It took us an hour to heave the seven wagons of precious food over the ancient turf rampart and so onto the hill’s gently domed top. I walked that domed plateau and discovered it to be a marvellous defensive position. The summit was a triangle, and on each of its three sides the ground fell steeply away so that any attacker would be forced to labour up into the teeth of our spears. I hoped the steepness of that slope would keep the Saxon warband from making any attack, and that in a day or two the enemy would leave and we would be free to find our way north to Corinium. We would arrive late, and Arthur would doubtless be angry with me, but for the moment I had kept this part of Dumnonia’s army safe. We numbered over two hundred spearmen and we protected a crowd of women and children, seven wagons and two Princesses, and our refuge was a grassy hilltop high above a deep river valley. I found one of the levy and asked him the name of the hill.

‘It’s named like the city, Lord,’ he said, apparently bemused that I should even want to know the name.

‘Aquae Sulis?’ I asked him.

‘No, Lord! The old name! The name before the Romans came.’

‘Baddon,’ I said.

‘And this is Mynydd Baddon, Lord,’ he confirmed.

Mount Baddon. In time the poets would make that name ring through all of Britain. It would be sung in a thousand halls and fire the blood of children yet unborn, but for now it meant nothing to me. It was just a convenient hill, a grass-walled fort, and the place where, all unwillingly, I had planted my two banners in the turf. One showed Ceinwyn’s star, while the other, which we had found and rescued from Argante’s wagons, flaunted Arthur’s banner of the bear.

So, in the morning light, where they flapped in the drying wind, the bear and the star defied the Saxons.

On Mynydd Baddon.

THE SAXONS WERE CAUTIOUS. They had not attacked us when they first saw us, and now that we were secure on Mynydd Baddon’s summit they were content to sit at the southern base of the hill and simply watch us. In the afternoon a large contingent of their spearmen walked to Aquae Sulis, where they must have discovered an almost deserted city. I expected to see the flare and smoke of burning thatch, but no such fires appeared and at dusk the spearmen came back from the city laden with plunder. The shadows of nightfall darkened the river valley and, while we on Mynydd Baddon’s summit were still in the last wash of daylight, our enemy’s campfires studded the dark beneath us.