“How many spears do we have?” I asked.
Lancelot had ignored me till then. I knew he had not forgotten our meeting of two years before, but he nevertheless smiled at my question. “We have four hundred and twenty men under arms and each of them has a spear. Can you work out the answer?”
I returned the silky smile. “Spears break, Lord Prince, and men defending walls throw their spears like javelins. When four hundred and twenty spears are thrown, what do we throw next?”
“Poets,” Culhwch growled, luckily too softly for Ban to hear.
“There are spares,” Lancelot said airily, ‘and besides, we shall use the spears the Franks throw at us.”
“Poets, for sure,” Culhwch said.
“You spoke, Lord Culhwch?” Lancelot asked.
“I belched, Lord Prince. But while I have your gracious attention, do we have archers?”
“Some.”
“Many?”
“Ten.”
“The Gods help us,” Culhwch said and slid down in his chair. He hated chairs.
Elaine spoke next, reminding us that the island was sheltering women, children and the world’s greatest poets. “The safety of the fill is in your hands,” she told us, ‘and you know what will happen to them if you fail.” I kicked Culhwch to stop him from making a comment.
Ban stood and gestured towards his library. “Seven thousand, eight hundred and forty-three scrolls are in there,” he said solemnly, ‘the accumulated treasures of human knowledge, and if the city falls, so will civilization.” He then told us an ancient tale of a hero going into a labyrinth to kill a monster and trailing behind him a woollen thread with which he could find his way out of the darkness. “My library,” he finally explained the point of the long tale, ‘is that thread. Lose it, gentlemen, and we stay in eternal darkness. So I beg you, I beg you, fight!” He paused, smiling. “And I have summoned help. Letters are gone to Broceliande and to Arthur, and I think the day is not far off when our horizon will be thick with friendly sails! And Arthur, remember, is oath-bound to help us!”
“Arthur,” Culhwch intervened, ‘has his hands full of Saxons.”
“An oath is an oath!” Ban said reprovingly.
Galahad enquired whether we planned to make our own raids on the Prankish encampments ashore. We could easily go by boat, he said, landing east or west of their positions, but Lancelot turned down the idea. “If we leave the walls,” he said, ‘we die. It is that simple.”
“No sallies?” Culhwch asked in disgust.
“If we leave the walls,” Lancelot repeated, ‘we die. Your orders are simple: you stay behind the walls.” He announced that Benoic’s best warriors, a hundred veterans of the war on the mainland, would guard the main gate. We fifty surviving Dumnonians were given the western walls, while the city’s levies, bolstered by fugitives from the mainland, guarded the rest of the island. Lancelot himself, with a company of the white-cloaked palace guard, would form the reserve that would watch the fighting from the palace and come down to intervene wherever their help was needed.
“Might as well call on the fairies,” Culhwch growled to me.
“Another belch?” Lancelot enquired.
“It’s all the fish I eat, Lord Prince,” Culhwch said.
King Ban invited us to inspect his library before we left, perhaps wanting to impress us with the value of what we defended. Most of the men who had been at the council of war shuffled in, gaped at the pigeon-holed scrolls, then went to stare at the bare-breasted harpist who played in the library’s antechamber. Galahad and I lingered longer among the books where the hump-backed Father Celwin was still bent over his old table where he was trying to keep his grey cat from playing with his quill. “Still working out the wingspan of angels, Father?” I asked him.
“Someone must,” he said, then turned to scowl at me with his one eye. “Who are you?”
“Derfel, Father, of Dumnonia. We met two years ago. I’m surprised you’re still here.”
“Your surprise is of no interest to me, Derfel of Dumnonia. Besides, I did leave for a while. I went to Rome. Filthy place. I thought the Vandals might have cleaned it up, but the place is still full of priests and their plump little boys, so I came back here. Ban’s harpists are much prettier than Rome’s catamites.” He gave me an unfriendly look. “Do you care about my safety, Derfel of Dumnonia?”