Bernard Cornwell - The Winter King

Early in the new spring we fell back before an army of Prankish warriors. They came with drums beating and under banners made of bull horns mounted on poles. I saw one shield-wall of over two hundred men and knew our fifty survivors could never break it and so, with Culhwch and Galahad either side of me, we retreated. The Franks jeered and pursued us with a hail of their light throwing spears. The kingdom of Benoic was stripped of people now. Most had gone to the kingdom of Broceliande that promised them land in return for war service. The old Roman settlements were deserted and their fields were tangled with couch grass. We Dumnonians walked north with our spears trailing as we went to defend the last fortress of Ban's kingdom: Ynys Trebes itself.

The island city was crowded with fugitives. Every house slept twenty. Children cried and families squabbled. Fishing boats carried some of the fugitives west to Broceliande or north to Britain, but there were never enough boats, and when the Prankish armies appeared on the shore facing the island, Ban ordered the remaining boats to stay anchored in Ynys Trebes's awkward little harbour. He wanted them there so they could supply the garrison once the siege started, but shipmasters are a stubborn breed and when the order came for them to stay many hauled their anchors instead and ran north empty. Only a handful of boats remained.

Lancelot was made commander of the city and women cheered as he walked down the city's circling street. All would be well now, the citizens believed, for the greatest of soldiers was in command. He took the adulation gracefully and made speeches in which he promised to build Ynys Trebes a new causeway from the skulls of dead Franks. The Prince certainly looked the part of a hero for he wore a suit of scale armour on which every metal plate had been enamelled a dazzling white so that the suit shone in the early spring sunshine. Lancelot claimed the armour had belonged to Agamemnon, a hero of antiquity, though Galahad assured me it was Roman work. Lancelot's boots were made of red leather, his cloak was dark blue, and at his hip, hanging from the embroidered sword belt that had been Arthur's gift, he wore Tanlladwyr, 'bright-killer', his sword. His helmet was black, crested with the spread wings of a sea-eagle.

“So he can fly away,” Cavan, my dour Irishman, commented sourly. Lancelot convened a council of war in the high, wind-kissed chamber next to Ban's library. It was low tide and the sea had fled from the bay's sandbanks where groups of Franks were trying to find a safe path to the city. Galahad had planted false wit hies all across the bay, trying to lead the enemy into quicksands or else on to firm banks that would be the first to be cut off when the tide turned and seethed across the bay. Lancelot, his back to the enemy, told us his strategy. His father sat on one side of him, his mother on the other, and both nodded at their son's wisdom.

The defence of Ynys Trebes was simple, Lancelot announced. All we needed to do was hold the island's walls. Nothing else. The Franks had few boats, they could not fly, so they must walk to Ynys Trebes and that was a journey they could only make at low tide and after they had discovered the safe route across the tidal plain. Once at the city they would be tired and never able to scale the stone walls. “Hold the walls,” Lancelot said, 'and we stay safe. Boats can supply us. Ynys Trebes need never fall!"

“True! True!” King Ban said, cheered by his son's optimism.

“How much food do we have?” Culhwch growled the question. Lancelot gave him a pitying look. “The sea,” he said, 'is full of fish. They're the shiny things, Lord Culhwch, with tails and fins. You eat them."

“I didn't know,” Culhwch said straight-faced, “I've been too busy killing Franks.” A murmur of laughter went through some of the warriors summoned to the meeting. A dozen of them, like us, had been fighting on the mainland, but the remainder were intimates of Prince Lancelot and had been newly promoted into captains for this siege. Bors, Lancelot's cousin, was Benoic's champion and commander of the palace guard. He, at least, had seen some fighting and had earned a reputation as a warrior, though now, sprawling long-legged in a Roman uniform and with his black hair, like his cousin Lancelot's, oiled flat against his skull, he looked jaded.

“How many spears do we have?” I asked.

Lancelot had ignored me till then. I knew he had not forgotten our meeting of two years before, but he nevertheless smiled at my question. “We have four hundred and twenty men under arms and each of them has a spear. Can you work out the answer?”

I returned the silky smile. “Spears break, Lord Prince, and men defending walls throw their spears like javelins. When four hundred and twenty spears are thrown, what do we throw next?”

“Poets,” Culhwch growled, luckily too softly for Ban to hear.

“There are spares,” Lancelot said airily, 'and besides, we shall use the spears the Franks throw at us."

“Poets, for sure,” Culhwch said.

“You spoke, Lord Culhwch?” Lancelot asked.

“I belched, Lord Prince. But while I have your gracious attention, do we have archers?”

“Some.”

“Many?”

“Ten.”

“The Gods help us,” Culhwch said and slid down in his chair. He hated chairs. Elaine spoke next, reminding us that the island was sheltering women, children and the world's greatest poets. “The safety of the fill is in your hands,” she told us, 'and you know what will happen to them if you fail." I kicked Culhwch to stop him from making a comment.

Ban stood and gestured towards his library. “Seven thousand, eight hundred and forty-three scrolls are in there,” he said solemnly, 'the accumulated treasures of human knowledge, and if the city falls, so will civilization.“ He then told us an ancient tale of a hero going into a labyrinth to kill a monster and trailing behind him a woollen thread with which he could find his way out of the darkness. ”My library,“ he finally explained the point of the long tale, 'is that thread. Lose it, gentlemen, and we stay in eternal darkness. So I beg you, I beg you, fight!” He paused, smiling. “And I have summoned help. Letters are gone to Broceliande and to Arthur, and I think the day is not far off when our horizon will be thick with friendly sails! And Arthur, remember, is oath-bound to help us!”

“Arthur,” Culhwch intervened, 'has his hands full of Saxons."

“An oath is an oath!” Ban said reprovingly.

Galahad enquired whether we planned to make our own raids on the Prankish encampments ashore. We could easily go by boat, he said, landing east or west of their positions, but Lancelot turned down the idea. “If we leave the walls,” he said, 'we die. It is that simple."

“No sallies?” Culhwch asked in disgust.

“If we leave the walls,” Lancelot repeated, 'we die. Your orders are simple: you stay behind the walls." He announced that Benoic's best warriors, a hundred veterans of the war on the mainland, would guard the main gate. We fifty surviving Dumnonians were given the western walls, while the city's levies, bolstered by fugitives from the mainland, guarded the rest of the island. Lancelot himself, with a company of the white-cloaked palace guard, would form the reserve that would watch the fighting from the palace and come down to intervene wherever their help was needed.

“Might as well call on the fairies,” Culhwch growled to me.

“Another belch?” Lancelot enquired.

“It's all the fish I eat, Lord Prince,” Culhwch said.

King Ban invited us to inspect his library before we left, perhaps wanting to impress us with the value of what we defended. Most of the men who had been at the council of war shuffled in, gaped at the pigeon-holed scrolls, then went to stare at the bare-breasted harpist who played in the library's antechamber. Galahad and I lingered longer among the books where the hump-backed Father Celwin was still bent over his old table where he was trying to keep his grey cat from playing with his quill. “Still working out the wingspan of angels, Father?” I asked him.