Dubricius seemed to have withdrawn deep inside himself, his eyes half closed once more. Then again he opened them, not swiftly this time, but with a slow deliberation, and fixed them on my face as a man might look into the pages of a book that interested him.
“Yes,” he said, when he had read enough. “I retract certain words of mine that I spoke just now. I believe, at all events, that you believe in this great Saxon thrust. Now tell me why?”
I remained standing, as though to sit down again would be to lose some advantage. I leaned forward with my hands on the table and told again all that I had learned from our scouts, of the stirring beyond the Sea Wolves’ borders, of the coming and going between the Cantii territory and the East Seax. Most of that, of course, was known to them already, but they had not before had the small pieces fitted together to form the whole picture. I told them of Ambrosius’s views (which were indeed my own also) as to why the thrust should come now, when it had not come last year nor the year before; I told them of the likelihood that the Barbarians were at last learning to combine, and the men about the table listened and nodded wisely and listened again; and when I was done, a small buzzing murmur rose from them until Dubricius silenced it with a movement of the hand.
“So,” he said. “You make out a good case, and clearly it is one that you believe in. . . . That, I have allowed already. You might still be mistaken.”
“I might, though thirty years of the war trail give one something of an instinct in these matters. But Ambrosius had it also, and I never knew him to be mistaken.”
There was another long and dragging silence, and in desperation I was just about to plunge in again, though indeed I did not know what more there was to say, when the Bishop turned his hand over and laid it flat on the table in a gesture of “Finish,” and said most surprisingly, “No, nor did I.”
He swept his gaze around the whole circle of the Council — and yet one knew that he had taken in every face as he came to it. “Brothers, shall we cast our votes on this matter? Will those of you who are in favor of leaving this choice to wait for a while, signify your judgment by putting your right hands on the table before you.”
Aquila’s hand and that of Perdius slammed on the table almost before he had finished speaking, and three other Councilors followed almost as swiftly; the lesser churchmen sat rigid with their hands in their laps; Ulpius Critas half raised his arm, then changed his mind and pretended to rub his nose, then changed again and laid three fingers on the edge of the table after all. Vericus of the bird’s-nest beard took his time to think, then set his hand before him with a small decisive slap. One more Councilor refrained, and the Bishop, smiling a little sleepily, left his own hand lying where it was, big and plump and pale on the polished wood. The ancient was still asleep, and nobody troubled to wake him; the verdict was clear enough without his vote.
I parted from my grimly triumphant escort within the gates of the Governor’s Palace, and went on home, to find that one of the scouts had come in and was sitting on his haunches half asleep in the corner of the courtyard where the evening sun yet lingered with a little warmth. He roused at the sound of my footsteps and was up with the swiftness of an otter, and came to meet me, touching joined palms to forehead in the gesture that the Dark People make before their chiefs.
Noni Heron’s Feather was well known to me, a man half bred between the Dark People and our own, with the skill as a hunter and tracker that only the Dark People possess. I had followed the game trail with him more than once, and there are few better ways of coming to know a man than by hunting with him; and it was so that he had become one of the chief among my scouts.
“What word do you bring, Noni my friend?” I said, stooping to fondle Cabal’s great gray-muzzled head as he came to greet me.
He thrust the long black hair out of his eyes, and stood up straight in his wildcat-skin mantle, as he had seen the Companions do when they spoke with me on parade occasions. “The Sea Wolf who walks by the name of Cerdic has gathered his war bands and moved up from the hunting runs of the Cantii, driving much beef cattle with him on the hoof, and has made his camp two days eastward of the frontier on the old track under the North Chalk. In other places also, the Wolves are driving off the herds. Indeed, that I tell as a thing from my own heart, for they have driven off the red cattle from my father’s village, and if my father’s folk had not contrived to hide the cows in calf among the forest, next winter they would have starved.” He paused for breath, for he had told the thing at a racing speed. “Another thing I tell, but this thing not of my own knowing: Erp the Otter bade me bring you the word and say that he will come in a while and a while when he has seen what follows, and tell it again himself, but that meantime you should know as soon as might be.” He paused again, a little anxiously, for in general I did not like secondhand information. But from those two, I knew it might be relied on.
“So?”
“Erp came from the edge of the Great Water, that way —” He pointed south and eastward. “And met me at a certain spot, and bade me tell you that he had seen three boats come in to the place that you call Dubris.”
“War boats?” I asked quickly.
He shook his head. “Na, not the long war boats, but broad-bellied like a woman in whelp, and out of them, men carried ashore new weapons rust-spotted with salt, and ironbound caps, and barrels, and one of the barrels broke open and out came much sawdust, and packed in the sawdust —” He broke off yet again, searching this time for the right word, his fingers making flickering filigree patterns over his own body. “War skins, like this — like salmon skins.”
“Mail shirts,” I said. “So they still have to bring in their best sarks from the Rhenus armorers, do they?”
“Mail shirts? That is the word? Aiee! I will remember.” He came a light half step nearer. “My Lord the Bear, one thing more I tell. I heard it spoken of around a Sea Wolves’ campfire, while I lay hid in the shadows beyond the firelight — and since, in other places also: they say that they have chosen out Aelle of the South Seax to be Battle Lord of them all, of all the tribes of the Sea Wolves, and lead them on the war trail!”
Like all his kind, Noni betrayed nothing through his eyes, but I think, from the almost prick-eared look on the rest of his face, that he wondered why I laughed.
SUNSET was past, but the web of light still lingered behind the hills northward, and the nights are never very dark in midsummer. And from the hawthorn-crested barrow that was the highest point of the camp, I could look out over the clustered wattle huts of the regular garrison (we always kept a small garrison there, even in times of so-called peace, for Badon Hill was one of the main strong points in Ambrosius’s system of defense in depth) and make out still the shape of the surrounding country. A familiar shape, for I served along the northern frontiers when I was a boy.
I could see how the huge hill shoulder thrust out from the main mass of the Downs, commanding the Ridgeway and the sweep of the White Horse Vale, and the pass where the road dives southward through the bare rounded turf hills. Once through that pass and into the rich lowlands beyond, the land would lie open to the invaders, to swing westward through the lead-mining hills into the reed and withy country south of Aquae Sulis — we might be able to do something there, but it would mean holding a perilously long and slender line, and the marshes would hamper our cavalry — and so on to the coast, and the main strength of Britain neatly sliced in two behind them. It was the old game, the same game as they had tried at Guoloph, twenty years ago. But between the Sea Wolves and all these things, like a giant on guard, stood Badon Hill with its triple crown of dikes and ramparts that had been a stronghold to our British forebears before even our Roman forebears came.