Sword at Sunset

“You have sworn oath enough,” I said.

And so the first of the gathering that Kinmarcus had foretold was well begun, the gathering that was to continue through all the dark months ahead until, when spring returned, I found myself with a goodly war host at my back.

WE had all but given up hope of Bedwyr’s return, when at last he appeared with the grain carts and the escort, looming out of a snowstorm that drove sideways in mealy drifts before a black wind from the northeast. Men and horses alike were near to the point where they drop and do not rise again; but behind him the light baggage carts were piled high with grainskins or covered with roped-down tent cloths. “It is a thing that has its uses, to be a prince in Arfon,” he said when we brought him and his fellows into the mess hall. “Even one born under a hawthorn bush,” and he staggered down beside the fire and sat there, his head hanging, while the snow thawed on his eyelashes. I think he was not more than half conscious. “They say — the harvest was good in Môn. There will be a few more cartloads in the spring, if the roads are open early enough.”

Somebody brought him a cup of heather beer, and he drank it off, and a little color came back into his ashen face. When I left him to oversee the storing of the grain, he had unslung the doeskin harp bag from his shoulders, and taken out his beloved harp, and begun to finger the white-bronze strings, making sure that no harm had come to it from the cold.

That winter we had no time to go out of condition, no time for the dullness of spirit that sometimes comes over a winter camp and must be guarded against as one tries to guard against fever and the flux. We had oats and barley in the granary now, but it had to be ground, and since if we wanted to eat meat we must get it for ourselves, some of us were always on the hunting trail. It was as I had said to Kinmarcus, we lived as the outposts had done in the old days, the corn in the granary and the boar in the woods; only with us it was mostly red deer and sometimes wolf — wolfmeat is none so bad eating, if one is hungry enough. There was much work needed about the camp, too, for the old fortress had been little but a ruin when we rode in.

There were the cavalry horses to be tended also; daily weapon practice lest the eye grow slow and the sword arm stiff; armor and gear to be reviewed, and new men and horses broken in. And on Sundays the priest who had helped Gwalchmai with the wounded on that first night of all came up from the city to preach God’s Word on the weed-grown parade ground. Most of us gathered to these services, though I think that among the ranks who stood bareheaded in the cold to listen, and afterward turned man to man with the kiss of peace, there were some who made their own prayers to Mithras or even Nuada of the Silver Hand and the remote and misty gods of their own hills. The kindly little priest would have been saddened if I had told him that, but it has never seemed to me to matter very greatly. I have always been a follower of the Christos, because it has seemed to me that the Christian faith is the strongest and best fitted to carry the light forward into the darkness that lies ahead. But I have prayed to too many different gods in my time, to set any very great store by the names that men cry out to for aid, or the form of prayers they use.

The months wore on and the months wore on, and there came no further news out of the north, by the ways that were closed by snow and mire and storm waters. But though there was no more news, I heard much, that winter, concerning Caledonia, all the same.

From Daglaef the Merchant, I heard it. He came jogging into Deva by the road from the Wall, only the day before Bedwyr and the grain carts returned from Arfon, riding a good horse and followed by a string of four pack mules with their drivers, and two couple of white-breasted Caledonian boarhounds running in leash behind him.

By and by word drifted up to the fortress that one Daglaef the Merchant had returned to his own place for the winter, after a whole summer spent, as he had spent summers before, trading in Caledonia. A great thing it is, to be one of the merchant kind, who can pass safe and welcome where a war host could scarce win through, I made haste to inquire of Lucianus, he who was chieftain or chief magistrate, as to the man’s trustworthiness, and Lucianus’s report on him being good (“I have never yet got anything cheap from Daglaef, but on the other hand I’ve never bought a pot from him that cracked the first time spice wine was poured into it, nor a cloak in which the colors ran, nor a hound that turned out to be not the one I paid for”), I sent to Daglaef himself, bidding him to sup with me.

He came, a square-built, sandy-gray man with a small bright eye that seemed always cocked for a bargain, wrapped in a mantle of magnificently dressed badger skins; and when supper was over and we drew to the brazier, began proceedings by trying to sell me a dagger of Eastern workmanship, with the ivory hilt carved into the likeness of a naked woman.

“Na,” I said, “I have already a dagger that feels familiar to my hand. It was not for your wares that I called you here.”

“For what, then? Assuredly not for the honor of my company, my Lord the Count of Britain?” He grinned at me, slipping back his mantle in the warmth, and began to play with the string of silver and coral beads at his throat, in the way that I came to know later was a habit with him.

“For your knowledge of what lies beyond the Wall.”

“That is easily summed up — hills and heather, and northward among the forests of Mannan, a people who speak a dark tongue and can seldom be trusted to keep a bargain.”

“And fire smoldering among the heather,” I said.

He ceased to finger the bright beads. “So you know of that.”

“Something of that — and I would know more. I would know also the shape of the land and the run of the roads beyond the Wall.”

“I am a merchant, and frontiers and tongues and peoples are not for me as they are for other men. Are you so sure, then, that I shall tell you the truth?”

“Lucianus says he never had a cloak from you in which the colors ran, nor a hunting dog that turned out to be not the one he paid for.”

“So.” Daglaef cocked an eyebrow at me with cheerful effrontery. “But I am very sure he told you also that he never had anything cheap from me — let alone free.”

I took a gold currency bracelet — I could ill spare it — from my wrist, and tossed it to him. “I am prepared to pay, so that the hunting dog proves to be the one I paid for.”

He laughed, tossing the bracelet between his hands, then abruptly stowed it away beneath his mantle, and thrusting aside the strewn fern with his foot, pulled a bit of half-charred stick from the fire. “The land and the roads first, then. . . .”

It was late, when at last we were done with my questions and his answers, and with his badger-skin robe already swathed about him to depart, he tried again to sell me the dagger with the hilt like a naked woman. I bought it as a gift for Cei.

After that, Daglaef the Merchant came on another evening, not to sell, but simply as one man to sit by another’s fire and drink a pot of beer and pass an hour or two. He was a great talker, and listening to him on those long winter evenings, as I have always loved to listen to the talk of travelers, I heard tales of strange lands and stranger peoples, of beasts as large as mountains moving and with tails at both ends, of long sea voyages and distant cities; but also, in and out between all these things, much more concerning Caledonia and the Caledonians.

It was February, and I remember that there were snowdrops appearing through the sodden brown of last year’s fallen leaves in what remained of the Commandant’s garden, when Flavian came looking for me one evening. I had formed a fondness for the place, scarcely larger than a good-sized room, shut within half-ruined walls; it had a quiet of its own, remote from the bustle of the fortress, that made it a good place to come to when I wanted to think. I had been pacing up and down and then sitting on the bench of green-stained marble, thinking of the things that Daglaef the Merchant had told me, and wondering how they were going to fit into any plan of action; and when I turned to go back to my quarters, there he was, just behind me.

I noticed that there were three snowdrops, fully out, stuck into the shoulder strap of his worn leather tunic, which struck me as odd, more like Cei than Flavian. “Sir —” he began. “Sir —” and seemed for the moment unsure how to go further.

“Well,” I said, “what is it, Flavian? Not trouble with the squadron?”

He shook his head.

“What, then?”

“Sir, I — I have come to ask leave to take a girl from her father’s hearth.”

I cursed inwardly. It happened from time to time, and for the Company it was a bad thing. “You mean legally, before witnesses?”

He nodded. “Yes, sir.”

I sat down again on the bench. “Minnow, I’ve never forbidden the Companions to marry, you know that; I have no right, and besides, I am well aware that I should have no Company if I did; but none the less, I don’t like it. Let a man take the girl he fancies to bed with him when he wants to laugh and make love, and be warm in the winter nights; there’s no harm in that, and afterward he is a free man to kiss and ride away. But the bond that he forges when he takes a wife — that is not good for men who fight the kind of war that we fight.”

Flavian’s face was troubled but perfectly steady in its resolve. “Sir, the bond is forged already; going before witnesses can make no difference. We belong to each other, Teleri and I.”

“In every way?”

“In every way.” His eyes were clear and quiet, and they never wavered.

“Then if it makes so little difference, why marry her?”

“So that if — if there’s a child, no one can point a finger at her.”

“So the Minnow also has done his begetting under a hawthorn bush.” I was silent for a while, crumbling the chill emerald moss from the back of the bench under my fingers. I understood the three snowdrops now. Teleri must have stuck them there with the fingers of love, while they spoke, no doubt, of how he would come to me for my leave to marry her. “Who and what is she, this girl?” I asked, after a while.

Flavian had been standing stiffly before me all the while. “Just a girl — little and brown like a bird that you hold in your hand. Her father is a wool merchant.”

“You have little enough to offer. Will he give her to you?”

“Yes, because I am of your Companions, and because there might be the babe.”

“If I give you leave to marry her, you know how it must be, don’t you? You leave her in her father’s house when we march in the spring; and it may be that one day we shall come back to make our winter quarters in Deva again, and it may be not; and it may be that one day you will be able to send for her to some other place, or again it may be not; but either way you leave her in her father’s house. I’ll have no virtuous wives following the camp to cause trouble, only whores.”

“I understand — we both understand that, sir.”

I heard myself sigh. “So be it, then. Go and tell her. And Minnow, hand over the squadron to Fercos first. You need not come back into camp tonight.”

“Yes, sir.” He looked down and then up again. “I don’t know how to thank you, sir, I have not the words — but if I could serve you more truly than I have done since the days that I was your armor-bearer, I would.” His grave face flashed for a moment into its rare laughter. “If it would give you the least satisfaction to have my hide for a riding rug, you have but to say the word.”

“I think Teleri might like it better on your back than Arian’s,” I said. “Go now. She will be waiting.”

He drew himself up in the old formal legionary salute, and turned and strode away.

I remained sitting on the weather-stained bench, hearing his tread fade into the distant sounds of the camp, and I knew that I would have given everything I possessed in the world, to be as the Minnow was tonight. Everything save the leadership of three hundred men and the thing that we fought for. But when I came to think of it, that was all I did possess.

Spring came, and we heard the curlews calling far into the night as they came in from the salt marshes to nest on the higher ground. Bedwyr set off once more for Arfon, and once more got back with the grain carts filled; green flame ran through the woodlands, and above the marshes the furze was on fire. A wild unrest seized us all, but as yet there was nothing we could do save wait.

There began to be rumors of black war boats on the coast far north of the Wall; of Pictish envoys having been seen in this place and that. One day a hunter with wolfskins for sale came to me from the North, saying: “My Lord the Bear, last autumn the Cran Tara went out, and now the Scots and the Painted People and the Sea Wolves are hosting. I saw a band of the White Shield Warriors on the track from the west with my own eyes, and they say that Huil Son of Caw stands at the Dun of his forefathers to lead them.“ Two days later one of my own scouts came in with the same story and showed me a Scottish arm ring with dried blood like rust between the coils to prove it. Kinmarcus had been right, and this year would indeed be a race against time. . . . And still, as yet, there was nothing that we could do but wait, praying that the waiting time would not be long.

That is the disadvantage of cavalry in the North or in mountain country; one cannot march until long after the true start of the campaigning season. One must wait until there is grass enough to feed the horses, and that may be May, even the start of June in a late season; whereas those who go to war for the most part on foot, as the Saxons do, can take the war trail a month earlier. We had no means of knowing whether Hengest and Octa would use that advantage to march on us while we were still bound in winter quarters, or whether they might be waiting for reinforcements, or planned to make their stronghold at Eburacum and hold it against us when we came. It was hard to wait so, for Hengest to take the initiative, and for myself, I have always hated to fight on the defensive, though many of my greatest fights have been defensive ones. But I thought that in the long run, our advantage might equal theirs, simply because if the battle was finally joined close to Deva, we should have short supply lines, whereas theirs would be perilously long — always supposing that the menace from the North did not strike before Hengest did. Everything depended on that.

So we lived through that April in a growing fever with one eye always cocked toward the dark moorland shoulder of Black Bull, a day’s march away, where the nearest of our watchers and signal fires waited. And at last it came to May Day Eve. . . .

That evening Cei and I had been out to sup with old Lucianus. Bedwyr was not of our company, for it was a law among us that all three were never out of camp at the same time. We had drunk a good deal, for it was one of those parties of the old imperial pattern one seldom met with now, in which the women withdrew as soon as the meal was over, and the men chose a drinking master and got down to the business of the evening. Our host had brought up in our honor the last of his treasured amphorae of Red Falernian, and when at last we came up the street and turned in through the fortress gates, the rich fumes of it were still in our heads, making the stars dance widdishins and our feet seem curiously far away. And as neither of us wished to wake next morning with dizzy heads and tongues like old leather, we turned aside from the sleeping quarters as by mutual consent, and climbing the steps to the narrow rampart walk, leaned there side by side, with our hot foreheads to the little thin east wind.

“Ah now, that is better!” said Cei, thrusting back the russet hair from his forehead, and snuffing like a hound. “No air down there in that cursed house.”

Fulvius, whose turn it was to take the second watch, had come strolling along the rampart walk to lean his elbows on the coping beside us. He laughed, the quiet laugh of a man on night watch. “Too many vine leaves in your hair?”

Yesterday, with the long strain of waiting which had begun to shorten tempers all around, Cei would have flown into a fury over that, but tonight the wine seemed to have mellowed him, and he answered peacefully enough. “Did you ever see a man with vine leaves in his hair walk up that deathtrap of a rampart stair without a stagger?”

“I’ve seen you walk the Bath Gardens wall at Lindum without a stagger,” I said, “when you were so dripping with vine leaves that most other men would have been lying on their backs in the kennel singing murky love songs to the stars.”

“I have a headache,” said Cei with dignity. “It was too hot in that cursed place of Lucianus’s. Shouldn’t have had the brazier glowing like that — May Eve, not midwinter.”

“There’ll be plenty of folk besides Lucianus keeping good fires tonight,” said Fulvius. “You can see fifteen Beltane fires from the ramparts here — I’ve counted them a score of times since I came up, for want of something better to do.”

Almost without thinking, with some idea, I suppose, of finding more than Fulvius, I began idly to do the same. I have always loved to see the fires on the hills at Beltane, making the old magic of returning life. One always burned on the high hill shoulder behind Dynas Pharaon, and many a time when I was a boy I have helped to drive the bellowing cattle through the sinking flames to make them fruitful in the coming year. I leaned my back against the rampart, and looked across the camp toward the western mountains, thinking of those fires; but that way the hills were dark. It must have been more than fifty miles away, even had there been no mountains in between.

Plenty of other fires, though, some near, some very far, like red seeds scattered in the dark bowl of the night. Turning slowly I also counted my fifteen, and could make it no more. And then suddenly, so far off that I could not be sure in the first few moments whether I was seeing it at all, there was another. I looked away, and then back again; it was still there, the faintest spark of ruddy light clinging to the skyline of the mountains away eastward. “Sixteen,” I said. “Sixteen, Fulvius — there, on the rim of the mountains.”

They both looked where I pointed, and were silent a moment, picking it up. “It is a star rising over the rim of High Wood,” said Cei.

Fulvius made a swift gesture of denial. “Na! This isn’t the first night I’ve kept watch up here; there’s no star rises at this hour over the crest of High Wood, no star as red as that anywhere, not even the Warrior. It’s a fire all right — but it wasn’t there when the Beltane fires were lit. It wasn’t there fifty heartbeats ago.”

A sudden silence caught us all by the throat. I felt my own heartbeat quicken and knew that it was the same with the other two. And then, on the bare crouched shoulder of Black Bull, only fifteen or twenty miles away, in almost direct line between us and the sixteenth fire, there was a sudden blink of light that wavered and sank and spread, and sprang up even while we watched with straining eyes, into a ragged flower of flame.

“The Saxons,” I said. And I remember the relief that broke over me like a wave that the long months of waiting were over and Hengest was here while the Northern menace still hung on the edge of breaking. I remember also that the last fumes of the Falernian were gone from my head as though a wind had risen and blown them clear away.

“God be praised that they chose Beltane!” Cei said.

I had been thinking the same thought. It had troubled me a good deal that any fire or smoke signal lit for us must be clear to the Saxons also, warning them all too surely that their advance had been seen and the advantage of surprise lost to them, and so putting them on their guard. But on May Eve, with the whole country aspark with Beltane fires, the signal would carry no meaning for them.

“How long do you reckon we’ve got?” Cei said.

“Four days, maybe. Enough, but not more than enough.” I had turned back to the rampart steps. “Go and rout me out Prosper and his trumpet. I want everybody on the parade ground.”

This time it should be we who picked the battleground. The enemy must advance by the old military road, for to trust to the mountain herding paths, or strike across country through the damp-oak scrub and the peat bogs that filled the valleys would be to go leaping on disaster. And knowing this, we had in fact chosen our place some time ago. It was a spot some five or six miles in advance of Deva, where the road from over the mountains, dipping into a marshy valley, forded a little river, then climbed again gently, almost lazily, up the western slope. The soft upward swell of the valley on that side, the Deva side, was crested by a long comb of thorn and tangled oak woods that reached for a mile or more in either direction; and through this narrow belt, as through a hedge, the road ran straight to the west gate of the City of Legions. In the old ordered days the trees had been cut back in the usual way, for a bowshot on either side of the road, but now all manner of quick-growing scrub had come creeping back, hazel, crack willow, blackthorn and bramble, making a tangle that was almost as difficult to break through as the woods on either hand — and as good cover for men.

In this place, on May Day morning, we set about preparing a welcome for Hengest and the Sea Wolves.

We began by felling trees to make a couple of rides through the woodland belt, for the quick bringing up of cavalry, and toward noon on the second day (we had taken our time over this work, not wishing to make a clumsy havoc that would show at a distance) a little dark mountain man of the breed that we sometimes used as scouts came drumming up the road on a shaggy black pony about the size of a big dog, to bring us word of the Saxon war host.

He was brought to me, where I was overseeing the careful screening of one of the ride mouths, and dropping from his pony’s back, stumbled and stood swaying, his head bent, his arm across the neck of the wretched little beast that stood with heaving flanks beside him.

“You have ridden hard, my friend,” I said. “What news do you bring?”

He tipped back his head slowly, thrusting the matted hair out of his eyes, and looking up at me with narrowed gaze as a man looks up into a tree. “You are he that they call Artos the Bear?”

“I am Artos the Bear.”

“So. It is good. Then the Sea Wolves passed at sundown last night, and made their camp among the fringes of Forest Dhu,”

“How many? Can you number them at all?”

“I did not see them. They are as the ants that swarm out when a child kicks at an ants’ nest; so said the man from beyond Broken Hill. But he carried this — it was given to him by the man before him, and he passed it on to me.” The little man took from the breast of his mangy wolfskin mantle a slim billet of wood which reminded me of the peeled willow wands on which Hunno kept his tallies. But this was the tally, not of a horse herd but a Saxon war host; and as he gave it into my hand I read the roughly carved numbers on the shaft: MCDLXX. Close on fifteen hundred men, maybe somewhat more, maybe somewhat less — I knew how difficult it could be to judge numbers when one was not used to it. But still, somewhere around fifteen hundred. The Saxon war host had already trebled its size since last autumn. Had the Picts, despite Kinmarcus’s opinion, already leapt over the Wall to join forces with the Sea Wolves of Eburacum? Or had Earl Hengest called up reinforcements from across the North Sea? Well, it made no difference for the moment; it was the numbers that mattered, not where they came from. Against them, allowing for the usual hurts and sickness, I could put something over two hundred and fifty of my own heavy cavalry into the field, and about five hundred tribesmen, more or less trained by now, who had gathered to me as auxiliaries and irregular troops during the winter. If I put the drivers into the fighting line, about a hundred more; and doubtless when the time came there would be a rabble of citizens, valiant and willing, but not much use save in pursuit. The horses would do something, a great deal, to even the desperate odds against us; but not enough. . . .

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.”

LATE 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 fire-flake 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 fault 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 burly 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 bis 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 battlefront 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.

I was aware suddenly, as though they were a part of myself, of the archers hidden among the hazel scrub, each with an arrow notched to his drawn bowstring. The timing was perfect, the struggling chaos along the trenches had barely begun to sink, when the dark flight of arrows that I had been waiting for leapt from among the bushes and thrummed like a cloud of hornets into its midst. Men were down in good earnest now, and I felt how the hidden bowmen stooped forward each one for another shaft from the ground before him or the loose battle quiver hanging at his saddlebow. . . .

Far along our own line I heard the shout of command, and our spearmen, yelping their own short sharp battle cry, were running forward down the hill. The few Saxon archers on the flank, unable to see where our bowmen loosed from under cover, turned their own short deadly arrows against the spears — and the moment had come to slip the hounds.

“Sound me the charge.”

The man beside me set the great horn to his lips, and winded the one long blast that set the echoes flying like startled birds all up and down the valley. From away to the left, almost in the same instant, Bedwyr’s trumpeter took up the note; a great shout rose from our men, and both cavalry wings broke forward, the spears that had been resting upright swinging down as one to the horizontal. I crouched low into the saddle, feet braced into my stirrups against the coming shock, feeling through every fiber of my being the balance of the leveled spear against palm and ringers, hearing the flying thunder of the squadron’s hooves behind me.

We took them on both flanks, and at the full gallop.

They had no chance to form the shield wall; for the first moments of impact it was not battle as I counted battle, but sheer red butchery. But whatever evil may be cried against the Sea Wolves, no man ever yet called their courage in question. Somehow they closed and steadied their ranks; they fought like heroes; their archers stood like rocks though their numbers grew steadily fewer under dark hail of the long British war shafts, and loosed their own arrows without pause into our ranks. The house carls of the center held us with spear and seax long after the light throwing axes were spent; their naked and stained berserkers flung themselves upon our very spearpoints to dirk our horses from underneath. Afterward, I was glad that the thing had after all been a battle and not a massacre. At the time I saw all things through a crimson haze, and felt very little.

The sun was gone, and the dusk was creeping up the valley like the slow inflowing of the tide, when they broke at last and turned to fly. They streamed away, a tattered shadow of the host that had stormed across the stream in the late sunlight, seemingly so short a time ago; and as we swept after them, down to the ford, the single high note of a horn sounded once more, and Cei and his wild riders swept down upon them out of the far woods.

In the swiftly fading light, the main number got away, all the same; and leaving Cei to harry them into the hills, the rest of us, who had borne the chief heat of the fighting, drew off and turned back toward the long wooded ridge below which the struggle had taken place, and the work that still waited for us there.

Some of the archers, with the pack train drivers and the women, were already moving among the fallen figures, looking at each to see if it were friend or foe, dead or wounded. Our own dead were being carried aside for burial, the Saxons left for the ravens and the wolves if any chanced not yet to have drawn off into their summer fortresses; they would make the Eburacum road unsavory for a while, but we had other things to do than bury Saxons. The Saxon wounded were being cleanly knifed; I doubt if they gave as clean an end to our own men in like case, but I have always set my face against mutilation, at least of living men, and the few women who had tried it in the early days had found their mistake.

I abandoned the scene, and when Amlodd had taken Arian from me (the old war-horse was still sidling and snorting, and there was blood and brains on his ironshod forehooves) went to see how it was with our own wounded. A swarm of good folk from Deva were helping to get the more sorely hurt into carts and farm sledges. We could not care for them in the camp, and at first light tomorrow we must be away after the Saxons, to follow up the day’s victory, so it was better for them to be got back to Deva, even if a few of them died of the jolting on the road. There would be folk in plenty to care for them; even a surgeon, good though generally drunk.

A great fire had been lit in the midst of our last night’s camp on the Deva side of the woods; and the carts and sledges were drawn up on the farthest fringes of the firelight; and Gwalchmai, with a filthy rag twisted around his own left forearm, was limping serenely among the wounded, looking to each as he was brought in through the trees, with the priest and a few of the women to help him. His face was gray and still, with the gentleness and complete withdrawal from all other matters that came to him only when he was plying his craft. I wanted to speak to him, ask him how badly we had suffered; I wanted to speak to some of the men themselves; but that must wait. I never forced questions on Gwalchmai when that look was on his face. I think I had always the feeling that to thrust myself between him and the thing he was doing would be in some way an intrusion.

So I left him and his wounded, and went back to the great fire where the standard had been set up and the food was already being given out and Bedwyr was waiting for me.

“Who is seeing about burying our dead?” I asked.

“Alun Dryfed is in charge just now. I’ve given orders for the work to be done in relays, for the grave must needs be dug deep, here in the wilderness.”

“Save for the amount needed to make good the road, we can use the earth from the trenches to raise a good-sized mound over them for safety.”

He nodded, looking into the fire under that one level and mocking eyebrow. “You’ll want Brother Simon to patter a few prayers over them before we cover them in?”

I never learned what god Bedwyr worshipped, if any; it certainly was not the Christos. Maybe it was the thing between hand and harp string. . . . “Seeing that we have a priest among us we might as well make use of him,” I said. “But there’s time enough for the prayers when he has done helping Gwalchmai with the wounded. The living first, the dead after.”

“All things in their proper order. Well, there are a good few more of the Saxon kind to feed the wolves than there are for the Christian prayers and the grave mound.”

“Yes,” I said. “So far as I can judge as yet, our losses have been surprisingly light compared with theirs.”

He cocked that flaring eyebrow at me. “Surprisingly? When one thinks of those bear pits?”

I was silent for a moment, and then I said, “It was not the kind of fighting that I would choose. I thought at the first after the Companions came in that it was going to be a massacre. I am glad it flowered into a battle after all.”

“You’re a strange man, my Lord Artos the Bear. There are times when I think that you come near to loving the Saxon kind.”

“Only when I am actually at his throat and he at mine. Not before — and not after.”

Two of my own squadron came out from the black gloom of the trees, dragging a body between them. A body that, judging by the way they handled it, was Saxon and none of ours. They flung it down in the full red glare of the firelight, rolling it over onto its back with a silent triumph that shouted more loudly than any voice could do. Then Bericus the Senior said simply, “We found this.”

Lying sprawled uncouthly at the foot of the Red Dragon where the men had tumbled him down, there was a certain splendor about him still. An old man, an old giant, with bright hairs that shone like gold wires in the gray jut of his beard and the mane of wild hair outflung about his head. I recognized him first by the earl’s bracelet twisted about his sword arm, for a spear had taken him between the eyes, but as I looked more closely into the smashed and blood-pooled face, I recognized the cunning iron-bound mouth, drawn back now in a frozen snarl. I recognized above all, I think, the greatness that seemed to cling about him still, an atmosphere of the thing that had made him a giant in more than body; this ancient enemy of Ambrosius’s. Hengest, the Jutish adventurer who had grown to be a war lord of the Saxon hordes, lying flung down like tribute at the foot of the British standard that stirred faintly in the night air above him.

That left the son and grandson to deal with.

“So-o,” Bedwyr said softly. “Earl Hengest goes at last to his own Storm Lords again. He should have died on a night of tempest, with the lightning leaping from hill to hill, not a still summer evening with the scent of hawthorn in the air.”

“He was a royal stag,” I said. “Thank God he is dead.”

Later, I had started out on a round of the watch fires, with a half-eaten bannock still in my hand, when Flavian appeared out of nowhere to join me. “Sir, all things are in order with the squadron. When do we strike camp in the morning?”

“At first light.”

“Then if I am back an hour before that — Deva is only six miles away — If I gave over the squadron to Fercos —”

I stopped and turned to face him. I suppose I was tireder than I knew, and my patience went like a snapped bowstring. “Oh, for God’s sake, Flavian! There are about five hours left to dawn; how much good do you suppose the captain of my third squadron is going to be tomorrow if he spends half the night riding about the countryside and the other half tearing his heart out in bed with a girl?”

Even in the dim light of the watch fire I saw how the blood surged up to his forehead, and I was as angry with myself as the instant before I had been with him. I said quickly, “I’m sorry, Flavian. That was unpardonable.”

He shook his head. “No, I — It was foolish of me to think of it.”

I set my hand on his shoulder. “It was; but not in the way you mean. Did you not say farewell to her before you came away?”

“Yes.”

“And do you not suppose it hurt both of you enough that time? Send her word that you are safe; but if you go back now it will be all to suffer again.”

“I suppose you are right. It is better for her, maybe —”

As I moved on, he turned back to the fire and took the knot of wilted hawthorn flowers from his shoulder buckle and dropped it into the flames. It was a gesture like a man making a votive offering.

Cei and his band came in during the night, having lost contact with the Sea Wolves in the dark; and at first light, our dead buried and our wounded safely back in Deva, we struck eastward along the Eburacum road on the scent of the fleeing Saxons, with the hunter of the Little Dark People who had first brought us word of their coming, riding with us for a guide. We had lost horses as well as men in the day’s fighting, but thanks to the young half-bred stallions, we had still enough to remount any man left horseless, and keep a few spare mounts, even now.

I suppose that to any who have never tried, it must seem easy enough for cavalry to hunt down a fleeing enemy on foot. But the thing is less simple than it would seem, at the start of May in the mountains, when the grass is still sparse. Horses must be rested at times, too, if one would not have them burst their willing hearts, whereas men, if hard enough pressed, can carry on by some power of the spirit long after the spent body is beyond crawling another step. Then also, we were not merely hunting down fugitives but marching in our turn on an enemy stronghold. We had our baggage train and spearmen with us to slow us down, and the Saxons had left the road, as they had not done on their westward march, and scattered into the hills where it was often impossible for the horses to follow them. (We never knew whether they had found some renegade Briton to guide them, or whether, being desperate, they simply trusted to their gods to keep them clear of the mosses.) And among the immensities of those bluff-browed rolling mountains with the bracken and stone bramble springing among the rocky outcrops, where it seems that nothing moves save the wind in the sparse mountain grasses and the kestrel hovering overhead, but the glens are thick with birch scrub, it is not easy to find one man or a knot of men; nor wise to push on heedlessly, leaving the enemy in one’s rear. We did find a few; they lay on their faces for the most part, each with a dark-feathered arrow scarcely larger than a birding bolt in the back. The Old Ones, the Little Dark People of the hills, had, it seemed, as little love for the Sea Wolves as we had.

Before long the reason for that became sickeningly plain, together with the way in which the hard-pressed Saxons had come by food to carry them on their flight. Twice in the first two days, we had seen smoke among the hills, smoke that was too dark and spreading to be that of a hunting fire; and on the third day, when we had left the road and were following our guide along a herding track where the grass was better than that along the scrubby valley through which the road ran, Owain sniffed the air like a hound, saying, “Smoke.” And presently as we rounded a bracken-clad shoulder, we saw it rising from beyond a wind-shaped tangle of thorn and rowan and mountain juniper, pale like smoke that is almost spent. We checked the horses — I remember the sudden silence of the high hills, when the soft dram of hooves over the turf fell away; a buzzard circling the blue heights of the upper air, and faintly the sound of falling water; one is seldom far from the sound of falling water among those hills, any more than among my own hills of Arfon. I called to Bedwyr and to Gwalchmai who generally rode close to me, and with our little dark guide and a handful more, we turned the horses’ heads toward the thorn tangle, leaving the rest of the war host under Cei to wait for us on the trail.

Beyond the belt of scrub, we came upon one of the settlements of the Little Dark People, half large farm, half small village; that is to say we came upon what the Saxons had left of it in their passing. A piteous huddle of huts half underground, the bracken thatch of their roofs still smoldering, blackened and fallen in, so that these that had been the homes of men were blackened and smoking pits gaping in the hillside; even the peat stacks had been wantonly fired, though among the densely packed turfs the fire had not taken hold. Spilled barley was scattered on the beaten earth (in the shelter of the mountain slope below the village showed the threadbare patchwork of small wretched fields). Dead cattle lay among the smoking wreckage; little hill cattle that had been famine lean even in their lives. Strips had been hacked from their flanks and shoulders; I suppose the Saxons had cut them to suck for the blood and warm juices, maybe even to eat raw. And among the sickening chaos of charred thatch and slaughtered cattle, lay the folk whose home this had been, hacked down in the uncouth attitudes of sudden death; old men, five or six dark narrow-boned warriors like our guide, women and bairns. There was a dead sheep dog lying at the feet of an old man whose brains were scattered among his bloody hair; a young woman with her body arched about that of the child she clutched against her, in a last effort to protect it. Both of them had their throats cut.

I turned to look at Bedwyr beside me, remembering what had passed between us a few nights ago. “No, Bedwyr, I do not love the Saxons.”

Our little dark guide, who in the first moments had seemed more frozen than any of us, made the first move. He began to go from one to another of the bodies. He checked beside that of an oldish man with amber phis in his hair, who had been run through the belly, and stooping, drew the long slender knife from his belt.

I said quickly, “Irach, what are you going to do?”

And he looked up at me with the air of someone explaining a thing, simply, to a child, his knife point already at the still breast. “I do the thing that must be done. I eat my father’s courage, that it may not be lost.”

“Your father? Then this place —”

“This was my home, and my people,” he said, and cut deeply and gently into the breast over the heart.

I looked away. My mouth was dry and my stomach crawled within me. I heard him say crooningly, “It is warm — it is still a little warm; that is good, my father,” and was aware of a dark shadow that flitted away into the heather, with something in his hands.

No one moved for a long moment. Then someone said, “My God! The little savage!” and somebody else made the Sign of the Horns quickly, to avert evil, for it was not wise to speak so of the Dark People in their own place. I swung around on my armor-bearer and bade him go and bring up some of the others. He was greenish white, and in the act of hurrying to do my bidding, crouched suddenly and vomited, then went on again.

By the time he returned with the others, we had begun to topple the poor mutilated bodies into the smoke-hazed pits that had been their homes. I laid the sheep dog myself at his old master’s feet, for the sake of Cabal, whom I would lief have had in like case to lie at mine. We piled over them everything that was loose or movable; charred beams, half-burned thatch, even the peats from the stack; anything that might serve to keep off the wolves and the scavenging mountain hare. Irach’s father we left until the last, and he was still unburied when the little hunter came back and set to work quietly beside us. Some of the Companions drew away from him in a kind of horror, and here and there men echoed the Sign of the Horns. But he had only done as the custom of his people demanded, and the act had been performed in love. When the last body had been covered over, he drew the mourning lines on his cheeks and forehead with spittle and gray ash, and scratched his breast and arms with the point of his dagger until they bled, and then turned to us with a great and gentle pride, like a host on his threshold. “It is in my heart that the Saxon Wolves will have left little behind, but all and anything that remains here is yours, and you are most welcome.”

But indeed the stouter-stomached among us had already begun hunting through the ruins in search of anything the Saxons had overlooked. There were few of us, I think, who would have cared to rout through a village of the Little Dark People in the ordinary way; but it was as though the Saxons had laid all open to the sky and the wind, and left behind nothing but the piteous wreck of human life; and maybe those of us who hunted through the ruins of Irach’s village that day lost forever the sharpest edge of the fear that the people of the sunshine must always feel for the people of the dark.

The few beer pots were empty, and the grain pits had been emptied of the little barley that would have been left in them at this time of year, all save one that they must have overlooked in their desperate haste. The gram inside it was poor wizened stuff, but better than nothing. We scooped it into the grainskins across the backs of the pack ponies; the men and women who had grown and harvested it would not be hungry for its lack, and it would help us to avenge them. We cut more meat from the carcasses of the cattle on which the flies were already beginning to settle as the smoke grew thinner. Then there was no more to do. Myself, I cut the three branches of hawthorn and laid them across where the gateway had been, and sprinkled them with salt and a little of the wine that we carried with us for the cleansing of wounds.

Then we came away, some with a great silence upon us, some cursing, some harshly merry; and left the place under its haze of still faintly rising smoke. Our guide, with the death cuts on his arms and breast still bleeding, rode beside me on his shaggy pony; and as he rode, he made a little dark moaning mouth-music that sounded as though it had been wandering like a homeless wind before ever the hills first reared toward the stars, and made the hair creep on the back of my neck.

Next day, through the gap between two tawny breasts of the hills, we caught our first glimpse of the wide blue lands that ran to Eburacum. And so at last we struggled down out of the mountains that were the roof ridge of Britain, into lowland country again. Our pace was slowing by that time. We knew it, and pushed on without mercy for ourselves or the horses. If we could fling ourselves between Eburacum and the Saxon remnant, if we could even come at them before they had had time to complete their defense, it would mean one sharp and bloody battle, and an end; once they were secure behind walls, there must follow all the long-drawn heart-rotting business of a siege; and with the North already smoldering ready to flare into flame at any moment, we could not, God knew that we could not, spare the time for a siege.

But as we left the highlands and came down into the dale country that lay green with woods under the gray and russet of the fells, a thing began to happen that acted on us like a draught of rye spirit on a man far spent. Out of nowhere, as it seemed, out of the hidden villages and the dark dale forests, men began to gather to the Red Dragon. The Brigantes had always been a wild proud lot; they had never fallen fully into Roman ways, but the Saxon yoke, it seemed, was still more unendurable; and as news of our march swept through the heather, so they came, one or two well-to-do landowners whose farms so far had escaped the Sea Wolves, each carrying Roman weapons in good condition and with a small band of household and farm servants behind them; escaped thralls scarred with their shackles, warriors still free, with the woad-stained war shields that their tribe had carried against the Legions in the far-off days. They joined us on the march and fell in, loping among our foot, or on their fiery little ponies; during the brief night halts they came to our campfire, proud as stags and with the light of battle already in their eyes, saying simply and directly as men speak in the wild places, “My Lord Artos, I am Guern, or Talore, or Cunofarinus son of Rathmail. I come with you in this thing.”

Toward evening of the last day’s march but one, we came upon a small burned-out farm with the fire still glowing dully under the charred thatch and gray ash, and everywhere about the place, the traces of a great company having been there. Irach ran about sniffing houndwise into all things, then came back to me, rubbing his hands on his wolfskin kilt. “Not half a day since they passed this way. Here they gathered themselves into one host again. Let my Lord the Bear make haste.”

I called up Bedwyr and Cei, and told them. “We shall push on with all speed while the daylight lasts; after dark we halt for an hour to eat and water the horses and let them roll. Then we shall push on again through the night, and we shall leave the foot to follow as swiftly as they may. The last lap of the race grows hot, my heroes!”

And so, save for that one break, we pushed forward through the darkness without halt, pressing the weary horses on across the softly rolling countryside, following again the metaled road; and next noon, almost within sight of Eburacum, we came up with the Saxon rear guard.

IT was a ragged and running fight; a fight that split and reformed and scattered away across the green levels among the sallows and the hazel thickets in a score of lesser fights, and bunched together again, drawing always back toward the gray walls of Eburacum that I began to see in the nearing distance. Slowly, slowly the gate towers rose higher and more formidable while the shadows lengthened from struggling men and white curled hawthorn scrub. I had hoped almost until then to thrust in between the Saxons and their stronghold and throw them back; but far spent as my men and horses were, and lacking all knowledge of how many of the Sea Wolves had been left to garrison the old legionary fortress, I dared not hazard them in such a position now. Instead, I took the alternative risk, charging forward to drive in amongst the enemy so close that there would be no space in which to secure the gates against us. We drove them as dogs drive sheep — not that there was much of the sheep about these men; they were valiant fighters, and fell back before our rushes steadily and with no sign of rout. Indeed they were steadier now than at any moment since they broke on the Deva road; shields up and swords biting, leaving their dead to lie in the track of the retreat without a glance.

There were only two or three hundred left when they gamed the gate, and we crashed after them so close that the triumphant forefront Companions were already mingled with Octa’s house carls, and the Red Dragon of Britain and the white horsetail standards of the Saxons flying almost as one. I could hear already above the yelling of my own lads, the bridge timbers ringing hollow under Arian’s hooves; I could see the folk within, women and old men and boys beside the warriors of the garrison, poised to draw their fellows in and hold the gate — and drive it to against us when the last Saxon was inside. And if they succeeded in that, it meant death to our own forefront, who would also be inside, cut off from all help of their comrades.

I had chosen to take the hideous gamble, but now as I saw the dark jaws of the gateway and the enemy swarms about it, I knew for an instant the sick helplessness of the hunter who sees his hounds running over a cliff. Too late to draw back now, too late to do anything but set our teeth and drive forward, sweep the Saxons away and keep the gates open by the thrust of our own charge. . . .

I raised the war cry: “Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!” and settled lower into the saddle, and drove my heel again and again into Arian’s sweating flank, flinging him forward among the enemy spears. “Keep close! For God’s sake keep close! Keep the gates back!” Beside me, Prosper was sounding the charge, and behind me the Companions sprang forward. But already as the defenders leapt to the aid of their reeling comrades, others had flung themselves yelling at the huge bronze-sheathed timbers of the gate. . . .

We were in the shadow of the gate arch. A flung spear took Irach’s pony in the breast, and the poor brute went down headlong, shrieking as it fell, while Irach himself leapt clear. The horse behind it swung aside, snorting in terror, and for an instant our whole forefront was checked and flung into confusion. The check lasted only for the shortest breath, for a racing heartbeat of time, but it would have been enough. . . . And then in that last black moment of our charge when everything seemed lost, the marvel happened — so swiftly that in the instant of its beginning it was in full fierce flood. Sudden chaos roared up among the defenders, wild figures were springing in from the rear, from the flanks, dropping out of nowhere as it seemed, into the midst of those who sought to close the gates; men, and women too, gaunt and savage, their tatters flying, thrall rings about their necks, with poles and matchets and butchers’ cleavers in their hands. They flung themselves against the valves of the gates to keep them open. All hell had broken loose and was swirling about me in the dark cavern of the gate arch; the shouting and screaming rose and gathered into a solid whirlpool of sound and was sucked up and lost in great hoarse triumphant cheering that might have been the cheering of damned souls. Again I heard myself raise the war cry: “Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!” It was caught up into a rolling roar behind me, and as it were upon a great wave of that cheering, we were crashing through upon that valiant rear guard, riding them down and sweeping them away as a sudden spate sweeps away all things in its path, while behind us the strong gate still strained and shuddered to and fro. Irach was running like a hound at my stirrup. We were crashing through the dark tunnel of the gate arch, deaf with the hollow thunder of our horses’ hooves under the groined roof, through a reeling, howling, wild-eyed mob that was fighting itself now rather than us; and beyond the struggling Saxon rear guard, the straight main street of Eburacum opened, empty of life, before us.

On that moment, even above the dazing roar of battle, I heard the high, wolfish, blood-stirring howl of the Dark People’s war cry, and Irach streaked forward, running with his dagger at the seething mass of warriors. He can have had no thought of breaking through, he was following again the custom of his own people who believe that victory must be bought with deliberate and willing sacrifice. And in that belief he flung himself upon the enemy spears. Truly the little man had eaten his father’s courage — or maybe he had enough of his own.

“Come on, lads!” I shouted. “To me! Follow Irach! Follow me! Follow me home!” And the hunting horn took up the call; ahead of me, with his few remaining house carls about him, I saw the giant figure of Octa Hengestson, his golden hair matted with blood from a scalp wound, and the chain mail of his breast and shoulders stained brown with it, as though with rust. He had lost his shield, or cast it aside. I urged Arian toward him, and with a high defiant yell he leapt to meet me; and as he swung up his sword I saw for an instant his eyes that seemed to burn with a gray-green flame. I took him with the sword point in the strong curve of the throat above the golden collar. Blood spurted out, and I saw his eyes widen as though in surprise; and he crashed backward among his house carls without a sound.

After that, the heart went from them, and they began to give way more quickly.

Someone had fired the thatch of a Saxon hovel and before the fresh evening wind the flames were spreading as wisps of blazing straw drifted from one roof to another; smoke began to hang over the broad street that was narrowed now by garbage piles spread half across it; the high white basilica that stood like a cliff above the huddled rook’s-nest bothies of the Barbarians was dimmed in drifting smoke, and the acrid smitch of it caught at our throats. Men with unlikely weapons in their hands and thrall rings about their necks were running beside me, all among the horses of the Companions. . . . And then the Sea Wolves broke and streamed back, and the thing was no longer a battle but a hunt.

Presently, with the fires already half quelled, I was sitting on the rim of the ornate fountain in the midst of the Forum, my arm through Arian’s bridle while he drank, while cavalry, foot and war-painted warriors ran questing through Eburacum in search of fugitives, and Cei and a handful of the light horsemen swept on after the others toward the coast, and the roaring flood of victory surged all about me. A big man was standing at my elbow. I had seen him in the forefront of the wild rabble at the gate; a man fair-haired as any Saxon, but with the gray iron thrall ring on his neck, and in his hands a naked sword which he was cleaning with care on a tuft of grass pulled from the base of the fountain.

“Whoever you may be, friend, I have to thank you.” My own voice, thick and heavy in my ears, surprised me into wakefulness.

“As to who I am, I am Jason the Swordsmith — it is so that I have this instead of a fence pole or a butcher’s cleaver. And that” — he pointed with the blade to another who passed staggering under the weight of a big wine jar — “was a clerk in the tower corn store; and that is Sylvianus who had land of his own and a whole roomful of books to read — and that is Helen, our golden Helen.” (Looking where he pointed, I knew the woman again for one whom I had seen in the thick of the fighting.) “The Sea Wolves treated her as a common whore, and she liked it little, having been mistress of her own house of girls for ten years and more. Thralls, most of us now, as you can see.” He touched the ring about his neck. “A fine following for the Count of Britain, are we not?”

“A fine following,” I said. “As to the thrall rings, doubtless you can deal with those, Jason the Swordsmith, with my armorers to help you. But for you and your war host, the larger part of mine would like enough be baying before the gates of Eburacum tonight, while I and the foremost of us lay hacked to red rags in the city gutters.” I looked up at him. Clearly he was the leader of the tatterdemalion band. “How did you contrive the thing?”

He shrugged thick shoulders. “We made our plans — two or three of them to be worked according as we found one better than another when the time came; a pleasure, that was. It was easier to come at each other with so many of the masters off on the war trail; easier to escape, too, when that time came. At first we meant just to break out, and then when word came of their defeat and Hengest’s slaying, we guessed how the thing must go, and we thought we’d bide for a while, and then break out to join you or lend a friendly hand from inside, as seemed best.”

“That was your plan, I think.” The boldness of it accorded with the set of his mouth.

“Mine and Helen’s.” He jerked his chin toward the woman in her gaudy rags and glass bangles, who had turned in passing, to flash her painted eyes at the nearest of the Companions. “Helen’s a jewel of a girl. She’s worth ten of the rest of us any day, and she don’t much care to be tossed around from one rutting boar to another without so much as a ‘By your leave’ or a ‘Thank you dearling,’ after being so long a madam in her own right.” He chuckled, a warm rumble of amusement deep beneath the golden fleece of his chest. “’Twas her idea to keep watch for you by sending up one after another of the girls with a bite of food and a beer pot for a kiss and cuddle with the men on the ramparts. And when the shout went up, and the girl that was up there then came flying down skirling that you rode upon the Sea Wolf’s very tail, we knew that the time had come to set things rolling. We was most of us lying hid among the bushes of the old temple garden, by that time, and some of us crept up on the ramparts and dealt with the lookouts up there —” He made a small hideous jabbing motion with his thumbs. “Easy enough if you can get close enough to your man to come at the back of his neck before he hears you. There wasn’t many of them, but their weapons added a bit to our store. The first of the Sea Wolves were falling back on to the bridge by that time, and the rest you know.”

“The rest I know.”

“Simple enough, when you come to think of it.”

“When you come to think of it,” I said, and we looked at each other with content.

All this while the hunt had been baying through the town, some-tunes nearer, sometimes farther off, and the smitch of quenched burning came and went on the wind. A hurrying step sounded on the grass-grown pavement, and I looked around as Flavian came to a halt beside me. “Oisc is clear away, sir,” he said. He was black with burning and none too steady on his feet, but he managed the old proud legionary salute with unusual precision. “We’ve turned the whole town out of doors, but there’s neither hide nor hair of him to be found.”

I shrugged wearily. “Aiee well, I should have liked to have made the kill complete and finished the whole brood, but I suppose that two generations out of three is not to be sniffed at. If he wins back to the Cantii then he’ll be for Ambrosius to deal with — or for us another day. . . . It can’t be helped, Minnow.”

“No sir,” said Flavian, and then quickly: “Sir — there’s something else. We found a boy in one of the houses over toward the east gate. We think he’s one of their great ones.”

“Then why would they be leaving him behind? Is he wounded?”

“No, sir, he-”

“So then. Bring him along.”

Flavian stood his ground in silence for a moment. Then he said, “I think perhaps — I think you should come, sir.”

I looked at him, surprised and questioning, and then got up. “Very well, I’ll come.” I set my hand for an instant on the shoulder of the big swordsmith. “Later, I shall want to speak to all your band. Meanwhile, get whatever wounded you have to my surgeon Gwalchmai; any of my men will tell you where to find him.”

I called to another of the Companions who was passing, and handed Arian over to him with a final pat on the horse’s moist drooping neck; then turned toward the Forum arch, Flavian falling in behind me, and walked out into the main street. “The east gate, you say?”

“Down a narrow street just short of it.”

We walked on in silence. The street, where smoking Saxon hovels huddled among the flaking walls of the Roman city, seemed strangely empty, for the hunt had swept to the farther end of the town and discovered the corn store; empty of the living, that is to say. There were enough bodies lying darkly sprawled in the glare of the angry sunset. Once a party of weeping women and children passed us, herded along by my men in the direction of the old fortress, where they could be more easily pent than in the town, but there were not many, even of them. A good number, I think, had escaped and would be heading for the coast; for the rest, there had been something of a massacre in Eburacum that fiery golden evening. Well, it might put the fear of God as well as Artos the Bear into the coastwise settlements. . . .

We reached the narrow street just short of the east gate, and turned into it; and instantly the fierce sunset light was cut off and the cool waters of the dusk flowed about us. Halfway down the street a gleam of saffron light shone from an open doorway, spilling already a faint yellow stain across the way. Several of the Companions stood beside the door, and they parted in the silence of men utterly weary, to let me through. Someone had brought a torch, kindled I suppose from a smoldering roof or someone’s forsaken hearth; and by its light I saw that the floor beneath my feet was of fine tesserae, though white with the droppings of swallows from their nests in the ragged thatch, and there were traces of color as well as damp stains on the plastered evil-smelling walls. Another door at my shoulder was open, and one of the Bearers of the Blue War Shield stood aside from before it. I glanced at Flavian, and then turned in through it, the man with the torch following me.

The room was a smallish one, but even so the makeshift torch left the walls in shadow, the light, as the man raised his arm, falling full upon the two figures in its midst. A woman lay there on a low pallet bed; a woman in the long straight folds of a crimson gown, with the glint of royal goldwork about her head. And beside her crouched a boy of about fourteen, with one arm circled protectingly across her body. For one wing beat of time, stillness held the scene within it as a bee is held in the heart of a tear of amber. Then as I entered, the boy sprang up like a wild beast and whirled about to face me. But from the woman there came no movement, no quiver under the straight folds of the crimson gown that ran unbroken as the fluting on a column from the white neck to the rigid feet.

“Don’t touch her!” he said between his teeth. I have seldom known anyone to do that in truth, but this boy did it. They were white strong teeth, and I felt that I was looking at some beautiful, shining wild animal that at any moment might spring at my throat. “Do not you dare to touch her!” And I scarcely noticed at the time that he spoke — after a fashion — in the British tongue.

I moved slowly forward, my hands open at my sides. “I’ll not touch her.”

I stood looking down at the woman, hearing the distant uproar of the city, the growl of voices in the outer chamber; hearing the short panting breaths of the boy beside me; and underneath, more potent than all else, the silence in the room. A great lady, dead and made ready for her pyre, in her finest gown with the gold-work of her rank wreathed about her head. A royal lady among her own folk, by the look of her; and a most beautiful woman. She was not young. It is hard to judge the summers of the dead, for sometimes youth comes upon the face, and sometimes age; but the hair that was spread over the pillow caught the torchlight with the ripe glow of a wheat field in low sunshine, despite the gray hairs in the brightness of it; and not all the gauntness of long fever, not the first faint stains of death beneath the eyes and at the corners of the winged nostrils, could dim the beauty of the face, nor soften its utter ruthlessness. Her eyes were decently closed, but as I looked down at her, the conviction grew on me that open, they would be the same greenish-gray as another pair of eyes that I had seen lately. I had never seen this woman before, I was as sure of that as I had been in Ygerna’s case. But I was glad they were shut; I did not like the thought of them open — there might be too much power in them, and the power not for good. Suddenly, for no seeming reason, I remembered the words of old Aquila, describing to me the Lady Rowen, who in the days of his captivity he had seen once in her father’s hall. “A witch, a golden witch in a crimson gown.” The Lady Rowen, Earl Hengest’s daughter, who had spell-drawn Vortigern the Red Fox into casting aside his own wife for love of her, and then used her power as a weapon against him in her father’s cause. The Lady Rowen who had deserted him and returned to her own people when his shamed and outcast days came upon him — but not, it was said, before she had conceived his son.

I turned and looked at the boy who stood on wide planted feet, still as far as he could come between me and her, and found myself looking into a pair of gray-green eyes, the color of shallow water on a cloudy day — Hengest’s eyes, though they had been smashed and full of blood the last time I saw them; Octa’s eyes, blazing up at me under the white horsetail standard only that evening, in the moment before I struck. But the boy’s hair was darker than theirs, darker than his mother’s; it was the fierce russet of a fox’s pelt.

So I knew the answer to my question even as I asked it. “Who are you?”

“I am Cerdic, son to Vortigern King of Britain. And the Lady Rowen who was my mother was daughter to Earl Hengest of the Jutish folk.” His voice was level, with the levelness of a boy’s who is desperately afraid that it may break.

“And what do you here, Cerdic, Son of Vortigern?”

“I bide with my mother.”

“You must think of a better story. Oisc is safe away; and would you ask me to believe that your own people, your mother’s people, would leave you here to the power of Artos the Bear?”

He was a valiant stripling; I could see that he was desperately afraid of me, but the strange gray-green eyes never wavered, and his head was thrown back, above the slim golden tore that circled his throat. “Not if they knew it. In a turmoil such as there has been here, it is easy enough to slip aside. They will be thinking me killed, no more.”

“Your mother is dead,” I said after a silence. “You know that, don’t you?”

“She died yesterday. I saw her made ready for the pyre.” The voice was steadier than ever.

“Then what purpose could you think to serve by staying here?”

This time the answer came at me like the clawed leap of the wild beast I had been thinking him. “I hope to guard her a little while. I hoped to kill at least one of you and maybe fire the thatch before you could come at her with your filthy ways, but you were too quick for me.” His hand went to his belt, where the hilt of his dirk should have been, then fell away again. “Is it that you think I don’t know the foul ways that you Christians have with the bodies of the dead? Is it that you think I don’t know about the flesh and the chalice of blood when you feast with your God?”

And with the words scarce spoken, suddenly he was upon me as though he would have torn my throat out.

I caught and held him, pinioning his arms and crashing him against me, while a burst of voices and the thud of a swift footstep came behind me. “Let be, damn you!” I said to the voices and the footstep. I was crushing the boy’s body to mine as hard as I dared. I was afraid to hit him. I was always afraid of hitting; the blow was prone to do too much damage. He struggled like a wildcat in my grasp. Once he managed to drive his head down and got his teeth in my arm, and held on; but his struggles were growing weaker because he could not breathe. I could feel his young breast fighting and thrusting for air under my own ribs, and tightened my hold still further. “Stop it, you young fool! Stop it or I shall have to hurt you.” But my words never reached him.

And then suddenly he was drooping in my arms, half fainting; I loosed him slowly, letting the air come back into his lungs, and as he began to find his legs again, held him off at arm’s length. He was quiet enough now, drawing his breath in great sobbing gasps, but I doubted whether if I relaxed my hold completely, he would not be at my throat again next instant. And all at once, looking into the sullen stone-set face, I knew that I could have loved this boy if he were my son. This boy and not the son whom I knew in my dark innermost places, was being reared for me by another witch among my own mountains. Indeed I think that in that one moment we were neither of us far from love of the other, so strange and wayward and terrible are the ways of the human heart.

The moment passed. “Who told you that?” I demanded. “About the flesh and the blood?”

He controlled his panting in one long shaken breath. “My mother. But all men know that it is true.”

“Listen — listen to me, Cerdic, and believe me: it is not true, as you understand it. Your mother was — mistaken.”

“I do not believe you.”

“You must. In all faiths there are mysteries; you are old enough, maybe, to have been initiated into the mysteries of your own. When we who call ourselves Christians feast with our God, we eat bread and drink wine; the rest is the mystery. But before the mystery, the bread is but bread as other bread, and the wine is but wine as other wine.”

“That is a thing easy to say.”

“It is the true thing. No harm will come to your mother’s body at our hands.”

“That also is a thing easy to say.” But I thought that there was beginning to be a flicker of uncertainty in Ms eyes. “How may I know that it is true?”

“I can give you no proof beyond my word. I will swear it, if you like.”

He was silent a moment; then he said, “On what?”

“On the blade and the pommel of my sword.”

“The sword which is to drive me and my folk into the sea?”

“It is none the less sacred to me.”

He stood for a long silent moment looking me eye into eye. Then I released him and drew the sword from its sheath, and swore. The star of violet light woke under the torchlight in the heart of the great amethyst. “This is the seal of my great-grandsire, Magnus Maximus, Emperor of Britain,” I said when I had sworn. And he watched the great jewel as I slammed the sword back into its sheath, then raised his eyes again to my face, with something of challenge in them, something else, too; a strange farsighted expression as though he were looking into a distance, not of place, but of time. But he spoke no word.

“Now it is time to be going,” I said.

He swallowed, and suddenly the manhood left him and he was a boy again. “Going? Are you — not going to kill me, then?”

I had been aware for some time past that Bedwyr had come into the room and was standing close behind me. The familiar voice said very quietly in my ear, “Yes!”

“No,” I said. “I do not kill boys. Come back when you are a man, and I will kill you if I can; and if you can, you shall kill me.”

“It may be that I will do that — one day,” he said.

But at the time I scarcely heard him. I turned on Flavian standing by. “Take a couple of the others and see him safely through the gate and three bowshots along the road to the coast.” I looked again at the cub standing beside his dead mother. “After that, you will be on your own. If you run into any of the Blue War Shields, or find that the war boats have already sailed when you reach the coast, then that is the end. There is no more than I can do about you. Now get out.”

He looked from me to the still body on the bed; one long look, and then back again. Then he turned without a word and walked to the door. Flavian turned in behind him, and I heard him call to two of those outside, “Vran, Conan, I want you —” and the knot of footsteps dying away down the narrow street.

In the torchlit room, Bedwyr and I faced each other beside the bed. “I would to God that it had been I who found him, and not that fool Flavian,” Bedwyr said. “I could have arranged matters without troubling the Count of Britain.” He never used that title save in the spirit of mockery.

“How?”

“By having him killed out of hand,” he said simply.

“In Christ’s name, why, Bedwyr?”

“Do you not understand that he is Vortigern’s son? He understood it, if you did not. You blind, bloody fool, Artos, have you forgotten that there are still folk enough in Britain who count Vortigern’s for the true Royal House, and yours for no more than a usurper’s, fathered by a Roman general who was born in Hispania and took the flower of their young men with him to die at Aquileia? That may have little meaning now, while Ambrosius is the High King, but when the time comes for Ambrosius to die —”

Silence flashed down like a sword between us, and held us for a long harsh moment. Then I said, “I suppose I had forgotten something of that. I think I am glad, Bedwyr.”

In the returned silence, the echo of receding footsteps still sounded, fainter with every breath that passed.

“It is still not too late,” said Bedwyr.

I shook my head. “Fate does not allow it to men to unpick part of the pattern.” As I said it, an odd foreboding brushed me by, a sense, not so much of future evil as of the fate that I had spoken of, a sense of the inescapable pattern of things. Whatever it was, it was gone as swiftly as a bird darts across a sunlit clearing, from the shadow into the shadow again. I glanced about me. “Na, the thing is done. Best see to this matter of the burning. Get in brushwood and loose straw and pile it around the bed. And clear back the nearer bushes in the garden. We don’t want another fire spreading through Eburacum tonight.”

“Fire? You want the whole house destroyed?” Bedwyr had said what he had to say, and there was an end of it. So now he turned to the next thing.

“Yes. Fire is the usual way, among her people; and the place stinks anyway.” But it was in my heart also that fire was a cleansing thing, and I was still remembering Aquila’s words, “A golden witch in a crimson gown.”

They were felling and uprooting the overgrown bushes in the little town garden as I came out again into the street, and the dusk had deepened to a soft blue darkness full of voices and hurrying shadows and the spitting flare of torches. They had lit great fires in the Forum by the time I returned to it. Most of the foot had come in by that time, and the whole war host was crowding close about the flames. They had driven in a few cattle, and already the smell of roasting meat was in the air. The whisper of another scent, sweet and heavy with musk, curled across my nose, and the woman Helen drifted out of the shadows and brushed across my path, then checked, glancing up at me over her shoulder. Her bright rags were allowed to slip just a little when she held them at her thin breast; her eyes half laughing, at once bright and unutterably weary under the lids whose green malachite had run in streaks, her body touched against mine, lightly, with a mute invitation.

I looked down at her. “I am so deeply thankful to you, Helen; tonight I cannot even find the words to tell you how thankful.”

“There are other things than words, my Lord Artos; other ways for a man and a woman to speak together.” Her voice was soft and throaty as a ringdove. “I have a little wine in my lodging.”

“Not tonight, darling. I’m too tired.”

Cei strutted into the light of the nearest fire as I spoke, and I jerked a thumb in his direction. “You see that one with the russet beard, and the bracelets? If you would be kind, go and offer him your wine.”

She looked at me without the least rancor, clearly with no sense of rebuff — but indeed I had meant no rebuff — only with a little mockery under the green-painted lids. “But perhaps he also is too tired.”

“He is never too tired,” I said.

WE remained several days in Eburacum to rest both men and horses and get the weapons and war gear mended and renewed and see to the wounded. And almost at once the folk of the city who had escaped fire and seax when the Sea Wolves came, began to trickle back from the refuges to which they had fled farther inland. With their help we cleared the streets of the sprawling dead, and stripped the dead of their war gear, claiming for ourselves as usual the keenest weapons and most finely wrought mail shirts to replace the boiled leather and horn and age-eaten Roman hoop mail that still had to serve for some of us. As Lindum would have had us stay, so would Eburacum, and indeed with better cause, for the Coritani had been almost free of the Sea Wolves when we left, but here we had been able to clear only the city itself and the land toward the coast was still in enemy hands. But the North was smoldering into flame, and I could not bide in Eburacum any more than in Lindum City.

I gathered an oddly assorted council of war: one or two hungry magistrates, leaner than ever they had been in their lives before; a handful of tottering graybeards who had come forward to answer my call for men who had served with the Eagles in their youth; the leaders of Kinmarcus’s tribesmen and of the Brigantian warriors who had joined us on the march; Jason the Swordsmith with the mark of the thrall ring red-raw on his neck, to speak for his own valiant rabble; my own lieutenants Bedwyr and Cei. I summoned them together into the Forum and told them I could not stay to finish the work that was begun, while the fire in the North swept down to engulf us all in the end. I would leave them a war band of trained spearmen to help them trahi themselves. I left them their own warriors, the Bearers of the Blue War Shields — and there were no fiercer fighting men under the sun, as the Eagles had good cause to know. I left them their old soldiers for wisdom and cunning in war craft, if their days for bearing a sword were past. (I saw how that made the men of the Blue Shield stand up straight like emperors, and the veterans begin to look down their noses at the Blue Shields; and began to harangue them on the need to forget all differences and stand together.) I forget now what I said, save that I did my best to strengthen their hearts and their sword hands, that I promised to come again and vowed that we would finish the work together. I know that I crooned over them like a bairn’s nurse, and cursed them like a time-expired centurion with the gutter words of half an empire at his command, and appealed to them like a girl appealing to her lover. I think that many of us were near to tears by the end. I know I felt like a murderer. But I was sure in my heart that now I had cleared out the wolf’s lair, they could hold their own — if only they could stand together! Dear God, let them be able to stand together! Let them learn that one lesson that seems impossible ever to be learned by the British kind!

Two days before we marched, a messenger came from the Prince Guidarius in Lindum, to tell me that the Coritani territory was still free of the Sea Wolves, but that even so, my old place still waited for me if I chose to return to it. I gave orders for the messenger to be fed and housed, and sent him back next day with word that I thanked the Prince Guidarius, but that I had not changed my plans. I had little time to weave courtesy into my reply, for I had both hands full with arrangements for food and war supplies to come up after us from Eburacum before the autumn’s, end. (I had already sent word back to Deva of the victory, together with a forewarning to Kinmarcus that we should need the same kind of supplies from him and from the Môn grainlands later.) With making plans for a supply depot at Corstopitum, the old depot town for the Wall fortress; with convincing the Bishop of Eburacum, who was among the returned survivors, that the income from certain Church orchard land, luckily undamaged by the Saxons, would be better spent on well-made arrows and salt and saddle leather, than laid by in gold to the Glory of God. He was not easy to convince, being less of a mouse than his brother of Lindum. But he saw my point in the end.

And the next day we marched out of Eburacum by the northern gate, and took the Legion’s road to the Wall.

It must have been a fine sight in its day, the Wall, when the sentries came and went along the rampart walks and bronze-mailed cohorts held the fortress towers and the statues and the altars to the Legion’s gods were thick along the crest; and between it and the road and the vallum ditch that followed it like its own shadow, one great string of towns, one long-drawn town under many names, straggling all the four days’ march from Segedunum to Luguvallium. The towns were as dead as the Wall, now, for the menace of the North was too near, the raids too frequent for them to have outlived the protection of the Eagles; and we rode into a ghost town, the roofs long since fallen in and the walls crumbling away, the tall armies of nettles where the merchants had spread their wares and the Auxiliaries had taken their pleasure in off-duty hours, where the married quarters had been, and children and dogs had tumbled in the sunshine under the very feet of the marching cohorts, and the drink shops had spilled beery song into the night, and the smiths and sandalmakers, the horse dealers and the harlots had plied their trades; and all that moved was a blue hare among the fallen gravestones of forgotten men, and above us a hoodie crow perching on the rotting carcass of what had once been one of the great catapults of the Wall, that flew off croaking, with a slow flap of indignant wings as we drew near.

We camped that night around the crumbling gate tower where the road from Corstopitum, and Eburacum beyond, passed through into lowland Caledonia, into the old lost province of Valentia. I called the captains together after the evening meal, and took a bit of stick and began to draw maps in the ashes on the edge of the campfire. How often I had seen Ambrosius doing that, on the eve of a campaign. I was mapping, for my own information as well as theirs, a countryside that I had never seen; but it was not for nothing that I had spent those long winter evenings listening to Daglaef the Merchant. “See — here we sit now at the Hunnum Gate; from here the road runs — so, north and a little west, to Trimontium, three days’ march.” (It was odd how, never having known the Legions, one still thought of the old legionary march of twenty miles, when one wanted to work out a distance.) “Here it crosses the Tweed — so, and runs on through the lowland hills and into the fringes of the Caledon Forest, to come out in the levels below the Highland Line.” Bedwyr and the others gathered closer in the firelight, peering over my shoulders. I went on scrawling lines and curves in the warm ash. “Now from Luguvallium, where I put this pebble, a second road runs north to Castra Cunetium, here, five marches by reason of the way the road sinks to avoid marsh country and high moors. And on, also, toward the Highland Line through the very heart of the Pict lands.” I returned to Trimontium, trying to remember exactly how the merchant had described to me the run of the Tweed. “Here the Tweed Valley narrows into a gorge, running so. Easy to see the strategic importance of the place, isn’t it, with the river valley and the road forming between them the main highways from Caledonia to the south; and the Inner Kingdom of the Picts thrusting down through the Forest in the northwest. . . . Then if Daglaef spake truth, there is a lateral road from Trimontium running thus, up toward the headwaters of the Tweed and across the high tongue of the Forest to those of the Cluta, and downvalley to Castra Cunetium. . . . Now have you all got that safely behind your foreheads? Then make sure that the rest of the lads have it, too, for it is in my mind that those three roads and those two forts are the pattern of our fate for a good while to come, for on our holding and our handling of them depends our hold of Caledonia.”

Presently, when I had done, I threw the stick into the heart of the fire, and brushed my hand through the gray ash, blotting out the crude map as though it had never been, and got up to go and take a look at the horse lines, as I always did before lying down to sleep.

Next morning Owain with fifty light-riding tribesmen set off westward along the frontier road to Luguvallium; their task was to watch the back road, the flank road of my map, and send me instant word if the enemy chose to run the hazard (for we should be on their flank at rear), of trying a break through into Britain from that side.

And when they were gone, Bedwyr and I with our foreguard rode out through the gaping ruins of the Hunnum Gate, under the charging boar of the Legion that had built it. Beyond the Wall, the country seemed all at once darker and wilder, the distant hills more brooding, the very wind through the heather blowing with a more desolate song. But that was foolishness; nothing but the knowledge in our hearts that we were beyond the frontier, beyond the pale of familiar things.

It must have been almost two hours later before the last of the rear guard was through the gate, for we moved in the usual formation for a march through hostile country, the foreguard of cavalry scouting a few miles ahead of the foot and baggage tram, the rear guard following a few miles behind, and the light horsemen scattered against the threat of flank attack on either side. I hated to ride in that formation; it lengthened the time of the day’s march unbearably, or else cut the distance covered. But to take any other course would have been to go bleating for trouble like a lost lamb in wolf country.

We got the trouble soon enough, without bleating for it. From the Wall to Trimontium was a three-day march, and we did it in something over three weeks. There was no random turmoil throughout the country, the thing had passed beyond that stage. But clearly Huil Son of Caw had had word of our coming, and sent out his light war parties to hold us up while he finished the gathering of his own war host and the armoring of his stronghold against us. And the warriors of his skirmishing bands had the advantage of knowing the country they fought over, while we were strangers to it. We had to fight through almost daily skirmishes in which the enemy appeared from nowhere, and even when beaten off, simply melted into the hillside again, leaving very few dead behind them to mingle with ours. We were attacked at any brown stream or blind turn of the track, shot at from behind every furze bush; stretches of road were torn up ahead of us just where the ground was softest, so that we had to spend whole days in getting the horses across maybe a mile of ground where the white silken tassels of the bog grass gave us the only warning of the worst patches; and almost always we were attacked while doing it, so that all the while, though not heavily, we lost men and horses. Indeed if the road had been a valley one or led through forest country, I think that it would have gone hard with us; but it ran for the chief part through heather moors, and in most places where it was not a natural ridgeway, it had been raised slightly above the level of the surrounding countryside by the engineers who built it — for which I blessed those engineers, praying ease on their long-departed souls in the names of all the gods I knew. But apart from men, the very land itself seemed in league with the traitors and the Sea Wolves, and twice smoked up dense white mists against us, which, since there would have been a certain unwisdom in marching blind through unknown and hostile country in a mist that could have hidden a war host within a spear’s length of us, held us captive for days at a time within the circle of the past night’s defenses, with the horses under strong guard outside. (We ditched the camp every night, and each man set his spear upright behind the ditch; it was as near as light-moving troops such as we were could come to the old “thorn hedge” of the Legions.) The picket lines were attacked on both occasions, and several horses killed and a few hamstrung by men who paid for it with their own lives.

It was very early summer when we marched out through the Hunnum Gate, and we had numbered nearly seven hundred, counting the drivers, but the first heather was coming into flower over the moors, and we had lost something like a fifth part of our strength, when we came at last in sight of the great red sandstone fort crouched at the foot of three-peaked Eildon; Trimontium, the Place of Three Hills.

I had drawn the war host closer as we neared the place, and sent out a handful of light horse to scout ahead. And just as we were making the noon halt they rode in again with their ponies in a smother, and their leader came straight to me, breathless and stumbling in his run. “My Lord Artos, they are ahead of us in Trimontium. Saxons too, for there’s one of their accursed horsetail standards peering over the wall. And Scots to judge by the glint of white shields on the ramparts.”

I had been half expecting that. The Place of Three Hills must have been a good rallying point for them as it was a good base and headquarters for us. I called Bedwyr who was overseeing the noon issue of biscuit, and told him. “The wolf pack is ahead of us. We are going to have to fight for Trimontium if we want it. Pass the word to the rest.”

But indeed the word was already running, as such tidings always do, like heath fire through the host. I sent a rider galloping back to summon up the foot and the rear guard, and when they came up with us we marched again, in changed formation ready for battle.

But before marching, the Companions, I also, picked sprigs of the big rose-purple bell heather and stuck them into our helmets and shoulder buckles, in the way that had become custom with us.

For a good while the fort was hidden from us by the slow moorland billows of the land between. But all the while three-peaked Eildon stood up before us, rising taller into the changing sky as the long miles passed. It was drawing toward evening when Bedwyr and I left the war host behind the last ridge, and riding forward alone, came out through the hazel and birch woods that had clothed the hills of the past day’s march, and saw the lean red menace of the old fort, no more than five or six bowshots away. The scouts had spoken truth. Heads crowded the ramparts, and there was a dark swarm about the gateway where pack ponies were hurriedly being got inside and the barricades flung up behind them, and the smoke of many cooking fires billowed sideways in the wind that had begun to rise.

“I would to God I had some means of knowing their numbers,” I said to Bedwyr, who had ridden out of the woodshore at my side. “The fort was built to hold a double cohort of a thousand for months on end; it would hold three or four times as many for a short space.”

“So long as the water holds out,” said Bedwyr.

I glanced aside at him. “You think they mean to stand siege here?”

“I think nothing — as yet — but I was ready to see them drawn up to make us welcome, on the clear ground yonder. They have had warning enough of our coming, and the Saxon at least has small love for fighting behind walls.”

I was silent. I too should have thought to see them drawn up ready for us. It could be the siege, of course. If they were well provisioned they might be counting on the fact that we, in an alien and hostile country, would be likely to run out of supplies before they did. But there was the water; after the years that the place had been deserted, the wells had probably fallen in, and in any case, since there would be many more than the place had been built for, and the pack beasts also must be watered, it could not be long before the supply began to fail. They might of course merely be waiting for morning, believing that we should start nothing so late in the day as this. Or they might be planning a night attack of their own, when we had been lulled into a false security. I wished to God I knew. Meanwhile I remained silent for a while, taking in the lay of the land. From the shallow valley that ran down ahead of us, the land on the right rose gently in a kind of broad spur to the fortress walls, not cleared back, as it must have been in the old days, but overgrown with the wildest tangle of hazel and elder scrub. Beyond the fort and on either side, it seemed, as well as I could see, that the hillside fell away steeply as the swoop of a falcon, into the wooded river gorge below Eildon. The place, in fact, was a spur above the river, and if the three farther sides were what they seemed, only this, the southern side, could be attacked in any force.

A blast on Prosper’s aurochs hunting horn brought no response save the ghost of an echo out of the river gorge.

The light was beginning to fade, and the rising wind sounded like a charge of cavalry when we turned back to the others beyond the ridge. I gathered a handful of our best scouts and trackers, and gave them their orders. “Get down the valley and lie close for a while. As soon as the day has dimmed to half-light, work your way in close to the fort. They may have pickets posted — I doubt it, but it is a thought to keep in mind. Work around the whole circuit, and bring me back word how steep the fall of the land is on the sides that one cannot judge from here, and what possibility there may be of sending in an attack from the river side. Notice also the condition of the walls, how the gates are held, any smallest detail that may aid us in the planning of the next move. Understood?”

When they had melted into the wind-swayed thickets, we made camp as best we could in the shelter of the ridge, leaving a few men to keep watch on Trimontium from the ridge itself; watered the horses at the stream which, rising somewhere in the high moors southward, flung its ferny loop around the far shoulder of the ridge and went purling down to join the Tweed; ate the evening meal of barley bannock and the inevitable hard yellow cheese, and settled down to wait as patiently as might be for the return of the scouting party. Sometime after dark — there was no moon that night, and the clouds were racing across the stars — they came slipping one after another out of the night and the wind-lashed woods to drop beside the campfire, and tell their story between ravenous mouthfuls of the food that had been set aside for them. There were no pickets, but also no possibility of mounting an attack of any strength from the farther side of the fort. “Scarce footing for the whin bushes,” said the leader when I put it to him. But there was a deer track, and a postern gate on the north side, and in one place the wall was down to not much over the height of a man, with plenty of stone and rubble still outside to aid climbing, so that it might be possible to get a small band around that way to mount some kind of decoy attack to draw attention from the main gates. The gates themselves had rotted apart, but all of them were strongly closed with thornwork and stout timber barricades. Of the numbers of the motley war host gathered in Trimontium, save that they were very many, the scouting party had of course been able to gain no idea.

When it was all told, we looked at each other, Cei and Bedwyr and I, in the wind-torn firelight. Bedwyr had brought out his beloved harp as he did most evenings when the food was eaten; he plucked a little inquiring flight of notes from it that seemed to leap into the wind and be whirled away like the first yellow birch leaves. “Tonight?”

“Tonight,” I said. “For one thing, we may not have a wind like this again, to cover the sound of Cei plunging through the undergrowth.”

Indeed the wind stood friend to us that night in more ways than one. It covered the sound of our general advance as we made our way over the ridge and down through the birch and hazel woods into the shallow valley. (For though the main part of our horses were under guard on the far side of the ridge, even a few horses make more noise than many men in dense undergrowth.) It covered, with its soft turmoil among the bushes of the steep fortress hillside, the movements of Bedwyr and his dismounted squadron as they crept and clambered around beneath the red sandstone walls toward the unmended breach that the scouts had spoken of; though I think that they would have made little sound in any case, for they had laid aside their ring-mail shirts, which always chimed a little in action, however carefully one moved in them, and gone into their venture with nothing but buckler and drawn sword. . . . It covered the sound of brushwood and wagon straw being piled against the main barricades (five men it cost us, though, to keep it there) and when it caught light from the firebrands that we flung into it, the wind caught and fanned the flames and roared them up and drove the licking tongues against the timbers of the barricade so swiftly that the first warning shouts had scarcely broken from the men within before the whole gateway was ablaze.

The archers, whom we had kept standing by, had light for shooting now, and crouching among the nearer bushes began to loose with a high trajectory that carried the arrows over the ramparts on either side of the gate towers, to fall on the heads of the defenders. Some of the arrows had flaming spirit-soaked rags tied to them, and their arc showed like shooting stars on a winter’s night. A few enemy arrows answered, but not many; the defenders were too intent on the gate itself to have much time for shooting (surely we had their whole attention now, and Bedwyr had his chance if ever he was to have it!). The uproar inside the gate was so wild that at one moment, sitting old Arian with my own squadron, just beyond the reach of the flame light, I was troubled lest I should not hear Bedwyr’s signal from the far side of the fort to tell me that he was ready, fearing even that he might not hear my horn sounding the charge. Where timing meant so much, we could ill afford to miss each other’s signals.

The barricade went with a roar and a crash, and a sheet of flame leapt toward the stormy sky, its crest caught by the wind and bent over like the crest of a wave before it breaks; rags of flame were flying across the fortress; and faintly, in the moment’s stunned hush that followed the fall of the barricades, I heard the war cry of Arfon sounding across the distance and the storm: “Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!” and knew that the moment had come.

Arian was sweating; I felt him start and tremble under me, for like all horses, he was terrified of fire. All horses . . . How if they refused to face the flaming gateway? I should have ordered the whole assault on foot, but we needed the crash and sweep of a cavalry charge. No time for regrets or wavering now; no time to let the flames die down, though already our lads, close under the wall where the arrows and throw spears of the defenders could not reach them, were flinging on masses of fresh bracken to damp them down for the moment. The white steam hissed up, and the flame-wall sank and grew ragged as I called to my trumpeter, “Now, man — the Charge!”

The familiar notes of the hunting horn leapt into the wind, and I bent forward onto Arian’s sweating neck. “Now! Now, brother!” He snorted and shook his head, beginning to swerve aside, and I flung a fold of my cloak across his eyes. Blind, I knew that he would go where I urged him, because he trusted me. “Git up! On, boy!” He hesitated an instant longer, and then with a defiant and despairing neigh broke forward into a canter, and I heard the hooves of the others drumming on his heels. The heat of the gateway struck at my face like a blow, the smitch of half-quenched flames choked and blinded me. My face was down against Arian’s neck, partly to shield my own eyes, partly that my voice might reach him above the tumult. I was managing him with my knees alone, the reins loose on his neck, that I might have one hand for my spear and the fold of my cloak across his eyes. I sang to him, shouted in his laid-back ear. “On, brave heart! Sa sa sa — up, come up, bold and beautiful! Come up, my hero!”

And old Arian answered me like a hero indeed. He gathered himself together, greathearted as he was, and with the terror of the fire in his nostrils, galloped straight forward into the dark, through the steaming and crackling inferno of the gateway and the massed spears beyond. And after me crashed the rest, tramping the fire under round hooves and scattering the red embers like sparks from a swordsmith’s anvil. I raised the war cry, and heard it echoed back to me from across the roaring chaos of the camp. “Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!” The hunting horn was sounding again, and suddenly from the heart of the camp ahead of us came the hollow booming of the Saxon war horns, and the deep throbbing snarl of the eight-foot war horns of the Scots. We charged on toward them.

The fire arrows and torn-off flames from the burning barricades had fired the rough thatch on some of the buildings; and by the leaping wind-torn light, we charged and charged again through the solid masses of the enemy, carrying the Red Dragon of Britain on toward the heart of the camp where the war horns and the up-reared standards told us that we should come at Huil Son of Caw, his household warriors and his allied chieftains. Our foot swarmed in over the still-smoking embers that we had scattered for them, and hand-to-hand fighting had spread into every corner of the great fort. And from the northern quarter, where Bedwyr and his war band had leapt in over the crumbling wall, the war cry, taken up by a score of triumphant voices, was sweeping nearer.

I remember little of the last phase. When once all vestige of the pattern is gone, there is little to remember of any battle save the chaos and the smell of blood and sweat that are common to all battles; and one is very tired, and not very clear in the head. . . . In the end they broke and streamed away — those who could — over the broken parts of the wall, leaping from the rampart walks and down the bush-grown hill scarp, leaving their dead behind them.

The time came when the last fighting was done, and a sudden quietness fell over the great camp; and even the wind seemed to drop for the moment. Men were putting out the flames of the roofs that had caught, and I was standing beside the remains of a cooking fire, with an arm over Arian’s neck, praising and consoling him for the red spear gash in his flank. Presently, I thought dimly, I must get it bathed; presently, if there was any water. Surely there had been something about a shortage of water, a long while ago? My head began to clear slowly, and I saw Bedwyr limping toward me, with the blood trickling from a gash just above his knee.

“A good hunting,” I said, when he came up.

“A good hunting.”

“Any sign of Huil?”

“None so far, but they have only just begun to go through the dead and wounded. There’s a good few of them.”

“What of our own losses?” (It might have been Eburacum over again, but after most battles there are much the same questions to be asked.)

“So far as we can tell as yet, not heavy. I lost several men getting in from the north rampart, but most of the wolf pack was faced to your blazing gate; yet it is in my mind that that charge of yours through the flames seemed more like a lightning flash than a thing that one could strike back at.” And then he said, “We’ve lost nine horses; that I do know.”

And the last of the fog lifted from my brain. (I think, looking back, that I must have taken a bang on the head without knowing it, for that kind of heaviness after battle was not usual with me.)

I looked at Bedwyr, scarcely noticing even when Arian muzzled at my shoulder. It was a worse loss than that of the same number of men; but there was no help for it, no help even in cursing. “Well, we have our winter quarters — though they stand somewhat in need of scrubbing out,” I said. Amlodd came to take Arian from me, and I handed the old horse over, and then turned to the multitude of tasks and decisions, the general clearing up, that always wait for every commander after the fighting’s over.

Gwalchmai as usual was serenely at work among our own wounded, gathered into a roofless barrack row; I heard a man cry out in pain, and his quiet voice in command and reassurance as I passed the tumble-down doorway.

Some of our men were throwing the Saxon dead and wounded alike over the ramparts at the spot where the escarpment fell almost sheer to the river; but not before they held a torch to each dead face to make sure that it was not Huil Son of Caw. Our own dead were being gathered and laid aside for burial in the long grave that their comrades were digging for them among the bushes where the ground was soft. I had made it a rule, years ago, that however hard and hot the day had been, however spent our bodies or sick our heads, however near the enemy and however little time remained to dawn, no dead body should be left unburied within the camp overnight. I do not know how it is; maybe evil spirits gather to bodies left lying so; but that way comes pestilence. I have seen it happen before, especially in summer weather. There would be no attack on Trimontium for a while and a while, and save for a few pickets, we could take the sleep we needed tomorrow.

The searchers found more than one Saxon chieftain, and a huge Pict with the blue spirals of his race tattooed from brow to ankle, and the gold collar of a noble, lying among the dead under the blood-dabbled horsetail standard where the last stand had been made. But when the last of the enemy slain had been dealt with, there was still no sign of any man who could be Huil Son of Caw.

“It is as well to have something saved for another day,” said Cei, who had discovered a store of Saxon beer jars in one of the old store barns and was inclined to take a cheerful view. “Sir, will you give the order for an issue of beer all around? I’m thinking the lads could do with it.”

For Cei was ever one to share good fortune.

“Well enough,” I said. “Get in a couple of the captains and half a dozen of the Company to see to it.”

But there was more than beer jars in that barn. A short while later, one of the Companions came to me in a hurry where I was standing with Bedwyr to see the baggage train brought in. “Sir, my Lord Artos, we have found a girl’s body over there among the beer jars. Will you come and look?” He was a veteran of many fights, hardened in the fire, I should have said, as any one of my Companions, but from the color of his face, I thought for a moment that he was going to spew.

I CURSED inwardly as I turned to go with him. It was Eburacum all over again. I seemed fated always to find myself with the body of a woman to dispose of when the fighting was done. But this was no golden witch in a crimson gown.

The men had been working by the light of a pine-knot torch, and so there was light enough to see what lay at their feet, when they moved back with an odd hush on them to let me through.

More than light enough.

A young woman, hardly more than a girl, lay there among the beer jars, in the ugly, contorted attitude in which she had been flung down and kicked aside. She was no taller than a girl of fourteen or fifteen would be among our own folk, but she was of the Little Dark People, and among them a grown woman is no taller than that. I thought, looking at her upturned face among the tangled masses of black hair, that she had once been very good to look upon, in the narrow, fine-boned way of her people; but she was not good to look upon now, though her skin was still honey soft between the bruises and clawings of the brutal handling she had received, and her contorted limbs slim and fine. She was stark naked, and from the stains upon her she had been raped not once but again and again. The man who held the torch moved his arm, and as the light shifted I looked again into the girl’s battered face. I had thought the look on it was one of torment and unutterable horror, but now I saw that beneath these things there was something else; a look of escape. She had possessed, this girl of the Old Race, the power which some birds and animals possess, when the outrage of living mounts beyond a certain point, of making the final withdrawal into the refuge of death where no tormentor can follow.

Cei was cursing in a sustained flow, his blue eyes blazing with a rage such as I had never seen in them before. “May their souls rot in Hell! By Christ! If I had the man here I’d unman him with my naked hands, and tear his living heart out afterward!”

“You’d need to unman a good few, I’m thinking — and maybe you’d need help,” said Bedwyr’s voice just behind me, still and cool as deep water by contrast with the hot rage of the other’s.

One of the men looked to me. “What are we to do with her, sir?”

I hesitated. If she had been one of our own kind she could have gone into the same long grave as our battle dead. But she was of the Old Race, the Little Dark Ones. Many of our own scouts and camp followers had something of that blood in them (I have sometimes thought that there was a strain of it in the Royal House of Arfon itself, for Ambrosius, though taller, was narrow-boned and dark as the Fairy kind), and our own people worked alongside them contentedly enough, especially since Irach; though many a time I have seen one of my own Companions make the Sign of the Horns before sharing food from the same dish with one of them. But I knew that if I ordered the girl’s body to be laid with our own dead, I should have trouble with my men, for fear that the nearness of the Fairy’s dead might harm our own in some way.

“Scoop her out a grave to herself somewhere among the bushes,” I said.

There was a sudden movement, a many-voiced murmur of dissent behind me, and swinging around I saw that a crowd had gathered, peering over each other’s shoulders at the small outraged body in the torchlight. One of the mule drivers came thrusting his way through, or was thrust by those behind him; a small dark hairy man with prick ears like a faun’s. “My Lord Artos, there is another word as to that.”

“Speak it, then.”

He stood with his feet apart, staring into my face, stubborn as one of his own mules. “My Lord Artos, I know something of these things, for my grandmother came from the Hollow Hills. They are not wont to lie alone, my people — my grandmother’s people. If you lay her as you have ordered, she will grow lonely, and in her loneliness she may walk. Women who die as she died are given to walking, anyway; and she will be angry, not only with those who killed her, but with us, who cast her out. But if you bury her here in the midst of the camp, she will be quiet with life going on about her and the warmth of the cooking fires overhead. Her anger will be all for those who killed her, and she will bring us luck and help us to hold the Place of Three Hills.”

Young Brys Son of Bradman protested furiously. “My Lord, do not listen to him, he will let her loose in our very midst!” And another added his word. “I’ve no wish to sleep at nights with that under my pillow!” And the refrain was taken up by others, while the mule driver stood his ground, still staring into my face, and behind him, the men who had thrust him forward muttered among themselves.

Cei demanded in his deep grumble, “Are you going to give ear to a bunch of mule drivers, rather than to your own Companions?”

“We shall still need mule drivers,” I said. And then suddenly I had the answer: not perfect, but the best that I was likely to find.

Only a few paces from where we stood, there was a deep broad pit, probably once a supplementary grain store, for mildewed shreds of the hides with which it had been lined still clung to its sides and to the remains of the timbers that had once closed it in. It could never be used again, and I had given orders that the dead horses were to be tipped into it and covered over for tonight with whatever came to hand of clods and debris and old thatch. That would be a lighter task than to drag the carcasses outside and far enough from the camp. There had not been time yet for the order to be carried out, though the first of the carcasses had been dragged close in readiness; and horses were creatures of the Sun, sacred among the Sun people once, while nine has ever been a number of Power.

“Lay her in the old grain pit before the horses go in,” I said. “Thrice three horses above her should make all safe, without keeping off the warmth of the cooking fires.” And before anyone had time to raise further objections: “Go, someone, and bring a couple of baggage ropes,” for I had no wish to tumble her into her grave as one flings a dead cat on a garbage pile; and while someone went to do my bidding and the rest stood by, few I think, even of her own kind, overeager to touch her, I flung off my old weather-stained cloak, and spread it on the ground, and lifted the poor broken body onto it. She weighed no more than a child, and some of the suppleness of life was still in her, so that I was able to lay her decently, and not in the crumpled attitude in which we had found her. Bedwyr knelt beside me, helping me to draw the dark folds close. “Cover her face,” he said; and then, “I’ll carry her.”

But she seemed in some way to be my charge. I shook my head, and got up with the small close-wrapped body in my arms, and went outside with her to where the mouth of the old grain pit gaped darkly in the torchlight. Half the camp had come thronging around by that time, but there was no sound save a low muttering as here and there men looked at each other or at the burden I carried, and made the Sign of the Horns. In the end we did not need the baggage ropes after all, for Gault and Levin, making a jest of it, but a gentle jest, sprang down into the pit themselves, and one standing on the other’s shoulders (they were much given to fooling together like a pair of acrobats) took the girl from me, and dropping clear as his friend crouched down, laid her kindly on the rough earth. We flung down fresh bracken to cover her, and the two warriors carefully wedged above her the beams that we passed down to them, so that they might keep the main weight of the horses off her. Then Levin climbed again onto his friend’s shoulders, and caught the edge of the hole and scrambled out, ignoring the hands reached to his aid, and turned about to help Gault out after him. But the depth was too great. Straining, they could just touch fingertips, but could not get a grip on each other’s hands. For the instant I saw them looking at each other, half laughing, one up from the pit that had become a grave, the other down into it, straining to reach each other. Then somebody tossed down the end of a knotted baggage rope and Gault swarmed up easily enough, and was standing among us again, panting a little.

The thing was over, and most of the weary fighting men were drifting away, while those that remained were stripping the dead horses of their gear before they went into the pit. I turned away to go and make sure that the whole baggage train had been got safely in, and find out the state of the wells. It was as I had expected; they had fallen in. There was water far down in one of them, enough for the wounded, anyway; the rest of us must do without water until the time came for taking the horses down to the river in the morning.

Morning was not so very far off, by that time, and a quiet was falling over the old red sandstone fort; dark shapes of sleeping men huddled in every corner, who stirred and cursed without moving if one fell over them; and the wind was lulling into soft fitful gusts with long exhausted stillnesses between, when I passed the old grain pit again. The last of the horses had been toppled into it, and the pit covered over with clods and half-charred thatch until tomorrow when it could be filled in properly. As I came toward it I saw that Bedwyr was ahead of me. I suppose he had checked in passing on some errand of his own. His little harp was in his hands, but I had not heard the notes of it until the moment before I saw him. He was playing very softly, fault plucked notes at long intervals, and the fitful wind was blowing the other way. He turned his head toward me (but I could not see his face for the nearest watch fire was sulking low), and went on playing, a note, and then a pause as though he listened for the next note before playing it, and then another note, spun so far apart that one could not carry the thing in one’s head as any kind of tune, only as single moments of beauty that tore at one’s heart, strung on those long dark silences of the dying wind.

“What is it?” I asked, when it seemed that the wind and the darkness had closed for good over the last note, and cursed myself for breaking the circle of perfection.

He struck another note with his thumbnail. “What does it sound like?”

“A lament — but I think not for the horses.”

“Na. Another time I will make a lament for the horses; a fine lament, set with words to the harp song, swift and shining like the wind under the sun, for the Nine Steeds of Artos, and men shall sing it around their watch fires for a thousand years. This is only a small lament for a small matter, the merest spray of blackthorn blossom crushed under heel; and see” — he struck a final descending ripple of three notes and reached for the harp bag that hung over his shoulder — “it is finished.”

Even as he spoke, I felt rather than saw his gaze go past me. He caught his breath in a snatch instantly stilled. “Look behind you, Artos my Brother. Were nine horses not enough after all?”

But I had already swung around. The fire, as a dying fire will, had leapt up as though in greeting; and on the fringe of the firelight something moved, then came forward into the full gold of the flames; a girl, a woman, though she was no taller than a fourteen-year-old child, with straight dark hair falling loose on either side of her narrow face, and huge eyes set long and slantwise in it. She was not naked as the other had been, but clad in a piece of some dark stuff — green and blue checker it was, when I saw it by the light of day, but in the firelight it looked almost black — flung across one shoulder and wrapped about her with a strap to hold it at the waist. Behind her came seven young men not much taller than herself and of the same dark, narrow make, naked save for kilts about their loins of the same dark plaid as hers or of otter or wildcat skin, and each carrying a light spear and a small bow and quiver. In the first moment of their stepping forward into the firelight, they made a strange and not easily forgotten picture, and a gasp ran through the men about me. Cei began to pray under his breath. But oddly enough it never even touched my mind that the girl was a ghost, though indeed she was white enough for one; and my first thought was to curse the men of the guard for sleeping on watch. But that was before I knew the pure-blooded People of the Hills as I came to know them later. When I did, I never again was hard on a sentry who let the Dark Ones slip through, for they move like shadows on the grass.

The men around the campfires had turned about to stare, and others loomed out of the shadows of the tumble-down barrack rows, drawn by some sudden sense of happening; and a great stillness took us all so that for a long moment we stood and looked at each other, the girl with the seven lithe young warriors, and ourselves in the firelight.

“Who are you?” I said. “And what do you here?”

“I am Daughter among the People of the Hills, up yonder,” she said, then, speaking the Celtic tongue with a hesitance and a strange cadence that betrayed it for a tongue that was not her own, “As to what I do here, I come — we come, my brothers and I, to say to you, ‘Oh my lord, let you give back to us our sister.’ ”

There was a stirring and a harsh indrawn breath among the men around the campfire, and she looked about her quickly. “You know, then. You have seen her?”

“We have seen her. . . . How did she fall into the hands of those who were here before we came?”

“She was cutting sallows to make a basket, by the river; we both were by the river. And they came upon us — the Sea Wolves and the Painted People.” She showed small teeth between drawn-back lips, teeth sharp and pointed as a field vole’s, but there was no expression in her voice. “We ran, and they came behind us. Then I suppose she tripped and fell, and her hand was torn from mine, and when I looked around, they were upon her.” She came a step closer, her eyes fixed on my face, her hands held out toward me. I smelled the faintly vixen smell of her, and the firelight splintered on the little bronze dagger, pointed as a bee’s sting, that was thrust into her belt. “You are the one they call Artos the Bear, are you not? Let you give her back to us, my lord.”

“Gladly, if I could,” I said. “She is dead.”

There was no change in the still, narrow face. “It has been in my heart all this night that she is dead. You found her dead when the strong place fell to you?”

“Yes.”

“Then give us her body, that we may take it and lay it in the Long House, among her own people.”

In the silence, we heard the wind harping softly across the crumbling ramparts, and the sudden spurt and crackle of the watch fire. Somewhere among the picket lines a horse fidgeted and was still. It was unthinkable to get those nine great carcasses out again; it would be a week’s work with ropes and levers; and if it could have been done by the lifting of a finger, I knew that I would not let this girl see what came out from under them, for it seemed to me that they had been near each other, these sisters. “If I had known that her own people would come for her, surely I would have delayed. Now I cannot give you her body, for she is buried already.”

“Where?”

I moved aside, so that she might see the mouth of the old grain pit with its rough covering of sods and thatch. Better that she should know it all, as swiftly as might be. “Here at the bottom of the pit, with the carcasses of nine war-horses laid above her. We wrapped her in a cloak and covered her thick with yellow bracken before we tumbled the horses in.”

There was a sudden flicker of wild mocking laughter in her face, like summer lightning; the very air about her seemed to quiver with it, but she made no sound. “And all men know that horses are creatures of the Sun, with power over such as we are who belong to the dark warm womb of the Earth. You have taken pains that she should not walk in your sleep. Nine war-horses above her should surely hold her deep enough.” And then the laughter died out of her face. “If indeed she lies there at all.”

“If?”

“Listen. Listen, Great Man, Sun Man whom they call Artos the Bear. You have told us that our sister is dead. You have told us that you found her so when the strong place fell to you. You have told us that she lies here with nine horses to keep her down. But what proof have we of these things? It is in my heart that she is dead indeed, but fear and longing may trick the heart. If I may not see her body, how may I be sure that you do not hold her here alive for your pleasure? If she be dead, how may I be sure that it was the Sea Wolves and not yourself that brought her to it?”

“How could you be sure of that, though I showed her to you ten times over?”

She looked at me in silence for a while, her eyes wide and still like the dark bitter willow-bark water under trees. Then she said, “No, I am sure of that, though you will not show her to me at all.”

“I cannot set my men to hauling nine horses out of a pit, when they are weary from battle, Daughter among the Dark People of the Hills.”

She sighed. “Na, I see that you cannot. So be it then, she must lie where she lies. Only come back with me to the Old Woman in my hills, that you may tell her, and she may give you the Dark Drink to pour and the sacred herbs for her sleep-place.”

There was a startled silence, and I was aware of the young warriors she had called her brothers, drawn close about her and watching me as intently as she herself, with dark inscrutable eyes.

Bedwyr, who had stood at my shoulder all the while, was the first to speak. “If there be need of this Dark Drink and the herbs, then send one of your brothers back here with them.”

“It is for the Sun Lord to do,” the girl answered, but her eyes never left my face.

“I am as the Sun Lord’s sword hand. I will come, then, in his name.”

“You will not, then,” I muttered.

But it was as though neither of them heard me. “Thinking maybe that music is a powerful talisman against the spells of the dark.” The low tone of mocking was back in her voice again. “But we also have our harpers in the Hollow Hills.” Then abandoning him as though he had ceased to exist: “Will you not come, my Lord Artos? It is such a simple thing, but it must be done by the Leader, the Lordly One.”

“Why should I come?” I asked at last.

And she moved closer still and set one hand on mine that was clenched on the hilt of my sword. “For a token of faith, maybe,” she said.

So I knew that I must go, and I knew why. “When do we start?”

“So soon as you have laid aside your sword and dagger.”

“That also?” I said.

“That also. Did I not say ‘for a token of faith’?”

I pulled off my sword belt, with the dagger that was thrust into it, and handed both to Bedwyr, who took them without a word. It was Cei who cut in, his voice rough with urgency. “Artos, don’t be a fool — armed or unarmed, for God’s sake don’t go with her!” His big hand was on my arm as though he would have held me back by force. “It’s a trap!”

“I think not.”

“Don’t go!”

I shook off his hand. “I must.”

“She has laid her spell on you! Don’t you understand what she is? If you go with her you’re risking your soul!”

I had thought of that, too. “I do not think so; but in any case, I must go.”

“At least let me come with you,” Bedwyr said, standing with my sword and dagger in his hands.

I shook my head, but I think I felt less steadfast than I seemed. “This is a thing for one man alone. . . . I am ready.”

We went out through the narrow northern gate, leaving a hushed camp behind us; the girl moving ahead and I following. The young warriors, silent as they had come, insubstantial now as shadows, as though they had lost all reality when the firelight ceased to touch them, moved behind me and on either hand. From the foot of the fortress wall the hillside dropped almost sheer to the river, thinly covered with broom bushes, hazel and bramble scrub. “This way,” said the girl. “Come,” and dropped from sight almost as though over a cliff. I followed, and found my feet on a faint path, half lost, narrow and precipitous as a wild-sheep track, that swooped down through the scrub.

“Come,” said the girl again; and the shadow-warriors fell back into single file behind me, as we started down. It seemed to me that we followed many paths that night, the thin faint trails made by the deer and the Dark People before ever the Legions drove their roads north. We crossed the road once, and running water at least twice — not the Tweed, but little swift hill streams coming down to join it. It seemed a very long way, but I realized afterward that the girl had led me by ways as twisting and mazy as the dance of a marsh light, and maybe my own weariness made it seem farther still, for I had ridden far and fought hard since last I snatched an hour’s sleep. And dawn was spreading up the shining wind-tumbled heights of the sky, when at last we came up by some small patches of oats and barley, over a last shoulder and the open moor, into a shallow upland hollow where three small lost valleys came together.

A little below us, toward the far side of the hollow, where I suppose there was some shelter from the wind, I saw what looked in the first moment like a cluster of small bush-grown barrows — I had seen such a barrow torn open once in my boyhood, when a stream had burst its banks in sudden spate and changed course; and in the heart of it there was the skeleton of a man crouched on his side as a child lies in the womb, and a bronze dagger and an amber necklace. But almost in the same instant as I checked, looking down in the growing light, I saw the pale blur of peat reek rising from among the bushes.

“This is my home,” said the girl, looking back over her shoulder. “I am sorry the way has seemed so long.”

And we dropped into the hollow where the newly roused little dun cattle lifted their heads to stamp and stare at us as we passed, forded the stream under its stunted moss-grown elder trees, and followed the path that led to the village or steading. Heather washed to the very foot of the turf wall that fenced it around, and even when we passed within, and the small prick-eared hounds came out yawning their pleasure at their lords’ return, the dwarfed bushes and briers that grew on the humped turf roofs still gave the place the air of a thicket. The girl made for the largest bothy, which stood, a mere turf hummock with a stunted whitethorn springing above its door hole, in the midst of the others. She ducked into the darkness under the roughly carved lintel beam, and I, following, had to crouch almost onto all fours to make my own way through the hole which was more like the mouth of an animal’s lair than a houseplace doorway. The fetid smell that came out of the gloom was animal, too, the same foxy smell that clung about the girl herself, and the thick peat reek caught at my throat and for the moment blinded me, so that if the girl had not cried out a warning, I must have plunged headlong down the four uneven steps within. As it was, I groped and stumbled my way down them awkwardly enough, and found even when I had reached the foot, that I could not stand upright under the willow spears that upheld the roof.

The young warriors and their dogs entered behind me, and with their coming the place grew very full. My sight had begun to clear, and blinking, I saw the folk who were huddled there already; a couple of graybeards and three or four youngish women, and a tumble of dogs and children about the newly awakened central fire. The warriors who had returned last seemed to be all the young men that there were in the place, and I wondered if they were indeed brothers, or if the girl had used the term simply as we of the Company sometimes spoke of ourselves as a brotherhood. I never came completely to understand the relationships of the Dark People, maybe because they do not marry as we do, but seem to hold the women in common.

The girl had gone straight to a white-haired old woman who sat or rather squatted on a low stool beside the fire; a creature obscenely fat, thick-haunched and bag-throated and panting, like an immense toad; and flinging herself on the ground before her, burst into a quick torrent of words in her own tongue. I could understand nothing of it, but I knew that she was telling the old woman of all that had passed at the fort; and the huddled men and women in the big bothy listened to her and watched me. I was increasingly aware of their eyes watching me, seeing, as it were, without giving anything of themselves in return; while the girl and the old woman spoke together, question and answer, question and answer, in that quick dark tongue that reminded me of the patter of thunder rain on broad leaves. The young women against the walls had begun to rock themselves to and fro, wailing softly in the beginning of ritual grief. The place grew stifling so that there seemed no air to breathe, only the peat reek and the stench of fox.

At last the old woman looked up, shaking the cobweb hair back over her shoulders, and beckoned to me with a crooked earth-colored finger. I came and stood before her, with my head bent under the roof, and she craned back her head and beckoned again, downward this time. “Down, kneel down, Sun Man. How may I see you, let alone speak with you, while you stand above me with your shoulders thrusting off the roof?”

“Do as she says,” murmured the girl. “She is the Old Woman.”

I knelt down, squatting onto my heels so that my eyes were not so much above hers as she sat on her stool, and she leaned forward, peering into my face with bright toad’s eyes. “You are he that they call Artos the Bear?”

“I am Artos the Bear, Old Woman.”

“So, they said that you were tall as a fir tree, and mouse-fair, and they spoke truth. They said also that you come to drive the Painted People north again, and the Sea Wolves back into the sea.”

“Who are they, Old Woman?”

“The wild geese when they fly north, maybe, or the wind through the hill grasses.” She reached out suddenly and set her hands like twisted claws on either side of my face, drawing it close to her own. Her breath smelled of wild garlic and old sick flesh, and I wanted to look away from the dark eyes with their opaque bloom of light. Even now I am not sure whether I held her narrowed gaze because I would not look away, or because I could not if I had tried. “And so she is dead, the little one,” she said at last.

“Yes.”

“And you laid her in a pit with nine war-horses piled above her.”

“If I had known that her own kind would come for her, I would have done otherwise.”

“As to that, the earth will be as warm and dark for her there, as in the Long House of the Mother.” Her eyes still held mine, and the wide toothless toad’s mouth worked a little. “How did she come to the Great Sleep?”

“As to a way of escape, at the last.” I heard my own voice saying: “She had been vilely used, and by many men, but though they would surely have killed her in the end, I think that she found her own freedom before that.”

“So, you too have something of the Old Wisdom, the Earth Wisdom in you, Sun Man. . . . And indeed you speak the truth.” Suddenly I felt my gaze released, as though she had seen all that she needed to see, but the touch of her hands was still on either side of my face. Then she released that hold also, and dropped them into the fine blue-stained marten skins on her lap. “She is not the first of our kind to take that way into death. . . . Men have always hated us; that is because they are fools, and always fools hate what they fear; but for the most part they have left us alone. But these men that swarm now in our hills, with them it is another thing, the Sea Wolves and the Pirates from the West and the Painted People. They think that because we are small they can crush us and so crush the fear too. They think also that there is gold in the place where we bury our dead. They burn us out as one burns out unwanted bees at the start of winter.” (I thought of Irach, who had eaten his father’s courage, and the small burned-out village above the road from Deva to Eburacum.) “They drive off our cattle and our women. This place is well hidden, and so far we have been safe from them, we small kindred. But now we too have our sorrow to avenge.”

She was silent, and I grew more aware of the thin high keening of the women, and one of the warriors drawing in his breath with a sharp hiss.

“Are you afraid of us, Sun Man?”

“A little,” I said. “But I have come in under your roof, Old Woman, when I need not have come at all, with neither a weapon nor a bunch of rowan in my hand.”

“That is true,” she agreed, “and because of that, and because you are who you are and your sword is a lightning against the Sea Wolves and their kind, it may be that if you call for the People of the Hills when you have need of their aid, the People of the Hills will come to your call. We are small and weak, and our numbers grow fewer with the years, but we are scattered very wide, wherever there are hills and high lonely places. We can send news and messages racing from one end of a land to the other between moon-rise and moonset; we can creep and hide and spy and bring back word; we are the hunters who can tell you when the game has passed, by a bent grass blade or one hair clinging to a bramble spray. We are the viper that stings in the dark —” She turned a little as she spoke, and summoned one of the young warriors with the same crooked finger with which she had summoned me. He came, and knelt beside me at her feet, not looking at her. Indeed I noticed that none of the men looked her in the eyes; she was sacred, taboo: “The Old Woman.”

“Show the Sun Lord one of your arrows.”

He reached to the quiver behind his shoulder, and drew out an arrow no larger than a birding bolt. It lay across his narrow palm, shafted with reed, flighted with widgeon’s feathers, and barbed with the most wonderfully dressed blue flint. It was a beautiful little thing, a child’s toy like the slender bow he carried; but as weapons of war, oddly pitiful.

“It is well made, is it not?” said the Old Woman. “And it flies like a bird. Be careful how you handle it, and do not touch the barb. It has only one fault, that it cannot be used for hunting — the poison remains in the kill.”

“Poison?” I had taken up the small thing to examine it more closely, but laid it back with both care and speed in its owner’s palm.

“One scratch from that barb — quite a small scratch — and you would be dead in a hundred heartbeats. Therefore it can only be used against man.”

“With such weapons to your hand, I find it wonderful that you have not yet driven the Sea Wolves from your hunting runs.”

“If we had enough of such weapons, well might you find it wonderful. But the plants that yield the poison are rare and hard to find, and there must be three to poison one arrowhead. Nonetheless, we have some store, and all that we add to it from now is in the hollow of your hand, Sun Lord. It is better and stronger when mixed with the black venom of hate; and we are good haters, we the People of the Hills.”

The owner of the arrow slid it back into his quiver as casually as though no death hung in the barb, and getting up, moved back to rejoin his brothers in the shadows; and I heard him playing with a young hound, teasing it and rolling it on its back as I had done with Cabal when he was a puppy.