I picked up a scarred but sound shield from the ground nearby, prised a spear from the hand of a dead crow-shield and took my place in the middle of the mound once more. Beside Iselle.
‘Can we win?’ she asked me. She was looking straight ahead, a shield in her left hand, Excalibur in her right, her helmet’s cheek irons down so that her face was mostly obscured, though her eyes were visible and as fierce as a hawk’s.
‘If we kill enough of them,’ I said.
The Saxons had taken up their chant of ‘Woden! Woden! Woden!’ The stench of open bowels and the startling iron stink of blood tainted the air, too strong even for the rain to wash it away, and yet I could still smell the Saxons. Their soaking, rancid furs and their swine-reeking sweat and their ale breath which fogged around their faces as they came on, invoking their god, who once had resided far away across the sea but who now, it was whispered, dwelt in these Dark Isles too.
‘Make way!’ a familiar voice called, ‘make way, damn you!’ A channel opened behind us and Merlin came through, leading a white stallion. ‘Don’t let them kill me, Galahad, there’s a good boy,’ he cried, as he led the stallion by its bridle down into the trench and up the other side onto the plain.
‘Where did he find that?’ Iselle asked, for it was a beautiful horse, a stallion which Lord Arthur himself would have coveted back in his prime when he was the lord of horses.
‘What are you doing, Merlin?’ I called down to him, but the druid ignored me. He stood there with that noble beast, which could have torn itself free at any time, or even killed Merlin if it had wanted.
‘Do you think they have all seen him?’ Merlin yelled back at me, holding the bridle still and facing the Saxon shieldwall.
‘Seen him?’ I shouted. ‘King Cerdic will be riding him if you don’t get back up here!’
Merlin nodded and raised a placating hand. He took a knife from his belt and put his face to the stallion’s muzzle, seeming to whisper or sing to him, and the beautiful creature lowered its head, accepting the old man’s embrace. Merlin’s arm moved quickly and the blade cut, and still the horse stood there, uncomplaining as Merlin’s hands and gown and even his face were sheeted in blood that steamed in the rain.
‘Merlin!’ Iselle shouted, for the Saxons were no more than an arrow’s flight away now. Soon the strongest of them would be trying to claim the glory of killing a druid with a spear throw; a deed for their scops to sing of. And yet Merlin clung to the stallion’s head still, cradling it, whispering soothing words like a man who is thanking his horse after a good ride.
‘Merlin, they’re close!’ Iselle cried, and with those words still fogging on the air, the stallion’s forelegs buckled, and it fell to its knees and it was now no longer a white horse but half red. And Merlin stood and pointed his bloody knife at the Saxons, who came to a halt, their shield rims kissing and their chant of Woden draining away like the stallion’s lifeblood.
‘A waste of a fine horse,’ grunted a man beside me. And perhaps he was right. But perhaps he was not, for I knew what Merlin was doing, or at least I knew why he was doing it.
That magnificent stallion, as handsome in his way as my father’s stallion Tormaigh had been, slumped onto his side with a soft snort, raised his head one final time, then laid it back down on the grass, his belly rising and falling with his last immense breaths.
‘The bastards have stopped,’ another red-cloaked spearman said. He wasn’t watching the horse but rather the Saxons. ‘Why have they stopped?’
‘Because Merlin has cursed King Cerdic,’ I said.
‘By cutting a horse’s throat?’ the first man asked.
‘Cerdic claims to be descended from the Saxon chieftain Hengist,’ I said, ‘who was himself descended from their god Woden. Hengist and his brother Horsa were the first Saxons to win land in Britain. Hengist became king in Ceint.’ I also knew that Hengist meant stallion, but I did not say it. I had learnt all this from Father Brice many years ago, for it had been expected of me in my novitiate that I should know how the ruin of Britain had begun.
Now, I watched the Saxon shieldwall waiting there, afraid of Merlin’s magic, afraid that the last druid in Britain had cursed their king by cutting that noble stallion’s throat, and I wondered if Father Brice and the other brothers’ bones still lay unburied amid the ruins of the monastery. If I lived through the day, I would bury the brothers as they deserved. I swore it to myself and to any gods who cared to listen. But first I would avenge them. The blood in my veins, hot and in spate, demanded it. There was no fear in me then. I hungered for the fray. Here, on Ynys Wydryn, on this island in the marsh, I would stand as the brothers had done.
Lord Constantine ordered a score of men to gather up any last spears or weapons from the ground and butcher those crow-shields who lay groaning in the ditch. Others took the opportunity to drink or exchange their battered shields for better ones, to ask Taranis for strength and skill at arms or to beseech Arawn for swift passage to the afterlife should they fall in the coming battle.
‘How long will the druid’s curse hold them?’ Morvan asked, but no one could answer that. Not even Merlin, who, leaving the stallion to pump the last of its blood into the grass, ambled back across the ditch and up the embankment with all the urgency of a man out gathering fungus and herbs.
But I hoped his magic would fade, or that the wizards whom King Cerdic had sent out ahead of his shieldwall to counter Merlin’s magic would break the chains which bound them. I wanted the Saxons to find their courage again, to defy the druid’s curse and come for us, because then I would kill them. I would slaughter them as my father had done. I was Galahad ap Lancelot, and I was a killer of men.
It took the three Saxon wizards the time it takes a candle to burn halfway down to counter Merlin’s curse with the horse. Enough time for our men to get their wind again and steel themselves for the next fight, but not so long that doubts and fears could gnaw too deeply at their souls.
‘Stay close,’ I told Iselle.
‘Not too close,’ she said, one eyebrow raised.
I nodded. I knew I was wild in the maelstrom of battle. ‘No, not too close.’
Some of our men at the rear had bows, and when the Saxons were less than fifty paces away, these archers sent their arrows streaking over our heads like swallows to roost. We cheered for every arrow that struck a Saxon face, shoulder or leg, and even when one tonked off a helmet, though most missed or buried themselves in the ground or in shields.
Their shieldwall hit ours with a clattering thump and a ragged chorus of grunts and then the shoving began. This was when you were close enough to your enemy to smell the sour cheese, garlic or onions he had eaten and the ale he had drunk, and you could smell his fear, too. I leant into my shield and thrust Boar’s Tusk through any gap I could find, while Iselle rammed her spear over my shield rim into men’s faces, screaming at them, her eyes flaring.
The man throwing his weight upon my shield went down and Iselle ran her spear into his belly to make sure he was dead, but another man took his place and when we killed him too, another came on, and so it went, until we were gasping for air but could find none.
Like the Black Crow traitors before them, the Saxons concentrated their attack on our centre, for they knew that was where Iselle stood, beneath her wolf banner, and they believed that if they killed her, we would break. I knew that Constantine had been right, that it was madness for her to be in the thick of the fight. But I also knew that her being there inspired our warriors to incredible efforts. Seeing her fighting at the fore, as she had promised, stabbing and killing and shrieking like some goddess of war, shamed them or emboldened them to push harder, to hack and hew with renewed strength, to not give ground but to take it from the enemy. Iselle carried the blood of the Pendragon in her veins. She was the beating heart of Dumnonia, of Britannia, and we fought for her.
But the enemy were too many and we were too few.
‘Hold! Hold!’ Lord Constantine bellowed in a voice
which had carried across battlefields for more than twice my lifetime. ‘Hold, damn you!’ he roared, ‘hold!’ but we could not hold.
Risking a look over my shoulder, I saw King Menadoc’s sun-shields running in groups of a dozen to plug the holes that the Saxons had carved in our shieldwall. They came shouting: ‘Cornubia! Cornubia!’, proud of the land of their birth as they lent their shoulders and shields and blades to counter the Saxons and tried to drive them back. But as I heard that call more and more, I knew that our line had been breached in too many places and that our rampart of flesh, wood and steel was disintegrating like a mound of sand on a beach before the relentless surging of the waves.
‘Back!’ I roared. ‘Do not break!’
I looked along that line, my view obscured by thrusting blades and snarling, bearded faces and the rain which still hammered down from the slate-grey sky, but I saw Lord Constantine and he saw me. He bared his teeth and nodded, then gave the same order. ‘Back!’ he yelled. ‘Slowly! Keep those shields up! Back! King Catigern!’ he screamed. ‘Damn you, pull your men back!’
I saw the big king of Powys spit a curse and order his men to withdraw in line with ours, lunging and shoving as we ceded the ridge. We gave ground, retreating en masse, still facing the enemy, our shields still pressed against theirs, back down the mound onto the flat. I saw thirty or so of Menadoc’s sun-shields hurrying to our right to meet a body of Saxons whose intention was to outflank us and attack our rear, and there was a crash of shields and a roar when those two groups met.
Then the man beside me tripped on a tussock or his own feet and went down, and I buried Boar’s Tusk in the earth and reached out to him, yelling at him to take my hand, but the weight of the enemy on our shieldwall was too much, their advance as inexorable as night, and just as our fingers touched I was driven back and only just managed to snatch up my precious sword before it was too late. I caught one more glimpse of the man, of his pleading eyes and the terror in his face, but then he was gone. He had been younger than me.
‘What can you see?’ I asked Iselle, for I was crouched behind my shield, and whilst spearing over my head she had a better view.
‘Saxons,’ she said, which was not the answer I’d hoped for.
Back we went, leaving our dead and dying behind. Two hundred paces from the ridge now. We could not stop the Saxons, but they had not broken our wall. Not yet.
We did not do much killing then. Our only ambition was to survive long enough to see the Saxons haunted by their nightmares made flesh, and so we gave up that narrow strip of ground between the reed-beds, though I knew that we must make a stand soon or else we would come onto the island proper and once there, Lady Morgana and King Cerdic would throw every man at us and we would be overwhelmed and surrounded and it would be over.
‘There!’ Iselle gasped, blinking away sweat and rain and looking beyond the enemy shieldwall. The Saxon leaning into his shield against me was tiring. I felt it through the limewood, though the men at his back were shoving him on. I lifted my head above my shield’s rim to see that we were three hundred paces from the embankment now and only a hundred paces from the wider ground at our backs. ‘There! On the ridge,’ Iselle said.
‘I see them,’ I snarled, manoeuvring my shield boss above the Saxon’s so that I could press his shield down. His strength was gone. Down went his shield and I saw the surprise in his eyes as Boar’s Tusk smashed through his teeth and out through the back of his skull.
King Cerdic and Lady Morgana were up on the ridge. They stood surrounded by their household warriors, Cerdic in ring mail, his hair, beard and long moustaches as silver as his helmet, Lady Morgana swathed and cowled in black like her granddaughter Lady Triamour. An old bear and two carrion crows looking over a field of corpses.
Come on, I willed them. Here we are.
Back we went, step by step, getting nearer to the sloping ground which led up to the tor, nearer to the open ground, upon which our enemies would roll over and around us in a wave of steel and death.
Come on. Come and kill us.
The battle din was not what it had been before. Men were tired. Their arms weakening. Blades bit into shields less, rasped off helmets less. Mouths were too dry to yell insults. Rain flayed us, seething in ground churning to mud. We slipped and stumbled in the sludge, and the muscles in my thighs, shoulders and arms screamed with hot pain. The sound of my own rasping breath was loud in my helmet, the pulse of my blood a rhythmic thump in my ears, and it all seemed somehow far away. The battle. The struggle. This savage contest. It was distant and I was a boy again watching from the hilltop at Camlan. Watching my father riding to his old friend, the two of them flickering like flames in the night.
And the next time I looked up I thought Lady Morgana and her Saxon king had retreated back over the ridge, but then I saw Cerdic striding forwards with his score of mailed, fair-bearded warriors, as if he was eager to join the fray now that victory looked certain. The old warrior, who had fought Uther and Arthur and Lord Constantine and now us, wanted to be close enough to see the end with his own eyes. He hungered to see the defeat in our faces, to feel the last hope go out of us. To see the last light of resistance extinguished.
So, what must the old Saxon have thought when he heard the long, ominous note of Lord Cai’s war horn carry across Ynys Wydryn like the judgement of a god?
They came in the shape of a spear, and in a way they were a spear, cast by Taranis, one of the old gods of Britain. Or a bolt of lightning, perhaps, for Taranis is the god of thunder and this was a day when the sky itself seemed to be at war.
Lord Cai led them. He was the point. On his left shoulder rode Parcefal and Cadwy, and on his right rode Gawain and Gediens, and storming behind came the rest of them, a dozen shining warriors, galloping across the summer flowers, red plumes flying from silver-chased helms, spears couched beneath their arms, their mounts armoured in leather: boiled shaffrons covering their faces, breastplates to protect their mighty hearts.
The last of Arthur’s horse lords. Men from another time, riding to one final battle.
And though they were not even a score, the earth itself thundered beneath the pounding of the horses’ iron shoes, and we cheered for them even in the tumult of that desperate fight.
‘Hold here!’ Lord Constantine yelled.
‘Hold!’ I shouted, and behind me someone blew a horn so that we all knew that this was where we must stand. We must give no more ground to the enemy but stand and hold them and kill them here.
A shudder ran through the Saxon shieldwall. I felt a lessening of the great weight bearing down upon us as men risked a backward glance, struck by the worst of all fears to afflict those fighting in a shieldwall: that you find enemies at your back.
Iselle felt it too. ‘Kill them!’ she screamed, parrying a spear that was aimed at her face and thrusting her own spear into a Saxon’s throat. ‘Kill them!’
Sometimes doubt will kill a man, and Lord Cai and Gawain had sown doubt in the enemy, so we drove into them, hacking and cutting, and on the left, the men of Powys were not merely holding the ground but were taking it back, their warrior king living up to all the bards’ songs which celebrated the courage and martial skill of his people.
Iselle had killed the man in front of me and for a brief moment I caught sight of Gawain and Parcefal driving their spears down into King Cerdic’s warriors, who, rather than fleeing, bravely stood their ground, surrounding their king. I saw Gawain hurl his spear and draw his sword. Saw him spur his horse into the thick of the fray, hacking down to his left and right, driving the mare on. I saw Gediens lop off a man’s head and I saw Parcefal cast his spear, which struck the man beside the king. And I saw a huge Saxon swinging a long axe at Gediens’s mare, cutting away both forelegs at the knee, toppling horse and rider. Gediens, no!
A spear blade struck my helmet but glanced off. Another punched into my shoulder but did not break through my scale armour. I hammered Boar’s Tusk down onto a leather skull cap and felt th
e keen edge bite.
‘Gawain needs us,’ Iselle rasped, and I saw fear in her eyes and so tried to peer over the shield. But now I could see nothing of the distant fight, a long arrow-flight away, between the horse warriors and the Saxon king. What I could see were those other Saxons, the ones who had stood under the banner of the ship’s prow beast and had yet to fight. They were running to help King Cerdic. A great roaring horde of men with shields, axes, spears or swords, charging through the veiling rain. And I knew that Cai and Gawain, Parcefal and the others, in their desperation to kill King Cerdic and rip the hearts out of our enemies, had not disengaged and formed to charge again, but had stayed in the melee, hacking and hewing and spurring their mounts through Cerdic’s best men to get to the king.
‘If we don’t help them, they’ll die,’ Iselle said.
‘If we try, we’ll die,’ I snarled.
But Iselle was right. The Saxons would swarm around each of the horsemen like hounds on a stag, wounding the horses over and over, bleeding them. They would thrust their spears up at the riders and the horse lords of Britain would fall one by one until they were no more.
I looked to my left. The spearmen of Powys were ahead of the rest of us now, though they were no longer making ground. To my right, King Bivitas had fallen. I had heard the desperate cries of his warriors and felt the news of it spread amongst us like an ill wind. And yet his men fought on, as did the warriors of Caer Gloui led by King Cuel, though their shieldwall was only three men deep in places now. But the fifty men of Caer Celemion, led by a grizzled-looking man named Gralon, still held their position at the rear.
‘Somebody bring me Gralon,’ I yelled.
Moments later, Gralon had muscled his way to me through the ranks. His spearmen stood at his back, tall and grim-faced and war-ready.
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