"Owain," Tristan said. "Who almost certainly took gold from Cadwy."
Bedwin shook his head. "No. No. No. It cannot be. No. On my oath, Lord Prince, I have no knowledge of any man's guilt." He gave Tristan a pleading look. "My Lord Prince, it would hurt me deeply to see our countries at war. I have offered what I can offer, and I shall have prayers said for your dead, but I cannot countermand a man's oath of innocence."
"I can," Arthur said. He had been waiting behind the kitchen screen at the hall's far end. I was with him as he stepped into the hall where his white cloak looked bright in the damp gloom.
Bedwin blinked at him. "Lord Arthur?"
Arthur stepped between the stirring, groaning bodies. "If the man who killed Kernow's miners is not punished, Bedwin, then he may murder again. Do you not agree?"
Bedwin shrugged, spread his hands, then shrugged again. Tristan was frowning, not sure where Arthur's words were leading.
Arthur stopped by one of the hall's central pillars. "And why should the kingdom pay sarhaed when the kingdom did not do the killing?" he demanded. "Why should my Lord Mordred's treasury be depleted for another man's offence?"
Bedwin gestured Arthur to silence. "We do not know the murderer!" he insisted.
"Then we must prove his identity," Arthur said simply.
"We can't!" Bedwin protested irritably. "The child is not a Tongued-one! And Lord Owain, if he is the man you speak of, has sworn on oath that he is innocent. He is a Tongued-one, so why go through the farce of a trial? His word is enough."
"In a court of words, yes," Arthur said, 'but there is also the court of swords, and by my sword, Bedwin," here he paused and drew Excalibur's glittering length into the half-light, "I maintain that Owain, Champion of Dumnonia, has caused our cousins of Kernow harm and that he, and no other, must pay the price." He thrust Excalibur's tip through the filthy rushes into the earth and left it there, quivering. For a second I wondered if the Gods of the Otherworld would suddenly appear to aid Arthur, but there was only the sound of wind and rain and newly woken men gasping.
Bedwin gasped too. For a few seconds he was speechless. "You..." he finally managed to say, but then could say no more.
Tristan, his handsome face pale in the wan light, shook his head. "If anyone should contend in the court of swords," he said to Arthur, 'let it be me."
Arthur smiled. "I asked first, Tristan," he said lightly.
"No!" Bedwin found his tongue. "It cannot be!"
Arthur gestured at the sword. "You wish to pluck it, Bedwin?"
"No!" Bedwin was in distress, foreseeing the death of the kingdom's best hope, but before he could say another word Owain himself burst through the hall door. His long hair and thick beard were wet and his bare chest gleamed with rain.
He looked from Bedwin to Tristan to Arthur, then down to the sword in the earth. He seemed puzzled. "Are you mad?" he asked Arthur.
"My sword," Arthur said mildly, 'maintains your guilt in the matter between Kernow and Dumnonia."
"He is mad," Owain said to his warriors who were crowding in behind him. The champion was red-eyed and tired. He had drunk for much of the night, then slept badly, but the challenge seemed to give him a new energy. He spat towards Arthur. "I'm going back to that Silurian bitch's bed," he said, 'and when I wake up I want this to prove a dream."
"You are a coward, a murderer and a liar," Arthur said calmly as Owain turned away and the words made the men in the hall gasp once more.
Owain turned back into the hall. "Whelp," he said to Arthur. He strode up to Excalibur and knocked the blade over, the formal acceptance of the challenge. "So your death, whelp, will be part of my dream. Outside." He jerked his head towards the rain. The fight could not be held indoors, not unless the feasting hall was to be cursed with abominable luck, so the men had to fight in the winter rain.
The whole fort was stirring now. Many of the folk who lived at Lindinis had slept in Caer Cadarn that night and the compound seethed as people were woken to witness the fight. Lunete was there, and Nimue and Morgan; indeed all Caer Cadarn hurried to watch the battle that took place, as tradition demanded, within the royal stone circle. Agricola, a red cloak over his gorgeous Roman armour, stood between Bedwin and Prince Gereint while King Melwas, a hunk of bread in his hand, watched wide-eyed among his guards. Tristan stood on the circle's far side where I, too, took my place. Owain saw me there and assumed I had betrayed him. He roared that my life would follow Arthur's to the Otherworld, but Arthur proclaimed my life was under his surety.
"He broke his oath!" Owain shouted, pointing at me.
"On my oath," Arthur said, 'he broke none." He took off his white cloak and folded it carefully on to one of the stones. He was dressed in trews, boots and a thin leather jerkin over a woollen vest. Owain was bare chested. His trews were crisscrossed with leather and he had massive nailed boots. Arthur sat on the stone and pulled his own boots off, preferring to fight barefoot.
"This is not necessary," Tristan said to him.
"It is, sadly," Arthur said, then stood and pulled Excalibur from its scabbard.
"Using your magic sword, Arthur?" Owain jeered. "Afraid to fight with a mortal weapon, are you?"
Arthur sheathed Excalibur again and laid the sword on top of his cloak. "Derfel," he turned to me, 'is that Hywel's sword?"
"Yes, Lord."
"Would you lend it me?" he asked. "I promise to return it."
"Make sure you live to keep that promise, Lord," I said, taking Hywelbane from her scabbard and handing it to him hilt first. He gripped the sword, then asked me to run to the hall and fetch a handful of gritty ash that, when I returned, he rubbed into the oiled leather of the hilt.
He turned to Owain. "If, Lord Owain," he said courteously, 'you would rather fight when you are rested, then I can wait."
"Whelp!" Owain spat. "Sure you don't want to put on your fish armour?"
"It rusts in the rain," Arthur answered very calmly.
"A fair-weather soldier," Owain sneered, then gave his long sword two practice cuts that whistled in the air. In the shield-line he preferred to fight with a short sword, but with any length of blade Owain was a man to fear. "I'm ready, whelp," he called.
I stood with Tristan and his guards as Bedwin made one last futile effort to stop the fight. No one doubted the outcome. Arthur was a tall man, but slender compared with Owain's muscled bulk, and no one had ever seen Owain bested in a fight. Yet Arthur seemed remarkably composed as he took his place at the circle's western edge and faced Owain who stood, uphill of him, at the east.
"Do you submit judgment to the court of swords?" Bedwin asked the two men, and both nodded their assent.
"Then God bless you, and God give the truth victory," Bedwin said. He made the sign of the cross and then, his old face heavy, he walked out of the circle.
Owain, as we had expected, rushed at Arthur, but halfway across the circle, right by the King's royal stone, his foot slipped in the mud, and suddenly Arthur was charging. I had expected Arthur to fight calmly, using the skills Hywel had taught him, but that morning, as the rains poured from the winter skies, I saw how Arthur changed in battle. He became a fiend. His energy was poured into just one thing, death, and he laid at Owain with massive, fast strokes that drove the big man back and back. The swords rang harsh. Arthur was spitting at Owain, cursing him, taunting him, and cutting again and again with the edge of the sword and never giving Owain a chance to recover from a parry.
Owain fought well. No other man could have sustained that opening, slaughterous assault. His boots slipped in the mud, and more than once he had to beat off Arthur's attacks from his knees, but he always managed to recover his footing even if he was still driven backwards. When Owain slipped a fourth time I understood part of Arthur's confidence. He had wanted rain to make the footing treacherous and I think he knew that Owain would be bloated and tired from a night's feasting. Yet he could not break through that dogged guard, even though he did drive the champion clean back to the place where Wlenca's blood was still just visible as a darker patch of soaking mud.
And there, by the Saxon's blood, Owain's luck changed. Arthur slipped, and though he recovered the falter was all the opening Owain needed. He lunged whip-fast. Arthur parried, but Owain's sword slit through the leather jerkin to draw the fight's first blood from Arthur's waist. Arthur parried again, then again, this time stepping back before the hard, quick lunges that would have gored an ox to its heart. Owain's men roared their support as the champion, scenting victory, tried to throw his whole body on to Arthur to drive his lighter opponent down into the mud, but Arthur had been ready for the manoeuvre and he sidestepped on to the royal stone and gave a back-cut of his sword that slashed open the back of Owain's skull. The wound, like all scalp wounds, bled copiously so that the blood matted in Owain's hair and trickled down his broad back to be diluted by the rain. His men went silent.
Arthur leaped from the stone, attacking again, and once again Owain was on the defensive. Both men were panting, both were mud-spattered and bloody, and both too tired to spit any more insults at the other. The rain made their hair hang in long, soaking hanks as Arthur cut left and right in the same fast rhythm with which he had opened the fight. It was so fast that Owain had no chance to do anything but counter the strokes. I remembered Owain's scornful description of Arthur's fighting style, slashing like a haymaker, Owain had said, hurrying to beat bad weather. Once, and only once, did Arthur whip his blade past Owain's guard, but the blow was half parried, robbing it of force, and the sword was checked by the iron warrior rings in Owain's beard. Owain threw the blade off, then tried again to drive Arthur down on to the ground with the weight of his body. Both fell and for a second it looked as though Owain would trap Arthur, but somehow Arthur scrambled away and climbed to his feet.
Arthur waited for Owain to rise. Both men were breathing hard and for a few seconds they watched each other, judging their chances, and then Arthur moved forward into the attack again. He swung again and again, just as he had before, and again and again Owain parried the wild blows, then Arthur slipped for a second time. He called in fear as he fell, and his cry was answered by a shout of triumph as Owain drew back his arm for the killing blow. Then Owain saw that Arthur had not slipped at all, but had merely pretended it to make Owain open his guard and now it was Arthur who lunged. It was his first lunge of the battle, and his last. Owain had his back to me and I was half hiding my eyes so that I would not have to see Arthur's death, but instead, right before me, I saw the shining tip of Hywelbane come clean out through Owain's wet and blood-streaked back. Arthur's lunge had gone straight through the champion's body. Owain seemed to freeze, his sword arm suddenly powerless. Then, from nerveless fingers, his sword dropped into the mud.
For a second, for a heartbeat, Arthur left Hywelbane in Owain's belly, then, with a huge effort that took every muscle in his body, he twisted the blade and ripped it free. He shouted as he tore that steel out of Owain, shouted as the blade broke the flesh's suction and ripped through bowel and muscle and skin and flesh, and still shouted as he dragged the sword out into the day's grey light. The force needed to drag the steel from Owain's heavy body meant that the sword kept going in a wild backswing that sprayed blood far across the mud-churned circle.
While Owain, disbelief on his face and with his guts spilling into the mud, fell.
Then Hywelbane thrust down once into the champion's neck.
And there was silence in Caer Cadarn.
Arthur stepped back from the corpse. Then he turned sunwise to look into the faces of every man around the circle. Arthur's own face was hard as stone. There was not a scrap of kindness there, only the face of a fighter come to triumph. It was a terrible face, his big jaw set in a rictus of hate so that those of us who only knew Arthur as a painstakingly thoughtful man were shocked by the change in him. "Does any man here," he called in a loud voice, 'dispute the judgment?"
None did. Rain dripped from cloaks and diluted Owain's blood as Arthur walked to face the fallen champion's spearmen. "Now's your chance," he spat at them, 'to avenge your Lord, otherwise you are mine." None could meet his eye, so he turned away from them, stepped over the fallen warlord and faced Tristan. "Does Kernow accept the judgment, Lord Prince?"
Tristan, pale-faced, nodded. "It does, Lord."
"SarhaedJ Arthur decreed, 'will be paid from Owain's estate." He turned again to look at the warriors. "Who commands Owain's men now?"
Griffid ap Annan stepped nervously forward. "I do, Lord."
"You will come to me for orders in one hour. And if any man of you touches Derfel, my comrade, then all of you will burn in a fire-pit." They lowered their gaze rather than meet his eyes.
Arthur used a handful of mud to clean the sword of its blood, then handed it to me. "Dry it well, Derfel."
