"After dark?" Cadorius grunted while Melwas' eyes shot wide.

Even Ancelotis was taken by surprise.

It was something, Stirling supposed, to startle three kings, each of them with more than a decade's bitter experience in combat. Yet the notion of a night sortie astonished them. Stirling grinned. "Why d'you think I wanted the specially trained men and the cordage? You do remember what the Oracle at Delphi said, don't you?"

Melwas frowned in puzzlement, but Cadorius had begun to chuckle. "Oh, aye. A grand story that was, I remember my own father reading it out to me in the Greek. I've forgotten which historian it was, but the story I recall very well, indeed."

Melwas looked from Stirling to Cadorius and back again. "I've not heard it."

"For a shipload of gold," the Dumnonian king chuckled, "the poor bastard was told by the Oracle of Apollo, 'You will destroy a great empire.' Sure of victory, he returned home to the war with Persia. And when the autumn came, and the time for the harvest was due, the fool retired from the field, for that was how war was fought in those days, everyone on both sides of a conflict going home to bring in the crops. Only the Persians followed him. Shocked the entire known world, waging war at harvest time. Sacked the capital, took over the gold fields, and put the vanquished king in chains, so he could repent at length on the empire he'd destroyed. His own."

Stirling nodded. "The Persians changed forever the way war would be fought, with that maneuver."

Melwas was grinning. "Fighting a night sortie will be just as great a shock to the Saxons, I'm thinking. Marvelous idea, Ancelotis."

Ancelotis, as startled as the others by the notion, laughed aloud. "Oh, aye, isn't it just, now?"

The others chuckled at the play on words.

The Saxons spent several hours erecting siege works, ditching the entire circumference of the hill and readying caches of weapons, spears and pikes, mostly. Swords were scarce amongst them, a fact which still surprised Stirling, for all that he'd heard the others discuss it. Briton forces watched in eerie silence as Germanic voices shouted far down the slope. One group climbed halfway up the lee side, dragging timbers and tools with them under the cover of a bristling shield wall of armed warriors.

"What in the devil's unholy name are they doing?" Melwas wondered aloud. "Erecting some kind of siege engine?"

"I think not," Ancelotis frowned. "A platform on which to mount one, perhaps."

"Should we discourage them from building it?"

The younger king was showing signs of impatience as the preparations dragged endlessly. Cadorius, who also stood frowning down at the activity two hundred fifty feet below them, answered the sub-king's question. "No, Melwas, I believe we'll let them build it, unhindered. The weaker we seem at the beginning, the likelier they are to err through overconfidence later. We give up nothing, for we can demolish it at our leisure, with any number of methods."

Stirling glanced at smoking braziers blazing at the bottom of firepits all along the inner perimeter, the fires protected from the weather not only by the depth of the pits, but also roofed over with small awnings and further protected by trenches the children had dug to allow any rainwater that did get in to drain away before it drowned the coals. Vats and iron cauldrons simmered over the fires, filled with rendered animal fat, much of it from the pigs and cattle slaughtered to feed them all.

And near each firepit stood a Roman-style catapult, standing ready to deliver the melted grease in each of those kettles and cauldrons. Cadorius, who followed Stirling's glance, said, "We've also prepared Greek fire, from the formula Emrys Myrddin obtained as a boy in Constantinople. With Greek fire, we can burn anything on this hill, whether it rains or no—and I am mortally certain the Saxons don't have the secret of it, to hurl back at us."

Stirling's brows had twitched upward in astonishment. The formula for "Greek fire"—an incendiary substance Greek warships had used to set fire to a Persian fleet—had been lost for millennia. Somehow, it didn't surprise Stirling that Emrys Myrddin should have added that particular secret to his truly vast collection of useful information. Ancelotis wondered uneasily where the Druidic councillor might be, for he had not returned to Caer-Badonicus and Covianna Nim claimed he'd left Glastenning Tor several days previously. Had he ridden north, to meet with Artorius on the march? Whatever the answer, Ancelotis hugged his impatience to himself and watched the Saxons.

The purpose of their platform became clear shortly before dusk, when the Saxons hauled up and erected a large pavilion tent on it, protected from the summit by a wooden wall which they'd driven into the hillside. That wooden palisade stood higher than a man, acting as a shield for the men who climbed laboriously up the first two hundred fifty feet from the broad plain, obviously intending to shelter in the tent. The broad expanse of cloth shuddered and rippled with the gusts of wind and rain, but the shield wall and the hill's own mass protected the platform, tent, and occupants from the worst of the weather.

"There's Cutha," Stirling said abruptly, as a small cadre of well-armored men climbed a muddy path up to the platform.

"And King Aelle beside him," Cadorius nodded. "They've brought their highest-ranking eoldormen and thegns with them, besides their athelings, princes of the blood. Speaking of which, Cerdic looks a bit pale, doesn't he?"

If the king of Wessex was pale, his son was ashen. Creoda kept glancing fearfully at the silent Briton defenders, bristling with weapons like an American porcupine.

"It's one thing," Ancelotis said thoughtfully, "to take a kingdom by treachery, killing off only the royal family, but quite another for a Briton traitor to order Briton troops into battle against Briton soldiers, to slaughter Briton women and children who've sheltered here. He must be wondering, even now, if his men will obey him when put to the test."

"And Aelle is wondering, right along with him," Melwas muttered. "Have you noticed, men wearing Briton armor, with Briton-made weapons, are held back from the front lines? Aelle's keeping them back as first reserves, putting loyal Saxons in the front ranks and more of his own men behind the Britons, to be sure of them."

Stirling hadn't noticed—neither had Ancelotis—but the young sub-king of Glastenning was correct. King Aelle clearly distrusted his gewisse Britons. The Saxons' high command disappeared from view into the royal pavilion. The conference they held there lasted well past darkness, with the occupants' shadows flickering, ghostlike, on the tent's walls and ceiling as the men within moved about, gesticulating occasionally to make some point. Stirling allowed himself a tight smile. Any one of his Sarmatian archers could have taken out the men inside that tent simply by aiming at those moving shadows. He filed away the plan for later execution, another piece of the plans firming up in his mind.

When it became clear that no attack would be launched this night, Cadorius suggested, "Sleep is what will do us the best good. Our sentries will watch for any possible treachery in the night, but I'm thinking they haven't completed enough of their preparations to launch an attack just yet. They're new to siege warfare and I'm thinking they'll want to be thorough about it, rather than risk haste and defeat themselves from poor preparations."

Ancelotis agreed, although Stirling would have preferred to remain on guard through the night, with his different perspective and expectations about when battles were waged. As it happened, however, Cadorius and Ancelotis were right in their assessment. They spent a quiet night, sleeping through most of it without interruption or alarms. Dawn found them on the walls again, watching as Saxon troops labored to build other relay camps halfway up the hill, laying in stashes of lightweight javelins to supplement the heavier spears and pikes the infantry would use as thrusting weapons.