Warriors of Camlann

by N. M. Browne

  ‘These men don’t know me, Dan – they didn’t even know I’d led the charge at Baddon. Arturus could have made it easier.’

  ‘Maybe he made it hard on purpose.’

  Ursula pulled a face. Dan could feel her fear and her excitement. She was flooded with nervous energy. He wanted to hold her, but she was fully equipped with kontos, sword and bow. The hillside looked too steep for her to climb. There were too many ways she could be killed. There was so much he wanted to say and yet this was not the time to say any of it.

  ‘Good Luck!’

  Ursula nodded, gave him a tight, terse smile and swung her mount away to join her men. Dan could sense their fear, too, and the beginnings of that strange adoration Ursula’s warrior-woman persona tended to engender. He almost went with her at that moment, to try to keep her safe, but he did not want to fight again and that determination could make him a liability. He returned to the main body of Arturus’s force as the High King was instructing his command group, and sought out Bryn and Braveheart.

  ‘Are you going with the High King?’

  Bryn shook his head. ‘I will not fight my former Lord if I can avoid it and anyway, you have forgotten, Dan, my role is with you.’

  ‘But you think me a coward, for not fighting.’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘I knew you felt it.’

  ‘I was a boy then.’

  Dan nodded. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could sing it all into oblivion, make it all melt away like Rhonwen’s illusion at Baddon?’

  Bryn grinned and the moment of awkwardness was over.

  ‘It wouldn’t work now – my voice broke some years back!’

  They rode together towards Taliesin and Frontalis’s cart. Brother Frontalis was with Arturus’s confessor, blessing the Christian troops.

  ‘What happens now?’ Dan asked Taliesin.

  ‘Bedewyr and the infantry will advance and form their wall when Ursula reaches the top of the hill.’

  ‘And we’ll know she’s done that when …?’

  ‘When you tell us, my friend.’

  Dan was not at all sure that he wanted to watch Ursula risk herself again. He was beginning to understand those mothers who looked away when their children did anything dangerous. He propped himself up against the cart and let his thoughts fly. He saw Ursula at once using the kontos like a walking stick and leading her reluctant horse. Her troops had spread out around her in a line rather than a column so that one man’s lost footing need not signal a major disaster. The ease with which Ursula climbed under the weight of her mail and helmet served to encourage the men. They were not going to be out-climbed by a mere girl. All the horses also appeared to be coping with the sharp incline. They were strong beasts but relatively lightly built, unlike the heavy, mediaeval war horses Dan had seen in pictures. It took perhaps an hour for all the men to reach the summit. Dan saw Ursula signal with a wave of her sword for her men to mount up. He saw her adjust Arturus’s cherubic, golden, face-mask. He shivered mentally as he saw the effect as her men fitted their own masks. Sixty human fighters were at once turned into sixty unearthly creatures, with bland, impassive, metal faces that did not register pain or fear. They stood proud, like inhuman centaur gods. They were outlined against the sky and visible to their enemies if not their allies. These sixty Cataphracts, so improbably positioned, were Arturus’s message to Medraut. Arturus was still High King, still in the game. It was not over yet.

  Dan allowed his consciousness to sink back into his body and opened his eyes.

  ‘Send the infantry!’

  One of the standard bearers immediately blew the advance and Arturus’s three hundred men marched forward the short distance to the valley. On a second signal the front row (and each of the men in the end column and the rear line) dropped to their knees and rested their oval shields on the ground. They pointed their spears forward at hip height, like the spines of some armoured, mythical beast. The horn blew again and the second row of infantry rested their shields on the shields of their comrades to form a wall as tall as a standing man. They held their spears at shoulder height. This second shield wall appeared on all four sides of the rectangular formation. It was a bizarre sight. A Roman tactic performed by the Combrogi. Each man had his own distinctive war gear. Some had mail shirts, some the battered remnants of antique Roman scale armour. Some wore the protection of boiled, hardened leather, others thickly padded woollen garments. Each man bore a shield painted with a different design, with their war gods or saints, with lucky symbols or sacred words, in every colour that their ingenuity could produce. They looked as different from each other as they did from their Aenglisc enemies but they moved as one.

  It was only when Arturus’s battle horn sounded that Gwynefa noticed her danger.

  Ursula heard the battle horn – it was her signal. Her legs ached from the climb and her tunic stuck to her, damp and itchy with sweat. The dappled, diffused light made the job of spotting the enemy harder, but the screaming of horses and cursing of armoured men told her all that she needed to know. Gwynefa had seen them and begun to recognise her peril and was ordering her men to face Ursula’s own force. She did not quite believe that Gwynefa would be so foolish. She lifted her mask briefly to grin confidently at the men nearest to her, Rhys and Caradoc. She had not wanted to bring either of them. She did not want their deaths on her conscience, but Vitus had chosen and was himself at the rear of his chosen men. She lowered her mask and patted the lathered neck of her mount. None of the horses in her troop wore armour now but, like the men, had to trust to speed, skill and the grace of God to stay alive. Ursula sat straighter in the saddle and raised her sword high in her own signal to advance.

  Without willing it, Dan found himself flying above Ursula again, drawn by his need to know that she was safe. He heard Gwynefa’s shrieked orders. She attempted to send half her force up the hill to face Ursula’s smaller force. It was a naïve mistake. Gwynefa’s Cataphracts were too tightly packed to benefit from the limited cover of the trees, each man carried a kontos some two metres long, each horse required more space than was available to turn round and face up hill. There was chaos as the well-trained Sarmatians struggled to obey orders that were almost impossible to follow. Men and weapons became entangled with tree branches and each other. For those few who managed the manoeuvre, the prospects were scarcely any better. Gwynefa’s horses were armoured and trying to charge up hill, while Ursula’s, though unprotected, had the advantage of the downward slope, the element of surprise, and a commander who had fought on horseback before. Dan saw Ursula at the moment she raised her sword again in the signal to charge. He saw her ride forward, her golden face lending her a terrible calm assurance. She held her kontos like a lance, to impale anyone who got in her way. There were too many terrified men and horses ahead of her. Dan dreaded the impact, the moment when spear pierced flesh and all the pain and animal terror began. Gwynefa’s forces panicked. They had not had time to fasten their own masks, and fear was evident in their faces. Half were facing downhill and they rode, without any signal from Gwynefa, to escape the gold-faced goddess who led their former comrades like an avenging angel. Gwynefa’s strategic value to Arturus’s enemy died at that point. She had lost control of her men, and her men were doomed. Dan did not want to watch as Ursula’s men dispatched their former comrades. He did not want to hear the thud as living men, unhorsed, fell onto the rucked ground. He did not want to hear the fear and horror in their primal cries as they were trampled under foot. He did not want to hear the ring of metal against metal, weapon against weapon, and worse, the sound of the cracking and splintering of bone, the ending of lives. When he had been a berserker he had never been aware of anything but his own bloody purpose – to watch a battle was a terrible thing and to feel men die was worse.

  Less than fifty of the rebel Sarmatians got away. Gwynefa was among them. She charged down the hill screaming words Dan could not hear. She was a princess of Rheged and rode like one, both hands
holding the kontos, keeping her seat with superb balance and skill, her black hair like a dark flag, streaming behind her. It was a shock then, when her horse stumbled on a corpse and she fell from the saddle. She landed badly like a doll tossed from a pram, her limbs bent at improbable angles. Dan could not see her move. Dan turned and wheeled away – away from the hillside and the riderless horses stampeding over Arturus’s Queen where she lay, bloodied and crushed. She was dead, trampled by her own men fleeing the chaos on the hillside. Dan had felt her dying anguish, her panic, and her sudden peace.

  He withdrew instinctively from the screams of combat and the soundless anguish that accompanied them and found himself flying over the plain where Larcius, too, had made Gwynefa’s fatal mistake and tried to fight on two fronts at once. Some of his light cavalry had successfully turned to face the bulk of Arturus’s Cataphracts, those that Ursula had not chosen, but most were fleeing the charging heavy horses, resplendent in their glimmering armour, fleeing the fierce strength of the armoured riders, with their inhuman metal face-masks. The greater part of Larcius’s force forgot all battle discipline and rode into the growing melee of men and horses across the centre of the plain. There, Bedewyr and the infantry held their square formation. They looked solid as a tank and deadly as a giant porcupine, sprouting spines of metal spears. Bedewyr’s men formed a formidable defensive weapon which hampered the movement of the surviving cavalry as they struggled to stay clear of the double row of spears. Larcius’s light cavalry were sandwiched between Arturus’s Sarmatians, the fleeing remnants of Gwynefa’s force and Ursula’s cavalry who had now swept down the hill into the central plain. There were horses everywhere rearing and kicking, dying or lying dead. There were bodies everywhere and small desperate battles in a confusion of contorted flesh and armour. All Dan could feel was pain. It almost drove him back to his own form, but he fought his own urgent need to flee: he had to find Ursula. At last, he spotted her golden face-mask and saw her fighting hand-to-hand with some light cavalryman, while her Sarmatians fought to get close enough to protect her. She was alive for now.

  He flew away, instinctively, too fearful to watch. He turned and found himself observing the battered form of the High King Arturus, wearing Frontalis’s tattered monk’s cloak and fighting for his life. He had lost his horse and was bleeding from a blow to the groin. He was coming to the end of his strength and struggling against a gore-soaked opponent whom Dan belatedly realised was Larcius. His face was almost unrecognisable, dark with congealing blood from a major wound to his head. He had lost his helmet and seemed scarcely more alive than Arturus. As Dan watched, Arturus staggered forward and thrust his sword through Larcius’s chest. He put all his weight, all his anger at betrayal, all his vast disappointment behind it. For a moment it looked as though Larcius would speak, his mouth opened, then Dan felt him die. Dan found himself staring at the dead man through Arturus’s battle-weary eyes, eyes that stung with salt sweat. Arturus wiped his face and Dan shared with him the hollowness of the victory. Arturus was exhausted, he waited until his breathing became less ragged, resting his hands on his thighs as he knelt on the ground beside his victim. Arturus stretched forward and twisted the hilt of the sword, Caliburn, Dan’s own Bright Killer, which still protruded from the chest of Gwynefa’s lover. Arturus gazed at his handiwork; and then, with a trembling sigh, ripped Caliburn from the dead man, cleaned it roughly on the grass and moved on through the confusion of bodies, in search of a horse. Dan struggled to separate his consciousness from that of the High King whose thoughts were shadowed with battle lust and a grim, dogged desire for vengeance.

  The sun was high now and the battleground reeked of death. The infantry had still not engaged. The only route to the enemy was still blocked with cavalry, fighting to get away, to stay alive, a sea of horseflesh. Ursula was nowhere to be seen. Dan circled, trying to ignore the grim sights and worse emotions that battered at his senses from all sides. It was worse than Baddon and even more difficult to find Ursula by eye alone and he dare not seek her thoughts. Her golden helm was almost invisible among the crowd of bodies. Some few of her men were with her, but there were many more of Larcius’s lighter cavalry. The battle no longer had any obvious pattern; men were fighting and dying without purpose, without reason. Ursula was swamped by men, fighting to retain her seat as her horse reared, fighting to parry the slashing swords that surrounded her. She cried out, with all the strength she had left. She knew she could not hold out much longer. Her cry broke through all the ambient pain and fear to deafen him.

  ‘Dan!’

  ‘Ursula! Hold on!’

  He woke in his own body, breathing as if he himself had been stabbed. It was his dream made real. Who else could it have been, the Arturus who was not Arturus but Ursula, whose deeds had become entangled with Arturus’s own? He had never been more afraid.

  ‘Bryn! Must go to Ursula! Braveheart!’

  Bryn reacted instantly, understanding everything, questioning nothing.

  It all looked different from the ground. What had seemed like a series of separate skirmishes from the air was from the ground unreadable chaos: a cacophony of noise, a crush of roiling, twisting, dying men. There were bodies underfoot and everywhere the stink of death and dung. Bryn and Dan took the swift horses of two of the messengers. Taliesin flew as Merlin somewhere unseen. Braveheart ran at their side. They rode past the still intact infantry division, past the body of Larcius, closer to the road than Dan had thought it. He rode into the melee hacking at anything that got in his way, except it wasn’t anything but anyone, and every blow he dealt he felt. In front of him he saw the battered form of Arturus locked in combat with Medraut. The veteran was frailer and older than Dan’s memory of him, but he was still a wily opponent. Arturus was badly injured and without a horse. Arturus tried valiantly to hamstring Medraut’s mount but had not the strength. Dan could feel the life leeching from the King as, with an almighty cry, Medraut launched a frenzied attack on his former comrade. Arturus had found a shield from somewhere and held it above him, saving himself from the most vicious of the blows but, weakened from blood loss, Arturus fell, only to be crushed by the hooves of Medraut’s mount as it reared, and Medraut rode on. Arturus Ursus, High King of Britannia, died there unnoticed by any eye save Dan’s. Arturus’s face was an unrecognisable ruin, another anonymous corpse on a mortuary field, wrapped in a monk’s cloak. Later, there would be deep regret and even sorrow, but there was no time in all that madness, in the bloody maelstrom of battle. Dan dismounted, swinging down from his horse and vaulting straight back up, pausing only to pick up his own blade, Bright Killer, from Arturus’s still warm and bloody hand. Dan was so desperate to save Ursula that it did not even seem a callous act.

  With single-minded purpose Dan refused to accept the pain he felt in every part of his being. He dared not stop to check whether he was truly bleeding from a hundred wounds, or if it merely felt like it. He could only think about Ursula. Her voice still screamed in his head, weaker but still desperate.

  ‘Dan-Dan-Dan-Dan!’

  ‘Hold on, Ursula!’

  He could not tell if she heard. He was dimly conscious of Bryn behind him. Somehow Bryn had acquired an Aenglisc war axe – perhaps it had been in his pack, but he used it to brutal effect at Dan’s left while, at his right, Braveheart dodged the hooves of horses, snarled, and savaged, and stayed by Dan’s side. Ursula was still in the thick of the fighting. Her gold face-mask was in place but blood was pooling at her neck. A young Sarmatian fought at her right hand, fending off what blows he could but he was himself hard-pressed and tiring. As Dan watched, Ursula despatched a new attacker with a ferocious blow to his groin which sliced an artery. Blood pumped from the wound and only as the man fell did Dan recognise the aged body of Medraut and, riding towards him through all the chaos of battle, Rhonwen.

  ‘Get Rhonwen!’ Dan yelled over the battle noise.

  Bryn seemed to understand.

  A large Sarmatian was closing in on Ursula. Dan sla
shed Bright Killer’s sharpened edge into the man’s face and almost passed out with the pain. The world went black for a moment, but he kept upright and got to Ursula. She was barely conscious, only in her seat because one of her men held her there trying to defend her with his own shield. Dan fought to hang on to his own awareness, not to feel Ursula’s pain. He concentrated ruthlessly upon action. Dan could not lift her onto his horse but, instead, leaped onto hers. He timed it carefully and slapped his own horse hard so that it reared and startled the throng pressing against Ursula. The young Sarmatian, who wore Cynfach’s armour, left Ursula’s defence to Dan and was able to launch an attack of his own. Between them they made some space and rode free, Braveheart at their heels, Bryn fighting his way after them, herding Rhonwen and her mount, and keeping attackers from their backs. Ursula’s mental cry, almost like a mechanical distress beacon, had stopped by the time Dan got her back to Taliesin. Dan hastily sheathed Bright Killer, still sticky with congealing gore. In the distance he knew that the battle still raged. He heard the roar as the Aenglisc infantry charged, and spent their lives on Combrogi spears. It no longer mattered. The one remaining messenger helped Ursula from her horse and between them they carried her to a safe place. Dan ripped off Ursula’s mask. Her face was so white he was momentarily afraid that she had died. She was so covered in blood he could not see where she was injured. He made himself think and tried to focus his empathy on her alone. She was in terrible pain and had been cut in many places – the worst being her leg. He fashioned a tourniquet. Brother Frontalis shook his head. She’d lost too much blood.

  ‘I’ve got to get her to hospital – in my own world – get her a transfusion,’ said Dan. ‘If I could get her home – she’d be all right.’

  Dan tried to do what he had once done with Medraut, tried to focus on his own health, and project that into her consciousness. It was too much. He could feel himself being dragged by the closeness of their rapport into the place of near-death where Ursula lay. He pulled away, physically gasping for air, tears of frustration and grief making it hard for him to see. Rhonwen dismounted and looked dispassionately at Ursula’s bloodless face.