‘Course they don’t,’ Balig answered for me. ‘They’re spearmen, no use for anything useful. Do it together, you bastards! Ready? Push forward! Oars down! Pull!’ He shook his head in mock despair. ‘Might as well teach pigs to dance.’

It was about nine miles to the open sea from Isca, nine miles that we covered swiftly because our boat was carried by the ebbing tide and the river’s swirling current. The Usk slid between glistening mudbanks that climbed to fallow fields, bare woods and wide marshes. Wicker fish traps stood on the banks where herons and gulls pecked at the flapping salmon stranded by the falling tide. Redshanks called plaintively while snipe climbed and swooped above their nests. We hardly needed the oars, for together the tide and current were carrying us fast, and once we reached the widening water where the river spilled into the Severn, Balig and his crewman hoisted a ragged brown sail that caught the west wind and made the boat surge forward. ‘Ship those oars now,’ he ordered my men, then he grasped the big steering oar and stood happily as the small ship dipped her blunt prow into the first big waves. ‘The sea will be lively today, Lord,’ he called cheerfully. ‘Scoop that water out!’ he shouted to my spearmen. ‘The wet stuff belongs outside a boat, not in it.’ Balig grinned at my incipient misery. ‘Three hours, Lord, that’s all, and we’ll have you ashore.’

‘You dislike boats?’ Taliesin asked me.

‘I hate them.’

‘A prayer to Manawydan should avert sickness,’ he said calmly. He had hauled a pile of nets beside my chest and now sat on them. He was plainly untroubled by the boat’s violent motion, indeed he seemed to enjoy it. ‘I slept last night in the amphitheatre,’ he told me. ‘I like to do that,’ he went on when he saw I was tod miserable to respond. ‘The banked seats serve like a dream tower.’

I glanced at him, my sickness somehow lessened by those last two words for they reminded me of Merlin who had once possessed a dream tower on the summit of Ynys Wydryn’s Tor. Merlin’s dream tower had been a hollow wooden structure that he claimed magnified the messages of the Gods, and I could understand how Isca’s Roman amphitheatre with its high banked seats set about its raked sand arena might serve the same purpose. ‘Were you seeing the future?’ I managed to ask him.

‘Some of it,’ he admitted, ‘but I also met Merlin in my dream last night.’

The mention of that name drove away the last qualms in my belly. ‘You spoke with Merlin?’ I asked.

‘He spoke to me,’ Taliesin corrected me, ‘but he could not hear me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘More than I can tell you, Lord, and nothing you wish to hear.’

‘What?’ I demanded.