Crystal Cave (38 page)

"No, sir. Let him go, Cadal. My lord, if you want to talk to me, you'll have to do it on the move. We should go, and quickly."

"Willingly." We set the horses in motion. As they struck into a gallop I said over my shoulder: "You guessed when you saw the brooch?"

"Before that. You have a look of him, Merlin Ambrosius." I heard him laugh again, deep in his throat.

"And by God, there are times when you have a look of your devil-sire as well! Steady now, we're nearly at the ford. It'll be deep. They say wizards can't cross water?"

I laughed. "I'm always sick at sea, but I can manage this." The horses plunged across the ford unhindered, and took the next slope at a gallop. Then we were on the paved road, plain to see in the flying starlight, which leads straight across the high ground to the south.

We rode all night, with no pursuit. Three days later, in the early morning, Ambrosius came to land.

The way the chronicles tell it, you would think it took Ambrosius two months to get himself crowned King and pacifyBritain . In fact, it took more than two years.

The first part was quick enough. It was not for nothing that he had spent all those years in Less Britain, he and Uther, developing an expert striking force the like of which had not been seen in any part of Europe since the disbanding nearly a hundred years ago of the force commanded by the Count of the Saxon Shore. Ambrosius had, in fact, modelled his own army on the force of theSaxonShore , a marvellously mobile fighting instrument which could live off the country and do everything at twice the speed of the normal force. Caesar-speed, they still called it when I was young.

He landed at Totnes inDevon , with a fair wind and a quiet sea, and he had hardly set up the Red Dragon when the whole West rose for him. He was King of Cornwall andDevon before he even left the shore, and everywhere, as he moved northwards, the chiefs and kings crowded to swell his army. Eldol of Gloucester, a ferocious old man who had fought withConstantine against Vortigern, with Vortigern against Hengist, with Vortimer against both, and would fight anywhere for the sheer hell of it, met him atGlastonbury and swore faith. With him came a host of lesser leaders, not least his own brother Eldad, a bishop whose devout Christianity made the pagan wolves look like lambs by comparison, and set me wondering where he spent the dark nights of the winter solstice. But he was powerful; I had heard my mother speak of him with reverence; and once he had declared for Ambrosius, all Christian Britain came with him, urgent to drive back the pagan hordes moving steadily inland from their landing-places in the south and east. Last came Gorlois of Tintagel in Cornwall, straight from Vortigern's side with news of Vortigern's hasty move out of the Welsh mountains, and ready to ratify the oath of loyalty which, should Ambrosius be successful, would add the whole kingdom of Cornwall for the first time to the High Kingdom of Britain.

Ambrosius' main trouble, indeed, was not lack of support but the nature of it. The native Britons, tired of Vortigern, were fighting-mad to clear the Saxons out of their country and get their homes and their own ways back, but a great majority of them knew only guerrilla warfare, or the kind of hit-and-ride-away tactics that do well enough to harass the enemy, but will not hold him back for long if he means business.

Moreover, each troop came with its own leader, and it was as much as any commander's authority was worth to suggest that they might regroup and train under strangers. Since the last trained legion had withdrawn fromBritain almost a century before, we had fought (as we had done before the Romans ever came) in tribes. And it was no use suggesting that, for instance, the men of Devet might fight beside the men ofNorth Wales even with their own leaders; throats would have been cut on both sides before the first trumpet ever sounded.

Ambrosius here, as everywhere, showed himself master. As ever he used each man for what that man's strength was worth. He sowed his own officers broadcast among the British — for co-ordination, he said, no more — and through them quietly adapted the tactics of each force to suit his central plan, with his own body of picked troops taking the main brunt of attack.

All this I heard later, or could have guessed from what I knew of him. I could have guessed, also, what would happen the moment his forces assembled and declared him King. His British allies clamoured for him to go straight after Hengist and drive the Saxons back to their own country. They were not unduly concerned with Vortigern. Indeed, such power as Vortigern had had was largely gone already, and it would have been simple enough for Ambrosius to ignore him and concentrate on the Saxons.

But he refused to give way to pressure. The old wolf must be smoked out first, he said, and the field cleared for the main work of battle. Besides, he pointed out, Hengist and his Saxons were Northmen, and particularly amenable to rumours and fear; let Ambrosius once unite the British to destroy Vortigern, and the Saxons would begin to fear him as a force really to be reckoned with. It was his guess that, given the time, they would bring together one large force to face him, which might then be broken at one blow.

They had a council about it, at the fort nearGloucester where the first bridge crosses the Sefern river. I could picture it, Ambrosius listening and weighing and judging, and answering with that grave easy way of his, allowing each man his say for pride; then taking at the end the decision he had meant to take from the beginning, but giving way here and there on the small things, so that each man thought he had made a bargain and got, if not what he wanted, then something near it, in return for a concession by his commander.

The upshot was that they marched northwards within the week, and came on Vortigern at Doward.

Doward is in the valley of the Guoy, which the Saxons pronounce Way or Wye. This is a big river, which runs deep and placid-seeming through a gorge whose high slopes are hung with forests. Here and there the valley widens to green pastures, but the tide runs many miles up river, and these low meadows are often, in winter, awash under a roaring yellow flood, for the great Wye is not so placid as it seems, and even in summer there are deep pools where big fish lie and the currents are strong enough to overturn a coracle and drown a man.

Well north of the limit of the tidal floods, in a wide curve of the valley, stand the two hills called Doward.

The one to the north is the greater, thick with forest and mined with caves inhabited, men say, by wild beasts and outlawed men. The hill called Lesser Doward is also forested, but more thinly, since it is rocky, and its steep summit, rising above the trees, makes a natural citadel so secure that it has been fortified time out of mind. Long before even the Romans came, some British king built himself a fortress on the summit which, with its commanding view, and the natural defenses of crag and river, made a formidable stronghold. The hill is wide-topped, and its sides steep and rough, and though siege engines could at one point be dragged up in dead ground, this ended in crags where the engines were useless.

Everywhere except at this point there was a double rampart and ditch to get through before the outer wall of the fortress could be reached. The Romans themselves had marched against it once, and only managed to reduce it through treachery. This was in the time of Caratacus. Doward was the kind of place that, likeTroy , must be taken from within.

This time also, it was taken from within. But not by treachery; by fire.

Everyone knows what happened there.

Vortigern's men were hardly settled after their headlong flight fromSnowdon , when Ambrosius' army came up the valley of the Wye, and encamped due west of Doward Hill, at a place called Ganarew. I never heard what store of provisions Vortigern had; but the place had been kept prepared, and it was well known that there were two good springs within the fortress which had not yet been known to fail; so it might well have taken Ambrosius some time to reduce it by siege. But a siege was just what he could not afford, with Hengist gathering his forces, and the April seas opening betweenBritain and the Saxon shores. Besides, his British allies were restless, and would never have settled down for a prolonged siege.

It had to be quick.

It was both quick and brutal. I have heard it said since that Ambrosius acted out of vengeance for his long-dead brother. I do not believe this to be true. Such long-standing bitterness was not in his nature, and besides, he was a general and a good fighting commander before he was even a man. He was driven only by necessity, and in the end, by Vortigern's own brutality.

Ambrosius besieged the place in the conventional way for about three days. Where he could, he drew up siege engines and tried to break the defenses. He did indeed breach the outer rampart in two places above what was still calledRomans Way , but when he found himself stopped by the inner rampart and his troops exposed to the defenders, he withdrew. When he saw how long the siege would take, and how, even in the three days, some of his British troops quietly left him and went off on their own, like hounds after the rumour of Saxon hares, he decided to make an end quickly. He sent a man to Vortigern with conditions for surrender. Vortigern, who must have seen the defection of some of the British troops, and who well understood Ambrosius' position, laughed, and sent back the messenger without a message, but with the man's own two hands severed, and bound in a bloody cloth to the belt at his waist.

He stumbled into Ambrosius' tent just after sundown of the third day, and managed to stay on his feet long enough to give the only message he was charged with.

"They say that you may stay here, my lord, until your army melts away, and you are left handless as I.

They have food in plenty, sir, I saw it, and water —"

Ambrosius only said: "He ordered this himself?"

"The Queen," said the man. "It was the Queen." He pitched forward on the word at Ambrosius' feet, and from the dripping cloth at his belt the hands fell, sprawling.

"Then we will burn out the wasps' nest, queen and all," said Ambrosius. "See to him."

That night, to the apparent pleasure of the garrison, the siege engines were withdrawn from Romans'

Way and the breached places in the outer rampart. Instead, great piles of brushwood and hewn branches were stacked in the gaps, and the army tightened its ring round the crest of the hill, with a circle of archers waiting, and men ready to cut down any who should escape. In the quiet hour before daylight the order was given. From every quarter the arrows, pointed with flaming, oil-soaked rags, showered into the fortress. It did not take long. The place was largely built of wood, and crowded with the wagons, provisions, beasts and their fodder. It burned fiercely. And when it was alight the brushwood outside the walls was fired, so that anyone leaping from the walls met another wall of fire outside. And outside that, the iron ring of the army.

They say that throughout, Ambrosius sat his big white horse, watching, till the flames made the horse as red as the Red Dragon above his head. And high on the fortress tower the White Dragon, showing against a plume of smoke, turned blood red as the flames themselves, then blackened and fell.

While Ambrosius was attacking Doward I was still at Maridunum, having parted from Gorlois on the ride south, and seen him on his way to meet my father.

It happened this way. All through that first night we rode hard, but there was no sign of pursuit, so at sunup we drew off the road and rested, waiting for Gorlois' men to come up with us. This they did during the morning, having been able, in the near-panic at Dinas Brenin, to slip away unobserved. They confirmed what Gorlois had already suggested to me, that Vortigern would head, not for his own fortress of Caer-Guent, but for Doward. And he was moving, they said, by the east-bound road through Caer Gai towards Bravonium. Once past Tomen-y-mur, there was no danger that we would be overtaken.

So we rode on, a troop now about twenty strong, but going easily. My mother, with her escort of fighting men, was less than a day ahead of us, and her party, with the litters, would be much slower than we were. We had no wish to catch up with them and perhaps force a fight which might endanger the women; it was certain, said Gorlois to me, that the latter would be delivered safely to Maridunum, "but,"

he added in his sharp, gruff way, "we shall meet the escort on their way back. For come back they will; they cannot know the King is moving east. And every man less for Vortigern is another for your father.

We'll get news at Bremia, and camp beyond it to wait for them."

Bremia was nothing but a cluster of stone huts smelling of peat smoke and dung, black doorways curtained from wind and rain with hides or sacking, round which peered scared eyes of women and children. No men appeared, even when we drew rein in the midst of the place, and curs ran yapping round the horses' heels. This puzzled us, till (knowing the dialect) I called out to the eyes behind the nearest curtain, to reassure the people and ask for news.

They came out then, women, children, and one or two old men, crowding eagerly round us and ready to talk.

The first piece of news was that my mother's party had been there the previous day and night, leaving only that morning, at the Princess's insistence. She had been taken ill, they told me, and had stayed for half the day and the night in the head-man's house, where she was cared for. Her women had tried to persuade her to turn aside for a monastic settlement in the hills nearby, where she might rest, but she had refused, and had seemed better in the morning, so the party had ridden on. It had been a chill, said the head-man's wife; the lady had been feverish, and coughing a little, but she had seemed so much better next morning, and Maridunum was not more than a day's ride; they had thought it better to let her do as she desired...

I eyed the squalid huts, thinking that, indeed, the danger of a few more hours in the litter might well be less than such miserable shelter in Bremia, so thanked the woman for her kindness, and asked where her man had gone. As to that, she told me, all the men had gone to join Ambrosius...