Arthur thought for a few seconds. ‘We have gold,’ he said, ‘silver, my armour.’
‘Baubles,’ Merlin answered dismissively.
There was silence for a while, then men outside the Council offered their answers. Some took torques from about their necks and waved them in the air. Others suggested offering weapons, one man even called out the name of Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. The Christians made no suggestions, because this was a pagan procedure and they would offer nothing but their prayers, but one man of Powys suggested we sacrifice a Christian and that idea prompted loud cheers. Meurig blushed again.
‘I sometimes think,’ Merlin said when no more suggestions were offered, ‘that I am doomed to live among idiots. Is all the world mad but me? Cannot one poor blinkered fool among you see what is plainly the most precious thing we possess? Not one?’
‘Food,’ I said.
‘Ah!’ Merlin cried, delighted. ‘Well done, you poor blinkered fool! Food, you idiots.’ He spat the insult at the Council. ‘Aelle’s plans are predicated upon the belief that we lack food, so we must demonstrate the opposite. We must waste food like Christians waste prayer, we must scatter it to the empty heavens, we must squander it, we must throw it away, we must,’ he paused to put stress on the next word, ‘sacrifice it.’ He waited for a voice to be raised in opposition, but no one spoke. ‘Find a place near here,’ Merlin ordered Arthur, ‘where you will be content to offer Aelle battle. Do not make it too strong, for you don’t want him to refuse combat. You’re tempting him, remember, and you must make him believe he can defeat you. How long will it take him to ready his forces for battle?’
‘Three days,’ Arthur said. He suspected that Aelle’s men were widely scattered in their loose ring that escorted us and it would take the Saxon at least two days to shrink that ring into a compact army, and another full day to shove it into battle order.
‘I shall need two days,’ Merlin said, ‘so bake enough hard bread to keep us barely alive for five days,’ he ordered. ‘Not a generous ration, Arthur, for our sacrifice has to be real. Then find your battleground and wait. Leave the rest to me, but I want Derfel and a dozen of his men to do some labouring work. And do we have any men here,’ he raised his voice so that all the men crowding about the Council could hear, ‘who have skills in carving wood?’
He chose six men. Two were from Powys, one bore the hawk of Kernow on his shield, and the others were from Dumnonia. They were given axes and knives, but nothing to carve until Arthur had discovered his battleground.
He found it on a wide heath that rose to a gentle summit crowned by a scattered grove of yew and whitebeam. The slope was nowhere steep, but we would still have the high ground and there Arthur planted his banners, and round the banners there grew an encampment of thatched shelters made from branches cut from the grove. Our spearmen would make a ring about the banners and there, we hoped, face Aelle. The bread that would keep us alive as we waited for the Saxons was baked in turf ovens. Merlin chose his spot to the north of the heath. There was a meadow there, a place of stunted alders and rank grass edging a stream that curled south towards the distant Thames. My men were ordered to fell three oaks, then strip the trunks of their branches and bark, and afterwards dig three pits into which the oaks could be set up as columns, though first he ordered his six carvers to make the oak trunks into three ghoulish idols. Iorweth helped Nimue and Merlin, and the three loved that work for it allowed them to devise the most ghastly, fearsome things that bore small resemblance to any God I had ever known, but Merlin did not care. The idols, he said, were not for us, but for the Saxons, and so he and his woodcarvers made three things of horror with animal faces, female breasts and male genitalia, and when the columns were finished my men stopped their other work and hoisted the three figures into their pits while Merlin and the woodcarvers tamped their bases with earth so that at last the columns stood upright.
‘The father,’ Merlin capered in front of the idols, ‘the son and the holy ghost!’ he laughed. My men, meanwhile, had been making a great stack of wood in front of the pits, and onto that wood we now piled what remained of our food. We killed the remaining oxen and heaved their heavy corpses onto the pile so that their fresh blood trickled down through the layers of timber, and onto the oxen we heaped everything they had hauled; dried meat, dried fish, cheese, apples, grain and beans, and on top of those precious supplies we put the carcasses of two newly-caught deer and a freshly slaughtered ram. The ram’s head, with its twin horns, was cut off and nailed to the central pillar. The Saxons watched us work. They were on the stream’s far bank and once or twice, on the first day, their spears had hurtled over the water, but after those first futile efforts to interfere with us they had been content to just watch and see exactly what strange things we did. I sensed that their numbers grew. On the first day we had glimpsed only a dozen men among the far trees, but by the second evening there were at least a score of fires smoking behind the leaf screen.
‘Now,’ Merlin said that evening, ‘we give them something to watch.’
We carried fire in cooking pots down from the heath’s low summit to the great pile of wood and thrust it deep into the tangle of branches. The wood was green, but we had stacked heaps of dry grass and broken twigs into the centre, and by nightfall the fire was raging fiercely. The flames lit our crude idols with a lurid glare, the smoke boiled in a great plume that drifted towards London and the smell of roasting meat wafted tantalizingly towards our hungry encampment. The fire crackled and collapsed, exploding streams of sparks into the air, and in its fierce heat the dead beasts twitched and twisted as the flames shrank their sinews and exploded their skulls. Melting fat hissed in the blaze, then flared up white and bright to cast black shadows on the three hideous idols. All night that fire seethed, burning our last hopes of leaving Lloegyr without victory, and in the dawn we watched as the Saxons crept out to investigate its smoking remnants.
Then we waited. We were not entirely passive. Our horsemen rode east to scout the London road, and came back to report bands of marching Saxons. Others of us cut timber and used it to begin constructing a hall beside the shrinking grove on the heath’s summit. We had no need of such a hall, but Arthur wanted to give the impression that we were establishing a base deep in Lloegyr from which we would harass Aelle’s lands. That belief, if it convinced Aelle, would surely provoke him to battle. We made the beginnings of an earthen rampart, but lacking the proper tools we made a poor showing of the wall, though it must have helped the deception.
We were busy enough, but that did not stop a rancorous division showing in the army. Some, like Meurig, believed we had adopted the wrong strategy from the start. It would have been better, Meurig now said, if we had sent three or more smaller armies to take the Saxon fortresses on the frontier. We should have harassed and provoked, but instead we were growing ever hungrier in a self-made trap deep in Lloegyr.
‘And maybe he’s right,’ Arthur confessed to me on the third morning.
‘No, Lord,’ I insisted, and to prove my point I gestured north towards the wide smear of smoke that betrayed where a growing horde of Saxons was gathering beyond the stream. Arthur shook his head. ‘Aelle’s army is there, right enough,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t mean he’ll attack. They’ll watch us, but if he has any sense, he’ll let us rot here.’
‘We could attack him,’ I suggested.
He shook his head. ‘Leading an army through trees and across a stream is a recipe for disaster. That’s our last resort, Derfel. Just pray he comes today.’
But he did not come, and that was the end of the fifth day since the Saxons had destroyed our supplies. Tomorrow we would eat crumbs and in two days more we would be ravenous. In three we would gaze defeat in its horrid eyes. Arthur displayed no concern, whatever doom the grumblers in the army suggested, and that evening, as the sun drifted down over distant Dumnonia, Arthur beckoned for me to climb and join him on the growing wall of our crudely constructed hall. I clambered up the logs
and pulled myself onto the top of the wall. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing east, and far off on the horizon I could see another smear of grey smoke and beneath the smoke, its buildings lit by the slanting sun, was a great town bigger than any I had ever seen before. Bigger then Glevum or Corinium, bigger even than Aquae Sulis. ‘London,’ Arthur said in a tone of wonder. ‘Did you ever think to see it?’
‘Yes, Lord.’
He smiled. ‘My confident Derfel Cadarn.’ He was perched on the wall’s top, holding onto an untrimmed pillar and staring fixedly at the city. Behind us, in the rectangle of the hall’s timbers, the army’s horses were stabled. Those poor horses were already hungry, for there was little grass on the dry heathland and we had brought no forage for them. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it,’ Arthur said, still gazing at London,
‘that by now Lancelot and Cerdic could have done battle and we’ll know nothing about it.’
‘Pray Lancelot won,’ I said.
‘I do, Derfel, I do.’ He kicked his heels against the half built wall. ‘What a chance Aelle has!’ he said suddenly. ‘He could cut down the best warriors of Britain here. By year’s end, Derfel, his men could hold our halls. They could stroll to the Severn Sea. All gone. All Britain! Gone.’ He seemed to find the thought amusing, then he twisted about and looked down at the horses. ‘We could always eat them,’ he said. ‘Their meat will keep us alive for a week or two.’
‘Lord!’ I protested at his pessimism.
‘Don’t worry, Derfel,’ he laughed, ‘I’ve sent our old friend Aelle a message.’
‘You have?’
‘Sagramor’s woman. Malla, her name is. What odd names these Saxons have. You know her?’
‘I’ve seen her, Lord.’ Malla was a tall girl with long muscular legs and shoulders broad as a barrel. Sagramor had taken her captive in one of his raids late in the previous year and she had evidently accepted her fate with a passivity that was reflected in her flat, almost vacant face that was surrounded by a mass of gold-coloured hair. Other than that hair there was no one feature of Malla’s that was particularly attractive, but somehow she was still oddly alluring; a great, strong, slow, robust creature with a calm grace and a demeanour as taciturn as her Numidian lover.
‘She’s pretending to have escaped us,’ Arthur explained, ‘and even now she should be telling Aelle that we plan to stay here through the coming winter. She says Lancelot’s coming to join us with another three hundred spears, and that we need him here because a lot of our men are weak with sickness, despite our pits being filled with good food.’ He smiled. ‘She’s spinning endless nonsense to him, or I hope she is.’
‘Or maybe she’s telling him the truth,’ I suggested gloomily.
‘Maybe.’ He sounded unworried. He watched a line of men bringing skins of water from a spring that bubbled at the foot of the southern slope. ‘But Sagramor trusts her,’ he added, ‘and I long ago learned to trust Sagramor.’
I made the sign against evil. ‘I wouldn’t let my woman go to an enemy camp.’
‘She volunteered,’ Arthur said. ‘She says the Saxons won’t harm her. It seems her father is one of their chiefs.’
‘Pray she loves him less than she loves Sagramor.’
Arthur shrugged. The risk was taken now and discussing it would not lessen its dangers. He changed the subject. ‘I want you in Dumnonia when all this is done.’
‘Willingly, Lord, if you promise me Ceinwyn will be safe,’ I answered and, when he tried to dismiss my fears with a wave of his hand, I persevered. ‘I hear tales of a dog being killed and its bloody pelt draped on a bitch.’
Arthur twisted about, swung his legs over the wall and dropped down into the makeshift stables. He shoved a horse aside and beckoned for me to join him where no man could see us or hear us. He was angry. ‘Tell me again what you hear,’ he commanded me.
‘That a dog was killed,’ I said when I had jumped down, ‘and its bloody pelt was draped on a crippled bitch.’
‘And who did that?’ he demanded.
‘A friend of Lancelot’s,’ I answered, unwilling to name his wife.
He struck a hand against the crude timber wall, startling the closest horses. ‘My wife,’ he said, ‘is a friend to King Lancelot.’ I said nothing. ‘A s am I,’ he challenged me, and still I said nothing. ‘He’s a proud man, Derfel, and he lost his father’s kingdom because I failed in my oath. I owe him.’ He said the last three words coldly.
I matched his coldness with my own. ‘I hear,’ I said, ‘that the crippled bitch was given the name Ceinwyn.’
‘Enough!’ He slapped the wall again. ‘Stories! Just stories! No one denies there’s resentment for what you and Ceinwyn did, Derfel, I am not a fool, but I will not hear this nonsense from you! Guinevere attracts these rumours. People resent her. Any woman who is beautiful, who is clever, and who has hard opinions and isn’t afraid to speak them attracts resentment, but are you saying she would work some filthy spell against Ceinwyn? That she’d slaughter a dog and skin it? Do you believe that?’
‘I would like not to,’ I said.
‘Guinevere is my wife.’ He had lowered his voice, but the tone was still bitter. ‘I don’t have other wives, I don’t take slaves to my bed, I am hers and she is mine, Derfel, and I will not hear anything said against her. Nothing!’ He shouted that last word and I wondered if he was remembering the filthy insults hurled by Gorfyddyd at Lugg Vale. Gorfyddyd had claimed to have bedded Guinevere, and claimed further that a whole legion of other men had bedded her as well. I remembered Valerin’s lover’s ring, cut by the cross and decorated with Guinevere’s symbol, but I thrust the memories aside.
‘Lord,’ I said quietly, ‘I never mentioned your wife’s name.’
He stared at me, and for a second I thought he was going to strike me, then he shook his head. ‘She can be difficult, Derfel. There are times when I wish she was not so ready to show scorn, but I cannot imagine living without her advice.’ He paused and gave me a rueful smile. ‘I cannot imagine living without her. She has killed no dogs, Derfel, she has killed no dogs. Trust me. That Goddess of hers, Isis, doesn’t demand sacrifices, at least not of living things. Of gold, yes.’ He grinned, his good mood suddenly restored. ‘Isis swallows gold.’
‘I believe you. Lord,’ I said, ‘but that doesn’t make Ceinwyn safe. Dinas and Lavaine have threatened her.’
He shook his head. ‘You hurt Lancelot, Derfel. I don’t blame you, for I know what drove you, but can you blame him for resenting you? And Dinas and Lavaine serve Lancelot, and it’s only right that men should share their master’s grudges.’ He paused. ‘When this war is done, Derfel,’ he went on, ‘we shall make a reconciliation. All of us! When I make my band of warriors into brothers, we shall make peace between us all. You, Lancelot and everyone. And until that happens, Derfel, I swear Ceinwyn’s protection. On my life if you insist. You can impose the oath, Derfel. You can demand whatever price you want, my life, my son’s life even, because I need you. Dumnonia needs you. Culhwch is a good man, but he can’t manage Mordred.’
‘Can I?’ I asked.
‘Mordred is wilful,’ Arthur ignored my question, ‘but what do we expect? He’s Uther’s grandson, he has the blood of Kings and we don’t want him to be a milksop, but he does need discipline. He needs guidance. Culhwch thinks it’s enough to hit him, but that just makes him more stubborn. I want you and Ceinwyn to raise him.’
I shuddered. ‘You make coming home ever more attractive, Lord.’
He scowled at my levity. ‘Never forget, Derfel, that our oath is to give Mordred his throne. That is why I came back to Britain. That is my first duty in Britain, and all who are sworn to me are sworn to that oath. No one said it would be easy, but it will be done. Nine years from now we shall acclaim Mordred on Caer Cadarn. On that day, Derfel, we are all released from the oath and I pray to every God who will listen to me that on that day I will be able to hang up Excalibur and never fight again. But till that good day comes, whatever the difficulties, we
shall cleave to our oath. Do you understand that?’
‘Yes, Lord,’ I said humbly.
‘Good.’ Arthur pushed a horse aside. ‘Aelle will come tomorrow,’ he said confidently as he walked away, ‘so sleep well.’
The sun sank over Dumnonia, drowning it in red fire. To the north our enemy chanted war songs, and about our campfires we sang of home. Our sentinels gazed into the darkness, the horses whinnied, Merlin’s dogs howled and some of us slept.
At dawn we saw that Merlin’s three pillars had been thrown down during the night. A Saxon wizard, his hair dunged into spikes and his naked body barely hidden by the tattered scraps of wolfskin hanging from a band at his neck, whirled in a dance where the pillars had stood. The sight of that wizard convinced Arthur that Aelle was planning his assault.
We deliberated made no show of readiness. Our sentinels stood guard; other spearmen just lazed on the forward slope as if they expected another uneventful day, but behind them, in the shadows of the shelters and under the remains of the whitebeam and yew, and inside the walls of the half-built hall, the mass of our men made ready.
We tightened shield straps, honed swords and blades that were already ground to a wicked edge, then we hammered spearheads tight onto their staffs. We touched our amulets, we embraced each other, we ate what little bread we had left and prayed to whatever Gods we believed would help us this day. Merlin, Iorweth and Nimue wandered among the shelters touching blades and distributing sprigs of dried vervain to offer us protection.
I donned my battle gear. I had heavy knee-length boots with strips of iron sewn to protect my calves from the spear stroke that comes under the shield’s edge. I wore the woollen shirt made from Ceinwyn’s crudely spun wool and over it a leather coat on which I had pinned Ceinwyn’s little golden brooch that had been my protective talisman all these long years. Over the leather I hauled a coat of chain mail, a luxury I had taken from a dead Powysian chief at Lugg Vale. It was an ancient coat of Roman make and had been forged with a skill that no man now possesses, and I often wondered what other spearmen had worn that knee-length coat of linked iron rings. The Powysian warrior had died in it, cut down through the skull by Hywelbane, but I suspected at least one other of the coat’s wearers had been killed wearing the mail for its rings had a deep rent over the left breast. The shattered mail had been crudely repaired with links of iron chain.
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