The kingdom of Benoic was stripped of people now. Most had gone to the kingdom of Broceliande that promised them land in return for war service. The old Roman settlements were deserted and their fields were tangled with couch grass. We Dumnonians walked north with our spears trailing as we went to defend the last fortress of Ban’s kingdom: Ynys Trebes itself.
The island city was crowded with fugitives. Every house slept twenty. Children cried and families squabbled. Fishing boats carried some of the fugitives west to Broceliande or north to Britain, but there were never enough boats, and when the Prankish armies appeared on the shore facing the island, Ban ordered the remaining boats to stay anchored in Ynys Trebes’s awkward little harbour. He wanted them there so they could supply the garrison once the siege started, but shipmasters are a stubborn breed and when the order came for them to stay many hauled their anchors instead and ran north empty. Only a handful of boats remained.
Lancelot was made commander of the city and women cheered as he walked down the city’s circling street. All would be well now, the citizens believed, for the greatest of soldiers was in command. He took the adulation gracefully and made speeches in which he promised to build Ynys Trebes a new causeway from the skulls of dead Franks. The Prince certainly looked the part of a hero for he wore a suit of scale armour on which every metal plate had been enamelled a dazzling white so that the suit shone in the early spring sunshine. Lancelot claimed the armour had belonged to Agamemnon, a hero of antiquity, though Galahad assured me it was Roman work. Lancelot’s boots were made of red leather, his cloak was dark blue, and at his hip, hanging from the embroidered sword belt that had been Arthur’s gift, he wore Tanlladwyr, ‘bright-killer’, his sword. His helmet was black, crested with the spread wings of a sea-eagle. “So he can fly away,” Cavan, my dour Irishman, commented sourly.
Lancelot convened a council of war in the high, wind-kissed chamber next to Ban’s library. It was low tide and the sea had fled from the bay’s sandbanks where groups of Franks were trying to find a safe path to the city. Galahad had planted false wit hies all across the bay, trying to lead the enemy into quicksands or else on to firm banks that would be the first to be cut off when the tide turned and seethed across the bay. Lancelot, his back to the enemy, told us his strategy. His father sat on one side of him, his mother on the other, and both nodded at their son’s wisdom.
The defence of Ynys Trebes was simple, Lancelot announced. All we needed to do was hold the island’s walls. Nothing else. The Franks had few boats, they could not fly, so they must walk to Ynys Trebes and that was a journey they could only make at low tide and after they had discovered the safe route across the tidal plain. Once at the city they would be tired and never able to scale the stone walls. “Hold the walls,” Lancelot said, ‘and we stay safe. Boats can supply us. Ynys Trebes need never fall!”
“True! True!” King Ban said, cheered by his son’s optimism.
“How much food do we have?” Culhwch growled the question.
Lancelot gave him a pitying look. “The sea,” he said, ‘is full of fish. They’re the shiny things, Lord Culhwch, with tails and fins. You eat them.”
“I didn’t know,” Culhwch said straight-faced, “I’ve been too busy killing Franks.”
A murmur of laughter went through some of the warriors summoned to the meeting. A dozen of them, like us, had been fighting on the mainland, but the remainder were intimates of Prince Lancelot and had been newly promoted into captains for this siege. Bors, Lancelot’s cousin, was Benoic’s champion and commander of the palace guard. He, at least, had seen some fighting and had earned a reputation as a warrior, though now, sprawling long-legged in a Roman uniform and with his black hair, like his cousin Lancelot’s, oiled flat against his skull, he looked jaded.