Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘The flooding?’ I asked.

  ‘When the river rises, Lord,’ he explained, ‘the water backs up through the Roman sewers. It’s already in the lower part of the city. And not just water either, I fear. The smell, you see?’ He sniffed delicately.

  ‘The problem,’ I said, ‘is that the bridge arches are dammed with debris. It was your task to keep them clear. It was also your task to preserve the walls.’ His mouth opened and closed without a word. He hefted the slate as if to demonstrate his efficiency, then just blinked helplessly. ‘Not that it matters now,’ I went on, ‘the city can’t be defended.’

  ‘Can’t be defended!’ Cildydd protested. ‘Can’t be defended! It must be defended! We can’t just abandon the city!’

  ‘If the Saxons come,’ I said brutally, ‘you’ll have no choice.’

  ‘But we must defend it, Lord,’ Cildydd insisted.

  ‘With what?’ I asked.

  ‘Your men, Lord,’ he said, gesturing at my spearmen who had taken refuge from the rain under the temple’s high portico.

  ‘At best,’ I said, ‘we can garrison a quarter mile of the wall, or what’s left of it. So who defends the rest?’

  ‘The levy, of course.’ Cildydd waved his slate towards the drab collection of men who waited beside the bath-house. Few had weapons and even fewer possessed any body armour.

  ‘Have you ever seen the Saxons attack?’ I asked Cildydd. ‘They send big war-dogs first and they come behind with axes three feet long and spears on eight-foot shafts. They’re drunk, they’re maddened and they’ll want nothing but the women and the gold inside your city. How long do you think your levy will hold?’

  Cildydd blinked at me. ‘We can’t just give up,’ he said weakly.

  ‘Does your levy have any real weapons?’ I asked, indicating the sullen-looking men waiting in the rain. Two or three of the sixty men had spears, I could see one old Roman sword, and most of the rest had axes or mattocks, but some men did not even possess those crude weapons, but merely held fire-hardened stakes that had been sharpened to black points.

  ‘We’re searching the city, Lord,’ Cildydd said. ‘There must be spears.’

  ‘Spears or not,’ I said brutally, ‘if you fight here you’ll all be dead men.’

  Cildydd gaped at me. ‘Then what do we do?’ he finally asked.

  ‘Go to Glevum,’ I said.

  ‘But the city!’ He blanched. ‘There are merchants, goldsmiths, churches, treasures.’ His voice tailed away as he imagined the enormity of the city’s fall, but that fall, if the Saxons came, was inevitable. Aquae Sulis was no garrison city, just a beautiful place that stood in a bowl of hills. Cildydd blinked in the rain. ‘Glevum,’ he said glumly. ‘And you’ll escort us there, Lord?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m going to Corinium,’ I said, ‘but you go to Glevum.’ I was half tempted to send Argante, Guinevere, Ceinwyn and the families with him, but I did not trust Cildydd to protect them. Better, I decided, to take the women and families north myself, then send them under a small escort from Corinium to Glevum.

  But at least Argante was taken from my hands, for as I was brutally destroying Cildydd’s slim hopes of garrisoning Aquae Sulis a troop of armoured horsemen clattered into the temple precinct. They were Arthur’s men, flying his banner of the bear, and they were led by Balin who was roundly cursing the press of refugees. He looked relieved when he saw me, then astonished as he recognized Guinevere. ‘Did you bring the wrong Princess, Derfel?’ he asked as he slid off his tired horse.

  ‘Argante’s inside the temple,’ I said, jerking my head towards the great building where Argante had taken refuge from the rain. She had not spoken to me all day.

  ‘I’m to take her to Arthur,’ Balin said. He was a bluff, bearded man with the tattoo of a bear on his forehead and a jagged white scar on his left cheek. I asked him for news and he told me what little he knew and none of it was good. ‘The bastards are coming down the Thames,’ he said, ‘we reckon they’re only three days’ march from Corinium, and there’s no sign of Cuneglas or Oengus yet. It’s chaos, Derfel, that’s what it is, chaos.’ He shuddered suddenly. ‘What’s the stink here?’

  ‘The sewers are backing up,’ I said.

  ‘AH over Dumnonia,’ he said grimly. ‘I have to hurry,’ he went on, ‘Arthur wants his bride in Corinium the day before yesterday.’

  ‘Do you have orders for me?’ I called after him as he strode towards the temple steps.

  ‘Get yourself to Corinium! And hurry! And you’re to send what food you can!’ He shouted the last order as he disappeared through the temple’s great bronze doors. He had brought six spare horses, enough to saddle Argante, her maids and Fergal the Druid, which meant that the twelve men of Argante’s Blackshield escort were left with me. I sensed they were as glad as I was to be rid of their Princess.

  Balin rode north in the late afternoon. I had wanted to be on the road myself, but the children were tired, the rain was incessant, and Ceinwyn persuaded me that we would make better time if we all rested this night under Aquae Sulis’s roofs and marched fresh in the morning. I put guards on the bath-house and let the women and children go into the great steaming pool of hot water, then sent Issa and a score of men to hunt through the city for weapons to equip the levy. After that I sent for Cildydd and asked him how much food remained in the city. ‘Scarcely any, Lord!’ he insisted, claiming he had already sent sixteen wagons of grain, dried meat and salted fish north.

  ‘You searched folk’s houses?’ I asked. ‘The churches?’

  ‘Only the city granaries, Lord.’

  ‘Then let’s make a proper search,’ I suggested, and by dusk we had collected seven more wagonloads of precious supplies. I sent the wagons north that same evening, despite the lateness of the hour. Ox-carts are slow and it was better that they should start the journey at dusk than wait for the morning.

  Issa waited for me in the temple precinct. His search of the city had yielded seven old swords and a dozen boar spears, while Cildydd’s men had turned up fifteen more spears, eight of them broken, but Issa also had news. ‘There’s said to be weapons hidden in the temple, Lord,’ he told me.

  ‘Who says?’

  Issa gestured at a young bearded man who was dressed in a butcher’s bloody apron. ‘He reckons a hoard of spears was hidden in the temple after the rebellion, but the priest denies it.’

  ‘Where’s the priest?’

  ‘Inside, Lord. He told me to get out when I questioned him.’

  I ran up the temple steps and through the big doors. This had once been a shrine to Minerva and Sulis, the first a Roman and the second a British Goddess, but the pagan deities had been ejected and the Christian God installed. When I had last been in the temple there had been a great bronze statue of Minerva attended by flickering oil lamps, but the statue had been destroyed during the Christian rebellion and now only the Goddess’s hollow head remained, and that had been impaled on a pole to stand as a trophy behind the Christian altar.

  The priest challenged me. ‘This is a house of God!’ he roared. He was celebrating a mystery at his altar, surrounded by weeping women, but he broke off his ceremonies to face me. He was a young man, full of passion, one of those priests who had stirred up the trouble in Dumnonia and whom Arthur had allowed to live so that the bitterness of the failed rebellion would not fester. This priest, however, had clearly lost none of his insurgent fervour. ‘A house of God!’ he shouted again, ‘and you defile it with sword and spear! Would you carry your weapons into your lord’s hall? So why carry them into my Lord’s house?’

  ‘In a week,’ I said, ‘it will be a temple of Thunor and they’ll be sacrificing your children where you stand. Are there spears here?’

  ‘None!’ he said defiantly. The women screamed and shrank away as I climbed the altar steps. The priest held a cross towards me. ‘In the name of God,’ he said, ‘and in the name of His holy Son, and in the name of the Holy Ghost. No!’ This last cry was because I had drawn H
ywelbane and used her to strike the cross out of his hand. The scrap of wood skittered across the temple’s marble floor as I rammed the blade into his tangled beard. ‘I’ll pull this place down stone by stone to find the spears,’ I said, ‘and bury your miserable carcass under its rubble. Now where are they?’

  His defiance crumpled. The spears, which he had been hoarding in hope of another campaign to put a Christian on Dumnonia’s throne, were concealed in a crypt beneath the altar. The entrance to the crypt was hidden, for it was a place where the treasures donated by folk seeking Sulis’s healing power had once been concealed, but the frightened priest showed us how to lift the marble slab to reveal a pit crammed with gold and weapons. We left the gold, but carried the spears out to Cildydd’s levy. I doubted the sixty men would be of any real use in battle, but at least a man armed with a spear looked like a warrior and, from a distance, they might give the Saxons pause. I told the levy to be ready to march in the morning and to pack as much food as they could find.

  We slept that night in the temple. I swept the altar clear of its Christian trimmings and placed Minerva’s head between two oil lamps so that she would guard us through the night. Rain dripped from the roof and puddled on the marble, but sometime in the small hours the rain stopped and the dawn brought a clearing sky and a fresh chill wind from the east.

  We left the city before the sun rose. Only forty of the city’s levy marched with us for the rest had melted away in the night, but it was better to have forty willing men than sixty uncertain allies. Our road was clear of refugees now, for I had spread the word that safety did not lie in Corinium but at Glevum, and so it was the western road that was crammed with cattle and folk. Our route took us east into the rising sun along the Fosse Way which here ran straight as a spear between Roman tombs. Guinevere translated the inscriptions, marvelling that men were buried here who had been born in Greece or Egypt or Rome itself. They were veterans of the Legions who had taken British wives and settled near the healing springs of Aquae Sulis, and their lichen-covered gravestones sometimes gave thanks to Minerva or to Sulis for the gift of years. After an hour we left the tombs behind and the valley narrowed as the steep hills north of the road came closer to the river meadows; soon, I knew, the road would turn abruptly north to climb into the hills that lay between Aquae Sulis and Corinium.

  It was when we reached the narrow part of the valley that the ox drivers came running back. They had left Aquae Sulis the previous day, but their slow wagons had reached no further than the northwards bend in the road, and now, in the dawn, they had abandoned their seven loads of precious food. ‘Sais!’ one man shouted as he ran towards us. ‘There are Sais!’

  ‘Fool,’ I muttered, then shouted at Issa to stop the fleeing men. I had allowed Guinevere to ride my horse, but now she slid off and I clumsily hauled my way onto the beast’s back and spurred her forward.

  The road turned northwards half a mile ahead. The oxen and their wagons had been abandoned just at the bend and I edged past them to peer up the slope. For a moment I could see nothing, then a group of horsemen appeared beside some trees at the crest. They were half a mile away, outlined against the brightening sky, and I could make out no details of their shields, but I guessed they were Britons rather than Saxons because our enemy did not deploy many horsemen.

  I urged the mare up the slope. None of the horsemen moved. They just watched me, but then, away to my right, more men appeared at the hill’s crest. These were spearmen and above them hung a banner that told me the worst.

  The banner was a skull hung with what looked like rags, and I remembered Cerdic’s wolf-skull standard with its ragged tail of flayed human skin. The men were Saxons and they barred our road. There were not many spearmen in sight, perhaps a dozen horsemen and fifty or sixty men on foot, but they had the high ground and I could not tell how many more might be hidden beyond the crest. I stopped the mare and stared at the spearmen, this time seeing the glint of sunlight on the broad axeblades some of the men carried. They had to be Saxons. But where had they come from? Balin had told me that both Cerdic and Aelle were advancing along the Thames, so it seemed likely that these men had come south from the wide river valley, but maybe they were some of Cerdic’s spearmen who served Lancelot. Not that it really mattered who they were; all that mattered was that our road was blocked. Still more of the enemy appeared, their spears pricking the skyline all along the ridge.

  I turned the mare to see Issa bringing my most experienced spearmen past the blockage at the road’s turn. ‘Saxons!’ I called to him. ‘Form a shield wall here!’

  Issa gazed up at the distant spearmen. ‘We fight them here, Lord?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ I dared not fight in such a bad place. We would be forced to struggle uphill, and we would ever be worried about our families behind us.

  ‘We’ll take the road to Glevum instead?’ Issa suggested.

  I shook my head. The Glevum road was thronged with refugees and if I had been the Saxon commander I would have wanted nothing more than to pursue an outnumbered enemy along that road. We could not outmarch him, for we would be obstructed by refugees, and he would find it a simple matter to cut through those panicked people to bring us death. It was possible, even likely, that the Saxons would not make any pursuit at all, but would be tempted to plunder the city instead, but it was a risk I dared not take. I gazed up the long hill and saw yet more of the enemy coming to the sun-bright crest. It was impossible to count them, but it was no small warband. My own men were making a shield wall, but I knew I could not fight here. The Saxons had more men and they had the high ground. To fight here was to die.

  I twisted in the saddle. A half-mile away, just to the north of the Fosse Way, was one of the old people’s fortresses, and its ancient earth wall – much eroded now – stood at the crest of a steep hill. I pointed to the grass ramparts. ‘We’ll go there,’ I said.

  ‘There, Lord?’ Issa was puzzled.

  ‘If we try to escape them,’ I explained, ‘they’ll follow us. Our children can’t move fast and eventually the bastards will catch us. We’ll be forced to make a shield wall, put our families in the centre, and the last of us to die will hear the first of our women screaming. Better to go to a place where they’ll hesitate to attack. Eventually they’ll have to make a choice. Either they leave us alone and go north, in which case we follow, or else they fight, and if we’re on a hilltop we stand a chance of winning. A better chance,’ I added, ‘because Culhwch will come this way. In a day or two we might even outnumber them.’

  ‘So we abandon Arthur?’ Issa asked, shocked at the thought.

  ‘We keep a Saxon warband away from Corinium,’ I said. But I was not happy with my choice, for Issa was right. I was abandoning Arthur, but I dared not risk the lives of Ceinwyn and my daughters. The whole careful campaign that Arthur had plotted was destroyed. Culhwch was cut off somewhere to the south, I was trapped at Aquae Sulis, while Cuneglas and Oengus mac Airem were still many miles away.

  I rode back to find my armour and weapons. I had no time to don the body armour, but I pulled on the wolf-plumed helmet, found my heaviest spear and took up my shield. I gave the mare back to Guinevere and told her to take the families up the hill, then ordered the men of the levy and my younger spearmen to turn the seven food wagons round and get them up to the fortress. ‘I don’t care how you do it,’ I said to them, ‘but I want that food kept from the enemy. Haul the wagons up yourself if you have to!’ I might have abandoned Argante’s wagons, but in war a wagon-load of food is far more precious than gold and I was determined to keep those supplies from the enemy. If necessary, I would burn the wagons and their contents, but for the moment I would try to save the food.

  I went back to Issa and took my place at the centre of the shield wall. The enemy ranks were thickening and I expected them to make a mad charge down the hill at any minute. They outnumbered us, but still they did not come and every moment that they hesitated was an extra moment in which our families and the precio
us wagon-loads of food could reach the hill’s summit. I glanced behind constantly, watching the wagons’ progress, and when they were just over halfway up the steep slope I ordered my spearmen back.

  That retreat spurred the Saxons into an advance. They screamed a challenge and came fast down the hill, but they had left their attack too late. My men went back along the road, crossed a shallow ford where a stream tumbled from the hills towards the river, and now we had the higher ground for we were retreating uphill towards the fortress on its steep slope. My men kept their line straight, kept their shields overlapping and held their long spears steady, and that evidence of their training stopped the Saxon pursuit fifty yards short of us. They contented themselves with shouting challenges and insults, while one of their naked wizards, his hair spiked with cow dung, danced forward to curse us. He called us pigs, cowards and goats. He cursed us, and I counted them. They had one hundred and seventy men in their wall, and there were still more who had not yet come down the hill. I counted them and the Saxon war-leaders stood their horses behind their shield wall and counted us. I could see their banner clearly now and it was Cerdic’s standard of a wolf skull hung with a dead man’s flayed skin, but Cerdic himself was not there. This had to be one of his warbands come south from the Thames. The warband far outnumbered us, but its leaders were too canny to attack. They knew that they could beat us, but they also knew the dreadful toll that seventy experienced warriors would cull from their ranks. It was enough for them to have driven us away from the road.

  We backed slowly up the hill. The Saxons watched us, but only their wizard followed us and after a while he lost interest. He spat at us and turned away. We jeered mightily at the enemy’s timidity, but in truth I was feeling a huge relief that they had not attacked.