Our men cheered. Their spirits, so abraded by the Druids and chilled by Valerin's foul insults, were instantly restored for we had drawn the first blood. I walked to the river's edge where I danced a victor's steps as I showed the dispirited enemy Hywelbane's bloodstained blade. Gorfyddyd, Cuneglas and Gundleus, their champion defeated, turned their horses away and my men taunted them as cowards and weaklings.
Sagramor nodded as I returned to the shield-wall. The nod was evidently his way of offering praise for a well-fought fight. “What do you want done with him?” He gestured to Valerin's fallen body. I had Issa strip the corpse of its jewellery, then two other men heaved it into the river and I prayed that the spirits of the water would carry my brother of Mithras to his reward. Issa brought me Valerin's weapons, his golden torque, two brooches and a ring. “Yours, Lord,” he said, offering me the plunder. He had also retrieved my spear from the river.
I took the spear and Valerin's weapons, but nothing else. “The gold is yours, Issa,” I said, remembering how he had tried to give me his own torque when we had returned from Ynys Trebes.
“Not this, Lord,” he said, and he showed me Valerin's ring. It was a piece of heavy gold, beautifully made and embossed with the figure of a stag running beneath a crescent moon. It was Guinevere's badge, and at the back of the ring, crudely but deeply cut into the thick gold, was a cross. It was a lover's ring and Issa, I thought, had been clever to spot it.
I took the ring and thought of Valerin wearing it through all the hurt years. Or maybe, I dared to hope, he had tried to revenge his pain on her reputation by cutting a false cross into the ring so that men would think he had been her lover. “Arthur must never know,” I warned Issa and then I hurled the heavy ring into the river.
“What was that?” Sagramor asked as I rejoined him.
“Nothing,” I said, 'nothing. Just a charm that might have brought us ill luck." Then a ram's horn sounded across the river and I was spared the need to think about the ring's message. The enemy was coming.
The Bards still sing of that battle, though the Gods only know how they invent the details they embroider into the tale because to hear their songs you would think none of us could have survived Lugg Vale and maybe none of us should. It was desperate. It was also, though the bards do not admit as much, a defeat for Arthur.
Gorfyddyd's first attack was a howling rush of maddened spearmen who charged into the ford. Sagramor ordered us forward and we met them in the river where the clash of the shields was like a crack of thunder exploding in the valley's mouth. The enemy had the advantage of numbers, but their attack was channelled by the ford's margins and we could afford to bring men from our flanks to thicken our centre. We in the front rank had time to thrust once, then we crouched behind our shields and simply shoved at the enemy line while the men in our second rank fought across our heads. The ring of sword blades and clatter of shield-bosses and clashing of spear-shafts was deafening, but remarkably few men died for it is hard to kill in the crush as two locked shield-walls grind against each other. Instead it becomes a pushing match. The enemy grasps your spearhead so you cannot pull it back, there is hardly room to draw a sword, and all the time the enemy's second rank are raining sword, axe and spear blows on helmets and shield-edges. The worst injuries are caused by men thrusting blades beneath the shields and gradually a barrier of crippled men builds at the front to make the slaughter even more difficult. Only when one side pulls back can the other then kill the crippled enemies stranded at the battle's tide line. We prevailed on that first attack, not so much out of valour but because Morfans pushed his six horsemen through the crush of our men and used his long horse spears to thrust down on the crouching enemy front line.
“Shields! Shields!” I heard Morfans shouting as the six horses' vast weight buckled our shield-line forward. Our rear-rank men hoisted their shields high to protect the big war horses from the rain of enemy spears, while we in the front rank crouched in the river and tried to finish off the men who recoiled from the horsemen's thrusts. I sheltered behind Arthur's polished shield and stabbed with Hywelbane whenever a gap offered in the enemy's line. I took two mighty blows to the head, but the helmet cushioned both even if my skull did ring for an hour afterwards. One spear struck my scale armour but could not pierce it. The man who launched that spear lunge was killed by Morfans, and after his death the enemy lost heart and splashed back to the river's northern bank. They took their wounded, all but for a handful who were too close to our line and that handful we killed before we retreated to our own bank. We had lost six men to the Otherworld and twice that many to wounds. “You shouldn't be in the front line,” Sagramor told me as he watched our wounded being carried away. “They'll see you're not Arthur.”
“They're seeing that Arthur fights,” I said, 'unlike Gorfyddyd or Gundleus." The enemy Kings had been close to the fight, but never close enough to use their weapons. lorweth and Tanaburs were screaming at Gorfyddyd's men, encouraging them to the slaughter and promising them the rewards of the Gods, but while Gorfyddyd reorganized his spearmen a group of master less men waded the river to attack on their own. Such warriors relied on a display of bravery to bring them riches and rank, and these thirty desperate men charged in a screaming rage once they were through the deepest part of the river. They were either drunk or battle-mad, for thirty alone attacked our whole force. The reward for their success would have been land, gold, forgiveness of their crimes and lordly status in Gorfyddyd's court, but thirty men were not enough. They hurt us, but died doing it. They were all fine spearmen with shield hands thick with warrior rings, but each now faced three or four enemies. A whole group rushed towards me, seeing in my armour and white plume the fastest route to glory, but Sagramor and my wolf-tailed spearmen met and matched them. One huge man was wielding a Saxon axe. Sagramor killed him with his dark curved blade, then plucked the axe from the dying hand and hurled it at another spearman, and all the while he was chanting his own weird battle song in his native tongue. A last swordsman attacked me and I parried his scything blow with the iron boss of Arthur's shield, knocked his own shield aside with Hywelbane, then kicked him in the groin. He doubled over, too hurt to cry out, and Issa rammed a spear into his neck. We stripped the dead attackers of their armour, their weapons and their jewellery and left their bodies at the ford's edge as a barrier to the next attack.
That attack came soon and came hard. Like the first this third assault was made by a mass of spearmen, only this time we met them at the near river bank where the press of men behind the enemy's front rank forced their leading spearmen to stumble on the piled bodies. Their stumbling opened them to our counter-attack and we shouted in triumph as we slashed our red spears forward. Then the shields cracked together again, dying men screamed and called on their Gods, and the swords rang loud as the anvils in Magnis. I was again in the front rank, crammed so close to the enemy line that I could smell the mead on their breath. One man tried to snatch the helmet from my head and lost his hand to a-sword stroke. The pushing match started again and again it seemed that the enemy must force us back by sheer weight, but again Morfans brought his heavy horses through the crush, and again the enemy hurled spears that clattered on our shields, and once again Morfans's men thrust down with their long horsemen's spears and once again the enemy pulled back. The bards say the river ran red, which is not true, though I did see tendrils of blood fading downstream from the wounded who tried and failed to get back through the ford.