That evening Cei and I had been out to sup with old Lucianus. Bedwyr was not of our company, for it was a law among us that all three were never out of camp at the same time. We had drunk a good deal, for it was one of those parties of the old imperial pattern one seldom met with now, in which the women withdrew as soon as the meal was over, and the men chose a drinking master and got down to the business of the evening. Our host had brought up in our honor the last of his treasured amphorae of Red Falernian, and when at last we came up the street and turned in through the fortress gates, the rich fumes of it were still in our heads, making the stars dance widdishins and our feet seem curiously far away. And as neither of us wished to wake next morning with dizzy heads and tongues like old leather, we turned aside from the sleeping quarters as by mutual consent, and climbing the steps to the narrow rampart walk, leaned there side by side, with our hot foreheads to the little thin east wind.
“Ah now, that is better!” said Cei, thrusting back the russet hair from his forehead, and snuffing like a hound. “No air down there in that cursed house.”
Fulvius, whose turn it was to take the second watch, had come strolling along the rampart walk to lean his elbows on the coping beside us. He laughed, the quiet laugh of a man on night watch. “Too many vine leaves in your hair?”
Yesterday, with the long strain of waiting which had begun to shorten tempers all around, Cei would have flown into a fury over that, but tonight the wine seemed to have mellowed him, and he answered peacefully enough. “Did you ever see a man with vine leaves in his hair walk up that deathtrap of a rampart stair without a stagger?”
“I’ve seen you walk the Bath Gardens wall at Lindum without a stagger,” I said, “when you were so dripping with vine leaves that most other men would have been lying on their backs in the kennel singing murky love songs to the stars.”
“I have a headache,” said Cei with dignity. “It was too hot in that cursed place of Lucianus’s. Shouldn’t have had the brazier glowing like that — May Eve, not midwinter.”
“There’ll be plenty of folk besides Lucianus keeping good fires tonight,” said Fulvius. “You can see fifteen Beltane fires from the ramparts here — I’ve counted them a score of times since I came up, for want of something better to do.”
Almost without thinking, with some idea, I suppose, of finding more than Fulvius, I began idly to do the same. I have always loved to see the fires on the hills at Beltane, making the old magic of returning life. One always burned on the high hill shoulder behind Dynas Pharaon, and many a time when I was a boy I have helped to drive the bellowing cattle through the sinking flames to make them fruitful in the coming year. I leaned my back against the rampart, and looked across the camp toward the western mountains, thinking of those fires; but that way the hills were dark. It must have been more than fifty miles away, even had there been no mountains in between.
Plenty of other fires, though, some near, some very far, like red seeds scattered in the dark bowl of the night. Turning slowly I also counted my fifteen, and could make it no more. And then suddenly, so far off that I could not be sure in the first few moments whether I was seeing it at all, there was another. I looked away, and then back again; it was still there, the faintest spark of ruddy light clinging to the skyline of the mountains away eastward. “Sixteen,” I said. “Sixteen, Fulvius — there, on the rim of the mountains.”
They both looked where I pointed, and were silent a moment, picking it up. “It is a star rising over the rim of High Wood,” said Cei.
Fulvius made a swift gesture of denial. “Na! This isn’t the first night I’ve kept watch up here; there’s no star rises at this hour over the crest of High Wood, no star as red as that anywhere, not even the Warrior. It’s a fire all right — but it wasn’t there when the Beltane fires were lit. It wasn’t there fifty heartbeats ago.”
A sudden silence caught us all by the throat. I felt my own heartbeat quicken and knew that it was the same with the other two. And then, on the bare crouched shoulder of Black Bull, only fifteen or twenty miles away, in almost direct line between us and the sixteenth fire, there was a sudden blink of light that wavered and sank and spread, and sprang up even while we watched with straining eyes, into a ragged flower of flame.
“The Saxons,” I said. And I remember the relief that broke over me like a wave that the long months of waiting were over and Hengest was here while the Northern menace still hung on the edge of breaking. I remember also that the last fumes of the Falernian were gone from my head as though a wind had risen and blown them clear away.
“God be praised that they chose Beltane!” Cei said.
I had been thinking the same thought. It had troubled me a good deal that any fire or smoke signal lit for us must be clear to the Saxons also, warning them all too surely that their advance had been seen and the advantage of surprise lost to them, and so putting them on their guard. But on May Eve, with the whole country aspark with Beltane fires, the signal would carry no meaning for them.
“How long do you reckon we’ve got?” Cei said.
“Four days, maybe. Enough, but not more than enough.” I had turned back to the rampart steps. “Go and rout me out Prosper and his trumpet. I want everybody on the parade ground.”
This time it should be we who picked the battleground. The enemy must advance by the old military road, for to trust to the mountain herding paths, or strike across country through the damp-oak scrub and the peat bogs that filled the valleys would be to go leaping on disaster. And knowing this, we had in fact chosen our place some time ago. It was a spot some five or six miles in advance of Deva, where the road from over the mountains, dipping into a marshy valley, forded a little river, then climbed again gently, almost lazily, up the western slope. The soft upward swell of the valley on that side, the Deva side, was crested by a long comb of thorn and tangled oak woods that reached for a mile or more in either direction; and through this narrow belt, as through a hedge, the road ran straight to the west gate of the City of Legions. In the old ordered days the trees had been cut back in the usual way, for a bowshot on either side of the road, but now all manner of quick-growing scrub had come creeping back, hazel, crack willow, blackthorn and bramble, making a tangle that was almost as difficult to break through as the woods on either hand — and as good cover for men.
In this place, on May Day morning, we set about preparing a welcome for Hengest and the Sea Wolves.
We began by felling trees to make a couple of rides through the woodland belt, for the quick bringing up of cavalry, and toward noon on the second day (we had taken our time over this work, not wishing to make a clumsy havoc that would show at a distance) a little dark mountain man of the breed that we sometimes used as scouts came drumming up the road on a shaggy black pony about the size of a big dog, to bring us word of the Saxon war host.
He was brought to me, where I was overseeing the careful screening of one of the ride mouths, and dropping from his pony’s back, stumbled and stood swaying, his head bent, his arm across the neck of the wretched little beast that stood with heaving flanks beside him.
“You have ridden hard, my friend,” I said. “What news do you bring?”
He tipped back his head slowly, thrusting the matted hair out of his eyes, and looking up at me with narrowed gaze as a man looks up into a tree. “You are he that they call Artos the Bear?”