I do not think I could have led those men through that wet night, but Nimue did. She claimed that her one eye saw in the dark where our eyes could not, and maybe that was true, or maybe she simply possessed a better idea of this stretch of countryside than I did, but however it was done, she did it well. In the last hour we walked along the shoulder of a hill and suddenly the going became easier for we were now on the western height above Lugg Vale and our enemies’ watch-fires burned in the dark beneath us. I could even see the barricade of felled pine trees and the glint of the River Lugg beyond. In the vale men threw great baulks of wood on the fires to light the road where attackers might come from the south.
We reached the woods and sank on to the wet ground. Some of us half slept in the deceptive, dream-filled, shallow slumber that seems like no sleep at all and leaves a man cold, weary and aching, but Nimue stayed awake, muttering charms and talking to men who could not sleep. It was not small-talk, for Nimue had no time for idle chatter, but fierce explanations of why we fought. Not for Mordred, she said, but for a Britain shorn of foreigners and of foreign ideas, and even the Christians in my ranks listened to her.
I did not wait for the dawn to make my attack. Instead, when the rain-soaked sky showed the first pale glimmer of steely light in the east, I woke the sleepers and led my fifty spearmen down to the wood’s edge. We waited there above a grassy slope that fell down to the vale’s bed as steeply as the flanks of Ynys Wydryn’s Tor. My left arm was tight in the shield straps, Hywelbane was at my hip and my heavy spear was gripped in my right hand. A small mist showed where the river flowed out of the vale. A white owl flew low beside our trees and my men thought the bird an ill omen, but then a wildcat snarled behind us and Nimue said that the owl’s doom-laden appearance had been nullified. I said a prayer to Mithras, giving all the next hours to His glory, then I told my men that the Franks had been far fiercer enemies than these night-fuddled Powysians in the valley beneath us. I doubted that was entirely true, but men on the edge of battle do not need truth, but confidence. I had privately ordered Issa and another man to stay close to Nimue for if she died I knew my men’s confidence would vanish like a summer mist.
The rain spat from behind us, making the grassy slope slick. The sky above the vale’s far side lightened further, showing the first shadows among the flying clouds. The world was grey and black, night-dark in the vale itself, but lighter on the wood’s edge, a contrast that made me fear the enemy could see us while we could not see him. Their fires still blazed, but much lower than they had during the dark spirit-haunted depths of night. I could see no sentries. It was time to go.
“Move slowly,” I ordered my men. I had imagined a mad rush down the hill, but now I changed my mind. The wet grass would be treacherous and it would be better, I decided, if we crept slow and silent down the slope like wraiths in the dawn. I led the way, stepping ever more cautiously as the hill became steeper. Even nailed boots gave treacherous holding on wet ground and so we went as slow as stalking cats and the loudest noise in the half-dark was the sound of our own breathing. We used spears as staffs. Twice men fell heavily, their shields clattering against scabbards or spears, and both times we all went still and waited for a challenge. None came.
The last part of the slope was the steepest, but from the brow of that final descent we could at last see the whole bed of the vale. The river ran like a black shadow on the far side, while beneath us the Roman road passed between a group of thatched huts where the enemy had to be sheltering. I could only see four men. Two were crouching near the fires, a third was sitting under the eaves of a hut while the fourth paced up and down behind the tree fence. The eastern sky was paling towards the bright flare of dawn and it was time to release my wolf-tailed spearmen to the slaughter. “The Gods be your shield-wall,” I told them, ‘and kill well.”