[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]so far from Corinium.
We had to fight them somewhere, he said, and you chose the place. I like it. We ve got the high
ground. He spoke loudly, wanting his confidence to spread amongst my men. I would have been here
sooner, he added to me, only I wasn t certain Cerdic had swallowed the bait.
Bait, Lord? I was confused.
You, Derfel, you. He laughed and jumped down from the rampart. War is all accident, isn t it? And
by accident you found a place we can beat them.
You mean they ll wear themselves out climbing the hill? I asked.
They won t be so foolish, he said cheerfully. No, I fear we shall have to go down and fight them in
the valley.
With what? I asked bitterly, for even with Cuneglas s troops we would be terribly outnumbered.
With every man we have, Arthur said confidently. But no women, I think. It s time we moved your
families somewhere safer.
Our women and children did not go far; there was a village an hour to the north and most found shelter
there. Even as they left Mynydd Baddon, more of Arthur s spearmen arrived from the north. These were
the men Arthur had been gathering near Corinium and they were among the best in Britain. Sagramor
came with his hardened warriors and, like Arthur, he went to the high southern angle of Mynydd Baddon
from where he could stare down at the enemy and so that they could look up and see his lean,
black-armoured figure on their skyline. A rare smile came to his face. Over-confidence makes them into
fools, he said scornfully. They ve trapped themselves in the low ground and they won t move now.
They won t?
Once a Saxon builds a shelter he doesn t like being marched again. It ll take Cerdic a week or more
to dig them out of that valley. The Saxons and their families had indeed made themselves comfortable,
and by now the river valley resembled two straggling villages of small thatched huts. One of those two
villages was close by Aquae Sulis, while the other was two miles east where the river valley turned sharp
south. Cerdic s men were in those eastern huts, while Aelle s spearmen were either quartered in the town
or in the newly built shelters outside. I had been surprised that the Saxons had used the town for shelter
rather than just burning it, but in every dawn a straggling procession of men came from the gates, leaving
behind the homely sight of cooking smoke rising from Aquae Sulis s thatched and tiled roofs. The initial
Saxon invasion had been swift, but now their impetus was gone. And why have they split their army into
two? Sagramor asked me, staring incredulously at the great gap between Aelle s encampment and
Cerdic s huts.
To leave us only one place to go, I said, straight down there, I pointed into the valley, where we ll
be trapped between them.
And where we can keep them divided, Sagramor pointed out happily, and in a few days they ll have
disease down there. Disease always seemed to spread whenever an army settled in one place. It had
been just such a plague that had stopped Cerdic s last invasion of Dumnonia, and a fiercely contagious
sickness that had weakened our own army when we had marched on London.
I feared that such a disease might weaken us now, but for some reason we were spared, perhaps
because our numbers were still small or perhaps because Arthur scattered his army along the three miles
of high crestline that ran behind Mynydd Baddon. I and my men stayed on the mount, but the newly
arrived spearmen held the line of northern hills. For the first two days after Arthur s arrival the enemy
could still have captured those hills because their summits were thinly garrisoned, but Arthur s horsemen
were continually on show and Arthur kept his spearmen moving among the crest s trees to suggest that
his numbers were greater than they really were. The Saxons watched, but made no attack, and then, on
the third day after Arthur s arrival, Cuneglas and his men arrived from Powys and we were able to
garrison the whole long crest with strong picquets who could summon help if any Saxon attack did
threaten. We were still heavily outnumbered, but we held the high ground and now had the spears to
defend it.
The Saxons should have left the valley. They could have marched to the Severn and laid siege to
Glevum and we would have been forced to abandon our high ground and follow them but Sagramor was
right; men who have made themselves comfortable are reluctant to move and so Cerdic and Aelle
stubbornly stayed in the river valley where they believed they were laying siege to us when in truth we
were besieging them. They finally did make some attacks up the hills but none of those assaults were
pressed home. The Saxons would swarm up the hills but when a shield line appeared at the ridge top
ready to oppose them and a troop of Arthur s heavy horsemen showed on their flank with levelled spears
their ardour would fade and they would sidle back to their villages and each Saxon failure only increased
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