If the White Horse Vale is the gateway into the heart of southern Britain, then Badon Hill is the key to the gate. It remained to be seen whether the Saxons could turn it. . . .
Ambrosius had been right. In the face of our growing cavalry strength, they had dared delay no longer in mounting their great attack. And for the first time in their lives, it seemed that the Saxons were indeed learning to combine. With Aelle of the South Seax for their chosen War King, and Oisc for his lieutenant, they had drawn together, the Jutes of Cantii Territory and the Tamesis Valley settlements, the East Angles and the Northfolk and Southfolk of the old Iceman horse country. Up from the south and swarming down the Ridgeway from north of the Tamesis, they had come, to converge at last on the White Horse Vale; and all the way, we had harried them, by flank attacks from Durocobrivae and Calleva, by night raids and ambushes, and the dog-pack tactics of slingers and mounted archers on their lines of march by day, striving by every means in our power to slow them up and thin their ranks. It had had some effect, but not enough, we could not spare sufficient light troops for the task; and the last messengers to come in had re-ported that the enemy had joined forces and were camped for the night astride the Ridgeway some six miles off, and that despite the valiant efforts of the light troops who were now keeping watch on them, they still numbered some seven or eight thousand men.
Against them we could muster not much over five. But we had the cavalry.
Below me in the camp where the light of the fires was biting more sharply as the last of the daylight died, arrows and fresh bowstrings were being given out, while men with torches moved along the picket lines, checking foot shackles, and from the field forges came the ring of hammer on anvil where the smiths and armorers were at work on last-minute repairs. And from the cooking fires the smell of the evening stew began to mingle on the air with the tang of woodsmoke and horse droppings.
I had called the Council of War to sup with me, for when there is not much time to spare, it serves ill to waste it by eating and conferring separately when both may be done together, and so in a little, Aquila the firstcomer tramped into the light of the council fire that burned almost at the foot of the bush-grown barrow, flinging back the heavy blood-red folds of his cloak, and half turning to speak to Bedwyr, who stepped out of the shadows behind him, into the fire flicker that touched as though with exploring fingers the pale feather of hair at his temple. And I went down to them, with old Cabal stalking at my heels.
Perdius was the next to join us, and little grim Marius who commanded the foot of the main war host. The Lords of Strathclyde and the North, and the princes of the Cymri, for I too had sent out my own Cran Tara that spring; and Cador of Dumnonia, grayer than when we hunted together in the spring before I sailed for Gaul, thicker in the shoulder and inclined to a paunch; and when the stewpot and baskets of barley cakes had already been set beside the fire, Cei arrived, clashing with cheap glass jewelry, from our sister fort across the road valley, where he held command of tomorrow’s left cavalry wing.
So we ate, and while we ate, worked out with bits of stick and ale cups and daggers, the pattern — so far as one can ever make such a pattern in advance — of tomorrow’s fighting.
When the food was eaten and the War Council ended, and the captains and leaders gone their own ways, I went to put on my war shirt. The day had been hot, and in summer no man wears link mail more than need be; and there would be little leisure for arming in the morning. Old Aquila walked with me, for the bodyguard was camped beyond the garrison huts, and so his way was mine. Before the mud bothy where my personal standard drooped on its spear shaft by the doorway, we checked, and lingered looking out over the great curve of the Downs silvered now by the moon, and by very contrast with the quiet of the summer night beyond the ramparts, the awareness of tomorrow’s battle was strong on us.
“We have waited a long time for this,” Aquila said.
“Ever since we drew breath after Guoloph, I suppose. Twenty years. And yet it seemed at the time, just for that one time, that we had fought the greatest fight that ever there would be between us and the Saxon kind. And afterward —”
I hesitated, and he said quietly, “A new Heaven and a new Earth?”
Cabal nosed at my hand, then began the old familiar pretense at savaging my wrist in his great jaws, until I took it away and be-gan to gentle his ears as he wished.
“Something of the kind. Most of us were young, then, and drunk with victory. Now there comes a greater fight, and we grow old and sober.”
“So — and afterward?”
“If God gives us again the victory — the old Heaven and the old Earth patched up to seem a little more secure. A few gained years in which men may sow their fields in reasonable hope of reaping the harvest.”
Aquila’s harsh hawk face was remote in the moonlight, as he looked far off between the dark bothies toward the rim of the Downs, every line of it deep cut as a sword gash; and under the frowning black brows, I had a feeling that it was not the shape of the rounded slopes against the sky that he was seeing, but something further and beyond. “Even that might be worth whatever price was asked for it.”
Abruptly he turned to me. “Bear Cub, will you do something for me?”
“I expect so,” I said. “What is it?”
He pulled the flawed emerald from his signet finger.
“Take this in charge, and if I die tomorrow and Flavian lives, give it to him to wear after me.”
“And if you do not die tomorrow?” I said quickly, as though by that I could turn the thing aside.
“Then give it back to me at sunset.”
“And how if I am no more weapon-proof than you?”
“The mark is not on your forehead yet,” Aquila said, and put the ring into my hand.
I stowed it in the little pouch of leather hanging around my neck inside my tunic, in which I kept sundry other matters of my own. “Until sunset, then. Maybe we shall meet in the thick of things, tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” he said, and touched my shoulder, and went on his way toward the guards’ part of the camp.
When he was gone, I turned into the bothy behind me, where a lantern hung from the center pole and my war shirt from its wooden cross against the wall. I did not call Riada, for the mail was laced at the side, and could be put on easily enough, not like the kind one pulls on over the head, and which is all but impossible to get into without help. I took it down and heaved into it, and was busy with the lacing when a step sounded outside, and Bedwyr ducked in through the low door hole.
He sat himself down on the packsaddle which as usual served the purpose of a chair, and watched me as I drew the broad thongs through the eyelet holes. “Artos, what do we take for our badge tomorrow?”
We still kept up our old custom of riding into action with a sprig of some flowering thing tucked into helmet comb or shoulder buckle — brown feathered rushes in the East Coast years, or sometimes yellow loosestrife or the little white many-thorned roses of the sand dunes; heather in the Caledonian years (“Taking Heather” had come to be the term men used in those years for joining the Companions). It was a privilege jealously guarded from the rest of the war host, a flourish, a grace note that was ours alone. But there was neither feathered rush nor royal heather on Badon Hill. Wild cranesbill along the foot of the chalk ramparts, but the blue flowers would be limp and dead before the first charge.