‘You know of it?’ I asked them.
‘Know of it?’ Maredudd echoed. ‘We fought there once against the English many years ago, and won ourselves a great victory, short-lived though it was.’
Ithel nodded solemnly, and in his eyes I saw sadness. ‘Not a month after that our father lay dead, our once-proud army was shattered and our kingdom was stolen from us.’
Much as I felt for their plight, this was not the time for reminiscences. What mattered was those hundred Welshmen, and what we planned to do about them. ‘What about the place itself?’
‘It’s one of the forts left behind by the Romans,’ Ithel replied. ‘When we were there we erected a stockade on top of the ramparts and set sharpened stakes in the ditches, but even if those are no longer standing, it is a hard place to capture.’
Of that I had no doubt, but then I had little intention of trying to take it. The likelihood was that the enemy did not mean to garrison the fort in any case: if the scout’s estimate of their numbers was reliable, they had too few men for that, and besides there seemed little reason to defend this spot when it lay so many miles from the borderlands. Instead I guessed they were merely stopping there, and that tomorrow they would march northwards to join the rest of Bleddyn and Rhiwallon’s host.
Any lingering hopes I might have held of storming that stronghold faded when first I glimpsed it. Night was fast approaching by then and it was hard to discern much in the gloom and the mist settling over the flood plain, but they had made campfires inside the stronghold and their faint glow was enough for my eyes to make out a series of earthen banks and ditches arranged in a rough rectangle, with the remains of what looked like a stone gatehouse at the eastern end. A timber palisade did indeed run along the top of the earthworks, although from such a distance it was impossible to tell its condition: whether it had been repaired in the years since Ithel and Maredudd had made their stand there, or whether it was already rotten, in which case all that would be needed were a few swift axe blows before it fell.
‘There’s a breach on its northern side,’ said Eudo, whose sight was better than mine. ‘Too narrow to make an attack, though.’
Not that any of the other approaches looked more promising, for Caerswys stood at the meeting-point of two fast-flowing rivers, meaning that it was protected by water to south and west, and while the Welsh brothers assured me that both were fordable I knew it would be all too easy for the enemy to see us coming and hold us at those crossings. The only other choice we had, then, was to try to assault the gatehouse, but that would be well defended and would surely mean the loss of many lives, which we could ill afford, especially when we had other choices at hand.
‘What do you suggest?’ asked Wace.
‘We wait until morning,’ I said. ‘They’ll leave sooner or later, and when they do, we’ll be ready for them.’
After posting sentries to keep a lookout for any signs of movement, I returned to where the rest of our host were waiting. From there we marched along the ridge that rose to the north of the fort, travelling in groups of no more than twenty at a time so that we would be less easily seen. Shadows shrouded the hills and cloud obscured the skies, and so it seemed doubtful that the enemy would spot us, but even so, one could never be too careful.
Several cart-tracks led out from the fort, heading in all directions along the two river valleys as well as into the hills, but only one led north. Suspecting that was the one that the enemy would take, I left Maredudd around half a mile from the fort with a contingent of spearmen and the forty or so archers we possessed. The gorse was thick enough there that they could easily lie hidden within arrow-shot of the road. At the same time his brother Ithel and I took the rest of our host – some three hundred men, most of them mounted – over to a clump of trees that stood a further quarter-mile away on the other side of the track, on the highest part of the ridge, where we might see the enemy but they would find it difficult to see us.