Sword at Sunset (20 page)

I was aware suddenly, as though they were a part of myself, of the archers hidden among the hazel scrub, each with an arrow notched to his drawn bowstring. The timing was perfect, the struggling
chaos along the trenches had barely begun to sink, when the dark flight of arrows that I had been waiting for leapt from among the bushes and thrummed like a cloud of hornets into its midst. Men
were down in good earnest now, and I felt how the hidden bowmen stooped forward each one for another shaft from the ground before him or the loose battle quiver hanging at his saddlebow ...

Far along our own line I heard the shout of command, and our spearmen, yelping their own short sharp battle cry, were running forward down the hill. The few Saxon archers on the flank, unable to
see where our bowmen loosed from under cover, turned their own short deadly arrows against the spears – and the moment had come to slip the hounds.

‘Sound me the charge.’

The man beside me set the great horn to his lips, and winded the one long blast that set the echoes flying like startled birds all up and down the valley. From away to the left, almost in the
same instant, Bedwyr’s trumpeter took up the note; a great shout rose from our men, and both cavalry wings broke forward, the spears that had been resting upright swinging down as one to the
horizontal. I crouched low into the saddle, feet braced into my stirrups against the coming shock, feeling through every fiber of my being the balance of the leveled spear against palm and fingers,
hearing the flying thunder of the squadron’s hooves behind me.

We took them on both flanks, and at the full gallop.

They had no chance to form the shield wall; for the first moments of impact it was not battle as I counted battle, but sheer red butchery. But whatever evil may be cried against the Sea Wolves,
no man ever yet called their courage in question. Somehow they closed and steadied their ranks; they fought like heroes; their archers stood like rocks though their numbers grew steadily fewer
under dark hail of the long British war shafts, and loosed their own arrows without pause into our ranks. The house carls of the center held us with spear and seax long after the light throwing
axes were spent; their naked and stained berserkers flung themselves upon our very spearpoints to dirk our horses from underneath. Afterward, I was glad that the thing had after all been a battle
and not a massacre. At the time I saw all things through a crimson haze, and felt very little.

The sun was gone, and the dusk was creeping up the valley like the slow inflowing of the tide, when they broke at last and turned to fly. They streamed away, a tattered shadow of the host that
had stormed across the stream in the late sunlight, seemingly so short a time ago; and as we swept after them, down to the ford, the single high note of a horn sounded once more, and Cei and his
wild riders swept down upon them out of the far woods.

In the swiftly fading light, the main number got away, all the same; and leaving Cei to harry them into the hills, the rest of us, who had borne the chief heat of the fighting, drew off and
turned back toward the long wooded ridge below which the straggle had taken place, and the work that still waited for us there.

Some of the archers, with the pack train drivers and the women, were already moving among the fallen figures, looking at each to see if it were friend or foe, dead or wounded. Our own dead were
being carried aside for burial, the Saxons left for the ravens and the wolves if any chanced not yet to have drawn off into their summer fortresses; they would make the Eburacum road unsavory for a
while, but we had other things to do than bury Saxons. The Saxon wounded were being cleanly knifed; I doubt if they gave as clean an end to our own men in like case, but I have always set my face
against mutilation, at least of living men, and the few women who had tried it in the early days had found their mistake.

I abandoned the scene, and when Amlodd had taken Arian from me (the old war-horse was still sidling and snorting, and there was blood and brains on his ironshod forehooves) went to see how it
was with our own wounded. A swarm of good folk from Deva were helping to get the more sorely hurt into carts and farm sledges. We could not care for them in the camp, and at first light tomorrow we
must be away after the Saxons, to follow up the day’s victory, so it was better for them to be got back to Deva, even if a few of them died of the jolting on the road. There would be folk in
plenty to care for them; even a surgeon, good though generally drunk.

A great fire had been lit in the midst of our last night’s camp on the Deva side of the woods; and the carts and sledges were drawn up on the farthest fringes of the firelight; and
Gwalchmai, with a filthy rag twisted around his own left forearm, was limping serenely among the wounded, looking to each as he was brought in through the trees, with the priest and a few of the
women to help him. His face was gray and still, with the gentleness and complete withdrawal from all other matters that came to him only when he was plying his craft. I wanted to speak to him, ask
him how badly we had suffered; I wanted to speak to some of the men themselves; but that must wait. I never forced questions on Gwalchmai when that look was on his face. I think I had always the
feeling that to thrust myself between him and the thing he was doing would be in some way an intrusion.

So I left him and his wounded, and went back to the great fire where the standard had been set up and the food was already being given out and Bedwyr was waiting for me.

‘Who is seeing about burying our dead?’ I asked.

‘Alun Dryfed is in charge just now. I’ve given orders for the work to be done in relays, for the grave must needs be dug deep, here in the wilderness.’

‘Save for the amount needed to make good the road, we can use the earth from the trenches to raise a good-sized mound over them for safety.’

He nodded, looking into the fire under that one level and mocking eyebrow. ‘You’ll want Brother Simon to patter a few prayers over them before we cover them in?’

I never learned what god Bedwyr worshipped, if any; it certainly was not the Christos. Maybe it was the thing between hand and harp string ... ‘Seeing that we have a priest among us we might
as well make use of him,’ I said. ‘But there’s time enough for the prayers when he has done helping Gwalchmai with the wounded. The living first, the dead after.’

‘All things in their proper order. Well, there are a good few more of the Saxon kind to feed the wolves than there are for the Christian prayers and the grave mound.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So far as I can judge as yet, our losses have been surprisingly light compared with theirs.’

He cocked that flaring eyebrow at me. ‘Surprisingly? When one thinks of those bear pits?’

I was silent for a moment, and then I said, ‘It was not the kind of fighting that I would choose. I thought at the first after the Companions came in that it was going to be a massacre. I
am glad it flowered into a battle after all.’

‘You’re a strange man, my Lord Artos the Bear. There are times when I think that you come near to loving the Saxon kind.’

‘Only when I am actually at his throat and he at mine. Not before – and not after.’

Two of my own squadron came out from the black gloom of the trees, dragging a body between them. A body that, judging by the way they handled it, was Saxon and none of ours. They flung it down
in the full red glare of the firelight, rolling it over onto its back with a silent triumph that shouted more loudly than any voice could do. Then Bericus the Senior said simply, ‘We found
this.’

Lying sprawled uncouthly at the foot of the Red Dragon where the men had tumbled him down, there was a certain splendor about him still. An old man, an old giant, with bright hairs that shone
like gold wires in the gray jut of his beard and the mane of wild hair outflung about his head. I recognized him first by the earl’s bracelet twisted about his sword arm, for a spear had
taken him between the eyes, but as I looked more closely into the smashed and blood-pooled face, I recognized the cunning iron-bound mouth, drawn back now in a frozen snarl. I recognized above all,
I think, the greatness that seemed to cling about him still, an atmosphere of the thing that had made him a giant in more than body; this ancient enemy of Ambrosius’s. Hengest, the Jutish
adventurer who had grown to be a war lord of the Saxon hordes, lying flung down like tribute at the foot of the British standard that stirred faintly in the night air above him.

That left the son and grandson to deal with.

‘So-o,’ Bedwyr said softly. ‘Earl Hengest goes at last to his own Storm Lords again. He should have died on a night of tempest, with the lightning leaping from hill to hill,
not a still summer evening with the scent of hawthorn in the air.’

‘He was a royal stag,’ I said. ‘Thank God he is dead.’

Later, I had started out on a round of the watch fires, with a half-eaten bannock still in my hand, when Flavian appeared out of nowhere to join me. ‘Sir, all things are in order with the
squadron. When do we strike camp in the morning?’

‘At first light.’

‘Then if I am back an hour before that – Deva is only six miles away – If I gave over the squadron to Fercos—’

I stopped and turned to face him. I suppose I was tireder than I knew, and my patience went like a snapped bowstring. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Flavian! There are about five hours left to
dawn; how much good do you suppose the captain of my third squadron is going to be tomorrow if he spends half the night riding about the countryside and the other half tearing his heart out in bed
with a girl?’

Even in the dim light of the watch fire I saw how the blood surged up to his forehead, and I was as angry with myself as the instant before I had been with him. I said quickly, ‘I’m
sorry, Flavian. That was unpardonable.’

He shook his head. ‘No, I – It was foolish of me to think of it.’

I set my hand on his shoulder. ‘It was; but not in the way you mean. Did you not say farewell to her before you came away?’

‘Yes.’

‘And do you not suppose it hurt both of you enough that time? Send her word that you are safe; but if you go back now it will be all to suffer again.’

‘I suppose you are right. It is better for her, maybe—’

As I moved on, he turned back to the fire and took the knot of wilted hawthorn flowers from his shoulder buckle and dropped it into the flames. It was a gesture like a man making a votive
offering.

Cei and his band came in during the night, having lost contact with the Sea Wolves in the dark; and at first light, our dead buried and our wounded safely back in Deva, we struck eastward along
the Eburacum road on the scent of the feeing Saxons, with the hunter of the Little Dark People who had first brought us word of their coming, riding with us for a guide. We had lost horses as well
as men in the day’s fighting, but thanks to the young half-bred stallions, we had still enough to remount any man left horseless, and keep a few spare mounts, even now.

I suppose that to any who have never tried, it must seem easy enough for cavalry to hunt down a feeing enemy on foot. But the thing is less simple than it would seem, at the start of May in the
mountains, when the grass is still sparse. Horses must be rested at times, too, if one would not have them burst their willing hearts, whereas men, if hard enough pressed, can carry on by some
power of the spirit long after the spent body is beyond crawling another step. Then also, we were not merely hunting down fugitives but marching in our turn on an enemy stronghold. We had our
baggage train and spearmen with us to slow us down, and the Saxons had left the road, as they had not done on their westward march, and scattered into the hills where it was often impossible for
the horses to follow them. (We never knew whether they had found some renegade Briton to guide them, or whether, being desperate, they simply trusted to their gods to keep them clear of the
mosses.) And among the immensities of those bluff-browed rolling mountains with the bracken and stone bramble springing among the rocky outcrops, where it seems that nothing moves save the wind in
the sparse mountain grasses and the kestrel hovering overhead, but the glens are thick with birch scrub, it is not easy to find one man or a knot of men; nor wise to push on heedlessly, leaving the
enemy in one’s rear. We did find a few; they lay on their faces for the most part, each with a dark-feathered arrow scarcely larger than a birding bolt in the back. The Old Ones, the Little
Dark People of the hills, had, it seemed, as little love for the Sea Wolves as we had.

Before long the reason for that became sickeningly plain, together with the way in which the hard-pressed Saxons had come by food to carry them on their flight. Twice in the first two days, we
had seen smoke among the hills, smoke that was too dark and spreading to be that of a hunting fire; and on the third day, when we had left the road and were following our guide along a herding
track where the grass was better than that along the scrubby valley through which the road ran, Owain sniffed the air like a hound, saying, ‘Smoke.’ And presently as we rounded a
bracken-clad shoulder, we saw it rising from beyond a wind-shaped tangle of thorn and rowan and mountain juniper, pale like smoke that is almost spent. We checked the horses – I remember the
sudden silence of the high hills, when the soft drum of hooves over the turf fell away; a buzzard circling the blue heights of the upper air, and faintly the sound of falling water; one is seldom
far from the sound of falling water among those hills, any more than among my own hills of Arfon. I called to Bedwyr and to Gwalchmai who generally rode close to me, and with our little dark guide
and a handful more, we turned the horses’ heads toward the thorn tangle, leaving the rest of the war host under Cei to wait for us on the trail.

Beyond the belt of scrub, we came upon one of the settlements of the Little Dark People, half large farm, half small village; that is to say we came upon what the Saxons had left of it in their
passing. A piteous huddle of huts half underground, the bracken thatch of their roofs still smoldering, blackened and fallen in, so that these that had been the homes of men were blackened and
smoking pits gaping in the hillside; even the peat stacks had been wantonly fired, though among the densely packed turfs the fire had not taken hold. Spilled barley was scattered on the beaten
earth (in the shelter of the mountain slope below the village showed the threadbare patchwork of small wretched fields). Dead cattle lay among the smoking wreckage; little hill cattle that had been
famine lean even in their lives. Strips had been hacked from their flanks and shoulders; I suppose the Saxons had cut them to suck for the blood and warm juices, maybe even to eat raw. And among
the sickening chaos of charred thatch and slaughtered cattle, lay the folk whose home this had been, hacked down in the uncouth attitudes of sudden death; old men, five or six dark narrow-boned
warriors like our guide, women and bairns. There was a dead sheep dog lying at the feet of an old man whose brains were scattered among his bloody hair; a young woman with her body arched about
that of the child she clutched against her, in a last effort to protect it. Both of them had their throats cut.