For King & Country (45 page)

"It won't be as effective if the Saxons approach in a thin skirmish line, but I've another idea or two that will bunch them up a bit, to give the archers a nice, broad target to drop arrows on, from overhead. Now, about these other ideas I have in mind, I'll need the best men we have, men who can move swiftly and silently in the darkness. And I'll need cordage, the largest, longest skeins or balls of it to be found in the southwestern kingdoms."

"Cordage?" Cadorius frowned in confusion.

Stirling grinned. "Trust me."

By week's end, Stirling was satisfied that they were as ready for the Saxons as they would ever be—and not a moment too soon, for a runner arrived in the middle of the night on a badly lathered horse, gasping out his message. "The Saxons are nearly upon us! They'll reach Caer-Badonicus by dawn!"

Final preparations took on frantic speed as the last of the horses hauled the final supplies up the hill. What the Britons could neither carry up to the hill fort nor send farther north, out of harm's way, they burned to further deprive the Saxons. It was a grim business, one that Stirling would have given much to avoid, but he knew only too well the cost of trying to walk away from madmen bent on destruction. The madmen followed, until you and everything you valued had been smashed into oblivion. Whether he acted rightly or wrongly with regard to the future timeline which had birthed him, he had no way to know. He knew only that here, in this now, he had only one real choice. He would stop the spread of darkness or die trying.

Stirling slept poorly that night and was awakened from fitful slumber by a commotion of voices. He groped for his sword before he was even fully awake; then a familiar voice, a woman's voice, drifted through the small crowd that had gathered to greet a newcomer.

"No," Covianna Nim was saying, "I can't imagine where Emrys Myrddin might be. He left the Tor three or four days ago."

Stirling and Ancelotis rose to find Covianna Nim looking half asleep and disheveled from what had obviously been a hard ride.

"Why did you come back to Caer-Badonicus?" Ganhumara asked. "Not that I'm dismayed to see you," the young queen added hastily, "for you must know I'm delighted to have a friend here, but I don't understand. They said you were dreadfully anxious about your family at the Tor."

"And I was," Covianna replied smoothly, stifling a yawn. "We've done all we can to strengthen the Tor's defenses and my clan wanted to send a master smith to Caer-Badonicus to help with the defense here. I was the logical choice, with my training in the healing arts, as well. Please, I'm dreadfully weary. I'll tell you all you want to know in the morning."

Ancelotis grunted once, then stumbled back to bed, asleep before the commotion of Covianna's arrival had fully died down. He didn't wake again until dawn, when a brassy signal trumpet sent its warning through the entire encampment atop Badon Hill. Ancelotis splashed cold water into his face, meeting grim glances from royal princes who had led troops here during the previous weeks and days. Half a dozen servants made the rounds with bread smoking hot from the ovens, served with slabs of cheese and cold ham.

Ancelotis bolted down the meal, buckling on armor and sword belt while still chewing. Leather creaked against ring-mail shirts and scale armor as the men prepared grimly for battle. Their sisters and mothers laid out spare weapons, heated enormous kettles of water over half a dozen hearths built into the room, prepared linens for bandages and set out ointments, salves, and glass vials of unknown medicines. Surgeons' tools—scalpels, bronze tweezers, saws for amputating mangled limbs—were dropped into boiling water to be held in clean readiness against all-too-probable need.

Ancelotis left the women to their preparations, harboring a secret feeling that their tasks were even harder than those of the men, knowing they sent loved ones out to be maimed or killed and quietly hugging terror and distress to their breasts while doing what was necessary to save lives. Stirling muttered silently,
You may just be right about that.
In his experience, gathered unpleasantly in the streets of Belfast, women were not only stronger than their menfolk, they were braver, as well, attempting to carry forward the business of living while their men were busy slaughtering one another.

It was a kind of courage Stirling didn't fully understand and found somewhat awe-inspiring to watch, that picking up of shattered lives, the bravery required for women who had seen the effect of bombs to choose, consciously and with a perhaps misplaced sense of hope, the decision to bring new lives into existence in the midst of societal suicide. It hurt, watching these women prepare for battle that might see the men they loved best maimed or killed by day's end.

Lips thinned to a marbled line, Stirling strode out into the grey morning, almost relishing the slap of icy rain and wind against his face. His cloak snapped and whipped around in the gusts, like a living thing gone mad. Mud squelched underfoot and the bleating of penned goats drifted on the wind. Everywhere he turned his gaze, Stirling saw men in armor, officers shouting directions, soldiers piling up caches of weapons, swords and long-necked iron
pila,
pikes and leaf-bladed spears by the hundreds, war axes and Roman-style short swords stacked beside piles of daggers.

A moment later, they had reached the southeastern slope, where Cadorius and Melwas had gathered around them the royalty of Britain. Ancelotis joined the group with a nod of greeting and watched silently as a great, boiling mass of men and horses coalesced on the horizon. It was an eerie, hideous sight, as though the driving rain had solidified into the shape of the enemy. Hundreds of men, a vast carpet of spearpoints and javelins and pikes, with a baggage train of supply wagons that reached farther than the eye could discern, even from the immense height of the hilltop.

"That," Cadorius said quietly, "is what we must hold back until the Dux Bellorum arrives with the greatest bulk of our own army."

Casting a practiced eye over the opposing force, Ancelotis estimated their strength at close to double a thousand men at arms, plus camp followers: wagoners, armorers, cooks and barber surgeons, signal men with curved ram's-horn trumpets whose calls drifted to them on the rain-slashed wind.

"They have learned a trick or two from their Briton captives," Melwas murmured, hearing those signal trumpeters. "That's no Saxon strategy, to march in formation under the direction of disciplined officers."

Cadorius glanced around, nodding grimly. "Aye, you've the right of that, Melwas. Cerdic and Creoda know well enough the strength of such organization. Filthy
gewisse,
all of them."

The term translated in Ancelotis' mind as "traitors."

"Let us hope," Ancelotis muttered, "that Cerdic's Saxon allies forget to
maintain
their discipline in the heat of battle."

They watched in silence as the Saxon army spread like plague across the Salisbury Plain half a thousand feet below. Most of them were on foot, poorly armored, but in a siege such as this, horses would be of little use to the Saxons, in any case. On horseback or not, armored or not, the Saxons had the advantage of sheer numbers, close to three times the number of Briton defenders on this hilltop. Stirling and Ancelotis and the others watched them come, watched them reach the base of the immense hill, watched the spiked carpet of men and weapons break like foam across a rocky seacoast, parting around the base of Badon Hill to surround it with a ring of glittering weapons.

At least, Stirling muttered to himself, they don't have siege engines.

The Saxon kings were in no apparent hurry to attack. An unpleasant, fluttering sensation rose from the pit of his stomach as Stirling watched the Saxons cut off escape routes one by one. At a nod from Cadorius, Stirling and his host walked the whole long perimeter of the innermost wall, studying troop deployments, squinting into the brutal teeth of the wind as the Saxons dispatched small squadrons along the muddy roads leading from Caer-Badonicus to the nearest villages.

They would find little of value in those villages, which had been abandoned for a radius of five miles around. The Saxons would find no food, no livestock, no slaves to force into building their siegeworks, nothing but a few very nasty surprises in the form of covered pit traps dug beneath barn and cottage floors. The Britons had camouflaged their man-traps with layers of dirt and straw or rushes across tightly stretched panels of woolen sailcloth, dyed brown with walnut hulls to match the color of their earthen coverings. Like Burmese tiger traps, the stake-studded pits waited for unwary predators to step into them. Very soon, the Saxons would discover just how high a price they must pay for attempting to conquer Salisbury Plain.

Down at the base of the hill, foot soldiers were busy erecting camps in a loose circle, a living noose of men, spears, and swords. They began digging trenches, as well, throwing up an earthen rampart to shield them somewhat from missiles hurled from above. Ancelotis muttered a few choice oaths, watching. "That bastard Cerdic is earning his blood money, no doubt of that." He spat disgustedly to one side, earning a grunt of agreement from King Melwas, who had joined him.

"That's a move yon bastards have never tried before," Melwas growled. "And I've fought them enough times to know."

Stirling watched and wished bitterly for better weapons than they had. What we could do with just one good machine gun... Might as well ask for attack helicopters and cruise missiles, while I'm at it.

Melwas frowned. "I see nothing like a tent a king would use down there. Not even one fit for a royal prince. The Saxons may be barbarians, but their so-called royalty are quick to demand the comforts of civilization and complain loudly when deprived of them."

Ancelotis grunted. "Try the lee of the hill. It's where
I'd
set up, were I King Aelle or Cerdic."

Melwas' glance was keen. "Emrys Myrddin said much the same thing."

"With good reason." Stirling grinned as fierce gusts of rain ripped through the Saxon encampment, playing hob with their attempts to set up sleeping tents.

Melwas smiled in dark humor. "They'll be cold and wet and exhausted before a few hours have passed. And unless I miss my guess, they'll have as much trouble as our own men did keeping cookfires going anywhere but the lee of the hill. "

An army fighting on cold, unpalatable rations was an unhappy army, resentful and discouraged. With the countryside laid bare in advance of their arrival, they'd find little more than dirt to add to their already strained supply of rations. He smiled in cold pleasure at the notion. Having seen enough for the moment, Ancelotis and Melwas left instructions for the men standing perimeter watch to report anything out of the ordinary in the Saxons' preparations, then headed back for the lee side, to study further developments there.

"They look to be throwing the bulk of their men downslope of here," Ancelotis told Cadorius, who was issuing orders on their own troop deployments.

Cadorius nodded. "It's as we expected, then. I've assigned Dumnonia left flank guard along the lee," he pointed to a stretch of wall some hundred feet distant, "and, Melwas, I'll want Glastenning on the right flank. Ancelotis, you and your Sarmatian archers will take the center, as we agreed and planned for." He nodded toward the banded poles set up at carefully measured intervals along the lee side of the summit. "We'll scatter the other kingdoms around the perimeter." He was scratching a rough map in the mud, sheltering it with his body as he crouched down to work.

Even with the number of men they already had, the summit and its sprawling perimeter walls were so large, the defenders would be spread dangerously thin. And they would have precious little but women and children in reserve, should Artorius be delayed on the march south.

I mislike it, Ancelotis said privately to Stirling. I mislike it a very great deal.

Stirling wasn't particularly keen on it, either. "We'll have to watch for shifts in their deployment, day and night," he said aloud for Cadorius' benefit. "The children could fill in the gaps as lookouts, particularly the older lads, and give our men more rest for the actual fighting. A sudden surge along one of the more thinly defended stretches, and they'd be among us before we knew they were climbing. Particularly after dark."

"After dark?" Cadorius grunted while Melwas' eyes shot wide.

Even Ancelotis was taken by surprise.

It was something, Stirling supposed, to startle three kings, each of them with more than a decade's bitter experience in combat. Yet the notion of a night sortie astonished them. Stirling grinned. "Why d'you think I wanted the specially trained men and the cordage? You do remember what the Oracle at Delphi said, don't you?"

Melwas frowned in puzzlement, but Cadorius had begun to chuckle. "Oh, aye. A grand story that was, I remember my own father reading it out to me in the Greek. I've forgotten which historian it was, but the story I recall very well, indeed."

Melwas looked from Stirling to Cadorius and back again. "I've not heard it."

"For a shipload of gold," the Dumnonian king chuckled, "the poor bastard was told by the Oracle of Apollo, 'You will destroy a great empire.' Sure of victory, he returned home to the war with Persia. And when the autumn came, and the time for the harvest was due, the fool retired from the field, for that was how war was fought in those days, everyone on both sides of a conflict going home to bring in the crops. Only the Persians followed him. Shocked the entire known world, waging war at harvest time. Sacked the capital, took over the gold fields, and put the vanquished king in chains, so he could repent at length on the empire he'd destroyed. His own."

Stirling nodded. "The Persians changed forever the way war would be fought, with that maneuver."

Melwas was grinning. "Fighting a night sortie will be just as great a shock to the Saxons, I'm thinking. Marvelous idea, Ancelotis."

Ancelotis, as startled as the others by the notion, laughed aloud. "Oh, aye, isn't it just, now?"

The others chuckled at the play on words.