Arthur’s horses were big. Sagramor once told me Arthur had captured the horses from Clovis, King of the Franks, and before Clovis had owned the herd the horses had been bred for the Romans and no other horses in Britain matched their size, and Arthur chose his biggest men to ride them. He had lost many of the great warhorses to Lancelot, and I had half expected to see those huge beasts among the enemy ranks, but Arthur had scoffed at that fear. He had told me that Lancelot had captured mostly brood mares and untrained yearlings only, and it took as many years to train a horse as it did to teach a man how to fight with an unwieldy lance from the horse’s back. Lancelot had no such men, but Arthur did, and now he led them from the northern slope against those of Aelle’s men who were fighting Sagramor.

There were only sixty of the big horses, and they were tired for they had first ridden to secure the bridge to the south and then come to the battle’s opposite flank, but Arthur spurred them into a gallop and drove them hard into the rear of Aelle’s battle line. Those rearward men had been heaving forward, trying to push their forward ranks over Sagramor’s shield wall, and Arthur’s appearance was so sudden that they did not have time to turn and make a shield wall of their own. The horses broke their ranks wide open, and as the Saxons scattered, so Sagramor’s warriors pushed back the front ranks and suddenly the right wing of Aelle’s army was broken. Some Saxons ran south, seeking safety among the rest of Aelle’s army, but others fled east towards Cerdic and those were the men we could see in the river meadows. Arthur and his horsemen rode those fugitives down mercilessly. The cavalrymen used their long swords to cut down fleeing men until the river meadow was littered with bodies and strewn with abandoned shields and swords. I saw Arthur gallop past my line, his white cloak spattered with blood, Excalibur reddened in his hand and a look of utter joy on his gaunt face. Hygwydd, his servant, carried the bear banner that now had a red cross marked on its lower corner. Hygwydd, normally the most taciturn of men, gave me a grin, and then he was past, following Arthur back up the hill to where the horses could recover their breath and threaten Cerdic’s flank. Morfans the Ugly had died in the initial attack on Aelle’s men, but that was Arthur’s only loss.