Within the half of an hour, Companions and tribesmen were snatching a meal in the crumbling mess hall. Around the upper fire a little apart from the rest, I had gathered to me Maelgwn himself with a couple of chieftains who had not yet dispersed to their own places after the summer’s fighting, Owain and Flavian and the Minnow still in all his dust; and while we ate we held a hurried council of war. From outside came the sounds of the aroused camp, men’s voices, and the trampling and neighing of horses as they were brought in, the clang of weapons fetched out from the armory and flung down in heaps.
“If Medraut has but now sent out the Cran Tara, it must be some while before the Scots or the Picts can gather to him in strength,” I said. “If the Fates are not against us we may well be able to take him and Cerdic before their friends can reach them.”
The Minnow, who had been staring with red-rimmed eyes into the fire, looked up and shook his head, which with the dust of his wild ride was grayer than his father’s. “If Noni Heron’s Feather and his sons speak truth, the Cran Tara must have gone out in the spring, for a war hosting at harvesttime. With a northwest wind to speed the currachs, the Scots and the Painted People will not be late to the feast.”
And it seemed to me that my heart settled, cold and heavy as flint, under my breastbone. For the wind which had risen at sunset and was siffling through the sand-dune grasses and across the ramparts of the fort blew from the northwest. . . .
Flavian beat his open hand on his knee. “Harvesttime! And three quarters of the war host at home in their own villages, getting in the barley!”
“So the call must have gone out at least two months before he left Venta,” I said, but I was speaking more to myself than to the other men about the fire. “While he still supped in hall with the rest of us. It is true that one cannot see into his eyes. . . .”
“He has the forethought and the gift for seeing and acting swiftly on the chances of a situation that becomes a High King, if nothing else,” Maelgwn said, in his throat, not without admiration.
A High King. Yes, the High Kingship was the quarry that Medraut hunted. The Purple would mean nothing to him, it belonged to another world than his. There would not be another Emperor of the West; all that would be over with my going. If he was victorious there would be a High King, and half a length behind him, as it were, a Saxon holding the greatest power in Britain; just as once it had been with Vortigern and the Sea Wolf Hengest. And then when the time came, as it must, for a trial of strength between them, there would be only the Saxon, and Britain would be torn between the tree and the stallion, and the end would be darkness, after all.
I must have groaned aloud, for there was a small swift movement among the men around the fire, and suddenly they were all. looking at me as though I had drawn their attention by some sound. I laughed, to cover the thing, whatever it had been, and tossed the last of my barley crust to the nearest hound, and looked around at them, gathering them in. “It is in my mind that with Cerdic and Medraut striking up from Vindocladia, the obvious place for a landing of the Scots, and presumably the Painted People with them, is well up the Sabrina Sea — somewhere in the marsh and reed country northwest of Lindinis — away beyond the Apple Island, maybe — low shores and small wandering waterways to run the war boats inland and ground them, and having landed, they will cut through to join hands with the Saxons as soon as may be.”
“The old game of cutting the kingdom in two,” Owain said.
“Partly, partly also, of course, to combine into their full strength before we can come to grips with them. It seems that they are all too likely to succeed in that, yet even now, if we ride like the hammers of hell, there is still a chance that we may meet one half of the enemy host in time to deal with it before it is joined by the other.”
“And so?” Flavian said.
“We ride like the hammers of hell. But before we ride, I have a Cran Tara of my own to send out. Maelgwn, can you furnish me with ink and parchment or tablets?”
“Na,” said Maelgwn, lordlywise. “I am no clerk.”
“But good God, man, have you no clerk here with the means of writing a letter?”
In the end he brought, with his own hands, a breviary rich with monk’s work in gold leaf and glimmering colors, that I think he loved next after his hawks and his women, though for its beauty rather than its content, and tossed it to me like a thing of no account. And I tore out the pages I needed, and tossed it back to him. One page, I remember, was half taken up with the initial S, fashioned into the likeness of a dragon with long arched neck and fantastic foliated tail, that was like the royal dragon arm ring that I had worn for twenty years. Another was gemmed with tiny trefoil flowers and leaves among the prayers, another bordered with delicate interlaced strapwork ending in birds’ heads. I turned them over and wrote on their blank sides on my knee, reading the hurried words aloud as I did so, that the others might know what orders I sent, and where.
I wrote to Connory at Deva, to rouse the Northern war bands and bring them down as swiftly as might be; they could not reach us until many days after battle joined, but whichever way it went, they might serve some purpose later. I scrawled my orders to Aurelius the Dog, the Lord of Glevum, to rush every man he could gather, down the Sabrina coast to prevent a landing if it were not already too late. But it would be too late, I knew that in the dark of my bones. To Cador of Dumnonia to get his war bands out before the fangs of the trap closed, and join Cei at — I hesitated, looking at the country in my inner eye — at Sorviodunum. Lastly I wrote to Cei himself, honoring him with the dragon page, bidding him call back the war host from their harvesting (but he would be doing that already) ; bidding him take the gathered host westward as far as Sorviodunum, and make his rallying place there while he waited for my coming. That would put them about midway between Venta and the southern Mendips. If they pushed farther west they might become engaged with the enemy before I could reach them, and I dared not risk the outcome of that.
I had already sent out a summons to any of the tribesmen of my own hills who could join me before moonrise, and Maelgwn had his orders to gather what troops he could within the next day, and bring them after me.
When the letters were written, someone brought me balls of beeswax, and I sealed them with Maximus’s great amethyst seal in the pommel of my sword, with the spread-winged eagle and the proud surrounding legend IMPERATOR. I called up three of the young warriors about the lower fires, all well known to me as swift horsemen and for their knowledge of the hills and hill tracks, and gave Cador’s letter to the first, bidding him take the shortest way south to the Silures coast, and for God’s sake keep out of Vortiporus’s hands, and cross by fisher boat into Dumnonia. The letters for Aurelius the Dog, and for Cei, I gave to the other two, bidding them ride together as far as Glevum, and the one to drop off there while the other pressed straight on to Sorviodunum. And when they had snatched up the last of their supper, flung on their cloaks and gone from the hall, that left only Connory and the North.
I remember looking across the fire to where the Minnow sat half asleep and propped against his father’s knee, and saw how Flavian’s hand with the great flawed emerald rested on the young man’s dusty shoulder. The last man to wear that ring had died in my service twenty years ago; in all likelihood Flavian would be dying with me in a few days from now. Three were too many to take in direct succession from one man’s line.
“Minnow,” I said, and as he roused and shook himself upright in his place, “eat first and sleep after. I can give you four hours for sleeping, after that take a fresh horse — see to that, Maelgwn my brother, since I shall be on the road south before then — and carry my summons up to Connory at Deva. If you can get two changes of horse on the way you should be there in less than three days.”