“So how will they know it’s you who attacked them?” Owain asked scornfully.
For answer Cadwy just tapped his cheek. The blue tattoos, he was suggesting, would betray his men.
Owain nodded. The buttered girl had at last been pinned down and was now surrounded by her captors among some shrubs that grew on the lower terrace. Owain crumbled some bread, then looked up at Cadwy again. “So?”
“So,” Cadwy said slyly, ‘if I could find a bunch of men who could thin these bastards out a little, it would help. It’ll make them look to me for protection, see? And my price will be the tin they’re sending to King Mark. And your price…” He paused to make sure Owain was not shocked by the implication, ‘.. . will be half that tin’s value.”
“How much?” Owain asked quickly. The two men were speaking softly and I had to concentrate to hear their words over the warriors’ laughter and cheers.
“Fifty gold pieces a year? Like this,” said Cadwy and took a gold ingot the size of a sword handle from a pouch and slid it along the table.
“That much?” Even Owain was surprised.
“It’s a rich place, the moor,” Cadwy said grimly. “Very rich.”
Owain stared down Cadwy’s valley to where the moon’s reflection lay on the distant river as flat and silver as a sword blade. “How many of these miners are there?” he finally asked the Prince.
The nearest settlement,” Cadwy said, ‘has got seventy or eighty men. And there are a deal of slaves and women, of course.”
“How many settlements?”
“Three, but the other two are a way off. I’m just worried about the one.”
“Only twenty of us,” Owain said cautiously.
“Night-time?” Cadwy suggested. “And they’ve not been attacked ever, so they won’t be keeping watch.”
Owain sipped wine from his horn. “Seventy gold pieces,” he said flatly, ‘not fifty.”
Prince Cadwy thought for a second, then nodded his acceptance of the price.
Owain grinned. “Why not, eh?” he said. He palmed the gold ingot, then turned fast as a snake to look up at me. I did not move, nor took my eyes from one of the girls who was wrapping her naked body round one of Cadwy’s tattooed warriors. “Are you awake, Derfel?” Owain snapped.
I jumped as though startled. “Lord?” I said, pretending my mind had been wandering for the last few minutes.
“Good lad,” Owain said, satisfied I had heard nothing. “Want one of those girls, do you?”
I blushed. “No, Lord.”
Owain laughed. “He’s just got himself a pretty little Irish girl,” he told Cadwy, ‘so he’s staying true to her. But he’ll learn. When you get to the Otherworld, boy’ he had turned back to me ‘you won’t regret the men you never killed, but you will regret the women you passed up.” He spoke gently. In my first days in his service I had been frightened of him, but for some reason Owain liked me and treated me well. Now he looked back at Cadwy. “Tomorrow night,” he said softly. “Tomorrow night.”
I had gone from Merlin’s Tor to Owain’s band, and it was like leaping from this world to the next. I stared at the moon and thought of Gundleus’s long-haired men massacring the guards on the Tor, and I thought of the people on the moor who would face the same savagery the very next night and I knew I could do nothing to stop it, even though I knew it should be stopped, but fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you’ll just weep yourself to death.
Our shields had been smeared with boat-builder’s pitch so they would look like the black shields of Oengus Mac Airem’s Irish raiders whose long, sharp-pr owed boats raided Dumnonia’s northern coast. A local guide with tattooed cheeks led us all afternoon through deep, lush valleys that climbed slowly towards the great bleak loom of the moor that was occasionally visible through some break in the heavy trees. It was good woodland, full of deer and cut with fast, cold streams running seaward off the moor’s high plateau.