THE stormy promise of last night’s sunset had been fulfilled in a day of soft blustering wind and squalls of rain, and the standards and the squadron pennons flew as though already carried at the charge. Beyond the huts and the cooking fires the whole war host was already mustered, horse and foot, archers and spearmen. The wild riders of my own mountains, sitting their small shaggy steeds as though they and the horses were one; the men of Glevum under the black hound banner of their prince; the men of the high chalk downs, with something of the formidable steadiness of the Legions about them still. If only, among them, I could have caught the saffron gleam of Cador’s standard, but the men of the West must be still many miles away. I wondered how near were Cynglass and Vortiporus. . . . My own Companions were drawn up before the rest, yellow-touched with the corn marigolds that each man wore in his helmet comb or shoulder buckle, waiting with Flavian at their head, for me to join them. My grand old Signus had died three years ago, and the big silver stallion Gray Falcon, who had taken his place as chief among my war steeds, was being walked up and down close by. He whinnied at sight of me, and the men shouted my name in greeting, so that it sounded like the sudden crash of waves on a sandy shore.
I flung up an arm to them in reply, and mounting, wheeled Gray Falcon in among them, with Bedwyr at my side on a tall raking sorrel drawn from the reserves, and suddenly knew the Brotherhood complete again. Pharic and his Caledonians, whose tribe had first loyalty with them, the traitors who had followed Medraut over to the Saxon camp, they were cut away; the familiar faces that were lacking and long since rotted into skulls were another matter, for it was not death could break the Brotherhood; what was left was the hard core, the men who, new-joined last year or with forty years of service behind them, chose to tuck the corn marigold in their war caps and ride into this last battle with me. These were the Companions of the Bear. And I have never loved them quite as I loved them at that moment.
I should speak to them now; almost always before battle I had made them some kind of fighting speech, but there had been so many battles, so many fighting speeches, that there seemed nothing left to say, and looking at their grim faces, I knew it was no time for false heartening. So I cried out to them only, “Brothers, you know the odds against us today; therefore let us fight so that whether we win or whether we die, the harpers shall sing of us for a thousand years!”
I flashed up my hand to Cei in command of the main cavalry, and old Marius who led the foot, and the great aurochs horn sang harshly merry and was echoed across the camp, the notes that ordered the march tossed to and fro on the squally wind that ruffled up and silvered the hazel leaves. And the first band of horse moved off, raising their spears to me in salute as they passed.
Hail Caesar! Those about to die. . . .
We rode in the usual formation for hostile country, for we could not be sure how near the enemy scouts and advance parties might be: foreguards flung out ahead, and knots of light horse screening the flanks of the main body, and I remember that Bedwyr, riding beside me, had his harp slung on his shoulder, as he had used to ride into battles, and presently, though he did not unsling it, he began to sing, so softly that it scarcely broke through the beat of his horse’s hooves, but I caught the breath of it and it was the first song that ever I had heard from him, the lament for the Corn King that helps the crops to grow, the promise of his return — out of the mists, back from the land of youth, strong with the sound of trumpets under the apple boughs . . . and I remembered the big stars and the smell of dung fires and the mule drivers listening on the outfringe of the firelight. . . . He must have heard himself at the same instant as I did, for we glanced aside at each other, and he laughed and flung up his head and broke baying into a cattle-reeving song of the Berwyn Hills.
Presently three of our scouts came riding back over the skyline of the low ridge as though the red-eared hounds of Anwn were after them. The foremost reined up in a smother of dust almost under Gray Falcon’s nose so that the big horse snorted and danced in his tracks. “Caesar, the advance guard is tangled with the Saxon outposts! They’re falling back —”
I sent the three of them out again, and rising in my stirrups shouted to the Companions to come on. The trumpeter beside me raised the great aurochs horn to his lips and sent the echoes flying out over the marshes, and we broke forward at an increased speed, the whole war host changing pattern and deploying for action at full march, so that we became, as it were, two advancing battle lines one behind the other, each with its own spear center and cavalry wings, and the small free bodies of light horse that flanked and partly joined the two together.
Just below the crest of the shallow ridge I checked them, and with Bedwyr and two of my captains rode forward through the furze to get a view of the Saxon position. It was a spur of the same ridge from which, farther back into the hills, I had seen the Saxon watch fires brightening under last night’s sunset.
On the very fringe of the marshes, where soft ground and winding waterways must limit the use of cavalry, the enemy battle line was drawn up not much more than a mile distant. Medraut, with the war training that I had given him — and the inborn skill that I had given him too — had chosen his ground well. In the clear between the soft showers of blowing mizzle, the Barbarian battle line was sharp-edged and pricked with detail; I could make out in their center the horsetail standard of Cerdic, where the Saxon leader held his heavy shield warriors, his hearth companions, white as a gleam of bog grass against the blurred greens and grays of marsh and reedbed; more white, that was the lime-washed Scottish bucklers; the dull glint of shield boss and spear blade and war cap splintering into sudden light where a gleam of wet sunshine fled across the marshes and the northward swell of the hills. No sign as yet of the pied and checkered standards of the traitors Cynglass and Vortiporus. God be thanked for that at least. Above all I saw the blood-red gleam on the right flank where the main part of the enemy cavalry was posted. (Cavalry wings on a Saxon war line!) Medraut was flying the Red Dragon of Britain for his battle standard, and my gorge rose at the sight.
Between the Saxon host and the ridge from which we looked toward it, our advance cavalry was falling back, scattered and pursued by a flying mob of light horsemen and running spears, and even as I looked, another band of riders appeared from behind some thick hawthorn scrub, and came curving across like a skein of wild geese in flight, to cut off our men from all hope of retreat.