They took me to Caer Cadarn, and once there they threw me into a hut. It was not the hut in which we had imprisoned Guinevere so many years before, but a much smaller one with a low door through which I had to crawl, helped by the boots and spear staves of my captors. I scrambled into the hut’s shadows and there saw another prisoner, a man brought from Durnovaria whose face was red from weeping. For a moment he did not recognize me without my beard, but then he gasped in astonishment. ‘Derfel!’

‘Bishop,’ I said wearily, for it was Sansum, and we were both Mordred’s prisoners.

‘It’s a mistake!’ Sansum insisted. ‘I shouldn’t be here!’

‘Tell them,’ I said, jerking my head towards the guards outside the hut, ‘not me.’

‘I did nothing. Except serve Argante! And look how they reward me!’

‘Be quiet,’ I said.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus!’ He fell on his knees, spread his arms and gazed up at the cobwebs in the thatch. ‘Send an angel for me! Take me to Thy sweet bosom.’

‘Will you be quiet?’ I snarled, but he went on praying and weeping, while I stared morosely towards Caer Cadarn’s wet summit where a heap of severed heads was being piled. My men’s heads were there, joining scores of others that had been fetched from all across Dumnonia. A chair draped in a pale blue cloth was perched on top of the pile; Mordred’s throne. Women and children, the families of Mordred’s spearmen, peered at the grisly heap, and some then came to look through our hut’s low door and laugh at my beardless face.

‘Where’s Mordred?’ I asked Sansum.

‘How would I know?’ he answered, interrupting his prayer.

‘Then what do you know?’ I asked. He shuffled back onto the bench. He had done me one small service by fumbling the rope free from my wrists, but the freedom gave me little comfort for I could see six spearmen guarding the hut, and I did not doubt that there were others I could not see. One man just sat facing the hut’s open entrance with a spear, begging me to try and crawl through the low door and thus give him a chance of skewering me. I had no chance of overpowering any of them. ‘What do you know?’ I asked Sansum again.

‘The King came back two nights ago,’ he said, ‘with hundreds of men.’

‘How many?’

He shrugged. ‘Three hundred? Four? I couldn’t count them, there were so many. They killed Issa in Durnovaria.’

I closed my eyes and said a prayer for poor Issa and his family. ‘When did they arrest you?’ I asked Sansum.

‘Yesterday.’ He looked indignant. ‘And for nothing! I welcomed him home! I didn’t know he was alive, but I was glad to see him. I rejoiced! And for that they arrested me!’

‘So why do they think they arrested you?’ I asked him.