PART FOUR

The Mysteries of Isis

Was Iseult beautiful?’ Igraine asks me.

I thought about the question for a few heartbeats. ‘She was young,’ I said at last, ‘and as her father said . . .’

‘I read what her father said,’ Igraine interrupted me curtly. When she comes to Dinnewrac Igraine always sits and reads through the finished skins before sitting on the window-sill and talking to me. Today that window is hung with a leather curtain to try and keep the cold out of the room, which is badly lit with rush lights on my writing-desk and filled with smoke because the wind is in the north and the smoke from the fire cannot find its way out of the roof-hole.

‘It was a long time ago,’ I said wearily, ‘and I only saw her for a day and two nights. I remember her as beautiful, but I suppose we always make the dead beautiful if they are young.’

‘The songs all say she was beautiful,’ Igraine said wistfully.

‘I paid the bards for those songs,’ I said. Just as I had paid men to carry Tristan’s ashes back to Kernow. It was right, I had thought, that Tristan should go to his own land in death, and I had mixed his bones and Iseult’s bones, and his ashes and her ashes, and no doubt a fair amount of ordinary wood ash too, and sealed them all in a jar we found in the hall where they had shared their impossible dream of love. I had been wealthy then, a great lord, master of slaves and servants and spearmen, wealthy enough to buy a dozen songs about Tristan and Iseult that are sung to this day in all the feasting halls. I made sure, too, that the songs put the blame for their deaths on Arthur.

‘But why did Arthur do it?’ Igraine said.

I rubbed my face with my one hand. ‘Arthur worshipped order,’ I explained. ‘I don’t think he ever really believed in the Gods. Oh, he believed they existed, he was no fool, but he didn’t think they cared about us any more. I remember he once laughed and said it was so arrogant of us to think that the Gods had nothing better to do than to worry about us. Do we lose sleep over the mice in the thatch? He asked me. So why would the Gods care about us? So all that was left to him, if you took away the Gods, was order, and the only thing that kept order was the law, and the only thing that made the powerful obey the law was their oaths. It was really quite simple.’ I shrugged. ‘He was right, of course; he almost always was.’

‘He should have let them live,’ Igraine insisted.

‘He obeyed the law,’ I said bleakly. I have often regretted allowing the bards to blame Arthur, but he forgave me.

‘And Iseult was burned alive?’ Igraine shuddered. ‘And Arthur just let it happen?’

‘He could be very hard,’ I said, ‘and he had to be, for the rest of us, God knows, could be soft.’

‘He should have spared them,’ Igraine insisted.

‘And there would have been no songs or stories if he had,’ I answered. ‘They would have grown old and fat and squabbled and died. Or else Tristan would have gone home to Kernow when his father died and taken other wives. Who knows?’

‘How long did Mark live?’ Igraine asked me.

‘Just another year,’ I said. ‘He died of the strangury.’

‘The what?’

I smiled. ‘A foul disease, Lady. Women, I think, are not subject to it. A nephew became King then, and I can’t even remember his name.’

Igraine grimaced. ‘But you can remember Iseult running from the sea,’ she said accusingly, ‘because her dress was wet.’

I smiled. ‘Like it was yesterday, Lady.’

‘The Sea of Galilee,’ Igraine said brightly, for St Tudwal had suddenly come into our room. Tudwal is now ten or eleven years old, a thin boy with black hair and a face that reminds me of Cerdic. A rat face. He shares both Sansum’s cell and his authority. How lucky we are to have two saints in our small community.

‘The saint wishes you to decipher these parchments,’ Tudwal demanded, putting them on my table. He ignored Igraine. Saints, it seems, can be rude to queens.

‘What are they?’ I asked him.

‘A merchant wants to sell them to us,’ Tudwal said. ‘He claims they’re psalms, but the saint’s eyes are too dim to read them.’

‘Of course,’ I said. The truth, of course, is that Sansum cannot read at all and Tudwal is much too lazy to learn, though we have all tried to teach him and we all now pretend that he can. I carefully uncurled the parchment that was old, cracking and feeble. The language was Latin, a tongue I can barely understand, but I did see the word Christus. ‘They aren’t psalms,’ I said, ‘but they are Christian. I suspect they’re gospel fragments.’

‘The merchant wants four pieces of gold.’

‘Two pieces,’ I said, though I did not really care whether we bought them or not. I let the parchments curl up. ‘Did the man say where he got them?’ I asked.

Tudwal shrugged. ‘The Saxons.’

‘We should certainly preserve them,’ I said dutifully, handing them back. ‘They should be in the treasure store.’ Where, I thought, Hywelbane rested with all the other small treasures I had brought from my old life. All but for Ceinwyn’s little golden brooch that I keep hidden from the older saint. I humbly thanked the younger saint for consulting me, and bowed my head as he left.

‘Spotty little toad,’ Igraine said when Tudwal had gone. She spat towards the fire. ‘Are you a Christian, Derfel?’

‘Of course I am, Lady!’ I protested. ‘What a question!’

She frowned quizzically at me. ‘I ask it,’ she said, ‘because it seems to me that you are less of a Christian today than you were when you began writing this tale.’

That, I thought, was a clever observation. And a true one too, but I dared not confess it openly for Sansum would love to have an excuse to accuse me of heresy and burn me to death. He wouldn’t stint on that firewood, I thought, even if he did ration what we could burn in our hearths. I smiled. ‘You make me remember the old things, Lady,’ I said, ‘that is all.’ It was not all. The more I recall of the old years the more some of those old things come back to me. I touched an iron nail in my wooden writing-desk to avert the evil of Sansum’s hatred. ‘I long ago abandoned paganism,’ I said.

‘I wish I was a pagan,’ Igraine said wistfully, drawing the beaver-pelt cloak tight about her shoulders. Her eyes are still bright and her face is so full of life that I am sure that she must be pregnant. ‘Don’t tell the saints I said that,’ she added swiftly. ‘And Mordred,’ she asked, ‘was he a Christian?’

‘No. But he knew that was where his support in Dumnonia was, so he did enough to keep them happy. He let Sansum build his great church.’

‘Where?’

‘On Caer Cadarn.’ I smiled, remembering it. ‘It was never finished, but it was supposed to be a great big church in the form of a cross. He claimed the church would welcome the second coming of Christ in the year 500, and he pulled down most of the feasting hall and used its timbers to build the wall and the stone circle to make the church’s foundations. He left the royal stone, of course. Then he took half the lands that belonged to Lindinis’s palace and used their wealth to pay for the monks on Caer Cadarn.’

‘Your land?’

I shook my head. ‘It was never my land, always Mordred’s. And, of course, Mordred wanted us evicted from Lindinis.’

‘So he could live in the palace?’

‘So Sansum could. Mordred moved into Uther’s Winter Palace. He liked it there.’

‘So where did you go?’

‘We found a home,’ I said. It was Ermid’s old hall, south of Issa’s Mere. The mere was not named for my Issa, of course, but for an old chieftain and Ermid had been another chief who had lived on its southern bank. When he died I had bought his lands, and after Sansum and Morgan took over Lindinis I moved there. The girls missed Lindinis’s open corridors and echoing rooms, but I liked Ermid’s Hall. It was old, thatched, shadowed by trees and full of spiders that made Morwenna scream and, for my oldest daughter’s sake, I became Lord Derfel Cadarn, the slayer of spiders.

‘Would you have killed Culhwch?’ Igraine asks me.

‘Of course not!’

‘I hate Mordred,’ she said.

‘You are not alone in that, Lady.’

She stared at the fire for a few moments. ‘Did he really have to become King?’

‘So long as it was in Arthur’s hands, yes. If it had been me? No, I would have killed him with Hywelbane, even if it did mean breaking my oath. He was a sad boy.’

‘It all seems so sad,’ Igraine said.

‘There was plenty of happiness in those years,’ I answered, ‘and even afterwards, sometimes. We were happy enough back then.’ I still remember the girls’ shouts echoing in Lindinis, the rush of feet and their excitement at some new game or some strange discovery. Ceinwyn was always happy she had a gift for it - and those around her caught the happiness and passed it on. And Dumnonia, I suppose, was happy. It prospered, certainly, and the hard workers made themselves wealthy. The Christians seethed with discontent, but even so those were the glory years, the time of peace, the time of Arthur. Igraine shuffled the new sheets of parchment to find one particular passage. ‘About the Round Table,’

she began.

‘Please,’ I said, holding up my one hand to still what I knew would be a protest.

‘Derfel!’ she said sternly. ‘Everyone knows that it was a serious thing! An important thing! All the best warriors of Britain, all sworn to Arthur, and all of them friends. Everyone knows it!’

‘It was a cracked stone table that by the day’s end was cracked even more and smeared with vomit. They all got very drunk.’

She sighed. ‘I expect you’ve just forgotten the truth,’ she said, dismissing the subject much too easily, which makes me think that Dafydd, the clerk who translates my words into the British tongue, will come up with something altogether more to Igraine’s liking. I even heard one tale not so long ago which claimed that the table was a vast wooden circle around which the whole Brotherhood of Britain sat and looked solemn, but there never was such a table, nor could there have been unless we had cut down half the woods of Dumnonia to build it.

‘The Brotherhood of Britain,’ I said patiently, ‘was an idea of Arthur’s that never really worked. It couldn’t! Men’s royal oaths took preference over the Round Table oath, and besides, no one except Arthur and Galahad ever really believed in it. By the end, believe me, even he was embarrassed if anyone even mentioned it.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she said, meaning that she was utterly sure I was wrong. ‘And I want to know,’ she went on, ‘what happened to Merlin.’

‘I will tell you. I promise.’

‘Now!’ she insisted. ‘Tell me now. Did he just fade away?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘His time did come. Nimue was right, you see. At Lindinis he was just waiting. He always liked to pretend, remember, and in those years he pretended to be an old, dying man, but underneath, where none of us saw it, the power was always there. But he was old, and he did have to hoard his power. He was waiting, you see, for the time when the Cauldron would be unveiled. He knew he would need his power then, but till it was needed he was happy to let Nimue guard the flame.’

‘So what happened?’ Igraine demanded excitedly.

I wrapped the sleeve of my cowl about the stump of my wrist. ‘If God lets me live, my Lady, I will tell you,’ I said, and I would not tell her more then. I was close to tears, remembering that last savage instance of Merlin’s power in Britain, but that moment lies a long, long way ahead in this story, long past the time when Nimue’s prophecy about the Kings coming to Cadarn came true.

‘If you won’t tell me,’ Igraine said, ‘then I won’t tell you my news.’

‘You’re pregnant,’ I said, ‘and I am so very happy for you.’

‘You beast, Derfel,’ she protested. ‘I wanted to surprise you!’

‘You have prayed for this, Lady, and I have prayed for you, and how could God not answer our prayers?’

She grimaced. ‘God sent Nwylle the pox, that’s what God did. She was all spots and sores and weeping pus, so the King sent her away’

‘I’m very glad.’

She touched her belly. ‘I just hope he lives to rule, Derfel.’

‘He?’ I asked.

‘He,’ she said firmly.

‘Then I will pray for that too,’ I said piously, though whether I will pray to Sansum’s God or to the wilder Gods of Britain I do not know. So many prayers have been said in my lifetime, so very many, and where did they bring me? To this damp refuge in the hills while our old enemies sing in our ancient halls. But that ending is also far ahead, and Arthur’s story is far from done. It is hardly begun in some ways, for now, as he discarded his glory and gave his power to Mordred, the times of testing came, and they were to prove the trials of Arthur, my Lord of oaths, my hard Lord, but my friend till death. At first, nothing happened. We held our breath, expected the worst, and nothing happened. We made hay, then cut the flax and laid the fibrous stems in the retting ponds so that our villages stank for weeks. We reaped the fields of rye, barley and wheat, then listened to the slaves singing their songs around the threshing floor or the endlessly turning millstones. The harvest straw was used to repair the thatch so that, for a time, patches of roof-gold shone in the late summer sun. We picked the orchards clean, cut the winter firewood and harvested willow rods for the basket-makers. We ate blackberries and nuts, smoked the bees out of their hives and pressed their honey in sacks that we hung in front of the kitchen fires where we left food for the dead on Samain Eve.

The Saxons stayed in Lloegyr, justice was done in our courts, maids were given in marriage, children were born and children died. The waning year brought mists and frost. The cattle were slaughtered and the stink of the retting ponds gave way to the nauseous smell of the tanning pits. The newly woven linen was bucked in vats filled with wood-ash, rainwater and the urine we had collected all year, the winter taxes were paid, and at the solstice we Mithraists killed a bull at our annual festival that honoured the sun while on the same day the Christians celebrated their God’s birth. At Imbolc, the great feast of the cold season, we fed two hundred souls in our hall, made sure three knives were laid on the table for the use of the invisible Gods and offered sacrifices for the new year’s crops. Newborn lambs were the first sign of that awakening year, then came the time for ploughing and sowing and of new green shoots on old bare trees. It was the first new year of Mordred’s rule.

That rule had brought some changes. Mordred demanded to be given his grandfather’s Winter Palace, and that surprised no one, but I was surprised when Sansum demanded Lindinis’s palace for himself. He made the demand in Council, saying he needed the palace’s space for his school and for Morgan’s community of holy women, and because he wanted to be close to the church he was building on Caer Cadarn’s summit. Mordred waved his assent, and so Ceinwyn and I were summarily evicted, but Ermid’s Hall was empty and we moved to its mist-haunted compound beside the mere. Arthur argued against letting Sansum into Lindinis, just as he opposed San-sum’s demand that the royal treasury pay for the repair of the damage done to the palace by, Sansum claimed, too many ill-disciplined children, but Mordred overruled Arthur. Those were Mordred’s only decisions, for he was usually content to let Arthur manage the kingdom’s affairs. Arthur, though he was no longer Mordred’s protector, was now the senior councillor and the King rarely came to Council, preferring to hunt. It was not always deer or wolves that he hunted and Arthur and I became accustomed to taking gold to some peasant’s hut to recompense the man for his daughter’s virginity or his wife’s shame. It was not a pleasant duty, but it was a rare and lucky kingdom where it was not necessary.

Dian, our youngest daughter, fell ill that summer. It was a fever that would not go away, or rather it came and went, but with such ferocity that three times we thought she was dead, and three times Merlin’s concoctions revived her, though nothing the old man did seemed able to shake the affliction clean away. Dian promised to be the liveliest of our three daughters. Morwenna, the oldest, was a sensible child who loved to mother her younger sisters and was fascinated by the workings of the household; ever curious about the kitchens, or the retting ponds or the linen vats. Seren, the star, was our beauty, a child who had inherited all her mother’s delicate looks, but had added to them a wistful and enchanting nature. She spent hours with the bards learning their songs and playing their harps, but Dian, Ceinwyn always said, was my daughter. Dian had no fear. She could shoot with a bow and arrow, loved to ride horses, and even at six years old could handle a coracle as well as any of the mere’s fishermen. She was in her sixth year when the fever gripped her, and if it had not been for that fever we would probably all have travelled to Powys together, for it was a month short of the first anniversary of Mordred’s acclamation when the King suddenly demanded that Arthur and I travel to Cuneglas’s realm. Mordred made the demand at one of his rare appearances at the royal Council. The suddenness of the demand surprised us, as did the need for the errand he proposed, but the King was determined. There was, of course, an ulterior motive, though neither Arthur nor I saw it at the time and nor did anyone else on the Council except Sansum who had proposed the idea, and it took us all a long time to smoke out the mouse-lord’s reasons for the suggestion. Nor was there any obvious reason why we should be suspicious of the King’s proposal for it seemed reasonable enough, though neither Arthur nor I understood why we should both be dispatched to Powys.

The matter sprang from an old, old story. Norwenna, Mordred’s mother, had been murdered by Gundleus, the King of Siluria, and though Gundleus had received his punishment, the man who had betrayed Norwenna still lived. His name was Ligessac, and he had been the chief of Mordred’s guard when the King was just a baby. But Ligessac had taken Gundleus’s bribes and opened the gates of Merlin’s Tor to the Silurian King’s murderous intent. Mordred had been snatched to safety by Morgan, but his mother had died. Ligessac, whose treachery had caused Norwenna’s death, had survived the war that followed the murder, just as he had survived the battle at Lugg Yale. Mordred had heard the tale, of course, and it was only natural that he should take an interest in Ligessac’s fate, but it was Bishop Sansum who fanned that interest into an obsession. Sansum somehow discovered that Ligessac had taken refuge with a band of Christian hermits in a remote and mountainous area of northern Siluria that was now under Cuneglas’s rule. ‘It hurts me to betray a fellow Christian,’ the mouse-lord announced sanctimoniously in the Council meeting, ‘but it hurts just as much that a Christian should have been guilty of so foul a treachery. Ligessac still lives, Lord King,’ he said to Mordred, ‘and should be brought to your justice.’

Arthur suggested that Cuneglas be asked to arrest the fugitive and send him back to Dumnonia, but Sansum shook his head at that proposal and said it was surely discourteous to ask another King to initiate a vengeance that touched so closely on Mordred’s honour. ‘This is Dumnonian business,’ Sansum insisted, ‘and Dumnonians, Lord King, should be the agents of its success.’

Mordred nodded agreement and then insisted that both Arthur and I go to capture the traitor. Arthur, surprised as always when Mordred asserted himself at Council, demurred. Why, he wanted to know, should two lords go on an errand that could be safely left to a dozen spearmen? Mordred smirked at that question. ‘You think, Lord Arthur, that Dumnonia will fall if you and Derfel are absent?’

‘No, Lord King,’ Arthur said, ‘but Ligessac must be an old man now and it won’t need two war-bands to capture him.’

The King thumped the table with his fist. ‘After my mother’s murder,’ he accused Arthur, ‘you let Ligessac escape. At Lugg Vale, Lord Arthur, you again let Ligessac escape. You owe me Ligessac’s life.’

Arthur stiffened momentarily at this accusation, but then inclined his head to acknowledge the obligation. ‘But Derfel,’ he pointed out, ‘was not responsible.’

Mordred glanced at me. He still disliked me for all the beatings he had taken as a child, but I hoped that the blows he had given me at his acclamation and his petty triumph in evicting us from Lindinis had slaked his thirst for revenge. ‘Lord Derfel,’ he said, as ever making the title sound mocking, ‘knows the traitor. Who else would recognize him? I insist you both go. And you don’t need to take two whole war-bands either,’ he reverted to Arthur’s earlier objection. ‘Just a few men will do.’ He must have been embarrassed at giving Arthur such military advice for his voice tailed weakly away and he looked shiftily at the other councillors before recovering what little poise he did possess. ‘I want Ligessac here before Samain,’ he insisted, ‘and I want him here alive.’

When a King insists, men obey, so Arthur and I both rode north with thirty men apiece. Neither of us believed we would need so many, but it was an opportunity to give some underemployed men the exercise of a long march. My remaining thirty spearmen stayed behind to guard Ceinwyn, while Arthur’s other men either stayed in Durnovaria or else went to reinforce Sagramor who still guarded the northern Saxon frontier. The usual Saxon war-bands were active on that frontier, not trying to invade us, but rather attempting to snatch cattle and slaves as they had through all the years of peace. We made similar raids, but both sides were careful not to let the raids turn into full-scale war. The makeshift peace we had forged at London had lasted remarkably well, though there had been little peace between Aelle and Cerdic. Those two had fought each other to a standstill and their squabbles had largely left us unmolested. We had, indeed, grown accustomed to peace.

My men walked north while Arthur’s rode, or at least led their horses, on the good Roman roads that took us first to Meurig’s kingdom of Gwent. The King gave us a grudging feast at which our men were outnumbered by priests, and after that we made a detour to the Wye Valley to see old Tewdric, whom we found living in a humble thatched hut that was half the size of the building where he kept his collection of Christian parchments. His wife, Queen Enid, grumbled at the fate that had driven her from Gwent’s palaces to this mice-ridden life in the woods, but the old King was happy. He had taken Christian orders and blithely ignored Enid’s scoldings. He gave us a meal of beans, bread and water and rejoiced at the news of Christianity’s spread in Dumnonia. We asked him about the prophecies which foretold the return of Christ in four years’ time and Tewdric said he prayed they were true, but suspected it was much more likely that Christ would wait a full thousand years before returning in glory. ‘But who knows?’ he asked.

‘It’s possible He will come in four years’ time. What a glorious thought!’

‘I just wish your fellow Christians would be content to wait in peace,’ Arthur said.

‘They have a duty to prepare the earth for His coming,’ Tewdric said sternly. ‘They must make converts. Lord Arthur, and cleanse the land of sin.’

‘They’ll make a war between themselves and the rest of us if they aren’t careful,’ Arthur grumbled. He told Tewdric how there had been riots in every Dumnonian town as Christians tried to pull down or defile pagan temples. The things we had seen in Isca had just been the beginnings of those troubles and the unrest was spreading fast, and one of the symptoms of that burgeoning trouble was the sign of the fish, a simple scrawl of two curving lines, that the Christians painted on pagan walls or carved into the trees of Druidic groves. Culhwch had been right: the fish was a Christian symbol.

‘It’s because the Greek word for fish is ichthus Tewdric told us, ‘and the Greek letters spell Christ’s name. Iesous Christos, Theou Uios, Soter. Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. Very neat, very neat indeed.’ He chuckled with pleasure at his explanation, and it was easy to see from where Meurig had inherited his annoying pedantry. ‘Of course,’ Tewdric went on, ‘if I were still a ruler then I’d be concerned by all this turmoil, but as a Christian I must welcome it. The holy fathers tell us there will be many signs and portents of the last days, Lord Arthur, and civil disturbances are merely one of those signs. So maybe the end is near?’

Arthur crumbled a piece of bread into his dish. ‘You truly welcome these riots?’ he asked. ‘You approve of attacks on pagans? Of shrines burned and defaced?’

Tewdric stared out of the open door at the green woods that pressed hard about his small monastery.

‘I suppose they must be hard for others to understand,’ he said, evading a direct answer to Arthur’s question. ‘You must see the riots as symptoms of excitement, Lord Arthur, not signs of our Lord’s grace.’ He made the sign of the cross and smiled at us. ‘Our faith,’ he said earnestly, ‘is a faith of love. The Son of God humbled Himself to save us from our sins, and we are enjoined to imitate Him in all we do or think. We are encouraged to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us, but those are hard commandments, too hard for most folk. And you must remember what it is that we pray for most fervently, and that is for the return to this earth of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ He made the sign of the cross again. ‘Folk pray and long for His second coming, and they fear that if the world is still ruled by pagans then He might not come and so they feel impelled to destroy heathenism.’

‘Destroying paganism,’ Arthur observed tartly, ‘hardly seems proper to a religion that preaches love.’

‘Destroying paganism is an act full of love,’ Tewdric insisted. ‘If you pagans refuse to accept Christ then you will surely go to hell. It will not matter that you have lived a virtuous life, for you will still burn for all eternity. We Christians have a duty to save you from that fate, and is that duty not an act of love?’

‘Not if I don’t want to be saved,’ Arthur said.

‘Then you must endure the enmity of those that love you,’ Tewdric said, ‘or at least you must endure it until the excitement dies down. And it will. These enthusiasms never last long, and if our Lord Jesus Christ does not return in four years then the excitement will surely wane until the millennium comes.’ He stared again at the deep woods. ‘How glorious it would be,’ he said in a voice full of wonder, ‘if I could live to see my Saviour’s face in Britain.’ He turned back to Arthur. ‘And the portents of His return will be disturbing, I fear. Doubtless the Saxons will be a nuisance. Are they much trouble these days?’

‘No,’ Arthur said, ‘but their numbers grow every year. I fear they won’t be quiet for much longer.’

‘I shall pray that Christ returns before they do,’ Tewdric said. ‘I don’t think I could bear to lose land to the Saxons. Not that it’s my business any longer, of course,’ he added hastily, ‘I leave all those things to Meurig now.’ He stood as a horn sounded from the nearby chapel. ‘Time for prayers!’ he said happily. ‘You’ll join me, perhaps?’

We excused ourselves, and next morning climbed the hills away from the old King’s monastery and crossed into Powys. Two nights later we were in Caer Sws where we were reunited with Culhwch who was prospering in his new kingdom. That night we all drank too much mead and next morning, when Cuneglas and I rode to Cwm Isaf, my head was sore. I found the King had kept our little house intact. ‘I never know when you might need it again, Derfel,’ he told me.

‘Maybe soon,’ I admitted glumly.

‘Soon? I do hope so.’

I shrugged. ‘We are not truly welcome in Dumnonia. Mordred resents me.’

‘Then ask to be released from your oath.’

‘I did ask,’ I said, ‘and he refused me.’ I had asked him after the acclamation, when the shame of the two blows was still keen in me, and then I had asked him again six months later and still he had refused me. I think he was clever enough to know that the best way to punish me was to force me to serve him.

‘Is it your spearmen he wants?’ Cuneglas asked, sitting on the bench under the apple tree by the house door.

‘Just my grovelling loyalty,’ I said bitterly. ‘He doesn’t seem to want to fight any wars.’

‘So he’s not a complete fool,’ Cuneglas said drily. Then we spoke of Ceinwyn and the girls and Cuneglas offered to send Malaine, his new chief Druid, to Dian’s side. ‘Malaine has a remarkable skill with herbs,’ he said. ‘Better than old Iorweth. Did you know he died?’

‘I heard. And if you can spare Malaine, Lord King, I would be glad.’

‘He’ll leave tomorrow. I can’t have my nieces sick. Doesn’t your Nimue help?’

‘No more and no less than Merlin,’ I said, touching the tip of an old sickle blade that was embedded in the apple tree’s bark. The touch of iron was to ward off the evil that threatened Dian. ‘The old Gods,’

I said bitterly, ‘have abandoned Dumnonia.’

Cuneglas smiled. ‘It never does, Derfel, to underestimate the Gods. They’ll have their day in Dumnonia again.’ He paused. ‘The Christians like to call themselves sheep, don’t they? Well, just you listen to them bleat when the wolves come.’

‘What wolves?’

‘The Saxons,’ he said unhappily. ‘They’ve given us ten years of peace, but their boats still land on the eastern shores and I can feel their power growing. If they start fighting us again then your Christians will be glad enough of pagan swords.’ He stood and laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘The Saxons are unfinished business, Derfel, unfinished business.’

That night he gave us a feast and next morning, with a guide given us by Cuneglas, we travelled south into the bleak hills that lay across the old frontier of Siluria.

We were going to a remote Christian community. Christians were still few in Powys, for Cuneglas ruthlessly ejected Sansum’s missionaries from his kingdom whenever he discovered their presence, but some Christians lived in the kingdom and there were many in the old lands of Siluria. This one group in particular was famous among Britain’s Christians for their sanctity, and they displayed that sanctity by living in extreme poverty in a wild, hard place. Ligessac had found his refuge among these Christian fanatics who, as Tewdric had told us, mortified their flesh, by which he meant that they competed with each other to see which could lead the most miserable lives. Some lived in caves, some refused shelter altogether, others ate only green things, some eschewed all clothes, others dressed in hair shirts with brambles woven into the fabric, some wore crowns made of thorns and others beat themselves bloody day after day like the flagellants we had seen in Isca. To me it seemed that the best punishment for Ligessac was to leave him in such a community, but we were ordered to fetch him out and take him home which meant we would have to defy the community’s leader, a fierce bishop named Cadoc whose belligerence was famous.

That reputation persuaded us to don our armour as we approached Cadoc’s squalid fastness in the high hills. We did not wear our best armour, at least those of us who had a choice did not, for that finery would have been wasted on a half-crazed pack of holy fanatics, but we were all helmeted and wore mail or leather and carried shields. If nothing else, we thought, the war gear might overawe Cadoc’s disciples who, our guide assured us, did not number more than twenty souls. ‘And all of them are mad,’ our guide told us. ‘One of them stood dead still for a whole year! Didn’t move a muscle, they say. Just stood like a beanpole while they shovelled food into one end of him and dung away from the other. Funny sort of God who asks that of a man.’

The road to Cadoc’s refuge had been beaten into the earth by pilgrims’ feet, and it twisted up the flanks of wide, bare hills where the only living things we saw were sheep and goats. We saw no shepherds, but they undoubtedly saw us. ‘If Ligessac has any sense,’ Arthur said, ‘he’ll be long gone. They must have seen us by now.’

‘And what will we tell Mordred?’

‘The truth, of course,’ Arthur said bleakly. His armour was a spearman’s plain helmet and a leather breastcoat, yet even such humble things looked neat and clean on him. His vanity was never flamboyant like Lancelot’s, but he did pride himself on cleanliness, and somehow this whole expedition into the raw uplands offended his sense of what was clean and proper. The weather did not help, for it was a bleak, raw summer’s day, with rain whipping out of the west on a chill wind. Arthur’s spirits might have been low, but our spearmen were cheerful. They made jokes about assaulting the stronghold of mighty King Cadoc and boasted of the gold, warrior rings and slaves they would capture in the assault, and the joke’s extravagant claims made them laugh when at last we breasted the final saddle in the hills and could look down into the valley where Ligessac had found his refuge. It was indeed a squalid place; a sea of mud in which a dozen round stone huts surrounded a small square stone church. There were some ragged vegetable gardens, a small dark lake, some stone pens for the community’s goats, but no palisade.

The only defence the valley boasted was a great stone cross carved with intricate patterns and an image of the Christian God enthroned in glory. The cross, which was a marvellous piece of stonework, marked the saddle where Cadoc’s land began and it was beside the cross, in plain sight of the tiny settlement that lay only a dozen spear throws away, that Arthur halted our war-band. ‘We shan’t trespass,’ he told us mildly, ‘till we’ve had a chance to talk with them.’ He rested his spear-butt on the ground beside his horse’s front hoofs and waited.

A dozen folk were visible in the compound and on seeing us they fled to the church, from which, a moment later, a huge man appeared and strode up the road towards us. He was a giant of a man, as tall as Merlin and with a massive chest and big, capable hands. He was also filthy, with an unwashed face and a brown robe caked with mud and dirt, while his grey hair, as dirty as his robe, seemed never to have been cut. His beard grew wild to below his waist, while behind his tonsure his hair sprang in dirty tangles like a great grey freshly sheared fleece. His face was tanned dark and he had a wide mouth, a jutting forehead and angry eyes. It was an impressive face. He carried a staff in his right hand, while at his left hip, unscabbarded, there hung a huge rusty sword. He looked as if he had once been a useful spearman, and I did not doubt that he could still deal a hard blow or two. ‘You are not welcome here,’

he shouted as he drew nearer to us, ‘unless you come to lay your miserable souls before God.’

‘Our souls are already laid before our Gods,’ Arthur answered pleasantly.

‘Heathen!’ the big man, whom I assumed had to be the famous Cadoc, spat at us. ‘You come in iron and steel to a place where Christ’s children play with the Lamb of God?’

‘We come in peace,’ Arthur insisted.

The bishop spat a great yellow gob of sputum towards Arthur’s horse. ‘You are Arthur ap Uther ap Satan,’ he said, ‘and your soul is a rag of filth.’

‘And you, I assume, are Bishop Cadoc,’ Arthur answered courteously.

The Bishop stood beside the cross and scratched a line in the road with the butt of his staff. ‘Only the faithful and the penitent can cross this line,’ he declared, ‘for this is God’s holy ground.’

Arthur gazed for a few heartbeats at the muddy squalor ahead, then smiled gravely at the defiant Cadoc. ‘I have no wish to enter your God’s ground, Bishop,’ he said, ‘but I do ask you, in peace, to bring us the man called Ligessac’

‘Ligessac,’ Cadoc boomed at us as though he was addressing a congregation of thousands, ‘is God’s blessed and holy child. He has been given sanctuary here and neither you nor any other so-called lord can invade that sanctuary.’

Arthur smiled. ‘A King rules here, Bishop, not your God. Only Cuneglas can offer sanctuary, and he has not.’

‘My King, Arthur,’ Cadoc said proudly, ‘is the King of Kings, and He has commanded me to refuse you entrance.’

‘You will resist me?’ Arthur asked with polite surprise in his voice.

‘To death!’ Cadoc shouted.

Arthur shook his head sadly. ‘I am no Christian, Bishop,’ he said mildly, ‘but do you not preach that your Otherworld is a place of utter delights?’ Cadoc made no answer and Arthur shrugged. ‘So I do you a favour, do I not, by hurrying you to that destination?’ He asked the question, then drew Excalibur. The Bishop used his staff to deepen the line he had scratched across the muddy track. ‘I forbid you to cross this line,’ he shouted. ‘I forbid it in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost!’

Then he raised the staff and pointed it at Arthur. He held the staff still for a heartbeat, then swept its tip to encompass the rest of us, and I confess that I felt a chill at that moment. Cadoc was no Merlin, and his God, I thought, had no power like Merlin’s Gods, but I still shuddered as that staff pointed my way and my fear made me touch my iron mail and spit onto the road. ‘I am going to my prayers now, Arthur,’

Cadoc said, ‘and you, if you wish to live, will turn and go from this place, for if you pass by this holy cross then I swear to you, by the sweet blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, that your souls will burn in torment. You will know the fire everlasting. You will be cursed from the beginning of time till its ending and from the vaults of heaven to the bottom-most pits of hell.’ And with that heavy curse delivered he spat one more time, then turned and walked away.

Arthur used the tail of his cloak to wipe the rain off Excalibur, then scabbarded the sword. ‘It seems we’re not welcome,’ he said with some amusement, then he turned and beckoned to Balin who was the oldest cavalryman present. ‘Take the horsemen,’ Arthur ordered him, ‘and get behind the village. Make sure no one can escape. Once you’re in place I’ll bring Derfel and his men to search the houses. And listen!’ - he raised his voice so that all sixty men could hear him - ‘these folk will resist. They’ll taunt and fight us, but we have no quarrel with any of them. Only with Ligessac. You will not steal from them and you will not hurt any of them unnecessarily. You will remember that you are soldiers and they are not. You will treat them with respect and return their curses with silence.’ He spoke sternly, and then, when he was sure that all our men had understood him, he smiled at Balin and gestured him forward. The thirty armoured horsemen rode ahead, streaming off the road to gallop around the valley’s edge to reach the far slope beyond the village. Cadoc, who was still walking towards his church, glanced at them, but showed no alarm.

‘I wonder,’ Arthur said, ‘how he knew who I was?’

‘You’re famous, Lord,’ I said. I still called him Lord and always would.

‘My name is known, perhaps, but not my face. Not here.’ He shrugged the mystery off. ‘Was Ligessac always a Christian?’

‘Since first I knew him. But never a good one.’

He smiled. ‘The virtuous life becomes easier when you’re older. At least I think it does.’ He watched his horsemen gallop past the village, their horses’ hoofs kicking up great spouts of water from the soaking grass, then he hefted his spear and looked back at my men. ‘Remember now! No theft!’ I wondered what there could possibly be to steal in such a drab place, but Arthur knew that all spearmen will usually find something as a keepsake. ‘I don’t want trouble,’ Arthur told them. ‘We just look for our man, then leave.’ He touched Llamrei’s flanks and the black mare started obediently forward. We foot-soldiers followed, our boots obliterating Cadoc’s scratched line in the muddy road beside the intricately carved cross. No fire came from heaven.

The Bishop had reached his church now and he stopped at its entrance, turned, saw us coming and ducked inside. ‘They knew we were coming,’ Arthur said to me, ‘so we’ll not find Ligessac here. I fear it’s a waste of our time, Derfel.’ A lame sheep hobbled over the road and Arthur checked his horse to give it passage. I saw him shudder and I knew he was offended by the settlement’s dirt that almost mailed the squalor of Nimue’s Tor.

Cadoc reappeared at the church door when we were just a hundred paces away. By now our horsemen were waiting behind the village, but Cadoc did not bother to look to see where they were. He just raised a big ram’s horn to his lips and blew a call that echoed hollowly in the bare bowl of hills. He sounded the horn once, paused to take a deep breath, then sounded it again. And suddenly we had a battle on our hands.

They had known we were coming right enough, and they had been ready for us. Every Christian in Powys and Siluria must have been summoned to Cadoc’s defence and those men now appeared on the crests all around the valley while others ran to block the road behind us. Some carried spears, some had shields and some hefted nothing but reaping hooks or hay forks, but they looked confident enough. Many, I knew, would once have been spearmen who served in the war levy, but what gave these Christians real confidence, apart from their faith in their God, was that they numbered at least two hundred men. ‘The fools!’ Arthur said angrily. He hated unnecessary violence and he knew that some killing was now unavoidable. He knew, too, that we would win, for only fanatics who believed their God would fight for them would take on sixty of Dumnonia’s finest warriors. ‘Fools!’ He spat again, then glanced at the village to see more armed men coming from the huts. ‘You stay here, Derfel,’ he said.

‘Just hold them, and we’ll see them off.’ He kicked back his spurs and galloped alone about the village’s edge towards his horsemen.

‘Shield-ring,’ I said quietly. We were only thirty men and our double-ranked ring made a circle so small that it must have looked like an easy target to those howling Christians who now ran down the hills or out of the village to annihilate us. The shield-ring is never a popular formation with soldiers because the splay of the spears out of the circle means that their points are spread far apart and the smaller the ring the wider those gaps between the spearheads, but my men were well trained. The front rank knelt, their shields touching and the butts of their long spears jammed into the ground behind them. We in the second rank laid our shields over the first rank’s shields, propping them on the ground so that our attackers faced a double thick wall of leather-covered timber. Then each of us stood behind a kneeling man and levelled our spears over their heads. Our job was to protect the front rank and their job was to stay staunch. It would be hard, bloody work, but so long as the kneeling men held their shields high and kept their spears firm, and so long as we protected them, the shield-ring should be safe enough. I reminded the kneeling men of

their training, told them they were there just as an obstacle as to

leave the killing to the rest of us. ‘Bel is with us,’ I said.

‘So is Arthur,’ Issa added enthusiastically.

For it was Arthur who would do the day’s real killing. We were the lure and he was the executioner, and Cadoc’s men took that lure like a hungry salmon rising to a mayfly. Cadoc himself led the charge from the village, carrying his rusty sword and a big round shield that was painted with a black cross behind which I could just see the ghostly outline of Siluria’s fox that betrayed his previous allegiance as a spearman in Gundleus’s ranks.

That Christian horde did not come as a shield-wall. That might have brought them victory, but instead they attacked in the old manner that the Romans had beaten out of us. In the old days, when the Romans were new in Britain, the tribes would charge them in one glorious, howling, mead-fuelled rush. Such a charge was fearsome to see, but easy for disciplined men to defeat, and my spearmen were wonderfully disciplined.

They doubtless felt fear. I felt fear, for the howling charge is a terrible thing to see. Against ill-disciplined men it works because of the terror it provokes, and this was the first time I had ever seen that old way of Britain’s battles. Cadoc’s Christians rushed fanatically at us, competing to see who could be first onto our spears. They shrieked and hurled curses, and it seemed as though each one of them wanted to be a martyr or else a hero. Their wild rush even included women who screamed as they swung wooden clubs or reaping knives. There were even children among that howling rabble.

‘Bel!’ I shouted as the first man tried to leap the kneeling men of the front rank and so died on my spear. I spitted him clean as a hare ready to be roasted, then threw him, spear and all, out of the circle so that his dying body would form an obstacle to his comrades. Hywel-bane killed the next man and I could hear my spearmen keening their dreadful battle chant as they ripped and lunged and cut and stabbed. We were all so good, so fast, and so thoroughly trained. Hours of dull training had gone into that shield-ring and though it had been years since most of us had fought in a battle, we discovered that our old instincts were as quick as ever, and it was instinct and experience that kept us alive that day. The enemy was a shrieking, milling press of fanatics who crammed themselves about our ring and thrust their spears towards us, but our outer shield-ring stayed firm as a rock and he mound of dead and dying attackers that grew so swiftly in front of their shields hindered the other attackers. For the first minute or two, when the ground about our shield-ring was still free of obstacles and the bravest of the enemy could still get close, it was a frantic fight, but once the ring of dead and dying protected us then only the bravest attackers tried to reach us and we fifteen of the inner rank could then pick our targets and use them for spear or sword practice.

We fought fast, we cheered each other and we killed without mercy.

Cadoc himself came early to the fight. He came swinging the huge rusty sword so vigorously that it whistled in the air. He knew his business well enough and he tried to batter down one of the kneeling men, for he knew that once that outer ring was broken then the rest of us would die quickly enough. I parried the great blow on Hywel-bane, back-cut him with a quick swing that wasted itself in his filthy thatch of hair, then Eachern, the tough little Irish spearman who still served me despite Mordred’s threats, rammed his spear-shaft at the Bishop’s face. Eachern’s spearhead had vanished, torn off by a sword blow, but he cracked the iron tip of the staff’s butt onto Cadoc’s forehead. The Bishop looked cross-eyed for a heartbeat, his mouth gaped rotten teeth, then he just sank to the mud. The last attacker to try and breach the shield-ring was a straggle-haired woman who climbed over the ring of dead and shrieked a curse at me as she tried to jump over the kneeling men of the front rank. I seized her hair, let her reaping knife blunt itself on my mail coat, then dragged her inside the ring where Issa stamped hard on her head. It was just then that Arthur struck.

Thirty horsemen with long spears slashed into the Christian rabble. We, I suppose, had been defending ourselves for all of three minutes, but once Arthur arrived the fight was over in an eyeblink. His horsemen came with couched spears, galloping hard, and I saw a terrible misting spray of blood as one of the spears slammed home, and then our attackers were fleeing in panic and Arthur, his spear discarded and with Excalibur shining in his hand, was shouting at his men to stop the killing. ‘Just drive them away!’ he shouted. ‘Drive them away!’ His horsemen split into small groups that scattered the terrified survivors and chased them back up the road towards the guardian cross.

My men relaxed. Issa was still sitting on the straggle-haired woman and Eachern was searching for his lost spearhead. Two men in the shield-ring had taken nasty wounds, and one man of the second rank had a broken and bloodied jaw, but otherwise we were unhurt, while around us were twenty-three corpses and at least as many badly wounded men. Cadoc, groggy from Eachern’s blow, still lived and we tied his hands and feet, and then, despite Arthur’s instructions to show our enemy respect, we cut off his hair and beard to shame him. He spat and cursed at us, but we stuffed his mouth with cut hanks of his greasy beard, then walked him back to the village.

And it was there I discovered Ligessac. He had not fled after all, but had simply waited beside the little altar in the church. He was an old man now, thin and grey-haired, and he yielded himself meekly, even when we cut off his beard and wove a crude rope from its hair that we leashed around his neck to show that he was a condemned traitor. He even seemed quite pleased to meet me again after all the years. ‘I told them they wouldn’t beat you,’ he said, ‘not Derfel Cadarn.’

‘They knew we were coming?’ I asked him.

‘We’ve known for a week now,’ he said, quietly holding out his hands so that Issa could lash his wrists with rope. ‘We even wanted you to come. We thought this was our chance to rid Britain of Arthur.’

‘Why would you want to do that?’ I asked him.

‘Because Arthur’s an enemy of the Christians, that’s why,’ Ligessac said.

‘He is not,’ I said scornfully.

‘And what do you know, Derfel?’ Ligessac asked me. ‘We’re readying Britain for Christ’s return and we have to scour the heathen from the land!’ He made that proclamation in a loud, defiant voice, then he shrugged and grinned. ‘But I told them this was no way to kill Arthur and Derfel. I told Cadoc you were too good.’ He stood and followed Issa out of the church, but then turned back to me in the doorway. ‘I suppose I’m to die now?’ he asked.

‘In Dumnonia,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘I shall see God face to face,’ he said, ‘so what is there to fear?’

I followed him out of the church. Arthur had unplugged the Bishop’s mouth and Cadoc was now cursing us with a stream of filthy language. I tickled the Bishop’s newly shaved chin with Hywelbane. ‘He knew we were coming,’ I told Arthur, ‘and they planned to kill us here.’

‘He failed,’ Arthur said, jerking his head aside to avoid a gob of the Bishop’s spittle. ‘Put the sword away,’ he ordered me.

‘You don’t want him dead?’ I asked.

‘His punishment is to live here,’ Arthur decreed, ‘instead of in heaven.’

We took Ligessac and walked away, and none of us really reflected on what Ligessac had revealed in the church. He had said they had known we were coming for a whole week, but a week before we had been in Dumnonia, not in Powys, and that meant someone in Dumnonia had sent the warning of our approach. But we never thought to connect anyone in Dumnonia with that muddy massacre in the squalid hills; we ascribed the slaughter to Christian fanaticism, not to treachery, but that ambush was plotted. To this day, of course, there are Christians who tell a different story. They say that Arthur surprised Cadoc’s refuge, raped the women, killed the men and stole all Cadoc’s treasures, but I saw no rape, we killed only those who tried to kill us, and I found no treasure to steal - but even if there had been, Arthur would not have touched it. A time would come, and not far off either, when I did see Arthur kill wantonly, but those dead were all to be pagans; yet the Christians still insisted he was their enemy and the story of Cadoc’s defeat only increased their hatred for him. Cadoc was elevated into a living saint and it was about that time that the Christians began to taunt Arthur as the Enemy of God. That angry title stuck to him for the rest of his days.

His crime, of course, was not the breaking of a few Christian heads in Cadoc’s valley, but rather his toleration of paganism during the time he governed Dumnonia. It never occurred to the more rabid Christians that Arthur was himself a pagan and tolerated Christianity, they just condemned him because he had the power to obliterate heathenism and did not do it, and that sin made him the Enemy of God. They also remembered, of course, how he had rescinded Uther’s exemption of the church from forced loans.

Not all Christians hated him. At least a score of the spearmen who fought alongside us in Cadoc’s valley were themselves Christians. Galahad loved him, and there were many others, like Bishop Emrys, who were his quiet supporters, but the church, in those unquiet days at the end of the first five hundred years of Christ’s rule on earth, was not listening to the quiet, decent men, it was listening to the fanatics who said that the world must be cleansed of pagans if Christ were to come again. I know now, of course, that the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ is the only true faith, and that no other faith can exist in the glorious light of its truth, but it still seemed strange to me, and does to this day, that Arthur, the most just and lawful of rulers, was called the Enemy of God.

Whatever. We gave Cadoc a headache, tied Ligessac’s throat with a leash made from his beard, and walked away.

Arthur and I parted company beside the stone cross at the head of Cadoc’s valley. He would take Ligessac north and then go east to find the good roads that led back to Dumnonia, while I had decided to travel deeper into Siluria to find my mother. I took Issa and four other spearmen and let the rest march home with Arthur.

We six men circled Cadoc’s valley where a woeful band of bruised and bloody Christians had gathered to chant prayers for their dead, and then we walked across the high bare hills and down into the steep green valleys that led to the Severn Sea. I did not know where Erce lived, but I suspected she would not be hard to find for Tanaburs, the Druid I had killed at Lugg Vale, had sought her out to work a dreadful spell on her and surely the Saxon slave woman so wickedly cursed by the Druid would be well enough known. And she was.

I found her living by the sea in a tiny village where the women made salt and the men caught fish. The villagers shrank away from my men’s unfamiliar shields, but I ducked into one of the hovels where a child fearfully pointed me towards the Saxon woman’s house that proved to be a cottage high up on a ragged bluff above the beach. It was not even a cottage, but rather a crude shelter made of driftwood and roofed with a ragged thatch of seaweed and straw. A fire burned on the small space outside the shelter and a dozen fish were smoking above its flames, while still more choking smoke drifted up from the coal fires that simmered the salt pans at the base of the low cliff. I left my spear and shield at the foot of the bluff and climbed the steep path. A cat bared its teeth and hissed at me as I crouched to look into the dark hut. ‘Erce?’ I called. ‘Erce?’

Something heaved in the shadows. It was a monstrous dark shape that shed layers of skins and ragged cloth to peer back at me. ‘Erce?’ I said. ‘Are you Erce?’

What did I expect that day? I had not seen my mother in over twenty-five years, not since the day I was torn from her arms by Gundleus’s spearmen and given to Tanaburs for the sacrifice in the death-pit. Erce had screamed as I was snatched away from her, and then she had been taken away to her new slavery in Siluria and she must have supposed me dead until Tanaburs had revealed to her that I still lived. In my nervous mind, as I had walked south through Siluria’s steep valleys, I had foreseen an embrace, tears, forgiveness and happiness.

But instead a huge woman, her blonde hair turned into a dirty grey, crawled out from the jumble of skins and blankets to blink at me suspiciously. She was a vast creature, a great heap of decaying flesh with a face as round as a shield and blotched by disease and scars, and with eyes that were small and hard and bloodshot. ‘I was called Erce once,’ she said in a hoarse voice. I backed out of the hut, repelled by its stench of urine and rot. She followed me, crawling heavily on all fours to blink in the morning sunlight. She was dressed in rags. ‘You are Erce?’ I asked her.

‘Once,’ she said, and yawned to show a ravaged, toothless mouth. ‘Long ago. Now they call me Enna.’ She paused. ‘Mad Enna,’ she added sadly, then peered at my fine clothes and rich sword belt and tall boots. ‘Who are you, Lord?’

‘My name is Derfel Cadarn,’ I said, ‘a Lord of Dumnonia.’ The name meant nothing to her. ‘I am your son,’ I added.

She showed no reaction to that, but just settled back against the driftwood wall of her hut that sagged dangerously under her weight. She thrust a hand deep inside the rags and scratched at her breast. ‘All my sons are dead,’ she said.

‘Tanaburs took me,’ I reminded her, ‘and threw me into the death-pit.’

The story seemed to mean nothing to her. She lay slumped against the wall, her huge body heaving with the effort of each laboured breath. She toyed with the cat and stared out across the Severn Sea to where, dim in the distance, the Dumnonian coast was a dark line under a row of rainclouds. ‘I did have a son once,’ she said at last, ‘who was given to the Gods in the death-pit. Wygga, his name was. Wygga. A fine boy.’

Wygga? Wygga! That name, so raw and ugly, stilled me for a few heartbeats. ‘I am Wygga,’ I finally said, hating the name. ‘I was given a new name after I was rescued from the pit,’ I explained to her. We spoke in Saxon, a language in which I was now more fluent than my mother, for it had been many years since she had spoken it.

‘Oh, no,’ she said, frowning. I could see a louse crawling along the edge of her hair. ‘No,’ she insisted again. ‘Wygga was just a little boy. Just a little boy. My firstborn, he was, and they took him away.’

‘I lived, mother,’ I said. I was revolted by her, fascinated by her and regretting that I had ever come to find her. ‘I survived the pit,’ I told her, ‘and I remember you.’ And so I did, but in my memory she was as slim and lithe as Ceinwyn.

‘Just a little boy,’ Erce said dreamily. She closed her eyes and I thought she was sleeping, but it seemed she was passing urine for a trickle appeared at the edge of her clothes and dripped down the rock towards the struggling fire.

‘Tell me about Wygga,’ I said.

‘I was heavy with him,’ she said, ‘when Uther captured me. A big man, Uther, with a great dragon on his shield.’ She scratched at the louse, which disappeared into her hair. ‘He gave me to Madog,’ she went on, ‘and it was at Madog’s holding that Wygga was born. We were happy with Madog,’ she said.

‘He was a good Lord, kind to his slaves, but Gundleus came and they killed Wygga.’

‘They didn’t,’ I insisted. ‘Didn’t Tanaburs tell you?’

At the mention of the Druid’s name she shuddered and pulled her tattered shawl tighter about her mountainous shoulders. She said nothing, but after a while tears showed at the corners of her eyes. A woman climbed the path towards us. She came slowly and suspiciously, glancing warily towards me as she sidled onto the rock platform. When at last she felt safe she scuttled past me and crouched beside Erce. ‘My name,’ I told the newcomer, ‘is Derfel Cadarn, but I was once called Wygga.’

‘My name is Linna,’ the woman said in the British tongue. She was younger than me, but the hard life of this shore had put deep lines on her face, bowed her shoulders and stiffened her joints, while the hard business of tending the salt-pan fires had left her skin blackened by coal.

‘You’re Erce’s daughter?’ I guessed.

‘Enna’s daughter,’ she corrected me.

‘Then I am your half-brother,’ I said.

I do not think she believed me, and why should she? No one came from a death-pit alive, yet I had, and thereby I had been touched by the Gods and given to Merlin, but what could that tale mean to these two tired and ragged women?

‘Tanaburs!’ Erce suddenly said, and raised both hands to ward oft evil. ‘He took away Wygga’s father!’ She wailed and rocked to and fro. ‘He went inside me and took away Wygga’s father. He cursed me and he cursed Wygga and he cursed my womb.’ She was weeping now and Linna cradled her mother’s head in her arms and looked at me reproachfully.

‘Tanaburs,’ I said, ‘had no power over Wygga. Wygga killed him, because he had power over Tanaburs. Tanaburs could not take away Wygga’s father.’

Maybe my mother heard me, but she did not believe me. She rocked in her daughter’s arms and the tears ran down her pockmarked, dirty cheeks as she half remembered the half-understood scraps of Tanaburs’s curse. ‘Wygga would kill his father,’ she told me, ‘that’s what the curse said, that the son will kill the father.’

‘So Wygga does live,’ I insisted.

She stopped her rocking motion suddenly and peered at me. She shook her head. ‘The dead come back to kill. Dead children! I see them, Lord, out there,’ she spoke earnestly and pointed at the sea, ‘all the little dead going to their revenge.’ She rocked in her daughter’s arms again. ‘And Wygga will kill his father.’ She was crying heavily now. ‘And Wygga’s father was such a fine man! Such a hero. So big and strong. And Tanaburs has cursed him.’ She sniffed, then sighed a lullaby for a moment before talking more about my father, saying how his people had sailed across the sea to Britain and how he had used his sword to make himself a fine house. Erce, I gathered, had been a servant in that house and the Saxon Lord had taken her to his bed and so given me life, the same life that Tanaburs had failed to take at the death-pit. ‘He was a lovely man,’ Erce said of my father, ‘such a lovely, handsome man. Everyone feared him, but he was good to me. We used to laugh together.’

‘What was his name?’ I asked, and I think I knew the answer even before she gave it.

‘Aelle,’ she said in a whisper, ‘lovely, handsome Aelle.’

Aelle. The smoke whirled about my head, and my brains, for a moment, were as addled as my mother’s wits. Aelle? I was Aelle’s son?

‘Aelle,’ Erce said dreamily, ‘lovely, handsome Aelle.’

I had no other questions and so I forced myself to kneel before my mother and give her an embrace. I kissed her on both cheeks, then held her tight as if I could give back to her some of the life she had given to me, and though she succumbed to the embrace, she still would not acknowledge that I was her son. I took lice from her.

I drew Linna down the steps and discovered she was married to one of the village fishermen and had six children living. I gave her gold, more gold, I think, than she had ever expected to see, and more gold, probably, than she even suspected existed. She stared at the little bars in disbelief.

‘Is our mother still a slave?’ I asked her.

‘We all are,’ she said, gesturing at the whole miserable village.

‘That will buy your freedom,’ I said, pointing to the gold, ‘if you want it.’

She shrugged and I doubted that being free would make any difference to their lives. I could have found their Lord and bought their freedom myself, but doubtless he lived far away and the gold, if it was wisely spent, would ease their hard life whether they were slave or free. One day, I promised myself, I would come back and try to do more.

‘Look after our mother,’ I told Linna.

‘I will, Lord,’ she said dutifully, but I still did not think she believed me.

‘You don’t call your own brother Lord,’ I told her, but she would not be persuaded. I left her and walked down to the shore where my men waited with the baggage. ‘We’re going home,’

I said. It was still morning and we had a long day’s march ahead. A march towards home. Home to Ceinwyn. Home to my daughters who were sprung from a line of British Kings and from their Saxon enemy’s royal blood. For I was Aelle’s son. I stood on a green hill above the sea and wondered at the extraordinary weave of life, but I could make no sense of it. I was Aelle’s son, but what difference did that make? It explained nothing and it demanded nothing. Fate is inexorable. I would go home.