Bishop Bedwin was wishing he had not invited the child into the hall. He dragged his fingers through his beard, then shook his head wearily. “A child’s word carries no weight in law,” he said plaintively. “A child is not among the Tongued-ones.” The Tongued-ones were the nine witnesses whose word carried the weight of truth in law: a Lord, a Druid, a priest, a father speaking of his children, a magistrate, a gift-giver speaking of his gift, a maiden speaking of her virginity, a herdsman speaking of his animals and a condemned man speaking his final words. Nowhere in the list was there any mention of a child speaking of her family’s massacre. “Lord Owain,” Bishop Bed win pointed out to Tristan, ‘is a Tongued-one.”
Tristan was pale, but he would not back down. “I believe the child,” he said, ‘and tomorrow, after sunrise, I shall come for Dumnonia’s answer, and if that answer denies Kernow justice then my father will take justice for himself.”
“What’s the matter with your father?” Owain jeered. “Lost interest in his latest wife, has he? So he wants to take a beating in battle instead?”
Tristan walked out amidst laughter, a laughter that grew as men tried to imagine little Kernow declaring war on mighty Dumnonia. I did not join in the laughter, but finished my stew instead, telling myself I needed the food if I was to keep warm during my spell of guard duty that would start at the feast’s end. Nor did I drink any mead, so I was still sober when I fetched my cloak, spear, sword and helmet and went to the north wall. The sleet had stopped and the clouds were passing to reveal a bright half-moon sailing amidst a shimmer of stars, though more clouds were heaping in the west above the Severn Sea. I shivered as I paced the rampart.
Where Arthur found me.
I had known he was coming. I had wanted him to come and yet I felt a fear of him as I watched him cross the compound and climb the short flight of wooden steps that led to the low wall of earth and stone. At first he said nothing, but just leaned on the wood palings and stared towards the distant speck of flame light that lit Ynys Wydryn. He was dressed in his white cloak, which he had gathered up so that its hem would not drag in the mud. He had tied the cloak’s corners about his waist just above his cross-hatched scabbard. “I’m not going to ask you,” he spoke at last, his breath misting in the night air, ‘what happened on the moor, because I don’t want to invite any man, least of all a man I like, to break a death-oath.”
“Yes, Lord,” I said, and wondered how he had known it was a death-oath that had bound us on that dark night.
“So instead, let us walk.” He smiled at me, and gestured along the rampart. “A walking sentry stays warm,” he said. “I hear you’re a good soldier?”
“I try, Lord.”
“And I hear you succeed, so well done.” He fell silent as we passed one of my comrades who was huddled against the palings. The man looked up at me as I passed and his face showed alarm that I might betray Owain’s troop. Arthur pushed the cloak’s hood back off his face. He had a long, firm stride and I had to hurry to keep pace with him. “What do you think a soldier’s job is, Derfel?” he asked me in that intimate manner that made you feel he was more interested in you than anyone else in the world.
“To fight battles, Lord,” I said.
He shook his head. “To fight battles, Derfel,” he corrected me, ‘on behalf of people who can’t fight for themselves. I learned that in Brittany. This miserable world is full of weak people, powerless people, hungry people, sad people, sick people, poor people, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to despise the weak, especially if you’re a soldier. If you’re a warrior and you want a man’s daughter, you just take her; you want his land, you just kill him; after all, you’re a soldier and you have a spear and a sword, and he’s just a poor weak man with a broken plough and a sick ox and what’s to stop you?” He did not expect an answer to the question, but just paced on in silence. We had come to the western gateway and the split-log steps that climbed to the platform over the gate were whitening with a new frost. We climbed them side by side. “But the truth is, Derfel,” Arthur said when we reached the high platform, ‘that we are only soldiers because that weak man makes us soldiers. He grows the grain that feeds us, he tans the leather that protects us and he polls the ash trees that make our spear-shafts. We owe him our service.”