‘Not for weeks now,’ Carig said, ‘but next year, no doubt, you will see plenty of Saxon spearmen in Dumnonia.’

‘Not in Gwent?’ I challenged him.

‘Aelle has no quarrel with us,’ Carig said firmly. He was a nervous young man who did not much like his exposed position on Britain’s frontier, though he did his duty conscientiously enough and his men, I noted, were well disciplined.

‘You’re Britons,’ I told Carig, ‘and Aelle’s a Saxon, isn’t that quarrel enough?’

Carig shrugged. ‘Dumnonia is weak, Lord, the Saxons know that. Gwent is strong. They will attack you, not us.’ He sounded horribly complacent.

‘But once they have beaten Dumnonia,’ I said, touching the iron in my sword hilt to avert the ill-luck implicit in my words, ‘how long before they come north into Gwent?’

‘Christ will protect us,’ Carig said piously, and made the sign of the cross. A crucifix hung on the hut wall and one of his men licked his fingers then touched the feet of the tortured Christ. I surreptitiously spat into the fire.

I rode east next morning. Clouds had come in the night and the dawn greeted me with a thin cold rain that blew into my face. The Roman road, broken and weed-grown now, stretched into a dank wood and the further I rode the lower my spirits sank. Everything I had heard in Carig’s frontier fort suggested that Gwent would not fight for Arthur. Meurig, the young King of Gwent, had ever been a reluctant warrior. His father, Tewdric, had known that the Britons must unite against their common enemy, but Tewdric had resigned his throne and gone to live as a monk beside the River Wye and his son was no warlord. Without Gwent’s well-trained troops Dumnonia was surely doomed unless a glowing naked nymph presaged some miraculous intervention by the Gods. Or unless Aelle believed Arthur’s lie. And would Aelle even receive me? Would he even believe that I was his son? The Saxon King had been kind enough to me on the few occasions we had met, but that meant nothing for I was still his enemy, and the longer I rode through that bitter drizzle between the towering wet trees, the greater my despair. I was sure Arthur had sent me to my death, and worse, that he had done it with the callousness of a losing gambler risking everything on one final cast on the throwboard.

At mid morning the trees ended and I rode into a wide clearing through which a stream flowed. The road forded the small water, but beside the crossing and stuck into a mound that stood as high as a man’s waist, there stood a dead fir tree that was hung with offerings. The magic was strange to me so I had no idea whether the bedecked tree guarded the road, placated the stream or was merely the work of children. I slid off my horse’s back and saw that the objects hung from the brittle branches were the small bones of a man’s spine. No child’s play, I reckoned, but what? I spat beside the mound to avert its evil, touched the iron of Hywelbane’s hilt, then led my horse through the ford.