Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  chapter ten

  Battle Before Deva

  LATE THAT NIGHT ANOTHER OF THE LITTLE DARK HILLMEN rode in on another shaggy pony, to bring us the latest word of Hengest’s advance. He was clear of the mountains and into the fringing lowland hills, and his forward scouts were making camp on the wooded flanks of Black Bull. By noon tomorrow, the waiting should be over.

  But there was always the chance that the enemy might try a night march, and so there was no lingering next morning. A meal of bannock and hard yellow cheese was doled out to the men at first light, and before the sun was well clear of the woods that crested the opposite ridge, we had taken up our fighting positions; the foot soldiers among the dense low scrub that flanked the road, the mounted archers and the Cymric longbows in the shadows of the trees on either side of them. On the far left, I knew that Bedwyr was waiting with his cavalry wing, as here on the right I held the other. Behind us, among the trees, Fulvius was with the reserves, and away among the woods across the valley, drawn well back from the Saxon’s line of advance, Cei – stone-cold sober, for he had kept his promise to me with regard to the heather beer – was lying up with another squadron of fifty or so mounted tribesmen, ready to take the Sea Wolves in the rear, or cut off their line of retreat when the time came.

  Hengest, it seemed, had not made a night march, and the day crawled slowly on with no sign of his coming. It was a soft day of veiled sunlight, with a silver bloom on the distant hills, and the milky scent of the hawthorn blossom along the woodshore came and went like breath on the little wandering aimless wind that seemed at times to lie down and go to sleep in the young bracken. A day when one could not quite believe in the red evening on which the sun must go down. The slow hours wore away; nothing stirred among the wayside scrub save from time to time that small fitful wind silvering the hazel bushes; only in the half shadow under the trees, now and then the jink of a bridle bit or the low voice of a man soothing a restless horse told where the cavalry waited – waited ...

  I put up my hand to feel that the knot of hawthorn was still in the forehead band of my helmet – it had become a custom with us of the Company always to ride into battle with something of the kind about us, both for identification and as a kind of grace note, a mark of pride. A gadfly bit my old Arian, and he tossed up his head, snorting and trying to flick his tail which was knotted up for battle in the usual way, that no enemy might grab him by it to hamstring him. Somewhere among the far woods the first cuckoo of the year called repeatedly, the sound soft and bloomed with distance. Beyond the scrub, the shining midge clouds danced in the sunshine.

  Noon was long past, the shadows of the opposite hillside had gathered themselves up small under the trees, and our own shadows were beginning to flow cool down toward the stream, when there was a kind of dark quiver along the skyline of the opposite ridge, where the Eburacum road lifted over it. I had been staring that way so long that for a moment I could not be sure that it was anything more than the skyline crawling under my tired eyes. I blinked, trying for clear sight, and the flicker came again, more strongly this time, more unmistakably.

  The waiting of that interminable day was over.

  A few moments more, and it was as though the dark lip of a wave lifted over the crest of the ridge, clung there an instant and then spilled over. And so we saw again the Saxon war host.

  They were spreading down into the valley, a swarm of ants, as the scout had said, their center on the road, their wings spread out, thick rather than far, over the firmer ground on either side. The level rays of the westering sun struck jinks of light out of their darkness, the broad fireflake of a spearhead, the round boss of a shield, the comb of a helmet; and among them the streaming white horsetail standards caught the light and seemed to shine of themselves, harshly bright as the sun-touched wings of a wheeling gull against a thunder sky.

  The scout had not been far astray in his estimate; there must be around fifteen hundred of the enemy. It seemed to me that I could feel already the faint trembling of the ground under their advancing feet. I was in the saddle by that time, and I said to Prosper my trumpeter, sitting his horse beside me with the silver-bound aurochs hunting horn we had always used to sing us into battle, ‘Sound me the “Mount and Make Ready.”’

  He set the silver mouthpiece to his lips, and the familiar notes rang out, not loudly but with a haunting echo under the trees, and instantly there was a stir to the right and left and behind me, as man after man swung into the saddle.

  ‘Now the “Advance.”’

  One cannot use too many different cavalry calls; it is confusing to the men and horses who must obey them, but I had passed to each of the chiefs and my squadron captains, that the first time the Advance sounded that day, it meant simply that the Companions and the spears and javelin men, but not the archers, who were to remain under cover just within the fringe of the scrub, were to move out from the woodshore into the open so that they could be seen by the enemy, and there halt.

  While the soft echoes still hung under the branches, there came a brushing and a cracking of twigs, and a surge forward through the undergrowth, the beat of hooves on last year’s fallen leaves, and the jingle of bit and harness, and our battle line moved out into the open and drew rein on the clear ground before the wood-shore. I bent forward for the dappled bullhide buckler with its boss of gilded bronze that hung from my saddlebow, and swinging it high to my bridle shoulder, gathered up the reins again, sensing rather than hearing the movement echoed all around me. We had begun of late years, as we got larger and heavier horses, to practice the new Byzantine style of warfare. It was far more effective than the old hacking sword charge, but it still seemed strange to me to ride into battle with the slim ashen spear shaft balanced in my hand instead of the familiar sword grip.

  The Saxons had seen us; their dark mass checked an instant in its advance, then they set up a great shout, and the quiet valley and the cuckoo’s calling were engulfed in the hollow booming of the Saxon war horns that seemed to burst to and fro from wooded crest to wooded crest. And the dark battle mass came rolling on again at an increased pace. That was what I had wanted; for that I had given the order to advance into the open; for it needed no mere orderly oncoming, but the hot-blood hurly of a charge to bring the bear traps into their full use.

  ‘Play me a tune,’ I said to Prosper. ‘Just a tune that sounds like mockery.’

  He grinned, and again putting the mouthpiece to his lips, answered the strident bellowing of the war horns with a lazy rendering of the hunting call that sics the hounds on when the quarry comes in sight. Probably they did not know what it meant, but the mere sound of it was an insult; and across the valley we heard the yell that they set up, and the war horns bellowing again. They were sweeping down toward the ford, the white horsetails lifting and flowing out on the wind of their going, and my old Arian flung up his head and neighed his own defiance to the war horns.

  I had wondered how the new crossbred horses would stand up to their initiation. All that winter we had been training them on, breaking them to crowds and hostile shouting and the boom of war horns, teaching them to charge unbroken against men with blunted spears, to stand undismayed against the rush of yelling warriors, to run straight on a target, to use their own ironshod forefeet as weapons; for to get the most worth out of a war-horse, he as well as the man on his back must be a fighter. They had learned well and willingly in the main, with the proud eagerness to understand and do what is wanted that most of the horse kind show, once the first struggle of breaking is over. But would they remember their training now? Now, when the spears were not blunt and they caught the smell of blood?

  The Saxons had almost reached the stream; a close-knit mass, shield to shield, shoulder to comrade’s shoulder, and as they came, quickening into a loping wolf run, we heard the deadly sound of the Saxon war cry that begins as a murmur like the murmur of distant surf, and swells and swells at last into an appalling roar that seems to shake the very hills. They had taken t
o the water now, their center crossing by the ford, those on either side splashing as best they could through the shifting shallows, and as they came I saw in their forefront, under the white horse standards, Hengest himself, in the brave midst of his house carls. An old gray-gold giant, with the golden arm ring of an earl coiled about his sword arm, and the low sunlight clashing like cymbals on the bronze-bound ox horns of his helmet; and at his side a lesser man of half his age but with something of the same brutish splendor, who could be no one else than Octa his son.

  Of necessity the Saxons had lost their close formation through the shallows; men were being pushed too far out, so that the battle line became ragged; the stream was all a yeasty thresh and the spray sheeted up about them, bright in the level sunlight. They were across now, closing the ragged shield mass, roaring uphill at the full charge, though their battle-front was taking on the shape of a bent bow as the struggling flanks were slowed by the soft ground.

  Old Arian began to dance under me, snorting, and I quieted him with a hand on his neck; he was always impatient for the charge before the trumpets sounded. Other horses were catching the fret from him; men, too; suddenly I felt as though I were holding straining hounds in leash, waiting for the moment to slip them against the quarry.

  I had not long to hold them. The van of the dark onsweeping mass was halfway up the gentle slope. Another spear’s length. The terrible rhythmic battle shouting broke into a ragged outcry, as between one step and the next, the innocent bracken-clad hillside opened to engulf the foremost surge of the great man-wave. The first rank plunged from view almost before they could yell their dismay; those behind could not stop, thrust on by those behind again, and pitched down on top of their comrades. One of the horsetail standards lurched and went down, and in a bare heartbeat of time all was wild confusion, twisting and struggling bodies and the furious and anguished cries of men.

  But with the trenches caved in all along their length, the Saxons could see what lay before them, and the surge forward began again. Some of the men had chance-struck the gaps of solid ground between, and were hardly checked at all, some jumped the trenches or swarmed across over the very bodies of their comrades, while those in the trenches who had escaped the sharpened stakes began to scramble out. The war horns were bellowing like wounded bulls. Nevertheless, the bear traps had done their work, and the impetus of the charge was broken.

  I was aware suddenly, as though they were a part of myself, of the archers hidden among the hazel scrub, each with an arrow notched to his drawn bowstring. The timing was perfect, the struggling chaos along the trenches had barely begun to sink, when the dark flight of arrows that I had been waiting for leapt from among the bushes and thrummed like a cloud of hornets into its midst. Men were down in good earnest now, and I felt how the hidden bowmen stooped forward each one for another shaft from the ground before him or the loose battle quiver hanging at his saddlebow ...

  Far along our own line I heard the shout of command, and our spearmen, yelping their own short sharp battle cry, were running forward down the hill. The few Saxon archers on the flank, unable to see where our bowmen loosed from under cover, turned their own short deadly arrows against the spears – and the moment had come to slip the hounds.

  ‘Sound me the charge.’

  The man beside me set the great horn to his lips, and winded the one long blast that set the echoes flying like startled birds all up and down the valley. From away to the left, almost in the same instant, Bedwyr’s trumpeter took up the note; a great shout rose from our men, and both cavalry wings broke forward, the spears that had been resting upright swinging down as one to the horizontal. I crouched low into the saddle, feet braced into my stirrups against the coming shock, feeling through every fiber of my being the balance of the leveled spear against palm and fingers, hearing the flying thunder of the squadron’s hooves behind me.

  We took them on both flanks, and at the full gallop.

  They had no chance to form the shield wall; for the first moments of impact it was not battle as I counted battle, but sheer red butchery. But whatever evil may be cried against the Sea Wolves, no man ever yet called their courage in question. Somehow they closed and steadied their ranks; they fought like heroes; their archers stood like rocks though their numbers grew steadily fewer under dark hail of the long British war shafts, and loosed their own arrows without pause into our ranks. The house carls of the center held us with spear and seax long after the light throwing axes were spent; their naked and stained berserkers flung themselves upon our very spearpoints to dirk our horses from underneath. Afterward, I was glad that the thing had after all been a battle and not a massacre. At the time I saw all things through a crimson haze, and felt very little.

  The sun was gone, and the dusk was creeping up the valley like the slow inflowing of the tide, when they broke at last and turned to fly. They streamed away, a tattered shadow of the host that had stormed across the stream in the late sunlight, seemingly so short a time ago; and as we swept after them, down to the ford, the single high note of a horn sounded once more, and Cei and his wild riders swept down upon them out of the far woods.

  In the swiftly fading light, the main number got away, all the same; and leaving Cei to harry them into the hills, the rest of us, who had borne the chief heat of the fighting, drew off and turned back toward the long wooded ridge below which the straggle had taken place, and the work that still waited for us there.

  Some of the archers, with the pack train drivers and the women, were already moving among the fallen figures, looking at each to see if it were friend or foe, dead or wounded. Our own dead were being carried aside for burial, the Saxons left for the ravens and the wolves if any chanced not yet to have drawn off into their summer fortresses; they would make the Eburacum road unsavory for a while, but we had other things to do than bury Saxons. The Saxon wounded were being cleanly knifed; I doubt if they gave as clean an end to our own men in like case, but I have always set my face against mutilation, at least of living men, and the few women who had tried it in the early days had found their mistake.

  I abandoned the scene, and when Amlodd had taken Arian from me (the old war-horse was still sidling and snorting, and there was blood and brains on his ironshod forehooves) went to see how it was with our own wounded. A swarm of good folk from Deva were helping to get the more sorely hurt into carts and farm sledges. We could not care for them in the camp, and at first light tomorrow we must be away after the Saxons, to follow up the day’s victory, so it was better for them to be got back to Deva, even if a few of them died of the jolting on the road. There would be folk in plenty to care for them; even a surgeon, good though generally drunk.

  A great fire had been lit in the midst of our last night’s camp on the Deva side of the woods; and the carts and sledges were drawn up on the farthest fringes of the firelight; and Gwalchmai, with a filthy rag twisted around his own left forearm, was limping serenely among the wounded, looking to each as he was brought in through the trees, with the priest and a few of the women to help him. His face was gray and still, with the gentleness and complete withdrawal from all other matters that came to him only when he was plying his craft. I wanted to speak to him, ask him how badly we had suffered; I wanted to speak to some of the men themselves; but that must wait. I never forced questions on Gwalchmai when that look was on his face. I think I had always the feeling that to thrust myself between him and the thing he was doing would be in some way an intrusion.

  So I left him and his wounded, and went back to the great fire where the standard had been set up and the food was already being given out and Bedwyr was waiting for me.

  ‘Who is seeing about burying our dead?’ I asked.

  ‘Alun Dryfed is in charge just now. I’ve given orders for the work to be done in relays, for the grave must needs be dug deep, here in the wilderness.’

  ‘Save for the amount needed to make good the road, we can use the earth from the trenches to raise a good-sized mound over the
m for safety.’

  He nodded, looking into the fire under that one level and mocking eyebrow. ‘You’ll want Brother Simon to patter a few prayers over them before we cover them in?’

  I never learned what god Bedwyr worshipped, if any; it certainly was not the Christos. Maybe it was the thing between hand and harp string ... ‘Seeing that we have a priest among us we might as well make use of him,’ I said. ‘But there’s time enough for the prayers when he has done helping Gwalchmai with the wounded. The living first, the dead after.’

  ‘All things in their proper order. Well, there are a good few more of the Saxon kind to feed the wolves than there are for the Christian prayers and the grave mound.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So far as I can judge as yet, our losses have been surprisingly light compared with theirs.’

  He cocked that flaring eyebrow at me. ‘Surprisingly? When one thinks of those bear pits?’

  I was silent for a moment, and then I said, ‘It was not the kind of fighting that I would choose. I thought at the first after the Companions came in that it was going to be a massacre. I am glad it flowered into a battle after all.’

  ‘You’re a strange man, my Lord Artos the Bear. There are times when I think that you come near to loving the Saxon kind.’

  ‘Only when I am actually at his throat and he at mine. Not before – and not after.’

  Two of my own squadron came out from the black gloom of the trees, dragging a body between them. A body that, judging by the way they handled it, was Saxon and none of ours. They flung it down in the full red glare of the firelight, rolling it over onto its back with a silent triumph that shouted more loudly than any voice could do. Then Bericus the Senior said simply, ‘We found this.’

  Lying sprawled uncouthly at the foot of the Red Dragon where the men had tumbled him down, there was a certain splendor about him still. An old man, an old giant, with bright hairs that shone like gold wires in the gray jut of his beard and the mane of wild hair outflung about his head. I recognized him first by the earl’s bracelet twisted about his sword arm, for a spear had taken him between the eyes, but as I looked more closely into the smashed and blood-pooled face, I recognized the cunning iron-bound mouth, drawn back now in a frozen snarl. I recognized above all, I think, the greatness that seemed to cling about him still, an atmosphere of the thing that had made him a giant in more than body; this ancient enemy of Ambrosius’s. Hengest, the Jutish adventurer who had grown to be a war lord of the Saxon hordes, lying flung down like tribute at the foot of the British standard that stirred faintly in the night air above him.