Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

‘Do you have any news of Culhwch?’ I asked Bors.

‘He’s out there somewhere,’ Bors said vaguely, waving to the south. ‘We never found him.’ He suddenly stiffened, and I looked round to see that Guinevere was watching us. She had abandoned her prison robe and was dressed in a leather jerkin, woollen trews and long boots: a man’s clothes like those she had used to wear when hunting. I later discovered she had found the clothes in Aquae Sulis and, though they were of poor quality, she somehow managed to imbue them with elegance. She had the Saxon gold at her neck, a quiver of arrows on her back, the hunter’s bow in her hand and a short knife at her waist.

‘Lord Bors,’ she greeted her old lover’s champion icily.

‘Lady.’ Bors stood up and gave her a clumsy obeisance.

She looked at his shield that still bore Lancelot’s insignia, then raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you bored with him too?’ she asked.

‘I’m a Briton, lady,’ Bors said stiffly.

‘And a brave Briton,’ Guinevere said warmly. ‘I think we’re fortunate to have you here.’ Her words were precisely right and Bors, who had been embarrassed by the encounter, suddenly looked coyly pleased. He muttered something about being happy to see Guinevere, but he was not a man who made compliments elegantly and he blushed as he spoke. ‘Can I assume,’ Guinevere asked him, ‘that your old lord is with the Saxons?’

‘He is, Lady.’

‘Then I pray he comes within range of my bow,’ Guinevere said.

‘He might not, Lady,’ Bors said, for he knew Lancelot’s reluctance to place himself in danger, ‘but you’ll have plenty of Saxons to kill before the day’s out. More than enough.’

And he was right, for beneath us, where the last of the river mist was being burned away by the sun, the Saxon horde was gathering. Cerdic and Aelle, still believing that their greatest enemy was trapped on Mynydd Baddon, were planning an overwhelming assault. It would not be a subtle attack, for no spearmen were being mustered to take us in the flank, but rather it would be a simple, crude hammerblow that would come in overwhelming force straight up Mynydd Baddon’s southern face. Hundreds of warriors were being gathered for the attack and their close-ranked spears glinted in the early light.

‘How many are there?’ Guinevere asked me.

‘Too many, Lady,’ I said bleakly.

‘Half their army,’ Bors said, and explained to her that the Saxon Kings believed that Arthur and his best men were trapped on the hilltop.

‘So he’s fooled them?’ Guinevere asked, not without a note of pride.

‘Or we have,’ I said glumly, indicating Arthur’s banner that stirred fitfully in the small breeze.

‘So now we have to beat them,’ Guinevere responded briskly, though how, I could not tell. Not since I had been trapped on Ynys Mon by Diwrnach’s men had I felt so helpless, but on that grim night I had possessed Merlin for an ally and his magic had seen us out of the trap. I had no magic on my side now and I could foresee nothing but doom.

All morning long I watched the Saxon warriors assemble among the growing wheat, and I watched as their wizards danced along the lines and as their chiefs harangued the spearmen. The men in the front of the Saxon battle line were steady enough, for they were the trained warriors who had sworn oaths to their lords, but the rest of that vast assembly must have been the equivalent of our levy, the fyrd the Saxons called it, and those men kept wandering away. Some went to the river, others back to the camps, and from our commanding height it was like watching shepherds trying to gather a vast flock; as soon as one part of the army was assembled, another would break apart and the whole business would start over again, and all the time the Saxon drums sounded. They were using great hollow logs that they thumped with wooden clubs so that their heartbeat of death echoed from the wooded slope on the valley’s far side. The Saxons would be drinking ale, bolstering the courage needed to come up into our spears. Some of my own men were guzzling mead. I discouraged it, but stopping a soldier from drinking was like keeping a dog from barking, and many of my men needed the fire that mead puts into a belly for they could count as well as I. A thousand men were coming to fight fewer than three hundred. Bors had asked that he and his men fight in the centre of our line and I had agreed. I hoped he would die swiftly, cut down by an axe or a spear, for if he was taken alive then his death would be long and horrible. He and his men had stripped their shields back to the bare wood, and now were drinking mead, and I did not blame them.

Issa was sober. ‘They’ll overlap us, Lord,’ he said worriedly.

‘They will,’ I agreed, and wished I could say something more useful, but in truth I was transfixed by the enemy preparations and helpless to know what to do about the attack. I did not doubt that my men could fight against the best Saxon spearmen, but I only had enough spearmen to make a shield wall a hundred paces wide and the Saxon attack, when it came, would be three times that width. We would fight in the centre, we would kill, and the enemy would surge around our flanks to capture the hill’s summit and slaughter us from behind.

Issa grimaced. His wolf-tailed helmet was an old one of mine on which he had hammered a pattern of silver stars. His pregnant wife, Scarach, had found some vervain growing near one of the springs and Issa wore a sprig on his helmet, hoping it would keep him from harm. He offered me some of the plant, but I refused. ‘You keep it,’ I said.

‘What do we do, Lord?’ he asked.

‘We can’t run away,’ I said. I had thought of making a desperate lunge northwards, but there were Saxons beyond the northern saddle and we would have to fight our way up that slope into their spears. We had small chance of doing that, and a much greater chance of being trapped in the saddle between two enemies on higher ground. ‘We have to beat them here,’ I said, disguising my conviction that we could not beat them at all. I could have fought four hundred men, maybe even six hundred, but not the thousand Saxons who were now readying themselves at the foot of the slope.

‘If we had a Druid,’ Issa said, then let the thought die, but I knew exactly what irked him. He was thinking that it was not good to go into battle without prayers. The Christians in our ranks were praying with their arms outstretched in imitation of their God’s death and they had told me they needed no priest to intercede for them, but we pagans liked to have a Druid’s curses raining on our enemies before a fight. But we had no Druid, and the absence not only denied us the power of his curses, but suggested that from this day on we would have to fight without our Gods because those Gods had fled in disgust from the interrupted rites on Mai Dun.

I summoned Pyrlig and ordered him to curse the enemy. He blanched. ‘But I’m a bard, Lord, not a Druid,’ he protested.

‘You began the Druid’s training?’

‘All bards do, Lord, but I was never taught the mysteries.’

‘The Saxons don’t know that,’ I said. ‘Go down the hill, hop on one leg and curse their filthy souls to the dungheap of Annwn.’

Pyrlig did his best, but he could not keep his balance and I sensed there was more fear than vituperation in his curses. The Saxons, seeing him, sent six of their own wizards to counter his magic. The naked wizards, their hair hung with small charms and stiffened into grotesque spikes with matted cow dung, clambered up the slope to spit and curse at Pyrlig who, seeing their approach, backed nervously away. One of the Saxon magicians carried a human thigh bone that he used to chase poor Pyrlig even further up the slope and, when he saw our bard’s obvious terror, the Saxon jerked his body in obscene gestures. The enemy wizards came still closer so that we could hear their shrill voices over the booming thud of the drums in the valley.