He would descend into the valley at the head of a small, mounted party, riding towards the enemy in company with three wagons filled with another twenty of my men, all of them dressed as clerics. When confronted, my hundred would form a line and hold their position, waiting until the enemy attacked. The wagons and the riders would turn and flee, my "clerics" leaping out of their slow moving vehicles, abandoning both them and their defending foot soldiers and tempting the enemy to attack. Then, at the first sign of an enemy advance, my hundred would fall back uphill, in formation, to break and run only when the hostile force was committed to a charge across the valley bottom and up the opposing hillside. At that point, with the enemy charging uphill, I would loose my cavalry to sweep around and down on either side.
Germanus listened as I outlined my strategy, and then smilingly asked if his men might shout Alleluia! I smiled in return, and then withdrew beyond the hilltop.
It was quickly over, and hardly worth the mention, save for the carnage that took place. The enemy fought bravely and showed more discipline than I had seen in any of our recent enemies in Cambria, holding their individual formations well, and even constructing defensive walls with their shields to stave off our attacks. The sheer weight and numbers of our horses were too much for them, however, and the shield walls buckled, then disintegrated. From that point on, they were in defeat and few of them escaped alive.
I moved among the banks and rows of their dead and wounded, and I noted that they were, as Dedalus had said they might be, very poorly armed. Few possessed swords; their most common weapon was the battle axe, and some of them had heavy spears. Most of them, however, were armed only with thick staves and daggers, and many had no more than heavy, crudely carved wooden clubs.
Many of the wounded might survive, I thought, could they but gain some medical attention, but that was not my concern. I had neither the time nor the desire to care for aliens. Germanus, however, refused to abandon them to death and set his bishops to go in among them, offering aid. Shamed by the sight, some of my own troopers, especially the medical personnel, began to lend assistance, too, and thus we passed the remainder of that fruitless day catering to our foes and spent the night uncomfortably in a makeshift camp high in the hills.
Two days later, close to Londinium, which Enos told me had lain abandoned now for nigh upon ten years, and less than two days' travel from our destination in Verulamium, the talk about the evening campfires was still of the cavalry charge and how we had mown down the Outlanders, whom someone had identified as Jutes. I was distempered and out of sorts, for I had slept but little for the previous two nights, disturbed by terrifying but ill remembered dreams that startled me awake, time and again, drenched in clammy sweat and gasping in horror. My inability to recall what it was that had brought me screaming into wakefulness infuriated me because it frightened me deeply. I had spent a lifetime dreading dreams that eluded my recall, but I had dared to hope myself all done with that in recent years.
It was frustration born of those fears that made me impatient with such silly talk of victory that night, and I said something snappish about how fortunate we were that these had been mere Jutes and not Horsa's Danes. We had consumed our evening meal by then and were grouped around a fire. I was sitting beside Germanus with Tress on my left. Cuthric sat on the bishop's right, and on his right sat Cayena. Then came Dedalus, and Benedict, and I knew not who else, for the fire was high and fierce and concealed those people sitting across the circle from us.
I saw Cuthric raise his eyebrows at my words and then lean close to talk to Germanus, who answered him, listened again, then shrugged and turned to me.
"Cuthric heard you speak of Horsa and his Danes, and wondered how you know of him."
"I know he's there, and that's enough to know. Only now am I beginning to breathe freely, knowing that he and his horde lie far behind us. For the first few days, and in particular when we were headed directly east, I thought we might penetrate their new territory and encounter them at any time. We have women with us, and that thought did not appeal to me."
Germanus translated this for Cuthric and the big Anglian grunted in surprise and spoke again, looking this time at me. I waited for Germanus's translation.
"He says he is surprised that you should know of Horsa's presence in the Weald, but that the Danes are no longer there and your concerns were groundless. They remained there for a time, many boatloads of them, settling temporarily in several of the ancient Roman forts along the shore while they explored the land, looking for holdings they could seize. But then they left again, all of them, in a great fleet, nigh on a month ago."
"What? They went back to the north?" I was incredulous.
Again Germanus questioned Cuthric, but this time as the big man answered him I saw the bishop stiffen, and the blood drained from his face. "Dear God," he said, turning back to me, his voice gone slack with shock. "Cuthric says that Vortigern is dead." He swung back to face the Anglian and the conversation between the two became fast and filled : with tension. I could hardly bear to listen without interrupting, but eventually the elderly bishop slumped and spoke to me again.
"It's true. He's dead, slain in battle by Horsa himself.: The report was brought to Cuthric by one of his own elders, whose daughter fell enamoured of a Dane of Horsa's party, and the fellow boasted of his prowess in the fighting, and of how he had struck off the hand of the Northumbrian king the hand that had dared to threaten Horsa. Cuthric has no idea who Vortigern is, or was, nor did he suspect that you or I could know of him. To Cuthric, he was but an unknown, faceless name who happened to be a king, far in the north. God rest his soul."
"Amen," I whispered. "Do you know, I heard my father say it would come to this, when I was just a boy. He knew, even then, that naught but harm could come from bringing Outlanders into this land to live." I heaved a sigh. "So Vortigern is gone. And so is Horsa, back to the north. He will be king in Northumbria now, I suppose."
"A Danish king, in Britain? I hope not."
"How does your Cuthric come to know so much about Horsa?"
The bishop shrugged his shoulders. "He shares a common interest with you, I suspect. Horsa and his Danes are?!
a threat to the settled Anglians close by, to the north of them. " He hesitated. "I wonder, though, how much he truly knows. He says the sky was black with Horsa's banners. "
I frowned. "Why should that trouble you?"
"It rings false, somehow. The Saxons don't use banners, nor do the Anglians or Jutes. None of these people do. "
"Horsa's a Dane, not a Saxon, Bishop, and he has lived his life observing Vortigern. Now there is a man who uses banners. His emblem is—damnation, was—the wolf's head. I can't believe he's dead. Anyway, Vortigern used his banners all the time, for spectacle's sake. You understand that, do you not?" He ignored my jibe, which was ill timed, and I continued. "So you see, it's more than possible that Horsa has taken his example. Ask Cuthric what Horsa's banner was. "
That took but a moment. "He says it's a bear, not unlike yours, save that Horsa's bear is black, while yours is silver. Every one of his ships' crews has a black bear banner, but the markings on the individual banners vary. "
He turned back to talk to Cuthric again, and I watched the expressions on the faces grouped around the fire as the word spread of Vortigern's death. I was talking to Tress about it when I felt the bishop's hand on my arm. He was still deep in conversation with Cuthric, but I knew he had something he wanted me to hear. Finally he turned back to face me, his eyes troubled.