Those war-bands made their assault on a summer afternoon, late on a falling tide. They came in a great swarm of leather-armoured men, iron-helmeted, with wooden shields held high. They crossed the causeway, leaped off its end and climbed the gentle slope of sand towards the city gate. The leading attackers carried a huge log as a battering ram, its end fire-hardened and sheathed in leather, while the men who followed brought long ladders. One horde came and threw their ladders against our walls. “Let them climb!” Culhwch bellowed at our soldiers. He waited until one ladder held five men then hurled a huge boulder straight down between its uprights. The Franks screamed as they were plucked off the rungs. An arrow glanced off Culhwch's helmet as he hurled another stone. More arrows rattled on the wall or hissed over our heads while a rain of light throwing spears clattered uselessly against the stone. The Franks were a churning dark mass at the wall's foot into which we hurled rocks and sewage. Cavan managed to lift one ladder clean over the wall and we broke it into scraps that we rained down on our attackers. Four of our women struggled to the rampart with a fluted stone column taken from a city doorway and we heaved it over the wall and took pleasure in the terrible screams of the men it crushed.
“This is how the darkness comes!” Galahad shouted at me. He was exultant; fighting the last battle and spitting in death's eye. He waited for a Frank to reach a ladder's top, then gave a mighty slash with his sword so that the man's head bounded off down to the sand. The rest of the dead man's corpse stayed clinging to the ladder, obstructing the Franks behind who became easy targets for our stones. We were breaking down the store-house wall now to make our ammunition and we were winning the fight too, for fewer and fewer Franks dared try to climb the ladders. Instead they retreated from the wall's base and we jeered at them, told them they had been beaten by women, but if they attacked again we would wake our warriors to the fight. Whether they understood our taunts I cannot tell, but they hung back, fearful of our de fences The main attack still seethed at the gate where the sound of the battering ram's pounding head was like a giant drum sickening the whole bay.
The sun stretched the shadows of the bay's western headland long across the sand while high pink clouds made bars across the sky. Gulls flew to their roosts. Our two wounded men had gone to empty our boat of stones I hoped no Franks had reached that far about the island to discover the craft yet I did not think we would even need it. Evening was falling and the tide was rising so that soon the water would drive the attackers back to the causeway, then back to their encampments and we would celebrate a famous victory.
But then we heard the battle roar of cheering men from beyond the city's gate and we saw our defeated Franks run from before our wall to join that distant assault and we knew the city was lost. Later, talking to survivors, we discovered that the Franks had succeeded in climbing the harbour's stone quay and now they were swarming into the city.
And so the screaming began.
Galahad and I took twenty men across our nearest barricade. Women were running towards us, but seeing us they panicked and tried to climb the granite hill. Culhwch stayed to guard our wall and to protect our retreat to the boat as the first smoke of a defeated city curled into the evening sky. We ran behind the main gate's defenders, turned down a flight of stone steps and there saw the enemy scrambling like rats into a granary. Hundreds of enemy spearmen were flooding up from the quay. Their bull-horn standards were advancing everywhere, their drums were beating while the women trapped in the city's houses were shrieking. Off to our left, at the harbour's far side where only a few attackers had gained a lodgement, a surge of white-cloaked spearmen suddenly appeared. Bors, Lancelot's cousin and the commander of the palace guard, was leading a counter-attack and for a moment I thought he would turn the day and seal off the invaders' retreat, but instead of assaulting along the quay Bors led his men to the sea-steps where a fleet of small boats waited to take them all to safety. I saw Prince Lancelot hurrying amid the guard, bringing his mother by the hand and leading a clutch of panicking courtiers. The fili were fleeing the doomed city.
Galahad cut down two men trying to climb the steps, then I saw the street behind us fill with dark-cloaked Franks. “Back!” I shouted, and hauled Galahad away from the alley.
“Let me fight!” He tried to pull away from me and face the next two men coming up the narrow stone steps.
“Live, you fool.” I pushed him behind me, feinted left with my spear, then brought it up and rammed its blade into a Frank's face. I let go of the shaft, took the second man's spear thrust on my shield while I drew Hywelbane, then I gave the low jab under the shield's edge that sent the man screaming to the steps with blood welling between hands that cupped his groin. “You know how to get us safe through the city!” I shouted at Galahad. I abandoned my spear as I pushed him back from the battle-maddened enemies who were surging up the steps. There was a potter's shop at the head of the steps and despite the siege the shopkeeper's wares were still displayed on trestle tables under a canvas awning. I tipped a table full of jugs and vases into the attackers' path, then ripped down the awning and hurled it into their faces.
“Lead us!” I screamed. There were alleys and gardens that only Ynys Trebes's inhabitants knew, and we would need such secret paths if we were to escape.
The invaders had broken through the main gate now to cut us off from Culhwch and his men. Galahad led us uphill, turned left into a short tunnel that ran beneath a temple, then across a garden and up to a wall that edged a rain cistern. Beneath us the city writhed in horror. The victorious Franks broke down doors to take revenge for their dead left on the sand. Children wailed and were silenced by swords. I watched one Prankish warrior, a huge man with horns on his helmet, cut down four trapped defenders with an axe. More smoke poured up from houses. The city might have been built of stone, but there was plenty of furniture, boat-pitch and timber roofs to feed a maniacal fire. Out at sea, where the incoming tide swirled across the sandbanks, I could see Lancelot's winged helmet bright in one of the three escaping boats, while above me, pink in the setting sun, the graceful palace waited for its last moments. The evening breeze snatched at the grey smoke and softly billowed a white curtain that hung in a shadowed palace window.
“Over here!” Galahad called, pointing to a narrow path. “Follow the path to our boat!” Our men ran for their lives. “Come on, Derfel!” he called to me.
But I did not move. I was staring up the steep hill.
“Come on, Derfel!” Galahad insisted.
But I was hearing a voice in my head. It was an old man's voice; a dry, sardonic and unfriendly voice, and the sound of it would not let me move.
“Come on, Derfel!” Galahad screamed.
“I put my life in your hands,” the old man had said, and suddenly he spoke again inside my skull. “I lay my life on your conscience, Derfel of Dumnonia.”
“How do I reach the palace?” I called to Galahad.
“Palace?”
“How!” I shouted angrily.
“This way,” he said, 'this way!"
We climbed.
The Bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.
I have been fortunate in friends. Arthur was one, but of all my friends there was never another like Galahad. There were times when we understood each other without speaking and others when words tumbled out for hours. We shared everything except women. I cannot count the number of times we stood shoulder to shoulder in the shield-wall or the number of times we divided our last morsel of food. Men took us for brothers and we thought of ourselves in the same way. And on that broken evening, as the city smouldered into fire beneath us, Galahad understood I could not be taken to the waiting boat. He knew I was in the hold of some imperative, some message from the Gods that made me climb desperately towards the serene palace crowning Ynys Trebes. All around us horror flooded up the hill, but we stayed ahead of it, running desperately across a church roof, jumping down to an alley where we pushed through a crowd of fugitives who believed the church would give them sanctuary, then up a flight of stone steps and so to the main street that circled Ynys Trebes. There were Franks running towards us, competing to be the first into Ban's palace, but we were ahead of them along with a pitiful handful of people who had escaped the slaughter in the lower town and were now seeking a hopeless refuge in the hilltop dwelling.