It was very early summer when we marched out through the Hunnum Gate, and we had numbered nearly seven hundred, counting the drivers, but the first heather was coming into flower over the moors, and we had lost something like a fifth part of our strength, when we came at last in sight of the great red sandstone fort crouched at the foot of three-peaked Eildon; Trimontium, the Place of Three Hills.
I had drawn the war host closer as we neared the place, and sent out a handful of light horse to scout ahead. And just as we were making the noon halt they rode in again with their ponies in a smother, and their leader came straight to me, breathless and stumbling in his run. “My Lord Artos, they are ahead of us in Trimontium. Saxons too, for there’s one of their accursed horsetail standards peering over the wall. And Scots to judge by the glint of white shields on the ramparts.”
I had been half expecting that. The Place of Three Hills must have been a good rallying point for them as it was a good base and headquarters for us. I called Bedwyr who was overseeing the noon issue of biscuit, and told him. “The wolf pack is ahead of us. We are going to have to fight for Trimontium if we want it. Pass the word to the rest.”
But indeed the word was already running, as such tidings always do, like heath fire through the host. I sent a rider galloping back to summon up the foot and the rear guard, and when they came up with us we marched again, in changed formation ready for battle.
But before marching, the Companions, I also, picked sprigs of the big rose-purple bell heather and stuck them into our helmets and shoulder buckles, in the way that had become custom with us.
For a good while the fort was hidden from us by the slow moorland billows of the land between. But all the while three-peaked Eildon stood up before us, rising taller into the changing sky as the long miles passed. It was drawing toward evening when Bedwyr and I left the war host behind the last ridge, and riding forward alone, came out through the hazel and birch woods that had clothed the hills of the past day’s march, and saw the lean red menace of the old fort, no more than five or six bowshots away. The scouts had spoken truth. Heads crowded the ramparts, and there was a dark swarm about the gateway where pack ponies were hurriedly being got inside and the barricades flung up behind them, and the smoke of many cooking fires billowed sideways in the wind that had begun to rise.
“I would to God I had some means of knowing their numbers,” I said to Bedwyr, who had ridden out of the woodshore at my side. “The fort was built to hold a double cohort of a thousand for months on end; it would hold three or four times as many for a short space.”
“So long as the water holds out,” said Bedwyr.
I glanced aside at him. “You think they mean to stand siege here?”
“I think nothing — as yet — but I was ready to see them drawn up to make us welcome, on the clear ground yonder. They have had warning enough of our coming, and the Saxon at least has small love for fighting behind walls.”
I was silent. I too should have thought to see them drawn up ready for us. It could be the siege, of course. If they were well provisioned they might be counting on the fact that we, in an alien and hostile country, would be likely to run out of supplies before they did. But there was the water; after the years that the place had been deserted, the wells had probably fallen in, and in any case, since there would be many more than the place had been built for, and the pack beasts also must be watered, it could not be long before the supply began to fail. They might of course merely be waiting for morning, believing that we should start nothing so late in the day as this. Or they might be planning a night attack of their own, when we had been lulled into a false security. I wished to God I knew. Meanwhile I remained silent for a while, taking in the lay of the land. From the shallow valley that ran down ahead of us, the land on the right rose gently in a kind of broad spur to the fortress walls, not cleared back, as it must have been in the old days, but overgrown with the wildest tangle of hazel and elder scrub. Beyond the fort and on either side, it seemed, as well as I could see, that the hillside fell away steeply as the swoop of a falcon, into the wooded river gorge below Eildon. The place, in fact, was a spur above the river, and if the three farther sides were what they seemed, only this, the southern side, could be attacked in any force.
A blast on Prosper’s aurochs hunting horn brought no response save the ghost of an echo out of the river gorge.
The light was beginning to fade, and the rising wind sounded like a charge of cavalry when we turned back to the others beyond the ridge. I gathered a handful of our best scouts and trackers, and gave them their orders. “Get down the valley and lie close for a while. As soon as the day has dimmed to half-light, work your way in close to the fort. They may have pickets posted — I doubt it, but it is a thought to keep in mind. Work around the whole circuit, and bring me back word how steep the fall of the land is on the sides that one cannot judge from here, and what possibility there may be of sending in an attack from the river side. Notice also the condition of the walls, how the gates are held, any smallest detail that may aid us in the planning of the next move. Understood?”
When they had melted into the wind-swayed thickets, we made camp as best we could in the shelter of the ridge, leaving a few men to keep watch on Trimontium from the ridge itself; watered the horses at the stream which, rising somewhere in the high moors southward, flung its ferny loop around the far shoulder of the ridge and went purling down to join the Tweed; ate the evening meal of barley bannock and the inevitable hard yellow cheese, and settled down to wait as patiently as might be for the return of the scouting party. Sometime after dark — there was no moon that night, and the clouds were racing across the stars — they came slipping one after another out of the night and the wind-lashed woods to drop beside the campfire, and tell their story between ravenous mouthfuls of the food that had been set aside for them. There were no pickets, but also no possibility of mounting an attack of any strength from the farther side of the fort. “Scarce footing for the whin bushes,” said the leader when I put it to him. But there was a deer track, and a postern gate on the north side, and in one place the wall was down to not much over the height of a man, with plenty of stone and rubble still outside to aid climbing, so that it might be possible to get a small band around that way to mount some kind of decoy attack to draw attention from the main gates. The gates themselves had rotted apart, but all of them were strongly closed with thornwork and stout timber barricades. Of the numbers of the motley war host gathered in Trimontium, save that they were very many, the scouting party had of course been able to gain no idea.