‘Don’t be a fool!’ Arthur turned on him angrily. ‘You think we can regain your throne without Derfel’s men?’ Mordred said nothing, and that petulant silence goaded Arthur into a fury like the one which had caused me to hit my King. ‘It can be done without you!’ he snarled at Mordred, ‘and whatever is done, you will stay here, under guard!’ Mordred gaped up at him and a tear fell to dilute the tiny trace of blood.
‘Not as a prisoner, Lord King,’ Arthur explained wearily, ‘but to preserve your life from the hundreds of men who would like to take it.’
‘So what will you do?’ Mordred asked, utterly pathetic now.
‘As I told you,’ Arthur said scornfully, ‘I will give the matter thought.’ And he would say no more. The shape of Lancelot’s design was at least plain now. Sansum had plotted Arthur’s death, Lancelot had sent men to procure Mordred’s death and then followed with his army in the belief that every obstacle to Dumnonia’s throne had been eliminated and that the Christians, whipped to fury by Sansum’s busy missionaries, would kill any remaining enemies while Cerdic held Sagramor’s men at bay. But Arthur lived, and Mordred lived too, and so long as Mordred lived Arthur had an oath to keep and that oath meant we had to go to war. It did not matter that the war might open Severn’s valley to the Saxons, we had to fight Lancelot. We were oath-locked.
Meurig would commit no spearmen to the fight against Lancelot. He claimed he needed all his men to guard his own frontiers against a possible attack from Cerdic or Aelle and nothing anyone said could dissuade him. He did agree to leave his garrison in Glevum, thus freeing its Dumnonian garrison to join Arthur’s troops, but he would give nothing more. ‘He’s a yellow little bastard,’ Culhwch growled.
‘He’s a sensible young man,’ Arthur said. ‘His aim is to preserve his kingdom.’ He spoke to us, his war commanders, in a hall at Glevum’s Roman baths. The room had a tiled floor and an arched ceiling where the painted remnants of naked nymphs were being chased by a faun through swirls of leaves and flowers.
Cuneglas was generous. The spearmen he had brought from Caer Sws would be sent under Culhwch’s command to help Sagramor’s men. Culhwch swore he would do nothing to aid Mordred’s restoration, but he had no qualms about fighting Cerdic’s warriors and that was still Sagramor’s task. Once the Numidian was reinforced by the men from Powys he would drive south, cut off the Saxons who were besieging Corinium and so embroil Cerdic’s men in a campaign that would keep them from helping Lancelot in Dumnonia’s heartland. Cuneglas promised us all the help he could, but said it would take at least two weeks to assemble his full force and bring it south to Glevum. Arthur had precious few men in Glevum. He had the thirty men who had gone north to arrest Ligessac who now lay in chains in Glevum, and he had my men, and to those he could add the seventy spearmen who had formed Glevum’s small garrison. Those numbers were being swollen daily by the refugees who managed to escape the rampaging Christian bands who still hunted down any pagans left in Dumnonia. We heard that many such fugitives were still in Dumnonia, some of them holding out in ancient earth forts or deep in the woodlands, but others came to Glevum and among them was Morfans the Ugly, who had escaped the massacre in Durnovaria’s taverns. Arthur put him in charge of the Glevum forces and ordered him to march them south towards Aquae Sulis. Galahad would go with him. ‘Don’t accept battle,’ Arthur warned both men, ‘just goad the enemy, harry them, annoy them. Stay in the hills, stay nimble, and keep them looking this way. When my Lord King comes’ — he meant Cuneglas — ’you can join his army and march south on Caer Cadarn.’
Arthur declared that he would fight with neither Sagramor nor Morfans, but would instead go to seek Aelle’s help. Arthur knew better than anyone that the news of his plans would be carried south. There were plenty enough Christians in Glevum who believed Arthur was the Enemy of God and who saw in Lancelot the heavensent forerunner of Christ’s return to earth; Arthur wanted those Christians to send their messages south into Dumnonia and he wanted those messages to tell Lancelot that Arthur dared not risk Guinevere’s life by marching against him. Instead Arthur was going to beg Aelle to carry his axes and spears against Cerdic’s men. ‘Derfel will come with me,’ he told us now. I did not want to accompany Arthur. There were other interpreters, I protested, and my only wish was to join Morfans and so march south into Dumnonia. I did not want to face my father, Aelle. I wanted to fight, not to put Mordred back on his throne, but to topple Lancelot and to find Dinas and Lavaine. Arthur refused me. ‘You will come with me, Derfel,’ he ordered, ‘and we shall take forty men with us.’
‘Forty?’ Morfans objected. Forty was a large number to strip from his small war-band that had to distract Lancelot.
Arthur shrugged. ‘I dare not look weak to Aelle,’ he said, ‘indeed I should take more, but forty men may be sufficient to convince him that I’m not desperate.’ He paused. ‘There is one last thing,’ he spoke in a heavy voice that caught the attention of men preparing to leave the bath house. ‘Some of you are not inclined to fight for Mordred,’ Arthur admitted. ‘Culhwch has already left Dumnonia, Derfel will doubtless leave when this war is done, and who knows how many others of you will go? Dumnonia cannot afford to lose such men.’ He paused. It had begun to rain and water dripped from the bricks that showed between the patches of painted ceiling. ‘I have talked to Cuneglas,’ Arthur said, acknowledging the King of Powys’s presence with an inclination of his head, ‘and I have talked with Merlin, and what we talked about are the ancient laws and customs of our people. What I do, I would do within the law, and I cannot free you of Mordred for my oath forbids it and the ancient law of our people cannot condone it.’ He paused again, his right hand unconsciously gripping Excalibur’s hilt. ‘But,’ he went on,
‘the law does allow one thing. If a king is unfit to rule, then his Council may rule in his stead as long as the king is accorded the honour and privileges of his rank. Merlin assures me this is so, and King Cuneglas affirms that it happened in the reign of his great-grandfather Brychan.’
‘Mad as a bat! Cuneglas put in cheerfully.
Arthur half smiled, then frowned as he gathered his thoughts. ‘This is not what I ever wanted,’ he protested quietly, his sombre voice echoing in the dripping chamber, ‘but I shall propose to the Council of Dumnonia that it should rule in Mordred’s place.’
‘Yes!’ Culhwch shouted.
Arthur hushed him. ‘I had hoped,’ he said, ‘that Mordred would learn responsibility, but he has not. I don’t care that he wanted me dead, but I do care that he lost his kingdom. He broke his acclamation oath and I doubt now that he will ever be able to keep that oath.’ He paused, and many of us must have reflected on how long it had taken Arthur to understand something that had seemed so obvious to the rest of us. For years he had stubbornly resisted acknowledging Mordred’s unfitness to rule, but now, after Mordred had lost his kingdom and, which was much worse in Arthur’s eyes, he had failed to protect his subjects, Arthur was at last prepared to face the truth. Water dripped on his bare head, but he seemed oblivious of it. ‘Merlin tells me,’ he went on in a melancholy voice, ‘that Mordred is possessed of an evil spirit. I am not skilled in these things, but that verdict does not seem unlikely and so, if the Council agrees, I shall propose that after we have restored Mordred then we shall pay him all the honours due to our King. He can live in the Winter Palace, he can hunt, he can eat like a king and indulge all his appetites within the law, but he will not govern. I am proposing we give him all the privileges, but none of the duties of his throne.’
We cheered. How we cheered. For now, it seemed, we had something to fight for. Not for Mordred, that wretched toad, but for Arthur, because despite all his fine talk of the Council ruling Dumnonia in Mordred’s stead we all knew what his words meant. They meant that Arthur would be Dumnonia’s King in all but name and for that good end we would carry our spears to war. We cheered, for now we had a cause to fight and die for. We had Arthur.
Arthur chose twenty of his best hor
semen and insisted I choose twenty of my finest spearmen for our embassy to Aelle. ‘We must impress your father,’ he told me, ‘and you don’t impress a man by arriving with broken and ageing spearmen. We take our best men.’ He also insisted that Nimue accompany us. He would have preferred Merlin’s company, but the Druid declared he was too old for the long journey and proposed Nimue instead.
We left Mordred guarded by Meurig’s spearmen. “Mordred knew of Arthur’s plans for him, but he had no allies in Glevum and no defiance in his rotten soul, though he did have the satisfaction of watching Ligessac being strangled in the forum and after that slow death Mordred stood on the terrace of the great hall and made a mumbling speech in which he threatened an equal fate to all the other traitors in Dumnonia, then he went sullenly back to his quarters while we followed Culhwch eastwards. Culhwch had gone to join Sagramor and help launch the attack that we all hoped would save Corinium. Arthur and I marched into the high fine countryside that was Gwent’s rich eastern province. It was a place of lavish villas, vast farms and great wealth, most of it grown on the backs of the sheep that grazed the rolling hills. We marched beneath two banners. Arthur’s bear and my own star, and we stayed well north of the Dumnonian frontier so that all the news going to Lancelot would tell him that Arthur was offering his stolen throne no threat. Nimue walked with us. Merlin had somehow persuaded her to wash and find clean clothes, and then, in despair at ever untangling the matted filth of her hair, he had cut it short and burned the dirt-encrusted tresses. The short hair looked good on her, she wore an eyepatch again and carried a staff, but no other baggage. She walked barefoot and she walked reluctantly for she had not wanted to come, but Merlin had persuaded her, though Nimue still claimed her presence was wasteful. ‘Any fool can defeat a Saxon wizard,’ she told Arthur as we neared the end of the first day’s march. ‘Just spit on them, roll your eyes and wave a chicken bone. That’s all it needs.’
‘We won’t see any Saxon wizards,’ Arthur answered calmly. We were in open country now, far from any villas, and he stopped his horse, raised his hand and waited for the men to gather around him. ‘We won’t see any wizards,’ he told us, ‘because we’re not going to see Aelle. We’re going south into our own country. A long way south.’
‘To the sea?’ I guessed.
He smiled. ‘To the sea.’ He folded his hands on his saddle bar. ‘We are few,’ he told us, ‘and Lancelot has many, but Nimue can make us a charm of concealment and we shall march by night and we shall march hard.’ He smiled and shrugged. ‘I can do nothing while my wife and son are prisoners, but if we free them, then I am free too. And when I am free I can fight against Lancelot, but you should know that we will be far from help and deep in a Dumnonia that is held by our enemies. Once I have Guinevere and Gwydre then I do not know how we shall escape, but Nimue will help us. The Gods will help us, but if any of you fear the task, then you may go back now.’
None did, and he must have known that none would. These forty were our best men and they would have followed Arthur into the serpent’s pit. Arthur, of course, had told no one but Merlin what he planned so that no hint of it could reach Lancelot’s ears; now he gave me a regretful shrug as though apologizing for deceiving me, but he must have known how pleased I was for we were not just going to where Guinevere and Gwydre were being held hostage, but to where Dian’s two killers believed they were safe from all revenge.
‘We go tonight,’ Arthur said, ‘and there’ll be no rest till dawn. We go south and by morning I want to be in the hills beyond the Thames.’
We put cloaks over our armour, muffled the horses’ hoofs with layers of cloth and then journeyed south through the gathering night. The horsemen led their beasts and Nimue led us, using her strange ability to find her way across unknown country in the darkness.
Sometime in that dark night we crossed into Dumnonia and, as we dropped from the hills down into the valley of the Thames, we saw, far off to our right, a glow in the sky that showed where Cerdic’s men were encamped outside Corinium. Once out of the hills our path inevitably took us through small dark villages where dogs barked at our passing, but no one questioned us. The inhabitants were either dead or else they feared we were Saxons, and so, like a band of ghosts, we passed them by. One of Arthur’s horsemen was a native of the river lands and he led us to a ford that came up to our chests. We held our weapons and bags of bread high, then forced our way through the strong current and so reached the far bank where Nimue hissed a spell of concealment towards a nearby village. By dawn we were in the southern hills, safe inside one of the Old People’s earth fortresses. We slept under the sun and at dark went south again. Our way led through a fine, rich land where no Saxon had yet set foot, but still no villager challenged us for no one but a fool questioned armed men who travelled by night in times of trouble. By daybreak we had reached the great plain and the rising sun cast the shadows of the Old People’s death mounds long across the pale grass. Some of the mounds still had treasures guarded by grave ghouls and those we avoided as we sought a grassy hollow where the horses could eat and we could rest.
In the next moonlight we passed the Stones, that great mysterious ring where Merlin had given Arthur his sword and where, so many years before, we had yielded the gold to Aelle before marching to Lugg Vale. Nimue glided among the great capped pillars, touching them with her staff, then standing in their centre with her eyes staring up at the stars. The moon was almost full and its light gave the Stones a pale luminosity. ‘Do they hold magic still?’ I asked her when she caught us up.
‘Some,’ she said, ‘but it’s fading, Derfel. All our magic is fading. We need the Cauldron.’ She smiled in the dark. ‘It isn’t far away now,’ she said, ‘I can feel it. It still lives, Derfel, and we’re going to find it and restore it to Merlin.’ There was a passion in her now, the same passion she had shown as we neared the end of the Dark Road. Arthur marched through the dark for his Guinevere, I for revenge and Nimue to summon the Gods with the Cauldron, but still we were few and the enemy was many. We were now deep inside Lancelot’s new land, yet we saw no evidence of his warriors nor any sign of the rabid Christian bands who were still said to be terrorizing the rural pagans. Lancelot’s spearmen had no business in this part of Dumnonia for they were watching the roads from Glevum, while the Christians must have gone to support his army in the belief it did Christ’s work, so we walked unmolested as we dropped down from the great plain onto the river lands of Dumnonia’s southern coast. We skirted the fortress town of Sorviodunum and smelt the smoke of the houses that had been burned there. Still no one challenged us because we walked beneath the near-full moon and were protected by Nimue’s spells.
We reached the sea on the fifth night. We had slipped past the Roman fortress of Vindocladia where Arthur was sure a garrison of Lancelot’s troops would be in place, and by dawn we were hidden in the deep woods above the creek where the Sea Palace stood. The palace was just a mile to our west and we had reached it undetected, coming like night ghosts in our own land. And we would make our attack at night too. Lancelot was using Guinevere as a shield, and we would take his shield away and, thus freed, carry our spears to his treacherous heart. But not for Mordred’s sake, for now we fought for Arthur and for the happy realm we saw beyond the war. As the bards now tell it, we fought for Camelot.
Most of the spearmen slept that day, but Arthur, Issa and I crawled to the edge of the wood and stared across the small valley at the Sea Palace.
It looked so fine with its white stone gleaming in the rising sun. We were gazing at its eastern flank from a crest that was slightly lower than the palace. Its eastern wall was broken by only three small windows so that it looked to us like a great white fortress on a green hill, though that illusion was spoiled somewhat by the great sign of the fish that had been crudely smeared in pitch on the limewashed wall, presumably to guard the palace against the anger of any itinerant Christians. The long southern facade which overlooked the creek and the sea that lay beyond a san
dy island on the creek’s southern bank was where the Roman builders had put their windows, just as they had relegated the kitchens and slave quarters and granaries to the northern ground behind the villa where Gwenhwyvach’s timber house stood. There was now a small village of thatched huts there as well, I guessed for the spearmen and their families, and a tangle of smoke trails rose from the huts’ cooking-fires. Beyond the huts were the orchards and vegetable fields, and beyond them again, bordered by the deep woods that grew thick in this part of the country, lay fields of partly cut hay.
In front of the palace, and just as I remembered them from that distant day when I had taken Arthur’s precious oath on the Round Table, the two embankments topped by arcades stretched towards the creek. The palace was all sunlit, so white and grand and beautiful. ‘If the Romans came back today,’
Arthur said proudly, ‘they would never know it had been rebuilt.’
‘If the Romans came back today,’ Issa said, ‘they’d have a proper fight on their hands.’ I had insisted that he come to the trees’ edge for I knew of no one with better eyesight and we needed to spend this day discovering just how many guards Lancelot had put in the Sea Palace. We counted no more than a dozen guards that morning. Just after dawn two men climbed to a wooden platform that had been built onto the roof’s summit and from there they watched the road that led north. Four other spearmen paced up and down the nearest arcade, and it seemed sensible to deduce that four more would be stationed on the western arcade that was hidden from us. The other guards were all on the land that lay between a stone balustraded terrace at the bottom of the gardens and the creek, a patrol that evidently guarded the paths that led along the coast. Issa, divested of his armour and helmet, made a reconnaissance in that direction, creeping through the woods in an attempt to see the villa’s facade between the twin arcades.
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