That death ended Mordred's acclamation. Poor Norwenna, buried beneath Ynys Wydryn's Holy Thorn, would have done it all so differently, yet even if a thousand bishops and a myriad of saints had gathered to pray Mordred on to his throne, the auguries would still have been the same. For Mordred, our King, was crippled and neither Druid nor bishop could ever change that.
Tristan of Kernow arrived that afternoon. We were in the great hall at Mordred's feast, an event remarkable for its lack of cheer, but Tristan's arrival made it even less cheerful. No one even noticed his arrival until he drew near to the big central fire and the flames glinted off his leather breastplate and iron helmet. The Prince was known as a friend of Dumnonia and Bishop Bedwin greeted him as such, but Tristan's only response was to draw his sword.
The gesture commanded instant attention for no man was supposed to carry a weapon into a feasting hall, let alone a hall that celebrated a king's acclamation. Some men in the hall were drunk, but even they went silent as they gazed at the young, dark-haired Prince.
Bedwin tried to ignore the drawn sword. "You came for the acclamation, Lord Prince? Doubtless you were delayed? Travel is so difficult in winter. Come, a seat here? Next to Agricola of Gwent? There's venison."
"I come with a quarrel," Tristan said loudly. He had left his six guards just outside the hall door where a cold sleet was spitting across the hilltop. The guards were grim men in wet armour and dripping cloaks whose shields were the right way up and whose war spears were whetted bright.
"A quarrel!" Bedwin said as though the very thought was remarkable. "Not on this auspicious day, surely not!"
Some of the warriors in the hall growled challenges. They were drunk enough to enjoy a quarrel, but Tristan ignored them. "Who speaks for Dumnonia?" he demanded.
There was a moment's hesitation. Owain, Arthur, Gereint and Bedwin all had authority, but none was pre-eminent. Prince Gereint, never a man to put himself forward, shrugged the question away, Owain stared balefully at Tristan, while Arthur respectfully deferred to Bedwin who suggested, very diffidently, that as the kingdom's chief counsellor he could speak as well as any man on behalf of King Mordred.
"Then tell King Mordred," Tristan said, 'that there will be blood between my country and his unless I receive justice."
Bedwin looked alarmed and his hands fluttered with calming motions as he tried to think what to say. Nothing suggested itself to him and in the end it was Owain who responded. "Say what you have to say," he said flatly.
"A group of my father's people," Tristan said, 'were given protection by High King Uther. They came to this country at Uther's request to work the mines and to live in peace with their neighbours, yet late last summer some of those neighbours came to their mine and gave them sword, fire and slaughter. Fifty-eight dead, tell your King, and their sarhaed will be the value of their lives plus the life of the man who ordered them killed, or else we shall come with our own swords and shields to take the price ourselves."
Owain roared with laughter. "Little Kernow? We're so frightened!"
The warriors all around me shouted scorn. Kernow was a small country and no match for Dumnonia's forces. Bishop Bedwin tried to stop the noise, but the room was full of men drunk into boastfulness and they refused to calm down until Owain himself called for silence. "I heard, Prince," Owain said, 'that it was the Blackshield Irish of Oengus Mac Airem who attacked the moor."
Tristan spat on the floor. "If they did," he said, 'then they flew across country to do it, for no man saw them pass and they did not steal so much as an egg from any Dumnonian."
"That's because they fear Dumnonia, but not Kernow," Owain said, and the hall burst into jeering laughter again.
Arthur waited until the laughter had subsided. "Do you know of any man other than Oengus Mac Airem who might have attacked your people?" he asked courteously.
Tristan turned and searched the men squatting on the hall floor. He saw Prince Cadwy of Isca's bald head and pointed at it with his sword. "Ask him. Or better still' he raised his voice to quieten the jeers 'ask the witness I have outside." Cadwy was on his feet and shouting to be allowed to fetch his sword while his tattooed spearmen were threatening all Kernow with massacre.
Arthur slapped his hand on the high table. The sound echoed in the hall, drawing silence. Agricola of Gwent, sitting next to Arthur, kept his eyes down, for this quarrel was none of his business, but I doubt if a single nuance of the confrontation was escaping his shrewd wits. "If any man draws blood tonight," Arthur said, 'he is my enemy." He waited until Cadwy and his men subsided, then looked again to Tristan. "Bring your witness, Lord."
"Is this a court of law?" Owain objected.
"Let the witness come in," Arthur insisted.
"This is a feast!" Owain protested.
"Let the witness come, let him come." Bishop Bedwin wanted the whole distasteful business over, and agreeing with Arthur seemed the quickest way to settle it. Men at the hall's edges shuffled closer to hear the drama, but laughed when Tristan's witness appeared, for she was just a small child, perhaps nine years old, who walked calmly and stiff-backed to stand beside her Prince who put an arm about her shoulder. "Sarlinna ferch Edain." He gave the child's name, then squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. "Speak."
Sarlinna licked her lips. She chose to speak direct to Arthur, perhaps because he had the kindest face of the men sitting at the high table. "My father was killed, my mother was killed, my brothers and sisters were killed..." She spoke as though she had been rehearsed in her words, though no man present doubted the truth of them. "My baby sister was killed," she went on, 'and my kitten was killed' - a first tear showed 'and I saw it done."
Arthur shook his head in sympathy. Agricola of Gwent ran a hand across his close-cropped grey hair, then stared up into the soot-blackened rafters. Owain leaned back in his chair and drank from a horn beaker while Bishop Bedwin looked troubled. "Did you really see the killers?" the Bishop asked the child.
"Yes, Lord." Sarlinna, now that she was no longer saying words she had prepared and practised, was more nervous.
"But it was night, child," Bedwin objected. "Wasn't the raid at night, Lord Prince?" he demanded of Tristan. The Lords of Dumnonia had all heard about the raid on the moor, but they had believed Owain's assertion that the massacre was the work of Oengus's Blackshield Irish. "How could the child see at night?" Bedwin asked.
Tristan encouraged the child by patting her shoulder. "Tell the Lord Bishop what happened," he instructed her.
"The men threw fire into our hut, Lord," Sarlinna said in a small voice.
"Not enough fire," a man growled from the shadows and the hall laughed.
"How did you live, Sarlinna?" Arthur asked her gently when the laughter had faded.
"I hid, Lord, under a pelt."
Arthur smiled. "You did well. But did you see the man who killed your mother and father?" He paused. "And your kitten?"
She nodded. Her eyes were bright with tears in the dim hall. "I saw him, Lord," she said quietly.
"So tell us about him," Arthur said.
Sarlinna was wearing a small grey shift under a black woollen cloak and now she lifted her thin arms and pushed the shift's sleeves back to bare her pale skin. "The man's arms had pictures, Lord, of a dragon. And of a boar. Here." She showed where the tattoos might be on her own small arms, then looked at Owain. "And there were rings in his beard," the girl added, and then she went silent, but she had no need to say more. Only one man wore warrior rings in his beard, and every man present had watched Owain's arms drive the spear into Wlenca's midriff that morning, and everyone knew those arms were tattooed with Dumnonia's dragon and with his own symbol of a long-tusked boar.
There was silence. A log crackled in the fire, sending a puff of smoke into the rafters. A gust of wind pattered sleet on the thick thatch and fluttered the rush-light flames that were scattered about the hall. Agricola was examining the silver-chased holder of his drinking horn as though he had never seen such an object before. Somewhere in the hall a man belched, and the noise seemed to prompt Owain to turn his great shaggy head to stare at the child. "She lies," he said harshly, 'and children who lie should be beaten bloody,"
Sarlinna began to cry, then buried her face in the wet folds of Tristan's cloak. Bishop Bedwin frowned. "It is true, Owain, is it not, that you visited Prince Cadwy late in the summer?"
"So?" Owain bristled. "So?" He roared the word again, this time as a challenge to the whole assembly. "Here are my warriors!" He gestured at us, sitting together on the right-hand side of the hall. "Ask them! Ask them! The child lies! On my oath, she lies!"
The hall was in sudden uproar as men spat their defiance at Tristan. Sarlinna was weeping so much that the Prince stooped, picked her up and held her in his arms and continued to hold her while Bedwin tried to regain control over the hall. "If Owain swears on his oath," the Bishop shouted, 'then the child does lie." The warriors growled agreement.
Arthur, I saw, was watching me. I looked down at my wooden bowl of venison.
Bishop Bedwin was wishing he had not invited the child into the hall. He dragged his fingers through his beard, then shook his head wearily. "A child's word carries no weight in law," he said plaintively. "A child is not among the Tongued-ones." The Tongued-ones were the nine witnesses whose word carried the weight of truth in law: a Lord, a Druid, a priest, a father speaking of his children, a magistrate, a gift-giver speaking of his gift, a maiden speaking of her virginity, a herdsman speaking of his animals and a condemned man speaking his final words. Nowhere in the list was there any mention of a child speaking of her family's massacre. "Lord Owain," Bishop Bed win pointed out to Tristan, 'is a Tongued-one."
Tristan was pale, but he would not back down. "I believe the child," he said, 'and tomorrow, after sunrise, I shall come for Dumnonia's answer, and if that answer denies Kernow justice then my father will take justice for himself."
"What's the matter with your father?" Owain jeered. "Lost interest in his latest wife, has he? So he wants to take a beating in battle instead?"
Tristan walked out amidst laughter, a laughter that grew as men tried to imagine little Kernow declaring war on mighty Dumnonia. I did not join in the laughter, but finished my stew instead, telling myself I needed the food if I was to keep warm during my spell of guard duty that would start at the feast's end. Nor did I drink any mead, so I was still sober when I fetched my cloak, spear, sword and helmet and went to the north wall. The sleet had stopped and the clouds were passing to reveal a bright half-moon sailing amidst a shimmer of stars, though more clouds were heaping in the west above the Severn Sea. I shivered as I paced the rampart.
Where Arthur found me.
I had known he was coming. I had wanted him to come and yet I felt a fear of him as I watched him cross the compound and climb the short flight of wooden steps that led to the low wall of earth and stone. At first he said nothing, but just leaned on the wood palings and stared towards the distant speck of flame light that lit Ynys Wydryn. He was dressed in his white cloak, which he had gathered up so that its hem would not drag in the mud. He had tied the cloak's corners about his waist just above his cross-hatched scabbard. "I'm not going to ask you," he spoke at last, his breath misting in the night air, 'what happened on the moor, because I don't want to invite any man, least of all a man I like, to break a death-oath."
"Yes, Lord," I said, and wondered how he had known it was a death-oath that had bound us on that dark night.
"So instead, let us walk." He smiled at me, and gestured along the rampart. "A walking sentry stays warm," he said. "I hear you're a good soldier?"
"I try, Lord."
"And I hear you succeed, so well done." He fell silent as we passed one of my comrades who was huddled against the palings. The man looked up at me as I passed and his face showed alarm that I might betray Owain's troop. Arthur pushed the cloak's hood back off his face. He had a long, firm stride and I had to hurry to keep pace with him. "What do you think a soldier's job is, Derfel?" he asked me in that intimate manner that made you feel he was more interested in you than anyone else in the world.
"To fight battles, Lord," I said.
He shook his head. "To fight battles, Derfel," he corrected me, 'on behalf of people who can't fight for themselves. I learned that in Brittany. This miserable world is full of weak people, powerless people, hungry people, sad people, sick people, poor people, and it's the easiest thing in the world to despise the weak, especially if you're a soldier. If you're a warrior and you want a man's daughter, you just take her; you want his land, you just kill him; after all, you're a soldier and you have a spear and a sword, and he's just a poor weak man with a broken plough and a sick ox and what's to stop you?" He did not expect an answer to the question, but just paced on in silence. We had come to the western gateway and the split-log steps that climbed to the platform over the gate were whitening with a new frost. We climbed them side by side. "But the truth is, Derfel," Arthur said when we reached the high platform, 'that we are only soldiers because that weak man makes us soldiers. He grows the grain that feeds us, he tans the leather that protects us and he polls the ash trees that make our spear-shafts. We owe him our service."
