“Everyone knows!” Sansum said derisively. “A camel is a fish, a great fish! Not unlike,” he added slyly, ‘the salmon that your husband sometimes remembers to send to us poor monks?”
“I shall have him send more,” Igraine said, ‘with the next batch of Derfel’s skins, and I know he’ll be sending some of those soon for this Saxon Gospel is very dear to the King.”
“It is?” Sansum asked suspiciously.
“Very dear, my Lord Bishop,” Igraine said firmly.
She is a clever girl, very clever, and beautiful too. King Brochvael is a fool if he takes a lover as well as his Queen, but men were ever fools for women. Or some men were, and chief of them, I suppose, was Arthur. Dear Arthur, my Lord, my Gift-Giver, most generous of men, whose tale this is.
It was strange to be home, especially as I had no home. I possessed some gold torques and scraps of jewellery, but those, save Ceinwyn’s brooch, I sold so that my men would at least have food in their first days back in Britain. My other belongings had all been in Ynys Trebes, and now they formed a part of some Frank’s hoard. I was poor, homeless, with nothing more to give to my men, not even a hall in which to feast them, but they forgave me that. They were good men and sworn to my service. Like me, they had left behind anything they could not carry when Ynys Trebes fell. Like me they were poor, yet none of them complained. Cavan simply said a soldier must take his losses like he takes his plunder, lightly. Issa, a farm boy who was an extraordinary spearman, tried to return a narrow gold torque that I had given him. It was not just, he said, that a spearman should wear a gold torque when his captain did not, but I would not take it, so Issa gave it as a token to the girl he had brought home from Benoic and the next day she ran off with a tramping priest and his band of whores. The countryside was full of such travelling Christians, missionaries they called themselves, and almost all of them had a band of women believers who were supposed to assist in the Christian rituals, but who, it was rumoured, were more likely to be used for the seduction of converts to the new religion.
Arthur gave me a hall just north of Durnovaria: not for my own, since it belonged to an heiress named Gyllad, an orphan, but Arthur made me her protector; a position which usually ended with the ruination of the child and the enrichment of the guardian. Gyllad was scarcely eight years old and I could have married her had I wanted and then disposed of her property, or else I could have sold her hand in marriage to a man willing to buy the bride along with the farmland, but instead, as Arthur had intended, I lived off Gyllad’s rents and allowed her to grow in peace. Even so her relatives protested at my appointment. That very same week of my return from Ynys Trebes, when I had been in Gyllad’s hall scarce two days, an uncle of hers, a Christian, appealed against my protector ship to Nabur, the Christian magistrate in Durnovaria, saying that before his death Gyllad’s father had promised him the guardianship, and I only managed to keep Arthur’s gift by posting my spearmen all around the courthouse. They were in full war gear with spearheads whetted bright, and their presence somehow persuaded the uncle and his supporters not to press their suit. The town guards were summoned, but one look at my veterans persuaded them that maybe they had better business elsewhere. Nabur complained about returning soldiers committing thuggery in a peaceful town, but when my opponents did not appear in court he weakly awarded me the judgment. I later heard the uncle had already purchased the opposite verdict from Nabur and that he was never able to have his money refunded. I appointed one of my men, Llystan, who had lost a foot in a battle in Benoic’s woods, as Gyllad’s steward and he, like the heiress and her estate, prospered.