‘Kill her! Kill all the Celt house servants, for I’ll not fear to sleep in my own hall. Put their heads on poles above the gate as a warning that Glamdring Ironfist will not tolerate disobedience. And put all the guards that were on duty tonight to the sword - publicly! They have failed in their duty to their tribe.’
The bloody executions had scarcely blunted the edge of Glamdring’s rage.
Even now, a snickering voice echoed in his mind, taunting him and reminding him that he would be a failure without clever little Wyrr to guide him.
But Wyrr was now worm food.
Glamdring fingered the carved bone hilt of the knife that hung round his neck. ‘But I still have the Arden Knife,’ he whispered aloud. ‘And Wyrr was certain that no hand could touch me unless they held the Arden Knife. So my luck will hold to the very end.’
But Glamdring was grimly aware that his original force had been reduced to only four hundred fully fit men capable of following him into the next battle. His wounded numbered a hundred or so but, because Saxon warriors were reluctant to retreat during a frontal attack, they rarely survived the fearsome injuries that were inflicted upon them. To be struck down usually meant death for the Saxon warriors for they were never lacking in courage.
Today would be different, for Glamdring suspected that the Celts had also suffered huge losses. The Saxon chieftain could comfort himself with the knowledge that his depleted forces were still larger than Artor’s original army, many of whom were off on a wild-goose chase as they harassed small settlements that were of no strategic importance.
The end was in sight, for how could the cursed Artor hold his narrow strip of land much longer? The Celtic king was in a hopeless position, and Glamdring Ironfist would bear Artor’s head back to Caer Fyrddin and set it on a pole before his hall with all the other Celtic slaves.
‘The crows will pick his skull clean, and I’ll find Dog! For him, I will create a special, more fitting death.’
But the sea wind brought the smell of corruption back to Glamdring on the early morning air. His own dead had been stacked into piles by the Celts and had been formed into barricades that slowed and frustrated his attacks. Even now, a miasma of death snaked through the Saxon camp, sapping the will of his warriors. Glamdring recognized that the Celts must be surrounded by Saxon dead as well as their own, and that the stench emanating from the battlefield must live with them, night and day, waking and sleeping. But they still held their shield wall in place, and they refused to give an inch when the Saxons engaged them in combat.
‘May the gods make that whoreson rot,’ Glamdring swore.
But of all the reverses of the last few days, the loss of Wyrr was the deepest blow. Only Glamdring knew how important that preternaturallyaged stripling had been in his thoughts and in his strategies.
In temper, he hurled his ale jug across the leather tent where it shattered on the hard earth and filled his nostrils with the reek of sour beer.
‘The foul Dog!’ Glamdring cried aloud in disgust as he recalled his erstwhile slave and the damage that had been inflicted on his campaign. ‘He will die a thousand deaths, mad with pain, if I ever lay my hands on that animal. But before he dies, I’ll give him to my women.’
Glamdring knew that no worse punishment existed, for women, especially those who had lost loved ones in battle, surpassed men in cold cruelty. They would keep an enemy alive to extend his suffering long after a man would have put him out of his misery.
Yes, he would give Dog to the widows of Caer Fyrddin.
What would Wyrr have advised? The thought went through his mind, now that he had decided on Dog’s fate.
For two days, Glamdring’s forces had faltered at the shield wall used by Artor’s defences. And it was becoming increasingly obvious that another direct assault was unlikely to succeed. Perhaps an alternative strategy would be more effective.
Glamdring Ironfist might have been an ignorant man, but he wasn’t stupid.
The answer to his problem came to him immediately, and he hastened to dress himself. In a fever of impatience, he plunged out into the pre-dawn darkness to rouse his captains.
‘We attack in the dark, immediately, as soon as you can wake our warriors and send them on their way. The Celts will be asleep, expecting us to come at them at dawn. If we are silent, we will have surprise on our side and will be able to negotiate the barricades without those infernal bowmen picking us off at will.’
Glamdring’s captains nodded and grinned. Their thane had been abstracted of late, and his irritability and uncertainty had helped to fuel a sense of hopelessness that swept through the troops as they fruitlessly attacked the Celtic positions. Now the old Ironfist was back, bursting with energy so that the air literally crackled around him.
The captains dispersed to alert their troops. Night birds watched with large, luminous eyes as the Saxons began to creep out on to the stretch of open land that separated their bivouac from the Celtic positions.
From a tall tree, Gruffydd awoke with a jerk as a careless foot snapped a twig a short distance away. For the last three nights, Gruffydd and his companions had watched the Saxon camp, killing any unwary warriors who wandered away from their fellows to relieve themselves. Using the cry of a night bird as an alarm signal to his men, Gruffydd slid down the tree and began to crawl on hands and knees through the deepest shadows to their prearranged meeting place.
He was joined by his fellow lookouts within minutes.
‘The Saxons are planning a night attack, and they’ve started moving already. Artor will be caught abed unless he is warned. You, Kennett, will take my place as leader of our little band while I carry the message to the High King.’
‘They’ll discover you as soon as you begin to move, Gruffydd. If you try to outrun them you’ll need to break cover. And if you do move on to open ground, you won’t stand a chance.’
‘I’m no longer young, Kennett, and I’ve never much cared for succumbing to the ills of old age, so shut your teeth and carry out your task.’
He embraced Kennett quickly, and then began to move resolutely in the direction of the Celtic lines. At first, he kept to the shadows of the tree line but, finally, he broke cover and sped silently with the uncanny sense of the trained spy.
Dressed in black, Gruffydd knew he wasn’t easy to see, so, as he outstripped a troop of Saxon warriors heading towards Artor’s flank, he began to shout a warning to the Celt defenders.
‘Awake! Awake! The Saxons are coming! Man the shield wall! Awake! Awake!’
Gruffydd could hear the sounds of Saxon pursuit immediately behind him, and saved his breath for running. The darkness protected him from accurate bowshot or from spears, and he knew that only close contact with a Saxon warrior could bring him down.
He ran until he thought his heart would burst.
At the first line of Saxon dead, he slowed momentarily to detour along the narrow passageway between the walls of bodies, and a young Saxon almost caught him. A groping hand clutched at a trailing fold of his cloak. He managed to slip out of the garment, leaving the Saxon holding its sable folds.
‘Awake!’ he shouted breathlessly. ‘Awake! The Saxons are coming! Awake!’
The spy threw himself over the last line of corpses, and tumbled over a stiff swollen hand. Thrusting aside a sudden superstitious dread, he scrambled to his feet and pounded over the fifteen feet into the blackness that had settled over the Celtic camp.
‘Make way! Sword Bearer Gruffydd! Make way!’
His lungs were heaving as he fell against the wood and iron defences. Hands grasped him and manhandled him through the lines as if he were as light as chaff, while the three lines of the defences reformed and thrust their spear butts into the earth in preparation for the coming Saxon charge. Gruffydd saw no sign of panic in the Celtic ranks, just the skull faces of tired men, their red eyes ringed with dark woad shadows against the smeared chalk on their faces.
Artor loomed out of the darkness, Odin at his heels. Gruffydd realized for the first time how close the shield wall was to the knoll where the baggage train created a natural circle.
‘It’s good to see you in one piece, Gruffydd,’ Artor murmured.
Gruffydd squinted up at Artor’s pale face, only partly lit by the lowering moon. He had never seen his king so pale under his tan, and he wondered if Artor was wounded. If so, Artor’s stature and mien gave no clue to his condition.
‘Pelles!’ Artor called, and the little man came running. ‘Unless you can fire arrows in the dark, get your men to the wall where they can act as a fourth line of defence. I doubt your men can miss a shot from close range, even if they can’t see what they’re aiming at.’
‘I obey, my lord. My men are keen to see some blood. They take it hard that they’ve suffered no losses after so many good lads have gone to the shades on this sodding plain. They’ll acquit themselves well.’
Artor grinned. ‘Take care, Pelles. You’re the last of the Anderida Scum and I’d take it amiss if you risked your head unnecessarily. Perhaps I’d start to lose my luck.’
Pelles winked his one good eye and grinned. ‘There’s no chance of that, lord. I’ve known for many years that the better you plan, the luckier you become. Only you would have had the foresight to position Gruffydd where he could warn us if Ironfist tried for a night attack. Your luck will hold, but Llanwith and Lot had better hurry.’
A shudder of sudden contact ran through the lines in front of them. The Saxons were throwing themselves at the Celtic line in a frenzied attack in almost pitch-black darkness.
‘Shite! I’d best hurry!’ Pelles cursed, and ran back towards his bowmen.
‘Gruffydd, call out the non-combatants, the wagon teams, the smiths, and any healers who can be spared. You can even call the women if they can use a slingshot. But the line must be held!’
Artor’s eyes were distant. ‘Come, Odin. It’s time the king added his sword to the battle. Targo, you stay put and keep me informed of everything I should know.’
‘Sire, I’ve obeyed you for fourteen years and followed you from one side of our lands to the other, but I’ll not stand back and wait to die. I may be old, but I still know how to kill.’
‘As you wish!’
Artor waded into the second defensive line alongside his warriors. As a man before him slumped over his weapons, Artor took up the warrior’s shield and drew his massive sword, ignoring the sudden agony that leapt along his shoulder and chest.
Around him, men’s eyes flared and the cry went up, ‘The king is with us! Artor! Artor!’
Mechanically, with Odin at his back, Artor straddled the wounded man and used his sword like a scythe. Where it struck flesh, it cleaved to the bone, and through the bone, and the Saxon warriors fell back from its deadly swathe.
Another Saxon appeared, almost over him, and Artor’s blade was fully extended. Before the axe of the savage could fall on Artor’s unprotected head, Targo’s short sword pierced his throat and the man fell to the ground.
The Saxon warriors attacked in wave after wave of huge, dim shapes that thrust and hacked at the Celtic line as they appeared out of the darkness. Gradually, the enemy became more visible as the sky lightened, and Pelles’s archers fired over Artor’s head, striking down the Saxons before they reached the line.
But still the enemy came, in endless, desperate tides, and Artor knew that the line was near to breaking.
‘Back!’ he roared. ‘Fall back to the knoll! For the west! Fall back to the knoll!’
The Celtic warriors fell back in disciplined ranks, fighting for every foot of earth. The Saxons sensed victory, but as the Celtic line constricted, it thickened, and the defenders were now fighting on firm earth, rather than ground that had been churned to mud with blood, entrails and dying men. Still, as the sun rose in a red orb over the tree line with the early-morning dawn, Artor saw little to bring him comfort. With their backs to their own piled dead, the shield wall had nowhere else to go.
From above them, the air was suddenly thick with a fusillade of stones that struck with deadly results and, even if they missed their mark, Saxons flinched away from the aerial attack and were distracted from their task. On the piles of their own dead, wild-eyed women swung slings round their heads and screeched like demons, cursing and crying in their rage and battle lust.
‘The women! Gods love them!’ Targo muttered, as he hacked away at the knees of Saxon attackers. Above the small form of his servant, Artor smiled as he used his shield in imitation of Bedwyr as he sliced another Saxon across his unprotected jaw.
Artor could even hear the screams of non-combatants as they called on their gods for courage. One smith cleaved the shield wall briefly as he wielded a bar of iron that had been heated to blood-red brilliance in the fire pit. As two Saxons reeled away from him, clutching their eyes, the smith stepped back behind the shelter of the shields once again without even noticing a gaping wound across his thigh.
Artor’s sword was thick with blood and gore, but even though his fingers slipped on the cunning pommel, the great blade seemed to possess a life of its own. The reflected light from the rays of the sun ran down Caliburn and transformed it into a grim, blazing tongue of light.
Then, as Pelles’s archers found themselves pressed against the heaped and rotting pile of corpses, a horn began to blare from the west, answered by another from the north.
‘At last! They’ve come at last,’ Artor yelled, as his sword arm continued to shear through the bone and muscle of his enemies. ‘Lot and Llanwith are here! Fight on, men of the west! The cavalry have come.’
As his last words sounded out, Artor’s despairing warriors found a new reason to raise their swords. The horns sounded again, and Targo repeated Artor’s words, joined by Odin and others, until the whole shield wall was chanting as they killed and were themselves killed in turn.