Perilous Times

Hard to argue with a god like Herne, who lives in every bramble thicket, every maggot crawling in every carcass, anywhere in the realm. But he’s not sure it would help these people, here in this camp, to have Arthur back as king. Arthur wasn’t a great healer, a great mender of broken things. He was the one who did the breaking, more often than not.

He’d rather fight a whole battalion of Germans single-handed. But that’s not what scares him. What scares him is the fear he can hear in Herne’s voice. The fear he can sense when he looks into the dark holes of Herne’s skull. Gods shouldn’t be afraid of anything. But here’s Herne, frightened of something and angry about it. What could frighten Cern

‘But it’s crazy,’ she says. ‘I’m not from Wales. I don’t speak Welsh. I don’t even like leeks!’ ‘But you have slain a dragon,’ says Gethin. ‘Look, this whole business of restoring the Welsh monarchy, it was all Dai’s idea. Twenty years ago, people would have laughed, if you told them there ought to be a King of Wales. But then Dai came along, and h

What has happened to the Medlwc? Does it just empty into this basin now, becoming a canal, losing all sense of itself as a wild thing that flows down from the hills? Kay hates it, the way people treat the world. People used to worship rivers. Now they brick them in, they make the water bend to their own will. They play at being gods themselves.

Kay crawls up from under his hill, up through the claggy earth.

From her bunk she can see the barometer on the wall which measures air quality up above them. Designed for nuclear war, not for climate breakdown, but it still does the same job. Yesterday it said CONTAMINATED. Now it’s moved up to SEVERELY CONTAMINATED

Kay can’t stop himself. ‘You just . . . you didn’t even think, did you? All that time ago. About what it would be like, for us. For me and Lance and all the others. You didn’t think for a moment what it would actually be like. To keep coming back and fighting. To keep dying, over and over again. And we all kept going because we thought you had a pl

On the other side of the square is the Moon Aid clinic. A camp within a camp. Five shipping containers bolted together, surrounded by a cluster of marquees and tents and awnings. Soggy cardboard signs hang from the canvas, written in English and Urdu. WOMEN’S HEALTH CLINIC. MENSTRUAL HYGIENE. SAFE TOILETS. GET AND WASH REUSABLE PADS HERE. There are

Kay drags himself to his feet. First thing to do is to find his sword and shield. They usually get regurgitated somewhere nearby, though there’s no exact science to it. He’s not sure that the earth fully understands its obligations. The covenant with Merlin was fairly specific. Make this warrior whole again and surrender him back to the realm of th

‘From saving the realm and banishing evil. The tree of time splits ahead of us, as always.’ ‘Not the bloody tree of time again,’ says Kay. Merlin’s scowl grows fiercer. ‘Yes, the tree of time! There are two branches ahead of us. The first is a blasted bough of blackness and corruption, down which we must not travel or the realm will perish and all