“I am Artos the Bear.”
“So. It is good. Then the Sea Wolves passed at sundown last night, and made their camp among the fringes of Forest Dhu,”
“How many? Can you number them at all?”
“I did not see them. They are as the ants that swarm out when a child kicks at an ants’ nest; so said the man from beyond Broken Hill. But he carried this — it was given to him by the man before him, and he passed it on to me.” The little man took from the breast of his mangy wolfskin mantle a slim billet of wood which reminded me of the peeled willow wands on which Hunno kept his tallies. But this was the tally, not of a horse herd but a Saxon war host; and as he gave it into my hand I read the roughly carved numbers on the shaft: MCDLXX. Close on fifteen hundred men, maybe somewhat more, maybe somewhat less — I knew how difficult it could be to judge numbers when one was not used to it. But still, somewhere around fifteen hundred. The Saxon war host had already trebled its size since last autumn. Had the Picts, despite Kinmarcus’s opinion, already leapt over the Wall to join forces with the Sea Wolves of Eburacum? Or had Earl Hengest called up reinforcements from across the North Sea? Well, it made no difference for the moment; it was the numbers that mattered, not where they came from. Against them, allowing for the usual hurts and sickness, I could put something over two hundred and fifty of my own heavy cavalry into the field, and about five hundred tribesmen, more or less trained by now, who had gathered to me as auxiliaries and irregular troops during the winter. If I put the drivers into the fighting line, about a hundred more; and doubtless when the time came there would be a rabble of citizens, valiant and willing, but not much use save in pursuit. The horses would do something, a great deal, to even the desperate odds against us; but not enough. . . .
I handed the man over to my own lads, with orders to feed him and the exhausted pony, and let them rest in the field camp while someone else belted back to Deva with their news. Then I sent for Bedwyr and Cei, and showed them the tally stick. Cei swore at sight of it, and Bedwyr, with his left eyebrow flying more than usually like a mongrel’s ear, whistled long and liquidly. “It seems that we shall have hot work when the time comes, my brothers.”
“Something too hot for my liking,” I said. “Therefore I think, since I’ve no mind to gamble against loaded dice when there’s any other way, that we must do something to ease the odds a trifle.”
“And that something?”
“Bear traps,” I said.
“Strange. I always thought that bear traps were dug for the bear, not by him.”
“Not in the case of this particular bear.”
So we set the tribesmen to digging; midway between the stream and the woodshore a long string of trenches and potholes with gaps between for the passage of cavalry, cutting straight across the road and reaching for somewhat over half a bowshot on either hand. The road crossed the stream on a broad paved ford, at a spot where the bank was fairly firm, but save for that one spot the water ran wide and shallow, in a chain of pools between marshy sallow-fringed banks where a man could become bogged down by a single unlucky step. Therefore we judged that the Saxons would not be able to fan out until they were well clear of the valley bottom and the half bowshot was enough. We cut the trenches about three feet deep and three to four feet wide, and set a few short stakes, their ends sharpened and hardened by fire, along their floors for good measure. And then, just as one does with a bear trap, covered all over with a light latticework of branches, scattering above it the sodden tawny wreck of last year’s bracken still clothing the hillside at that point. The place where the trench crossed the road might have been a difficulty, but as the valley was soft, the road just there was a corduroy of logs carried on a brushwood bed, and it was a simple matter, after we had cut the trench across, to lay the logs back over a flimsy hurdlework just strong enough to carry them but no more. One or two of the logs had rotted through and had to be replaced, but that might have been done simply in an attempt to keep the road in some kind of repair; and when the thing was finished, the hillside looked just as it had looked before.
The spare earth we carried back into the trees, in every trug and basket that Deva could provide.
The thing was finished, and with maybe a day to spare.
That night we camped behind the belt of woods, as we had done ever since the work started, and I called Bedwyr to me. “Beer all around, I think, Bedwyr. The men are all tired; they have worked like heroes and tomorrow they must fight like heroes. But for God’s sake see that they don’t drink too much. I can’t afford to find myself with a camp full of walking corpses in the morning.” I went to look for Cei myself, and when I found him in the horse lines, took him aside and issued a private ultimatum. “Cei, I’ve given the order for beer all around. Don’t swill too much of it.”
His indignation was, as usual, ludicrous. “Have you ever known me drunk?”
“I’ve never known you show drunk; but nevertheless, it makes you reckless afterward.”
He looked at me, half laughing, half indignant still, then flung an arm clashing with blue glass and copper wire bracelets across my shoulder. “I’ll not lose you Britain, for the sake of a horn of sour beer.”
LATE that night another of the little dark hillmen rode in on another shaggy pony, to bring us the latest word of Hengest’s advance. He was clear of the mountains and into the fringing lowland hills, and his forward scouts were making camp on the wooded flanks of Black Bull. By noon tomorrow, the waiting should be over.
But there was always the chance that the enemy might try a night march, and so there was no lingering next morning. A meal of bannock and hard yellow cheese was doled out to the men at first light, and before the sun was well clear of the woods that crested the opposite ridge, we had taken up our fighting positions; the foot soldiers among the dense low scrub that flanked the road, the mounted archers and the Cymric longbows in the shadows of the trees on either side of them. On the far left, I knew that Bedwyr was waiting with his cavalry wing, as here on the right I held the other. Behind us, among the trees, Fulvius was with the reserves, and away among the woods across the valley, drawn well back from the Saxon’s line of advance, Cei — stone-cold sober, for he had kept his promise to me with regard to the heather beer — was lying up with another squadron of fifty or so mounted tribesmen, ready to take the Sea Wolves in the rear, or cut off their line of retreat when the time came.
Hengest, it seemed, had not made a night march, and the day crawled slowly on with no sign of his coming. It was a soft day of veiled sunlight, with a silver bloom on the distant hills, and the milky scent of the hawthorn blossom along the woodshore came and went like breath on the little wandering aimless wind that seemed at times to lie down and go to sleep in the young bracken. A day when one could not quite believe in the red evening on which the sun must go down. The slow hours wore away; nothing stirred among the wayside scrub save from time to time that small fitful wind silvering the hazel bushes; only in the half shadow under the trees, now and then the jink of a bridle bit or the low voice of a man soothing a restless horse told where the cavalry waited — waited. . . .
I put up my hand to feel that the knot of hawthorn was still in the forehead band of my helmet — it had become a custom with us of the Company always to ride into battle with something of the kind about us, both for identification and as a kind of grace note, a mark of pride. A gadfly bit my old Arian, and he tossed up his head, snorting and trying to flick his tail which was knotted up for battle in the usual way, that no enemy might grab him by it to hamstring him. Somewhere among the far woods the first cuckoo of the year called repeatedly, the sound soft and bloomed with distance. Beyond the scrub, the shining midge clouds danced in the sunshine.