The next dawn showed that the Saxons were still in the valley, where the smoke of their campfires mingled with the river mist. As the mist thinned we saw they were cutting down trees to make huts; depressing evidence that they intended to stay. My own men were busy on the mount’s slopes, chopping down the small hawthorns and the birch saplings that might give cover to an attacking enemy. They dragged the brush and small trees back to the summit and piled them as rudimentary breastworks on the remains of the old people’s wall. I had another fifty men on the hill crest to the north of the saddle, where they were cutting firewood that we hauled back to the mount in one of the ox-wagons we had emptied of food. Those men brought back enough timber to make a long wooden hut of our own, though our hut, unlike the Saxon shelters that were roofed with thatch or turf, was nothing but a ramshackle structure of untrimmed timbers stretched between four of the wagons and crudely thatched with branches, but it was large enough to shelter the women and children.

During the first night I had sent two of my spearmen north. Both of them were cunning rogues from among the unblooded youngsters and I ordered each to try and reach Corinium and tell Arthur of our plight. I doubted whether he could help us, but at least he would know what had happened. All next day I dreaded seeing those two young men again, fearing to see them being dragged as prisoners behind a Saxon horseman, but they vanished. Both, as I learned later, survived to reach Corinium.

The Saxons built their shelters and we piled more thorn and brush on our shallow wall. None of the enemy came near us, and we did not go down to challenge them. I divided the summit into sections, and assigned each to a troop of spearmen. My seventy experienced warriors, the best of my small army, guarded the angle of ramparts that faced due south towards the enemy. I split my youngsters into two troops, one on each flank of the experienced men, then gave the defence of the hill’s northern side to the twelve Blackshields, supported by the levy and the guards from Caer Cadarn and Durnovaria. The Blackshields’ leader was a scarred brute named Niall, a veteran of a hundred harvest raids whose fingers were thick with warrior rings, and Niall raised his own makeshift banner on the northern rampart. It was nothing but a branch-stripped birch sapling struck into the turf with a scrap of black cloak flying from its tip, but there was something wild and satisfyingly defiant about that ragged Irish flag.