‘Should have done that to Guinevere,’ Culhwch growled to me.

Galahad had left my side, dismounted, and now freed Mardoc’s bonds. The child immediately began screaming for his mother.

‘I never could abide noisy children,’ Merlin said mildly, then he shifted the ladder so that it rested beside the rope holding Gawain to the beam. He climbed the rungs slowly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said as he clambered upwards, ‘whether the Gods have come or not. You all of you expected too much, and maybe they are here already. Who knows? But we shall finish without the blood of Mordred’s child,’ and with that he sawed clumsily at the rope holding Gawain’s ankles. The body swayed as he cut so that the blood-soaked hair slapped at the Cauldron’s edge, but then the rope parted and the corpse dropped heavily into the blood that splashed up to stain the Cauldron’s rim. Merlin climbed slowly down the ladder, then ordered the Blackshields who had been watching the confrontation to fetch the great wicker baskets of salt that were standing a few yards away. The men scooped the salt into the Cauldron, packing it tight around Gawain’s hunched and naked body.

‘What now?’ Arthur asked, sheathing his sword.

‘Nothing,’ Merlin said. ‘It is over.’

‘Excalibur?’ Arthur demanded.

‘She is in the southernmost spiral,’ Merlin said, pointing that way, ‘though I suspect you will have to wait for the fires to burn out before you can retrieve her.’

‘No!’ Nimue had recovered enough to protest. She spat blood from the inside of her cheek that had been split open by Arthur’s blow. ‘The Treasures are ours!’

‘The Treasures,’ Merlin said wearily, ‘have been gathered and used. They are nothing now. Arthur may have his sword. He’ll need it.’ He turned and threw his long knife into the nearest fire, then turned to watch as the two Blackshields finished packing the Cauldron. The salt turned pink as it covered Gawain’s hideously wounded body. ‘In the spring,’ Merlin said, ‘the Saxons will come, and then we shall see if there was any magic here this night.’

Nimue screamed at us. She wept and raved, she spat and cursed, she promised us death by air, by fire, by land and by sea. Merlin ignored her, but Nimue was never ready to accept half measures and that night she became Arthur’s enemy. That night she began to work on the curses that would give her revenge on the men who stopped the Gods coming to Mai Dun. She called us the ravagers of Britain and she promised us horror.

We stayed on the hill all night. The Gods did not come, and the fires burned so fiercely that it was not till the following afternoon that Arthur could retrieve Excalibur. Mardoc was given back to his mother, though I later heard he died that winter of a fever.