Loud shouts in Saxon carried on the breeze from the western end of the camp where Penda’s captains gathered their men. Ignoring them, Hywel threw back the door flap and stepped into Penda’s tent. The only light came from a lantern on a stubby table. Penda was alone, leaning over a map spread out in front of him, but he looked up at Hywel’s entrance. At first he looked back to the map, instantly dismissing Hywel, but then he brought up head again. “I don’t know you.”
“No, my lord,” Hywel said in Saxon. “I have a message for you.”
Penda looked past Hywel to the door of the tent, but none of his servants came through it. Hywel kept his hands loose at his sides, hoping that Penda wouldn’t decide to run him through. He had a sword, and Hywel wasn’t accomplished yet in the use of his new axe.
“What is it?” Penda said.
Hywel bowed. “My name is Hywel. I bring you news from the King of Gwynedd.”
“So Cadfael seeks peace, does he?” Penda said. “He snubbed my son, refusing him his wayward daughter. He has not responded to any of my messages and rebuffed my councils. It is too late for peace.”
Hywel almost choked on his tongue. Could Penda not know that Cadfael was dead? That Cadwaladr was king? And yet, it appeared so. Hywel swallowed hard. This was not the news he’d thought he was bringing Penda. “My lord, I-I-I—” Hywel found himself stuttering.
“Why does Cadfael even bother with this charade? He must fear defeat. He must think he can turn his magician in my direction, and I’ll turn tail and run away. No.” Penda shook his head. “I will crush Cadfael beneath my boot, and all Wales will fall to me before the year is out.”
Hywel finally marshaled his thoughts. “It is not Cadfael who sends you word. Cadfael is dead.”
The new seemed to shake Penda, if only a little bit, and he recovered quickly, tsking through his teeth. “Not Cadfael? Then who? My sister never gave Cadfael a son. Who has taken the throne?”
“Your sister didn’t need to,” Hywel said. “She’d already given one to Cadwallon.”
Penda’s mouth opened in surprise. “The boy lived? I would have thought Cadfael was smarter than that. If I had been he, I would have scoured Gwynedd for every year-old son, just as Herod did in the Christian Bible.” Penda laughed openly. “If all the rulers in that religion had his spine, I might join that faith myself.”
Penda was definitely not the type to turn the other cheek.
“His name is Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon, soon to be High King of the Britons.” Hywel’s chest swelled at his own words. Here was a name—and a king—that could shake even this great lord of Mercia.
Penda’s brow furrowed. “You imply that because another man leads the Welsh, the game has changed? Why would I treat with him if I wouldn’t have spoken to Cadfael?”
“Cadwaladr is your nephew.”
“He thinks to bind me with blood?” Penda said. “I haven’t spoken to my sister in fifteen years. Is that all you have for me?”
“King Cadwaladr sent me to warn you.”
“Warn me? Enough of your riddles.” Penda scoffed under his breath. “Give me your message, and I might allow you to live.”
“Oswin of Northumbria gathers a force on your northern border. If you do not withdraw from this fight, you may not have a country left to defend.”
Penda crossed his arms across his chest and tapped a finger to his lower lip. “How does your king know this? Perhaps this is a trick.”
“It’s no trick,” Hywel said.
“Withdraw, eh? He must be more afraid of me than I supposed, to think that such a ruse could possibly work. We outnumber you. You are locked in your little fort and cannot get out, with too few men to win the day. Or night.”
Hywel kept his face impassive, but Penda laughed again.
“I see I am right.”
“You are wrong. King Cadwaladr sends me to you because he would prefer an enemy he knows on his border than one he does not. You might not die yourself today, but if you do not withdraw and turn your attention to Oswin, your army will never recover. You will not have the men to defeat him. And you yourself will not live out the year.”
Penda stared at him, and Hywel realized that his voice had changed as he’d spoken those last words, deepened into a rhythmic chant reminiscent of Taliesin. What had come over him? For Penda’s part, he gazed at Hywel for several heartbeats.
“You resemble your father more than a little. Is he well?”
Hywel tried not to betray himself with an uncomfortable swallow. “He is.”
“But the rest of your message is not that he comes to join me? To beg forgiveness for deserting me when I needed him most?”
“No.” The word came out short, and Hywel forced himself not to glance towards the door, knowing that it would indicate weakness to Penda. He had very little time. Bedwyr was waiting. From the looks of it, they still had a war to fight.
But Penda was done too. “Go. If I see you again, it will be your death.”
Hywel didn’t need to be told twice.
Chapter Ten
Rhiann
The Saxon torches sputtered and spit in the pouring rain, barely penetrating the cloak of darkness that had descended on Caer Fawr. Rhiann gazed over the rampart. Dafydd stood beside her, extreme tension in his shoulders. For Rhiann’s part, she felt a strange sense of dislocation—as if what she was seeing wasn’t real—and if it was, she was watching the scene from the point of view of someone else. The Saxons outnumbered them at least four to one. Maybe more. The defenders didn’t have enough arrows. It was as simple as that.
Cade had told Rhiann about his argument with Dafydd. What Cade hadn’t told Dafydd was that he’d listened, and the end result was that he’d insisted to Rhiann herself that she keep as safe as possible. Whether or not Dafydd knew it, Cade was punishing him just a little by making him stay with her. They stood on a raised platform behind a palisade, overlooking the southwestern gate. By splitting their force to directly assault both gates at the same time, the Saxons had forced Cade to split his as well.
Rhiann was torn between horror at what was coming at them and an absolute refusal to believe that they were all going to die. If they couldn’t hold the Saxons off long enough to prompt Penda to rethink this action, it would be hand-to-hand along the ramparts soon enough and there was no way the Welsh were going to win that battle.
“Aim for the neck or heart,” Dafydd said.
Rhiann glanced at him. “I’m glad you’ve found Angharad.”
“Can we not talk about it?” Dafydd said—and then proceeded to talk about it. “She’s smart, and she doesn’t talk too much, and she says she loves me. I have no idea why.”
“Don’t be foolish, Dafydd,” Rhiann said. “I loved Cade before I met you. It doesn’t mean you weren’t worthy of love. Such modesty doesn’t become you.” She elbowed him in the ribs to take the sting out of her words.
“Remember Caersws?” Dafydd said.
“How could I forget?” Rhiann said. “I’m staring down at an overwhelming force where the odds don’t favor us.”
“And yet we won the day. Just the two of us.”
“We did, didn’t we?” Rhiann found courage at the memory, though that had been a different situation. These weren’t mindless demons, chasing confused villagers across Powys. These men followed a commander who knew what he was doing and had won more battles in the last thirty years than any Mercian king before him.
“We have King Cadwaladr,” Dafydd said. “Maybe they don’t understand what that means.”
“According to Hywel, they hadn’t realized my father was dead. They are truly behind the times.”
“Here they come.” Dafydd raised his bow.
Because of the rain, they’d waited to tie their bowstrings until the last moment. As it was, the strings would soon be soaked and unusable. Rhiann had two spares. Like the arrows, she could only pray that they would be enough.
“They’re coming!” The shout came from below them.
<
br /> “Why didn’t Taliesin save his explosion for now?” Dafydd said. “He could have killed two hundred of them instead of half that number.”
“He bought us time.” His own bow in his hand, Cade had arrived to stand with them. Then he lifted his voice above the grunting and marching of men. “Fire at will!”
Rhiann obeyed. At first, she focused entirely on the feel of the bow in her hand, the physical act of pressing and loosing arrow after arrow, and the concentration needed to aim it. She didn’t even bother to see if her arrows hit anyone, so quickly did she fire them off. Fortunately for the Welsh, the Saxons were pressed so close together, accuracy was immaterial, and the first waves of arrows devastated the initial ranks of marching soldiers.
“Watch out!”
Cade launched himself at Rhiann and pulled her to the ground, cushioning her fall with his own body.
“What—what happened?”
“They have their own bowmen,” Cade said. “I didn’t expect it.”
“They have one fewer now,” Dafydd said.
Cade pushed to his feet but kept a hand on Rhiann’s shoulder to keep her below the level of the rampart. “Stay there!”
He released six arrows in the time she could have gotten off one.
“Cade, this is ridiculous—”
“Not to me. And anyway, you can get up now. They’re all down.” Cade pulled her to her feet and into a quick hug, squeezed once, and set off at a run toward the rampart above them.
Rhiann went back to work.
It was a brutal business. Rhiann shot and shot and shot again, feeling that same welling up of fear—and the draining out of everything she cared about. As at Caersws, she became one with the bow, the string, and the arrow that she shot from it. She lost track of the number of arrows she loosed or the Saxons she hit.
Even as Rhiann continued to shoot, she was mindful of her emptying quiver. Each archer had brought at least two dozen of his own arrows with him, but if Rhiann’s were nearly gone so were everybody else’s.
A call went up from the archers who held a more easterly position. “More arrows! We need more arrows!”
A moment later, Angharad appeared behind Rhiann and stuffed a handful of arrows into her quiver and then another handful into Dafydd’s.
“Taliesin is keeping count.” Angharad’s breath came in short gasps. “Take care of these. We don’t have many left.”
Angharad ran back to the stockpile.
“We’ve made headway against the Saxons, but how long can we hold out?” Dafydd muttered under his breath, calculating as Rhiann was the number of arrows, the number of archers, and the number of Saxons they needed to kill.
His bow loose in his hand and unstrung, having run all the way from the northern gate, Hywel skidded to a halt behind Rhiann. “We’ve turned them back!”
“Are you sure?” Rhiann aimed carefully at a Saxon who had the temerity to creep into the ditch at the base of the wall below her. From what she could see, they’d only killed the first ranks of Saxons—not even a thousand men. And even that thought sickened her, knowing that she’d been responsible for many dozen all by herself.
“Hold!” Cade’s call came from above them. “We can’t afford to waste even one arrow.” He landed beside Dafydd and Rhiann with a thud, having jumped the distance from the upper rampart. “Hywel’s right. They’ve retreated from the northern gate. I don’t yet know whether they intend to renew the assault there, or if they’re going to concentrate on only this gate.”
Rhiann lowered her bow. She didn’t believe it. For every Saxon they’d killed, another had come to take his place. And yet, in the few moments she’d spent talking to Cade and Hywel, the Saxons below her had also backed off from the lowest rampart, to a point just out of arrow range, having faced enough opposition to prevent them from laying their siege ladders against it.
“Maybe Penda is rethinking his decision to attack,” she said.
“I don’t think so.” Dafydd pointed a finger, which didn’t actually tremble, though a slight waver appeared in his voice. “The Saxons are bringing their wagons forward.”
They peered together into the murk.
“What’s in them?” Rhiann said.
“Soil and ladders,” Hywel said. “I saw them when I was in the Saxon camp. Penda must have been working his men like dogs to have managed this plan so quickly. He knows what he’s about.”
Cade waved to Goronwy who commanded the men in the portion of their defenses Cade had taken to calling the annex. It was the bit of rampart that protected the entry gate on the southwest side of the fort, just below where Dafydd and Rhiann stood. “Cease firing! I need more bowmen on the first rampart. We must make each shot count!”
Rhiann pushed the wet tendrils of hair loosened from her braid out her eyes and gazed down at the oncoming Saxons with horror and a mouth full of bitterness. The carts rolled right over the bodies of the Saxon dead.
“Is Penda mad?” she said. “Doesn’t he see the carnage right in front of him?”
Cade wrapped an arm around her and pulled her to him. “He thinks to defeat us now, and that is worth any number of dead to him, if he can accomplish it before dawn.”
“Surely doubt has seeped in by now,” Dafydd said.
“If he finishes us off, he has no western flank to defend,” Cade said. “He thinks he can handle Oswin as he has in the past.”
“That we are defeated won’t help him if he doesn’t have an army left,” Rhiann said.
“That’s what I told him,” Hywel said.
“Penda is an experienced commander. He will have seen that the pace of our arrows slowed before he withdrew his troops.” Cade said. “In fact, that’s probably why he withdrew. He knows that we are running out. He wants to give us time to contemplate our mortality.”
“Would he honor a flag of truce?” Rhiann said.
“No.” The three men spoke in unison, with no hesitation.
“And I wouldn’t show one,” Cade said.
Rhiann looked from one to the other. Each man had the exact same expression of grim determination on his face.
Catrin raced up to Cade, breathing hard. “Goronwy says one-third of his force protects the inner wall. If the Saxons crest the lower rampart, he’ll be able to shoot them as they come up the pathway. But we need to take them down before they reach that point.”
“Agreed.” Cade lifted his own bow and the battle was on again. Press. Loose. Press. Loose.
But too many Saxons came at them. Now, for every Saxon casualty, two more came to take his place. The Saxons gradually filled the moat with dirt from the carts interspersed with the bodies of the dead. After another half-hour passed, the stockpile of arrows was gone. Each archer had three or four arrows left and was staring into a full frontal assault by the Saxons.
“Ladders!”
Two men holding the base of the first scaling ladder slammed it into the ground, while other men lifted it up against the rampart.
“Shoot them before they reach the top!”
Whoever had called the order meant well, but it wasn’t really possible. The initial Saxon climbers fell but others took their places, swarming up the ladders like a waterfall in reverse.
“How many are there?” Rhiann’s voice went high as she gazed across the wall at the oncoming Saxons.
No one answered her.
Dafydd tossed his bow to the ground and pulled out his sword. The Saxons had placed their ladders a few feet apart such that in total it seemed there were a hundred of them side by side.
Cade handed his bow to Rhiann. “Be safe, cariad. Get yourself to the hall. There’s nothing more you can do here.”
Rhiann stared at the bow, wanting to deny him, but she felt Dafydd’s eyes on her and knew it would be foolish to do so. “Yes, my lord.”
She ran away. With every step she cursed and wept at the same time, tears streaming down her cheeks, hating to leave her husband and her friends but knowing that her skill with a blade wou
ld be inadequate to the task. She would only get herself killed along with them.
Chapter Eleven
Goronwy
The first Saxon had just pulled himself to the top of the wall when an arrow pierced his neck. He screamed and tumbled forward off the ladder. Goronwy had a moment of relief but in the next moment shook it off. There was no hope here.
Another Saxon replaced the first, and then another, and surely there were hundreds more waiting at the foot of the ladder to take the place of every one who fell. When the next Saxon appeared, Goronwy hacked him with a down sweep of his sword. He too fell back. And then so many faced him in succession Goronwy stopped counting.
Geraint moved up beside him, and they fought back to back, in concert with the dozen other men who’d staked out this portion of the rampart. Goronwy knew many of them. He’d taught some of them sword play, but now, when it was no longer play, it was he they looked to for courage. As had been the case in the council hall, his lord was counting on him. Goronwy smiled grimly as he hacked away at another Saxon neck. He was better at fighting than talking.
On the other side of him, Bedwyr slashed at a Saxon who came up the ladder one over from the one Goronwy was protecting.
“To the wall!” Goronwy hoped they’d prove a bold sight to the other Welsh fighters, encouraging them to think they had a chance, even if Goronwy himself knew better.
He, Geraint, and Bedwyr leapt onto the rampart itself and swung their swords at the necks of the first men who poked their heads over the rampart. If Goronwy could maintain his position, he could stop every Saxon who reached the top of the ladder. The rain hindered both defender and attacker, making the ladder slippery and the sod wall of the rampart soft and mucky. More than one man’s foot slipped off a rung and plunged him down onto the soldiers below him. It seemed every man tried a different technique for reaching the top, whether climbing one-handed with an axe in one hand, putting a blade between his teeth, or with a weapon slung along his back.
Rise of the Pendragon (The Last Pendragon Saga Book 6) Page 6