Ancelotis' eyes widened. "Dear God, I thought the whole family dead! I thank God in heaven that you were spared. But how?"
Tears welled up in her eyes. "The Saxons came in the night, led by traitors among the fisherfolk. They slaughtered my whole family as we slept. A servant, one of the old men from the stables who had seen the Saxons arrive, dragged me from my bed, threw old clothes across my nightdress, hid me in the kitchen. I crouched for hours in the hearth, covered with ash and shaking with terror. The Saxons came through the kitchen, guzzling wine and ale until they could scarcely stagger to the cesspits."
Princess Iona was trembling. The look in her eyes chilled Ancelotis' blood. "Just before cockcrow, the stableman led me down to the strand, where loyal fishermen hid me beneath their nets and took me to safety in Caer-Durnac. When the Saxons came across the border into Caer-Durnac, I fled into the marshes, where I hid for months, eating raw fish and learning to survive by my wits." She gazed down at her hands, visibly roughened and red, even by lamplight. "It took more courage than I thought I had left, to come out of those marshes and seek asylum with Cadorius and Melwas. But I had to come, to warn the other royal houses of Britain what the Saxons are capable of, when they set their sights on a victim."
Ancelotis reached up with gentle fingertips to wipe tears from her cheeks. "Thank you, Iona, for your courage. And for reminding us that creatures like Ganhumara are the rare exception, among Britain's royal ladies. I sorrow for your losses. Please consider Gododdin a place of refuge for you, should you ever need a home."
The tears came faster, but she managed a tremulous smile. "I am honored, Ancelotis of Gododdin. Thank you. And I fear I have kept you too long from your bed. If there is anything I can do, on the morrow, to help you and your men prepare, please ask it of me."
He offered her a formal bow, then found an unoccupied cot and collapsed onto the straw-filled tick, asleep within moments. Morning found him outside the circumvallation, walking the steep, muddy hillside in the company of the Sarmatian commanders of Gododdin's cataphracti. Stirling pointed down the lee side of the hill. "According to Cadorius, Emrys Myrddin expects the bulk of the Saxons to camp along here, protected from the weather. Frankly, I agree. What I want is for someone to pace off known distances from the outermost wall, beginning with the farthest range of a bowshot and coming back toward the wall in stepped increments, three paces at a time. Put up small wooden posts to mark the known distances."
"For what purpose?" one of his officers asked, brow furrowed in puzzlement.
Stirling grinned. "You'll see shortly. Put several men in charge of the work out here. Then join me inside the walls again."
As they hiked in through the mazelike passages between the walls, Ancelotis muttered silently, Just what are you up to? I don't understand it, either.
Stirling explained. The Sarmatian cavalry archers are very good for our purposes. The flight of an arrow is very much akin to the flight of a bullet or cannon ball—and artillery ballistics is something I bloody well know. What I'm going to do is teach our Sarmatians some drills, things I know that will increase their effectiveness, a way of shooting at targets they can't see.
What sort of drills? Ancelotis asked, unsure what artillery and firearms might even be; despite the memory images in Stirling's mind, it was difficult for the sixth-century king to grasp the concepts and distances an ordinary rifle or mortar could throw a projectile, never mind the speeds such projectiles could reach. Before he could answer, the officers of his cataphracti joined him inside the wall, so Stirling explained it to everyone at once. "How many bowmen are with us?" he began.
"Seventy, at least," one of the officers answered.
"And they shoot at individual targets, one at a time, from horseback?"
The officers nodded, expressions puzzled. "It's the way Sarmatians have fought for centuries."
"Very effectively," Stirling agreed. "But there are other ways of firing a bow than aiming directly at a target, especially since we'll have battlements to use as shelter."
Puzzlement turned to utter bafflement.
"May I?" Stirling asked, nodding to the nearest heavy compound bow, made of horn and wood and requiring a strong man, indeed, to pull it. The Sarmatian handed over his bow and a quiver of arrows. "Very good. What I'm going to teach you is a way to hit something you cannot see, do so without exposing yourself to enemy spears or javelins, by coordinating your shots."
He notched an arrow and pulled the powerful bow, drawing the string back to his chest, rather than his ear, in the older style of shooting that Sarmatians and other ancient archers had used—a technique that would remain in force until the advent of the Welsh longbow. Rather than aiming directly at the wall, three paces away, Stirling aimed high above it, eyeballing the angle and projecting the parabola of the arrow's flight.
He released the bow with a whap! and watched the arrow speed skyward. It arced upward and out across the walls, the curve descending steeply at the end of the foreshortened parabola. The arrow vanished somewhere downslope, well beyond the wall.
He turned to find the officer unimpressed.
Stirling chuckled and handed the bow back to its owner. "Shall we see how far it flew before landing?" They found the arrow several yards downslope, sticking up like a spike in the muddy ground.
"How can a man control it, though?" one of the officers asked, staring from the wall to the arrow embedded in the mud. "How would you know how high to aim, to have the arrow drop precisely where you wanted it to go?"
"That's what the posts out here are for, to mark known distances from the wall. I'll want several tall wooden poles erected inside the walls, with bands marked on them. And I'll want marker stones inside the walls, as well, so that if a man stands on the stone and aims past one of the painted rings on a pole, he'll know exactly how far that arrow will travel and where it will come down, with close approximation, relative to the marker posts out here. Then we'll drill to make sure we can hit those marks every time."
"Even so, it will be impossible to hit your enemy with any real accuracy if we can't see them because we're behind the walls!"
"Ah, but we'll have one man up top, a forward observer acting as the eyes for all the rest of us who'll be shooting at exactly the same time and exactly the same place."
Understanding dawned. "God above, it's elegant!"
They put every archer in Gododdin's cataphracti to work, cutting and setting poles every few yards along the innermost wall, painting narrow bands every few inches along the poles, setting stones in a line with those poles, and cutting marker posts which they placed beyond the walls to mark the farthest and nearest ranges of arrows when shot past the upper- and lower-most bands. Once the markers had been placed, the archers began practicing, with Stirling once again demonstrating.
"If I aim just to the left of the white band at the top, my arrow will fall very close to the post nearest the wall." He let an arrow fly and had a boy leap onto the outermost wall to call where it had landed. The boy shouted, "You're a foot beyond the post!"
Three more arrows and Stirling had put the shot within six inches of the post he could not see, nearest the outermost wall. "Mark this spot with a stone," he nodded in satisfaction, "and do the same for every pole we've put up along the line." He gestured. "Devise a shooting order, so that every man knows his place beside his comrades and always shoots from the same spot, whether he stands on a stone or to the left or right of the markers."