‘Who saw him first?’ Arthur asked.
‘My Lord King did.’ Bors indicated Lancelot.
‘Then he’s yours, Lord King.’ Arthur graciously waived the honour of the kill to Lancelot.
‘He is my gift to you, Lord,’ Lancelot answered. Ceinwyn was standing behind him, biting her lower lip and with eyes wide. She had taken the spare spear from Bors, not because she hoped to use it, but to spare him the burden, and she held the weapon nervously.
‘Put the hounds on him!’ Guinevere joined us. Her eyes were bright and her face animated. She was, I think, often bored in Dumnonia’s great palaces and the hunting field gave her an excitement she craved.
‘You’ll lose both dogs,’ Arthur warned her. ‘This pig knows how to fight.’ He moved cautiously forward, judging how best to provoke the beast, then he stepped sharply ahead and beat hard down on the bushes with his spear as though to offer the boar a path out of its sanctuary. The beast grunted, but did not move, not even when the spear blade flashed down within inches of its snout. The sow was behind the boar, watching us.
‘It’s done this before,’ Arthur said happily.
‘Let me take him. Lord,’ I said, suddenly anxious for him.
‘You think I’ve lost my skill?’ Arthur asked with a smile. He beat the bushes again, but the briars would not lie flat, nor would the boar move. ‘The Gods bless you.’ Arthur said to the beast, then he shouted a challenge and jumped into the tangle of thorns. He leapt to one side of the path he had crudely beaten and as he landed he rammed the spear hard forward, aiming its glittering blade at the boar’s left flank just forward of its shoulder.
The boar’s head seemed to twitch, only a slight twitch, but it was enough to deflect the spear blade off the tusk so that it slashed a bloody and harmless cut down the animal’s flank, and then it charged. A good boar can come from a still stance into instant madness with its head down and tusks ready to gut upwards, and this beast was already past Arthur’s spearhead when it charged and Arthur was trapped by the brambles.
I shouted to distract the boar and plunged my own spear into its belly. Arthur was on his back, his spear abandoned, and the boar was on top of him. The hounds howled and Guinevere was shouting at us to help. My spear was deep in the beast’s belly and its blood spurted up to my hands as I levered up and over to roll the wounded beast off my Lord. The creature weighed more than two full sacks of grain, and its muscles were like iron ropes that twitched my spear. I gripped hard and pushed up, but then the sow charged and swept my feet away from under me. I fell, and my weight pulled the spear shaft down and thus brought the boar back onto Arthur’s belly.
Arthur had somehow gripped both the beast’s tusks and, using all his strength, was now forcing its head away from his chest. The sow vanished, plunging downhill towards the stream. ‘Kill him!’ Arthur shouted, though he was half laughing as well. He was just inches from death, but he was loving the moment. ‘Kill him!’ he called again. The boar’s back legs were thrusting, its spittle was spattering Arthur’s face and its blood was soaking his clothes.
I was on my back, my face lacerated with thorns. I scrambled to my feet and reached for my jerking, twisting spear that was still buried in the great brute’s belly, but then Bors plunged a knife into the boar’s neck and I saw the enormous strength of the animal begin to ebb as Arthur managed to force the squat, stinking, bloody head away from his ribs. I seized my spear and twisted the blade, searching for the animal’s life blood deep in its guts as Bors stabbed a second time. The boar suddenly pissed on Arthur, gave one last desperate lunge of its huge neck and then abruptly slumped down. Arthur was awash in its blood and urine, and half buried under its bulk.
He cautiously let go of the tusks, then dissolved into helpless laughter. Bors and I took a tusk each and, with a concerted heave, hauled the corpse away from Arthur. One of the tusks had caught in Arthur’s jerkin and it ripped the cloth as we tugged it away. We dropped the beast into the brambles, then helped Arthur to his feet. The three of us stood grinning, our clothes muddied and torn and covered with leaves, twigs and the blood of the boar. ‘I’ll have a bruise there,’ Arthur said, tapping his chest. He turned to Lancelot, who had not moved to help during the struggle. There was the briefest pause, then Arthur bowed his head. ‘You gave me a noble gift, Lord King,’ he said, ‘and I took it most ignobly.’ He wiped his eyes. ‘But I enjoyed it all the same. And we shall all enjoy it at your betrothal feast.’ He looked at Guinevere and saw that she was pale, almost trembling, and immediately he crossed to her. ‘Are you ill?’
‘No, no,’ she said, and she put her arms about him and leaned her head against his bloodied chest. She was crying. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry.
Arthur patted her back. ‘There was no danger, my love,’ he said, ‘no danger. I just made a hash of the killing.’
‘Are you hurt?’ Guinevere asked, pulling away from him and cuffing away her tears.
‘Only scratched.’ His face and hands were lacerated by thorns, but he was otherwise unwounded except for the bruise caused by the tusk. He stepped away from her, picked up his spear and gave a whoop. ‘I haven’t been put on my back like that in a dozen years!’
King Cuneglas came running, worried about his guests, and the huntsmen arrived to truss and carry the corpse away. They must all have noted the comparison between Lancelot’s unstained clothes and our dishevelled and bloody state, but no one remarked on it. We were all excited, pleased to have survived and eager to share the story of Arthur holding the brute away from his body by its tusks. The story spread and the sound of men’s laughter rang loud among the trees. Lancelot alone did not laugh. ‘We must find you a boar now, Lord King,’ I said to him. We were standing a few paces from the excited crowd that had gathered to watch as the huntsmen gralloched the beast to give Guinevere’s hounds a meal of its guts.
Lancelot gave me a sidelong, considering glance. He disliked me every scrap as much as I disliked him, but suddenly he smiled. ‘A boar,’ he said, ‘would be better than a sow, I think.’
‘A sow?’ I asked, smelling an insult.
‘Didn’t the sow charge you?” he asked, then opened his eyes guilelessly wide. ‘Surely you don’t think I was referring to your marriage!’ He offered me an ironic bow. ‘I must congratulate you, Lord Derfel!
To marry Gwenhwyvach!’
I forced my anger down, and made myself look into his narrow mocking face with its delicate beard, dark eyes, and long hair oiled as black and shining as a raven’s wing. ‘And I must congratulate you, Lord King, on your betrothal.’
‘To Seren,’ he said, ‘the star of Powys.’ He gazed at Ceinwyn who stood with her hands clasped to her face as the huntsmen’s knives ripped out the long coils of the boar’s intestines. She looked so young with her bright hair drawn up at the nape of her neck. ‘Doesn’t she look charming?’ Lancelot asked me in a voice like the purr of a cat. ‘So vulnerable. I never believed the stories of her beauty, for who would expect to find such a jewel among Gorfyddyd’s whelps? But she is beautiful, and I am so very fortunate.’
‘Yes, Lord King, you are.’
He laughed and turned away. He was a man in his glory, a King come to take his bride, and he was also my enemy. But I had his bone in my pouch. I touched it, wondering if the struggle with the boar had broken the rib, but it was still whole, still hidden and just waiting for my pleasure. Cavan, my second-in-command, came to Caer Sws on the eve of Ceinwyn’s betrothal and brought with him forty of my spearmen. Galahad had sent them back, reckoning that his work in Siluria could be completed by the twenty remaining men. The Silurians, it seems, had glumly accepted their country’s defeat and there had been no unrest at the news of their King’s death, merely a docile submission to the exactions of the victors. Cavan told me that Oengus of Demetia, the Irish King who had brought Arthur victory at Lugg Vale, had taken his allotted portion of slaves and treasure, stolen as much again, and had then gone home, and the Silurians were evidently happy enough that the renowned Lancelot was now to be their King. ‘And I reckon the bastard’s welcome to the place,’ Cavan said when he found me in Cuneglas’s hall where I spread my blanket and took my meals. He scratched at a louse in his beard.
‘Scrubby place, Siluria.’
‘They breed good warriors,’ I said.
‘Fighting to get away from home, I wouldn’t wonder.’ He sniffed. ‘What clawed your face, Lord?’
‘Thorns. Fighting a boar.’
‘I thought you might have got married when I wasn’t watching you,’ he said, ‘and that was her wedding gift.’
‘I am to be married,’ I told him as we walked out of the hall into Caer Sws’s sunlight, and I described Arthur’s proposal to make me Mordred’s champion and his own brother-in-law. Cavan was pleased at the news of my imminent enrichment for he was an Irish exile who had sought to turn his skills with spear and sword into a fortune in Uther’s Dumnonia, but somehow the fortune had kept slipping away across the throwboard. He was twice my age, a squat man, broad-shouldered, grey-bearded and with hands thick with the warrior rings we forged from the weapons of defeated enemies. He was delighted that my marriage would mean gold and he was tactful about the bride who would bring that metal. ‘She isn’t a beauty like her sister,’ he said.
‘True,’ I admitted.
‘In fact,’ he said, abandoning tact, ‘she’s as ugly as a sack of toads.’
‘She is plain,’ I conceded.
‘But plain ones make the best wives, Lord,’ he declared, never having been married himself, though never lonely either. ‘And she’ll bring us all wealth,’ he added happily, and that, of course, was the reason I would marry poor Gwenhwyvach. My common sense could not put faith in the pork rib in my pouch, and my duty to my men was to reward them for their fidelity, and those rewards had been few in the last year. They had lost virtually all their possessions at the fall of Ynys Trebes and had then struggled against Gorfyddyd’s army at Lugg Vale; now they were tired, they were impoverished and no men had ever deserved more of their lord.
I greeted my forty men who were waiting to be assigned quarters. I was glad to see Issa among them, for he was the best of my spearmen: a young farm boy of huge strength and undying optimism who protected my right side in battle. I embraced him, then expressed my regrets that I had no gifts for them.
‘But our reward is coming soon,’ I added, then glanced at the two dozen girls they must have attracted in Siluria, ‘though I’m glad to see most of you have already found some rewards for yourselves.’
They laughed. Issa’s girl was a pretty dark-haired child of perhaps fourteen summers. He introduced her to me. ‘Scarach, Lord.’ He named her proudly.
‘Irish?’ I asked her.
She nodded. ‘I was a slave. Lord, to Ladwys.’ Scarach spoke the tongue of Ireland; a language like ours, but different enough, like her name, to mark her race. I guessed she had been captured by Gundleus’s men in a raid on King Oengus’s lands in Demetia. Most Irish slaves came from such settlements on Britain’s west coast though none, I suspected, were ever captured from Lleyn. No one but a fool ventured uninvited into Diwrnach’s territory.
‘Ladwys!’ I said. ‘How is she?’ Ladwys had been Gundleus’s mistress, a dark, tall woman whom Gundleus had secretly married, though he had been ready enough to disown the marriage when Gorfyddyd had offered him the prospect of Ceinwyn’s hand.
‘She’s dead, Lord,’ Scarach said happily. ‘We killed her in the kitchen. I put a spit in her belly.’
‘She’s a good girl,’ Issa said eagerly.
‘Evidently,’ I said, ‘so look after her.’ His last girl had deserted him for one of the Christian missionaries who wandered Dumnonia’s roads, but somehow I doubted that the redoubtable Scarach would prove such a fool.
That afternoon, using lime from Cuneglas’s stores, my men painted a new device on their shields. The honour of carrying my own device had been granted to me by Arthur on the eve of the battle at Lugg Vale, but we had been given no time to change the shields which, till now, had all carried Arthur’s symbol of the bear. My men expected me to choose a wolf’s mask as our symbol, to echo the wolf-tails that we had begun to wear on our helmets in the forests of Benoic, but I insisted that we each painted a five-pointed star. ‘A star!’ Cavan growled in disappointment. He wanted something fierce, with claws and beak and teeth, but I insisted on the star. ‘Seren,’ I said, ‘for we are the stars of the shield-wall.’
They liked that explanation, and none suspected the hopeless romanticism that lay behind my choice. So we first laid a coat of black pitch on the round, leather-covered willow-board shields, then painted the stars in lime, using a scabbard to get the edges straight, and when the limewash had dried we applied a varnish made of pine resin and egg-white that would protect the stars from rain for a few months. ‘It’s different,’ Cavan grudgingly allowed when we admired the finished shields.
‘It’s splendid,’ I said, and that night, when I dined in the circle of warriors who ate on the floor of the hall, Issa stood behind me as shield-bearer. The varnish was still wet, but that only made the star seem brighter. Scarach served me. It was a poor meal of barley gruel, but Caer Sws’s kitchens could provide no better for they were busy preparing the next night’s great feast. Indeed the whole compound was busy with those preparations. The hall had been decorated with boughs of dusk-red beech, the floor had been swept and strewn with new rushes, and from the women’s quarters we heard tales of dresses being made and delicately embroidered. At least four hundred warriors were now in residence at Caer Sws, most of them quartered in crude shelters thrown up on the fields outside the ramparts, and the warriors’ women, children and dogs thronged the fort. Half the men belonged to Cuneglas, the other half were Dumnonians, but despite the recent war there was no trouble, not even when the news spread that Ratae had fallen to Aelle’s Saxon horde because of Arthur’s treachery. Cuneglas must have suspected that Arthur had purchased Aelle’s peace by some such means and he accepted Arthur’s oath-promise that the men of Dumnonia would extract vengeance for the dead of Powys who lay in the ashes of the captured fortress. I had seen neither Merlin nor Nimue since the night on Dolforwyn. Merlin had left Caer Sws, but Nimue, I heard, was still in the fortress and was staying hidden in the women’s quarters where, rumour said, she was much in the Princess Ceinwyn’s company. That seemed unlikely to me because Nimue and Ceinwyn were so very different. Nimue was a few years older than Ceinwyn and she was dark and intense and forever trembling on the narrow divide between madness and anger, while Ceinwyn was fair and gentle and, as Merlin had told me, so very conventional. I could not imagine that either woman had much to say to the other, and so I assumed that the rumours were false and that Nimue was with Merlin who, I believed, had gone to find the men who would carry their swords into Diwrnach’s dreaded land to seek the Cauldron.