I wonder if the war will ever end. For as long as I have lived the Britons have fought the Saxons, and though we did win one great victory over them, in the years since that victory we have seen more land lost and, with the land, the stories that were attached to the valleys and hilltops have been lost as well. History is not just a tale of men’s making, but is a thing tied to the land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past. The Sais take our land and our history. They spread like a contagion, and we no longer have Arthur to protect us. Arthur, scourge of the Sais, Lord of Britain and the man whose love hurt him more than any wound from sword or spear. How I do miss Arthur.

The winter solstice is when we prayed that the Gods would not abandon the earth to the great darkness. In the bleakest of winters those prayers often seemed like pleas of despair, and that was never more so than in the year before the Saxons attacked when our world was deadened beneath a shell of ice and crusted snow. For those of us who were adepts of Mithras the solstice had a double meaning, for it is also the time of our God’s birth, and after the big solstice feast at Dun Caric I took Issa west to the caves where we held our most solemn ceremonies and there I inducted him into the worship of Mithras. He endured the ordeals successfully and so was welcomed into that band of elite warriors who keep the God’s mysteries. We feasted afterwards. I killed the bull that year, first hamstringing the beast so that it could not move, then swinging the axe in the low cave to sever its spine. The bull, I recall, had a shrivelled liver, which was reckoned a bad omen, but there were no good omens that cold winter.

Forty men attended the rites, despite the bitter weather. Arthur, though long an initiate, did not arrive, but Sagramor and Culhwch had come from their frontier posts for the ceremonies. At the end of the feasting, when most of the warriors were sleeping off the effects of the mead, we three withdrew to a low tunnel where the smoke was not thick and we could talk privately.