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glumly accepted their country’s defeat and there had been no unrest at the news of their King’s death, merely a docile submission to the exactions of the victors. Cavan told me that Oengus of Demetia, the Irish King who had brought Arthur victory at Lugg Vale, had taken his allotted portion of slaves and treasure, stolen as much again, and had then gone home, and the Silurians were evidently happy enough that the renowned Lancelot was now to be their King. ‘And I reckon the bastard’s welcome to the place,’ Cavan said when he found me in Cuneglas’s hall where I spread my blanket and took my meals. He scratched at a louse in his beard.
    ‘Scrubby place, Siluria.’
    ‘They breed good warriors,’ I said.
    ‘Fighting to get away from home, I wouldn’t wonder.’ He sniffed. ‘What clawed your face, Lord?’
    ‘Thorns. Fighting a boar.’
    ‘I thought you might have got married when I wasn’t watching you,’ he said, ‘and that was her wedding gift.’
    ‘I am to be married,’ I told him as we walked out of the hall into Caer Sws’s sunlight, and I described Arthur’s proposal to make me Mordred’s champion and his own brother-in-law. Cavan was pleased at the news of my imminent enrichment for he was an Irish exile who had sought to turn his skills with spear and sword into a fortune in Uther’s Dumnonia, but somehow the fortune had kept slipping away across the throwboard. He was twice my age, a squat man, broad-shouldered, grey-bearded and with hands thick with the warrior rings we forged from the weapons of defeated enemies. He was delighted that my marriage would mean gold and he was tactful about the bride who would bring that metal. ‘She isn’t a beauty like her sister,’ he said.
    ‘True,’ I admitted.
    ‘In fact,’ he said, abandoning tact, ‘she’s as ugly as a sack of toads.’
    ‘She is plain,’ I conceded.
    ‘But plain ones make the best wives, Lord,’ he declared, never having been married himself, though never lonely either. ‘And she’ll bring us all wealth,’ he added happily, and that, of course, was the reason I would marry poor Gwenhwyvach. My common sense could not put faith in the pork rib in my pouch, and my duty to my men was to reward them for their fidelity, and those rewards had been few in the last year. They had lost virtually all their possessions at the fall of Ynys Trebes and had then struggled against Gorfyddyd’s army at Lugg Vale; now they were tired, they were impoverished and no men had ever deserved more of their lord.
    I greeted my forty men who were waiting to be assigned quarters. I was glad to see Issa among them, for he was the best of my spearmen: a young farm boy of huge strength and undying optimism who protected my right side in battle. I embraced him, then expressed my regrets that I had no gifts for them.
    ‘But our reward is coming soon,’ I added, then glanced at the two dozen girls they must have attracted in Siluria, ‘though I’m glad to see most of you have already found some rewards for yourselves.’
    They laughed. Issa’s girl was a pretty dark-haired child of perhaps fourteen summers. He introduced her to me. ‘Scarach, Lord.’ He named her proudly.
    ‘Irish?’ I asked her.
    She nodded. ‘I was a slave. Lord, to Ladwys.’ Scarach spoke the tongue of Ireland; a language like ours, but different enough, like her name, to mark her race. I guessed she had been captured by Gundleus’s men in a raid on King Oengus’s lands in Demetia. Most Irish slaves came from such settlements on Britain’s west coast though none, I suspected, were ever captured from Lleyn. No one but a fool ventured uninvited into Diwrnach’s territory.
    ‘Ladwys!’ I said. ‘How is she?’ Ladwys had been Gundleus’s mistress, a dark, tall woman whom Gundleus had secretly married, though he had been ready enough to disown the marriage when Gorfyddyd had offered him the prospect of Ceinwyn’s hand.
    ‘She’s dead, Lord,’ Scarach said