Sword at Sunset (30 page)

The Companions were superb. Unused to foot fighting as they were, they were holding stubbornly to the ground that they had taken, in face of the furious pressure that was being hurled against
them. Once they even thrust forward again, before they were once more slowed into clogged immobility. For long moments that seemed to stretch into an aching eternity of time, the two centers
strained together, so that even above the boil of battle it seemed that one could hear the gasping breath and the throb of bursting hearts. Men were falling on both sides behind the shield-walls,
tangling the feet of the living, as the long death-locked battle mass heaved and swayed to and fro, with never more than a stride’s length lost or won. God alone knew how long that hideous
grapple might last, draining us of men, with nothing gained, and I knew that the moment to fling in the reserves had come. I put up my hand in signal to the trumpeter beside me, and he raised the
aurochs horn on its baldric and sounded the charge, clear and high above the surf-roar of battle. It was the charge for the outlying cavalry knots as well as for us, and as we burst forward I was
aware of a new sound swelling the tumult; the swift drub of horses’ hooves sweeping in from the wings.

The struggling ranks ahead parted to let us through, as foot parts to let through a cavalry squadron. We had taken the blunt-ended wedge formation, and like a wedge we drove on into the battle
mass of the enemy, yelling the old war cry, ‘Yr Widdfa!
Yr Widdfa!
’ Chins driven down behind our shields, gray mailed wedge broadening behind the Red Dragon, we drove forward
deeper and deeper into the Saxons, while at the same time – though I had no thought to spare for them now – the little bodies of horse had charged in on flank and rear, driving the
Barbarians down upon our wedge. Archers and javelin men, tossing aside their now useless weapons, drew sword and closed in from either flank. The Wolves were driven in on each other, becoming so
densely packed that each man’s shield hampered his comrade’s sword arm, and the dead clogged the feet of the living, and all their valiant efforts to force their way on only drove them
the more deeply to our iron wedge.

Even now I am not sure how the day would have gone had the enemy been one war host, instead of four, each with their own ways of fighting, with little idea of how to combine, and nothing save
courage and savagery in common between them. As it was, quite suddenly their battle mass began to waver in its forward thrust as its ranks thinned, and at last the moment came when with one supreme
effort, with a slow long straining heave, we seemed to lift and upsurge and spill over them. Then, split well nigh in two by our wedge, overwhelmed and battered blind, they broke and gave back and
began to stream away, trampling their own dead and wounded underfoot, trampled down in their turn by the small unshod hooves of the light cavalry.

We broke forward after them, cutting them down as they ran. Among the Saxons, only the great ones wore ring mail, while the lesser folk had no better body armor than a leather jerkin, and that
only if they were lucky; the Scottish warriors, save again for their nobles, had little more, and the Picts, from the greatest to the least, had flung themselves into battle naked save for a
leather loin guard. Yet some would not run but stood to face us, or retreated step by step, still fighting, and were cut down in their tracks, still proud beyond yielding. The hummocky ground among
the bushes was clothed with trampled dead, and as we thrust on, I was aware of others running beside the war host; little shadows that slipped low from tree to tree. Something passed my ear with
the high whine of a gnat, and the Saxon in front of me ran on a few steps with a small dark arrow no bigger than a birding bolt quivering between his shoulders, then dropped and lay writhing. The
light riders were taking over the chase from us now, and I called off the Companions as one calls off hounds; most of them could not have heard me, and I dared not use the horn to sound the
Retreat, for that would have called off the others also; but one by one, finding the chase taken up from them, they were dropping out, panting in their heavy war gear, wiping reddened sword blades
on handfuls of long grass, turning back to me, gathering into their squadrons again. The sounds of the pursuit were dying away, and the wind and the soft chill rain still came scudding down from
the north over our hunched shoulders as we turned back to our battle line and last night’s camp beyond.

‘Look there,’ said Bedwyr, suddenly walking at my shoulder. ‘And there—’ He pointed. And there was a man lying among the dead with a little dark arrow in his back;
and then another man, and another ...

‘The Old Woman said they were the viper that stings in the dark,’ I said. ‘The pursuit is in sure hands, it seems.’

It is in my mind that that was the cruelest fight I ever fought. It cost us dearly, too, for our own battle line was marked out now with its random line of bodies, piled in places two and three
deep. More than fifty of the Companions died that day, apart from the auxiliaries, and jaunty little Fulvius lay among them, taking part of my boyhood with him; and Fercos who had followed me down
from Arfon in the first spring of the Brotherhood. I looked up at the faint brightness beyond the drifting cloud wrack overhead, and saw that it was not yet much past noon.

The sun was still above the western moors and the weary work that follows battle not yet completed, and I was with Cei and Gwalchmai snatching a brief respite beside one of the watch fires while
the tatterdemalion gaggle of women who had followed us as usual got some kind of meal together, when a crashing and rattling came through the undergrowth as though some great beast were heading our
way, and as I turned quickly toward the sound, a man rolled, or rather was thrust, into the firelight. A tall man, naked and war-patterned with the Pictish woad, with a mane of tawny hair and
frowning tawny eyes, who stumbled and almost fell, then caught himself proudly erect once more. I saw that he was dripping blood from a wound in the left knee; his hands were twisted behind his
back and he was surrounded by a knot of little dark warriors. In the first moment of seeing him as he stood there in their midst, I thought suddenly of some proud wild thing brought to bay by a
pack of little dark hounds, save that no hounds were as silent or as deadly as those that thronged about him.

‘My Lord Artos,’ one of them said, and I saw that it was Druim Dhu, ‘we have brought you Huil, the spearhead of your enemies. Here is his sword,’ and he stooped and laid
it at my feet.

The man in their grip was far spent, panting like a beast that has been run hard; sweat gleamed on his forehead when he raised his head to give me look for look, flinging back the tawny hair
that he had no free hand to thrust out of his eyes.

‘Is that true?’ I demanded.

‘I am Huil, Son of Caw.’ He gave me the answer in Latin little worse than my own. ‘And you, I know, are he that they call Artos the Bear, and I am in your power. That is all
that we need to know, you and I. Now kill me and be done with it.’

I did not answer at once. The man before me was not a Great One in the way of Hengest, but he was a man whom other men follow; I am such a one myself, and I recognized the kind. He was too
dangerous to let go free, for if I did so, men would gather to him again. There were three courses open to me: I could have his sword hand struck off, and let him go. None of his own would follow a
maimed leader, for by their way of thinking to do so would be to run upon disaster. I could send him south to Ambrosius, safely chained like a wild beast for the arena; or I could kill him
now ...

‘Why did you do it?’ I asked, and the question sounded stupid in my own ears.

‘Revolt against my rightful Lords and masters?’ He looked at me with something of laughter even in his despair and white exhaustion. ‘Maybe because, like you, I would be free,
but for me, freedom is a different thing.’

Others were gathering about us to look on, his name running from one to another, but he never spared them a glance; his fierce tawny gaze held unwavering to my face, as though he knew that it
was the last thing he would see. ‘Kill me now,’ he repeated, and the tone was an order. ‘But strike from in front; I never yet took a wound in the back, and even in death a man
has his vanities. Also let you first unbind my hands.’

‘There is nothing to bruise any man’s vanities in dying with his hands bound,’ I said. I have wondered since whether I was wrong, but at the time I was taking no risk. I made a
small gesture to Cei, who had stepped forward, his own sword drawn, to the captive’s side. Huil Son of Caw smiled a little, confronting the blow with open eyes. Under the blue war patterns I
saw how white his skin was, where the brown of the strong neck ended at the collar bone; white as a peeled hazel nut – until the red fountained out over it. The blow was swift, and he made it
swifter by leaning to meet it.

That was the only time I ever had to do that particular thing.

We cut his bound hands free, then, and later, when our own dead had been laid away, we gave him honorable burial, deep against the wolves, and his sword with him. Only we raised no mound or
cairn to mark the spot for a place of gathering. The wind was dying away and the rain turning soft and steady, what the folk of the Cornlands call a growing rain, as Cei and I turned away from the
dark plot of newly turned leaf mold.

‘It is in my heart that we shall not need to fight another pitched encounter among these hills,’ Cei said. ‘Your sword hand is something heavy.’

‘There are more Wolves in Caledonia than died today.’

‘Truly. But I think that they will not again face the Bear as a war host in open battle. Better from now on, to look for the ambush behind the hill shoulder and the knife in the back,
Artos my friend.’

chapter fifteen

C
EI WAS RIGHT.
T
HERE WERE NO MORE ENEMY HOSTINGS
, no more pitched battles among the lowland hills. Instead, from that time forth
began a different kind of war, a war of raids and counter-raids, a patrol ambushed and cut to pieces in the hill mists, a village burned out in return, a stream poisoned by having dead bodies
dumped into it ... It was more wearying than any campaign of open fighting could have been. For one thing it never quite ceased, even in winter, and so there was never a time when one could sit back
and sigh and loosen the sword belt. That first summer and autumn I was striving by every means in my power to strengthen my hold over the great boss of lowland hills that was the chief barrier
between the northern wilds and the rest of Britain; gaining the friendship, where I could, of the surrounding British chieftains, putting the fear of the gods into those that needed it. Presently I
must follow up Cit Coit Caledon by turning on the last coast settlements to drive back the Sea Wolves, as I had done around Lindum. But first the lowland hills must be secured. And we carried fire
and avenging sword and the terror of heavy cavalry that they had never known before, among the Duns and villages and the old turf-walled hill forts west and northward even into the heart of the
Pict Country.

About a month after Cit Coit Caledon the supply train got through to us from Corstopitum, bringing, besides the grain and arrow sheaves, the spearheads and tallow and bandage linen in the great
leather-covered pack panniers, the money (less than had been promised) to pay the men. And not many days later the supplies from Deva arrived at Castra Cunetium, together with that year’s
draft of young horses, which Cei, who had taken over the outpost by that time, sent on to me. With the supply trains came our first news of the outside world in half a year. For me the news came in
a long dispatch from Ambrosius. Oisc and the boy Cerdic who had escaped from Eburacum had both reappeared in Cantii Territory. The Saxons under Aelle had captured Regnum and sacked Anderida,
slaying every man of the British garrison, but Ambrosius had succeeded in hemming them into the narrow coastal strip under the South Chalk though as yet he had failed to drive them from their new
hills. It did not make particularly good hearing, but it all seemed oddly far away.

For Flavian also there was news, but his came up with the Deva supplies. He took the letter off by himself to a quiet corner of the camp before breaking the thread that held the two leaves of
the tablet together; and later he came to me where I was looking over the new horses, the letter still in his hand. ‘Artos – sir—’ He was almost stammering in his eagerness,
filled with a kind of grave delight.

‘It is from Teleri. She has got a child!’ But I had known as soon as I saw the fool’s face.

I said the due things and asked, because clearly he was waiting for that: ‘Is it a boy – or a girl?’

‘A boy,’ he said. ‘A son.’

‘Then we will wet his head in his absence, this evening when the day’s work is done.’ I set my hand on his shoulder in congratulation. But God knows how I envied him.

Autumn came, and found us well strengthened in our position, with a fruitful summer’s work behind us. Winter passed and again the alders by the horses’ drinking pool flushed red with
rising sap. I had had few dealings with the Dark People since Cit Coit Caledon; they brought us news from time to time, and in return we gave them all that we could spare from the winter grain
stores. That was all. But I knew always that I had only to hang a garland on the Lord of the Alder Trees, and before night, Druim Dhu or one of his brothers would come walking into the fort, and
the knowledge was good.

That spring also, I had another earnest of the Dark People, for a small plant with silvery leaves and a fragile white flower sprang up in the rough grass that now covered the place where the
girl lay with our nine war-horses above her. I suppose a seed must have fallen from the dried herbs that Old Woman had given me, when I burned them for the girl’s spirit, and lain fallow for
a year. I never saw that flower growing anywhere else.

In the second spring, leaving Cei now in command at Trimontium, and Bedwyr harrying the East Coast Settlements, I took Amlodd my armor-bearer, Flavian and Gault and a few others, no more than
would make up a hunting party, and rode far to the southwest, into Dumnonia hunting runs. To me it felt almost painfully homelike to be in that land of heather moors and little shining lochs within
the sounding of the western sea; for the tribesmen were the same breed as those of Cador’s kingdom who were my own kin. But I had not come into those western moors to savor the sour-sweet of
homing hunger, but in the course of my efforts to bond together the loyal tribes and draw them to the Red Dragon.