“To the South!” he cried. “To the Saxons!”
CHAPTER XV.
The Black Horse.
Cutha was slain! The Saxons were defeated!
These were the magic words that men were repeating to each other.
Cutha was slain, the Saxons were defeated—these were the two first acts of the Black Horse—cried the followers of Cormac; the rest would follow, and Britain would soon be again in the hands of its own people.
Cormac’s great army settled down to rest and make merry in the peaceful valley of the Severn. His soldiers recked not that they were shut off from retreat by hill and forest; that they were dangerously easy of access to the West Saxons, and to those fierce Angles—the men of the Merce.
South-south-east they had journeyed. They had swept, triumphantly, across the land as though the victories they sang of were already behind them. Their leader, they said, was to take all before him and drive the Saxons from the shores. Revenge was to be taken at last on the Jutish conquerors who had been the first of the savage stock to set foot in Britain; the two brothers bearing the strange titles signifying the Horse and the Mare—Hengist and Horsa, who had left the emblem of the White Horse as a sign of conquest.
But it was the Black Horse now against the White. On all sides the emblem of a black steed was displayed—on samite, and on coarse flax, and hemp; this was to put utterly to shame, to destroy entirely, the dread sign of Hengist.
The popular cry of the Black Horse appealed to all men. On all sides chieftains had flocked forward to fight under the boy-leader—among them Brochmael, Prince of Powys, who had united with him in defeating the Saxons. And, just as on Southern slopes, the Saxons cut their white horse on the chalk soil—so Cormac’s hosts burnt their hostile symbol black on moss and heather.
The Severn valley was scorched in many places with the forms of sprawling monsters that bore no more resemblance to a horse than to any other quadruped. A huge banner, bearing the same device, flapped over Cormac’s tent on the left bank of the river.