Sword at Sunset (24 page)

Presently, when I had done, I threw the stick into the heart of the fire, and brushed my hand through the gray ash, blotting out the crude map as though it had never been, and got up to go and
take a look at the horse lines, as I always did before lying down to sleep.

Next morning Owain with fifty light-riding tribesmen set off westward along the frontier road to Luguvallium; their task was to watch the back road, the flank road of my map, and send me instant
word if the enemy chose to run the hazard (for we should be on their flank at rear), of trying a break through into Britain from that side.

And when they were gone, Bedwyr and I with our foreguard rode out through the gaping ruins of the Hunnum Gate, under the charging boar of the Legion that had built it. Beyond the Wall, the
country seemed all at once darker and wilder, the distant hills more brooding, the very wind through the heather blowing with a more desolate song. But that was foolishness; nothing but the
knowledge in our hearts that we were beyond the frontier, beyond the pale of familiar things.

It must have been almost two hours later before the last of the rear guard was through the gate, for we moved in the usual formation for a march through hostile country, the foreguard of cavalry
scouting a few miles ahead of the foot and baggage train, the rear guard following a few miles behind, and the light horsemen scattered against the threat of flank attack on either side. I hated to
ride in that formation; it lengthened the time of the day’s march unbearably, or else cut the distance covered. But to take any other course would have been to go bleating for trouble like a
lost lamb in wolf country.

We got the trouble soon enough, without bleating for it. From the Wall to Trimontium was a three-day march, and we did it in something over three weeks. There was no random turmoil throughout
the country, the thing had passed beyond that stage. But clearly Huil Son of Caw had had word of our coming, and sent out his light war parties to hold us up while he finished the gathering of his
own war host and the armoring of his stronghold against us. And the warriors of his skirmishing bands had the advantage of knowing the country they fought over, while we were strangers to it. We
had to fight through almost daily skirmishes in which the enemy appeared from nowhere, and even when beaten off, simply melted into the hillside again, leaving very few dead behind them to mingle
with ours. We were attacked at any brown stream or blind turn of the track, shot at from behind every furze bush; stretches of road were torn up ahead of us just where the ground was softest, so
that we had to spend whole days in getting the horses across maybe a mile of ground where the white silken tassels of the bog grass gave us the only warning of the worst patches; and almost always
we were attacked while doing it, so that all the while, though not heavily, we lost men and horses. Indeed if the road had been a valley one or led through forest country, I think that it would
have gone hard with us; but it ran for the chief part through heather moors, and in most places where it was not a natural ridgeway, it had been raised slightly above the level of the surrounding
countryside by the engineers who built it – for which I blessed those engineers, praying ease on their long-departed souls in the names of all the gods I knew. But apart from men, the very
land itself seemed in league with the traitors and the Sea Wolves, and twice smoked up dense white mists against us, which, since there would have been a certain unwisdom in marching blind through
unknown and hostile country in a mist that could have hidden a war host within a spear’s length of us, held us captive for days at a time within the circle of the past night’s defenses,
with the horses under strong guard outside. (We ditched the camp every night, and each man set his spear upright behind the ditch; it was as near as light-moving troops such as we were could come
to the old ‘thorn hedge’ of the Legions.) The picket lines were attacked on both occasions, and several horses killed and a few hamstrung by men who paid for it with their own
lives.

It was very early summer when we marched out through the Hunnum Gate, and we had numbered nearly seven hundred, counting the drivers, but the first heather was coming into flower over the moors,
and we had lost something like a fifth part of our strength, when we came at last in sight of the great red sandstone fort crouched at the foot of three-peaked Eildon; Trimontium, the Place of
Three Hills.

I had drawn the war host closer as we neared the place, and sent out a handful of light horse to scout ahead. And just as we were making the noon halt they rode in again with their ponies in a
smother, and their leader came straight to me, breathless and stumbling in his run. ‘My Lord Artos, they are ahead of us in Trimontium. Saxons too, for there’s one of their accursed
horsetail standards peering over the wall. And Scots to judge by the glint of white shields on the ramparts.’

I had been half expecting that. The Place of Three Hills must have been a good rallying point for them as it was a good base and headquarters for us. I called Bedwyr who was overseeing the noon
issue of biscuit, and told him. ‘The wolf pack is ahead of us. We are going to have to fight for Trimontium if we want it. Pass the word to the rest.’

But indeed the word was already running, as such tidings always do, like heath fire through the host. I sent a rider galloping back to summon up the foot and the rear guard, and when they came
up with us we marched again, in changed formation ready for battle.

But before marching, the Companions, I also, picked sprigs of the big rose-purple bell heather and stuck them into our helmets and shoulder buckles, in the way that had become custom with
us.

For a good while the fort was hidden from us by the slow moorland billows of the land between. But all the while three-peaked Eildon stood up before us, rising taller into the changing sky as
the long miles passed. It was drawing toward evening when Bedwyr and I left the war host behind the last ridge, and riding forward alone, came out through the hazel and birch woods that had clothed
the hills of the past day’s march, and saw the lean red menace of the old fort, no more than five or six bowshots away. The scouts had spoken truth. Heads crowded the ramparts, and there was
a dark swarm about the gateway where pack ponies were hurriedly being got inside and the barricades flung up behind them, and the smoke of many cooking fires billowed sideways in the wind that had
begun to rise.

‘I would to God I had some means of knowing their numbers,’ I said to Bedwyr, who had ridden out of the woodshore at my side. ‘The fort was built to hold a double cohort of a
thousand for months on end; it would hold three or four times as many for a short space.’

‘So long as the water holds out,’ said Bedwyr.

I glanced aside at him. ‘You think they mean to stand siege here?’

‘I think nothing – as yet – but I was ready to see them drawn up to make us welcome, on the clear ground yonder. They have had warning enough of our coming, and the Saxon at
least has small love for fighting behind walls.’

I was silent. I too should have thought to see them drawn up ready for us. It could be the siege, of course. If they were well provisioned they might be counting on the fact that we, in an alien
and hostile country, would be likely to run out of supplies before they did. But there was the water; after the years that the place had been deserted, the wells had probably fallen in, and in any
case, since there would be many more than the place had been built for, and the pack beasts also must be watered, it could not be long before the supply began to fail. They might of course merely
be waiting for morning, believing that we should start nothing so late in the day as this. Or they might be planning a night attack of their own, when we had been lulled into a false security. I
wished to God I knew. Meanwhile I remained silent for a while, taking in the lay of the land. From the shallow valley that ran down ahead of us, the land on the right rose gently in a kind of broad
spur to the fortress walls, not cleared back, as it must have been in the old days, but overgrown with the wildest tangle of hazel and elder scrub. Beyond the fort and on either side, it seemed, as
well as I could see, that the hillside fell away steeply as the swoop of a falcon, into the wooded river gorge below Eildon. The place, in fact, was a spur above the river, and if the three farther
sides were what they seemed, only this, the southern side, could be attacked in any force.

A blast on Prosper’s aurochs hunting horn brought no response save the ghost of an echo out of the river gorge.

The light was beginning to fade, and the rising wind sounded like a charge of cavalry when we turned back to the others beyond the ridge. I gathered a handful of our best scouts and trackers,
and gave them their orders. ‘Get down the valley and lie close for a while. As soon as the day has dimmed to half-light, work your way in close to the fort. They may have pickets posted
– I doubt it, but it is a thought to keep in mind. Work around the whole circuit, and bring me back word how steep the fall of the land is on the sides that one cannot judge from here, and
what possibility there may be of sending in an attack from the river side. Notice also the condition of the walls, how the gates are held, any smallest detail that may aid us in the planning of the
next move. Understood?’

When they had melted into the wind-swayed thickets, we made camp as best we could in the shelter of the ridge, leaving a few men to keep watch on Trimontium from the ridge itself; watered the
horses at the stream which, rising somewhere in the high moors southward, flung its ferny loop around the far shoulder of the ridge and went purling down to join the Tweed; ate the evening meal of
barley bannock and the inevitable hard yellow cheese, and settled down to wait as patiently as might be for the return of the scouting party. Sometime after dark – there was no moon that
night, and the clouds were racing across the stars – they came slipping one after another out of the night and the wind-lashed woods to drop beside the campfire, and tell their story between
ravenous mouthfuls of the food that had been set aside for them. There were no pickets, but also no possibility of mounting an attack of any strength from the farther side of the fort.
‘Scarce footing for the whin bushes,’ said the leader when I put it to him. But there was a deer track, and a postern gate on the north side, and in one place the wall was down to not
much over the height of a man, with plenty of stone and rubble still outside to aid climbing, so that it might be possible to get a small band around that way to mount some kind of decoy attack to
draw attention from the main gates. The gates themselves had rotted apart, but all of them were strongly closed with thornwork and stout timber barricades. Of the numbers of the motley war host
gathered in Trimontium, save that they were very many, the scouting party had of course been able to gain no idea.

When it was all told, we looked at each other, Cei and Bedwyr and I, in the wind-torn firelight. Bedwyr had brought out his beloved harp as he did most evenings when the food was eaten; he
plucked a little inquiring flight of notes from it that seemed to leap into the wind and be whirled away like the first yellow birch leaves. ‘Tonight?’

‘Tonight,’ I said. ‘For one thing, we may not have a wind like this again, to cover the sound of Cei plunging through the undergrowth.’

Indeed the wind stood friend to us that night in more ways than one. It covered the sound of our general advance as we made our way over the ridge and down through the birch and hazel woods into
the shallow valley. (For though the main part of our horses were under guard on the far side of the ridge, even a few horses make more noise than many men in dense undergrowth.) It covered, with
its soft turmoil among the bushes of the steep fortress hillside, the movements of Bedwyr and his dismounted squadron as they crept and clambered around beneath the red sandstone walls toward the
unmended breach that the scouts had spoken of; though I think that they would have made little sound in any case, for they had laid aside their ring-mail shirts, which always chimed a little in
action, however carefully one moved in them, and gone into their venture with nothing but buckler and drawn sword ... It covered the sound of brushwood and wagon straw being piled against the main
barricades (five men it cost us, though, to keep it there) and when it caught light from the firebrands that we flung into it, the wind caught and fanned the flames and roared them up and drove the
licking tongues against the timbers of the barricade so swiftly that the first warning shouts had scarcely broken from the men within before the whole gateway was ablaze.

The archers, whom we had kept standing by, had light for shooting now, and crouching among the nearer bushes began to loose with a high trajectory that carried the arrows over the ramparts on
either side of the gate towers, to fall on the heads of the defenders. Some of the arrows had faming spirit-soaked rags tied to them, and their arc showed like shooting stars on a winter’s
night. A few enemy arrows answered, but not many; the defenders were too intent on the gate itself to have much time for shooting (surely we had their whole attention now, and Bedwyr had his chance
if ever he was to have it!). The uproar inside the gate was so wild that at one moment, sitting old Arian with my own squadron, just beyond the reach of the flame light, I was troubled lest I
should not hear Bedwyr’s signal from the far side of the fort to tell me that he was ready, fearing even that he might not hear my horn sounding the charge. Where timing meant so much, we
could ill afford to miss each other’s signals.

The barricade went with a roar and a crash, and a sheet of flame leapt toward the stormy sky, its crest caught by the wind and bent over like the crest of a wave before it breaks; rags of flame
were flying across the fortress; and faintly, in the moment’s stunned hush that followed the fall of the barricades, I heard the war cry of Arfon sounding across the distance and the storm:
‘Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!’ and knew that the moment had come.