When Einion had left we put Arthur-bach and little Seren on one of the mules, heaped our armour on the other, and walked south. By now, Arthur knew, Mordred would have discovered that we had fled from Siluria and Dumnonia’s army would already be retracing its steps. Nimue’s men would doubtless be with them, and they had the advantage of the hard Roman roads while we had miles of hilly country to cross. And so we hurried.
Or we tried to hurry, but the hills were steep, the road was long, Ceinwyn was still weak, the mules were slow, and Culhwch had limped ever since the long-ago battle we had fought against Aelle outside London. We made a slow journey of it, but Arthur seemed resigned to his fate now. ‘Mordred won’t know where to seek us,’ he said.
‘Nimue might,’ I suggested. ‘Who knows what she forced Merlin to tell her at the end?’
Arthur said nothing for a while. We were walking through a wood bright with bluebells and soft with the new year’s leaves. ‘You know what I should do?’ he said after a while. ‘I should find a deep well and throw Excalibur into its depths, and then cover her with stones so that no one will ever find her between now and the world’s ending.’
‘Why don’t you, Lord?’
He smiled and touched the sword’s hilt. ‘I’m used to her now. I shall keep her till I need her no more. But if I must, I shall hide her. Not yet, though.’ He walked on, pensive. ‘Are you angry with me?’ he asked after a long pause.
‘With you? Why?’
He gestured as if to encompass all Dumnonia, all that sad country that was so bright with blossom and new leaf on that spring morning. ‘If I had stayed, Derfel,’ he said, ‘if I had denied Mordred his power, this would not have happened.’ He sounded regretful.
‘But who was ever to know,’ I asked, ‘that Mordred would prove a soldier? Or raise an army?’
‘True,’ he admitted, ‘and when I agreed to Meurig’s demand I thought Mordred would rot away in Durnovaria. I thought he’d drink himself into his grave or fall into a quarrel and fetch a knife in the back.’
He shook his head. ‘He should never have been King, but what choice did I have? I had sworn Uther’s oath.’
It all went back to that oath and I remembered the High Council, the last to be held in Britain, where Uther had devised the oath that would make Mordred King. Uther had been an old man then, gross and sick and dying, and I had been a child who wanted nothing more than to become a spearman. It was all so long ago, and Nimue had been my friend in those days. ‘Uther didn’t even want you to be one of the oath-takers,’ I said.
‘I never thought he did,’ Arthur said, ‘but I took it. And an oath is an oath, and if we purposefully break one then we break faith with all.’ More oaths had been broken, I thought, than had ever been kept, but I said nothing. Arthur had tried to keep his oaths and that was a comfort to him. He smiled suddenly, and I saw that his mind had veered off onto a happier subject. ‘Long ago,’ he told me, ‘I saw a piece of land in Broceliande. It was a valley leading to the south coast and I remember a stream and some birches there, and I thought what a good place it would be for a man to build a hall and make a life.’
I laughed. Even now all he really wanted was a hall, some land, and friends about him; the very same things he had always desired. He had never loved palaces, nor rejoiced in power, though he had loved the practice of war. He tried to deny that love, but he was good at battle and quick in thought and that made him a deadly soldier. It was soldiering that had made him famous, and had let him unite the Britons and defeat the Saxons, but then his shyness about power, and his perverse belief in the innate goodness of man, and his fervent adherence to the sanctity of oaths, had let lesser men undo his work.
‘A timber hall,’ he said dreamily, ‘with a pillared arcade facing the sea. Guinevere loves the sea. The land slopes southwards, towards a beach, and we can make our hall above it so that all day and night we can hear the waves falling on the sand. And behind the hall,’ he went on, ‘I shall build a new smithy.’
‘So you can torture more metal?’ I asked.
‘Ars longa,’ he said lightly, ‘‘vita brevis.’
‘Latin?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘The arts are long, life is short. I shall improve, Derfel. My fault is impatience. I see the form of the metal I want, and hurry it, but iron won’t be hurried.’ He put a hand on my bandaged arm.
‘You and I have years yet, Derfel.’
‘I hope so, Lord.’
‘Years and years,’ he said, ‘years to grow old and listen to songs and tell stories.’
‘And dream of Britain?’ I asked.
‘We served her well,’ he said, ‘and now she must serve herself.’
‘And if the Sais come back,’ I asked, ‘and men call for you again, will you return?’
He smiled. ‘I might return to give Gwydre his throne, but otherwise I shall hang Excalibur on the highest rafter of my hall’s high roof, Derfel, and let the cobwebs shroud her. I shall watch the sea and plant my crops and see my grandchildren grow. You and I are done, my friend. We’ve discharged our oaths.’
‘All but one,’ I said.
He looked at me sharply. ‘You mean my oath to help Ban?’
I had forgotten that oath, the one, the only one, that Arthur had failed to keep, and his failure had ridden him hard ever since. Ban’s kingdom of Benoic had gone down to the Franks, and though Arthur had sent men, he had not gone to Benoic himself. But that was long in the past, and I for one had never blamed Arthur for the failure. He had wanted to help, but Aelle’s Saxons had been pressing hard at the time and he could not have fought two wars at once. ‘No, Lord,’ I said, ‘I was thinking of my oath to Sansum.’
‘The mouse lord will forget you,’ Arthur said dismissively.
‘He forgets nothing, Lord.’
‘Then we shall have to change his mind,’ Arthur said, ‘for I do not think I can grow old without you.’
‘Nor I without you, Lord.’
‘So we shall hide ourselves away, you and I, and men will ask, where is Arthur? And where is Derfel? And where is Galahad? Or Ceinwyn? And no one will know, for we shall be hidden under the birch trees beside the sea.’ He laughed, but he could see that dream so close now and the hope of it drove him on through the last miles of our long journey.
It took us four days and nights, but at last we reached Dumnonia’s southern shore. We had skirted the great moor and we came to the ocean while walking on the ridge of a high hill. We paused at the ridge’s crest while the evening light streamed over our shoulders to light the wide river valley that opened to the sea beneath us. This was Camlann.
I had been here before, for this was the southern country below Dumnonian Isca where the local folk tattooed their faces blue. I had served Lord Owain when I first came, and it was under his leadership that I had joined the massacre on the high moors. Years later I had ridden close to this hill when I went with Arthur to try and save Tristan’s life, though my attempt failed and Tristan had died, and now I had returned a third time. It was lovely country, as beautiful as any I had seen in Britain, though for me it held memories of murder and I knew I would be glad to see it fade behind Caddwg’s boat. We stared down at our journey’s end. The River Exe flowed to the sea beneath us, but before it reached the ocean it formed a great wide sea-lake that was penned from the ocean by a narrow spit of sand. That spit was the place men called Camlann, and at its tip, just visible from our high perch, the Romans had built a small fortress. Inside the fort they had raised a great high becket of iron that had once held a fire at night to warn approaching galleys of the treacherous sandspit. Now we gazed down at the sea-lake, the sandspit and the green shore. No enemy was in sight. No spear blade reflected the day’s late sun, no horsemen rode the shore tracks and no spearmen darkened the narrow tongue of sand. We could have been alone in all the universe.