‘A dying dog would deserve more attention.’
‘Then what?’
He grimaced at my obtuseness. ‘They will remember, Derfel, that the cross was carried on your shields. Today, you fool, we gave Britain to the Christians, and I was the one who gave it to them. I gave Arthur his ambition, but the price, Derfel, was mine. Do you understand now?’
‘Yes, Lord.’
‘And so I made Nimue’s task a great deal harder. But she will try, Derfel, and she is not like me. She is not weak. There is a hardness inside Nimue, such a hardness.’
I smiled. ‘She will not kill Gwydre,’ I said confidently, ‘for neither Arthur nor I will let her, and she won’t be given Excalibur, so how can she win?’
He gazed at me. ‘Do you think, idiot, that either you or Arthur are strong enough to resist Nimue? She is a woman, and what women want, they get, and if the world and all it holds must be broken in the getting, then so be it. She’ll break me first, then turn her eye on you. Isn’t that the truth, my young prophet?’ he asked Taliesin, but the bard had closed his eyes. Merlin shrugged. ‘I shall take her Gawain’s ashes, and give her what help I can,’ he said, ‘because I promised her that. But it will all end in tears, Derfel, it will all end in tears. What a mess I have made. What a terrible mess.’ He pulled his cloak about his shoulders. ‘I shall sleep now,’ he announced.
Beyond the fire the Blackshields raped their captives and I sat staring into the flames. I had helped win a great victory, and was inexpressibly sad.
I did not see Arthur that night and met him only briefly in the misty half-light just before the dawn. He greeted me with all his old vivacity, throwing an arm about my shoulders. ‘I want to thank you,’ he said,
‘for looking after Guinevere these last weeks.’ He was in his full armour and was making a hasty breakfast from a mildewed loaf of bread.
‘If anything,’ I said, ‘Guinevere looked after me.’
‘The wagons, you mean! I do wish I’d seen it!’ He threw down the bread as Hygwydd, his servant, led Llamrei out of the gloom. ‘I might see you tonight, Derfel,’ Arthur said as he let Hygwydd heave him up into the saddle, ‘or maybe tomorrow.’
‘Where are you going, Lord?’
‘After Cerdic, of course.’ He settled himself on Llamrei’s back, gathered her reins and took his shield and spear from Hygwydd. He kicked back his heels, going to join his horsemen who were shadowy shapes in the mist. Mordred was also riding with Arthur, no longer under guard, but accepted as a useful soldier in his own right. I watched him curb his horse and remembered the Saxon gold I had found in Lindinis. Had Mordred betrayed us? If he had I could not prove it, and the battle’s result negated his treachery, but I still felt a pang of hatred for my King. He caught my malevolent gaze and turned his horse away. Arthur shouted his men on and I listened to the thunder of their departing hoofs. I stirred my sleeping men awake with the butt of a spear and ordered them to find Saxon captives to dig more graves and build more funeral pyres. I believed I would spend my own day doing that weary business, but in mid-morning Sagramor sent a messenger begging me to bring a detachment of spearmen to Aquae Sulis where trouble had broken out. The disturbances had begun with a rumour among Tewdric’s spearmen that Cerdic’s treasury had been discovered and that Arthur was keeping it all for himself. Their proof was Arthur’s disappearance and their revenge was a proposal to pull down the city’s central shrine because it had once been a pagan temple. I managed to calm that frenzy by announcing that two chests of gold had indeed been discovered, but that they were under guard and their contents would be fairly shared once Arthur returned. At Tewdric’s suggestion we sent a half-dozen of his soldiers to help guard the chests, which were still in the remnants of Cerdic’s encampment. The Christians of Gwent calmed down, but then the spearmen of Powys made new trouble by blaming Oengus mac Airem for Cuneglas’s death. The enmity between Powys and Demetia went back a long way, for Oengus mac Airem was famously fond of raiding his richer neighbour’s harvest; indeed, Powys was known in Demetia as ‘our larder’, but this day it was the men of Powys who picked the quarrel by insisting that Cuneglas would never have died if the Blackshields had not come late to the battle. The Irish have never been reluctant to join a fight, and no sooner were Tewdric’s men placated than there was a clash of swords and spears outside the law courts as Powysians and Blackshields met in a bloody skirmish. Sagramor brought an uneasy peace by the simple expedient of killing the leaders of both factions, but throughout the rest of that day there was trouble between the two nations. The discord grew worse when it was learned that Tewdric had sent a detachment of soldiers to occupy Lactodu-rum, a northern fortress that had not been in British hands for a lifetime, but which the leaderless men of Powys claimed had always been in their territory, not Gwent’s, and a hastily raised band of Powysian spearmen set off after Tewdric’s men to challenge their claim. The Blackshields, who had no dog in the Lactodurum fight, nevertheless insisted that the men of Gwent were right, only because they knew that opinion would infuriate the Powysians, and so there were more battles. They were deadly brawls about a town of which most of the combatants had never heard and which might, anyway, still be garrisoned by the Saxons. We Dumnonians managed to avoid those battles, and so it was our spearmen who guarded the streets and thus confined the fighting to the taverns, but in the afternoon we were dragged into the disputes when Argante and a score of attendants arrived from Glevum to discover that Guinevere had occupied the bishop’s house that was built behind the temple of Minerva. The bishop’s palace was not the largest or most comfortable in Aquae Sulis, that distinction belonged to the palace of Cildydd, the magistrate, but Lancelot had used Cildydd’s house while he was in Aquae Sulis and for that reason Guinevere avoided it. Argante nevertheless insisted that she should have the bishop’s house, for it was within the sacred enclosure, and an enthusiastic party of Blackshields went to evict Guinevere, only to be met by a score of my men intent on defending her. Two men died before Guinevere announced that she did not care what house sheltered her and moved to the priests’ chambers that were built alongside the great baths. Argante, victorious in that encounter, declared that Guinevere’s new quarters were fitting, for she claimed that the priests’ chambers had once been a brothel, and Argante’s Druid, Fergal, led a crowd of Blackshields to the bath-house where they amused themselves by demanding to know the brothel’s prices and shouting for Guinevere to show them her body. Another contingent of Blackshields had occupied the temple and thrown out the hastily erected cross that Tewdric had placed above the altar, and scores of red-robed spearmen of Gwent were gathering to fight their way inside and replace the cross.
Sagramor and I brought spearmen to the sacred enclosure which, in the late afternoon, promised to become a bloodbath. My men guarded the temple doors, Sagramor’s protected Guinevere, but we were both outnumbered by the drunken warriors from Demetia and Gwent, while the Powysians, glad to have a cause with which they could annoy the Blackshields, shouted their support for Guinevere. I pushed through the mead-sodden crowd, clubbing down the most raucous troublemakers, but I feared the violence that grew ever more menacing as the sun sank. It was Sagramor who finally brought an uneasy peace to the evening. He climbed to the bath-house roof and there, standing tall between two statues, he roared for silence. He had stripped himself to the waist so that, contrasted with the white marble of the warriors on either side, his black skin was all the more striking. ‘If any of you have an argument,’ he announced in his curiously accented British, ‘you will have it with me first. Man to man! Sword or spear, take your pick.’ He drew his long curved sword and glared at the angry men below.