“The ladders are down, sir.” Peredur coughed with a sickening wet sound. The rivulet became a spray, and he fell forward over his mount’s neck. Even as I reached to steady him—“Gareth, help me here”—the cry went up from a hundred throats.

Lancelot! Lancelot!

Giving Peredur over to men of the third, I yelled with the last of my breath: “Cohort order, form!”

The riders broke away on all sides of me to execute the command, but still the cry went up: Lancelot!

For there he stood on the wall, hurling down the last of the cages that turned night into day, serene as a bishop in that hurricane of battle, crossing the longsword to his left hand, hilt upward, offering it like a cross to the men below.

“Not Lancelot but God’s Will!” he cried.

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“Lancelot! God and Lancelot!”

In a lull in the cheering, I hallooed up to him. “How does Cador?”

“We go to join him now,” Lancelot replied in his formal manner. “God with you, my lord.” And he disappeared behind the parapet as Agrivaine reined in at my knee, helmet gone, black hair hanging loose around his dark face, broken shield flapping in two pieces, visibly shaking with rage and excitement.

“I’ve fought this kind before, Arthur. It doesn’t feel right. Na, call me mad, there’s no love ‘twixt you and me, but something’s wrong.”

I put out a hand to steady him, but he shrugged away. “What? I’ve prayed to every god with a name tonight. If madness will help, I’ll use that.”

“I think we’ve been had,” Agrivaine said bluntly. “This is not their whole force. If there was more light, you’d see it’s not. Picts rely on archers; hardly one shaft’s been flown at us. They’re gone, done what they had to, pulled us away from the river.”

I looked into his streaked, ftre-glinted face. “A diversion?”

“That for a fact,” Agrivaine rasped. “If I’m wrong, call me old woman, but we may have given his main force time to land.”

“Thank the gods for one suspicious man. We’ll take up our original line.”

He gathered his reins, glowering. “There’s still a quarrel between us, brutish as you’ve made it.”

“Meanwhile, Peredur’s wounded. Will you take the second line on the river?”

Agrivaine blinked. “You mean command?”

“I mean lead. Not a vengeful mob but a line, Agrivaine, Can you do it?”

“Can I—?” For the first time in his life, Agrivaine gave me something like a salute. “Done. And until we meet, you’re still a bastard!”

As the sky brightened from ink to a dingy gray, we squandered a few precious minutes in gathering up dropped lances, borrowing unbroken shields from the wounded left behind. Then, as the cohort wheeled in formation to follow me, a rider galloped toward us around the northeast corner of the wall and came to a halt beside me.

“Ten longships,” he blurted. “All in line, all hard against the

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shore. Christ, they can’t draw more than three feet of water. The pigs are pouring off like wine from a stove-in butt.”

Bless dour Agrivaine and his canny northern instinct. He deserved a commendation.

“To Cador in the city,” I directed the messenger. “His archers are no good in there. 1 need them to support me at the river, clear? Go on.”

Pounding out onto the river plain before the city, it was just light enough now to see how right Agrivaine was: the fog-wisped river and the line of ships, the men plunging over the sides into the shallows, clambering up onto the beach, the first wave with scaling ladders. When they saw us move between them and the gates, they wavered and halted, hastily trying to set up a line of spears.

“Can’t let them form!” I yelled. “Centurions to me.”

The cohort wheeled into two broadside lines of attack twenty paces apart as my commanders ranged about me. They seemed to quiver; the fight in their eyes might have been madness but it thrilled me. They were for this, needing no spur. I couldn’t have held them back.

“Keep to the plan, two lines, Agrivaine in front of the seconU. Hit, reform, attack again. And again and again as long as we have a tine. He’s lost the dark and we’ve got him. See where the sun comes up.”

“On our day for once,” Bedivere exulted.

“To your squadrons.”

Our day at last, our turn. Old Vortigem, gritty bargainer with one unsullied dream, where are you now?

Cerdic’s first men had stopped, others running to join them. They were cut off from their prize by two solid lines of lance. There was no noise from their line, as if they suddenly knew what faced them. I gave the order.

“Couch—lances!”

My command echoed from the centurions. “Lances … lances … lances.”

The iron tips dipped to the ready in a rippling wave. Now, for one moment, we were not mere tribes but something called Britain. I scooped my shield arm in a wide arc.

“Forward—charge!”

And Britain followed me.

A few more minutes and Cerdic might have won, reached the south gate with ladders and battering rams, archers massed to repel my cavalry. But we broke him with speed. Arrows flew,

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but no concentrated storm. Most of the archers never got ashore. And then Cador’s own bowmen were in place and peppering the

boats.

We shattered them as a line, battering into the first spearmen, taking them on our lances, trampling them down, wheeling to reform and attack again. We broke them at a cost as men were dragged from or went down over the heads of spitted horses, but always the line reformed, whirled and came again, a great scythe in the early light, until I sent a messenger racing out of the battle to the waiting archers behind us, and the first flight of arrows exploded into the morning air—up, over and down on the ships and men like a swarm of angry wasps.

Each attack pressed them further back toward the river until our forward movement bogged down in the sheer mass of bodies. We cut and kicked clear, reformed and came again. They tried to lure us into scattered fights to break the tine, but our discipline held. For all his perversity, Agrivaine served me well. No sooner was the first rank disengaged than it maneuvered aside to let the Orkneymen through. That done, the first wheeled to reform again. Foot by foot, the yellow-haired berserkers and tattooed Picts retreated toward the river shallows. Faces flashed by me in the red smear of battle, blurred as the light-streak on a falling ax before my shield blocked or sword parried. The balanced blade seemed alive in my hand as it caught the new sun’s rays, knowing of itself where to strike.

Gradually the retreat became a hapless rout to regain the ships. On the last charge, we won clear to the water’s edge. It was then that I caught sight of Cerdic standing up to his hips in the frothing water with only a sword in his hand, urging the men past him to the ships. An arrow grazed his arm as I watched, just deep enough to protrude fore and aft from his flesh. With more impadence than anger, as if to say, “I haven’t got time for this,” he snapped the shaft and hurled the fragments away. I pushed toward him, but just then, another horseman plunged across my path. In that moment Cerdic turned, floundered to the nearest ship, snaked nimbly over the side and disappeared as the boat heaved away toward the middle of the stream.

“Cohort fall back,” I grated to Bedivere with a voice raw from yelling. “Archers forward. Shoot as long as the boats are in range.”

Bedivere looked demented, helmet awry, nose and cheeks grime-streaked. “Are you hurt, Arthur?”

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“Don’t think so.” It hurt to talk. I could barely whisper. “You?”

“No, but Trystan’s down.”

“Oh no, not Tryst!”

“Think it was him.” Bedivere nodded dazedly. “Think it was him.”

“We did it,” I croaked. “God of all luck in battle, we did it! Pull them back. I’ve no voice left.”

There are truths remembered long after tactical details are forgotten, pictures bristling vividly from the unchanging face of war that historians like Caesar seem to overlook. Men in battle are much the same. They rage and fear and try to stay alive. Men after battle are more eloquent. The violence leaves them exhausted. They slump in the saddle, jolting limply with the movement of stumbling horses, or limp on foot, leading the wretched beast behind in an aimless, dream-like progress. Some cry softly with the release of tension, some curse like praying or pray like profanity, shuddering down from the violent height they have scaled. Fumbling and gentle, they help a wounded friend, encouraging, scolding as they coax him along. “Come on, damn you, hold onto me. Na, I know it hurts, you great fool. Come on, not far.”

They gather together, staring back at the place they have come out of. That gaze is unseeing and all-knowing, and they will have little to say of what happened-They were in a battle and survived, that’s all. These things never change.

Among the last of them hobbled Trystan, leading his mount, apparently unhurt except for a peculiar limp. Gratefully, I went to him.

“Down, Tryst. Sit and rest.”

His eyes were fever-wild, but the sardonic smile was immutable. “Thank you, I’ll stand.”

He grabbed his saddle horn with both hands, shoulders heaving, head sunk unto his arms, and from those depths I heard building laughter.

“Absurdity, Arthur! Tragic, were it not so funny. Lord Trystan of Castle Dore, heart with a thousand songs, harp that knows woman like a hand on her breast. Sing it, O Britons!”

He paused while the helpless mirth shook him, “Nay, was my sword not magic? Was I not so thick-rounded with Saxons I seemed to wear them like a coat, and yet come from it unscathed as from a field of flowers?” He raised his head, the tears of a terrible glee rolling down his cheeks. “And then this horse—”

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Whatever the joke, it was too much for Trystan; he fell gasping on my neck. “This insensitive, unpoetic beast, when I am off his lathered back and leaning for rest on my sword, this traitorous ox, does he not kick me in the arse and knock me flat before all my men and such of the Saxons who cared to watch?”