There were sixty or seventy of the enemy, all of them horsemen, and they must have ridden hard to reach us, but now they were waiting at the spit’s landward end and we all knew that other spearmen would be following them. By dusk we could face an army, maybe two, for Nimue’s men would surely be hurrying with Mordred’s spearmen.

Arthur was in his war finery. His scale armour, which had tongues of gold amidst the iron plates, glinted in the sun. I watched him pull on his helmet that was crested with white goose feathers. Hygwydd would usually have armoured him, but Hygwydd was dead so Guinevere strapped Excalibur’s cross-hatched scabbard about his waist and hung the white cloak on his shoulders. He smiled at her, leaned to hear her speak, laughed, then closed the helmet’s cheekpieces. Two men helped him up into the saddle of one of Sagramor’s horses, and once he was mounted they passed him his spear and his silver-sheeted shield from which the cross had long been stripped away. He took the reins with his shield hand, then kicked the horse towards us. ‘Let’s stir them up,’ he called down to Sagramor, who stood beside me. Arthur planned to lead thirty horsemen towards the enemy, then feint a panicked withdrawal that he hoped would tempt them into a trap.

We left a score of men to guard the women and children in the fort while the rest of us followed Sagramor to a deep hollow behind a dune that fronted the sea’s beach. The whole sandspit west of the fort was a confusion of dunes and hollows that formed a maze of traps and blind alleys, and only the spit’s final two hundred paces, east of the fort, offered level ground.

Arthur waited until we were hidden, then led his thirty men west along the sea-rippled sand that lay close to the breaking waves. We crouched under the high dune’s cover. I had left my spear at the fort, preferring to fight this battle with Hywelbane alone. Sagramor also planned to fight with sword alone. He was scrubbing a patch of rust from his curved blade with a handful of sand. ‘You lost your beard,’ he grunted at me.

‘I exchanged it for Amhar’s life.’

I saw a flash of teeth as he grinned behind the shadow of his helmet’s cheekpieces. ‘A good exchange,’ he said, ‘and your hand?’

‘To magic’

‘Not your sword hand, though.’ He held the blade to catch the light, was satisfied that the rust was gone, then cocked his head, listening, but we could hear nothing except the breaking waves. ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ he said after a while.

‘Why not?’ I had never known Sagramor to shirk a fight.

‘They must have followed me,’ he said, jerking his head westwards to indicate the enemy.