Noon was long past, the shadows of the opposite hillside had gathered themselves up small under the trees, and our own shadows were beginning to flow cool down toward the stream, when there was a kind of dark quiver along the skyline of the opposite ridge, where the Eburacum road lifted over it. I had been staring that way so long that for a moment I could not be sure that it was anything more than the skyline crawling under my tired eyes. I blinked, trying for clear sight, and the flicker came again, more strongly this time, more unmistakably.
The waiting of that interminable day was over.
A few moments more, and it was as though the dark lip of a wave lifted over the crest of the ridge, clung there an instant and then spilled over. And so we saw again the Saxon war host.
They were spreading down into the valley, a swarm of ants, as the scout had said, their center on the road, their wings spread out, thick rather than far, over the firmer ground on either side. The level rays of the westering sun struck jinks of light out of their darkness, the broad fire-flake of a spearhead, the round boss of a shield, the comb of a helmet; and among them the streaming white horsetail standards caught the light and seemed to shine of themselves, harshly bright as the sun-touched wings of a wheeling gull against a thunder sky.
The scout had not been far astray in his estimate; there must be around fifteen hundred of the enemy. It seemed to me that I could feel already the fault trembling of the ground under their advancing feet. I was in the saddle by that time, and I said to Prosper my trumpeter, sitting his horse beside me with the silver-bound aurochs hunting horn we had always used to sing us into battle, “Sound me the ‘Mount and Make Ready.’ ”
He set the silver mouthpiece to his lips, and the familiar notes rang out, not loudly but with a haunting echo under the trees, and instantly there was a stir to the right and left and behind me, as man after man swung into the saddle.
“Now the ‘Advance.’ ”
One cannot use too many different cavalry calls; it is confusing to the men and horses who must obey them, but I had passed to each of the chiefs and my squadron captains, that the first time the Advance sounded that day, it meant simply that the Companions and the spears and javelin men, but not the archers, who were to remain under cover just within the fringe of the scrub, were to move out from the woodshore into the open so that they could be seen by the enemy, and there halt.
While the soft echoes still hung under the branches, there came a brushing and a cracking of twigs, and a surge forward through the undergrowth, the beat of hooves on last year’s fallen leaves, and the jingle of bit and harness, and our battle line moved out into the open and drew rein on the clear ground before the wood-shore. I bent forward for the dappled bullhide buckler with its boss of gilded bronze that hung from my saddlebow, and swinging it high to my bridle shoulder, gathered up the reins again, sensing rather than hearing the movement echoed all around me. We had begun of late years, as we got larger and heavier horses, to practice the new Byzantine style of warfare. It was far more effective than the old hacking sword charge, but it still seemed strange to me to ride into battle with the slim ashen spear shaft balanced in my hand instead of the familiar sword grip.
The Saxons had seen us; their dark mass checked an instant in its advance, then they set up a great shout, and the quiet valley and the cuckoo’s calling were engulfed in the hollow booming of the Saxon war horns that seemed to burst to and fro from wooded crest to wooded crest. And the dark battle mass came rolling on again at an increased pace. That was what I had wanted; for that I had given the order to advance into the open; for it needed no mere orderly oncoming, but the hot-blood burly of a charge to bring the bear traps into their full use.
“Play me a tune,” I said to Prosper. “Just a tune that sounds like mockery.”
He grinned, and again putting the mouthpiece to his lips, answered the strident bellowing of the war horns with a lazy rendering of the hunting call that sics the hounds on when the quarry comes in sight. Probably they did not know what it meant, but the mere sound of it was an insult; and across the valley we heard the yell that they set up, and the war horns bellowing again. They were sweeping down toward the ford, the white horsetails lifting and flowing out on the wind of their going, and my old Arian flung up his head and neighed his own defiance to the war horns.
I had wondered how the new crossbred horses would stand up to their initiation. All that winter we had been training them on, breaking them to crowds and hostile shouting and the boom of war horns, teaching them to charge unbroken against men with blunted spears, to stand undismayed against the rush of yelling warriors, to run straight on a target, to use their own ironshod forefeet as weapons; for to get the most worth out of a war-horse, he as well as the man on his back must be a fighter. They had learned well and willingly in the main, with the proud eagerness to understand and do what is wanted that most of the horse kind show, once the first struggle of breaking is over. But would they remember their training now? Now, when the spears were not blunt and they caught the smell of blood?
The Saxons had almost reached the stream; a close-knit mass, shield to shield, shoulder to comrade’s shoulder, and as they came, quickening into a loping wolf run, we heard the deadly sound of the Saxon war cry that begins as a murmur like the murmur of distant surf, and swells and swells at last into an appalling roar that seems to shake the very hills. They had taken to the water now, their center crossing by the ford, those on either side splashing as best they could through the shifting shallows, and as they came I saw in their forefront, under the white horse standards, Hengest himself, in the brave midst of his house carls. An old gray-gold giant, with the golden arm ring of an earl coiled about his sword arm, and the low sunlight clashing like cymbals on the bronze-bound ox horns of his helmet; and at his side a lesser man of half his age but with something of the same brutish splendor, who could be no one else than Octa bis son.
Of necessity the Saxons had lost their close formation through the shallows; men were being pushed too far out, so that the battle line became ragged; the stream was all a yeasty thresh and the spray sheeted up about them, bright in the level sunlight. They were across now, closing the ragged shield mass, roaring uphill at the full charge, though their battlefront was taking on the shape of a bent bow as the struggling flanks were slowed by the soft ground.
Old Arian began to dance under me, snorting, and I quieted him with a hand on his neck; he was always impatient for the charge before the trumpets sounded. Other horses were catching the fret from him; men, too; suddenly I felt as though I were holding straining hounds in leash, waiting for the moment to slip them against the quarry.
I had not long to hold them. The van of the dark onsweeping mass was halfway up the gentle slope. Another spear’s length. The terrible rhythmic battle shouting broke into a ragged outcry, as between one step and the next, the innocent bracken-clad hillside opened to engulf the foremost surge of the great man-wave. The first rank plunged from view almost before they could yell their dismay; those behind could not stop, thrust on by those behind again, and pitched down on top of their comrades. One of the horsetail standards lurched and went down, and in a bare heartbeat of time all was wild confusion, twisting and struggling bodies and the furious and anguished cries of men.