Arthur Imperator (22 page)

XLV March

Like
a huge migrating herd of beasts, the Saxons covered the land as they moved north. Their swarming mass of humanity had abandoned the flea-infested, wattle-and-mud halls where they had wintered, outside the conflagrated ruins of Colchester, and King Skegga himself threw a burning brand onto the thatch of his own mead-hall. This was a narrow, rectangular, moss-insulated building that stank of smoke, human grease, wet wool and animal dung.

“Someone
else wants to live here, they can build their own. I’ll have a stone palace soon enough,” he said cheerfully as the flames leaped high and a handful of field mice scampered for safety. It had not been a lucky place, he felt, with the disease that had followed them from their previous camp, and with the desertion of so many troops the previous winter. Let the fire have it.

The
trek north had begun hours before the king burned down his hall. First, even before wolf light had edged the darkness, the mostly Jutish scouts had trotted their ponies out of the palisaded settlement. Behind them, once full dawn had brightened the sky, spear-carrying pickets had marched out, shields slung over their backs, leading and guarding the pioneers whose task it would be to clear the muddy tracks and good, paved roads of obstacles. They would prepare the way, cut gradients into stream banks for the following waggons and ensure the solidity of any bridges their army must cross. 

The
pioneers’ horse-drawn carts were piled high with tools and axes, with coils of braided rope, sawn timbers, blocks of tar pitch, even some flagstones; all the paraphernalia needed to build, reinforce or repair the route the heavy waggons must take.

Behind
the pioneers marched the vanguard, roughly-formed phalanxes of spearmen flanked by a few archers, all mustered by tribal affiliations. Minor warlords in heavy furs led their own small war bands, but a handful of the greater thegns formed a mounted group around their king, Skegga. He rode proud at the head of the next contingent, which was the main body of his army, and his under-chiefs vied to imitate his bearing. They were bearded and long-moustached men, shaggy as Bactrian camels, with scarred faces and bodies. They showed bare arms heavy with bronze and silver rings, blue with tattoos, hands that were thick with rings made from the weapons of defeated enemies. All wore the big seax daggers that marked them as Saxons, the leather-wrapped hilts glinting with wrapped gold wire.

Beside
them trotted their personal house carls, one carrying his lord’s elm-and-leather shield, another hefting his heavy, ash-shafted spear. Trailing them was the main army, bearded, long-haired spearmen in conical leather and horn helmets who carried small round shields. They kept together in rough columns and village or tribal groups that spread wide across the fields and fens, and they foraged as they went. 

The
multitude travelled at different paces and moved not much more than ten miles a day. Some squads marched steadily, some men dawdled and straggled idly. Some spent the day busily elbowing their way forward, hurrying to reach the front, others could be seen simply standing still in the track, letting the onward tide of humanity wash around them. And some had fallen out of the line of march and were sitting, picking at their feet, eating or drinking, or just watching the world walk by.

After
the main body of the army came the baggage train, strung in a long column along the roadway. Lines of patiently-plodding packhorses carried bundles and bales in wicker baskets slung over their sides; slow-moving oxen pulled the rumbling wooden-wheeled farm waggons that brought heavier impedimenta, everything from grain and cooking pots to siege ballistae, animal-hide tents, caged chickens and sharpened stakes that would serve as palisade pickets. 

Mules
stepped daintily under tall loads of forage and firewood, flocks of sheep bleated and skittered under the supervision of shepherds and their crazy-eyed dogs, some scrawny cattle were herded by small boys and even a few goats plodded along in the mud, droppings and farm stench that trailed the host.

Behind
all that was the rearguard, who comprised the most disciplined-looking group of all, swinging along in unison, sometimes chanting or singing, their officers riding beside them. These men carried their spears and shields purposefully, well aware that any attack would likely involve their participation, and they were staying alert to the threat. The last couple of ranks of the rearguard were made up of archers who constantly looked around, nervously checking the woods and ditches, conscious that an arm’s length of iron-tipped pinewood loosed silent from cover could steal a life in seconds.

Last
of all on the rutted mud trail that spread wide on either side of the roadway came the stragglers, laggards, whores, pedlars, fake doctors, cutpurses, bards, holy men, thieves and beggars, a ragtag horde of camp followers, their curs and their children like those that have trailed every army in history. They and the rest of the motley progress were scattered far across the landscape, but the horde still covered several miles from head to tail. All trudged slowly north, moving at every muddy step or rumbling turn of a cart’s wheels inexorably closer to battle, fire and plunder. The wealth of Britain’s woodlands, and the lure of its landscapes of fertile farmlands had drawn these Saxons. They had come to seize and settle the land for themselves. The British could concede, or die, and only Arthur could prevent a Saxon conquest.

XLVI Humber

Even
by Roman standards, the palace at Eboracum was lavish, but I had no inclination to enjoy its luxuries. The emperor Septimius Severus had used it as his base for an invasion of Pictland, but had died here, the task unfinished. I needed to accomplish my goals, or I’d be like Severus, and dead. I had to turn back the Saxons with a much-outnumbered force, now that the Christians had deserted. I called on Guinevia to send out her mind’s eye and tell me what she could, I had a squadron of mounted scouts viewing the Saxon horde as they moved slowly north, and I was forming a plan. 

“We
just cannot defeat this army head-on,” I told my assembled officers. “The odds are too heavy. We must either trap them, surprise them or bluff them, or all three. I’m leaning towards a trap where they will be unable to deploy all their force at one time, and I am thinking about this place here-” I showed them a map.

The
Saxons were now close to Lincoln, which should be safe from them, as the invaders had little siege equipment and that well-defended citadel on a hill would not tempt them to linger, for I had ordered the land around laid waste. Starving the Saxons of supplies, our bedrock policy of attrition, called resource tactics, meant cutting their supply lines and stripping the country bare. Scorching the earth might hurt our peasants, but it would make an invader move on. This, I reasoned meant the Saxons would continue north to confront us at Eboracum. I planned to meet them elsewhere, and showed my officers just where. Mentally, I ran through my usual checklist: objective, intelligence, communications, supply, personnel and transport. Then I addressed the tribunes and prefects to explain the strategy.

If
we could persuade the Saxons to stay to the east side of the river Trent, we could confine them between it and the Humber’s estuary. The Trent ran north and emptied into the Humber 30 or so miles before that wide river met the German Sea. My hope was to tempt the Saxons to the south bank of the Humber, onto a strip of sandy land between its mile-wide flow and a vast marsh to the south. I knew the region. We had surprised the Parisi tribe there by building a hidden crossing from the Humber’s opposite bank. With luck and the right incentives, we could meet the main Saxon army in a place where they had no room to fully deploy, and our smaller but more professional force could defeat them. It was a slender chance, but it was the best we had.

What
might tempt Skegga’s army into that watery trap was bait, and I knew what to use. I gave Grimr some careful instructions for his fleet, and he sailed away that afternoon, down the Ouse and into the Humber, to carry out the preparations. Cragus, the commander of the heavy cavalry, also had his instructions, and my newly-promoted tribune Celvinus, now commander of the light cavalry, trotted his columns out of the Decumana Gate the next morning. 

Our
pioneer and engineer cohorts followed, taking a long baggage train of equipment, and I ordered several cohorts of archers, the last of my house guard Chevrons and a half-legion of infantry to go with me on our part of the mission. I was disappointed to see that Candless, the Caledonian Pict who had been so enthusiastic about going to war, seemed to have quietly vanished, but there was a great deal else to occupy me, and I soon forgot about him. 

Myrddin
arrived that day, listened to my proposal with interest and agreed to help. I think he was secretly delighted, and I gave him several assistants so that he could set to work.

My
war horse Corvus had gone with Cragus and his heavy cavalry, so I rode out of Eboracum, perhaps for the last time, on a tough little moorland pony. I had just a dozen outriders. We were cloaked and cowled like monks, our swords hidden. We seemed to wish to leave undetected, but we did leave in daylight and as I hoped from what Guinevia’s later messages told me, spies in the city were soon on their way to tell Skegga what we had done. We caught glimpses of the scouts who followed us at a discreet distance and we were careful to let them keep us in sight.

Some
miles down river, we came to Seletun, a hamlet raided years before by Hibernians, one of whose actions led to me recovering my father’s silver and amber badge of British office from the escaped slave Mullinus. I had arranged to meet a sizeable infantry force there and we moved on with them south and east, to cross the Trent and march along the south bank of the Humber, the place where I wished to lure Skegga. The terrain was perfect for my plan: a river almost a mile and a half wide on one hand, a vast marsh on the other. We moved along the sandy banks for several miles until we came to a place Grimr had scouted and told me about. The Saxon spies who trailed us stayed inconspicuous and we affected not to have seen them as we set up a camp.

It
took three more days, but the wolf eventually poked his head into the trap, to take the bait. Our hidden outliers warned me in plenty of time that the Saxons were coming in force, and we lit the signal fires. As the invaders moved up the Humber’s bank to trap us like a cork going into a bottle, we moved away, down to the eastern beaches of the estuary, out of the bottle’s base and onto Grimr’s longships. We left a few ponies behind, but they were the only captives the Saxons took that day. We simply sailed across the river and left our enemies on the wrong side of it.

Skegga
had marched his men hard to catch our small force between the river and the coast, so he halted at the old Parisi settlement to rest them for a few days. There were some crops to be had there, since I had ordered the region spared, and the whole Saxon horde seemed to have moved in, soldiers and camp followers alike, to rest and eat.

Once
the locust-like multitude had stripped the area clean, the Saxons began their slow move back west, and we met their vanguard at the River Trent with the larger part of our force. Our archers and infantry used the Trent as a bulwark and the slaughter as the invaders struggled out of the water and up the steep banks was fearsome.

“They
never got the chance to form their shield walls, lord,” one of my centurions boasted later. “They waded what they could, then came out of the water with more arrows sticking out of them than a hedgehog has spines. They couldn’t charge at us, they were dead meat.”

The
Saxons suffered the punishment for two hours, then withdrew while they sought another crossing of the river. As dusk was falling, Celvinius and his light cavalry caught them and cut the unprepared columns of foot soldiers to pieces. Again, the Saxons retreated, retiring to their new camp, where we heard the sounds of their drinking and their fury for the whole night. In the morning, I knew, we would face an organized shield wall with all the devastating power it could bring to a battlefield, but I had no intention of waiting.

Grimr
had beached his longships two miles east of the Saxon camp and landed his men after dark. Many of them carried crossbows as well as spears, and they moved quietly along the south bank of the Humber to our rendezvous. I stood on the north bank, waiting for the tide. Under the swirling water in front of me and my elite force of foot soldiers was a hidden causeway and a set of concrete piers. The wooden roadbed that would turn those piers into a bridge across the falling tide was ready to be floated out by a cohort of pioneers. They had done this once before, when we had constructed that same secret crossing to surprise a rebellious tribe. Now we would use it to save Britain.

Myrddin
came silently to my elbow and coughed discreetly. “I am quite looking forward to this,” he said. “I have never been in an actual battle before.”

“You
won’t be in any battle, my lord Myrddin,” I said abruptly. “You will stay back, behind your assistants. I do not want you and your gifts taken away by some scrap of iron.”

He
snorted huffily. “I am quite capable of looking after myself,” he declared. I turned away. The last thing I wanted was to argue with a sorcerer, and I needed his full cooperation in the coming hour. Bite your tongue, I muttered to myself. The tide was dropping, and I signalled to the engineer troop to move. They pushed out the timber roadbed to float and waded along the underwater causeway to the sandbank that was rapidly rising out of the river.

The
timing was exact, and daylight began to show as the pioneers made the last of the roadbed fast. We had a small group of infantry already on the far bank, shivering and soaked from their crossing, but the rest would cross in relative comfort. The first of our troops were wading the causeway when the flames erupted in the distance.