He looked at Hengest, sitting on the far side of the table with his leaders about him. He was a little more grey, a little less golden than he had been on the night that Rowena made her singing magic, a little broader and heavier of body, but with the same shifting, grey-green light in his eyes; the same womanish trick of playing with the same string of raw amber round his neck as he sat sideways in his chair, his other hand on the narwhal ivory hilt of his sword, and watched Ambrosius under his brows.
Ambrosius was speaking levelly and a little harshly, putting into a few words the thing that they had been arguing about, it seemed to Aquila, for hours. ‘Assuredly it goes as hardly with you as with us, to speak of an agreed peace, O my enemy. Yet weakened as we both of us are by the battle that we have fought, we must both of us know that there is no other road that we can take. You cannot sleep secure in your new settlements, knowing that we may be upon your flanks at any hour, and that we are too strong for you to crush us out of existence. We, alas, are not strong enough to drive you into the sea. And so the matter stands.’
The heavy creases in Hengest’s wind-bitten cheeks deepened in a ferocious smile. ‘And so the matter stands.’ His eyes never leaving Ambrosius’s face, he leaned forward, and dropping his hand from the amber about his neck, made on the table the unmistakable gesture of a man moving a piece on a chess-board. ‘Stalemate. It remains only, O my enemy, to draw a frontier between us.’
Ambrosius rose, pulled his dagger from the crimson scarf knotted about his waist, and, bending forward a little, he drew a long curved line on the table, crossing it with a straight one, then another, the sharp point of the dagger scoring cruelly deep into the fine, polished citron wood with a sound that set one’s teeth on edge. Ambrosius, the last leader of Rome-in-Britain, was very quiet, very controlled, very civilized; but the searing, screeching line of the dagger’s wake, white on the precious wood, showed his mood clearly enough. Aquila, watching, saw the familiar map beginning to take shape, the map that he had seen drawn so often in charred stick beside the hearth at Dynas Ffaraon, now scratched with a dagger on a polished table-top, for the making of an agreed frontier with the barbarians.
Hengest, who had been frowning down at the thing growing on the table-top, bent forward suddenly with a grunt. ‘Sa! A picture of a land! I have seen the country so—spread out—when I lay on the High Chalk and looked down as an eagle might.’
‘A picture of a land,’ Ambrosius said. ‘Here is Aquae Sulis, here Cunetio, here runs the High Chalk, and here’—he stabbed downward with the dagger and left it quivering in the table between them—‘we stand in the Basilica at Calleva Atrebatum, talking of a frontier.’
They talked long, very long, and heavily and hotly, before at last the matter was talked out; and Ambrosius plucked up his dagger again and drew one great, jagged furrow screeching across the map, from agreed point to agreed point, making of Calleva almost a frontier town. He drew it with careful precision, but so deeply that Aquila saw his wrist quiver.
‘So, it is done,’ Hengest said. ‘Now swear,’ and took from the breast of his ring-mail byrnie a great arm-ring of beaten gold, and laid it on the table, midway across the frontier that Ambrosius had drawn.
Ambrosius looked down at it, shining in the cool, greenish light of the great hall. ‘On what am I to swear?’
‘On Thor’s ring.’
‘Thor is not my God,’ Ambrosius said. ‘I will swear by the name of my own God, and in the words that have bound my people for a thousand years. If we break faith in this peace that has been agreed between your people and mine, may the green earth open and swallow us, may the grey seas roll in and overwhelm us, may the sky of stars fall on us and crush us out of life for ever.’
Hengest smiled, a little contemptuously. ‘So, I accept it. And now I swear for my people on Thor’s Ring.’ He rose as he spoke, his great hand was on the ring. ‘Hear me, Thor the Thunderer, hear me swear for my people, that we also keep the faith.’
There was a silence, echoing in the high emptiness of the hall; then Ambrosius said, ‘And now all that is left is to choose the men from either host who are to trace out the frontier.’
Hengest’s eyes narrowed a little. ‘One thing more.’
‘So? And what is that?’
‘The question of hostages.’
That time the silence was a long one, broken only by a quick and furious movement from Artos, instantly stilled. Then Ambrosius said, ‘Is a most sacred oath, then, not a thing to be relied upon?’
‘A hostage who is dear to his lord makes it yet more to be relied upon,’ Hengest said, inexorably.
Ambrosius’s hand on his dagger-hilt clenched until the knuckles shone white as the scars that he had made on the polished citron wood. He looked at Hengest for a long moment, eye into eye.
‘Very well,’ he said at last; and the words, though icily clear, sounded as though his lips were stiff. He turned his head, and looked consideringly into face after face of the men about him. Artos looked back, smiling a little from his great height; Pascent’s face was wide open to him, both of them offering themselves. But his dark gaze passed them over and came to rest on the pouchy, slack-lined face of the man who had been one of his father’s bodyguard. ‘Valarius, will you do this for me?’
Aquila saw an odd look in the older man’s face, as though the blurred lines grew clearer, saw his head go up with a new pride. ‘Yes, sir, most joyfully I will do this for you,’ Valarius said.
One or two of the Saxons muttered together, and Hengest said, ‘Who, then, is this man that you offer as hostage?’
‘Valarius, one of my father’s bodyguard, to whom I owe my life,’ Ambrosius said, ‘and my friend.’
Hengest looked from the Prince of Britain to the old soldier and back again, studying both faces under his brows, and nodded. ‘So be it, then. For my own hostage—’
Ambrosius cut him short, in that voice as smooth as a sword blade that Aquila had heard only once before. ‘I ask no hostage in return. If Hengest is not bound by his sacred oath, I do not believe that the life of one of his hearth-companions will bind him. Therefore I accept his oath alone, though he does not accept mine.’
If he had hoped to reach some kind of chivalry in his enemy, the hope was a vain one. Hengest merely shrugged his great shoulders, his flickering stare still on Ambrosius’s face. ‘It is for Ambrosius to do as he chooses,’ he said. But the flickering gaze said as clearly as could be, that if Ambrosius chose to be a fool . .
Aquila stood leaning on his spear beside the gap in the bank and ditch where the road came through, and looked away north-eastward. Almost from his feet the land began its gentle, undulating fall-away to the smoke-blue distances of the Tamesis Valley: wood and pasture and winding water, all blurred over with a blueness that was like smoke. It might have been the smoke of burning cities, but the Saxons had not burned the cities. They had looted sometimes, but for the most part, having no use for town life, they had simply left the cities alone to live as best they could, to grow emptier and poorer, and fall more and more into decay, until the few people left in them drifted out at last to the Saxon way of life. It was all Saxon land down there now.
Summer was nearly gone, the sixth summer since Hengest and Ambrosius had faced each other across the council table at Calleva Atrebatum; and the goldfinches were busy among the silk-headed seeding thistles in the ditch, and the hawthorn bushes of the slopes below were already growing red as rust with berries, though there were still harebells in the grass of the bank beside Aquila, where the turf was tawny as a hound’s coat. Five years ago that bank had been bare, chalky earth, raw with newness; a dyke cast up to mark the frontier between two worlds where it crossed the open downs and had nothing else to mark it; now it looked as old and settled in its ways as the downs themselves.
A faint waft of woodsmoke came to Aquila on the evening air, mingling with the warm, dry scent of the turf, and a horse whinnied, and somebody began to sing, and he heard the rattle of a bucke
t from the huddled bothies of the guard-post behind him. They had not had guards along the downs at first, but the years of peace had grown more strained and uneasy as they went by, and the simple line had become little by little a guarded frontier. Aquila, who had spent much of those five years on the frontier, thought sometimes that he knew something of what it must have been like on Hadrian’s Wall in the old days; the long waiting with one’s eyes always on the north; not enough to do, yet never able to relax. And behind the frontiers, as those five years went by, Ambrosius, with Artos at his shoulder, had been at the old struggle to keep their fighting men together, to make some kind of oneness with their neighbours, against the time when the war hosts of Britain and the barbarians crashed together again. For, despite oaths and hostages, all men knew that that time would come one day. Last year there had been so much unrest along the borders that they had thought it was upon them. But this year had passed more quietly again; and now the campaigning season was almost over.
The light was beginning to fade, and he was on the point of turning away to go down to the guard-post for the evening meal, when his eye was caught by a movement among the bushes lower down the slope.
He checked, instantly alert, watching for it to come again. For a long, waiting moment nothing moved down there save an indignant blackbird that flew scolding out of a hawthorn bush; and then the movement flickered again under the turf-tangle of the autumn scrub. Something, someone was working his way through the bushes towards the road. Aquila’s hand tightened automatically on the shaft of his spear, his frowning gaze following the small, stealthy movements as they drew nearer—nearer—until, between one instant and the other, a man broke from cover of the whitethorn scrub on to the open turf. An oldish man, for his head was cobweb colour in the fading light: a man who ran low, swerving and zigzagging as a snipe flies, but with none of the lightness of a snipe, for he stumbled and lurched as he ran, as though he were far spent, with unmistakably the look of a hunted man putting on one last, heart-tearing burst of speed to reach the bank that marked the frontier before the hunt was upon him. Aquila’s mouth was open to shout for his men, but he shut it again. He could see no sign of pursuit, and if the fugitive had for the moment shaken off whoever it was that he ran from, to shout would betray him. Aquila took a long step forward, poised for instant action. The fugitive had stumbled out on to the road now; he was very near the gap in the bank, so near that for a moment he looked as though he might make it. Then a kind of snapping hum sounded behind him in the bushes, something thrummed like a hornet through the air towards him, and he staggered and half fell, then recovered himself and ran on. Aquila sprang forward, yelling to the men behind him in the guard-post as he ran. Another arrow thrummed out of the bushes, but in the fading light it missed, and stood quivering in the roadway. Aquila cast his spear at the bushes from which it had come, and heard a cry as he ripped out his sword, still running. A few moments later, with his own men already pounding down towards him, he reached the reeling fugitive just as he fell, and saw the short Saxon arrow in his back: saw also, with a feeling of shocked unbelief, who the man was. The hostage had returned in a strange manner to his own people.
Aquila was kneeling over him in the road, his men all around them. ‘It’s Valarius,’ he said. ‘Get him back, lads. The devils! See what they have done to him!’
They took the old man up and carried him back through the gap in the dyke that he had so nearly gained, and on the British side of it, in the safety that was too late for him now, made to lie him down on his face. But somehow he got to his knees, looking up at Aquila with a twisted and sweating face that yet smiled a little.
‘Ah, the Dolphin! Five years is a long time, and it is good—to be—among friends again,’ he said, and sagged forward into Aquila’s arms.
‘Keep guard, in case they try to rush us,’ Aquila said to his men. ‘Valarius, in Our Lord’s name, what has happened?’
‘They won’t rush you—won’t—risk any sort of frontier trouble—not now,’ Valarius gasped. ‘I hoped to lie up till—dark before trying—to get across, but they—routed me out too soon.’ And then, as he felt Aquila’s hand near the wound, ‘Na, let be! There’s nought to be done, and—if you meddle with that—I shall die—shall die anyway, but—must talk—first.’
Aquila also knew that there was nothing to be done, not with an arrow deep-driven in that position. He eased the old soldier over, holding him with an arm under his shoulders so that no weight came on the barb, and propped him with a knee, listening to the harsh, agonized words that he gasped out with such desperate urgency. ‘Hengest has made—an alliance with Guitolinus—the Scots too, some Scots settlers from Southern Cymru—going to invade—invade—’
‘When?’ Aquila snapped.
‘In—half a month, by the—original plan. That leaves them—clear month’s campaigning time—may be more. Gambling on Ambrosius—not expecting anything so—late in the year. But knowing that I’m—slipped through their fingers with—maybe breath for a few words left in—my body, I think they’ll—come sooner.’
‘They swore on Thor’s Ring,’ Aquila began stupidly.
‘To the Saxon kind—an oath between friends is binding—to the death. An oath between—enemies is made to be kept until—the time comes for breaking it.’
‘Are you sure of all this?’ Aquila demanded.
‘I have been a hostage among them for five years—oh, my God! Five years!—Nobody troubles to keep a hostage in the dark. I know these things—beyond all doubt.’
‘Where will the attack fall?’
‘I—do not know.’
‘Do you know anything more?’ Aquila pressed him with merciless urgency, for it seemed to him that Valarius was beginning already to drift away from them. ‘Anything more, Valarius?’
‘Na, nothing more. Is not that—enough?’
Aquila looked up, singling out one from among the men around him. ‘Priscus, saddle up and ride like the hammers of hell for Venta. Tell Ambrosius that Hengest has made an alliance with Guitolinus and the Scots settlers in Cymru and intends invading, certainly in half a moon, maybe sooner. Tell him that Valarius has returned to us, and in what manner. Repeat after me.’
The man repeated his orders, and swung away, striding downhill towards the horse-lines. Aquila shifted a little, trying to find an easier position for Valarius.
‘Water,’ Valarius whispered.
‘Go and get it,’ Aquila said to the man nearest him.
Valarius lay looking up at the sky, from which the light was beginning to fade. Little clouds that had not showed when the sun was up made a flight of dim, rose-coloured feathers across the arch of it. The green plover were crying, and a little wind, cool after the heat of the day, stirred the grass along the crest of the bank. The men of the guard-post stood round in silence, looking down.
‘It is good to come back,’ Valarius said with a deep contentment. ‘The Saxon kind promised—that when the fighting joined, and the time for secrecy was done—I should be free to—come back to die with my—own people, but I was always—an impatient man. Is the—water coming?’
‘It will be here very soon,’ Aquila said, wiping away the stain of blood from the corner of Valarius’s mouth. ‘Is there any word that you would have me carry to Ambrosius?’
‘Tell him—I rejoice to have redeemed my debt.’
‘He has never thought of any debt,’ Aquila said. ‘I have told you that before.’
A queer little smile twisted Valarius’s mouth. ‘But I have—and I have told you that before … Tell him, all the same. Even if he has—not thought of it so—he will understand and be—glad for me.’ His last words were scarcely to be heard at all. He turned his head on Aquila’s arm, and began to cough, and more blood came out of his mouth; and the thing was over. So Valarius died with more dignity than he had lived for many years.
The man who had gone for the water came running with it in his leather helmet, and knelt down beside Aquila. ‘Is he—a
m I—?’
Aquila shook his head. ‘You are just too late.’ He felt under Valarius’s body, and snapped off the projecting arrow-shaft, knowing that there was no more harm the barb could do him now, and laid him down at the foot of the bank among the long, tawny grasses and the late harebells that looked almost white in the dusk.
19
‘Victory Like a Trumpet Blast’
AFEW evenings later the British war host was encamped within the turf banks of the ancient hill fort a few miles east of Sorviodunum, knowing that tomorrow’s battle was for life or death.
Aquila, checking just below the crest of the great western rampart on his way down to the horse-lines, saw the slow heave of the downs westward like a vast sea in the windy dusk. Below him, below the encircling rampart on its isolated hill, the shallow valley dipped away, rising again to the wave-lift of downs on the far side. As he looked away north-westward along the line of them, he could just make out, even now, the gap in the hills where the road from Sorviodunum came through on its way to Calleva; the gap beyond which, somewhere, the hosts of Hengest were encamped, waiting, as the British were waiting, for dawn. Behind the ancient turf fortress the land fell gently, dark-furred with thorn scrub, as were all the skirts of the downs, to the low flatness of reed and willow and alder brake, the stray gleam of water where the river marshes crept in among the hills. Ambrosius had chosen his position well: the marshes and the thorn scrub and the hill slopes to guard the British flanks, the road from Venta to Sorviodunum a few miles behind for their supply line.
Only three days ago, the whole frontier had gone up in flames. The break-through had come just below Cunetio, and Hengest with Guitolinus and the Scots had swept like a flood through a broken dam down the road south, hurling back the British skirmishing bands sent up to clog their advance and slow them down while the main defence made ready. A few hours since, and a few miles short of Sorviodunum, they had swung south-eastward for the gap in the downs where the Calleva road passed through. Once through that they would be free to march on Venta itself, or, more likely, sweep down the broad river valley the last few miles to the head of Vectis Water, so cutting Ambrosius’s little kingdom in two. Free, that is, save for the British standing in the way, the hastily gathered host of lowland foot-soldiers and mountain cavalry, the bowmen of Cymru and a few untrained, late-joined companies from the nearest fringes of the Dumnonii.