“The scald,” Maelgwyn pointed. “The speaker of truths and poetry. See how the boy leads his mule? He’s blinded early when he takes up his art, leaving his sight clear for eternity. There, listen!”

The old man’s voice rolled out, cadenced and powerful, clear as a youth’s. Maelgwyn strained to hear him.

“For man’s life is the briefest day, coming from darkness only to return. A toy of the gods, the greatest of whom will fall … something-something the bridge to doomed Asgard. Therefore since life is a moment, let it be lived with honor among war-companions. Cry hoch to Cerdic Sword-Giver who feasts his brothers on spoil while ravens gorge on his enemies.”

The spears and shields thundered. Hoch! Hoch!

Now Cerdic paced his horse up and down the first level, men kneeling in clumps as he passed them, and began to speak in a voice far-carrying and vital as the scald’s.

“Clever bastard,” Maelgwyn cracked a dry grin. “Oh, he knows how to use them. The berserkers are pledged not to outlive him if he dies in battle. It’s lifelong shame if they do. A little thing like an empty belly? They’d die before complaining.”

Bedivere and I listened as Mal translated the cadenced voice. Cerdic knew how to use words as a torch, simple, moving words that had a way of staying in the mind.

“If we must die, I could choose no better place than this mud of Badon and no better companions than you, the oath-brothers who have followed me here. But let dying go, let’s talk of life.

“I’m a plain man as you, my feet as cold, my spirit so weighed down with Briton tyranny that I come to spit it back at them or admit myself a slave.

“I do not tell you to hate Arthur Pendragon. Why curse the ;:Saow that summer will melt anyway? He sits in a crumbling and calls you barbarians because you love and husband the

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soil as Freya commands. How can he know what you are, he or his great lords who grind their own people underfoot, who count a man nothing who is not highborn. They are the barbarians, the rags of rotten Rome. They are the ignorant and the dead.

“You there! You look like a farmer. May I, even your chosen war-chief, take from you one hide of land without payment? Arthur can. May I kill your kinsmen with impunity? His lords can. Enter the poorest hut without permission? Arthur can. His queen can, the fabled Guenevere so like her father. We remember Cador, don’t we?

“They cling like rot on the leaves of a healthy plant, and even Britons rise up against the foot on their necks, the foot of lords who say to them, ‘Sweat in my fields, bake my bread, bow your head when I pass, listen to the monks when they tell you the meek will inherit the earth. Swallow that lie whole so you won’t see that not the meek, not you, but / inherit the earth, and it will always be so. Live on your knees and I’ll throw you my leavings.’

“You younger men, ask your fathers how they were driven out of the midlands, those that survived. Ask why there were so few women for almost twenty years, and almost no children. Ask them the. kind of war Arthur waged in the Time of the Smoke when nothing could live but flies. Ask of the great British lords so honored and sung by their bards, the names so well remembered. Bedivere, the right hand of Arthur. He’s here today. Ancellius, called Lancelot, the pious butcher of children. He’s here today. Gawain who threw Saxon tongues to his hounds at Eburacum. He’s here. All here—or all remembered, like Trystan, harp in one hand and a whore in the other, so nithing and bare of honor that his own kind rose up at last to cast him from Britain.

“Can such as these say to dawn, hold back? To spring, stay winter? To seed, flower only at my will? To the future, you may not come? No! They can only delay, this faded rag of Rome, only hide their heads and pretend you are not rising like the sun, but even as they squeeze their coward eyes shut, they feel your heat on the lids.

“Brothers—I do not move you to hate; how can you hate the mere husks of winter, bending dry in the wind and ready to blow away? Plow them under and plant again. Seeds and sons and tomorrows, for every man who follows me today carries tomorrow like seed in his loins. Every men—every man a pride in my heart, the equal of their father gods. Fated men. Horses, brothers to Baldur, follow me now and let our waiting women say we brought tomorrow like a gift.”

“Oh, he goes on, that Cerdic,” Bedivere complained as we trudged back up the hill. “You could say it in half the words.”

Perhaps. But with the heart of my country eaten away in disaffection and distrust, could I have so believed as Cerdic did?

My cavalry were pummeled to pulp. I had to save them for the’ next foray out, knowing it would probably be the last. Cerdic’s next attack, when it came, was a fierce clash between men on foot, archers and slingers against spear and sword, finally fist to claw. Small detachments of horse guarded the causeways, beating them back whenever they gained the beleaguered second level. Bedivere and I rode a wide circle higher about the hill, observing the mad dance of the slingers, the graceful, deadlier movements of the archers, all under the great dissonant bellow of war and the time-beating thud of the catapults. We saw the defenders tense for another effort as the yellow-haired men broke over the parapet only to be driven back as our own troops rallied or a few swift horse streaked along the ditch to trample the invaders underfoot.

Someone called as we turned off the third level into the causeway, a rider, plowing through a press of men. “Arthur? Where is Arthur?”

Bedivere thrust the dragon aloft. “Here, here. What news?”

The horse stumbled toward us, bleeding about the shoulders and forelegs. Lucullus bowed over the saddle horn, short of breath.

. “Ancellius sent me,” he panted. “We lost a part of the Second level on the north. Trying to clear them out now. If we can’t, just have to barricade and hold the rest.”

“That’s all you can do.” I noted the bent sword in his grip. “You look like you’ve caught it.”

Lucullus glared, wheezing. “Let Bedivere witness that once more I formally protest this callous insult to Rome. I’ve been nearly killed three times this hour.”

“We regret the inconvenience, cousin, and will make full account to Theodoric.”

“Account? What account?” Lucullus stared from Bedivere to as demented children who drained the last of his mature

ience, yanked the lathered horse about and plunged back up

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The battle rose to a fever pitch as the high tide of Cerdic’s men broke once more over the second level, hung in balance, fury against fury, then fell back repulsed while we crouched for the next screaming rush. It didn’t come, but still we waited.

Oid Maelgwyn leaned against a parapet timber, spent. “Now,

d’you think?”

“Has to be now,” I said. “They won’t have the strength

tomorrow.”

“Nor we.” Maelgwyn gazed about the battered second level where the dead and wounded were being cleared out to the redoubt. “Nothing left above but the catapult crews. All else is down here and scant enough. We can’t hold, my king.”

He jerked his white head toward the battered and dispirited men still on their feet. “Good lads, but they’ve taken the brunt from the first, and that bastard just keeps coming. Kill ten, thirty come running after.”

His voice broke. The old prince’s tears left lighter furrows down his spattered, windburned cheeks. He tore off his helmet and raked furrows of frustration through the snowy thatch. “I’ve led them, driven *em, sworn to bloody well hang them if they fell back. That—that won’t do anymore. They’re too worn out to care, the best of them.”

I saw what he meant in the listless posture of the youths around us, drained of vitality, moving as little as possible, the disjointed movements of men amazed that they were still alive, that their ration of courage was enough, their mortal fear not too great. This time. But what of the next?

Maelgwyn passed me a flagon of uisge. As he did, I noticed a familiar sheepskin bag at his feet and drew the dark-polished harp from its depths.

“Dafydd’s?”

“As I said, Arthur. The best of them. He just left it there.”

“Where is he?”

“Down the line. Hurt and trying not to show it, like the rest.”

“Bring the uisge, Mal. Let’s find a harper.”

To know the face of war, you need look no further than Dafydd, who sprawled against a pile of logs, gray with pain, one shoulder of his buff leather jerkin torn and stiff with caked blood. Eyes closed, mouth shut tight around the misery, that unchanging picture of wounded men—not age, but the youth wiped out for a time before life calls it back again. Like a father

I wished I could keep him from this bleak knowledge, leave it to old men like Mal and me who have known it longer.

Dafydd’s eyes opened, the only part of him that moved. I put the flagon to his lips.

“It’s fitting for a king to serve a bard,” I said, “for they stood high as druids and could call a chief to judgment.”

He coughed as the liquor burned down his throat. “They almost did it this time, sir.”

. Maelgwyn laid the harp in Dafydd’s good arm. “Here. What are the people of the cat without their bard?”

“Not a bard, and the thousand verses never learned. But my . da was one. A bard and a great lord, mum said.”

Another generous drink sparked a flicker of his old spirit. “God, that’s good! A great lord, she always said—on one sweet night’s acquaintance, mind—traveling from the south to the Wall, the lord of him half drunk and the bard all mad as it should be. He left in the morning with a smile and a rhyme and myself snug inside her, that sort of style. She always said I had his touch.”

Another drink, Maelgwyn wincing only a little at my prodigality and the boy’s thirst, but Davy-bach recovered more each moment. He nestled the harp into his good shouider.