We encountered our first Saxon war-band in a wide river valley where a group of the invaders was making a settlement. By the time we arrived they had built half a wooden stockade and planted the wood pillars of their main hall, but our appearance at the edge of the woods made them drop their tools and pick up their spears. We outnumbered them three to one, yet even so Griffid could not persuade us charge their well-knit, fierce-speared shield-line. We younger men were keen enough and some of us pranced like fools in front of the Saxons, but there were never enough of us to charge home and the Saxons ignored our taunts while the rest of Griffid's men drank their mead and cursed our eagerness. To me, desperate to earn a warrior ring made from Saxon iron, it seemed madness that we did not attack, but I had yet to experience the butchery of two locked shield-walls, nor had I learned how hard it is to persuade men to offer their bodies to that grisly work. Griffid did make some half-hearted efforts to encourage an attack; then was content to drink his mead and shout insults; and thus we faced the enemy for three hours or more without ever advancing more than a few steps. Griffid's timidity at least gave me a chance to examine the Saxons who, in truth, did not look so very different from ourselves. Their hair was fairer, their eyes palely blue, their skins ruddier than ours, and they liked to wear a lot of fur about their clothes, but otherwise they dressed like us and the only differences in weapons were that most Saxons carried a long-bladed knife that was wicked for close-quarter work, and many of them used huge broad-bladed axes that could split a shield with one stroke. Some of our own men were so impressed by the axes that they carried such weapons themselves, but Owain, like Arthur, disdained them as clumsy. You cannot parry with an axe, Owain used to say, and a weapon that does not defend as well as attack was no good in his eyes. The Saxon priests were quite different from our own holy men, for these foreign sorcerers wore animal skins and caked their hair with cow dung so that it stood in spikes about their heads. On that day in the river valley one such Sais priest sacrificed a goat to discover whether or not they should fight us. The priest first broke one of the animal's back legs, then stabbed it in the neck and let it run away with its broken leg trailing. It lurched bleeding and crying along their battle line, then turned towards us before collapsing on the grass, and that was evidently a bad omen for the Saxon shield-line lost its defiance and summarily retreated through their half-built compound, across a ford, and back into the trees. They took their women, children, slaves, pigs and herd with them. We called it a victory, ate the goat and pulled down their stockade. There was no plunder.
Our levy was now hungry, for in the manner of all levies they had eaten their whole supply of food in the first few days and now had nothing to eat except for the hazelnuts they stripped from the wood's trees. That lack of food meant we had no choice but to retreat. The hungry levy, eager to be home, went first while we warriors followed more slowly. Griffid was dour, for he was returning with neither gold nor slaves, though in truth he had accomplished as much as most war-bands that roamed the disputed lands. But then, when we were almost back in familiar country, we met a Saxon war-band returning the other way. They must have encountered part of our retreating levy for they were burdened with captured weapons and women.
The meeting was a surprise to both sides. I was at the rear of Griffid's column and only heard the beginning of the fight which started when our vanguard emerged from the trees to find a half dozen Saxons crossing a stream. Our men attacked, then spearmen from both sides rushed to join the haphazard fight. There was no shield-wall, just a bloody brawl across a shallow stream, and once again, just like that day when I had killed my first enemy in the woods south of Ynys Wydryn, I experienced the joy of battle. It was, I decided, the same feeling that Nimue felt when the Gods filled her; like having wings, she had said, that lift you high into glory, and that was just how I felt that autumn day. I met my first
Saxon at a flat run, my spear levelled, and I saw the fear in his eyes and I knew he was dead. The spear stuck fast in his belly, so I drew Hywel's sword, that now I called Hywelbane, and finished him with a sideways cut, then waded into the stream itself and killed two more. I was screaming like an evil spirit, shouting at the Saxons in their own tongue to come and taste death, and then a huge warrior accepted my invitation and charged me with one of the big axes that look so terrifying. Except an axe has too much dead weight. Once swung it cannot be reversed, and I put the big man down with a straight sword thrust that would have warmed Owain's heart. I took three gold torques, four brooches and a jewelled knife off that one axe man alone and I kept his axe blade to make my first battle rings. The Saxons fled, leaving eight dead and as many again wounded. I had killed no fewer than four of the enemy, a feat which was noticed by my companions. I basked in their respect, though later, when I was older and wiser, I ascribed my day's disproportionate killing to mere youthful stupidity. The young will often rush in where the wise go steadily. We lost three men, one of them Licat, the man who had saved my life on the Moor. I retrieved my spear, collected two more silver torques from the men I had killed in the stream, then watched as the enemy wounded were despatched to the Otherworld where they would become the slaves of our own dead fighters. We found six British captives huddled in the trees. They were women who had followed our levy to war and been captured by these Saxons, and it was one of those women who discovered the single enemy warrior still hiding in some brambles at the stream's edge. She screamed at him, and tried to stab him with a knife, but he scrambled away into the stream where I captured him. He was only a beardless youngster, perhaps my own age, and he was shaking with fear.
“What are you called?” I asked him with my bloody spear-blade at his throat. He was sprawling in the water. “Wlenca,” he answered, and then he told me he had come to Britain just weeks before, though when I asked him where he had come from he could not really answer except to say from home. His language was not quite the same as mine, but the differences were slight and I understood him well enough. The King of his people, he told me, was a great leader called Cerdic who was taking land on the south coast of Britain. Cerdic, he said, had needed to fight Aesc, a Saxon king who now ruled the Kentish lands, to establish his new colony, and that was the first time I realized that the Saxons fought amongst themselves just as we British did. It seems that Cerdic had won his war against Aesc and was now probing into Dumnonia.
The woman who had discovered Wlenca was squatting close by and hissing threats at him, but another of the women declared that Wlenca had taken no part in the raping that had followed their capture. Griffid, feeling relief at having some booty to take home, declared that Wlenca could live and so the Saxon was stripped naked, put under a woman's guard and marched west towards slavery. That was the last expedition of the year and though we declared it a great victory it paled beside Arthur's exploits. He had not only driven Aelle's Saxons out of northern Gwent, but had then defeated the forces of Powys and in the process had chopped off King Gorfyddyd's shield arm. The enemy King had escaped, but it was a great victory all the same and all of Gwent and Dumnonia rang with Arthur's praises. Owain was not happy.
Lunete, on the other hand, was delirious. I had brought her gold and silver, enough so she could wear a bearskin robe in winter and employ her own slave, a child of Kernow whom Lunete purchased from Owain's household. The child worked from dawn to dusk, and at night wept in the corner of the hut we now called home. When the girl cried too much Lunete hit her, and when I tried to defend the girl Lunete hit me. Owain's men had all moved from Caer Cadarn's cramped warrior quarters to the more comfortable settlement at Lindinis where Lunete and I had a thatched, wattle-walled hut inside the low earth ramparts built by the Romans. Caer Cadarn was six miles away and was occupied only when an enemy came too close, or when a great royal occasion was celebrated. We had one such occasion that winter on the day when Mordred turned one year old and when, by chance, Dumnonia's troubles came to their head. Or perhaps it was not chance at all, for Mordred was ever ill-omened and hi
s acclamation was doomed to be touched by tragedy.
The ceremony happened just after the Solstice. Mordred was to be acclaimed king and the great men of Dumnonia gathered at Caer Cadarn for the occasion. Nimue came a day early and visited our hut, which Lunete had decorated with holly and ivy for the solstice. Nimue stepped over the hut's threshold that was scored with patterns to keep the evil spirits away, then sat by our fire and pushed back the hood of her cloak.
I smiled because she had a golden eye. “I like it,” I said.
“It's hollow,” she said, and disconcertingly tapped the eye with a fingernail. Lunete was shouting at the slave for burning the pottage of sprouted barley seeds and Nimue flinched at the display of anger.
“You're not happy,” she said to me.
“I am,” I insisted, for the young hate to admit making mistakes. Nimue glanced about the untidy and smoke-blackened interior of our hut as though she was scenting the mood of its inhabitants. “Lunete's wrong for you,” she said calmly as she idly picked from the littered floor half an empty egg-shell and crunched it into fragments so that no evil spirit could lurk in its shelter.
“Your head is in the clouds, Derfel,” she went on as she tossed the shell fragments on to the flames, 'while Lunete is earth-bound. She wants to be rich and you want to be honourable. It won't mix." She shrugged, as though it was not really important, then gave me her news of Ynys Wydryn. Merlin had not come back and no one knew where he was, but Arthur had sent money captured from the defeated King Gorfyddyd to pay for the Tor's reconstruction and Gwlyddyn was supervising the building of a new and grander hall. Pellinore was alive, as were Druidan and Gudovan the scribe. Norwenna, Nimue told me, had been buried in the shrine of the Holy Thorn where she was revered as a saint.
“What's a saint?” I asked.
“A dead Christian,” she said flatly. “They should all be saints.”
“And what about you?” I asked her.
“I'm alive,” she said tonelessly.
“Are you happy?”
“You always ask such stupid things. If I wanted to be happy, Derfel, I'd be down here with you, baking your bread and keeping your bedding clean.”
“Then why aren't you?”
She spat in the fire to ward off my stupidity. “Gundleus lives,” she said flatly, changing the subject.
“Imprisoned in Corinium,” I said, as though she did not already know where her enemy was.
“I've buried his name on a stone,” she said, then gave me a golden-eyed glance. “He made me pregnant when he raped me, but I killed the foul thing with ergot.” Ergot was a black blight that grew on rye and women used it to abort their young. Merlin also used it as a means of going into the dream-state and talking with the Gods. I had tried it once and was sick for days.
Lunete insisted on showing Nimue all her new possessions: the trivet, cauldron and sieve, the jewels and cloak, the fine linen shift and the battered silver jug with the naked Roman horseman chasing a deer about its belly. Nimue made a bad pretence of being impressed, then asked me to walk her to Caer Cadarn where she would spend the night. “Lunete's a fool,” she told me. We were walking along the edge of a stream that flowed into the River Cam. Brown brittle leaves crunched underfoot. There had been a frost and the day was bitterly cold. Nimue looked angrier than ever and, because of that, more beautiful. Tragedy suited Nimue, she knew it and so she sought it. “You're making a name for yourself,” she said, glancing at the plain iron warrior rings on my left hand. I kept my right hand free of the rings so I could keep a firm grip of a sword or spear, but I now wore four iron rings on my left hand.
“Luck.” I explained the rings.
“No, not luck.” She raised her left hand so I could see the scar. “When you fight, Derfel, I fight with you. You're going to be a great warrior, and you'll need to be.”
“Will I?”
She shivered. The sky was grey, the same grey as an unpolished sword, though the western horizon was streaked with a sour, yellow light. The trees were winter black, the grass sullenly dark, and the smoke from the settlement's fires clung to the ground as though it feared the cold, empty sky. “Do you know why Merlin left Ynys Wydryn?” she asked me suddenly, surprising me with the question.
“To find the Knowledge of Britain,” I answered, repeating what she had told the High Council in Glevum.
“But why now? Why not ten years ago?” Nimue asked me, then answered her own question. “He has gone now, Derfel, because we are coming into the bad time. Everything good will get bad, everything bad will get worse. Everyone in Britain is gathering their strength because they know the great struggle is coming. Sometimes I think the Gods are playing with us. They are heaping all the throw pieces at once to see how the game will end. The Saxons are getting stronger and soon they'll attack in hordes, not war-bands. The Christians' she spat into the stream to avert evil 'say that very soon it will be five hundred winters since their wretched God was born and claim that means the time for their triumph is coming.” She spat again. “And for us Britons? We fight each other, we steal from each other, we build new feasting halls when we should be forging swords and spears. We are going to be put to the test, Derfel, and that's why Merlin is gathering his strength, for if the kings will not save us then Merlin must persuade the Gods to come to our aid.” She stopped beside a pool of the stream and stared into the black water that had the gelid stillness that comes just before freezing. The water in the cattle hoofprints at the pool's edge was already frozen.
“What of Arthur?” I asked. “Won't he save us?”
She gave me a flicker of a smile. “Arthur is to Merlin what you are to me. Arthur is Merlin's sword, but neither of us can control you. We give you power' she reached out her scarred left hand and touched the bare pommel of my sword 'and then we let you go. We have to trust that you will do the right thing.”
“You can trust me,” I said.
She sighed as she always did when I made such a statement, then shook her head. “When the Test of Britain comes, Derfel, and it will, none of us will know how strong our sword will prove.” She turned and looked at the ramparts of Caer Cadarn that were bright with the banners of all the lords and chiefs come to witness Mordred's acclamation on the morrow. “Fools,” she said bitterly, 'fools." Arthur arrived the next day. He came shortly after dawn, having ridden with Morgan from Ynys Wydryn. He was accompanied by only two warriors, the three men all mounted on their big horses, though they carried no armour or shields, just spears and swords. Arthur did not even bring his banner. He was very relaxed, almost as though this ceremony had no interest for him other than curiosity. Agricola, Tewdric's Roman warlord, had come in place of his master who had a fever, and Agricola too seemed aloof from the ceremony, but everyone else in Caer Cadarn was tense, worried that the day's omens might prove bad. Prince Cadwy of Isca was there, his cheeks blue with tattoos. Prince Gereint, Lord of the Stones, had come from the Saxon frontier and King Melwas had come from decaying Venta. All the nobility of Dumnonia, more than a hundred men, waited in the fort. There had been sleet in the night that had left Caer Cadarn's compound slick and muddy, but first light brought a brisk westerly wind and by the time Owain emerged from the hall with the royal baby the sun was actually showing on the hills which circled Caer Cadarn's eastern approaches.
Morgan had decided on the hour of the ceremony, divining it from auguries of fire, water and earth. It was, predictably, a morning ceremony, for nothing good comes of endeavours undertaken when the sun is in decline, but the crowd had to wait until Morgan was satisfied that the exact hour was imminent before the proceedings could begin in the stone circle that crowned Caer Cadarn's peak. The stones of the circle were not large, none was bigger than a stooping child while in the very centre, where Morgan fussed as she took her alignments on the pale sun, was the royal stone of Dumnonia. It was a flat, grey boulder, indistinguishable from a thousand others, yet it had been on that stone, we were taught, that the God Bel had anointed his human child
Beli Mawr who was the ancestor of all Dumnonia's kings. Once Morgan was satisfied with her calculation, Balise was ushered to the circle's centre. He was an ancient Druid who lived in the woods west of Caer Cadarn and, in Merlin's absence, had been persuaded to attend and invoke the Gods' blessings. He was a stooped, lice-ridden creature, draped in goatskin and rags, so dirty that it was impossible to tell where his rags began and his beard ended, yet it was Balise, I had been told, who had taught Merlin many of his skills. The old man raised his staff to the watery sun, mumbled some prayers, then spat in a sunwise circle before succumbing to a terrible coughing fit. He stumbled to a chair at the edge of the circle where he sat panting as his companion, an old woman almost indistinguishable in appearance from Balise himself, feebly rubbed his back. Bishop Bedwin said a prayer to the Christian God, then the baby King was paraded around the outside of the stone circle. Mordred had been laid upon a war shield and swathed in fur and it was thus he was shown to all the warriors, chiefs and princes who, as the baby passed, dropped to their knees to pay him homage. A grown king would have walked about the circle, but two Dumnonian warriors carried Mordred, while behind the child, his long sword drawn, paced Owain, the King's champion. Mordred was carried against the sun, the only time in all a king's life when he would so go against the natural order, but the unlucky direction was deliberately chosen to show that a king descended from the Gods was above such petty rules as always going sunwise in a circle.
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