Sarlinna licked her lips. She chose to speak direct to Arthur, perhaps because he had the kindest face of the men sitting at the high table. “My father was killed, my mother was killed, my brothers and sisters were killed…” She spoke as though she had been rehearsed in her words, though no man present doubted the truth of them. “My baby sister was killed,” she went on, ‘and my kitten was killed’ – a first tear showed ‘and I saw it done.”
Arthur shook his head in sympathy. Agricola of Gwent ran a hand across his close-cropped grey hair, then stared up into the soot-blackened rafters. Owain leaned back in his chair and drank from a horn beaker while Bishop Bedwin looked troubled. “Did you really see the killers?” the Bishop asked the child.
“Yes, Lord.” Sarlinna, now that she was no longer saying words she had prepared and practised, was more nervous.
“But it was night, child,” Bedwin objected. “Wasn’t the raid at night, Lord Prince?” he demanded of Tristan. The Lords of Dumnonia had all heard about the raid on the moor, but they had believed Owain’s assertion that the massacre was the work of Oengus’s Blackshield Irish. “How could the child see at night?” Bedwin asked.
Tristan encouraged the child by patting her shoulder. “Tell the Lord Bishop what happened,” he instructed her.
“The men threw fire into our hut, Lord,” Sarlinna said in a small voice.
“Not enough fire,” a man growled from the shadows and the hall laughed.
“How did you live, Sarlinna?” Arthur asked her gently when the laughter had faded.
“I hid, Lord, under a pelt.”
Arthur smiled. “You did well. But did you see the man who killed your mother and father?” He paused. “And your kitten?”
She nodded. Her eyes were bright with tears in the dim hall. “I saw him, Lord,” she said quietly.
“So tell us about him,” Arthur said.
Sarlinna was wearing a small grey shift under a black woollen cloak and now she lifted her thin arms and pushed the shift’s sleeves back to bare her pale skin. “The man’s arms had pictures, Lord, of a dragon. And of a boar. Here.” She showed where the tattoos might be on her own small arms, then looked at Owain. “And there were rings in his beard,” the girl added, and then she went silent, but she had no need to say more. Only one man wore warrior rings in his beard, and every man present had watched Owain’s arms drive the spear into Wlenca’s midriff that morning, and everyone knew those arms were tattooed with Dumnonia’s dragon and with his own symbol of a long-tusked boar.
There was silence. A log crackled in the fire, sending a puff of smoke into the rafters. A gust of wind pattered sleet on the thick thatch and fluttered the rush-light flames that were scattered about the hall. Agricola was examining the silver-chased holder of his drinking horn as though he had never seen such an object before. Somewhere in the hall a man belched, and the noise seemed to prompt Owain to turn his great shaggy head to stare at the child. “She lies,” he said harshly, ‘and children who lie should be beaten bloody,”
Sarlinna began to cry, then buried her face in the wet folds of Tristan’s cloak. Bishop Bedwin frowned. “It is true, Owain, is it not, that you visited Prince Cadwy late in the summer?”
“So?” Owain bristled. “So?” He roared the word again, this time as a challenge to the whole assembly. “Here are my warriors!” He gestured at us, sitting together on the right-hand side of the hall. “Ask them! Ask them! The child lies! On my oath, she lies!”
The hall was in sudden uproar as men spat their defiance at Tristan. Sarlinna was weeping so much that the Prince stooped, picked her up and held her in his arms and continued to hold her while Bedwin tried to regain control over the hall. “If Owain swears on his oath,” the Bishop shouted, ‘then the child does lie.” The warriors growled agreement.
Arthur, I saw, was watching me. I looked down at my wooden bowl of venison.