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Carig s job was to guard the frontier and he brusquely demanded to know my business, but enquired no
further when I gave him my name and said I rode for Arthur.
Carig s fortress was a simple wooden palisade inside which was built a pair of huts that were thick
with smoke from their open fires. I warmed myself as Carig s dozen men busied themselves with cooking
a haunch of venison on a spit made from a captured Saxon spear. There were a dozen such fortresses
within a day s march, all watching eastwards to guard against Aelle s raiders. Dumnonia had much the
same precautions, though we kept an army permanently close to our border. The expense of such an
army was exorbitant, and resented by those whose taxes of grain and leather and salt and fleeces paid for
the troops. Arthur had always struggled to make the taxes fair and keep their burden light, though now,
after the rebellion, he was ruthlessly levying a stiff penalty on all those wealthy men who had followed
Lancelot. That levy fell disproportionately on Christians, and Meurig, the Christian King of Gwent, had
sent a protest that Arthur had ignored. Carig, Meurig s loyal follower, treated me with a certain reserve,
though he did do his best to warn me of what waited across the border. You do know, Lord, he said,
that the Sais are refusing to let men cross the frontier?
I had heard, yes.
Two merchants went by a week ago, Carig said. They were carrying pottery and fleeces. I warned
them, but, he paused and shrugged, the Saxons kept the pots and the wool, but sent back two skulls.
If my skull comes back, I told him, send it to Arthur. I watched the venison fat drip and flare in the
fire. Do any travellers come out of Lloegyr?
Not for weeks now, Carig said, but next year, no doubt, you will see plenty of Saxon spearmen in
Dumnonia.
Not in Gwent? I challenged him.
Aelle has no quarrel with us, Carig said firmly. He was a nervous young man who did not much like
his exposed position on Britain s frontier, though he did his duty conscientiously enough and his men, I
noted, were well disciplined.
You re Britons, I told Carig, and Aelle s a Saxon, isn t that quarrel enough?
Carig shrugged. Dumnonia is weak, Lord, the Saxons know that. Gwent is strong. They will attack
you, not us. He sounded horribly complacent.
But once they have beaten Dumnonia, I said, touching the iron in my sword hilt to avert the ill-luck
implicit in my words, how long before they come north into Gwent?
Christ will protect us, Carig said piously, and made the sign of the cross. A crucifix hung on the hut
wall and one of his men licked his fingers then touched the feet of the tortured Christ. I surreptitiously
spat into the fire.
I rode east next morning. Clouds had come in the night and the dawn greeted me with a thin cold rain
that blew into my face. The Roman road, broken and weed-grown now, stretched into a dank wood and
the further I rode the lower my spirits sank. Everything I had heard in Carig s frontier fort suggested that
Gwent would not fight for Arthur. Meurig, the young King of Gwent, had ever been a reluctant warrior.
His father, Tewdric, had known that the Britons must unite against their common enemy, but Tewdric had
resigned his throne and gone to live as a monk beside the River Wye and his son was no warlord.
Without Gwent s well-trained troops Dumnonia was surely doomed unless a glowing naked nymph
presaged some miraculous intervention by the Gods. Or unless Aelle believed Arthur s lie. And would
Aelle even receive me? Would he even believe that I was his son? The Saxon King had been kind
enough to me on the few occasions we had met, but that meant nothing for I was still his enemy, and the
longer I rode through that bitter drizzle between the towering wet trees, the greater my despair. I was
sure Arthur had sent me to my death, and worse, that he had done it with the callousness of a losing
gambler risking everything on one final cast on the throwboard.
At mid morning the trees ended and I rode into a wide clearing through which a stream flowed. The
road forded the small water, but beside the crossing and stuck into a mound that stood as high as a
man s waist, there stood a dead fir tree that was hung with offerings. The magic was strange to me so I
had no idea whether the bedecked tree guarded the road, placated the stream or was merely the work of
children. I slid off my horse s back and saw that the objects hung from the brittle branches were the small
bones of a man s spine. No child s play, I reckoned, but what? I spat beside the mound to avert its evil,
touched the iron of Hywelbane s hilt, then led my horse through the ford.
The woods began again thirty paces beyond the stream and I had not covered half that distance when
an axe hurtled out of the shadows beneath the branches. It turned as it came towards me, the day s grey
light flickering from the spinning blade. The throw was bad, and the axe hissed past a good four paces
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