Two of my own squadron came out from the black gloom of the trees, dragging a body between them. A body that, judging by the way they handled it, was Saxon and none of ours. They flung it down in the full red glare of the firelight, rolling it over onto its back with a silent triumph that shouted more loudly than any voice could do. Then Bericus the Senior said simply, “We found this.”
Lying sprawled uncouthly at the foot of the Red Dragon where the men had tumbled him down, there was a certain splendor about him still. An old man, an old giant, with bright hairs that shone like gold wires in the gray jut of his beard and the mane of wild hair outflung about his head. I recognized him first by the earl’s bracelet twisted about his sword arm, for a spear had taken him between the eyes, but as I looked more closely into the smashed and blood-pooled face, I recognized the cunning iron-bound mouth, drawn back now in a frozen snarl. I recognized above all, I think, the greatness that seemed to cling about him still, an atmosphere of the thing that had made him a giant in more than body; this ancient enemy of Ambrosius’s. Hengest, the Jutish adventurer who had grown to be a war lord of the Saxon hordes, lying flung down like tribute at the foot of the British standard that stirred faintly in the night air above him.
That left the son and grandson to deal with.
“So-o,” Bedwyr said softly. “Earl Hengest goes at last to his own Storm Lords again. He should have died on a night of tempest, with the lightning leaping from hill to hill, not a still summer evening with the scent of hawthorn in the air.”
“He was a royal stag,” I said. “Thank God he is dead.”
Later, I had started out on a round of the watch fires, with a half-eaten bannock still in my hand, when Flavian appeared out of nowhere to join me. “Sir, all things are in order with the squadron. When do we strike camp in the morning?”
“At first light.”
“Then if I am back an hour before that — Deva is only six miles away — If I gave over the squadron to Fercos —”
I stopped and turned to face him. I suppose I was tireder than I knew, and my patience went like a snapped bowstring. “Oh, for God’s sake, Flavian! There are about five hours left to dawn; how much good do you suppose the captain of my third squadron is going to be tomorrow if he spends half the night riding about the countryside and the other half tearing his heart out in bed with a girl?”
Even in the dim light of the watch fire I saw how the blood surged up to his forehead, and I was as angry with myself as the instant before I had been with him. I said quickly, “I’m sorry, Flavian. That was unpardonable.”
He shook his head. “No, I — It was foolish of me to think of it.”
I set my hand on his shoulder. “It was; but not in the way you mean. Did you not say farewell to her before you came away?”
“Yes.”
“And do you not suppose it hurt both of you enough that time? Send her word that you are safe; but if you go back now it will be all to suffer again.”
“I suppose you are right. It is better for her, maybe —”
As I moved on, he turned back to the fire and took the knot of wilted hawthorn flowers from his shoulder buckle and dropped it into the flames. It was a gesture like a man making a votive offering.
Cei and his band came in during the night, having lost contact with the Sea Wolves in the dark; and at first light, our dead buried and our wounded safely back in Deva, we struck eastward along the Eburacum road on the scent of the fleeing Saxons, with the hunter of the Little Dark People who had first brought us word of their coming, riding with us for a guide. We had lost horses as well as men in the day’s fighting, but thanks to the young half-bred stallions, we had still enough to remount any man left horseless, and keep a few spare mounts, even now.
I suppose that to any who have never tried, it must seem easy enough for cavalry to hunt down a fleeing enemy on foot. But the thing is less simple than it would seem, at the start of May in the mountains, when the grass is still sparse. Horses must be rested at times, too, if one would not have them burst their willing hearts, whereas men, if hard enough pressed, can carry on by some power of the spirit long after the spent body is beyond crawling another step. Then also, we were not merely hunting down fugitives but marching in our turn on an enemy stronghold. We had our baggage train and spearmen with us to slow us down, and the Saxons had left the road, as they had not done on their westward march, and scattered into the hills where it was often impossible for the horses to follow them. (We never knew whether they had found some renegade Briton to guide them, or whether, being desperate, they simply trusted to their gods to keep them clear of the mosses.) And among the immensities of those bluff-browed rolling mountains with the bracken and stone bramble springing among the rocky outcrops, where it seems that nothing moves save the wind in the sparse mountain grasses and the kestrel hovering overhead, but the glens are thick with birch scrub, it is not easy to find one man or a knot of men; nor wise to push on heedlessly, leaving the enemy in one’s rear. We did find a few; they lay on their faces for the most part, each with a dark-feathered arrow scarcely larger than a birding bolt in the back. The Old Ones, the Little Dark People of the hills, had, it seemed, as little love for the Sea Wolves as we had.
Before long the reason for that became sickeningly plain, together with the way in which the hard-pressed Saxons had come by food to carry them on their flight. Twice in the first two days, we had seen smoke among the hills, smoke that was too dark and spreading to be that of a hunting fire; and on the third day, when we had left the road and were following our guide along a herding track where the grass was better than that along the scrubby valley through which the road ran, Owain sniffed the air like a hound, saying, “Smoke.” And presently as we rounded a bracken-clad shoulder, we saw it rising from beyond a wind-shaped tangle of thorn and rowan and mountain juniper, pale like smoke that is almost spent. We checked the horses — I remember the sudden silence of the high hills, when the soft dram of hooves over the turf fell away; a buzzard circling the blue heights of the upper air, and faintly the sound of falling water; one is seldom far from the sound of falling water among those hills, any more than among my own hills of Arfon. I called to Bedwyr and to Gwalchmai who generally rode close to me, and with our little dark guide and a handful more, we turned the horses’ heads toward the thorn tangle, leaving the rest of the war host under Cei to wait for us on the trail.
Beyond the belt of scrub, we came upon one of the settlements of the Little Dark People, half large farm, half small village; that is to say we came upon what the Saxons had left of it in their passing. A piteous huddle of huts half underground, the bracken thatch of their roofs still smoldering, blackened and fallen in, so that these that had been the homes of men were blackened and smoking pits gaping in the hillside; even the peat stacks had been wantonly fired, though among the densely packed turfs the fire had not taken hold. Spilled barley was scattered on the beaten earth (in the shelter of the mountain slope below the village showed the threadbare patchwork of small wretched fields). Dead cattle lay among the smoking wreckage; little hill cattle that had been famine lean even in their lives. Strips had been hacked from their flanks and shoulders; I suppose the Saxons had cut them to suck for the blood and warm juices, maybe even to eat raw. And among the sickening chaos of charred thatch and slaughtered cattle, lay the folk whose home this had been, hacked down in the uncouth attitudes of sudden death; old men, five or six dark narrow-boned warriors like our guide, women and bairns. There was a dead sheep dog lying at the feet of an old man whose brains were scattered among his bloody hair; a young woman with her body arched about that of the child she clutched against her, in a last effort to protect it. Both of them had their throats cut.