‘He has no claim, none! None!’ Meurig squeaked angrily. ‘His father, need I remind you, is a bastard!’
‘As am I, Lord King,’ I intervened.
Meurig ignored that. ‘ “A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord”!’ he insisted. ‘It is written thus in the scriptures. Is that not so, Bishop?’
‘ “Even to the tenth generation the bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord”, Lord King,’ Lladarn intoned, then crossed himself. ‘Praise be for His wisdom and guidance, Lord King.’
‘There!’ Meurig said as though his whole argument was thus proved.
I smiled. ‘Lord King,’ I pointed out gently, ‘if we were to deny kingship to the descendants of bastards, we would have no Kings.’
He stared at me with pale, bulging eyes, trying to determine whether I had insulted his own lineage, but he must have decided against picking a quarrel. ‘Gwydre is a young man,’ he said instead, ‘and no son of a King. The Saxons grow stronger and Powys is ill-ruled. Britain lacks leaders, Lord Derfel, it lacks strong Kings!’
‘We daily chant hosannas because your own dear self proves the opposite, Lord King,’ Lladarn said oilily.
I thought the Bishop’s flattery was nothing more than a polite rejoinder, the sort of meaningless phrase courtiers ever utter to Kings, but Meurig took it as gospel truth. ‘Precisely!’ the King said enthusiastically, then gazed at me with open eyes as if expecting me to echo the Bishop’s sentiments.
‘Who,’ I asked instead, ‘would you like to see on Dumnonia’s throne, Lord King?’
His sudden and rapid blinking showed that he was discomfited by the question. The answer was obvious: Meurig wanted the throne for himself. He had half-heartedly tried to gain it before Mynydd Baddon, and his insistence that Gwent’s army would not help Arthur fight the Saxons unless Arthur renounced his own power had been a shrewd effort to weaken Dumnonia’s throne in the hope that it might one day fall vacant, but now, at last, he saw his opportunity, though he dared not announce his own candidacy openly until definite news of Mordred’s death reached Britain. ‘I will support,’ he said instead,
‘whichever candidate shows themselves to be a disciple of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘I can do no other, for I serve Almighty God.’
‘Praise Him!’ the Bishop said hurriedly.
‘And I am reliably informed, Lord Derfel,’ Meurig went on earnestly, ‘that the Christians in Dumnonia cry out for a good Christian ruler. Cry out!’
‘And who informs you of their cry, Lord King?’ I asked in a voice so acid that poor Peredur looked alarmed. Meurig gave no answer, but nor did I expect one from him, so I supplied it myself. ‘Bishop Sansum?’ I suggested, and saw from Meurig’s indignant expression that I was right.
‘Why should you think that Sansum has anything to say in this matter?’ Meurig demanded, red-faced.
‘Sansum comes from Gwent, does he not, Lord King?’ I asked and Meurig blushed still more deeply, making it obvious that Sansum was indeed plotting to put Meurig on Dumnonia’s throne, and Meurig, Sansum could be sure, would be certain to reward Sansum with yet more power. ‘But I don’t think the Christians of Dumnonia need your protection, Lord King,’ I went on, ‘nor Sansum’s. Gwydre, like his father, is a friend to your faith.’
‘A friend! Arthur, a friend to Christ!’ Bishop Lladarn snapped at me. ‘There are pagan shrines in Siluria, beasts are sacrificed to the old Gods, women dance naked under the moon, infants are passed through the fire, Druids babble!’ Spittle sprayed from the Bishop’s mouth as he tallied this list of iniquities.
‘Without the blessings of Christ’s rule,’ Meurig leaned towards me, ‘there can be no peace.’
‘There can be no peace, Lord King,’ I said directly, ‘while two men want the same kingdom. What would you have me tell my son-in-law?’
Again Meurig was unsettled by my directness. He fiddled with an oyster shell while he considered his answer, then shrugged. ‘You may assure Gwydre that he will have land, honour, rank and my protection,’ he said, blinking rapidly, ‘but I will not see him made King of Dumnonia.’ He actually blushed as he spoke the last words. He was a clever man, Meurig, but a coward at heart and it must have taken a great effort for him to have expressed himself so bluntly. Maybe he feared my anger, but I gave him a courteous reply. ‘I shall tell him, Lord King,’ I said, though in truth the message was not for Gwydre, but for Arthur. Meurig was not only declaring his own bid to rule Dumnonia, but warning Arthur that Gwent’s formidable army would oppose Gwydre’s candidacy.
Bishop Lladarn leaned towards Meurig and spoke in an urgent whisper. He used Latin, confident that neither Galahad nor I would understand him, but Galahad spoke the language and half heard what was being said. ‘You’re planning to keep Arthur penned inside Siluria?’ he accused Lladarn in British. Lladarn blushed. As well as being the Bishop of Burrium, Lladarn was the King’s chief counsellor and thus a man of power. ‘My King,’ he said, bowing his head in Meurig’s direction, ‘cannot allow Arthur to move spearmen through Gwent’s territory.’
‘Is that true, Lord King?’ Galahad asked politely.
‘I am a man of peace,’ Meurig blustered, ‘and one way to secure peace is to keep spearmen at home.’
I said nothing, fearing that my anger would only make me blurt out some insult that would make things worse. If Meurig insisted that we could not move spearmen across his roads then he would have succeeded in dividing the forces that would support Gwydre. It meant that Arthur could not march to join Sagramor, nor Sagramor to join Arthur, and if Meurig could keep their forces divided then he would most likely be the next King of Dumnonia.
‘But Meurig won’t fight,’ Galahad said scornfully as we rode down the river towards Isca the next day. The willows were hazed with their first hint of spring leaves, but the day itself was a reminder of winter with a cold wind and drifting mists.
‘He might,’ I said, ‘if the prize is large enough.’ And the prize was huge, for if Meurig ruled both Gwent and Dumnonia then he would control the richest part of Britain. ‘It will depend,’ I said, ‘on how many spears oppose him.’
‘Yours, Issa’s, Arthur’s, Sagramor’s,’ Galahad said.
‘Maybe five hundred men?’ I said, ‘and Sagramor’s are a long way away, and Arthur’s would have to cross Gwent’s territory to reach Dumnonia. And how many men does Meurig command? A thousand?’
‘He won’t risk war,’ Galahad insisted. ‘He wants the prize, but he’s terrified of the risk.’ He had stopped his horse to watch a man fishing from a coracle in the centre of the river. The fisherman cast his hand net with a careless skill and, while Galahad was admiring the fisherman’s dexterity, I was weighting each cast with an omen. If this throw yields a salmon, I told myself, then Mordred will die. The throw did bring up a big struggling fish, and then I thought that the augury was a nonsense, for all of us would die, and so I told myself that the next cast must net a fish if Mordred was to die before Beltain. The net came up empty and I touched the iron of Hywelbane’s hilt. The fisherman sold us a part of his catch and we pushed the salmon into our saddlebags and rode on. I prayed to Mithras that my foolish omen was misleading, then prayed that Galahad was right, and that Meurig would never dare commit his troops. But for Dumnonia? Rich Dumnonia? That was worth a risk, even for a cautious man like Meurig. Weak kings are a curse on the earth, yet our oaths are made to kings, and if we had no oaths we would have no law, and if we had no law we would have mere anarchy, and so we must bind ourselves with the law, and keep the law by oaths, and if a man could change kings at whim then he could abandon his oaths with his inconvenient king, and so we need kings because we must have an immutable law. All that is true, yet as Galahad and I rode home through the wintry mists I could have wept that the one man who should have been a king would not be one, and that those who should never have been kings all were.