The Dragon Lord

by David Drake

  Cei and Lancelot had mounted their horses. Mael, who had been lying on his belly, rose and ran his left arm through the loops of his target. "Give me a minute, will you?" Geraint requested without concern. The squadron commander rode back toward his position at a canter.

  The leading Saxons were berserkers and champions from among the housecarls, and thegns with a reputation for valor or the desire to gain one. When those leaders had waded ashore on the west bank, the mass of the army began to follow them across the ford in a brown wave. The Saxons slipped, spilling themselves and their neighbors in tangles of limbs and equipment. "Now!" Starkad shouted. The Dane had risen to his feet and slung his shield around to his back where it gave no protection but would not interfere with his axe.

  Arthur gave his cornicine an order. Mael could not hear it in the din from the Saxons and the excited exclamations of the recruits nearby. The horn sounded a five-note series. Maglos and his cadre ran behind the untrained men shouting, "No farther than the standards!" as the whole British army shuddered forward into the sunlight.

  The king was splendid at its head and center. He wore full mail, including chaps which covered his legs without preventing his inner thighs from gripping his horse firmly. All Arthur's armor had been silvered. The bronze wings flaring to either side of the helmet had been picked out in gold as well. The midmorning brightness made the king a lightning bolt rather than a man. The dragon standard borne at his side filled with the first breeze and unfurled its scarlet terror. The scales of bronze and gold worked into the standard's fabric hissed as though the serpent were a living creature. The Saxons fell silent, save for a few shouts of bravado which rang more fearful than frightening.

  Arthur drew up just clear of the trees. His armored squadrons, tightening ranks which the forest had disarrayed, halted to either flank. And the Saxon swarm which had stopped in fear, divided by the river at the king's appearance, raised a great shout and rushed to reunite on the west bank.

  Whimpering with frustration but not quite mad enough to charge alone, Starkad turned from the enemy and hugged Mael to his breast. "What's he waiting for?" the Dane demanded in a voice that half the army could hear. "We could—while the river cut them—"

  "Don't worry," Mael murmured, patting his friend's iron back like someone consoling a child on the death of a pet, "it'll be all right for us, yes. . . ." Mael's eye caught the glitter of the king's helm. He looked up at the monarch. Arthur, cold and remote as a statue from Karnak, was staring at the two of them. Mael stared back, repeating, "It'll be all right."

  Starkad shuddered, regained control of himself. He gave the Irishman a final squeeze before loosing him.

  Arthur's force, now that Mael could see it whole for the first time, was drawn up as a line of infantry between two solid masses of ranked horsemen. The center was made up of the native Britons and the recruits, dismounted to either side of the king. The Britons were setting their spears butt-first in the soil and propping their shields against them. That accomplished, the Companions strung their longbows and waited for orders.

  The cavalry on the flanks was more restive. Mael noted that the mounted Companions, too, were handling their bows. Their lances pointed vertically upward—ready, but waiting.

  Like a crystal with a core of glittering steel, the Saxon host grew by accretion. Men still wandered down the hillside to the ford, yawning and shifting their equipment into more comfortable postures. When they reached the river they paused, then splashed through it to find places among the thousands of warriors already knotted on the other side. In the center of the Saxon line, the nobles and their paid men were ranked ten deep around the standards. Those placed in the forefront were there of their own will. Already they stamped and clashed blades against their shield bosses. From the second rank rose Aelle's own standard, the Battle Swine, raised from the dirt to lower over the array

  The men on the fringes of the formation, two-thirds or more of the Saxon force, were of another sort. These were the peasants who owed their thegns produce at harvest time and their bodies in war. It was men like these—freeborn and free-holders, but living at a subsistence level—whom Aelle had left as a tripwire at Lincoln. They had no mail coats nor even the long tunics of iron-studded leather which some of the housecarls wore. In linen and wool and occasionally a steer-hide jerkin, the peasants eyed the archers waiting on the hill before them. They shuddered, then edged a little closer inward toward their armored betters. The peasants' weapons were generally spears, leavened with a few axes and billhooks—tools on any day of the year save days of battle. There were a few men carrying bows. Since the bowmen generally lacked even the flimsy bucklers carried by most of the carls, they were especially determined to worm their way in from the exposed fringes where they might have been of some use.

  In a clear, carrying voice, Arthur cried, "Now to grind the vermin away! Loose the horse!"

  The cornicine lilted out a call that horns on both wings echoed instantly. The twenty troops of horsemen under Gawain and Geraint scissored down from the flanks at a fast walk rather than a gallop. The Companions began shooting at two hundred yards. Their targets, the mass of Saxon peasantry, crumpled like grass in a hailstorm. Each horseman carried two dozen arrows in his quiver. The front rank of nomad mercenaries, Huns and easterners to whom horses and horn bows were a way of life, spent their loads in less than a minute. The remaining Companions were mostly Germans of one nation or another who had been as innocent of archery as the Saxons until Arthur trained them. They were slower to fire, but there were eight hundred of them.

  The Saxon wings disintegrated under the weight of fire. The carls had no protection but shields of wicker and unstrapped wood—and the bodies of the men dying in front of them. Arthur's men were using broadheads that slashed wounds as wide as paired thumbs. In the soft targets the arrows still penetrated completely and pinned men to their dying neighbors.

  Without any defense or means to retaliate, without any stiffening from the chieftains who were concentrated in the center of the array, the surviving peasants broke and ran. The Dubglas, more an incident than an impediment when the Saxons advanced across it unopposed, became a bloody deathtrap. Men who slipped were trampled into the rocks. Disabling wounds left others to die, trying to scream in the frothing water that smothered them. The ford was only a hundred yards wide. It packed the thousands of fugitives into a still denser killing zone for the arrows that ripped among them. Fallen bodies dammed the water into a bloody pond. The surface foamed repeatedly as it broke through the obstruction, then stilled again when fresh corpses took the place of those washed downstream. Mael turned to speak to Starkad as the last rank of Companions wheeled their horses. Only then did the Irishman realize that he could not shout over the cries from the river a quarter mile away.

  The cavalrymen were reforming and again filling their quivers from stores borne from Lincoln by mule train. A few horses had stumbled. Their riders had either remounted their own animals or swung up on the pillions of neighboring riders. Arthur's fighting strength was undiminished.

  But so, despite the carnage, was that of the Saxons.

  Aelle's thegns and housecarls had not been touched by the arrows. Their shields were broad and thick, wrapped and studded with iron. Raising them, chanting a war hymn, the Saxons began to plod forward toward the thin British line. Aelle's men still outnumbered their opponents two or three to one. Rightly, they feared neither lances nor the arrows with which the squadrons were being feverishly replenished. The Saxon formation was a wedge of interlocked shields, the inexorable swine-array whose invention had been Wotan's greatest gift to men of valor.

  "Look there," Starkad said and pointed. Half a dozen horsemen still loitered near the Saxons. As the wedge began to advance, these Companions cantered even closer. Extra quivers were slung across the withers of their mounts and their bows seemed extensions of their arms. They were Huns.

  Saxons in the center of the array raised their shields overhead; those on the left f
lank facing the horsemen crouched down so that their heads and torsos were covered by their shields. Completely protected, the Saxons waited for the arrows to come.

  Come they did, stabbing into the bare calves and ankles of the outermost men of the swine-array. The screams and clash of falling armor masked the machine-like snap of bowstrings and the laughter of the Huns. Every time a Saxon fell or dropped his shield to clutch at his bleeding leg, a second arrow took him in the chest or belly.

  "They aren't using broadheads any more," Mael muttered. "Those must be bodkin points to do that, I don't care how strong their bows are." At fifty yards the Hunnish arrows were driving through even good ring mail.

  As if the sudden clutter of bodies were an anchor dragging it back, the whole formation faltered. Then, from the front where the boar's skull threatened, Aelle's deep voice boomed, "Wotan loves brave men! Forward!"

  The bellow and the clashing of armor in answer to Aelle's shout startled even the seasoned war-horses of the Huns. The Saxon ranks closed; the swine-array resumed its advance upon eight thousand feet.

  Hooting and yipping more to themselves than to frighten, the Huns guided their mounts with their knees to within ten yards of the Saxons. There the little men of the steppes opened fire again. They were so close that their shafts pierced even the sturdy shields raised against them, pinning the wood to the arms that held it or gouging deeper into faces. Starkad's knuckles went white against the unyielding helve of his axe. The Dane was not an archer, and he could identify all too easily with the Saxons below.

  One huge Saxon broke ranks and charged the tormentor whose arrow had lodged in his left eye-socket. The German was deaf to the shouts of those trying to bring him back. Iron medals cast in the shape of Roman horsetrappings glittered against his chest. The Hun who had pricked him wheeled his horse and retreated a dozen paces. The archers to either side waited until the footman had drawn abreast of them. They shot together. The goose-quill fletching of their arrows bloomed against the Saxon's rib cage without the hindrance of the heavy shield to penetrate. Dead on his feet, the warrior staggered on.

  Shouting in high-pitched voices, the pair of Huns slapped six arrows apiece through the Saxon's cuirass. Each clump of feathers was so tight that a man's palm could cover the entry holes. The victim's arms slowly straightened so that his spear and shield were hanging as dead weights instead of weapons. Still the Saxon kept advancing.

  When the dying warrior was within a yard of the Hun who was his quarry, that horseman shot once more. This time the shaft entered the right eye and clanked against the helmet at the base of the skull. The Saxon stiffened and fell backward like a tree sawn through at the roots. The Hun who had killed him bent without dismounting. He swung up again with the iron medallions in his hand.

  Starkad cursed on the hill from which he watched the lethal toying. Beside him, Mael slapped his fist again and again upon his pelvis. The Irishman could see this game was almost over. It would be the Saxons' turn to strike next. Arthur's line overlapped the wedge to either side, but the Saxons were ten ranks deep and faced only a single row of longbowmen and recruits. Horns cried fierce, brassy commands from Arthur's wing squadrons. That was too late, Mael thought—the Saxons had reached the edge of the hill, only two hundred yards from the British. Aelle shouted and his men broke into a bellowing charge. Arrows could perhaps needle the margins of the swine-array, but missiles alone could never break it.

  Then Mael gasped as the wedge disintegrated of its own accord at almost the instant the rush began. The whole Saxon front rank began to scream and stumble like their comrades who had been leg-pierced by the Hunnish arrows. The weight of the ranks behind the leaders pressed the charge onward. Men hopped and fell, shrieking as they stood one-legged and pulled black metal from the bare soles of their raised feet.

  "Crows' feet!" Mael shouted, recognizing from the result what was breaking the Saxon line. The Irish used the devices, too, when time and location permitted. Crows' feet, caltrops, tetrahedrons—they were simply four iron nails welded with their heads together so that a spike was upward no matter how the object fell. Strewn in high grass, they were almost invisible. Their spikes ripped buskins or bare feet like so many two-inch spear blades.

  The crows' feet were disabling but they could not kill. The arrows that now darted from three sides of the broken array accomplished the killing. Longbows from the hilltop thrummed as Saxons dropped their shields to pluck iron from their feet. From either flank rode three hundred archers, firing from refilled quivers. The Companions' fingers were bloody from earlier shooting and many riders were unable to draw their shafts to full nock. The body armor of the thegns was often able to turn a missile anyway, even when it missed the shields. Still, many arrows found targets and Saxons gurgled and fell.

  Mael part drew and resheathed his sword a dozen times in nervous exultation. "If they run!" he was shouting. "If they run—"

  Warriors in the rear of the array broke. That was their death, for the last two ranks of Arthur's horsemen whooped and charged with their lances couched. The wave of steel lance heads bit into the backs and necks of the running Saxons like saw-teeth in soft pine. The victims flew forward. Their arms windmilled; sometimes a bright froth of pulmonary blood sprayed from their nostrils. The killers rode over the fallen Saxons, pivoting their wrists at the balance of the lance shafts and dragging the points free. Then the Companions could strike again, either with butt spikes or the already bloodied heads.

  As a week before at Lincoln, as other armies for a thousand years, the Saxons proved that to run from a lance was to die. The darting steel left them food for the battlefield crows, whether they were thegn or earl, naked or mailed.

  Some of the Saxon peasants who had survived to recross the stream lay on the far bank watching. They were shivering spectators for whom the price of admission had been the death of the men to every side of them. Now, as their screaming superiors rushed toward the water to die, the carls turned again. They began to straggle off toward their homes as swiftly as exhaustion allowed their legs to move. War was coming too close again, and the peasants had had their bellies full of it for this day.

  Not all the Saxons ran. The men in the front ranks thrust forward and up the hill because it never occurred to them to go in any other direction. Some wore wooden-soled sandals which turned the points of the crows feet. Some were simply lucky, skipping across ground which, though thickly sown, was not interlocked with spikes. A few showed enough intelligence to shuffle forward instead of striding, scuffing the devices harmlessly out of their way. Most of the Saxon champions, however, twisted the bloody iron from their feet and walked on, treating the wound as one more incident of war like a bee sting or sunburn. Men who could not do that fled and died fleeing, but among warriors whose honor and livelihood was physical valor, it would have been surprising had there not been many who ignored injuries in order to close with the enemy.

  The longbowmen, their quivers emptied, were snatching shields and spears. "All right, you bastards!" Maglos roared to his recruits. "Time to earn your pay!"

  Mael shrugged once more to settle his armor comfortably. With a shout that tried to equal all the battle noise around him, Starkad bounded toward the nearest of the oncoming Saxons. Mael ran at the Dane's left and a step behind him. The Saxon, a great walleyed ruffian in chain mail, thrust his target forward to block Starkad's axe. The axe blade sheared the iron-bound linden wood from one rim to the other, gouging so deeply that it opened the Saxon's forearm as well. The Saxon screamed, spinning off balance from the torque of the blow he had received. Mael's sword tip laid the falling man's throat open, drowning his cries in a spray of blood.

  Still bellowing his berserk challenge, Starkad met a clot of a dozen Saxons. They split apart at his fury. Some of them were engaged by the other recruits and Britons following the Dane to battle. Starkad's axe was making broad figure-eight passes in the air before him. One housecarl counted on the pattern he imagined in the Dane's offense. Starkad,
reversing the direction of the axe in mid-sweep, dashed the Saxon's brains out with the peen. A thegn to Starkad's left saw the Dane's back open, forgot Mael, and raised his spear. Mael thrust and the thegn took the Irishman's sword through the rib cage. The Saxon fell, his bones gripping the blade. Mael tried to tug his weapon clear as two of the dead man's housecarls pressed him. The blade bent as it came out, cocking up in the middle at a thirty-degree angle.

  Cursing and suddenly in fear of death, the Irishman jumped back to avoid the spear which licked at his face. Mael's missing earlobe burned as if afire. The sword he carried was the one he had taken from Ceadwalla's body, a well-polished blade and solid to look on. But the metal was soft, and now it would be his death for not testing it earlier. . . . The Saxons struck together, both holding their spears overhand at the balance. Mael backed again, letting the points notch his shield facing. He set his blade under his right sandal and tried to straighten the weapon.

  The leftward Saxon howled and thrust with both hands, driving his spear six inches deep in Mael's shield. The Irishman slashed from a crouch. The stroke severed the Saxon's wrists before he could step away from it. The dying man threw his spurting stumps in the air and turned, fouling his companion's blow so that the spear only ripped Mael's side instead of splitting his breastbone as intended. The Irishman's mail shirt was as good as could be forged, but its links parted before the spear head.

  Mael countered with a backhanded slash at the remaining Saxon. Ceadwalla's blade had twisted axially under the stress of lopping through the previous opponent's wrists. The edge did not bite, but the effect on the Saxon was that of being slapped across the head with a long iron club. The man went down. Mael finished him with his shield edge. He dropped his useless sword so that he could use both hands to slam the iron rim down on the Saxon's neck.

  Ignoring the swords sheathed at the dead men's belts, Mael worked the spear out of his shield to rearm himself. The weapon had a long, double-edged blade, and its shaft for several feet back was wrapped with iron wire. To free the spear, Mael pumped the shaft up and down. His eyes darted about the immediate battlefield to be sure that none of the men brawling nearby was about to stab him.