Each brought some word of the enemy’s hosting, of the numbers growing in Caledon even before the snow was gone from the northern corries of Eildon; of Pictish and Scottish war bands seeping in by secret ways; of the long black war boats of the Sea Wolves prowling in up the Bodotria Estuary with reinforcements for their brothers of the settlements. And for the time being there was little we could do but hold all things in readiness, and wait until the red-hot moment came. I knew that to try to deal with the inflowing war bands piecemeal would be to fritter away our own strength almost certainly to no purpose. It was no formless skirmishing of war bands all across Valentia that we needed, but one smashing victory at the heart of things, Huil Son of Caw slain and his war host broken and scattered; after that the rest, however slow, would follow.
So I turned a deaf ear to the urging of the hotheads, and remained, as Cei told me to my face, “like an old eagle molting on his perch,” in my half-ruined fort, while slowly the Barbarians gathered like thunder drawing in from the skyline.
Presently Bedwyr came in, leaving Owain in command at Castra Cunetium, and we held a council of war around the fire that burned in the entrance to the part-roofed Sacculum where I had made my own quarters. By that time it was clear from their movements, reported by the Little Dark People, that the enemy intended to cut the lateral road, and that once done, we should cease to be a system for quenching and holding down Lowland Caledonia, and become merely two isolated strongholds, each with its own perilously long and fragile communication line behind it, and no sure means of linking shields with each other.
“Added to which,” said Bedwyr, thrumming softly at the harp on his knee, “that if Druim and his kind speak truth, we are like to be outnumbered by upward of three to one when Huil has the last of his war host gathered, and you have a most noble prospect.”
“Cei has been urging me to deal with the inflow piecemeal,” I said.
“And you are not of his mind?”
“I am of the mind to wait for the right time, and break the thing with one blow — or am I growing old, Bedwyr?”
“No,” said Bedwyr. “That is Cei. It is always the old who are fiercest and most impatient.” And he made music on his harp that was like a snapping of the fingers, and grinned across the fire at Cei, who grew purple behind his russet bush of beard.
“Why you — you lop-eared nightingale —” I caught his eye and he subsided into mutterings like an old hound when it is put out.
“Peace, children, and listen to me. I have let battle be forced upon me because I have very little choice in the matter, but also because I believe that by doing so we may well gain our own choice of fighting ground.”
“How then?” Cei put aside his anger for more important matters.
“By waiting until the last possible moment, to allow the enemy down into the most southerly tongue of Caledon; by not taking our own battle stand until they are within a few miles of the road itself. The forest is more open there, and on the watershed we shall have the river marshes below on either side to narrow the pass for us.”
“For them also,” Cei said.
“Aye, but at the least it will even the length of the battle lines and keep them from spreading out to engulf us, as they could well do with their greater numbers; and I think that we can take care of their flanks in advance. Therein lies one of the few advantages of a defensive action.” I took a bit of charred stick from the fire and began to draw the pattern of fighting as I proposed it. I was not a stranger to Cit Coit Caledon, for I had hunted there, and ridden with the patrol more than once; it is no bad thing for a war leader to gain some knowledge of the lay of his campaign country.
And so on a March morning, drawn up in a somewhat unorthodox battle formation across the highest part of the watershed, we waited for the Barbarians.
The red-hot moment that we had waited for had come at last, signaled to us by the Dark People in smoke smother across the hills; and within an hour, all of us, save for a small and most evilly tempered garrison left behind in Trimontium, had been on the march. It had been almost noon when the signal came through, and it was far into the night when we reached the agreed war camp and found Owain with his slim column from Castra Cunetium there just ahead of us. Found there also Druim Dhu, standing by one of the newly kindled campfires. But I had scarcely recognized him at first, through the war patterns of clay and red ochre daubed on his face and slight naked body. Only when he came and touched my foot in the stirrup in the moment before I dismounted, I had known him for sure by the familiar gesture. His hair was bound back with thongs, and the quiver of small deadly arrows hung well-stocked from his shoulder.
“The Wolves have made camp on the shoulder of Wildcat Ridge by the Mark Stones,” he said. (To the People of the Hills, the Saxons were the Sea Wolves and the rest the Painted People; and the Tribes and the Scots raiders, when banded together, they often spoke of simply as “The Wolves.”)
“How far is that?”
But distance meant little to Druim and his kind; they reckoned by the time that it took to make the journey. “If they start at first light, they will be well into the high ground whence the two rivers spring when the shadows lie so —” He stooped, and setting the foot of his bow to the ground, drew a line where its shadow would fall about three hours before noon.
“So. How many do they muster now?”
“Between two and three times the number that follow you, my Lord Artos. But there are brothers of mine — a few — not so far from here, who have scouted for you all this time and will serve none so ill as warriors.”
And indeed a score or more of the Little Dark Warriors did come to our fire in the night, and disappeared again by morning. Whether they were the full tally, I did not ask. I had long since learned that where the Dark People were concerned, one did not ask; to try to use them as normal troops would have been like trying to forge a spear blade from the substance of a hill mist. One simply accepted what they gave.
We had snatched a few hours of sleep, and been astir at first light, with the fires fallen into ash, and after tending the horses, were gulping down our own hurried meal of hard barley bannock as we moved off into position, when the word came that the enemy were on the move — God knows how they got it through so quickly, for one could not send a beacon chain through the forest; but I thought that once just before first light I had felt rather than heard a distant rhythmic mutter of sound that might be a hollow log slapped by an open palm.
And so now, in the chosen place a few miles north of the road, our battle line was formed, and we waited for the first sign of the enemy. I was not happy, for I have always been a cavalry leader; my ways of battle are the ways of the horse, and yet save for our light riders far out of sight on the advanced flanks, the struggle ahead of us must be fought out on foot. Impossible to use heavy cavalry effectively in this scrub woodland, though it was far less dense than a few miles farther north. Waiting with my own squadron in the reserve, a little behind the center, I looked along the battle line, wondering, now that it was too late to make any change, whether I had made the best use of my strength. I had dismounted the whole of the Company, the heaviest and steadiest troops that I possessed, and set Cei and Bedwyr to captain them in the center of the battle line. On either flank the light spearmen, and beyond again, on the outer horns, the archers and slingers in isolated groups, curved forward so that the whole line formed, as well as it could in that rough country, a deep bow to bring the advancing Wolves under flank attack before ever their center could make contact with ours. Beyond again, hidden from sight, I knew where the knots of light riders waited; and I prayed to all the gods that ever gave ear to fighting men, that no pony would betray them by whinnying at the wrong moment.