Galahad cut down two men trying to climb the steps, then I saw the street behind us fill with dark-cloaked Franks. “Back!” I shouted, and hauled Galahad away from the alley.
“Let me fight!” He tried to pull away from me and face the next two men coming up the narrow stone steps.
“Live, you fool.” I pushed him behind me, feinted left with my spear, then brought it up and rammed its blade into a Frank’s face. I let go of the shaft, took the second man’s spear thrust on my shield while I drew Hywelbane, then I gave the low jab under the shield’s edge that sent the man screaming to the steps with blood welling between hands that cupped his groin. “You know how to get us safe through the city!” I shouted at Galahad. I abandoned my spear as I pushed him back from the battle-maddened enemies who were surging up the steps. There was a potter’s shop at the head of the steps and despite the siege the shopkeeper’s wares were still displayed on trestle tables under a canvas awning. I tipped a table full of jugs and vases into the attackers’ path, then ripped down the awning and hurled it into their faces. “Lead us!” I screamed. There were alleys and gardens that only Ynys Trebes’s inhabitants knew, and we would need such secret paths if we were to escape.
The invaders had broken through the main gate now to cut us off from Culhwch and his men. Galahad led us uphill, turned left into a short tunnel that ran beneath a temple, then across a garden and up to a wall that edged a rain cistern. Beneath us the city writhed in horror. The victorious Franks broke down doors to take revenge for their dead left on the sand. Children wailed and were silenced by swords. I watched one Prankish warrior, a huge man with horns on his helmet, cut down four trapped defenders with an axe. More smoke poured up from houses. The city might have been built of stone, but there was plenty of furniture, boat-pitch and timber roofs to feed a maniacal fire. Out at sea, where the incoming tide swirled across the sandbanks, I could see Lancelot’s winged helmet bright in one of the three escaping boats, while above me, pink in the setting sun, the graceful palace waited for its last moments. The evening breeze snatched at the grey smoke and softly billowed a white curtain that hung in a shadowed palace window.
“Over here!” Galahad called, pointing to a narrow path. “Follow the path to our boat!” Our men ran for their lives. “Come on, Derfel!” he called to me.
But I did not move. I was staring up the steep hill.
“Come on, Derfel!” Galahad insisted.
But I was hearing a voice in my head. It was an old man’s voice; a dry, sardonic and unfriendly voice, and the sound of it would not let me move.
“Come on, Derfel!” Galahad screamed.
“I put my life in your hands,” the old man had said, and suddenly he spoke again inside my skull. “I lay my life on your conscience, Derfel of Dumnonia.”
“How do I reach the palace?” I called to Galahad.
“Palace?”
“How!” I shouted angrily.
“This way,” he said, ‘this way!”
We climbed.
THE BARDS SING OF love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.
I have been fortunate in friends. Arthur was one, but of all my friends there was never another like Galahad. There were times when we understood each other without speaking and others when words tumbled out for hours. We shared everything except women. I cannot count the number of times we stood shoulder to shoulder in the shield-wall or the number of times we divided our last morsel of food. Men took us for brothers and we thought of ourselves in the same way.
And on that broken evening, as the city smouldered into fire beneath us, Galahad understood I could not be taken to the waiting boat. He knew I was in the hold of some imperative, some message from the Gods that made me climb desperately towards the serene palace crowning Ynys Trebes. All around us horror flooded up the hill, but we stayed ahead of it, running desperately across a church roof, jumping down to an alley where we pushed through a crowd of fugitives who believed the church would give them sanctuary, then up a flight of stone steps and so to the main street that circled Ynys Trebes. There were Franks running towards us, competing to be the first into Ban’s palace, but we were ahead of them along with a pitiful handful of people who had escaped the slaughter in the lower town and were now seeking a hopeless refuge in the hilltop dwelling.