‘Start over again?’ I asked.

‘Beat back Cerdic once more,’ he said, ‘and knock some sense into Meurig.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘There’s always one more battle. Have you noticed that? Whenever you think everything is settled, it all seethes up again.’ He touched Excalibur’s hilt. ‘Poor Hygwydd. I shall miss him.’

‘You’ll miss me too, Lord,’ I said gloomily. The stump of my left wrist was throbbing painfully and my missing hand was unaccountably itching with a sensation so real that I kept trying to scratch it.

‘I’ll miss you?’ Arthur asked, raising an eyebrow.

‘When Sansum summons me.’

‘Ah! The mouse lord.’ He gave me a quick smile. ‘I think our mouse lord will want to come back to Dumnonia, don’t you? I can’t see him gaining preferment in Gwent, they have too many bishops already. No, he’ll want to come back, and poor Morgan will want the shrine at Ynys Wydryn again, so I shall make a bargain with them. Your soul for Gwydre’s permission for them to live in Dumnonia. We’ll free you of the oath, Derfel, never you mind.’ He slapped my shoulder, then clambered forward to where Guinevere sat beneath the mast.

Balig plucked an arrow from the sternpost, twisted away its iron head that he tucked into a pocket for safe keeping, then tossed the feathered shaft overboard. ‘Don’t like the look of that,’ he said to me, jerking his chin towards the west. I turned and saw there were black clouds far out to sea.

‘Rain coming?’ I asked.

‘Could be a bite of wind in it, too,’ he said ominously, then spat overboard to avert the ill-luck. ‘But we don’t have far to go. We could miss it.’ He leaned on the steering oar as the boat was swept about the last great loop of the river. We were going west now, hard into the wind, and the river’s surface was choppy with small, white-flecked waves that shattered on our bow and splashed back across the deck. The sail was still lowered. ‘Pull now!’ Balig called to our oarsmen. The Saxon had one oar, Galahad another, Taliesin and Culhwch had the middle bench and Culhwch’s two sons completed the crew. The six men pulled hard, fighting the wind, but the current and tide still helped us. The banners at prow and stern snapped hard in the wind, rattling the arrows trapped in their weave.

Ahead of us the river turned southwards and it was there, I knew, that Balig would hoist the sail so that the wind would help us down die long sea reach. Once at sea we would be forced to keep inside the withy-marked channel that ran between the wide shallows until we reached the deep water where we could turn away from the wind and race across to the Dumnonian shore. ‘It won’t take long to cross,’ Balig said comfortingly, glancing at the clouds, ‘not long. Should outrun that bit of wind.’

‘Can the boats stay together?’ I asked.