‘Fight?’ Ceinwyn asked warily.
Arthur gave her a gentle smile. ‘I come to take Derfel away from you, my Lady.’
‘Bring him back to me, Lord,’ was all she said.
‘With riches enough for a kingdom,’ Arthur promised, but then he turned and looked at Cwm Isaf’s low walls and the bulging heap of thatch that kept us warm and the steaming dungheap that lay beyond the gable’s end. It was not as big as most farmhouses in Dumnonia, but it was still the kind of croft a prosperous freeman in Powys might own and we were fond of it. I thought Arthur was about to make some comment comparing my present humble state with my future wealth and I was ready to defend Cwm Isaf against such a comparison, but instead he looked rueful. ‘I do envy you this, Derfel.’
‘It’s yours for the taking, Lord,’ I said, hearing the yearning in his voice.
‘I am doomed to marble pillars and soaring pediments.’ He laughed the moment away. ‘I leave tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Cuneglas will follow within ten days. Would you come with him? Or earlier if you can. And bring as much food as you can carry.’
‘To where?’ I asked.
‘Corinium,’ he replied, then stood and gazed up the cwm before smiling down at me. ‘One last word?’ he requested.
‘I must be sure Scarach isn’t scalding the milk,’ Ceinwyn said, taking his broad hint. ‘I wish you victory, Lord,’ she said to Arthur, then stood to give him a parting embrace.
Arthur and I walked up the cwm where he admired the newly-pleached hedges, the trimmed apple trees and the small fish pool we had dammed into the stream. ‘Don’t become too rooted in this soil, Derfel,’ he told me. ‘I want you back in Dumnonia.’
‘Nothing would give me more pleasure, Lord,’ I said, knowing it was not Arthur who kept me from my homeland, but his wife and her ally Lancelot.
Arthur smiled, but said nothing more of my return. ‘Ceinwyn,’ he said instead, ‘seems very happy.’
‘She is. We are.’
He hesitated a second. ‘You might discover,’ he said with the authority of a new father, ‘that pregnancy will make her turbulent.’
‘Not so far, Lord,’ I said, ‘though these are early weeks.’
‘You are fortunate in her,’ he said softly, and looking back I think that was the very first time I ever heard him utter the faintest criticism of Guinevere. ‘Childbirth is a stressful time,’ he added in hasty explanation, ‘and these preparations for war don’t help. Alas, I can’t be at home as much as I’d like.’ He stopped beside an ancient oak that had been riven by lightning so that its fire-blackened trunk was split in two, though even now the old tree was struggling to put out new green shoots. ‘I have a favour to ask of you,’ he said softly.
‘Anything, Lord.’
‘Don’t be hasty, Derfel, you don’t know the favour yet.’ He paused, and I sensed the request would be hard for he was embarrassed to be making it. For a moment or two he could not make the request at all, but instead stared towards the woods on the southern side of the cwm and muttered something about deer and bluebells.
‘Bluebells?’ I asked, thinking I must have misheard him.
‘I was just wondering why deer never eat bluebells,’ he said evasively. ‘They eat everything else.’
‘I don’t know, Lord.’
He hesitated a heartbeat, then looked into my eyes. ‘I have asked for a gathering of Mithras at Corinium,’ he finally admitted.
I understood what was coming then and hardened my heart to it. War had given me many rewards, but none so precious as the fellowship of Mithras. He had been the Roman God of war and He had stayed in Britain when the Romans left; the only men admitted to His mysteries were those elected by his initiates. Those initiates came from every kingdom, and they fought against each other as often as they fought for each other, but when they met in Mithras’s hall they met in peace and they would only elect the bravest of the brave to be their fellows. To be an initiate of Mithras was to receive the praise of Britain’s finest warriors and it was an honour that I would not give lightly to any man. No women, of course, were permitted to worship Mithras. Indeed, if a woman even saw the mysteries she would be killed.
‘I have called the gathering,’ Arthur said, ‘because I want us to admit Lancelot to the mysteries.’ I had known that was the reason. Guinevere had made the same request of me the year before, and in the months that followed I had hoped her idea would fade away, but here, on the eve of war, it had returned.
I gave a politic answer. ‘Would it not be better, Lord,’ I asked, ‘if King Lancelot were to wait until the Saxons are defeated? Then, surely, we will have seen him fight.’ None of us had yet seen Lancelot in the shield-wall and, to be truthful, I would be astonished to see him fight in this coming summer, but I hoped the suggestion would delay the terrible moment of choice for a few further months.
Arthur offered a vague gesture as though my suggestion was somehow irrelevant. ‘There is pressure,’ he said vaguely, ‘to elect him now.’
‘What pressure?’ I asked.
‘His mother is unwell.’
I laughed. ‘Hardly a reason to elect a man to Mithras, Lord.’
Arthur scowled, knowing his arguments were feeble. ‘He is a King, Derfel,’ he said, ‘and he leads a King’s army to our wars. He doesn’t like Siluria, and I can’t blame him. He yearns for the poets and harpists and halls of Ynys Trebes, but he lost that kingdom because I could not fulfil my oath and bring my army to his father’s aid. We owe him, Derfel.’
‘Not me, Lord.’
‘We owe him,’ Arthur insisted.
‘He should still wait for Mithras,’ I said firmly. ‘If you propose his name now, Lord, then I dare say it will be rejected.’
He had feared I would say that, but still he did not abandon his arguments. ‘You are my friend,’ he said, and waved away any comment I might make, ‘and it would please me, Derfel, if my friend were as honoured in Dumnonia as he is in Powys.’ He had been staring down at the bole of the storm-blasted oak, but now he looked up at me. ‘I want you at Lindinis, friend, and if you, above all others, support Lancelot’s name in Mithras’s hall, then his election is assured.’
There was far more there than Arthur’s bare words had said. He was subtly confirming to me that it was Guinevere who was pressing Lancelot’s candidacy, and that my offences in Guinevere’s eyes would be forgiven if I granted her this one wish. Elect Lancelot to Mithras, he was saying, and I could take Ceinwyn to Dumnonia and assume the honour of being Mordred’s champion with all the wealth, land and rank which accompanied that high position.
I watched a group of my spearmen come down from the high northern hill. One of them was cradling a lamb, and I guessed it was an orphan that would need to be hand-fed by Ceinwyn. It was a laborious business, for the lamb would have to be nurtured on a cloth teat soaked in milk and as often as not the little things died, but Ceinwyn insisted on trying to save their lives. She had utterly forbidden any of her lambs to be buried in wicker or have their pelts nailed to a tree and the flock did not seem to have suffered as a result of that neglect. I sighed. ‘So at Corinium,’ I said, ‘you will propose Lancelot?’
‘Not I, no. Bors will propose him. Bors has seen him fight.’
‘Then let us hope, Lord, that Bors is given a tongue of gold.’
Arthur smiled. ‘You can give me no answer now?’
‘None that you would want to hear, Lord.’
He shrugged, took my arm and walked me back. ‘I do hate these secret guilds,’ he said mildly, and I believed him for I had never yet seen Arthur at a meeting of Mithras even though I knew he had been initiated many years before. ‘Cults like Mithras,’ he said, ‘are supposed to bind men together, but they only serve to drive them apart. They rouse envy. But sometimes, Derfel, you have to fight one evil with another and I am thinking of starting a new guild of warriors. Those men who bear arms against the Saxons will belong, all of them, and I shall make it the most honoured band in all Britain.’
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‘The largest too, I hope,’ I said.
‘Not the levies,’ he added, thus restricting his honoured band to those men who carried a spear by oath-duty rather than by land obligation. ‘Men will rather belong to my guild than to any secret mystery.’
‘What will you call it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. Warriors of Britain? The Comrades? The Spears of Cadarn?’ He spoke lightly, but I could tell he was serious.
‘And you think that if Lancelot belongs to these Warriors of Britain,’ I said, snatching one of his suggested titles, ‘then he won’t mind being barred from Mithras?’
‘It might help,’ he admitted, ‘but it isn’t my prime reason. I shall impose an obligation on these warriors. To join they will have to take a blood-oath never to fight each other again.’ He gave a swift smile. ‘If the Kings of Britain squabble then I shall make it impossible for their warriors to fight each other.’
‘Hardly impossible,’ I said tartly. ‘A royal oath supersedes all others, even your blood-oath.’
‘Then I shall make it difficult,’ he insisted, ‘because I shall have peace, Derfel, I shall have peace. And you, my friend, will share it with me in Dumnonia.’
‘I hope so, Lord.’
He embraced me. ‘I shall meet you in Corinium,’ he said. He raised a hand in greeting to my spearmen, then looked back to me. ‘Think about Lancelot, Derfel. And consider the truth that sometimes we must yield a little pride in return for a great peace.’
And with those words he strode away and I went to warn my men that the time for farming was over. We had spears to sharpen, swords to hone and shields to repaint, revarnish and bind hard. We were back at war.
We left two days before Cuneglas, who was waiting for his western chieftains to arrive with their rough-pelted warriors from Powys’s mountain fastnesses. He told me to promise Arthur that the men of Powys would be in Corinium within a week, then he embraced me and swore on his life that Ceinwyn would be safe. She was moving back to Caer Sws where a small band of men would guard Cuneglas’s family while he was at war. Ceinwyn had been reluctant to leave Cwm Isaf and rejoin the women’s hall where Helledd and her aunts ruled, but I remembered Merlin’s tale of a dog being killed and its skin draped on a crippled bitch in Guinevere’s temple of Isis, and so I pleaded with Ceinwyn to take refuge for my sake, and at last she relented.
I added six of my men to Cuneglas’s palace guard, and the rest, all Warriors of the Cauldron, marched south. All of us bore Ceinwyn’s five-pointed star on our shields, we carried two spears each, our swords, and had huge bundles of twice-baked bread, salted meat, hard cheese and dried fish strapped to our backs. It was good to be marching again, even though our route did take us through Lugg Vale where the dead had been unearthed by wild pigs so that the fields of the vale looked like a boneyard. I worried that the sight of the bones would remind Cuneglas’s men of their defeat, and so insisted that we spend a half day re-burying the corpses that had all had one foot chopped off before they were first buried. Not every dead man could be burned as we would have liked, so most of our dead we buried, but we took away one foot to stop the soul walking. Now we re-buried the one-footed dead, but even after that half day’s work there was still no disguising the butchery of the place. I paused in the work to visit the Roman shrine where my sword had killed the Druid Tanaburs and where Nimue had extinguished Gundleus’s soul, and there, on a floor still stained by their blood, I lay flat between the piles of cobwebbed skulls and prayed that I would return unwounded to my Ceinwyn.
We spent the next night at Magnis, a town that was a whole world away from fog-shrouded cauldrons and night-time tales of the Treasures of Britain. This was Gwent, Christian territory, and everything here was grim business. The blacksmiths were forging spearheads, the tanners were making shield covers, scabbards, belts and boots, while the town’s women were baking the hard, thin loaves that could keep for weeks on a campaign. King Tewdric’s men were in their Roman uniforms of bronze breastplates, leather skirts and long cloaks. A hundred such men had already marched to Corinium, another two hundred would follow, though not under the command of their King, for Tewdric was sick. His son Meurig, the Edling of Gwent, would be their titular leader, though in truth Agricola would command them. Agricola was an old man now, but his back was straight and his scarred arm could still wield a sword. He was said to be more Roman than the Romans and I had always been a little scared of his severe frown, but on that spring day outside Magnis he greeted me as an equal. His close-cropped grey head ducked under the lintel of his tent, then, dressed in his Roman uniform, he strode towards me and, to my astonishment, greeted me with an embrace.
He inspected my thirty-four spearmen. They looked shaggy and unkempt beside his clean-shaven men, but he approved of their weapons and approved even more of the amount of food we carried. ‘I’ve spent years,’ he growled, ‘teaching that it’s no use sending a spearman to war without a pack full of food, but what does Lancelot of Siluria do? Sends me a hundred spearmen without a peck of bread between them.’ He had invited me into his tent where he served me a sour, pale wine. ‘I owe you an apology, Lord Derfel,’ he said.
‘I doubt that, Lord,’ I said. I felt embarrassed to be in such intimacy with a famous warrior who was old enough to be my grandfather.
He waved away my modesty. ‘We should have been at Lugg Vale.’
‘It seemed a hopeless fight, Lord,’ I said, ‘and we were desperate. You were not.’
‘But you won, didn’t you?’ he growled. He turned as a lick of wind tried to dislodge a wood shaving from his table that was covered with scores of other such shavings, each bearing lists of men and rations. He weighted the wisp of wood with an ink-horn, then looked back to me. ‘I hear we are to meet with the bull.’
‘At Corinium,’ I confirmed. Agricola, unlike his master Tewdric, was a pagan, though Agricola had no time for the British Gods, only for Mithras.
‘To elect Lancelot,’ Agricola said sourly. He listened as a man shouted orders in his camp lines, heard nothing that would spring him out of the tent and so looked back to me. ‘What do you know of Lancelot?’ he asked.
‘Enough,’ I said, ‘to speak against him.’
‘You’d offend Arthur?’ He sounded surprised.
‘I either offend Arthur,’ I said bitterly, ‘or Mithras.’ I made the sign against evil. ‘And Mithras is a God.’
‘Arthur spoke to me on his way back from Powys,’ Agricola said, ‘and told me that electing Lancelot would bind Britain’s union.’ He paused, looking morose. ‘He hinted that I owed him a vote to make up for our absence at Lugg Vale.’
Arthur, it seemed, was buying votes however he could. ‘Then vote for him, Lord,’ I said, ‘for his exclusion only needs one vote, and mine will suffice.’
‘I don’t tell lies to Mithras,’ Agricola snapped, ‘and nor do I like King Lancelot. He was here two months ago, buying mirrors.’
‘Mirrors!’ I had to laugh. Lancelot had always collected mirrors, and in his father’s high, airy sea-palace at Ynys Trebes he had kept the walls of a whole room covered with Roman mirrors. They must all have melted in the fire when the Franks swarmed over the palace walls and now, it seemed, Lancelot was rebuilding his collection.
‘Tewdric sold him a fine electrum mirror,’ Agricola told me. ‘Big as a shield and quite extraordinary. It was so clear that it was like looking into a black pool on a fine day. And he paid well for it.’ He would have had to, I thought, for mirrors of electrum, an amalgam of silver and gold, were rare indeed. ‘Mirrors,’ Agricola said scathingly. ‘He should be attending to his duties in Siluria, not buying mirrors.’ He snatched up his sword and helmet as a horn sounded from the town. It called twice, a signal Agricola recognized. ‘The Edling,’ he growled, and led me out into the sunlight to see that Meurig was indeed riding out from Magnis’s Roman ramparts. ‘I camp out here,’ Agricola told me as he watched his honour guard form into two ranks, ‘to stay away from their priests.??
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Prince Meurig came attended by four Christian priests who ran to keep up with the Edling’s horse. The Prince was a young man, indeed I had first seen him when he was a child and that had not been so very long before, but he disguised his youth with a querulous and irritable manner. He was short, pale and thin, with a wispy brown beard. He was notorious as a creature of pettifogging detail who loved the quibbles of the lawcourts and the squabbles of the church. His scholarship was famous; he was, we were assured, an expert at refuting the Pelagian heresy that so harassed the Christian church in Britain, he knew by heart the eighteen chapters of tribal British law, and he could name the genealogies of ten British kingdoms going back twenty generations as well as the lineage of all their septs and tribes; and that, we were informed by his admirers, was only the beginning of Meurig’s knowledge. To his admirers he seemed a youthful paragon of learning and the finest rhetorician of Britain, but to me it seemed that the Prince had inherited all of his father’s intelligence and none of his wisdom. It was Meurig, more than any other man, who had persuaded Gwent to abandon Arthur before Lugg Vale and for that reason alone I had no love for Meurig, but I obediently went down on one knee as the Prince dismounted.
‘Derfel,’ he said in his curiously high-pitched voice, ‘I remember you.’ He did not tell me to rise, but just pushed past me into the tent.
Agricola beckoned me inside, thus sparing me the company of the four panting priests who had no business here except to stay close to their Prince who, dressed in a toga and with a heavy wooden cross hanging on a silver chain about his neck, seemed irritated by my presence. He scowled at me, then went on with a querulous complaint to Agricola, but as they spoke in Latin I had no idea what they talked about. Meurig was buttressing his argument with a sheet of parchment that he waved in front of Agricola who endured the harangue patiently.