“Come on!” shouted a golden-braided warrior, climbing to the top of the embankment. He waved to us. “Come on to your certain deaths! We welcome you.”
Arthur, walking beside me, drew Excalibur from its sheath with a silvery hiss. On the other side of the trunk Lancelot pulled his sword and behind me I heard
the other knights drawing theirs.
We were within arrow range of the trench. Barbarian bowmen began pelting us. My senses went into overdrive and I could see the arrows soaring lazily toward us. One thunked into the trunk inches from me. Arthur extended his shield to cover me, exposing himself to their fire.
Is this how he will die, I asked myself, trying to protect me? How Aten will laugh if
it happens that way.
Now they were throwing spears. I saw everything in slow motion, but although I could easily see arrows and spears coming my way, I could not dodge them. Not unless I dropped the tree trunk. Arthur caught an arrow on his shield. A spear hit the ground at his feet and clattered off the Roman paving stones.
We were within a few paces of the ditch’s edge. I heard a man scream
with sudden pain, and the trunk nearly twisted out of my grip.
“Now!” Arthur bellowed.
With every atom of strength in me, I ran down into the ditch, lugging the trunk with me. The other squires followed my lead, although two more of them went down with arrows through their bodies.
We rammed the tree trunk against the embankment. Most of the squires ducked under it for protection as the knights
clambered atop it and rushed straight across the ditch to the top of the embankment. I drew my sword and climbed up the sloping earthwork to be with Arthur.
Lancelot dashed forward, straight onto the crest of the embankment, where the barbarian warriors waited with their axes and swords. Arthur was rushing up behind him. He caught an axe thrust on his shield and took off the arm of the axe-wielder
with a stroke from Excalibur. The man shrieked as he fountained blood.
I dove in beside him as the other knights rushed into the fight, slashing and killing with the maddened fury that rises when blood begins to flow. Sir Emrys took a spear in his gut but sliced out his killer’s throat before he died. The knights were forming a wedge of steel, slowly pushing the barbarians back, down the rear
slope of their embankment. We were outnumbered by perhaps a hundred to one, but the knights—protected by their chain mail and shields—were weaving a web of death with their dripping swords.
Lancelot pushed deeper into the swarming mass of barbarian warriors, his sword a blur, men screaming and stumbling as he stroked the life out of them. Arthur struggled to keep up with him, wielding Excalibur
like a bloody buzz saw that took off arms, heads, split bare-chested warriors from shoulder to navel.
I tried to stay close behind Arthur but he and Lancelot were driving deeper into the mass of roaring, screaming warriors and I had my hands full keeping barbarians off their backs. More and more of them came swarming up the embankment, eager to get to the handful of knights. The whole barbarian
army seemed to be surging toward us.
Lancelot’s squire went down, an axe buried in his skull, and Arthur stumbled over the body.
I saw it all in agonizing slow motion: Arthur falling forward, thrusting his shield out in front of him to support himself as he went down. A huge barbarian, blond braids flying as he swung his axe in a mighty two-handed chop at Arthur’s unprotected back. Lancelot
not more than three feet away, but with his back turned to Arthur, hacking other barbarians to pieces. And me, separated from Arthur now by a good five yards, with half a dozen bloodied fighters between us.
“Arthur!” I screamed, driving through a flailing wall of fighting men.
Lancelot turned at the sound of my shout. Without an instant’s hesitation he swung his shield toward the descending
axe. I cut down two men trying to stand before me and pushed on toward Arthur, knowing I could not get to him in time. Lancelot caught the axeman’s forearm with the edge of his shield, knocking the blow away from Arthur. His axe thudded harmlessly into the ground as Lancelot split his skull, helmet and all, with a tremendous slash of his sword.
Arthur got to one knee as I reached him. A spearman
tried to get Arthur, but I yanked the spear out of his hands and drove my sword into his belly.
At the top of the earthwork we could see the entire mass of the barbarian army, hundreds of them rushing up the dirt slope to get at us, eager to wipe out our small force of knights and squires. There were far too many of them for us to have any hope of surviving.
It was like fighting against a tidal
wave. We stood at the crest of the rampart and fought for what seemed like hours. No matter how many we killed, more warriors charged up the slope at us. Knights and squires went down as the barbarians shrieked their battle cries and surged up at us with their spears and axes and swords.
We were only a handful to begin with. Our numbers were being whittled away. We slew three, four, seven men
for every one we lost. But for every barbarian who went down, ten more charged up the earthen ramp at us. It was only a matter of time before we all were killed, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, three hundred men against an army. And we were far fewer than three hundred.
Then it happened. A trumpet blast came up from the woods and with a bellowing roar the bulk of Arthur’s knights and footmen
charged out from the trees on both sides of the road, into the flanks of the surging torrent of barbarians. The knights were afoot, but I recognized them by the emblems on their shields: Sir Brian’s red badger, young Tristram’s Celtic cross, and the black hawk of Sir Bors, who was hacking through the surprised barbarians like the angel of death himself.
All through history, troops that have withstood
withering frontal assaults have broken and run when assailed from their flank or rear. Humans are made to look directly ahead; attacks from the side or from behind unnerve even the most battle-hardened soldiers.
Suddenly assaulted on both flanks, the barbarians broke and tried to run. They knew that a few miles down the Roman road was another defensive ditch, another entrenchment that could shelter
them from these sword-wielding Celtic knights pouring out of the woods.
They still outnumbered us greatly, but they were shattered by surprise and sudden fear. From the top of the earthen rampart I saw them break and flee down the road.
But not far. Galloping up the road toward us came the rest of Arthur’s knights, on their charging steeds, Gawain in the lead. They lowered their spears and smashed
into the broken, disheartened barbarians.
It was soon finished. The paving stones were littered with bodies, slick with blood. A few of the barbarians had managed to slip away through the woods, but very few. The heart of their army lay dead and dying at the feet of Arthur’s victorious men.
Victorious, but battered. Sir Bors was limping badly, his hip bleeding from an axe blow. Most of the other
knights who had fought on foot were also wounded. To my surprise I found that I had taken a spear thrust in my side. I hadn’t noticed it in the heat of battle. Now I automatically clamped down the blood vessels to stop the bleeding and lowered the pain signals along my nerves to a tolerable level.
I smiled tiredly as I watched the men patching each other’s wounds. No need to bind my side; I could
control my body well enough, and accelerated healing processes had been built into me.
Arthur slumped down beside me, resting his back against a tree, looking weary and grim. He was nicked here and there. Blood trickled from a slice along his right forearm.
“It’s only a scratch,” he said, when he noticed me staring at the wound.
Lancelot came up, all brightness and zeal. He was totally unharmed,
untouched, his tunic not even muddied. Only the dents in his shield revealed that he had been in battle.
He squatted down beside Arthur. “We can gallop down the road and catch the few who got away.”
Arthur shook his head.
“Why not?” Lancelot asked, surprised. He almost looked hurt. “It’s not much past noon. We have plenty of time to dispatch them.”
“They have another entrenchment up the road,”
Arthur said. “And still another after that.”
That dimmed Lancelot’s enthusiasm for less than a second. “What of it? We took this one, didn’t we? We made great slaughter of them! Let’s go on!”
“No,” Arthur said, his voice low. “The cost was too high.”
“But—”
Arthur reached out and put a hand on Lancelot’s shoulder. “We have gutted their army. They won’t be raiding our villages and farmsteads
now. We’ve taught them a lesson that they will remember for a long time.”
“But we haven’t driven them into the sea!”
“No, and we’re not going to. Not now. We’ve lost too many men. We need to rest a bit and recruit more men. Then we move north against the Jutes.”
Lancelot looked shocked. “And leave the Angles in their villages? Without driving them into the sea?”
“We don’t have the strength
to drive them into the sea. Not yet.”
Shaking his head in disappointment, Lancelot murmured, “That’s not the path to glory, my lord. Leaving them chastened isn’t the same as a glorious victory.”
With a tired smile, Arthur said, “I’m not interested in glory, my young friend. I’m interested in power.”
It was clear that Lancelot did not understand, but I thought I did. The Angles would huddle
behind their defensive earthworks and stay in their villages, the cream of their manhood killed. It would be a long time before they ventured out again to raid Celtic farms and settlements. Arthur would use that time to draw new recruits to his army, to march north and defeat the Jutes there, to drive the Scots back behind Hadrian’s Wall and secure the northern kingdoms.
He would win great power
for Ambrosius Aurelianus, making the old man a true High King among the Celts. And perhaps, I thought, Arthur himself would in the end become the High King. He was certainly showing that he understood the workings of power.
Aten wanted him dead, but it seemed to me that Arthur was actually on his way to uniting the fractious Celts. Maybe he would one day truly drive the barbarian invaders out
of Britain. I vowed anew to help him all I could.
Then I thought of Lancelot, so eager for glory. Aten had meant for Lancelot to lead Arthur to his death in the battle. Instead, Lancelot had saved Arthur’s life. I felt glad about that.
Yet I thought I heard, in the far recesses of my mind, Aten’s cynical laughter. Lancelot will still be the agent of Arthur’s death, the Golden One seemed to be
saying. Wait and see. Wait and see.
CHAPTER SIX
Bernicia
1
Arthur wasted no time marching northward.
He and his knights had fought all summer long, battling the invading barbarians in a bitter campaign that had started far to the south and now had brought us to the border of the Scottish lands. The aging Ambrosius Aurelianus, who styled himself High King of all the Celts, remained in his fine castle at Cadbury, ready to move
against the Saxons dwelling on Britain’s southern shore if they tried to push inland.
“It’s the wrong time of year for campaigning,” Sir Bors groused, peering up at the gray sky as we rode slowly along the old Roman road. “We should be heading back south.”
“Aye,” Sir Gawain agreed. “It’s cold up here. And there are too few wenches.”
Arthur shook his head stubbornly. “We’ll turn back once we’ve
driven the Picts and Scots back behind Hadrian’s Wall.”
There had been too few knights for Arthur to drive the barbarians entirely out of southern Britain. But he crushed their military power, annihilated the flower of their fighting manhood. Thoroughly cowed, they retreated to their fortified villages along the coast, but they would not be bringing fire and sword to the Celtic villages farther
inland. Not until a new generation of boys grew to fighting age.
Meantime the wild and fearsome Scots and Picts had swarmed across the unguarded length of Hadrian’s Wall to spread death and terror through the northern lands. Now we rode against them. They had thought the old crumbling wall was meant to keep them out of Britain’s northern reaches. Arthur intended to show them that the Wall had
other uses.
It was a terrible day, raining hard. Once we turned off the Roman road the ground beneath our horses’ hooves was a sea of cloying, slippery mud. At last we found the enemy, half naked in the cold pelting rain, a huge mass of barbarians drawing themselves into a ragged battle line once they saw us approaching.
Sir Bors wanted to wait until the rain stopped and the field dried, but
Arthur feared that the barbarians would escape across the Wall by then. So we charged through the rain and mud into the wild, disorganized mass of frenzied barbarians. Soon the mud was churned into an ocean of blood.
I rode behind Arthur, his faithful squire, protecting his back. He divided the knights into two divisions, one headed by Bors, the other by himself. We charged from opposite directions,
catching the freezing, rain-soaked barbarian warriors between us. They fought bravely at first, but no man on foot can stand up to the charge of knights protected by chain mail, shield, and helmet, driving home an iron-tipped lance with all the power of a mighty steed at full gallop behind it.
As Arthur had planned, the Wall became a trap. Pinned against it, the barbarians could not flee when
Arthur’s knights rode down on them.
They crumbled after that first charge. The battle became a melee, with enemy warriors scrambling madly up the overgrown old stones of the Wall, made slippery by the incessant rain, slicker still by their own blood.
Arthur wielded Excalibur, stroking to the right and left, slashing the life from every warrior he could reach. Lancelot was at his left hand, his
own sword a blur of swift death. I stayed on Arthur’s right, alert for treachery.
The battle ended at last; Arthur was barely touched during the fighting. The blood-soaked mud was littered with the bodies of the dead.