I swallowed the sickness, wiped the sweat off my palms, and ran to find Cerdic.

CHAPTER NINE

SO it was that I first left Maridunum. At that time it seemed like the greatest adventure in the world, to ride out in the chill of dawn, when stars were still in the sky, and make one of the jostling, companionable group of men who followed Camlach and the King. To begin with most of the men were surly and half asleep, and we rode pretty well in silence, breath smoking in the icy air, and the horses’ hoofs striking sparks from the slaty road. Even the jingle of harness sounded cold, and I was so numb that I could hardly feel the reins, and could think of nothing else but how to stay on the excited pony and not get myself sent home in disgrace before we had gone a mile.

And now, because the tales of childhood are tedious, and there are great affairs still to be told, I will pass as quickly as I may over our excursion to Segontium, which lasted eighteen days. It was my first sight of King Vortigern, who had at this time been High King of Britain for more than twenty years. Be sure I had heard plenty about him, truth and tales alike. He was a hard man, as one must be who had taken his throne by murder and held it with blood; but he was a strong king in a time when there was need for strength, and it was not altogether his fault that his stratagem of calling in the Saxons as mercenaries to help him had twisted in his hand like an edged sword slipping, and cut it to the bone. He had paid, and paid again, and then had fought; and now he spent a great part of every year fighting like a wolf to keep the ranging hordes contained along the Saxon Shore. Men spoke of him—with respect—as a fierce and bloodthirsty tyrant, and of his Saxon Queen, Rowena, with hatred as a witch; but though I had been fed from childhood on the tales of the kitchen slaves, I was looking forward to seeing them with more curiosity than fear.

In any event, I need not have been afraid; I saw the High King only from a distance. My grandfather’s leniency had extended only to letting me go in his train; once there, I was of no more account—in fact of much less—than his pages Mael and Duach. I was left to fend for myself among the anonymous rabble of boys and servants, and, because my ways had made me no friends among my contemporaries, was left to myself. I was later to be thankful for the fact that, on the few occasions when I was in the crowd surrounding the two Kings, Vortigern did not lay eyes on me, and neither my grandfather nor Gamlach remembered my existence.

We lay a week at Segontium, which the Welsh call Caerynar-Von, because it lies just across the strait from Mona, the druids’ isle. The town is set, like Maridunum, on the banks of an estuary, where the Seint River meets the sea. It has a splendid harbour, and a fortress placed on the rising ground above this, perhaps half a mile away. The fortress was built by the Romans to protect the harbour and the town, but had lain derelict for over a hundred years until Vortigern put part of it into repair. A little lower down the hill stood another more recent strong point, built, I believe, by Macsen, grandfather of the murdered Constantius, against the Irish raiders.