We walked on, the bird song, the buzz of flies and the snap of dry sticks beneath our feet seeming to grow louder, like waves rolling up the shingle.
‘I was happy to see her,’ I said at last.
Arthur considered that for a long moment. ‘Just happy?’ he said.
So this was why we were alone in the woods with that bird who, for all her magnificence, would surely rather have been snugged up in her roost waiting for nightfall. As it was, King Einion of Ebrauc would have to wait a day longer. So too the people of southern Caer Gwinntguic who saw Saxon spear blades and helmets glinting in the sun. All of Britain would wait, because Arthur must know if I was in love with his wife.
But how could I be in love with Guinevere? Until seven days ago I had not laid eyes on her for eight years. Before that, she and I had barely spoken since she came to Camelot. Whatever Guinevere and I had once shared, it lay in the far-flung past. It was the heady days of early spring only barely recalled in the long winter dark. It was a half-remembered melody. An old feeling given fleeting life by a smell or a song.
How could Arthur imagine that my heart would still clench in my chest at the thought of Guinevere? That my blood would beat like a drum in my ears at the sight of her gathering herbs from Camelot’s ramparts or tying the worm’s knot to cure a restive cow, or shearing wool from a black sheep to cure a child’s earache.
How had he known that I had ever loved her?
Because he knew Guinevere, that’s how. Because he loved her too, and he knew me as well as I knew him. And because he was no fool.
Above us, the crack of squirrels breaking hazelnuts. To my right, a rustling in the litter, then silence as the unseen creature waited for us to pass.
‘I do not know your Guinevere, Arthur,’ I said.
It was the truth, yet I could see that Arthur did not know how to take it for the implicit admission that she had once been mine. Or at least, I had been hers and fool enough to believe she was mine.
‘I want her to be happy,’ I said.
An easier truth for him, that. I saw his teeth pulling at his lip, but whatever he was thinking of saying remained unsaid as we broke from the trees and came onto open land again.
We turned north-west, keeping the warm breeze on our faces so as to be downwind of any prey.
‘I am sorry I cannot give you more than a score of horse,’ Arthur said. He was taking sixty horsemen north to Ebrauc to fight the Picts, leaving me with just twenty.
‘A score will be enough,’ I said. We had learnt that just the sight of those big men on their armoured mounts was often enough to sow fear into the Saxons. And men in fear’s grip fight only for themselves, not for their spear-brothers, and that was when shieldwalls broke and death poured in.
‘No prisoners, Lancelot,’ he said.
‘No prisoners,’ I said.
We had already agreed our strategies. He would help King Einion drive the Picts back into the north, then ride east to fight with King Masgwid the Lame of Elmet against King Cerdic’s Saxons. Gawain and Bedwyr would go with him, as would Mordred and Melwas, who was Mordred’s man these days. My task was to kill those Saxons who had come west into Caer Gwinntguic and then take the fight to Rhegin and the Saxons’ settlements there. I was to bleed the enemy in the south so that they would not be strong enough to venture north for at least two seasons. By showing that his sword still reached all across Britain, and by helping these kings in their own wars, Arthur would be proving himself High King in all but name. Next spring, he would sit on the Pendragon’s high seat whether he was acclaimed or not. He would rule and even if we could not throw the Saxons back into the sea, maybe they would be content to farm the land they had in Rhegin and Lindisware and Britain would know peace. And maybe the clouds themselves would take the shape of the bears which adorned our shields and war banners, and every stream would chime with songs of our victories, and the flames in folks’ hearths would whisper the name of Arthur.
‘There,’ I said under my breath, reaching out to stop Arthur mid-stride.
‘She’s seen it,’ he said, moving only his eyes down to the eagle-owl on his arm.
Sixty paces away, partly shaded by the spreading canopy of a beech whose leaves flickered with the breeze, was a hare, its grizzled yellow-brown fur a smudge amongst long green grass.
I watched Hades fasten her eyes on her prey, as my little sparhawk had used to do long ago. Saw her body tense on the glove and the feathers around her face lift slightly with anticipation. I held my breath and with graceful fluidity Arthur lifted his arm and Hades flew, her huge wings, their span as long as I was tall, skimming the grass as she beat upwind.
I saw the hare lift its head, sensing the danger, then it dashed away across the meadow, fast as an arrow off the string but not fast enough. Spreading those great wings to stop herself, Hades struck the hare, which squealed in terror and pain. I heard the crunch of bone as the bird sank her wicked talons deep.
‘The hardest part is getting her to give it over,’ Arthur said as we hurried across the field, both of us thrumming with the excitement of the kill. Both thankful for the distraction from that which the day had really been about.
It was funny in the end, the two of us standing there over that bird who refused to relinquish her kill, with Arthur holding up a mouse by its tail as a trade, having brought it with him for this very reason.
‘Well, don’t ask me to try to steal the thing away from her,’ I said, when Arthur swore under his breath and looked up at me, shaking his head with frustration. We were the protectors of Britain. We were leaders of men and lords of war. And yet we could not take a dead hare from a bird.
Hades glared at us as if daring us to steal what she alone had won. But we did not dare and so we laughed, the sound of it rising on the warm breeze of that summer morning.
And the next day, we went to war.
24
Black Bryony and Bittersweet
I SPLIT MY army into three parts and sent Bors ahead with fifty spearmen, telling him not to fight the enemy. Telling him to avoid a fight even if it meant showing the Saxons his back and running away. Unsurprisingly he had not liked that, but he understood what I needed of him.
Our scouts had spotted a Saxon war band camped between the Tarant River and the old Roman town of Noviomagus. Two hundred of King Aella’s wolves, sent to prowl east along Caer Gwinntguic’s southern borderlands and try Arthur’s strength. Aella knew of Arthur’s obligations, of the treaties he had made with the other kings of Britain. The Saxon king knew that Arthur was being pulled east and north. He knew that Arthur would be drawn into King Masgwid of Elmet’s war against King Cerdic, too, and so he was testing our spears. Bors’s job was to make Aella think he had found us wanting.
‘Find them, and let them get a good look at you,’ I told Bors. ‘Make it seem that you will fight. But do not fight.’
‘What if we run into their skirmishers? If we outnumber them, yet do not fight?’ Agga said.
Bors and I had been amazed to see Agga again. Like Melwas before him, he had left Karrek and the Lady to come and fight for Arthur, the promise of war being a lure too bright for a young man who has given his life to the practice of weapon craft to ignore.
‘Then they will think we cannot risk losses, Agga,’ I said. ‘They will think us weaker than we are and that will make their chieftain even more eager to kill you. But you will not fight him.’ I had turned back to Bors, to impress upon Agga that Bors was in charge, hoping to soothe my cousin’s wounded pride, for it turned out that Agga was the spearman of whom Guinevere had spoken. He had married Bors’s one-time sweetheart Emblyn, and though Bors did not blame Agga, it was no easy draught to swallow.
‘You will find good ground,’ I told Bors. ‘High ground. Set yourself up on some hill, raise your banner and wait for me.’
That’s what Bors had done, and it was a good hill, too. Steep and boulder-strewn on three sides, but one side sloping onto wide, rolling pasture. A gentle enoug
h slope not to deter a war host from climbing it, even in formation with shield rims kissing. Gentle enough for the leader of that host not to even consider splitting his force and sending some men up the steep and difficult sides. No, he would take his two hundred spearmen straight up that slope, confident that he could strike the Britons off the summit of that hill, as his god Thunor might knock apples off a tree with his smith’s hammer.
But the Saxons would never reach the top of that hill.
The night before the battle I dreamt of my father. He was dressed in his war gear, his helmet and mail, as though he would fight at my side the following day. He did not speak in my dream. I too was dressed for battle and I had thought my father would be surprised to see me older and possessing the accoutrements of a warlord, yet he did not speak. And I stood before him, then held him in my arms in such an embrace as I hoped would hold him to this world. And I wept like a child, so that I woke unbalanced and weary and as heavy as if a druid had laid a curse upon me. For in my dream my father had been so real. So immense and strong, and I had touched him. But when I woke he was nothing but the void of his absence, the empty air through which he had once moved.
Yet I took some small heart from having seen him again, ready to fight at my side, so that I almost pitied the enemies that I would face that day. And later that morning, as I waited with my fifty warriors at the foot of the hill’s northern side, hidden from Bors and the enemy ranged below him on the eastern slope, I saw another omen.
I was strapping on the greaves which Arthur had given me, when Agga touched my shoulder and pointed into the northern sky, where a distant clamour of rooks stood out like a black cloud against the deep blue of cornflowers. We did not say anything but just watched those birds, both of us aware of the ill portent should those carrion-feeders fly over the hill’s summit and Bors’s men who waited up there, or over those of us at the foot of the hill. Then, for reasons only the gods know, those raucous birds turned before they reached the hill and swept eastward, so that the Saxons must have felt their cool shadow wash over them and felt the bad omen in that.
Agga grinned at me, looking like the freckle-faced, copper-haired boy I had known on Karrek, and I nodded and bent to finish strapping on the greaves. We had never been true friends on the island but I had always liked Agga better than Melwas and I was glad to have him with me then, even if he and I had never fought in a proper battle together.
Then, before our savage eagerness for the fray could become tainted by the doubt and fears that seep into men made to wait too long for a fight, Bors’s man up on the hill sounded his war horn. Still we waited, because I knew that Cai and Parcefal and their twenty armoured cataphracts would be skirting the hill’s southern side at the canter, making their way up to the pasture so as to get behind the Saxons.
That horn blast meant that the Saxons had started to advance uphill. Bors had let them see him and then retreated in search of a good place to make a stand. Now our foes had taken the bait and those men from some land across the grey Morimaru must have thought they would make a slaughter to have their long-dead ancestors thumping their fists on the mead benches of their god Woden. They looked up at that rise and saw not Arthur’s bear but Uther’s dragon, vivid and blood-red against cloth which had once been white but now was grey. I had sent Agga to fetch that banner from the old hall at Tintagel and we had fixed it between two new long boar spears so that the cloth would stretch and that dragon could stand in all its sharp-clawed and winged glory, even on a windless day.
Seeing Uther’s dragon would confuse the Saxons. Perhaps they would think we Britons hoped to invoke the old warlord’s spirit. Or they might presume that Arthur’s son Mordred had taken up his grandfather’s symbol as his own and that it must be he who now waited to die on that hill. Certainly they would think that Arthur had taken his war horses north, which he had. But he had not taken all of them.
The horn sounded again, like the lowing of some great bull, and that meant that Cai and Parcefal were killing. Their men arrayed in an arrowhead formation, they had thundered across that summer meadow, spears couched, and struck the Saxon rear, and so now it was our turn.
‘Let them hear you,’ I told my men as we set off at a fast walk, striding up the northern slope, beating our spear shafts against the inside of our shields, singing the death hymn of Balor, that mournful tune rising on the warm breeze. And when we crested the rise we saw the carnage which our armoured men and horses had wrought. We saw the terror which they sowed.
The Saxon shieldwall had been three men deep and facing uphill, and the last thing those men had expected to see was Lord Arthur’s famed horse warriors bearing down on them. They had barely the time to turn in that tight press and get their shields up before this wedge of horseflesh, muscle, iron and blade had ploughed into them. The riders’ long spears punching through shields and leather and mail and the frail bodies beneath. The horses themselves smashing bones and throwing men to the ground. Iron-shod hooves trampling them, pummelling flesh and cracking skulls.
Having left a chaos of shrieking, dying, bloody men in their wake, those horsemen had re-formed on the uphill slope, Parcefal glinting in scales at the point and Cai on his right shoulder, Arthur’s dragon-headed wind banner, which whistled and keened when the wind blew through its open mouth, raised up, the silk streaming from it like blood. Now they brought their bloodied spear points down, kicked their heels and charged again, and like sheep seeking the safety of the flock, the Saxons sought desperately to mass together as best they could, given the mess of bodies and shields littering the ground.
We sang for Balor, god of death, promising slaughter in his honour. I looked up the hill and saw Bors thrust his spear into the air. Saw him yelling the order to attack, though could not hear his voice above my men’s singing and the battle clamour ahead of us now that Parcefal and his twenty war horses had struck the Saxons again. Though this time they did not punch through the Saxons but rather stayed amongst them, stabbing down with their spears, wheeling their mounts and running men down – but holding their ground, because what they had done was split the enemy into two parts.
‘Now!’ I roared, and I ran to join the fray, and my spearmen ran with me. No song raised in honour of our gods. Just screams, raw and wild and given to the terrible joy of battle.
The Saxons had not expected to face armoured horse. Now those of them who were not fighting for their lives looked up and saw Britons flying down the slope at them, spear blades and shield bosses flashing in the sun. Some of those Saxons looked north and saw yet more Britons charging towards them, led by a god of war in gleaming bronze scales and a silver-chased helm, its white plume streaming.
‘Kill them all!’ Agga cried, and threw his spear at the run. I saw it streak across the distance and plunge into a man’s chest as he turned to face this new threat, the violence of Agga’s cast throwing the Saxon back as a rain-filled gale might flatten barley.
Then we were amongst them.
I held on to my own spear, using it to turn a Saxon spear blade before scything it back to savage his eyes.
They still outnumbered us, and had it been a fight between two shieldwalls we would likely have lost. But there were no shieldwalls now. There was just a maelstrom of bodies and blades, and the Saxons, skilled and fierce as they were, were reeling with shock and terror. For they must have known that we had trapped them. They saw enemies on all sides and they saw big, armoured horses amongst them and they must have thought that Arthur himself, the warlord of Britain, had come to kill them.
Agga killed the man I had blinded, while I buried my spear in the soft place under a Saxon’s arm as he thrust his spear overhead at the man on my right. Then I drew Boar’s Tusk and started killing.
I lopped off a man’s sword arm then opened his bowels to the air. I spun, taking an axe blow on my shield, and slashed through a bearded neck. I was fast and strong, honed by years of battle and blessed by the gods of war, and my enemies could not touch me with the
ir blades. Agga, too, was deadly. He moved with fluid grace, striking and cutting with prowess earned from boyhood. From a life dedicated to the craft. And somewhere on the other side of our horse warriors who stabbed and thrust about them, Bors too was reaping lives. We three were Pelleas and Benesek, Edern and Madern. We were the amalgam of their skill and experience, and where we fought the Saxons died.
A horse squealed and I saw it go down, its rider hauled from the saddle and butchered with spears and long knives before his companions could kick their own mounts close enough to help him.
‘Agga,’ I called, pointing Boar’s Tusk at a Saxon who wore a long mail coat and a gilded iron helmet which had a face mask comprising eye-sockets, eyebrows, moustache, mouth and a nose made from tinned bronze.
Agga nodded. Men instinctively flanked Agga, just as they flanked me, and we both worked our way towards that magnificent helmet, like converging streams, and the Saxons before us either gave way or died.
Yet neither I nor Agga killed that Saxon warlord. Before we could get close enough to fight his bodyguards, Parcefal on his enormous mare forced his way through the press, laying about him with a long and gore-slathered sword. For he too had seen that helmet shining in the sun. Whoever that Saxon was, he saw death coming for him through the eye-holes of that mask, and even though I never saw his face, I was certain there was no fear in it. He eyed Agga and me, waiting for us to reach him, his scarred shield across his chest and his spear blade pointed at the sky.
Parcefal’s sword took off his head. For the Saxons around him, the sight of that lustrous helmet, head and all, tumbling down into the shadowed crush of feet and filth, was as bad an omen as if the sun had suddenly gone from the summer sky. A shudder ran through the Saxon throng and perhaps many of them would have thrown down their weapons and begged for their lives had they not known we would kill them even if they did so.
And so many more Britons died before the end. When that end came, it was sudden, swift and bloody. A knot of Saxons on the downhill slope dropped their shields and ran. Seeing this, those of their spear-brothers who were not fighting for their lives broke and fled, so that those remaining were outnumbered and easily cut down.
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