‘Have you ever seen the Saxons attack?’ I asked Cildydd. ‘They send big war-dogs first and they come behind with axes three feet long and spears on eight-foot shafts. They’re drunk, they’re maddened and they’ll want nothing but the women and the gold inside your city. How long do you think your levy will hold?’
Cildydd blinked at me. ‘We can’t just give up,’ he said weakly.
‘Does your levy have any real weapons?’ I asked, indicating the sullen-looking men waiting in the rain. Two or three of the sixty men had spears, I could see one old Roman sword, and most of the rest had axes or mattocks, but some men did not even possess those crude weapons, but merely held fire-hardened stakes that had been sharpened to black points.
‘We’re searching the city, Lord,’ Cildydd said. ‘There must be spears.’
‘Spears or not,’ I said brutally, ‘if you fight here you’ll all be dead men.’
Cildydd gaped at me. ‘Then what do we do?’ he finally asked.
‘Go to Glevum,’ I said.
‘But the city!’ He blanched. ‘There are merchants, goldsmiths, churches, treasures.’ His voice tailed away as he imagined the enormity of the city’s fall, but that fall, if the Saxons came, was inevitable. Aquae Sulis was no garrison city, just a beautiful place that stood in a bowl of hills. Cildydd blinked in the rain. ‘Glevum,’ he said glumly. ‘And you’ll escort us there, Lord?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m going to Corinium,’ I said, ‘but you go to Glevum.’ I was half tempted to send Argante, Guinevere, Ceinwyn and the families with him, but I did not trust Cildydd to protect them. Better, I decided, to take the women and families north myself, then send them under a small escort from Corinium to Glevum.
But at least Argante was taken from my hands, for as I was brutally destroying Cildydd’s slim hopes of garrisoning Aquae Sulis a troop of armoured horsemen clattered into the temple precinct. They were Arthur’s men, flying his banner of the bear, and they were led by Balin who was roundly cursing the press of refugees. He looked relieved when he saw me, then astonished as he recognized Guinevere. ‘Did you bring the wrong Princess, Derfel?’ he asked as he slid off his tired horse.
‘Argante’s inside the temple,’ I said, jerking my head towards the great building where Argante had taken refuge from the rain. She had not spoken to me all day.
‘I’m to take her to Arthur,’ Balin said. He was a bluff, bearded man with the tattoo of a bear on his forehead and a jagged white scar on his left cheek. I asked him for news and he told me what little he knew and none of it was good. ‘The bastards are coming down the Thames,’ he said, ‘we reckon they’re only three days’ march from Corinium, and there’s no sign of Cuneglas or Oengus yet. It’s chaos, Derfel, that’s what it is, chaos.’ He shuddered suddenly. ‘What’s the stink here?’
‘The sewers are backing up,’ I said.
‘All over Dumnonia,’ he said grimly. ‘I have to hurry,’ he went on, ‘Arthur wants his bride in Corinium the day before yesterday.’
‘Do you have orders for me?’ I called after him as he strode towards the temple steps.
‘Get yourself to Corinium! And hurry! And you’re to send what food you can!’ He shouted the last order as he disappeared through the temple’s great bronze doors. He had brought six spare horses, enough to saddle Argante, her maids and Fergal the Druid, which meant that the twelve men of Argante’s Blackshield escort were left with me. I sensed they were as glad as I was to be rid of their Princess. Balin rode north in the late afternoon. I had wanted to be on the road myself, but the children were tired, the rain was incessant, and Ceinwyn persuaded me that we would make better time if we all rested this night under Aquae Sulis’s roofs and marched fresh in the morning. I put guards on the bath-house and let the women and children go into the great steaming pool of hot water, then sent Issa and a score of men to hunt through the city for weapons to equip the levy. After that I sent for Cildydd and asked him how much food remained in the city. ‘Scarcely any, Lord!’ he insisted, claiming he had already sent sixteen wagons of grain, dried meat and salted fish north.
‘You searched folk’s houses?’ I asked. ‘The churches?’
‘Only the city granaries, Lord.’
‘Then let’s make a proper search,’ I suggested, and by dusk we had collected seven more wagonloads of precious supplies. I sent the wagons north that same evening, despite the lateness of the hour. Ox-carts are slow and it was better that they should start the journey at dusk than wait for the morning.
Issa waited for me in the temple precinct. His search of the city had yielded seven old swords and a dozen boar spears, while Cildydd’s men had turned up fifteen more spears, eight of them broken, but Issa also had news. ‘There’s said to be weapons hidden in the temple, Lord,’ he told me.
‘Who says?’
Issa gestured at a young bearded man who was dressed in a butcher’s bloody apron. ‘He reckons a hoard of spears was hidden in the temple after the rebellion, but the priest denies it.’
‘Where’s the priest?’
‘Inside, Lord. He told me to get out when I questioned him.’
I ran up the temple steps and through the big doors. This had once been a shrine to Minerva and Sulis, the first a Roman and the second a British Goddess, but the pagan deities had been ejected and the Christian God installed. When I had last been in the temple there had been a great bronze statue of Minerva attended by flickering oil lamps, but the statue had been destroyed during the Christian rebellion and now only the Goddess’s hollow head remained, and that had been impaled on a pole to stand as a trophy behind the Christian altar.
The priest challenged me. ‘This is a house of God!’ he roared. He was celebrating a mystery at his altar, surrounded by weeping women, but he broke off his ceremonies to face me. He was a young man, full of passion, one of those priests who had stirred up the trouble in Dumnonia and whom Arthur had allowed to live so that the bitterness of the failed rebellion would not fester. This priest, however, had clearly lost none of his insurgent fervour. ‘A house of God!’ he shouted again, ‘and you defile it with sword and spear! Would you carry your weapons into your lord’s hall? So why carry them into my Lord’s house?’
‘In a week,’ I said, ‘it will be a temple of Thunor and they’ll be sacrificing your children where you stand. Are there spears here?’
‘None!’ he said defiantly. The women screamed and shrank away as I climbed the altar steps. The priest held a cross towards me. ‘In the name of God,’ he said, ‘and in the name of His holy Son, and in the name of the Holy Ghost. No!’ This last cry was because I had drawn Hywelbane and used her to strike the cross out of his hand. The scrap of wood skittered across the temple’s marble floor as I rammed the blade into his tangled beard. ‘I’ll pull this place down stone by stone to find the spears,’ I said, ‘and bury your miserable carcass under its rubble. Now where are they?’
His defiance crumpled. The spears, which he had been hoarding in hope of another campaign to put a Christian on Dumnonia’s throne, were concealed in a crypt beneath the altar. The entrance to the crypt was hidden, for it was a place where the treasures donated by folk seeking Sulis’s healing power had once been concealed, but the frightened priest showed us how to lift the marble slab to reveal a pit crammed with gold and weapons. We left the gold, but carried the spears out to Cildydd’s levy. I doubted the sixty men would be of any real use in battle, but at least a man armed with a spear looked like a warrior and, from a distance, they might give the Saxons pause. I told the levy to be ready to march in the morning and to pack as much food as they could find.