The Crown of the Iutes: The Song of Octa Book 3 (The Song of Britain Part 2: The Song of Octa) by James Calbraith

Author:James Calbraith [Calbraith, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flying Squid
Published: 2021-12-24T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIV

THE LAY OF VICTURIUS

Comes Paulus’s funeral pyre still smoulders on top of our ridge when a great cloud of dust rising in the rust-red barley fields to the east announces the overdue arrival of Eishild and her band of Bacauds. They march up the Turonum highway, the rebel warband too sprawling and too unruly to keep to the road. With the Saxon boats patrolling both shores of the river, our forces are completely cut off from each other, and once again I can only watch as a troop of Budic’s legionnaires sallies from Andecawa to surprise Eishild’s vanguard in the open field, before they can prepare any sort of defence. The skirmish is brief – the Armoricans are grossly outnumbered by what appears to be a full cohort of the rebels, and they’re smart enough not to risk the enemy’s greater numbers overcoming them; but as they retreat, in orderly squares, back to the city, they leave behind a smattering of corpses – men and horses – in the young barley. I can only hope Eishild wasn’t anywhere near that brief bout.

With Andecawa’s mighty gates shut before them, the Bacauds start setting up their camp in the fields by hanging two banners on tall poles. One is the emblem of Martinus – a red torn soldier’s cloak on a pole; the other one I don’t recognise – a blue dragon circling a blue pearl.

“Are they planning a siege?” asks Seawine, scratching the scar on his face. “They’ll have an even harder time of it than Odowakr’s men.”

His was a harrowing tale. When the Iutes reached Andecawa with Queen Basina, Paulus at first assigned them to service duties: as provision porters, arrow fletchers, construction workers helping with digging ditches and piling up earthen banks around the city. It was only after Seawine led a detachment of his men into victory against a Saxon patrol boat that the Comes agreed for the Iute warriors to join his garrison on the ramparts.

The Armorican contingent arrived soon after, and overran Andecawa’s makeshift defences in the grounds of the suburban villa with ease which, Seawine admitted, should’ve raised suspicion from the start. The Iutes took no part in that battle – their task was to patrol the eastern shore and assist with keeping the peace in the besieged city’s streets. Paulus, trusting in the might of his walls and siege machines, made no attempt to retake the villa; he knew the main thrust of Odowakr’s assault would come from the river, and paid little attention to Budic’s feeble attempts at breaking through the fortified bridge.

“Not all of the Armoricans were trained legionnaires, at first,” Seawine said. “There was a core of trained soldiers, but the rest resembled more the roughs we had to fight in Britannia, bandits and small town brutes, seeking easy fortune. We destroyed them all in a few initial skirmishes, until only the legionnaires remained. This gave us false hope. No enemy ever took Andecawa’s walls by force, Paulus told us – and it didn’t seem as if it would happen now.

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