamb.

‘Oh, no,’ Ceinwyn protested and turned away. Gwydre grimaced and I put an arm about his shoulders.

Fergal bellowed his challenge at the night, then held both lamb and knife high over his head. He screamed again, then savaged the lamb, striking and tearing at its little body with the clumsy, blunt knife, the lamb struggled ever more weakly and bleated to its mother that called hopelessly back, and all the while blood poured from its fleece onto Fergal’s raised face and onto his wild, bone-hung, fox-plaited beard. ‘I am very glad,’ Galahad murmured in my ear, ‘that I do not live in Demetia.’

I glanced at Arthur while this extraordinary sacrifice was being performed and I saw a look of utter revulsion on his face. Then he saw that I was watching him and his face stiffened. Argante, her mouth open eagerly, was leaning forward to watch the Druid. Mordred was grinning. The lamb died and Fergal, to the horror of us all, began to prance about the courtyard, shaking the corpse and screaming prayers. Blood droplets spattered us. I threw my cloak protectively over Ceinwyn as the Druid, his own face streaming with rivulets of blood, danced past. Arthur plainly had no idea that this barbarous killing had been arranged. He had doubtless thought his new bride had planned some decorous ceremony to precede the feast, but the rite had become an orgy of blood. All five lambs were slaughtered, and when the last small throat had been cut by the black flint blade, Fergal stepped back and gestured at the hoop. ‘Nantosuelta awaits you,’ he called to us, ‘here she is! Come to her!’ Clearly he expected some response, but none of us moved. Sagramor stared up at the moon and Culhwch hunted a louse in his beard. Small flames flickered along the hoop and scraps of burning straw fluttered down to where the torn bloody corpses lay on the courtyard’s stones, and still none of us moved. ‘Come to Nantosuelta!’ Fergal called hoarsely.

Then Argante stood. She shrugged off the stiff golden robe to reveal a simple blue woollen dress that made her look more childlike than ever. She had narrow boyish hips, small hands and a delicate face as white as the lambs’ fleeces had been before the black knife took their little lives. Fergal called to her.

‘Come,’ he chanted, ‘come to Nantosuelta, Nantosuelta calls you, come to Nantosuelta,’ and on he crooned, summoning Argante to her Goddess. Argante, almost in a trance now, stepped slowly forward, each step a separate effort so that she moved and stopped, moved and stopped, as the Druid beguiled her onwards. ‘Come to Nantosuelta,’ Fergal intoned, ‘Nantosuelta calls you, come to Nantosuelta.’

Argante’s eyes were closed. For her, at least, this was an awesome moment, though the rest of us were all, I think, embarrassed. Arthur looked appalled, and no wonder, for it seemed that he had only exchanged Isis for Nantosuelta, though Mordred, who had once been promised Argante as his own bride, watched with an eager face as the girl shuffled forward. ‘Come to Nantosuelta, Nantosuelta calls you,’ Fergal beckoned her on, only now his voice had risen to a mock female screech. Argante reached the hoop and as the heat of the last flames touched her face she opened her eyes and almost seemed surprised to find herself standing beside the Goddess’s fire. She looked at Fergal, then ducked swiftly through the smoky ring. She smiled triumphantly and Fergal clapped her, inviting the rest of us to join the applause. Politely we did so, though our unenthusiastic clapping ceased as Argante crouched down beside the dead lambs. We were all silent as she dipped a delicate finger into one of the knife wounds. She withdrew her finger and held it up so that we could all see the blood thick on its tip. Then she turned so that Arthur could see. She stared at him as she opened her mouth, baring small white teeth, then slowly placed the finger between her teeth and closed her lips around it. She sucked it clean. Gwydre, I saw, was staring in disbelief at his stepmother. She was not much older than Gwydre. Ceinwyn shuddered, her hand firmly clasping mine.

Argante was still not finished. She turned, wet her finger with blood again, and stabbed the bloody finger into the hot embers of the hoop. Then, crouching still, she groped under the hem of her blue dress, transferring the blood and ashes to her thighs. She was ensuring that she would have babies. She was using Nantosuelta’s power to start her own dynasty and we were all witnesses to that ambition. Her eyes were closed again, almost in ecstasy, then suddenly the rite was over. She stood, her hand visible again, and beckoned Arthur. She smiled for the first time that evening, and I saw she was beautiful, but it was a stark beauty, as hard in its way as Guinevere’s, but without Guinevere’s tangle of bright hair to soften it. She beckoned to Arthur again, for it seemed the ritual demanded that he too must pass through the hoop. For a second he hesitated, then he looked at Gwydre and, unable to take any more of the superstition, he stood up and shook his head. ‘We shall eat,’ he said harshly, then softened the curt invitation by smiling at his guests; but at that moment I glanced at Argante and saw a look of utter fury on her pale face. For a heartbeat I thought she would scream at Arthur. Her small body was tensed rigid and her fists were clenched, but Fergal, who alone except for me seemed to have noticed her rage, whispered in her ear and she shuddered as the anger passed. Arthur had noticed nothing. ‘Bring the torches,’ he ordered the guards, and the flames were carried inside the palace to illuminate the feasting-hall. ‘Come,’ Arthur called to the rest of us and we gratefully moved towards the palace doors. Argante hesitated, but again Fergal whispered to her and she obeyed Arthur’s summons. The Druid stayed beside the smoking hoop.

Ceinwyn and I were the last of the guests to leave the courtyard. Some impulse had held me back, and I touched Ceinwyn’s arm and drew her aside into the arcade’s shadow from where we saw that one other person had also stayed in the courtyard. Now, when it seemed empty of all but the bleating ewes and the blood-soaked Druid, that person stepped from the shadows. It was Mordred. He limped past the dais, across the flagstones, and stopped beside the hoop. For a heartbeat he and the Druid stared at each other, then Mordred made an awkward gesture with his hand, as though seeking permission to step through the glowing remnants of the fire circle. Fergal hesitated, then nodded abruptly. Mordred ducked his head and stepped through the hoop. He stooped at the far side and wet his finger in blood, but I did not wait to see what he did. I drew Ceinwyn into the palace where the smoking flames lit the great wall-paintings of Roman Gods and Roman hunts. ‘If they serve lamb,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘I shall refuse to eat.’

Arthur served salmon, boar and venison. A harpist played. Mordred, his late arrival unnoticed, took his place at the head table where he sat with a sly smile on his blunt face. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him, but at times he glanced across at the pale, thin Argante who alone in the room seemed to take no pleasure from the feast. I saw her catch Mordred’s eye once and they exchanged exasperated shrugs as if to suggest that they despised the rest of us, but other than that one glance, she merely sulked and Arthur was embarrassed for her, while the rest of us pretended not to notice her mood. Mordred, of course, enjoyed her sullenness.

Next morning we hunted. A dozen of us rode, all men. Ceinwyn liked to hunt, but Arthur had asked her to spend the morning with Argante and Ceinwyn had reluctantly agreed. We drew the western woods, though without much hope for Mordred frequently hunted among these trees and the huntsman doubted we would find game. Guinevere’s deerhounds, now in Arthur’s care, loped off among the black trunks and managed to start a doe which gave us a fine gallop through the woods, but the huntsman called off the hounds when he saw that the animal was pregnant. Arthur and I had ridden at a tangent to the chase, thinking to head off the prey at the edge of the woods, but we reined in when we heard the horns. Arthur looked about him, as if expecting to find more company, then grunted when he saw I was alone with him. ‘A strange business, last night,’ he said awkwardly. ‘But women like these things,’ he added dismissively.

‘Ceinwyn doesn’t,’ I said.

He gave me a sharp look. He must have been wondering if she had told me about his proposal of marriage, but my face betrayed nothing and he must have decided she had not spoken. ‘No,’ he said. He hesitated again, then laughed awkwardly. ‘Argante believes I should have stepped through the flames as a way of marking the marriage, but I told her I don’t need dead lambs to tell me I’m married.’

‘I never had a chance to congratulate you on your marriage,’ I said very formally, ‘so let me do so now. She’s a beautiful girl.’

That pleased him. ‘She is,’ he said, then blushed. ‘But only a child.’

‘Culhwch says they should all be taken young, Lord,’ I said lightly. He ignored my levity. ‘I hadn’t meant to marry,’ he said quietly. I said nothing. He was not looking at me, but staring across the fallow fields. ‘But a man should be married,’ he said firmly, as if trying to convince himself.

‘Indeed,’ I agreed.

‘And Oengus was enthusiastic. Come spring, Derfel, he’ll bring all his army. And they’re good fighters, the Blackshields.’

‘None better, Lord,’ I said, but I reflected that Oengus would have brought his warriors whether Arthur had married Argante or not. What Oengus had really wanted, of course, was Arthur’s alliance against Cuneglas of Powys, whose lands Oengus’s spearmen were forever raiding, but doubtless the wily Irish King had suggested to Arthur that the marriage would guarantee the arrival of his Blackshields for the spring campaign. The marriage had plainly been arranged in haste and now, just as plainly, Arthur was regretting it.

‘She wants children, of course,’ Arthur said, still thinking of the horrid rites that had bloodied Lindinis’s courtyard.

‘Don’t you, Lord?’

‘Not yet,’ he said curtly. ‘Better to wait, I think, till the Saxon business is over.’

‘Speaking of which,’ I said, ‘I have a request from the Lady Guinevere.’ Arthur gave me another sharp look, but said nothing. ‘Guinevere fears,’ I went on, ‘that she will be vulnerable if the Saxons attack in the south. She begs you to move her prison to a safer place.’

Arthur leaned forward to fondle his horse’s ears. I had expected him to be angry at the mention of Guinevere, but he showed no irritation. ‘The Saxons might attack in the south,’ he said mildly, ‘in fact I hope they do, for then they’ll split their forces into two and we can pluck them one at a time. But the greater danger, Derfel, is if they make one single attack along the Thames, and I must plan for the greater, not the lesser, danger.’

‘But it would surely be prudent,’ I urged him, ‘to move whatever is valuable from southern Dumnonia?’

He turned to look at me. His gaze was mocking, as though he despised me for showing sympathy to Guinevere. ‘Is she valuable, Derfel?’ he asked. I said nothing and Arthur turned away from me to stare across the pale fields where thrushes and blackbirds hunted the furrows for worms. ‘Should I kill her?’

he suddenly asked me.

‘Kill Guinevere?’ I responded, shocked at the suggestion, then decided that Argante was probably behind his words. She must have resented that Guinevere still lived after committing an offence for which her sister had died. ‘The decision, Lord,’ I said, ‘is not mine, but surely, if it was death she deserved, it should have been given months ago? Not now.’

He grimaced at that advice. ‘What will the Saxons do with her?’ he asked.

‘She thinks they’ll rape her. I suspect they’ll put her on a throne.’

He glowered across the pale landscape. He knew I meant Lancelot’s throne, and he was imagining the embarrassment of his mortal enemy on Dumnonia’s throne with Guinevere beside him and Cerdic holding their power. It was an unbearable thought. ‘If she’s in any danger of capture,’ he said harshly, ‘then you will kill her.’

I could hardly believe what I had heard. I stared at him, but he refused to look me in the eyes. ‘It’s simpler, surely,’ I said, ‘to move her to safety? Can’t she go to Glevum?’

‘I have enough to worry about,’ he snapped, ‘without wasting thought on the safety of traitors.’ For a few heartbeats his face looked as angry as I had ever seen it, but then he shook his head and sighed. ‘Do you know who I envy?’ he asked.

‘Tell me, Lord.’

‘Tewdric’

I laughed. ‘Tewdric! You want to be a constipated monk?’

‘He’s happy,’ Arthur said firmly, ‘he has found the life he always wanted. I don’t want the tonsure and I don’t care for his God, but I envy him all the same.’ He grimaced. ‘I wear myself out getting ready for a war no one except me believes we can win, and I want none of it. None of it! Mordred should be King, we took an oath to make him King, and if we beat the Saxons, Derfel, I’ll let him rule.’ He spoked defiantly, and I did not believe him. ‘All I ever wanted,’ he went on, ‘was a hall, some land, some cattle, crops in season, timber to burn, a smithy to work iron, a stream for water. Is it too much?’ He rarely indulged in such self-pity, and I just let his anger talk itself out. He had often expressed such a dream of a household tight in its own palisade, shielded from the world by deep woods and wide fields and filled with his own folk, but now, with Cerdic and Aelle gathering their spears, he must have known it was a hopeless dream. ‘I can’t hold Dumnonia for ever,’ he said, ‘and when we’ve beaten the Saxons it might be time to let other men bridle Mordred. As for me, I’ll follow Tewdric into happiness.’ He gathered his reins. ‘I can’t think about Guinevere now,’ he said, ‘but if she’s in any danger, you deal with her.’ And with that curt command he clapped his heels back and drove his horse away. I stayed where I was. I was appalled, but if I had thought beyond my disgust at his order, I should surely have known what was in his mind. He knew I would not kill Guinevere, and he knew therefore that she was safe, but by giving me the harsh order he was not required to betray any affection for her. Odi at amo, excrucior.

We killed nothing that morning.

In the afternoon the warriors gathered in the feasting-hall. Mordred was there, hunched in the chair that served as his throne. He had nothing to contribute for he was a king without a kingdom, yet Arthur accorded him a proper courtesy. Arthur began, indeed, by saying that when the Saxons came Mordred would ride with him and that the whole army would fight beneath Mordred’s banner of the red dragon. Mordred nodded his agreement, but what else could he do? In truth, and we all knew it, Arthur was not offering Mordred a chance of redeeming his reputation in battle, but ensuring that he could make no mischief. Mordred’s best chance of regaining his power was to ally himself with our enemies by offering himself as a puppet king to Cerdic, but instead he would be a prisoner of Arthur’s hard warriors. Arthur then confirmed that King Meurig of Gwent would not fight. That news, though no surprise, was met by a growl of hatred. Arthur hushed the protest. Meurig, he said, was convinced that the coming war was not Gwent’s battle, but the King had still given his grudging permission for Cuneglas to bring the army of Powys south across Gwent’s land and for Oengus to march his Blackshields through his kingdom. Arthur said nothing of Meurig’s ambition to rule Dumnonia, perhaps because he knew that such an announcement would only make us even angrier with the King of Gwent, and Arthur still hoped that somehow he could change Meurig’s mind and so did not want to provoke more hatred between us and Gwent. The forces of Powys and Demetia, Arthur said, would converge on Corinium, for that walled Roman city was to be Arthur’s base and the place where all our supplies were to be concentrated. ‘We start supplying Corinium tomorrow,’ Arthur said. ‘I want it crammed with food, for it’s there we shall fight our battle.’ He paused. ‘One vast battle,’ he said, ‘with all their forces against every man we can raise.’

‘A siege?’ Culhwch asked, surprised.

‘No,’ Arthur said. Instead, he explained, he intended to use Corinium as a lure. The Saxons would soon hear that the town was filled with salted meat, dried fish and grain, and, like any great horde on the march, they would be short of food themselves and so would be drawn to Corinium like a fox to a duckpond, and there he planned to destroy them. ‘They will besiege it,’ he said, ‘and Morfans will defend it.’ Morfans, forewarned of that duty, nodded his agreement. ‘But the rest of us,’ Arthur went on,

‘will be in the hills north of the city. Cerdic will know he has to destroy us and he’ll break off his siege to do that. Then we’ll fight him on ground of our choosing.’

The whole plan depended on both Saxon armies advancing up the valley of the Thames, and all the signs indicated that this was indeed the Saxon intention. They were piling supplies into London and Pontes, and making no preparations on the southern frontier. Culhwch, who guarded that southern border, had raided deep into Lloegyr and told us that he had found no concentration of spearmen, nor any indication that Cerdic was hoarding grain or meat in Venta or any other of the frontier towns. Everything pointed, Arthur said, to a simple, brutal and overwhelming assault up the Thames aimed at the shore of the Severn Sea with the decisive battle being fought somewhere near Corinium. Sagramor’s men had already built great warning beacons on the hilltops on either side of the Thames valley, and still more beacons had been made on the hills spreading south and west into Dumnonia, and when we saw the smoke of those fires we were all to march to our places.

‘That won’t be until after Beltain,’ Arthur said. He had spies in both Aelle’s and Cerdic’s halls, and all had reported that the Saxons would wait until after the feast of their Goddess Eostre which would be celebrated a whole week after Beltain. The Saxons wished the Goddess’s blessing, Arthur explained, and they wanted to give the new season’s boats time to come across the sea with their hulls packed with yet more hungry fighting men.

But after Eostre’s feast, he said, the Saxons would advance and he would let them come deep into Dumnonia without a battle, though he planned to harass them all the way. Sagramor, with his battle-hardened spearmen, would retreat in front of the Saxon horde and offer whatever resistance he could short of a shield wall, while Arthur gathered the allied army at Corinium. Culhwch and I had different orders. Our task was to defend the hills south of the Thames valley. We could not expect to defeat any determined Saxon thrust that came south through those hills, but Arthur did not expect any such attack. The Saxons, he said again and again, would keep marching westwards, ever westwards along the Thames, but they were bound to send raiding parties into the southern hills in search of grain and cattle. Our task was to stop those raiding parties, thus forcing the scavengers to go north instead. That would take the Saxons across the Gwentian border and might spur Meurig into a declaration of war. The unspoken thought in that hope, though each of us in that smoky room nevertheless understood it, was that without Gwent’s well-trained spearmen the great battle near Corinium would be a truly desperate affair. ‘So fight them hard,’ Arthur told Culhwch and me. ‘Kill their foragers, scare them, but don’t be caught in battle. Harass them, frighten them, but once they’re within a day’s march of Corinium, leave them alone. Just march to join me.’ He would need every spear he could gather to fight that great battle outside Corinium, and Arthur seemed sure that we could win it so long as our forces had the high ground.

It was, in its way, a good plan. The Saxons would be lured deep into Dumnonia and there be forced to attack up some steep hill, but the plan depended on the enemy doing exactly as Arthur wanted, and Cerdic, I thought, was not an obliging man. Yet Arthur seemed confident enough, and that, at least, was comforting.

We all went home. I made myself unpopular by searching all the houses in my district and confiscating grain, salted meat and dried fish. We left enough supplies to keep the folk alive, but sent the rest to Corinium where it would feed Arthur’s army. It was a distasteful business, for peasants fear hunger almost as much as they fear enemy spearmen, and we were forced to search for hiding places and ignore the screams of women who accused us of tyranny. But better our searches, I told them, than Saxon ravages.

We also readied ourselves for battle. I laid out my wargear and my slaves oiled the leather jerkin, polished the mail coat, combed out the wolf-hair plume on the helmet and repainted the white star on my heavy shield. The new year came with the blackbird’s first song. Missel thrushes called from the high twigs of the larches behind Dun Caric’s hill, and we paid the children of the village to run with pots and sticks through the apple orchards to scare away the bullfinches that would steal the tiny fruit buds. Sparrows nested and the stream glinted with the returning salmon. The dusks were made noisy by flocks of pied wagtails. Within a few weeks there were blossoms on the hazel, dog violets in the woods and gold-touched cones on the sallow trees. Buck hares danced in the fields where the lambs played. In March there was a swarm of toads and I feared what it meant, but there was no Merlin to ask, for he, with Nimue, had vanished and it seemed we must fight without his help. Larks sang, and the predatory magpies hunted for new-laid eggs along hedgerows that still lacked their cover of foliage. The leaves came at last, and with them news of the first warriors arriving south from Powys. They were few in number, for Cuneglas did not want to exhaust the food supplies being piled in Corinium, but their arrival gave promise of the greater army that Cuneglas would lead south after Beltain. Our calves were born, butter was churned and Ceinwyn busied herself cleaning out the hall after the long smoky winter.

They were odd and bittersweet days, for there was the promise of war in a new spring that was suddenly glorious with sundrenched skies and flower-bright meadows. The Christians preach of’the last days’, by which they mean those times before the world’s ending, and maybe folk will feel then as we did in that soft and lovely spring. There was an unreal quality to everyday life which made every small task special. Maybe this would be the last time we would ever burn winter straw from our bedding and maybe the last time we would ever heave a calf all bloody from its mother’s womb into the world. Everything was special, because everything was threatened.

We also knew that the coming Beltain might be the last we would ever know as a family and so we tried to make it memorable. Beltain greets the new year’s life, and on the eve of the feast we let all the fires die in Dun Caric. The kitchen fires, that had burned all winter long, went unfed all day and by night they were nothing but embers. We raked them out, swept the hearths clean, then laid new fires, while on a hill to the east of the village we heaped two great piles of firewood, one of them stacked about the sacred tree that Pyrlig, our bard, had selected. It was a young hazel that we had cut down and carried ceremonially through the village, across the stream and up the hill. The tree was hung with scraps of cloth, and all the houses, like the hall itself, were decked with new young hazel boughs. That night, all across Britain, the fires were dead. On Beltain Eve darkness rules. The feast was laid in our hall, but there was no fire to cook it and no flame to light the high rafters. There was no light anywhere, except in the Christian towns where folks heaped their fires to defy the Gods, but in the countryside all was dark. At dusk we had climbed the hill, a mass of villagers and spearmen driving cattle and sheep that were folded into wattle enclosures. Children played, but once the great dark fell the smallest children fell asleep and their little bodies lay in the grass as the rest of us gathered about the unlit fires and there sang the Lament of Annwn.

Then, in the darkest part of the night, we made the new year’s fire. Pyrlig made the flame by rubbing two sticks while Issa dribbled shavings of larch-wood kindling onto the spark that gave off a tiny wisp of smoke. The two men stooped to the tiny flame, blew on it, added more kindling, and at last a strong flame leapt up and all of us began to sing the Chant of Belenos as Pyrlig carried the new fire to the two heaps of firewood. The sleeping children awoke and ran to find their parents as the Beltain fires sprang high and bright.

A goat was sacrificed once the fires were burning. Ceinwyn, as ever, turned away as the beast’s throat was cut and as Pyrlig scattered its blood on the grass. He tossed the goat’s corpse onto the fire where the sacred hazel was burning, then the villagers fetched their cattle and sheep and drove them between the two great blazes. We hung plaited straw collars about the cows’ necks, and then watched as young women danced between the fires to seek the blessing of the Gods on their wombs. They had danced through fire at Imbolc, but always did it again at Beltain. That was the first year Morwenna was old enough to dance between the fires and I felt a pang of sadness as I watched my daughter twirl and leap. She looked so happy. She was thinking of marriage and dreaming of babies, yet within a few weeks, I thought, she could be dead or enslaved. That thought filled me with a huge anger and I turned away from our fires and was startled to see the bright flames of other Beltain fires burning in the distance. All across Dumnonia the fires were burning to greet the newly arrived year.

My spearmen had brought two huge iron cauldrons to the hilltop and we filled their bellies with burning wood, then hurried down the hill with the two flaming pots. Once in the village the new fire was distributed, each cottage taking a flame from the fire and setting it to the waiting wood in the hearth. We went to the hall last and there carried the new fire into the kitchens. It was almost dawn by then, and the villagers crowded into the palisade to wait for the rising sun. The instant that its first brilliant shard of light showed above the eastern horizon, we sang the song of Lugh’s birth; a joyous, dancing hymn of merriment. We faced the east as we sang our welcome to the sun, and right across the horizon we could see the dark dribble of Beltain smoke rising into the ever paler sky. The cooking began as the hearth fires became hot. I had planned a huge feast for the village, thinking that this might be our last day of happiness for a long time. The common folk rarely ate meat, but on that Beltain we had five deer, two boars, three pigs and six sheep to roast; we had barrels of newly brewed mead and ten baskets of bread that had been baked on the old season’s fires. There was cheese, honied nuts and oatcakes with the cross of Beltain scorched onto their crusts. In a week or so the Saxons would come, so this was a time to give a feast that might help our people through the horrors to come. The villagers played games as the meat cooked. There were foot-races down the street, wrestling matches and a competition to see who could lift the heaviest weight. The girls wove flowers in their hair and, long before the feast began, I saw the couples slipping away. We ate in the afternoon, and while we feasted the poets recited and the village bards sang to us and the success of their compositions was judged by the amount of applause each generated. I gave gold to all the bards and poets, even the worst ones, and there were many of those. Most of the poets were young men who blushingly declaimed clumsy lines addressed to their girls, and the girls would look sheepish and the villagers would jeer, laugh and then demand that each girl reward the poet with a kiss, and if the kiss was too fleeting, the couple would be held face to face and made to kiss properly. The poetry became markedly better as we drank more.

I drank too much. Indeed we all feasted well and drank even better. At one point I was challenged to a wrestling match by the village’s wealthiest farmer and the crowd demanded I accept and so, half drunk already, I clapped my hands on the farmer’s body, and he did the same to me, and I could smell the reeking mead on his breath as he could doubtless smell it on mine. He heaved, I heaved back, and neither of us could move the other, so we stood there, locked head to head like battling stags, while the crowd mocked our sad display. In the end I tipped him over, but only because he was more drunk than I was. I drank still more, trying, perhaps, to obliterate the future.

By nightfall I was feeling sick. I went to the fighting platform we had built on the eastern rampart and there I leaned on the wall’s top and stared at the darkening horizon. Twin wisps of smoke drifted from the hilltop where we had lit our night’s new fires, though to my mead-fuddled mind it seemed as if there were at least a dozen smoke pyres. Ceinwyn climbed up to the platform and laughed at my dismal face.

‘You’re drunk,’ she said.

‘I am that,’ I agreed.

‘You’ll sleep like a hog,’ she said accusingly, ‘and snore like one too.’

‘It’s Beltain,’ I said in excuse, and waved my hand at the distant wisps of smoke. She leaned on the parapet beside me. She had sloe blossom woven into her golden hair and looked as beautiful as ever. ‘We must talk to Arthur about Gwydre,’ she said.

‘Marrying Morwenna?’ I asked, then paused to collect my thoughts. ‘Arthur seems so unfriendly these days,’ I finally managed to say, ‘and maybe he has a mind to marry Gwydre to someone else?’

‘Maybe he has,’ Ceinwyn said calmly, ‘in which case we should find someone else for Morwenna.’

‘Who?’

‘That’s exactly what I want you to think about,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘when you’re sober. Maybe one of Culhwch’s boys?’ She peered down into the evening shadows at the foot of Dun Caric’s hill. There was a tangle of bushes at the foot of the slope and she could see a couple busy among the leaves. ‘That’s Morfudd,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘Morfudd,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘the dairy girl. Another baby coming, I suppose. It really is time she married.’ She sighed and stared at the horizon. She was silent for a long time, then she frowned. ‘Don’t you think there are more fires this year than last?’ she asked.

I dutifully stared at the horizon, but in all honesty I could not distinguish between one spiring smoke trail and another. ‘Possibly,’ I said evasively.

She still frowned. ‘Or maybe they aren’t Beltain fires at all.’

‘Of course they are!’ I said with all the certitude of a drunken man.

‘But beacons,’ she went on.

It took a few heartbeats for the meaning of her words to sink in, then suddenly I did not feel drunk at all. I felt sick, but not drunk. I gazed eastwards. A score of plumes smudged their smoke against the sky, but two of the plumes were far thicker than the others and far too thick to be the remnants of fires lit the night before and allowed to die in the dawn.

And suddenly, sickeningly, I knew they were the warning beacons. The Saxons had not waited until after their feast of Eostre, but had come at Beltain. They knew we had prepared warning beacons, but they also knew that the fires of Beltain would be lit on hilltops all across Dumnonia, and they must have guessed that we would not notice the warning beacons among the ritual fires. They had tricked us. We had feasted, we had drunk ourselves insensible, and all the while the Saxons were attacking. And Dumnonia was at war.

I was the leader of seventy experienced warriors, but I also commanded a hundred and ten youngsters I had trained through the winter. Those one hundred and eighty men constituted nearly one third of all Dumnonia’s spearmen, but only sixteen of them were ready to march by dawn. The rest were either still drunk or else so suffering that they ignored my curses and blows. Issa and I dragged the worst afflicted to the stream and tossed them into the chill water, but it did small good. I could only wait as, hour by hour, more men recovered their wits. A score of sober Saxons could have laid Dun Caric waste that morning.

The beacon fires still burned to tell us that the Saxons were coming, and I felt a terrible guilt that I had failed Arthur so badly. Later I learned that nearly every warrior in Dumnonia was similarly insensible that morning, though Sagramor’s hundred and twenty men had stayed sober and they dutifully fell back in front of the advancing Saxon armies, but the rest of us staggered, retched, gasped for breath and gulped water like dogs.

By midday most of my men were standing, though not all, and only a few were ready for a long march. My armour, shield and war spears were loaded on a pack-horse, while ten mules carried the baskets of food that Ceinwyn had been busy filling all morning. She would wait at Dun Caric, either for victory or, more likely, for a message telling her to flee.

Then, a few moments after midday, everything changed.

A rider came from the south on a sweating horse. He was Culhwch’s eldest son, Einion, and he had ridden himself and his horse close to exhaustion in his frantic attempt to reach us. He half fell from the saddle. ‘Lord,’ he gasped, then stumbled, found his feet and gave me a perfunctory bow. For a few heartbeats he was too breathless to speak, then the words tumbled out in frantic excitement, but he had been so eager to deliver his message and had so anticipated the drama of the moment that he was quite unable to make any sense, though I did understand he had come from the south and that the Saxons were marching there.

I led him to a bench beside the hall and sat him down. ‘Welcome to Dun Caric, Einion ap Culhwch,’ I said very formally, ‘and say all that again.’

‘The Saxons, Lord,’ he said, ‘have attacked Dunum.’

So Guinevere had been right and the Saxons had marched in the south. They had come from Cerdic’s land beyond Venta and were already deep inside Dumnonia. Dunum, our fortress close to the coast, had fallen in yesterday’s dawn. Culhwch had abandoned the fort rather than have his hundred men overwhelmed, and now he was falling back in front of the enemy. Einion, a young man with the same squat build as his father, looked up at me woefully. ‘There are just too many of them, Lord.’

The Saxons had made fools of us. First they had convinced us that they meant no mischief in the south, then they had attacked on our feast night when they knew we would mistake the distant beacon fires for the flames of Beltain, and now they were loose on our southern flank. Aelle, I guessed, was pushing down the Thames while Cerdic’s troops were rampaging free by the coast. Einion was not certain that Cerdic himself led the southern attack, for he had not seen the Saxon King’s banner of the red-painted wolf skull hung with a dead man’s flayed skin, but he had seen Lancelot’s flag of the sea eagle with the fish clutched in its talons. Culhwch believed that Lancelot was leading his own followers and two or three hundred Saxons besides.

‘Where were they when you left?’ I asked Einion.

‘Still south of Sorviodunum, Lord.’

‘And your father?’

‘He was in the town, Lord, but he dare not be trapped there.’

So Culhwch would yield the fortress of Sorviodunum rather than be trapped. ‘Does he want me to join him?’ I asked.

Einion shook his head. ‘He sent word to Durnovaria, Lord, telling the folk there to come north. He thinks you should protect them and take them to Corinium.’

‘Who’s at Durnovaria?’ I asked.

‘The Princess Argante, Lord.’

I swore softly. Arthur’s new wife could not just be abandoned and I understood now what Culhwch was suggesting. He knew Lancelot could not be stopped, so he wanted me to rescue whatever was valuable in Dumnonia’s heartland and retreat north towards Corinium while Culhwch did his best to slow the enemy. It was a desperately makeshift strategy, and at its end we would have yielded the greater part of Dumnonia to the enemy’s forces, but there was still the chance that we could all come together at Corinium to fight Arthur’s battle, though by rescuing Argante I abandoned Arthur’s plans to harass the Saxons in the hills south of the Thames. That was a pity, but war rarely goes according to plan.

‘Does Arthur know?’ I asked Einion.

‘My brother is riding to him,’ Einion assured me, which meant Arthur would still not have heard the news. It would be late afternoon before Einion’s brother reached Corinium, where Arthur had spent Beltain. Culhwch, meanwhile, was lost somewhere south of the great plain while Lancelot’s army was where? Aelle, presumably, was still marching west, and maybe Cerdic was with him, which meant Lancelot could either continue along the coast and capture Durnovaria, or else turn north and follow Culhwch towards Caer Cadarn and Dun Caric. But either way, I reflected, this landscape would be swarming with Saxon spearmen in only three or four days.

I gave Einion a fresh horse and sent him north to Arthur with a message that I would bring Argante to Corinium, but suggesting he might send horsemen to Aquae Sulis to meet us and then hurry her northwards. I then sent Issa and fifty of my fittest men south to Durnovaria. I ordered them to march fast and light, carrying only their weapons, and I warned Issa that he might expect to meet Argante and the other fugitives from Durnovaria coming north on the road. Issa was to bring them all to Dun Caric. ‘With good fortune,’ I told him, ‘you’ll be back here by tomorrow nightfall.’

Ceinwyn made her own preparations to leave. This was not the first time she had been a fugitive from war and she knew well enough that she and our daughters could take only what they could carry. Everything else must be abandoned, and so two spearmen dug a cave in the side of Dun Caric’s hill and there she hid our gold and silver, and afterwards the two men filled the hole and disguised it with turf. The villagers were doing the same with cooking pots, spades, sharpening stones, spindles, sieves, anything, indeed, that was too heavy to carry and too valuable to lose. All over Dumnonia such valuables were being buried.

There was little I could do at Dun Caric except wait for Issa’s return and so I rode south to Caer Cadarn and Lindinis. We kept a small garrison at Caer Cadarn, not for any military reason, but because the hill was our royal place and so deserved guarding. That garrison was composed of a score of old men, most of them crippled, and of the twenty only five or six would be truly useful in the shield wall, but I ordered them all north to Dun Caric, then turned the mare west towards Lindinis. Mordred had sensed the dire news. Rumour passes at unimaginable speed in the countryside, and though no messenger had come to the palace, he still guessed my mission. I bowed to him, then politely requested that he be ready to leave the palace within the hour.

‘Oh, that’s impossible!’ he said, his round face betraying his delight at the chaos that threatened Dumnonia. Mordred ever delighted in misfortune.

‘Impossible, Lord King?’ I asked.

He waved a hand about his throne room that was filled with Roman furniture, much of it chipped or with its inlay missing, but still lavish and beautiful. ‘I have things to pack,’ he said, ‘people to see. Tomorrow, maybe?’

‘You ride north to Corinium in one hour, Lord King,’ I said harshly. It was important to move Mordred out of the Saxon path, which was why I had come here rather than ridden south to meet Argante. If Mordred had stayed he would undoubtedly have been used by Aelle and Cerdic, and Mordred knew it. For a moment he looked as though he would argue, then he ordered me out of the room and shouted for a slave to lay out his armour. I sought out Lanval, the old spearman whom Arthur had placed in charge of the King’s guard. ‘You take every horse in the stables,’ I told Lanval, ‘and escort the little bastard to Corinium. You give him to Arthur personally.’

Mordred left within the hour. The King rode in his armour and with his standard flying. I almost ordered him to furl the standard, for the sight of the dragon would only provoke more rumours in the country, but maybe it was no bad thing to spread alarm because folk needed time to prepare and to hide their valuables. I watched the King’s horses clatter through the gate and turn north, then I went back into the palace where the steward, a lamed spearman named Dyrrig, was shouting at slaves to gather the palace’s treasures. Candle-stands, pots and cauldrons were being carried to the back garden to be concealed in a dry well, while bedspreads, linens and clothes were being piled on carts to be hidden in the nearby woods. ‘The furniture can stay,’ Dyrrig told me sourly, ‘the Saxons are welcome to it.’

I wandered through the palace’s rooms and tried to imagine the Saxons whooping between the pillars, smashing the fragile chairs and shattering the delicate mosaics. Who would live here, I wondered? Cerdic? Lancelot? If anyone, I decided, it would be Lancelot, for the Saxons seemed to have no taste for Roman luxury. They left places like Lindinis to rot and built their own timber and thatch halls nearby. I lingered in the throne room, trying to imagine it lined with the mirrors that Lancelot so loved. He existed in a world of polished metal so that he could ever admire his own beauty. Or perhaps Cerdic would destroy the palace to show that the old world of Britain was ended and that the new brutal reign of the Saxons had begun. It was a melancholy, self-indulgent moment, broken when Dyrrig shuffled into the room trailing his maimed leg. ‘I’ll save the furniture if you want,’ he said grudgingly.

‘No,’ I said.

Dyrrig plucked a blanket off a couch. ‘The little bastard left three girls here, and one of them’s pregnant. I suppose I’ll have to give them gold. He won’t. Now, what’s this?’ He had stopped behind the carved chair that served as Mordred’s throne and I joined him to see that there was a hole in the floor. ‘Wasn’t there yesterday,’ Dyrrig insisted.

I knelt down and found that a complete section of the mosaic floor had been lifted. The section was at the edge of the room, where bunches of grapes formed a border to the central picture of a reclining God attended by nymphs, and one whole bunch of grapes had been carefully lifted out from the border. I saw that the small tiles had been glued to a piece of leather cut to the shape of the grapes, and beneath them there had been a layer of narrow Roman bricks that were now scattered under the chair. It was a deliberate hiding place, giving access to the flues of the old heating chamber that ran beneath the floor. Something glinted at the bottom of the heating chamber and I leaned down and groped among the dust and debris to bring up two small gold buttons, a scrap of leather and what, with a grimace, I realized were mice droppings. I brushed my hands clean, then handed one of the buttons to Dyrrig. The other, which I examined, showed a bearded, belligerent, helmeted face. It was crude work, but powerful in the intensity of the stare. ‘Saxon made,’ I said.

‘This one too, Lord,’ Dyrrig said, and I saw that his button was almost identical to mine. I peered again into the heating chamber, but could see no more buttons or coins. Mordred had plainly hidden a hoard of gold there, but the mice had nibbled the leather bag so that when he lifted the treasure free a couple of the buttons had fallen out.

‘So why does Mordred have Saxon gold?’ I asked.

‘You tell me, Lord,’ Dyrrig said, spitting into the hole.

I carefully propped the Roman bricks on the low stone arches that supported the floor, then pulled the leather-backed tiles into place. I could guess why Mordred had gold, and I did not like the answer. Mordred had been present when Arthur revealed the plans of his campaign against the Saxons, and that, I thought, was why the Saxons had been able to catch us off balance. They had known we would concentrate our forces on the Thames, so all the while they had let us believe that was where the assault would come and Cerdic had slowly and secretly built up his forces in the south. Mordred had betrayed us. I could not be certain of that for two golden buttons did not constitute proof, but it made a grim sense. Mordred wanted his power back, and though he would not gain all that power from Cerdic he would certainly get the revenge on Arthur that he craved. ‘How would the Saxons have managed to talk with Mordred?’ I asked Dyrrig.

‘Simple, Lord. There are always visitors here,’ Dyrrig said. ‘Merchants, bards, jugglers, girls.’

‘We should have slit his throat,’ I said bitterly, pocketing the button.

‘Why didn’t you?’ Dyrrig asked.

‘Because he’s Uther’s grandson,’ I said, ‘and Arthur would never permit it.’ Arthur had taken an oath to protect Mordred, and that oath bound Arthur for life. Besides, Mordred was our real King, and in him ran the blood of all our Kings back to Beli Mawr himself, and though Mordred was rotten, his blood was sacred and so Arthur kept him alive. ‘Mordred’s task,’ I said to Dyrrig, ‘is to whelp an heir of a proper wife, but once he’s given us a new King he would be well advised to wear an iron collar.’

‘No wonder he doesn’t marry,’ Dyrrig said. ‘And what happens if he never does? Suppose there’s no heir?’

‘That’s a good question,’ I said, ‘but let’s beat the Saxons before we worry about answering it.’

I left Dyrrig disguising the old dry well with brush. I could have ridden straight back to Dun Caric for I had looked after the urgent needs of the moment; Issa was on his way to escort Argante to safety, Mordred was safely gone north, but I still had one piece of unfinished business and so I rode north on the Fosse Way that ran beside the great swamps and lakes that edged Ynys Wydryn. Warblers were noisy among the reeds while sickle-winged martins were busy pecking beakfuls of mud to make their new nests beneath our eaves. Cuckoos called from the willows and birches that edged the marshland. The sun shone on Dumnonia, the oaks were in new green leaf and the meadows to my east were bright with cowslips and daisies. I did not ride hard, but let my mare amble until, a few miles north of Lindinis, I turned west onto the land bridge that reached towards Ynys Wydryn. So far I had been serving Arthur’s best interests by ensuring Argante’s safety and by securing Mordred, but now I risked his displeasure. Or maybe I did exactly what he had always wanted me to do.

I went to the shrine of the Holy Thorn, where I found Morgan preparing to leave. She had heard no definite news, but rumour had done its work and she knew Ynys Wydryn was threatened. I told her what little I knew and after she had heard that scanty news she peered up at me from behind her golden mask.

‘So where is my husband?’ she demanded shrilly.

‘I don’t know, Lady,’ I said. So far as I knew Sansum was still a prisoner in Bishop Emrys’s house in Durnovaria.

‘You don’t know,’ Morgan snapped at me, ‘and you don’t care!’

‘In truth, Lady, I don’t,’ I told her. ‘But I assume he’ll flee north like everyone else.’

‘Then tell him we’ve gone to Siluria. To Isca.’ Morgan, naturally, was quite prepared for the emergency. She had been packing the shrine’s treasures in anticipation of the Saxon invasion, and boatmen were ready to carry those treasures and the Christian women across Ynys Wydryn’s lakes to the coast where other boats were waiting to carry them north across the Severn Sea to Siluria. ‘And tell Arthur I’m praying for him,’ Morgan added, ‘though he doesn’t deserve my prayers. And tell him I have his whore safe.’

‘No, Lady,’ I said, for that was why I had ridden to Ynys Wydryn. To this day I am not exactly sure why I did not let Guinevere go with Morgan, but I think the Gods guided me. Or else, in the welter of confusion as the Saxons tore our careful preparations to tatters, I wanted to give Guinevere one last gift. We had never been friends, but in my mind I associated her with the good times, and though it was her foolishness that brought on the bad, I had seen how stale Arthur had been ever since Guinevere’s eclipse. Or perhaps I knew that in this terrible time we needed every strong soul we could muster, and there were few souls as tough as that of the Princess Guinevere of Henis-Wyren.

‘She comes with me!’ Morgan insisted.

‘I have orders from Arthur,’ I insisted to Morgan, and that settled the matter, though in truth her brother’s orders were terrible and vague. If Guinevere is in danger, Arthur had told me, I was to fetch her or maybe kill her, but I had decided to fetch her, and instead of sending her to safety across the Severn I would carry her still closer to the danger.

‘It’s rather like watching a herd of cows threatened by wolves,’ Guinevere said when I reached her room. She was standing at the window from where she could see Morgan’s women running to and fro between their buildings and the boats that waited beyond the shrine’s western palisade. ‘What’s happening, Derfel?’

‘You were right, Lady. The Saxons are attacking in the south.’ I decided not to tell her that it was Lancelot who led that southern assault.

‘Do you think they’ll come here?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. I just know that we can’t defend any place except where Arthur is, and he’s at Corinium.’

‘In other words,’ she said with a smile, ‘everything is confusion?’ She laughed, sensing an opportunity in that confusion. She was dressed in her usual drab clothes, but the sun shone through the open window to give her splendid red hair a golden aura. ‘So what does Arthur want to do with me?’ she asked. Death? No, I decided, he had never really wanted that. What he wanted was what his proud soul would not let him take for itself. ‘I am just ordered to fetch you, Lady,’ I answered instead.

‘To go where, Derfel?’

‘You can sail across the Severn with Morgan,’ I said, ‘or come with me. I’m taking folk north to Corinium and I dare say from there you can travel on to Glevum. You’ll be safe there.’

She walked from the window and sat in a chair beside the empty hearth. ‘Folk,’ she said, plucking the word from my sentence. ‘What folk, Derfel?’

I blushed. ‘Argante. Ceinwyn, of course.’

Guinevere laughed. ‘I would like to meet Argante. Do you think she’d like to meet me?’

‘I doubt it, Lady.’

‘I doubt it too. I imagine she’d prefer me to be dead. So, I can travel with you to Corinium, or go to Siluria with the Christian cows? I think I’ve heard enough Christian hymns to last me a lifetime. Besides, the greater adventure lies at Corinium, don’t you think?’

‘I fear so, Lady.’

‘Fear? Oh, don’t fear, Derfel.’ She laughed with an exhilarating happiness. ‘You all forget how good Arthur is when nothing goes right. It will be a joy to watch him. So when do we leave?’

‘Now,’ I said, ‘or as soon as you’re ready.’

‘I’m ready,’ she said happily, ‘I’ve been ready to leave this place for a year.’

‘Your servants?’

‘There are always other servants,’ she said carelessly. ‘Shall we go?’

I only had the one horse and so, out of politeness, I offered it to her and walked beside her as we left the shrine. I have rarely seen a face as radiant as Guinevere’s face was that day. For months she had been locked inside Ynys Wydryn’s walls, and suddenly she was riding a horse in the open air, between new-leaved birch trees and under a sky unlimited by Morgan’s palisade. We climbed to the land bridge beyond the Tor and once we were on that high bare ground she laughed and gave me a mischievous glance. ‘What’s to stop me riding away, Derfel?’

‘Nothing at all, Lady.’

She whooped like a girl and kicked back her heels, then kicked again to force the tired mare into a gallop. The wind streamed in her red curls as she galloped free on the grassland. She shouted for the joy of it, curving the horse around me in a great circle. Her skirts blew back, but she did not care, she just kicked the horse again and so rode around and around until the horse was blowing and she was breathless. Only then did she curb the mare and slide out of the saddle. ‘I’m so sore!’ she said happily.

‘You ride well, Lady,’ I said.

‘I dreamed of riding a horse again. Of hunting again. Of so much.’ She patted her skirts straight, then gave me an amused glance. ‘What exactly did Arthur order you to do with me?’

I hesitated. ‘He was not specific, Lady.’

‘To kill me?’ she asked.

‘No, Lady!’ I said, sounding shocked. I was leading the mare by her reins and Guinevere was walking beside me.

‘He certainly doesn’t want me in Cerdic’s hands,’ she said tartly, ‘I’d just be an embarrassment! I suspect he flirted with the idea of slitting my throat. Argante must have wanted that. I certainly would if I were her. I was thinking about that as I rode around you just now. Suppose, I thought, that Derfel has orders to kill me? Should I keep riding? Then I decided you probably wouldn’t kill me, even if you did have orders. He’d have sent Culhwch if he wanted me dead.’ She suddenly grunted and bent her knees to imitate Culhwch’s limping walk. ‘Culhwch would cut my throat,’ she said, ‘and wouldn’t think twice about it.’ She laughed, her new high spirits irrepressible. ‘So Arthur wasn’t specific?’

‘No, Lady.’

‘So truly, Derfel, this is your idea?’ She waved at the countryside.

‘Yes, Lady,’ I confessed.

‘I hope Arthur thinks you did the right thing,’ she said, ‘otherwise you’ll be in trouble.’

‘I’m in trouble enough already, Lady,’ I confessed. ‘The old friendship seems dead.’

She must have heard the bleakness in my voice, for she suddenly put an arm through mine. ‘Poor Derfel. I suppose he’s ashamed?’

I was embarrassed. ‘Yes, Lady.’

‘I was very bad,’ she said in a rueful voice. ‘Poor Arthur. But do you know what will restore him? And your friendship?’

‘I’d like to know, Lady.’

She took her arm from mine. ‘Grinding the Saxons into offal, Derfel, that’s what will bring Arthur back. Victory! Give Arthur victory and he’ll give us his old soul back.’

‘The Saxons, Lady,’ I warned her, ‘are halfway to victory already.’ I told her what I knew: that the Saxons were rampaging free to the east and south, our forces were scattered and that our only hope was to assemble our army before the Saxons reached Corinium, where Arthur’s small warband of two hundred spearmen waited alone. I assumed Sagramor was retreating towards Arthur, Culhwch was coming from the south, and I would go north as soon as Issa returned with Argante. Cuneglas would doubtless march from the north and Oengus mac Airem would hurry from the west the moment they heard the news, but if the Saxons reached Corinium first, then all hope was gone. There was little enough hope even if we did win the race, for without Gwent’s spearmen we would be so outnumbered that only a miracle could save us.

‘Nonsense!’ Guinevere said when I had explained the situation. ‘Arthur hasn’t even begun to fight!

We’re going to win, Derfel, we’re going to win!’ And with that defiant statement she laughed and, forgetting her precious dignity, danced some steps on the verge of the track. All seemed doom, but Guinevere was suddenly free and full of light and I had never liked her as much as I did at that moment. Suddenly, for the first time since I had seen the beacon fires smoking in the Beltain dusk, I felt a surge of hope.

The hope faded quickly enough, for at Dun Caric there was nothing but chaos and mystery. Issa had not returned and the small village beneath the hall was filled with refugees who were fleeing from rumour, though none had actually seen a Saxon. The refugees had brought their cattle, their sheep, their goats and their pigs, and all had converged on Dun Caric because my spearmen offered an illusion of safety. I used my servants and slaves to start new rumours that said Arthur would be withdrawing westwards to the country bordering Kernow, and that I had decided to cull the refugees’ herds and flocks to provide rations for my men and those false rumours were enough to start most of the families walking towards the distant Kernow frontier. They should be safe enough on the great moors and by fleeing westwards their cattle and sheep would not block the roads to Corinium. If I had simply ordered them towards Kernow they would have been suspicious and lingered to make certain that I was not tricking them. Issa was not with us by nightfall. I was still not unduly worried, for the road to Durnovaria was long and it was doubtless thronged with refugees. We made a meal in the hall and Pyrlig sang us the song of Uther’s great victory over the Saxons at Caer Idem. When the song ended, and I had tossed Pyrlig a golden coin, I remarked that I had once heard Cynyr of Gwent sing that song, and Pyrlig was impressed.

‘Cynyr was the greatest of all the bards,’ he said wistfully, ‘though some say Amairgin of Gwynedd was better. I wish I’d heard either of them.’

‘My brother,’ Ceinwyn remarked, ‘says there is an even greater bard in Powys now. And just a young man, too.’

‘Who?’ Pyrlig demanded, scenting an unwelcome rival.

‘Taliesin is his name,’ Ceinwyn said.

‘Taliesin!’ Guinevere repeated the name, liking it. It meant ‘shining brow’.

‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Pyrlig said stiffly.

‘When we’ve beaten the Saxons,’ I said, ‘we shall demand a song of victory from this Taliesin. And from you too, Pyrlig,’ I added hastily.

‘I once heard Amairgin sing,’ Guinevere said.

‘You did, Lady?’ Pyrlig asked, again impressed.

‘I was only a child,’ she said, ‘but I remember he could make a hollow roaring sound. It was very frightening. His eyes would go very wide, he swallowed air, then he bellowed like a bull.’

‘Ah, the old style,’ Pyrlig said dismissively. ‘These days, Lady, we seek harmony of words rather than mere volume of sound.’

‘You should seek both,’ Guinevere said sharply. ‘I’ve no doubt this Taliesin is a master of the old style as well as being skilled at metre, but how can you hold an audience enthralled if all you offer them is clever rhythm? You must make their blood run cold, you must make them cry, you must make them laugh!’

‘Any man can make a noise, Lady,’ Pyrlig defended his craft, ‘but it takes a skilled craftsman to imbue words with harmony.’

‘And soon the only people who can understand the intricacies of the harmony,’ Guinevere argued, ‘are other skilled craftsmen, and so you become ever more clever in an effort to impress your fellow poets, but you forget that no one outside the craft has the first notion of what you’re doing. Bard chants to bard while the rest of us wonder what all the noise is about. Your task, Pyrlig, is to keep the people’s stories alive, and to do that you cannot be rarefied.’

‘You would not have us be vulgar, Lady!’ Pyrlig said and, in protest, struck the horsehair strings of his harp.

‘I would have you be vulgar with the vulgar, and clever with the clever,’ Guinevere said, ‘and both, mark you, at the same time, but if you can only be clever then you deny the people their stories, and if you can only be vulgar then no lord or lady will toss you gold.’

‘Except the vulgar lords,’ Ceinwyn put in slyly.

Guinevere glanced at me and I saw she was about to launch an insult at me, and then she recognized the impulse herself and burst into laughter. ‘If I had gold, Pyrlig,’ she said instead, ‘I would reward you, for you sing beautifully, but alas, I have none.’

‘Your praise is reward enough, Lady,’ Pyrlig said.

Guinevere’s presence had startled my spearmen and all evening I saw small groups of men come to stare at her in wonderment. She ignored their gaze. Ceinwyn had welcomed her without any show of astonishment, and Guinevere had been clever enough to be kind to my daughters so that Morwenna and Seren both now slept on the ground beside her. They, like my spearmen, had been fascinated by the tall, red-haired woman whose reputation was as startling as her looks. And Guinevere was simply happy to be there. We had no tables or chairs in our hall, just the rush floor and woollen carpets, but she sat beside the fire and effortlessly dominated the hall. There was a fierceness in her eyes that made her daunting, her cascade of tangled red hair made her striking and her joy at being free was infectious.

‘How long will she stay free?’ Ceinwyn asked me later that night. We had given up our private chamber to Guinevere, and were in the hall with the rest of our people.

‘I don’t know.’

‘So what do you know?’ Ceinwyn asked.

‘We wait for Issa, then we go north.’

‘To Corinium?’

‘I shall go to Corinium, but I’ll send you and the families to Glevum. You’ll be close enough to the fighting there and if the worst happens, you can go north into Gwent.’

I began to fret next day as Issa still did not appear. In my mind we were racing the Saxons towards Corinium, and the longer I was delayed, the more likely that race would be lost. If the Saxons could pick us off warband by warband then Dumnonia would fall like a rotted tree, and my warband, which was one of the strongest in the country, was stalled at Dun Caric because Issa and Argante had not appeared. At midday the urgency was even greater for it was then that we saw the first distant smears of smoke against the eastern and southern sky. No one commented on the tall, thin plumes, but we all knew that we saw burning thatch. The Saxons were destroying as they came, and they were close enough now for us to see their smoke.

I sent a horseman south to find Issa while the rest of us walked the two miles across the fields to the Fosse Way, the great Roman road that Issa should have been using. I planned to wait for him, then continue up the Fosse Way to Aquae Sulis which lay some twenty-five miles northwards, and then to Corinium which was another thirty miles further on. Fifty-five miles of road. Three days of long, hard effort.

We waited in a field of molehills beside the road. I had over a hundred spearmen and at least that number of women, children, slaves and servants. We had horses, mules and dogs, all waiting. Seren, Morwenna and the other children picked bluebells in a nearby wood while I paced up and down the broken stone of the road. Refugees were passing constantly, but none of them, even those who had come from Durnovaria, had any news of the Princess Argante. A priest thought he had seen Issa and his men arrive in that city because he had seen the five-pointed star on some spearmen’s shields, but he did not know if they were still there or had left. The one thing all the refugees were certain of was that the Saxons were near Durnovaria, though no one had actually seen a Saxon spearman. They had merely heard the rumours that had grown ever more wild as the hours passed. Arthur was said to be dead, or else he had fled to Rheged, while Cerdic was credited with possessing horses that breathed fire and magic axes that could cleave iron as though it were linen.

Guinevere had borrowed a bow from one of my huntsmen and was shooting arrows at a dead elm tree that grew beside the road. She shot well, putting shaft after shaft into the rotting wood, but when I complimented her on her skill, she grimaced. ‘I’m out of practice,’ she said, ‘I used to be able to take a running deer at a hundred paces, now I doubt I’d hit a standing one at fifty.’ She plucked the arrows from the tree. ‘But I think I might hit a Saxon, given the chance.’ She handed the bow back to my huntsman, who bowed and backed away. ‘If the Saxons are near Durnovaria,’ Guinevere asked me,

‘what do they do next?’

‘They come straight up this road,’ I said.

‘Not go further west?’

‘They know our plans,’ I said grimly, and told her about the golden buttons with the bearded faces that I had found in Mordred’s quarters. ‘Aelle’s marching towards Corinium while the others run ragged in the south. And we’re stuck here because of Argante.’

‘Let her rot,’ Guinevere said savagely, then shrugged. ‘I know you can’t. Does he love her?’

‘I wouldn’t know, Lady,’ I said.

‘Of course you’d know,’ Guinevere said sharply. ‘Arthur loves to pretend that he’s ruled by reason, but he yearns to be governed by passion. He would turn the world upside down for love.’

‘He hasn’t turned it upside down lately,’ I said.

‘He did for me, though,’ she said quietly, and not without a note of pride. ‘So where are you going?’

I had walked to my horse that was cropping grass among the molehills. ‘I’m going south,’ I said.

‘Do that,’ Guinevere said, ‘and we risk losing you too.’

She was right and I knew it, but frustration was beginning to boil inside me. Why had Issa not sent a message? He had fifty of my finest warriors and they were lost. I cursed the wasting day, cuffed a harmless boy who was strutting up and down pretending to be a spearman, and kicked at thistles. ‘We could start north,’ Ceinwyn suggested calmly, indicating the women and children.

‘No,’ I said, ‘we must stay together.’ I peered southwards, but there was nothing on the road except for more sad refugees trudging north. Most were families with one precious cow and maybe a calf, though many of this new season’s calves were still too small to walk. Some calves, abandoned by the road, called piteously for their mothers. Others of the refugees were merchants trying to save their goods. One man had an ox-wagon filled with baskets of fuller’s earth, another had hides, some had pottery. They glared at us as they passed, blaming us for not having stopped the Saxons sooner. Seren and Morwenna, bored with their attempt to denude the wood of bluebells, had found a nest of leverets under some ferns and honeysuckle at the trees’ edge. They excitedly called Guinevere to come and look, then gingerly stroked the little fur bodies that shivered under their touch. Ceinwyn watched them. ‘She’s made a conquest of the girls,’ she said to me.

‘A conquest of my spearmen too,’ I said, and it was true. Just a few months ago my men had been cursing Guinevere as a whore, and now they gazed at her adoringly. She had set out to charm them, and when Guinevere decided to be charming, she could dazzle. ‘Arthur will have a great deal of trouble putting her back behind walls after this,’ I said.

‘Which is probably why he wanted her released,’ Ceinwyn observed. ‘He certainly didn’t want her dead.’

‘Argante does.’

‘I’m sure she does,’ Ceinwyn agreed, then stared southwards with me, but there was still no sign of any spearmen on the long straight road.

Issa finally arrived at dusk. He came with his fifty spearmen, with the thirty men who had been the guards on the palace at Durnovaria, with the dozen Blackshields who were Argante’s personal soldiers and with at least two hundred other refugees. Worse, he had brought six ox-drawn wagons and it was those heavy vehicles that had caused the delay. A heavily laden ox-wagon’s highest speed is slower than an old man’s walk, and Issa had fetched the wagons all the way north at their snail’s pace. ‘What possessed you?’ I shouted at him. ‘There isn’t time to haul wagons!’

‘I know, Lord,’ he said miserably.

‘Are you mad?’ I was angry. I had ridden to meet him and now wheeled my mare on the verge.

‘You’ve wasted hours!’ I shouted.

‘I had no choice!’ he protested.

‘You’ve got a spear!’ I snarled. ‘That gives you the right to choose what you want.’

He just shrugged and gestured towards the Princess Argante who rode atop the leading wagon. The wagon’s four oxen, their flanks bleeding from the goads that had driven them all day, stopped in the road with their heads low.

‘The wagons go no farther!’ I shouted at her. ‘You walk or ride from here!’

‘No!’ Argante insisted.

I slid off the mare and walked down the line of wagons. One held nothing but the Roman statues that had graced the palace courtyard in Durnovaria, another was piled with robes and gowns, while a third was heaped with cooking pots, beckets and bronze candle-stands. ‘Get them off the road,’ I shouted angrily.

‘No!’ Argante had leapt down from her high perch and now ran towards me. ‘Arthur ordered me to bring them.’

‘Arthur, Lady,’ I turned on her, stifling my anger, ‘does not need statues!’

‘They come with us,’ Argante shouted, ‘otherwise I stay here!’

‘Then stay here, Lady,’ I said savagely. ‘Off the road!’ I shouted at the ox drivers. ‘Move it! Off the road, now!’ I had drawn Hywelbane and stabbed her blade at the nearest ox to drive the beast towards the verge.

‘Don’t go!’ Argante screamed at the ox drivers. She tugged at one of the oxen’s horns, pulling the confused beast back onto the road. ‘I’m not leaving this for the enemy,’ she shouted at me. Guinevere watched from the roadside. There was a look of cool amusement on her face, and no wonder, for Argante was behaving like a spoiled child. Argante’s Druid, Fergal, had hurried to his Princess’s aid, protesting that all his magical cauldrons and ingredients were loaded on one of the wagons. ‘And the treasury,’ he added as an afterthought.

‘What treasury?’ I asked.

‘Arthur’s treasury,’ Argante said sarcastically, as though by revealing the existence of the gold she won her argument. ‘He wants it in Corinium.’ She went to the second wagon, lifted some of the heavy robes and rapped a wooden box that was hidden beneath. ‘The gold of Dumnonia! You’d give it to the Saxons?’

‘Rather that than give them you and me, Lady,’ I said and then I slashed with Hywelbane, cutting loose the oxen’s harness. Argante screamed at me, swearing she would have me punished and that I was stealing her treasures, but I just sawed at the next harness as I snarled at the ox drivers to release their animals.

‘Listen, Lady,’ I said, ‘we have to go faster than oxen can walk.’ I pointed to the distant smoke.

‘That’s the Saxons! They’ll be here in a few hours.’

‘We can’t leave the wagons!’ she screamed. There were tears in her eyes. She might have been the daughter of a King, but she had grown up with few possessions and now, married to Dumnonia’s ruler, she was rich and she could not let go of those new riches. ‘Don’t undo that harness!’ she shouted at the drivers and they, confused, hesitated. I sawed at another leather trace and Argante began beating me with her fists, swearing that I was a thief and her enemy.

I pushed her gently away, but she would not go and I dared not be too forceful. She was in a tantrum now, swearing at me and hitting me with her small hands. I tried to push her away again, but she just spat at me, hit me again, then shouted at her Blackshield bodyguard to come to her aid. Those twelve men were hesitant, but they were her father’s warriors and sworn to Argante’s service, and so they came towards me with levelled spears. My own men immediately ran to my defence. The Blackshields were terribly outnumbered, but they did not back down and their Druid was hopping in front of them, his fox-hair woven beard wagging and the small bones tied to its hairs clicking as he told the Blackshields that they were blessed and that their souls would go to a golden reward. ‘Kill him!’

Argante screamed at her bodyguard and pointing at me. ‘Kill him now!’

‘Enough!’ Guinevere called sharply. She walked into the centre of the road and stared imperiously at the Blackshields. ‘Don’t be fools, put your spears down. If you want to die, take some Saxons with you, not Dumnonians.’ She turned on Argante. ‘Come here, child,’ she said, and pulled the girl towards her and used a corner of her drab cloak to wipe away Argante’s tears. ‘You did quite right to try and save the treasury,’ she told Argante, ‘but Derfel is also right. If we don’t hurry the Saxons will catch us.’ She turned to me. ‘Is there no chance,’ she asked, ‘that we can take the gold?’

‘None,’ I said shortly, nor was there. Even if I had harnessed spearmen to the wagons they would still have slowed us down.

‘The gold is mine!’ Argante screamed.

‘It belongs to the Saxons now,’ I said, and I shouted at Issa to get the wagons off the road and cut the oxen free.

Argante screamed a last protest, but Guinevere seized and hugged her. ‘It doesn’t become princesses,’ Guinevere murmured softly, ‘to show anger in public. Be mysterious, my dear, and never let men know what you’re thinking. Your power lies in the shadows, but in the sunlight men will always overcome you.’

Argante had no idea who the tall, good-looking woman was, but she allowed Guinevere to comfort her as Issa and his men dragged the wagons onto the grass verge. I let the women take what cloaks and gowns they wanted, but we abandoned the cauldrons and tripods and candle-holders, though Issa did discover one of Arthur’s war-banners, a huge sheet of white linen decorated with a great black bear embroidered in wool, and that we kept to stop it falling into the hands of the Saxons, but we could not take the gold. Instead we carried the treasury boxes to a flooded drainage ditch in a nearby field and poured the coins into the stinking water in the hope that the Saxons would never discover it. Argante sobbed as she watched the gold being poured into the black water. ‘The gold is mine!’ she protested a last time.

‘And once it was mine, child,’ Guinevere said very calmly, ‘and I survived the loss, just as you now will.’

Argante pulled abruptly away to stare up at the taller woman. ‘Yours?’ she asked.

‘Did I not name myself, child?’ Guinevere asked with a delicate scorn. ‘I’m the Princess Guinevere.’

Argante just screamed, then fled up the road to where her Blackshields had retreated. I groaned, sheathed Hywelbane, then waited as the last of the gold was concealed. Guinevere had found one of her old cloaks, a golden cascade of wool trimmed in bear fur, and had discarded the old dull garment she had worn in her prison. ‘Her gold indeed,’ she said to me angrily.

‘It seems I have another enemy,’ I said, watching Argante who was deep in conversation with her Druid and doubtless urging him to put a curse on me.

‘If we share an enemy, Derfel,’ Guinevere said with a smile, ‘then that makes us allies at last. I like that.’

‘Thank you, Lady,’ I said, and reflected that it was not just my daughters and spearmen who were being charmed.

The last of the gold was sunk in the ditch and my men came back to the road and picked up their spears and shields. The sun flamed over the Severn Sea, filling the west with a crimson glow-as we, at last, started northwards to the war.

We only made a few miles before the dark drove us off the road to find shelter, but at least we had reached the hills north of Ynys Wydryn. We stopped that night at an abandoned hall where we made a poor meal of hard bread and dried fish. Argante sat apart from the rest of us, protected by her Druid and her guards, and though Ceinwyn tried to draw her into our conversation she refused to be tempted and so we let her sulk.

After we had eaten I walked with Ceinwyn and Guinevere to the top of a small hill behind the hall where two of the old people’s grave mounds stood. I begged the dead’s forgiveness and climbed to the top of one of the mounds where Ceinwyn and Guinevere joined me. The three of us gazed southwards. The valley beneath us was prettily white with moon-glossed apple blossom, but we saw nothing on the horizon except the sullen glow of fires. ‘The Saxons move fast,’ I said bitterly. Guinevere pulled her cloak tight around her shoulders. ‘Where’s Merlin?’ she asked.

‘Vanished,’ I said. There had been reports that Merlin was in Ireland, or else in the northern wilderness, or perhaps in the wastes of Gwynedd, while still another tale claimed he was dead and that Nimue had cut down a whole mountainside of trees to make his balefire. It was just rumour, I told myself, just rumour.

‘No one knows where Merlin is,’ Ceinwyn said softly, ‘but he’ll surely know where we are.’

‘I pray that he does,’ Guinevere said fervently, and I wondered to what God or Goddess she prayed now. Still to Isis? Or had she reverted to the British Gods? And maybe, I shuddered at the thought, those Gods had finally abandoned us. Their balefire would have been the flames on Mai Dun and their revenge was the warbands that now ravaged Dumnonia.

We marched again at dawn. It had clouded over in the night and a thin rain started with the first light. The Fosse Way was crowded with refugees and even though I placed a score of armed warriors at our head who had orders to thrust all ox-wagons and herds off the road, our progress was still pitifully slow. Many of the children could not keep up and had to be carried on the pack animals that bore our spears, armour and food, or else hoisted onto the shoulders of the younger spearmen. Argante rode my mare while Guinevere and Ceinwyn walked and took it in turns to tell stories to the children. The rain became harder, sweeping across the hilltops in vast grey swathes and gurgling down the shallow ditches on either side of the Roman road.

I had hoped to reach Aquae Sulis at midday, but it was the middle of the afternoon before our bedraggled and tired band dropped into the valley where the city lay. The river was in spate and a choking mass of floating debris had become trapped against the stone piers of the Roman bridge to form a dam that had flooded the upstream fields on either bank. One of the duties of the city’s magistrate was to keep the bridge spillways clear of just such debris, but the task had been ignored, just as he had ignored the upkeep of the city wall. That wall lay only a hundred paces north of the bridge and, because Aquae Sulis was not a fortress town, it had never been a formidable wall, but now it was scarcely an obstacle at all. Whole stretches of the wooden palisade on top of the earth and stone rampart had been torn down for firewood or building, while the rampart itself had become so eroded that the Saxons could have crossed the city wall without breaking stride. Here and there I could see frantic men trying to repair stretches of the palisade, but it would have taken five hundred men a full month to rebuild those defences. We filed through the city’s fine southern gate and I saw that though the town possessed neither the energy to preserve its ramparts nor the labour to keep the bridge from choking with flotsam, someone had found time to deface the beautiful mask of the Roman Goddess Minerva that had once graced the gate’s arch. Where her face had been there was now just a calloused mass of hammered stone on which a crude Christian cross had been cut. ‘It’s a Christian town?’ Ceinwyn asked me.

‘Nearly all towns are,’ Guinevere answered for me.

It was also a beautiful town. Or it had been beautiful once, though over the years the tiled roofs had fallen and been replaced by thick thatch and some houses had collapsed and were now nothing but piles of brick or stone, but still the streets were paved and the high pillars and lavishly carved pediment of Minerva’s magnificent temple still soared above the petty roofs. My vanguard forced a brutal way through the crowded streets to reach the temple, which stood on a stepped pediment in the sacred heart of the city. The Romans had built an inner wall about that central shrine, a wall that encompassed Minerva’s temple and the bath-house that had brought the city its fame and prosperity. The Romans had roofed in the bath, which was fed by a magical hot spring, but some of the roof tiles had fallen and wisps of steam now curled up from the holes like smoke. The temple itself, stripped of its lead gutters, was stained with rainwater and lichen, while the painted plaster inside the high portico had flaked and darkened; but despite the decay it was still possible to stand in the wide paved enclosure of the city’s inner shrine and imagine a world where men could build such places and live without fear of spears coming from the barbarian east.

The city magistrate, a flurried, nervous, middle-aged man named Cildydd who wore a Roman toga to mark his authority, hurried out of the temple to greet me. I knew him from the time of the rebellion when, despite being a Christian himself, he had fled from the crazed fanatics who had taken over the shrines of Aquae Sulis. He had been restored to the magistracy after the rebellion, but I guessed his authority was slight. He carried a scrap of slate on which he had made scores of marks, evidently the numbers’ of the levy that was assembled inside the shrine’s compound. ‘Repairs are in hand!’ Cildydd greeted me without any other courtesy. ‘I have men cutting timbers for the walls. Or I did. The flooding is a problem, indeed it is, but if the rain stops?’ He let the sentence trail away.

‘The flooding?’ I asked.

‘When the river rises, Lord,’ he explained, ‘the water backs up through the Roman sewers. It’s already in the lower part of the city. And not just water either, I fear. The smell, you see?’ He sniffed delicately.

‘The problem,’ I said, ‘is that the bridge arches are dammed with debris. It was your task to keep them clear. It was also your task to preserve the walls.’ His mouth opened and closed without a word. He hefted the slate as if to demonstrate his efficiency, then just blinked helplessly. ‘Not that it matters now,’ I went on, ‘the city can’t be defended.’

‘Can’t be defended!’ Cildydd protested. ‘Can’t be defended! It must be defended! We can’t just abandon the city!’

‘If the Saxons come,’ I said brutally, ‘you’ll have no choice.’

‘But we must defend it, Lord,’ Cildydd insisted.

‘With what?’ I asked.

‘Your men, Lord,’ he said, gesturing at my spearmen who had taken refuge from the rain under the temple’s high portico.

‘At best,’ I said, ‘we can garrison a quarter mile of the wall, or what’s left of it. So who defends the rest?’

‘The levy, of course.’ Cildydd waved his slate towards the drab collection of men who waited beside the bath-house. Few had weapons and even fewer possessed any body armour.

‘Have you ever seen the Saxons attack?’ I asked Cildydd. ‘They send big war-dogs first and they come behind with axes three feet long and spears on eight-foot shafts. They’re drunk, they’re maddened and they’ll want nothing but the women and the gold inside your city. How long do you think your levy will hold?’

Cildydd blinked at me. ‘We can’t just give up,’ he said weakly.

‘Does your levy have any real weapons?’ I asked, indicating the sullen-looking men waiting in the rain. Two or three of the sixty men had spears, I could see one old Roman sword, and most of the rest had axes or mattocks, but some men did not even possess those crude weapons, but merely held fire-hardened stakes that had been sharpened to black points.

‘We’re searching the city, Lord,’ Cildydd said. ‘There must be spears.’

‘Spears or not,’ I said brutally, ‘if you fight here you’ll all be dead men.’

Cildydd gaped at me. ‘Then what do we do?’ he finally asked.

‘Go to Glevum,’ I said.

‘But the city!’ He blanched. ‘There are merchants, goldsmiths, churches, treasures.’ His voice tailed away as he imagined the enormity of the city’s fall, but that fall, if the Saxons came, was inevitable. Aquae Sulis was no garrison city, just a beautiful place that stood in a bowl of hills. Cildydd blinked in the rain. ‘Glevum,’ he said glumly. ‘And you’ll escort us there, Lord?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m going to Corinium,’ I said, ‘but you go to Glevum.’ I was half tempted to send Argante, Guinevere, Ceinwyn and the families with him, but I did not trust Cildydd to protect them. Better, I decided, to take the women and families north myself, then send them under a small escort from Corinium to Glevum.

But at least Argante was taken from my hands, for as I was brutally destroying Cildydd’s slim hopes of garrisoning Aquae Sulis a troop of armoured horsemen clattered into the temple precinct. They were Arthur’s men, flying his banner of the bear, and they were led by Balin who was roundly cursing the press of refugees. He looked relieved when he saw me, then astonished as he recognized Guinevere. ‘Did you bring the wrong Princess, Derfel?’ he asked as he slid off his tired horse.

‘Argante’s inside the temple,’ I said, jerking my head towards the great building where Argante had taken refuge from the rain. She had not spoken to me all day.

‘I’m to take her to Arthur,’ Balin said. He was a bluff, bearded man with the tattoo of a bear on his forehead and a jagged white scar on his left cheek. I asked him for news and he told me what little he knew and none of it was good. ‘The bastards are coming down the Thames,’ he said, ‘we reckon they’re only three days’ march from Corinium, and there’s no sign of Cuneglas or Oengus yet. It’s chaos, Derfel, that’s what it is, chaos.’ He shuddered suddenly. ‘What’s the stink here?’

‘The sewers are backing up,’ I said.

‘All over Dumnonia,’ he said grimly. ‘I have to hurry,’ he went on, ‘Arthur wants his bride in Corinium the day before yesterday.’

‘Do you have orders for me?’ I called after him as he strode towards the temple steps.

‘Get yourself to Corinium! And hurry! And you’re to send what food you can!’ He shouted the last order as he disappeared through the temple’s great bronze doors. He had brought six spare horses, enough to saddle Argante, her maids and Fergal the Druid, which meant that the twelve men of Argante’s Blackshield escort were left with me. I sensed they were as glad as I was to be rid of their Princess. Balin rode north in the late afternoon. I had wanted to be on the road myself, but the children were tired, the rain was incessant, and Ceinwyn persuaded me that we would make better time if we all rested this night under Aquae Sulis’s roofs and marched fresh in the morning. I put guards on the bath-house and let the women and children go into the great steaming pool of hot water, then sent Issa and a score of men to hunt through the city for weapons to equip the levy. After that I sent for Cildydd and asked him how much food remained in the city. ‘Scarcely any, Lord!’ he insisted, claiming he had already sent sixteen wagons of grain, dried meat and salted fish north.

‘You searched folk’s houses?’ I asked. ‘The churches?’

‘Only the city granaries, Lord.’

‘Then let’s make a proper search,’ I suggested, and by dusk we had collected seven more wagonloads of precious supplies. I sent the wagons north that same evening, despite the lateness of the hour. Ox-carts are slow and it was better that they should start the journey at dusk than wait for the morning.

Issa waited for me in the temple precinct. His search of the city had yielded seven old swords and a dozen boar spears, while Cildydd’s men had turned up fifteen more spears, eight of them broken, but Issa also had news. ‘There’s said to be weapons hidden in the temple, Lord,’ he told me.

‘Who says?’

Issa gestured at a young bearded man who was dressed in a butcher’s bloody apron. ‘He reckons a hoard of spears was hidden in the temple after the rebellion, but the priest denies it.’

‘Where’s the priest?’

‘Inside, Lord. He told me to get out when I questioned him.’

I ran up the temple steps and through the big doors. This had once been a shrine to Minerva and Sulis, the first a Roman and the second a British Goddess, but the pagan deities had been ejected and the Christian God installed. When I had last been in the temple there had been a great bronze statue of Minerva attended by flickering oil lamps, but the statue had been destroyed during the Christian rebellion and now only the Goddess’s hollow head remained, and that had been impaled on a pole to stand as a trophy behind the Christian altar.

The priest challenged me. ‘This is a house of God!’ he roared. He was celebrating a mystery at his altar, surrounded by weeping women, but he broke off his ceremonies to face me. He was a young man, full of passion, one of those priests who had stirred up the trouble in Dumnonia and whom Arthur had allowed to live so that the bitterness of the failed rebellion would not fester. This priest, however, had clearly lost none of his insurgent fervour. ‘A house of God!’ he shouted again, ‘and you defile it with sword and spear! Would you carry your weapons into your lord’s hall? So why carry them into my Lord’s house?’

‘In a week,’ I said, ‘it will be a temple of Thunor and they’ll be sacrificing your children where you stand. Are there spears here?’

‘None!’ he said defiantly. The women screamed and shrank away as I climbed the altar steps. The priest held a cross towards me. ‘In the name of God,’ he said, ‘and in the name of His holy Son, and in the name of the Holy Ghost. No!’ This last cry was because I had drawn Hywelbane and used her to strike the cross out of his hand. The scrap of wood skittered across the temple’s marble floor as I rammed the blade into his tangled beard. ‘I’ll pull this place down stone by stone to find the spears,’ I said, ‘and bury your miserable carcass under its rubble. Now where are they?’

His defiance crumpled. The spears, which he had been hoarding in hope of another campaign to put a Christian on Dumnonia’s throne, were concealed in a crypt beneath the altar. The entrance to the crypt was hidden, for it was a place where the treasures donated by folk seeking Sulis’s healing power had once been concealed, but the frightened priest showed us how to lift the marble slab to reveal a pit crammed with gold and weapons. We left the gold, but carried the spears out to Cildydd’s levy. I doubted the sixty men would be of any real use in battle, but at least a man armed with a spear looked like a warrior and, from a distance, they might give the Saxons pause. I told the levy to be ready to march in the morning and to pack as much food as they could find.

We slept that night in the temple. I swept the altar clear of its Christian trimmings and placed Minerva’s head between two oil lamps so that she would guard us through the night. Rain dripped from the roof and puddled on the marble, but sometime in the small hours the rain stopped and the dawn brought a clearing sky and a fresh chill wind from the east.

We left the city before the sun rose. Only forty of the city’s levy marched with us for the rest had melted away in the night, but it was better to have forty willing men than sixty uncertain allies. Our road was clear of refugees now, for I had spread the word that safety did not lie in Corinium but at Glevum, and so it was the western road that was crammed with cattle and folk. Our route took us east into the rising sun along the Fosse Way which here ran straight as a spear between Roman tombs. Guinevere translated the inscriptions, marvelling that men were buried here who had been born in Greece or Egypt or Rome itself. They were veterans of the Legions who had taken British wives and settled near the healing springs of Aquae Sulis, and their lichen-covered gravestones sometimes gave thanks to Minerva or to Sulis for the gift of years. After an hour we left the tombs behind and the valley narrowed as the steep hills north of the road came closer to the river meadows; soon, I knew, the road would turn abruptly north to climb into the hills that lay between Aquae Sulis and Corinium. It was when we reached the narrow part of the valley that the ox drivers came running back. They had left Aquae Sulis the previous day, but their slow wagons had reached no further than the northwards bend in the road, and now, in the dawn, they had abandoned their seven loads of precious food. ‘Sais!’

one man shouted as he ran towards us. ‘There are Sais!’

‘Fool,’ I muttered, then shouted at Issa to stop the fleeing men. I had allowed Guinevere to ride my horse, but now she slid off and I clumsily hauled my way onto the beast’s back and spurred her forward. The road turned northwards half a mile ahead. The oxen and their wagons had been abandoned just at the bend and I edged past them to peer up the slope. For a moment I could see nothing, then a group of horsemen appeared beside some trees at the crest. They were half a mile away, outlined against the brightening sky, and I could make out no details of their shields, but I guessed they were Britons rather than Saxons because our enemy did not deploy many horsemen.

I urged the mare up the slope. None of the horsemen moved. They just watched me, but then, away to my right, more men appeared at the hill’s crest. These were spearmen and above them hung a banner that told me the worst.

The banner was a skull hung with what looked like rags, and I remembered Cerdic’s wolf-skull standard with its ragged tail of flayed human skin. The men were Saxons and they barred our road. There were not many spearmen in sight, perhaps a dozen horsemen and fifty or sixty men on foot, but they had the high ground and I could not tell how many more might be hidden beyond the crest. I stopped the mare and stared at the spearmen, this time seeing the glint of sunlight on the broad axeblades some of the men carried. They had to be Saxons. But where had they come from? Balin had told me that both Cerdic and Aelle were advancing along the Thames, so it seemed likely that these men had come south from the wide river valley, but maybe they were some of Cerdic’s spearmen who served Lancelot. Not that it really mattered who they were; all that mattered was that our road was blocked. Still more of the enemy appeared, their spears pricking the skyline all along the ridge.

I turned the mare to see Issa bringing my most experienced spearmen past the blockage at the road’s turn. ‘Saxons!’ I called to him. ‘Form a shield wall here!’

Issa gazed up at the distant spearmen. ‘We fight them here, Lord?’ he asked.

‘No.’ I dared not fight in such a bad place. We would be forced to struggle uphill, and we would ever be worried about our families behind us.

‘We’ll take the road to Glevum instead?’ Issa suggested.

I shook my head. The Glevum road was thronged with refugees and if I had been the Saxon commander I would have wanted nothing more than to pursue an outnumbered enemy along that road. We could not outmarch him, for we would be obstructed by refugees, and he would find it a simple matter to cut through those panicked people to bring us death. It was possible, even likely, that the Saxons would not make any pursuit at all, but would be tempted to plunder the city instead, but it was a risk I dared not take. I gazed up the long hill and saw yet more of the enemy coming to the sun-bright crest. It was impossible to count them, but it was no small warband. My own men were making a shield wall, but I knew I could not fight here. The Saxons had more men and they had the high ground. To fight here was to die.

I twisted in the saddle. A half-mile away, just to the north of the Fosse Way, was one of the old people’s fortresses, and its ancient earth wall — much eroded now — stood at the crest of a steep hill. I pointed to the grass ramparts. ‘We’ll go there,’ I said.

‘There, Lord?’ Issa was puzzled.

‘If we try to escape them,’ I explained, ‘they’ll follow us. Our children can’t move fast and eventually the bastards will catch us. We’ll be forced to make a shield wall, put our families in the centre, and the last of us to die will hear the first of our women screaming. Better to go to a place where they’ll hesitate to attack. Eventually they’ll have to make a choice. Either they leave us alone and go north, in which case we follow, or else they fight, and if we’re on a hilltop we stand a chance of winning. A better chance,’ I added, ‘because Culhwch will come this way. In a day or two we might even outnumber them.’

‘So we abandon Arthur?’ Issa asked, shocked at the thought.

‘We keep a Saxon warband away from Corinium,’ I said. But I was not happy with my choice, for Issa was right. I was abandoning Arthur, but I dared not risk the lives of Ceinwyn and my daughters. The whole careful campaign that Arthur had plotted was destroyed. Culhwch was cut off somewhere to the south, I was trapped at Aquae Sulis, while Cuneglas and Oengus mac Airem were still many miles away. I rode back to find my armour and weapons. I had no time to don the body armour, but I pulled on the wolf-plumed helmet, found my heaviest spear and took up my shield. I gave the mare back to Guinevere and told her to take the families up the hill, then ordered the men of the levy and my younger spearmen to turn the seven food wagons round and get them up to the fortress. ‘I don’t care how you do it,’ I said to them, ‘but I want that food kept from the enemy. Haul the wagons up yourself if you have to!’ I might have abandoned Argante’s wagons, but in war a wagon-load of food is far more precious than gold and I was determined to keep those supplies from the enemy. If necessary, I would burn the wagons and their contents, but for the moment I would try to save the food. I went back to Issa and took my place at the centre of the shield wall. The enemy ranks were thickening and I expected them to make a mad charge down the hill at any minute. They outnumbered us, but still they did not come and every moment that they hesitated was an extra moment in which our families and the precious wagon-loads of food could reach the hill’s summit. I glanced behind constantly, watching the wagons’ progress, and when they were just over halfway up the steep slope I ordered my spearmen back.

That retreat spurred the Saxons into an advance. They screamed a challenge and came fast down the hill, but they had left their attack too late. My men went back along the road, crossed a shallow ford where a stream tumbled from the hills towards the river, and now we had the higher ground for we were retreating uphill towards the fortress on its steep slope. My men kept their line straight, kept their shields overlapping and held their long spears steady, and that evidence of their training stopped the Saxon pursuit fifty yards short of us. They contented themselves with shouting challenges and insults, while one of their naked wizards, his hair spiked with cow dung, danced forward to curse us. He called us pigs, cowards and goats. He cursed us, and I counted them. They had one hundred and seventy men in their wall, and there were still more who had not yet come down the hill. I counted them and the Saxon war-leaders stood their horses behind their shield wall and counted us. I could see their banner clearly now and it was Cerdic’s standard of a wolf skull hung with a dead man’s flayed skin, but Cerdic himself was not there. This had to be one of his warbands come south from the Thames. The warband far outnumbered us, but its leaders were too canny to attack. They knew that they could beat us, but they also knew the dreadful toll that seventy experienced warriors would cull from their ranks. It was enough for them to have driven us away from the road.

We backed slowly up the hill. The Saxons watched us, but only their wizard followed us and after a while he lost interest. He spat at us and turned away. We jeered mightily at the enemy’s timidity, but in truth I was feeling a huge relief that they had not attacked.

It took us an hour to heave the seven wagons of precious food over the ancient turf rampart and so onto the hill’s gently domed top. I walked that domed plateau and discovered it to be a marvellous defensive position. The summit was a triangle, and on each of its three sides the ground fell steeply away so that any attacker would be forced to labour up into the teeth of our spears. I hoped the steepness of that slope would keep the Saxon warband from making any attack, and that in a day or two the enemy would leave and we would be free to find our way north to Corinium. We would arrive late, and Arthur would doubtless be angry with me, but for the moment I had kept this part of Dumnonia’s army safe. We numbered over two hundred spearmen and we protected a crowd of women and children, seven wagons and two Princesses, and our refuge was a grassy hilltop high above a deep river valley. I found one of the levy and asked him the name of the hill.

‘It’s named like the city, Lord,’ he said, apparently bemused that I should even want to know the name.

‘Aquae Sulis?’ I asked him.

‘No, Lord! The old name! The name before the Romans came.’

‘Baddon,’ I said.

‘And this is Mynydd Baddon, Lord,’ he confirmed.

Mount Baddon. In time the poets would make that name ring through all of Britain. It would be sung in a thousand halls and fire the blood of children yet unborn, but for now it meant nothing to me. It was just a convenient hill, a grass-walled fort, and the place where, all unwillingly, I had planted my two banners in the turf. One showed Ceinwyn’s star, while the other, which we had found and rescued from Argante’s wagons, flaunted Arthur’s banner of the bear.

So, in the morning light, where they flapped in the drying wind, the bear and the star defied the Saxons.

On Mynydd Baddon.

The Saxons were cautious. They had not attacked us when they first saw us, and now that we were secure on Mynydd Baddon’s summit they were content to sit at the southern base of the hill and simply watch us. In the afternoon a large contingent of their spearmen walked to Aquae Sulis, where they must have discovered an almost deserted city. I expected to see the flare and smoke of burning thatch, but no such fires appeared and at dusk the spearmen came back from the city laden with plunder. The shadows of nightfall darkened the river valley and, while we on Mynydd Baddon’s summit were still in the last wash of daylight, our enemy’s campfires studded the dark beneath us. Still more fires showed in the hilly land to the north of us. Mynydd Baddon lay like an offshore island to those hills, and was separated from them by a high grassy saddle. I had half thought we might cross that high valley in the night, climb to the ridge beyond and make our way across the hills towards Corinium; so, before dusk, I sent Issa and a score of men to reconnoitre the route, but they returned to say there were mounted Saxon scouts all across the ridge beyond the saddle. I was still tempted to try and escape northwards, but I knew the Saxon horsemen would see us and that by dawn we would have their whole warband on our heels. I worried about the choice till deep into the night, then picked the lesser of the two evils: we would stay on Mynydd Baddon.

To the Saxons we must have appeared a formidable army. I now commanded two hundred and sixty-eight men and the enemy were not to know that fewer than a hundred of those were prime spearmen. Forty of the remainder were the city levy, thirty-six were battle-hardened warriors who had guarded Caer Cadarn or Durnovaria’s palace, though most of those three dozen men were old and slow now, while a hundred and ten were unblooded youngsters. My seventy experienced spearmen and Argante’s twelve Blackshields were among the best warriors in Britain, and though I did not doubt that the thirty-six veterans would be useful and that the youngsters might well prove formidable, it was still a pitifully small force with which to protect our hundred and fourteen women and seventy-nine children. But at least we had plenty of food and water, for we possessed the seven precious wagons and there were three springs on Mynydd Baddon’s flanks.

By nightfall on that first day we had counted the enemy. There were about three hundred and sixty Saxons in the valley and at least another eighty on the land to the north. That was enough spearmen to keep us penned on Mynydd Baddon, but probably not enough to assault us. Each of the flat and treeless summit’s three sides was three hundred paces in length, making a total that was far too great for my small numbers to defend, but if the enemy did attack we would see them coming from a long way off and I would have time to move spearmen to face their assault. I reckoned that even if they made two or three simultaneous assaults I could still hold, for the Saxons would have a terrible steep slope to climb and my men would be fresh, but if the enemy numbers increased then I knew I must be overwhelmed. My prayer was that these Saxons were nothing more than a strong foraging band, and once they had stripped Aquae Sulis and its river valley of whatever food they could find they would go back north to rejoin Aelle and Cerdic.

The next dawn showed that the Saxons were still in the valley, where the smoke of their campfires mingled with the river mist. As the mist thinned we saw they were cutting down trees to make huts; depressing evidence that they intended to stay. My own men were busy on the mount’s slopes, chopping down the small hawthorns and the birch saplings that might give cover to an attacking enemy. They dragged the brush and small trees back to the summit and piled them as rudimentary breastworks on the remains of the old people’s wall. I had another fifty men on the hill crest to the north of the saddle, where they were cutting firewood that we hauled back to the mount in one of the ox-wagons we had emptied of food. Those men brought back enough timber to make a long wooden hut of our own, though our hut, unlike the Saxon shelters that were roofed with thatch or turf, was nothing but a ramshackle structure of untrimmed timbers stretched between four of the wagons and crudely thatched with branches, but it was large enough to shelter the women and children.

During the first night I had sent two of my spearmen north. Both of them were cunning rogues from among the unblooded youngsters and I ordered each to try and reach Corinium and tell Arthur of our plight. I doubted whether he could help us, but at least he would know what had happened. All next day I dreaded seeing those two young men again, fearing to see them being dragged as prisoners behind a Saxon horseman, but they vanished. Both, as I learned later, survived to reach Corinium. The Saxons built their shelters and we piled more thorn and brush on our shallow wall. None of the enemy came near us, and we did not go down to challenge them. I divided the summit into sections, and assigned each to a troop of spearmen. My seventy experienced warriors, the best of my small army, guarded the angle of ramparts that faced due south towards the enemy. I split my youngsters into two troops, one on each flank of the experienced men, then gave the defence of the hill’s northern side to the twelve Blackshields, supported by the levy and the guards from Caer Cadarn and Durnovaria. The Blackshields’ leader was a scarred brute named Niall, a veteran of a hundred harvest raids whose fingers were thick with warrior rings, and Niall raised his own makeshift banner on the northern rampart. It was nothing but a branch-stripped birch sapling struck into the turf with a scrap of black cloak flying from its tip, but there was something wild and satisfyingly defiant about that ragged Irish flag. I still had hopes of escaping. The Saxons might be making shelters in the river valley, but the high northern ground went on tempting me and on that second afternoon I rode my horse across the saddle of land beneath Niall’s banner and so up to the opposing crest. A great empty stretch of moorland lay under the racing clouds. Eachern, an experienced warrior whom I had put in command of one of the bands of youngsters cutting timber on the crest, came to stand beside my mare. He saw that I was staring at the empty moor and guessed what was in my mind. He spat. ‘Bastards are out there, so they are,’ he said.

‘You’re sure?’

‘They come and they go, Lord. Always horsemen.’ He had an axe in his right hand and he pointed it westwards to where a valley ran north-west beside the moor. Trees grew thick in the small valley, though all we could see of them was their leafy tops. ‘There’s a road in those trees,’ Eachern said, ‘and that’s where they’re lurking.’

‘The road must go towards Glevum,’ I said.

‘Goes to the Saxons first, Lord,’ Eachern said. ‘Bastards are there, so they are. I heard their axes.’

Which meant, I guessed, that the track in the valley was blocked with felled trees. I was still tempted. If we destroyed the food and left behind anything that could slow our march, then we might still break out of this Saxon ring and reach Arthur’s army. All day my conscience had been nagging like a spur, for my clear duty was to be with Arthur and the longer I was stranded on Mynydd Baddon the harder his task was. I wondered if we could cross the moorland at night. There would be a half moon, enough to light the way, and if we moved fast we would surely outrun the main Saxon warband. We might be harried by a handful of Saxon horsemen, but my spearmen could deal with those. But what lay beyond the moor? Hilly country, for sure, and doubtless cut by rivers swollen by the recent rains. I needed a road, I needed fords and bridges, I needed speed or else the children would lag behind, the spearmen would slow to protect them and suddenly the Saxons would be on us like wolves outrunning a flock of sheep. I could imagine escaping from Mynydd Baddon, but I could not see how we were to cross the miles of country between us and Corinium without falling prey to enemy blades.

The decision was taken from me at dusk. I was still contemplating a dash north and hoping that by leaving our fires burning brightly we might deceive the enemy into thinking we remained on Mynydd Baddon’s summit, but during the dusk of that second day still more Saxons arrived. They came from the north-east, from the direction of Corinium, and a hundred of them moved onto the moorland I had hoped to cross, then came south to drive my woodcutters out of the trees, across the saddle and so back onto Mynydd Baddon. Now we were truly trapped.

I sat that night with Ceinwyn beside a fire. ‘It reminds me,’ I said, ‘of that night on Ynys Mon.’

‘I was thinking of that,’ she said.

It was the night we had discovered the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn, and we had huddled in a jumble of rocks with the forces of Diwrnach all about us. None of us had expected to live, but then Merlin had woken from the dead and mocked me. ‘Surrounded, are we?’ he had asked me. ‘Outnumbered, are we?’ I had agreed to both propositions and Merlin had smiled. ‘And you call yourself a lord of warriors!’

‘You’ve landed us in a predicament,’ Ceinwyn said, quoting Merlin, and she smiled at the memory, then sighed. ‘If we weren’t with you,’ she went on, indicating the women and children about the fires,

‘what would you do?’

‘Go north. Fight a battle over there,’ I nodded towards the Saxon fires that burned on the high ground beyond the saddle, ‘then keep marching north.’ I was not truly certain I would have done that, for such an escape would have meant abandoning any man wounded in the battle for the ridge, but the rest of us, unencumbered by women or children, could surely have outmarched the Saxon pursuit.

‘Suppose,’ Ceinwyn said softly, ‘that you ask the Saxons to give the women and children safe passage?’

‘They’ll say yes,’ I said, ‘and as soon as you’re out range of our spears they’ll seize you, rape you, kill you and enslave the children.’

‘Not really a good idea, then?’ she asked gently.

‘Not really.’

She leaned her head on my shoulder, trying not to disturb Seren who was sleeping with her head pillowed on her mother’s lap. ‘So how long can we hold?’ Ceinwyn asked.

‘I could die of old age on Mynydd Baddon,’ I said, ‘so long as they don’t send more than four hundred men to attack us.’

‘And will they?’

‘Probably not,’ I lied, and Ceinwyn knew I lied. Of course they would send more than four hundred men. In war, I have learned, the enemy will usually do whatever you fear the most, and this enemy would certainly send every spearman they had.

Ceinwyn lay silent for a while. Dogs barked among the distant Saxon encampments, their sound coming clear through the still night. Our own dogs began to respond and little Seren shifted in her sleep. Ceinwyn stroked her daughter’s hair. ‘If Arthur’s at Corinium,’ she asked softly, ‘then why are the Saxons coming here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You think they’ll eventually go north to join their main army?’

I had thought that, but the arrival of more Saxons had given me doubts. Now I suspected that we faced a big enemy warband that had been trying to march southwards around Corinium, looping deep into the hills to re-emerge at Glevum and so threaten Arthur’s rear. I could think of no other reason why so many Saxons were in Aquae Sulis’s valley, but that did not explain why they had not kept marching. Instead they were making shelters, which suggested they wanted to besiege us. In which case, I thought, perhaps we were doing Arthur a service by staying here. We were keeping a large number of his enemies away from Corinium, though if our estimation of the enemy forces was right then the Saxons had more than enough men to overwhelm both Arthur and us.

Ceinwyn and I fell silent. The twelve Blackshields had begun to sing, and when their song was done my men answered with the war chant of Ultydd. Pyrlig, my bard, accompanied the singing on his harp. He had found a leather breastplate and armed himself with a shield and spear, but the wargear looked strange on his thin frame. I hoped he would never have to abandon his harp and use the spear, for by then all hope would be lost. I imagined Saxons swarming across the hilltop, whooping their delight at finding so many women and children, then blotted the horrid thought out. We had to stay alive, we had to hold our walls, we had to win.

Next morning, under a sky of grey clouds through which a freshening wind brought snatches of rain from the west, I donned my wargear. It was heavy, and I had deliberately not worn it till now, but the arrival of the Saxon reinforcements had convinced me that we would have to fight and so, to put heart into my men, I chose to wear my finest armour. First, over my linen shirt and woollen trews, I pulled a leather tunic that fell to my knees. The leather was thick enough to stop a sword slash, though not a spear thrust. Over the tunic I pulled the precious coat of heavy Roman mail that my slaves had polished so that the small links seemed to shine. The mail coat was trimmed with golden loops at its hem, its sleeves and its neck. It was an expensive coat, one of the richest in Britain, and forged well enough to stop all but the most savage spear thrusts. My knee-length boots were sewn with bronze strips to cheat the lunging blade that comes low under the shield wall, and I had elbow-length gloves with iron plates to protect my forearms. My helmet was decorated with silver dragons that climbed up to its golden peak where the wolf-tail helm was fixed. The helmet came down over my ears, had a flap of mail to shield the back of my neck, and silvered cheekpieces that could be swung over my face so that an enemy did not see a man, but a metal-clad killer with two black shadows for eyes. It was the rich armour of a great warlord and it was designed to put fear into an enemy. I strapped Hywelbane’s belt around the mail, tied a cloak about my neck and hefted my largest war spear. Then, thus dressed for battle and with my shield slung on my back, I walked the ring of Mynydd Baddon’s walls so that all my men and all the watching enemy would see me and know that a lord of warriors waited for the fight. I finished my circuit at the southern peak of our defences and there, standing high above the enemy, I lifted the skirts of mail and leather to piss down the hill towards the Saxons.

I had not known Guinevere was close, and the first I knew was when she laughed and that laughter rather spoiled my gesture for I was embarrassed. She brushed away my apology. ‘You do look fine, Derfel,’ she said.

I swung the helmet’s cheekpieces open. ‘I had hoped, Lady,’ I said, ‘never to wear this gear again.’

‘You sound just like Arthur,’ she said wryly, then walked behind me to admire the strips of hammered silver that formed Ceinwyn’s star on my shield. ‘I never understand,’ she said, coming back to face me,

‘why you dress like a pigherder most of the time, but look so splendid for war.’

‘I don’t look like a pigherder,’ I protested.

‘Not like mine,’ she said, ‘because I can’t abide having grubby people about me, even if they are swineherds, and so I always made certain they had decent clothes.’

‘I had a bath last year,’ I insisted.

‘As recently as that!’ she said, pretending to be impressed. She was carrying her hunter’s bow and had a quiver of arrows at her back. ‘If they come,’ she said, ‘I intend to send some of their souls to the Other world.’

‘If they come,’ I said, knowing that they would, ‘all you’ll see is helmets and shields and you’ll waste your arrows. Wait till they raise their heads to fight our shield wall, then aim for their eyes.’

‘I won’t waste arrows, Derfel,’ she promised grimly.

The first threat came from the north where the newly arrived Saxons formed a shield wall among the trees above the saddle that separated Mynydd Baddon from the high ground. Our most copious spring was in that saddle and perhaps the Saxons intended to deny us its use, for just after midday their shield wall came down into the small valley. Niall watched them from our ramparts. ‘Eighty men,’ he told me. I brought Issa and fifty of my men across to the northern rampart, more than enough spearmen to see off eighty Saxons labouring uphill, but it soon became obvious that the Saxons did not intend to attack, but wanted to lure us down into the saddle where they could fight us on more equal terms. And no doubt once we were down there more Saxons would burst from the high trees to ambush us. ‘You stay here,’ I told my men, ‘you don’t go down! You stay!’

The Saxons jeered us. Some knew a few words of the British tongue, sufficient to call us cowards or women or worms. Sometimes a small group would climb halfway up our slope to tempt us to break ranks and rush down the hill, but Niall, Issa and I kept our men calm. A Saxon wizard shuffled up the wet slope towards us in short nervous rushes, jabbering incantations. He was naked beneath a wolfskin cape and had his hair dunged into a single tall spike. He shrilled his curses, wailed his charm words and then hurled a handful of small bones towards our shields, but still none of us moved. The wizard spat three times, then ran shivering down to the saddle, where a Saxon chieftain now tried to tempt one of us to single combat. He was a burly man with a tangled mane of greasy, dirt-matted golden hair that hung down past a lavish golden collar. His beard was plaited with black ribbons, his breastplate was of iron, his greaves of decorated Roman bronze, and his shield was painted with the mask of a snarling wolf. His helmet had bull’s horns mounted on its sides and was surmounted by a wolf’s skull to which he had tied a mass of black ribbons. He had strips of black fur tied around his upper arms and thighs, carried a huge double-bladed war axe, while from his belt hung a long sword and one of the short, broad-bladed knives called a seax, the weapon that gave the Saxons their name. For a time he demanded that Arthur himself come down and fight him, and when he tired of that he challenged me, calling me a coward, a chicken-hearted slave and the son of a leprous whore. He spoke in his own tongue which meant that none of my men knew what he said and I just let his words whip past me in the wind. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, when the rain had ended and the Saxons were bored with trying to lure us down to battle, they brought three captured children to the saddle. The children were very young, no more than five or six years old, and they were held with seaxs at their throats. ‘Come down,’

the big Saxon chieftain shouted, ‘or they die!’

Issa looked at me. ‘Let me go, Lord,’ he pleaded.

‘It’s my rampart,’ Niall, the Blackshield leader, insisted. ‘I’ll fillet the bastard.’

‘It’s my hilltop,’ I said. It was more than just my hilltop, it was also my duty to fight the first single combat of a battle. A king could let his champion fight but a warlord had no business sending men where he would not go himself, and so I closed the cheekpieces of my helmet, touched a gloved hand to the pork bones in Hywelbane’s hilt, then pressed on my mail coat to feel the small lump made by Ceinwyn’s brooch. Thus reassured I pushed through our crude timber palisade and edged down the steep slope.

‘You and me!’ I shouted at the tall Saxon in his own language, ‘for their lives,’ and I pointed my spear at the three children.

The Saxons roared approval that they had at last brought one Briton down from the hill. They backed away, taking the children with them, leaving the saddle to their champion and to me. The burly Saxon hefted the big axe in his left hand, then spat onto the buttercups. ‘You speak our language well, pig,’ he greeted me.

‘It is a pig’s language,’ I said.

He tossed the axe high into the air where it turned, its blade flashing in the weak sunlight that was trying to break the clouds. The axe was long and its double-bladed head heavy, but he caught it easily by its haft. Most men would have found it hard to wield such a massive weapon for even a short time, let alone toss and catch it, but this Saxon made it look easy. ‘Arthur dared not come and fight me,’ he said, ‘so I shall kill you in his stead.’

His reference to Arthur puzzled me, but it was not my job to disabuse the enemy if they thought Arthur was on Mynydd Baddon. ‘Arthur has better things to do than to kill vermin,’ I said, ‘so he asked me to slaughter you, then bury your fat corpse with your feet pointing south so that through all time you will wander lonely and hurting, never able to find your Otherworld.’

He spat. ‘You squeal like a spavined pig.’ The insults were a ritual, as was the single combat. Arthur disapproved of both, believing insults to be a waste of breath and single combat a waste of energy, but I had no objection to fighting an enemy champion. Such combat did serve a purpose, for if I killed this man my troops would be hugely cheered and the Saxons would see a terrible omen in his death. The risk was losing the fight, but I was a confident man in those days. The Saxon was a full hand’s breadth taller than I and much broader across his shoulders, but I doubted he would be fast. He looked like a man who relied on strength to win, while I took pride in being clever as well as strong. He looked up at our rampart that was now crowded with men and women. I could not see Ceinwyn there, but Guinevere stood tall and striking among the armed men. ‘Is that your whore?’ the Saxon asked me, holding his axe towards her.

‘Tonight she’ll be mine, you worm.’ He took two steps nearer me so that he was just a dozen paces away, then tossed the big axe up in the air again. His men were cheering him from the northern slope, while my men were shouting raucous encouragements from the ramparts.

‘If you’re frightened,’ I said, ‘I can give you time to empty your bowels.’

‘I’ll empty them on your corpse,’ he spat at me. I wondered whether to take him with the spear or with Hywelbane and decided the spear would be faster so long as he did not parry the blade. It was plain that he would attack soon for he had begun to swing the axe in fast intricate curves that were dazzling to watch and I suspected his intention was to charge me with that blurring blade, knock my spear aside with his shield, then bury the axe in my neck. ‘My name is Wulfger,’ he said formally, ‘Chief of the Sarnaed tribe of Cerdic’s people, and this land shall be my land.’

I slipped my left arm out of the shield loops, transferred the shield to my right arm and hefted the spear in my left hand. I did not loop the shield on my right arm, but just gripped the wooden handle tight. Wulfger of the Sarnaed was left-handed and that meant his axe would have attacked from my unguarded side if I had kept the shield on its original arm. I was not nearly so good with a spear in my left hand, but I had a notion that might finish this fight fast. ‘My name,’ I answered him formally, ‘is Derfel, son of Aelle, King of the Aenglish. And I am the man who put the scar on Liofa’s cheek.’

My boast had been intended to unsettle him, and perhaps it did, but he showed little sign of it. Instead, with a sudden roar, he attacked and his men cheered deafeningly. Wulfger’s axe was whistling in the air, his shield was poised to knock my spear aside, and he was charging like a bull, but then I hurled my own shield at his face. I hurled it sideways on, so that it spun towards him like a heavy disc of metal-rimmed wood.

The sudden sight of the heavy shield flying hard at his face forced him to raise his own shield and check the violent whirling of his blurring axe. I heard my shield clatter on his, but I was already on one knee with my spear held low and lancing upwards. Wulfger of the Sarnaed had parried my shield quickly enough, but he could not stop his heavy forward rush, not could he drop his shield in time, and so he ran straight onto that long, heavy, wicked-edged blade. I had aimed at his belly, at a spot just beneath his iron breastplate where his only protection was a thick leather jerkin, and my spear went though that leather like a needle slipping through linen. I stood up as the blade sank through leather, skin, muscle and flesh to bury itself in Wulfger’s lower belly. I stood and twisted the haft, roaring my own challenge now as I saw the axe blade falter. I lunged again, the spear still deep in his belly and twisted the leaf-shaped blade a second time, and Wulfger of the Sarnaed opened his mouth as he stared at me and I saw the horror come to his eyes. He tried to lift the axe, but there was only a terrible pain in his belly and a liquefying weakness in his legs, and then he stumbled, gasped and fell onto his knees. I let go of the spear and stepped back as I drew Hywelbane. ‘This is our land, Wulfger of the Sarnaed,’ I said loudly enough for his men to hear me, ‘and it stays our land.’ I swung the blade once, but swung it hard so that it razored through the matted mass of hair at the nape of his neck and chopped into his backbone.

He fell dead, killed in an eyeblink.

I gripped my spear shaft, put a boot on Wulfger’s belly and tugged the reluctant blade free. Then I stooped and wrenched the wolf skull from his helmet. I held the yellowing bone towards our enemies, then cast it on the ground and stamped it into fragments with my foot. I undid the dead man’s golden collar, then took his shield, his axe and his knife and waved those trophies towards his men, who stood watching silently. My men were dancing and howling their glee. Last of all I stooped and unbuckled his heavy bronze greaves which were decorated with images of my God, Mithras. I stood with my plunder. ‘Send the children!’ I shouted at the Saxons.

‘Come and fetch them!’ a man called back, then with a swift slash he cut a child’s throat. The other two children screamed, then they too were killed and the Saxons spat on their small bodies. For a moment I thought my men would lose control and charge across the saddle, but Issa and Niall held them to the rampart. I spat on Wulfger’s body, sneered at the treacherous enemy, then took my trophies back up the hill.

I gave Wulfger’s shield to one of the levy, the knife to Niall and the axe to Issa. ‘Don’t use it in battle,’

I said, ‘but you can chop wood with it.’

I carried the golden collar to Ceinwyn, but she shook her head. ‘I don’t like dead men’s gold,’ she said. She was cradling our daughters and I could see she had been weeping. Ceinwyn was not a woman to betray her emotions. She had learned as a child that she could keep her fearsome father’s affections by being bright-natured, and somehow that habit of cheerfulness had worked itself deep into her soul, but she could not hide her distress now. ‘You could have died!’ she said. I had nothing to say, so I just crouched beside her, plucked a handful of grass and scrubbed the blood from Hywelbane’s edge. Ceinwyn frowned at me. ‘They killed those children?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Who were they?’

I shrugged. ‘Who knows? Just children captured in a raid.’

Ceinwyn sighed and stroked Morwenna’s fair hair. ‘Did you have to fight?’

‘Would you rather I had sent Issa?’

‘No,’ she admitted.

‘So yes, I had to fight,’ I said, and in truth I had enjoyed the fight. Only a fool wants war, but once a war starts then it cannot be fought half-heartedly. It cannot even be fought with regret, but must be waged with a savage joy in defeating the enemy, and it is that savage joy that inspires our bards to write their greatest songs about love and war. We warriors dressed for battle as we decked ourselves for love; we made ourselves gaudy, we wore our gold, we mounted crests on our silver-chased helmets, we strutted, we boasted, and when the slaughtering blades came close we felt as though the blood of the Gods coursed in our veins. A man should love peace, but if he cannot fight with all his heart then he will not have peace.

‘What would we have done if you had died?’ Ceinwyn asked, watching as I buckled Wulfger’s fine greaves over my boots.

‘You would have burned me, my love,’ I said, ‘and sent my soul to join Dian.’ I kissed her, then carried the golden collar to Guinevere, who was delighted by the gift. She had lost her jewels with her freedom, and though she had no taste for heavy Saxon work, she placed the collar about her neck.

‘I enjoyed that fight,’ she said, patting the golden plates into place. ‘I want you to teach me some Saxon, Derfel.’

‘Of course.’

‘Insults. I want to hurt them.’ She laughed. ‘Coarse insults, Derfel, the coarsest that you know.’

And there would be plenty of Saxons for Guinevere to insult, for still more enemy spearmen were coming to the valley. My men on the southern angle called to warn me, and I went to stand on the rampart beneath our twin banners and saw two long lines of spearmen winding down the eastern hills into the river meadows. ‘They started arriving a few moments ago,’ Eachern told me, ‘and now there’s no end to them.’

Nor was there. This was no warband coming to fight, but an army, a horde, a whole people on the march. Men, women, beasts and children, all spilling from the eastern hills into Aquae Sulis’s valley. The spearmen marched in their long columns, and between the columns were herds of cattle, flocks of sheep and straggling trails of women and children. Horsemen rode on the flanks, and more horsemen clustered about the two banners that marked the coming of the Saxon Kings. This was not one army, but two, the combined forces of Cerdic and Aelle, and instead of facing Arthur in the valley of the Thames they had come here, to me, and their blades were as numerous as the stars of the sky’s great belt. I watched them come for an hour and Eachern was right. There was no end to them, and I touched the bones in Hywelbane’s hilt and knew, more surely than ever, that we were doomed. That night the lights of the Saxon fires were like a constellation fallen into Aquae Sulis’s valley; a blaze of campfires reaching far to the south and deep to the west to show where the enemy encampments followed the line of the river. There were still more fires on the eastern hills, where the rearguard of the Saxon horde camped on the high ground, but in the dawn we saw those men coming down into the valley beneath us.

It was a raw morning, though it promised to be a warm day. At sunrise, when the valley was still dark, the smoke from the Saxon fires mingled with the river mist so that it seemed as if Mynydd Baddon was a green sunlit vessel adrift in a sinister grey sea. I had slept badly, for one of the women had given birth in the night and her cries had haunted me. The child was stillborn and Ceinwyn told me it should not have been delivered for another three or four months. ‘They think it’s a bad omen,’ Ceinwyn added bleakly. And so it probably was, I reflected, but I dared not admit as much. Instead I tried to sound confident.

‘The Gods won’t abandon us,’ I said.

‘It was Terfa,’ Ceinwyn said, naming the woman who had tortured the night with her crying. ‘It would have been her first child. A boy, it was. Very tiny.’ She hesitated, then smiled sadly at me. ‘There’s a fear, Derfel, that the Gods abandoned us at Samain.’

She was only saying what I myself feared, but again I dared not admit it. ‘Do you believe that?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t want to believe it,’ she said. She thought for a few seconds and was about to say something more when a shout from the southern rampart interrupted us. I did not move and the shout came again. Ceinwyn touched my arm. ‘Go,’ she said.

I ran to the southern rampart to find Issa, who had stood the night’s last sentry watch, staring down into the valley’s smoky shadows. ‘About a dozen of the bastards,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘See the hedge?’ He pointed down the bare slope to where a white-blossomed hawthorn hedge marked the end of the hillside and the beginning of the valley’s cultivated land. ‘They’re there. We saw them cross the wheatfield.’

‘They’re just watching us,’ I said sourly, angry that he had called me away from Ceinwyn for such a small thing.

‘I don’t know, Lord. There was something odd about them. There!’ He pointed again and I saw a group of spearmen clamber through the hedge. They crouched on our side of the hedge and it seemed as if they looked behind them, rather than towards us. They waited for a few minutes, then suddenly ran towards us. ‘Deserters?’ Issa guessed. ‘Surely not!’

And it did seem strange that anyone should desert that vast Saxon army to join our beleaguered band, but Issa was right, for when the eleven men were halfway up the slope they ostentatiously turned their shields upside down. The Saxon sentries had at last seen the traitors and a score of enemy spearmen were now pursuing the fugitives, but the eleven men were far enough ahead to reach us safely. ‘Bring them to me when they get here,’ I told Issa, then went back to the summit’s centre where I pulled on my mail armour and buckled Hywelbane to my waist. ‘Deserters,’ I told Ceinwyn. Issa brought the eleven men across the grass. I recognized the shields first, for they showed Lancelot’s sea-eagle with the fish in its talons, and then I recognized Bors, Lancelot’s cousin and champion. He smiled nervously when he saw me, then I grinned broadly and he relaxed. ‘Lord Derfel,’ he greeted me. His broad face was red from the climb, and his burly body heaving to draw in breath.

‘Lord Bors,’ I said formally, then embraced him.

‘If I am to die,’ he said, ‘I’d rather die on my own side.’ He named his spearmen, all of them Britons who had been in Lancelot’s service and all men who resented being forced to carry their spears for the Saxons. They bowed to Ceinwyn, then sat while bread, mead and salted beef were brought to them. Lancelot, they said, had marched north to join Aelle and Cerdic, and now all the Saxon forces were united in the valley beneath us. ‘Over two thousand men, they reckon,’ Bors said.

‘I have less than three hundred.’

Bors grimaced. ‘But Arthur’s here, yes?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

Bors stared up at me, his open mouth full of food. ‘Not here?’ he said at last.

‘He’s somewhere up north as far as I know.’

He swallowed his mouthful, then swore quietly. ‘So who is here?’ he asked.

‘Just me.’ I gestured about the hill. ‘And what you can see.’

He lifted a horn of mead and drank deeply. ‘Then I reckon we will die,’ he said grimly. He had thought Arthur was on Mynydd Baddon. Indeed, Bors said, both Cerdic and Aelle believed that Arthur was on the hill and that was why they had marched south from the Thames to Aquae Sulis. The Saxons, who had first driven us to this refuge, had seen Arthur’s banner on Mynydd Baddon’s crest and had sent news of its presence to the Saxon Kings who had been seeking Arthur in the upper reaches of the Thames. ‘The bastards know what your plans are,’ Bors warned me, ‘and they know Arthur wanted to fight near Corinium, but they couldn’t find him there. And that’s what they want to do, Derfel, they want to find Arthur before Cuneglas reaches him. Kill Arthur, they reckon, and the rest of Britain will lose heart.’ But Arthur, clever Arthur, had given Cerdic and Aelle the slip, and then the Saxon kings had heard that the banner of the bear was being flaunted on a hill near Aquae Sulis and so they had turned their ponderous force southwards and sent orders for Lancelot’s forces to join them.

‘Do you have any news of Culhwch?’ I asked Bors.

‘He’s out there somewhere,’ Bors said vaguely, waving to the south. ‘We never found him.’ He suddenly stiffened, and I looked round to see that Guinevere was watching us. She had abandoned her prison robe and was dressed in a leather jerkin, woollen trews and long boots: a man’s clothes like those she had used to wear when hunting. I later discovered she had found the clothes in Aquae Sulis and, though they were of poor quality, she somehow managed to imbue them with elegance. She had the Saxon gold at her neck, a quiver of arrows on her back, the hunter’s bow in her hand and a short knife at her waist.

‘Lord Bors,’ she greeted her old lover’s champion icily.

‘Lady.’ Bors stood up and gave her a clumsy obeisance.

She looked at his shield that still bore Lancelot’s insignia, then raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you bored with him too?’ she asked.

‘I’m a Briton, lady,’ Bors said stiffly.

‘And a brave Briton,’ Guinevere said warmly. ‘I think we’re fortunate to have you here.’ Her words were precisely right and Bors, who had been embarrassed by the encounter, suddenly looked coyly pleased. He muttered something about being happy to see Guinevere, but he was not a man who made compliments elegantly and he blushed as he spoke. ‘Can I assume,’ Guinevere asked him, ‘that your old lord is with the Saxons?’

‘He is, Lady.’

‘Then I pray he comes within range of my bow,’ Guinevere said.

‘He might not, Lady,’ Bors said, for he knew Lancelot’s reluctance to place himself in danger, ‘but you’ll have plenty of Saxons to kill before the day’s out. More than enough.’

And he was right, for beneath us, where the last of the river mist was being burned away by the sun, the Saxon horde was gathering. Cerdic and Aelle, still believing that their greatest enemy was trapped on Mynydd Baddon, were planning an overwhelming assault. It would not be a subtle attack, for no spearmen were being mustered to take us in the flank, but rather it would be a simple, crude hammerblow that would come in overwhelming force straight up Mynydd Baddon’s southern face. Hundreds of warriors were being gathered for the attack and their close-ranked spears glinted in the early light.

‘How many are there?’ Guinevere asked me.

‘Too many, Lady,’ I said bleakly.

‘Half their army,’ Bors said, and explained to her that the Saxon Kings believed that Arthur and his best men were trapped on the hilltop.

‘So he’s fooled them?’ Guinevere asked, not without a note of pride.

‘Or we have,’ I said glumly, indicating Arthur’s banner that stirred fitfully in the small breeze.

‘So now we have to beat them,’ Guinevere responded briskly, though how, I could not tell. Not since I had been trapped on Ynys Mon by Diwrnach’s men had I felt so helpless, but on that grim night I had possessed Merlin for an ally and his magic had seen us out of the trap. I had no magic on my side now and I could foresee nothing but doom.

All morning long I watched the Saxon warriors assemble among the growing wheat, and I watched as their wizards danced along the lines and as their chiefs harangued the spearmen. The men in the front of the Saxon battle line were steady enough, for they were the trained warriors who had sworn oaths to their lords, but the rest of that vast assembly must have been the equivalent of our levy, the fyrd the Saxons called it, and those men kept wandering away. Some went to the river, others back to the camps, and from our commanding height it was like watching shepherds trying to gather a vast flock; as soon as one part of the army was assembled, another would break apart and the whole business would start over again, and all the time the Saxon drums sounded. They were using great hollow logs that they thumped with wooden clubs so that their heartbeat of death echoed from the wooded slope on the valley’s far side. The Saxons would be drinking ale, bolstering the courage needed to come up into our spears. Some of my own men were guzzling mead. I discouraged it, but stopping a soldier from drinking was like keeping a dog from barking, and many of my men needed the fire that mead puts into a belly for they could count as well as I. A thousand men were coming to fight fewer than three hundred. Bors had asked that he and his men fight in the centre of our line and I had agreed. I hoped he would die swiftly, cut down by an axe or a spear, for if he was taken alive then his death would be long and horrible. He and his men had stripped their shields back to the bare wood, and now were drinking mead, and I did not blame them.

Issa was sober. ‘They’ll overlap us, Lord,’ he said worriedly.

‘They will,’ I agreed, and wished I could say something more useful, but in truth I was transfixed by the enemy preparations and helpless to know what to do about the attack. I did not doubt that my men could fight against the best Saxon spearmen, but I only had enough spearmen to make a shield wall a hundred paces wide and the Saxon attack, when it came, would be three times that width. We would fight in the centre, we would kill, and the enemy would surge around our flanks to capture the hill’s summit and slaughter us from behind.

Issa grimaced. His wolf-tailed helmet was an old one of mine on which he had hammered a pattern of silver stars. His pregnant wife, Scarach, had found some vervain growing near one of the springs and Issa wore a sprig on his helmet, hoping it would keep him from harm. He offered me some of the plant, but I refused. ‘You keep it,’ I said.

‘What do we do, Lord?’ he asked.

‘We can’t run away,’ I said. I had thought of making a desperate lunge northwards, but there were Saxons beyond the northern saddle and we would have to fight our way up that slope into their spears. We had small chance of doing that, and a much greater chance of being trapped in the saddle between two enemies on higher ground. ‘We have to beat them here,’ I said, disguising my conviction that we could not beat them at all. I could have fought four hundred men, maybe even six hundred, but not the thousand Saxons who were now readying themselves at the foot of the slope.

‘If we had a Druid,’ Issa said, then let the thought die, but I knew exactly what irked him. He was thinking that it was not good to go into battle without prayers. The Christians in our ranks were praying with their arms outstretched in imitation of their God’s death and they had told me they needed no priest to intercede for them, but we pagans liked to have a Druid’s curses raining on our enemies before a fight. But we had no Druid, and the absence not only denied us the power of his curses, but suggested that from this day on we would have to fight without our Gods because those Gods had fled in disgust from the interrupted rites on Mai Dun.

I summoned Pyrlig and ordered him to curse the enemy. He blanched. ‘But I’m a bard, Lord, not a Druid,’ he protested.

‘You began the Druid’s training?’

‘All bards do, Lord, but I was never taught the mysteries.’

‘The Saxons don’t know that,’ I said. ‘Go down the hill, hop on one leg and curse their filthy souls to the dungheap of Annwn.’

Pyrlig did his best, but he could not keep his balance and I sensed there was more fear than vituperation in his curses. The Saxons, seeing him, sent six of their own wizards to counter his magic. The naked wizards, their hair hung with small charms and stiffened into grotesque spikes with matted cow dung, clambered up the slope to spit and curse at Pyrlig who, seeing their approach, backed nervously away. One of the Saxon magicians carried a human thigh bone that he used to chase poor Pyrlig even further up the slope and, when he saw our bard’s obvious terror, the Saxon jerked his body in obscene gestures. The enemy wizards came still closer so that we could hear their shrill voices over the booming thud of the drums in the valley.

‘What are they saying?’ Guinevere had come to stand beside me.

‘They’re using charms, Lady,’ I said. ‘They’re beseeching their Gods to fill us with fear and turn our legs to water.’ I listened to the chanting again. ‘They beg that our eyes be blinded, that our spears be broken and our swords blunted.’ The man with the thigh bone caught sight of Guinevere and he turned on her and spat a vituperative stream of obscenities.

‘What’s he saying now?’ she asked.

‘You don’t wish to know, Lady.’

‘But I do, Derfel, I do.’

‘Then I don’t wish to tell you.’

She laughed. The wizard, only thirty paces away from us now, jerked his tattooed crotch at her and shook his head, rolled his eyes, and screamed that she was a cursed witch and promised that her womb would dry to a crust and her breasts turn sour as gall, and then there was an abrupt twang beside my ear and the wizard was suddenly silent. An arrow had transfixed his gullet, going clean through his neck so that one half of the arrow jutted behind his nape and the feathered shaft stuck out beneath his chin. He stared up at Guinevere, he gurgled, and then the bone dropped from his hand. He fingered the arrow, still staring at her, then shuddered and suddenly collapsed.

‘It’s considered bad luck to kill an enemy’s magicians,’ I said in gentle reproof.

‘Not now,’ Guinevere said vengefully, ‘not now.’ She took another arrow from her quiver and fitted it to the string, but the other five wizards had seen the fate of their fellow magician and were bounding down the hill out of range. They were shrieking angrily as they went, protesting our bad faith. They had a right to protest, and I feared that the death of the one wizard would only fill the attackers with a cold anger. Guinevere took the arrow off the bow. ‘So what will they do, Derfel?’ she asked me.

‘In a few minutes’ time,’ I said, ‘that great mass of men will come up the hill. You can see how they’ll come,’ I pointed down to the Saxon formation that was still being pushed and herded into shape, ‘a hundred men in their front rank, and nine or ten men in every file to push those front men onto our spears. We can face those hundred men, Lady, but our files will only have two or three men apiece, and we won’t be able to push them back down the hill. We’ll stop them for a while, and the shield walls will lock, but we won’t drive them backwards and when they see that all our men are locked in the fighting line, they’ll send their rearward files to wrap around and take us from behind.’

Her green eyes stared at me, a slightly mocking look on her face. She was the only woman I ever knew who could look me straight in the eyes, and I always found her direct gaze unsettling. Guinevere had a knack of making a man feel like a fool, though on that day, as the Saxon drums beat and the great horde steeled themselves to climb up to our blades, she wished me nothing but success. ‘Are you saying we’ve lost?’ she asked lightly.

‘I’m saying, Lady, that I don’t know if I can win,’ I answered grimly. I was wondering whether to do the unexpected and form my men into a wedge that would charge down the hill and pierce deep into the Saxon mass. It was possible that such an attack would surprise them and even panic them, but the danger was that my men would be surrounded by enemies on the hillside and, when the last of us was dead, the Saxons would climb to the summit and take our undefended families. Guinevere slung the bow on her shoulder. ‘We can win,’ she said confidently, ‘we can win easily.’ For a moment I did not take her seriously. ‘I can tear the heart out of them,’ she said more forcefully. I glanced at her and saw the fierce joy in her face. If she was to make a fool of any man that day it would be Cerdic and Aelle, not me. ‘How can we win?’ I asked her.

A mischievous look came to her face. ‘Do you trust me, Derfel?’

‘I trust you, Lady.’

‘Then give me twenty fit men.’

I hesitated. I had been forced to leave some spearmen on the northern rampart of the hill to guard against an attack across the saddle, and I could scarce lose twenty of the remaining men who faced south; but even if I had two hundred spearmen more I knew I was going to lose this battle on the hilltop, and so I nodded. ‘I’ll give you twenty men from the levy,’ I agreed, ‘and you give me a victory.’ She smiled and strode away, and I shouted at Issa to find twenty young men and send them with her. ‘She’s going to give us a victory!’ I told him loud enough for my men to hear and they, sensing hope on a day when there was none, smiled and laughed.

Yet victory, I decided, needed a miracle, or else the arrival of allies. Where was Culhwch? All day I had expected to see his troops in the south, but there had been no sign of him and I decided he must have made a wide detour around Aquae Sulis in an attempt to join Arthur. I could think of no other troops who might come to our aid, but in truth, even if Culhwch had joined me, his numbers could not have swelled ours enough to withstand the Saxon assault.

That assault was near now. The wizards had done their work and a group of Saxon horsemen now left the ranks and spurred uphill. I shouted for my own horse, had Issa cup his hands to heave me into the saddle, then I rode down the slope to meet the enemy envoys. Bors might have accompanied me, for he was a lord, but he did not want to face the men he had just deserted and so I went alone. Nine Saxons and three Britons approached. One of the Britons was Lancelot, as beautiful as ever in his white scale armour that dazzled in the sunlight. His helmet was silvered and crested with a pair of swan’s wings that were ruffled by the small wind. His two companions were Amhar and Loholt, who rode against their father beneath Cerdic’s skin-hung skull and beneath my own father’s great bull skull that was spattered with fresh blood in honour of this new war. Cerdic and Aelle both climbed the hill and with them were a half-dozen Saxon chieftains; all big men in fur robes and with moustaches hanging to their sword belts. The last Saxon was an interpreter and he, like the other Saxons, rode clumsily, just as I did. Only Lancelot and the twins were good horsemen.

We met halfway down the hill. None of the horses liked the slope and all shifted nervously. Cerdic scowled up at our rampart. He could see the two banners there, and a prickle of spear points above our makeshift barricade, but nothing more. Aelle gave me a grim nod while Lancelot avoided my gaze.

‘Where is Arthur?’ Cerdic finally demanded of me. His pale eyes looked at me from a helmet rimmed with gold and gruesomely crested with a dead man’s hand. Doubtless, I thought, a British hand. The trophy had been smoked in a fire so that its skin was blackened and its fingers hooked like claws.

‘Arthur is taking his ease, Lord King,’ I said. ‘He left it to me to swat you away while he plans how to remove the smell of your filth from Britain.’ The interpreter murmured in Lancelot’s ear.

‘Is Arthur here?’ Cerdic demanded. Convention dictated that the leaders of armies conferred before battle, and Cerdic had construed my presence as an insult. He had expected Arthur to come and meet him, not some underling.

‘He’s here, Lord,’ I said airily, ‘and everywhere. Merlin transports him through the clouds.’

Cerdic spat. He was in dull armour, with no show other than the ghastly hand on his gold-edged helmet’s crest. Aelle was dressed in his usual black fur, had gold at his wrists and neck and a single bull’s horn projecting from the front of his helmet. He was the older man, but Cerdic, as ever, took the lead. His clever, pinched face gave me a dismissive glance. ‘It would be best,’ he said, ‘if you filed down the hill and laid your weapons on the road. We shall kill some of you as a tribute to our Gods and take the rest of you as slaves, but you must give us the woman who killed our wizard. She we will kill.’

‘She killed the wizard on my orders,’ I said, ‘in return for Merlin’s beard.’ It had been Cerdic who had slashed off a hank of Merlin’s beard, an insult I had no mind to forgive.

‘Then we shall kill you,’ Cerdic said.

‘Liofa tried to do that once,’ I said, needling him, ‘and yesterday Wulfger of the Sarnaed tried to snatch my soul, but he is the one who is back in his ancestors’ sty.’

Aelle intervened. ‘We won’t kill you, Derfel,’ he growled, ‘not if you surrender.’ Cerdic began to protest, but Aelle hushed him with an abrupt gesture of his maimed right hand. ‘We will not kill him,’ he insisted. ‘Did you give your woman the ring?’ he asked me.

‘She wears it now, Lord King,’ I said, gesturing up the hill.

‘She’s here?’ He sounded surprised.

‘With your grandchildren.’

‘Let me see them,’ Aelle demanded. Cerdic again protested. He was here to prepare us for slaughter, not to witness a happy family meeting, but Aelle ignored his ally’s protest. ‘I would like to see them once,’ he told me, and so I turned and shouted uphill.

Ceinwyn appeared a moment later with Morwenna in one hand and Seren in the other. They hesitated at the rampart, then stepped delicately down the grass slope. Ceinwyn was dressed simply in a linen robe, but her hair shone gold in the spring sun and I thought, as ever, that her beauty was magical. I felt a lump in my throat and tears at my eyes as she came so lightly down the hill. Seren looked nervous, but Morwenna had a defiant look on her face. They stopped beside my horse and stared up at the Saxon Kings. Ceinwyn and Lancelot looked at each other and Ceinwyn spat deliberately on the grass to void the evil of his presence.

Cerdic pretended disinterest, but Aelle clumsily slid down from his worn leather saddle. ‘Tell them I am glad to see them,’ he told me, ‘and tell me the children’s names.’

‘The older is called Morwenna,’ I said, ‘and the younger is Seren. It means star.’ I looked at my daughters. ‘This King,’ I told them in British, ‘is your grandfather.’

Aelle fumbled in his black robe and brought out two gold coins. He gave one each to the girls, then looked mutely at Ceinwyn. She understood what he wanted and, letting go of her daughters’ hands, she stepped into his embrace. He must have stunk, for his fur robe was greasy and full of filth, but she did not flinch. When he had kissed her he stepped back, lifted her hand to his lips, and smiled to see the small chip of blue-green agate in its golden ring. ‘Tell her I will spare her life, Derfel,’ he said. I told her and she smiled. ‘Tell him it would be better if he went back to his own land,’ she said, ‘and that we would take much joy in visiting him there.’

Aelle smiled when that was translated, but Cerdic just scowled. ‘This is our land!’ he insisted, and his horse pawed at the ground as he spoke and my daughters backed away from his venom.

‘Tell them to go,’ Aelle growled at me, ‘for we must talk of war.’ He watched them walk uphill. ‘You have your father’s taste for beautiful women,’ he said.

‘And a British taste for suicide,’ Cerdic snapped. ‘Your life is promised you,’ he went on, ‘but only if you come down from the hill now and lay your spears on the road.’

‘I shall lay them on the road, Lord King,’ I said, ‘with your body threaded on them.’

‘You mew like a cat,’ Cerdic said derisively. Then he looked past me and his expression became grimmer, and I turned to see that Guinevere was now standing on the rampart. She stood tall and long-legged in her hunter’s clothes, crowned with a mass of red hair and with her bow across her shoulders so that she looked like some Goddess of war. Cerdic must have recognized her as the woman who had killed his wizard. ‘Who is she?’ he demanded fiercely.

‘Ask your lapdog,’ I said, gesturing at Lancelot, and then, when I suspected that the interpreter had not translated my words accurately, I said them again in the British tongue. Lancelot ignored me.

‘Guinevere,’ Amhar told Cerdic’s interpreter, ‘and she is my father’s whore,’ he added with a sneer. I had called Guinevere worse in my time, but I had no patience to listen to Amhar’s scorn. I had never held any affection for Guinevere, she was too arrogant, too wilful, too clever and too mocking to be an easy companion, but in the last few days I had begun to admire her and suddenly I heard myself spitting insults at Amhar. I do not remember now what I said, only that anger gave my words a vicious spite. I must have called him a worm, a treacherous piece of filth, a creature of no honour, a boy who would be spitted on a man’s sword before the sun died. I spat at him, cursed him and drove him and his brother down the hill with my insults, and then I turned on Lancelot. ‘Your cousin Bors sends you greetings,’ I told him, ‘and promises to pull your belly out of your throat, and you had better pray that he does, for if I take you then I shall make your soul whine.’

Lancelot spat, but did not bother to reply. Cerdic had watched the confrontation with amusement.

‘You have an hour to come and grovel before me,’ he finished the conference, ‘and if you don’t, we shall come and kill you.’ He turned his horse and kicked it on down the hill. Lancelot and the others followed, leaving only Aelle standing beside his horse.

He offered me a half smile, almost a grimace. ‘It seems we must fight, my son.’

‘It seems we must.’

‘Is Arthur really not here?’

‘Is that why you came, Lord King?’ I answered, though not answering his question.

‘If we kill Arthur,’ he said simply, ‘the war is won.’

‘You must kill me first, father,’ I said.

‘You think I wouldn’t?’ he asked harshly, then held his maimed hand up to me. I clasped it briefly, then watched as he led his horse down the slope.

Issa greeted my return with a quizzical look. ‘We won the battle of words,’ I said grimly.

‘That’s a start, Lord,’ he said lightly.

‘But they’ll finish it,’ I said softly and turned to watch the enemy kings going back to their men. The drums beat on. The last of the Saxons had finally been mustered into the dense mass of men that would climb to our slaughter, but unless Guinevere really was a Goddess of war, I did not know how we could beat them.

The Saxon advance was clumsy at first, because the hedges about the small fields at the foot of the hill broke their careful alignment. The sun was sinking in the west for it had taken all day for this attack to be prepared, but now it was coming and we could hear the rams’ horns blaring their raucous challenge as the enemy spearmen broke through the hedges and crossed the small fields. My men began singing. We always sang before battle, and on this day, as before all the greatest of our battles, we sang the War Song of Beli Mawr. How that terrible hymn can move a man! It speaks of killing, of blood in the wheat, of bodies broken to the bone and of enemies driven like cattle to the slaughter-pen. It tells of Beli Mawr’s boots crushing mountains and boasts of the widows made by his sword. Each verse of the song ends in a triumphant howl, and I could not help but weep for the defiance of the singers.

I had dismounted and taken my place in the front rank, close to Bors who stood beneath our twin banners. My cheekpieces were closed, my shield was tight on my left arm and my war spear was heavy in my right. All around me the strong voices swelled, but I did not sing because my heart was too full of foreboding. I knew what was about to happen. For a time we would fight in the shield wall, but then the Saxons would break through the flimsy thorn barricades on both our flanks and their spears would come from behind and we would be cut down man by man and the enemy would taunt our dying. The last of us to die would see the first of our women being raped, yet there was nothing we could do to stop it and so those spearmen sang and some men danced the sword dance on the rampart’s top where there was no thorn barricade. We had left the centre of the rampart clear of thorns in the thin hope that it might tempt the enemy to come to our spears rather than try to outflank us.

The Saxons crossed the last hedge and began their long climb up the empty slope. Their best men were in the front rank and I saw how tight their shields were locked, how thick their spears were ranked and how brightly their axes shone. There was no sign of Lancelot’s men; it seemed this slaughter would be left to the Saxons alone. Wizards preceded them, rams’ horns urged them on, and above them hung the bloody skulls of their kings. Some in the front rank held leashed war-dogs that would be loosed a few yards short of our line. My father was in that front rank while Cerdic was on a horse behind the Saxon mass.

They came very slowly. The hill was steep, their armour heavy, and they felt no need to rush into this slaughter. They knew it would be a grim business, however short-lived. They would come in a shield-locked wall, and once at the rampart our shields would clash and then they would try to push us backwards. Their axes would flash over our shield rims, their spears would thrust and jab and gore. There would be grunts and howls and shrieks, and men wailing and men dying, but the enemy had the greater number of men and eventually they would outflank us and so my wolftails would die. But now my wolftails sang as they tried to drown the harsh sound of the horns and the incessant beat of the tree drums. The Saxons laboured closer. We could see the devices on their round shields now; wolf masks for Cerdic’s men, bulls for Aelle’s, and in between were the shields of their warlords: hawks and eagles and a prancing horse. The dogs strained at their leashes, eager to tear holes in our wall. The wizards shrieked at us. One of them rattled a cluster of rib bones, while another scrabbled on all fours like a dog and howled his curses.

I waited at the southern angle of the summit’s rampart which jutted like the prow of a boat above the valley. It was here in the centre that the first Saxons would strike. I had toyed with the idea of letting them come and then, at the very last moment, pulling back fast to make a shield-ring about our women. Yet by retreating I ceded the flat hilltop as my battlefield and gave up the advantage of the higher ground. Better to let my men kill as many of the enemy as they could before we were overwhelmed. I tried not to think of Ceinwyn. I had not kissed her farewell, or my daughters, and maybe they would live. Maybe, amidst the horror, some spearman of Aelle’s would recognize the little ring and take them safe to his King.

My men began to clash their spear shafts against their shields. They had no need to lock their shields yet. That could wait till the last moment. The Saxons looked uphill as the noise battered their ears. None of them raced ahead to throw a spear — the hill was too steep for that — but one of their war-dogs broke its leash and came loping fast up the grass. Eirrlyn, who was one of my two huntsmen, pierced it with an arrow and the dog began to yelp and run in circles with the shaft sticking from its belly. Both huntsmen began shooting at other dogs and the Saxons hauled the beasts back behind the protection of their shields. The wizards scampered away to the flanks, knowing that the battle was about to begin. A huntsman’s arrow smacked into a Saxon shield, then another glanced off” a helmet. Not long now. A hundred paces. I licked my dry lips, blinked sweat from my eyes and stared down at the fierce bearded faces. The enemy was shouting, yet I do not remember hearing the sound of their voices. I just remember the sound of their horns, the beat of their drums, the thump of their boots on the grass, the clink of scabbards on armour and the clash of shields touching.

‘Make way!’ Guinevere’s voice sounded behind us, and it was full of enjoyment. ‘Make way!’ she called again.

I turned and saw her twenty men were pushing two of the food wagons towards the ramparts. The ox-wagons were great clumsy vehicles with solid wooden discs for wheels, and Guinevere had augmented their sheer weight with two further weapons. She had stripped the pole shafts from the front of the wagons and wedged spears in their place, while the wagon beds, instead of holding food, now carried blazing fires of thorn brush. She had turned the wagons into a massive pair of flaming missiles that she planned to roll down the hill into the enemy’s packed ranks, and behind her wagons, eager to see the chaos, came an excited crowd of women and children.

‘Move!’ I called to my men, ‘move!’ They ceased singing and hurried apart, leaving the whole centre of the ramparts undefended. The Saxons were now only seventy or eighty paces away and, seeing our shield wall break apart, they scented victory and quickened their pace. Guinevere shouted at her men to hurry and more spearmen ran to put their weight behind the smoking wagons. ‘Go!’ she called, ‘go!’ and they grunted as they shoved and tugged and as the wagons began to roll faster. ‘Go! Go! Go!’ Guinevere screamed at them, and still more men packed in behind the wagons to force the cumbersome vehicles up across the banked earth of the ancient rampart. For a heartbeat I thought that low earth bank would defeat us, for both the wagons slowed to a halt there and their thick smoke wreathed about our choking men, but Guinevere shouted at the spearmen again and they gritted their teeth to make one last great effort to heave the wagons over the turf wall.

‘Push!’ Guinevere screamed, ‘push!’ The wagons hesitated on the rampart, then began to tip forward as men shoved from beneath. ‘Now!’ Guinevere shouted and suddenly there was nothing to hold the wagons, just a steep grass slope in front and an enemy beneath. The men who had been pushing reeled away exhausted as the two flaming vehicles began to roll downhill.

The wagons went slowly at first, but then quickened and began to bounce on the uneven turf so that flaming branches were flung over the burning wagon sides. The slope steepened, and the two great missiles were hurtling now; massive weights of timber and fire that thundered down onto the appalled Saxon formation.

The Saxons had no chance. Their ranks were too tight packed for men to escape the wagons, and the wagons were well aimed for they were rumbling in smoke and flame towards the very heart of the enemy attack.

‘Close up!’ I shouted at my men, ‘make the wall! Make the wall!’

We hurried back into position just as the wagons struck. The enemy’s line had stalled and some men were trying to break away, but there was no escape for those in the direct path of the wagons. I heard a scream as the long spears fixed to the wagons’ fronts drove into the mass of men, then one of the wagons reared up as its front wheels bounced on fallen bodies, yet still it drove on, smashing and burning and breaking men in its path. A shield broke in two as a wheel crushed it. The second wagon veered as it struck the Saxon line. For a heartbeat it was poised on two wheels, then it tumbled onto its side to spill a wash of fire down into the Saxon ranks. Where there had been a solid, disciplined mass, there was now only chaos, fear and panic. Even where the ranks had not been struck by the wagons there was chaos, for the impact of the two vehicles had caused the careful ranks to shudder and break.

‘Charge them!’ I shouted. ‘Come on!’

I screamed a war shout as I jumped from the rampart. I had not meant to follow the wagons down the hill, but the destruction they had caused was so great, and the enemy’s horror so evident, that now was the time to add to that horror.

We screamed as we ran down the hill. It was a scream of victory, calculated to put terror into an enemy already half beaten. The Saxons still outnumbered us, but their shield wall was broken, they were winded, and we came like avenging furies from the heights. I left my spear in a man’s belly, whipped Hywelbane free of her scabbard, and laid about me like a man slashing at hay. There is no calculation in such a fight, no tactics, just a soaring delight in dominating an enemy, in killing, in seeing the fear in their eyes and watching their rearward ranks running away. I was making a mad keening noise, loving the slaughter, and beside me my wolftails hacked and stabbed and jeered at an enemy that should have been dancing on our corpses.

They still could have beaten us, for their numbers were so great, but it is hard to fight in a broken shield wall going uphill and our sudden attack had broken their spirits. Too many of the Saxons were also drunk. A drunken man fights well in victory, but in defeat he panics quickly, and though Cerdic tried to hold them to the battle, his spearmen panicked and ran. Some of my youngsters were tempted to follow further down the hill, and a handful yielded to the temptation and went too far and so paid for their temerity, but I shouted at the others to stay where they were. Most of the enemy escaped, but we had won, and to prove it we stood in the blood of Saxons and our hillside was thick with their dead, their wounded and their weapons. The overturned wagon burned on the slope, a trapped Saxon screaming beneath its weight, while the other still rumbled on until it thumped into the hedge at the foot of the hill. Some of our women came down to plunder the dead and kill the wounded. Neither Aelle nor Cerdic were among those Saxons left on the hill, but there was one great chief who was hung with gold and wore a sword with a gold-decorated hilt in a scabbard of soft black leather criss-crossed with silver; I took the belt and sword from the dead man and carried them up to Guinevere. I knelt to her, something I had never done. ‘It was your victory, Lady,’ I said, ‘all yours.’ I offered her the sword. She strapped it on, then lifted me up. ‘Thank you, Derfel,’ she said.

‘It’s a good sword,’ I said.

‘I’m not thanking you for the sword,’ Guinevere said, ‘but for trusting me. I always knew I could fight.’

‘Better than me, Lady,’ I said ruefully. Why had I not thought to use the wagons?

‘Better than them!’ Guinevere said, indicating the beaten Saxons. She smiled. ‘And tomorrow we shall do it all over again.’

The Saxons did not return that evening. It was a lovely twilight, soft and glowing. My sentries paced the wall as the Saxon fires brightened in the spreading shadows below. We ate, and after the meal I talked with Issa’s wife, Scarach, and she recruited other women and between them they found some needles, knives and thread. I had given them some cloaks that I had taken from the Saxon dead and the women worked through the dusk, then on into the night by the light of our fires. So that next morning, when Guinevere awoke, there were three banners on Mynydd Baddon’s southern rampart. There was Arthur’s bear and Ceinwyn’s star, but in the middle, in the place of honour as befitted a victorious warlord, there was a flag showing Guinevere’s badge of a moon-crowned stag. The dawn wind lifted it, she saw the badge and I saw her smile.

While beneath us the Saxons gathered their spears again.

The drums began at dawn and within an hour five wizards had appeared on Mynydd Baddon’s lower slopes. Today, it seemed, Cerdic and Aelle were determined to exact revenge for their humiliation. Ravens tore at more than fifty Saxon corpses that still lay on the slope close to the charred remnants of the wagon, and some of my men wanted to drag those dead to the parapet and there make a horrid array of bodies to greet the new Saxon assault, but I forbade it. Soon, I reckoned, our own corpses would be at the Saxons’ disposal and if we defiled their dead then we would be denied in turn. It soon became clear that this time the Saxons would not risk one assault that could be turned to chaos by a tumbling wagon. Instead they were preparing a score of columns that would climb the hill from the south, the east and the west. Each group of attackers would only number seventy or eighty men, but together the small attacks must overwhelm us. We could perhaps fight off three or four of the columns, but the others would easily get past the ramparts and so there was little to do except pray, sing, eat and, for those who needed to, drink. We promised each other a good death, meaning that we would fight to the finish and sing as long as we could, but I think we all knew the end would not be a song of defiance, but a welter of humiliation, pain and terror. It would be even worse for the women. ‘Should I surrender?’

I asked Ceinwyn.

She looked startled. ‘It isn’t for me to say.’

‘I have done nothing without your advice,’ I told her.

‘In war,’ she said, ‘I have no advice to give you, except maybe to ask what will happen to the women if you don’t surrender.’

‘They’ll be raped, enslaved, or else given as wives to men who need wives.’

‘And if you do surrender?’

‘Much the same,’ I admitted. Only the rape would be less urgent.

She smiled. ‘Then you don’t need my advice after all. Go and fight, Derfel, and if I don’t see you till the Otherworld, then know that you cross the bridge of swords with my love.’

I embraced her, then kissed my daughters, and went back to the jutting prow of the southern rampart to watch the Saxons start up the hill. This attack was not taking nearly so long as the first, for that had needed a mass of men to be organized and encouraged, while today the enemy needed no motivation. They came for revenge and they came in such small parties that even if we had rolled a wagon down the hill they could easily have evaded it. They did not hurry, but they had no need for haste. I had divided my men into ten bands, each responsible for two of the Saxon columns, but I doubted that even the best of my spearmen would stand for more than three or four minutes. Most likely, I thought, my men would run back to protect their women as soon as the enemy threatened to outflank them and the fight would then collapse into a miserable one-sided slaughter around our makeshift hut and its surrounding campfires. So be it, I thought, and I walked among my men and thanked them for their services and encouraged them to kill as many Saxons as they could. I reminded them that the enemies they slew in battle would be their servants in the Otherworld, ‘so kill them,’ I said, ‘and let their survivors recall this fight with horror.’ Some of them began to sing the Death Song of Werlinna, a slow and melancholy tune that was chanted about the funeral fires of warriors. I sang with them, watching the Saxons climb nearer, and because I was singing, and because my helmet clasped me tight about the ears, I did not hear Niall of the Blackshields hail me from the hill’s farther rim. It was not till I heard the women cheering that I turned. I still saw nothing unusual, but then, above the sound of the Saxon drums, I heard the shrill, high note of a horn.

I had heard that horn-call before. I had first heard it when I was a new young spearman and Arthur had ridden to save my life, and now he came again.

He had come on horseback with his men, and Niall had shouted at me when those heavily armoured horsemen had swept through the Saxons on the hill beyond the saddle and galloped on down the slope. The women on Mynydd Baddon were running to the ramparts to watch him, for Arthur did not ride up to the summit, but led his men around the upper slope of the hill. He was in his polished scale armour and wore his gold-encrusted helmet and carried his shield of hammered silver. His great war banner was unfurled, its black bear streaming stark on a linen field that was as white as the goose feathers in Arthur’s helm. His white cloak billowed from his shoulders and a pennant of white ribbon was tied about the base of his spear’s long blade. Every Saxon on Mynydd Baddon’s lower slopes knew who he was and knew what those heavy horses could do to their small columns. Arthur had only brought forty men, for most of his big warhorses had been stolen by Lancelot in the previous year, but forty heavily armoured men on forty horses could tear infantry into horror.

Arthur reined in beneath the southern angle of the ramparts. The wind was small, so that Guinevere’s banner was not visible except as an unrecognizable flag hanging from its makeshift staff. He looked for me, and finally recognized my helmet and armour. ‘I have two hundred spearmen a mile or so behind!’ he shouted up at me.

‘Good, Lord!’ I called back, ‘and welcome!’

‘We can hold till the spearmen come!’ he shouted, then he waved his men on. He did not go down the hill, but kept riding around Mynydd Baddon’s upper slopes as though daring the Saxons to climb and challenge him.

But the sight of those horses was enough to check them because no Saxon wanted to be the first to climb into the path of those galloping spears. If the enemy had come all together they could easily have overwhelmed Arthur’s men, but the curve of the hill meant that most of the Saxons were invisible to each other, and each group must have hoped that another would dare to attack the horsemen first, and thus they all hung back. Once in a while a band of braver men would clamber upwards, but whenever Arthur’s horsemen came back into view they would edge nervously down the hill. Cerdic himself came to rally the men immediately below the southern angle, but when Arthur’s men turned to face those Saxons they faltered. They had expected an easy battle against a small number of spearmen, and were not ready to face cavalry. Not uphill, and not Arthur’s cavalry. Other horse-warriors might not have scared them, but they knew the meaning of that white cloak and of the goose-feathered plume and of the shield that shone like the very sun. It meant that death had come to them, and none was willing to climb to it. A half-hour later Arthur’s infantry came to the saddle. The Saxons who had held the hill north of the saddle fled from the arrival of our reinforcements, and those tired spearmen climbed to our ramparts with our cheers deafening them. The Saxons heard the cheers and saw the new spears showing above the ancient wall, and that finished their ambitions for the day. The columns went, and Mynydd Baddon was safe for one more turn of the sun.

Arthur pulled off his helmet as he spurred a tired Llamrei up to our banners. A breath of wind gusted and he looked up and saw Guinevere’s moon-crowned stag flying beside his own bear, but the broad smile on his face did not change. Nor did he say anything about the banner as he slid from Llamrei’s back. He must have known that Guinevere was with me, for Balin had seen her at Aquae Sulis and the two men whom I had sent with messages could have told him, but he pretended to know nothing. Instead, just as in the old days, and as if no coolness had ever come between us, he embraced me. All his melancholy had fled. There was life in his face again, a verve that spread amongst my men who clustered about him to hear his news, though first he demanded news from us. He had ridden among the dead Saxons on the slope and he wanted to know how and when they had died. My men forgivably exaggerated the number who had attacked the previous day, and Arthur laughed when he heard how we had pushed two flaming wagons down the slope. ‘Well done, Derfel,’ he said, ‘well done.’

‘It wasn’t me, Lord,’ I said, ‘but her.’ I jerked my head towards Guinevere’s flag. ‘It was all her doing, Lord. I was ready to die, but she had other ideas.’

‘She always did,’ he said softly, but asked nothing more. Guinevere herself was not in sight, and he did not ask where she was. He did see Bors and insisted on embracing him and hearing his news, and only then did he climb onto the turf wall and stare down at the Saxon encampments. He stood there a long time, showing himself to a dispirited enemy, but after a while he beckoned for Bors and me to join him. ‘I never planned to fight them here,’ he said to us, ‘but it’s as good a place as any. In fact it’s better than most. Are they all here?’ he asked Bors.

Bors had again been drinking in anticipation of the Saxon attack, but he did his best to sound sober.

‘All, Lord. Except maybe the Caer Ambra garrison. They were supposed to be chasing Culhwch.’ Bors jerked his beard towards the eastern hill where still more Saxons were coming down to join the encampment. ‘Maybe that’s them, Lord? Or perhaps they’re just foraging parties?’

‘The Caer Ambra garrison never found Culhwch,’ Arthur said, ‘for I had a message from him yesterday. He’s not far away, and Cuneglas isn’t far off either. In two days we’ll have five hundred more men here and then they’ll only outnumber us by two to one.’ He laughed. ‘Well done, Derfel!’

‘Well done?’ I asked in some surprise. I had expected Arthur’s disapproval for having been trapped so far from Corinium.

‘We had to fight them somewhere,’ he said, ‘and you chose the place. I like it. We’ve got the high ground.’ He spoke loudly, wanting his confidence to spread amongst my men. ‘I would have been here sooner,’ he added to me, ‘only I wasn’t certain Cerdic had swallowed the bait.’

‘Bait, Lord?’ I was confused.

‘You, Derfel, you.’ He laughed and jumped down from the rampart. ‘War is all accident, isn’t it? And by accident you found a place we can beat them.’

‘You mean they’ll wear themselves out climbing the hill?’ I asked.

‘They won’t be so foolish,’ he said cheerfully. ‘No, I fear we shall have to go down and fight them in the valley.’

‘With what?’ I asked bitterly, for even with Cuneglas’s troops we would be terribly outnumbered.

‘With every man we have,’ Arthur said confidently. ‘But no women, I think. It’s time we moved your families somewhere safer.’

Our women and children did not go far; there was a village an hour to the north and most found shelter there. Even as they left Mynydd Baddon, more of Arthur’s spearmen arrived from the north. These were the men Arthur had been gathering near Corinium and they were among the best in Britain. Sagramor came with his hardened warriors and, like Arthur, he went to the high southern angle of Mynydd Baddon from where he could stare down at the enemy and so that they could look up and see his lean, black-armoured figure on their skyline. A rare smile came to his face. ‘Over-confidence makes them into fools,’ he said scornfully. ‘They’ve trapped themselves in the low ground and they won’t move now.’

‘They won’t?’

‘Once a Saxon builds a shelter he doesn’t like being marched again. It’ll take Cerdic a week or more to dig them out of that valley.’ The Saxons and their families had indeed made themselves comfortable, and by now the river valley resembled two straggling villages of small thatched huts. One of those two villages was close by Aquae Sulis, while the other was two miles east where the river valley turned sharp south. Cerdic’s men were in those eastern huts, while Aelle’s spearmen were either quartered in the town or in the newly built shelters outside. I had been surprised that the Saxons had used the town for shelter rather than just burning it, but in every dawn a straggling procession of men came from the gates, leaving behind the homely sight of cooking smoke rising from Aquae Sulis’s thatched and tiled roofs. The initial Saxon invasion had been swift, but now their impetus was gone. ‘And why have they split their army into two?’ Sagramor asked me, staring incredulously at the great gap between Aelle’s encampment and Cerdic’s huts.

‘To leave us only one place to go,’ I said, ‘straight down there,’ I pointed into the valley, ‘where we’ll be trapped between them.’

‘And where we can keep them divided,’ Sagramor pointed out happily, ‘and in a few days they’ll have disease down there.’ Disease always seemed to spread whenever an army settled in one place. It had been just such a plague that had stopped Cerdic’s last invasion of Dumnonia, and a fiercely contagious sickness that had weakened our own army when we had marched on London. I feared that such a disease might weaken us now, but for some reason we were spared, perhaps because our numbers were still small or perhaps because Arthur scattered his army along the three miles of high crestline that ran behind Mynydd Baddon. I and my men stayed on the mount, but the newly arrived spearmen held the line of northern hills. For the first two days after Arthur’s arrival the enemy could still have captured those hills because their summits were thinly garrisoned, but Arthur’s horsemen were continually on show and Arthur kept his spearmen moving among the crest’s trees to suggest that his numbers were greater than they really were. The Saxons watched, but made no attack, and then, on the third day after Arthur’s arrival, Cuneglas and his men arrived from Powys and we were able to garrison the whole long crest with strong picquets who could summon help if any Saxon attack did threaten. We were still heavily outnumbered, but we held the high ground and now had the spears to defend it.

The Saxons should have left the valley. They could have marched to the Severn and laid siege to Glevum and we would have been forced to abandon our high ground and follow them but Sagramor was right; men who have made themselves comfortable are reluctant to move and so Cerdic and Aelle stubbornly stayed in the river valley where they believed they were laying siege to us when in truth we were besieging them. They finally did make some attacks up the hills but none of those assaults were pressed home. The Saxons would swarm up the hills but when a shield line appeared at the ridge top ready to oppose them and a troop of Arthur’s heavy horsemen showed on their flank with levelled spears their ardour would fade and they would sidle back to their villages and each Saxon failure only increased our confidence.

That confidence was so high that, after Cuneglas’s army arrived, Arthur felt able to leave us. I was astonished at first, for he offered no explanation other than he had an important errand that lay a day’s long ride northwards. I suppose my astonishment must have showed, for he laid an arm on my shoulders.

‘We haven’t won yet,’ he told me.

‘I know, Lord.’

‘But when we do, Derfel, I want this victory to be overwhelming. No other ambition would take me away from here.’ He smiled. ‘Trust me?’

‘Of course, Lord.’

He left Cuneglas in command of our army, but with strict orders that we were to make no attacks into the valley. The Saxons were to be left imagining that they had us cornered, and to help that deception a handful of volunteers pretended to be deserters and ran to the Saxon camps with news that our men were in such low spirits that some were running away rather than face a fight, and that our leaders were in furious dispute over whether to stay and face a Saxon attack or run north to beg for shelter in Gwent.

‘I’m still not sure I see a way to end this,’ Cuneglas admitted to me on the day after Arthur had left.

‘We’re strong enough to keep them from the high ground,’ he went on, ‘but not strong enough to go down into the valley and beat them.’

‘So maybe Arthur’s gone to fetch help, Lord King?’ I suggested.

‘What help?’ Cuneglas asked.

‘Culhwch perhaps?’ I said, though that was unlikely because Culhwch was said to be east of the Saxons, and Arthur was riding north. ‘Oengus mac Airem?’ I offered. The King of Demetia had promised his Blackshield army, but those Irishmen had still not come.

‘Oengus, maybe,’ Cuneglas agreed, ‘but even with the Black-shields we won’t have enough men to beat those bastards.’ He nodded down into the valley. ‘We need Gwent’s spearmen to do that.’

‘And Meurig won’t march,’ I said.

‘Meurig won’t march,’ Cuneglas agreed, ‘but there are some men in Gwent who will. They still remember Lugg Vale.’ He offered me a wry smile, for on that occasion Cuneglas had been our enemy and the men of Gwent, who were our allies, had feared to march against the army led by Cuneglas’s father. Some in Gwent were still ashamed of that failure, a shame made worse because Arthur had won without their help, and I supposed it possible that, if Meurig permitted it, Arthur might lead some of those volunteers south to Aquae Sulis; but I still did not see how he could collect enough men to let us go down into that nest of Saxons and slaughter them.

‘Perhaps,’ Guinevere suggested, ‘he’s gone to find Merlin?’

Guinevere had refused to leave with the other women and children, insisting that she would see the battle through to defeat or victory. I thought Arthur might insist that she left, but whenever Arthur had come to the hilltop Guinevere had hidden herself, usually in the crude hut we had made on the plateau, and it was only after Arthur left that she reappeared. Arthur surely knew that she had remained on Mynydd Baddon, for he had watched our women leave with a careful eye and he must have seen she was not among them, but he had said nothing. Nor, when Guinevere emerged, did she mention Arthur, though she did smile whenever she saw that he had allowed her banner to remain on the ramparts. I had originally encouraged her to leave the mount, but she had scorned my suggestion and none of my men had wanted her to go. They ascribed their survival to Guinevere, and rightly too, and their reward was to equip her for battle. They had taken a fine mail shirt from a rich Saxon corpse and, once the blood was scrubbed from the mail’s links, they had presented it to Guinevere, they had painted her symbol on a captured shield, and one of my men had even yielded his own prized wolftail helmet, so that she was now dressed like the rest of my spearmen, though being Guinevere she managed to make the wargear look disturbingly seductive. She had become our talisman, a heroine to all my men.

‘No one knows where Merlin is,’ I said, responding to her suggestion.

‘There was a rumour he was in Demetia,’ Cuneglas said, ‘so maybe he’ll come with Oengus?’

‘But your Druid has come?’ Guinevere asked Cuneglas.

‘Malaine is here,’ Cuneglas confirmed, ‘and he can curse well enough. Not like Merlin, perhaps, but well enough.’

‘What about Taliesin?’ Guinevere asked.

Cuneglas showed no surprise that she had heard of the young bard, for clearly Taliesin’s fame was spreading swiftly. ‘He went to seek Merlin,’ he said.

‘And is he truly good?’ Guinevere asked.

‘Truly,’ Cuneglas said. ‘He can sing eagles from the sky and salmon from their pools.’

‘I pray we shall hear him soon,’ Guinevere said, and indeed those strange days on that sunny hilltop did seem more suited to singing than to fighting. The spring had become fine, summer was not far off, and we lazed on the warm grass and watched our enemies who seemed struck by a sudden helplessness. They attempted their few futile attacks on the hills, but made no real effort to leave the valley. We later heard they were arguing. Aelle had wanted to combine all the Saxon spearmen and strike north into the hills, so splitting our army into two parts that could be destroyed separately, but Cerdic preferred to wait until our food ran short and our confidence ebbed, though that was a vain hope for we had plenty of food and our confidence was increasing every day. It was the Saxons who went hungry, for Arthur’s light horsemen harried their foraging parties, and it was Saxon confidence that waned, for after a week we saw mounds of fresh earth appear on the meadows by their huts and we knew that the enemy were digging graves for their dead. The disease that turns the bowels to liquid and robs a man of his strength had come to the enemy, and the Saxons weakened every day. Saxon women staked fish traps in the river to find food for their children, Saxon men dug graves, and we lay in the high sun and talked of bards.

Arthur returned the day after the first Saxon graves were dug. He spurred his horse across the saddle and up Mynydd Baddon’s steep northern slope, prompting Guinevere to pull on her new helmet and squat among a group of my men. Her red hair flaunted itself under the helmet’s rim like a banner, but Arthur pretended not to notice. I had walked to meet him and, halfway across the hill’s summit, I stopped and stared at him in astonishment.

His shield was a circle of willow boards covered in leather, and over the leather was hammered a thin sheet of polished silver that shone with the reflected sunlight, but now there was a new symbol on his shield. It was the cross; a red cross, made from cloth strips that had been gummed onto the silver. The Christian cross. He saw my astonishment and grinned. ‘Do you like it, Derfel?’

‘You’ve become a Christian, Lord?’ I sounded appalled.

‘We’ve all become Christians,’ he said, ‘you as well. Heat a spear blade and burn the cross into your shields.’

I spat to avert evil. ‘You want us to do what, Lord?’

‘You heard me, Derfel,’ he said, then slid off Llamrei’s back and walked to the southern ramparts from where he could stare down at the enemy. ‘They’re still here,’ he said, ‘good.’

Cuneglas had joined me and overheard Arthur’s previous words. ‘You want us to put a cross on our shields?’ he asked.

‘I can demand nothing of you, Lord King,’ Arthur said, ‘but if you would place a cross on your shield, and on your men’s shields, I would be grateful.’

‘Why?’ Cuneglas demanded fiercely. He was famous for his opposition to the new religion.

‘Because,’ Arthur said, still gazing down at the enemy, ‘the cross is the price we pay for Gwent’s army.’

Cuneglas stared at Arthur as though he hardly dared believe his ears.

‘Meurig is coming?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Arthur said, turning to us, ‘not Meurig. King Tewdric is coming. Good Tewdric.’

Tewdric was Meurig’s father, the king who had given up his throne to become a monk, and Arthur had ridden to Gwent to plead with the old man. ‘I knew it was possible,’ Arthur told me, ‘because Galahad and I have been talking to Tewdric all winter.’ At first, Arthur said, the old King had been reluctant to give up his pious, scrimped life, but other men in Gwent had added their voices to Arthur and Galahad’s pleadings and, after nights spent praying in his small chapel, Tewdric had reluctantly declared he would temporarily take back his throne and lead Gwent’s army south. Meurig had fought the decision, which he rightly saw as a reproof and a humiliation, but Gwent’s army had supported their old King and so now they were marching south. ‘There was a price,’ Arthur admitted. ‘I had to bow my knee to their God and promise to ascribe victory to Him, but I’ll ascribe victory to any God Tewdric wants so long as he brings his spearmen.’

‘And the rest of the price?’ Cuneglas asked shrewdly.

Arthur made a wry face. ‘They want you to let Meurig’s missionaries into Powys.’

‘Just that?’ Cuneglas asked.

‘I might have given the impression,’ Arthur admitted, ‘that you would welcome them. I’m sorry, Lord King. The demand was only sprung on me two days ago, and it was Meurig’s idea, and Meurig’s face has to be saved.’ Cuneglas grimaced. He had done his best to keep Christianity from his kingdom, reckoning that Powys did not need the acrimony that always followed the new faith, but he made no protest to Arthur. Better Christians in Powys, he must have decided, than Saxons.

‘Is that all you promised Tewdric, Lord?’ I asked Arthur suspiciously. I was remembering Meurig’s demand to be given Dumnonia’s throne and Arthur’s longing to be rid of that responsibility.

‘These treaties always have a few details that aren’t worth bothering about,’ Arthur responded airily,

‘but I did promise to release Sansum. He is now the Bishop of Dumnonia! And a royal counsellor again. Tewdric insisted on it. Every time I knock our good Bishop down he bobs up again.’ He laughed.

‘Is that all you promised, Lord?’ I asked again, still suspicious.

‘I promised enough, Derfel, to make sure Gwent marches to our aid,’ Arthur said firmly, ‘and they have undertaken to be here in two days with six hundred prime spearmen. Even Agricola decided he wasn’t too old to fight. You remember Agricola, Derfel?’

‘Of course I remember him, Lord,’ I said. Agricola, Tewdric’s old warlord, might be long in years now, but he was still one of Britain’s most famous warriors.

‘They’re all coming from Glevum,’ Arthur pointed west to where the Glevum road showed in the river valley, ‘and when they come I’ll join him with my men and together we’ll attack straight down the valley.’

He was standing on the rampart from where he stared down into the deep valley, but in his mind he was not seeing the fields and roads and wind-ruffled crops, nor the stone graves of the Roman cemetery, but instead he was watching the whole battle unfold before his eyes. ‘The Saxons will be confused at first,’

he went on, ‘but eventually there’ll be a mass of enemy hurrying along that road,’ he pointed down to the Fosse Way immediately beneath Mynydd Baddon, ‘and you, my Lord King,’ he bowed to Cuneglas,

‘and you, Derfel,’ he jumped down from the low rampart and poked a finger into my belly, ‘will attack them on the flank. Straight down the hill and into their shields! We’ll link up with you,’ he curved his hand to show how his troops would curl about the northern flank of the Saxons, ‘and then we’ll crush them against the river.’

Arthur would come from the west and we would attack from the north. ‘And they’ll escape eastwards,’ I said sourly.

Arthur shook his head. ‘Culhwch will march north tomorrow to join Oengus mac Airem’s Blackshields, and they’re coming down from Corinium right now.’ He was delighted with himself, and no wonder, for if it all worked then we would surround the enemy and afterwards slaughter him. But the plan was not without risk. I guessed that once Tewdric’s men arrived and Oengus’s Blackshields joined us then our numbers would not be much smaller than the Saxons, but Arthur was proposing to divide our army into three parts and if the Saxons kept their heads they could destroy each part separately. But if they panicked, and if our attacks came hard and furious, and if they were confused by the noise and dust and horror, we might just drive them like cattle to the slaughter. ‘Two days,’ Arthur said, ‘just two days. Pray that the Saxons don’t hear of it, and pray that they stay where they are.’ He called for Llamrei, glanced across at the red-haired spearman, then went to join Sagramor on the ridge beyond the saddle. On the night before battle we all burned crosses onto our shields. It was a small price to pay for victory, though not, I knew, the full price. That would be paid in blood. ‘I think, Lady,’ I told Guinevere that night, ‘that you had best stay up here tomorrow.’

She and I were sharing a horn of mead. I had found that she liked to talk late in the night and I had fallen into the habit of sitting by her fire before I slept. Now she laughed at my suggestion that she should stay on Mynydd Baddon while we went down to fight. ‘I always used to think you were a dull man, Derfel,’ she said, ‘dull, unwashed and stolid. Now I’ve begun to like you, so please don’t make me think I was right about you all along.’

‘Lady,’ I pleaded, ‘the shield wall is no place for a woman.’

‘Nor is prison, Derfel. Besides, do you think you can win without me?’ She was sitting in the open mouth of the hut we had made from the wagons and trees. She had been given one whole end of the hut for her quarters and that night she had invited me to share a supper of scorched beef cut from the flank of one of the oxen that had hauled the wagons to Mynydd Baddon’s summit. Our cooking fire was dying now, sifting smoke towards the bright stars that arched across the world. The sickle moon was low over the southern hills, outlining the sentries who paced our ramparts. ‘I want to see it through to the end,’ she said, her eyes bright in the shadows. ‘I haven’t enjoyed anything so much in years, Derfel, not in years.’

‘What will happen in the valley tomorrow, Lady,’ I said, ‘will not be enjoyable. It will be bitter work.’

‘I know,’ she paused, ‘but your men believe I bring them victory. Will you deny them my presence when the work is hard?’

‘No, Lady,’ I yielded. ‘But stay safe, I beg you.’

She smiled at the vehemence of my words. ‘Is that a prayer for my survival, Derfel, or a fear that Arthur will be angry with you if I come to harm?’

I hesitated. ‘I think he might be angry, Lady,’ I admitted.

Guinevere savoured that answer for a while. ‘Did he ask about me?’ she finally enquired.

‘No,’ I said truthfully, ‘not once.’

She stared into the remnants of the fire. ‘Maybe he is in love with Argante,’ she said wistfully.

‘I doubt he can even stand the sight of her,’ I answered. A week before I would never have been so frank, but Guinevere and I were much closer now. ‘She’s too young for him,’ I went on, ‘and not nearly clever enough.’

She looked up at me, a challenge in her fire-glossed eyes. ‘Clever,’ she said. ‘I used to think I was clever. But you all think I’m a fool, don’t you?’

‘No, Lady.’

‘You were always a bad liar, Derfel. That’s why you were never a courtier. To be a good courtier you must lie with a smile.’ She stared into the fire. She was silent a long time, and when she spoke again the gentle mockery was gone from her voice. Maybe it was the nearness of battle that drove her to a layer of truth I had never heard from her before. ‘I was a fool,’ she said quietly, so quietly I had to lean forward to hear her over the crackling of the fire and the melody of my men’s songs. ‘I tell myself now that it was a kind of madness,’ she went on, ‘but I don’t think it was. It was nothing but ambition.’ She went quiet again, watching the small flickering flames. ‘I wanted to be a Caesar’s wife.’

‘You were,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘Arthur’s no Caesar. He’s not a tyrant, but I think I wanted him to be a tyrant, someone like Gorfyddyd.’ Gorfyddyd had been Ceinwyn and Cuneglas’s father, a brutal King of Powys, Arthur’s enemy, and, if rumour was true, Guinevere’s lover. She must have been thinking about that rumour, for she suddenly challenged me with a direct gaze. ‘Did I ever tell you he tried to rape me?’

‘Yes, Lady,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t true.’ She spoke bleakly. ‘He didn’t just try, he did rape me. Or I told myself it was rape.’

Her words were coming in short spasms, as if the truth was a very hard thing to admit. ‘But maybe it wasn’t rape. I wanted gold, honour, position.’ She was fiddling with the hem of her jerkin, stripping small lengths of linen from the frayed weave. I was embarrassed, but I did not interrupt, because I knew she wanted to talk. ‘But I didn’t get them from him. He knew exactly what I wanted, but knew better what he wanted for himself, and he never intended to pay my price. Instead he betrothed me to Valerin. Do you know what I was going to do with Valerin?’ Her eyes challenged me again, and this time the gloss on them was not just fire, but a sheen of tears.

‘No, Lady.’

‘I was going to make him King of Powys,’ she said vengefully. ‘I was going to use Valerin to revenge myself on Gorfyddyd. I could have done it, too, but then I met Arthur.’

‘At Lugg Vale,’ I said carefully, ‘I killed Valerin.’

‘I know you did.’

‘And there was a ring on his finger, Lady,’ I went on, ‘with your badge on it.’

She stared at me. She knew what ring I meant. ‘And it had a lover’s cross?’ she asked quietly.

‘Yes, Lady,’ I said, and touched my own lover’s ring, the twin of Ceinwyn’s ring. Many folk wore lovers’ rings incised with a cross, but not many had rings with crosses made from gold taken from the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn as Ceinwyn and I did.

‘What did you do with the ring?’ Guinevere asked.

‘I threw it in the river.’

‘Did you tell anyone?’

‘Only Ceinwyn,’ I said. ‘And Issa knows,’ I added, ‘because he found the ring and brought it to me.’

‘And you didn’t tell Arthur?’

‘No.’

She smiled. ‘I think you have been a better friend than I ever knew, Derfel.’

‘To Arthur, Lady. I was protecting him, not you.’

‘I suppose you were, yes.’ She looked back into the fire. ‘When this is all over,’ she said, ‘I shall try to give Arthur what he wants.’

‘Yourself?’

My suggestion seemed to surprise her. ‘Does he want that?’ she asked.

‘He loves you,’ I said. ‘He might not ask about you, but he looks for you every time he comes here. He looked for you even when you were in Ynys Wydryn. He never talked to me about you, but he wearied Ceinwyn’s ears.’

Guinevere grimaced. ‘Do you know how cloying love can be, Derfel? I don’t want to be worshipped. I don’t want every whim granted. I want to feel there’s something biting back.’ She spoke vehemently, and I opened my mouth to defend Arthur, but she gestured me to silence. ‘I know, Derfel,’ she said, ‘I have no right to want anything now. I shall be good, I promise you.’ She smiled. ‘Do you know why Arthur is ignoring me now?’

‘No, Lady.’

‘Because he does not want to face me till he has victory.’

I thought she was probably right, but Arthur had shown no overt sign of his affection and so I thought it best to sound a note of warning. ‘Maybe victory will be satisfaction enough for him,’ I said. Guinevere shook her head. ‘I know him better than you, Derfel. I know him so well I can describe him in one word.’

I tried to think what that word would be. Brave? Certainly, but that left out all his care and dedication. I wondered if dedicated was a better word, but that did not describe his restlessness. Good? he was certainly good, but that plain word obscured the anger that could make him unpredictable. ‘What is the word, Lady?’ I asked.

‘Lonely,’ Guinevere said, and I remembered that Sagramor in Mithras’s cave had used the very same word. ‘He’s lonely,’ Guinevere said, ‘like me So let’s give him victory and maybe he won’t be lonely again.’

‘The Gods keep you safe, Lady,’ I said.

‘The Goddess, I think,’ she said, and saw the look of horror on my face. She laughed. ‘Not Isis, Derfel, not Isis.’ It had been Guinevere’s worship of Isis that had led her to Lancelot’s bed and to Arthur’s misery. ‘I think,’ she went on, ‘that tonight I will pray to Sulis. She seems more appropriate.’

‘I’ll add my prayers to yours, Lady.’

She held out a hand to check me as I rose to leave. ‘We’re going to win, Derfel,’ she said earnestly,

‘we’re going to win, and everything will be changed.’

We had said that so often, and nothing ever was. But now, at Mynydd Baddon, we would try again. We sprang our trap on a day so beautiful that the heart ached. It promised to be a long day too, for the nights were growing ever shorter and the long evening light lingered deep into the shadowed hours. On the evening before the battle Arthur had withdrawn his own troops from all along the hills behind Mynydd Baddon. He ordered those men to leave their campfires burning so that the Saxons would believe they were still in place, then he took them west to join the men of Gwent who were approaching on the Glevum road. Cuneglas’s warriors also left the hills, but they came to the summit of Mynydd Baddon where, with my men, they waited.

Malaine, Powys’s chief Druid, went among the spearmen during the night. He distributed vervain, elf stones and scraps of dried mistletoe. The Christians gathered and prayed together, though I noted how many accepted the Druid’s gifts. I prayed beside the ramparts, pleading with Mithras for a great victory, and after that I tried to sleep, but Mynydd Baddon was restless with the murmur of voices and the monotonous sound of stones on steel.

I had already sharpened my spear and put a new edge on Hywelbane. I never let a servant sharpen my weapons before battle, but did it myself and did it as obsessively as all my men. Once I was sure the weapons were as sharp as I could hone them I lay close to Guinevere’s shelter. I wanted to sleep but I could not shake the fear of standing in a shield wall. I watched for omens, fearing to see an owl, and I prayed again. I must have slept in the end, but it was a fitful dream-racked sleep. It had been so long since I had fought in a shield wall, let alone broken an enemy’s wall. I woke cold, early and shivering. Dew lay thick. Men were grunting and coughing, pissing and groaning. The hill stank, for although we had dug latrines there was no stream to carry the dirt away. ‘The smell and sound of men,’ Guinevere’s wry voice spoke from the shadow of her shelter.

‘Did you sleep, Lady?’ I asked.

‘A little.’ She crawled out under the low branch that served as roof and door. ‘It’s cold.’

‘It will be warm soon.’

She crouched beside me, swathed in her cloak. Her hair was tousled and her eyes were puffy from sleep. ‘What do you think about in battle?’ she asked me.

‘Staying alive,’ I said, ‘killing, winning.’

‘Is that mead?’ she asked, gesturing at the horn in my hand.

‘Water, Lady. Mead slows a man in battle.’

She took the water from me, splashed some on her eyes and drank the rest. She was nervous, but I knew I could never persuade her to stay on the hill. ‘And Arthur,’ she asked, ‘what does he think about in battle?’

I smiled. ‘The peace that follows the fighting, Lady. He believes that every battle will be the last.’

‘Yet of battles,’ she said dreamily, ‘there will be no end.’

‘Probably never,’ I agreed, ‘but in this battle, Lady, stay close to me. Very close.’

‘Yes, Lord Derfel,’ she said mockingly, then dazzled me with a smile. ‘And thank you, Derfel.’

We were in armour by the time the sun flared behind the eastern hills to touch the scrappy clouds crimson and throw a deep shadow across the valley of Saxons. The shadow thinned and shrank as the sun climbed. Wisps of mist curled from the river, thickening the smoke from the campfires amongst which the enemy moved with an unusual energy. ‘Something’s brewing down there,’ Cuneglas said to me.

‘Maybe they know we’re coming?’ I guessed.

‘Which will make life harder,’ Cuneglas said grimly, though if the Saxons did have wind of our plans, they showed no evident preparation. No shield wall was formed to face Mynydd Baddon, and no troops marched west towards the Glevum road. Instead, as the sun rose high enough to burn the mist from the river banks, it appeared as if they had at last decided to abandon the place altogether and were preparing to march, though whether they planned to go west, north or south it was hard to tell for their first task was to collect their wagons, pack-horses, herds and flocks. From our height it looked like an ant’s nest kicked into chaos, but gradually some order emerged. Aelle’s men gathered their baggage just outside Aquae Sulis’s northern gate, while Cerdic’s men organized their march beside their encampment on the river’s bend. A handful of huts were burning, and doubtless they planned to fire both of their encampments before they left. The first men to go were a troop of lightly armed horsemen who rode westwards past Aquae Sulis, taking the Glevum road. ‘A pity,’ Cuneglas said quietly. The horsemen were scouting the route the Saxons hoped to take, and they were riding straight towards Arthur’s surprise attack.

We waited. We would not go down the hill until Arthur’s force was well within sight, and then we had to go fast to fill the gap between Aelle’s men and Cerdic’s troops. Aelle would have to face Arthur’s fury while Cerdic would be prevented from helping his ally by my spearmen and by Cuneglas’s troops. We would almost certainly be outnumbered, but Arthur hoped he could break through Aelle’s men to bring his troops to our aid. I glanced to my left, hoping for a sight of Oengus’s men on the Fosse Way, but that distant road was still empty. If the Blackshields did not come, then Cuneglas and I would be stranded between the two halves of the Saxon army. I looked at my men, noting their nervousness. They could not see down into the valley, for I had insisted they stay hidden until we launched our flank attack. Some had their eyes closed, a few Christians knelt with arms outstretched while other men stroked sharpening stones along spear blades already quickened to a razor’s edge. Malaine the Druid was chanting a spell of protection, Pyrlig was praying and Guinevere was staring at me wide-eyed as though she could tell from my expression what was about to happen.

The Saxon scouts had disappeared in the west, but now they suddenly came galloping back. Dust spurted from their horses’ hoofs. Their speed was enough to tell us that they had seen Arthur and soon, I thought, that tangled flurry of Saxon preparations would turn into a wall of shields and spears. I gripped my own spear’s long ash shaft, closed my eyes and sent a prayer winging up through the blue to wherever Bel and Mithras were listening.

‘Look at them!’ Cuneglas exclaimed while I was praying, and I opened my eyes to see Arthur’s attack filling the western end of the valley. The sun shone in their faces and glinted offhundreds of naked blades and polished helmets. To the south, beside the river, Arthur’s horsemen were spurring ahead to capture the bridge south of Aquae Sulis while the troops of Gwent marched in a great line across the centre of the valley. Tewdric’s men wore Roman gear; bronze breastplates, red cloaks and thick plumed helmets, so that from Mynydd Baddon’s summit they appeared as phalanxes of crimson and gold beneath a host of banners that showed, instead of Gwent’s black bull, red Christian crosses. To the north of them were Arthur’s spearmen, led by Sagramor under his vast black standard that was held on a pole surmounted by a Saxon skull. To this day I can close my eyes and see that army advancing, see the wind stirring the ripple of flags above their steady lines, see the dust rising from the road behind them and see the growing crops trampled flat where they had passed.

While in front of them was panic and chaos. Saxons ran to find armour, to save their wives, to seek their chiefs or to rally in groups that slowly joined to make the first shield wall close to their encampment by Aquae Sulis, but it was a scant wall, thin and ill-manned, and I saw a horseman wave it back. To our left I could see that Cerdic’s men were quicker in forming their ranks, but they were still more than two miles from Arthur’s advancing troops which meant that Aelle’s men would have to take the brunt of the attack. Behind that attack, ragged and dark in the distance, our levy was advancing with scythes, axes, mattocks and clubs.

I saw Aelle’s banner raised among the graves of the Roman cemetery, and saw his spearmen hurry back to rally under its bloody skull. The Saxons had already abandoned Aquae Sulis, their western encampment and the baggage that had been collected outside the city, and maybe they hoped Arthur’s men would pause to plunder the wagons and pack-horses, but Arthur had seen that danger and so led his men well to the north of the city’s wall. Gwentian spearmen had garrisoned the bridge, leaving the heavy horsemen free to ride up behind that gold and crimson line. Everything seemed to happen so slowly. From Mynydd Baddon we had an eagle’s view and we could see the last Saxons fleeing over Aquae Sulis’s crumbled wall, we could see Aelle’s shield wall at last hardening and we could see Cerdic’s men hurrying along the road to reinforce them and we silently urged Arthur and Tewdric on, wanting them to crush Aelle’s men before Cerdic could join the battle, but it seemed as though the attack had slowed to a snail’s pace. Mounted messengers darted between the troops of spearmen, but no one else seemed to hurry.

Aelle’s forces had pulled back a half-mile from Aquae Sulis before forming their line and now they waited for Arthur’s attack. Their wizards were capering in the fields between the armies, but I could see no Druids in front of Tewdric’s men. They marched under their Christian God, and at last, after straightening their shield wall, they closed on the enemy. I expected to see a conference between the lines as the leaders of the armies exchanged their ritual insults and while the two shield walls judged each other. I have known shield walls stare at each other for hours while men summoned the courage to charge, but those Christians of Gwent did not check their pace. There was no meeting of opposing leaders and no time for the Saxon wizards to cast their spells, for the Christians simply lowered their spears, hefted their oblong shields that were painted with the cross, and marched straight through the Roman graves and into the enemy’s shields.

We heard the shield clash on the hill. It was a dull grinding sound, like thunder from under the earth, and it was the sound of hundreds of shields and spears striking as two great armies smashed head to head. The men of Gwent were stopped, held by the weight of the Saxons who heaved against them, and I knew men were dying down there. They were being speared, being chopped by axes, being trampled underfoot. Men were spitting and snarling over their shield rims, and the press of men would be so great that a sword could hardly be lifted in the crush.

Then Sagramor’s warriors struck from the northern flank. The Numidian had plainly hoped to outflank Aelle, but the Saxon king had seen the danger and sent some of his reserve troops to form a line that took Sagramor’s charge on their shields and spears. Again the splintering crash of shield striking shield sounded, and then, to us who had the eagle’s view, the battle became strangely still. Two throngs of men were locked together, and those in the rear were shoving the ones in front and the ones in front were struggling to loosen their spears and thrust them forward again, and all the while Cerdic’s men were hurrying along the Fosse Way beneath us. Once those men reached the battle they would easily outflank Sagramor. They could wrap around his flank and take his shield wall in the rear, and that was why Arthur had kept us on the hill.

Cerdic must have guessed we were still there. He could see nothing from the valley, for our men were hidden behind Mynydd Baddon’s low ramparts, but I saw him gallop his horse to a group of men and point them up the slope. It was time, I reckoned, for us to go, and I looked at Cuneglas. He looked at me at the same time and offered me a smile. ‘The Gods be with you, Derfel.’

‘And you, Lord King.’ I touched his offered hand, then pressed my palm against my coat of mail to feel the reassuring lump of Ceinwyn’s brooch beneath.

Cuneglas stepped onto the rampart and turned to face us. ‘I’m not a man for speeches,’ he shouted,

‘but there are Saxons down there, and you’re reckoned the best killers of Saxons in Britain. So come and prove it! And remember! Once you reach the valley keep the shield wall tight! Keep it tight! Now, come!’

We cheered as we spilled over the hill’s rim. Cerdic’s men, those who had been sent to investigate the summit, checked, then retreated as more and more of our spearmen appeared above them. We went down that hill five hundred strong, and we went fast, angling westwards to strike against the leading troops of Cerdic’s reinforcements.

The ground was tussocky, steep and rough. We did not go down in any order, but raced each other to reach the bottom, and there, after running through the field of trampled wheat and clambering through two hedges that were tangling with thorns, we formed our wall. I took the left side of the line, Cuneglas the right, and once we were properly formed and our shields were touching, I shouted at my men to go forward. A Saxon shield wall was forming in the field in front of us as men hurried from the road to oppose us. I looked to my right as we advanced and saw what a huge gap there was between us and Sagramor’s men, a gap so big I could not even see his banner. I hated the thought of that gap, hated to think what horror could pour through it and so come behind us, but Arthur had been adamant. Do not hesitate, he said, do not wait for Sagramor to reach you, but just attack. It must have been Arthur, I thought, who had persuaded the Christians of Gwent to attack without pause. He was trying to panic the Saxons by denying them time, and now it was our turn to go fast into battle. The Saxon wall was makeshift and small, maybe two hundred of Cerdic’s men who had not expected to fight here, but who had thought to add their weight to Aelle’s rearmost ranks. They were also nervous. We were just as nervous, but this was no time to let fear abrade valour. We had to do what Tewdric’s men had done, we had to charge without stopping to take the enemy off balance, and so I roared a war shout and quickened my pace. I had drawn Hywelbane and was holding her by the upper blade in my left hand, letting the shield hang on its loops from my forearm. My heavy spear was in my right hand. The enemy shuffled together, shield against shield, spears levelled, and some-where from my left a great war-dog was released to run at us. I heard the beast howl, then the madness of battle let me forget everything except the bearded faces in front of me.

A terrible hate wells up in battle, a hatred that comes from the dark soul to fill a man with fierce and bloody anger. Enjoyment, too. I knew that Saxon shield wall would break. I knew it long before I attacked it. The wall was too thin, had been too hurried in the making, and was too nervous, and so I broke out of our front rank and shouted my hate as I ran at the enerm. At that moment all I wanted to do was kill. No, I wanted more, I wanted the bards to sing of Derfel Cadarn at Mynydd Baddon. I wanted men to look at me and say, there is the warrior who broke the wall at Mynydd Baddon, I wanted the power that comes from reputation. A dozen men in Britain had that power; Arthur, Sagramor, Culhwch were among them, and it was a power that superseded all other except for kingship. Ours was a world where swords gave rank, and to shirk the sword was to lose honour, and so I ran ahead, madness filling my soul and exultation giving me a terrible power as I picked my victims. They were two young men, both smaller than me, both nervous, both with skimpy beards, and both were shrinking away even before I hit them. They saw a British warlord in splendour, and I saw two dead Saxons. My spear took one in the throat. I abandoned the spear as an axe chopped into my shield, but I had seen it coming and warded off the blow, then I rammed the shield against the second man and thrust my shoulder into the shield’s belly as I snatched Hywelbane with my right hand. I chopped her down and saw a splinter fly from a Saxon spear shaft, then felt my men pouring in behind me. I whirled Hywelbane over my head, chopped her down again, screamed again, swung her to the side, and suddenly in front of me there was nothing but open grass, buttercups, the road and the river meadows beyond. I was through the wall, and I was screaming my victory. I turned, rammed Hywelbane into the small of a man’s back, twisted her free, saw the blood spill offher tip, and suddenly there were no more enemies. The Saxon wall had vanished, or rather it had been turned into dead and dying meat that bled onto the grass. I remember raising shield and spear towards the sun and howling a cry of thanks to Mithras.

‘Shield wall!’ I heard Issa bellow the order as I celebrated. I stooped to retrieve my spear, then twisted to see more Saxons hurrying from the east.

‘Shield wall!’ I echoed Issa’s shout. Cuneglas was making his own wall, facing west to guard us from Aelle’s rearward men, while I was making our line face towards the east from where Cerdic’s men were coming. My men screamed and jeered. They had turned a shield wall into offal and now they wanted more. Behind me, in the space between Cuneglas’s men and my own, a few wounded Saxons still lived, but three of my men were making short work of them. They cut their throats, for this was no time to take prisoners. Guinevere, I saw, was helping them.

‘Lord, Lord!’ That was Eachern shouting from the right-hand end of our short wall, and I looked to see him pointing at a mass of Saxons who were hurrying through the gap between us and the river. That gap was wide, but the Saxons were not threatening us, but rather hurrying to support Aelle.

‘Let them be!’ I shouted. I was more worried by the Saxons in front of us, for they had checked to form in ranks. They had seen what we had just done and would not let us do it to them and so they packed themselves four or five ranks deep, then cheered as one of their wizards came prancing out to curse us. He was one of the mad wizards, for his face twitched uncontrollably as he spat filth at us. The Saxons prized such men, thinking they had the ear of the Gods, and their Gods must have blanched as they heard this man curse.

‘Shall I kill him?’ Guinevere asked me. She was fingering her bow.

‘I wish you weren’t here, Lady,’ I said.

‘A little late for that wish, Derfel,’ she said.

‘Let him be,’ I said. The wizard’s curses were not bothering my men who were shouting at the Saxons to come and test their blades, but the Saxons were in no mood to advance. They were waiting for reinforcements, and those were not far behind them. ‘Lord King!’ I shouted at Cuneglas. He turned.

‘Can you see Sagramor?’ I asked him.

‘Not yet.’

Nor could I see Oengus mac Airem whose Blackshields were supposed to pour out of the hills to take the Saxons still deeper in the flank. I began to fear that we had charged too early, and that we were now trapped between Aelle’s troops who were recovering from their panic and Cerdic’s spearmen who were carefully thickening their shield wall before they came to overpower us. Then Eachern shouted again and I looked south to see that the Saxons were now running east instead of west. The fields between our wall and the river were scattered with panicked men and for a heartbeat I was too puzzled to make sense of what I saw, and then I heard the noise. A noise like thunder. Hoofbeats.

Arthur’s horses were big. Sagramor once told me Arthur had captured the horses from Clovis, King of the Franks, and before Clovis had owned the herd the horses had been bred for the Romans and no other horses in Britain matched their size, and Arthur chose his biggest men to ride them. He had lost many of the great warhorses to Lancelot, and I had half expected to see those huge beasts among the enemy ranks, but Arthur had scoffed at that fear. He had told me that Lancelot had captured mostly brood mares and untrained yearlings only, and it took as many years to train a horse as it did to teach a man how to fight with an unwieldy lance from the horse’s back. Lancelot had no such men, but Arthur did, and now he led them from the northern slope against those of Aelle’s men who were fighting Sagramor.

There were only sixty of the big horses, and they were tired for they had first ridden to secure the bridge to the south and then come to the battle’s opposite flank, but Arthur spurred them into a gallop and drove them hard into the rear of Aelle’s battle line. Those rearward men had been heaving forward, trying to push their forward ranks over Sagramor’s shield wall, and Arthur’s appearance was so sudden that they did not have time to turn and make a shield wall of their own. The horses broke their ranks wide open, and as the Saxons scattered, so Sagramor’s warriors pushed back the front ranks and suddenly the right wing of Aelle’s army was broken. Some Saxons ran south, seeking safety among the rest of Aelle’s army, but others fled east towards Cerdic and those were the men we could see in the river meadows.

Arthur and his horsemen rode those fugitives down mercilessly. The cavalrymen used their long swords to cut down fleeing men until the river meadow was littered with bodies and strewn with abandoned shields and swords. I saw Arthur gallop past my line, his white cloak spattered with blood, Excalibur reddened in his hand and a look of utter joy on his gaunt face. Hygwydd, his servant, carried the bear banner that now had a red cross marked on its lower corner. Hygwydd, normally the most taciturn of men, gave me a grin, and then he was past, following Arthur back up the hill to where the horses could recover their breath and threaten Cerdic’s flank. Morfans the Ugly had died in the initial attack on Aelle’s men, but that was Arthur’s only loss.

Arthur’s charge had broken Aelle’s right wing and Sagramor was now leading his men along the Fosse Way to join his shields to mine. We had not yet surrounded Aelle’s army, but we had penned him between the road and river, and Tewdric’s disciplined Christians were now advancing up that corridor and killing as they came. Cerdic was still outside the trap, and it must have occurred to him to leave Aelle there and so let his Saxon rival be destroyed, but instead he decided victory was still possible. Win this day and all Britain would become Lloegyr.

Cerdic ignored the threat of Arthur’s horses. He must have known that they had struck Aelle’s men where they were most disordered, and that disciplined spearmen, tight in their wall, would have nothing to fear from cavalry and so he ordered his men to lock their shields, lower their spears and advance.

‘Tight! Tight!’ I shouted, and pushed my way into the front rank where I made sure my shield overlapped those of my neighbours. The Saxons were shuffling forward, intent on keeping shield against shield, their eyes searching our line for a weak spot as the whole mass edged towards us. There were no wizards that I could see, but Cerdic’s banner was in the centre of the big formation. I had an impression of beards and horned helmets, heard a harsh ram’s horn blowing continually, and watched the spear and axe blades. Cerdic himself was somewhere in the mass of men, for I could hear his voice calling to his men. ‘Shields tight! Shields tight!’ the King called. Two great war-dogs were loosed at us and I heard shouts and sensed disorder somewhere to my right as the dogs struck the line. The Saxons must have seen my shield wall buckle where the dogs had attacked for they suddenly cheered and surged forward.

‘Tight!’ I shouted, then hefted my spear over my head. At least three Saxons were looking at me as they rushed forward. I was a lord, hung with gold, and if they could send my soul to the Otherworld then they would win renown and wealth. One of them ran ahead of his fellows, intent on glory, his spear aimed at my shield and I guessed he would drop the point at the last moment to take me in the ankle. Then there was no time for such thought, only for fighting. I rammed my spear at the man’s face, and pushed my shield forward and down to deflect his thrust. His blade still scored my ankle, razoring through the leather of my right boot beneath the greave I had taken from Wulfger, but my spear was bloody in his face and he was falling backwards by the time I pulled it back and the next men came to kill me. They came just as the shields of the two lines crashed together with a noise like the sound of colliding worlds. I could smell Saxons now, the smell of leather and sweat and ordure, but I could not smell ale. This battle was too early in the morning, the Saxons had been surprised, and they had not had time to drink themselves into courage. Men heaved at my back, crushing me against my shield which pushed against a Saxon’s shield. I spat at the bearded face, lunged the spear over his shoulder and felt it gripped by an enemy hand. I let it go and, by giving a huge push, freed myself just enough to draw Hywelbane. I hammered the sword down on the man in my front. His helmet was nothing but a leather cap stuffed with rags and Hywelbane’s newly sharpened edge went through it to his brain. She stuck there a moment and I struggled against the dead man’s weight and while I struggled a Saxon swung an axe at my head. My helmet took the blow. There was a clanging noise that filled the universe and in my head a sudden darkness shot with streaks of light. My men said later that I was insensible for minutes, but I never fell because the press of bodies kept me upright. I remember nothing, but few men remember much of the crush of shields. You heave, you curse, you spit and you strike when you can. One of my shield neighbours said I stumbled after the axe blow and almost tripped on the bodies of the men I had killed, but the man behind me grabbed hold of my sword belt and he hauled me upright and my wolftails pressed around to give me protection. The enemy sensed I was hurt and fought harder, axes slashing at battered shields and nicked sword blades, but I slowly came out of the daze to find myself in the second rank and still safe behind the shield’s blessed protection and with Hywelbane still in my hand. My head hurt, but I was unaware of it, only aware of the need to stab and slash and shout and kill. Issa was holding the gap the dogs had made, grimly killing the Saxons who had broken into our front rank and so sealing our line with their bodies.

Cerdic outnumbered us, but he could not outflank us to the north for the heavy horsemen were there and he did not want to throw his men uphill against their charge, and so he sent men to outflank us to the south, but Sagramor anticipated him and led his spearmen into that gap. I remember hearing that clash of shields. Blood had filled my right boot so that it squelched whenever I put weight on it, my skull was a throbbing thing of pain and my mouth fixed in a snarl. The man who had taken my place in the front rank would not yield it back to me. ‘They’re giving, Lord,’ he shouted at me, ‘they’re giving!’ And sure enough the enemy’s pressure was weakening. They were not defeated, just retreating, and suddenly an enemy shout called them back and they gave a last spear lunge or axe stroke and backed hard away. We did not follow. We were too bloody, too battered and too tired to pursue, and we were obstructed by the pile of bodies that mark the tide’s edge of a spear and shield battle. Some in that pile were dead, others stirred in agony and pleaded for death.

Cerdic had pulled his men back to make a new shield wall, one big enough to break through to Aelle’s men, now cut off from safety by Sagramor’s troops who had filled most of the gap between my men and the river. I learned later that Aelle’s men were being pushed back against the river by Tewdric’s spearmen, and Arthur left just enough men to keep those Saxons trapped and sent the rest to reinforce Sagramor.

My helmet had a dent across its left side and a split at the base of the dent that went clean through the iron and the leather liner. When I eased the helmet off it tugged at the blood clotting in my hair. I gingerly felt my scalp, but sensed no splintered bone, only a bruise and a pulsing pain. There was a ragged wound on my left forearm, my chest was bruised and my right ankle was still bleeding. Issa was limping, but claimed it was nothing but a graze. Niall, the leader of the Blackshields, was dead. A spear had spitted his breastplate and he lay on his back, the spear jutting skyward, with his open mouth brimming with blood. Eachern had lost an eye. He padded the open socket with a scrap of rag that he tied round his scalp, then jammed the helmet over the crude bandage and swore to revenge the eye a hundredfold. Arthur rode down from the hill to praise my men. ‘Hold them again!’ he shouted to us, ‘hold them till Oengus comes and then we’ll finish them for ever!’ Mordred rode behind Arthur, his great banner alongside the flag of the bear. Our King carried a drawn sword and his eyes were wide with the excitement of the day. For two miles along the river bank there was dust and blood, dead and dying, iron against flesh.

Tewdric’s gold and scarlet ranks closed around Aelle’s survivors. Those men still fought, and Cerdic now made another attempt to break through to them. Arthur led Mordred back up to the hill, while we locked shields again. ‘They’re eager,’ Cuneglas commented as he saw the Saxon ranks advance again.

‘They’re not drunk,’ I said, ‘that’s why.’

Cuneglas was unhurt and filled with the elation of a man who believes his life is charmed. He had fought in the front of the battle, he had killed, and he had not taken a scratch. He had never been famous as a warrior, not like his father, and now he believed he was earning his crown. ‘Take care, Lord King,’

I said as he went back to his men.

‘We’re winning, DerfelP he called, and hurried away to face the attack. This would be a far bigger attack than the first Saxon assault, for Cerdic had placed his own bodyguard at the centre of his new line and those men released huge war-dogs that raced at Sagramor whose men formed the centre of our line. A heartbeat later the Saxon spearmen struck, hacking into the gaps that the dogs had torn in our line. I heard the shields crash, then had no thought for Sagramor for the Saxon right wing charged into my men.

Again the shields banged onto one another. Again we lunged with spears or hacked down with swords, and again we were crushed against each other. The Saxon opposing me had abandoned his spear and was trying to work his short knife under my ribs. The knife could not pierce my mail armour and he was grunting, shoving, and gritting his teeth as he twisted the blade against the iron rings. I had no room to bring my right arm down to catch his wrist and so I hammered his helmet with Hy welbane’s pommel, and went on hammering until he sank down at my feet and I could step on him. He still tried to cut me with the knife, but the man behind me speared him, then rammed his shield into my back to force me on into the enemy. To my left a Saxon hero was smashing left and right with his axe, savaging a path into our wall, but someone tripped him with a spear shaft and a half-dozen men pounced on the fallen man with swords or spears. He died among the bodies of his victims.

Cerdic was riding up and down behind his line, shouting at his men to push and kill. I called to him, daring him to dismount and come and fight like a man, but he either did not hear me or else ignored the taunts. Instead he spurred southwards to where Arthur was fighting alongside Sagramor. Arthur had seen the pressure on Sagramor’s men and led his horsemen behind the line to reinforce the Numidian, and now our cavalry were shoving their horses into the crush of men and stabbing over the heads of the front rank with their long spears. Mordred was there, and men said later that he fought like a demon. Our King never lacked brute valour in battle, just sense and decency in life. He was no horse soldier, and so he had dismounted and taken a place in the front rank. I saw him later and he was covered in blood, none of it his own. Guinevere was behind our line. She had seen Mordred’s discarded horse, mounted it, and was loosing arrows from its back. I saw one strike and shiver in Cerdic’s own shield, but he brushed the thing away as if it were a fly.

Sheer exhaustion ended that second clash of the walls. There came a point where we were too tired to lift a sword again, when we could only lean on our enemy’s shield and spit insults over the rim. Occasionally a man would summon the strength to raise an axe or thrust a spear, and for a moment the rage of battle would flare up, only to subside as the shields soaked up the force. We were all bleeding, all bruised, all dry-mouthed, and when the enemy backed away we were grateful for the respite. We pulled back too, freeing ourselves from the dead who lay in a heap where the shield walls had met. We carried our wounded with us. Among our dead were a few whose foreheads had been branded by the touch of a red-hot spear blade, marking them as men who had joined Lancelot’s rebellion the previous year, but they were men who now had died for Arthur. I also found Bors lying wounded. He was shuddering and complaining of the cold. His belly had been cut open so that when I lifted him his guts spilled on the ground. He made a mewing noise as I laid him down and told him that the Otherworld waited for him with roaring fires, good companions and endless mead, and he gripped my left hand hard as I cut his throat with one quick slash of Hywelbane. A Saxon crawled pitifully and blindly among the dead, blood dripping from his mouth, until Issa picked up a fallen axe and chopped down into the man’s backbone. I watched one of my youngsters vomit, then stagger a few paces before a friend caught him and held him up. The youngster was crying because he had emptied his bowels and he was ashamed of himself, but he was not the only one. The field stank of dung and blood. Aelle’s men, far behind us, were in a tight shield wall with their backs to the river. Tewdric’s men faced them, but were content to keep those Saxons quiet rather than fight them now, for cornered men make terrible enemies. And still Cerdic did not abandon his ally. He still hoped he could drive through Arthur’s spearmen to join Aelle and then strike north to split our forces in two. He had tried twice, and now he gathered the remnants of his army for the last great effort. He still had fresh men, some of them warriors hired from Clovis’s army of the Franks, and those men were now brought to the front of the battle line and we watched as the wizards harangued them, then turned to spit their maledictions at us. There was to be nothing hurried about this attack. There was no need because the day was still young, it was not even midday, and Cerdic had time to let his men eat, drink and ready themselves. One of their war drums began its sullen beat as still more Saxons formed on their army’s flanks, some with leashed dogs. We were all exhausted. I sent men to the river for water and we shared it out, gulping from the helmets of the dead. Arthur came to me and grimaced at my state. ‘Can you hold them a third time?’ he asked.

‘We have to, Lord,’ I said, though it would be hard. We had lost scores of men and our wall would be thin. Our spears and swords were blunted now and there were not enough sharpening stones to make them keen again, while the enemy was being reinforced with fresh men whose weapons were untouched. Arthur slid from Llamrei, threw her reins to Hygwydd, then walked with me to the scattered tide line of the dead. He knew some of the men by name, and he frowned when he saw the dead youngsters who had scarcely had time to live before they met their enemy. He stooped and touched a finger to Bors’s forehead, then walked on to pause beside a Saxon who lay with an arrow embedded in his open mouth. For a moment I thought he was about to speak, then he just smiled. He knew Guinevere was with my men, indeed he must have seen her on her horse and seen her banner that now flew alongside my starry flag. He looked at the arrow again and I saw a flicker of happiness on his face. He touched my arm and led me back towards our men who were sitting or else leaning on their spears. A man in the gathering Saxon ranks had recognized Arthur and now strode into the wide space between the armies and shouted a challenge at him. It was Liofa, the swordsman I had faced at Thunreslea, and he called Arthur a coward and a woman. I did not translate and Arthur did not ask me to. Liofa stalked closer. He carried no shield and wore no armour, not even a helmet, and carried only his sword and that he now sheathed as if to show that he had no fear of us. I could see the scar on his cheek and I was tempted to turn and give him a bigger scar, a scar that would put him in a grave, but Arthur checked me. ‘Let him be,’ he said.

Liofa went on taunting us. He minced like a woman, suggesting that was what we were, and he stood with his back to us to invite a man to come and attack him. Still no one moved. He turned to face us again, shook his head with pity for our cowardice, then strode on down the tide line of the dead. The Saxons cheered him while my men watched in silence. I passed word down our line that he was Cerdic’s champion, and dangerous, and that he should be left alone. It galled our men to see a Saxon so rampant, but it was better that Liofa should live now than be given a chance to humiliate one of our tired spearmen. Arthur tried to give our men heart by remounting Llamrei and, ignoring Liofa’s taunts, galloping along the line of corpses. He scattered the naked Saxon wizards, then drew Excalibur and spurred yet closer to the Saxon line, flaunting his white crest and bloodied cloak. His red-crossed shield glittered and my men cheered to see him. The Saxons shrank away from him, while Liofa, left impotent in Arthur’s wake, called him woman-hearted. Arthur wheeled the horse and kicked her back to me. His gesture had implied that Liofa was not a worthy opponent, and it must have stung the Saxon champion’s pride because he came still nearer to our line in search of an opponent.

Liofa stopped by a pile of corpses. He stepped into the gore, then seized a fallen shield that he dragged free. He held it up so that we could all see the eagle of Powys and, when he was sure we had seen the symbol, he threw the shield down then opened his trews and pissed on the insignia of Powys. He moved his aim so that his urine fell on the shield’s dead owner, and that insult proved too great. Cuneglas roared his anger and ran out of the line.

‘No!’ I shouted and started towards Cuneglas. It was better, I thought, that I should fight Liofa, for at least I knew his tricks and his speed, but I was too late. Cuneglas had his sword drawn and he ignored me. He believed himself invulnerable that day. He was the king of battle, a man who had needed to show himself a hero, and he had achieved that and now he believed that everything was possible. He would strike down this impudent Saxon in front of his men, and for years the bards would sing of King Cuneglas the Mighty, King Cuneglas the Saxon-killer, King Cuneglas the Warrior. I could not save him for he would lose face if he turned away or if another man took his place and so I watched, horrified, as he strode confidently towards the slim Saxon who wore no armour. Cuneglas was in his father’s old wargear, iron trimmed with gold and with a helmet crested with an eagle’s wing. He was smiling. He was soaring at that moment, filled with the day’s heroics, and he believed himself touched by the Gods. He did not hesitate, but cut at Liofa and we could all have sworn that the cut must strike home, but Liofa glided from under the slash, stepped aside, laughed, then stepped aside again as Cuneglas’s sword cut air a second time.

Both our men and the Saxons were roaring encouragement. Arthur and I alone were silent. I was watching Ceinwyn’s brother die, and there was not a thing I could do to stop it. Or nothing I could do with honour, for if I were to rescue Cuneglas then I would disgrace him. Arthur looked down at me from his saddle with a worried face.

I could not relieve Arthur’s worry. ‘I fought him,’ I said bitterly, ‘and he’s a killer.’

‘You live.’

‘I’m a warrior, Lord,’ I said. Cuneglas had never been a warrior, which was why he wanted to prove himself now, but Liofa was making a fool of him. Cuneglas would attack, trying to smash Liofa down with his sword, and every time the Saxon just ducked or slid aside, and never once did he counter-attack; and slowly our men fell silent, for they saw that the King was tiring and that Liofa was playing with him.

Then a group of men from Powys rushed forward to save their King and Liofa took three fast backward steps and mutely gestured at them with his sword. Cuneglas turned to see his men. ‘Go back!’

he shouted at them. ‘Go back!’ he repeated, more angrily. He must have known he was doomed, but he would not lose face. Honour is everything.

The men from Powys stopped. Cuneglas turned back to Liofa, and this time he did not rush forward, but went more cautiously. For the first time his sword actually touched Liofa’s blade, and I saw Liofa slip on the grass and Cuneglas shouted his victory and raised his sword to kill his tormentor, but Liofa was spinning away, the slip deliberate, and the whirl of his swing carried his sword low above the grass so that it sliced into Cuneglas’s right leg. For a moment Cuneglas stood upright, his sword faltering, and then, as Liofa straightened, he sank. The Saxon waited as the King collapsed, then he kicked Cuneglas’s shield aside and stabbed down once with his sword point.

The Saxons cheered themselves hoarse, for Liofa’s triumph was an omen for their victory. Liofa himself had time only to seize Cuneglas’s sword, then he ran lithely away from the men who chased him for vengeance. He easily outstripped them, then turned and taunted them. He had no need to fight them, for he had won his challenge. He had killed an enemy King and I did not doubt that the Saxon bards would sing of Liofa the Terrible, the slayer of kings. He had given the Saxons their first victory of the day. Arthur dismounted and he and I insisted on carrying Cuneglas’s body back to his men. We both wept. In all the long years we had possessed no stauncher ally than Cuneglas ap Gorfyddyd, King of Powys. He had never argued with Arthur and never once failed him, while to me he had been like a brother. He was a good man, a giver of gold, a lover of justice, and now he was dead. The warriors of Powys took their dead King from us and carried him behind the shield wall. ‘The name of his killer,’ I said to them, ‘is Liofa, and I will give a hundred gold coins to the man who brings me his head.’

Then a shout turned me. The Saxons, assured of victory, had started their advance. My men stood. They wiped sweat from their eyes. I pulled on my battered and bloody helmet, closed its cheekpieces, and snatched up a fallen spear.

It was time to fight again.

This was the biggest Saxon attack of the day and it was made by a surge of confident spearmen who had recovered from their early surprise and who now came to splinter our lines and to rescue Aelle. They roared their war chants as they came, they beat spears on shields and they promised each other a score of British dead apiece. The Saxons knew they had won. They had taken the worst that Arthur could hurl at them, they had fought us to a standstill, they had seen their champion slay a King, and now, with their fresh troops in the lead, they advanced to finish us. The Franks drew back their light throwing-spears, readying themselves to rain a shower of sharpened iron on our shield wall. When suddenly a horn sounded from Mynydd Baddon.

At first few of us heard the horn, so loud were the shouts and the tramp of feet and the moans of the dying, but then the horn called again, then a third time, and at the third call men turned and stared up at Mynydd Baddon’s abandoned rampart. Even the Franks and Saxons stopped. They were only fifty paces from us when the horn checked them and when they, like us, turned to gaze up the long green hillside.

To see a single horseman and a banner.

There was only one banner, but it was a huge one; a wind-spread expanse of white linen on which was embroidered the red dragon of Dumnonia. The beast, all claws, tail and fire, reared on the flag that caught the wind and almost toppled the horseman who carried it. Even at this distance we could see that the horseman rode stiffly and awkwardly as though he could neither handle his black horse nor hold the great banner steady, but then two spearmen appeared behind him and they pricked his horse with their weapons and the beast sprang away down the hill and its rider was jerked hard backwards by the sudden motion. He swayed forward again as the horse raced down the slope, his black cloak flew up behind and I saw that his armour beneath the cloak was shining white, as white as the linen of his fluttering flag. Behind him, spilling off Mynydd Baddon as we had spilled just after dawn, came a shrieking mass of men with black shields and other men with tusked boars on their shields. Oengus mac Airem and Culhwch had come, though instead of striking down the Corinium road they had first worked their way onto Mynydd Baddon so that their men would link up with ours. But it was the horseman I watched. He rode so awkwardly and I could see now that he was tied onto the horse. His ankles were linked under the stallion’s black belly with rope, and his body was fixed to the saddle by what had to be strips of timber clamped to the saddle’s tree. He had no helmet so that his long hair flew free in the wind, and beneath the hair the rider’s face was nothing but a grinning skull covered by desiccated yellow skin. It was Gawain, dead Gawain, his lips and gums shrunken back from his teeth, his nostrils two black slits and his eyeballs empty holes. His head lolled from side to side while his body, to which the dragon banner of Britain was strapped, swayed from side to side. It was death on a black horse called Anbarr, and at the sight of that ghoul coming at their flank, the Saxon confidence shuddered. The Blackshields were shrieking behind Gawain, driving the horse and its dead rider over the hedges and straight at the Saxon flank. The Blackshields did not attack in a line, but came in a howling mass. This was the Irish way of war, a terrifying assault of maddened men who came to the slaughter like lovers.

For a moment the battle trembled. The Saxons had been on the point of victory, but Arthur saw their hesitation and unexpectedly shouted us forward. ‘On!’ he shouted, and ‘Forward!’ Mordred added his command to Arthur’s, ‘Forward!’

Thus began the slaughter of Mynydd Baddon. The bards tell it all, and for once they do not exaggerate. We crossed our tide line of dead and carried our spears to the Saxon army just as the Blackshields and Culhwch’s men hit their flank. For a few heartbeats there was the clangour of sword on sword, the thump of axe on shield, the grunting, heaving, sweating battle of locked shield walls, but then the Saxon army broke and we fought among their shredding ranks in fields made slick with Frankish and Saxon blood. The Saxons fled, broken by a wild charge led by a dead man on a black horse, and we killed them until we thought nothing of killing. We crammed the bridge of swords with Sais dead. We speared them, we disembowelled them, and some we just drowned in the river. We took no prisoners at first, but vented years of hatred on our hated enemies. Cerdic’s army had shattered under the twin assault, and we roared into their breaking ranks and vied each other in killing. It was an orgy of death, a welter of slaughter. There were some Saxons so terrified that they could not move, who literally stood with wide eyes waiting to be killed, while there were others who fought like demons and others who died running and others who tried to escape to the river. We had lost all semblance of a shield wall, we were nothing but a pack of maddened war-dogs tearing an enemy to pieces. I saw Mordred limping on his clubbed foot as he cut down Saxons, I saw Arthur riding down fugitives, saw the men of Powys avenging their King a thousandfold. I saw Galahad cut left and right from horseback, his face as calm as ever. I saw Tewdric in a priest’s robes, skeletally thin and with his hair tonsured, savagely slashing with a great sword. Old Bishop Emrys was there, a huge cross hanging about his neck and an old breastplate tied over his gown with horsehair rope. ‘Get to hell!’ he roared as he jabbed at helpless Saxons with a spear.

‘Burn in the cleansing fire for ever!’ I saw Oengus mac Airem, his beard soaked with Saxon blood, spearing yet more Sais. I saw Guinevere riding Mordred’s horse and chopping with the sword we had given her. I saw Gawain, his head fallen clean off, slumping dead on his bleeding horse that peacefully cropped the grass among the Saxon corpses. I saw Merlin at last, for he had come with Gawain’s corpse, and though he was an old man, he was striking at Saxons with his staff and cursing them for miserable worms. He had an escort of Blackshields. He saw me, smiled, and waved me on to the slaughter.

We overran Cerdic’s village where women and children cowered in the huts. Culhwch and a score of men were working a stolid butcher’s path through the few Saxon spearmen who tried to protect their families and Cerdic’s abandoned baggage. The Saxon guards died and the plundered gold spilled like chaff. I remember dust rising like a mist, screams of women and men, children and dogs running in terror, burning huts spewing smoke and always Arthur’s big horses thundering through the panic with spears dipping to take enemy spearmen in the back. There is no joy like the destruction of a broken army. The shield wall breaks and death rules, and so we killed till our arms were too tired to lift a sword and when the killing was done we found ourselves in a swamp of blood, and that was when our men discovered the ale and mead in the Saxon baggage and the drinking began. Some Saxon women found protection amongst our few sober men who carried water from the river to our wounded. We looked for friends alive and embraced them, saw friends dead and wept for them. We knew the delirium of utter victory, we shared our tears and laughter, and some men, tired as they were, danced for pure joy. Cerdic escaped. He and his bodyguard cut through the chaos and climbed the eastern hills. Some Saxons swam south across the river, while others followed Cerdic and a few pretended death and then slipped away in the night, but most stayed in the valley beneath Mynydd Baddon and remain there to this day.

For we had won. We had turned the fields beside the river into a slaughterhouse. We had saved Britain and fulfilled Arthur’s dream. We were the kings of slaughter and the lords of the dead, and we howled our bloody triumph at the sky.

For the power of the Sais was broken.