'And so did you,' Igraine said, 'on Dolforwyn. What was it that Merlin gave you to drink?'

'The same thing Nimue gave Ceinwyn at Llyn Cerrig Bach,' I said, 'and that was probably an infusion of the red cap.'

'The mushroom!' Igraine sounded appalled.

I nodded. 'That was why I was twitching and couldn't stand.'

'But you could have died!' she protested.

I shook my head. 'Not many die from red caps, and besides, Nimue was skilled in such things.' I decided not to tell her that the best way to make the red cap safe was for the wizard himself to eat the mushroom, then give the dreamer a cup of his urine to drink. 'Or maybe she used rye-blight?' I said instead, 'but I think it was red cap.'

Igraine frowned as St Sansum ordered Brother Maelgwyn to stop singing his pagan song. The saint is in a testier mood than usual these days. He suffers pain when pa.s.sing urine, maybe because of a stone. We pray for him.

'So what happens now?' Igraine asked, ignoring Sansum's ranting.

'We went home,' I said. 'Back to Powys.'

'And to Arthur?' she asked eagerly.

'To Arthur too,' I said, for this is his tale; the tale of our dear warlord, our law-giver, our Arthur. That spring was so glorious in Cwm Isaf, or perhaps when you are in love everything appears fuller and brighter, but it seemed to me as though the world had never been so crammed with cowslips and dog mercury, with bluebells and violets, with lilies and great banks of cow parsley. Blue b.u.t.terflies haunted the meadow where we ripped out tangled bundles of couch gra.s.s from beneath the apple trees that blossomed pink. Wrynecks sang in the blossom, there were sandpipers by the stream and a wagtail made its nest under Cwm Isaf's thatch. We had five calves, all healthy and greedy and soft-eyed, and Ceinwyn was pregnant.

I had made us both lovers' rings when we returned from Ynys Mon. They were rings incised with a cross, though not the Christian cross, and girls often wore them after they had pa.s.sed from being maids to women. Most girls took a twist of straw from their lovers and wore it as a badge, and spearmen's women usually wore a warrior ring on which the cross had been scratched, while women of the highest rank rarely wore the rings at all, despising them as vulgar symbols. Some men wore them, too, and it had been just such a crossed lover's ring that Valerin, the chieftain of Powys, had worn when he died at Lugg Vale. Valerin had been Guinevere's betrothed before she met Arthur.

Our rings were both warrior rings made from a Saxon axehead, but before I left Merlin, who was continuing his journey southwards to Ynys Wydryn, I secretly broke off a fragment of the Cauldron's detoration; it was a miniature golden spear carried by a warrior and it came off easily. I hid the gold in a pouch and, once back at Cwm Isaf, I took the sc.r.a.p of gold and the two warrior rings to a metalworker there and watched as he melted and fashioned the gold into two crosses that he burned onto the iron. I stood over to him make sure he did not subst.i.tute some other gold, and then I carried one of the rings to Ceinwyn and wore the other myself. Ceinwyn laughed when she saw the ring. 'A piece of straw would have done just as well, Derfel,' she said.

'Gold from the Cauldron will serve better,' I answered. We wore the rings always, much to Queen h.e.l.ledd's disgust.

Arthur came to us in that lovely spring. He found me stripped to the waist and pulling couch gra.s.s, a job as unending as spinning wool. He hailed me from the stream, then strode uphill to greet me. He was dressed in a grey linen shirt and long dark leggings, and he carried no sword. 'I like to see a man working,' he teased me.

'Pulling couch is harder work than fighting,' I grumbled and pressed my hands into the small of my back. 'You've come to help?'

'I've come to see Cuneglas,' he said, then took a seat on a boulder near one of the apple trees that dotted the pasture.

'War?' I asked, as though Arthur might have any other business in Powys. He nodded. 'Time to gather the spears, Derfel. Especially,' he smiled, 'the Warriors of the Cauldron.'

Then he insisted on hearing the whole story, even though he must already have heard it a dozen times, and when it was told he had the grace to apologize for having doubted the Cauldron's existence. I am sure Arthur still thought it was all a nonsense, and even a dangerous nonsense, for the success of our quest had angered Dumnonia's Christians who, as Galahad had said, believed we performed the devil's work. Merlin had carried the precious Cauldron back to Ynys Wydryn where it was being stored in his tower. In time. Merlin said, he would summon its vast powers, but even now, just by being in Dumnonia, and despite the hostility of the Christians, the Cauldron was giving the land a new confidence.

'Though I confess,' Arthur told me, 'that I take more confidence from seeing spearmen gathered. Cuneglas tells me he will march next week, Lancelot's Silurians are gathering at Isca, and Tewdric's men are ready to march. And it will be a dry year, Derfel, a good year for fighting.'

I agreed. The ash trees had turned green before the oaks, and that signified a dry summer to come, and dry summers meant firm ground for shield-walls. 'So where do you want my men?' I asked.

'With me, of course,' he said, then paused before offering me a sly smile. 'I thought you would have congratulated me, Derfel.'

'You, Lord?' I asked, pretending ignorance so he could tell me the news himself. His smile grew broader. 'Guinevere gave birth a month ago. A boy, a fine boy!'

'Lord!' I exclaimed, pretending he had surprised me with the news, though a report of the birth had reached us a week before.

'He's healthy and hungry! A good omen.' He was plainly delighted, but he was always inordinately pleased with the commonplace things of life. He yearned for a st.u.r.dy family within a well-built house surrounded by properly tended crops. 'We call him Gwydre,' he said, and repeated the name fondly, 'Gwydre.'

'A good name, Lord,' I said, then told him of Ceinwyn's pregnancy and Arthur immediately decreed that her child must be a daughter and, of course, would marry his Gwydre when the time came. He put an arm round my shoulder and walked me up to the house where we found Ceinwyn skimming cream from a dish of milk. Arthur embraced her warmly then insisted she leave the cream-making to her servants and come into the sunlight to talk.

We sat on a bench Issa had made under the apple tree that grew beside the house door. Ceinwyn asked him about Guinevere. 'Was it an easy birth?' she asked.

'It was.' He touched an iron amulet that hung at his neck. 'It was indeed, and she's well!' He grimaced. 'She worries a little that having a child will make her look old, but that's nonsense. My mother never looked old. And having a child will be good for Guinevere.' He smiled, imagining that Guinevere would love a son as much as he would himself. Gwydre, of course, was not his first child. His Irish mistress, Ailleann, had given him twin boys, Amhar and Loholt, who were now old enough to take their places in the shield-wall, but Arthur was not looking forward to their company. 'They are not fond of me,' he admitted when I asked about the twins, 'but they do like our old friend Lancelot.' He offered us both a ruefully apologetic glance at the mention of that name. 'And they will fight with his men,' he added.

'Fight?' Ceinwyn asked warily.

Arthur gave her a gentle smile. 'I come to take Derfel away from you, my Lady.'

'Bring him back to me, Lord,' was all she said.

'With riches enough for a kingdom,' Arthur promised, but then he turned and looked at Cwm Isaf's low walls and the bulging heap of thatch that kept us warm and the steaming dungheap that lay beyond the gable's end. It was not as big as most farmhouses in Dumnonia, but it was still the kind of croft a prosperous freeman in Powys might own and we were fond of it. I thought Arthur was about to make some comment comparing my present humble state with my future wealth and I was ready to defend Cwm Isaf against such a comparison, but instead he looked rueful. 'I do envy you this, Derfel.'

'It's yours for the taking, Lord,' I said, hearing the yearning in his voice.

'I am doomed to marble pillars and soaring pediments.' He laughed the moment away. 'I leave tomorrow,' he said. 'Cuneglas will follow within ten days. Would you come with him? Or earlier if you can. And bring as much food as you can carry.'

'To where?' I asked.

'Corinium,' he replied, then stood and gazed up the cwm before smiling down at me. 'One last word?'

he requested.

'I must be sure Scarach isn't scalding the milk,' Ceinwyn said, taking his broad hint. 'I wish you victory, Lord,' she said to Arthur, then stood to give him a parting embrace. Arthur and I walked up the cwm where he admired the newly-pleached hedges, the trimmed apple trees and the small fish pool we had dammed into the stream. 'Don't become too rooted in this soil, Derfel,' he told me. 'I want you back in Dumnonia.'

'Nothing would give me more pleasure, Lord,' I said, knowing it was not Arthur who kept me from my homeland, but his wife and her ally Lancelot.

Arthur smiled, but said nothing more of my return. 'Ceinwyn,' he said instead, 'seems very happy.'

'She is. We are.'

He hesitated a second. 'You might discover,' he said with the authority of a new father, 'that pregnancy will make her turbulent.'

'Not so far, Lord,' I said, 'though these are early weeks.'

'You are fortunate in her,' he said softly, and looking back I think that was the very first time I ever heard him utter the faintest criticism of Guinevere. 'Childbirth is a stressful time,' he added in hasty explanation, 'and these preparations for war don't help. Alas, I can't be at home as much as I'd like.' He stopped beside an ancient oak that had been riven by lightning so that its fire-blackened trunk was split in two, though even now the old tree was struggling to put out new green shoots. 'I have a favour to ask of you,' he said softly.

'Anything, Lord.'

'Don't be hasty, Derfel, you don't know the favour yet.' He paused, and I sensed the request would be hard for he was embarra.s.sed to be making it. For a moment or two he could not make the request at all, but instead stared towards the woods on the southern side of the cwm and muttered something about deer and bluebells.

'Bluebells?' I asked, thinking I must have misheard him.

'I was just wondering why deer never eat bluebells,' he said evasively. 'They eat everything else.'

'I don't know, Lord.'

He hesitated a heartbeat, then looked into my eyes. 'I have asked for a gathering of Mithras at Corinium,' he finally admitted.

I understood what was coming then and hardened my heart to it. War had given me many rewards, but none so precious as the fellowship of Mithras. He had been the Roman G.o.d of war and He had stayed in Britain when the Romans left; the only men admitted to His mysteries were those elected by his initiates. Those initiates came from every kingdom, and they fought against each other as often as they fought for each other, but when they met in Mithras's hall they met in peace and they would only elect the bravest of the brave to be their fellows. To be an initiate of Mithras was to receive the praise of Britain's finest warriors and it was an honour that I would not give lightly to any man. No women, of course, were permitted to worship Mithras. Indeed, if a woman even saw the mysteries she would be killed.

'I have called the gathering,' Arthur said, 'because I want us to admit Lancelot to the mysteries.' I had known that was the reason. Guinevere had made the same request of me the year before, and in the months that followed I had hoped her idea would fade away, but here, on the eve of war, it had returned. I gave a politic answer. 'Would it not be better, Lord,' I asked, 'if King Lancelot were to wait until the Saxons are defeated? Then, surely, we will have seen him fight.' None of us had yet seen Lancelot in the shield-wall and, to be truthful, I would be astonished to see him fight in this coming summer, but I hoped the suggestion would delay the terrible moment of choice for a few further months. Arthur offered a vague gesture as though my suggestion was somehow irrelevant. 'There is pressure,'

he said vaguely, 'to elect him now.'

'What pressure?' I asked.

'His mother is unwell.'

I laughed. 'Hardly a reason to elect a man to Mithras, Lord.'

Arthur scowled, knowing his arguments were feeble. 'He is a King, Derfel,' he said, 'and he leads a King's army to our wars. He doesn't like Siluria, and I can't blame him. He yearns for the poets and harpists and halls of Ynys Trebes, but he lost that kingdom because I could not fulfil my oath and bring my army to his father's aid. We owe him, Derfel.'

'Not me, Lord.'

'We owe him,' Arthur insisted.

'He should still wait for Mithras,' I said firmly. 'If you propose his name now, Lord, then I dare say it will be rejected.'

He had feared I would say that, but still he did not abandon his arguments. 'You are my friend,' he said, and waved away any comment I might make, 'and it would please me, Derfel, if my friend were as honoured in Dumnonia as he is in Powys.' He had been staring down at the bole of the storm-blasted oak, but now he looked up at me. 'I want you at Lindinis, friend, and if you, above all others, support Lancelot's name in Mithras's hall, then his election is a.s.sured.'

There was far more there than Arthur's bare words had said. He was subtly confirming to me that it was Guinevere who was pressing Lancelot's candidacy, and that my offences in Guinevere's eyes would be forgiven if I granted her this one wish. Elect Lancelot to Mithras, he was saying, and I could take Ceinwyn to Dumnonia and a.s.sume the honour of being Mordred's champion with all the wealth, land and rank which accompanied that high position.

I watched a group of my spearmen come down from the high northern hill. One of them was cradling a lamb, and I guessed it was an orphan that would need to be hand-fed by Ceinwyn. It was a laborious business, for the lamb would have to be nurtured on a cloth teat soaked in milk and as often as not the little things died, but Ceinwyn insisted on trying to save their lives. She had utterly forbidden any of her lambs to be buried in wicker or have their pelts nailed to a tree and the flock did not seem to have suffered as a result of that neglect. I sighed. 'So at Corinium,' I said, 'you will propose Lancelot?'

'Not I, no. Bors will propose him. Bors has seen him fight.'

'Then let us hope, Lord, that Bors is given a tongue of gold.'

Arthur smiled. 'You can give me no answer now?'

'None that you would want to hear, Lord.'

He shrugged, took my arm and walked me back. 'I do hate these secret guilds,' he said mildly, and I believed him for I had never yet seen Arthur at a meeting of Mithras even though I knew he had been initiated many years before. 'Cults like Mithras,' he said, 'are supposed to bind men together, but they only serve to drive them apart. They rouse envy. But sometimes, Derfel, you have to fight one evil with another and I am thinking of starting a new guild of warriors. Those men who bear arms against the Saxons will belong, all of them, and I shall make it the most honoured band in all Britain.'

'The largest too, I hope,' I said.

'Not the levies,' he added, thus restricting his honoured band to those men who carried a spear by oath-duty rather than by land obligation. 'Men will rather belong to my guild than to any secret mystery.'

'What will you call it?' I asked.

'I don't know. Warriors of Britain? The Comrades? The Spears of Cadarn?' He spoke lightly, but I could tell he was serious.

'And you think that if Lancelot belongs to these Warriors of Britain,' I said, s.n.a.t.c.hing one of his suggested t.i.tles, 'then he won't mind being barred from Mithras?'

'It might help,' he admitted, 'but it isn't my prime reason. I shall impose an obligation on these warriors. To join they will have to take a blood-oath never to fight each other again.' He gave a swift smile. 'If the Kings of Britain squabble then I shall make it impossible for their warriors to right each other.'

'Hardly impossible,' I said tartly. 'A royal oath supersedes all others, even your blood-oath.'

'Then I shall make it difficult,' he insisted, 'because I shall have peace, Derfel, I shall have peace. And you, my friend, will share it with me in Dumnonia.'

'I hope so, Lord.'

He embraced me. 'I shall meet you in Corinium,' he said. He raised a hand in greeting to my spearmen, then looked back to me. 'Think about Lancelot, Derfel. And consider the truth that sometimes we must yield a little pride in return for a great peace.'

And with those words he strode away and I went to warn my men that the time for farming was over. We had spears to sharpen, swords to hone and shields to repaint, revarnish and bind hard. We were back at war.

We left two days before Cuneglas, who was waiting for his western chieftains to arrive with their rough-pelted warriors from Powys's mountain fastnesses. He told me to promise Arthur that the men of Powys would be in Corinium within a week, then he embraced me and swore on his life that Ceinwyn would be safe. She was moving back to Caer Sws where a small band of men would guard Cuneglas's family while he was at war. Ceinwyn had been reluctant to leave Cwm Isaf and rejoin the women's hall where h.e.l.ledd and her aunts ruled, but I remembered Merlin's tale of a dog being killed and its skin draped on a crippled b.i.t.c.h in Guinevere's temple of Isis, and so I pleaded with Ceinwyn to take refuge for my sake, and at last she relented.

I added six of my men to Cuneglas's palace guard, and the rest, all Warriors of the Cauldron, marched south. All of us bore Ceinwyn's five-pointed star on our shields, we carried two spears each, our swords, and had huge bundles of twice-baked bread, salted meat, hard cheese and dried fish strapped to our backs. It was good to be marching again, even though our route did take us through Lugg Vale where the dead had been unearthed by wild pigs so that the fields of the vale looked like a boneyard. I worried that the sight of the bones would remind Cuneglas's men of their defeat, and so insisted that we spend a half day re-burying the corpses that had all had one foot chopped oft before they were first buried. Not every dead man could be burned as we would have liked, so most of our dead we buried, but we took away one foot to stop the soul walking. Now we re-buried the one-footed dead, but even after that half day's work there was still no disguising the butchery of the place. I paused in the work to visit the Roman shrine where my sword had killed the Druid Tanaburs and where Nimue had extinguished Gundleus's soul, and there, on a floor still stained by their blood, I lay flat between the piles of cobwebbed skulls and prayed that I would return unwounded to my Ceinwyn. We spent the next night at Magnis, a town that was a whole world away from fog-shrouded cauldrons and night-time tales of the Treasures of Britain. This was Gwent, Christian territory, and everything here was grim business. The blacksmiths were forging spearheads, the tanners were making shield covers, scabbards, belts and boots, while the town's women were baking the hard, thin loaves that could keep for weeks on a campaign. King Tewdric's men were in their Roman uniforms of bronze breastplates, leather skirts and long cloaks. A hundred such men had already marched to Corinium, another two hundred would follow, though not under the command of their King, for Tewdric was sick. His son Meurig, the Edling of Gwent, would be their t.i.tular leader, though in truth Agricola would command them. Agricola was an old man now, but his back was straight and his scarred arm could still wield a sword. He was said to be more Roman than the Romans and I had always been a little scared of his severe frown, but on that spring day outside Magnis he greeted me as an equal. His close-cropped grey head ducked under the lintel of his tent, then, dressed in his Roman uniform, he strode towards me and, to my astonishment, greeted me with an embrace.

He inspected my thirty-four spearmen. They looked s.h.a.ggy and unkempt beside his clean-shaven men, but he approved of their weapons and approved even more of the amount of food we carried. 'I've spent years,' he growled, 'teaching that it's no use sending a spearman to war without a pack full of food, but what does Lancelot of Siluria do? Sends me a hundred spearmen without a peck of bread between them.' He had invited me into his tent where he served me a sour, pale wine. 'I owe you an apology, Lord Derfel,' he said.

'I doubt that, Lord,' I said. I felt embarra.s.sed to be in such intimacy with a famous warrior who was old enough to be my grandfather.

He waved away my modesty. 'We should have been at Lugg Vale.'

'It seemed a hopeless fight, Lord,' I said, 'and we were desperate. You were not.'

'But you won, didn't your' he growled. He turned as a lick of wind tried to dislodge a wood shaving from his table that was covered with scores of other such shavings, each bearing lists of men and rations. He weighted the wisp of wood with an inkhorn, then looked back to me. 'I hear we are to meet with the bull.'

'At Corinium,' I confirmed. Agricola, unlike his master Tewdric, was a pagan, though Agricola had no time for the British G.o.ds, only for Mithras.

'To elect Lancelot,' Agricola said sourly. He listened as a man shouted orders in his camp lines, heard nothing that would spring him out of the tent and so looked back to me. 'What do you know of Lancelot?' he asked.

'Enough,' I said, 'to speak against him.'

'You'd offend Arthur?' He sounded surprised.

'I either offend Arthur,' I said bitterly, 'or Mithras.' I made the sign against evil. 'And Mithras is a G.o.d.'

'Arthur spoke to me on his way back from Powys,' Agricola said, 'and told me that electing Lancelot would bind Britain's union.' He paused, looking morose. 'He hinted that I owed him a vote to make up for our absence at Lugg Vale.'

Arthur, it seemed, was buying votes however he could. 'Then vote for him, Lord,' I said, 'for his exclusion only needs one vote, and mine will suffice.'

'I don't tell lies to Mithras,' Agricola snapped, 'and nor do I like King Lancelot. He was here two months ago, buying mirrors.'

'Mirrors!' I had to laugh. Lancelot had always collected mirrors, and in his father's high, airy sea-palace at Ynys Trebes he had kept the walls of a whole room covered with Roman mirrors. They must all have melted in the fire when the Franks swarmed over the palace walls and now, it seemed, Lancelot was rebuilding his collection.

'Tewdric sold him a fine electrum mirror,' Agricola told me. 'Big as a shield and quite extraordinary. It was so clear that it was like looking into a black pool on a fine day. And he paid well for it.' He would have had to, I thought, for mirrors of electrum, an amalgam of silver and gold, were rare indeed.

'Mirrors,' Agricola said scathingly. 'He should be attending to his duties in Siluria, not buying mirrors.'

He s.n.a.t.c.hed up his sword and helmet as a horn sounded from the town. It called twice, a signal Agricola recognized. 'The Edling,' he growled, and led me out into the sunlight to see that Meurig was indeed riding out from Magnis's Roman ramparts. 'I camp out here,' Agricola told me as he watched his honour guard form into two ranks, 'to stay away from their priests.'

Prince Meurig came attended by four Christian priests who ran to keep up with the Edling's horse. The Prince was a young man, indeed I had first seen him when he was a child and that had not been so very long before, but he disguised his youth with a querulous and irritable manner. He was short, pale and thin, with a wispy brown beard. He was notorious as a creature of pettifogging detail who loved the quibbles of the lawcourts and the squabbles of the church. His scholarship was famous; he was, we were a.s.sured, an expert at refuting the Pelagian heresy that so hara.s.sed the Christian church in Britain, he knew by heart the eighteen chapters of tribal British law, and he could name the genealogies of ten British kingdoms going back twenty generations as well as the lineage of all their septs and tribes; and that, we were informed by his admirers, was only the beginning of Meurig's knowledge. To his admirers he seemed a youthful paragon of learning and the finest rhetorician of Britain, but to me it seemed that the Prince had inherited all of his father's intelligence and none of his wisdom. It was Meurig, more than any other man, who had persuaded Gwent to abandon Arthur before Lugg Vale and for that reason alone I had no love for Meurig, but I obediently went down on one knee as the Prince dismounted.

'Derfel,' he said in his curiously high-pitched voice, 'I remember you.' He did not tell me to rise, but just pushed past me into the tent.