Enemy Of God Part 11

'My dear father,' he said ironically, 'has taken a new bride. Ialle of Broceliande.' Broceliande was the remaining British kingdom in Armorica and it was ruled by Budic ap Camran, who was married to Arthur's sister Anna, which meant that Ialle was Arthur's niece.

'What's this,' I asked, 'your sixth stepmother?'

'Seventh,' Tristan said, 'and she's only fifteen summers old and father must be fifty at least. I'm already thirty!' he added gloomily.

'And not married?'

'Not yet. But my father marries enough for both of us. Poor Ialle. Give her four years, Derfel, and she'll be dead like the rest. But he's happy enough for now. He's wearing her out like he wears them all out.' He put an arm round my shoulders. 'And I hear you're married?'

'Not married, but well harnessed.'

'To the legendary Ceinwyn!' He laughed. 'Well done, my friend, well done. One day I'll find my own Ceinwyn.'

'May it be soon, Lord Prince.'

'It'll have to be! I'm getting old! Ancient! I saw a white hair the other day, here in my beard.' He poked at his chin. 'See it?' he asked anxiously.

'It?' I mocked him. 'You look like a badger.' There might have been three or four grey strands among the black, but that was all.

Tristan laughed, then glanced at a slave who was running beside the road with a dozen leashed dogs.

'Emergency rations?' he asked me.

'Merlin's magic, and he won't tell me what they're for.' The Druid's dogs were a nuisance; they needed food we could not spare, kept us awake at night with their howling and fought like fiends against the other dogs that accompanied our men.

On the day after Tristan joined us we reached Pontes where the road crosses the Thames on a wondrous stone bridge made by the Romans. We had expected to find the bridge broken, but our scouts reported it whole and, to our astonishment, it was still whole when our spearmen reached it. That was the hottest day of the march. Arthur forbade anyone to cross the bridge until the wagons had closed up on the main body of the army, and so our men sprawled by the river as they waited. The bridge had eleven arches, two on either bank where they lifted the roadway onto the seven-arch span that crossed the river itself. Tree trunks and other floating debris had piled against the upstream side of the bridge so that the river to the west was wider and deeper than to the east, and the makes.h.i.+ft dam made the water race and foam between the stone pilings. There was a Roman settlement on the far bank; a group of stone buildings surrounded by the remnants of an earth embankment, while at our end of the bridge a great tower guarded the road that pa.s.sed beneath its crumbling arch on which a Roman inscription still existed. Arthur translated it for me, telling me that the Emperor Adrian had ordered the bridge to be built. 'Imperator' I said, peering up at the stone plaque. 'Does that mean Emperor?'

'It does.'

'And an Emperor is above a King?' I asked.

'An Emperor is a Lord of Kings,' Arthur said. The bridge had made him gloomy. He clambered about its landward arches, then walked to the tower and laid a hand on its stones as he peered up at the inscription. 'Suppose you and I wanted to build a bridge like this,' he said to me, 'how would we do it:'

I shrugged. 'Make it from timber, Lord. Good elm pilings, the rest from split oak.'

He grimaced. 'And would it still be standing when our great-great-grandchildren live?'

'They can build their own bridges,' I suggested.

He stroked the tower. 'We have no one who can dress stone like this. No one who knows how to sink a stone pier into a river bed. No one who even remembers how. We're like men with a treasure h.o.a.rd, Derfel, and day by day it shrinks and we don't know how to stop it or how to make more.' He glanced back and saw the first of Meurig's wagons appearing in the distance. Our scouts had probed deep into the woods that grew either side of the road and they had reported neither sight nor smell of any Saxons, but Arthur was still suspicious. 'If I was them I'd let our army cross, then attack the wagons,' he said, so instead he had decided to throw an advance guard over the bridge, cross the wagons into what remained of the settlement's decaying earth wall, and only then bring the main part of his army over the river.

My men formed the advance guard. The land beyond the river was less thickly wooded and though some of the remaining trees grew close enough to hide a small army, no one appeared to challenge us. The only sign of the Saxons was a severed horse's head waiting at the bridge's centre. None of my men would pa.s.s it until Nimue came forward to dispel its evil. She merely spat at the head. Saxon magic, she said, was feeble stuff, and once its evil had been dissipated, Issa and I heaved the thing over the parapet. My men guarded the earth wall as the wagons and their escort crossed. Galahad had come with me and the two of us poked about the buildings inside the wall. Saxons, for some reason, were loath to use Roman settlements, preferring their own timber and thatched halls, though some folk had been living here till recently, for the hearths contained ashes and some of the floors were swept clean. 'Could be our people,' Galahad said, for plenty of Britons lived among the Saxons, many of them as slaves, but some as free people who had accepted the foreign rule.

The buildings appeared to have been barracks once, but there were also two houses and what I took to be a huge granary which, when we pushed open its broken door, proved to be a beast house where cattle were sheltered overnight to protect them from wolves. The floor was a deep mire of straw and dung that smelt so rank that I would have left the building there and then, but Galahad saw something in the shadows at its far end and so I followed him across the wet, viscous floor. The building's far end was not a straight gabled wall, but was broken by a curved apse. High on the apse's stained plaster, and barely visible through the dust and dirt of the years, was a painted symbol that looked like a big X on which was superimposed a P. Galahad stared up at the symbol and made the sign of the cross. 'It used to be a church, Derfel,' he said in wonder.

'It stinks,' I said.

He gazed reverently at the symbol. 'There were Christians here.'

'Not any longer.' I shuddered at the overwhelming stench and batted helplessly at the flies that buzzed around my head.

Galahad did not care about the smell. He thrust his spear-b.u.t.t into the compacted ma.s.s of cow dung and rotting straw, and finally succeeded in uncovering a small patch of the floor. What he found only made him work harder until he had revealed the upper part of a man depicted in small mosaic tiles. The man wore robes like a bishop, had a sun-halo round his head and in one uplifted hand was carrying a small beast with a skinny body and a great s.h.a.ggy head. 'St Mark and his lion,' Galahad told me.

'I thought lions were huge beasts,' I said, disappointed. 'Sagramor says they're bigger than horses and fiercer than bears.' I peered at the dung-smeared beast. 'That's just a kitten.'

'It's a symbolic lion,' he reproved me He tried to clear more of the floor, but the filth was too old, thick-packed and glutinous. 'One day,' he said, 'I shall build a great church like this. A huge church. A place where a whole people can gather before their G.o.d.'

'And when you're dead,' I pulled him back towards the door, 'some b.a.s.t.a.r.d will winter ten herds of cattle in it and be thankful to you.'

He insisted on staying one minute more and, while I held his s.h.i.+eld and spear, he spread his arms wide and offered a new prayer in an old place. 'It's a sign from G.o.d,' he said excitedly as he at last followed me back into the suns.h.i.+ne. 'We shall restore Christianity to Lloegyr, Derfel. It's a sign of victory!'

It might have been a sign of victory to Galahad, but that old church was almost the cause of our defeat. The next day, as we advanced east towards London that was now so tantalizingly close, Prince Meurig stayed at Pontes. He sent the wagons on with most of their escort, but kept fifty men back to clear the church of its cloying filth. Meurig, like Galahad, was much moved by the existence of that ancient church and decided to re-dedicate the shrine to its G.o.d, and so he had his spearmen lay aside their war gear and clear the building of its dung and straw so that the priests who accompanied him could say whatever prayers were needed to restore the building's sanct.i.ty.

And while the rearguard forked dung, the Saxons who had been following us came over the bridge. Meurig escaped. He had a horse, but most of the dung-sweepers died and so did two of the priests, and then the Saxons stormed up the road and caught the wagons. The remnant of the rearguard put up a fight, but they were outnumbered and the Saxons outflanked them, overran them, and began slaughtering the plodding oxen so that, one by one, the wagons were stopped and fell into the enemy's hands. By now we had heard the commotion. The army stopped as Arthur's hors.e.m.e.n galloped back towards the sound of the killing. None of those hors.e.m.e.n was properly equipped for battle, for it was simply too hot for a man to ride in armour all day, yet their sudden appearance was enough to stampede the Saxons, but the damage had already been done. Eighteen of the forty wagons had been immobilized and, without oxen, they would have to be abandoned. Most of the eighteen had been plundered and barrels of our precious flour had been spilt onto the road. We salvaged what flour we could and wrapped it in cloaks, but the bread it would bake would be poor stuff and riddled with dust and twigs. Even before the raid we had been cutting down on rations, reckoning we had enough for two more weeks, but now, because most of the food had been in the rearward vehicles, we faced the prospect of abandoning the march in just one week and even then there would be barely enough food remaining to see us safe back to Calleva or Caer Ambra.

'There are fish in the river,' Meurig pointed out.

'G.o.ds, not fish again,' Culhwch grumbled, recalling the privations of the last days of Ynys Trebes.

'There are not fish enough to feed an army,' Arthur answered angrily. He would have liked to have shouted at Meurig, to have stripped his stupidity bare, but Meurig was a Prince and Arthur's sense of what was proper would never let him humiliate a Prince. If it had been Culhwch or I who had divided the rearguard and exposed the wagons Arthur would have lost his temper, but Meurig's birth protected him. We were at a Council of War north of the road which here ran straight across a dull, gra.s.sy plain that was studded with clumps of trees and with straggling banks of gorse and hawthorn. All the commanders were present, and dozens of lesser men crowded close to hear our discussions. Meurig, of course, denied all responsibility. If he had been given more men, he said, the disaster would never have happened. 'Besides,' he said, 'and you will forgive me for pointing this out, though I would have thought it an obvious point that should hardly need my explication, no success can attend an army that ignores G.o.d.'

'So why did G.o.d ignore us?' Sagramor asked.

Arthur hushed the Numidian. 'What is done is done,' he said. 'What happens next is our business here.'

But what happened next was up to Aelle rather than to us. He had won the first victory, though it was possible he did not know the extent of that triumph. We were miles inside his territory and we faced starvation unless we could trap his army, destroy it, and so break out into land that had not been stripped of supplies. Our scouts brought us deer, and once in a while they came across some cattle or sheep, but such delicacies were rare and not nearly sufficient to make up for the lost flour and dried meat.

'He has to defend London, surely?' Cuneglas suggested.

Sagramor shook his head. 'London is populated by Britons,' he said. 'The Saxons don't like it there. He'll let us have London.'

'There'll be food in London,' Cuneglas said.

'But how long will it last, Lord King?' Arthur asked. 'And if we take it with us, what do we do? Wander for ever, hoping Aelle will attack?' He stared at the ground, his long face hardened by thought. Aelle's tactics were clear enough now, the Saxon would let us march and march, and his men would always be ahead of us to sweep our path clean of food, and once we were weakened and dispirited, the Saxon horde would swarm around us. 'What we must do,' Arthur said, 'is draw him onto us.'

Meurig blinked rapidly. 'How?' he inquired, in a tone suggesting Arthur was being ridiculous. The Druids who accompanied us, Merlin, Iorweth and two others from Powys, were all sitting in a group to one side of the Council and Merlin, who had commandeered a convenient ant hill as his seat, now commanded attention by raising his staff. 'What do you do,' he asked mildly, 'when you want something valuable?'

'Take it,' Agravain growled. Agravain commanded Arthur's heavy hors.e.m.e.n, leaving Arthur free to lead the whole army.

'When you want something valuable from the G.o.ds,' Merlin amended his question, 'what do you do then?'

Agravain shrugged, and none of the rest of us could supply an answer. Merlin stood so that his height dominated the Council. 'If you wish something,' he said very simply as though he was our teacher and we his pupils, 'you must give something. You must make an offering, a sacrifice. The thing I wanted above all things in this world was the Cauldron, so I offered my life to its search and I received my wish, but if I had not offered my soul for it, the gift would not have come. We must sacrifice something.'

Meurig's Christianity was offended and he could not resist taunting the Druid. 'Your life, perhaps, Lord Merlin? It worked last time.' He laughed and looked to his surviving priests to join the laughter. The laughter died as Merlin pointed his black staff at the Prince. He kept the staff very still, its b.u.t.t just inches from Meurig's face, and he held it there long after the laughter had stopped. And still Merlin held the staff, stretching the silence unbearably. Agricola, feeling he must support his Prince, cleared his throat, but a twitch of the black staff stilled whatever protest Agricola might have made. Meurig wriggled uncomfortably, but seemed struck dumb. He reddened, blinked and squirmed. Arthur frowned, but said nothing. Nimue smiled in antic.i.p.ation of the Prince's fate, while the rest of us watched in silence and some of us shuddered in fear, and still Merlin did not move until, at last, Meurig could take the suspense no longer. 'I was jesting!' he almost shouted in desperation. 'I meant no offence.'

'Did you say something, Lord Prince?' Merlin inquired anxiously, pretending Meurig's panicked words had jolted him out of reverie. He lowered the staff. 'I must have been daydreaming. Where was I? Oh yes, a sacrifice. What do we have, Arthur, that is most precious?'

Arthur thought for a few seconds. 'We have gold,' he said, 'silver, my armour.'

'Baubles,' Merlin answered dismissively.

There was silence for a while, then men outside the Council offered their answers. Some took torques from about their necks and waved them in the air. Others suggested offering weapons, one man even called out the name of Arthur's sword, Excalibur. The Christians made no suggestions, because this was a pagan procedure and they would offer nothing but their prayers, but one man of Powys suggested we sacrifice a Christian and that idea prompted loud cheers. Meurig blushed again.

'I sometimes think,' Merlin said when no more suggestions were offered, 'that I am doomed to live among idiots. Is all the world mad but me? Cannot one poor blinkered fool among you see what is plainly the most precious thing we possess? Not one?'

'Food,' I said.

'Ah!' Merlin cried, delighted. 'Well done, you poor blinkered fool! Food, you idiots.' He spat the insult at the Council. 'Aelle's plans are predicated upon the belief that we lack food, so we must demonstrate the opposite. We must waste food like Christians waste prayer, we must scatter it to the empty heavens, we must squander it, we must throw it away, we must,' he paused to put stress on the next word, 'sacrifice it.' He waited for a voice to be raised in opposition, but no one spoke. 'Find a place near here,' Merlin ordered Arthur, 'where you will be content to offer Aelle battle. Do not make it too strong, for you don't want him to refuse combat. You're tempting him, remember, and you must make him believe he can defeat you. How long will it take him to ready his forces for battle?'

'Three days,' Arthur said. He suspected that Aelle's men were widely scattered in their loose ring that escorted us and it would take the Saxon at least two days to shrink that ring into a compact army, and another full day to shove it into battle order.

'I shall need two days,' Merlin said, 'so bake enough hard bread to keep us barely alive for five days,' he ordered. 'Not a generous ration, Arthur, for our sacrifice has to be real. Then find your battleground and wait. Leave the rest to me, but I want Derfel and a dozen of his men to do some labouring work. And do we have any men here,' he raised his voice so that all the men crowding about the Council could hear, 'who have skills in carving wood?'

He chose six men. Two were from Powys, one bore the hawk of Kernow on his s.h.i.+eld, and the others were from Dumnonia. They were given axes and knives, but nothing to carve until Arthur had discovered his battleground.

He found it on a wide heath that rose to a gentle summit crowned by a scattered grove of yew and whitebeam. The slope was nowhere steep, but we would still have the high ground and there Arthur planted his banners, and round the banners there grew an encampment of thatched shelters made from branches cut from the grove. Our spearmen would make a ring about the banners and there, we hoped, face Aelle. The bread that would keep us alive as we waited for the Saxons was baked in turf ovens. Merlin chose his spot to the north of the heath. There was a meadow there, a place of stunted alders and rank gra.s.s edging a stream that curled south towards the distant Thames. My men were ordered to fell three oaks, then strip the trunks of their branches and bark, and afterwards dig three pits into which the oaks could be set up as columns, though first he ordered his six carvers to make the oak trunks into three ghoulish idols. Iorweth helped Nimue and Merlin, and the three loved that work for it allowed them to devise the most ghastly, fearsome things that bore small resemblance to any G.o.d I had ever known, but Merlin did not care. The idols, he said, were not for us, but for the Saxons, and so he and his woodcarvers made three things of horror with animal faces, female b.r.e.a.s.t.s and male genitalia, and when the columns were finished my men stopped their other work and hoisted the three figures into their pits while Merlin and the woodcarvers tamped their bases with earth so that at last the columns stood upright.

'The father,' Merlin capered in front of the idols, 'the son and the holy ghost!' he laughed. My men, meanwhile, had been making a great stack of wood in front of the pits, and onto that wood we now piled what remained of our food. We killed the remaining oxen and heaved their heavy corpses onto the pile so that their fresh blood trickled down through the layers of timber, and onto the oxen we heaped everything they had hauled; dried meat, dried fish, cheese, apples, grain and beans, and on top of those precious supplies we put the carca.s.ses of two newly-caught deer and a freshly slaughtered ram. The ram's head, with its twin horns, was cut off and nailed to the central pillar. The Saxons watched us work. They were on the stream's far bank and once or twice, on the first day, their spears had hurtled over the water, but after those first futile efforts to interfere with us they had been content to just watch and see exactly what strange things we did. I sensed that their numbers grew. On the first day we had glimpsed only a dozen men among the far trees, but by the second evening there were at least a score of fires smoking behind the leaf screen.

'Now,' Merlin said that evening, 'we give them something to watch.'

We carried fire in cooking pots down from the heath's low summit to the great pile of wood and thrust it deep into the tangle of branches. The wood was green, but we had stacked heaps of dry gra.s.s and broken twigs into the centre, and by nightfall the fire was raging fiercely. The flames lit our crude idols with a lurid glare, the smoke boiled in a great plume that drifted towards London and the smell of roasting meat wafted tantalizingly towards our hungry encampment. The fire crackled and collapsed, exploding streams of sparks into the air, and in its fierce heat the dead beasts twitched and twisted as the flames shrank their sinews and exploded their skulls. Melting fat hissed in the blaze, then flared up white and bright to cast black shadows on the three hideous idols. All night that fire seethed, burning our last hopes of leaving Lloegyr without victory, and in the dawn we watched as the Saxons crept out to investigate its smoking remnants.

Then we waited. We were not entirely pa.s.sive. Our hors.e.m.e.n rode east to scout the London road, and came back to report bands of marching Saxons. Others of us cut timber and used it to begin constructing a hall beside the shrinking grove on the heath's summit. We had no need of such a hall, but Arthur wanted to give the impression that we were establis.h.i.+ng a base deep in Lloegyr from which we would hara.s.s Aelle's lands. That belief, if it convinced Aelle, would surely provoke him to battle. We made the beginnings of an earthen rampart, but lacking the proper tools we made a poor showing of the wall, though it must have helped the deception.

We were busy enough, but that did not stop a rancorous division showing in the army. Some, like Meurig, believed we had adopted the wrong strategy from the start. It would have been better, Meurig now said, if we had sent three or more smaller armies to take the Saxon fortresses on the frontier. We should have hara.s.sed and provoked, but instead we were growing ever hungrier in a self-made trap deep in Lloegyr.

'And maybe he's right,' Arthur confessed to me on the third morning.

'No, Lord,' I insisted, and to prove my point I gestured north towards the wide smear of smoke that betrayed where a growing horde of Saxons was gathering beyond the stream. Arthur shook his head. 'Aelle's army is there, right enough,' he said, 'but that doesn't mean he'll attack. They'll watch us, but if he has any sense, he'll let us rot here.'

'We could attack him,' I suggested.

He shook his head. 'Leading an army through trees and across a stream is a recipe for disaster. That's our last resort, Derfel. Just pray he comes today.'

But he did not come, and that was the end of the fifth day since the Saxons had destroyed our supplies. Tomorrow we would eat crumbs and in two days more we would be ravenous. In three we would gaze defeat in its horrid eyes. Arthur displayed no concern, whatever doom the grumblers in the army suggested, and that evening, as the sun drifted down over distant Dumnonia, Arthur beckoned for me to climb and join him on the growing wall of our crudely constructed hall. I clambered up the logs and pulled myself onto the top of the wall. 'Look,' he said, pointing east, and far off on the horizon I could see another smear of grey smoke and beneath the smoke, its buildings lit by the slanting sun, was a great town bigger than any I had ever seen before. Bigger then Glevum or Corinium, bigger even than Aquae Sulis. 'London,' Arthur said in a tone of wonder. 'Did you ever think to see it?'

'Yes, Lord.'

He smiled. 'My confident Derfel Cadarn.' He was perched on the wall's top, holding onto an untrimmed pillar and staring fixedly at the city. Behind us, in the rectangle of the hall's timbers, the army's horses were stabled. Those poor horses were already hungry, for there was little gra.s.s on the dry heathland and we had brought no forage for them. 'It's odd, isn't it,' Arthur said, still gazing at London, 'that by now Lancelot and Cerdic could have done battle and we'll know nothing about it.'

'Pray Lancelot won,' I said.

'I do, Derfel, I do.' He kicked his heels against the half built wall. 'What a chance Aelle has!' he said suddenly. 'He could cut down the best warriors of Britain here. By year's end, Derfel, his men could hold our halls. They could stroll to the Severn Sea. All gone. All Britain! Gone.' He seemed to find the thought amusing, then he twisted about and looked down at the horses. 'We could always eat them,' he said. 'Their meat will keep us alive for a week or two.'

'Lord!' I protested at his pessimism.

'Don't worry, Derfel,' he laughed, 'I've sent our old friend Aelle a message.'

'You have?'

'Sagramor's woman. Malla, her name is. What odd names these Saxons have. You know her?'

'I've seen her, Lord.' Malla was a tall girl with long muscular legs and shoulders broad as a barrel. Sagramor had taken her captive in one of his raids late in the previous year and she had evidently accepted her fate with a pa.s.sivity that was reflected in her flat, almost vacant face that was surrounded by a ma.s.s of gold-coloured hair. Other than that hair there was no one feature of Malla's that was particularly attractive, but somehow she was still oddly alluring; a great, strong, slow, robust creature with a calm grace and a demeanour as taciturn as her Numidian lover.

'She's pretending to have escaped us,' Arthur explained, 'and even now she should be telling Aelle that we plan to stay here through the coming winter. She says Lancelot's coming to join us with another three hundred spears, and that we need him here because a lot of our men are weak with sickness, despite our pits being filled with good food.' He smiled. 'She's spinning endless nonsense to him, or I hope she is.'

'Or maybe she's telling him the truth,' I suggested gloomily.

'Maybe.' He sounded unworried. He watched a line of men bringing skins of water from a spring that bubbled at the foot of the southern slope. 'But Sagramor trusts her,' he added, 'and I long ago learned to trust Sagramor.'

I made the sign against evil. 'I wouldn't let my woman go to an enemy camp.'

'She volunteered,' Arthur said. 'She says the Saxons won't harm her. It seems her father is one of their chiefs.'

'Pray she loves him less than she loves Sagramor.'

Arthur shrugged. The risk was taken now and discussing it would not lessen its dangers. He changed the subject. 'I want you in Dumnonia when all this is done.'

'Willingly, Lord, if you promise me Ceinwyn will be safe,' I answered and, when he tried to dismiss my fears with a wave of his hand, I persevered. 'I hear tales of a dog being killed and its b.l.o.o.d.y pelt draped on a b.i.t.c.h.'

Arthur twisted about, swung his legs over the wall and dropped down into the makes.h.i.+ft stables. He shoved a horse aside and beckoned for me to join him where no man could see us or hear us. He was angry. 'Tell me again what you hear,' he commanded me.

'That a dog was killed,' I said when I had jumped down, 'and its b.l.o.o.d.y pelt was draped on a crippled b.i.t.c.h.'

'And who did that?' he demanded.

'A friend of Lancelot's,' I answered, unwilling to name his wife.

He struck a hand against the crude timber wall, startling the closest horses. 'My wife,' he said, 'is a friend to King Lancelot.' I said nothing. 'A s am I,' he challenged me, and still I said nothing. 'He's a proud man, Derfel, and he lost his father's kingdom because I failed in my oath. I owe him.' He said the last three words coldly.

I matched his coldness with my own. 'I hear,' I said, 'that the crippled b.i.t.c.h was given the name Ceinwyn.'

'Enough!' He slapped the wall again. 'Stories! Just stories! No one denies there's resentment for what you and Ceinwyn did, Derfel, I am not a fool, but I will not hear this nonsense from you! Guinevere attracts these rumours. People resent her. Any woman who is beautiful, who is clever, and who has hard opinions and isn't afraid to speak them attracts resentment, but are you saying she would work some filthy spell against Ceinwyn? That she'd slaughter a dog and skin it? Do you believe that?'

'I would like not to,' I said.

'Guinevere is my wife.' He had lowered his voice, but the tone was still bitter. 'I don't have other wives, I don't take slaves to my bed, I am hers and she is mine, Derfel, and I will not hear anything said against her. Nothing!' He shouted that last word and I wondered if he was remembering the filthy insults hurled by Gorfyddyd at Lugg Vale. Gorfyddyd had claimed to have bedded Guinevere, and claimed further that a whole legion of other men had bedded her as well. I remembered Valerin's lover's ring, cut by the cross and decorated with Guinevere's symbol, but I thrust the memories aside.

'Lord,' I said quietly, 'I never mentioned your wife's name.'

He stared at me, and for a second I thought he was going to strike me, then he shook his head. 'She can be difficult, Derfel. There are times when I wish she was not so ready to show scorn, but I cannot imagine living without her advice.' He paused and gave me a rueful smile. 'I cannot imagine living without her. She has killed no dogs, Derfel, she has killed no dogs. Trust me. That G.o.ddess of hers, Isis, doesn't demand sacrifices, at least not of living things. Of gold, yes.' He grinned, his good mood suddenly restored. 'Isis swallows gold.'

'I believe you. Lord,' I said, 'but that doesn't make Ceinwyn safe. Dinas and Lavaine have threatened her.'

He shook his head. 'You hurt Lancelot, Derfel. I don't blame you, for I know what drove you, but can you blame him for resenting you? And Dinas and Lavaine serve Lancelot, and it's only right that men should share their master's grudges.' He paused. 'When this war is done, Derfel,' he went on, 'we shall make a reconciliation. All of us! When I make my band of warriors into brothers, we shall make peace between us all. You, Lancelot and everyone. And until that happens, Derfel, I swear Ceinwyn's protection. On my life if you insist. You can impose the oath, Derfel. You can demand whatever price you want, my life, my son's life even, because I need you. Dumnonia needs you. Culhwch is a good man, but he can't manage Mordred.'

'Can I?' I asked.