Winter's Blossom: The Seasons of Arthur

Chapter 54

Despite our victory, it was over a week later that we would make it to back to Din Eidyn. We had lost a little over two hundred dead, with another two hundred badly wounded, there was not a man among us though who carried no wounds. Except for Gareth it seemed, his skin was not even blemished with a bruise. I wanted to punch him as my cheek throbbed and stung every time that I opened my mouth.

Owain kept the army in place, clearing up the dead and instead splitting the cavalry up to go and shadow the two armies back to their own lands. They did not even try to rescue their wounded. Of the three and a half thousand men we expected them to have between the two armies, the larger Scotti Army had left nine hundred men on the field of battle. The Angles had left six, about another eight hundred had escaped and were racing across the land with their tails between their legs to the five hundred men who guarded their ships. Many ships would never leave these northern shores.

Owain went after the Angles with the cavalry, and he harried them on the way back. He seemed to have forgiven Lancelot, though I noticed he did not ride with him but instead sent him to follow the Scotti. Perhaps Owain was not as forgiving as he made out.

I meanwhile was left with the Army. Officially I was in charge, apparently as a reward for my timely intervention that stopped us being surrounded and wiped out. It was a nice gesture, but it was Dirandon who was in charge. He organised the men into groups to collect the wounded, tend to them and to gather the dead. The first night was spent patrolling the battlefield with spear and flaming torches while men worked as wolves, foxes and birds came to worry at the dead, moving amongst the corpses in a wary truce as they tried to drag bodies into the night while men chased them away.

The wounded were laid out by the river, and slaves tended to them as well as the men. Some of these slaves were so beaten they looked as if they had been in a battle themselves, with black eyes and split lips from where they had fought the men who had raped them. Victory was not so sweet, I thought bitterly as I watched them. I had watched my own woman though, young and unhurt helping the freed Votadini women that had been taken in captivity and wondered how many of these women I would be adding into the household that I could barely afford. Then again, perhaps I could. A veritable treasure had come from the two camps and from amongst the loot, treasure that I had a strong entitlement too. These new riches would have to be tempered with payment though, and I had already rewarded Gareth with my own coat of mail. Percival had died of his wounds, and with his claim of the Scotti king's mail gone, Owain had rewarded me with his body and the loot that went with it, including war garb fit for a king. It even had a collar of gold rings around it's collar. It was beautiful.

As the days went by, and the cavalry returned, we began our march back north to Din Eidyn. Pellinore's body came north with us as well to be buried in the cemetery at the foot of the hill where his seat rested, and where his ancestors lay too for as long as they had been Christian. Elaine rode next to the cart that carried her father. I had seen little of her these past days, and continued to see little. We had barely eve spoken, though often I had tried to but I failed. I was afraid that she blamed me for her father's death, and I felt guilty that I had been unable to save her in the way that I had hoped, as unrealistic as that hope had been. At night she still came to me, but neither of us had a word to say, we just clung to one another and I held her as she sobbed herself to sleep. It was made even worse when reached Din Eidyn and found that both her brother and uncle had died, her brother in the skirmishes to the north and her uncle when the town had been sacked.

It was Owain who realised that we needed to talk, and arranged to meet both of us together on the walls of Din Eidyn like we had used to, but just never turned up so that we looked awkwardly at each other for a moment in first confusion and then understanding. We walked for a while in companionable silence along the ramparts, pausing on the west wall to watch the sun slip below the jagged silhouette of the horizon when I could not hold myself in anymore. 'I still love you; you know.' I blurted out, feeling the flush in my cheeks. I looked out; the sky was a pale pink above the shaded horizon now that the sun had dipped below it. 'When I thought you were lost to me it was like I had lost a piece of my soul. And all I felt was the surety was that I could never be happy without you.' I faltered, feeling my voice crack through the raw lump in my throat. 'Only now I have you but am terrified that your blame for me will forever hang over us.'