My men formed the advance guard. The land beyond the river was less thickly wooded and though some of the remaining trees grew close enough to hide a small army, no one appeared to challenge us. The only sign of the Saxons was a severed horse’s head waiting at the bridge’s centre. None of my men would pass it until Nimue came forward to dispel its evil. She merely spat at the head. Saxon magic, she said, was feeble stuff, and once its evil had been dissipated, Issa and I heaved the thing over the parapet.
My men guarded the earth wall as the wagons and their escort crossed. Galahad had come with me and the two of us poked about the buildings inside the wall. Saxons, for some reason, were loath to use Roman settlements, preferring their own timber and thatched halls, though some folk had been living here till recently, for the hearths contained ashes and some of the floors were swept clean. ‘Could be our people,’ Galahad said, for plenty of Britons lived among the Saxons, many of them as slaves, but some as free people who had accepted the foreign rule.
The buildings appeared to have been barracks once, but there were also two houses and what I took to be a huge granary which, when we pushed open its broken door, proved to be a beast house where cattle were sheltered overnight to protect them from wolves. The floor was a deep mire of straw and dung that smelt so rank that I would have left the building there and then, but Galahad saw something in the shadows at its far end and so I followed him across the wet, viscous floor.
The building’s far end was not a straight gabled wall, but was broken by a curved apse. High on the apse’s stained plaster, and barely visible through the dust and dirt of the years, was a painted symbol that looked like a big X on which was superimposed a P. Galahad stared up at the symbol and made the sign of the cross. ‘It used to be a church, Derfel,’ he said in wonder.
‘It stinks,’ I said.
He gazed reverently at the symbol. ‘There were Christians here.’
‘Not any longer.’ I shuddered at the overwhelming stench and batted helplessly at the flies that buzzed around my head.
Galahad did not care about the smell. He thrust his spear-butt into the compacted mass of cow dung and rotting straw, and finally succeeded in uncovering a small patch of the floor. What he found only made him work harder until he had revealed the upper part of a man depicted in small mosaic tiles. The man wore robes like a bishop, had a sun-halo round his head and in one uplifted hand was carrying a small beast with a skinny body and a great shaggy head. ‘St Mark and his lion,’ Galahad told me.
‘I thought lions were huge beasts,’ I said, disappointed. ‘Sagramor says they’re bigger than horses and fiercer than bears.’ I peered at the dung-smeared beast. ‘That’s just a kitten.’
‘It’s a symbolic lion,’ he reproved me. He tried to clear more of the floor, but the filth was too old, thick-packed and glutinous. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘I shall build a great church like this. A huge church. A place where a whole people can gather before their God.’
‘And when you’re dead,’ I pulled him back towards the door, ‘some bastard will winter ten herds of cattle in it and be thankful to you.’
He insisted on staying one minute more and, while I held his shield and spear, he spread his arms wide and offered a new prayer in an old place. ‘It’s a sign from God,’ he said excitedly as he at last followed me back into the sunshine. ‘We shall restore Christianity to Lloegyr, Derfel. It’s a sign of victory!’
It might have been a sign of victory to Galahad, but that old church was almost the cause of our defeat. The next day, as we advanced east towards London that was now so tantalizingly close, Prince Meurig stayed at Pontes. He sent the wagons on with most of their escort, but kept fifty men back to clear the church of its cloying filth. Meurig, like Galahad, was much moved by the existence of that ancient church and decided to rededicate the shrine to its God, and so he had his spearmen lay aside their war gear and clear the building of its dung and straw so that the priests who accompanied him could say whatever prayers were needed to restore the building’s sanctity.
And while the rearguard forked dung, the Saxons who had been following us came over the bridge.
Meurig escaped. He had a horse, but most of the dung-sweepers died and so did two of the priests, and then the Saxons stormed up the road and caught the wagons. The remnant of the rearguard put up a fight, but they were outnumbered and the Saxons outflanked them, overran them, and began slaughtering the plodding oxen so that, one by one, the wagons were stopped and fell into the enemy’s hands.
By now we had heard the commotion. The army stopped as Arthur’s horsemen galloped back towards the sound of the killing. None of those horsemen was properly equipped for battle, for it was simply too hot for a man to ride in armour all day, yet their sudden appearance was enough to stampede the Saxons, but the damage had already been done. Eighteen of the forty wagons had been immobilized and, without oxen, they would have to be abandoned. Most of the eighteen had been plundered and barrels of our precious flour had been spilt onto the road. We salvaged what flour we could and wrapped it in cloaks, but the bread it would bake would be poor stuff and riddled with dust and twigs. Even before the raid we had been cutting down on rations, reckoning we had enough for two more weeks, but now, because most of the food had been in the rearward vehicles, we faced the prospect of abandoning the march in just one week and even then there would be barely enough food remaining to see us safe back to Calleva or Caer Ambra.
‘There are fish in the river,’ Meurig pointed out.
‘Gods, not fish again,’ Culhwch grumbled, recalling the privations of the last days of Ynys Trebes.
‘There are not fish enough to feed an army,’ Arthur answered angrily. He would have liked to have shouted at Meurig, to have stripped his stupidity bare, but Meurig was a Prince and Arthur’s sense of what was proper would never let him humiliate a Prince. If it had been Culhwch or I who had divided the rearguard and exposed the wagons Arthur would have lost his temper, but Meurig’s birth protected him.
We were at a Council of War north of the road which here ran straight across a dull, grassy plain that was studded with clumps of trees and with straggling banks of gorse and hawthorn. All the commanders were present, and dozens of lesser men crowded close to hear our discussions. Meurig, of course, denied all responsibility. If he had been given more men, he said, the disaster would never have happened. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘and you will forgive me for pointing this out, though I would have thought it an obvious point that should hardly need my explication, no success can attend an army that ignores God.’
‘So why did God ignore us?’ Sagramor asked.
Arthur hushed the Numidian. ‘What is done is done,’ he said. ‘What happens next is our business here.’
But what happened next was up to Aelle rather than to us. He had won the first victory, though it was possible he did not know the extent of that triumph. We were miles inside his territory and we faced starvation unless we could trap his army, destroy it, and so break out into land that had not been stripped of supplies. Our scouts brought us deer, and once in a while they came across some cattle or sheep, but such delicacies were rare and not nearly sufficient to make up for the lost flour and dried meat.
‘He has to defend London, surely?’ Cuneglas suggested.
Sagramor shook his head. ‘London is populated by Britons,’ he said. ‘The Saxons don’t like it there. He’ll let us have London.’
‘There’ll be food in London,’ Cuneglas said.
‘But how long will it last, Lord King?’ Arthur asked. ‘And if we take it with us, what do we do? Wander for ever, hoping Aelle will attack?’ He stared at the ground, his long face hardened by thought. Aelle’s tactics were clear enough now, the Saxon would let us march and march, and his men would always be ahead of us to sweep our path clean of food, and once we were weakened and dispirited, the Saxon horde would swarm around us. ‘What we must do,’ Arthur said, ‘is draw him onto us.’
Meurig blinked rapidly.
‘How?’ he inquired, in a tone suggesting Arthur was being ridiculous.
The Druids who accompanied us, Merlin, Iorweth and two others from Powys, were all sitting in a group to one side of the Council and Merlin, who had commandeered a convenient ant hill as his seat, now commanded attention by raising his staff. ‘What do you do,’ he asked mildly, ‘when you want something valuable?’
‘Take it,’ Agravain growled. Agravain commanded Arthur’s heavy horsemen, leaving Arthur free to lead the whole army.
‘When you want something valuable from the Gods,’ Merlin amended his question, ‘what do you do then?’
Agravain shrugged, and none of the rest of us could supply an answer.
Merlin stood so that his height dominated the Council. ‘If you wish something,’ he said very simply as though he was our teacher and we his pupils, ‘you must give something. You must make an offering, a sacrifice. The thing I wanted above all things in this world was the Cauldron, so I offered my life to its search and I received my wish, but if I had not offered my soul for it, the gift would not have come. We must sacrifice something.’
Meurig’s Christianity was offended and he could not resist taunting the Druid. ‘Your life, perhaps, Lord Merlin? It worked last time.’ He laughed and looked to his surviving priests to join the laughter.
The laughter died as Merlin pointed his black staff at the Prince. He kept the staff very still, its butt just inches from Meurig’s face, and he held it there long after the laughter had stopped. And still Merlin held the staff, stretching the silence unbearably. Agricola, feeling he must support his Prince, cleared his throat, but a twitch of the black staff stilled whatever protest Agricola might have made. Meurig wriggled uncomfortably, but seemed struck dumb. He reddened, blinked and squirmed. Arthur frowned, but said nothing. Nimue smiled in anticipation of the Prince’s fate, while the rest of us watched in silence and some of us shuddered in fear, and still Merlin did not move until, at last, Meurig could take the suspense no longer. ‘I was jesting!’ he almost shouted in desperation. ‘I meant no offence.’
‘Did you say something, Lord Prince?’ Merlin inquired anxiously, pretending Meurig’s panicked words had jolted him out of reverie. He lowered the staff. ‘I must have been daydreaming. Where was I? Oh yes, a sacrifice. What do we have, Arthur, that is most precious?’
Arthur thought for a few seconds. ‘We have gold,’ he said, ‘silver, my armour.’
‘Baubles,’ Merlin answered dismissively.
There was silence for a while, then men outside the Council offered their answers. Some took torques from about their necks and waved them in the air. Others suggested offering weapons, one man even called out the name of Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. The Christians made no suggestions, because this was a pagan procedure and they would offer nothing but their prayers, but one man of Powys suggested we sacrifice a Christian and that idea prompted loud cheers. Meurig blushed again.
‘I sometimes think,’ Merlin said when no more suggestions were offered, ‘that I am doomed to live among idiots. Is all the world mad but me? Cannot one poor blinkered fool among you see what is plainly the most precious thing we possess? Not one?’
‘Food,’ I said.
‘Ah!’ Merlin cried, delighted. ‘Well done, you poor blinkered fool! Food, you idiots.’ He spat the insult at the Council. ‘Aelle’s plans are predicated upon the belief that we lack food, so we must demonstrate the opposite. We must waste food like Christians waste prayer, we must scatter it to the empty heavens, we must squander it, we must throw it away, we must,’ he paused to put stress on the next word, ‘sacrifice it.’ He waited for a voice to be raised in opposition, but no one spoke. ‘Find a place near here,’ Merlin ordered Arthur, ‘where you will be content to offer Aelle battle. Do not make it too strong, for you don’t want him to refuse combat. You’re tempting him, remember, and you must make him believe he can defeat you. How long will it take him to ready his forces for battle?’
‘Three days,’ Arthur said. He suspected that Aelle’s men were widely scattered in their loose ring that escorted us and it would take the Saxon at least two days to shrink that ring into a compact army, and another full day to shove it into battle order.
‘I shall need two days,’ Merlin said, ‘so bake enough hard bread to keep us barely alive for five days,’ he ordered. ‘Not a generous ration, Arthur, for our sacrifice has to be real. Then find your battleground and wait. Leave the rest to me, but I want Derfel and a dozen of his men to do some labouring work. And do we have any men here,’ he raised his voice so that all the men crowding about the Council could hear, ‘who have skills in carving wood?’
He chose six men. Two were from Powys, one bore the hawk of Kernow on his shield, and the others were from Dumnonia. They were given axes and knives, but nothing to carve until Arthur had discovered his battleground.
He found it on a wide heath that rose to a gentle summit crowned by a scattered grove of yew and whitebeam. The slope was nowhere steep, but we would still have the high ground and there Arthur planted his banners, and round the banners there grew an encampment of thatched shelters made from branches cut from the grove. Our spearmen would make a ring about the banners and there, we hoped, face Aelle. The bread that would keep us alive as we waited for the Saxons was baked in turf ovens.
Merlin chose his spot to the north of the heath. There was a meadow there, a place of stunted alders and rank grass edging a stream that curled south towards the distant Thames. My men were ordered to fell three oaks, then strip the trunks of their branches and bark, and afterwards dig three pits into which the oaks could be set up as columns, though first he ordered his six carvers to make the oak trunks into three ghoulish idols. Iorweth helped Nimue and Merlin, and the three loved that work for it allowed them to devise the most ghastly, fearsome things that bore small resemblance to any God I had ever known, but Merlin did not care. The idols, he said, were not for us, but for the Saxons, and so he and his woodcarvers made three things of horror with animal faces, female breasts and male genitalia, and when the columns were finished my men stopped their other work and hoisted the three figures into their pits while Merlin and the woodcarvers tamped their bases with earth so that at last the columns stood upright. ‘The father,’ Merlin capered in front of the idols, ‘the son and the holy ghost!’ he laughed.
My men, meanwhile, had been making a great stack of wood in front of the pits, and onto that wood we now piled what remained of our food. We killed the remaining oxen and heaved their heavy corpses onto the pile so that their fresh blood trickled down through the layers of timber, and onto the oxen we heaped everything they had hauled; dried meat, dried fish, cheese, apples, grain and beans, and on top of those precious supplies we put the carcasses of two newly caught deer and a freshly slaughtered ram. The ram’s head, with its twin horns, was cut off and nailed to the central pillar.
The Saxons watched us work. They were on the stream’s far bank and once or twice, on the first day, their spears had hurtled over the water, but after those first futile efforts to interfere with us they had been content to just watch and see exactly what strange things we did. I sensed that their numbers grew. On the first day we had glimpsed only a dozen men among the far trees, but by the second evening there were at least a score of fires smoking behind the leaf screen.
‘Now,’ Merlin said that evening, ‘we give them something to watch.’
We carried fire in cooking pots down from the heath’s low summit to the great pile of wood and thrust it deep into the tangle of branches. The wood was green, but we had stacked heaps of dry grass and broken twigs into the centre, and by nightfall the fire was raging fiercely. The flames lit our crude idols with a lurid glare, the smoke boiled in a great plume that drifted towards London and the smell of roasting meat wafted tantalizingly towards our hungry encampment. The fire crackled and collapsed, exploding streams of sparks into the air, and in its fierce heat the dead beasts twitched and twisted as the flames shrank their sin
ews and exploded their skulls. Melting fat hissed in the blaze, then flared up white and bright to cast black shadows on the three hideous idols. All night that fire seethed, burning our last hopes of leaving Lloegyr without victory, and in the dawn we watched as the Saxons crept out to investigate its smoking remnants.
Then we waited. We were not entirely passive. Our horsemen rode east to scout the London road, and came back to report bands of marching Saxons. Others of us cut timber and used it to begin constructing a hall beside the shrinking grove on the heath’s summit. We had no need of such a hall, but Arthur wanted to give the impression that we were establishing a base deep in Lloegyr from which we would harass Aelle’s lands. That belief, if it convinced Aelle, would surely provoke him to battle. We made the beginnings of an earthen rampart, but lacking the proper tools we made a poor showing of the wall, though it must have helped the deception.
We were busy enough, but that did not stop a rancorous division showing in the army. Some, like Meurig, believed we had adopted the wrong strategy from the start. It would have been better, Meurig now said, if we had sent three or more smaller armies to take the Saxon fortresses on the frontier. We should have harassed and provoked, but instead we were growing ever hungrier in a self-made trap deep in Lloegyr.