The Saxon Spears

by James Calbraith

  This is met with a long burst of cheers and beating of weapon against weapon. I join the applause, but I remain puzzled. At no point of my stay among the outlaws did I ever get a sense they desired for anything more than just to roam the forest, robbing the passing caravans and feasting on the plunder. But this… This is something else. I glance at Hilla beside me, her cheeks red, her eyes burning with passion buried deep within her by the years of serving as a Briton slave, and I let myself be raised by the same warrior fever momentarily, before remembering why I’m really here.

  “When do we get to meet this Aelle?” I ask, when the cheering subdues. I don’t need to pretend to sound excited — the rush still makes my blood run hot.

  “On the field of battle, hopefully,” replies Eirik with a grin. “We will march on the Stone Bridge from the south, while Aelle and Nanna strike from the north. The attack is scheduled on what the wealas call the Feast of Paul and Peter. This gives us two weeks to prepare.”

  “Are we moving camp again?”

  “No — the bridge is not far from here. Besides, this place is now hallowed with the blood of our fallen. I hope we can stay here all summer, with Wodan’s blessing.”

  All summer?

  “You don’t seem too happy about it, Aec?” Eirik gives me a questioning look.

  “No — I… I just can’t wait for the battle. Two weeks feels too long!”

  “I know what you mean.” Eirik laughs. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you don’t grow bored waiting.”

  The transformation I’ve witnessed at the morning briefing is not just a passing phase. The band is buoyed by the recent victory and the prospect of further glories. I see the change in the way they walk, the way they talk. They are no longer galley oarsmen, petty thieves, runaway slaves hiding in the woods. They are Saxons. Their forefathers once brought such terror to this island that the Romans named their sea defences after them: litus Saxonicum, the Saxon Shore. But that was a long time ago, before the Saxons, Iutes and Angles settled among Britons as allies and mercenaries — before Rome abandoned its forts, and its people. What will happen to Britannia if the Saxons decide to bring back that time of dread?

  The camp is starting to resemble that of a warband, albeit a tiny one. Eirik and Ubba have even begun performing rudimentary muster and training manoeuvres with the veterans, though they look nothing like as much as the first such attempts made by Fastidius and myself, back at the Ariminum play fields. Part of the camp’s meadow is cleared of tents and refuse, to make place for the exercises. Soon the forest is filled with clanking of weapons, and with drumming of spear shafts against shields. This is a new sound in the camp. We have captured a handful of spear blades in the village, and the rest of us make do with sharpened sticks. To complement those, the veterans have made round shields from hide and bent branches tied with twine. These are mere play things, unable to stop a decent knife thrust, but I see the effect the new training has on the men. Any brute can wave a club around. A shield and spear is what changes a brawler into a warrior. I find myself wishing I had my Anglian aesc with me, so that I could join the veterans in their exercises.

  We younglings, what few are left, can only watch. Eirik doesn’t trust us with spears and shields, not even me and Hilla. It matters little to me, but I can see her fuming at being forced to stand on the side-lines.

  “I have a sword!” she cries, charging at me. I parry her spatha with the blunt blade of my own, one I picked up from a refuse heap at the Briton village, a half-made weapon, abandoned midway by some long-gone smith. “And I know how to use it!” She strikes again. “What good is it if I can’t fight in the first line?”

  “I don’t think there will be any lines,” I reply. “If it’s anything like the last time.”

  “Then why are they training as if it was a pitched battle?”

  “To make them feel like warriors,” says Eirik. He joins our duel armed only with a staff and promptly disarms both of us with deft strokes. “You already have a warrior’s heart, Hilla,” he adds, then points the butt of the staff at me. “And you’re almost there.”

  “I’m fine where I am now,” I say, boastfully. “I’m still the best of your recruits.”

  “Oh, you’re well trained, I give you that. But you fight like a slave.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “You say you hate the Britons, but there’s no fire in you to fight them. No conviction. You’ve spent so much time among them, you’ve grown to think like a Briton. But you’re not a Briton, boy.” He punches my chest lightly with the staff. “Not here. In here, you’re one of us. Remember that.”

  I stare, stunned, as the Geat walks away. I feel I was this close to having my cover blown. No one else has seen right through me like that since Father Paulinus; but then, Eirik is unlike anyone else I’ve met. I suppose no ordinary man would survive the long, lonely journey from his cold northern homeland to Britannia. How many like him are there in Aelle’s service?

  His words strike a nerve. I thought I had no qualms fighting the Briton outlaws, but Eirik must have sensed something I haven’t. Even when fighting bandits, it seemed, I would rather choose a Briton’s life over my own kin.

  Hilla leaves me no time to contemplate the feelings stirring inside me.

  “Ha!” She rushes at me, weaving the sword over her head. “I knew you were just a coward!”

  Incensed, both by her accusation and by Eirik’s words, I don’t simply parry the incoming blow. Instead, I dodge it, strike the blade down, let Hilla’s momentum propel her forward. I grab her by the wrist, twist and turn until she flies to the ground, face-first. She leaps up in an instant, her eyes gleaming, and demands that I teach her this new move.

  “Maybe later,” I say. I don’t want her to know all my secrets and tricks just yet — and I don’t feel that keen on the training anymore. I walk over to the rainwater barrel and pour a pail over myself to cool down. The vapour rises from my body in the rays of the sun filtered through leaves.

  “Hey, I was just joking,” says Hilla, prodding me with the tip of her sword.

  “I know. But Eirik wasn’t. And he’s right. I need to learn how to think like a Saxon warrior, not a Briton slave. Otherwise I’m as much good in battle as this blunted blade.” I throw the sword in the mud and turn my face away from her.

  The coming battle at Stone Bridge will be fought, judging by the preparations, against regular soldiers. There may be civilians, perhaps even Church men, if there is going to be a feast. How long can I keep up this pretence if I’m forced to kill an innocent Briton?

  “It must’ve been strange,” she says. “Growing up among people not of your own kin.”

  “Yes, it was,” I reply. There is truth in my words deeper than either she or Eirik realise. “For years I didn’t even know what made me so different to everyone else around. Even among the slaves there were few who looked like me.”

  “At least I had my band of orphans to keep me company,” she says. “And there were always so many other Saxons in New Port, guarding the ships and the wagons…”

  “You said the Saxons in the south had to fight for scraps,” I say, “but if there were so many of you, why didn’t you just take what you wanted from the Britons?”

  “We were never united enough. The wealas knew how to play one warband against another. This is why we needed Pefen, to show us the way out of these squabbles.”

  There’s that name again, Pefen. What’s his relation to Aelle? If he’s working on uniting the Saxon warbands, on becoming a Drihten like Hengist, he may be a far greater threat than the forest bandits. Again, I have to ask myself, does Wortigern know about any of this? I can’t see how he wouldn’t — all this must be common knowledge among the Regin merchants and courtiers. What would the Regin Comes, Catuar, have to say about this?

  “Come on,” Hilla pulls on my tunic. “There’s still some time before the cena. Let’s have one more duel.”

  Hesitantly, I stoop to pick up the dull blade. I
spot her bringing the flat of her sword to my back. I grab her legs and pull upwards. Her backside lands in the mud with a great, sloppy splash.

  The enthusiasm with which we marched out of the camp in the morning wanes with every mile of the cracked Roman flagstone under our feet.

  The highway is wider even than the road to New Port. A river of stone, twenty-five feet wide, it is a military road, once used by the Legions to move at lightning speed between Londin and the provinces. Our band would barely fill it out from gutter to gutter in a single row, but faced with this empty expanse we huddle instinctively to one side, no longer an army on the march, but a gang of stragglers, looking for a brawl.

  Eirik tries to rouse us with a war chant, but after a few stanzas even his enthusiasm dies out. The road, in its featureless silence, is too oppressive. Even cracked and overgrown with moss, even with so many of its flagstones loose or lost — and it’s in far worse shape than other Roman roads I’ve seen — it’s a bleak reminder of the might of the ancient engineers who built it, and of the Britons who inherited it from them. To march so brazenly down it, to think of fighting whoever is facing us at its end, seems a folly bordering on madness.

  Hilla is as subdued and anxious as everyone else in the band. She casts a nervous glance at every traveller we pass — and there are fewer of them than I’d expect on a road this size and importance. Has word gone out of our march already? Or is this road just leading nowhere in particular these days — which would explain its parlous state?

  “This place gives me chills,” she says.

  “Have you not seen a Roman road before?”

  “I once glanced out of the gate at New Port, but I had no idea it was like this all the way… Why did the Ancients have to build this road so huge?”

  There’s a change in her voice when she says the word “Ancients”. I barely contain a laugh. To me, the Romans are the people who wrote the boring books Paulinus forced me to read. To her, they are gods.

  “They used it to move their armies around,” I say.

  “How big were their armies?” she asks, astonished.

  “A Legion at the time this was built would have been four thousand strong, plus auxiliaries.” I see the number is too large for her to comprehend. It’s more than the entire population of New Port, the only city she ever knew. But there is something else in her eyes as well: she’s beginning to wonder how a mere runaway slave could possibly know these things. I’ve said too much.

  “What do you think is waiting for us at the Stone Bridge?” I ask, quickly changing the subject.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” she replies. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

  As it turns out, it’s a little of everything. The settlement, what’s left of it, starts half a mile from the bridge itself. It seems to have been mostly abandoned, at least a generation ago. The roofs of the huts have fallen in, the earthen walls crumbled; vine grows over the rubble. The few remaining inhabitants shut the wicker doors of their huts on our arrival.

  Nearer the bridge, the huts have encroached on the empty pavement, narrowing the highway to less than half its original width. Here, Eirik raises his hand. We halt. At the far end of the highway I spot a crumbled half of a gatehouse, with earthen embankment stretching out from either side of it, and walls of some other, greater building behind it. It must be a gate to the bridge, but I can’t see if it’s manned from this distance. Eirik looks to the sky, then tells us to disperse among the huts and wait for his signal.

  Hilla and I crouch by a wall that has more holes in it than daub. There’s a sickly stench coming from inside and, after the experience from the bandit village, neither of us is willing to check the source of the smell. I calm my breath. The tension of waiting is getting to me. If that gatehouse is operational, if it’s manned, even by as few as four archers, our bunch of outlaws has no chance of getting through. Maybe if we struck at the wall from the forest, then…

  What am I thinking? I’m not here to figure out how to defeat the Britons. The Britons are my people. They sent me here, to find out how to defeat Aelle and his bandits.

  Aelle. Is he really here, somewhere? Has he already begun his attack on the bridge? How will I get my hands on him in the chaos of combat?

  “You’re distracted,” Hilla says. “Focus. We’re about to go into battle.”

  “I know. I can’t wait.”

  She sniggers. “You’re a bad liar, Aec. I can see your mind is elsewhere. What you need is some henbane wine.”

  “Henbane wine?”

  “I’ve heard stories, from Eirik and others. The northern warriors drink it before each battle. It turns them into mad men who care not for wounds and weariness. It’s a pity nobody in our band knows how to make it.”

  Henbane. That’s the herbal brew Beadda offered me in his village, “for courage”. So the Iutes and Geats know of it, but Saxons don’t… That’s good to know. Thank you, Hilla.

  A distant sound rings out in the air. I’ve spent so long in these wild woods, where the only sounds were birdsong and whooshing of wind in the branches that I don’t recognise it at first. Then it comes to me: it’s an alarm bell, struck frantically by a guard.

  I seek out Eirik with my eyes. The Geat stands up, puts two fingers to his lips and whistles. Our time has come. The fight is on.

  All the days of training amount to nothing. Within seconds of reaching the embankment, the Saxons drop their unwieldy shields and spears and start clamouring, first down a refuse-filled ditch, then up the muddy slope, armed only with their usual clubs, hatchets and knives. It matters not: the earthen bank is manned only by three soldiers. When we reach its top, one of them attempts to make a stand, but seeing the other two abandon their posts in panic, decides to join them instead.

  I’m among the first to reach the top of the embankment, rising five feet over the surrounding river plain. I pause to take in the scene before me. The wall extends both ways to form three sides of a large enclosure, with the river, spanned by a stone arch of the Roman bridge, at its back. It surrounds the remnants of a mansio, an old staging post, comprising several ruined buildings. In the centre, on the eastern side of the road, stands what must have once been a coaching inn and the accommodation for high-ranking officials. Two of its walls are still standing high, and it’s these walls that I glimpsed earlier rising over the battlement — the rest of it is filled out in timber and cloth, forming the same sort of shapeless, roofless hut I’ve seen all over Britannia. Another, larger building on the western side of the road, is a wooden grain warehouse, resting on squat stilts; and on the far end of the enclosure, overlooking the river, rises a small chapel, of sturdy oak beams on a stone foundation, with thick bronze-bound door and slit windows in each of its walls. It’s more a fortress than a church.

  Just off the western edge of the embankment, in the middle of a cluster of primitive roundhouses, lies a pile of brick rubble and red tile in the unmistakable shape of a foundation of a bath house. All that remains of it is the bell turret, once used for announcing bath times. It was this bell’s ringing that we heard earlier. The guard who reached it to raise the alarm now lies in the mud with a black bolt in his throat.

  Each of these structures is surrounded by a handful of defending Britons, and they, in turn, are surrounded by invading Saxons, pouring down the stone bridge. Across the river, I spot one more group of fighters, this one focused around an overturned carriage. Two horses lie dead before it, the direction of their bodies indicating that the carriage driver was desperate to reach the bridge before being overrun by the bandits.

  Blood rushes to my head so fast it almost blinds me. In an instant I’m transported back to that black day on the shores of Medu, to another battle between Britons and Saxons, fighting over another overturned carriage. Momentarily, I forget all about my mission and my disguise. I want to charge across the bridge to aid those forlorn travellers, to destroy the bandits, to find Aelle and kill him, right there and then. I know he’s around h
ere somewhere — the black bolt in the guard’s throat could have come from nowhere else than his mysterious weapon. There’s too much chaos around the battlefield to search for him now, too many people fighting, screaming, running for their lives; it’s hard even to tell the Saxon and Briton warriors apart, their faces and hair covered in mud and blood… But I know he’s out there somewhere. I can almost feel him.

  Though some of the Briton defenders are civilians, fighting for their lives with the same improvised weapons as the attacking outlaws, most, I now notice, appear to be soldiers, armed with military-quality weapons. Broken shields and shattered spear shafts lay scattered around the enclosure. Here and there, mail and steel glints from under the leather cloaks. I spot some of them wearing bronze armbands of Wortimer’s militia — a long way away from the walls of Londin. Even for a staging post, this is an unusual amount of force, especially for a road so infrequently travelled. Did Wortimer know of the coming attack? Perhaps I wasn’t the only spy sent into Andreda Forest…

  A bandit charging past me down the embankment bumps me on the shoulder and snaps me out of my pondering. I see Hilla and the other younglings have already reached the fight at the mansio, their arrival quickly changing the tide of this section of the battle. I glance around. Eirik, his Geat spear raised high over his head, leads most of his veterans in the attack on the grain store; the other outlaws scatter around the battlefield, each seeking an easy target. I realise I must do the same myself, before anyone starts to wonder what I am doing, standing alone at the top of the bank.

  I scan the field of battle one more time to decide where to join the fighting. I could go where the bandit victory is almost certain — the grain store has all but fallen to the attackers, some of the Saxons having climbed its roof and throwing tiles on the heads of the soldiers below; but this would be the easy way, one that would not grant me enough glory to leave Eirik’s band. To reach Aelle, I need an act of heroism.

  I run to Hilla and pull her out of the brawl just as she’s about to land her spatha on the skull of a wounded Briton at her feet.