Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve

pastureland. Gorse popping in the sunshine as we rode to it along a white track, dust clouding from our horses’ hooves like smoke, and a hawk pinned on the sky high up. The owner of the place looked even sulkier than the rest when Myrddin told him that great Arthur was guarding this land against the Saxons. He said this was the territory of Maelwas, King of Dumnonia, and he had already paid his tribute.
    “If this is Maelwas’s land, where is he?” asked Arthur, smiling, looking puzzled. The men behind him laughed. Maelwas was a joke to them, the old king of a land too big for him. Arthur rode on their laugher, laughing himself as he went on, “I don’t see Maelwas hereabout. We crossed into his country days since, and never a welcome have we had. I think Maelwas’s lands are shrinking like the last patch of hair on an old man’s head. I reckon you need someone else to guard you against those Saxons.”
    The landowner looked grim, and said he had already paid tribute.
    “Then you’ll pay it again,” said Arthur, and he jumped down off his horse and walked past Myrddin and knocked the man down. He didn’t draw his sword, just kept kicking and stamping until the man’s face was one soft mask of blood and his teeth were scattered all about in the dry grass, yellow as gorse-flowers.
    The man’s servants and family looked on withoutspeaking or trying to help. Children snuggled into their mothers’ skirts. When Arthur was finished some slaves came forward to drag their master away. “You see what can happen?” Arthur asked the rest, wiping blood-spatter off his face with a corner of his cloak. “You never know when a war-band might ride up here to burn your huts and take your cattle and your women and your gold. You need a strong friend to keep trouble at bay.”
    And Bedwyr and me going round with the bags while he spoke, and the servants running indoors to fetch gold coins and pewter dishes and a set of silver spoons with the symbols of Christ on the handles, and that hawk still circling high up.
    After that Arthur pointed us east towards a rich church he planned to plunder. But at a ford along the road we met a band of men sent out by Maelwas, who had heard of our coming at last. Insults and arrows went to and fro across the water all through a sweltering day, but it was too hot to fight, and come the sundown we drew back into the woods on our side of the river, and the Dumnonii drew back into theirs. “Arthur doesn’t need a fight with Maelwas,” Myrddin said. “He has made the old man notice him. That’s a start.”
    So we turned downriver to the sea, where there was a place that had been held by one of Arthur’s old shield-companions once, a man called Peredur Long-Knife. He was ten years dead, this Long-Knife, and all his sons with him, but his widow was supposed to hold his lands still, and Myrddin reckoned she’d pay well for Arthur’s protection.
    We came at evening down a long combe, following aimless sheep-tracks through bracken and bilberries and the scratchy, purple ling, and there was the sea, all shiny pewter and as wide as the world. I’d thought it would be smooth and clear, like a great pond, but it was dark and rough and hummocked, heaving up in white-topped hills. I had to hide my surprise, for Bedwyr and the other boys thought I’d been across it in a boat when I came from Armorica to be my master’s servant. I couldn’t see how anybody could venture out on that restless greyness in a boat. I couldn’t stop glancing at it, for fear it would rise up when I wasn’t looking and drown the land. I didn’t trust that sea one bit.
    We rode down to the beach, and our horses snorted and jerked up their heads at the salt air. The sky was a wet slate, scratched all across by the hard voices of the gulls. There was a smell of rot from the tideline, and a village of round huts straggling up to a stronghold on a cliff-top. Door-curtains flapped in the damp air, and a few fishermen’s