‘No,’ Arthur said, ‘but their numbers grow every year. I fear they won’t be quiet for much longer.’
‘I shall pray that Christ returns before they do,’ Tewdric said. ‘I don’t think I could bear to lose land to the Saxons. Not that it’s my business any longer, of course,’ he added hastily, ‘I leave all those things to Meurig now.’ He stood as a horn sounded from the nearby chapel. ‘Time for prayers!’ he said happily. ‘You’ll join me, perhaps?’
We excused ourselves, and next morning climbed the hills away from the old King’s monastery and crossed into Powys. Two nights later we were in Caer Sws where we were reunited with Culhwch who was prospering in his new kingdom. That night we all drank too much mead and next morning, when Cuneglas and I rode to Cwm Isaf, my head was sore. I found the King had kept our little house intact. ‘I never know when you might need it again, Derfel,’ he told me.
‘Maybe soon,’ I admitted glumly.
‘Soon? I do hope so.’
I shrugged. ‘We are not truly welcome in Dumnonia. Mordred resents me.’
‘Then ask to be released from your oath.’
‘I did ask,’ I said, ‘and he refused me.’ I had asked him after the acclamation, when the shame of the two blows was still keen in me, and then I had asked him again six months later and still he had refused me. I think he was clever enough to know that the best way to punish me was to force me to serve him.
‘Is it your spearmen he wants?’ Cuneglas asked, sitting on the bench under the apple tree by the house door.
‘Just my grovelling loyalty,’ I said bitterly. ‘He doesn’t seem to want to fight any wars.’
‘So he’s not a complete fool,’ Cuneglas said drily. Then we spoke of Ceinwyn and the girls and Cuneglas offered to send Malaine, his new chief Druid, to Dian’s side. ‘Malaine has a remarkable skill with herbs,’ he said. ‘Better than old Iorweth. Did you know he died?’
‘I heard. And if you can spare Malaine, Lord King, I would be glad.’
‘He’ll leave tomorrow. I can’t have my nieces sick. Doesn’t your Nimue help?’
‘No more and no less than Merlin,’ I said, touching the tip of an old sickle blade that was embedded in the apple tree’s bark. The touch of iron was to ward off the evil that threatened Dian. ‘The old Gods,’
I said bitterly, ‘have abandoned Dumnonia.’
Cuneglas smiled. ‘It never does, Derfel, to underestimate the Gods. They’ll have their day in Dumnonia again.’ He paused. ‘The Christians like to call themselves sheep, don’t they? Well, just you listen to them bleat when the wolves come.’
‘What wolves?’
‘The Saxons,’ he said unhappily. ‘They’ve given us ten years of peace, but their boats still land on the eastern shores and I can feel their power growing. If they start fighting us again then your Christians will be glad enough of pagan swords.’ He stood and laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘The Saxons are unfinished business, Derfel, unfinished business.’
That night he gave us a feast and next morning, with a guide given us by Cuneglas, we travelled south into the bleak hills that lay across the old frontier of Siluria.
We were going to a remote Christian community. Christians were still few in Powys, for Cuneglas ruthlessly ejected Sansum’s missionaries from his kingdom whenever he discovered their presence, but some Christians lived in the kingdom and there were many in the old lands of Siluria. This one group in particular was famous among Britain’s Christians for their sanctity, and they displayed that sanctity by living in extreme poverty in a wild, hard place. Ligessac had found his refuge among these Christian fanatics who, as Tewdric had told us, mortified their flesh, by which he meant that they competed with each other to see which could lead the most miserable lives. Some lived in caves, some refused shelter altogether, others ate only green things, some eschewed all clothes, others dressed in hair shirts with brambles woven into the fabric, some wore crowns made of thorns and others beat themselves bloody day after day like the flagellants we had seen in Isca. To me it seemed that the best punishment for Ligessac was to leave him in such a community, but we were ordered to fetch him out and take him home which meant we would have to defy the community’s leader, a fierce bishop named Cadoc whose belligerence was famous.
That reputation persuaded us to don our armour as we approached Cadoc’s squalid fastness in the high hills. We did not wear our best armour, at least those of us who had a choice did not, for that finery would have been wasted on a half-crazed pack of holy fanatics, but we were all helmeted and wore mail or leather and carried shields. If nothing else, we thought, the war gear might overawe Cadoc’s disciples who, our guide assured us, did not number more than twenty souls. ‘And all of them are mad,’ our guide told us. ‘One of them stood dead still for a whole year! Didn’t move a muscle, they say. Just stood like a beanpole while they shovelled food into one end of him and dung away from the other. Funny sort of God who asks that of a man.’
The road to Cadoc’s refuge had been beaten into the earth by pilgrims’ feet, and it twisted up the flanks of wide, bare hills where the only living things we saw were sheep and goats. We saw no shepherds, but they undoubtedly saw us. ‘If Ligessac has any sense,’ Arthur said, ‘he’ll be long gone. They must have seen us by now.’
‘And what will we tell Mordred?’
‘The truth, of course,’ Arthur said bleakly. His armour was a spearman’s plain helmet and a leather breastcoat, yet even such humble things looked neat and clean on him. His vanity was never flamboyant like Lancelot’s, but he did pride himself on cleanliness, and somehow this whole expedition into the raw uplands offended his sense of what was clean and proper. The weather did not help, for it was a bleak, raw summer’s day, with rain whipping out of the west on a chill wind. Arthur’s spirits might have been low, but our spearmen were cheerful. They made jokes about assaulting the stronghold of mighty King Cadoc and boasted of the gold, warrior rings and slaves they would capture in the assault, and the joke’s extravagant claims made them laugh when at last we breasted the final saddle in the hills and could look down into the valley where Ligessac had found his refuge. It was indeed a squalid place; a sea of mud in which a dozen round stone huts surrounded a small square stone church. There were some ragged vegetable gardens, a small dark lake, some stone pens for the community’s goats, but no palisade.
The only defence the valley boasted was a great stone cross carved with intricate patterns and an image of the Christian God enthroned in glory. The cross, which was a marvellous piece of stonework, marked the saddle where Cadoc’s land began and it was beside the cross, in plain sight of the tiny settlement that lay only a dozen spear throws away, that Arthur halted our war-band. ‘We shan’t trespass,’ he told us mildly, ‘till we’ve had a chance to talk with them.’ He rested his spear-butt on the ground beside his horse’s front hoofs and waited.
A dozen folk were visible in the compound and on seeing us they fled to the church, from which, a moment later, a huge man appeared and strode up the road towards us. He was a giant of a man, as tall as Merlin and with a massive chest and big, capable hands. He was also filthy, with an unwashed face and a brown robe caked with mud and dirt, while his grey hair, as dirty as his robe, seemed never to have been cut. His beard grew wild to below his waist, while behind his tonsure his hair sprang in dirty tangles like a great grey freshly sheared fleece. His face was tanned dark and he had a wide mouth, a jutting forehead and angry eyes. It was an impressive face. He carried a staff in his right hand, while at his left hip, unscabbarded, there hung a huge rusty sword. He looked as if he had once been a useful spearman, and I did not doubt that he could still deal a hard blow or two. ‘You are not welcome here,’
he shouted as he drew nearer to us, ‘unless you come to lay your miserable souls before God.’
‘Our souls are already laid before our Gods,’ Arthur answered pleasantly.
‘Heathen!’ the big man, whom I assumed had to be the famous Cadoc, spat a
t us. ‘You come in iron and steel to a place where Christ’s children play with the Lamb of God?’
‘We come in peace,’ Arthur insisted.
The bishop spat a great yellow gob of sputum towards Arthur’s horse. ‘You are Arthur ap Uther ap Satan,’ he said, ‘and your soul is a rag of filth.’
‘And you, I assume, are Bishop Cadoc,’ Arthur answered courteously.
The Bishop stood beside the cross and scratched a line in the road with the butt of his staff. ‘Only the faithful and the penitent can cross this line,’ he declared, ‘for this is God’s holy ground.’
Arthur gazed for a few heartbeats at the muddy squalor ahead, then smiled gravely at the defiant Cadoc. ‘I have no wish to enter your God’s ground, Bishop,’ he said, ‘but I do ask you, in peace, to bring us the man called Ligessac’
‘Ligessac,’ Cadoc boomed at us as though he was addressing a congregation of thousands, ‘is God’s blessed and holy child. He has been given sanctuary here and neither you nor any other so-called lord can invade that sanctuary.’
Arthur smiled. ‘A King rules here, Bishop, not your God. Only Cuneglas can offer sanctuary, and he has not.’
‘My King, Arthur,’ Cadoc said proudly, ‘is the King of Kings, and He has commanded me to refuse you entrance.’
‘You will resist me?’ Arthur asked with polite surprise in his voice.
‘To death!’ Cadoc shouted.
Arthur shook his head sadly. ‘I am no Christian, Bishop,’ he said mildly, ‘but do you not preach that your Otherworld is a place of utter delights?’ Cadoc made no answer and Arthur shrugged. ‘So I do you a favour, do I not, by hurrying you to that destination?’ He asked the question, then drew Excalibur. The Bishop used his staff to deepen the line he had scratched across the muddy track. ‘I forbid you to cross this line,’ he shouted. ‘I forbid it in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost!’
Then he raised the staff and pointed it at Arthur. He held the staff still for a heartbeat, then swept its tip to encompass the rest of us, and I confess that I felt a chill at that moment. Cadoc was no Merlin, and his God, I thought, had no power like Merlin’s Gods, but I still shuddered as that staff pointed my way and my fear made me touch my iron mail and spit onto the road. ‘I am going to my prayers now, Arthur,’
Cadoc said, ‘and you, if you wish to live, will turn and go from this place, for if you pass by this holy cross then I swear to you, by the sweet blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, that your souls will burn in torment. You will know the fire everlasting. You will be cursed from the beginning of time till its ending and from the vaults of heaven to the bottom-most pits of hell.’ And with that heavy curse delivered he spat one more time, then turned and walked away.
Arthur used the tail of his cloak to wipe the rain off Excalibur, then scabbarded the sword. ‘It seems we’re not welcome,’ he said with some amusement, then he turned and beckoned to Balin who was the oldest cavalryman present. ‘Take the horsemen,’ Arthur ordered him, ‘and get behind the village. Make sure no one can escape. Once you’re in place I’ll bring Derfel and his men to search the houses. And listen!’ — he raised his voice so that all sixty men could hear him — ‘these folk will resist. They’ll taunt and fight us, but we have no quarrel with any of them. Only with Ligessac. You will not steal from them and you will not hurt any of them unnecessarily. You will remember that you are soldiers and they are not. You will treat them with respect and return their curses with silence.’ He spoke sternly, and then, when he was sure that all our men had understood him, he smiled at Balin and gestured him forward. The thirty armoured horsemen rode ahead, streaming off the road to gallop around the valley’s edge to reach the far slope beyond the village. Cadoc, who was still walking towards his church, glanced at them, but showed no alarm.
‘I wonder,’ Arthur said, ‘how he knew who I was?’
‘You’re famous, Lord,’ I said. I still called him Lord and always would.
‘My name is known, perhaps, but not my face. Not here.’ He shrugged the mystery off. ‘Was Ligessac always a Christian?’
‘Since first I knew him. But never a good one.’
He smiled. ‘The virtuous life becomes easier when you’re older. At least I think it does.’ He watched his horsemen gallop past the village, their horses’ hoofs kicking up great spouts of water from the soaking grass, then he hefted his spear and looked back at my men. ‘Remember now! No theft!’ I wondered what there could possibly be to steal in such a drab place, but Arthur knew that all spearmen will usually find something as a keepsake. ‘I don’t want trouble,’ Arthur told them. ‘We just look for our man, then leave.’ He touched Llamrei’s flanks and the black mare started obediently forward. We foot-soldiers followed, our boots obliterating Cadoc’s scratched line in the muddy road beside the intricately carved cross. No fire came from heaven.
The Bishop had reached his church now and he stopped at its entrance, turned, saw us coming and ducked inside. ‘They knew we were coming,’ Arthur said to me, ‘so we’ll not find Ligessac here. I fear it’s a waste of our time, Derfel.’ A lame sheep hobbled over the road and Arthur checked his horse to give it passage. I saw him shudder and I knew he was offended by the settlement’s dirt that almost mailed the squalor of Nimue’s Tor.
Cadoc reappeared at the church door when we were just a hundred paces away. By now our horsemen were waiting behind the village, but Cadoc did not bother to look to see where they were. He just raised a big ram’s horn to his lips and blew a call that echoed hollowly in the bare bowl of hills. He sounded the horn once, paused to take a deep breath, then sounded it again. And suddenly we had a battle on our hands.
They had known we were coming right enough, and they had been ready for us. Every Christian in Powys and Siluria must have been summoned to Cadoc’s defence and those men now appeared on the crests all around the valley while others ran to block the road behind us. Some carried spears, some had shields and some hefted nothing but reaping hooks or hay forks, but they looked confident enough. Many, I knew, would once have been spearmen who served in the war levy, but what gave these Christians real confidence, apart from their faith in their God, was that they numbered at least two hundred men. ‘The fools!’ Arthur said angrily. He hated unnecessary violence and he knew that some killing was now unavoidable. He knew, too, that we would win, for only fanatics who believed their God would fight for them would take on sixty of Dumnonia’s finest warriors. ‘Fools!’ He spat again, then glanced at the village to see more armed men coming from the huts. ‘You stay here, Derfel,’ he said.
‘Just hold them, and we’ll see them off.’ He kicked back his spurs and galloped alone about the village’s edge towards his horsemen.
‘Shield-ring,’ I said quietly. We were only thirty men and our double-ranked ring made a circle so small that it must have looked like an easy target to those howling Christians who now ran down the hills or out of the village to annihilate us. The shield-ring is never a popular formation with soldiers because the splay of the spears out of the circle means that their points are spread far apart and the smaller the ring the wider those gaps between the spearheads, but my men were well trained. The front rank knelt, their shields touching and the butts of their long spears jammed into the ground behind them. We in the second rank laid our shields over the first rank’s shields, propping them on the ground so that our attackers faced a double thick wall of leather-covered timber. Then each of us stood behind a kneeling man and levelled our spears over their heads. Our job was to protect the front rank and their job was to stay staunch. It would be hard, bloody work, but so long as the kneeling men held their shields high and kept their spears firm, and so long as we protected them, the shield-ring should be safe enough. I reminded the kneeling men of
their training, told them they were there just as an obstacle as to
leave the killing to the rest of us. ‘Bel is with us,’ I said.
‘So is Arthur,’ Issa added enthusiastically
.
For it was Arthur who would do the day’s real killing. We were the lure and he was the executioner, and Cadoc’s men took that lure like a hungry salmon rising to a mayfly. Cadoc himself led the charge from the village, carrying his rusty sword and a big round shield that was painted with a black cross behind which I could just see the ghostly outline of Siluria’s fox that betrayed his previous allegiance as a spearman in Gundleus’s ranks.
That Christian horde did not come as a shield-wall. That might have brought them victory, but instead they attacked in the old manner that the Romans had beaten out of us. In the old days, when the Romans were new in Britain, the tribes would charge them in one glorious, howling, mead-fuelled rush. Such a charge was fearsome to see, but easy for disciplined men to defeat, and my spearmen were wonderfully disciplined.
They doubtless felt fear. I felt fear, for the howling charge is a terrible thing to see. Against ill-disciplined men it works because of the terror it provokes, and this was the first time I had ever seen that old way of Britain’s battles. Cadoc’s Christians rushed fanatically at us, competing to see who could be first onto our spears. They shrieked and hurled curses, and it seemed as though each one of them wanted to be a martyr or else a hero. Their wild rush even included women who screamed as they swung wooden clubs or reaping knives. There were even children among that howling rabble.
‘Bel!’ I shouted as the first man tried to leap the kneeling men of the front rank and so died on my spear. I spitted him clean as a hare ready to be roasted, then threw him, spear and all, out of the circle so that his dying body would form an obstacle to his comrades. Hywel-bane killed the next man and I could hear my spearmen keening their dreadful battle chant as they ripped and lunged and cut and stabbed. We were all so good, so fast, and so thoroughly trained. Hours of dull training had gone into that shield-ring and though it had been years since most of us had fought in a battle, we discovered that our old instincts were as quick as ever, and it was instinct and experience that kept us alive that day. The enemy was a shrieking, milling press of fanatics who crammed themselves about our ring and thrust their spears towards us, but our outer shield-ring stayed firm as a rock and he mound of dead and dying attackers that grew so swiftly in front of their shields hindered the other attackers. For the first minute or two, when the ground about our shield-ring was still free of obstacles and the bravest of the enemy could still get close, it was a frantic fight, but once the ring of dead and dying protected us then only the bravest attackers tried to reach us and we fifteen of the inner rank could then pick our targets and use them for spear or sword practice.
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