“So he can fly away,” Cavan, my dour Irishman, commented sourly. Lancelot convened a council of war in the high, wind-kissed chamber next to Ban's library. It was low tide and the sea had fled from the bay's sandbanks where groups of Franks were trying to find a safe path to the city. Galahad had planted false wit hies all across the bay, trying to lead the enemy into quicksands or else on to firm banks that would be the first to be cut off when the tide turned and seethed across the bay. Lancelot, his back to the enemy, told us his strategy. His father sat on one side of him, his mother on the other, and both nodded at their son's wisdom.
The defence of Ynys Trebes was simple, Lancelot announced. All we needed to do was hold the island's walls. Nothing else. The Franks had few boats, they could not fly, so they must walk to Ynys Trebes and that was a journey they could only make at low tide and after they had discovered the safe route across the tidal plain. Once at the city they would be tired and never able to scale the stone walls. “Hold the walls,” Lancelot said, 'and we stay safe. Boats can supply us. Ynys Trebes need never fall!"
“True! True!” King Ban said, cheered by his son's optimism.
“How much food do we have?” Culhwch growled the question. Lancelot gave him a pitying look. “The sea,” he said, 'is full of fish. They're the shiny things, Lord Culhwch, with tails and fins. You eat them."
“I didn't know,” Culhwch said straight-faced, “I've been too busy killing Franks.” A murmur of laughter went through some of the warriors summoned to the meeting. A dozen of them, like us, had been fighting on the mainland, but the remainder were intimates of Prince Lancelot and had been newly promoted into captains for this siege. Bors, Lancelot's cousin, was Benoic's champion and commander of the palace guard. He, at least, had seen some fighting and had earned a reputation as a warrior, though now, sprawling long-legged in a Roman uniform and with his black hair, like his cousin Lancelot's, oiled flat against his skull, he looked jaded.
“How many spears do we have?” I asked.
Lancelot had ignored me till then. I knew he had not forgotten our meeting of two years before, but he nevertheless smiled at my question. “We have four hundred and twenty men under arms and each of them has a spear. Can you work out the answer?”
I returned the silky smile. “Spears break, Lord Prince, and men defending walls throw their spears like javelins. When four hundred and twenty spears are thrown, what do we throw next?”
“Poets,” Culhwch growled, luckily too softly for Ban to hear.
“There are spares,” Lancelot said airily, 'and besides, we shall use the spears the Franks throw at us."
“Poets, for sure,” Culhwch said.
“You spoke, Lord Culhwch?” Lancelot asked.
“I belched, Lord Prince. But while I have your gracious attention, do we have archers?”
“Some.”
“Many?”
“Ten.”
“The Gods help us,” Culhwch said and slid down in his chair. He hated chairs. Elaine spoke next, reminding us that the island was sheltering women, children and the world's greatest poets. “The safety of the fill is in your hands,” she told us, 'and you know what will happen to them if you fail." I kicked Culhwch to stop him from making a comment.
Ban stood and gestured towards his library. “Seven thousand, eight hundred and forty-three scrolls are in there,” he said solemnly, 'the accumulated treasures of human knowledge, and if the city falls, so will civilization.“ He then told us an ancient tale of a hero going into a labyrinth to kill a monster and trailing behind him a woollen thread with which he could find his way out of the darkness. ”My library,“ he finally explained the point of the long tale, 'is that thread. Lose it, gentlemen, and we stay in eternal darkness. So I beg you, I beg you, fight!” He paused, smiling. “And I have summoned help. Letters are gone to Broceliande and to Arthur, and I think the day is not far off when our horizon will be thick with friendly sails! And Arthur, remember, is oath-bound to help us!”
“Arthur,” Culhwch intervened, 'has his hands full of Saxons."
“An oath is an oath!” Ban said reprovingly.
Galahad enquired whether we planned to make our own raids on the Prankish encampments ashore. We could easily go by boat, he said, landing east or west of their positions, but Lancelot turned down the idea. “If we leave the walls,” he said, 'we die. It is that simple."
“No sallies?” Culhwch asked in disgust.
“If we leave the walls,” Lancelot repeated, 'we die. Your orders are simple: you stay behind the walls." He announced that Benoic's best warriors, a hundred veterans of the war on the mainland, would guard the main gate. We fifty surviving Dumnonians were given the western walls, while the city's levies, bolstered by fugitives from the mainland, guarded the rest of the island. Lancelot himself, with a company of the white-cloaked palace guard, would form the reserve that would watch the fighting from the palace and come down to intervene wherever their help was needed.
“Might as well call on the fairies,” Culhwch growled to me.
“Another belch?” Lancelot enquired.
“It's all the fish I eat, Lord Prince,” Culhwch said.
King Ban invited us to inspect his library before we left, perhaps wanting to impress us with the value of what we defended. Most of the men who had been at the council of war shuffled in, gaped at the pigeon-holed scrolls, then went to stare at the bare-breasted harpist who played in the library's antechamber. Galahad and I lingered longer among the books where the hump-backed Father Celwin was still bent over his old table where he was trying to keep his grey cat from playing with his quill. “Still working out the wingspan of angels, Father?” I asked him.
“Someone must,” he said, then turned to scowl at me with his one eye. “Who are you?”
“Derfel, Father, of Dumnonia. We met two years ago. I'm surprised you're still here.”
“Your surprise is of no interest to me, Derfel of Dumnonia. Besides, I did leave for a while. I went to Rome. Filthy place. I thought the Vandals might have cleaned it up, but the place is still full of priests and their plump little boys, so I came back here. Ban's harpists are much prettier than Rome's catamites.” He gave me an unfriendly look. “Do you care about my safety, Derfel of Dumnonia?” I could hardly answer no, though I was tempted to. “My job is to protect lives,” I said rather pretentiously, 'including yours, Father."
“Then I put my life in your hands, Derfel of Dumnonia,” he said as he turned his ugly face back to the table and pushed the cat away from his quill. “I lay my life on your conscience, Derfel of Dumnonia, and now you can go and fight and leave me to do something useful.” I tried to ask the priest about Rome, but he waved my questions away and so I went down to the storehouse on the western wall that would be our home for the rest of the siege. Galahad, who considered himself an honorary Dumnonian now, was with us and he and I tried to count the Franks who were retreating from the incoming tide after another attempt to discover the track across the sands. The bards, singing of Ynys Trebes's siege, say the enemy outnumbered the grains of sand in the bay. They were not quite that many, but still they were formidable. Every Prankish war-band in western Gaul had combined to help capture Ynys Trebes, the jewel of Armorica which, it was rumoured, was crammed with the treasures of Rome's fallen Empire. Galahad estimated we were faced by three thousand Franks, my guess was two thousand, while Lancelot assured us there were ten thousand. But by anyone's count there was a terrible lot of them.