Sword at Sunset (19 page)

I handed the man over to my own lads, with orders to feed him and the exhausted pony, and let them rest in the field camp while someone else belted back to Deva with their news. Then I sent for
Bedwyr and Cei, and showed them the tally stick. Cei swore at sight of it, and Bedwyr, with his left eyebrow flying more than usually like a mongrel’s ear, whistled long and liquidly.
‘It seems that we shall have hot work when the time comes, my brothers.’

‘Something too hot for my liking,’ I said. ‘Therefore I think, since I’ve no mind to gamble against loaded dice when there’s any other way, that we must do
something to ease the odds a trifle.’

‘And that something?’

‘Bear traps,’ I said.

‘Strange. I always thought that bear traps were dug for the bear, not by him.’

‘Not in the case of this particular bear.’

So we set the tribesmen to digging; midway between the stream and the woodshore a long string of trenches and potholes with gaps between for the passage of cavalry, cutting straight across the
road and reaching for somewhat over half a bowshot on either hand. The road crossed the stream on a broad paved ford, at a spot where the bank was fairly firm, but save for that one spot the water
ran wide and shallow, in a chain of pools between marshy sallow-fringed banks where a man could become bogged down by a single unlucky step. Therefore we judged that the Saxons would not be able to
fan out until they were well clear of the valley bottom and the half bowshot was enough. We cut the trenches about three feet deep and three to four feet wide, and set a few short stakes, their
ends sharpened and hardened by fire, along their floors for good measure. And then, just as one does with a bear trap, covered all over with a light latticework of branches, scattering above it the
sodden tawny wreck of last year’s bracken still clothing the hillside at that point. The place where the trench crossed the road might have been a difficulty, but as the valley was soft, the
road just there was a corduroy of logs carried on a brushwood bed, and it was a simple matter, after we had cut the trench across, to lay the logs back over a flimsy hurdlework just strong enough
to carry them but no more. One or two of the logs had rotted through and had to be replaced, but that might have been done simply in an attempt to keep the road in some kind of repair; and when the
thing was finished, the hillside looked just as it had looked before.

The spare earth we carried back into the trees, in every trug and basket that Deva could provide.

The thing was finished, and with maybe a day to spare.

That night we camped behind the belt of woods, as we had done ever since the work started, and I called Bedwyr to me. ‘Beer all around, I think, Bedwyr. The men are all tired; they have
worked like heroes and tomorrow they must fight like heroes. But for God’s sake see that they don’t drink too much. I can’t afford to find myself with a camp full of walking
corpses in the morning.’ I went to look for Cei myself, and when I found him in the horse lines, took him aside and issued a private ultimatum. ‘Cei, I’ve given the order for beer
all around. Don’t swill too much of it.’

His indignation was, as usual, ludicrous. ‘Have you ever known me drunk?’

‘I’ve never known you
show
drunk; but nevertheless, it makes you reckless afterward.’

He looked at me, half laughing, half indignant still, then flung an arm clashing with blue glass and copper wire bracelets across my shoulder. ‘I’ll not lose you Britain, for the
sake of a horn of sour beer.’

chapter ten

L
ATE THAT NIGHT ANOTHER OF THE LITTLE DARK HILLMEN
rode in on another shaggy pony, to bring us the latest word of Hengest’s advance. He was clear of the mountains and into the
fringing lowland hills, and his forward scouts were making camp on the wooded flanks of Black Bull. By noon tomorrow, the waiting should be over.

But there was always the chance that the enemy might try a night march, and so there was no lingering next morning. A meal of bannock and hard yellow cheese was doled out to the men at first
light, and before the sun was well clear of the woods that crested the opposite ridge, we had taken up our fighting positions; the foot soldiers among the dense low scrub that flanked the road, the
mounted archers and the Cymric longbows in the shadows of the trees on either side of them. On the far left, I knew that Bedwyr was waiting with his cavalry wing, as here on the right I held the
other. Behind us, among the trees, Fulvius was with the reserves, and away among the woods across the valley, drawn well back from the Saxon’s line of advance, Cei – stone-cold sober,
for he had kept his promise to me with regard to the heather beer – was lying up with another squadron of fifty or so mounted tribesmen, ready to take the Sea Wolves in the rear, or cut off
their line of retreat when the time came.

Hengest, it seemed, had not made a night march, and the day crawled slowly on with no sign of his coming. It was a soft day of veiled sunlight, with a silver bloom on the distant hills, and the
milky scent of the hawthorn blossom along the woodshore came and went like breath on the little wandering aimless wind that seemed at times to lie down and go to sleep in the young bracken. A day
when one could not quite believe in the red evening on which the sun must go down. The slow hours wore away; nothing stirred among the wayside scrub save from time to time that small fitful wind
silvering the hazel bushes; only in the half shadow under the trees, now and then the jink of a bridle bit or the low voice of a man soothing a restless horse told where the cavalry waited –
waited ...

I put up my hand to feel that the knot of hawthorn was still in the forehead band of my helmet – it had become a custom with us of the Company always to ride into battle with something of
the kind about us, both for identification and as a kind of grace note, a mark of pride. A gadfly bit my old Arian, and he tossed up his head, snorting and trying to flick his tail which was
knotted up for battle in the usual way, that no enemy might grab him by it to hamstring him. Somewhere among the far woods the first cuckoo of the year called repeatedly, the sound soft and bloomed
with distance. Beyond the scrub, the shining midge clouds danced in the sunshine.

Noon was long past, the shadows of the opposite hillside had gathered themselves up small under the trees, and our own shadows were beginning to flow cool down toward the stream, when there was
a kind of dark quiver along the skyline of the opposite ridge, where the Eburacum road lifted over it. I had been staring that way so long that for a moment I could not be sure that it was anything
more than the skyline crawling under my tired eyes. I blinked, trying for clear sight, and the flicker came again, more strongly this time, more unmistakably.

The waiting of that interminable day was over.

A few moments more, and it was as though the dark lip of a wave lifted over the crest of the ridge, clung there an instant and then spilled over. And so we saw again the Saxon war host.

They were spreading down into the valley, a swarm of ants, as the scout had said, their center on the road, their wings spread out, thick rather than far, over the firmer ground on either side.
The level rays of the westering sun struck jinks of light out of their darkness, the broad fireflake of a spearhead, the round boss of a shield, the comb of a helmet; and among them the streaming
white horsetail standards caught the light and seemed to shine of themselves, harshly bright as the sun-touched wings of a wheeling gull against a thunder sky.

The scout had not been far astray in his estimate; there must be around fifteen hundred of the enemy. It seemed to me that I could feel already the faint trembling of the ground under their
advancing feet. I was in the saddle by that time, and I said to Prosper my trumpeter, sitting his horse beside me with the silver-bound aurochs hunting horn we had always used to sing us into
battle, ‘Sound me the “Mount and Make Ready.”’

He set the silver mouthpiece to his lips, and the familiar notes rang out, not loudly but with a haunting echo under the trees, and instantly there was a stir to the right and left and behind
me, as man after man swung into the saddle.

‘Now the “Advance.”’

One cannot use too many different cavalry calls; it is confusing to the men and horses who must obey them, but I had passed to each of the chiefs and my squadron captains, that the first time
the Advance sounded that day, it meant simply that the Companions and the spears and javelin men, but not the archers, who were to remain under cover just within the fringe of the scrub, were to
move out from the woodshore into the open so that they could be seen by the enemy, and there halt.

While the soft echoes still hung under the branches, there came a brushing and a cracking of twigs, and a surge forward through the undergrowth, the beat of hooves on last year’s fallen
leaves, and the jingle of bit and harness, and our battle line moved out into the open and drew rein on the clear ground before the wood-shore. I bent forward for the dappled bullhide buckler with
its boss of gilded bronze that hung from my saddlebow, and swinging it high to my bridle shoulder, gathered up the reins again, sensing rather than hearing the movement echoed all around me. We had
begun of late years, as we got larger and heavier horses, to practice the new Byzantine style of warfare. It was far more effective than the old hacking sword charge, but it still seemed strange to
me to ride into battle with the slim ashen spear shaft balanced in my hand instead of the familiar sword grip.

The Saxons had seen us; their dark mass checked an instant in its advance, then they set up a great shout, and the quiet valley and the cuckoo’s calling were engulfed in the hollow booming
of the Saxon war horns that seemed to burst to and fro from wooded crest to wooded crest. And the dark battle mass came rolling on again at an increased pace. That was what I had wanted; for that I
had given the order to advance into the open; for it needed no mere orderly oncoming, but the hot-blood hurly of a charge to bring the bear traps into their full use.

‘Play me a tune,’ I said to Prosper. ‘Just a tune that sounds like mockery.’

He grinned, and again putting the mouthpiece to his lips, answered the strident bellowing of the war horns with a lazy rendering of the hunting call that sics the hounds on when the quarry comes
in sight. Probably they did not know what it meant, but the mere sound of it was an insult; and across the valley we heard the yell that they set up, and the war horns bellowing again. They were
sweeping down toward the ford, the white horsetails lifting and flowing out on the wind of their going, and my old Arian flung up his head and neighed his own defiance to the war horns.

I had wondered how the new crossbred horses would stand up to their initiation. All that winter we had been training them on, breaking them to crowds and hostile shouting and the boom of war
horns, teaching them to charge unbroken against men with blunted spears, to stand undismayed against the rush of yelling warriors, to run straight on a target, to use their own ironshod forefeet as
weapons; for to get the most worth out of a war-horse, he as well as the man on his back must be a fighter. They had learned well and willingly in the main, with the proud eagerness to understand
and do what is wanted that most of the horse kind show, once the first struggle of breaking is over. But would they remember their training now? Now, when the spears were not blunt and they caught
the smell of blood?

The Saxons had almost reached the stream; a close-knit mass, shield to shield, shoulder to comrade’s shoulder, and as they came, quickening into a loping wolf run, we heard the deadly
sound of the Saxon war cry that begins as a murmur like the murmur of distant surf, and swells and swells at last into an appalling roar that seems to shake the very hills. They had taken to the
water now, their center crossing by the ford, those on either side splashing as best they could through the shifting shallows, and as they came I saw in their forefront, under the white horse
standards, Hengest himself, in the brave midst of his house carls. An old gray-gold giant, with the golden arm ring of an earl coiled about his sword arm, and the low sunlight clashing like cymbals
on the bronze-bound ox horns of his helmet; and at his side a lesser man of half his age but with something of the same brutish splendor, who could be no one else than Octa his son.

Of necessity the Saxons had lost their close formation through the shallows; men were being pushed too far out, so that the battle line became ragged; the stream was all a yeasty thresh and the
spray sheeted up about them, bright in the level sunlight. They were across now, closing the ragged shield mass, roaring uphill at the full charge, though their battle-front was taking on the shape
of a bent bow as the struggling flanks were slowed by the soft ground.

Old Arian began to dance under me, snorting, and I quieted him with a hand on his neck; he was always impatient for the charge before the trumpets sounded. Other horses were catching the fret
from him; men, too; suddenly I felt as though I were holding straining hounds in leash, waiting for the moment to slip them against the quarry.

I had not long to hold them. The van of the dark onsweeping mass was halfway up the gentle slope. Another spear’s length. The terrible rhythmic battle shouting broke into a ragged outcry,
as between one step and the next, the innocent bracken-clad hillside opened to engulf the foremost surge of the great man-wave. The first rank plunged from view almost before they could yell their
dismay; those behind could not stop, thrust on by those behind again, and pitched down on top of their comrades. One of the horsetail standards lurched and went down, and in a bare heartbeat of
time all was wild confusion, twisting and struggling bodies and the furious and anguished cries of men.

But with the trenches caved in all along their length, the Saxons could see what lay before them, and the surge forward began again. Some of the men had chance-struck the gaps of solid ground
between, and were hardly checked at all, some jumped the trenches or swarmed across over the very bodies of their comrades, while those in the trenches who had escaped the sharpened stakes began to
scramble out. The war horns were bellowing like wounded bulls. Nevertheless, the bear traps had done their work, and the impetus of the charge was broken.