“The Princess Guinevere can go free,” Galahad restated the offer.
“The whore!” Gorfyddyd shouted. “I lay with her often enough, so I should know. Tell Arthur that!” He spat the demand into Galahad’s face. “Tell him she came to my bed willingly, and to other beds too!”
“I shall tell him,” Galahad lied to stem the bitter words. “And what, Lord King,” Galahad went on, ‘of Mordred?”
“Without Arthur,” Gorfyddyd said, “Mordred will need a new protector. I shall take responsibility for Mordred’s future. Now go.”
We bowed, we mounted and we rode away, and I looked back once in hope of seeing Ceinwyn, but only men showed on Caer Sws’s ramparts. All around the fortress the shelters were being pulled down as men prepared to march on the direct road to Branogenium. We had agreed not to use that road, but to go home the longer way through Caer Lud so we would not be able to spy on Gorfyddyd’s gathering host.
Galahad looked grim as we rode eastwards, but I could not restrain my happiness and once we had ridden clear of the busy encampments I began to sing the Song of Rhiannon.
“What is the matter with you?” Galahad asked irritably.
“Nothing. Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!” I shouted in joy and kicked back my heels so that the horse bolted down the green path and I fell into a patch of nettles. “Nothing at all,” I said when Galahad brought the horse back to me. “Absolutely nothing.”
“You’re mad, my friend.”
“You’re right,” I said as I clambered awkwardly back on to the horse. I was indeed mad, but I was not going to tell Galahad the reason for my madness, so for a time I tried to behave soberly. “What do we tell Arthur?” I asked him.
“Nothing about Guinevere,” Galahad said firmly. “Besides, Gorfyd-dyd was lying. My God! How could he tell such lies about Guinevere?”
“To provoke us, of course,” I said. “But what do we tell Arthur about Mordred?”
“The truth. Mordred is safe.”
“But if Gorfyddyd lied about Guinevere,” I said, ‘why shouldn’t he lie about Mordred? And Merlin didn’t believe him.”
“We weren’t sent for Merlin’s answer,” Galahad said.
“We were sent to find the truth, my friend, and I say Merlin spoke it.”
“But Tewdric,” Galahad answered firmly, ‘will believe Gorfyddyd.”
“Which means Arthur has lost,” I said bleakly, but I did not want to talk about defeat, so instead I asked Galahad what he had thought of Ceinwyn. I was letting the madness take hold of me again and I wanted to hear Galahad praise her and say she was the most beautiful creature between the seas and the mountains, but he simply shrugged. “A neat little thing,” he said carelessly, ‘and pretty enough if you like those frail-looking girls.” He paused, thinking. “Lancelot will like her,” he went on. “You do know Arthur wants them to marry? Though I don’t suppose that will happen now. I suspect Gundleus’s throne is safe and Lancelot will have to look elsewhere for a wife.”
I said nothing more about Ceinwyn. We rode back the way we had come and reached Magnis on the second night where, just as Galahad had predicted, Tewdric put his faith in Gorfyddyd’s promise while Arthur preferred to believe Merlin. Gorfyddyd, I realized, had used us to separate Tewdric and Arthur, and it seemed to me that Gorfyddyd had done well, for as we listened to the two men wrangle in Tewdric’s quarters it was plain that the King of Gwent had no stomach for the coming war. Galahad and I left the two men arguing while we walked on Magnis’s ramparts that were formed by a great earthen wall flanked by a flooded ditch and topped with a stout palisade. “Tewdric will win the argument,” Galahad told me bleakly. “He doesn’t trust Arthur, you see.”
“Of course he does,” I protested.
Galahad shook his head. “He knows Arthur’s an honest man,” he allowed, ‘but Arthur’s also an adventurer. He’s landless, have you ever thought of that? He defends a reputation, not property. He holds his rank because of Mordred’s age, not through his own birth. For Arthur to succeed he must be bolder than other men, but Tewdric doesn’t want boldness right now. He wants security. He’ll accept Gorfyddyd’s offer.” He was silent for a while. “Maybe our fate is to be wandering warriors,” he continued gloomily, ‘deprived of land, and always being driven back towards the Western Sea by new enemies.”