“And perhaps more than just the touch. Sometimes in your hall, Prince—oh, the glorious nights when the rhyming came like spun gold from my mouth and my fingers knew they could stroke and grasp and tear such music from these strings as no bard in the wild, wailing world has ever made.”

The stiff fingers of his right hand splayed clumsily over the strings.

“Music just beyond me when I reached, but there and waiting to be found, so pure and perfect that no other song need ever be sung. And each night I’d try and tear and try and tear and drink too much because that sound is fire and a pain in the gut—until they’d lay hold of me and pull the harp away—‘Na, Davy, leave off. You’ll kill the poor thing like a sufferin’ beast. There’s no such music, no such sound in a harp!’ But there is. Listen, my king!”

A chord sprang out of the strings, impaling the listener on a spear of sound. Another and another followed, sounds a harp couldn’t make but did.

“Who says there’s no such music?” Dafydd challenged. “When

•I’ve heard it all my life saying: find me in these strings or

^•just beyond what they were strung to do by small-singing, small—

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dreaming men. Find me when you’re brave, reeling drunk or whispering between a woman’s breasts or in the midst of revel when you’re all of a sudden alone. Find me in all things too far and too much and just further than a man can reach, but must. Oh, Davy, it says to me, you’ll always hear the echo of where I’ve been and always follow. Is there no more cheer in that flagon, my lord?”

“There is that.” I passed it to him.

Dafydd took a last huge gulp with a sensual sigh, lurching to unsteady feet. “I’m feeling deathly and mad as an owl in daylight, but by God, I—can—sing!”

He touched the strings again, no longer a sound of darkness and sharp angles but mellow and rich with remembrance. Dafydd the harper began a song, and what happened then was, perhaps, what this testament is all about. 1 can’t ask you to understand it where I cannot myself.

It was the sort of thing I have seen and heard all my life among Britons, from lords to farmers: one man, one harper began a song. Within a few soft notes, another man had joined him in unison. And then another and another, the sweet clear line of “‘Bronwen in the Vale” that I’ve sung since boyhood. And then, as our people do, other men began to sing, not the melody but the harmony that deep-dyes and thrills through the sad, glorious music of my people.

Maelgwyn and I were rooted to the spot. “Listen to them, Arthur,” he whispered reverently. “Nefoedd annwyl, listen to them!”

Then, with his helmet off and the wind whipping about his white head, Maelgwyn was singing yet a third part of the soaring, intricate music he’d learned in his cradle. And the music spread out from us along the trench.

Light and candles of evening And wait me, dear Bronwen

And still another line of harmony rolled under the melody like a deep river, and I looked up, spirit thrust aloft by the swelling sound, to see our men on the third level, standing forward of the catapults, joining in.

Let the sweet sound of summer Call me home to the vale

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And more and more from God knows where the voices rose, until the winter air went warm with a beauty to burst the heart. Stronger and stronger the voices until I wondered how the drab world could hold so much of heaven and what god had set it down here just for me. And I cried out to them, “Sing it, you lovely men! Sing out dear! Let them hear what they come against.”

No man not on his feet now all along the ditch, turning the song with the unexpected twists of harmony that sear the soul with its sound. I grabbed Maelgwyn, the two of us dancing like mad old bears in the mud.

“Ha-ha, Arthur. Just listen to my boys!”

“They’ll hold, old Cat. They’ll hold this ditch against God himself. Just stay with them, Mal. Now’s the time. I’m going out.”

The last chords were still rolling lovely about the hill as my cavalry trotted into line behind their commanders. Battered and weary, they still sang with the others, faces new-lit with an old joy. Even laconic Bedivere was ecstatic.

“Och, Artos, 1 never sang better, and the highest notes were mine, did you hear? Listen, some of them are at it still.”

“No better time to go, Bedwyr. Advance the dragon.”

There were beautiful tears in his eyes. “Aye, Artos.”

“Kay, Gawain! Bless you all this day. I’m going out.”

And then a kind of preparate stillness broken only by the leather-creak metal-scrape harness-jingle of men and steel and horses drawing together into single purpose. Once more the silent lines, the lances aloft, the ready men waiting, and under it all the whisper of the east wind, the snuffle of a horse here and there.

I couldn’t speak for all to hear, but 1 needed no eloquence like Cerdic’s, not for Britons who’d found their own in the song. Little need I say to the soul of them.

“My lords, I must go down this hill against Cerdic. And I would be honored by any man who cares to follow.”

No command was given, not one voice, but the forest of lances swept forward in salute. I closed my eyes against sudden tears.

“Alae, forward—”

“Orkney—”

“Dobunni—”

“Dyfneint—”

“Ha-oh!”

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It was the beginning of the end tor Cerdic. His men would still fight, but no longer as a savage tide. Most of them hadn’t eaten for two days, fighting almost continually in wet muck and cold with no shelter. Strong men with the spirit of gods, but mortal bodies that could not be pushed any further. Several attacks hit the second level, but they were sporadic and easily beaten back. When we smashed through and began to tear at them, Cerdic was forced to face his men away from Badon, forming them into squares and diamonds of locked shields.

“Gone to defense,” Bedivere hissed between bared teeth. “Gone to ground and it’s my turn now. Cerdic, where are you?” Defensive but hardly beaten, the Saxons held their ground. They held, they went down, they fell back craftily only to close about the unwary, run in slaughtering and then reform, each square its separate redoubt torn by our attacks. Cerdic’s berserkers forsook the hard-won first level and streamed down the causeway to reinforce their comrades. Some never reached the bottom, pelted and crushed by the last of Maelgwyn’s catapult stones.

I reined in beside Gawain, screaming through the noise. “We’ve got them, got them. Take your Orkney, hit them on the right. Kay! Kay! Dobunni forward to me.” “Cerdic!”

The horse and rider hurtled past me. Leaning from his saddle, Kay punched my arm. “Look!”

It was Bedivere, bent forward behind his shield, sword whirling in his right hand, galloping alone straight at a shield wall. Cerdic was behind it, the great war ax resting for a moment on his shoulder. Searching since we dashed off the causeway, Bedivere found him now.

“Cerdic, you pig—”

We had seconds or less to support him. I snapped the order to Kay and his men. “Couch lances, follow me.”

My own lance was long gone. I drew my sword and dug heels into the horse’s flank, plunging forward. We smashed into the outermost square only a few bounds behind Bedivere.

It was a mistake and almost our last. I had eyes for Bedivere and Cerdic alone and never stopped to realize how few Dobunni ever heard my order. Only Kay and a handful followed me into the square. As we plowed through the shields, the Saxons cut off and surrounded us. A moment of whirling about, then someone hamstrung my horse and it went down under me. I managed to

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get free of the stirrups before we fell, but my right leg was pinned. Helpless, I saw Cerdic’s head go back in a roar of exultant laughter, then a blur of horses as the Dobunni circled me about while I struggled free of the crippled mount. Bedivere was on foot now, leaping free of the horse that fell dead with a throwing ax in its brain. As three of Cerdic’s men closed in on him, he screamed with maniacal joy, a high-pitched song of mayhem counterpointed by the swoosh of his longsword cutting a great, murdering arc in front of him.

The fools were coming at him with swords alone. No one does mat and lives, not with Bedivere. His feet were cat pads, the feet of a dancer, the sword a mere extension of long, ropy arms as bis body twisted lightly under the clumsy blows and came up killing. I saw him spin out of a slice that shattered one man’s arm and lunge forward against Cerdic’s ax before another man cut across his path. Cerdic strode down on me, raising the ax, but even as I dragged free, a horse shot by me and Cerdic, with his ax poised to kill me, was blotted out by a body that dove from the saddle to tumble him in the mud. Only a moment’s scrambling, then Cerdic’s hand snaked to his belt, out and back, and the body lay still. But I was clear, rising to my knees, groping for the dropped sword.

What happened then was a blur of shock and sound. I saw Cerdic wobbling to his feet, shaken, then suddenly both of us went flat again out of sheer self-preservation as a roaring storm broke over us. Horsemen from God knows where, a solid line of them that shattered the Saxon square like kindling and swept the survivors away from Cerdic and me. It was stupid, comical. We stared at each other like pummeled clowns in a farce—What happened?—while the iron line of horse ground Saxons into the mud. Then Cerdic reached for the ax. I couldn’t find the sword— no, there it was, but too far, not enough time, and Cerdic was raising himself, the ax already swinging high.

“Now, Arthur!”

Before the swing reached its peak, I dove at him, the instinctive last-first weapon in my hand. The old bronze knife that marked mefhain. I closed with Cerdic under his raised arm and _ drove the knife through his eye deep into the brain behind.

We teetered together like statues, then the ax dropped behind him and Cerdic fell away from me. I remember stabbing uselessly at the body again and again with Bedivere coming and then suddenly dodging aside with the same comic desperation as ;$ fresh line of horse damn near ran him down. Filthy, stubble-306