But with the trenches caved in all along their length, the Saxons could see what lay before them, and the surge forward began again. Some of the men had chance-struck the gaps of solid ground between, and were hardly checked at all, some jumped the trenches or swarmed across over the very bodies of their comrades, while those in the trenches who had escaped the sharpened stakes began to scramble out. The war horns were bellowing like wounded bulls. Nevertheless, the bear traps had done their work, and the impetus of the charge was broken.
I was aware suddenly, as though they were a part of myself, of the archers hidden among the hazel scrub, each with an arrow notched to his drawn bowstring. The timing was perfect, the struggling chaos along the trenches had barely begun to sink, when the dark flight of arrows that I had been waiting for leapt from among the bushes and thrummed like a cloud of hornets into its midst. Men were down in good earnest now, and I felt how the hidden bowmen stooped forward each one for another shaft from the ground before him or the loose battle quiver hanging at his saddlebow. . . .
Far along our own line I heard the shout of command, and our spearmen, yelping their own short sharp battle cry, were running forward down the hill. The few Saxon archers on the flank, unable to see where our bowmen loosed from under cover, turned their own short deadly arrows against the spears — and the moment had come to slip the hounds.
“Sound me the charge.”
The man beside me set the great horn to his lips, and winded the one long blast that set the echoes flying like startled birds all up and down the valley. From away to the left, almost in the same instant, Bedwyr’s trumpeter took up the note; a great shout rose from our men, and both cavalry wings broke forward, the spears that had been resting upright swinging down as one to the horizontal. I crouched low into the saddle, feet braced into my stirrups against the coming shock, feeling through every fiber of my being the balance of the leveled spear against palm and ringers, hearing the flying thunder of the squadron’s hooves behind me.
We took them on both flanks, and at the full gallop.
They had no chance to form the shield wall; for the first moments of impact it was not battle as I counted battle, but sheer red butchery. But whatever evil may be cried against the Sea Wolves, no man ever yet called their courage in question. Somehow they closed and steadied their ranks; they fought like heroes; their archers stood like rocks though their numbers grew steadily fewer under dark hail of the long British war shafts, and loosed their own arrows without pause into our ranks. The house carls of the center held us with spear and seax long after the light throwing axes were spent; their naked and stained berserkers flung themselves upon our very spearpoints to dirk our horses from underneath. Afterward, I was glad that the thing had after all been a battle and not a massacre. At the time I saw all things through a crimson haze, and felt very little.
The sun was gone, and the dusk was creeping up the valley like the slow inflowing of the tide, when they broke at last and turned to fly. They streamed away, a tattered shadow of the host that had stormed across the stream in the late sunlight, seemingly so short a time ago; and as we swept after them, down to the ford, the single high note of a horn sounded once more, and Cei and his wild riders swept down upon them out of the far woods.
In the swiftly fading light, the main number got away, all the same; and leaving Cei to harry them into the hills, the rest of us, who had borne the chief heat of the fighting, drew off and turned back toward the long wooded ridge below which the struggle had taken place, and the work that still waited for us there.
Some of the archers, with the pack train drivers and the women, were already moving among the fallen figures, looking at each to see if it were friend or foe, dead or wounded. Our own dead were being carried aside for burial, the Saxons left for the ravens and the wolves if any chanced not yet to have drawn off into their summer fortresses; they would make the Eburacum road unsavory for a while, but we had other things to do than bury Saxons. The Saxon wounded were being cleanly knifed; I doubt if they gave as clean an end to our own men in like case, but I have always set my face against mutilation, at least of living men, and the few women who had tried it in the early days had found their mistake.
I abandoned the scene, and when Amlodd had taken Arian from me (the old war-horse was still sidling and snorting, and there was blood and brains on his ironshod forehooves) went to see how it was with our own wounded. A swarm of good folk from Deva were helping to get the more sorely hurt into carts and farm sledges. We could not care for them in the camp, and at first light tomorrow we must be away after the Saxons, to follow up the day’s victory, so it was better for them to be got back to Deva, even if a few of them died of the jolting on the road. There would be folk in plenty to care for them; even a surgeon, good though generally drunk.
A great fire had been lit in the midst of our last night’s camp on the Deva side of the woods; and the carts and sledges were drawn up on the farthest fringes of the firelight; and Gwalchmai, with a filthy rag twisted around his own left forearm, was limping serenely among the wounded, looking to each as he was brought in through the trees, with the priest and a few of the women to help him. His face was gray and still, with the gentleness and complete withdrawal from all other matters that came to him only when he was plying his craft. I wanted to speak to him, ask him how badly we had suffered; I wanted to speak to some of the men themselves; but that must wait. I never forced questions on Gwalchmai when that look was on his face. I think I had always the feeling that to thrust myself between him and the thing he was doing would be in some way an intrusion.
So I left him and his wounded, and went back to the great fire where the standard had been set up and the food was already being given out and Bedwyr was waiting for me.
“Who is seeing about burying our dead?” I asked.
“Alun Dryfed is in charge just now. I’ve given orders for the work to be done in relays, for the grave must needs be dug deep, here in the wilderness.”
“Save for the amount needed to make good the road, we can use the earth from the trenches to raise a good-sized mound over them for safety.”
He nodded, looking into the fire under that one level and mocking eyebrow. “You’ll want Brother Simon to patter a few prayers over them before we cover them in?”
I never learned what god Bedwyr worshipped, if any; it certainly was not the Christos. Maybe it was the thing between hand and harp string. . . . “Seeing that we have a priest among us we might as well make use of him,” I said. “But there’s time enough for the prayers when he has done helping Gwalchmai with the wounded. The living first, the dead after.”
“All things in their proper order. Well, there are a good few more of the Saxon kind to feed the wolves than there are for the Christian prayers and the grave mound.”
“Yes,” I said. “So far as I can judge as yet, our losses have been surprisingly light compared with theirs.”
He cocked that flaring eyebrow at me. “Surprisingly? When one thinks of those bear pits?”
I was silent for a moment, and then I said, “It was not the kind of fighting that I would choose. I thought at the first after the Companions came in that it was going to be a massacre. I am glad it flowered into a battle after all.”
“You’re a strange man, my Lord Artos the Bear. There are times when I think that you come near to loving the Saxon kind.”
“Only when I am actually at his throat and he at mine. Not before — and not after.”