Since an attempted surprise from the sea would be discovered by the sentry, always on the look-out for pirates; since we could never carry out an approach in disguise, and since they had these ridiculous scruples about naked treachery, there was only one way left of getting to that wall before the garrison knew we were coming; we should have to get there faster than the news could travel. Nobody fights his best after a fifteen-mile forced march, but we could scrape together enough horses to mount the best men of the war-band, and the rest must be employed on a diversion to draw out the garrison. The drawback was that the Regni would at any rate know there was a war on, though they would not be expecting an attack on their city. But it was the only scheme that had a chance of success. The whole council unanimously agreed that I was the best man to draw up the plans, and I retired to what had once been the study in a ruined house; there I could make notes, and even draw a sketch-map, without my comrades finding out how well educated I was.
I decided to begin the war at midsummer, as soon as the volunteers from Kent arrived; and to divide the army into three groups. Our low-class peasant spearmen, about a thousand strong, would march directly east and harry the Roman shepherds of the chalk uplands; the Roman peasants would gather to repel them, and they would probably be joined by reinforcements from the comitatus. When enough time had elapsed for the enemy to concentrate in full force on their western frontier the well-armed warriors from Kent would threaten another invasion from the north; there would only be two or three hundred of these, but they were all good swordsmen; the Romans would have to send some of their best comrades to counter the threat. Then, when the city was empty of its best defenders, I myself would lead a little band of noble and well-armed Germans straight for Anderida, across the chalk and the marshes; there would not be more than sixty of us, but we ought to be able to escalade the wall in face of the weakened garrison. We should attack at dusk, and the rest of our forces must march all night to join us in the morning. The whole plan depended absolutely on the other detachments arriving at the appointed time; it was a very ambitious scheme to attempt with barbarian troops, who never remember the date and dislike forced marches. But success was certain if only the time-table was kept, and it had the great advantage of giving me a prominent place in the campaign; Aella would realize that he owed Anderida entirely to my courage and skill, and must reward me suitably. I explained all this to Frideswitha, so that she should press the claims of Cynric to my reward if anything happened to me; and though she was appalled by the complication of a campaign in three columns, a thing no barbarian would ever undertake, she finally agreed that I was a more skilful warrior than she had supposed.
The council readily agreed to my plan, although it took a lot of explaining before they understood it. The chief difficulty would be fixing the date. The Saxons use a calendar for religious purposes, and have borrowed the Roman names for most of the months; but the warriors seldom bother to keep track of it, and they are always extremely inaccurate. Aella commanded the peasant spearmen, who adored him, and Cissa was to lead the volunteers from Kent, who thought Aella was too pacific; they were both intelligent men, who could probably count up to twenty without making a mistake, but for greater safety I gave each of them a peeled stick with nine notches; every evening they were to enlarge one notch, and the night they finished the last was the time when they should set out for Anderida.
On midsummer day we lit the usual bonfires and sacrificed an ox; it should have been a horse, but all the horses we could get hold of were needed to mount my storming party. Then Aella led his spearmen eastwards, and Cissa took his party of Kentish volunteers into the Forest; they had all crossed it at least once to get to us at all, so I hoped they would not lose their way before they appeared on the northern frontier of the Regni. I stayed behind for a week, and made my followers practise riding in close formation after dark; no German noble is afraid of anything on four legs, but horsemanship is not their strongest point; they did not fall very often, and did not mind if they did, but they were inclined to scatter over a very wide area as soon as we began to gallop.
On the eighth day we moved gently up to the border, and camped in a sheepfold. A messenger from Aella told me that the Roman shepherds were hanging round his force, avoiding battle but making sure that he could not scatter his men to plunder; that was just what I had expected, and it fitted in very well with my plans. On the ninth morning we began to ride slowly eastward; now that the Romans were collected into an army they would not have many scouts in the open country, and any who saw us would think we were reinforcements for Aella. We came up with his army at midday, and he told us that a small force of the enemy, including all their mounted men, had been seen to move off to the northeast that very morning. Evidently Cissa had made his presence known on the northern frontier, and he was in the right place at the right time.
Now was the opportunity for my men to ride unobserved to the city. Those chalk uplands look very open, and it is true that from the hill-tops you can see other hills many miles away; but they are cut by very steep valleys, with rounded slopes, so that a man riding along the bottom is out of sight of a sentry on the hill-top. I could see the defending army massed on the skyline a mile away; they had taken shelter within the ramparts of an old hill-fort, and they were watching Aella’s men on the lower hill opposite. There was one of these steep ravines behind us, and I made my men stroll down in twos and threes, leading their horses as though they were taking them to water. Once we were all assembled at the bottom I led them at a steady trot along the winding valley floor.
The horses were tired enough to go quietly, and as they had been exercised together for more than a week they had no urge to carry their heavy-fisted riders away from the column. About an hour before sunset we reached the edge of the chalk uplands, and saw Anderida lying in its marsh six miles away. Now came the most hazardous part of the journey; we were in the midst of the enemy, and if they heard in time of our presence we would be overwhelmed by superior numbers. I put the tired horses into a gallop, and trusted that we would outride the news of our coming.
That marsh was always damp, even in midsummer, and we did not raise a betraying cloud of dust. Then as the sun set I had an unexpected piece of luck. A thick mist began to rise; these mists off the marshes are quite unpredictable, and I had not dared to count on one coming to my assistance; but I knew that it would last until the remaining light of the afterglow had faded into complete darkness. Presently we halted, and I ordered my men to dismount and turn their horses loose. I was afraid I might have trouble in getting myself obeyed, for Wlenca and Cymen were with the party, and horses are valuable and scarce; but all of Aella’s regular followers were sensible law-abiding men; though there was grumbling at such a wasteful proceeding no one openly defied me.
When we were all on foot I led them quietly along a stream that I knew flowed close by the wall I was seeking. All round us in the darkness I heard voices shouting that Saxon raiders were about, and someone in the city blew a trumpet to get the garrison under arms; but they would not expect a direct assault on the walls they considered impregnable, and were more likely to send out a strong party of well-armed comrades to look for the raiders in the open. Just as the outline of the wall loomed up through the grey fog we heard an outburst of shouting and trumpet-calls some way behind us; the Romans must have stumbled on our horses, and now they would try to follow up our tracks. Well, they had won good plunder, but we hoped to get something even more valuable in exchange.
We crept closer to the wall. The mist lay low; though we were hidden, the top of the rampart showed clear against a starry sky. There was a trumpeter on the landward side of the wall, blowing his hardest to exchange signals with the reconnaissance party; he was making such a din that no one heard our approach.
My band was composed of trusted veterans, and some of them were rather stiff in the joints for climbing sheer walls; but I had foreseen this, as I seemed to have foreseen everything on this very lucky
venture, and I had specially picked out one brave and steady young man, whose hobby was climbing trees to steal eggs; he went up first, very quietly, and let down a knotted rope to help the old gentlemen. The Romans on the wall did not observe us until we had half a dozen men in position, and the rope was full of others climbing up; then the trumpeter sounded an alarm, and the rest dashed towards us. It was just the sort of fight I had hoped for; a series of desperate single combats at close quarters, where Roman drill and discipline would go for nothing, and all depended on the strength and ferocity of the individual combatants.
At first we pressed them back, clearing about fifty yards of the wall. Then numbers told, and we were forced to defend what we had won. This was all exactly as I had planned the assault. We held a bridgehead inside their defences, and all we had to do was to hang on until the rest of our army joined us at dawn. The fighting platform behind the battlements was about six feet wide, built of solid masonry; so there was no question of breaking it down to right and left of us, as we could have done if it had been the usual gallery resting on wooden beams. But some of the stone merlons that crowned the wall were old and decayed, and piles of brushwood for signal fires had been left lying about in a most unmilitary fashion; we managed to make little barricades on both sides, and set ourselves to hold them until dawn. Of course, these flimsy heaps of brushwood and broken stone were not a serious obstacle, but the moral effect of holding a fixed line is very great.
This was the first deadly fight in which I had commanded really first-class Saxon warriors; all my men were wealthy nobles, equipped with the best of arms in the Saxon fashion, and they were veterans. I was quite amazed at the ferocity with which they fought. I had expected them to stand firm and guard their heads carefully, like Roman soldiers; instead, they were always leaping over the barricade and dashing for their enemies, and their war-cries filled the night with ghastly noise. Even an elderly grey-haired German can fight like a tiger when he is aroused, and in fact if you don’t let them attack all the time they will run away.
The best men in the comitatus of Anderida had marched out to the north to counter the threat from Cissa, and the young boys had formed the patrol that discovered our horses. As a result we were opposed only by second-line troops, and an elderly Roman is no match for an elderly Saxon. I wondered if I would see my father, but I never noticed him on the wall; he must have been over seventy by now, and I expect he found the steps too steep to climb. The Romans seemed to have no leader, or else they had several, which is even worse; at least, instead of drawing off until they had assembled all their force, and then making one great attack to sweep us from the vital point we had gained in their defences, they attacked in driblets as each man armed himself and ran to the fighting.
I kept myself well in the background. My part had been to lead the storming party to a place where they could climb the wall unobserved, and I had carried it out with complete success; but I naturally expected that if I took chances while leading an attack on my father the gods would see to it that I lost my life. It is on just such occasions that good warriors are killed by women throwing roof-tiles, or find the stones turning under their feet when a little boy comes at them with a knife. So I stayed by the rope, and kept a look-out that no Romans should climb up behind us. My men did not mind; they were enjoying themselves, and they knew that I had been trained in a Roman army; if they noticed it at all, they put it down to Roman caution.
The sky was unclouded, but there was no moon, and I could hear what was going on better than I could see it. After little more than an hour the fighting died down; presumably the Romans were satisfied that they had us hemmed in one segment of the wall, and were waiting for daylight to destroy us with arrows from a safe distance. They never dreamt that barbarians would have the patience and the skill in organization to work out a combined attack by three separate forces; they thought we had merely set out on a raid that had gone farther than intended. Germans are notoriously easy to beat if you can pin them down to be shot at, and they were quite right to wait for better light to finish us off. They built little barricades themselves to stop us from spreading farther along the wall, and lined the open spaces inside the city (the pompoerium) with slaves and peasants armed with spears. By this time the patrol that had found our-horses must have returned to the city, and they would have plenty of cavalry to pursue us if we tried to retreat in daylight.
We were all very hungry and tired, though as we had filled our water-bags just before we began to climb the wall we did not suffer from thirst. We lost about fifteen men killed, a quarter of our strength; but we had only one seriously wounded man with us, for in that sort of fighting anyone who was knocked down was usually finished off at once. The wounded man was Cymen himself; he had caught a spear with his left hand, and the point had ploughed a deep and jagged cut from his wrist nearly to his shoulder; his arm was already beginning to swell and throb, and he would die in a few days when the poisoning really set in; but he did not seem to mind, and spoke only of how lucky he was to get his death-wound in a famous fight, instead of dying in bed. Saxons never show fear when they know they must die, though they take reasonable precautions to stay alive as long as possible.
We crouched behind our barricades, and the Romans shouted rude remarks at us from theirs. I was glad that none of them had recognized me, and that Aella would never know I had waged war on my own father. At last the summer night drew to a close. As dawn broke the enemy began the arrow-shower that I had expected. We were a sitting target and could make no reply, for Saxons only use the bow for hunting, and they are atrociously bad shots even then. Our barricades helped us a certain amount; we picked up all the large Roman shields that we could find where the fighting had raged, and my men were amazingly agile at dodging those arrows they saw coming; but that is very tiring work, and they would not be able to keep it up for long. If the rest of our army was late they might find us already driven from the wall.
But everything went right at the taking of Anderida. As the sun came up over the sea I looked back and saw the two detachments of Cissa and Aella hurrying through the marsh towards us. The Romans noticed them, too, and they mustered their men for an all-out attack before we were joined by our reinforcements. But we held them for the necessary half-hour, and then Aella had driven off the force that tried to bar his way outside the town, and was leading his men up the knotted rope.
After we had joined on the ramparts the fight could only have one end. Some Romans from the other defending forces on the border had followed our men to the city, and the townsmen still outnumbered us slightly; but we were all trained warriors, and they had many unarmoured spearmen in their ranks. When the ramparts were won Aella led us down among the gimcrack houses of the town. No Roman asked for quarter, and certainly no German thought of giving it when his sword was wet; even the women and small children did what they could with roof-tiles and kitchen knives; it was all very messy and unpleasant, and I found that I could not fight with any enthusiasm. Of course, it was all my father’s fault; if he had made me his heir, instead of Constans, I am sure the Kingdom of the Regni would still be a flourishing state.
I took my place in the second rank of the fighters, and devoted all my attention to finishing off any wounded man who might otherwise have recognized me and called out my name. The Romans knew that all was lost, and were more anxious to find a quick death than to attempt to drive us back. Quite soon they had abandoned most of the city and taken refuge in the stone-walled church; there they barred the doors, and began to cut the throats of the women while we prepared to burn our way in. I was one of the first to enter when the door collapsed; I had to make sure that all the elderly citizens, who remembered me, were killed as quickly as possible. My father was not there, and in fact I never learned in what obscure alley or cellar he met his death. But I saw my brother Paul, standing on the steps of the High Altar at the far end. I made straight for him, and gave him a merciful thrust through the heart; as he fell I cut his thr
oat with my seaxknife, to prevent any tiresome dying declaration, but I don’t think he realized who I was. The thatched roof had caught alight from the burning door, and presently collapsed on the piled corpses.
That is how we took the city of Anderida; a very remarkable achievement for barbarians unskilled in siege-work, and entirely owing to my cunning and knowledge of the ground. It is the only Roman town in Britain that has fallen by bloody assault; Cantwaraburh was taken over with its slaves and lower classes, and most of the other ruined cities were evacuated for fear of the raiders, like Calleva and Noviomagus. I believe the Sack of Anderida is the subject of a famous poem among the Aellingas; although my name is left out of the official account, for reasons that I shall now relate.
In the evening we held a feast among the ruins. A little wine had been found in the debris of the church, and there was a great quantity of beer. When the drinking began the comrades hailed Aella as King of the South Saxons, a title which was his due now that he had conquered the whole Kingdom of Eleutherus. Then a poet began an ode in praise of the cunning Woden-born leader who had brought them inside the walls; this was me, and I listened with great pleasure. But Aella banged with the hilt of his sword for silence, and called for me to come and stand before him. I thought he was going to announce that I was his heir, or the guardian of his young son, which would come to the same thing in the end; but he frowned as he looked on me, and spoke thus:
‘Cerdic Elesing, you won this city for me, and I am duly grateful. You may take as reward all that you can carry of the spoil. But when you have chosen you must depart at once. Leave Anderida in three hours, and my Kingdom in three days; then you will be outlaw, and any man may slay you for your wealth. I found dying in the street a captain of the Romans, and because he had fought bravely I offered him the mercy of a quick death. But as I leaned over to cut his throat he spoke, in the camp-Latin I learned when I was a child on the Rhine; he told me who you are, and why you had left home. He said that you are the second son of the Roman King of this place, and that you fled from your father because you had murdered your brother, the heir, Now you have destroyed your father’s city, with all your kin inside it, and it is quite possible that you have killed some of them with your own hands. Answer me yes or no; is this story true?’
Conscience of the King Page 17