‘No!’ Nimue had recovered enough to protest. She spat blood from the inside of her cheek that had been split open by Arthur’s blow. ‘The Treasures are ours!’
‘The Treasures,’ Merlin said wearily, ‘have been gathered and used. They are nothing now. Arthur may have his sword. He’ll need it.’ He turned and threw his long knife into the nearest fire, then turned to watch as the two Blackshields finished packing the Cauldron. The salt turned pink as it covered Gawain’s hideously wounded body. ‘In the spring,’ Merlin said, ‘the Saxons will come, and then we shall see if there was any magic here this night.’
Nimue screamed at us. She wept and raved, she spat and cursed, she promised us death by air, by fire, by land and by sea. Merlin ignored her, but Nimue was never ready to accept half measures and that night she became Arthur’s enemy. That night she began to work on the curses that would give her revenge on the men who stopped the Gods coming to Mai Dun. She called us the ravagers of Britain and she promised us horror.
We stayed on the hill all night. The Gods did not come, and the fires burned so fiercely that it was not till the following afternoon that Arthur could retrieve Excalibur. Mardoc was given back to his mother, though I later heard he died that winter of a fever.
Merlin and Nimue took the other Treasures away. An ox-cart carried the Cauldron with its ghastly contents. Nimue led the way and Merlin, like an old obedient man, followed her. They took Anbarr, Gawain’s uncut, unbroken black horse, and they took the great banner of Britain, and where they went none of us knew, but we guessed it would be a wild place to the west where Nimue’s curses could be honed through the storms of winter.
Before the Saxons came.
It is odd, looking back, to remember how Arthur was hated then. In the summer he had broken the hopes of the Christians and now, in the late autumn, he had destroyed the pagan dreams. As ever, he seemed surprised by his unpopularity. ‘What else was I supposed to do?’ he demanded of me. ‘Let my son die?’
‘Cefydd did,’ I said unhelpfully.
‘And Cefydd still lost the battle!’ Arthur said sharply. We were riding north. I was going home to Dun Caric, while Arthur, with Cuneglas and Bishop Emrys, was travelling on to meet King Meurig of Gwent. That meeting was the only business that mattered to Arthur. He had never trusted the Gods to save Britain from the Sais, but he reckoned that eight or nine hundred of Gwent’s well-trained spearmen could tip the balance. His head seethed with numbers that winter. Dumnonia, he reckoned, could field six hundred spearmen of whom four hundred had been tested in battle. Cuneglas would bring another four hundred, the Blackshield Irish another hundred and fifty and to those we could add maybe a hundred masterless men who might come from Armorica or the northern kingdoms to seek plunder. ‘Say twelve hundred men,’ Arthur would guess, then he would worry the figure up or down according to his mood, but if his mood was optimistic he sometimes dared add eight hundred men from Gwent to give us a total of two thousand men, yet even that, he claimed, might not be enough because the Saxons would probably field an even larger army. Aelle could assemble at least seven hundred spears, and his was the weaker of the two Saxon kingdoms. We estimated Cerdic’s spears at a thousand, and rumours were reaching us that Cerdic was buying spearmen from Clovis, the King of the Franks. Those hired men were being paid in gold, and had been promised more gold when victory yielded them the treasury of Dumnonia. Our spies also reported that the Saxons would wait until after the Feast of Eostre, their spring festival, to give the new boats time to come from across the sea. ‘They’ll have two and a half thousand men,’ Arthur reckoned, and we had only twelve hundred if Meurig would not fight. We could raise the levy, of course, but no levy would stand against properly trained warriors, and our levy of old men and boys would be opposed by the Saxon fyrd.
‘So without Gwent’s spearmen,’ I said gloomily, ‘we’re doomed.’
Arthur had rarely smiled since Guinevere’s treachery, but he smiled now. ‘Doomed? Who says that?’
‘You do, Lord. The numbers do.’
‘You’ve never fought and won when you’ve been outnumbered?’
‘Yes, Lord, I have.’
‘So why can’t we win again?’
‘Only a fool seeks a battle against a stronger enemy, Lord,’ I said.
‘Only a fool seeks a battle,’ he said vigorously. ‘I don’t want to fight in the spring. It’s the Saxons who want to fight, and we have no choice in the matter. Believe me, Derfel, I don’t wish to be outnumbered, and whatever I can do to persuade Meurig to fight, I will do, but if Gwent won’t march then we shall have to beat the Saxons by ourselves. And we can beat them! Believe that, Derfel!’
‘I believed in the Treasures, Lord.’
He gave a derisory bark of laughter. ‘This is the Treasure I believe in,’ he said, patting Excalibur’s hilt.
‘Believe in victory, Derfel! If we march against the Saxons like beaten men then they’ll give our bones to the wolves. But if we march like winners we’ll hear them howl.’
It was a fine bravado, but it was hard to believe in victory. Dumnonia was shrouded with gloom. We had lost our Gods, and folk said it was Arthur who had driven them away. He was not just the enemy of the Christian God, now he was the enemy of all the Gods and men said that the Saxons were his punishment. Even the weather presaged disaster for, on the morning after I parted from Arthur, it began to rain and it seemed as though that rain would never stop. Day after day brought low grey clouds, a chill wind, and insistent driving rain. Everything was wet. Our clothes, our bedding, our firewood, the floor-rushes, the very walls of our houses seemed greasy with damp. Spears rusted in their racks, stored grain sprouted or grew mouldy, and still the rain drove relentlessly from the west. Ceinwyn and I did our best to seal Dun Caric’s hall. Her brother had brought her a gift of wolf pelts from Powys and we used them to line the timber walls, but the very air beneath the roof beams seemed sodden. Fires burned sullen to grudge us a spitting and smoky warmth that reddened our eyes. Both our daughters were cross-grained that early winter. Morwenna, the eldest, who was usually the most placid and contented of children, became shrewish and so insistently selfish that Ceinwyn took a belt to her. ‘She misses Gwydre,’ Ceinwyn told me afterwards. Arthur had decreed that Gwydre would not leave his side, and so the boy had gone with his father to meet King Meurig. ‘They should marry next year,’ Ceinwyn added. ‘That will cure her.’
‘If Arthur will let Gwydre marry her,’ I responded gloomily. ‘He has no great love for us these days.’ I had wanted to accompany Arthur into Gwent, but he had peremptorily refused me. There had been a time when I had thought myself his closest friend, but now he growled at me rather than welcomed me.
‘He thinks I risked Gwydre’s life,’ I said.
‘No,’ Ceinwyn disagreed. ‘He’s been distant with you ever since the night when he discovered Guinevere.’
‘Why would that change things?’
‘Because you were with him, my dear,’ Ceinwyn said patiently, ‘and with you he cannot pretend that nothing has changed. You were a witness to his shame. He sees you and he remembers her. He’s also jealous.’
‘Jealous?’
She smiled. ‘He thinks you are happy. He thinks now that if he had married me then he too would be happy.’
‘He probably would,’ I said.
‘He even suggested it,’ Ceinwyn said carelessly.
‘He did what?’ I erupted.
She soothed me. ‘It wasn’t serious, Derfel. The poor man needs reassurance. He thinks that because one woman rejected him all women might, and so he asked me.’
I touched Hywelbane’s hilt. ‘You never told me.’