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 feeing 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 feeing 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 drum 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 pins 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 tiling, 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 su
ddenly 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 grain 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.
chapter eleven
The Witch’s Son
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 gained 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 runn
ing 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.
Sword at Sunset Page 16