Page 38 of The Bear's Heart
Merlin came to my rescue. “A great victory.” He must have sensed my feelings. Apart from Arthur, he alone knew this wasn’t what I’d been brought up to.
Gwalchmei nodded and turned toward Cei, who was swinging himself down from the saddle, sword in hand. He stepped toward the huddle of all that remained of the Saxon raiding party, apart from the dead and those who’d fled on foot into the forest.
Arthur pushed his horse forward. The man I’d glimpsed leading the Saxons was not amongst the prisoners. Had he escaped, or did he lie unrecognized amid the faceless dead? The Saxons gazed in surly defiance at their captors. Deprived now of their swords and axes, they looked smaller than they had on the field of battle, their yellow hair dirty, lank and matted with blood, nothing like the golden color I’d pictured.
This was the first time I’d properly laid eyes on the ancestors of my people– the English. When they’d attacked our camp on the way to Viroconium it had been dark, and I’d seen them only by the light of the campfire.
At home, in Din Cadan, Arthur’s son, Llacheu, had painted a picture of them as monsters. Of course, he was just a seven-year-old whose mother had probably fed him those stories to frighten him into obedience.If you don’t behave, the Yellow Hairs will get you. I’d taken what he’d told me with a pinch of salt.
Now I looked at them in fascination. Was I like them? Could I see myself in them?
The answer was no. These men had nothing of the twenty-first-century Englishman about them. Big-boned and muscular, with not an ounce of spare flesh on their bodies, their angry eyes ranged from the blue of the summer sky to grey like the winter seas they’d sailed.
I went no closer.
They were surrounded, with nowhere to go, and every British warrior had a sword in his hand. So why didn’t I feel safe? Why did I feel as if I were at the zoo looking at the tigers who were looking back at me hungrily from behind the flimsiest of barriers?
It would have done them no good to try to make a run for it, though. There was nowhere to go. Behind them the smoke from their burning ships rose into the dull grey morning air. Their fellows who’d fled would have a long trek to the east coast and the safety of Saxon-occupied territory.
Arthur halted his blood-spattered horse ten paces from them, wisely not getting close enough for any of them possessed of a death wish to make a lunge for him. Theodoric the Goth, who’d joined us from his fleet at Caer Uisc, brought his own big bay cob up beside him.
“Men of the East,” Arthur began, pausing for a second for Theodoric to translate. “You have fought well against my warriors.” His gaze roamed from face to surly face, gathering them to him as he would have done his own men. “But we are the victors here. And you are our prisoners.” Theodoric translated this and the Saxons exchanged wary glances.
“My warships have need of oarsmen, the mines have need of labor and you are strong. You will go west to the mines, or to join the British Fleet, or,” he paused, “you will die today. That is your choice.”
Visions of the filmBen Hurcame charging into my head. Did he mean to chain them to the oars of Theodoric’s fleet as Ben Hur had been chained in the Roman galley? Or worse, in a quarry like Spartacus? Theodoric had brought his Goth ships to Britain after Gaul had fallen to the Franks. What sort of ships might these might be, and could it be slaves that powered them? The existence of slaves working in mines in the fifth century was a discovery, even though I’d seen the ingots of tin at Din Tagel.
A silence fell amongst the prisoners. They looked at one another as though seeking for someone to take the lead, rudderless without their captain. The British warriors shifted uneasily, and weak sunlight glinted off their swords as they moved. Metal clinked on metal and their mail shirts rattled.
What sort of a choice did these prisoners have? Slavery or death? It went against everything I’d ever held dear until the moment I’d fallen back through time. Yet understanding, hard-won over the months I’d spent in Din Cadan as Arthur’s Queen, held me silent. I had to think of these men as the enemy– an enemy who would do the same, or worse, to us.
One of the Saxons stepped out of their ranks. A forest of swords pointed at his chest.
His words came haltingly in our tongue.
“We sailors.” His voice was deep and heavily accented, guttural in the way a modern German accent is. “Ships our home. Choose ships. Not die.”
Arthur turned his horse away. “Bind them and send them west to Caer Uisc to join the fleet. They’d be wasted in the mines.”
He saw me and flashed a smile, his teeth white against the dirt. He almost looked like the Arthur I’d come to know, but not quite.
“The wounded need you.” He twisted in his saddle toward the young warrior approaching us across the battlefield. “Bedwyr, take the Queen to the wounded so she may treat them with you.” And then to me. “He has a pack horse with bandages and spirits and anything else you may need.”
I went with Bedwyr. Arthur didn’t need me. He was deep within a world in which I could only ever be an observer on the sidelines and never the partner I wanted to be. Nor was it a world I felt ready to be a part of, now I’d seen the reality of battle.
The wounded lay on a bank above the river where the ground was drier and less churned by the hundreds of feet that had been fighting there. Most had sword cuts to arms and legs that I could disinfect with the strong spirit Bedwyr passed me, then stitch and bandage. It was bloody work, but not too many men had been wounded. The Saxons had been caught by surprise, not expecting a new army to appear in Linnuis out of the blue, and the battle had never swayed in their direction. They’d fought well and fiercely but had been unable to claw any advantage.
Near the burning ships the British warriors constructed a pyre and laid our own dead on it with punctilious respect. While I worked on the living, Arthur took a torch and thrust it into the kindling stuffed into the base of the pyre. The flames caught, and smoke rose toward the lowering sky, soon accompanied by a stench of roasting meat that made my stomach roil.
I was just bandaging the last man’s arm when the order came to march.
Merlin brought Alezan. We helped the wounded onto their horses and I took Alezan’s reins, and, setting my foot in my stirrup, swung myself up into the saddle. Left behind us lay the still-burning funeral pyre, the scattered bodies of the enemy dead, the mud, the blood, the smoking hulks of the ships and a battle site that would be remembered forever, thanks to an obscure ninth-century monk called Nennius, as the battle of the River Glein.
Chapter Fifteen
The Roman cityof Caer Lind Colun, that would one day become modern Lincoln, sat on the rising ground beside the River Witham. Its walls stretched down to stone wharves where long ago hundreds of ships from across the Roman Empire must have docked to unload their wares; small, single-masted trading ships like that of Captain Xander. That charming polygamist was no doubt safely through the Bay of Biscay by now, on his way back toward the Straits of Gibraltar carrying our tin and his tales of far-off Britain. Now, however, the wharves lay empty of all but a few scruffy boats that looked no more than river craft.
Riding between Arthur and me, still flushed with his own success in battle, Prince Beli of Linnuis pointed to the river curling away south-eastwards from the city. “Our river– the Witham. Beyond lies the Metaris estuary and beyond that the German Ocean, filled with more Saxon pirates every year.” He grimaced. “And each year, to north and south of my father’s kingdom, their settlements spread toward us like a canker.”
