At least, Stirling muttered to himself, they don't have siege engines.
The Saxon kings were in no apparent hurry to attack. An unpleasant, fluttering sensation rose from the pit of his stomach as Stirling watched the Saxons cut off escape routes one by one. At a nod from Cadorius, Stirling and his host walked the whole long perimeter of the innermost wall, studying troop deployments, squinting into the brutal teeth of the wind as the Saxons dispatched small squadrons along the muddy roads leading from Caer-Badonicus to the nearest villages.
They would find little of value in those villages, which had been abandoned for a radius of five miles around. The Saxons would find no food, no livestock, no slaves to force into building their siegeworks, nothing but a few very nasty surprises in the form of covered pit traps dug beneath barn and cottage floors. The Britons had camouflaged their man-traps with layers of dirt and straw or rushes across tightly stretched panels of woolen sailcloth, dyed brown with walnut hulls to match the color of their earthen coverings. Like Burmese tiger traps, the stake-studded pits waited for unwary predators to step into them. Very soon, the Saxons would discover just how high a price they must pay for attempting to conquer Salisbury Plain.
Down at the base of the hill, foot soldiers were busy erecting camps in a loose circle, a living noose of men, spears, and swords. They began digging trenches, as well, throwing up an earthen rampart to shield them somewhat from missiles hurled from above. Ancelotis muttered a few choice oaths, watching. "That bastard Cerdic is earning his blood money, no doubt of that." He spat disgustedly to one side, earning a grunt of agreement from King Melwas, who had joined him.
"That's a move yon bastards have never tried before," Melwas growled. "And I've fought them enough times to know."
Stirling watched and wished bitterly for better weapons than they had. What we could do with just one good machine gun... Might as well ask for attack helicopters and cruise missiles, while I'm at it.
Melwas frowned. "I see nothing like a tent a king would use down there. Not even one fit for a royal prince. The Saxons may be barbarians, but their so-called royalty are quick to demand the comforts of civilization and complain loudly when deprived of them."
Ancelotis grunted. "Try the lee of the hill. It's where I'd set up, were I King Aelle or Cerdic."
Melwas' glance was keen. "Emrys Myrddin said much the same thing."
"With good reason." Stirling grinned as fierce gusts of rain ripped through the Saxon encampment, playing hob with their attempts to set up sleeping tents.
Melwas smiled in dark humor. "They'll be cold and wet and exhausted before a few hours have passed. And unless I miss my guess, they'll have as much trouble as our own men did keeping cookfires going anywhere but the lee of the hill. "
An army fighting on cold, unpalatable rations was an unhappy army, resentful and discouraged. With the countryside laid bare in advance of their arrival, they'd find little more than dirt to add to their already strained supply of rations. He smiled in cold pleasure at the notion. Having seen enough for the moment, Ancelotis and Melwas left instructions for the men standing perimeter watch to report anything out of the ordinary in the Saxons' preparations, then headed back for the lee side, to study further developments there.
"They look to be throwing the bulk of their men downslope of here," Ancelotis told Cadorius, who was issuing orders on their own troop deployments.
Cadorius nodded. "It's as we expected, then. I've assigned Dumnonia left flank guard along the lee," he pointed to a stretch of wall some hundred feet distant, "and, Melwas, I'll want Glastenning on the right flank. Ancelotis, you and your Sarmatian archers will take the center, as we agreed and planned for." He nodded toward the banded poles set up at carefully measured intervals along the lee side of the summit. "We'll scatter the other kingdoms around the perimeter." He was scratching a rough map in the mud, sheltering it with his body as he crouched down to work.
Even with the number of men they already had, the summit and its sprawling perimeter walls were so large, the defenders would be spread dangerously thin. And they would have precious little but women and children in reserve, should Artorius be delayed on the march south.
I mislike it, Ancelotis said privately to Stirling. I mislike it a very great deal.
Stirling wasn't particularly keen on it, either. "We'll have to watch for shifts in their deployment, day and night," he said aloud for Cadorius' benefit. "The children could fill in the gaps as lookouts, particularly the older lads, and give our men more rest for the actual fighting. A sudden surge along one of the more thinly defended stretches, and they'd be among us before we knew they were climbing. Particularly after dark."
"After dark?" Cadorius grunted while Melwas' eyes shot wide.
Even Ancelotis was taken by surprise.
It was something, Stirling supposed, to startle three kings, each of them with more than a decade's bitter experience in combat. Yet the notion of a night sortie astonished them. Stirling grinned. "Why d'you think I wanted the specially trained men and the cordage? You do remember what the Oracle at Delphi said, don't you?"
Melwas frowned in puzzlement, but Cadorius had begun to chuckle. "Oh, aye. A grand story that was, I remember my own father reading it out to me in the Greek. I've forgotten which historian it was, but the story I recall very well, indeed."
Melwas looked from Stirling to Cadorius and back again. "I've not heard it."
"For a shipload of gold," the Dumnonian king chuckled, "the poor bastard was told by the Oracle of Apollo, 'You will destroy a great empire.' Sure of victory, he returned home to the war with Persia. And when the autumn came, and the time for the harvest was due, the fool retired from the field, for that was how war was fought in those days, everyone on both sides of a conflict going home to bring in the crops. Only the Persians followed him. Shocked the entire known world, waging war at harvest time. Sacked the capital, took over the gold fields, and put the vanquished king in chains, so he could repent at length on the empire he'd destroyed. His own."
Stirling nodded. "The Persians changed forever the way war would be fought, with that maneuver."
Melwas was grinning. "Fighting a night sortie will be just as great a shock to the Saxons, I'm thinking. Marvelous idea, Ancelotis."
Ancelotis, as startled as the others by the notion, laughed aloud. "Oh, aye, isn't it just, now?"
The others chuckled at the play on words.
The Saxons spent several hours erecting siege works, ditching the entire circumference of the hill and readying caches of weapons, spears and pikes, mostly. Swords were scarce amongst them, a fact which still surprised Stirling, for all that he'd heard the others discuss it. Briton forces watched in eerie silence as Germanic voices shouted far down the slope. One group climbed halfway up the lee side, dragging timbers and tools with them under the cover of a bristling shield wall of armed warriors.
"What in the devil's unholy name are they doing?" Melwas wondered aloud. "Erecting some kind of siege engine?"
"I think not," Ancelotis frowned. "A platform on which to mount one, perhaps."
"Should we discourage them from building it?"
The younger king was showing signs of impatience as the preparations dragged endlessly. Cadorius, who also stood frowning down at the activity two hundred fifty feet below them, answered the sub-king's question. "No, Melwas, I believe we'll let them build it, unhindered. The weaker we seem at the beginning, the likelier they are to err through overconfidence later. We give up nothing, for we can demolish it at our leisure, with any number of methods."
Stirling glanced at smoking braziers blazing at the bottom of firepits all along the inner perimeter, the fires protected from the weather not only by the depth of the pits, but also roofed over with small awnings and further protected by trenches the children had dug to allow any rainwater that did get in to drain away before it drowned the coals. Vats and iron cauldrons simmered over the fires, filled with rendered animal fat, much of it from the pigs and cattle slaughtered to feed them all.