Galahad was happier the more desperate things became. Part of his happiness sprang from the presence of Leanor, the harpist who had welcomed me two years before, the girl for whom Galahad had confessed his lust to me, the same girl Lancelot had raped. She and Galahad lived in a corner of the store-room. We all had women. There was something about the hopelessness of our plight that eroded normal behaviour and so we crammed as much living as we could into those hours before our expected deaths. The women stood guard with us and hurled rocks whenever the Franks tried to dismantle our fragile fish traps. We had long run out of spears, except for those we had brought to Benoic ourselves and which we were saving for the main assault. Our handful of archers had no missiles except the ones shot into the city by the Franks, and that supply increased when the enemy’s causeway was a short bow’s shot from the city gate. The Franks erected a timber fence at the end of the causeway and their archers stood behind the fence and poured arrows on the gate’s defenders. The Franks made no attempt to extend the causeway all the way to the city, for the new roadway was only ever intended to give them a dry passage to the place where their assault could begin. We knew that attack must come soon.
It was early summer when the causeway was finished. The moon was full and brought huge tides. For much of the time the causeway was under water, but at low tide the sands stretched wide about Ynys Trebes, and the Franks, who were learning the secrets of the sand flats day by day, ranged all about us. Their drums were our constant music and their threats were ever in our ears. One day brought a feast special to their tribes and instead of attacking us they lit great fires on the beach then marched a column of slaves to the causeway’s end where, one by one, the captives were beheaded. The slaves were Britons, some of them with relatives watching from the city’s wall, and the barbarism of the slaughter goaded some of Ynys Trebes’s defenders to rush out of the gate in a vain attempt to rescue the doomed women and children. The Franks were waiting for the attack and formed a shield-wall on the sand, but the men of Ynys Trebes, crazed by anger and hunger, charged home. Bleiddig was one of the attackers. He died that day, cut down by a Prankish spear. We Dumnonians watched as a handful of survivors fled back to the city. There was nothing we could have done except add our corpses to the pile. Bleiddig’s body was flayed, disembowelled, then planted on a stake at the causeway’s end so that we were forced to look at him until the next high tide. Somehow, though, the body stayed on the stake despite being immersed so that next morning, in a grey dawn, the gulls were tearing at his salt-washed corpse.
“We should have charged with Bleiddig,” Galahad told me bitterly.
“No.”
“Better to have died like a man in front of a shield-wall than be starved here.”
“You’ll get your chance to fight the shield-wall,” I promised him, but I also took what steps I could to help my people in defeat. We barricaded the alleys leading to our sector so that should the Franks break into the island-city we could hold them at bay while our women were taken on a narrow rock-bound path that twisted across the shoulder of the granite peak to a tiny cleft on the island’s northwestern shore where we had hidden our captured ship. The cleft was no kind of harbour, so we protected our ship by filling it with stones so that the tide flooded it twice a day. Under water the fragile hull was safe from being pounded against the cleft’s rocky sides by the wind and waves. I guessed that the enemy assault would be made at low water and two of our wounded men were under instructions to empty the boat of its rocks as soon as the attack began so that the craft would float on the flooding tide. The idea of escaping in the boat was desperate, but it gave our people heart.