by Jack Whyte
"Exactly, so he cannot be a Saxon. Therefore he must be an Angle, or perhaps a Jute—" He smiled again, seeing my face. "Another race entirely. There are many of them."
"Aye." I said no more, allowing my tone to convey my disgust in the single syllable and reaching to grasp my saddle horn, preparing to mount. His hand on my arm stopped me.
"No, wait, Cay. I want to see what kind of place this is, what kind of farm they have. That barn is large, larger than I would have expected to find in a place like this." He stopped, looking me in the eye. "Will you wait for me? Or will you join me?"
I looked up at the sky and sniffed loudly. It was already almost full daylight, and the man might be returning even now, but I had already learned not to argue with my brother when his curiosity was stirring.
"What if we meet him in the woods?"
"Then we nod and pass by, what else? We won't meet him, Cay! How stupid do you think I am? I'm not suggesting we ride boldly forward here. We'll harness our horses back there in the woods behind the barn and make our way forward on foot, clear of the path. If someone comes, we'll drop flat. Come on, I'm curious to see what we have here."
We did as he suggested and moved forward carefully, and less than a hundred paces from the barn we came upon the main holding, an extensive farm yard containing a long, low, central building made of stone, with a thickly thatched roof, surrounded by a collection of smaller huts and shelters, some of them strongly built, the others a ragtag variety of lean-to sheds in various stages of repair. The strongest-looking outhouses, all walled byres, were for cattle. We could hear the sounds of them from where we crouched behind the screen of bushes separating us from the yard. Smoke billowed from a vent in the roof of the main building, but we could see neither door nor windows from where we crouched; nothing but stone walls. Muttering that these people had obviously lived here for some time, since the buildings had been carefully and strongly built, requiring years of effort, Ambrose beckoned me to follow him and cautiously, ready to drop at any sound, we made our way laterally until the front of the longhouse came into view. It had one wide, central door divided laterally into two sections, top and bottom, much like those I had seen in Eire. The top section was open and we could hear voices from inside, but then a woman's face appeared and she reached over, raising the latch that held the bottom closed. She emerged as it swung open, a tall, well-made, wholesome-looking woman in her early twenties, I surmised, and was followed by a brood of brawling children, three of them, all boys, tugging and hauling at each other as they spilled into the light of day. She snapped some words at them and crossed directly to a solid-looking table close by the door, where she lowered the large wooden bowl she had been holding in her right arm. One of the boys, the smallest, hit by one of his brothers, ran to her in tears and clutched her skirts, burying his face against her leg. She dropped one hand protectively to his bowed head and gave his siblings the rough edge of her tongue, then raised her head and called out again. Her man, the one who had almost stumbled on us, came from the largest outhouse, evidently in answer to her summons. Seen thus, in full light, he appeared even larger than he had before, an enormous, broad-shouldered, blond-haired man with a handsome face almost completely covered by a dense beard. The little skin I could see around his bright blue eyes looked deeply tanned. The woman gestured to the wooden bowl, then knelt to soothe the little boy, while her man approached and looked into the deep- sided bowl. From it he took a jug, a wedge of bread and what appeared to be a handful of dried grain, and then he leaned against the table's edge, feeding from his closed fist and grinning as he watched his woman fussing with the child. She bussed the boy, then cleaned his tear-streaked face with her apron, just as a woman of our Colony would have, after which she straightened and moved to stand beside her man. He raised the hand in which he held the jug, and she came into the crook of his arm, leaning against him. He lowered his head and nuzzled his bearded face against her hair, then continued eating while she spoke to him.
I had no notion of what she was saying, but the domesticity of the scene surprised me, although had I been asked how I might have expected such people to behave towards each other I would have been unable to provide an answer. The man turned his head slightly and called out something, and a young girl appeared in the doorway. She was most evidently the daughter or the sister of the first woman, and my mind immediately chose the former, adjusting its estimate of the woman's age accordingly. The girl was laughing at something her father had said as she turned and disappeared again into the interior of the house.
I felt Ambrose's eyes upon my face and turned to look at him. He merely raised an eyebrow, a half-smile upon his face, but then he froze, head cocked to the side, and gestured urgently, a small, tight movement of one hand. The sounds he had heard reached my ears immediately, and then a two-wheeled cart, drawn by a horse and containing three more men, came creaking from the woods on the other side of the farm yard and approached the house. The driver was an older man, about equal in age to the farmer, and the other two were younger, beardless youths. It was evident that they had been expected, for the farmer, swigging a quick drink from the jug before setting it down, hugged his wife one-armed, pinching a buttock fondly, and they moved together to greet the newcomers. One of the younger men was already handing down tools, shovels and mattocks, to his companion who had jumped to the ground.
Ambrose tugged at my sleeve and we backed away cautiously until we were sure we were in no danger of being seen, and then we headed back towards our horses.
"Well," he asked me as he walked. "Don't you feel glad you didn't have to kill him?" I shook my head, impatient with his tone, but he would not let be. "Come, Brother. Would you rather have left him dead, simply for being here, and her a widow with a brood to feed?"
I looked at him, tight-lipped, but he merely grinned and swung himself up into his saddle. And so we rode in silence for a spell. I was deeply disturbed, however, by the scene we had just witnessed, although I would have been at a loss for words had Ambrose asked me why. The word that came back to me, and refused to leave my mind, was "domesticity." That family on whom we had spied so briefly was long settled and its members were happy in their home and with each other. They fitted ill with my own long- held and jealously cherished notion of the invaders who were despoiling Britain, and yet they tallied precisely with the kind of people Germanus had described to me in his first letter, bidding me to be charitable. I found myself going over, time and again, the various other comments I had heard and with which I had vociferously disagreed, regarding the peaceful intentions of many of the new settlers and even desirable aspects of having such people as neighbours. Equus's son Lars and his family, isolated in their rundown hostelry near the abandoned town of Isca in the south, had told me they would rather treat with the settled Saxons they had come to know, who were quiet, orderly neighbours, than they would with their own island people who had consistently brought them warfare and disruption. The thought had horrified me when I first heard it stated. And months later, it had been reinforced by both Ambrose and Donuil.
All of my training, all I had been taught throughout my life, told me that they were wrong; they must be wrong. Were that not so, I told myself now for the twentieth time, then all our training, and Camulod's very existence, was the result of an error in judgment. These people were invaders, alien to our ways and to our life, as much as to our land. What did it matter that some of them were now peaceful farmers and "good neighbours," as I had been assured by their apologists? They had landed here as raiders in the very recent past and had remained as local conquerors. My mind reeled with the conviction that accepting their pacific behaviour now must entail, in logic, nothing less than total capitulation to the tide they represented; the abandonment of all reservations towards them would amount to the complete welcome of an inevitability. Within a decade of that acceptance, it seemed to me, we would be outnumbered, our Romano-Celtic roots overwhelmed and buried, stamped out forever. Britain would ce
ase to be Britain and would become a Saxon province.
Shaken and disturbed by my own logic, I could not believe my friends, for all their own strong-mindedness, had thought this matter through in its entirety, and I told myself that someone, most probably me, had to do just that: examine the entire problem judiciously and logically, and then convince all of them of their error. I could see no alternative, although I knew I faced a thankless task. Survival—our own survival—depended on their being wrong. And so I rode in silence, and I was deeply troubled.
We had ridden for about a mile when I became aware that Ambrose, slightly ahead of me, had stopped and now stood upright in his stirrups, head cocked to the side, listening. I stopped my own mount and listened, too, but I could hear nothing. I had had ample evidence on this journey, however, that my brother's hearing was far more acute than my own, so I was ready when he put his fingers to his lips and waved us off the path. I kicked Germanicus forward and kept close as Ambrose spurred his horse through the bushes and up a slight rise that was crowned by a clump of large trees, their boles concealed by heavy brush. I reined in beside him and looked in the direction he was watching.
"What did you hear?"
"People coming towards us. More than a few. Listen."
I strained my ears for long moments, then finally heard the noises that had alerted him: voices, now below us, approaching along the path.
"We're pretty exposed up here, don't you think?"
"Come, we'll tether the horses behind the hilltop, out of sight, and then go forward again and find a place to watch from." As we swung down from our saddles, the sounds were already much closer, individual voices audible in the buzz of quiet conversation.
"Ach, too late," he said. "They'll be past here by the time we come back." He was looking around as he spoke, and suddenly he pulled the Pendragon longbow he had "adopted" from the saddle of his pack-horse. "Leave the horses and bring your bow, but take off your helmet and carry it. We'll watch from over there!" He nodded towards a trio of large trees some distance to our left; then, pulling a bowstring from his scrip, he quickly strung his bow and snatched a quiver of arrows that hung by the pack saddle while I did the same, and within moments we were crouching side by side between the two largest trees. Below us, less than thirty paces from where we crouched, a long line of men emerged from the forest, all of them armed and armoured, wearing conical helmets, some of which had horns, walking in a double file along the path. Ambrose slipped back, keeping his head low, and crossed to where I crouched.
"Now those," he whispered, "are Saxons."
As he said the words, one of the men in the lead stopped abruptly, holding up one arm so that the line of men behind him came to a halt, their voices dying away rapidly. For a space of heartbeats I thought he must have heard Ambrose's whisper, but he immediately began to speak to his people, his voice urgent and minatory. I glanced at Ambrose, but he shook his head at me, frowning with concentration as he listened to what was being said below. Whatever it was, it was briefly stated. Two men immediately moved up ahead of the leader and vanished along the pathway. Moments later, the train moved forward again, proceeding now in silence. We watched them leave, and I counted twenty-four of them, including the two who had gone ahead of the main party. When the sounds of their passage had diminished, I turned to Ambrose, who was still frowning.
"What was that about? Did you understand him?"
"Aye, I did," he replied, his face grim. His eyes moved restlessly from side to side, looking from where the Saxons had disappeared along the track, to the point at which they had come into view. Finally, my impatience took over.
"Well? What did he say?"
Now his eyes moved to me. "He told them they must be quiet from here on, to achieve surprise. Then he sent two scouts on ahead to make sure no one on the road would be able to raise an alarm."
It took me several moments to absorb what he had said.
"You mean they're going to attack that farm? The Saxon farm?"
"Any time now," he answered. "The Anglian farm. I told you, they're a different people, a different race altogether; an enemy race."
"Good God!" I had a vision, immediate and stark, of that tall, fair young mother being raped, her husband and her young sons lying dead around her, and my mind went back to the sight of young Arthur's nurse, Turga, when I had first seen her, witless with despair, demented eyes gazing sightlessly at the dead baby in front of her.
"We have to raise an alarm!"
Ambrose glanced at me again. "How? It's too late now. We're behind them. To sound any kind of warning we would have to be ahead of them, between them and the farm."
"Damnation! There must be something we can do," I retorted, but he was right and I had seen the truth of it as soon as he had said the words. The forest grew too densely here on either side to allow us to make any kind of speedy progress away from the path, even on horseback.
"There may be." His voice was curt. "I have one idea and I think it may be insane. Come, quickly!" He had snatched up his helmet and now turned, running towards the horses. I was close behind him as he reached them, but he was already mounted by the time I began to unhitch my reins.
"Quick," he snapped. "Leave the pack animals. We have no time."
I swung myself up into the saddle and then saw that he was standing in his stirrups. He had unstrung his bow and was shrugging off his cloak and wrapping it around his bow stave and quiver.
"Do the same as I'm doing."
Mystified, but making no attempt to argue, I slipped down from my saddle again and quickly unstrung my bow, then used the string to tie the bundle made by my bow stave and quiver wrapped in my cloak as securely as I could before slinging it, as he had, from my saddle horn.
"Right," he said as I remounted. "Make sure your helmet's tight on your head. Fasten your chin strap. And you'll need that." He was pointing to my iron flail, which hung at its usual place by my right knee from the hook mounted on my saddle. I reached for it and gripped its leather-bound wooden handle tightly, feeling the weight of the heavy iron ball at the end of its chain. Ambrose had unslung his long cavalry sword and now he kicked his horse hard, angling it downhill to regain the path. I spurred Germanicus hard.
"What's the plan?" I called as I gained his side. Our horses were already stretching to a full gallop, their shod hooves making surprisingly little noise on the pathway, cushioned by a thick carpet of leaves sodden by the previous day's rain.
"The first part is straightforward," he called back. "Surprise backed up by impetus. We couldn't leave the path—they won't be able to, either. So we'll catch them from behind, if we're fast enough, and smash through them. The people at the farm should hear the commotion and be able to prepare themselves. At least they won't be taken completely unawares."
"What if we don't catch them on the path?" I was bent forward now, head down to avoid the twigs and branches flailing at my head and face.
"Then we charge at them wherever we do find them, but in either case we ride clear through them and out the other side. Don't stop."
"Why not?" We were making no attempt to be quiet.
"That's the second part—aha!"
We had caught up with the rear part of the Saxon column, and I saw the surprise and fright on the faces that turned towards us in consternation. One fellow had time to throw up his shield and raise his sword, but then Germanicus was upon him, smashing the shield with his great shoulder and hurling the fellow aside, into his nearest companion and directly into the path of Ambrose's charging horse.
I was standing upright in my stirrups, swinging my lethal flail with all my strength, and whatever the iron ball struck it crushed and maimed. Germanicus bore me forward, his pace unflagging, adding his own bulk and momentum to the havoc we wreaked on that narrow pathway. A horse will normally attempt to avoid trampling a man, but a trained war-horse has no such scruples. Side by side, our charging mounts constituted an implacable and irresistible force, and the men on the ground ahead
of us were too surprised, too tightly packed and too terror-stricken to offer anything in the way of resistance. In the sudden chaos, many threw themselves bodily into the dense brush on either side of the path to save themselves, and we were unopposed. For a long count of moments we were in utter turmoil, and then we were through the press and clear, with the barn where we had spent the night directly ahead of us. Ambrose had fallen slightly behind me on my left, but as I turned to see if all was well with him he drew level with me, leaning in to shout into my ear.
"Did you hear? They took us for Romans." I shook my head, concentrating on the tunnel of trees ahead of us, which led into the farm yard. "Ride straight through," he yelled again. " There's a small knoll to the north, at the far end of the farm yard. Some big trees on it. Keep going until we're over the brow and out of sight."
Suddenly we were in the yard itself, galloping past the rear of the farmhouse, our horses' hooves clattering over the hard-packed surface. The place seemed deserted, showing no sign of the people we had watched earlier.
"They won't be far behind us," Ambrose shouted. "Once they find we're not coming back at them, they'll come on hard and they'll be angry. I think I killed three of them . . . What about you?"
"Two, perhaps three," I yelled back. "If I hit them with this thing, they're as good as dead."
We were beyond the farm yard now, the sound of our hoofbeats changing as we surged up the tree-clad hill on the far side of it. As soon as we had cleared the summit, however, and dropped out of sight of the farm on the other side, Ambrose hauled back on his reins so that his horse halted in a skidding stop, almost on its haunches. He dismounted easily, stepping out of his stirrups and taking the cloak-wrapped bundle from where it hung by his saddle. I did the same.
When he had restrung his bow, Ambrose slung the quiver of arrows around his waist and shook out his cloak, reversing it so that its snowy white lining of fine wool was uppermost. He grinned at me, moving quickly, his teeth bared.