The Winter King Part 12

"My weapons and armour," he said. He untied the boat's painter, then leaped aboard. "I'm coming with you."

The boat glided from the quay under a dark sail. The water rippled at the bow and splashed gently down the hull's length as we drew off into the bay. Galahad was stripping himself of the toga, which he tossed to the boatman, before dressing in war gear, while I stared back at the palace on the hill. It hung in the sky like a sky ship sailing into clouds, or maybe like a star come down to earth; a place of dreams; a refuge where a just King and a beautiful Queen ruled and where poets sang and old men could study the wingspan of angels. It was so beautiful, Ynys Trebes, so utterly beautiful. And, unless we could save it, doomed utterly.

Two years we fought. Two years against all odds. Two years of splendour and vileness. Two years of slaughter and feast, of broken swords and shattered shields, of victory and disaster, and in all those months and in all those sweated fights when brave men choked on their own life blood and ordinary men did deeds they never dreamed possible, I never saw Lancelot once. Yet the poets said he was the hero of Benoic, the most perfect warrior, the fighter of fighters. The poets said that preserving Benoic was Lancelot's fight, not mine, not Galahad's, not Culhwch's, but Lancelot's. But Lancelot spent the war in bed, begging his mother to bring him wine and honey.

No, not always in bed. Lancelot was sometimes at a fight, but always a mile behind so that he could be first back to Ynys Trebes with his news of victory. He knew how to tear a cloak, batter a sword edge, rumple his oiled hair and even cut his face so that he staggered home looking the hero, and then his mother would have the fili compose a new song and the song would be carried to Britain by traders and seamen so that even in distant Rheged, north of Elmet, they believed that Lancelot was the new Arthur. The Saxons feared his coming, while Arthur sent him the gift of an embroidered sword belt with a richly enamelled buckle.

"You think life should be fair?" Culhwch asked me when I complained about the gift.

"No, Lord," I said.

"Then don't waste breath on Lancelot," Culhwch said. He was the cavalry leader left behind in Armorica when Arthur went to Britain, and also a cousin of Arthur's, though he bore no resemblance to my Lord. Culhwch was a squat, fiercely bearded, long-armed brawler who asked nothing of life but a plentiful supply of enemies, drink and women. Arthur had left him in command of thirty men and horses, but the horses were all dead and half the men were gone so that now Culhwch fought on foot. I joined my men to his and so accepted his command. He could not wait for the war in Benoic to end so that he could fight again at Arthur's side. He adored Arthur.

We fought a strange war. When Arthur had been in Armorica the Franks were still some miles to the east where the land was flat and cleared of trees and thus ideal for his heavy hors.e.m.e.n, but now the enemy was deep inside the woods that cloaked the hills of central Benoic. King Ban, like Tewdric of Gwent, had put his faith in fortifications, but where Gwent was ideally placed for ma.s.sive forts and high walls, the woods and hills of Benoic offered the enemy too many paths that pa.s.sed by the hilltop fortresses garrisoned by Ban's dispirited forces. Our job was to give those forces hope again and we did it by using Arthur's own tactics of hard marches and surprise attacks. The wooded hills of Benoic were made for such battles and our men were peerless. There are few joys to compare with the fight that follows an ambush well sprung, when the enemy is strung out and has his weapons sheathed. I put new scars on Hywelbane's long edge.

The Franks feared us. They called us forest wolves and we adopted the insult as our symbol and wore grey wolf-tails on our helmets. We howled to frighten them, kept them awake night after night, stalked them for days and sprang our ambushes when we wanted and not when they were ready, yet the enemy was many and we were few, and month by month our numbers shrank.

Galahad fought with us. He was a great fighter, yet he was also a scholar who had delved into his father's library and he would talk at night of old G.o.ds, new religions, strange countries and great men. I remember one night when we camped in a ruined villa. A week before it had been a thriving settlement with its own fulling mill, pottery and dairy, but the Franks had been there and now the villa was a smoking ruin, splashed by blood, its walls tumbled and its spring poisoned with the corpses of women and children. Our sentries were guarding the paths in the woods so we had the luxury of a fire on which we roasted a brace of hares and a kid. We drank water and pretended it was wine.

"Falernian," Galahad said dreamily, holding his clay cup to the stars as though it were a golden flask.

"Who's he?" Culhwch asked.

"Falernian, my dear Culhwch, is a wine, a most pleasant Roman wine."

"I never did like wine," Culhwch said, then yawned hugely. "A woman's drink. Now Saxon ale! There's a drink for you." Within minutes he was asleep.

Galahad could not sleep. The fire flickered low while above us the stars shone bright. One fell, cutting its swift white path through the heavens and Galahad made the sign of the cross for he was a Christian and to him a falling star was the sign of a demon falling from paradise. "It was on earth once," he said.

"What was?" I asked.

"Paradise." He leaned back on the gra.s.s and rested his head on his arms. "Sweet paradise."

"Ynys Trebes, you mean?"

"No, no. I mean, Derfel, that when G.o.d made man He gave us a paradise in which to live, and it occurs to me that we have been losing that paradise, inch by inch, ever since. And soon, I think, it will be gone. Darkness descends." He went silent for a while, then sat up as his thoughts gave him a new energy. "Just think of it," he said, 'not a hundred years ago this land was peaceful. Men built great houses. We can't build like they did. I know Father has made a fine palace, but it's just broken pieces of old palaces cobbled together and patched with stone. We can't build like the Romans. We can't build as high, or as beautifully. We can't make roads, we can't make ca.n.a.ls, we can't make aqueducts." I did not even know what an aqueduct was, but kept silent as Culhwch snored contentedly beside me. "The Romans built whole cities," Galahad went on, 'places so vast, Derfel, it would take a whole morning to walk from one side of the city to the other and all of your footsteps would fall on trimmed, dressed stone. And in those days you could walk for weeks and still be on Rome's land, subject to Rome's laws and listening to Rome's language. Now look at it." He waved at the night. "Just darkness. And it spreads, Derfel. The dark is creeping into Armorica. Benoic will go, and after Benoic, Broceliande, and after Broceliande, Britain. No more laws, no more books, no more music, no more justice, only vile men round smoky fires planning on who they'll kill next day."

"Not while Arthur lives," I said stubbornly.

"One man against the dark?" Galahad asked sceptic ally "Wasn't your Christ one man against the dark?" I asked.

Galahad thought for a second, staring into the fire that shadowed his strong face. "Christ," he said finally, 'was our last chance. He told us to love one another, to do good to each other, to give alms to the poor, food to the hungry, cloaks to the naked. So men killed Him." He turned and looked at me. "I think Christ knew what was coming and that was why He promised us that if we lived as He lived then one day we'd be with Him in paradise. Not on earth, Derfel, but in paradise. Up there' he pointed to the stars' because He knew the earth was finished. We're in the last days. Even your G.o.ds have fled from us. Isn't that what you tell me? That your Merlin is scouring strange lands to find clues to the old G.o.ds, but what use will the clues be? Your religion died long ago when the Romans ravaged Ynys Mon and all you have left are disconnected sc.r.a.ps of knowledge. Your G.o.ds are gone."

"No," I said, thinking of Nimue who felt their presence, though to me the G.o.ds were always distant and shadowy. Bel, to me, was like Merlin, only far away and indescribably huge and far more mysterious. I thought of Bel as somehow living in the far north, while Manawydan must live in the west where the waters tumbled endlessly.

"The old G.o.ds are gone," Galahad insisted. "They abandoned us because we are not worthy."

"Arthur is worthy," I said stubbornly, 'and so are you." He shook his head. "I am a sinner so vile, Derfel, that I cringe." I laughed at his abject tone. "Nonsense," I said.

"I kill, I l.u.s.t, I envy." He was truly miserable, but then Galahad, like Arthur, was a man who was for ever judging his own soul and finding it wanting and I never met such a man who was happy for long.

"You only kill men who would kill you," I defended him.

"And, G.o.d help me, I enjoy it." He made the sign of the cross.

"Good," I said. "And what's wrong with l.u.s.t?"

"It overcomes reason."

"But you're reasonable," I pointed out.

"But I l.u.s.t, Derfel, how I l.u.s.t. There is a girl in Ynys Trebes, one of my father's harpists." He shook his head hopelessly.

"But you control your l.u.s.t," I said, 'so be proud of that."

"I am proud of it, and pride is another sin."

I shook my head at the hopelessness of arguing with him. "And envy?" I offered him the last of his trinity of sins. "Whom do you envy?"

"Lancelot."

"Lancelot?" I was surprised.

"Because he is Edling, not I. Because he takes what he wants, when he wants, and does not seem to regret it. That harpist? He took her. She screamed, she fought, but no one dared stop him for he was Lancelot."

"Not even you?"

"I would have killed him, but I was far from the city."

"Your father didn't stop him?"

"My father was with his books. He probably thought the girl's screams were a gull calling into the sea wind or two of his fili having a squabble about a metaphor."

I spat into the fire. "Lancelot is a worm," I said.

"No," Galahad insisted, 'he is, simply, Lancelot. He gets what he wants and he spends his days plotting how to get it. He can be very charming, very plausible and he could even be a great king."

"Never," I said firmly.

"Truly. If power is what he wants, and it is, and if he receives it, then perhaps his appet.i.tes will be slaked? He does want to be liked."

"He goes a strange way about it," I said, remembering how Lancelot had taunted me at his father's table.

"He knew, from the first, that you were not going to like him and so he challenged you. That way, when he makes an enemy of you, he can explain to himself why you don't like him. But with people who don't threaten him he can be kind. He might be a great king."

"He's weak," I said scornfully.

Galahad smiled. "Strong Derfel. Derfel the Doubtless. You must think we're all weak."

"No," I said, 'but I think we're all tired and tomorrow we have to kill Franks, so I'll sleep." And next day we did kill Franks, and afterwards we rested in one of Ban's hilltop forts before, with our wounds bandaged and our battered swords sharpened, we went back into the woods. Yet week by week, month by month, we fought closer to Ynys Trebes. King Ban called on his neighbour, Budic of Broceliande, to send troops, but Budic was fortifying his own frontier and declined to waste men on defending a lost cause. Ban appealed to Arthur, and though Arthur did send one small shipload of men, he did not come himself. He was too busy fighting Saxons. We did get news from Britain, though such news was infrequent and often vague, but we heard that new hordes of Saxons were trying to colonize the middle lands and pressing hard on Dumnonia's borders. Gorfyddyd, who had been such a threat when I left Britain, had been quieter of late, thanks to a terrible plague that had afflicted his country. Travellers told us that Gorfyddyd himself was ill and many thought he would not last the year. The same sickness that had afflicted Gorfyddyd had killed Ceinwyn's betrothed, a prince of Rheged. I had not even known she was betrothed again and I confess that I felt a selfish pleasure that the dead prince of Rheged would not marry the star of Powys. Of Guinevere, Nimue or Merlin I heard nothing. Ban's kingdom crumbled. There were no men to gather the harvest in the last year and that winter we huddled in a fortress on the southern edge of the kingdom where we lived on venison, roots, berries and wildfowl. We still made an occasional raid into Prankish territory, but now we were like wasps trying to sting a bull to death for the Franks were everywhere. Their axes rang through the winter forests as they cleared land for their farms while their new-built stockades of brightly split logs shone in the pale wintry sun.

Early in the new spring we fell back before an army of Prankish warriors. They came with drums beating and under banners made of bull horns mounted on poles. I saw one shield-wall of over two hundred men and knew our fifty survivors could never break it and so, with Culhwch and Galahad either side of me, we retreated. The Franks jeered and pursued us with a hail of their light throwing spears. The kingdom of Benoic was stripped of people now. Most had gone to the kingdom of Broceliande that promised them land in return for war service. The old Roman settlements were deserted and their fields were tangled with couch gra.s.s. We Dumnonians walked north with our spears trailing as we went to defend the last fortress of Ban's kingdom: Ynys Trebes itself.

The island city was crowded with fugitives. Every house slept twenty. Children cried and families squabbled. Fishing boats carried some of the fugitives west to Broceliande or north to Britain, but there were never enough boats, and when the Prankish armies appeared on the sh.o.r.e facing the island, Ban ordered the remaining boats to stay anch.o.r.ed in Ynys Trebes's awkward little harbour. He wanted them there so they could supply the garrison once the siege started, but shipmasters are a stubborn breed and when the order came for them to stay many hauled their anchors instead and ran north empty. Only a handful of boats remained.

Lancelot was made commander of the city and women cheered as he walked down the city's circling street. All would be well now, the citizens believed, for the greatest of soldiers was in command. He took the adulation gracefully and made speeches in which he promised to build Ynys Trebes a new causeway from the skulls of dead Franks. The Prince certainly looked the part of a hero for he wore a suit of scale armour on which every metal plate had been enamelled a dazzling white so that the suit shone in the early spring sunshine. Lancelot claimed the armour had belonged to Agamemnon, a hero of antiquity, though Galahad a.s.sured me it was Roman work. Lancelot's boots were made of red leather, his cloak was dark blue, and at his hip, hanging from the embroidered sword belt that had been Arthur's gift, he wore Tanlladwyr, 'bright-killer', his sword. His helmet was black, crested with the spread wings of a sea-eagle.

"So he can fly away," Cavan, my dour Irishman, commented sourly. Lancelot convened a council of war in the high, wind-kissed chamber next to Ban's library. It was low tide and the sea had fled from the bay's sandbanks where groups of Franks were trying to find a safe path to the city. Galahad had planted false wit hies all across the bay, trying to lead the enemy into quicksands or else on to firm banks that would be the first to be cut off when the tide turned and seethed across the bay. Lancelot, his back to the enemy, told us his strategy. His father sat on one side of him, his mother on the other, and both nodded at their son's wisdom.

The defence of Ynys Trebes was simple, Lancelot announced. All we needed to do was hold the island's walls. Nothing else. The Franks had few boats, they could not fly, so they must walk to Ynys Trebes and that was a journey they could only make at low tide and after they had discovered the safe route across the tidal plain. Once at the city they would be tired and never able to scale the stone walls. "Hold the walls," Lancelot said, 'and we stay safe. Boats can supply us. Ynys Trebes need never fall!"

"True! True!" King Ban said, cheered by his son's optimism.

"How much food do we have?" Culhwch growled the question. Lancelot gave him a pitying look. "The sea," he said, 'is full of fish. They're the shiny things, Lord Culhwch, with tails and fins. You eat them."

"I didn't know," Culhwch said straight-faced, "I've been too busy killing Franks." A murmur of laughter went through some of the warriors summoned to the meeting. A dozen of them, like us, had been fighting on the mainland, but the remainder were intimates of Prince Lancelot and had been newly promoted into captains for this siege. Bors, Lancelot's cousin, was Benoic's champion and commander of the palace guard. He, at least, had seen some fighting and had earned a reputation as a warrior, though now, sprawling long-legged in a Roman uniform and with his black hair, like his cousin Lancelot's, oiled flat against his skull, he looked jaded.

"How many spears do we have?" I asked.

Lancelot had ignored me till then. I knew he had not forgotten our meeting of two years before, but he nevertheless smiled at my question. "We have four hundred and twenty men under arms and each of them has a spear. Can you work out the answer?"

I returned the silky smile. "Spears break, Lord Prince, and men defending walls throw their spears like javelins. When four hundred and twenty spears are thrown, what do we throw next?"

"Poets," Culhwch growled, luckily too softly for Ban to hear.

"There are spares," Lancelot said airily, 'and besides, we shall use the spears the Franks throw at us."

"Poets, for sure," Culhwch said.

"You spoke, Lord Culhwch?" Lancelot asked.

"I belched, Lord Prince. But while I have your gracious attention, do we have archers?"

"Some."

"Many?"

"Ten."

"The G.o.ds help us," Culhwch said and slid down in his chair. He hated chairs. Elaine spoke next, reminding us that the island was sheltering women, children and the world's greatest poets. "The safety of the fill is in your hands," she told us, 'and you know what will happen to them if you fail." I kicked Culhwch to stop him from making a comment.

Ban stood and gestured towards his library. "Seven thousand, eight hundred and forty-three scrolls are in there," he said solemnly, 'the acc.u.mulated treasures of human knowledge, and if the city falls, so will civilization." He then told us an ancient tale of a hero going into a labyrinth to kill a monster and trailing behind him a woollen thread with which he could find his way out of the darkness. "My library," he finally explained the point of the long tale, 'is that thread. Lose it, gentlemen, and we stay in eternal darkness. So I beg you, I beg you, fight!" He paused, smiling. "And I have summoned help. Letters are gone to Broceliande and to Arthur, and I think the day is not far off when our horizon will be thick with friendly sails! And Arthur, remember, is oath-bound to help us!"

"Arthur," Culhwch intervened, 'has his hands full of Saxons."

"An oath is an oath!" Ban said reprovingly.

Galahad enquired whether we planned to make our own raids on the Prankish encampments ash.o.r.e. We could easily go by boat, he said, landing east or west of their positions, but Lancelot turned down the idea. "If we leave the walls," he said, 'we die. It is that simple."

"No sallies?" Culhwch asked in disgust.

"If we leave the walls," Lancelot repeated, 'we die. Your orders are simple: you stay behind the walls." He announced that Benoic's best warriors, a hundred veterans of the war on the mainland, would guard the main gate. We fifty surviving Dumnonians were given the western walls, while the city's levies, bolstered by fugitives from the mainland, guarded the rest of the island. Lancelot himself, with a company of the white-cloaked palace guard, would form the reserve that would watch the fighting from the palace and come down to intervene wherever their help was needed.

"Might as well call on the fairies," Culhwch growled to me.

"Another belch?" Lancelot enquired.

"It's all the fish I eat, Lord Prince," Culhwch said.

King Ban invited us to inspect his library before we left, perhaps wanting to impress us with the value of what we defended. Most of the men who had been at the council of war shuffled in, gaped at the pigeon-holed scrolls, then went to stare at the bare-breasted harpist who played in the library's antechamber. Galahad and I lingered longer among the books where the hump-backed Father Celwin was still bent over his old table where he was trying to keep his grey cat from playing with his quill. "Still working out the wingspan of angels, Father?" I asked him.

"Someone must," he said, then turned to scowl at me with his one eye. "Who are you?"

"Derfel, Father, of Dumnonia. We met two years ago. I'm surprised you're still here."

"Your surprise is of no interest to me, Derfel of Dumnonia. Besides, I did leave for a while. I went to Rome. Filthy place. I thought the Vandals might have cleaned it up, but the place is still full of priests and their plump little boys, so I came back here. Ban's harpists are much prettier than Rome's catamites." He gave me an unfriendly look. "Do you care about my safety, Derfel of Dumnonia?" I could hardly answer no, though I was tempted to. "My job is to protect lives," I said rather pretentiously, 'including yours, Father."

"Then I put my life in your hands, Derfel of Dumnonia," he said as he turned his ugly face back to the table and pushed the cat away from his quill. "I lay my life on your conscience, Derfel of Dumnonia, and now you can go and fight and leave me to do something useful." I tried to ask the priest about Rome, but he waved my questions away and so I went down to the storehouse on the western wall that would be our home for the rest of the siege. Galahad, who considered himself an honorary Dumnonian now, was with us and he and I tried to count the Franks who were retreating from the incoming tide after another attempt to discover the track across the sands. The bards, singing of Ynys Trebes's siege, say the enemy outnumbered the grains of sand in the bay. They were not quite that many, but still they were formidable. Every Prankish war-band in western Gaul had combined to help capture Ynys Trebes, the jewel of Armorica which, it was rumoured, was crammed with the treasures of Rome's fallen Empire. Galahad estimated we were faced by three thousand Franks, my guess was two thousand, while Lancelot a.s.sured us there were ten thousand. But by anyone's count there was a terrible lot of them.

The first attacks brought the Franks nothing but disaster. They found a way across the sand and a.s.saulted the main gate and were repelled bloodily, then the next day they attacked our part of the wall and were given the same treatment, only this time they stayed too long and a large part of their force was cut off by the incoming tide. Some tried to wade to the mainland and were drowned, others retreated to the shrinking stretch of sand before our walls where they were slaughtered by a sally of spearmen led from the gate by Bleiddig, the chief who had fetched me to Benoic and who was now the leader of Benoic's veterans. Bleiddig's sortie across the sand was in direct disobedience to Lancelot's rule that we must stay inside the city's wall, but the dead were so many that Lancelot pretended to have ordered the attack and later, after Bleiddig's death, he even claimed to have led the sally. The fill made a song telling how Lancelot had dammed the bay with Prankish dead, but in truth the Prince stayed in the palace while Bleiddig attacked. For days afterwards the bodies of Prankish warriors swilled around the island's base, carried by the tide and providing rich carrion for the gulls.

The Franks then began to build a proper causeway. They cut hundreds of trees and laid them on the sand, then weighted the trunks with rocks carried to the sh.o.r.e by slaves. The tides in Ynys Trebes's wide bay were fierce, sometimes rising forty feet, and the new causeway was ripped by the currents so that at low tide the flats were littered with floating logs, but always the Franks brought more trees and stone and so plugged the gaps. They had captured thousands of slaves and did not care how many died in building the new road. The causeway became longer as our food supplies grew shorter. Our few remaining boats still went fishing, and others carried grain from Broceliande, but the Franks launched their own boats from the sh.o.r.e and after two of our fishing boats were captured and their crews disembowelled, our shipmasters stayed at home. The poets on the hilltop, posturing with their spears, lived off the palace's rich stores, but we warriors sc.r.a.ped barnacles off the rocks, ate mussels and razor clams or stewed the rats we trapped in our storehouse that was still filled with pelts, salt and barrels of nails. We did not starve. We had willow fish traps at the base of the rocks and most days they yielded a few small fish though at low tide the Franks would send raiding parties to destroy the traps. At high tide the Prankish boats rowed round the island to pull up the fish traps set further from the city's sh.o.r.e. The bay was shallow enough for the enemy to see the traps and then to break them with spears. One such boat grounded on its return to the mainland and was left stranded a quarter-mile from the city as the tide fell. Culhwch ordered a sortie and thirty of us climbed down fishing nets suspended from the wall's top. The twelve men of the boat's crew fled as we approached, and inside the abandoned craft we found a barrel of salted fish and two dry loaves of bread that we carried back in triumph. When the tide rose we brought the boat back to the city and tied it safe beneath our wall. Lancelot watched our disobedience, but sent no reprimand though a message did come from Queen Elaine demanding to know what supplies we had fetched back from the ship. We sent some dried fish up the road and no doubt the gift was construed as an insult. Lancelot then accused us of capturing the boat so that we could desert Ynys Trebes and ordered us to deliver the ship to the island's small harbour. For answer I climbed the hill to the palace and demanded that he back up his accusation of cowardice with his sword. I shouted the challenge around the courtyard, but the Prince and his poets stayed inside their locked doors. I spat on their threshold and left.

Galahad was happier the more desperate things became. Part of his happiness sprang from the presence of Leanor, the harpist who had welcomed me two years before, the girl for whom Galahad had confessed his l.u.s.t to me, the same girl Lancelot had raped. She and Galahad lived in a corner of the store-room. We all had women. There was something about the hopelessness of our plight that eroded normal behaviour and so we crammed as much living as we could into those hours before our expected deaths. The women stood guard with us and hurled rocks whenever the Franks tried to dismantle our fragile fish traps. We had long run out of spears, except for those we had brought to Benoic ourselves and which we were saving for the main a.s.sault. Our handful of archers had no missiles except the ones shot into the city by the Franks, and that supply increased when the enemy's causeway was a short bow's shot from the city gate. The Franks erected a timber fence at the end of the causeway and their archers stood behind the fence and poured arrows on the gate's defenders. The Franks made no attempt to extend the causeway all the way to the city, for the new roadway was only ever intended to give them a dry pa.s.sage to the place where their a.s.sault could begin. We knew that attack must come soon. It was early summer when the causeway was finished. The moon was full and brought huge tides. For much of the time the causeway was under water, but at low tide the sands stretched wide about Ynys Trebes, and the Franks, who were learning the secrets of the sand flats day by day, ranged all about us. Their drums were our constant music and their threats were ever in our ears. One day brought a feast special to their tribes and instead of attacking us they lit great fires on the beach then marched a column of slaves to the causeway's end where, one by one, the captives were beheaded. The slaves were Britons, some of them with relatives watching from the city's wall, and the barbarism of the slaughter goaded some of Ynys Trebes's defenders to rush out of the gate in a vain attempt to rescue the doomed women and children. The Franks were waiting for the attack and formed a shield-wall on the sand, but the men of Ynys Trebes, crazed by anger and hunger, charged home. Bleiddig was one of the attackers. He died that day, cut down by a Prankish spear. We Dumnonians watched as a handful of survivors fled back to the city. There was nothing we could have done except add our corpses to the pile. Bleiddig's body was flayed, disembowelled, then planted on a stake at the causeway's end so that we were forced to look at him until the next high tide. Somehow, though, the body stayed on the stake despite being immersed so that next morning, in a grey dawn, the gulls were tearing at his salt-washed corpse.

"We should have charged with Bleiddig," Galahad told me bitterly.

"No."

"Better to have died like a man in front of a shield-wall than be starved here."

"You'll get your chance to fight the shield-wall," I promised him, but I also took what steps I could to help my people in defeat. We barricaded the alleys leading to our sector so that should the Franks break into the island-city we could hold them at bay while our women were taken on a narrow rock-bound path that twisted across the shoulder of the granite peak to a tiny cleft on the island's northwestern sh.o.r.e where we had hidden our captured ship. The cleft was no kind of harbour, so we protected our ship by filling it with stones so that the tide flooded it twice a day. Under water the fragile hull was safe from being pounded against the cleft's rocky sides by the wind and waves. I guessed that the enemy a.s.sault would be made at low water and two of our wounded men were under instructions to empty the boat of its rocks as soon as the attack began so that the craft would float on the flooding tide. The idea of escaping in the boat was desperate, but it gave our people heart.

No ships came to our rescue. One morning a great sail was seen in the north and the rumour flashed about the city that Arthur himself was coming, but gradually the sail hauled off and disappeared in the summer haze. We were alone. At night we sang songs and told tales, while by day we watched the Prankish war-bands gather on the sh.o.r.e.

Those war-bands made their a.s.sault on a summer afternoon, late on a falling tide. They came in a great swarm of leather-armoured men, iron-helmeted, with wooden shields held high. They crossed the causeway, leaped off its end and climbed the gentle slope of sand towards the city gate. The leading attackers carried a huge log as a battering ram, its end fire-hardened and sheathed in leather, while the men who followed brought long ladders. One horde came and threw their ladders against our walls. "Let them climb!" Culhwch bellowed at our soldiers. He waited until one ladder held five men then hurled a huge boulder straight down between its uprights. The Franks screamed as they were plucked off the rungs. An arrow glanced off Culhwch's helmet as he hurled another stone. More arrows rattled on the wall or hissed over our heads while a rain of light throwing spears clattered uselessly against the stone. The Franks were a churning dark ma.s.s at the wall's foot into which we hurled rocks and sewage. Cavan managed to lift one ladder clean over the wall and we broke it into sc.r.a.ps that we rained down on our attackers. Four of our women struggled to the rampart with a fluted stone column taken from a city doorway and we heaved it over the wall and took pleasure in the terrible screams of the men it crushed.

"This is how the darkness comes!" Galahad shouted at me. He was exultant; fighting the last battle and spitting in death's eye. He waited for a Frank to reach a ladder's top, then gave a mighty slash with his sword so that the man's head bounded off down to the sand. The rest of the dead man's corpse stayed clinging to the ladder, obstructing the Franks behind who became easy targets for our stones. We were breaking down the store-house wall now to make our ammunition and we were winning the fight too, for fewer and fewer Franks dared try to climb the ladders. Instead they retreated from the wall's base and we jeered at them, told them they had been beaten by women, but if they attacked again we would wake our warriors to the fight. Whether they understood our taunts I cannot tell, but they hung back, fearful of our de fences The main attack still seethed at the gate where the sound of the battering ram's pounding head was like a giant drum sickening the whole bay.

The sun stretched the shadows of the bay's western headland long across the sand while high pink clouds made bars across the sky. Gulls flew to their roosts. Our two wounded men had gone to empty our boat of stones I hoped no Franks had reached that far about the island to discover the craft yet I did not think we would even need it. Evening was falling and the tide was rising so that soon the water would drive the attackers back to the causeway, then back to their encampments and we would celebrate a famous victory.

But then we heard the battle roar of cheering men from beyond the city's gate and we saw our defeated Franks run from before our wall to join that distant a.s.sault and we knew the city was lost. Later, talking to survivors, we discovered that the Franks had succeeded in climbing the harbour's stone quay and now they were swarming into the city.

And so the screaming began.

Galahad and I took twenty men across our nearest barricade. Women were running towards us, but seeing us they panicked and tried to climb the granite hill. Culhwch stayed to guard our wall and to protect our retreat to the boat as the first smoke of a defeated city curled into the evening sky. We ran behind the main gate's defenders, turned down a flight of stone steps and there saw the enemy scrambling like rats into a granary. Hundreds of enemy spearmen were flooding up from the quay. Their bull-horn standards were advancing everywhere, their drums were beating while the women trapped in the city's houses were shrieking. Off to our left, at the harbour's far side where only a few attackers had gained a lodgement, a surge of white-cloaked spearmen suddenly appeared. Bors, Lancelot's cousin and the commander of the palace guard, was leading a counter-attack and for a moment I thought he would turn the day and seal off the invaders' retreat, but instead of a.s.saulting along the quay Bors led his men to the sea-steps where a fleet of small boats waited to take them all to safety. I saw Prince Lancelot hurrying amid the guard, bringing his mother by the hand and leading a clutch of panicking courtiers. The fili were fleeing the doomed city.

Galahad cut down two men trying to climb the steps, then I saw the street behind us fill with dark-cloaked Franks. "Back!" I shouted, and hauled Galahad away from the alley.