‘Won’t Cerdic attack in the south?’ I asked.
Culhwch shook his head. ‘He’s not making any show of it. Nothing stirring in Venta.’
‘They don’t trust each other,’ Sagramor spoke of Cerdic and Aelle. ‘They daren’t let one another out of their sight. Cerdic fears we’ll buy off Aelle, and Aelle fears that Cerdic will cheat him of the spoils, so they’re going to stick closer than brothers.’
‘So what will Arthur do?’ I asked.
‘We hoped you’d tell us that,’ Culhwch answered.
‘Arthur doesn’t speak to me these days,’ I said, not bothering to hide my bitterness.
‘That makes two of us,’ Culhwch growled.
‘Three,’ Sagramor said. ‘He comes to see me, he asks questions, he rides on raids and then he goes away. He says nothing.’
‘Let’s hope he’s thinking,’ I said.
‘Too busy with that new bride, probably,’ Culhwch offered sourly.
‘Have you met her?’ I asked.
‘An Irish kitten,’ he said dismissively, ‘with claws.’ Culhwch told us he had visited Arthur and his new bride on his way north to this meeting with Mithras. ‘She’s pretty enough,’ he said grudgingly. ‘If you took her slave you’d probably want to make sure she stayed in your own kitchen for a while. Well, I would. You wouldn’t, Derfel.’ Culhwch often teased me about my loyalty to Ceinwyn, though I was not so very unusual in my fidelity. Sagramor had taken a captured Saxon for a wife and, like me, was famously loyal to his woman. ‘What use is a bull that only serves one cow?’ Culhwch now asked, but neither of us responded to his jibe.
‘Arthur is frightened,’ Sagramor said instead. He paused, gathering his thoughts. The Numidian spoke the British tongue well, though with a wretched accent, but it was not his natural language, and he often spoke slowly to make certain he was expressing his exact ideas. ‘He has defied the Gods, and not just at Mai Dun, but by taking Mordred’s power. The Christians hate him and now the pagans say he is their enemy. Do you see how lonely that makes him?’
‘The trouble with Arthur is that he doesn’t believe in the Gods,’ Culhwch said dismissively.
‘He believes in himself,’ Sagramor said, ‘and when Guinevere betrayed him, he took a blow to the heart. He is ashamed. He lost much pride, and he’s a proud man. He thinks we all laugh at him, and so he is distant from us.’
‘I don’t laugh at him,’ I protested.
‘I do,’ Culhwch said, flinching as he straightened his wounded leg. ‘Stupid bastard. Should have taken his sword belt to Guinevere’s back a few times. That would have taught the bitch a lesson.’
‘Now,’ Sagramor went on, blithely ignoring Culhwch’s predictable opinion, ‘he fears defeat. For what is he if he is not a soldier? He likes to think he is a good man, that he rules because he is a natural ruler, but it is the sword that has carried him to power. In his soul he knows that, and if he loses this war then he loses the thing he cares about most; his reputation. He will be remembered as the usurper who was not good enough to hold what he usurped. He is terrified of a second defeat for his reputation.’
‘Maybe Argante can heal the first defeat,’ I said.
‘I doubt it,’ Sagramor said. ‘Galahad tells me that Arthur didn’t really want to marry her.’
‘Then why did he?’ I asked gloomily.
Sagramor shrugged. ‘To spite Guinevere? To please Oengus? To show us that he doesn’t need Guinevere?’
‘To slap bellies with a pretty girl?’ Culhwch suggested.
‘If he even does that,’ Sagramor said.
Culhwch stared at the Numidian in apparent shock. ‘Of course he does,’ Culhwch said. Sagramor shook his head. ‘I hear he doesn’t. Only rumour, of course, and rumour is least trustworthy when it comes to the ways of a man and his woman. But I think this Princess is too young for Arthur’s tastes.’
‘They’re never too young,’ Culhwch growled. Sagramor just shrugged. He was a far more subtle man than Culhwch and that gave him a much greater insight into Arthur, who liked to appear so straightforward, but whose soul was in truth as complicated as the twisted curves and spooling dragons that decorated Excali-bur’s blade.
We parted in the morning, our spear and sword blades still reddened with the blood of the sacrificed bull. Issa was excited. A few years before he had been a farm boy, but now he was an adept of Mithras and soon, he had told me, he would be a father for Scarach, his wife, was pregnant. Issa, given confidence by his initiation into Mithras, was suddenly sure we could beat the Saxons without Gwent’s help, but I had no such belief. I might not have liked Guinevere, but I had never thought her a fool, and I was worried about her forecast that Cerdic would attack in the south. The alternative made sense, of course; Cerdic and Aelle were reluctant allies and would want to keep a careful eye on each other. An overwhelming attack along the Thames would be the quickest way to reach the Severn Sea and so split the British kingdoms into two parts, and why should the Saxons sacrifice their advantage of numbers by dividing their forces into two smaller armies that Arthur might defeat one after the other? Yet if Arthur expected just one attack, and only guarded against that one attack, the advantages of a southern assault were overwhelming. While Arthur was tangled with one Saxon army in the Thames valley, the other could hook around his right flank and reach the Severn almost unopposed. Issa, though, was not worried by such things. He only imagined himself in the shield wall where, ennobled by Mithras’s acceptance, he would cut down Saxons like a farmer reaping hay.
The weather stayed cold after the season of the solstice. Day after day dawned frozen and pale with the sun little more than a reddened disc hanging low in the southern clouds. Wolves scavenged deep into the farmlands, hunting for our sheep that we had penned into hurdle folds, and one glorious day we hunted down six of the grey beasts and so secured six new wolf tails for my warband’s helmets. My men had begun to wear such tails on their helmet crests in the deep woods of Armorica where we had fought the Franks and, because we had raided them like scavenging beasts, they had called us wolves and we had taken the insult as a compliment. We were the Wolftails, though our shields, instead of bearing a wolf mask, were painted with a five-pointed star as a tribute to Ceinwyn. Ceinwyn was still insistent that she would not flee to Powys in the spring. Morwenna and Seren could go, she said, but she would stay. I was angry at that decision. ‘So the girls can lose both mother and father?’ I demanded.
‘If that’s what the Gods decree, yes,’ she said placidly, then shrugged. ‘I may be being selfish, but that is what I want.’
‘You want to die? That’s selfish?’
‘I don’t want to be so far away, Derfel,’ she said. ‘Do you know what it’s like to be in a distant country when your man is fighting? You wait in terror. You fear every messenger. You listen to every rumour. This time I shall stay.’
‘To give me something else to worry about?’
‘What an arrogant man you are,’ she said calmly. ‘You think I can’t look after myself?’