The challenge had meant nothing to Herbard. It meant everything to Eliud. For the words were Welsh, and the voice was the voice of Elis, high and imperious, honed sharp by desperation, bidding his fellow, countrymen: “Stand and turn! For shame on your fathers, to come whetting your teeth on holy women! Go back where you came from and find a fight that does you some credit!” And higher and more peremptorily: “The first man ashore I spit on this pikel, Welsh or no, he’s no kinsman of mine!” This to a war-band roused and happy and geared for killing!
“Elis!” cried Eliud in a great howl of anger and dismay, and he lay forward over his horse’s neck and drove in his heels, shaking the bridle wild. He heard the archer at his back shout an order to halt, heard and felt the quivering thrum of the shaft as it skimmed his right shoulder, tore away a shred of cloth, and buried itself vibrating in the turf beyond. He paid no heed, but plunged madly ahead, down the steep green ride and out on to the bank of the brook.
They had come by way of the thicker cover a little downstream, to come at the grange and the ford before they were detected, and leave aimless and out of range any defenders who might be stationed at the mill, where there was a better field for archery. The little footbridge had not yet been repaired, but with a stream so fallen from its winter spate there was no need of a bridge. From stone to stone the water could be leaped in two or three places, but the attackers favoured the ford, because so many could cross there shoulder to shoulder and bring a battering-ram of lances in one sweep to drive along the near bank. The forest bowmen lay in reeds and bushes, dispersed along the brink, but such a spearhead, with men and weight enough behind it, could cleave through and past them and be into the precinct within moments.
They were deceived if they thought the forest men had not detected their approach, but there was no sign of movement as the attackers threaded their way quietly between the trees to mass and sweep across the brook. Perhaps twenty cottars, woodsmen and hewers of laborious assarts from the forests lay in cover against more than a hundred Welsh, and every man of the twenty braced himself, and knew only too well how great a threat he faced. They knew how to keep still until the proper moment to move. But as the lurkers in the trees signalled along their half-seen ranks and closed all together in a sudden surge into the open at the edge of the ford, one man rose out of the bushes opposite and bestrode the grassy shelf of the shore, brandishing a long, two, tined pikel lashed to a six, foot pole, and sweeping the ford with it at breast, height.
That was enough to give them an instant’s pause out of sheer surprise. But what stopped them in mid, stride and set them back on their heels was the indignant Welsh trumpet blaring: “Stand and turn! For shame on your fathers, to come whetting your teeth on holy women!” He had not done, there was more, rolling off the inspired tongue in dread of a pause, or in such flight as to be unable to pause. “Cowards of Powys, afraid to come north and meddle with men! They’ll sing you in Gwynedd for this noble venture, how you jumped a brook and showed yourselves heroes against women older than your mothers, and a world more honest. Even your drabs of dams will disown you for this. You and your mongrel pedigrees shall be known for ever by the songs we’ll make…” They had begun to stir out of their astonishment, to scowl and to grin. And still the hidden bowmen in the bushes held their hands, willing to wait the event, though their shafts were fitted and their bows partly drawn, ready to brace and loose.
If by some miracle this peril might dissolve in withdrawal and conciliation, why lose arrows or blunt blades?
“You, is it?” shouted a Welshman scornfully. “Cynan’s pup, that we left spewing water and being pumped dry by the nuns. He, to halt us! A lickspit of the English now!”
“A match for you and better!” flashed Elis, and swung the pikel towards the voice. “And with grace enough to let the sisters here alone, and to be grateful to them, too, for a life they could as well have let go down the stream, for all they owed me. What are you looking for here? What plunder is there, here among the willing poor? And for God’s sake and your Welsh fathers’ sake, what glory?” He had done all he could, perhaps provided a few minutes of time, but he could do little more, and it was not enough. He knew it. He even saw the archer in the fringe of the trees opposite fit his shaft without haste, and draw very steadily and deliberately. He saw it out of the corner of his eye, while he continued to confront the lances levelled against him, but there was nothing he could do to deflect or elude, he was forced to stand and hold them as long as he could, shifting neither foot nor eye.
Behind him there was a rush of hooves, stamping deep into the turf, and someone flung himself sobbing out of the saddle in one vaulting bound, and along the shelf of grass above the water, just as the forest bowmen drew and loosed their first shafts, every man for himself, and the archer on the opposite shore completed his easy draw, and loosed full at Elis’s breast, Welsh of Powys striking coldly at Welsh of Gwynedd. Eliud vented a scream of anger and defiance, and hurled himself between, embracing Elis breast to breast and covering him with his own body, sending them both reeling a pace backwards into the turf, to crash against a corner of the sisters” garden fence. The pikel with its long handle was jerked out of Elis’s hand, and slashed into the stream in a great fan of water. The Welshman’s arrow jutted from under Eliud’s right shoulder, blade, transfixing his body and piercing through the under-flesh of Elis’s upper arm, pinning the two together inseparably. They slid down the fence and lay in the grass locked in each other’s arms, and their blood mingled and made one, closer even than fostering.
And then the Welsh were over and ashore, floundering in the pits of the ford, ripped on the stakes among the reeds, trampling the two fallen bodies, and battle was joined along the banks of the brook.
Almost at the same moment, Alan Herbard deployed his men along the eastern bank and waded into the fighting, and Hugh Beringar swept through the trees on the western bank, and drove the Welsh outposts into the churned and muddied ford.
The clang of hammer on anvil, with themselves cracked between, demoralised the Welsh of Powys, and the battle of Godric’s Ford did not last long. The din and fury was out of proportion to the damage done, when once they had leisure to assess it. The Welsh were ashore when their enemies struck from both sides, and had to fight viciously and hard to get out of the trap and melt away man by man into cover, like the small forest predators whose kinship with the earth and close understanding of it they shared. Beringar, once he had shattered the rear of the raiders, herded them like sheep but held his hand from unnecessary killing as soon as they fled into cover and made for home. Alan Herbard, younger and less experienced, gritted his teeth and thrust in with all his weight, absolute to make a success of his first command, and perhaps did more execution than was heedful out of pure anxiety.
However it was, within half an hour it was over.
What Brother Cadfael most keenly remembered, out of all that clash, was the apparition of a tall girl surging out of the fenced enclosure of the grange, her black habit kilted in both hands, the wimple torn from her head and her fair hair streaming silvery in sudden sunlight, a long, fighting scream of defiance trailing like a bannerole from her drawn, back lips, as she evaded a greedy Welsh hand grasping at her. and flung herself on her knees beside the trampled, bruised, bleeding bodies of Elis and Eliud, still clamped in each other’s arms against the bloodied fence.