I drank too much. Indeed we all feasted well and drank even better. At one point I was challenged to a wrestling match by the village’s wealthiest farmer and the crowd demanded I accept and so, half drunk already, I clapped my hands on the farmer’s body, and he did the same to me, and I could smell the reeking mead on his breath as he could doubtless smell it on mine. He heaved, I heaved back, and neither of us could move the other, so we stood there, locked head to head like battling stags, while the crowd mocked our sad display. In the end I tipped him over, but only because he was more drunk than I was. I drank still more, trying, perhaps, to obliterate the future.
By nightfall I was feeling sick. I went to the fighting platform we had built on the eastern rampart and there I leaned on the wall’s top and stared at the darkening horizon. Twin wisps of smoke drifted from the hilltop where we had lit our night’s new fires, though to my mead-fuddled mind it seemed as if there were at least a dozen smoke pyres. Ceinwyn climbed up to the platform and laughed at my dismal face.
‘You’re drunk,’ she said.
‘I am that,’ I agreed.
‘You’ll sleep like a hog,’ she said accusingly, ‘and snore like one too.’
‘It’s Beltain,’ I said in excuse, and waved my hand at the distant wisps of smoke. She leaned on the parapet beside me. She had sloe blossom woven into her golden hair and looked as beautiful as ever. ‘We must talk to Arthur about Gwydre,’ she said.
‘Marrying Morwenna?’ I asked, then paused to collect my thoughts. ‘Arthur seems so unfriendly these days,’ I finally managed to say, ‘and maybe he has a mind to marry Gwydre to someone else?’
‘Maybe he has,’ Ceinwyn said calmly, ‘in which case we should find someone else for Morwenna.’
‘Who?’
‘That’s exactly what I want you to think about,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘when you’re sober. Maybe one of Culhwch’s boys?’ She peered down into the evening shadows at the foot of Dun Caric’s hill. There was a tangle of bushes at the foot of the slope and she could see a couple busy among the leaves. ‘That’s Morfudd,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘Morfudd,’ Ceinwyn said, ‘the dairy girl. Another baby coming, I suppose. It really is time she married.’ She sighed and stared at the horizon. She was silent for a long time, then she frowned. ‘Don’t you think there are more fires this year than last?’ she asked.
I dutifully stared at the horizon, but in all honesty I could not distinguish between one spiring smoke trail and another. ‘Possibly,’ I said evasively.
She still frowned. ‘Or maybe they aren’t Beltain fires at all.’
‘Of course they are!’ I said with all the certitude of a drunken man.
‘But beacons,’ she went on.
It took a few heartbeats for the meaning of her words to sink in, then suddenly I did not feel drunk at all. I felt sick, but not drunk. I gazed eastwards. A score of plumes smudged their smoke against the sky, but two of the plumes were far thicker than the others and far too thick to be the remnants of fires lit the night before and allowed to die in the dawn.
And suddenly, sickeningly, I knew they were the warning beacons. The Saxons had not waited until after their feast of Eostre, but had come at Beltain. They knew we had prepared warning beacons, but they also knew that the fires of Beltain would be lit on hilltops all across Dumnonia, and they must have guessed that we would not notice the warning beacons among the ritual fires. They had tricked us. We had feasted, we had drunk ourselves insensible, and all the while the Saxons were attacking. And Dumnonia was at war.
I was the leader of seventy experienced warriors, but I also commanded a hundred and ten youngsters I had trained through the winter. Those one hundred and eighty men constituted nearly one third of all Dumnonia’s spearmen, but only sixteen of them were ready to march by dawn. The rest were either still drunk or else so suffering that they ignored my curses and blows. Issa and I dragged the worst afflicted to the stream and tossed them into the chill water, but it did small good. I could only wait as, hour by hour, more men recovered their wits. A score of sober Saxons could have laid Dun Caric waste that morning.
The beacon fires still burned to tell us that the Saxons were coming, and I felt a terrible guilt that I had failed Arthur so badly. Later I learned that nearly every warrior in Dumnonia was similarly insensible that morning, though Sagramor’s hundred and twenty men had stayed sober and they dutifully fell back in front of the advancing Saxon armies, but the rest of us staggered, retched, gasped for breath and gulped water like dogs.
By midday most of my men were standing, though not all, and only a few were ready for a long march. My armour, shield and war spears were loaded on a pack-horse, while ten mules carried the baskets of food that Ceinwyn had been busy filling all morning. She would wait at Dun Caric, either for victory or, more likely, for a message telling her to flee.
Then, a few moments after midday, everything changed.
A rider came from the south on a sweating horse. He was Culhwch’s eldest son, Einion, and he had ridden himself and his horse close to exhaustion in his frantic attempt to reach us. He half fell from the saddle. ‘Lord,’ he gasped, then stumbled, found his feet and gave me a perfunctory bow. For a few heartbeats he was too breathless to speak, then the words tumbled out in frantic excitement, but he had been so eager to deliver his message and had so anticipated the drama of the moment that he was quite unable to make any sense, though I did understand he had come from the south and that the Saxons were marching there.
I led him to a bench beside the hall and sat him down. ‘Welcome to Dun Caric, Einion ap Culhwch,’ I said very formally, ‘and say all that again.’
‘The Saxons, Lord,’ he said, ‘have attacked Dunum.’
So Guinevere had been right and the Saxons had marched in the south. They had come from Cerdic’s land beyond Venta and were already deep inside Dumnonia. Dunum, our fortress close to the coast, had fallen in yesterday’s dawn. Culhwch had abandoned the fort rather than have his hundred men overwhelmed, and now he was falling back in front of the enemy. Einion, a young man with the same squat build as his father, looked up at me woefully. ‘There are just too many of them, Lord.’
The Saxons had made fools of us. First they had convinced us that they meant no mischief in the south, then they had attacked on our feast night when they knew we would mistake the distant beacon fires for the flames of Beltain, and now they were loose on our southern flank. Aelle, I guessed, was pushing down the Thames while Cerdic’s troops were rampaging free by the coast. Einion was not certain that Cerdic himself led the southern attack, for he had not seen the Saxon King’s banner of the red-painted wolf skull hung with a dead man’s flayed skin, but he had seen Lancelot’s flag of the sea eagle with the fish clutched in its talons. Culhwch believed that Lancelot was leading his own followers and two or three hundred Saxons besides.