“What else could you do?” I asked.
“You don’t understand, Derfel,” Arthur accused me bitterly, though in truth he was accusing himself. “I always knew Aelle would want something more than gold. They’re Saxons! They don’t want peace, they want land! I knew that, why else would I have brought that poor man from Ratae? Before Aelle ever asked I was ready to give, and how many men will die for that foresight? Three hundred? And how many women taken into slavery? Two hundred? How many children? How many families will be broken apart? And for what? To prove I’m a better leader than Gorfyddyd? Is my life worth so many souls?”
“Those souls,” I said, ‘will keep Mordred on his throne.”
“Another oath!” Arthur said bitterly. “All these oaths that bind us! I am oath-bound to Uther to put his grandson on the throne, oath-bound to Leodegan to retake Henis Wyren.” He stopped abruptly and Sagramor looked at me with an alarmed face for it was the first either of us had ever heard about an oath to fight Diwrnach, the dread Irish King of Lleyn who had taken Leodegan’s land. “Yet of all men,” Arthur said miserably, “I break oaths so easily. I broke the oath to Ban and I broke my oath to Ceinwyn. Poor Ceinwyn.” It was the first time any of us had ever heard him so openly lament that broken promise. I had thought Guinevere was a sun so bright in Arthur’s firmament that she had dimmed Ceinwyn’s paler lustre into invisibility, but it seemed the memory of Powys’s Princess could still gall Arthur’s conscience like a spur. Just as the thought of Ratae’s doom galled him now. “Maybe I should send them a warning,” he said.
“And lose the hostages?” Sagramor asked.
Arthur shook his head. “I’ll exchange myself for Balin and Lanval.”
He was thinking of doing just that. I could tell. The agony of remorse was biting at him and he was seeking a way out of that tangle of conscience and duty, even at the price of his own life. “Merlin would laugh at me now,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed, ‘he would.” Merlin’s conscience, if he possessed one at all, was merely a guide to how lesser men thought, and thus served as a goad for Merlin to behave in the contrary manner. Merlin’s conscience was a jest to amuse the Gods. Arthur’s was a burden.
Now he stared at the mossy ground beneath the oak’s shadow. The day was settling into twilight as Arthur’s mind sank into gloom. Was he truly tempted to abandon everything? To ride to Aelle’s fastness and exchange his existence for the lives of Ratae’s souls? I think he was, but then the insidious logic of his ambition rose to overcome his despair like a tide flooding Ynys Trebes’s bleak sands. “A hundred years ago,” he said slowly, ‘this land had peace. It had justice. A man could clear land in the happy knowledge that his grandsons would live to till it. But those grandsons are dead, killed by Saxons or their own kind. If we do nothing then the chaos will spread until there’s nothing left but prancing Saxons and their mad wizards. If Gorfyddyd wins he’ll strip Dumnonia of its wealth, but if I win I shall embrace Powys like a brother. I hate what we are doing, but if we do it, then we can put things right.” He looked up at us both. “We are all of Mithras,” he said, ‘so you can witness this oath made to Him.” He paused. He was learning to hate oaths and their duties, but such was his state after that meeting with Aelle that he was willing to burden himself with a new one. “Find me a stone, Derfel,” he ordered.
I kicked a stone out of the soil and brushed the earth from it, then, at Arthur’s bidding, I scratched Aelle’s name on the stone with the point of my knife. Arthur used his own knife to dig a deep hole at the foot of the oak, then stood. “My oath is this,” he said, ‘that if I survive this battle with Gorfyddyd then I shall avenge the innocent souls I have condemned at Ratae. I will kill Aelle. I shall destroy him and his men. I shall feed them to the ravens and give their wealth to the children of Ratae. You two are my witnesses, and if I fail in this oath you are both released from all the bonds you owe me.” He dropped the stone into the hole and the three of us kicked earth over it. “May the Gods forgive me,” Arthur said, ‘for the deaths I have just caused.”