PART TWO

The Broken War

‘No!’ Igraine protested, when she looked at the last parchment in the pile.

‘No?’ I asked politely.

‘You can’t just leave the story there!’ she said. ‘What happened?’

‘We walked out, of course.’

‘Oh, Derfel!’ She threw the parchment down. ‘There are scullions who know how to tell a tale better than you! Tell me how it happened, I insist!’

So I told her.

It was near dawn and the fog lay like a fleece so thick that when we managed to descend the rocks and assemble on the grass at the top of the knoll we were in danger of losing each other by taking just one step. Merlin made us form a chain, each person holding the cloak of the one in front, and then, with the Cauldron tied to my back, we crept downhill in single file. Merlin, with his staff held at arm’s length, led us clean through the surrounding Bloodshields and not one of them saw us. I could hear Diwrnach shouting at them, telling them to spread out, but the dark riders knew it was a wizard’s fog and they preferred to stay close by their fires; yet those first few steps were the most dangerous part of our journey.

‘But the stories,’ my Queen insisted, ‘say that you all disappeared. Diwrnach’s men claimed that you flew off the island. It’s a famous story! My mother told it to me. You can’t just say that you walked away!’

‘But we did,’ I said.

‘Derfel!’ she reprimanded me.

‘We neither disappeared,’ I said patiently, ‘nor did we fly, whatever your mother might have told you.’

‘So what happened then?’ she asked, still disappointed in my pedestrian version of the tale. We walked for hours, following Nimue who possessed an uncanny ability to find her wav in darkness or fog. It was Nimue who had led my war-band on the night before Lugg Vale, and now, in that thick winter fog in Ynys Mon, she led us to one of the great grassy hummocks that had been made by the Old People. Merlin knew the place, indeed he claimed to have slept there years before, and he ordered three of my men to pull away the stones that blocked the entrance which lay between two curving banks of grassy earth that jutted out like horns. Then, one by one, on our hands and knees, we crawled into the mound’s black centre.

The mound was a grave and it had been made by piling huge rocks to make a central passageway off which branched six smaller chambers, and when the whole thing was done the Old People had roofed the corridor and chambers with stone slabs, then piled earth above the stones. They did not burn their dead as we did, or leave them in the cold earth like Christians, but placed them in the stone chambers where they still lay, each with treasures: horn cups, deer antlers, stone spearheads, flint knives, a bronze dish and a necklace of precious pieces of jet that were strung on a decayed thread of sinew. Merlin insisted we should not disturb the dead for we were their guests, and we huddled together in the central passage and left the bone-chambers alone. We sang songs and told tales. Merlin told us how the Old People had been the guardians of Britain before the British came and there were places, he said, where they still lived. He had been to those deep lost valleys in the wilds and had learned some of their magic. He told us how they would take the first lamb born in the year, bind it in wicker and bury it in a pasture to ensure that the other lambs would be born healthy and strong.

‘We still do that,’ said Issa.

‘Because your ancestors learned from the Old People,’ Merlin said.

‘In Benoic,’ Galahad said, ‘we used to take the skin of the first lamb and nail it to a tree.’

‘That works too.’ Merlin’s voice echoed in the cool, dark passage.

‘Poor lambs,’ Ceinwyn said, and everyone laughed.

The fog lifted, but deep in the mound we had little sense of night or day except when we unblocked the entrance so that some of us could creep out. We had to do that from time to time if we were not to live in our own dung, and if it was daylight when we pulled down the stones then we would hide between the mound’s earth horns and watch the dark riders searching the fields, caves, moors, rocks, cabins and small woods of wind-bent trees. They searched for five long days, and in that time we ate the last scraps of our food and drank the water that seeped down through the mound, but at last Diwrnach decided that our magic was superior to his and abandoned his search. We waited two more days to make sure he was not trying to entice us out of our hiding place, and then, at last, we left. We added gold to the treasures of the dead as payment of rent, we blocked the entrance behind us, then walked eastwards under a wintry sun. Once at the coast we used our swords to commandeer two fishing boats and so sailed away from the sacred isle. We went east, and as long as I live I shall remember the sun glinting from the Cauldron’s golden ornaments and thick silver belly as the ragged sails dragged us to safety. We made a song as we sailed, the Song of the Cauldron, and even to this day it is sometimes sung, though it is a poor thing compared with the songs of the bards. We landed in Cornovia and from there walked south across Elmet into friendly Powys. ‘And that, my Lady,’ I concluded, ‘is why all the tales say that Merlin vanished.’

Igraine frowned. ‘Didn’t the dark riders search the mound?’

‘Twice,’ I said, ‘but they didn’t know the entrance could be unblocked, or else they feared the spirits of the dead inside. And Merlin, of course, had woven us a charm of concealment.’

‘I wish you had flown away,’ she grumbled. ‘It would make a much better tale.’ She sighed for that lost dream. ‘But the story of the Cauldron does not end there, does it?’

‘Alas, no.’

‘So . . .’

‘So I will tell it in its proper place,’ I interrupted her.

She pouted. Today she is wearing her cloak of grey wool edged with otter fur that makes her look so pretty. She is still not pregnant, which makes me think that either she is not destined to have children or else her husband, King Brochvael, is spending too much time with his mistress, Nwylle. It is cold today, and the wind gusts at my window and tugs at the small flames in the hearth that is big enough to hold a fire ten times the size of the one Bishop Sansum allows me. I can hear the saint scolding Brother Arun, who is our monastery’s cook. The gruel was too hot this morning and scalded St Tudwal’s tongue. Tudwal is a child in our monastery, the Bishop’s close companion in Christ Jesus, and last year the Bishop declared Tudwal to be a saint. The devil sets many snares in the path of true faith.

‘So it was you and Ceinwyn,’ Igraine accuses me.

‘Was what?’ I asked.

‘You were her lover,’ Igraine said.

‘For life, Lady,’ I confessed.

‘And you never married?’

‘Never. She took her oath, remember?’

‘But nor did she split in two with a baby,’ Igraine said.

‘The third child almost killed her,’ I said, ‘but the others were much easier.’

Igraine was crouching by the fire, holding her pale hands to its pathetic flames. ‘You are lucky, Derfel.’

‘I am?’

‘To have known a love like that.’ She looked wistful. The Queen is no older than Ceinwyn when I first knew her, and, like Ceinwyn, Igraine is beautiful and deserves a love fit for a bard’s song.

‘I was lucky,’ I admitted. Outside my window Brother Maelgwyn is finishing the monastery’s log pile, splitting the trunks with a maul and hammer and singing as he goes about his business. His song tells the love story of Rhydderch and Morag, which means he will be reprimanded as soon as St Sansum has finished humiliating Arun. We are brothers in Christ, the saint tells us, united in love.

‘Wasn’t Cuneglas angry with his sister for running away with you?’ Igraine asks me. ‘Not even a bit?’

‘Not in the least,’ I said. ‘He wanted us to move back to Caer Sws, but we both liked it in Cwm Isaf. And Ceinwyn never really liked her sister-in-law. Helledd was a grumbler, you see, and she had two aunts who were very tart. They all disapproved of Ceinwyn, and they were the ones who started all the stories of scandal, but we were never scandalous.’ I paused, remembering those early days. ‘Most people were very kind, in fact,’ I went on. ‘In Powys, you see, there was still some resentment about Lugg Vale. Too many people had lost fathers, brothers and husbands, and Ceinwyn’s defiance was a kind of recompense to them. They enjoyed seeing Arthur and Lancelot embarrassed, so other than Helledd and her ghastly aunts, no one was unkind to us.’

‘And Lancelot didn’t fight you for her?’ asked Igraine, shocked.

‘I wish he had,’ I said drily. ‘I would have enjoyed that.’

‘And Ceinwyn just made up her own mind?’ Igraine asked, astonished at the very thought of a woman daring to do such a thing. She stood and walked to the window where she listened for a while as Maelgwyn sang. ‘Poor Gwenhwyvach,’ she said suddenly. ‘You make her sound very plain and plump and dull.’

‘She was all of those things, alas.’

‘Not everyone can be beautiful,’ she said, with the assurance of one who was.

‘No,’ I agreed, ‘but you do not want tales of the commonplace. You want Arthur’s Britain to be livid with passion and I could feel no passion for Gwenhwyvach. You cannot command love, Lady, only beauty or lust does that. Do you want the world to be fair? Then just imagine a world with no kings, no queens, no lords, no passion and no magic. You would want to live in such a dull world?’

‘That has nothing to do with beauty,’ Igraine protested.

‘It has everything to do with beauty. What is your rank but the accident of your birth? And what is your beauty but another accident? If the Gods,’ I paused and corrected myself, ‘if God wanted us to be equal then he would have made us equal, and if we were all the same, where would your romance be?’

She abandoned the argument. ‘Do you believe in magic, Brother Derfel?’ she challenged me instead. I thought about it. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And even as Christians, we can believe in it. What else are the miracles, but magic?’

‘And Merlin could really make a fog?’

I frowned. ‘Everything Merlin did, my Lady, had another explanation. Fogs do come from the sea, and lost things are found every day.’

‘And the dead come to life?’

‘Lazarus did,’ I said, ‘and so did our Saviour.’ I crossed myself.

Igraine dutifully made the sign of the cross. ‘But did Merlin rise from the dead?’ she demanded.

‘I don’t know that he was dead,’ I said carefully.

‘But Ceinwyn was certain?’

‘Till her dying day, Lady’

Igraine twisted her gown’s braided belt in her fingers. ‘But wasn’t that the Cauldron’s magic? That it could restore life?’

‘So we are told.’

‘And surely Ceinwyn’s discovery of the Cauldron was magic,’ Igraine said.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘but maybe it was just common sense. Merlin had spent months discovering every stray memory about Ynys Mon. He knew where the Druids had their sacred centre, and that was beside Llyn Cerrig Bach, and Ceinwyn merely led us to the nearest place where the Cauldron could be safely hidden. She did have her dream, though.’

‘And so did you,’ Igraine said, ‘on Dolforwyn. What was it that Merlin gave you to drink?’

‘The same thing Nimue gave Ceinwyn at Llyn Cerrig Bach,’ I said, ‘and that was probably an infusion of the red cap.’

‘The mushroom!’ Igraine sounded appalled.

I nodded. ‘That was why I was twitching and couldn’t stand.’

‘But you could have died!’ she protested.

I shook my head. ‘Not many die from red caps, and besides, Nimue was skilled in such things.’ I decided not to tell her that the best way to make the red cap safe was for the wizard himself to eat the mushroom, then give the dreamer a cup of his urine to drink. ‘Or maybe she used rye-blight?’ I said instead, ‘but I think it was red cap.’

Igraine frowned as St Sansum ordered Brother Maelgwyn to stop singing his pagan song. The saint is in a testier mood than usual these days. He suffers pain when passing urine, maybe because of a stone. We pray for him.

‘So what happens now?’ Igraine asked, ignoring Sansum’s ranting.

‘We went home,’ I said. ‘Back to Powys.’

‘And to Arthur?’ she asked eagerly.

‘To Arthur too,’ I said, for this is his tale; the tale of our dear warlord, our law-giver, our Arthur. That spring was so glorious in Cwm Isaf, or perhaps when you are in love everything appears fuller and brighter, but it seemed to me as though the world had never been so crammed with cowslips and dog mercury, with bluebells and violets, with lilies and great banks of cow parsley. Blue butterflies haunted the meadow where we ripped out tangled bundles of couch grass from beneath the apple trees that blossomed pink. Wrynecks sang in the blossom, there were sandpipers by the stream and a wagtail made its nest under Cwm Isaf’s thatch. We had five calves, all healthy and greedy and soft-eyed, and Ceinwyn was pregnant.

I had made us both lovers’ rings when we returned from Ynys Mon. They were rings incised with a cross, though not the Christian cross, and girls often wore them after they had passed from being maids to women. Most girls took a twist of straw from their lovers and wore it as a badge, and spearmen’s women usually wore a warrior ring on which the cross had been scratched, while women of the highest rank rarely wore the rings at all, despising them as vulgar symbols. Some men wore them, too, and it had been just such a crossed lover’s ring that Valerin, the chieftain of Powys, had worn when he died at Lugg Vale. Valerin had been Guinevere’s betrothed before she met Arthur.

Our rings were both warrior rings made from a Saxon axehead, but before I left Merlin, who was continuing his journey southwards to Ynys Wydryn, I secretly broke off a fragment of the Cauldron’s detoration; it was a miniature golden spear carried by a warrior and it came off easily. I hid the gold in a pouch and, once back at Cwm Isaf, I took the scrap of gold and the two warrior rings to a metalworker there and watched as he melted and fashioned the gold into two crosses that he burned onto the iron. I stood over to him make sure he did not substitute some other gold, and then I carried one of the rings to Ceinwyn and wore the other myself. Ceinwyn laughed when she saw the ring. ‘A piece of straw would have done just as well, Derfel,’ she said.

‘Gold from the Cauldron will serve better,’ I answered. We wore the rings always, much to Queen Helledd’s disgust.

Arthur came to us in that lovely spring. He found me stripped to the waist and pulling couch grass, a job as unending as spinning wool. He hailed me from the stream, then strode uphill to greet me. He was dressed in a grey linen shirt and long dark leggings, and he carried no sword. ‘I like to see a man working,’ he teased me.

‘Pulling couch is harder work than fighting,’ I grumbled and pressed my hands into the small of my back. ‘You’ve come to help?’

‘I’ve come to see Cuneglas,’ he said, then took a seat on a boulder near one of the apple trees that dotted the pasture.

‘War?’ I asked, as though Arthur might have any other business in Powys. He nodded. ‘Time to gather the spears, Derfel. Especially,’ he smiled, ‘the Warriors of the Cauldron.’

Then he insisted on hearing the whole story, even though he must already have heard it a dozen times, and when it was told he had the grace to apologize for having doubted the Cauldron’s existence. I am sure Arthur still thought it was all a nonsense, and even a dangerous nonsense, for the success of our quest had angered Dumnonia’s Christians who, as Galahad had said, believed we performed the devil’s work. Merlin had carried the precious Cauldron back to Ynys Wydryn where it was being stored in his tower. In time. Merlin said, he would summon its vast powers, but even now, just by being in Dumnonia, and despite the hostility of the Christians, the Cauldron was giving the land a new confidence.

‘Though I confess,’ Arthur told me, ‘that I take more confidence from seeing spearmen gathered. Cuneglas tells me he will march next week, Lancelot’s Silurians are gathering at Isca, and Tewdric’s men are ready to march. And it will be a dry year, Derfel, a good year for fighting.’

I agreed. The ash trees had turned green before the oaks, and that signified a dry summer to come, and dry summers meant firm ground for shield-walls. ‘So where do you want my men?’ I asked.

‘With me, of course,’ he said, then paused before offering me a sly smile. ‘I thought you would have congratulated me, Derfel.’

‘You, Lord?’ I asked, pretending ignorance so he could tell me the news himself. His smile grew broader. ‘Guinevere gave birth a month ago. A boy, a fine boy!’

‘Lord!’ I exclaimed, pretending he had surprised me with the news, though a report of the birth had reached us a week before.

‘He’s healthy and hungry! A good omen.’ He was plainly delighted, but he was always inordinately pleased with the commonplace things of life. He yearned for a sturdy family within a well-built house surrounded by properly tended crops. ‘We call him Gwydre,’ he said, and repeated the name fondly,

‘Gwydre.’

‘A good name, Lord,’ I said, then told him of Ceinwyn’s pregnancy and Arthur immediately decreed that her child must be a daughter and, of course, would marry his Gwydre when the time came. He put an arm round my shoulder and walked me up to the house where we found Ceinwyn skimming cream from a dish of milk. Arthur embraced her warmly then insisted she leave the cream-making to her servants and come into the sunlight to talk.

We sat on a bench Issa had made under the apple tree that grew beside the house door. Ceinwyn asked him about Guinevere. ‘Was it an easy birth?’ she asked.

‘It was.’ He touched an iron amulet that hung at his neck. ‘It was indeed, and she’s well!’ He grimaced. ‘She worries a little that having a child will make her look old, but that’s nonsense. My mother never looked old. And having a child will be good for Guinevere.’ He smiled, imagining that Guinevere would love a son as much as he would himself. Gwydre, of course, was not his first child. His Irish mistress, Ailleann, had given him twin boys, Amhar and Loholt, who were now old enough to take their places in the shield-wall, but Arthur was not looking forward to their company. ‘They are not fond of me,’ he admitted when I asked about the twins, ‘but they do like our old friend Lancelot.’ He offered us both a ruefully apologetic glance at the mention of that name. ‘And they will fight with his men,’ he added.

‘Fight?’ Ceinwyn asked warily.

Arthur gave her a gentle smile. ‘I come to take Derfel away from you, my Lady.’

‘Bring him back to me, Lord,’ was all she said.

‘With riches enough for a kingdom,’ Arthur promised, but then he turned and looked at Cwm Isaf’s low walls and the bulging heap of thatch that kept us warm and the steaming dungheap that lay beyond the gable’s end. It was not as big as most farmhouses in Dumnonia, but it was still the kind of croft a prosperous freeman in Powys might own and we were fond of it. I thought Arthur was about to make some comment comparing my present humble state with my future wealth and I was ready to defend Cwm Isaf against such a comparison, but instead he looked rueful. ‘I do envy you this, Derfel.’

‘It’s yours for the taking, Lord,’ I said, hearing the yearning in his voice.

‘I am doomed to marble pillars and soaring pediments.’ He laughed the moment away. ‘I leave tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Cuneglas will follow within ten days. Would you come with him? Or earlier if you can. And bring as much food as you can carry.’

‘To where?’ I asked.

‘Corinium,’ he replied, then stood and gazed up the cwm before smiling down at me. ‘One last word?’

he requested.

‘I must be sure Scarach isn’t scalding the milk,’ Ceinwyn said, taking his broad hint. ‘I wish you victory, Lord,’ she said to Arthur, then stood to give him a parting embrace. Arthur and I walked up the cwm where he admired the newly-pleached hedges, the trimmed apple trees and the small fish pool we had dammed into the stream. ‘Don’t become too rooted in this soil, Derfel,’ he told me. ‘I want you back in Dumnonia.’

‘Nothing would give me more pleasure, Lord,’ I said, knowing it was not Arthur who kept me from my homeland, but his wife and her ally Lancelot.

Arthur smiled, but said nothing more of my return. ‘Ceinwyn,’ he said instead, ‘seems very happy.’

‘She is. We are.’

He hesitated a second. ‘You might discover,’ he said with the authority of a new father, ‘that pregnancy will make her turbulent.’

‘Not so far, Lord,’ I said, ‘though these are early weeks.’

‘You are fortunate in her,’ he said softly, and looking back I think that was the very first time I ever heard him utter the faintest criticism of Guinevere. ‘Childbirth is a stressful time,’ he added in hasty explanation, ‘and these preparations for war don’t help. Alas, I can’t be at home as much as I’d like.’ He stopped beside an ancient oak that had been riven by lightning so that its fire-blackened trunk was split in two, though even now the old tree was struggling to put out new green shoots. ‘I have a favour to ask of you,’ he said softly.

‘Anything, Lord.’

‘Don’t be hasty, Derfel, you don’t know the favour yet.’ He paused, and I sensed the request would be hard for he was embarrassed to be making it. For a moment or two he could not make the request at all, but instead stared towards the woods on the southern side of the cwm and muttered something about deer and bluebells.

‘Bluebells?’ I asked, thinking I must have misheard him.

‘I was just wondering why deer never eat bluebells,’ he said evasively. ‘They eat everything else.’

‘I don’t know, Lord.’

He hesitated a heartbeat, then looked into my eyes. ‘I have asked for a gathering of Mithras at Corinium,’ he finally admitted.

I understood what was coming then and hardened my heart to it. War had given me many rewards, but none so precious as the fellowship of Mithras. He had been the Roman God of war and He had stayed in Britain when the Romans left; the only men admitted to His mysteries were those elected by his initiates. Those initiates came from every kingdom, and they fought against each other as often as they fought for each other, but when they met in Mithras’s hall they met in peace and they would only elect the bravest of the brave to be their fellows. To be an initiate of Mithras was to receive the praise of Britain’s finest warriors and it was an honour that I would not give lightly to any man. No women, of course, were permitted to worship Mithras. Indeed, if a woman even saw the mysteries she would be killed.

‘I have called the gathering,’ Arthur said, ‘because I want us to admit Lancelot to the mysteries.’ I had known that was the reason. Guinevere had made the same request of me the year before, and in the months that followed I had hoped her idea would fade away, but here, on the eve of war, it had returned. I gave a politic answer. ‘Would it not be better, Lord,’ I asked, ‘if King Lancelot were to wait until the Saxons are defeated? Then, surely, we will have seen him fight.’ None of us had yet seen Lancelot in the shield-wall and, to be truthful, I would be astonished to see him fight in this coming summer, but I hoped the suggestion would delay the terrible moment of choice for a few further months. Arthur offered a vague gesture as though my suggestion was somehow irrelevant. ‘There is pressure,’

he said vaguely, ‘to elect him now.’

‘What pressure?’ I asked.

‘His mother is unwell.’

I laughed. ‘Hardly a reason to elect a man to Mithras, Lord.’

Arthur scowled, knowing his arguments were feeble. ‘He is a King, Derfel,’ he said, ‘and he leads a King’s army to our wars. He doesn’t like Siluria, and I can’t blame him. He yearns for the poets and harpists and halls of Ynys Trebes, but he lost that kingdom because I could not fulfil my oath and bring my army to his father’s aid. We owe him, Derfel.’

‘Not me, Lord.’

‘We owe him,’ Arthur insisted.

‘He should still wait for Mithras,’ I said firmly. ‘If you propose his name now, Lord, then I dare say it will be rejected.’

He had feared I would say that, but still he did not abandon his arguments. ‘You are my friend,’ he said, and waved away any comment I might make, ‘and it would please me, Derfel, if my friend were as honoured in Dumnonia as he is in Powys.’ He had been staring down at the bole of the storm-blasted oak, but now he looked up at me. ‘I want you at Lindinis, friend, and if you, above all others, support Lancelot’s name in Mithras’s hall, then his election is assured.’

There was far more there than Arthur’s bare words had said. He was subtly confirming to me that it was Guinevere who was pressing Lancelot’s candidacy, and that my offences in Guinevere’s eyes would be forgiven if I granted her this one wish. Elect Lancelot to Mithras, he was saying, and I could take Ceinwyn to Dumnonia and assume the honour of being Mordred’s champion with all the wealth, land and rank which accompanied that high position.

I watched a group of my spearmen come down from the high northern hill. One of them was cradling a lamb, and I guessed it was an orphan that would need to be hand-fed by Ceinwyn. It was a laborious business, for the lamb would have to be nurtured on a cloth teat soaked in milk and as often as not the little things died, but Ceinwyn insisted on trying to save their lives. She had utterly forbidden any of her lambs to be buried in wicker or have their pelts nailed to a tree and the flock did not seem to have suffered as a result of that neglect. I sighed. ‘So at Corinium,’ I said, ‘you will propose Lancelot?’

‘Not I, no. Bors will propose him. Bors has seen him fight.’

‘Then let us hope, Lord, that Bors is given a tongue of gold.’

Arthur smiled. ‘You can give me no answer now?’

‘None that you would want to hear, Lord.’

He shrugged, took my arm and walked me back. ‘I do hate these secret guilds,’ he said mildly, and I believed him for I had never yet seen Arthur at a meeting of Mithras even though I knew he had been initiated many years before. ‘Cults like Mithras,’ he said, ‘are supposed to bind men together, but they only serve to drive them apart. They rouse envy. But sometimes, Derfel, you have to fight one evil with another and I am thinking of starting a new guild of warriors. Those men who bear arms against the Saxons will belong, all of them, and I shall make it the most honoured band in all Britain.’

‘The largest too, I hope,’ I said.

‘Not the levies,’ he added, thus restricting his honoured band to those men who carried a spear by oath-duty rather than by land obligation. ‘Men will rather belong to my guild than to any secret mystery.’

‘What will you call it?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. Warriors of Britain? The Comrades? The Spears of Cadarn?’ He spoke lightly, but I could tell he was serious.

‘And you think that if Lancelot belongs to these Warriors of Britain,’ I said, snatching one of his suggested titles, ‘then he won’t mind being barred from Mithras?’

‘It might help,’ he admitted, ‘but it isn’t my prime reason. I shall impose an obligation on these warriors. To join they will have to take a blood-oath never to fight each other again.’ He gave a swift smile. ‘If the Kings of Britain squabble then I shall make it impossible for their warriors to right each other.’

‘Hardly impossible,’ I said tartly. ‘A royal oath supersedes all others, even your blood-oath.’

‘Then I shall make it difficult,’ he insisted, ‘because I shall have peace, Derfel, I shall have peace. And you, my friend, will share it with me in Dumnonia.’

‘I hope so, Lord.’

He embraced me. ‘I shall meet you in Corinium,’ he said. He raised a hand in greeting to my spearmen, then looked back to me. ‘Think about Lancelot, Derfel. And consider the truth that sometimes we must yield a little pride in return for a great peace.’

And with those words he strode away and I went to warn my men that the time for farming was over. We had spears to sharpen, swords to hone and shields to repaint, revarnish and bind hard. We were back at war.

We left two days before Cuneglas, who was waiting for his western chieftains to arrive with their rough-pelted warriors from Powys’s mountain fastnesses. He told me to promise Arthur that the men of Powys would be in Corinium within a week, then he embraced me and swore on his life that Ceinwyn would be safe. She was moving back to Caer Sws where a small band of men would guard Cuneglas’s family while he was at war. Ceinwyn had been reluctant to leave Cwm Isaf and rejoin the women’s hall where Helledd and her aunts ruled, but I remembered Merlin’s tale of a dog being killed and its skin draped on a crippled bitch in Guinevere’s temple of Isis, and so I pleaded with Ceinwyn to take refuge for my sake, and at last she relented.

I added six of my men to Cuneglas’s palace guard, and the rest, all Warriors of the Cauldron, marched south. All of us bore Ceinwyn’s five-pointed star on our shields, we carried two spears each, our swords, and had huge bundles of twice-baked bread, salted meat, hard cheese and dried fish strapped to our backs. It was good to be marching again, even though our route did take us through Lugg Vale where the dead had been unearthed by wild pigs so that the fields of the vale looked like a boneyard. I worried that the sight of the bones would remind Cuneglas’s men of their defeat, and so insisted that we spend a half day re-burying the corpses that had all had one foot chopped oft before they were first buried. Not every dead man could be burned as we would have liked, so most of our dead we buried, but we took away one foot to stop the soul walking. Now we re-buried the one-footed dead, but even after that half day’s work there was still no disguising the butchery of the place. I paused in the work to visit the Roman shrine where my sword had killed the Druid Tanaburs and where Nimue had extinguished Gundleus’s soul, and there, on a floor still stained by their blood, I lay flat between the piles of cobwebbed skulls and prayed that I would return unwounded to my Ceinwyn. We spent the next night at Magnis, a town that was a whole world away from fog-shrouded cauldrons and night-time tales of the Treasures of Britain. This was Gwent, Christian territory, and everything here was grim business. The blacksmiths were forging spearheads, the tanners were making shield covers, scabbards, belts and boots, while the town’s women were baking the hard, thin loaves that could keep for weeks on a campaign. King Tewdric’s men were in their Roman uniforms of bronze breastplates, leather skirts and long cloaks. A hundred such men had already marched to Corinium, another two hundred would follow, though not under the command of their King, for Tewdric was sick. His son Meurig, the Edling of Gwent, would be their titular leader, though in truth Agricola would command them. Agricola was an old man now, but his back was straight and his scarred arm could still wield a sword. He was said to be more Roman than the Romans and I had always been a little scared of his severe frown, but on that spring day outside Magnis he greeted me as an equal. His close-cropped grey head ducked under the lintel of his tent, then, dressed in his Roman uniform, he strode towards me and, to my astonishment, greeted me with an embrace.

He inspected my thirty-four spearmen. They looked shaggy and unkempt beside his clean-shaven men, but he approved of their weapons and approved even more of the amount of food we carried. ‘I’ve spent years,’ he growled, ‘teaching that it’s no use sending a spearman to war without a pack full of food, but what does Lancelot of Siluria do? Sends me a hundred spearmen without a peck of bread between them.’ He had invited me into his tent where he served me a sour, pale wine. ‘I owe you an apology, Lord Derfel,’ he said.

‘I doubt that, Lord,’ I said. I felt embarrassed to be in such intimacy with a famous warrior who was old enough to be my grandfather.

He waved away my modesty. ‘We should have been at Lugg Vale.’

‘It seemed a hopeless fight, Lord,’ I said, ‘and we were desperate. You were not.’

‘But you won, didn’t your’ he growled. He turned as a lick of wind tried to dislodge a wood shaving from his table that was covered with scores of other such shavings, each bearing lists of men and rations. He weighted the wisp of wood with an inkhorn, then looked back to me. ‘I hear we are to meet with the bull.’

‘At Corinium,’ I confirmed. Agricola, unlike his master Tewdric, was a pagan, though Agricola had no time for the British Gods, only for Mithras.

‘To elect Lancelot,’ Agricola said sourly. He listened as a man shouted orders in his camp lines, heard nothing that would spring him out of the tent and so looked back to me. ‘What do you know of Lancelot?’ he asked.

‘Enough,’ I said, ‘to speak against him.’

‘You’d offend Arthur?’ He sounded surprised.

‘I either offend Arthur,’ I said bitterly, ‘or Mithras.’ I made the sign against evil. ‘And Mithras is a God.’

‘Arthur spoke to me on his way back from Powys,’ Agricola said, ‘and told me that electing Lancelot would bind Britain’s union.’ He paused, looking morose. ‘He hinted that I owed him a vote to make up for our absence at Lugg Vale.’

Arthur, it seemed, was buying votes however he could. ‘Then vote for him, Lord,’ I said, ‘for his exclusion only needs one vote, and mine will suffice.’

‘I don’t tell lies to Mithras,’ Agricola snapped, ‘and nor do I like King Lancelot. He was here two months ago, buying mirrors.’

‘Mirrors!’ I had to laugh. Lancelot had always collected mirrors, and in his father’s high, airy sea-palace at Ynys Trebes he had kept the walls of a whole room covered with Roman mirrors. They must all have melted in the fire when the Franks swarmed over the palace walls and now, it seemed, Lancelot was rebuilding his collection.

‘Tewdric sold him a fine electrum mirror,’ Agricola told me. ‘Big as a shield and quite extraordinary. It was so clear that it was like looking into a black pool on a fine day. And he paid well for it.’ He would have had to, I thought, for mirrors of electrum, an amalgam of silver and gold, were rare indeed.

‘Mirrors,’ Agricola said scathingly. ‘He should be attending to his duties in Siluria, not buying mirrors.’

He snatched up his sword and helmet as a horn sounded from the town. It called twice, a signal Agricola recognized. ‘The Edling,’ he growled, and led me out into the sunlight to see that Meurig was indeed riding out from Magnis’s Roman ramparts. ‘I camp out here,’ Agricola told me as he watched his honour guard form into two ranks, ‘to stay away from their priests.’

Prince Meurig came attended by four Christian priests who ran to keep up with the Edling’s horse. The Prince was a young man, indeed I had first seen him when he was a child and that had not been so very long before, but he disguised his youth with a querulous and irritable manner. He was short, pale and thin, with a wispy brown beard. He was notorious as a creature of pettifogging detail who loved the quibbles of the lawcourts and the squabbles of the church. His scholarship was famous; he was, we were assured, an expert at refuting the Pelagian heresy that so harassed the Christian church in Britain, he knew by heart the eighteen chapters of tribal British law, and he could name the genealogies of ten British kingdoms going back twenty generations as well as the lineage of all their septs and tribes; and that, we were informed by his admirers, was only the beginning of Meurig’s knowledge. To his admirers he seemed a youthful paragon of learning and the finest rhetorician of Britain, but to me it seemed that the Prince had inherited all of his father’s intelligence and none of his wisdom. It was Meurig, more than any other man, who had persuaded Gwent to abandon Arthur before Lugg Vale and for that reason alone I had no love for Meurig, but I obediently went down on one knee as the Prince dismounted.

‘Derfel,’ he said in his curiously high-pitched voice, ‘I remember you.’ He did not tell me to rise, but just pushed past me into the tent.

Agricola beckoned me inside, thus sparing me the company of the four panting priests who had no business here except to stay close to their Prince who, dressed in a toga and with a heavy wooden cross hanging on a silver chain about his neck, seemed irritated by my presence. He scowled at me, then went on with a querulous complaint to Agricola, but as they spoke in Latin I had no idea what they talked about. Meurig was buttressing his argument with a sheet of parchment that he waved in front of Agricola who endured the harangue patiently.

Meurig at last abandoned his argument, rolled up the parchment and thrust it into his toga. He turned to me. ‘You will not,’ he said, speaking British again, ‘be expecting us to feed your men?’

‘We carry our own food, Lord Prince,’ I said, then inquired after his father’s health.

‘The King suffers from fistula in the groin,’ Meurig explained in his squeaking voice. ‘We have used poultices and the physicians are bleeding father regularly, but alas, God has not seen fit to requite the condition.’

‘Send for Merlin, Lord Prince,’ I suggested.

Meurig blinked at me. He was very short-sighted, and it was those weak eyes, perhaps, that gave his face its permanent expression of ill-temper. He uttered a short snaffle of mocking laughter. ‘You, of course, if you will forgive the remark,’ he said snidely, ‘are famous as one of the fools who risked Diwrnach to bring a bowl back to Dumnonia. A mixing bowl, yes?’

‘A cauldron, Lord Prince.’

Meurig’s thin lips flickered in a quick smile. ‘You did not think, Lord Derfel, that our smiths could have hammered you a dozen cauldrons in as many days?’

‘I shall know where to come for my cooking pots next time, Lord Prince,’ I said. Meurig stiffened at the insult, but Agricola smiled.

‘Did you understand any of that?’ Agricola asked me when Meurig had left.

‘I have no Latin, Lord.’

‘He was complaining because a chieftain hasn’t paid his taxes. The poor man owes us thirty smoked salmon and twenty cartloads of cut timber, and we’ve had no salmon from him and only five carts of wood. But what Meurig won’t grasp is that poor Cyllig’s people have been struck by the plague this last winter, the river Wye’s been poached empty, and Cyllig is still bringing me two dozen spearmen.’

Agricola spat in disgust. ‘Ten times a day!’ he said, ‘ten times a day the Prince will come out here with a problem that any half-witted treasury clerk could solve in twenty heartbeats. I just wish his father would just strap up his groin and get back on the throne.’

‘How sick is Tewdric?’

Agricola shrugged. ‘He’s tired, not sick. He wants to give up his throne. He says he’ll have his head tonsured and become a priest.’ He spat onto the tent floor again. ‘But I’ll manage our Edling. I’ll make sure his ladies come to war.’

‘Ladies?’ I asked, made curious by the ironic twist Agricola had put on the word.

‘He might be blind as a worm, Lord Derfel, but he can still spot a girl like a hawk seeing a shrew. He likes his ladies, Meurig does, and plenty of them. And why not? That’s the way of princes, isn’t it?’ He unstrapped his sword belt and hung it on a nail driven into one of the tent poles. ‘You march tomorrow?’

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘Dine with me tonight,’ he said, then ushered me out of the tent and squinted up at the sky. ‘It will be a dry summer. Lord Derfel. A summer for killing Saxons.’

‘A summer to breed great songs,’ I said enthusiastically.

‘I often think that the trouble with us Britons,’ Agricola said gloomily, ‘is that we spend too much time singing and not enough killing Saxons.’

‘Not this year,’ I said, ‘not this year,’ for this was Arthur’s year, the year to slaughter the Sais. The year, I prayed, of total victory.

Once out of Magnis we marched on the straight Roman roads that tied Britain’s heartland together. We made good time, reaching Corinium in just two days, and we were all glad to be back in Dumnonia. The five-pointed star on my shield might have been a strange device, but the moment the country folks heard my name they knelt for a blessing for I was Derfel Cadarn, the holder of Lugg Vale and a Warrior of the Cauldron, and my repute, it seemed, soared high in my homeland. At least among the pagans it did. In the towns and larger villages, where the Christians were more numerous, we were more likely to be met by preaching. We were told that we were marching to do God’s will by fighting the Saxons, but that if we died in battle our souls would go to hell if we were still worshippers of the older Gods. I feared the Saxons more than the Christian hell. The Sais were a dreadful enemy; poor, desperate and numerous. Once at Corinium, we heard ominous tales of new ships grounding almost daily on Britain’s eastern shores, and how each ship brought its cargo of feral warriors and hungry families. The invaders wanted our land, and to take it they could muster hundreds of spears, swords and double-edged axes, yet still we had confidence. Fools that we were, we marched almost blithely to that war. I suppose, after the horrors of Lugg Vale, we believed we could never be beaten. We were young, we were strong, we were loved by the Gods and we had Arthur.

I met Galahad in Corinium. Since the day we had parted in Powys he had helped Merlin carry the Cauldron back to Ynys Wydryn, then he had spent the spring at Caer Ambra from which rebuilt fortress he had raided deep into Lloegyr with Sagramor’s troops. The Saxons, he warned me, were ready for our coming and had set beacons on every hill to give warning of our approach. Galahad had come to Corinium for the great Council of War that Arthur had summoned, and he brought with him Cavan and those of my men who had refused to march north into Lleyn. Cavan went on one knee and begged that he and his men might renew their old oaths to me. ‘We have made no other oaths,’ he promised me,

‘except to Arthur, and he says we should serve you if you’ll have us.’

‘I thought you’d be rich by now,’ I told Cavan, ‘and gone home to Ireland.’

He smiled. ‘I still have the throwboard, Lord.’

I welcomed him back to my service. He kissed Hywelbane’s blade, then asked if he and his men could paint the white star on their shields.

‘You may paint it,’ I said, ‘but with only four points.’

‘Four, Lord?’ Cavan glanced at my shield. ‘Yours has five.’

‘The fifth point,’ I told Cavan, ‘is for the Warriors of the Cauldron.’ He looked unhappy, but agreed. Nor would Arthur have approved, for he would have seen, rightly enough, that the fifth point was a divisive mark which implied that one group of men was superior to another, but warriors like such distinctions and the men who had braved the Dark Road deserved it.

I went to greet the men who accompanied Cavan and found them camped beside the River Churn that flowed to the east of Corinium. At least a hundred men were bivouacked beside that small river, for there was not nearly enough space inside the town for all the warriors who had assembled about the Roman walls. The army itself was gathering close to Caer Ambra, but every leader who had come for the Council of War had brought some retainers, and those men alone were sufficient to give the appearance of a small army in the Churn’s water meadows. Their stacked shields showed the success of Arthur’s strategy, for at a glance I could see the black bull of Gwent, the red dragon of Dumnonia, the fox of Siluria, Arthur’s bear, and the shields of men, like me, who had the honour of carrying their own device: stars, hawks, eagles, boars, Sagramor’s dread skull and Galahad’s lone Christian cross. Culhwch, Arthur’s cousin, was camped with his own spearmen, but now hurried to greet me. It was good to see him again. I had fought at his side in Benoic and had come to love him like a brother. He was vulgar, funny, cheerful, bigoted, ignorant and coarse, and there was no better man to have alongside in a fight. ‘I hear you’ve put a loaf in the Princess’s oven,’ he said when he had embraced me. ‘You’re a lucky dog. Did you have Merlin cast you a spell?’

‘A thousand.’

He laughed. ‘I can’t complain. I’ve three women now, all clawing each other’s eyes out and all of them pregnant.’ He grinned, then scratched at his groin. ‘Lice,’ he said. ‘Can’t get rid of them. But at least they’ve infested that little bastard Mordred.’

‘Our Lord King?’ I teased him.

‘Little bastard,’ he said vengefully. ‘I tell you, Derfel, I’ve beaten him bloody and he still won’t learn. Sneaky little toad.’ He spat. ‘So tomorrow you speak against Lancelot?’

‘How do you know?’ I had told no one but Agricola of that firm decision, but somehow news of it had preceded me to Corinium, or else my antipathy to the Silurian King was too well known for men to believe I could do anything else.

‘Everyone knows,’ Culhwch said, ‘and everyone supports you.’ He looked past me and spat suddenly. ‘Crows,’ he growled.

I turned to see a procession of Christian priests walking alongside the Churn’s far bank. There were a dozen of them, all black gowned, all bearded, and all chanting one of the dirges of their religion. A score of spearmen followed the priests and their shields, I saw with surprise, bore either Siluria’s fox or Lancelot’s sea-eagle. ‘I thought the rites were in two days’ time,’ I said to Galahad, who had stayed with me.

‘They are,’ he said. The rites were the preamble to war and would ask the blessing of the Gods on our men, and that blessing would be sought from both the Christian God and the pagan deities. ‘This looks more like a baptism,’ Galahad added.

‘What in Bel’s name is a baptism?’ Culhwch asked.

Galahad sighed. ‘It is an outward sign, my dear Culhwch, of a man’s sins being washed away by God’s grace.’

That explanation made Culhwch bay with laughter, prompting a frown from one of the priests who had tucked his gown into his belt and was now wading into the shallow river. He was using a pole to discover a spot deep enough for the baptismal rite and his clumsy probing attracted a crowd of bored spearmen on the rushy bank opposite the Christians.

For a while nothing much happened. The Silurian spearmen made an embarrassed guard while the tonsured priests wailed their song and the lone paddler poked about in the river with the butt end of his long pole that was surmounted by a silver cross. ‘You’ll never catch a trout with that,’ Culhwch shouted,

‘try a fish spear!’ The watching spearmen laughed, and the priests scowled as they sang drearily on. Some women from the town had come to the river and joined in the singing. ‘It’s a woman’s religion,’

Culhwch spat.

‘It is my religion, dear Culhwch,’ Galahad murmured. He and Culhwch had argued thus throughout the whole long war in Benoic and their argument, like their friendship, had no end. The priest found a deep enough spot, so deep, indeed, that the water came right up to his waist, and there he tried to fix the pole in the river’s bed, but the force of the water kept bearing the cross down and each failure prompted a chorus of jeers from the spearmen. A few of the spectators were Christians themselves, but they made no attempt to stop the mockery.

The priest at last managed to plant the cross, albeit precariously, and climbed back out of the river. The spearmen whistled and hooted at the sight of his skinny white legs and he hurriedly dropped the sopping skirts of his robe to hide them.

Then a second procession appeared and the sight of it was sufficient to cause a silence to drop on our bank of the river. The silence was one of respect, for a dozen spearmen were escorting an ox-cart that was hung with white linens and in which sat two women and one priest. One of the women was Guinevere and the other was Queen Elaine, Lancelot’s mother, but most astonishing of all was the identity of the priest. It was Bishop Sansum. He was in his full bishop’s regalia, a mound of gaudy copes and embroidered shawls, and had a heavy red-gold cross hanging about his neck. The shaven tonsure at the front of his head was burned pink by the sun, and above it his black hair stood up like mouse ears. Lughtigern, Nimue always called him, the mouse lord. ‘I thought Guinevere couldn’t stand him,’ I said, for Guinevere and Sansum had always been the bitterest of enemies, yet here the mouse-lord was, riding to the river in Guinevere’s cart. ‘And isn’t he in disgrace?’ I added.

‘Shit sometimes floats,’ Culhwch growled.

‘And Guinevere isn’t even a Christian,’ I protested.

‘And look at the other shit who’s with her,’ Culhwch said, and pointed to a group of six horsemen who followed the lumbering cart. Lancelot led them. He was mounted on a black horse and wore nothing but a simple pair of trews and a white shirt. Arthur’s twin sons, Amhar and Loholt, flanked him, and they were dressed in full war gear with plumed helmets, mail coats and long boots. Behind them rode three other horsemen, one in armour and the other two in the long white robes of Druids.

‘Druids?’ I said. ‘At a baptism?’

Galahad shrugged, no more able to find an explanation than I. The two Druids were both muscular young men with dark handsome faces, thick black beards and long, carefully brushed black hair that grew back from their narrow tonsures. They carried black staffs tipped with mistletoe and, unusually for Druids, had swords scab-barded at their sides. The warrior who rode with them, I saw, was no man, but a woman; a tall, straight-backed, red-haired woman whose extravagantly long tresses cascaded from beneath her silver helmet to touch the spine of her horse. ‘Ade, she’s called,’ Culhwch told me.

‘Who is she?’ I asked.

‘Who do you think? His kitchen-maid? She keeps his bed warm.’ Culhwch grinned. ‘Does she remind you of anyone?’

She reminded me of Ladwys, Gundleus’s mistress. Was it the fate of Silurian Kings, I wondered, always to have a mistress who rode a horse and wore a sword like a man? Ade had a longsword at her hip, a spear in her hand and the sea-eagle shield on her arm. ‘Gundleus’s mistress,’ I told Culhwch.

‘With that red hair?’ Culhwch said dismissively.

‘Guinevere,’ I said, and there was a distinct resemblance between Ade and the haughty Guinevere who sat next to Queen Elaine in the cart. Elaine was pale, but otherwise I could see no evidence of the sickness that was rumoured to be killing her. Guinevere looked as handsome as ever, and betrayed no sign of the ordeal of childbirth. She had not brought her child with her, but nor would I have expected her to. Gwydre was doubtless in Lindinis, safe in a wet nurse’s arms and far enough away so that his cries could not disturb Guinevere’s sleep.

Arthur’s twins dismounted behind Lancelot. They were still very young, only just old enough, indeed, to carry a spear to war. I had met them many times and did not like them for they had none of Arthur’s pragmatic sense. They had been spoiled since childhood, and the result was a pair of tempestuous, selfish, greedy youths who resented their father, despised their mother Ailleann and took revenge for their bastardy on people who dared not fight back against Arthur’s progeny. They were despicable. The two Druids slid off their horses’ backs and stood beside the ox-cart.

It was Culhwch who first understood what Lancelot was doing. ‘If he’s baptized,’ he growled to me,

‘then he can’t join Mithras, can he?’

‘Bedwin did,’ I pointed out, ‘and Bedwin was a bishop.’

‘Dear Bedwin,’ Culhwch explained to me, ‘played both sides of the throwboard. When he died we found an image of Bel in his house, and his wife told us he’d been sacrificing to it. No, you see if I’m not right. This is how Lancelot evades being rejected from Mithras.’

‘Maybe he has been touched by God,’ Galahad protested.

‘Then your God must have filthy hands by now,’ Culhwch responded, ‘begging your pardon, seeing as he’s your brother.’

‘Half-brother,’ Galahad said, not wanting to be too closely associated with Lancelot. The cart had stopped very close to the river bank. Sansum now clambered down from its bed and, without bothering to tuck up his splendid robes, pushed through the rushes and waded into the river. Lancelot dismounted and waited on the bank as the Bishop reached and grasped the cross. He is a small man, Sansum, and the water came right up to the heavy cross on his narrow chest. He faced us, his unwitting congregation, and raised his strong voice. ‘This week,’ he shouted, ‘you will carry your spears against the enemy and God will bless you. God will help you! And today, here in this river, you will see a sign of our God’s power.’ The Christians in the meadow crossed themselves while some pagans, like Culhwch and I, spat to avert evil.

‘You see here King Lancelot!’ Sansum bellowed, throwing a hand towards Lancelot as though none of us would have recognized him. ‘He is the hero of Benoic, the King of Siluria and the Lord of Eagles!’

‘The Lord of what?’ Culhwch asked.

‘And this week,’ Sansum went on, ‘this very week, he was to be received into the foul company of Mithras, that false God of blood and anger.’

‘He was not,’ Culhwch growled amidst the other murmurs of protest from the men in the field who were Mithraists.

‘But yesterday,’ Sansum’s voice beat down the protest, ‘this noble King received a vision. A vision!

Not some belly-given nightmare spawned by a drunken wizard, but a pure and lovely dream sent on golden wings from heaven. A saintly vision!’

‘Ade lifted her skirts,’ Culhwch muttered.

‘The holy and blessed mother of God came to King Lancelot,’ Sansum shouted, it was the Virgin Mary herself, that lady of sorrows, from whose immaculate and perfect loins was born the Christ-child, the Saviour of all mankind. And yesterday, in a burst of light, in a cloud of golden stars, she came to King Lancelot and touched her lovely hand to Tanlladwyr!’ He gestured behind him again, and Ade solemnly drew out Lancelot’s sword that was called Tanlladwyr, which meant ‘Bright Killer’, and held it aloft. The sun slashed its reflection off the steel, blinding me for an instant.

‘With this sword,’ Sansum shouted, ‘our blessed Lady promised the King that he would bring Britain victory. This sword, our Lady said, has been touched by the nail-scarred hand of the Son and blessed by the caress of His mother. From this day on, our Lady decreed, this sword shall be known as the Christ-blade, for it is holy.’

Lancelot, to give him credit, looked exquisitely embarrassed at this sermon; indeed the whole ceremony must have embarrassed him for he was a man of vast pride and fragile dignity, but even so it must have seemed better to him to be dunked in a river than publicly humiliated by losing election to Mithras. The certainty of his rejection must have prompted him to this public repudiation of all the pagan Gods. Guinevere, I saw, pointedly stared away from the river, gazing instead towards the war banners that had been hoisted on Corinium’s earth and wooden ramparts. She was a pagan, a worshipper of Isis; indeed her hatred of Christianity was famous, yet that hatred had clearly been overcome by the need to support this public ceremony that spared Lancelot from Mithras’s humiliation. The two Druids talked softly with her, sometimes making her laugh.

Sansum turned and faced Lancelot. ‘Lord King,’ he called loudly enough for those of us on the other bank to hear, ‘come now! Come now to the waters of life, come now as a little child to receive your baptism into the blessed church of the one true God.’

Guinevere slowly turned to watch as Lancelot walked into the river. Galahad crossed himself. The Christian priests on the far bank had their arms spread wide in an attitude of prayer, while the town’s women had fallen to their knees as they gazed ecstatically at the handsome, tall King who waded out to Bishop Sansum’s side. The sun glittered on the water and slashed gold from Sansum’s cross. Lancelot kept his eyes lowered, as though he did not want to see who witnessed this humiliating rite. Sansum reached up and put his hand on the crown of Lancelot’s head. ‘Do you,’ he shouted so we could all hear, ‘embrace the one true faith, the only faith, the faith of Christ who died for our sins?’

Lancelot must have said ‘Yes’, though none of us could hear his response.

‘And do you,’ Sansum bellowed even louder, ‘hereby renounce all other Gods and all other faiths and all the other foul spirits and demons and idols and devil-spawn whose filthy acts deceive this world?’

Lancelot nodded and mumbled his assent.

‘And do you,’ Sansum went on with relish, ‘denounce and deride the practices of Mithras, and declare them to be, as indeed they are, the excrement of Satan and the horror of our Lord Jesus Christ?’

‘I do.’ That answer of Lancelot’s came clear enough to us all.

‘Then in the name of the Father,’ Sansum shouted, ‘and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I pronounce you Christian,’ and with that he gave a great heave that pushed down on Lancelot’s oiled hair, and so forced the King under the Churn’s cold water. Sansum held Lancelot there for so long that I thought the bastard would drown, but at last Sansum let him up. ‘And,’ Sansum finished as Lancelot sputtered and spat out water, ‘I now proclaim you blessed, name you a Christian, and enrol you in the holy army of Christ’s warriors.’ Guinevere, uncertain how to respond, clapped politely. The women and priests burst into a new song that, for Christian music, was surprisingly spritely.

‘What in the holy name of a holy harlot,’ Culhwch asked Galahad, ‘is a holy ghost?’

But Galahad did not wait to answer. In a rush of happiness caused by his brother’s baptism he had plunged into the river and now waded across so that he emerged from the water at the same time as his blushing half-brother. Lancelot had not expected to see him and for a second he stiffened, doubtless thinking of Galahad’s friendship for me, but then he suddenly remembered the duty of Christian love that had just been imposed upon him and so he submitted to Galahad’s enthusiastic embrace.

‘Shall we kiss the bastard too?’ Culhwch asked me with a grin.

‘Let him be,’ I said. Lancelot had not seen me, and I did not feel any need to be seen, but just then Sansum, who had emerged from the river and was trying to wring the water from his heavy robes, spotted me. The mouse-lord never could resist provoking an enemy, nor did he now.

‘Lord Derfel!’ the Bishop called.

I ignored him. Guinevere, on hearing my name, looked up sharply. She had been talking to Lancelot and his half-brother, but now she snapped an order to the ox driver who stabbed his goad at his beasts’

flanks and so lurched the cart forward. Lancelot hastily clambered onto the moving vehicle, abandoning his followers beside the river. Ade followed, leading his horse by its bridle.

‘Lord Derfel!’ Sansum called again.

I turned reluctantly to face him. ‘Bishop?’ I answered.

‘Might I prevail on you to follow King Lancelot into the river of healing?’

‘I bathed at the last full moon, Bishop,’ I called back, provoking some laughter from the warriors on our bank.

Sansum made the sign of the cross. ‘You should be washed in the holy blood of the Lamb of God,’ he called, ‘to wipe away the stain of Mithras! You are an evil thing, Derfel, a sinner, an idolater, an imp of the devil, a spawn of Saxons, a whore-master!’

That last insult tripped my rage. The other insults were mere words, but Sansum, though clever, was never a prudent man in public confrontations and he could not resist that final insult to Ceinwyn and his provocation sent me charging forward to the cheers of the warriors on the Churn’s eastern bank, cheers that swelled as Sansum turned in panic and fled. He had a good start on me, and he was a lithe, swift man, but the sopping layers of his weighty robes tangled his feet and I caught him within a few paces of the Churn’s far bank. I used my spear to knock his feet out from under him and so sent him sprawling among the daisies and cowslips.

Then I drew Hywelbane and put her blade to his throat. ‘I did not quite hear, Bishop,’ I said, ‘the last name you called me.’

He said nothing, only glanced towards Lancelot’s four companions who now gathered close. Amhar and Loholt had their swords drawn, but the two Druids left their swords scabbarded and just watched me with unreadable expressions. By now Culhwch had crossed the river and was standing beside me, as was Galahad, while Lancelot’s worried spearmen watched us from a distance.

‘What word did you use, Bishop?’ I asked, tickling his throat with Hywelbane.

‘The whore of Babylon!’ he gabbled desperately, ‘all pagans worship her. The scarlet woman, Lord Derfel, the beast! The anti-Christ!’

I smiled. ‘And I thought you were insulting the Princess Ceinwyn.’

‘No, Lord, no! No!’ He clasped his hands. ‘Never!’

‘You promise me now?’ I asked him.

‘I swear it. Lord! By the Holy Ghost, I swear it.’

‘I don’t know who the Holy Ghost is, Bishop,’ I said, giving his adam’s apple a small blow with Hywelbane’s tip. ‘Swear your promise on my sword,’ I said, ‘kiss that, and I will believe you.’

He loathed me then. He had disliked me before, but now he hated me, yet still he put his lips to Hywelbane’s blade and kissed the steel. ‘I meant the Princess no insult,’ he said, ‘I swear it.’

I left Hywelbane at his lips for a heartbeat, then drew the sword back and let him stand. ‘I thought, Bishop,’ I said, ‘that you had a Holy Thorn to guard in Ynys Wydryn?’

He brushed grass off his wet robes. ‘God calls me to higher things,’ he snapped.

‘Tell me of them.’

He looked up at me, hate in his eyes, but his fear overcame his hate. ‘God called me to King Lancelot’s side, Lord Derfel,’ he said, ‘and His grace served to soften the Princess Guinevere’s heart. I have hopes that she may yet see His everlasting light.’

I laughed at that. ‘She has the light of Isis, Bishop, and you know it. And she hates you, you foul thing, so what did you bring her to change her mind?’

‘Bring her, Lord?’ he asked disingenuously. ‘What have I to bring a Princess? I have nothing, I am made poor in God’s service, I am but a humble priest.’

‘You are a toad, Sansum,’ I said, sheathing Hywelbane. ‘You are dirt beneath my boots.’ I spat to avert his evil. I guessed, from his words, that it had been his idea to propose baptism to Lancelot, and that idea had served well enough to spare the Silurian King his embarrassment with Mithras, but I did not believe the suggestion would have been sufficient to reconcile Guinevere to Sansum and his religion. He must have given her something, or promised her something, but I knew he would never confess it to me. I spat again, and Sansum, taking the spittle as his dismissal, scuttled off towards the town.

‘A pretty display,’ one of the two Druids said caustically.

‘And the Lord Derfel Cadarn,’ the other said, ‘does not have a reputation for prettiness.’ He nodded when I glared at him. ‘Dinas,’ he said, introducing himself.

‘And I am Lavaine,’ said his companion. They were both tall young men, both built like warriors and both with hard, confident faces. Their robes were dazzling white and their long black hair was carefully combed, betraying; a fastidiousness that was made somehow chilling by their stillness. It was the same stillness that men like Sagramor possessed. Arthur did not. He was too restless, but Sagramor, like some other great warriors, had a stillness that was chilling in battle. I never fear the noisy men in a fight, but I take care when an enemy is calm for those are the most dangerous men, and these two Druids had that same calm confidence. They also looked very alike, and I supposed them to be brothers.

‘We are twins,’ Dinas said, perhaps reading my thoughts.

‘Like Amhar and Loholt,’ Lavaine added, gesturing towards Arthur’s sons who still had their swords drawn. ‘But you can tell us apart. I have a scar here,’ Lavaine said, touching his right cheek where a white scar buried itself in his bristling beard.

‘Which he took at Lugg Vale,’ Dinas said. Like his brother he had an extraordinarily deep voice, a grating voice that did not match his youth.

‘I saw Tanaburs at Lugg Vale,’ I said, ‘and I remember Iorweth, but I recall no other Druids in Gorfyddyd’s army.’

Dinas smiled. ‘At Lugg Vale,’ he said, ‘we fought as warriors.’

‘And killed our share of Dumnonians,’ Lavaine added.

‘And only shaved our tonsures after the battle,’ Dinas explained. He had an unblinking and unsettling gaze. ‘And now,’ he added softly, ‘we serve King Lancelot.’

‘His oaths are our oaths,’ Lavaine said. There was a threat in his words, but it was a distant threat, not challenging.

‘How can Druids serve a Christian?’ I challenged them.

‘By bringing an older magic to work alongside their magic, of course,’ Lavaine answered.

‘And we do work magic, Lord Derfel,’ Dinas added, and he held out his empty hand, closed it into a fist, turned it, opened his fingers and there, on his palm, lay a thrush’s egg. He tossed the egg carelessly away. ‘We serve King Lancelot by choice,’ he said, ‘and his friends are our friends.’

‘And his enemies our enemies,’ Lavaine finished for him.

‘And you,’ Arthur’s son Loholt could not resist joining in the provocation, ‘are an enemy of our King.’

I looked at the younger pair of twins; callow, clumsy youths who suffered an excess of pride and a shortfall of wisdom. They both had their father’s long bony face, but on them it was overlaid by petulance and resentment. ‘How am I an enemy of your King, Loholt?’ I asked him. He did not know what to say, and none of the others answered for him. Dinas and Lavaine were too wise to start a fight here, not even with all Lancelot’s spearmen so close, for Culhwch and Galahad were with me and scores of my supporters were just yards away across the slow-flowing Churn. Loholt reddened, but said nothing.

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.