“There’s more,” Agricola went on ominously. “The kingdom of Cornovia has donated men and just yesterday we heard that Oengus Mac Airem of Demetia has come with a war-band of his Black-shields; maybe a hundred strong? And another report says the men of Gwynedd have joined Gorfyddyd.”
“Levies?” I asked.
Agricola shrugged. “Five, six hundred? Maybe even a thousand. But they won’t come until the harvest’s finished.”
I was beginning to wish I had not asked. “And our numbers, Lord?”
“Now that Arthur has arrived…” He paused. “Seven hundred spears.”
I said nothing. It was no wonder, I thought, that men in Gwent and Dumnonia buried their treasures and whispered that Arthur should leave Britain. We were faced by a horde.
“I would be grateful,” Agricola said acidly, as though the thought of gratitude was utterly alien to his thinking, ‘if you did not bruit the numbers about? We’ve had desertions enough already. More, and we might as well dig our own graves.”
“No deserters from my men,” I insisted.
“No,” he allowed, ‘not yet.” He stood and took his short Roman sword from where it hung on a tent pole, then paused in the doorway from where he cast a baleful eye towards the enemy hills. “Men say you’re a friend of Merlin.”
“Yes, Lord.”
“Will he come?”
“I don’t know, Lord.”
Agricola grunted. “I pray he does. Someone needs to talk sense into this army. All commanders are summoned to Magnis tonight. A council of war.” He said it bitterly, as though he knew that such councils produced more quarrels than comradeship. “Be there by sunset.”
Galahad came with me. Nimue stayed with my men for her presence gave them confidence and I was glad she did not come for the council was opened by a prayer from Bishop Conrad of Gwent who seemed imbued with defeatism as he begged his God to give us strength to face the over-mighty foe. Galahad, his arms spread in the Christian pose of prayer, murmured along with the Bishop while we pagans grumbled that we should not pray for strength, but victory. I wished we had some Druids among us, but Tewdric, a Christian, employed none, and Balise, the old man who had attended Mordred’s acclamation, had died during the first winter I was in Benoic. Agricola was right to hope that Merlin would come, for an army without Druids was giving away an advantage to its enemy.
There were some forty or fifty men at the council, all of us chieftains or leaders. We met in the bare stone hall of Magnis’s bath house that reminded me of Ynys Wydryn’s church. King Tewdric, Arthur, Agricola and Tewdric’s son, the Edling Meurig, sat at a table on a stone dais. Meurig had grown into a pale thin creature who looked unhappy in his ill-fitting Roman armour. He was just old enough to fight, but with his nervous air he looked very unfit for battle. He blinked constantly, as if he had just come into sunlight from a very dark room, and he kept fidgeting with a heavy gold cross that hung around his neck. Arthur alone of the commanders was not in war gear, but looked relaxed in his countryman’s clothes.
The warriors cheered and stamped their spear-butts when King Tewdric announced that the Saxons were believed to have withdrawn from the eastern frontier, but that was the last cheering for a long while that night, because Agricola then stood and gave his blunt assessment of the two armies. He did not list all the enemy’s smaller contingents, but even without those additions it was clear that Gorfyddyd’s army would outnumber ours by two to one. “We’ll just have to kill twice as fast!” Morfans shouted from the back. He had returned the scale armour to Arthur, swearing that only a hero could wear that amount of metal and still fight. Agricola ignored the interruption, adding instead that the harvest should be complete in a week and the levies of Gwent would then swell our numbers. No one seemed too cheered by that news.
King Tewdric proposed that we should fight Gorfyddyd under the walls of Magnis. “Give me a week,” he said, ‘and I will so fill this fortress with the new harvest that Gorfyddyd will never pitch us out. Fight here’ he gestured towards the dark beyond the hall doors ‘and if the battle goes ill we pull inside the gates and let them waste their spears on wooden palisades.” It was the way of war Tewdric preferred and had long perfected: siege warfare, where he could use the work of long-dead Roman engineers to frustrate spears and swords. A murmur of agreement sounded in the room, and that murmur swelled when Tewdric told the council that Aelle might well be planning to attack Ratae.