I felt a liking for young Dafydd. His bumptiousness held no ‘insolence, only the high, thoughtless spirits Bedivere and I knew once. “You a harper and can’t find a rhyme for emperor?”

Dafydd sipped at the mug when it came back to him. “If I could, I’d be the first. Let’s see … emperor.”

The other men shared the cup gratefully, a little embarrassed

by my presence. Partly to relieve it, I climbed up on the log

parapet and looked out across the fire-sown dark. Some of

Cerdic’s fires were very close to this lower level. We might talk

.to each other.

Then a scrabble and grunt close by as young Davy climbed up beside me.

“Temperer. Temperer, that’s it, my lord.”

“What’s what?”

“Why, the rhyme for emperor.”

“That’s not a word, Davy-bach.”

.., “It’s not?” The poet’s dismay, then the true creator’s answer. ^‘Well, it should be.”

$5 While he spoke his eyes never left the nearest Saxon fire. A moved across the light and back again, then paused. With : skill, Dafydd fined a shaft to his bow, drew to the head

284

Firelord

King of a Hundred Battles

285

and loosed. Down by the fire, surprised curses went up like flushed birds. My archer grinned white in the gloom.

“I do that now and again, sir. Keeps my spirits up and theirs down.”

“Ever hit them in this dark?”

“Ah, who knows? Come light, they go down like wheat. We get sick of the sight.” The cockiness deserted him for a moment. “But still they come.”

“Listen.” From the plain below I heard a muffled, rustling jingle, the sound of large numbers of men shuffling into position. Dafydd said grimly, “Getting an early start, sir.”

I cupped both hands to my mouth. “Cerdic!”

“He wouldn’t be so close, sir. Back taking his ease, that sort of style.”

“He’s been up this hour like me. Ay, Cerdic! You there?”

A pause; then, over the rustle of moving men we heard a loud rattling, the sound of spears and swords clashed rapidly against

shields.

“There’s someone of note out there,” I told Dafydd. “Thane or earl. That’s how they honor their leaders.”

“Noisy sods, aren’t they?”

The clear, vibrant voice came suddenly out of the dark. “Good morning, Arthur.”

“Cerdic?”

The voice was full of careless good humor. “Yes. Horrible

hour to be up.”

Dafydd muttered savagely, fitting another arrow. “Just a gleam more light, just one. I could pick him like a cherry.”

“We were just breakfasting,” I called. “Thought I’d nod in.”

“Good of you,” Cerdic returned. “Looks like better weather.”

“Colder.”

“We’re used to it.”

A rapid exchange in Saxon gutturals and a burst of rough laughter.

“Arthur, we regret killing so many good horses. It’s the best part of a British lord.”

Dafydd howled, “Bugger off!” and my men roared behind the rampart, throwing a few sentiments of their own. I waited for quiet so Cerdic could hear every word.

“You’d better eat them, boyo. They’re all you’re going to eat besides mud.”

He didn’t have a ready answer for that. I added with honeyed malice, “Getting hungry, Cerdic?”

“Not yet, thank you.”

“Well, breakfast is cooling. Till we meet, boyo.”

“Till then, Arthur.”

We jumped down from the rampart to warm our hands at the fire while Davy preened for his comrades.

“Imagine me, lads: up on the ramp nattering away with bloody Cerdic himself. Oh, I gave him summ’at. Hear me?”

“I caught every word of him,” one of the men wondered. “Not half the proper Brit, is he?”

“That’s just what he is, half,” I said. “And a fine prince.”

Dafydd gaped. “That trash?”

“Never knew better.”

He was shocked as if I’d confessed a family of congenital idiots. “I thought you were just having him on, sir. But you know him?”

“And wish he were on my side. The trouble is, the man wants to walk where you’re standing. And you were here first, Davy-bach.”

At the first gleam of light in the east, our cavalry filed down the two causeways, Lancelot with his Dyfneinters, Kay and Gawain with me. We would operate separately with a single plan: drive through to Cerdic’s rear, then prowl the fringes of the voracious ant-army in tight formations, darting in and out with the same tactics that drove him into the water at Eburacum. This way we peeled him like an onion while he could never exert full pressure on the hill.

That reads well; the military historian can diagram it neatly, the bard conjures flying squadrons as they batter into the shield-locked ranks:

One blade out of many blades, Great scythe of Arthur and Gawain, Even slain, they slew as they fell.

It is neither precise as the one nor lyrical as the other, but give .it a try. You are King of Britain and leading trained cavalry. Forty-five years old; still hard and strong, but the Hfe-or-death dance of war takes your muscles an eye-blink longer than before (pd you pay more for it afterward. Couched under your right arm

an ashwood lance ten feet long with a needle point. On your

286

Firelord

left arm is a heavy shield of bull-hide stretched over wood, bronze-bossed and rimmed with iron.

You charge in line, hoping that line will stay intact, praying you won’t go down with the next rank too close behind, because you’ll be crushed or caught by the nimble Saxons who dodge between the horses to drag men out of the saddle.

You have a moment before the lance strikes a shield, one moment when everything seems frozen still and you can see with heightened clarity every detail of the death in front of you: shields locked under cold eyes, cone helmets with die broad nose guard that makes the wearer look remote and inhuman. You see the spears and the stakes suddenly thrust out from behind the shields like a wolf baring fangs.

At the last moment you brace yourself forward against the collision, head ducked in behind your shield, and then you hit with the composite shock of war—tortured wood and iron, jarred sinew and the scream of metal on metal, the explosive grunt of men slammed together like brutal lovers.

The line of shields buckles and gives. For a murderous instant, you feel like plunging on through, but that’s folly. Your knees transmit their message to the trained horse and you swing aside, already feeling the rumble of the second line behind you coming to hit them again, and you’d damned well better be out of the way or become part of the landscape. But that’s for green boys, beginners. You’ve been too long at this and you dance clear of the carnage as the second line goes in.

But there’s four of them dashing out at you from one side— Jesu, where did they come from—at you, precious mortal flesh, you. Too close for you to get up any momentum in the hoof-sucking mud, and as you tighten rein for quicker control, you almost feel their unstoppable determination. They’re going to kill you. Bleeding, cold, starved or crippled, they’re going to kill you.

You stop thinking and let your muscles react. You back the horse craftily, apparently unsure, as if you’re boxed, drawing them further and further out of their ranks. The vicious pleasure gleams in their eyes when they realize they’ve got you.

“Artur! Ha, Artur!”

And now they’re unprotected, too far out and know it too late as the rider hurtles down on them, sword raised like an archangel’s vengeance before it whirs through flesh and bone.

“Back to the line, Artos. I’ll cover you!”

Out of the chaos me line forms again. You lift in the stirrups for all to see: you still iive and while you do, so does Britain.

King of a Hundred Battles

287

Your arm comes down. The great scythe whistles forward again. And again.

The rain falls, men fall. Again. And ail through this, all through the screaming welter of fear and rage and agony petrified inside seconds like flies in amber that will be remembered in troubled dreams, you ride an animal mortal as you but, for all its endurance, remarkably stupid. As you execute the movements refined by a lifetime of training and intelligence, the brute under you may lose its footing at any moment or be hamstrung by a . darting sword, may blunder into one of the myriad holes dug for the stakes that took so many of your men.

Stakes, where are they?

Then you know: the next time you hit, the stakes are thrust out suddenly, followed by an avalanche of spears. The horses go down; you don’t look, don’t want to recognize the men already good as dead on the ground. You swing the brute under you, kick clear, slash with the sword, dance away. Back to the reforming line. Your arm goes up—“Forward!”—and you dash in again. This time you’re ready and wary for stakes or spears behind that shield-wall. But not for what happens. The wall opens suddenly and lets you through, and coming at you is another wall of long stakes, each driven by two leg-churning, long-haired men while two running files of them snake out along your flanks.

“Artos, they’re getting round us!”

But the stake is coming dead at you to take the guts out of your laboring horse. You swerve-at the last second and take half the head off one of the carriers as too many horses go screaming down into the mud, and screaming men, too, but you are free again, gasping, bent forward over the .pungent foam on your horse’s neck, looking desperately for the center of your line if there is one.

“Right wheel!”

And as the Saxons close ranks again, you’re moving once more beyond their rear like wolves around a flock, looking for another weak spot, another opening.

There’s an easier way to imagine all this. Put a ten-pound weight in either hand and run three miles. Take care to select only muddy ground and be sure to lose your balance and stumble dangerously on the edge of a hole now and then. Have someone run alongside to yank at the weights regularly, yelling all the time. Imagine the whole three mites that the next instant may never come for you at all. At the end, fall down between two

288

Firelord

men that you may or may not know, one crying and vomiting at the same time—very hard on the stomach—the other with no stomach left to vomit from.