Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [106]
The most striking part of his dress however, was not the bright cloak, nor the brooch, but a huge, heavy strip of gold he wore round his neck: it had been shaped into a ring and the free ends, which met at the front, were each fitted with a magnificent golden boss, carved in the shape of a boar’s head. This was the torc, the most important ornament worn by any Celtic warrior: it was a badge of office and its huge size proclaimed that, despite his youth, this young man was the chief.
His name was Tosutigus. He was brave, but he was obstinate and he was ignorant; the fate of the dune, of Sarum, and of his family, now lay in his hands, and the plan that for many months he had carefully and secretly formed was about to cause the downfall of all three.
Tosutigus let his eyes travel along the parapet. The forces at his disposal consisted of a hundred men, six horses, an ancient chariot – for the war chariots were considered out of date nowadays – and a Druid. Since there was no question of this little garrison giving open battle to the Romans, the chariot would certainly remain unused. His men were armed with spears and arrows, both tipped with iron points, and he could rely on them to fight to the last man. But, like many of the Celts at that time, the defenders of Sarum had a still more effective weapon – which lay in the huge piles of smooth round pebbles that had been stacked every few yards along the parapet. These were the stones that the men, and some of the women, would fit into the long slings that they knew how to use so well. Swung round the head and released with the additional leverage of a fully stretched arm, the slings could hurl one of the pebbles with such force that it could drop a man stone dead at a hundred yards. In this type of fighting, the slingsmen worked so fast that their pebbles fell like a freak hailstorm, mowing their enemies down like grass.
As the people of Sarum waited to fight, and perhaps to die, they knew nothing about the plan that their young chief had pondered secretly for so long. But it was this plan which occupied all his thoughts now as he scanned the horizon for signs of the Romans, and which caused him to murmur:
“I’ll make Sarum greater than it has ever been before; and my family shall be powerful kings again, as they were in ancient times.”
His dynastic pride was well founded: no family on the island had an older claim to their territory. Five hundred years ago, had not his Celtic ancestor, Coolin the warrior, come riding down the great ridgeway from the north with his huge iron sword and his six faithful companions? Had they not halted at the entrance to the sacred temple of Stonehenge and there found Alana, last daughter of the house of Krona, whose noble ancestry stretched back into the mists of time? Heroic as the legend sounded, it was perfectly true; and the descendants of the union between the Celtic warlord and the last heiress of Sarum had continued to rule over a mixed population of Celtic and ancient island stock as the centuries passed. A further legend had also grown up, and had been encouraged by his family, that the first ancestors of Alana were giants who had carried the huge sarsens to the henge on their backs and built the temple in a single night. For the stones were known to be magic and the rulers of Sarum liked to remind their people that their ancestors were something more than ordinary men. Although the temple