I wrenched Gray Falcon half around on his haunches, and thrust in beside Cei who was standing in his stirrups to steady his men, his eyes blue fires in a face smeared with blood and filth, and shouted to him, “Constantine can’t be far off now, but it seems that Cynglass and Vortiporus will be here first.”
“How near?” he roared back, as I had done. (“Ya-ai ya ya ya! Stand firm, you rabble!”)
“Something well under a score of bowshots. Take over, Cei. I’m going to try and draw Medraut off for a while.”
“Don’t be a fool, Artos, you can’t!”
“If I can’t, then there’ll be nothing but the bits for Constantine to pick up when he does get through. It’s your battle now.”
He looked around at me, grinning like a dog in the gray jut of his beard, then flung the half shield away from him, and sent his horse plunging forward, and the fight closed over between him and me.
I drove back somehow through the turmoil to my own squadron, flinging off my cloak of the betraying purple and bundling it under my shield, shouted to them to throw away the yellow corn marigolds and follow me, and a few moments later, with my trumpeter beside me and young Drusus, with my personal standard dragged from its lance pole and bundled under one arm, was leading them out of the boil of battle.
“Is it some game that we play?” Flavian cried, leaning from his saddle toward me.
“A game of marsh lights and played with Medraut. The curs of the Cymri are overnear, and Cei and Marius can do without his attentions as well.”
“This is a game that my father would have enjoyed,” he said, and choked on the last word and pitched from the saddle with a flung spear between his shoulders.
We swung wide, with a small ragged pursuit on our heels, and into cover of the alder woods that fringed the rising ground, then turned and charged them. They scattered back, and we did not wait to ride down the survivors, but turned about once more and headed at full gallop into the soft rolling country that lifted above the marsh to the north. Bedwyr had taken Flavian’s place, and rode stirrup to stirrup with me as we had ridden in the early days, as we struggled upward in desperate haste toward the hill track from Aquae Sulis. Just before we lost the full cover of the woods I called a few moments’ halt. “Now, Drusus, get the standard back on its spear shaft, and you Alun Dryfed, and you Gallgoid, your cloak is a good bright one. Tear it in half and it shall serve us for two —” I flung on my own cloak of the unmistakable purple at the same time, and when we rode on again, widely spaced now to allow for the phantom cavalry among us, we carried on long hazel branch or spearpoint what seemed to be the pennons of a dozen squadrons. We came out on to the bush-scattered ferny hillside, and turning Gray Falcon aside a short distance down the wood-shore, I could see the whole battle spread before me, and the pied flicker of the traitor standards already on the fringe of it. The Little Dark Warrior had spoken truth. I could see also, but still a long way off, the faint dust cloud of marching men on the great causeway road from Lindinis.
“They’ve a long way to go! My God; they’ve a long way to go!”
I turned back to the rest again. “All’s well, raise the standard again. Now your turn, Aidan. Sound me a fanfare.” And touching heel to Gray Falcon’s flank, I rode forward with Drusus close behind me, choosing my line so as to give an uninterrupted view to the enemy, and pausing to let the gleam of the horse’s coat and the red and gold flame of the standard show up against the deep summer colors of the hillside. Beyond me, the bushes and tall form of the trackside would break and blur the numbers and movement of the rest of the squadron, leaving only the pennons clear — those pennons of a dozen squadrons: Artos and his heavy cavalry reserves sweeping around through the higher ground to take them on the flank! Even from that distance I could hear the roar as we were sighted, and looking back before I rejoined the head of the squadron and swung them northward again following the track into a shallow fold of the hills, saw a mass of cavalry already shaking free from the main mass of the Saxon war host, and swinging toward the higher ground.
A short while later we let ourselves be glimpsed again on the crest of another soft billow of moor, then rode like the hammers of hell for the place where the track forded a stream coming down from the higher hills, and beyond it became a stony scramble half lost among the heather of a narrow combe. We gained it ahead of Medraut and his horsemen, splashed through, and wheeled about on the farther side.
“We are not like to find a better place to hold them,” I said.
And Bedwyr nodded, cleaning his sword blade on his horse’s mane that was almost as red, that it might be bright for further use. “I never saw a place more to my mind,” he said, “nor a Company,” and met my eye, and I thought how he had said last night, “I have always been one to choose with care the company I die in.”
Far off and dulled by the swell of the land, I could hear the rumor of battle like the rumor of a storm rushing through distant forest country, and already the nearing beat of hooves drumming up toward us. I looked around me once, I remember, seeing the pocket of level in the quiet lap of the moors, the stream silvering over the ford, the furze coming into its second flowering, bean-scented in the sun and wet. There were linnets in the furze, I heard their song; and the great cloud shadows sailed up from the south as they had done on the morning of Badon fight. A good place for a last stand, with the combe narrowing behind us, and the river ford before.
I remembered, across more than half a lifetime, Irach leaping upon the enemy spears, and for an instant felt again the oneness of all things, that is man’s comfort under his knowledge of being alone. Yes, a good place for a final stand. By the time the last of us fell, Constantine should surely have come up. . . .
I glanced behind me and on either side at the score of men ranged there with me, and saw it in their faces, that they knew their purpose here as well as I did. I wanted to say something to them now, something to toughen the fiber and kindle the heart, but that is for an army, and this was a knot of friends, and instead I said: “My most dear, we have fought many fights together, and this is the last of them and it must be the best. If it is given to men to remember in the life we go to, remember that I loved you, and do not forget that you loved me.”
They looked back at me kindly, as friend looks at friend. Only one of them spoke and that was Drusus my standard-bearer, the youngest of them all. He said: “We have good memories, Artos the Bear.”
And then in a new burst of cloud shadows sweeping up from the marshes, Medraut’s cavalry burst out of the valley before us. They reined in on the farther bank, and for a long trampling pause, each looked to the other across the running water. There were faces that I knew among the horsemen on the farther bank; in the midst and forefront of them, Medraut sitting his tall roan with his naked sword across its neck and on his arm the great dragon arm ring of a Prince of Britain, that was brother to the one I wore on my own. The stream was little more than a couple of spear lengths wide, and we could have spoken to each other as one speaks to the man across the hearth. We looked eye into eye and I saw his nostrils widen and tremble. Then he cried out and heeled his horse into the water, and instantly the foremost of his riders plunged after him.
And we, on the near bank, braced ourselves and spurred forward to meet the coming shock.
We fought hock-deep across the ford, up to the girths on either side, and the water sheeted up, boiling to a yeasty turmoil, white and then stained with rusty streaks that spread down the run of the stream. Men were in the water, and a horse screamed and went down, rolling belly up into shallows like a great wineskin. Again and again they hurled against us, yelling, and again and again we flung them back. More horses were down now, and men fought on foot, knee-deep, thigh-deep, in the boiling shallows, and so far, not one of the traitors had reached the western bank. Small difference if they had; but men fighting as we were must have something to hold, some rampart which is of the spirit as much as of pass or narrows or running water; and for us it was the ford and the line pf that lowland stream. . . . Bedwyr was beside me, the rest of the surviving Companions close-knit on either hand, and if we never fought in all our lives before, God of gods! we fought then! And in the midst of all, Medraut and I came together, naturally and inevitably, as to a meeting long appointed.