‘Your three wives keep you solid enough,’ I said, poking him in his substantial ribs.
‘I pick them for the way they cook, Derfel, not the way they look.’
‘You have something to contribute, Lord Culhwch?’ Arthur asked.
‘Nothing, cousin!’ Culhwch responded cheerfully.
‘Then we shall continue,’ Arthur said. He asked Sagramor what chance there was of Cerdic’s men fighting for Aelle, and the Numidian, who had guarded the Saxon frontier all winter, shrugged and said that anything was possible with Cerdic. He had heard, he said, that the two Saxons had met and exchanged gifts, but no one had reported that an actual alliance had been made. Sagramor’s best guess was that Cerdic would be content to let Aelle be weakened, and that while the Dumnonian army was about that business he would attack along the coast in an effort to capture Durnovaria.
‘If we were at peace with him…’ Meurig tried again.
‘We won’t be,’ King Cuneglas said curtly, and Meurig, outranked by the only King at the Council, went quiet again.
‘There is one last thing,’ Sagramor warned us. ‘The Sais have dogs now. Big dogs.’ He spread his hands to show the huge size of the Saxon war dogs. We had all heard of these beasts, and we feared them. It was said that the Saxons released the dogs just seconds before the shield-walls clashed, and that the beasts were capable of tearing huge holes in the wall into which the enemy spearmen poured.
‘I will deal with the dogs,’ Merlin said. It was the only contribution he made to the council, but the calm, confident statement relieved some worried men. Merlin’s unexpected presence with the army was contribution enough, for his possession of the Cauldron made him, even for many of the Christians, a figure of more awesome power than ever. Not that many understood the purpose of the Cauldron, but they were pleased that the Druid had declared his willingness to accompany the army. With Arthur at our head, and Merlin on our side, how could we lose?
Arthur made his dispositions. King Lancelot, he said, with the spearmen of Siluria and a detachment of men from Dumnonia, would guard the southern frontier against Cerdic. The rest of us would assemble at Caer Ambra and march due east along the valley of the Thames. Lancelot made a show of being reluctant to be thus separated from the main army that would have to fight Aelle, but Culhwch, hearing the orders, shook his head in wonder. ‘He’s skipping out of battle again, Derfel!’ he whispered to me.
‘Not if Cerdic attacks him,’ I said.
Culhwch glanced across at Lancelot who was flanked by the twins Dinas and Lavaine. ‘And he’s staying near his protectress, isn’t he?’ Culhwch said. ‘Mustn’t stray too far from Guinevere, else he has to stand up by himself.’
I did not care. I was only relieved that Lancelot and his men were not in the main army; it was enough to face the Saxons without worrying about Tanaburs’s grandsons or a Silurian knife in my back.
And so we marched. It was a ragged army of contingents from three British kingdoms while some of our more distant allies had still not arrived. There were men promised to us from Elmet and even from Kernow, but they would follow us along the Roman road that ran south-east from Corinium and then east towards London.
London. The Romans had called it Londinium, and before that it had been plain Londo, which Merlin once told me meant ‘a wild place’, and now it was our goal, the once-great city that had been the largest in all Rome’s Britain and which now lay decaying amidst Aelle’s stolen lands. Sagramor had once led a famous raid into the old city and he had found its British inhabitants cowed by their new masters, but now, we hoped, we would take them back. That hope spread like wildfire through the army, though Arthur consistently denied it. Our task, he said, was to bring the Saxons to battle and not be lured by the ruins of a dead city, but in this Arthur was opposed by Merlin. ‘I’m not coming to see a handful of dead Saxons,’ he told me scornfully. ‘What use am I in killing Saxons?’
‘Every use, Lord,’ I told him. ‘Your magic frightens the enemy.’
‘Don’t be absurd, Derfel. Any fool can hop about in front of an army making faces and hurling curses. Frightening Saxons isn’t skilled work. Even those ludicrous Druids of Lancelot’s could just about manage that! Not that they’re real Druids.’
‘They’re not?’
‘Of course they’re not! To be a real Druid you have to study. You have to be examined. You have to satisfy other Druids that you know your business, and I never heard of any Druid examining Dinas and Lavaine. Unless Tanaburs did, and what kind of Druid was he? Not a very good one, plainly, else he’d never have let you live. I do deplore inefficiency.’
‘They can make magic, Lord,’ I said.
‘Make magic!’ He hooted at that. ‘One of the wretches produces a thrush’s egg and you think that’s magic? Thrushes do it all the time. Now if he’d made a sheep’s egg, I’d take some notice.’
‘He produced a star too, Lord.’
‘Derfel! What an absurdly credulous man you are!’ he exclaimed. ‘A star made of scissors and parchment? Don’t worry, I heard about that star and your precious Ceinwyn isn’t in any danger. Nimue and I made sure of that by burying three skulls. You don’t need to know the details, but you can rest assured that if those frauds go anywhere near Ceinwyn they’ll be changed into grass-snakes. Then they can lay eggs for ever.’ I thanked him for that, then asked him just why he was accompanying the army if not to help us against Aelle. ‘Because of the scroll, of course,’ he told me and patted a pocket of his dirty black robe to show me the scroll was safe.
‘Caleddin’s scroll?’ I asked.
‘Is there another?’ he countered.
Caleddin’s scroll was the treasure Merlin had brought from Ynys Trebes, and in his eyes it was as valuable as all the Treasures of Britain, and no wonder, for the secret of those Treasures was described in the ancient document. Druids were forbidden to write anything down because they believed that to record a spell was to destroy the writer’s power to work the magic, and thus all their lore and rites and knowledge were handed down by voice alone. Yet the Romans, before they attacked Ynys Mon, had so feared the British religion that they had suborned a Druid named Caleddin and had persuaded him to dictate all he knew to a Roman scribe, and Caleddin’s traitorous scroll had thus preserved all the ancient knowledge of Britain. Much of it, Merlin once told me, had been forgotten in the passing centuries, for the Romans had persecuted the Druids cruelly and much of the old knowledge had vanished into time, but now, with the scroll, he could recreate that lost power. ‘And the scroll,’ I ventured, ‘mentions London?’
‘My, my, how curious you are,’ Merlin mocked me, but then, perhaps because it was a fine day and he was in a sunny mood, he relented. ‘The last Treasure of Britain is in London,’ he said. ‘Or it was,’ he added hastily. ‘It’s buried there. I thought of giving you a spade and letting you dig the thing up, but you were bound to make a mess of it. Just look at what you did on Ynys Mon! Outnumbered and surrounded, indeed. Unforgivable. So I decided to do it myself. I have to find where it’s buried first, of course, and that could be difficult.’
‘And is that, Lord,’ I asked, ‘why you brought the dogs?’ For Merlin and Nimue had collected a mangy pack of snapping mongrels that now accompanied the army.
Merlin sighed. ‘Allow me, Derfel,’ he said, ‘to give you some advice. You do not buy a dog and bark yourself. I know the purpose of the dogs, Nimue knows their purpose, and you do not. That is how the Gods intended it to be. Do you have any more questions? Or may I now enjoy this morning’s walk?’ He lengthened his stride, thumping his big black staff into the turf with each emphatic step.
The smoke of great beacons welcomed us once we had passed Calleva. Those fires were the enemy’s signals that we were in sight, and whenever a Saxon saw such a plume of smoke he was under orders to waste the land. The grain stores were emptied, the houses were burned and the livestock driven away. And always Aelle withdrew, staying ever a day’s march ahead of us and thus temptin
g us forward into that wasted land. Wherever the road passed through woodland it would be blocked by trees, and sometimes, as our men laboured to pull the felled trunks out of the way, an arrow or spear would crash through the leaves to snatch a life, or else one of the big Saxon war dogs would come leaping and slavering out of the undergrowth, but they were the only attacks Aelle made and we never once saw his shield-wall. Back he went, and forward we marched, and each day the enemy spears or dogs would snatch a life or two.
Much more damage was done to us by disease. We had found the same thing before Lugg Vale, that whenever a large army gathered, so the Gods plagued it with sickness. The sick slowed us terribly, for if they could not march they had to be laid in a safe place and guarded by spearmen to keep them from the Saxon war-bands that prowled all about our flanks. We would see those enemy bands by day as distant ragged figures, while every night their fires flickered on our horizon. Yet it was not the sick that slowed us the most, but rather the sheer ponderousness of moving so many men. It was a mystery to me why thirty spearmen could cover an easy twenty miles on a relaxed day, but an army of twenty times that number, even trying hard, was lucky to cover eight or nine. Our markers were the Roman stones planted on the verge that recorded the number of miles to London, and after a while I refused to look at them for fear of their depressing message.
The ox-wagons also slowed us. We were equipped with forty capacious farm wagons that carried our food and spare weapons, and those wagons lumbered at a snail’s pace in the army’s rear. Prince Meurig had been given command of that rearguard and he fussed over the wagons, counted them obsessively, and forever complained that the spearmen ahead were marching too fast.
Arthur’s famed horsemen led the army. There were fifty of them now, all mounted on the big shaggy horses that were bred deep inside Dumnonia. Other horsemen, who did not wear the mail armour of Arthur’s band, ranged ahead as our scouts and sometimes those men failed to return, though we would always find their severed heads waiting for us on the road as we advanced.
The main body of the army was composed of five hundred spearmen. Arthur had decided to take no levies with him, for such farmers rarely carried adequate weapons; so we were all oath-sworn warriors and all carried spears and shields and most possessed swords too. Not every man could afford a sword, but Arthur had sent orders throughout Dumnonia that every household possessing a sword which was not already sworn to the army’s service should surrender the weapon, and the eighty blades so collected had been distributed among his army. Some men – a few – carried captured Saxon war axes, though others, like myself, disliked the weapon’s clumsiness.
And to pay for all this? To pay for the swords and new spears and new shields and wagons and oxen and flour and boots and banners and bridles and cooking pots and helmets and cloaks and knives and horseshoes and salted meat? Arthur laughed when I asked him. ‘You must thank the Christians, Derfel,’ he said.
‘They yielded more?’ I asked. ‘I thought that udder was dry.’
‘It is now,’ he said grimly, ‘but it’s astonishing how much their shrines yielded when we offered their guardians martyrdom, and it’s even more astonishing how much we’ve promised to repay them.’
‘Did we ever repay Bishop Sansum?’ I asked. His monastery at Ynys Wydryn had provided the fortune that had purchased Aelle’s peace during the autumn campaign that had ended at Lugg Vale.
Arthur shook his head. ‘And he keeps reminding me of that.’
‘The Bishop,’ I said carefully, ‘seems to have made new friends.’
Arthur laughed at my attempt at tact. ‘He’s Lancelot’s chaplain. Our dear Bishop, it seems, cannot be kept down. Like an apple in a water barrel, he just bobs up again.’
‘And he has made his peace with your wife,’ I observed.
‘I like to see folk resolve their arguments,’ he said mildly, ‘but Bishop Sansum does have strange allies these days. Guinevere tolerates him, Lancelot lifts him and Morgan defends him. How about that? Morgan!’ He was fond of his sister, and it pained him that she was so estranged from Merlin. She ruled Ynys Wydryn with a fierce efficiency, almost as if to demonstrate to Merlin that she was a more suitable partner for him than Nimue, but Morgan had long lost the battle to be Merlin’s chief priestess. She was valued by Merlin, Arthur said, but she wanted to be loved, and who, Arthur asked me sadly, could ever love a woman so scarred and shrivelled and disfigured by fire? ‘Merlin was never her lover,’ Arthur told me, ‘though she pretended he was, and he never minded the pretence for the more folk think him odd the happier he is, but in truth he can’t stand the sight of Morgan without her mask. She’s lonely, Derfel.’ So it was no wonder that Arthur was glad for his maimed sister’s friendship with Bishop Sansum, though it puzzled me how the fiercest proponent of Christianity in Dumnonia could be such friends with Morgan who was a pagan priestess of famous power. The mouse-lord, I thought, was like a spider making a very strange web. His last web had tried to catch Arthur and it had failed, so who was Sansum busy weaving for now?
We heard no news from Dumnonia after the last of our allies joined us. We were cut off now, surrounded by Saxons, though the last news from home had been reassuring. Cerdic had made no move against Lancelot’s troops, nor, it was thought, had he moved east to support Aelle. The last allied troops to join us were a war-band from Kernow led by an old friend who came galloping up the column to find me, then slid off his horse to trip and fall at my feet. It was Tristan, Prince and Edling of Kernow, who picked himself up, beat the dust off his cloak, then embraced me. ‘You can relax, Derfel,’ he said, ‘the warriors of Kernow have arrived. All will be well.’
I laughed. ‘You look well, Lord Prince.’ He did too.
‘I am free of my father,’ he explained. ‘He has let me out of the cage. He probably hopes a Saxon will bury an axe in my skull.’ He made a grotesque face in imitation of a dying man and I spat to avert evil.
Tristan was a handsome, well-made man with black hair, a forked beard and long moustaches. He had a sallow skin and a face that often looked sad, but which today was filled with happiness. He had disobeyed his father by bringing a small band of men to Lugg Vale, for which act, we had heard, he had been confined to a remote fortress on Kernow’s northern coast all winter, but King Mark had now relented and released his son for this campaign. ‘We’re family now,’ Tristan explained.
‘Family?’
‘My dear father,’ he said ironically, ‘has taken a new bride. Ialle of Broceliande.’ Broceliande was the remaining British kingdom in Armorica and it was ruled by Budic ap Camran, who was married to Arthur’s sister Anna, which meant that Ialle was Arthur’s niece.
‘What’s this,’ I asked, ‘your sixth stepmother?’
‘Seventh,’ Tristan said, ‘and she’s only fifteen summers old and father must be fifty at least. I’m already thirty!’ he added gloomily.
‘And not married?’
‘Not yet. But my father marries enough for both of us. Poor Ialle. Give her four years, Derfel, and she’ll be dead like the rest. But he’s happy enough for now. He’s wearing her out like he wears them all out.’ He put an arm round my shoulders. ‘And I hear you’re married?’
‘Not married, but well harnessed.’
‘To the legendary Ceinwyn!’ He laughed. ‘Well done, my friend, well done. One day I’ll find my own Ceinwyn.’
‘May it be soon, Lord Prince.’
‘It’ll have to be! I’m getting old! Ancient! I saw a white hair the other day, here in my beard.’ He poked at his chin. ‘See it?’ he asked anxiously.
‘It?’ I mocked him. ‘You look like a badger.’ There might have been three or four grey strands among the black, but that was all.
Tristan laughed, then glanced at a slave who was running beside the road with a dozen leashed dogs. ‘Emergency rations?’ he asked me.
‘Merlin’s magic, and he won’t tell me what they’re for.’ The Druid’s dogs were a nuisance; they needed food we could not s
pare, kept us awake at night with their howling and fought like fiends against the other dogs that accompanied our men.
On the day after Tristan joined us we reached Pontes where the road crosses the Thames on a wondrous stone bridge made by the Romans. We had expected to find the bridge broken, but our scouts reported it whole and, to our astonishment, it was still whole when our spearmen reached it.
That was the hottest day of the march. Arthur forbade anyone to cross the bridge until the wagons had closed up on the main body of the army, and so our men sprawled by the river as they waited. The bridge had eleven arches, two on either bank where they lifted the roadway onto the seven-arch span that crossed the river itself. Tree trunks and other floating debris had piled against the upstream side of the bridge so that the river to the west was wider and deeper than to the east, and the make shift dam made the water race and foam between the stone pilings. There was a Roman settlement on the far bank; a group of stone buildings surrounded by the remnants of an earth embankment, while at our end of the bridge a great tower guarded the road that passed beneath its crumbling arch on which a Roman inscription still existed. Arthur translated it for me, telling me that the Emperor Adrian had ordered the bridge to be built. ‘Imperator,’ I said, peering up at the stone plaque. ‘Does that mean Emperor?’
‘It does.’
‘And an Emperor is above a King?’ I asked.
‘An Emperor is a Lord of Kings,’ Arthur said. The bridge had made him gloomy. He clambered about its landward arches, then walked to the tower and laid a hand on its stones as he peered up at the inscription. ‘Suppose you and I wanted to build a bridge like this,’ he said to me, ‘how would we do it?’
I shrugged. ‘Make it from timber, Lord. Good elm pilings, the rest from split oak.’
He grimaced. ‘And would it still be standing when our great-great-grandchildren live?’
‘They can build their own bridges,’ I suggested.
He stroked the tower. ‘We have no one who can dress stone like this. No one who knows how to sink a stone pier into a river bed. No one who even remembers how. We’re like men with a treasure hoard, Derfel, and day by day it shrinks and we don’t know how to stop it or how to make more.’ He glanced back and saw the first of Meurig’s wagons appearing in the distance. Our scouts had probed deep into the woods that grew either side of the road and they had reported neither sight nor smell of any Saxons, but Arthur was still suspicious. ‘If I was them I’d let our army cross, then attack the wagons,’ he said, so instead he had decided to throw an advance guard over the bridge, cross the wagons into what remained of the settlement’s decaying earth wall, and only then bring the main part of his army over the river.