Dominic and his archers rode past Augustus and advanced a way down the hill. ‘This time we’ll shut their wretched noise once and for all!’ shouted Dominic, through the clamour of horns, drumbeats and shrieking. Augustus watched as the mounted bowmen, all armed with composite bows of unequalled power, stood in saddles and sent a shower of death towards the druids.
Many of Guertepir’s holy men fell to the first wave of arrows. The remainder turned and fled, scrambling under the shields and away from the theatre of war.
Dominic’s group quickly sent another flock of arrows skywards. After describing a high, looping trajectory, the arrows fell upon the men at the back of the shieldwall. The action provoked a response from the cavalry at the flanks and a detachment peeled away towards Dominic and his men.
As the archers fled—their role being to skirmish, rather than fight head-on with armed horsemen—Augustus and the other fifty tacticians did as the Druids had done and ran towards their own wall. The shields parted, allowing them to enter and take positions at the front.
Three British horn blasts sounded (the signal to meet advancing horse), and soon spears were passed from the back of the line to stick outwards from every shield.
A detachment of sixty Votadini cavalry hurtled towards the centre section of the British wall. Two of the younger riders, driven by battle fever and eager to prove themselves, rushed at the spears. Cunedda, who led the group, attempted to check the progress of the pair but his cry was unheard in the furore.
Augustus winced as he readied himself for the collision. When it came, it sent him backwards three steps, causing his teeth to judder, but his section of wall held. His spear flew from his grasp, half its length sticking from the horse’s chest. The animal reared upwards, before falling backwards and dead, its rider landing in a heap at Augustus’ feet. The man next to him thrust his spear into the stricken rider, killing him. Down the line, the other horse and rider had met a similar fate.
Arthur dwelt on the right flank of the shieldwall. With him, Flint, Withred, Dominic and three hundred and fifty cavalry sat ready to go. On the opposite flank, some four hundred paces away, Gherwan, Hereferth and an equal number of riders waited. Lightly caparisoned, the cavalry wore armour made of tough fabric or leather—garb suited for mobility and freedom of movement. Shields, painted with Arthur’s unicorn or Hereferth’s lynx, accompanied all.
Arthur eyes blazed from the eye-slits of his plumed helm as he rode between the men. He shouted above the roar of battle. ‘Remember your role is to rush the overlapping flank of their wall! DO NOT attempt to break it—their spears will put an end to you if you do! Our purpose is to draw their cavalry from the outer edges and so expose the shieldsmen there to our archers!’
He pointed to Dominic, who was addressing his men a distance away. ‘They have their own role, and will be our support. Flint counts five hundred mounted Votadini, Saxon and Hibernian riders on each of their flanks, so we will be outnumbered! Few of them, though, are used to fighting from the saddle, and that’s where we’ll press our advantage!’
He looked to Withred and Flint. The pair sat pale but resolute. Withred was dressed in a black, studded leather tunic; his head enwrapped in an iron-grey helm with purple plume. Flint wore a composite bronze cuirass, consisting of breastplate and backplate. A Roman-style riveted helmet completed his armour. His arms, like Withred’s and Arthur’s, were bare from shoulder to fingertip. The sight of the pair filled Arthur with hope. Both nodded to him. Both were ready to go.
Arthur stood in his saddle and raised Skullcleft, his sword, skywards. On the opposite flank, Gherwan took up the signal and reciprocated Arthur’s stance. Horses snorted, whinnied and stamped as the raw, sizzling energy of the morning infused their very bones.
A distance away Dominic had finished his parley to his mounted archers. His instructions had been clear: each group was to send death to Saxon archers, Votadini shield, and enemy riders on both flanks. Next to Dominic, bestride a piebald pony, sat Tomas. Both men (because Tomas had become a man) had ditched the helms supplied by Arthur, deeming them to cumbersome and restrictive. Now they wore their wolf heads; now they were hunters again.
The archers formed into two groups—eighty men would harass Arthur’s protagonists on the right flank of the enemy shieldwall, and eighty harass Gherwan’s on the left. All knew their task. All were eager to go.
‘TO WAR!’ Arthurs cry rang out sudden and clear. Gherwan, on the opposite flank, echoed the command.
Dominic held his archers back as the knights thundered away. He looked over to the left, where an able man named Harvey, some four hundred paces distant, awaited his signal.
Dominic watched as Arthur and Gherwan closed upon the shieldwall, prompting Guertepir’s riders to break from the edges. ‘It’s worked,’ he said. ‘Now we can start to sting them.’ He gave Harvey the signal to move and rode into the field of battle.
Arthur twisted in his saddle as he jerked Storm’s muscular neck backwards and away from the Votadini spears that spiked from the rowan-emblazoned shields. Withred, beside him, pointed towards the approaching enemy cavalry. He shouted above the clamour. ‘They come to engage and so leave their backs exposed to Dominic’s arrows—so far so good!’
Arthur cast a glance behind him along the entire length of the shieldwall. ‘Gherwan’s troop has drawn them out as well!’ he shouted. Turning back to Withred, he readied himself for the onrushing first wave of attack. ‘Get ready, here they come—‘
Withred’s darting eyes had caught sight of the hurtling spear. Flung from the back of the shieldwall it headed for Arthur. He pushed at his lord, almost knocking him from the saddle. The shaft brushed Arthur’s head as it passed.
Wheeling his horse around, Withred looked out for further projectiles. ‘Nerthus! The bastards nearly picked our purses at the first encounter! We must get away from these shields and fight them nearer to our own line!’
Before he could respond, Arthur was forced to engage the slashing sword of a Saxon rider who had come quickly upon him. Another rider—a Hibernian, wielding an ax and holding his shield close—went for Withred. The Angle, whose preferred weapon on horse was the longsword, parried the smash with his shield. He screamed inwardly as a jolt shot up his arm, but answered the assault with a sideways slash at the Hibernian. The man barely met the parry, his shield splintering such was the power of the blow. Withred dropped his body to the neck side of his horse to avoid an immediate, retaliatory, overhead swipe from the Hibernian. The hack bit into his beast’s withers causing it to rear.
With horse aloft, Withred towered above his man, and as the beast dropped to its forelegs, he timed his next attack to precision. His blade whistled as it slammed into the plumed helmet. The Hibernian’s face, thus revealed, evidenced his total concussion. Withred kicked him from his saddle and swung round to Arthur.
He gasped to find that the lord of Brythonfort was already dispatching his fourth man. Arthur’s words—“Few of them, though, are used to fighting from the saddle, and that’s where we can press our advantage!”—came to him as noticed the three bodies lying dead at the busy feet of Arthur’s mare. But—Gods—man, you are not human, he thought, as he allowed himself a fleeting glance of Arthur at work.
Arthur readied himself to strike at his fourth challenger as he skilfully and tightly guided Storm around him. Although carrying a shield, Arthur’s horsemanship was such that he rarely needed to use it. His opponent, a Hibernian wielding a single-bladed battle-ax, had failed to land a single strike upon him.
Frustrated, the man screamed out his fury. ‘Keep still and fight me like a man’—again he lunged and missed—‘damn you, keep still and fight!’
Playing his reins through his left hand, Arthur remained impassive, his subtle signals transferring his every intention through to Storm, who danced with precision and dexterity to his tune. Soon the Hibernian was gasping. A quick glance away from Arthur, as his exasperation led him to look for help, was to be his undoing.
Arthur, who had bided his time and waited for the slightest opening, met the Hibernian’s renewal of attention with his slashing blade. Skullcleft’s keen edge found the gap between the man’s cheekguard and shoulder, removing his head in one swipe.
Arthur, blood splattered and breathless, turned Storm in a tight circle to assess developments. A brief respite allowed him to take in the scene. The enemy shieldwall, delayed by the mounted battle before it, had halted its synchronized march up the hill. The main body of mounted conflict (Gherwan’s group having now melded with Arthur’s) had edged nearer to the British shieldwall and this suited Arthur. Soon Guertepir’s cavalry would be exposed to British spears. A half mile still separated the lines, and upon this ground the entire cavalries now fought.
Another rider, eager for fame after spotting Arthur’s distinctive white plume, galloped towards him, but this time the British king had no need to act. The man fell from his saddle when still six horse lengths away. A glance to the edge of the battlefield revealed that Dominic’s group was active and the man had fallen to one of their arrows.
Dominic had been careful to keep his men away from direct contact with Guertepir’s cavalry. Whenever enemy riders rushed them, the archers would disperse, leaving the combatants frustrated and with nobody to fight.
Dominic had split his eighty men on the right flank into three groups. His best archers (some thirty men) all wielded high velocity recurved bows and these were sent to harry the two hundred strong Votadini archers who stood behind Guertepir’s shieldwall. Dominic’s elite archers also had their counterparts on the left flank. Both groups had the same brief: to pin down the Votadini bowmen and effectively neutralize their threat. With superior reach, the British had no fear of effective return fire from the Votadini.
Dominic’s second section (again with its mirror image on the left flank) was to send a shower of death into the exposed edges of Guertepir’s shieldwall, now void of the protection of their cavalry.
The third group, meanwhile, had turned its attention to the horse fight; its task to pick off enemy riders from distance.
Tomas paused a moment as an arrow bearer came to him. Having already sent fifty arrows at the Votadini bowmen, he took a full quiver from Frysil—one of many men whose sole job was to keep the archers supplied with missiles. Frysil’s own horse had full quivers of arrows hanging from several hooks and catches on its tack.
‘How goes it, elsewhere?’ asked Tomas.
‘Goes well … for our archers at least!’ shouted Frysil above the noise. ‘The edge of their shieldwall has shrunk from our arrows. By my guess its not much wider than our own now. The spare men have piled up behind it, though … seven … eight deep they are in in places. They’ll give one almighty shove when they meet our boys!’
‘And Dominic?’
‘He sends hell into their riders along with twenty others; they must have taken out nearly one hundred of them!’ Frysil noticed a line of arrows stuck into the ground thirty paces away. He nodded towards them. ‘I take it that’s the range of the Votadini archers!’
‘Yes, we’re outranging them with these bows. Have them pinned down, they can’t move!’
‘Well good luck, I must be gone!’ shouted Frysil, his voice becoming lost in the din as he left to attend to another archer.
Augustus had taken his place at the front of the shieldwall and now watched as events unfolded below. Like an organic, single entity, the wall stood tense and ready on the ridge.
Pwyll stood beside Augustus, his small head enclosed in a round steel helmet. ‘D’you think we’ll get to jab at their cavalry with these spears, Gus?’ he asked.
‘Well, that’s the plan, Pwyll,’ said Augustus, his attention riveted on the action below, ‘and it seems to be working up to now. The fight’s coming towards us; the nearest of them can only be three hundred paces away.’
‘How d’you think it’s going?’
‘We’re holding our own and their shieldwall’s lost its overlap. Shit, Pwyll, Dominic and his men are causing havoc on the flanks. It’s almost as if this fight’s been made for the wily bastard, he’s … whoa! prepare yourself, there’s a rider on his way, lift your spear!’
But it was Flint, gore-smitten and intense, who approached. He looked for Augustus in the line and soon found him. ‘Their wall has enormous depth and is moving again!’ he shouted. ‘Our riders need to get out of the gap soon—that or be trapped. We hope to push some of their horses onto your spears before we withdraw, but nothing’s certain yet!’
‘Then get your scrawny arse back down there and thin them out a little before they get here!’ shouted Augustus.
With a wry smile, Flint touched his helmet to Augustus, then turned and rode back into the fray.
Two hours before dawn on the third day of the battle, Raedwald had slinked away from Aquae Sulis. Not wishing to chance being seen by Hrodgar or the others, he had decided his best course was to leave the city altogether. He would head westwards towards the place named Brythonfort, and there wait for the Saxon army as it advanced. With any luck, the bastard Hrodgar might have fallen by then, saving him a job. That would enable him to blend into the army as if he’d never been away.
But instead of heading southwards as he should, Raedwald managed to get himself lost again, taking a meandering path before ending up on a road five miles east of Aquae Sulis.
Dawn was smudging the sky with its first light when he finally met the road and began to head south. Soon, a wagon rambled towards him from behind, forcing him to scuttle for cover. Raedwald cursed his luck when the dray stopped a mere twenty paces away. Astounded and hidden, he had gasped when seeing a giant of a man and another in a wolf hat. They had ridden beside the wagon and attended to the two women who rode upon it.
The wolf hat could mean but one thing—Dominic the companion of Withred, and the man partly responsible for the death of his father. The other man too was legend, as the dog tied with a long lead to the wagon reminded him. He had to be ‘Augustus the giant’—the destroyer of a killer dog with his bare hands. Furthermore, he had done the same to Ambrosius, the Negro. Possessing enough rationality not to act at that moment, Raedwald decided to watch and learn.
That the women meant much to the two Britons was plain to see. Satisfied they were far enough from Aquae Sulis to continue on their way alone, the women were saying their goodbyes. No doubt fleeing out of harm’s way before the battle began. Raedwald could see that the slimmer of the two was dear to the wolf man, whilst the other was cherished by the giant. He then realised that contrary to it being against him, fortune had done him a service. Before him, beside the wagon, the whores precious to the pair would soon be void of their protection. Having already settled one score—the slaughter and defilement of Withred’s aunt—he now had the chance to tie up the remaining loose ends. Now he could fully avenge the death of his father. He would follow the women and slay them, but first he would have to deal with the dog.
The cavalry fight had gone well for the British. Four hundred enemy riders now lay dead on the churned ground between the shieldwalls. Arthur had lost just one hundred, leaving the number of opposing riders standing at an equal six hundred.
The fight raged nearer to the British shieldwall and the gap had reduced to three hundred strides. The Brythonfort knights; some two hundred men—specialists trained to fight in the way of the Polybian horsemen of Rome and possessing their effective weaponry and technique—had wreaked havoc upon the enemy riders. Most, like Arthur and Flint, wore cuirasses to protect both torso and back. All wielded spathas—the long swords giving them superior reach over their opponents. More importantly, they knew exactly how to use their weapons.
In contrast, the enemy equestrians had fought in a way not familiar to them. Many had preferred to carry the spear and found to their cost that the heavy weapons required two-handed use, thus leaving their horses scantily controlled. The consequences were proving dire for them, as British riders were able to avoid the spear thrusts an
d deliver deathblows with their spathas.
Gherwan worked his way towards the man he guessed to be Hrodgar. That the Saxon was high ranking was apparent—Gherwan knew by the way men flocked to protect him whenever he was threatened. Gherwan was sure he was the same man who had attended the parley with Arthur, but now he wore a Saxon helm, partly obscuring his features. Shrieking his allegiance to Woden, another Saxon—the last one between Hrodgar and Gherwan—came at him. Arthur’s man ducked under a clumsy sideways swipe—his own counterstrike crunching against the chainmail hauberk of the Saxon, slamming him mid-torso. The man screamed out his unbridled agony as his ribs splintered beneath the ledge of the sword. Gherwan, whose horseplay matched Arthur’s, guided his steed close enough to deliver a lateral dagger thrust to the man’s jugular and so end the bout.
Gherwan now had Hrodgar before him. The British shieldwall, bristling with spears, stood behind them. Gherwan goaded his warhorse towards Hrodgar’s, pressing him towards the spears. Hrodgar, wild eyed and aware of the move, spurred his mount forward towards Gherwan and away from the threat behind him. He screamed at Gherwan, his furious curses and oaths unheard in the tremendous noise of battle.
Their swords met, high and ringing, the resultant crucifix locked a moment skywards. Hrodgar slid his sword from the deadlock and delivered his blurring blade towards Gherwan’s midriff. The blade floundered upon the bronze protection of the Briton’s cuirasse. Wincing, Gherwan delivered his counterstrike. Hrodgar’s horse shifted, taking the full force of the blow on its muzzle. With nostrils riven and bone exposed, the beast swung its neck away from Gherwan and fell backwards upon the spears protruding from the British shields. Hrodgar went to ground, his steed impaled.
Wolfbane (Historical Fiction Action Adventure Book, set in Dark Age post Roman Britain) Page 80
