Baddon
A hill. A siege. A victory remembered wrongly.
More than half a century after Baddon, an old soldier sits in a rain-dark hall and listens as a young bard sings of the great victory that saved Britain. In the song, the hill is white, the dead are noble, the saints are clean, and peace is given by famous men.
Cunorix knows better.
He was there.
He remembers the winter campaign before the hill. The mud, hunger, fever, quarrels, broken oaths, foul water, and men shitting blood in the cold. He remembers the mixed warband that held the western hollow: Britons, Christians, pagans, old Saxon settlers, boys sent by distant kings, priests with weapons, and men who had no clean name for what they were becoming.
Above all, he remembers the old lord who stood among them.
Not a king. Not a saint. Not the polished hero later generations would need. A hard, fair, weathered man with too many names and no name large enough to keep him. A commander who did not promise glory, only the bitter work of holding long enough for others to breathe.
As the bard's beautiful lies fill the hall, Cunorix is forced back into the siege itself — into the western hollow, the cross in the rain, the false songs of command, the names of the dead, and the terrible question of what survives when living memory becomes history.
Baddon is a literary historical novel about the mud before the myth: a story of post-Roman Britain, fractured kingdoms, faith and older gods, Saxon newcomers and settled neighbours, and the human cost hidden beneath the first faint roots of legend.
Some victories do not bring peace.
Some truths are not sung.
