It took us four days and nights, but at last we reached Dum- nonia’s southern shore. We had skirted the great moor and we came to the ocean while walking on the ridge of a high hill. We paused at the ridge’s crest while the evening light streamed over our shoulders to light the wide river valley that opened to the sea beneath us. This was Camlann.

I had been here before, for this was the southern country below Dumnonian Isca where the local folk tattooed their faces blue. I had served Lord Owain when I first came, and it was under his leadership that I had joined the massacre on the high moors. Years later I had ridden close to this hill when I went with Arthur to try and save Tristan’s life, though my attempt failed and Tristan had died, and now I had returned a third time. It was lovely country, as beautiful as any I had seen in Britain, though for me it held memories of murder and I knew I would be glad to see it fade behind Caddwg’s boat.

We stared down at our journey’s end. The River Exe flowed to the sea beneath us, but before it reached the ocean it formed a great wide sea-lake that was penned from the ocean by a narrow spit of sand. That spit was the place men called Camlann, and at its tip, just visible from our high perch, the Romans had built a small fortress. Inside the fort they had raised a great high becket of iron that had once held a fire at night to warn approaching galleys of the treacherous sandspit.

Now we gazed down at the sea-lake, the sandspit and the green shore. No enemy was in sight. No spear blade reflected the day’s late sun, no horsemen rode the shore tracks and no spearmen darkened the narrow tongue of sand. We could have been alone in all the universe.

‘You know Caddwg?’ Arthur asked me, breaking the silence.

‘I met him once, Lord, years ago.’

‘Then find him, Derfel, and tell him we shall wait for him at the fort.’

I looked southwards towards the sea. Huge and empty and glittering, it was the path to take us from Britain. Then I went downhill to make the voyage possible.

The last glimmering light of evening lit my way to Caddwg’s house. I had asked folk for directions and had been guided to a small cabin that lay on the shore north of Camlann and now, because the tide was only halfway in, the cabin faced a gleaming expanse of empty mud. Caddwg’s boat was not in the water, but perched high and dry on land with its keel supported by rollers and its hull by wooden poles. ‘Prydwen, she’s called,’ Caddwg said, without any greeting. He had seen me standing beside his boat and now came from his house. The old man was thickly bearded, deeply suntanned and dressed in a woollen jerkin that was stained with pitch and glittering with fish scales.