Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

‘Just all day,’ Ceinwyn said, and she glanced up the sea-lake to where Prydmen floated at the edge of the mudbank. Men were hauling her mast upright, but soon the falling tide would strand the boat again and we would have to wait for the waters to rise. But at least the enemy had not bothered Caddwg, and had no reason to do so. To them he was doubtless just another fisherman and no business of theirs. We were their business.

There were sixty or seventy of the enemy, all of them horsemen, and they must have ridden hard to reach us, but now they were waiting at the spit’s landward end and we all knew that other spearmen would be following them. By dusk we could face an army, maybe two, for Nimue’s men would surely be hurrying with Mordred’s spearmen.

Arthur was in his war finery. His scale armour, which had tongues of gold amidst the iron plates, glinted in the sun. I watched him pull on his helmet that was crested with white goose feathers. Hygwydd would usually have armoured him, but Hygwydd was dead so Guinevere strapped Excalibur’s cross-hatched scabbard about his waist and hung the white cloak on his shoulders. He smiled at her, leaned to hear her speak, laughed, then closed the helmet’s cheekpieces. Two men helped him up into the saddle of one of Sagramor’s horses, and once he was mounted they passed him his spear and his silver-sheeted shield from which the cross had long been stripped away. He took the reins with his shield hand, then kicked the horse towards us. ‘Let’s stir them up,’ he called down to Sagramor, who stood beside me. Arthur planned to lead thirty horsemen towards the enemy, then feint a panicked withdrawal that he hoped would tempt them into a trap.

We left a score of men to guard the women and children in the fort while the rest of us followed Sagramor to a deep hollow behind a dune that fronted the sea’s beach. The whole sandspit west of the fort was a confusion of dunes and hollows that formed a maze of traps and blind alleys, and only the spit’s final two hundred paces, east of the fort, offered level ground. Arthur waited until we were hidden, then led his thirty men west along the sea-rippled sand that lay close to the breaking waves. We crouched under the high dune’s cover. I had left my spear at the fort, preferring to fight this battle with Hywelbane alone. Sagramor also planned to fight with sword alone. He was scrubbing a patch of rust from his curved blade with a handful of sand. ‘You lost your beard,’ he grunted at me.

‘I exchanged it for Amhar’s life.’

I saw a flash of teeth as he grinned behind the shadow of his helmet’s cheekpieces. ‘A good exchange,’ he said, ‘and your hand?’

‘To magic’

‘Not your sword hand, though.’ He held the blade to catch the light, was satisfied that the rust was gone, then cocked his head, listening, but we could hear nothing.except the breaking waves. ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ he said after a while.

‘Why not?’ I had never known Sagramor to shirk a fight.

‘They must have followed me,’ he said, jerking his head westwards to indicate the enemy.

‘They might have known we were coming here anyway,’ I said, trying to comfort him, though unless Merlin had betrayed Camlann to Nimue, it seemed more likely that Mordred would indeed have left some lightly armoured horsemen to watch Sagramor and that those scouts must have betrayed our hiding place. Whatever, it was too late now. Mordred’s men knew where we were and now it was a race between Caddwg and the enemy.

‘Hear that?’ Gwydre called. He was in armour and had his father’s bear on his shield. He was nervous, and no wonder, for this would be his first real battle.

I listened. My leather padded helmet muffled sound, but at last I heard the thud of hoofs on sand.

‘Keep down!’ Sagramor snarled at those men who were tempted to peer over the crest of the dune. The horses were galloping down the sea’s beach, and we were hidden from that beach by the dune. The sound drew nearer, rising to a thunder of hoofs as we gripped our spears and swords. Sagramor’s helmet was crested with the mask of a snarling fox. I stared at the fox, but heard only the growing noise of the horses. It was warm and sweat was trickling down my face. The mail coat felt heavy, but it always did until the fighting started.

The first hoofs pounded past, then Arthur was shouting from the beach. ‘Now!’ he called, ‘Now!

Now! Now!’

‘Go!’ Sagramor shouted and we all scrambled up the dune’s inner face. Our boots slipped in the sand, and it seemed I would never reach the top, but then we were over the crest and running down onto the beach where a swirl of horsemen churned the hard wet sand beside the sea. Arthur had turned and his thirty men had clashed with their pursuers who outnumbered Arthur’s men by two to one, but those pursuers now saw us running towards their flank and the more prudent immediately turned and galloped west towards safety. Most stayed to fight.

I screamed a challenge, took a horseman’s spear point plumb on the centre of my shield, raked Hywelbane across the horse’s rear leg to hamstring the animal, and then, as the horse tipped towards me, I swept Hywelbane hard into the rider’s back. He yelped in pain, and I jumped back as horse and man collapsed in a flurry of hoofs, sand and blood. I kicked the twitching man in the face, stabbed down with Hywelbane, then backswung the sword at a panicked horseman who feebly stabbed at me with his spear. Sagramor was keening a terrible war cry and Gwydre was spearing a fallen man at the sea’s edge. The enemy were breaking from the fight and spurring their horses to safety through the sea’s shallows where the receding water sucked a swirl of sand and blood back into the collapsing waves. I saw Culhwch spur his horse to an enemy and haul the man bodily from his saddle. The man tried to stand, but Culhwch backswung the sword, turned his horse and chopped down again. The few enemy who had survived were trapped between us and the sea now, and we killed them grimly. Horses screamed and thrashed their hoofs as they died. The small waves were pink and the sand was black with blood. We killed twenty of them and took sixteen prisoners, and when the prisoners had told us all they knew, we killed them too. Arthur grimaced as he gave the order, for he disliked killing unarmed men, but we could spare no spearmen to guard prisoners, nor did we have any mercy for these foes who carried unmarked shields as a boast of their savagery. We killed them quickly, forcing them to kneel on the sand where Hywelbane or Sagramor’s sharp sword took their heads. They were Mordred’s men, and Mordred himself had led them down the beach, but the King had wheeled his horse at the first sign of our ambush and shouted at his men to retreat. ‘I came close to him,’ Arthur said ruefully, ‘but not close enough.’ Mordred had escaped, but the first victory was ours, though three of our men had died in the fight and another seven were bleeding badly. ‘How did Gwydre fight?’ Arthur asked me.

‘Bravely, Lord, bravely,’ I said. My sword was thick with blood that I tried to scrape off with a handful of sand. ‘He killed, Lord,’ I assured Arthur.

‘Good,’ he said, then crossed to his son and put an arm around his shoulders. I used my one hand to scrub the blood from Hywelbane, then tugged the buckle of my helmet loose and pulled it off my head. We killed the wounded horses, led the uninjured beasts back to the fort, then collected our enemy’s weapons and shields. ‘They won’t come again,’ I told Ceinwyn, ‘not unless they’re reinforced.’ I looked up at the sun and saw that it was climbing slowly through the cloudless sky. We had very little water, only what Sagramor’s men had brought in their small baggage, and so we rationed the water-skins. It would be a long and thirsty day, especially for our wounded. One of them was shivering. His face was pale, almost yellow, and when Sagramor tried to trickle a little water into the man’s mouth he bit convulsively at the skin’s lip. He began to moan, and the sound of his agony grated on our souls and so Sagramor hastened the man’s death with his sword. ‘We must light a pyre,’