We stood grimly silent for a few moments; there seemed nothing to be said.
Then I asked, “Have the Glevum troops come in?” for the city had been empty of its fighting men when we rode through (one messenger rides faster than a whole war band) but they might still be scouring the Sabrina marshes for the landing that they had been too late to stop.
“This morning. As soon as they found themselves too late to prevent the Scots landing, they pressed on to the hosting place — indeed, they were here and making themselves free of the city wineshops when our foreguard came up.”
I was glancing about the camp, seeing the great dragon standard upreared among the cooking fires, and farther off, the black deer-hound of Glevum, but nowhere the saffron flash of the Dumnonian banner. “What of Cador and Constantine?”
“No sign as yet.”
“No word at all?”
He shook his head, like that of a gray and ragged old sheep dog beset by flies.
“If they are not here by dawn tomorrow, it will surely mean that they could not get out in time,” I said, “and we must count them lost to us and do as best we may without them. With the traitor princes of my own people already flighting south to join the Saxons, we cannot afford a longer delay, even for Marius and Tyrnon to come up. Call me a council, Cei; we can make plans as we eat as we did at Badon.”
But of all that hurriedly called council I can remember little, save that I ordered a general advance westward at dawn, save also — and this I remember clearly indeed — that seeing how sorely we were outnumbered, I proposed a battle formation that had never been used before, but which seemed to offer some hope of holding off the threat of the longer enemy wings, and that somehow I hammered the rest of the council into agreeing to it. All the rest is lost in a gray shifting murk like the smoke of the cooking fires. Also it seems very long ago — longer ago than our council before Badon fight, and yet it cannot be many days — God knows how many or how few; it grows hard to keep count of time. . . .
In the lag end of the night the long-awaited messenger got through to us from Constantine. “From Constantine?” I said when he was brought to me. “What of Cador, the King?”
“My Lord the King grows old before his tune. He is sick and cannot ride,” the man said, standing before me in the cold flare of torches in the windy dawn. “Therefore he sends his son to lead the war bands.”
“How soon can they join us?”
“Here?” he said, doubtfully.
“No, we march westward in an hour; we shall be within a few miles of the enemy when we camp again.”
“So, then maybe not long past noon tomorrow. They make forced marching.”
“By noon tomorrow the work may be for the wolves and ravens rather than for the men of Dumnonia,” I said. “They must force the march still farther. How large is the force?”
“The household warriors, and such of the war host as we could gather quickly. It is harvesttime.”
Harvesttime, harvesttime!
I said, “Go now and get something in your belly, then get back to Constantine and tell him the need that we have of his coming swiftly.”
Within the hour, we marched; pushing westward over the great summer-pale combers of the Downs, following the Legion’s road at first, then by the alder green ridgeway into the low-lying country below the Mendips. And that night we camped on a patch of rising ground in a soft country of deep woods and ferny hillsides, with the downs of our day’s march rising cloud-dappled, chalk-scarred, behind us, and far ahead, the gleam of water and the curious lightening of the sky that told of marsh country. Far ahead also, unglimpsed, unhinted at in the summer quiet land sweep, were the enemy war host; the enemy war host led against me by my son and the man whom I would have had most joyfully for my son if Fate had woven the pattern that way. They were encamped some five miles off, reported the little dark scouts who brought in word of them, and I would have pushed on then and forced the battle, for there were still some hours of daylight left, and in that way we would have had the advantage of surprise with us; but half my men were blind weary, and to go into battle next day with men strengthened by a few hours’ sleep, would, I judged, be a thing to outweigh the loss of surprise. So we made camp, and mounted a strong watch, with a screen of outpost pickets beyond. And while the main camp was being pitched, I rode the rounds of the outposts with Cei, from one to another of the knots of men lying up wherever there was cover and command of the country westward, in small ferny hillside hollows, or the fringes of an alder thicket, among the last pink smoke of the summer willow herb, while the horses grazed nearby. In one such outpost as we rode nearer, they were singing softly, with their mouths full of bannock; an unlikely war song, but I have noticed that men only sing of fighting in time of peace.
Singing very softly with a swing that was at once grim and merry, their eyes on the track where it passed below them. They rolled over and scrambled to their feet at my coming, and the youngling in charge of them came and stood at my stirrup, looking up, eager for my approval because this was his first command of men. “All well?” I said, in the usual form.
“All well, Caesar,” he returned, and then, forgetting his dignity, grinned, and flashed me the “Thumbs Up” that men used to use in the arena, but only boys use now. I stuck my own thumb skyward, laughing, as I turned my horse away.
I saw his head on a Saxon spear before the same time next evening. It was still recognizable by the big crescent-shaped mole on one cheek.
It was sunset when, the round completed, we turned back toward the camp. But I remember that as though by common consent, with no word spoken between us, we wheeled the horses on a low billow of rising land, and looked westward once more, and having looked, could neither of us look away. I have seen wild sunsets in my time, but seldom, surely never, a sky quite like that one. It was as though beyond the dark, gold-fringed cloud bars of the west, the world itself were burning, and the torn-off rags of the burning, spreading into great wings as they went, were drifting all across the sky so that even when one looked upward to the zenith, still the sky was full of the rush of vast wings of flame. Far off toward the Island of Apples, the winding waters of the reed country caught fire from the burning west, and earth and sky alike blazed into an oriflamme. It was a sunset full of the sound of trumpets and the flying of banners, a sunset that made one feel naked under the eye of God. . . .
“If tomorrow we go down into the Dark,” Cei said at last, with awe in his deep grumble of a voice as the radiance began to fade, “at least we have seen the sunset.”
But for the moment I was looking at something else, at red petals of fire brightening far out in the dusking marshes. The campfires of the Saxon war host.
In a while we turned the horses and rode on into camp, to find Marius and Tyrnon there with their hastily gathered reinforcements who had marched in just ahead of us. God’s face was not turned from us in all things, it seemed.