This was the biggest Saxon attack of the day and it was made by a surge of confident spearmen who had recovered from their early surprise and who now came to splinter our lines and to rescue Aelle. They roared their war chants as they came, they beat spears on shields and they promised each other a score of British dead apiece. The Saxons knew they had won. They had taken the worst that Arthur could hurl at them, they had fought us to a standstill, they had seen their champion slay a King, and now, with their fresh troops in the lead, they advanced to finish us. The Franks drew back their light throwing-spears, readying themselves to rain a shower of sharpened iron on our shield wall.

When suddenly a horn sounded from Mynydd Baddon.

At first few of us heard the horn, so loud were the shouts and the tramp of feet and the moans of the dying, but then the horn called again, then a third time, and at the third call men turned and stared up at Mynydd Baddon’s abandoned rampart. Even the Franks and Saxons stopped. They were only fifty paces from us when the horn checked them and when they, like us, turned to gaze up the long green hillside.

To see a single horseman and a banner.

There was only one banner, but it was a huge one; a wind-spread expanse of white linen on which was embroidered the red dragon of Dumnonia. The beast, all claws, tail and fire, reared on the flag that caught the wind and almost toppled the horseman who carried it. Even at this distance we could see that the horseman rode stiffly and awkwardly as though he could neither handle his black horse nor hold the great banner steady, but then two spearmen appeared behind him and they pricked his horse with their weapons and the beast sprang away down the hill and its rider was jerked hard backwards by the sudden motion. He swayed forward again as the horse raced down the slope, his black cloak flew up behind and I saw that his armour beneath the cloak was shining white, as white as the linen of his fluttering flag. Behind him, spilling off Mynydd Baddon as we had spilled just after dawn, came a shrieking mass of men with black shields and other men with tusked boars on their shields. Oengus mac Airem and Culhwch had come, though instead of striking down the Corinium road they had first worked their way onto Mynydd Baddon so that their men would link up with ours.