by Philip Reeve
“They’re coming.” He’s breathless. “Their scouts came at dawn. They saw our men at the ford and heard their challenges, and laughed when they saw how few there were. Now the whole band is moving up, wagons and everything…”
Through the trees behind him we catch distant shouts. Insults are bellowing back and forth across the ford. We strain our ears. We cup our hands around them to catch the drips of sound. We can’t make out words, and even if we could, the Saxons speak a different tongue from ours. But we all hear the shouting blur into a roar as the attackers surge forward into the ford. It’s that battle-noise again, that ugly music woven out of shouting voices and hoof-falls and the clang of swords. I start to wish I’d stayed with my master. Then we hear the high horns ringing, calling Arthur’s hidden riders out of the woods.
“Mount up!” shouts Medrawt, who Arthur’s put in charge of us. He feels ashamed at being left to lead this rag-tag army of boys, and he cuffs the heads of those who stand closest and bellows loud to make himself feel better. “Ride!”
There’s no more time for fear, or prayers, or anything. We struggle into our saddles and dig knees and heels into our mounts’ flanks and crash against each other as the animals turn and fret. But at last we’re all moving, faster and faster, down through the trees with branches flailing at our heads like clubs, with twigs snatching at our caps and cloaks, with the whole world gone to a whirl of sky and trees and hooves and the hot stink of horses. I reach for my new sword, but Dewi is galloping so hard and the ground’s so rough that I slip sideways in the saddle as soon as I take my hand off the reins, so I forget the sword and grab a handful of his mane instead, and a thick branch comes swiping at my face and I duck under it and suddenly there are no more trees and we’re rushing out across open land, a water-meadow where the mist hangs in woolly ribbons above the drainage ditches, and the other horses are beside me, foaming, racing, and boys are shouting, and Medrawt ahead of us with a spear upraised, and ahead of him is a big crowd of men, white faces flashing under helmets as they turn to see us.
I have just time to think “Saxons!” before our charge carries us into the middle of the battle. Off to one side I see Arthur’s red banner flying. The Saxons are bunched up on the road where it slopes downhill to the ford. We gallop past a wagon that has pitched sideways into a ditch and spilled out pots and cloth-wrapped bundles and a shrieking woman. Cows get in our way, white-eyed with terror, blundering across the line of our charge. Dewi rears up, and I lose my grip and slither backwards over his arse and down with a thump in wet bracken.
The battle wraps me in its noise and reek. I get up quick, not wanting to be kicked to death. Where’s Dewi? This isn’t like the battles Myrddin tells about, where brave warriors fight one against another. It’s more like shoving through a packed marketplace. I blunder against friends and enemies. My ears fill with the sound of blades against shield-wood: a cosy thud, like someone chopping logs. My face gets shoved into a Saxon’s side; I taste the hairy weave of his tunic, smell his sweat. Lucky for me he’s too busy to notice, flailing with his sword at Bedwyr, who’s still mounted. The edge of a shield catches me and pulls me sideways. A yellow-haired man is shouting something at me and waving a great big axe, which I suddenly understand he means to hit me with, but the blow never comes; the battle tugs us away from one another. A riderless pony sends me sprawling. I crash into the reeds at the edge of one of those drainage ditches, slither down into the water. The reeds are spear-high, with flags of thin, pale stuff at the top, waving. Between their stalks the water is brown and brackish, covered with a film of dead flies, their spread-out wings like tiny windows, hundreds of them, thousands. Beyond the reeds men are yelling and horses are shrieking.
Were they really Saxons? There weren’t many of them; less than a hundred. How could such a small army have struck so deep into the British side of Britain? I think maybe they were no more than a gang of foreign foederates, mercenaries hired to protect some town up in Calchvynydd who had grown tired of waiting to be paid and turned to banditry instead. Saxons are hard fighters, I’ve heard. Saxons would have found high ground and formed a shield-wall, made a fence of wood and steel that Arthur’s cavalry could not have broken. This lot just scattered when they saw the horses coming. Ran this way and that, pursued by horsemen. Rallied in small clumps, easily cut down. It was more like a hunt than a battle.
Later, when it’s quiet, I part the reeds and scramble out.
I’m frightened that people will ask where I’ve been. I have worked out a lie to tell them, about being stunned and waking up in the ditch to find the battle over. But no one asks. They’re busy in the piles of dead, digging out fallen friends or stripping the Saxons of the things they carried. Crows are circling. Up above, the green hill of Badon rises from its blankets of woods. I see Arthur on his white horse, and Medrawt among the knot of men around him. In the mud near the ford lies Valerius, and I can’t help but notice that he’s been speared in the back.
“Gwyn!” someone is shouting. “Gwyn!”
It’s Bedwyr, leading Dewi, who he found wandering in the meadows eastward, where our men are plundering the Saxons’ baggage-train. He runs up and hugs me. “We won,” he says, but he doesn’t sound triumphant. He says it like a question, as if he can’t quite believe that any of us is still alive. “I killed a man. I killed him, Gwyn. We won.”
He hugs me hard. He smells of sweat and other people’s blood. And when my face presses against his I feel a prickling where his first, thin, boyish beard is starting to grow.
XVIII
Badon fight was a turning point. It was a change in the tide. Arthur and the people round him would talk often of the battle, and the men would swap tales of it whenever there was fighting or drinking to be done. It wasn’t long before people who hadn’t been there started to get Arthur’s little victory over the robber-band confused with that other battle of the Hill of Badon, the big, important one that old Ambrosius had won. Which was exactly what my master was hoping for when he picked out the battlefield.
As for me, all Myrddin said when he saw me alive and whole after the fight was, “So you came through unscathed. Did you enjoy your battle?”
I nodded, of course, but he knew I was lying. “I am never, never, never going into a war again,” I promised myself. And I felt sorry for Bedwyr and the other boys. They must have been as scared as me, but they’d be men soon, and would have to keep on plunging into fights like that until they got into one they would never come out of. I pulled out my sword and looked at it, and I wanted to cast it away. I’d not used it, but I knew that someone had, in the days before it was mine, and that there must still be dried traces of blood grained in the grooves of its hilt and the cracked ivory pommel.
Myrddin went stalking off to help tend to the wounded men who had been dragged from the field by their friends. He talked a lot about the great healers of times gone by, men with names like Hippocrates and Galen. He did his best, after the battles, binding wounds and applying poultices of herbs and cobwebs, lashing dead pigeons to the feet of men with blood-souring to draw their fevers out. I don’t know if it did much good. It seemed to me that if a man had a wound that was more than a shallow cut, he’d most likely die, and if that was what God wanted for him then there was nothing my master’s bandages and ointments and long words could do.
Down by the river Bedwyr and my other friends were wading about among the dead, pulling Saxons’ boots and sword-belts off.
We pulled back from the ford and camped on Badon Hill, among the green slopes of an age-old fortress. That night, around the campfires, there was less talk of war than usual, as if the memory of the real thing was too fresh in everybody’s minds for the old boasts and poems to work their magic. Even Arthur looked sombre and thoughtful, staring at the sparks as they danced up into the dark. We all kept close to the fires, wary of the ghosts that would be wandering in the dark beyond those circles of light. But when we had eaten, Myrddin took out his harp and spun the day’s
fight into stories, listing the brave deeds that each man had done, leaving out none of them, not even Bedwyr. He touched his story with humour, telling us how none of the enemy had dared face Owain, because he was so beautiful they thought he was an angel sent to help Arthur, and how they had fled before Cei, who was so ugly they thought he was a devil come to help Arthur. And slowly, as we listened, we started to forget how afraid we’d all been, and began to remember it as he told it: Arthur’s shining victory.
And when the stories were done and we were winding ourselves in our blankets and settling down to sleep, Arthur and Cei came and found my master and they went away together into Arthur’s tent.
I was a long time finding sleep. I lay on the hard ground and felt the bruises blooming on me where I’d been knocked and jostled in the fight, and all the while I could hear Arthur and Cei and Myrddin talking low. And I remember wondering what they were planning, and where it would take us to next.
XIX
Before dawn, my master’s toe prodded me awake. I scrambled up quick and followed him between the turf ramparts to the horse-lines. There was a line of light like a tide-mark along the bottom of the eastern sky. I could see the curve of the river shining below us, and on the dark land beyond it I could dimly make out the heap of dead enemies we had left there for the crows and foxes.
“Where are we going, master?” I asked, as we saddled the horses.
“Back to Aquae Sulis.”
“Just us alone?”
“The rest will follow later. Arthur is sending me ahead, with a message for the town.”
“What message?”
“Was there ever a servant as impertinent as you? No business of yours, that’s what message. Did you never hear of the boy who was turned into a stone because he asked too many foolish questions?”
We rode out of the camp before anyone but the sentries were stirring. My mind worked all the way to Aquae Sulis, worriedly wondering what Arthur and my master were planning, and what it might mean for me. Was there to be another fight? Did Arthur mean to take Aquae Sulis for himself? I knew fretting about what was going to happen wouldn’t stop it happening, but I couldn’t help myself.
This was what my time with Myrddin had done to me. In the old days I’d never given a thought to the future, and not much to the past. I’d lived simply in the now. I’d been happy if I had enough to eat, and nobody was hitting me. I’d been miserable when I was cold, and frightened when I was ill, but mostly I gave no more thought than an animal did to what might happen tomorrow, or next week. Just an animal walking about on two legs, that’s all I was till Myrddin changed me. It seemed to me sometimes I’d been happier that way.
The town greeted us uncertainly, not sure if we were good news or bad. People always expect news to be one or the other. Usually it’s both, as the news we carried was. The ordo raised their old lizardy arms in praise of God when Myrddin told them how the battle had gone, and then set to groaning and looking downcast when they heard of Valerius’s death. The servant-women who waited on the dead man’s wife started to shriek and sob and pull their hair about, but the lady herself just stood there silently, her long face whiter than ever and her grey eyes fixed on my master, until they turned her about, and led her away.
“What is to become of us?” the chief magistrate wondered as he watched her go. “This victory has come at a high price. With Valerius gone, who will be our defender…?”
“Arthur wishes to bring your town under his protection,” said Myrddin helpfully. “In exchange for quite reasonable tributes he would be prepared to make Aquae Sulis his capital. Build up its defences and improve it in every way.”
“But we pay our taxes to Maelwas of Dumnonia.”
“Maelwas is as weak as a woman. Has he sent you any help in your present need? No. So how can he object if you turn to another lord, one who can protect you?”
“A half-heathen savage out of the western hills,” grumbled the bishop, not loudly, but loud enough for all the rest to hear.
Myrddin ignored him. “Arthur would like a treaty. A sign of lasting trust between us.”
“Gold,” muttered another councillor. “He’ll want gold.”
The chief magistrate closed his eyes and ran his hand over his face like he was counting all the wrinkles. He wanted to be left alone to take in this news of Valerius’s death. He didn’t want my master standing here, pressing him for an answer that would seal the fate of his whole town.
“Valerius had a wife,” said Myrddin lightly.
The magistrate opened a beady eye. “Gwenhwyfar?”
“Arthur is unmarried,” said Myrddin. (I wondered about red-headed Cunaide, but Myrddin told me later she wasn’t a Christian wife, so didn’t count.) “I gather that the lady Gwenhwyfar’s father came from the family of Ambrosius himself,” he went on. “And that she is related on her mother’s side to King Maelwas. That would be an auspicious marriage for our Dux Bellorum.”
The other old men clicked their tongues and shook their heads, but the chief magistrate was snared. You could see the calculations going on behind his eyes, driving out whatever sorrow he’d felt for Valerius. If what he’d heard was true, Arthur might have all Britain under his command within a few more years. An alliance with a man like that might be most useful, and if all it took was a marriage with Valerius’s beanpole widow…
He turned to a servant, sniffing delicately. “Call Gwenhwyfar here. We should talk with her, before the Dux Bellorum returns.”
XX
Arthur’s army arrived the next day, and fat black clouds came with them like a baggage train, drenching the town in rain. It ran in rivers down the street-gutters and waterfalled from clogged downpipes. It drummed on the canvas roofs of the plunder-wagons Arthur had taken from the Saxons. It drowned out the bleating of the women who ran to mourn beside Valerius’s corpse. The dead man had been carried back in honour from the battlefield, wrapped in a cloak and laid upon a shield, a noble Roman fallen in battle. But the rain soaked him through and through, and by the time they reached the church he looked like he’d drowned in a flooded ditch.
The dead man’s widow steps out into the rain to meet him. Gwenhwyfar has a striking face; too long to be pretty, but a face you notice. She has dark eyes, with secrets in them. Her hair is dark, too, ash-streaked with grey. It hangs low over her forehead, as if she would like to hide behind it. Her eyes and nostrils are red like she’s been crying, but maybe it’s a cold. Her body, what I can see of it under her woollen cloak, is all bony angles. Her name means “white shadow", and there is something shadowy about her. She looks as if she can’t quite believe in herself.
The boys I run with could talk of nothing but Gwenhwyfar last night. They say she’s bad luck. She was promised to Valerius’s brother when she was young, but he was killed in a cattle-raid before they could marry. She wed Valerius instead, and gave him a son, but the child died and there have been no others. Now she has no husband either. We boys can’t believe Arthur means to make a wife of this grey icicle.
She steps forward to kiss her dead husband’s forehead, and the men carrying him lower the shield a little to let her do it, almost spilling the corpse into the mud. She looks at him thoughtfully. Her white fingers rest on his chest.
“There is no wound,” she says, looking across the body at my master.
“He was struck from behind,” says Myrddin. Her eyes stay on him. The question in them makes him shift awkwardly. I wonder about how Valerius died. Did one of our men drive the spear into his back? Did Arthur order it? Did my master advise that it be done?
“It is not unusual for a blow to come from behind in the turmoil of battle,” Myrddin says, answering the lady’s question as if she’d spoken it aloud. “Your husband was such a valiant fighter, Gwenhwyfar, that I doubt any Saxon dared meet him face-to-face.”
Gwenhwyfar lowers her eyes and steps back into the company of her waiting-women. She can’t press my master any further without insulting his master, Arthur, whos
e riders and spearmen pack the streets around. The question of her husband’s death blows downwind, unanswered.
Arthur watches her carefully from the far side of the church all through the bishop’s funeral prayers. He has the same look that he gets when he is thinking about buying a horse, or taking a new stretch of land.
Outside, in the skinny, driving rain, the men of Aquae Sulis dug a hole in the wet ground and bundled Valerius into it. Before they had finished filling in the grave, Arthur was making himself at home. Working men were ordered to repair the defensive walls and clear the rubbish from the ditches below them. What soldiers the place still had were set to drilling with spears and shields. We thought that when Maelwas learned of the bite Arthur had taken out of his borderlands he would send men north to take it back, and we wanted to be ready for them. We shod horses, and sharpened spears, and dragged felled trees across the places where the walls had tumbled down. We took turns to stand on the walls at night, watching the mist steam off the wet woods, watching the hills keep their secrets.
XXI
We watched and watched, but Maelwas never came. Maybe he’d heard tell of the great victory Arthur had won under the Hill of Badon, and didn’t fancy meeting him in battle. He sent heralds instead, all in white on white horses, with green branches held up high to show they came in peace. They passed on to Arthur Maelwas’s thanks for preserving Aquae Sulis, and asked that he send gold and cattle as a token of his loyalty. Arthur gave them half the gold they asked for, and none of the cattle, and the heralds went back to Maelwas’s strongholds in the Summer Country, leaving the town in the hands of its new lord.