‘Can you?’

‘Never too late to learn,’ Sagramor said, then spat. ‘Besides, we’re not dead yet.’

Nor were we beaten yet, and every minute that passed took us nearer safety. I could see Caddwg’s men carrying the sail to Prydwen, which was canted at the edge of the sea. Her mast was now upright, though men still rigged lines from the masthead, and in an hour or two the tide would turn and she would float again, ready for the voyage. We just had to endure till the late afternoon. We occupied ourselves by making a huge pyre from the driftwood, and when it was burning we heaved the bodies of our dead into the flames. Their hair flared bright, then came the smell of roasting flesh. We threw on more timber until the fire was a roaring, white-hot inferno.

‘A ghost fence might deter the enemy,’ Taliesin remarked when he had chanted a prayer for the four burning men whose souls were drifting with the smoke to find their shadowbodies.

I had not seen a ghost fence in years, but we made one that day. It was a grisly business. We had thirty-six dead enemy bodies and from them we took thirty-six severed heads which we rammed onto the blades of the captured spears. Then we planted the spears across the spit and Taliesin, conspicuous in his white robe and carrying a spear shaft so that he resembled a Druid, walked from one bloody head to the next so that the enemy would think that an enchantment was being made. Few men would willingly cross a ghost fence without a Druid to avert its evil, and once the fence was made we rested more easily. We shared a scanty midday meal and I remember Arthur looking ruefully at the ghost fence as he ate. ‘From Isca to this,’ he remarked softly.

‘From Mynydd Baddon to this,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘Poor Uther,’ he said, and he must have been thinking of the oath that had made Mordred King, the oath that had led to this sun-warmed spit beside the sea.

Mordred’s reinforcements arrived in the early afternoon. They mostly came on foot in a long column that straggled down the sea-lake’s western shore. We counted over a hundred men and knew that more would be following.

‘They’ll be tired,’ Arthur told us, ‘and we have the ghost fence.’

But the enemy now possessed a Druid. Fergal had arrived with the reinforcements, and an hour after we first saw the column of spearmen, we watched as the Druid crept near the fence and sniffed the salt air like a dog. He threw handfuls of sand towards the nearest head, hopped on one leg for a moment, then ran to the spear and toppled it. The fence was broken, and Fergal tipped his head to the sun and gave a great cry of triumph. We pulled on helmets, found our shields and passed sharpening stones amongst ourselves.