Geraint: Last of the Arthurians

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© 2015 DONALD RAWE. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 07/18/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-4494-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-4495-3 (e)

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Author’s Foreword

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

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17

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Some published works by

Donald R Rawe

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Padstow’s Obby Oss and May day Festivities

Cornish Villages

A Prospect of Cornwall

Spargo’s Confession (novel)

Eglosow Kernow : Cornish Church Poems

Cornish Hauntings and Happenings

Haunted Landscapes

The Mermaid of Padstow and other stories

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Acknowledgments

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The following works have been instrumental in providing the background of various details of the events in the book.

All omissions, misinterpretations, and suppositions are entirely my own.— D.R.R.

Author’s Foreword

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This novel is an attempt, utilising what is at present available, to present the situation in Cornwall/Kernow and the south-western Celtic kingdom of Dumnonia, following the westward expansion of Germanic invaders (Angles, Saxons, Jutes etc) which had been halted at the battle of Badon Hill about 540 A.D.

The situation is clouded and mystified by the tradition of eleven previous battles won by the legendary King Arthur against the invaders. This campaign gave the Britons a respite lasting 30 to 40 years, during which the newcomers consolidated and established themselves in the Midlands and North of what is now England. The Jutes dominated Kent and much of East Anglia.

But not all Arthur’s knights had met their demise, and the last of them, Gerennius or Geraint of Dumnonia, was still ruling his South Western kingdom. By about 560 A.D. the invaders were moving into Somerset and Dorset and threatening to spread further west. Geraint was faced with the prospect of making a desperate stand— or dying peacefully, allowing his kingdom to be subjugated. At this stage no obvious successor, trained in the art and science of war, was evident.

Was Geraint a Christian? Probably only nominally. We have the evidence of his name, connected to the parish Gerrans (dedicated to St Geraint); also of St Just (in Roseland and Penwith), and St Levan, dedicated to St Seleven. This book postulates that neither of those sons of Geraint was fitted to succeed their father and lead Dumnonia to war.

We do not as yet have historical or archaeological evidence that Gerrans parish was the seat of Geraint’s power. There is however a farm at Carwarthen in the parish, seated strategically above the river Fal, and it has been postulated (taking into account later changes in the Cornish language, adopting mutations) its name means Fortress of Geraint. Perhaps archaeology and further historical studies will confirm this.

If Jestyn and Selevan (Selyf) were the sons of Geraint and are commemorated at St Just and St Levan they must have been sincere Christians at least in later life. So this book is an attempt to explain how this came about, and how the last of Arthur’s great warriors was also sanctified.

The study of Cornish and Celtic place names is a perennially fascinating one. The Cornish Language, though subjugated by the adoption of English following the 1549 imposition of the Tudor Prayer Book has clung on in various corners of the Duchy, treasured by a few and reinforced by writers using it during 16th to 19th century, and has been successfully revived in the 20th century. Therefore I have used some of the multitudinous Cornish and Celtic place-names recorded, as evidence of the background of this chronicle.

This is a novel, not a history. But some at least of its suppositions must be true, and hopefully will be supported by future evidence emerging.

D.R.R

2015

To Helen

1

Down through the oaks along the Vala the north-easterly moaned in the fitful half-light of dawn. A sky of puce grew in the east beyond the woods of Polgerran, the Anchorage of Geraint. On the south shore of the creek the carpenters and caulkers came and went reluctantly in the frosty shadows, cold and speechless at this dumb hour. Mallets, saws and chisels could be heard sporadically; men came over to warm their hands at the smith’s fire, rising red in the sheltered cove. They tightened their leather jerkins and breeches against the birching wind, and envied the young captain his heavy woollen cloak as they saw him descending the path. Some, securely married, wished themselves back in their feather beds with their warm plump wives; others, glad to have left their hovels for the day, looked upon Cradog’s workshop as a palace of genial comfort. They rubbed their hands and stamped their feet and stared out at the skeleton of the longship, looming with ghostly white ribs between them and the darkness of the wide river.

The keel had been laid three weeks before, back in February, Mys Whevrer, when the weather had been calmed into one of those unearthly lulls between one season and the next; it had coincided with Imbolc, the first festival of the Celtic year, when the ewes gave milk and tiny lambs ran crying on spindleshanks to their mothers on the heath of the Ros-land above. Under the strict military eye of the captain these men had soaked and warped the ribs, tree-nailed the frame, and raised stem and stern upon flat slabs of granite and slate along the foreshore. Now on that rough slipway she was receiving her beams and clinkered strakes. Mules were driven daily down the newly-widened path through the woods, pulling oak-beams and ash-planks to be hammered onto her with finger-long nails from the forge at Cargerran Castle above.

The wind dropped suddenly; the glowing warmth of the fire brought quiet cheer to them. A malodorous mass of glue heaved and spat in the great iron pot hanging over it— Cradog’s cauldron, they called it, and accused him playfully of casting spells by throwing unmentionable objects into it. Cradog now took his long gleaming knife and began to pare cow and sheep hooves into a bowl. ’Tis cold enough, boys,’ he grunted, ‘but we shan’t get rain from this quarter, you can be thankful for that.’

‘Ah. Spring can’t be far off now. Mael Tyack caught two salmon down on the Percuil yesterday, so I heard,’ somebody remarked.

‘Turn to, me sons,’ said a bearded caulker, beginning to move. ‘Here comes Captain Cock-Pheasant.’

The young captain, Michael Morval, was marching towards them. ‘What do you men think you’re doing? ’Tis full daylight, almost. Maybe you want to lose a day’s pay, each of you?’ His voice was a shrill, high tenor, with a slightly unpleasant rasp to it.

They drifted across the shingle towards the longship, muttering and joking quietly between themselves. The Captain’s boyish ways were a source of amusement to them, though his sword and his authority had to be respected. ‘I know what I’d do to un if I c’d find’n alone one night without his armoury,’ the heavy caulker said, snorting through his black beard.

‘A wudden know whether a was man or woman then, eh, Brengy?’ His companion guffawed, and took up an adze to shape down a joist on which to fit the bottom-boards. Brengy went to the oakum pile and began to shred flax and moss which later, dipped in hot resin and tallow, would be rammed in between the ship’s timber to seal her from the water. Soon the orchestra of saws, mallets, chisels, axes and other tools rang out its steady concatenations, echoing through the trees amid the myriad cheepings and twitterings of awakened birds.

For nearly an hour Captain Morval strutted among them, occasionally giving orders, several of them unnecessary. His hand would fall from time to time on to the haft of his short broad sword, reminiscent of the ones the Roman legionaries used two centuries before, but carved at the hilt and bearing a two-headed snake motif on the handle. The weapon reassured him in his dealings, and forestalled the amused criticism which, he sensed, would otherwise be directed at him by these seasoned craftsmen. This was his first assignment at the age of twenty (the very age the King had been when he had fought under Arthur at Mount Badon)— he was conscious of the need to impress his subordinates. He often wondered how Geraint had handled his men, almost sixty years ago, in that famous battle which had won peace for Britain and a desperately needed respite from the Saxon advances.

The voice, of course, had something to do with it. Even now, the old King would growl out like thunder, regal and commanding, brooking no challenge, denial or evasion. Morval coughed, and essayed under his breath to deepen his voice. No use. He sighed to himself. Perhaps in time … ‘All you need is a good woman to make a man of you, my lad.’ That was what Prince Selyf had said to him a few nights ago as, half-drunk, he lay arguing and carousing in the Great Hall of the castle. At nearly forty, Selyf was going to waste: a would-be hero, he had grown up in the time of the Great Peace, and apart from one or two skirmishes against the Irish who had landed in West Kernow, he had had no means of proving himself in battle. Unlike the unworldly Jestyn, his younger brother, Selyf saw himself as the inheritor of Geraint’s strength, generalship and heroism; yet now he was growing fat and bald, hardly, able to take part in the hurling or battle games on the heath outside Cargerran, and coming home exhausted from a day’s hunting.

Morval shivered with youthful disgust at the prospect of ageing. To come to such a pass— even if one had actually loved all the women Selyf boasted of having! Selyf’s wife, Merouda, grew sharp-tongued and disdainful. What she needed was another man, a strong new lover— so the men hinted; but no one was prepared to risk that imperious glance which could scorch one’s soul. Those inviting sensual lips were ever ready with a wounding comment to deflate a man’s pretensions.

The sun now broke through the eastern cloudbank; the day began to arch blue and golden above them, with high white fleering clouds. Oyster-catchers whirled past, low over the water, a squadron of black and white arrows veering and swerving as one. Lapwings stepped delicately along the shore, probing the stones and mud for lugworms. From Restronguet creek opposite, four hide-covered fishing craft put out and made seawards, disappearing out of sight into the widening expanse of deep water that lay around the bend beyond Polgerran. From the chapel up at Tolvern drifted the clear notes of the hermit’s bell, signifying he was at his early devotions, praying for all their immortal souls. This holy man had arrived from Cambria a few years ago and made his cell there on the hill-brow in the solitude of the forest, sufficiently near the track down to Keybellens Passage where he could be of assistance to travellers.

Yes, reflected Morval, there was plenty of coming and going these days, between Cambria, Ireland and Kernow, between Kernow and Armorica, and further across the seas to Britonia in North-West Iberia. Not that he personally held a great regard for this one-God Christianity, preferring (like Geraint himself) the familiar family of Celtic Gods his ancestors had worshipped and trusted from the mists of time: Lugh the All-Skilful, God of Lightning, Cernunnos the Horned God, Tarannis the Thunderer, Dagda the Lord of Perfect Knowledge, the fertile Matres, Bel the Sun-God, Nemetona Goddess of War, and many others. But since Arthur’s day Christianity had spread fast among the Celts on both sides of the British Sea; nearly everyone paid at least lip-service to it now, even on occasions the old warrior up there in the fortress. It was becoming fashionable to spend weeks in fasting each year, as a tribute to this God who had died (so they maintained) and then come back to life. The Queen, Enid, was virtually a nun, living on oatmeal and bread and water; her women had to get up with her every morning at four o’clock to pray.

Morval stirred the muddy shingle with his foot, a yard or so from the quietly lapping grey-green water now flooding in on the tide. It was past his comprehension how that sort of religion could save Dumnonia against the West Saxons— now rumoured to be moving west under Ceawlin, their King, near the border on the River Perryt. In his view it would only sap the Celtic will to fight. Didn’t these Christians preach forgiveness to one’s enemies? What sort of sense was there in that? Prince Jestyn, now: there was a so-called man who refused to take arms, spending his time in reading, prayer and contemplation. It was difficult to believe he was a son of the mighty Geraint, the last of Arthur’s captains. Morval’s hand itched to use his sword against the invaders from Germany, who had usurped so much of the Isle of Britain from the Celtic peoples. Though in a way the Britons had only themselves to blame, for was it not Vortigern himself, King of the Dobunni, Pendragon and Overlord of all Britain, who had brought in the Angles and Saxons to fight for him as mercenaries? It was said that he gave them land in return for Hengist’s daughter, whom he made his Queen. That was a long time ago, before Arthur, before Uther and Ambrosius; but it was a lesson still not learned. People like Jestyn were talking again of treating with the German wolves.

Morval approached the ship and looked in through the ribs and stringers. A big man with light-coloured greying hair was supervising the laying of beams inside the hull. His back was broad, stretching tight his well-worn leather jerkin, and on his chest he wore the insignia of Geraint— a flying chough with crimson beak and legs. Over forty years ago, returning from the battlefield at Camlan at which the rebellious Medraut, Arthur’s nephew, had been killed, Geraint had adopted this emblem, for a prophecy had been made that the spirit of Arthur would inhabit a chough; and people said that as long as there were choughs flying on the cliffs of Kernow, the Celtic spirit of Britain would remain alive. Morval knew all this well; it had been taught him by his father, as it was taught to all boys in Dumnonia, as an article of religion.

The man in the jerkin looked up at Morval and nodded. Angwin, the Fair One, was no inferior. A master shipwright, he had inherited the skills of the Roman naval architects, and was now the one man in all Dumnonia, the Kingdom of the South-Western Celts, who could construct a sound warship able to mount ballistae and withstand the fire-arrows of the Saxons.

‘I hope you’ve got the wood for the mast under way, sir,’ Angwin said. ‘We’ll be making the step and putting in the stays soon. We’ll need a good stout ash pole for that.’

‘No, Angwin. There’ll be no mast.’

The shipwright stared. ‘No mast? But she’s a sea-going ship…’

‘My orders are that she will not carry a mast.’ Morval spoke firmly. The two men working under Angwin looked up and exchanged glances. ‘I must have a word with you in private, if you please.’

The shipwright clambered out and paced with him out of earshot of the men, along the scum-bearing tide line. Two kittiwakes screeched and swooped up the creek from the broad estuary, skimming the very surface of the water, twisting and turning with incredibly quick manoeuvres; probably an aerial courtship dance, Morval thought, watching them. But Angwin was waiting for him to speak.

‘You must by now have realised,’ Morval said, ‘that this is no ordinary ship you’re building.’

‘Well, there must be some urgency, specially considering the time of year,’ Angwin said. Normally the construction of such a craft would not be undertaken until the balmier days of spring or early summer, when frosts would not attack the joints or weaken the clinkering.

‘Exactly. Time may not be on our side, it seems. You’re not building a ship, Angwin, but a coffin.’

Angwin halted in his tracks. The water lapped up to his leather boots, bearing frothy bubbles and swirling threads of green weed. A small soft-backed crab scuttled out from under a stone and into the water.

‘A coffin … for the King?’

‘It is his command.’

‘He wants to be buried at sea?’

Morval said, ‘Perhaps; I don’t know; I’m not one of his intimate advisors. But the orders are clear enough; we have to finish the job as soon as possible. Maybe he has a death wish on him; or he’s had a forewarning.’

‘More likely,’ Angwin said, ‘he wants to be ferried.’ Seeing Morval’s questioning look he went on, ‘They used to ferry the dead, so I’ve heard my old people say— an old British custom, dying out now the Christians are taking over. Especially seafarers. You take them across the water, a river or to an island; it signifies a crossing from this life to the next.’

‘At all events,’ said Morval, ‘this is the last ship you’ll build for Geraint. Afterwards, with a new king, who knows?’

‘As you say. Things will never be the same again after King Geraint. But he’s still a strong man, even at seventy-odd. I can’t believe …’

‘There’s one more thing,’ Morval cut in. ‘I trust you to say nothing, though no doubt it’ll get out one way or another. When Geraint dies she will be plated with gold from stem to stern. The plates are being beaten out now in the forge up at Cargerran.’

Angwin’s mouth fell slack and open. ‘Gold,’ he said. ‘Plated with real gold?’

Morval smiled wryly, though his eyes gleamed in anticipation of a great spectacle. ‘It will be a magnificent funeral. There are those of us sworn to see to that. Geraint will pass over as befits a true Briton.’

The sun now topped the trees behind them, and the wind seemed to lose its edge. The men began to work more cheerfully, some whistling and singing, Angwin returned to the ship, his gaze travelling over her forty-foot length with a new surmise.

2

The ramparts of Cargerran ranged around, a circle unbroken except for the gate on the west side. Within them lay a conglomeration of wooden huts and thatched buildings, the largest of which was the Great Hall, a long building next to the kitchens, with an upper chamber for the King. Across the beaten earth roadway from it was the State Room where Geraint met his counsellors.

Outside the earth and stone walls of the fort lay a deep ditch, beyond which ran a second but lower bank of earth, also with its ditch; these had been dug by Geraint’s Celtic ancestors before the Romans arrived in Britain, and came to the south-west seeking tin. Fortunately or unfortunately, though they had built several small square-sided forts and one or two villas, the Roman presence in Kernow, the Horn of Dumnonia, had never been obtrusive. Geraint, though he had received a Roman education of sorts, and knew a fair amount of Latin, had never regarded himself as Roman. His father, Erbyn, had been partly responsible for this, having disagreed with his own father, Custentin Gorneu (Constantine the Cornishman), on that very point. In Custentin’s day, before and during the time that Uther and Arthur were combating the Saxon advance, it had still been an article of faith that British royalty and nobility should speak and worship in Latin, and also, like Rialobranus and Notus and others, take Latin names. But this emphasis was now fast breaking down: had not Rome summarily abandoned Britain when barbarians were attacking Italy itself, and told the British henceforth to look to their own defences? Geraint himself had scant regard for Roman traditions, though he knew enough of their military prowess and seamanship to respect them. His obsessive vision was one of a united Britain secure in its own Celtic way of life and worship, though he knew such a thing might never come again— if, in fact, it ever had been achieved. He leaned now on his huge blackthorn stick and expounded to Elbryn, his Armourer, not for the first or the last time, his trenchant views.

‘Peoples are created, Elbryn, not just by their living together in one place, or by traditions of common ancestors, nor even by sharing a common way of life— though surely all these things contribute. No; there is something of far greater importance than these, without which all is passing vanity and mere hopes scattered in the wind: to be a united people, a lasting race, they must have a common religion, living gods and goddesses whom they respect and really believe in.’ His plentiful whitening beard and hair, still with evident streaks of the renowned auburn glory it possessed in his prime, stirred in the slight breeze moving across the uplands from Pendower beach. The leonine head looked out over the bouldered ramparts, magisterially taking in the whole prospect, from bull-nosed Nare Head on the east to Pendynas on the south, and beyond to the Maen Eglos Rocks and the open British Sea. Immediately below, on the west, lay the Vala River, a silver-green flood among the oak and elm woods crowding its bank to the very water’s edge, now becoming tinged with the first green suffusance of spring. Where it met the other arms of this gathering of waters the great estuary opened out to embrace the ocean, providing incomparable anchorages and fishing grounds Three miles south, below the headland that terminated the Ros-land, this promontory he loved so well, a hermitage of cob and stones was being constructed by a newly arrived fanatical monk, who would live there with the wild weather in his soul and bones, in praise of the Christian God.

‘The whole trouble with our people is that they are bewildered and torn by two different religions— their own ancient Celtic one, and this Christianity. How on earth are they to choose? There is a dissension in my own family. You know how the Queen lives and thinks. And there is Jestyn. It grieves me more and more each day that I am a stranger to my own flesh and blood.’

‘I know how you feel, sir,’ Elbryn said, ‘But after all, Arthur himself, your great cousin, was a Christian. How can we hold on to the old gods?’ Elbryn was a practical man. Not given much to musing or philosophising, he saw life in terms of what was realistic or unrealistic. He implied that Geraint was out of step with the new age, that his pantheon of deities were already fading away like so many dragonflies who had had their day.

‘For myself, I can— and I will,’ growled Geraint; his iron-tipped cudgel struck the stone of the defences and sparks flew off it. ‘Nor am I alone in this; indeed I believe that most of my people want to remain true to Cernunnos and Lugh, Epona and Tarannis and the other great ones. They know them: the greatness of our British peoples lies in their keeping, not in the soft sermons spoken five hundred or more years ago by some Jew in Palestine. It was our own British Gods and Goddesses who gave our ancestors that supreme belief in the Other World, so that they went into battle with fervour and faith, completely unafraid to die. That was how Ambrosius and Uther and Arthur won their wars. And I’ll tell you this, also, Elbryn…’ he leaned close to the sixty-years old armourer, as if divulging a long-held secret, ‘Arthur was never one for praying to new Gods. He did his duty by the old— he always had his Druids with him, and before every battle they went to the Sacred Groves and sacrificed as they should. He may have used the fact that he was a Christian, though in name only, to rally to his side those of our people who had embraced the new faith. But the monks, you know, have little love for his memory; they cast aspersions on him as a mere war-leader, and say that if he had been a perfect Christian Medraut would not have revolted and divided Britain.’

He paused, thinking back, of the sanctimonious hermits and travelling monks he had known. One could admire their utter devotion, their singlemindedness, but the whole movement, denying the joys of the flesh and insisting on a needless asceticism, baffled him. One Christian alone had had the humanity, the tolerance and charity to penetrate Geraint’s massive indifference and wilful lack of understanding: Teilo, Bishop of Llandaff, who thirty years before had left Cambria before the dreaded yellow plague that was decimating the Britons in those parts. He had stayed only three days and two nights with Enid and Geraint at Isca, the capital of Dumnonia; yet in that short time Geraint and he had become boon companions, as close as blood brothers, delighting in each other’s exploits and opinions and dreams. Was it really strange that a holy man like Teilo could enjoy the best jokes, the bawdy songs of minstrels, appreciate a pretty woman (Geraint wondered whether he ever took one to bed with him), almost outdrink Geraint himself at the table, and delight in a day’s hunting? At that time, so many years ago, it had not seemed strange at all.

‘Life is to be lived and loved to the full,’ Teilo had proclaimed. ‘It is God’s gift to each one of us— and if we waste it He will not lightly forgive us.’

For all that, Teilo was acutely wise in politics as well as in mundane life. Geraint had received some sagacious advice from him at the time, and now often wished he had such a prelate to advise him. When would Teilo, now in Armorica, return? The Yellow Plague was over, so it was said, in Cambria. Would he go back to Llandaff? Geraint had sworn that he alone of Christian priests should attend him on his death-bed. He would forego their rites, meaningless to him personally, unless Teilo administered them. He had already made detailed plans for his funeral, a parting from this world that his people would remember for centuries, keeping alive in them the memory of their old true religion. For what was death but a passing over from one bank of the river of life to the other? So all his ancestors believed, unquestioningly. But Elbryn was thinking along another track.

‘I have heard,’ he was saying, ‘that Arthur’s wife, Gwynhyfar, was unfaithful to him.’

‘You may have heard aright,’ Geraint said, after a pause. ‘The lady was much sought after: she was his second wife and much younger than he was. And she had Saxon blood on her mother’s side. In my opinion Arthur himself cannot escape blame, leaving her for months whilst he pursued campaigns against the Picts and going off to Rome to help the Pope— a vain venture if ever there was one. That gave Medraut his chance.’ He said no more, not wishing perhaps to criticise further his kinsman, the son of his mother’s sister Ygerna.

‘And then,’ went on Elbryn, as if deliberately ignoring his master’s reluctance, ’tis said by some that Medraut was not Arthur’s nephew but his son, fathered on his half-sister Morgause of Orkney.’

Geraint sighed. ‘Perhaps. What of it? You talk like a disapproving monk. I do not personally wish to foster this great legend of Arthur, which our people seize on, making him such a hero of god-like stature that the man himself is already becoming forgotten. Arthur Pendragon was indeed a great man— a great general rather than a hero, for he was never much one for hand-to-hand combat. I knew him, as an adopted son knows his new father; when I was eighteen I entered his service at Camlodum in that high fortress on the hill in Gwlas an Haf, and he taught me to command his cavalry. I’ve told you this many times before, no doubt…’

‘Yes, sir, indeed you have,’ murmured Elbryn; an indulgent half-smile passed over his weathered features.

‘Well, well; ’tis an old man’s prerogative to repeat himself. At least when I tell it ’tis always the same, eh?’

‘The very same. It should all be written down, sign your deeds and Arthur’s, especially the rout of the Saxons at Mount Badon. They sing about it in their songs— how we broke the Saxons in ten battles, from far north to the South of Britain. And Arthur carried on the shield the image of the Virgin holding the Child.’ Elbryn gave the King a meaningful glance.

‘Do not attach too much importance to that,’ said Geraint, scowling but tolerating the shaft. ‘Though the Christians believe, and no doubt always will, that therein lay the secret of the victories. It was a clever move to adopt that emblem; when I tell you that the Arch-Druid Myrddin himself counselled it, you will understand that the decision was political, not religious.’

‘Anyway, it succeeded.’

‘Our cavalry succeeded.’ Geraint’s voice rose irritably, and he thumped his stick again on the path, moving on around the ramparts. ‘We rode seventy miles a day, and struck when they had no idea we could be anywhere in the district. From Glein in the north down to Celidon in the centre, and Dubglass in the east, and Castle Gwynnyon in the Cambrian Marches; they never knew where next we’d be upon them.’ He paused and turned, smiling grimly behind the faded flames of his beard. ‘You bait me, Elbryn. ’Tis as well we are old friends.’

‘I hope so, sir.’ After twenty-five years as Geraint’s personal Armourer, Elbryn knew how far he could joke with his master.

From below, launching from a high-piled nest on a spit of ground thrusting out into the river, a white-winged apparition rose. His great wings beating rhythmically, inexorably rending the protesting air with a sound compounded of terror and exultation, the swan flew towards them and passed directly over the fortress, his long neck majestically out-thrust. Geraint and Elbryn watched in silence as he wheeled away to the north-east and out towards the cliffs of Pendower and the sea.

‘My royal cock-bird,’ Geraint said. ‘I have a mind to feast on him soon, Elbryn.’

‘If you wait much longer he’ll be too tough to eat. The pen is raising her fourth brood. And I’m not getting any younger, either, I have a slight trouble growing in my left eye. It clouds my sight.’

‘You must do the work, Elbryn. I’ll have nobody else. See Rumon— he’ll prescribe a salve for the eye.’

Elbryn grunted. ‘Like the rest of us, Rumon has been good in his day. But now…’

‘By the horns of Cernunnos, you’ll have me weeping soon, man, with your talk of getting old. I can still ride and hunt with the best, and take a lively girl to bed and pleasure her— though ’tis true I’m less attracted to such sports these days. But if it comes to it, Elbryn, I shall lead my men against the Saxons again; and then, my friend, I shall expect you to be there with me.’

‘You think it will come to that? Why not make over the command to Selyf? He’s itching to make war, and surely you owe it to him to give him the experience …’

Geraint folded his arms and looked at him, not angrily, but saddened. ‘Elbryn, my dear man, my old campaigner: tell me honestly, now. Imagine yourself in my place. Would you entrust the command to a drunken sot who hasn’t yet given the throne an heir?’

The two considered each other, the King troubled, Elbryn calmly patient. ‘Well, sir, I must say I’m glad ’tisn’t my decision to make. But Selyf did well against the Irish down in Penwith a year or two back …’

‘Enough of that. While I can sit on a horse, I shall stay at the head of my army, even if I live to be a hundred. Though Epona herself only knows what would be left in life for me then.’

The cool clear measured sound of a girl’s voice singing came floating up to them on the sharp south-easterly breeze. The words were not distinguishable, but on leaning over between the boulders along the rampart Geraint made out, some way below them, a slender form in a white smock, washing clothes in the