Mordred looked at Fergal, who nodded. ‘That is certainly one way it can be done, Lord King,’ the Irish Druid confirmed.

‘It isn’t true!’ I shouted and, for my pains, received another raking blow from the bear claws on Loholt’s silver-sheathed stump.

‘I can lift the charm,’ Taliesin went on calmly, ‘but it must be lifted while Lord Derfel lives, for he was the petitioner of the charm, and if I lift it now, while the sun sets, it cannot be done properly. I must do it, Lord King, in the dawn, for the enchantment must be removed while the sun is rising, or else your Queen will stay childless for ever.’

Mordred again glanced at Fergal and the small bones woven into the Druid’s beard rattled as he nodded his assent. ‘He speaks true, Lord King.’

‘He lies!’ I protested.

Mordred pushed his sword back into its scabbard. ‘Why do you offer this, Taliesin?’ he asked.

Taliesin shrugged. ‘Arthur is old, Lord King. His power wanes. Druids and bards must seek patronage where the power is rising.’

‘Fergal is my Druid,’ Mordred said. I had thought him a Christian, but was not surprised to hear that he had reverted to paganism. Mordred was never a good Christian, though that, I suspect, was the very least of his sins.

‘I shall be honoured to learn more skills from my brother,’ Taliesin said, bowing to Fergal, ‘and I will swear to follow his guidance. I seek nothing, Lord King, but a chance to use my small powers for your great glory.’

He was smooth. He spoke with honey on his tongue. I had paid him no gold for charms, but everyone there believed him, and none more so than Mordred and Argante. It was thus that Taliesin, the bright-browed, bought me an extra night of life. Loholt was disappointed, but Mordred promised him my soul as well as my hand in the dawn and that gave him some consolation.

I was made to crawl back to the hut. I took a beating and kicking on the way, but I lived.

Amhar took the leash of hair from my neck, then booted me into the hut. ‘We shall meet in the dawn, Derfel,’ he said.

With the sun in my eyes and a blade at my throat.

That night Taliesin sang to Mordred’s men. They had gathered in the half-finished church that Sansum had started to build on Caer Cadarn, and which now served as a roofless, broken-walled hall, and there Taliesin charmed them with his music. I had never before, and have never since, heard him sing more beautifully. At first, like any bard entertaining warriors, he had to fight the babble of voices, but gradually his skill silenced them. He accompanied himself on his harp and he chose to sing laments, but laments of such loveliness that Mordred’s spearmen listened in awestruck silence. Even the dogs ceased their yelping and lay silent as Taliesin the Bard sang into the night. If he ever paused too long between songs the spearmen demanded more, and so he would sing again, his voice dying on the melody’s endings, then surging again with the new verses, but forever soothing, and Mordred’s folk drank and listened, and the drink and the songs made them weep, and still Taliesin sang to them. Sansum and I listened too, and we also wept for the ethereal sadness of the laments, but as the night stretched on Taliesin began to sing lullabies, sweet lullabies, delicate lullabies, lullabies to put drunken men to sleep, and while he sang the air grew colder and I saw that a mist was forming over Caer Cadarn.