I walked on in silence. The Severn Sea was visible now, a crawling flood of silver black beneath a sinking moon. Ceinwyn was crying softly and I took her hand. ‘I discovered,’ I said to her, trying to distract her from her grief, ‘who my father is. Just yesterday I found it out.’
‘Your father is Aelle,’ Merlin said placidly.
I gazed at him. ‘How did you know?’
‘It’s in your face, Derfel, in your face. Tonight, when you came through the gate, you only needed a black bear cloak to be him.’ He smiled at me. ‘I remember you as an earnest little boy, all questions and frowns, then tonight you came like a warrior of the Gods, a terrifying thing of iron and steel and plume and shield.’
‘Is it true?’ Ceinwyn asked me.
‘Yes,’ I admitted, and feared what her reaction might be.
I need not have feared. ‘Then Aelle must be a very great man,’ she said firmly, and gave me a sad smile, ‘Lord Prince.’
We reached the sea and turned north. We had nowhere else to go except towards Gwent and Powys where the madness had not spread, but our path ended at a place where the sand of the beach petered out into a spit where the incoming tide broke white on a rippled expanse of mud. To our left was the sea, to our right were the marshes of Avalon, and it seemed to me that we were trapped there, but Merlin told us we should not worry. ‘Rest,’ he said, ‘for help will come soon.’ He looked east to see a glimmer of light showing above the hills beyond the marsh. ‘Dawn,’ he announced, ‘and when the sun is full up, our help will come.’ He sat and played with Seren and her kittens while the rest of us lay on the sand, our bundles beside us, as Pyrlig, our bard, sang the Love Song of Rhiannon that had always been Dian’s favourite song. Ceinwyn, one arm around Morwenna, wept while I just stared at the fretting grey sea and dreamed of revenge.
The sun rose, promising another lovely summer’s day in Dumnonia, only on this day the iron-clad horsemen would be spreading across the countryside to find us. The Cauldron had at last been used, the Christians had flocked to Lancelot’s banner, horror was spilling across the land and all Arthur’s work was under siege.
Lancelot’s men were not the only ones who searched for us that morning. The marsh villages had heard the news of Ermid’s Hall, just as they had heard that the ghoulish ceremony in Ynys Wydryn had been a Christian wedding, and any enemy of the Christians was a friend of the marsh folk, so their boatmen and trackers and hunters ranged wide across the swamps in search of us.
They found us two hours after sunrise and led us north through the marsh paths where no enemy would dare intrude. By nightfall, out of the marshes now, we were close to the town of Abona where ships sailed for the Silurian coast with cargoes of grain, pottery, tin and lead. A band of Lancelot’s men guarded the Roman-built wharves that lined the river-port, but his army was thinly scattered and there were no more than twenty spearmen watching the ships, and most of those spearmen were half drunk from a looted cargo of mead. We killed them all. Death had already come to Abona, for the bodies of a dozen pagans lay on the mud above the river’s tide line. The fanatical Christians who had slaughtered the pagans had already left, gone to join Lancelot’s army, and the folk who remained in the town were fearful. They told us what had happened in the town, swore their own innocence in the killings, then barred their doors that all bore the mark of the fish. Next morning, on a rising tide, we sailed for Silurian Isca, the fort on the Usk where Lancelot had once made his palace when he had sulked on Siluria’s inadequate throne.
Ceinwyn sat next to me in the boat’s scuppers. ‘It’s strange,’ she said, ‘how wars come and go with kings.’
‘How?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘Uther died and there was nothing but fighting till Arthur killed my father, then we had peace, and now Mordred comes to the throne and we have war again. It’s like the seasons, Derfel. War comes and it goes.’ She leaned her head on my shoulder. ‘So what will happen now?’ she asked.
‘You and the girls will go north to Caer Sws,’ I said, ‘and I shall stay and fight.’
‘Will Arthur fight?’ she asked.
‘If Guinevere’s been killed,’ I said, ‘he’ll fight till there isn’t an enemy left alive.’ We had heard nothing of Guinevere, but with Christians marauding throughout Dumnonia it seemed unlikely that she would have been left unmolested.
‘Poor Guinevere,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘and poor Gwydre.’ She was very fond of Arthur’s son. We landed in the River Usk, safe at last on territory ruled by Meurig, and from there we walked north to Gwent’s capital, Burrium. Gwent was a Christian country, but it had not been infected by the madness that had swept Dumnonia. Gwent already had a Christian King, and maybe that circumstance had been sufficient to keep its people calm. Meurig blamed Arthur. ‘He should have suppressed paganism,’ he told us.
‘Why, Lord King?’ I asked. ‘Arthur’s a pagan himself
‘Christ’s truth is blindingly obvious, I should have thought,’ Meurig said. ‘If a man cannot read the tides of history, then he only has himself to blame. Christianity is the future, Lord Derfel, and paganism is its past.’
‘Not much of a future,’ I said scornfully, ‘if history is to end in four years.’
‘It doesn’t end!’ Meurig said. ‘It begins! When Christ comes again, Lord Derfel, the days of glory arrive! We shall all be Kings, all be joyful and all be blessed.’
‘Except us pagans.’
‘Naturally, hell must be fed. But there is still time for you to accept the true faith.’
Both Ceinwyn and I declined his invitation of baptism and next morning she left for Powys with Morwenna, Seren and the other wives and children. We spearmen embraced our families, then watched them walk north. Meurig gave them an escort, and I sent six of my own men with orders to come back south as soon as the women were safe under Cuneglas’s guard. Malaine, Powys’s Druid, went with them, but Merlin and Nimue, whose quest for the Cauldron was suddenly burning as hot as ever it had on the Dark Road, stayed with us.
King Meurig travelled with us to Glevum. That town was Dumnonian, but right on the border of Gwent, and its earth and timber walls guarded Meurig’s land, so, sensibly enough, he had already garrisoned it with his own spearmen to make sure that the tumults of Dumnonia did not spread north into Gwent. It took us a half day to reach Glevum and there, in the great Roman hall where Uther’s last High Council had been held, I found the rest of my men, Arthur’s men, and Arthur himself. He saw me come into the hall and the look of relief on his face was so heartfelt that tears came to my eyes. My spearmen, those who had stayed with Arthur when I went south to find my mother, cheered, and the next few moments were a bluster of reunions and news. I told them of Ermid’s Hall, told them the names of the men who had died, assured them that their women still lived, then looked at Arthur. ‘But they killed Dian,’ I said.
‘Dian?’ I think he did not believe me at first.
‘Dian,’ I said, and the wretched tears came again.
Arthur eased me out of the hall and walked with his right arm about my shoulders to Glevum’s ramparts where Meurig’s red-cloaked spearmen now manned every fighting platform. He made me tell him the whole tale again, right from the moment I had left him until the moment we took ship from Abona.
‘Dinas and Lavaine.’ He spoke the names bitterly, then he drew Excalibur and kissed the grey blade.
‘Your vengeance is mine,’ he said formally, then slid the sword back into her scabbard. For a time we said nothing, but just leaned on the top of the wall and stared at the wide valley south of Glevum. It looked so peaceful. The hay crop was nearly reach for cutting and there were bright poppies in the growing corn. ‘Do you have news of Guinevere?’
Arthur broke the silence and I heard something close to desperation in his voice.
‘No, Lord.’
He shuddered, then regained control of himself. ‘The Christians hate her,’ he said softly, and then, uncharacteristically, he touched the iron of Excalibur’s hilt to avert evil.
‘Lord,’ I tried to reassure him, ‘she has guards. And her palace is by the sea. She would have escaped if there was danger.’
‘To where? Broceliande? But suppose Cerdic sent ships?’ He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then shook his head. ‘We can only wait for news.’
I asked him about Mordred, but he had heard nothing more than the rest of us. ‘I suspect he is dead,’
he said bleakly, ‘for if he had escaped then he should have reached us here by now’
He did have news of Sagramor, and that news was bad. ‘Cerdic hurt him hard. Caer Ambra’s fallen, Calleva’s gone and Corinium is under siege. It should hold out a few days yet, for Sagramor managed to add two hundred spears to its garrison, but their food will be gone by the month’s end. It seems we have war again.’ He gave a short, harsh bark of laughter. ‘You were right about Lancelot, weren’t you? and I was blind. I thought him a friend.’ I said nothing, but just glanced at him and saw, to my surprise, that there were grey hairs at his temples. To me he still seemed young, but I supposed that if any man were to meet him now for the first time they would think him on the edge of his middle years. ‘How could Lancelot have brought Cerdic into Dumnonia,’ he asked angrily, ‘or encouraged the Christians in their madness?’
‘Because he wants to be King of Dumnonia,’ I said, ‘and he needs their spears. And Sansum wants to be his chief councillor, his royal treasurer and everything else too.’
Arthur shuddered. ‘You think Sansum really planned our deaths at Cadoc’s shrine?’
‘Who else?’ I asked. It was Sansum, I believed, who had first linked the fish on Lancelot’s shield with the name of Christ, and Sansum who had whipped the excited Christian community into a fervour that would sweep Lancelot onto Dumnonia’s throne. I doubted that Sansum put much faith in his Christ’s imminent coming, but he did want to hold as much power as he could and Lancelot was Sansum’s candidate for Dumnonia’s kingship. If Lancelot succeeded in holding the throne, all the reins of power would lead back to the mouse-lord’s paws. ‘He’s a dangerous little bastard,’ I said vengefully. ‘We should have killed him ten years ago.’
‘Poor Morgan,’ Arthur sighed. Then he grimaced. ‘What did we do wrong?’ he asked me.
‘We?’ I said indignantly. ‘We did nothing wrong.’
‘We never understood what the Christians wanted,’ he said, ‘but what could we have done if we had? They were never going to accept anything less than utter victory.’
‘It’s nothing we did,’ I said, ‘only what the calendar does to them. The year 500 has made them mad.’
‘I had hoped,’ he said softly, ‘that we had weaned Dumnonia away from madness.’
‘You gave them peace, Lord,’ I said, ‘and peace gave them the chance to breed their madness. If we’d been fighting the Saxons all those years their energies would have gone into battle and survival, but instead we gave them the chance to foment their idiocies.’
He shrugged. ‘But what do we do now?’
‘Now?’ I said. ‘We fight!’
‘With what?’ he asked bitterly. ‘Sagramor has his hands full with Cerdic. Cuneglas will send us spears, I’m sure, but Meurig won’t fight.’
‘He won’t?’ I asked, alarmed. ‘But he swore the Round Table oath!’
Arthur smiled sadly. ‘These oaths, Derfel, how they haunt us. And these sad days, it seems, men take them so lightly. Lancelot swore the oath too, did he not? But Meurig says that with Mordred dead there is no casus belli? He quoted the Latin bitterly, and I remembered Meurig using the same words before Lugg Vale, and how Culhwch had mocked the King’s erudition by twisting the Latin into ‘cow’s belly’.
‘Culhwch will come,’ I said.
‘To fight for Mordred’s land?’ Arthur asked. ‘I doubt it.’
‘To fight for you, Lord,’ I said. ‘For if Mordred is dead, you’re King.’
He smiled bitterly at that statement. ‘King of what? Of Glevum?’ He laughed. ‘I have you, I have Sagramor, I have whatever Cuneglas gives me, but Lancelot has Dumnonia and he has Cerdic.’ He walked in silence for a short while, then gave me a crooked smile. ‘We do have one other ally, though hardly a friend. Aelle has taken advantage of Cerdic’s absence to retake London. Maybe Cerdic and he will kill each other?’
‘Aelle,’ I said, ‘will be killed by his son, not by Cerdic’
He gave me a quizzical glance. ‘What son?’
‘It’s a curse,’ I said, ‘and I am Aelle’s son.’
He stopped and gazed at me to see if I was jesting. ‘Your’ he asked.
‘Me, Lord.’
‘Truly?’
‘Upon my honour, Lord, I am your enemy’s son.’
He still stared at me, then began to laugh. The laughter was genuine and extravagant, ending in tears that he wiped away as he shook his head in amusement. ‘Dear Derfel! If only Uther and Aelle knew!’
Uther and Aelle, the great enemies, whose sons had become friends. Fate is inexorable.
‘Maybe Aelle does know,’ I said, remembering how gently he had reprimanded me for ignoring Erce.
‘He’s our ally now,’ Arthur said, ‘whether we want him or not. Unless we choose not to fight.’
‘Not to fight?’ I asked in horror.
‘There are times,’ Arthur said softly, ‘when all I want is to have Guinevere and Gwydre back and a small house where we can live in peace. I’m even tempted to make an oath, Derfel, that if the Gods give me back my family then I’ll never trouble them again. I’ll go to a house like the one you had in Powys, remember?’
‘Cwm Isaf,’ I said, and wondered how Arthur could ever believe that Guinevere might be happy in such a place.
‘Just like Cwm Isaf,’ he said wistfully. ‘A plough, some fields, a son to raise, a King to respect and songs by the evening hearth.’ He turned and gazed south again. To the east of the valley great green hills rose steep, and Cerdic’s men were not so very far away from those summits. ‘I am tired of it all,’ Arthur said. For a moment he looked close to tears. ‘Think of all we achieved, Derfel, all the roads and lawcourts and bridges, and all the disputes we settled and all the prosperity we made, and all of it is turned to nothing by religion! Religion!’ He spat across the ramparts. ‘Is Dumnonia even worth fighting for?’
‘Dian’s soul is worth fighting for,’ I said, ‘and while Dinas and Lavaine live then I am not at peace. And I pray. Lord, that you won’t have such deaths to revenge, but still you must tight. If Mordred’s dead, then you’re King, and if he lives, we have our oaths.’