“What was that?” Sagramor asked as I rejoined him.
“Nothing,” I said, ‘nothing. Just a charm that might have brought us ill luck.”
Then a ram’s horn sounded across the river and I was spared the need to think about the ring’s message.
The enemy was coming.
THE BARDS STILL SING of that battle, though the Gods only know how they invent the details they embroider into the tale because to hear their songs you would think none of us could have survived Lugg Vale and maybe none of us should. It was desperate. It was also, though the bards do not admit as much, a defeat for Arthur.
Gorfyddyd’s first attack was a howling rush of maddened spearmen who charged into the ford. Sagramor ordered us forward and we met them in the river where the clash of the shields was like a crack of thunder exploding in the valley’s mouth. The enemy had the advantage of numbers, but their attack was channelled by the ford’s margins and we could afford to bring men from our flanks to thicken our centre.
We in the front rank had time to thrust once, then we crouched behind our shields and simply shoved at the enemy line while the men in our second rank fought across our heads. The ring of sword blades and clatter of shield-bosses and clashing of spear-shafts was deafening, but remarkably few men died for it is hard to kill in the crush as two locked shield-walls grind against each other. Instead it becomes a pushing match. The enemy grasps your spearhead so you cannot pull it back, there is hardly room to draw a sword, and all the time the enemy’s second rank are raining sword, axe and spear blows on helmets and shield-edges. The worst injuries are caused by men thrusting blades beneath the shields and gradually a barrier of crippled men builds at the front to make the slaughter even more difficult. Only when one side pulls back can the other then kill the crippled enemies stranded at the battle’s tide line. We prevailed on that first attack, not so much out of valour but because Morfans pushed his six horsemen through the crush of our men and used his long horse spears to thrust down on the crouching enemy front line. “Shields! Shields!” I heard Morfans shouting as the six horses’ vast weight buckled our shield-line forward. Our rear-rank men hoisted their shields high to protect the big war horses from the rain of enemy spears, while we in the front rank crouched in the river and tried to finish off the men who recoiled from the horsemen’s thrusts. I sheltered behind Arthur’s polished shield and stabbed with Hywelbane whenever a gap offered in the enemy’s line. I took two mighty blows to the head, but the helmet cushioned both even if my skull did ring for an hour afterwards. One spear struck my scale armour but could not pierce it. The man who launched that spear lunge was killed by Morfans, and after his death the enemy lost heart and splashed back to the river’s northern bank. They took their wounded, all but for a handful who were too close to our line and that handful we killed before we retreated to our own bank. We had lost six men to the Otherworld and twice that many to wounds. “You shouldn’t be in the front line,” Sagramor told me as he watched our wounded being carried away. “They’ll see you’re not Arthur.”
“They’re seeing that Arthur fights,” I said, ‘unlike Gorfyddyd or Gundleus.” The enemy Kings had been close to the fight, but never close enough to use their weapons. lorweth and Tanaburs were screaming at Gorfyddyd’s men, encouraging them to the slaughter and promising them the rewards of the Gods, but while Gorfyddyd reorganized his spearmen a group of master less men waded the river to attack on their own. Such warriors relied on a display of bravery to bring them riches and rank, and these thirty desperate men charged in a screaming rage once they were through the deepest part of the river. They were either drunk or battle-mad, for thirty alone attacked our whole force. The reward for their success would have been land, gold, forgiveness of their crimes and lordly status in Gorfyddyd’s court, but thirty men were not enough. They hurt us, but died doing it. They were all fine spearmen with shield hands thick with warrior rings, but each now faced three or four enemies. A whole group rushed towards me, seeing in my armour and white plume the fastest route to glory, but Sagramor and my wolf-tailed spearmen met and matched them. One huge man was wielding a Saxon axe. Sagramor killed him with his dark curved blade, then plucked the axe from the dying hand and hurled it at another spearman, and all the while he was chanting his own weird battle song in his native tongue. A last swordsman attacked me and I parried his scything blow with the iron boss of Arthur’s shield, knocked his own shield aside with Hywelbane, then kicked him in the groin. He doubled over, too hurt to cry out, and Issa rammed a spear into his neck. We stripped the dead attackers of their armour, their weapons and their jewellery and left their bodies at the ford’s edge as a barrier to the next attack.