I smiled. ‘We want fidelity in our lovers, Lady, so is it not obvious that they want it in us? Fidelity is a gift we offer to those we love. Arthur gave it to Guinevere, but she could not return it. She wanted something different.’

‘Which was?’

‘Glory, and he was ever averse to glory. He achieved it, but he would not revel in it. She wanted an escort of a thousand horsemen, bright banners to fly above her and the whole island of Britain prostrate beneath her. And all he ever wanted was justice and good harvests.’

‘And a free Britain and the Saxons defeated,’ Igraine reminded me drily.

‘Those too,’ I acknowledged, ‘and he wanted one other thing. He wanted that thing more than all the others.’ I smiled, remembering, and then thought that perhaps of all Arthur’s ambitions, this last was the one he found most difficult to achieve and the one that the few of us who were his friends never truly believed he wanted.

‘Go on,’ Igraine said, suspecting that I was falling into a doze.

‘He just wanted a piece of land,’ I said, ‘a hall, some cattle, a smithy of his own. He wanted to be ordinary. He wanted other men to look after Britain while he sought happiness.’

‘And he never found it?’ Igraine asked.

‘He found it,’ I assured her, but not in that summer after Lancelot’s rebellion. It was a summer of blood, a season of retribution, a time when Arthur hammered Dumnonia into a surly submission.

Lancelot had fled southwards to his land of the Belgae. Arthur would dearly have loved to pursue him, but Cerdic’s Saxon invaders were now the greater danger. They had advanced as far as Corinium by the rebellion’s end, and might even have captured that city had the Gods not sent a plague to ravage their army. Men’s bowels voided unstoppably, they vomited blood, they were weakened until they could not stand, and it was when the plague was at its worst that Arthur’s forces struck them. Cerdic tried to rally his men, but the Saxons believed their Gods had deserted them and so they fled. ‘But they’ll be back,’ Arthur told me when we stood among the bloody remnants of Cerdic’s defeated rearguard. ‘Next spring,’ he said, ‘they will be back.’ He cleaned Excalibur’s blade on his blood-stained cloak and slid her into the scabbard. He had grown a beard and it was grey. It made him look older, much older, while the pain of Guinevere’s betrayal had made his long face gaunt, so that men who had never met Arthur until that summer found his appearance fearsome and he did nothing to soften that impression. He had ever been a patient man, but now his anger lay very close to the skin and it could erupt at the smallest provocation.