Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

‘Good, Lord!’ I called back, ‘and welcome!’

‘We can hold till the spearmen come!’ he shouted, then he waved his men on. He did not go down the hill, but kept riding around Mynydd Baddon’s upper slopes as though daring the Saxons to climb and challenge him.

But the sight of those horses was enough to check them because no Saxon wanted to be the first to climb into the path of those galloping spears. If the enemy had come all together they could easily have overwhelmed Arthur’s men, but the curve of the hill meant that most of the Saxons were invisible to each other, and each group must have hoped that another would dare to attack the horsemen first, and thus they all hung back. Once in a while a band of braver men would clamber upwards, but whenever Arthur’s horsemen came back into view they would edge nervously down the hill. Cerdic himself came to rally the men immediately below the southern angle, but when Arthur’s men turned to face those Saxons they faltered. They had expected an easy battle against a small number of spearmen, and were not ready to face cavalry. Not uphill, and not Arthur’s cavalry. Other horse-warriors might not have scared them, but they knew the meaning of that white cloak and of the goose-feathered plume and of the shield that shone like the very sun. It meant that death had come to them, and none was willing to climb to it. A half-hour later Arthur’s infantry came to the saddle. The Saxons who had held the hill north of the saddle fled from the arrival of our reinforcements, and those tired spearmen climbed to our ramparts with our cheers deafening them. The Saxons heard the cheers and saw the new spears showing above the ancient wall, and that finished their ambitions for the day. The columns went, and Mynydd Baddon was safe for one more turn of the sun.

Arthur pulled off his helmet as he spurred a tired Llamrei up to our banners. A breath of wind gusted and he looked up and saw Guinevere’s moon-crowned stag flying beside his own bear, but the broad smile on his face did not change. Nor did he say anything about the banner as he slid from Llamrei’s back. He must have known that Guinevere was with me, for Balin had seen her at Aquae Sulis and the two men whom I had sent with messages could have told him, but he pretended to know nothing. Instead, just as in the old days, and as if no coolness had ever come between us, he embraced me. All his melancholy had fled. There was life in his face again, a verve that spread amongst my men who clustered about him to hear his news, though first he demanded news from us. He had ridden among the dead Saxons on the slope and he wanted to know how and when they had died. My men forgivably exaggerated the number who had attacked the previous day, and Arthur laughed when he heard how we had pushed two flaming wagons down the slope. ‘Well done, Derfel,’ he said, ‘well done.’

‘It wasn’t me, Lord,’ I said, ‘but her.’ I jerked my head towards Guinevere’s flag. ‘It was all her doing, Lord. I was ready to die, but she had other ideas.’

‘She always did,’ he said softly, but asked nothing more. Guinevere herself was not in sight, and he did not ask where she was. He did see Bors and insisted on embracing him and hearing his news, and only then did he climb onto the turf wall and stare down at the Saxon encampments. He stood there a long time, showing himself to a dispirited enemy, but after a while he beckoned for Bors and me to join him. ‘I never planned to fight them here,’ he said to us, ‘but it’s as good a place as any. In fact it’s better than most. Are they all here?’ he asked Bors.

Bors had again been drinking in anticipation of the Saxon attack, but he did his best to sound sober.

‘All, Lord. Except maybe the Caer Ambra garrison. They were supposed to be chasing Culhwch.’ Bors jerked his beard towards the eastern hill where still more Saxons were coming down to join the encampment. ‘Maybe that’s them, Lord? Or perhaps they’re just foraging parties?’

‘The Caer Ambra garrison never found Culhwch,’ Arthur said, ‘for I had a message from him yesterday. He’s not far away, and Cuneglas isn’t far off either. In two days we’ll have five hundred more men here and then they’ll only outnumber us by two to one.’ He laughed. ‘Well done, Derfel!’

‘Well done?’ I asked in some surprise. I had expected Arthur’s disapproval for having been trapped so far from Corinium.

‘We had to fight them somewhere,’ he said, ‘and you chose the place. I like it. We’ve got the high ground.’ He spoke loudly, wanting his confidence to spread amongst my men. ‘I would have been here sooner,’ he added to me, ‘only I wasn’t certain Cerdic had swallowed the bait.’

‘Bait, Lord?’ I was confused.

‘You, Derfel, you.’ He laughed and jumped down from the rampart. ‘War is all accident, isn’t it? And by accident you found a place we can beat them.’

‘You mean they’ll wear themselves out climbing the hill?’ I asked.

‘They won’t be so foolish,’ he said cheerfully. ‘No, I fear we shall have to go down and fight them in the valley.’

‘With what?’ I asked bitterly, for even with Cuneglas’s troops we would be terribly outnumbered.

‘With every man we have,’ Arthur said confidently. ‘But no women, I think. It’s time we moved your families somewhere safer.’

Our women and children did not go far; there was a village an hour to the north and most found shelter there. Even as they left Mynydd Baddon, more of Arthur’s spearmen arrived from the north. These were the men Arthur had been gathering near Corinium and they were among the best in Britain. Sagramor came with his hardened warriors and, like Arthur, he went to the high southern angle of Mynydd Baddon from where he could stare down at the enemy and so that they could look up and see his lean, black-armoured figure on their skyline. A rare smile came to his face. ‘Over-confidence makes them into fools,’ he said scornfully. ‘They’ve trapped themselves in the low ground and they won’t move now.’

‘They won’t?’

‘Once a Saxon builds a shelter he doesn’t like being marched again. It’ll take Cerdic a week or more to dig them out of that valley.’ The Saxons and their families had indeed made themselves comfortable, and by now the river valley resembled two straggling villages of small thatched huts. One of those two villages was close by Aquae Sulis, while the other was two miles east where the river valley turned sharp south. Cerdic’s men were in those eastern huts, while Aelle’s spearmen were either quartered in the town or in the newly built shelters outside. I had been surprised that the Saxons had used the town for shelter rather than just burning it, but in every dawn a straggling procession of men came from the gates, leaving behind the homely sight of cooking smoke rising from Aquae Sulis’s thatched and tiled roofs. The initial Saxon invasion had been swift, but now their impetus was gone. ‘And why have they split their army into two?’ Sagramor asked me, staring incredulously at the great gap between Aelle’s encampment and Cerdic’s huts.

‘To leave us only one place to go,’ I said, ‘straight down there,’ I pointed into the valley, ‘where we’ll be trapped between them.’

‘And where we can keep them divided,’ Sagramor pointed out happily, ‘and in a few days they’ll have disease down there.’ Disease always seemed to spread whenever an army settled in one place. It had been just such a plague that had stopped Cerdic’s last invasion of Dumnonia, and a fiercely contagious sickness that had weakened our own army when we had marched on London. I feared that such a disease might weaken us now, but for some reason we were spared, perhaps because our numbers were still small or perhaps because Arthur scattered his army along the three miles of high crestline that ran behind Mynydd Baddon. I and my men stayed on the mount, but the newly arrived spearmen held the line of northern hills. For the first two days after Arthur’s arrival the enemy could still have captured those hills because their summits were thinly garrisoned, but Arthur’s horsemen were continually on show and Arthur kept his spearmen moving among the crest’s trees to suggest that his numbers were greater than they really were. The Saxons watched, but made no attack, and then, on the third day after Arthur’s arrival, Cuneglas and his men arrived from Powys and we were able to garrison the whole long crest with strong picquets who could summon help if any Saxon attack did threaten. We were still heavily outnumbered, but we held the high ground and now had the spears to defend it.