The wind was rising now. I vomited over the boat’s quarter, then looked up to see the rest of the fleet tossing in a grey nightmare of broken water and flying spindrift. I heard a crack above me, and looked up to see that our sail had split in two. Balig cursed. Behind us the shore was a dark line, and beyond it, lit by sunlight, the hills of Siluria glowed green, but all around us was dark and wet and threatening.

‘Bail!’ Balig shouted again, and those who were in the belly of the boat used helmets to scoop the water from around the bundles of treasure, armour and food.

And then the storm hit. Till now we had suffered only from the storm’s outriders, but now the wind howled across the sea and the rain came flat and stinging above the whitened waves. I lost sight of the other boats, so thick was the rain and so dark the sky. The shore disappeared, and all I could see was a nightmare of short, high, white-crested waves from which the water flew to drench our boat. The sail flogged itself to ragged shreds that streamed from the spar like broken banners. Thunder split the sky and the boat fell off a wave crest and I saw the water, green and black, surging up to spill across the gunwales, but somehow Balig steered the bow into the wave and the water hesitated at the boat’s rim, then dropped away as we rose to the next wind-tortured crest.

‘Lighten the boat!’ Balig screamed over the storm’s howl.

We threw the gold overboard. We jettisoned Arthur’s treasure, and my treasure, and Gwydre’s treasure and Culhwch’s treasure. We gave it all to Manawydan, pouring coins and cups and candlesticks and gold bars into his greedy maw, and still he wanted more, and so we hurled the baskets of food and the furled banners overboard, but Arthur would not give him his armour, and nor would I, and so we stowed the armour and our weapons in the tiny cabin under the after deck and instead threw some of the ship’s stone ballast after the gold. We reeled about the boat like drunken men, tossed by the waves and with our feet sliding in a slopping mix of vomit and water. Morwenna clutched her children, Ceinwyn and Guinevere prayed, Taliesin bailed with a helmet, while Culhwch and Galahad helped Balig and the Saxon crewman to lower the remnants of the sail. They threw the sail overboard, spar and all, but tied its wreckage to a long horse-hair rope that they looped about the boat’s sternpost, and the drag of the spar and sail somehow turned our boat’s head into the wind so that we faced the storm and rode its anger in great swooping lurches.