Sword at Sunset (61 page)

For a time – short or long – the close-grappled line reeled and strained to and fro, as the ebb and flow of battle set now this way and now that, and then the British broke their
hold and drew back, but as a wild animal draws back to spring, and with a bound and a roar, sprang forward with uplifted spears. Again came that rolling thunder of shield meeting shield, for a long
desperate moment the two war hosts strained together, locked and immovable; so I have seen wrestlers strain together, or a pair of antler-locked stags in the rutting season, neither for the moment
able to gain the least shadow of advantage over the other. And then, with a slow long heave, the British seemed not so much to thrust the Saxons back as to lift up and pass over and engulf
them.

By that time the white dust cloud was hanging half the height of the valley, but through it I could still make out dimly how the Saxons gave ground, slowly at first and then more swiftly,
falling back in something like disorder upon their own reserves, who had not so far been engaged. Open ground littered with dead and wounded had appeared between Briton and Barbarian, and it was as
though both sides paused to draw breath. I remember now, the quietness that rushed in to fill the place of the tumult as it died away, an acute and shining quietness, wind-haunted and filigreed
with the churring of grasshoppers among the seeding grasses and the blue cranesbill flowers.

The dust cloud had begun to sink, and through it I saw Aelle of the South Seax, the War King, with his house carls about him and his white horsetail standards, come forward with his reserves.
The pause was over and with a roar and a bellowing of war horns, the two hosts sprang again for each other’s throats.

And again, after a sharp and bitter struggle, I saw the British battle line begin to give ground; slowly as ever, and contesting every yard of the way, back over ground that had been fought over
before, back beyond it; they were level with the concealed cavalry wings now; and I knew that it was time to fling in the horse. And in that same instant, I saw what remained of the bodyguard
– a score of men, maybe – led by old Aquila, heave forward from the rest of the battle line, cleaving like a wedge of red-hot metal into the battle mass of the enemy.

They too knew it was time for the horse, and were drawing the attention of the whole war host upon themselves to give the best possible chance to the cavalry charge; they were throwing away
their lives for the price of taking the greatest possible number of the Barbarians with them. It was a superb and glorious piece of waste, one of those things that men do when for the moment they
cease to be quite men, and walk with the high gods.

My hand was already lifting in the signal; Prosper raised the horn to his lips and the swift notes of the cavalry charge took wing across the valley, to be caught up before the last note had
died, by the trumpeter on the ramparts of Cader Berywen. Among the thorn scrub a sword flashed up, and the next instant, with Perdius at their head, the cavalry broke forward and were away at a
canter, at full flying gallop, their spears swinging down as they went.

I watched them away, as one watches one’s hounds slipped on a boar, but there was no time to see how the charge took effect. I caught up my buckler, and sent Signus plunging back to rejoin
the waiting squadrons of the Company. ‘Our turn now! Come on, lads!’

For us it must be the longer way around, for with the steep slope of the hill northwest, and the spread of the fighting up the flanks of it, it was impossible to bring a rear charge around that
way without arriving in disorder that would rob us of half our striking power. We flung our curve right-hand-wise around Badon Camp, riding like the Wild Hunt, for we must have had the best part of
a mile to cover. I heard the drum of the squadrons’ hooves behind me and on either side; the wind of our going filled the standard so that the Red Dragon of Britain seemed to spread its wings
in flight above us. We struck the Ridgeway and thundered down it toward its meeting point with the road south. Signus’s flying mane whipped back over my buckler, and the round sods flew
beneath his shod forehooves; and as we swung into the mouth of the pass, at full pitch of my lungs I raised the war cry of Arfon: ‘Yr Widdfa!
Yr Widdfa!
’ and heard it caught up
behind me into a challenge, into a paean.

From both sides the cavalry wings had driven home their charge, crumpling and driving inward the Barbarian flanks to jam their own center, breaking the force of the deadly thrust against the
British battle line; and now it was for us to give the crowning blow.

We took the Saxon war host in the rear, crushing in the hastily formed shield-wall as though it had been a thornwork hedge. And I saw before me a swaying and struggling mass of yelling,
battle-crazed faces under horned and flanged helmets, a crimson deadly leaping of spears and short seax blades over the rims of the linden bucklers; and then it broke and crumbled back, and with a
roar, we hurled through upon the reeling battle mass of the enemy beyond.

The battle of which I had decreed the pattern, and which, so short a while before, I had looked down on, magisterially aloof, seeing it spread below me in its entirety, became for me as for the
youngest boy with a javelin, the few yards of howling turmoil closest at hand, the feel of my weapon striking home, the snarling face of the man next before me, the reek of blood and horse’s
sweat and choking chalk dust.

My spear broke in my hand at last, as I wrenched it from the body of a gigantic Saxon, and I flung the shaft away and drew my sword as we thrust on. I was making for the place where, dimly
through the rolling dust cloud, I could glimpse the white horse standard with its crimson tassels and gilded skull that staggered to and fro above the mob, marking where Aelle of the South Seax
fought among his house carls; and suddenly it seemed that the solid battle mass before me was thinning, breaking up as the mailed wedges of cavalry drove into it. The muzzle of a black horse swept
up on my right, and snatching a glance that way, I saw Medraut flinging his squadron forward as though the battle were his alone; his face, with a small east-wind smile on it, was white as the moon
daisies that he wore like a plume in the comb of his war cap, and his sword blade was blooded to the hilt and over the hand that held it.

An alley of clear space opened for an instant, and as I thrust Signus into it, a naked figure sprang across almost beneath his breast. The Saxons had learned long since that their berserkers
were the most terrible weapon they possessed for use against cavalry. For a splintered and sickening instant of time, I saw the drugged, dilated eyes, the lean body reddened from head to heel, the
wicked disemboweling blade; then, as the creature dived for Signus’s belly, I took the only chance there was, wrenched the great horse away, and sent him up in a rearing half turn, screaming
with rage, his hooves lashing for the man’s head. It was a hideous expedient, for the least misjudgment of time or position would give the berserker a perfect opening for his belly thrust; as
it was, hampered by the reeling throng about me, I doubt if I should have made it, but in the same instant, with a deep singsong snarl, Cabal crouched, and launched himself at the man’s
throat. Between the lashing forehooves I saw them go down together, and could wait to see no more ... no more ... but thrust on toward the white gleam of the horsetail standard that still showed above
the sea of conflict. I was within half a spear toss of the royal shield-burg, when a young man – a chieftain to judge by his dragon-scale war shirt and the red gold about his neck –
sprang in before me at the head of a yowling knot of his own kind, and caught at Signus’s bridle, and clung on, and even as the horse reared and plunged squealing with fury, his sword rang
against mine; and the westering sunlight, slipping over the downland shoulder into the shadows of the pass, fell full upon his face. And for a moment as his fellows swept forward to meet the
squadron the fighting that boiled around us fell away. His war cap had been struck off and the wild mane of hair that sprang to his shoulders was red as a fox’s pelt, and the eyes that blazed
into mine were filled with a gray-green fire, a kind of furious laughter. And across the years that had made him a man and a leader of men, I knew him again, and he knew me. He shouted to me,
‘Did you not say that I should come again, and kill you if I was able?’

And I shouted back, ‘Or I you, Cerdic, son of Vortigern!’ and caught his stroke with a shock of blade on blade that ran up my arm in numbing flight of pain sparks, and sent it
spinning from his hand, then struck again, at the neck. I saw his face contort into a choking snarl, and the bright spurt of blood, and without a sound, he was gone among the trampling hooves and
feet of the battle.

But the horsetail standard had also disappeared from sight.

Presently the host of the Saxons had become a mass of swirling separated war bands that swayed and surged to and fro, each battling desperately for itself; with the cavalry busy among them. They
were breaking away in flying groups, and later still, at twilight, when people in houses would be lighting candles for the women to weave by, after the evening stew, we were hunting the defeated
rabble of a proud and mighty war host down the White Horse Vale.

Not today, not today, would Britain go down into the dark.

chapter thirty

W
E HUNTED HARD AND SLEW OFTEN, AND
I
REMEMBER THAT
we were singing as we rode, one of the old triumph songs out of the Western
hills. The singing made me think of Bedwyr who had so often sung us home from battle, but in the deepening twilight I could see no sign of him, and there was no time for asking of this man or that.
No time for feeling much, at all, neither for triumph – despite the singing of the squadrons about me – nor for grief; I was spent and empty as I rode, the empty husk of a thing created
for the purpose of killing Saxons.

The dusk was almost deepened into the dark when we came to the place below where the Ridgeway crossed the Calleva road. There was a sickly smell to the place, and the ground, even down into the
Vale, was cluttered with bodies, British and Saxon; and ahead of us the red gleeds of watch fires showed where the Barbarian host had left their wagon laager. We set up a shout, and settled down
into the saddle for more fighting, but the men who had been left with the baggage train had joined the rout of their comrades and nothing and no one was left to draw seax against us. With one
accord, the irregulars and a good part of the cavalry dropped out in search of plunder. I could have whipped them off, I suppose, as a hunter whips the hounds off a carcass, but it scarcely seemed
to matter now what they did. I left them to their scavenging, and rode on with whoever cared to follow me. But I remember that there was no more singing, we were all too weary.

Indeed we carried the hunt little farther ourselves, but a few miles down the Vale, drew rein by a little chalk stream to breathe and water the horses; and knew as by common consent that for
this night, the hunting was over.

The stream ran under the lee of a hazel coppice, and the snail-shine of the rising moon was silvering the world about us, and, unbelievably, in the hazy depths of the thicket a nightingale was
singing. A big shadow loomed up beside me, and I saw that it was Cei, drooping in the saddle, with his buckler hanging almost in two halves at his shoulder.

‘God! What a day! What a thundering victory! Is this all, or do we hunt them further?’

‘Let them go,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow will be time enough to scour out the countryside – when we have learned our own losses and bound up our wounds.’ I was looking at
the figures on the wood-shore, some still sitting their horses, some sliding like cramped old men from their saddles. Those who, for the most part, still wore somewhere about them the withered rags
of a moon daisy had thrust up closest to me. There were maybe two squadrons of them, or rather less. ‘Is this all that is left of us?’

Someone laughed thickly in his throat, and I knew it for Owain. ‘Na, Pharic and his wild men dropped off to help rifle the baggage wagons.’

‘
I
did not, then!’ Young Riada pushed up beside me. ‘I am my lord’s armor-bearer.’

‘And there are likely a good few of us back among the wounded!’ someone else put in.

‘What of Bedwyr?’ I asked after a moment. ‘Does anyone know?’

Flavian answered me, that time. ‘I saw him go down. No more than that.’

And the nightingale was singing as it had sung in the old palace garden on the night small Hylin died.

In a while, when we had breathed and watered the horses, and ourselves drunk and bathed our hurts at the stream, I gave the order to remount, and got them going again.

The moon was well clear of the Downs by now, and as we turned the horses’ heads back the way we had come, there shone out at us, from the turf of the Downs glimmering and gigantic,
distorted by the slopeway of the hillside, the chalk-cut sacred Sun Horse of the White Horse Vale.

At the same time we saw, far up the curve of the Vale and sweeping closer, the flare of torches; and a few moments later caught the first faint throb of hooves. ‘Sa, they have rifled even
the watch fires!’ someone said. ‘They have finished with the wagons and remembered the hunt again.’

A flying cloud of dark shapes was taking substance under the torches, heavy cavalry and men on little fiery mountain ponies; some of the light cavalry from the battle had come up, the riders
leaning sideways in their saddles, with men on foot leaping along beside them clinging to their stirrups, and man after man carrying makeshift torches kindled from the Saxon watch fires, that
streamed in mare’s tails of flame above their heads. Signus stamped and snorted at the nearing fire, and the foremost of the wild riders saw the Red Dragon on the edge of the stream, and set
up a great hoarse shout and swung toward us. In a few moments the first of them were dropping from their horses all around, then more and more until the whole loop of the stream was full of men and
horses and the swirling, dancing flare of torches that drove out the white light of the rising moon. Some were dumb and dazed with utter weariness, others beginning to be drunk, as much with the
aftermath of battle as with the honey beer that they had found in the wagons. One – a long lean man with a brilliant eye – capered wildly in an open spot, wearing a woman’s
flame-colored gown hitched to his knees; and another, dismounting from his weary horse while it drank, sat on the stream bank with his head on his knees, and wept bubblingly for a dead friend. It
might as well have been myself. Many had twists of blood-soaked rag somewhere about them, and the horses too showed gashes on breast and flanks, so that some of them it was pitiful to see. Men and
beasts alike made for the water – even those men who were already awash with Saxon ale, so that for a little, with the bathing of many hurts, as well as drinking, the stream below the
torchlight must have run fouled and reddened.