Part 11 (1/2)

'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 spare, 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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.o.a.rd, 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.

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 pa.s.s 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-b.u.t.t into the compacted ma.s.s 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 s.h.a.ggy 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 G.o.d.'

'And when you're dead,' I pulled him back towards the door, 'some b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 s.h.i.+eld and spear, he spread his arms wide and offered a new prayer in an old place. 'It's a sign from G.o.d,' he said excitedly as he at last followed me back into the suns.h.i.+ne. '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 re-dedicate the shrine to its G.o.d, 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 sanct.i.ty.

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 hors.e.m.e.n galloped back towards the sound of the killing. None of those hors.e.m.e.n 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.

'G.o.ds, 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, gra.s.sy 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 G.o.d.'

'So why did G.o.d 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 hors.e.m.e.n, leaving Arthur free to lead the whole army.

'When you want something valuable from the G.o.ds,' 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 b.u.t.t 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 antic.i.p.ation 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.