The struggling ranks ahead parted to let us through, as foot parts to let through a cavalry squadron. We had taken the blunt-ended wedge formation, and like a wedge we drove on into the battle mass of the enemy, yelling the old war cry, “Yr Widdfa! Yr Widdfa!” Chins driven down behind our shields, gray mailed wedge broadening behind the Red Dragon, we drove forward deeper and deeper into the Saxons, while at the same time — though I had no thought to spare for them now — the little bodies of horse had charged in on flank and rear, driving the Barbarians down upon our wedge. Archers and javelin men, tossing aside their now useless weapons, drew sword and closed in from either flank. The Wolves were driven in on each other, becoming so densely packed that each man’s shield hampered his comrade’s sword arm, and the dead clogged the feet of the living, and all their valiant efforts to force their way on only drove them the more deeply to our iron wedge.
Even now I am not sure how the day would have gone had the enemy been one war host, instead of four, each with their own ways of fighting, with little idea of how to combine, and nothing save courage and savagery in common between them. As it was, quite suddenly their battle mass began to waver in its forward thrust as its ranks thinned, and at last the moment came when with one supreme effort, with a slow long straining heave, we seemed to lift and upsurge and spill over them. Then, split well nigh in two by our wedge, overwhelmed and battered blind, they broke and gave back and began to stream away, trampling their own dead and wounded underfoot, trampled down in their turn by the small unshod hooves of the light cavalry.
We broke forward after them, cutting them down as they ran. Among the Saxons, only the great ones wore ring mail, while the lesser folk had no better body armor than a leather jerkin, and that only if they were lucky; the Scottish warriors, save again for their nobles, had little more, and the Picts, from the greatest to the least, had flung themselves into battle naked save for a leather loin guard. Yet some would not run but stood to face us, or retreated step by step, still fighting, and were cut down in their tracks, still proud beyond yielding. The hummocky ground among the bushes was clothed with trampled dead, and as we thrust on, I was aware of others running beside the war host; little shadows that slipped low from tree to tree. Something passed my ear with the high whine of a gnat, and the Saxon in front of me ran on a few steps with a small dark arrow no bigger than a birding bolt quivering between bis shoulders, then dropped and lay writhing. The light riders were taking over the chase from us now, and I called off the Companions as one calls off hounds; most of them could not have heard me, and I dared not use the horn to sound the Retreat, for that would have called off the others also; but one by one, finding the chase taken up from them, they were dropping out, panting in their heavy war gear, wiping reddened sword blades on handfuls of long grass, turning back to me, gathering into their squadrons again. The sounds of the pursuit were dying away, and the wind and the soft chill rain still came scudding down from the north over our hunched shoulders as we turned back to our battle line and last night’s camp beyond.
“Look there,” said Bedwyr, suddenly walking at my shoulder. “And there —” He pointed. And there was a man lying among the dead with a little dark arrow in his back; and then another man, and another. . . .
“The Old Woman said they were the viper that stings in the dark,” I said. “The pursuit is in sure hands, it seems.”
It is in my mind that that was the cruelest fight I ever fought. It cost us dearly, too, for our own battle line was marked out now with its random line of bodies, piled in places two and three deep. More than fifty of the Companions died that day, apart from the auxiliaries, and jaunty little Fulvius lay among them, taking part of my boyhood with him; and Fercos who had followed me down from Arfon in the first spring of the Brotherhood. I looked up at the faint brightness beyond the drifting cloud wrack overhead, and saw that it was not yet much past noon.
The sun was still above the western moors and the weary work that follows battle not yet completed, and I was with Cei and Gwalchmai snatching a brief respite beside one of the watch fires while the tatterdemalion gaggle of women who had followed us as usual got some kind of meal together, when a crashing and rattling came through the undergrowth as though some great beast were heading our way, and as I turned quickly toward the sound, a man rolled, or rather was thrust, into the firelight. A tall man, naked and war-patterned with the Pictish woad, with a mane of tawny hair and frowning tawny eyes, who stumbled and almost fell, then caught himself proudly erect once more. I saw that he was dripping blood from a wound in the left knee; his hands were twisted behind his back and he was surrounded by a knot of little dark warriors. In the first moment of seeing him as he stood there in their midst, I thought suddenly of some proud wild thing brought to bay by a pack of little dark hounds, save that no hounds were as silent or as deadly as those that thronged about him.
“My Lord Artos,” one of them said, and I saw that it was Druim Dhu, “we have brought you Huil, the spearhead of your enemies. Here is his sword,” and he stooped and laid it at my feet.
The man in their grip was far spent, panting like a beast that has been run hard; sweat gleamed on his forehead when he raised his head to give me look for look, flinging back the tawny hair that he had no free hand to thrust out of his eyes.
“Is that true?” I demanded.
“I am Huil, Son of Caw.” He gave me the answer in Latin little worse than my own. “And you, I know, are he that they call Artos the Bear, and I am in your power. That is all that we need to know, you and I. Now kill me and be done with it.”
I did not answer at once. The man before me was not a Great One in the way of Hengest, but he was a man whom other men follow; I am such a one myself, and I recognized the kind. He was too dangerous to let go free, for if I did so, men would gather to him again. There were three courses open to me: I could have his sword hand struck off, and let him go. None of his own would follow a maimed leader, for by their way of thinking to do so would be to run upon disaster. I could send him south to Ambrosius, safely chained like a wild beast for the arena; or I could kill him now. . . .
“Why did you do it?” I asked, and the question sounded stupid in my own ears.
“Revolt against my rightful lords and masters?” He looked at me with something of laughter even in his despair and white exhaustion. “Maybe because, like you, I would be free, but for me, freedom is a different thing.”
Others were gathering about us to look on, his name running from one to another, but he never spared them a glance; his fierce tawny gaze held unwavering to my face, as though he knew that it was the last thing he would see. “Kill me now,” he repeated, and the tone was an order. “But strike from in front; I never yet took a wound in the back, and even in death a man has his vanities. Also let you first unbind my hands.”
“There is nothing to bruise any man’s vanities in dying with his hands bound,” I said. I have wondered since whether I was wrong, but at the time I was taking no risk. I made a small gesture to Cei, who had stepped forward, his own sword drawn, to the captive’s side. Huil Son of Caw smiled a little, confronting the blow with open eyes. Under the blue war patterns I saw how white his skin was, where the brown of the strong neck ended at the collar bone; white as a peeled hazel nut — until the red fountained out over it. The blow was swift, and he made it swifter by leaning to meet it.