The Winter King Part 5

"It isn't my tin," Cadwy said forcefully.

"Must be someone's," Owain said. "You want me to ask Lwellwyn? He's a clever b.a.s.t.a.r.d when it comes to money and ownership." His man slapped the girl's belly hard, splattering b.u.t.ter all over the low table and causing a gust of laughter. The girl complained, but the man told her to be quiet and started scooping b.u.t.ter and pork grease on to the rest of her body.

"The fact of the matter is," Cadwy said forcefully to get Owain's attention off the naked girl, 'that Uther let in a pack of men from Kernow. They came to work the old Roman mines, because none of our people had the skills. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are supposed, mark that, supposed to send their rent to your treasury, but the b.u.g.g.e.rs are sending tin back to Kernow. I know that for a fact." Owain's ears had p.r.i.c.ked up now. "Kernow?"

"Making money off our land, they are. Our land!" Cadwy said indignantly. Kernow was a separate kingdom, a mysterious place at the very end of Dumnonia's western peninsula that had never been ruled by the Romans. Most of the time it lived in peace with us, but every now and then King Mark would stir himself from his latest wife's bed and send a raiding party over the River Tamar. "What are men of Kernow doing here?" Owain asked in a voice every bit as indignant as his host's.

"I told you. Stealing our money. And not just that. I've been missing good cattle, sheep, even a few slaves. Those miners are getting above themselves, and they're not paying you like they should. But you'll never prove it. Never. Not even your clever fellow Lwellwyn can look at a hole in the moor and tell me how much tin is supposed to come out in a year." Cadwy swiped at a moth, then shook his head moodily. "They think they're above the law. That's the problem. Just because Uther was their patron they think they're above the law."

Owain shrugged. His attention was back on the b.u.t.ter-smothered girl who was now being chased about the lower terrace by a half dozen drunken men. The grease on her body made her hard to catch and the grotesque hunt was making some of the watching men helpless with laughter. I was having a hard time stopping myself from giggling. Owain looked back to Cadwy. "So go up there and kill a few of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, Lord Prince," he said as though it was the easiest solution in the world.

"I can't," Cadwy said.

"Why not?"

"Uther gave them protection. If I attack them they'll complain to the council and to King Mark and I'll be forced to pay sarhaed." Sarhaed was the blood price put on a man by law. A King's sarhaed was un payable a slave's was cheap, but a good miner probably had a high enough price to hurt even a wealthy prince like Cadwy.

"So how will they know it's you who attacked them?" Owain asked scornfully. For answer Cadwy just tapped his cheek. The blue tattoos, he was suggesting, would betray his men. Owain nodded. The b.u.t.tered girl had at last been pinned down and was now surrounded by her captors among some shrubs that grew on the lower terrace. Owain crumbled some bread, then looked up at Cadwy again. "So?"

"So," Cadwy said slyly, 'if I could find a bunch of men who could thin these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds out a little, it would help. It'll make them look to me for protection, see? And my price will be the tin they're sending to King Mark. And your price..." He paused to make sure Owain was not shocked by the implication, '.. . will be half that tin's value."

"How much?" Owain asked quickly. The two men were speaking softly and I had to concentrate to hear their words over the warriors' laughter and cheers.

"Fifty gold pieces a year? Like this," said Cadwy and took a gold ingot the size of a sword handle from a pouch and slid it along the table.

"That much?" Even Owain was surprised.

"It's a rich place, the moor," Cadwy said grimly. "Very rich." Owain stared down Cadwy's valley to where the moon's reflection lay on the distant river as flat and silver as a sword blade. "How many of these miners are there?" he finally asked the Prince. The nearest settlement," Cadwy said, 'has got seventy or eighty men. And there are a deal of slaves and women, of course."

"How many settlements?"

"Three, but the other two are a way off. I'm just worried about the one."

"Only twenty of us," Owain said cautiously.

"Night-time?" Cadwy suggested. "And they've not been attacked ever, so they won't be keeping watch." Owain sipped wine from his horn. "Seventy gold pieces," he said flatly, 'not fifty." Prince Cadwy thought for a second, then nodded his acceptance of the price. Owain grinned. "Why not, eh?" he said. He palmed the gold ingot, then turned fast as a snake to look up at me. I did not move, nor took my eyes from one of the girls who was wrapping her naked body round one of Cadwy's tattooed warriors. "Are you awake, Derfel?" Owain snapped. I jumped as though startled. "Lord?" I said, pretending my mind had been wandering for the last few minutes.

"Good lad," Owain said, satisfied I had heard nothing. "Want one of those girls, do you?" I blushed. "No, Lord."

Owain laughed. "He's just got himself a pretty little Irish girl," he told Cadwy, 'so he's staying true to her. But he'll learn. When you get to the Otherworld, boy' he had turned back to me 'you won't regret the men you never killed, but you will regret the women you pa.s.sed up." He spoke gently. In my first days in his service I had been frightened of him, but for some reason Owain liked me and treated me well. Now he looked back at Cadwy. "Tomorrow night," he said softly. "Tomorrow night." I had gone from Merlin's Tor to Owain's band, and it was like leaping from this world to the next. I stared at the moon and thought of Gundleus's long-haired men ma.s.sacring the guards on the Tor, and I thought of the people on the moor who would face the same savagery the very next night and I knew I could do nothing to stop it, even though I knew it should be stopped, but fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the G.o.ds, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you'll just weep yourself to death. Our shields had been smeared with boat-builder's pitch so they would look like the black shields of Oengus Mac Airem's Irish raiders whose long, sharp-pr owed boats raided Dumnonia's northern coast. A local guide with tattooed cheeks led us all afternoon through deep, lush valleys that climbed slowly towards the great bleak loom of the moor that was occasionally visible through some break in the heavy trees. It was good woodland, full of deer and cut with fast, cold streams running seaward off the moor's high plateau.

By nightfall we were on the moor's edge, and after dark we followed a goat track up to the heights. It was a mysterious place. The Old People had lived here and left their sacred stone circles in its valleys while the peaks were crowned with jumbled ma.s.ses of grey rock and the low places were filled with treacherous swamps through which our guide led us unerringly.

Owain had told us that the people of the moor were in rebellion against King Mordred, and that their religion had taught them to fear men with black shields. It was a good tale, and I might have believed it had I not eavesdropped on his conversation with Prince Cadwy the night before. Owain had also promised us gold if we did our task properly, then warned us that this night's killing would have to stay secret for we had no orders from the council to mete out this punishment. Deep in the thick woods on our way to the moor we had come to an old shrine built beneath a grove of oaks and Owain had made us each swear the death-oath of secrecy in front of the moss-grown skulls that were lodged in niches of the shrine's wall. Britain was full of such ancient, hidden shrines -evidence of how widespread the Druids had been before the Romans came where country folk still came to seek the G.o.ds' help. And that afternoon, under the great lichen-hung oaks, we had knelt before the skulls and touched the hilt of Owain's sword and those men who were initiates in the secrets of Mithras had received Owain's kiss. Then, thus blessed by the G.o.ds and sworn to the killing, we moved on towards the night. It was a filthy place we came to. Great smelting fires spewed sparks and smoke towards the heavens. A sprawl of huts lay between the fires and around the gaping black maws that showed where men delved into the earth. Huge mounds of charcoal looked like black tors, while the valley smelt like no other I had ever seen; indeed, to my heated imagination that upland mining village seemed more like Annawn's realm, the Otherworld, than any human settlement.

Dogs barked as we approached, but no one in the settlement took any notice of their noise. There was no fence, not even an earth bank to protect the place. Ponies were picketed close to rows of carts and they began to whinny as we edged down the valley's side, but still no one came out of the low huts to find the cause of the unrest. The huts were circles made of stone and roofed with turf, but in the settlement's centre was a pair of old Roman buildings; square, tall and solid.

"Two men apiece, if not more," Owain hissed at us, reminding us how many men we were each expected to kill. "And I'm not counting slaves or women. Go fast, kill fast and always watch your backs. And stay together!"

We divided into two groups. I was with Owain whose beard glinted from the fire that reflected off his iron warrior rings. The dogs barked, the ponies whinnied, then at last a c.o.c.kerel crowed and a man crawled from a hut to discover what had disturbed the livestock, but it was already too late. The killing had begun.

I saw many such killings. In Saxon villages we would have burned the huts before we began the slaughter, but these crude stone and turf circles would not take the fire and so we were forced to go inside with spears and swords. We s.n.a.t.c.hed burning wood from a nearby fire and hurled it inside the huts before entering so that the interior would be light enough for the killing, and sometimes the flames were enough to drive the inhabitants out to where the waiting swords chopped down like butchers' axes. If the fire did not drive the family out then Owain would order two of us to go inside while the others stood guard outside. I dreaded my turn, but knew it would come and knew, too, that I dared not disobey the command. I was oath-bound to this b.l.o.o.d.y work and to refuse it would have been my death warrant. The screaming began. The first few huts were easy enough for the people were asleep or only just waking, but as we moved deeper into the settlement the resistance became fiercer. Two men attacked us with axes and were cut down with contemptuous ease by our spearmen. Women fled with children in their arms. A dog leaped at Owain and died whimpering with its spine broken. I watched a woman run with a baby in one arm and holding a bleeding child's hand with the other, and I suddenly remembered Tanaburs's parting shout that my mother still lived. I shuddered as I realized that the old Druid must have laid a curse on me when I had threatened his life, and though my good fortune was holding the curse at bay, I could feel its malevolence circling me like a hidden dark enemy. I touched the scar on my left hand and prayed to Bel that Tanaburs's curse would be defeated.

"Derfel! Licat! That hut!" Owain shouted and, like a good soldier, I obeyed my orders. I dropped my shield, flung a firebrand through the door, then crouched double to get through the tiny entrance. Children screamed as I entered, and a half-naked man leaped at me with a knife that forced me to twist desperately aside. I fell on a child as I lunged at her father with my spear. The blade slid off the man's ribs and he would have landed on top of me and stabbed the knife down through my throat if Licat had not killed him. The man doubled over, clasping his belly, then he gasped as Licat wrenched the spearhead free and drew his own knife to begin killing the screaming children. I ducked back outside, blood on my spearhead, to tell Owain there had only been the one man inside.

"Come on!" Owain shouted. "Demetia! Demetia!" That was our war cry of the night; the name of Oengus Mac Airem's Irish kingdom to the west of Siluria. The huts were all empty now and we began hunting miners down in the dark s.p.a.ces of the settlement. Fugitives were running everywhere, but some men stayed behind and tried to fight us. One brave group even formed a crude battle line and attacked us with spears, picks and axes, but Owain's men met the crude charge with a terrible efficiency, letting their black shields soak up the impact, then using their spears and swords to cut down their attackers. I was one of those efficient men. May G.o.d forgive me, but I killed my second man that night, and perhaps a third too. The first I speared in the throat, the second in the groin. I did not use my sword, for I did not think Hywel's blade a fit instrument for that night's purpose.

It ended quickly enough. The settlement was suddenly empty of all but the dead, the dying and a few men, women and children trying to hide. We killed all we found. We killed their animals, we burned the carts they used to fetch the charcoal up from the valleys, we stove in the turf roofs of their huts, we trampled their vegetable gardens, and then we ransacked the settlement for treasure. A few arrows flickered down from the skyline, but none of us was. .h.i.t.

There was a tub of Roman coins, gold ingots and silver bars in their chief's hut. It was the biggest hut, full twenty feet across, and inside the hut the light of our firebrands showed the dead chief sprawling with a yellowish face and a slit belly. One of his women and two of his children lay dead in his blood. A third child, a girl, lay under a blood-soaked pelt and I thought I saw her hand twitch when one of our men stumbled on her body, but I pretended she was dead and left her alone. Another child screamed in the night as her hiding place was found and a sword hacked down.

G.o.d forgive me, G.o.d and his angels forgive me, but I only ever confessed that night's sin to one person, and she was not a priest and had no power to grant me Christ's absolution. In purgatory, or maybe h.e.l.l, I know I will meet those dead children. Their fathers and mothers will be given my soul for their plaything, and I shall deserve the punishment.

But what choice did I have? I was young; I wanted to live; I had taken the oath; I followed my leader. I killed no man who did not attack me, but what plea is that in the face of those sins? To my companions it seemed no sin at all: they were merely killing creatures of another tribe, another nation indeed, and that was justification enough for them; but I had been raised on the Tor where we came from all races and all tribes, and though Merlin was himself a tribal chief and fiercely protective of anyone who could boast the name of Briton, he did not teach a hatred of other tribes. His teaching made me unfit for the unthinking slaughter of strangers for no reason other than their strangeness.

Yet, unfit or not, I killed, and may G.o.d forgive me that, and all the other sins too numerous to remember. We left before dawn. The valley was smoking, blood-sodden and horrid. The moor stank from the killing and was haunted with the wailing cries of widows and orphans. Owain gave me a gold ingot, two silver bars and a handful of coins and, G.o.d forgive me, I kept them.

Autum brings battle, for all through spring and summer the boats ferry new Saxons to our eastern sh.o.r.e, and the autumn is when those newcomers try to find their own land. It is war's last fling before winter locks the land.

And it was in the autumn of the year of Uther's death that I first fought the Saxons, for no sooner had we come back from our tax collecting in the west than we heard of Saxon raiders in the east. Owain put us under the command of his captain, a man named Griffid ap Annan, and sent us to aid Melwas, King of the Belgae, a client monarch of Dumnonia. Melwas's responsibility was to defend our southern sh.o.r.e against the Sais invaders who, in that grim year of Uther's bale fire had found a new belligerence. Owain stayed at Caer Cadarn for there was a sharp squabble in the kingdom's council about who should be responsible for Mordred's upbringing. Bishop Bedwin wanted to raise the King in his household, but the non-Christians, who were the majority on the council, did not want Mordred raised as a Christian, just as Bedwin and his party objected to the child-King being raised as a pagan. Owain, who claimed to worship all G.o.ds equally, proposed himself as a compromise. "Not that it matters what G.o.d a king believes in," he told us before we marched, 'because a king should be taught how to fight, not how to pray." We left him arguing his case while we went to kill Saxons. Griffid ap Annan, our captain, was a lean, lugubrious man who reckoned that what Owain really wanted was to prevent Arthur from raising Mordred. "It isn't that Owain doesn't like Arthur," he hastened to add, 'but if the King belongs to Arthur, then so does Dumnonia."

"Is that so bad?" I asked.

It's better for you and me, boy, if the land belongs to Owain." Griffid fingered one of the gold torques around his neck to show what he meant. They all called me boy or lad, but only because I was the youngest in the troop and still un blooded by proper battle against other warriors. They also believed that my presence in their ranks brought them good luck because I had once escaped from a Druid's death-pit. All Owain's men, like soldiers everywhere, were mightily superst.i.tious. Every omen was considered and debated; every man carried a hare's foot or a lightning stone; and every action was ritualized, so that no man would pull on a right boot before a left or sharpen a spear in his own shadow. There were a handful of Christians in our ranks and I had thought they might show less fear of the G.o.ds, spirits and ghosts, but they proved every bit as superst.i.tious as the rest of us.

King Melwas's capital, Venta, was a poor frontier town. Its workshops had long closed down and the walls of its large Roman buildings showed great scorch marks from the times when the town had been sacked by raiding Saxons. King Melwas was terrified that the town was about to be sacked again. The Saxons, he said, had a new leader who was hungry for land and dreadful in battle. "Why didn't Owain come?" he demanded petulantly, 'or Arthur? They want to destroy me, is that it?" He was a fat and suspicious man with the foulest breath of anyone I ever met. He was the king of a tribe, rather than of a country, which made him of the second rank, though to look at him you would have thought Melwas was a serf and a querulous serf at that. "There aren't many of you, are there?" he complained to Griffid. "It's a good thing I raised the levy."

The levy was Melwas's citizen army and every able-bodied man in his Belgic tribe was supposed to serve, though a good few had made themselves scarce and most of the richer tribesmen had sent slaves as subst.i.tutes. Nevertheless Melwas had managed to a.s.semble a force of more than three hundred men, each carrying his own food and bringing his own weapons. Some of the levy had once been warriors and came equipped with fine war spears and carefully preserved shields, but most had no armour and a few had nothing but single-sticks or sharpened mattocks for weapons. A lot of women and children accompanied the levy, unwilling to stay alone in their homes when the Saxons were threatening. Melwas insisted that he and his own warriors would stay to defend the crumbling ramparts of Venta, which meant that Griffid had to lead the levy against the enemy. Melwas had no idea where the Saxons were and so Griffid blundered helplessly into the deep woods east of Venta. We were more of a rabble than a war-band, and the sight of a deer would start a mad whooping pursuit that would have alerted any enemy within a dozen miles, and the pursuit would always finish with the levy scattered across a swathe of woodland. We lost nearly fifty men that way, either because their careless pursuit led them into Saxon hands, or else because they simply became lost and decided to go home. There were plenty of Saxons in those woods, though at first we saw none. Sometimes we found their campfires still warm and once we found a small Belgic settlement that had been raided and burned. The men and the old people were still there, all of them dead but the young and the women had been taken as slaves. The smell of the dead dampened the high spirits of the remaining levy and made them stay together as Griffid edged on eastwards.

We encountered our first Saxon war-band in a wide river valley where a group of the invaders was making a settlement. By the time we arrived they had built half a wooden stockade and planted the wood pillars of their main hall, but our appearance at the edge of the woods made them drop their tools and pick up their spears. We outnumbered them three to one, yet even so Griffid could not persuade us charge their well-knit, fierce-speared shield-line. We younger men were keen enough and some of us pranced like fools in front of the Saxons, but there were never enough of us to charge home and the Saxons ignored our taunts while the rest of Griffid's men drank their mead and cursed our eagerness. To me, desperate to earn a warrior ring made from Saxon iron, it seemed madness that we did not attack, but I had yet to experience the butchery of two locked shield-walls, nor had I learned how hard it is to persuade men to offer their bodies to that grisly work. Griffid did make some half-hearted efforts to encourage an attack; then was content to drink his mead and shout insults; and thus we faced the enemy for three hours or more without ever advancing more than a few steps. Griffid's timidity at least gave me a chance to examine the Saxons who, in truth, did not look so very different from ourselves. Their hair was fairer, their eyes palely blue, their skins ruddier than ours, and they liked to wear a lot of fur about their clothes, but otherwise they dressed like us and the only differences in weapons were that most Saxons carried a long-bladed knife that was wicked for close-quarter work, and many of them used huge broad-bladed axes that could split a shield with one stroke. Some of our own men were so impressed by the axes that they carried such weapons themselves, but Owain, like Arthur, disdained them as clumsy. You cannot parry with an axe, Owain used to say, and a weapon that does not defend as well as attack was no good in his eyes. The Saxon priests were quite different from our own holy men, for these foreign sorcerers wore animal skins and caked their hair with cow dung so that it stood in spikes about their heads. On that day in the river valley one such Sais priest sacrificed a goat to discover whether or not they should fight us. The priest first broke one of the animal's back legs, then stabbed it in the neck and let it run away with its broken leg trailing. It lurched bleeding and crying along their battle line, then turned towards us before collapsing on the gra.s.s, and that was evidently a bad omen for the Saxon shield-line lost its defiance and summarily retreated through their half-built compound, across a ford, and back into the trees. They took their women, children, slaves, pigs and herd with them. We called it a victory, ate the goat and pulled down their stockade. There was no plunder.

Our levy was now hungry, for in the manner of all levies they had eaten their whole supply of food in the first few days and now had nothing to eat except for the hazelnuts they stripped from the wood's trees. That lack of food meant we had no choice but to retreat. The hungry levy, eager to be home, went first while we warriors followed more slowly. Griffid was dour, for he was returning with neither gold nor slaves, though in truth he had accomplished as much as most war-bands that roamed the disputed lands. But then, when we were almost back in familiar country, we met a Saxon war-band returning the other way. They must have encountered part of our retreating levy for they were burdened with captured weapons and women.

The meeting was a surprise to both sides. I was at the rear of Griffid's column and only heard the beginning of the fight which started when our vanguard emerged from the trees to find a half dozen Saxons crossing a stream. Our men attacked, then spearmen from both sides rushed to join the haphazard fight. There was no shield-wall, just a b.l.o.o.d.y brawl across a shallow stream, and once again, just like that day when I had killed my first enemy in the woods south of Ynys Wydryn, I experienced the joy of battle. It was, I decided, the same feeling that Nimue felt when the G.o.ds filled her; like having wings, she had said, that lift you high into glory, and that was just how I felt that autumn day. I met my first Saxon at a flat run, my spear levelled, and I saw the fear in his eyes and I knew he was dead. The spear stuck fast in his belly, so I drew Hywel's sword, that now I called Hywelbane, and finished him with a sideways cut, then waded into the stream itself and killed two more. I was screaming like an evil spirit, shouting at the Saxons in their own tongue to come and taste death, and then a huge warrior accepted my invitation and charged me with one of the big axes that look so terrifying. Except an axe has too much dead weight. Once swung it cannot be reversed, and I put the big man down with a straight sword thrust that would have warmed Owain's heart. I took three gold torques, four brooches and a jewelled knife off that one axe man alone and I kept his axe blade to make my first battle rings. The Saxons fled, leaving eight dead and as many again wounded. I had killed no fewer than four of the enemy, a feat which was noticed by my companions. I basked in their respect, though later, when I was older and wiser, I ascribed my day's disproportionate killing to mere youthful stupidity. The young will often rush in where the wise go steadily. We lost three men, one of them Licat, the man who had saved my life on the Moor. I retrieved my spear, collected two more silver torques from the men I had killed in the stream, then watched as the enemy wounded were despatched to the Otherworld where they would become the slaves of our own dead fighters. We found six British captives huddled in the trees. They were women who had followed our levy to war and been captured by these Saxons, and it was one of those women who discovered the single enemy warrior still hiding in some brambles at the stream's edge. She screamed at him, and tried to stab him with a knife, but he scrambled away into the stream where I captured him. He was only a beardless youngster, perhaps my own age, and he was shaking with fear.

"What are you called?" I asked him with my b.l.o.o.d.y spear-blade at his throat. He was sprawling in the water. "Wlenca," he answered, and then he told me he had come to Britain just weeks before, though when I asked him where he had come from he could not really answer except to say from home. His language was not quite the same as mine, but the differences were slight and I understood him well enough. The King of his people, he told me, was a great leader called Cerdic who was taking land on the south coast of Britain. Cerdic, he said, had needed to fight Aesc, a Saxon king who now ruled the Kentish lands, to establish his new colony, and that was the first time I realized that the Saxons fought amongst themselves just as we British did. It seems that Cerdic had won his war against Aesc and was now probing into Dumnonia.

The woman who had discovered Wlenca was squatting close by and hissing threats at him, but another of the women declared that Wlenca had taken no part in the raping that had followed their capture. Griffid, feeling relief at having some booty to take home, declared that Wlenca could live and so the Saxon was stripped naked, put under a woman's guard and marched west towards slavery. That was the last expedition of the year and though we declared it a great victory it paled beside Arthur's exploits. He had not only driven Aelle's Saxons out of northern Gwent, but had then defeated the forces of Powys and in the process had chopped off King Gorfyddyd's shield arm. The enemy King had escaped, but it was a great victory all the same and all of Gwent and Dumnonia rang with Arthur's praises. Owain was not happy.

Lunete, on the other hand, was delirious. I had brought her gold and silver, enough so she could wear a bearskin robe in winter and employ her own slave, a child of Kernow whom Lunete purchased from Owain's household. The child worked from dawn to dusk, and at night wept in the corner of the hut we now called home. When the girl cried too much Lunete hit her, and when I tried to defend the girl Lunete hit me. Owain's men had all moved from Caer Cadarn's cramped warrior quarters to the more comfortable settlement at Lindinis where Lunete and I had a thatched, wattle-walled hut inside the low earth ramparts built by the Romans. Caer Cadarn was six miles away and was occupied only when an enemy came too close, or when a great royal occasion was celebrated. We had one such occasion that winter on the day when Mordred turned one year old and when, by chance, Dumnonia's troubles came to their head. Or perhaps it was not chance at all, for Mordred was ever ill-omened and his acclamation was doomed to be touched by tragedy.

The ceremony happened just after the Solstice. Mordred was to be acclaimed king and the great men of Dumnonia gathered at Caer Cadarn for the occasion. Nimue came a day early and visited our hut, which Lunete had decorated with holly and ivy for the solstice. Nimue stepped over the hut's threshold that was scored with patterns to keep the evil spirits away, then sat by our fire and pushed back the hood of her cloak.

I smiled because she had a golden eye. "I like it," I said.

"It's hollow," she said, and disconcertingly tapped the eye with a fingernail. Lunete was shouting at the slave for burning the pottage of sprouted barley seeds and Nimue flinched at the display of anger.

"You're not happy," she said to me.

"I am," I insisted, for the young hate to admit making mistakes. Nimue glanced about the untidy and smoke-blackened interior of our hut as though she was scenting the mood of its inhabitants. "Lunete's wrong for you," she said calmly as she idly picked from the littered floor half an empty egg-sh.e.l.l and crunched it into fragments so that no evil spirit could lurk in its shelter.

"Your head is in the clouds, Derfel," she went on as she tossed the sh.e.l.l fragments on to the flames, 'while Lunete is earth-bound. She wants to be rich and you want to be honourable. It won't mix." She shrugged, as though it was not really important, then gave me her news of Ynys Wydryn. Merlin had not come back and no one knew where he was, but Arthur had sent money captured from the defeated King Gorfyddyd to pay for the Tor's reconstruction and Gwlyddyn was supervising the building of a new and grander hall. Pellinore was alive, as were Druidan and Gudovan the scribe. Norwenna, Nimue told me, had been buried in the shrine of the Holy Thorn where she was revered as a saint.

"What's a saint?" I asked.

"A dead Christian," she said flatly. "They should all be saints."

"And what about you?" I asked her.

"I'm alive," she said tonelessly.

"Are you happy?"

"You always ask such stupid things. If I wanted to be happy, Derfel, I'd be down here with you, baking your bread and keeping your bedding clean."

"Then why aren't you?"

She spat in the fire to ward off my stupidity. "Gundleus lives," she said flatly, changing the subject.

"Imprisoned in Corinium," I said, as though she did not already know where her enemy was.

"I've buried his name on a stone," she said, then gave me a golden-eyed glance. "He made me pregnant when he raped me, but I killed the foul thing with ergot." Ergot was a black blight that grew on rye and women used it to abort their young. Merlin also used it as a means of going into the dream-state and talking with the G.o.ds. I had tried it once and was sick for days.

Lunete insisted on showing Nimue all her new possessions: the trivet, cauldron and sieve, the jewels and cloak, the fine linen shift and the battered silver jug with the naked Roman horseman chasing a deer about its belly. Nimue made a bad pretence of being impressed, then asked me to walk her to Caer Cadarn where she would spend the night. "Lunete's a fool," she told me. We were walking along the edge of a stream that flowed into the River Cam. Brown brittle leaves crunched underfoot. There had been a frost and the day was bitterly cold. Nimue looked angrier than ever and, because of that, more beautiful. Tragedy suited Nimue, she knew it and so she sought it. "You're making a name for yourself," she said, glancing at the plain iron warrior rings on my left hand. I kept my right hand free of the rings so I could keep a firm grip of a sword or spear, but I now wore four iron rings on my left hand.

"Luck." I explained the rings.

"No, not luck." She raised her left hand so I could see the scar. "When you fight, Derfel, I fight with you. You're going to be a great warrior, and you'll need to be."

"Will I?"

She shivered. The sky was grey, the same grey as an unpolished sword, though the western horizon was streaked with a sour, yellow light. The trees were winter black, the gra.s.s sullenly dark, and the smoke from the settlement's fires clung to the ground as though it feared the cold, empty sky. "Do you know why Merlin left Ynys Wydryn?" she asked me suddenly, surprising me with the question.

"To find the Knowledge of Britain," I answered, repeating what she had told the High Council in Glevum.

"But why now? Why not ten years ago?" Nimue asked me, then answered her own question. "He has gone now, Derfel, because we are coming into the bad time. Everything good will get bad, everything bad will get worse. Everyone in Britain is gathering their strength because they know the great struggle is coming. Sometimes I think the G.o.ds are playing with us. They are heaping all the throw pieces at once to see how the game will end. The Saxons are getting stronger and soon they'll attack in hordes, not war-bands. The Christians' she spat into the stream to avert evil 'say that very soon it will be five hundred winters since their wretched G.o.d was born and claim that means the time for their triumph is coming." She spat again. "And for us Britons? We fight each other, we steal from each other, we build new feasting halls when we should be forging swords and spears. We are going to be put to the test, Derfel, and that's why Merlin is gathering his strength, for if the kings will not save us then Merlin must persuade the G.o.ds to come to our aid." She stopped beside a pool of the stream and stared into the black water that had the gelid stillness that comes just before freezing. The water in the cattle hoofprints at the pool's edge was already frozen.

"What of Arthur?" I asked. "Won't he save us?"

She gave me a flicker of a smile. "Arthur is to Merlin what you are to me. Arthur is Merlin's sword, but neither of us can control you. We give you power' she reached out her scarred left hand and touched the bare pommel of my sword 'and then we let you go. We have to trust that you will do the right thing."

"You can trust me," I said.

She sighed as she always did when I made such a statement, then shook her head. "When the Test of Britain comes, Derfel, and it will, none of us will know how strong our sword will prove." She turned and looked at the ramparts of Caer Cadarn that were bright with the banners of all the lords and chiefs come to witness Mordred's acclamation on the morrow. "Fools," she said bitterly, 'fools." Arthur arrived the next day. He came shortly after dawn, having ridden with Morgan from Ynys Wydryn. He was accompanied by only two warriors, the three men all mounted on their big horses, though they carried no armour or shields, just spears and swords. Arthur did not even bring his banner. He was very relaxed, almost as though this ceremony had no interest for him other than curiosity. Agricola, Tewdric's Roman warlord, had come in place of his master who had a fever, and Agricola too seemed aloof from the ceremony, but everyone else in Caer Cadarn was tense, worried that the day's omens might prove bad. Prince Cadwy of Isca was there, his cheeks blue with tattoos. Prince Gereint, Lord of the Stones, had come from the Saxon frontier and King Melwas had come from decaying Venta. All the n.o.bility of Dumnonia, more than a hundred men, waited in the fort. There had been sleet in the night that had left Caer Cadarn's compound slick and muddy, but first light brought a brisk westerly wind and by the time Owain emerged from the hall with the royal baby the sun was actually showing on the hills which circled Caer Cadarn's eastern approaches.

Morgan had decided on the hour of the ceremony, divining it from auguries of fire, water and earth. It was, predictably, a morning ceremony, for nothing good comes of endeavours undertaken when the sun is in decline, but the crowd had to wait until Morgan was satisfied that the exact hour was imminent before the proceedings could begin in the stone circle that crowned Caer Cadarn's peak. The stones of the circle were not large, none was bigger than a stooping child while in the very centre, where Morgan fussed as she took her alignments on the pale sun, was the royal stone of Dumnonia. It was a flat, grey boulder, indistinguishable from a thousand others, yet it had been on that stone, we were taught, that the G.o.d Bel had anointed his human child Beli Mawr who was the ancestor of all Dumnonia's kings. Once Morgan was satisfied with her calculation, Balise was ushered to the circle's centre. He was an ancient Druid who lived in the woods west of Caer Cadarn and, in Merlin's absence, had been persuaded to attend and invoke the G.o.ds' blessings. He was a stooped, lice-ridden creature, draped in goatskin and rags, so dirty that it was impossible to tell where his rags began and his beard ended, yet it was Balise, I had been told, who had taught Merlin many of his skills. The old man raised his staff to the watery sun, mumbled some prayers, then spat in a sunwise circle before succ.u.mbing to a terrible coughing fit. He stumbled to a chair at the edge of the circle where he sat panting as his companion, an old woman almost indistinguishable in appearance from Balise himself, feebly rubbed his back. Bishop Bedwin said a prayer to the Christian G.o.d, then the baby King was paraded around the outside of the stone circle. Mordred had been laid upon a war shield and swathed in fur and it was thus he was shown to all the warriors, chiefs and princes who, as the baby pa.s.sed, dropped to their knees to pay him homage. A grown king would have walked about the circle, but two Dumnonian warriors carried Mordred, while behind the child, his long sword drawn, paced Owain, the King's champion. Mordred was carried against the sun, the only time in all a king's life when he would so go against the natural order, but the unlucky direction was deliberately chosen to show that a king descended from the G.o.ds was above such petty rules as always going sunwise in a circle.

Mordred was then laid in his shield upon the central stone while gifts were brought to him. A child laid a loaf of bread before him as a symbol of his duty to feed his people, then a second child brought him a scourge to show that he had to be a magistrate to his country, and afterwards a sword was laid at his feet to symbolize his role as a defender of Dumnonia. Mordred screamed throughout, and kicked so l.u.s.tily that he almost tipped himself out of his shield. His kicking bared his maimed foot and that, I thought, had to be a bad omen, but the celebrants ignored the clubbed limb as the great men of the kingdom approached one by one and added their own gifts. They brought gold and silver, precious stones, coins, jet and amber. Arthur gave the child a golden statue of a hawk, a present that made the onlookers gasp with its beauty, but Agricola brought the most valuable gift of all. He laid the royal war gear of King Gorfyddyd of Powys at the baby's feet. Arthur had captured the gold-trimmed armour after rousting Gorfyddyd from his encampment and had, in turn, presented the armour to King Tewdric who now, through his warlord, gave the treasure back to Dumnonia.

The fretful baby was at last lifted from the stone and given to his new nurse, a slave of Owain's household. Now came Owain's moment. Every other great man had come cloaked and furred against the day's cold, but Owain strode forward dressed in nothing but his trews and boots. His tattooed chest and arms were as bare as the drawn sword that, with due ceremony, he laid flat upon the royal stone. Then, deliberately, and with scorn on his face, he walked around the outer circle and spat towards all present. It was a challenge. If any man there deemed that Mordred should not be King then all he needed to do was step forward and pluck the naked sword from the stone. Then he must fight Owain. Owain strutted, sneered and invited a challenge, but no one moved. Only when Owain had made two full circuits did he go back to the stone and pick up the sword.

Upon which everyone cheered, for Dumnonia had a king again. The warriors who ringed the ramparts beat their spear-staffs against their shields.

One last ritual was needed. Bishop Bed win had tried to forbid it, but the council had over-ridden him. Arthur, I noticed, walked away, but everyone else, even Bishop Bedwin, stayed as a captive was led, naked and frightened, to the royal stone. It was Wlenca, the Saxon lad I had captured. I doubt he knew what was happening, but he must have feared the worst.

Morgan tried to rouse Balise, but the old Druid was too weak to do his part, so Morgan herself walked up to the shivering Wlenca. The Saxon was unbound and could have tried to run, though the G.o.ds know there could have been no escape through the armed crowd that circled him, but in the event he stood quite still as Morgan approached him. Maybe the sight of her gold mask and limping walk froze him, and he did not move until she had dipped her maimed and gloved left hand in a dish and then, after a moment's deliberation, touched him high on his belly. At that touch Wlenca jumped in alarm, but then went still again. Morgan had dipped her hand into a dish of newly drawn goat's blood that now made its wet red mark on Wlenca's thin, pale belly.

Morgan walked away. The crowd was very still, silent and apprehensive, for this was an awesome moment of truth. The G.o.ds were about to speak to Dumnonia.

Owain entered the circle. He had discarded his sword and was instead carrying his black-shafted war spear. He kept his eyes on the frightened Saxon lad who seemed to be praying to his own G.o.ds, but they had no power at Caer Cadarn.

Owain moved slowly. He took his eyes off Wlenca's gaze for only a second, just the time he needed to place the tip of his spear directly over the marked spot on the Saxon's belly, then he looked again into the captive's eyes. Both men were still. There were tears in Wlenca's eyes and he gave a tiny shake of his head in a mute appeal for mercy, but Owain ignored the plea. He waited until Wlenca was still again. The spear-tip rested on the blood mark and neither man moved. The wind stirred their hair and lifted the damp cloaks of the spectators.

Owain thrust. He gave one hard-muscled lunge that drove the spear deep into Wlenca's body and then wrenched the blade free and ran backwards to leave the bleeding Saxon alone in the royal circle. Wlenca screamed. The wound was a terrible one, deliberately inflicted to give a slow, pain-crazed death, but from the dying man's death-throes a trained augurer like Balise or Morgan could tell the kingdom's future. Balise, stirred from his torpor, watched as the Saxon staggered with one hand clutched to his belly and his body bent over against the awful pain. Nimue leaned eagerly forward, for this was the first time she had witnessed the most powerful of all divinations and she wanted to learn its secrets. I confess I grimaced, not for the horror of the ceremony, but because I had liked Wlenca and seen in his broad, blue-eyed face an idea of what I myself probably looked like, yet I consoled myself with the knowledge that his sacrifice meant he would be offered a warrior's place in the Otherworld where, one day, he and I would meet again.

Wlenca's screaming had subsided into a desperate panting. His face had gone yellow, he was shaking, but somehow he kept his feet as he tottered towards the east. He reached the circle of stones and for a second it seemed he must collapse, then a spasm of pain made him arch his back, then snap forward again. He whirled in a wild circle, spattering blood, and took a few steps to the north. And then, at last, he fell. He was jerking in agony, and each spasm meant something to Balise and Morgan. Morgan scuttled forward to watch him more closely as he twisted, shivered and twitched. For a few seconds his legs shuddered, then his bowels broke, his head went back and a choking rattle sounded in his throat. A great wash of blood spilt almost to Morgan's feet as the Saxon died. Something in Morgan's stance told us that the augury was bad and her sour mood spread to the crowd who waited for the dreaded p.r.o.nouncement. Morgan went back to stoop beside Balise who gave a raucous, irreverent cackle. Nimue had gone to inspect the blood trail and then the body, and afterwards she joined Morgan and Balise as the crowd waited. And waited.

Morgan at last went back to the body. She addressed her words to Owain, the King's champion who stood beside the baby King, but everyone in the crowd leaned forward to hear her speak. "King Mordred," she said, 'will have a long life. He will be a leader of battle, and he will know victory." A sigh went through the crowd. The augury could be translated as favourable, though I think everyone knew how much had been left unsaid and a few present could remember Uther's acclamation when the dying man's blood trail and agonized twitches had truthfully predicted a reign of glory. Still, even without glory, there was some hope in the augury of Wlenca's death.

That death ended Mordred's acclamation. Poor Norwenna, buried beneath Ynys Wydryn's Holy Thorn, would have done it all so differently, yet even if a thousand bishops and a myriad of saints had gathered to pray Mordred on to his throne, the auguries would still have been the same. For Mordred, our King, was crippled and neither Druid nor bishop could ever change that.

Tristan of Kernow arrived that afternoon. We were in the great hall at Mordred's feast, an event remarkable for its lack of cheer, but Tristan's arrival made it even less cheerful. No one even noticed his arrival until he drew near to the big central fire and the flames glinted off his leather breastplate and iron helmet. The Prince was known as a friend of Dumnonia and Bishop Bedwin greeted him as such, but Tristan's only response was to draw his sword.

The gesture commanded instant attention for no man was supposed to carry a weapon into a feasting hall, let alone a hall that celebrated a king's acclamation. Some men in the hall were drunk, but even they went silent as they gazed at the young, dark-haired Prince.

Bedwin tried to ignore the drawn sword. "You came for the acclamation, Lord Prince? Doubtless you were delayed? Travel is so difficult in winter. Come, a seat here? Next to Agricola of Gwent? There's venison."

"I come with a quarrel," Tristan said loudly. He had left his six guards just outside the hall door where a cold sleet was spitting across the hilltop. The guards were grim men in wet armour and dripping cloaks whose shields were the right way up and whose war spears were whetted bright.

"A quarrel!" Bedwin said as though the very thought was remarkable. "Not on this auspicious day, surely not!"

Some of the warriors in the hall growled challenges. They were drunk enough to enjoy a quarrel, but Tristan ignored them. "Who speaks for Dumnonia?" he demanded. There was a moment's hesitation. Owain, Arthur, Gereint and Bedwin all had authority, but none was pre-eminent. Prince Gereint, never a man to put himself forward, shrugged the question away, Owain stared balefully at Tristan, while Arthur respectfully deferred to Bedwin who suggested, very diffidently, that as the kingdom's chief counsellor he could speak as well as any man on behalf of King Mordred.

"Then tell King Mordred," Tristan said, 'that there will be blood between my country and his unless I receive justice."

Bedwin looked alarmed and his hands fluttered with calming motions as he tried to think what to say. Nothing suggested itself to him and in the end it was Owain who responded. "Say what you have to say," he said flatly.

"A group of my father's people," Tristan said, 'were given protection by High King Uther. They came to this country at Uther's request to work the mines and to live in peace with their neighbours, yet late last summer some of those neighbours came to their mine and gave them sword, fire and slaughter. Fifty-eight dead, tell your King, and their sarhaed will be the value of their lives plus the life of the man who ordered them killed, or else we shall come with our own swords and shields to take the price ourselves." Owain roared with laughter. "Little Kernow? We're so frightened!" The warriors all around me shouted scorn. Kernow was a small country and no match for Dumnonia's forces. Bishop Bedwin tried to stop the noise, but the room was full of men drunk into boastfulness and they refused to calm down until Owain himself called for silence. "I heard, Prince," Owain said, 'that it was the Blackshield Irish of Oengus Mac Airem who attacked the moor." Tristan spat on the floor. "If they did," he said, 'then they flew across country to do it, for no man saw them pa.s.s and they did not steal so much as an egg from any Dumnonian."

"That's because they fear Dumnonia, but not Kernow," Owain said, and the hall burst into jeering laughter again.

Arthur waited until the laughter had subsided. "Do you know of any man other than Oengus Mac Airem who might have attacked your people?" he asked courteously.

Tristan turned and searched the men squatting on the hall floor. He saw Prince Cadwy of Isca's bald head and pointed at it with his sword. "Ask him. Or better still' he raised his voice to quieten the jeers 'ask the witness I have outside." Cadwy was on his feet and shouting to be allowed to fetch his sword while his tattooed spearmen were threatening all Kernow with ma.s.sacre. Arthur slapped his hand on the high table. The sound echoed in the hall, drawing silence. Agricola of Gwent, sitting next to Arthur, kept his eyes down, for this quarrel was none of his business, but I doubt if a single nuance of the confrontation was escaping his shrewd wits. "If any man draws blood tonight," Arthur said, 'he is my enemy." He waited until Cadwy and his men subsided, then looked again to Tristan. "Bring your witness, Lord."