‘And soon the only people who can understand the intricacies of the harmony,’ Guinevere argued, ‘are other skilled craftsmen, and so you become ever more clever in an efifort to impress your fellow poets, but you forget that no one outside the craft has the first notion of what you’re doing. Bard chants to bard while the rest of us wonder what all the noise is about. Your task, Pyrlig, is to keep the people’s stories alive, and to do that you cannot be rarefied.’

‘You would not have us be vulgar, Lady!’ Pyrlig said and, in protest, struck the horsehair strings of his harp.

‘I would have you be vulgar with the vulgar, and clever with the clever,’ Guinevere said, ‘and both, mark you, at the same time, but if you can only be clever then you deny the people their stories, and if you can only be vulgar then no lord or lady will toss you gold.’

‘Except the vulgar lords,’ Ceinwyn put in slyly.

Guinevere glanced at me and I saw she was about to launch an insult at me, and then she recognized the impulse herself and burst into laughter. ‘If I had gold, Pyrlig,’ she said instead, ‘I would reward you, for you sing beautifully, but alas, I have none.’

‘Your praise is reward enough, Lady,’ Pyrlig said.

Guinevere’s presence had startled my spearmen and all evening I saw small groups of men come to stare at her in wonderment. She ignored their gaze. Ceinwyn had welcomed her without any show of astonishment, and Guinevere had been clever enough to be kind to my daughters so that Morwenna and Seren both now slept on the ground beside her. They, like my spearmen, had been fascinated by the tall, red-haired woman whose reputation was as startling as her looks. And Guinevere was simply happy to be there. We had no tables or chairs in our hall, just the rush floor and woollen carpets, but she sat beside the fire and effortlessly dominated the hall. There was a fierceness in her eyes that made her daunting, her cascade of tangled red hair made her striking and her joy at being free was infectious.

‘How long will she stay free?’ Ceinwyn asked me later that night. We had given up our private chamber to Guinevere, and were in the hall with the rest of our people.

‘I don’t know.’

‘So what do you know?’ Ceinwyn asked.

‘We wait for Issa, then we go north.’

‘To Corinium?’

‘I shall go to Corinium, but I’ll send you and the families to Glevum. You’ll be close enough to the fighting there and if the worst happens, you can go north into Gwent.’

I began to fret next day as Issa still did not appear. In my mind we were racing the Saxons towards Corinium, and the longer I was delayed, the more likely that race would be lost. If the Saxons could pick us off warband by warband then Dumnonia would fall like a rotted tree, and my warband, which was one of the strongest in the country, was stalled at Dun Caric because Issa and Argante had not appeared.