Sansum signalled for silence and the monks who carried the flails shouted at the excited crowd that slowly calmed down from their frenzy. Every now and then a woman would scream and the crowd would give a nervous shudder, but at last there was silence. The choir’s voices tailed away and Sansum raised his arms and prayed that Almighty God would bless this union of a man and a woman, this King and his Queen, and then he instructed Lancelot to take the bride’s hand. Lancelot reached down with his gloved right hand and lifted the yellow bones. The cheek pieces of his helmet were open and I could see he was grinning. The crowd shouted for joy and I remembered Tewdric’s words about signs and portents, and I guessed that in this unholy marriage the Christians were seeing proof that their God’s return was imminent.
‘By the power invested in me by the Holy Father and by the grace given to me by the Holy Ghost,’
Sansum shouted, ‘I pronounce you man and wife!’
‘Where’s our King?’ Issa asked me.
‘Who knows?’ I whispered back. ‘Dead probably.’ Then I watched as Lancelot lifted the yellow bones of Norwenna’s hand and pretended to give her fingers a kiss. One of the fingers dropped away as he let the hand go.
Sansum, never able to resist a chance to preach, began to harangue the crowd and it was then that Morgan accosted me. I had not seen her approach and the first I knew of her presence was when I felt a hand tugging at my cloak and I turned in alarm to see her gold mask glinting in the firelight. ‘When they find the guards missing from the gate,’ she hissed, ‘they’ll search this compound and you’ll be dead men. Follow me, fools.’
We jumped guiltily down and followed her humped black figure as it scuttled behind the crowd into the shadows of the shrine’s big church. She stopped there and stared up into my face. ‘They said you were dead,’ she told me. ‘Killed with Arthur at Cadoc’s shrine.’
‘I live, Lady.’
‘And Arthur?’
‘He lived three days ago, Lady,’ I answered. ‘None of us died at Cadoc’s shrine.’
‘Thank God,’ she breathed, ‘thank God.’ Then she gripped my cloak and hauled my face down close to her mask. ‘Listen,’ she said urgently, ‘my husband had no choice in this thing.’
‘If you say so, Lady,’ I said, not believing her for one moment, but understanding that Morgan was doing her best to straddle both sides of this crisis that had come so suddenly to Dumnonia. Lancelot was taking the throne, and someone had conspired to make sure Arthur was out of the country when he did it. Worse, I thought, someone had sent Arthur and me to Cadoc’s high valley and arranged for men to ambush us there. Someone wanted us dead, and it had been Sansum who had first revealed Ligessac’s refuge to us and Sansum who had argued against allowing Cuneglas’s men to make the arrest, and Sansum who now stood before Lancelot and a corpse in the light of this night’s fires. I smelt the mouse-lord’s paws all over this wicked business, though I doubted Morgan knew half of what her husband had done or planned. She was too old and wise to be infected by religious frenzy, and she at least was trying to pick a safe path through the cascading horrors.
‘Promise me Arthur lives!’ she appealed to me.
‘He did not die in Cadoc’s valley,’ I said. ‘That much I can promise you.’
She was silent for a while and I think she was crying beneath the mask. ‘Tell Arthur we had no choice,’ she said.
‘I will,’ I promised her. ‘What can you tell me of Mordred?’
‘He’s dead,’ she hissed. ‘Killed while he was hunting.’
‘But if they lied about Arthur,’ I said, ‘then why not about Mordred?’
‘Who knows?’ she crossed herself and plucked at my cloak. ‘Come,’ she said abruptly, and led us down the side of the church towards a small wooden hut. Someone was trapped inside the hut for I could hear fists beating on its door that was secured by the knotted loops of a leather leash. ‘You should go to your woman, Derfel,’ Morgan told me as she fumbled at the knot with her one good hand. ‘Dinas and Lavaine rode south to your hall after nightfall. They took spearmen.’
Panic whipped inside me, making me use my spear-point to slash at the leather leash. The moment the binding was cut the door flew open and Nimue leapt out, hands hooked like claws, but then she recognized me and stumbled against my body for support. She spat at Morgan.
‘Go, you fool,’ Morgan snarled at her, ‘and remember it was I who saved you from death today.’
I took Morgan’s two hands, the burned and the good, and put them to my lips. ‘For this night’s deeds, Lady,’ I said, ‘I am in your debt.’
‘Go, you fool,’ she said, ‘and hurry!’ and we ran through the back parts of the shrine, past storehouses and slave huts and granaries, then out through a wicket gate to where the fishermen kept their reed punts. We took two of the small craft and used our long spear-shafts as quant poles, and I remembered that far-off day of Norwenna’s death when Nimue and I had escaped from Ynys Wydryn in just this fashion. Then, as now, we had headed for Ermid’s Hall and then, as now, we had been hunted fugitives in a land overrun by enemies.
Nimue knew little of what had happened to Dumnonia. Lancelot, she said, had come and declared himself King, but of Mordred she could only repeat what Morgan had said, that the King had been killed while hunting. She told us how spearmen had come to the Tor and taken her captive to the shrine where Morgan had imprisoned her. Afterwards, she heard, a mob of Christians had climbed the Tor, slaughtered whoever they found there, pulled down the huts and begun to build a church out of the salvaged timbers.
‘So Morgan did save your life,’ I said.
‘She wants my knowledge,’ Nimue said. ‘How else will they know what to do with the Cauldron? That’s why Dinas and Lavaine have gone to your hall, Derfel. To find Merlin.’ She spat into the mere.
‘It’s as I told you,’ she finished, ‘they’ve unleashed the Cauldron and they don’t know how to control its power. Two Kings have come to Cadarn. Mordred was one and Lancelot was the second. He went there this afternoon and stood upon the stone. And tonight the dead are being taken in marriage.’
‘And you also said,’ I reminded her bitterly, ‘that a sword would be laid at a child’s throat,’ and I thrust my spear down into the shallow mere in my desperate hurry to reach Ermid’s Hall. Where my children lay. Where Ceinwyn lay. And where the Silurian Druids and their spearmen had ridden not three hours before.
Flames lit our homeward path. Not the flames that illuminated Lancelot’s marriage to the dead, but new flames that sprang red and high from Ermid’s Hall. We were halfway across the mere when that fire flared up to shiver its long reflections on the black water.
I was praying to Gofannon, to Lleullaw, to Bel, to Cernunnos, to Taranis, to all the Gods, wherever they were, that just one of them would stoop from the realm of stars and save my family. The flames leapt higher, spewing sparks of burning thatch into the smoke that blew east across poor Dumnonia. We travelled in silence once Nimue had finished her tale. Issa had tears in his eyes. He was worrying about Scarach, the Irish girl he had married, and he was wondering, as I was, what had happened to the spearmen we had left to guard the hall. There had been enough men, surely, to hold up Dinas and Lavaine’s raiders? Yet the flames told another tale and we thrust the spear-shafts down to make the punts go even faster.
We heard the screams as we came closer. There were just six of us spearmen, but I did not hesitate, or try to make a circuitous approach, but simply drove the punts hard into the tree-shadowed creek that lay alongside the hall’s palisade. There, next to Dian’s little coracle that Gwlyddyn, Merlin’s servant, had made for her, we leapt ashore.
Later I put together the tale of that night. Gwilym, the man who commanded the spearmen who had stayed behind while I marched north with Arthur, had seen the distant smoke to the east and surmised there was trouble brewing. He had placed all his men on guard, then debated with Ceinwyn whether they should take to the boats and hide in the marshes that lay beyond the mere. Ceinwyn said no. Malaine, her brother’s Druid, had given Dian a concoction of leaves that had lifted the fever, but the child was still weak, and besides, no one knew what the smoke meant, nor had any messengers come with a warning; so instead Ceinwyn sent two of the spearmen east to find news and then waited behind the wooden palisade.
Nightfall brought no news, but it did bring a measure of relief for few spearmen marched at night and Ceinwyn felt safer than she had in daylight. From inside the palisade they saw the flames across the mere at Ynys Wydryn and wondered what they meant, but no one heard Dinas and Lavaine’s horsemen come into the nearby woods. The horsemen dismounted a long way from the hall, tied their beasts’ reins to trees and then, under the pale, cloud-misted moon, they had crept towards the palisade. It was not till Dinas and Lavaine’s men attacked the gate that Gwilym even realized the hall was under attack. His two scouts had not returned, there were no guards in the woods and the enemy was already within feet of the palisade’s gate when the alarm was first raised. It was not a formidable gate, no more than the height of a man, and the first rank of the enemy rushed it without armour, spears or shields and succeeded in climbing over before Gwilym’s men could assemble. The gate guards fought and killed, but enough of those first attackers survived to lift the bar of the gate and so open it to the charge of Dinas and Lavaine’s heavily armoured spearmen. Ten of those spearmen were Lancelot’s Saxon Guards, while the rest were Belgic warriors sworn to their King’s service.
Gwilym’s men rallied as best they could, and the fiercest fight took place at the hall’s door. It was there that Gwilym himself lay dead with another six of my men. Six more were lying in the courtyard where a storehouse had been set on fire and those were the flames that had lit our path across the lake and which now, as we reached the open gate, showed us the horror inside. The battle was not over. Dinas and Lavaine had planned their treachery well, but their men had failed to get through the hall door and my surviving spearmen were still holding the big building. I could see their shields and spears blocking the door’s arch, and I could see another spear showing from one of the high windows that let the smoke out from the gable end. Two of my huntsmen were in that window, and their arrows were preventing Dinas and Lavaine’s men carrying the fire from the burning store house to the hall thatch. Ceinwyn, Morwenna and Seren were all inside the hall, together with Merlin, Malaine and most of the other women and children who lived inside the compound, but they were surrounded and outnumbered; and the enemy Druids had found Dian.
Dian had been sleeping in one of the huts. She often did, liking to be in the company of her old wet-nurse who was married to my blacksmith, and maybe it was her golden hair that had given her away or maybe, being Dian, she had spat defiance at her captors and told them her father would take his revenge.
And now Lavaine, robed in black and with an empty scabbard hanging at his hip, held my Dian against his body. Her small grubby feet were sticking out from beneath the little white robe she wore and she was struggling as best she could, but Lavaine had his left arm tight about her waist and in his right hand he held a naked sword against her throat.
Issa clutched my arm to stop me charging madly at the line of armoured men who faced the beleaguered hall. There were twenty of them. I could not see Dinas, but he, I suspected, was with the other enemy spearmen at the rear of the hall, where they would be cutting off the escape of all the souls trapped inside.
‘Ceinwyn!’ Lavaine called in his deep voice. ‘Come out! My King wants you!’
I laid the spear down and drew Hywelbane. Her blade hissed softly on the scabbard’s throat.
‘Come out!’ Lavaine called again.
I touched the strips of pig bone on the sword hilt, then prayed to my Gods that they would make me terrible this night.
‘You want your whelp dead?’ Lavaine called, and Dian screamed as the sword blade tightened on her throat. ‘Your man’s dead!’ Lavaine shouted. ‘He died in Powys with Arthur, and he won’t come to help you.’ He pressed the sword harder and Dian screamed again.
Issa kept his hand on my arm. ‘Not yet, Lord,’ he whispered, ‘not yet.’
The shields parted at the hall door and Ceinwyn stepped out. She was dressed in a dark cloak that was clasped at her throat. ‘Put the child down,’ she told Lavaine calmly.
‘The child will be released when you come to me,’ Lavaine said. ‘My King demands your company.’
‘Your King?’ Ceinwyn asked. ‘What King is that?’ She knew well enough whose men had come here this night, for their shields alone told that tale, but she would make nothing easy for Lavaine.
‘King Lancelot,’ Lavaine said. ‘King of the Belgae and King of Dumnonia.’
Ceinwyn pulled her dark cloak tighter about her shoulders. ‘So what does King Lancelot want of me?’ she asked. Behind her, in the space at the back of the hall and dimly lit by the burning storehouse, I could see more of Lancelot’s spearmen. They had taken the horses from my stables and now they watched the confrontation between Ceinwyn and Lavaine.
‘This night, Lady,’ Lavaine explained, ‘my King has taken a bride.’
Ceinwyn shrugged. ‘Then he does not need me.’
‘The bride, Lady, cannot give my King the privileges that a man demands on his wedding night. You, Lady, are to be his pleasure instead. It is an old debt of honour that you owe him. Besides,’ Lavaine added, ‘you are a widow now. You need another man.’
I tensed, but Issa again gripped my arm. One of the Saxon Guards close to Lavaine was restless and Issa was mutely suggesting we wait until the man relaxed again.
Ceinwyn dropped her head for a few seconds, then looked up again. ‘And if I come with you,’ she said in a bleak voice, ‘you will let my daughter live?’
‘She will live,’ Lavaine promised.
‘And all the others too?’ she asked, gesturing to the hall.
‘Those too,’ said Lavaine.
‘Then release my daughter,’ Ceinwyn demanded.
‘Come here first,’ Lavaine retorted, ‘and bring Merlin with you.’ Dian kicked at him with her bare heels, but he tightened the sword again and she went still. The storehouse roof collapsed, exploding sparks and burning scraps of straw into the night. Some of the flames landed on the hall’s thatch where they flickered feebly. The rainwater in the thatch was protecting the hall for the moment, but soon, I knew, the hall roof must catch the blaze.