The Lantern Bearers (book III) (30 page)

Artos, with his standard flying above the flower of the British cavalry, was out of sight round the flank of the fortress hill, waiting for his moment to come. He was all the reserves they had; and save for him, the whole hope of Britain was strung across that shallow downland valley. Aquila wondered suddenly whether Flavian minded desperately being with him instead of with Artos, and glanced round at the boy sitting his horse just behind him. Flavian looked rather white. He was smiling a little, but the smile did not touch his eyes; and as Aquila looked, he ran the tip of his tongue over his lower lip as though it were uncomfortably dry. It was the look that Aquila had often seen before in the face of a boy going into battle for the first time. Flavian caught his eye and flushed painfully, as though his father’s look made him ashamed, and stooped to fiddle with Whitefoot’s harness. Aquila looked face-forward again. Amid the whole British host, he suddenly felt very much alone.

The day had fully come—a day of broken lights and grape-coloured shadows racing across the tawny hills—when a darkness that was denser and slower than a cloud shadow came into view, creeping towards them along the fringe of the downs. Knowing that it would be hidden as yet from the main battle line, Aquila flashed his sword from its sheath, and rising in his stirrups flourished it in great circles above his head, and from the knot of horsemen about the golden dragon, far off and small and bright with distance, he saw Ambrosius fling up his own sword arm, and knew that his signal had been received; he felt in himself the kind of ripple that ran down the long curve of the battle line like a deep-drawn breath. The dark swarm of the advancing host drew nearer. When the cloud shadows sped across it, it was merely a dark mass, but when the sun touched it, it woke to a kind of pulsing, beetle-wing brilliance with here and there a blink of light from a bronze shield-boss or the curved top of a Chieftain’s helmet. A faint haze of white chalk-dust hung like a cloud above the rear of the Saxon host, for it had been a dry summer; and behind them, north-westward, the sky and the hills seemed to darken as they came, as though they trailed the storm like a cloak behind them. And away over the downs, for a jewel in that sombre cloak, Aquila saw the ragged, torn-off end of a rainbow brightening against the gloom of the massing storm-clouds.

He pointed. ‘Look, lads! Already the Rainbow Bridge is run out for the Saxon kind. Surely they make ready to welcome Hengest in the Valhalla tonight!’

There was a laugh behind him, and little fierce Owain, who had stood with him to hold Durobrivae Bridge fourteen years ago, cried out, laughing also, ‘Na, na! It is but the stump of a bridge. They have cut through Bifrost to keep him out!’

The Saxons were so near now that he could see the white gleam of the horse’s head borne on a spear-shaft that was Hengest’s standard, and hear plain above the wuthering of the wind in his ears the formless smother of sound that was the voice of an advancing host. A Saxon war-horn boomed, and was answered by the higher, brighter note of the Roman trumpets; challenge and answering challenge tossed to and fro by the wind. The Saxon war host came rolling on, not fast, but remorselessly, shield to shield, with Guitolinus’s light cavalry scouring on either side. They seemed appallingly strong, but Aquila, sitting with his bull’s-hide buckler high on his shoulder, and the flat of his drawn sword resting across Falcon’s neck, saw that though they outnumbered the waiting British by upward of two to one, they were for the most part a foot army, and had nothing to compare with Artos’s great hidden cavalry wing.

They were within bowshot now, and there came a sudden flicker of movement among the knot of archers behind the British spearmen, and a flight of arrows leapt out over the spears to plunge into the advancing battle-mass of the Saxons. For a few moments the enemy ranks had the look of a barley field hit by a sudden squall, as men staggered and dropped in their tracks; but the rest closed their torn ranks and pressed on, yelling. The British long-bow men got in one more flight, before the Saxon short-bows came into range; and after that the deadly hail of arrows was a two-way thing, tearing its gaps in the British ranks as it had torn them in the Saxon. And in the midst of the killing hail, the two hosts rolled together, seeming at the last instant to gather themselves like two great animals, then spring for each other’s throats.

A few moments later, without ever taking his eyes from the reeling press below, Aquila said to the man beside him, ‘Now! Sound me the charge!’ And the dull roar of battle and the storm cock’s shining song were drowned in the ringing
tran-ta-ran
of the cavalry trumpet. Falcon flung up his head and neighed, adding his defiance to the defiance of the trumpet, not needing his rider’s urging heel in his flank as he broke from a stand into a canter, from a canter into a full flying gallop. Aquila heard behind him the hoof-thunder of the cavalry wing sweeping down the hillside into the teeth of the westerly gale. He was yelling the war cry, ‘Constantine! Constantine!’ And he heard it caught up in a great rushing wave of sound. Guitolinus’s cavalry wheeled about to meet them, and as they thundered down upon each other, Aquila’s sight was full of a wild wave of up-tossed horses’ heads, the dazzle of the stormy sunlight on shield-rim and sword-blade, a nearing wall of faces with staring eyes and open, yelling mouths. He caught the glint of gilded bronze and the emerald flash of a wind-torn silken cloak where Guitolinus rode among his men. Then they rolled together with a shock that seemed as though it must shake the very roots of the fortress hill.

Guitolinus’s cavalry crumpled and gave ground, then gathered again for a forward thrust. And for Aquila the battle, that had been clear in view and purpose as he sat his horse above it such a short while ago, had lost all form, become a sheer, blind struggle. He had no idea of how things were going with Pascent in the left wing, or even what was happening along the centre; all he knew was the cavalry struggle going on around him, the shock of charge and counter-charge, until at last, above the roar of battle, his ear caught the sound that all the while it had been waiting for: the sound of a hunting-horn ringing like the horns of the Lordly Ones from behind the shoulder of the fortress hill. It was like Artos to sweep his men into action with the gay notes of a hunting-horn. The sound rose above the battle din, high and sweet and shining as the song of the storm-cock in the whitethorn tree. A great warning cry went up from the nearest ranks of the enemy, and snatching one glance over his shoulder, Aquila saw the flower of the British cavalry sweeping towards them along the tawny slope. There was a swelling thunder of hooves in his ears, and the wild, high song of the hunting-horn as the great arrow-head of wild riders hurtled down upon the battle. At the shining point of the arrow-head, Artos swept by, his great white horse turned for a flashing moment to silver by the burst of sunlight that came scudding down the valley to meet him, the silver mane streaming over his bridle arm, and the sods flying like birds from the great round hooves. His huge wolfhound, Cabal—son to the Cabal of his boyhood—bounded at his side, and half a length behind him galloped Kylan, his standard-bearer, with the crimson dragon streaming like a flame from its upreared spear-shaft. Just for the one instant they were there, seen out of the corner of the eye, with the white, fierce brilliance of figures seen by lightning; then they were past, and the following cavalry thundered after, to hurl themselves into the cavalry of Guitolinus—into them and through them, scattering them as dead leaves scatter before a gust of wind, and on.

Aquila swept his own men forward into the breach that Artos had made.

‘Constantine! Constantine! Follow me!’

He heard the hunting-horn again, and again the wild riders were sweeping towards them. They circled wide to charge from the flank, hurling Guitolinus’s cavalry back in confusion on to the Saxon shield wall. Ambrosius’s hard-pressed centre, relieved for the moment from the deadly thrust against them, drove forward again, cheering wildly, into a charge of their own. From the far wing also, from Pascent’s cavalry, the cheering had begun to rise. Aquila, charging again and again at the head of a wedge of his own men, knew nothing of that; he knew only that there was no longer a solid mass of cavalry before him, but isolated knots of desperate horsemen. Indeed, the whole battle seemed breaking up, disintegrating, while in the midst of the spreadings chaos the core of the Saxon host strove desperately to form the shield burg about the white-horse standard of Hengest.

Shouting to his men, Aquila drove his heel into Falcon’s flank and rode straight for the half-formed shield burg.

Under his barbaric standard, Hengest stood head and shoulders taller than any of his house-carls, wielding his great war-axe at arm’s length, blood striping the hair under his bull-horned helmet, blood on his shoulders and crimsoning the down-sweeping blade, and in his berserker’s face the eyes full of a grey-green flame.

But it was not Hengest’s wild features that started out at Aquila as the shield burg reeled and crumbled. It was the face of a young warrior glaring up at him over a broken shield-rim. A dark, fine-boned face, distorted now with rage and hate, that was yet as like to Flavia’s face as a man’s can be to a woman’s.

Only for an instant he saw it, for a jagged, sickening splinter of time; and then a half-naked Scot sprang in under Falcon’s head, his reddened dirk stabbing upward under Aquila’s buckler. He wrenched sideways half out of the saddle, and felt the blow that should have ripped up his belly like a rotten fig gash through his old leather tunic, nicking the flesh like a hornet sting. Falcon reared up with lashing hooves, but he brought him down again with a blow of his shield-rim between the ears, and thrust in, in his turn, above the Scot’s buckler; and the man was gone as though he had never been, under the trampling hooves of the mêlée.

The young dark warrior also was gone as though he had never been. The battle had closed over between him and Aquila, and he was no more to be seen. Maybe he, too, was down now under the trampling horses’ hooves and the red welter of the breaking shield burg.

By noon the storm had broken, and the white, lashing swathes of rain were sweeping across the downs before the gale. The great battle of the Dragon and the White Horse had scattered over a score of downland and marshy miles, into a score of lesser battles; and there were dead men and horses lying in the little chalky stream and scattered grotesquely over the hillsides and down the wide valley. Guitolinus lay dead, his emerald cloak darkened and sodden with the driving rain, under a whitethorn bush on whose tossing and streaming branches the berries were already the colour of dried blood. The storm-cock was still shouting his shining song over the battlefield. And Artos and the British Cavalry were hunting the tattered remnant of Hengest’s war host over the bare, chalky uplands north of Sorviodunum.

For Aquila, riding on the wing of that ruthless hunt, there had been a time of sickening anxiety when he realized that the Minnow was no longer with his squadron. It had not lasted long, for when he had demanded of Owain what had become of the boy, that grim little man had laughed, jerking his head sideways. ‘The last I saw of him he was riding half a length behind Artos and yelling like all the fiends in hell!’

Now he was merely angry, and that with only half his mind; for the other half was twisted and tangled with the dark young warrior he had seen for one jagged instant of time as the shield burg crumbled.

F
AR
up towards the old frontier below Cunetio a great villa, and one that had been rich in the old days, stood with its cornland and orchards spread below it in a bay of the wooded downs. Its people had fled before the Saxon break-through, and Hengest’s host, sweeping southward, had found it empty, plundered it and set torch to it in passing. But for some reason the fire had not spread through the whole three-sided range of buildings, and the main house-place had stood deserted with its one burnt-out wing, until, two days after the great battle for Britain, Artos had called off the chase some miles north of Cunetio, and drawn his men back into British territory. Now, in the light of a wild sunset, the place was thrumming with life again, though not the life of its own people.

Men slow and half blind with weariness dropped from horses as weary as themselves in the pale gold of the stubble-field below the garden wall; there were makeshift horse-lines in the lee of the orchard, and in the wide greenness of the garden court, camp-fires began to echo the colours of the windy sunset.

Aquila, riding in with his men, late from their scouring of the hills, found the whole bay of the downs between the woods and the river already turned into a great camp. And almost the first person he saw as he reined in below the orchard where the apples were gold and russet on the wind-tossed branches, was Flavian plodding up from the horse-lines with a saddle on his shoulder.

The boy caught sight of him at the same instant, and Aquila saw him hesitate, and brace himself for whatever might be coming. Then he changed direction and came to meet his father. He halted at Falcon’s shoulder, and stood looking up.

‘I hope that you had good hunting with Artos,’ Aquila said formally, after a moment.

Flavian flushed scarlet, but his eyes never wavered. ‘I am sorry about that, Father. It—it just happened.’

Aquila nodded wearily. He had been very angry, but now he felt too weary to be angry any more, too weary to be anything very definite. ‘Things do—just happen, in the heat of battle,’ he said, and saw the quick relief in his son’s face.

Flavian put up a hand to caress Falcon’s neck. ‘Sir, I was close behind you—I mean—I was
still
close behind you when you charged the Saxon shield burg. I’m glad I didn’t miss that; it was magnificent!’

Aquila did not answer at once. He was wondering rather desperately why he could not remember that charge and the shield burg crumbling without seeing again and again a dark face that was so like Flavian’s, so like Flavia’s, starting out at him from the press. All these two days past he had been looking for that dark Saxon warrior, looking for him in every live Saxon he saw, and every dead one. Again and again he had told himself that he was a fool, that the thing had been no more than a chance resemblance; that whatever it had been, the man was surely dead back there under the ramparts of the old green hill fort, and he would look for him no more. But he had gone on looking.