That attack came soon and came hard. Like the first this third assault was made by a mass of spearmen, only this time we met them at the near river bank where the press of men behind the enemy’s front rank forced their leading spearmen to stumble on the piled bodies. Their stumbling opened them to our counter-attack and we shouted in triumph as we slashed our red spears forward. Then the shields cracked together again, dying men screamed and called on their Gods, and the swords rang loud as the anvils in Magnis. I was again in the front rank, crammed so close to the enemy line that I could smell the mead on their breath. One man tried to snatch the helmet from my head and lost his hand to a-sword stroke. The pushing match started again and again it seemed that the enemy must force us back by sheer weight, but again Morfans brought his heavy horses through the crush, and again the enemy hurled spears that clattered on our shields, and once again Morfans’s men thrust down with their long horsemen’s spears and once again the enemy pulled back. The bards say the river ran red, which is not true, though I did see tendrils of blood fading downstream from the wounded who tried and failed to get back through the ford.
“We could fight the bastards here all day,” Morfans said. His horse was bleeding and he had dismounted to treat the animal’s wound.
I shook my head. “There’s another ford upriver.” I pointed westwards. “They’ll have spearmen on this bank soon enough.”
Those outflanking enemy came sooner than I thought, for ten minutes later a shout from our left flank warned us that a group of enemy had indeed crossed the river to the west and was now advancing along our bank.
“Time to go back,” Sagramor told me. His clean-shaven black face was smeared with blood and sweat, but there was joy in his eyes for this was proving to be a fight that would make the poets struggle for new words to describe a battle, a fight that men would remember in smoky halls for winters to come, a fight that, even lost, would send a man in honour to the warrior halls of the
Otherworld. “Time to draw them in,” Sagramor said, then shouted the order to withdraw so that slowly and cumbersomely our whole force retreated past the village with its Roman building and stopped a hundred paces beyond. Our left flank was now anchored on the vale’s steep western side while our right was protected by the marshy ground that stretched towards the river. Even so we were much more vulnerable than we had been at the ford for our shield-wall was now desperately thin and the enemy could attack all along its length.
It took Gorfyddyd a whole hour to bring his men across the river and array them in a new shield-line. I guessed it was already afternoon and I glanced behind me for some sign of Galahad or Tewdric’s men, but I saw no one approaching. Nor, I was glad to see, were there any men on the western hill where Nimue’s ghost-fence guarded our flank, but Gorfyddyd hardly needed men there for his army was now bigger than ever. New contingents had come from Branogenium and Gorfyddyd’s commanders were tugging and shoving those newcomers into the shield-wall. We watched the captains using their long spears to straighten the enemy’s line and all of us, despite the defiance we shouted, knew that for every man we had killed at the river ten more had come across the ford. “We’ll never hold them here,” Sagramor said as he watched the enemy forces grow. “We’ll have to go back to the tree fence.”
But then, before Sagramor could give the order to retreat, Gorfyddyd himself rode forward to challenge us. He came alone, without even his son, and he came with just a sheathed sword and a spear for he had no arm to hold a shield. Gorfyddyd’s gold-trimmed helmet, that Arthur had returned the week of his betrothal to Ceinwyn, was crowned with the spread wings of a golden eagle, and his black cloak was spread across his horse’s rump. Sagramor growled at me to stay where I was and strode forward to meet the King.