Sword at Sunset (29 page)

Each brought some word of the enemy’s hosting, of the numbers growing in Caledon even before the snow was gone from the northern corries of Eildon; of Pictish and Scottish war bands
seeping in by secret ways; of the long black war boats of the Sea Wolves prowling in up the Bodotria Estuary with reinforcements for their brothers of the settlements. And for the time being there
was little we could do but hold all things in readiness, and wait until the red-hot moment came. I knew that to try to deal with the inflowing war bands piecemeal would be to fritter away our own
strength almost certainly to no purpose. It was no formless skirmishing of war bands all across Valentia that we needed, but one smashing victory at the heart of things, Huil Son of Caw slain and
his war host broken and scattered; after that the rest, however slow, would follow.

So I turned a deaf ear to the urging of the hotheads, and remained, as Cei told me to my face, ‘like an old eagle molting on his perch,’ in my half-ruined fort, while slowly the
Barbarians gathered like thunder drawing in from the skyline.

Presently Bedwyr came in, leaving Owain in command at Castra Cunetium, and we held a council of war around the fire that burned in the entrance to the part-roofed Sacculum where I had made my
own quarters. By that time it was clear from their movements, reported by the Little Dark People, that the enemy intended to cut the lateral road, and that once done, we should cease to be a system
for quenching and holding down Lowland Caledonia, and become merely two isolated strongholds, each with its own perilously long and fragile communication line behind it, and no sure means of
linking shields with each other.

‘Added to which,’ said Bedwyr, thrumming softly at the harp on his knee, ‘that if Druim and his kind speak truth, we are like to be out -numbered by upward of three to one when
Huil has the last of his war host gathered, and you have a most noble prospect.’

‘Cei has been urging me to deal with the inflow piecemeal,’ I said.

‘And you are not of his mind?’

‘I am of the mind to wait for the right time, and break the thing with one blow – or am I growing old, Bedwyr?’

‘No,’ said Bedwyr. ‘That is Cei. It is always the old who are fiercest and most impatient.’ And he made music on his harp that was like a snapping of the fingers, and
grinned across the fire at Cei, who grew purple behind his russet bush of beard.

‘Why you – you lop-eared nightingale—’ I caught his eye and he subsided into mutterings like an old hound when it is put out.

‘Peace, children, and listen to me. I have let battle be forced upon me because I have very little choice in the matter,
but also because I believe that by doing so we may well gain our
own choice of fighting ground
.’

‘How then?’ Cei put aside his anger for more important matters.

‘By waiting until the last possible moment, to allow the enemy down into the most southerly tongue of Caledon; by not taking our own battle stand until they are within a few miles of the
road itself. The forest is more open there, and on the watershed we shall have the river marshes below on either side to narrow the pass for us.’

‘For them also,’ Cei said.

‘Aye, but at the least it will even the length of the battle lines and keep them from spreading out to engulf us, as they could well do with their greater numbers; and I think that we can
take care of
their
flanks in advance. Therein lies one of the few advantages of a defensive action.’ I took a bit of charred stick from the fire and began to draw the pattern of
fighting as I proposed it. I was not a stranger to Cit Coit Caledon, for I had hunted there, and ridden with the patrol more than once; it is no bad thing for a war leader to gain some knowledge of
the lay of his campaign country.

And so on a March morning, drawn up in a somewhat unorthodox battle formation across the highest part of the watershed, we waited for the Barbarians.

The red-hot moment that we had waited for had come at last, signaled to us by the Dark People in smoke smother across the hills; and within an hour, all of us, save for a small and most evilly
tempered garrison left behind in Trimontium, had been on the march. It had been almost noon when the signal came through, and it was far into the night when we reached the agreed war camp and found
Owain with his slim column from Castra Cunetium there just ahead of us. Found there also Druim Dhu, standing by one of the newly kindled campfires. But I had scarcely recognized him at first,
through the war patterns of clay and red ochre daubed on his face and slight naked body. Only when he came and touched my foot in the stirrup in the moment before I dismounted, I had known him for
sure by the familiar gesture. His hair was bound back with thongs, and the quiver of small deadly arrows hung well-stocked from his shoulder.

‘The Wolves have made camp on the shoulder of Wildcat Ridge by the Mark Stones,’ he said. (To the People of the Hills, the Saxons were the Sea Wolves and the rest the Painted People;
and the Tribes and the Scots raiders, when banded together, they often spoke of simply as ‘The Wolves.’)

‘How far is that?’

But distance meant little to Druim and his kind; they reckoned by the time that it took to make the journey. ‘If they start at first light, they will be well into the high ground whence
the two rivers spring when the shadows lie so—’ He stooped, and setting the foot of his bow to the ground, drew a line where its shadow would fall about three hours before noon.

‘So. How many do they muster now?’

‘Between two and three times the number that follow you, my Lord Artos. But there are brothers of mine – a few – not so far from here, who have scouted for you all this time
and will serve none so ill as warriors.’

And indeed a score or more of the Little Dark Warriors did come to our fire in the night, and disappeared again by morning. Whether they were the full tally, I did not ask. I had long since
learned that where the Dark People were concerned, one did not ask; to try to use them as normal troops would have been like trying to forge a spear blade from the substance of a hill mist. One
simply accepted what they gave.

We had snatched a few hours of sleep, and been astir at first light, with the fires fallen into ash, and after tending the horses, were gulping down our own hurried meal of hard barley bannock
as we moved off into position, when the word came that the enemy were on the move – God knows how they got it through so quickly, for one could not send a beacon chain through the forest; but
I thought that once just before first light I had felt rather than heard a distant rhythmic mutter of sound that might be a hollow log slapped by an open palm.

And so now, in the chosen place a few miles north of the road, our battle line was formed, and we waited for the first sign of the enemy. I was not happy, for I have always been a cavalry
leader; my ways of battle are the ways of the horse, and yet save for our light riders far out of sight on the advanced flanks, the struggle ahead of us must be fought out on foot. Impossible to
use heavy cavalry effectively in this scrub woodland, though it was far less dense than a few miles farther north. Waiting with my own squadron in the reserve, a little behind the center, I looked
along the battle line, wondering, now that it was too late to make any change, whether I had made the best use of my strength. I had dismounted the whole of the Company, the heaviest and steadiest
troops that I possessed, and set Cei and Bedwyr to captain them in the center of the battle line. On either flank the light spearmen, and beyond again, on the outer horns, the archers and slingers
in isolated groups, curved forward so that the whole line formed, as well as it could in that rough country, a deep bow to bring the advancing Wolves under flank attack before ever their center
could make contact with ours. Beyond again, hidden from sight, I knew where the knots of light riders waited; and I prayed to all the gods that ever gave ear to fighting men, that no pony would
betray them by whinnying at the wrong moment.

We were strung across the neck of the watershed, making the best use of the natural slope of the country, with our left flank resting on a burn that ran down to join the young Cluta, and our
right on the steep thorn-tangled scarp that dropped to the marshes of the Tweed. Behind me, if I looked southward, I should see the great hills of the frontier country, where half the rivers of
Valentia were born, and through which, by way of Three Hills or its outpost fort, the roads ran to the Wall. Ahead of us opened a broad clearing where the young bracken was beginning to spring, and
beyond, the forest rolled away and away like a dark sea washing about Manann the ancient heartland of the Pictish kingdoms; the Dark, the Forest, the ancient and savage and unknown; so that we
stood as it were in the pass between two worlds, to hold it for one against the other.

It was a gray spring day, early in the year for the start of the campaigning season, and the starry white wood anemones turned their shivering backs to the wind and the scuds of rain that blew
in our faces and darkened the crimson of the dragon on our standard to the color of half-dried blood. I thought how Arian’s mane should be blowing back across my bridle hand, and I missed him
sorely, missed his fidgeting and quickening, the thrusting urgency of him between my knees. My mail shirt dragged at my shoulders, weighing more heavily upon me with the long standing, the tramping
up and down; and I wondered again if I had done a foolish thing in keeping the Companions in full war gear while dismounting them. But it was weight I wanted in the center, weight and steadiness;
mobility was for the wings.

Ahead of us the forest seemed very dark – and indeed I do not think that was fancy, for I have noticed always the same thing about Cit Coit Caledon; partly of course it is the pines, the
dark slow tide of pines such as we do not know in the South, but it is the same in the thinner places where the hills and the high moorlands thrust up through the scrub of oak and birch and hazel
like gaunt shoulders through the rents in a shaggy cloak; always in my mind there is this quality of darkness, of wolfish menace in the land itself. It was as though maybe it were a very old forest
and crouched brooding over secrets that it would not be well for men to know.

Something stirred behind me, and a dark shadow slid between my elbow and that of my standard-bearer. I caught the whiff of fox, and again Druim Dhu was there. ‘They are less than eight
bowshots beyond the rim of the dark trees – a great host, a very great host. We shall have good hunting by and by,’ and he showed white teeth in a flash of silent laughter – his
laughter was always silent, like his sister’s. With the stripes of clay and ochre ring-straking his slight brown limbs like the early light striking through the bushes, it was hard to be
sure, save for his voice, that he was there at all; and then suddenly – he was not.

But almost in the same instant, as though it were an echo or an answer to his words, we heard the roaring of the Scottish war horns, like some huge stag belling under the trees.

I saw a ripple run through the ranks ahead of me as a cat’s-paw of wind through standing barley; and the whole center, who until now had been leaning on their spear shafts, crouched down,
each man under his covering buckler, with his spear leveled in welcome to the nearing enemy.

The wind fell away, and somewhere a magpie scolded sharply; then a long gust came booming up through the woods driving a dark scud of rain into our faces, and with the wind suddenly there was a
crashing among the undergrowth that rolled swiftly nearer, and a flicker of movement all along the shore of the clearing. It strengthened and gathered form and substance and became a swarming of
men under the spring-flushed trees. The Wolves were here. They set up a great shout at sight of us, and came on, keeping what line they could among the bramble hummocks and the tangle of last
year’s bracken, sweeping toward us at a steady, menacing wolf lope that seemed slow and yet ate up the ground with a terrible speed. I had just time to make out the barbaric horsetail
standards of the Saxons in the center, the white gull-wing gleam of the Scots’ lime-washed shields on the left wing and the brave blue war paint of the yelling Picts on the right. It was a
very great war host, as Druim Dhu had said, spreading out as it seemed forever, and as they swung nearer, I felt the tremor of the ground under their feet, as one feels it when a river breaks its
banks after rain in the hills, and the very rocks are afraid.

Indeed I felt at that moment much as a man must feel who stands in the track of floodwater and sees the spate roaring toward him. I felt rooted in my heavy ring shirt, and knew that the same
sense of nightmare was howling through every man of my heavily armed center.

The foremost of the Barbarians’ rush was level with the tips of the curved horns now; and I prayed that the archers might not loose too soon. ‘Mithras, slayer of the Bull, hold back
their arrow hands! Lugh of the Shining Spear – Christos, let them not loose too soon!’

The Barbarians were well within the trap when first from one side, and then a heartbeat later from the other, a ragged flight of arrows leapt from the undergrowth and thrummed into their midst.
Men pitched and fell in their tracks, and for an instant under the barbed hail the charge wavered and lost impetus; then with a yell, gathered itself together and stormed on, men stumbling and
falling on the flanks where the arrows wrought most havoc. Before me I saw the tense backs and braced shoulders of the men crouching over their leveled spears ...

A volley of light throwing axes came rattling against the bull-hide buckles of our front rank, and hard after it the enemy sprang forward yelling like berserkers upon the waiting spears. Shield
rank and shield rank came together with a rolling thunder; the cries of men who had found the spears, the ring and clash of weapons and the grinding clangor of shield boss on shield boss; and the
breath-held tension of the moments before had gone roaring up in bloody chaos. The Saxons were striving to take our spearpoints on their oxhide shields, jamming and bearing them down into
uselessness, and in the first crash of the onslaught they were succeeding as, despite the weight, our center was forced back by the sheer ferocity of the rush. Then the Companions rallied and
thrust forward again; swords were out now, and through the tumult and the weapon ring I heard Cei’s bull voice roaring to his men, and all along the center the two battle lines were locked
together like two wild animals struggling for a throathold. Behind me and on either side I felt the squadron taut as runners in the instant before the white scarf falls, but they were all the
reserves I had, and I could not afford to fling them in too soon.