The vale had seen much death that day, but now it saw outright massacre for nothing makes for easy killing like a broken shield-wall. Arthur tried to stop the slaughter, but nothing could have checked that pent-up release of savagery, and his horsemen rode like avenging Gods among the panicked mass while we pursued and cut the fugitives down in an orgy of blood. Scores of the enemy succeeded in fleeing past the horsemen and crossing the ford to safety, but scores more were forced to take refuge in the village where at last they found the time and space to make a new shield-wall. Now it was their turn to be surrounded. The evening light was stretching across the vale, touching the trees with the first faint yellow sunlight of that long and bloody day as we stopped around the village. We were panting and our swords and spears were thick with blood.
Arthur, his sword as red as mine, slid heavily from Llamrei’s back. The black mare was white with sweat, trembling, her pale eyes wide, while Arthur himself was bone-weary from his desperate fight. He had tried and tried again to break through to us; he had fought, his fnen told us, like a man possessed by the Gods even though it had seemed, all that long afternoon, as if the Gods had deserted him. Now, despite being victor of the day, he was in distress as he embraced Sagramor and then hugged me. “I failed you, Derfel,” he said, “I failed you.”
“No, Lord,” I said, ‘we won,” and I pointed with my battered, reddened sword at Gorfyddyd’s survivors who had rallied around the eagle banner of their trapped King. Gundleus’s fox banner also showed there, though neither of the enemy Kings was in view.
“I failed,” Arthur said. “I never broke through. There were too many.” That failure galled him, for he knew only too well how close we had come to utter defeat. Indeed, he felt he had been defeated, for his vaunted horsemen had been held and all he had been able to do was watch as we were cut down, but he was wrong. The victory was his, all his, for Arthur, alone of all the men of Dumnonia and Gwent, had possessed the confidence to offer battle. That battle had not gone as Arthur had planned; Tewdric had not marched to help us and Arthur’s war horses had been checked by Gundleus’s shield-wall; but it was still a victory and it had been brought about by one thing only: Arthur’s courage in fighting at all. Merlin had intervened, of course, but Merlin never claimed the victory. That was Arthur’s and though, at the time, Arthur was full of self-recrimination it was Lugg Vale, the one victory Arthur always despised, that turned him into the eventual ruler of Britain. The Arthur of the poets, the Arthur who wearies the tongues of the bards, the Arthur for whose return all men pray in these dark days, was made great by that stumbling shambles of a fight. Nowadays, of course, the poets do not sing the truth about Lugg Vale. They make it sound like a victory as complete as the later battles, and perhaps they are right to shape their story thus for in these hard times we need Arthur to have been a great hero from the very first, but the truth is that in those early years Arthur was vulnerable. He ruled Dumnonia by virtue of Owain’s death and Bedwin’s support, but as the years of war ground on there were many who wished him gone. Gorfyddyd had his supporters in Dumnonia and, God forgive me, too many Christians were praying for Arthur’s defeat. And that was why he fought, because he knew he was too weak not to fight. Arthur had to provide victory or lose everything, and in the end he did win, but only after coming within a blade’s edge of disaster.
Arthur crossed to embrace Tristan, then to greet Oengus Mac Airem, the Irish King of Demetia, whose contingent had saved the battle. Arthur, as ever, went to his knees before a king, but Oengus lifted him up and gave him a bear hug. I turned and stared at the vale as the two men talked. It was foul with broken men, pitiful with dying horses, and glutted with corpses and littered weapons. Blood stank and the wounded cried. I felt more weary than I had ever felt in my life and so did my men, but I saw that Gorfyddyd’s levy had come down from the hill to start plundering the dead and wounded and so I sent Cavan and a score of spearmen to drive them away. Ravens flapped black across the river to tear at dead men’s bowels. I saw that the huts we had fired that morning still smoked. Then I thought of Ceinwyn, and amid all that bestial horror, my soul suddenly lifted as though on great white wings.