“But you control your lust,” I said, ‘so be proud of that.”
“I am proud of it, and pride is another sin.”
I shook my head at the hopelessness of arguing with him. “And envy?” I offered him the last of his trinity of sins. “Whom do you envy?”
“Lancelot.”
“Lancelot?” I was surprised.
“Because he is Edling, not I. Because he takes what he wants, when he wants, and does not seem to regret it. That harpist? He took her. She screamed, she fought, but no one dared stop him for he was Lancelot.”
“Not even you?”
“I would have killed him, but I was far from the city.”
“Your father didn’t stop him?”
“My father was with his books. He probably thought the girl’s screams were a gull calling into the sea wind or two of his fili having a squabble about a metaphor.”
I spat into the fire. “Lancelot is a worm,” I said.
“No,” Galahad insisted, ‘he is, simply, Lancelot. He gets what he wants and he spends his days plotting how to get it. He can be very charming, very plausible and he could even be a great king.”
“Never,” I said firmly.
“Truly. If power is what he wants, and it is, and if he receives it, then perhaps his appetites will be slaked? He does want to be liked.”
“He goes a strange way about it,” I said, remembering how Lancelot had taunted me at his father’s table.
“He knew, from the first, that you were not going to like him and so he challenged you. That way, when he makes an enemy of you, he can explain to himself why you don’t like him. But with people who don’t threaten him he can be kind. He might be a great king.”
“He’s weak,” I said scornfully.
Galahad smiled. “Strong Derfel. Derfel the Doubtless. You must think we’re all weak.”
“No,” I said, ‘but I think we’re all tired and tomorrow we have to kill Franks, so I’ll sleep.”
And next day we did kill Franks, and afterwards we rested in one of Ban’s hilltop forts before, with our wounds bandaged and our battered swords sharpened, we went back into the woods. Yet week by week, month by month, we fought closer to Ynys Trebes. King Ban called on his neighbour, Budic of Broceliande, to send troops, but Budic was fortifying his own frontier and declined to waste men on defending a lost cause. Ban appealed to Arthur, and though Arthur did send one small shipload of men, he did not come himself. He was too busy fighting Saxons. We did get news from Britain, though such news was infrequent and often vague, but we heard that new hordes of Saxons were trying to colonize the middle lands and pressing hard on Dumnonia’s borders. Gorfyddyd, who had been such a threat when I left Britain, had been quieter of late, thanks to a terrible plague that had afflicted his country. Travellers told us that Gorfyddyd himself was ill and many thought he would not last the year. The same sickness that had afflicted Gorfyddyd had killed Ceinwyn’s betrothed, a prince of Rheged. I had not even known she was betrothed again and I confess that I felt a selfish pleasure that the dead prince of Rheged would not marry the star of Powys. Of Guinevere, Nimue or Merlin I heard nothing.
Ban’s kingdom crumbled. There were no men to gather the harvest in the last year and that winter we huddled in a fortress on the southern edge of the kingdom where we lived on venison, roots, berries and wildfowl. We still made an occasional raid into Prankish territory, but now we were like wasps trying to sting a bull to death for the Franks were everywhere. Their axes rang through the winter forests as they cleared land for their farms while their new-built stockades of brightly split logs shone in the pale wintry sun.
Early in the new spring we fell back before an army of Prankish warriors. They came with drums beating and under banners made of bull horns mounted on poles. I saw one shield-wall of over two hundred men and knew our fifty survivors could never break it and so, with Culhwch and Galahad either side of me, we retreated. The Franks jeered and pursued us with a hail of their light throwing spears.