Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Who were they?’

I shrugged. ‘Who knows? Just children captured in a raid.’

Ceinwyn sighed and stroked Morwenna’s fair hair. ‘Did you have to fight?’

‘Would you rather I had sent Issa?’

‘No,’ she admitted.

‘So yes, I had to fight,’ I said, and in truth I had enjoyed the fight. Only a fool wants war, but once a war starts then it cannot be fought half-heartedly. It cannot even be fought with regret, but must be waged with a savage joy in defeating the enemy, and it is that savage joy that inspires our bards to write their greatest songs about love and war. We warriors dressed for battle as we decked ourselves for love; we made ourselves gaudy, we wore our gold, we mounted crests on our silver-chased helmets, we strutted, we boasted, and when the slaughtering blades came close we felt as though the blood of the Gods coursed in our veins. A man should love peace, but if he cannot fight with all his heart then he will not have peace.

‘What would we have done if you had died?’ Ceinwyn asked, watching as I buckled Wulfger’s fine greaves over my boots.

‘You would have burned me, my love,’ I said, ‘and sent my soul to join Dian.’ I kissed her, then carried the golden collar to Guinevere, who was delighted by the gift. She had lost her jewels with her freedom, and though she had no taste for heavy Saxon work, she placed the collar about her neck.

‘I enjoyed that fight,’ she said, patting the golden plates into place. ‘I want you to teach me some Saxon, Derfel.’

‘Of course.’

‘Insults. I want to hurt them.’ She laughed. ‘Coarse insults, Derfel, the coarsest that you know.’

And there would be plenty of Saxons for Guinevere to insult, for still more enemy spearmen were coming to the valley. My men on the southern angle called to warn me, and I went to stand on the rampart beneath our twin banners and saw two long lines of spearmen winding down the eastern hills into the river meadows. ‘They started arriving a few moments ago,’ Eachern told me, ‘and now there’s no end to them.’

Nor was there. This was no warband coming to fight, but an army, a horde, a whole people on the march. Men, women, beasts and children, all spilling from the eastern hills into Aquae Sulis’s valley. The spearmen marched in their long columns, and between the columns were herds of cattle, flocks of sheep and straggling trails of women and children. Horsemen rode on the flanks, and more horsemen clustered about the two banners that marked the coming of the Saxon Kings. This was not one army, but two, the combined forces of Cerdic and Aelle, and instead of facing Arthur in the valley of the Thames they had come here, to me, and their blades were as numerous as the stars of the sky’s great belt. I watched them come for an hour and Eachern was right. There was no end to them, and I touched the bones in Hywelbane’s hilt and knew, more surely than ever, that we were doomed. That night the lights of the Saxon fires were like a constellation fallen into Aquae Sulis’s valley; a blaze of campfires reaching far to the south and deep to the west to show where the enemy encampments followed the line of the river. There were still more fires on the eastern hills, where the rearguard of the Saxon horde camped on the high ground, but in the dawn we saw those men coming down into the valley beneath us.

It was a raw morning, though it promised to be a warm day. At sunrise, when the valley was still dark, the smoke from the Saxon fires mingled with the river mist so that it seemed as if Mynydd Baddon was a green sunlit vessel adrift in a sinister grey sea. I had slept badly, for one of the women had given birth in the night and her cries had haunted me. The child was stillborn and Ceinwyn told me it should not have been delivered for another three or four months. ‘They think it’s a bad omen,’ Ceinwyn added bleakly. And so it probably was, I reflected, but I dared not admit as much. Instead I tried to sound confident.

‘The Gods won’t abandon us,’ I said.

‘It was Terfa,’ Ceinwyn said, naming the woman who had tortured the night with her crying. ‘It would have been her first child. A boy, it was. Very tiny.’ She hesitated, then smiled sadly at me. ‘There’s a fear, Derfel, that the Gods abandoned us at Samain.’

She was only saying what I myself feared, but again I dared not admit it. ‘Do you believe that?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t want to believe it,’ she said. She thought for a few seconds and was about to say something more when a shout from the southern rampart interrupted us. I did not move and the shout came again. Ceinwyn touched my arm. ‘Go,’ she said.

I ran to the southern rampart to find Issa, who had stood the night’s last sentry watch, staring down into the valley’s smoky shadows. ‘About a dozen of the bastards,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘See the hedge?’ He pointed down the bare slope to where a white-blossomed hawthorn hedge marked the end of the hillside and the beginning of the valley’s cultivated land. ‘They’re there. We saw them cross the wheatfield.’

‘They’re just watching us,’ I said sourly, angry that he had called me away from Ceinwyn for such a small thing.

‘I don’t know, Lord. There was something odd about them. There!’ He pointed again and I saw a group of spearmen clamber through the hedge. They crouched on our side of the hedge and it seemed as if they looked behind them, rather than towards us. They waited for a few minutes, then suddenly ran towards us. ‘Deserters?’ Issa guessed. ‘Surely not!’

And it did seem strange that anyone should desert that vast Saxon army to join our beleaguered band, but Issa was right, for when the eleven men were halfway up the slope they ostentatiously turned their shields upside down. The Saxon sentries had at last seen the traitors and a score of enemy spearmen were now pursuing the fugitives, but the eleven men were far enough ahead to reach us safely. ‘Bring them to me when they get here,’ I told Issa, then went back to the summit’s centre where I pulled on my mail armour and buckled Hywelbane to my waist. ‘Deserters,’ I told Ceinwyn. Issa brought the eleven men across the grass. I recognized the shields first, for they showed Lancelot’s sea-eagle with the fish in its talons, and then I recognized Bors, Lancelot’s cousin and champion. He smiled nervously when he saw me, then I grinned broadly and he relaxed. ‘Lord Derfel,’ he greeted me. His broad face was red from the climb, and his burly body heaving to draw in breath.

‘Lord Bors,’ I said formally, then embraced him.

‘If I am to die,’ he said, ‘I’d rather die on my own side.’ He named his spearmen, all of them Britons who had been in Lancelot’s service and all men who resented being forced to carry their spears for the Saxons. They bowed to Ceinwyn, then sat while bread, mead and salted beef were brought to them. Lancelot, they said, had marched north to join Aelle and Cerdic, and now all the Saxon forces were united in the valley beneath us. ‘Over two thousand men, they reckon,’ Bors said.

‘I have less than three hundred.’

Bors grimaced. ‘But Arthur’s here, yes?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

Bors stared up at me, his open mouth full of food. ‘Not here?’ he said at last.

‘He’s somewhere up north as far as I know.’

He swallowed his mouthful, then swore quietly. ‘So who is here?’ he asked.

‘Just me.’ I gestured about the hill. ‘And what you can see.’

He lifted a horn of mead and drank deeply. ‘Then I reckon we will die,’ he said grimly. He had thought Arthur was on Mynydd Baddon. Indeed, Bors said, both Cerdic and Aelle believed that Arthur was on the hill and that was why they had marched south from the Thames to Aquae Sulis. The Saxons, who had first driven us to this refuge, had seen Arthur’s banner on Mynydd Baddon’s crest and had sent news of its presence to the Saxon Kings who had been seeking Arthur in the upper reaches of the Thames. ‘The bastards know what your plans are,’ Bors warned me, ‘and they know Arthur wanted to fight near Corinium, but they couldn’t find him there. And that’s what they want to do, Derfel, they want to find Arthur before Cuneglas reaches him. Kill Arthur, they reckon, and the rest of Britain will lose heart.’ But Arthur, clever Arthur, had given Cerdic and Aelle the slip, and then the Saxon kings had heard that the banner of the bear was being flaunted on a hill near Aquae Sulis and so they had turned their ponderous force southwards and sent orders for Lancelot’s forces to join them.