I knocked his sword aside with Hywelbane, then stepped close to him. ‘Let me give you some advice, Loholt,’ I said softly. ‘Choose your enemies more wisely than you choose your friends. I have no quarrel with you, nor do I wish one, but if you desire such a quarrel, then I promise you that my love for your father and my friendship with your mother will not stop me from sinking Hywelbane in your guts and burying your soul in a dungheap.’ I sheathed my sword. ‘Now go.’
He blinked at me, but he had no belly for a fight. He went to fetch his horse and Amhar went with him. Dinas and Lavaine laughed, and Dinas even bowed to me. ‘A victory!’ he applauded me.
‘We are routed,’ Lavaine said, ‘but what else could we expect from a Warrior of the Cauldron?’ he pronounced that title mockingly.
‘And a killer of Druids,’ Dinas added, not at all mockingly.
‘Our grandfather, Tanaburs,’ Lavaine said, and I remembered how Galahad had warned me on the Dark Road about the enmity of these two Druids.
‘It is reckoned unwise,’ Lavaine said in his grating voice, ‘to kill a Druid.’
‘Especially our grandfather,’ Dinas added, ‘who was like a father to us.’
‘As our own father died,’ Lavaine said.
‘When we were young.’
‘Of a foul disease,’ Lavaine explained.
‘He was a Druid too,’ Dinas said, ‘and he taught us spells. We can blight crops.’
‘We can make women moan,’ Lavaine said.
‘We can sour milk.’
‘While it’s still in the breast,’ Lavaine added, then he turned abruptly away and, with an impressive agility, vaulted into his saddle.
His brother leapt onto his own horse and collected his reins. ‘But we can do more than turn milk,’
Dinas said, looking balefully down at me from his horse and then, as he had before, he held out his empty hand, made it into a fist, turned it over and opened it again, and there on his palm was a parchment star with five points. He smiled, then tore the parchment into scraps that he scattered on the grass. ‘We can make the stars vanish,’ he said as a farewell, then kicked his heels back. The two galloped away. I spat. Culhwch retrieved my fallen spear and handed it to me. ‘Who in all the world are they?’ he asked.
‘Tanaburs’s grandsons.’ I spat a second time to avert evil. ‘The whelps of a bad Druid.’
‘And they can make the stars disappear?’ He sounded dubious.
‘One star.’ I gazed after the two horsemen. Ceinwyn, I knew, was safe in her brother’s hall, but I also knew I would have to kill the Silurian twins if she was to remain safe. Tanaburs’s curse was on me and the curse was called Dinas and Lavaine. I spat a third time, then touched Hywelbane’s sword hilt for luck.
‘We should have killed your brother in Benoic,’ Culhwch growled to Galahad.
‘God forgive me,’ Galahad said, ‘but you’re right.’
Two days later Cuneglas arrived and that night there was a Council of War, and after the Council, under the waning moon and by the light of flaming torches, we pledged our spears to the war against the Saxons. We warriors of Mithras dipped our blades in bull’s blood, but we held no meeting to elect new initiates. There was no need; Lancelot, by his baptism, had escaped the humiliation of rejection, though how any Christian could be served by Druids was a mystery that no one could explain to me. Merlin came that day and it was he who presided over the pagan rites. Iorweth of Powys helped him, but there was no sign of Dinas or Lavaine. We sang the Battle Song of Beli Mawr, we washed our spears in blood, we vowed ourselves to the death of every Saxon and next day we marched.
* * *
There were two important Saxon leaders in Lloegyr. Like us the Saxons had chiefs and lesser kings, indeed they had tribes and some of the tribes did not even call themselves Saxons but claimed to be Angles or Jutes, but we called them all Saxons and knew they only possessed two important Kings and those two leaders were called Aelle and Cerdic. They hated each other. Aelle, of course, was then the famous one. He called himself the Bretwalda, which in the Saxon tongue meant the ‘ruler of Britain’, and his lands stretched from south of the Thames to the border of distant Elmet. His rival was Cerdic, whose territory lay on Britain’s southern coast and whose only borders were with Aelle’s lands and Dumnonia. Of the two kings Aelle was older, richer in land and stronger in warriors, and that made Aelle our chief enemy; defeat Aelle, we believed, and Cerdic would inevitably fall afterwards.
Prince Meurig of Gwent, arrayed in his toga and with a ludicrous bronze wreath perched atop his thin, pale brown hair, had proposed a different strategy at the Council of War. With his usual diffidence and mock humility he had suggested we make an alliance with Cerdic. ‘Let him fight for us!’ Meurig said.
‘Let him attack Aelle from the south while we strike from the west. I am, I know, no strategist,’ he paused to simper, inviting one of us to contradict him, but we all bit our tongues, ‘but it seems clear, even surely to the meanest of intelligences, that to fight one enemy is better than two.’
‘But we have two enemies,’ Arthur said plainly.
‘Indeed we do, I have made myself master of that point, Lord Arthur. But my point, if you can seize it in turn, is to make one of those enemies our friend.’ He clasped his hands together and blinked at Arthur.
‘An ally,’ Meurig added, in case Arthur had still not understood him.
‘Cerdic,’ Sagramor growled in his atrocious British, ‘has no honour. He will break an oath as easily as a magpie breaks a sparrow’s egg. I will make no peace with him.’
‘You fail to understand,’ Meurig protested.
‘I will make no peace with him,’ Sagramor interrupted the Prince, speaking the words very slowly as though he spoke to a child. Meurig reddened and went silent. The Edling of Gwent was scared half to death of the tall Numidian warrior, and no wonder, for Sagramor’s reputation was as fearsome as his looks. The Lord of the Stones was a tall man, very thin and quick as a whip. His hair and face were as black as pitch and that long face, cross-hatched from a lifetime of war, bore a perpetual scowl that hid a droll and even generous character. Sagramor, despite his imperfect grasp of our language, could keep a campfire enthralled for hours with his tales of far-off lands, but most men only knew him as the fiercest of all Arthur’s warriors; the implacable Sagramor who was terrible in battle and sombre out of it, while the Saxons believed he was a black fiend sent from their underworld. I knew him well enough and liked him, indeed it had been Sagramor who had initiated me into Mithras’s service, and Sagramor who had fought at my side all that long day in Lugg Vale. ‘He’s got himself a big Saxon girl now,’ Culhwch had whispered to me at the council, ‘tall as a tree and with hair like a haystack. No wonder he’s so thin.’
‘Your three wives keep you solid enough,’ I said, poking him in his substantial ribs.
‘I pick them for the way they cook, Derfel, not the way they look.’
‘You have something to contribute, Lord Culhwch?’ Arthur asked.
‘Nothing, cousin!’ Culhwch responded cheerfully.
‘Then we shall continue,’ Arthur said. He asked Sagramor what chance there was of Cerdic’s men fighting for Aelle, and the Numidian, who had guarded the Saxon frontier all winter, shrugged and said that anything was possible with Cerdic. He had heard, he said, that the two Saxons had met and exchanged gifts, but no one had reported that an actual alliance had been made. Sagramor’s best guess was that Cerdic would be content to let Aelle be weakened, and that while the Dumnonian army was about that business he would attack along the coast in an effort to capture Durnovaria.
‘If we were at peace with him. .’ Meurig tried again.
‘We won’t be,’ King Cuneglas said curtly, and Meurig, outranked by the only King at the Council, went quiet again.
‘There is one last thing,’ Sagramor warned us. ‘The Sais have dogs now. Big dogs.’ He spread his hands to show the huge size of the Saxon war dogs. We had all heard of these beas
ts, and we feared them. It was said that the Saxons released the dogs just seconds before the shield-walls clashed, and that the beasts were capable of tearing huge holes in the wall into which the enemy spearmen poured.
‘I will deal with the dogs,’ Merlin said. It was the only contribution he made to the council, but the calm, confident statement relieved some worried men. Merlin’s unexpected presence with the army was contribution enough, for his possession of the Cauldron made him, even for many of the Christians, a figure of more awesome power than ever. Not that many understood the purpose of the Cauldron, but they were pleased that the Druid had declared his willingness to accompany the army. With Arthur at our head, and Merlin on our side, how could we lose?
Arthur made his dispositions. King Lancelot, he said, with the spearmen of Siluria and a detachment of men from Dumnonia, would guard the southern frontier against Cerdic. The rest of us would assemble at Caer Ambra and march due east along the valley of the Thames. Lancelot made a show of being reluctant to be thus separated from the main army that would have to fight Aelle, but Culhwch, hearing the orders, shook his head in wonder. ‘He’s skipping out of battle again, Derfel!’ he whispered to me.
‘Not if Cerdic attacks him,’ I said.
Culhwch glanced across at Lancelot who was flanked by the twins Dinas and Lavaine. ‘And he’s staying near his protectress, isn’t he?’ Culhwch said. ‘Mustn’t stray too far from Guinevere, else he has to stand up by himself
I did not care. I was only relieved that Lancelot and his men were not in the main army; it was enough to face the Saxons without worrying about Tanaburs’s grandsons or a Silurian knife in my back. And so we marched. It was a ragged army of contingents from three British kingdoms while some of our more distant allies had still not arrived. There were men promised to us from Elmet and even from Kernow, but they would follow us along the Roman road that ran south-east from Corinium and then east towards London.
London. The Romans had called it Londinium, and before that it had been plain Londo, which Merlin once told me meant ‘a wild place’, and now it was our goal, the once-great city that had been the largest in all Rome’s Britain and which now lay decaying amidst Aelle’s stolen lands. Sagramor had once led a famous raid into the old city and he had found its British inhabitants cowed by their new masters, but now, we hoped, we would take them back. That hope spread like wildfire through the army, though Arthur consistently denied it. Our task, he said, was to bring the Saxons to battle and not be lured by the ruins of a dead city, but in this Arthur was opposed by Merlin. ‘I’m not coming to see a handful of dead Saxons,’ he told me scornfully. ‘What use am I in killing Saxons?’
‘Every use, Lord,’ I told him. ‘Your magic frightens the enemy.’
‘Don’t be absurd, Derfel. Any fool can hop about in front of an army making faces and hurling curses. Frightening Saxons isn’t skilled work. Even those ludicrous Druids of Lancelot’s could just about manage that! Not that they’re real Druids.’
‘They’re not?’
‘Of course they’re not! To be a real Druid you have to study. You have to be examined. You have to satisfy other Druids that you know your business, and I never heard of any Druid examining Dinas and Lavaine. Unless Tanaburs did, and what kind of Druid was he? Not a very good one, plainly, else he’d never have let you live. I do deplore inefficiency.’
‘They can make magic, Lord,’ I said.
‘Make magic!’ He hooted at that. ‘One of the wretches produces a thrush’s egg and you think that’s magic? Thrushes do it all the time. Now if he’d made a sheep’s egg, I’d take some notice.’
‘He produced a star too, Lord.’
‘Derfel! What an absurdly credulous man you are!’ he exclaimed. ‘A star made of scissors and parchment? Don’t worry, I heard about that star and your precious Ceinwyn isn’t in any danger. Nimue and I made sure of that by burying three skulls. You don’t need to know the details, but you can rest assured that if those frauds go anywhere near Ceinwyn they’ll be changed into grass-snakes. Then they can lay eggs for ever.’ I thanked him for that, then asked him just why he was accompanying the army if not to help us against Aelle. ‘Because of the scroll, of course,’ he told me and patted a pocket of his dirty black robe to show me the scroll was safe.
‘Caleddin’s scroll?’ I asked.
‘Is there another?’ he countered.
Caleddin’s scroll was the treasure Merlin had brought from Ynys Trebes, and in his eyes it was as valuable as all the Treasures of Britain, and no wonder, for the secret of those Treasures was described in the ancient document. Druids were forbidden to write anything down because they believed that to record a spell was to destroy the writer’s power to work the magic, and thus all their lore and rites and knowledge were handed down by voice alone. Yet the Romans, before they attacked Ynys Mon, had so feared the British religion that they had suborned a Druid named Caleddin and had persuaded him to dictate all he knew to a Roman scribe, and Caleddin’s traitorous scroll had thus preserved all the ancient knowledge of Britain. Much of it, Merlin once told me, had been forgotten in the passing centuries, for the Romans had persecuted the Druids cruelly and much of the old knowledge had vanished into time, but now, with the scroll, he could recreate that lost power. ‘And the scroll,’ I ventured, ‘mentions London?’
‘My, my, how curious you are,’ Merlin mocked me, but then, perhaps because it was a fine day and he was in a sunny mood, he relented. ‘The last Treasure of Britain is in London,’ he said. ‘Or it was,’ he added hastily. ‘It’s buried there. I thought of giving you a spade and letting you dig the thing up, but you were bound to make a mess of it. Just look at what you did on Ynys Mon! Outnumbered and surrounded, indeed. Unforgivable. So I decided to do it myself. I have to find where it’s buried first, of course, and that could be difficult.’
‘And is that, Lord,’ I asked, ‘why you brought the dogs?’ For Merlin and Nimue had collected a mangy pack of snapping mongrels that now accompanied the army.
Merlin sighed. ‘Allow me, Derfel,’ he said, ‘to give you some advice. You do not buy a dog and bark yourself. I know the purpose of the dogs, Nimue knows their purpose, and you do not. That is how the Gods intended it to be. Do you have any more questions? Or may I now enjoy this morning’s walk?’ He lengthened his stride, thumping his big black staff into the turf with each emphatic step. The smoke of great beacons welcomed us once we had passed Calleva. Those fires were the enemy’s signals that we were in sight, and whenever a Saxon saw such a plume of smoke he was under orders to waste the land. The grain stores were emptied, the houses were burned and the livestock driven away. And always Aelle withdrew, staying ever a day’s march ahead of us and thus tempting us forward into that wasted land. Wherever the road passed through woodland it would be blocked by trees, and sometimes, as our men laboured to pull the felled trunks out of the way, an arrow or spear would crash through the leaves to snatch a life, or else one of the big Saxon war dogs would come leaping and slavering out of the undergrowth, but they were the only attacks Aelle made and we never once saw his shield-wall. Back he went, and forward we marched, and each day the enemy spears or dogs would snatch a life or two.
Much more damage was done to us by disease. We had found the same thing before Lugg Vale, that whenever a large army gathered, so the Gods plagued it with sickness. The sick slowed us terribly, for if they could not march they had to be laid in a safe place and guarded by spearmen to keep them from the Saxon war-bands that prowled all about our flanks. We would see those enemy bands by day as distant ragged figures, while every night their fires flickered on our horizon. Yet it was not the sick that slowed us the most, but rather the sheer ponderousness of moving so many men. It was a mystery to me why thirty spearmen could cover an easy twenty miles on a relaxed day, but an army of twenty times that number, even trying hard, was lucky to cover eight or nine. Our markers were the Roman stones planted on the verge that recorded the number of miles to London, and after
a while I refused to look at them for fear of their depressing message.
The ox-wagons also slowed us. We were equipped with forty capacious farm wagons that carried our food and spare weapons, and those wagons lumbered at a snail’s pace in the army’s rear. Prince Meurig had been given command of that rearguard and he fussed over the wagons, counted them obsessively, and forever complained that the spearmen ahead were marching too fast. Arthur’s famed horsemen led the army. There were fifty of them now, all mounted on the big shaggy horses that were bred deep inside Dumnonia. Other horsemen, who did not wear the mail armour of Arthur’s band, ranged ahead as our scouts and sometimes those men failed to return, though we would always find their severed heads waiting for us on the road as we advanced. The main body of the army was composed of five hundred spearmen. Arthur had decided to take no levies with him, for such farmers rarely carried adequate weapons; so we were all oath-sworn warriors and all carried spears and shields and most possessed swords too. Not every man could afford a sword, but Arthur had sent orders throughout Dumnonia that every household possessing a sword which was not already sworn to the army’s service should surrender the weapon, and the eighty blades so collected had been distributed among his army. Some men a few carried captured Saxon war axes, though others, like myself, disliked the weapon’s clumsiness.
And to pay for all this? To pay for the swords and new spears and new shields and wagons and oxen and flour and boots and banners and bridles and cooking pots and helmets and cloaks and knives and horseshoes and salted meat? Arthur laughed when I asked him. ‘You must thank the Christians, Derfel,’
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