Free Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve Page B

men behind him the same. He said, “These things we shall take as tribute. Henceforward, this place is under our protection.”
    As we rode away I looked up and saw Peredur watching from a window, gazing wide-eyed at the splendour of our cloaks and horses and our shiny swords. I waved, and he waved back, and I rode on, glad that I was not quite alone in the world.

XV
     
    I thought often of Peredur on the long ride home, but once we reached Arthur’s stronghold I soon forgot him. There was work for us boys in the fields below the ramparts, helping reap and stack the hay for winter silage, cutting and threshing the wheat. And harvest was barely in the barns before a messenger arrived. He was a nervous, chinless man, sent from a town called Aquae Sulis that prided itself for clinging on tight to the old Roman ways. He had come to ask for Arthur’s help.
    I wasn’t there when he said his piece to Arthur and Myrddin, but word of what he’d come about soon spread. A Saxon raiding band was moving west, burning and looting. Aquae Sulis’s hired soldiers had deserted, and now it lay defenceless. The council had demanded help from Maelwas, since the town lay on the fringes of his lands, but no help had come. So they begged Arthur to bring his war-band and save them.
    It was the chance that Arthur had been waiting for. He needed a town under his protection if he was ever tobe taken seriously as a power among the little kings of Britain. Aquae Sulis wasn’t big, but it had been important once, and it was still rich.
    I listened to the men talking about it as Bedwyr and I and the other boys got the horses and the weapons ready. The way they spoke made you wonder if the poor old citizens wouldn’t be better off just letting the Saxons in.
    North-east along the old roads, in autumn sunlight, with the dusty blue sky above and a line of white cloud on the horizon like the foam of a wave that never broke. Sleeping in the open, in the golden woods. Myrddin with his harp beside Arthur’s fire, spinning us tales of victories gone by, and reminding us that it was near Aquae Sulis that Ambrosius had routed the Saxons in our fathers’ time.
    Aquae Sulis waited for us in a loop of silvery river, at the bottom of a green bowl of downland. A wall ringed the main part of the town, thrown up hastily during the Saxon wars, with fragments of old pagan tombs mixed in among the brick. There were gates in it, and people coming and going. Coming, mostly; packing into the town out of the rumour-haunted countryside. The guards were men in Roman gear. Big four-cornered shields with the sign of Christ on them. Rusty armour patched and mended. Their leader rode a bay horse, and walked it forward to meet Arthur in the shadow of the gate. “Valerius,” he said. “I command the defences of this place.”
    “Artorius Magnus,
Dux Bellorum
of the Britons,” saidMyrddin, riding out front as usual, to announce his lord.
    Valerius looked at Arthur down his long nose. Arthur looked at the walls, the rubbish heaped up in the ditch below, the thistles on the rampart, the half dozen shabby spearmen guarding the gate. He grinned. “We’re here to save you from the barbarians,” he said.
    Valerius just kept on looking at Arthur, and I reckon he was thinking the same I’d thought: that Aquae Sulis might be better off without Arthur’s help. But then he gave a smile that seemed to hurt him, and his men stood aside, and Arthur went past him and into the town with the rest of us following.
    Inside those walls wasn’t much different from outside at first. The buildings near the edge of town were so overgrown they looked like up-croppings of mossy rock in a wood. In the gaps between them market gardens and small fields had been made. Cattle were nibbling at the grass that sprouted up between the stones of the road. In one place a crowd of beehive lime-kilns sent up their fug of smoke. Men with barrows and sledges brought down slabs of marble, pillars and pediments