Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [196]
As soon as the news reached the villa, Placidia knew what she must do. Stalking to the door of his prison, she opened it herself and let him out.
“You’re free.”
He looked at her curiously.
“Why?”
“The Saxons are coming and we are all going to the dune. I can’t leave you here.” Even as she spoke, he could see Numincus and some of the men loading weapons into a cart. “If you want to go to Ireland,” she added, “I suggest you leave at once.”
Petrus stared at his mother. The sun caught her white hair and her lined old face. His own bald head now had three days’ growth of hair on the crown and he looked bedraggled. But as he looked up at her and saw her indomitable spirit, he thought that he had never felt better.
“I think I’ll come with you to the dune,” he replied with a grin.
By that evening, all was in readiness within the ancient fortress. A newly built oak gate lay against the earthwork wall, ready to be slid into place and buttressed against the entrance. Numincus’s militia were armed and ready to mount the ramparts; and all the Sarum families, together with a quantity of livestock, were camping within the big circular space.
Petrus had also sent a horseman to the west to beg for aid from the young leaders of the militia there.
“I think we can hold the Saxons off for a short time,” he told his mother. “But we were promised help, and we may need reinforcements to drive the Saxons away.”
“Then I hope they come,” Placidia said bleakly.
“Of course they will,” he replied.
All in all, however, he was not dissatisfied with the dune’s defences.
“The bowmen can protect the walls,” he explained to his father; “then we can make sallies out with the German mercenaries.”
The dune was also a Christian fortress.
For one point on which Petrus had insisted was that both Numincus, whose unspoken devotion to Mithras was well known, and the heathen Germans should be baptised; and in this he had had the vigorous support of Constantius. Accordingly, though the Germans had grumbled, father and son had led them down to the river below and immersed each of them in the water, making the sign of the Cross as they did so. Though neither was a priest, such a brief ceremony would have to do. In the centre of the dune he also placed a small wooden cross. It was enough.
“God will protect us,” Petrus told the people as he moved amongst them, pleased with the transformation he had wrought.
But a greater transformation still was the appearance of Constantius. He was a new man. Dressed in a magnificent bronze breastplate, wearing his finest blue cloak, and carrying a long iron sword which he himself had honed to a razor sharpness, he seemed not only to have shed his customary torpor, but he was an inspiration to the defenders. Leaving the ordering of business to Numincus and Petrus, he moved cheerfully amongst the men, his grey head held erect and his black eyes no longer bloodshot, but clear and keen. Chatting to one of the bowmen on the ramparts, or sharing a joke with the women in the camp, he seemed to give them confidence, and Placidia found herself several times gazing with admiration and even affection at the man that her husband might have been.
Two days passed. Every hour Petrus looked out from the walls for some sign of the reinforcements from the west. They did not appear.
Then, on the third day, the Saxons came.
The only thing that Petrus had not foreseen in his elaborate plans for Sarum’s defence was that the fearsome German mercenaries would desert. But early on the third day, when the lookout on the ramparts saw a large force of Saxons approaching from the south-east and informed those below that there were at least a hundred of them, this was what happened. Nodding briskly to their women to follow them, the huge men swung on to their horses and, before anyone realised what was happening, rode out of the gate and on to the road that led north-eastwards towards Calleva. They had come to fight for pay, but not to be killed. Petrus could