Here Lies Arthur (8 page)

XVII

 

Two days later, in the grey of dawn, and I’m sat by my pony in a dripping wood. Around me, in the gathering light, the other boys of the war-band wait. Sometimes somebody speaks, but we’re quiet, mostly. Good Christians among us pray, face down on the wet earth with their arms spread out, like fallen swallows. The rest of us finger lucky charms, and look for omens in the way the dew drips off the twigs above our heads. We all have weapons; not just our own knives and spears but old swords and rusty javelins that Aquae Sulis’s cowardly mercenaries forgot to take with them when they quit. We can’t stop touching these new toys; rubbing the worn leather bindings on the grips of swords, picking splinters off of spear-hafts, stroking the hide coverings of our clumsy, heavy shields. The horses snort steam and clomp their hooves in the beechmast and nose about vainly for grass to eat among the grey, still trees.

This is how I come to be here. The Saxon raiders,
according to farmers fleeing into Aquae Sulis, are close on a hundred strong. They’re heading towards the town, but slow, distracted by all the farmsteads and villas that lie in their path waiting to be looted, and held to walking pace by the wagons of plunder and columns of slaves that they’ve gathered in their push from the east. They’ve heard that the citizens of Aquae Sulis have a treasure-house stuffed full of gold.

Arthur, who knew that his men and their horses were tired after their own journey to the town, had been all for waiting a few days and meeting the raiders at a place just a mile from the walls, where the old roads crossed the river. But my master had a better idea. He looked at an old map and saw which way the Saxons would be coming. The best route would bring them to a ford that lies beneath the Hill of Badon. What if Arthur could meet them there, where his father Uthr and Ambrosius Aurelianus won their great fight all those years ago? A new victory at Badon would add far more to Arthur’s legend than a skirmish beside some fading town most men have hardly heard of.

Myrddin is not in the battle-line, of course. “My head’s too valuable to have some Saxon axe-man use it for a whetstone,” he said. He’ll be watching from a safe distance, up on the wooded ridge west of the ford. He wanted me to stay there with him. I told him Bedwyr and the other boys would never let me forget it if I did not ride with them into the fight, but he said, “They are fools, and I need you by me. What if you were killed, Gwyn? What if you were wounded? What if someone found you on the battlefield afterwards and peeled your
clothes off and found what’s underneath, and what’s not? No, boy; you stay with me, safe from harm.”

But boys will be boys, even the ones who are only girls dressed up: that’s one of the rules of the world. And another is that servants are always up before their masters. So in the dark before dawn, while Myrddin was still snoring, I crept away to join the others, a long line of us, riding silent as we could across the ford and up into the hanging woods on Badon’s lower slopes. It was a fearful thing, to disobey my master, but not as fearful as facing the jeers of all the others calling me coward.

So here we are, in the wet wood, waiting. The battle-line is drawn up west of the ford, out of sight of us. There aren’t many of them, for Arthur’s hoping to make the Saxons think it’s just a few men from Aquae Sulis come out to try and bar their way. Valerius, in his old Roman gear, has been put in command at the ford. But Arthur is waiting in the trees behind. Once the Saxons start to cross, his horsemen will come thundering down on them. And since the enemy are many, Arthur has decided to throw us boys into the fight as well. We may not be warriors yet, but the Saxons won’t realize that when we come charging from behind them out of the trees, and our coming will push them back on to the swords of the real war-band.

The light grows. We stand as the hoof beats of a single horse come drumming uphill. It’s Bedwyr; my friend Bedwyr, with a leather helmet on his head and straw stuffed in under the rim to stop it sliding down over his eyes. I feel my heart fill at the sight of him. You never love your friends more than when you fear they might
be taken from you in the next few moments. I feel almost as much love for the other boys, for my pony, Dewi, for the trees, for the droplets which fall on my face as Bedwyr reins his horse in close by and spatters me with watery mud.

“They’re coming.” He’s breathless. “Their scouts came at dawn. They saw our men at the ford and heard their challenges, and laughed when they saw how few there were. Now the whole band is moving up, wagons and everything…”

Through the trees behind him we catch distant shouts. Insults are bellowing back and forth across the ford. We strain our ears. We cup our hands around them to catch the drips of sound. We can’t make out words, and even if we could, the Saxons speak a different tongue from ours. But we all hear the shouting blur into a roar as the attackers surge forward into the ford. It’s that battle-noise again, that ugly music woven out of shouting voices and hoof-falls and the clang of swords. I start to wish I’d stayed with my master. Then we hear the high horns ringing, calling Arthur’s hidden riders out of the woods.

“Mount up!” shouts Medrawt, who Arthur’s put in charge of us. He feels ashamed at being left to lead this rag-tag army of boys, and he cuffs the heads of those who stand closest and bellows loud to make himself feel better. “Ride!”

There’s no more time for fear, or prayers, or anything. We struggle into our saddles and dig knees and heels into our mounts’ flanks and crash against each other as the animals turn and fret. But at last we’re all moving,
faster and faster, down through the trees with branches flailing at our heads like clubs, with twigs snatching at our caps and cloaks, with the whole world gone to a whirl of sky and trees and hooves and the hot stink of horses. I reach for my new sword, but Dewi is galloping so hard and the ground’s so rough that I slip sideways in the saddle as soon as I take my hand off the reins, so I forget the sword and grab a handful of his mane instead, and a thick branch comes swiping at my face and I duck under it and suddenly there are no more trees and we’re rushing out across open land, a water-meadow where the mist hangs in woolly ribbons above the drainage ditches, and the other horses are beside me, foaming, racing, and boys are shouting, and Medrawt ahead of us with a spear upraised, and ahead of
him
is a big crowd of men, white faces flashing under helmets as they turn to see us.

I have just time to think “Saxons!” before our charge carries us into the middle of the battle. Off to one side I see Arthur’s red banner flying. The Saxons are bunched up on the road where it slopes downhill to the ford. We gallop past a wagon that has pitched sideways into a ditch and spilled out pots and cloth-wrapped bundles and a shrieking woman. Cows get in our way, white-eyed with terror, blundering across the line of our charge. Dewi rears up, and I lose my grip and slither backwards over his arse and down with a thump in wet bracken.

The battle wraps me in its noise and reek. I get up quick, not wanting to be kicked to death. Where’s Dewi? This isn’t like the battles Myrddin tells about, where brave warriors fight one against another. It’s more like
shoving through a packed marketplace. I blunder against friends and enemies. My ears fill with the sound of blades against shield-wood: a cosy thud, like someone chopping logs. My face gets shoved into a Saxon’s side; I taste the hairy weave of his tunic, smell his sweat. Lucky for me he’s too busy to notice, flailing with his sword at Bedwyr, who’s still mounted. The edge of a shield catches me and pulls me sideways. A yellow-haired man is shouting something at me and waving a great big axe, which I suddenly understand he means to hit me with, but the blow never comes; the battle tugs us away from one another. A riderless pony sends me sprawling. I crash into the reeds at the edge of one of those drainage ditches, slither down into the water. The reeds are spear-high, with flags of thin, pale stuff at the top, waving. Between their stalks the water is brown and brackish, covered with a film of dead flies, their spread-out wings like tiny windows, hundreds of them, thousands. Beyond the reeds men are yelling and horses are shrieking.

Were they really Saxons? There weren’t many of them; less than a hundred. How could such a small army have struck so deep into the British side of Britain? I think maybe they were no more than a gang of foreign
foederates,
mercenaries hired to protect some town up in Calchvynydd who had grown tired of waiting to be paid and turned to banditry instead. Saxons are hard fighters, I’ve heard. Saxons would have found high ground and formed a shield-wall, made a fence of wood and steel that Arthur’s cavalry could not have broken. This lot just
scattered when they saw the horses coming. Ran this way and that, pursued by horsemen. Rallied in small clumps, easily cut down. It was more like a hunt than a battle.

Later, when it’s quiet, I part the reeds and scramble out.

I’m frightened that people will ask where I’ve been. I have worked out a lie to tell them, about being stunned and waking up in the ditch to find the battle over. But no one asks. They’re busy in the piles of dead, digging out fallen friends or stripping the Saxons of the things they carried. Crows are circling. Up above, the green hill of Badon rises from its blankets of woods. I see Arthur on his white horse, and Medrawt among the knot of men around him. In the mud near the ford lies Valerius, and I can’t help but notice that he’s been speared in the back.

“Gwyn!” someone is shouting. “Gwyn!”

It’s Bedwyr, leading Dewi, who he found wandering in the meadows eastward, where our men are plundering the Saxons’ baggage-train. He runs up and hugs me. “We won,” he says, but he doesn’t sound triumphant. He says it like a question, as if he can’t quite believe that any of us is still alive. “I killed a man. I killed him, Gwyn. We won.”

He hugs me hard. He smells of sweat and other people’s blood. And when my face presses against his I feel a prickling where his first, thin, boyish beard is starting to grow.

XVIII

 

Badon fight was a turning point. It was a change in the tide. Arthur and the people round him would talk often of the battle, and the men would swap tales of it whenever there was fighting or drinking to be done. It wasn’t long before people who hadn’t been there started to get Arthur’s little victory over the robber-band confused with that other battle of the Hill of Badon, the big, important one that old Ambrosius had won. Which was exactly what my master was hoping for when he picked out the battlefield.

As for me, all Myrddin said when he saw me alive and whole after the fight was, “So you came through unscathed. Did you enjoy your battle?”

I nodded, of course, but he knew I was lying. “I am never, never, never going into a war again,” I promised myself. And I felt sorry for Bedwyr and the other boys. They must have been as scared as me, but they’d be men soon, and would have to keep on plunging into fights like that until they got into one they would never come
out of. I pulled out my sword and looked at it, and I wanted to cast it away. I’d not used it, but I knew that someone had, in the days before it was mine, and that there must still be dried traces of blood grained in the grooves of its hilt and the cracked ivory pommel.

Myrddin went stalking off to help tend to the wounded men who had been dragged from the field by their friends. He talked a lot about the great healers of times gone by, men with names like Hippocrates and Galen. He did his best, after the battles, binding wounds and applying poultices of herbs and cobwebs, lashing dead pigeons to the feet of men with blood-souring to draw their fevers out. I don’t know if it did much good. It seemed to me that if a man had a wound that was more than a shallow cut, he’d most likely die, and if that was what God wanted for him then there was nothing my master’s bandages and ointments and long words could do.

Down by the river Bedwyr and my other friends were wading about among the dead, pulling Saxons’ boots and sword-belts off.

We pulled back from the ford and camped on Badon Hill, among the green slopes of an age-old fortress. That night, around the campfires, there was less talk of war than usual, as if the memory of the real thing was too fresh in everybody’s minds for the old boasts and poems to work their magic. Even Arthur looked sombre and thoughtful, staring at the sparks as they danced up into the dark. We all kept close to the fires, wary of the ghosts that would be wandering in the dark beyond
those circles of light. But when we had eaten, Myrddin took out his harp and spun the day’s fight into stories, listing the brave deeds that each man had done, leaving out none of them, not even Bedwyr. He touched his story with humour, telling us how none of the enemy had dared face Owain, because he was so beautiful they thought he was an angel sent to help Arthur, and how they had fled before Cei, who was so ugly they thought he was a devil come to help Arthur. And slowly, as we listened, we started to forget how afraid we’d all been, and began to remember it as he told it: Arthur’s shining victory.

And when the stories were done and we were winding ourselves in our blankets and settling down to sleep, Arthur and Cei came and found my master and they went away together into Arthur’s tent.

I was a long time finding sleep. I lay on the hard ground and felt the bruises blooming on me where I’d been knocked and jostled in the fight, and all the while I could hear Arthur and Cei and Myrddin talking low. And I remember wondering what they were planning, and where it would take us to next.

XIX

 

Before dawn, my master’s toe prodded me awake. I scrambled up quick and followed him between the turf ramparts to the horse-lines. There was a line of light like a tide-mark along the bottom of the eastern sky. I could see the curve of the river shining below us, and on the dark land beyond it I could dimly make out the heap of dead enemies we had left there for the crows and foxes.

“Where are we going, master?” I asked, as we saddled the horses.

“Back to Aquae Sulis.”

“Just us alone?”

“The rest will follow later. Arthur is sending me ahead, with a message for the town.”

“What message?”

“Was there ever a servant as impertinent as you? No business of yours, that’s what message. Did you never hear of the boy who was turned into a stone because he asked too many foolish questions?”

We rode out of the camp before anyone but the
sentries were stirring. My mind worked all the way to Aquae Sulis, worriedly wondering what Arthur and my master were planning, and what it might mean for me. Was there to be another fight? Did Arthur mean to take Aquae Sulis for himself? I knew fretting about what was going to happen wouldn’t stop it happening, but I couldn’t help myself.

This was what my time with Myrddin had done to me. In the old days I’d never given a thought to the future, and not much to the past. I’d lived simply in the now. I’d been happy if I had enough to eat, and nobody was hitting me. I’d been miserable when I was cold, and frightened when I was ill, but mostly I gave no more thought than an animal did to what might happen tomorrow, or next week. Just an animal walking about on two legs, that’s all I was till Myrddin changed me. It seemed to me sometimes I’d been happier that way.

The town greeted us uncertainly, not sure if we were good news or bad. People always expect news to be one or the other. Usually it’s both, as the news we carried was. The
ordo
raised their old lizardy arms in praise of God when Myrddin told them how the battle had gone, and then set to groaning and looking downcast when they heard of Valerius’s death. The servant-women who waited on the dead man’s wife started to shriek and sob and pull their hair about, but the lady herself just stood there silently, her long face whiter than ever and her grey eyes fixed on my master, until they turned her about, and led her away.

“What is to become of us?” the chief magistrate
wondered as he watched her go. “This victory has come at a high price. With Valerius gone, who will be our defender…?”

“Arthur wishes to bring your town under his protection,” said Myrddin helpfully. “In exchange for quite reasonable tributes he would be prepared to make Aquae Sulis his capital. Build up its defences and improve it in every way.”

“But we pay our taxes to Maelwas of Dumnonia.”

“Maelwas is as weak as a woman. Has he sent you any help in your present need? No. So how can he object if you turn to another lord, one who
can
protect you?”

“A half-heathen savage out of the western hills,” grumbled the bishop, not loudly, but loud enough for all the rest to hear.

Myrddin ignored him. “Arthur would like a treaty. A sign of lasting trust between us.”

“Gold,” muttered another councillor. “He’ll want gold.”

The chief magistrate closed his eyes and ran his hand over his face like he was counting all the wrinkles. He wanted to be left alone to take in this news of Valerius’s death. He didn’t want my master standing here, pressing him for an answer that would seal the fate of his whole town.

“Valerius had a wife,” said Myrddin lightly.

The magistrate opened a beady eye. “Gwenhwyfar?”

“Arthur is unmarried,” said Myrddin. (I wondered about red-headed Cunaide, but Myrddin told me later she wasn’t a Christian wife, so didn’t count.) “I gather that the lady Gwenhwyfar’s father came from the family
of Ambrosius himself,” he went on. “And that she is related on her mother’s side to King Maelwas. That would be an auspicious marriage for our
Dux Bellorum.”

The other old men clicked their tongues and shook their heads, but the chief magistrate was snared. You could see the calculations going on behind his eyes, driving out whatever sorrow he’d felt for Valerius. If what he’d heard was true, Arthur might have all Britain under his command within a few more years. An alliance with a man like that might be most useful, and if all it took was a marriage with Valerius’s beanpole widow…

He turned to a servant, sniffing delicately. “Call Gwenhwyfar here. We should talk with her, before the
Dux Bellorum
returns.”