The Shining Company (21 page)

In the end the shield-ring crumbled and went down.
In the end the hand-to-hand fighting that reached from end to end of the steading broke up also. Companions and shieldbearers were plunging in and out of blazing buildings dealing with any who they found within; and the remaining defenders broke and ran, streaming away over the blackened wreckage of the stockades, heading for the refuge of the forest and the marsh country. We did not go after them; they were few enough.

When the last fighting was done, a spent stillness came over the Royal Village. Only the soft gusting of the wind, only the ugly sounds of wounded men and horses, and the lowing of frightened cattle in the corral. Men were slaking the flames of burning roofs as best they could. Presently we would fire the whole place, but not yet, not till we had stripped it of all that we could make use of, weapons and grain and cattle. I had slipped from the saddle and was standing with my arm over Shadow’s neck, leaning my weary weight against her while she turned her head and lipped at my shoulder. I fondled her, and as my head cleared somewhat, began to look around for Gorthyn, my lord. He was standing with Llif and a few more, close-gathered about the Captain, looking down at the bodies of the housecarls sprawled about the horse-tail standard. Urging Shadow forward I went to join them, not really thinking why, just following the pattern whereby unless he has reason to be elsewhere, a shieldbearer’s place is with his warrior. Lleyn was there, too; and the arrowhead was complete.

Men were turning over the dead, looking at their faces by the light of a firebrand. Looking for someone,
it seemed. One of the searchers lifted aside the fallen standard, its flowing white horsetail stained and clotted crimson, and under it lay a very tall man, his face hidden by the great wolf-mask helmet that he wore. I had glimpsed that helmet earlier, rearing half a head taller even than his housecarls at the centre of the shield-ring.

‘Aethelfrith,’ someone said.

Ceredig Fosterling himself stooped and seized it by the crest and dragged it off. There was a faint smile as though of amused triumph on the dead face, but the hair - Aethelfrith’s hair was molten red - was brindled grey, and the face belonged to a man much older than the Saxon king.

There was a leaden silence. The thing was too bad for any outcry, any cursing, to make it better.

The Captain straightened up, still holding the great helmet, and looked at those about him. ‘Make search,’ he ordered. ‘There is always the chance that he is hiding somewhere, or among the dead elsewhere.’ And men scattered to do his bidding, but we knew, as he knew, that the housecarls had made their shield-ring, and stood up to die, the tallest among them wearing the King’s helmet, to cover the escape of their king himself.

‘They were brave men. Pity it is that their chief was not worthy of them,’ Llif said.

And Gorthyn agreed, in the tone of one making an interesting discovery, ‘I did not think that he would show us white feathers in his tail.’

The Captain swung round on him wearily. ‘Use what wits you have, man. Aethelfrith is no coward, only hard-headed. He knew that had he remained to
die here with his men. We should have gained the victory that we came for. While he lives his hosting war-bands still have him to lead them, and we have no true victory after all.’

‘So, what do we do now?’ someone asked, nursing a sword-arm that dripped red.

‘See to our own dead and wounded, take all that may be of use to us and make for the fort,’ the Fosterling said. ‘All that follows after must wait until these things be done.’

Men were going through the Saxon dead, stripping them of weapons and useful gear. They lay everywhere. There were women and bairns, mercifully not many, for those belonging to the steading in Aelle’s time must for the most part have gone in one way or another when Aethelfrith came upon them, and the newcomers would not yet have brought in their own women. We handled them more gently than the men, but where there was a gold ring or an enamelled belt clasp for the taking we took from all alike, according to the custom of war. We gathered our own dead together for burial, digging out for them hastily a long grave-ditch where the ground was soft outside the stockade. We had not lost heavily, not yet, more horses than men, and those we left lying where they had fallen, finishing off the wounded beasts for kindness’ sake.

Lleyn and I carried Dara to the grave trench, and laid him in it with his cloak across his ruined face. He was really Cynan’s affair, but Cynan and Cynran had a grave-laying of their own to tend to, for they had found Cynri lying where the bodies were clotted thick in the mouth of the Mead Hall.

We stripped the royal steading of all that could be of use to us - weapons, beer, corn, even cattle-fodder - and loaded it on to the farm sleds. We gathered the few cattle from the corral in a small lowing herd; and so with horsemen flanking them in case of surprise, we drove and hauled the spoils back to what remained of the Roman town, through the windy darkness that yet remained of the night. And when the last load was away, we set torches to the thatch again, wherever the fires had been quenched, and left the place to burn over its dead.

Catraeth, Catteractonium as the Romans had called it, was a double cohort fort, and so there was room enough for all of us within the crumbling defences, but not for the horses, so we picketed them outside the fort but within the turf walls of the town, keeping a strong guard on them. Mercifully the river, running quiet after the white water further upstream, looped close under the town walls, making it easy to water them, at least for the present. There were wells and springs in both the town and the fort, but most of them had fallen in.

That first day is a jumble of crowded and shifting memories in my mind. We found a barrack-row with part of its roof still on, to make a shelter for our wounded, and started up cooking fires - there was plenty of dead wood about the place. We slaughtered some of the cattle. The rest would be kept for later need, but men fresh from battle need hot food with blood in it. Conn and his mates, coming in with the rest of the horses and their holders from the place beyond the river where they had been left before the attack, set up their field-forge in what had once been the armourer’s shop. I mind that they brought in with them a little dark man with a thrall-ring round his neck. Some of the steading’s thralls had been caught up and killed in the fighting, others, seizing their
chance, had run while the running was good. This one had come back, being minded to kill a few Saxons in his turn, and being a local man became one of our scouts. Conn’s first task was to cut off his thrall-ring.

I mind coming up from the horse-lines and seeing Aneirin sitting beside one of the fires, looking with interest at a Saxon harp that must have come from Aethelfrith’s Hall. There was blood on him; he had been working all day among our wounded, but it might have been his own, for he had been with the archers last night. I paused beside him and demanded, as though I were the greybeard and he some young hothead, ‘And what would we have done for a praise-singer if the Great Ones had not had a care of you last night?’ (My excuse? That it was not a day since I had helped to lay Dara in his grave, and I was face to face with the fact, which had not quite broken through to me before, that in battle my friends and those most near and dear to me might actually die.)

He looked up at me with an air of great serenity about him, and said only, ‘Nay now, if I am to sing the Great Song of the Gododdin at Catraeth, God and all the Great Ones will hold me safe for the sake of the singing that is in me. If I am not, then what value is my life above the lives of other men?’

There was still hope in us at that time - we waited for the war-bands of Elmet to come in. Elmet that was so much the nearest of the northern kingdoms and must therefore reach us ahead of all the rest. And in those few open days before the warhosts of Deira and Bernicia closed in, we sent off scouts to keep watch to the north and west for the men of the kingdoms and bring us word of their coming. (We are better scouts
than the Saxons, because we are hunters and they are not.) Also Ceredig the Captain called out Madog, he being an Elmet man, and ordered him away into his own hills to tell his tribe that we were in Catraeth and waited for their coming …

After their going, we set ourselves to get the grain sacks and the great jars of Saxon beer stacked under cover. Beer has a cold bitter taste, not like the fire-hearted yellow mead that we were used to, but the cold of it warmed in the belly and dimmed one’s sorrows and weariness, though it did not give the same shine to life. We got the few black cattle fenced in and hunted out anything that would serve as pails and water troughs for them and the horses, against the time when we might not be able to get to the river.

Next day two of the scouts came in, and almost at once after their coming word was running through the fort that a big war-band was on the road from the south, and that the tall red haired man at their head - so said the scout who had once been his thrall - was Aethelfrith.

Of the Elmet men there was still no sign.

From the rampart and the stump of the signal tower we could see afar off the bright blur of the Saxon fires strung along the woodshore to the south, where they had made camp that first night. The next night there were more of them, from the north across the river, as well. The first night the Fosterling held us like hounds in leash, but the second night he called out Cynan and Tydfwlch and said, ‘Are your troops ready?’ We had been ready all day, and we told him so. And he said, ‘Go then, and good hunting to you.’

The brushwood barricades across the main gateway were pulled aside and we went.

After that, for a while there were no more fires in the dark, for the Saxons had learned the un-wisdom of showing their whereabouts in smoke by day or flame by night; but it made little difference, for the scouts brought us word of where the camps were pitched.

But the camps grew more and bigger as the days went by.

In some ways those raids of ours were like the cattle raids that many of us had known among our own hills, and called for the same skills and the same reckless speed. In others they were more like hunting, but a deadly hunting in which the quarry was men. Sometimes we took them on the march, coming on them out of the woods at twilight or out of the westering sun, with the thunderbolt crack of cavalry upon a rabble of men on foot. Sometimes we skirmished about the camps, beyond the firelight. All the while we cost them men and more men, of Deira and Bernicia which I have heard they call Northumberland now. But all the while, despite all that we could do, the numbers against us grew; and they cost us dearly also, in men but even more in horses, until, except when the purpose of things demanded cavalry, we took to holding the horses back and making our raids on foot.

That called for a different kind of fighting, ringmail left behind because of the faint chime that it makes in movement; a closing in, silent as shadows, until the last moment came … That eased the drain on the horses, but it cost us yet more heavily in men.

And still the men of Elmet did not come, nor the combined warhost of the north and west, nor even the warrior bands of the Gododdin, though the Cran-Tara must have reached many of them before we crossed the border on our road south.

In a while - I do not know the exact tally of nights and days - the whole of the two-fold Saxon war-horde was gathered to the mustering place, and we were encircled in their midst. The Saxons built stockades across the roads to the north and south and wherever the ground was possible for a breakout. To attack the stockades would only be to lose men to no purpose, especially as escape was not among our orders; and the barricades would rise again.

Even to get the horses watered now cost men. The time of the wild-riding sorties was over, as the siege tightened about us, and there were daily skirmishes as they sought to drive us in from the crumbling town defences. Soon we should be penned fast within the fort itself, and that would mean losing most of the horses and the best of the still surviving wells. It was on the last mounted sally, the last riding out to guard the horses at their watering, covered by our archers from the town walls, that Gorthyn’s horse was killed under him. I mind the slipping shambles as man and beast came down together, and the bright arc of an axe blade up-swung. It took him between neck and shoulder, slicing through the ringmail into flesh and bone. Lleyn’s dirk was in the Saxon’s throat almost before Gorthyn hit the ground, and an arrow from the walls took him under the arm. But that was too late for Gorthyn.

We slung him across my saddle bow and got him
back into the fort, Lleyn covering our rear. And all the while his blood spurted over my bridle arm. Once back in the fort, we got him down, and lashed his own neck-cloth and mine round his shoulder to check the bleeding, and carried him up to the barrack-row that sheltered the wounded, and laid him on the bare ground - there was no more straw nor fern for bedding - and Aneirin came and did what could be done for him. It was not much. Nearly all the salves and medicines that the Queen had sent with us, even the bandage linen, were gone by then. And in any case, he had lost more blood than a man can well lose and yet live.

The wound sickened and turned foul almost at once. That was the way with most of our wounded, as it generally is when wounded men must lie too close together and there is not enough of anything, even water. It took him three days to die, but I think that he was out of his body for most of that time, even before the fever took him.

Lleyn and I nursed him between us when we were free from other matters.

We were both with him on the last morning. Earlier, he had been bright-eyed and raving, but as the light grew he had slipped into a kind of sleep that was not like true sleep. There was quiet, save for his quick, shallow breathing, in the corner of the barrack-row which we had curtained off with dead men’s cloaks strung on spear-shafts to give him a private dying-space. Such quiet that faintly, from the woods down river, I heard the cuckoo calling; the first cuckoo of the year.