We went no further, letting brother and sister and their Saxon ally walk all the way, carrying the burden of our gaze, until they stopped six paces away. There, they nodded in greeting and we nodded back but did not speak, making it clear that we had nothing we wanted to say to them.
Lady Triamour broke the silence.
‘Is it true, lady?’ she asked Iselle. ‘You are Arthur’s daughter?’
‘I am, lady,’ Iselle said.
Lady Triamour gave a sad smile. I had never seen a sadder face than hers, nor, perhaps, a more beautiful one. ‘Then you know we are related by blood,’ she said, which of course they were, Lady Triamour being Mordred’s daughter and Melehan being his son. ‘Your father was my grandfather,’ the lady said. She looked at Iselle as though curious to know what her aunt made of that. But Iselle did not give her the satisfaction of appearing to make anything of it.
‘Where have you been all these years?’ Lady Triamour asked.
‘I’ve been living as best I can, away from all this,’ Iselle replied. ‘And killing Saxons when I could.’ Her words paid the big, mail-clad, fair-haired Saxon no heed. As if he was not there. ‘And you?’ she asked Lady Triamour.
Lady Triamour did not answer. I glanced at Lord Melehan and knew that his eyes had never left me. For I had killed his brother and he wanted to fight me, wanted more than anything to kill me. I believed he would have given up the high seat promised by King Cerdic and his grandmother, in exchange for my head on his spear.
‘You could join us, lady,’ Lady Triamour said to Iselle. ‘Rather than die here with them.’ A pale hand gestured at Lord Constantine and me.
‘And you could join me,’ Iselle replied, ‘and together we could beat Cerdic and destroy the Saxons’ power in Britain for a generation.’ Once again, Iselle did not even acknowledge the Saxon, but I looked at him to see if he understood. Of course he did. That was why King Cerdic had sent him with Melehan and Lady Triamour. I had seen a faint amusement in his eyes when Iselle had suggested that Lady Triamour should join us.
‘My grandmother wants the same thing you do,’ Lady Triamour said. ‘Peace in Britain.’
‘Morgana would give Britain to this man’s king.’ Constantine now spoke, lifting his smooth-shaven chin towards the Saxon. ‘But it is not Morgana’s to give.’
‘When my brother is king, he will protect Dumnonia,’ Lady Triamour said.
‘Your brother is a coward and a traitor and will never be king,’ I said. Melehan was a traitor but he was no coward, and I had hoped to provoke him to draw his sword, but he let the insult slide off him, promising me death only with his eyes.
‘I think the time for talking has passed,’ Lord Constantine said, but Melehan raised a hand as if to beg his forbearance a moment longer and gestured to the ivory-hilted sword at Iselle’s left hip. ‘Is that Excalibur?’ he asked.
‘It is,’ Iselle said.
Melehan hungered to kill me, but he also coveted Excalibur and I knew that he was imagining that sword at his own side. ‘Arthur could not win.’ When he spoke his grandfather’s name, it was as if it tasted rotten in his mouth. ‘What makes you think you can?’
Iselle smiled. In spite of the battle to come and the overwhelming numbers facing us, in spite of all the death and the pain and the anguish which would soon glut the day, Iselle smiled. And I saw how Melehan hated it and the Saxon was confused by it, and Lady Triamour feared it. ‘We have Merlin,’ Iselle said. ‘And Merlin has the Cauldron of Annwn. And we have the gods.’ She spoke as if these were simple truths, and yet her words had my blood trembling in my veins. I was in awe of her.
‘Your gods are weak,’ the Saxon spat. His first words. ‘As weak as a woman.’
Iselle looked at the man for the first time, and he grinned because he thought he had managed to offend her.
‘And we have Galahad,’ she said, looking into the Saxon’s blue eyes.
She caught me off guard with that, given how she had been talking of a treasure of Britain, a druid, and of the gods themselves, but an instinct, unforeseen and unbidden, told me I ought to do something.
And so I killed the Saxon.
It happened so fast. Lady Triamour stared at the dead man and Melehan half pulled his sword from its scabbard, but Lord Constantine levelled his spear.
‘I wouldn’t,’ Constantine said, loudly because our men on the ridge behind us were cheering, and Melehan let his polished iron blade wink once beneath the morning sun before thrusting it home into its dark bed.
‘You have no honour,’ he rasped at me, his eyes round and so full of hate I thought they might burst.
‘I let him draw his sword.’ I pointed my own blood-slick blade at the dead Saxon, who lay soaking the green grass and the rich Dumnonian earth with his own blood, like so many of his people before him. And I had let him draw his sword. More than that, I had told him to draw it. He was experienced enough to know that I was serious and had pulled his sword and come at me with a scything attack, fast and deadly, but I was faster and twisted aside, his sword’s tip hissing down my scale coat before I spun back, punching Boar’s Tusk into his throat and driving it on until the gleaming hilt was in his beard. When I had hauled Boar’s Tusk free, blood sprayed more than five feet, hitting Iselle across the cheek and somehow spattering Lady Triamour too across her pale face and leaf-bud lips.
Lady Triamour wiped at the blood now, smearing it across that speck of brown below her left eye, but Iselle left the blood where it was. Holly berries strewn across snow.
Our spearmen cheering and my flesh trembling, I took the Saxon’s head from his shoulders. ‘Take this back to the old hound who shares your grandmother’s bed,’ I said, thrusting it at Melehan, who must have been sick of being given men’s heads, yet he took it.
Lady Triamour looked up at the wolf banner and the bear banner and the grim-faced men who lined the summit of the embankment and thumped their spear shafts against their shields. Some of them were yelling at me to kill Melehan too, others were asking Lord Constantine’s permission to come down and do it themselves.
‘You will all die here.’ Lady Triamour’s words rose above the din, her beautiful, sad face seeming to show regret.
‘We expect no quarter, for we shall give none,’ Lord Constantine said.
Melehan stood there, holding the Saxon’s head by his long, pale yellow hair, the ruined neck dripping into the grass, the dead eyes staring as if in disbelief.
‘I will find you in the battle, Galahad,’ he snarled.
‘I hope so,’ I said.
Then he looked at Iselle and jerked his chin in Constantine’s direction. ‘You will wish these old men had not pulled you out of the marshes,’ he said. ‘Arthur is not here to save you now.’
Iselle remained silent, having said everything that she wished to, and so the last word was left to the man who had been flying the bear banner all these years.
‘You are a fool if you think Arthur is not here now,’ Lord Constantine said, looking around him at the shivering grass and the distant reed-beds and the hawthorn tangles down by the brook on our right.
Melehan and Lady Triamour shared a look which had some meaning known only to brother and sister, then they turned and walked back towards our enemies. Our own men up on the low ridge took to hurling insults at them both, calling Melehan the son of a worm and a traitor and far worse yet, while others assured Lady Triamour that they would find her after the fighting, and these threats made my skin crawl, for they were far worse than anything they promised Melehan.
We watched them walk away, each of us lost within our own thoughts and aware of the weight of what had just happened. For there could be no peace now, only battle and pain and death.
‘I don’t think you would have made a good monk of the Holy Thorn, lad,’ Lord Constantine said, his eyes shadowed beneath his helmet’s rim and furrowed brows.
‘I don’t think so either,’ I admitted, remembering that Iselle had said the same thing before we had made lo
ve on the Isle of the Dead. I glanced at her now. Her jaw was clenched, the muscle in her cheek bouncing beneath the blood-speckled skin.
Then Constantine, son of Ambrosius, nephew of Uther Pendragon and warlord of Britain, turned and walked down into the ditch and up onto the bank, and we followed him.
And no sooner were we standing beneath our war banners again, than did the mournful tones of Saxon war horns carry on the dawn air, and the mass of spearmen with their crow-shields lurched forward onto the green meadow.
‘Back! Get the lady back!’ Lord Constantine yelled, his face a grimacing, gore-spattered mask. ‘Get her out of here, Galahad!’ he screamed. I hacked into a neck, then thrust Boar’s Tusk into a mailed shoulder, breaking through the iron rings into the leather, flesh and bone beneath. I had long ago lost my spear but I still gripped my shield and now I drove my left shoulder into it, heaving against the weight of bodies pressing in on me, trying to stay on my feet, to not be sucked under where men writhed and screamed and suffocated and died.
‘Iselle!’ I caught sight of her amongst the rolling human tide, this swell of desperate terror, and though she was only two paces away, she was unreachable. Then I saw a young warrior holding his spear in a two-handed grip above the press, its blade pointing at her.
I called to her but the clamour filled the world: a clashing of blades and the thump of shields, the terrible shrieks of pain and the gasping of men fighting for every breath. I had never heard anything so loud, not even the crashing of the sea in some raging storm.
My strength was useless against the thronging mass and so I brought Boar’s Tusk up and sawed through the shield straps, letting the shield fall away. Then, by touch alone, I found Boar’s Tusk’s scabbard and pushed the blade home, for there was no room for sword work now.
Our shieldwall had held until a vast swathe of cloud, as grey as charcoal, swept across the noonday sun, at which time the crow-shields established a footing on our embankment and carved deeper and deeper into our position. To my right and left, our shieldwall yet held, but in the centre it was broken, and chaos was lord of the field. And so I pulled my long knife and punched it into necks and chests, into bellies and groins, and with my other hand I pulled and clawed at the flailing bodies of those I was butchering, hauling them out of my way, forcing them down into the carnage below, treading on them to get to Iselle.
Blades scraped on my armour, hands grasped like tangles of gorse at my greaves and my legs, but I would not be stopped and I killed and maimed and then I came face to face with the young spearman, who could not get his weapon down in time to stop me ramming my knife into the hollow beneath his raised right arm. He screamed into my face as I twisted the knife free and hacked into him, taking his lower jaw in a spray of hot blood.
‘Galahad!’ Iselle was wild-eyed and daubed in crimson. She looked lost. Confused. As though she had woken from deep sleep amid this stinking, convulsing carnage and could not imagine how she had got there.
‘Back!’ I told her, putting myself in front of her and drawing Boar’s Tusk, and together we moved backwards as Lord Constantine led his best men in a desperate counter-attack against the crow-shields.
‘For Lady Iselle!’ our warriors cried. ‘For the lady!’ and they surged forward, driving the crow-shields back up onto the ridge. ‘For the lady!’ They drove on, sending the enemy tumbling down into the ditch onto those who were trying to clamber up, so that the trench became a seething mass of struggling men.
Then a great crack tore the sky, drowning the uproar of mortal strife, so violent that I felt it in my chest, felt it in the ground and rising up through my legs. A deep rumble followed, rolling on and on through the decisive moments of men’s lives, sounding like some god driving his chariot across the roof of the world. Then a giant serpent’s hiss as rain lashed down, fogging the day, sluicing blood from helmets and shields and faces. In an eye-blink the grass became treacherous and men were losing their footing and going down. Those who were not in the front ranks or caught up in the melee at our centre turned their faces to the grey sky and opened their mouths to catch what water they could, and when I looked over my shoulder I saw Merlin standing up on the crest of the rise, his arms and his staff raised to the rain-heavy sky as though he had called that downpour upon us, his beard rope jutting from his chin, the black dye with which he had darkened his eyes running down his gaunt cheeks.
Another peal of thunder ripped through the western sky, the rain arrowed down, bouncing from helmets and drenching the war banners so that they sagged heavily between their spear poles, and Constantine’s men on the bank hurled spears down at the men struggling in the ditch, who roared and shrieked and writhed in a welter of despair.
And then Lady Morgana’s war horns called her spearmen back.
Some fifty or more of our men chased them across the bank but most of us let the crow-shields go, content to yell insults after them and relieved to see their backs instead of their faces. I looked over to our right, where King Bivitas of Cynwidion stood with his spearmen. Still solid. Still defiant. I caught the king’s eye and he nodded. Beyond the men of Cynwidion stood the warriors of Caer Gloui under King Cuel. I could not see them, but I saw the bristling boar banner standing firm in the seething rain. And behind them, in reserve, some fifty or so brave men of Caer Celemion who had not abandoned us and tramped home with Lord Cyndaf.
All around me men were bent double, sucking air into their lungs. Some tasted the rain on their tongues and took off their helmets to catch it, for there was so much coming down.
‘Are you hurt?’ I asked Iselle, looking for any wounds, any damage to her leather scale coat. My eyes were full of sweat and my vision was blurred by the rain, and I was terrified that she might have taken a blade but did not know it yet, as can happen.
‘No,’ she said. She gripped Excalibur in her right hand. The blade was red with gore. Her eyes sharpened and she came back to herself. ‘No,’ she said again, as if confirming it to herself. ‘You?’
I shook my head and took her arm, wanting to lead her to the rear, to where King Menadoc of Cornubia and Lord Geldrin waited with their men as a reserve, but she pulled away and removed her helmet so that the men around us could see that she was alive and unharmed.
‘Get her away from here, Galahad,’ Lord Constantine bellowed, striding over to us, pushing men out of his path.
‘No, Galahad,’ Iselle said. ‘I won’t go.’
‘You must,’ I urged her, but then Constantine was upon us.
‘You need to get to the back, lady,’ he said, blood-slathered and furious, still in the grip of the battle lust. Glaring at her. ‘If you die, it’s over.’
‘I’m staying here,’ Iselle told him.
Lord Constantine’s head snapped back as though he had been struck. ‘You’ll do what I tell you, lady.’ He ground the words out.
Not even a heartbeat and Boar’s Tusk was at his throat.
‘Careful, lord,’ I rasped. For I too was thrumming with the savage thrill of battle and I blamed myself for having been carried away from Iselle in the thick of the fight, and any man who threatened her now, Saxon or Briton, would pay with his life.
‘Lower your blade, Galahad,’ Morvan, Lord Constantine’s second in command, ordered, his own sword close enough to my face that I could see the rain washing the blood off it.
‘Galahad.’ Iselle’s voice, wanting me to do as Morvan said.
I did not lower Boar’s Tusk, nor did I take my eyes from Constantine’s, ignoring Morvan as though he was of no more consequence than the rain dripping from my helmet’s rim. I knew that there were other warriors around us, gripping spears and swords and waiting for their lord’s command. Beyond them, and all around, the cries and moans of the broken and dying.
Constantine made a gesture which told Morvan to lower his sword, which the man did, glowering at me.
‘Then you had better keep her alive, boy,’ Constantine snarled at me.
‘I will,’ I said, and remo
ved my blade from his throat.
‘Here they come!’ someone yelled, and we all turned to look east again, our small enmities falling away in the face of King Cerdic’s Saxons moving forward in a shieldwall forty men across and five ranks deep. The retreating crow-shields were streaming past both flanks, some getting stuck in the treacherous, marshy ground because there was no way through the oncoming Saxon rampart.
‘Cerdic made Morgana send her men first,’ Constantine said, ‘to prove their loyalty.’
‘And to soften us up,’ Morvan said.
Our men were gathering spears and discarded weapons. Some were down in the ditch, looting the enemy dead, pulling off helmets, arm rings and finger rings, stripping armour from bodies which had moments before been living men, drinking from flasks for which the dead had no use, cutting amulets from the cords around men’s necks and searching for coins and anything else of worth. But there had been no time to gather up our own dead and they lay where they had fallen, dozens of them in their scarlet cloaks, once the flower of Britannia, given now as some appalling sacrifice which we knew would appease neither men nor gods.
‘This will be harder,’ Constantine announced, sweeping his shield- and bone-blunted sword towards the coming mass of foes, ‘for this Saxon king knows that we are all that stands between him and the high seat of Britain.’ His voice carried as if on wings, far over the clamour. ‘On this day, in this place, will the fates of Dumnonia and Caer Celemion, Cynwidion and Caer Gwinntguic and even mighty Powys be decided,’ he yelled, nodding over to his left at King Catigern, who stood at the forefront of his men. ‘We must not fail!’
I nodded at Iselle, who dipped her head in grim resoluteness, both of us admitting in unspoken accord that Lord Constantine was a leader and we were lucky to have him.
‘You will not find the warriors of Powys wanting, Lord Constantine,’ King Catigern boomed, spitting the rain which ran down his thick moustaches and beard. ‘Send the Saxon dogs to die on our spears.’
‘Powys! Powys! Powys!’ they chanted, clattering their spear staves against their shields in a woeful echo of the thunder, for though the men beneath that stag antler banner had repelled some half-hearted assaults from Morgana’s crow-shields, they had yet to face the onslaught that we in the centre had faced, and they craved to prove themselves our equals or betters.
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