For the following three weeks, we stormed through the mountain passes of western Cambria, leaving a trail of slaughter in our wake. We reached the western shore at the end of that time to find the remnants of Ironhair's embattled levies drawn up along the strand, facing us defiantly behind crude and hastily made fortifications. Their evacuation plans had fallen into ruin. The fleet that should have been there to carry them away to safety had failed to meet them, and there was no sign of its coming. They were vulnerable to siege, starvation and thirst, crammed into a narrow space backed with saltwater and bare of any kind of vegetation other than the wrack of seaweed cast up by each high tide. Yet still they refused to surrender, fearing, I had no doubt, the total lack of mercy shown by the Pendragon to any of their ilk.
By the end of the third morning of the "siege, " the defenders were completely encircled and at the mercy of the Overwhelming superiority of the Pendragon besiegers.
I sought out Huw Strongarm and asked his blessing to return with my people to Camulod. Ironhair's invasion, to my eyes and his, was over. The principals, Ironhair himself and Carthac Pendragon, had escaped unscathed, as far as we knew, their bid for mastery in Cambria having failed abjectly. As surely as Ironhair's army had expected to be rescued by a waiting fleet, I, too, had expected to see signs of Connor Mac Athol's presence in the waters off the coast. As neither fleet had been seen, my conjecture was that they had met at sea and, dependent upon the outcome of the battle, either fleet could materialize at any time. Whatever developed, however, Huw now had sufficient strength surrounding the enemy bastion on the beach to handle it. He did not need our continuing presence, or the aggravation of continuing to feed us when we might be better employed at home in Camulod.
Huw believed that Ironhair and Carthac would be likely to return, but not for another year, at least. By that time, Cambria would, under his leadership, be unassailable. A spirit of unity among the Pendragon had been unknown for long enough now—since the death of Uther—that its nearly miraculous re-emergence gave it an exceptional fire and vigour. Should Ironhair invade again in days to come, Huw would request our assistance again, in return for his wholehearted support of young Arthur's claim to Cambria as Uther Pendragon's son. I told him then about my agreement with Llewellyn, which would bring the lad to Cambria the following year, and Huw immediately relieved Llewellyn of his current duties and released him to return to Camulod with us. We two then embraced as friends and equals, and shortly afterwards I turned my two half legions around and led them home to Camulod. We had been away from our Colony for nearly half a year.
ELEVEN
Autumn had already touched the trees with its mordant breath by the time we came down from the highlands and began to approach Camulod from the northwest, having made our way without incident from Dolaucothi in the central hills. We travelled down to the southern coast of Cambria and thence eastward along the littoral, collecting our holding forces from Caerwent and Caerdyff in passing. Then we forded the river mouth to the west of Glevum at low tide—a relatively simple task at summer's end—and struck inland, south and east, to skirt Aquae Sulis and find the great road running south from there to Camulod. Pleased though we were to be going home, we were nevertheless strangely subdued; an air of dissatisfaction hung over us, born of the barely mentioned but inescapable conclusion that it had primarily been the Pendragon Celts, not the forces of Camulod, that had beaten the invaders. We knew we were the anvil against which the Celtic hammer had crashed down to smite and flatten the enemy; it was our solid, unyielding weight against which they had found themselves trapped and crushed. Llewellyn himself had constructed the analogy. But our Camulodian pride was not accustomed to accepting a secondary role, and so many of our number felt discontented and unfulfilled, believing themselves to have achieved nothing of moment.
Needless to say, the mood of our army lightened as we' grew ever closer to Camulod and the comforts of home. My men were looking forward to removing their armour and taking their ease for a spell; the thought of making love to a wife or sweetheart was present in the mind of every man who rode with us, and I was no exception.
Our homecoming was both triumphant and chaotic. Never before had an army returned victorious to the Colony with so few casualties—less than a hundred men had died in the summer long campaign, and no more than three hundred had been wounded. The chaos, meanwhile, was precipitated mainly by the arrival of thousands of hungry mouths. Notwithstanding the fact that our advent had been expected and awaited, the abrupt appearance of our swarming numbers caused immediate dismay and consternation among the Colony's quartermasters, for as Publius Tetra, my own senior campaign quartermaster, had pointed out to me days earlier, it is one thing to contemplate the existence of six thousand legionaries, knowing that they once belonged and lived in one place. It is quite another matter to overlook the fact that those six thousand have another thousand in attendance upon them, and then to see full seven thousand living men descend upon your camp, eyeing your stores and granaries.
Thanks to the foresight of Tetra and his fellow quartermasters, however, we had been at pains to annul the impact of our arrival from that viewpoint, at least; I had sent organized hunting parties out to scour the land for game in the last five days of our approach, and we brought wagons laden with fresh meat and even grain, gleaned from the granaries of those new garrisons we had passed by. Heartened by the new strength offered them in those outlying areas, and encouraged by the prospect of a new, safe and bountiful harvest within the month, the farmers in three communities had been grateful and happy to supply us with their surplus at summer's end.
Another, unforeseeable aspect of the chaos arose from the number of guests in the Colony who had been, with differing degrees of patience, awaiting our arrival. I learned immediately that Connor Mac Athol was in residence, having arrived mere days earlier to find his brother Brander already there, also awaiting me. Ambrose and Arthur had returned the previous month from Northumbria, too, expecting to find me already returned from Cambria, and Ambrose had brought several of Vortigern's senior advisers back with him. They had come, ostensibly, to meet and confer with me about the expedition I would lead northeast the following year, but in reality Ambrose's intent was to demonstrate to these powerful men—and through them to their king—that Camulod, which no one among them had ever seen, was indeed what we had said it was: a prosperous and self sufficient colony and a source of allies far richer than the five hundred Scouts Ambrose had led forth. Finding me still from home, Ambrose had been playing host to the Northumbrian leaders ever since, and those duties had expanded to include Brander, from the moment of the Scots king's unexpected appearance with a full retinue that included his wife, Salina, her niece, Morag, and a round score of the Scots chieftains who were his counsellors. And as though that were not enough, an entire delegation of eleven bishops had then arrived under the leadership of the elderly Bishop Enos, who had ministered to my Great aunt Luceiia. They, too, had come seeking me.
I discovered all of this from Dedalus, whom we found awaiting us at the head of a magnificent honour guard when we reached the boundary of Camulod at the great north south road. The protocols of welcome and entry to the Colony quickly taken care of, Ded and I rode knee to knee while he warned me of how many people would try to claim my attention. When he had done, I laughed at the irony of my thoughts of Tressa and the wishes I had had so recently. I shared my thoughts with him and he laughed with me, his laughter softer than mine and rich with sympathy.