The enemy began putting new troops in their front line. Some carried Cuneglas’s eagle, some Gundleus’s fox and a few had emblems of their own. Then a cheer sounded behind me and I turned, expecting to see Tewdric’s men arriving in their Roman uniforms, but instead it was Galahad who came alone on a sweating horse. He slid to a halt behind our line and half fell off the horse in his haste to reach us. “I thought I’d be too late,” he said.
“Are they coming?” I asked.
He paused and even before he spoke I knew that we had been abandoned. “No,” he said at last.
I swore and looked back to the enemy. It was the Gods alone who had saved us in the last attack, but the Gods alone knew how long we could hold now. “No one is coming?” I asked bitterly.
“A few maybe.” Galahad gave the bad news in a low voice. “Tewdric believes we’re doomed, Agricola says they should help us, but Meurig says we must be left to die. They’re all arguing, but Tewdric did say that any man who wants to die here could follow me. Maybe some are on the way?”
I prayed there were, for some of Gorfyddyd’s levy had arrived on the western hill now, though none of that ragged horde had yet dared to cross Nimue’s ghost-fence. We could hold for two more hours, I thought, and after that we were doomed, though Arthur would surely come first. “No sign of the Blackshield Irish?” I asked Galahad.
“No, thank God,” he said, and it was one small blessing on a day almost bereft of blessings, though a half-hour after Galahad came, we did at last receive some reinforcements. Seven men walked north towards our battered shield-wall, seven men in war gear carrying spears, shields and swords, and the symbol on the shields was the hawk of Kernow, our enemy. Yet these men were no enemies. They were six scarred and hardened fighters led by their Edling, Prince Tristan.
He explained his presence when the excitement of greeting was over. “Arthur fought for me once, and I have long wanted to repay the debt.”
“With your life?” Sagramor asked grimly.
“He risked his,” Tristan said simply. I remembered him as a tall handsome man, and so he still was, but the years had added a wary and tired look to his face as though he had suffered too many disappointments. “My father,” he added ruefully, ‘may never forgive my coming here, but I could never have forgiven my absence.”
“How’s Sarlinna?” I asked him.
“Sarlinna?” He took a few seconds to remember the small girl who had come to accuse Owain at Caer Cadarn. “Oh, Sarlinna! Married now. To a fisherman.” He smiled. “You gave her the kitten, didn’t you?”
We put Tristan and his men in our centre, the place of honour on this battlefield, yet when the enemy’s next assault came it was not against the centre, but against the tree fence protecting our flanks. For a time the shallow trench and the fence’s tangling branches caused them havoc, but they learned swiftly enough to use the felled trees to protect themselves and in some places they burst clean through and bent our line backwards again. But again we held them, and Griffid, my erstwhile enemy, made a name for himself by cutting down Nasiens, Gundleus’s champion. The shields crashed incessantly. Spears broke, swords shattered and shields split as the exhausted fought the weary. On the hilltop the enemy levy gathered to watch from beyond Nimue’s ghost-fence as Morfans once again forced his tired horse up the perilously steep slope. He stared northwards and we watched him and prayed that he would blow the horn. He stared for a long time, but he must have been satisfied that all the enemy forces were now trapped in the vale for he put the silver horn to his lips and blew the blessed summons across the din of battle.
Never was a horn call more welcome. Our whole line surged forward and scarred swords hammered at the enemy with a new energy. The silver horn, so pure and clear, called again and again, a hunting call to the slaughter, and each time it sounded our men pressed forward into the branches of the felled trees to cut and stab and scream at the enemy who, suspecting some trickery, glanced nervously around the vale as they defended themselves. Gorfyddyd shouted at his men to break us now, and his royal guard led the attack on our centre. I heard Kernow’s men screaming their war cry as they paid their Edling’s debt. Nimue was among our spearmen and wielding a sword with both hands. I shouted at her to get back, but the bloodlust had swamped her soul and she fought like a fiend. The enemy was scared of her, knowing that she was of the Gods, and men tried to evade rather than fight her, but all the same I was glad when Galahad thrust her away from the fight. Galahad might have come late to the battle, but he fought with a savage glee that drove the enemy back from the twitching pile of dead and dying men.