‘Who are you?’ Arthur asked again, becoming annoyed with the old man’s aloof tone and the surprise of waking to his strange appearance at the campfire.
‘If we are going to travel together, I suppose someone should introduce us.’
‘What makes you think we shall travel together?’
‘Cut his skinny throat and be done with his meddling,’ growled Huell.
‘Many have tried that before, and here come your hunters. What a merry band of spearmen they make on their little ponies.’ He pointed to the north and cackled as Arthur scrambled to his feet. Six Saxon riders approached in tied leggings and russet cloaks, their spears glinting in the early morning light. ‘Your luck is in, young men. For I am Merlin and I have come to your aid.’
8
Saxon riders pounded along a raised bank which cut through the bog like a bridge, their spears shaking and points catching the morning sun. Arthur scrambled to his feet, grabbing his long knife and seax. Kai rose too, and the two friends glanced nervously at each other and then at the oncoming riders. Huell pushed himself to his feet, a shadow of his former self. Dirt and dried blood caked his body as he stooped, looking pale, with a face etched with lines of pain like a carved Roman pillar. Huell braced himself against the oak tree and staggered forward as though to join the fight. Merlin’s presence at Arthur’s campfire both baffled and awed him, and he had so many questions for the legendary druid, a man straight out of the stories told at winter hearths since he was a boy. But there was no time for that now. The Saxon war band had found them and came to kill.
‘We cannot fight them,’ said Kai, though he set himself for battle.
‘Don’t talk nonsense. You are the son of Ector,’ said Merlin. Arthur wondered how Merlin knew who Kai was, but assumed the two had spoken whilst he was asleep. The old man stood with a groan and rubbed the small of his back. He was not a tall man, shorter than Arthur by a head, and was slight across the shoulders. Merlin reached behind the oak’s roots and grabbed a long black staff, like that carried by Kadvuz when he had marched into King Urien’s Bear Fort, but Merlin’s staff had a fist-sized lump of polished amber at its top. The amber twinkled in the morning light like an egg-shaped drop of sun. Merlin pulled on a long white cloak and slung a large pack across his shoulders. He strode forward with his staff held before him like a torch on a winter’s night, and the amber glowed as though it gathered power from the sun or from the earth itself.
Huell pulled a knife from his belt and stumbled past Arthur towards the oncoming Saxons.
‘Stay back,’ Arthur warned him, because the maimed warrior was in no fit state to fight.
‘Let me die with honour,’ he said, his lips cracked and pale blue. He grabbed Arthur’s shoulder with his good hand, and there was some of Huell’s old strength in the grip. Arthur stared into his glassy eyes and nodded. For all his cruelty, Huell deserved a warrior’s death, a death in battle.
‘Wait,’ Merlin ordered with all the confidence of Ector or a great war-leader. The jovial tone was gone, and his voice was now as hard and sharp as flint. He waved his staff as though he wanted to catch the Saxons’ attention, to make sure they had seen the Britons beneath the great oak tree. The Saxons whooped for joy at the sight of their prey and urged their horses into a gallop. The sound of their hooves was like thunder, and they shook their spears and let out an undulating war cry.
‘They are trespassers on our land,’ Merlin said, his voice low and fearsome, ‘despoiling the soil of our forefathers with their malice. I call to you, Neit, god of war, grant us battle luck today, brighten our blades with your wrath and cast our enemies down to Annwn to suffer the horrors of the underworld for eternity!’ Merlin shouted the last few words, the timbre of his voice grown low and powerful like Kadvuz’s chanting in Urien’s hall. Merlin brought his staff down, slamming it into the earth, and let out a mighty bellow, like the roar of a great beast.
Suddenly a score of men sprang up from beside the bank, men in leather, chain mail, black cloaks and iron helmets. They rose like demons from beneath the earth, and Arthur gasped, for it was like Merlin had raised warriors from the ground itself with the power of his druid magic.
‘God, Christ, Maponos and Manawydan,’ said Kai, almost dropping his spear in awe at the armed warriors who appeared from nowhere. They came howling from the earth like long dead Briton fighters from a lost war, risen again at Merlin’s command to slay the hated Saxon enemy.
The foremost two men in black ran away from the ditch, dashing in opposite directions, and Arthur noticed that each carried one end of a hemp rope, braced over the hedge and a hawthorn tree on either side of the bank. They ran until the rope sprang taut, and the riders saw the trap too late to halt their horses. The first riders flew backwards from their galloping horses’ backs as the rope bit into their chests. Their horses carried on thundering along the bank riderless. The next riders could not stop in time to avoid the rope, so what they thought was a gallop to glorious slaughter now became a ruin of shouting, panicked men, flailing horses and fallen warriors.
A Briton with a full-faced helmet clambered up onto the bank. He carried two shining swords and his black cloak billowed behind him. A Saxon tried to rise from where he fell, but the warrior in black swung his sword and the Saxon’s head flew from his shoulders in a spray of bright blood. Another Saxon died with a spear through his chest where he lay on the bank with his leg twisted unnaturally beneath him. A horse galloped past Arthur and Kai, its eyes rolling white with fear at the smell of blood and the noise of clashing weapons and screaming men. Arthur leapt out of its way and then clambered up to rejoin Kai, using the oak roots as a ladder.
The warrior in the full-faced helm charged into the flailing Saxons, and his swords swung and struck as he danced into the carnage. His black-cloaked warriors joined him, and the Saxons fell beneath their spears, swords and fury. The attackers carried shields which bore a sigil Arthur did not recognise, a fox painted across their dark leather covers. They tore into the Saxons, stabbing and ripping with their blades. Two Saxons leapt from their horses. One fought with his seax blade, but the other set off running into the bog. He plunged into the heavy, watery sludge and tripped as he glanced over his shoulder at the slaughter. The Saxon struggled to rise in the cloying bog, and a black-cloaked warrior threw a spear. It arced through the air, leaf-shaped blade spinning, before it slammed into the Saxon’s back between his shoulder blades.
‘What are you waiting for?’ said Merlin, scolding Arthur and Kai for their hesitation. ‘Kill the Saxon dogs.’
Arthur raced along the bank with Kai alongside him, and the two young Rheged men charged into the fight. But by the time Arthur reached the rope and the screaming horses, the fight was over. Six Saxons lay dead beside a hedge, sprawled on the bank with bloody wounds. The warrior with two swords turned at the sound of Arthur’s approach and brought a sword up, its blade coming level with Arthur’s throat. He scrambled and stopped himself before he ran onto the bloody sword point. The warrior was fearsome in the full-faced helm, its closed cheekpieces hid his face so that only his eyes showed in the darkness beneath the metal helmet, giving him a demonic appearance. The warrior’s head cocked to one side, his breath metallic and loud inside the helmet, but he let his sword fall to his side as Merlin strode along the ditch.
‘Balin of the Two Swords, meet Arthur of Caer Ligualid, and Kai ap Ector,’ said Merlin. Merlin introduced Kai as the son of Ector, and Arthur was pleased that he did him the honour of not introducing him as a man of nowhere and no father.
‘I have fought beside Ector many times,’ said Balin, and inclined his helmeted head slightly. ‘Welcome to what was once Bernicia, my home, before we lost it to the Saxons and Vortigern’s treachery.’ He took off his helmet to reveal a lean face framed by a dark beard and close-cropped black hair. A jagged scar cut through the left side of Balin’s face, from forehead to jaw. The scar caused his eye to droop, and the skin around the old wound looked puckered and tight, as though it had been stretched too thin across his strong cheekbones.
‘Where did you come from?’ asked Arthur. He realised he spoke in a whisper, still astounded at the warrior’s emergence from the earth.
‘We waited, crouched in the bog since before the sun came up,’ said Balin with a grin. ‘We’ve been tracking that war band for days. They were part of a much larger Saxon force raiding in the borderlands. They split in two. The smaller group went scouting in the hills, and this group was on its way back to Dun Guaroy. Who is that?’ Balin pointed his sword over Arthur’s shoulder to where Huell came stumbling towards them, his stump in its sling, the makeshift bandage around it filthy with dark, dried blood. ‘I know that man.’
‘Huell of Rheged,’ said Kai, ‘the Saxons took his hand.’
‘Huell of Rheged, a champion of your father’s war band?’
‘Yes, a great warrior.’
‘I know him. We fought together many times against the Saxons. Can you help him, Merlin?’
‘Of course I can,’ Merlin said with an impatient wave of his hand. He eased Arthur, Balin and Kai out of the way with his staff and peered at the fallen Saxons. Balin’s men searched them for silver, weapons, food and ale. Three of the Saxons’ horses had fled, but the remaining three stood in nearby fields cropping at the grass as though nothing had happened on that late spring morning. ‘Are any of them alive?’
‘All dead.’
‘Warriors,’ said Merlin with a sigh. ‘Full of bravery and courage, but with heads as empty as a gambler’s purse. I wanted to question one.’
Balin shrugged. ‘We can find more, Lord Merlin. They are as thick in these lands as flies on shit.’
‘Yes, well, thank you for that gentle analogy, Balin. Now, Huell, let’s get you fixed up. Follow me.’ Merlin strode back towards the campfire beneath the oak tree and beckoned Huell to follow him. Huell, however, just stood staring at Balin with glassy eyes, his skin shining white like wax. Kai took Huell by the good arm and led him after Merlin.
‘It was as though you and your men appeared from nowhere, conjured by Merlin to kill the Saxons,’ said Arthur as Balin took his forearm in the warrior’s grip.
‘That’s Merlin’s way, but we knew the Saxons would come for you. We saw them from the clifftop overlooking the bay. We’d followed their tracks from the hills but came too late to intervene in your fight on the beach. You had better help your friend.’ Balin jutted his chin to where Merlin crouched by the fire, and Kai helped Huell sit against the oak tree’s roots.
Arthur went to join them, leaving Balin and his men to search the dead for anything of value. As he walked, Arthur’s head swam with the events of that morning. He had met Merlin, the most famous druid in Britain, and had thought that Merlin had worked deep magic before his very eyes, when instead it was nothing more than a cunning ambush. The warp and weft of that ambush stuck in Arthur’s throat like a fish bone. If Merlin and Balin had watched the Saxon war band since the fight on the beach, then they had used Arthur, Kai and Huell as bait for a trap. It was all too much to take in. A druid, a two-sworded warrior Arthur had never heard of, and a slaughtered Saxon war band, all before he had properly woken up.
‘Hold him down,’ Merlin said, pointing at Huell. Merlin wrapped the hem of his cloak around his hand and grabbed the handle of the knife he had placed into the flames before the fight. It came out glowing a fierce red, and Merlin nodded, satisfied with the red-hot blade. He shifted to Huell and reached for his bloody wrist, but Huell flinched away from the druid, and despite his weakened state, he was still too strong for Kai to hold alone. Merlin tutted. ‘Grab him, I said!’
Arthur sank to his knees and grabbed Huell around the shoulder, but the big man understood what Merlin intended to do, and he jerked and thrashed, too strong for even Arthur and Kai together.
‘Very well, then. I shall have to do everything myself. You two boys are as weak as kittens. We shall need to toughen you up. Try to keep him still.’ Merlin shoved the knife back into the flames and came towards Huell slowly, his head and neck twisting like the undulating movements of a serpent. He made a deep humming noise in his throat, just like the chanting of Kadvuz at the Bear Fort. He stared deep into Huell’s eyes, and the warrior tried to twist away. ‘Hold him, I said!’ Merlin roared, making Arthur jump. He and Kai wrestled with Huell and held him still, and Merlin’s eyes locked with Huell’s. The druid’s eyes were grey, strange like the sky after a storm, and they went wide as he captured Huell’s gaze. Merlin hummed his guttural rumble, and it grew louder, like a fearsome thundering song. After a short time, Huell went slack and lay back still, eyes still focused on Merlin’s.
