For King & Country (50 page)

Men slipped and scrambled through the deadly black rain. Saxon kings and royal princes cartwheeled and skidded through the muck. At the base of the hill, Saxon infantry scurried like confused ants. Someone was blowing the signal to charge. Someone else was frantically gesturing troops out of the flood's path. Water hit the wooden wall shielding the royal pavilion, parted in a great splash, and roared down into the camp below. Whole tents were swept away, their anchoring pegs yanked out of the softened, muddy ground. Saxons splashed after them, trying to rescue weapons washed away with the rest of the flotsam.

"Look!" Melwas cried.

He was pointing to the northeast corner of the hill.

Saxons were running in wild confusion, a whole mass of them fleeing in a mob. Some tried to climb the hill, others ran straight out onto the plain. A fierce exultation swept through Stirling. Ancelotis let out a wild shout. "They're running! Bastards are
running
!
We've broken them!
"

An instant later, a thousand galloping horses burst into view. Thunder rolled across the Salisbury Plain, four thousand flying hooves shaking the very ground. Artorius was visible in the vanguard, his white stallion snorting at full charge, his golden armor gleaming in the early light, the red dragon banner snapping like a ribbon of blood. The cavalry charge cut through the mass of fleeing Saxons, mowing them down like rye before a scythe. Hundreds of Saxons went down beneath the
cataphracti
's hooves. None of those who fell so much as stirred when the cavalcade swept past. Britons up and down the wall were shouting, hurling javelins into the clustered Saxons foolish enough to seek safety by climbing toward the fortress. A flight of Sarmatian arrows blackened the sky once more, bringing down more.

"Charge!" Cadorius shouted. "Sound the charge!
Cataphracti,
to horse!"

The watchtower lookout sounded a long blast. A wave of Briton infantry poured over the walls. Women and children led horses forward, running with them toward other gates snatched open by foot soldiers manning the walls. Cavalrymen vaulted into the saddle and charged through them, carefully keeping to solid ground on either side of the slurry that had spelled ruin to the Saxons' hopes. Ancelotis shouted, "Archers! Keep your ranks closed up! Advance in a group! Continue massed fire!"

He leaped onto the nearest horse, not caring whose it was, and plunged through the open gates, leading Gododdin in the charge. The Saxon kings and their shaken sons cowered against the wooden shield wall of their command platform. Covered in mud, eyes wild, horses dead or galloping away riderless across the open plain, the Saxons drew swords to face down the Britons stampeding toward them.

"Alive!" Ancelotis shouted. "Take them alive!"

A moment later, Gododdin had surrounded them, hemming them round with a glittering wall of British steel. Ancelotis gave them a mocking salute with his own sword.

"You seem to have lost an army," Ancelotis favored them with a cold smile. He gestured slightly with the tip. "Unless it is your wish to die immediately, throw down your weapons and your arrogant pride and beg the kings of Britain—whom you have greatly wronged—for mercy on your shivering wives and daughters."

King Aelle of Sussex, barely recognizable through muddy filth, blood, and shock, snarled, "What guarantees do you give us for our safety, do we acquiesce?"

"Guarantees?" Ancelotis raised his brows. "What guarantees did your murderous son and the odious, craven fool with him offer the village of Penrith? Or the farmholds within five miles of the standing stones? We guaranteed Cutha and Creoda safe passage and they repaid it by spitting infants on pikes and hacking toddling babes into scattered pieces for the crows to eat. Shall I return your courtesy back to you in full measure?"

Aelle lost color beneath the grime. Not, Stirling realized with utter contempt, because the news of the massacre was a surprise, but because Aelle finally realized that an accounting was due for their atrocities—and that he, as much as his son, would be held accountable for it. Stirling could see it in his eyes, that moment of sick horror when he realized the Britons were fully capable of slaughtering
his
daughters. Even Cutha looked pale around his tight-clenched mouth, pale with shock and hatred and the burning desire to sever British heads from British necks in a war he had already lost.

Ancelotis smiled down into their eyes.

"Yield up all that we demand," he said softly, "or your wives and daughters will learn the true meaning of terror. You have shown us too much of Saxon butchery to expect pity on your women and your squalling infants. Not from men whose families you have slaughtered like lambs under the axe. You have sown hatred and now you reap it in full measure. Surrender here and now, or I vow to you, there will be no stopping our soldiers in their drunken rampages across the lands you've stolen. They will defile your daughters and feed your infants to their dogs and smile while they do it. What say you, curs of Saxony? Shall I loose the hounds of Britain against your families? Or leash them and show the mercy you have failed to show any of us and ours?"

For tense moments, silence gripped the huddled knot of men at his horse's feet. The Britons hemming them in tested the keenness of their blades and smiled into the prisoners' eyes.
Come,
those blazing looks whispered,
come let me part your ribs with the kiss of steel...

King Aelle had not taken his gaze from Stirling's. He stared, pride warring with shock and exhaustion and the realization that he could salvage nothing by his own hand. A sigh finally shivered loose and he broke his long silence.

"Let me speak for Sussex, then," he began hoarsely, "and beg from you better mercy on my people than my fool of a son showed yours." He let his sword thunk into the mud. The splash darkened the blade with muck. Cutha's mouth worked once, twice, while his hand tightened like the grip of a vise around the pommel of his sword. His father turned on him with a snarl. "Don't be a bigger fool than you were at birth! Throw down the sword—for it is no longer yours to hold. I take it back, sword, pommel, and gold rings of honor. I strip you of them before Woden and all his Valkyries, for you are unworthy in my sight and a curse to every Saxon who treads soil upon this earth."

Cutha's face washed grey with shock. He collapsed back against the wooden wall, shaking violently. The sword slid from unnerved fingers, splashing down beside his father's. His father had just repudiated him before everyone who was likely to matter in Cutha's life. To take back the sword, to be disgraced by its loss, by the loss of the rings of fealty, rings of reward for fine service—such humiliation overbalanced him, left his eyes wide and staring.

Shunned, Stirling warned Ancelotis silently, shunned and broken. He'll be deadlier than any wolverine when that shock wears off. Consumed with hatred, blaming everyone but himself. Watch that bastard closely in future—if the kings of Britain allow him to live.

Ancelotis grunted. If the king of Gododdin has any say in the matter, Cutha will be hanged for a murderer from the nearest oak.

The others—Creoda, his father Cerdic, their few surviving
eoldormen
and
thegns
—let their weapons fall in formal surrender. "Bind their hands with rope," Ancelotis said tersely. "Behind them, please. Drag them up to the fortress. We'll want to question them closely—" He broke off, startled, as movement out across the southeastern plain caught his attention. From his vantage point two hundred fifty feet up the hillside, he could see a long way across the open ground to the southeast.

Beyond Artorius and the
cataphracti
, beyond the straggling lines of the smashed Saxon supply train,beyond the running, panic-stricken Saxon infantry, a living carpet flowed across the plain. Horses at the full gallop. An army's worth of them. Headed straight for Caer-Badonicus. And Ancelotis could not for the life of him figure out whose army it might be. The Saxon kings, following his gaze, turned to peer across the plain.

"Your reinforcements?" Melwas demanded harshly.

King Aelle shook his head, obviously confused. "No. Would to Woden they were, but they are not men under my command. Nor under Cerdic's."

"Then who—?" Ancelotis realized in a lightning flash of utter horror who they
must
be. "Dear God. Take these men up to the fort and guard them. Archers, to horse, ride with me!"

He kicked his horse into a flat-out run, plunging wildly down the sodden, mud-churned slope. Out on the Salisbury Plain, the fleeing Saxon infantry had stumbled and stalled in their headlong flight from Artorius. The front ranks began to shift direction, running back toward the British lines, scattering to the sides, trying to escape two cavalry charges that rushed toward one another on a direct collision course.

Spurring madly, Stirling and his host caught up with Artorius—who had slowed in open puzzlement—just as the leading edge of Saxons, men who'd fled British steel just moments previously, crashed in amongst them, screaming for mercy, many of them flinging themselves to the ground, prostrate before Artorius' white stallion.

"Oh, dear God," Artorius breathed as Ancelotis reined to a halt beside him.

They could see the approaching army's battle flags. Ancelotis knew those flags, knew them as well as Artorius did. The bottom fell out of Stirling's gut, splashed into the mud at his horse's feet, and tried to crawl away with the wounded, exhausted Saxons. "
Ireland!
"

Artorius opened his mouth to give the shout to charge, when the Irish cavalcade drew abrupt rein and halted, hundreds of them, just out of javelin distance. For long moments, an eerie, unnerving hush fell across the field of death, with neither side moving. Then a small knot of riders detached themselves from the main body of Irish troops. A white scrap of cloth fluttered in the wet wind as they rode slowly forward, horses dancing sideways in the adrenaline rush of the foreshortened charge. After a tense moment, Stirling could make out five riders, three women and two men, it looked like. A moment longer and they were close enough to recognize faces.

"
Morgana!
" The word was wrung from Artorius.

He spurred forward, gesturing the
cataphracti
to wait. Ancelotis was right on his heels.

They met halfway between the two armies, with cowering Saxons lying prone in the mud all around them, desperate to avoid rousing fatal attention. Morgana rode like a woman carved of granite, face pale and haggard with exhaustion and strain. Medraut was with her. Ancelotis wondered at the glow in the boy's eyes, an inner fire he had never before seen in the boy. The other man with them wore Irish insignia of royal rank, as did one of the ladies, a girl barely Medraut's age. Father and daughter, Stirling realized abruptly, tracing similarity of features and proud carriage. The other woman was a quiet, sharp-eyed soul who had the look and demeanor of a highly placed court councillor.

"Greetings, stepbrother," Morgana said quietly, spine straight as a church steeple. "I bring allies of Britain." She gestured with one graceful hand. "King Dallan mac Dalriada. Riona Damhnait, a Druidess of his privy council. Keelin, daughter of Dallan mac Dalriada and wife to Medraut, King of Galwyddel by my lawfully recorded order. He has made the Princess of Dalriada a Queen of Galwyddel, binding our two peoples into one. Before you speak," she lifted a slim hand in a commanding gesture that closed Artorius' lips over the protest balanced there, "know that the Saxons have committed atrocity in Irish-held lands and attempted to shift blame for it onto Britons."

Lailoken...

Stirling found himself wondering where that bastard might be, along with his unseen guest.

Morgana, reiterating the story of poisoned wells at Fortress Dunadd, which he and Artorius already knew, added, "The Dalriadan Irish and their kin from Belfast seek alliance with any force strong enough to hurl Saxon swine into the sea. Dallan mac Dalriada begs the favor of joining their not inconsiderable force to ours to keep both our islands safe from Saxon ravages." Her eyes glowed with fiery pride and a defiance that left Artorius pale and silent. "It would," she murmured, "at the very least, secure much of our northern border and a very large portion of our western seacoast."

Artorius sat blinking for long moments. He finally brought himself sufficiently out of shock to say, "I cannot trust Irish treachery, Morgana."

"Brother," she said gently, "they have already given us the greatest hostage they possess: Keelin, of the royal house of the
Scotti
clan, last of her father's direct line. They have held Medraut and me in their power for more than a week now, could have killed us and launched an attack against Galwyddel, against Ynys Manaw and Strathclyde, against any Briton kingdom they chose, with our armies distracted by this Saxon menace to the south. They chose, instead, to seek alliance against a common enemy."

Ancelotis and Stirling, both of them deeply curious about Morgana's new allies, studied the face of the Irish king. They saw pride there, strength, and pain, but nothing of treachery. And Keelin—God help, queen of Galwyddel—had reached across to grip Medraut's hand. The look he gave her was so gentle, so protective, Ancelotis could not hold suspicion in his hands. He turned to Artorius.

"This is a matter for the kings and queens of Britain to discuss in council," he said quietly. "If I may suggest it, allow the Irish army to camp here, keeping the Saxons imprisoned between us, and hold a dialogue with King Dallan mac Dalriada and Queen Keelin in the meeting hall at Caer-Badonicus. Would to God Emrys Myrddin were not missing. We could use his guidance."

"Missing?" Artorius asked sharply.

Ancelotis explained.

"I mislike it," the Dux Bellorum muttered. "I mislike it intensely." Ancelotis wasn't entirely certain whether he spoke of Emrys Myrddin's disappearance or his new in-laws. Both, probably.

"Very well, let us see to these wretches' confinement, then seek the council chamber."