For a few heartbeats I ignored him, looking about the blood-soaked compound in a wild hope that there might still be some means of escape, but we were ringed by the horsemen who waited with spears and swords for the order to kill us. ‘Who are you?’ I asked the man in the decorated helmet. For answer he simply turned back his cheekpieces. Then smiled at me. It was not a pleasant smile, but nor was he was a pleasant man. I was staring at Amhar, one of Arthur’s twin sons. ‘Amhar ap Arthur,’ I greeted him, then spat.
‘Prince Amhar,’ he corrected me. Like his brother Loholt, Amhar had ever been bitter about his illegitimate birth and he must now have decided to adopt the title of Prince even though his father was no king. It would have been a pathetic pretension had not Amhar changed so much since my last brief glimpse of him on the slopes of Mynydd Baddon. He looked older and much more formidable. His beard was fuller, a scar had flecked his nose and his breastplate was scored with a dozen spear strikes. Amhar, it seemed to me, had grown up on the battlefields of Armorica, but maturity had not decreased his sullen resentment. ‘I have not forgotten your insults at Mynydd Baddon,’ he told me, ‘and have longed for the day when I could repay them. But my brother, I think, will be even more pleased to see you.’ It had been I who had held Loholt’s arm while Arthur struck off his hand.
‘Where is your brother?’ I asked.
‘With our King.’
‘And your King is who?’ I asked. I knew the answer, but wanted it confirmed.
‘The same as yours, Derfel,’ Amhar said. ‘My dear cousin, Mordred.’ And where else, I thought, would Amhar and Loholt have gone after the defeat at Mynydd Baddon? Like so many other masterless men of Britain they had sought refuge with Mordred, who had welcomed every desperate sword that came to his banner. And how Mordred must have loved having Arthur’s sons on his side!
‘The King lives?’ I asked.
‘He thrives!’ Amhar said. ‘His Queen sent money to Clovis, and Clovis preferred to take her gold than to fight us.’ He smiled and gestured at his men. ‘So here we are, Derfel. Come to finish what we began this morning.’
‘I shall have your soul for what you did to these folk,’ I said, gesturing with Hywelbane at the blood that still lay black in Dun Caric’s yard.
‘What you will have, Derfel,’ Amhar said, leaning forward on his saddle, ‘is what I, my brother and our cousin decide to give you.’
I stared up at him defiantly. ‘I have served your cousin loyally.’
Amhar smiled. ‘But I doubt he wants your services any more.’
‘Then I shall leave his country,’ I said.
‘I think not,’ Amhar said mildly. ‘I think my King would like to meet you one last time, and I know my brother is eager to have words with you.’
‘I would rather leave,’ I said.
‘No,’ Amhar insisted. ‘You will come with me. Put the sword down.’
‘You must take it, Amhar.’
‘If I must,’ he said, and did not seem worried by the prospect, but why should he have been worried? He outnumbered us, and at least half my men had neither shields nor spears. I turned to my men. ‘If you wish to surrender,’ I told them, ‘then step out of the ring. But as for me, I will fight.’ Two of my unarmed men took a hesitant step forward, but Eachern snarled at them and they froze. I waved them away. ‘Go,’ I said sadly. ‘I don’t want to cross the bridge of swords with unwilling companions.’ The two men walked away, but Amhar just nodded to his horsemen and they surrounded the pair, swung their swords and more blood flowed on Dun Caric’s summit. ‘You bastard!’ I said, and ran at Amhar, but he just twitched his reins and spurred his horse out of my reach, and while he evaded me his men spurred in towards my spearmen.
It was another slaughter, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. Eachern killed one of Amhar’s men, but while his spear was still fixed in that man’s belly, another horseman cut Eachern down from behind. The rest of my men died just as swiftly. Amhar’s spearmen were merciful in that, at least. They did not let my men’s souls linger, but chopped and stabbed with a ferocious energy. I knew little of it, for while I pursued Amhar one of his men spurred behind me and gave me a huge blow across the back of my head. I fell, my head reeling in a black fog shot through with streaks of light. I remember falling to my knees, then a second blow struck my helmet and I thought I must be dying. But Amhar wanted me alive, and when I recovered my wits I found myself lying on one of Dun Caric’s dung-heaps with my wrists tied with rope and Hywelbane’s scabbard hanging at Amhar’s waist. My armour had been taken, and a thin gold torque stolen from around my neck, but Amhar and his men had not found Ceinwyn’s brooch that was still safely pinned beneath my jerkin. Now they were busy sawing off the heads of my spearmen with their swords. ‘Bastard,’ I spat the insult at Amhar, but he just grinned and turned back to his grisly work. He chopped through Eachern’s spine with Hywelbane, then gripped the head by the hair and tossed it onto the pile of heads that were being gathered into a cloak. ‘A fine sword,’ he told me, balancing Hywelbane in his hand.
‘Then use it to send me to the Otherworld.’
‘My brother would never forgive me for showing such mercy,’ he said, then he cleaned Hywelbane’s blade on his ragged cloak and thrust it into the scabbard. He beckoned three of his men forward, then drew a small knife from his belt. ‘At Mynydd Baddon,’ he said, facing me, ‘you called me a bastard cur and a worm-ridden puppy. Do you think I am a man to forget insults?’
‘The truth is ever memorable,’ I told him, though I had to force the defiance into my voice for my soul was in terror.
‘Your death will certainly be memorable,’ Amhar said, ‘but for the moment you must be content with the attentions of a barber.’ He nodded at his men.
I fought them, but with my hands bound and my head still throbbing, there was little I could do to resist them. Two men held me fast against the dung-heap while the third gripped my head by the hair as Amhar, his right knee braced against my chest, cut off my beard. He did it crudely, slicing into the skin with each stroke, and he tossed the cut hanks of hair to one of his grinning men who teased the strands apart and wove them into a short rope. Once the rope was finished it was made into a noose that was put about my neck. It was the supreme insult to a captured warrior, the humiliation of having a slave’s leash made from his own beard. They laughed at me when it was done, then Amhar hauled me to my feet by tugging on the beard-leash. ‘We did the same to Issa,’ he said.
‘Liar,’ I retorted feebly.
‘And made his wife watch,’ Amhar said with a smile, ‘then made him watch while we dealt with her. They’re both dead now.’
I spat in his face, but he just laughed at me. I had called him a liar, but I believed him. Mordred, I thought, had worked his return to Britain so efficiently. He had spread the tale of his imminent death, and all the while Argante had been shipping her hoarded gold to Clovis, and Clovis, thus purchased, had let Mordred go free. And Mordred had sailed to Dumnonia and was now killing his enemies. Issa was dead, and I did not doubt that most of his spearmen, and the spearmen I had left in Dumnonia, had died with him. I was a prisoner. Only Sagramor remained.
They tied my beard-leash to the tail of Amhar’s horse, then marched me southwards. Amhar’s forty spearmen formed a mocking escort, laughing whenever I stumbled. They dragged Gwydre’s banner through the mud from the tail of another horse.
They took me to Caer Cadarn, and once there they threw me into a hut. It was not the hut in which we had imprisoned Guinevere so many years before, but a much smaller one with a low door through which I had to crawl, helped by the boots and spear staves of my captors. I scrambled into the hut’s shadows and there saw another prisoner, a man brought from Durnovaria whose face was red from weeping. For a moment he did not recognize me without my beard, but then he gasped in astonishment. ‘Derfel?’