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He notched an arrow and pulled the powerful bow, drawing the string back to his chest, rather than his ear, in the older style of shooting that Sarmatians and other ancient archers had used—a technique that would remain in force until the advent of the Welsh longbow. Rather than aiming directly at the wall, three paces away, Stirling aimed high above it, eyeballing the angle and projecting the parabola of the arrow's flight.
He released the bow with a whap! and watched the arrow speed skyward. It arced upward and out across the walls, the curve descending steeply at the end of the foreshortened parabola. The arrow vanished somewhere downslope, well beyond the wall.
He turned to find the officer unimpressed.
Stirling chuckled and handed the bow back to its owner. "Shall we see how far it flew before landing?" They found the arrow several yards downslope, sticking up like a spike in the muddy ground.
"How can a man control it, though?" one of the officers asked, staring from the wall to the arrow embedded in the mud. "How would you know how high to aim, to have the arrow drop precisely where you wanted it to go?"
"That's what the posts out here are for, to mark known distances from the wall. I'll want several tall wooden poles erected inside the walls, with bands marked on them. And I'll want marker stones inside the walls, as well, so that if a man stands on the stone and aims past one of the painted rings on a pole, he'll know exactly how far that arrow will travel and where it will come down, with close approximation, relative to the marker posts out here. Then we'll drill to make sure we can hit those marks every time."
"Even so, it will be impossible to hit your enemy with any real accuracy if we can't see them because we're behind the walls!"
"Ah, but we'll have one man up top, a forward observer acting as the eyes for all the rest of us who'll be shooting at exactly the same time and exactly the same place."
Understanding dawned. "God above, it's elegant!"
They put every archer in Gododdin's cataphracti to work, cutting and setting poles every few yards along the i
"If I aim just to the left of the white band at the top, my arrow will fall very close to the post nearest the wall." He let an arrow fly and had a boy leap onto the outermost wall to call where it had landed. The boy shouted, "You're a foot beyond the post!"
Three more arrows and Stirling had put the shot within six inches of the post he could not see, nearest the outermost wall. "Mark this spot with a stone," he nodded in satisfaction, "and do the same for every pole we've put up along the line." He gestured. "Devise a shooting order, so that every man knows his place beside his comrades and always shoots from the same spot, whether he stands on a stone or to the left or right of the markers."
Stirling promised a keg of ale and a gold coin to the five archers who, at the end of a week, placed their shots consistently closest to the outside marker posts. The contest spurred the Sarmatians to a friendly competition of skill that sharpened their accuracy with amazing rapidity. Ancelotis was delighted, while Cadorius and Melwas regarded the king of Gododdin as a military genius.
"It won't be as effective if the Saxons approach in a thin skirmish line, but I've another idea or two that will bunch them up a bit, to give the archers a nice, broad target to drop arrows on, from overhead. Now, about these other ideas I have in mind, I'll need the best men we have, men who can move swiftly and silently in the darkness. And I'll need cordage, the largest, longest skeins or balls of it to be found in the southwestern kingdoms."
"Cordage?" Cadorius frowned in confusion.
Stirling gri
By week's end, Stirling was satisfied that they were as ready for the Saxons as they would ever be—and not a moment too soon, for a ru
Final preparations took on frantic speed as the last of the horses hauled the final supplies up the hill. What the Britons could neither carry up to the hill fort nor send farther north, out of harm's way, they burned to further deprive the Saxons. It was a grim business, one that Stirling would have given much to avoid, but he knew only too well the cost of trying to walk away from madmen bent on destruction. The madmen followed, until you and everything you valued had been smashed into oblivion. Whether he acted rightly or wrongly with regard to the future timeline which had birthed him, he had no way to know. He knew only that here, in this now, he had only one real choice. He would stop the spread of darkness or die trying.
Stirling slept poorly that night and was awakened from fitful slumber by a commotion of voices. He groped for his sword before he was even fully awake; then a familiar voice, a woman's voice, drifted through the small crowd that had gathered to greet a newcomer.
"No," Covia
Stirling and Ancelotis rose to find Covia
"Why did you come back to Caer-Badonicus?" Ganhumara asked. "Not that I'm dismayed to see you," the young queen added hastily, "for you must know I'm delighted to have a friend here, but I don't understand. They said you were dreadfully anxious about your family at the Tor."
"And I was," Covia
Ancelotis grunted once, then stumbled back to bed, asleep before the commotion of Covia
Ancelotis bolted down the meal, buckling on armor and sword belt while still chewing. Leather creaked against ring-mail shirts and scale armor as the men prepared grimly for battle. Their sisters and mothers laid out spare weapons, heated enormous kettles of water over half a dozen hearths built into the room, prepared linens for bandages and set out ointments, salves, and glass vials of unknown medicines. Surgeons' tools—scalpels, bronze tweezers, saws for amputating mangled limbs—were dropped into boiling water to be held in clean readiness against all-too-probable need.
Ancelotis left the women to their preparations, harboring a secret feeling that their tasks were even harder than those of the men, knowing they sent loved ones out to be maimed or killed and quietly hugging terror and distress to their breasts while doing what was necessary to save lives. Stirling muttered silently, You may just be right about that. In his experience, gathered unpleasantly in the streets of Belfast, women were not only stronger than their menfolk, they were braver, as well, attempting to carry forward the business of living while their men were busy slaughtering one another.