We waded the stream beneath Dun Caric, skirted the houses, and came to the steep path that led to the palisade about the small hill. Everything was very quiet. Not even the dogs were in the village street and, more worryingly, no spearmen guarded the palisade. ‘Issa’s not here,’ I said, touching Hywelbane’s hilt. Issa’s absence, by itself, was not unusual, for he spent much of his time in other parts of Dumnonia, but I doubted he would have left Dun Caric unguarded. I glanced at the village, but those doors were all shut tight. No smoke showed above the rooftops, not even from the smithy.
‘No dogs on the hill,’ Eachern said ominously. There was usually a pack of dogs about Dun Caric’s hall and by now some should have raced down the hill to greet us. Instead there were noisy ravens on the hall roof and more of the big birds calling from the palisade. One bird flew up out of the compound with a long, red, lumpy morsel trailing from its beak.
None of us spoke as we climbed the hill. The silence had been the first indication of horror, then the ravens, and halfway up the hill we caught the sour-sweet stench of death that catches at the back of the throat, and that smell, stronger than the silence and more eloquent than the ravens, warned us of what waited inside the open gate. Death waited, nothing but death. Dun Caric had become a place of death. The bodies of men and women were strewn throughout the compound and piled inside the hall. Forty-six bodies in all, and not one still possessed a head. The ground was blood-soaked. The hall had been plundered, every basket and chest upturned, and the stables were empty. Even the dogs had been killed, though they, at least, had been left with their heads. The only living things were the cats and the ravens, and they all fled from us.
I walked through the horror in a daze. It was only after a few moments that I realized there were only ten young men among the dead. They must have been the guards left by Issa, while the rest of the corpses were the families of his men. Pyrlig was there, poor Pyrlig who had stayed at Dun Caric because he knew he could not rival Taliesin, and now he lay dead, his white robe soaked in blood and his harpist’s hands deep scarred where he had tried to fend off the sword blows. Issa was not there, nor was Scarach, his wife, for there were no young women in that charnel house, neither were there any children. Those young women and children must have been taken away, either to be playthings or slaves, while the older folk, the babies and the guards had all been massacred, and then their heads had been taken as trophies. The slaughter was recent, for none of the bodies had started to bloat or rot. Flies crawled over the blood, but as yet there were no maggots wriggling in the gaping wounds left by the spears and swords.
I saw that the gate had been thrown off its hinges, but there was no sign of a fight and I suspected that the men who had done this thing had been invited into the compound as guests.
‘Who did it, Lord?’ one of my spearmen asked.
‘Mordred,’ I said bleakly.
‘But he’s dead! Or dying!’
‘He just wants us to think that,’ I said, and I could conjure up no other explanation. Taliesin had warned me, and I feared the bard was right. Mordred was not dying at all, but had returned and loosed his warband on his own country. The rumour of his death must have been designed to make people feel safe, and all the while he had been planning to return and kill every spearman who might oppose him. Mordred was throwing off his bridle, and that meant, surely, that after this slaughter at Dun Caric he must have gone east to find Sagramor, or maybe south and west to discover Issa. If Issa still lived.
It was our fault, I suppose. After Mynydd Baddon, when Arthur had given up his power, we had thought that Dumnonia would be protected by the spears of men loyal to Arthur and his beliefs, and that Mordred’s power would be curtailed because he had no spearmen. None of us had foreseen that Mynydd Baddon would give our King a taste for war, nor that he would be so successful at battle that he would attract spearmen to his banner. Mordred now had spears, and spears give power, and I was seeing the first exercise of that new power. Mordred was scouring the country of the folk who had been set to limit his power and who might support Gwydre’s claim to the throne.
‘What do we do, Lord?’ Eachern asked me.
‘We go home, Eachern,’ I said, ‘we go home.’ And by ‘home’ I meant Siluria. There was nothing we could do here. We were only eleven men, and I doubted we had any chance of reaching Sagramor whose forces lay so far to the east. Besides, Sagramor needed no help from us in looking after himself. Dun Caric’s small garrison might have given Mordred easy pickings, but he would find plucking the Numidian’s head a much harder task. Nor could I hope to find Issa, if Issa even lived, and so there was nothing to do but go home and feel a frustrated fury. It is hard to describe that fury. At its heart was a cold hate for Mordred, but it was an impotent and aching hate because I knew I could do nothing to give swift vengeance to these folk who had been my people. I felt, too, as though I had let them down. I felt guilt, hate, pity and an aching sadness.
I put one man to stand guard at the open gate while the rest of us dragged the bodies into the hall. I would have liked to burn them, but there was not enough fuel in the compound and we had no time to collapse the hall’s thatched roof onto the corpses, and so we contented ourselves with putting them into a decent line, and then I prayed to Mithras for a chance to bring these folk a fitting revenge. ‘We’d better search the village,’ I told Eachern when the prayer was done, but we were not given the time. The Gods, that day, had abandoned us.
The man at the gate had not been keeping proper watch. I cannot blame him. None of us were in our right minds on that hilltop, and the sentry must have been looking into the blood-soaked compound instead of watching out of the gate, and so he saw the horsemen too late. I heard him shout, but by the time I ran out of the hall the sentry was already dead and a dark-armoured horseman was pulling a spear from his body. ‘Get him!’ I shouted, and started running towards the horseman, and I expected him to turn his horse and ride away, but instead he abandoned his spear and spurred further into the compound and more horsemen immediately followed him.
‘Rally!’ I shouted, and my nine remaining men crowded about me to make a small shield circle, though most of us had no shields for we had dropped them while we hauled the dead into the hall. Some of us did not even have spears. I drew Hywelbane, but I knew there was no hope for there were more than twenty horsemen in the compound now and still more were spurring up the hill. They must have been waiting in the woods beyond the village, maybe expecting Issa’s return. I had done the same myself in Benoic. We would kill the Franks in some remote outpost, then wait in ambush for more, and now I had walked into an identical trap.
I recognized none of the horsemen, and none bore an insignia on their shields. A few of the horsemen had covered their leather shield faces with black pitch, but these men were not Oengus mac Airem’s Blackshields. They were a scarred group of veteran warriors, bearded, ragged-haired and grimly confident. Their leader rode a black horse and had a fine helmet with engraved cheekpieces. He laughed when one of his men unfurled Gwydre’s banner, then he turned and spurred his horse towards me. ‘Lord Derfel,’ he greeted me.
For a few heartbeats I ignored him, looking about the blood-soaked compound in a wild hope that there might still be some means of escape, but we were ringed by the horsemen who waited with spears and swords for the order to kill us. ‘Who are you?’ I asked the man in the decorated helmet.
For answer he simply turned back his cheekpieces. Then smiled at me.
It was not a pleasant smile, but nor was he was a pleasant man. I was staring at Amhar, one of Arthur’s twin sons. ‘Amhar ap Arthur,’ I greeted him, then spat.
‘Prince Amhar,’ he corrected me. Like his brother Loholt, Amhar had ever been bitter about his illegitimate birth and he must now have decided to adopt the title of Prince even though his father was no king. It would have been a pathetic pretension had not Amhar changed so much since my last brief glimpse of him on the slopes of Mynydd Baddon. He looked older a
nd much more formidable. His beard was fuller, a scar had flecked his nose and his breastplate was scored with a dozen spear strikes. Amhar, it seemed to me, had grown up on the battlefields of Armorica, but maturity had not decreased his sullen resentment. ‘I have not forgotten your insults at Mynydd Baddon,’ he told me, ‘and have longed for the day when I could repay them. But my brother, I think, will be even more pleased to see you.’ It had been I who had held Loholt’s arm while Arthur struck off his hand.
‘Where is your brother?’ I asked.
‘With our King.’
‘And your King is who?’ I asked. I knew the answer, but wanted it confirmed.
‘The same as yours, Derfel,’ Amhar said. ‘My dear cousin, Mordred.’ And where else, I thought, would Amhar and Loholt have gone after the defeat at Mynydd Baddon? Like so many other masterless men of Britain they had sought refuge with Mordred, who had welcomed every desperate sword that came to his banner. And how Mordred must have loved having Arthur’s sons on his side!
‘The King lives?’ I asked.
‘He thrives!’ Amhar said. ‘His Queen sent money to Clovis, and Clovis preferred to take her gold than to fight us.’ He smiled and gestured at his men. ‘So here we are, Derfel. Come to finish what we began this morning.’
‘I shall have your soul for what you did to these folk,’ I said, gesturing with Hywelbane at the blood that still lay black in Dun Caric’s yard.
‘What you will have, Derfel,’ Amhar said, leaning forward on his saddle, ‘is what I, my brother and our cousin decide to give you.’
I stared up at him defiantly. ‘I have served your cousin loyally.’
Amhar smiled. ‘But I doubt he wants your services any more.’
‘Then I shall leave his country,’ I said.
‘I think not,’ Amhar said mildly. ‘I think my King would like to meet you one last time, and I know my brother is eager to have words with you.’
‘I would rather leave,’ I said.
‘No,’ Amhar insisted. ‘You will come with me. Put the sword down.’
‘You must take it, Amhar.’
‘If I must,’ he said, and did not seem worried by the prospect, but why should he have been worried? He outnumbered us, and at least half my men had neither shields nor spears.
I turned to my men. ‘If you wish to surrender,’ I told them, ‘then step out of the ring. But as for me, I will fight.’ Two of my unarmed men took a hesitant step forward, but Eachern snarled at them and they froze. I waved them away. ‘Go,’ I said sadly. ‘I don’t want to cross the bridge of swords with unwilling companions.’ The two men walked away, but Amhar just nodded to his horsemen and they surrounded the pair, swung their swords and more blood flowed on Dun Caric’s summit. ‘You bastard!’ I said, and ran at Amhar, but he just twitched his reins and spurred his horse out of my reach, and while he evaded me his men spurred in towards my spearmen.
It was another slaughter, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. Eachern killed one of Amhar’s men, but while his spear was still fixed in that man’s belly, another horseman cut Eachern down from behind. The rest of my men died just as swiftly. Amhar’s spearmen were merciful in that, at least. They did not let my men’s souls linger, but chopped and stabbed with a ferocious energy.
I knew little of it, for while I pursued Amhar one of his men spurred behind me and gave me a huge blow across the back of my head. I fell, my head reeling in a black fog shot through with streaks of light. I remember falling to my knees, then a second blow struck my helmet and I thought I must be dying. But Amhar wanted me alive, and when I recovered my wits I found myself lying on one of Dun Caric’s dung-heaps with my wrists tied with rope and Hywelbane’s scabbard hanging at Amhar’s waist. My armour had been taken, and a thin gold torque stolen from around my neck, but Amhar and his men had not found Ceinwyn’s brooch that was still safely pinned beneath my jerkin. Now they were busy sawing off the heads of my spearmen with their swords. ‘Bastard,’ I spat the insult at Amhar, but he just grinned and turned back to his grisly work. He chopped through Eachern’s spine with Hywelbane, then gripped the head by the hair and tossed it onto the pile of heads that were being gathered into a cloak. ‘A fine sword,’ he told me, balancing Hywelbane in his hand.
‘Then use it to send me to the Otherworld.’
‘My brother would never forgive me for showing such mercy,’ he said, then he cleaned Hywelbane’s blade on his ragged cloak and thrust it into the scabbard. He beckoned three of his men forward, then drew a small knife from his belt. ‘At Mynydd Baddon,’ he said, facing me, ‘you called me a bastard cur and a worm-ridden puppy. Do you think I am a man to forget insults?’
‘The truth is ever memorable,’ I told him, though I had to force the defiance into my voice for my soul was in terror.
‘Your death will certainly be memorable,’ Amhar said, ‘but for the moment you must be content with the attentions of a barber.’ He nodded at his men.
I fought them, but with my hands bound and my head still throbbing, there was little I could do to resist them. Two men held me fast against the dung-heap while the third gripped my head by the hair as Amhar, his right knee braced against my chest, cut off my beard. He did it crudely, slicing into the skin with each stroke, and he tossed the cut hanks of hair to one of his grinning men who teased the strands apart and wove them into a short rope. Once the rope was finished it was made into a noose that was put about my neck. It was the supreme insult to a captured warrior, the humiliation of having a slave’s leash made from his own beard. They laughed at me when it was done, then Amhar hauled me to my feet by tugging on the beard-leash. ‘We did the same to Issa,’ he said.
‘Liar,’ I retorted feebly.
‘And made his wife watch,’ Amhar said with a smile, ‘then made him watch while we dealt with her. They’re both dead now.’
I spat in his face, but he just laughed at me. I had called him a liar, but I believed him. Mordred, I thought, had worked his return to Britain so efficiently. He had spread the tale of his imminent death, and all the while Argante had been shipping her hoarded gold to Clovis, and Clovis, thus purchased, had let Mordred go free. And Mordred had sailed to Dumnonia and was now killing his enemies. Issa was dead, and I did not doubt that most of his spearmen, and the spearmen I had left in Dumnonia, had died with him. I was a prisoner. Only Sagramor remained.
They tied my beard-leash to the tail of Amhar’s horse, then marched me southwards. Amhar’s forty spearmen formed a mocking escort, laughing whenever I stumbled. They dragged Gwydre’s banner through the mud from the tail of another horse.
They took me to Caer Cadarn, and once there they threw me into a hut. It was not the hut in which we had imprisoned Guinevere so many years before, but a much smaller one with a low door through which I had to crawl, helped by the boots and spear staves of my captors. I scrambled into the hut’s shadows and there saw another prisoner, a man brought from Durnovaria whose face was red from weeping. For a moment he did not recognize me without my beard, but then he gasped in astonishment. ‘Derfel!’
‘Bishop,’ I said wearily, for it was Sansum, and we were both Mordred’s prisoners.
‘It’s a mistake!’ Sansum insisted. ‘I shouldn’t be here!’
‘Tell them,’ I said, jerking my head towards the guards outside the hut, ‘not me.’
‘I did nothing. Except serve Argante! And look how they reward me!’
‘Be quiet,’ I said.
‘Oh, sweet Jesus!’ He fell on his knees, spread his arms and gazed up at the cobwebs in the thatch. ‘Send an angel for me! Take me to Thy sweet bosom.’
‘Will you be quiet?’ I snarled, but he went on praying and weeping, while I stared morosely towards Caer Cadarn’s wet summit where a heap of severed heads was being piled. My men’s heads were there, joining scores of others that had been fetched from all across Dumnonia. A chair draped in a pale blue cloth was perched on top of the pile; Mordred’s throne. Women and children, the families
of Mordred’s spearmen, peered at the grisly heap, and some then came to look through our hut’s low door and laugh at my beardless face.
‘Where’s Mordred?’ I asked Sansum.
‘How would I know?’ he answered, interrupting his prayer.
‘Then what do you know?’ I asked. He shuffled back onto the bench. He had done me one small service by fumbling the rope free from my wrists, but the freedom gave me little comfort for I could see six spearmen guarding the hut, and I did not doubt that there were others I could not see. One man just sat facing the hut’s open entrance with a spear, begging me to try and crawl through the low door and thus give him a chance of skewering me. I had no chance of overpowering any of them. ‘What do you know?’ I asked Sansum again.
‘The King came back two nights ago,’ he said, ‘with hundreds of men.’
‘How many?’
He shrugged. ‘Three hundred? Four? I couldn’t count them, there were so many. They killed Issa in Durnovaria.’
I closed my eyes and said a prayer for poor Issa and his family. ‘When did they arrest you?’ I asked Sansum.
‘Yesterday.’ He looked indignant. ‘And for nothing! I welcomed him home! I didn’t know he was alive, but I was glad to see him. I rejoiced! And for that they arrested me!’
‘So why do they think they arrested you?’ I asked him.
‘Argante claims I was writing to Meurig, Lord, but that can’t be true! I have no skill with letters. You know that.’
‘Your clerks do, Bishop.’
Sansum adopted an indignant look. ‘And why should I talk to Meurig?’
‘Because you were plotting to give him the throne, Sansum,’ I said, ‘and don’t deny it. I talked with him two weeks ago.’
‘I was not writing to him,’ he said sulkily.
I believed him, for Sansum had ever been too canny to put his schemes on paper, but I did not doubt he had sent messengers. And one of those messengers, or perhaps a functionary at Meu-rig’s court, had betrayed him to Argante who had doubtless craved Sansum’s hoarded gold. ‘You deserve whatever you’re going to get,’ I told him. ‘You’ve plotted against every king who ever showed you kindness.’
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