"For what purpose?" one of his officers asked, brow furrowed in puzzlement.
Stirling grinned. "You'll see shortly. Put several men in charge of the work out here. Then join me inside the walls again."
As they hiked in through the mazelike passages between the walls, Ancelotis muttered silently, Just what are you up to? I don't understand it, either.
Stirling explained. The Sarmatian cavalry archers are very good for our purposes. The flight of an arrow is very much akin to the flight of a bullet or cannon ball—and artillery ballistics is something I bloody well know. What I'm going to do is teach our Sarmatians some drills, things I know that will increase their effectiveness, a way of shooting at targets they can't see.
What sort of drills? Ancelotis asked, unsure what artillery and firearms might even be; despite the memory images in Stirling's mind, it was difficult for the sixth-century king to grasp the concepts and distances an ordinary rifle or mortar could throw a projectile, never mind the speeds such projectiles could reach. Before he could answer, the officers of his cataphracti joined him inside the wall, so Stirling explained it to everyone at once. "How many bowmen are with us?" he began.
"Seventy, at least," one of the officers answered.
"And they shoot at individual targets, one at a time, from horseback?"
The officers nodded, expressions puzzled. "It's the way Sarmatians have fought for centuries."
"Very effectively," Stirling agreed. "But there are other ways of firing a bow than aiming directly at a target, especially since we'll have battlements to use as shelter."
Puzzlement turned to utter bafflement.
"May I?" Stirling asked, nodding to the nearest heavy compound bow, made of horn and wood and requiring a strong man, indeed, to pull it. The Sarmatian handed over his bow and a quiver of arrows. "Very good. What I'm going to teach you is a way to hit something you cannot see, do so without exposing yourself to enemy spears or javelins, by coordinating your shots."
He notched an arrow and pulled the powerful bow, drawing the string back to his chest, rather than his ear, in the older style of shooting that Sarmatians and other ancient archers had used—a technique that would remain in force until the advent of the Welsh longbow. Rather than aiming directly at the wall, three paces away, Stirling aimed high above it, eyeballing the angle and projecting the parabola of the arrow's flight.
He released the bow with a whap! and watched the arrow speed skyward. It arced upward and out across the walls, the curve descending steeply at the end of the foreshortened parabola. The arrow vanished somewhere downslope, well beyond the wall.
He turned to find the officer unimpressed.
Stirling chuckled and handed the bow back to its owner. "Shall we see how far it flew before landing?" They found the arrow several yards downslope, sticking up like a spike in the muddy ground.
"How can a man control it, though?" one of the officers asked, staring from the wall to the arrow embedded in the mud. "How would you know how high to aim, to have the arrow drop precisely where you wanted it to go?"
"That's what the posts out here are for, to mark known distances from the wall. I'll want several tall wooden poles erected inside the walls, with bands marked on them. And I'll want marker stones inside the walls, as well, so that if a man stands on the stone and aims past one of the painted rings on a pole, he'll know exactly how far that arrow will travel and where it will come down, with close approximation, relative to the marker posts out here. Then we'll drill to make sure we can hit those marks every time."
"Even so, it will be impossible to hit your enemy with any real accuracy if we can't see them because we're behind the walls!"
"Ah, but we'll have one man up top, a forward observer acting as the eyes for all the rest of us who'll be shooting at exactly the same time and exactly the same place."
Understanding dawned. "God above, it's elegant!"
They put every archer in Gododdin's cataphracti to work, cutting and setting poles every few yards along the innermost wall, painting narrow bands every few inches along the poles, setting stones in a line with those poles, and cutting marker posts which they placed beyond the walls to mark the farthest and nearest ranges of arrows when shot past the upper- and lower-most bands. Once the markers had been placed, the archers began practicing, with Stirling once again demonstrating.
"If I aim just to the left of the white band at the top, my arrow will fall very close to the post nearest the wall." He let an arrow fly and had a boy leap onto the outermost wall to call where it had landed. The boy shouted, "You're a foot beyond the post!"
Three more arrows and Stirling had put the shot within six inches of the post he could not see, nearest the outermost wall. "Mark this spot with a stone," he nodded in satisfaction, "and do the same for every pole we've put up along the line." He gestured. "Devise a shooting order, so that every man knows his place beside his comrades and always shoots from the same spot, whether he stands on a stone or to the left or right of the markers."
Stirling promised a keg of ale and a gold coin to the five archers who, at the end of a week, placed their shots consistently closest to the outside marker posts. The contest spurred the Sarmatians to a friendly competition of skill that sharpened their accuracy with amazing rapidity. Ancelotis was delighted, while Cadorius and Melwas regarded the king of Gododdin as a military genius.
"It won't be as effective if the Saxons approach in a thin skirmish line, but I've another idea or two that will bunch them up a bit, to give the archers a nice, broad target to drop arrows on, from overhead. Now, about these other ideas I have in mind, I'll need the best men we have, men who can move swiftly and silently in the darkness. And I'll need cordage, the largest, longest skeins or balls of it to be found in the southwestern kingdoms."
"Cordage?" Cadorius frowned in confusion.
Stirling grinned. "Trust me."
By week's end, Stirling was satisfied that they were as ready for the Saxons as they would ever be—and not a moment too soon, for a runner arrived in the middle of the night on a badly lathered horse, gasping out his message. "The Saxons are nearly upon us! They'll reach Caer-Badonicus by dawn!"
Final preparations took on frantic speed as the last of the horses hauled the final supplies up the hill. What the Britons could neither carry up to the hill fort nor send farther north, out of harm's way, they burned to further deprive the Saxons. It was a grim business, one that Stirling would have given much to avoid, but he knew only too well the cost of trying to walk away from madmen bent on destruction. The madmen followed, until you and everything you valued had been smashed into oblivion. Whether he acted rightly or wrongly with regard to the future timeline which had birthed him, he had no way to know. He knew only that here, in this now, he had only one real choice. He would stop the spread of darkness or die trying.
Stirling slept poorly that night and was awakened from fitful slumber by a commotion of voices. He groped for his sword before he was even fully awake; then a familiar voice, a woman's voice, drifted through the small crowd that had gathered to greet a newcomer.
"No," Covianna Nim was saying, "I can't imagine where Emrys Myrddin might be. He left the Tor three or four days ago."
Stirling and Ancelotis rose to find Covianna Nim looking half asleep and disheveled from what had obviously been a hard ride.
"Why did you come back to Caer-Badonicus?" Ganhumara asked. "Not that I'm dismayed to see you," the young queen added hastily, "for you must know I'm delighted to have a friend here, but I don't understand. They said you were dreadfully anxious about your family at the Tor."
"And I was," Covianna replied smoothly, stifling a yawn. "We've done all we can to strengthen the Tor's defenses and my clan wanted to send a master smith to Caer-Badonicus to help with the defense here. I was the logical choice, with my training in the healing arts, as well. Please, I'm dreadfully weary. I'll tell you all you want to know in the morning."
Ancelotis grunted once, then stum
bled back to bed, asleep before the commotion of Covianna's arrival had fully died down. He didn't wake again until dawn, when a brassy signal trumpet sent its warning through the entire encampment atop Badon Hill. Ancelotis splashed cold water into his face, meeting grim glances from royal princes who had led troops here during the previous weeks and days. Half a dozen servants made the rounds with bread smoking hot from the ovens, served with slabs of cheese and cold ham.
Ancelotis bolted down the meal, buckling on armor and sword belt while still chewing. Leather creaked against ring-mail shirts and scale armor as the men prepared grimly for battle. Their sisters and mothers laid out spare weapons, heated enormous kettles of water over half a dozen hearths built into the room, prepared linens for bandages and set out ointments, salves, and glass vials of unknown medicines. Surgeons' tools—scalpels, bronze tweezers, saws for amputating mangled limbs—were dropped into boiling water to be held in clean readiness against all-too-probable need.
Ancelotis left the women to their preparations, harboring a secret feeling that their tasks were even harder than those of the men, knowing they sent loved ones out to be maimed or killed and quietly hugging terror and distress to their breasts while doing what was necessary to save lives. Stirling muttered silently, You may just be right about that. In his experience, gathered unpleasantly in the streets of Belfast, women were not only stronger than their menfolk, they were braver, as well, attempting to carry forward the business of living while their men were busy slaughtering one another.
It was a kind of courage Stirling didn't fully understand and found somewhat awe-inspiring to watch, that picking up of shattered lives, the bravery required for women who had seen the effect of bombs to choose, consciously and with a perhaps misplaced sense of hope, the decision to bring new lives into existence in the midst of societal suicide. It hurt, watching these women prepare for battle that might see the men they loved best maimed or killed by day's end.
Lips thinned to a marbled line, Stirling strode out into the grey morning, almost relishing the slap of icy rain and wind against his face. His cloak snapped and whipped around in the gusts, like a living thing gone mad. Mud squelched underfoot and the bleating of penned goats drifted on the wind. Everywhere he turned his gaze, Stirling saw men in armor, officers shouting directions, soldiers piling up caches of weapons, swords and long-necked iron pila, pikes and leaf-bladed spears by the hundreds, war axes and Roman-style short swords stacked beside piles of daggers.
A moment later, they had reached the southeastern slope, where Cadorius and Melwas had gathered around them the royalty of Britain. Ancelotis joined the group with a nod of greeting and watched silently as a great, boiling mass of men and horses coalesced on the horizon. It was an eerie, hideous sight, as though the driving rain had solidified into the shape of the enemy. Hundreds of men, a vast carpet of spearpoints and javelins and pikes, with a baggage train of supply wagons that reached farther than the eye could discern, even from the immense height of the hilltop.
"That," Cadorius said quietly, "is what we must hold back until the Dux Bellorum arrives with the greatest bulk of our own army."
Casting a practiced eye over the opposing force, Ancelotis estimated their strength at close to double a thousand men at arms, plus camp followers: wagoners, armorers, cooks and barber surgeons, signal men with curved ram's-horn trumpets whose calls drifted to them on the rain-slashed wind.
"They have learned a trick or two from their Briton captives," Melwas murmured, hearing those signal trumpeters. "That's no Saxon strategy, to march in formation under the direction of disciplined officers."
Cadorius glanced around, nodding grimly. "Aye, you've the right of that, Melwas. Cerdic and Creoda know well enough the strength of such organization. Filthy gewisse, all of them."
The term translated in Ancelotis' mind as "traitors."
"Let us hope," Ancelotis muttered, "that Cerdic's Saxon allies forget to maintain their discipline in the heat of battle."
They watched in silence as the Saxon army spread like plague across the Salisbury Plain half a thousand feet below. Most of them were on foot, poorly armored, but in a siege such as this, horses would be of little use to the Saxons, in any case. On horseback or not, armored or not, the Saxons had the advantage of sheer numbers, close to three times the number of Briton defenders on this hilltop. Stirling and Ancelotis and the others watched them come, watched them reach the base of the immense hill, watched the spiked carpet of men and weapons break like foam across a rocky seacoast, parting around the base of Badon Hill to surround it with a ring of glittering weapons.
At least, Stirling muttered to himself, they don't have siege engines.
The Saxon kings were in no apparent hurry to attack. An unpleasant, fluttering sensation rose from the pit of his stomach as Stirling watched the Saxons cut off escape routes one by one. At a nod from Cadorius, Stirling and his host walked the whole long perimeter of the innermost wall, studying troop deployments, squinting into the brutal teeth of the wind as the Saxons dispatched small squadrons along the muddy roads leading from Caer-Badonicus to the nearest villages.
They would find little of value in those villages, which had been abandoned for a radius of five miles around. The Saxons would find no food, no livestock, no slaves to force into building their siegeworks, nothing but a few very nasty surprises in the form of covered pit traps dug beneath barn and cottage floors. The Britons had camouflaged their man-traps with layers of dirt and straw or rushes across tightly stretched panels of woolen sailcloth, dyed brown with walnut hulls to match the color of their earthen coverings. Like Burmese tiger traps, the stake-studded pits waited for unwary predators to step into them. Very soon, the Saxons would discover just how high a price they must pay for attempting to conquer Salisbury Plain.
Down at the base of the hill, foot soldiers were busy erecting camps in a loose circle, a living noose of men, spears, and swords. They began digging trenches, as well, throwing up an earthen rampart to shield them somewhat from missiles hurled from above. Ancelotis muttered a few choice oaths, watching. "That bastard Cerdic is earning his blood money, no doubt of that." He spat disgustedly to one side, earning a grunt of agreement from King Melwas, who had joined him.
"That's a move yon bastards have never tried before," Melwas growled. "And I've fought them enough times to know."
Stirling watched and wished bitterly for better weapons than they had. What we could do with just one good machine gun... Might as well ask for attack helicopters and cruise missiles, while I'm at it.
Melwas frowned. "I see nothing like a tent a king would use down there. Not even one fit for a royal prince. The Saxons may be barbarians, but their so-called royalty are quick to demand the comforts of civilization and complain loudly when deprived of them."
Ancelotis grunted. "Try the lee of the hill. It's where I'd set up, were I King Aelle or Cerdic."
Melwas' glance was keen. "Emrys Myrddin said much the same thing."
"With good reason." Stirling grinned as fierce gusts of rain ripped through the Saxon encampment, playing hob with their attempts to set up sleeping tents.
Melwas smiled in dark humor. "They'll be cold and wet and exhausted before a few hours have passed. And unless I miss my guess, they'll have as much trouble as our own men did keeping cookfires going anywhere but the lee of the hill. "
An army fighting on cold, unpalatable rations was an unhappy army, resentful and discouraged. With the countryside laid bare in advance of their arrival, they'd find little more than dirt to add to their already strained supply of rations. He smiled in cold pleasure at the notion. Having seen enough for the moment, Ancelotis and Melwas left instructions for the men standing perimeter watch to report anything out of the ordinary in the Saxons' preparations, then headed back for the lee side, to study further developments there.
"They look to be throwing the bulk of their men downslope of here," Ancelotis told Cadorius, who was issuing orders on their own troop deployments
.
Cadorius nodded. "It's as we expected, then. I've assigned Dumnonia left flank guard along the lee," he pointed to a stretch of wall some hundred feet distant, "and, Melwas, I'll want Glastenning on the right flank. Ancelotis, you and your Sarmatian archers will take the center, as we agreed and planned for." He nodded toward the banded poles set up at carefully measured intervals along the lee side of the summit. "We'll scatter the other kingdoms around the perimeter." He was scratching a rough map in the mud, sheltering it with his body as he crouched down to work.
Even with the number of men they already had, the summit and its sprawling perimeter walls were so large, the defenders would be spread dangerously thin. And they would have precious little but women and children in reserve, should Artorius be delayed on the march south.
I mislike it, Ancelotis said privately to Stirling. I mislike it a very great deal.
Stirling wasn't particularly keen on it, either. "We'll have to watch for shifts in their deployment, day and night," he said aloud for Cadorius' benefit. "The children could fill in the gaps as lookouts, particularly the older lads, and give our men more rest for the actual fighting. A sudden surge along one of the more thinly defended stretches, and they'd be among us before we knew they were climbing. Particularly after dark."
"After dark?" Cadorius grunted while Melwas' eyes shot wide.
Even Ancelotis was taken by surprise.
It was something, Stirling supposed, to startle three kings, each of them with more than a decade's bitter experience in combat. Yet the notion of a night sortie astonished them. Stirling grinned. "Why d'you think I wanted the specially trained men and the cordage? You do remember what the Oracle at Delphi said, don't you?"
Melwas frowned in puzzlement, but Cadorius had begun to chuckle. "Oh, aye. A grand story that was, I remember my own father reading it out to me in the Greek. I've forgotten which historian it was, but the story I recall very well, indeed."
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