‘Four thousand?’
‘Oh, that’s good,’ Pyrlig said. ‘It’s lucky we’re Welshmen. Four thousand Danes? No trouble for a few Welshmen.’
‘You’re all Welsh?’ I asked.
‘We asked for help,’ the other priest said, ‘to ensure that the light of the gospel isn’t extinguished from Britain, so that the pagans are defeated utterly, and so the love of Christ will fill this land.’
‘What he means,’ Pyrlig explained, ‘is that he knew you were in the shit so he came to me and asked for help, and I had nothing better to do.’
‘We asked good Christian men to offer their services,’ the younger priest explained earnestly, ‘and these men came.’
‘“And then I heard the voice of God”,’ Pyrlig said in a sonorous tone, and I realised he was quoting from the Christians’ holy book, ‘“and He said, ‘Whom shall I send? Who will go for me?’ and I said, ‘Here I am, Lord, send me.’”’ He paused, then smiled at me. ‘I always was an idiot, Uhtred.’
‘And King Edward is coming,’ the younger priest said. ‘We just have to hold them here for a short while.’
‘You know that?’ I asked, still dazed.
‘I know it …’ he paused, ‘Father.’
The younger priest was Father Judas, my son. The son I had insulted, beaten and rejected. I turned away from him so that he would not see the tears in my eyes.
‘The armies met north of Lundene,’ Father Judas went on, ‘but that was over a week ago. Lord Æthelred joined his men to King Edward’s and they’re both coming north.’
‘Æthelred left East Anglia?’ I asked. I was finding it difficult to comprehend the news.
‘As soon as you drew Cnut away from the frontier. He went south towards Lundene.’
‘Lundene,’ I said vaguely.
‘He and Edward met somewhere just to the north of Lundene, I think.’
I sniffed. Still more Danes were arriving across the river where Cnut’s shield wall was widening. Now it would overlap us at either end. That meant we must lose. I turned back to look at the man who had been my son. ‘You blamed me for killing Abbot Wihtred,’ I said.
‘He was a holy man,’ he said reprovingly.
‘He was a traitor! Cnut sent him. He was doing their bidding.’ I pointed Serpent-Breath at the Danes. ‘It was all Cnut’s idea!’ Father Judas just stared at me. I could see he was trying to decide whether or not I was lying. ‘Ask Finan,’ I said, ‘or Rolla. They were both there when Cnut’s children talked about Uncle Wihtred. I did you damned Christians a service, but I get little thanks from you.’
‘But why would Cnut send Æthelred chasing after the blessed Oswald’s bones?’ Pyrlig asked. ‘He knew that finding them would encourage the Saxons, so why do it?’
‘Because he’d already pounded the bones to dust or thrown them into the sea. He knew there were no bones.’
‘But there were,’ Father Judas said triumphantly. ‘They found them, God be praised.’
‘They found a skeleton I chopped up for them, you young fool. Ask Osferth if you live long enough to see him again. I even chopped off the wrong arm. And your precious Wihtred was sent by Cnut! So what do you have to say to that?’
He looked from me to the enemy. ‘I’d say, Father, that you’d best retreat to the higher ground.’
‘You insolent bastard,’ I said. But he was right. The Danes were almost ready to advance, and their wall was far wider than mine, which meant we would be surrounded and we would die, and so our only hope now was to join the Welsh on the ridge’s low crest and hope that together we could hold the enemy till help came. ‘Finan,’ I shouted, ‘up the hill, fast! Now!’
I thought Cnut might attack when he saw us retreat, but he was too intent on gathering the men who still arrived and adding them to his shield wall, which was now over eight ranks deep. He could have hurried over the river and assaulted us while we went back to the ridge’s top, but he must have thought we would reach that low summit long before he could catch us and he preferred to attack in his own time and with overwhelming force.
And so we went to the ridge, our last refuge. It was hardly a hill to frighten an enemy. The slope was gentle and easy to climb, but there were those burning houses and they made formidable obstacles. There were seven of them and all still burned. The roofs had collapsed so that each was now a smoking pit of fire, and our shield wall filled the gaps between the fierce blazes. The Welsh faced north towards the men who had crossed the river, and my men faced east and south towards Cnut’s larger force, and there we touched our shields together and watched as Cnut’s horde crossed the ford.
The Welsh were singing a psalm in praise of the nailed god. Their voices were strong, deep and confident. We had made a circle on the ridge’s top, a circle of shields and weapons and fire. Æthelflaed was in the circle’s centre where our banners flew, and where, I thought, the last survivors must eventually be crushed and cut down. Father Judas and two other priests were moving along the ranks giving men blessings. One by one the Christians knelt and the priests would touch the crest of their helmet. ‘Believe in the resurrection of the dead,’ Father Judas said to Sihtric in my earshot, ‘and in the life everlasting, and may the peace of God shine upon you ever more.’
‘Were you telling the truth about Wihtred?’ Pyrlig asked me. He was standing behind me in our second rank. Today, it seemed, he would be a warrior again. He carried a heavy shield decorated with a dragon writhing about a cross, and in his other hand a short, stout spear.
‘That he was doing Cnut’s bidding? Yes.’
He chuckled. ‘A clever bastard, our Cnut. How are you?’
‘Angry.’
‘Ah, nothing changes.’ He smiled. ‘Who are you angry with?’
‘Everyone.’
‘It’s good to be angry before battle.’
I gazed southwards, looking for King Edward’s army. It was strange how peaceful that land looked, just low hills and lush pastures, fields of stubble and stands of trees, and a swan flying westwards and the falcon high above just circling on its still, outstretched wings. It was all so beautiful, and so empty. No warriors.
‘My lady!’ I threaded our thin wall to face Æthelflaed. Cnut’s son was beside her, guarded by a tall warrior who had a drawn seax.
‘Lord Uhtred?’ she said.
‘Did you choose a man to do what I suggested?’
She hesitated, then nodded. ‘But God will give us victory.’
I looked at the tall man with the drawn sword and he just lifted the short blade to show he was ready. ‘Is it sharp?’ I asked him.
‘It will cut deep and swift, lord,’ he said.
‘I love you,’ I said to Æthelflaed, not caring who heard me. I gazed at her for a moment, my woman of gold with her stern jaw and blue eyes, and then I turned back fast because a great shout deafened the sky.
Cnut was coming.
He came as I had expected. He came slowly. His massive shield wall was so big that most of his men would never have to fight, they just trailed behind the long front ranks that tramped towards the ridge. The pagan banners were held high. The Danes were beating blades against shields in a rhythm set by the big war drums behind their massive wall. They were chanting too, though I could not hear what words they said. The Welsh were still singing.
I pushed through to the front rank, taking my place between Finan and Uhtred, my son. Pyrlig was again behind me, his big shield raised to protect me from the spears and axes that would be hurled before the shield walls clashed.
Though the insults came first. The Danes were close enough now that we could see their helmet-framed faces, see the grimaces, the snarling. ‘You’re cowards,’ they taunted us. ‘Your women will be our whores!’
Cnut faced me. He was flanked by a pair of tall warriors in fine war gear, men heavy with arm rings, men whose reputations came from battle-slaughter. I sheathed Serpent-Breath and drew Wasp-Sting, the seax. She was much shorter than Serpent-Breath, but in the
close embrace of a shield wall a long weapon is a hindrance, while a short blade can be lethal. I kissed the sword’s hilt, then touched the hilt to the hammer about my neck. Cnut still carried Ice-Spite, though he had taken a shield for this assault. The shield was covered in cowhide on which his symbol of the axe-shattered cross was daubed in black paint. The two men who flanked him carried wide-bladed, long-hafted war axes.
‘What they’ll do,’ I said, ‘is try to hook my shield down with the axes so that Cnut can finish me. When they do it, you two can kill the axemen.’
Uhtred said nothing. He was shaking. He had never fought in the shield wall and perhaps would never fight in one again, but he was trying to look calm. His face was grim. I knew what he felt. I knew the fear. Finan was muttering in Irish, I assume it was a prayer. He carried a short-sword like mine.
The Danes were still shouting. We were women, we were boys, we were shit, we were cowards, we were dead men. They were scarce twenty paces away and they stopped there. They were summoning the courage for the rush uphill, for the killing. Two younger men stepped forward and called challenges to us, but Cnut snarled at them to get back in their ranks. He did not want any distractions. He wanted to kill us all. There were horsemen behind the deep ranks. If we broke and some of us fled westwards, which was the only direction where no Danes threatened, those horsemen would pursue and cut us down. Cnut did not just want to kill us, he wanted to annihilate us; he wanted his poets to sing of a battle where not one enemy survived, where Saxon blood made the ground sodden. His men shouted their insults, and we watched their faces, watched the blades, saw the shields lock and saw the spears fly. Spears and axes, hurled from the enemy’s rearward ranks, and we crouched, shields locked, as the missiles struck. A spear thumped hard into my shield, but did not lodge there. Our own spears flew. They had small hope of piercing the shield wall, but a man whose shield is cumbered with a heavy spear or axe is at a disadvantage. Another blade crashed against my shield and then Cnut bellowed his order, ‘Now!’
‘God is with us!’ Father Judas shouted.
‘Brace yourselves!’ Finan called.
And they came. A scream of war cries, faces disfigured by hate, shields raised, weapons ready, and perhaps we shouted too, and perhaps our faces were ugly with hate, and for certain our shields were locked and weapons ready, and they hit, and I went down on one knee as Cnut’s shield slammed forward and crashed into mine. He thrust it low, hoping to slant the top away from my body so that his axemen could hook it with their blades and drag it down further, but I had anticipated him and the shields met plumb, and I was the heavier man so that Cnut recoiled, and Pyrlig’s shield was above me as the twin axes slashed down, and I was moving.
Moving forward. Moving forward and rising. The axes struck Pyrlig’s shield, which hit my helmet hard, but I hardly felt the blow because I was moving fast, snarling, and now it was my shield that was lower than Cnut’s and I was driving his upwards. The axemen were trying to drag their weapons out of Pyrlig’s shield, and Finan and Uhtred were screaming as they thrust at the pair, but all I saw was the inside of my shield as I thrust it up, still up, and Ice-Spite was too long to be used in this close embrace, but Wasp-Sting was short and she was stout and she was sharp, and I rammed my shield arm to the left, saw the bright mail beyond, and stabbed.
All my strength went into that stab. Years of sword-craft, of exercising, of training went into that lunge. I stood as I thrust. My shield had swept Cnut’s aside, he was open, Ice-Spite was tangled in an axe-haft and my teeth were clenched and my hand death-tight around Wasp-Sting’s hilt.
And she struck.
The blow jarred up my arm. Wasp-Sting’s short blade struck Cnut hard, and I felt him recoil from the savage thrust, and still I pushed her, trying to gouge the guts from his belly, but then the man to Cnut’s left chopped his shield down and the rim struck my forearm with such force that I was driven back down to my knees and Wasp-Sting was pulled back by the motion. The axe was raised, but stayed aloft as the strength went from the man’s shield arm. A spear was in his chest, thrust by a man behind me, and I stabbed Wasp-Sting again, this time taking down the axeman, whose blood was already soaking his chest’s mail. He went down. Uhtred had his seax in the dying man’s face and pulled it free as I dragged my shield to cover myself and looked over the rim for Cnut.
And could not see him. He was gone. Had I killed him? That blow would have felled an ox, but I had not felt her pierce mail or break through skin and muscle. I had felt her strike with vicious force, a sword-thrust as heavy as Odin’s thunder, and I knew I must have hurt him if not killed him, yet Cnut was nowhere to be seen. I could only see a man with a yellow beard and a silver neck ring coming to fill the place where Cnut had been standing and he was shouting at me as his shield crashed onto mine and we were shoving at each other. I probed with Wasp-Sting, found no gap. Pyrlig was bellowing about God, but keeping his shield high. A spear scraped against my left ankle, which meant a man was crouching low in the Danish second rank and I thrust my shield hard forward and the yellow-bearded man went backwards, tripped on the crouching spearman, and there was a gap and Finan was into the space faster than a mead-quickened weasel. His sword drank blood. The point was in the spearman’s neck, not deep, but blood was rushing and bright, spurting and bright, and Finan twisted the blade as I slid Wasp-Sting into the man to my right, another hard blow, and I could feel pain in my forearm where the shield rim had struck it, but Wasp-Sting had found flesh and I fed her, I drove her between ribs, and my son brought his sword up from below so that the blade buried itself in the man’s guts and he was lifted up as Uhtred ripped the sword still higher.
Guts and blood, shining coils, smelling of shit, spilling from a dying man’s belly to be trampled into the mud, and men screaming and shields splintering, and we had only been fighting for a few heartbeats. I did not know what was happening on that low, smoke-wreathed ridge-top. I did not know which of my men were dying, or whether the enemy had broken our shield wall, because when the shield walls meet you only see what is there in front of you or just beside you. A blow struck my left shoulder and did no harm; I did not see who dealt it, I had stepped back and my shield was high and touching Finan’s to my left and my son’s to the right, and all I knew was that our part of the wall had held, that we had driven Cnut away, that the Danes were now impeded by their own dead, who made a low rampart in front of us. That made their job harder and made them easier to kill, yet still they came.
The Welshmen had stopped singing, which told me they were fighting, and I was dully aware of the sounds of battle behind me, the thunder of shields meeting shields, the clash of blades, but I dared not turn because an axeman was swinging his long-shafted axe to bring it down on my head and I stepped back, lifted the shield to let the axe strike, and Uhtred stepped over the dead man in front of me and took the axeman under the chin. One stab, quick and upwards, the blade going through the chin, the mouth, the tongue, up behind the nose and then he stepped away from the threat of a Danish sword-lunge, and the axeman was shaking like an aspen leaf, the axe forgotten in his suddenly weak hand as blood spilled from his mouth to run in wriggling rivulets down his beard, which was hung with dull iron rings.
A terrible scream sounded from my left and suddenly, above the stench of blood, ale and shit, I smelt roasting flesh. A man had been thrown into a burning cottage. ‘We’re holding them!’ I shouted. ‘We’re holding them! Let the bastards come to us!’ I did not want my men breaking ranks to pursue a wounded enemy. ‘Hold hard!’
We had killed the enemy’s front rank and hurt their second rank and now the Danes in front of me pulled back some two or three paces. To attack us now they had to clamber over their own dead and dying and they hesitated. ‘Come to us!’ I taunted them. ‘Come and die!’ And where was Cnut? I could not see him. Had I wounded him? Had he been carried down the slope to die where the big drums still thudded their battle-rhythm?
But if Cnut was missing, Sigurd Thorrson was t
here. Sigurd, who was Cnut’s friend and whose son I had killed, bellowed at the Danes to give him room. ‘I’ll gut you!’ he shouted at me. His eyes were red-rimmed and his mail thick and heavy and his sword a brutal long blade, and his neck was hung with gold and his arms were bright with metal as he charged up the slope, seeking me, but it was my son who stepped forward.
‘Uhtred,’ I shouted, but Uhtred ignored me, taking Sigurd’s sword blow on his shield and driving the seax forward with a young man’s speed and strength. The seax glanced off the iron rim of Sigurd’s shield and the big Dane tried to swing his sword at my son’s waist, but the blow had no power because Sigurd was off balance. Then the two stepped apart, pausing to appraise each other.
‘I’ll kill your pup,’ Sigurd snarled at me, ‘then I’ll kill you.’ He gestured for his men to step back a pace, to give him space to fight, then he pointed his heavy sword at my son. ‘Come on, little boy, come and die.’
Uhtred laughed. ‘You’re fat as a bishop,’ he told Sigurd. ‘You’re like a Yule-fattened pig. You’re a bloated piece of shit.’
‘Pup,’ Sigurd said and stepped forward, shield high, sword swinging from his right, and I remember thinking that my son was at a huge disadvantage because he was fighting with a seax and I thought to throw him Serpent-Breath, and then he went down.
He went down onto one knee, the shield held like a roof above him, and Sigurd’s long-sword glanced off the shield, going nowhere, and my son was rising, the seax held firm, and he did all this so fast, so smoothly that he made it look easy as his brief blade punctured Sigurd’s mail and buried itself in the heavy gut and Uhtred was still coming from his knees, all his body’s strength behind that short blade that was deep inside his enemy’s belly. ‘That’s for my father!’ Uhtred shouted as he rose.
‘Good boy,’ Finan muttered.
‘And for God the Father,’ Uhtred said, ripping the seax upward, ‘and God the Son,’ he said with another jerk, pulling the blade higher, ‘and God the Holy bloody Ghost,’ and with that he stood fully upright and slit Sigurd’s mail and flesh from the groin to the chest and he left the blade there, the hilt stuck in a gutted trunk and he used his free hand to rip Sigurd’s sword away. He hammered the captured weapon on Sigurd’s helmet, and the big man went down into the mess of entrails that had spilled around his boots, and then a group of Danes rushed to take revenge and I stepped forward to haul Uhtred back into the wall and he raised his shield to touch mine. He was laughing.