The Shining Company by Rosemary Sutcliff
Just as we were making the noon halt, last night’s scouts rode in with their horses in a lather. And almost before their report had been given to the Captain, it was running through the troops. Aethelfrith the Lord of Bernicia and Deira was still holed up in Catraeth, and the first-come of his gathering war-bands with him, all crowded into and around the Royal Village, leaving the old town and its fort empty, according to their usual custom.
‘Can we make any guess at their numbers, now?’ Gorthyn asked of the world in general, with his mouth full of oat cake.
And one of the others, newly come to the share-out, murmured over his shoulder, ‘The scouts reckon, counting the shieldbearers, much the same as our own.’
I thought it was good news, that we were not as yet outnumbered, but Tydfwlch who was older and more experienced than most of the Companions said soberly, ‘Not so good. The Legions reckoned, at least according to my grandsire, that an attacking force needed at least twice the strength of the defenders, to over-run a defended position.’
‘Hark to our own croaking raven,’ Morien said.
And Cynan called across from where he stood with his horse’s upturned hoof in his hand while he got a stone out of its frog. ‘That’s if the quality of attackers and defenders are equal. The war-bands of Aethelfrith are no more than farmers with weapons in their hands and the blood-lust behind their noses. They are not the Companions, nor have they spent a year in the Mead Hall and the training grounds of Mynyddog the Golden.’
And then it was time to be on the march again.
In the midtime between noon and twilight we came out on to the great Legions’ road leading north and south, and on the edge of dusk, we were lying up along the woodshore, with Catraeth town across its loop of river not much more than a mile to the south.
Ahead of us the land was roughly cleared, though overgrown with hazel and alder scrub between broad intake fields that showed faintly green here and there with promises of a threadbare crop. Always the Saxons clear the forest and plant their wheat where the land is not good enough for crops, though it might support black cattle. But the forest would have been better left for timber and hunting. The forsaken town looked from that distance like little more than a kind of grey shingle ridge; save where on the highest ground the remains of the fort crouched like an old hound in the last thickening light of sunset. Of the Royal Village another mile beyond it, there was no sign at all.
A wind had begun to rise, blowing from the southwest, which was good, for it would help to cover the sound of our coming. And I mind as we waited, dismounted along the edges of the forest, the fading petals of blackthorn coming down before the gusts, freckling the darkness of Shadow’s mane with white.
The scouts had been sent forward again, and while we waited for their return and for the dark to cover us, we watered the horses at the nearby stream, and fed them what was left of their bean ration, and ate our own evening bannock and the ration of dried meat saved for our last meal before battle. And all the while the wind rose until it sounded like a charge of cavalry in the woods behind us.
Some while after dark there came a sudden stir further along the line that we knew must mean the return of the scouts. The fourth troop, dismounted to act as archers, were going ahead on foot, their horses left with the remounts and baggage train in care of the horse-holders; but we knew little of that at the time. Our own troop was still cavalry as we followed Cynan forward into the near-dark, with a red night’s work ahead of us.
The Legions’ road led straight between the usual gravestones and a huddle of fallen buildings that might have been warehouses or the like, to the gates of Catraeth town; but the road was not for us, even if the bridge that carried it across the river had still been standing. We swung westward and forded the river further up beyond the cleared land, where it ran shallow over shelving stones, tearing down the bank for a spear-throw on either side by our passing. Troop by troop, we crossed, the foot somewhere on ahead of us, and skeined away into the dark like wild geese at the autumn flighting. And the wind covered the noise that we made with its soft turmoil among the bushes, as we headed for the Royal Village. Presently we had the place ringed round. There was no moon in the sky of hurrying cloud, but beyond the stockades there were lights, not the alerted hurrying of torches, but cooking fires and the glow from doorways, and as we waited the wind brought us fitfully the sound of voices roaring out in song. Aethelfrith’s housecarls were feasting as we had feasted in Mynyddog’s Hall. It seemed that they kept no watch; and the advantage of surprise was with us still.
The first flight of arrows went over our heads from the archers in the scrub behind us. Not man-killers but the fire arrows of Morien’s conjuring, trailing fiery tails of spirit-soaked rag dragon-wise behind them as they flew, to lodge in the stockade timbers and the thorn-work of the gateways; a few, the furthest travellers, to pitch down into the thatch of the huddled roofs within. Dogs began a frenzied barking, but our own warhounds, trained to silence, made no reply. A man shouted, and his warning yell was taken up by others. The singing in Aethelfrith’s hall came to a ragged halt. Shadow fidgeted uneasily under me as I swung the shield on to my shoulder and shifted the balance of my spear, and I soothed her in a whisper, ‘Soft now! Softly, cariad, all’s well.’
From the far side of the steading, clear across the uproar that was beginning to rise between, sounded the clear high note of the hunting horn, telling us that all was in readiness, and our own took up the call, like two cocks crowing against each other in the sunrise. I drove my heel into Shadow’s flank as we broke forward from a stand into a canter, heading for the now blazing gateway. I remembered the fire-rides in the practice ground below Dyn Eidin, which had seemed to have little purpose at the time but had purpose enough now. The canter quickened to full gallop, and above the rolling thunder of hooves we were yelling like fiends out of hell as we came.
The first troop, the Captain’s own troop, was through and over the blazing thorn-work of the gateway, beating the fire under their hooves and scattering a bright spindrift of flame, and into the midst of the men who came running with snatched up weapons to meet them. And after them we plunged, choked and half blinded, across the glowing way that they had left behind. Vaguely, I was aware to left and right of riders crashing through the burning stockades - through and over in a score of places. I was aware of yelling faces and flamelight on the swinging blades of axes and the long straight Saxon knives, and the narrow heads of our own spears. I think I killed, and more than once, but of that I am not sure; none of it seemed to matter as much as that single killing of three nights ago. Our hunting horns were sounding again, and from the heart of the steading before the long barn-like building that must be Aethelfrith’s Hall - Aelle’s Hall - there rose the sudden hollow booming of the Saxon war-horn. We thrust on towards it. The fire arrows had set the high thatched roof alight, and against the wavering sheet of flame, high on the gable end, a spreading pair of antlers marked the place for what it was, the Mead Hall of a king; and below, the upreared horse-tail standards marked the battle-stand of Aethelfrith himself.
We went for it, charging and charging again behind the Red Dragon of Britain, ploughing through the fanged masses of the Saxon kind, with our own dismounted men, their arrows spent, running beside us to guard the horses’ bellies, and the hunting horns from the far side of the steading sounding nearer and nearer yet.
The Saxons were taken all unawares, many of them were drunk from the Mead Hall; but they fought like wolves, and the King’s housecarls forming the shield-ring, stood rock steady, swinging their mighty axes, and died like heroes when the time came for dying. Again and again the horsetail standard lurched and all but went down; but each time was caught and heaved aloft once more as another man stepped into the place of the fallen standard bearer.
Much of this comes into my mind like memory, but truth to tell, I think that is because I heard it told so often afterward, and because I knew that that must have been the way of it. A
In the end the shield-ring crumbled and went down. In the end the hand-to-hand fighting that reached from end to end of the steading broke up also. Companions and shieldbearers were plunging in and out of blazing buildings dealing with any who they found within; and the remaining defenders broke and ran, streaming away over the blackened wreckage of the stockades, heading for the refuge of the forest and the marsh country. We did not go after them; they were few enough.
When the last fighting was done, a spent stillness came over the Royal Village. Only the soft gusting of the wind, only the ugly sounds of wounded men and horses, and the lowing of frightened cattle in the corral. Men were slaking the flames of burning roofs as best they could. Presently we would fire the whole place, but not yet, not till we had stripped it of all that we could make use of, weapons and grain and cattle. I had slipped from the saddle and was standing with my arm over Shadow’s neck, leaning my weary weight against her while she turned her head and lipped at my shoulder. I fondled her, and as my head cleared somewhat, began to look around for Gorthyn, my lord. He was standing with Llif and a few more, close-gathered about the Captain, looking down at the bodies of the housecarls sprawled about the horse-tail standard. Urging Shadow forward I went to join them, not really thinking why, just following the pattern whereby unless he has reason to be elsewhere, a shieldbearer’s place is with his warrior. Lleyn was there, too; and the arrowhead was complete.
Men were turning over the dead, looking at their faces by the light of a firebrand. Looking for someone, it seemed. One of the searchers lifted aside the fallen standard, its flowing white horsetail stained and clotted crimson, and under it lay a very tall man, his face hidden by the great wolf-mask helmet that he wore. I had glimpsed that helmet earlier, rearing half a head taller even than his housecarls at the centre of the shield-ring.
‘Aethelfrith,’ someone said.
Ceredig Fosterling himself stooped and seized it by the crest and dragged it off. There was a faint smile as though of amused triumph on the dead face, but the hair - Aethelfrith’s hair was molten red - was brindled grey, and the face belonged to a man much older than the Saxon king.
There was a leaden silence. The thing was too bad for any outcry, any cursing, to make it better.
The Captain straightened up, still holding the great helmet, and looked at those about him. ‘Make search,’ he ordered. ‘There is always the chance that he is hiding somewhere, or among the dead elsewhere.’ And men scattered to do his bidding, but we knew, as he knew, that the housecarls had made their shield-ring, and stood up to die, the tallest among them wearing the King’s helmet, to cover the escape of their king himself.
‘They were brave men. Pity it is that their chief was not worthy of them,’ Llif said.
And Gorthyn agreed, in the tone of one making an interesting discovery, ‘I did not think that he would show us white feathers in his tail.’
The Captain swung round on him wearily. ‘Use what wits you have, man. Aethelfrith is no coward, only hard-headed. He knew that had he remained to die here with his men. We should have gained the victory that we came for. While he lives his hosting war-bands still have him to lead them, and we have no true victory after all.’
‘So, what do we do now?’ someone asked, nursing a sword-arm that dripped red.
‘See to our own dead and wounded, take all that may be of use to us and make for the fort,’ the Fosterling said. ‘All that follows after must wait until these things be done.’
Men were going through the Saxon dead, stripping them of weapons and useful gear. They lay everywhere. There were women and bairns, mercifully not many, for those belonging to the steading in Aelle’s time must for the most part have gone in one way or another when Aethelfrith came upon them, and the newcomers would not yet have brought in their own women. We handled them more gently than the men, but where there was a gold ring or an enamelled belt clasp for the taking we took from all alike, according to the custom of war. We gathered our own dead together for burial, digging out for them hastily a long grave-ditch where the ground was soft outside the stockade. We had not lost heavily, not yet, more horses than men, and those we left lying where they had fallen, finishing off the wounded beasts for kindness’ sake.
Lleyn and I carried Dara to the grave trench, and laid him in it with his cloak across his ruined face. He was really Cynan’s affair, but Cynan and Cynran had a grave-laying of their own to tend to, for they had found Cynri lying where the bodies were clotted thick in the mouth of the Mead Hall.
We stripped the royal steading of all that could be of use to us - weapons, beer, corn, even cattle-fodder - and loaded it on to the farm sleds. We gathered the few cattle from the corral in a small lowing herd; and so with horsemen flanking them in case of surprise, we drove and hauled the spoils back to what remained of the Roman town, through the windy darkness that yet remained of the night. And when the last load was away, we set torches to the thatch again, wherever the fires had been quenched, and left the place to burn over its dead.
16
Waiting for Elmet
Catraeth, Catteractonium as the Romans had called it, was a double cohort fort, and so there was room enough for all of us within the crumbling defences, but not for the horses, so we picketed them outside the fort but within the turf walls of the town, keeping a strong guard on them. Mercifully the river, running quiet after the white water further upstream, looped close under the town walls, making it easy to water them, at least for the present. There were wells and springs in both the town and the fort, but most of them had fallen in.
That first day is a jumble of crowded and shifting memories in my mind. We found a barrack-row with part of its roof still on, to make a shelter for our wounded, and started up cooking fires - there was plenty of dead wood about the place. We slaughtered some of the cattle. The rest would be kept for later need, but men fresh from battle need hot food with blood in it. Conn and his mates, coming in with the rest of the horses and their holders from the place beyond the river where they had been left before the attack, set up their field-forge in what had once been the armourer’s shop. I mind that they brought in with them a little dark man with a thrall-ring round his neck. Some of the steading’s thralls had been caught up and killed in the fighting, others, seizing their chance, had run while the running was good. This one had come back, being minded to kill a few Saxons in his turn, and being a local man became one of our scouts. Conn’s first task was to cut off his thrall-ring.
I mind coming up from the horse-lines and seeing Aneirin sitting beside one of the fires, looking with interest at a Saxon harp that must have come from Aethelfrith’s Hall. There was blood on him; he had been working all day among our wounded, but it might have been his own, for he had been with the archers last night. I paused beside him and demanded, as though I were the greybeard and he some young hothead, ‘And what would we have done for a praise-singer if the Great Ones had not had a care of you last night?’ (My excuse? That it was not a day since I had helped to lay Dara in his grave, and I was face to face with the fact, which had not quite broken through to me before, that in battle my friends and those most near and dear to me might actually die.)
He looked up at me with an air of great serenity about him, and said only, ‘Nay now, if I am to sing the Great Song of the Gododdin at Catraeth, God and all the Great Ones will hold me safe for the sake of the singing that is in me. If I am not, then what value is my life above the lives of other men?’
There was still hope in us at that time - we waited for the war-bands of E
After their going, we set ourselves to get the grain sacks and the great jars of Saxon beer stacked under cover. Beer has a cold bitter taste, not like the fire-hearted yellow mead that we were used to, but the cold of it warmed in the belly and dimmed one’s sorrows and weariness, though it did not give the same shine to life. We got the few black cattle fenced in and hunted out anything that would serve as pails and water troughs for them and the horses, against the time when we might not be able to get to the river.
Next day two of the scouts came in, and almost at once after their coming word was running through the fort that a big war-band was on the road from the south, and that the tall red haired man at their head - so said the scout who had once been his thrall - was Aethelfrith.
Of the Elmet men there was still no sign.
From the rampart and the stump of the signal tower we could see afar off the bright blur of the Saxon fires strung along the woodshore to the south, where they had made camp that first night. The next night there were more of them, from the north across the river, as well. The first night the Fosterling held us like hounds in leash, but the second night he called out Cynan and Tydfwlch and said, ‘Are your troops ready?’ We had been ready all day, and we told him so. And he said, ‘Go then, and good hunting to you.’