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"Charge!" Cadorius shouted. "Sound the charge! Cataphracti, to horse!"
The watchtower lookout sounded a long blast. A wave of Briton infantry poured over the walls. Women and children led horses forward, ru
He leaped onto the nearest horse, not caring whose it was, and plunged through the open gates, leading Gododdin in the charge. The Saxon kings and their shaken sons cowered against the wooden shield wall of their command platform. Covered in mud, eyes wild, horses dead or galloping away riderless across the open plain, the Saxons drew swords to face down the Britons stampeding toward them.
"Alive!" Ancelotis shouted. "Take them alive!"
A moment later, Gododdin had surrounded them, hemming them round with a glittering wall of British steel. Ancelotis gave them a mocking salute with his own sword.
"You seem to have lost an army," Ancelotis favored them with a cold smile. He gestured slightly with the tip. "Unless it is your wish to die immediately, throw down your weapons and your arrogant pride and beg the kings of Britain—whom you have greatly wronged—for mercy on your shivering wives and daughters."
King Aelle of Sussex, barely recognizable through muddy filth, blood, and shock, snarled, "What guarantees do you give us for our safety, do we acquiesce?"
"Guarantees?" Ancelotis raised his brows. "What guarantees did your murderous son and the odious, craven fool with him offer the village of Penrith? Or the farmholds within five miles of the standing stones? We guaranteed Cutha and Creoda safe passage and they repaid it by spitting infants on pikes and hacking toddling babes into scattered pieces for the crows to eat. Shall I return your courtesy back to you in full measure?"
Aelle lost color beneath the grime. Not, Stirling realized with utter contempt, because the news of the massacre was a surprise, but because Aelle finally realized that an accounting was due for their atrocities—and that he, as much as his son, would be held accountable for it. Stirling could see it in his eyes, that moment of sick horror when he realized the Britons were fully capable of slaughtering his daughters. Even Cutha looked pale around his tight-clenched mouth, pale with shock and hatred and the burning desire to sever British heads from British necks in a war he had already lost.
Ancelotis smiled down into their eyes.
"Yield up all that we demand," he said softly, "or your wives and daughters will learn the true meaning of terror. You have shown us too much of Saxon butchery to expect pity on your women and your squalling infants. Not from men whose families you have slaughtered like lambs under the axe. You have sown hatred and now you reap it in full measure. Surrender here and now, or I vow to you, there will be no stopping our soldiers in their drunken rampages across the lands you've stolen. They will defile your daughters and feed your infants to their dogs and smile while they do it. What say you, curs of Saxony? Shall I loose the hounds of Britain against your families? Or leash them and show the mercy you have failed to show any of us and ours?"
For tense moments, silence gripped the huddled knot of men at his horse's feet. The Britons hemming them in tested the kee
King Aelle had not taken his gaze from Stirling's. He stared, pride warring with shock and exhaustion and the realization that he could salvage nothing by his own hand. A sigh finally shivered loose and he broke his long silence.
"Let me speak for Sussex, then," he began hoarsely, "and beg from you better mercy on my people than my fool of a son showed yours." He let his sword thunk into the mud. The splash darkened the blade with muck. Cutha's mouth worked once, twice, while his hand tightened like the grip of a vise around the pommel of his sword. His father turned on him with a snarl. "Don't be a bigger fool than you were at birth! Throw down the sword—for it is no longer yours to hold. I take it back, sword, pommel, and gold rings of honor. I strip you of them before Woden and all his Valkyries, for you are unworthy in my sight and a curse to every Saxon who treads soil upon this earth."
Cutha's face washed grey with shock. He collapsed back against the wooden wall, shaking violently. The sword slid from u
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Ancelotis grunted. If the king of Gododdin has any say in the matter, Cutha will be hanged for a murderer from the nearest oak.
The others—Creoda, his father Cerdic, their few surviving eoldormen and thegns—let their weapons fall in formal surrender. "Bind their hands with rope," Ancelotis said tersely. "Behind them, please. Drag them up to the fortress. We'll want to question them closely—" He broke off, startled, as movement out across the southeastern plain caught his attention. From his vantage point two hundred fifty feet up the hillside, he could see a long way across the open ground to the southeast.
Beyond Artorius and the cataphracti, beyond the straggling lines of the smashed Saxon supply train,beyond the ru
"Your reinforcements?" Melwas demanded harshly.
King Aelle shook his head, obviously confused. "No. Would to Woden they were, but they are not men under my command. Nor under Cerdic's."
"Then who—?" Ancelotis realized in a lightning flash of utter horror who they must be. "Dear God. Take these men up to the fort and guard them. Archers, to horse, ride with me!"
He kicked his horse into a flat-out run, plunging wildly down the sodden, mud-churned slope. Out on the Salisbury Plain, the fleeing Saxon infantry had stumbled and stalled in their headlong flight from Artorius. The front ranks began to shift direction, ru
Spurring madly, Stirling and his host caught up with Artorius—who had slowed in open puzzlement—just as the leading edge of Saxons, men who'd fled British steel just moments previously, crashed in amongst them, screaming for mercy, many of them flinging themselves to the ground, prostrate before Artorius' white stallion.
"Oh, dear God," Artorius breathed as Ancelotis reined to a halt beside him.
They could see the approaching army's battle flags. Ancelotis knew those flags, knew them as well as Artorius did. The bottom fell out of Stirling's gut, splashed into the mud at his horse's feet, and tried to crawl away with the wounded, exhausted Saxons. "Ireland!"