Excalibur

PART FOUR The Last Enchantment

Spring has come to Dinnewrac. The monastery warms, and the silence of our prayers is broken by the bleating of lambs and the song of larks. White violets and stitchwort grow where snow lay for so long, but best of all is the news that Igraine has given birth to a child. It is a boy, and both he and his mother live. God be thanked for that, and for the season’s warmth, but for little else. Spring should be a happy season, but there are dark rumours of enemies.

The Saxons have returned, though whether it was their spearmen who started the fires we saw on our eastern horizon last night, no one knows. Yet the fires burned bright, flaring in the night sky like a foretaste of hell. A farmer came at dawn to give us some split logs of lime that we can use to make a new butter churn, and he told us the fires were set by raiding Irish, but we doubt that for there have been too many stories of Saxon warbands in the last few weeks. Arthur’s achievement was to keep the Saxons at bay for a whole generation, and to do it he taught our Kings courage, but how feeble our rulers have become since then! And now the Sais return like a plague.

Dafydd, the clerk of the justice who translates these parchments into the British tongue, arrived to collect the newest skins today and he told me that the fires were almost certainly Saxon mischief, and afterwards informed me that Igraine’s new son is to be named Arthur. Arthur ap Brochvael ap Perddel ap Cuneglas; a good name, though Dafydd plainly did not approve of it, and at first I was not sure why. He is a small man, not unlike Sansum, with the same busy expression and the same bristly hair. He sat in my window to read the finished parchments and kept tutting and shaking his head at my handwriting.

‘Why,’ he finally asked me, ‘did Arthur abandon Dumnonia?’

‘Because Meurig insisted on it,’ I explained, ‘and because Arthur himself never wanted to rule.’

‘But it was irresponsible of him!’ Dafydd said sternly.

‘Arthur was not a king,’ I said, ‘and our laws insist that only kings can rule.’

‘Laws are malleable,’ Dafydd said with a sniff, ‘I should know, and Arthur should have been a king.’

‘I agree,’ I said, ‘but he was not. He was not born to it and Mordred was.’

‘Then nor was Gwydre born to the kingship,’ Dafydd objected.

‘True,’ I said, ‘but if Mordred had died, Gwydre had as good a claim as anyone, except Arthur, of course, but Arthur did not want to be King.’ I wondered how often I had explained this same thing.

‘Arthur came to Britain,’ I said, ‘because he took an oath to protect Mordred, and by the time he went to Siluria he had achieved all that he had set out to do. He had united the kingdoms of Britain, he had given Dumnonia justice and he had defeated the Saxons. He might have resisted Meurig’s demands to yield his power, but in his heart he didn’t want to, and so he gave Dumnonia back to its rightful King and watched all that he had achieved fall apart.’

‘So he should have remained in power,’ Dafydd argued. Dafydd, I think, is very like Saint Sansum, a man who can never be in the wrong.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but he was tired. He wanted other men to carry the burden. If anyone was to blame, it was me! I should have stayed in Dumnonia instead of spending so much time in Isca. But at the time none of us saw what was happening. None of us realized Mordred would prove a good soldier, and when he did we convinced ourselves that he would die soon enough and Gwydre would become King. Then all would have been well. We lived in hope rather than in the real world.’

‘I still think Arthur let us down,’ Dafydd said, his tone explaining why he disapproved of the new Edling’s name. How many times have I been forced to listen to that same condemnation of Arthur? If only Arthur had stayed in power, men say, then the Saxons would still be paying us tribute and Britain would stretch from sea to sea, but when Britain did have Arthur it just grumbled about him. When he gave folk what they wanted, they complained because it was not enough. The Christians attacked him for favouring the pagans, the pagans attacked him for tolerating the Christians, and the Kings, all except Cuneglas and Oengus mac Airem, were jealous of him. Oengus’s support counted for little, but when Cuneglas died Arthur lost his most valuable royal supporter. Besides, Arthur did not let anyone down. Britain let itself down. Britain let the Saxons creep back, Britain squabbled amongst itself and then Britain whined that it was all Arthur’s fault. Arthur, who had given them victory!

Dafydd skimmed through the last few pages. ‘Did Ceinwyn recover?’ he asked me.

‘Praise God, yes,’ I said, ‘and lived for many years after.’ I was about to tell Dafydd something of those last years, but I could see he was not interested and so I kept my memories to myself. In the end Ceinwyn died of a fever. I was with her, and I wanted to burn her corpse, but Sansum insisted that she was buried in the Christian manner. I obeyed him, but a month later I arranged for some men, the sons and grandsons of my old spearmen, to dig up her corpse and burn it on a pyre so that her soul could go to join her daughters in the Otherworld and for that sinful action I have no regrets. I doubt that any man will do as much for me, though perhaps Igraine, if she reads these words, will have my balefire built. I pray so.

‘Do you change the tale when you translate it?’ I asked Dafydd.

‘Change it?’ He looked indignant. ‘My Queen won’t let me change a syllable!’

‘Truly?’ I asked.

‘I might correct some infelicities of grammar,’ he said, collecting the skins, ‘but nothing else. I presume the ending of the story is close now?’

‘It is.’

‘Then I shall return in a week,’ he promised, and pushed the parchments into a bag and hurried away. A moment later Bishop Sansum scurried into my room. He was carrying a strange bundle which at first I took to be a stick wrapped up in an old cloak. ‘Did Dafydd bring news?’ he asked.

‘The Queen is well,’ I said, ‘as is her child.’ I decided against telling Sansum that the child was to be named Arthur, for it would only annoy the saint and life is much easier in Dinnewrac when Sansum is in a good temper.

‘I asked for news,’ Sansum snapped, ‘not women’s gossip about a child. What about the fires? Did Dafydd mention the fires?’

‘He knows no more than we do, Bishop,’ I said, ‘but King Brochvael believes they are Saxons.’

‘God preserve us,’ Sansum said, and walked to my window from where the smear of smoke was still just visible in the east. ‘God and His saints preserve us,’ he prayed, then came to my desk and put the strange bundle on top of this skin. He pulled away the cloak and I saw, to my astonishment, and almost to the provocation of my tears, that it was Hywelbane. I did not dare show my emotion, but instead crossed myself as if I was shocked by the appearance of a weapon in our monastery. ‘There are enemies near,’ Sansum said, explaining the sword’s presence.

‘I fear you are right, Bishop,’ I said.

‘And enemies provoke hungry men in these hills,’ Sansum went on, ‘so at night you will stand guard on the monastery.’

‘So be it, Lord,’ I said humbly. But me? Stand guard? I am white-haired, old and feeble. One might as well ask a toddling child to stand guard as to rely on me, but I made no protest and once Sansum had left the room I slid Hywelbane from her scabbard and thought how heavy she had become during the long years she had lain in the monastery’s treasure cupboard. She was heavy and clumsy, but she was still my sword, and I peered at the yellowed pig bones set into her hilt and then at the lover’s ring that was bound about its pommel and I saw, on that flattened ring, the tiny scraps of gold I had stolen from the Cauldron so long ago. She brought back so many stories, that sword. There was a patch of rust on her blade and I carefully scraped it away with the knife I use for sharpening my quills, and then I cradled her for a long time, imagining that I was young again and still strong enough to wield her. But me? Stand guard? In truth Sansum did not want me to stand guard, but rather to stand like a fool to be sacrificed while he scuttled out of the back door with Saint Tudwal in one hand and the monastery’s gold in the other. But if that is to be my fate I will not complain. I would rather die like my father with my sword in my hand, even if my arm is weak and the sword blunt. That was not the fate Merlin wanted for me, nor what Arthur wanted, but it is not a bad way for a soldier to die, and though I have been a monk these many years and a Christian even longer, in my sinful soul I am still a spearman of Mithras. And so I kissed my Hywelbane, glad to see her after all these years. So now I shall write the tale’s ending with my sword beside me and I shall hope that I am given time to finish this tale of Arthur, my Lord, who was betrayed, reviled and, after his departure, missed like no other man was ever missed in all of Britain’s history.

I fell into a fever after my hand was struck oif, and when I woke I discovered Ceinwyn sitting beside my bed. At first I did not recognize her, for her hair was short and had gone as white as ash. But it was my Ceinwyn, she was alive and her health was coming back, and when she saw the light in my eyes she leaned forward and laid her cheek on mine. I put my left arm around her and discovered I had no hand to stroke her back, only a stump bound in bloody cloth. I could feel the hand, I could even feel it itching, but there was no hand there. It had been burned. A week later I was baptized in the River Usk. Bishop Emrys performed the ceremony, and once he had dipped me in the cold water, Ceinwyn followed me down the muddy bank and insisted on being baptized as well. ‘I will go where my man goes,’ she told Bishop Emrys, and so he folded her hands on her breasts and tipped her back into the river. A choir of women sang as we were baptized and that night, dressed in white, we received the Christian bread and wine for the first time. After the mass Morgan produced a parchment on which she had written my promise to obey her husband in the Christian faith and she demanded that I sign my name.

‘I’ve already given you my word,’ I objected.

‘You will sign, Derfel,’ Morgan insisted, ‘and you will swear the oath on a crucifix as well.’

I sighed and signed. Christians, it seemed, did not trust the older form of oath-making, but demanded parchment and ink. And so I acknowledged Sansum as my Lord and, after I had written my name, Ceinwyn insisted on adding her own. Thus began the second half of my life, the half in which I have kept my oath to Sansum, though not as well as Morgan hoped. If Sansum knew I was writing this tale he would construe it as a breaking of the promise and punish me accordingly, but I no longer care. I have committed many sins, but breaking oaths was not one of them.

After my baptism I half expected a summons from Sansum, who was still with King Meurig in Gwent, but the mouse lord simply kept my written promise and demanded nothing, not even money. Not then. The stump of my wrist healed slowly, and I did not help the healing by insisting on practising with a shield. In battle a man puts his left arm through the two shield loops and grips the wooden handle beyond, but I no longer had fingers to grip the shield and so I had the loops remade as buckled straps that could be tightened about my forearm. It was not as secure as the proper way, but it was better than having no shield, and once I had become used to the tight straps I practised with sword and shield against Galahad, Culhwch or Arthur. I found the shield clumsy, but I could still fight, even though every practice bout left the stump bleeding so that Ceinwyn would scold me as she put on a new dressing. The full moon came and I took no sword or sacrifice to Nant Dduu. I waited for Nimue’s vengeance, but none came. The feast of Beltain was a week after the full moon and Ceinwyn and I, obedient to Morgan’s orders, did not extinguish our fires or stay awake to see the new fires lit, but Culhwch came to us next morning with a brand of the new fire that he tossed into our hearth. ‘You want me to go to Gwent, Derfel?’ he asked.

‘Gwent?’ I asked. ‘Why?’

‘To murder that little toad, Sansum, of course.’

‘He’s not troubling me.’

‘Yet,’ Culhwch grumbled, ‘but he will. Can’t imagine you as a Christian. Does it feel different?’

‘No.’

Poor Culhwch. He rejoiced to see Ceinwyn well, but hated the bargain I had made with Morgan to make her well. He, like many others, wondered why I did not simply break my promise to Sansum, but I feared Ceinwyn’s sickness would return if I did and so I stayed true. In time that obedience became a habit, and once Ceinwyn was dead I found I had no will to break the promise, even though her death had loosed the promise’s grip on me.

But this lay far in the unknown future on that day when the new fires warmed cold hearths. It was a beautiful day of sunshine and blossom. I remember we bought some goslings in the marketplace that morning, thinking our grandchildren would like to see them grow in the small pond that lay behind our quarters, and afterwards I went with Galahad to the amphitheatre where I practised again with my clumsy shield. We were the only spearmen there, for most of the others were still recovering from a night of drinking. ‘Goslings aren’t a good idea,’ Galahad said, rattling my shield with a solid blow of his spear butt.

‘Why not?’

‘They grow up to be bad-tempered.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘They grow up to become supper.’

Gwydre interrupted us with a summons from his father, and we strolled back into the town to discover Arthur had gone to Bishop Emrys’s palace. The Bishop was seated, while Arthur, in shirt and trews, was leaning on a big table that was covered with wood shavings on which the Bishop had written lists of spearmen, weapons and boats. Arthur looked up at us and for a heartbeat he said nothing, but I remember his grey-bearded face was very grim. Then he uttered one word. ‘War.’

Galahad crossed himself, while I, still accustomed to my old ways, touched Hywelbane’s hilt. ‘War?’ I asked.

‘Mordred is marching on us,’ Arthur said. ‘He’s marching right now! Meurig gave him permission to cross Gwent.’

‘With three hundred and fifty spearmen, we hear,’ Emrys added.

To this day I believe it was Sansum’s persuasion that convinced Meurig to betray Arthur. I have no proof of that, and Sansum has ever denied it, but the scheme reeked of the mouse lord’s cunning. It is true that Sansum had once warned us of the possibility of just such an attack, but the mouse lord was forever cautious in his betrayals and if Arthur had won the battle that Sansum confidently expected to be fought in Isca then he would have wanted a reward from Arthur. He certainly wanted no reward from Mordred, for Sansum’s scheme, if it was indeed his, was intended to benefit Meurig. Let Mordred and Arthur fight to the death, then Meurig could take over Dumnonia and the mouse lord would rule in Meurig’s name.

And Meurig did want Dumnonia. He wanted its rich farmlands and its wealthy towns, and so he encouraged the war, though he strenuously denied any such encouragement. If Mordred wanted to visit his uncle, he said, who was he to stop it? And if Mordred wanted an escort of three hundred and fifty spearmen, who was Meurig to deny a King his entourage? And so he gave Mordred the permission he wanted, and by the time we first heard of the attack the leading horsemen of Mordred’s army were already past Glevum and hurrying west towards us.

Thus by treachery, and through the ambition of a weak King, Arthur’s last war began. We were ready for that war. We had expected the attack to come weeks before, and though Mordred’s timing surprised us our plans were all made. We would sail south across the Severn Sea and march to Durnovaria where we expected Sagramor’s men to join us. Then, with our forces united, we would follow Arthur’s bear north to confront Mordred as he returned from Siluria. We expected a battle, we expected to win, and afterwards we would acclaim Gwydre as King of Dumnonia on Caer Cadarn. It was the old story; one more battle, then everything would change.

Messengers were sent to the coast demanding that every Silurian fishing-boat be brought to Isca, and while those boats rowed up river on the flood tide, we readied for our hasty departure. Swords and spears were sharpened, armour was polished and food was put into baskets or sacks. We packed the treasures from the three palaces and the coins from the treasury, and warned Isca’s inhabitants to be ready to flee westwards before Mordred’s men arrived.

Next morning we had twenty-seven fishing-boats moored in the river beneath Isca’s Roman bridge. A hundred and sixty-three spearmen were ready to embark, and most of those spearmen had families, but there was room in the boats for them all. We were forced to leave our horses behind, for Arthur had discovered that horses make bad sailors. While I had been travelling to meet Nimue he had tried loading horses onto one of the fishing-boats, but the animals panicked in even the gentlest waves, and one had even kicked its way through the boat’s hull and so on the day before we sailed we drove the animals to pastures on a distant farm and promised ourselves we would return for them once Gwydre was made King. Morgan alone refused to sail with us, but instead went to join her husband in Gwent. We began loading the boats at dawn. First we placed the gold in the bottom of the boats, and on top of the gold we piled our armour and our food, and then, under a grey sky and in a brisk wind, we began to embark. Most of the boats took ten or eleven people, and once the boats were filled they pulled into the middle of the river and anchored there so that the whole fleet could leave together. The enemy arrived just as the last boat was being loaded. That was the largest boat and it belonged to Balig, my sister’s husband. In it were Arthur, Guinevere, Gwydre, Morwenna and her children, Galahad, Taliesin, Ceinwyn and me, together with Culhwch, his one remaining wife and two of his sons. Arthur’s banner flew from the boat’s high prow and Gwydre’s standard flapped at the stern. We were in high spirits, for we were sailing to give Gwydre his kingdom, but just as Balig was shouting at Hygwydd, Arthur’s servant, to hurry aboard, the enemy came.

Hygwydd was bringing a last bundle from Arthur’s palace and he was only fifty paces from the river bank when he looked behind and saw the horsemen coming from the town gate. He had time to drop the bundle and half draw his sword, but then the horses were on him and a spear took him in the neck. Balig threw the gangplank overboard, pulled a knife from his belt and slashed the stern mooring line. His Saxon crewman threw off the bow line and our boat drifted out into the current as the horsemen reached the bank. Arthur was standing and staring in horror at the dying Hygwydd, but I was looking towards the amphitheatre where a horde had appeared.

It was not Mordred’s army. This was a swarm of the insane; a scrabbling rush of bent, broken and bitter creatures who surged round the amphitheatre’s stone arches and ran down to the river bank yelping small cries. They were in rags, their hair was wild and their eyes filled with a fanatical rage. It was Nimue’s army of the mad. Most were armed with nothing but sticks, though a few had spears. The horsemen were all armed with spears and shields, and they were not mad. They were fugitives from Diwrnach’s Bloodshields and still wore their ragged black cloaks and carried their blood-darkened shields, and they scattered the mad people as they spurred down the bank to keep pace with us. Some of the mad went down beneath the horses’ hoofs, but dozens more just plunged into the river and swam clumsily towards our boats. Arthur shouted at the boatmen to let go their anchors, and one by one the heavily laden boats cut themselves free and began to drift. Some of the crews were reluctant to abandon the heavy stones that served as anchors and tried to haul them up, and so the drifting boats crashed into the stationary ones and all the time the desperate, sad, mad things were thrashing clumsily towards us. ‘Spear butts!’ Arthur shouted, and seized his own spear, turned it, and thrust it hard down onto a swimmer’s head.

‘Oars!’ Balig called, but no one heeded him. We were too busy pushing the swimmers away from the hull. I worked one-handed, thrusting attackers under the water, but one madman seized my spear shaft and almost pulled me into the water. I let him have the weapon, drew Hywelbane and sliced her down. The first blood flowed on the river.

The river’s north bank was now thick with Nimue’s howling, capering followers. Some threw spears at us, but most just screamed their hate, while others followed the swimmers into the river. A long-haired man with a hare lip tried to climb aboard our bows, but the Saxon kicked him in the face, then kicked him again so that he fell. Taliesin had found a spear and was using its blade on other swimmers. Downstream of us a boat drifted onto the muddy bank where its crew desperately tried to pole themselves free of the mud, but they were too slow and Nimue’s spearmen scrambled aboard. They were led by Bloodshields, and those practised killers screamed defiance as they carried their spears down the stranded boat’s length. It was Bishop Emrys’s boat and I saw the white-haired Bishop parry a spear with a sword, but then he was killed and a score of mad things followed the Bloodshields onto the slippery deck. The Bishop’s wife screamed briefly, then was savaged by a spear. Knives slashed and ripped and stabbed, and blood trickled from the scuppers to flow towards the sea. A man in a deerskin tunic balanced himself on the stern of the captured boat, and, as we drifted past, leapt towards our gunwale. Gwydre raised his spear and the man shrieked as he impaled himself on the long shaft. I remember his hands gripping the spear pole while his body writhed on the point, then Gwydre dropped both spear and man into the river and drew his sword. His mother was thrusting a spear into the thrashing arms beside the boat. Hands clung to our gunwale and we stamped on them, or cut them with swords, and gradually our boat drew away from its attackers. All the boats were drifting now, some sideways, some stern first, and the boatmen were swearing and shouting at each other or else screaming at the spearmen to use the oars. A spear flew from the bank and thumped into our hull, and then the first arrows flew. They were hunters’ arrows, and they hummed as they whipped over our heads.

‘Shields!’ Arthur shouted, and we made a wall of shields along the boat’s gunwale. The arrows spat into them. I was crouching beside Balig, protecting both of us, and my shield quivered as the small arrows thumped home.

We were saved by the river’s swift current and by the ebbing tide which carried our jumbled mass of boats downstream and so out of the bowmen’s range. The cheering, raving horde followed us, but west of the amphitheatre there was a stretch of boggy ground and that slowed our pursuers and gave us time in which we could at last make order out of chaos. The cries of our attackers followed us, and their bodies drifted in the current beside our small fleet, but at last we had oars and could pull the boat’s bow around and follow the other vessels towards the sea. Our two banners were stuck thick with arrows.

‘Who are they?’ Arthur demanded, staring back at the horde.

‘Nimue’s army,’ I said bitterly. Thanks to Morgan’s skill, Nimue’s charms had failed and so she had unleashed her followers to fetch Excalibur and Gwydre.

‘Why didn’t we see them coming?’ Arthur wanted to know.

‘A charm of concealment, Lord?’ Taliesin guessed, and I remembered how often Nimue had worked such charms.

Galahad scoffed at the pagan explanation. ‘They marched through the night,’ he suggested, ‘and hid in the woods until they were ready, and we were all too busy to look for them.’

‘The bitch can fight Mordred now instead of us,’ Culhwch suggested.

‘She won’t,’ I said, ‘she’ll join him.’

But Nimue had not finished with us yet. A group of horsemen were galloping on the road that led northwards about the swamp, and a horde of folk followed those spearmen on foot. The river did not run straight to the sea, but made vast loops through the coastal plain and I knew that at every western curve we would find the enemy waiting.

The horsemen did indeed wait for us, but the river widened as it neared the sea and the water ran swiftly, and at each bend we were swept safely past them. The horsemen called curses down on us, then galloped on to find the next bend from where they could launch their spears and arrows at us. Just before the sea there was a long straight stretch of the river and Nimue’s horsemen kept pace with us all down the length of that reach, and that was when I first saw Nimue herself. She rode a white horse, was dressed in a white robe, and had her hair tonsured like a Druid. She carried Merlin’s staff and wore a sword at her side. She shouted at us, but the wind snatched her words away, and then the river curved eastwards and we slid away from her between the reed-thick banks. Nimue turned away and spurred her horse towards the river’s mouth.

‘We’re safe now,’ Arthur said. We could smell the sea, gulls called above us, ahead was the endless sound of waves breaking on a shore, and Balig and the Saxon were hitching the sail’s yard to the ropes that hoisted it up the mast. There was one last great loop of the river to negotiate, one last encounter with Nimue’s horsemen to endure, and then we would be swept out into the Severn Sea.

‘How many men did we lose?’ Arthur wanted to know, and we shouted questions and answers back and forth between the small fleet. Only two men had been struck by arrows, and the one stranded boat had been overwhelmed, but most of his small army was safe. ‘Poor Emrys,’ Arthur said, and then was silent for a while, but he pushed the melancholy aside. ‘In three days,’ he said, ‘we’ll be with Sagramor.’

He had sent messages eastwards and, now that Mordred’s army had left Dumnonia, there was surely nothing to stop Sagramor coming to meet us. ‘We shall have a small army,’ Arthur said, ‘but a good one. Good enough to beat Mordred, and then we start all over again.’

‘Start over again?’ I asked.

‘Beat back Cerdic once more,’ he said, ‘and knock some sense into Meurig.’ He laughed bitterly.

‘There’s always one more battle. Have you noticed that? Whenever you think everything is settled, it all seethes up again.’ He touched Excalibur’s hilt. ‘Poor Hygwydd. I shall miss him.’

‘You’ll miss me too, Lord,’ I said gloomily. The stump of my left wrist was throbbing painfully and my missing hand was unaccountably itching with a sensation so real that I kept trying to scratch it.

‘I’ll miss you?’ Arthur asked, raising an eyebrow.

‘When Sansum summons me.’

‘Ah! The mouse lord.’ He gave me a quick smile. ‘I think our mouse lord will want to come back to Dumnonia, don’t you? I can’t see him gaining preferment in Gwent, they have too many bishops already. No, he’ll want to come back, and poor Morgan will want the shrine at Ynys Wydryn again, so I shall make a bargain with them. Your soul for Gwydre’s permission for them to live in Dumnonia. We’ll free you of the oath, Derfel, never you mind.’ He slapped my shoulder, then clambered forward to where Guinevere sat beneath the mast.

Balig plucked an arrow from the sternpost, twisted away its iron head that he tucked into a pocket for safe keeping, then tossed the feathered shaft overboard. ‘Don’t like the look of that,’ he said to me, jerking his chin towards the west. I turned and saw there were black clouds far out to sea.

‘Rain coming?’ I asked.

‘Could be a bite of wind in it, too,’ he said ominously, then spat overboard to avert the ill-luck. ‘But we don’t have far to go. We could miss it.’ He leaned on the steering oar as the boat was swept about the last great loop of the river. We were going west now, hard into the wind, and the river’s surface was choppy with small, white-flecked waves that shattered on our bow and splashed back across the deck. The sail was still lowered. ‘Pull now!’ Balig called to our oarsmen. The Saxon had one oar, Galahad another, Taliesin and Culhwch had the middle bench and Culhwch’s two sons completed the crew. The six men pulled hard, fighting the wind, but the current and tide still helped us. The banners at prow and stern snapped hard in the wind, rattling the arrows trapped in their weave. Ahead of us the river turned southwards and it was there, I knew, that Balig would hoist the sail so that the wind would help us down the long sea reach. Once at sea we would be forced to keep inside the withy-marked channel that ran between the wide shallows until we reached the deep water where we could turn away from the wind and race across to the Dumnonian shore. ‘It won’t take long to cross,’

Balig said comfortingly, glancing at the clouds, ‘not long. Should outrun that bit of wind.’

‘Can the boats stay together?’ I asked.

‘Near enough.’ He jerked his head at the boat immediately in front of us. ‘That old tub will lag behind. Sails like a pregnant pig, she does, but near enough, near enough.’

Nimue’s horsemen waited for us on a spit of land that lay where the river turned south towards the sea. As we came closer she rode out from the mass of spearmen and urged her horse into the shallow water, and as we came closer still I saw two of her spearmen drag a captive into the shallows beside her. At first I thought it must be one of our men taken from the stranded boat, but then I saw that the prisoner was Merlin. His beard had been cut off and his unkempt white hair blew ragged in the rising wind as he stared blindly towards us, but I could have sworn that he was smiling. I could not see his face clearly, for the distance was too great, but I do swear he was smiling as he was pulled into the small waves. He knew what was about to happen.

Then, suddenly, so did I, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. Nimue had been carried from this sea as a child. She had been captured in Demetia by a band of slave-raiders, then brought across the Severn Sea to Dumnonia, but on the voyage a storm rose and all the raiders’ ships were sunk. The crews and their captives drowned, all but for Nimue who had come safe from the sea onto Ynys Wair’s rocky shore and Merlin, rescuing the child, had called her Vivien because she was so plainly beloved by Manawydan, the sea God, and Vivien is a name that belongs to Manawydan. Nimue, being cross-grained, had ever refused to use the name, but I remembered it now, and I remembered that Manawydan loved her, and I knew she was about to use the God’s help to work a great curse on us.

‘What is she doing?’ Arthur asked.

‘Don’t watch, Lord,’ I said.

The two spearmen had waded back to shore, leaving the blinded Merlin alone beside Nimue’s horse. He made no attempt to escape. He just stood there, his hair streaming white, while Nimue drew a knife from her sword belt. It was the Knife of Laufrodedd.

‘No!’ Arthur shouted, but the wind carried his protest back in our boat’s path, back across the marshes and the reeds, back to nowhere. ‘No!’ he called again.

Nimue pointed her Druid’s staff towards the west, raised her head to the skies and howled. Still Merlin did not move. Our fleet swept past them, each boat coming close to the shallows where Nimue’s horse stood before being snatched southwards as the crews hoisted their sails. Nimue waited until our flag-hung boat came near and then she lowered her head and gazed at us with her one eye. She was smiling, and so was Merlin. I was close enough to see clearly now, and he was still smiling as Nimue leaned down from her saddle with the knife. One hard stroke was all it needed. And Merlin’s long white hair and his long white robe turned red.

Nimue howled again. I had heard her howl many times, but never like that, for this howl mingled agony with triumph. She had worked her spell.

She slid off the horse and let go of her staff. Merlin must have died quickly, but his body still thrashed in the small waves and for a few heartbeats it looked as though Nimue was wrestling with the dead man. Her white robe was spattered with red, and the red was instantly diluted by the sea as she heaved and pushed Merlin’s corpse further into the water. At last, free of the mud, he floated and she pushed him out into the current as a gift for her Lord, Manawydan.

And what a gift she gave. The body of a Druid is powerful magic, as powerful as any that this poor world possesses, and Merlin was the last and the greatest of the Druids. Others came after him, of course, but none had his knowledge, and none his wisdom, and none had half his power. And all that power was now given to one spell, one incantation to the God of the sea who had rescued Nimue so many years before.

She plucked the staff from where it floated on the waves and pointed it at our boat, then she laughed. She put her head back and laughed like the mad who had followed her from the mountains to this killing in the waters. ‘You will live!’ she called to our boat, ‘and we shall meet again!’

Balig hoisted the sail and the wind caught it and snatched us down the sea reach. None of us spoke. We just stared back towards Nimue and to where, white in the turmoil of the grey waves, the body of Merlin followed us towards the deep.

Where Manawydan waited for us.

We turned our boat south-east to let the wind drive into the tattered sail’s belly and my stomach heaved with every lurching wave.

Balig was struggling with the steering oar. We had shipped the other oars, letting the wind do the work, but the strong tide was driving against us and it kept pushing our boat’s head round to the south where the wind would make the sail slap, and the steering oar would bend alarmingly, but slowly the boat would come back, the sail would crack like a great whip as it filled again, and the bows would dip into a wave trough and my belly would churn and the bile rise in my throat. The sky darkened. Balig looked up at the clouds, spat, then heaved on the steering oar again. The first rain came, great drops that spattered on the deck and darkened the dirty sail. ‘Pull in those banners!’

Balig shouted, and Galahad furled the forward flag while I struggled to free the flag at the stern. Gwydre helped me bring it down, then lost his balance as the boat tipped on a wave crest. He fell against the gunwale as the water broke over the bow. ‘Bail!’ Balig shouted, ‘bail!’

The wind was rising now. I vomited over the boat’s quarter, then looked up to see the rest of the fleet tossing in a grey nightmare of broken water and flying spindrift. I heard a crack above me, and looked up to see that our sail had split in two. Balig cursed. Behind us the shore was a dark line, and beyond it, lit by sunlight, the hills of Siluria glowed green, but all around us was dark and wet and threatening.

‘Bail!’ Balig shouted again, and those who were in the belly of the boat used helmets to scoop the water from around the bundles of treasure, armour and food.

And then the storm hit. Till now we had suffered only from the storm’s outriders, but now the wind howled across the sea and the rain came flat and stinging above the whitened waves. I lost sight of the other boats, so thick was the rain and so dark the sky. The shore disappeared, and all I could see was a nightmare of short, high, white-crested waves from which the water flew to drench our boat. The sail flogged itself to ragged shreds that streamed from the spar like broken banners. Thunder split the sky and the boat fell off a wave crest and I saw the water, green and black, surging up to spill across the gunwales, but somehow Balig steered the bow into the wave and the water hesitated at the boat’s rim, then dropped away as we rose to the next wind-tortured crest.

‘Lighten the boat!’ Balig screamed over the storm’s howl.

We threw the gold overboard. We jettisoned Arthur’s treasure, and my treasure, and Gwydre’s treasure and Culhwch’s treasure. We gave it all to Manawydan, pouring coins and cups and candlesticks and gold bars into his greedy maw, and still he wanted more, and so we hurled the baskets of food and the furled banners overboard, but Arthur would not give him his armour, and nor would I, and so we stowed the armour and our weapons in the tiny cabin under the after deck and instead threw some of the ship’s stone ballast after the gold. We reeled about the boat like drunken men, tossed by the waves and with our feet sliding in a slopping mix of vomit and water. Morwenna clutched her children, Ceinwyn and Guinevere prayed, Taliesin bailed with a helmet, while Culhwch and Galahad helped Balig and the Saxon crewman to lower the remnants of the sail. They threw the sail overboard, spar and all, but tied its wreckage to a long horse-hair rope that they looped about the boat’s sternpost, and the drag of the spar and sail somehow turned our boat’s head into the wind so that we faced the storm and rode its anger in great swooping lurches.

‘Never known a storm move so quick!’ Balig shouted to me. And no wonder. This was no usual storm, but a fury brought by a Druid’s death, and the world shrieked air and sea about our ears as our creaking ship rose and fell to the pounding waves. Water spurted between the planks of the hull, but we bailed it out as fast as it came.

Then I saw the first wreckage on the crest of a wave, and a moment later glimpsed a man swimming. He tried to call to us, but the sea drove him under. Arthur’s fleet was being destroyed. Sometimes, as a squall passed and the air momentarily cleared, we could see men bailing madly, and see how low their boats rode in the turmoil, and then the storm would blind us again, and when it lifted again there were no boats visible at all, just floating timbers. Arthur’s fleet, boat by boat, was sunk and his men and women drowned. The men who wore their armour died the quickest.

And all the while, just beyond the sea-fretted wreckage of our sail that dragged behind our labouring boat, Merlin’s body followed us. He appeared sometime after we had hurled the sail overboard, and then he stayed with us and I would see his white robe on the face of a wave, see it vanish, only to glimpse it again as the seas moved on. Once it seemed as though he lifted his head from the water and I saw the wound in his throat had been washed white by the ocean, and he stared at us from his empty sockets, but then the waters dipped him down and I touched an iron nail in the sternpost and begged Manawydan to take the Druid down to the sea’s bed. Take him down, I prayed, and send his soul to the Otherworld, but every time I looked he was still there, his white hair fanning about his head on the swirling sea. Merlin was there, but no more boats. We peered through the rain and flying spray, but there was nothing there except a dark churning sky, a grey and dirty white sea, wreckage, and Merlin, always Merlin, and I think he was protecting us, not because he wanted us safe, but because Nimue had still not finished with us. Our boat carried what she most desired, and so our boat alone must be preserved through Manawydan’s waters.

Merlin did not disappear until the storm itself had vanished. I saw his face one last time and then he just went down. For a heartbeat he was a white shape with spread arms in the green heart of a wave, and then he was gone. And with his disappearance the wind’s spite died and the rain ceased. The sea still tossed us, but the air cleared and the clouds turned from black to grey, and then to broken white, and all about us was an empty sea. Ours was the only boat left and as Arthur stared around the grey waves I saw the tears in his eyes. His men were gone to Manawydan, all of them, all his brave men save we few. A whole army was gone.

And we were alone.

We retrieved the spar and the remnants of the sail, and then we rowed for the rest of that long day. Every man except me had blistered hands, and even I tried to row, but found my one good hand was not enough to manage an oar, and so I sat and watched as we pulled southwards through the rolling seas until, by evening, our keel grated on sand and we struggled ashore with what few possessions we still had left.

We slept in the dunes, and in the morning we cleaned the salt off our weapons and counted what coins we still had. Balig and his Saxon stayed with their boat, claiming they could salvage her, and I gave him my last piece of gold, embraced him, and then followed Arthur south. We found a hall in the coastal hills and the lord of that hall proved to be a supporter of Arthur’s, and he gave us a saddle horse and two mules. We tried to give him gold, but he refused it. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘I had spearmen to give you, but alas.’ He shrugged. His hall was poor and he had already given us more than he could afford. We ate his food, dried our clothes by his fire, and afterwards sat with Arthur under the apple blossom in the hall’s orchard. ‘We can’t fight Mordred now,’ Arthur told us bleakly. Mordred’s forces numbered at least three hundred and fifty spearmen, and Nimue’s followers would help him so long as he pursued us, while Sagramor had fewer than two hundred men. The war was lost before it had even properly begun.

‘Oengus will come to help us,’ Culhwch suggested.

‘He’ll try,’ Arthur agreed, ‘but Meurig will never let the Blackshields march through Gwent.’

‘And Cerdic will come,’ Galahad said quietly. ‘As soon as he hears that Mordred is fighting us, he’ll march. And we shall have two hundred men.’

‘Fewer,’ Arthur interjected.

‘To fight how many?’ Galahad asked. ‘Four hundred? Five? And our survivors, even if we win, will have to turn and face Cerdic.’

‘Then what do we do?’ Guinevere asked.

Arthur smiled. ‘We go to Armorica,’ he said. ‘Mordred won’t pursue us there.’

‘He might,’ Culhwch growled.

‘Then we face that problem when it comes,’ Arthur said calmly. He was bitter that morning, but not angry. Fate had given him a terrible blow, so all he could do now was reshape his plans and try to give us hope. He reminded us that King Budic of Broceliande was married to his sister, Anna, and Arthur was certain the King would give us shelter. ‘We shall be poor,’ he gave Guinevere an apologetic smile, ‘but we have friends and they will help us. And Broceliande will welcome Sagramor’s spearmen. We shan’t starve. And who knows?’ he gave his son a smile, ‘Mordred might die and we can come back.’

‘But Nimue,’ I said, ‘will pursue us to the world’s end.’

Arthur grimaced. ‘Then Nimue must be killed,’ he said, ‘but that problem must also wait its time. What we need to do now is decide how we reach Broceliande.’

‘We go to Camlann,’ I said, ‘and ask for Caddwg the boatman.’

Arthur looked at me, surprised by the certainty in my voice. ‘Caddwg?’

‘Merlin arranged it, Lord,’ I said, ‘and told me of it. It is his final gift to you.’

Arthur closed his eyes. He was thinking of Merlin and for a heartbeat or two I thought he was going to shed tears, but instead he just shuddered. ‘To Camlann, then,’ he said, opening his eyes. Einion, Culhwch’s son, took the saddle horse and rode eastwards in search of Sagramor. He took new orders that instructed Sagramor to find boats and go south across the sea to Armorica. Einion would tell the Numidian that we sought our own boat at Camlann and would look to meet him on Broceliande’s shore. There was to be no battle against Mordred, no acclamation on Caer Cadarn, just an ignominious flight across the sea.

When Einion had left we put Arthur-bach and little Seren on one of the mules, heaped our armour on the other, and walked south. By now, Arthur knew, Mordred would have discovered that we had fled from Siluria and Dumnonia’s army would already be retracing its steps. Nimue’s men would doubtless be with them, and they had the advantage of the hard Roman roads while we had miles of hilly country to cross. And so we hurried.

Or we tried to hurry, but the hills were steep, the road was long, Ceinwyn was still weak, the mules were slow, and Culhwch had limped ever since the long-ago battle we had fought against Aelle outside London. We made a slow journey of it, but Arthur seemed resigned to his fate now. ‘Mordred won’t know where to seek us,’ he said.

‘Nimue might,’ I suggested. ‘Who knows what she forced Merlin to tell her at the end?’

Arthur said nothing for a while. We were walking through a wood bright with bluebells and soft with the new year’s leaves. ‘You know what I should do?’ he said after a while. ‘I should find a deep well and throw Excalibur into its depths, and then cover her with stones so that no one will ever find her between now and the world’s ending.’

‘Why don’t you, Lord?’

He smiled and touched the sword’s hilt. ‘I’m used to her now. I shall keep her till I need her no more. But if I must, I shall hide her. Not yet, though.’ He walked on, pensive. ‘Are you angry with me?’ he asked after a long pause.

‘With you? Why?’

He gestured as if to encompass all Dumnonia, all that sad country that was so bright with blossom and new leaf on that spring morning. ‘If I had stayed, Derfel,’ he said, ‘if I had denied Mordred his power, this would not have happened.’ He sounded regretful.

‘But who was ever to know,’ I asked, ‘that Mordred would prove a soldier? Or raise an army?’

‘True,’ he admitted, ‘and when I agreed to Meurig’s demand I thought Mordred would rot away in Durnovaria. I thought he’d drink himself into his grave or fall into a quarrel and fetch a knife in the back.’

He shook his head. ‘He should never have been King, but what choice did I have? I had sworn Uther’s oath.’

It all went back to that oath and I remembered the High Council, the last to be held in Britain, where Uther had devised the oath that would make Mordred King. Uther had been an old man then, gross and sick and dying, and I had been a child who wanted nothing more than to become a spearman. It was all so long ago, and Nimue had been my friend in those days. ‘Uther didn’t even want you to be one of the oath-takers,’ I said.

‘I never thought he did,’ Arthur said, ‘but I took it. And an oath is an oath, and if we purposefully break one then we break faith with all.’ More oaths had been broken, I thought, than had ever been kept, but I said nothing. Arthur had tried to keep his oaths and that was a comfort to him. He smiled suddenly, and I saw that his mind had veered off onto a happier subject. ‘Long ago,’ he told me, ‘I saw a piece of land in Broceliande. It was a valley leading to the south coast and I remember a stream and some birches there, and I thought what a good place it would be for a man to build a hall and make a life.’

I laughed. Even now all he really wanted was a hall, some land, and friends about him; the very same things he had always desired. He had never loved palaces, nor rejoiced in power, though he had loved the practice of war. He tried to deny that love, but he was good at battle and quick in thought and that made him a deadly soldier. It was soldiering that had made him famous, and had let him unite the Britons and defeat the Saxons, but then his shyness about power, and his perverse belief in the innate goodness of man, and his fervent adherence to the sanctity of oaths, had let lesser men undo his work.

‘A timber hall,’ he said dreamily, ‘with a pillared arcade facing the sea. Guinevere loves the sea. The land slopes southwards, towards a beach, and we can make our hall above it so that all day and night we can hear the waves falling on the sand. And behind the hall,’ he went on, ‘I shall build a new smithy.’

‘So you can torture more metal?’ I asked.

‘Ars longa,’ he said lightly, ‘‘vita brevis.’

‘Latin?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘The arts are long, life is short. I shall improve, Derfel. My fault is impatience. I see the form of the metal I want, and hurry it, but iron won’t be hurried.’ He put a hand on my bandaged arm.

‘You and I have years yet, Derfel.’

‘I hope so, Lord.’

‘Years and years,’ he said, ‘years to grow old and listen to songs and tell stories.’

‘And dream of Britain?’ I asked.

‘We served her well,’ he said, ‘and now she must serve herself.’

‘And if the Sais come back,’ I asked, ‘and men call for you again, will you return?’

He smiled. ‘I might return to give Gwydre his throne, but otherwise I shall hang Excalibur on the highest rafter of my hall’s high roof, Derfel, and let the cobwebs shroud her. I shall watch the sea and plant my crops and see my grandchildren grow. You and I are done, my friend. We’ve discharged our oaths.’

‘All but one,’ I said.

He looked at me sharply. ‘You mean my oath to help Ban?’

I had forgotten that oath, the one, the only one, that Arthur had failed to keep, and his failure had ridden him hard ever since. Ban’s kingdom of Benoic had gone down to the Franks, and though Arthur had sent men, he had not gone to Benoic himself. But that was long in the past, and I for one had never blamed Arthur for the failure. He had wanted to help, but Aelle’s Saxons had been pressing hard at the time and he could not have fought two wars at once. ‘No, Lord,’ I said, ‘I was thinking of my oath to Sansum.’

‘The mouse lord will forget you,’ Arthur said dismissively.

‘He forgets nothing, Lord.’

‘Then we shall have to change his mind,’ Arthur said, ‘for I do not think I can grow old without you.’

‘Nor I without you, Lord.’

‘So we shall hide ourselves away, you and I, and men will ask, where is Arthur? And where is Derfel? And where is Galahad? Or Ceinwyn? And no one will know, for we shall be hidden under the birch trees beside the sea.’ He laughed, but he could see that dream so close now and the hope of it drove him on through the last miles of our long journey.

It took us four days and nights, but at last we reached Dumnonia’s southern shore. We had skirted the great moor and we came to the ocean while walking on the ridge of a high hill. We paused at the ridge’s crest while the evening light streamed over our shoulders to light the wide river valley that opened to the sea beneath us. This was Camlann.

I had been here before, for this was the southern country below Dumnonian Isca where the local folk tattooed their faces blue. I had served Lord Owain when I first came, and it was under his leadership that I had joined the massacre on the high moors. Years later I had ridden close to this hill when I went with Arthur to try and save Tristan’s life, though my attempt failed and Tristan had died, and now I had returned a third time. It was lovely country, as beautiful as any I had seen in Britain, though for me it held memories of murder and I knew I would be glad to see it fade behind Caddwg’s boat. We stared down at our journey’s end. The River Exe flowed to the sea beneath us, but before it reached the ocean it formed a great wide sea-lake that was penned from the ocean by a narrow spit of sand. That spit was the place men called Camlann, and at its tip, just visible from our high perch, the Romans had built a small fortress. Inside the fort they had raised a great high becket of iron that had once held a fire at night to warn approaching galleys of the treacherous sandspit. Now we gazed down at the sea-lake, the sandspit and the green shore. No enemy was in sight. No spear blade reflected the day’s late sun, no horsemen rode the shore tracks and no spearmen darkened the narrow tongue of sand. We could have been alone in all the universe.

‘You know Caddwg?’ Arthur asked me, breaking the silence.

‘I met him once, Lord, years ago.’

‘Then find him, Derfel, and tell him we shall wait for him at the fort.’

I looked southwards towards the sea. Huge and empty and glittering, it was the path to take us from Britain. Then I went downhill to make the voyage possible.

The last glimmering light of evening lit my way to Caddwg’s house. I had asked folk for directions and had been guided to a small cabin that lay on the shore north of Camlann and now, because the tide was only halfway in, the cabin faced a gleaming expanse of empty mud. Caddwg’s boat was not in the water, but perched high and dry on land with its keel supported by rollers and its hull by wooden poles.

‘Prydmen, she’s called,’ Caddwg said, without any greeting. He had seen me standing beside his boat and now came from his house. The old man was thickly bearded, deeply suntanned and dressed in a woollen jerkin that was stained with pitch and glittering with fish scales.

‘Merlin sent me,’ I said.

‘Reckoned he would. Said he would. Is he coming himself?’

‘He’s dead,’ I said.

Caddwg spat. ‘Never thought to hear that.’ He spat a second time. ‘Thought death would give him a miss.’

‘He was murdered,’ I said.

Caddwg stooped and threw some logs on a fire that burned under a bubbling pot. The pot held pitch, and I could see that he had been caulking the gaps between Prydwen’s planks. The boat looked beautiful. Her wooden hull had been scraped clean and the shining new layer of wood contrasted with the deep black of the pitch-soaked caulking that stopped the water spurting between her timbers. She had a high prow, a tall sternpost and a long, newly made mast that now rested on trestles beside the stranded hull. ‘You’ll be wanting her, then,’ Caddwg said.

‘There are thirteen of us,’ I told him, ‘waiting at the fort.’

‘Tomorrow this time,’ he said.

‘Not till then?’ I asked, alarmed at the delay.

‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ he grumbled, ‘and I can’t launch her till high water, and that’ll be tomorrow morning, and by the time I get her mast shipped and the sail bent on and the steerboard shipped, the tide’ll be ebbed again. She’ll float again by mid afternoon, she will, and I’ll come for you quick as I can, but like as not it’ll be dusk. You should have sent me word.’

That was true, but none of us had thought to send a warning to Caddwg for none of us understood boats. We had thought to come here, find the boat and sail away, and we had never dreamed that the boat might be out of the water. ‘Are there other boats?’ I asked.

‘Not for thirteen folk,’ he said, ‘and none that can take you where I’m going.’

‘To Broceliande,’ I said.

‘I’ll take you where Merlin told me to take you,’ Caddwg said obstinately, then stumped around to Prydwen ‘s bow and pointed up to a grey stone that was about the size of an apple. There was nothing remarkable about the stone except that it had been skilfully worked into the ship’s stem where it was held by the oak like a gem clasped by a gold setting. ‘He gave me that bit of rock,’ Caddwg said, meaning Merlin. ‘A wraithstone, that is.’

‘Wraithstone?’ I asked, never having heard of such a thing.

‘It’ll take Arthur where Merlin wanted him to go, and nothing else will take him there. And no other boat can take him there, only a boat that Merlin named,’ Caddwg said. The name Prydwen meant Britain. ‘Arthur is with you?’ Caddwg asked me, suddenly anxious.

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll bring the gold as well,’ Caddwg said.

‘Gold?’

‘The old man left it for Arthur. Reckoned he’d want it. No good to me. Gold can’t catch a fish. It bought me a new sail, I’ll say that for it, and Merlin told me to buy the sail and so he had to give me gold, but gold don’t catch fish. It catches women,’ he chuckled, ‘but not fish.’

I looked up at the stranded boat. ‘Do you need help?’ I asked.

Caddwg offered a humourless laugh. ‘And what help can you give? You and your short arm? Can you caulk a boat? Can you step a mast or bend on a sail?’ He spat. ‘I only have to whistle and I’ll have a score of men helping me. You’ll hear us singing in the morning, and that’ll mean we’re hauling her down the rollers into the water. Tomorrow evening,’ he nodded curtly to me, ‘I’ll look for you at the fort.’ He turned and went back to his hut.

And I went to join Arthur. It was dark by then and all the stars of heaven pricked the sky. A moon shimmered a long trail across the sea and lit the broken walls of the little fort where we would wait for Prydwen.

We had one last day in Britain, I thought. One last night and one last day, and then we would sail with Arthur into the moon’s path and Britain would be nothing but a memory. The night wind blew soft across the fort’s broken wall. The rusted remnant of the ancient beacon tilted on its bleached pole above us, the small waves broke on the long beach, the moon slowly dropped into the sea’s embrace and the night darkened.

We slept in the small shelter of the ramparts. The Romans had made the walls of the fort out of sand on which they had mounded turf planted with sea grass, and then they had placed a wooden palisade along the wall’s top. The wall must have been feeble even when it had been built, but the fort had never been anything more than a look-out station and a place where a small detachment of men could shelter from the sea winds as they tended the beacon. The wooden palisade was almost all decayed now, and the rain and wind had worn much of the sand wall down, but in a few places it still stood four or five feet high.

The morning dawned clear and we watched as a cluster of small fishing-boats put out to sea for their day’s work. Their departure left only Prydwen beside the sea-lake. Arthur-bach and Seren played on the lake’s sand where there were no breakers, while Galahad walked with Culhwch’s remaining son up the coast to find food. They came back with bread, dried fish and a wooden pail of warm fresh milk. We were all oddly happy that morning. I remember the laughter as we watched Seren roll down the face of a dune, and how we cheered when Arthur-bach tugged a great bunch of seaweed out of the shallows and up onto the sand. The huge green mass must have weighed as much as he did, but he pulled and jerked and somehow dragged the heavy tangle right up to the fort’s broken wall. Gwydre and I applauded his efforts, and afterwards we fell to talking. ‘If I’m not meant to be King,’ Gwydre said, ‘then so be it.’

‘Fate is inexorable,’ I said and, when he looked quizzically at me, I smiled. ‘That was one of Merlin’s favourite sayings. That and “Don’t be absurd, Derfel.” I was always absurd to him.’

‘I’m sure you weren’t,’ he said loyally.

‘We all were. Except perhaps Nimue and Morgan. The rest of us simply weren’t clever enough. Your mother, maybe, but she and he were never really friends.’

‘I wish I’d known him better.’

‘When you’re old, Gwydre,’ I said, ‘you can still tell men that you met Merlin.’

‘No one will believe me.’

‘No, they probably won’t,’ I said. ‘And by the time you’re old they’ll have invented new stories about him. And about your father too.’ I tossed a scrap of shell down the face of the fort. From far off across the water I could hear the strong sound of men chanting and knew I listened to the launching of Prydwen. Not long now, I told myself, not long now. ‘Maybe no one will ever know the truth,’ I said to Gwydre.

‘The truth?’

‘About your father,’ I said, ‘or about Merlin.’ Already there were songs that gave the credit for Mynydd Baddon to Meurig, of all people, and many songs that extolled Lancelot above Arthur. I looked around for Taliesin and wondered if he would correct those songs. That morning the bard had told us that he had no intention of crossing the sea with us, but would walk back to Siluria or Powys, and I think Taliesin had only come with us that far so that he could talk with Arthur and thus learn from him the tale of his life. Or perhaps Taliesin had seen the future and had come to watch it unfold, but whatever his reasons, the bard was talking with Arthur now, but Arthur suddenly left Taliesin’s side and hurried towards the shore of the sea-lake. He stood there for a long while, peering northwards. Then, suddenly, he turned and ran to the nearest high dune. He clambered up its face, then turned and stared northwards again.

‘Derfel!’ Arthur called, ‘Derfel!’ I slithered down the fort’s face and hurried over the sand and up the dune’s flank. ‘What do you see?’ Arthur asked me.

I stared northwards across the glittering sea-lake. I could see Prydmen halfway down its slip, and I could see the fires where salt was panned and the daily catches were smoked, and I could see some fishermen’s nets hanging from spars planted in the sand, and then I saw the horsemen. Sunlight glittered off a spear point, then another, and suddenly I could see a score of men, maybe more, pounding along a road that led well inland of the sea-lake’s shore. ‘Hide!’ Arthur shouted, and we slid down the dune, snatched up Seren and Arthur-bach, and crouched like guilty things inside the fort’s crumbling ramparts.

‘They’ll have seen us, Lord,’ I said.

‘Maybe not.’

‘How many men?’ Culhwch asked.

‘Twenty?’ Arthur guessed, ‘thirty? Maybe more. They were coming from some trees. There could be a hundred of them.’

There was a soft scraping noise and I turned to see that Culhwch had drawn his sword. He grinned at me. ‘I don’t care if it’s two hundred men, Derfel, they’re not cutting my beard.’

‘Why would they want your beard?’ Galahad asked. ‘A smelly thing full of lice?’

Culhwch laughed. He liked to tease Galahad, and to be teased in return, and he was still thinking of his reply when Arthur cautiously raised his head above the rampart and stared west towards the place where the approaching spearmen would appear. He went very still, and his stillness quieted us, then suddenly he stood and waved. ‘It’s Sagramor!’ he called to us, and the joy in his voice was unmistakable. ‘It’s Sagramor!’ he said again, and he was so excited that Arthur-bach took up the happy cry. ‘It’s Sagramor!’ the small boy shouted, and the rest of us clambered over the rampart to see Sagramor’s grim black flag streaming from a skull-tipped spear shaft. Sagramor himself, in his conical black helmet, was in the lead and, seeing Arthur, he spurred forward across the sand. Arthur ran to greet him, Sagramor vaulted from his horse, stumbled to his knees and clasped Arthur about the waist.

‘Lord!’ Sagramor said in a rare display of feeling, ‘Lord! I thought not to see you again.’

Arthur raised him, then embraced him. ‘We would have met in Broceliande, my friend.’

‘Broceliande?’ Sagramor said, then spat. ‘I hate the sea.’ There were tears on his black face and I remembered him telling me once why he followed Arthur. Because, he had said, when I had nothing, Arthur gave me everything. Sagramor had not come here because he was reluctant to board a ship, but because Arthur needed help.

The Numidian had brought eighty-three men, and Einion, Culhwch’s son, had come with them. ‘I only had ninety-two horses, Lord,’ Sagramor told Arthur. ‘I’ve been collecting them for months.’ He had hoped he could outride Mordred’s forces and so bring all his men safe to Siluria, but instead he had brought as many as he could to this dry spit of sand between the sea-lake and the ocean. Some of the horses had collapsed on the way, but eighty-three had come through safe.

‘Where are your other men?’ Arthur asked.

‘They sailed south yesterday with all our families,’ Sagramor said, then pulled back from Arthur’s embrace and looked at us. We must have appeared a sorry and battered group, for he offered one of his rare smiles before bowing low to Guinevere and Ceinwyn.

‘We have only one boat coming,’ Arthur said worriedly.

‘Then you will take that one boat, Lord,’ Sagramor said calmly, ‘and we shall ride west into Kernow. We can find boats there and follow you south. But I wanted to meet you this side of the water in case your enemies found you too.’

‘We’ve seen none so far,’ Arthur said, touching Excalibur’s hilt, ‘at least, not this side of the Severn Sea. And I pray we shall see none all day. Our boat comes at dusk, and then we leave.’ ‘So I shall guard you till dusk,’ Sagramor said, and his men slid from their saddles, took their shields from their backs and planted their spears in the sand. Their horses, sweat-whitened and panting, stood exhausted while Sagramor’s men steexctad their tired arms and legs. We were now a warband, almost an army, and our banner was Sagramor’s black flag.

But then, just an hour later, on horses as tired as Sagramor’s, the enemy came to Camlann.

Ceinwyn helped me pull on my armour for it was hard to rnanage the heavy mail shirt with only one hand, and impossible to buckle the bronze greaves that I had taken at Mynydd Baddon and which protected my legs from the spear thrust that comes under the shield rim. Once the greaves and the mail were in place, and once Hywelbane’s belt was buckled around my waist, I let Ceinwyn fasten the shield to my left arm. ‘Tighter,’ I told her, instinctively pressing against my mail coat to feel the small lump where her brooch was attached to my shirt. It was safely there, a talisman that had seen me through countless battles.

‘Maybe they won’t attack,’ she said, tugging the shield straps as tight as they would go.

‘Pray that they don’t,’ I said.

‘Pray to whom?’ she asked with a grim smile.

‘To whichever God you trust the most, my love,’ I said, then kissed her. I pulled on my helmet, and she fastened the strap under my chin. The dent made in the helmet’s crown at Mynydd Baddon had been hammered smooth and a new iron plate riveted to cover the gash. I kissed Ceinwyn again, then closed the cheekpieces. The wind blew the wolftail plume in front of the helmet’s eyes slits, and I flicked my head back to throw the long grey hair aside. I was the very last wolftail. The others had been massacred by Mordred or taken down into Manawydan’s keeping. I was the last, just as I was the last warrior alive to carry Ceinwyn’s star on my shield. I hefted my war spear, its shaft as thick as Ceinwyn’s wrist and its blade a sharpened wedge of Morridig’s finest steel. ‘Caddwg will be here soon,’ I told her, ‘we won’t have long to wait.’

‘Just all day,’ Ceinwyn said, and she glanced up the sea-lake to where Prydmen floated at the edge of the mudbank. Men were hauling her mast upright, but soon the falling tide would strand the boat again and we would have to wait for the waters to rise. But at least the enemy had not bothered Caddwg, and had no reason to do so. To them he was doubtless just another fisherman and no business of theirs. We were their business.

There were sixty or seventy of the enemy, all of them horsemen, and they must have ridden hard to reach us, but now they were waiting at the spit’s landward end and we all knew that other spearmen would be following them. By dusk we could face an army, maybe two, for Nimue’s men would surely be hurrying with Mordred’s spearmen.

Arthur was in his war finery. His scale armour, which had tongues of gold amidst the iron plates, glinted in the sun. I watched him pull on his helmet that was crested with white goose feathers. Hygwydd would usually have armoured him, but Hygwydd was dead so Guinevere strapped Excalibur’s cross-hatched scabbard about his waist and hung the white cloak on his shoulders. He smiled at her, leaned to hear her speak, laughed, then closed the helmet’s cheekpieces. Two men helped him up into the saddle of one of Sagramor’s horses, and once he was mounted they passed him his spear and his silver-sheeted shield from which the cross had long been stripped away. He took the reins with his shield hand, then kicked the horse towards us. ‘Let’s stir them up,’ he called down to Sagramor, who stood beside me. Arthur planned to lead thirty horsemen towards the enemy, then feint a panicked withdrawal that he hoped would tempt them into a trap.

We left a score of men to guard the women and children in the fort while the rest of us followed Sagramor to a deep hollow behind a dune that fronted the sea’s beach. The whole sandspit west of the fort was a confusion of dunes and hollows that formed a maze of traps and blind alleys, and only the spit’s final two hundred paces, east of the fort, offered level ground. Arthur waited until we were hidden, then led his thirty men west along the sea-rippled sand that lay close to the breaking waves. We crouched under the high dune’s cover. I had left my spear at the fort, preferring to fight this battle with Hywelbane alone. Sagramor also planned to fight with sword alone. He was scrubbing a patch of rust from his curved blade with a handful of sand. ‘You lost your beard,’ he grunted at me.

‘I exchanged it for Amhar’s life.’

I saw a flash of teeth as he grinned behind the shadow of his helmet’s cheekpieces. ‘A good exchange,’ he said, ‘and your hand?’

‘To magic’

‘Not your sword hand, though.’ He held the blade to catch the light, was satisfied that the rust was gone, then cocked his head, listening, but we could hear nothing.except the breaking waves. ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ he said after a while.

‘Why not?’ I had never known Sagramor to shirk a fight.

‘They must have followed me,’ he said, jerking his head westwards to indicate the enemy.

‘They might have known we were coming here anyway,’ I said, trying to comfort him, though unless Merlin had betrayed Camlann to Nimue, it seemed more likely that Mordred would indeed have left some lightly armoured horsemen to watch Sagramor and that those scouts must have betrayed our hiding place. Whatever, it was too late now. Mordred’s men knew where we were and now it was a race between Caddwg and the enemy.

‘Hear that?’ Gwydre called. He was in armour and had his father’s bear on his shield. He was nervous, and no wonder, for this would be his first real battle.

I listened. My leather padded helmet muffled sound, but at last I heard the thud of hoofs on sand.

‘Keep down!’ Sagramor snarled at those men who were tempted to peer over the crest of the dune. The horses were galloping down the sea’s beach, and we were hidden from that beach by the dune. The sound drew nearer, rising to a thunder of hoofs as we gripped our spears and swords. Sagramor’s helmet was crested with the mask of a snarling fox. I stared at the fox, but heard only the growing noise of the horses. It was warm and sweat was trickling down my face. The mail coat felt heavy, but it always did until the fighting started.

The first hoofs pounded past, then Arthur was shouting from the beach. ‘Now!’ he called, ‘Now!

Now! Now!’

‘Go!’ Sagramor shouted and we all scrambled up the dune’s inner face. Our boots slipped in the sand, and it seemed I would never reach the top, but then we were over the crest and running down onto the beach where a swirl of horsemen churned the hard wet sand beside the sea. Arthur had turned and his thirty men had clashed with their pursuers who outnumbered Arthur’s men by two to one, but those pursuers now saw us running towards their flank and the more prudent immediately turned and galloped west towards safety. Most stayed to fight.

I screamed a challenge, took a horseman’s spear point plumb on the centre of my shield, raked Hywelbane across the horse’s rear leg to hamstring the animal, and then, as the horse tipped towards me, I swept Hywelbane hard into the rider’s back. He yelped in pain, and I jumped back as horse and man collapsed in a flurry of hoofs, sand and blood. I kicked the twitching man in the face, stabbed down with Hywelbane, then backswung the sword at a panicked horseman who feebly stabbed at me with his spear. Sagramor was keening a terrible war cry and Gwydre was spearing a fallen man at the sea’s edge. The enemy were breaking from the fight and spurring their horses to safety through the sea’s shallows where the receding water sucked a swirl of sand and blood back into the collapsing waves. I saw Culhwch spur his horse to an enemy and haul the man bodily from his saddle. The man tried to stand, but Culhwch backswung the sword, turned his horse and chopped down again. The few enemy who had survived were trapped between us and the sea now, and we killed them grimly. Horses screamed and thrashed their hoofs as they died. The small waves were pink and the sand was black with blood. We killed twenty of them and took sixteen prisoners, and when the prisoners had told us all they knew, we killed them too. Arthur grimaced as he gave the order, for he disliked killing unarmed men, but we could spare no spearmen to guard prisoners, nor did we have any mercy for these foes who carried unmarked shields as a boast of their savagery. We killed them quickly, forcing them to kneel on the sand where Hywelbane or Sagramor’s sharp sword took their heads. They were Mordred’s men, and Mordred himself had led them down the beach, but the King had wheeled his horse at the first sign of our ambush and shouted at his men to retreat. ‘I came close to him,’ Arthur said ruefully, ‘but not close enough.’ Mordred had escaped, but the first victory was ours, though three of our men had died in the fight and another seven were bleeding badly. ‘How did Gwydre fight?’ Arthur asked me.

‘Bravely, Lord, bravely,’ I said. My sword was thick with blood that I tried to scrape off with a handful of sand. ‘He killed, Lord,’ I assured Arthur.

‘Good,’ he said, then crossed to his son and put an arm around his shoulders. I used my one hand to scrub the blood from Hywelbane, then tugged the buckle of my helmet loose and pulled it off my head. We killed the wounded horses, led the uninjured beasts back to the fort, then collected our enemy’s weapons and shields. ‘They won’t come again,’ I told Ceinwyn, ‘not unless they’re reinforced.’ I looked up at the sun and saw that it was climbing slowly through the cloudless sky. We had very little water, only what Sagramor’s men had brought in their small baggage, and so we rationed the water-skins. It would be a long and thirsty day, especially for our wounded. One of them was shivering. His face was pale, almost yellow, and when Sagramor tried to trickle a little water into the man’s mouth he bit convulsively at the skin’s lip. He began to moan, and the sound of his agony grated on our souls and so Sagramor hastened the man’s death with his sword. ‘We must light a pyre,’

Sagramor said, ‘at the spit’s end.’ He nodded his head towards the flat sand where the sea had left a tangle of sun-bleached driftwood.

Arthur did not seem to hear the suggestion. ‘If you want,’ he said to Sagramor, ‘you can go west now.’

‘And leave you here?’

‘If you stay,’ Arthur said quietly, ‘then I don’t know how you will leave. We have only one boat coming. And more men will come to Mordred. None to us.’

‘More men to kill,’ Sagramor said curtly, but I think he knew that by staying he was assuring his own death. Caddwg’s boat might take twenty people to safety, but certainly no more. ‘We can swim to the other shore, Lord,’ he said, jerking his head towards the eastern bank of the channel that ran deep and fast about the tip of the sandspit. ‘Those of us who can swim,’ he added.

‘Can you?’

‘Never too late to learn,’ Sagramor said, then spat. ‘Besides, we’re not dead yet.’

Nor were we beaten yet, and every minute that passed took us nearer safety. I could see Caddwg’s men carrying the sail to Prydmen, which was canted at the edge of the sea. Her mast was now upright, though men still rigged lines from the masthead, and in an hour or two the tide would turn and she would float again, ready for the voyage. We just had to endure till the late afternoon. We occupied ourselves by making a huge pyre from the driftwood, and when it was burning we heaved the bodies of our dead into the flames. Their hair flared bright, then came the smell of roasting flesh. We threw on more timber until the fire was a roaring, white-hot inferno.

‘A ghost fence might deter the enemy,’ Taliesin remarked when he had chanted a prayer for the four burning men whose souls were drifting with the smoke to find their shadowbodies. I had not seen a ghost fence in years, but we made one that day. It was a grisly business. We had thirty-six dead enemy bodies and from them we took thirty-six severed heads which we rammed onto the blades of the captured spears. Then we planted the spears across the spit and Taliesin, conspicuous in his white robe and carrying a spear shaft so that he resembled a Druid, walked from one bloody head to the next so that the enemy would think that an enchantment was being made. Few men would willingly cross a ghost fence without a Druid to avert its evil, and once the fence was made we rested more easily. We shared a scanty midday meal and I remember Arthur looking ruefully at the ghost fence as he ate. ‘From Isca to this,’ he remarked softly.

‘From Mynydd Baddon to this,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘Poor Uther,’ he said, and he must have been thinking of the oath that had made Mordred King, the oath that had led to this sun-warmed spit beside the sea. Mordred’s reinforcements arrived in the early afternoon. They mostly came on foot in a long column that straggled down the sea-lake’s western shore. We counted over a hundred men and knew that more would be following.

‘They’ll be tired,’ Arthur told us, ‘and we have the ghost fence.’

But the enemy now possessed a Druid. Fergal had arrived with the reinforcements, and an hour after we first saw the column of spearmen, we watched as the Druid crept near the fence and sniffed the salt air like a dog. He threw handfuls of sand towards the nearest head, hopped on one leg for a moment, then ran to the spear and toppled it. The fence was broken, and Fergal tipped his head to the sun and gave a great cry of triumph. We pulled on helmets, found our shields and passed sharpening stones amongst ourselves.

The tide had turned, and the first fishing-boats were coming home. We hailed them as they passed the spit, but most ignored our calls, for common folk all too often have good reason to fear spearmen, but Galahad waved a gold coin and that lure did bring one boat which nosed gingerly into the shore and grounded on the sand near the blazing balefire. Its two crewmen, both with heavily tattooed faces, agreed to take the women and children to Caddwg’s craft, which was almost afloat again. We gave the fishermen gold, handed the women and children into the boat, and sent one of the wounded spearmen to guard them. ‘Tell the other fishermen,’ Arthur told the tattooed men, ‘that there’s gold for any man who brings his boat with Caddwg.’ He made a brief farewell to Guinevere, as I did to Ceinwyn. I held her close for a few heartbeats and found I had no words.

‘Stay alive,’ she told me.

‘For you,’ I said, ‘I will,’ and then I helped push the grounded boat into the sea and watched it slowly pull away into the channel.

A moment later one of our mounted scouts came galloping back from the broken ghost fence.

‘They’re coming, Lord!’ he shouted.

I let Galahad buckle my helmet strap, then held out my arm so he could bind the shield tight. He gave me my spear. ‘God be with you,’ he said, then picked up his own shield that was blazoned with the Christian cross.

We would not fight in the dunes this time because we did not have enough men to make a shield wall that would stretch right across the hilly part of the sandspit, and that meant Mordred’s horsemen could have galloped around our flanks, surrounded us, and we would have been doomed to die in a tightening ring of enemies. Nor did we fight in the fort, for there too we could have been surrounded and thus cut off from the water when Caddwg arrived, and so we retreated to the narrow tip of the spit where our shield wall could stretch from one shore to the other. The balefire still blazed just above the line of weed that marked the high-tide limit, and while we waited for the enemy Arthur ordered still more driftwood to be heaped on its flames. We went on feeding that fire until we saw Mordred’s men approaching, and then we made our shield wall just a few paces in front of the flames. We set Sagramor’s dark banner in the centre of our line, touched our shields edge to edge and waited. We were eighty-four men and Mordred brought over a hundred to attack us, but when they saw our shield wall formed and ready, they stopped. Some of Mordred’s horsemen spurred into the shallows of the sea-lake, hoping to ride about our flank, but the water deepened swiftly where the channel ran close beside the southern shore and they found they could not ride around us; so they slid out of their saddles and carried their shields and spears to join Mordred’s long wall. I looked up to see that the sun was at last sliding down towards the high western hills. Prydwen was almost afloat, though men were still busy in her rigging. It would not be long, I thought, before Caddwg came, but already there were more enemy spearmen straggling down the western road. Mordred’s forces grew stronger, and we could only grow weaker.

Fergal, his beard woven with fox fur and hung with small bones, came to the sand in front of our shield wall and there he hopped on one leg, held one hand in the air and kept one eye closed. He cursed our souls, promising them to the fire-worm of Crom Dubh and to the wolfpack that hunts Eryri’s Pass of Arrows. Our women would be given as playthings to the demons of Annwn and our children would be nailed to the oaks of Arddu. He cursed our spears and our swords, and threw an enchantment to shatter our shields and turn our bowels to water. He screamed his spells, promising that for food in the Otherworld we would have to scavenge the droppings of the hounds of Arawn and that for water we would lick the bile of Cefydd’s serpents. ‘Your eyes will be blood,’ he crooned, ‘your bellies shall be filled with worms, and your tongues will turn black! You will watch the rape of your women and the murder of your children!’ He called some of us by name, threatening torments unimaginable, and to counter his spells we sang the War Song of Beli Mawr.

From that day to this I have not heard that song sung again by warriors, and never did I hear it better sung than on that sea-wrapped stretch of sun-warmed sand. We were few, but we were the best warriors Arthur ever commanded. There were only one or two young men in that shield wall; the rest of us were seasoned, hardened men who had been through battle and smelt the slaughter and knew how to kill. We were the lords of war.

There was not a weak man there, not a single man who could not be trusted to protect his neighbour, and not a man whose courage would break, and how we sang that day! We drowned Fergal’s curses, and the strong sound of our voices must have carried across the water to where our women waited on Prydwen. We sang to Beli Mawr who had harnessed the wind to his chariot, whose spear shaft was a tree and whose sword slaughtered the enemy like a reaping hook cutting thistles. We sang of his victims scattered dead in the wheatfields and rejoiced for the widows made by his anger. We sang that his boots were like millstones, his shield an iron cliff and his helmet’s plume tall enough to scrape the stars. We sang tears into our eyes and fear into our enemy’s hearts.

The song ended in a feral howl, and even before that howl had ended Culhwch had limped out of our shield wall and shaken his spear at the enemy. He derided them as cowards, spat on their lineage and invited them to taste his spear. The enemy watched him, but none moved to take his challenge. They were a tattered, fearsome band, as hardened to killing as we were, though not, maybe, to the war of shield walls. They were the scourings of Britain and Armorica, the brigands, outlaws and masterless men who had flocked to Mordred’s promise of plunder and rape. Minute by minute their ranks swelled as men came down the spit, but the newcomers were footsore and weary, and the narrowing of the spit restricted the number of men who could advance into our spears. They might push us back, but they could not outflank us.

Nor, it seemed, would any come to face Culhwch. He planted himself opposite Mordred, who stood in the centre of the enemy line. ‘You were born of a toad-whore,’ he called to the King, ‘and fathered by a coward. Fight me! I limp! I’m old! I’m bald! But you daren’t face me!’ He spat at Mordred, and still not one of Mordred’s men moved. ‘Children!’ Culhwch jeered at them, then turned his back on the enemy to show his scorn of them.

It was then that a youngster rushed from the enemy ranks. His helmet was too big for his beardless head, his breastplate a poor thing of leather and his shield had a gaping split between two of its boards. He was a young man who needed to kill a champion to find wealth and he ran at Culhwch, screaming hatred, and the rest of Mordred’s men cheered him on.

Culhwch turned back, half crouched, and held his spear towards his enemy’s crotch. The young man raised his own spear, thinking to drive it down over Culhwch’s low shield, then shouted in triumph as he thrust down hard, but his shout turned into a choking scream as Culhwch’s spear flicked up to snatch the youngster’s soul from his open mouth. Culhwch, old in war, stepped back. His own shield had not even been touched. The dying man stumbled, the spear stuck in his throat. He half turned towards Culhwch, then fell. Culhwch kicked his enemy’s spear out of his hand, jerked his own spear free and stabbed down hard into the youngster’s neck. Then he smiled at Mordred’s men. ‘Another?’ he called. No one moved. Culhwch spat at Mordred and walked back to our cheering ranks. He winked at me as he came near. ‘See how it’s done, Derfel?’ he called, ‘watch and learn,’ and the men near me laughed. Prydwen was floating now, her pale hull shimmering its reflection on the water that was being ruffled by a small western wind. That wind brought us the stench of Mordred’s men; the mingled smells of leather, sweat and mead. Many of the enemy would be drunk, and many would never dare face our blades if they were not drunk. I wondered if the youngster whose mouth and gullet were now black with flies had needed mead-courage to face Culhwch.

Mordred was cajoling his men forward now, and the bravest among them were encouraging their comrades to advance. The sun seemed much lower suddenly, for it was beginning to dazzle us; I had not realized how much time had passed while Fergal cursed us and Culhwch taunted the enemy, and still that enemy could not find the courage to attack. A few would start forward, but the rest would lag behind, and Mordred would then curse them as he closed up the shield wall and urged them on again. It was ever thus. It takes great courage to close on a shield wall, and ours, though small, was close-knit and full of famous warriors. I glanced at Prydwen and saw her sail fall from the yard, and saw too that the new sail was dyed scarlet like blood and was decorated with Arthur’s black bear. Caddwg had spent much gold for that sail, but then I had no time to watch the distant ship for Mordred’s men were at last coming close and the brave ones were urging the rest into a run.

‘Brace hard!’ Arthur shouted, and we bent our knees to take the shock of the shield blow. The enemy was a dozen paces away, ten, and about to charge screaming when Arthur shouted again. ‘Now!’ he called, and his voice checked the enemy’s rush for they did not know what he meant, and then Mordred screamed at them to kill, and so at last they closed with us.

My spear hit a shield and was knocked down. I let it go and snatched up Hywelbane that I had stuck into the sand in front of me. A heartbeat later Mordred’s shields struck our shields and a short sword flailed at my head. My ears rang from a blow on my helmet as I stabbed Hywelbane under my shield to find my attacker’s leg. I felt her blade bite, twisted her hard and saw the man stagger as I crippled him. He flinched, but stayed on his feet. He had black curly hair crammed under a battered iron helmet and he was spitting at me as I managed to pull Hywelbane up from behind my shield. I parried a wild blow of his short sword, then beat my heavy blade down on his head. He sank to the sand. ‘In front of me,’ I shouted to the man behind me, and he used his spear to kill the crippled man who could otherwise have stabbed up into my groin, and then I heard men shouting in pain or alarm and I glanced left, my view obscured by swords and axes, and saw that great burning baulks of driftwood were being hurled over our heads into the enemy line. Arthur was using the balefire as a weapon, and his last word of command before the shield walls clashed had ordered the men by the fire to seize the logs by their unburned ends and hurl them into Mordred’s ranks. The enemy spearmen instinctively flinched away from the flames, and Arthur led our men into the gap that was made.

‘Make way!’ a voice shouted behind me, and I ducked aside as a spearman ran through our ranks with a great burning shaft of wood. He thrust it at the enemy’s faces, they twisted aside from the glowing tip, and we jumped into the gap. The fire scorched our faces as we hacked and thrusted. More flaming brands flew over us. The enemy closest to me had twisted away from the heat, opening his unprotected side to my neighbour, and I heard his ribs snap under the spear’s thrust and saw the blood bubble at his lips as he dropped. I was in the enemy’s second rank now, and the fallen timber was burning my leg, but I let the pain turn into a rage that drove Hywelbane hard into a man’s face, and then the men behind me kicked sand onto the flames as they pushed forward, driving me on into the third rank. I had no room now to use my sword, for I was crushed shield to shield against a swearing man who spat at me and tried to work his own sword past my shield’s edge. A spear came over my shoulder to strike the swearing man’s cheek and the pressure of his shield yielded just enough to let me push my own shield forward and swing Hywelbane. Later, much later, I remember screaming an incoherent sound of rage as I hammered that man into the sand. The madness of battle was on us, the desperate madness of fighting men trapped in a small place, but it was the enemy who was giving way. Rage was turned into horror and we fought like Gods. The sun blazed just above the western hill.

‘Shields! Shields! Shields!’ Sagramor roared, reminding us to keep the wall continuous, and my right-hand neighbour knocked his shield on mine, grinned, and stabbed forward with his spear. I saw an enemy’s sword being drawn back for a mighty blow and I met it with Hywelbane on the man’s wrist and she cut through that wrist as though the enemy’s bones were made of reed. The sword flew into our rear ranks with a bloody hand still gripping its hilt. The man on my left fell with an enemy spear in his belly, but the second rank man took his place and shouted a great oath as he slammed his shield forward and swung his sword down.

Another burning log flew low over us and fell on two of the enemy, who reeled apart. We leapt into the gap, and suddenly there was empty sand ahead of us. ‘Stay together!’ I shouted, ‘stay together!’ The enemy was breaking. Their front rank was dead or wounded, their second rank was dying, and the men in the rear were those who least wanted to fight and so were the ones who were easiest to kill. Those rear ranks were filled by men who were skilled at rape and clever at pillage, but had never faced a shield wall of hardened killers. And how we were killing now. Their wall was breaking, corroded by fire and fear, and we were screaming a victor’s chant. I stumbled on a body, fell forward and rolled over with my shield held above my face. A sword slammed into the shield, the sound deafening, then Sagramor’s men stepped over me and a spearman hauled me upright. ‘Wounded?’ he asked.

‘No.’

He pushed on. I looked to see where our wall needed strengthening, but everywhere it was at least three men deep, and those three ranks were grinding forward over the carnage of a slaughtered enemy. Men grunted as they swung, as they stabbed and as they drove the blades into enemy flesh. It is the beguiling glory of war, the sheer exhilaration of breaking a shield wall and slaking a sword on a hated enemy. I watched Arthur, a man as kind as any I have known, and saw nothing but joy in his eyes. Galahad, who prayed each day that he could obey Christ’s commandment to love all men, was now killing them with a terrible efficiency. Culhwch was roaring insults. He had discarded his shield so that he could use both hands on his heavy spear. Gwydre was grinning behind his cheekpieces, while Taliesin was singing as he killed the enemy wounded left behind by our advancing shield wall. You do not win the fight of the shield wall by being sensible and moderate, but by a Godlike rush of howling madness. And the enemy could not stand our madness, and so they broke and ran. Mordred tried to hold them, but they would not stay for him, and he fled with them back towards the fort. Some of our men, the rage of battle still seething inside them, began to pursue, but Sagramor called them back. He had been wounded on his shield shoulder, but he shook off any attempt we made to help him and bellowed at his men to stop their pursuit. We dared not follow them, beaten though they were, for then we would have found ourselves in the wider part of the spit and so have invited the enemy to surround us. Instead we stayed where we had fought and we jeered at our enemies, calling them cowards. A gull pecked at the eyes of a dead man. I looked away to see that Prydrven was bows on to us now and free of her mooring, though her bright sail was hardly stirring in the gentle wind. But she was just moving, and the colour of her sail shivered its long reflection on the glassy water. Mordred saw the boat, saw the great bear on her sail, and he knew his enemy might escape to sea and so he screamed at his men to make a new wall. Reinforcements were joining him minute by minute, and some of the newcomers were Nimue’s men for I saw two Bloodshields take their place in the new line that formed to charge us.

We fell back to where we had started, making our shield wall in the blood-soaked sand just in front of the fire that had helped us win the first attack. The bodies of our first four dead were only half burned and their scorched faces grinned foully at us through lips shrivelled back from discoloured teeth. We left the enemy’s dead on the sand as obstacles in the path of the living, but hauled our own dead back and piled them beside the fire. We had sixteen dead and a score of badly wounded, but we still had enough men to form a shield wall, and we could still fight.

Taliesin sang to us. He sang his own song of Mynydd Baddon, and it was to that hard rhythm that we touched our shields together again. Our swords and spears were blunted and bloodied, the enemy was fresh, but we cheered as they came towards us. Prydwen was scarcely moving. She looked like a ship poised on a mirror, but then I saw long oars unfold like wings from her hull.

‘Kill them!’ Mordred screamed, and he now had the battle rage himself and it drove him onto our line. A handful of brave men supported him, and they were followed by some of Nimue’s demented souls, so it was a ragged charge that first fell on our line, but among the men who came were new arrivals who wanted to prove themselves, and so again we bent our knees and crouched behind our shield rims. The sun was blinding now, but in the moment before the crazed rush struck home, I saw flashes of light from the western hill and knew that there were still more spearmen on that high ground. I gained the impression that a whole new army of spearmen had come to the summit, but from where, or who led them, I could not tell, and then I had no time to think of the newcomers, for I was thrusting my shield forward and the blow of shield on shield made the stump of my arm sing in pain and I keened a sound of agony as I sliced Hywelbane down. A Bloodshield opposed me, and I cut him down hard, finding the gap between his breastplate and helmet, and when I had jerked Hywelbane free of his flesh I slashed wildly at the next enemy, a mad creature, and spun him away with blood spurting from his cheek, nose and eye. Those first enemies had run ahead of Mordred’s shield wall, but now the bulk of the enemy struck us and we leaned into their attack and screamed defiance as we lunged our blades across our shield rims. I recall confusion and the noise of sword ringing on sword, and the crash of shield striking shield. Battle is a matter of inches, not miles. The inches that separate a man from his enemy. You smell the mead on their breath, hear the breath in their throats, hear their grunts, feel them shift their weight, feel their spittle on your eyes, and you look for danger, look back into the eyes of the next man you must kill, find an opening, take it, close the shield wall again, step forward, feel the thrust of the men behind, half stumble on the bodies of those you have killed, recover, push forward, and afterwards you recall little except the blows that so nearly killed you. You work and push and stab to make an opening in their shield wall, and then you grunt and lunge and slash to widen the gap, and only then does the madness take over as the enemy breaks and you can begin to kill like a God because the enemy is scared and running, or scared and frozen, and all they can do is die while you harvest souls.

And beat them back again we did. Again we used flames from our balefire, and again we broke their wall, but we broke our own in the doing of it. I remember the sun bright behind the high western hill, and I remember staggering into an open patch of sand and shouting at men to support me, and I remember slashing Hywelbane onto the exposed nape of an enemy’s neck and watching his blood well up through severed hair and seeing his head jerk back, and then I saw that the two battle lines had broken each other and we were nothing but small struggling groups of bloody men on a bloody stretch of fire-littered sand.

But we had won. The rearmost ranks of the enemy ran rather than take more of our swords, but in the centre, where Mordred fought, and Arthur fought, they did not run and the fight became grim around those two leaders. We tried to surround Mordred’s men, but they fought back, and I saw how few we were and how many of us would never fight again because we had spilt our blood into Camlann’s sands. A crowd of the enemy watched us from the dunes, but they were cowards and would not come forward to help their comrades, and so the last of our men fought the last of Mordred’s, and I saw Arthur hacking with Excalibur, trying to reach the King, and Sagramor was there, and Gwydre too, and I joined in the fight, throwing a spear away with my shield, stabbing Hywelbane forward, and my throat was dry as smoke and my voice a raven’s croak. I struck at another man, and Hywelbane left a scar across his shield and he staggered back and did not have the strength to step forward again, and my own strength was ebbing and so I just stared at him through sweat-stung eyes. He came forward slowly, I stabbed, he staggered back from the blow on his shield and thrust a spear at me, and it was my turn to go backwards. I was panting, and all across the spit tired men fought tired men. Galahad was wounded, his sword arm broken and his face bloody. Culhwch was dead. I did not see it, but I found his body later with two spears in his unarmoured groin. Sagramor was limping, but his quick sword was still deadly. He was trying to shelter Gwydre, who bled from a cut on his cheek and was attempting to reach his father’s side. Arthur’s goose-feather plumes were red with blood and his white cloak streaked with it. I watched him cut down a tall man, kick away the enemy’s despairing lunge and slice down hard with Excalibur.

It was then that Loholt attacked. I had not seen him till that moment, but he saw his father and he spurred his horse and drew his spear back with his one remaining hand. He screamed a chant of hate as he charged into the tangle of tired men. The horse was white-eyed and terrified, but the spurs drove it on as Loholt aimed his blade at Arthur, but then Sagramor plucked up a spear and hurled it so that the horse’s legs were tangled by the heavy staff and the animal fell in a shower of sand. Sagramor stepped into the flailing hoofs and scythed his sword’s dark blade sideways and I saw blood spurt up from Loholt’s neck, but just as Sagramor snatched Loholt’s soul, so a Bloodshield darted forward and lunged at Sagramor with a spear. Sagramor backhanded his sword, spraying Loholt’s blood from its tip, and the Bloodshield went down screaming, but then a shout announced that Arthur had reached Mordred and the rest of us instinctively turned to watch as the two men confronted each other. A lifetime of hatred rankled between them.

Mordred reached his sword out lowly, then swept it back to show his men he wanted Arthur for himself. The enemy obediently stumbled away. Mordred, just as he had been on the day when he had been acclaimed on Caer Cadarn, was all in black. A black cloak, black breastplate, black trews, black boots and a black helmet. In places the black armour had been scarred where blades had cut through the dried pitch to fleck open the bare metal. His shield was covered in pitch, and his only touches of colour were a shrivelled sprig of vervain that showed at his neck and the eye sockets of the skull that crested his helmet. A child’s skull, I thought, for it was so small, and its eye sockets had been stuffed with scraps of red cloth. He limped forward on his clubbed foot, swinging his sword, and Arthur gestured at us to step back to give him room to fight. He hefted Excalibur, and raised his silver shield that was torn and bloody. How many of us were left by then? I do not know. Forty? Maybe less, and Prydmen had reached the turn in the river channel and was now gliding towards us with the wraithstone grey in her prow and her sail barely stirring in the small wind. The oars dipped and rose. The tide was almost full. Mordred lunged, Arthur parried, lunged with his own blade, and Mordred stepped back. The King was quick, and he was young, but his clubbed foot and the deep thigh wound he had taken in Armorica made him less agile than Arthur. He licked dry lips, came forward again, and the swords rang loud in the evening air. One of the watching enemy suddenly staggered and fell for no apparent reason, but he did not move again as Mordred stepped fast forward and swung his sword in a blinding arc. Arthur met the blade with Excalibur, then shoved his shield forward to strike the King and Mordred staggered away. Arthur drew his arm back for the lunge, but Mordred somehow kept his footing and scrambled back with his sword countering the lunge and flicking fast forward in reply. I could see Guinevere standing in Prydwen’s prow with Ceinwyn just behind her. In the lovely evening light it seemed as though the hull was made of silver and the sail of finest scarlet linen. The long oars dipped and rose, dipped and rose, and slowly she came until a breath of warm wind at last filled the bear on her sail and the water rippled faster down her silver flanks, and just then Mordred screamed and charged, the swords clashed, shields banged, and Excalibur swept the grisly skull from the crest of Mordred’s helm. Mordred swung hard back and I saw Arthur flinch as his enemy’s blade struck home, but he pushed the King away with his shield and the two men stepped apart. Arthur pressed his sword hand against his waist where he had been struck, then shook his head as though denying that he was hurt. But Sagramor was hurt. He had been watching the fight, but now he suddenly bent forward and stumbled down into the sand. I crossed to him. ‘Spear in my belly,’ he said, and I saw he was clutching his stomach with both hands to stop his guts from spilling onto the sand. Just as he had killed Loholt, so the Bloodshield had struck Sagramor with his spear and had died in that achievement, but Sagramor was dying now. I put my one good arm about him and turned him onto his back. He gripped my hand. His teeth chattered, and he groaned, then he forced up his helmeted head to watch as Arthur went cautiously forward.

There was blood at Arthur’s waist. Mordred’s last swing had cut up into the scale armour, up between the scale-like flakes of metal, and it had bitten deeply into Arthur’s side. Even as Arthur went forward new blood glistened and welled where the sword had torn through his armoured coat, but Arthur suddenly leapt forward and turned his threatened lunge into a downwards chop that Mordred parried on his shield. Mordred threw the shield wide to throw Excalibur clear and stabbed forward with his own sword, but Arthur took that lunge on his shield, drew back Excalibur, and it was then that I saw his shield tilt backwards and saw Mordred’s sword scrape up the torn silver cover. Mordred shouted and pushed the blade harder and Arthur did not see the sword tip coming until it broke over the shield’s edge and stabbed up into the eyehole of his helmet.

I saw blood. But I also saw Excalibur come down from the sky in a blow as strong as Arthur ever struck.

Excalibur cut through Mordred’s helmet. It slit the black iron as though it were parchment, then broke the King’s skull and sliced into his brain. And Arthur, with blood glistening at his helmet’s eyehole, staggered, recovered, then wrenched Excalibur free in a spray of bloody droplets. Mordred, dead from the moment Excalibur had split his helmet, fell forward at Arthur’s feet. His blood gushed onto the sand and onto Arthur’s boots, and his men, seeing their King dead and Arthur still on his feet, gave a low moan and stepped backwards.

I took my hand from Sagramor’s dying grip. ‘Shield wall!’ I shouted, ‘shield wall!’ And the startled survivors of our small warband closed ranks in front of Arthur and we touched our ragged shields together and snarled forward over Mordred’s lifeless body. I thought the enemy might come back for vengeance, but they stepped backwards instead. Their leaders were dead, and we were still showing defiance, and they had no belly for more death that evening.

‘Stay here!’ I shouted at the shield wall, then went back to Arthur. Galahad and I eased the helmet from his head and so released a rush of blood. The sword had missed his right eye by a finger’s breadth, but it had broken the bone outside the eye and the wound was pulsing blood. ‘Cloth!’ I shouted, and a wounded man ripped a length of linen from a dead man’s jerkin and we used it to pad the wound. Taliesin bound it up, using a strip torn from the skirts of his robe. Arthur looked up at me when Taliesin was finished and tried to speak.

‘Quiet, Lord,’ I said.

‘Mordred,’ he said.

‘He’s dead, Lord,’ I said, ‘he’s dead.’

I think he smiled, and then Prydwen\ bow scraped on the sand. Arthur’s face was pale and bloody rivulets laced his cheek.

‘You can grow a beard now, Derfel,’ he said.

‘Yes, Lord,’ I said, ‘I will. Don’t speak.’ There was blood at his waist, far too much blood, but I could not take his armour off to find that wound, even though I feared it was the worse of his two injuries.

‘Excalibur,’ he said to me.

‘Quiet, Lord,’ I said.

‘Take Excalibur,’ he said. ‘Take it and throw it into the sea. Promise me?’

‘I will, Lord, I promise.’ I took the bloodied sword from his hand, then stepped back as four unwounded men lifted Arthur and carried him to the boat. They passed him over the gunwale, and Guinevere helped to take him and to lay him on Prydwerts deck. She made a pillow of his blood-soaked cloak, then crouched beside him and stroked his face. ‘Are you coming, Derfel?’ she asked me. I gestured to the men who still formed a shield wall on the sand. ‘Can you take them?’ I asked. ‘And can you take the wounded?’

‘Twelve men more,’ Caddwg called from the stern. ‘No more than twelve. Don’t have space for more.’

No fishing-boats had come. But why should they have come? Why should men involve themselves in killing and blood and madness when their job is to take food from the sea? We only had Prydwen and she would have to sail without me. I smiled at Guinevere. ‘I can’t come, Lady,’ I said, then turned and gestured again towards the shield wall. ‘Someone must stay to lead them over the bridge of swords.’ The stump of my left arm was oozing blood, there was a bruise on my ribs, but I was alive. Sagramor was dying, Culhwch was dead, Galahad and Arthur were injured. There was no one but me. I was the last of Arthur’s warlords.

‘I can stay!’ Galahad had overheard our conversation.

‘You can’t fight with a broken arm,’ I said. ‘Get in the boat, and take Gwydre. And hurry! The tide’s falling.’

‘I should stay,’ Gwydre said nervously.

I seized him by the shoulders and pushed him into the shallows. ‘Go with your father,’ I said, ‘for my sake. And tell him I was true to the end.’ I stopped him suddenly, and turned him back to face me, and I saw there were tears on his young face. ‘Tell your father,’ I said, ‘that I loved him to the end.’

He nodded, then he and Galahad climbed aboard. Arthur was with his family now, and I stepped back as Caddwg used one of the oars to pole the ship back into the channel. I looked up at Ceinwyn and I smiled, and there were tears in my eyes, but I could think of nothing to say except to tell her that I would wait for her beneath the apple trees of the Otherworld; but just as I was phrasing the clumsy words, and just as the ship slipped off the sand, she stepped lightly onto the bow and leapt into the shallows.

‘No!’ I shouted.

‘Yes,’ she said, and reached out a hand so that I would help her onto the shore.

‘You know what they’ll do to you?’ I asked.

She showed me a knife in her left hand, meaning she would kill herself before she was taken by Mordred’s men. ‘We’ve been together too long, my love, to part now,’ she said and then she stood beside me to watch as Prydwen edged into the deep water. Our last daughter and her children were sailing away. The tide had turned and the first of the ebb was creeping the silver ship towards the sea reach.

I stayed with Sagramor as he died. I cradled his head, held his hand and talked his soul onto the bridge of swords. Then, with my eyes brimming with tears, I walked back to our small shield wall and saw that Camlann was filled with spearmen now. A whole army had come, but they had come too late to save their King, though they still had time enough to finish us. I could see Nimue at last, her white robe and her white horse bright in the shadowed dunes. My friend and one-time lover was now my final enemy.

‘Fetch me a horse,’ I told a spearman. There were stray horses everywhere and he ran, grabbed a bridle and brought a mare back to me. I asked Ceinwyn to unstrap my shield, then had the spearman help me onto the mare’s back and, once mounted, I tucked Excalibur under my left arm and took the reins with my right. I kicked back and the horse leapt ahead, and I kicked her again, scattering sand with her hoofs and men from her path. I was riding among Mordred’s men now, but there was no fight in them for they had lost their Lord. They were masterless and Nimue’s army of the mad was behind them, and behind Nimue’s ragged forces there was a third army. A new army had come to Camlann’s sands. It was the same army I had seen on the high western hill, and I realized it must have marched south behind Mordred to take Dumnonia for itself. It was an army that had come to watch Arthur and Mordred destroy themselves, and now that the fighting was done the army of Gwent moved slowly forward beneath their banners of the cross. They came to rule Dumnonia and to make Meurig its King. Their red cloaks and scarlet plumes looked black in the twilight, and I looked up to see that the first faint stars were pricking the sky.

I rode towards Nimue, but stopped a hundred paces short of my old friend. I could see Olwen watching me, and Nimue’s baleful stare, and then I smiled at her and took Excalibur into my right hand and held up the stump of my left so that she would know what I had done. Then I showed her Excalibur. She knew what I planned then. ‘No!’ she screamed, and her army of the mad wailed with her and their gibbering shook the evening sky.

I put Excalibur under my arm again, picked up the reins and kicked the mare as I turned her about. I urged her on, driving her fast onto the sand of the sea-beach, and I heard Nimue’s horse galloping behind me, but she was too late, much too late.

I rode towards Prydwen. The small wind was filling her sail now and she was clear of the spit and the wraithstone at her bows was rising and falling in the sea’s endless waves. I kicked again and the mare tossed her head and I shouted her on into that darkening sea, and kept kicking her until the waves broke cold against her chest and only then did I drop the reins. She quivered under me as I took Excalibur in my right hand.

I drew my arm back. There was blood on the sword, yet her blade seemed to glow. Merlin had once said that the Sword of Rhydderch would turn to flame at the end, and perhaps she did, or perhaps the tears in my eyes deceived me.

‘No!’ Nimue wailed.

And I threw Excalibur, threw her hard and high towards the deep water where the tide had scoured the channel through Camlann’s sands.

Excalibur turned in the evening air. No sword was ever more beautiful. Merlin swore she had been made by Gofannon in the smithy of the Otherworld. She was the Sword of Rhydderch and a Treasure of Britain. She was Arthur’s sword and a Druid’s gift, and she wheeled against the darkening sky and her blade flashed blue fire against the brightening stars. For a heartbeat she was a shining bar of blue flame poised in the heavens, and then she fell.

She fell true in the channel’s centre. There was hardly a splash, just a glimpse of white water, and she was gone.

Nimue screamed. I turned the mare away and drove her back to the beach and back across the litter of battle to where my last warband waited. And there I saw that the army of the mad was drifting away. They were going, and Mordred’s men, those that survived, were fleeing down the beach to escape the advance of Meurig’s troops. Dumnonia would fall, a weak King would rule and the Saxons would return, but we would live.

I slid from the horse, took Ceinwyn’s arm, and led her to the top of a nearby dune. The sky in the west was a fierce red glow for the sun was gone, and together we stood in the world’s shadow and watched as Prydwen rose and fell to the waves. Her sail was full now, for the evening wind was blowing from the west and Prydwen’s prow broke water white and her stern left a widening wake across the sea. Full south she sailed, and then she turned into the west, but the wind was from the west and no boat can sail straight into the wind’s eye, yet I swear that boat did. She sailed west, and the wind was blowing from the west, yet her sail was full and her high prow cut the water white, or maybe I did not know what it was that I saw for there were tears in my eyes and more tears running down my cheeks. And while we watched we saw a silver mist form on the water.

Ceinwyn gripped my arm. The mist was just a patch, but it grew and it glowed. The sun was gone, there was no moon shining, just the stars and the twilight sky and the silver-flecked sea and the dark-sailed boat, yet the mist did glow. Like the silver spindrift of stars, it glowed. Or maybe it was just the tears in my eyes.

‘Derfel!’ Sansum snapped at me. He had come with Meurig and now he scrambled across the sand towards us. ‘Derfel!’ he called. ‘I want you! Come here! Now!’

‘My dear Lord,’ I said, but not to him. I spoke to Arthur.

And I watched and wept, my arm around Ceinwyn, as the pale boat was swallowed by the shimmering silver mist.

And so my Lord was gone.

And no one has seen him since.