“Hold Gorfyddyd here,” one man said, ‘and he’ll run back north when he hears Aelle’s coming through his back door.”
“Aelle will not fight my battle.” Arthur spoke for the first time, and the room became still. Arthur seemed embarrassed at having spoken so firmly. He smiled apologetically at King Tewdric and asked exactly where the enemy forces were gathered. Arthur already knew, of course, but he was asking the question so that the rest of us would hear the answer.
Agricola answered for Tewdric. “Their forward men are strung between Coel’s Hill and Caer Lud,” he said, ‘while the main army gathers at Branogenium. More men are marching from Caer Sws.”
The names meant little to us, but Arthur seemed to understand the geography. “So they guard the hills between us and Branogenium?”
“Every pass,” Agricola confirmed, ‘and every hilltop.”
“How many at Lugg Vale?” Arthur asked.
“At least two hundred of their best spearmen. They’re not fools, Lord,” Agricola added sourly.
Arthur stood. He was at his best at these councils, easily dominating crowds of fractious men. He smiled at us. “The Christians will understand this best,” he said, subtly flattering the men most likely to oppose him. “Imagine a Christian cross. Here at Magnis we are at the foot of the cross. The cross’s shaft is the Roman road that runs north from Magnis to Branogenium, and the crosspiece is made by the hills that bar that road. Coel’s Hill is at the left of the crosspiece, Caer Lud at the right, and Lugg Vale is at the cross’s centre. The vale is where the road and river pass through the hills.”
He walked out from behind the table and perched himself on its front so he was closer to his audience. “I want you to think about something,” he said. The flame light from the becke ted torches cast shadows on his long cheeks, but his eyes were bright and his tone energetic. “Everyone knows we must lose this battle,” he said. “We are outnumbered. We wait here for Gorfyddyd to attack us. We wait and some of us become dispirited and carry our spears home. Others fall ill. And all of us brood on that great army gathering in the bowl of the hills around Branogenium and we try not to imagine our shield-wall outflanked and the enemy coming at us from three sides at once. But think of the enemy! They wait too, but as they wait they get stronger! Men come from Cornovia, from Elmet, from Demetia, from Gwynedd. Landless men come to gain land and master less men to take plunder. They know they will win and they know we wait like mice trapped by a tribe of cats.”
He smiled again and stood up. “But we’re not mice. We have some of the greatest warriors ever to lift a spear. We have champions!” The cheering began. “We can kill cats! And we know to skin them too! But.” That last word stopped the next cheer just as it began. “But,” Arthur went on, ‘not if we wait here to be attacked. Wait here behind Magnis’s walls and what happens? The enemy will march around us. Our homes, our wives, our children, our lands, our flocks and our new harvest become theirs, and all we become are mice in a trap. We must attack, and attack soon.”
Agricola waited for the Dumnonian cheers to die. “Attack where?” he asked sourly.
“Where they least expect it, Lord, in their strongest place. Lugg Vale. Straight up the cross! Straight to the heart!” He held up a hand to stop any cheering. “The vale is a narrow place,” he said,
‘where no shield-line can be outflanked. The road fords the river north of the valley.” He was frowning as he spoke, trying to remember a place he had seen only once in his life, but Arthur had a soldier’s memory for terrain and only needed to see a place once. “We would need to put men on the western hill to stop their archers raining arrows down, but once in the vale I swear we cannot be moved.”
Agricola objected. “We can hold there,” he agreed, ‘but how do we fight our way in? They have two hundred spearmen there, maybe more, but even one hundred men can hold that valley all day. By the time we’ve fought to the vale’s far end Gorfyddyd will have brought his horde down from Branogenium. Worse, the Blackshield Irish who garrison Coel’s Hill can march south of the hills and take our rear. We might not be moved, Lord, but we’ll be killed where we stand.”