• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 422 0

could, and with them thrashed out a plan for outwitting the huge host waiting for them at the foot of the hill. At first nobody had much idea beyond the need to escape, but someone -- I heard later that it was Gorlois -- pointed out that to retreat further was merely to postpone defeat and the destruction of the new kingdom: if escape was possible, then so was attack, and this seemed feasible if the British did not wait until daylight, but used what element of surprise there was in attacking downhill out of the dark and long before the enemy expected it. Simple tactics, indeed, that the Saxons might have expected from men so desperately trapped, but Saxons are stupid fighters, and as I have said before, lacking in discipline. It was almost certain that they would expect no move till dawn, and that they slept soundly where they had lain down that night, confident of victory, and with any luck three parts drunken on the stores they had taken.

To do the Saxons justice, Octa had posted scouts, and these were wide enough awake. But Gorlois' plan worked, helped by a little mist which crept before dawn up from the low ground and surrounded the base of the hill like a veil. Through this, twice as large as life, and in numbers altogether deceiving, the British came in a silent, stabbing rush at the first moment when there was light enough to see one's way across the rocks. Those Saxon outposts who were not cut down in silence, gave the alarm, but too late. Warriors rolled over, cursing, snatching their weapons up from where they lay beside them, but the British, silent no longer, swept yelling across the half-sleeping host, and cut it to pieces. It was finished before noon, and Octa and Eosa taken prisoner. Before winter, with the north swept clear of Saxons, and the burned longboats smoking quietly on the northern beaches, Uther was back in London with his prisoners behind bars, making ready for his coronation the following spring.

His battle with the Saxons, his near defeat and subsequent sharp, brilliant victory, was all that the reign needed. Men forgot the bale of Ambrosius' death, and talked of the new King like a sun rising. His name was on everyone's lips, from the nobles and warriors who crowded round him for gifts and honours, to the workmen building his palaces, and the ladies of his court flaunting new dresses like a field of poppies in a colour called Pendragon Red.

I saw him only once during these first weeks. I was at Amesbury still, superintending the work of raising the Giants' Dance. Tremorinus was in the north, but I had a good team, and after their experience with the king-stone at Killare, the men were eager to tackle the massive stones of the Dance. For the raising of the uprights, once we had aligned the stones, dug the pits and sunk the guides, there was nothing that could not be done with rope and shear-legs and plumb-line. It was with the great lintels that the difficulty lay, but the miracle of the building of the Dance had been done countless years before, by the old craftsmen who had shaped those gigantic stones to fit as surely one into the other as wood dovetailed by a master carpenter. We had only to find means to lift them. It was this which had exercised me all those years, since I first saw the capped stones in Less Britain, and began my calculations. Nor had I forgotten what I had learned from the songs. In the end I had designed a wooden crib of a kind which a modern engineer might have dismissed as primitive, but which -- as the singer had been my witness -- had done the task before, and would again. It was a slow business, but it worked. And I suppose it was a marvellous enough sight to see those vast blocks rising, stage by stage, and settling finally into their beds as smoothly as if they had been made of tallow. It took two hundred men to each stone as it was moved, drilled teams who worked by numbers and who kept up their rhythms, as rowers do, by music. The rhythms of the movement were of course laid down by the work, and the tunes were old tunes that I remembered from my childhood;