Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (97 page)

The men who had crossed the paddock formed a squadron around Cynrig, and they charged back as one unit, crashing into the backs of the Savages around the cart. Their effect, in the darkness, was greater than their numbers deserved, and in a short while we were free and clear, the enemy drawing back. We stood on our dead, and on those we had killed, a desperate band in the centre of the village, around the cart, on which now Owain climbed, and we lifted Bradwen up with us. The fire flared higher, and Owain suddenly shouted, ‘The houses! Precent, there are men in the houses!’

I jumped down and kept Precent’s back, as he gathered two sections. We made a rush at the nearest Savages, and they did not wait for us, but fled out of the village, leaving us a space to enter the great Hall by the main doors. There were men in the houses, men that had been asleep or dead drunk when the attack came, and they were all dead now. Savages were flooding into the Hall through a door in the other end. We tried a charge, and threw them back for long enough to see that there was no one in the place to help. We snatched what fragments of our equipment we could pick up – I took Owain’s cross-bow, the only one in the
Household – and then we fell back into the open air, while the Savages came in again to fill the room.

But they gained nothing by it, because when the Hall was full of them, they heard a crackling, and saw that Morien had thrown fire into the thatch, and that while we held one door, Peredur and a dozen men had got round to the other, and though they could not hold it shut completely, they could at least delay the Savages in getting out. The night was cloudy and calm, yet the sparks from the Hall spread every-where, and all the village in a short time was ablaze.

We concentrated again around the cart.

‘What now?’ Precent shouted to Owain.

‘We cannot stay here,’ he replied. But what to do he did not say. We none of us knew, but then Cynrig, pushing through to us, said, ‘Cattraeth. Let us get to Cattraeth. The Savages cannot fight against walls. If we can get there, we can defy them for a time, and then perhaps we can regain our horses.’

Owain considered for a moment. Then: ‘To Cattraeth!’ he shouted.

It was not a march I would have liked to undertake in daylight, or mounted, or with a clear head, or fresh. We had none of those advantages. We moved in a curious series of jerks. We would form into a wedge, and rush at the nearest front of the Savages. They would, perhaps, run before us, or, perhaps, they would stand till we pressed them back and broke them. In either case, we then had a little space and time to march in a column perhaps two or three hundred paces in the direction where we hoped Cattraeth lay.

It was a bitter journey. The Savages were all around us. Bigger men than we, they were, and fresher. Their shields were better made for fighting on foot, and many of us threw down our light leather-covered baskets, meant for warding off the thrown spear, and picked up the heavy ironbound planks that stopped a sword thrust or cut with ease. Their swords were shorter than ours, and we could cut at men while out of their reach: their iron was better, though, and few of the saxes would bend as our swords often did. Spears were no great trouble to deal with, because you could get inside the man’s thrust and settle him. Few of them were mailed,
and there were hardly any helmets. If the Savages had been well armoured, as well as armed, we would not have lived, any of us.

By rush and by stand, we made our way from the blazing houses, where Bladulf’s wealth and our own dead together came to ash. Any man who fell, fell. There was no time to help him, and if a man had not good friends, then a slight wound would do for him. It happened at last to me. I was in the front line of an attack, and as we trampled over the bodies of those who had tried to stand in our way, one of them thrust up at me from the ground. His spearpoint went up under my mail, into the muscles of my thigh, and I fell grunting with the pain. Then there were a dozen of them coming at me, and I would have been pegged to death with their spikes if Aidan had not returned to stand over me. Then Precent was with him, and Caradog, and they pulled me to my feet. Precent, the strongest, put my arm around his neck, and aided me to hop back to the main body, where there were helpers in plenty. And lucky it was, that we were then almost in Cattraeth.

Below the walls of Cattraeth, the Savages had cleared the woods away, and had heaved out the stumps of the trees. They were now busy, day by day, in clearing the scattered stones and bricks from the ground, ready for ploughing, and as we pressed along in the beginning dawn, our ranks were parted, like hairs by a comb, around carts, filled with stones picked up and abandoned where they stood, in mid-work, by men who had run to join a host.

Over the last few hundred paces, the Savages let us alone. We found the gateway in the crumbling walls, and we passed inside, into a city that had been empty for generations. The houses had no roofs, and the grass grew up through the stones of the roads. Men fell down on the hard ground, bleeding, exhausted, sobbing with pain and weariness and disappointment. Owain looked around him in the growing light.

‘Courage, my comrades,’ he shouted to us. ‘Have courage, be cheerful. Our war has just begun. Do not let our hearts go down. The best of our lives is to come.’

We sat up again from where we had thrown ourselves. The sound of his voice was enough to give us hope again, and to persuade us that we could win this war we had come on. Aidan, kneeling by me and binding up the slash in my thigh with my scarf, the only thing I had for him to use, began to smile again. I looked closely at him, and saw the tracks his tears had cut through the dust-caked sweat on his face.

‘Now we have an advantage again, greater than we lost with our horses,’ Owain continued. ‘Savages cannot overcome stone walls. We can hold out here till they grow tired and melt away. Then we can continue our march down to Elmet.’

I believed him, we all believed him. I knew well enough that it was not true. We had not between us food for one square meal all around. We did not know where there was water in Cattraeth. We were no more than a hundred and fifty, half the strength that had marched from Eiddin, half of us wounded, all of us tired, many sleeping still where they had fallen. Now the light was strong enough for us to look through the gate, and see the red cloaks scattered over the field outside. There were one or two heaps that stirred, and yet we were so spent that there was no one willing to go outside and fetch the dying men in. Any man of the Household who could reach Cattraeth on his own, we would be glad to see; but we could, would, give them no help. Still, Owain was Owain. What he said was true for us. What he said, we believed, though it was counter to the plain evidence of our senses.

We had silence and a kind of peace for the time between seeing the first rays of the sun on the clouds till the time when it was light enough to tell a red cloak from a green scarf, for the break in the cloud closed in. And then, from far away, we heard them coming. Far away, faintly, the horns blew and the spears beat on the shields, and Savage voices shrieked their strange war cries. Owain stood up, bold, defiant, on the wall to see them come. Precent called men to him, sent them to stand here and there all round the city, to see where the attack came from. But the greater number of us he concentrated by the gateway. Morien and Hoegi took axes and cut down some of the young birches that already stood between the houses, and we pulled them to block the gateway with a breastwork of timber and stones.

The noise of the Savages came closer, resounding through the woods, sounding from all sides, trying to frighten us, to show us that we were surrounded, that they could come at us in overwhelming strength from all sides and bury us in bodies. Yet, we knew that Savages will not rush at walls, cannot scale them and have not the patience to undermine them. If they attacked us at
all here, if they did not prefer to sit around and starve us out, they would attack the gate, as they did at York.

And so they did. The noise of the enemy fell silent. For a long period, the field before Cattraeth was so still that the first crows settled on the dead outside the walls. This silence was deliberate. They were testing our nerves, hoping that our hearts would fail with uncertainty. And even in that silence, there were some of us who were so tired, or so calm, that they went to sleep where they waited.

At last there came what we waited for. Out of the woods around us they came, not too many, perhaps a hundred of them. But that hundred was more than enough to threaten us, for all giants they were, the big ones. They pranced on the side of the field, along the hedges, shouting and singing spells and hymns to their demons, winding in and out of each other in long lines, beating their swords on their shields. For besides their shields, these men wore no mail, no helmets, no shirts or breech clouts even. They were stark naked, erect, entranced, rigid as if they were the dead walking. And so they counted themselves. They danced and gyrated senselessly, generating strength and momentum, losing their consciousness, their individuality, their imagination, their fear. These were the poets of war, possessed by the Muse of Hate, composing a satire of destruction, selecting their alliteration of attack, their metre of murder, before they flung themselves, of a sudden, up the slope at us.

These are the most dangerous, men who in their own minds are already dead. A sane man, a whole man – thrust at his eyes and he will sway away his head, cut at his neck and he will guard with his own sword. But men like these naked entranced warriors cannot be deflected, do not waste effort on defending themselves. Their only thought is to kill till they drop, themselves killed. Straight against the gate they came, in a horde, but they did not pass. Some of us sprang on to the breastwork and thrust down at them: others, like myself, stood close to the timbers and pushed them away with spears. Ten men stood higher still, on the walls, while the rest of us passed up to them big stones, torn from the houses and the paved streets, to throw down into the press. The enemy was forced to concentrate all his strength against the gate,
where never more than twenty of his men could approach us at one time. There we could hold the Savages, however mad for blood they were. It was a hard fight, a long struggle before the last of the shirtless ones lay dead in the way. They had been able neither to pull down our barrier nor to cross it. But scarcely had the last of them crawled away across the field, than we heard again the rhythmical singing, the tuneless chanting of the Savage army.

They stood in a great horde, as always, on the edge of the woods below us, a long dun line of mindless, faceless blocks, clashing their spears against their shields and thundering out that six-syllable line, whatever it was, again and again. They stamped their feet on the ground till it shook, and the ox-tail tassels that they tie to their spears and on their belts and around their knees waved like marsh reeds in a gale. They shouted, louder, and louder, not moving, as if they wanted to frighten us: to frighten us not enough to run away but enough to draw us out from the shelter of our walls. But we did not move. Owain stood at the centre of the barrier, and the Raven banner still waved over his head. Bradwen still stood firm.

And then, like a ripple of water over the sand, the dun mass began to come nearer to us. Slowly and insignificantly nearer at first, because as fast as they came out of the wood, so others thronged behind them, filling in the space, and soon all the green of the field was turning dun. But they were learning, these Savages. They knew, from that one attempt, that no charge of unsupported men could break into Cattraeth.

Therefore, their wizards came out of the line, and danced against us, trying to harm us with their magic, but they could not, because the Virgin watched over us. But they could bewitch our eyes, and with their posturings and gestures they drew our attention gradually to one end of their line, as Owain had drawn their attention to one end of their line on the Bloodfield. I had climbed, now, up on to the wall, six feet above the ground, and I too watched the dancers, till of a sudden movement the other way caught my eye. I shouted, but by then everybody else had seen it. A crowd of the Savages had taken one of the abandoned carts, full of stones, that lay scattered about the field in front of the gate, the filed they were clearing to plant wheat in. Instead of
bringing oxen to pull it, they themselves took it by the pole to push it. More and more of them clustered around it, as we had around the ship, and they rolled it across the ground towards the gate. This was how they had taken York: not able to scale the walls, they had broken in the gate by night, while the garrison slept and thus treacherously murdered them all in their beds. Now they pushed the wagon towards the gate as fast as a man could run, and it was heavy, too, full of stones. We saw at once that if it hit the barricade square on it would scatter the birch-poles and leave a gap for the Savages to rush in by. Clinging to the wall, I lifted stones from the crumbling parapet and threw them at the cart. But Morien had a better device. Who else but he, at this bitter time, would have lit a fire? And it was armed with flame, a flaring torch of his own red cloak, that he leapt on the parapet with me. He waved it round and round his head, till the cart was near enough to throw it. The torch landed on the cart, and flared into the faces of the men on the farther side, running as fast as if they were racing for a pig, and they jerked away, some of them burnt, but most only frightened. And the cart swerved, and turned towards us, losing little speed, and hit the wall below us with a terrible crash.

The ruinous wall crumbled under our feet. I saw it coming, and I jumped away, but my wounded thigh robbed me both of the power to leap and the agility to land. I sprawled on the road of the city beneath the tottering wall. Morien leapt a moment later: but he had already left it too late, and he jumped from a moving surface, so that he covered no distance at all. The stones came down around us, thundering like the tide on a rocky coast in an autumn gale: I felt my ribs crack under the shower, and my knee twisted under me.