There was blood at Arthur’s waist. Mordred’s last swing had cut up into the scale armour, up between the scale-like flakes of metal, and it had bitten deeply into Arthur’s side. Even as Arthur went forward new blood glistened and welled where the sword had torn through his armoured coat, but Arthur suddenly leapt forward and turned his threatened lunge into a downwards chop that Mordred parried on his shield. Mordred threw the shield wide to throw Excalibur clear and stabbed forward with his own sword, but Arthur took that lunge on his shield, drew back Excalibur, and it was then that I saw his shield tilt backwards and saw Mordred’s sword scrape up the torn silver cover. Mordred shouted and pushed the blade harder and Arthur did not see the sword tip coming until it broke over the shield’s edge and stabbed up into the eyehole of his helmet.

I saw blood. But I also saw Excalibur come down from the slcy in a blow as strong as Arthur ever struck.

Excalibur cut through Mordred’s helmet. It slit the black iron as though it were parchment, then broke the King’s skull and sliced into his brain. And Arthur, with blood glistening at his helmet’s eyehole, staggered, recovered, then wrenched Excalibur free in a spray of bloody droplets. Mordred, dead from the moment Excalibur had split his helmet, fell forward at Arthur’s feet. His blood gushed onto the sand and onto Arthur’s boots, and his men, seeing their King dead and Arthur still on his feet, gave a low moan and stepped backwards.

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.