He turned to look at me. His gaze was mocking, as though he despised me for showing sympathy to Guinevere. ‘Is she valuable, Derfel?’ he asked. I said nothing and Arthur turned away from me to stare across the pale fields where thrushes and blackbirds hunted the furrows for worms. ‘Should I kill her?’
he suddenly asked me.
‘Kill Guinevere?’ I responded, shocked at the suggestion, then decided that Argante was probably behind his words. She must have resented that Guinevere still lived after committing an offence for which her sister had died. ‘The decision, Lord,’ I said, ‘is not mine, but surely, if it was death she deserved, it should have been given months ago? Not now.’
He grimaced at that advice. ‘What will the Saxons do with her?’ he asked.
‘She thinks they’ll rape her. I suspect they’ll put her on a throne.’
He glowered across the pale landscape. He knew I meant Lancelot’s throne, and he was imagining the embarrassment of his mortal enemy on Dumnonia’s throne with Guinevere beside him and Cerdic holding their power. It was an unbearable thought. ‘If she’s in any danger of capture,’ he said harshly, ‘then you will kill her.’
I could hardly believe what I had heard. I stared at him, but he refused to look me in the eyes. ‘It’s simpler, surely,’ I said, ‘to move her to safety? Can’t she go to Glevum?’
‘I have enough to worry about,’ he snapped, ‘without wasting thought on the safety of traitors.’ For a few heartbeats his face looked as angry as I had ever seen it, but then he shook his head and sighed. ‘Do you know who I envy?’ he asked.
‘Tell me, Lord.’
‘Tewdric’
I laughed. ‘Tewdric! You want to be a constipated monk?’
‘He’s happy,’ Arthur said firmly, ‘he has found the life he always wanted. I don’t want the tonsure and I don’t care for his God, but I envy him all the same.’ He grimaced. ‘I wear myself out getting ready for a war no one except me believes we can win, and I want none of it. None of it! Mordred should be King, we took an oath to make him King, and if we beat the Saxons, Derfel, I’ll let him rule.’ He spoked defiantly, and I did not believe him. ‘All I ever wanted,’ he went on, ‘was a hall, some land, some cattle, crops in season, timber to burn, a smithy to work iron, a stream for water. Is it too much?’ He rarely indulged in such self-pity, and I just let his anger talk itself out. He had often expressed such a dream of a household tight in its own palisade, shielded from the world by deep woods and wide fields and filled with his own folk, but now, with Cerdic and Aelle gathering their spears, he must have known it was a hopeless dream. ‘I can’t hold Dumnonia for ever,’ he said, ‘and when we’ve beaten the Saxons it might be time to let other men bridle Mordred. As for me, I’ll follow Tewdric into happiness.’ He gathered his reins. ‘I can’t think about Guinevere now,’ he said, ‘but if she’s in any danger, you deal with her.’ And with that curt command he clapped his heels back and drove his horse away. I stayed where I was. I was appalled, but if I had thought beyond my disgust at his order, I should surely have known what was in his mind. He knew I would not kill Guinevere, and he knew therefore that she was safe, but by giving me the harsh order he was not required to betray any affection for her. Odi at amo, excrucior.
We killed nothing that morning.
In the afternoon the warriors gathered in the feasting-hall. Mordred was there, hunched in the chair that served as his throne. He had nothing to contribute for he was a king without a kingdom, yet Arthur accorded him a proper courtesy. Arthur began, indeed, by saying that when the Saxons came Mordred would ride with him and that the whole army would fight beneath Mordred’s banner of the red dragon. Mordred nodded his agreement, but what else could he do? In truth, and we all knew it, Arthur was not offering Mordred a chance of redeeming his reputation in battle, but ensuring that he could make no mischief. Mordred’s best chance of regaining his power was to ally himself with our enemies by offering himself as a puppet king to Cerdic, but instead he would be a prisoner of Arthur’s hard warriors. Arthur then confirmed that King Meurig of Gwent would not fight. That news, though no surprise, was met by a growl of hatred. Arthur hushed the protest. Meurig, he said, was convinced that the coming war was not Gwent’s battle, but the King had still given his grudging permission for Cuneglas to bring the army of Powys south across Gwent’s land and for Oengus to march his Blackshields through his kingdom. Arthur said nothing of Meurig’s ambition to rule Dumnonia, perhaps because he knew that such an announcement would only make us even angrier with the King of Gwent, and Arthur still hoped that somehow he could change Meurig’s mind and so did not want to provoke more hatred between us and Gwent. The forces of Powys and Demetia, Arthur said, would converge on Corinium, for that walled Roman city was to be Arthur’s base and the place where all our supplies were to be concentrated. ‘We start supplying Corinium tomorrow,’ Arthur said. ‘I want it crammed with food, for it’s there we shall fight our battle.’ He paused. ‘One vast battle,’ he said, ‘with all their forces against every man we can raise.’
‘A siege?’ Culhwch asked, surprised.
‘No,’ Arthur said. Instead, he explained, he intended to use Corinium as a lure. The Saxons would soon hear that the town was filled with salted meat, dried fish and grain, and, like any great horde on the march, they would be short of food themselves and so would be drawn to Corinium like a fox to a duckpond, and there he planned to destroy them. ‘They will besiege it,’ he said, ‘and Morfans will defend it.’ Morfans, forewarned of that duty, nodded his agreement. ‘But the rest of us,’ Arthur went on,
‘will be in the hills north of the city. Cerdic will know he has to destroy us and he’ll break off his siege to do that. Then we’ll fight him on ground of our choosing.’
The whole plan depended on both Saxon armies advancing up the valley of the Thames, and all the signs indicated that this was indeed the Saxon intention. They were piling supplies into London and Pontes, and making no preparations on the southern frontier. Culhwch, who guarded that southern border, had raided deep into Lloegyr and told us that he had found no concentration of spearmen, nor any indication that Cerdic was hoarding grain or meat in Venta or any other of the frontier towns. Everything pointed, Arthur said, to a simple, brutal and overwhelming assault up the Thames aimed at the shore of the Severn Sea with the decisive battle being fought somewhere near Corinium. Sagramor’s men had already built great warning beacons on the hilltops on either side of the Thames valley, and still more beacons had been made on the hills spreading south and west into Dumnonia, and when we saw the smoke of those fires we were all to march to our places.
‘That won’t be until after Beltain,’ Arthur said. He had spies in both Aelle’s and Cerdic’s halls, and all had reported that the Saxons would wait until after the feast of their Goddess Eostre which would be celebrated a whole week after Beltain. The Saxons wished the Goddess’s blessing, Arthur explained, and they wanted to give the new season’s boats time to come across the sea with their hulls packed with yet more hungry fighting men.
But after Eostre’s feast, he said, the Saxons would advance and he would let them come deep into Dumnonia without a battle, though he planned to harass them all the way. Sagramor, with his battle-hardened spearmen, would retreat in front of the Saxon horde and offer whatever resistance he could short of a shield wall, while Arthur gathered the allied army at Corinium. Culhwch and I had different orders. Our task was to defend the hills south of the Thames valley. We could not expect to defeat any determined Saxon thrust that came south through those hills, but Arthur did not expect any such attack. The Saxons, he said again and again, would keep marching westwards, ever westwards along the Thames, but they were bound to send raiding parties into the southern hills in search of grain and cattle. Our task was to stop those raiding parties, thus forcing the scavengers to go north instead. That would take the Saxons across the Gwentian border and might spur Meurig into a declaration of war. The unspoken thought in that hope, though each of us in that smoky room nevertheless understood it, was that without Gwent’s well-trained spearmen the great battle near Corinium would be a truly desperate affair. ‘So fight them hard,’ Arthur told Culhwch and me. ‘Kill their foragers, scare them, but don’t be caught in battle. Harass them, frighten them, but once they’re within a day’s march of Corinium, leave them alone. Just march to join me.’ He would need every spear he could gather to fight that great battle outside Corinium, and Arthur seemed sure that we could win it so long as our forces had the high ground.