But the horsetail standard had also disappeared from sight.
Presently the host of the Saxons had become a mass of swirling separated war bands that swayed and surged to and fro, each battling desperately for itself; with the cavalry busy among them. They were breaking away in flying groups, and later still, at twilight, when people in houses would be lighting candles for the women to weave by, after the evening stew, we were hunting the defeated rabble of a proud and mighty war host down the White Horse Vale.
Not today, not today, would Britain go down into the dark.
WE hunted hard and slew often, and I remember that we were singing as we rode, one of the old triumph songs out of the Western hills. The singing made me think of Bedwyr who had so often sung us home from battle, but in the deepening twilight I could see no sign of him, and there was no time for asking of this man or that. No time for feeling much, at all, neither for triumph — despite the singing of the squadrons about me — nor for grief; I was spent and empty as I rode, the empty husk of a thing created for the purpose of killing Saxons.
The dusk was almost deepened into the dark when we came to the place below where the Ridgeway crossed the Calleva road. There was a sickly smell to the place, and the ground, even down into the Vale, was cluttered with bodies, British and Saxon; and ahead of us the red gleeds of watch fires showed where the Barbarian host had left their wagon laager. We set up a shout, and settled down into the saddle for more fighting, but the men who had been left with the baggage train had joined the rout of their comrades and nothing and no one was left to draw seax against us. With one accord, the irregulars and a good part of the cavalry dropped out in search of plunder. I could have whipped them off, I suppose, as a hunter whips the hounds off a carcass, but it scarcely seemed to matter now what they did. I left them to their scavenging, and rode on with whoever cared to follow me. But I remember that there was no more singing, we were all too weary.
Indeed we carried the hunt little farther ourselves, but a few miles down the Vale, drew rein by a little chalk stream to breathe and water the horses; and knew as by common consent that for this night, the hunting was over.
The stream ran under the lee of a hazel coppice, and the snail-shine of the rising moon was silvering the world about us, and, unbelievably, in the hazy depths of the thicket a nightingale was singing. A big shadow loomed up beside me, and I saw that it was Cei, drooping in the saddle, with his buckler hanging almost in two halves at his shoulder.
“God! What a day! What a thundering victory! Is this all, or do we hunt them further?”
“Let them go,” I said. “Tomorrow will be time enough to scour out the countryside — when we have learned our own losses and bound up our wounds.” I was looking at the figures on the wood-shore, some still sitting their horses, some sliding like cramped old men from their saddles. Those who, for the most part, still wore somewhere about them the withered rags of a moon daisy had thrust up closest to me. There were maybe two squadrons of them, or rather less. “Is this all that is left of us?”
Someone laughed thickly in his throat, and I knew it for Owain. “Na, Pharic and his wild men dropped off to help rifle the baggage wagons.”
“I did not, then!” Young Riada pushed up beside me. “I am my lord’s armor-bearer.”
“And there are likely a good few of us back among the wounded!” someone else put in.
“What of Bedwyr?” I asked after a moment. “Does anyone know?”
Flavian answered me, that time. “I saw him go down. No more than that.”
And the nightingale was singing as it had sung in the old palace garden on the night small Hylin died.
In a while, when we had breathed and watered the horses, and ourselves drunk and bathed our hurts at the stream, I gave the order to remount, and got them going again.
The moon was well clear of the Downs by now, and as we turned the horses’ heads back the way we had come, there shone out at us, from the turf of the Downs glimmering and gigantic, distorted by the slopeway of the hillside, the chalk-cut sacred Sun Horse of the White Horse Vale.
At the same time we saw, far up the curve of the Vale and sweeping closer, the flare of torches; and a few moments later caught the first faint throb of hooves. “Sa, they have rifled even the watch fires!” someone said. “They have finished with the wagons and remembered the hunt again.”
A flying cloud of dark shapes was taking substance under the torches, heavy cavalry and men on little fiery mountain ponies; some of the light cavalry from the battle had come up, the riders leaning sideways in their saddles, with men on foot leaping along beside them clinging to their stirrups, and man after man carrying makeshift torches kindled from the Saxon watch fires, that streamed in mare’s tails of flame above their heads. Signus stamped and snorted at the nearing fire, and the foremost of the wild riders saw the Red Dragon on the edge of the stream, and set up a great hoarse shout and swung toward us. In a few moments the first of them were dropping from their horses all around, then more and more until the whole loop of the stream was full of men and horses and the swirling, dancing flare of torches that drove out the white light of the rising moon. Some were dumb and dazed with utter weariness, others beginning to be drunk, as much with the aftermath of battle as with the honey beer that they had found in the wagons. One — a long lean man with a brilliant eye — capered wildly in an open spot, wearing a woman’s flame-colored gown hitched to his knees; and another, dismounting from his weary horse while it drank, sat on the stream bank with his head on his knees, and wept bubblingly for a dead friend. It might as well have been myself. Many had twists of blood-soaked rag somewhere about them, and the horses too showed gashes on breast and flanks, so that some of them it was pitiful to see. Men and beasts alike made for the water — even those men who were already awash with Saxon ale, so that for a little, with the bathing of many hurts, as well as drinking, the stream below the torchlight must have run fouled and reddened.
They were all around me, also, a sea of torchlit faces turned up to mine as I sat the great battle-weary horse above them. Men were thrusting in for a closer look, to touch my knee or my sword sheath or my foot in the stirrup, and all I wanted was to get them into some kind of order and back as far as the wagon laager for the night. And then — even now I do not know how it started — one of the veterans, with enough years behind him to remember the old way of things and the last imperial troops still in Britain, set up a shout of “Hail Caesar!” And those nearest about him caught it up, and the thing spread like the ripples in a pool, until the whole of the war host — or such of them as were mustered there — were shouting, bellowing it out and beating it home upon their shields and the shoulders of their comrades. “Hail Caesar! Caesar! Caesar!”
Wounds and weariness were forgotten, and the whole night took fire about us and roared up in triumphal chaos. They plucked me from Signus’s back and flung me up again onto a royal throne made of the shoulders of men; a tossing and swaying throng that lurched to and fro, the whole night lurching with it as the mob surged about us. Cei and Pharic with his tall Caledonians and the rest of the Companions fought their way in to make a bodyguard about me, baying as loud as any. I looked down on battered and filthy faces exultant in the torch glare, spears shaken aloft, a vast, blasphemously uproarious mob, and flung out my arms, shouting too — I do not know what, save that it was no order to be still. Few of them could have heard the words, anyway; but at sound of my bellow they ceased for a moment the roar of “Caesar! Caesar!” and began to cheer, a fierce hot thunder of cheering that rolled the breadth of the war host and curled back and burst upward in waves of sound that set the horses plunging. And then as the cheering sank, somebody cried out, pointing with a spear toward the great beast that pranced half-hillside-high, cut from the turf of the White Horse Down. And that cry too was taken up, and still carrying me shoulder high in their midst, they set off toward it at a stumbling run, the torch flames streaming out behind, until their speed slackened with the steepening slope of the ground.