We placed a thick piece of timber on the anvil. Galahad held me tight, his arms about me, and I bared my arm and laid my left hand on the timber. Culhwch gripped my forearm, not to keep it still, but for afterwards.

Arthur raised Excalibur. ‘Are you sure, Derfel?’ he asked.

‘Do it, Lord,’ I said.

Morridig watched wide-eyed as the bright blade touched the rafters above the anvil. Arthur paused, then hacked down once. He hacked down hard, and for a second I felt no pain, none, but then Culhwch took my spurting wrist and thrust it into the burning coals of the forge and that was when the pain whipped through me like a spear thrust. I screamed, and then I remember nothing at all.

I heard later how Morgan took the severed hand with its fatal scar and sealed it in the clay womb. Then, to a pagan chant as old as time, she pulled the bloody hand out through the birth canal and tossed it onto the brazier.

And thus I became a Christian.

PART FOUR

The Last Enchantment

SPRING HAS COME TO Dinnewrac. The monastery warms, and the silence of our prayers is broken by the bleating of lambs and the song of larks. White violets and stitchwort grow where snow lay for so long, but best of all is the news that Igraine has given birth to a child. It is a boy, and both he and his mother live. God be thanked for that, and for the season’s warmth, but for little else. Spring should be a happy season, but there are dark rumours of enemies.

The Saxons have returned, though whether it was their spearmen who started the fires we saw on our eastern horizon last night, no one knows. Yet the fires burned bright, flaring in the night sky like a foretaste of hell. A farmer came at dawn to give us some split logs of lime that we can use to make a new butter churn, and he told us the fires were set by raiding Irish, but we doubt that for there have been too many stories of Saxon warbands in the last few weeks. Arthur’s achievement was to keep the Saxons at bay for a whole generation, and to do it he taught our Kings courage, but how feeble our rulers have become since then! And now the Sais return like a plague.