Free Cast Not the Day by Paul Waters Page A

you’re right, because if you’re not, then there is nothing between the coast and here to stop them.’
    Men started to glance around, thinking, no doubt, of their private concerns: their families, their farms, their savings stashed at home under some kitchen pot. Already, across the flat land in the middle distance, where the roads meet at the southern approaches to the bridge, the traffic was building – and it was heading only one way: northwards, to the safety of the city walls.
    The crowd began to fragment and scatter.
    ‘Let us go back,’ I said to Sericus, ‘here, rest your weight on me.’
    He had grown less easy on his feet of late.
    In the days that followed, a stream of citizens arrived, each carrying what he could in wagons, or on his back. The Saxons had descended on the coast at a time when the seas were normally quiet. Richborough fort had fallen; Dover was cut off, and the raiders were swarming over all the land between, torching farmsteads and putting to the sword, or carrying off into servitude, those too foolish or too slow to flee inland.
    Just as the soldier had said, the roads to the coast were unguarded. No one knew how far the barbarians had advanced, or how many there were.
    But there was worse to come; and it was my uncle Balbus, returning at last from York, who brought the news. The great northern frontier wall had been breached all along its length, and the fearsome painted Picts had come sweeping south. The troops at the undermanned border forts, seeing themselves about to be surrounded, had lost their nerve and fled. The enemy had been left to plunder at will.
    Balbus, abandoning his own slow carriage, had been forced to part with a fortune to secure a swift light gig from a York merchant with an eye to the main chance, who knew a terrified rich man when he saw one. He arrived filthy from the road, to a house that was already like an upturned ant-nest. Lucretia sobbed, and went to the cellar to bury her jewels. Balbus retired to his study, and sat with his head in his hands, staring at the wall. Amid the chaos and panic, only the slaves seemed to retain any composure.
    Terror did more damage even than the Saxons. The country-folk flocked to the city, abandoning their homes and crops. A few brave souls stood fast, intent on staying until there was sure news of the enemy’s approach. Of these, some managed to bring in the harvest and turn a good profit on it, if their slaves and farm-hands had not fled to the hills. Nor did we begrudge them what they made, for if they were caught, the Saxons showed no mercy.
    They killed, it seemed, for the very joy of killing. They burned what they could have possessed for themselves. It was as if they hated the very idea of civilization.
    In London, the Council convened. The magistrates voted to send a fast messenger by the long western route where the barbarians had not yet penetrated, to beg Constans for help. We went about our business out of habit, and because there was nothing else to do. Then, one blustery dawn near midwinter, they arrived.
    I had just walked into my uncle’s offices and was talking to Ambitus when shouts of alarm echoed along the street. We broke off and looked at each other, knowing what it meant, then ran out and joined the rush to the walls, and gazed out from the ragstone crenels with all the rest.
    The Saxons had penetrated as far as London: never in men’s memories had such a thing happened. They came not as a fearsome army, as I had imagined in my mind’s eye; but as scattered bands of dishevelled men, wandering without order, tall and flaxen-haired under their pillaged Roman helmets, clad in damp half-cured fur, unwashed from the day they were born.
    A great silence fell over the city. The gates were closed; the ramparts, though old and crumbled and neglected, would keep the Saxons out. But we were hemmed within, unarmed citizens without an army, like men stranded on an island in the midst of a dangerous sea. We watched