We overran Cerdic’s village where women and children cowered in the huts. Culhwch and a score of men were working a stolid butcher’s path through the few Saxon spearmen who tried to protect their families and Cerdic’s abandoned baggage. The Saxon guards died and the plundered gold spilled like chaff. I remember dust rising like a mist, screams of women and men, children and dogs running in terror, burning huts spewing smoke and always Arthur’s big horses thundering through the panic with spears dipping to take enemy spearmen in the back. There is no joy like the destruction of a broken army. The shield wall breaks and death rules, and so we killed till our arms were too tired to lift a sword and when the killing was done we found ourselves in a swamp of blood, and that was when our men discovered the ale and mead in the Saxon baggage and the drinking began. Some Saxon women found protection amongst our few sober men who carried water from the river to our wounded. We looked for friends alive and embraced them, saw friends dead and wept for them. We knew the delirium of utter victory, we shared our tears and laughter, and some men, tired as they were, danced for pure joy.

Cerdic escaped. He and his bodyguard cut through the chaos and climbed the eastern hills. Some Saxons swam south across the river, while others followed Cerdic and a few pretended death and then slipped away in the night, but most stayed in the valley beneath Mynydd Baddon and remain there to this day.

For we had won. We had turned the fields beside the river into a slaughterhouse. We had saved Britain and fulfilled Arthur’s dream. We were the kings of slaughter and the lords of the dead, and we howled our bloody triumph at the sky.

For the power of the Sais was broken.

PART THREE

Nimue’s Curse

QUEEN IGRAINE SAT IN my window and read the last sheets of parchment, sometimes asking me the meaning of a Saxon word, but otherwise saying nothing. She hurried through the story of the battle, then threw the parchments onto the floor in disgust. ‘What happened to Aelle?’ she demanded indignantly, ‘or to Lancelot?’

‘I shall come to their fates, Lady,’ I said. I had a quill trapped on the desk with the stump of my left arm and was trimming its point with a knife. I blew the scraps onto the floor. ‘All in good time.’

‘All in good time!’ she scoffed. ‘You can’t leave a story without an ending, Derfel!’

‘It will have an ending,’ I promised.