In the twenty-first century, such notions were diluted by other distractions, by larger loyalties as a subject of the British Empire and a member of a world community that had set itself in opposition to tribal violence and terrorism. In the sixth century, Stirling's larger loyalties were fading away, increasingly insubstantial, half-remembered dreams, while the raw immediacy of his new reality—where a man's honor and personal courage were often all that stood between loved ones and brutal death—tugged at him with almost irresistible strength.
As miserable as the trek from Carlisle to Humberside had been, the journey back was infinitely worse, with nothing but saddle galls and shaken loyalties and defeat to carry back with him.
Emrys Myrddin and the kings of the south sped rapidly along the dragon's spine, rousing the men to arms as they passed town, village, and farmhold. And as they rode, day by miserable, rain- swept day, Myrddin began to develop his plan for defending Caer-Badonicus. He had been to the hill fort only once, but his was an excellent memory and he had been watching men wage war for more than fifty years. He knew how leaders thought, had studied the histories, understood very well indeed, why Alexander of Macedonia and Julius Caesar had won victory after victory. By comparison, the Saxons they were soon to face were little more than yelling apes, baboons with swords and thrusting spears and no concept of strategy other than overwhelming an opponent with sheer numbers.
That, of course, was Britain's chief problem: the sheer number of the barbaric creatures. Still, Saxon ignorance was an advantage to be used and Myrddin had a fair idea how to go about exploiting it. Hard riding took them deep into the southlands, where unseasonal autumn rains were even heavier than they had been in the north, destroying crops and threatening the countryside with starvation over the winter. Little wonder King Cadorius and Sub-King Melwas were all but frantic, facing such a winter with such neighbors about to come calling at their borders.
Emrys Myrddin and the kings of the south skirted the eastern end of the Cotswold Hills to enter a countryside thick with ancient monuments, places like the monolithic barrow dubbed West Kennet, with its mass graves hidden deep within the mound, and the mysterious Silburis Hill, a man-made tower of white chalk blocks rising more than a hundred thirty feet into the air. By riding cross-country from one great monument to the next, a man could follow the ancient ley lines Myrddin's Druidic instructors had named the "dragon lines," conduits of energy that wound, braidlike, through the region, touching such places as Caer-Aveburis and Stonehenge, where immense circles of standing stones had sat since the beginning of time, erected by a people so ancient, not even the Druids could recall their names.
The dragon lines snaked through more than a dozen such ancient monuments left by the old ones. Emrys Myrddin might not know who had built these holy places, but he understood very well, indeed, their deep impact on the minds of those who lived near to them. He and Uthyr Pendragon and Ambrosius Aurelianus before him had used that awe to forge ties of alliance between widely scattered tribes of southern Britons. It had worked so well, Emrys Myrddin had spread the concept north and east and west, throughout the whole of Britain, literally creating one people united by a commonly held identity.
It was, Myrddin knew, his greatest legacy to the people of Britain. And now he must fight to save that legacy from foreign destruction.
There was no mistaking Caer-Badonicus for any other hill in Britain. Even Silburis Hill was a mere child's toy, compared with Caer-Badonicus. Its windswept summit, a broad, flat stretch of land fully eighteen acres in area, towered five hundred feet above the Salisbury Plain. Broodingly immense against the stormy grey rainclouds scudding past its flanks, Caer-Badonicus was a natural fortress, crowned with ancient and crumbling walls, an earthwork fortification so old, not even Emrys Myrddin had ever heard its original name. During the long centuries of peaceful Roman rule, hill forts like Badonicus had fallen into ruins, no longer necessary to safeguard the people of the surrounding plain. The wheel of time had turned, however, and walls were needed once again. Emrys Myrddin was here to ensure that the walls they built were the strongest, most protective walls ever built by Briton hands.
The future of an entire people depended upon it.
And upon him.
Keenly aware of the pain Atlas had felt of old, Myrddin squinted against the downpour to study the profile of the hill rising up from the flatlands. The wind whipped through the crowns of mature trees at the summit, lashing them with brutal fury. As they drew closer, he spotted several white-water cataracts where rainwater poured off the hillcrest, surging and spilling its way down the steep, bramble-covered slopes.
It gave him an idea.
"I want to get right to the top," he said over the sound of rain and wind.
King Cadorius of Dumnonia grimaced, while the younger Melwas of Glastenning, in whose territory Caer-Badonicus actually lay, turned to him in visible dismay. "Now? In this driving downpour?"
"Aye, now. We'll be fighting the Saxons up there in conditions just as bad."
Covianna Nim, as bedraggled and mud-splashed as the rest of them, frowned. "I doubt we'll get the horses up that, not in this muck. That's a good thirty- or forty-degree slope and if ever there was a road to the summit, it's long since grown over and vanished."
Myrddin chuckled, which startled Cadorius and Melwas into staring. Accustomed to the limitations of most men's minds—and particularly those of kings, several of whom he had tutored personally—he explained with the same patience a mother reserves for her child: "The fact that there is no road works in our favor, for the Saxons will have just as hard a time reaching the crest as we will. Even without the nasty surprises I have in mind."
They did, indeed, have to leave the horses behind. Slogging their way through mud, through freshets of runoff that cut eroding gullies into the hillside, past wild brambles and outcroppings of native bedrock that scraped the hands and left the footing slick and treacherous beneath their feet, they climbed steadily toward the storm-lashed clouds. Panting, pausing to rest now and again, they finally scaled the summit, standing beneath a towering oak for protection from the wind-whipped gusts of rain.
Clumps of mistletoe, the "Druids' weed," had shaken loose from the oak's boughs, littering the ground with dark green leaves and clusters of tiny white berries, along with larger limbs snapped off by the storm. Blocks of stone lay piled haphazardly where work had already begun on the refortification, work interrupted by the rain. That, alone, would have to change. They didn't have time to wait on niceties like cooperative weather.
The view from the summit was impressive. Myrddin squinted against the rain, shielding his eyes with one hand while absently pulling his sodden cloak tighter around his shivering frame. Pacing off the distances, he walked the ancient walls, surveying the entire hilltop, while the king of Dumnonia and Melwas trailed along in his wake. Covianna remained huddled beneath the oaks, shivering and trying to stay out of the wind.
"We'll want circumvallations," Myrddin said at length, "several layers of them, right around the summit." He pointed, then knelt to retrieve a small branch, sketching what he intended in the mud, using his cloak to protect the muddy drawing as best he could. "My suggestion is five walls, at a minimum, arrayed like this, and we'll need shelters for a good-sized armed force to hold out against siege. Barracks, arms rooms, privies, stables for horses and livestock, pens for chickens and goats, shelters for womenfolk and children, for they'll need shelter behind strong walls when the Saxons come marching from the southeast, else they'll repeat Penrith on a grander scale."