Legacy: Arthurian Saga (42 page)

Well north of the limit of the tidal
floods, in a wide curve of the valley, stand the two hills called
Doward. The one to the north is the greater, thick with forest and
mined with caves inhabited, men say, by wild beasts and outlawed
men. The hill called Lesser Doward is also forested, but more
thinly, since it is rocky, and its steep summit, rising above the
trees, makes a natural citadel so secure that it has been fortified
time out of mind. Long before even the Romans came, some British
king built himself a fortress on the summit which, with its
commanding view, and the natural defenses of crag and river, made a
formidable stronghold. The hill is wide-topped, and its sides steep
and rough, and though siege engines could at one point be dragged
up in dead ground, this ended in crags where the engines were
useless. Everywhere except at this point there was a double rampart
and ditch to get through before the outer wall of the fortress
could be reached. The Romans themselves had marched against it
once, and only managed to reduce it through treachery. This was in
the time of Caratacus. Doward was the kind of place that, like
Troy, must be taken from within.

This time also, it was taken from
within. But not by treachery; by fire.

Everyone knows what happened
there.

Vortigern's men were hardly settled
after their headlong flight from Snowdon, when Ambrosius' army came
up the valley of the Wye, and encamped due west of Doward Hill, at
a place called Ganarew. I never heard what store of provisions
Vortigern had; but the place had been kept prepared, and it was
well known that there were two good springs within the fortress
which had not yet been known to fail; so it might well have taken
Ambrosius some time to reduce it by siege. But a siege was just
what he could not afford, with Hengist gathering his forces, and
the April seas opening between Britain and the Saxon shores.
Besides, his British allies were restless, and would never have
settled down for a prolonged siege. It had to be quick.

It was both quick and brutal. I have
heard it said since that Ambrosius acted out of vengeance for his
long-dead brother. I do not believe this to be true. Such
long-standing bitterness was not in his nature, and besides, he was
a general and a good fighting commander before he was even a man.
He was driven only by necessity, and in the end, by Vortigern's own
brutality.

Ambrosius besieged the place in the
conventional way for about three days. Where he could, he drew up
siege engines and tried to break the defenses. He did indeed breach
the outer rampart in two places above what was still called Romans
Way, but when he found himself stopped by the inner rampart and his
troops exposed to the defenders, he withdrew. When he saw how long
the siege would take, and how, even in the three days, some of his
British troops quietly left him and went off on their own, like
hounds after the rumor of Saxon hares, he decided to make an end
quickly. He sent a man to Vortigern with conditions for surrender.
Vortigern, who must have seen the defection of some of the British
troops, and who well understood Ambrosius' position, laughed, and
sent back the messenger without a message, but with the man's own
two hands severed, and bound in a bloody cloth to the belt at his
waist.

He stumbled into Ambrosius' tent just
after sundown of the third day, and managed to stay on his feet
long enough to give the only message he was charged
with.

"They say that you may stay here, my
lord, until your army melts away, and you are left handless as I.
They have food in plenty, sir, I saw it, and water --"

Ambrosius only said: "He ordered this
himself?"

"The Queen," said the man. "It was the
Queen." He pitched forward on the word at Ambrosius' feet, and from
the dripping cloth at his belt the hands fell,
sprawling.

"Then we will burn out the wasps'
nest, queen and all," said Ambrosius. "See to him."

That night, to the apparent pleasure
of the garrison, the siege engines were withdrawn from Romans' Way
and the breached places in the outer rampart. Instead, great piles
of brushwood and hewn branches were stacked in the gaps, and the
army tightened its ring round the crest of the hill, with a circle
of archers waiting, and men ready to cut down any who should
escape. In the quiet hour before daylight the order was given. From
every quarter the arrows, pointed with flaming, oil-soaked rags,
showered into the fortress. It did not take long. The place was
largely built of wood, and crowded with the wagons, provisions,
beasts and their fodder. It burned fiercely. And when it was alight
the brushwood outside the walls was fired, so that anyone leaping
from the walls met another wall of fire outside. And outside that,
the iron ring of the army.

They say that throughout, Ambrosius
sat his big white horse, watching, till the flames made the horse
as red as the Red Dragon above his head. And high on the fortress
tower the White Dragon, showing against a plume of smoke, turned
blood red as the flames themselves, then blackened and
fell.

2

While Ambrosius was attacking Doward I
was still at Maridunum, having parted from Gorlois on the ride
south, and seen him on his way to meet my father. It happened this
way. All through that first night we rode hard, but there was no
sign of pursuit, so at sunup we drew off the road and rested,
waiting for Gorlois' men to come up with us. This they did during
the morning, having been able, in the near-panic at Dinas Brenin,
to slip away unobserved. They confirmed what Gorlois had already
suggested to me, that Vortigern would head, not for his own
fortress of Caer-Guent, but for Doward. And he was moving, they
said, by the east-bound road through Caer Gai towards Bravonium.
Once past Tomen-y-mur, there was no danger that we would be
overtaken.

So we rode on, a troop now about
twenty strong, but going easily. My mother, with her escort of
fighting men, was less than a day ahead of us, and her party, with
the litters, would be much slower than we were. We had no wish to
catch up with them and perhaps force a fight which might endanger
the women; it was certain, said Gorlois to me, that the latter
would be delivered safely to Maridunum, "but," he added in his
sharp, gruff way, "we shall meet the escort on their way back. For
come back they will; they cannot know the King is moving east. And
every man less for Vortigern is another for your father. We'll get
news at Bremia, and camp beyond it to wait for them."

Bremia was nothing but a cluster of
stone huts smelling of peat smoke and dung, black doorways
curtained from wind and rain with hides or sacking, round which
peered scared eyes of women and children. No men appeared, even
when we drew rein in the midst of the place, and curs ran yapping
round the horses' heels. This puzzled us, till (knowing the
dialect) I called out to the eyes behind the nearest curtain, to
reassure the people and ask for news.

They came out then, women, children,
and one or two old men, crowding eagerly round us and ready to
talk.

The first piece of news was that my
mother's party had been there the previous day and night, leaving
only that morning, at the Princess's insistence. She had been taken
ill, they told me, and had stayed for half the day and the night in
the head-man's house, where she was cared for. Her women had tried
to persuade her to turn aside for a monastic settlement in the
hills nearby, where she might rest, but she had refused, and had
seemed better in the morning, so the party had ridden on. It had
been a chill, said the head-man's wife; the lady had been feverish,
and coughing a little, but she had seemed so much better next
morning, and Maridunum was not more than a day's ride; they had
thought it better to let her do as she desired...

I eyed the squalid huts, thinking
that, indeed, the danger of a few more hours in the litter might
well be less than such miserable shelter in Bremia, so thanked the
woman for her kindness, and asked where her man had gone. As to
that, she told me, all the men had gone to join
Ambrosius...

She mistook my look of surprise. "Did
you not know? There was a prophet at Dinas Brenin, who said the Red
Dragon would come. The Princess told me herself, and you could see
the soldiers were afraid. And now he has landed. He is
here."

"How can you know?" I asked her. "We
met no messenger."

She looked at me as if I were crazed,
or stupid. Had I not seen the firedrake? The whole village knew
this for the portent, after the prophet had spoken so. The men had
armed themselves, and had gone that very day. If the soldiers came
back, the women and children would take to the hills, but everyone
knew that Ambrosius could move more swiftly than the wind, and they
were not afraid...

I let her run on while I translated
for Gorlois. Our eyes met with the same thought. We thanked the
woman again, gave her what was due for her care of my mother, and
rode after the men of Bremia.

South of the village the road divides,
the main way turning south-east past the gold mine and then through
the hills and deep valleys to the broad valley of the Wye whence it
is easy riding to the Sefern crossing and the south-west. The
other, minor, road goes straight south, a day's ride to Maridunum.
I had decided that in any case I would follow my mother south and
talk to her before I rejoined Ambrosius; now the news of her
illness made this imperative. Gorlois would ride straight to meet
Ambrosius and give him the news of Vortigern's
movements.

At the fork where our ways parted we
came on the villagers. They had heard us coming and taken cover --
the place was all rocks and bushes -- but not soon enough; the
gusty wind must have hidden our approach from them till we were
almost on them. The men were out of sight, but one of their
miserable pack-donkeys was not, and stones were still rolling on
the scree.

It was Bremia over again. We halted,
and I called out into the windy silence. This time I told them who
I was, and in a moment, it seemed, the roadside was bristling with
men. They came crowding round our horses, showing their teeth and
brandishing a peculiar assortment of weapons ranging from a bent
Roman sword to a stone spearhead bound on a hay-rake. They told the
same story as their women; they had heard the prophecy, and they
had seen the portent; they were marching south to join Ambrosius,
and every man in the west would soon be with them. Their spirit was
high, and their condition pitiful; it was lucky we had a chance to
help them.

"Speak to them," said Gorlois to me.
"Tell them that if they wait another day here with us, they shall
have weapons and horses. They have picked the right place for an
ambush, as who should know better than they?"

So I told them that this was the Duke
of Cornwall, and a great leader, and that if they would wait a day
with us, we would see they got weapons and horses. "For Vortigern's
men will come back this way," I told them. "They are not to know
that the High King is already fleeing eastwards: they will come
back by this road, so we will wait for them here, and you will be
wise to wait with us."

So we waited. The escort must have
stayed rather longer than need be in Maridunum, and after that cold
damp ride who could blame them? But towards dusk of the second day
they came back, riding at ease, thinking maybe of a night's shelter
at Bremia.

We took them nicely by surprise, and
fought a bloody and very unpleasant little action. One roadside
skirmish is very like another. This one differed only from the
usual in being better generally and more eccentrically equipped,
but we had the advantages both of numbers and of surprise, and did
what we had set out to do, robbed Vortigern of twenty men for the
loss of only three of our own and a few cuts. I came out of it more
creditably than I would have believed possible, killing the man I
had picked out before the fighting swept over and past me and
another knocked me off my horse and would possibly have killed me
if Cadal had not parried the stroke and killed the fellow himself.
It was quickly over. We buried our own dead and left the rest for
the kites, after we had stripped them of their arms. We had taken
care not to harm the horses, and when next morning Gorlois said
farewell and led his new troops south-east, every man had a horse,
and a good weapon of some kind. Cadal and I turned south for
Maridunum, and reached it by early evening.

The first person I saw as we rode down
the street towards St. Peter's was my cousin Dinias. We came on him
suddenly at a corner, and he jumped a foot and went white. I
suppose rumors had been running like wildfire through the town ever
since the escort had brought my mother back without me.

"Merlin. I thought -- I thought
--"

"Well met, cousin, I was coming to
look for you." He said quickly: "Look, I swear I had no idea who
those men were --"

"I know that. What happened wasn't
your fault. That isn't why I was looking for you."

" -- and I was drunk, you know that.
But even if I had guessed who they were, how was I to know they'd
take you up on a thing like that? I'd heard rumors of what they
were looking for, I admit, but I swear it never entered my head
--"

"I said it wasn't your fault. And I'm
back here again safely, aren't I? All's well that ends well. Leave
it, Dinias. That wasn't what I wanted to talk to you
about."