We were strung across the neck of the watershed, making the best use of the natural slope of the country, with our left flank resting on a burn that ran down to join the young Cluta, and our right on the steep thorn-tangled scarp that dropped to the marshes of the Tweed. Behind me, if I looked southward, I should see the great hills of the frontier country, where half the rivers of Valentia were born, and through which, by way of Three Hills or its outpost fort, the roads ran to the Wall. Ahead of us opened a broad clearing where the young bracken was beginning to spring, and beyond, the forest rolled away and away like a dark sea washing about Manann the ancient heartland of the Pictish kingdoms; the Dark, the Forest, the ancient and savage and unknown; so that we stood as it were in the pass between two worlds, to hold it for one against the other.
It was a gray spring day, early in the year for the start of the campaigning season, and the starry white wood anemones turned their shivering backs to the wind and the scuds of rain that blew in our faces and darkened the crimson of the dragon on our standard to the color of half-dried blood. I thought how Arian’s mane should be blowing back across my bridle hand, and I missed him sorely, missed his fidgeting and quickening, the thrusting urgency of him between my knees. My mail shirt dragged at my shoulders, weighing more heavily upon me with the long standing, the tramping up and down; and I wondered again if I had done a foolish thing in keeping the Companions in full war gear while dismounting them. But it was weight I wanted in the center, weight and steadiness; mobility was for the wings.
Ahead of us the forest seemed very dark — and indeed I do not think that was fancy, for I have noticed always the same thing about Cit Coit Caledon; partly of course it is the pines, the dark slow tide of pines such as we do not know in the South, but it is the same in the thinner places where the hills and the high moorlands thrust up through the scrub of oak and birch and hazel like gaunt shoulders through the rents in a shaggy cloak; always in my mind there is this quality of darkness, of wolfish menace in the land itself. It was as though maybe it were a very old forest and crouched brooding over secrets that it would not be well for men to know.
Something stirred behind me, and a dark shadow slid between my elbow and that of my standard-bearer. I caught the whiff of fox, and again Druim Dhu was there. “They are less than eight bowshots beyond the rim of the dark trees — a great host, a very great host. We shall have good hunting by and by,” and he showed white “teeth in a flash of silent laughter — his laughter was always silent, like his sister’s. With the stripes of clay and ochre ring-straking his slight brown limbs like the early light striking through the bushes, it was hard to be sure, save for his voice, that he was there at all; and then suddenly — he was not.
But almost in the same instant, as though it were an echo or aa answer to his words, we heard the roaring of the Scottish war horns, like some huge stag belling under the trees.
I saw a ripple run through the ranks ahead of me as a cat’s-paw of wind through standing barley; and the whole center, who until now had been leaning on their spear shafts, crouched down, each man under his covering buckler, with his spear leveled in welcome to the nearing enemy.
The wind fell away, and somewhere a magpie scolded sharply; then a long gust came booming up through the woods driving a dark scud of rain into our faces, and with the wind suddenly there was a crashing among the undergrowth that rolled swiftly nearer, and a flicker of movement all along the shore of the clearing. It strengthened and gathered form and substance and became a swarming of men under the spring-flushed trees. The Wolves were here. They set up a great shout at sight of us, and came on, keeping what line they could among the bramble hummocks and the tangle of last year’s bracken, sweeping toward us at a steady, menacing wolf lope that seemed slow and yet ate up the ground with a terrible speed. I had just time to make out the barbaric horsetail standards of the Saxons in the center, the white gull-wing gleam of the Scots’ lime-washed shields on the left wing and the brave blue war paint of the yelling Picts on the right. It was a very great war host, as Druim Dhu had said, spreading out as it seemed forever, and as they swung nearer, I felt the tremor of the ground under their feet, as one feels it when a river breaks its banks after rain in the hills, and the very rocks are afraid.
Indeed I felt at that moment much as a man must feel who stands in the track of floodwater and sees the spate roaring toward him. I felt rooted in my heavy ring shirt, and knew that the same sense of nightmare was howling through every man of my heavily armed center.
The foremost of the Barbarians’ rush was level with the tips of the curved horns now; and I prayed that the archers might not loose too soon. “Mithras, slayer of the Bull, hold back their arrow hands! Lugh of the Shining Spear — Christos, let them not loose too soon!”
The Barbarians were well within the trap when first from one side, and then a heartbeat later from the other, a ragged flight of arrows leapt from the undergrowth and thrummed into their midst. Men pitched and fell in their tracks, and for an instant under the barbed hail the charge wavered and lost impetus; then with a yell, gathered itself together and stormed on, men stumbling and falling on the flanks where the arrows wrought most havoc. Before me I saw the tense backs and braced shoulders of the men crouching over their leveled spears. . . .
A volley of light throwing axes came rattling against the bull-hide buckles of our front rank, and hard after it the enemy sprang forward yelling like berserkers upon the waiting spears. Shield rank and shield rank came together with a rolling thunder; the cries of men who had found the spears, the ring and clash of weapons and the grinding clangor of shield boss on shield boss; and the breath-held tension of the moments before had gone roaring up in bloody chaos. The Saxons were striving to take our spearpoints on their oxhide shields, jamming and bearing them down into uselessness, and in the first crash of the onslaught they were succeeding as, despite the weight, our center was forced back by the sheer ferocity of the rush. Then the Companions rallied and thrust forward again; swords were out now, and through the tumult and the weapon ring I heard Cei’s bull voice roaring to his men, and all along the center the two battle lines were locked together like two wild animals struggling for a throathold. Behind me and on either side I felt the squadron taut as runners in the instant before the white scarf falls, but they were all the reserves I had, and I could not afford to fling them in too soon.
The Companions were superb. Unused to foot fighting as they were, they were holding stubbornly to the ground that they had taken, in face of the furious pressure that was being hurled against them. Once they even thrust forward again, before they were once more slowed into clogged immobility. For long moments that seemed to stretch into an aching eternity of time, the two centers strained together, so that even above the boil of battle it seemed that one could hear the gasping breath and the throb of bursting hearts. Men were falling on both sides behind the shield-walls, tangling the feet of the living, as the long death-locked battle mass heaved and swayed to and fro, with never more than a stride’s length lost or won. God alone knew how long that hideous grapple might last, draining us of men, with nothing gained, and I knew that the moment to fling in the reserves had come. I put up my hand in signal to the trumpeter beside me, and he raised the aurochs horn on its baldric and sounded the charge, clear and high above the surf-roar of battle. It was the charge for the outlying cavalry knots as well as for us, and as we burst forward I was aware of a new sound swelling the tumult; the swift drub of horses’ hooves sweeping in from the wings.