Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [199]
Not wishing to address Sulicena, he rode over to this second cart.
“Where are you going?”
“West,” they told him.
“Why?” he demanded. “Didn’t we just beat off the Saxons?”
The man shrugged.
“Until next time. But they burned down our farm.”
“Where will you go?”
“To the Severn. Maybe further.”
He nodded slowly. He could not blame them, though whether they would be any safer in the west than at Sarum, it was hard to know. He did not try to stop them. If they had decided to go, they would find a way to leave anyway.
“Good luck, then,” he said, and rode off.
Yet despite this discouraging sign, as he stood with his mother in front of the villa a few nights later, he felt a new sense of hope.
The Germans had deserted. The promised aid from the eager young men in the west had never come. Many farms had been burned. But they had survived, and he was sure they could do so again.
Opposite, the sun was sinking over the western ridge, but he could still make out, on the river below, the pale forms of the swans as they moved sedately about, and on the slopes behind he could see the tiny white patches of sheep in the dusk. Gently he took his mother’s hand.
“I’ll stay,” he promised her quietly. “And God will give Sarum a new dawn.”
Placidia said nothing. An instinct, which she did not share with him, told her that this was not a dawn, but a twilight, and she wondered bleakly what lay in the darkness beyond.
In the terrible times that followed, the young militiamen from the west never came to the aid of Petrus Porteus.
Others, like Sulicena, left him; it was the start of a long process by which, in the coming generations, many families would migrate south-westwards into the peninsula of Britain that would become western Cornwall, or across the Severn river into the hills of Wales – areas which the Saxons were never to penetrate effectively and which contain the ancient Celtic and pre-Celtic stock of Britain to this day.
As the coming of the Saxons and of their neighbour tribes of Angles and Jutes increased until they became a steady migration, the historical record almost ceases.
But the impetus of Romano-British people like Petrus Porteus and the young bloods who tried to start a militia did not die out without leaving an echo – an echo that gave rise to a legend which has grown greater with the passing of centuries.
For it was in the west, probably in the rich, rolling lands that lie between Wessex and the Welsh and Cornish hills, that about two generations after Petrus Porteus, a new and vigorous force arose. They were Romano-Britons and they seem to have been well organised. They were probably Christian; they won a great battle against the Saxons at a place, still not identified, called Mons Badonicus; and it is quite likely that they had a general named Artorius.
From references to these events in historical records, medieval historians and romancers began, some eight hundred years later, to construct a Christian and chivalric order of knights led by a king called Arthur.
Behind the legend of Arthur and the knights of the Round Table lie several elements of historical reality, however. The world of Arthur, though it is chivalric and romanticised in a way that belongs to a later era, is nonetheless a Celtic, Christian world, with ties not only to Wales and the west country but also across the English Channel to Brittany, to which, in the century that followed the end of Roman Britain, a number of British families emigrated.
The history of Sarum, too, enters an era of twilight at this point. It may be called the age of Arthur. It was the twilight, not of the feudal knight, who did not yet exist, but