“Morfans?” I asked, astonished. “How did he earn such a gift?”
“It’s not a gift, Derfel. Morfans is just borrowing it, and every day for the past week he has been riding close to Gorfyddyd’s men. They think I’m already there, and maybe that has given them pause? So far, at least, we have no news of any attack.”
I had to laugh at the thought of Morfans’s ugly face being concealed behind the cheek pieces of Arthur’s helmet, and maybe the deception worked for when we joined King Tewdric at the Roman fort of Magnis the enemy had still not sallied from their strongholds in Powys’s hills.
Tewdric, dressed in his fine Roman armour, looked almost an old man. His hair had gone grey and there was a stoop in his carriage that had not been there when I had last seen him. He greeted the news about Aelle with a grunt, then made an effort to be more complimentary. “Good news,” he said curtly, then rubbed his eyes, ‘though God knows Gorfyddyd never needed Saxon help to beat us. He has men to spare.”
The Roman fort seethed. Armourers were making spearheads, and every pollard ash for miles had been stripped for shafts. Carts of newly harvested grain arrived hourly and the bakers’ ovens burned as fierce as the blacksmiths’ furnaces so that a constant pyre of smoke hung above the palisaded walls. Yet despite the new harvest the gathering army was hungry. Most of the spearmen were camped outside the walls, some were miles away, and there were constant arguments about the distribution of the hard-baked bread and dried beans. Other contingents complained of water fouled by the latrines of men camped upstream. There was disease, hunger and desertion; evidence that neither Tewdric nor Arthur had ever had to grapple with the problems of commanding an army so large. “But if we have difficulties,” Arthur said optimistically, ‘imagine Gorfyddyd’s troubles.”
“I would rather have his problems than mine,” Tewdric said gloomily.
My spearmen, still under Galahad’s command, were camped eight miles to the north of Magnis where Agricola, Tewdric’s commander, kept a close watch on the hills that marked the frontier between Gwent and Powys. I felt a pang of happiness at seeing their wolf-tail helmets again. After the defeatism of the countryside it was suddenly good to think that here, at least, were men who would never be beaten. Nimue came with me and my men clustered about her so she could touch their spearheads and sword blades to give them power. Even the Christians, I noted, wanted her pagan touch. She was doing Merlin’s business, and because she was known to have come from the Isle of the Dead she was thought to be almost as powerful as her master.
Agricola received me inside a tent, the first I had ever seen. It was a wondrous affair with a tall central pole and four corner staffs holding up a linen canopy that filtered the sunlight so that Agricola’s short grey hair looked oddly yellow. He was in his Roman armour and sitting at a table covered in scraps of parchment. He was a stern man and his greeting was perfunctory, though he did add a compliment about my men. “They’re confident. But so are the enemy, and there are many more of them than there are of us.” His tone was grim.
“How many?” I asked.
Agricola seemed offended by my bluntness, but I was no longer the boy I had been when I had first seen Gwent’s warlord. I was a lord myself now, a commander of men, and I had a right to know what odds those men faced. Or maybe it was not my directness that irritated Agricola, but rather that he did not want to be reminded of the enemy’s preponderance. Finally, however, he gave me the tally. “According to our spies,” he said, “Powys has assembled six hundred spearmen from their own land. Gundleus has brought another two hundred and fifty from Siluria, maybe more. Ganval of Elmet has sent two hundred men, and the Gods alone know how many master less men have gone to Gorfyddyd’s banner for a share of the spoils.” Masterless men were rogues, exiles, murderers and savages who were drawn to an army for the plunder they could gain in battle. Such men were feared for they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. I doubted we had many such on our side, not just because we were expected to lose, but because both Tewdric and Arthur were ill disposed towards such lord less creatures. Curiously, though, many of Arthur’s best horsemen had once been just such men. Warriors like Sagramor had fought in the Roman armies that had been shattered by the heathen invaders of Italy and it had been Arthur’s youthful genius to harness such lord less mercenaries into a war-band.