Excalibur

by Bernard Cornwell

  I had divided my men into ten bands, each responsible for two of the Saxon columns, but I doubted that even the best of my spearmen would stand for more than three or four minutes. Most likely, I thought, my men would run back to protect their women as soon as the enemy threatened to outflank them and the fight would then collapse into a miserable one-sided slaughter around our makeshift hut and its surrounding campfires. So be it, I thought, and I walked among my men and thanked them for their services and encouraged them to kill as many Saxons as they could. I reminded them that the enemies they slew in battle would be their servants in the Otherworld, ‘so kill them,’ I said, ‘and let their survivors recall this fight with horror.’ Some of them began to sing the Death Song of Werlinna, a slow and melancholy tune that was chanted about the funeral fires of warriors. I sang with them, watching the Saxons climb nearer, and because I was singing, and because my helmet clasped me tight about the ears, I did not hear Niall of the Blackshields hail me from the hill’s farther rim.

  It was not till I heard the women cheering that I turned. I still saw nothing unusual, but then, above the sound of the Saxon drums, I heard the shrill, high note of a horn.

  I had heard that horn-call before. I had first heard it when I was a new young spearman and Arthur had ridden to save my life, and now he came again.

  He had come on horseback with his men, and Niall had shouted at me when those heavily armoured horsemen had swept through the Saxons on the hill beyond the saddle and galloped on down the slope. The women on Mynydd Baddon were running to the ramparts to watch him, for Arthur did not ride up to the summit, but led his men around the upper slope of the hill. He was in his polished scale armour and wore his gold-encrusted helmet and carried his shield of hammered silver. His great war banner was unfurled, its black bear streaming stark on a linen field that was as white as the goose feathers in Arthur’s helm. His white cloak billowed from his shoulders and a pennant of white ribbon was tied about the base of his spear’s long blade. Every Saxon on Mynydd Baddon’s lower slopes knew who he was and knew what those heavy horses could do to their small columns. Arthur had only brought forty men, for most of his big warhorses had been stolen by Lancelot in the previous year, but forty heavily armoured men on forty horses could tear infantry into horror.

  Arthur reined in beneath the southern angle of the ramparts. The wind was small, so that Guinevere’s banner was not visible except as an unrecognizable flag hanging from its makeshift staff. He looked for me, and finally recognized my helmet and armour. ‘I have two hundred spearmen a mile or so behind!’ he shouted up at me.

  ‘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. ‘AH, 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 Bri
tain. 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.

  The Saxons should have left the valley. They could have marched to the Severn and laid siege to Glevum, and we would have been forced to abandon our high ground and follow them, but Sagramor was right; men who have made themselves comfort- able are reluctant to move and so Cerdic and Aelle stubbornly stayed in the river valley where they believed they were laying siege to us when in truth we were besieging them. They finally did make some attacks up the hills, but none of those assaults were pressed home. The Saxons would swarm up the hills, but when a shield line appeared at the ridge top ready to oppose them and a troop of Arthur’s heavy horsemen showed on their flank with levelled spears, their ardour would fade and they would sidle back to their villages, and each Saxon failure only increased our confidence.

  That confidence was so high that, after Cuneglas’s army arrived, Arthur felt able to leave us. I was astonished at first, for he offered no explanation other than he had an important errand that lay a day’s long ride northwards. I suppose my astonishment must have showed, for he laid an arm on my shoulders. ‘We haven’t won yet,’ he told me.

  ‘I know, Lord.’

  ‘But when we do, Derfel, I want this victory to be overwhelming. No other ambition would take me away from here.’ He smiled. ‘Trust me?’

  ‘Of course, Lord.’

  He left Cuneglas in command of our army, but with strict orders that we were to make no attacks into the valley. The Saxons were to be left imagining that they had us cornered, and to help that deception a handful of volunteers pretended to be deserters and ran to the Saxon camps with news that our men were in such low spirits that some were running away rather than face a fight, and that our leaders were in furious dispute over whether to stay and face a Saxon attack or run north to beg for shelter in Gwent.

  ‘I’m still not sure I see a way to end this,’ Cuneglas admitted to me on the day after Arthur had left. ‘We’re strong enough to keep them from the high ground,’ he went on, ‘but not strong enough to go down into the valley and beat them.’

  ‘So maybe Arthur’s gone to fetch help, Lord King?’ I suggested.

  ‘What help?’ Cuneglas asked.

  ‘Culhwch perhaps?’ I said, though that was unlikely because Culhwch was said to be east of the Saxons, and Arthur was riding north. ‘Oengus mac Airem?’ I offered. The King of Demetia had promised his Blackshield army, but those Irishmen had still not come.

  ‘Oengus, maybe,’ Cuneglas agreed, ‘but even with the Black-shields we won’t have enough men to beat those bastards.’ He nodded down into the valley. ‘We need Gwent’s spearmen to do that.’

  ‘And Meurig won’t march,’ I said.

  ‘Meurig won’t march,’ Cuneglas agreed, ‘but there are some men in Gwent who will. They still remember Lugg Vale.’ He offered me a wry smile, for on that occasion Cuneglas had been our enemy and the men of Gwent, who were our allies, had feared to march against the army led by Cuneglas’s father. Some in Gwent were still ashamed of that failure, a shame made worse because Arthur had won without their help, and I supposed it possible that, if Meurig permitted it, Arthur might lead some of those volunteers south to Aquae Sulis; but I still did not see how he could collect enough men to let us go down into that nest of Saxons and slaughter them.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Guinevere suggested, ‘he’s gone to find Merlin?’

  Guinevere had refused to leave with the other women and children, insisting that she would see the battle through to defeat or victory. I thought Arthur might insist that she left, but whenever Arthur had come to the hilltop Guinevere had hidden herself, usually in the crude hut we had made on the plateau, and it was only after Arthur left that she reappeared. Arthur surely knew that she had remained on Mynydd Baddon, for he had watched our women leave with a careful eye and he must have seen she was not among them, but he had said nothing. Nor, when Guinevere emerged, did she mention Arthur, though she did smile whenever she saw that he had allowed her banner to remain on the ramparts. I had originally encouraged her to leave the mount, but she had scorned my suggestion and none of my men had wanted her to go. They ascribed their survival to Guinevere, and rightly too, and their reward was to equip her for battle. They had taken a fine mail shirt from a rich Saxon corpse and, once the blood was scrubbed from the mail’s links, they had presented it to Guinevere, they had painted her symbol on a captured shield, and one of my men had even yielded his own prized wolftail helmet, so that she was now dressed like the rest of my spearmen, though being Guinevere she managed to make the wargear look disturbingly seductive. She had become our talisman, a heroine to all my men.

  ‘No one knows where Merlin is,’ I said, responding to her suggestion.

  ‘There was a rumour he was in Demetia,’ Cuneglas said, ‘so maybe he’ll come with Oengus?’

  ‘But your Druid has come?’ Guinevere asked Cuneglas.

  ‘Malaine is here,’ Cuneglas confirmed, ‘and he can curse well enough. Not like Merlin, perhaps, but well enough.’

  ‘What about Taliesin?’ Guinevere asked.

  Cuneglas showed no surprise that she had heard of the young bard, for clearly Taliesin’s fame was spreading swiftly. ‘He went to seek Merlin,’ he said.
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  ‘And is he truly good?’ Guinevere asked.

  ‘Truly,’ Cuneglas said. ‘He can sing eagles from the sky and salmon from their pools.’

  ‘I pray we shall hear him soon,’ Guinevere said, and indeed those strange days on that sunny hilltop did seem more suited to singing than to fighting. The spring had become fine, summer was not far off, and we lazed on the warm grass and watched our enemies who seemed struck by a sudden helplessness. They attempted their few futile attacks on the hills, but made no real effort to leave the valley. We later heard they were arguing. Aelle had wanted to combine all the Saxon spearmen and strike north into the hills, so splitting our army into two parts that could be destroyed separately, but Cerdic preferred to wait until our food ran short and our confidence ebbed, though that was a vain hope for we had plenty of food and our confidence was increasing every day. It was the Saxons who went hungry, for Arthur’s light horsemen harried their foraging parties, and it was Saxon confidence that waned, for after a week we saw mounds of fresh earth appear on the meadows by their huts and we knew that the enemy were digging graves for their dead. The disease that turns the bowels to liquid and robs a man of his strength had come to the enemy, and the Saxons weakened every day. Saxon women staked fish traps in the river to find food for their children, Saxon men dug graves, and we lay in the high sun and talked of bards.

  Arthur returned the day after the first Saxon graves were dug. He spurred his horse across the saddle and up Mynydd Baddon’s steep northern slope, prompting Guinevere to pull on her new helmet and squat among a group of my men. Her red hair flaunted itself under the helmet’s rim like a banner, but Arthur pretended not to notice. I had walked to meet him and, halfway across the hill’s summit, I stopped and stared at him in astonishment.

  His shield was a circle of willow boards covered in leather, and over the leather was hammered a thin sheet of polished silver that shone with the reflected sunlight, but now there was a new symbol on his shield. It was the cross; a red cross, made from cloth strips that had been gummed onto the silver. The Christian cross. He saw my astonishment and grinned. ‘Do you like it, Derfel?’