It was, in its way, a good plan. The Saxons would be lured deep into Dumnonia and there be forced to attack up some steep hill, but the plan depended on the enemy doing exactly as Arthur wanted, and Cerdic, I thought, was not an obliging man. Yet Arthur seemed confident enough, and that, at least, was comforting.
We all went home. I made myself unpopular by searching all the houses in my district and confiscating grain, salted meat and dried fish. We left enough supplies to keep the folk alive, but sent the rest to Corinium where it would feed Arthur’s army. It was a distasteful business, for peasants fear hunger almost as much as they fear enemy spearmen, and we were forced to search for hiding places and ignore the screams of women who accused us of tyranny. But better our searches, I told them, than Saxon ravages.
We also readied ourselves for battle. I laid out my wargear and my slaves oiled the leather jerkin, polished the mail coat, combed out the wolf-hair plume on the helmet and repainted the white star on my heavy shield. The new year came with the blackbird’s first song. Missel thrushes called from the high twigs of the larches behind Dun Caric’s hill, and we paid the children of the village to run with pots and sticks through the apple orchards to scare away the bullfinches that would steal the tiny fruit buds. Sparrows nested and the stream glinted with the returning salmon. The dusks were made noisy by flocks of pied wagtails. Within a few weeks there were blossoms on the hazel, dog violets in the woods and gold-touched cones on the sallow trees. Buck hares danced in the fields where the lambs played. In March there was a swarm of toads and I feared what it meant, but there was no Merlin to ask, for he, with Nimue, had vanished and it seemed we must fight without his help. Larks sang, and the predatory magpies hunted for new-laid eggs along hedgerows that still lacked their cover of foliage. The leaves came at last, and with them news of the first warriors arriving south from Powys. They were few in number, for Cuneglas did not want to exhaust the food supplies being piled in Corinium, but their arrival gave promise of the greater army that Cuneglas would lead south after Beltain. Our calves were born, butter was churned and Ceinwyn busied herself cleaning out the hall after the long smoky winter.
They were odd and bittersweet days, for there was the promise of war in a new spring that was suddenly glorious with sundrenched skies and flower-bright meadows. The Christians preach of’the last days’, by which they mean those times before the world’s ending, and maybe folk will feel then as we did in that soft and lovely spring. There was an unreal quality to everyday life which made every small task special. Maybe this would be the last time we would ever burn winter straw from our bedding and maybe the last time we would ever heave a calf all bloody from its mother’s womb into the world. Everything was special, because everything was threatened.
We also knew that the coming Beltain might be the last we would ever know as a family and so we tried to make it memorable. Beltain greets the new year’s life, and on the eve of the feast we let all the fires die in Dun Caric. The kitchen fires, that had burned all winter long, went unfed all day and by night they were nothing but embers. We raked them out, swept the hearths clean, then laid new fires, while on a hill to the east of the village we heaped two great piles of firewood, one of them stacked about the sacred tree that Pyrlig, our bard, had selected. It was a young hazel that we had cut down and carried ceremonially through the village, across the stream and up the hill. The tree was hung with scraps of cloth, and all the houses, like the hall itself, were decked with new young hazel boughs. That night, all across Britain, the fires were dead. On Beltain Eve darkness rules. The feast was laid in our hall, but there was no fire to cook it and no flame to light the high rafters. There was no light anywhere, except in the Christian towns where folks heaped their fires to defy the Gods, but in the countryside all was dark. At dusk we had climbed the hill, a mass of villagers and spearmen driving cattle and sheep that were folded into wattle enclosures. Children played, but once the great dark fell the smallest children fell asleep and their little bodies lay in the grass as the rest of us gathered about the unlit fires and there sang the Lament of Annwn.
Then, in the darkest part of the night, we made the new year’s fire. Pyrlig made the flame by rubbing two sticks while Issa dribbled shavings of larch-wood kindling onto the spark that gave off a tiny wisp of smoke. The two men stooped to the tiny flame, blew on it, added more kindling, and at last a strong flame leapt up and all of us began to sing the Chant of Belenos as Pyrlig carried the new fire to the two heaps of firewood. The sleeping children awoke and ran to find their parents as the Beltain fires sprang high and bright.
A goat was sacrificed once the fires were burning. Ceinwyn, as ever, turned away as the beast’s throat was cut and as Pyrlig scattered its blood on the grass. He tossed the goat’s corpse onto the fire where the sacred hazel was burning, then the villagers fetched their cattle and sheep and drove them between the two great blazes. We hung plaited straw collars about the cows’ necks, and then watched as young women danced between the fires to seek the blessing of the Gods on their wombs. They had danced through fire at Imbolc, but always did it again at Beltain. That was the first year Morwenna was old enough to dance between the fires and I felt a pang of sadness as I watched my daughter twirl and leap. She looked so happy. She was thinking of marriage and dreaming of babies, yet within a few weeks, I thought, she could be dead or enslaved. That thought filled me with a huge anger and I turned away from our fires and was startled to see the bright flames of other Beltain fires burning in the distance. All across Dumnonia the fires were burning to greet the newly arrived year.
My spearmen had brought two huge iron cauldrons to the hilltop and we filled their bellies with burning wood, then hurried down the hill with the two flaming pots. Once in the village the new fire was distributed, each cottage taking a flame from the fire and setting it to the waiting wood in the hearth. We went to the hall last and there carried the new fire into the kitchens. It was almost dawn by then, and the villagers crowded into the palisade to wait for the rising sun. The instant that its first brilliant shard of light showed above the eastern horizon, we sang the song of Lugh’s birth; a joyous, dancing hymn of merriment. We faced the east as we sang our welcome to the sun, and right across the horizon we could see the dark dribble of Beltain smoke rising into the ever paler sky. The cooking began as the hearth fires became hot. I had planned a huge feast for the village, thinking that this might be our last day of happiness for a long time. The common folk rarely ate meat, but on that Beltain we had five deer, two boars, three pigs and six sheep to roast; we had barrels of newly brewed mead and ten baskets of bread that had been baked on the old season’s fires. There was cheese, honied nuts and oatcakes with the cross of Beltain scorched onto their crusts. In a week or so the Saxons would come, so this was a time to give a feast that might help our people through the horrors to come. The villagers played games as the meat cooked. There were foot-races down the street, wrestling matches and a competition to see who could lift the heaviest weight. The girls wove flowers in their hair and, long before the feast began, I saw the couples slipping away. We ate in the afternoon, and while we feasted the poets recited and the village bards sang to us and the success of their compositions was judged by the amount of applause each generated. I gave gold to all the bards and poets, even the worst ones, and there were many of those. Most of the poets were young men who blushingly declaimed clumsy lines addressed to their girls, and the girls would look sheepish and the villagers would jeer, laugh and then demand that each girl reward the poet with a kiss, and if the kiss was too fleeting, the couple would be held face to face and made to kiss properly. The poetry became markedly better as we drank more.