‘Derfel,’ he said, stopping a half dozen paces from me. ‘Derfel,’ he said again. ‘I have heard that name, and it is no Saxon name.’
‘It is my name,’ I answered, ‘and I am a Saxon.’
‘A son of Aelle?’ He was suspicious.
‘Indeed.’
He considered me for a moment. He was a tall man with a mass of brown hair crammed into his horned helmet. His beard reached almost to his waist and his moustaches hung to the top edge of the leather breastplate he wore beneath his fur cloak. I supposed he was a local chieftain, or maybe a warrior deputed to guard this part of the frontier. He twisted one of his moustaches in his free hand, then let the strands unwind. ‘Hrothgar, son of Aelle, I know,’ he said musingly, ‘and Cyrning, son of Aelle, I call a friend. Penda, Saebold and Yffe, sons of Aelle, I have seen in battle, but Derfel, son of Aelle?’ He shook his head.
‘You see him now,’ I said.
He hefted his spear, noting that my shield was still hanging from my horse’s saddle. ‘Derfel, friend of Arthur, I have heard of,’ he said accusingly.
‘You see him also,’ I said, ‘and he has business with Aelle.’
‘No Briton has business with Aelle,’ he said, and his men growled their assent.
‘I am a Saxon,’ I retorted.
‘Then what is your business?’
‘That is for my father to hear and for me to speak. You are not part of it.’
He turned and gestured towards his men. ‘We make it our business.’
‘Your name?’ I demanded.
He hesitated, then decided that imparting his name would do no harm. ‘Ceolwulf,’ he said, ‘son of Eadbehrt.’
‘So, Ceolwulf,’ I said, ‘do you think my father will reward you when he hears that you delayed my journey? What will you expect of him? Gold? Or a grave?’
It was a fine bluff, but it worked. I had no idea whether Aelle would embrace me or kill me, but Ceolwulf had sufficient fear of his King’s wrath to give me grudging passage and an escort of four spearmen who led me deeper and deeper into the Lost Lands.
And so I travelled through places where few free Britons had stepped in a generation. These were the enemy heartlands, and for two days I rode through them. At first glance the country looked little different from British land, for the Saxons had taken over our fields and they farmed them in much the same manner as we did, though I noted their haystacks were piled higher and made squarer than ours, and their houses were built more stoutly. The Roman villas were mostly deserted, though here and there an estate still functioned. There were no Christian churches here, indeed no shrines at all that I could see, though we did once pass a British idol which had some small offerings left at its base. Britons still lived here and some even owned their own land, but most were slaves or else were wives to Saxons. The names of the places had all changed and my escort did not even know what they had been called when the British ruled. We passed through Lycceword and Steortford, then Leodasham and Celmeresfort, all strange Saxon names but all prosperous places. These were not the homes and farms of invaders, but the settlements of a fixed people. From Celmeresfort we turned south through Beadewan and Wicford, and as we rode my companions proudly told me that we now rode across farmland that Cerdic had yielded back to Aelle during the summer. The land was the price, they said, of Aelle’s loyalty in the coming war that would take these people clean across Britain to the Western Sea. My escort was confident that they would win. They had all heard how Dumnonia had been weakened by Lancelot’s rebellion, and that revolt had encouraged the Saxon Kings to unite in an effort to take all southern Britain. Aelle’s winter quarters were at a place the Saxons called Thunreslea. It was a high hill in a flat landscape of clay fields and dark marshes, and from the hill’s flat summit a man could stare southwards across the wide Thames towards the misty land where Cerdic ruled. A great hall stood on the hill. It was a massive building of dark oak timbers, and fixed high on its steep pointed gable was Aelle’s symboclass="underline" a bull’s skull painted with blood. In the dusk the lonely hall loomed black and huge, a baleful place. Off to the east there was a village beyond some trees and I could see the flicker of a myriad fires there. It seemed I had arrived in Thunreslea at the time of a gathering, and the fires showed where folk camped.
‘It’s a feast,’ one of my escort told me.
‘In honour of the Gods?’ I enquired.
‘In honour of Cerdic. He’s come to talk with our King.’
My hopes, that were already low, plummeted. With Aelle I stood some chance of survival, but with Cerdic, I thought, there was none. Cerdic was a cold, hard man, while Aelle had an emotional, even a generous, soul.
I touched Hywelbane’s hilt and thought of Ceinwyn. I prayed the Gods would let me see her again, and then it was time to slide off my weary horse’s back, twitch my cloak straight, unhook the shield from my saddle’s pommel and go to face my enemies.
Three hundred warriors must have been feasting on the rush-covered floor of that high, gaunt hall on its damp hilltop. Three hundred raucous, cheerful men, bearded and red-faced, who, unlike us Britons, saw nothing wrong in carrying weapons into a lord’s feasting-hall. Three huge fires flared in the hall’s centre and so thick was the smoke that at first I could not see the men sitting behind the long table at the hall’s far end. No one noticed my entrance, for with my long fair hair and thick beard I looked like a Saxon spearman, but as I was led past the roaring fires a warrior saw the five-pointed white star on my shield and he remembered facing that symbol in battle. A growl erupted through the tumult of talk and laughter. The growl spread until every man in that hall was howling at me as I walked towards the dais on which the high table stood. The howling warriors put down their horns of ale and began to beat their hands against the floor or against their shields so that the high roof echoed with the death-beat. The crash of a blade striking the table ended the noise. Aelle had stood, and it was his sword that had driven splinters from the long rough table where a dozen men sat behind heaped plates and full horns. Cerdic was beside him, and on Cerdic’s other side was Lancelot. Nor was Lancelot the only Briton there. Bors, his cousin, slouched beside him while Amhar and Loholt, Arthur’s sons, sat at the table’s end. All of them were enemies of mine, and I touched Hywelbane’s hilt and prayed for a good death. Aelle stared at me. He knew me well enough, but did he know I was his son? Lancelot looked astonished to see me, he even blushed, then he beckoned to an interpreter, spoke to him briefly and the interpreter leant towards Cerdic and whispered in the monarch’s ear. Cerdic also knew me, but neither Lancelot’s words, nor his recognition of an enemy, changed the impenetrable expression on his face. It was a clerk’s face, clean-shaven, narrow-chinned, and with a high broad forehead. His lips were thin and his sparse hair was combed severely back to a knot behind his skull, but the otherwise unremarkable face was made memorable by his eyes. They were pale eyes, merciless eyes, a killer’s eyes. Aelle seemed too astonished to speak. He was much older than Cerdic, indeed he was a year or two beyond fifty which made him an old man by any reckoning, but he still looked formidable. He was tall, broad-chested, and had a flat, hard face, a broken nose, scarred cheeks and a full black beard. He was dressed in a fine scarlet robe and had a thick gold torque at his neck and more gold about his wrists, but no finery could disguise the fact that Aelle was first and foremost a soldier, a great bear of a Saxon warrior. Two fingers were missing from his right hand, struck off in some long-ago battle where, I daresay, he had taken a bloody revenge. He finally spoke. ‘You dare come here?’