I took my hand from Sagramor’s dying grip. ‘Shield wall!’ I shouted, ‘shield wall!’ And the startled survivors of our small warband closed ranks in front of Arthur and we touched our ragged shields together and snarled forward over Mordred’s lifeless body. I thought the enemy might come back for vengeance, but they stepped backwards instead. Their leaders were dead, and we were still showing defiance, and they had no belly for more death that evening.

‘Stay here!’ I shouted at the shield wall, then went back to Arthur.

Galahad and I eased the helmet from his head and so released a rush of blood. The sword had missed his right eye by a finger’s breadth, but it had broken the bone outside the eye and the wound was pulsing blood. ‘Cloth!’ I shouted, and a wounded man ripped a length of linen from a dead man’s jerkin and we used it to pad the wound. Taliesin bound it up, using a strip torn from the skirts of his robe. Arthur looked up at me when Taliesin was finished and tried to speak.

‘Quiet, Lord,’ I said.

‘Mordred,’ he said.

‘He’s dead, Lord,’ I said, ‘he’s dead.’

I think he smiled, and then Prydweris bow scraped on the sand. Arthur’s face was pale and bloody rivulets laced his cheek.

‘You can grow a beard now, Derfel,’ he said.

‘Yes, Lord,’ I said, ‘I will. Don’t speak.’ There was blood at his waist, far too much blood, but I could not take his armour off to find that wound, even though I feared it was the worse of his two injuries.

‘Excalibur,’ he said to me.

‘Quiet, Lord,’ I said.

‘Take Excalibur,’ he said. ‘Take it and throw it into the sea. Promise me?’

‘I will, Lord, I promise.’ I took the bloodied sword from his hand, then stepped back as four unwounded men lifted Arthur and carried him to the boat. They passed him over the gunwale, and Guinevere helped to take him and to lay him on Prydmeri’s deck. She made a pillow of his blood-soaked cloak, then crouched beside him and stroked his face. ‘Are you coming, Derfel?’ she asked me.

I gestured to the men who still formed a shield wall on the sand. ‘Can you take them?’ I asked. ‘And can you take the wounded?’

‘Twelve men more,’ Caddwg called from the stern. ‘No more than twelve. Don’t have space for more.’

No fishing-boats had come. But why should they have come? Why should men involve themselves in killing and blood and madness when their job is to take food from the sea? We only had Prydrven and she would have to sail without me. I smiled at Guinevere. ‘I can’t come, Lady,’ I said, then turned and gestured again towards the shield wall. ‘Someone must stay to lead them over the bridge of swords.’ The stump of my left arm was oozing blood, there was a bruise on my ribs, but I was alive. Sagramor was dying, Culhwch was dead, Galahad and Arthur were injured. There was no one but me. I was the last of Arthur’s warlords.